Dean Baker wrote a great article yesterday, Why Do the Media Give So Much More Attention to Jobs We Lose Due to Environmental Restrictions Than Jobs We Lose Because of the Trade Deficit? And he actually answers half the question. I answer the rest.

The issue is that in the entire United States, there are less than 80,000 people who work in the coal industry. Is that a lot? Well, there are roughly 138 million jobs in the country. So that’s less than 0.06% of our work force. It would seem that this is not an industry that we should be all that concerned about. What’s more, as I discussed on Tuesday, because of changes in the way the coal industry is managed, coal jobs have been disappearing for decades. Baker noted that during the eight years from 1985 to 1993 (You know: the Reagan and Bush years!) the coal industry cut 80,000 jobs. And that was when there were fewer people in the work force and so the jobs lost was a bigger deal. As Baker noted, “I don’t recall anywhere near the same focus on this far more serious hit to coal country.”

Meanwhile, our country has seen a sharp rise in its trade deficit. This deficit is due to our strong dollar. It is cheaper for us to buy imported products and more expensive for other countries to buy our exported products. The increase in the deficit represents roughly 700,000 jobs, by Baker’s estimate. That’s in one year. Yet what is everyone talking about: the fact that some coal jobs will be lost because of new power plant regulations—regulations that will take effect over the course of 16 years. So even if all the coal jobs were lost (and they won’t be—not even close), that would be a loss of 5,000 jobs per year. This is an amount that likely could be accommodated by attrition alone. Regardless, this is less than one percent of the jobs lost due to our trade deficit.

So why does this get so little attention? Simple: the strong dollar is great for the rich. If you already have money, it is best that the money be worth as much as possible. But if you aren’t rich and don’t have a job, a strong dollar is bad. But it is worse than that. Baker pointed out that certain businesses you’ve heard of depend upon a strong dollar so they can continue to sell cheap imported goods to the working poor:

Of course, this alone doesn’t explain why journalists aren’t interested in the subject. To understand that, you have to look to Chris Hedges in Death of the Liberal Class. The upper middle class who are our journalists and economists are supposed to be the ones who make the democracy work. They are supposed stop the excesses at the top. They are supposed to keep inequality in check, for example. As a class, that’s what they’re paid for. But over the last four decades, they’ve fallen down on the job and allowed our country to become effectively a plutocracy. That’s why our mainstream journalists focus on tiny issues, getting the people worried about an issue (eg coal) that is really all about how much money owners will make in profit. And that’s why the mainstream journalists ignore huge issues, letting the people stay ignorant of an issue (eg the trade deficit) that is hurting the people themselves.

I am not saying, however, that the journalists know they are doing this. It is just that over the years, the culture of journalism has lost its way. Fundamentally, it is about laziness. The “liberal class” thinks it deserves its decent lifestyle. It has forgotten that those lifestyles were provided for doing real work. And that work was not to be the apologists of the rule elites.

Afterword

Just to be clear, Dean Baker is doing great work as an economist and Chris Hedges is doing great work as a journalist. But the vast majority of the economists and journalists are nothing but lazy apologists for the power elite.

On this day in 1883, the great economist John Maynard Keynes was born. Last year, I spent most of the time complaining about how this depression we are still in was in no fundamental sense different from the Great Depression, yet policy makers were determined to ignore everything we learned from Keynes. I noted that things weren’t nearly as bad because we had automatic policy like Social Security and unemployment. But I have little doubt that if we didn’t have those stabilizers, the economic conservatives still would have decided to do nothing to help the people. As it was, conservatives have done everything they could to undermine the social safety net at exactly the time when we need it most.

It would have been one thing if in 1999, when the economy was booming and anyone who wanted a job could have a job, Paul Ryan had made his comment about the social safety net lulling able body people into life of complacency. But we have been getting this rhetoric (And worse!) during a period when our employment to population ratio is five percentage points less than it was during most of the Bush the Younger years.

I have begun to think that maybe Keynes wasn’t such an original thinker. Sure, he was brilliant and all. But economics has pretty much always been a handmaiden of policy makers and so economists have always tended to tell the power elite what they wanted to hear. That’s one of the reasons that Marx is so vilified. And Keynes isn’t far behind him in vilification, despite the fact that economically speaking they are on opposite poles. But just like Marx, Keynes told the power elite things they didn’t and still don’t want to hear.

Where Keynes’ brilliance laid (and that of most geniuses) was in seeing things clearly rather than through a veil of established wisdom. His important work all seems to be based upon the paradox of thrift. That was an idea that was very old. Adam Smith wrote, “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great Kingdom.” But it was Keynes who grabbed onto it and showed how it explained depressions.

But even after the Great Depression and the clearest demonstration that Keynes was right, we find ourselves in the same situation. The same disproved theories that were used during the Great Depression to justify the government doing little or nothing were brought out during this depression for the same purpose. Of course, they were given need clothes. There was Reinhart-Rogoff with their 90% debt cutoff that was bogus. There was Alesina-Ardagna with their expansionary austerity that was bogus. And now, we are left with Keynes and only Keynes.

And what do we do? Nothing. Because doing nothing was always the plan of the policy makers—the power elite. They don’t see economics as a science that can make the running of the economy better. They see it as a form of apologetics to be used to justify whatever policy they prefer. So when R-R and A-A went down in flames, it didn’t matter. They were just objects to be held up to the masses to justify policies that enrich the rich and impoverish the poor. Those policies were given, it was just nice to have their little stable of kept economists who will twist their data and models to justify those policies. When they can’t do it, the kept economists are sent away like court jesters who have begun being tiresome.

Meanwhile, Keynes was right. And that matters in the intellectual history of humanity. But it doesn’t matter at all when it comes to the policies that economic conservatives put forward.

Happy birthday John Maynard Keynes!

I just got back from work and I am exhausted. But I happened across a bit of Fox News and I saw Charles Krauthammer talking about what a bad precedent Bergdahl sets and how Israel had to release over a thousand terrorists for one guy. At first I thought, “Yeah, and that was a deal that the Israelis were willing to make to get Gilad Shalit back. Who are you to second guess them? They obviously thought it was a good deal!”

But then it occurred to me. The right wing in American politics would not have been okay with us trading these five Taliban soldiers for President Obama. A couple of things are crystal clear. One is that there is absolutely nothing that the Obama administration could do about anything that they would not find fault with. Second, is that they just hate Obama. Of course, after he’s out of office and another Democrat is in, they will talk about how he wasn’t that bad but whoever is in at that time is just terrible, although admittedly, not from Kenya.

The right in this country has no credibility. It isn’t that their ideas are bad. It is that they have no ideas. All they stand for is whatever opposes what the Democrats stand for. That’s a lot more dangerous than is commonly understood. Because I don’t know where they go from here. If they regain power, they will not do what they now claim to want to do: all the silly Tea Party stuff about the government not interfering with anything except for abortion rights. For one thing, such a government would destroy the red state base of the Republicans’ power. If they really did that, they would be voted out as quickly as possible. So they will just go back to their usual crony capitalism.

But when that doesn’t work out, what then? Are they going to turn on a dime yet again and be for “liberty”? I don’t think so. I think there is a real crisis going on in the Republican Party but we won’t really see it until it is far too late. And that’s when the right wing nuts might just start a new civil war. But I hope we deal with this one better. I say life without parole for all such traitors. The last thing we want is wingnuts a hundred years from now celebrating another wave of traitors.

But that is my question to Charles Krauthammer, “Would it have been a good deal to give up those five prisoners for President Obama?” I’m certain he would say no, just as I’m certain that if it had been eight years earlier, he would have said yes. Consistency is not something that matters to Krauthammer, or pretty much any conservative.

Charlie Savage and Andrew Lehren over at The New York Times wrote a really interesting article yesterday, Can Bowe Bergdahl Be Tied to 6 Lost Lives? Facts Are Murky. Through this whole thing, I’ve tried to stay away, because it is more of a technical matter. I’ve never been in the military and I don’t know much about how wars are run. What’s more, the Republicans are playing their usual outrage game by pretending that these five Taliban prisons of war were really “terrorists.” But I have had my suspicious about Bergdahl.

The main thing I’ve thought is that Bergdahl deserves the presumption of innocence. If it turns out that he did nothing wrong, will Fox News later have weeks of blanket coverage about how they were wrong? But more than that, the complaints I hear sound like soldiers who had a problem with Bergdahl before this incident. And I really wonder about military pride that so many soldiers are willing to speak anonymously on this subject that they may know little or nothing about. Don’t they think that the military has the ability to deal with this young man if he did anything wrong without fueling political operatives who are using the incident for their own purposes?

The Times article goes into what is the most damning allegation against Bergdahl: that six other servicemen lost their lives looking for him. The article treads lightly on the subject, but it is clear the the situation is totally different from what has been portrayed in the media. What most people think is that Bergdahl went missing so a search and rescue operation was launched and six people died as a result. That’s not it at all. More or less, Bergdahl’s detractors are just blaming him for all the deaths that happened in the two months after his capture.

It seems that Bergdahl was culpable in as much as orders were given, “Go do reconnaissance in that area, and pay attention for any signs of Bergdahl too.” Well, people fighting in a war get killed. And that seems to be what happened here. Blaming Bergdahl for their deaths is far less reasonable than blaming George Bush. The fact that this idea has come from anonymous soldiers makes me come back to the original idea that some people just didn’t like this guy. And that in itself could have caused him to desert, if that is in fact what he did.

Add to that, the reporting by Democracy Now! Reporter: Bowe Bergdahl’s Fellow Soldiers Questioned Afghan War More Than He Did. This is information from five years ago, but at that time, other members of that unit were quite vocal about their criticism of the mission. Even if true, it doesn’t absolve Bergdahl, but it certainly points to the fact that there were morale problems in the unit and perhaps in the entire theater of operation.

In the end, what we should be doing is what we should have been doing all along: moving forward slowly and carefully. All the allegations against Bergdahl are as helpful as all the speculation about what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Maybe Bergdahl was abducted by space aliens and then returned to the Taliban. Who can say? But at least in this case, I’m sure the Army will get to the bottom of it. And all the ranters and anonymous sources don’t really help.

H/T: Susie Madrak

Okay, I’ll bite. You see, I have a bit of a problem. Last year, for the birthday post, I did Rosalind Russell. And I would do her again this year. The problem is that wasn’t the only time I’ve written about her. She is one of the great crushes of my life. I have such a crush on her, that I have a residual crush on Jennifer Jason Leigh because she basically did Russell in The Hudsucker Proxy. And I could have done King George III, but about the only thing I have to say about him is that he was not actually cured and lived his whole, very long life, as mad as a hatter. And of course, there is the great Freddy Fender, but really, what do I have to say other than that I really like “Before the Next Teardrop Falls.”

You all know that I’m no fan of abstract expressionism. I’m not one of these fools who think it is easy. In fact, in many ways, it is the hardest form of painting because you have so little to work with. And I think I can tell the difference between reasonable work and total crap. Take Jackson Pollock, for example. Anyone can flick paint on a canvus. But you’ve got to know what colors to flick where and most of all when to stop. I’m actually rather a fan of some of his work.

On this day in 1916, the Canadian abstract expressionist Fernand Leduc was born. And, in fact, he only died earlier this year at the age of 97. In my experience, there are two kinds of artists: eclectic and non-eclectic. The non-eclectics can be very great. I see Pollock as a non-eclectic. He worked on the same idea over and over again. Paul Klee is another who of think of that way. I would even say that Picasso was largely non-eclectic. Leduc was eclectic. All of his work fits very neatly into the abstract expressionist movement, but his renderings were often distinctly different.

With the abstract expressionists, I’m most often interested in how they deal with edges. Leduc was most inclined toward sharp edges, often with naturalistic shapes. But sometimes whole canvases are the same cover, with only subtle changes throughout the canvas. These are the sort of things that photographs can never really capture. He also did more “messy” work while maintaining the same conservative approach to color. Here is one I especially like, Retention Bleu-vert (Retention in Teal?):

Happy birthday Fernand Leduc!

Well folks, sometimes other things intrude on my normal life stuck here in front of this computer screen. Today, it was a rather large “emergency” project for a company that found the network and phone system in their new office not working. I love that kind of work. It’s always exciting to troubleshoot these kinds of problems. Of course, it would be easier if these people would just hire us to do the stuff from scratch. But there is something wonderful to go in and see an old and complex system. It’s like archaeology. You can see how it all started and how things were added over time. And step by step they take a well designed system and turn it into a nightmare.

This one was especially interesting, because the initial stuff was professional hardware, and it was installed correctly. But absolutely no care was taken to document it. The patch bay had on it only a single cryptic number that didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything in the office area. Some of office outputs were labeled and some were not. And of course, there is the very old analogue telephone infrastructure there—the building is about 50 years old. It is still all hooked in, but of course none of it is being used. Now the phones and the network are all through cable coaxial line.

I was a little anxious when I got the call. I feel totally secure with computer networks regardless of how complicated they are. But it’s been a few years since I’ve dealt with telephone systems. I had nothing to fear. Telephones are simpler today than they’ve ever been. It did, however, take me a little while to figure out what exactly was going on. Here’s a pet peeve of mine: no documentation. When I set up a network, I create a log book that I keep with the data hub. That provides all the information about what connects to what. And then it acts as a diary explaining all changes that have been made. Here, of course: nothing. But I did figure it out quickly enough.

It’s sad though. In the old days of analogue telephones, it was kind of romantic. It takes me back to the original Star Trek and Scott being a “miracle worker.” The telephone systems were such a nightmare of tiny wires that it made those of us who knew what we were doing kind of wizards. Now, I think any reasonably intelligent person could take a semester course on TCP/IP and know most of what I know. Maybe add a little knowledge of UDP and some better ways to deal with realtime issues, and clients might as well hire them.

But the fact remains that most people still have trouble with even the most basic networking. And when you are talking about business phone lines and different subnets, they probably still see people like me as wizards. But we all know better. If you’ve never done it, you owe it to yourself to check out an old telecom closet. They are things to behold. And you’ll wonder, “How did they keep all that straight?” And the answer is that to some extent, they didn’t. It was magic.

I remember hearing these stories of American contractors trying to get the electrical system in Iraq back working. And after years, it was worse than it had ever been. All I could think was that there were a bunch of young, well trained engineers who understood the proper way of how to do stuff. But they didn’t understand all the creativity of countless men who were making that system work under less than ideal conditions. I don’t know what they finally did, but there were only two real choices. Either start over from scratch or hire back those Ba’ath Party members who understood the magical incantations of the electrical grid. We old timers still have our uses.

Afterword

I’ll probably be working all day tomorrow, so not much posting except maybe in the morning and then in the evening.

There is a term that I’ve been using for a long time, and last week at The Nation in an article There Are No More Honest Conservatives, So Stop Looking For One, Rick Perlstein used it, “No more affirmative action for conservatives.” Actually, I’ve stopped using the term, because “affirmative action” applies to giving explicit opportunities to members of certain groups because of the excess implicit opportunities that members of others get. This is not the situation with conservatives in the media.

Of course, it is exactly the arguments that conservatives have made over the last five decades when they’ve labeled all media that is not explicitly conservative as “liberal.” They claimed that the reason there were so few conservatives in mainstream media was because of bias. What they avoided (or perhaps didn’t realize because of their own ideological bias) was that there were very few liberals in the mainstream media. Those outlets preferred flavorless reporters and commentators who had very middle of the road beliefs.

But before the rise of the internet, in reaction to this conservative “working of the refs,” we saw lots of conservatives get jobs in the mainstream news industry that were not matched by liberal hires. And that led to outrages like the PBS Newshour pairing the moderate, ever so slightly left of center, Mark Shields, with the 25 year younger, conservative ideologue David Brooks. Balance!

But Perlstein’s article is worth reading in full. The truth is that even the smartest and most conscientious conservatives show their true colors when it is to their ideological advantage. Perlstein specifically mentioned Sean Trende. Now you may know his work, because it is usually very good. He is an excellent numbers guy and he is very much worth reading. But coming right off doing really good work, Perlstein noted:

Perlstein ended by saying, “Time to stop the soft bigotry of low expectations toward the right.” But sadly, that is not going to happen any time soon. There are a couple of reasons. One is simply that the mainstream media are determined create balance among the parties. If Republicans were in favor of killing poor children (which they pretty much are) and Democrats were not, ABC News would have a panel with one pro-child killer on the right, one anti-child killer on the left, and a moderate in the middle calling for a compromise of maybe just killing the ugly poor children.

Another, and I would say even more difficult problem, is that the Overton Window of our political discourage has been skewed. Now it is shocking to hear someone on a mainstream outlet talk explicitly and positively about redistributing wealth from the top to the bottom. But neo-fascist discussion of “helping the job creators” or libertarian discussion of abandoning the poor are common and considered just fine. Since true liberals, much less socialists, have been left out of the conversation for so long, they shock the senses of viewers, even when the viewers themselves are more in agreement with their ideas.

There is one other issue, but I don’t know how important it is. Now that the right has its own sealed off media system, they can push stories that no one outside is even paying attention to. This just doesn’t happen on the left. The mainstream media outlets want to keep conduits to the world in case they stumble upon a real story. But this does seem like a minor issue. After all, George Will may now be on Fox News (where he should have been all along), but for decades he was both on ABC and at the Washington Post.

We will see a good example of the problem in the upcoming Benghazi! hearings. Regardless of the coverage, which I am hopeful will be largely dismissive, there will be plenty of airtime dedicated to conservative hacks screaming about, “Four dead Americans!” Even though the scandal, such as it is, has nothing to do with that. It will be more conservative operatives masquerading as journalists throwing anything possible out, hoping that something sticks. Meanwhile, real news will go un-covered and editors will continue to look for the “honest” conservative.

Dean Baker wrote another one of those blog posts, If Kentucky Is a Coal Mining State Is it Also a Heavy and Civil Engineering Construction State? What he’s getting out is that The New York Times (although they are hardly alone), refers to Kentucky as a “coal state.” But the entire coal industry in the state is responsible for only 0.6% of all the jobs. There are actually more jobs in heavy and civil engineering. So why not, “Kentucky, a heavy and civil engineering construction state, would benefit greatly from a federal jobs program focused on infrastructure building”?

The truth of the matter is that newspapers to this day refer to Kentucky and West Virginia as “coal states” because the coal industry has been so successful at lobbying. They like the image of the hard working coal miner like you see in, Harlan County, USA. It’s great PR, because how can you not admire those hard working people doing the most dangerous of jobs. But most of those jobs have gone. And they haven’t gone away because of government regulation. Some of the lost jobs have just gone because of market forces—coal is losing market share to other energy sources like natural gas.

But the big change comes from the changes in how mining is done. The industry itself doesn’t want to pay a small army of people to dig down into a mountain. So now there is far more surface mining that doesn’t require nearly as many workers. In an article four years ago by Bill Bishop and Tim Marema of The Daily Yonder, they noted, “What’s interesting is how the national press constantly overstates the importance of coal to the economies of eastern coal states.” And they provide this amazing graph of coal employment in southern Appalachia:

So I get angry when when anyone complains about moving away from coal, which produces a whole lot more carbon-dioxide per unit of energy than do most other fossil fuels. They scream about the job losses. But who has been screaming about the job losses the management of the industry has been involved in over the last three decades? No one. Because all the wringing of hands has nothing to do with workers’ jobs; it is all about company profits.

I haven’t had time to get into all of the new EPA regulations for power plants, but at first glance, it looks very good indeed. In fact, it is a win for everyone, except for the owners. Forcing power plants to upgrade and retrofit will create jobs. We should have been doing this for a long time, but again, it will hurt profits of the already rich and so generally our government won’t do anything.

But it is true that people who work in and around the coal industry have been harmed and will continue to be harmed. But it would cost us almost nothing to help them. So if conservatives claim to be worried about these people (and we know that mostly they don’t), they should be for providing welfare and job training and even government jobs for these people. That’s what you do if you care about the coal miners. And you should care. We should all care. But the coal industry owners? They are doing just fine and can take care of themselves.