“Cranking Up For 2016”: Pledging Allegiance To Charlatans And Cranks
Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, is said to be a rising contender for the Republican presidential nomination. So, on Wednesday, he did what, these days, any ambitious Republican must, and pledged allegiance to charlatans and cranks.
For those unfamiliar with the phrase, “charlatans and cranks” is associated with N. Gregory Mankiw, a professor at Harvard who served for a time as George W. Bush’s chief economic adviser. In the first edition of his best-selling economics textbook, Mr. Mankiw used those words to ridicule “supply-siders” who promised that tax cuts would have such magic effects on the economy that deficits would go down, not up.
But, on Wednesday, Mr. Walker, in what was clearly a rite of passage into serious candidacy, spoke at a dinner at Manhattan’s “21” Club hosted by the three most prominent supply-siders: Art Laffer (he of the curve); Larry Kudlow of CNBC; and Stephen Moore, chief economist of the Heritage Foundation. Politico pointed out that Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, attended a similar event last month. Clearly, to be a Republican contender you have to court the powerful charlatan caucus.
So a doctrine that even Republican economists consider dangerous nonsense has become party orthodoxy. And what makes this political triumph especially remarkable is that it comes just as the doctrine’s high priests have been setting new standards for utter, epic predictive failure.
I’m not talking about the fact that supply-siders didn’t see the crisis coming, although they didn’t. Mr. Moore published a 2004 book titled “Bullish on Bush,” asserting that the Bush agenda was creating a permanently stronger economy. Mr. Kudlow sneered at the “bubbleheads” asserting that inflated home prices were due for a crash. Still, you could argue that few economists of any stripe fully foresaw the coming disaster.
You can’t say the same, however, about postcrisis developments, where the people Mr. Walker was courting have spent years warning about the wrong things. “Get ready for inflation and higher interest rates” was the title of a June 2009 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal by Mr. Laffer; what followed were the lowest inflation in two generations and the lowest interest rates in history. Mr. Kudlow and Mr. Moore both predicted 1970s-style stagflation.
To be fair, Mr. Kudlow and Mr. Laffer eventually admitted that they had been wrong. Neither has, however, given any indication of reconsidering his views, let alone conceding the possibility that the much-hated Keynesians, who have gotten most things right even as the supply-siders were getting everything wrong, might be on to something. Mr. Kudlow describes the failure of runaway inflation to materialize — something he has been predicting since 2008 — as “miraculous.”
Something else worth noting: as befits his position at Heritage, Mr. Moore likes to publish articles filled with lots of numbers. But his numbers are consistently wrong; they’re for the wrong years, or just plain not what the original sources say. And somehow these errors always run in the direction he wants.
So what does it say about the current state of the G.O.P. that discussion of economic policy is now monopolized by people who have been wrong about everything, have learned nothing from the experience, and can’t even get their numbers straight?
The answer, I’d suggest, runs deeper than economic doctrine. Across the board, the modern American right seems to have abandoned the idea that there is an objective reality out there, even if it’s not what your prejudices say should be happening. What are you going to believe, right-wing doctrine or your own lying eyes? These days, the doctrine wins.
Look at another issue, health reform. Before the Affordable Care Act went into effect, conservatives predicted disaster: health costs would soar, the deficit would explode, more people would lose insurance than gain it. They were wrong on all counts. But, in their rhetoric, even in the alleged facts (none of them true) people like Mr. Moore put in their articles, they simply ignore this reality. Reading them, you’d think that the dismal failure they wrongly predicted had actually happened.
Then there’s foreign policy. This week Jeb Bush tried to demonstrate his chops in that area, unveiling his team of expert advisers — who are, sure enough, the very people who insisted that the Iraqis would welcome us as liberators.
And don’t get me started on climate change.
Along with this denial of reality comes an absence of personal accountability. If anything, alleged experts seem to get points by showing that they’re willing to keep saying the same things no matter how embarrassingly wrong they’ve been in the past.
But let’s go back to those economic charlatans and cranks: Clearly, failure has only made them stronger, and now they are political kingmakers. Be very, very afraid.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 20, 2015
“Ignoring Basic Principles Of Government”: Texas Judge’s Immigration Ruling Is Full Of Legal Holes
U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen’s decision to block the Obama plan to defer deportation for about 5 million immigrants here illegally ignores a basic principle of government: For better or worse, the executive branch of government always has discretion as to whether and how to enforce the law.
The judge’s lengthy opinion is wrong as a matter of law and, worse, is based on xenophobia and stereotypes about immigrants. It is very likely to be overturned by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, and, if necessary, the Supreme Court.
Every president must set enforcement priorities on immigration, choosing whom to prosecute or whom to deport. No administration brings prosecutions against all who violate the law. Resources make that impossible, and there are laws on the books that should not be enforced.
Nor has any administration, Democratic or Republican, sought to deport every person who is illegally in the United States. For humanitarian reasons or because of foreign policy considerations or for lack of resources, the government often chooses not to bring deportation actions. In fact, as recently as three years ago, the Supreme Court in United States vs. Arizona recognized that an inherent part of executive control over foreign policy is the ability of the president to choose whether to bring deportation proceedings.
That is exactly what President Obama’s executive orders on immigration have done. He has announced that the federal government will not seek to deport 600,000 young people who were illegally brought to the U.S. as children, or the undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents who have resided in the country for at least five years. Millions of parents would be able to remain with their children because of this order and not need to live every day in fear of deportation.
The judge’s order makes several basic legal mistakes. For example, the law is clear that a federal court has jurisdiction to hear a matter only if the federal court’s decision would solve the problem. If the court’s decision would have no effect, it would be nothing but an advisory opinion, which is prohibited by the Constitution. Thus, the Supreme Court long has held that a party has standing to sue in federal court only if a favorable decision would “redress” its injury.
The lawsuit in Hanen’s court was brought by state governments that object to the Obama orders, claiming injury by the presence of immigrants here illegally. But the federal government deports only about 400,000 such immigrants a year. It is entirely speculative that stopping the executive orders would have any effect on the states that brought the suit. In fact, it is unclear what the judge’s order will mean. He cannot force the Department of Homeland Security to deport anyone.
The central argument in Hanen’s ruling is that the executive branch must promulgate a formal rule to defer deportation of these individuals. But the federal government constantly sets enforcement priorities without a formal rule. The Justice Department’s policies to not prosecute possession of small amounts of marijuana or credit card fraud below a designated dollar level, for example, were not adopted by formal rules.
In fact, recent presidents, including Republican ones, have deferred deportations without formal rules. In 1987, in response to political turmoil in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the Reagan administration took executive action to stop deportations for 200,000 Nicaraguan exiles. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush, post-Tiananmen, stopped deportations of Chinese students. He kept hundreds of Kuwaiti citizens who were illegally in the United States from being deported after Saddam Hussein invaded their nation. In 2001, President George W. Bush limited deportation of Salvadoran citizens at the request of El Salvador’s president, and ordered that deportation decisions include consideration of factors such as whether a mother was nursing or whether the person in question was a U.S. military veteran.
Judge Hanen, appointed to the federal bench by George W. Bush, has the reputation of being especially conservative on immigration issues. That tone underlies his opinion, especially as he spoke of immigrants being “terrorists” and “criminals.” What he misses, though, is that the point of Obama’s executive orders was to set enforcement priorities to focus deportations on terrorists and criminals and not on breaking up families.
It is not surprising that a conservative Republican judge would try to stop the Obama immigration policy. But it is just the first word and one unlikely to be sustained on appeal.
By: Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the UC Irvine School of Law; Samuel Kleiner, a Fellow at the Yale Law Information Society Project; The Los Angeles Times; The National Memo, february 20, 2015
“A Quintessentially American Experience”: Black History Is More Than Just One Month
Is it already that time of year?
It must be: Black lecturers are busy on the speaking circuit; black authors have been pushed to the front shelves of bookstores; schoolteachers, black, white and brown, are teaching their charges how George Washington Carver, ah, invented the peanut.
It’s Black History Month, that annual tribute to the accomplishments of black Americans, whose ingenuity, perseverance, creativity and fortitude made America what it is today. But there is a problem with the yearly observance: It manages to make black history seem a thing apart, a separate reality, a slender appendix to the encyclopedia of American history.
It isn’t. Black history is American history — baked and bricked into the nation’s foundations. And that’s how it ought to be taught, right in the same volumes as the Boston Tea Party, the settling of the Old West, the defeat of the Nazis. Black Americans were part of each of those monumental chapters, as well as countless less-celebrated episodes.
It’s time to retire the annual celebration, as outdated now as rotary phones, segregated drinking fountains, and the term “Negro.” Ask yourself this: Will the current occupant of the White House — president of all of the United States, not merely of its black citizens — be celebrated only in February?
Carter Woodson, a black historian, started Negro History Week in 1926, when racism was still raw, public accommodations segregated and the Ku Klux Klan a powerhouse. The notion that black Americans were intellectually inferior and that they should be assigned a second- (or third- or fourth-) class status was taken for granted by most whites, including the leadership classes.
Woodson saw that black contributions to American history “were overlooked, ignored, and even suppressed by the writers of history textbooks and the teachers who use them.” He began a systematic study of black history and chose a week in February to commemorate it — timed to honor the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln, Feb. 12, and famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Feb. 14.
Happily, much has changed since then. Monuments stand to honor the accomplishments of black Americans, from the Buffalo Soldiers who served in segregated cavalry units after the Civil War, to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who became the first black American to be commemorated on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Movies celebrate the bravery of the Tuskegee Airmen, who persevered at a time when most whites didn’t believe black men were capable of becoming fighter pilots. There is even a Smithsonian-run National Museum of African-American History and Culture, designed to “educate generations to come,” under construction on the National Mall.
(Yes, there is irony in the notion of a separate black history museum. But founding director Lonnie Bunch has promised that it will allow visitors to delve “deeply into the African-American experience and understand that … it is a quintessentially American experience.”)
Many black Americans would argue that Black History Month is still necessary in a land where racism, though waning, continues to exert a peculiar power. There are its blatant manifestations, evident in police brutality and in prison populations. Then there are its more subtle signs, such as research into hiring practices that shows applicants with “black” names are less likely to get jobs, regardless of their stellar résumés.
Moreover, the dominant culture remains reluctant to acknowledge the essential Americanness of its black members. We remain exotic, the other, ethnics. A vocal minority of white citizens continues to insist that President Obama is illegitimate, a foreign-born usurper. The “girl next door” is blonde; the superhero is blue-eyed.
Unfortunately, though, Black History Month merely reinforces that fundamental bias. The one-month observation — ironically, the shortest month of the year — keeps our history away from mainstream history. Instead, it should be included in every history text, taught in every history class, commemorated in every history museum — from maritime to martial, from agricultural to architectural.
The story of America is accurately told only when the stories of black Americans are included in every month of the year.
By: Cynthia Tucker, a Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary, 2007; The National Memo, February 21, 2015
“Just Differing Species Of The Same Family”: ISIS And American Conservatives; If It Looks Like A Duck And Quacks Like A Duck…
Look who just banned teaching evolution in schools:
The extremist-held Iraqi city of Mosul is set to usher in a new school year. But unlike years past, there will be no art or music. Classes about history, literature and Christianity have been “permanently annulled.”The Islamic State group has declared patriotic songs blasphemous and ordered that certain pictures be torn out of textbooks.
But instead of compliance, Iraq’s second largest city has — at least so far — responded to the Sunni militants’ demands with silence. Although the extremists stipulated that the school year would begin Sept. 9, pupils have uniformly not shown up for class, according to residents who spoke anonymously because of safety concerns. They said families were keeping their children home out of mixed feelings of fear, resistance and uncertainty.
I know we’re not supposed to say this out loud because it’s so outrageous to suggest that ISIS and American conservatives might have anything in common. And obviously the level of outrageous and murderous violence perpetrated by ISIS has no parallel in the American political system–but that’s also because of the secular counterweight of civil society and constitutional democracy. Culturally, there are a lot of striking similarities between the conservative reactionary ethos in both the western and the Islamic worlds.
Hate evolution? check.
Hate sexually liberated and empowered women? Check.
Love guns and hate gays? Check.
Hate big liberal government? Check.
Believe that society should be organized according to religious principles and that secular people should have no right to curtail religious “freedom”? Check.
Want to empower down-home rural principles against those corrupt city bubble dwellers? Check.
Believe in eye-for-an-eye retributive justice? Check.
Love to sport big Duck Dynasty-style beards? Check.
Just how much quacking do we need to see here before we acknowledge they’re just differing species of the same family of ducks?
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, February 22, 2015
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