I really like Robert Reich as a public intellectual. In fact, right now, I have a tab open with an article by him that I want to write about. And he’s a great speaker. So I was very keen to see his documentary Inequality for All. But I was disappointed today when I finally got to see it.

The spine of the film is very good. It comes back again and again to Reich speaking to his class at Berkeley on inequality. There are also various interview segments with Reich outside the classroom. But even in these, the focus is scattered. There is a strong case made that the decline in unionization has been the cause of rising inequality since the 1970s. But he goes off on tangents like the effect of education on inequality that greatly distract. I understand what he’s getting at: the society as a whole needs to invest in education. But in the context of inequality, it feeds a tired myth that inequality is just a story of education. It is like having a segment about bicycle accidents in a film about the causes of spontaneous abortions: it gives the viewer the wrong idea.

But the film really goes off track when it gets away from Reich. There are two extended segments with families. One of them dealing with a father having been laid off and another involving a conservative Mormon family involved with trying to get a union started at work. Each are interesting in their way, but they go nowhere. The viewer is left wondering what the point was. That times are bad? That conservatives support unions too? I really don’t know.

Some of the expert interviews were interesting, and I was pleased to see the work of Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. And Nick Hanauer is always entertaining doing his “rich people only wear one pair of pants at a time” thing. But all of that was more than offset by Robert Reich palling around with Alan Simpson. I don’t mind that Simpson exists or that he is in the movie. But to refer to him as a liberal, is over the top. What Simpson is is an old fashioned (1990s) Republican. Just because the current Republican Party is a hair’s breadth away from fascism, doesn’t mean we should start referring to people like Simpson as anything other than a conservative.

A big part of the film is its use of graphics, which are all excellent. The following screenshot highlights a point that doesn’t get made enough. It shows that things are much worse than stagnant wages would indicate, because the cost of living has been going up relentlessly.

There is also a great animation that shows wages and productivity rising together until around 1970 when the wages stagnate while the productivity gains continue up and up. So the film has a lot of interesting and important information. And in the end, I enjoyed it. It’s hard not to given just how charming Reich is. But I did expect more.

On this day in 1950, the musician Michael Been was born. He is best known as the lead singer and bass player of the bad The Call. I always thought that Been was a big time Christian, but there’s not a lot of mention of it online. It is certainly the case that he wrote songs with a whole lot of Christian imagery and theology. In fact, this tended to ruin most of The Call’s albums for me. But one got the mix perfect: Reconciled.

The song “Blood Red (America)” particularly appealed to me. The refrain is: “He says, ‘We’ll walk in the front door and proudly raise our heads.’ I say, ‘Man you must be joking, our hands are covered in blood red.” I thought that it was a comment about the very common belief that all a Christian has to do is to believe in Jesus and he will enter the kingdom of heaven. So I thought Been was saying that if we neglected the injustice in the world and thought we would go to heaven, we are crazy. Sadly, I don’t think he’s saying that at all.

In the song, “he” is Jesus Christ. The singer is saying, “How can we get into heaven with all this suffering that we are responsible for?” And Jesus says, “It’s easy!” And by the end of the song, he has accepted this easy salvation. So Michael Been is pushing the same “salvation on the cheap” claptrap that is so common among Born Again Christians the world over.

I shouldn’t be surprised. This is very much in keeping with another song from that album, “I Still Believe.” But that one isn’t about how all one need do is accept God’s love and everything will be fixed. It takes it as a given that belief is not easy. All of life is a struggle, the singer says, and despite that he still believes that God loves him. That’s a much more compelling message that even an atheist like me can appreciate. So Here’s the song performed live:

I saw The Call once live. It was at a small club. They were very good. But Been spent the entire concert bitching at the sound engineer in the balcony about problems with the monitors. I think he was used to playing in better and bigger venues. But he still came off as a dick.

Happy birthday Michael Been!

It’s St Patrick’s Day! Time to get sloshed on some distinctly non-Irish beer. Of course, if we are to believe Ballykissangel, the Irish don’t drink much Irish beer. One thing’s for certain: Americans don’t much care for Guinness, although they do up their consumption on St Patrick’s day.

I saw a statistic about St Patrick’s Day that was supposed to scare me: 80% of St Patty’s Day drunk driving deaths involve drivers who are over twice the legal limit. I have known lots of people who have be caught drunk driving and not one of them has killed anyone. Yet they almost all had over twice the legal limit. Remember: the legal limit is 0.08%. It used to be 0.12%. The fact most fatalities involve people over 0.16% is hardly surprising.

Having said that, I am very much against people driving at all while intoxicated. As one who walks a lot, I am already concerned about the sober drivers. I don’t need drunk drivers to worry about. Just the same, if I were to walk down the street to the bar, get drunk, and walk back home, I would be breaking the law. The truth is that we live in an authoritarian state were just about anything you do is against the law. And so the laws are never enforced—until you piss off someone. I’m good at pissing off people—especially people in power.

But there are a lot more reasons to avoid the holiday than just that a whole bunch of people get drunk and kill people. Perhaps a bigger problem is that America is more Irish than Ireland. Until the 1970s, St Patrick’s Day was a minor religious holiday in Ireland. It was America that turned it into the green stained whiskey soaked monstrosity that we’ve all know. Personally, I’m fond of Ireland, but not especially so. I’m no more excited about celebrating the Irish than I am celebrating the Swedish. And I am a fair chunk Irish and not at all Swedish.

Four years ago, Matthew Schmitz wrote, My Problem with St. Patrick’s Day. In it, he argues that the reason that we celebrate the Irish and not, say, the Germans, is that the Irish are the last white group that can plausibly claim the mantle of oppression:

So add a subtext of racism to your enjoyment of the day! But as Schmitz notes, there are real reasons to love the Irish. And here’s one, even though it was first written in French:

Nothing to be done but to wish you a happy St Patrick’s Day. Try not to kill anyone.

Afterword

Can we at least agree to stop saying that corned beef and cabbage is a traditional Irish dish?! Eat some shepherd’s pie for God’s sake!

Gretchen Morgenson calls the lie to all the nonsense we’ve heard from the Obama administration this last five years about how hard they were working on financial crime that led to the global economic crisis of 2008, A Loan Fraud War That’s Short on Combat. “If there had been cases to make,” people from the administration would say, “We would have made them!” Well, it turns out—Contain your shock!—this is not true. Last week, the inspector general of the Justice Department issued a report, Audit of the Department of Justice’s Efforts to Address Mortgage Fraud (pdf). Morgenson sums up the report’s conclusion, “Complex financial crimes were the lowest priority for the criminal investigative division.”

This is not a surprise. I’m very cynical when it comes to this kind of stuff. It is very simple: the power elite do not go after the power elite. The law is meant to keep the little guy in line. The logic is that simple. But that doesn’t mean that we should accept things the way they are. But things will continue to be this way as long as we continue to elect people like Barack Obama whose call for “hope and change” was really about hoping that nothing changes. And no one should have been surprised. He never claimed to be anything but an establishment kind of guy. He was the candidate of the Wall Street bankers and so no one should have been surprised that he’s the president of the Wall Street bankers.

Dean Baker followed up Morgenson’s reporting with an analysis of his own, Locking Up the Banksters: It’s Not Hard. In it, he goes through the basics of building a case against systemic fraud: from the bottom up. That’s because at every level except the top, there was someone telling a subordinate to misbehave. And if the government were handing out prison terms, there would have been a whole lot of people who were not willing to fall on their swords for the sake of their bosses.

I have a personal example that is related, although I’m unsure where exactly it fits in the pantheon of financial crime. My wife and I owned a condo and owed about $80,000 on it. We were interested in refinancing and so we worked with someone who I think was representing Ameriquest, but I could be wrong. They printed out the loan offer and sent it to us. I went over it and noticed a problem. The fees were so high on the loan that despite the lower interest rate, we would end up paying more in interest over the term of the loan. I told this to the loan officer and I got almost no push back from her. She was well aware that she was offering me a terrible loan. She acted the way any con artist would when discovered: she made a hasty exit.

I tell this story to point out that the bankers knew exactly what they were doing. Of course, when it comes to the packaging of subprime mortgages, the con is baked right in. It was like a game of hot potato: get the bad loan and pass it off on someone else as fast as possible. Of course, the report itself didn’t even deal with securities fraud. So as bad as it shows the system to be, it is far worse.

Morgenson finishes her article by quoting former Delaware Senator Edward Kaufman, “The report fits a pattern that is scary for a democracy, that there really are two levels of justice in this country, one for the people with power and money and one for everyone else. And that eats at the heart of what I think makes this country great.” This is the basis of all our country’s problems. The powerful cannot be punished. The rich cannot lose money. The United States is well on its way to complete destruction. Sadly, our enormous military will prop it up for a while longer, during which we will do untold damage to our own people and people throughout the world.

I just watched Kiss of the Spider Woman. I first saw it right after it came out in 1985. It was a great film and particularly appropriate because the authoritarian regime in the film could easily have been the El Salvadorian government of that time, which was a very big issue in the United States. As a result, I probably saw the movie as much more serious than it is. In fact, although the film involves politics and torture, it is highly lyrical.

The thread that holds the entire film together is Luis’ (William Hurt) telling the story of a romantic film he once saw, Her Real Glory. It turns out that it was actually a Nazi propaganda film, but Luis is too naive to have noticed the politics. Valentin (Raul Julia) straightens him out but lets him continue to tell the story, given that Luis is only focused on the romance of it. The film uses this storytelling to recreate it as a film within a film, Her Real Glory. And it is very funny. For example, when the evil men from the French Resistance ran over a young French woman, I burst out laughing. It is not intended to be funny in Her Real Glory but it is in Kiss of the Spider Woman. There other such scenes like one near the end where the French Underground leader tries to rape the woman who is in love with the Nazi Chief of Counter-Intelligence. The villainy of the “bad guys” is just a tad less believable than Snidely Whiplash.

The whole film plays with this kind of postmodern take on perception and it is brilliantly successful. In the end, all of us at any time are stuck in a jail cell with one other person. And regardless of everything else and all of differences, we need to learn to connect with that other person. But ultimately, this is more about respecting ourselves than anything about the other person. So broadly speaking, Luis and Valentin both have the same character arc of self discovery and acceptance.

Practically speaking, Kiss of the Spider Woman is very serious. It brings to mind much more uncomfortable associations than the brutality of the El Salvadorian government which we supported so strongly. As political prisoners are periodically brought into the prison, they are hooded, just like at Abu Ghraib. Of course, the film is not about that or any political question at all. It is about the political nature of human relationships and love. This is why I think it is important to focus on the practical in politics. Ideological rigidity is what leads to Nazism as well as lesser political crimes against our fellow humans. As long as we can extend dignity to each other, all will be okay. Sadly, extending dignity is rarer than it ought to be.

Where the film falls down is in the third act. That is when Luis and Valentin are separated. Luis is paroled and the film spends a lot of time finalizing his personal transformation. It works well enough, but it breaks the spell. Hurt and Julia are so great together that just about anything else would be a let down. However, after the Luis plot is completed, the film ends rather well. Because of his machinations, Luis managed to keep Valentin from being tortured as long as he was around. As soon as he is gone, Valentin is again tortured. We see him in the prison hospital having just been badly tortured. A doctor gives him an injection of morphine and immediately, his lover Marta (Sonia Braga who also plays Leni, the heroine in the Nazi film) grabs his arm and they run out of the prison, to the sea, and sail away in a boat.

It is a beautiful and lyrical ending to the film. But it is also profound. Such personal connections are not only how we manage to continue on against adversary, they are why. Kiss of the Spider Woman is a rare film that looks clear-eyed at the brutality of life and still gives us reasons to say, “Yes!”

To me, the essence of liberalism is open-mindedness. In modern America, that is what differentiates a liberal from a conservative. I’ve written about this a lot around here. Conservatives start discussing any problem with a long list of things they just can’t do. Liberals on the other hand are more than willing to use free market solutions to problems, if they work. But as we saw with Obamacare, when liberals accept free market solutions, two things happen. First, liberals get weaker solutions. Second, conservatives turn against the free market solutions that they once pushed.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that conservatives don’t actually want to solve any problems and just bring up the “free market” approaches as a delaying tactic. But I think among the punditry and think tank workers, there are a number who are actually interested in solving problems. These are the Reformish Republicans. And that is sad. The most open-minded conservatives are still 90% closed-minded. And then there is George Will whose mind is 100% closed.

The purpose of Will’s newest column should be clear enough based upon its title, Democrats Are Making Income Inequality Worse. It ends with, “And [this is] why the loudest complaints about inequality are coming from those whose policies worsen it.” Dean Baker took on Will’s column, George Will Is Badly Confused on Economic Issues, Again. He tore it to pieces, in fact—showing that Will was doing what he usually does: making up numbers and distorting others. Go take a look for all the bloody details.

I want to focus on one thing that Will talked about: food stamps. It is particularly disingenuous. He wrote, “Between 2000, when 17 million received food stamps, and 2006, food stamp spending doubled, even though unemployment averaged just 5.1 percent.” Note the framing here: he starts in 2000, when the economy was overheated and the unemployment rate was below 4%. Baker noted that in 2006, there were 3.4 million fewer people with jobs. That probably explains half the increase given that most people support children.

In addition to this, food prices rose by 16% during that period. What’s more, according to Will’s own source, the number of people on food stamps in 2006 was still lower than it had been in 1995. This is despite a major push to get qualifying people to get welfare. So we aren’t seeing a huge explosion of “takers.” But note how Will is eager to distort the data to make his point. He starts with a conclusion: aid to the poor is bad. And then he shoehorns the data in a spectacularly distorted way to justify his predefined conclusion.

On a deeper level, Will is making the same old conservative argument, “Giving poor people food hasn’t eliminated poverty, so we shouldn’t give them food!” We got this from Paul Ryan who was arguing that aid to the poor hadn’t worked because if you didn’t count aid to the poor, there were as many poor as ever. That’s a damned strange argument to make against aid to the poor. The real argument is the Ayn Rand argument, which at least she was honest about: the poor shouldn’t be helped because they’re losers. But George Will can’t make that argument. He’s got to maintain his reputation as the modern William F Buckley.

The bottom line of all of this is that conservatives claim to be for a small government as a good in itself. In fact, this isn’t really true. Conservatives are for small government when it comes to the poorer classes. When it comes to welfare for the rich, they want to spend ever more. This is the same as their approach to taxes where they really don’t matter when applied to the poor and middle classes. Remember when Fox News went through a period of pushing for the poor to at least pay some taxes? Tax increases are always wrong, unless they are on the poor! But conservatives like the idea of a smaller government.

Liberals, on the other hand, don’t want a larger government. Social goods they want may require a larger government. But there is nothing about a larger government as such that they are looking for. This sums up how liberals are focused on practical matters and conservatives on ideological matters. And that is why problems come second (if at all), only after ideological purity. George Will wants to spend less on the poor, he doesn’t want to fix the problem of poverty—except in the one ideologically pure way: by spending less on the poor.

Matt Yglesias is fond of saying that the best way to help people out of poverty is to give them money—direct cash assistance. His point is very simple: the problem with poverty is not having enough money. Things like drug addiction are primarily a result of poverty, not a cause of it. If you give the poor money they will use it to get healthier and more educated. Generally unstated is the fact that most programs proscribe the benefits to the poor because the power elite think the poor don’t make good decisions.

That’s where we get the whole conservative song and dance about poverty. Poverty isn’t about money and economic opportunity, its about culture. The people in the “inner city” just aren’t going to church enough! Of course that’s just conservative wish fulfillment. They think everyone should go to church (except of course their heroes like Ronald Reagan). And they think that they should never have to spend any money on the poor. Therefore, as always, the solution to poverty just happens to be what they already want to do. This goes along with the conservative response to the Ukraine situation: a war in the Middle East!

This morning, Paul Krugman published a great graph from the Economic Policy Institute. It shows the changes in the wages of males in real dollars from 1973 to 2012. Looking at just men is important because their work patterns have not really changed over this 40 year period the way women’s have. So the result is relatively pure. And what the result shows is that we have a very screwed up society:

Just to be clear here: this shows that the wages of the bottom 60% have gone down over the last 40 years. This is a remarkable result because men are actually more skilled than they were then. They are more educated. And productivity is much higher. It is just that the extra money in the economy is being shared less equitably.

Notice how this goes against the claims of conservatives everywhere. The last resort of people like Milton Friedman was always something like, “The rich may be much richer, but the poor are at least somewhat richer.” Well, they aren’t! Of course, I don’t expect this to change any minds. In general, they will continue to make that argument despite the data. And if pushed, they will just move on to some argument such as looking at households rather than men where instead of a decline there is only stagnation. Or they will go all libertarian and say it doesn’t matter because: “Freedom!”

I just heard that David Brenner died. He was 78 and had been suffering from cancer. I loved him when I was a kid but he’s fallen off my radar since then, although I would occasionally see him pop up. His act hadn’t really changed at all. And he was hugely influential. He was a critical part of the move from the old story-focused stand-up comedy of people like Shelley Berman to the observational humor that to a large extent is still with us.

Brenner didn’t start in comedy until late in life. He had been a documentary filmmaker into his 30s. In 1971, at the age of 35, his stand-up career took off after performing on The Tonight Show. And, in fact, he appeared on the show more than any other person—almost 160 times. Here is his first appearance on the show. It is a bit dated, but still quite funny. It made me laugh out loud a few times: