Danny Schechter : 'March Madness' in American Politics

Digital photomanipulation from deviantart.
'March Madness' takes on new meaning:
Peddling the irrational in American politics

By Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / March 9, 2011

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold -- William Butler Yeats

The term class war has been extricated from the archives of another era, while divisions over the future of the economy have become a battleground in which the adversaries yell at each other, but rarely engage in any discourse with each other in a shared language.

The worse things get, the harder it is for people to agree on what to do.

This is a month known in the USA for the “March Madness” college basketball finals, but the madness seems now to be oozing from sports arenas into political capitols.

In the Middle East, all the political turmoil will ultimately impact on a regional economy built on the flow and price of oil, contends author/historian Michael Klare:

Whatever the outcome of the protests, uprisings, and rebellions now sweeping the Middle East, one thing is guaranteed: the world of oil will be permanently transformed. Consider everything that’s now happening as just the first tremor of an oilquake that will shake our world to its core.

Back in the once thought of as “stable” United States, the economic crisis has finally spurred a confrontation between right and left with noisy protests following threatened crackdowns on union rights to collective bargaining, and cutbacks on social programs.

Conservatives hype the austerity programs that divided and created chaos in Ireland as the model Americans should be following.

Writes Terrance Heath,

The irony is that the things that the Heritage (Foundation) praises about Ireland's economy are what drove it to the brink of extinction... Ireland followed the same tax-cutting, deregulating conservative economic path to its misfortune that led America to its own. That Ireland stands as an example of austerity's epic failure, makes it even more mystifying that conservatives keep spotlighting the clearest example of the disastrous impact of conservative economic policy.

Activists in the sweltering heat of Egypt hold up signs praising protesters in Wisconsin while the shivering public workers in the snow of Madison talk about struggling "like an Egyptian."

Who would have thunk?

The poet Yeats once wrote that things fall apart when the center doesn’t hold, and his words seem prophetically appropriate to the unraveling now underway in the U.S. with fierce political combat paralyzing the Congress and rhetoric escalating into a realm beyond the rational.

Even as a film won an Academy Award for calling the collapse of the economy an “inside job,” there is no consensus on the causes of the financial crisis.

The debate about what to do, and whether or not to punish wrongdoers, rages on even as the media looks away from the consequences -- the armies of permanently unemployed and growing foreclosures.

Politicians only worry about public budgets, not the private pain of their constituents.

An ideological fight over policy footnotes is considered de rigueur but the suffering of those unable to cope with cutoffs of benefits, rising gas and food prices, and growing despair, is considered a “bummer.”

Many Democrats want so badly to move on that they avoid discussions of Wall Street crime and massive fraud. The President sees all that as unproductive because his new focus is to “win the future.” Believe it or not, that slogan comes from a book by Newt Gingrich.

The White House deliberately stayed away from protests in Wisconsin, later scolding the Democratic Party apparatus after learning that it was urging supporters to back worker protests. For them, such pro-union activism was decidedly off-message, reports The New York Times.

And so much for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report with 633 pages of documented analysis about how the system imploded. That was last week’s non-story.

Republicans want to change the subject and have found new theories to divert attention and/or make the debate so complicated that no one except some Ph.D.'s can follow it.

And even they have problems doing so.

Fed head Ben Bernanke who ignored calls to stop mortgage fraud when it might have made a difference now says that the crisis was caused by China.

It’s all their fault!

The Chinese meanwhile buy up American debt and keep our system going.

The right conspiracy theorists have a new explanation to amuse themselves with as well: the crisis was caused by terrorists.

The Washington Times, a newspaper owned by the Moonies, reports:

Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that financial subversion carried out by unknown parties, such as terrorists or hostile nations, contributed to the 2008 economic crash by covertly using vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system...

Suspects include financial enemies in Middle Eastern states, Islamic terrorists, hostile members of the Chinese military, or government and organized crime groups in Russia, Venezuela or Iran.

That just about throws all the “bad guys” they could come up with into one big barrel of ducks to shoot at. Never mind, that this “revelation” is vague and totally undocumented.

On the left, artists explore apocalyptic themes, not a serious activist response. One new exhibit is called “The Days of this Society Are Numbered."

Inspired by a famous statement by French thinker Guy Debord, proclaiming that THE DAYS OF THIS SOCIETY ARE NUMBERED, this exhibition plays with the notion that at the beginning of the XXI century one is experiencing a period of fin de siècle, in which the state of affairs is questioned and a collective anxiety is emerging, a situation caused by the feeling of political, economic, and cultural crisis that is permeating the Western world and is creating a social entropy.

Perhaps there is something in the water or the political ether that precludes any agreement on facts, much less a consensus on what to do about them.

Resolve on punishing mortgage fraudsters has gotten caught up in arcane debate over obtuse contractual language. Even as “pervasive fraud” was documented by the FBI, no one, least of all the regulators, can agree on who is responsible and what the fines and penalties should be.

It’s clear that denial is not just a river in Egypt. Reports The New York Times, “as the negotiations grind on, there are signs that the banks have still not come to grips with the problems plaguing the foreclosure process.”

The newspaper of record does not look at the record to note that big banks may have no interest in coming “to grips” with charges that they defrauded their customers.

All of this “debate” functions like a fog machine to insure that the public doesn’t know what is happening, and to insure that the class at the top is not treated like the class at the bottom as Naked Capitalism.com’s Yves Smith observes:

It is one thing to point out a sorry reality, that the rich and powerful often get away with abuses while ordinary citizens seldom do. It’s quite another to present it as inevitable.

It would be far more productive to isolate what are the key failings in our legal, prosecutorial, and regulatory regime are and demand changes. The fact that financial fraud cases are often difficult does not mean they are unwinnable.

Winnable or not, there seems to be rational calculation -- even a carefully constructed strategy -- behind the increasingly irrational political debate.

Perhaps it’s a form of a calculated lack of “intelligent design” that belongs right up there with classic political strategies in which invented realities and message points become believable they more they are repeated.

George Bush once contrasted a fact-based political order with his preferred faith-based one. That’s why all the exposes of his WMD claims in Iraq rolled off his back and never stuck.

The madness this month is like a chicken that has come home to roost, reminding us again that the only time we can tell when a politician is lying is when his or her lips start moving.

[News Dissector and blogger Danny Schechter directed Plunder The Crime of Our Time, a film assessing the financial crisis as a crime story. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org.

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Worse or Worser? : Barrier Grief in Louisiana

An oil soaked brown pelican attempts to takes flight on Louisiana coast. Photo by Gerald Herbert / AP.
Worse or worser?
Gulf grief, contractors, and media mania

By Greg Moses / The Rag Blog / May 29, 2010

Shock and awe, misdirection, the whole truth turned upside down? Could it be that the obscenity-driven confrontation between Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was a more exact replica of oil war shock tactics than I thought?

Kirk James Murphy, MD, argues in the firedoglake blog that the sand-barrier plan to block the oil slick on the Louisiana coast is being pushed to completion by interests who would rather be rid of the marshlands than save them.

Is our grief over the deathwatch at the Gulf Coast being crassly manipulated for the purposes of real estate development? Dr. Murphy’s blog-post quotes at length a May 8 report by Josh Wingrove of the News and Mail, pointing out that the barrier-island plan has been three years in the making.

What wrenched our hearts out this week was the CNN presentation of Anderson Cooper’s visit to a dead marshland, recently killed off by a gooey assault of crude oil. Not even the bugs had survived, we were shown. Nungesser pleaded for immediate action. James Carville bore witness to the fact that nothing was being done anywhere in sight.

Jindal and Nungesser have been arguing that barrier berms would stop oil from reaching more marshland. And their arguments make obvious sense under the circumstances.

The danger in the dredging plan, argues Dr. Murphy, is that the dredged material would be drawn from polluted shipping channels and washed ashore during the volatile hurricane season coming soon. The oil will not be stopped, yet the toxic damage will be multiplied.

There is money involved, of course. And already by Thursday evening Nungesser was on CNN demanding more.

The CNN media campaign this week has the shocking effects that we remember from oil wars past. And the effects are especially felt among those of us who like Louisiana Congressman Charlie Melancon find it difficult not to cry at the sight of our dying Gulf. And there is no doubt that our shock is being played like a football on its way to one goal line or the other.

But why does Dr. Murphy opine that the berms probably won’t survive the hurricane season, while he argues that they would dry out the marshes? And what good are wetlands anyway once they have been covered by bubbling crude?

Dr. Murphy’s argument would place our shocked grief in alliance with the Corps of Engineers, who apparently resisted the berm idea until CNN tossed Nungesser a lateral pass this week. Given the velocities of these shock tactics, there is never very much time to decide things. And maybe the velocity alone is enough to raise suspicion. Except.

Except in this case there actually is an enemy attacking the marshlands, and Nungesser appeared to be making his arguments in the company of lots of people. The image of Nungesser in a crowded room makes it more difficult to believe that his plan runs counter to the interests of people who live along the marshlands and who are working up a campaign of self-defense. But this is the way shock psychology would work with the power of images.

It’s also curious that the Corps of Engineers is not more forthcoming for the cameras. Nungesser does make a point when he asks: where’s the plan? And compared with the images of oily death in the marshes, it would seem that the risk of drying wetlands is less inhumane to the doomed creatures of the Gulf. Once upon a time I walked to work through those coastal marshlands on my way to an offshore drilling job. On the Gulf Coast, from Corpus Christi to New Orleans, there is no such thing as a non-toxic option.

Marshland protection is one of at least three scientific issues that are being fought on the fly during this oil spill. Thursday evening brings news of an “oil plume” that is about 1,000 yards deep and six miles wide drifting in the direction of Mobile Bay, Alabama. Reports say the plume is a toxic cocktail of dispersants and oil. Is it better or worse than an oil slick? Oil slicks either repel life or kill it. Plumes, apparently, allow life but at the cost of a living toxicity that will work its way up the food chain. Cancer clinics for everyone.

When CNN flashes pictures of the oil operation, there is a ship spraying cascades of fluids onto the water. Is this the dispersant? Here and there we see comments from scientists saying that nobody knows if the dispersant is such a good idea. Is it better or worse than a slick of thick crude? LIke Nungesser’s berms, dispersants also raise questions of money trails.

The third scientific issue of course is how to plug the hole. Speaking on Larry King Live, the legendary oilman T. Boone Pickens says either you get lucky or you drill a relief well. August is the frequently cited expectation for when the relief well will be completed.

“We’ve been here 38 days,” said Pickens, “and we’ll probably be here 38 days more.” If Pickens is right, will it be possible to stop the oil from washing ashore?

They say the first stage of grief is denial, and I don’t want to believe that any of this is happening. What Congressman Melancon did in public yesterday, we have been doing in our homes this week all along the Gulf Coast. You cannot love the Gulf Coast, witness this shocking trauma, and control your tears at the same time.

But now on top of it all we have to watch out for the ways that our tears are being maneuvered into contracting strategies that may have no other uses beyond profiteering. I’m not convinced that there are worse things than a raw oil slick, not even if they are barrier berms or 6-mile plumes of noxious crap. But if it is the best thing for all God’s creatures on the Gulf Coast to just stand aside and accept the sacrifice that oil slicks bring once they are imminent, then it’s time we started moving from Denial to Acceptance at some improbable speed.

[Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence. He can be reached at gmosesx@gmail.com]

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Racial Profiling : What's Up With the Mormons?

Image from Early Onset of Night.
Mormons for racial profiling?
Unsustainable contradictions in immigration law

By Greg Moses / The Rag Blog / April 27, 2010

What’s up with the Mormons? Orem, Utah legislator Stephen Eric Sandstrom last week pledged to follow the lead of “my friend” Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce and expand the number of states with show-me-your-papers bills aiming to criminalize, jail, and deport irregular migrants.

Rep. Sandstrom, who is a graduate of Brigham Young University and a former Mormon missionary to Venezuela, takes credit for co-founding a state’s rights organization called the Patrick Henry Caucus.

Sandstrom’s “friend” Sen. Pearce of Arizona, sponsor of the recently signed SB-1070, hails from the Mormon stronghold of Mesa and claims to be the mastermind behind Maricopa County’s infamous Tent City Jail.

For Pearce and Sandstrom, the crucial issue of liberty in the 21st Century would appear to involve the rights of states in relation to the federal government of the USA -- never mind the rights of individual people who reside in those states.

What’s curious about this particular Pearce-Sandstrom movement for state’s rights over individual rights is how it seems to contradict the interests of the Mormon family itself, which has been witnessing an increase in Spanish-speaking congregations.

Last summer, Salt Lake Tribune writer Peggy Fletcher Stack reported increasing fears among Spanish-speaking members of the Mormon Church of Latter- day Saints (LDS) who were concerned about travel restrictions they were facing for missionary work and then-impending implementation of Utah’s anti-migrant law, SB-81. “People are very scared,” said one woman via translator.

“Other than for its missionaries, the LDS Church takes a ‘don't ask, don't tell’ approach toward the immigration status of its members,” reported Fletcher Stack. “But some estimate between 50 percent and 75 percent of members in Utah's 104 Spanish-speaking congregations are undocumented. That includes many bishops, branch presidents, even stake presidents.”

Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank declared that Utah’s SB-81 would require illegal racial profiling, so he openly refused to enforce the self-contradictory statute. Last week Chief Burbank “blasted” Arizona’s SB-1070, telling KSL NewsRadio talk-show host Doug Wright: “This sets law enforcement back 30 to 40 years.”


Mormon Times columnist Jerry Earl Johnston shook his head last year in dismay over the unwisdom of the Utah anti-migrant legislation:

“I can only speak from my own LDS experience here, but I hold Utah lawmakers responsible for breaking up good LDS families and forcing young American citizens out of their native land,” wrote Johnston, predicting that victory would not reward the shortsighted anti-migrant forces.

“I could see these Hispanic brethren were going to win,” wrote Johnston. “I could see their faith, resilience and strength. They wanted to be in Utah more than Utah lawmakers wanted them out. They had weathered tribulations with good humor and without malice toward those who persecuted them.”

Meanwhile, in the Mormon stronghold of Mesa, Arizona, represented by SB-1070 sponsor Sen. Pearce, the number of Spanish-speaking LDS congregations had grown from five to 13 between 2002 and 2007 according to East Valley Tribune reporter Sarah N. Lynch.

Last fall, official LDS printing presses in Salt Lake City ran off an approved Spanish-language edition of the Mormon Bible -- The Santa Biblia: Reina-Valera 2009 (Publicada por La Iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Últimos Días, Salt Lake City, Utah, E.U.A.) -- with an initial press run of 800,000 copies.

“It is one of the most significant scripture projects ever undertaken by the Church,” proclaimed a notice of Sept. 14, 2009, posted at lds.org. “The volume contains new chapter headings, footnotes and cross-references to all scriptures used by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Announcement of the volume was reportedly shared among “thousands of Spanish-speaking Latter-day Saints congregations.”

Mormon political leaders, like everyone else in today’s global economy, are confronting a real crisis in human welfare. Maricopa County in particular is a frontline disaster zone for the crisis in real estate values, mortgage defaults, unemployment, and revenue shortfalls.

“In Maricopa,” according to an April report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Q3 2009 unemployment, “every private industry group except education and health services experienced an employment decline, with construction experiencing the largest decline (-32.2 percent).”

Crisis reveals character. So when Mormon political leaders campaign for agendas of states’ rights according to Patrick Henry rhetorics of “liberty or death,” perhaps their Spanish-speaking LDS brethren can remind them that there are millions of people of goodwill in need of actual freedom-loving legislators in whatever state they have freely chosen to congregate and build up.

[Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence. He can be reached at gmosesx@gmail.com.]

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Rage Against the Machine : Diebold and the Massachusetts Election

Illustration by Doug Potter / The Austin Chronicle.
Hacking the vote:
Will Diebold steal the Senate?

As Bay Staters vote to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, most will be marking scantron ballots to be run through easily hackable electronic counters made by Diebold/Premier.

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / January 18, 2010

The same types of machines that helped put George W. Bush in the White House in 2000, and “reelect” him in 2004, may now decide who wins the all-important “60th Senate seat” in Massachusetts. The fate of health care and much much more hang in the balance.

As Bay Staters vote to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, most will be marking scantron ballots to be run through easily hackable electronic counters made by Diebold/Premier.

A paper ballot of sorts does come through these machines. But the count they generated was seriously compromised in the Florida 2000 election that put George W. Bush in the White House. Similar machines played a critical role skewing the Ohio 2004 vote count to fraudulently reelect him.

In 2004 in Lucas County (Toledo) Ohio, incorrectly calibrated Diebold scantron machines left piles of uncounted ballots in heavily black districts in the inner city.

The Free Press also found that on optiscan machines in Miami County, Ohio the reported totals were significantly higher than the actual number of people who signed in to vote.

Ironically, the cheated candidate in that election was Massachusetts’ now-senior Senator John Kerry. Kerry is circulating email appeals warning that this election is a "jump ball" in which "shady right-wing organizations and out of state conservatives have descended upon the state in droves."

But Kerry himself has infamously said nothing about the theft of the 2004 election. Neither he, the Democratic Party, nor the Obama Administration have done anything to change a system in which elections can be stolen by the very well-funded Republican-owned companies that make and administer the vote-counting machines. A dozen election protection groups from around the country have now issued an "orange alert" warning that the Massachusetts vote count could be "ripe for manipulation."

Thus Kerry’s new colleague could be “selected” by the same means that deprived him of the White House.

According to Selectman Dan Keller of the western town of Wendell, some Massachusetts communities -- including his -- do have hand-counted paper ballots.

But most of the state relies on Diebold scantron counters which can be manipulated in numerous ways, including by switching calibrations and moving ballots from precinct-to-precinct or county-to-county, thus reversing intended votes from one candidate to another.

According to Brad Friedman at BradBlog LHS Associates sells and services many of the machines being used in this special election. Though the vast majority of elected officials in Massachusetts are Democrats, control of the vote count can be a grey area where voting machines are involved, especially given Sen. Kerry’s six-year stupor over the stolen 2004 election, a record of inaction amply matched by the Democratic Party and Obama Administration.

According to Friedman, LHS “has admitted to illegally tampering with memory cards during elections,” and has a Director of Sales and Marketing who has been “barred from Connecticut by their Secretary of State.”

The stakes in this election cannot be overstated. The deceased Senator Kennedy’s seat holds the key to a filibuster-breaking 60-seat Democratic majority in the Senate. State Attorney-General Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate, is a supporter of the Obama health care plan, and an opponent of atomic power.

Coakley’s opponent, conservative Republican State Senator Scott Brown, has been running a Tea Bagger-style “populist” campaign.

Poll results differ substantially as the campaign winds down, but all show a close race. Thus Diebold, a thoroughly tainted player with deep Republican roots, could hold the key to the election by shifting the outcome in just a few key precincts.

After internet-based reporting broke the story of the stolen 2004 election, thousands of election-protection activists turned out to monitor the 2008 vote count. Among other things, careful exit polling was done to provide a close reality check on official vote counts. Poll monitors interviewed voters and carefully scrutinized voting procedures and how ballots were handled and counted.

Often overlooked are voter registration manipulations, which were used in Ohio and elsewhere to strip hundreds of thousands of voters of their right to cast a ballot. In Ohio alone, more than 300,000 legally registered voters were electronically removed from the voter rolls between the 2000 and 2004 elections. Most were in heavily Democratic urban areas.

In 2008, the Free Press found that the number of purged Ohio voters jumped to more than a million.

Thus the fact that the electoral apparatus in Massachusetts is apparently in the hands of Democrats may not matter. Private vendors like LHS and Diebold have the actual control over the final numbers.

In Massachusetts, a recount only occurs if the final results are less than half of one percent, and as election reform activist John Bonifaz points out, Massachusetts does not require random audits of the computerized vote counting machines to compare the computer results to the optical scan ballots marked by the voters. Bonifaz notes that in the Al Franken-Norm Coleman Minnesota Senate race in 2008, “everything was ultimately hand-counted.” The problem in Massachusetts hinges on whether the race is close enough to trigger a recount, which candidates can petition for within 30 days.

Exit polls remain the gold standard for election integrity throughout the democratic world. But in Ohio in 2004, the exit polls indicated that the election results were reversed and that Kerry actually won. Jonathan Simon, election integrity expert, points out that the exit polls in 2008 in Minnesota “had Franken winning by 10%! This is a huge disparity, not remotely reflected by the recount.”

“Could the exit poll have been that badly off? Or could a large number of ballots, 200,000 or so, have been swapped out before the recount? Here is where the chain of custody, or lack thereof, comes in. These ballots were not exactly under heavy surveillance during the month-long period between election day and recount completion,” Simon said.

What will matter in Massachusetts is how thoroughly election-protection advocates are able to scrutinize voter certification, access, and ballot security. Billions of dollars -- and much more -- are riding on the outcome of this election. Those who believe it cannot or would not be stolen are simply in denial.

Given the Democratic party’s astonishing lack of leadership on so many issues, it is entirely possible that Scott Brown could legitimately beat Martha Coakley in this election.

But it is also possible that the outcome could be manipulated by the companies in control of the registration rolls and vote counts. It will be up to citizen election protection activists to make sure that doesn’t happen yet again.

[Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman broke many of the major stories surrounding the theft of the 2004 election, and have co-authored four books on election protection, which appear at www.freepress.org, where they are publisher and senior editor, and where this story also appears.]

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Got Fascism? : Obama Advisor Promotes 'Cognitive Infiltration'

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Presidential advisor and long-time Obama buddy Cass Sunstein.
Your government appointees at work:
Cass Sunstein seeks 'cognitive' provocateurs

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / January 11, 2010

Cass Sunstein is President Obama's Harvard Law School friend, and recently appointed Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

In a recent scholarly article, he and coauthor Adrian Vermeule take up the question of "Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures." (J. Political Philosophy, 7 [2009], pp. 202-227). This is a man with the president's ear. This is a man who would process information and regulate things. What does he here propose?

[W]e suggest a distinctive tactic for breaking up the hard core of extremists who supply conspiracy theories: cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, whereby government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups, thereby introducing beneficial cognitive diversity. (Page 219.)

Read this paragraph again. Unpack it. Work your way through the language and the intent. Imagine the application. What do we learn?

• It is "extremists" who "supply" "conspiracy theories."
• Their "hard core" must be "broken up" with distinctive tactics. What tactics?
• "Infiltration" ("cognitive") of groups with questions about official explanations or obfuscations or lies. Who is to infiltrate?
• "Government agents or their allies," virtually (i.e. on-line) or in "real-space" (as at meetings), and "either openly or anonymously," though "infiltration" would imply the latter. What will these agents do?
• Undermine "crippled epistemology" -- one's theory and technique of knowledge. How will they do this?
• By "planting doubts" which will "circulate." Will these doubts be beneficial?
• Certainly. Because they will introduce "cognitive diversity."

Put into English, what Sunstein is proposing is government infiltration of groups opposing prevailing policy. Palestinian Liberation? 9/11 Truth? Anti-nuclear power? Stop the wars? End the Fed? Support Nader? Eat the Rich?

It's easy to destroy groups with "cognitive diversity." You just take up meeting time with arguments to the point where people don't come back. You make protest signs which alienate 90% of colleagues. You demand revolutionary violence from pacifist groups.

We expect such tactics from undercover cops, or FBI. There the agents are called "provocateurs" -- even if only "cognitive." One learns to smell or deal with them in a group, or recognize trolling online. But even suspicion or partial exposure can “sow uncertainty and distrust within conspiratorial groups [now conflated with conspiracy theory discussion groups] and among their members,” and “raise the costs of organization and communication” -- which Sunstein applauds as "desirable." "[N]ew recruits will be suspect and participants in the group’s virtual networks will doubt each other’s bona fides." (p.225).

And are we now expected to applaud such tactics frankly proposed in a scholarly journal by a high-level presidential advisor?

The full text of a slightly earlier version of Sunstein's article is available for download here.

Marc Estrin. The author gets in the last word.
[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

UPDATE: See Rag Blog Scoop about 'Cognitive Infiltration' Stirs up Internet Storm by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / January 16, 2009

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Apocalypse 2010 : Meltdown Under the American Bubble

Planet Earth was coming apart at the seams.
Remembering 2010 (if we must):
Mass amnesia, the Rapture,
and the Palin-Bachmann nuptials

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / January 4, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- Book-ended by mass amnesia under the American bubble, 2010 was yet another year to erase from living memory. Although Planet Earth was coming apart at the seams with the usual volcanoes blowing their stacks, earthquakes rearranging the landscape, flood and drought rampaging from one continent to the next, nuclear war raging in the Middle East, and serial economic calamities inducting a billion more sentient human beings into the starvation army, First World elites navigated through daily disaster delusionally convinced that everything was honky dory.

Children played happily with their Chinese mechanical hamsters until the batteries went dead and families gathered around home entertainment centers, even the millions of families who had been evicted from their homes. Neighbors exchanged pleasantries as they cruised empty super market aisles (most brand-name products were recalled because of suspect Chinese-induced E Coli contamination), oblivious of the unseen poor parboiled in their own sweat and tears far beyond American shores. Scientists attributed this massive indifference to the plight of the planet to the presence of toxic amounts of Ambien in the water systems of major U.S. cities.

The majority of U.S. citizens were not even aware of their failing memories and did not know what was missing. Still mass forgetfulness had grave political downsides. One example: no one could remember the name of the U.S. president when just a year ago, it was on the tips of everyone's tongue. Indeed, no one could recall much of anything anymore. Even after the physical environment collapsed and the faithful were taken up in the Rapture, no one seemed to miss them.

The faithful were taken up in the rapture, but weren't missed. Artist reconstruction.
The following month-by-month capsule of how the Apocalypse impaled Planet Earth on the Cross of Catastrophe was scraped together from the author's pitiful scraps of memory before he slipped into total dementia.

JANUARY - The failure of climate change negotiations in Copenhagen (they will reconvene in December 2010 in Mexico City, the most monstrous megalopolis in the Americas) and the formation of a cartel of the world's pollution leaders had immediate repercussions when Somali pirates captured an iceberg floating in the Red Sea.

In accordance with the U.S. Zero Tolerance For Pirates protocol, President What's His Name stealth-bombed the dusky buccaneers who were towing the huge block of ice into port and so-called depleted uranium radiation liquefied it, triggering monumental flooding -- all of Yemen and parts of east Africa remain underwater and the quat crop has been decimated for years to come, causing wide-spread depression on the Dark Continent.

Further north, global warming had a more fortuitous fallout when the melt-down of a thermo-nuclear power plant in the capital city of Nuuk converted the Greenland Ice Cap to boiling water and the Inuit Riviera caught fire as a hot tourist attraction

Back under the American Bubble, on the first year anniversary of his hope-saturated inauguration on the Capital Mall, 78% of those polled by the Pew Institute On Domestic Dementia could no longer remember the President's name -- 72% referred to him simply as "you know, that black guy." Another 16% still had the President confused with Osama Bin Laden but 9% could correctly remember his first and last name although not at the same time.

On the other side of the political ledger, the words "Republican Party" had no name recognition for 81% of those who responded to the Pew poll. Alarmed pollsters hypothesized that the results were symptomatic of mass brainwashing, probably due to "something in the water."

FEBRUARY - Whatever his name was, The President of the United States was confronted with his umpteenth international terrorist crisis when Taliban technicians, employing Sky Grabber technology on sale at Radio Shack for $26 Americano, seized control of an unmanned and unwomanned drone over North Waziristan and redirected it to Kabul where the rebels launched missile attacks against the seat of the puppet government, flattening President Karsai and his entire cabinet, which included three of the world's most influential heroin dealers.

The obliteration of central authority quickly splintered the Afghan Crusade into a series of local mini-wars. Caught in the crossfire between feuding warlords, the U.S. death toll climbed to 502 for the month, topping even Iraq at the nadir of the illegal American invasion and occupation. Both the Nobel Peace Prize winning president and his Commander-in-Chief Stanley McChrystal extolled the high death toll as proof that the U.S. was winning the war and vowed to dispatch 60,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

When Taliban Sky Grabber gear hijacked two more drones and targeted Blackwater/Xe training facilities in the Great North Carolina swamp, Obama or Osama or whatever his name was closed down all Radio Shacks in the continental U.S.

Also under the bubble, cheap Chinese pork chops were deemed responsible for an outbreak of an inscrutable strain of Swine flu ("Swinear flu") that convulsed the breadbasket of the country.

The majority of citizens weren't aware of their failing memories. Image from TheTugboatComplex.
MARCH - A post-midnight coup March 11 in Quito, Ecuador, in which a junta of generals and admirals trained at the former School of the Americas overthrew and subsequently dismembered that tiny Andean country's elected president, the economist Rafael Correa, was the latest violent "regime change" in Latin America.

Since the White House greenlighted the overthrow of right-wing leftist Mel Zelaya in Honduras in June 2009, 11 Latin countries have suffered "golpes de estado," 10 of them this year (Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Bolivia, Suriname, Trinidad & Tobago, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay). The wave of coup d'etats is almost certainly being orchestrated by the U.S. South Command operating out of seven state-of-the art bases recently installed in Colombia.

In Paraguay, the U.S. 4th Fleet parked itself off the coast while military gorillas dethroned former liberationist bishop and father of 14, Fernando Lugo. Up until January 2010 Paraguay had no coastline but global warming has brought the Atlantic Ocean to that impoverished majority Indian nation's doorstep.

Meanwhile in Mexico, scattered rebellion has broken out to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. In early January, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation occupied sacred sites throughout the country including Chichen Itza in the Yucatan, Palenque in Chiapas, and Teotihuacan near Mexico City, calling upon ancient Mayan and Mexica deities to join their uprising.

Panicked by the prospect of declining tourist dollars, fraudulently elected president Felipe Calderon pulled 50,000 troops out of his failed war with the drug cartels that has now taken 25,000 Mexican lives, to dislodge the Zapatistas. The strategy backfired when the cartels seized statehouses in Sinaloa, Sonora, and Chihuahua.

On March 18th, the 72nd anniversary of the nationalization of Mexico's petroleum from the transnational Seven Sisters, President Calderon was found dangling from the rafters at Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, an apparent suicide -- however, an autopsy turned up a note apparently pinned to the inside of his tie with a single Mexican expletive inscribed: "RATERO!"

Further scandal erupted when photographs emerged of Calderon's corpse, clad only in jockey shorts and plastered with bloody Mexican and U.S. bills, amulets, crucifixes, and rosaries in classic narco fashion, raising questions about the dead president's cartel affiliations.

APRIL - Global warming was deemed responsible for the near-biblical migration of small, undocumented mammals abandoning a disintegrating Mexico for El Norte -- badgers, gophers, skunks, coyotes, foxes, and bats had little trouble burrowing under the 1,000 kilometer-long Separation Wall between the two distant neighbor countries or flying over it. Hundreds of thousands of acres in the southwest were destroyed by the marauding illegals.

Rabid bat of the type that devoured a Minuteman in Lubbock.
When an anti-immigration Minuteman was devoured by rabid bats in Lubbock, Texas, crusading Mexican killer Lou Dobbs flew to the scene of the crime where he was confronted by several hundred indignant skunks that rendered his campaign for the White House permanently unviable. The stench caused frontrunner Sarah Palin to replace Dobbs on the ticket with hysterical TV paranoid Alex Jones of Austin, Texas.

Passions in the Middle East boiled over in April when Iranian patrol boats sunk a Liberian-flagged tanker carrying 176,000 gallons of Chinese-made flan to Spain. The sinking cargo soon gummed up the Straits of Hormuz through which the bulk of oil destined for Europe, the Americas, and China passes each day. Oil prices immediately shot up from a seasonal low of $50 USD to $250, deflating the dementia-driven euphoria on Wall Street. Acting on the self-interest of his Goldman Sachs advisors, the President floated multi-billion dollar bailouts.

MAY - After five months of testy reconciliation conferences between the House and the Senate during which Dennis Kucinich challenged Michelle Bachman to a duel and was shot dead on the House floor, the U.S. Congress announced that it had reached agreement on a compromise version of all but forgotten health care reform. Indeed all the health care reform provisions in the John Doe Omnibus Health Care Reform bill (named for a bus driver who had to sell both his kidneys in order to feed a starving puppy) had been stripped from the measure before it arrived at the White House for the first Afro-American president's John Hancock.

Among the provisions of "John Doe": renewed funding for the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kerghizstan, and Uzbekistan (two Stans will be added every year though 2018); the criminalization of abortion; and the restitution of the universal mandatory death penalty.

A new Pew poll prepared by the Institute for Domestic Dementia indicated that many Americans (a whopping 77%) had forgotten all about health care reform by May.

Sabotaged by the flan crisis, the economy was again in freefall despite White House lies that the 2009 depression was officially over and the country was growing again. As jobless benefits dried up, many families in the lower socio-economic brackets were forced to reduce their daily caloric intake and unemployed carnivores threatened to eat the rich.

Fortunately, rolling black- and brown-outs as river flows slowed to a trickle due to global warming and shut down hydro-electric power plants, caused widespread refrigeration meltdowns and millions of tons of spoiled meat, fruit, and dairy products poured into dumps and landfills where hungry garbage pickers were eager to harvest the putrefying bonanza.

Also in May, the last U.S. daily print newspaper, Rudolf Murdoch's New York Wall Street Times Journal Sporting News, closed up shop.

JUNE - Food riots became generalized in such depression-wracked formerly industrial cities as Detroit and Houston and Fox News Chief Albino Glenn Beck encouraged Tea Party Patriots to arm themselves for self-defense -- the average white North American family now owns 12 to 15 automatic weapons to hold off their equally heavily armed neighbors, according to the Pew Institute On Domestic Violence.

Beck encouraged Tea Party Patriots coagulated around a doddering George H.W. Bush in Texas and Dick Cheney in the Wyoming-Colorado Theater to seize state armories and hold nominating conventions. With armed insurrection being urged on cable news channels, the first Afro-American President of the United States retreated to a hollowed-out mountain in Virginia to watch the NBA Finals.

The Finals themselves generated alarming news when it was reported that Kobe Bryant had been genetically engineered on a farm in Kansas once owned by assassinated late term abortionist George Tiller -- it was not known if embryonic cells were employed in Kobe's modifications. A federal raid on the "farm" led by General Jeff Novitsky (he won his stripes in the Barry Bonds genocide campaign) uncovered thousands of Kobe clones in various stages of assemblage.

In other sporting news, the World Cup Matches in South Africa had to be called off when starving rioters set stadiums aflame, roasting tens of thousands of first world hooligans.

Flood and drought raged from one continent to the next. Image from Worth1000.com.
JULY - Prodded by global broiling, temperatures all across the northern regions of the planet jumped three degrees Celsius in July, one degree higher than the acceptable limits imposed by the polluting nations at the Copenhagen conference. The summer heat was so intense that roadways buckled and bridge struts melted and infrastructure in the U.S. midwest collapsed. The overload on the electricity grid shut down air conditioning units in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia and sweltering senior citizens dropped like flies. So many old people expired during the month (123,000 according to the Pew Institute On One-Time Senior Citizens) that morgues overflowed and bodies were put out on the street each morning for the dead wagons to collect and carry off to common graves.

By mid-summer with the doomed president's jobless recovery in full flower, 36% of all American families were living in their cars, according to the Pew Institute On Vehicular Gridlock, transforming the nation's highway system into a coast-to-coast parking lot. Then cars began to commit suicide, blowing sky-high with no warning. Homeland Security blamed explosives sewn into drivers' underwear for the plague of car bombings although some experts speculated that the automobile industry was just depressed.

AUGUST - The dog days extended into August with no relief in sight. Despite the intense heat, the Tea Bag Patriots were on the move, traveling mostly at night towards Washington D.C. for the much ballyhooed Palin-Bachman same sex nuptials set for later in the month despite Michelle's pending indictment for gunning down a liberal congressperson on the House floor.

Sarah Palin announced her engagement to Michelle Bachman who had killed Dennis Kucinich in a duel on the floor of the House. Photo from jezebel.
As U.S. troops abandoned Iraq to its own explosive devices, the summer doldrums were punctured when a terrorist commando, the Universal Unitarian Salvation Squadron (UU'SS) thought to be affiliated with the Al Qaeda-Taliban Axis of Evil overran Pakistan's nuclear arsenal near Islamabad demanding, among other items, that the United States get out of the Islamic world, Africa, and South and North America. Holed up in his Virginia mountain bunker, President Osama/Obama called for a diplomatic solution. The Palin-Bachman nuptials were called off, reportedly due to domestic dispute.

Diplomats shuttled in and out of Islamabad seeking solutions to this latest geo-political crisis. One no-show: Osama Bin Laden who had passed away many years before trundling his dialysis machine over the Khyber Pass. A proposal offered by Tuvalo's ambassador that Washington change places with his low-laying Pacific island nation was rejected by the United Nations Security Council on the grounds that moving the U.S. Capital would be an extravagance a bankrupt world could ill afford.

Feeling excluded from the international spotlight, Israel, with a go-ahead from the White House-in-exile, launched a nuclear attack on the Iranian holy city of Qum where the Ayatollahs were putting the finishing touches on their own minaret-tipped nuclear missiles. Mamoud Ahmadinejad, hanging on to power by the skin of his wolf-like teeth, ordered retaliation against the Zionists but his delivery system fell short of Tel Aviv and obliterated Syria and Jordan instead.

SEPTEMBER - By Labor Day weekend, the Tea Party Patriots were encamped on the White House lawn and demanding that the first Afro American President turn over the keys to the executive mansion for the on-again off-again Palin-Bachman nuptials.

The serial catastrophes that now included the incineration of vast swaths of the Middle East had an upside -- Americans no longer worried much about global warming. Although world temperature readings had jumped another point, the calamity was no longer an issue on the 24-Hour news cycle or the Sunday morning talk shows. Despite the fact that humpback whales were beaching themselves in record numbers on whatever dry land they could find and birds had begun to fly backwards, a sign that the Apocalypse was in the pipeline, the general public seemed more preoccupied by Palin's and Bachman's never-ending domestic disputes.

Finally, fed up with the first Afro-American President's stonewalling, the Tea Party Patriots broke into the White House and a troika -- Sarah Palin, her sometimes lover Michelle Bachman, Dennis Kucinich's assassin, and George H.W. Bush, now suffering terminal Alzheimer's Disease -- was sworn in. Glenn Beck was appointed Secretary of Defense and Alex Jones got State. Mel Gibson bought the movie rights.

OCTOBER - While the right-wing fanatics squabbled over power in Washington, most of the planet was either underwater or so radioactive that the land could no longer sustain life. Slowly falling ash blotted out the sun and in the feeble light no one could tell if it was dawn or dusk anymore. Water, although there was plenty of it, was undrinkable and the food chain tainted. Cannibals roamed the roads in packs. Indeed, outside of the Washington bubble, the earth had become a road show of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." Inside his Virginia mountain, the former president tried to watch the World Series but he was too depressed.

NOVEMBER - All was not lost yet. Vulture Capitalists saw profit in the new holocaust and took steps to bolster their failing fortunes. Murdoch bought up what news was left and changed the channel. A new television season kicked in and sponsors returned. The slate was wiped clean: no more nuclear war, world hunger, mindless terrorism, and global warming. Ambian dosage was increased for all citizens.

The new shows looked a lot like the old shows but since no one could remember the old shows, reruns became the real thing. New generations were enchanted by Lucy and Desi and Ed Sullivan's "Toast Of The Town" ("Gilligan's Island" was submerged deep beneath the graying sea.)

Outside of the bubble, of course, the rainforest was on fire and 39% of all children were born with multiple deformities (the Pew Institute On Monstrous Deformations.) The cities of the world had been abandoned.

Here in Mexico City where 23 million people had once lived cheek by jowl you could spend a whole day without speaking to anyone. On the Day of the Dead, I walked out to where Chapultepec Park lay in ruins behind a curtain of toxic smoke. It was then that I saw my neighbors tramping north towards Mictlan, the direction of the dead, and I tried to stop them. "Wait!" I urged, "Stay! The U.N. Climate Conference will convene here in December and surely, the leaders will fix things up..." But my neighbors just kept marching towards Mictlan.

DECEMBER - Inside the bubble, the Holiday Season was in full swing. Americans went shopping for mechanical hamsters again, not remembering that it was last year's toy to die for. They went to Church forgetting that God was dead and wagered on the Stock Market as if the bottom had not fallen out of the Big Board long ago. Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny led parades and made patriotic, optimistic speeches and Santa promised to visit every home.

So the families went home, those who still had one, and set fire to their furniture and hung their stockings by a roaring hearth. They wrote letters to Santa and left out cookies and cocoa for the jolly old fruitcake but although he had promised, Santa Claus never showed up.

Indeed, he would never show up again. Late-breaking film from the Arctic Circle showed the old gentleman and his eight reindeer keeled over in their North Pole sweat lodge.

[John Ross will launch a three-month, coast-to-coast book tour with his latest and much-buzzed cult classic El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City in Fresno, California, this February 4. For further info and suggested venues (Chicago area and east coast dates are solicited) consult johnross@igc.org.]

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Health Care Reform : Our Christmas Eve Present

Congress' health care reform
Promises huge returns for all

'Their principal job is to reinforce the great ideas of yesterday while suppressing the great ideas of tomorrow.' -- Deepak Chopra on skeptics.

By Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog / December 29, 2009

[The Rag Blog has run numerous articles critical of Congress' attempt at health care reform. Contributor Janet Gilles has a very different perspective.]

Few politicians have dared to question the health care system itself in this country. Yet, there are 99,000 easily preventable deaths a year from infections acquired in the hospital, according to the Center for Disease Control. The passage of health reform, the Christmas Eve gift to the American public, promises huge returns for everyone, even those with excellent health insurance. Because what good is good insurance when more people die from infections acquired in the hospital than from breast cancer and AIDS combined??

In most states, hospitals are not required to report these rates of infections, which is how they get away with it. New regulations in the health bill which require reporting of hospital acquired infections, will almost entirely eliminate this deadly threat.Other examples of how cost controls are going to result in a betterSystem of health care abound.

For the last decade or two, the costs of health care have skyrocketed. The Mayo Clinic has led the way, and numerous commissions have made simple recommendations to change the rules of the game, by comparing treatments to determine which are most effective. Due to their great promise of cutting costs, most of these measures have made it into the current law now so close to our grasp.

What has been needed has been a restructuring of incentives, a consistent theme in Obama’s health care reform agenda, and we are that close. Because of the power of the right, the new bill does not cover everyone, but Paul Krugman says it best. “Guys, this is a major program to aid lower and lower-middle-income families. How is that not a big progressive victory?”

Jonathan Chait explains why this legislation is the greatest social achievement of our time. Our health care system has been focused on finding the most expensive remedies; this new legislation will require an apples to apples comparison of treatments and end up changing the nature of health care. Change we can depend on.

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Glenn W. Smith : Coyote Nation

Our wily neighbor. Photo by Scott Stewart / AP.

You know why coyotes do so well? Because they are not ideologues.

By Glenn W. Smith / The Rag Blog / September 21, 2009

Coyotes have come to the city. I sit here writing in the foreshortened suburban night and listen to them howling and singing out back, hidden in what we used to call a gulch but is now called a green belt. A coyote can hold a note a lot longer than you think.

To many, they are a dangerous nuisance. Pet cats and puppies disappear. Coyotes, or “ghosts of the city” as a recent study calls them, get the blame. That study (pdf), by Ohio State’s Stanley Gehrt, says coyotes “have become the top carnivores in an increasing number of urban areas across North America…”

If pets disappear, though, so do skunks and rats. I think it’s a fair trade.

Years ago I sat on a little rise near the Rio Grande with my father and watched a pair of coyotes tag-team a deer, one resting while the other ran the deer in circles. The next, fully rested, took up the game so the partner could rest. It took four cycles. I’ll spare you the end of the story, except to say the coyotes seemed skilled and well-fed.

It’s almost too easy to paint a romantic metaphor here: wild things persist and thrive, despite human gated communities, speed bumps, stop-lights, WalMarts, chin-pulling urban planners and beleaguered city councilmen who themselves get tag-teamed at churches and Christmas parties by suburban couples who’ve lost cocker spaniels and tabbies.

You know why coyotes do so well? Because they are not ideologues.

They take great advantage of an evolved mammalian trait too often derided by humans as lack of conviction or commitment: mental flexibility, a willingness to live with uncertainty and unpredictability so that more alternative courses of action are opened.

Coyotes, we say, are wily. As regards humans, the English poet John Keats called it “negative capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

Every ideologue in human history has failed. That’s because most ideas are contingent and bound up with current or past circumstances and often unsuited to tomorrow’s risks and opportunities. The Framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized this. It’s why Jefferson said we need a revolution every generation. The U.S. Constitution is not an idea, and it’s a terrible mistake to read it like a list of commandments. The Constitution’s greatest feature is the inbuilt recognition of the need for its own mutability.

Jefferson, however, did hold one truth as immutable or “self-evident”: human equality. Does this contradict the fundamental insight of the Enlightenment, the insight that truth is man-made and fallible?

Maybe, but the recognition of human equality was a truth made necessary by the fact that every other idea for ordering or enforcing human inequality by economic prowess, religion, skin color, geographic origin, I.Q., or arm strength was doomed from the start.

The trouble is, of course, that technology has now empowered ideas with the ability to take us all down with them when they go.

A further trouble is, in politics those of “negative capability” often seem to be at a disadvantage in debate with stubborn ideologues. The former are made to seem weak and uncertain, the latter strong and certain, no matter how demonstrably false the ideas they cling to (the free, unregulated market comes with an invisible hand that blesses all; fossil fuels are infinite in supply and safe for the environment; war is peace, et cetera).

But who is really stronger, the coyote or the domesticated dog?

I think Barack Obama is the first president in my lifetime to possess Keat’s negative capability. The trait was made more politically attractive by its juxtaposition with the many failures of George W. Bush’s stubborn clinging to ideas already bled to death during the world’s most violent century.

I fear Obama’s attraction to Abraham Lincoln is already being trivialized by the press, but it’s a fact that Lincoln might have been the last president to possess this quality.

We should be cautious about judging Obama in the light of our own sticky ideas. It’s not that anyone should quit advocating for what they believe. Democracy depends upon it. It’s simply to put into action the recognition that in America’s gulch or green belt, if we want to survive, we’re going to have to eat a skunk or two.

[Glenn W. Smith, according to Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, is a “legendary political consultant and all-around good guy.” This article has also been published at FireDogLake and at Glenn's excellent new blog, DogCanyon.]

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The Tea Party Parade: Shouting at Phantoms

Mark Williams speaking during a Tea Party Express rally at the Cape Buffalo Grille in Dallas, Texas, on Sept, 4, before heading to Washington, D.C. Photo: Matt Nager.
Working Class Zero
By Timothy Egan / September 16, 2009

The first nine years of the new century have yet to find a defining label, something as catchy as Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade” of the 1970s or the “Silent Generation” of 1950s men in gray flannel suits. Bookmarked by the horror of 9/11 and the history of a black president, the aughts certainly don’t lack for drama.

But last week, lost in the commotion over the brat’s cry of Joe Wilson and the shotgun blast of rage in the Washington protest, something definitive was released just as this decade nears its curtain call.

For average Americans, the last 10 years were a lost decade. At the end of President George W. Bush’s eight years in office, American households had less money and less economic security, and fewer of them were covered by health care than 10 years earlier, the Census Bureau reported in its annual survey.

The poverty rate in 2008 rose to 13.2 percent, the highest in 11 years, while median household income fell to $50,303. Ten years earlier, adjusted for inflation, it was $51,295.

Of course this reflects the ravages of a horrid recession. But the decline started before the collapse in the housing and financial sectors — and it was calculated, in the eyes of some.

Harvard economist Lawrence Katz called it “a plutocratic boom.” If anything comes close to defining the era, that would be my nomination. President Bush cut $1.3 trillion in taxes — and the biggest beneficiaries by far were the top 1 percent of earners. At the same time, Wall Street was inflated by the helium of a regulation-free economy that eventually gave us Bernie Madoff and banks begging for bailouts.

Now consider the people who showed up in a state of generalized rage in Washington over the weekend. They have no leaders, save a self-described rodeo clown — Glenn Beck of Fox News — and some well-funded Astroturf outfits from the permanent lobbying class inside the Beltway. They are loosely organized under a Tea Party movement, but these people are closer to British Tories than 18th century patriots with a love of equality.

And they have the wrong target.

Mark Williams, a Sacramento talk radio host, was speaking to CNN on behalf of the demonstrators — many of whom carried signs comparing Obama to a witch doctor, an undocumented worker or a Nazi — when he played the blue collar card.

Who is Williams? A garden variety demagogue who calls Obama “an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug” and the Democratic party “a domestic enemy” of America. He also refers to the president as “racist in chief.” That says all you need to know about leaders of the Tea Party movement.

Williams repeatedly invoked the “working stiffs” who feel left out. Working people are always the last to get aboard the gravy train, and the first to be used in campaigns that will not advance their cause. And with these demonstrators, and the hucksters trying to distract them from real issues, history repeats itself.

Where was the Tea Party movement when the tax burden was shifted from the high end to the middle? Where were the patriots when Wall Street, backed in Congress by Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, rewrote securities laws so that the wonder boys of Lehman and A.I.G. could reduce home mortgages to poker chips at a trillion-dollar table?

Where were the angry “stiffs” when the banking industry rolled the 2005 Congress into rewriting bankruptcy law, making it easier to keep people in permanent credit card hock?

Where were they when President Bush started the bailouts, with $700 billion that had to be paid on a few days’ notice — with no debate — to save global capitalism?

They were nowhere, because they were clueless, just as most journalists were.

But now, at a time when a new president wants to reform health care to fix the largest single cause of middle-class economic collapse, he’s called a Nazi by these self-described friends of the working stiff.

“A working class hero is something to be,” John Lennon, that product of ragged Liverpool, sang just after leaving the Beatles. “Keep you doped with religion and sex and T.V.”

As someone who had a union card in my wallet before I owned a Mastercard, I don’t share Lennon’s dark view of blue collar workers. But as long as they can be distracted by people who say all government is bad, while turning a blind eye to manipulation at corporate levels, they’re doomed to shouting at phantoms.

One more detail caught my eye in these new economic reports on the lost decade. People in their prime earning years — age 45 to 54 — took the biggest hit in the last years of the Bush Administration, their median income falling by $5,000. And the region that suffered most — the South.

Older southern whites — that’s who got hit hardest by the freewheeling decade now fading. They should be angry. But they’re five years too late.

Source / New York Times

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The Bankruptcy of Economic 'Theory' Based on the Celebration of Greed

Just the Facts: Taxes, Debts, and National Prosperity

By Sid Eschenbach / The Rag Blog / August 3, 2009

For the past 30 years, conservative Republicans have been able to dominate the economic policy debate by controlling the framework of the argument, by building an economic ‘theory’ based on the celebration of greed, by selling the erroneous belief that that high taxes create low growth, and that low taxes create high growth. As no one, rich or poor wants to pay taxes, it was an easy sell. Unfortunately, if we didn’t suspect it’s legitimacy before, we confirmed the lie in September of 2008 when all the houses built on greed collapsed.

Amazingly, today, under a very different presidency than the Reagan presidency that started the disaster, we still hear Republicans advance the same ‘Atlas Shrugged’ narrative; that we’re overtaxed as a nation, that big government and high taxes stifle healthy economic growth, and that Obama’s financial recovery spending combined with health care spending will create big government and massive deficits that will bring hyperinflation and/or slavish indebtedness.

Just this week, after seeing evidence that the Obama Recovery Act has dramatically helped the local, state and national economies, we hear more from the party line: economist Randall Pozdena said the temporary boost will ‘hurt the economy in the long run because taxes will rise.’ "The question is, are you spending money productively?" said Pozdena, managing director of ECONorthwest, a consulting firm in Portland, Ore… as though buying flat-screen TV’s made in Korea was the highest, best and most productive use of capital.

Unfortunately for the nation, the Democrats don’t challenge the premise and continue to commit the fundamental error of fighting the battle on the opponent’s terms. Until they slay that dragon and redefine the conversation, neither the discussion nor the policies will evolve in a more prosperous direction. Therefore, a review of the actual economic record is urgently needed in order to escape from the Reagan framework and free policymakers and voters alike from a mistaken premise… and allow them to hold a real debate about the merits and the affordability of healthcare reform. Finding answers to the following five questions may help in this regard:

1. Are rates of taxation related statistically to rates of national economic growth?
2. Are U.S. taxes high by historic U.S. standards?
3. Does U.S. national debt represent a threat to the U.S. economy?
4. Is the U.S. government large or small by international standards?
5. What is the ‘proper’ size of government (or, is big government bad government)?

Are rates of taxation related statistically to rates of national economic growth?

Since the 1980’s, it has been advanced as economic fact that high tax rates create low growth rates, and that low tax rates create high growth rates. This theory of the relationship of taxes to growth is at the heart of neo-liberal economics, and has come to form a major pillar of conservative Republican politics. Over the past three decades it has been successfully used to brow-beat, mislead, fear-monger and usually defeat efforts to raise taxes at local, state and national levels in order to balance budgets and provide public services without going into debt. However, a review of the historical record shows there is absolutely no proof of any statistically significant relationship of that ‘fact’ being true over the past century of American history. Indeed, to the degree that there is a relationship at all, it appears to be the reverse; that higher taxes create higher growth, while lower taxes create lower growth.

The following chart shows the relationship between economic growth (net GDP growth year by year) and tax policy (as represented by the highest marginal rate) for every year from the first national income tax (1913) to the present. As can be seen, the first 30 years are entirely inconclusive regarding any relationship between taxation and growth, probably explained by the much bigger effects that World War I, the Great Depression and World War II had on the national economy during that period… and the wild swings in both taxation and growth produced by them.



Therefore, if there is a relationship at all we should see it from 1945 to the present, a relatively stable and consistent period of modern American History. The second graph (below) shows that period by itself, again with figures for each year of both net GDP and highest marginal rate of taxation.



According to neo-liberal theory, with the top marginal tax rate over 70% for the first 37 years of the post war period (and over 90% for 15 of those years), and the top marginal tax rate under 40% for the past 26 years, we should see very low growth rates for the first 37 years, and very high growth rates over the past 26 years… but we don’t. Indeed, to the degree that there is a relationship, it is just the reverse. The years of highest growth are in the 38 high tax years (6.04% average GDP growth), and the years of lowest growth are in the 26 low tax years (4.8% average GDP growth). The growth rate in the high tax years is 26% higher on average than the low tax years.

The statistical correlation, the ‘p’ value for the post war period to the present is ‘.14’. To put this result in medical terms, if a company ran tests on a drug to determine its effectiveness and came up with an equivalent p value, they wouldn’t even bother to present it to the FDA, as it would have demonstrated no statistical treatment efficacy. Furthermore, the stock value of the company that had produced those results would take a major hit… something that the Republican proponents of their economic ‘drug’ with a similar failed outcome took in the last elections, as the effectiveness of their ‘drug’ was finally revealed to the world.
In this case of the economic data, while it doesn’t prove statistically that high tax rates cause high growth, it doesn’t even pass a laugh test insofar as supporting the argument that high rates cause low growth and low rates cause high growth. In passing, it is also worthwhile to note that the extraordinarily high tax rates of the post-war period didn’t, as predicted by Ayn Rand, Arthur Laffer and President Reagan, discourage all the creative, intelligent, educated hard working people from working… something that most seemed to do all through the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. Indeed, the period is marked by robust growth and unrivaled generalized prosperity.
The economic truth is that growth rates within an economy are the sum of many factors, a short listing of which would include labor policy, trade policy, educational levels, wars, political stability, social and entrepreneurial culture, tax policy, the quality of the legal system, transportation infrastructure, etc. What makes it worse is that the importance of these and other factors vary in importance over time and place, so it’s very difficult to attribute to any one of them a primal importance relative to growth… of the sort attributed to tax policy by the Republicans.

What the data shows very clearly is that over the length of the American experiment, there is NO statistical basis whatsoever to the argument that a high tax environment slows growth, or that a low tax environment spurs growth, and if Ronald Reagan ran a drug company, he’d now be bankrupt. More importantly, it means that anyone who advances that particular lie is just doing just that…. lying.

Are U.S. taxes high by historic standards?

Another of the mistaken premises neo-liberals have been successfully able to insert into discussions about public policy is that U.S. tax rates are ‘too high’… that Americans are ‘over-taxed’, that that ‘over-taxation’ threatens productivity (see above), and the solution to this supposed problem is to lower taxes and, not incidentally, shrink government. As can be seen in the following graph, American tax history can be divided into 8 major tax eras, the last of which being the one we are currently in, from 1987 – 2009. As can also be seen, the current maximum marginal tax rate of 34% is the second to lowest top rate ever paid by Americans, and by far the lowest of the past 80 years. So much for being overtaxes by historical standards.



It comes as a shock to many Americans that during the period generally considered by economists to be the most robust and prosperous of our history, the period from 1945 to 1980, Americans paid maximum rates that averaged over 70% and went over 90% for 15 years… or nearly three times as high as is paid today by the wealthiest Americans. Never bothered by facts standing in the way of a good theory, however, there is still constant carping that the U.S. is ‘overtaxed’ and that that is the reason we’re not as prosperous as we once were. It’s nothing but greed masquerading as reason, and its pure nonsense.

As regards the previous point, the argument that low taxes create high productivity, the following chart shows clearly the GDP growth rates over the postwar period. Keep in mind when looking at these rates that taxes after 1980 were much lower (50% lower) than before 1980. What does that say about the relationship between taxes and productivity?



Does U.S. national debt represent a threat to the U.S. economy?

We hear on a daily basis from Republicans that Obama’s spending on healthcare and the stimulus will ‘destroy’ the economy. While they’re sure it’ll get destroyed, they’re not sure exactly how… but they generally offer either of two scenarios; through hyperinflation or by ultrahigh taxes on our children and grandchildren (see the first question above to understand the independent absurdity of this ‘threat’), Could they be right, at least about hyperinflation? Is the current or forecast U.S. government debt really a systemic or socio-economic threat?

The following graph is helpful in understanding how far the U.S. actually is from such a threat... to the degree that it can even be taken at face value (the idea that the world’s largest and only internationally recognized trading currency would be subject to hyperinflation is absurd on it’s face… but again, that’s never stopped a Republican economic argument before.) The U.S. would have to run a deficit of over two trillion dollars a year for the next 10 or so years just to catch up to Japan… which not incidentally doesn’t appear to be doing so badly now with their 170% rate. In short, the argument is absurd, and Japan proves it if nothing else.



Is the U.S. government large or small by international standards?

This is not a question that would have mattered as much 40 years ago, but as the globe shrinks with advances in communication and transportation, relative national tax rates and total tax revenues become more important. The argument made by conservative Republicans is that if taxes are too high in the U.S., the highly mobile international businesses will simply move elsewhere, and that will hurt the domestic economy. As the following chart shows, the size of the total tax revenue as a percentage of GDP in the U.S. is among the lowest of all the industrialized nations. If the general assertion that higher taxation invariably produces lower growth were true, then all the countries shown below that have higher total tax burdens as a percent of GDP than the U.S. does (some nearly double) should be withering while those below the U.S…. Afghanistan for example, with its total tax burden of 6%... should be prospering. Of course, none of those predictions based upon the ‘high tax low growth’ theory are in fact true. Afghanistan is not prospering, and Germany is not withering. There is clearly something else at play here, but as long as the Republicans can frame the debate in the ‘high tax = low growth’ context, those other factors that lead to growth will be neither identified nor fortified.



What is the proper size of government?

The above chart clearly shows that economies can be successful, even thrive, at much higher tax burdens than currently set in the U.S. As that is the case, a question policy makers must ask (after they have freed themselves from the ‘high tax = low growth dogma’) is the fourth… what is the ‘proper’ size of government?

Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this question other than that there are no simple answers… such as the ‘government bad, big government worse’ mantric nonsense peddled by ‘conservative’ Republicans. In government, as in much else, size is far less important than efficiency and goals. It should be obvious that a good big government is better than a bad small government… but thanks to Reagan, it’s not seen that way. There are many who still laugh at the joke he used to great effect: “Hello, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help”. They don’t laugh when they call the police, and they don’t laugh when they drive on public highways; they don’t laugh as they send their children to free public schools or sleep safely in their homes at night, and they don’t laugh when they visit the majestic national parks or pick up their unemployment checks… but as no one wants to pay taxes, Reagan’s joke made it o.k. to scorn and belittle the very government that does and must do all those essential things.

This last graph, however, can give us an idea of what other successful countries spend on their governments, and shows the gap between what they spend and what is currently spent in the U.S. As shown, the U.S. currently spends about 28% of GDP on government, Germany about 40%, and the Danish spend 50%. In dollar terms, the actual amounts represented by the red (difference) sections in the German and Danish column equal, for the U.S. economy, an additional $1.7 trillion in spending if the U.S. were to spend at the Germans rate, and an additional $3.1 trillion if the U.S. were to spend at the rate of the Danish.



In other words, there is no economic reason whatsoever that the U.S. couldn’t easily provide healthcare AND balance the budget AND have a healthy economy if it so desired. The only reason it “can’t” be done is because opinion makers and policy writers are still thinking from inside the box that Ronald Reagan built and put them into: they are still thinking that more taxes will necessarily hurt the economy (FALSE), that we are overtaxed as a nation (FALSE), and that big government is necessarily bad government (FALSE).

In Review:

1. Are rates of taxation related statistically to rates of national economic growth? NO.
2. Are U.S. taxes high by historic U.S. standards? NO.
3. Does U.S. national debt represent a threat to the U.S. economy? NO.
4. Is the U.S. government large or small by international standards as a share of GDP? SMALL.
5. What is the ‘proper’ size of government (or, is big government bad government)? NO.

What all of this proves is that greed and power never go out of style, and the Republican economic theories are all about both. To the degree that the rich keep more money and deny funds to the government, they are able to control government and dominate political discourse. Unfortunately, their economic theories combined with their greed and desperate grasping at power brought the world to a standstill in September of 2008. However, nothing will change unless Democrats slay the premises that created the disaster and set economics… and the nation, on a sounder path.

[Sidney Eschenbach, 60, lives and works in Guatemala, Central America. His thoughts regarding developmental economics and trade are based on decades of development work in Latin America at various levels, community and corporate.]

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