I was listening to the impeachment hearings live broadcast today to get an update about the kind of defense Republicans are running. At various times, they've floated different way to defend Trump, including Nick Mulvaney's, "It's not a crime, we do it all the time" and Laura Ingraham's, "Attempted crimes aren't crimes." But Republicans' go-to game plan remains, "This is all a fantasy on the part of Democrats." On November 13 (a very long time ago, as it predates the public impeachment testimony), Republican Congressman Mark Meadows tweeted:
4 inconvenient facts for the Democrat impeachment fantasy:
- Call transcript shows zero link between aid and political investigations
- Aid was released WITHOUT any new investigations
- Ukraine didn’t know aid was withheld during the call
- Trump/Zelensky both say: zero pressure
There was plenty of publicly available information to contradict the above tweet eight days ago, and more has come out since then. But this Republican line of defense endures. Broken down point by point, these specious lines of reasoning all function the same way: they only work if one takes a single fact, discusses that fact out of context, and ignores every related, contradictory fact. Let me show you what I mean.
Myth: Call transcript shows zero link between aid and political investigations
Fact: While it's true that Trump and President Zelensky didn't discuss the withheld aid package on the phone call that prompted the whistleblower complaint that lead to the impeachment investigation, there was a direct quid pro quo: Zelensky inquired about purchasing military aid, and Trump's response was, "I would like you to do us a favor though" in the from of politically-motivated investigations. Regarding the congressional aid package however, Ukraine was informed by E.U. Ambassador Gordon Sondland that there was little chance the aid would be forthcoming until they made a public statement committing to opening the investigations. Sondland has testified that while the tie between the release of the aid and the investigations was a presumption on his part, there was a quid pro quo from the White House communicated to him tying other calls and meetings with President Trump sought by Ukraine to the public announcement of those same investigations.
Myth: Aid was released WITHOUT any new investigations
Fact: The congressional aid package was released, not coincidentally when the whistleblower complaint was about to go public. The Ukrainians had indeed decided to announce the investigations based on the pressure they were facing from Trump. President Zelensky had planned to go public with the investigations live on CNN on September 13, but called off the announcement due to the release of aid.
Not a myth, but a misleading fact: Ukraine didn’t know aid was withheld during the call
Fact: They knew it a few days later.
Not a myth, but a misleading fact: Trump/Zelensky both say: zero pressure
Fact: In the first post in this series, I discussed the documentation that President Zelensky and his team felt enormously pressured by the conflict between their need for promised American support and Trump's demands for poltically-motivated investigations; this despite Zelensky had said, "No one pushed me" while sitting next to President Trump.
Thursday, November 21, 2019
Sunday, November 17, 2019
A Few Links to Dispel Conservative Myths: The Impeachment of Trump, Part Two: The Conspiracy Theories (Look, No One Wants Nude Pictures of Trump)
So if Democrats are trying to impeach the President based on a narrative of certain events, his defenders obviously need an alternate narrative. A problem for those defenders: the case against Trump's creation of a shadow foreign policy that included withholding aid to Ukraine until that country announced investigations damaging to Trump's political opponents is rock solid. So much so that Republicans are having to resort to far out conspiracy theories to try and clear the President of wrongdoing (or at least create a lot of distractions from that wrongdoing).
And who better than to repeat all the craziness Republicans have been circulating than California Congressman David Nunes, who, at the impeachment hearings this week used his time to air, (from Will Sommer of The Daily Beast, "conspiracy theories that are little-known outside of Fox News and the right-wing media ecosystem, and were widely divergent from what witnesses Ambassador William Taylor and State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent were at the hearing to discuss."
From the Republican point of view, Nunes is the perfect guy to spread their cuckoo-bananas nonsense, as he has a lot of experience in the craft. Earlier this year, during the Mueller Special Counsel investigation, Nunes offered up far out (and debunked) theories regarding a "deep state" conspiracy between Democrats, rogue US government officials and Russia to discredit Trump.
As sometimes happens with current events, the article I intended to write today has already been written by someone else. In this case, the debunking of the conspiracy theories Republicans are using to prop up Trump has been covered very well by Grace Panetta of Business Insider in an article titled, Congressional Republicans are repeating many baseless conspiracy theories in Trump's impeachment inquiry. Here's why they're all bogus.
From the article:
Here's a breakdown of the conspiracy theories many Republicans are pushing and why they don't hold up:
Hunter Biden committed corrupt activity in Ukraine, and his father tried to cover for him
The entire impeachment inquiry centers around Trump and the GOP's discredited claim that in his capacity as vice president, Biden tried to help his son by calling for the firing of Viktor Shokin, a prosecutor they say was investigating Burisma.
Despite Trump and Giuliani's allegations, both US and Ukrainian government officials have confirmed there's no evidence that the Bidens did anything improper.
(Note from Joe: Read the article if you'd like to read a lot more about the complete lack of any reason for further investigation of Hunter Biden.)
---
Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election to benefit the Democratic party
On the July 25 call, Trump also referenced a discredited conspiracy — also heavily pushed by Giuliani — that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and that Ukraine was somehow in possession of a DNC server.
"I would like you to do us a favor though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike ... I guess you have one of your wealthy people ... The server, they say Ukraine has it," Trump said on the call.
The US intelligence community has conclusively established that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to undermine Hillary Clinton by hacking the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.
In the call, Trump was referencing the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which the DNC retained to help them respond to Russia's breach of its servers during the 2016 election.
"The server" refers to an unfounded conspiracy theory that the DNC hid an incriminating server from the FBI while the bureau was investigating Russia's hack, and that the server contains information about who was really responsible for the breach.
In reality, there is no single, physical DNC server, and there is no evidence that Ukraine's government "hid" it from investigators or was in any way involved in the 2016 US presidential election.
CrowdStrike's CEO George Kurtz told CNBC that Trump's reference to CrowdStrike in the Zelensky call was "unintelligible, to be honest."
(Note from Joe: The idea that Ukraine, rather than Russia, interfered in the 2016 US election is supposed to bolster the idea that Trump had legitimate reason to call for "investigations" in the Ukraine, as if he was interested in more than stirring up doubt against Joe and Hunter Biden.)
---
A DNC operative named Alexandra Chalupa conspired with Ukraine to spread dirt on Trump
As part of the conspiracy that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, some have also claimed that a DNC operative named Alexandra Chalupa coordinated with the Ukrainian government to dig up dirt on Trump.
In reality, Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American Democratic political consultant and operative, ran a minority engagement program for the DNC in 2016 and communicated with Ukrainian officials about Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who served as an advisor and lobbyist on behalf of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.
There is no evidence Chalupa conspired with Ukraine to conduct any kind of opposition research with regard to Trump. Manafort resigned from the Trump campaign in August of 2016, and is currently serving a seven-and-a-half year federal prison sentence for financial fraud, failing to register as a foreign agent, and witness tampering.
---
Democrats tried to collaborate with Ukraine to obtain nude pictures of Trump
The Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, twice claimed that Democrats collaborated with "people they thought were Ukrainians" to get nude photos of Trump. Nunes made these statements in the September 26 public testimony of the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, and in the November 15 testimony of Marie Yovanovitch, former US ambassador to Ukraine.
In 2018, The Atlantic reported that two Russian pranksters posing as members of Ukraine's parliament prank-called House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff claiming to have "pictures of naked Trump" from a purported encounter Trump had with a famous Russian woman.
While Schiff said on the call that the information was "helpful," his staff told The Atlantic in a statement that they had alerted law enforcement before and after the call that it was "probably bogus."
And who better than to repeat all the craziness Republicans have been circulating than California Congressman David Nunes, who, at the impeachment hearings this week used his time to air, (from Will Sommer of The Daily Beast, "conspiracy theories that are little-known outside of Fox News and the right-wing media ecosystem, and were widely divergent from what witnesses Ambassador William Taylor and State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent were at the hearing to discuss."
From the Republican point of view, Nunes is the perfect guy to spread their cuckoo-bananas nonsense, as he has a lot of experience in the craft. Earlier this year, during the Mueller Special Counsel investigation, Nunes offered up far out (and debunked) theories regarding a "deep state" conspiracy between Democrats, rogue US government officials and Russia to discredit Trump.
As sometimes happens with current events, the article I intended to write today has already been written by someone else. In this case, the debunking of the conspiracy theories Republicans are using to prop up Trump has been covered very well by Grace Panetta of Business Insider in an article titled, Congressional Republicans are repeating many baseless conspiracy theories in Trump's impeachment inquiry. Here's why they're all bogus.
From the article:
Here's a breakdown of the conspiracy theories many Republicans are pushing and why they don't hold up:
Hunter Biden committed corrupt activity in Ukraine, and his father tried to cover for him
The entire impeachment inquiry centers around Trump and the GOP's discredited claim that in his capacity as vice president, Biden tried to help his son by calling for the firing of Viktor Shokin, a prosecutor they say was investigating Burisma.
Despite Trump and Giuliani's allegations, both US and Ukrainian government officials have confirmed there's no evidence that the Bidens did anything improper.
(Note from Joe: Read the article if you'd like to read a lot more about the complete lack of any reason for further investigation of Hunter Biden.)
---
Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election to benefit the Democratic party
On the July 25 call, Trump also referenced a discredited conspiracy — also heavily pushed by Giuliani — that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and that Ukraine was somehow in possession of a DNC server.
"I would like you to do us a favor though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike ... I guess you have one of your wealthy people ... The server, they say Ukraine has it," Trump said on the call.
The US intelligence community has conclusively established that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to undermine Hillary Clinton by hacking the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.
In the call, Trump was referencing the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which the DNC retained to help them respond to Russia's breach of its servers during the 2016 election.
"The server" refers to an unfounded conspiracy theory that the DNC hid an incriminating server from the FBI while the bureau was investigating Russia's hack, and that the server contains information about who was really responsible for the breach.
In reality, there is no single, physical DNC server, and there is no evidence that Ukraine's government "hid" it from investigators or was in any way involved in the 2016 US presidential election.
CrowdStrike's CEO George Kurtz told CNBC that Trump's reference to CrowdStrike in the Zelensky call was "unintelligible, to be honest."
---
A DNC operative named Alexandra Chalupa conspired with Ukraine to spread dirt on Trump
As part of the conspiracy that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, some have also claimed that a DNC operative named Alexandra Chalupa coordinated with the Ukrainian government to dig up dirt on Trump.
In reality, Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American Democratic political consultant and operative, ran a minority engagement program for the DNC in 2016 and communicated with Ukrainian officials about Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who served as an advisor and lobbyist on behalf of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.
There is no evidence Chalupa conspired with Ukraine to conduct any kind of opposition research with regard to Trump. Manafort resigned from the Trump campaign in August of 2016, and is currently serving a seven-and-a-half year federal prison sentence for financial fraud, failing to register as a foreign agent, and witness tampering.
---
Democrats tried to collaborate with Ukraine to obtain nude pictures of Trump
The Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, twice claimed that Democrats collaborated with "people they thought were Ukrainians" to get nude photos of Trump. Nunes made these statements in the September 26 public testimony of the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, and in the November 15 testimony of Marie Yovanovitch, former US ambassador to Ukraine.
In 2018, The Atlantic reported that two Russian pranksters posing as members of Ukraine's parliament prank-called House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff claiming to have "pictures of naked Trump" from a purported encounter Trump had with a famous Russian woman.
While Schiff said on the call that the information was "helpful," his staff told The Atlantic in a statement that they had alerted law enforcement before and after the call that it was "probably bogus."
---
Future articles in this series will cover subjects including Trump's mischaracterizations of his infamous call with President Zelensky, and the lingering possibility that impeachment of Trump will include obstruction of justice in the Mueller investigation. Of course with public hearings just getting rolling, who know what kind of crazy nonsense Republicans will be throwing out there? I'll be covering that too.
Saturday, November 16, 2019
A Few Links to Dispel Conservative Myths: The Impeachment of Trump, Part One: Quid Pro Quo
Between September of 2014 and September of 2017, I wrote a fourteen-part series on the myths and lies Republicans and conservatives tell about health care, climate change and many other subjects. Donald Trump killed the series. How can I possibly fact check a President who more made more than 13,000 false and misleading statements during his first 1,000 days in office?
But now that Trump is facing impeachment, I can't help but bring the subject of conservative lies out of retirement, given the furious way Republicans are using every kind of falsehood and misleading argument in a desperate attempt to keep Trump in office. Before we dive in, a quick review of where we are: In September, Democrats commenced hearings that might have lead to the impeachment of President Trump when they subpoenaed former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in connection with the Special Counsel investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials, conducted by special prosecutor Robert Mueller from May 2017 to March 2019. Long story short, Trump's actions in the Mueller investigation left him open to charges of obstruction of justice. There's also been talk of impeachment of Trump over the Stormy Daniels payoff, and his violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution.
Suddenly, a bombshell: a whistleblower's complaint was given to Congress on September 25, 2019 revealing a phone call between Trump and Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky implying that U.S. military aid approved by Congress to Ukraine was to be withheld until Zelensky gave in to demands that the leaders of Ukraine publicly announce investigations of former U.S. vice president and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that six committees of the House of Representatives would undertake a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Those committees began taking depositions immediately, and public hearings started this week.
Republicans in response have been throwing out excuse they can think of to derail the impeachment of Trump, including, "Trump is too dumb to commit this crime." That one is a bit too subjective for this blog post; I'll be sticking to the Republican excuses that are objectively false. And away we go.
Myth: The whistleblower complaint is not legitimate, as it is "hearsay".
Fact: In the first days in the formal impeachment inquiry, Republicans complained a lot that the Democrats shouldn't even be able to hold hearings, or demonstrate that Trump might have committed a crime on the Trump-Zelensky call, as the government official who submitted the complaint didn't actually hear the call. From Sarah Lustbader of the Washington Post, "The first problem with the Republicans’ hearsay defense is that the White House’s rough transcript confirmed much of what the whistleblower was told by several officials. But even if that memo had not been released, the complaints about hearsay would be missing the mark. Hearsay does not mean "unreliable information," and it can play an important and legitimate part in many kinds of investigations and legal proceedings. So while Trump and his allies are correct that the whistleblower report could not, by itself, be introduced as evidence in a criminal trial, that’s entirely beside the point." And of course, the "hearsay defense" has been rendered moot by the fact that we have a transcript of the Trump-Zelensky phone call with a smoking gun in the form of the now infamous "prid pro quo". Speaking of which...
Myth: There was "no quid pro quo" - there exists no evidence that the reason why Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine was because he was pressuring officials there to open investigations of Joe and Hunter Biden.
Fact:
1. The quid pro quo is in the call transcript that was the basis for the whistleblower complaint:
Zelensky: "We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps. Specifically we are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United· States for defense purposes."
Trump: "I would like you to do us a favor though"
Now the above exchange doesn't prove that Trump withheld the aid Congress approved in return for an investigation of the Bidens. However,
2. White House Chief of Staff Mike Mulvaney (bizarrely) flat-out admitted the quid pro quo. From CNN: "White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney made a stunning admission Thursday by confirming that President Donald Trump froze nearly $400 million in US security aid to Ukraine in part to pressure that country into investigating Democrats."
"That's why we held up the money," Mulvaney said"... "Get over it."... "We do that all the time with foreign policy."
Now Mulvaney quickly tried to walk back that admission, but the quid pro quo had been proven in myriad ways, including:
3. Rudy Giuliani, the President's personal lawyer, told U.S. special envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker to push Ukraine's newly elected president to publicly promise he would order an investigation into Hunter Biden.
4. Based on a phone conversation with Trump, Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, told a Ukrainian official that security assistance to the country would be likely to resume only if the authorities in Kyiv opened the Biden investigations.
Other U.S. government officials have confirmed these same facts.
Myth: According to the White House, the investigation is not legitimate because the full House had not voted to authorize it.
Fact: No full vote is needed to authorize an investigation and the House is not obligated to let Trump’s lawyers participate. This argument was rendered moot by the House's full authorization vote, passed on Halloween no less.
Myth: The Democrats' early closed-door impeachments hearings were an unfair, dangerous and secretive process.
Fact: The House rules being used by Chairman Adam Schiff have been in place since 2015 when Republicans were in the majority. "The House rules permit committee chairs to hold closed hearings on matters of national security or intelligence. Diplomatic matters implicate both national security and intelligence. The rules also permit standing committees – as opposed to the full House – to issue subpoenas. As well, they permit interviews of witnesses in secret in order to determine if they are credible enough to present in public." - Fox News political commentator and legal analyst Andrew Napolitano
Myth: Speaker Pelosi has suggested that the quid pro quo may result in an impeachment charge of bribery against the President, but, "Attempted bribery isn't in the Constitution." - Laura Ingrahan of Fox News
Fact: Some Republicans are trying to suggest that the quid pro quo, if it did exist, isn't a criminal act or an impeachable offense. However, (from John Nichols of The Nation): "Apart from the problem of a "defense" that suggests the president was trying to do wrong but didn’t fully achieve his goal, this argument splits the wrong hair. Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute reminds us: "Attempts to bribe exist at common law and under the Model Penal Code, and often, the punishment for attempted bribery and completed bribery are identical." That’s useful. But even more useful is an understanding of the fact that impeachment is not a legal intervention that requires evidence of a specific criminal act or statutory violation, as President Trump and so many of Republican allies on the House Intelligence Committee so desperately want the American people and their elected officials to imagine."
Myth: The aid was eventually released, and President Zelensky has said he did not feel pressured to open the Biden investigations. So if there's no victim, there's no crime. Republican Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota: "Zelensky doesn’t feel like he was pressured. I don’t know who the rest of the world is to feel victimized on his behalf."
Fact: The U.S. authorized the aid to the Ukraine as a matter of national security. By delaying the aid package, the victims were the American people. According to Laura Cooper, a Defense Department official, whose deposition was released Monday in the House impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump: "My sense is that all of the senior leaders of the U.S. national security departments and agencies were all unified in their — in their view that this assistance was essential," she said. "And they were trying to find ways to engage the President on this."
Furthermore, while Zelensky did state, while sitting next to President Trump, that he was not pressured by Trump to open the Biden investigations, in private he was very concerned about the quid pro quo. From the Chicago Tribune: "Volodymyr Zelenskiy gathered a small group of advisers on May 7 in Kyiv for a meeting that was supposed to be about his nation's energy needs. Instead, the group spent most of the three-hour discussion talking about how to navigate the insistence from Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, for a probe and how to avoid becoming entangled in the American elections, according to three people familiar with the details of the meeting."
"The three people's recollections differ on whether Zelenskiy specifically cited that first call with Trump as the source of his unease. But their accounts all show the Ukrainian president-elect was wary of Trump's push for an investigation into the former vice president and his son Hunter's business dealings."
Much more to come as we enter the second public week of impeachment hearings.
But now that Trump is facing impeachment, I can't help but bring the subject of conservative lies out of retirement, given the furious way Republicans are using every kind of falsehood and misleading argument in a desperate attempt to keep Trump in office. Before we dive in, a quick review of where we are: In September, Democrats commenced hearings that might have lead to the impeachment of President Trump when they subpoenaed former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in connection with the Special Counsel investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials, conducted by special prosecutor Robert Mueller from May 2017 to March 2019. Long story short, Trump's actions in the Mueller investigation left him open to charges of obstruction of justice. There's also been talk of impeachment of Trump over the Stormy Daniels payoff, and his violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution.
Suddenly, a bombshell: a whistleblower's complaint was given to Congress on September 25, 2019 revealing a phone call between Trump and Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky implying that U.S. military aid approved by Congress to Ukraine was to be withheld until Zelensky gave in to demands that the leaders of Ukraine publicly announce investigations of former U.S. vice president and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that six committees of the House of Representatives would undertake a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Those committees began taking depositions immediately, and public hearings started this week.
Republicans in response have been throwing out excuse they can think of to derail the impeachment of Trump, including, "Trump is too dumb to commit this crime." That one is a bit too subjective for this blog post; I'll be sticking to the Republican excuses that are objectively false. And away we go.
Myth: The whistleblower complaint is not legitimate, as it is "hearsay".
Fact: In the first days in the formal impeachment inquiry, Republicans complained a lot that the Democrats shouldn't even be able to hold hearings, or demonstrate that Trump might have committed a crime on the Trump-Zelensky call, as the government official who submitted the complaint didn't actually hear the call. From Sarah Lustbader of the Washington Post, "The first problem with the Republicans’ hearsay defense is that the White House’s rough transcript confirmed much of what the whistleblower was told by several officials. But even if that memo had not been released, the complaints about hearsay would be missing the mark. Hearsay does not mean "unreliable information," and it can play an important and legitimate part in many kinds of investigations and legal proceedings. So while Trump and his allies are correct that the whistleblower report could not, by itself, be introduced as evidence in a criminal trial, that’s entirely beside the point." And of course, the "hearsay defense" has been rendered moot by the fact that we have a transcript of the Trump-Zelensky phone call with a smoking gun in the form of the now infamous "prid pro quo". Speaking of which...
Myth: There was "no quid pro quo" - there exists no evidence that the reason why Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine was because he was pressuring officials there to open investigations of Joe and Hunter Biden.
Fact:
1. The quid pro quo is in the call transcript that was the basis for the whistleblower complaint:
Zelensky: "We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps. Specifically we are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United· States for defense purposes."
Trump: "I would like you to do us a favor though"
Now the above exchange doesn't prove that Trump withheld the aid Congress approved in return for an investigation of the Bidens. However,
2. White House Chief of Staff Mike Mulvaney (bizarrely) flat-out admitted the quid pro quo. From CNN: "White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney made a stunning admission Thursday by confirming that President Donald Trump froze nearly $400 million in US security aid to Ukraine in part to pressure that country into investigating Democrats."
"That's why we held up the money," Mulvaney said"... "Get over it."... "We do that all the time with foreign policy."
Now Mulvaney quickly tried to walk back that admission, but the quid pro quo had been proven in myriad ways, including:
3. Rudy Giuliani, the President's personal lawyer, told U.S. special envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker to push Ukraine's newly elected president to publicly promise he would order an investigation into Hunter Biden.
4. Based on a phone conversation with Trump, Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, told a Ukrainian official that security assistance to the country would be likely to resume only if the authorities in Kyiv opened the Biden investigations.
Other U.S. government officials have confirmed these same facts.
Myth: According to the White House, the investigation is not legitimate because the full House had not voted to authorize it.
Fact: No full vote is needed to authorize an investigation and the House is not obligated to let Trump’s lawyers participate. This argument was rendered moot by the House's full authorization vote, passed on Halloween no less.
Myth: The Democrats' early closed-door impeachments hearings were an unfair, dangerous and secretive process.
Fact: The House rules being used by Chairman Adam Schiff have been in place since 2015 when Republicans were in the majority. "The House rules permit committee chairs to hold closed hearings on matters of national security or intelligence. Diplomatic matters implicate both national security and intelligence. The rules also permit standing committees – as opposed to the full House – to issue subpoenas. As well, they permit interviews of witnesses in secret in order to determine if they are credible enough to present in public." - Fox News political commentator and legal analyst Andrew Napolitano
Myth: Speaker Pelosi has suggested that the quid pro quo may result in an impeachment charge of bribery against the President, but, "Attempted bribery isn't in the Constitution." - Laura Ingrahan of Fox News
Fact: Some Republicans are trying to suggest that the quid pro quo, if it did exist, isn't a criminal act or an impeachable offense. However, (from John Nichols of The Nation): "Apart from the problem of a "defense" that suggests the president was trying to do wrong but didn’t fully achieve his goal, this argument splits the wrong hair. Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute reminds us: "Attempts to bribe exist at common law and under the Model Penal Code, and often, the punishment for attempted bribery and completed bribery are identical." That’s useful. But even more useful is an understanding of the fact that impeachment is not a legal intervention that requires evidence of a specific criminal act or statutory violation, as President Trump and so many of Republican allies on the House Intelligence Committee so desperately want the American people and their elected officials to imagine."
Myth: The aid was eventually released, and President Zelensky has said he did not feel pressured to open the Biden investigations. So if there's no victim, there's no crime. Republican Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota: "Zelensky doesn’t feel like he was pressured. I don’t know who the rest of the world is to feel victimized on his behalf."
Fact: The U.S. authorized the aid to the Ukraine as a matter of national security. By delaying the aid package, the victims were the American people. According to Laura Cooper, a Defense Department official, whose deposition was released Monday in the House impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump: "My sense is that all of the senior leaders of the U.S. national security departments and agencies were all unified in their — in their view that this assistance was essential," she said. "And they were trying to find ways to engage the President on this."
Furthermore, while Zelensky did state, while sitting next to President Trump, that he was not pressured by Trump to open the Biden investigations, in private he was very concerned about the quid pro quo. From the Chicago Tribune: "Volodymyr Zelenskiy gathered a small group of advisers on May 7 in Kyiv for a meeting that was supposed to be about his nation's energy needs. Instead, the group spent most of the three-hour discussion talking about how to navigate the insistence from Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, for a probe and how to avoid becoming entangled in the American elections, according to three people familiar with the details of the meeting."
"The three people's recollections differ on whether Zelenskiy specifically cited that first call with Trump as the source of his unease. But their accounts all show the Ukrainian president-elect was wary of Trump's push for an investigation into the former vice president and his son Hunter's business dealings."
Much more to come as we enter the second public week of impeachment hearings.
Sunday, September 22, 2019
Adventures in Late-Stage Capitalism #7: Universal Basic Income and Americans: Irreconcilable Differences
America's economy is grounded upon the idea that everyone who isn't disabled or independently wealthy will work at a full-time job for 45 to 50 years. Some folks have argued for a long time that it doesn't have to be that way; if we were to shift away from capitalism, we could all work less or retire earlier. Or maybe we could even distribute resources in a way that would allow people to live above the poverty line without having a job at all, if that's their thing.
As architect and visionary Buckminster Fuller said in 1970:
"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
OK, let's stop right there. This is a not a blog written to answer the question, "Is a socialist utopia viable?" I don't have time to write that. Like most Americans, I have to work for a living. But as I discussed in my last post, artificial intelligence is rapidly delivering an economy where it will be very difficult to create useful jobs for every able-bodied, not-already-wealthy adult. The solution, according to some, is basic universal income (UBI). Whether UBI is workable in the United States is debatable.
If you're interested in UBI, I recommend visiting Andrew Yang's campaign site. Yang, a Democrat seeking the Presidential nomination, has created a very detailed Q & A on the subject. He'd grant $1,000 per month to every adult American, in addition to single-payer healthcare (free to the poor) while continuing social security and veterans benefits. UBI would however replace disability payments and welfare such as food stamps.
So, according to Yang, how would we come up with the money? In short:
* Corporations and wealthy individuals would start paying a lot more in taxes.
* All that money in the hands of consumers would grow the economy.
* A healthier society less prone to incarceration and homelessness would mean less tax money targeted to those problems.
For the record, I think this program is workable and in general a good idea. But I see two big problems with ever getting UBI implemented. The first problem is: your puritanical, pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps American is not going to get behind a welfare program like this, and big business and the wealthy will fight paying for it tooth and nail. Andrew Yang's UBI program, combined with single payer healthcare isn't really very different with the New Frontier/Great Society programs created to fight the "War on Poverty" of the 1960s. Those programs worked - Under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, the poverty rate fell from 23% to 12%. Unfortunately, a great many Americans hated those programs. Personally, I've had any number of conversation about politics that began with someone indignantly asking, "What about all these people on welfare?" Ronald Reagan based much of his first Presidential campaign on the idea that people on welfare were robbing everyone else, and even Democrat Bill Clinton was adamant about "ending welfare as we know it."
Second, UBI is easily perverted into a libertarian dream of destroying public services. As Daron Acemoglu of Marketwatch.com pointed out recently:
"Sacrificing all other social programs for the sake of a UBI is a terrible idea. Such programs exist to address specific problems, such as the vulnerability of the elderly, children, and disabled people. Imagine living in a society where children still go hungry, and where those with severe health conditions are deprived of adequate care, because all the tax revenue has gone to sending monthly checks to every citizen, millionaires and billionaires included."
Actually, we don't have to imagine such a society. The state of Alaska has already perverted the idea of UBI in exactly the way described by Acemoglu. Alaska has had for decades a Permanent Dividend Fund, which makes annual cash payments derived from oil revenue to every Alaskan. Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy ran for office on a platform of raising these payments from $1,600 to $3,000. Unfortunately, those increased payments now necessitate devastating cuts in state spending. From Josh Axelrod of National Public Radio:
"The University of Alaska System is bracing for a 41% cut in funding it receives from the state, after Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed a $130 million line item in the state's budget.
The announcement came last Friday, three days before the fiscal year began on July 1. Dunleavy vetoed roughly $400 million in items in the budget, with education receiving the largest cut.
The university system will lose $130 million from the veto — on top of an additional $5 million previously agreed upon by legislators. The governor's 182 line-item cuts also included Medicaid, senior benefit payments and homelessness services.
University President James Johnsen says he was caught by surprise."
""I'm not arguing against the [Permanent Fund] dividend necessarily, but if we didn't have it we would actually have a budget surplus this year," Johnsen says. "But given that 37% of the state's budget is proposed to go to $3,000 checks to every Alaskan – that's what creates this this fiscal challenge.""
To summarize, we live in a country where the President of the United States has recently issued an executive order demanding that federal agencies review their welfare policies and find ways to crack down on the lazy and indolent. A country that elects a President like that is not going to warm up to the idea of universal basic income any time soon. So what will Republicans do when artificial intelligence means jobs are no longer available? In my estimation, they'll do the same thing they're doing in addressing climate change, Americans with no health insurance, ballooning budget deficits and every other problem faced by this country: Republicans will do nothing at all.
As architect and visionary Buckminster Fuller said in 1970:
"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
OK, let's stop right there. This is a not a blog written to answer the question, "Is a socialist utopia viable?" I don't have time to write that. Like most Americans, I have to work for a living. But as I discussed in my last post, artificial intelligence is rapidly delivering an economy where it will be very difficult to create useful jobs for every able-bodied, not-already-wealthy adult. The solution, according to some, is basic universal income (UBI). Whether UBI is workable in the United States is debatable.
If you're interested in UBI, I recommend visiting Andrew Yang's campaign site. Yang, a Democrat seeking the Presidential nomination, has created a very detailed Q & A on the subject. He'd grant $1,000 per month to every adult American, in addition to single-payer healthcare (free to the poor) while continuing social security and veterans benefits. UBI would however replace disability payments and welfare such as food stamps.
So, according to Yang, how would we come up with the money? In short:
* Corporations and wealthy individuals would start paying a lot more in taxes.
* All that money in the hands of consumers would grow the economy.
* A healthier society less prone to incarceration and homelessness would mean less tax money targeted to those problems.
For the record, I think this program is workable and in general a good idea. But I see two big problems with ever getting UBI implemented. The first problem is: your puritanical, pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps American is not going to get behind a welfare program like this, and big business and the wealthy will fight paying for it tooth and nail. Andrew Yang's UBI program, combined with single payer healthcare isn't really very different with the New Frontier/Great Society programs created to fight the "War on Poverty" of the 1960s. Those programs worked - Under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, the poverty rate fell from 23% to 12%. Unfortunately, a great many Americans hated those programs. Personally, I've had any number of conversation about politics that began with someone indignantly asking, "What about all these people on welfare?" Ronald Reagan based much of his first Presidential campaign on the idea that people on welfare were robbing everyone else, and even Democrat Bill Clinton was adamant about "ending welfare as we know it."
Second, UBI is easily perverted into a libertarian dream of destroying public services. As Daron Acemoglu of Marketwatch.com pointed out recently:
"Sacrificing all other social programs for the sake of a UBI is a terrible idea. Such programs exist to address specific problems, such as the vulnerability of the elderly, children, and disabled people. Imagine living in a society where children still go hungry, and where those with severe health conditions are deprived of adequate care, because all the tax revenue has gone to sending monthly checks to every citizen, millionaires and billionaires included."
Actually, we don't have to imagine such a society. The state of Alaska has already perverted the idea of UBI in exactly the way described by Acemoglu. Alaska has had for decades a Permanent Dividend Fund, which makes annual cash payments derived from oil revenue to every Alaskan. Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy ran for office on a platform of raising these payments from $1,600 to $3,000. Unfortunately, those increased payments now necessitate devastating cuts in state spending. From Josh Axelrod of National Public Radio:
"The University of Alaska System is bracing for a 41% cut in funding it receives from the state, after Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed a $130 million line item in the state's budget.
The announcement came last Friday, three days before the fiscal year began on July 1. Dunleavy vetoed roughly $400 million in items in the budget, with education receiving the largest cut.
The university system will lose $130 million from the veto — on top of an additional $5 million previously agreed upon by legislators. The governor's 182 line-item cuts also included Medicaid, senior benefit payments and homelessness services.
University President James Johnsen says he was caught by surprise."
""I'm not arguing against the [Permanent Fund] dividend necessarily, but if we didn't have it we would actually have a budget surplus this year," Johnsen says. "But given that 37% of the state's budget is proposed to go to $3,000 checks to every Alaskan – that's what creates this this fiscal challenge.""
To summarize, we live in a country where the President of the United States has recently issued an executive order demanding that federal agencies review their welfare policies and find ways to crack down on the lazy and indolent. A country that elects a President like that is not going to warm up to the idea of universal basic income any time soon. So what will Republicans do when artificial intelligence means jobs are no longer available? In my estimation, they'll do the same thing they're doing in addressing climate change, Americans with no health insurance, ballooning budget deficits and every other problem faced by this country: Republicans will do nothing at all.
Sunday, September 08, 2019
Adventures in Late-Stage Capitalism #6: America’s Economy as Player Piano
I. The Problem of Artificial Intelligence and Automation
Kurt Vonnegut’s debut novel Player Piano, published is 1952, is a reflection on the impact of automation on daily life. It’s a story of people searching for meaning in their lives in a world in which there is no meaningful work for them to do. In the world of Player Piano, everyone has an adequate standard of living but most men are assigned by the government to useless jobs to keep them busy, while virtually all women are housewives who watch a lot of television.
The dystopia of Player Piano has not come to pass... yet. As in the novel, during the second half of the 20th century, millions of Americans did leave their workbenches and assembly lines as machines and robots replaced factory workers on a vast scale (or factory jobs just went overseas). This has not resulted in a economy with widespread unemployment however, because the US successfully made a transition from an industrial economy to a post-industrial service economy. (The term "successfully" is subjective; in 1952 virtually any man could get a good job working at General Motors, while in 2019 America’s largest private-sector employer is Wal-Mart, a company that pays below the poverty line.)
So, questions regarding the shrinking middle-class aside, America’s post-industrial economy is humming right along. Or at least it will be, until the next revolution in automation eliminates the service jobs that are now the backbone of the job market. No doubt about it - artificial intelligence will soon make millions of workers obsolete, both in the industrial and service sectors. From a recent Fortune.com article by Gwen Moran entitled, Your Job Will be Automated - Here’s How to Figure Out When A.I. Will Take Over:
"Automation is increasingly making its way into the workplace, raising concerns among employees about the ways technology will change their jobs—or eliminate them entirely. A June 2019 report by Oxford Economics predicts that 8.5% of the world’s manufacturing positions alone—some 20 million jobs—will be displaced by robots by 2030."
OK, robots replacing factory workers is not news. But from the same article:
"A 2013 paper, "The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?" found that roughly 47% of jobs were at high risk of being automated with advances in artificial intelligence."
"This isn’t some futuristic hypothetical. Michael Chui, Ph.D., a partner at McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), says roughly half of the tasks people perform at work could theoretically be done by technology that exists today.
And it’s not just low-income workers whose jobs will change. Chui and his team estimate that roughly six out of 10 jobs are made up of 30% or more tasks that can be automated. CEOs, financial advisors, insurance agents, and others all fall into this category."
II. Don't Expect Any Help from the Republican Oligarchy
So now it’s 2052, the centennial of the publishing of Player Piano, and the automated world described by Kurt Vonnegut has come to pass: there is no productive work for many or most folks to do. In Player Piano, most men are assigned to killing time in public works jobs that aren’t really needed. Ironically, if millions of workers were given public works jobs in today’s America it would actually be a great thing, given our crumbled infrastructure.
My key concern regarding an automated world is this: what makes anyone think that the billionaire oligarchy that controls America's economy and politics will establish a nanny state that would provide employment and social security for millions of people simply because folks can’t find jobs? Knowing what we do about today’s Republicans, isn’t it more likely they would just shrug their shoulders and let widespread poverty takeover?
Consider the Republican attitude to the Medicaid expansion included with Obamacare. The law was designed to provide health insurance to those who cannot afford otherwise afford it, generally because they have no income or resources. Most states controlled by Republicans have refused the Medicare expansion, going so far as to turn down federal grants that would provide life-saving care to those who cannot otherwise afford it.
Conservative Kansas typifies the Republican non-solution to the problem. From a 2015 article by Kartrina vanden Heuvel of the Washington Post:
"Kansas has some of the most restrictive Medicaid eligibility requirements in the country. The program is available only to non-disabled adults earning less than 32 percent of the federal poverty level, and most childless adults don’t qualify, regardless of income. The Affordable Care Act was supposed to raise that threshold to 138 percent, but Brownback declined to implement the Medicaid expansion. As a result, thousands of poor Kansans who would qualify for Medicaid in other states remain uninsured.
Brownback has often characterized his opposition to expanding Medicaid and other poverty programs, in (editor of The Nation Kai) Wright’s words, as a "moral rejection of dependency." Last June, for example, Brownback told the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal Web site that Kansas had not expanded Medicaid because "We’re trying to push people that are able-bodied right now to get a job." Similarly, Brownback pledged in his State of the State address this year to continue "helping people move from dependence on the government to independence."
But, in practice, Brownback’s resistance to Medicaid expansion is causing some people to move from independence to desperation. Wright spoke with several Kansans who are suffering because of Kansas’s severe eligibility requirements. Far from the right-wing caricature of lazy moochers, they are hard workers who aren’t looking for a handout. One woman, RaDonna, is too sick to hold down food, let alone a full-time job. Yet, as a childless adult, she doesn’t qualify for Medicaid — and the state rejected her application for disability benefits. While RaDonna now lives with her sister, Cathy, she insists on helping with the laundry and dishes to earn her keep. "She can’t do the whole sink full of dishes without stopping and sitting down for a while," Cathy says.
The stories from Kansas are heartbreaking, but unfortunately they are not unique. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, "Nationally, nearly four million poor uninsured adults fall into the ‘coverage gap’ that results from state decisions not to expand Medicaid." Republicans have full control of the legislature in all 21 states that have not expanded the program.
"For most Republican leaders, opposing Medicaid expansion is simply a matter of ideological faith. "Why is more people on Medicaid a good thing?" (Wisconsin Governor Scott) Walker asked last year. Echoing Brownback, he added, "I’d rather find a way, particularly for able-bodied adults without children, I’d like to find a way to get them into the workforce. I think ideologically that’s a better approach, not just as a conservative but as an American. Have more people live the American dream if they’re not dependent on the American government." More recently, Walker framed his position in religious terms. "My reading of the Bible finds plenty of reminders that it’s better to teach someone to fish if they’re able," he said."
To summarize, millions of Americans cannot afford health insurance. Many of these folks are too sick or otherwise disadvantaged to be able to find and retain the kind of full-time work that provides insurance. Yet Republican leaders have responded to the problem with a shrug of the shoulders, effectively dooming these these Americans to continue to be denied healthcare. Given these facts, is there any reason to believe that Republicans won’t also deny other basic necessities to those who are unable to find work after being displaced by artificial intelligence? The country has had crises of unemployment in the past; Republicans responded to both the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2009 mostly by doing nothing.
So let’s assume we remove Republicans from power before everyone who loses a job to artificial intelligence dies from lack of food, shelter and health care. What then? Well if you ask some leading technologists, they’ll tell you we need a program of universal basic income. Next time, I’ll discuss universal basic income in detail; who thinks it's viable on a large scale, how it might work and what might go wrong.
Kurt Vonnegut’s debut novel Player Piano, published is 1952, is a reflection on the impact of automation on daily life. It’s a story of people searching for meaning in their lives in a world in which there is no meaningful work for them to do. In the world of Player Piano, everyone has an adequate standard of living but most men are assigned by the government to useless jobs to keep them busy, while virtually all women are housewives who watch a lot of television.
The dystopia of Player Piano has not come to pass... yet. As in the novel, during the second half of the 20th century, millions of Americans did leave their workbenches and assembly lines as machines and robots replaced factory workers on a vast scale (or factory jobs just went overseas). This has not resulted in a economy with widespread unemployment however, because the US successfully made a transition from an industrial economy to a post-industrial service economy. (The term "successfully" is subjective; in 1952 virtually any man could get a good job working at General Motors, while in 2019 America’s largest private-sector employer is Wal-Mart, a company that pays below the poverty line.)
So, questions regarding the shrinking middle-class aside, America’s post-industrial economy is humming right along. Or at least it will be, until the next revolution in automation eliminates the service jobs that are now the backbone of the job market. No doubt about it - artificial intelligence will soon make millions of workers obsolete, both in the industrial and service sectors. From a recent Fortune.com article by Gwen Moran entitled, Your Job Will be Automated - Here’s How to Figure Out When A.I. Will Take Over:
"Automation is increasingly making its way into the workplace, raising concerns among employees about the ways technology will change their jobs—or eliminate them entirely. A June 2019 report by Oxford Economics predicts that 8.5% of the world’s manufacturing positions alone—some 20 million jobs—will be displaced by robots by 2030."
OK, robots replacing factory workers is not news. But from the same article:
"A 2013 paper, "The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?" found that roughly 47% of jobs were at high risk of being automated with advances in artificial intelligence."
"This isn’t some futuristic hypothetical. Michael Chui, Ph.D., a partner at McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), says roughly half of the tasks people perform at work could theoretically be done by technology that exists today.
And it’s not just low-income workers whose jobs will change. Chui and his team estimate that roughly six out of 10 jobs are made up of 30% or more tasks that can be automated. CEOs, financial advisors, insurance agents, and others all fall into this category."
II. Don't Expect Any Help from the Republican Oligarchy
So now it’s 2052, the centennial of the publishing of Player Piano, and the automated world described by Kurt Vonnegut has come to pass: there is no productive work for many or most folks to do. In Player Piano, most men are assigned to killing time in public works jobs that aren’t really needed. Ironically, if millions of workers were given public works jobs in today’s America it would actually be a great thing, given our crumbled infrastructure.
My key concern regarding an automated world is this: what makes anyone think that the billionaire oligarchy that controls America's economy and politics will establish a nanny state that would provide employment and social security for millions of people simply because folks can’t find jobs? Knowing what we do about today’s Republicans, isn’t it more likely they would just shrug their shoulders and let widespread poverty takeover?
Consider the Republican attitude to the Medicaid expansion included with Obamacare. The law was designed to provide health insurance to those who cannot afford otherwise afford it, generally because they have no income or resources. Most states controlled by Republicans have refused the Medicare expansion, going so far as to turn down federal grants that would provide life-saving care to those who cannot otherwise afford it.
Conservative Kansas typifies the Republican non-solution to the problem. From a 2015 article by Kartrina vanden Heuvel of the Washington Post:
"Kansas has some of the most restrictive Medicaid eligibility requirements in the country. The program is available only to non-disabled adults earning less than 32 percent of the federal poverty level, and most childless adults don’t qualify, regardless of income. The Affordable Care Act was supposed to raise that threshold to 138 percent, but Brownback declined to implement the Medicaid expansion. As a result, thousands of poor Kansans who would qualify for Medicaid in other states remain uninsured.
Brownback has often characterized his opposition to expanding Medicaid and other poverty programs, in (editor of The Nation Kai) Wright’s words, as a "moral rejection of dependency." Last June, for example, Brownback told the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal Web site that Kansas had not expanded Medicaid because "We’re trying to push people that are able-bodied right now to get a job." Similarly, Brownback pledged in his State of the State address this year to continue "helping people move from dependence on the government to independence."
But, in practice, Brownback’s resistance to Medicaid expansion is causing some people to move from independence to desperation. Wright spoke with several Kansans who are suffering because of Kansas’s severe eligibility requirements. Far from the right-wing caricature of lazy moochers, they are hard workers who aren’t looking for a handout. One woman, RaDonna, is too sick to hold down food, let alone a full-time job. Yet, as a childless adult, she doesn’t qualify for Medicaid — and the state rejected her application for disability benefits. While RaDonna now lives with her sister, Cathy, she insists on helping with the laundry and dishes to earn her keep. "She can’t do the whole sink full of dishes without stopping and sitting down for a while," Cathy says.
The stories from Kansas are heartbreaking, but unfortunately they are not unique. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, "Nationally, nearly four million poor uninsured adults fall into the ‘coverage gap’ that results from state decisions not to expand Medicaid." Republicans have full control of the legislature in all 21 states that have not expanded the program.
"For most Republican leaders, opposing Medicaid expansion is simply a matter of ideological faith. "Why is more people on Medicaid a good thing?" (Wisconsin Governor Scott) Walker asked last year. Echoing Brownback, he added, "I’d rather find a way, particularly for able-bodied adults without children, I’d like to find a way to get them into the workforce. I think ideologically that’s a better approach, not just as a conservative but as an American. Have more people live the American dream if they’re not dependent on the American government." More recently, Walker framed his position in religious terms. "My reading of the Bible finds plenty of reminders that it’s better to teach someone to fish if they’re able," he said."
To summarize, millions of Americans cannot afford health insurance. Many of these folks are too sick or otherwise disadvantaged to be able to find and retain the kind of full-time work that provides insurance. Yet Republican leaders have responded to the problem with a shrug of the shoulders, effectively dooming these these Americans to continue to be denied healthcare. Given these facts, is there any reason to believe that Republicans won’t also deny other basic necessities to those who are unable to find work after being displaced by artificial intelligence? The country has had crises of unemployment in the past; Republicans responded to both the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2009 mostly by doing nothing.
So let’s assume we remove Republicans from power before everyone who loses a job to artificial intelligence dies from lack of food, shelter and health care. What then? Well if you ask some leading technologists, they’ll tell you we need a program of universal basic income. Next time, I’ll discuss universal basic income in detail; who thinks it's viable on a large scale, how it might work and what might go wrong.
Sunday, August 11, 2019
Adventures in Late-Stage Capitalism #5: America Tried Capitalism Instead of Socialism for Health Care. Boy, Did That Not Work
Before World War II, health insurance was rare. In the following years, the idea that everyone needs health insurance gained widespread acceptance. Among leading industrialized nations, everybody but the United States adopted universal coverage guaranteed by the government, while the US went a with a largely free-market system.
I. The Problem
Nearly a century later, how do these opposing systems compare? Hands down, socialized medicine is the winner. From an article in The Hill by Anders Åslund entitled US health care is an ongoing miserable failure:
"The state of U.S. health care is catastrophic. In no other area is the U.S. lagging so far behind the European Union. Average U.S. life expectancy is 78.7 years to compare with 81 in the 28 countries of the European Union.
U.S. life expectancy has fallen for the last three years, while it rises all around the world. U.S. infant mortality is 5.6 per 1,000 life births, but only 3.6 on average in the EU. American maternal mortality is 14 per 100,000 births and rising. Compare that with a mere 3 deaths per 100,000 births each in Finland, Greece and Poland.
As if to add insult to injury, U.S. health-care costs 18 percent of GDP while the cost is limited to barely 9 percent of GDP in Europe.
This astounding U.S. underperformance raises two questions: How is it possible to perform so poorly; and why has the U.S. failed to do anything about it?"
Åslund goes on to itemize things wrong with the US health care system, including that our free-markets, "do not work because they have been captured by vested interests, reflecting a wider problem of current American crony capitalism."
"While European insurance companies are usually mutually-owned by the insurance takers, U.S. insurance companies work for profit and find it cheaper to harass their customers with innumerable administrative queries than to deliver services."
II. How We Got Here
So why hasn't private health care succeeded? Isn't the profit motive supposed to create greater efficiency than a system run by lazy government bureaucrats? It boils down to two problems:
1. The US health care system is designed to try to create profits rather than to provide care.
We spend about 30% of health care dollars on administrative costs, while other leading nations spend half as much or less. This is the outcome of a system that's built around health care providers trying to get paid by insurance companies for providing care, while insurance companies are trying to protect profits.
2. Even profitable insurers reserve the right to deny insurance to unprofitable customers.
The individual insurance market in Iowa is a complete mess. The number of people in the individual market was small in the first place, which makes it difficult to create a healthy risk pool. Then the decision was made to let folks stay on non-Obamacare-compliant "junk" plans, which many did. Obamacare was actually designed to anticipate the problems insurance companies would have covering smaller pools of high-risk people. It originally had a "risk-corridor" system that would pay insurers if they suffered large losses on a high-risk pool. But of course congressional Republicans managed to kill that program.
As a result, insurers are pulling out of the the Iowa Obamacare market. Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield, the state's largest carrier announced it would leave in 2017. But what's really going on here? Consider these observations on Wellmark from Shelby Livingston in 2017 on modernhealthcare.com:
"In a statement, Wellmark said it lost about $90 million from ACA-compliant health plans sold in Iowa over the past three years.
That's not a small sum, and insurers aren't in the business of withstanding losses to prop up a struggling market, said Craig Garthwaite, a health economist at Northwestern University. It's critical that the insurers are able to at least break even on the marketplaces, he said.
Still, the loss is a drop in a bucket relative to the $2.7 billion in revenue Wellmark recorded in 2016 alone, financial documents show.
Given the minor loss, it is likely that Wellmark's exit has more to do with the uncertainty surrounding the future of the health insurance landscape and the prospect of further financial losses if the Trump administration fails to shore up the marketplaces, experts said."
Got that? Even though Wellmark is a very profitable company, it reserves the right to serve only those customers who help make it more profitable.
III. The Future
Can the US make a successful transition from its patchwork system to single-payer? All it takes is the will to do so. Consider the same experience in Taiwan. From Tsung-Mei Cheng of Health Affairs:
"In 1986 Taiwan’s government began planning to provide universal health insurance for its citizens. At the time, 41 percent of Taiwan’s population (8.6 million people) was uninsured and either paid for care out of pocket or went without it. The objective was to provide every citizen with timely access to needed health care, on equal terms, without unduly burdening the budgets of households, but also with effective controls on the growth of overall health spending."
"In the relatively short time from the late 1980s to 1994, Taiwan’s health policy planners carefully studied alternative health care systems around the world. This global survey persuaded the planners to consolidate the more than ten insurance programs then in existence in Taiwan into a single-payer government-run health insurance system modeled after the Canadian provincial health plans, but coupled with a financing scheme inspired by Germany’s payroll-based premium system."
"On its twentieth anniversary, Taiwan’s National Health Insurance (NHI) stands out as a high-performing single-payer national health insurance system that provides universal health coverage to Taiwan’s 23.4 million residents based on egalitarian ethical principles."
"Taiwan’s experience with the NHI shows that a single-payer approach can work and control health care costs effectively. There are lessons for the United States in how to expand coverage rapidly, manage incremental adjustments to the health system, and achieve freedom of choice."
America's private insurers are very afraid that something like Taiwan's transition to single-payer will happen here. Before the first Democratic primary Presidential debate last this, a Republican group ran a scare ad asking, "How long will you wait for care?" "In other countries with socialized health care, patients wait weeks, even months for treatment." Typical of the disingenuous way that Republicans talk about health care, the ad does not inform the viewer in which countries, "patients wait weeks, even months for treatment". For the record, the ad appears to refer to wait times to see a specialist; grasping at straws to find anything about the US healthcare system that isn't inferior to single-payer, Republicans have discovered that wait times for non-threatening surgery are slightly longer in many public systems than in the US.
Get ready for more of the same scare tactics as Democrats continue to debate Medicare for All. Lying all the time about Democratic solutions to the country's problems is how Republicans do business.
I. The Problem
Nearly a century later, how do these opposing systems compare? Hands down, socialized medicine is the winner. From an article in The Hill by Anders Åslund entitled US health care is an ongoing miserable failure:
"The state of U.S. health care is catastrophic. In no other area is the U.S. lagging so far behind the European Union. Average U.S. life expectancy is 78.7 years to compare with 81 in the 28 countries of the European Union.
U.S. life expectancy has fallen for the last three years, while it rises all around the world. U.S. infant mortality is 5.6 per 1,000 life births, but only 3.6 on average in the EU. American maternal mortality is 14 per 100,000 births and rising. Compare that with a mere 3 deaths per 100,000 births each in Finland, Greece and Poland.
As if to add insult to injury, U.S. health-care costs 18 percent of GDP while the cost is limited to barely 9 percent of GDP in Europe.
This astounding U.S. underperformance raises two questions: How is it possible to perform so poorly; and why has the U.S. failed to do anything about it?"
Åslund goes on to itemize things wrong with the US health care system, including that our free-markets, "do not work because they have been captured by vested interests, reflecting a wider problem of current American crony capitalism."
"While European insurance companies are usually mutually-owned by the insurance takers, U.S. insurance companies work for profit and find it cheaper to harass their customers with innumerable administrative queries than to deliver services."
II. How We Got Here
So why hasn't private health care succeeded? Isn't the profit motive supposed to create greater efficiency than a system run by lazy government bureaucrats? It boils down to two problems:
1. The US health care system is designed to try to create profits rather than to provide care.
We spend about 30% of health care dollars on administrative costs, while other leading nations spend half as much or less. This is the outcome of a system that's built around health care providers trying to get paid by insurance companies for providing care, while insurance companies are trying to protect profits.
2. Even profitable insurers reserve the right to deny insurance to unprofitable customers.
The individual insurance market in Iowa is a complete mess. The number of people in the individual market was small in the first place, which makes it difficult to create a healthy risk pool. Then the decision was made to let folks stay on non-Obamacare-compliant "junk" plans, which many did. Obamacare was actually designed to anticipate the problems insurance companies would have covering smaller pools of high-risk people. It originally had a "risk-corridor" system that would pay insurers if they suffered large losses on a high-risk pool. But of course congressional Republicans managed to kill that program.
As a result, insurers are pulling out of the the Iowa Obamacare market. Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield, the state's largest carrier announced it would leave in 2017. But what's really going on here? Consider these observations on Wellmark from Shelby Livingston in 2017 on modernhealthcare.com:
"In a statement, Wellmark said it lost about $90 million from ACA-compliant health plans sold in Iowa over the past three years.
That's not a small sum, and insurers aren't in the business of withstanding losses to prop up a struggling market, said Craig Garthwaite, a health economist at Northwestern University. It's critical that the insurers are able to at least break even on the marketplaces, he said.
Still, the loss is a drop in a bucket relative to the $2.7 billion in revenue Wellmark recorded in 2016 alone, financial documents show.
Given the minor loss, it is likely that Wellmark's exit has more to do with the uncertainty surrounding the future of the health insurance landscape and the prospect of further financial losses if the Trump administration fails to shore up the marketplaces, experts said."
Got that? Even though Wellmark is a very profitable company, it reserves the right to serve only those customers who help make it more profitable.
III. The Future
Can the US make a successful transition from its patchwork system to single-payer? All it takes is the will to do so. Consider the same experience in Taiwan. From Tsung-Mei Cheng of Health Affairs:
"In 1986 Taiwan’s government began planning to provide universal health insurance for its citizens. At the time, 41 percent of Taiwan’s population (8.6 million people) was uninsured and either paid for care out of pocket or went without it. The objective was to provide every citizen with timely access to needed health care, on equal terms, without unduly burdening the budgets of households, but also with effective controls on the growth of overall health spending."
"In the relatively short time from the late 1980s to 1994, Taiwan’s health policy planners carefully studied alternative health care systems around the world. This global survey persuaded the planners to consolidate the more than ten insurance programs then in existence in Taiwan into a single-payer government-run health insurance system modeled after the Canadian provincial health plans, but coupled with a financing scheme inspired by Germany’s payroll-based premium system."
"On its twentieth anniversary, Taiwan’s National Health Insurance (NHI) stands out as a high-performing single-payer national health insurance system that provides universal health coverage to Taiwan’s 23.4 million residents based on egalitarian ethical principles."
"Taiwan’s experience with the NHI shows that a single-payer approach can work and control health care costs effectively. There are lessons for the United States in how to expand coverage rapidly, manage incremental adjustments to the health system, and achieve freedom of choice."
America's private insurers are very afraid that something like Taiwan's transition to single-payer will happen here. Before the first Democratic primary Presidential debate last this, a Republican group ran a scare ad asking, "How long will you wait for care?" "In other countries with socialized health care, patients wait weeks, even months for treatment." Typical of the disingenuous way that Republicans talk about health care, the ad does not inform the viewer in which countries, "patients wait weeks, even months for treatment". For the record, the ad appears to refer to wait times to see a specialist; grasping at straws to find anything about the US healthcare system that isn't inferior to single-payer, Republicans have discovered that wait times for non-threatening surgery are slightly longer in many public systems than in the US.
Get ready for more of the same scare tactics as Democrats continue to debate Medicare for All. Lying all the time about Democratic solutions to the country's problems is how Republicans do business.
Sunday, July 14, 2019
Adventures in Late-Stage Capitalism #4: Democratic Socialism in Scandinavia
We ought to "look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people," said Senator Bernie Sanders during the 2016 Democratic primary debates. "What we have in mind and what my policies most closely resemble are what we see in the UK, in Norway, in Finland, in Sweden," Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also said in a recent interview.
Senator Bernie Sanders took on a very difficult task when he decided to explain his vision for democratic socialism to the American people. The road to the future is always blocked by those trying to protect the status quo, and by a lot of ignorance and prejudice. Democratic socialism is not a philosophy that can described in a few words. And Americans are not very familiar with what goes on in countries that Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez cite as successful examples of democratic socialism. (On the other hand, it could be worse. At least there are successful examples of Democratic socialism. As an undergraduate, I once attended a debate between representatives of the campus Democratic, Republican, and Communist parties. The Communist was asked, "If communism is so great, why has there never been a successful communist country?" Poor kid; he had no idea what to say.)
Americans, I think, have only a vague notion of how life in northern Europe is different from that of the US. Witness Hillary Clinton's response to Bernie Sanders mention of Scandinavia in 2016, reminding Americans of ,"all the small businesses that were started because we have the opportunity and the freedom in our country for people to do that and to make a good living for themselves and their families." This response speaks directly to American prejudices; Norway is more socialized that the US, so it must have less freedom, so it must somehow be stifling small business. In reality, Scandinavian economies are doing just fine, as we'll see.
The fear-mongering and misinformation regarding northern European economies that comes from the American right is of course far worse, and is delivered in two distinct packages. The situation is summarized perfectly by an article in New York Magazine by Eric Levitz enttiled, Conservatives Can’t Decide If Nordic Socialism Is a Totalitarian Nightmare or Actually Capitalist.
As an example of the first case, Scandinavia as dystopian nightmae, Levitz first cites examples of classic red-baiting; such as that used by Commentary Magazine's Noah Rothman: "Rothman casts all proponents of single-payer health care as proto-Stalinists." "And make no mistake: America is hurtling down the road to serfdom at a terrifying pace. Democrats may think they "can control the monster they’re bringing back to life," Rothman writes, but if socialists are given an opportunity to prevail at the polls, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer "will find themselves prisoners to their party’s collectivists soon enough. After all, taking captives is what socialism does best." Levitz also quotes Rothman, "Likewise, establishing as a right the ability to access tuition-free education at public universities and a federal jobs guarantee—all planks of the Democratic Socialist agenda with increasingly broad appeal—are pillars of the Soviet Constitution."
The above are exactly the tactics traditionally used by the American right to attack progressive reform. As I noted in the last post in this series: According to the right, if anything favored by the left happens to also have been a policy of the old communist dictatorships, then it naturally follow that enacting that policy here will of course turn America into a Soviet-style autocracy.
Regarding the second argument, that Scandinavian countries are successful not because of their expansive welfare states but because they are largely free-market economies, Levitz says, "Perhaps Denmark’s welfare state isn’t the source of its strong economic growth. But there’s little question that the country’s aberrantly high levels of social spending are responsible for its exceptionally low levels of relative poverty and income inequality. If conservatives concede that it is possible for a country to provide all citizens with low-cost health insurance, child care, paid family leave, etc. — and still function as a vibrant, free-market economy — then how could they possibly justify the GOP’s ambition to throw millions of Americans off of Medicaid?"
And the idea that Scandinavian economies resemble the free-market ideal more than socialism is a dubious proposition, even when those on the right cherry-pick facts such as the lack of a minimum wage in those countries. In the article above, Levitz cites journalist Mat Bruenig who points out that:
"In addition to their large welfare states and high tax levels, Nordic economies are also home to large public sectors, strong job protections, and labor markets governed by centralized union contracts … The governments of Norway and Finland own financial assets equal to 330 percent and 130 percent of each country’s respective GDP. In the US, the same figure is just 26 percent.
… State-owned enterprises (SOEs), defined as commercial enterprises in which the state has a controlling stake or large minority stake, are also far more prevalent in the Nordic countries. In 2012, the value of Norwegian SOEs was equal to 87.9 percent of the country’s GDP. For Finland, that figure was 52.3 percent. In the US, it was not even 1 percent.
… In Norway, the state manages direct ownership of 70 companies. The businesses include the real estate company Entra; the country’s largest financial services group DNB; the 30,000-employee mobile telecommunications company Telenor; and the famous state-owned oil company Statoil."
The divergence between the US economy and those of western Europe is best illustrated by the graphs below. While the percentage of national income earned by the top 1% and that earned by the bottom 50% has stayed about the same in western Europe since 1980, in the US the top 1% have doubled their share while share of income for the bottom 50% has fallen by half.
"Scandinavians set out to find a middle path. That path was contested—by socialist-inspired workers on the one hand, and by capitalist owners and their elite cronies on the other—but in the end, it led to a mixed economy. Thanks largely to the solidarity and savvy of organized labor and the political parties it backed, the long struggle produced a system that makes capitalism more or less cooperative, and then redistributes equitably the wealth it helps to produce."
Next time I'll talk about the biggest pack of lies being sold by American conservatives regarding other leading nations: the widespread adoption of socialized medicine versus the American train-wreck of a health care system.
Senator Bernie Sanders took on a very difficult task when he decided to explain his vision for democratic socialism to the American people. The road to the future is always blocked by those trying to protect the status quo, and by a lot of ignorance and prejudice. Democratic socialism is not a philosophy that can described in a few words. And Americans are not very familiar with what goes on in countries that Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez cite as successful examples of democratic socialism. (On the other hand, it could be worse. At least there are successful examples of Democratic socialism. As an undergraduate, I once attended a debate between representatives of the campus Democratic, Republican, and Communist parties. The Communist was asked, "If communism is so great, why has there never been a successful communist country?" Poor kid; he had no idea what to say.)
Americans, I think, have only a vague notion of how life in northern Europe is different from that of the US. Witness Hillary Clinton's response to Bernie Sanders mention of Scandinavia in 2016, reminding Americans of ,"all the small businesses that were started because we have the opportunity and the freedom in our country for people to do that and to make a good living for themselves and their families." This response speaks directly to American prejudices; Norway is more socialized that the US, so it must have less freedom, so it must somehow be stifling small business. In reality, Scandinavian economies are doing just fine, as we'll see.
The fear-mongering and misinformation regarding northern European economies that comes from the American right is of course far worse, and is delivered in two distinct packages. The situation is summarized perfectly by an article in New York Magazine by Eric Levitz enttiled, Conservatives Can’t Decide If Nordic Socialism Is a Totalitarian Nightmare or Actually Capitalist.
As an example of the first case, Scandinavia as dystopian nightmae, Levitz first cites examples of classic red-baiting; such as that used by Commentary Magazine's Noah Rothman: "Rothman casts all proponents of single-payer health care as proto-Stalinists." "And make no mistake: America is hurtling down the road to serfdom at a terrifying pace. Democrats may think they "can control the monster they’re bringing back to life," Rothman writes, but if socialists are given an opportunity to prevail at the polls, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer "will find themselves prisoners to their party’s collectivists soon enough. After all, taking captives is what socialism does best." Levitz also quotes Rothman, "Likewise, establishing as a right the ability to access tuition-free education at public universities and a federal jobs guarantee—all planks of the Democratic Socialist agenda with increasingly broad appeal—are pillars of the Soviet Constitution."
The above are exactly the tactics traditionally used by the American right to attack progressive reform. As I noted in the last post in this series: According to the right, if anything favored by the left happens to also have been a policy of the old communist dictatorships, then it naturally follow that enacting that policy here will of course turn America into a Soviet-style autocracy.
Regarding the second argument, that Scandinavian countries are successful not because of their expansive welfare states but because they are largely free-market economies, Levitz says, "Perhaps Denmark’s welfare state isn’t the source of its strong economic growth. But there’s little question that the country’s aberrantly high levels of social spending are responsible for its exceptionally low levels of relative poverty and income inequality. If conservatives concede that it is possible for a country to provide all citizens with low-cost health insurance, child care, paid family leave, etc. — and still function as a vibrant, free-market economy — then how could they possibly justify the GOP’s ambition to throw millions of Americans off of Medicaid?"
And the idea that Scandinavian economies resemble the free-market ideal more than socialism is a dubious proposition, even when those on the right cherry-pick facts such as the lack of a minimum wage in those countries. In the article above, Levitz cites journalist Mat Bruenig who points out that:
"In addition to their large welfare states and high tax levels, Nordic economies are also home to large public sectors, strong job protections, and labor markets governed by centralized union contracts … The governments of Norway and Finland own financial assets equal to 330 percent and 130 percent of each country’s respective GDP. In the US, the same figure is just 26 percent.
… State-owned enterprises (SOEs), defined as commercial enterprises in which the state has a controlling stake or large minority stake, are also far more prevalent in the Nordic countries. In 2012, the value of Norwegian SOEs was equal to 87.9 percent of the country’s GDP. For Finland, that figure was 52.3 percent. In the US, it was not even 1 percent.
… In Norway, the state manages direct ownership of 70 companies. The businesses include the real estate company Entra; the country’s largest financial services group DNB; the 30,000-employee mobile telecommunications company Telenor; and the famous state-owned oil company Statoil."
The divergence between the US economy and those of western Europe is best illustrated by the graphs below. While the percentage of national income earned by the top 1% and that earned by the bottom 50% has stayed about the same in western Europe since 1980, in the US the top 1% have doubled their share while share of income for the bottom 50% has fallen by half.
So what's it really like to live in northern Europe? I recommend the article After I Lived in Norway, America Felt Backward. Here’s Why. by Ann Jones of the Nation. From Jones:
"Norway, Denmark, and Sweden practice variations of a system that works much better than ours."
"Proof that they do work is delivered every year in data-rich evaluations by the United Nations and other international bodies. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s annual report on international well-being, for example, measures 11 factors, ranging from material conditions such as affordable housing and employment to quality-of-life matters like education, health, life expectancy, voter participation, and overall citizen satisfaction. Year after year, all the Nordic countries cluster at the top, while the United States lags far behind. In addition, Norway has ranked first on the UN Development Program’s Human Development Index for 12 of the last 15 years, and it consistently tops international comparisons in such areas as democracy, civil and political rights, and freedom of expression and the press."
"Scandinavians set out to find a middle path. That path was contested—by socialist-inspired workers on the one hand, and by capitalist owners and their elite cronies on the other—but in the end, it led to a mixed economy. Thanks largely to the solidarity and savvy of organized labor and the political parties it backed, the long struggle produced a system that makes capitalism more or less cooperative, and then redistributes equitably the wealth it helps to produce."
Next time I'll talk about the biggest pack of lies being sold by American conservatives regarding other leading nations: the widespread adoption of socialized medicine versus the American train-wreck of a health care system.
Thursday, July 04, 2019
Adventures in Late-Stage Capitalism #3: Red-Baiting in the 21st Century
In my previous post, I discussed Bernie Sanders' June 12th speech about democratic socialism as the guiding philosophy of his political career. The response to Bernie's speech from his more conservative rivals for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination was predictable. From Brian Slodysko of the Associated Press:
Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper of Colorado, "said Sanders was "wrong" to call for policies such as "Medicare for All" that would dramatically increase public spending and government involvement in Americans’ daily lives. Hickenlooper called for less expansive changes to the "regulated capitalism that has guided this country for over 200 years."
"Democrats must say loudly and clearly that we are not socialists. If we do not, we will end up helping to reelect the worst president in the country’s history," he said in Washington. "Socialism is the most efficient attack line Republicans can use against Democrats as long as (President Donald) Trump is at the top of the ticket.""
Hickenlooper's attack seems disingenuous since he, like Sanders is calling for Medicare to be expanded. To be fair, he's just doing what rivals for the Presidential nomination who are trailing in the polls always do: make headlines by attacking the front-runners. Putting those things aside, let's unpack the other reasons Hickenlooper is attacking Sanders and democratic socialism.
1. "(R)egulated capitalism... has guided this country for over 200 years". True. And in 1860, slavery had guided European settlement in North America for longer than that. Just because a country has been doing a thing for a long time doesn't necessarily mean that thing is good. Once upon a time, one could make the argument that American-style capitalism had created the highest standard of living in the world. But that's no longer true; as we reviewed in the first part of this series, today the US has a quality of life substantially below that of other leading industrialized countries. The "we've always done it that way" argument for American capitalism is part of the idea of "American exceptionalism", a philosophy that suggests among other things that laissez-faire economics are part of what America has to give to a backward world. More on that later.
2. "Socialism is the most efficient attack line Republicans can use against Democrats".
Possibly that's true; time will tell. Republicans are in fact churning out a lot of propaganda demonizing Democrats as socialist. They're so in love with the idea, they this attack use for things that have nothing to do with socialism. For example, Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell recently called the Democratic party movement to make Puerto Rico a state, "full-bore socialism", which is a line of logic I can't follow.
Red-baiting is the act of attacking or persecuting a person or idea as a Communist or as communistic. Red-baiting has been used by the right in America for more than a century to attack anything even vaguely leftist or collectivist or anything done by Democrats really as leading us on the path to an autocratic, dystopian nightmare. Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, during the first Red Scare, US Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer rounded up, jailed, or deported thousands of suspected radicals, stoking fear that they were trying to import Communism (or anarchism) to the United States.
Red-baiting in the US reached its pinnacle during the 1940s and 50s when, (from Peter Dreier of The Nation), "another wave of hysteria swept the country during the Cold War, when politicians like Martin Dies, Joseph McCarthy, and Richard Nixon engineered witch hunts to identify and blacklist progressives and radicals in government, schools and universities, Hollywood, labor unions, and the media, alleging that Communists were infiltrating key institutions in order to undermine the American way of life. (McCarthy’s top witch-hunting assistant was Roy Cohn, who would later become Trump’s attorney and political mentor.) Anyone who questioned the nuclear-arms race, supported racial integration, or called for higher taxes on the rich could be branded an anti-American Communist. Not even Martin Luther King Jr. was immune."
Red-baiting and "American exceptionalism" are the reasons why Americans didn't start enjoying the benefits of single-payer health care decades ago. In the 1940s, Republican Governor of California Earl Warren introduced a single-payer plan for the state which initially enjoyed tremendous support but was done in by an advertising campaign which suggested, "We have enough regimentation in this country now. Certainly we don't want to be forced to go to "A State doctor" or pay for such a doctor whether we use him or not."
President Franklin Roosevelt had heard the same kind of arguments in attacks on the New Deal a few years earlier. In response he said, "A few timid people, who fear progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. Sometimes they will call it ‘Fascism’, sometimes ‘Communism’, sometimes ‘Regimentation’, sometimes ‘Socialism’. But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical."
So it goes with the American right-wing, arguing the same thing into a second century:
1. Liberals want to do a thing.
2. That thing is something that socialists and communists support.
3. Socialist and communist countries are bad places to live.
4. So the thing liberals want must be bad by definition, and if we tried that thing, America would turn into a failed state.
Example, here's an excerpt from a 2018 letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times:
"How can we guarantee that a democratic socialist takeover of the Democratic Party will not descend into the same chaos we see currently in "socialist" countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua? How can we be sure that the rhetoric of class antagonism will not devolve into outright class hatred? Or that "Medicare For All" won’t result, as it has in Venezuela, in hospitals that can’t even provide bedsheets?"
I hear this exact argument all the time on social media: Expanding the highly popular and successful Medicare program to more people will transform American into a communist banana republic dictatorship. Never mind that every developed nation in the world has socialized medicine. Never mind that the United States already has socialized the military, police, fire departments, highways, education and dozens of other public services and yet somehow has avoided turning into North Korea.
In response to the L.A. Times letter cited above, another reader sent this response to the Editor:
"Why do people so often cite the failures of democratic socialism by cherry picking their examples? Why not cite Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, Great Britain, Japan, Australia, Italy, Canada, Norway, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Belgium, New Zealand, Austria, Switzerland or the Netherlands — all countries that have successfully achieved a balance between capitalism and socialism? No country is perfect, but citing the worst examples does not move the conversation forward in any meaningful way."
An excellent summary. Next time I'll comment on what actually goes on in those scary "socialist" countries.
Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper of Colorado, "said Sanders was "wrong" to call for policies such as "Medicare for All" that would dramatically increase public spending and government involvement in Americans’ daily lives. Hickenlooper called for less expansive changes to the "regulated capitalism that has guided this country for over 200 years."
"Democrats must say loudly and clearly that we are not socialists. If we do not, we will end up helping to reelect the worst president in the country’s history," he said in Washington. "Socialism is the most efficient attack line Republicans can use against Democrats as long as (President Donald) Trump is at the top of the ticket.""
Hickenlooper's attack seems disingenuous since he, like Sanders is calling for Medicare to be expanded. To be fair, he's just doing what rivals for the Presidential nomination who are trailing in the polls always do: make headlines by attacking the front-runners. Putting those things aside, let's unpack the other reasons Hickenlooper is attacking Sanders and democratic socialism.
1. "(R)egulated capitalism... has guided this country for over 200 years". True. And in 1860, slavery had guided European settlement in North America for longer than that. Just because a country has been doing a thing for a long time doesn't necessarily mean that thing is good. Once upon a time, one could make the argument that American-style capitalism had created the highest standard of living in the world. But that's no longer true; as we reviewed in the first part of this series, today the US has a quality of life substantially below that of other leading industrialized countries. The "we've always done it that way" argument for American capitalism is part of the idea of "American exceptionalism", a philosophy that suggests among other things that laissez-faire economics are part of what America has to give to a backward world. More on that later.
2. "Socialism is the most efficient attack line Republicans can use against Democrats".
Possibly that's true; time will tell. Republicans are in fact churning out a lot of propaganda demonizing Democrats as socialist. They're so in love with the idea, they this attack use for things that have nothing to do with socialism. For example, Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell recently called the Democratic party movement to make Puerto Rico a state, "full-bore socialism", which is a line of logic I can't follow.
Red-baiting is the act of attacking or persecuting a person or idea as a Communist or as communistic. Red-baiting has been used by the right in America for more than a century to attack anything even vaguely leftist or collectivist or anything done by Democrats really as leading us on the path to an autocratic, dystopian nightmare. Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, during the first Red Scare, US Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer rounded up, jailed, or deported thousands of suspected radicals, stoking fear that they were trying to import Communism (or anarchism) to the United States.
Red-baiting in the US reached its pinnacle during the 1940s and 50s when, (from Peter Dreier of The Nation), "another wave of hysteria swept the country during the Cold War, when politicians like Martin Dies, Joseph McCarthy, and Richard Nixon engineered witch hunts to identify and blacklist progressives and radicals in government, schools and universities, Hollywood, labor unions, and the media, alleging that Communists were infiltrating key institutions in order to undermine the American way of life. (McCarthy’s top witch-hunting assistant was Roy Cohn, who would later become Trump’s attorney and political mentor.) Anyone who questioned the nuclear-arms race, supported racial integration, or called for higher taxes on the rich could be branded an anti-American Communist. Not even Martin Luther King Jr. was immune."
Red-baiting and "American exceptionalism" are the reasons why Americans didn't start enjoying the benefits of single-payer health care decades ago. In the 1940s, Republican Governor of California Earl Warren introduced a single-payer plan for the state which initially enjoyed tremendous support but was done in by an advertising campaign which suggested, "We have enough regimentation in this country now. Certainly we don't want to be forced to go to "A State doctor" or pay for such a doctor whether we use him or not."
President Franklin Roosevelt had heard the same kind of arguments in attacks on the New Deal a few years earlier. In response he said, "A few timid people, who fear progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. Sometimes they will call it ‘Fascism’, sometimes ‘Communism’, sometimes ‘Regimentation’, sometimes ‘Socialism’. But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical."
So it goes with the American right-wing, arguing the same thing into a second century:
1. Liberals want to do a thing.
2. That thing is something that socialists and communists support.
3. Socialist and communist countries are bad places to live.
4. So the thing liberals want must be bad by definition, and if we tried that thing, America would turn into a failed state.
Example, here's an excerpt from a 2018 letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times:
"How can we guarantee that a democratic socialist takeover of the Democratic Party will not descend into the same chaos we see currently in "socialist" countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua? How can we be sure that the rhetoric of class antagonism will not devolve into outright class hatred? Or that "Medicare For All" won’t result, as it has in Venezuela, in hospitals that can’t even provide bedsheets?"
I hear this exact argument all the time on social media: Expanding the highly popular and successful Medicare program to more people will transform American into a communist banana republic dictatorship. Never mind that every developed nation in the world has socialized medicine. Never mind that the United States already has socialized the military, police, fire departments, highways, education and dozens of other public services and yet somehow has avoided turning into North Korea.
In response to the L.A. Times letter cited above, another reader sent this response to the Editor:
"Why do people so often cite the failures of democratic socialism by cherry picking their examples? Why not cite Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, Great Britain, Japan, Australia, Italy, Canada, Norway, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Belgium, New Zealand, Austria, Switzerland or the Netherlands — all countries that have successfully achieved a balance between capitalism and socialism? No country is perfect, but citing the worst examples does not move the conversation forward in any meaningful way."
An excellent summary. Next time I'll comment on what actually goes on in those scary "socialist" countries.
Sunday, June 23, 2019
Adventures in Late-Stage Capitalism #2: And in This Corner the Challenger... Democratic Socialism!
As discussed in my last post, America's economic system of lightly-regulated capitalism has produced a nation of highly-productive people who are cheated out of the benefits of all their hard work. Compared to working people in other leading industrialized countries, Americans are poorly compensated, have poor health care and bleak prospects for security in retirement. They are furthermore victims of irresponsible, rapacious corporations whose unlimited power to lobby and shape government results in environmental disaster and economic catastrophes like the Great Recession.
So what's the alternative? A recent poll shows that four in ten Americans would prefer living in a socialist nation to a capitalist one. "Socialism" means a lot of different things to people. But in the United States, a lot of people are latching on to a set of ideas known as democratic socialism. Or rather, I should say, they are latching on to the term democratic socialism. Even its biggest supporters aren't very precise on what democratic socialism actually is.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is America's best known proponent of democratic socialism. Earlier this month, Sanders sought to distinguish himself from the two dozen or so other candidates for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2020 by giving a speech that would define his principles as a democratic socialist. From Tara Volshan of Vox.com:
"Four months into his second presidential campaign, Sanders took the stage at George Washington University to make his clearest case for democratic socialism." Sanders called, "for an economic bill of rights: for health care, affordable housing, racial equality, a clean environment, and a living wage."
Sanders' speech elicited several different responses from Democrats and other folks on the left. The podcasters of Pod Save America commented that the speech was an enthusiastic defense of all the ideas espoused in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, particularly FDR's Economic Bill of Rights. That's just fine, Pod Save America pointed out, but the Sanders campaign made clear this was to be a speech about democratic socialism, not the continued relevance of the New Deal, and if there's anybody who should be able to make clear the distinction between those two sets of ideas, you'd think it would be Bernie Sanders. It used to be that Sanders supported the idea of nationalizing major industries, including energy companies, factories and banks. That vision is dramatically different from New Deal liberalism, and one that meets many conventional definitions of socialism. But Sanders no longer advocates for nationalization.
After Bernie Sanders, certainly the best-known proponent of democratic socialism is superstar freshman Democratic congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Perhaps she can help un-muddy the waters? In a recent interview with Nisha Stickles and Barbara Corbellini Duarte of Business Insider, the authors reported:
"Ocasio-Cortez has likened her view of democratic socialism to Scandinavian social democracy. The congresswoman's progressive platform consists of a single-payer health care system that covers all forms of health care.
"We're talking about single-payer health care that has already been successful in many different models, from Finland to Canada to the UK," she said.
Ocasio-Cortez, who is still paying off her student loans, also believes in tuition-free public colleges and universities. Her platform includes guaranteeing Americans a living wage that maintains "basic levels of dignity so that no person in America is too poor to live," Ocasio-Cortez said."
But again, public health care, a living wage guarantee and free adult education were all parts of the New Deal. For help on the definition of democratic socialism and what differentiates it from what Presidents FDR and Truman advocated decades ago, let's turn to Maggie Astor of the New York Times: "If we use the standard definition, democratic socialists don’t support capitalism: They want workers to control the means of production. In social democracies, by contrast, the economy continues to operate "on terms that are set by the capitalist class," Maria Svart, national director of the Democratic Socialists of America, told The Times last year. "Our ultimate goal really is for working people to run our society and run our workplaces and our economies." According to Astor, that would put democratic socialism to the left of "social democracy", common to the leading nations of Europe. Social democracy, says Astor, "preserves capitalism, but with stricter regulations and government programs to distribute resources more evenly."
Okay, now we're getting somewhere. So what does it mean in practical terms for people, rather than capitalists, to run our society and workplaces? Heading over to the Democratic Socialists of America web site, I see that:
"Social ownership could take many forms, such as worker-owned cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives. Democratic socialists favor as much decentralization as possible. While the large concentrations of capital in industries such as energy and steel may necessitate some form of state ownership, many consumer-goods industries might be best run as cooperatives.
Democratic socialists have long rejected the belief that the whole economy should be centrally planned. While we believe that democratic planning can shape major social investments like mass transit, housing, and energy, market mechanisms are needed to determine the demand for many consumer goods."
So if I can summarize: Democratic socialism is in most respects identical to the economic and social guarantees of the New Deal. That is:
* Everyone able to work has access to employment paying a living wage.
* All persons have a right to food, clothing, housing, education, medical care and social security.
* Freedom from unfair competition and monopolies, and price supports for farmers.
* National investment in transportation and energy infrastructure.
* Environmental protection.
The key difference between New Deal liberalism and democratic socialism: The New Deal emphasized unionization enabling workers to collectively bargain with private employers, while democratic socialism promotes employee-owned businesses and employee and consumer-controlled cooperatives.
So I guess your author is a democratic socialist too. I support emolyee-owned businesses, or unions, or pretty much anything that will break the cycle of people working full-time and still living in poverty.
Next time I'll cover the reaction of some folks on the right and on the mainstream left to democratic socialism. Spolier: They don't like it.
So what's the alternative? A recent poll shows that four in ten Americans would prefer living in a socialist nation to a capitalist one. "Socialism" means a lot of different things to people. But in the United States, a lot of people are latching on to a set of ideas known as democratic socialism. Or rather, I should say, they are latching on to the term democratic socialism. Even its biggest supporters aren't very precise on what democratic socialism actually is.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is America's best known proponent of democratic socialism. Earlier this month, Sanders sought to distinguish himself from the two dozen or so other candidates for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2020 by giving a speech that would define his principles as a democratic socialist. From Tara Volshan of Vox.com:
"Four months into his second presidential campaign, Sanders took the stage at George Washington University to make his clearest case for democratic socialism." Sanders called, "for an economic bill of rights: for health care, affordable housing, racial equality, a clean environment, and a living wage."
Sanders' speech elicited several different responses from Democrats and other folks on the left. The podcasters of Pod Save America commented that the speech was an enthusiastic defense of all the ideas espoused in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, particularly FDR's Economic Bill of Rights. That's just fine, Pod Save America pointed out, but the Sanders campaign made clear this was to be a speech about democratic socialism, not the continued relevance of the New Deal, and if there's anybody who should be able to make clear the distinction between those two sets of ideas, you'd think it would be Bernie Sanders. It used to be that Sanders supported the idea of nationalizing major industries, including energy companies, factories and banks. That vision is dramatically different from New Deal liberalism, and one that meets many conventional definitions of socialism. But Sanders no longer advocates for nationalization.
After Bernie Sanders, certainly the best-known proponent of democratic socialism is superstar freshman Democratic congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Perhaps she can help un-muddy the waters? In a recent interview with Nisha Stickles and Barbara Corbellini Duarte of Business Insider, the authors reported:
"Ocasio-Cortez has likened her view of democratic socialism to Scandinavian social democracy. The congresswoman's progressive platform consists of a single-payer health care system that covers all forms of health care.
"We're talking about single-payer health care that has already been successful in many different models, from Finland to Canada to the UK," she said.
Ocasio-Cortez, who is still paying off her student loans, also believes in tuition-free public colleges and universities. Her platform includes guaranteeing Americans a living wage that maintains "basic levels of dignity so that no person in America is too poor to live," Ocasio-Cortez said."
But again, public health care, a living wage guarantee and free adult education were all parts of the New Deal. For help on the definition of democratic socialism and what differentiates it from what Presidents FDR and Truman advocated decades ago, let's turn to Maggie Astor of the New York Times: "If we use the standard definition, democratic socialists don’t support capitalism: They want workers to control the means of production. In social democracies, by contrast, the economy continues to operate "on terms that are set by the capitalist class," Maria Svart, national director of the Democratic Socialists of America, told The Times last year. "Our ultimate goal really is for working people to run our society and run our workplaces and our economies." According to Astor, that would put democratic socialism to the left of "social democracy", common to the leading nations of Europe. Social democracy, says Astor, "preserves capitalism, but with stricter regulations and government programs to distribute resources more evenly."
Okay, now we're getting somewhere. So what does it mean in practical terms for people, rather than capitalists, to run our society and workplaces? Heading over to the Democratic Socialists of America web site, I see that:
"Social ownership could take many forms, such as worker-owned cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives. Democratic socialists favor as much decentralization as possible. While the large concentrations of capital in industries such as energy and steel may necessitate some form of state ownership, many consumer-goods industries might be best run as cooperatives.
Democratic socialists have long rejected the belief that the whole economy should be centrally planned. While we believe that democratic planning can shape major social investments like mass transit, housing, and energy, market mechanisms are needed to determine the demand for many consumer goods."
So if I can summarize: Democratic socialism is in most respects identical to the economic and social guarantees of the New Deal. That is:
* Everyone able to work has access to employment paying a living wage.
* All persons have a right to food, clothing, housing, education, medical care and social security.
* Freedom from unfair competition and monopolies, and price supports for farmers.
* National investment in transportation and energy infrastructure.
* Environmental protection.
The key difference between New Deal liberalism and democratic socialism: The New Deal emphasized unionization enabling workers to collectively bargain with private employers, while democratic socialism promotes employee-owned businesses and employee and consumer-controlled cooperatives.
So I guess your author is a democratic socialist too. I support emolyee-owned businesses, or unions, or pretty much anything that will break the cycle of people working full-time and still living in poverty.
Next time I'll cover the reaction of some folks on the right and on the mainstream left to democratic socialism. Spolier: They don't like it.
Wednesday, June 12, 2019
Adventures in Late-Stage Capitalism #1: Juicero Versus the Working Poor
Welcome to a new series on politics and economy in America. Today we'll begin discussing the big questions: Can our dysfunctional society survive? Are jobs disappearing? Is American capitalism going to be replaced with something else? If so, what might come next?
As a brief introduction, I'd like to ruminate on two anecdotes that I think shed light on what's gone wrong in this country.
I. Juicero!
Like juice? Well, you could squeeze packets of fresh juice into a glass. Or, thanks to the Juicero company, you could spend $700 for a machine to squeeze the packets, somewhat more slowly than you could squeeze them yourself. The Juicero machine, an engineering marvel consisting of four hundred of custom-machined parts, apparently cost more than $1,000 to produce, but the company sold them at a loss figuring to make up the deficit by selling you a lot of expensive juice.
My point here is that savvy investors calculated that the Juicero was such a good idea, they backed it with $120 million in venture capital. In other words they were betting on the idea that so many affluent Americans had so much money to burn, they could turn a profit on a system based around a superfluous $700 bag squeezer. And until journalists exposed the Juicero for what it really was (in a sort of "The Emperor has no clothes" moment so embarrassing that the company withdrew the product) those investors were actually correct - the very wealthy in America really do have that much money to burn.
Meanwhile...
II. Work for America's largest and most profitable corporations... and go on welfare.
Here's an excerpt from a post I wrote in 2015 about minimum wage and working in America:
"In late 2013, Nancy Salgado, a 27-year-old mother of two and employee of McDonald's made news for protesting the poor wages paid by her employer. After 10 years at McDonald's, she was making only $8.25 per hour, significantly below the poverty line for three people. Incredibly, the response by McDonald's to the inquiries of employees seeking information on making ends meet was to suggest that they apply for welfare. From Emily Cohn of the Huffington Post:
"McDonald's workers struggling to get by on poverty wages should apply for food stamps and Medicaid. That's the advice one activist McDonald's worker received when she called the company's "McResource Line," a service provided to McDonald's workers who need help with issues like child and health care."You can ask about things like food pantries. Are you on SNAP? SNAP is Supplemental Nutritional Assistance [Program] -- food stamps ... You would most likely be eligible for SNAP benefits," a McResource representative told 27-year-old Nancy Salgado, who works at a Chicago McDonald's. "Did you try and get on Medicaid? Medicaid is a federal program. It's health coverage for low income or no income adults -- and children.""
My reaction to this article was simple enough: McDonald's, a corporation that makes around $6 billion dollars per year in profits, should pay Ms. Salgado a living wage. Furthermore, it's wrong for large profitable companies to expect the taxpayers to subsidize their employees in the form of welfare benefits."
Some facts about American workers: We are among the hardest working and most productive in the world. Yet we live in the only leading industrialized nation that does not mandate universal health insurance, and also does not guarantee workers paid holidays, vacation and sick and maternity leave. One in nine U.S. workers are paid wages that can leave them in poverty, even when working full time.
A recent "Quality of Life" study conducted through the University of Pennsylvania compared leading nations according to essential ideas of broad access to food, housing, quality education, health care, employment and job security, political stability, individual freedom and environmental quality. This study found quality of life is better than that of the United States in twelve European countries as well as Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
What do these facts mean (beyond confirming that American workers are getting screwed)? Well, we as Americans have been taught since time out of memory that free-market capitalism is good, and that anything that falls under the rough heading of "socialism" is bad. But compared to other leading nations, one conclusion about life in the United States is inescapable: Our national economy is less centrally-managed and less socialized than other countries, but in every measurable sense our economic and political systems return poorer results than those same countries. And if Americans are hard-working and productive, and they're getting a raw deal, shouldn't we expect things to change?
As a brief introduction, I'd like to ruminate on two anecdotes that I think shed light on what's gone wrong in this country.
I. Juicero!
Like juice? Well, you could squeeze packets of fresh juice into a glass. Or, thanks to the Juicero company, you could spend $700 for a machine to squeeze the packets, somewhat more slowly than you could squeeze them yourself. The Juicero machine, an engineering marvel consisting of four hundred of custom-machined parts, apparently cost more than $1,000 to produce, but the company sold them at a loss figuring to make up the deficit by selling you a lot of expensive juice.
My point here is that savvy investors calculated that the Juicero was such a good idea, they backed it with $120 million in venture capital. In other words they were betting on the idea that so many affluent Americans had so much money to burn, they could turn a profit on a system based around a superfluous $700 bag squeezer. And until journalists exposed the Juicero for what it really was (in a sort of "The Emperor has no clothes" moment so embarrassing that the company withdrew the product) those investors were actually correct - the very wealthy in America really do have that much money to burn.
Meanwhile...
II. Work for America's largest and most profitable corporations... and go on welfare.
Here's an excerpt from a post I wrote in 2015 about minimum wage and working in America:
"In late 2013, Nancy Salgado, a 27-year-old mother of two and employee of McDonald's made news for protesting the poor wages paid by her employer. After 10 years at McDonald's, she was making only $8.25 per hour, significantly below the poverty line for three people. Incredibly, the response by McDonald's to the inquiries of employees seeking information on making ends meet was to suggest that they apply for welfare. From Emily Cohn of the Huffington Post:
"McDonald's workers struggling to get by on poverty wages should apply for food stamps and Medicaid. That's the advice one activist McDonald's worker received when she called the company's "McResource Line," a service provided to McDonald's workers who need help with issues like child and health care."You can ask about things like food pantries. Are you on SNAP? SNAP is Supplemental Nutritional Assistance [Program] -- food stamps ... You would most likely be eligible for SNAP benefits," a McResource representative told 27-year-old Nancy Salgado, who works at a Chicago McDonald's. "Did you try and get on Medicaid? Medicaid is a federal program. It's health coverage for low income or no income adults -- and children.""
My reaction to this article was simple enough: McDonald's, a corporation that makes around $6 billion dollars per year in profits, should pay Ms. Salgado a living wage. Furthermore, it's wrong for large profitable companies to expect the taxpayers to subsidize their employees in the form of welfare benefits."
Some facts about American workers: We are among the hardest working and most productive in the world. Yet we live in the only leading industrialized nation that does not mandate universal health insurance, and also does not guarantee workers paid holidays, vacation and sick and maternity leave. One in nine U.S. workers are paid wages that can leave them in poverty, even when working full time.
A recent "Quality of Life" study conducted through the University of Pennsylvania compared leading nations according to essential ideas of broad access to food, housing, quality education, health care, employment and job security, political stability, individual freedom and environmental quality. This study found quality of life is better than that of the United States in twelve European countries as well as Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
What do these facts mean (beyond confirming that American workers are getting screwed)? Well, we as Americans have been taught since time out of memory that free-market capitalism is good, and that anything that falls under the rough heading of "socialism" is bad. But compared to other leading nations, one conclusion about life in the United States is inescapable: Our national economy is less centrally-managed and less socialized than other countries, but in every measurable sense our economic and political systems return poorer results than those same countries. And if Americans are hard-working and productive, and they're getting a raw deal, shouldn't we expect things to change?
Thursday, May 16, 2019
The Eclipse of American Democracy, Part Twenty: Will White Americans Dismantle the Republic?
There's an old story that in 1787 at the close of the Constitutional Convention, a woman asked Benjamin Franklin if the Constitution would produce a republic or a monarchy. "A Republic, if you can keep it," replied Franklin.
A 2014 Northwestern University study concluded that the United States is not a democratic republic but an oligarchy of economic elites: "Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."
"When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it."
I've discussed at length in this series how big money interests have subverted democracy in America, but there's an elephant in the room I haven't talked about yet. Republican voter suppression tactics aside, it's for the most part the American people themselves who have forfeited their own rights by either not voting or by electing Republicans. The US has a two-party political system. One party, the Republicans, has for the past several decades sought to curtail voting rights, workers' rights, immigrants' rights, minority rights and just about every legal right afforded to human beings in favor of the power of the economic elites commonly referred to as the "1%". The Democratic party, by contrast, has tried (often not hard enough, granted) to protect people power.
So why have Americans allowed this to happen? I think there are three reasons.
1. Apathy
Only about 6 in 10 Americans vote in Presidential election years, and about 4 in 10 in the midterms. Research shows that a majority of young people don't think voting is an effective way to change society. Republicans have few qualms perpetuating those feelings among young voters, as nonvoters more likely to be poor, young, Hispanic or Asian-American and more likely to align with the Democratic Party.
2. People vote against their own interests
Non-college-educated white voters have gone all-in for Donald Trump and Republican politics. And what have they gotten in return? American workers are among the hardest working and most productive in the world, yet find themselves commonly living below the poverty line, denied healthcare, and denied basic benefits they would be guaranteed in other leading nations such as paid vacation and maternity leave and a retirement pension at a reasonable age.
Roger Ebert discussed the strange phenomenon of people voting against their economic interests in in a great 2011 article entitled, The One-Percenters. The article noted that Wall Street duped investors and wrecked the economy during the Great Recession, all while voting itself record bonuses. And the public's response?
"What puzzles me is why there isn't more indignation. The Tea Party is the most indignant domestic political movement since Norman Thomas's Socialist Party, but its wrath is turned in the wrong direction. It favors policies that are favorable to corporations and unfavorable to individuals. Its opposition to Obamacare is a textbook example. Insurance companies and the health care industry finance a "populist" movement that is manipulated to oppose its own interests. The billionaire Koch brothers payroll right wing front organizations that oppose labor unions and financial reform. The patriots wave their flags and don't realize they're being duped.
Consider taxes. Do you know we could eliminate half the predicted shortfall in the national budget by simply failing to renew the Bush tax cuts? Do you know that if corporations were taxed at a fair rate, much of the rest could be found? General Electric recently reported it paid no current taxes. Why do you think that was? Why do middle and lower class Tea Party members not understand that they bear an unfair burden of taxes that should be more fairly distributed? Why do they support those who campaign against unions and a higher minimum wage? What do they think is in it for them?"
Similarly, Thomas Frank wrote in the political study, What's the Matter with Kansas, "Out here the gravity of discontent pulls in only one direction: to the right, to the right, farther to the right. Strip today’s Kansans of their job security, and they head out to become registered Republicans. Push them off their land, and next thing you know they’re protesting in front of abortion clinics. Squander their life savings on manicures for the CEO, and there’s a good chance they’ll join the John Birch Society. But ask them about the remedies their ancestors proposed (unions, antitrust, public ownership), and you might as well be referring to the days when knighthood was in flower."
3. Racism
2020 will mark the Quadricentennial celebration of the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. For 400 years old, white, wealthy, "Christian", allegedly heterosexual men have run everything in this country. Because white people have always been the majority, unless you count the Native Americans, which White America seldom has. But not for much longer. By the year 2045, America will become minority white. This is a prospect that terrifies white America. And I think it's the biggest reason why more white people are voting Republican, and voting for xenophobic white supremacists like Donald Trump.
Just this past week, economist Paul Krugman commented on this in the New York Times. Krugman noted that President Trump's economic policies are clearly terrible for rural America, and asked: "Why, then, do rural areas support Trump? A lot of it has to do with cultural factors. In particular, rural voters are far more hostile to immigrants than urban voters — especially in communities where there are few immigrants to be found. Lack of familiarity apparently breeds contempt."
Krugman has hit the nail on the head: a lot of Americans are prepared to keep an insane, lying criminal with no respect for democratic institutions in the White House, as long as he speaks to their fears of a browner America.
But the problem goes deeper than just a lot of Republicans and un-worldly rural people who believe a lot of lies about immigrant populations harming America. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 46 percent of white Americans fear that a non-white majority population in the US would weaken American "culture". Similarly, a 2014 New York University study showed that white people who read about the coming white non-white majority in America tend to favor more restrictive immigration policies.
So where does this all lead? Unfortunately, it leads us to even worse things than electing a white supremacist as President. The title of this NBC News article by Noah Berlastky says it all: The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism.
According to Berlatsky, while many cite increasing partisanship as the biggest threat to American democracy, "A new study, however, suggests that the main threat to our democracy may not be the hardening of political ideology, but rather the hardening of one particular political ideology. Political scientists Steven V. Miller of Clemson and Nicholas T. Davis of Texas A&M have released a working paper titled "White Outgroup Intolerance and Declining Support for American Democracy." Their study finds a correlation between white America's intolerance, and support for authoritarian rule. In other words, when intolerant white people fear democracy may benefit marginalized people, they abandon their commitment to democracy."
"Based on surveys from the United States, the authors found that white people who did not want to have immigrants or people of different races living next door to them were more likely to be supportive of authoritarianism. For instance, people who said they did not want to live next door to immigrants or to people of another race were more supportive of the idea of military rule, or of a strongman-type leader who could ignore legislatures and election results."
So is there any good news? Yes. Time is on the side of democracy. And not because the country is becoming less white. Consider a recent article by Colby Itkowitz of the Washington Post entitled: The next generation of voters is more liberal, more inclusive and believes in government.
"Generation Z, defined as those born after 1996, is on the cusp of adulthood. The oldest are graduating college. By 2020, almost half will be eligible to vote in the presidential election, which means their values and opinions could soon help shape national politics.
According to (a recent Pew Center) survey, released Thursday, Gen Z teens and young adults have overwhelmingly adopted left-leaning beliefs similar to those of the millennials before them. They overwhelmingly disapprove of President Trump, believe the government should do more and reject American exceptionalism.
It’s not uncommon for young people to hold liberal views that moderate as they age. But Gen Zers grew up in a very different world than previous generations. The oldest among them was 11 when the first black president was elected. They became teenagers as same-sex marriage was legalized around the country. They also, according to Pew, will be the most racially diverse and well-educated generation.
This younger generation is much more likely to see climate change as a result of human behavior and to believe black Americans are treated unfairly."
And it's not as if the Republican party is attempting any kind of outreach to less-conservative, multicultural young people, as party leaders suggested after Mitt Romney's loss in 2012. Long-time Republican strategist and leader of the "Never Trump" movement Rick Wilson commented last year that, "Everything we Never Trump folks warned you of, including massive, decades-long downstream election losses, is coming. Alienating African Americans and Hispanics beyond redemption? Check. Raising a generation of young voters who are fleeing the GOP in droves? Check. Age-old beefs, juvenile complaints, and ego bruises taking center stage while the world burns? Check. Playing public footsie with white supremacists and neo-Nazis? Check. Blistering pig-ignorance about the economy and the world? Check. … Shredding the last iota of the GOP’s credibility as a party that cares about debt, deficits, and fiscal probity? Check."
You know the Republican party is in trouble with minority voters when the only minority candidates it can find to run for Congress are just as racist and crazy as Donald Trump. Just this week the GOP was excited to announce the congressional bid of Cuban-American Irina Vilariño in Florida. Ms. Vilariño is known for backing various bigoted conspiracy theories, and has refused to apologize for promoting a fake video which makes President Obama appear to say he was born in Kenya.
In conclusion, this is the thread that ties together everything I've discussed in this series on the many threats to America's democratic institutions: White, conservative Americans see that in their lifetimes people of color will become a majority in this country, and they consider that a threat to white dominance of American culture. They also see that the new multicultural majority is rejecting the neo-liberal politics of Ronald Reagan and those who came after him that seek to perpetually grow power for the wealthy while brutalizing the poor. And the old conservative white hegemony does not intend to let a little thing like democracy curtail their power, culturally or politically.
Jason Sattler, opinion columnist for USA Today recently observed, "Republicans have given up on voters. America's future depends on whether Democrats can expand voting rights faster than the GOP can restrict them."
Every day, the tide of population demographics shifts a little more against the Trump voter. Democracy in this country may last longer than they do. I think it will.
Thanks for reading.
A 2014 Northwestern University study concluded that the United States is not a democratic republic but an oligarchy of economic elites: "Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."
"When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it."
I've discussed at length in this series how big money interests have subverted democracy in America, but there's an elephant in the room I haven't talked about yet. Republican voter suppression tactics aside, it's for the most part the American people themselves who have forfeited their own rights by either not voting or by electing Republicans. The US has a two-party political system. One party, the Republicans, has for the past several decades sought to curtail voting rights, workers' rights, immigrants' rights, minority rights and just about every legal right afforded to human beings in favor of the power of the economic elites commonly referred to as the "1%". The Democratic party, by contrast, has tried (often not hard enough, granted) to protect people power.
So why have Americans allowed this to happen? I think there are three reasons.
1. Apathy
Only about 6 in 10 Americans vote in Presidential election years, and about 4 in 10 in the midterms. Research shows that a majority of young people don't think voting is an effective way to change society. Republicans have few qualms perpetuating those feelings among young voters, as nonvoters more likely to be poor, young, Hispanic or Asian-American and more likely to align with the Democratic Party.
2. People vote against their own interests
Non-college-educated white voters have gone all-in for Donald Trump and Republican politics. And what have they gotten in return? American workers are among the hardest working and most productive in the world, yet find themselves commonly living below the poverty line, denied healthcare, and denied basic benefits they would be guaranteed in other leading nations such as paid vacation and maternity leave and a retirement pension at a reasonable age.
Roger Ebert discussed the strange phenomenon of people voting against their economic interests in in a great 2011 article entitled, The One-Percenters. The article noted that Wall Street duped investors and wrecked the economy during the Great Recession, all while voting itself record bonuses. And the public's response?
"What puzzles me is why there isn't more indignation. The Tea Party is the most indignant domestic political movement since Norman Thomas's Socialist Party, but its wrath is turned in the wrong direction. It favors policies that are favorable to corporations and unfavorable to individuals. Its opposition to Obamacare is a textbook example. Insurance companies and the health care industry finance a "populist" movement that is manipulated to oppose its own interests. The billionaire Koch brothers payroll right wing front organizations that oppose labor unions and financial reform. The patriots wave their flags and don't realize they're being duped.
Consider taxes. Do you know we could eliminate half the predicted shortfall in the national budget by simply failing to renew the Bush tax cuts? Do you know that if corporations were taxed at a fair rate, much of the rest could be found? General Electric recently reported it paid no current taxes. Why do you think that was? Why do middle and lower class Tea Party members not understand that they bear an unfair burden of taxes that should be more fairly distributed? Why do they support those who campaign against unions and a higher minimum wage? What do they think is in it for them?"
Similarly, Thomas Frank wrote in the political study, What's the Matter with Kansas, "Out here the gravity of discontent pulls in only one direction: to the right, to the right, farther to the right. Strip today’s Kansans of their job security, and they head out to become registered Republicans. Push them off their land, and next thing you know they’re protesting in front of abortion clinics. Squander their life savings on manicures for the CEO, and there’s a good chance they’ll join the John Birch Society. But ask them about the remedies their ancestors proposed (unions, antitrust, public ownership), and you might as well be referring to the days when knighthood was in flower."
3. Racism
2020 will mark the Quadricentennial celebration of the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. For 400 years old, white, wealthy, "Christian", allegedly heterosexual men have run everything in this country. Because white people have always been the majority, unless you count the Native Americans, which White America seldom has. But not for much longer. By the year 2045, America will become minority white. This is a prospect that terrifies white America. And I think it's the biggest reason why more white people are voting Republican, and voting for xenophobic white supremacists like Donald Trump.
Just this past week, economist Paul Krugman commented on this in the New York Times. Krugman noted that President Trump's economic policies are clearly terrible for rural America, and asked: "Why, then, do rural areas support Trump? A lot of it has to do with cultural factors. In particular, rural voters are far more hostile to immigrants than urban voters — especially in communities where there are few immigrants to be found. Lack of familiarity apparently breeds contempt."
Krugman has hit the nail on the head: a lot of Americans are prepared to keep an insane, lying criminal with no respect for democratic institutions in the White House, as long as he speaks to their fears of a browner America.
But the problem goes deeper than just a lot of Republicans and un-worldly rural people who believe a lot of lies about immigrant populations harming America. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 46 percent of white Americans fear that a non-white majority population in the US would weaken American "culture". Similarly, a 2014 New York University study showed that white people who read about the coming white non-white majority in America tend to favor more restrictive immigration policies.
So where does this all lead? Unfortunately, it leads us to even worse things than electing a white supremacist as President. The title of this NBC News article by Noah Berlastky says it all: The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism.
According to Berlatsky, while many cite increasing partisanship as the biggest threat to American democracy, "A new study, however, suggests that the main threat to our democracy may not be the hardening of political ideology, but rather the hardening of one particular political ideology. Political scientists Steven V. Miller of Clemson and Nicholas T. Davis of Texas A&M have released a working paper titled "White Outgroup Intolerance and Declining Support for American Democracy." Their study finds a correlation between white America's intolerance, and support for authoritarian rule. In other words, when intolerant white people fear democracy may benefit marginalized people, they abandon their commitment to democracy."
"Based on surveys from the United States, the authors found that white people who did not want to have immigrants or people of different races living next door to them were more likely to be supportive of authoritarianism. For instance, people who said they did not want to live next door to immigrants or to people of another race were more supportive of the idea of military rule, or of a strongman-type leader who could ignore legislatures and election results."
So is there any good news? Yes. Time is on the side of democracy. And not because the country is becoming less white. Consider a recent article by Colby Itkowitz of the Washington Post entitled: The next generation of voters is more liberal, more inclusive and believes in government.
"Generation Z, defined as those born after 1996, is on the cusp of adulthood. The oldest are graduating college. By 2020, almost half will be eligible to vote in the presidential election, which means their values and opinions could soon help shape national politics.
According to (a recent Pew Center) survey, released Thursday, Gen Z teens and young adults have overwhelmingly adopted left-leaning beliefs similar to those of the millennials before them. They overwhelmingly disapprove of President Trump, believe the government should do more and reject American exceptionalism.
It’s not uncommon for young people to hold liberal views that moderate as they age. But Gen Zers grew up in a very different world than previous generations. The oldest among them was 11 when the first black president was elected. They became teenagers as same-sex marriage was legalized around the country. They also, according to Pew, will be the most racially diverse and well-educated generation.
This younger generation is much more likely to see climate change as a result of human behavior and to believe black Americans are treated unfairly."
And it's not as if the Republican party is attempting any kind of outreach to less-conservative, multicultural young people, as party leaders suggested after Mitt Romney's loss in 2012. Long-time Republican strategist and leader of the "Never Trump" movement Rick Wilson commented last year that, "Everything we Never Trump folks warned you of, including massive, decades-long downstream election losses, is coming. Alienating African Americans and Hispanics beyond redemption? Check. Raising a generation of young voters who are fleeing the GOP in droves? Check. Age-old beefs, juvenile complaints, and ego bruises taking center stage while the world burns? Check. Playing public footsie with white supremacists and neo-Nazis? Check. Blistering pig-ignorance about the economy and the world? Check. … Shredding the last iota of the GOP’s credibility as a party that cares about debt, deficits, and fiscal probity? Check."
You know the Republican party is in trouble with minority voters when the only minority candidates it can find to run for Congress are just as racist and crazy as Donald Trump. Just this week the GOP was excited to announce the congressional bid of Cuban-American Irina Vilariño in Florida. Ms. Vilariño is known for backing various bigoted conspiracy theories, and has refused to apologize for promoting a fake video which makes President Obama appear to say he was born in Kenya.
In conclusion, this is the thread that ties together everything I've discussed in this series on the many threats to America's democratic institutions: White, conservative Americans see that in their lifetimes people of color will become a majority in this country, and they consider that a threat to white dominance of American culture. They also see that the new multicultural majority is rejecting the neo-liberal politics of Ronald Reagan and those who came after him that seek to perpetually grow power for the wealthy while brutalizing the poor. And the old conservative white hegemony does not intend to let a little thing like democracy curtail their power, culturally or politically.
Jason Sattler, opinion columnist for USA Today recently observed, "Republicans have given up on voters. America's future depends on whether Democrats can expand voting rights faster than the GOP can restrict them."
Every day, the tide of population demographics shifts a little more against the Trump voter. Democracy in this country may last longer than they do. I think it will.
Thanks for reading.
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