Well my friends, the next two days will have scant postings here. I am off to do some field tests with my business partner Mikhail on our totally cool high tech device that hopefully some day soon I will be able to talk about. It is arguably the best work that I’ve ever done. We are quickly getting to the point being able to release prototypes and maybe even getting some money. This project is also the reason that I don’t post quite as much as I used to. But you still get at least four articles per day!

There probably won’t be anything more today. Sunday will have a birthday post, but I’m not sure of what else. Maybe a lot else, but I’m not promising anything!

Most of what is wrong with the American criminal justice system is summed up in the following headline from the ABA Journal, Rare “Perry Mason” Moment in Court Wins Dismissal for Defendant, Desk Duty for 5 Police Officers. The basic story is sadly typical. The police pulled over Joseph Sperling, a 23-year-old in the Chicago area. They claimed to pulled him over for not using his turn signal. Then, when the officer approached the car, while Sperling was getting his driver’s license, he just happened to smell the cannabis and discovered it.

But the story has a happy ending. The defense attorney, Steven Goldman, sent a subpoena to the Glenview police department for the squad car video. And what do you know? It turned out that every one of the five officers involved in the arrest told the exact same lies. The judge was not pleased about this, calling it “outrageous conduct.” And according to the article, “Cook County Circuit Judge Catherine Haberkorn granted a defense motion to suppress the search, which eliminated a basis for his arrest and resulted in a swift dismissal by prosecutors of the felony drug case against the 23-year-old.”

I am really glad that Sperling lucked out in this case. But what’s sad is that he indeed “lucked out.” This kind of police behavior is not just common; it is standard operating procedure. But look what happens to these cops who conspired against an American citizen, “The officers were later put on desk duty…” There will be an investigation. Most likely, it will find that any collusion was inadvertent. But even if the investigation finds that they did intentionally collude, nothing bad will happen to them because everyone in the police force knows that this is how they do their jobs. It’s just that normally, there isn’t video tape that exposes them. (And even when there is, defense attorneys don’t have the time to check it out.)

Police officers throughout the nation destroy the lives of people all the time. People get arrested on drug possession charges, become labeled felons, and have difficulty finding gainful employment for the rest of their lives. So I have no problem with throwing the book at cops that are caught doing this kind of thing. It shouldn’t just be a matter removal, much less the “indignity” of having to work inside the office. At minimum, they should be prevented from ever working in law enforcement again.

The system we have insists upon treating cases like this as though they are the exception instead of the rule that they clearly are. And so every time an officer testifies in court, it is just assumed that he would never lie. If I were on a jury (and I never will be, precisely because I think this), I would take officer’s word as less reliable than others. I’ve seen this in traffic court. Officers always claim to remember the most banal stuff, which they don’t. It is all in their notes, but of course, they could write anything in their notes. And we see that in this much more serious case.

People always argue for the death penalty as a deterrent to crime. It doesn’t actually work because people don’t usually make calculated, reasonable decisions about murder. But police officers do make calculated, reasonable decisions about bending the rules and making their jobs easier. Deterrents really will work on them. We should throw the book at these officers.

Tim Curry is 68 today. To be honest, I’m not that fond of him as an actor in a general sense. There is a sameness to all his roles that I find boring. But as a musical comedy actor, he’s brilliant. And he is quite simply a fabulous singer. That’s where his true greatness lies and I still find it amazing that he hasn’t had a bigger career in that regard.

He got his start in London theater where he was in Hair. There he met Richard O’Brien who was writing The Rocky Horror Show. The rest, as they say, is history. Theater history. It was made into an iconic film in 1975. It is one of the silliest movies ever. And much of it really doesn’t work. But Curry is great in the part of Dr. Frank N. Furter. Here he is doing “Sweet Transvestite”:

In terms of his acting, he is also notable for playing the part of Mozart in the original Broadway production of Amadeus opposite Ian McKellen. Otherwise, he’s mostly stayed with musicals, which is really for the best. I don’t see how a musical starring Curry could miss. He’s also had a very successful movie career, but as I said, not of great artistic merit.

Curry has released three very listenable albums that for some reason are not held in high esteem. Last night I read the reviews on All Music and I was amazed how they did go on. The criticism seemed to be that the albums were not something else—the worst kind of review. I was particularly bothered by the review of Read My Lips. Because it was produced by Bob Ezrin with prominent use of Dick Wagner, the reviewer, Joe Viglione, got it into his head that it was a sequel to Lou Reed’s Berlin, and failed by comparison. This is despite the fact that the All Music review of Berlin is lukewarm.

I think that Read My Lips is a great album. So I’m going to present two songs from it. First, a reggae version of The Beatles’ “I Will”:

And this gorgeous version of Bacharach & David’s “Anyone Who Had a Heart”:

Of course, Read My Lips isn’t available on CD or even MP3 because America doesn’t believe in having the good kind of class.

Happy birthday Tim Curry!

I remember reading something Ayn Rand had written about the way political oppression worked in the Soviet Union. She said it wasn’t that harsh laws were applied to everyone. It was that there were many laws and they were never applied to anyone, except when that person got out of line. Now I’m not sure exactly how true that was, given that she was only there during the very early stages of the government, before things got really bad under Stalin. But the point is well taken.

We’ve seen this in the United States a whole lot. In the 60s and 70s, hippies everywhere found themselves cited and arrested for ridiculous charges like spitting. And anyone arrested today can confirm that you are never arrested for a single thing. If the cops find you with a joint in your pocket, you are likely to find yourself facing a dozen other charges. That’s not explicitly politically motivated, by it is a form of political oppression.

A more explicit form of this has been going on in Louisiana for the last year. The East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriffs’ Department has been staging sting operations by picking up gay when and then arresting them for sodomy. These kinds of laws were made unconstitutional decades ago. But apparently, local officials wanted to “get the fags” and so they did. All the cases fell through and it was embarrassing. So the Louisiana House of Representatives voted on a bill to overturn the law. And it failed by a vote of 27-67. Of the 27 voting for repeal, only three were Republicans. Of the 67 voting to keep the law, 55 were Republicans. So 95% of the freedom loving Republicans voted to make private consensual behavior illegal. The Democrats hardly did themselves proud with only 63% voting for repeal. But then, Democrats don’t claim to be the party of individual liberty. It all makes a clear statement though: stay away from Louisiana because it’s filled with a bunch of bigots.

Meanwhile, we have an even better (and really, more American) example of this process. In Latta, South Carolina, the mayor fired Police Cheif Crystal Moore. This is being reported as a firing based upon Moore being openly gay. But what I think is fascinating about it is that this appears to not be the case. It looks like Mayor Earl Bullard fired her to end Moore’s investigation of one of Bullard’s crony hires, Parks and Recreation Department Director Vontray Sellers. And this is where it gets good.

Bullard seems to have thought that he could use Moore’s homosexuality against her in this fight. During a private conversation with another council member that has been leaked, Bullard said, “I would much rather have—and I will say this to anybody’s face—somebody who drank and drank too much taking care of my child than I had somebody whose lifestyle is questionable around children… I’m not going to let two women stand up there and hold hands and let my child be aware of it. And I’m not going to see them do it with two men neither.” It is vile and ignorant, but it’s made so much worse that he seems to be using it thinking its going to play with a big chunk of the electorate.

The good news is that thus far, the people are supporting the police chief. About a hundred people came to the town council meeting tonight. They weren’t allowed to speak. Bullard said the issue was not on the agenda and so that was that. But it looks like at least part of the council is in open rebellion. And I really don’t see Bullard winning this one.

But notice what Bullard’s plan appears to have been. It wasn’t necessary to even use the law against Moore. His plan was to just use social mores against her. It was fine that she was gay—I’m sure everyone knew that she was. But the moment she did something that Bullard didn’t like, he tried to use her homosexuality against her. This is a key point, because this is something that libertarians like Ayn Rand don’t understand: it isn’t just the government that we have to worry about taking away our freedoms. In modern America, corporations have far more power to limit our freedom than the government does. And it is as big a problem. And any demagogue like Earl Bullard can easily use the bigotry of the American people to oppress pretty much anyone—whether the demagogue is a mayor or not.

“But would that be so bad?” Matt Yglesias asked that question about the effect of very high marginal taxes on very high incomes. So CEOs retire earlier than they normally would? So celebrity lawyers leave the field early and take up a hobby? So movie stars stop making action films and take small projects with roles more in tune with why they became actors in the first place? The horror!

This afternoon, Yglesias published what may be the best thing I’ve ever read by him, Beyond the Laffer Curve—the Case for Confiscatory Taxation. For those of you who don’t know it, the Laffer Curve is a theoretical idea that increasing taxes will only increase revenues so far. If the government raised the top tax bracket to 99%, the rich would figure out ways to avoid taxes. And even if they didn’t, the theory goes, the rich wouldn’t work as hard and we would all suffer. Here it is:

One thing is clear about the Laffer Curve: our current tax rates are far far far below the equilibrium point. So the truth is that we could raise taxes for the sole purpose of raising revenues. And we could do it a lot We have a long way to go. But that isn’t Yglesias’ point. Certainly he knows that higher marginal tax rates would improve government balance sheets. But tax rates are not always about raising revenues:

His point is that income inequality is so bad that we ought to create taxes to address the problem, just as we did with cigarettes. It will probably come as no surprise to all of you that I totally agree with him. The truth is that without a decent amount of income equality we cannot have democracy. It isn’t just me; the only unquestionably great Found Father, Thomas Paine, was deeply interested in the issue. And surely, the recent Princeton study should make it clear to anyone who isn’t completely closed minded.

Yglesias makes another great point about this. If we taxed incomes over $10 million at 90%, corporations would have incentives to pay lower level employees more. And certainly, taxes could be set up to facilitate this even more. The way we have set up our political economy is such that it tends to create winner-take-all markets. I know that conservatives think this is because that is the “natural” and “proper” outcome of markets. But it is actually just the result of society’s winners manipulating our laws to their advantage.

The only problem with Yglesias’ idea is that the rich have all kinds of incentives to find ways around these restrictions. But generally, such loopholes are put into the law because the law is created by these very same rich people. If we had a true democratic process, we would doubtless have better laws. And as loopholes showed up, we could fix them. All we need is a democracy.

The standard conservative argument against the minimum wage is that it will cost jobs. If you scratch at it, however, it falls apart. As I discussed in Rasing Minimum Wage Won’t Hurt Employment, the truth is that the data on this issue are at worst murky. And one has to ask, “If raising the minimum wage is so catastrophic, why are the data supporting this claim so poor?” What’s more, the argument against raising the minimum wage is the same as the argument against even having a minimum wage. Though this is an argument that appeals to the Tea Party base, it doesn’t fly with any other voting block.

So it was quite interesting when the Associated Press reported, Budget Office: Wage Boost Would Cost Firms $15B. The Senate plan to raise the minimum wage up to $10.10 per hour (Still too low, but a good start!) would cost the business community $15 billion per year as of 2017. That sounds like a lot of money, but the AP was nice enough to put it into perspective:

It would also cost the government an extra $2 million for the ten year planning period. That’s almost nothing: less than 0.0001% of the federal budget, according to CEPR’s indispensable Responsible Budget Calculator. Why so little? Because the entire federal government only has 4,000 employees who currently make less than $10.10 per hour!

Of course, I know what the next line of attack would be from conservatives, “That’s $15 billion more that we will have to pay for stuff!” Now this is absolutely not true, as I explained in, Raising Minimum Wage Won’t Raise Prices. But let’s assume for the moment that it does. The United States’ economy is enormous. The initial estimate of our GDP last year is $16.8 trillion dollars. So this extra pay represents less than one-tenth of one percent of our economy. But it doesn’t work that way. Mostly, what raising the minimum wage will do (especially in our depressed economy) is take money away from people who don’t spend it all and give it to people who do spend it all. So the economy won’t be hurt.

This afternoon, Dean Baker wrote, $15 Billion In Higher Pay: Cheap Fun for Republicans Over the Minimum Wage. In it, he noted:

Of course, the conservatives will have no trouble batting that aside. It’s the usual issue that $10 billion spent on Exxon is Right and Proper. But $10 million spent on hungry kids is an Outrage. The rest of us don’t have to listen to that though. A rise in the minimum wage is long overdue.

On 20 November 2002, The Wall Street Journal editorial page used the term “lucky duckies” to describe people who made so little money that they owed no federal income taxes. It is a ridiculous claim. The implication is that its hard to be a billionaire paying a 13% tax rate on your income, but it’s very easy to live in poverty. It also depends upon a common conservative distortion by focusing on the one tax in America that is moderately progressive. The payroll tax is never mentioned, given that it is highly regressive. Similarly, state taxes tend to be flat, meaning that the poor pay a far higher percentage tax on their expendable income.

When the editorial came out, it was widely criticized. Jonathan Chait at The New Republic then, wrote, “One of the things that has fascinated me about The Wall Street Journal editorial page is its occasional capacity to rise above the routine moral callousness of hack conservative punditry and attain a level of exquisite depravity normally reserved for villains in James Bond movies.” Following off this, Farhad Manjoo at Slate, wrote:

Even better is Ruben Bolling‘s Lucky Ducky cartoon. Here is a typical episode:

But by far the best response came from Pier Petersen, who offered a modest proposal to the editors of The Journal:

But despite all this well deserved derision, not only did The Wall Street Journal not back down, the term “lucky duckies” has become something of a staple in right wing media. One hears it all the time on Fox News, for example.

The thought occurred to me this morning after reading Paul Krugman about the current state of Obamacare. Conservatives seem to have the same attitude toward health insurance. The poor are “lucky” to get insurance. They aren’t unlucky to be poor—most of them born poor with virtually no opportunities. But I wasn’t going to write about this connection until I saw an article by Ed Kilgore this morning, Blaming the “Losers.” At the end of the article, he even uses the term, “Lucky duckies.”

The article is about new research from HuffPost/YouGov. The results are stark and horrible. Conservatives believe that the rich are rich because they earned it and the poor are poor because they are lazy. The numbers are overwhelming. Among Republicans, 48% of Republicans think the poor are just lazy as opposed to just 23% who don’t think that. Democrats skew even further in the opposite direction: 14% to 61%.

This shows the same kind of callousness as the editorial in The Journal. And I think it is very much in line with Manjoo’s question: haven’t they ever met a person of little means? It strikes me as typical of racist beliefs: it is much easier for people to be racists when they have no actual contact with people of the race they hate. Watching Fox News, people get the impression that the poor are just losers who spend all their time gaming the system. But if they knew actual poor people, they would see them struggling to make ends meet. If there ever was a welfare gravy train, it is long gone.

I’ve been concerned about this issue for a long time. This is why gay rights have made so much progress: gay people are evenly distributed throughout society. But poor people are not. It doesn’t matter how badly Tagg Romney screws up in life, he will not be poor. If he is convicted of murdering his wife, when he gets out of prison, he won’t have to find a job working as a busboy at Denny’s. There will be people who will take care of him and find him a respectable job. So there will never be a groundswell of support for the poor, because they will always be The Other. And increasing income inequality only makes the situation worse

So it is no surprise that conservatives continue to think that not paying federal income taxes and not paying for healthcare make people lucky duckies. Because the rich do mind paying for those things. And they have no experience with the other aspects of the supposed lucky duckies’ lives.

The great Japanese screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto is 96 years old today. He is especially associate with Akira Kurosawa, having co-written a number of his greatest films. He started his career writing the multi-perspective classic Rashomon, based upon Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story. This led directly to his second film, Ikiru, and then Seven Samurai. Both of those films were co-written with Kurosawa and the great older screenwriter Hideo Oguni. They also wrote Throne of Blood and The Hidden Fortress. But during that time, Hashimoto increasingly worked with other directors. In fact, The Hidden Fortress was his large film with Kurosawa.

Hashimoto went on to write well over 50 files. And I have only seen a handful of them. Those that I’ve seen are great, but that’s hardly surprising because weak films are unlikely to be released here. Two films particularly stand out to me, because they are samurai films, but not sword fighting films. The first is Harakiri, the story of a ronin who wants to kill himself after his children and grandchild die. The second is Samurai Rebellion (which I reviewed a year and a half ago), the story samurai who rebels against his lord to honor the love of his son and daughter in law. Both films are well worth checking out.

Here is Shinobu Hashimoto talking about the making of Harakiri:

Happy birthday Shinobu Hashimoto!

That graph comes from an excellent article today by Jonathan Cohn, Obamacare Signups Hit 8 Million. And I will come back to the article and this bit of excellent news. But I present it now as an object of magical properties—for conservatives. They see that huge spike in March and they shout, “The administration has been cooking the books!” And indeed: the administration projection was that March would only have modestly increased signups compared to February.

But I think of myself as very normal when it comes to these things. And do you know when I signed up? Not at the last minute! No, I gave myself a whole day for error: I signed up on 30 March. So the March signup surge—and even more, the late March surge—strikes me as entirely believable. The only thing that I’m surprised about is why the administration didn’t predict it.

Dylan Scott wrote a great article at Talking Points Memo about the Republican reaction to the administration’s recent good news, House GOP Leaders Take up The Banner of Obamacare Trutherism. He focused on House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy’s “debunking” of the original 7 million figure. There are a couple of interesting things in it. First, it is not a debunking; it is just a list of questions. Second, the questions are really minor—some of which have already been answered and cut against the Republican case.

The best question is, “How many paid their first month’s premium but not their second or third?” This follows after the talking point we’ve heard the last two months, “Sure, people are signing up; but they aren’t paying!” Now we know that most are paying—Blue Cross Says “80-85” Percent Of Obamacare Enrollees Are Paying. So now the Republicans push it out to the third month. Did they pay for three straight months? After that it will be six month and before you know it, they will want numbers on the 75-year planning period of Social Security. Have the signups paid until they died?

But as Cohn noted, the news is shockingly good. Even if you assume that only 80% of the people who signed up are actually going to pay for their insurance, that’s still 6.4 million people—roughly what the expectations were without the disastrous website rollout. But the good news isn’t just the number of people who have signed up. The demographics indicate that young people are signing up at exactly the rate they signed up the first year for Romneycare in Massachusetts. There was no “death spiral” then and so there will be no “death spiral” now.

All along in the journey of Obamacare, the reality has outpaced the predictions. And on that issue, Jonathan Chait made a great point this afternoon, Obama Declares Obamacare Victory:

I would only counter by noting that just because Republicans claim healthcare is easy, doesn’t mean they believe that. They just don’t want healthcare. That’s why the only plans they ever get behind are comprised of the same conservative wishlist: “health care tax breaks for individuals, letting people buy insurance across state lines, health savings accounts, tort reform, partially privatizing Medicare, and turning Medicaid over to the states.” None of these items would improve access to or cost of healthcare. The last thing they want is for our healthcare system to be fixed.

What we have right now is a transitional period for the conservatives. McCarthy’s “debunking” is just part of the process of saving face. Eventually, the Republicans will get on with redefining the status quo as including Obamacare. There will always been rhetoric about repealing it, just as conservatives today rant about that socialist FDR and how Social Security should be overturned. But apart from some minor scrimmages, the war is over. America won. The Republicans lost.

I’m not so concerned about the generally wacky, anti-fact beliefs of conservatives. The much bigger problems come from the assumptions of the mainstream press when it comes to economic issues. It is there that we get the unquestioned framing of the oligarchs. Take for example, the inflation target of the Federal Reserve. A few decades ago, a four percent inflation target was considered just fine. Now it is two percent. In Europe it is “less than” two percent. And the actual inflation in this country is more like 1%. Moderate inflation is good for employment. But low inflation is good for the owners of capital. So what do we get? The inflation that hurts workers and enriches the already rich.

The Fed is supposed to have a dual mandate: keep inflation low and employment high. But in practice, they keep inflation low and don’t much worry about employment unless things are so terrible that the unemployed are coming at them with pitchforks. I never get tired of Matt Yglesias’ remark about this, “If the unemployment and inflation rates were reversed, would the Fed do something about it?” It’s a rhetorical question, because we all know that it would. We can’t allow the bonds of the rich to decrease in value!

Dean Baker highlighted the way that the media frame this, The IMF’s Data Disagree With the NYT on the State of Russia’s Economy. The New York Times published an article, Russia Economy Worsens Even Before Sanctions Hit. You may well have already heard about the terrible Russian economy. Such stories have become a genre. But there isn’t much too them.

They all depend upon the idea that inflation is the worst thing for an economy. Russia has moderately high inflation—currently 6.2%. But this is not disastrous—even for the rich bond holders. But it is apparently pretty good for workers. The unemployment rate in Russia is currently 5.4%. So things are no so bad for Russian workers, but according to the Times, things are bad in a general way because bond holders aren’t making as much money as they think they should.

What’s more, Baker noted that the inflation rate has actually improved:

So things have improved in Russian since 2008 and unemployment is low. But the media define this as a bad economy because the oligarchs don’t think they are making enough money. There is “objective” American journalism!