AlterNet Comics: Jen Sorensen on Election 2016
October 24, 2016
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election2016
As Methodists Continue Their Support of BDS, Is Hillary Clinton on the Wrong Side on Palestinian Rights?
May 29, 2016
Despite the latest frontal attack on the grassroots boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian freedom by church member Hillary Clinton, and intense lobbying by representatives of the Israeli government with church delegates, the United Methodist Church continued its support of Palestinian rights at its General Conference in Portland last week.
In a press release, United Methodist Kairos Response, a group that advocates for policies in support of an end to the church’s complicity in Israel’s occupation, reported:
Despite fierce opposition, which included calls to delegates from Israeli ambassadors and consulates, the United Methodist General Conference passed strong measures calling for an end to Israel’s unjust practices toward Palestinians… Resolution 60206 calls on Israel to correct the unequal distribution of water in the West Bank, where illegal Israeli settlers receive four times as much water as the indigenous Palestinians. It also demands that Israel recognize existing titles to land owned by Palestinians within the West Bank…
Resolution 60843 calls for accountability from the Israeli government for the destruction of land and life. It urges U.S. officials to contact the Israeli government to halt the expansion of illegal settlements and confiscation of Palestinian land.
A third measure, Resolution 60868, calls for a church-wide Task Force led by key agencies to review and research actions that respond to the requests by church missionaries and Palestinian Christians. All United Methodist missionaries who have served in the Holy Land and thousands of Palestinian Christians have asked the church to cut its financial ties to the occupation.
The conference also voted down a measure that would have included criticism of Israeli state policies in its definition of anti-Semitism. The defeat of that threadbare diversion and the passage of these measures despite all this pressure—by an organization that is increasingly split between progressive and conservative wings—is highly significant. The church has seen sharp divisions not only with regard to Israel-Palestine, but also LGBT rights; at the same conference delegates voted 428-405 to delay all consideration of LGBT-related proposals.
Reflecting the ongoing strength of the church’s support for Palestinian rights, it’s important to recall that the United Methodist Church has in fact already taken concrete action to boycott and divest from Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands.
At its last general conference in 2012, the church voted to boycott products made in Israeli settlements built on occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law and official U.S. policy. Most recently, in an unprecedented move, in December the church’s pension fund put five Israeli banks on a no-investing list, divesting from two of them. As the New York Times reported in January: “The pension board of the United Methodist Church—one of the largest Protestant denominations in the United States, with more than seven million members—has placed five Israeli banks on a list of companies that it will not invest in for human rights reasons… It appeared to be the first time that a pension fund of a large American church had taken such a step regarding the Israeli banks, which help finance settlement construction in occupied Palestinian territories.”
The UMC has clearly taken major steps in support of Palestinian human rights, including the use of boycotts and divestment, as have a growing number of other organizations and institutions, including other Christian denominations like the Presbyterian Church (USA) and United Church of Christ.
In a recent interview on Democracy Now!, Noam Chomsky provided this diagnosis of why Clinton is so outspoken against such boycotts, divestment, and sanctions:
As to the tactics of boycott and divestment, they make perfect sense. When the Presbyterian Church imposes a boycott and divestment on anything connected to the Israeli-occupied territories, including U.S. multinationals—that’s critical—which are involved in the territories, that’s a very positive step forward, not only supportive of international law, supportive of genuine moral principles, a significant act, a nonviolent act, to oppose brutality, violence and repression. We could, I think, go much farther. As I said, we should be calling for implementation of U.S. law, along joining Amnesty International and others to call for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel. Boycott and sanctions make perfectly good sense when these tactics are properly applied, as they often are.
You can understand why Hillary Clinton is frightened of them. They might undermine the policy of her husband and his predecessors, and Obama, as well, to support Israeli violence and aggression, to protect Israeli nuclear weapons from scrutiny so we can’t have a nuclear weapons-free zone in the region, to veto Security Council resolutions, which literally support official U.S. policy, as Obama did in February 2011. Yeah, and the nonviolent actions to undermine this, legitimate actions, of course frighten Hillary Clinton enormously.
Clinton also might also want to keep in mind that she’s increasingly out of touch with the American public in general, and Democratic voters in particular, who are far more critical of Israel and oppose the kind of unconditional support for Israel that she advocates. According to a November 2015 poll done by the University of Maryland’s Shibley Telhami, who tracks U.S. public opinion on Israel-Palestine, 75 percent of Democrats and 80 percent of independents want the U.S. to be neutral in its dealings with the Israelis and Palestinians. The same poll showed that 49 percent of Democrats would support sanctions or stronger action against Israel over settlement building, while a poll conducted by Professor Telhami in November 2014 showed that 39 percent of all Americans felt the same. According to the November 2015 poll, only 45 percent of Republicans want the U.S. to take Israel’s side.
In particular, young people, progressives and people of color are increasingly sympathetic to the cause of Palestinian freedom, including the BDS movement. These findings concern exactly the demographics that Bernie Sanders has been so successful with. Reflecting this desire for a more fair and just U.S. policy toward Israel-Palestine among his supporters and Americans in general, Sanders has announced that he will be appointing James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, DNC member, and activist and scholar Dr. Cornel West, both outspoken supporters of Palestinian rights, to a seat on the committee that will decide the Democratic party platform.
And in a remarkable exchange during their debate in Brooklyn earlier this year, Sanders “shattered an American taboo on Israel,” as Vox’s headline put it, by doubling down on his statement that Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2014 was “disproportionate” to the threat it was facing, and pressing Clinton on her lack of concern for Palestinian lives and rights—to cheers and a cry of “free Palestine” from the audience.
Sympathy for an increasingly militant and radically aggressive Israel is being eroded continually as its true nature is becoming more and more manifest to the world at large. Consider these recent remarks from former Israeli prime minister and minister of defense Ehud Barak, as reported in Ha’aretz:
Israel has been “infected by the seeds of fascism,” former prime minister and defense minister Ehud Barak said during a TV interview on Friday night.
Responding to the resignation of Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon earlier in the day, Barak said that it “should be a red light for all of us regarding what’s going on in the government.” “Life-sustaining Zionism and the seeds of fascism cannot live together,” Barak told a Channel 10 interviewer.
Ya’alon’s resignation is “the end of a chain that began with the case of the soldier who shot [a wounded Palestinian assailant to death],” Barak said. “Such incidents give us an X-ray image that is opposed to the will of the people.” … “What has happened is a hostile takeover of the Israeli government by dangerous elements. And it’s just the beginning.”
This is precisely the government whose head of state Clinton has said she plans to welcome to the White House immediately after she is elected, and who she has repeatedly pledged to protect from the grassroots, nonviolent BDS movement for Palestinian freedom and rights. Clinton is allying herself with a leader even Israel’s own people are increasingly concerned about, and in the process she is standing on the wrong side of history—yet again.
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The 'Madman Theory' of Donald Trump: What's the GOP Supposed to Do About a Lying, Authoritarian Demagogue?
May 16, 2016
Back in the day, liberals used to always wonder why Warren Beatty didn’t run for president. Nowadays, you’ll hear the same thing about George Clooney. After all, these are people with 100 percent name recognition, fabulous good looks, brains, charisma, money and political contacts. They have an obvious knowledge and interest in government and achieved the very highest pinnacle of success as actors, directors and producers.
The reason they won’t do it is simple. As world-class movie stars, they understand fame in a way that a mediocre tabloid star cannot and they know that the glare of the press is unrelenting and brutal when you reach a certain level. They opted to pursue politics as private citizens because they were smart enough to know that every detail of their lives would be seen through a different prism if they ran for office and that many things people accept in a celebrity will look different in a politician. (Just ask Arnold Schwarzenegger who would probably be a U.S. senator right now if not for his sex scandals catching up to him.)
Donald Trump clearly isn’t that smart.
Over the weekend we had a storm of Trump tabloid news—from the fallout over the revelation that he had been a sock-puppet public relations man back in the ’90s who pimped his own sexual exploits to reporters and tabloids under the pseudonym “John Miller”; to his white supremacist butler; to a front page story in the New York Times about his years of sexually harassing women; to using the same pseudonyms to cheat illegal immigrants out of their wages. This was on top of his continued refusal to show his tax returns amidst rumors that it’s because his fortune is vastly over stated.
It was quite a run of personal news about the The Donald, and he seemed uncharacteristically off-balance. He snapped at George Stephanopoulos for pressing him about his taxes. He blatantly lied when confronted with a recording of himself pretending to be his own PR person, even though he’d previously admitted doing it. He hung up on reporters when they brought it up later. He wasn’t even his usual swashbuckling self on Twitter over the weekend, merely taking a few flaccid swipes at the New York Times and retweeting a couple of women who say they like him. As he himself would put it, he “had a tough weekend.”
There has been some talk that this sock-puppet charge could be one that sticks to him more than others, because it denotes someone who is mentally unstable. Personally, I think it’s been fairly obvious from the beginning that the man has some serious issues of temperament and judgment that make him unfit for the job. Indeed, after hearing Trump’s alter ego on tape going on about his prowess with the opposite sex, the first thing that came to mind was the letter his physician allegedly dictated but suspiciously seems to have been written by a very grandiose layman instead:
To Whom My [sic] Concern:
I have been the personal physician of Mr. Donald J. Trump since 1980. His previous physician was my father Dr. Jacob Bornstein. Over the past 39 years, I am pleased to report that Mr. trump has had no significant medical problems. Mr Trump has had a recent complete medical examination that showed only positive results. Actually, his blood pressure, 110/65 and laboratory test results were astonishingly excellent.
Over the past twelve months he has lost at least fifteen pounds. Mr Trump takes 81 mg of aspirin daily and a low dose of a statin. His PSA test score is 0.15 (very low). His physical strength and stamina are extraordinary.Mr Trump has suffered no form of cancer, has never had a hip, knee or shoulder replacement or any other orthopedic surgery. His only surgery was an appendectomy at age ten. His cardiovascular status is excellent. He has no history of ever using alcohol or tobacco products.
If elected, Mr Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.
Dr. Bornstein does exist, unlike Trump alter ego “John Miller.” But his style certainly bears more than a passing resemblance to his patient’s.
Whether his “issues” are of a clinical nature or are a matter of character is unknown, but it really doesn’t matter. He’s got issues. And if he thought he wouldn’t be under a much more intense spotlight as a presidential candidate than he ever was as a mediocre TV celebrity and rich playboy, he was extremely naive. In fact, in some ways, he’s almost childlike about it, which makes RNC chairman Reince Priebus’s statement to the AP on Friday even weirder than it seems at first glance:
“He’s been trying very hard to be presidential and gracious and I think he’s actually done a nice job of that lately. I expect him to continue working at it an getting the job done.”
That’s not the kind of comment you expect to hear about someone who is running for the most important job on the planet. It’s the comment you see on a third grader’s report card.
On “Face the Nation” yesterday, former Bush official Michael Gerson tried to grapple with this problem. After listening to various GOP officials twist themselves into pretzels trying to explain what it is Trump has to do to gain their favor, Gerson wonders if Trump can properly represent the United States at all:
I think politicians are used to dealing with splitting differences on issues. They’re used to their best of, you know, two bad alternatives. But the question is here whether the Republican candidate for president is fit to be president. Whether he has pursued a division, a nativism at the center of American politics that could really change our public life in destructive ways, fundamental and destructive ways? And under those circumstances, you’re not talking about this issue or that issue. You’re talking about fitness. You’re talking about, can this man represent America in the world? Can he represent all our citizens in—in—in this process. And those are open questions right now given the way that he has gotten to this point.
That’s not an open question. Of course he is unfit. He is an authoritarian demagogue who lies as a matter of course. The day he becomes president, the world will view the United States as a rogue superpower bound by no rules or norms or law. He seems to sincerely believe that “unpredictability” is a positive attribute in an American leader.
He isn’t the first, of course. Richard Nixon famously told his lieutenant Bob Haldeman:
“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, “for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button” and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”
As it turned out, Nixon may not have technically been a “madman” but he was a pathological liar with a whole bundle of issues that made him make some extremely destructive decisions. It would be a tragic mistake to elect another one.
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The Bernie or Bust Movement Shows No Signs of Slowing Down
May 16, 2016
For months now, my Facebook feed has been clogged with inspirational posts about Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders getting arrested at a civil rights rally. Bernie Sanders’s modest tax returns. Bernie Sanders with a bird. Now that the delegate math is stacked against him, my Facebook feed is full of panicky moralistic posts about how Bernie or Bust is going to ruin everything, that it’s time for Sanders supporters to give up on ideological purity and unify behind the presumed nominee.
But the case for giving up on Sanders is turning out to be as difficult to make as the one for nominating him. Could it be that the Bernie or Bust movement, however righteous or quixotic, is not about Sanders at all, but another symptom of a high-rolling advertising-driven culture that has eroded all our trust in the social contract? I mean, if you’re looking for someone to blame, Edward Bernays is your man, not Sanders—and certainly not anyone who plans to write in Sanders’s name on a general election ballot.
Bernays, who was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, is the one who brought advertising into everyday life, not as billboard and print ads but as real events. In other words “public relations,” a term he also coined. Bernays kicked off his “torches of freedom” campaign for the American Tobacco Company in 1929 by hiring women to pose as suffragists in the Easter Sunday Parade and light up on cue. The point was to convince more women to smoke, but the whole campaign was dressed up as a grass-roots political movement. In 1954, “the father of spin” was hired by the United Fruit Company to set up local media in Guatemala that would coordinate with the CIA to topple the democratically elected government.
But corporate accounts were only a side-job for Bernays. His career really took off when he set up shop in Washington, D.C., with the motto “If you can use propaganda for war, you can certainly use it for peace.” Working for every president from 1924 to 1961 (besides FDR), his notion that politics should be treated as a form of lifestyle advertising inspired a new generation of political consultants. It was Dick Morris, for example, who convinced Bill Clinton in 1994 to drop the platform he won on and adopt, in Morris’s words, a “consumer rules philosophy.” This formulation is misleading. As Adam Curtis argues in his award-winning BBC documentary “The Century of the Self,” this formulation is misleading. In the world of advertising, it isn’t the consumer that is king. It is the unconscious. Consultants like Morris have worked hard to convince leaders in both parties that they should ignore the better angels of our nature and speak directly to our unnamable fears and desires.
Is it any wonder that a country buried to its eyeballs in propaganda would treat the first honest politician to come along as some kind of messiah? And is it so unreasonable that Sanders’s more enthusiastic followers should balk at conventional party-unifying tactics as we transition from primary to general election? Ironically, tragically, the Bernaysian strategies of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and others in the Democratic leadership have turned out to be very bad PR for Hillary Clinton, at least for a certain constituency. To be sure, Clinton can thank these same strategies for her frontrunner status. She has emerged from the primaries with the image of a savvy power broker who knows how to get things done inside a broken system, not least by virtue of the cronyism built into the primary process. This is the “New Democrat” ideal, right? The shrewd and alert face of transactional politics. Our very own Karl Rove.
As Matt Taibbi points out, this strategy is more divisive than party leadership understands. It betrays a fundamental willingness to capitalize on—and exacerbate—the most urgent problem we face in American political culture: the crisis of a representative democracy in which representation, statistically speaking, does not exist (as found, for example, by the 2014 Princeton study). Bernays’s project of turning politics into a sub-discipline of advertising has been so successful we no longer have a functional public sphere.
Sanders, of course, is no saint. His success raising large funds on small donations has given him plenty of advertising muscle to flex, and by all accounts he has flexed it. But here we need to make an important distinction. It is one thing to advertise your position to potential constituents in a contest of ideas. This is about engaging constituents—a function of the public sphere. It is another thing entirely when advertising is your platform. This is political realism: the doctrine that power can and should beget more power. Political realists do not deal in constituents, they deal in consumers. And putting one in charge of fixing America’s crisis of trust, incrementally or otherwise, is like putting the petroleum industry in charge of clean energy. Unfortunately for Democrats, this is also where Clinton utterly fails to distinguish herself from a candidate like Trump.
There is ample evidence that voters in 2016 demand a political system that appeals to their rational judgment, not one that preys on the unconscious. Perhaps party leaders, for all their posturing, really were afraid of a New Deal Democrat like Sanders. Perhaps they were so busy with the work of selling Clinton they didn’t have time to read the writing on the wall. Either way, their heavy-handed endorsement has only served to remind reformist-minded Democrats that they are part of the problem. Their only hope now is that Trump’s screaming orange face will scare us back to Clinton’s side. Who knows? Maybe they are right.
But if we really want to treat the problem—not just the symptoms—I would recommend that we stop wringing our hands on cue and take the Bernie or Bust movement for what it really is. Not the ideological purity of dreamers, or the bad sportsmanship of losers, but a struggle to do something responsible with our faith in politics now that we’ve found it again. That’s why the “vote blue no matter who” slogan, typically accompanied by a photo of Trump’s face exactly as it will appear in our post-election nightmares, is so terribly misguided. The whole thing has the look-feel of a Bernaysian PR trick.
As usual, rank-and-file Democrats want to wait until it’s too late and then crucify the messenger—that’s been our strategy ever since Ralph Nader “spoiled” the election in 2000. Isn’t it time we tried something new? Because the political life of a country is like a relationship. The more you ignore the crisis, the uglier it’s going to get. And, make no mistake, Donald Trump and his brownshirt flavored rallies are also a symptom of this crisis. That’s why the question “Wouldn’t Hillary Clinton do better for our country than Trump?” is so badly formulated—not to mention that it has the same foul smell as the prepackaged consent typically served up by both parties, no doubt on the advice of their PR teams.
Yes, it’s gotten that bad. And for many voters, this November will be a time to decide not who to vote for, but how to enact a newly awakened political will, one that aims to correct the anti-democratic tactics of both parties. Bernie or Bust is no doubt a foolhardy and extreme position, not least because it is bound to create all kinds of bad PR for the reformist cause. In the big picture, however, it looks like our best chance—perhaps our only chance—to deliver a long awaited verdict on a disastrous New Democrat agenda responsible in part for every bad decision from the Iraq Resolution to Citizens United.
More importantly, the write-in vote is our last chance to call bluff on the iron fist of political realism, which Democratic leadership have raised again and again against their own constituents by playing us off against bogeymen like Trump. A century of treating the public sphere as if it were a sub-discipline of advertising has robbed us of all but the bluntest of political instruments—without, for that matter, delivering us from the obligation of using them.
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Sam Brownback Gutted Kansas: How America’s Worst Governor and an Ultra-Conservative Ideology Wrecked an Entire State
May 01, 2016
It’s safe to say that if Kansas’s Gov. Sam Brownback or any of the state’s ultraconservative legislators had been in fictional astronaut Mark Watney’s place (“The Martian“), they would have never survived the 543 sols that Watney spent stranded on Mars before being rescued. It’s doubtful they would have even made it back to the Hab in the first place after inadvertently being left for dead in the middle of the fateful sandstorm that drove the crew to abandon their mission. Survival depended on logically assessing the situation at hand and subsequently deciding on a course of action based on empirical evidence, sound scientific, engineering and even economic principles, and best practices. These aren’t key strengths of Brownback or ultraconservative legislators.
And in this case they would have essentially been responsible for creating the sandstorm that forced the astronaut team to flee Mars to begin with. Kansas is experiencing a massive “lack of revenue” storm created by the income tax cuts of 2012 and 2013, seriously jeopardizing the state’s future and quality of life for Kansans across the state. Everything from transportation infrastructure to public education are struggling to stay upright in the gale-force winds of the income tax cuts. Some Kansans are fleeing the state as if having been given the order to abandon the mission, though most fight to survive in this increasingly hostile environment.
For Kansas, a better protagonist would be the Kansas Center for Economic Growth (KCEG), a nonpartisan organization with a much better grasp of economics and the use of empirical evidence to guide their policy recommendations. Executive director Annie McKay, senior fellow Duane Goossen and others at the KCEG are far better prepared to “science the shit out of this,” rescuing themselves and the rest of us from the desolation of the Kansas economic landscape being wrought by the “lack of revenue” storm.
In their recent report, “Kansas Public Education: The Foundation for Economic Growth,” the KCEG effectively demonstrates a) the short- and long-term benefits of a strong public education system (everything from reduced public healthcare costs to the attraction and retention of workers/businesses), b) that K-12 education is an economic driver in Kansas with a significant return on investment and c) that K-12 public education is currently underfunded (and under threat) in the state of Kansas.
To address this, KCEG makes the following two policy recommendations to provide better support for Kansas public education and subsequently provide broader economic prosperity across the state:
- Repeal the unaffordable income tax changes to generate revenue and invest in schools.
- Replace the inadequate block grant with an equitable school funding formula that accounts for what it actually costs to educate and prepare students for life after high school.
KCEG’s report and policy recommendations are based on solid economic and education third-party research, their own data analyses (conducted by qualified individuals in an objective manner) and conversations with business, community and school leaders from across the state. Contrast this with the ideological zealotry of the Brownback administration, their ultraconservative legislative allies and organizations like the Kansas Policy Institute (KPI), who’ve been standing firm on the tax cuts, regardless of what the short- and long-term impacts on public services and Kansans will be.
Of course if one assumes the goal is to significantly reduce the role and size of state government, and to correspondingly increase a) the burden on the individual (subscribing to the myth of the self-made “man”) as well as b) privatization, particularly for public education which composes the majority of the state’s budget, then the tax cuts are working. Unfortunately, they’ll eventually turn Kansas’s economy into a something resembling the desolate Martian landscape.
KCEG’s report partially demonstrates from one economic perspective why such a view of the world, when actualized into public policy, doesn’t work, except for those at the top of the financial food chain. KCEG rightly points out that the tax revenues devoted to state-provided services, such as transportation infrastructure, public education and healthcare, to name a few, are in actuality investments in some very “powerful economic development tools” available to Kansas (and other states).
Looking just at public education, according to KCEG’s analysis, “[e]ach dollar invested in public schools reaps a $2.62 return…” that benefits all Kansans in terms of the quality of our workforce, the earning (and spending) power of graduates, reduced healthcare costs, reduced crime control costs and reduced welfare costs. The return on investment we all receive from the taxes that generate these much-needed revenues, regardless of whether one receives a direct or indirect benefit (i.e., people without children or who were home-schooled also benefit from a well-educated citizenry) doesn’t fit the ultraconservative narrative of a free market utopia with little government involvement and individuals solely responsible for their successes and misfortunes.
And the wealthy do typically gain more than everyone else under such a system – they keep more of their wealth with reduced taxes and are able to supplement with their own resources any reduction in government services, such as sending their kids to private schools. They often benefit from the increased privatization that occurs if they are financially involved in the private entities who provide the services. Those investments relative to business growth are also focused on their own interests, and therefore the greater economic benefits are more localized and smaller relative to the benefits and services that were displaced through shrinking government. Trickle-down is an apt term – it typically is just a trickle (if that) relative to the population at large.
Research in other disciplines strongly support this as well. Continuing with the theme of wanting to “science the shit out of this,” let’s take a look at what research from the intersection of biology, behavior, economics and the social sciences have to say (see “Evolution: This View of Life” as well as the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization Special Issue on Evolution as a General Theoretical Framework for Economics and Public Policy for a jumping-off point into this research).
Free market principles and associated economic models are built in part around the view of humans as Homo economicus, making “rational” decisions based on a narrow, relatively short-term cost/benefit analysis and pursuing their self-interests relentlessly at the near exclusion of all other factors. While it’s true such “selfish” behavior (selfish relative to other individuals or the groups one is a part of) exists and manifests under a variety of conditions, it by no means fully defines human behavior.
Our evolutionary history has also designed us to be extremely social creatures who love to congregate. In contrast to selfish behavior, “pro-social” actions benefit the larger, encompassing groups one is a part of (sometimes at the expense of the individual or smaller group). Selfish behaviors tend to be locally advantageous, particularly for the individual or smaller group conducting the behavior, and more relevant in the short term, while pro-social behaviors tend to be globally advantageous to the larger encompassing group and society, and more relevant in the long term.
Pro-social behaviors also tend to enhance cooperation among group members. And our social/cultural norms act as a kind of “glue,” binding together unrelated individuals within larger groups and providing a measure of uniformity in their behavior. From an evolutionary perspective, cooperation and a measure of uniformity are hallmarks of successful groups.
And so individual decisions often are made to conform with social/cultural norms and rules of interaction, typically benefiting the larger group as much as or more than the individual. There also is the potential for such decisions and actions to be a detriment to the individual relative to other group members. Paying taxes benefits the larger group structures themselves – the institutions of the state and subsequent services provided; it also benefits individual citizens to varying degrees relative to the “services” provided by the state. It may benefit the individual paying the taxes directly and immediately or it may be an indirect benefit in that group longevity, stability and prosperity are all contributed to by payment of taxes.
Individuals (and businesses) who avoid paying their fair share of taxes (selfish behavior relative to the larger group), either illegally or through legal loopholes, put themselves at an advantage compared to their fellow group members who pro-socially pay their fair share. And wealthier individuals (and businesses) who support drastically reducing or eliminating taxes also put themselves at a benefit relative to their fellow citizens who depend to varying degrees on state services. Such actions in effect shift the level of selection from the larger group down to the level of individuals and smaller groups (including communities and businesses), creating more intragroup competition and decreasing group uniformity and cooperation.
Our pro-social and selfish natures, and their differing manifestations relative to the dominant level of selection, developed over the course of our evolutionary history spent as hunter-gatherers living in more egalitarian groups. Social/cultural mechanisms and processes, such as transparency of behavior, public shaming, gossiping and ostracizing evolved to minimize selfish behaviors and maximize pro-social behaviors in groups that are smaller and less complex than the ones we live in today.
Those same social/cultural mechanisms and processes can be effective in modern society. However, the much greater number of individuals and subgroups, often competing and cooperating on different levels at the same time and often hierarchically nested within each other, require additional social mechanisms to help maintain the level of selection primarily at the larger group level. Formal laws, regulations and governing structures, including those requiring taxes be paid to adequately fund services provided by the state, are examples of such mechanisms. A few years ago, David Sloan Wilson, Elinor Ostrom and Michael E. Cox provided a more detailed overview of the application of these mechanisms in modern society.
This was a simplified discussion of the literature, but it summarizes some of the limitations of Homo economicus as the only important aspect of human behavior to consider in economic models as well as the fallacy of a free market utopia where individual freedoms and responsibility reign supreme. It also ends in the same place as the conclusions of KCEG’s report: public services, including a strong, equitable public education system, benefit us all and therefore require adequate and fair taxation as a source of revenue.
Despite all of the evidence against the governor and ultraconservative legislators clinging to a free market utopia, despite being put on a credit watch by Standard and Poor’s, despite many previous ultraconservative legislative allies now jumping ship as the fall elections approach, the governor is standing by the tax cuts. And he continues to receive support (and likely pressure) from the Kansas Policy Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and other similar groups as they persist in whipping up a sandstorm of misinformation and spin.
As David Sloan Wilson, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University, has previously stated, “[Ideological] zealots are famously immune to experience, scientific evidence, logic and common sense… Perverse [policies] with ruinous consequences make sense to the economic true believer. If they fail, then the solution is to practice them even more assiduously. The only solution to this problem is to break the spell by changing the story to one that is more in tune with reality.”
And that’s what I’ve tried to do here (as well as KCEG and others elsewhere), but I’ve little hope it will break the free market spell holding sway over the governor. Nor should Kansans be fooled by those ultraconservative legislators now calling for some degree of tax cut repeal. A term-limited governor who continuously threatens to veto any legislation repealing or reducing the tax cuts serves as great cover for those ultraconservative legislators with the same goals, who are also seeking re-election.
Ultimately, the real hero in this story will be Kansas voters if they recognize what it takes to “science the shit out of this” and use their voting power to change the legislative landscape this fall.
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Trump Makes Pals With European Politicians Who Flirt With Fascism
May 01, 2016
April 25 was Liberation Day in Italy, a day meant to commemorate the end of fascism and the Nazi occupation of Italy. This Liberation Day, Matteo Salvini, the far-right leader of Italy’s Lega Nord party, chose not to celebrate but instead to come to Philadelphia to support Donald Trump’s campaign the day before the Pennsylvania primary.
Salvini is known for his large rallies, where some of his followers wave photos of Benito Mussolini and black Celtic cross flags, a common neo-Nazi symbol in Europe. Salvini himself praised Mussolini for his “efficacy” and “dedication” to Italy and his pension policies. According to the right-wing politician, Mussolini did “so many good things” before teaming up with Adolf Hitler. Salvini will also occasionally slip on a black shirt, perhaps as a tribute to the fascist dictator.
Ironically, Trump accidentally tweeted the Mussolini quote, “Better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep.” When confronted later about it, he said it didn’t matter who spoke the words because the quote was “interesting.”
Salvini and Trump met on April 25 to talk about immigration reform and said they were in “total agreement” on closed borders. Salvini has criticized the pope and Angela Merkel for their positions on taking in Syrian refugees. “Matteo, I hope you will soon become the prime minister of Italy,” Trump said, according to ANSA news service.
Salvini posted a photo on Facebook of the two together with their thumbs up and the caption “Go, Donald, go!” He also lambasted Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi for supporting American Democrats, posting “Renzi chooses the disastrous do-goodery of Obama and Merkel, I prefer the legality and security proposals from Trump!” on Facebook.
Lega Nord was founded as a secessionist party in 1991 in northern Italy, but Salvini has since emphasized an anti-immigration and Islamophobic rhetoric. Salvini was elected to the party in 2013 and is becoming a rising political figure. With little more than 14 percent of the population’s support, Lega Nord is Italy’s third most popular party; however, Salvini’s approval rate is growing.
Salvini and Trump are a similar breed of politician, both charismatic celebrities who tap into blue-collar nationalism. Salvini, 42, posed shirtless for a magazine cover and is known to be popular with women. One of Salvini’s biggest admirers is Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front in France. Of Salvini, she said, “He sends me into ecstasy.” Le Pen, who called for an “immediate end to all reception of migrants in France,” endorsed Trump after he called for a shutdown of Muslims entering the U.S. After the Paris attacks last year, the far-right National Front ran many ads playing on people’s fears of terrorism, and Le Pen won 30 percent of the vote in her region last election.
Xenophobia is growing in Europe, with France, the United Kingdom, Austria, Greece, Denmark and Sweden all electing far-right nationalist candidates. Like Trump, they unite voters with a platform of blocking migrants from the Middle East and Africa. More blatant demonstrations of anti-Semitism flared up in Greece, with its Golden Dawn party donning Nazi-like uniforms and symbolism.
Cas Mudde, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, commented on the parallels between European and American politics. “I see the phenomena as very similar. Trump is the functional equivalent of the far right in Europe; he performs the same functions in the political system, and attracts the same kind of support… white, nativist, lower-educated and very unhappy with the establishment.”
Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician who founded the right-wing Freedom Party, also endorsed Trump, tweeting, “Make the Netherlands Great Again.” (Wilders, who is currently on trial for incendiary remarks, bears a weird physical resemblance to Donald Trump.)
Despite these connections, Trump has recently been careful to avoid linking himself with Europe’s far right. He has distanced himself from Marine Le Pen and rebuffed her supporters’ efforts to meet with him in March. But could his meeting with Salvini be the start of a dangerous alliance with right-wing Europe? Trump, like Salvini, does not conform completely to the far-right political groups, but rather a new mold governed by a cult of personality that appeals to moderates. Trump has also been compared to former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, the conservative media tycoon who rose to power and governed Italy for nine years.
With Trump likely to seize the Republican nomination, his endorsements from far-right groups in both Europe and the United States (Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke) will alienate him with voters in the general election.
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Bernie Is the Hero of 2016: Just Because He’s Losing the Nomination Doesn’t Mean He’s Failed
May 01, 2016
Since Hillary Clinton’s triumphant Tuesday, in which she won four out of the five state primaries and padded her delegate lead—almost ensuring her the Democratic nomination for president—the Bernie Sanders campaign has noticeably adjusted its tone, hinting, as the New York Times reports, that “the senator is looking past the nominating fight and toward a future role in shaping the [Democratic] party.” On Thursday, it was announced that the campaign was downsizing its staff by more than 200, while Sanders has begun to focus increasingly on the Democratic Party itself, rather than his primary opponent.
“The Democratic Party has to reach a fundamental conclusion,” said the senator at an Oregon rally on Thursday. “Are we on the side of working people or big-money interests?”
While Sanders may not end up becoming the Democratic nominee, he has already accomplished more than anyone could have predicted just six months ago, and is now a powerful force in the Democratic Party and American politics. Since announcing his candidacy a year ago, winning the nomination has always been somewhat subordinate to creating a popular progressive movement, or what he has termed a “political revolution.” As he explained in a speech back in October:
We need millions of people—people who have given up on the political process, people who are demoralized, people who don’t believe that government listens to them. We need to bring those people together to stand up loudly and clearly and to say “Enough is enough.” This country belongs to all of us, not just wealthy campaign donors.
Sanders has run on a bold (but by no means “radical”) platform that directly challenges America’s plutocracy. And the one underlying message of the Sanders campaign has been straightforward and simple: The economy is about power, and over the past 40 years, as unions have weakened and monied interests have united to drive policy and political debate in Washington, economic gains have gone to the wealthiest, while wages have stagnated for the vast majority. Contrary to the mainstream notion that America’s economic winners and losers are determined entirely by merit and the invisible hand of the market, those who win tend to be those who already have enough economic (and therefore political) power to rig the game in their favor.
In his latest book, Saving Capitalism, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich refutes this myth of the free market:
Few ideas have more profoundly poisoned the minds of more people than the notion of a “free market” existing somewhere in the universe, into which government intrudes. But the prevailing view, as well as the debate it has spawned, is utterly false. There can be no “free market” without government… Competition in the wild is a contest for survival in which the largest and strongest typically win. Civilization, by contrast, is defined by rules; rules create markets, and governments generate the rules.
In an ideal democracy, the power to determine these rules of the market would rest in the hands of the people. Of course, the United States is not an ideal democracy, and the founding fathers—many of whom were extremely cynical about the masses (perhaps justifiably so for the time)—designed the Constitution to ensure that the economic and social elites retained control.
But throughout the country’s history, the people—workers, farmers, suffrage activists, civil rights activists, abolitionists, populists, socialists, etc.—fought to create a more inclusive and democratic society. When people united to form popular movements, they generated a collective strength that the economic and political elites could no longer afford to ignore (or could no longer suppress). Eventually, popular movements led to the progressive and New Deal eras, and as the political apparatus became increasingly democratic, the rules of the economy were leveled to ensure working people were treated and paid fairly.
But the people became complacent—worse, they were divided by race, gender, religion, culture, and so on. Starting in the ’70s, corporate America came to realize the importance of taking back political power, which had become more evenly distributed throughout the 20th century. To quote Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo, a sort of capitalist manifesto:
Business must learn the lesson… that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination—without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.
Private industry took Powell’s advice. Since the ’70s, corporate lobbyists have infested Washington, thousands of political action committees have formed, right-wing think tanks like Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation have become major influencers of public policy, and political campaign spending has gone through the roof—especially after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling of 2010.
“It is not a coincidence that as more and more money has infected the two parties, their concern for the well-being of the vast majority of the American people has declined,” writes Mike Lofgren, a former Republican who worked in Washington for nearly 30 years, in his outstanding book, The Party is Over. “The extensive political ads that pollute television after Labor Day during an election year may ooze with empathy for Joe Average, but actions speak louder than words.”
Indeed, according to an oft-cited Princeton University study that analyzed 20 years of public opinion polling data, compared to legislation passed in Washington during the same time period, American politicians are influenced very little by the needs of Joe and Jane Average. The report found that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”
In other words, America is a plutocracy (or, if you prefer, an oligarchy).
And the only way to challenge this “government by the wealthy” is for the people to rise up and demand a fair and just economy, as they have in the past. This has been Bernie Sanders’ message throughout 2016—that only the power of the collective can stand up to the power of monied interests.
Whether the Bernie campaign can broaden into a larger popular movement that exists beyond electoral politics will be determined in the months and years to come. But as longtime Democratic strategist Robert Shrum recently put it to The Hill, Sanders has “ignited a new powerful and enduring grassroots movement inside the Democratic Party” and “brought a new generation of people into politics.” He has also reminded us that real change can only transpire when people come together and demand it, and that there is true power in collective action.
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How Donald Trump Became the Dictator of Social Media
May 01, 2016
By now I must be at least the millionth commentator to observe that Donald Trump is the candidate for whom social media have longed. What FDR was to radio and JFK to television, Trump is to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, et al.
This is usually taken to mean that Trump, like some political McLuhan, is a mastermind who understands social media the way his forebears understood their media. But I suspect that with him, it may be less a matter of his brilliance or even his intuition than of the accidental match of personality with medium. He is a man of his technological moment.
The standard take on that mutuality is that social media prioritize constant churn, and Trump is a non-stop, one-man political tornado, roaring through this campaign and sucking up every news cycle in his vortex. That certainly describes what Trump has done, but it isn’t exclusive to social media. In fact, he seems to have grabbed more attention on traditional news sites, especially cable TV, than on social media.
Trump is the decontextualizer-in-chief.
Where Trump and social media do conjoin, promoting his candidacy and changing our whole political environment, isn’t in the generation of noise. It is in something even more fundamental to each: Trump is the “decontexualizer-in-chief” operating in a medium that likewise is about cutting the world into bits that don’t necessarily accrete into anything sensical.
Books have been written about the impact of social media on our electoral process, and decontextualization usually isn’t high on the list of transformations, in part because fragmentation isn’t usually high on the list of properties that inhere to social media. Those properties, as I see them, are instantaneity, anonymity, democratization, authenticity and yes, fragmentation, and they lead, in their various ways, to a variety of consequences.
Studies have shown, not surprisingly, that social media contribute to increased polarization of our politics, since social media allow like-minded people to find one another who might otherwise be atomized—sometimes to public advantage, and sometimes not.
You might think of social media as a mechanism of social aggregation that can lead to positive social activism. Then again you might think of it as a virtual Munich beer hall. In any case, I don’t think there is any doubt that social media have begun to edge out more traditional forms of collective action—for example, party apparatuses. And I also don’t think there is any doubt that Trump benefited from this erosion, the darling of social media vanquishing Jeb Bush, the darling of the GOP establishment, or Marco Rubio, the darling of the MSM.
Thanks in part to the anonymity in which folks can use social media, those media have also been accused of coarsening our politics, evicting the politesse, and Trump has clearly benefited from that, too. It is much easier to bloviate, as Trump’s supporters do, in the blogosphere where you can’t be found than on the page or the TV screen where you can. There are no trolls in the MSM because there are no bridges for them to hide under. (OK, I take that back. There is Fox News.) We all know that social media can facilitate bullies and fortify the weak and cowardly, which can be mistaken for the authenticity of speaking your mind. Again, enter Donald Trump.
When you think of democratization on social media, you think of that collective action I referenced above. But social media—in fact, the Internet generally—have also recalibrated our focus by democratizing information; not the access to it, but the lack of discrimination among bits of information. The Internet is a great disinformation machine where anyone can say anything. It is also a kind of magnifying glass enlarging the most minute and trivial things—things, frankly, that very few people seemed to care about before the advent of the Internet. I don’t recall us ever having recaps of every episode of every television program, complete with critical annotation. Well, now we do.
Similarly, though live tweeting might be perceived as a form of increased immediacy, it might also be perceived as a form of disproportion. By magnifying the small and putting everything on the same valence, the trivial and the significant together, it fogs our ability to discern the big from the small. And, God knows, this has helped Trump, too. If he is the most bullying of candidates, he is also the most trivializing. His idea of a policy pronouncement is “build a wall.”
When it comes to democratization, though, perhaps more important as a practical matter is how social media can allow a candidate to circumvent the MSM and seize the narrative: the democracy of challenging the gatekeepers. This has certainly been one of Trump’s achievements as well. Every time the MSM begin one of their Trump rants—the sort of rants that in the past have forged iron narratives candidates cannot break—Trump rants right back over Twitter, leaving the MSM no choice but to cover the rant and, in the process, subvert themselves.
I said in an earlier column that in Iowa, Trump stole the narrative away from the MSM. He has been running with it ever since, and it has been this collaboration between Trump and social media that, I think, may be the second most important way he and they have transformed our political process. By the lights of the MSM, Trump should have been buried long ago under the weight of his effrontery. With the help of social media, he hasn’t been.
I say “second most” because the most important, I believe, is the way Trump, with the accommodation of social media, has used its affinity for decontextualization to decontextualize our politics. Social media are the champions of the nugget—the minute-or-less Instagram film, the 140-character tweet, the instantaneous Snapchat, the six-second (yes, six seconds!) Vine. Because nothing in social media is sustained, people may connect, but ideas rarely do. By the time you have finished slicing and dicing everything into those nuggets, you have pried them out of any larger context, any skein of meaning, any argument, any vision. In a way, social media take the Memento approach to life and apply it to everything.
Politically, this fragmentation has major ramifications. Context is reason. Context is what enables us to weigh and judge. Context removes impulse. And this is really why you cannot conduct a serious campaign on social media. Context disappears. Of course, radio lends itself to emotion and unreason and even soundbites. So obviously does television. Both can substitute the momentary for the considered.
This is one of the things the great media analyst Neil Postman decried in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He fretted over the way an increasingly visceral culture had given rise to an increasingly unserious culture, with the obvious political implications. Above all else, Donald Trump is the candidate of impulse running against candidates of calculation. He is the king of the one-liner, the insult, the proudly politically incorrect slur. And that is a central reason why disaffected Republicans have rallied to him. He is nothing but bites.
All of which makes Trump not just a more outrageous and blustering candidate than the ones to whom we are accustomed. It makes him an epistemologically different kind of candidate—one who challenges the very basis of our politics. He doesn’t have to make sense. He doesn’t have to provide a program or a vision. All he needs are his zingers, so long as they are no more than 140-characters. Twitter can do that to you. And now we are getting a taste of what it can do to our political discourse.
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Clinton Team Cynically Exploits 'Cyberbullying' to Justify $1 Million Online Propaganda Push
April 25, 2016
Friday, Clinton super PAC Correct the Record announced it was starting a million-dollar social media campaign to “push back” against online criticism of Clinton supporters and her superdelegates. It’s a plan awash in PR posture about “cyberbullying” that amounts to little more than a classic social media astroturf campaign—the likes of which we’ve seen everywhere from Russia to Mexico to the Department of Defense.
Clinton’s super PAC is spending lots of money for some combination of real and automated persona management to counter hostile messages on social media.
This was timed with an effort by the Clinton campaign, who ran an anti-“cyberbullying” message to two uncritical outlets: MSNBC and CNN—neither of which connected Clinton's otherwise non sequitur concern for cyberbullying with her super PAC’s parallel effort to frame online critics as such to justify a million-dollar astroturfing effort.
How can the campaign and Correct the Record coordinate such an effort? Simple: the Clinton campaign and its most influential super PAC guru David Brock have argued they can coordinate messaging, so long as it’s online and not an “independent expenditure.” As the Sunlight Foundation’s Libby Watson explained to the Daily Beast:
Super PACs aren’t supposed to coordinate with candidates. The whole reasoning behind (Supreme Court decision) Citizens United rests on (PACs) being independent, but Correct the Record claims it can coordinate. It’s not totally clear what their reasoning is, but it seems to be that material posted on the Internet for free—like, blogs—doesn’t count as an “independent expenditure.”
While Clinton supporters have indeed been subject to online harassment—as I noted in February—there’s little reason to suspect they’ve been alone (one Tumblr that collects tweets and Facebook posts showing Sanders and his partisans being attacked makes this clear). It’s also worth highlighting that Clinton’s super PAC Correct the Record has already been using paid trolls to message on social media. Buried in Correct the Record’s press release is this interesting nugget: “the task force currently combats online political harassment, having already addressed more than 5,000 individuals who have personally attacked Secretary Clinton on Twitter.” So, there’s a greater than trivial chance you’ve already run across one of these bots if you're on Twitter.
Some have accused Sanders of participating in the same activities, but the Daily Beast was quick to report that there is no evidence the Vermont senator has engaged in such practices.
There’s a foul stench of cynicism with framing routine social media astroturfing as an anti-bullying effort, but it's also par for course. There isn’t a social media astroturfing effort in the history of the practice that hasn’t argued that it’s simply pushing back against “misinformation” or harassment.
Indeed, what Clinton is doing is no different than what Russian President Vladimir Putin has long been criticized for: paying for some combination of automated software and real people to spam social media and comment sections with propaganda. The difference is in the framing: Clinton is “pushing back” against “bullies” while Putin is “paying troll farms” to disseminate “propaganda."
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The similarities don’t stop there. Clinton is apparently spending the exact same amount on her astroturf effort as Putin did, according to a 2014 Buzzfeed report on Putin’s “troll army”:
Kremlin campaign to claim control over the Internet, launching a million-dollar army of trolls to mold American public opinion...
A similar framing disparity is seen when the Israeli government uses social media sock puppets vs. when Russia does. Notice: Israel “pay[s] students” to “defend it online,” while Russia has “professional trolls” spread “online propaganda”:
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But the practice is the same; all that’s different is how it’s framed—and thus far, the Clinton camp’s scrappy “pushing back” framing remains unchallenged.
The Bernie Bro bully narrative has been a favorite of the Clinton campaign’s high-profile defenders—largely because it allows them to gloss over policy differences and avoid legitimate criticism—so it’s logical her super PAC communications team would frame one of the most powerful people in the world, a former secretary of state and senator who has made tens of millions since leaving public office, as a victim under siege by a mob of foaming Sanders zealots.
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A Citizen’s Guide to Combating Election Propaganda: Debunking Minimum Wage Myths
April 14, 2016
Much hand-wringing among political, media, and business elites has followed the decisions by New York and California to raise the minimum wage. New York has mandated a raise in the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2018, while California has mandated a $15 wage by 2022. Support for a higher minimum wage is articulated by Democratic presidential candidates, as Bernie Sanders supports a $15 an hour minimum wage, while Hillary Clinton supports a $12 an hour wage. Their rhetoric aside, however, Democrats have consistently failed or refused over recent decades to prioritize regular raises in the minimum wage. Republican presidential candidates rail against such raises. They predict dire consequences, should government mandate higher wages for the working-class. Donald Trump claims that: “I want to create jobs so that you don’t’ have to worry about the minimum wage, they’re doing a great job and they’re making much more than the minimum wage…I think having a low minimum wage is not a bad thing for this country.” Similarly, Ted Cruz argues: “Every time you raise the minimum wage, the people who are hurt the most [are] the most vulnerable.” Cruz supported a filibuster in the Senate in 2014 to prevent a vote on raising the national minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour, claiming on the Senate floor that “the undeniable reality, the undeniable truth, is if the president succeeded in raising the minimum wage, it would cost jobs from the most vulnerable.”
Cruz’s comments reflect long-standing reactionary thinking that raising the minimum wage will increase inflation and unemployment among working Americans. As the rationale goes, if employers have to pay more for employee wages, they will lay off workers in increased numbers to offset the cost of a growing wage. Alternatively, employers will not hire new employees as old ones quit. Furthermore, employers will increase the cost of goods in order to offset the costs of a higher wage, thereby contributing to a significant growth in national inflation rates. These claims are brought up in right-wing media and by Republican officials every time the minimum wage is discussed. If accurate, both claims suggest raising the minimum wage will harm low-wage workers; but the key question is whether such claims are accurate. Fortunately, much research has been done in recent years suggesting that the standard reactionary arguments against the minimum wage are either exaggerated or wholly inaccurate.
Misrepresenting the Scope of the California and New York Raises
A jump to $15.00 an hour sounds large within the context of a national minimum wage of just $7.25 an hour today. But the increase is not as large as it seems. One should remember that the current wages in California and New York are higher than the national wage, and that the national minimum wage is extremely low, relative to its higher value in past decades. Also the value of the minimum wage should be radically higher, if working class wages had kept pace with growing worker productivity over the last few recent decades. The minimum wage, adjusted for inflation and measured in 2016 dollars, reached a high value of $10.90 an hour in 1968. The current rate of $7.25, then, represents a 33 percent decline in the purchasing power of the minimum wage over nearly 50 years, despite the U.S. economy having grown far more profitable, productive, and larger in that time. This decline in value occurred because both parties raised the minimum wage so infrequently from the 1970s through today, compared to earlier decades.
Minimum wage raises in California and New York look far less radical once one understands that the federal minimum wage is put in place to reflect a base pay rate across the U.S. It is not tailored to meet cost of living needs in the most expensive states in the country such as California and New York. Restoring wages to their national high from 1968 of $10.90 an hour, and adjusting the national rate to the value needed to provide a higher purchasing power due to higher cost of living, wages in California and New York would need to be even higher. In California, the cost of living is 127 percent higher than the national average, so a 1968 minimum wage of $10.90 would translate into $13.85 an hour in California if adjusted for cost of living. Similarly, the cost of living in New York is 132 percent higher than the national average, meaning that a $10.90 minimum wage in 1968 would need to translate into $14.40 an hour after being adjusted for cost of living.
One should also take into account how much inflation, held constant at rates seen in recent years, will wear away at the cost of minimum wage raises in California and New York. The purchasing power of the minimum wage will fall significantly by late 2018 to early 2019 – when the increase will be put into effect in New York, and by 2022, when the full raise will be phased in throughout California. If average inflation rates seen in the last half-decade hold constant for the next three years in New York, and the next six years in California, the minimum wage will be worth more like $14 an hour in California, and $14.33 in New York, in 2016 dollars. In sum, after accounting for inflation, geographic cost-of-living adjustments, and returning the minimum wage to its 1968 height, the values of the minimum wages in California and New York do not look so out of place. They are hardly out of line with reasonable expectations for what low income workers could (and should) be paid in higher cost-of-living states.
Recent studies that examine growing productivity of American labor, as measured in production of goods and services per hour, suggest that the current value of the minimum wage is radically below what it should be had it kept pace with growing productivity over the years. As the Economic Policy Institute reports, “Had the minimum wage been raised since 1968 at the same rate as growth in productivity—i.e., the rate at which the average worker can produce income for her employer from each hour of work—it would be nearly $18.50 per hour.” A rate of $18.50 an hour is significantly higher than the wage rates being put in place in New York and California. In short, discussions about radical wage hikes in New York and California seem misplaced, for a variety of reasons.
Effects on Unemployment and Inflation?
The minimum wage is one of the most heavily studied issues in public policy and economics. Meta-studies, summarizing dozens of previous research papers on the minimum wage, suggest little evidence of any significant effect of raising the minimum wage on employment levels. For example, one scholarly review in 2009 by Doucouliagos and Stanley looked at 64 previous studies of the minimum wage and teenage employees in the U.S., finding that the average “effect” of raising wages on employment levels clustered across the vast majority of scholarly papers and their estimates at zero or near zero. Similarly, a second meta-study by Wolfson and Belman examining 27 minimum wage papers published post-2000 found no consistent record of a statistically significant negative effect of raising the minimum wage on employment. These numbers correspond with my own academic research on state minimum wage raises during the first half of the 2000s. Examining employment levels and median earnings for fast-food service workers in states that did and did not raise the minimum wage between 2000 and 2006, I found that states raising their minimum wage saw no noticeable changes in employment compared to states that failed to raise the minimum wage. However, for states that raised their minimum wage, median pay rates among food service workers increased by 1 percent in the year after a wage raise compared to the year prior to raise after adjusting for inflation. In contrast, food service workers in states without a wage raise saw median wages fall by one-half a percent, after inflation, from one year to the next. These studies suggest little serious evidence of a link between minimum wage increases and employment levels for low-wage workers.
It is also difficult to find a meaningful relationship between national minimum wage rates and national inflation rates. If raising wages really does exert a huge cost on employers and businesses, one would expect to find that inflation rates grow during years that the national minimum wage is raised. This is not the case. Examining a time-series from 1945 through 2014, I find no statistically significant correlation between annual inflation rates and the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage. From 1945 through 1965, the inflation rate in the U.S. fell dramatically from 8 percent per year to less than one percent a year, while the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage increased from approximately $4 an hour to nearly $11 an hour, in 2014 dollars. From the late-1960s through 1980, the value of the minimum wage steadily fell from nearly $11 an hour to less than $10 hour in 2014 dollars, while the inflation rate grew dramatically from less than five percent a year in the late-1960s to about 10 percent annually in 1980. From 1980 to 1990, both the inflation rate and the minimum wage value fell, and in the post-1990 period, the national inflation rate and value of the minimum wage have both fluctuated positively and negatively at times, but with no noticeable correlation between the two factors. In short, the obsession with inflation and the minimum wage appears to be much ado about nothing, despite propagandistic warnings in the corporate press and among right-wing political and business elites. The real reason for conservative opposition to higher wages has nothing to do with inflation or employment, but is motivated by business elites’ efforts to avoid paying a higher cost for labor that cuts into corporate profits.
Misrepresentations of the Intent of the Minimum Wage
I commonly hear my students embrace the claim that those earning the minimum wage were never supposed to earn a wage to pull them out of poverty. As the common sentiment goes, most of the people earning this wage are high school kids, so why should they receive a living wage that allows them to pay for the needs of an adult with a family and children? These assumptions reflect a misunderstanding of who earns the minimum wage. As the Department of Labor explains, “The typical minimum wage worker is not a high school student earning weekend pocket money. In fact, 89 percent of those who would benefit from a federal minimum wage increase are age 20 or older.”
Aside from the current demographics of minimum wage earners, it is simply inaccurate, historically speaking, to claim that the minimum wage was developed to ensure that the poor remain in poverty. The minimum wage was introduced in 1938 as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act by the Franklin Roosevelt administration and Democrats in Congress, specifically as a way to ensure basic fairness in pay and social justice for the poor. A minimum floor was developed, to ensure that businesses were not able to severely exploit the working class and poor. In his 1937 speech to Congress on the minimum wage, Roosevelt spoke against the specter of growing poverty in Depression America: “one third of our population, the overwhelming majority of which is in agriculture or industry, is ill-nourished, ill-clad, and ill-housed.” Roosevelt railed against business elites who had denied a livable wage to American workers: “The overwhelming majority of this Nation has little patience with the small minority which vociferates today that prosperity has returned, that wages are good, that crop prices are high, and that government should take a holiday.” Roosevelt continued: “Self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling workers’ wages or stretching workers’ hours.” Roosevelt spoke against “goods produced under conditions which do not meet rudimentary standards of decency,” and advocated for government “to put some floor below which the [worker’s] wage ought not to fall.” In short, concern with limiting big-business exploitation of the working class was the major motivation behind introducing the minimum wage.
Of course, one could point out that the actual value of the minimum wage in 1938 was just .38 cents an hour, or $6.39 in inflation-adjusted, 2016 dollars. This appears to be far from a living wage today, and would not allow for working Americans to pay for many basic needs such as food, health care, education, clothing, and shelter. Still, Roosevelt was clearly unhappy with this basic floor, as he made clear in his 1944 State of the Union address. In that speech, Roosevelt voiced his support for a “Second Bill of Rights,” which voiced support for a living wage for American workers. More specifically, Roosevelt called for the following:
— “The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation”
— “The right of every farmer to raise and sell his product at a return that will give him and his family a decent living.”
— “The right of every family to a decent home”
— “The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.”
Clearly, the latter three relate directly to the ability to earn a living wage, especially in a country that historically refuses to implement universal health care or generous public housing subsidies.
Previous studies of the minimum wage examined relatively incremental increases in the minimum wage over the years (often less than $1 a year) – not as large as an increase from $9 to $15 an hour (in New York) that is now planned in just three years. It is possible that this large increase could produce higher inflation or unemployment, although there is little in the current economic literature to suggest that this will be definitely be the case. It’s also possible, however, that no such effects will occur. The $15 wage is concentrated across the costly New York City metropolitan area, whereas the rest of the state only has to comply with a minimum wage of $12.50 over five years, by the end of 2020. A raise from $9 to $12.50 over a half-decade is an incremental increase in the minimum wage, representing just .70 cents a year.
In the case of California, attacks on a higher minimum wage seem misplaced considering that a raise from $10 to $15 an hour over six years is incremental, constituting just .71 cents a year. Even if large wage raises in California and New York produce some negative economic consequences, this outcome should be assessed within a broader context of a political-economic system that undervalued American labor for decades and continues to deny a living wage to workers in the world’s richest country. The national minimum wage currently stands at half of what it should be worth had pay raises kept pace with worker productivity growth. Within this context, we should remember that class warfare by the rich against the poor is the true cause of misery among working Americans today. Growing wages in states like California and New York should set a positive precedent for how we value American labor moving forward. They should not become pariah states, to be sacrificed at the altar of corporate-mandated wage-slavery for the masses.
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Hear Hillary Clinton Defend Her Role in Honduras Coup When Questioned by Juan González
April 13, 2016
With the New York primary less than a week away, the race for the Democratic nomination continues to heat up. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders will meet Thursday in Brooklyn for their first debate in over a month. We begin today’s show looking at Hillary Clinton and Honduras. Earlier this week, the former secretary of state publicly defended her role in the 2009 coup in Honduras that ousted democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. Since the coup, Honduras has become one of the most violent places in the world. Clinton was asked about Honduras during a meeting with the New York Daily News editorial board on Saturday. The question was posed by Democracy Now!’s own Juan González.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: With the New York primary less than a week away, the race for the Democratic nomination continues to heat up. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders will meet Thursday in Brooklyn for their first debate in over a month. We begin today’s show looking at Hillary Clinton and Honduras. Earlier this week, the former secretary of state publicly defended her role in the 2009 coup in Honduras, when the military seized democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya in the middle of the night, deposed him and sent him into exile. Since the coup, Honduras has become one of the most violent places in the world. Clinton was asked about Honduras during a meeting with the New York Daily News editorial board on Saturday. The question was posed by Democracy Now!’s Juan González.
JUAN GONZÃ�LEZ: Secretary Clinton, I’d like to ask you, if I can, about Latin America—
HILLARY CLINTON: Yes, Juan, yes.
JUAN GONZÃ�LEZ: —and a policy specifically that you were directly involved in: the coup in Honduras.
HILLARY CLINTON: Mm-hmm.
JUAN GONZ�LEZ: As you know, in 2009, the military overthrew President Zelaya.
HILLARY CLINTON: Right.
JUAN GONZÃ�LEZ: There was a period there where the OAS was trying to isolate that regime. But the—apparently, some of the emails that have come out as a result of State Department releases show that some of your top aides were urging you to declare it a military coup, cut off U.S. aid. You didn’t do that.
HILLARY CLINTON: Mm-hmm.
JUAN GONZ�LEZ: You ended up negotiating with Óscar Arias a deal for new elections.
HILLARY CLINTON: Mm-hmm, right.
JUAN GONZ�LEZ: But the situation in Honduras has continued to deteriorate.
HILLARY CLINTON: Right.
JUAN GONZÃ�LEZ: There’s been a few hundred people killed by government forces. There’s been all these children fleeing, and mothers, from Honduras over the border into the United States. And just a few weeks ago, one of the leading environmental activists, Berta Cáceres, was assassinated in her home.
HILLARY CLINTON: Right, right.
JUAN GONZ�LEZ: Do you have any concerns about the role that you played in that particular situation, not necessarily being in agreement with your top aides in the State Department?
HILLARY CLINTON: Well, let me again try to put this in context. The Legislature—or the national Legislature in Honduras and the national judiciary actually followed the law in removing President Zelaya. Now, I didn’t like the way it looked or the way they did it, but they had a very strong argument that they had followed the Constitution and the legal precedents. And as you know, they really undercut their argument by spiriting him out of the country in his pajamas, where they sent, you know, the military to, you know, take him out of his bed and get him out of the country. So this was—this began as a very mixed and difficult situation.
If the United States government declares a coup, you immediately have to shut off all aid, including humanitarian aid, the Agency for International Development aid, the support that we were providing at that time for a lot of very poor people. And that triggers a legal necessity. There’s no way to get around it. So, our assessment was, we will just make the situation worse by punishing the Honduran people if we declare a coup and we immediately have to stop all aid for the people, but we should slow off and try to stop anything that the government could take advantage of, without calling it a coup.
So, you’re right. I worked very hard with leaders in the region and got Óscar Arias, the Nobel Prize winner, to take the lead on trying to broker a resolution without bloodshed. And that was very important to us, that, you know, Zelaya had friends and allies, not just in Honduras, but in some of the neighboring countries, like Nicaragua, and that we could have had a terrible civil war that would have been just terrifying in its loss of life. So I think we came out with a solution that did hold new elections, but it did not in any way address the structural, systemic problems in that society. And I share your concern that it’s not just government actions; drug gangs, traffickers of all kinds are preying on the people of Honduras.
So I think we need to do more of a Colombian plan for Central America, because remember what was going on in Colombia when first my husband and then followed by President Bush had Plan Colombia, which was to try to use our leverage to rein in the government in their actions against the FARC and the guerrillas, but also to help the government stop the advance of the FARC and guerrillas, and now we’re in the middle of peace talks. It didn’t happen overnight; it took a number of years. But I want to see a much more comprehensive approach toward Central America, because it’s not just Honduras. The highest murder rate is in El Salvador, and we’ve got Guatemala with all the problems you know so well.
So, I think, in retrospect, we managed a very difficult situation, without bloodshed, without a civil war, that led to a new election. And I think that was better for the Honduran people. But we have a lot of work to do to try to help stabilize that and deal with corruption, deal with the violence and the gangs and so much else.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton responding to a question from Democracy Now!'s Juan González on Saturday during her meeting with the New York Daily News editorial board. Juan later wrote about the exchange in a column for the Daily News titled "Clinton's Policy was a Latin American Crime Story." We’ll link to it on our website.
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