D R Tucker over at Political Animal brought my attention to the fact that Woodward and Bernstein were on Face the Nation to chat with Bob Schieffer about Watergate 40 years later. Tucker was impressed with it, which amazes me. I’ve come to think rather highly of his work, but he missed it on this one. I realize that everyone is having a great good time this week dumping on Nixon, but we don’t want to let that blind us to our modern reality.

Let’s start with the fact that Woodward and Bernstein were on CBS. Schieffer notes at the beginning that the dynamic duo’s two books All the President’s Men and The Final Days had just been reissued by Simon & Schuster. And they just happened to be owned by CBS. Gee, I wonder why the guys weren’t over talking to George Stephanopoulos?

Shieffer starts with a really stupid observation that people found Watergate so hard to believe because it was so stupid. But the whole scandal was never really about the Watergate break-in. That was simply want led to the plumbers and the CCREEP slush fund and all the stuff that did matter. The real reason people found Watergate so hard to believe is that most people are a bunch of sheep who never want to think that the power elite would act so badly. The president couldn’t possibly be doing this kind of stuff because he was the right kind of person. (For the record conservatives: there is a big difference between being open to malfeasance by the president and just assuming it whenever the other party is in power. Bill Clinton had Vince Foster killed? Really?!)

Some of the interview is rather good. But it’s strange. Woodward says that the piston of the Nixon administration was hate. But later, when talking in more depth, it is clear that this isn’t true. Paranoia and resentment is more what drove him. Later, Woodward talks about how the Republicans put nation over party. That’s not true at all. And that’s what gets to the core of Watergate: if it hadn’t been for the tapes, Nixon wouldn’t have been forced to resign. It was only because there was a smoking gun that the Republicans turned on him.

But what I most hate about this is how self-congratulatory the whole thing is. I don’t mean that about any of the participants especially, but about journalism itself. The truth is that what Woodward and Bernstein did was great work. But can you imagine the Washington Post allowing reporters that kind of latitude today? And look at the work that Woodward does today: he’s just a Republican hack, although admittedly, a careful one because he actually has a reputation to protect.

Shieffer’s last question is whether it could happen again. A better question is whether the corporate controlled media would ever allow it again. As we see today, Glenn Greenwald is hated by most establishment journalists. And if the journalists are like that, you can imagine what their employers think. I believe that if there hadn’t been the tapes, Shieffer wouldn’t have had the segment today. There would have been 40 years of Republican disinformation to convince everyone that Nixon was totally innocent. And Shieffer wouldn’t be certain.

So yeah, now 40 years later, CBS runs a segment talking about the great success of journalism. Shieffer is there to say, “Go team!” But when it comes Edward Snowden who has provided us such important information about what the government is doing to its own people, Shieffer has been incredibly harsh. When it has come to NSA spying generally, he has been nothing short of an apologist. But looking back 40 years, sure: fight the power!

I don’t often get a chance to say that Paul Krugman is wrong, so I’ll use italics: Paul Krugman is wrong. Okay, technically speaking, he is right in a blog post today, Meanwhile, in Europe. In it, he noted that inflation in Europe is dropping fast. Core inflation is below 1% and it does indeed seem to be headed for deflation: negative inflation. But Krugman is wrong to imply that this is a big deal.

Dean Baker is generally right on top of this stuff, and if I had to bet, I’d put some money on his writing about it in the next day. The problem is that inflation is just a measure of the prices of a basket of goods. So to really simplify, if inflation were 0% it would indicate that roughly half of the goods had gone up in price and half had gone down. This also means that when inflation is low, there is a bit more upward pressure on prices than downward pressure. When deflation is low, it is simply flipped. In other words, nothing magical happens at 0% inflation.

Note what I am not saying. I am not saying that deflation is just fine. I’m saying quite the opposite. Deflation is very bad. But I’m also saying that low inflation is bad. In fact, it is bad in the exact same way that deflation is bad, just not to as big an extent. This is important, because some people (most notably libertarians) claim that deflation is not a problem, and may actually be good. The argument is, “So what if the value of cash in your wallet goes up over time? Would you mind that?” Well, no; all else being equal, I wouldn’t mind that at all!

The problem is that all else is never equal and it is especially so in this case. If people can depend upon the value of their cash going up, they have a real incentive to hang onto it. This results in demand for stuff going down, and that leads to economic stagnation and increased unemployment. So if you are like most people, you depend upon a job to continue filling your wallet with cash. But if you already have all the cash you want, then deflation is super cool. This is why the rich tend to be obsessed with inflation, although I think it is shortsighted for them as well.

My main interest is in people having jobs. Thus, deflation and low inflation are bad things. And I think it is dangerous to make a big deal out deflation, as though the only real harm from low inflation is that it might lead to deflation. Of course, Paul Krugman is far more aware of this than I will ever be. He was just being careless. But I think it’s an important issue.

Regular readers know that I believe in a guaranteed basic income. Not only would it solve a lot of problems, it is what we should do ethically. We simply are too rich to allow people to be desperately poor. Two hundred and twenty years ago, Thomas Paine laid out the basic logic: every human is born with an equal right to the resources of the planet. We have created a system that allows some people to do far better than this natural state would dictate through the use of laws and history. At the same time, poor people do worse than they would in the natural state where they could just farm and hunt as they wanted. Therefore, some amount of redistribution is called for to make up for the fact that our economy is rigged. (See: Inequality: the Monopoly Analogy.)

But I wasn’t happy to hear that libertarians like Matt Zwolinski were writing things like, The Pragmatic Libertarian Case for a Basic Income Guarantee. The reason is that Zwolinski isn’t interested in the question at hand. This is just a provocative way of saying, “Look: the government doesn’t work!” At this point, I’m to the breaking point of dealing with disingenuous libertarian “arguments.”

If you spend any time arguing with libertarians, you will run into the “local is better” argument. This is the idea that local governments are better because they are more responsive to the needs of their people. There are many problems with this. For example, when the United States was formed, its population was less than four million people. This is roughly one-tenth the population of California today. Is it really true that the federal government was less responsive to the needs of its people than the state government is today? Also, what we’ve seen is that state and local governments are generally too responsive to the “needs” of certain people leading to discrimination. Over the last half century, the worst government abuses toward individual rights have been at the state and local level.

Of course, the whole idea of pushing “local is better” is to allow libertarians to do in a circuitous way what they can’t do in a direct way: destroy the government. We see this with the general conservative obsession with block grants. The idea is that the federal government just gives money to the states to use as they will. Of course, what will happen over time is that federal support for these grants will decrease. Why should federal politicians support giving money for programs when they have no control. When we decide we have to balance the federal budget, the block grants would be the first things cut.

So when the John Galt crowd starts arguing in favor of a guaranteed basic income, you know it is not because they care about the poor or that they’ve been reading Thomas Paine. It is just a ruse to push more of their anti-government and “makers vs takers” ideology. Luckily, Mike Konczal is on the job in an article yesterday, The Pragmatic Libertarian Case for a Basic Income Doesn’t Add Up. He takes the argument far more seriously than I do. He goes through the numbers and shows that we couldn’t replace all the welfare programs with a minimum income without costing more in taxes—something that no conservative would agree to.

But to give you an idea of just how disingenuous Zwolinski is, one of the programs that would be cut would be Medicaid. Poor people don’t need no stinking medical care! Of course, he never even mentions Medicaid. It is central to his argument, but it isn’t stated because even the most gullible of readers would notice that a basic income of $10,000 per year would not allow someone in our country with its broken healthcare system to get the care they need.

It doesn’t matter though. All the calculations and bright ideas are meaningless. Zwolinski doesn’t care about fixing anything. He is only interested in making the argument that the government doesn’t provide welfare efficiently. It is yet another “government is the problem” argument. But as Konczal shows in the following graph, the government is actually very efficient in providing welfare:

None of this reflects on the basic idea of a guaranteed basic income. I’ve never thought that such a program would eliminate the need for other welfare programs. For example, it seems to me that poor families with children would have extra needs. And it is certainly true that universal healthcare would be necessary. What Zwolinski is offering is an actual smart man’s version of Paul Ryan’s poverty plan. This is the same old thing with conservatives: they have a certain bag of tricks that they apply to every problem, because they aren’t interested in solving the problem. They are interested in using the problem as an excuse to push their existing agenda.

What is wrong with the police in Helmetta, New Jersey?! As you may have heard there was an incident where one of their part-time officers said, “Obama has decimated the frigging Constitution, so I don’t give a damn. Because if he doesn’t have to follow the Constitution, we don’t have to.” But that’s not what I’m talking about. The officer, Richard Recine, has since claimed that he was being sarcastic. And you all know me: I’m not keen on the law enforcement community and I am usually the first to blast them. But I actually believe Recine. Well, mostly.

If you watch the whole video, you can see a situation developing. Steve Wronko is some kind of animal rights activist and he has taken to shooting video inside of animal shelters. And like most politically involved people, he’s passionate and annoying. Actually, he’s more annoying than that. Because he doesn’t seem as interested in doing what he came there to do as he is in having this confrontation with the officer. He has been given the okay to go around and collect his video footage. Yet he doesn’t.

So I can see that Recine is getting more and more agitated. But I’m so used to police agitation leading to choke holds, tasers, and hails of bullets that this confrontation seems downright charming. At one point, the Police Director comes in to see what’s going on. Wronko asks him his name, and the man says, “Bob.” Again, this is not usual for a police department. Usually it is something like, “Police Director Bob Manney!” Or worse: something coarse and belligerent.

Then Manney says that if Wronko is being disruptive, he will have to leave. And Recine comes to his defense, “No. He’s not being disruptive.” But soon enough, it all does get a bit unpleasant as the police escort Wronko out of the building. They had a disagreement about exactly what Wronko’s rights were. But what’s interesting is that earlier on, Recine had okayed for Wronko to record in the building with the animal shelter, but not the offices. As far as I could tell, Wronko was making the argument that if a building was public, he could go anywhere he wants. I think that’s a misreading of the law, but I’m all for people pushing the limits of access. I just don’t see this really being the way to do it: waving around papers with “case law” in front of police officers.

Regardless, I thought the whole thing was handled pretty well. In general, the police are not interested in the Constitution. The Constitution is not a simple document and it has over 200 years of decisions based upon that. I’m sure it is annoying to the police to have people quoting the Fourth Amendment to them. So I think what happens here is that Officer Recine is annoyed and so he says, “We don’t need no stinking Constitution.” Whether Recine actually thinks that Obama has “decimated” or not, I can’t say. He claims to be a Democrat, and he may well have been conflating the conservative ideologues who claim this about Obama and this guy who seems equally extreme. It hardly matters. It is certainly true that Recine did not literally mean that the department didn’t have to follow the Constitution.

class=”center”