Why It’s Okay To Hate Union Workers
By now you’ve heard the cookie joke. You know: a CEO, a tea party member, and a union worker are all sitting at a table when a plate with a dozen cookies arrives. Before anyone else can make a move, the CEO reaches out to rake in eleven of the cookies. When the other two look at him in surprise, the CEO locks eyes with the tea party member. “You better watch him,” the executive says with a nod toward the union worker. “He wants a piece of your cookie.”
It’s funny for the same reason most good jokes are funny, because it contains a strong element of truth. This little game, pitting one group of working class voters against another, isn’t just a trick, it’s the trick. It’s what enables bankers to rob the nation blind and walk away. It’s what lets executives take an ever larger share of corporate income when they’re doing well, a larger share when they’re doing poorly, a larger share when they’re staying, and a larger share when they’re leaving. It’s what allows corporations to sit on the greatest stacks of money the world has ever seen, turn profits that dwarf those of even a few years ago, and still demand that their workers surrender a little more. A little more. A little more, please. Thanks, now get out.
Not only that, they get their workers to fight for them. Fight for surrendering their own rights, and fight to take those rights from others.
The engine of this schism is always powered by the same forces: fear and envy. There’s always someone out there to be the “other,” someone whose cultural values don’t line up with yours. Someone who is getting a better deal than you. Robber barons and corporations have always been good at promoting factionalism, and of course it helps when you have the media and politicians under your thumb. No doubt nobles played the same game to keep their comfy seats throughout history. Heck, there was probably a nice “Intro for New Pharaohs” scroll that explained how to keep the stonecutters jealous of the hieroglyph carvers, just so neither group ever got around to wondering if carving Rootintootin III’s face on blocks the size of houses was really the best use of their time.
For America, the tea party movement is just an update of a very old script.
You could see the same forces at work in 1843, as factionalism split the Whig Party and produced a third party movement. The American Republican Party first appeared on local election ballots in New York. This wasn’t the Republican Party that would emerge over a decade later, but it was one of several movements and parties that boiled up out of the Whig’s weakness. Supported by business organizations and trade unions , the party scored shocking victories in its first elections first in New York then in Philadelphia. Almost overnight, the party spread and within a year it had become a national movement challenging the established parties in almost every state. Both major parties quickly adjusted their policies to try and accommodate this new entity, but the new party had a focus and energy that delivered surprising wins in Boston, in Chicago, and in several other cities.
What powered the movement? Most of the energy came from a source that’s still highly potent today: demonization of immigrants. The leaders of the movement (which soon changed its name to the American Nativist Party and then just the American Party) warned that the uncontrolled wave of immigration was destroying what made America great. The new immigrants lacked both education and culture. They were insular, odd, and dangerous; unwilling to adopt American customs and values. They were shiftless, without the productive and creative spark of Americans, but at the same time they were willing to work so cheaply that they threatened to steal jobs from American workers.
These immigrants were other. This invading army had their own language, their own music, and most threatening of all they brought with them a corrosive philosophy, one that was the enemy of both democracy and capitalism. This philosophy was out to cripple trade and destroy companies. It encouraged laziness, diminished respect for personal property, and threatened established institutions. Despite these un-American tendencies, traitorous and corrupt politicians had been elected who were beholding to these immigrants. These America-hating politicians refused to pass tough federal laws to clamp down on immigration. They even argued that state and local laws limiting immigrant’s rights were unconstitutional. They tolerated or encouraged their new philosophy. Some even embraced it. In response, the American Party platform mandated English as the official language and restricted the government from printing documents in other languages, it sharply limited immigration and raised the requirements for citizenship, and it limited all political offices (including school teachers) to native born Americans.
The wave of dangerous immigrants came from Ireland and Germany. The anti-American philosophy they propagated was Roman Catholicism.
The nativism that spurred the appearance of the American Republican Party mirrors exactly the feelings and ideas that now power anti-immigrant movements in Arizona and across the nation. If the hatred for union workers, government workers, and really anyone not part of their own small group may not be precisely the same, but it’s a close cousin. It’s not racism, but it fills that racism-shaped hole in society’s soul. For tea partiers, the lazy, fat-cat teacher taking home a big pension on the government dime has replaced the Cadillac driving welfare queen. It doesn’t matter that both are myths. Both of them are just placeholders for the other, a symbol of that person you just know is out there taking advantage of you – a focus for unfocused anger. A focus provided by people who are so, so relieved that you’re willing to keep looking enviously at other workers and never glance up to see what your betters are doing.
At America’s founding, there were dire predictions that the nation would not last out one election cycle. Then, as now, there were far more poor than rich. What was to prevent the have-nots from passing legislation that stripped wealth from the hands of the haves? Democracy was seen as utterly incompatible with capitalism. Traders and businessmen viewed it with horror, certain that they would be overrun by the mob. But it never worked that way.
Instead, those at the top have always found it easy to get people to champion their cause. There’s always a group that feels wounded, angry and neglected. This group is susceptible to being told that they’re better than some other group, that some other group is getting a better deal, that some other group deserves to be put in its place. It doesn’t matter if that group is called Irish or Italian, Black or Hispanic, Union members or government workers. Anyone can be painted as a threat with enough hot air and yellow journalism. Anyone.
In the heyday of the American Republican Party, members developed a not-so-secret phrase. Asked what they knew about party activities, they were taught to respond “I know nothing.” Because of this, members of the group soon carried the name “Know-Nothings.” Over a century and a half later, there may not be anyone eager to embrace the title of Know-Nothing. But as long as some working class voters are willing to carry the billionaire’s water by attacking other workers, there are certainly plenty of Learned Nothings around.
By: Mark Sumner, Daily Kos, March 6, 2011
Tea Party Tailspin: Anger And Shifting Momentums
The Tea Party is synonymous with anger. Anger defined it. Anger fueled it. Anger marred it. Anger became its face and its heart. But anger is too exhausting an emotion to sustain.
A poll released Thursday by the Pew Research Center found that anger at the government among Tea Party supporters fell by 40 percent from September 2010 to this month. Furthermore, anger among Republicans fell by more than half, and anger among whites, the elderly and independents fell by 40 percent or more.
On the other hand, the percentage of Tea Party supporters who said that they trusted the government always or most of the time doubled from last March to this March, and the percentage of Republicans saying so nearly doubled. In fact, the percent of both Republicans and independents saying so is now higher than it has been since January 2007.
Less anger? More trust? What happened? The midterms happened, that’s what.
Elections have a way of cooling passions, especially when voters get what they want. (Remember how lethargic many Democrats became after November 2008?) Electoral success not only satisfies, it pacifies. The enormous gains by Republicans during the midterms assuaged much of the country’s grief. The pressure began to subside. The novelty dimmed. The urgency evaporated.
Yet Tea Party leaders are still sniping from the sidelines, holding politicians to overreaching promises made when the electorate was still stewing. Judson Phillips, founder of the Tea Party Nation, wrote a post on its Web site this week saying the House speaker, John Boehner, looks “like a fool” and should face a primary challenge in 2012 for not pursuing enough spending cuts this year.
For these Tea Partiers, any concession is a crime worthy of expulsion.
A September Pew Poll found that only 22 percent of those who identify with the Tea Party admire political leaders who make compromises. This is not the way the rest of the country feels. Fifty-five percent of Democrats and 36 percent of Republicans said that they admired politicians who compromise.
Staunch Tea Partiers seem to be guided by the worst kind of fundamentalist political extremism — immutable positions derived from a near-religious adherence to self-proclaimed inviolable principles. This could well be their undoing.
During the right’s season of anger, passion and convictions galvanized Tea Party supporters into an army of activism. But the vehicle is outliving its fuel. The movement is losing momentum. In fact, Tea Party-backed governors like Scott Walker in Wisconsin could be providing the rallying cry on the left to pick up the mantle of anger and send the momentum back the other way.
If Tea Party leaders continue to operate as if anger is still a major part of their arsenal and Republican politicians continue to feel pressured into untenable positions, Democrats could enjoy their very own Charlie Sheen-ism come 2012: “Winning!”
By: Charles Blow, Op-Ed columnist; Original article published in The New York Times, March 4, 2011
How To Kill A Recovery-Republican Style
The economic news has been better lately. New claims for unemployment insurance are down; business and consumer surveys suggest solid growth. We’re still near the bottom of a very deep hole, but at least we’re climbing.
It’s too bad that so many people, mainly on the political right, want to send us sliding right back down again.
Before we get to that, let’s talk about why economic recovery has been so long in coming.
Some economists expected a rapid bounce-back once we were past the acute phase of the financial crisis — what I think of as the oh-God-we’re-all-gonna-die period — which lasted roughly from September 2008 to March 2009. But that was never in the cards. The bubble economy of the Bush years left many Americans with too much debt; once the bubble burst, consumers were forced to cut back, and it was inevitably going to take them time to repair their finances. And business investment was bound to be depressed, too. Why add to capacity when consumer demand is weak and you aren’t using the factories and office buildings you have?
The only way we could have avoided a prolonged slump would have been for government spending to take up the slack. But that didn’t happen: growth in total government spending actually slowed after the recession hit, as an underpowered federal stimulus was swamped by cuts at the state and local level.
So we’ve gone through years of high unemployment and inadequate growth. Despite the pain, however, American families have gradually improved their financial position. And in the past few months there have been signs of an emerging virtuous circle. As families have repaired their finances, they have increased their spending; as consumer demand has started to revive, businesses have become more willing to invest; and all this has led to an expanding economy, which further improves families’ financial situation.
But it’s still a fragile process, especially given the effects of rising oil and food prices. These price rises have little to do with U.S. policy; they’re mainly because of growing demand from China and other emerging markets, on one side, and disruption of supply from political turmoil and terrible weather on the other. But they’re a hit to purchasing power at an especially awkward time. And things will be much worse if the Federal Reserve and other central banks mistakenly respond to higher headline inflation by raising interest rates.
The clear and present danger to recovery, however, comes from politics — specifically, the demand from House Republicans that the government immediately slash spending on infant nutrition, disease control, clean water and more. Quite aside from their negative long-run consequences, these cuts would lead, directly and indirectly, to the elimination of hundreds of thousands of jobs — and this could short-circuit the virtuous circle of rising incomes and improving finances.
Of course, Republicans believe, or at least pretend to believe, that the direct job-destroying effects of their proposals would be more than offset by a rise in business confidence. As I like to put it, they believe that the Confidence Fairy will make everything all right.
But there’s no reason for the rest of us to share that belief. For one thing, it’s hard to see how such an obviously irresponsible plan — since when does starving the I.R.S. for funds help reduce the deficit? — can improve confidence.
Beyond that, we have a lot of evidence from other countries about the prospects for “expansionary austerity” — and that evidence is all negative. Last October, a comprehensive study by the International Monetary Fund concluded that “the idea that fiscal austerity stimulates economic activity in the short term finds little support in the data.”
And do you remember the lavish praise heaped on Britain’s conservative government, which announced harsh austerity measures after it took office last May? How’s that going? Well, business confidence did not, in fact, rise when the plan was announced; it plunged, and has yet to recover. And recent surveys suggest that confidence has fallen even further among both businesses and consumers, indicating, as one report put it, that the private sector is “unprepared to fill the hole left by public sector cuts.”
Which brings us back to the U.S. budget debate.
Over the next few weeks, House Republicans will try to blackmail the Obama administration into accepting their proposed spending cuts, using the threat of a government shutdown. They’ll claim that those cuts would be good for America in both the short term and the long term.
But the truth is exactly the reverse: Republicans have managed to come up with spending cuts that would do double duty, both undermining America’s future and threatening to abort a nascent economic recovery.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 3, 2011
The Make-Believe Billion: How Drug Companies Exaggerate Research Costs To Justify Absurd Profits
For years the government has sought to make brand-name drugs cheaper and more widely available to the public. It has tried and failed to limit to a reasonable time period various patent and other “exclusivity” protections. Or it’s tried and failed to negotiate volume discounts on the drugs that the feds purchase through Medicare. Every time, the pharmaceutical lobby has used its considerable wealth and political clout to block any government action that might trim Big Pharma’s profits, which typically amount to between one-quarter and one-half of company revenues. And just about every time, Big Pharma has argued that huge profit margins are vitally necessary to the pharmaceutical industry because drug research and development costs are so high.
The statistic Big Pharma typically cites (see, for instance, this PhRMA video on how Mister Chemical Compound becomes Mister Brand-Name Drug) is that the cost of bringing a new drug to market is about $1 billion. Now a new study indicates the cost is more like, um, $55 million.
Big Pharma has been making its R&D argument for half a century, but the specific source of the $1 billion claim is a 2003 study published in the Journal of Health Economics by economists Joseph DiMasi of Tufts, Ronald W. Hansen of the University of Rochester, and Henry Grabowski of Duke. I will henceforth refer to this team as the Tufts Center group, because they were working out of the (drug-company-funded) Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. The Tufts Center group “obtained from a survey of 10 pharmaceutical firms” the research and development costs of 68 randomly chosen new drugs and calculated an average cost of $802 million in 2000 dollars. That comes to $1 billion in 2011 dollars based on the general inflation rate since 2000 (28 percent). One billion dollars for every little orange prescription bottle in your medicine cabinet! And according to PhRMA, even that is way too low! As of 2006, its calculation of the drug-development average had already risen to $1.32 billion. That means costs specific to drug development increased by 64 percent between 2000 and 2006. Medical inflation typically outpaces general inflation, but PhRMA’s calculation puts its rate of cost increase at more than twice the rate for medical inflation during that period (26 percent). If Pharma’s alleged inflation rate hasn’t slackened since 2006, then the drug-development average should be now approaching $2 billion. But let’s not go there. We’ll stick to Big Pharma’s official last-stated estimate of $1.32 billion.
The new study, by sociologist Donald W. Light of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and economist Rebecca Warburton of the University of Victoria, and published in the journal BioSocieties, builds on some excellent previous research by journalist and health care blogger Merrill Goozner, author of The $800 Million Pill, and the consumer advocate Jamie Love. Light and Warburton begin by pointing out that drug companies submitted their R&D data to the Tufts Center group on a confidential basis and that these numbers are therefore unverifiable. Light and Warburton find it a little fishy that only 10 of the 24 invited firms chose to participate, given “the centrality of the issue and the prominence of the Center” within the industry. “The sample,” they suggest, “could be skewed” toward companies or drugs “with higher R&D costs.” Light and Warburton also observe that if the Tufts Center group made any effort of its own to verify the information it received from the drug companies, the group makes no mention of it in the study.
The first research phase involved in developing a new drug is basic (as opposed to applied) research. Very little of this type of research is funded by drug companies; 84 percent is funded by the government, and private universities provide additional, unspecified funding. The Tufts Center group assumed that drug companies spent, on average, $121 million on basic research to create a new drug, but Light and Warburton find that hard to square with their estimate that industry devotes only 1.2 percent of sales to all their basic research. Add in a few additional considerations and Big Pharma would have us believe basic research costs end up constituting more than one-third of the Tufts Center’s $802 million estimate. That’s way too much, Light and Warburton say.
Another problem Light and Warburton have with the Tufts Center group is that they didn’t subtract from their R&D calculations pharmaceutical firms’ tax breaks. Research and development costs, they point out, are not depreciated over time like other investments; rather, they’re excluded entirely from taxable profits. This tax break lowers net costs by 39 percent. Add in other tax breaks and that cuts the Tufts Center group’s R&D estimate in half.
Now take that figure and cut it in half again, Light and Warburton say, because half the Tufts Center group’s estimate was the “cost of capital,” i.e., revenue foregone by not taking the money spent on R&D and investing it in securities instead. But R&D is a cost of doing business, Light and Warburton point out; if you don’t want to spend money on it, then you don’t want to be a drug company. And who says that investing in securities always increases your capital? Sometimes the market goes down. Many of us learned that the hard way in 2008.
There are other problems. The Tufts Center group’s per-subject calculation of how much clinical trials cost was six times that of a National Institutes of Health study. Its calculation of how much time it takes to conduct clinical trials and have them reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration—7.5 years—is twice as long as Light and Warburton’s calculation, which is less than four years. The Tufts Center group’s use of the average (mean) cost rather than the median cost, Light and Warburton argue, is also misleading, because R&D costs for different drug products vary widely, and a very few expensive drugs will skew the mean. That appears to have happened in this case, because the Tuft Center group’s median was only 74 percent of the mean.
When Light and Warburton correct for all these flaws—well, all the ones that can be quantified—they end up with an average cost of bringing a drug to market that’s $59 million and a median cost that’s $43 million. In 2011 dollars, that’s a $75 million average and a $55 million median.
So the drug companies’ $1.32 billion estimate was off, according to Light and Warburton, by only $977 million. Let’s call it a rounding error.
By: Timothy Noah, Slate-March 3, 2011
How A Birther Thinks: A Demonstration
Mike Huckabee’s defenders have made much of the fact that he’s never endorsed the idea that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Therefore, he’s not a “birther” and his comments on a conservative radio show earlier this week are those of a man who either “didn’t mean it” and “clearly misspoke” or who is guilty of an “odd” but relatively benign ignorance about Obama’s biography.
As I’ve noted, these defenses fall flat on several levels. Even if you put the birther issue aside, It should be obvious that Huckabee didn’t just misspeak when he claimed that Obama grew up in Kenya; after all, he went into detail about the effect that a Kenyan upbringing filled with stories from relatives about the horrors of British colonial rule and the glory of the Mau Mau uprising would have had on Obama’s worldview and his actions as president today. Nor is this benign ignorance akin to (as Dave Weigel suggested) Obama being fuzzy on the details of Huckabee’s life story. Obama, to my knowledge, is not promoting an inflammatory indictment of Huckabee’s basic worldview and policy instincts that is based on an entirely and laughably false understanding of the circumstances of his upbringing.
Then there’s the matter of birtherism. Yes, it’s true, Huckabee is not claiming that Obama was born in Kenya — or in Indonesia or in any country other than the United States. But, as Jonathan Bernstein pointed out earlier this week:
This is where birtherism gets tricky. In its wildest forms, birtherism is about a massive conspiracy to install a conscious, deliberate enemy of the United States in the White House. It’s nice that Mike Huckabee doesn’t subscribe to that. But in its more plausible, and presumably more popular forms, it’s really just a way of saying that Barack Obama isn’t a “real” American.
Which brings me to the e-mails we’ve been receiving in response to our coverage of Huckabee, which (as you might have noticed) has been on the critical side. Plenty of readers are upset with Huckabee’s comments, to be sure, but I’ve also noticed an unusually large number of virulently anti-Obama e-mails written in Huckabee’s defense. I’ll readily admit that I don’t know any of the people who are sending these individually; for all I know, some or all of them are fake. But I’ve gotten so many expressing the same basic sentiments that I think it’s worth running one in its entirety:
Steve,
Where were you when Obama had to think so hard that it hurt-his-brain when he stated he went to 57 states in his campaign?
You continued supporting Obama and covering up his mistakes because of his skin color.
Because you are white, You are So Racist and bigoted and can’t help it.
So why should you worry when someone thinks Obama was born in Kenya—especially when the Kenyan official government states he was born there.
Instead, Obama claims to be born in the last state to enter the Union, so how could Obama claim 57 states?
Is it because he is stupid?
Since you never brought it up, you must agree with someone that ignorant and stupid.
And why does Indonesia have a school enrollment certificate that categorically states Obama is a Muslim? And why can Obama recite the muslim evening call to prayer from memory if he is a Christian, but he is a member of the “God Damn America” church of the most reverend Wright.
You can deny facts all you want, just like the hide the decline global warmest conspirators but that does not make you right.
Smug maybe, because you like attacking selected people because you are bigoted and racist.
Again, I don’t know the person who sent this to me. Who knows — it could be a mischievous liberal having some fun by assuming the voice of a right-winger. But the points this e-mailer makes are representative of the points that many, many others have expressed to me this week. In that sense, I think this e-mail demonstrates how Huckabee’s comments — even though they didn’t endorse birtherism in any literal sense — encourage the exact kind of attitude that has led a majority of Republicans likely to participate in next year’s primaries to express doubt over whether their president was even born in this country.
Note that the e-mailer didn’t get the part where Huckabee resisted endorsing full-on birtherism. “[W]hy should you worry when someone thinks Obama was born in Kenya?” he/she asks. And note how quick the e-mailer is to latch onto the false equivalency that Huckabee has been promoting since the interview blew up — that he committed a “slip of the tongue” no different from the slip of the tongue Obama committed as a candidate in 2008 when he said he’d visited 57 states. The difference between these episodes, as I noted yesterday, ought to be blindingly obvious.
Not all of the anti-Obama e-mails I received this week were as specific and detailed as this one. But almost all of them seemed to be written with the conviction that the president of the United States is a fundamentally un-/anti-American figure. Yes, the slice of the Republican Party base that actually bothers to send e-mails to Salon writers is very, very small. But the basic feelings expressed to me this week are more widespread. What Huckabee has done is to reinforce those feelings.
By: Steve Kornacki-News Editor, Salon, March 3, 2011
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