Glenn Greenwald wrote a depressing article, Those Demanding Free Speech Limits to Fight ISIS Pose a Greater Threat to US Than ISIS. Obviously, we know that the Republicans want to destroy everything that is good about America because they are vewy vewy afwaid. They’re like Private Hudson from Aliens: talking tough, but the moment there is a hint of danger, “Game over, man!” But I had hoped that the Democrats and other reasonable folk would be better. And to a large extent, they have been. They at least don’t wet themselves every time there is an attack. I noted before that Clinton wasn’t exactly great on the subject, Trump, Clinton, and the ISIS Freak Out.

Last month following the ISIS attacks in Paris, Cass Sunstein wrote, Islamic State’s Challenge to Free Speech. He starts off, “The intensifying focus on terrorism, and on Islamic State in particular, poses a fresh challenge to the greatest American contribution to the theory and practice of free speech: the clear and present danger test.” Oh yes! The clear and present danger test, which held that encouraging young men to resist the draft during World War I was a clear and present danger. I’ve always found it interesting that we shroud our authoritarian actions in a cloak legal mumbo jumbo. We should just be honest: we have freedom of speech so long as it doesn’t threaten the power elite.

But now we have Eric Posner, clearly sitting in his own urine while he wrote, ISIS Gives Us No Choice but to Consider Limits on Speech. This is something that truly boggles my mind. When I was growing up during the Cold War, it was just assumed that people in the Soviet Union didn’t have freedom of speech because their leaders were evil and wouldn’t brook any dissent. And that was true! But that wasn’t what the people of the Soviet Union were told.

In the Soviet Union, the people were told that attacking the government was dangerous and that it put everyone’s life in peril. So it’s just depressing to see people like Professor Posner running around explaining that we have to get rid of freedom of speech, but not for authoritarian reasons, but for the good of the people. This is always what authoritarians say. It doesn’t matter how much you disguise it with nice words and legal reasoning. And where would it stop? “Terrorism” is a word that has no meaning outside, “Acts by people who our government has decided are enemies.”

But this is all about… what?! The Islamic State?! That’s the new boogeyman? As a country, we spend almost as much money on the military as the rest of the world combined. Yet some insurgent group half way around the world represents such a threat that we must destroy our most cherished ideals? And really, let’s face it: this is all about San Bernardino. Certainly, 14 people murdered is a tragedy. But if the shooters hadn’t been Muslims, no one would be talking about limiting the First Amendment or shutting down parts of the internet. (Although clearly Eric Posner has a long history of this.)

And then, I learned via Greenwald that the San Bernardino shooters were not radicalized by ISIS. According to PBS, “The FBI revealed in a criminal complaint this week that one of the San Bernardino shooters, the husband, Syed Rizwan Farooq, and an alleged co-conspirator who bought the couple’s assault rifles, were inspired by former al Qaeda leader Anwar Awlaki.” So it wasn’t even about ISIS. But that won’t stop the San Bernardino murders from being used as an excuse to dismantle our rights.

Eric Posner even cites the destruction of the First Amendment during wartime as a positive example. And since we are at war now, well, carve away my friends! The problem is that the United States is now always at war. But what does that matter to the authoritarians who want only to have the kind of free speech that they find acceptable. “You can say anything you want as long as I don’t mind!” It’s pathetic but not surprising. What is surprising is that people would be pushing this over such a minor threat as ISIS.

Ted McLaughlin put together some data that seems worth looking at as the year comes to an end, What People Most Want In Their Lives. YouGov polled almost 20,000 people in 17 countries about what they wanted in their lives. And as should come as no surprise, people all over the world want the same things. But that’s partly my bias. I focus on the similarities. Others, I’m sure, would focus on the differences. But the fact is that nowhere on the list is “kill the infidel” or “restore the Constitution to its real meaning.” People mostly want to love and health.

But there were some interesting findings in the poll. The countries that are most ostentatiously religious were also the countries that wanted “spiritual progress.” These included: Indonesia, USA, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Thailand. They are the countries with 10% or more wanting that. A lot of it is religious fundamentalism. And as much as I go on about atheism, I am very worried about fundamentalism. The place I differ with many people is that I think religious fundamentalism in the United States is the most dangerous.

Strangely, there isn’t much correlation between “spiritual progress” and “moral virtue.” In fact, the USA is number one in the disconnect here. It tops out in terms of wanting spiritual progress at 13%, but it’s in the middle of the pack with wanting moral virtue of only 5%. That represents the largest gap of any nation. I assume it is because American religious people think they already have moral virtue. As I’ve written about many times, salvation comes very cheap to Americans. It’s like Santa Claus: they just have to believe and they get an all access pass to heaven.

There is one big difference between what people in the west want and what people in the east want. Love is the biggest thing that westerners want: 19% of them. For the east, the number if only 9%. I figure this has to do with money. Although there are some very rich countries representing the east, China and Indonesia dominate. And people just trying to get by don’t focus too much on things like love. And this is the area that is most stark. The lowest love score for the western countries is for the USA at 15%; and the highest love score for the eastern countries is 10%.

But I have to wonder about some of these questions. “Success in my career” has the USA scoring toward the bottom of the countries. Given that Indonesia is at the top, it would seem like it is an indication of how happy people are in their careers. But I suspect that is not happening here on the home front. I think people here have largely given up on the idea that work can get better. They figure that work is about as good as they could hope. If they even have a job, that’s a good thing.

A related statistic is that people in the USA are towards the bottom in wanting more free time. Americans work on average 1,789 hour per year, yet they are less inclined to want more free time than the Germans, who work on average 1,371 hours — almost a quarter fewer hours. We are also less interested in making more money. Americans are amazingly good at self-oppressing. No wonder we live in a plutocracy.

But at least most people agree that all we really need is love.

Afterword

Because The Beatles didn’t believe the BS they shoveled, this is not The Beatles doing the song:

I just watched The Trials Of Henry Kissinger. It’s based in part on Christopher Hitchens’ book The Trial of Henry Kissinger. It was published back in 2001, before Hitchens became just like Kissinger. Of course, that doesn’t mean that Hitchens ever forgave Kissinger. That was the interesting thing about Hitchens: he never went back on what he thought before. So a Kissinger in power in 2003 was just fine with Hitchens, even while it was clear as day that the actual Henry Kissinger of 1973 was a war criminal. Luckily, the film doesn’t dwell too much on Hitchens and provides Kissinger with a much more fair treatment than he deserves.

What most struck me in the film was that in 1968, the Johnson administration was on the verge of ending the Vietnam War. Kissinger was acting as a double agent — leaking information he gained from his position in the Johnson campaign to the Nixon campaign. And then Nixon used that information to convince South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu to reject the deal. Had the deal held, Hubert Humphrey might have been elected president. But that’s not really what’s important. What’s important is that the war could have been over then. Instead, it went on for another five years.

Half of the Americans who died in the Viewnam War did so after that date. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese died after that date. And for what? So that Richard Nixon could be president? So that Henry Kissinger could further his career? Regardless of the way that you see it, there is no excuse for sabotaging the peace process. To me, it qualifies as treason. It makes the Watergate break-in sound like a trivial matter — even if you view it in its widest possible context. But this kind of thing seems to be acceptable now. Just look at the Republican letter to Iran that was meant to destroy the nuclear deal. It seems that among conservatives, their commitment is to gaining power and not the country itself.

Regardless, five years after Kissinger worked to destroy the peace deal in the Viewnam War, he brokered his own. He even got the Nobel Peace Prize. But I learned something new: the deal he worked out was almost identical to the 1968 deal he helped to derail. That’s really something. I wonder how people like that live with themselves. Is it really just that people who operate at that level are all psychopaths? Because that’s what it seems like.

There’s no indication that Kissinger or Nixon or anyone else actually thought that the Viewnam War was winnable. It was just a pawn in their little game. They were willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people on the theory that they could convince the American people that they had the secret to winning that war. I don’t think much of the American people, but I don’t think they would have gone for Nixon’s deal if he had been honest about it. There were two options. The first was that the war ends and that was that. The second was that the war continues on and we just hope for the best. I think the American people would have gone overwhelmingly for the first option.

Henry Kissinger is very old. Even if he weren’t, there would never have been any justice. But it would be right if he spent what little time he had left rotting in a prison cell. But even that is a fantasy. We’ll be lucky if after his death he gets anything but hagiography.

The Republicans are back with their bad old idea on improving the economy: tax cuts for the rich. But you’ll never believe their new twist!

Paul Krugman published two short post that I thought were very interesting. The most recent one was a comparison of the economic recovery under Obama and Bush, Obama The Job-Killer. As you can see in the graph below, the Bush recovery was much worse than the Obama recovery. Don’t worry about the recession at the end of the Bush administration. Just look at the main trend line. Obama’s trend is faster than Bush’s. That’s amazing. I’m the first to admit that the Obama recovery has been mediocre. I don’t blame Obama for that; the Republicans have stood in the way at every turn, pushing policy that only hurts the economy.

But there was Bush. During his first two years, he had a Republican House and a compliant Democratic Senate. From 2003 to 2007, he a Republican controlled Congress. So he got to do pretty much what he wanted. And the results were meh. Because that’s what Republican policy does. It is designed to help the rich, and it does that brilliantly. But it doesn’t help the economy generally. And that would be fine if that was what the Republicans campaigned on. But they know that if they campaigned on their actual agenda, they would never get elected anywhere.

Here is the comparison of private jobs created during the two administrations:

So what are the policies that we are talking about? Basically, we are talking tax cuts for the rich. The Republicans only have two policies that they push. They are the same policies that they have been pushing for four decades. The first is deregulation of the finance and oil industries. I’m not going to go into it here, but these are policies that give more money to the already rich without helping the overall economy. The second is focused tax cuts that give more money to the rich.

Under the right circumstances, tax cuts can be helpful for the economy. It is certainly true that the temporary payroll tax cut during the first term of the Obama administration was helpful. That’s a tax cut that helped all working people, allowing them to spend more money. But you will note that when it came time to lift that tax cut, the Republicans didn’t complain. They had “reasons” why it didn’t matter. Grover Norquist was okay with it. He didn’t have a reason for it. But we know why he didn’t care: it didn’t affect the rich.

Giving tax cuts to the rich does not help the economy because they will just sit on the money. If the government had it, the money would be put to use in the economy. Alternatively, it could be given to working people who would also put it to use. But giving money to people who already have too much money does little good for the economy. But what do you think the new breed of Republicans think we should do to help the economy. Let’s all say it together: tax cuts for the rich! Here’s a graph from the second Krugman article, Doubling Down On W:

The only think that has changed is that the tax cuts of the establishment candidate, Jeb Bush, and the “crazy” candidate, Donald Trump, are even more lopsided than the very lopsided tax cuts of George W Bush. This is what we get from the Republicans. I constantly hear from Republicans how Democrats want to do the same old stuff but that the Republicans have big new ideas. But they don’t have any ideas. Sure, some conservative thinkers have some ideas. But they are only around for window dressing. If they ever became politically possible, the Republicans would turn on them in an instant.

So time and again, giving the rich huge tax cuts has not helped the economy. So the new group of Republicans is back with the same old idea. But with a twist: the tax cuts will be even bigger!

“Balanced budgets goood! Budget deficits baaad!” That’s a reference to Phil Hartman’s Frankenstein, which is itself a reference to Frankenstein (or perhaps more accurately Young Frankenstein). It implies a gut reaction to things — not a considered intellectual opinion. It’s great fun in the films and parodies, even if it is rather the opposite of what is going on in the book. But what bothers me is that supposed serious political analysts don’t usually have any more depth of thought, “Balanced budgets goood! Budget deficits baaad!”

That brings us to Fred Hiatt who is upset that the federal government isn’t balancing its budget, but he’s very happy about something, One Governor Bucking the Bipartisan Tradition of Passing the Buck. It is such a load of Villager idiocy that I’m not going to even go into it. It’s filled with the usual “Both sides do it!” nonsense, even though the Republicans are responsible for everything he’s actually complaining about in the budget that Congress just passed. He’s also on about “unaffordable pensions” for public sector workers. I wonder what Mr Hiatt would think if someone came in and told him the pension he negotiated with The Washington Post 34 years ago is “unaffordable” and will have to be cut.

What’s absurd is that Hiatt compares the state and federal governments as though they are comparable. States have to maintain more or less balanced budgets; governments with their own currency (like our federal government) do not. Given that, you might wonder why everyone makes such a big deal out of balanced budgets. And the truth is, the times when we ought to worry about them are exactly the times when people like Fred Hiatt don’t worry about them.

Think back to glory days of the late Clinton administration. We had a budget surplus! And everyone of Fred Hiatt’s caliber of analysis thinks it is because we cut spending and raised taxes. But that was a very small part of it. In fact, although these policy changes would have decreased the deficit, they wouldn’t have come close to balancing the budget. What did it was the roaring economy, which brought in loads more in taxes from people who didn’t only got jobs, they god raises for the only time in the last four decades.

Had we not had a surplus at that time, it would have been an excellent time to get one. Because that’s the only time it matters to have a balanced budget: when the economy is strong. The reason is because the economy is working at peak efficiency. Businesses want to borrow money to invest. If the government is also borrowing money, the cost of loans goes up. That’s really the whole story. Budget deficits are bad for the economy when there is great demand from the private sector for loans.

Is that the case now? No! Right now, the federal government can borrow money with 10-year treasury notes for 2.24%. The lowest this number ever was during the Clinton administration was 4.44%. And most of the time it was close to 6%. What this tells us is that the economy is performing poorly. The private sector is not interested in borrowing money. So if the government weren’t borrowing it, it would just be sitting there, doing nothing.

And that’s what Fred Hiatt wants. Dean Baker is always good at stabbing right at the heart of the matter, and his response was, Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt Pushes for Higher Unemployment. That’s what’s so annoying about the way we talk about economics in this country. It’s all about budget deficits and interest rates. These all sound like no-brainers — or at least morally neutral. But for Very Serious People like Fred Hiatt, the policies they push just happen to always mean that regular Americans have static wages — when they have jobs at all.

See Also

Very Serious Conspiracy Theorists
Fred Hiatt’s Circuitous False Equivalence

At The Washington Post last week, Radley Balko wrote a great article, In the end, 2015 Saw No “War on Cops” and No “National Crime Wave.” As he noted, this was supposed to be because of all the supposed anti-cop rhetoric and so on. But the data are in and it shows that there is no spike in violence against the police. In fact, the numbers from this year continue the downward trend of police fatalities that started in the mid-1970s. It is safer to be a police offer than it has been in well over a century.

But think about that supposed anti-cop rhetoric. I don’t recall any anti-cop rhetoric. Every person of any power who was critical of policing always went far out of their way to say that most officers were great at their jobs. This is at best an exaggeration. But the fact that everyone felt the need to continue to lick the boots of law enforcement shows just how much power and inexplicable goodwill that people have for the police. It was only the police unions and other advocates who equated criticism of systemic problems and individual officers with attacks on the police generally.

As for crime, well, that too is down. We have some statistics via Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime (pdf). It is “a group of 150 of the country’s most prominent current and former police chiefs, sheriffs, district and state’s attorneys, US Attorneys, attorneys general, and other law enforcement leaders…” And they reported:

Remember back to why crime was supposedly spiking: police officers were not doing their jobs because they were vewy vewy awraid. So if crime had increased, wouldn’t that have been the fault of the police? Shouldn’t we have reacted badly toward them and not their critics? After all, don’t we have to sit through their royal-like funerals because their jobs are just so dangerous? Isn’t this why we must be now and forever on hands and knees licking their boots? I understand their whining; I’d hate to be a police officer. But I don’t see why the rest of us should put up with the whining. Policing is one of the few good-paying jobs left in America that someone can get with only a high school education.

Despite the fact that violent crime is low and getting lower, Americans think that it was up this year. I think we know why this is. The whining of police officers has an effect. But it’s strange that we put up with it. Would we ever accept teachers going around whining that students were really stupid and that’s why they weren’t doing their jobs? No, we’d tell them to shut up. But since it is the police, it’s somehow acceptable. So in addition to doing at best a mediocre job, the police are spreading lies and fear.

As Radley Balko concluded, “It’s one thing to give in to fear when crime really is on the rise. But it would be tragic if the opportunity we have today to reform laws was thwarted by [this] sort of fact-free fear.”

Stephen Glass is back in the news. In the upcoming issue of Harper’s Magazine, they are running a letter from him and have issued a retraction about an article he wrote for them all the way back in 1998. For those who don’t know, Glass was a writer at New Republic in the mid to late 1990s. He was something of a star — publishing many remarkable and amusing stories. The problem was that he was just making stuff up — in some cases, entire articles. But it is coming up on two decades now and Glass is still running around making amends.

The article in question is, “Prophets and Losses.” In it, Glass supposedly went to work for a telephone psychic outfit. By the calculations of the Harper’s Magazine editors: “at least 5,647 of the 7,902 words… were based on fabrications.” That’s pretty amazing. At the same time, as a writer, I appreciate that he was actually writing. The question is whether such writing would have been published had it not been “true.” And the answer to that is pretty clearly that it wouldn’t have been. People accept much less interesting stories if they are supposedly true. Just look at The Blair Witch Project, which never would have been a hit without the cover story of it being real. It just isn’t that interesting and has a totally boring denouement.

But I still think it is pretty bad that Stephen Glass is still trying to piece his life back together. The same goes for Jayson Blair, although I don’t know what he’s up to. In Glass’ case, he’s trying to become a lawyer, but the state of California thinks he can’t be trusted to be a lawyer because of all the made-up stories he published. It’s kind of amusing really. I mean, a lawyer?! He wants to be part of a profession where creating plausible but false stories is critical.

Michael Hiltzik at The Los Angeles Times noted last week that there is much to dislike about Glass. In particular, “His imaginary characters are lower-class, often minority figures, depicted as credulous and uneducated, sometimes speaking in dialect.” But that brings up the broader issue of why it was that Stephen Glass was such a hot commodity while he lasted. As Hiltzik put it, “Glass played on his bosses’ prejudices…” So the question is: if his bosses at New Republic had such a classist take on the work, do we really think that the lawyers of California do not?

My interest is not in Stephen Glass. He’s from a privileged background. Even with all his baggage, and without license to practice law, he finds himself with the impressive sounding position at Director of Special Projects at a big-time law firm. But the treatment of him is typical of the way we treat people who have made mistakes in the past. We are not a forgiving society. There is a binary nature to our attitudes, where people are all good or all bad. And that just isn’t the case. People are all grey, as far as the eye can see.

But for most people without the resources of Stephen Glass, life is effectively over after a drug felony. These are the people who I fret over. And as a society, I think we really need to decide when we are going get over past wrongs. In Stephen Glass’ case, his great wrong was to embarrass a certain economic and intellectual class. I don’t defend what he did. But he’s hardly a murderer — and even they deserve some reconsideration over time. As a society, we need to learn the art of forgiveness.

Alice Ollstein at Think Progress reported that just in time for Christmas, Newly Elected Governor Strips 140,000 of Voting Rights, Lowers the Minimum Wage. Yes, everyone’s favorite red state governor Matt Bevin decided to reverse the executive actions of the previous governor, Steve Beshear, that allowed non-violent ex-felons to vote and government workers to have something approaching a living wage. Merry Christmas!

Of course, Matt Bevin doesn’t want to disenfranchise all these men and women. He said that “it is an issue that must be addressed through the legislature and by the will of the people.” And you should believe it to the extent that you believe a pathological liar. Politicians never claim to be against any popular legislation that they overturn or otherwise sabotage. It is always something along the lines of, “I would love to support this legislation, there is just this one problem…” And if that one problem is eliminated, they always find another “one problem” that prevents them from supporting that legislation that they otherwise love.

Earlier this year I discussed the status of the states regarding this, Felons and Voting Rights. Kentucky — along with Florida, Iowa, and Virginia — are what I called the “completely vile” states where “you have to file an individual petition and get a pardon from the governor.” Think about that. Republicans, who go on and on about efficiency, think that the state should have to go over every one of those 140,000 before they get the right to vote. That’s over 3% of the population. And according to Think Progress, “As a result, one in five African Americans in the state are disenfranchised.” Know this: if the legislature did send him such a bill, he would find a reason to veto it.

Of course, none of this is an accident. Michelle Alexander talked about this, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Going away to jail for even ten years is not the big deal. It is that you are labeled for the rest of your life. Look at the way we talk about this issue: 140,000 felons. Not ex-felons. And this is part of the idea that a felon should never be allowed to vote again. As Think Progress noted, “Studies have found that ex-felons who have their voting rights restored feel more invested in their communities and are less likely to end up back in the criminal justice system.”

Matt Bevin didn’t just ruin the Christmas of ex-offenders, of course. He also reduced the minimum wage for state workers and contractors from $10.10 per hour to $7.25. Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas! He stated, “Wage rates ideally would be established by the demands of the labor market instead of being set by the government.” That’s your typical conservative claim that the market is perfect and if the government would just get out of the way, everyone would have jobs and own their own homes with picket fences and Barbara Billingsley waiting with a martini. They’ve never heard of monopsony.

But it wasn’t all bad news! Matt Bevin saw to it that someone got good news for Christmas. And that someone was Kentucky clerk Kim Davis. She’s wanted clerk names removed from marriage licenses because God don’t like them gays but she sure likes her job. So Bevin saw to it that Kim Davis and the other bigots like her can have a happy Christmas knowing that they are complicit in helping to establish equal rights.

This just in: Matt Bevin seen stealing Tiny Tim’s crutch so he can sell it and provide tax cuts for squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old rich people.