b psycho's blog
A recent post on FiveThirtyEight about US public opinion concerning wasteful government spending brought up, in passing, misconceptions about the breakdown of said spending. The example at the time was how public estimates of foreign aid spending are off the actual amount by more than 20x over. Lack of depth when gauging public opinion has long been a political pet peeve of mine, so my interest was piqued when later on those misconceptions were revisited (click for the chart referred to):
Before proceeding, let's establish some general baselines of actual federal government spending against which to compare what we do know about American perceptions. The above pie chart, taken from Wikipedia, breaks down spending into more than two dozen programs or cabinet agencies. But we can simplify this a bit by collapsing the eight largest chunks/wedges into three main categories:
- Welfare for seniors, 34 percent: Social Security and Medicare wedges.
- Defense, 22 percent (Defense and Homeland Security).
- Welfare for everyone else, 20 percent ( Medicaid, Unemployment Insurance and Health & Human Services.)
- Interest, 9 percent (Interest).
First of all, Americans tend to think we spend too much on what they call "welfare," but which in fact limited mostly to category 3 above--welfare for non-seniors. A Kaiser survey conducted a while back (1995) clearly indicates a high level of suspicion toward "welfare" spending, but when asked to clarify respondents clearly meant programs like food stamps, TANF programs (formerly AFDC), Medicaid and public housing. Indeed, although about 90 percent of Americans viewed housing, AFDC and food stamps as welfare, only 30 percent defined Medicare and just 15 percent deemed Social Security "welfare."
This philosophical sorting out of transfer payments is interesting, to say the least. So, knowing how the spending actually shakes out, how do we think it does?
About 40 percent of Americans cited two of the following four items as being one of the government's top two expenditures: foreign aid (41%), welfare (40%), interest (40%) and defense (37%). Only if Americans defined welfare as inclusive of Social Security and Medicare would these views be accurate--with welfare thusly combined and defined easily ranking #1, and in which case defense would rank #2.
Aid to old people & the military are the top 2 in reality; in the public mind it's aid to poor people & foreigners.
There's two interpretations of this attitude in the air. The more broadly applicable view in terms of politics is that, since voter turnout skews higher with seniors & people generally earn more in their years closer towards retirement, generational division is mirroring class conflict. You can guess the other one yourselves...
There's been plenty of content suggesting the obvious -- that the American public has rediscovered deep distrust of large institutions. This is just the latest:
Basically, when it comes to financial well-being, anything that is not blood relative is getting the Stink Eye. Considering the results of these institutions, this is a rational response to an extent. However, there is huge downside possible, depending on how that displeasure is addressed. Think about what I'm suggesting there for a moment, I'll come back to it later...
Now, modern liberalism (at least at the activist end) has generally worked from a stance that the pitfalls of big business w/r/t the condition of the average person can be addressed politically. Even organized labor (though, I would argue, due to its deliberate neutering) has shifted from direct action to political engagement as an interest group. So, how is this playing as of late?
Let's be honest here, for all intents & purposes the categories of wealthy individuals, major corporations, & banks blur together for much of the population. Treating this as representative (since it appears to be repeatable, as previously mentioned), you have 17% thinking the benefit has gone to people who deserve & could actually use help, 76% saying it's doing the opposite. For the mainstream liberal view, this is almost pure Fail. After all, the less that people believe you when you propose to ameliorate economic conditions via politics, the less opportunity you'll have to even try it.
As I see it, the most logical route to take is to shift towards breaking down to size those institutions that the public holds in such contempt. But can you even advocate for that inside the political arena & survive, let alone accomplish it? My inclination is no, so the mainstream Left has a challenge: prove that wrong.
BTW: that huge downside I mentioned? It's neo-tribalism, a reactionary embrace of ever-narrowing cultural bounds in rejection of all else. The hard-right types would love nothing better.
While reading about the extensions of subsidies in the Senate health care bill in some random post elsewhere, the following recurring thought came back up:
If people above the "official" poverty line, according to the mainstream Left, still need assistance, then doesn't that mean the "official" definition of poverty is meaningless?
(cross-posted to Psychopolitik)
A common bit of snark that bubbles up among the political blogosphere is to respond to state skeptics by saying "well look at Somalia". This completely ignores the reason why Somalia doesn't have a central government, among other things, but whatever, it's out there. Oddly enough, the New York Times did a profile on one of the warlords currently running a piece of the country:
ABOVE the shimmering horizon, in the middle of a deserted highway, stands an oversize figure wearing a golf cap, huge sunglasses, baggy jeans, and an iPhone on his hip, not your typical outfit in war-torn Somalia. But then again, Mohamed Aden, the man waiting in the road, is not your typical Somali. The instant his guests arrive, he spreads his arms wide, ready for a bear hug. “Welcome to Adado,” he says, beaming. “Now, let’s bounce.”
Mr. Aden, 37, is part militia commander, part schoolteacher, part lawmaker, part engineer, part environmentalist, part king — a mind-boggling combination of roles for anyone to play, let alone for a guy who dresses (and talks) like a rapper and recently moved from Minnesota to Somalia in an effort to build a local government.
Think of him as the accidental warlord. And a shard of hope. In less than a year, Mr. Aden, who was born in Somalia and emigrated to the United States at age 22, has essentially built a state within a state.
The wording the author of this article adopts for the subject is a bit annoying, though unsurprising. So what does the Aden Administration look like?
Somalia is one of the most violent countries on the planet, and at times Mr. Aden has had to speak with the business end of a machine gun.
This is like saying "at times, major league pitchers have had to throw fastballs". But I digress...
His patch — which encompasses around 5,000 square miles and a few hundred thousand people, most of them desperately poor nomads and members of his own Saleban clan — is now one of the safest parts of this broken nation. [...] Mr. Aden does not get much help from the United Nations or the internationally supported transitional government of Somalia, which is led by moderate Islamists and preoccupied with beating back an intense insurgency in the capital, Mogadishu. Most of what Mr. Aden has accomplished he has accomplished on his own, in distinctly Somali fashion. His police officers carry rocket-propelled grenades. Parked in front of the police station are two enormous tanks. “My Cadillacs,” Mr. Aden calls them. But however playful or flamboyant he may come across, Mr. Aden seems to have hit upon a deeper truth. People want government, he says, even in Somalia. “They’re begging for it,” he said. (emphasis mine)
There's no way of knowing how literal this is, barring an in-person survey of Somalis. Food, money, medicine for common regional ailments? Of course they want that. Stability? Obviously chaos is counterproductive. Yet it seems a bit of a stretch to claim of a people with such a long tradition of polycentric order that they beg for a State, at least if we're assuming the Western view of such. Acknowledging their history leads to a realization: the residents under Aden are used to having plenty of options if they disapprove, so his claim of a monopoly on force doesn't carry an immovable amount of weight. They must be getting something out of the arrangement, right?
With the elders firmly behind him, he was able to form a well-armed police force of several hundred fellow clansmen who are fiercely protective of him — essentially his own private army, which has made it difficult for the extremist Islamists wreaking havoc in other parts of Somalia to establish a beachhead here.Well, that works. But as always, there's the reminder of what else comes with the authority:
People who have challenged his authority have paid the price. Last summer, his police officers shot to death four men who violently refused to vacate a piece of property that Mr. Aden’s administration ruled belonged to someone else. “I knew there were outliers, people with their own rules,” he said. “I knew I had to challenge them, sooner or later.”Much of the 1st World ignores this. The few who do acknowledge it, most do little beyond shake their head & call it barbaric. A waste, as this leaves a question hanging in the air that we could benefit from asking regardless of what side we come down on: just what is a State, really?
(cross-posted to Psychopolitik)
I've had the following bouncing around in my head for a bit, figured I'd let it out and see what response it got...
It's happened throughout human history: sometimes people have unexpected problems come up. Sure, if an individual has the resources they can stock up in preparation, but then that would mean by definition they weren't unexpected. Realizing this, some decided over time to pool small amounts, basically as a hedge on the possibility of some among the group facing a hardship they couldn't address alone. Historically, these kinds of groups started out based solely on cultural & immediate geographical ties. From crude tribal ties, to things like mutual aid associations, to the modern concept of insurance, the idea has remained simple, that you regularly pool some resources with the assumption that should the worst occur you can get enough to help.
Or, to put it another way, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". Sound familiar?
Now, when Marx said it he envisioned people with unequal abilities only getting what was absolutely necessary, so it's not the exact same thing. However, the concept is related in that with insurance you pay what you can and take out what you need, just with an emergency-centric definition of "needs". If I understand the basics right, then the departure from direct administration of such pooling of resources to the current system is that people are paying a 3rd party to operate the pool for them. To reattach with the latest debate, the argument towards health insurance companies is that the administrators are abusing their position, defeating the purpose of the pools they run for their own gain.
That charge is an understandable one. Keep in mind though, we don't just pool resources to pay for health care. Ostensibly, collective responsibility for defense against force is the most basic purpose of the modern state, and they haven't exactly been faithful humble servants either. In fact many people, myself included, think the administrators of this "insurance policy" are a living contradiction, and have done little more than abuse their position.
A couple of thoughts I've reached based on this:
-If collective provision for things is somehow evil, as the Right insinuates, then I'm not sure how they even explain insurance itself as a concept. As if the convenient nudging aside of the military wasn't dissonance enough...
-I can understand why mainstream liberals question the insurance companies, and I'm no fan of them either. But at the same time, and for similar reasons, I question government as well. Why is it seen as so awkward to question both?
(cross-posted to Psychopolitik.com)
What with all the talk about a "public option" in a possible health care reform bill, I found this Huffington Post column by Ellen Brown proposing a "public option" in banking interesting, both for good and bad reasons. The points she ticks off about the current system are familiar: the bailouts, huge bonuses in the face of obvious failure, lack of transparency & the willingness of the US government to drastically overpay for assets that mark-to-market rules actually define as worthless. These facts lead her to the following:
We may not be able to stop them, but we can join them. We the people need to play the bankers' game ourselves. Even corporate giants such as General Motors and WalMart have now gotten into the banking game and are easing their credit problems by forming their own banks.
Considering the huge amount of power Big Finance has, particularly due to the structure of central banking, it's refreshing to hear this kind of questioning from a liberal perspective. After all, the US financial system is pretty much one humongous textbook example of regulatory capture.
Now the hard part: what's her definition of "public"?
In President Obama's July 17 weekly address, he repeated his call for a public option in health care, in order to "increase competition and keep insurance companies honest" and to "put an end to the worst practices of the insurance industry." The same call needs to be made for a public option in banking. In some countries, publicly-owned banks have operated alongside privately-owned banks for decades; and in those countries, the current crisis has served to show that public banks generally do a better job of serving the people and protecting their interests than their private counterparts.
So "public"=government. What a shock...
From there, examples are given such as the Canadian province of Alberta & their Treasury Branches during the Great Depression, India, and (I kid you not) China. There's an example in the US though, since North Dakota runs a state-owned bank. Sounds successful, though I can't help but wonder if there are other factors protecting them from the credit-burst fallout.
She sums up like so, again touching on some sticking points of the currently accepted system:
A bank charter brings with it the privilege of creating "credit" simply as an accounting entry on the bank's books. The flaw in the private banking scheme is that banks create the principal portion of their loans but not the interest, which is continually drawn off the top as profit. New borrowers must continually be found to take out new loans to create this extra profit, making private banking effectively a pyramid scheme; and like any pyramid scheme, it has mathematical limits. Today, those limits appear to have been reached. Personal and national debts have gotten so large relative to incomes that it is no longer possible to maintain the fiction of solvency. We soon won't have the money even to pay the interest on our existing debts, let alone to incur new ones. Public banking does not suffer from that flaw, because interest is not drawn out of the system but is returned to the public coffers. Public banking is thus mathematically sound and sustainable.
Clearly something has to give. However, it seems like the root of the modern US financial system got left in the dust somewhere on the way to this point. With the Federal Reserve, FDIC, etc., argument that in a way we already have a government system (albeit a corporatist one, rather than the ideal of representation and fulfillment of public good) is quite reasonable. So the question isn't about whether public banking would be better, but whether or not "public" should, or ever does in practice, equal government.
While reading an LA Times article about the budget woes of California, I started thinking about what form it'd take if, hypothetically, my view that as long as government exists determining who pays for it should be based on resources use, in both the natural sense and in who utilizes the force of government the most, were applied at state level.
For an easy, relevant example, use Cali. Might as well...
Imagine the tax & spending structure of California were torn down & rebuilt on that basis, with the worst of what the state government does outright eliminated, & the burden of what was left tilted towards the people & organizations that most use Arnold & co. Anyone that knows something about how California works (or, in this case, doesn't), I submit the following mental exercise to you: I know that such a proposal would be rejected on all sides by the political establishment of their state, but what interest group in particular do you think would be the loudest, and why? If, by some miracle such a radical reform were put into place, what would the policy there look like that followed the philosophy?
Note: I say this as someone not from there, and don't profess to be an expert on the state in the slightest. If you feel this is just absolutely stupid for that reason, then ignore it. If you don't know any more about California than I do, but you can contact someone who does, feel free to pose the scenario to them.
Some stories just speak volumes. All emphasis mine:
Border guards in Chiasso see plenty of smugglers and plenty of false-bottomed suitcases, but no one in the town, which straddles the Italian-Swiss frontier, had ever seen anything like this. Trussed up in front of the police in the train station were two Japanese men, and beside them a suitcase with a booty unlike any other. Concealed at the bottom of the bag were some rather incredible sheets of paper. The documents were apparently dollar-denominated US government bonds with a face value of a staggering $134bn (£81bn).
How on earth did these two men, who at first refused to identify themselves, come to be there, trying to ride the train into Switzerland carrying bonds worth more than the gross domestic product of Singapore? If the bonds were genuine, the pair would have been America's fourth-biggest creditor, ahead of the UK and just behind Russia.
No sooner had the story leaked out from the Italian lakes region last week than it sparked a panoply of conspiracy tales. But one resounded more than any other: that the men were agents of the Japanese finance ministry, in the country for the G8 meeting, making a surreptitious journey into Switzerland to sell off one small chunk of the massive mountain of US bonds stacked up in the Japanese Treasury vaults.
You have to wonder about the logic of a world where such documents are even remotely considered to actually be worth that much.
The global financial/monetary system is just amazing... and by "amazing", I mean "absolute top to bottom nonsense".
Within the libertarian argument against the concept of "intellectual property", it's said that owning ideas means owning people. Well, here we have an example of just how absurd that quest for monopoly rents has gotten (all emphasis mine):
To date, about 20 percent of the human genome has been patented, including genes for Alzheimer’s, asthma, colon cancer, and perhaps most famously, breast cancer. This means pharmaceutical companies, scientists, and universities control what research can be done on those genes, and how much resulting therapies and diagnostic tests will cost. That is why, three years ago, a woman named Genae Girard couldn’t get a second opinion on a test showing she carried the breast cancer genes. Her doctor couldn’t help her, because Myriad Genetics holds the patent on the genes, and forbids other doctors or companies from testing for them.
This week, the ACLU, several breast cancer survivors, and professional groups representing more than 150,000 scientists, sued Myriad Genetics over their breast cancer gene patents. Those genes, mutated forms of BRCA1 and BRCA2, are responsible for most cases of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. They’re also very lucrative, because Myriad has created something of a monopoly. It charges $3,000 per test, which often isn’t covered by insurance. No one else can offer the test, and researchers can’t develop new or cheaper ones (or new therapies for that matter) unless they get permission from Myriad and pay a steep licensing fee. So women have no choice about who performs their tests, and they can’t seek those second opinions. [...]
[W]ith its lawsuit, the ACLU isn’t just fighting Myriad’s patent—it hopes to end the practice of gene patenting entirely on the grounds that it’s illegal, unconstitutional, and interfering with science.
Yes, you read that right. Thanks to the aid of the government, one company "owns" part of the human genome, and is using that "ownership" as excuse to extract tribute from any woman who dares to hold curiosity over the status of their own genetic code. Inability to pay for this could mean more women developing breast cancer -- and, potentially, more women dying of it.
Keep this in mind during the argument about U.S. health care policy. Anyone who thinks what we currently have is a "free-market", whether they think that means it's good or bad, is grossly misled. (cross-posted to Psychopolitik)
Reminder #12312978 of the bankruptcy of politics: people that write garbage like this aren't laughed into obscurity...:
If ever there were a time for President Obama to trust his instincts and stick to his guns, that time is now, when he is being pressured to change his mind about closing the books on the "torture" policies of the past. Obama, to his credit, has ended one of the darkest chapters of American history, when certain terrorist suspects were whisked off to secret prisons and subjected to waterboarding and other forms of painful coercion in hopes of extracting information about threats to the United States. He was right to do this. But he was just as right to declare that there should be no prosecution of those who carried out what had been the policy of the United States government. And he was right when he sent out his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, to declare that the same amnesty should apply to the lawyers and bureaucrats who devised and justified the Bush administration practices. (emphasis mine)
As I've mentioned before, the likelihood of prosecutions was, is and will be zilch barring an absolute miracle. There's generally been two views shaking out over this:
- Right-wingers say that the entire thing -- disclosure of the memos, criticism of the interrogation methods, all of it -- is stupid, the techniques INCLUDING waterboarding aren't torture, and it doesn't matter anyway because they were only applied to the worst of the worst and great intel came from them. All of these are verifiably false, but at least it's internally consistent with their ends-justify-the-means ironically relativist worldview.
- Pretty much everybody else approves of the releases, and if they don't openly call for prosecutions (though, as Glenn recently pointed out, polls have shown approval for such) they at the least think the tactics were a dumb and/or disgusting idea.
[...]having vowed to end the practices, Obama should use all the influence of his office to stop the retroactive search for scapegoats. This is not another Sept. 11 situation, when nearly 3,000 Americans were killed. We had to investigate the flawed performances and gaps in the system and make the necessary repairs to reduce the chances of a deadly repetition. The memos on torture represented a deliberate, and internally well-debated, policy decision, made in the proper places -- the White House, the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department -- by the proper officials.
This sounds like Broder is trying to argue that torture was, possibly, the only thing standing between us & another attack, only w/o coming out and actually saying it. Either that, or he's justifying wild half-assed panic in response to failure. How he figures waterboarding and slamming people into walls was just another allegedly carefully agreed upon tactic switch for Defending The Homeland purposes and not feel-good vindictiveness (and, as we now know, fishing for that al-qaeda/Saddam tie that never materialized...) puzzles me. No, seriously David, what's your argument?
Suppose that Obama backs down and Holder or someone else starts hauling Bush administration lawyers and operatives into hearings and courtrooms. Suppose the investigators decide that the country does not want to see the former president and vice president in the dock. Then underlings pay the price while big shots go free. But at some point, if he is at all a man of honor, George W. Bush would feel bound to say: That was my policy. I was the president. If you want to indict anyone for it, indict me. Is that where we want to go? (emphasis mine)
Words fail me...
(cross-posted to Psychopolitik)
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