Like The 39 Steps or The Loyal 47 Ronin, The 22 “Top Secret” Email Messages has a mythic quality to it. As you may have heard if you are a normal person, and definitely heard if you are a Fox News or hate radio devotee, the government declared 22 Clinton email messages “top secret.” And so withheld them from release. Almost immediately, the Clinton campaign demanded that the email messages be released. Why would they do that? Most people are like Max Fisher at Vox who thinks that it is because the Clinton campaign wants the world to see that there is nothing top secret about them.

I disagree.

This is definitely the reason. Good God! I would be shocked if even 0.01% of classified documents deserve to be. When very old documents are finally declassified, they are almost always the most banal things. When they are sexy, it is because they embarrassed someone, not because they would have led to the fall of our empire. Creating “top secret” documents is a way for bureaucrats to feel like they are special. The fact that their jobs are usually pretty boring probably doesn’t help matters. Everyone likes to feel like they are an insider, and what better way than to mark banal nonsense as “top secret”?

One thing I remember very fondly from the 1990s was all of the work that the Clinton administration did declassifying documents. It was amazing and refreshing. I’ve always hated the over-classification of stuff. It’s anti-democratic. But the icing on the cake of what Clinton had done was that after George W Bush was appointed president, Dick Cheney began his own program of re-classifying what Clinton had declassified. It showed that there really are two kinds of people in the world: normal and authoritarian jerks. I mean, that’s such a Stalinist move! Sure, the information has been made public, but now I’m going to stop anyone from talking about it!

Paul Krugman wrote a really good blog post about his own experience with classified documents. Here is the heart of the matter which not only goes along with everything I know about classified documents but is also pretty funny:

I’m not a good prognosticator, but I’ll tell you how I think this is going to go: no one who doesn’t already care will care. The truth is that the Clinton campaign is playing this exactly right. By immediately demanding the documents’ release, they are signaling that there is nothing to see. And the vast majority of people already know that our classification system, very much including “top secret,” is a joke.

There’s another aspect to it too. People might have their questions about Hillary Clinton. Is she too secretive? Is she a political opportunist? (As if all politicians aren’t both.) But no one thinks that she is incompetent or a traitor. What’s more, it is all so boring. But if it starts a discussion about how over-classified government documents have become, it will be a great thing.

I know one thing: Bernie Sanders won’t be using the “damn emails” as an issue.

Erik Loomis brought my attention to an article in The New York Times, Lawsuits Claim Disney Colluded to Replace US Workers With Immigrants. This is all about the H-1B visa. This is supposed to be a way for companies to get highly skilled workers that they just can’t find in the United States. It is most definitely not meant to be used to bring workers from other countries to replace existing workers. And so there are two class action lawsuits against Disney for doing just that.

I’ve written about H-1B visa a lot, because in my life, I’ve worked with a lot of people on H-1B visas. I have nothing against them — some I even counted as friends while I knew them and one I gave a guitar and instruction to. But they were neither super smart nor super knowledgeable about arcane subjects. They were just good, professional coders. There was nothing to distinguish them from the many good, professional coders here in the US except that they would work for a lot less money.

What’s so annoying about the constant drum beat for more H-1B visas is that it is the same old scam. Business owners always say they can’t find qualified workers. What they actually mean is that they can’t find qualified workers for the crummy pay they offer. I remember back a few years, my father was aghast that an employer was complaining that he couldn’t find skilled workers would could do trigonometry and other things. How much was he offering? Fifteen dollars an hour with no benefits. That’s a $30,000 a year job. (As I recall, the guy was also upset that many of the workers he did get were fired because they insisted on their legal rights — things like breaks.)

What we are seeing with Disney is not at all surprising. And the truth is, it is no different than the way the H-1B visa is normally used. Other companies just aren’t as obvious about it. But does it really matter that a company has a 50-something coder who is now considered too expensive so it brings in a cheap Indian coder? How is that different from a company that pretends it can’t find qualified people in the first place? There really is no difference, and everyone in government and industry knows it. This is all “nod and wink” nonsense.

Last year I wrote, H-1B Visas Are a Scam to Keep Wages Low. In it, I talked about an actual criminal conspiracy: Steve Job’s deal with other Silicon Valley giants not to hire each other’s workers. Instead of making sure that workers were happy, the CEOs just made it impossible for a high tech professional to go from, say, Apple to Google. Employers already have the great advantage of a monopsony. They wanted to make it so that even the little wiggle room that employees had was removed. Effectively, they wanted to turn workers into serfs.

Sadly, Erik Loomis doesn’t really get what’s going on. He’s an academic and they get screwed over in a totally different way. But this isn’t about people having to train their replacements or even putting people out of work. This is about a systemic problem designed to keep wages down. The H-1B visa is just a tool in that regard.

Exactly who are these workers who have skills that the US lacks? We aren’t talking about letting Albert Einstein into the country here. In the days of old, IBM didn’t expect to hire people with the “right skills.” They expected to hire smart young people, invest in them, and employ them for their entire careers. But now we have a whole new way of thinking where having any job at all is considered some kind of privilege. So people go way into debt so that they can get those lauded “right skills.” And even if they happen to succeed in that, by their 50s, they will find that they are costing the company too much money and be replaced.

It’s disturbing. People like David Brooks and Charles Murray have spent decades talking about the decline of values in America. But they never touch the single most important area where values are lacking: the business world. If you want people to marry, have kids, and raise them properly, they first need a job they can depend upon. Well that is out of the question now because all that matters is next quarter’s profits and the bonuses of top management.

Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) has an editorial asking one of the stupidest questions you are likely to hear this year, Why Is There No Uber For Health Care? It is based on a paper by pretend wonk Avik Roy, Health Care 2.0: Ushering in Medicine’s Digital Revolution (pdf). Before I get to the specifics of the stupid question, let’s go over a few issues that the editorial raises.

First, IBD thinks healthcare costs are all about technology. This isn’t even close to being true. For one thing, in Japan, they have a lot more healthcare technology than we do, yet their healthcare spending is much lower. People who make these kinds of arguments are all free marketeers who are just looking for some reason to claim that the free market will save us if we just let it.

Well, a free market in healthcare might be just fine. But the people at IBD aren’t interested in that. And Avik Roy certainly isn’t interested in that. They aren’t calling for an end to licensing of doctors. In fact, they aren’t even calling for an end to restrictions in doctors immigrating to the US. Because that’s the reason healthcare costs so much: doctors get paid two to three times as much in the United States as they do in other advanced countries. Do we have better doctors than they do in Canada and Japan and Germany? I don’t think so.

Then IBD asks a question about all this technology, not understanding its wider ramifications, “Why would any consumer demand a more expensive product if they had no idea whether it would work?” Well, the truth is that most people do not demand a more expensive product. But generally speaking, healthcare customers are not knowledgeable enough to make good healthcare buying decisions. This is why the neoliberal approach (Not to mention the free market approach!) is not a good way to provide healthcare.

But the editors — based upon Avik Roy — go in the opposite direction. The real solution is to get rid of insurance! It’s the conservatives’ great solution to everything: health savings accounts so that people can count every penny and not go in for expensive procedures! Of course, they started with the understanding that people don’t know what they are doing when it comes to healthcare.

But there’s another issue here. Ultimately, conservatives all think we should save money on healthcare by getting less of it. They don’t want to deal with the issue that the healthcare itself is too expensive. And let’s face it: it’s a false saving. Because if you get people to count their pennies, many of them will decide they can save a buck by not getting preventative care or taking drugs that will lead to much more expensive care later on.

Big on Avik Roy’s radar is that the insurance that people get, they don’t pay for directly. Thus the “direct consumer is largely indifferent to the price.” But surely the businesses and government agencies that are paying for the insurance care about price and are in a much better position to negotiate it. Again we are back to the idea that the more the individual has to pay for care, the better. But the truth is that increasing co-pays and similar devices have not been shown to cut down on unnecessary care.

The great Avik Roy trick in all this is that technology will save us. This is the answer that conservatives have for every problem. And there is no doubt that technology can help. But the kind of technology that Roy and Carly Fiorina and the editors at IBD want is market innovation. They want a way to make it easier for customers to compare prices. They want a little app that will allow people to get the best price on a colonoscopy. Okay. I’m not saying that might not save a few pennies.

But it wouldn’t be like Uber. Uber saves money because it is a low-skill service. It has thrived because there are a bunch of out of work, desperate people. And it effectively placed all the burden on these powerless people. In as much as it has changed the market, it has taken a pretty bad job and made it worse. Yet in the entire IBD editorial, the word “doctor” is used only once — and then in a quote that they attack. Do they really think that doctors are going to allow themselves to be Uberred?

No. What it all comes down to is that the people at IBD and Avik Roy (who I’ve been following for years), don’t give a damn about providing healthcare. They just want to keep taxes down and salaries high for the already rich. So they will nibble around the edges. Medical technology! Skin the game! Malpractice insurance! In fact, the article even talks about the high price of drug entrepreneurship, without discussing all the billions of dollars that the government does in drug research that makes the drug companies rich.

A couple years ago, Avik Roy went through a cycle. He kept writing articles about this or that country that had a supposed free market healthcare system that worked. And then, an actual healthcare wonk would point out why he was wrong. So Roy would move onto another country. Because there just isn’t a country that provides reasonably priced high quality healthcare without having the government very much involved.

The problem is as it always is with conservatives on any issue. They are constrained by conclusions. Yes, they would like everyone to have good paying jobs, but only if the solution is that we lower taxes on the rich and get rid of regulation. And they would like everyone to have good affordable healthcare — but only if it involves the government only helping the rich stakeholders in the process. If it involves subsidizing individuals, forget it.

For more on this, see my article from three years ago: Avik Roy: Healthcare Apologist.

I devised The Paul Krugman Bernie Sanders Giving Game just three days ago. If I were actually playing it, I would now be broke. Three days! Krugman doesn’t seem to be interested in much of anything but how wrong it would be to vote for Bernie Sanders and how Hillary Clinton is the only sane choice.

He also has taken to complaining about Sanders’ supporters not being nice to his friends and him. In fact, last week, he wrote, Health Wonks and Bernie Bros. Now I don’t know the etymology of the term “Bernie Bros”; it probably started with Sanders supporters, but among the liberal punditocracy, it has become a pejorative. The implication has long been that Sanders appeals to young men and that being a Sanders supporter is somehow sexist (despite the fact that the people supporting Sanders first wanted Elizabeth Warren). And note: young women now support Sanders far more than Clinton.

But Krugman’s column yesterday was truly over the top, Plutocrats and Prejudice. It’s a straw man, as so many arguments against Sanders are: Sanders is an idealist who can’t get his big ideas accomplished and Clinton is a pragmatist who will make incremental improvements. The implication is always and forever that Sanders is some ossified old sixties socialist who can’t adjust to political reality. Listening to Krugman, you would think that when the public option was off the table, Sanders had voted against Obamacare. What actually happened was that he got the Senate to roughly double funding for community clinics in exchange for his support. Sounds like a guy who is capable of making incremental change.

So Krugman argues that since Sanders talks insistently about economics, he must think that is the only (or almost the only) issue. It’s funny. Just a few days before, Jonathan Chait wrote pretty much the same thing, What Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Understand About American Politics. I’m not suggesting that these guys are on the Clinton payroll, but they both have the same ax to grind, and they grind it the same way.

But it is worse than that. Because Krugman starts off by going over territory that I’ve gone over before: the plutocrats were able to get their lower taxes and decreased regulation by supporting politicians who got votes by demagoguing against minorities. But that isn’t entirely true. We got the Taft–Hartley Act in 1947 — long before the Silent Majority, Welfare Queens, and Willy Horton. But does Krugman really believe that Sanders doesn’t understand the role that bigotry has played in helping the plutocrats since the 1960s? I don’t think so.

If you look at the other things that Krugman has been writing, you’ll see a certain level of hysteria. He’s been looking for anything he can hammer away at Sanders on. There’s never a kind word. And there is never a negative word for Clinton. No, in Krugman’s world, Clinton is right and perfect and Sanders is wrong about everything that matters. As one commenter (PN) put it, “Prof Krugman seems to dream of ways to disagree with Sanders and to support Hillary.” It’s true.

So we have a Republican Party that is bigoted. One of their great bigotries is against powerful women. And one of their greatest bigotries is Hillary Clinton herself. And she’s the one who is going to be able to make incremental progress? Krugman ended the article with a question, “Isn’t there something noble, even inspiring, about fighting the good fight, year after year, and gradually making things better?” Yes! Yes! Again, I say, yes! But isn’t there also something incredibly suspicious about a candidate who campaigns in that way?

Everyone (and certainly Krugman) knows the Mario Cuomo quote, “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” And Bernie Sanders’ entire career has demonstrated that. The only place that isn’t true is in the fever dreams of people like Krugman. It could be that Krugman either doesn’t really like Sanders’ positions, but this seems unlikely given that they really aren’t that different from Clinton’s. I think it is that Krugman doesn’t think Sanders can win the general election. That’s a fair argument. Make it! Don’t give us this garbage about how Sanders is too high minded and naive to be president.