Category Archives: Random Blogging

If You Wonder Why I’m Always in a Bad Mood…

Here are a few of the things that make me want to go to bed and pull the covers over my head. (H/T to Juanita Jean and the World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Parlor).

Furious parents and citizens of Oklahoma took to the streets early Thursday, protesting against Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos.  Protesters allege the show is blatantly promoting an anti-Creationist agenda and is ‘standing against the Judeo-Christian moors and values of the Saddleback Township community and others nationwide.”

The fact that they can’t spell “mores” is the least of it…The fact that they can’t tell the difference between science and religion is infinitely depressing.

And another “Christian” heard from, this time from Virginia.

Virginia GOP state delegate and congressional candidate Bob Marshall is standing by his claim that disabled children are God’s punishment for women who have an abortion. “Nature takes its vengeance on subsequent children,” Marshall said in 2010. “It’s a special punishment, Christians would suggest.”

I don’t know about you, but in my opinion, the kind of God who would get back at “sinful” women by punishing innocent children really doesn’t seem worth worshipping…

Impressively crazy as those entrants are, South Carolina isn’t about to give up its hopes of winning the All-batshit competition.

On Thursday, a Senate committee in South Carolina voted to expand the state’s so-called “Stand Your Ground” law to approve the use of deadly force to protect a fetus. The proposal would grant pregnant women protection from prosecution if they were defending their “unborn children,” defined as “the offspring of human beings from conception until birth.”

At least they didn’t vote to arm each fetus. They must be libruls…

South Carolina’s legislature is also having a heated debate over a proposal–triggered by a third-grader who is clearly more scientifically literate than many S.C. lawmakers–to name the wooly mammoth the “State Fossil.”

Sen. Kevin Bryant, a pharmacist and self-described born-again Christian who has compared President Obama with Osama bin Laden, voted to sustain a veto by Governor Nikki Haley of funding for a rape crisis center, and called climate change a “hoax,” proposed amending the bill to include three verses from the Book of Genesis detailing God’s creation of the Earth and its living inhabitants—including mammoths.

The proposal has subsequently been bogged down as legislators debate the additional language.

Meanwhile, Dispatches from the Culture Wars reports that the Louisiana legislature wants to pass a law making the King James Version of the Bible the official state book, and Miami-Dade County in Florida is closing all the bathrooms in polling places. And then there’s this.

And Indiana Governor Mike Pence really thinks he could be President.

We’re doomed. Really.

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Necessary Distinctions

I’ve spent a fair amount of time on this blog criticizing corporate interests–Big Oil, the Kochs, all the mega-corporations evading taxes by any means arguably lawful, and others of that ilk. But a recent story reminded me that markets often exert powerful pressure for good, and not just because competition tends to drive down prices and make goods and services affordable. The vast majority of businesses operate in competitive markets that reward good behavior as well as low prices.

A good example is the fight for equal rights for GLBT citizens. Business has been in the forefront of that fight.

The link in the first paragraph is to an article about Chik-fil-A, which is furiously backpedaling from the anti-gay remarks made last year by its founder and CEO. While it would be nice if that retreat was the result of some sort of moral epiphany, the truth is that it has been forced by the realities of the market. (As one consultant recently wrote,  “There are few more treacherous actions a CEO can take than to make derogatory comments about gay men and lesbians or to be publicly exposed for funding anti-gay causes.”)

Chick-fil-A’s socially conservative agenda, which formerly led the company to donate millions to charitable groups opposed to gay marriage, has been tempered. This, just as the company aims to quickly expand into Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. Southern hospitality must give way to urban reality as the 1,800 store chain moves to compete with big city success stories like McDonald’s, Panera Bread and Chipotle.

Homophobia, racism, anti-Semetism and the like are bad for business. That lesson has been learned by hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs, middle-managers and HR folks–and along the way, many of them have become true believers in the value of valuing diversity. Their advocacy, in turn, has moved the entire culture in a more inclusive direction.

For every asshole who is buying politicians and squirreling profits away in the Cayman Islands, there are twenty companies genuinely making America a better place–by treating GLBT people fairly, by becoming more environmentally conscious, by adopting local schools or supporting civic and charitable causes.

We need to rein in the bad actors, but we also need to appreciate the good guys. Even the guys who are only being good because that’s what the market rewards.

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Why Am I Not Surprised?

The Washington Post recently reported on a study conducted by political scientists Kyle Dropp (Dartmouth College) Joshua D. Kertzer (Harvard University) and  Thomas Zeitzoff  (Princeton University).

Here’s their description of the study.

On March 28-31, 2014, we asked a national sample of 2,066 Americans (fielded via Survey Sampling International Inc. (SSI), what action they wanted the U.S. to take in Ukraine, but with a twist: In addition to measuring standard demographic characteristics and general foreign policy attitudes, we also asked our survey respondents to locate Ukraine on a map as part of a larger, ongoing project to study foreign policy knowledge. We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign policy views. We found that only one out of six Americans can find Ukraine on a map, and that this lack of knowledge is related to preferences: The farther their guesses were from Ukraine’s actual location, the more they wanted the U.S.  to intervene with military force.

Here, in a nutshell (pun sort of intended), is the problem of our times: the loudest voices, the partisans arguing with the most certainty and the least nuance, belong to the people who know the least about the matter at hand.

What makes it even worse is that we elect so many of them.

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And Furthermore….

The McCutcheon decision, with its political privileging of the very wealthy, should focus our attention on the realities of the American economic landscape.

Thomas Piketty’s new book–which has been hailed as an “instant economic classic”– does just that. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty asks whether we can stop the relentless accumulation of wealth by the richest few, and if so, how.

As Eduard Porter summarized Piketty’s core message in the Times, “the economic forces concentrating more and more wealth in the hands of the fortunate few are almost sure to prevail for a very long time.” Piketty says that as the return to capital exceeds economic growth, an ever larger share of national income goes to the owners of capital, the managers of capital and to their heirs, and he warns that economics cannot reverse this. Policy–political action–will be required.

Unfortunately, in the wake of Citizens United and McCutcheon, the wealthy–who already had far more political clout than the rest of us–seem likely to continue calling the policy shots.

In a thoughtful essay in The Nation, Ari Berman explains why policy change will be so difficult: the Court has made it easier for the wealthy to influence elections at the same time it has made it harder for poor folks to vote.

These are not unrelated issues—the same people, like the Koch brothers, who favor unlimited secret money in US elections are the ones funding the effort to make it harder for people to vote. The net effect is an attempt to concentrate the power of the top 1 percent in the political process and to drown out the voices and votes of everyone else.

Berman calculates that 322,000 average Americans would have to give an equivalent share of their net worth to match Sheldon Adelson’s $91.8 million in Super Pac contributions. And he points out that, since Shelby County  (the voting rights case), eight states that had been covered under Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act have passed or implemented new voting restrictions (Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia, South Carolina, and North Carolina), and other states have been encouraged to follow suit.

According to the New York Times, “nine states [under GOP control] have passed measures making it harder to vote since the beginning of 2013.”

So–more ways for the “haves” to “express themselves.” Fewer avenues for participation or influence by the rest of us.

Can we spell oligarchy?

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An Interesting–and Damaging–Comparison

Walmart routinely defends its practice of paying poverty-level wages by pointing to its low prices. Sure, taxpayers end up subsidizing Walmart employees who qualify for Medicaid and food stamps, but the company’s low, low prices mean that even Walmart employees can afford those tube socks!

That assertion–that low pay is what allows Walmart to offer goods at low prices–just took a hit.

The most recent issue of Consumer Reports contains a very interesting comparison of grocery prices. Titled “Getting More from Your Store,” the article had the usual number of helpful hints; what really caught my eye, however, was the chart comparing prices for the same brand of purchases like flour, coffee, tall kitchen bags, toilet paper and similar items. The folks from Consumers compared the costs of store brands, Costco, Walmart, various regional chains and Walgreens for each item. Store brands, unsurprisingly, were cheapest overall.

Next was Costco.

Costco pays its employees roughly twice as much per hour, on average, as Walmart, and also provides health insurance. Yet Costco was cheaper than Walmart for eleven of the twelve items sampled. The totals for the “basket” of twelve items were: store brands, 49.59; Costco, 55.49, Walmart 70.52. The regional chains averaged 72.93 and Walgreens came in at a whopping 96.90.

Um…tell me again why taxpayers are subsidizing Walmart employees?

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