cecilmcgrlybts

I already posted these to Facebook, since I'm much more like to reach a readership there, but I may as well post here too. The first four I would call must-read articles, but I've also tried to order them in importance, in case you want to read some but not all.

Vanity Fair has a great article from Joseph Stiglitz reporting on the massive and growing inequality in our society, its self-reinforcing nature, and the abuses it produces. This is a must-read. Here's a quote:


A great article on the difference between right-wing media and "liberal" media. It correctly argues that the two are not "mirror images," both hyper-partisan in opposite directions. Instead, right-wing media is only interested in reinforcing a world-view. "Liberal" media attempts to present things as they are (not that it always succeeds). Those are the distant and opposed poles which cause such animosity. Quote:

This article at Pandagon makes a compelling argument that the linking thread behind the Culture Wars Right's attacks on abortion, contraception, services for the poor, and social safety nets is that they all contradict the neo-Christian notion that a woman needs to be dependent on a man.

Glenn Greenwald has a great run-down on exactly why it is ludicrous for the wealthy elite to whine about public opinion turning against them, and how bizarre it is for them to call Obama an anti-business Marxist when his policies clearly all strongly favor that same wealthy elite.

I don't always like Michael Lind. For one thing, he has a tendency to hippy-bash. That said, this article is a good analysis of the failure of the dominant American idea that a company's responsibility to solely to maximize the value it gives its investors, with a little on how that idea has played a part in recent troubles.

This interesting look at an elitist vs. populist argument among the nation's founders reminds us that these issues aren't new; they're just being won more thoroughly by the elite now. Here's a quote:

So I had a thought this morning. A dominant Republican idea is that the government is worse at getting things done than private corporations. That everything gets better when you have to pay a corporation to take care of it. The very idea that government will do a worse job than a corporation is to believe that democracy is simply a worse way to get things done than greed-is-good, cronyistic, dynastic oligarchy, since the only thing that distinguishes the two (aside from what they are each allowed to do) is the way they do it. Each is simply a way to organize the labor of many to achieve something an individual could not do. The difference is the idea that everyone subject to and affected by the organization should have a say in its implementation, versus the the idea that the only guiding principle of the organization should be what generates revenue for the top of the organization. The latter sure sounds a lot like a dictatorship, or oligarchy, doesn't it?

Now for some links. Robert Reich has had a couple good articles posted over at Salon on why Wisconsin matters so much and the real Republican strategy and on the case for a 70% highest tax rate. I like what he has to say, largely, and I wish there were any voices even considering positions like his in the mainstream.

And speaking of ideas not brought up in the mainstream discourse, Tom Engelhardt has a great idea for where we could find $100 billion to put towards our budget woes, rather than use it as an excuse to continue dismantling the middle class.

So, it turns out women in the military were dying from dehydration because they were afraid to drink water at night lest they have to use the bathroom, on the way to which they would likely get raped. It goes without saying that the military covered it up without addressing the causes of the issue.

So, after all of Glenn Greenwald's defense of Wikileaks and Bradley Manning, it turns out that Bank of America was formulating a secret plan to extort, intimidate, and otherwise silence him (and also other Wikileaks supporters, and also destroy Wikileaks). Oh, and funny story: their planned tactics are almost certainly illegal, and were definitely assisted by the United States government.

So here's how it all went down: The government came out against Wikileaks, despite their having broken no laws, and so Bank of America froze Wikileaks out. A hacker group called Anonymous then launched a minor denial of service attack at Bank of America, shutting down their website briefly. Bank of America then attempted to launch an attack to determine the identity of members of Anonymous, at which point Anonymous hacked BoA and found the details of this plan, and released them to the media.

Oh, and Wikileaks happens to be promising to release documents detailing fraud or corruption from high up in Bank of America. These documents wouldn't necessarily hurt Bank of America the company. They would, however hurt the top echelon.

But anyone who attacks the enemy of the United States government will get the government's help, whether or not such help is legal or humane.

UPDATE: HBGary Federal is the entity which prepared the leaked documents, and which claimed to be infiltrating Anonymous. All of the other organizations involved have denied involvement or knowledge, and several have severed all ties to HBGary Federal.

Once again, the incisive periodical of note and mouthpiece of the age The Onion captures the state of things.

For an excellent list of what awful truths Wikileaks has revealed in the past year,see this Greenwald article. It has a comprehensive list, in the form of screenshots of headlines (with links) to news articles reporting on each of the revelations.

Edit: added link. Whoops.

It's crap like this that made me stop reading Slate. In this article, Daniel Sarewitz claims that scientists need to do something to make Republicans want to become scientists. But what? Stop advocating that demonstrable proof trump self-serving justifications? Start reflexively agreeing with conservative superstars? Demand less curiosity and intellectual integrity? Choose to get paid wildly out of proportion to their level of achievement?

Whichever answer you choose, the important thing is that it's scientists' fault that Republicans have no interest in them or what they do.

Consider this bizarre paragraph:

Or this gem:
But all pointing and making fun of the mind-boggling foolishness aside, here's his point:

His point here is predicated on the premise that today's American conservatives (hereafter just "conservatives") are essentially no less interested in provable truth, intellectual consistency, and the attempt to form an objective representation of reality than today's American conservatives (hereafter just "liberals"). This is simply ludicrous. Science demands that you test and challenge your beliefs, and the overwhelming majority of conservatives are people whose beliefs are formed without reference to rationality and who value those beliefs over anything else. That view is entirely antithetical to science, and that is why they do not go into the sciences. When your identity and world-view are built entirely on a demonstrably false and/or non-rational idea, science is most unwelcome.

Most conservatives have also accepted that money equates to virtue, and since science rarely pays as well as business or demagoguery (in part thanks to decades of Republican gutting of science funding while transferring that money to big business), few conservatives bright enough to succeed at science will choose to do so.

In short, pathological liars and infants are also under-represented in the sciences. I don't wonder why, but it seems like Sarewitz does.

As a closing note, what does it tell you that Americans place their trust most firmly in the institution with the best track record of having the least conservative values? I hear that Americans also prefer the flavor of ice cream to that of burning tires. Would Sarewitz suggest that ice cream include more flaming rubber?

President Obama would seem to be the sort of amazing 11 dimensional chess master who is capable of using a position of strength to not just negotiate a "compromise" that entirely capitulates to the other party's demands, but even gives them a bonus as well, all without securing anything for his alleged aims whatsoever. I speak, of course, of the "negotiation" in which he not only caved to Republican demands that he give scarce money to wealthy people amidst cries to lower the deficit, but on top of that added in a provision to cut Social Security payroll taxes, which will be politically impossible to ever reinstate and effectively kills Social Security. So, here's a quick breakdown of what each party got from this negotiation:

Republicans: tax cuts for the wealthy, tax cuts for everyone including the wealthy, and the slow death of Social Security.
Democrats: a huge political liability in the form of giving the Republicans two different opportunities to make hay when the Democrats try to "raise taxes" twice by reinstating these cut taxes, the appearance of weakness and capitulation, and the blame for everything that will go wrong as a result.

Good job.

But seriously, what happened Obama? Did they double-dog-dare you to do it? Did they tell you that all the cool kids were doing it? Was there an elaborate farce where suddenly you realized that you were listening to Mitch McConnell wearing a poorly-constructed Rahm Emmanuel costume?
   
Maybe I'm getting to complicated. Maybe in your moderate, pragmatic wisdom you hate taxes and Social Security just as much as any "drown the government in a bathtub" Republican.

Maybe the thing you were advocating change of in your campaign was how Democrats and Republicans advocate different policy.

Today Salon is hosting the text of James K. Galbraith's speech to the Americans for Democratic Action Education Fund’s Post-election Conference last month. Galbraith is an economist and a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. The speech is well worth reading, and captures much of what I've been feeling about the state of the country and its politics and policies. Here's a quote from towards the end, after laying out both problems he sees affecting the country and what he sees as being the liberal policies we should aspire to put into place:

First up, Wikileaks. As usual on this topic, I'm largely going to direct you to Glenn Greenwald, who, I think, understands this topic as much as anyone. So, here's Glenn discussing how Wikileaks critics call for bloodshed, and misunderstand "treason". An excellent quote:

Here's more from Glenn on the subject, including this revelatory quote:


Oh, and speaking of scary Muslim terrorists, here's Greenwald on how the FBI managed to (apparently) turn someone into a terrorist and then arrest him for it. Kudos all around. Of course, they didn't manage to stop people enraged by this faux terrorist from burning down the mosque he used to attend.

Everyone's heard of this now, but just so that I have this for future reference, here's some links from the blogger it happened to, Glenn Greenwald, and Digby about the TSA's bullying police-state behavior, along with a quote from Digby:

Michael Lind writes a column in Salon today entitled "Why we need Big Business and Big Government". His thesis is that there is a bipartisan consensus that "Big" entities like "Big Government" and "Big Business" are bad, and that that consensus is misguided. I will argue that he is incorrect about the consensus, and that he fundamentally misunderstands what objections to "Big" entities there are. I think his defense of Big Business stems from these misunderstandings, but I will largely leave his defense of Big Government alone, as I think he has the right basic idea.

First the argument: Lind claims that in the early 70s, liberals came to hate dams and cars and business and exploration, while conservatives came to hate the New Deal. The left was growing food in communes and the right home-schooling its kids, in each case because they "rebelled against industrial modernity[,]" because "they shared a dread of technological modernity and large-scale organization." The legacy of these values is enshined today in the form of Republican Big Government bashing, and Democratic Big Business bashing. Hence, "Big" is pejorative. However, Lind argues, who will get things done if not "Big" entities? Where will the hippies get their medicine if not Big Pharma? Their oil, if not Big Oil?

And, in case that didn't convince you, mistrusting Big Business prevents any real efforts to create jobs and fix the economy, because Big Business is the best employer. While Lind confesses that small businesses of the sort lefties favor employ 99% of employed Americans, he takes issue with the government definition of a "large" business as a  business with five hundred or more employees. He says that we should count any business with more than 50 employees as a "medium" or "large" business, though the extent of his argument in favor of this reclassification could be characterized as "I dunno, doesn't seem small, does it?":

Assuming all his statistics are correct here, that implies that 69% of employed Americans work for a business with less than 50 employees, which is the largest size he is willing to define as "small". It's unclear from his article why the 31% of jobs provided by big businesses (by his definition) are worth more than the 69% provided by small ones. Even if this weren't the case, it's still not clear that having Big Business provide these jobs is better. He discusses economy of scale, and one economy is to have fewer people do more work for less pay. Perhaps if the Big Businesses weren't around to employ these people, the resulting small businesses could employ more people and/or at better wages and/or better working conditions. At the very least, Lind should give us some reason to think that we should be happy to have these jobs being provided by Big Businesses rather than small ones.

Incidentally, the one industry he does not support "Big" is the banking industry, because there, he is willing to confess, there is no economy of scale. He does not give an argument to defend why there would be an economy of scale in farming or energy, two industries which ought to be big in his mind, though there is ample evidence of corruption, disaster, pollution, and lowered quality of product in those industries.

Lind's fundamental concept here is that liberals hate Big Business in a reflexive fashion, essentially without reason, and hence demonstrating that Big Business has uses or makes needed products alone is enough reason to defend it. What Lind misses is that most Big-Business-hating lefties hate is not large-scale organized efforts to achieve a goal; if that were the issue, then they wouldn't like Big Government either.

What lefties hate is that Big Business tends to destroy and corrupt everything around it as a consequence of putting profits over any other conceivable value. Big Business often exploits and kills workers, pollutes public and private property (including property even that they do not own), manipulates prices against the consumer, increases income disparity, uses unfair business tactics to crush the small business that employ most Americans (according to Lind's statistics), manipulates our government policy, promotes unhappiness and fosters ignorance in order to create sales opportunities, moves jobs overseas, produces tainted products, and more.

Lefties don't hate Big Business because it produces so much, they hate it because of the massive costs (often costs in human life and suffering) that everyone else pays for its production. For example, if we could have the production and benefits of Big Pharma without the profit-siphoning, policy manipulation, incorrect drug-pushing, drug culture promotion, shady research, and indifference to human life, I would be entirely in favor of it.

Oddly, Lind even acknowledges that research, one of the good effects many attribute to corporations, is often more effectively delivered by the government: