I’ve long wondered about the conservative addiction to shutting down the government. I get the fact that they hate the government, even though they are actually for bigger government than liberals. (They are remarkably good at defining as “government” only those things — usually the least expensive things — that they don’t like.) But given that shutting down the government always goes poorly for them, I’ve wondered why they continue to do it. In general, I’ve been of the opinion that they do it because they just can’t help themselves. It’s a form of irrational exuberance for them.

Jonathan Bernstein has a much more plausible theory, Ted Cruz’s Shutdown Trap — for Republicans. It’s brilliantly simple: the Republicans need to shut down the government in order to differentiate themselves. This folds perfectly into something I talk about a lot: the fact that the Republican Party at the Federal level is pretty much monolithic. The range of beliefs among Republican elites is extremely limited. So in order to differentiate themselves, they have to have events like a government shutdown where people like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner will be shown to be RINOs just because they aren’t crazy.

Most of the Very Serious Pundits would have us believe that the Republican “establishment” beat the Tea Party elements into submission during this electoral cycle and that’s why the party did so well. But it has been apparent for a very long time that there really is no substantive difference between the two factions. In fact, that was always the hilarious (and terrifying) thing about the Tea Party. It was made up of a bunch of middle class people who were “mad as hell!” And their solution just happened to integrate perfectly with the interests of the elites. This is, interestingly, exactly what happened to Howard Beale in the film Network: the corporate elites were able to funnel his progressive rage into sad acquiescence about the fact that money is now God.

But just because the pundit class has been tricked into thinking that there is some huge divide in the Republican Party doesn’t mean that the party itself is fooled. Greg Sargent wrote about the plan yesterday morning, Ted Cruz’s Brilliant Strategy to Help Ted Cruz. Basically, there is no strategy and not even any thought as to what the end game will be. But Bernstein explained why this works out well for more than just Ted Cruz:

I’m developing a new theory. As you may know, my Grand Unified Theory of How Everything Got So Messed Up is that the New Democrats pushed to the right and the Republicans had no place to go but crazy-town. But a corollary of this may be that when all the Republicans got bunched up at the “as extreme as you can get without being a Nazi” edge, the Republicans had to break out into areas beyond policy. Hence shooting copies of Obamacare. Hence national debt as slavery. Hence suing the president, impeaching the president, and shutting down the government.

This would all be funny as hell if there weren’t real impacts on millions of real lives. And what’s terrible is that although these kinds of stunts don’t necessarily work to help Republicans (although they often do), they never hurt them in the long run. People were angry about the Republicans shutting down the government a year ago. But by this November, they had forgotten about it and didn’t even show up to vote. Somehow, I’ve got to get past all this and just enjoy the show. Because it is coming. And soon.

There’s nothing quite like listening to two New Democrats complain about exactly how much is the right amount to sell out the liberal movement. Today, the battle was between John Breaux and Ed Kilgore. It all started with a Molly Ball article about Mary Landrieu, The Last Southern Democrat. In it, Ball asked one of those dreary and stupid questions about “what happened” to the Democrats on 4 November. Landrieu didn’t want to answer the question, but former Senator Breaux did, “The perception now is that the Democratic Party is too far to the left and the Republican Party is too far for the right. The majority of Americans are somewhere in the middle.”

This statement is true, but not in the way that Breux thinks it is. Americans are socially conservative and economically liberal. And when you ask them about specific policies, the American people come down decidedly with the Democratic Party. That ought to make Democrats think that the party needs to get a whole lot better at messaging — not that it should move to the right politically. But Breux wants to start up the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) again. And what that means is that he thinks that the Democrats should move to the right on exactly the economic issues where the American people are generally to the left of it.

Ed Kilgore is not happy to hear this, even though he used to work at the DLC. His complaint is that unlike the real New Democrats, Breux and his ilk never believed in the philosophy and were only interested in making whatever deals they could with the Republicans. That would be a good point to make if the principles of the DLC were not so toxic. After all, their primary interest was to remove economic liberalism as a choice from either major American political party. And ultimately, it was razor-focused on winning elections regardless of its effect on actual policy. As I’ve argued many times before, the Republicans won when Clinton became president.

What the DLC always stood for was winning elections. And their way to do that was to pander to the oligarchs. But they couldn’t just become the Republican Party. They had to maintain the brand of liberalism. So they held onto civil rights (as long as it didn’t cost the rich any money) and abortion rights (as long as it didn’t cost the rich any money) and gay rights (as long as it didn’t cost the rich any money). So it is hardly strange that Breux is obsessively pushing the Democratic Party to the right — that’s what a New Democrat is always for.

It’s funny, of course, that Breux can’t see that Obama is exactly a New Democrat — pretty much indistinguishable from Bill Clinton except for the tail chasing and the skin color. What’s really happened is that Kilgore has ossified as a member of the early DLC. Thus, he still believes in many forms of liberalism. But Breaux is actually the more true to the movement. After all, the DLC was only in favor of given policies at any particular time. The overall philosophy was: ever to the right!

If there is a difference between the Kilgore style DLC and the Breux style DLC, it is that the latter is just stupid. If you are willing to move to the right for political gain, you have to do it strategically. John Breux is like many a southern Democrat who abandoned the party during the years of Bush the Younger. But let’s not kid ourselves: the DLC has done terrible harm to liberalism generally and the Democratic Party specifically. And it did absolutely nothing to get Democrats elected. Democrats would have won in 1992, 2000, and 2008 regardless. Kilgore’s embrace of the DLC can be attributed to youthful idiocy. Breux’s embrace of always moving to the right can be attributed to lifelong idiocy. But the DLC was terrible for the country, regardless of whose philosophy of selling out liberalism was followed.

There are a lot of people at New Republic who I really like. In particular: Brian Beutler and Jonathan Cohn. But as a going concern, New Republic generally means one thing to me: a supposedly liberal magazine that is most concerned with attacking liberalism. Most of all, I associate it with its darkest years under the editorial leadership of Andrew Sullivan. This was when it pushed not only Betsy McCaughey’s hit job against the Clinton administration’s healthcare reform law, but also The Bell Curve.

This is what made the phrase “Even The New Republic…” so pernicious. Conservatives could and did say things like, “Even The New Republic thinks that economic inequality doesn’t matter because minority groups are just stupid!” (For those who don’t remember, that was the argument of The Bell Curve — although stated less bluntly.) Back in 2004, Steve Rendall and Anne Kosseff at FAIR described the magazine’s abandonment of its progressive roots since the early 1970s, Not Even the New Republic. In fact, it included a great quote from Hendrik Hertzberg, “The old ‘even The New Republic…’ scam was getting a little old in the 1980s; now it’s a quarter of a century old.”

As a result of this, I have a hard time getting too excited by the news that Chris Hughes has decided to destroy New Republic and turn it into a “digital media company” — think: BuzzFeed. The news, however, is both funny and sad. It is funny in that billionaire man-child Hughes has decided to do this. After all, why did he buy the magazine in the first place? He could have started his own stupid “also ran” digital media company. The whole thing is entirely typical of the useless rich. They like the idea of buying a magazine with a storied past, but they are soon bored and decide to “update” it and make it profitable. According to Jonathan Chait, the magazine has never been profitable and Hughes must have known that when he bought it.

The news is sad because many great writers have now quit BuzzFeed--. (That’s a programming joke!) This includes Jonathan Cohn and Noam Scheiber. The truth is that over the last few years, New Republic really has gotten a lot better. And now this is all gone. And I don’t have any convenient place to check out what Alec MacGillis and Julia Ioffe are writing. But I’m sure they will all still be around and I will find them.

The question is whether this is actually worse than Martin Peretz’s purchase of the magazine in 1974 or the beginning of Andrew Sullivan’s editorship in 1991. And there is potentially a huge upside here. I suspect this will be a huge failure. New Republic will muddle along for many years to come. But it is for all intents and purposes dead. No one is going to step up in a decade and say, “I want to take this mediocre ‘digital media company’ and turn it back into the important magazine it once was!” Instead, one day in the not so distant future, Chris Hughes will have had his fun and will be beyond caring what everyone is saying about him, and he will quietly abandon the project.

There is an important lesson in all of this. The rich are not the saviors of our culture. When they rush in to save institutions like New Republic, they do it as a form of self-aggrandizement. Our only hope is that we create a more equal society. But at this point, it wouldn’t make me sad if Chris Hughes was killed in an auto accident.

The Jobs Report is out for November and it is really good. Matt Yglesias provided a good overview of it, A Dominant Jobs Report. As he noted, the surface of the report is good news: 321,000 jobs added in November. “Dig a little bit deeper, though, and you see even more good news.” On the other hand, Dean Baker (Gloomy but correct!) would doubtless tell us that at this rate it would still take us years to reach full employment. Regardless, it is a good jobs report.

As a result, I’m worried. One of the best things in the jobs report is that we are finally seeing some wage growth: hourly wages went up by 9¢ this month. That’s great news all by itself. But the Federal Reserve is just itching to raise rates to head off inflation. You know: it is much better to kill an economic recovery than risk even the smallest amount of inflation that would hurt the rich rentiers. And the most liberal position on the Fed is that we should wait until wages start to rise before putting a great big drag on the economy.

Not surprisingly, I see it differently. I think that American workers have been suffering in a big way for the last six years. At the same time, the owners of capital have done extremely well. So the Federal Reserve should — For a change! — error on the side of the American worker. It should allow reasonable levels of actual inflation. I am so tired of the Fed constantly slamming the brakes on the economy before we see inflation. The justification for this is that inflation can quickly get out of control. But when have we seen this? It is ridiculous to suggest that if inflation went up to 3%, the Fed would be at a loss to do anything about it.

For the record, I think the Federal Reserve inflation target should surely be 3%. In fact, I’ve never heard a reasonable argument for why it shouldn’t be 4%. The truth is that over the last six years, the inflation rate has been below the ridiculously low target of 2% over 60% of the time. And the 2% inflation target is not based upon anything. It was just a number that Alan Greenspan made up. And his reason for doing so would not sit right with most economists. He claimed that the inflation measures overstated actual inflation so that 2% inflation actually represented zero inflation. Zero inflation is bad for workers and the economy; it is only good for the already rich.

This morning, Paul Krugman also argued for caution from the Fed. In fact, he gave what I think is infinitely reasonable advice, “So still: the Fed should wait until it sees the whites of inflation’s eyes — and by inflation I mean inflation clearly above 2 percent, and if I had my way higher than that.” But sadly, I don’t think any level of rational argument will matter. The clearest proof that our government is an oligarchy is found with the Federal Reserve. Not only does it give money away as long as the recipient is rich enough, it has never seen its purpose as being anything but helping the rich. The only good thing I can remember the Fed doing was under Greenspan where he allowed unemployment to get much lower than more establishment figures (like Janet Yellen) thought wise. And I don’t think he did that because he was concerned about the American worker.

Hopefully, the Federal Reserve will not act as stupidly and cruelly as is its tendency. But you can depend upon many people screaming about raising interest rates. One thing is pretty clear. The Fed has signaled that it will raise interests in mid-2015. The good jobs report today makes that much more likely.

Update (7 December 2014 10:06 am)

As expected, Dean Baker wrote, “To get back to the labor market of the late 1990s and 2000 we would need 3.5 years of November’s growth.”

It is extremely rare that technology saves us. An example of this was shown in a highly visible way this week. After the Michael Brown killer Darren Wilson was not indicted based to some extent on conflicting testimony, President Obama called for 50,000 body cameras to be worn by police throughout the country. That was Monday. And on Wednesday, the killer of Eric Garner went unindicted, despite video of the whole thing. Maybe next the president will call for brain implants that will record what police officers were thinking while they are strangling a man on the street or gunning down a 12-year-old in a park. But my guess is that grand juries would still find the officers innocent. After all, the police have such dangerous jobs. And what about black-on-black crime? And who are you to second-guess officers in the heat of the moment when they are staring into the barrel of a pellet gun or focusing on some untaxed cigarettes that may or may not exist?

As regular readers know, I don’t find these police apologia credible. The police really don’t have very dangerous jobs. I heard someone earlier this week say, “Police leave for work in the morning not knowing if they are coming back home that night.” That was said by a liberal! Yet that statement is meaningless in that it applies to literally every person who goes to work in the morning. And it is even more true of fishermen and cab drivers than it is of police officers.

The “What about black-on-black crime?” argument is just a dodge. How is killing Eric Garner over some potential illegal cigarette selling affected by black-on-black crime? What about all the blacks dying from Malaria in Africa? Should we just accept police violence and murder until we wipe out Malaria? The “What about black-on-black crime?” is at best a way to avoid discussing police abuse. At worst, it is a way of subtly placing the blame on blacks, “If those blacks weren’t so violent, the police wouldn’t be killing them all the time!”

The last claim is perhaps the most ridiculous. It is the one that police officers always mention in my experience. But the argument would never be applied to a run of the mill, non-police officer, murderer. No one suggests that we not second guess criminals. “Imagine you had been born into poverty and your father beat you every day and you ran away and lived on the streets from the age of 12 and so got into crime as your only occupational choice and ended up burglarizing a warehouse and were surprised by a police officer pointing a gun at you!” In that context, it would be very reasonable to shoot the officer, but no one has ever avoided prosecution with that argument. What people making such arguments are saying is that the police should never be held accountable.

In the case of Tamir Rice, the outcome will likely be different. I only say that because he was 12-years-old. Also, following the Brown and Garner cases, there will be real pressure on the District Attorney to get at least an indictment. I’d give a conviction for second-degree manslaughter a 50-50 chance. And I’m sure there won’t be an indictment of Officer Timothy Loehmann for murder. Even that would be asking for too much.

What we need to be aware of are two things. One is that we live in a racist society. The police are not any more racist than we are generally. The second thing to keep in mind is that we as a society have decided that the police are above the law. Unless they act in an egregious manner, they are generally clear. Having more video evidence won’t change that. For example, if there had been video of Michael Brown’s killing, I’m sure it would have shown that Brown was, in fact, stumbling and not charging Officer Wilson. But in court, Wilson still would have claimed that he thought Brown was charging — because I’m sure Wilson really did think that Brown was charging! He might have been indicted, but he certainly wouldn’t have been convicted.

Matthew Pratt Guterl wrote an excellent article today at New Republic, Police Cameras Won’t Cure Our National Disease. In it, he discussed various cases of police abusing their authority caught on camera:

I’m not sure what the solution is. Clearly we do not have to cure racism to make the situation substantially better. I think it would help for police to spend more time in the communities that they police. They should see their jobs as more interfacing with the community rather than “looking for crime.” They should stop thinking of the police force itself as a tribe. I’d love to see an end to the default carrying of guns and tasers. In other words, I’d like to see an entirely different approach to policing. But I’d be happy to just see a small amount of accountability. But I don’t expect to see even that.

Recent research published in Health Affairs shows that last year, healthcare spending grew at its lowest rate since the government has been measuring it. And it is expected to be the same for this year. What’s more, total healthcare spending as a fraction of the economy has remained flat since 2009. It’s really great news. So obviously, it is more important than ever that we destroy Obamacare. And now with help supposed liberals like Thomas Edsall and Charles Schumer, our long national nightmare of affordable healthcare may soon be over.

Of course, we really are going to have to depend upon the conservative ideologues on the Supreme Court and the most recent nutty case against Obamacare, King v Burwell. That’s the case where the plaintiffs are defending the right of people living in red states to not get help with their insurance. Those conservatives sure are charmers! But as history will show, there is no level to which conservatives can sink that will cause the people to turn against them. After all, didn’t the conservatives protect them from terrorist attacks. I mean other than that one time on 11 September 2001. Am I right?!

People like me had been hoping that when the Supreme Court eventually ignores the law and strikes down the exchange subsidies, that at least the more reasonable states could just set up simple exchanges — maybe just a simple website with a link to the federal exchange. Apparently, this is not going to fly. And silly me for thinking that it might! After all, this case isn’t about the law; this is just yet another opportunity for the conservatives on the court to gut a law they don’t like.

Let’s think about John Roberts in this case. Previously, Roberts found that Obamacare was a tax and thus upheld the law. He claimed that the government should be given wide latitude and that the courts should do everything they can to find in favor of laws. As Michael Hiltzik pointed out, if the court finds against Obamacare in this case, it will be going against “a 30-year-old precedent allowing federal agencies great leeway in implementing drafted statutory language.” So any credibility that Roberts maintains will be completely gone if he finds for the plaintiffs. But here’s the thing: I’m not sure he knows that. He may well be thinking that he can continue to chip away at the law and history will not judge him ill because he didn’t kill the law outright. If I were him, I’d be giving a lot of thought to Roger Taney.

As for the matter at hand, Nicholas Bagley, professor at the University of Michigan, explained the problem:

In addition to this, now there are no Obamacare funds to help states set up exchanges. And this is to mention nothing of the fact that in many states the lack of subsidies will be cheered as a great thing. And if we learned anything from the Sam Brownback re-election, it is that totally screwing over the people of your state will not hurt you politically.

So we better hope that John Roberts is smarter than he seems to be. Well, you had better hope that. I’ve given up hoping. John Roberts is an ideologically driven conservative Catholic. I know he isn’t smarter than he seems. I also know he’s a liar. (“Balls and strikes“!) And that he’s an evil man that doesn’t seem to have learned anything from all that supposed Jesus-loving.

Brad Plumer wrote a very interesting article over at Vox, Will Falling Oil Prices Kill the US Shale Boom? There has been a boom in shale oil because oil has been running at $100 per barrel. But now that it has dropped to $70 per barrel, at least some of it will stop being profitable. But there is huge disagreement about how much. For example, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that only 4% of the shale production will become unprofitable with oil less than $80 per barrel. But according to Bernstein Research, one-third of the production will be unprofitable.

I don’t find the specifics of this all that interesting. What is interesting, however, is that the profit margins are so slim for these hydrocarbon extractions. That means that if even a small fraction of the externalities associated with fossil fuels were included in the price, the industry would be dead. For decades we’ve been told that solar energy is just not competitive. In fact, conservatives have whined about every subsidy associated with solar. That is what is really behind the conservative obsession with Solyndra. If the government had lost a half billion on a loan to an oil company, there would have been no uproar. But it was a solar panel company, so of course it was a waste of money.

In 2011 and 2012, Congress tried to get rid of the $2.4 billion per year in tax subsidies that go to the big five oil companies. It was defeated, of course. Because somehow in the conservative brain, oil is “natural.” What’s it’s really all about is that big business is what conservatives in both parties care most about. Solar is not yet a behemoth. And so in a kind of twisted logic that only the power elite can understand, we must subsidize established industries. It angers the god of the free market to help out fledgling industries. But as I’ve already noted, the fledgling industries would probably be just fine if only the power elite didn’t stack the deck against them.

Low gas prices are a bad thing regardless. They may make shale unprofitable. And they may put an end to the Keystone XL Pipeline. But they will also allow the world to continue on its merry way pumping more and more carbon into the atmosphere. Because gas is not cheap. There are many hidden costs and many more not so hidden costs. And they are coming due. But the same people who tell us that our minor federal budget deficit is destroying our children’s future, are mostly silent about the unpaid cost of changes to the climate system.

I would think that the leaders of a country would be the ones who made the hard decisions. They would be the ones who explained that there was a steep long-term cost of cheep prices at the pump. But it is just the opposite. The people are surprisingly mature on this issue. Before Fox News started propagandizing the issue, global warming was widely accepted in this country, even when the evidence for it was far less clear than it is now. It’s our leaders who prefer pretty lies and piles of cash to the harsh reality. Fifty years ago, we should have been taxing oil extra for the environmental damage it was causing. But we didn’t. And even today, we are subsidizing it. And “wise” people claim that some day solar might be “competitive.” But the only reason it wasn’t long ago is because of the special privileges that we bestow on the oil industry.

Imagine that it is 1900 in San Francisco. The police are arresting a whole lot of Chinese people for opium possession. So some sociologists decide to look into whether the arrest of the Chinese is a form of racism. They come back with a study that concludes that these arrests are not because of racism. It is just that the Chinese are far more likely to use opium. And San Francisco has a law against opium — the first drug law in the nation. Does that mean that the these are not racist arrests? Of course not! The opium law itself was a racist law, enacted specifically to target the Chinese who were the most hated minority group at that time.

This is, tellingly, the reason for pretty much all drug laws. They are always about elevating “our drugs” and suppressing “their drugs.” So the opium laws were about getting the “chinks.” The cocaine laws were about getting the “coloreds.” And cannabis laws were about getting the “spicks.” In fact, the word “marijuana” was coined specifically to associate the drug with Mexicans. And this is why I don’t use the word unless I am quoting someone. People are often confused as to why tobacco and alcohol are legal when other, far less dangerous drugs, are not. But such thinking just means that they still accept the establishment paradigm that claims that drugs are made illegal because they are dangerous. A drug’s danger has absolutely nothing to do with its legal status.

On Monday, Ezra Klein wrote a great article that touches on this, How Racial Discrimination in Law Enforcement Actually Works. It counters the argument that law enforcement isn’t really racist. The argument goes more or less like this: when you control for social factors, the police don’t actually pull over African Americans more than whites. But when one of those controls is the age and condition of the car and African Americans generally have older and poorer cars, that is systemic racism — the study is “controlling” for what it is supposedly looking for. There are various others, some of which are so obvious — like neighborhood — that you have to wonder about the neutrality of the researchers.

Klein noted that all of these controls ultimately make the opposite case that conservatives claim. For example, when controlling for everything imaginable, African Americans are still twice as likely as whites to be arrested on a drug charge. So even when you control for the fact that the police target the African American community far more than the white community, there is still a major racial bias. But conservatives argue that since the controls make the racial aspect of the effect smaller, there is nothing to see. I guess they assume that there are just other controls that we haven’t found. Here’s an idea: control for skin color!

I’ve never thought that police officers were any more racist than the society in general. But given that the society itself is highly racist, the policing will be too. What’s troubling is that we don’t accept this fact. Instead, we run around trying to prove that we are a colorblind society. And that is exhibit number one in our racism problem. I have a very low opinion of Alcoholics Anonymous, but they are right about one thing: you can’t deal with a problem if you won’t admit it. And America will not admit its racism problem.

Update (3 December 2014 1:27 pm)

Wow! I just watched last night’s The Daily Show and Larry Wilmore made the same comparison about racism as an addiction and admitting a problem.