Category Archives: Random Blogging

Pining for the Days of Reality-Based Debate

The dictionary defines “propaganda” as “information of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view, and the dissemination of such information as a political strategy.”

We live in an age of propaganda.

I don’t know about others, but I have gotten to the point where I doubt the accuracy of virtually everything I read that has political implications–not just the right-wing fantasies that are embarrassingly obvious, but even ostensibly factual reporting from more moderate and progressive sources that seems to confirm my own biases. We live in an age where propaganda is increasingly driving out objective, fact-based reporting–where we have to double-check everything.

Take the various (misnamed) “think tanks.” Perhaps I was simply more naive a couple of decades ago, but my recollection was that even the private research institutions with an ideological preference generated intellectually respectable studies. They might draw different conclusions from the facts of a matter, but by and large, they began with verifiable facts. They resided in what has come to be called “the reality-based community.”

No longer.

Today’s exhibit: The Heritage Foundation, now run by former Tea Party Senator Jim DeMint. The first report issued after he took over the leadership was a “study” of immigration that was so ridiculously untethered from honesty that even foes of immigration distanced themselves from it. (The author was later found to have produced previous articles “documenting” the inferiority of certain minority groups.) This week, I was intrigued by an article posted to Facebook by an economist friend, analyzing Heritage’s most recent “economic freedom index.”

As the author, Bill Black, points out at The Big Picture, Heritage defines “freedom” as lack of regulation–it rates financial, environmental, and worker health and safety regulations as indicators of less freedom. Similarly, the index treats government spending–even when that spending increases education or health–as diminishing freedom.

Black focuses on the Index’ treatment of Ecuador–treatment which, as he notes, exposes the fallacies of Heritage’s index.

Under its current administration, a million Ecuadorians (out of 15 million) have been brought out of poverty. The prior high levels of emigration have turned around, and the country now has net immigration. Despite Heritage’s description of Ecuador’s growth rate as “moderate,” it was 7.8%–pretty robust by today’s standards, and considerably better than a U.S. 4.4% rate of growth in the 1980s that they had described as “spectacular growth” and attributed to a tax cut. (It’s worth noting that the U.S. economy grew at an average annual rate of 3.4% under Reagan.) The same index that dismissed Ecuador’s 7.8% growth described Peru’s (very respectable) 6.9% growth as “strong.”

Peru is a relatively conservative country, and Ecuador’s President Correa (an economist) is progressive, so 6.9% is strong and 7.8% is moderate.

Agree with Correa or not, he is enormously popular in Ecuador, where his policies have dramatically reduced inequality and poverty. Ecuador’s real growth in wages in 2012 was 3%. (Heritage has a chart that describes a 1.4% growth in wages as a “Rapid Growth Scenario.” Unless, of course, the growth is inconsistent with Heritage ideology.)

After I read Bill Black’s post, I did some independent research. (That trust deficit again….). I found that International Living has ranked Ecuador a top retirement destination for the past five years in a row, citing excellent health care, low crime, and a low and stable cost of living. Business Insider ranks Ecuador as one of the best places in the world to retire.

None of this is intended to paint Ecuador as some sort of Shangri-La. What the facts do show is that Heritage’s wildly misleading index is propaganda, not research.

I wish I could conclude this post by saying that this blatant dishonesty is confined to Heritage and a few other so-called Think Tanks, but it isn’t. It isn’t universal, but it is anything but rare. And that poses a huge problem for citizens who are genuinely trying to understand current policy debates.

My mother used to counsel my sister and me to “consider the source” when we heard something questionable or defamatory. It was good advice.

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I Should Probably Stick to the Comics….

I love leisurely Sunday mornings. I still get the newspapers (Star and New York Times) on paper, and while I have long since gone to electronic receipt of the “funnies,” I will never be as comfortable with online formats as I am with old-fashioned newsprint.

That said, it’s impossible to read the news without being forcibly reminded how quickly and dramatically the world is changing, how complicated our reality is, and how difficult it is for many of us to accept those changes or deal with them.

Three totally different articles from today’s Star underscored the pace of change, the resistance to it, and not incidentally, our need to be sure we are asking the right questions in order to deal with it.

Least important, but telling, was the Varvel cartoon portraying the upcoming arguments over same-sex marriage in the Indiana General Assembly by drawing a castle with a moat around it. I’m not entirely sure what he thought he was saying with this image–presumably that our legislature is impervious to outside opinions–but it inadvertently (and accurately) portrayed our lawmakers as residents of the 17th Century.

The question is, how do legislatures or citizens who are firmly ensconced in the past deal with things like bitcoins?  The business section had a fairly lengthy article about this new currency, composed of nothing more than computer code, and not backed by the “full faith and credit” of any government. This is one of many spontaneous new ways of doing business via the internet, a method that allows for anonymity and avoids the problems of foreign exchange. Its value is entirely determined by market forces (and that value has been extremely volatile). I have no idea whether bitcoins are a harbinger of our future, or an experiment that will fizzle–but the very concept has to be unsettling to the “gold standard” folks who populate talk radio and TV and are currently encouraging everyone to buy gold or trade in their paper money for silver coins. If they still don’t understand that money gets its value from people’s willingness to accept it, they are going to have a lot of trouble dealing with bitcoin and its progeny.

Less arcane, perhaps, was the article about rapidly changing attitudes toward marijuana. I’ve written before about the insanity of our drug war, and evidently, a lot of people have come to realize how self-defeating our approach to drug use has been. The problem is, as the article demonstrated, we are still asking the wrong questions–still in thrall to an approach that fails to distinguish between use and abuse.

Both sides of this debate are drawing wrong conclusions from wrong questions. The reason attitudes about pot are changing is that so many people have used marijuana occasionally, much as they have a drink or two occasionally, with no deleterious effect. That leads them to believe pot is harmless and should be legalized. Opponents of legalization point to the (relatively few) addicts, and see danger.

This focus on the substance being abused misses the point. People with addictive personalities can abuse anything–alcohol, tobacco, freon from the air conditioner, grandpa’s heart medicine, inhalents…It is literally impossible to ban everything someone might abuse. With alcohol and tobacco–thanks less to common sense and more to corporate lobbyists–we’ve found a workable middle ground: we regulate, tax and inform. And it works; in most places, it is much easier for teens to get drugs than it is for them to buy alcohol. (As one drug war critic noted, when was the last time you saw the owner of the local liquor store hanging around the schoolyard saying “Psst, kids. We got a new shipment of Stoly in today”?)

The world isn’t only changing. Thanks in no small part to science and technology, it’s getting more complicated.

If we stay in that 17th-Century castle protected from reality by a moat of our own construction, we’re not going to be able to deal with 21st Century challenges.

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Theology and Human Nature

This morning’s New York Times has an article about Paula Deen  and the black church’s tradition of forgiveness. (Hate the racism, love the racist.)

The article itself is less than newsworthy–it uses the current flap over Deen’s cluelessness as a “hook” for a general discussion of the black church and the theology of forgiveness–but it reminded me of an important difference between Christian and Jewish teachings that I have often pondered. Christians are told to love their neighbors; Jews are taught to “do justice.” In other words, we don’t have to love anyone, but we must treat everyone as we would want to be treated.

No offense to my Christian friends, but doing justice has always seemed a lot easier.

It’s sort of like the First Amendment. I don’t have to like what you have to say, but I do have to let you say it. I don’t have to agree with your ideas, but I do have to agree that you have as much right to express them as I have to express mine. If current behaviors are any indication, it’s hard enough to get people to respect each others’ rights. Love seems to be pushing it.

I mean, let’s be honest. There is no way I’m going to love Rick Perry or Michelle Bachmann, and if they knew me, they’d be equally hard-pressed to love me. I realize that, unlike politics, theology isn’t “the art of the possible,” but I’m glad my tradition only requires me to be fair and just. Loving these people is probably beyond me.

I wonder how Christians manage it.

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An Interesting Observation…

Yesterday, President Obama nominated a veteran of the Bush Administration to head up the FBI. There has been a lot of chatter about the choice–the nominee is apparently highly regarded on both sides of the aisle, something we don’t see much of these days. But I was struck by an observation posted to Maddowblog:

If the president and his team had any reason to worry at all about ongoing investigations casting the White House in a negative light — or worse — there’s simply no way Obama would choose a Republican lawyer with a history of independence to lead the FBI. Indeed… just the opposite is true — if Obama were the least bit concerned about any of the so-called “scandals,” he’d almost certainly look for a Democratic ally to lead the FBI.

But the president is doing the opposite — Comey is not only a veteran of the Bush/Cheney administration, he also donated to the McCain/Palin and Romney/Ryan campaigns, in the hopes of preventing Obama from getting elected. If the president thought the “scandals” might lead to the Oval Office, he’d never choose someone like Comey to take over the FBI right now.

Another indication that there is no “there” there.

The real problem with the persistent, ongoing hysterical efforts to prove that Obama’s Administration has done something criminal, of course, is that it has utterly distorted what ought to be the critique of this or any administration. Rather than focusing on the misplaced policies or bureaucratic inefficiencies  that are always fair game, drummed up (and sometimes wholly fabricated) accusations simply feed the appetites of GOP partisans who want to believe the worst. That in turn generates knee-jerk defensiveness by Democrats who might otherwise disagree with administration policy.

Partisan pissing contests have taken the place of potentially productive conversations about how we might govern ourselves better, or how we might grow the economy or improve education or balance the right to privacy against the needs of national defense.

We are governed by two-year-olds.

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Pigs and Hogs

There’s an old saying: pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered. If that’s true, there’s a reckoning due.

Let’s just review a few recent news items. Florida’s governor has signed a bill forbidding local government units from requiring businesses to pay sick leave. While this is somewhat less egregious than originally reported–early descriptions suggested the bill was an outright outlawing of sick leave–it is still horrendously bad policy. It’s particularly ironic that the governor who approvingly signed the bill is the same “job creator” who paid huge fines when his company  (a company that depended upon government-provided medical care for its profits) was convicted of  Medicare fraud.

Closer to home, Indiana Congressman Marlin Stutzman wants to separate food stamp authorization from the farm bill, so that it will be easier to reduce the SNAP payments that poor Americans depend upon to buy food, while retaining those all-important farm subsidies. (Stutzman knows how important those subsidies are because he himself has reportedly received at least 200,000 worth. And he’s hardly alone.)

Then there are all those “right to work” laws (while there is no evidence that they generate economic growth, there’s plenty of evidence that they depress the wages employers pay). There are all of the companies scrambling for ways to avoid compliance with the Affordable Care Act (wouldn’t want the cost of basic medical care for the most poorly-paid employees to affect that bottom-line!). There’s the GOPs hysterical reaction to any suggestion that our historically low tax rates be raised even modestly. There’s the stubborn opposition to equal pay for women (remember the howls over the Lily Ledbetter Act?), and even more stubborn resistance to proposals to raise the minimum wage.

These are just a few examples of the relentless campaign being waged by the most privileged against the working poor, a campaign accompanied by sneering references to “takers” and “moochers.”

Leaving aside issues of simple justice, what I want to know is, whatever happened to enlightened self-interest?

I often think back to a conversation I had years ago with a wealthy friend who explained his support for higher taxes on the wealthy and a more robust social safety net thusly: “I’m better off paying higher taxes than I would be if people get so desperate that they take to the streets. Social unrest isn’t good for anyone’s bottom line, and when you grind people down too far, eventually that’s what happens.”

Corporate America has evidently lost sight of Henry Ford’s central insight: workers should be paid wages sufficient to allow them to buy your product. The poor and the dispossessed can’t afford to participate in the market. 

People with money and status will always be better off than those without. Most of us are willing to live with that reality. But at some point, excesses of greed will generate unpleasant consequences.

Pigs and hogs.

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