Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Spare Sift articles

There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.

-- Andrew Carnegie

In this week's Sift:

Beyond Wisconsin: The Battle Spreads

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One of Michigan Governor Rick Snyder's most controversial proposals is for the legislature to give him the power to take over bankrupt local governments and appoint managers who are unaccountable to local voters. That may sound unconstitutional, but Slate's Richard Thompson Ford explains why it isn't.

I'll take my own stab at an explanation: The federal Constitution defines the powers of the federal government, and gives it (under Article IV, section 4) the responsibility to "guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." But the federal government has no similar responsibility to the cities and towns.

And state constitutions do not devolve powers to the local governments in the same way that the federal constitution devolves power to the states. So a local government's powers are not inherent, they're defined by state law. (Article VII of Michigan's Constitution says "Each organized county shall be a body corporate with powers and immunities provided by law.") So if the state decides to abolish local government completely -- as Michigan seems to be doing in this case -- that's it's prerogative.

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Perverse Incentives: The Prison-Industrial Complex

Way back in 1998, The Atlantic did a long article called The Prison-Industrial Complex. Through the 70s and 80s, politicians from both parties competed to be tougher on crime than the other guy, with a result Atlantic summed up like this:

Three decades after the war on crime began, the United States has developed a prison-industrial complex—a set of bureaucratic, political, and economic interests that encourage increased spending on imprisonment, regardless of the actual need. The prison-industrial complex is not a conspiracy, guiding the nation's criminal-justice policy behind closed doors. It is a confluence of special interests that has given prison construction in the United States a seemingly unstoppable momentum. It is composed of politicians, both liberal and conservative, who have used the fear of crime to gain votes; impoverished rural areas where prisons have become a cornerstone of economic development; private companies that regard the roughly $35 billion spent each year on corrections not as a burden on American taxpayers but as a lucrative market; and government officials whose fiefdoms have expanded along with the inmate population.

In the 80s and 90s, the fad was privatization: Companies like Wackenhut or CCA making money by building and running prisons. Today there's an added profit source: cheap prison labor. The NYT reported last Thursday:

Prison labor — making license plates, picking up litter — is nothing new, and nearly all states have such programs. But these days, officials are expanding the practice to combat cuts in federal financing and dwindling tax revenue, using prisoners to paint vehicles, clean courthouses, sweep campsites and perform many other services done before the recession by private contractors or government employees.
… Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, introduced a bill last month to require all low-security prisoners to work 50 hours a week. Creating a national prison labor force has been a goal since he went to Congress in 1995, but it makes even more sense in this economy, he said.

Think that through for a minute. At a time when voters say the #1 priority of government should be jobs "it makes even more sense" to use what amounts to slave labor so that government doesn't have to hire people.

Public Goods and the Public Good

At one particularly dramatic moment in Atlas Shrugged, industrialist Hank Rearden declares: "The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!"

This is all part of a larger philosophical idea, which the novel's author Ayn Rand defended in her essays: There is no such entity as "the Public", so it can't appreciate or value or own any goods. Margaret Thatcher was expressing something similar when she said, "There is no such thing as Society." Only individuals really exist; everything else is just an abstraction. (I sometimes wonder how this notion can get squared with the belief that Exxon-Mobil exists and has rights, but that's a different article.)

You may be tempted to stop listening and move on when someone starts talking like this. Practical people don't have time to debate about whether Cleveland or the State of Florida are real. But what we're seeing in the current budget battles is the ultimate result of letting these kinds of arguments go unanswered for the last half century: A number of state governments are now controlled by factions who don't believe in the Public.

From there it follows that public goods like libraries and schools and parks are owned by Nobody, and those of us who use them are freeloaders of one sort or another. In the Libertarian Utopia, everything is private. All roads are toll roads, all schools charge tuition, parks are only open to their members, libraries rent books rather than loan them for free, and so on.

 

The one public institution that has to be defended at all costs is the library. Knowledge is power, and at a public library knowledge is free. Do the math. Democracy may fall asleep sometimes, but as long as there are free public libraries, it can never die.

The plutocrats have done the math. If you want power to cost money, you absolutely have to either defund or privatize the libraries. They're working on both approaches.

 

Short Notes

The next time somebody tells you we can't afford Head Start or some other worthy government program, remind them of the F-22. We've spent $65 billion on it so far, and it has yet to fly a combat mission. We're currently not using it over Libya because … well, it was designed to win dogfights "against a highly advanced enemy fighter fleet" -- assuming some hostile power builds such a fleet someday. For any other mission, there's already some better, cheaper tool.

 

The NFL owners have started a lock-out because their current agreement with the players doesn't give them enough money. Right now the league rakes in about $9 billion a year and the players and owners each get about half of it.

I know what the players do in exchange for their $4.5 billion. You can argue that they don't deserve that much, but at least we know what they do. Anybody know what owners do? If the owners just went away -- the Packers don't have one -- would anybody notice?

The NFL is actually a pretty good example of one fundamental problem with the capitalist model. Back in 1920when the NFL was formed, it took real foresight to believe that a professional football league would be a good business. Those founding owners had to be visionaries and risk-takers and marketers and problem-solvers. It makes sense that their faith and hard work was rewarded. They deserved to get rich.

But those guys are all dead now. In their place we have parasites who each suck away tens of millions of dollars in profit every year just for "owning" -- a non-activity that adds no value either to the sport or to the larger society. And now the parasites are threatening to shut the league down because they want to suck more.

 

If you own an e-book reader, don't nag your library about e-book lending. Yeah, it would be great, but some of the publishers are being jerks about this, as the Librarian in Black explains:

I cannot over-emphasize that we are in trouble my friends. The lack of legislative leadership and advocacy in the last decade has created a situation where libraries have lost the rights to lending and preserving content that we have had for centuries. We have lost the right to buy a piece of content, lend it to as many people as we want consecutively, and then donate or sell that item when it has outlived its usefulness (if, indeed, that ever happens at all).

So your library may need to boycott certain publishers' e-books. Don't complain about it. Or complain to the publisher, not the library.

Another important library issue, related to the larger issues about state budgets, is library privatization. The most important clients of a public library are the poor and the powerless -- people who don't figure in a business plan. There's never going to be profit in paying a trained professional to help a low-income middle school student research his term paper. So at some point that just won't happen anymore.

We're in an era when, as Orwell said, "the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious." Well, here's something obvious that needs restating: The public library is the most democratic institution in America. Knowledge is power, and in America knowledge is free. If that ever changes, our democracy is in deep trouble.

It doesn't take a genius to be a good journalist. Sometimes you just have to keep track of stuff and refuse to be blown off-course by PR announcements. Pro Publica has been maintaining a database on TARP since the program was first announced at the end of the Bush administration. Current tally: TARP is still $123 billion in the red, and the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailouts are behind by a similar amount. There's no telling how much of this might get paid back someday, but as of now "taxpayers are $257 billion in the hole."

William Bradley explains why you should be watching Doctor Who.

Corning's vision of the near future: A Day Made of Glass. Sort of neat, sort of creepy. Do you really want email showing up on the bathroom mirror while you brush your teeth?

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This Week's Challenge

 

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05092011 Sift

Pity quote

-- Wise Person

In this week's Sift:

First Story

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One of the stranger ideas to float around in right-wing circles is that we should have desecrated bin Laden's body.

Did the Dalai Lama really say that killing Bin Laden was OK? No, he didn't. Was Rush Limbaugh serious when he said, "Thank God for President Obama"? No, he wasn't.

Second Story

Once in a while, it helps to go outside the polarized American system of Left/Right, Republican/Democrat, and get a view from somebody who on occasion will either please or annoy either side -- like the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto.

De Soto's book The Mystery of Capital is an icon in certain right-wing circles, because it outlines a capitalistic path for third-world development, one that focuses first and foremost on establishing the rule of law and the transparency of markets. If you think, "They don't need billions in foreign aid, they need to follow our example", then you're likely to be a de Soto fan. That's why he won prizes named after Barry Goldwater and Milton Friedman and Adam Smith.

But de Soto has one decided drawback as a right-wing hero: He really means it. De Soto-ism is not just a compassionate veneer to slap onto a policy of plutocratic class warfare. He really wants a legal/economic system that is lawful and transparent. What's more, he believes that the first world would do well to practice what it preaches to the third world.

So de Soto's view of the 2008 economic collapse is not likely to win him another Friedman award.

One basic idea runs through all de Soto's writings: Markets work well when everybody knows what they're buying and selling, but they work badly when doubts start to creep in. (Maybe what you're buying doesn't really exist, maybe the guy selling it to you doesn't really own it, maybe owning the thing entails drawbacks and restrictions you don't know about, and so on.) When a market is rife with those kinds of doubts, even an honest seller can't get what his property is worth. And sometimes doubt gets so extreme that the market just breaks down, the way credit markets broke down in 2008.

When he looks at third-world urban poverty through this lens (in The Mystery of Capital), de Soto sees that a lot of people are not destitute, but everything they own is either off the books or otherwise ambiguous. They can use it, but they can't take it to a bank and get a loan. So they can't start family businesses or send their kids to college, or do any of the other things that people with recognized property do. De Soto wants to get their unofficial property into a lawful transparent system, so that they can use it as capital.

But when he turns that lens to the 2008 financial collapse, de Soto sees that the first world had the kind of system he wants for Peru, but threw it away by de-regulating.

It is the business of government, de Soto argues, to create and enforce standards that allow people to know what they're buying. In the financial markets, that means allowing investors to know what they're investing in. The great achievement of the West was the creation of "public memory systems" that standardized and kept track of who owned what, who owed what, and who was responsible for what risks. These systems replaced informal relationships and handshake commitments with publicly verifiable facts.

Over the past 20 years, Americans and Europeans have quietly gone about destroying these facts. … The results are hardly surprising. In the U.S., trust has broken down between banks and subprime mortgage holders; between foreclosing agents and courts; between banks and their investors—even between banks and other banks. Overall, credit (from the Latin for "trust") continues to flow steadily, but closer examination shows that nongovernment credit has contracted. Private lending has dropped 21 percent since 2007. Outstanding loans to small businesses dropped more than 6 percent over the past year, while lending to large businesses, measured in commercial loans of more than $1 million, fell nearly 9 percent.
… When then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson initiated his Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in September 2008, I assumed the objective was to restore trust in the market by identifying and weeding out the "troubled assets" held by the world's financial institutions. Three weeks later, when I asked American friends why Paulson had switched strategies and was injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into struggling financial institutions, I was told that there were so many idiosyncratic types of paper scattered around the world that no one had any clear idea of how many there were, where they were, how to value them, or who was holding the risk. These securities had slipped outside the recorded memory systems and were no longer easy to connect to the assets from which they had originally been derived. Oh, and their notional value was somewhere between $600 trillion and $700 trillion dollars, 10 times the annual production of the entire world.

De Soto understands that there is no "free" market, if by free we mean unregulated. Markets are created by regulation.

Markets were never intended to be anarchic: It has always been government's role to police standards, weights and measures, and records, and not condone legalized sleight of hand in the shadows of the informal economy. To understand and repair one of mankind's greatest achievements—the creation of economic facts through public memory—is the stuff of nation-builders.

To avoid another 2008 collapse, he argues, we need to re-regulate. Governments need to standardize and keep records on all the new financial instruments, and insist on accounting standards that make them transparent. Otherwise, how can investors know whether they are buying the next AIG?

Third Story

 

 

 

Short Notes

Best satire of the last month: The Borowitz Report -- Exporting Democracy Has Led to Shortages of it in U.S., Expert Say.

a new study commissioned by the University of Minnesota ... predicts that if the U.S. continues to export democracy at its current pace it may completely run out of it at home by the year 2015.

House Speaker Boehner is quoted as recommending that we deal with the shortage by exploring "alternative forms of government, such as oligarchy or plutocracy."

I never get enough of Jon Stewart talking to Rachel Maddow.

 

 

Lawrence O'Donnell introduces his audience to David Barton, a "historian" well-known in right-wing circles. The main drum Barton beats is that separation-of-church-and-state is unhistorical, and he's not above making stuff up to "prove" that point. If you have relatives in the religious right, you may be hearing arguments and examples that come originally from Barton.

People for the American Way have a debunking report.

In 2007, the possible presidential candidates who were making appearances in early primary states went ahead to run, while the ones who weren't, didn't. Using that criterion, Nate Silver says:

the 2012 Republican field is far more defined than most people think, with Mr. Gingrich, Gary Johnson, Mr. Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Mr. Romney as likely’s and Mr. Huckabee, Mr. Trump and Mr. Paul as maybe’s.

In a multiple-bank-shot way, I think Bin Laden's death helps Ron Paul. In the 2008 cycle, his opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was an unforgivable heresy among Republicans, so he never got taken seriously. But if we're now in a post-war-on-terror era, he's a legitimate candidate.

The Houston Fox affiliate devoted a news segment to whether Glee is too gay to be on before young children go to bed. Salon sums up the segment as "Is Glee turning our kids gay?" The supposedly neutral interviewer mentions "product placement" -- as if going from straight to gay was like switching between Pepsi and Coke.


 

 

 

This Week's Challenge

 

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift's Facebook page.

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Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Born to Property

The earth in its natural, uncultivated state, was, and ever would have continued to be THE COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life-proprietor with the rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.

-- Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice, (1793)

In this week's Sift:

  • The Justice of the Public Sector. What about that idea that the government is "stealing your money" and spending it on "freeloaders"? New-fangled notions from John Locke and Thomas Paine explain the hole in that thinking.
  • Who's Ready for Democracy? We can examine the obstacles to democracy in Libya (and elsewhere) without invoking religious, racial, or cultural stereotypes.
  • Short Notes. More soap opera in Wisconsin. Jon Stewart thinks "Gov hurts". The ACA is a year old. Warrantless wiretapping is back in court. And my wife and I politely ask NOM to stop defending our marriage, which is doing fine on its own.
  • This Week's Challenge. Let me know how the Sift gets from me to you.
The Justice of the Public Sector

Last week I argued that the current battles over state and federal budgets are part of a long-term conservative plan to destroy the public sector by "starving the beast". Last September (in a review of Thomas Geoghegan's Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?) I claimed that a society with a large public sector -- public schools, public parks, public healthcare, public pensions -- is a nicer place to live for the large majority of its citizens.

But even someone who granted me all those points might still say: "Yes, but the public sector is unjust. It relies on the government taking money from the people who earn it and spending it on people who didn't earn it."

Conservative rhetoric is the mirror image of Marxist rhetoric on this issue. To conservatives, you're a parasite if you flip burgers for minimum wage, pay little-to-no tax, and still expect the government to spend somebody else's taxes on your daughter's chemotherapy. To Marxists, you're a parasite if you expect burger-flippers to work for minimum wage so that dividends from your McDonalds stock can pay your country club membership.

Who's right?

If you look at things on the small scale, conservative rhetoric looks compelling: There's a big number at the top of your paycheck, and a considerably smaller number at the bottom that you get to take home. The idea that you "earned" the big number, but the government "stole" a chunk of it -- it looks right.

If you pull back to a larger scale, though, the Marxists have a point (especially if you express their ideas in religious terms that Marx would have hated). Pre-tax earnings (both yours and the owners') reflect the outcome of a rigged game, because they're based on a property system that is fundamentally unjust.

Think about it: For whose benefit did God create the world? Everybody's? Or just for the people who have their names on deeds? Babies are born into a world in which every object of value is already the property of someone else -- how can that be just? What did those babies do to lose their share of the inheritance of the world?

As Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly argue in Unjust Desserts, and I've echoed on my religious blog, the same ideas apply more widely than just to land and other natural resources. Whether you're a capitalist, a worker, or something in between, the reason our economy is so productive has little to do with your efforts.

You can think of the economy as an enormous lever that magnifies the results of the effort we put into it. When we work, we pull that lever and move the world. But how did the lever get there? Why is our work so much more productive than the work of our hunter-gatherer ancestors?

In a word, the answer is knowledge. Not just the insights reflected in patents and copyrights, but the deep knowledge that is embedded in the system as a whole: language, the wheel, fire, and many other discoveries made by people who are long dead. A huge slice of the economic pie is due to them, not to us. To us it may look like a wage, but it's really an inheritance too.

So who should get the benefit of that inheritance? Lately we have been operating the American economy under the assumption that capital-owners are the sole heirs; the lever belongs to them, and they graciously let the rest of us use it. That's reflected in the fact that wages have stagnated even as productivity increases. The lever of accumulated human knowledge continues to get longer and longer, but the benefit of its use no longer percolates down to everyone.

This way of looking at things is not new. The people who built the philosophical foundations of modern society knew that there was an original injustice at the root of the property system. When John Locke justified private property in his Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690), he set the stage like this:

The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being. And tho' all the fruits it naturally produces, and beasts it feeds, belong to mankind in common, as they are produced by the spontaneous hand of nature; and no body has originally a private dominion, exclusive of the rest of mankind, in any of them, as they are thus in their natural state: yet being given for the use of men, there must of necessity be a means to appropriate them some way or other, before they can be of any use, or at all beneficial to any particular man.

That means of "appropriation" -- privatizing, in our language -- was labor. If someone gathered acorns, the acorns became his or her private property through the effort of gathering. Similarly, land became property through the labor of cultivation:

God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest conveniencies of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational, (and labour was to be his title to it;) not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious. He that had as good left for his improvement, as was already taken up, needed not complain, ought not to meddle with what was already improved by another's labour: if he did, it is plain he desired the benefit of another's pains, which he had no right to, and not the ground which God had given him in common with others to labour on, and whereof there was as good left, as that already possessed, and more than he knew what to do with, or his industry could reach to.

And there's the rub: After your labor makes a bucket of acorns or a piece of land yours, there should still be "as good left" for other people to invest their labor in and make their own. Plainly, that no longer is true, and it was already false in England in Locke's day.

So the basis of the property system was flawed from the beginning. But what can be done about it? Even if you could uproot the whole property system without inciting a civil war, you would probably wreck productivity so badly that in the end everyone would be poor (as the Soviets proved in the 20th century).

In Agrarian Justice(1793), Thomas Paine provided a solution: Let the unjust-but-productive system run, but tax it to provide compensating benefits to those who have been disinherited from the legacy of God and our common ancestors. (Specifically, Paine proposed an inheritance tax to fund a grant of capital to the young and a pension to the old.)

And that's the philosophical basis of the public sector we have today.

So the big number on your paycheck is your share of that original unjust system. It may seem like a lot, but for most people it is Esau's porridge compared to the human birthright they have lost claim to.

Fortunately, though, those unjust desserts are taxed, and the taxes go to provide a public sector for the benefit of everyone. The public sector is our compensation for giving up our share of humanity's common inheritance. Conservatives can argue that this compensation is too large. But when you appreciate the magnitude of the legacy, I think there's a better case for claiming that the public sector is not big enough.

And that's why the burger-flipper's children are not freeloaders, even if their parents' taxes don't cover the cost of their education, or the use they get out of the parks or libraries or hospitals. Mark Twain once responded the the charge that he was "low born" by pointing to his descent from Adam. The burger-flipper's kids have a similar pedigree. It includes Og, who invented the wheel, and goes all the way back to God, who created the Earth.

Who's Ready for Democracy?

Whenever we intervene in another country, we need to ask: What would count as success?

Obviously, our highest hope is that the country could become a prosperous democracy like Japan or Germany. But when is that a reasonable expectation?

Personally, I get a sinking feeling whenever I hear somebody wax optimistic about Afghan or Iraqi or Libyan democracy, but I don't want to indulge in the racial, religious, or cultural stereotypes that so often get used to justify those feelings. You know what I'm talking about. There's an longstanding argument about who is "ready for democracy". Are Arabs ready for democracy? What about Muslims? Africans? Asians?

If you follow the thread of those questions back through history, you wind up listening to the self-justifications of 19th-century European imperialists, who carry the "white man's burden" to bring civilization to the benighted parts of the world. In this telling of the story, the non-Western nations are like children, and we are the grown-ups. We need to nurture and discipline them until they're "ready" to be Western nations themselves.

Yuck. Get the mental floss.

On the other hand, it still seems naive to expect Libya to be Germany. But why, exactly?

The problems that keep democracy from taking hold in places like Afghanistan are hard to think about because they are inherently political and collective, not averages of individual attributes like intelligence or maturity or education. (That should be obvious: Individuals of every description come to America, and once they get here they do fine with democracy.) Almost all these problems boil down to one issue: As a nation, have we reached consensus on the issues that are worth killing people over?

Try this thought experiment: You and I belong to different tribes, and our tribes have a blood feud going. My people want to kill all of your people, and vice versa. Now imagine that some imperial bureaucrat draws a circle around our territories and wants our two tribes to be a democracy. Is that going to work? If the candidate from your tribe loses the election and my tribesman takes control of the army, are your people going to submit peacefully to the genocide?

Of course not. We'll be in civil war before the inauguration. But it's got nothing to do with you and me as individuals, or even with the "maturity" of our tribal cultures. Maybe your tribe could be a perfectly fine democracy, and so could mine. We just can't be a democracy together, because we don't have consensus on the issues worth killing over.

Look at the early United States. We had a run of really excellent statesmen, but all they could manage was to put the Civil War off for most of a century -- because slavery was worth killing over, and we didn't have consensus on it.

Around the world, vast wealth is considered worth killing for. Sometimes there are widely accepted ideas about who legitimately owns what, and in those cases the accepted ideas can be the basis for democratic laws. But a lot of the world's wealth is what I sometimes call pirate treasure -- it belongs just as legitimately to any person as to any other person. Unless a society comes up with some way to legitimize its ownership, pirate treasure will be controlled by force -- and that's bound to undermine a democracy.

Oil in the ground is a prime example of pirate treasure. Why, for example, did Saddam control the oil of Iraq? Because he had the guns. When we came along with bigger guns, then we controlled the oil. Nobody wastes their time worrying that some long-lost heir of Saddam will come along to claim legitimate ownership of the Iraqi oil, because there was no legitimate ownership in the first place. It was pirate treasure; finders keepers.

So as we wonder whether Libya or Iraq or Afghanistan will come out of their current struggles with a democracy, let's look in the right direction. It's got nothing to do with their DNA or the sophistication of their culture or even with Islam. (Remember: Overall, Muslim Americans have proven to be fine citizens.) The right question is: Can these countries reach consensus on the issues worth killing over? In Libya and Iraq, that especially hangs on the question of legitimizing ownership of the oil.

It won't be easy, because it's not enough to wield a majority on these questions. The consensus has to be large enough that any dissenters can be characterized as criminals, not a rebel faction. Again, think of the U.S.: Some teen-ager may decide that he owns your car, but that's not a threat to democracy in America. We can deal with it as a crime, not a revolution.

University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan blogged a pessimistic view of Libya's prospects on the NYT website. LIbya has numerous "characteristics that make democracy unlikely", including oil and an "ethnically heterogeneous" population:

no amount of Allied help will change the country’s location or its basic economics. Nor would it change Libya’s demographics, though perhaps a post-Qaddafi Libya would consist of multiple countries, each more homogeneous than the unified Libya was.
The Allied intervention will not bring Libya peace in the short term, and will not bring democracy in the long term as long as Libya has valuable oil in the ground.

A separate NYT article raises the possibility that the Libyan revolt is a "tribal civil war", but Juan Cole is more optimistic.

It's important to understand why "heterogeneous population" is an obstacle to democracy, because otherwise you can find yourself justifying xenophobia and nativism.

The key insight comes from Walter Lippmann's 1920 classic Public Opinion: Democracy is a way for the will of the people to manifest itself and rule a country. But drawing a circle on a map doesn't automatically create a popular will among the people inside. Unless and until they form a national consciousness and develop a popular will, democracy will just be a tussle among the wills of various factions.

So homogeneity is useful when founding a democracy, but once a national consciousness has formed, people of all ethnicities can join it. In 1776, for example, the Founders benefited from a shared perspective as English Protestants. But if today's Americans consider themselves Irish or Jewish or Hispanic in addition to being Americans, democracy isn't harmed.

Here are some maps that deserve more attention than they're getting: a tribal and ethnic map of Libya and the locations of the oil reserves.

Compare them with the battle lines. In general, the population is along the Mediterranean coast. Qaddafi holds the capital of Tripoli in the West, while the rebels hold the the cities of the eastern coast. The west is dominated by the El Magarha tribe, while the east is split among numerous other tribes.

Both east and west have oil reserves, a fact which lends itself to the idea that the country could be partitioned. The pipeline to Europe is in Tripoli.

Short Notes

The soap opera of Wisconsin's union-killing bill just keeps getting soapier. In our last episode, a judge restrained the Secretary of State from publishing the bill (a technical step necessary for it to take effect). The injunction was supposed to provide time for the court to decide whether the rush-rush process Republicans used to pass the bill violated Wisconsin's open meetings law.

Friday, in what the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel called "a stunning twist", the Legislative Reference Bureau posted the bill to its website. The Walker administration says that's publication enough -- even though both the head of the LRB and the Secretary of State say no -- so they will begin enforcing the bill as law.

Both of the Republicans' latest moves are head-scratchers. The bill-passing maneuver didn't have to be so rush-rush, and premature enforcement will only spawn new court cases. Why not just let the first case proceed to a conclusion? Ratings, I guess.

Gov. Walker's budget slashes public funds available to finance elections to the state Supreme Court -- because judges should have to pander to wealthy special interests just like everyone else.

In another classy move, Wisconsin Republicans are using a freedom-of-information law to examine the emails of a history professor who criticized Governor Walker. Paul Krugman comments.

Governor Rick Scott's plan to contract out Medicaid services may or may not save Florida money, but it will definitely benefit the health-services company Scott founded. No conflict of interest, though, because he got rid of all his stock in that company -- by transferring it to his wife.

Rick Snyder, Rick Scott, Scott Walker -- Jon Stewart skewers them all in a segment called "Gov hurts".

The Affordable Care Act became law a year ago (though many of its features haven't kicked in yet). Wendell Potter, the ex-health-insurance-executive who realized that his previous job was immoral, explains why we should be happy about the ACA.

Warrantless wiretapping is back in the news. A lawsuit challenging the practice was thrown out of district court in 2009 because the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue. But Monday an appeals court reversed that decision. Neither ruling touches the merits of the case, which may finally get a hearing.

The National Organization for Marriage has a new ad attacking President Obama's decision to stop defending the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act in court. Stop8.org takes the ad apart point by point.

Having just celebrated our 27th anniversary, my wife and I have a message for NOM: Thanks, but we don't need your help. Whatever you think you're accomplishing, don't do it on our account.

This Week's Challenge

It's not a challenge exactly, but I would like to hear from you: How do you get the Sift? Email? RSS feed? Somebody links to it or forwards it to you? You bookmark the website?

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift's Facebook page.

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Monday, March 21, 2011

Stubborn Ounces

You say the little efforts that I make

will do no good: they never will prevail

to tip the hovering scale

where Justice hangs in balance.

 

I don’t think

I ever thought they would.

But I am prejudiced beyond debate

in favor of my right to choose which side

shall feel the stubborn ounces of my weight.

-- Bonaro W. Overstreet

In this week's Sift:

A Hard Week to Sift

Every now and then as I write the Weekly Sift, my spider-sense goes off. I seldom know immediately just what I've done wrong, but somehow I have fallen into one of the traps I try to guide others around. I have accidentally wandered over some indistinct boundary and am in danger of spreading ignorance and confusion rather than knowledge and clarity.

Usually the alarm isn't hard to turn off.  I just back up, re-think the topic, and start over. Or sometimes the topic itself is the problem. Maybe (like Sarah Palin) it's already getting more attention than it deserves, and whatever I say about it will just make the problem worse. So I drop it.

This week my spider-sense went off and refused to be cajoled into silence. It wasn't the specific topic, and it wasn't the way I was framing the topic. It was the week. I was looking at the week all wrong.

That had never happened before, so it forced me to re-think things I usually take for granted. In general, sifting about sifting is not that interesting or worthwhile, so I try to avoid meta-articles about what I'm trying to accomplish or how I do it.

I thought I'd make an exception this week. But don't worry, it's not going to become a habit.

What/who the Sift is for. The purpose of the Weekly Sift is to provide useful information to people who are trying to be good citizens without quitting their day jobs. If full-time political activists find it interesting or apathetic people are entertained by it, that's fine, but that's not what it's for. The target Sift-readers are not the political movers and shakers, but ordinary people who want to keep track of public affairs so that they can wisely position the stubborn ounces of their weight.

Why is it so hard to find that information? Given how many well-intentioned ordinary citizens there must be, you'd think they would be a well-served market. But they're not. (You probably know that already.)

On any given topic, it's easy to learn the same five facts everybody else seems to know. You hear them repeated on newscast after newscast, headline after headline. But if you think about those five facts long enough to realize that (put together) they don't really make sense, it takes much more effort to dig up the sixth and seventh facts that might bring things into a new focus. Worse, sometimes the five ubiquitous facts are so mis-stated or mis-framed that they might as well be lies.

Every topic has its own traps -- misleading ways of arranging the facts that either disarm the public or turn well-intentioned people against their own interests. But there are three traps that apply across-the-board:

1. Distraction. In the summer of 2009 we lost about two weeks of news coverage because Michael Jackson died. I admit, he was the King of Pop, and the Billie Jean video is one of my all-time favorites. But was there really nothing else happening that needed our attention during those two weeks? And what could you do about Michael being dead anyway?

That's an extreme case, but just about every week the corporate media dangles some bright shiny object to distract you from events that actually affect your life -- events that could be changed if enough people like you paid attention.

2. Passive obsession. In reaction to the distractions of the corporate media, the blogosphere has its own trap. You can use the internet to learn everything about an important topic, and then you can either sit at your computer angsting about the whole thing, or you can feel quietly superior to all those ignorant drones who only know five facts (three of which are completely wrong).

The root problem with passive obsession is that action -- even something as simple as changing the kind of bread you buy -- is what makes information worthwhile. Without some minimal connection to action, knowing all the facts and figures about global warming is no more important than knowing the batting averages of the 1927 Yankees. If you're not going to do anything, ever, it's all just trivia.

3. Hype. When you know that people aren't really listening to you, and that even the ones who do listen are unlikely to do anything about what you're saying, it's tempting to turn up the volume. Nearly everyone, I imagine, gets regular emails from some friend or relative claiming that some current event is the Worst Outrage Ever!! Not only is the sky about to fall, the sky has already fallen, and we'd all be too mesmerized to notice if our friend didn't point it out to us.

The ultimate source of this alarming information (if you can trace it at all) is usually some interested group: a political party, a special-interest front organization, or some entertainer/propagandist on the radio.

One way to spot hype is that the proposed action (if any) is woefully inadequate to the scale of the alarm. You should buy a book or forward this email or send $20 to a campaign or just stay awake at night shaking in your bed.

The Week. Three major things have been happening this week: the failing nuclear reactors in Japan, the intervention in Libya, and the continuing budget battles at both the state and federal levels.

The first two are the kinds of stories the Sift can't cover well, at least not yet. Right now, there really isn't much you need to know or should be doing about Japan. There are various places you could send money, but frankly, Japan isn't Haiti. The Japanese have money, and to the extent that money can solve this problem, Japan will get it done.

Eventually, we're going to need to assess what happened and what it means for our own nuclear industry, but the information necessary to make that assessment isn't available yet. It's a good idea to start learning some background on nuclear power, and I'll link to some in the coming weeks. But speculating on what might be happening (or about to happen) isn't that useful.

Libya is still in the breaking-news category. There are a few things that it makes sense for a weekly to point out, and I'll have a few paragraphs later. But much of what has happened so far has been behind closed doors, or in places where we have no reliable eyes and ears. So we're all just speculating about it. Is the intervention working? Well, something might happen between my posting the Sift and you reading it that changes everything. You need a good 24-hour news channel to cover this story right now, and all I can do is wish we had one.

That leaves the budgets.

Budget battles. I've been on the state-budget story for weeks now, and there is more material this week than ever. More outrageous things in more states are getting closer than ever to fruition -- so many that filling the Sift's 3000-word template would be easy this week.

And then my spider-sense went off.

It took a while to sort out, but eventually I realized I was bouncing back and forth between passive obsession and hype. This awful thing is happening! That awful thing is happening! Here's a near-complete list with hundreds of links you can follow.

I was losing the useful-information-for-citizens view.

So I took some time off, backed up, and wrote the next article. Some details are down there, mostly in the links. But what you really need to know is the big picture. So that's where I'm going to start.

Starve the Beast, Defund the Left

As I explained in the first article, I have had a hard time finding the right level of alarm to convey about the political battles that have followed the 2010 elections. The sky is not falling, but something new and dangerous is happening. It's easy to pick out the particular outrages that affect your community or your family or your particular interest group, but it's hard to get a handle on what to do unless you understand the big picture. So let me boil it down to bullet points:

  • This is not the ordinary back-and-forth of liberal/conservative politics. Something new and important is happening.
  • The many different proposals in the various states and at the federal level are part of a unified conservative strategy.
  • That strategy's ultimate goal is the complete dismantling of the public sector.
  • This is the archetypal think-globally-act-locally issue. You need to understand the big picture, and then make common cause with people near you who care about the things you care about: your local schools, your library, the special services your children need, or the infrastructure of your town.
  • Your local concerns then need to make common cause with the local concerns of other people. That's why you need the big picture, so that your energy doesn't get diverted into fighting against someone else's equally valid concerns.

Now let's talk that through, starting from the beginning.

The origin of Starve the Beast. The fundamental economic differences between the two parties go back at least a century, and hardened during the Depression, when Franklin Roosevelt created the federal government we know today: a government that takes responsibility for the welfare of individual citizens through programs like Social Security and unemployment insurance, and is big enough to regulate the corporations.

But although post-Roosevelt Republicans continued to be for lower taxes and smaller government than Democrats wanted, from the 1950s through the 1980s there was broad agreement about the overall mission. Republicans wanted government to run more cheaply and efficiently, Democrats more generously. That yin/yang relationship worked fairly well. A Republican governor might cut away Democratic mistakes, and leave a more sound foundation on which the next Democrat could build.

In particular, both parties shared a fiscal vision: You decided what the government needed to do, then found taxes to pay for it. Republicans prided themselves on balanced budgets, and often had to raise taxes to achieve them.

Beginning in the Reagan administration, though, a new Republican strategy developed that became known as starve the beast. Traditional Republicans had wanted to cut spending so that they could cut taxes, but starve-the-beast said Republicans should cut taxes first, intentionally create a fiscal emergency, and then use the panic of that emergency to build popular support for spending cuts.

President Reagan pioneered the rhetoric of starve-the-beast, but he didn't practice it. The Reagan tax cuts of 1981 were pitched as a way to raise revenue by stimulating growth. When large deficits emerged instead, Reagan spent the rest of his terms raising taxes to cover them. Bush the First did the same, even though his famous read-my-lips campaign pledge said he wouldn't.

The first authentic beast-starver was Bush the Second. He inherited a budget surplus from President Clinton, destroyed it by cutting taxes and starting wars, and then kept cutting taxes until he handed President Obama a $1.2 trillion deficit and a broken economy. We are still in the first economic downturn since the starve-the-beast strategy took hold.

Tactics of Starve the Beast. Economic booms raise revenue, while recessions raise expenses for things like unemployment insurance. So ideally, a government would run a surplus in good times and a deficit in hard times.

If you want to starve the beast, though, you cut taxes in good times so that the deficit is already at the maximum level acceptable to the public when the recession starts. Then as government revenues drop and expenses rise, you have the fiscal crisis you need to stampede the public into accepting deep cuts in otherwise popular government programs.

State-level starving. The federal government can ride out a recession by borrowing, but states can't. The hidden story of the Obama stimulus was that it countered beast-starvation by passing borrowed funds down to the states.

Now that the stimulus has ended, states face the full force of the unusually deep Bush/Obama recession. Simultaneously, newly elected Tea Party governors are cutting taxes even further on corporations and property owners, intentionally making the fiscal problem worse to extract deeper spending cuts.

Targets. This would all make sense if Republicans had some specific target, some particular government waste that they wanted to eliminate. In fact they don't. Instead, conservative rhetoric has worked hard to create a vague impression of government waste, without identifying specifics beyond an occasional overpaid bus driver or bridge-to-nowhere whose cost is an infinitesimal fraction of government spending. This leads to the kind of citizen comment Democratic Congressman Paul Tonko faced at a recent townhall meeting: "I find it incredible that out of a $3 trillion budget, we can't find $100 billion to cut." The citizen can't find the cuts-that-won't-hurt-anybody either, but he is sure they must be there.

In fact the target is the entire public sector: public schools, libraries, Social Security, all of it. There is no part of government that someone has not proposed privatizing, including many military functions.

In the current state budget battles, the cuts are largely being pushed onto the schools and Medicaid. Again, this is not because specific wastes have been identified, but because conservative rhetoric insists waste must be in there somewhere.

Defund the Left. Within the beast-starving cuts is a much smaller target list: any money that might find its way back to Democrats. This explains the vehemence of the current assault on public-employee unions: Those unions support Democratic candidates. Ditto for tort reform: Trial lawyers are not just enemies of the big corporations, they are major contributors to Democrats. So anything that decreases the income of lawyers is a double win for Republicans.

The destruction of ACORN and the current attacks on Planned Parenthood and NPR are similar efforts that save minuscule amounts of money, but eliminate liberal infrastructure.

It's worth pointing out that many government contracts go to corporations that support Republican candidates, including Koch Energy, but there is no comparable liberal plan to defund the Right by canceling those contracts.

Local impact. You're likely to face the effects of  budget cuts on a very personal level: teacher lay-offs will give your child fewer curriculum options and more crowded classrooms; your street will have potholes; your union could go away; your library will cut back; emergency services will be slower to arrive; the impact of any personal misfortune will magnify as the social safety net frays.

It's important to realize that these are all effects of starving the beast. It's not an accident or a misfortune, it's a plan. If we don't realize that, we'll all be pitted against each other to maintain our slice of a mysteriously shrinking pie. People who want their school's music program restored will try to take the money from the special education budget, or vice versa. Laid-off teachers will resent bus drivers, or vice versa.

But like musical chairs, this is a manufactured crisis. We have to compete only because someone keeps taking chairs away. America continues to be a rich country. We are not broke. We can have roads and schools and adequate medical care and retirements without poverty. But we can't do that while continually slashing taxes on the rich and the corporations.

Libya: The Third War

After a UN Security Council resolution and with the support of allies including France and Britain, air strikes against Libya started Saturday. The stated purpose of the intervention is to protect civilians who were being killed, mainly by the pro-Qaddafi forces, and President Obama says no U.S. ground troops will be used.

There's a lot we don't know yet: what the full intentions of the coalition are, whether the Qaddafi opposition is coherent enough to put together a government and what kind of government it would be, how solid Qaddafi's support is, and so on. Some of these things might be known by the Obama administration, or might not.

Rather than speculate about things I don't know, I'll just say what I hope is true: I hope that Qaddafi is widely unpopular, and was being kept in power only because his side had the heavy weapons. I hope that air strikes can take out a lot of that weaponry without massive civilian casualties. I hope that Libyans who calculated that Qaddafi would win are changing their calculations and will desert him. I hope the opposition can now overthrow Qaddafi quickly, without foreign troops, and that Western troops never set foot in the country. I hope that a new government can form, can hold the country together, and can give the Libyan people the benefit of that nation's enormous oil wealth.

So far, the man difference between this intervention and the invasion of Iraq is that there is already an indigenous revolution going on; it's not just us taking out somebody we have decided is a bad guy. If that continues to be the story, this could turn out well. If not, it won't.

Watch for developments on BBC and Al Jazeera.

Short Notes

Huffington Post exposes Ashford University, a 76,000-student online money machine that is headquartered in San Diego, but maintains a Potemkin campus in Iowa for 1% of its students. Investors bought the campus, along with its accreditation, from an order of Francisan nuns whose only alternative was bankruptcy.

Now Ashford runs like one of those mortgage-lending schemes from the real estate bubble. They intensely recruit students who have little chance of college success, sign them up for federal student loans they don't understand, and give them lots of encouragement for the four weeks of enrollment necessary to qualify for the loans.

Some students do eventually get an Ashford degree, for what that's worth, but many drop out and then are surprised to discover they're in debt.

Rep. Anthony Weiner's satirical reaction to the House's defunding of NPR is hilarious.

Things are getting testy on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. A new judge gets elected April 5.

Protesters who went to the home of Wisconsin State Senator Randy Hopper were met by his wife, who says he doesn't live there any more -- he lives in Madison with his mistress. According to one report, the wife and family maid are signing the petition to recall Hopper. The mistress is a 25-year-old woman who recently got a state job making significantly more than her predecessor.

Recall petitions against the Republican state senators are going well, while the corresponding efforts against Democrats are fizzling.

This graphic compares tax cuts to budget cuts.

This strangely amusing Japanese animation explains the stomach ache of Nuclear Boy.

This Week's Challenge

This week as you listen to or read the news, think about the traps of distraction, obsession, and hype. Watch yourself watch the news, and monitor your emotional reactions. Let me know if you identify traps I should have listed.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift's Facebook page.

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Monday, March 14, 2011

I or We

The way I see it is we've got two choices. I can have my union busted and stand alone and be pitted against my neighbor in a desperate and unequal economy, or WE can come together to say, "This is what our families need. This is what our communities need. This is what a just wage is. This is what democracy looks like."

-- Wisconsin farmer Tony Schultz

at Saturday's 100,000-person rally in Madison

In this week's Sift:

  • Did We Lose? Wisconsin Governor Walker came up with a parliamentary maneuver to pass his union-busting bill without any Democratic support. So in the short term, we lost. But unlike other recent losses, this one leaves a lot to build on.
  • Money and Motivation. It seems like common sense: If you want more from people, reward the top performers. Merit pay, pay-for-performance -- it's called a lot of things. But what if the whole idea behind it is wrong?
  • Short Notes. How many lives have government regulations saved in Japan? Larry Kudlow is grateful that the human toll was worse than the economic toll. NH college students will keep the vote. Why Newt won't be nominated. Bachman gives Lexington and Concord to NH. Domestic oil production isn't providing the answer.
  • This Week's Challenge. Do one thing this week.
Did We Lose?

Friday, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed the union-busting bill that Democrats have been trying to block and the citizens of Wisconsin have been demonstrating against for the last month. He didn't compromise on anything, and also gained vast new powers to regulate the state health care system.

So it looks like we lost that one. Or did we?

How it got done. The 14 Democrats in the state Senate had escaped to Illinois to deny the Senate the quorum it needs to vote on fiscal matters. Despite a new rumor every few days saying that they were about to give in and come back, they didn't. And despite a well-funded propaganda campaign about how they needed to "come back and do their jobs" -- i.e., knuckle under to Governor Walker -- poll after poll showed the people of Wisconsin supporting their position.

Here's how it went down: After weeks of claiming that the union-busting parts of the bill were absolutely essential to close the budget gap, the Republicans reversed themselves, split the union-busting off from the rest of the bill, and then declared that union-busting part was non-fiscal, and so didn't need the 20-senator quorum. They passed it 18-1 in what the Wisconsin State Journal called "a bizarre two-and-a-half hour legislative sprint" that appeared to violate Wisconsin laws about public notice.

Democratic Senator Jon Erpanbach summed up:

They have been saying all along that this is a fiscal item; we've been saying it is not. They have been lying. Their goal is to bust up the unions.

Will it stand? Wisconsin's Open Meetings Law says that public meetings require 24 hours notice unless there is an emergency, and even then two hours are required. The conference committee that split the fiscal and non-fiscal parts of the bill did neither. Worse, notice was provided inside the Capitol at a time when access to the Capitol had been strictly limited.

So there will be a legal challenge, and it's possible the bill will get thrown out. On the other hand, the Senate clerk says everything is OK, and it's not clear that the state courts have the right to call the legislature to account for rules the legislature imposed on itself. I can't predict what will happen.

BTW, this makes the April 5 election of a new state Supreme Court justice way more interesting.

What next? The bill restricts the public-employee unions' ability to collect union dues and requires an annual re-certification election, in addition to taking off the table nearly all the issues that would make workers want to have a union to begin with. So without question, it will kill the unions in the long run.

In the short run though, not much happens other than public employees seeing their take-home pay shrink. (Governor Walker told Sean Hannity workers could make up the difference by not paying union dues: "So, you can use those five or $600 if you are a state employee that you otherwise pay for union dues or up to $1,000 for teachers' union dues, and you can use those if you chose to pay for your health care and your pension contributions.")

Other than what the courts do, the next fight is to recall the eight Republican senators who are eligible for recall. Petitions are circulating, but the process is difficult. Two senators, though, seem to be in real trouble, and their recall would send a serious message.

Energized Democrats. There are a number of lenses through which to see the two major parties: big government vs. small government, government vs. corporations, and so on. The one that paints the Democrats in the best light is: working people against the rich. That's the frame this issue reinforces, and the longer it stays in the headlines, the better for Democrats.

In all these state budget battles, Democrats are for working people, for the public schools that the children of working people attend, for the state universities working people hope to send their kids to, and for unemployment insurance and state health care assistance they will need if they ever lose their jobs. Republicans, meanwhile, are for tax cuts and subsidies for corporations, and against any regulations that will prevent corporations from abusing their workers, cheating their customers, or destroying the environment.

The longer that frame stays in place, the better for the Democrats.

Best of all, for once Democrats did not knuckle under. They lost, but they lost defiantly, determined to continue the battle and win the war. Rank-and-file Democrats are hungry for that kind of backbone -- as was obvious Saturday when nearly 100,000 energized people welcomed the 14 Democratic senators back to Madison.

Contrast this with other recent progressive losses -- for example, when the public option was removed from the health care plan. Then we were left feeling depressed and leaderless, because our leaders were the ones telling us we'd have to give in. Is it any wonder Democratic turnout was low in 2010?

I think Walker expected that pattern to repeat. The polls would back him, the Democrats would come back to Madison with their tails between their legs, and we'd all feel depressed again. That didn't happen. Instead, Walker had to pull a fast one to get his way.

Tactics. The important question is what to do with this energy and how to keep it going. Initially, I worried that there would be violence after the legislative chicanery. But through some combination of leadership and good sense among the rank-and-file, that hasn't happened.

Obviously, recalling the Republican senators is an important political move.

There has even been talk of a general strike --  a phrase that (until this week) I had not heard used seriously in the United States in my lifetime. I'm still doubtful this will happen, and I'm undecided about whether it would be a good idea. But it shows where we've gotten to: Tactics from the earliest days of the labor movement are relevant again, because (like then) the survival of the labor movement is at stake.

Lesser actions are already happening. For example, unions are urging people to take their money out of the M&I bank, which has been a major Walker supporter. The M&I boycott home page is here. The full boycott list is here. (This morning, I sold my IRA's shares in one of the boycott companies, Johnson Controls.)

What you can do. MoveOn is raising money to support the Wisconsin recall movement. You can contribute here. When I checked this morning, they were just short of $1 million.

Tomorrow, Defend the American Dream demonstrations are planned around the country to protest the ongoing attacks on the middle class disguised as state and federal budget proposals. You can find one near you here.

One way to get rich is to inherit Koch Energy from your Dad. Another way is to start out with next to nothing and use your talent to write books people enjoy reading. Strangely, the people who take these different paths look at the world differently.

Stephen King, well known as a Mainer but also a Florida snowbird, spoke to an Awake the State rally in Sarasota Tuesday. The purpose of the rally was to raise energy against the budget proposed by new Tea Party Governor Rick Scott. King said:

You might say "hey what are you doing up there, aren't you rich?" The answer is, "thank God, yes" ...  And you know what, as a rich person I pay 28 percent [federal] tax. What I want to ask you is: Why am I not paying 50? Why is everybody in my bracket not paying 50?

Scott's budget is perhaps the most naked class-war attack of any of the new Tea Party governors, because it is clearly not about closing a deficit. He proposes billions in new tax cuts for businesses and property owners while cutting public education and Medicaid, as well as cutting benefits for state workers. Scott intends Florida's business taxes to go away completely by 2018.

Conservative rhetoric says that soaring compensation for public employees is bankrupting the states. Is there anything to that? Well, no. The Center for American Progress gets numbers from the U. S. Census Bureau and graphs total worker compensation as a percentage of state spending: It's been heading slowly downward since 1992, from around 23% then to a little less than 20% now.

The states are in trouble because revenue collapsed during the recession and hasn't completely recovered. No matter how many times you hear someone say, "We don't have a revenue problem", we have a revenue problem. Tax cuts just make it worse.

Comparisons have been made between the Wisconsin legislative maneuver and the Democrats passing health care reform through the reconciliation process. There are similarities, but also some important differences: The Democrats' maneuver was discussed in public long before it happened. At the time it happened, anybody who was paying attention knew what was going on. And finally, the legal justifications of the maneuver were made in public before the fact, not afterwards.

I can't resist pointing out the time-honored history of the general strike. History's first recorded general strike was the Aventine Secession of 494 BC that resulted in the establishment of the Roman tribunes, ten plebeian officials who had veto power to protect the common people.

Department of Corrections. Last week I said:

Newly-elected Governor Scott Walker inherited a budget headed for either balance or a small surplus, which he promptly wrecked with corporate tax cuts.

This turns out not to be true, as a commenter pointed out to me. I was fooled by the fact that the budget gap was $137 million and Walker had just passed a $140 million corporate tax cut. But the the cut is for the next fiscal cycle.

I stand by the larger point of the article -- that Walker took a fairly minor budget gap and used it as an excuse for solidifying Republican power in ways that had nothing to do with the budget.

Money and Motivation in Education

The best video I saw this week -- both for content and technique -- was Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. It's 11 minutes long, has fascinating content, and demonstrates what you can do with low-tech animation tools like a whiteboard and fast forward. It's from a talk Daniel Pink gave at RSA almost a year ago, and apparently almost 5 million people saw it before I heard about it. (I've got to get better connected.)

The economic "common sense" that keeps popping up in both business and government says you can get people to work harder and produce more if you reward the top performers with more money and penalize or fire the poorest performers. This creates a king-of-the-hill environment where everybody scrambles to be the best.

Well, research shows that this only works if the task is mechanical and repetitive. If you're paying people to dig ditches or stack up cinder blocks, they'll dig or stack faster if it affects their pay.

But if the task involves skill or thought, the reverse happens: pay-for-performance actually makes performance worse. Money will get you to pay more attention to a task you don't want to do. But if you already want to succeed, money just mucks things up. (Ask any golfer standing over a million-dollar putt.)

Pink explains:

The best use of money as a motivator is to give people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough so that they're not thinking about money and they're thinking about the work. Once you do that, there are three factors that the science shows lead to better performance, not to mention personal satisfaction: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

OK, now let's look at this week's news: Florida legislators want to rate public-school teachers half on their principal's opinion and half on student test scores. High-rated teachers will be paid more, while poorly rated teachers will be paid less or fired.

This is a great idea if teaching is a mechanical job like ditch-digging or block-stacking. If teachers aren't interested in seeing their students learn, then we can pay for performance so that they get interested and work harder at the rote task of teaching.

On the other hand, what if teachers already want to teach? What if good teaching requires thought and creativity? Well, then, Pink's research says you would get better results if you just paid the teachers decently and got out of the way. Give them autonomy to try out their own ideas. Encourage them to master their profession and find a sense of purpose in the success of their students.

But rather than compare just-so stories from both sides, let's look at data. Since 2007, New York City has been trying out merit pay for teachers. Public and private sources came up with an extra $75 million for incentives. A Harvard economist (who was originally optimistic about the incentives) analyzed the results and concluded: "If anything, student achievement declined."

The economist believes differently-structured incentives still might succeed, but a commenter on the news report about this study has a different analysis:

The idea of merit pay includes an underlying assumption that teachers are operating at well below their capacity: in other words, merit pay should only be expected to work if teachers are, in fact, mostly being lazy, and are capable of much better work simply by applying themselves.
That assumption is pretty clearly embedded in the US' current public image of teachers. My own experience as an educator, however, indicates that such teachers are actually a minority of the active field of teachers. Most of the teachers I work with are working pretty near their capacity (and so couldn't be realistically expected to raise their performance in response to any sort of incentive…)

An interesting sidebar here is that the same people who believe in merit pay are also likely to believe in reforms that make teaching more mechanical and less emotionally rewarding: uniform curricula, tightly scripted lesson plans, frequent testing, and so on. Perversely, they could end up creating a situation in which their ideas pan out. Teaching could be turned into a dull, mechanical job that nobody really wants to do. And then financial incentives would make a difference.

Short Notes

I'm assuming you already know everything I do about the Japanese earthquake. JM Ashley adds this point: The headline you'll never see is Strict Government Regulations Save Millions of Lives. But that might well be the truth. Japan's building codes include a high level of earthquake-proofing, and they've done a massive amount of public education regarding disaster preparedness. As bad as this has been, imagine how a libertarian Japan would be faring.

It's hard to grasp the scale of the quake, but these numbers give you an idea: Much of the coastline of Japan's main island of Honshu seems to have moved about 8 feet, and the earth's axis shifted by 4 inches. And if you think time is speeding up, you're right: An earth-day is now 1.8 millionths of a second shorter. But Dan McNamara of the U. S. Geological Service says some of the claims for the earthquake are overblown.

CNBC's free-market cheerleader Larry Kudlow comments on the impact of the quake: "The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that."  Or at least Larry can be grateful that he has more invested more in stocks than in people.

In addition to busting unions, another element of the Republican plan to solidify power is to make it harder to vote. (Marginal voters tend to vote for Democrats.) Here in New Hampshire, we've managed to scrap a plan to disenfranchise college students.

Nate Silver explains why Newt Gingrich won't be the Republican nominee: He has no base, and his high unfavorability ratings make him a poor dark horse candidate if the early leaders falter.

Speaking of Newt, Salon has graphed "wives per GOP presidential candidate, 1988-2012". It starts at 1.17, drops to 1 in 1992, and then starts its inexorable climb to 1.8 in 2012.

The drill-baby-drill crowd knows what we have to do to protect the country from high oil prices: Increase domestic production. Guess what? We did. US oil production in 2010 was the highest since 2003, up more than 10% from its low in 2008. Have you noticed any decrease in gas prices at the pump?

Michelle Bachman continues to do everything necessary to run for president. She just got endorsed by an Iowa state senator who the Iowa Independent describes as "a favorite of Iowa's evangelical conservatives and tea partiers".

And then she came to New Hampshire and congratulated us on the battles of Lexington and Concord. Actually that was Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, but we have a Concord in NH too, so what's the big deal?

This Week's Challenge

Don't be passive this week. Whether you support my positions or not, do something to participate in democracy: Go to a demonstration, contribute to a fund, write a letter to the editor, call your representatives, boycott something, or whatever. Don't just wish things would get better. If you want, post a comment about what you did.

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