Category Archives: Politics

Dean Baker Is Must Reading

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Dean BakerI think I have to call it: Dean Baker is the most important writer for liberals to read. But you understand: I’m talking about real liberals — economic liberals and not those corporate posers who think liberalism consists of support for same-sex marriage, a woman’s right to choose, and the idea that people ought to be “nice” to one another. Baker is the most clear-eyed commentator on economic issues that we have. What’s more, he’s great at poking the eyes of the pretentious apologists of the oligarchs. You should start each day by read his blog, Beat the Press. To demonstrate, I will to go over what he’s posted there in the last 24 hours.

Last night, Baker took on perhaps the most pretentious apologist, George Will and Tax Reform: If Only He Were Old Enough to Remember the Sixties. One thing that I most hate about modern American conservatives is how they argue that they are just looking out for the little guy, when they have no interest in that whatsoever. Will’s column on Friday was, The Cheerfulness of Tax Reform. In it, he says that everyone would be cheerful if the economy were doing well and so therefore everyone should be cheerful about tax reform. We all know that the only thing that is holding back the economy is a more “fair” tax system, am I right?!

Will is just hocking Dave Camp’s tax “reform” proposal. But what’s interesting about it is how Will is oh so very concerned about the fact that the economy isn’t growing enough to create jobs for the unemployed or the fact that young people aren’t saving enough for retirement or that the poor “on the lower rungs of the ladder of upward mobility” are paying too much in taxes. This is pretty good! We’re supposed to believe that the Republican Party is worried that the poor are paying too much in taxes when they’ve been bitching for the last four years about the fact that 47% of Americans pay no federal income taxes (often implied or even stated as “no taxes” whatsoever).

Will made a number of mistakes in his argument. The most notable was that he claimed that we should lower tax rates because economic growth was so great in the 1960s. Dean Baker had a few choice words for Will:

While Will is right about the low bar for success (we should be seeing very rapid job growth following a steep downturn like the 2008-2009 recession), the sixties do not support his case for a need to cut tax rates. Through most of the 1960s the top individual tax rate was 70 percent, while the corporate rate was 50 percent. That compares to a top individual rate of 41 percent today, and a corporate tax rate of 35 percent. The top marginal tax rate in the first two months when we had 300k plus job gains was 90 percent. If Will wants to make the case for lower tax rates spurring job growth, he should not be citing the sixties.

Early this morning, Baker wrote, NYT Brings Adventures in Uninformative Budget Reporting to Kansas. This is another battle in his long war with journalist over the tendency to throw out large numbers without context. It’s interesting that The New York Times seemed to surrender some time ago, adopting a policy of not reporting meaningless budget numbers. But they don’t seem to follow the policy very well. In this case, The Times explained that Kansas has a $280 million shortfall in the current fiscal year. Baker noted that it is roughly 2% of the Kansas budget. He summed up, “It is understandable that the governor and his allies would prefer euphemisms to conceal their agenda. It is not clear why the NYT would share the same motivations.”

Another of Baker’s big interests is our totally messed up intellectual property system. This morning, he wrote a brief post that gets into one example of how this makes our economy work far worse, If We Didn’t Have Patents, How Would Major Companies Be Able to Harass Innovative Start-Ups? It involves the Chinese company Xiaomi. According to The New York Times, “Xiaomi does not yet have much of a patent portfolio, leaving it vulnerable to lawsuits from competitors.” Baker explained what that meant. The “patent portfolio” is an offensive weapon used by companies to attack each other companies with baseless lawsuits. In other words: it’s all bad for the regular economy — but great for the legal profession.

The most interesting of the posts is his most recent, Health Care Cost Slowdown Persists in Spite of Projections. Baker is rarely better than when he is taking on Robert Samuelson at The Washington Post. Baker has written many posts with titles like, It’s Monday and Robert Samuelson is Confused. But the great thing about Baker is that nothing is automatic — when Samuelson says something smart, Baker backs him up. I haven’t found that Samuelson says that much smart, though. Like Will, he is an apologist who is always looking for ways to justify his own ideological policies.

Last night, he wrote, Health Spending — Under Control? His main point is that the only reason that healthcare spending inflation is down is because of the poor economy. This is Samuelson’s clarion call, “Healthcare spending is out of control, we must starve old people!” But Baker noted that there is no basis for Samuelson’s contention that the better healthcare numbers are almost entirely due to the bad economy:

Robert Samuelson discusses the slowdown in health care costs in his column today and considers possible explanations. He notes a study from Kaiser Family Foundation which attributes three quarters of the slowdown to the weak economy. This study predicted that spending would accelerate in 2014.

We actually have data on this, since the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports spending through October (Table 2.4.5U, Line 168). Through the first 10 months of 2014 we are on track to see a 3.3 percent increase in spending compared to 2013, down slightly from the 3.5 percent increase last year. (This category accounts for about 70 percent of total spending.) That would suggest that 2014 is not fitting the pattern predicted by the Kaiser analysis, which should raise doubts about the extent to which a weak economy can explain a reduction in spending.

Dean Baker is must reading. And if you aren’t going to read his blog, you should read some of his free Kindle books like Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People (with the also great Jared Bernstein) or The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive. And if you haven’t read it, everything you need to know about Social Security was written by him and Mark Weisbrot 13 years ago, Social Security: The Phony Crisis.

There Is No American Right-Wing Populism

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Elizabeth WarrenCould Elizabeth Warren appeal to the Tea Party because of their supposed populism? No.

In an otherwise uninspiring column, Paul Krugman made an interesting observation about the lack of right-wing rage about Citigroup raping the Dodd-Frank law, “You sometimes hear claims that the Tea Party is as opposed to bailing out bankers as it is to aiding the poor, but there’s no sign that this alleged hostility to Wall Street is having any influence at all on Republican priorities.” Yes, we do hear that. And we have been hearing it for the last five and a half years. But we have never seen it.

It has been mildly amusing to watch the Tea Party as they rant about the Constitution and bail-outs and the End of Freedom™. But if you look at who they vote for, the main thing that the Tea Party cares about is taking a hard line against abortion. They are also anti-gay and anti-immigrant. But even that is just an indication that the Tea Party movement is a group of social conservatives. As Claire Conner suggests in Wrapped in the Flag, the Tea Party is just the modern incarnation of the John Birth Society. And that’s really nothing more than a cultural movement: the good people in the Tea Party versus those takers, who just so happen to never be anyone with actual power like weapons manufacturers or bank presidents.

Over the weekend, Miles Mogulescu at Huffington Post wrote, The Speech That Could Make Elizabeth Warren the Next President of the United States. He suggested that Warren could unite people across the political spectrum, because everybody hates Wall Street, “Tea party supporters don’t like bailouts and crony capitalism any more that progressives do.” No, no, no! What is wrong with political commentators on the left? Have they been asleep the last six years?

The Tea Party did not start because a bunch of conservatives were angry about bank bailouts. They were angry — “Mad as hell!” — that a relatively small program was being created to help struggling homeowners. And they were mad that a charismatic African American president had been elected. But even that wasn’t really what was going on. They would have done nothing — Nada! Rien! Nichts! — if it hadn’t been for Fox News advertising it like it was a live Peter Pan starring Christopher Walken. And even with that, it would have died off quickly without Koch brother and other establishment conservative funding. Anyone who thinks that there is any kind of a real populist streak in the Tea Party is delusional. It was the realization of this that caused Tea Party support to go from roughly 50% in 2010 to roughly 20% now. And 20% of the population is the the ultra-conservative Republican base. There is no populism here.

This morning, Ed Kilgore called this whole thing nonsense, Elizabeth Warren’s Real and Imaginary Appeal. But even he undersells the ideological vacuousness of the Tea Party on this issue:

Yes, many “constitutional conservatives” oppose corporate bailouts. But they also typically support eliminating not just subsidies but regulation of big banks and other corporations; oppose most if not all of the social safety net (and certainly its expansion); and also oppose legalized abortion and marriage equality, for that matter.

I go along with all that, but not the elimination of subsidies. Maybe Rand Paul is against some giveaways to the military contractors. But he is still a corporate lackey who is only really interested in taking money away from the poorer classes because they need to be encouraged by want. It’s always in the best interests of the country to give tax breaks to oil companies. Conservatives are just like liberals: they don’t mind the government doing things they agree with. The difference is that conservatives are hypocrites who claim that they want to create a smaller government. They don’t. They want a very big government — one big enough to make sure two men don’t hold hands in public and no woman ever causes herself to miscarry. There is no “right-wing populism” in this country.

Three Glorious Years Without Christopher Hitchens

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Christopher HitchensAll of this was triggered for me by the death this week of Christopher Hitchens and the remarkably undiluted, intense praise lavished on him by media discussions. Part of this is explained by the fact that Hitchens — like other long-time media figures, such as Tim Russert — had personal interactions with huge numbers of media figures who are shaping how he is remembered in death. That’s understandable: it’s difficult for any human being to ignore personal feelings, and it’s even more difficult in the face of the tragic death of a vibrant person at a much younger age than is normal.

But for the public at large, at least those who knew of him, Hitchens was an extremely controversial, polarizing figure. And particularly over the last decade, he expressed views — not ancillary to his writings but central to them — that were nothing short of repellent.

Corey Robin wrote that “on the announcement of his death, I think it’s fair to allow Christopher Hitchens to do the things he loved to do most: speak for himself,” and then assembled two representative passages from Hitchens’ post-9/11 writings. In the first, Hitchens celebrated the ability of cluster bombs to penetrate through a Koran that a Muslim may be carrying in his coat pocket (“those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. So they won’t be able to say, ‘Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.’ No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words”), and in the second, Hitchens explained that his reaction to the 9/11 attack was “exhilaration” because it would unleash an exciting, sustained war against what he came addictively to call “Islamofascism”: “I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.”

Hitchens, of course, never “prosecuted” the “exhilarating” war by actually fighting in it, but confined his “prosecution” to cheering for it and persuading others to support it. As one of Hitchens’ heroes, George Orwell, put it perfectly in Homage to Catalonia about the anti-fascist, tough-guy war writers of his time:

As late as October 1937 the New Statesman was treating us to tales of Fascist barricades made of the bodies of living children (a most unhandy thing to make barricades with), and Mr Arthur Bryant was declaring that ‘the sawing-off of a Conservative tradesman’s legs’ was ‘a commonplace’ in Loyalist Spain.

The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

I rarely wrote about Hitchens because, at least for the time that I’ve been writing about politics (since late 2005), there was nothing particularly notable about him. When it came to the defining issues of the post-9/11 era, he was largely indistinguishable from the small army of neoconservative fanatics eager to unleash ever-greater violence against Muslims: driven by a toxic mix of barbarism, self-loving provincialism, a sense of personal inadequacy, and, most of all, a pity-inducing need to find glory and purpose in cheering on military adventures and vanquishing some foe of historically unprecedented evil even if it meant manufacturing them. As Robin put it:

Hitchens had a reputation for being an internationalist. Yet someone who gets excited by mass murder — and then invokes that excitement, to a waiting audience, as an explanation of his support for mass murder — is not an internationalist. He is a narcissist, the most provincial spirit of all.

Hitchens was obviously more urbane and well-written than the average neocon faux-warrior, but he was also often more vindictive and barbaric about his war cheerleading. One of the only writers with the courage to provide the full picture of Hitchens upon his death was Gawker’s John Cook, who — in an extremely well-written and poignant obituary — detailed Hitchens’ vehement, unapologetic passion for the attack on Iraq and his dismissive indifference to the mass human suffering it caused, accompanied by petty contempt for those who objected… As Cook put it: “it must not be forgotten in mourning him that he got the single most consequential decision in his life horrifically, petulantly wrong”; indeed: “People make mistakes. What’s horrible about Hitchens’ ardor for the invasion of Iraq is that he clung to it long after it became clear that a grotesque error had been made.”

Subordinating his brave and intellectually rigorous defense of atheism, Hitchens’ glee over violence, bloodshed, and perpetual war dominated the last decade of his life. Dennis Perrin, a friend and former protégée of Hitchens, described all the way back in 2003 how Hitchens’ virtues as a writer and thinker were fully swamped by his pulsating excitement over war and the Bush/Cheney imperial agenda:

I can barely read him anymore. His pieces in the Brit tabloid The Mirror and in Slate are a mishmash of imperial justifications and plain bombast; the old elegant style is dead. His TV appearances show a smug, nasty scold with little tolerance for those who disagree with him. He looks more and more like a Ralph Steadman sketch. And in addition to all this, he’s now revising what he said during the buildup to the Iraq war.

In several pieces, including an incredibly condescending blast against Nelson Mandela, Hitch went on and on about WMD, chided readers with “Just you wait!” and other taunts, fully confident that once the US took control of Iraq, tons of bio/chem weapons and labs would be all over the cable news nets — with him dancing a victory jig in the foreground. Now he says WMD were never a real concern, and that he’d always said so. It’s amazing that he’d dare state this while his earlier pieces can be read at his website. But then, when you side with massive state power and the cynical fucks who serve it, you can say pretty much anything and the People Who Matter won’t care.

Currently, Hitch is pushing the line, in language that echoes the reactionary Paul Johnson, that the US can be a “superpower for democracy,” and that Toms Jefferson and Paine would approve. He’s also slammed the “slut” Dixie Chicks as “fucking fat slags” for their rather mild critique of our Dear Leader. He favors Bush over Kerry, and doesn’t like it that Kerry “exploits” his Vietnam combat experience (as opposed to, say, re-election campaign stunts on aircraft carriers).

Sweet Jesus. What next? I’m afraid my old mentor is not the truth-telling Orwell he fancies himself to be. He’s becoming a coarser version of Norman Podhoretz.

One of the last political essays he wrote in his life, for Slate, celebrated the virtues of Endless War.

—Glenn Greenwald
Christopher Hitchens and the Protocol for Public Figure Deaths

The Pastor Who Ruined the Christmas Play

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Jesus CryingI wasn’t going to say anything. I was invited to go to a Christmas play. It was at a church, but it was no big deal. It was a fundraiser, but I wasn’t paying. I figured it would be a bunch of kids in sheets like, A Charlie Brown Christmas. Instead, it was a fairly professional affair. The choir was quite good — as were a number of the featured singers. Some of the acting wasn’t bad, and one of its attempts at comedy worked pretty well. The orchestra was good at times, but the flutes, and even more, the trumpets were out of tune — especially in the first act. But overall, not a bad production at all.

But in the middle of the second act, the senior pastor of the church came up on the stage to talk about Jesus. For a good five minutes, I could pretend that it was all part of the show. But he continued on and on — for a total of twenty minutes, it seemed to me. It became nothing but proselytizing — for Jesus, but more to the point, for his own little fiefdom, the church I was sitting in. And I can see why! The church consists of at least three sizable buildings. This production was presented in the main church that holds roughly a thousand people. And it is packed with equipment — hundreds of thousands of dollars of audio equipment, as far as I could tell.

When the show was over, he stopped everyone from leaving to spend another five minutes pimping for his church. This man had destroyed any goodwill that I had acquired toward the Christian faith. In general, I push back against people who claim that religion is all about money. I truly don’t think that’s true. But in this case, the good pastor was not a fisherman of souls; he was a fisherman of cash — indirect though it may be. It was disgusting.

At one point during his main performance, he had all of us in the audience pray and ask God to come into our sinful hearts. And he said something about how if you ask Jesus to make his presence know, he will. Okay: typical evangelical nonsense. But it occurred to me at that point that it is pretty easy to stand up there on stage and talk about all the blessings of God when you are doing pretty well in a material sense. I thought of Satan in the Book of Job. Let’s take everything away from Pastor Cundall and see if his faith is as strong as Job’s. My guess: no.

It was also at this point that I really began to think about something I had noticed earlier, but put in the back of my mind. In all the cast and audience, the only non-white person I saw was a single Asian. I didn’t see any Latinos and I didn’t see any African Americans. This is a lily-white church in the middle of a country that does everything it can to bless lily-white people. And I was reminded how one of the big themes in the first act was bowing down to God — and by extension authority. And the scene right before the pastor’s talk involved shepherds being very slippery with the concepts of king and God.

For the first time in my life, I really saw a church as primarily a system of control. Its primary function is to perpetuate and empower itself. But secondarily, its function is to quiet dissent in the larger world. The church depends upon the existing secular power structure for its existence. This is quite a different way for me to think about the Abrahamic religions. Generally, I focus on their lack of theological depth — at least the way that most of them practice it. And there was lots of that on display, including the truly offensive idea that all you have to do is “believe” in Jesus and you are saved — like Christians are children watching Peter Pan trying to make Tinker Bell come back to life.

But I’m beyond that now. I can understand the need of many people to infantilize themselves in the face of death and the cosmic unknowable. But these are just the parishioners. The institutional nature of churches is evil. Garry Wills is right that the Catholic Church should get rid of priests. The Quakers have been right all these centuries. The church I found myself in tonight is more like a corporation than anything early Christians would have understood as a church.

The Psychology of Open-Carry

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Veronica DunnachieVeronica Dunnachie seems to have killed her estranged husband and his adult daughter. There is nothing especially significant in the report of yet another disturbed person killing people. What makes this case notable is that Dunnachie was an outspoken advocate for open-carry laws. On the plus side, there were three small children in the house and she didn’t kill them. (Or even shoot them, bless her heart!) After performing the deed, she drove herself to a local mental hospital and checked herself in at the urging of another open-carry advocate. The police later arrested her there and she is now in jail.

According to Daniel Strauss at Talking Points Memo, “Reached by TPM on Thursday, Arlington, Texas police pointed to Dunnachie’s Facebook page and the photos on there showing her involved in Open Carry Tarrant County and pictures of Open Carry Texas.” The police said that they couldn’t comment on her affiliations “but if you go to her Facebook page, it’s pretty clear.” Indeed it is. Sadly clear. The Facebook page has been taken down. But here is an image of her exercising her Constitutional rights at what looks like a fast food restaurant, grabbed by Hunter at Daily Kos (apparently originally on Liberaland):

Veronica Dunnachie Exercising Her Constitutional Rights

I’m surprised that this story has not gotten more traction. Maybe it is just that it is so predictable. Somewhere I saw someone say something obvious but profound, “It’s amazing how quickly a ‘good guy with a gun’ can turn into a ‘bad guy with a gun.'” Or “gal” as the case may be. Of course, even with the minor coverage, the pushback has begun. Yesterday, Liberaland published, Open Carry Group Denies Double Murder Suspect Was a Member, but She Was. You really should click over to the article. It not only has a lot more details about what happened, but it has great snarky comments about the open carry groups’ pathetic attempts to distance themselves, like the following:

Open Carry Tarrant County’s leader Kory Watkins is denying any affiliation with Dunnachie. Watkins told Guns.com that Dunnachie “was not a member of the group.”

Oh look, here’s Kory with the double murder suspect…

Here is his organization on Facebook calling her “One of our members.”

I’m interested in the psychology of the open-carry advocates. Most states allow pretty much anyone (other than felons) to get concealed-carry licenses. Why is open-carry necessary? I don’t think it is about not wanting to wear a jacket. I think it is about rubbing the fact that you are armed in the faces of everyone around you. It is a power trip. It’s about saying, “Don’t mess with me!” But what kind of loser is so insecure that they need to do that?

Sadly, I think the psychology is very similar to that of Bill White, that I discussed exactly a year ago, How to Not Become a Neo-Nazi. In that article (one of my better ones), I pointed to the fact that White seemed to lack meaning in his life. He was running around from cause to cause until finally finding a home with the neo-Nazis. I see a similar need with the open-carry brigade. But just as finding his cause made White a dangerous man, open-carry made Veronica Dunnachie a dangerous woman.

I’m always reminded of this great Tom Tomorrow cartoon, “I said after you, dammit!”

Armed Society is a Polite Society

I have little doubt that Dunnachie is mentally unstable. And break-ups are very difficult. But a situation that would normally end in a slap fight ends with two people dead, because a mentally unstable, emotionally fragile person had a gun. And in Dunnachie’s case, she always had a gun. Because “freedom.” But that’s a mighty strange concept of freedom: people have to die because a bunch of rudderless people have decided that if they aren’t allowed to carry guns everywhere, the black helicopters will come.

The Problem With Obama

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Garry WillsI think one of the things that may be hindering him is that he’s so aware that he is the change — that it’s such a break with our history to elect a black President — and that’s such an odd thing to some people and that’s why they’re calling him “not an American” or “socialist” or “fascist” or whatever — that he wants to emphasize continuity almost to a fault. So even though he came to national attention by opposing the Iraq War, he appointed his Secretary of State (someone who voted for the Iraq War), his Vice-President (someone who voted for the Iraq War), his Secretary of Defense (someone who conducted the Iraq War), the two generals in Afghanistan (who conducted the Iraq War). That’s continuity, all right! But is it the continuity that we need?

And then I noticed that the same thing was happening in other things. He wanted to face up to the banking problems. So he put in Geithner and Summers and Bernanke — the same people who got us into the banking problems. He wanted to bring us healthcare. And the first people he invited into the White House were the AMA, big pharma, the insurance companies. And he actually said, foolishly, “This is the first time we’ve had all these people on our side.” They weren’t on his side; they were snookering him. So I think that his rhetoric of a post-racial, post-partisan, post-blue-state-red-state America is just unrealistic. And the Republican Party has played him for a fool.

—Garry Wills
Interview on Conversations With History

Nazi Gumball Ring… Or Is It?

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Nazi RingMy friend Will brought my attention to this curious article, Toy Vending Machine Gives Tulsa Boy a Nazi-Themed Ring. A Oklahoma mother was shopping at a dollar store when her son got the ring pictured there on the left from one of those little toy vending machines.

My first reaction was that it must be a prank being perpetrated by the boy or his mother. But when the local news ponied up some serious coin, they found a dozen other rings just like it. This led me to my second reaction: it must be something done by someone who works for the vending machine company. That could be a prank but it could also be a stunt done by some neo-Nazi. That got me searching Google Images.

I immediately noticed that I couldn’t find any Nazi ring that looked anything like this. And even a search on Nazi symbols with birds in them didn’t turn up anything that looked especially like this. Overwhelmingly, Nazi symbols contained birds with their wings outstretched. I’m sure the Nazis saw themselves as very active: birds that soared, not birds that nested. This is the best match I can come up with:

Nazi Eagle Symbol

Another question I have is how anyone could do this even if they wanted to. It would certainly be easier to create Nazi swastika decals rather than plastic rings. What’s more, let’s not forget that the Nazi swastika was first and is still part of the primary symbol of Jainism — the most peaceful religion or philosophy in the world:

Jainism Symbol Explained
Image used without permission from Jain Belief

I figure it happened as follows. The vending machine company buys these rings for about a penny a piece from some company in China. The company in China makes rings with all sorts of designs on them. They don’t know what they mean, nor do they care. They are providing stupid plastic rings at unbelievably low prices. And the people at the vending machine company don’t even look at the rings because they usually just have Hello Kitty on them anyway. What’s more, they aren’t as hung up on the Nazis as we are. They remember the Japanese! When they see a swastika, they probably think Jainism, not fascism.

All this means that it probably is a Nazi symbol. But I doubt that anyone intended it as Nazi propaganda. It was just another example of how great globalization is. And it just proves that the market is always right. Heil profits!

Attack of the Crybaby: Why Chris Hughes Turned Against New Republic

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Chris HughesI don’t especially care about the death of New Republic. As I discussed in, New Republic: 1914 – 2014, I mostly associate it with The Bell Curve. But I am interested in Chris Hughes. After all, what did Chris Hughes do in life? His singular claim to fame is that he was Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate. In exchange for that chance encounter, Hughes has a half billion dollars. Now I don’t think much of Zuckerberg either. But at least he did something and was a leader of men. Hughes is just a man-child who ought to be a barista at a suburban Starbucks.

So I’m really interested in how this entitled rich boy went from the savior of New Republic to its destroyer. And luckily, Ryan Lizza at The New Yorker has the whole story, Inside the Collapse of the New Republic. Just to give you a little idea of how thoroughly Hughes has managed to destroy the magazine, Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke at the hundred year anniversary for the magazine last month. This month, she canceled her subscription. But it may not matter. Because of the mass resignations, New Republic has stopped producing the magazine until February. We’ll see if they manage to grind one out even then. And if they do, I wonder how long it will go on. The two top people are New Republic have no experience doing actual journalism.

But I don’t want to get distracted. My interest is in Chris Hughes and his crybaby act. According to the article, things were great at first. Hughes even went to a conference with the writers and editors and hung out with them late into the night. Sadly, everyone involved, including Lizza, seems to think that this was a good sign. But it wasn’t. It was just a pampered rich boy playing with his new toy. Here were all these urbane sophisticated people willing to hang out with Hughes, who is the kind of guy every one of those writers would have scoffed at had he not been the boss.

Just how pathetic a figure is Chris Hughes? After totally screwing up and causing a mass exodus of his staff, he whined to his remaining staff that he cared “about tradition and about institutions.” And as an example of that, he noted that he studied history and literature at Harvard. Oh my! That does settle it, then. And this is why he hired a guy who said the following on his first day of being placed in charged of the magazine:

They say that there’s two types of CEOs. There’s the peacetime CEO and the wartime CEO. Not to be overly dramatic about it, but this is sort of a war. This is a wartime period. That just means that we need to change a lot of things. We need to just break shit. Sorry to say, we’ve got to break shit and embrace being uncomfortable sometimes. And it’s scary. It’s definitely a scary thing to do. But it’s also fun: you know, lean up against the wall and break it.

This bit of self-consciously belligerent new economy babble was widely mocked by the staff at New Republic. What’s become clear over the past decade or so is that the jargon of the high tech “entrepreneurs” is no more meaningful than the Sun Tzu quotations of the idiot traders of the 1980s. But this is all that Hughes and company bring to the table: business “truisms.” The fact that Hughes considers himself a Democrat is all you really need to know about the state of the Democratic Party.

One of the first things that Hughes did after buying New Republic was an amazing bit of micromanagement. The magazine was already being printed. But Hughes stopped it because he didn’t like the following headline, “Attack of the Crybabies: Why Hedge Fund Honchos Turned Against Obama.” He had the staff remove “Attack of the Crybabies” from the headline. Similarly, when Amazon cut off their participation in their Alpha House campaign because of a critical New Republic article, Hughes did not want that information made public. That one’s a twofer: two different high tech icons showing that they behave exactly the same (if not worse) than their business predecessors.

But I will just quote Lizza for the best example of how small-minded Chris Hughes is. It shows what really attracts him to the Democratic Party: it accepts his sexual orientation and makes no claims on his wealth:

Hughes’s eroding relationship with the staff took on an ideological edge. On the morning that Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, announced that he was gay, MacGillis wrote a note to “the Plank,” TNR’s internal e-mail listserv for writers and editors. “I see the celebration of his announcement, while entirely justifiable, as another sign of what’s happened to liberalism today, where rights/identity liberalism trumps economic liberalism,” he wrote. “This is, after all, a guy who embodies so much of what’s amiss in the age of inequality — pulling down $378 million in 2011 alone; Apple skirting taxes more brazenly than anyone else — yet those revelations have caused barely a stir.”

Hughes responded to the note six minutes later: “I think those are valid issues, although Apple has acted squarely within the law,” he wrote. “The law itself is fucked up. But I don’t think you can underestimate the difficulty of his decision or how tone deaf that argument would be today.”

The other editorial employees on the list were surprised by the response. It was an internal listserv for writers and editors, and the staffers didn’t realize that Hughes, who had relinquished his title as editor-in-chief when he installed Vidra, was on it. MacGillis responded by saying that he would hold off on writing, but added, “Just for the record, though, it is not so clear that Apple acted squarely within the law. The law’s a mess, but Apple pushed the bounds of it more than anyone.” He pasted text from a piece in the Times that questioned some of Apple’s practices.

“I’m confused,” Hughes wrote back. “Has anyone, including this article, said what they did was illegal? Companies have an obligation to their shareholders to maximize shareholder value, including through strategic tax planning.”

When the whole thing was over, Hughes was genuinely surprised. One ex-staffer said, “He was shocked. And I’m kind of shocked that he was shocked.” Hughes had no problem with New Republic being a money loser so long as he was having fun with his new toy. But that could only last so long. Rather than flattering him, people like Alec MacGillis were saying things that indicated that maybe they disagreed with his outlook on life. So New Republic quickly became just another investment. And that meant that it needed to make money! Of course, Chris Hughes doesn’t have a clue how to actually make money other than to hire people who speak the same incoherent language that he does.

If we had a just society, Chris Hughes would die soon, alone, and broke. But no one with a half billion dollars is ever allowed to fail in our society. So Chris Hughes will always be successful in the only way that matters to him: financially. But I do hope that liberals will finally wake up to the fact that Chris Hughes and all the other billionaire “liberals” are anything but actual liberals. They are, in fact, a great impediment to making social progress. We need to elect a president who would never take a call from the likes of the crybaby billionaire class. They only harm society.

Update (14 December 2014 10:14 am)

I haven’t read it yet, but the subtitle to Thomas Frank’s column today is, “Zillionaire new media barons think themselves geniuses, not say, really lucky to’ve been Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate.” It appears great and middling Franks think alike.

America Is Falling Apart

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Noam ChomskyObama virtually nationalized the auto industry. It was collapsing, so it had to be kind of built up by the taxpayers. So he took over most of the auto industry. There were a few possibilities. One possibility, of course, was the one that was followed. Bail out the owners, bail out the banks, give it back to the same people, or other people with different faces but essentially the same roles in society, and have it continue to produce what it had always been producing — automobiles. There was another possibility.

Give it to the work force. Subsidize them to develop and have it produce what we need. What do we need? I can give you a personal example.

My wife and I came to New York by train from Boston. The train took only an hour and a half longer than when I took it in 1950 for the first time. Either it was standing still or it was going slower than the trucks on the Connecticut Turnpike.

There isn’t a country in the world where this happens. And that’s just a symbol of the country. This is the richest country in the world that has incomparable advantages and it’s just falling apart.

—Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky Talks US Militarism and Capitalism, at Home and Abroad

Zulu and the Politics of Power

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ZuluLast night, I watched the 1964 classic, Zulu. I’ve always really liked the film, but it also seems somehow racist. I add the modifier there, because the film goes out of its way to portray the Zulu with a great deal of dignity. And having watched the film again, I am of the opinion that it isn’t racist, although it is Anglophilic: it tells the story entirely from the standpoint of the British. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that — especially given when the film was made. What I think is most interesting, however, is that an equally great film could be made entirely from the Zulu perspective.

I love the stories of family squabbles, especially when they have consequences far outside the family. Cetshwayo kaMpande, the king of Zululand, was a good ruler. The British were the aggressors in the Anglo-Zulu war. And overall, the Zulu were doing quite well. But Cetshwayo was not out to create a new empire. He was just trying to hold onto to his own kingdom. Even after his success at the Battle of Isandlwana (the subject of the mediocre film Zulu Dawn), he wanted to make peace with the British. And he might have been successful if it weren’t for his half-brother, Dabulamanzi kaMpande.

It was Dabulamanzi who instigated the Battle of Rorke’s Drift — the subject of Zulu. Rorke’s Drift was outside of Zululand and Cetshwayo did not want to attack outside of his own land. That’s not to say that Dabulamanzi was disloyal. In fact, he was very loyal. He was just younger and less wise. It’s not clear what he really thought to accomplish at Rorke’s Drift. A victory would have meant nothing compared to the victory at Isandlawana. As it was, the British didn’t win the battle so much as survive. That brings up the important point about the ending of Zulu.

The most beautiful part of the film is where the Zulu sing a song in preparation for a huge attack. In response, the British sing, “Men of Harlech.” It is a beautiful moment that has no historical basis. But who cares? It is followed by the Zulu attack. The British fall back and form three lines of fire. And after much sound and fury, the British are left standing in front of a sea of death Zulu warriors. It is an amazing bit of filmmaking, switching from the lyricism of the singing scene to the brutality of the attack.

After this, the film cuts to three hours later where we learn that the Zulu have not attacked again. Then the Zulu appear on the hillside — thousands of them. The British don’t even try. It is over. But instead of attacking, the Zulu sing a song honoring them as fellow warriors. And then the Zulu go on their merry. It works rather well as an ending to the film, but it isn’t what happened. In fact, the Zulu just disappeared because they were short on supplies, with many wounded, and far from home.

But Rorke’s Drift had great public relations benefit for the British. I question whether the British would have continued on with the Anglo-Zulu War without this “victory” — especially with Cetshwayo’s attempts to broker a peace. But it’s hard to say. In terms of imperialism, the British were not nearly as bad as many. But that’s just a function of how bad others — notably my own Portuguese ancestors — were, and not of the British being great.

Another interesting thing about the battle is what happened to the British soldiers who fought in it. Most of them died quite young. Lieutenant Bromhead, for example, died of typhoid fever at the age of 45 while serving in India. But the situation was much worse for lower ranks. One of the men, William Jones, ended up pawning his Victoria Cross. He died in a workhouse. But in some ways, he was lucky — living into his 70s. The most extreme case was that of Ferdinand Schiess. He couldn’t find work — a common situation for the men who fought at Rorke’s Drift. A few years after the battle, he was discovered by the Royal Navy on the streets of Cape Town — starving. They saved him, but he died on the journey back to England. He was 28 years old. (That is the age that the hero dies in Jude the Obscure — written around the same time.)

I bring this up because it shows the way that the powerful treat the people. It doesn’t matter if they are enemies (reluctant though they may be) or friends — even heroes. They are all expendable.

Image licensed under Fair Use.

Two More Things About Torture Report

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Stop Torture - Funny enough, cropped from image at US Embassy WebsiteI’ve seen two more things about the torture report that really should be read. The first is from Jonathan Chait, The Torture Party: Why Republicans Defend the Most Sadistic Government Program in Recent History. It’s a longish article, that will be in the upcoming issue of New York Magazine. It makes a number of good points. For example, all the torture apologias up until now have used the same now discredited claim, “We waterboarded in the CIA — the CIA waterboarded three terrorists. Just three.” Of course, we pretty much knew that wasn’t true two years ago. But now we know that wasn’t true and that the CIA did much worse.

This leads us to the horrifyingly amusing spectacle of Ted Cruz claiming that torture is terrible but “after six years, enough with saying ‘everything is George W Bush’s fault.'” Because the torture report is really just the administration’s effort to blame everything on Bush. And we know this because (1) the White House did not want to release the report; and (2) the report is really a whitewash as far as Bush and company are concerned — it puts all the blame on the CIA, where it most definitely does not all belong. Chait noted, “To Cruz and other Republicans still in office, the allegation that the Bush administration used torture had gone from outrageous smear to tired news without ever having passed through the stage of acceptable topic of discussion.”

Chait also pointed to Dick Cheney on Fox News, who finally said what he really thinks, “What are we supposed to do? Kiss him on both cheeks and say ‘Please, please, tell us what you know’? Of course not. We did exactly what needed to be done in order to catch those who were guilty on 9/11 and prevent a further attack, and we were successful on both parts.” In addition to being morally bankrupt, people like Cheney will never accept that (1) torture is not effective; (2) we tortured a whole lot of innocent people; and (3) there are huge opportunity costs associated with what we did. Chait ended with a summation that I’m afraid applies to a whole lot more people than just Dick Cheney:

Here, finally, was the brutal moral logic of Cheneyism on bright display. The insistence by his fellow partisans on averting their eyes from the horrible truth at least grows out of a human reaction. Cheney does not even understand why somebody would look away. His soul is a cold, black void.

Ron Wyden

After the report was released, a group of ex-CIA heads wrote an OpEd in The Wall Street Journal, Interrogations Saved Lives. I think there is a special kind of logic here that they would never admit to, “Our interrogations must have saved lives! If they didn’t, then we would have to admit to being monsters!” But you know what I say, “If the rectal tubing fits, it doesn’t matter how nice a suit you wear, you are a monster.” But I digress.

Senator Ron Wyden saw the OpEd and he wasn’t pleased. So he put together the following annotated version of it. You will have to click on the full-screen button to read it. But it is very much worth the effort!

Wyden Torture Rebuttal

What bugs me about all of this is the sense I have that the American media is so done with this torture report. To me, this is extremely deep. Even at the time, I was greatly disturbed. When I was young, I was a true believer in America. I believed everything I was taught. And one of the things that I was taught was that we don’t torture. That was a big difference between “us” and “them.” But the moment it became convenient, we tortured. It seems as though many people had just been waiting for the chance. When Walter Johnson’s fast ball started to slow, he retired. He didn’t turn into Ty Cobb. I guess it is different for nations. The error was mine: to ever think that we were better than others. So maybe Dick Cheney and company did me a great favor. The sad thing is, they can torture and still think that we are better.

H/T: Zack Beauchamp

CRomnibus Is Not That Bad

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Obama CopeAs I explain quite a lot around here, I’m really not very ideological. If I lived in a better time and place, perhaps I would be. But I’ve seen too much of the dangers of ideology — on the left and, most especially and recently, on the right. So as a pragmatist, I’m not especially upset about this new budget — the so called CRomnibus. (It’s called that because it is a combination of a normal budget — an ombibus — and a continuing resolution, or CR.) I’ll get to the details of the deal in a moment.

One thing that we liberals have to understand is that it really doesn’t matter that roughly half the population consistently votes against its own best interests — usually in the name of concepts that have no meaningful policy substance — things like “life” and “freedom.” And it doesn’t matter that if everyone voted we would have a far better government. The fact remains that a large enough block of the electorate votes for oligarchs and we have to make the best of this situation. (I might note that when things go ridiculously wrong because of the oligarchs, we would be better off voting in a bunch of actual liberals and not New Democrats like Obama, but I’ll leave that for another time.)

There are a number of things that are wrong with the new budget. It isn’t just the change to Dodd-Frank and the increase in political party giving. There is also a change to the funding of the risk corridor program in Obamacare. There are some cuts to the EPA. There are cuts to the IRS that are totally self-defeating unless you are a Republican and want to “destroy the IRS.” And perhaps the worst thing is that Congress is blocking the District of Columbia’s cannabis legalization law. Republicans always talk about what an authoritarian Obama is. That’s a joke, of course; but their treatment of DC is quite authoritarian.

But even if this was all there was to the budget deal, it wouldn’t be that bad. A government shutdown is a very bad thing. It hurts people. Nothing here is totally unreasonable like defunding the Medicaid expansion or enacting chained-CPI. So I don’t see any reason to freak out regardless. But the truth is that it isn’t that bad because the Democrats did get a lot of what they wanted. And that’s what we’ve all been saying over the last four years: compromise involves getting something and giving something. So what did the Democrats get?

Kevin Drum over at Mother Jones provided a good overview, Here’s What Democrats Got Out of the CRomnibus. In the article, Jim Morgan explained that perhaps the biggest thing they got was not having the EPA gutting — which is what the Republicans wanted to do with a thousand cuts (okay: 26). And according to Obama it included “investments for the President’s early education agenda, Pell Grants, the bipartisan Manufacturing Institutes initiative, and extension of the Trade Adjustment Assistance program.” These are not the greatest things in the world, but the same can be said for what the Republicans got. Which is why the right-wing authoritarians are screaming about the bill.

Some, like Ezra Klein, are arguing that the Democrats really had to take this opportunity, because otherwise, they would have just passed a three month continuing resolution. That would have meant the even more crazy fully Republican controlled Congress would have to be dealt with. I don’t really buy that, either. The Republican leadership wanted the CRomnibus too. They are as afraid of the new Congress as the Democrats are. But they weren’t going to roll-over on this. And that’s why this compromise bill actually made sense.

I’m not exactly happy with the CRomnibus. But it isn’t the sort of thing that I’m going to get worked up about. It isn’t the end of the world. I’m much more concerned that the Federal Reserve is going to raise interest rates just in time to assure us a Republican president. I’m far more outraged that the torture report was met by conservatives (and many “liberals” as well) with a shrug and a, “That was so long ago!” Above all, I’m angry that the Democratic Party can’t manage to be an actual liberal party when it comes to the economy or the national security state or foreign affairs. But this budget deal? No big deal.