The Court Decides

I never understood why there could be any argument or how the result could be in doubt – except on grounds of the ideologies of certain appointees to the Court – about the insurance mandate.

Here’s an example. I’m an urban homeowner. If the City says they have to replace the sewer lateral to my home, it’s for my good health and the health and safety of the community. Then they put it in and they make me pay for it. So if local government can make you buy something you don’t particularly care to buy for yourself…. Get the point?

Probably there are many such examples. Yet I don’t know the subtleties of the issue lately resolved in favor of the mandate. I do know the President will be expected to defend it, and the whole scheme of legislation, in the election. And I know it’s going to cost me money. But I’m going to vote for him anyway.

The health care act is eventually going to cost me money because my family has “Cadillac” health insurance, provided as part of my compensation by my employer. Soon part of that compensation will be considered income, just like the cash money it would cost me to buy it for myself. And the taxes on that income will help defray the costs of certain benefits, say, coverage for pre-existing conditions, people less fortunate than I will enjoy under this legislation.

Many petit bourgeois types find this upsetting. And they, and their big bourgeois friends who couldn’t personally care less about the cost of health insurance nor indeed who stays healthy and who gets sick, have got the “tea partiers” upset about it too, even those tea partiers who will never pay a cent of the penalty or the tax, and even, or so it might seem, those who aren’t insured at all but are afraid of the legislation for no articulable reason anyway.

There’s no need to repeat in all detail the steps in that argument. Bourgeois types, with a real fear of seeing the cash balances in their accounts dwindle in order to pay the public costs of health care, have to generate other kinds of fears among people who don’t share their interests, in order to influence and, they hope, control the outcome. These are necessarily false fears precisely because the real interests involved are not the same. And so I say, put yourself in the shoes of the working poor, because you’re a lot more likely to become one of them than to become one of the Few.

Next: Whose Shoes?

Off with their heads!

Those who think having to face a recall election is too stiff a penalty for political crimes against the people of Wisconsin should reflect that, in some societies, some political crimes are or were capital. Now I don’t want to resurrect Joe Stalin and run him for governor, but I do want to re-emphasize the kinds of outlawry as such certain people are being held to account for in these elections.

One and all these are crimes of fraud and manipulation in favor of narrow, partisan, and merely political interests, and against public interest and good. It was possible to commit them because an anomaly gave Republicans complete control of the legislative process. After that: no amity, no consensus, no compromise…nor even consideration nor communication. Finding no other worthy interests, they consulted only their own. There’s the crime.

Most of these arguments have already been made, some by people in an official capacity. My purpose is to shed a different light both on the arguments and the actions themselves.

Here are the several counts in the indictment, in rough order of notoriety and abuse.

Collective Bargaining: The right of unions to exist was paid for in blood, even on the streets of Milwaukee. Predicated on that right, the rights to bargain and to strike make a double-edged sword. The Republicans blunted the one edge – without cause or need, ignoring offers of compromise on the point essential to the public good, which was the budget. It was pretence: the obliteration of rights was unnecessary to the stated purpose of the scheme of legislation. So: notorious abuse of the first order.

Voter Identification: Again, in some countries offenses against fundamental law are or were capital in nature. The courts, more than one of them, have found this legislation so offensive they granted a preliminary injunction, without a full hearing of the case, against its enforcement. For purely partisan reasons, to prevent a wrong merely imagined to exist, the Republicans placed an unconstitutional burden on a fundamental right – a poll tax, notoriously unconstitutional since the days of Jim Crow.

If the right to vote is sacred, what kind of outlawry is this?

Secret Redistricting: …was also roundly criticized by the courts – the federal courts – both the secrecy and the result. So far were the Republicans from an attitude of political amity that they refused to correct their error, and left it to the court to restore the voting rights their redistricting plan had infringed.

For people who may not understand what they did that was wrong, let me explain a bit. When they moved the Senate district lines, some people, hundreds of thousands of them, lost their votes in the next Senate elections. They were put in districts where the vote does not take place until the following cycle, and they have to wait until then to cast them: four years instead of two. So their votes were taken away, delayed, solely to advantage Republican candidates by giving them more Republican voters in the some of the affected districts.

Politics always obtrudes on the redistricting process, but in this case the abuse was egregious and ran afoul of constitutional law.

Again, if the right to vote is sacred…?

Fake Candidates: …were nominated by the Republicans to run fraudulently as Democrats, in their own words, to “level the playing field.” A notorious case of advertising a weak point! The real intent is to give their Senate candidates the advantage of Walker’s coattails in the general election. This isn’t spin: it’s an open lie. It might be higher on the list, but the public cost of this particular abuse is hard to measure and may not be particularly much.

Mining Legislation: …is last on the list, but only because it was an attempted abuse. See my post at the time the legislation failed.

Now Mr. Walker wants to revive the legislation on a “bipartisan” basis. But this only proves my point: up to now, in none of these instances were anything other than partisan interests ever considered.

I’ve already characterized The Outlaw for what he is. Too bad his Senate seat is secure. At the very least, the recall election will make him attempt to justify, if not answer for, his crimes. In fact, he’s the chief conspirator, isn’t he? I’ve permitted myself to wonder what leadership role Mr. Walker himself played, if any, but from here it’s impossible to tell. I don’t know what he’s telling his big bourgeoisie friends either. I do know Ms. Kleefisch made a phone call or two; she says so on television. That is enough to implicate her in the conspiracy.

And so the verdict, and the sentence, mild as it must be, lie in the hands of Wisconsin voters.

Fortunately not in the hands of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The grounds for their endorsement of Mr. Walker are disingenuous. The question is not whether Mr. Walker deserves to face the recall – that is, it’s not about whether the paper’s editorial position on that point was correct. Now it’s about who should be governor of Wisconsin.

Class Math: The Mythmakers

What about those people who paid for, among others, the “Job creators” myth, the ones for whom political influence is an element of profit?

I realize I can scarcely post to this blog without making reference to the “lies” and “manipulations” of certain classes of people, or to their ability to buy “impressions” that serve as a substitute for the truth. Yet, absent some kind of explanation, people might think that I am making things up, that I have embraced some sort of conspiracy theory, and that I, not they, am guilty of lies and manipulations.

But while it’s still a conspiracy, it’s not a theory any more. The steps in the process are all more or less in the open now. You don’t have to use your imagination to supply missing ones, or substitute passion for understanding, any more.

Here’s how it works, step-by-step. Keep in mind that this is all in addition to directly supporting the candidates the mythmakers favor, and therefore is not determined by any candidate’s views, policies, opinions, or publicly-held positions.

Buying the Impressions:

1.       The Few – really the big bourgeoisie, but generally speaking the Few – have interests to advance or protect.

2.       It’s easy – it’s natural – to formulate opinions expressing such interests, both directly and as a guide to public policy.

3.       The opinions constitute a message one would like to share.

4.       It’s lawful to promulgate, publish, broadcast such messages…

5.       …and to do so under some name or form other than, as I do, in one’s own proper person.

6.       The message requires a medium.

7.       The medium must be paid for.

8.       So form an organization.

9.       Give it the money. (Who gives it is still the great secret.)

10.   Get your similarly situated friends to give it money.

11.   Package the message. The organization designs the packaging; the buyers, naturally, approve it.

12.   Buy impressions. There are plenty of vendors in the market and vanishingly few have any scruples about it.

13.   Measure the effect and adjust the package as necessary.

For example, whence these distorted advertisements about right-to-work legislation in Wisconsin? That’s a 20^th century issue – from before the Big War. Why is it coming up now? Well, because the unions, weak as they are, are about the only entities the big bourgeoisie have to fear, and they would like to make them weaker. For another example, just today there is a report that Mr. Romney has had to repudiate advertisements funded by a Mr. Billionaire Ricketts.

Next: Why are the messages, like the ones in my examples, always and in principle lies and manipulations?

Making up Lies

1.       The message couldn’t start off any truer than an opinion. The Few are not philosophers, nor are philosophers among the Few.

2.       Is the opinion thus ever anything more than a more or less direct expression of self-interest?

3.       If it weren’t, why the anonymity of an organization? All those names are either tautological or fraudulent in themselves. All Americans are “for prosperity” – with a small “p.” The question is: whose? Why not use personal names? That would be unmistakable and truthful. As it is, we don’t know quite exactly whose interests are being served, and only by inference what class of people they belong to.

4.       The message is bent and spun. The Few would like to take the hopes and fears of the many, and match them up with their own exaggerated ambitions. And they have running dogs to help them. But the interests don’t really match. They don’t match at all: that’s the point. So now it begins to look like manipulations…

5.       …and finally passes to lies. When a string of manipulations and half-truths achieves a certain level of intensity, and something is needed to top it off, where else can you go? And it’s not just getting carried away or getting careless; it’s open, conscious, purposeful lies.

We’ve all seen political advertisements we don’t believe. Why believe any of them? Just think about where they come from – who pays – and then decide what to believe.

There’s another way, metaphorical for now, of looking at this. False opinions are sticky. Hold one and others will stick to it. Pretty soon you’ve got a whole view of the world that is irretrievably false – and a following besides. Think Rush Limbaugh. Jefferson Davis. Adolf Hitler. Sensible people proceed quite differently, as I’d be happy to explain in another place and time.

Class Myth: The Job Creators…

…never create jobs unless they stand to gain from it. Job creation is not a charity. Making them heroes is a myth. Who are these people? They are very few indeed. And the Republican Party would like to take the shackles off certain of these individuals or entities as might in return do the many the favor of giving them jobs.

It’s useful to boil the Republican jobs program down to one proposition: let’s find ways to make it more profitable to create a job. In general, this is to be done by sacrificing some other public interest, not to the creation of the job, but to the profit of the creator. Tax incentives are one such, possibly the least abusive, form of public sacrifice.

It’s just mathematics, isn’t it? At the margin, the public gets another job, but has to give up something from a different margin of their own. Why not rather insist that the job creators be good at what they do, and then make shift themselves to gather an adequate profit? Those who insist they can’t create a job because of, say, a regulated use of public lands, either lack ideas or energy  for other kinds of efficiencies, or want to make a killing out of public assets that cost them nothing.

And so there are already two kinds of job “creators,” maybe three. Some, the real ones, are entrepreneurs who can deliver products or services better, faster, cheaper (according to the old business saw, pick two of the three). These people rely on their own ideas to make a buck, and as necessary to that end, they create a job. They may be rich, but not wealthy yet. The only way they’ll ever become wealthy is to create jobs; this kind of job creation is real, not mythical.

They’re not permanently petit bourgeois, and they’re not yet big bourgeoisie either. Even if they’re already among the Few, they’re too busy to try to influence public policy – at least not directly, and not just to generate profit. Instead they vote, and they may contribute to the candidates of their choice. But they (the ones I’m thinking of) rely more on industry associations and the like, and not on their own dollars, for political influence. At the margin, they’d rather invest that dollar in, for example, creating a job, than in contributing to a PAC with a specific policy change agenda and a known record of…we’ll see. For one thing, the profit on the job is tangible, immediate, calculable, and under their own control. The profit in political manipulations is none of those things, so to these people it’s not worth the risk.

They are entitled, it seems to me, to vote Republican if they like. But there aren’t enough of them to elect one, and the people who work for them do not have to vote with them to keep their jobs. They can and should vote in their own interests.

Next, what about all that cash money on the books of the largest corporations? If somebody wanted to create jobs, why not use that money? But they don’t, as we’ve seen, unless the new worker will bring profit. Otherwise it’s just wages down the drain – which makes the worker bee who doesn’t have a chance to earn them, metaphorically, a “drain.”

So the money is used instead to buy back stock, to acquire businesses that actually are creating jobs, to pay dividends – in short, for things that make the balance sheet and stock price look good – but not for things that in themselves create jobs.

No: institutional investors and boards of directors are not job creators either. They’re profit takers, profit creators, not job creators. In fact that, not job creation, is their fiduciary duty, not their self-interest only. I suppose if you’re a small investor like me, to whom this fiduciary duty is owed, you might want to vote Republican, just to help ensure your retirement is comfortable.  But I’ll take a pass. I’d rather vote to help ensure the working poor can take care of themselves when they retire.

Which brings me back to those other people, the people who purchased the “job creators” myth, and several others, the ones for whom political influence is an element of profit. It’s always something for nothing with them, isn’t it? We’ll tell you lies and you give us votes. And with your votes, we’ll loose the bonds on the public values we covet, and tear off the shackles on our…greed.

But all this require further explanation, otherwise it might look like a conspiracy theory. And so…coming soon: The Mythmakers.

Class Math: Voting for “the man…”

…and not the party. I’m happy to say I’ve never done that. I’ve been terribly impressed with Mr. Clinton’s genius for policy sometimes, and with Mr. Obama’s wisdom. I had great hopes for Mr. Carter. I even forgave Mr. Reagan a little for the regressive things he did when I saw that he had been able to end the Cold War favorably to us as a people and to the world as a whole. Even though that was a relief, it doesn’t mean I would change my votes against him.

I regret that my party hadn’t better candidates than the ones who lost, but that didn’t make me think twice about whether to vote for them.

So I have to wonder about people who let considerations merely personal to the candidates involved decide their votes. For one thing, people are better judges of their interests than of character – more precisely, they are less easily deceived about the former than about the latter (though to be sure, it’s not impossible to deceive people about their interests).

The principles of the Democratic party have not changed since the days of Jefferson and Jackson: we are the party of the many. The principles of the Republican party, on the contrary, have changed since the days of Lincoln, maybe since the days of Eisenhower: at some point they became the party of the Few, or at best simply their willing accomplice.

Do your interests change from one election to the next? Maybe you got a job. Is that enough reason to vote Republican? Maybe you earned enough to begin to hope that some day you might become one of the Few. Maybe you actually became one of the Few. That last might be a good reason from the standpoint of class interest to switch parties. But that doesn’t happen to many of us; by definition it only happens to a few. So why would you vote for a democrat in one cycle, and a republican in the next, and then back again? Does your life, do your interests, really change that much?

While the principles of an individual might be more or less nuanced, while they might be unique – not to say peculiar – to that unique individual, while they might be formed by accident of birth or any number of other accidents, the principles of party are by comparison simple, straightforward, well known, generally shared, and formed under the experience of history. A party is like a culture that, being formed by a common set of influences, shares a common set of attitudes – which by the way is the original meaning of common sense.

This is the math part. What really happens is that the Few buy enough impressions to put in front of the public so that voters begin to think they constitute a form of truth about the candidate. They think they are voting for “the man,” when they are really voting for the impressions of the man that someone else could afford to put before them. Or, worse yet, voting against impressions of the other man or woman that were also bought and paid for.

Yes, it’s true, there have been great presidents and there have been, it’s not unfair to say, disastrous ones. Can you tell the difference? in advance? It’s by far a surer thing to vote for party. Even the failings and mistakes of an individual can be carried forward by the commitment to progress the Democratic party represents and by the party as a whole. Progress would be better and surer without party rancor, just because conflicting interests would be more likely to reach salutary adjustment. Who can change this if the voters do not select individuals, of either party, more moderate at least in their forms of expression?

So by all means, vote for that if you cannot bring yourself to vote for a democrat.

Excuse me...

…but I think I understand the grammar of the English language passably well. Apparently some of the law faculty of Georgetown University, who lately appeared on the News Hour, do not.

In English the subjunctive mood of a verb is sometimes used to express a condition that does not exist. Mr. Obama is not a commentator in the conservative media. If he were, he might have said that “unelected” persons display “judicial activism” when they overturn the deliberate acts of an elected body established for that purpose. But he’s not. And he didn’t. That’s how the subjunctive mood is supposed to work.

So the law professor who said the President’s proposition is “invalid” ignored, or is showing his ignorance of, the form and natural meaning of the sentence in question. Other speeches on this matter, including Mr. Ryan saying the expression was “unpresidential,” have some, if only partisan, cause for overlooking the rules of grammar.

The Georgetown colleague who delivered the counterpoint at least expressed the view that the statement is valid, without taking note of the question of grammar. Maybe that’s even worse, if it means he thinks the President was criticizing “unelected,” “activist” judges. The President made it clear he wasn’t, the following day, without backtracking, but just by expressing himself in the indicative mood.

Yet last Friday, even Mark Shields, whom I respect, didn’t note the construction of the sentence in question either. So perhaps what I call its “natural meaning” no longer holds. There’s a lot more to be said about this – from the people who brought you “Who to Contact,” in a collectively unconscious effort to obliterate the distinction between the nominative and objective cases.

What I heard the President say, I took to be a criticism of the conservative media, who, if they wanted to be consistent with themselves, ought to be criticizing the Court for legislating at all on the matter of insuring for the national health. But they don’t. And they aren’t.

Class Math: Public Money for Public Purposes

Certain people of limited outlook have long been able to score a debating point – at least with other people of limited understanding – by saying the government ought to be run like a business. It’s a valid point so long as it means only that expenditure of public money ought to be administered efficiently, and that vendors of goods and services to the government ought to be chosen through a competitive process, a real marketplace absent of corruption.

The further, really intended claim, that the people would get a better value if the service governments provide were provided instead by private, for-profit entities, goes too far. Along the way, it distorts or obliterates the notion of public purposes.

The reason government performs certain social functions is that the whole society has interests in the outcomes. Education and road-building are good examples.

Take roads. There was a day long ago when highways were like railroads still are today – privately owned and operated for profit – except they were made of wooden planks rather than iron rails. Is anybody saying we ought to go back to that situation? Maybe some people should if they want to be consistent.

Now streets and highways are one and all, of course, owned by the public. This is so obviously true it’s odd to think, why so? Well, every segment of the public and very nearly every public activity make use of them. Everybody has an interest in how they are built and maintained. Collectively these interests may be referred to as the public purpose of streets and highways.

Or again, they’re not just built so the big bourgeoisie can receive their components and distribute their products. They’re not just built so the proletarians can get to the places where they hand over their surplus labor. Nor so that petit bourgeois mom and dad can take the kids to, say, Wisconsin Dells.

All these interests have to be accommodated. The only way to do it is through a process accountable to be public, that is, a political process.

Of course, that’s not how you build highways. That function is bid out to an entity that is operated from the top down. There’s a difference.

Next take education. There’s a difference between training and education. The former develops skills required by and to be used for private purposes. The latter imparts the knowledge a child requires to function as a citizen: paying taxes, voting, understanding the laws and making a prudent decision about which ones to obey. As Vico observed about the Latin etymology of the word, education leads the citizen out from the child. That is, it serves public purposes.

The people generally are very sound on this. They understand that education creates potential and opens up opportunity. Only after they become adults and have a job do they submit to training. So nobody suggests that educational systems funded by public money ought to be training systems designed to serve private purposes – not even the big bourgeoisie.

But we do have privately owned and operated charter schools, funded at least in part by public money. And some of them meet the public purposes of education reasonably well.

Finally, those functions explicitly reserved to the branches of government by the Constitution and state constitutions, making laws, carrying out laws, and deciding cases at law, are one and all (at least in theory) performed exclusively for public purposes and in the interests of the people as a whole.

Now, if the notion of public purposes is well enough understood, the thoughtful reader will also admit that it nearly entirely – except in the senses already mentioned – negatives the notion that government should be run like a business, and the corollary that the people would be better off if businessmen ran the government.

The latter would of course be undemocratic. In business, the executive is informed and then decides, sets goals and policies, chooses subordinates and delegates at will, overhauls the whole organization or any part of it that is not meeting his objectives – in short, is in a position of command, responsible only to the shareholders, and that only in the limited and non-moral sense that they expect a return on their money.

Business has rather the structure of military authority than of public office. Only by obedience to order, without debate, can an army hope to move, fight, and gain its objectives. That is so, almost to the same extent, in business, though the urgency is not the life or death of the nation or its vital interests. It’s not so in politics, which must consult all public and private interests, with deliberate speed, before proceeding.

So it consequently is that businessmen have no special qualification to serve in public office, and on the contrary, that people with talent and experience serving - and negotiating, accommodating, compromising - conflicting public interests are in fact better qualified to so serve.

Unfortunately, my examples reveal a problem. It’s grounded in the ambiguity of the phrase “run [something] like a business.” Clearly decisions about public purposes aren’t business-like, and for the reasons given, ought not to be. But carrying out decisions, such as building a road, can be and sometimes should be run that way. Remember that, when we do this, we are giving public interests over to the private profit-taking interest. Prudence is required. This part of the problem may have to be solved on a case-by-case basis. It would probably be just as disastrous to turn over major projects of road-building (as opposed to minor repairs, which are done badly enough) to crews of public employees, as it would be to turn over foreign wars to armies of mercenaries.

A list follows of purposes and interests that might or might not be considered public. Inevitably this line of thought leads from purposes that the whole public shares, to purposes only some of us do, to purposes of which the connection to the public has become tenuous, to purposes you don’t want the government to be picking your pockets over. Along this path, the shared purposes of all gradually begin to look like the private purposes of some. You decide where to draw the line, and vote accordingly, keeping in mind you also have to consider what kind of entity ought to be doing any related work that comes up.

·         The national defense, in some configuration. And the first line of defense is always foreign policy – cheap at twice the price.

·         Health care, for certain protected classes. But which classes? The elderly, the disabled, to be sure. The poor? You can distribute that burden either through the public entitlement system at the expenses of the whole tax-paying population, or through the private insurance system, at the expense of people who are already insured. But then….

·         Heath insurance. Who gets to be insured? And for what? There’s more to be said, naturally, about this.

·         Financial security. Is one thing for workers, and another thing for the petit bourgeois. Even though Social Security is next to nothing by itself, at least the working poor are already accustomed to the level of finances – not to say security – it provides. On the other hand, it is possible to be financially secure without being among the Few. Maybe those people’s interests are served by voting Republican.

·         The public debt. It’s also true that everyone has a measureable interest, greater or smaller, and whether they know it or not, in the full faith and credit of the United States. Even the bean counters at Standard & Poor’s. So we have to pay the interest on the debt.

The question of party, class, or private interest becomes more vexed at just this point

·         Housing. Maybe you can’t afford it at all (working poor), or maybe you just can’t afford your mortgage anymore (petit bourgeois).

·         Regulation in general. In particular:

o   Of the greed of corporations

o   Of the quality of the environment

o   Of the quality of food and drugs

o   Of the uses of land (mostly by state and local governments)

I guess you would like to pick and choose, depending on whether you are more likely to be harmed by the lack (consumers and workers) or existence (the Few and their wannabes) of regulation.

·         Subsidies. For housing? Agriculture? Education, through grants and loans? It seems to depend on the interests – and influence – of the buyers and sellers.

·         Basic research. They have a lot of fun with this, don’t they? Back to the days of Senator Bill Proxmire. But it’s not profitable for business to do it, and academe – well, that is their business.

·         Quality of life. The arts? Public television? Some people think protecting the environment is a quality of life issue – the lives of the individuals of the endangered species.

·         Transportation – other than roads. It’s probably in everybody’s interest to have alternatives to $5.00 a gallon gas. Waiting to provide them until everybody realizes they need them only hastens the day of need.

·         Forests, Parks, Reservations. Public lands hold many kinds of valuable assets and tribal lands hold…casinos. All in all, this could be on the revenue side of the ledger, were there not so much potential for abuse.

It’s not impossible to find the public purposes in all these budget items. People whose private interests coincide to a degree ought to be willing to do their part to provide the revenue – at least to the same degree. You can’t begrudge money that creates public goods you yourself make use of. Certain deeply cynical people who already have more than they can even enjoy frequently prefer to spend some of the excess creating false resentments on this score. I guess it’s cheaper than paying their fair share of taxes.

Class Math will continue, visiting a few of these manipulations, and revisiting some of these budget items.