Shinzō Abe is the prime minister of Japan. He was elected with promises to stimulate the Japanese economy using standard Keynesian economics. Basically, he’s trying to bring the New Deal to Japan. And since he was elected in late 2012, the Japanese economy has done pretty well. But from the very start, mainstream reporters in the United States have had little but derision for Abe. It reminds me of Eric Alterman’s classic book, What Liberal Media? When it comes to economics, American reporters push the interests of their publishers. And for the better known reports — the ones clearly inside the upper class — they push the interests of their class. (And let’s be honest: there is no columnist or pundit who you’ve ever heard of who isn’t at least in the upper middle class.)

Thus, after 2014 showed basically no economic growth for Japan, we get articles such as Japan Emerges From Recession but Growth Subdued and Japan’s Economy Expands, but Less Than Expected. But Dean Baker responded with the obvious, Confusion on Japan’s Economy. He noted that the short Japanese recession in 2014 was due to a hike in the sales tax that was approved before Abe took power. And Abe has killed a second scheduled increase in the sales tax.

Jonathan Soble at The New York Times provided this amazingly biased assessment, “A long-planned increase in the national sales tax, carried out in April, hit consumers harder than the government and most economists had expected, calling the effectiveness of Mr Abe’s approach into question.” Baker responded, “While it says that the resulting downturn was a surprise to economists, this is exactly what standard economics would predict.” But not, of course, what the heterodox economics of expansionary austerity predicts. And this is what the mainstream media want to push: economic theories that have no theoretical or empirical evidence. And they want to push it because this is what the power elite want to hear.

This brings me back to my days as a libertarian. At that time, I made a lot of arguments about how consumers would rebel against companies that didn’t behave properly. Even at the time, I wasn’t too sanguine about this theory. The problem that I came to see was that the vast majority of people don’t have the time, energy, or power to do something about every injustice in their lives. If a chemical company is polluting their ground water, they may be very upset. But it isn’t going to kill them as fast as not eating will kill them, so they continue to go to work. But the rich have the time, energy, and power to do something about every injustice that they see in their lives. That’s because they can hire people to protect their interests.

This is how it is that the liberal readership of The New York Times can put up with reporting that takes it as granted that of course economic policy that is bad for a nation but good for its power elites is good economic policy. Personally, I think that Jonathan Soble should be thrown in jail for a few years for writing that one “news” article. But he should at least lose his job because he clearly isn’t doing the work that the readers of The New York Times expect. But most readers of The Times don’t even know that they are being deceived. Reporters like Soble have been shilling for the power elite for so long that it is now seen as “objective reporting.”

Instead, we have to read Dean Baker who has a far smaller profile. (Dean Baker Is Must Reading!) But as usual, he smashes the subtext of most of the reporting on Japan, which claims that the economy is not doing well under Shinzō Abe:

So we continue to be told that traditional Keynesian economics isn’t working in Japan — or even worse: that it can’t work. This has nothing to do with Japan, of course. It is all about what is acceptable to discuss here in the United States. And the power elite do not want us discussing economic stimulus. They want to focus on “out of control debt” and the need for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. Because the health of the economy doesn’t matter to the power elite — only controlling what they already have. And reporters all over America are there to shill for them. But without ever admitting it. They are just being “objective.”

One thing that most people don’t understand because they have spent little or no time in actual courts in the the United States, is that judges are often incredibly ignorant and often even more bigoted. Alabama Chief Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore is a perfect example of this. He is the man who was thrown off the bench in 2004 because he put a two ton granite Ten Commandments statue in the state judicial building. The “fine” people of Alabama voted him back onto the bench in 2012. And now he is back defying a federal court ruling allowing same-sex marriage in Alabama. All you really need to know about Moore is that he’s a typical judge in that he thinks he’s above the law.

He’s getting major push-back, however. Yesterday morning, he was being interviewed by Chris Wallace who was friendly enough — but clearly not too pleased that this freak of a judge is making a mockery of “reasonable” conservatism. He said, “A state ethics panel said that you had to be removed from office because you had put yourself above the law. Are you doing the same thing now, sir?” Of course, Moore doesn’t think he was wrong in the first place, so obviously he doesn’t think so now. As Walt would say in Breaking Bad, “I am the one who knocks.”

What was especially funny in the interview is how Moore tries to take the high ground. This is typical of conservatives everywhere. They just love to hearken back to slavery — as though they would have been anything but slavery apologists if they had lived at that time. Moore said, “I could recuse or dissent as a justice from Delaware did in the Dred Scott case in 1857. They ruled black people were property. Should a court today base such a ruling that is contradictory to the Constitution…?”

There are a couple of factual matters that Moore got wrong. First, slavery was hardly unconstitutional in 1857. Neither of the two justices who dissented (John McLean and Benjamin Curtis) were from Delaware. And they dissented on procedural grounds — not out of any moral reasoning against the injustice of slavery. But there is a much bigger issue here.

Moore may be talking about recusing and dissenting now. But his actions have not been done within the judicial system. The day before a federal court ruling was to take effect, Moore ordered that probate judges disregard the federal courts. So unlike McLean and Curtis, Moore is not working inside the legal system and losing. He is claiming that he knows what the law should be and that just because other judges who hold positions above him have found otherwise, he can just ignore that.

This is the thinking of a despot. And it is interesting to hear him talk circles around the issues that he’s raised. For example, his Ten Commandments statue was constitutional because he has decided that the First Amendment gave him the right to do that. So again and again we hear from Moore that he follows the law but only to the extent that he gets to say what the law means. Remember: this is a state chief supreme court justice, and he thinks the law doesn’t apply to him.

What is sad is that if he pushes this matter (I don’t think he will in this case), and he gets thrown off the bench, the people of Alabama will just re-elect him. American justice is screwed up. But people like Roy Moore make it far more dangerous. He should not be allowed any kind of power at all because he abuses whatever power he has. He’s a despot in a robe. And his position represents the darkest aspect of democracy.

Last weekend, our colleague Marc McDonald over at Beggars Can Be Choosers wrote, “American Sniper”: Chris Kyle Was a Perfect Poster Boy for Bush’s War of Lies. He did an excellent job of putting Kyle into the context of Bush’s illegal and immoral war. But I was very taken with one line from Kyle’s autobiography. Apparently, he wrote, “I couldn’t give a flying fuck about the Iraqis.” That wasn’t the first time I’d read that quote. But this time it hit me in a different way.

Kyle was a sniper. He had enormous power and discretion in who he targeted. Add to this that at one point, another sniper was threatening Kyle’s record for number of kills, and suddenly Kyle found that a whole lot more “bad guys” were appearing in front of his scope. Coming from an objective sniper with no inclinations other than to do his job to the best of his abilities, this would raise troubling questions. But coming from a sniper who apparently hated all Iraqis and who thought they were “damn savages,” you end up with a very bad situation — one where there really is no doubt that many innocent Iraqis were murdered by Kyle. And his absolute certainty that everyone he shot was a “bad guy,” makes it all the more suspect.

It would seem that in Chris Kyle’s Christian fanaticism, any Iraqi that he killed was a bad guy. He starts his book by discussing his first sniper kill of a woman with a grenade, “My shots saved several Americans, whose lives were clearly worth more than that woman’s twisted soul.” The irony is rich. The woman is fighting against an invading force. Regardless of what I think about what the woman did or stood for, Kyle was clueless. He was a member of an invading force and her actions were absolutely no more twisted than his own.

The most base form of tribalism in our society is religion. And this is what most bothers me about the almost total lack of a theological basis among Christian conservative faiths. All they really offer to their followers is the idea that we are “good” and they are “bad.” And the reason for the distinction is nothing more than that we are “us.” So we get comments from Kyle like, “I don’t shoot people with Korans. I’d like to, but I don’t.” It’s just a book. Why would you want to kill every person who has that book? Because having that book indicates that they are one of those people.

I would think that the US military would filter for people like Chris Kyle. Clearly, he went to Iraq with a different agenda than the military’s stated agenda. After all, we were supposedly there to liberate the Iraqi people from the oppression of Saddam Hussein. Iraq is 99% Muslim. Imagine a country invading America to free us from the tyranny of Barack Obama. America is an 80% Christian nation. Would it make sense to have snipers who wanted to shoot everyone they saw with a Bible? It would only make sense if the “freedom mission” was just a lie. It would only make sense if it wasn’t a war for the American people, but against them.

So Marc McDonald is right — in more than one way. America allows these kinds of Christian nationalists in the military — people who believe that Christianity is The Truth™ and that our wars should be in the service of spreading their religion. In addition to this being immoral, in the long-term, it will destroy our country.

Shaila Dewan over at The Upshot reported, States Consider Increasing Taxes for the Poor and Cutting Them for the Affluent. This is not exactly shocking. I’ve been writing about this for a good long time. These states, of course, are Republican run states. They are states like Kansas where the Republicans decided that their economies would boom if they cut taxes on the rich and on businesses. They were wrong. Their economies did not boom, but their budget deficits sure did. So what is a Republican government to do? Well, first they cut funding for the schools. But that only gets you so far. Eventually, they have to turn to taxes.

But wasn’t that what got them in trouble in the first place? What is the point of cutting taxes if you are just going to raise them later? Well, it’s very simple. The idea was never to cut taxes. The idea was to shift the tax burden from the rich onto the poor. You may remember back at the start of 2013. The Republicans in Congress were crazy mad because the Obama administration wanted to end the temporary (decade long) tax cuts on incomes over a quarter million dollars per year. The Republicans were united in their belief that this was an outrage! But at the exact same time, the Republicans were absolutely fine with payroll taxes going back up. They claimed that was just because the payroll tax holiday was meant to be temporary. But so were the Bush tax cuts that the Republicans were so angry about.

Let’s think about that for a moment. The normal payroll tax rate is 12.4%. And the payroll tax holiday brought that amount down to 10.4%. The median American worker made $51,900 in 2013. There are no deductions for the payroll taxes, so normally, this worker would pay $6,435.60 per year, but during the holiday period, paid only $5,397.60. So that was an extra thousand bucks that the worker would take home each year. That’s a nice chunk of change — 2% of her gross pay for the year.

Because the payroll tax is extremely regressive, it worked very differently for a rich person. Consider Mitt Romney. Since 2013 was after the 2012 election, we can assume that Romney’s gross income was back up to its usual amount. We’ll go easy on him and just assume it was $20 million. I’m not sure if Mitt Romney’s income consists of any earned income at all. So he may pay none. But let’s just assume that he earned $113,700 that year — the maximum amount that payroll taxes apply. So he would have normally paid $14,098.80, but with the holiday, it would have only been $11,824.80. So he would have another two thousand bucks to spend. Maybe he’d buy an extra shirt or something. But the difference in his taxes wouldn’t be 2%. It would be just over 0.01%. So you can see that Mitt Romney and his class wouldn’t care about the payroll tax holiday, even though it was much better for the economy than the lower top marginal tax rate that the congressional Republicans were so worked up about.

So we’ve known for a very long time that the Republicans are not against taxes. They just don’t want their rich friends to be taxed. And the interesting thing is that Republicans are always the first to cry “class warfare” whenever inequality is brought up. But the entire basis of their ideology is class warfare. Now if you ask them, they will claim that they just want the tax system to be fair. And by that, they mean that everyone should have to pay the same percentage of their incomes in taxes. That is preposterous, of course. A young person living on $10,000 per year cannot afford a 10% tax rate the way that, for example, Mitt Romney can. But the situation is worse than that.

Conservatives are only in favor of an equal tax rate right now. Look at the way that they think the payroll tax is just fine. That’s a tax that I pay 12.4% of my income on — and always have. But Mitt Romney pays a rate of 0.07%. I pay almost 200 times as high a rate in payroll taxes as the Great and Mighty Trust-Fund Bully Romney. This is why you never hear Republicans complain about the payroll tax. If they ever managed to enact a single income tax rate, the Republicans would immediately start pushing for an equal tax: every person would pay the same amount in taxes. After all, regardless of how rich or poor a person is, she can only use one road at a time. Why should the rich person have to pay more for it?

Conservative thought nominally goes back to Edmund Burke. But he was just pushing a far older idea that the rich really are better than the rest of us. So it is not surprising that conservatives will always be pushing for more and more taxes to be borne by the poor. And the end result of that is for the rich to pay no taxes. Ultimately, for conservatives, the government should be replaced by the rich. They are our betters. They will take care of us out of their sense of noblesse oblige. (Modern definition of “noblesse oblige”: greed is good!) And rule by the people will ultimately lead to the Reign of Terror. This is why conservatives don’t believe in democracy. It is all part of the same package.

Paul Krugman responded to Shaila Dewan’s article, Naked Came the Class Warriors. He noted, “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I can’t take talk about ‘reform conservatism’ seriously.” Of course. I’m not sure why people ever took “reform conservatism” seriously. It is an oxymoron. But more important, the idea of conservatism is not to make society better and more just through conservative policy. It is quite simply to give more power to those who already have the most power. And this is simply because conservatives think that the powerful are better. But the rest of us must wake up to reality: conservatism in anti-American. And if it succeeds, it will destroy the nation. It’s already gone a long way in accomplishing that goal.

Rick Perry is running for president. Personally, if I had had a “whoops” moment, I would go hide out on my “farm” for the rest of my life and research ways to induce retroactive amnesia. But I don’t think that Perry is smart enough for that. He probably thinks that anything is possible because Richard Nixon went on to become president after saying, “You don’t have Nixon to kick around any more.” (As I’ve discussed in the past, that was actually just an awkward Nixon joke and actually quite charming.) But clueless Rick is out making the nation know that he can do for America what he did to Texas. And so this week, he was in New Hampshire making his case. The New Hampshire Journal reported, Perry: In ’16, Americans Will Want “Someone Who Has Been Tested.”

Martin Longman noted one very interesting part of the article:

I love that line. It is Republican boilerplate. But it is also meaningless. There are two important aspects of this. First, how is Obamacare one-size-fits-all? One might say that with regard to a single payer system. But Obamacare simply makes the current insurance based system more affordable. People who couldn’t afford healthcare on the open market are now helped. And everyone is helped in a different way. Now personally, I’m not thrilled with Obamacare because in one way it is one-size-fits-all: it depends upon insurance companies. And they don’t add any value to the healthcare that the whole system is meant to provide. They are a relic of times long gone. But that’s not Perry’s problem. Perry’s problem is that Obamacare is a government program and, in his mind, that means it is one-size-fits-all.

The second aspect of this is simply that if a federal government program is by definition one-size-fits-all, so what? Social Security is one-size-fits-all and people love it. Medicare is far more one-size-fits-all than Obamacare, and people are very happy with it. Perry’s claim that Obamacare is a one-size-fits-all program is the usual Republican rhetoric. All he’s actually saying is that Obamacare is doody pants — he doesn’t like it but has no real reason why that’s the case.

Perry also said, “Texas has been criticized for having a large number of uninsured, but that’s what Texans wanted.” But that’s not really true. Most of those uninsured would very much like to have insurance. It is just that the conservative Texas government is against it. In fact, Texas passed a law making it hard to become a “navigator”: a person who helps people use the healthcare exchange. And 20% of the people in Texas are uninsured — the highest rate in the nation. Meanwhile, roughly 40% the Texas residents have a favorable opinion of Obamacare — which is roughly what it is nation wide.

Perry continued, “They did not want a large government program forcing everyone to purchase insurance.” But the truth is that regardless of what Texas wanted, they still have a large government program forcing them to purchase insurance. What the spiteful Texas legislators and smiling, bespectacled governor did was make it harder for Texans to get the benefits of the program — including stopping the working poor from getting healthcare at all. These are, in addition, programs that Texas has already paid for. So this isn’t about “freedom”; it is about good government. And Rick Perry and his pals have decided to take a noble stand for bad government.

Let me clarify what Rick Perry has accomplished. There is a large government program called Obamacare. The people of Texas pay for that program. In addition, the people of Texas are required to purchase health insurance or they are penalized by the government. To help the people of Texas comply with this new law, the federal government is giving money and support to the state. Rick Perry has made it hard for the people to get that support. He has also refused to allow many of the people who live in Texas to get free healthcare paid for by the government.

Basically, Obamacare can be cut in two: the bad parts and the good parts. Perry hasn’t been able to do anything at all to shield Texas from the bad parts of Obamacare. But he has done a great deal to limit the good parts of Obamacare. In other words, he has managed Obamacare in the worst possible way for the residents of Texas. And now he is going around the nation claiming that his terrible policies are something to be proud of. And Perry is not alone. Republicans the nation over have accomplished nothing in their fight against Obamacare except harming their own constituencies. And no one has really noticed it.

I would like to see this brought up in a debate. “You say you have fought against Obamacare, but the only thing you’ve done is stop your people from getting benefits they’ve paid for. All the taxes and requirements still apply to Texans. How does this make Texas a freer place?” I wonder what Perry would answer, “Whoops”?