Sunday, October 3, 2010

Conspiracies and Cock-ups

Many journalists have fallen for the conspiracy theory of government. I do assure you that they would produce more accurate work if they adhered to the cock-up theory.

-- Bernard Ingham, press secretary to Margaret Thatcher

In this week's Sift:

  • Quotations of Chairman Anonymous. American movies and novels and paranoid screeds love to imagine an anonymous oligarchy: some tiny cell of nameless freemasons or immortals or aliens who really pull the strings. Well, thanks to the Supreme Court we have a real one now: Through front groups, a few rich anonymous donors may decide our elections.
  • Gaza Update. A UN report on the Gaza flotilla looks bad for Israel, but another report is still coming.
  • Spending. Politicians get away with vague calls to "cut spending" because most Americans have no idea how much the government spends or what it spends on. If you go down the list of sacred-cow programs, you don't get far before you run out of revenue.
  • Rick Sanchez. The stupid thing he said about Jews got all the press, but the point his interviewer couldn't hear about class is more interesting to me.
  • Short Notes. Bill Gates' dad gets soaked and likes it. Social networking as a political tool. Defending the stimulus. Latest polls. The phony ACORN pimp's strange new scheme goes awry. And more.
Quotations of Chairman Anonymous

American pop culture is full of anonymous oligarchies: vampires, cyborgs, aliens, immortals, ascended masters of some mystical discipline -- we can't get enough of the idea that a tiny class of powerful beings is secretly living among us and pulling the strings. Sometimes the motif jumps out of our fiction and becomes an actual hallucination: Opus Dei, Elders of Zion, Freemasons, the Trilateral Commission -- they must be the ones who really run things.

Well, this year the holes the Supreme Court has punched in campaign finance law (and Congress' inability to fill them) have given us a real, live anonymous oligarchy. We can point to their actions, but we can't say who they are.

Blue Oregon reports what is happening in one congressional district:

In Oregon this week ... the Concerned Taxpayers of America began an ad blitz in Southern Oregon, threatening to spend unlimited amounts of money to defeat US Congressman Peter DeFazio. Though commercials will air in heavy rotation, voters will have no idea who is paying to try to influence their decisions.

Thursday Rachel Maddow did a marvelous job fleshing this story out. Concerned Taxpayers of America is front organization headquartered in a house in Washington, D.C. When Rep. DeFazio went to the house (camera crew in tow), the man living there claimed to know nothing about CTA. You can't find CTA's web site on Google, and when Rachel did manage to track it down, it contained no mention of rallies, members, events, or even a request to contribute. The site contained only a mission statement and purchased clip art of models who are supposed to represent "concerned taxpayers".

CTA has already put $165,000 into ads attacking DeFazio, with more presumably to come. (DeFazio told Rachel that a complete campaign in his district typically costs about $500,000.) Given that CTA is so hard to find and isn't soliciting contributions publicly, it's a fair bet that their money doesn't come from ordinary citizens of Oregon's 4th district. So where, then? Maybe from aliens or vampires, for all we know. CTA doesn't have to say.

Billionaires are a more likely possibility. Or corporations. News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, just gave $1 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has been running attack ads against Democratic Senate candidates (including Paul Hodes here in New Hampshire). (The Chamber also advertised against the DISCLOSE Act, which would have made it harder to campaign anonymously through dummy organizations.) Which candidates is Fox telling the Chamber to target with its money? They don't have to say.

When the Citizens United decision was announced, many knowledgable people assured us it was no big deal. "Corporations cannot afford to alienate customers by overt election campaigning," Columbia law professor Henry Monaghan told the Columbia Law School Magazine.

But what if the customers -- like the voters -- never find out? If Exxon-Mobil advertises against an environmentalist candidate under its own name, voters at least have a chance to consider the source and discount the ads' claims accordingly. Offended drivers could boycott Exxon stations rather than have their own money used against them politically. But if the oil is laundered out of Exxon's money by some front organization that didn't exist two weeks ago, what then?

Blackwater might balk at openly campaigning for a new war -- and even if it did, it might create a backlash. But if it could hide behind some bogus Committee for a Non-Nuclear Iran, then why not? Political advertising could be an effective way to promote new business.

It's easy to spin these nightmare scenarios about future campaigns, but just think about where we already are. If Peter Defazio loses to Republican Art Robinson, Robinson will owe his seat in Congress to the small number of oligarchs who put up the money for the Concerned Taxpayers of America ad blitz. Oregon voters won't know who those people are. But Robinson will.

Cartoonist Mark Fiore lauds "Cashocracy: taking the guesswork out of democracy, one million dollars at a time."

Think Progress points out an odd contradiction: People who identify with the Tea Party are against free trade agreements, believing that they have helped send American jobs overseas. But candidates who identify with the Tea Party strongly support free trade. Maybe the billionaires who fund the Tea Party are calling the shots, not "We the People".

Gaza Update

Monday, the UN's Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights released its report on the Gaza flotilla incident. (Recall: On May 31, Israel seized six ships that were trying to bring aid to Gaza, which Israel is blockading. Violence broke out on one ship: Nine of that ship's passengers were killed and seven Israeli commandos were injured.)

The report looks bad for Israel. The worst is on page 27:

Forensic analysis demonstrates that two of the passengers killed on the top deck received wounds compatible with being shot at close range while lying on the ground: Furkan Doğan received a bullet in the face ...

Dogan was a 19-year-old Turkish-American. His death and five others are described on page 37 as "extralegal, arbitrary and summary executions".

The pro-Israeli group CAMERA critiques the report here. The objections boil down to:

  • If any other country did the same thing, no one would care. ("It is, after all, nothing less than bigotry and injustice to consistently judge one country by a particular set of standards while failing to apply those standards to the rest of the world.")
  • The UN report relied largely on eye-witness testimony. And since Israel was not cooperating with the investigation, that testimony was primarily from the flotilla passengers, who are anti-Israel activists. In particular, because the Israelis confiscated all video of the raid and released only carefully edited segments, the OHCHR considered the Israeli-approved videos suspect.

While the first point is probably true, it is not exactly a refutation of the report's conclusions. The second problem is something the Israeli government brought on itself. It could have fully cooperated and released all the video. (Here's the IDF video. The incident also launched dueling music videos: The pro-Israeli "We Con the World" and the anti-Israeli "Internet Killed Israeli PR" to the tune of "Video Killed the Radio Star".)

A second UN investigation was announced by the Secretary General in August. Israel is reported to be cooperating with this probe. We should soon see what that cooperation amounts to and whether the resulting report comes to any different conclusions.

Spending

The surest way for a candidate to get applause this season is to promise to "cut spending". Spending is one of those words that just sounds bad. Spending is the unfortunate half of buying. We all like to get stuff, but we hate to spend.

Just about everybody can remember opening a credit card bill and saying, "I've got to stop spending so much." It feels virtuous to say that, and it costs nothing. But a resolution to cut spending doesn't leave the realm of fantasy until it starts getting specific. Until you start picking out things you can spend less on -- things that you spend more than nickels and dimes on now -- you haven't gotten serious.

One reason we have such a low-quality national conversation about the federal government's spending is that most of us have no idea how much money the government spends or what it spends it on. So people can promise to "cut spending" while simultaneously promising not to cut just about everything we actually spend money on.

So let's lay out the basic facts with as little editorializing as possible.

First, the totals. These estimates were made in May and probably won't match the exact numbers for fiscal year 2010, which ended Thursday. But they're probably reasonably close.

Fiscal Year 2010.

Revenue: $2.333 trillion. Spending: $3.591 trillion. Deficit: $1.258 trillion

Now let's drill down into the spending part, starting with the stuff that would have been hardest to cut: interest on the national debt. The only way not to spend that $136 billion would have been to declare bankruptcy.

Next come the sacred cows, most of which you can find on Table S-4 of the link above: Defense, Homeland Security, Veteran's Benefits, Social Security, and Medicare. It's not that there's nothing to cut here, but when a candidate pledges to "cut spending", he or she usually doesn't start talking about yanking troops out of Afghanistan or making Grandma pay for her own hip replacement. (The Republicans' Pledge to America refers to "common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops" before promising to "roll back government spending".) Complaints about Homeland Security are usually that we aren't doing enough in terms of keeping out illegal immigrants or stopping drug smuggling. I haven't heard anybody pledge to cut down on border patrols.

Defense: $707 billion. Homeland Security: $39 billion. Veterans: $124 billion. Social Security: $696 billion. Medicare: $452 billion.

Total so far: $2.018 trillion. If we stop here and zero out everything else, we've got a surplus of only $315 billion. (Which is fictitious, of course. Without that additional spending the economy would have shrunk further and revenue would have dropped. But ignore that for now.) For comparison, the surplus recorded in FY 2000 under the Clinton administration was $230 billion.

Next come the relatively uncontroversial payments to people in need: disaster relief, unemployment compensation, and children's health insurance (SCHIP). Again, it's not that it's impossible to cut these programs, but it's hard to classify them as "waste". We all want the helicopters to come if we're stranded by a flood. Unemployment is paid out of a fund that workers and their employers paid into when they had jobs. And SCHIP takes care of sick kids whose parents can't pay.

disasters: $11 billion. unemployment: $158 billion.  SCHIP: $10 billion.

That's $179 billion more, so we have $136 billion left.

But we still haven't taken care of all the sick kids, because many of them get coverage under Medicaid ($290 billion). And the rest of Medicaid is also hard to classify as "waste". You may object to handing poor people cash that they might spend on drugs or guns, but do you really want to let them die when they get sick?

So there we are: We've already got a $154 billion deficit.

And there's still nearly a trillion dollars we haven't accounted for: It did stuff like build interstate highways and maintain the national parks, plus thousands of other things that may or may not be wasteful, depending on your point of view: NASA, NSF, EPA, CDC, food stamps, foreign aid, farm subsidies, non-veteran education, and so on. If you don't want a deficit, you have zero all that stuff out. Not just cut the waste -- zero out the whole program.

Summing up: If you were going to balance the 2010 budget without raising taxes, you'd have to cut $154 billion out of interest on the debt, Defense, Homeland Security, Social Security, Medicare, veterans' benefits, disaster relief, SCHIP, Medicaid, and unemployment compensation. And zero out everything else the government does.

So when candidates tell you they're going to "cut spending", don't let them handwave about earmarks, foreign aid, bridges to nowhere, or any other unpopular-but-trivial expense. Any serious attempt to balance the budget without raising taxes is going to involve serious cuts in programs most Americans believe in.

Rick Sanchez

The story of CNN firing Rick Sanchez is getting plenty of coverage. You've undoubtedly already heard that he called Jon Stewart a bigot and then said this:

I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah.

It got him fired and I have no argument with that. He should have known how close that is to an Elders-of-Zion, Jews-run-the-world conspiracy theory that a lot of dangerous people seriously believe.

Listening to larger chunks of the interview, though, I'm hearing an aspect of the story that isn't getting any coverage: The conversation turns to race and ethnicity only because the interviewer (Pete Dominick) can't hear the point Sanchez is trying to make about class prejudice.

Let's start at the beginning: Dumb things that Sanchez says or does on the air are regularly lampooned on the Daily Show. That's part of what Stewart does, and he does it to lots of news anchors -- but maybe Sanchez more than most.

Early in the interview, Sanchez is trying to say that it's way too easy for people like Stewart who grew up in educated households to dismiss everybody else as ignorant -- not because those people are actually stupid, but because they haven't been schooled in how educated people are supposed to act and sound.

So Sanchez contrasts Stewart's father (a physics professor) with his own (a Cuban immigrant who used to "work in a factory, wash dishes, drive a truck, get spit on"). Dominick seems to have no idea what point Sanchez could be trying to make (and Sanchez isn't very articulate about setting him straight), and can only hear the Jew/Hispanic difference. Dominick argues that Jews and Hispanics are both minorities, so Stewart's Jewish experience gives him insight and empathy with Sanchez's Cuban experience.

That ticks Sanchez off -- for good reasons, I think. Flustered, he starts trying to explain the difference between Stewart's career experience and his own, and screws it up.

Here's the point he should have made: Jon Stewart never had to be a trail-blazer for other Jews; Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce established the Jewish-comedian-doing-edgy-social-commentary thing half a century ago. And he didn't have to break ceilings; wherever he went, Jews had already been higher up in the organization.

Sanchez had to do both. So no, for both class and ethnic reasons, Stewart's life experience gives him no insight into Sanchez's life.

Anyway, Sanchez wasn't able to think that through on the spot and say it properly, so instead he blurts something stupid that gets him fired. That's probably also how he said the stupid things that got him skewered on the Daily Show to begin with.

Here's my take-away point: Class prejudice is so ingrained in the professional class that a lot of people (like Dominick) can't see it even when someone points to it. Forget whether or not it's true that Stewart's criticism of Sanchez was classist -- Dominick couldn't even understand the question.

A lot of criticism of the Tea Party has a classist element, which I am constantly filtering out before quoting it on the Sift.

I'm against Tea Party candidates because they say things that are factually incorrect, they promote theories that bear no resemblance to the way the world works, and they don't live up to the values they want to impose on the rest of us. But if Sarah Palin wants to say "refudiate" or write notes on her hand or give her children funny names, let her. Those are class markers, not evidence that she would be a bad president.

I'm reminded of what Jack Burden says in my favorite political novel All the King's Men: "Graft is what he calls it when the fellows do it who don't know which fork to use."

Short Notes

The best ad I saw this week: Bill Gates Sr. invites Washington voters to soak the rich.

Rebellious Pixels shows us who Glenn Beck's target audience is: Donald Duck.

I was going to write about Malcolm Gladwell's dismissal of social networking as a tool for political activism, but Sam Graham-Felsen said everything I wanted say with more authority. Short version: If you're using technology instead of interacting with people, that's bad. If you're using technology to interact with people better, that's good.

Or, from the user perspective: If you click a Like button and say, "Done now", you're not going to change the world much. But if clicking a Like button is the first tiny commitment that gets you moving towards larger commitments later, then maybe you will.

With all these new technologies, I think it's useful to imagine what non-telephone users must have asked the first telephone users: "Why are you talking to that machine instead of talking to a real person?"

Stephen Colbert skewers Justice Scalia's interpretation of the Constitution. Scalia claims to be an "originalist", which means that he wants the Constitution and its amendments interpreted the way they were at the time of ratification (unless you're talking about corporate rights; those the Court can invent to its heart's content).

Stephen spells it out:

Scalia must argue that the First Amendment only truly guarantees freedom of speech as it was spoken in 1791. If you don't like his opinion, it's his right to say, "Go bugger a Hottentot, you leprous octaroon." If you're offended by Scalia's argument, perhaps you should defend your rights with force of arms. But remember, by this argument the Second Amendment gives you the right only to bear blunderbusses and flintlock pistols.

For those few people who are paying attention to evidence this year, the stimulus was money well spent.

Nate Silver's current projections: Democrats will hold the Senate 52-48, but lose the House 224-211. As of this morning, TPM's poll average for the generic congressional ballot has the Republicans up 2%. That margin has been dropping since late August.

In general, polls are weird this year: Different organizations poll the same races at more or less the same time and get wildly different results. You can get depressed every time you see a discouraging poll, or you can look around until you find a result you like better.

My advice: If you were planning to campaign or contribute or otherwise try to affect this election, don't let a poll change your mind.

I want to see more of these White House White Board talks. In this one, Council of Economic Advisors Chair Austan Goolsbee explains the difference between the Republican and Democratic plans to extend the Bush tax cuts. It's simple and it's clear.

James O'Keefe -- the guy whose carefully staged and edited videos brought down ACORN, and who is currently serving three years of probation for attempting to bug Senator Landrieau's office -- has finally jumped the shark.

In August, CNN correspondent Abbie Boudreau wanted to interview O'Keefe for the CNN documentary "Right on the Edge" about young conservative activists. O'Keefe attempted to lure her onto a boat filled with hidden cameras and sex toys, trying to provoke reactions that could be edited into an embarrassing video. (CNN's version is here.)

Even O'Keefe's former employer Andrew Breitbart (promoter of the similarly mis-edited Shirley Sherrod video) describes his plan as "patently gross and offensive".

Jay Bakker, son of disgraced evangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, preaches about gay marriage -- and all the "amens" suddenly stop.

While researching Bakker, I mistyped and wound up reading the blog of Jay Baker, who reposted this marvelous piece about "the gay agenda".

Colorado Senate candidate Ken Buck's plan to avoid the media is working so well that he' s now stopped speaking in public at all.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or follow the Sift on Facebook.

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Monday, September 27, 2010

Stir the Pot

That's the point of social democracy: It's not just that working people get an extra chicken in the pot; more important, they get the right to stir the pot.

-- Thomas Geoghegan

In this week's Sift:

  • The Sift Bookshelf: Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? We Americans don't know much about how things work in Europe. We should. In an economy a lot like ours, ordinary people are better off. They have more free time, more access to high-quality public goods, and less to worry about.
  • Short Notes. Thomas Friedman explains why the Iraq War was "unquestionably worth doing". Katy Perry's video is banned on Sesame Street. If money is speech, three billionaires are speaking really loud. Democrats don't have to run wimpy campaigns. Jon Stewart examines the Republican "Pledge to America". And more.
The Sift Bookshelf: Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?by Thomas Geoghegan

Recent Sifts have focused a little too much on the downside: what's wrong, why it's wrong, and why it's so hard to do anything about it. How conservative propaganda works and why evidence doesn't seem to dent it. How the economy has been stagnating for everybody but the rich, and why a supposedly democratic system has been pushing that outcome.

Well, this week's book talks about how things can work better: the sick can get care, the old can retire in comfort, education can be free, cities can be safe and beautiful, and society can start re-orienting itself in a greener direction. And best of all, this isn't a happening in a visionary Utopia, it's happening in a continent: Europe.

The non-collapse of the European welfare state. Here in the U.S., we've been hearing for decades that the European system doesn't work and is headed for disaster. Back in the 70s, I saw a 60 Minutes piece about the crazy welfare state of the Netherlands, where all kinds of silly things were subsidized, taxes were spiraling upward, and soon no one would bother working because they could do just fine sitting around and collecting welfare.

You know how the Netherlands is doing, nearly 40 years after that dire assessment? Better than we are. Wikipedia lists 2009 per capita GDP according to three different sources: the IMF, the World Bank, and the CIA. The Dutch beat us in all three. Unemployment in the Netherlands is 4.8%, about half of our rate. And the unemployed Dutch are much better off than unemployed Americans, because … well, because the Netherlands is still a crazy welfare state.

Maybe over the years you've seen the same Europe-is-collapsing story about Sweden or Norway. They're doing fine too. Norway has 3.5% unemployment, Sweden 8.5%. Sweden's per capita GDP is a little less than ours, but Norway's is a lot more. (North Sea oil has something to do with that.)

America's conservative propagandists have realized that they can say anything they want about Europe, because most Americans will never go there. Most of the ones that do go will get their picture taken in front of the Eiffel Tower or have a genuine Oktoberfest beer in Munich, but they won't learn the local languages, read the newspapers, talk to the natives, or learn much of anything about how the countries actually work.

So during the debate over the Obama health-care plan, we heard the most amazing things about socialized medicine in Europe: long waits for care, no access to the latest treatments, letting the old die to save money, and so on. Pretty much none of that is true, but who cares? You can say anything about Europe. (A fairer comparison of the U.S. and French health systems appeared in -- of all places -- Business Week. See this summary table. BW covered the waiting-time issue here.)

Germany and France. Advocates of American-style capitalism brush off the comparisons to small countries. Put together, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands have a population somewhere between Texas and California -- a little over 30 million. But Germany and France put together have about 150 million people, about half the size of the U.S.  Compare us to them, people say, and you'll see the American advantage.

Well, sort of. The U.S. is 11th on the CIA's per-capita-GDP list ($46,400), while France is 16th ($41,600) and Germany 18th ($40,700). The difference is even greater when the CIA figures in factors like the over-valuation of the euro to come up with something called "purchasing power parity" GDP. Since dollars are the measuring unit, the U.S. stays the same ($46,400), while France ($32,800) and Germany ($34,100) drop.

That extra $12-14K per person makes Americans better off than Germans or the French, right?

Not exactly. First you have to adjust for inequality -- our concentration of very rich people pulls up the averages without making life any better for the ordinary person. It's tricky to find the exact statistic you'd want, but this source does a reasonable job of estimating the median rather than the average. Now the US is at $37,100, Germany at $31,300, and France at $29,500.

So that extra $6-8K per person makes Americans better off than Germans or the French. Right?

Were you born on the wrong continent? That's where Thomas Geoghegan takes up the argument. He's a labor-union lawyer from Chicago who goes to France, spends some serious time in Germany, and then explains why life is better over there for ordinary people.

Before I get into his book, two caveats: First, Geoghegan writes in a chatty that-reminds-me-of-a-story style that you will either love or hate. So this is not a book you can hand to your conservative cousins, because they'll throw it down in disgust by about page ten. Second, I think Geoghegan's numbers are spun slightly -- not false, but not always measuring the right thing. (The difference isn't extreme -- about par for the course in books with a point of view.) So I've gone looking for my own numbers rather than just repeating his.

Geoghegan makes a few arguments to knock the numbers down, and then goes into intangibles. Let's start with the numbers.

First, the main reason the Europeans make less money than Americans is that they work fewer hours. They get more vacation, more holidays, and work less overtime. In 2004, the average American worker put in 1777 hours per year, while the French average was 1346 and the German 1362. So to get your household's extra $6-8K per person, the workers in your household each put in an extra 400 hours. (Picture a family with two working parents and two kids: 800 extra working hours produce about $28K more money.)

Geoghegan argues that even 400 hours is an underestimate, because Americans are pressured to put in off-the-clock hours, while Europeans tend to knock off early. Also, Americans are more likely to live in suburbs or edge cities from which they spend a long time commuting. Those don't count as working hours in the stats, but they're not free time either.

Public goods. Purchasing-power statistics underestimate the European lifestyle, because Europeans have access to high-quality public goods that are expensive for Americans to duplicate privately. (That's the dark side of President Bush's vision of an "ownership society".)

In America we are short-changed on public goods, though there are still enough around to make the point: I live in an apartment, so I have no yard and much less space for books than I would like. But two blocks in one direction is Mine Falls Park, where I once shot a blurry photo of a wild mink. Two blocks in the other direction is a very nice public library. Imagine how rich I would have to be to provide that level of luxury for myself, by owning things, rather than by living in a city that owns them for me.

Ordinary Europeans may be poorer than we are as individuals, but they are collectively richer. They have smaller cars and pay more for gas, but they also have better, cheaper, safer public transportation. They don't have huge suburban houses, but they don't need them, because their cities are safe and provide good public schools. They enjoy public art that they could never afford to buy or display in their homes. They're less likely to have elaborate playscapes in their yards, but the public parks are clean and safe and beautiful.

You can measure the cost of such things in terms of taxes, but how do you measure their value?

Risk and competition. Europeans have less need to pile up money than we do, because they are exposed to less risk. If they get sick, they'll get health care. Their kids' education is paid for, even college. When they retire, they get a pension. If their aging parents have to go to a nursing home, the state takes care of it.

So a German with nothing in the bank is in much better shape than an American with nothing in the bank. In spite of that, the Germans save more than we do and take on less debt.

Plus, there's a more subtle effect. European society is set up for most people to succeed, so there is less competitive pressure to make sure you (or your child) gets to the top. That is another reason Americans need money.

For example, state universities in the U.S. may not be free, but some are considerably cheaper than private schools. Annual in-state tuition at the University of Arkansas, for example, is only $6768 -- one of the cheapest I could find and far less than the $36,640 at Princeton. But in an economy where only a few people really succeed and the unsuccessful face so many risks on their own, is U of A good enough? Don't you have to send your kid to Princeton if you can?

Producer spending vs. consumer spending. One very insightful concept in Geoghegan's book is the difference between producer and consumer spending. An awful lot of the extra money we get for working extra hours is spent on things we need only because we work so much. It looks like consumption in the stats, but it really is a cost of production.

In the stats, for example, a Parisian couple enjoying a leisurely night out at the bistro looks just like an American mom picking up some KFC on the way home because she had to work late and there's no time to cook. 

As we work longer hours, we really do need to eat out, bring in housecleaners, and in general contract out our lives. As I say, these are not so much "consumer" but "producer" wants. We need computers so that we can work at home, i.e., on weekends, late at night, etc. … We are not so much "consuming" as we are "investing" in ourselves as human capital.

How do they do it? If you listen to American conservatives, European socialism is all about "redistribution" -- taking money from productive people and giving it to unproductive people. And there is a kernel of truth there: European governments do make more transfer payments -- unemployment compensation, welfare, etc. -- than our government does.

But that's not the heart of the difference. In Europe, the working classes have more power to shape the system, so equality is built into the way things work, not just pasted on after-the-fact by transfer payments. The poster child here is Germany. By law, German corporations practice co-determination (mitbestimmung). Half the people on a corporate board are elected by the workers. Shareholders have a tie-breaking vote, but on any issue where the workers' representatives are united and the shareholders aren't, the workers' interest prevails.

That explains why the Germans haven't shipped all their manufacturing jobs to China.

Germans also practice regional industry-wide collective bargaining: All competing companies are committed to pay the same wages for similar job classifications, so none can get an advantage by squeezing its workers harder.

This is an important point to understand about cost-cutting in American corporations. Often it has nothing to do with efficiency or innovation. A company can cut costs just by paying people less, or by insisting that they do more for the same money. That kind of cost-cutting just re-slices the pie without doing anything to make it larger.

When one American company manages to squeeze its workers harder, its competitors are driven to follow suit in a race to the bottom. For example, when WalMart supermarkets came to California, the other groceries chains demanded cutbacks. Business Week reported: 

The industry's goal is to bring its health-care costs more in line with those of nonunion Wal-Mart Stores (WMT). The retail giant's medical plan covers fewer than half its workers, and its sales clerks earn less, on average, than the federal poverty level.

When the dust settled, the real economy hadn't changed -- the same workers did the same jobs, for the most part -- but they just made less money. That couldn't have happened in Germany, because WalMart would have been covered by the same collective bargaining agreement.

The work rules in German businesses are interpreted by works councils, who are also elected by the workers. Geoghegan explains: 

That means you help manage the place. On layoffs and other issues, the employer has to reach an agreement with the works council. So you help decide when to open and close the store. You help decide what shift someone gets. You help decide if someone gets fired. (No, I'm not kidding.) … That's the point of social democracy: it's not just that working people get an extra chicken in the pot; more important, they get the right to stir the pot.

At any moment, about half a million German workers are serving on works councils. Millions more have served at one time or another. That experience, Geoghegan claims, makes them politically aware and motivates them to stay informed. Geoghegan believes that's the reason German newspapers are fat and widely read: 

78 percent of Germans read a newspaper every day for an average of twenty-eight minutes.

Competitiveness. Hearing all that, an American pictures bloated organizations that can't compete globally and will soon be run out of business -- if not by us, by the Chinese. But that's not happening. According to the CIA, Germany exports more than the United States and only slightly less than China. Per capita, Germany exports almost four times as much as we do.

German industry survived, Geoghegan claims, precisely because its corporate structure forced it to compete on quality rather than wages. 

in the U.S. and the U.K., we got out of manufacturing because the labor costs were too low. We took the path of least resistance, competing on the basis of labor costs. Then, when that didn't work, it was so much easier to shut down.

So low-wage South Carolina stole the textile industry from high-wage Massachusetts -- for a few years, until the jobs moved on to Mexico or India or China.

Why don't we all know this already? I didn't, and I like to think I'm pretty well informed. I had no idea just how socialist Germany is. Most Americans have no idea how well health care works in France, that Denmark is energy independent, or that Sweden handled their banking collapse much more smoothly than we did.

The coverage we get of Europe, and especially of European socialism, is almost entirely negative. The Greek crisis is attributed to socialism, but not the German recovery.

Think about how often you hear that American workers need to tighten their belts, because we have to compete with the Chinese. To be more competitive, we need even deeper cuts in rich people's taxes and government benefits for the rest of us. We have to accept even more individual risk, work even longer hours, and be less particular about the environment and food safety and whether we're killing our miners.

Europe proves that it ain't necessarily so. But in a country where Disney, News Corporation, Time-Warner, General Electric and Comcast control just about everything you see or hear, why should anybody tell you?

Well, why should anybody (other than the Daily Show) tell you? Last April, Wyatt Cynac went to Sweden to expose the socialist nightmare. Part I. Part II.

Short Notes

Assuming that the Iraq War is over now, Thomas Friedman tells Charlie Rose that it was "unquestionably worth doing". What does Friedman think we got for our trillions of dollars and thousands of lives? We got to send a message to Middle Eastern Muslims: "Suck on this."

I'm increasingly amazed that Friedman is treated as if he were an insightful thinker, or even a sane one.

Racy movies used to advertise that they'd been "banned in Boston". Well, this Katy Perry video is too hot for Sesame Street, for what that's worth. At least she didn't wear this.

After their 2006 and 2008 disasters, the Republicans went into a period of soul-searching, promising to come back with new ideas. Now the fruit of their labors: their Pledge to America.

Jon Stewart brilliantly cuts between the new pledge and old footage of Republicans saying the exact same words in previous years. He sums up with the image of an abusive ex-boyfriend who wants a second chance:

"Baby, I know you left me. But if we get back together I pledge to you, I promise you I will still try to f**k your sister every chance I get. It's who I am, baby."

The media does this all the time with polls: Obama's agenda is assumed to be liberal, and then if a poll says people disagree with it, then the people must be more conservative.

Well, maybe not. According to a new poll by Associated Press, the number of people who wish the health reform bill did more is double the number who wish it did less.

I always suspected that those groups behind conservative attack ads were funded by a few rich people, but I didn't realize how extreme things had gotten.

Friday, Rachel Maddow explained how Karl Rove's American Crossroads group, which is planning to spend $52 million to elect Republicans this year, got 91% of its August contributions from three billionaires. We're not just talking about a small fraction of the public. We're talking about three people.

You want to see how a Democrat can hit a Republican hard? Check out these ads by Alan Grayson and Barbara Boxer.

Digby shoots down Ben Stein's whining about his taxes.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Help me figure out what to do with the Sift's Facebook page.

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Monday, September 20, 2010

Made For You and Me

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.
Sign was painted, it said "Private Property."
But on the other side, it didn't say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.

-- Woody Guthrie, "This Land is Your Land" (1940)

In this week's Sift:

The Sift Bookshelf: Winner-Take-All Politics

Very suddenly over the last month, the liberal side of the blogosphere has started buzzing about the concentration of wealth and income, and how the United States has become much more stratified over the last few decades.

Of course this is nothing new: You've been seeing articles about the disappearing middle class for many years. (The Bartlett and Steele best-seller America: What Went Wrong? was on the story in 1992, and the libertarian magazine Reason felt it necessary to deny the trend in 2007.) Lots of us have been talking about this for a long time, but recently we've all been talking about it at the same time. Why?

I think it's due to two new popularizations: the book Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer -- and Turned Its Back on the Middle Classby Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson which came out September 14, and Timothy Noah's 10-part series The Great Divergence on Slate, published September 3-14. Both draw from research published over the last five years by two French economists: Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty.

Winner-Take-All-Politics is a marvelous connect-the-dots book. It makes not just one point, but a series of points that fit together like train-cars.

Inequality is really happening, but not how you think. This is the part that relies on Saez and Piketty, who looked at U.S. tax data to paint a finer-grained portrait of inequality than we used to get from census data. The old statistics typically cut the country up into five 20% chunks (quintiles) or ten 10% chunks (deciles). If you do that, you can see the top quintile or decile pulling away from the rest, but it doesn't look too bad.

Saez and Piketty showed that something much more strange and scary is going on: The real action isn't in the center of the economy, it's on the extreme where the very rich live. What the rest of us are experiencing is just the trailing edge of a wave that starts there.

Within the top decile, the top 1% is pulling away even faster from the other 9%. Within the top 1%, the top .1% is pulling away faster yet, and so on. If the United States were 1000 people, the richest guy would have made 2% of the money in 1973. By 2008 his share was up to 8%. (Factoring in capital gains, it goes from 2.7% to 12.3%. In a village of 1000 people, one guy makes nearly 1/8 of the money.)

And that screws up a lot of the benign explanations. Yes, globalization and immigration force our unskilled workers to compete with the unskilled workers of the world. Yes, automation is replacing factory workers with machines. Yes, women and minorities are competing in labor markets that used to belong to white men. Yes, the educated fare better in the modern world than the uneducated. But that can't explain why the effect is most pronounced at the wealthy extreme, why we increasingly have a winner-take-all economy. None of those factors apply to the moderately rich, or explain why they can't keep up with the super-rich.

It's the government, stupid. We usually picture the economy as a natural phenomenon, and see government coming in after-the-fact to "redistribute" income. The recent decades' changes in government "redistribution" -- mainly tax and benefit cuts -- clearly benefit the rich, but aren't enough to account for the changes, so we think government is off the hook and look for larger forces like globalization.

In fact, government shapes the "free" market at every level: what can be owned or sold (your patented idea is a marketable asset, your liver isn't), who has a seat at the negotiating table (unions are represented on corporate boards in Germany, and boards have much more control over CEOs), who absorbs risk (that's what the bailouts represent: private interests transferring their risks to the public), what costs are externalized (pollution), and so on.

In the United States (and not nearly so much in Europe) government policy since about 1978 has consistently shaped the economy towards a winner-take-all structure. As a result, the U.S. used to be more egalitarian than Europe, and now is much less so. And that's not because Europe exists in a different global economy.

What about democracy? Hacker and Pierson take seriously the paradox of an elected government systematically favoring the few over the many, even when Democrats have been in power. How is that possible?

The short answer is that when a complex bureaucracy governs a complex economy, organization matters more than numbers. The rich and their corporations have gotten much more organized in the last generation, while organizations that focused workers' power (i.e., unions) have declined. Both of these patterns are embedded in vicious cycles: the government can make it harder or easier for various interest groups to organize.

The organized few beating the disorganized many explains how polls can say that 60% favor a public option in health care, but the public option doesn't even come up for a vote in the Senate. A clear majority favors letting the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthy, and it makes no sense to extend them, but even some Democrats are ready to.

Even when good laws get passed, enforcement depends on a million little things happening correctly, and the organized power of wealth is there to see that they don't happen. Loopholes get written into regulation. Regulators get appointed who don't want to enforce the law. Penalties get set at levels so low that violators just consider them a normal cost of doing business, and so on.

Organization also shapes the outcome by misdirection: Exxon never gets confused about where its interests lie in the global warming debate, but ordinary people do.

Hacker/Pierson trace this trend to the Carter administration, when huge post-Watergate Democratic majorities were unable to make any progress on a liberal agenda. The initial conditions that get the vicious cycle started are: a decline in union membership, television increases the role of money in campaigns, and the wealthy started pooling their money to create a wide-ranging infrastructure. (In the old days, GM would lobby against car safety regulations and Standard Oil would try to hang onto special tax treatment for oil wells, but neither would do much to influence a Supreme Court nomination. Now, corporate and billionaire money supports a broad conservative movement through institutions like the Heritage Foundation or the Club for Growth.)

America in a parallel universe. I don't really have the space to do the Hacker/Pierson case justice, so instead I'll illustrate in my own way how relatively subtle changes in the economic/political cycle can have huge impacts over time. Let's look at how early America could have developed differently.

America was founded not just on freedom and democracy, but also on high wages. In colonial times, the nearby western frontier worked like a minimum-wage law. If you paid people too badly, they'd go clear their own land instead of working for you.

As the frontier moved further west, the causality started working in the other direction, creating a virtuous cycle: High wages in the East allowed workers to raise the capital they needed to go west and homestead -- enough for a horse, a wagon, some tools, and the wherewithal to keep a family going until a crop came in. In Democracy in America (1835) de Touqueville described it like this:

The European emigrant always lands, therefore, in a country which is but half full, and where hands are in request; he becomes a workman in easy circumstances, his son goes to seek his fortune in unpeopled regions, and he becomes  a rich landowner. The former amasses the capital which the latter invests.

So the West was like college. You came to America and saved so that you could send your children there.

Whatever actually happened always looks inevitable. But it didn't have to work that way. If the rich in the East could have beaten down wages for just a decade or two, they could have stopped this egalitarian cycle. Then the poor would be trapped working for them for subsistence wages, and never raise the capital to go west.

Picture how it plays out from there: As the western expansion fizzles, the wealthy make the case to Congress that the policy of selling public land cheaply in small parcels (going back to the Land Ordinance of 1785) has failed. The way to settle the continent, they claim, is in vast Spanish-style haciendas.

But America's frontier isn't the open country of Mexico. So how can the rich clear the forests of Ohio and turn them into tillable land? The same way they drained the swamps of Georgia and South Carolina and established plantations there: with slaves. The case might sound a lot like the one made by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney in 1787: "the nature of our climate, and the flat, swampy situation of our country, obliges us to cultivate our lands with negroes ... without them South Carolina would soon be a desert waste." ["desert" meant "deserted" in those days, not dry.]

So the first new states get settled like this: A plantation-owning family from Virginia purchases a 10,000-acre plot from the government and sends out a younger son with a slave workforce to clear it. Any law that might stop him is standing in the way of the nation's progress, and needs to be repealed.

And this, of course, keeps the low-wage cycle going. If you want a job on the frontier, you'll have to do it cheaper than a slave. Even in Ohio, a worker can't raise the capital to move on and settle Illinois or Wisconsin. So the rich will have to manage that expansion too.

When coal is discovered in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, that also becomes a job that white (i.e. free) men won't do -- at least they won't do it for wages that compete with slaves. That becomes common sense, just like our idea today that only Mexicans will pick lettuce.

And America becomes a very different place.

You see, an egalitarian society is a fragile thing. If power and wealth ever get too concentrated -- even accidentally, even just for a little while -- then the powerful can capture enough of the government, media, and intelligensia to make their vision of the future seem like common sense. Even if you theoretically have the votes to defeat them, you can't, because any alternative vision seems too utopian to fight for.

If you want to see how the far Right responds to these ideas, look here. The vanishing middle class is Socialism's fault. The fact that it's not happening nearly as badly in countries that are more socialist than we are just doesn't come up.

Anti-Crazy is not a Winning Political Platform

Now the primaries are complete: Christine O'Donnell of Delaware has joined Marco Rubio in Florida, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Sharon Angle in Nevada, Ken Buck in Colorado, Mike Lee in Utah, and Joe Miller in Alaska in a bloc of seven Republican/Tea Party Senate candidates.

Of that group, O'Donnell is both the newest and the most unlikely: Not only does she have no government experience, she barely has a resume at all. She founded the Savior's Alliance for Lifting the Truth (SALT, as in "salt of the Earth"), a group that encouraged young people to live lives of Christian purity, particularly in regard to sex. (By now probably everyone has seen her denunciation of masturbation on MTV.) And she worked for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (a conservative non-profit focused on college students) until that job ended in a gender discrimination lawsuit in 2005. Since then she has been running for the Senate and supporting herself by doing "odd jobs" -- or maybe by illegally spending campaign funds for living expenses.

Democrats have treated O'Donnell's victory over popular Congressman Mike Castle like an early Christmas present. Castle was a shoo-in to move Joe Biden's old seat into the Republican column, but O'Donnell trails Democrat Chris Coons by double digits. Castle is refusing to endorse O'Donnell -- maybe her campaign's suggestion that he's gay ticked him off -- so the prospects for Republican unity are dim.

Still, I'm worried that the campaign against O'Donnell is off to a bad start. Despite their pro-rich, anti-working-class agenda, conservatives appeal to the working class by casting liberals as over-educated elitists who look down on people like you. So carelessly heaping scorn on O'Donnell just makes her the someone-like-you that liberals look down on.

In particular, problems in a candidate's past only work if they are substantiated in the present. Here's what I said about Obama/McCain in June, 2008:

Experience works as an issue only until the public can see the candidates side-by-side. At that point, the experience difference has to be visible in their performance -- McCain needs to look like he knows what he's talking about while Obama doesn't. If the experience advantage is invisible -- and I think it will be -- the issue goes away.

Well, crazy works the same way. If O'Donnell on the campaign trail looks no more threatening than a young Sally Field, it won't matter how many nutty things she's said in the past. But if Democrats can make an issue of the nutty things she's advocating now, then her past becomes significant again.

With that in mind, I think Rachel Maddow was on the right track Thursday when she called attention to the truly radical anti-abortion positions of the Tea Party candidates:

There are now at least five Republican Senate nominees -- five -- who not only think that the government should outlaw abortion nationwide, they think there should be no exceptions made for anybody who's the victim of incest or is the victim of rape. … What these Republican candidates are talking about is not only the federal government monitoring every pregnancy in the country to make sure that it ends the way the government prefers, which is a live birth, but they're also saying that the government should force rape victims -- the government should force rape victims, under pain of criminal prosecution -- to give birth to their rapist's baby.

In the world Sharon Angle, Cristine O'Donnell, Joe Miller, Ken Buck, and Rand Paul want to create, rape is a viable evolutionary strategy for men. We can put a rapist's body in jail, but his genes will live on.

Similarly off-the-wall Republican positions are that to return all unspent stimulus money. In other words: All those half-done road repairs should be left the way they are. Rand Paul's view that private business should be allowed to practice racial discrimination -- that's something he believes now, not some foolish idea from his benighted youth. And in the Senate, he'd have a vote on nominees for the Supreme Court.

And finally, the attack on health-care reform needs to be met head-on. Fifty million people now lack health insurance, and many of the rest of us are one lay-off away from joining them. The law that Democrats passed will cut that number in half, and give Americans security where Republicans offer them only risk. Repealing health-care reform with no plan for covering those 50 million is a truly wacky idea, and it needs to be called out as such.

If you follow the Rachel Maddow link, you'll see one thing that I think she gets wrong. She quotes Sharon Angle responding to the no-exception-for-rape abortion question :

I'm a Christian, and I believe that god has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives, and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations. We need to have a little faith in many things.

Rachel comments: "I don't know what you're supposed to have faith in" and makes a couple of guesses that miss the point. But anybody who speaks Fundamentalist knows immediately what Angle meant: You wouldn't have gotten pregnant if God didn't have a plan for your rapist's baby.

Let's be sure to call her crazy for the right reasons, and not because we don't understand what she's saying.

Restore Sanity With Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart is rallying in Washington to restore sanity. It's on: Saturday, October 30 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C, sane people will get together to "take it down a notch for America".

Not to be outdone, Stephen Colbert is having a counter-rally to Keep Fear Alive.

This is not a joke. Or rather, it is a joke, but it's also really happening. Here's hoping the Jon/Stephen combo can significantly outdraw Glenn Beck. Think about going. It will be fun.

Short Notes

Image of the Week: Fractal Wrongness.

Check out the Echo Park Time Travel Mart in Los Angeles. ("Whenever you are, we're already then.") If the slushy machine isn't working come back yesterday. But don't even think about buying fire if you're pre-Neolithic. ("No upright posture, no mastery of tools -- no fire.")

Paul Krugman's take on the folks who want the rich to keep their Bush tax cuts:

when the tax fight is over, one way or another, you can be sure that the people currently defending the incomes of the elite will go back to demanding cuts in Social Security and aid to the unemployed. America must make hard choices, they’ll say; we all have to be willing to make sacrifices. But when they say “we,” they mean “you.” Sacrifice is for the little people.

Jay Rosen's lecture to French journalism students is well worth reading. Your authority as a journalist, he tells them, "begins when you do the work" of going someplace, talking to somebody, or reading something that your readers haven't gone/talked to/read. "If an amateur or a blogger does the work, the same authority is earned."

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com.

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Friday, September 10, 2010

Propaganda

It is easy to find a man in almost any line of employment who is twice as efficient as another employee, but it is very rare to find one who is ten times as efficient. It is common, however, to see one man possessing not ten times but a thousand times the wealth of his neighbor.

-- Willford I. King
The Wealth and Income of the People of the United States (1915)

In this week's Sift:

  • Propaganda Lessons From the Religious Right. It's no longer enough just to correct the specific misinformation that comes from the Right. We need to figure out how their propaganda works.
  • Distribution of Wealth. Concentrated wealth at the top isn't just bad for the people at the bottom. It's bad for the economy in general.
  • Short Notes. Why Koran-burning is news now. What teaching in Florida is really like. Haley Barbour's fictional history of southern Republicans. What the WaPo can learn from Digby. And the Dutch example for dealing with teen sex.

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Propaganda Lessons From the Religious Right

The most frustrating thing about this election campaign is how much of it is based on nonsense and fantasy. If we were just losing a reasonable debate about, say, the role of government, I think we'd all know what to do: go back to the drawing board and come up with better policies and better ways of explaining them.

But what if we lose because sizable numbers of people believe that President Obama is a Muslim who "hates white people"? Or that the new health-care law institutes death panels? Or that the Democrats are part of some sinister plot to recruit children into homosexuality or impose sharia law?

What drawing board do we go back to then?

So often we seem to be in a battle with something we can't see. The other side makes a claim that is provably false -- like that Obama has raised taxes or quadrupled the deficit -- and rather than ask for examples or evidence, large numbers of people just nod their heads. We can't get important issues like global warming or the increasing concentration of wealth on the national agenda, while the other side can conjure issues like the ground zero mosque or Obama's czars out of thin air.

How does that work?

In a word, the problem is propaganda: The Right has the Left way outclassed in terms of propaganda. And because most of us have no idea how propaganda works, we feel like we're battling with ghosts.

For a long time the Sift has been pruning the branches of propaganda: I do a Disinformation Watch article every now and then, and most weeks some outrageous lie gets debunked in the Short Notes. But that's like digging up individual dandelions. The other side can produce a hundred new lies in the time it takes our side to research one.

This week I want to look at the larger structure of propaganda: Why does it work? Why are so many people so ready to believe these things?

Beyond Lying. The fundamental misconception most liberals have about propaganda is that it's just lying: Say something false, repeat it often enough, and people will start to believe it. Superficially, "death panels" worked that way. Overnight the phrase was everywhere, repeated by so many people that it seemed like there must be something to it, even it had been exaggerated.

But if propaganda was just lying, then truth-telling would undo it. All we'd have to do would be to get more people telling our truth than their lie, and we'd win.

How often have you seen that work?

Beyond Framing. A frame is a metaphoric template that organizes the individual facts about an issue. What makes them so effective is that most of the action is unconscious: You can invoke a frame by using some of its words and images, without ever justifying that it's the right way to think about the issue. When neo-cons talked about "appeasing" Saddam, that one word invoked the whole Hitler/Munich frame, in which the enemy is implacable and war is inevitable. And because those ideas stayed in the background, they didn't have to support them with evidence.

The problem is that counter-framing also doesn't work very often -- for reasons that liberal framing godfather George Lakoff understands but has trouble communicating. It's in his books, but it seldom comes across.

What most liberals miss about framing is that effective framing doesn't happen in mid-debate. Effective framing is laid down in layers, over decades or even centuries.

The only way I can think to explain this is through example. I want to take a very small-but-specific issue: The current religious-right argument that anti-bullying campaigns in the schools are part of some sinister gay agenda that takes away the rights of Christian parents. And I want to describe some of the layers of frames that make their argument so undeservedly convincing and so hard to argue against.

It Starts With the Devil. Like a lot of traditional faiths, the Christian Right's theology includes a Devil. This isn't the place to argue about the existence of a Prince of Darkness, but I want to point out what you can do once you have a Devil in your theology.

The Devil is the ultimate sinister conspirator, motivated by pure evil. Once you have a Devil, it follows without evidence that there is a conspiracy against anything true and good and right. How could there not be? The Devil is against it, and unless he has suddenly lost his innate cleverness and his characteristic ability to lie and tempt and cajole, he will have followers.

So if you are arguing in front of a Devil-postulating audience, you don't have prove that there is a conspiracy against the Good -- of course there is -- you only have to identify that conspiracy. The Manichean frame (God/Devil, Good/Evil) is sitting there, waiting for you to connect yourself with Light and your opponent with Darkness.

Once you've done that, the hardest part of establishing a conspiracy theory -- giving it a motive -- is accomplished. So when President Bush said of terrorists

They are a movement defined by their hatreds. They hate progress, and freedom, and choice, and culture, and music, and laughter, and women, and Christians, and Jews, and all Muslims who reject their distorted doctrines.

large numbers of people just nodded their heads in recognition. They didn't ask for evidence that such people exist or wonder why anyone would sign up with them. The Devil has minions. How could he not?

Layer II: Reverse discrimination. The second layer isn't quite so universal as the Devil, but it has been used for decades in so many circumstances that it also can be invoked largely without evidence: Maybe the weak were persecuted generations ago, but in our era the tables have been turned, and it is actually the strong that are persecuted.

Now the law favors blacks over whites, non-Christians over Christians, the poor over the rich, gays over straights, foreigners over English-speakers, illegal immigrants over citizens, and on and on and on.

In general, minority rights are controversial in a democracy, and special action is required to make things equal. No matter how bad things are for the minority, the special action can always be cast as some kind of privilege. (The Little Rock Nine were escorted by the 101st Airborne Division. But I had to fend for myself when I went to high school.)

Almost invariably, the examples of reverse discrimination fall apart when looked at closely. (The Christian church near Ground Zero that hasn't been rebuilt yet was part of a deal involving millions in public money. It's not an example of Christians being treated worse than Muslims.) Majorities are powerful in America, and they can get their cases favorably resolved.

This layer serves two purposes. First, it corrupts the language of equality, devaluing it in the same way that counterfeit money devalues real money. "You're discriminated against? No, look at me, I'm discriminated against."

But in the longer term, the second purpose is even more significant: By constant repetition, the notion that the majority is persecuted becomes axiomatic -- at least in the eyes of the majority. If a minority is claiming rights and wanting government intervention, it must be trying to claim an advantage. There's no need to specify that advantage too exactly, or to substantiate examples of majority persecution.

You can see Layers I and II working together in the claim that same-sex-marriage advocates want to destroy traditional marriage. ("this is the ultimate goal of activists," writes James Dobson, "and they will not stop until they achieve it.") It's an unmotivated conspiracy of the minority to oppress the majority. What would same-sex couples gain by destroying traditional marriage? How are opposite-sex couples harmed when same-sex couples marry? Among the faithful these questions are answered by the unconscious assumptions in the frame; more specific answers are unnecessary.

Tactics. There are other layers -- the poor are lazy, traditional sexual morality is related to non-sexual moral issues like honesty and integrity -- but lets just stick with those two and see how they influence tactics. The main thing to remember is: When you work within a long-established frame, you don't have to prove anything, you just have to fill in the blanks.

Think about Glenn Beck's chalkboard talks. If you make yourself watch one, I predict you'll come out saying, "What was that all about?" They're all names and labels: So-and-so is a Marxist and is connected to this other guy who has some kind of relationship with Obama. It doesn't sound like an assemblage of evidence, because it isn't. He's just helping his audience identify an enemy that abstract principles tell them must exist.

And only now do the lies come in: to vilify some person like Van Jones. And pointing out that the lies are lies gains very little: The point is the pattern of accusations, and if this one or that one isn't true, well, what of it?

The lies exist inside a web of mischaracterization. No enemies are quoted in complete sentences or allowed to speak in their own words at length and in context. Everything is summarized and labelled.

Applied Tactics. The easiest way to see how tactics work is to look at some small issue you haven't thought much about before. For me this week, that was the Religious Right's attempt to smear a campaign against bullying in schools. (It's part of the "gay agenda" to "sneak homosexuality lessons into classrooms".)

It's a comparatively young smear, so you can read a nearly complete collection of documents in a short time. Start with an article called Parents beware of deceptive "anti-bullying" initiatives. (You can pull the glossier print version off the truetolerance.org main menu.)

If you come to the article wondering what is happening that you as a parent should worry about, you will be confused. LIke the Beck chalktalk, most of it goes right past the uninitiated, leaving a "What was that about?" feeling.

Instead you'll learn that local anti-bullying organizations have "ties" to gay-friendly organizations. (Given how often bullying involves insults like "queer" or "faggot", it would be strange if they didn't.) They're also "tied" to "President Obama's controversial 'Safe Schools czar' Kevin Jennings". (Czars are bad, even when they're doing exactly what their job titles indicate.)

You'll also learn about things that might happen or even could be happening right now: gay activists "infiltrating classrooms" which would be "transformed into indoctrination centers" with "mandatory homosexuality lessons". You're well into the second page before you run into anything that actually did happen:

the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance [was] heavily involved in crafting state legislation that makes “sexual orientation” and “gender-related identity” protected categories in schools.

No clue what that would actually mean in terms of stuff happening in the schools, but it plugs into the "special rights" frame. The minority is oppressing the majority again! When good Christian kids scream "queer!" in some other kid's face, they will be in trouble instead of the homo.

A variety of books and videos are identified as things to watch out for. They are pejoratively summarized in a few words, never linked to, and never quoted in complete sentences. The only way you can check these summaries is if they mention a title you can google and look up on your own.

(I managed to look up and read Just The Facts About Sexual Orientation and Youth, a pamphlet intended for teachers and school administrators. The religious-right counter-pamphlet Just the Real Facts Please, is then easily seen to be a collection of non-sequiturs that use out-of-context quotes as excuses to go off on tangents. But how many people are going to go to that much trouble? Most will just know that there is a good pamphlet refuting the bad pamphlet.)

What to do? Imagine being a liberal parent and having a religious-right parent give you Parents Beware as part of a we-have-to-do-something talk. What can you say? You can't argue with a case that hasn't been made, with "ties" and sinister fantasies that don't involve any checkable facts. It is impossible to prove that some organization you just heard of isn't in league with the Devil.

This problem shows up again and again. Take the so-called Ground Zero Mosque: What exactly its opponents are afraid of and what exactly they want to do about it has remained fluid. Arguing about it has been like wrestling with a jello monster.

Tactically, when you have these kinds of discussions one-on-one, I recommend a judo strategy: Draw the other side out before you object. You can't argue with unconscious assumptions, so make them state a problem and propose a solution. If they can't, ridicule them for that -- don't take the bait and go down some tangent.

Long-term, we need to recognize that we can't re-frame issues in mid-debate just by making up new slogans and new metaphors from scratch. The other side is using multiple layers of frames, the deepest of which have been laid down centuries ago. We need to get in touch with our own deep layers (which go back to the Enlightenment, the Sermon on the Mount, and timeless notions of fairness) and work to nurture and promote those ideas in everything we do. When we do that, we can speak with a power and authenticity that is very different from "spin".

Wednesday in DailyKos I addressed a different level of propaganda: How right-wing money creates bogus think tanks whose bogus experts get quoted even in supposedly liberal venues like the New York Times.

Distribution of Wealth

Just about the only time I hear the phrase distribution of wealth these days is when somebody like Glenn Beck talks about redistribution of wealth -- that's when the evil Marxists come, take away the money you earned by your hard work and brilliance, and give it to the lazy stupid people.

This week, though, Slate's Timothy Noah started a series called The Great Divergence, about why the portion of our national income that goes to the rich has grown so much over the last 30 years. (Inequality peaked just before the Great Crash in 1929, fell from the 30s through the 70s, and recently has returned to 1929 levels.)

I had planned to cover that series in this week's Sift, but it isn't finished yet. So next week I'll discuss Noah's points (and possibly the new book Winner-Take-All Politics which takes on related issues).

This week I just want to make one point: It's no coincidence that high concentrations of wealth and bad economies go together. When you shift money from the poor and middle class to the rich, demand drops. That can turn into a deflationary cycle if business adjusts to lower demand by cutting jobs, which then lowers demand further.

What was the real difference between the Happy-Days economy of the 50s and the Grapes-of-Wrath economy of the 30s? We had the same natural resources, similar technology, similar culture. But in between, the war gave our government a reason to tax the rich and spend an enormous amount of money. That shifted the distribution of wealth, moving the economy to a high-demand, high-production mode rather than a low-demand, low-production mode.

Short Notes

The best coverage of the Koran-burning minister came from Rachel Maddow:

For the most part, [this story] has been talked about in terms of religious freedom and First Amendment rights.  That‘s the way that the national, responsible mainstream media dealt with this story. But that‘s actually the wrong frame for this story. He is a kook doing as kooks do.

Religious nutjobs have burned Korans in public before and no one cared. But they're newsworthy now because supposedly serious political figures like Newt Gingrich are mining the same vein of war-with-Islam craziness.

A major piece of the conservative government-is-evil rhetoric is to demonize everybody who gets a paycheck from the taxpayers: They're all lazy parasites (unless they die, like the 9-11 firefighters).

From the Facebook wall of my sister the teacher, an essay by a Florida teacher explaining how things really are:.

I am required to teach Social Studies and Writing without any curriculum/materials provided, so I purchase them myself. I am required to conduct Science lab without Science materials, so I buy those, too. The budgeting process has determined that copies of classroom materials are too costly, so I resort to paying for my copies at Staples, refusing to compromise my students’ education because high-ranking officials are making inappropriate cuts. It is February, and my entire class is out of glue sticks. Since I have already spent the $74 allotted to me for warehouse supplies, if I don’t buy more, we will not have glue for the remainder of the year.

No doubt she's living like a princess on her $28K a year.

Here's what I wonder: Each kind of government worker -- teachers, police, fire, and so on -- knows that the conservative rhetoric about them is false. Do they realize that it's false about the other government workers too? Or do they believe that the folks at the DMV are living it up?

Haley Barbour is rewriting the history of civil rights in the South to put himself and the Republican Party on the right side. The truth: When the Democrats embraced civil rights, white racists switched parties and became Republicans. And they were welcomed with open arms.

Digby points out one way in which bloggers are more thorough than Washington Post reporters: Before we quote a congressman, we'll google him to make sure he's real.

You know whose statistics on teen pregnancy and STDs we should envy? The permissive Dutch.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com.

 

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