Harvard Prof Continues to Embarass the Civilized World
Posted: May 4, 2013 Filed under: homophobia | Tags: Austerian, gay baiting, homophobia, Keynes, Niall Ferguson 27 Comments
Niall Ferguson is one of those right wing “intellectuals” that continually proves why there are few intellectually prepared people to actually argue the idiotic causes of modern ‘conservatives’ cogently. Since there is no real case to be made, the conversation usually turns to some screed against some straw man or some persecuted out group. Ferguson is a homophobe. He can’t go long without finding some really stupid way to make being gay an issue in any thing that relates to his diatribes. He really stepped in it this time. This is from Digby.
There’s a lot of chatter today about Niall Ferguson’s odious comments about John Maynard Keynes.
This is the gist of it:
An excerpt from Lance Roberts’ post at StreetTalkLive.com reporting a question from former PIMCO banker Paul McCulley (in bold) and Robertson’s notes on Ferguson’s response (its not clear whether these notes are verbatim or paraphrased):
Question By Paul McCulley
“The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs…in the long run we are all dead.”
Are we in a liquidity trap, are we at a zero bound of interest rates and stuck at 8% unemployment?
[Ferguson:] Keynes was a homosexual and had no intention of having children. We are NOT dead in the long run…our children are our progeny. It is the economic ideals of Keynes that have gotten us into the problems of today. Short term fixes, with a neglect of the long run, leads to the continuous cycles of booms and busts. Economies that pursue such short term solutions have always suffered not only decline, but destruction, in the long run.
Several details of Ferguson’s remarks that were included in the Financial Advisor story have not been confirmed by other sources. For example, Financial Advisor reported that Ferguson asked his audience how many children Keynes had and “explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of “poetry” rather than procreated.” Other sources have not reported that rhetorical question or the additional disparaging remarks in Ferguson’s answer to it. No full transcript or video of Ferguson’s remarks has yet emerged.
WTF? Read this for some folks attending the speech that twittered and blogs his comments.
In addition to the offensive suggestion that those who don’t have children don’t care about the future or society, Professor Ferguson’s reported remarks are bizarre and insulting to Keynes on two levels.
First, this is the first time we have heard a respectable academic tie another economist’s beliefs to his or her personal situation rather than his or her research. Saying that Keynes’ economic philosophy was based on him being childless would be like saying that Ferguson’s own economic philosophy is based on him being rich and famous and therefore not caring about the plight of poor unemployed people.
Second, Keynes’ policies did not suggest that he did not care about future generations. On the contrary. … For the sake of both future generations and current generations, Keynes believed that governments should run deficits during recessions and then run surpluses during economic booms. Politicians have never seemed to be able to follow the second part of Keynes’ proscription — they tend to run deficits at all times — but it seems unfair to blame this latter failing on Keynes.
Ferguson is not the first person to suggest that Keynes did not care about the future, and this sentiment is normally tied to one of Keynes’ most famous sayings:
“… In the long run, we are all dead.”
Importantly, however, in saying this, Keynes was in no way suggesting that the future doesn’t matter. Rather, when this remark is read in context, it is clear that Keynes was chiding economists for ducking responsibility for their own lousy short-term predictions:
In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if, in tempestuous seasons, they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
So if Ferguson is basing his assertion that Keynes didn’t care about the future on this line, his remark is even more unfair.
For those who are new to the larger economic debate that is the backdrop to these remarks, here’s a snapshot:
Professor Ferguson and other economists have been loudly and consistently warning for years that the deficit spending and debts of most developed countries will eventually end in disaster. Professor Ferguson and other “austerians” suggest that governments should immediately cut spending and balance their budgets, even if this results in a brutal short-term recession and exploding unemployment.
This “austerian” philosophy has been countered by the “Keynesian” philosophy advocated by Paul Krugman and others in which governments enact stimulus and run big deficits during weak economic periods to offset weak private-sector spending and help shore up employment, consumer spending, and social well-being until the private sector recovers. High debts and deficits are a long-term concern that needs to be addressed, Krugman says, but they do not constitute a near-term crisis that requires immense, self-inflicted, short-term pain to alleviate.
In the past five years, the experience of many countries suggests that Krugman’s philosophy is correct, and, as yet, none of the doom predicted by Ferguson and other austerians has come to pass. Meanwhile, countries like the U.K. and Greece, which have cut spending to try to balance their budgets, have been mired in multiple recessions (or, in the case of Greece, a depression). And, notably, because lower economic output leads to less tax revenue, these countries have not made much progress in balancing their budgets.
It’s pretty spurious behavior. Ferguson has no intellectual, theoretical or empirical evidence for his deficit hysteria so when he has nothing to validate he views, he turns to homophobia. So, he did apologize. But it doesn’t mean much because he’s done it before. That link goes to a page of one of his books. He has a history of being a jerk on many levels.
Ferguson should be the last person to be casting aspersions on anyone else’s personal life, given that, while still married to someone else, he began an affair with author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali and knocked her up. He then dumped his wife of over 20 years (they had had three children together) to marry Ali. What a heart-warming demonstration of traditional values!
Ferguson’s slur was ugly indeed — so much so that the no-doubt conservative audience fell into a stunned silence following his remark. But Ferguson — a man for whom the term “hackademic” would surely have been invented, had it not already existed — is part of a long right-wing hack tradition. He is far from the first to take this line of attack. Ferguson likely stole the “childless homosexual” epithet from British wingnut Daniel Johnson (who’s the son of another winger, Paul Johnson. Why do these demon spawn second generation right-wingers tend to be even more appalling than their progenitors? ). The great novelist — and famously nasty conservative — V.S. Naipul has characterized Keynes as a gay exploiter.
Over on this side of the pond, conservative author Mark Steyn attempted to smear Keynes’ ideas by referring to him as — surprise! — a “childless homosexual.” The American Spectator has repeated that slur, as has this contributor to FrontPageMag.com. George Will has also cast the “childless” aspersion (which is pretty clearly a dog whistle for “gay”) against Keynes. So did right-wing economists Greg Mankiw and Joseph Schumpeter. I am reliably informed that William F. Buckley used to gay-bait Keynes as well, although a quick internet search did not produce evidence of this.
Ferguson’s comments are idiotic and offensive on many levels. First of all, there’s his illogical ad hominem style of argument — could not an Oxford-educated Harvard professor done a little bit better? Then there’s the juvenile homophobia — OMG! this faggy fag economist who liked to talk about faggy subjects subjects like poetry and ballet with his wife! — when everyone knows only Real Men can do economics!
But it’s not only the homophobia that’s offensive, it’s the bitchy slur against childless people. I deeply resent the insinuation that, because I haven’t irresponsibly procreated, I care nothing about future generations and would cheerfully assent to the world going to hell in a handbasket.
Anyway, I should know not to take people like Ferguson seriously, but damn it!, the man gets a platform and is at an institution where he gets more status than he deserves. He’s an obvious example of affirmative action placement for assholes. Rich, powerful”conservatives” moan about never seeing one of them in the communist land of academia so universities have to bring in some obvious propaganda-spewing asshole in to fill the ranks. Ferguson is part of the affirmative action plan of the anti-intellectual intellectual right to stick their asshole views in academia even when they never stand up to rigorous peer review. Too bad we’ve become so advanced in the idea of equivocation that serious hacks can crawl their way up to the public arena through academia simply because we have to make room for an invalid approach to life, the world, and the meaning of humanity and civilization. Perhaps Ferguson should just get a shrink and work out his troubled young life in Brit public school with him/her instead of on the rest of us.
Friday Reads
Posted: May 3, 2013 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: bank abuses, debtor's prisons, increase in US suicide rates, Jeffrey Sachs, Rubber Duck project, The Girls of Atomic CIty 38 Comments
Good Morning!
It’s still raining here and we’re under a flash flood warning and have been since yesterday afternoon. It’s May! Enough of the April Showers already! My magnolia tree out front is blooming up a storm on its own. The huge white blossoms are picture perfect!
Well, you knew it was coming! It was just a matter of time before Debtors Prisons came back given the way Banana Republican States are trying to shove us back several centuries. Why do people feel like the poor should be punished?
The jailing of people unable to pay fines and court costs is no longer a relic of the 19th century American judicial system. Debtors’ prisons are alive and well in one-third of the states in this country.
In 2011, Think Progress’ Marie Diamond wrote: “Federal imprisonment for unpaid debt has been illegal in the U.S. since 1833. It’s a practice people associate more with the age of Dickens than modern-day America. But as more Americans struggle to pay their bills in the wake of the recession, collection agencies are using harsher methods to get their money, ushering in the return of debtor’s prisons.”
In 2010, the ACLU did a study titled In for a Penny: The Rise of America’s New Debtors’ Prisons, which revealed the use of debtors prison practices in five states, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, Georgia and Washington.
In his 1964 State of the Union address, President Lyndon B. Johnson said: “Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope – some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity.”
Nearly 50 years after Johnson’s address, which launched the “War on Poverty,” “poverty in America has not dissipated,” the ACLU’s report states that “the number of people living in poverty in Ohio grew by 57.7% from 1999 to 2011, with the largest increase coming from suburban counties.”
This year’s ACLU report – which takes its name from a phrase in Johnson’s speech – points out that many poor “Ohioans … convicted of a criminal or traffic offense and sentenced to pay a fine an affluent defendant may simply pay … and go on with his or her life [find the fine] unaffordable [launching] the beginning of a protracted process that may involve contempt charges, mounting fees, arrest warrants, and even jail time. The stark reality is that, in 2013, Ohioans are being repeatedly jailed simply for being too poor to pay fines.”
According to the report, Ohio courts in Huron, Cuyahoga, and Erie counties “are among the worst offenders. In the second half of 2012, over 20% of all bookings in the Huron County Jail were related to failure to pay fines. In Cuyahoga County, the Parma Municipal Court jailed at least 45 people for failure to pay fines and costs between July 15 and August 31, 2012. During the same period in Erie County, the Sandusky Municipal Court jailed at least 75 people for similar charges.”
Meanwhile, suicide rates are on the rise in the US.
More people now die of suicide than in car accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which published the findings in Friday’s issue of its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. In 2010 there were 33,687 deaths from motor vehicle crashes and 38,364 suicides.
Suicide has typically been viewed as a problem of teenagers and the elderly, and the surge in suicide rates among middle-aged Americans is surprising.
From 1999 to 2010, the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent, to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people, up from 13.7. Although suicide rates are growing among both middle-aged men and women, far more men take their own lives. The suicide rate for middle-aged men was 27.3 deaths per 100,000, while for women it was 8.1 deaths per 100,000.
The most pronounced increases were seen among men in their 50s, a group in which suicide rates jumped by nearly 50 percent, to about 30 per 100,000. For women, the largest increase was seen in those ages 60 to 64, among whom rates increased by nearly 60 percent, to 7.0 per 100,000.
It is likely the stress of joblessness, lack of access to health care, loss of assets like the values of homes and retirement funds is correlated with 
this. Bank abuses, however, are “in your face” and out of control according to Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs is a Columbia University Economics professor.
When I really started to count in fact and keep track of the number of lawsuits, and the number of settlements, and it’s amazing actually how many there are, of course. Libor, Abacus, other financial fraud scandals, money laundering, insider trading. The list is actually extraordinary. The frequency of new cases, new settlements, new SEC charges, is stunning. And the lack of any apparent remorse from leaders of the industry.
[There hasn’t been one] major figure in the industry acknowledging this rot, and also calling upon the industry to clean itself up. And I find that amazing because I would’ve expected at least one or two voices that would’ve have played that role and that hasn’t happened yet.
Why the lack of prosecution?
The legal defenses are very powerful, the lobbying is very powerful, the government in general is completely squeezed even if it would like to regulate. But we also have a revolving door of senior regulatory officials, congressional staff, congressmen and senators. Everyone’s in on this. So the question is how is this going to be cleaned up, what will it really take to get this under control? We just haven’t seen glimmers of that yet.
What will it take to change the system?
I think that the public is utterly disgusted, of course, and that is a major start.
There’s going to be a massive backlash. But some thought, and I thought at the beginning, that Obama was going to bring in control, that’s essentially what he promised, but he actually essentially brought in Wall Street to do the clean up. Perhaps the next government, or perhaps the next crash, it’s hard to say. But what one does feel is that the extent of abuse, the stench of it, is reaching such a high level that we’re not in an equilibrium, political or social, right now.
This is explosive stuff (scandals like Abacus and insider trading). It’s unbelievable. So far it hasn’t stopped the practice, but it can’t get more in your face than this actually.
I think in the end the question will be for our politics in general, whether a political movement not based on mega-donations can win political control. I believe that it can actually.
Some movement like the populist movement or the progressive era of the past is going to rise and say ‘we don’t need contributions, we’re not taking them, and if you the American people want a way out of this that doesn’t involve politicians bought for big money, we’re the ones.”
But short of that I don’t see a way out. Our politicians are not heroes, to say the least, and they seem to have no taste for this.
Will Dodd-Frank be effective?
It’s clearly being eaten alive and at critical points — of too big to fail and the control of derivatives — I doubt that it’s going to have any real effect as it is right now. The lobbying is just simply so overwhelming that I doubt that it’s going to have much sticking power.
There’ a great book reviewed about some of the women who really helped win World War II. It’s called “The Girls of Atomic City” written by Denise Kiernan. Here’s an excerpt from a review at td.
In the fall of 1942, residents of a rural swath of east Tennessee began receiving official notifications that their homes and farms were no longer theirs and that they would have to move. The new owner was the U.S. government, which swept up some 59,000 acres of land and in a matter of months built an instant city of 75,000 people so secret it wasn’t even listed on maps.
Its purpose? To process uranium for the world’s first atomic bomb.
The fascinating story of the Manhattan Project has been told often, and often told well—Richard Rhodes’ “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” placing high on that lengthy list. But given the project’s significant and lasting impact, there’s plenty more mining to be done, and Denise Kiernan has found a rich vein in “The Girls of Atomic City.” Rosie, it turns out, did much more than drive rivets.
The secret Tennessee city eventually became modern Oak Ridge, built to support what was known as the Clinton Engineer Works. The sprawling complex was off-limits to anyone without proper ID. It was so vertically segregated in its operations that only a handful of people at the top knew what was really going on, and so swaddled in internal secrecy that to speculate on the purpose of your job invited immediate dismissal and eviction.
To see long excerpts from “The Girls of Atomic City” at Google Books, click here. As Kiernan demonstrates, because of the shortage of manpower during the war years, much of the work at Oak Ridge was done by women. They were drawn from cities in the Northeast, farms in the South, and small towns in the Midwest, were paid good money for the time and the place, and were crammed into dormitories and trailers; and for the small contingent of African-Americans, there were four-person, 256-square-foot “hutments,” each one “a square plywood box of a structure that had a potbellied stove sitting right smack-dab in the middle.” Houses, impermanent as they were, were reserved for families.
Women may have migrated to Oak Ridge in droves, but they were still hemmed in by the social and racial narrows of the time. Few achieved levels of authority at work; housing policies forbade gender or racial mixing; a household wasn’t a household unless it was led by a man, which meant women with children who arrived ahead of their husbands struggled to find shelter.
Kiernan has amassed a deep reservoir of intimate details of what life was like for women living in the secret city, gleaned from seven years of interviews and research.
Here’s some fun from Victoria Harbor in Hong Kong. This is part of the Rubber Duck Project conceived by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman.
The artist has used this installment in other cities. The artist explains its purpose.
The piece, called Rubber Duck, is by Dutch conceptual artist Florentijn Hofman, internationally renowned for his large-scale sculptures, which often originate from recognisable, everyday objects. He said: “The Rubber Duck knows no frontiers, it doesn’t discriminate people and doesn’t have a political connotation. The friendly, floating Rubber Duck has healing properties: It can relieve mondial tensions as well as define them.”
So, that’s my bit for this morning. What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Workers of the World Unite
Posted: May 2, 2013 Filed under: income inequality, worker rights | Tags: 401(k), diminishing real wage, Felix Salmon, Henry Blodgett, Income Inequality, Thomas Friedman whore 8 Comments
We continue to see abuse of labor from the horrible explosions in a West, Texas chemical plant to the collapse of a building in Bangladesh. US workers continue to get the shaft when it comes to working harder and more productively for less. It is a sad trend that just keeps reaching new records. The gap between incomes going to workers and profits going to owners–mostly passive stockholders–continues unabated. This gap does not reflect a lack of labor productivity. It appears to reflect mostly the ability of capital owners to gamble themselves into strong positions. Industrialists are force to drive down costs to attract capital and to do some very short sighted things. The rush to increase ROE with no thought to other factors is a very bad omen for this country.
Henry Blodgett provides some very depressing May Day graphs at Business Insider.
Corporate profit margins just hit another all-time high. Companies are making more per dollar of sales than they ever have before. If you’re a shareholder, that seems like good news (in the very short term, anyway). Alas, most people aren’t shareholders. And for folks whose investment horizon is longer than “this quarter” and “this year,” it’s actually bad news. Companies are under-investing in their employees and the future.
Normally, high profits are a good sign. What is disturbing is the the under-investing and the unequal increase in wages. Labor–in theory–should gain with productivity gains. This tends to stoke the growth of an economy and of a solid middle class. This trend means there is less purchasing power among the majority of households and more wage and job insecurity. This is Felix Salmon’s take.It’s May Day, and Henry Blodget is celebrating — if that’s the right word — with three charts, of which the most germane is the one above. It shows total US wages as a proportion of total US GDP — a number which continues to hit all-time lows. Blodget also puts up the converse chart — corporate profits as a percentage of GDP. That line, you won’t be surprised to hear, is hitting new all-time highs. He’s clear about how destructive these trends are:
Low employee wages are one reason the economy is so weak: Those “wages” are represent spending power for consumers. And consumer spending is “revenue” for other companies. So the short-term corporate profit obsession is actually starving the rest of the economy of revenue growth.
In other words, we’re in a vicious cycle, where low incomes create low demand which in turn means that there’s no appetite to hire workers, who in turn become discouraged and drop out of the labor force. Blodget’s third chart is one we’re all familiar with: the employment-to-population ratio, which fell off a cliff during the Great Recession and which will probably never recover. The current “recovery” is not actually a recovery for the bottom 99%, for real people who need to live on paychecks. And today is exactly the right day to point that out.
And yet that’s Tom Friedman’s column this May Day:
If you are self-motivated, wow, this world is tailored for you. The boundaries are all gone. But if you’re not self-motivated, this world will be a challenge because the walls, ceilings and floors that protected people are also disappearing. That is what I mean when I say “it is a 401(k) world.”
This manages to be both incomprehensible and incredibly offensive at the same time. I have no idea what Friedman thinks he’s talking about when he blathers on about disappearing protective floors; I can only hope that he isn’t making a super-tasteless reference to the recent disaster in Bangladesh. But it’s simply wrong that today’s world is “tailored” for anybody who happens to be “self-motivated”. Both the self and the motivation are components of labor, not capital, and as such they’re on the losing side of the global economy, not the winning side.
Friedman is a billionaire (by marriage) who — like all billionaires these days — is convinced that he achieved his current prominent position by merit alone, rather than through luck and through the diligent application of cultural and financial capital. His paean to self-motivation recalls nothing so much as Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as society” quote: “parenting, teaching or leadership that ‘inspires’ individuals to act on their own will be the most valued of all,” he writes, bizarrely choosing to wrap his scare quotes around the word “inspires” rather than around the word “leadership”, where they belong.
True leadership, in a society where the workers are failing to be paid even half the fruits of their labor, would involve attempting to turn the red line in Blodget’s chart around, and to spread the nation’s prosperity among all its citizens. Rather than telling everybody that they’re “on their own” and that if they’re not a success then hey, they’re probably just not “self-motivated” enough.
The ultimate Friedman kick in the balls, however, doesn’t come from his lazily meritocratic priors. Rather, it comes from his overarching metaphor: the idea that if you have a 401(k) plan, then you’re somehow in charge of your own destiny. Friedman might be right that we’re living in a 401(k) world, but if he is then he’s right for the wrong reason. In Friedman’s mind, a 401(k) plan is an icon of self-determination: you get out what you put in. “Your specific contribution,” he writes, italics and all, “will define your specific benefits.”
We are learning more and more each day on how the finance industry games the kinds of investments available to you in those plans. We also know that mega corporations are getting congress to defund OSHA and any regulatory agency that watches over worker safety. Many investments are also subject to whacked performance because of excessive speculation that is encouraged by our tax laws. This has destroyed home values during the Great Recession and eaten up many folks retirement plans and savings. Frankly, it’s difficult to see how any one that relies on their sweat and has no rich family connections these days even crawls into the middle class. All of these things add up to major insecurities and risks. This is simply not the way things are supposed to work. But, it is the world that the Koch Brothers and others have carefully crafted by making politicians and pundits whores to their agenda of greed.
Pity the poor working man and woman.
The Current State of Op Ed Writing or Things that Belong in a Hello Kitty Diary
Posted: May 1, 2013 Filed under: The Media SUCKS, We are so F'd | Tags: David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Op Ed criticism, op ed writers 12 Comments
Okay, so I was torn between using Hello Kitty Diary and Hello Kitty Litter Box in the title of this thread because I am so tired of seeing hacks get money and column space in what used to be the world’s great papers. Let’s face it! My cats’ litter box is a better use of a newspaper that’s filled with the inane ramblings of the likes of Ross Douthat, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, George F. Will, and well, you get my drift. There were op ed writers with whom I disagreed but whose arguments, evidence, and writing style made for compelling reading and arguments. The group that’s left to us now should still be doing penmanship exercises in second grade.
So, obviously I was inspired to write this. I use the world ‘inspired’ loosely because it was more like I was influenced by the painful awareness of cats screeching in the alley looking for attention from other heat-seeking cats. The primary source of screeching came from MoDo today who Charlie Pierce promptly diced and sliced in “In Which MoDo Loses A Fight With James Madison” in his Esquire blog
Maureen Dowd has fashioned herself another Chronic Ward of a newspaper column today on her now-regular theme of what a wimpety-wimp-wimp Barry Obama is, and why she never should have let him take her to prom instead of the hunky Andrew Shepherd from The American President who, while admittedly fictional, never would take this guff from actual human beings like John Boehner and Eric Cantor and Louie Gohmert, to which latter we give the benefit of a considerable doubt on this score. From the available evidence (again), and for all the relevance her insights have on what’s actually going on in American politics, Dowd once again seems to be writing from an assisted-living facility on the far side of a world Beyond The Planet Of The Ultra-Vixens. First of all, she, along with Jonathan Karl, seems to be overly concerned with the condition of the president’s “juice,” which she seems to feel is less fortified with essential vitamins and iron than the juice of a president should be. And, somewhere in the Beyond, Freud gives up the business entirely and opens a cigar store.
Pierce offers this more succinct explanation.
Look, I make the same criticism of the president from time to time, but mine is based on what I believe is the obvious empirical fact that the Republican party has gone insane and that the president has been painfully slow in coming to realize that he is dealing with lunatics. I don’t find this “professorial” or “high-minded.” I just find it wrong. But, then again, I don’t measure politics by the inseam, either.
What is it about reality that most of the op ed writers don’t appear to get these days? Well, I stumbled across an equally good take down and explanation over at NY magazine written by Jonathan Chait called “David Brooks and the Role of Opinion Journalism”. David Brooks is the nearly the best example of an op ed writer that is a waste of good reading time. He has the dial set to 11 for vacuity nearly every day.
Brooks likes to veer frequently from the beaten path of topicality. He wants us to associate this habit with intellectual honesty. But why should we? One could just as easily think of it as an evasive tactic designed to spare him from confronting the uncomfortable pathologies of his own side.
Brooks goes further, smuggling into his schema notions not merely unrelated to but actually at odds with intellectual honesty. The detached writer, he argues, “sees politics as a competition between partial truths.” Well, yes, sometimes it is. On the other hand, sometimes politics is not a competition between partial truths. If you’re committed a priori to always seeing politics as a competition between partial truths, you will render yourself unable to accurately describe the times when it’s not and find yourself writing things that are provably untrue. Writing things that are provably untrue — rather than, say, being irritating — ought to be the central thing to avoid.
It’s a shame Brooks has done such an injustice to the topic, since the question of standards for opinion journalism is a pretty important and underexplored one. Straight news reporters tend to lump opinion writing of all forms into the same bin — punditry, essays, agitprop — and to therefore shy away from holding it to any defined standard. (This is why, for instance, the Washington Post blithely lets George Will misstate facts about climate science on its op-ed page.)
So, I would like to say that the standard for op ed “journalism” is there is no honor among thieves, but given their platform, it’s hard to just write off 
99.99% of them as hapless hacks and ignore them. Chait actually offers up some common sense advice on how to make an argument instead of publishing your dreamy-eyed Potomac platitudes. Most of them are common sense like don’t set up and attack straw men and avoid reflexive equivocation and black-and-white moralism. These last two are staples of op ed pages today. Douthat is a lousy writer who specializes in his own specious form of black-and-white moralism to the point that I wonder if he ever leaves his house or was actually weaned by his mother. This glib last bit from Chait sums up the state of op ed writing today for me. I’ve edited it to what it should be.
If you’re going to write
a guide toopinionwritingthat’s completely self-aggrandizing, you should probably own up to it.
Not only should you own up to it, you should stop pretending it’s anything else but self-aggrandizing twaddle. I’m tired of seeing endless self-pleasuring in high circulation papers. I am so not into that!!!
But, I see this as the main stay of today’s opinion writers. It is always about them and never about their topic, the actual good of the country or an idea, or the greater search for truth. WAPO and NYT excel at placing free range WATBs on their op pages who only engage in self-aggrandizing and who never see the world outside the thunderdomes of Manhattan and the DC beltway. Most of them are so comfortably snuggled into their socio-economic status they probably couldn’t tell a homeless person from a fireplug.
Thankfully, there are now blogs and there are blogger/writers like Pierce and Chait or I would be one very depressed Kat who would consider reading Romance Novels or Pop! Star Magazine in lieu of David Brooks or Maureen Dowd. They are all about on the same level of intellectual discourse and reality. And for that, the NYT put up a paywall and WAPO wants to still think of itself as the paper of investigative journalism. Douthat belongs on the pages of Catholic Voice or maybe some nice rag promoting the return of The Inquisition. None of these folks are the serious human beings they presume themselves to be.
Here kitty, kitty!!! I just changed your litter box and its nicely lined!!!
Monday Reads
Posted: April 29, 2013 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Black voter turnout, Brown-Vitter, congressional lap dogs, Dodd Frank, hairless cats that look like Putin, scrambling for the rich, West Fertilizer Co. 29 Comments
Good Morning!
It has really been raining here in New Orleans. I mean really raining. Yesterday there was a series of downpours and it I don’t recall seeing the sun. I am trying to tell myself to not complain too much because this is better than the horrible hot heat of summer. But, I would like to feel like it is daytime some time during a day. This is making it very hard for me to think about posting political news. Some days the last thing you need is more doom and gloom. So let me give you a scattering of good, bad, and interesting.
Black voter turnout passed white turnout this past election. This is a historical event. My guess is that all the active voter suppression attempts caused black Americans to get out to protect their voting rights.
America’s blacks voted at a higher rate than other minority groups in 2012 and by most measures surpassed the white turnout for the first time, reflecting a deeply polarized presidential election in which blacks strongly supported Barack Obama while many whites stayed home.
Had people voted last November at the same rates they did in 2004, when black turnout was below its current historic levels, Republican Mitt Romney would have won narrowly, according to an analysis conducted for The Associated Press.
Census data and exit polling show that whites and blacks will remain the two largest racial groups of eligible voters for the next decade. Last year’s heavy black turnout came despite concerns about the effect of new voter-identification laws on minority voting, outweighed by the desire to re-elect the first black president.
William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, analyzed the 2012 elections for the AP using census data on eligible voters and turnout, along with November’s exit polling. He estimated total votes for Obama and Romney under a scenario where 2012 turnout rates for all racial groups matched those in 2004. Overall, 2012 voter turnout was roughly 58 percent, down from 62 percent in 2008 and 60 percent in 2004.
Did you know the Koch Brothers had a huge portion–in fact the largest portion–of the fertilizer business? Have you also noticed how we continue to see an under-reporting of the West Fertilizer Co. explosion? Why have there been no arrests made? Bangaldesh sure got their man pretty quickly when it came to those responsible for unsafe work conditions killing people.
The West Fertilizer Co. explosion last week in West, Texas, took the lives of at least 14 and left scores injured and homeless. But the story was largely obscured by blanket coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing. More than that, says legendary EPA whistleblower Hugh Kaufman, a guest on this week’s CounterSpin, what coverage there was often obscured the real story. Here’s a transcript of Kaufman’s appearance:
CounterSpin: In his recent piece on the Nation‘s website, Greg Mitchell interviews you about the explosion in the town of West, Texas. Before we get to what’s missing in the coverage of the West disaster, tell us what the media is reporting.
Hugh Kaufman: The media is reporting the case as if it’s some sort of an industrial accident, when in fact the town of west Texas is blown off the face of the earth. The material that did all that damage was the same material that Timothy McVeigh used to blow up the Oklahoma City building — the fertilizer, ammonium nitrate.
CS: Two hundred seventy tons of it.
HK: That’s correct. So the amount of people harmed and the ramifications are incredible. Thousands of people every year die who work in dangerous industries, whereas only a few people die because of a terrorist bombing. And yet, there is nothing but a wall-to-wall coverage of Boston disaster around the same time as a town in Texas is blown off from the face of the earth.
Both situations are frightening but what’s more frightening is that the terrorists seem to be winning the war of the TV coverage. But there are thousands more people harmed and killed because of lax law enforcement of dangerous industries. The fertilizer industry is a dangerous industry.
CS: But you’re saying that this fertilizer explosion wasn’t just a matter of some regulatory oversight. You claim in Greg Mitchell’s piece that there’s perhaps criminal activity here.
HK: The company lied to EPA when they said that there is no risk of fire or explosion at the facility, but at the same time they told EPA that, they were honest with the state because they know the state wouldn’t do anything in saying that they had 270 tons of fire and explosive material, the ammonium nitrate. So they were honest with the state because they knew the state wasn’t going to do anything, but to the federal government and the Obama administration, they lied. And of course, the local fire department — not equipped to handle the type of emergency that that entailed — they didn’t have any respirators, they didn’t have any training how to handle that type of fire.
CS: They did not know not to squirt water on that type of fire, even.
HK: Exactly. And they didn’t even know there was such a risk of an explosion.
CS: You also give some praise but many media outlets got the story wrong. Let’s have the bad first.
HK: I think the worst was the New York Times. The New York Times claimed that the company notified EPA that they had 270 tons of this explosive ammonium nitrate, but they did not notify EPA of that. In fact, they told EPA that the facility posed no fire or explosion hazard. The New York Times did not say that, and I think that’s probably the biggest problem.
Interestingly, Texas is a Republican state — a red state — and in fact, many of the leaders want to secede from the union, and they despise EPA — they want the EPA abolished. And yet the Republican newspaper, the Dallas Morning News, has probably has the best environmental coverage of the case, which makes it very ironic to me.
My scourge-of-the-country senator is still trying to tank Dodd Frank. He and three others are being sneaky about it. Course, Diaper David Vitter’s used to being sneaky about things. Here’s a story where he’s the hooker.
First, the Brown-Vitter legislation, which was introduced April 24, changes everything. The news isn’t that Brown wants to make the financial system safer. That has been a top priority of his since the spring of 2010, when he co-wrote the Brown-Kaufman amendment, which would have imposed a binding size cap on the largest banks. (It failed on the Senate floor.)
Now, however, he has a Republican co-sponsor, and they have converged on a strong message. Vitter, who is on the right of the political spectrum, articulates well the case for ending the implicit subsidies that exist because creditors understand that the government and the Federal Reserve won’t allow a megabank to fail. This broad and sensible message resonates across the political spectrum.
Second, small banks are increasingly focused on the ways megabanks have achieved an unfair competitive advantage — primarily through implicit government subsidies.
The most compelling voice at the forum last week was Terry Jorde, a senior executive vice president of the Independent Community Bankers of America. She made clear that small banks are being undermined by the reckless behavior of megabanks that are seen as “too big to fail.” There is no market at work here, just a hugely unfair and inefficient government-subsidy scheme. The U.S. economy wasn’t built on megabanks and there is no good reason to continue to accept the risks they pose.
The megabanks have more money to spend on politics than the community banks. And as the biggest banks become even larger, they acquire more clout, spreading branches and other largesse across congressional districts. But for the moment, in all 50 states, community bankers are strong enough — both directly and as leaders in their communities — to effectively stand up to the six largest banks that are at the heart of the problem.
I found this analysis in the NYT compelling. Congress get all kinds of things done for the powerful quickly. But, when it comes to doing things for ordinary people, the entire process stalls. It’s an op ed by their editorial board.
Congress can’t pass a budget or control guns or confirm judges on time, but this week members of both parties found something they could agree on, and in a big hurry: avoiding blame for inconveniencing air travelers. The Senate and House rushed through a bill that would avert furloughs to air traffic controllers, which were mandated by Congress’s own sequester but proved embarrassing when flights began to back up around the country.
Then lawmakers scurried out of town, taking a week’s vacation while ignoring the low-income victims of the mandatory budget cuts, who have few representatives in Washington to protest their lost aid for housing, nutrition and education. Though they are suffering actual pain, not just inconvenience, no one rushed to give them a break from the sequester, and it is clear that no one will.
Catering to the needs of people with money, such as business travelers, is the kind of thing the country has come to expect in recent years from Congressional Republicans. But Democrats share full responsibility for this moment of cowardice. The Senate version of the bill passed by unanimous consent. That means not a single Democrat opposed bailing out travelers while poor kids are getting kicked out of Head Start or nutrition programs.
Even worse, the White House said President Obama would sign the bill. Apparently the ridicule pouring out of Republican offices — with Twitter hashtags like #ObamaFlightDelays — was extremely effective.
In the House, only 29 Democrats voted against the gift to travelers, which was made possible by switching some funds for airport improvement into the controllers budget. One of the few willing to brave the Republican attack machine was Steny Hoyer, the Democratic whip, who said he could not support repealing a piece of the sequester while preserving its harmful impact. “Seventy thousand children will be kicked out of Head Start,” he said. “Nothing in this bill deals with them.”
As I said, I found this article compelling because I’ve noticed that they’ve scrambled to ensure that small airports–home to private jets and planes–are getting priority over children, cancer patients, and all kinds of things that benefit people What kind of country has those kind of priorities?
Foreign Policy has decided it wants to see more lists like in Gawker and Buzzfeed. You know those buzzfeed lists with items like the top 12 reasons why Justin Beieber annoys us or the ten reasons George Bush and Dick Cheney should share cell in prison. So, as a last little morning laugh, go check out the link and see great suggestions like this one:
Seriously, it’s a good idea.
So, what’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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