Several years ago, an economist put together a little tool to decide what Greece should do about its economic troubles. It was very detailed, with well over a hundred “blocks” that various responses to many questions led to. My approach to the problem was simple: Greece should leave the euro and deal with the suffering that would cause. My thinking wasn’t really that sophisticated. It was just that I felt an exit of Greece was a given and it was better to suffer the exit then rather than suffer for months or years and then suffer the exit.

Paul Krugman’s column this morning is, Mad as Hellas. And from it, I learned that after years of intense suffering, the Greek economy is still very bad and the people seem to have finally had enough. The current Greek government that is committed to austerity is trying to put off an election. According to Krugman, “And, if it fails, the likely winner in that election is Syriza, a party of the left that has demanded a renegotiation of the austerity program, which could lead to a confrontation with Germany and exit from the euro.”

Why would that mean that the Greece would exit the euro? Simply: Germany is filled with a bunch of jerks. I don’t see Germany yielding in this matter. Germany’s economy is doing fine. Germany is certain that if everyone just acted like them, they too would be doing fine. Germany has a century-long record of abusing its power on the rest of Europe. I suppose we should be happy that they no longer have to start a war. But it hardly matters when you can get everyone to do as you want without firing a shot.

The United States’ federal budget is $3.5 trillion. According to Krugman, Greece has been forced to cut its budget and raise taxes at a level that would be equivalent to us doing so to a tune of one trillion dollars per year. We are talking massive austerity. And the results? “Meanwhile, wages in the private sector have plunged. Yet a quarter of the Greek labor force, and half its young, remain unemployed… Meanwhile, the debt situation has if anything gotten worse, with the ratio of public debt to GDP at a record high — mainly because of falling GDP, not rising debt — and with the emergence of a big private debt problem, thanks to deflation and depression.”

So it is just as I thought four years ago: the Greek economy is not doing any better, but the Greek people are doing much worse. And there is no indication that Germany will think anything ought to change. After all, things are going quite well for them. And as with all ideologues, the reasoning will be very clear, “If austerity hasn’t worked so far, you need more austerity!” In other words: the beatings will continue until morale improves.

Krugman also noted that extremist political parties are on the rise in France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. You can only kick people when they are down for so long. And it is just that. It isn’t, as is generally claimed, that these countries need to “take their medicine.” In this case, the “medicine” is like blood letting an anemic patient. Krugman has it exactly right:

Being “very serious” in the world of economics is all about people being “hard” and “tough.” But the pain that must be accepted is never their own pain. We see it here in the United States where our budget deficit supposedly means we must lower taxes on the rich and cut benefits of the retired. But the best example of it is found with the way that Germany treats the rest of Europe. One of the reasons for forming the Eurozone was so that they wouldn’t have anymore wars. But this is just another kind of war and someone has to fight back against Germany.

The torture report executive summary (pdf) is out, and it makes me something more than depressed. What’s wrong with us? Can’t we even be evil without being creepy? I read in International Business Times, CIA Torture Report: “Rectal Feeding” Pasta, Hummus and Nuts to Detainees Revealed. Who thinks these kinds of things up? This is the kind of stuff that comes out of the mind of a psychopath, and I mean that literally. The officials, of course, claimed that it was all for a good cause: to show the supposed interrogator’s “total control over the detainee.” That sounds a whole lot like a kind of psycho-sexual, sadomasochistic hoohah — done for the pleasure of the “interrogator” and for no other reason.

At USA Today, Paul Singer provided, 7 Key Facts About the Senate’s CIA Torture Report. It shows that the report itself is something of a whitewash. It claims that the supposed enhanced interrogation techniques “in some cases amounting to torture.” Some cases? Based upon other things in the report, it isn’t clear that there was effective enough oversight to say that torture was ever not used. The general idea during the Bush years was simply that if we did it, it wasn’t torture. Instead, it was “enhanced interrogation techniques!” George Orwell would have loved this stuff!

But despite the 499 page executive summary (of the still classified 6,200 page report) being in large part a whitewash, it is still damning. In addition to putting food up the rectums of detainees, they killed at least one detainee. And, of course, they operated black sites. I love this last part, because one of the worst acts of despotic regimes is how they just make people disappear so that their family and friends don’t know what has become of them. It isn’t surprising that the United States would do that (and still does). After all, we’ve supported countless regimes that did it. But it is disappointing.

One funny thing is what Obama said, “I hope that today’s report can help us leave these techniques where they belong, in the past.” That’s just what the father of a dysfunctional family says. “Can’t we just leave all the mental, physical, and sexual abuse where it belongs, in the past?” This is supposed to be a happy occasion! Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed who.

And in the end, what does it all mean? The United States of America — my country — tortured people, even to death, and did it using some very creepy means that could only come out of the mind of a very disturbed person. But half the country won’t even believe it. Republicans Marco Rubio and Jim Risch are already claiming that it is a partisan report, despite the fact that the whole thing gives the Bush administration a complete pass. But the “America right or wrong” crowd will never actually admit that the country ever does anything wrong. You know, IOKIIA (It’s Okay if it’s America).

Meanwhile, the only person in the whole world to have been prosecuted in regard to this is John Kiriakou (see also links at the end of that article) — the man who told the media about it. Because we need to have priorities! Cramming pasta into the anuses of people in our custody may be wrong. Allowing them to die of hypothermia may be unfortunate. But alerting the American people about these crimes that are being done their names?! That’s an outrage! (FYI: Kiriakou is still in prison.)

And the la-hand of the Freeeeee!
And the hoooome, of thhhhhe, braaaave!

You may remember back in May I wrote, 60 Minutes Spins for BP. It was about one of the most disgraceful segments I have seen on the once great news program. After the BP oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, BP made general settlement with the businesses in the area. But three years later, after the heat was off, the company tried to backtrack. It noted that some business that hadn’t been directly harmed by the spill were getting money. Poor BP!

While there were certainly some highly questionable claims, there were thousands of others that were at best open to debate that BP also didn’t want to pay for. Basically, they agreed on a half billion dollar settlement — which was a great deal for them at that time — and now they were doing everything they could think of to take back some of that money. So they hired Ted “I stuck you with the worst president ever!” Olson to use every legal trick in the book to get BP out of its legal accountability.

That’s all to be expected from a soulless corporation and a legal hack. The true disgrace came in the form of the 60 Minutes segment that was a total whitewash of the situation. Although there were a couple of experts who pushed back against the BP case, the whole story was told just the way BP and Ted Olson wanted it. The segment could not have been any better if they had directed it themselves. As I noted at the time, “In the golden years with Mike Wallace, 60 Minutes took on the big guys and how they were screwing the little guys. Now? 60 Minutes wants us to decide whether the little guys are screwing the big guy BP, who just happens to have destroyed the Gulf of Mexico.”

Up until yesterday, BP has been losing all of its cases. As far as I can tell, the logic is clear. BP agreed to a settlement. Just because they would like to back out of it now is no reason why the courts should allow them to do it. I don’t think any of this surprised BP and its hired guns. But I suspect that they thought (as did I) that if only they could get it to the Supreme Court, there were four justices (and maybe a fifth) who would side with them, because, hey, when did facts ever get in the way of finding for a huge corporation when it was trying to screw the little guy. But that didn’t work this time.

Without dissent, the Supreme Court dismissed the case, “The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.” I looked up the word “certiorari” and it claims it is a writ that higher courts consider, which strikes me as kind of dumb — “writ of a writ”?! But what it means is, “Go away boy, you bother me!” This is very good news. It is nice to be reminded occasionally that evil does not always win in his country and that the conservatives on the court aren’t totally corrupt.

Jonathan Chait wrote an interesting article this morning, Obama Calls Racism “Deeply Rooted.” He’s Right. Mostly, it is about our subconscious racist attitudes that we aren’t in control of. I’m extremely aware of these in myself, and I find it very troubling to have to fight gut reactions. And that is to say nothing of the things that I’m not even aware of. Chait made the point that it is hard to deal with our cultural racism when so many of us refuse to even admit it.

He quoted Quin Hillyer of National Review, who said, “We’re not oblivious to racism; we just want to transcend it by leaving it out of discussions where it doesn’t belong.” That’s just code for, “We want to pretend it doesn’t exist so we don’t have to do anything about it.” In my experience, people who make these kinds of arguments are the worst kind of racists: the ones who think that as long as they don’t use the n-word, they aren’t racists. (Interestingly, fifty years ago, their argument would have been that they aren’t racists because they don’t support lynching — it’s progress at a glacial rate.) To give you an idea of Hillyer’s seriousness, he complained about Obama telling Black Entertainment Television (BET) that racism is “deeply rooted” in America. Chait noted that his claim about where racism should and shouldn’t be discussed don’t mean much, “Apparently the places it doesn’t belong include an interview about race with BET — which is to say, it doesn’t belong anywhere because Hillyer and many of his allies believe it does not exist.”

But I have to disagree with Chait on one point. I’m just not sure that things are better for African Americans now. They are certainly different, but that is hardly the same thing. I was looking at some statistics about lynching in America. From 1882 to 1968, 3,446 black people were lynched in the United States. That’s roughly 40 per year. Lynching wasn’t so much about killing any particular person. It was part of a campaign of terrorism against the African American community. The message was clear: get out of line and we will murder you.

The police now kill a whole lot of people in the African American community. I can’t say if it is more. Police at every level and in every region have gone out of their way to avoid researchers to put together a complete picture of the problem. But let’s just look at one city: Oakland. During the five years from 2004 to 2008, the police shot 37 African Americans — only 40% had guns on them. So that’s 22 unarmed. And one-third were fatal shootings. So that’s seven fatalities — over one per year. That’s in quite a small city.

What’s more, this terror campaign works really well in that it often kills totally at random as in cases like Oscar Grant and Akai Gurley. This obliterates the “Twice as Good” concept that Ta-Nehisi Coates has discussed. This is the idea that if only the African American community (or any other oppressed group) would act twice as good as the powerful majority, they will eventually be accepted. This is certainly what people like Quin Hillyer believe. And it just isn’t true.

So have we really made progress? It used to be vigilante groups who killed African Americans to keep them in line. Now it has been institutionalized and police offers are held accountable. And by “accountable” I mean that in a theoretical sense. Of the 22 unarmed men who police shot in Oakland, not one was ever charged with a crime. For the bigots, this is perfect. In the past they couldn’t claim official exoneration. Today, as we’ve seen with people like Joe Scarborough in the Michael Brown killing, they do just that. The kangaroo grand jury decided not to indict, so that means Michael Brown was a thug who should have gone to the electric chair and Darren Wilson was a hero.

If this is a colorblind society, let me see all the colors. And let Joe Scarborough and Quin Hillyer say what they really mean, “We hate those n*****s who stand up for themselves!”

Paul Krugman claims to not understand why smart economists would make claims that they know to be wrong. It is too bad that Krugman doesn’t read me, because I am going to use my super-powers of cynicism to explain why these economists behave in this way. But first, we have to consider the question that the economists are grappling with.

As you may know, Japan has a huge amount of debt because of its very long recession. It is currently about 240% of the nation’s GDP. Compare this to the freak out we have among conservatives in the United States with our debt level being just over 100%. (Note: this is ridiculous; most homeowners owe a lot more than they make in any given year.) So some economists maintain that one day, people who buy Japanese bonds may just require a higher interest rate than they are now getting. This would cause the Japanese government to have to pay much more to support its debt. Thus catastrophe would ensue.

The problem is that it doesn’t work this way. What would happen instead is that the Japanese yen would simply go down in value. And here is the critical thing: this would be great for the Japanese economy! Suddenly, Japanese exports would be in greater demand and the Japanese people would be importing less. The only potential problem would be that the yen would fall so much that it would cause an inflation crisis. But as Krugman noted, this “seems unlikely and certainly isn’t the way the warnings are usually phrased…”

So why is it that economists would forget about this and claim that Japan must enact austerity policies like the ones that are working so badly in the United Kingdom and throughout Europe? That is such an easy question! And I don’t actually think that Krugman is ignorant of this. He just can’t be seen as questioning the integrity of such a huge figure as Ken Rogoff. So he pretends not to know that Rogoff is just an apologist for the power elite.

There is one group of people who would be harmed if investors lost faith in Japan: the people who already have a lot of Japanese yens. You know: the owning class. But the Ken Rogoffs of the world can’t say, “Japan really needs to get its fiscal house in order or a bunch millionaires and billionaires are likely to lose some serious money!” But I doubt that people making these arguments are even aware of what they are actually doing. I suspect that they are just so used to seeing the world through the eyes of this class that it just seems natural.

But imagine if we could get economists to think in terms of workers! Imagine if the unknown assumption was always, “How will this affect working men and women?”! That would be something. But it won’t happen. The economics profession is like a priesthood. It’s primary interest is in the purity of its models. And workers just pollute that purity. If there were truth in advertising for academia, economics would be renamed “oligarchic apologia.”

Simon Wren-Lewis wrote a great article today, The Imaginary World of Small State People. It is about this conservative notion that because they want a small government just for the sake of having a small government, liberals must want a big government just for the sake of having a big government. According to Wren-Lewis, there was a time when there were people on the left (in Europe anyway) who wanted a large government for its own sake. I’m not sure such people have ever much existed here in the United States — except for the explicit communists, who have never been a large enough group to think much of.

What definitely is true is that for my entire life, people on the left have been in favor of making “a more perfect union” by whatever means works. And that makes people on the left simple pragmatists. Maybe that is a problem. Maybe that’s why we were so susceptible to the con that was the New Democrats. One thing is for sure: the right is highly ideological and without an ideology to counter that, we are toothless in a turf war. If you have people who argue that the government should be destroyed on one side, and people who think the government should be whatever size is reasonable on the other, it should not be surprising that you end up with a government that is far too small.

There is another aspect of Wren-Lewis’ article that I disagree with. I don’t think that conservatives actually want a small government. They certain say that they want one. But when it comes to big government in the military, policing, and the bedroom, they seem to think the bigger the better. And let’s not forget that it just doesn’t cost that much money to feed poor people. You can serve up a whole lot of meals for the cost of a single roughly $100 million F-35.

But Wren-Lewis is dead on about the rhetoric of the small government conservatives. He correctly noted that most people really don’t care about the size of the government as an end in itself. (This includes many conservative voters.) He puts forth four problems he has with the small government types, but they are really all the same: the small government people are disingenuous. They don’t look at proposals on the merits because they are blinded by ideology. And they don’t look at evidence, because when you have an ideology, you don’t need no stinking evidence.

More concerning is the way that conservatives try to convince everyone that their policies work through pure force of will. Wren-Lewis quoted Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne and political commentator Janan Ganesh claiming that the liberals are going to lose big-time now that everyone sees that their austerity plans didn’t hurt the way everyone said they would. Except, no. Austerity in the United Kingdom since 2010 could easily have cut GDP by 5%. And cuts to social programs have inflicted enormous pain on the poorer classes.

I think Wren-Lewis gets the reasons why the small government cheerleaders don’t see the problem:

What bothers me is that there is some sense to what the conservatives are doing. Eventually, economies do heal — even ones that are totally mismanaged. So if the George Osbornes of the world (like Margaret Thatcher before them) can just hold out long enough and avoid admitting that they have inflicted great pain in the name of hurting the macroeconomy even more, they can be rewarded. And I have no idea how you defend against this, other than to wait for the rich to so thoroughly destroy the social contract that the poorer classes start to push back.

Robert Reich has an annoying habit of claiming that education really is the ticket up the social ladder. It just isn’t the case. Consider Mark Zuckerberg. He wasn’t some poor kid who networked with the elites at Harvard and clawed his way to the top. Both his parents were highly paid professionals — certainly well inside the upper class. And then Zuckerberg didn’t even graduate. Or what about Daymond John? He had no college education. I realize that these are just single instances, the data on it is shockingly inconsistent. And the question is no longer, “Does a college education raise you up?” It is now, “Does the cost of the education pay for itself over the course of your working life?” On that issue the answer seems to be: probably. That isn’t anything close to what a college education would do for you in the 1970s.

But apart from this little affliction of Reich’s, he’s right about the problems with our educational system, How a Wealthy California Town Makes Sure No Poor Kids Attend Its “Public” School. In the article, he discusses the town of Orinda, which is very wealthy and so has a really well funded public school system. This is the number one thing that is wrong with our educational system: we give the rich far more money to educate their kids than we give to the poor. That’s real “equality of opportunity” for you!

To give you some idea of the inequality here, all the schools in Orinda, 94% white or Asian, get a perfect score of 10 on the GreatSchools rating system. Twenty miles away in Bay Point, a majority Latino town, the grammar schools get ratings of 2 to 4 points. Equality of opportunity! Equality of opportunity! Hooray! But that’s not all. The Orinda school district uses part of its torrent of cash to pay private investigators to make sure that the children in Orinda schools really live in Orinda. This is the public school equivalent of a gated community. For the rest of this article, just inject “Equality of opportunity!” after every sentence.

Reich highlights one such student: Vivian a seven-year-old Latina. Her technical address is in Bay Point of the Awful Schools. But she lives with her mother in Orinda during the week. Her mother is a live-in nanny for a rich couple in Orinda. And Vivian has her own bedroom. On weekends, they both live with the grandmother in Bay Point. So it is clear that the Orinda school district is using whatever means is necessary to get rid of the Latina interloper.

The article was written a week before the school was set to throw out Vivian. And as expected, the school did exactly that. But the whole thing blew up in the Bay Area news. So a day later, the school district reversed course. But what’s interesting here is that previous to this whole thing, the school denied Vivian a free school lunch because they said that she was an Orinda resident. So I guess the idea here was just to “Get the Latina!” at all costs.

But my main interest here is not about this particular student and this particular school. It is the broader issue that we have an incredibly unequal educational system. Some of our public schools are the best in the world. And others are right at the bottom. What’s more, the resources are being used poorly. The children at the bad schools are the ones who need the greatest help. But this is entirely typical of this country: aflict the aflicted and comfort the comfortable. I wonder when Billie and Mindy are going to start caring about this issue. My guess is: never.

See also: Education Reform Billie and Mindy Can’t Abide