My sister called me the other night to ask about the phrase, “two bits.” It is a phrase that I don’t hear much anymore, but people of my father’s generation used it all the time to refer to a quarter of a dollar. It seems kind of strange for us to use because one “bit” would be twelve and a half cents. So what’s up with that?

It all goes back to another curious phrase, “pieces of eight.” From the mid-14th century for a few hundred years, the Spanish dollar was worth 8 reals. So a piece of eight was a silver coin worth one dollar or eight reals.

Similarly, since the dollar was divided into 8 reals, 1 real (or bit) is worth 12.5% of a dollar. Thus two bits is a quarter.

Now if we could just understand the basis of “mind your Ps and Qs“!

Jonathan Chait thinks that all the calls for presidential leadership to get Congress to, you know, do its job is magical thinking. In an article this morning, he said that there are two kinds analysts: quants and guts. Quants are people who look at the numbers. “The Democrats don’t have a filibuster-proof majority so little gets done.” Guts are people who just know that if Obama would show leadership and, say, part the red sea, everything would be fine. He’s right as far as it goes: a lot of observers want to create a kind of romantic narrative where the president is Achilles who can win the battle through force of will.

Where I think Chait got it wrong is in assuming that these people are not apologists for the Republican Party. He noted that the pundits who are pushing this line largely agree with Obama. While that’s true, they aren’t liberals; they are professional centrists who tilt slightly to the right or left depending on the person. They cannot allow themselves to say that something is wrong with the Republican Party much less with our entire political system. And so they focus all of their disappointment on Obama’s supposed lack of leadership.

These same commentators were not complaining about the watered down legislation that Obama did get passed when he had the power. That’s because they all like middle-of-the-road legislation. Of course, it is even more the case that they don’t want any actual economic reforms. After all, their lives are good.[1] But when it comes to new legislation that might inconvenience gun buyers a tiny amount but otherwise would be useless, well, that’s unacceptable! Maureen Dowd, Dana Milbank, and Ron Fournier want Congressional action for its own sake. If Obama had complete control the Congress and he decided to enact a financial transaction tax, I’m sure they would be outraged.

What these moderates want above all else is the appearance of Congressional action. They want a narrative that says that all is fine in Washington; there is no dysfunction; both parties love America and are trying to do what is right. They cannot admit that anything is wrong, so they turn to the narrative that Obama isn’t leading, as though he is Hugh Beaumont on Leave it to Beaver. It is pathetic, of course; but it isn’t new. It is just a different take on false equivalence.

Afterword

For the record, I am very much a quant. In fact, after last year’s election, I repeatedly countered the idea from people (including Chait) that Obama’s sizable win mattered in terms of policy. His big win in 2008 mattered because the Democrats controlled Congress. He could have won 100% of the vote in 2012 and it wouldn’t have matter as long as Congress was still controlled by the Republicans. So there is a lot of magical thinking going around.

[1] Here is Randy Newman’s “My Life Is Good”:

The mainstream media are only really interested in big (corporate) business. But it is always put forward as discussion of “small business.” There are a lot of definitions of “small business” so it isn’t hard for the media to call just about any company “small.” In fact, one of the more liberal-friendly definitions is: a company with fewer than 50 employees. That is a reasonably small company. But most companies that I’ve worked for had far fewer employees than that. And to my mind, the ultimate example of a small business is an owner-operated deli.

We have been told that these kinds of businesses hate Obamacare because it is going to cost them a bunch of money. But that’s just not true. In fact, these kinds of truly small businesses should be thrilled with Obamacare. It is quite simple. First, such businesses don’t have 50 employees so they are not required to provide healthcare. Second, their employees usually make something like minimum wage and are often not full time. So the employees will have their healthcare either mostly or fully funded by the federal government. This is equivalent to giving our deli employees a huge raise. And the deli owner gets happier and healthier employees.

Unfortunately, on the TV machine, we get our “small business” perspectives from Goldman Sacks and Walmart. In general, real small businesses are too busy and too poor to go around politicking. But most small business owners get their ideas about their best interests from these same TV frauds. However, the truth will out. And in a couple of years, most small business owner will wonder how they ever did without Obamacare.

Yesterday, Paul Krugman posted an article on his blog about why the economic crisis didn’t result in more calls for protectionism: tariffs and the like. He proposes a few ideas but decides it is all about our trade agreements. I think he’s wrong.

It may well be the fact that there are institutional barriers against protectionist policies. For example, if we start putting import taxes on all products, the World Trade Organization will go after us. But that isn’t the same as why no one even talked about trying to protect our local industries. For that, I think there are two issues: helplessness and elite media control.

In my discussions with people from all over geographically and economically, what I get is a strong resignation that nothing can be done. Everyone is just hoping that they can hold on until things improve. But even there, they think they have no control over improving things or what that improved situation might look like. They do generally feel that although things will be a little better for them, it will be enormously better for the elite class. From 35 years of stagnant wages, they’ve developed a kind of learned helplessness. Just like with dogs, they know that regardless of what they do, they are going to be shocked.

The second issue is related to this: it is part of the cause of these feelings of helplessness. Have you seen the major media coverage of efforts to end tax cuts to companies for sending jobs overseas? Most likely, you haven’t. There has been very little coverage of it. It is being blocked in Congress, primarily by Republicans but also by Democrats. And it isn’t that workers are not interested; they are. The major media are just not interested in this issue or any other issue that focuses on the needs of workers. You can hardly watch a news broadcast that doesn’t mention what the stock market did that day. Does that have any relevance to the average viewer? Nope. But it has lots of relevance to the elite reporters and owners of the news sources.

Krugman understands this, of course. Last week he wrote a column about how we have become a country “of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent.” And they don’t want protection of jobs in America, because their profits come from all over the world. And that’s why we haven’t heard calls for protectionism.

Afterword

Personally, I think that protectionism in general is a bad idea. It is often a very good idea when trying to get new industries off the ground. But wholesale, it just ends up hurting all of the countries. My point is not that we should have implemented protectionism, but just that it is natural for it to be discussed. And it wasn’t. And that is indicative of the fact that we really don’t live in a democracy anymore.

Everyone knows Martin Niemoller’s “First they came for the communists…” poem. These days, we mostly hear it from conservatives because it is based on the slippery slope argument that is so beloved on the right. But I think the poem is fundamentally wrong; oppression doesn’t happen that way.

I was thinking about this yesterday while reading Glenn Greenwald. He was writing about some reporting in the Los Angeles Times that quoted an anonymous source who said that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev repeatedly asked for a lawyer and was refused “since he was being questioned under the public safety exemption to the Miranda rule.” This is a big deal if it is true. It is one thing to not tell a suspect his rights, it is quite another to withhold those rights. And there is nothing in the public safety exemption of the Miranda rule that allows the government to refuse a suspect his right to representation for hours or even days.

And that’s what got me thinking about the Niemoller quote. It is not that we don’t speak up for the “communists” because we are not one. It is that we don’t speak up for them because we hate them. I know the reaction of the vast majority of people in this country to my belief that Tsarnaev deserves all of the guarantees of the Constitution. They would say something along the lines of, “He’s a terrorist! We shouldn’t give him any rights at all!” So may I humbly offer a rewrite:

And that really is the way rights are lost. This is why we allow the Nazis to have parades. It isn’t because we like them. As a culture, we hate them. But as John Adams wrote, we have “a government of laws, and not of men.” And if we can’t listen to him, perhaps we can listen to that hippy Jew, “Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me.”

I don’t have any specific fondness for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. But I have a great fondness for this country and especially its ideals. And if one criminal can destroy that, we are all lost.

Update (30 April 2013 9:49 am)

Glenn Greenwald just added an update to his article where who quoted by far my favorite founding father, Thomas Paine:

Of course, I’ve found that most Americans today are far more primitive than this great man who died over 200 years ago. Of course, Americans at that time were just as primitive as they are today. But one would hope that they would have improved a little. Alas.

I just had a thought. Remember that Pew poll that found that roughly half Americans blame Obama and half blame the Republicans for the flight delays caused by the Sequester? I discussed it earlier today, Democrats Own Sequester Air Traffic Exception. In that article, I argued that Obama should not take the poll as indicating that the right thing to do is to sign the repellent air traffic Sequester exception bill that is headed to his desk. If he signs it, it is all his; he can’t blame it on the Republicans.

Well, I was over at the Maddow Blog reading Steve Benen about how the Republicans are wrong to think they won the air traffic debate. But it got me thinking in a broad sense about the Pew poll. It shows that a great many people are not paying any attention at all. But it also shows that all of Obama’s contortions and bending over backwards to accommodate the Republicans bought him essentially nothing. (This is more evidence that I am right in thinking that Obama wants to cut entitlements, but let’s leave that for now.)

Who does Obama think he is impressing with all of this post-partisan nonsense? It isn’t effective in regards to policy. And we see clearly that it isn’t effective in regards to public opinion. So what audience is he playing to? Posterity? I often wonder if that isn’t the case. And that is perhaps even more misguided than any other audience. In the long run, historians will look back on this period of time and see it as a tragedy. I don’t think Obama will look that bad, but that will be despite his constant pitch to the center, not because of it.

Our best wishes go out to Jamelle Bouie. We hope he has a speedy recovery.

Bouie was a very insightful commentator over at The American Prospect, but he is totally wrong this morning. He wrote an article at the Plum Line, A Small Victory Against Anti-Tax Conservatives. In it, he discussed new legislation to require sales taxes be collected on all internet purchases. It is apparently getting a lot of bipartisan love. Bouie noted, “What Heritage and Norquist want is a Republican Party governed by ideology alone, where no tax is acceptable, no matter what. That they’re losing this fight is a sign Republicans are at least open to bucking anti-tax extremists.”

This is a sure sign that Bouie has caught Washington Pundit’s Disease (WPD). It starts by affecting the memory. In his case, he has forgotten the last two years of American politics. This is so sad!

Bouie may think so, but the Heritage Foundation and Gover Norquist are not really against this sales tax legislation. It is just that they are contractually obligated to oppose all new tax proposals. I can assure Bouie (because I do remember the last two years), that they are not putting much pressure on Republicans to oppose this bill. Remember (which Bouie sadly can no longer do): Republicans are not against new taxes. For the umpteenth time (which sometimes helps WPD victims and sometimes doesn’t): they are against new taxes on the rich. That’s it. They had no problem allowing payroll taxes to go back up. What’s more, a bit more than a year ago, they were fighting an extension of the payroll tax cut (“holiday”).

So this recent move does not, not, not show that the Republicans are moving even just a little on taxes. This is the position they’ve had all along. And Jamelle Bouie used to know that. But apparently he’s entered Stage 2 of WPD where he now feels the compulsion to make nice and pretend that the Republicans are showing signs of being reasonable. It’s sad when anyone gets WPD, but especially when it effects a fine writer in his prime. All we can do is help him remember.

Sympathy cards can be sent to Jamelle Bouie care of The American Prospect, 1710 Rhode Island Ave, 12th Floor, Washington, DC 20036.

You know how racism works, right? You hate blacks; you think they are violent. You see a news story about some black guy who killed his girlfriend. That’s more evidence that blacks are violent. You see another news story about some black guy who helps young people start small businesses. Well, that’s the exception; you never said that all blacks were bad (even though you in fact did). It’s all about an inclination. Racism is natural for us as a species. The real question is if you have strong feelings about any group of people, are you going to feed it with biased information or not? You can fight against these irrational feelings or your can use your rational mind to reinforce them. It is up to you.

The same thing goes on with societies at large. The best example of this is how Islam is portrayed. Every time there is a terrorist attack by a Muslim, the whole country emits a huge, “See?!” When a terrorist attack is performed by someone else, the reaction is vague confusion, “Oh, what a surprise!” And it gets filed under, “Sometimes terrorists are not Muslims, but usually they are.” And that’s as far as it goes.

Juan Cole wrote an amazing article over at his blog informed COMMENT, Terrorism and the Other Religions. He looked at political and religious violence over the last century and found that very little of it was done by Muslims. They make up almost one-quarter of the population but only about 2% of the killing. Now most of that killing was in the world wars. But he goes on to note the universality of terrorism. This part particularly struck me:

I remember back to all the trouble in Northern Ireland when the IRA was most clearly a terrorist organization. They killed over 600 civilians in a country of only a million and a half. (That is equivalent to over 100,000 in the United States.) That was political and religious. And yet no one went on TV and attacked the Irish. There was no discussion of radical-Catholicism. And there’s a good reason for that: the Irish and the Catholics by that point were well integrated into our society. Muslims are still thought of as outsiders. I even hear people say the same things people said about the Irish and Catholics earlier in our history, “They stay among themselves; they don’t want to integrate!” It wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now. There is a process and it takes generations.

Our media really need to take a lot of blame for this. All this emphasis on Muslim terrorism and endless apology for all others just feeds the cultural bigotry against one of our more recent groups of immigrants. You can go back to the beginning of our republic and see the same dynamic again and again. We should learn to put this stuff in perspective. Juan Cole’s article is a small corrective. I recommend reading the whole thing.

Afterword

Here is a great Bill Moyer interview with Glenn Greenwald on some of these issues:

Kenneth Rogoff, last year:

In a series of academic papers with Carmen Reinhart… we find that very high debt levels of 90% of GDP are a long-term secular drag on economic growth that often lasts for two decades or more.

Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, today:

Nowhere did we assert that 90 percent was a magic threshold that transforms outcomes, as conservative politicians have suggested.

I will admit, Carmen Reinhart did not run around the country claiming that we had to have austerity or we’d have slow or even negative economic growth. No, it’s always been Kenneth Rogoff. Just the same, we didn’t hear a peep from Reinhart that he was mischaracterizing their work. But let’s lay that aside for the moment. If Reinhart & Rogoff didn’t show that a 90% debt to GDP ratio was some bad tipping point, what was the big deal of their paper? Matt Yglesias answers this question, “The raw fact that there’s a statistical correlation between debt:GDP being high and GDP growth being low is trivial and offers no policy guidance.”

What we have here is a case of scientists riding a popular wave based upon an obscene overstatement (that they helped create) of their work. And then when their work is shown in no uncertain terms to not show what was claimed, they retreat back to the safety of scientific objectivity and caveats. This is totally unacceptable. Rogoff especially should be thrown out of the field. But of course he won’t be. He’s “elite.” And you know what that means: unless he’s caught tweeting pictures of his junk, he can’t be touched.

Back in February, I wrote about the situation with H1-B visas. These are visas that allow highly educated workers in science and technology (STEM) to come to the United States to work. High tech companies are always pushing for more of these visas. But as I pointed out then, this is not a form of immigration; it is more like indentured servitude. But most important from a policy standpoint, it is yet another example of how companies who are well connected can get unfair advantages from the government.

I also noted that company requests for H1-B workers did not represent the fact that there were not qualified workers in America; they represent the fact that companies don’t want to pay the going rate for workers with these skills. Well, on Wednesday, the Economic Policy Institute released a report by Salzman, Kuehn, and Lowell (SKL), Guestworkers in the High-Skill U.S. Labor Market. Their conclusion, “Our examination of the IT labor market, guestworker flows, and the STEM education pipeline finds consistent and clear trends suggesting that the United States has more than a sufficient supply of workers available to work in STEM occupations” (italics in original).

There is one fundamental economic fact about the supposed lack of STEM workers: there is no unusual growth in wages. If there really were a high demand for workers and a low supply, wages should increase to push more people into the field. This is not happening so there really isn’t any reason to think there is a huge unfulfilled demand. As SKL noted, “Employment and wage levels in IT jobs have been weak, trends that are not consistent with strong demand.” What’s more, they showed that there is more than enough supply of STEM workers coming out of college. The United States graduates 50% more college educated workers than go into the field. Most of these graduates go into other fields because they can make more money, but roughly a third just can’t find jobs in their fields.

Meanwhile, guestworkers make up a large and increasing part of the workforce. In IT, as many as one-half of the new hires are guestworkers. In addition, a good one-third of the workforce doesn’t have college degrees at all. This isn’t to say that college degrees are necessary to do this kind of work. Rather, there are a lot of people who can fill the positions that these firms claim they need guestworkers for.

So we are left with a very bad situation. SKL conclude, “The supply of IT guestworkers appears to be growing dramatically, despite stagnant or even declining wages.” This is at a time when corporate profits are sky high. And even this explosion of guestworkers is not enough; the industry wants more. But let’s be clear: they want more because they want to keep wages as low as possible, not because they can’t find the workers.

According to The Hill yesterday evening, House Lawmakers Pull Immigration to the Right. That’s to be expected. As Idaho Republican Raul Labrador notes, “[There’re] a lot of things in the Senate bill that are right, but the reality is that the Senate is controlled by Democrats and the House is controlled by Republicans, and what you’re going to see out of the House is probably a more Republican bill.” There’s no problem with that thinking at all!

And that’s why it is so important for the Democratically controlled Senate to produce bills that maybe kind of sort of just a wee bit liberal. Instead, the Senate’s great compromise is that undocumented residents will be able to become citizens in a minimum of 13 years—that’s eight years of temporary legal status before they can get a Green Card. Compare that to conservative icon Ronald Reagan’s law: 18 months. Is this what we are supposed to think is a great liberal proposal? It isn’t even an acceptable liberal compromise. And that’s not even including all of the other right wing pro-business aspects of the bill.

But naturally, the House bill will have to be worse. According to The Hill, it will require 15 years. And remember, this is coming from a bipartisan group. What finally gets out of the House will be even worse. How about 25 years? 50 years? The maximum age that a human can live seems to be 124. So why not make it 125 years?! In fact, that would be perfect for Congress. They could pass a bill that doesn’t do a thing and still claim that they are doing something. A win-win!

Perhaps some day the Democratic Party will learn that if they put forward a proposal for a 3-year path to Green Card (which they could correctly argue is twice Reagan’s law), they might have ended up with a 5-year path. “But the Senate had to get past a filibuster!” Well whose fault is that? Regardless, even if they can’t pass legislation, the Democratic Party has to stand up and say, “We are for reasonable policies.” As long as they hurry to meet the Republicans in the middle, the conversation just moves further and further to the right.

And that’s how we got to this place. We need to get back to where we were in 1970 (at least). And we won’t get there by moving inch by inch to the right.