It’s as if GOP icon Ronald Reagan had, after firing the air traffic controllers, replaced them with the inmates of Ken Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest and Christopher Lloyd’s Dream Team.
Stephen’s helpful suggestions on how to reduce hospital overcrowding
Stephen Colbert warns us that a hospital is no place to get sick, especially if you are indigent or have fallen into a coma.
If, for instance, you’re an undocumented immigrant, you might find yourself discharged from an Intensive We Don’t Care Unit in Las Vegas and given a one way bus ticket to Los Angeles, with 3 days of meds and instructions to dial 911 when you get there. Same goes for the mentally handicapped.
If you’re really lucky and have fallen into a coma, you could be flown on a private jet for free and deposited in another country altogether.
But there is a darker possibility. You could be shipped off to somewhere that no one ever returns from…a Carnival Cruise vacation.
Lost amid the tidal wave of media coverage over the Boston Marathon bombings this week was the destruction of a foundational argument of the Avatars of Austerity, aka “deficit hawks.”
Thanks to a little fact checking and spreadsheet analysis by a U Mass grad student and his associates, they proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that key economic data used by the Austerians to justify their slash and burn budget prescriptions is full of shit.
The bogus data is enshrined in a paper by two Harvard economists, Reinhart and Rogoff, frequently cited as Holy Writ by everyone form Erskine-Bowles to Paul Ryan to Fux News. Details to follow, but first, an overview.
Following the collapse of the international financial system during the George W. Bush Administration, deficits worldwide exploded as former tax paying workers were laid off in the tens of millions. Instead of putting them to work building infrastructure and the like, the strategy chosen by FDR during the last Great Depression to re-start the economy and thereby raise government revenues, the uber rich offered their own re-cycled remedy of trickle-down economics, with a twist– tax cuts for them and budget cuts for everyone else.
While the subtext of the Austerians’ campaign to slash government budgets, which overwhelmingly disadvantage the poor and middle class, is obvious: the One Percenters resent having to pay taxes that benefit society as a whole (see Willard Romney’s attack on the 47% as parasites demanding “free stuff”); and while the actual real world results of austerity regimes currently in place in Europe have resulted in deeper economic dislocation and misery — Great Britain is in the middle of a triple dip recession despite deep cuts in vital government institutions like the BBC — one would think that the Austerians would accept reality and admit their anti-Keneysian belief system is wrong.
Fat chance. Depression levels of unemployment in Greece, Spain, and Portugal, accompanied by negative GDP, the contagion effect of austerity is being felt in even healthy exporting countries like Germany, to the extent that even the IMF came out this week against austerity. Despite irrefutable facts, the Austerians remain convinced of the rightness of their crusade. Ignoring Einstein’s definition of insanity — doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result — they argue for even greater cuts, and more time for them to work their expected magic.
[T]he Rogoff-Reinhart paper entitled Growth In A Time Of Debt became the intellectual backbone for the austerity movement/plutocrats and their apparatchiks in Washington and elsewhere. The big take away was that a high government debt to GDP ratio – past 90% – would hurt economic growth. Hence, the austerity movement’s central claim that cutting government spending is necessary to restore higher growth levels. And if you are following along, you probably realize why this argument does not even work in its own context. Cutting spending does not eliminate debt – which increases perpetually with interest. Nor is debt itself a reflection of spending levels, debt merely represents borrowing. The government can spend as much as possible and avoid high debt to GDP ratios if taxes are levied to pay for the spending. In fact, the highest growth period in the history of America was during one of its highest tax periods. Neither taxes, debt, nor government spending are, in and of themselves, determinative of economic growth.
Sounds reasonable enough on the surface, assuming that the data they used and its analysis reflect reality. But Houston, we have a problem:
Thomas Herndon, a 28-year-old economics grad student at UMass Amherst, just used part of his spring semester to shake the intellectual foundation of the global austerity movement.
Herndon became instantly famous in nerdy economics circles this week as the lead author of a recent paper, “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff,” that took aim at a massively influential study by two Harvard professors named Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. Herndon found some hidden errors in Reinhart and Rogoff’s data set, then calmly took the entire study out back and slaughtered it.
What Herndon had discovered was that by making a sloppy computing error, Reinhart and Rogoff had forgotten to include a critical piece of data about countries with high debt-to-GDP ratios that would have affected their overall calculations. They had also excluded data from Canada, New Zealand, and Australia — all countries that experienced solid growth during periods of high debt and would thus undercut their thesis that high debt forestalls growth.
Oopsie. Paul Krugman in his Friday column asks the logical, resulting gobsmacking question:
So, did an Excel coding error destroy the economies of the Western world?
Informed of the mathematical mistake that undergirded his and his BFF Alan Simpson’s whole austerity thesis, Democrat deficit hawk Erskine Bowles in essence replied that he didn’t care–he still believes in its viability, the facts be damned.
“I have obviously read the report and have referenced it a number of times,” Bowles said. “I know they had a worksheet error in the report and my understanding is that does make a difference.”
“But what it doesn’t change is the common sense and my own personal experience in both the public and private sector that when any organization has too much debt that is an enormous risk factor and your risks go up then people lending you money will want more money for their money,” Bowles said.
Translation: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”
So, Bowles is reduced to playing the “common sense” card so popular among conservatives these days when one of their pet ideologically driven crusades fails an objective analysis of its underlying facts. Sure, there is evidence that debt in excess of 90% of GDP retards economic growth by a measurable percentage. But it doesn’t drive it down anywhere near the level the Austerians maintain, making their Chicken Little The Sky Is Falling routine absurd on its face.
(Reminds me of the cognitive dissonance I used to see operating inside the criminal justice system. As advocacy groups like the Innocence Project has shown, not everyone convicted of a crime is guilty, as post-hoc DNA tests regularly show. You’d think that the original police investigators and prosecutors would eat a little humble pie for being proven wrong, but you’d be wrong. Like chest thumping politicians, they are geniuses at rationalization, maintaining that the victim was guilty for some other reason, because, well, just because. After all, they are professionals, experts who know their stuff.)
Other problems with R&R’s analyses includes the counterfactual case of England, which despite violating the 90% threshold for 19 continuous years, still maintained positive economic growth; and worse, cancelling its influence on the overall data set by giving it equal weight with a single year of severe negative economic growth in New Zealand in the early 1950s. Furthermore, economic conditions change over the decades, and when one analyzes R&R’s data from the beginning of the 21st century forward, the presumed relationship between the 90% level of economic stagnation becomes even more tenuous.
The question now is whether this cold slap of mathematical reality will be enough to end the hysteria of debt obsession that has the Serious People is D.C. so enthralled, and whether the far more critical and economically productive emphasis on job creation is once again the subject of serious policy debate.
Democratic accountability has been sucked out of the nation-state system and deposited into the hands of a planetary bureaucracy of transnational corporations and central bankers. And from their perspective there is no crisis, at least not anymore, just a continued redistribution of wealth up and the necessity of building a police state to protect it. Austerity forever.
As the Master of Disaster W. once said: “Fool me once, shame on, shame on, you. Fool me–you can’t get fooled again!”
Rand Paul tries to get his Black on at Howard University
Rest at pale evening…
A tall slim tree…
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.
–Langston Hughes, Dream Variations
Following a decade-long bout with a temporary form of blindness, Texas author John Howard Griffin lit upon a novel idea: to effectively alter his physical appearance such that he could pass for a black man, to better understand the challenges that confronted the Black race in the pre-Civil Rights era of the late 1950s. The gritty results of this one man social experiment were published in book form under the title Black Like Me (later turned into a movie of the same name, starring James Whitmore). From the BBC account on the 50th anniversary of its publication:
In the American Deep South in 1959, to be black was to be despised — to be treated as something less than human. There was the grinding poverty, of course, and the segregation and legalised discrimination which reserved certain railroad cars, bus seats and drinking fountains for the whites. But there were humiliations that ran deeper still. In some states, black men accused of looking at white women with lust in their hearts could be arrested under laws which made “ogling” a form of sexual assault. In others, “eyeballing” laws meant that failing to look down at the sidewalk when white folks passed by could lead to a charge of behaving in a confrontational way.
(As a detested “heepy” living in Hawaii in the early ’70s, I learned early on, if possible, never make eye contact with da local boys. A fellow traveler was not so fortunate. Having caught the attention of the big guys hanging outside of Auggie’s Pool Hall in Paia, they raced across the street, chased him into a cane field, and beat him with their pool cues to within an inch of his life.)
All of which is background for a condescending historical lecture on Civil Rights given by Senator Ron Paul (R-Teabagger) to a polite but gobsmacked audience Wednesday at one of the country’s premiere Black colleges, Howard University. ThinkProgress has the highlights:
1.The Civil Rights movement is actually the “history of the Republican Party”. The thrust of Paul’s speech was a recapitulation of the history of race and racism and a defense of the Republican record on race (representative line: “The story of emancipation, voting rights and citizenship, from Fredrick Douglass until the modern civil rights era, is in fact the history of the Republican Party.”) The problem was that this speech, ostensibly designed to persuade black voters that the GOP was interested in them, was telling the audience things it already knew. Moreover, the speech didn’t grapple with what happened to make the Democrats the more racially liberal party in the mid-40s or the turn towards racially divisive politics on the Republican right, essentially skipping over the real reason the GOP alienated African-American voters.
2. Assumed the audience didn’t know the history of the NAACP. In one of the most awkward moments of the talk, Paul asked the audience if anyone knew that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had been founded by Republicans. The audience responded with a resounding “yes!”
3. Suggested that African-Americans were “demeaning” the history of sergregation by calling voter ID laws discrimination. When asked how African-Americans could trust the Republican Party given its generalized support for discriminatoryvoter ID laws, Rand Paul told the audience to chill out about the measures, suggesting they were common sense. Paul argued that the view that these laws were an updated version of poll taxes was “[demeaning] the horror” of segregation. NAACP President Benjamin Jealous has said voter ID laws are “pushing more voters out of the ballot box than any point since Jim Crow.”
4. Mangled the name of the first popularly-elected black Senator. In what appeared to be an attempt to demonstrate his familiarity with the subject matter, Paul brought up Senator Edward William Brooke III (a Republican mentioned in the prepared remarks as “the first [elected] black U.S. Senator”). He referred to him, however, as “Edwin Brooks,” a point the audience corrected.
5. Misled about his opposition to the Civil Rights Act.Paul said “I’ve never wavered in my support for civil rights or the Civil Rights Act.” The problem, as Mother Jones‘ Adam Serwer pointed out, is that he opposed the law’s ban on discrimination in “places of public accommodation” like businesses, one of its most important planks. As an audience member asking Paul about this issue pointed out, “this was on tape.”
“an example of what happens when a staunch conservative steps out of the GOP’s tightly-drawn racial nonsense bubble and hits an audience not dying to be convinced that the GOP’s problems with non-whites are the results of boffo misunderstandings about a Republican party that is actually the best thing that ever happened to black people.”
Marshall concludes with an insight into what happens when the brain’s narrative circuitry crystallizes around a long held personal prejudice:
” You can become so lost in your own story that you confuse your conciliation with your aggression. The GOP is so deep into its own self-justifying racial alternative reality that there’s some genuine surprise when the claptrap doesn’t survive first contact with actual black people.”
It’s like, for the whole fifty years of his sheltered life, Senator Aqua Buddha lived in a parallel Libertarian universe where compassionate, visionary Republicans ushered in the Second Great Emancipation of the downtrodden Negro race. I guess his nose was too stuck too far into Ayn Rand’s fantasy novels to notice that when the Redneck South abandoned the Democratic Party after LBJ signed the Civil Rights and Voting Acts, those Yellow Dog Democrats found a welcome home in the GOP. Or that Ronald Reagan announced his 1980 presidential run in the Mississippi town where civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Cheney were murdered in 1964.
Yesterday, I watched the new movie 42 about the legendary Jackie Robinson, the first Black professional baseball player who did so much to pave the way for later day civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers. Jackie suffered much abuse as he became the focal point of the intense racial hatred that prevailed during the year of his breakthrough, 1947. Scenes from the movie include the iconic Whites Only signs that hung like nooses over bathroom doors and restaurants and professional baseball parks. In one scene, his minor league team bus stopped to gas up and Jackie headed towards the restroom to relieve himself. The attendant forbade from using it, saying he should know better.
Ron Paul, even today, would have supported the attendant’s choice, given his reading of the Constitution that private businesses should be allowed to discriminate.
Liz Cheney sets the way back machine to 1961 to explain the Grand Obstructionist Party’s response to health care reform
In his NY Times column Monday, Paul Krugman asks a question whose subtext subsumes its substance:
How many Americans will be denied essential health care in the name of freedom?
In case you haven’t noticed, the response to every critical policy issue proffered by the plutocratic funded Teabagger, Libertarian dominated GOP is a non-answer: no can-do, because, you know, freedom. An easy, bumper sticker slogan that appeals to the low information voter and propagandists alike.
Rational gun safety laws? Farmer Fred might have to drive 30 miles to town to record a transfer of his shotgun to his grandson. (Maybe he could combine it with one of his regular town trips, or like, when he has to register the transfer of a vehicle.) Financial regulation? As the banksters are fond of saying: the invisible hand of capitalism is regulator enough, thank you very much. Pollution controls? That costs jobs and all the freedom that goes with ’em. Immigration reform? Employers should be free to hire whomever they want, at whatever pay the market will bear. That’s the free market, baby.
Krugman drills down on the healthcare issue:
“I’m referring, of course, to the question of how many Republican governors will reject the Medicaid expansion that is a key part of Obamacare. What does that have to do with freedom? In reality, nothing. But when it comes to politics, it’s a different story.
It goes without saying that Republicans oppose any expansion of programs that help the less fortunate — along with tax cuts for the wealthy, such opposition is pretty much what defines modern conservatism. But they seem to be having more trouble than in the past defending their opposition without simply coming across as big meanies.
Specifically, the time-honored practice of attacking beneficiaries of government programs as undeserving malingerers doesn’t play the way it used to. When Ronald Reagan spoke about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, it resonated with many voters. When Mitt Romney was caught on tape sneering at the 47 percent, not so much.
There is, however, an alternative. From the enthusiastic reception American conservatives gave Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom,” to Reagan, to the governors now standing in the way of Medicaid expansion, the U.S. right has sought to portray its position not as a matter of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, but as a courageous defense of freedom.”
Yup, the Romney Revelation required a reboot— blaming the victim can only take you so far, especially when the victims are so close at hand. So, time to step into the Cheney time machine to make old things appear new again.
“Conservatives love, for example, to quote from a stirring speech Reagan gave in 1961, in which he warned of a grim future unless patriots took a stand. (Liz Cheney used it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article just a few days ago.) “If you and I don’t do this,” Reagan declared, “then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” What you might not guess from the lofty language is that “this” — the heroic act Reagan was calling on his listeners to perform — was a concerted effort to block the enactment of Medicare.”
So, it’s back to the future, where the right wing antediluvians think they can pour old wine into new wine skins. Their conception of freedom is truncated into the freedom from formulation— freedom from government, which is to say, society as a whole. The other formulation of freedom, freedom to, was long ago perverted into license— license to do whatever the hell somebody with means wants, ignoring the generations of collective effort that made their self-centered notions of freedom possible.
When but a sophomore in high school, I had the good fortune to encounter the writings of the noted psychologist, Erich Fromm, who made clear to me the nuanced differences between freedom from and freedom to. (As a horny teenager, I picked up his classic The Art of Loving, thinking it was a sex manual of some sort, but got hooked instead on his philosophical approach to life.) As long as we are doing a little time traveling, let’s go back another twenty years, to the publication of Fromm’s Escape From Freedom in 1941 (during the height of The Third Reich). From the WikiP entry:
Fromm distinguishes between ‘freedom from’ (negative freedom) and ‘freedom to’ (positive freedom). The former refers to emancipation from restrictions such as social conventions placed on individuals by other people or institutions. This is the kind of freedom typified by the Existentialism of Sartre, and has often been fought for historically, but according to Fromm, on its own it can be a destructive force unless accompanied by a creative element, ‘freedom to’ the use of freedom to employ spontaneously the total integrated personality in creative acts. This, he argues, necessarily implies a true connectedness with others that goes beyond the superficial bonds of conventional social intercourse: “…in the spontaneous realization of the self, man unites himself anew with the world…”
A world unobtainable to the selfish and the cruel. What else explains their desire to destroy a society which they reject, from which they have chosen to ex-communicate themselves? Better its destruction than a constant reminder of their own dysfunction.
WikiP concludes its review with this (italic emphasis mine):
Fromm examines democracy and freedom. Modern democracy and the industrialised nation are models he praises but it is stressed that the kind of external freedom provided by this kind of society can never be utilised to the full without an equivalent inner freedom. Fromm suggests that though we are free from obvious authoritarian influence, we are still dominated in our thinking and behaviour by ideas of ‘common sense’, the advice of experts and the influence of advertising. The way to become truly free in an individual sense is to become spontaneous in our self-expression and behaviour and respond truthfully to our genuine feelings. This is crystallised in his existential statement “there is only one meaning of life: the act of living it“. Fromm counters suggestions that this might lead to social chaos by claiming that being truly in touch with our humanity is to be truly in touch with the needs of those with whom we share the world. This is the meaning of a truly social democracy and the realisation of the positive ‘freedom to’ that arises when people escape the malign influence of totalising political orders.
I heard Senator Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) play the “common sense” card yesterday, trying to explain his support for the watered down gun safety agreement he reached with his Democratic counterpart, Joe Manchin (D-W.VA). “Common sense” is the mantra conservatives are using these days to oppose government regulation of any sort. “The advice of experts” is what fuels the whole deferential beltway pundit mentality. And the advertising industry is exactly the foundation of the modern day political propaganda machine.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
The bill simplistically equates sharia with terrorism without any proof and declares that it is “treasonous” and incompatible with the US constitution. It incorrectly identifies sharia as a political doctrine that “requires all its adherents to actively support the establishment of a political society based upon sharia as foundational or supreme law and the replacement of any political entity not governed by sharia with a sharia political order.” The bill goes on to state: “Sharia requires all its adherents to actively and passively support the replacement of American constitutional republic, including the representative government of this state with a political system based upon sharia.”
The very start of the language of the bill is profoundly disturbing. Sharia is falsely equated with Islamic law. Sharia refers to God’s will, laws, principles and values, found in the Qur’an and the traditions of the prophet Muhammad. Islamic law is the product of early jurists who interpreted and developed during it in the early Islamic centuries.
The hysteria continues with unsubstantiated accusations: “The knowing adherence to sharia and to foreign sharia authorities is prima facie evidence of an act in support of the overthrow of the United States government and the government of this state through the abrogation, destruction, or violation of the United States and Tennessee Constitutions by the likely use of imminent criminal violence and terrorism with the aim of imposing sharia on the people of this state.”
The bill states that its goal is not to outlaw freedom of religion or the practice of Islam. However, though breathtakingly devoid of evidence of any call to impose sharia in Tennessee or anywhere else in the US, it uncritically condemns sharia and asserts that it represents a major threat to Tennessee, brush-stroking the vast majority of mainstream Muslims and Islam in America.
Tennessee is no stranger to bigotry. Last year, TPM Muckraker reported that:
In a free training session on Monday, John Guandolo, a former FBI agent and the vice president of the Virginia-based Strategic Engagement Group (SEG), spoke to law enforcement officers in Rutherford County, Tennessee, at the World Outreach Church. The seminar was part of a three-day training course about Islam and the threat of terrorism, and was attended by roughly 100 law enforcement officers in the area, according to Middle Tennessee Public Radio. The Sheriff’s Department in Rutherford County confirmed that 25 of its officers had attended the training course. WSMV-TV attempted to film the event, and their camera was pushed away by Guandolo. But, according to reporter Nancy Amons, “Guandolo talked about Hamas and its plan to destroy Western civilization from within, and spoke of Islamic centers as potential military compounds.”
One of those terrorist compounds presumably includes the newly constructed Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, Permits didn’t come easy, necessitating intervention from a U.S. attorneys and a federal judge. During construction there was vandalism, a bomb threat, and an arson fire that destroyed construction equipment. Members of the congregation received various threats via phone calls, letters, and email..
Alleged Islamic terrorism compound at Murfreesboro, Tennessee
Bigotry by Tennessee officials isn’t limited to just Muslims, though. Earlier this month, U.S. Congressman Rep. Marsha Blackburn (yes, she insists on using the man suffix) voted against reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act signed into law by President Obama, explaining:
“I didn’t like the way it was expanded to include other different groups.”
By “other different groups”, Marsha of course means people that don’t look and act like her. The enhanced VAWA extends coverage for women in the LGBTQ, Native American, and immigrant communities. (As a paralegal working in Alaska in the mid ’90s, I can testify that violence against native Alaskan women is endemic. Too bad for them, in Martha’s World.)
This law is important, and for the women it protected during its previous tenure, it was successful. Between 1993 and 2010 the rate of violence between intimate partners declined 67%. That is huge! Additionally, more instances of domestic violence are being reported to the police and are dealt with through arrests. The expansion of the law to cover the “different groups,” as Blackburn calls them, is absolutely necessary considering that three out of every five Native American women will endure violence by an intimate partner. Similarly, one out of every three to one out of every four same-sex relationships has endured domestic violence. The rate for heterosexual relationships is one out of four, thus showing women in same-sex relationships are fighting a very similar battle to that of heterosexual women. They deserve protection, too.
Everyone deserves protection from hypocritical, self-righteous, paranoid bigots. Do unto others, and all that.
———–
NB: Concerned that I sound like I’m dumpin’ on Tennessee. Never been there and I’m sure it has its share of lovely people. My only connection to the state is that it is the birthplace of my treasured 12 string guitar that I’ve had and played for forty years. A shoutout to J.W. Gallagher & Son in Wartrace, Tenn.
Either one of these placards would be worthy of prominence, but taken together….
No big fan of MoDo, but she hits it out the park this morning in her op-ed concerning our dysfunctional Supreme Court in general; and what its oral argument over the anti-gay marriage Prop 8 case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, says about its dithering in the particular:
As the arguments unfurled in Tuesday’s case on same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court justices sounded more and more cranky. Things were moving too fast for them. How could the nine, cloistered behind velvety rose curtains, marble pillars and archaic customs, possibly assess the potential effects of gay marriage? They’re not psychics, after all.
[…]
Swing Justice Anthony Kennedy grumbled about “uncharted waters,” and the fuddy-duddies seemed to be looking for excuses not to make a sweeping ruling. Their questions reflected a unanimous craven impulse: How do we get out of this? This court is plenty bold imposing bad decisions on the country, like anointing W. president or allowing unlimited money to flow covertly into campaigns. But given a chance to make a bold decision putting them on the right, and popular, side of history, they squirm.es
The CW among legal observers is that the Court will punt this one, probably over the issue of standing. This would leave the broader issue of the right for gays to marry subject to the prevailing mores (i.e. bigotry and varying degrees of enlightenment) of the individual states, at least until a less problematic case is granted cert. (For a more detailed discussion of standing, see e.g. here.) That would mean gay marriage would be legal once again California, leaving the fundamental human right of marriage in national limbo.
MoDo spells out one of the social consequences:
The only emotional moment in court was when Justice Kennedy brought up the possible “legal injury” to 40,000 children in California who live with same-sex parents. “They want their parents to have full recognition and full status,” he told Cooper. “The voice of those children is important in this case, don’t you think?”
Prolly not. Conservatives are all about the fetus, not what happens to it after it leaves the birth canal.
Modo concludes:
While Justice Alito can’t see into the future, most Americans can. If this court doesn’t reject bigotry, history will reject this court.
Next up: Prop 8’s older sister: DOMA, being argued today. Stay tuned.
