Shinzō Abe is the prime minister of Japan. He was elected with promises to stimulate the Japanese economy using standard Keynesian economics. Basically, he’s trying to bring the New Deal to Japan. And since he was elected in late 2012, the Japanese economy has done pretty well. But from the very start, mainstream reporters in the United States have had little but derision for Abe. It reminds me of Eric Alterman’s classic book, What Liberal Media? When it comes to economics, American reporters push the interests of their publishers. And for the better known reports — the ones clearly inside the upper class — they push the interests of their class. (And let’s be honest: there is no columnist or pundit who you’ve ever heard of who isn’t at least in the upper middle class.)

Thus, after 2014 showed basically no economic growth for Japan, we get articles such as Japan Emerges From Recession but Growth Subdued and Japan’s Economy Expands, but Less Than Expected. But Dean Baker responded with the obvious, Confusion on Japan’s Economy. He noted that the short Japanese recession in 2014 was due to a hike in the sales tax that was approved before Abe took power. And Abe has killed a second scheduled increase in the sales tax.

Jonathan Soble at The New York Times provided this amazingly biased assessment, “A long-planned increase in the national sales tax, carried out in April, hit consumers harder than the government and most economists had expected, calling the effectiveness of Mr Abe’s approach into question.” Baker responded, “While it says that the resulting downturn was a surprise to economists, this is exactly what standard economics would predict.” But not, of course, what the heterodox economics of expansionary austerity predicts. And this is what the mainstream media want to push: economic theories that have no theoretical or empirical evidence. And they want to push it because this is what the power elite want to hear.

This brings me back to my days as a libertarian. At that time, I made a lot of arguments about how consumers would rebel against companies that didn’t behave properly. Even at the time, I wasn’t too sanguine about this theory. The problem that I came to see was that the vast majority of people don’t have the time, energy, or power to do something about every injustice in their lives. If a chemical company is polluting their ground water, they may be very upset. But it isn’t going to kill them as fast as not eating will kill them, so they continue to go to work. But the rich have the time, energy, and power to do something about every injustice that they see in their lives. That’s because they can hire people to protect their interests.

This is how it is that the liberal readership of The New York Times can put up with reporting that takes it as granted that of course economic policy that is bad for a nation but good for its power elites is good economic policy. Personally, I think that Jonathan Soble should be thrown in jail for a few years for writing that one “news” article. But he should at least lose his job because he clearly isn’t doing the work that the readers of The New York Times expect. But most readers of The Times don’t even know that they are being deceived. Reporters like Soble have been shilling for the power elite for so long that it is now seen as “objective reporting.”

Instead, we have to read Dean Baker who has a far smaller profile. (Dean Baker Is Must Reading!) But as usual, he smashes the subtext of most of the reporting on Japan, which claims that the economy is not doing well under Shinzō Abe:

So we continue to be told that traditional Keynesian economics isn’t working in Japan — or even worse: that it can’t work. This has nothing to do with Japan, of course. It is all about what is acceptable to discuss here in the United States. And the power elite do not want us discussing economic stimulus. They want to focus on “out of control debt” and the need for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. Because the health of the economy doesn’t matter to the power elite — only controlling what they already have. And reporters all over America are there to shill for them. But without ever admitting it. They are just being “objective.”

One thing that most people don’t understand because they have spent little or no time in actual courts in the the United States, is that judges are often incredibly ignorant and often even more bigoted. Alabama Chief Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore is a perfect example of this. He is the man who was thrown off the bench in 2004 because he put a two ton granite Ten Commandments statue in the state judicial building. The “fine” people of Alabama voted him back onto the bench in 2012. And now he is back defying a federal court ruling allowing same-sex marriage in Alabama. All you really need to know about Moore is that he’s a typical judge in that he thinks he’s above the law.

He’s getting major push-back, however. Yesterday morning, he was being interviewed by Chris Wallace who was friendly enough — but clearly not too pleased that this freak of a judge is making a mockery of “reasonable” conservatism. He said, “A state ethics panel said that you had to be removed from office because you had put yourself above the law. Are you doing the same thing now, sir?” Of course, Moore doesn’t think he was wrong in the first place, so obviously he doesn’t think so now. As Walt would say in Breaking Bad, “I am the one who knocks.”

What was especially funny in the interview is how Moore tries to take the high ground. This is typical of conservatives everywhere. They just love to hearken back to slavery — as though they would have been anything but slavery apologists if they had lived at that time. Moore said, “I could recuse or dissent as a justice from Delaware did in the Dred Scott case in 1857. They ruled black people were property. Should a court today base such a ruling that is contradictory to the Constitution…?”

There are a couple of factual matters that Moore got wrong. First, slavery was hardly unconstitutional in 1857. Neither of the two justices who dissented (John McLean and Benjamin Curtis) were from Delaware. And they dissented on procedural grounds — not out of any moral reasoning against the injustice of slavery. But there is a much bigger issue here.

Moore may be talking about recusing and dissenting now. But his actions have not been done within the judicial system. The day before a federal court ruling was to take effect, Moore ordered that probate judges disregard the federal courts. So unlike McLean and Curtis, Moore is not working inside the legal system and losing. He is claiming that he knows what the law should be and that just because other judges who hold positions above him have found otherwise, he can just ignore that.

This is the thinking of a despot. And it is interesting to hear him talk circles around the issues that he’s raised. For example, his Ten Commandments statue was constitutional because he has decided that the First Amendment gave him the right to do that. So again and again we hear from Moore that he follows the law but only to the extent that he gets to say what the law means. Remember: this is a state chief supreme court justice, and he thinks the law doesn’t apply to him.

What is sad is that if he pushes this matter (I don’t think he will in this case), and he gets thrown off the bench, the people of Alabama will just re-elect him. American justice is screwed up. But people like Roy Moore make it far more dangerous. He should not be allowed any kind of power at all because he abuses whatever power he has. He’s a despot in a robe. And his position represents the darkest aspect of democracy.

Last weekend, our colleague Marc McDonald over at Beggars Can Be Choosers wrote, “American Sniper”: Chris Kyle Was a Perfect Poster Boy for Bush’s War of Lies. He did an excellent job of putting Kyle into the context of Bush’s illegal and immoral war. But I was very taken with one line from Kyle’s autobiography. Apparently, he wrote, “I couldn’t give a flying fuck about the Iraqis.” That wasn’t the first time I’d read that quote. But this time it hit me in a different way.

Kyle was a sniper. He had enormous power and discretion in who he targeted. Add to this that at one point, another sniper was threatening Kyle’s record for number of kills, and suddenly Kyle found that a whole lot more “bad guys” were appearing in front of his scope. Coming from an objective sniper with no inclinations other than to do his job to the best of his abilities, this would raise troubling questions. But coming from a sniper who apparently hated all Iraqis and who thought they were “damn savages,” you end up with a very bad situation — one where there really is no doubt that many innocent Iraqis were murdered by Kyle. And his absolute certainty that everyone he shot was a “bad guy,” makes it all the more suspect.

It would seem that in Chris Kyle’s Christian fanaticism, any Iraqi that he killed was a bad guy. He starts his book by discussing his first sniper kill of a woman with a grenade, “My shots saved several Americans, whose lives were clearly worth more than that woman’s twisted soul.” The irony is rich. The woman is fighting against an invading force. Regardless of what I think about what the woman did or stood for, Kyle was clueless. He was a member of an invading force and her actions were absolutely no more twisted than his own.

The most base form of tribalism in our society is religion. And this is what most bothers me about the almost total lack of a theological basis among Christian conservative faiths. All they really offer to their followers is the idea that we are “good” and they are “bad.” And the reason for the distinction is nothing more than that we are “us.” So we get comments from Kyle like, “I don’t shoot people with Korans. I’d like to, but I don’t.” It’s just a book. Why would you want to kill every person who has that book? Because having that book indicates that they are one of those people.

I would think that the US military would filter for people like Chris Kyle. Clearly, he went to Iraq with a different agenda than the military’s stated agenda. After all, we were supposedly there to liberate the Iraqi people from the oppression of Saddam Hussein. Iraq is 99% Muslim. Imagine a country invading America to free us from the tyranny of Barack Obama. America is an 80% Christian nation. Would it make sense to have snipers who wanted to shoot everyone they saw with a Bible? It would only make sense if the “freedom mission” was just a lie. It would only make sense if it wasn’t a war for the American people, but against them.

So Marc McDonald is right — in more than one way. America allows these kinds of Christian nationalists in the military — people who believe that Christianity is The Truth™ and that our wars should be in the service of spreading their religion. In addition to this being immoral, in the long-term, it will destroy our country.