Paul Waldman wrote in interesting if maddening article article yesterday over at The Washington Post, The Substance and Politics of Obamacare, in One Citizen. It tells the story of Kentucky resident Amanda Mayhew who is thrilled with all the needed medical care she is receiving because of Obamacare. But she would give it all away if it would put an end to all the old people who are being killed by the death panels. It’s kind of sweet actually. Ms Mayhew is clearly a very caring person. In fact, she’s the kind of person that Americans flatter themselves as being: willing to put the needs of the less fortunate above their own.

The bad aspect of this is that her very decency is being used against her. She’s been lied to. There are no death panels. No one is deciding if old people deserve cancer treatment. This is just a scare story designed to malign the new healthcare law. Teens are told the story of The Hook to scare them away from making out in their cars and the Death Panel is told to the working poor to make them turn against a healthcare bill that is designed to help them.

Waldman blames politicians and hate radio hosts and Fox News for the problem of all the misinformation about Obamacare. But I don’t. They are just doing their jobs. They are the foot soldiers for their fascist leaders. My problem is with the mainstream media. All the right wing propaganda about a government takeover of healthcare and death panels never would have gotten a foothold in the mainstream consciousness if it hadn’t been for the local news and the big newspapers and the network news reporting it as, “The administration says that the government is not taking over the healthcare system and that there are no such things as death panels; the Republicans claim this is the end of quality healthcare in America and all people over the age of 65 will be forced to kill themselves; as objective reporters we have no way of saying what the truth is.”

Let’s not forget where the whole idea of the death panel came from. Sarah Palin, of course, came up with the name. But the concept came from Betsy McCaughey — the disingenuous health policy “analyst” who pretty much single-handedly destroyed the Clinton healthcare reform plan. And like James O’Keefe, it doesn’t matter how many times she lies and is shown to be totally wrong, the press just can’t manage to apply even the smallest amount of skepticism towards her. Because, you know: that wouldn’t be “objective!”

The best example of this came when McCaughey went on The Daily Show when she brings out a big binder containing the Obamacare law. And Stewart gets her moving from section to section until it is clear that what she’s claiming is nonsense. Nothing in the law says anything about death panels. It’s clearly just about end of life planning — living wills — and Stewart is absolutely right when he calls what McCaughey is doing hyperbolic and dangerous. Also check out the second part of the interview.

But as usual, the mainstream media didn’t do anything near as good as what the comedy show The Daily Show did. So as usual, the problem is our media that has no real interest in informing readers and viewers. Instead, it is a kind of talking point aggregator. And that’s why we can’t have decent governance. Our government is only as good as the media that covers it. And we don’t even have a media that covers the government. We have a media that repeats the government.

So we have poor Amanda Mayhew who would vote to eliminate Obamacare because of the all the old people she thinks the law will kill. “Liberal” Californians vote against GMO food labeling because they think it is going to harm the one remaining small family farm in the state. And Americans consistently vote for politicians who take money from them and give it to the rich because of some weird sense of fairness. And it is all due to a media system that will only take a stand on an issue when it helps the power elite.

Robert Samuelson is a truly vile person. He uses his prominent perch at The Washington Post to argue week after week that all of our problems come from the fact that we treat our elderly too well. He thinks Social Security pays too much, even though it pays out what it takes in and it is not nearly as generous as similar programs in other advanced economies. And then he complains about all the money we spend on Medicare, but isn’t at all concerned that the cost is so high because we pay twice as much for our healthcare as people in other advanced economies where the medical care is better. He just wants to harm the poorer people in our society and assure more and more money for the already rich. Like I said: he’s a vile guy.

On Christmas eve, he sunk to new lows, Repairing the Middle Class in 2015. The title itself is funny. As if Samuelson is in the least bit interested in helping the middle class. But the article itself is just one distortion after another. He claims that the American system is not rigged against the middle class but rather for the middle class. “That’s a natural result for a democracy in which politicians compete more for votes than for dollars.” No serious person could look out on the vast American political system and conclude that the votes really matter. A tiny investment of $8 million by Monsanto caused a hugely popular GMO food labeling bill in California to go down to a resounding defeat.

But when it comes to all that money that the middle class is getting from the government, Samuelson points to — Surprise! — Social Security and Medicare. Keven Drum calls him on this issue, The Middle Class Needs More Income. Faith Will Follow:

But Samuelson doesn’t leave it there. He goes on to complain that most of the taxes fall on the rich. Well I wonder why that might be! Median incomes have been stagnant for almost four decades. But he is further disingenuous by looking only at the federal government where taxes are most fair. As I showed last week when discussing the supposed Texas Miracle, state taxes are usually ridiculously regressive. But Samuelson doesn’t want to talk about that, because he isn’t interested in what the truth is about life for the poorer classes in the United States. He’s interested in pushing the interests of the oligarchs.

But if that weren’t bad enough, he then goes on to blame the financial crisis of bursting the house bubble on those evil poor people getting loans they couldn’t afford. He noted, “There is much evidence for [the cause of the financial crisis], but it ignores the deeper cause: an intellectual, political and social climate that legitimized lax lending policies in the name of promoting middle-class well-being.” To begin with, those lax lending policies were not created to help the middle-class. They were created to help bankers make a lot of money. But his narrative is just outrageous. Oh, those poor bankers being pushed around by the intellectual, political, and social climate! Funny how when people are screaming for jobs, the business community is sitting on piles of cash, despite the intellectual, political, and social climate.

Samuelson ends his article by noting that the challenges for the middle class are only partly economic. It is also psychological. It seems we can’t really control the economic environment, but we can control ourselves. So let’s not do anything about the economy and let’s complain that the middle class just kind of sucks. Dean Baker called this for the nonsense that it is, Robert Samuelson Thinks That Because He Is Confused About the Economy, Everyone Else Is Also:

It’s also interesting that the government has done nothing to keep the minimum wage up with the rate of inflation — to say nothing of the rate of productivity growth. The government has done everything it could get away with to screw the poorer classes and lavish the rich with every possible benefit. But that’s what Robert Samuelson thinks it ought to do. I just wish he were more honest about it.

Michael Hiltzik offered up some potentially good news at the end of this year, Is Texas, the Biggest Domino, About to Topple on Medicaid Expansion? It seems that not all right wing freaks are created equal. With Rick Perry and his Super Glasses leaving office to pursue truth, justice and the American way, governor-elect Greg Abbot has indicated that he might be open to taking the Medicaid expansion in the form that Arkansas and Utah have pioneered. In it, instead of the working poor getting added to Medicaid, they are given money to buy insurance on the exchanges. It ain’t perfect, but it is a distinct improvement on the way things are.

It’s kind of the perfect way for Republicans to dip their toes into Obamacare. After all, they are already part of it. The citizens of Texas are already required to have health insurance. And they are already paying higher taxes for the new law. So they are getting everything bad from the law and relatively little good from it. They might as well get some of that money back that they are sending away. The way the law was designed, blue states (because they are generally richer) were subsidizing red states. But because Republicans have been so spiteful about Obamacare, it’s worked out that red states have been subsidizing blue states. This is not a state of affairs that can go on for long.

This kind of “block grant” approach to the Medicaid expansion is something that Republicans have long claimed to like. And this kind of deal is a great face saving maneuver that allows the Republicans to claim both that they made the evil president bend to their will and that they don’t just hate the working poor. (Even though they clearly do.) Now we will have to see if Texas goes along with this. It is still likely that the Texas legislature will be unable to get past their mean girl spite and do what is best. But this is good news regardless.

Hiltzik runs the numbers in his article and they are overwhelming. Texas has the highest level of uninsured residents with over 22%, when the average is around 13%. And with bad economic times coming to Texas, it will only get worse. A 2013 report found that by not taking the Medicaid expansion, the state was set to lose almost $8 billion and have extra costs of almost $400 million. That was for a two year period. What’s more, hospitals are getting hit hard. Each year, they do $17 billion in uncompensated work. The Medicaid expansion would take a big chunk out of that.

I spend a lot of time complaining that the Democratic Party is too much the party of big business. But what’s remarkable is that the business community is so wedded to the Republican Party when the party doesn’t look out for its interests at all. Its general incompetence hurts business growth but on the individual level, it doesn’t do anything for business except for its trademark crony capitalism.

But we have a perfect storm here in Texas. It is losing a huge amount of money. The hospitals are keen to see the extra money coming in. The state is looking at bad times ahead. And it has a perfect face saving excuse for signing up for the program now. Given the absolute joke that the Republican Party is — especially in Texas — we can’t say what will happen. But this is hopeful news. And if Texas accepts the Medicaid expansion, many other states are sure to follow.

Charlie Pierce made an interesting comparison over at his place at Esquire, Life And Cheerios Imitate The Newsroom. He started by noting the ridiculousness of Chuck Todd claiming that he has to allow Republicans (“politicians”) to lie on Meet the Press, because if he didn’t, they wouldn’t come on the show. It was a remarkable moment of honesty, although Todd does seem to think it is about “balance.”

I think it is typical of what I call “fake power” — the kind of power you only have as long as you don’t use it. The best recent example of this has been Speaker of the House John Boehner who has enormous power, but if he ever used that power to do what was right rather than just to do what his caucus wanted, he would find that he was out of a job. Similarly, Chuck Todd has the power to ask the “hard questions” only so long as he absolutely never asks the hard questions.

It reminds me of something else. You could watch the nightly news on ABC, NBC, and CBS. And you would never see anything different. It is a remarkable example of self-censorship. Either that or it just so happens that the major news outlets manage to get right to the heart of what is going on in the world. Of course, we know that isn’t the case. You can go back over the decades and see what the news sources were reporting in their amazing unanimity and see what was really going on. It’s just follow the leader.

Meanwhile, all the time I was growing up, I was told that the Soviet Union didn’t have a free press. Well, true enough. But that didn’t speak poorly of them so much as it speaks poorly of us for thinking that we do have a free press. It’s like what Noam Chomsky said in The Common Good, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

So good old Chuck Todd is there to play the part of a free journalist. And indeed, he isn’t being told what to say and not to say by the government. Oh no! He’s being told what to say and not to say by the “free” market! And that is better because… I’m not sure. No one has ever answered it because no one seems to even be aware that it is a question to be answered.

Pierce focused primarily on Reince Priebus’ recent hissyfit about not allowing any Republicans to come on MSNBC, after someone at the network had tweeted out, “Maybe the rightwing will hate it, but everyone else will go awww: the adorable new #Cheerios ad w/ biracial family.” MSNBC folded like a cheap ironing board, of course. And Pierce notes that if a Democrat had made a similar demand, he would have laughed out of polite company. But there is a difference I’m afraid: Democrats aren’t bigots. If half the electorate that votes Republican weren’t compelled to do so by their bigotry, Priebus wouldn’t have felt the need to demand an apology.

I don’t think there is an other side to this situation. Democrats — despite their many failings — actually believe in what they claim to believe in. It isn’t the case that half of the Democratic vote comes from closet communists. And even that would be more acceptable than the racist base of the Republican Party. So of course if the Democrats started acting like the Republicans, people would scoff. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine a comment that would cut the party so deeply while also being true.

What’s wrong with our media system is that people like Chuck Todd don’t start interviews with Reince Priebus with questions like, “What is the Republican Party going to do when all its racist voters die off? Does the party have a plan to create new racist voters?” But that won’t happen. If it did, the Republicans wouldn’t come on Meet the Press, and people like Chuck Todd would have to do actual journalism. And I don’t think there are many people in the mainstream press that still know how that’s done.

While looking for images for my last article, I came upon this image from an article in Driftglass, Today in False Equivalence. I’m not so much interested in the article itself, because it doesn’t actually address what they’ve done with this image. It’s a takeoff of one or more of those Demi Moore covers that I guess are supposed to say that the magazine is celebrating the beauty of pregnancy, but somehow always come off as a celebration of pregnancy fetishes. But in this case, the point is clear: supposed reasonable conservatives don’t want to take responsibility for the craziness of the conservative movement.

Actually, I don’t know if they care. Based upon his writing, David Brooks seems a little concerned. He is part of the long line of conservatives who are embarrassed by all the coarse things that other conservatives say. Brooks is careful with his language so that when everything that he believes in crumbles and destroys millions of lives, he can say, “I said it might be a good idea to raise taxes on the poor and eliminate taxes on the rich; I didn’t say it would be a good idea!” So it makes more sense to apply the unwanted pregnancy image to him.

I have a special dislike for David Frum. He’s as much of an ideologue as any Tea Party wacko. The only reason people consider him reasonable is because he thinks that having a bit of gun control mightn’t be the worst thing in the world. He’s also recently okay with same sex marriage. For decades he was against it because he thought it would be bad for “the kids.” But now the data are in and that case can’t be made anymore. Fair enough. But the truth is that his original problem with it was not based on evidence. It was based upon bigotry. When evidence becomes overwhelming, Frum will change his mind. But it is always up to the world to convince him that his bigotry is wrong. In other words: he’s just a right wing wacko who is smart enough to know when his arguments are untenable.

What I think totally sums up David Frum is the popular phrase “axis of evil.” He’s the guy who invented it. And it shows that like all conservatives, he has no actual interest in the truth. In World War II, the axis powers were a coalition. Iraq, Iran, and North Korea were not a coalition. In as much as they had anything to do with each other, it was to fight. But Frum was more than happy to lump them in together because Frum is an evil little man who doesn’t care about the nation or the world. Just like with Cheney and Bush, Frum cares about power.

The image is perfect in that it shows that the smarter people in the conservative movement would prefer to deny that they are responsible for the state of the modern Republican Party. Those Tea Party people that continue to clog up Congress are an embarrassment. But let’s not kid ourselves. They are an embarrassment because they are vulgar. They are an embarrassment because they aren’t tactical about the long-term goals of the conservative movement. They are an embarrassment because they are ignorant and stupid. But they are right in line with the ideology of David Brooks, David Frum, and all the “respectable” conservatives.

For Christmas, Paul Krugman wrote, Tidings of Comfort. He felt that people were kind of glum this holiday season. And the reason is that the media have painted a picture of the world that has indeed been very bleak. There was Ebola that was going to kill us all. Then there was Vladimir Putin and ISIS and North Korea who were going to destroy us because, you know, a democracy could never meet the threat of authoritarians except minor things like World War II that are easy enough to forget about. But perhaps you are like Paul Krugman and you’ve noticed that all of these things are imaginary.

I don’t think any of this is unusual. As a nation, we are always freaking out. We don’t have much in terms of cultural cohesion to hang onto. So we manage our lives by moving from crisis to crisis. We are like adrenaline junkies: we get excited and then we calm down. Wash, rinse, repeat — for the rest of our lives. I don’t much care in a certain way. My interest is in the way that such behavior stops us from dealing with real problems. And I think that our hair-trigger concern that we are, for example, all going to die from Ebola explains why we have the highest levels of teen pregnancy, illiteracy, and income inequality among the advanced economies.

It is hard not to think back to another great American who jumped from freak out to freak out: Ronald Reagan. Remember when he told us, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”? What exactly did he mean by that? I was never really clear what that one problem was. But I feel certain that what he meant was that individuals and the private sector was the solution to our problem. But it is three and a half decades later and it is more clear than ever that individuals don’t have the power to solve that one great problem (largely because of policies Reagan himself enacted) and that the private sector has become, if anything, a far greater problem than the original one great problem.

I’ve written a few articles this last week about Darrell Issa. And the main thing that I’ve had to say is that Issa has won in all of his fake scandal mongering. It doesn’t matter in the least that nothing came of those scandals — that there was literally nothing untoward going on. What matters is that he was allowed to go to media outlets all over the nation and push the idea that something was amiss. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” So he got people to think exactly the opposite of what was true and what was in their best interests, “The government is bad; the government can’t be trusted; the government is out to get you.” Imagine that you tell someone a hundred times that the White House is targeting its enemies. And then on the 101st time, you say, “Oops! I was wrong; the White House didn’t do anything wrong.” What are they going to remember? Or more to the point: what are they going to remember when the media don’t even cover that 101st statement?

I have little use for wimps on the left that don’t seem to stand for anything other than maybe technocratic competence. I have no use for the demagogues on the right who will do anything to keep themselves in power and enrich their friends. But there is a very special level of hell that I reserve for our media system that allows disinformation to be reported as fact in the name of balance. It can be very hard to get to the truth of any matter. But our media have given up on it. It’s hard, so they just report what the two powerful sides of the debate claim. And usually, the truth is far from both.

Dean Baker brought up an important issue today, New for Washington Post: Politicians Don’t Always Tell the Truth and TPP Is Not a Free-Trade Agreement. Primarily, he’s talking about the likely reason that Obama is pushing the TPP and TTIP, “President Obama is trying to get more business support for the Democratic Party.” But I’m more focused on just how awful these deals are.

As Baker has noted many times in the past, these are not “free trade” agreements. The two agreements involve nations in Asia (TPP) and Europe (TTIP) with which we already have pretty much free trade. What these agreements would do is make it very easy for business to contest local, state, and federal laws in newly created tribunals. Here is the key that ought to cause a shiver down the spine of all sentient beings, “Their rulings could not be over-turned by domestic courts.”

You know all the right-wing loonies who are always worried about the one world government or the imposition of sharia law? Well, that’s all nonsense. But this here is a very real threat. As I discuss a great deal on this blog, what we have to fear is the business community. Conservatives are constantly worried that it is the government that is oppressing them. But that isn’t the case at all. Our biggest threats come from private corporations with the government backing them up.

And that’s what we see with the TPP and TTIP. This is a very clear attack on national sovereignty. And this is why people like Obama want a quick vote on this — fast track authority. Because they know that a careful analysis of it will kill it. This is just another way for the business community to gain more power over us. I can’t say exactly how it would all work. No one can because these treaties have never been made public. But it is quite likely that what they would eventually mean is that local minimum wage laws were illegal. And local environmental laws were illegal. And local zoning laws were illegal.

I’m I going too far? I doubt it. Things that seem beyond the pale in one step are often totally acceptable in two steps — much less a hundred. Let me give you an example. In the 19th century, the idea of drug laws was preposterous and clearly unconstitutional. But by the beginning of the 20th century, the idea of taxing drugs and then using the power to effectively make drugs illegal was acceptable. And before long, the government just made laws that never would have been allowed a century earlier.

So going home to the house located a few meters from a new fracking operation after losing your only shot at justice in the TPP tribunals shouldn’t sound too far fetched. Because if we don’t work against it, it will become reality. This is an area where we really do have allies on the right. Of course, after Fox News starts pushing it, I can’t say. The black helicopter crowd isn’t hard to manipulate. As long as a Democrat is pushing the TPP and the TTIP, they will doubtless be against this move. But once President Cruz is pushing it, all bets are off.

Paul Krugman has written a couple of blog posts about David Beckworth. I know what you’re thinking, “Why would Krugman be writing about soccer? Or is he writing about the Spice Girls?” Don’t be an idiot like me: it’s Beckworth, not Beckham. He’s an economist of sorts. In the first post, Krugman was impressed that Beckworth agreed with him about the limitations of monetary policy when interest rates are already hanging around zero. But in his second post, Krugman grumbled because Beckworth seemed to be backtracking.

The argument that Beckworth is making is really interesting, even if Krugman’s argument is valid. Beckworth’s argument is that fiscal stimulus can’t really help the economy either. He claimed that any stimulus created by the government spending money would be offset by the Fed raising rates. Krugman countered that this isn’t true in the current situation where the Federal Reserve has consistently been unable to keep inflation as high as its (ridiculously low) inflation target. When it comes to this, I think there is an easier way to counter Beckworth. Basically, he’s just making the argument that there is never anything the government can do to fight economic downturns. So why bother?! That’s a typical conservative conclusion in search of an argument.

But there is something to be said for Beckworth’s argument in a general sense. In regular times, the Fed stands guard over the wealth of the power elite. If the economy starts to really take off — most especially in the form of workers actually earning more money for a change — the Fed raises interest rates to slow the economy down. The only time in the last four decades that we have seen a substantive improvement in the earnings of ordinary workers was when crazy heterodox Fed chairman Alan Greenspan went against what all the economists said.

The interesting thing is that Greenspan showed that unemployment could get down to below 4% without causing inflation. But the actual real world experiment hasn’t changed the thinking of economists. I still hear economists claiming that inflation below 6% is going to cause inflation. I know that things change over time. But 6%? Really?! That’s extreme. Things haven’t changed that much. But this is why I think it is better to think of economists as religious apologists than as scientists. But instead of arguing on the literal truth of the Bible, they argue for whatever is best for the power elite.

So in good times — or moderately good times — the Federal Reserve really does have the power to kill any recovery that democratically elected officials might be able to facilitate. And that really doesn’t speak well for us. It means that what hereditary “rights” did for feudalism, the Fed does for modern capitalism. And capitalism hardly needs such help! But with the Fed, it makes it substantially harder to break the established bonds of the power elite. It’s not just the fact that money makes money and that’s why you are best off being born rich. It is also that the most important economic entity in the entire world is there to enforce the status quo.

But just like we tell children fairy tales to make them behave, we tell ourselves comforting myths about meritocracy in America. But it is time to put away childish illusions and look at the cold reality of modern America. Then maybe we can change it.

See also: The Myth of the NAIRU and Its Purpose