Dave Zirin explains to Rachel Maddow the real Tiger Woods scandal.
Good stuff.
Zirin on Tiger Woods
December 1st, 2009More War
November 26th, 2009Though he won’t formally announce this until next week, reports indicate that President Obama is about to authorize an additional deployment of 34,000 US soldiers to Afghanistan.
Last night on Charlie Rose, Arianna Huffington complained that this was a reversal of what Obama argued during the 2008 Democratic convention, that “the greatest risk for the U.S. in Afghanistan would be to do the same old thing, play the same old politics, with the same old players and then expect different results.”
But the truth is, escalation in Afghanistan was always the most likely course of action and Obama himself, leaving aside the platitudes of a convention speech, promised as much.
As I wrote in September 2008, after the first Obama-McCain debate, both candidates were promising more war:
John McCain has surrounded himself with foreign policy advisers that include the most fanatical elements of the neo-conservative movement. His relish for further war-in Iran and Syria, as well as Iraq, is a fact.
Obama’s position on Afghanistan is also disturbing. Few people would have denied the US the right to respond militarily in Afghanistan after 9/11. But, seven years later, our escalating presence in that country is only driving it further back into the hands of the Taliban. American bombings there repeatedly kill Afghan civilians and our increasingly provocative incursions into Pakistan threaten to de-stabilize a nuclear-armed country that has strongly and fanatically anti-American elements. A major military escalation there-as Obama proposes-could well inflame the situation further.
Furthermore, it’s no longer clear what, if any strategic value, capturing or killing Bin Laden has, as Obama repeatedly vowed to do. Al Qaeda is a diffuse network in dozens of countries, as Obama himself pointed out. And, the 9/11 plotters mostly prepared for their attack in places like Florida.
In short, the answer to terrorism is not necessarily conventional military action. Obama may know this, but, he’s still unwilling to challenge the fundamental, disturbing prerogative at the heart of American foreign policy: our unique right to project military force anywhere in the world, regardless of the consequences for innocent civilians.
Obama offers depressingly little in the way of “change” here. Is his position politically necessary? Perhaps. Is it disturbing and insidious? Certainly.
Our country’s militarism has reached pathological proportions, as Andrew Bacevich has argued eloquently for years. It threatens our national security, undermines the prospects for an ambitious domestic agenda and does more harm than good to the intended targets of our aggression, including the innocent civilians we’re ostensibly trying to protect and the sound governments we’re supposedly trying to establish.
Obama is about to sign off on more death, more wasted money, more failed diplomacy. But no one can really claim to be surprised.
Remember When…
November 23rd, 2009…all the way back in June, Paul Starr warned that the public option that ended up getting negotiated might be so weak that it would be worse than no public option at all.
Well, we may have reached that point, as Josh Marshall notes here and Robert Reich details here.
This is the product of a corrupt and broken political system.
Toobin on Stupak
November 17th, 2009Via Coates, Jeffrey Toobin has an incisive take on the Stupak amendment and its larger implications. He explains clearly why the Stupak amendment, if not modified, means that:
Today, most policies cover abortion; in a post-Stupak world, they probably won’t. With a health-care plan that is supposed to increase access and lower costs, the opposite would be true with respect to abortion. And that, of course, is what legislators like Stupak want—to make abortions harder, and more expensive, to obtain. Stupak and his allies were willing to kill the whole bill to get their way; the liberals in the House were not.
And closes with these words:
“The Greatest Theft and Cover-Up Ever”
November 17th, 2009This is from July, but I am just getting to it now. The relentless Dylan Ratigan and Eliot Spitzer explain clearly, in eight minutes, how it was that the US taxpayer committed trillions to banking institutions in exchange for garbage.
And here’s Tim Geithner squirming his way through a Q and A with Elizabeth Warren about why institutions like AIG had to receive 100 cents on the dollar for their bad debts for the sake of their counterparties, creditors, employees, etc., but companies like GM, which employ millions of blue collar workers, didn’t.
It makes listening to discussions about whether we can “afford” health care reform impossible to listen to without getting, well, sick.
And it makes this article I wrote in January seem almost quaint.
Update: And if you want to be too mad to think today, spend another ten minutes with Professor Warren.
What He Said, Bob Somerby Edition
November 14th, 2009Yesterday, The Daily Howler highlighted a column by Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, about GOP falsehoods on health care reform (HCR). Somerby notes that Marcus wrote a “very good column,” pointing out the repeated lies uttered by House Republicans during last Saturday’s floor debate.
After debunking one whopper after another, Marcus asked in exasperation:
“You have to wonder: Are the Republican arguments against the bill so weak that they have to resort to these misrepresentations and distortions?
Somerby:
“You have to wonder?” Actually, you don’t—if you’ve been alive on this planet during the past few decades of Republican disinformation about American health care. What Marcus saw is par for the course.
…
The Republican Party has been spreading disinformation about health care for a very long time now. (If only she’d been able to see Candidate Giuliani parade about during Campaign 08!) Citizens have been handed familiar, well-scripted howlers—and since no one like Marcus ever speaks up, many citizens tend to believe the things they have endlessly heard. They’ve been told that “we have the best health care system in the world.” They’ve been told that “European-style health care has never worked anywhere it’s been tried.” They’ve been handed all manner of bull-roar and crap about waiting lists and long lines. And of course, they haven’t ever really been told about our astonishing level of spending.
Had Marcus only been awake, she would have seen this disinformation campaign at work for the past several decades.
She would have seen something else, of course: The utter failure of the mainstream press to respond to this torrent of disinformation. And failure of the “liberal” world. And the failure of the Democratic Party, including its most fiery liberals.
Of course, as depressingly true as Somerby’s point is here, it’s worse than that. Somerby politely declined to rehash Marcus’ generally poor record as a columnist. She’s not merely been asleep about key issues. She herself has been an active peddler of “misinformation,” for example on social security “reform.” (Of course, lying about social security is a virtual mandate in the editorial and op-ed pages of the Washington Post). More broadly, she has been a faithful practitioner in the beltway pundit art of a pox-on-both-their-houses cynicism - whereby pundits demonstrate their cool and independence of thought by arguing that “both sides” engage in the same kinds of political tactics, all while hypocritically lecturing the American people not to expect “too much” from the political process even as they defend privilege. In this spirit, we’ve seen Marcus engage in idiotic false equivalencies, mindlessly defend government power and secrecy, and ignorantly opine on the government’s responsibility to deal with a severe economic downturn, among many other failures.
Arguably the most significant development of the last thirty years in America has been the extraordinary transfer of wealth up the income ladder, making the United States one of the most unequal societies in the world. During that time, executive power has increased dramatically, America has become the world’s number one incarcerator and the wealth, access and privilege of those at the top have reached levels in ways that would have been unimaginable three decades ago, all while the United States has become an unchecked global military colossus. All of these developments have been possible for three principle reasons:
1) This has been the outright agenda of the Republican Party since 1980 - to transfer more wealth to the wealthy, increase executive and policing power, promote militarism - all of which was to be paid for by squeezing the majority of Americans.
2) The Democratic Party’s failure to fight anything but a rear-guard action against these developments when not actively collaborating in them.
3) the mainstream media’s refusal to acknowledge these central developments in American life, preferring instead to focus on petty trivialities, false equivalencies and rationalizations for their own increasing privilege.
That Marcus suddenly realized this week that the GOP was lying about health care reform, whose urgency is a direct consequence of the thirty year upward redistribution of wealth, access and privilege is just one more reminder of how utterly our gatekeepers of public discourse have failed us.
What Passes for Reasonable
November 13th, 2009David Brooks has an especially insipid column today, touting the virtues of John Thune, Republican senator from South Dakota, as a viable contender in 2012. According to Brooks, Thune’s chief virtues include the fact that he’s tall and handsome, and that he carries on quiet conversations, rather than ranting loudly. As Yglesias writes, none of this changes the fact that Thune is a down-the-line right-conservative who has no demonstrable agenda for anything. He’s also a serial repeater of false right-wing talking points and an avowed opponent of any reform of health care. Oh and a member in good standing of a bizarre and secretive Christianist group known for sleazy sexual activities and has pushed radical legislation to expand conceal and carry gun laws.
Brooks more or less acknowledges at the end of the piece that on the critical question of middle class economic anxieties, Thune has nothing to say. But since Thune’s views are no more vacuous than Brooks’ own, I guess it’s all good. And besides, Brooks points out that Karl Rove says the tide is turning against Obama and the Democrats, so it must be true.
Defending our Freedom
November 11th, 2009As an avid sports fan, I listen to sports talk on radio almost daily. And at this time of year - Veterans Day - one certainly gets one’s fill of paeans to our men and women in uniform. It has been true since long before 9/11 that, during times of war, our major organized sports - college and professional - have wanted to demonstrate their patriotic bonafides. Some sports, like football, are especially eager to promote the connection between themselves and the symbols of militarism.
But over the past few years, there have been more determined efforts from entities like the NFL, Major League Baseball and ESPN to pay homage to our armed forces. Whether it’s ESPN’s Sports Center going on location in Kuwait, Mike and Mike broadcasting from the newly commissioned battleship, the USS New York (whose hull was built from the wreckage of the twin towers), fighter-jet flyovers at Super Bowls and other major sporting events, the pro-militaristic bent of American sports seems as great as ever (and, conversely, the vilification of those few athletes who, in some public way, dissent from these displays- such as Carlos Delgado and Toni Smith).
There’s nothing surprising about this, but there is one aspect of it in particular that I find especially disturbing - the way in which all of these celebrations of the military perpetuate the worst propaganda about why we’re fighting the wars we’re currently engaged in. It’s embedded in a variant of a simple statement that I have heard countless times from sports casters, athletes and other sports official since 2003 - that we should “thank” the men and women in uniform for “preserving our freedom,” for sacrificing their lives so that we may continue to enjoy the unthinking privilege that is the right of every American. Even when its not explicitly stated, the implication is that we are free to live the lives we do because of the soldiers currently fighting overseas, whether it’s Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere.
Even stalwart proponents of the war would have a hard time squaring the circle between our presence in Iraq and the protection of our freedoms at home. The idea that had the counter-factual prevailed - that we had never toppled Saddam Hussein - we would be, somehow, unfree today is absurd on its face. Whatever justifications one can think for our 2003 invasion of Iraq, protecting our freedoms cannot possibly be one of them (whether we did it for oil, as Alan Greenspan says was obviously true, and therefore to preserve our “way of life” more broadly is a somewhat separate question).
And whatever justification we had for toppling the Taliban eight years ago, it cannot reasonably be asserted that a decision to withdraw from there now would pose an imminent threat to our freedoms. Al Qaeda’s global viability, many experts on the subject agree, is not dependent on the Taliban re-taking control of Afghanistan.
And all of this grants a premise - that fighting wars, in general, preserves freedom. But hasn’t our war-fighting often meant the opposite - a crackdown on civil liberties and an expansion of government surveillance and other abuses of power? To take recent history, haven’t Americans, in the past eight years, lost individual freedom to an increasingly secretive and expansive government-surveillance apparatus? And how has our war-fighting mitigated those developments?
So, there’s no misunderstanding here, this is not a post about Americans in uniform. As members of the armed forces, they go where their told and do what they’re commanded to do. Quite a number of them have developed serious doubts about the purpose of our recent wars. What’s striking, though, is the degree to which the sports world, with rare exception, has adopted the most unthinking, uncritical and extreme neo-c0nservative rationale for “supporting our troops” - that Americans’ own freedom would be imperiled were we not at constant war overseas.
Isn’t there a way to express support for troops that doesn’t require proffering such propaganda?
Our Atrocious Economic Information Environment
November 3rd, 2009As Dean Baker daily catalogs, there are endless examples of bad economics reporting and, more broadly, economic analysis in respectable American media. This makes it very hard for normal folks, who don’t have all day to sit around digging to the bottom of what they read, to make clear judgments about how economic forces play out the way they do.
One example from Baker’s blog caught my eye, in this case out-sourced to his colleague John Schmitt. Casey Mulligan, a University of Chicago economist, recently told his audience at the New York Times Economix blog that paid sick days - which employers in the United States are not required to give, but are commonplace in Europe - are a bad thing. Why? Because they incentivize healthy workers taking time off.
His proof? An IMF study showing that, on average, Americans take fewer average sick days than Europeans. In support of this finding, Mulligan reproduces a graph from the IMF showing that folks in the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway take lots more sick days than do American workers. As Schmitt notes, Mulligan fails to ask key questions about whether this is really a bad thing, especially if discinentives to taking sick days by people who should results in things like spreading illness.
But more to the point, while Mulligan provides his readers with bar graphs for the four countries noted above, he fails to actually reproduce the IMF’s original graph. And that graph, you’ll be shocked to know, shows that nine European countries that do provide paid sick days have lower sickness-related absences than the United States. (follow the Schmitt link above to see what the Mulligan graph and the actual IMF graph look like).
It’s hard to know how using data in this way - in effect, fabricating a graph in order to mispresent the original - is anything but lying.
But this is, unfortunately, what we face every hour of every day in our respectable media - what can only be described as sheer, willful dishonesty. The intersection of that dishonesty with Americans’ woeful ignorance about how life in America compares with life elsewhere is having a crippling effect on our public policy debates.
And it’s that intersection - between dishonesty and ignorance - that provides the breeding ground for the utterly absurd pronouncements of people like the insane Virginia Foxx, the fanatically right-wing Congresswoman from North Carolina, who said yesterday that we have more to fear from health care reform passing than “we do from any terrorist right now in any country.”
Olympia Snowe Still Opposes Public Option Because it’s too good
October 28th, 2009The big news yesterday was Joe Lieberman’s threat to filibuster health care legislation that contains a public option. As many folks have pointed out, Lieberman’s arguments, including his claim that the public option will be a burden on taxpayers, simply do not wash.
Among the people who understand this fact is Senator Olympia Snowe, the focus of a bizarre delusion that a single Republican vote for watered down health care reform constitutes a “bi-partisan” solution to a problem that, if not tackled aggressively, threatens to swamp our economy in the next decade.
Talking Points Memo’s Brian Beutler asked Senator Snowe whether she agreed with Lieberman that the public option would be a significant financial burden on the government. Her response: “no.” In fact, and not for the first time, Snowe explained that she was opposed to the public option because it’s too good. Really. Here’s what she said:
“[triggers] obviously can have a maximum impact…certainly, not as comparable to a full public option and what they want, but on the other hand what you’re doing with the public option is basically crowding out the private sector, because of the government’s, you know, inordinate advantage in the market place.” (Beutler’s emphasis).
Snowe later elaborated that the public option would “drive[] the industry out” and clarified that “I believe in, to the extent possible, to allow the private sector to provide a solution.”
This is not the first time (see item#3) Snowe has argued against the public option because it would be too good for ordinary Americans. But of all the bizarro-world aspects of the debate about health care reform, this may take the cake. A robust public option would save the government money while providing many more Americans with affordable health insurance and because this is bad for an oligopolistic industry whose profits have exploded in the past ten years at most Americans’ expense, this is a bad outcome.
Of course, Snowe is claiming to stand on principle in asserting that better is worse. She believes, she tells us, that it’s better for the private sector to provide a solution even, apparently, if it’s an inferior solution. This principle runs contrary to the founding texts of modern economics, including the writings of Adam Smith. For Smith, the division of labor, private exchange and self-interest were to be praised to the extent that they achieved ends worthy of praise - namely what Smith called “universal opulence.” Private economic activity was not praiseworthy as an end in itself. In those instances where private economic interests were not likely to produce better outcomes than the government, and Smith enumerated plenty such instances, the government should certainly step in.
Snowe, by contrast, is articulating a blindly ideological view, one that asserts, against common sense, that even when the outcome is likely to be inferior, we should prefer “private” solutions (whether large, privileged corporations are ‘private’ in the sense that is ordinarily meant is another question). Whether that sort of incoherence is better or worse than Lieberman simply lying about the public option, I cannot say.
Of course, ascribing Snowe’s views to blind ideology might be a charitable view of her motivations.