Month: August 2015

Demagogues and Majority Opinion

I don’t know about you, but it annoys me when I learn that a quote I treasure has been misattributed or told with the wrong phrasing. So, it’s hard for me to give up the idea that P.T. Barnum said that “there’s a sucker born every minute.” Regardless of who said it, however, it remains a very succinct way of pointing out that there are a tremendous number of really gullible people in the world. I’m more confident of the provenance of the phrase: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” That came from H.L. Mencken, and it means the same thing.

It’s a feature of the human condition that most of us aren’t in any way conventionally intelligent or logical. And that means that the public is always at risk of falling for some scam or another. This is the premise of the entire snake oil industry and all political demagoguery.

On the other hand, most of us aren’t wealthy, either. Most of us don’t own businesses or any truly meaningful amount of stock. Most of us don’t have adequate savings for retirement. Most of us can’t afford to send our kids to college without some assistance or taking on debt. So, while it’s true that we can’t think our way out of a paper bag, we do have things in common that provide a common political interest. If college tuition is more affordable for you, it is also more affordable for me. We don’t have to be philosophers or physicists to understand that a system of taxation that progressively increases the wealth disparity of the nation is not in our interests.

There can be cases where our lack of brain power leads us to support things that seem to be in our collective interests but are in fact counterproductive. Conservatives argue that this is the case in a number of areas, including raising the minimum wage (leads to fewer jobs), opposing free trade (keeps consumer costs low and ultimately grows the economy leading to better quality jobs and more wealth), and subsidized access to health care (leads to rationing, lower quality health care, and government interference in doctor/patient relationships).

And, it’s true, there are tradeoffs to everything and there are many times in life when something seems like a good deal but turns out to be lousy in the long run.

We do have ways of dealing politically with the shortcomings of the mental capacity of the average human being.

In a representative democracy, we are ideally hiring someone to represent us who we trust to weigh the pros and cons of different policies and choose ones that seem best designed to do more good than harm. We elect them and then we go about our lives, our jobs, our family obligations. It’s supposed to be their job to do the due diligence of figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

Of course, it’s more complicated than that because we are potential sources of valuable information about what works and what doesn’t. We might be able to tell a politician firsthand how some regulation isn’t working as intended because we have to interact with that regulation as part of the work we do for a living. We might know how some policing policy is backfiring because we live in the community that is being adversely affected by that policy. Or, we might even be part of what is derisively called an “interest group” and have information about how our group is being negatively or positively impacted by policies or lack of policies. So, part of our job goes beyond simply choosing someone to represent us. We need to be ready to educate or “lobby” our representative. All the more so because there are other groups out there that have gotten organized to try to persuade our representatives to do things that are counter to our interests.

Still, on the theoretical/ideal level, we’re not supposed to be the deciders. We’re supposed to delegate that responsibility. And if we don’t like how the job is getting done, our right is to pick someone new to represent us.

Now, Mark Kleiman wants to know how Donald Trump gets away with saying stuff that any “thinking” person finds outrageous, and he finds the answer in the fact that, for most people, there is no aversion to talking nonsense. This is true. And it presents a problem for the idea that the best form of government is one in which we ask the people their opinion and accept the majority opinion as the most valuable. The depressing level of intelligence of the median voter is why brilliant minds like H.L. Mencken and Friedrich Nietzsche had a low opinion of democratic representative government. It’s also why conservatives frequently will come right out and say that they don’t want everyone voting. Or, as Brown University Professor Jason Brennan puts it:

“If most voters decide, ‘We don’t know anything, we’re just going to kind of choose whatever we find emotionally appealing,’ then they’re imposing that upon other people,” said Brennan, a professor of political philosophy at Brown University. “And not only are they imposing it upon other people, they’re imposing it literally at gunpoint.”

The idea here is that what we really need is an informed electorate, one that knows that you can’t balance the budget by eliminating earmarks and foreign aid, for example, and hopefully one that can understand that none of those things would be desirable anyway. This kind of electorate wouldn’t fall for Donald Trump’s so-called “plan” to build a 3,000 mile wall on our border with Mexico.

There’s something to this, certainly. But people who truly understand issues are alway a minority and if the majority comes to agree with them, even for a short time, it’s usually no more than a happy coincidence. So, the question becomes, why should we value the opinion of a majority? Why would we want more people to vote irrespective of their familiarity with the issues and their capacity to logically assess pros and cons?

And the answer is really twofold.

First, we like participatory representative government foremost because it’s better than all the alternatives. And one reason it is superior is that it creates the “consent of the governed.” If the people will not abide by the rules laid down by our authorities, we can’t have any kind of civil order, and without civil order we can’t have nice things like civilization. The most important part of gaining that consent is that we allow our leaders to be held accountable. And we convince the people that if a majority of them reject a politician then that’s a valid decision that should be respected rather than an affront that should lead to civil war or domestic terrorism.

Second, we already have a bunch of anti-democratic features built into our system that mitigate against mob rule or our leaders making really bad impulsive decisions. Our Senate is one of these. It was not intended to have popularly elected officials for precisely this reason. Having legislatures elect them and giving them six-year terms was supposed to keep them from being overly responsive to the popular will. They’re supposed to ignore us.

The Electoral College is another means by which our betters are supposed to maintain some control over our political fate. And, like everything else, there are pros and cons to this. Does anyone really think it would be an awful thing if a bunch of state leaders decided to simply reject Donald Trump as the Republican Party’s nominee because that’s a fucking crazy idea hatched by a public that is currently out of its damn mind?

I don’t.

I know that this is a giant heresy, but the will of the public can be destructive. I don’t have a problem with having a mechanism in place to deal with this part of the human condition even if I can almost never imagine it being a good idea to use it. Likewise, the Senate frustrates me to no end because it thwarts progress. But it also thwarts right-wing insanity, and I’m more concerned about the latter than the former.

This puts me the position of an elitist, certainly, because I ultimately see democracy as a means to an end rather than something sacrosanct. Our political leadership will always be formed of an elite. I’d like to see that elite made up of people of the broadest possible set of backgrounds and I want an incredibly low barrier of entry for joining this elite. I want this elite to be civic-minded and responsive to the people and mindful foremost of the people who are in need. But I also want them to be insulated enough to be able to tell us to go pound sand when we ask for something that is manifestly not good for us.

When it comes to demagogues, Kleiman has a good formulation:

The deepest mistake is to regard someone who acts as if he doesn’t give a damn whether anything he says is true, or consistent with what he said yesterday, as stupid. That’s the mistake many liberals made (and some still make) about George W.

It’s true that this is a mistake, but I’m not sure that it matters all that much. What’s important is not so much that there are politicians who have no intellectual conscience as that the majority of the people are vulnerable to being taken in by them. This isn’t supposed to be possible in a system wherein the most valid and binding opinion is the opinion of the majority of voters, but it is not only possible but a constant and unchanging condition that can be only modestly improved.

What we’re doing, in part, is making a tradeoff. The majority of the people may be worthless for determining whether the negotiated deal with Iran is a good deal or a poor risk, but they have a collective wisdom in more general matters that is a better guide than the whims of a few unaccountable and corruptible individuals.

Now, progressives will argue that things can be made better if we just do a better job of educating the public. We need to teach them how to think. I agree with this because the more informed people are, the better. But, as a matter of principle, the value of the majority opinion (and its binding power in our system) does not and never has rested on it being good reasoning. In principle, majority-opinion is the best way to resolve disputes and prevent them from becoming violent. In principle, accountability is the best way to keep our representative leaders from becoming overly corrupt or of serving interests other than our own.

Finally, this desire to have a more informed electorate has been misappropriated to apply tests that have the purpose not of getting a smarter result but of preventing whole classes of people from voting at all. This is what the Jim Crow election laws were all about, for example. In the end, quite aside from the unfairness of the Jim Crow election system, it failed to maintain the consent of the governed or to keep civil order. Excluding people from the political system for any reason is a violation of their rights as citizens and so this cannot be a solution to improving the median decision-making capability of the electorate. Even if it succeeded in the latter, it would fail in the former. In any case, it could never work in a country in which people are not set on an equal footing and you have a history of systemic race-based discrimination, especially in education. After all, one of the legitimate demands of the black community since the beginning of the Civil Rights Era was for an improvement in access to quality education. To exclude many of them from the process because they don’t meet your educational standard is nothing more than the perpetuation of an injustice, using past injustices to rationalize future injustices.

So, we kind of sell this ideal that the best answer to a political question can be found by ascertaining the opinion of the majority of the people, and that the more people who participate, the better and more valid and more binding the answer will be. This is basically bullcrap.

What’s true, though, is that this is a better ideal than any known alternative, and we should fight for it every day.

Casual Observation

We’re gearing up here because CabinBoytheElder is having a birthday today. I wasn’t sure what he wanted as a present. Who knows with these millennials?

But I am 100% confident that he isn’t concerned with Hillary Clinton one way or the other. I don’t think anyone from his generation is at this point.

One Headline Says it All

You have all seen those click bait titles at the end of some article you’ve read, trying to grab your attention. The one’s that begin “One weird trick …” have become both a joke and a cliche, and yet people still click through to the link. Why? Well, I finished reading an article on a sports site this morning, that was definite click bait material, but in a way that I found profoundly disturbing. What was the title you ask? Well here it is:/

An Extremely Brilliant Way To Avoid Paying Interest
On Your Credit Card Balance

I’m not going to give you the link. That isn’t the point. What that click bait ad title implies, and not so subtlety, is that there are large numbers of people desperately struggling with a large amount of personal debt, whether debt incurred to pay for basic necessities such as food, shelter, and clothing, or debt incurred to pay off past debt back when they had a better job, or any job at all. Or people with large medical debts to pay off, because many do, despite the improvement in the cost of health insurance the ACA has helped bring about for many families, but sadly, not all. Or so many younger (and not so younger people know) with large amounts of student loan debt.

Not to mention the far more worrisome massive increase in personal credit card debt over the last year.

Credit card debt is ballooning, leaving American households with a net increase of $57.1 billion in new credit card debt in 2014, according to a new survey from CardHub. The credit card comparison site said it’s forecasting new credit card debt will rise 5 percent in 2015, reaching $60 billion this year.

While the increased spending could signal that Americans are feeling more sanguine about their prospects and the economy, it’s also a cause for concern given that most workers aren’t seeing the type of wage growth that would support that higher spending. The surge has left the average household credit card balance at almost $7,200, or not far from the $8,300 level that CardHub considers unsustainable. […]

While Americans are carrying more debt, their earnings are barely ahead of where they were a decade ago. Household earnings have increased only 2 percent during the past 10 years, The Pew Charitable Trusts said in a study issued last month.

How can this be happening, if the economy is showing a fall in the unemployment rate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Well, that number comes from a survey, and the survey on the overall unemployment rate doesn’t account for the types of jobs being created in our stagnant economy, where since 2008, part-time jobs, compared to full time jobs, has grown at a faster rate that pre-recession figures.

Back in 2008, before the Wall Street collapse triggered by the bursting of the housing bubble and the over-reliance by the Banksters on selling derivatives to institutional investors based on securitized residential mortgages, jobs designated as full time positions for all employees 16 years old and older represented 83.1% of the economy before the crash. Now they represent under 82%, with part time jobs rising from 16.9% of the economy to roughly 17.7%. That may not seem like much, until you look at the cohort of people 28-54, the group in their prime earning years where the contrast is far starker:

As you can see from that chart, the rate of part-time jobs since 2008 has grown and despite recent improvements, still exceeds the rate at which full time positions are being created. Now this isn’t a result of implementation of the ACA, as some on the right would like to claim. It’s a clearly a hangover from the economic policies that led to the great Depression.

“With regard to Obamacare and part-time employment, the surge in part-time employment was triggered by the recession, not by the Affordable Care Act…” The statistics show that part time employment is not correlated to any increase in part-time jobs. In fact part time positions are trending downward since the ACA was enacted and implemented. Still, growth in low wage jobs, which are more often than not part-time positions, has accounted for roughly 2/5ths of all the new jobs created since “the labor market bottomed out in February, 2010.”

Every month the government heralds the falling unemployment rate as a sign of an improving economy. However, besides the growth in part time work versus full time positions, what else do the BLS unemployment statistics tell us? Or more importantly, what are our political leaders and mainstream media not telling you?

The most important thing they fail to say, or speak about in a sotto voce voice, is that a large number of the people who are jobless are not employed, and not counted as unemployed under the official statistics, because they have stopped looking for work. As of July 2015, the BLS estimates that 9.743 million people are not counted in the labor market, because they are not actively seeking work. These are people not counted in the unemployment statistics because, for whatever reason, they have been discouraged from seeking employment or have otherwise dropped out of the labor market. Percentage wise, that is the lowest rate of participation in the labor force since 1977.

“We are definitely seeing recovery but the extent of it is not as much as you would think from the unemployment rate,” says Nick Bunker, policy analyst at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. “There is this long decline of labor force participation due to a variety of factors, mostly demographics. Obviously the unemployment rate has dropped quite a bit the last two years, but that’s hard to look at as a pure indicator of labor market health like people did prior to the recession.”

There are a couple of factors at work that undermine the reliability of the unemployment rate. As the huge Baby Boomer generation ages, the labor force participation rate declines as they either retire or, in cases more extreme than Klein’s, cannot find work at all – even part-time work. This jobs report revealed a labor force participation rate of 62.6 percent, unchanged from last month, the lowest level since 1977.

So who has been talking about this issue consistently both before and after he joined the race for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination for 2016? Bernie Sanders, that’s who.

The truth is that real unemployment is not the 5.4 percent you read in newspapers. It is close to 11 percent if you include those workers who have given up looking for jobs or who are working part time when they want to work full time. Youth unemployment is over 17 percent and African-American youth unemployment is much higher than that. Today, shamefully, we have 45 million people living in poverty, many of whom are working at low-wage jobs. These are the people who struggle every day to find the money to feed their kids, to pay their electric bills and to put gas in the car to get to work. This campaign is about those people and our struggling middle class. It is about creating an economy that works for all, and not just the one percent.

Sanders’ rise in popularity is due in large part to his willingness to speak the truth to the American people about the real economic struggles they face, rather than present us with happy talk about how great the unemployment numbers are. And that truth is that wages are stagnant for most people, there are far more people unemployed or marginally employed than the mainstream media wants to talk about, and as a result, personal household debt is once again on the rise.

You want to know what the one brilliant trick to not having to pay interest on your credit card balance? Not having such high credit card balances in the first place. And that will require more jobs, and better, higher paying jobs.

And among all the major candidates, Sanders has been the one person most consistent in his focus on improving wage growth (such as his strong support for a $15 an hour minimum wage) and unions, and by creating real employment gains at home by reeling in the large multinational corporations who are sending jobs overseas as well as evading taxes by hiding their profits offshore, as well.

Is there any reason to doubt why Sanders’ popularity is surging despite lack of media coverage he receives compared to other candidates, especially the unparalleled attention given to the odious Donald Trump?

One man is selling himself as the savior of America. The other is telling the truth about our so-called “economic recovery” that has left millions falling ever further behind, while also offering policies and detailed plans to solve the most pressing problems those people face, policies that offer real hope and change.

Is Sanders a great orator like President Obama? No. But maybe we don’t need great speeches right now. Maybe we just need someone telling the truth about the oligarchic corporate takeover of our government and the real life misery that has created for the 99% of us who aren’t benefiting from corporate control of our government institutions, federal, state and local. A person committed to effecting change that will benefit the lives of African Americans, White Americans, LGBT Americans, Latino Americans, Disabled Americans, working class and poor Americans, and every other American you can think of other than those few at the top who have been soaking up all the gains from our “recovering economy” while leaving the crumbs for the rest of us.

That’s my opinion, in any case, for what it is worth.

Ps. I am not affiliated in any way with the Sanders’ campaign. I’m neither a volunteer nor have I made a financial donation to him. But I’m thinking I should, and soon.

Why Won’t Lindsey Graham Quit, Already?

I know that he’s John McCain’s echo and ambiguously single to boot, but just his eleventy billion appearances on cable television alone should assure that Sen. Lindsey Graham gets more than zero percent in the national polls. Of course, he tried to go toe to toe with Donald Trump and he’s still looking for his ass and formatting his new phone.

>lindseygraham

I guess you can’t go around advocating that we wage war in a dozen countries and then get pounded into Myrtle Beach sand the instant you step into the presidential fray. It’s bad optics, particularly if people keep asking about, you know, the wife or lack thereof.

Still, being a U.S. senator counts for something, and even if only four percent of South Carolinian poll respondents express an intent to vote for Graham in the South Carolina primary, that doesn’t mean people in the Palmetto State want to get on his bad side by endorsing or going to work for Ben Carson or Rand Paul or Marco Rubio or, you know, ad infinitum.

Could be that Rick Perry and Chris Christie are no longer relevant to this conversation.

And Graham wouldn’t be relevant either if his state didn’t come third in the nominating process.

But it does, and it’s making people down there a little annoyed that their terror-fightin’ senator won’t just face reality and drop out of the race.

“It is a precarious situation for people,” said Greenville-based GOP strategist Chip Felkel. “Whether he was ever going to become the Republican nominee or not, he’s still going to be a sitting United States senator.”

While elected officials often lock up the support of their state’s party establishment, South Carolina’s early primary makes the stakes higher.

“South Carolina is like Iowa and New Hampshire. The circus comes to town every four years, and you have a chance as an official or as an operative to become the next Lee Atwater,” said Bruce Haynes, president of the political consulting firm Purple Strategies. After working his way up in South Carolina politics, Atwater helped Ronald Reagan win the state’s primary and went on to become a presidential adviser and then chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Isn’t that cute how they all want to be the next Lee Atwater?

No one tell them that Atwater understood better than anyone that what he’d done was going to land him in hell.

Have Some Belligerent Stupidity

I noticed this:

There are a couple of quasi-Trumpers at National Review, but by and large they are embarrassed by him, which they naturally express with belligerent stupidity. (Here for example is Kevin D. Williamson, in a column called “National Fronts,” tying the rightist-racist parties of Europe to Trump — and Bernie Sanders, because National Socialist get it; plus, Sanders is racist against Mexicans because he complained the Koch Brothers want “all kinds of people” to “work for $2 and $3” — which is the kind of stretch that, had it been employed by a black person as evidence of racism, would have spurred a National Review special double issue.)

But I didn’t say anything.

Open Thread

When these shootings happen and they capture the full attention of the media, it sometimes seems like it’s in bad taste to write about anything else. I know I can kind of feel that way right now.

What else is on your mind?

Republic of TURKEY Is Hot for Lobbyists

White House foreign policy … just follow the money!

Former CIA Director Porter Goss Registers to Lobby for Turkey | The Intercept – May 2015 |

Former Central Intelligence Director Porter Goss is taking an unusual swing through the revolving door: He recently registered to lobby for the government of Turkey, according to forms filed with the Justice Department.

Goss registered through his new employer, Dickstein Shapiro, which has a longstanding relationship with the Turkish government.

The disclosure shows Goss will advise Turkey on a variety of issues, including counterterrorism efforts; lobby members of Congress on “issues of importance to Turkey”; and notify Turkey of actions in Congress or the Executive Branch.

Turkey resents America’s love story with the Kurds

To help manage the US relationship, Turkey can count on a finely tuned lobbying campaign. The $3 million-a-year effort has helped smooth over tensions in recent years as Congress and the Obama administration have grown increasingly worried about Turkey’s authoritarian drift under Erdogan and its discreet support for Islamist fighters in Syria.

The lobbying push is led by former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., and his Gephardt Group. The group and its four subcontractors on the Turkey account get paid $1.4 million a year.

Ankara scored a coup in April when one of those firms, Dickstein Shapiro, hired former CIA director Porter Goss to lobby for Turkey. The ex-spy chief will use his wealth of contacts to assist the country on issues of “trade, energy security, counterterrorism efforts and efforts to build regional stability in the broader Middle East and Europe.”

Turkey closes deal with Obama administration  .. bombing the Kurds to gain AKP majority in snap election Nov. 1

Dickstein Shapiro LLP  1826 Eye Street NW  Washington DC  20006 [pdf]

Dickstein Shapiro operates for its principal the Republic of Turkey through the Gephardt group… indeed Democrat Dick Gephardt!

Dick Gephardt endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton for president in 2007 … reaping benefits of aggression by Turkey and support for the Muslim Brotherhood(MB)?