Category Archives: Random Blogging

Politics and Paranoia

I have an old friend (old meaning duration, not age, although neither of us is getting any younger) who has remained resolutely Republican despite his own distress at the party’s current incarnation. Presumably because of that affiliation, he is evidently on some sort of list that allows him to get the sort of emails that I rarely see, and from time to time, he shares them. (I think he likes to imagine me with my hair on fire as I read them.)

The other day, he sent me one that began:

The American Dream ended (on November 6th) in Ohio. The second term of Barack Obama will be the final nail in the coffin for the legacy of the white Christian males who discovered, explored, pioneered, settled and developed the greatest Republic in the history of mankind.

A coalition of Blacks, Latinos, Feminists, Gays, Government Workers, Union Members, Environmental Extremists, The Media, Hollywood, uninformed young people, the “forever needy,” the chronically unemployed, illegal aliens and other “fellow travelers” have ended Norman Rockwell’s America.

Next time someone solemnly assures you that their problems with Obama have nothing to do with bigotry or mean-spiritedness–and that what is really racist is to suggest that they do–think about this diatribe.

From the far Right, we increasingly hear these laments–the whine of the poor white male Christian victims. What we get from the far Left is more likely to be naiveté and annoying immaturity, but it also can descend into paranoia.

I have a Facebook friend who is constantly sending email “alarms”–with lots of exclamation points and highlighted passages–bemoaning President Obama’s “sellout” and viewing every presidential or congressional action as a conspiracy against “the 99%.” No one gets the benefit of the doubt. All Republicans are evil, all Democrats are disappointing pussies and/or fellow-travelers.

Interestingly, at the very end of the “Patriot’s” screed, he warns darkly that the nation can only be “saved” by zealots with guns. A similar thread runs through my leftist friend’s hysterical “alerts”–only by taking to the streets can “real Americans” prevail.

Thanks to the Internet, it is sometimes hard to remember that the vast majority of Americans are pretty sensible people who would very much like to see the crazies from both ends of the spectrum return to their caves or wherever they came from.

Most of us think it would be nice if our elected officials spent less time placating hysterical extremists and more time attending to the nation’s problems.

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Dear Lord, Where Do They Find These People?

According to Rep. Tom McClintock, there simply is no such thing as white-collar crime.

At a town hall meeting in El Dorado Hills, California on Tuesday, a constituent asked McClintock for his “stance on Wall Street criminal practices.” The congressman responded, “Well first of all, for a criminal practice there has to be a gun. It’s pretty simple.”

I think we know what’s simple, and it isn’t the Congressman’s intriguing theory of what it takes to constitute criminal behavior.

Every day, it seems we meet a new officeholding whack-a-doodle.

This week it was Lee Bright calling Lindsey Graham a “community organizer for the Muslims.” Last week, Steve King explained that for every young immigrant who was a valedictorian, there were a hundred others with “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” Before him, Paul Broun insisted that evolution and climate change were “lies from the mouth of hell.” Rand Paul insists that  black people have no trouble voting–and that despite his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and any and all measures to lift people from poverty, he’s all for equality. And of course, almost every week there’s some new insanity from Louie Gohmert, who Charles Pierce memorably called “perhaps the dumbest mammal to enter a legislative chamber since Caligula’s horse.”

There’s a new one just about every day. Michelle Bachmann hasn’t even taken her crazy eyes into retirement yet, and literally dozens of her fellow Republican Congresscritters are contending for her title of  “least securely tethered to reality.”

It would be funny if it weren’t so terrifying.

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How Long Can This Continue?

The State, a newspaper in South Carolina, reports that Senator Lindsay Graham–the very right-wing South Carolina Senator who is coming up for re-election–has attracted a primary opponent. Because, you know, Graham is insufficiently insane.

State Sen. Lee Bright announced his candidacy Tuesday for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate, calling incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham “a community organizer for the Muslim Brotherhood.”

“During the (congressional) recess, when I would hope that he would be around folks in South Carolina, getting their feelings on so many issues that affect their lives, he has instead chosen to take his time to be a community organizer for the Muslim Brotherhood and that concerns me,” Bright told supporters in a conference call. “He needs to spend more time listening to what the brothers in South Carolina have to say.”

Increasingly, I feel as though I have fallen down the Rabbit Hole with Alice, or I’m living in one of those science fiction books I used to read, where the protagonist goes to sleep only to wake up in an alternate universe.

Mr. (not very) Bright uses all the dog whistle words: community organizer. Muslim. Next thing you know, he’ll be accusing Graham of having been civil to the President (although he’d be hard pressed to find an example of Graham actually voting for something the President proposed. At this point, if President Obama suggested we endorse the sun continuing to rise in the east, most Republicans would call the very idea “socialism” and oppose it.)

I know we Americans have gone through periods of hysteria and bigotry and self-destructive behaviors before. We just didn’t have the internet and Facebook and blogs to rub our faces in every paranoid utterance, every display of aggressive ignorance and racial animus. I want to believe that this, too, shall pass…..

But I’d feel so much better if someone could assure me that we will come to the end of this cycle of crazy before the harm done becomes irreparable.

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Big Mac Attack

In the face of walkouts by fast-food employees, and negative publicity over the “budgeting advice” provided by McDonalds to its workers, opponents of a higher minimum wage have  gone into high gear, warning that jobs will be lost and prices will rise precipitously if the minimum wage is increased.

What–they ask in ominous tones–would a Big Mac cost if the workers preparing and serving it made 15.00 an hour?

As it happens, we know the answer to that.

The Economist Magazine created and maintains a “Big Mac Index,” making it possible to compare the price of Big Macs in different countries with different wage scales. In Australia, where the minimum wage is 15.00 and the minimum wage for fast food workers is, for some reason, slightly higher–on July 1st, the fast food rate went up from $17.03 an hour to $17.98 an hour–a Big Mac costs 70 cents more than it does in the U.S.

Salvatore Babones is a senior lecturer in sociology and social policy at the University of Sydney in Sydney, Australia, and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.. As he explained in a recent interview, 

What you get for that in Australia is you get to go to a fast food restaurant where you know that everybody behind the counter has full health insurance, everyone behind the counter gets a really good wage, they’re treated well, and they have, you know, options in life…

What about the argument that raising the minimum wage necessarily means fewer jobs?

There’s a theory that raising the minimum wage will result in fewer jobs. And that theory seems to make intuitive sense, that when wages are higher, you know, people hire fewer people. And in isolation that would be true. There’s an assumption economists like to make called ceteris paribus, which means all other things remaining equal, this would happen.

 But all other things are never equal. For example, if you raise the minimum wage, people make more money. That’s the first thing that’s not equal. As people make more money, they spend more, they pay more in taxes. The entire character of the economy changes.

As Babones points out, study after study confirms that no matter how “intuitively” persuasive the argument that raising the minimum wage will depress employment, it is an argument that has no empirical support. In the real world, it doesn’t work that way.

Interestingly, Australia was also the only rich country to dodge the Great Recession.

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Is This Possible?

It is something akin to an article of faith that white senior citizens are the backbone of the GOP–that they will troop reliably to the polls to support the Grand Old Party even as it regresses into an anti-reason, anti-science cult.  It is overwhelmingly my age cohort (aka “old farts”) that watches Faux News, votes religiously (in both senses of that word), and constitutes the loyal and irreplaceable base of the Republican Party.

I have resigned myself to the probability that improvements in American political life won’t occur until the over-65 generation dies off.  Of course, that inconveniently includes me, but hey–it is what it is. I routinely apologize to my students for the mess my generation is  bequeathing them.

But then I read this! Is it possible?

Carville-Greenberg, the Democratic polling operation, has recently reported growing disaffection with the GOP among the elderly.

We first noticed a shift among seniors early in the summer of 2011, as Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare became widely known (and despised) among those at or nearing retirement. Since then, the Republican Party has come to be defined by much more than its desire to dismantle Medicare. To voters from the center right to the far left, the GOP is now defined by resistance, intolerance, intransigence, and economics that would make even the Robber Barons blush. We have seen other voters pull back from the GOP, but among no group has this shift been as sharp as it is among senior citizens.

According to Carville-Greenberg, seniors voted for Republicans by a 21 point margin (38 percent to 59 percent) in 2010, but among seniors likely to vote in 2014, the generic Republican candidate leads by just 5 points (41 percent to 46 percent.) Seventy-one percent of seniors disapprove of the Republicans in Congress. Only 28% of seniors view the GOP favorably, down from 43% in 2010. During that same period of time, seniors’ approval of Democrats actually rose three points, from 37% to 40%.

More than half (55 percent) of seniors say the Republican Party is too extreme, half (52 percent) say it is out of touch, and half (52 percent) say the GOP is dividing the country. Just 10 percent of seniors believe that the Republican Party does not put special interests ahead of ordinary voters.

These numbers, if accurate, reflect a sea change in a constituency that has been the GOP’s most dependable voting bloc.

Evidently, when a party gets crazy enough, even its most loyal foot-soldiers begin to notice.

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