Long since passed understanding what it takes to be satisfied

I don’t mean this in a “who will rid me of this meddlesome pundit kind of way” but convincing elites to act responsibly is the key problem in our current political predicament and I don’t know how to do it. Atrios:

Elites need to earn their respect, especially elites who face neither voters nor any other realistic check on potential corruption and hackery. Frankly about the only realistic check on the power of Supremos is their potential concern that people on the internets might be mean to them in furious blog posts. If elites want us to respect elite institutions they should do a better job of policing their own. Instead they try to police us.

Steve M:

Gallup’s “Confidence in Institutions” survey shows dreadful numbers for banks, and for big business in general. Notice those guys suffering? The Wall Streeters whine as if they’re suffering, but mostly what they say when they whine is, in effect, “We want all the money and respect!”

That’s pretty much what we may hear from the Supremes, or at least from the chief justice. Cohn mentions John Roberts’s “frequently professed concern for the court’s respectability.” But he seems to be oblivious to the fact that he’s lost that already. (As I’ve noted before, a recent Bloomberg poll showed that 75% of Americans expect the Court to issue a health care ruling based on political concerns.) The actual rulings show no signs of circumspection—Roberts apparently wants your respect in spite of those rulings.

Until we Americans start actually finding ways to hurt powerful people we despise, it’s going to continue to be good to be the hated king.

I’m not sure it has to be all stick and no carrot. I’m happy to have parades in Jamie Dimon’s honor and (gulp) even Bobo’s honor if I they start doing things that help our society, instead of destroying it. But what do they want? I don’t know. I can’t fathom having that kind of money and caring about more, not because I’m some awesome altruist, but because I don’t like thinking about money and if I didn’t have to, I wouldn’t.

And if what they want isn’t so simple, what do they fear? The eventual beheading of Luke Clinton-Kristol in 2060 is too far into the future to scare anyone too much, IMHO.

Unite and fight, you have nothing to lose but your tote bags

John’s post on how educated conservatives are even crazier than uneducated conservatives really hit the mark for me. In my regular life, I’m able to avoid socializing with other academics for the most part, but on this sabbatical, my after-work life is like an extended episode of the Charlie Rose show. I’ve never listened to so much Vichy liberal bullshit in my life.

Granted, I’m a deeply unserious person who thinks it’s irresponsible not to speculate about the possible effects of guillotining a few hundred members of the permanent government (I honestly believe that it is irresponsible not to consider this, I do), but even so…the ignorance of contemporary politics I see from these people is off the charts. I’ve been asked “what’s Obama hiding, why won’t he release his long-form birth certificate”. I’ve been looked at like I was Che Guevera for saying that the U of Chicago econ department lost credibility after the 2008 crash. I’ve spent half an hour explaining why it’s politically difficult for Obama to propose a new gasoline tax (this was a little different than the others, because in this case the person seemed willing to learn at least).

People are dumb. Really fucking dumb. It doesn’t matter what kind of a degree they have after their name, they’re still idiots, maybe just clever, erudite idiots (maybe). And politics is complicated and non-obvious, at first blush. It’s a lot easier to say “Al Gore is fat” than to consider the evidence on global warming, it’s a lot easier to say “both sides do it” than to put Bush v Gore and the Clinton impeachment in historical context. Everyone is this way, I’m sure, I don’t care if you’re Donald Trump or Irving the tailor. I enjoy firing up the Clash and writing diatribes against our Galtian overlords, and I know that’s not a rational exercise. (But the men at the factory really are old and cunning, all the evidence bears that out.)

I fear more and more that educational credentials (when paraded around in public discourse, not within narrow fields of expertise) and all this talk of “cognitive elite” are just new ways of saying STFU plebe.

Burn down the mission

If SCOTUS voids the ACA, (I agree with John that they’re reasonably like to) there’s going to be a lot of talk about how liberals need to moderate their attacks on the court for the sake of the sanctity of our institutions, how even the liberal Joe Nocera and Kevin Drum agree that all the problems started when Bork was Borked and so on.

Fuck that.

If Republican judges void ACA, liberals need to launch an all-out assault all the credibility of the Roberts courts (I have to think more about this). It can’t always be liberals need to bend over and take it to keep our society from unraveling. It already is unraveling anyway.

Take this to heart.

Update. I rethought the impeachment stuff but the site no longer supports the strike through feature on front page posts, so I just deleted that part.

Lifestyles of the rich and famous

These are some of the people who like to lecture liberal elites for being out of touch:

David Gregory, host of NBC’s Meet The Press, and Bret Baier, host of Fox News’s Special Report, are among the latest applicants to the Chevy Chase Club, the historic social club that has catered to Washington’s wealthiest for over a century.

[....]

The Chevy Chase Club was founded in 1892. As recently as 1976, it did not accept Jewish or African-American members, according to a report in the New York Times. And despite reforms, some who have visited the club believe it has maintained an atmosphere reminiscent of earlier days.

“Order a cocktail at the Chevy Chase country-club and you’ll step back into ante-bellum Savannah,” one British reporter for The Telegraph observed last year. “The blacks wait on Wasps, showing all the deference expected of them. You won’t find many Cohens either, lounging on the well-kept lawn.”

Our Galtian superiors

An interesting piece by Tom Edsall:

The publication last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior” provided fresh fodder for the liberal critique of the Republican Party and the corporate ethic.

The paper, by Paul K. Piff of the University of California, Berkeley, and four colleagues, reports that members of the upper class are more likely than others to behave unethically, to lie during negotiations, to drive illegally and to cheat when competing for a prize.

“Greed is a robust determinant of unethical behavior,” the authors conclude. “Relative to lower-class individuals, individuals from upper-class backgrounds behaved more unethically in both naturalistic and laboratory settings.”

The Piff paper is part of an extensive academic critique of the right.

One quibble: there are a great many in the sociopathic suck-on-this, bomb-them-all austerity crowd who are not generally considered members of “the right”. In fact, among white Americans, conservatism does not correlate with wealth that closely. (For example, college-educated white Americans earn more than non-college educated white Americans and are also more likely to vote Democrat than non-college-educated white Americans). I don’t like the 27 percenters. But the sociopathic behavior that dominates elite American discourse is in no way limited to the far right. It goes a lot deeper than that. I’m sure Charlie Rose and Tom Friedman voted for Obama. That doesn’t mean they’re not sociopaths.

But there is an important point here: the right’s central myth is that rich people are awesome moral specimens (unless they give money to liberal causes, in which case they are scumbags) while working-class people are mostly shiftless moocher and looters.

The entertainer

A dispatch from Real Murka (h/t):

I have written a couple comments about my daughter regarding this birth control issue. She is on birth control and has been for almost a year now- not for sexual activity and pregnancy prevention, but even if that were the case so what? No, instead beantown girl suffers from menorrhagia and secondary dysmenorrhea.

[...]

My daughter took a trip with the school band for 5 days just a week and a half ago. Any student on prescription medication had to have a form filled out and signed by the prescribing physician turned in before the trip. The day of the trip, the prescription medication was given to the doctor who was traveling with the students. He would hand out the medication as prescribed. For beantown girl, this was every morning after breakfast. She never thought a thing about it- neither did I. They returned from their trip…

[....]

They lined up behind my daughter to get their lunch tray and started in on her. “Birth control whore”, “I told my mom you were on the pill and she said you were nothing but a little tramp” “My mom said some guy she listens to on the radio was just talking about girls like you- he even said you were a slut!” “Yeah, my mom said the same thing, said it’s about time people spoke up and weren’t afraid to tell the truth”! They laughed, they harassed, they said so many things my daughter couldn’t begin to remember it all- she walked back to her table without food and told her friends what was going on. She cried through lunch and through the rest of the day. She said she almost went to the office to call me to come get her but she was trying to be strong and not let them win! The last class of the day, however, was the final straw- it’s her history class and 2 of these little monsters are in the class with her. They start the class off by talking about current events. One of the little witches brought up Rush Limbaugh and the (male) teacher said that he was an American Icon- sometimes he says things that can be construed as insensitive but overall, he was one of the few people left in today’s media who was not afraid to speak the truth!

They are we who we thought they were.

But what about that time the anonymous MoveOn member used “Hitler” and “Bush” in the same sentence? Both sides do it, and you all deserve Moore Award nominations if you suggest otherwise. The true heroes are the Olympia Snowes of the world, who dare not criticize a great American icon like Rush Limbaugh.

And you decked some fucking blackshirt

My reaction to Rush Limbaugh’s apology, like my reaction to Komen’s shit-canning of Karen Handel, is two words: Uh. Winning.

Rush Limbaugh and Nancy Brinker backed down because they were scared, mostly of losing sponsors. They didn’t see the error of their ways, they saw their careers flash before their eyes.

There are those of you (though I’d like to think I’ve alienated most of the hard-core totebaggers at this point) who think that everything would be fine in American politics if Mark Shields could just make the most thoughtful, incisive possible argument to David Brooks. You know I ain’t down with that shit, Lieutenant. Human beings are greedy, fearful, irrational beings, and most (maybe all) of what makes conservativism ascendant right now is its ability to scare—xenophobes into voting against their own economic interests, “journalists” into deference, elected officials into toeing the teahad line, liberals into keeping their mouth shuts—and bribe (do I even need to give you examples?).

Andrew Breitbart’s so-called success is a testimony to the power of intimidation. Anne-Laurie’s post gives a perfect example.

Never forget that. When liberals cower in fear of the awesome moral and political power of right-wing Bishops and talk show hosts, we lose. When we say “I wish a motherfucker would try to ban contraceptives”, we win.

This is the saddest story I’ve ever heard

Megan McArdle is officially the Paganini of the world’s smallest violin playing just for the not-quite-rich-enough folks.

When middle-class people lose their jobs, they need to suck it up and admit that they’re too fucking soft and lazy to live in dormitories like REAL workers do in China. They need to accept cuts to their health care and retirement funds and if they complain about it, they need a lecture on morality from Daddy Bobo.

When people making 400K get bumped down to 300K, it’s a three-hanky tragedy.

Tell me again that Robespierre didn’t have a point.

Update. Megan front-pages some wise words from a commenter:

Another factor I’ve noticed with my bankruptcy clients is that a very rich person whose income takes a sudden precipitous drop to a still-pretty-good income can actually wind up in more financial trouble, faster, than a very poor person whose income drops to zero. If you were making $300k a year and spending $200k of it on fixed expenses, and your household income drops to $125k a year, unless you have substantial liquid savings or are able to sell your house and your car and your boat yank your kids out of private school REALLY fast, you’re going to wind up in bankruptcy in a fairly short space of time. A person who was making $18k a year and suddenly finds themselves making nothing, as a practical matter, can often break their lease and move in with mom and get on food stamps until a new job materializes and wind up with only a couple thousand dollars in debt. Not that it’s not still ultimately much better to be the rich person, but the rich person does get hit with a more panic-inducing financial calamity in the short term.

Civility sells, but who’s buying

Fuck this:

Peter Gleick violated a principle rule of the global-warming debate: Climate scientists must be better than their opponents.

[...]

Taking the high road is not easy or fun. But Gleick and the rest of us who favor decarbonizing the world economy have to be, and should want to be, the adults in the debate. Gleick’s confession and apology Monday are more than climate scientists ever got from deniers for the overblown “Climategate” e-mail scandal. But it would have been far better if he hadn’t needed to provide either.

Why? They won’t get credit for being “better” even if they are. Politifact will rate the deniers’ claims as mostly true, Tom Friedman and Fred Hiatt will tell us the truth is in the middle, that Extremist Scientists are as bad as flat-earthers, etc. etc.

What’s the point of civiling while American burns? What does it accomplish?

Hurry up, meteor

This is not parody:

Allegheny College will honor New York Times columnist David Brooks and nationally syndicated columnist Mark Shields as the recipients of the inaugural Prize for Civility in Public Life. Brooks and Shields were selected because of their steadfast civility in their public commentary, perhaps best exemplified by their civil jousting with one another during their weekly debates on “PBS NewsHour.”

How’s That Austerity Thing Working For You?

Just to remember how bad Republican notions that we should cut spending in the midst of a recession, this latest from the Eurozone:

The euro zone economy shrank slightly less than expected in the last three months of 2011, but five countries including Italy fell into recession as the sovereign debt crisis discouraged consumers from spending and businesses from investing. sovereign debt crisisdiscouraged consumers from spending and businesses from investing.

Growth in the 17 countries that make up the euro zone fell 0.3 percent, Eurostat, the European statistics agency said [PDF] Wednesday. But the pain was most acute among smaller countries and in southern Europe — ground zero of the debt crisis.

...“It could have been worse,” Martin van Vliet, an economist at ING Bank, said in a note to clients. The figures “clearly indicate that ‘core’ euro zone economies generally were less affected by the escalating debt crisis than peripheral economies, which seems to make sense given that the financial turmoil and austerity efforts are concentrated in the latter part of the region.” (Emphasis added.)

In case you were wondering whether even hobbled stimulus efforts matter, here’s the context with which Eurostat framed its update:

Susan G. Komen for the Lure and the art of deception

I was about to write a post on this, but as usual, the faster and smarter front pagers beat me to it.  My take is this—in the HuffPo column by Laura Bassett, both the Susan G. Komen For the Lure foundation, and the article’s writer Bassett, blame Planned Parenthood for SGKFTL’s own goal, with absolutely no evidence to back that up:
The author states, without attribution:

The charity struggled to deal with the pressure, especially in a face-off against Planned Parenthood, an organization whose fine-tuned political team has experience in these high-pitched, high-stakes debates.

“Komen’s not equipped to spend its days fighting political battles,” the source said. “Abortion is not our issue, and I think [leadership] tried to finesse a way out of it, and this investigation criteria was the solution. And it blew up in their faces. They were just naive in the face of [the] incredibly sophisticated Planned Parenthood operation.”

As long as SGK can delude itself into thinking that they were mau-mau’ed by a very effective Planned Parenthood, they will continue this behavior, as will any other organization that learns that particular “lesson.”  They are, along with their partners and friends in the conservative blogosphere, and apparently at the Huffington Post, working very hard to change the narrative of the story to one of bravely standing up to a shake down by a bunch of baby killers, only to have the rug pulled out from under them by those same baby killers rallying their baby-killing-loving supporters.  Now perhaps, being a bear of very little brain, and liking honey too much, I didn’t notice the huge PR push by Planned Parenthood.  I thought it looked like a huge number of women reacting to the betrayal by a charity that claimed to be all about women’s health, taking a huge shit all over another organization that is primarily about women’s health.  But that is because I don’t suffer from the siege mentality that conservatives live under.

Instant Komen’s gonna get you

That Komen story from last week came out of nowhere…and now it seems to be gone. I can’t find much about it on news sites today. One way or another, we’ve got to keep the pressure on. I know not everyone likes it when I talk this way, but heads to need to roll. Karen Handel, and preferably Nancy Brinker as well (though that might be a tall order), have to go. If everyone keeps their job, then no one on the right will be rattled by any of this at all.

I think the Komen story is important for two reasons:

(1) We need scalps. The right scares the fuck out of the press (for example) because they got people at NPR fired recently, ended Dan Rather’s career a few years ago, etc. The left needs to scare people too. Nothing scares comfortable people more than the destructions of careers and organizations.

(2) It’s a way of moving the reproductive rights battle from abortion—where Republicans have the upper hand—to cancer screenings, contraceptives, and other places where Democrats can have the upper hand.

So let’s not forget about KomenGate. Keep up the heat anyway you can think of.

Update. Here’s something (h/t many of you):

[A] Komen insider told HuffPost on Sunday that Karen Handel, Komen’s staunchly anti-abortion vice president for public policy, was the main force behind the decision to defund Planned Parenthood and the attempt to make that decision look nonpolitical.

“Karen Handel was the prime instigator of this effort, and she herself personally came up with investigation criteria,” the source, who requested anonymity for professional reasons, told HuffPost. “She said, ‘If we just say it’s about investigations, we can defund Planned Parenthood and no one can blame us for being political.’”

Emails between Komen leadership on the day the Planned Parenthood decision was announced, which were reviewed by HuffPost under the condition they not be published, confirm the source’s description of Handel’s sole “authority” in crafting and implementing the Planned Parenthood policy.

Komenfraude

Mistermix is right that the pink ribbon branding makes it very, very easy for consumers to avoid products made by companies that continue to sponsor Komen.

You can tell Yoplait to drop Komen here on their Facebook page.

You can give to Planned Parenthood here.

I know not everyone here likes it when I talk this way, but the truth is that fear and intimidation are an important part of the American political process. The right understands this, but the left is inclined to bring tote-bags to gun fights. If Komen can be completely and utterly destroyed or humiliated here, the next right-wing group that wants to fuck with women’s health will think twice.

Kind of a drag

A disturbing chart, from Jared Bernstein via K-Thug.

In other words, we’re looking at -0.3% in GDP from cuts in state and local budgets alone. The idea with Keynesian economics is that state cuts/expenditure increases get multiplied in terms of overall impact on the GDP, but, even leaving that aside, these numbers are large:

Kthug:

It’s hard to overstate just how wrong all this is. We have a situation in which resources are sitting idle looking for uses — massive unemployment of workers, especially construction workers, capital so bereft of good investment opportunities that it’s available to the federal government at negative real interest rates. Never mind multipliers and all that (although they exist too); this is a time when government investment should be pushed very hard. Instead, it’s being slashed.

All of this belt-tightening for the sake of belt-tightening is simply insane. It is failing over and over again everywhere, and this isn’t just some academic exercise, people’s lives are getting destroyed. It’s a tragedy, plain and simple, one that has real victims and real perpetrators.