global food crisis

Aid is not enough to address food price crisis, says Oxfam

World leaders at a UN meeting in Switzerland must go beyond immediate aid to address the root causes of the global food price crisis, said international agency Oxfam today.

"Aid is urgently needed to address the immediate threat to poor people posed by higher food prices but money is not enough. World leaders must take this opportunity to address structural problems such as under-investment in agriculture and unfair trade rules, which are exacerbating the problem," said Celine Charveriat, Oxfam International's Deputy Advocacy Director.
Among those attending the two-day meeting called by UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon, are World Bank president Robert Zoellick and WTO Director General Pascal Lamy, along with the heads of 20 other agencies. Oxfam is calling on them to consider long-term, structural solutions to the crisis and to see it as an opportunity for reform.

High on Oxfam's list of recommendations is an end to current biofuels mandates in rich countries, widely recognized as fuelling price rises and speculation. Experts have predicted that biofuels targets may result in an extra 600m people being hungry by 2025.

Charveriat: "Biofuels are not only a major cause of increasing prices but are also linked to labour rights abuses and land grabs in developing countries. Furthermore, research suggests they may make climate change worse. In this context it is absolute madness to have mandatory targets."

Oxfam also accused rich countries and global institutions of hypocrisy for criticizing poor countries' policy responses, while failing to acknowledge their own culpability.

Charveriat: "The EU, US, and World Bank have criticized developing countries for imposing export bans but they have largely failed to point the finger at themselves. Decades of trade liberalization and dumping have increased poor countries' dependency on food imports and vulnerability to shocks. Export bans may well not be the ideal response, but without coordinated global support they are among the only options poor countries have."

Oxfam is calling for fairer trade rules and increased investment in agriculture in developing countries, focused on small-scale producers and women. Donors should provide support for this and help fund safety nets and social protection schemes for the most vulnerable people.

Oxfam warned that increasingly erratic weather caused in part by climate change would cause further disruption in world food production and undermine poverty reduction in the future, unless dramatic and immediate action was taken.

Charveriat: "Rich countries must step up to the plate on climate change by increasing funding for adaptation and taking immediate action to mitigate against further warming. Now is also the perfect time to reform the global food aid system, which is inefficient and has created dependency in many countries."

seems to be useful for others academics as well.... (turned into a blogging ethics post)

Collected Advice for the Young Economists

update: I just wondered to myself if I need to hat-tip to the big boys... every time I pick up a good link from a Dean Baker or Brad Delong do I need to tell you? I tend to link/quote from their site... but everyonce in a while I get sent to another site (3rd site) and you don't know how I found it.

In this situation it came from Delong. Is hat-tip needed in inverse outsourcing? If I did would my readers stay away from my blog once they learn they can go to the direct source. Is this like illegal copies of a movie or new cd?

I want people to use my blog as a tool to save them time. If I hat tip to the bloggers that I use and learn from. I might lose what little audience I have. Do market principles say I don't need to hat-tip? I'm not claiming I wrote it... and if asked I'd tell you where I found--academic and intellectual honesty is not what I'm about.

But I don't know...

Any thoughts???

Dennett: Can we know our own minds?

Here is our recent local press release in Henry County....

Westmoreland says "No" to business innovation

Start-up businesses in the 3rd Congressional District would have a tougher time bringing their ideas to market, if Rep. Lynn Westmoreland had his way.
04/29/08



For Immediate Release: April 29, 2008

Contact: Jim Nichols
770-312-6736
Jim.Nichols@gmail.com

Westmoreland says "no" to business innovation

Local Congressman opposes small business investment

Start-up businesses in the 3rd Congressional District would have a tougher time bringing their ideas to market, if Rep. Lynn Westmoreland had his way. The Republican from Sharpsburg was one of only 43 House members to vote against H.R. 5819,reauthorizing the Small Business and Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer program. The programs provide assistance and funding for small businesses to help them with research and development. Over the five-year span of the reauthorization, the investment in small businesses would cost about $0.17 per capita.

"Independent business is the backbone of the American economy," said Jim Nichols, Chair of the Henry County Democratic Party. "We should be doing more to help small businesses grow into prosperous ventures, not less. Congressman Westmoreland's vote harms entrepreneurs and hinders bipartisanship."

H.R. 5819 passed the House with a overwhelming bipartisan majority of 368 votes.

"People in Henry County are tired of representation that puts politics before prosperity," Nichols said. "We're ready for a Congressman who is pro-economy, and committed to working across party lines, when necessary, for the good of our economy."

http://campaignwindow.com/HenryCountyDems/blog/index.cfm?Fuseaction=ViewBlog&BlogTopicID=3492

www.henrydems.org

on Chavez and condemnation...

Civil liberties have been generally protected, even the harshest critics who are at all serious concede Some of the harshest criticism in the West concerns the government's refusal to renew the license of RCTV (which now broadcasts only on cable). I agreed that it was wrong. I also agreed with Western commentary that "it couldn't happen here." For very good reasons. It couldn't happen here because if there had been a military coup in the US that overthrew the government, disbanded Congress and the Supreme Court and every other democratic institution, and then was reversed by a popular uprising, and if CBS, say, had publicly supported the coup and gros sly distorted what was happening so as to facilitate it, then CBS wouldn't have had its license revoked 5 years later. Rather, the owners and managers would have long ago been in prison or probably would have received the death sentence. It's fair to criticize violations of rights by an official enemy, but there should be some limits on hypocrisy.

good point

I'm not very happy right now...

political pander

update: oh... my bad, did not catch her tax on oil company profits; this is like Obama/Hillary health care distinction both go for same thing in a different route. Some like the ad-hoc patch work method; others don't.... that in the end has to be a personal preference

Still prefer Obama's method personally...

What are the labor issues involved in this?

Industries urged to train, use workers in Georgia state prisons

Commissioner Donald said a company taking part in the Prison Industry Enhancement Programs would be required to pay wages to prison workers and pledge that the prison workers will not take away jobs from outside employees.

Inmates would earn about 52 cents on the dollar of their wages, Commissioner Donald said. The remainder of the inmate’s paychecks would go toward taxes, room and board and victim’s compensation.

For industries, the benefits would be many, he said. Among them are tax incentives for participation, no requirement to provide workers with costly health insurance or pension or retirement plans, and reduced costs related to a work force with no required vacation, family leave or sick pay.

Bill Jourdain, chairman of the Dalton/Whitfield County Chamber of Commerce board of directors, said, “It presents a golden opportunity for businesses. Businesses are always interested in saving money and cutting costs, and this accomplishes that.”

Georgia already has a corrections industry program, in which state prisoners make everything from eye glasses to filing cabinets for state government. Prisoners also farm on 23,000 acres in the state.

The Prison Industry Enhancement Program will allow prisoner-made made products to be sold in the free market.

The program was created by Congress in 1979 and is active in about 40 states, including Tennessee.

Commissioner Donald said a main goal of the program is to improve Georgia’s recidivism rate. He said 65 percent of inmates in Georgia’s state prisons are repeat offenders.

The Georgia prison system is the nation’s fifth largest with a population of about 60,000, officials said.

State Rep. Jay Neal, R-LaFayette, said that population size makes it crucial to lower the $50-a-day cost to incarcerate convicted felons. He said that starts with changing the public’s perception of prisoners.

“We need to understand the difference between the ones we are mad at and the ones we are afraid of,” Rep. Neal said. “The ones we are just mad at … we need to look for ways to get them involved, whether it’s working at chicken houses in South Georgia, or whatever, so they are bringing in some income to offset the expenses we have, plus are able to take care of their children and their fines and restitution.”

Paul Tipton, branch manager of Quality Staffing in Dalton, Ga., said prisoners and ex-cons make good workers. He said there are prisoners leaving the system with master’s degrees.

“If you looked at that degree and that résumé, and you excluded the fact they were in prison, you would think you would have to pay them $60,000 or $80,000 a year,” Mr. Tipton said. “However, if they’ve been in the prison system and they know someone is giving them a second chance to be established, they will work for a lot less.”

Bob Barr quote

"They have this sort of idea in their minds, bless their hearts, that nobody should do anything to upset the Republican nominee. This notion that the political world swirls around two galaxies only, Republican and Democrat only, and anybody else who enters that fray is going to affect the other two and that's bad —- that's a very myopic notion." --Bob Barr **

Soros quote

In human affairs, as distinguished from natural science, I argue that our understanding is imperfect. And our imperfect understanding introduces an element of uncertainty that's not there in natural phenomena. So therefore you can't predict human affairs in the same way as you can natural phenomena. And we have to come to terms with the implication of our own misunderstandings, that it's very hard to make decisions when you know you may be wrong. You have to learn to recognize that we in fact may be wrong. And, even worse than that, it's almost inevitable that all of our constructs will have some kind of a flaw in them. So when it comes to currencies, no currency system is perfect.

So you have to recognize that all of our constructions are imperfect. We have to improve them. But just because something is imperfect, the opposite is not perfect. So because of the failures of socialism, communism, we have come to believe in market fundamentalism, that markets are perfect; everything will be taken care of by markets. And markets are not perfect. And this time we have to recognize that, because we are facing a very serious economic disruption.

Now, we should not go back to a very highly regulated economy because the regulators are imperfect. They're only human and what is worse, they are bureaucratic. So you have to find the right kind of balance between allowing the markets to do their work, while recognizing that they are imperfect. You need authorities that keep the market under scrutiny and some degree of control. That's the message that I'm trying to get across. --George Soros *

Economics...

One of the things I oberserved working as a legislative aide this session was the lack of economic understanding--across the board from both Democrats and Republicans. This is concerning to me since having a strong economy is about a fundamental as it gets to what government should focus on.

I was studying for my economics class today and I came across this statement...

The measure that economists really care about is not money but people's happiness or welfare.

I was caught off gaurd because I realized that a lot of the focus in the media is on money.

Much of the Republican parties message and agenda is on money ("money in your pocket", "its your money"...) and it has always seemed off putting. Now I have a better frame of reference. Money isn't the issue, the issue is people's welfare and happines. When money is the focus the bigger picture is missed. This either speaks to a misconception of what economics is all about or an attempt to get off the subject of citizens quality of life; i'm not sure which.. or maybe its a little of both depending on the situation.

I also think part of this is in the media not doing its job.

Confederate Day?

From time to time I forget i'm in GA...

I had never heard of this...

http://www.cviog.uga.edu/Projects/gainfo/confmem.htm

I personally feel this slightly disturbing

Rev. Wright doesn't seem as outlandish now...

Having failed to capture Osama Bin Ladin they turn to other hobgoblins in hopes that we forget...

Republicans are putting a heavy focus on Race and flag-pin politics...

Good quote in the NYT's today:

“Republicans have lost their credibility on the issues they want to scare people on, like national security, so they will try a different strategy.” Chris Van Hollen Chair of DCCC

Osama Bin Ladin is still on the loose so they want us to forget it was on their watch. Hobgoblins are always the best distraction...

92 reasons to oppose the Fair Tax...

Actually since there were 105,480,101 households in America in 2000 there are actually--by my calculations--about 97,041,692 reasons (or should I say households) to oppose the Fair Tax; or any sort of consumption tax.

Don't follow what I mean? I know, unfortunately at least a few supporters of the Fair Tax probably hope you don't.  I'll turn to the tax policy center and their online issue brief: National Retail Sales Tax: Who would bear the burden?

Under a national retail sales tax, the wealthiest households in the country would receive stunningly large tax cuts. Households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution have an average income of about $475,000. Their average tax cut would be $79,000, or more than the incomes of all but about 8 percent of households. Put another way, the roughly 1.1 million taxpayers in this top 1 percent would save a total of $87 billion on their taxes each year. This cut would be financed by tax increases on the bottom 92 percent of households. Households with income between $5,000 and $50,000 would face an average tax increase of over $1,000.

If someone turns to you and asks why you don't want the Fair Tax... "cause like its Fair" and "who would be against that."  Just smile and respectfully say...

"Speaking as just one of the 92% of us in this country who would actually get a tax hike from it... I'd have to say no its not, and no it wouldn't be."

Quote

"For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria."

--Richard Dawkins

"Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not." --Isaiah Berlin

online review on Philosophy of psychology...

Review - Brain, Mind, and Human Behavior in Contemporary Cognitive Science

Both scientists and philosophers have a strong interest in understanding how it is that a brain, apparently made up of simple matter, has (seemingly) evolved to know and experience the world in which it exists. This issue has of course been a mainstay of philosophy throughout recorded history, but are we any closer to a satisfying approach? With the marvelous progress in the cognitive and neurological sciences in the past few decades, the relationship between mind and brain would seem a practical problem that may soon be unraveled.

background on Israeli-Palestinian Crisis

Council on Foregin Relations releases Interactive Guide on Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

CFR.org Launches Web's Most Authoritative, Interactive Guide on the Israeli-Palestinian Crisis
CFR.org Interactive Guide on the Israeli-Palestinian Crisis
CFR has produced a new online multimedia feature, Crisis Guide: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Using a comprehensive array of audio, video, imagery, and text, the guide offers an in-depth look at the history of the conflict and its geopolitical repercussions. The guide, narrated by veteran journalist Michael Goldfarb, includes:

A historical video overview of the conflict
A timeline of the complex and often contested history of the conflict
An interactive map illustrating the territorial disputes central to the conflict, written and narrated by CFR Fellow Steven A. Cook
A survey of diplomatic efforts throughout the decades aimed at settlement of the dispute, including audio analysis by Daniel C. Kurtzer, a Princeton scholar of Mideast studies and former U.S. ambassador to Egypt and Israel
A chapter summarizing the roles and interests of parties to the conflict, including Israel and the Palestinian Authority, countries (including the United States, Egypt, and Britain), diplomatic actors (including the United Nations and the Arab League), as well as other non-state actors (including Hamas and Fatah)
A chapter offering links to more than thirty documents and treaties, as well as maps, timelines, and further research and analysis from CFR and other institutions

on the expiration of the tax-cuts

Bruce Bartlett formerly of the Bush Treasury Department was recently in the LA times talking about the expiration of the Bush tax cut.

Bartlett is very much in the guise of Esienhower/Rockafeller Republicans of old. I guess they are called Schwarzenegger Republicans now. They put major focus on quality fiscal stregth and market fundamentals, steady and diplomatic in foriegh policy. Are willing to roll up their sleeves and compromise to govern (which is what they are in the buisness of doing). I like the type even when I don't always agree with them.

All economists know that permanent tax changes have far more effect than temporary ones because people won't change their behavior significantly unless they have some assurance that the tax regime will be in effect for the long term. Businesses and individuals often make economic decisions that won't pay off for many years. If they think the tax system will be more unfavorable when the payoff comes, they will act differently, favoring smaller, short-term gains and rejecting opportunities for higher profits in the future.

There is little doubt that the economy would have been stronger with permanent tax cuts. But that would have meant fewer tax cuts and thus fewer opportunities to buy votes. It also would have forced Republicans to deal with the true budgetary consequences of their actions.

The reality is that we are not going to see the biggest tax increase in history in 2011 because neither Congress nor the White House will allow it to happen, regardless of which party is in control. The choice is not between full extension of all the Bush tax cuts or a massive tax increase, but between extension of the Bush tax cuts and some other sort of tax cuts that would keep the tax burden from rising on the vast majority of taxpayers.

Tax policy is an important campaign issue, and it would be good to get agreement on the post-2010 tax code as soon as possible. Current law makes it impossible to plan for the future with regard to taxes. Whatever is done should be done permanently to the greatest extent possible.

I'm sure everyone by now knows my position. We need to get back to the economy that FDR created for the "Greatest Generation"--my parents generation benefited enormously from it and now want my generation and future generations to not get the same empowerment and protection that they received.

* Going back to the tax code of the mid-90's economy before the bush tax cuts.

* On top of that modest middle income tax cuts--because they create market incentives to spend and invest in important social infrastructure (i.e. buying houses, paying for kids to go to college, modest vacations).

* Simplification of the tax code.

* Increase in capital gains tax (it creates less incentive to "play the market"--which can destabilize the long term health of the economy since nobody can properly judge the value of capital and commodities--because people are trying to get an easy buck without work. There should be a general rule if you aren't rolling up your sleeves and sweating you probably don't deserve ENORMOUS returns (by the by there are many financial experts who do roll up their sleeves and work on making sound financial investment--Warren Buffet, George Soros come to mind... )

* Some form of Universal health care--we can't expect to compete with the rest of the industrialized world if we are the only one of them to not have some kind of universal health care coverage. Plus we pay two to three times as much than all of those countries for worse results--why else did we rank 37th in the world according to the World Health Organization.

* pass Republican Chuck Hegal and Democrat Jim Webb's "New G.I. Bill" that brings the benifits back to the levels the Greatest Generation received.

* begin budgeting for the 40% of our soldiers who will require long term mental and physical care. Bush's failure to include this in his budgets is probably the single greatest failing of his administration.


With Osama Bin Ladin still on the loose,an over extended military, and growing economic inequality we are harming our economic engine and long term fiscal health at a time when China and India are exploding. If we want to remain a global power and influence the world we better get on board with some sound economic policies. Some of the moves the European Union have made in the past two decades may be wise to consider--they won't all work for our circumstances but we should look into them. We have to bite the bullet and move past feel good economics and get serious. Somewhere along the road we have gone off coarse. I don't know about you, but I'm ready to change that...

Thoughts on Hamas and Carter...

Wherever you stand on the issue... the conflict over Palestine and the Palestinian people that has been going on since the British years ago is a horrible page in history.

When I heard the NPR story about Carter going to speak with Hamas I couldn't help but feel proud to be a citizen whose leaders will work to solve the problems of this world--for 8 years we've seen the opposite.

As long as you accept the teachings of Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.. You can never turn away from a place for dialogue and communication no matter how bad the difference are. Resistance and action against violence and coercion--always. But rejection of dialogue means the terrorists win, the violence wins, our biologic/genetic ancestry wins out over man's potential for humanity.

Here is a Billy Bragg song on a tragic glimpse of the every day violence that the civiians on all sides have to face every single day... only this time through the eyes of American who stood up for peaceful resistance and civil disobeience. We have a marvolous history of many who have stood for this prinicple of non-violent resistance.

I cry every time I watch it.

Political pandering... or negative hyperbole?

My dad pointed out that the by-line(?) of our recent press release on McCain's gas-tax holiday for the Henry County Democratic party was a possibly antagonistic.

Jim Nichols, Chair of the Democratic Party in Henry County, responded today to John McCain's political pandering in a recent economic speech by the Republican nominee. In the speech, McCain called for a gas tax holiday.

For more on the issue you can go to a post I did on the Henry County Democrats site.

My dads comments were

The opening sentence of the Release referred to John McCain's "political pandering". Right off the bat that puts off those that may not yet have formed an opinion on McCain - whether they be Dems or Repubs. To me, use of that phrase - outside of your quote - immediately discounts the rest of the Release - it's clearly one-sided and shrill. Can I really glean anything useful from it? (that's my reaction).


I think it's more powerful for that phrase to be in your quote. Something like: "This is simply political pandering by John McCain" That's legit for you to say that - but not for the text of the release to say that. The text of the Release should set you up, in a neutral way - not do your work.


For what it's worth...

Part of me thinks he is probably right. I intended to point out that it is a questionable policy move, be a very astute political move. My point was that it won't help the market fundmentals. The goals should be to lower gas prices.

And while people like the idea of lowering their taxation for understandable reasons the impacts of lost revenue that would be going into fixing roads and other infrastucture needs seems like a higher social priority; espcially when most economists feel that since supply is fixed (oil producers claim they are churning out the product as quickly as they can) the only possible change in the price can come from demand going down.

The likelyhood of demand going down during the summer when people go on vacation and travel of lot seems a bit far-fetched. Are people going to walk their kids to summer camp?

So maybe I ought to start saying "putting votes before good policy," or "prioritizing votes before market fundamentals."? Nothing seems to roll off the tongue very well.

here is some stuff I found on political pandering...

definition of pander --

Pronunciation: \ˈpan-dər\
Function: intransitive verb Date: 1523
: to act as a pander; especially : to provide gratification for others' desires

Economist Russ Roberts speech on Political pandering


Economist Arnold Kling on the economics blog Econlog post in response to Roberts speech

What Roberts calls pandering, I call fear-mongering. I think that both parties do it. For those of us who believe in free markets, I believe that the Republican exaggerate not only their own commitment to free markets but also the extent to which Democrats threaten free markets.

I think that stem-cell research and Global Warming both are issues that are heavy on pandering and fear-mongering. The Bush Administration has not outlawed stem-cell research. It has only stopped Federal government funding for certain types of stem-cell research. On the other hand allowing embryonic stem-cell research would not mean the end of respect for human life.

On Global Warming, the main thing that believers do is get angry with skeptics. What sort of legislation are we seeing proposed? Anyone? Bueller?

On health care, the Left is excited about single-payer health care, and the Right fears single-payer health care. Again, where are the specific proposals for single-payer health care in terms of legislation or the platforms of leading Presidential candidates?

A reasonable theory of modern politics is that it is all melodrama. People take government less and less seriously, which makes politicians shout louder and louder to get our attention. Whenever a story breaks in the media, whether it be Terry Schiavo or the Virginia Tech killings, politicians rush to get in front of the camera to take advantage of it. That, I would suggest, is a sign of their desperation.

John McCain's Tax Pandering on economics by Kevin Drum

Now that's a shocking development, isn't it? A Republican presidential candidate prating endlessly about helping the regular guy and then offering up a tax plan that even Donald Trump would be embarrassed to ask for directly. The only thing missing was the usual sad song about some mythical Midwest striver who had to sell the family farm to pay his "death taxes."

But at least someone is noticing the two-face act this time around — though that's mostly because McCain is turning out to be unusually clumsy at this kind of stuff. In an odd way, this almost speaks well for him. The pandering he's doing is so plain and so odious that I suspect he's having a hard time making it sound like he really believes this stuff. George Bush never had that difficulty.

please feel free to comment... I'm not sure where I'm at on my Dad's point.

Contending Conservatives the right way....

In my recent post DFA Training Works I said something that still sits with me as not quite accurate and fair.

Conservatives don’t care if the lady down the street has health care or not. Conservatives don’t care if our economy doesn’t work for working people. Conservatives want us to stay demoralized, sitting all alone in our houses, angry at the world. Conservatives want to tell people it’s a dog eat dog world, that people can’t trust the government. Every time we show up we challenge those conceptions to the very core of its vacuousness.

I can't really decide if I said it wrong, should have used other words, or kept it out all together. I know a number of Conservatives who do care about health care, about poverty, about all the things I speak about. They just disagree with me on the methods and approaches. I feel that they haven't looked very closely at the evidence and policy ideas surrounding those issues. And I feel they do not put up a great deal of effort in responding to my questions and challenges, aside from putting trust in Conservative leaders on TV and the radio.

I quite often feel angry at the lack of personal effort to back up ideas they passionately hold; past the creative talking points coming out of the media. But still I do meet conservatives who do care. I know they care because I see them worry how they are going to pay their bills, afford health care, save for retirement. And it probably offends them when I go strutting around my Liberal Friends saying they don't.

This morning on my walk, with the dog wandering back and forth and the moon hanging just above the trees I was thinking about something I saw at the King Center yesterday.

It was a quote from one of the video's on the civil rights protesters rules of behavior. It said you must always be respectful, stay calm, look forward, do not respond, do as directed by the group leader. He then went on to say the reason... "we aren't fighting our neighbors... we're fighting for equal rights..."

That kept sticking with me all day yesterday and this morning. As Chairman of the Henry County Democrats I have to focus a lot of economic and social frustration. I know personally as a human rights activist it is mind-boggling that my country and my president is now the focus of much of my human rights focus. It is almost unreal. So many times people want to vent... I do it myself.

The question is what are we fighting for?

I'm fighting for everyone in this country to have health care. I'm fighting for decent wages, education, and opportunity for all Americans. I'm not fighting my neighbor. And it would be wise on my part not to waste time using words and condescending phrases that might not allow them to hear the issues, statistics, and arguments I use to address and change those problems.

I think if I could go back I might say something to the effect of: Conservatives put a higher priority on personal choices than on making sure we all have health care. Personally I'm will to sacrifice a little so that others won't have to suffer. Conservatives put a greater value on personal wealth, and personal hard work paying off, over the strength and welfare of our economy as a whole. They see us as individuals, Liberals see us a complex social group.

That might help me not make it "me against my neighbor" and turn it into "me advocating for my neighbor. All of them to be exact."

Obama and many Democrats a little off on the working class...

Professor Larry Bartels points out that the "bitter" perception is a little less than accurate when you look at the numbers... Who's Bitter Now?

Last week in Terre Haute, Ind., Mr. Obama explained that the people he had in mind “don’t vote on economic issues, because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them.” He added: “So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington.”

This is a remarkably detailed and vivid account of the political sociology of the American electorate. What is even more remarkable is that it is wrong on virtually every count.

Small-town people of modest means and limited education are not fixated on cultural issues. Rather, it is affluent, college-educated people living in cities and suburbs who are most exercised by guns and religion. In contemporary American politics, social issues are the opiate of the elites.

For the sake of concreteness, let’s define the people Mr. Obama had in mind as people whose family incomes are less than $60,000 (an amount that divides the electorate roughly in half), who do not have college degrees and who live in small towns or rural areas. For the sake of convenience, let’s call these people the small-town working class, though that term is inevitably imprecise. In 2004, they were about 18 percent of the population and about 16 percent of voters.

For purposes of comparison, consider the people who are their demographic opposites: people whose family incomes are $60,000 or more, who are college graduates and who live in cities or suburbs. These (again, conveniently labeled) cosmopolitan voters were about 11 percent of the population in 2004 and about 13 percent of voters. While admittedly crude, these definitions provide a systematic basis for assessing the accuracy of Mr. Obama’s view of contemporary class politics.

Small-town, working-class people are more likely than their cosmopolitan counterparts, not less, to say they trust the government to do what’s right. In the 2004 National Election Study conducted by the University of Michigan, 54 percent of these people said that the government in Washington can be trusted to do what is right most of the time or just about always. Only 38 percent of cosmopolitan people expressed a similar level of trust in the federal government.

Do small-town, working-class voters cast ballots on the basis of social issues? Yes, but less than other voters do. Among these voters, those who are anti-abortion were only 6 percentage points more likely than those who favor abortion rights to vote for President Bush in 2004. The corresponding difference for the rest of the electorate was 27 points, and for cosmopolitan voters it was a remarkable 58 points. Similarly, the votes cast by the cosmopolitan crowd in 2004 were much more likely to reflect voters’ positions on gun control and gay marriage.

Small-town, working-class voters were also less likely to connect religion and politics. Support for President Bush was only 5 percentage points higher among the 39 percent of small-town voters who said they attended religious services every week or almost every week than among those who seldom or never attended religious services. The corresponding difference among cosmopolitan voters (34 percent of whom said they attended religious services regularly) was 29 percentage points.

It is true that American voters attach significantly more weight to social issues than they did 20 years ago. It is also true that church attendance has become a stronger predictor of voting behavior. But both of those changes are concentrated primarily among people who are affluent and well educated, not among the working class.

Mr. Obama’s comments are supposed to be significant because of the popular perception that rural, working-class voters have abandoned the Democratic Party in recent decades and that the only way for Democrats to win them back is to cater to their cultural concerns. The reality is that John Kerry received a slender plurality of their votes in 2004, while John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, in the close elections of 1960 and 1968, lost them narrowly.

Reinhold Niebuhr quote...

I've been reading the German Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man Immoral Society, this past week and wanted to post on it. I'll focus on the opening quote:

[A] sharp distinction must be drawn between the moral and social behavior of individuals and of social groups, national, racial, and economic; and that this distinction justifies and necessitates political policies which a purely individualistic ethic must always find embarrassing..."

This is something progressive understand intuitively. I think this is part of the reasons Conservatives struggle with economic policies that will work for people in a highly complex global market. Pull yourself up by your boot straps doesn't work no matter how warm and fuzzy people feel about it. This is probably a good challenge to ponder for progressives. How better to reach out to voters explaining complex policy in a way that is neither pejorative nor condescending...

DFA Training works...

Crossposted: http://www.blogforamerica.com/view/25011


Before the run-up to the war I was working as an organizer for Amnesty International an international human rights group. As the push towards war began I actively helped organize the Anti-War efforts on my campus. We did all we could to raise awareness, organize, and stop the Bush machine from using fear to get what they wanted.

When the war happened. I was crushed. This too was one more example of the Democrats failing ME. The Democrats failed ME. They are useless and not worth promoting. It was angry, it was defeatist, it was depression; and it was all about ME. And how the Democratic party had failed ME.

At some point something changed. As the numbers of U.S. soldiers who had died or been wounded started rising, as the Iraqi civilian deaths started imploding, as we became occupiers, and the Middle East was inflamed I started to snap out of it. At some point I looked in the mirror and realized that maybe the Democratic party didn’t fail me? Maybe I failed the Democratic Party? When was the last time I went to a local meeting? When was the last time I phone banked or canvassed? When did I work to make sure that those who would rise to the top would be the kind of people capable of taking on the conservatives without triangulating everything away. When did I work to organize within one of the two parties. In a two party system the lesser of two evils is all you got.

Our founding fathers were both cunning and clever. The mechanisms that defended our Republic from authoritarians were brilliant moves, the mechanisms that harmed slaves, women, and men who didn’t own property were horrendous bigotries of their day and age. But many brave people worked hard to organize and fight against the injustices of their day. Many things have improved, many haven't. It is now my time–our time, and we must do our part to fight the injustices before us.

To skip two steps and jump straight into Utopia is dangerous and defeating. To roll up our sleeves and work to build alliances that will stop conservatives whose goal is to "starve the beast" is vital and necessary. Conservatives don’t care if the lady down the street has health care or not. Conservatives don’t care if our economy doesn’t work for working people. Conservatives want us to stay demoralized, sitting all alone in our houses, angry at the world. Conservatives want to tell people it’s a dog eat dog world, that people can’t trust the government. Every time we show up we challenge those conceptions to the very core of its vacuousness.

Conservatives win if we don’t turn our anger into action, the sadness into wisdom, the hopelessness into determination. We have to look in the mirror and take some responsibility for our political process. Members of DFA know that. Many members of DFA new that years ago... long before I stopped banging my spoon on my high-chair. But at somepoint after the Iraq War started I finally got it.

Not to long after that I went to one of the Democracy for America campaign training’s because I thought highly of a local DFA activists as well as Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign. The next month I went to my very first local Democratic county party meeting–I walked out the door with a mandate to start building an activist base of Democrats who wanted to knock on doors and make phone calls. I jumped into a special election in a neighboring county and helped organize and run the GOTV plan in a heavily conservative district. That county had never seen an actual GOTV plan from a Democratic candidate.

We came in 3rd far behind the better funded Republicans but we walked away with a sense of ownership and a feeling that this was a new day for that Counties Democratic Party. It was a message loud and clear that we weren’t going to sit back quietly. We were going to stand for something. And we were going to make damn sure that everyone knew we were against the recklessness and intolerance of the conservatives.

I now sit here having some how become the Chairman of my county party. We have an energized group of local democrats who are excited to start the process of learning how to walk like a party, talk like a party, and be a party. We will be training ourselves on how to phone bank. We will be training ourselves on how to knock on doors, GOTV, and fight the conservatives tooth and nail on the ground.

DFA helped me learn what I needed to be doing to lead my counties Democrats. Best of all through DFA I have met a core group of people who share a common goal of creating a more Progressive future. People who believe that the purpose of Government is to protect and empower it citizens. People who you can turn to when you have a house party where nobody shows, or a meet-up where two people go. DFA has inspired me to work hard, empowered me with the tools to do it, and has helped me once again stand up and say that : We the Democratic party will never again fail America by being inactive and silent.

I’ve got to run... I have 22 people coming over to my house for Howard Deans DNC Neighborhood Leader training.

Thank you DFA... local progressive on the ground couldn’t do what we are doing without you. And thank you to DFA members, sometimes down here in the south where the Flat Tax reigns king, and getting kids health care is socialism; can feel like a hopeless fight. It isn’t. As my fellow DFA activist Peter Lewin always says: "keep the faith"

Jim Nichols

www.henrydems.org

www.politicalautomaton.blogspot.com

Its up to us...

...to hold the media accountable. There was a great segment on PBS's news hour...

Paul Sheilds was dead on and I quote his best points below. But its up to us to do something about it. Politicians lie, Politicians pander (on all sides) but its our duty to protect the Republic. If we don't speak out we have to look ourselves in the mirror and realize its our own fault.

Please get innvolved, please write letters to the editor. Also send me links to any good stories, examples of politics of divisiveness, nonsense, or invective. I was shocked at the negativity and also hate of many of the emails that came across my desk at the Georgia Assembly.

If articulate, respectful dialogue is not sustained and rises above the the crassness then we all lose. Share things with me you find, hold others you know (myself included) accountable when we fall short of such standards. Just a quite: Hey thats out of line can go a far way.

Little things like the fact that 40% of our veterans come home disabled in some way and our Presidents Budget has not included the long term costs of taking care of their health--both mental and physical. That should be spoken out loudly against. I'm watching the generation after mine be pulled under every day by our lack of accountability and lazyness.

We are to blame if we don't speak out. I think the condecending tone of Obama's preparitory remarks was a decent question to at the very least question and move on from. But a flag pin?

But there was no more egregious example of sort of the macho-swagger, press-pass, take-no-prisoners prosecutor attitude than asking Senator Obama, "Why don't you wear a flag lapel pin?"

And I'd just give you two quick examples on this, because this is the kind of question -- the explanation to ask? "It's all over the Internet." I mean, so are theories about John Kennedy's assassination and the United States government blowing up the Twin Towers. That's no reason.

I mean, Jim Webb, Democratic senator from Virginia, who was a company commander in the -- Marine company commander in Vietnam and won the Navy Cross, the second-highest award the country can give, the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts, and opposed the war in Iraq, does not wear a lapel pin.

Dick Cheney, who during the 1960s sought and received five deferments to avoid military service and explained that he did so because he had other priorities than military service, supported the war in Iraq and wears a flag lapel pin.

So I guess the question then becomes: Why doesn't -- should it be that why doesn't Jim Webb do it? I mean, this really bothered me. Now...

MARK SHIELDS: Judy, we found out on the Rand report this week that one out of five veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome or depression, one out of five. That's over 300,000. We have no plan for them as a people.

Now where is the patriotism? I mean, the flag lapel pin, I mean, is so fatuous, is so absolutely silly. I mean, if one wears -- if one is an uncritical supporter of the United States' invasion and occupation of another country, that makes him a patriot and someone who opposes it isn't? And you wear a flag to show that?

MARK SHIELDS: They've [obama and clinton] locked themselves in and they were dishonest, because let's be very frank about it. Judy, we've seen this week the FAA is not working. The Food and Drug Administration says that they can't even begin to test medicines and medical devices. We've had, in addition to that, we've had, today, the Wall Street Journal reported we can't inspect meat that's going into our children's schools.

You know, the federal government needs more resources. It needs more money to do its job. We need to rebuild bridges. We need to rebuild roads. Everybody says that.

BOOK REVIEW: Philip Bobbitt's Terror and Consent: Rethinking the future on fighting terror

By historian Niall Ferguson

Just as the 14th-century plagues were unintended consequences of increased trade and urbanization, so terrorism is a negative externality of our borderless world.

tax's cut that go to the top 1%... no kidding

It is no accident that the President managed to use the t-word at least twenty and as many as 36 times in each of his post-9/11 State of the Union addresses (as opposed to only once in January 2001).

--John Mueller Terrorphobia

update: I need to give you more of the juicy quotes from this one...

Since when does it take political courage to defend a rational approach to public policy against an hysterical one?

Once again, the parallel with the post-World War II Red Scare is instructive. In that atmosphere politicians scurried to support spending billions upon billions of dollars to surveil, screen and protect, and to spy on an ever-expanding array of individuals who had aroused suspicion for one reason or another. Organizations were infiltrated, phones were tapped (each tap can require the full-time services of a dozen agents and support personnel), letters were intercepted, people were followed, loyalty oaths were required, endless leads (almost all to nowhere) were pursued, defense plants were hardened, concentration camps for prospective emergency use were established (an idea desperately proposed by Senate liberals in 1950), and garbage was meticulously sifted in the hope of unearthing scraps of incriminating information.


[credit: Associated Press] At the time, critics of this process focused almost entirely on the potential for civil liberties violations. This is a worthy concern, but hardly the only one. As far as I know, at no point during the Cold War did anyone say: “Yes, many domestic Communists adhere to a foreign ideology that ultimately has as its goal the destruction of capitalism and democracy by violence if necessary, but they’re so pathetic they couldn’t subvert their way out of a wet paper bag. So why are we expending so much time, effort and treasure over this issue?” It is astounding to me that this plausible, if admittedly debatable, point of view seems never to have been publicly expressed by any politician, pundit, professor or editorialist (although some may have believed it privately). On Stouffer’s survey, only a lonely and obviously politically insignificant share of the population (about 2 percent) professed to believe that domestic Communists presented no danger at all.....

Criticisms of the Patriot Act and of the Bush Administration’s efforts to apprehend prospective terrorists focus almost entirely on concerns about civil liberties, worrying that the rights of innocent Americans might be trampled in the rush to pursue terrorists. This is a perfectly valid concern, but from time to time someone might wonder a bit in public about how much the quest to ferret out terrorists and to protect ourselves is costing, as well as about how meager the results have been. In their valuable recent book, Less Safe, Less Free (2007), David Cole and Jules Lobel ably detail and critique the process. As their title implies, they suggest that we are less safe in part because the FBI and other agencies have failed in their well-funded quest to uncover the enemy within. There’s an alternative explanation, however: They have not failed, and we are not less safe; investigators haven’t found much of anything because there isn’t much of anything to find... All this may help to explain why there have been no al-Qaeda attacks in the United States for so many years, contrary to almost all anticipations. Perhaps the group’s goal is not to destroy the United States with explosions, but to have the Americans destroy themselves by wallowing in fear and by engaging in counterproductive policy overreaction. Thus, shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden happily crowed that “America is full of fear, from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that.” And in 2004 he proclaimed his policy to be “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy”, noting with consummate glee that, “It is easy for us to provoke and bait. . . . All that we have to do is . . . raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses.” The 9/11 attacks, he calculated, cost only $500,000 to carry out, “while the attack and its aftermath inflicted a cost of more than $500 billion on the United States.”

Zbigniew Brzezinski interview

Zbigniew Brzezinski about the history of America’s involvement in Afghanistan, and the uses and abuses of the intelligence craft: I'd do it again

In 1979 and 1980, when the decision was made, we were dealing with a powerful Soviet Union that was on a roll. The Soviet Union maintained terrorist training camps all over their country. If the Soviet Union had prevailed then, I can only imagine what the world would have been like subsequently. I am not at all regretful that the Soviet Union collapsed, and one of the reasons it collapsed was because of what we did in Afghanistan. I would not hesitate to do it again.

But there’s something else to be said apropos of the current situation. A public opinion poll recently appeared in the Economist which showed that 80 percent of the people in Iraq would like our troops to leave, but 70 percent of the people in Afghanistan want our troops to stay despite the growing difficulties. That should focus our attention on an important point: namely, that we wouldn’t have that support today in Afghanistan if we hadn’t done what we did beginning in the Carter Administration. The support of the majority of the Afghan people greatly minimizes the threat from Islamist extremists confronting us today. Moreover, the al-Qaeda phenomenon has been much more a Middle Eastern phenomenon than an Afghan one. There are hardly any Afghans among the terrorists responsible for 9/11 and other attacks in Europe and elsewhere. Let me add, however, an additional point: My great fear is that if we over-militarize our current efforts in Afghanistan, we will gradually turn the Afghans against us. They do not care for foreigners with guns in their country.

On the Taliban rise

The fact of the matter is that the Taliban came into the region after ten years of sustained Soviet pulverization of Afghan society, and after at least half a decade of American indifference to Afghanistan after the Soviets left. That’s the backdrop against which to view the Taliban’s rise.

American indifference to Afghanistan after the Soviets leave is important in all of this. Americans like to cut and run. We win a war and then forget that building communities, strengthening social frameworks that will allow for markets and democratic governance is a very nuanced and long-term process that must be navigated very carefully. The shoot from the hip cowboy sway that George Bush is famous for amongst his supports is detrimental to long term successes around the globe. And lets face it, with China and India rising the more we waste energy over extending ourselves and not nurturing strong global relationships the more we harm our long term economic success.

The arrival of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan took place, as you say, in the second half of the 1990s, 16 years after we initially decided to prevent the Soviets from prevailing in Afghanistan. So it is a totally ahistorical argument which seems to be premised on the notion, maybe implicitly, that it would be better if the Soviet Union still existed. That way we would not be waging “World War IV”, as some of the crazies among the neocons call it, against Islamofascism.

Islamofascism... I really don't like that word, it generally shows a lack of historical as well as on-the-ground complexities of what is going on.

AI: It’s certainly clear to anyone who’s been paying attention that, as you well know, the forces that issued forth from the mujaheddin experience included not just Muslims who don’t like us, but also the several constituents of the Northern Alliance, who were also mujaheddin but were on our side during the war. This is a complicated part of the world. It isn’t easily divisible into good guys and bad guys. There aren’t just two sides but often three or four sides. Yet Americans seem to approach all these subjects with what S.I. Hayakawa once called the “two-value orientation.” Are we so Manichaean of mind that we can’t understand a conflict with more than two sides?

ZB: I think you’re putting your finger on a major weakness of contemporary America. The weakness is that we’re more democratic than we’ve ever been before, in the sense that popular pressures translate into policy pressures very quickly. And we’re probably as ignorant as ever about the rest of the world, because everybody now lives in a kind of simplistic, trivialized virtual reality in which fact and fiction, impressions and impulses, are mixed up in an incoherent fashion. The public really has no grasp of complexities, no sense of intellectual refinement in judging them, and our political leaders have become increasingly demagogic. The way George W. Bush campaigned for the war in Iraq, with reference to fictitious WMDs, and with sweeping, simplistic, black-and-white generalizations about freedom and tyranny, is a case in point. But he was responding to our increasingly imbecilized societal condition. This is very troublesome. I think the degeneration of the newspapers as a primary source of information, the collapse of serious television news programs, and the emergence of this kind of instant communion between reality and virtual reality creates a collective state of mind that is not derived from rational analysis.

I like his re-direct... that the way George Bush campaigned was a direct repercussion of what the American public will listen to. I like re framing things in ways that make people accountable. Oh.. woe is me the world is hopeless, the masses are ignorant, I'm smart enough to grasp such a complex world, its too bad others aren't as wise as I am!" When you flip a question and make it a form of accountability. Forcing people to look in the mirror the question becomes how do I do things--in a very proactive manner--that can counter-balance the bad things going on in the world. I see them, where many other don't quite grasp it. It is up to me to work with others and do things that can push back on this tide of ignorance and naivety.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the threat to the United States became more diversified, and related to less tangible and less rational populist, ethnic and religious dynamics. In this third phase, understanding the intellect, penetrating the culture, and relating on a human basis to often non-Western decision-makers has become much more important. In this phase, I think we have been a total flop. We misunderstood what was happening in Iran early on in the 1970s; we failed to grasp the rise of radical populism later on; and most recently, the advent of Islamist terrorism hit us almost completely unawares. The debacle in Iraq with intelligence was just the culmination of this inadequacy. Even the fairly recent seeming reversal of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran—at least in the unclassified version—testifies to the fundamental, politically damaging lack of credibility of our intelligence establishment today. While I am prepared to believe that the most recent update on Iran is probably more accurate than the earlier one, one could also make a plausible case for the opposite being true.
AI: Here’s another example of your point: One outcome of the Iraq war, so far anyway, has been a significant exacerbation of the Sunni-Shi‘a rivalry throughout the Muslim world. When I was in government, I asked several people in a position to know if anyone had studied this issue before the war as a possible concern. The answer I got was of the yes-and-no variety. Yes, there were people in the intelligence community who had flagged this as an issue, but no, no senior decision-maker had evinced the slightest curiosity about it. Therefore, since nobody asked our experts to study the issue, it was never evaluated in-depth. That’s alarming.

ZB: It is, yes, and it all pertains to public statements about conditions in the Persian Gulf in the phase preceding the decision to go into Iraq. The President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense rarely referred to the cleavage between the Sunnis and the Shi‘a or the potential implications of these cleavages. I strongly suspect that when the President announced the decision to go into Iraq, he wasn’t intellectually aware of the ramifications of the Sunni-Shi‘a divide.

AI: But again, it’s not because the U.S. government doesn’t know these things; it’s because our leaders don’t ask the questions, and it doesn’t pay intelligence professionals anymore to work on issues no one demands to know about, no matter how important they may be.

ZB: That’s right, and we may have had a National Security Advisor at the time who wasn’t particularly curious about these things either, and worse, wasn’t determined enough to compel the President to address the ramifications of this issue. After all, one of the jobs of the NSA is not just to coordinate the activities of the different agencies, but also to encourage the President to digest intelligently the available information from the intelligence community.

Asking questions, wanting leaders who ask questions... true since the days of Socrates and Jesus...

Baby Izzy

Baby Izzy
Originally uploaded by nicknich4

I have a baby sister!

Maybe we start considering our own consumption practices that impact food costs?

World Bank tackles food emergency

World Bank head Robert Zoellick warned that 100 million people in poor countries could be pushed deeper into poverty by spiralling prices.

The crisis has sparked recent food riots in several countries including Haiti, the Philippines and Egypt

concerned

Over at the CATO institute blog they wonder: Good Lord, what’s happened to American conservatism?

Daniel Dennett...

hat tip to Bill Kerr's blog for leading me to Dennetts paper We Earth Neurons
I'll quote the last part... but please go read it.

Now what will we do with our knowledge? The birth-pangs of our discoveries have not subsided. Many are afraid that learning too much about what we are–trading in mystery for mechanisms–will impoverish our vision of human possibility. This fear is ill-considered. Look around at those who are eagerly participating in this quest for further knowledge and embracing the new discoveries; they are manifestly not bereft of optimism, moral conviction, engagement in life, commitment to society. In fact, if you want to find anxiety, despair, anomie today, look among the undereducated young people scavenging their dimly understood heritages (or popular culture) for a comfortable identity. Among intellectuals, look to the fashionable tribe of postmodernists, who would like to suppose that modern science is just another in a long line of myths, its institutions and expensive apparatus just the rituals and accouterments of yet another religion. That intelligent people can take this seriously is a testimony to the power that fearful thinking still has, in spite of our advances in self-consciousness. The postmodernists are right, of course, that science is just one of the things we might want to spend our extra calories on. The fact that science has been the major source of the efficiencies that created those extra calories does not entitle it to any particular share of the wealth it has created. But it still ought to be obvious that the methods and rules of science–not just its microscopes and telescopes and computers–are the new sense organs of our species, enabling us to answer questions, solve mysteries, and anticipate the future in ways no earlier human institutions can approach. The more we learn about what we are, the more options we will discern about what to try to become. We Americans have long honored the “self-made man” but now that we are actually learning enough to be able to re-make ourselves into something new, many flinch. Many people would apparently rather bumble around with their eyes closed, trusting in tradition, than look around to see what’s about to happen. Yes, it is unnerving; yes, it can be scary. After all, there are many entirely new mistakes we are now empowered to make. But it’s the beginning of a great new adventure for our knowing species–and much more exciting, as well as safer, if we open our eyes.

free will...

Free will? Not as much as you think

You're going to press that button, right? You know you're going to press it and then . . . you make a conscious decision and you press it, right?

more stories like thisMaybe not, say German researchers in a new study published in the April 13 online edition of Nature Neuroscience.

Using sophisticated brain imaging techniques, the researchers found that they can predict people's simple decisions up to 10 seconds before they're conscious of making such a choice.

"It seems that your brain starts to trigger your decision before you make up your mind," said the study's lead author, John-Dylan Haynes of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany. "We can't rule out free will, but I think it's very implausible. The question is, can we still decide against the decision our brain has made?"

update: Wired has an article on the same study... Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them

"It's not like you're a machine. Your brain activity is the physiological substance in which your personality and wishes and desires operate," he said.

The unease people feel at the potential unreality of free will, said National Institutes of Health neuroscientist Mark Hallett, originates in a misconception of self as separate from the brain.

"That's the same notion as the mind being separate from the body -- and I don't think anyone really believes that," said Hallett. "A different way of thinking about it is that your consciousness is only aware of some of the things your brain is doing.

Bush Tax cut email floating around...

From Fact-Check.org

Q: Do middle-income persons pay lower federal income taxes under Bush than they did under Bill Clinton?
I received this forwarded email from my sister... She constantly distributes this sort of stuff. I don't want to cause family dissention, however, if I could at least enlighten her, I would feel better. It is my duty to find out if this is true or not first and I thought you would be the best source.

Subject: FWD: Taxes

How about this information? Most voters are completely ignorant of the pertinent facts that should be considered when one enters the voting booth.

After watching a focus group of democrats that watched the democratic
debate the other day in Vegas, I literally wanted to puke. For the most part, all of them bashed Bush over and over again on how he is out for his millionaire friends and the big oil companies and he has totally forgotten or disregarded the little guy. So being an ex-IRS employee, I decided to look back on the tax tables to see if there is any truth to what they said and the media keeps stating as fact, "Bush is only out for the rich in this country.

Based on using the actual tax tables (see link below), here are some examples on what the taxes were/are on various amounts of income for both singles and married couples. so let's see if the Bush tax cuts only helped the rich.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/151.html

Taxes under Clinton 1999 Taxes under Bush 2008
Single making 30K - tax $8,400 Single making 30K - tax $4,500
Single making 50K - tax $14,000 Single making 50K - tax $12,500
Single making 75K - tax $23,250 Single making 75K - tax $18,750
Married making 60K - tax $16,800 Married making 60K- tax $9,000
Married making 75K - tax $21,000 Married making 75K - tax $18,750
Married making 125K - tax $38,750 Married making 125K - tax $31,250

If you want to know just how effective the mainstream media is, it is amazing how many people that fall into the categories above think Bush is screwing them and Bill Clinton was the greatest President ever. If any democrat is elected, ALL of them say they will repeal the Bush tax cuts and a good portion of the people that fall into the categories above can't wait for it to happen. This is like the movie the Sting with Paul Newman, you scam somebody out of some money and they don't even know what happened. Now this is effective (maybe not honest) marketing or maybe a better word is brain washing.


A: Yes, middle-income taxpayers pay less, but not nearly as much less as claimed in a widely circulated chain e-mail. Moreover, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton propose additional middle-income cuts, contrary to what the message insinuates.
The first thing to note is that every number in that e-mail is wrong. They grossly overstate the Bush tax cuts at all levels.

The Tax Foundation, the very group this spurious e-mail cites, says the message is wrong. The link provided in the e-mail leads to a message saying: "Note: If you clicked on this link in response to an e-mail comparing income taxes under Presidents Clinton and Bush, please see this page." And that link in turn leads to an article by senior economist Gerald Prante and staff writer Alicia Hansen of the Tax Foundation. They call the e-mail "incorrect" and add that it "contains some mathematical errors," which is putting it mildly.

The Tax Foundation is an anti-tax, pro-business group and about the last place we would expect to defend the tax policies of the Clinton administration. Prante and Hansen state, quite correctly, that "federal income taxes have indeed fallen under George Bush for groups at all points on the income spectrum." No tax expert we know of disputes that. Nevertheless, to its credit, the Tax Foundation demolishes this particular comparison.

The "mathematical errors" in the e-mail actually are huge, resulting in very large overstatements of the amounts by which persons in various low- and middle-income categories benefited from the tax cuts. For example, the e-mail claims a tax cut for a single person making $30,000 a year that is nearly 10 times larger than the actual cut as calculated by Tax Foundation experts.

Here's a table we created, comparing the cuts claimed in the e-mail with the cuts calculated by the Tax Foundation.

Cut claimed by e-mail
Actual cut per Tax Foundation
E-mail over-
statement


Single making 30K $3,900.00 $401.25 $3,498.75
Single making 50K $1,500.00 $656.25 $843.75
Single making 75K $4,500.00 $1,406.25 $3,093.75
Married making 60K $7,800.00 $1,072.50 $6,727.50

Married making 75K $2,250.00 $1,664.00 $586.00
Married making 125K $7,500.00 $3,964.00 $3,536.00

Actual results would vary from one individual or couple to another, depending on circumstances. The Tax Foundation's Prante and Hansen say their calculations assume each taxpayer took only the standard deductions and had no children. They also ignored the effects of the Alternative Minimum Tax, which might have further reduced the benefit of the Bush tax cuts for some at the upper end of the scale.

The anonymous author of the e-mail made several fundamental errors, according to the Tax Foundation's experts. One error was to apply the top statutory rates for 1999 and 2008 to ALL income, even though much income would be taxed at lower rates in the lower tax brackets. The author also failed to account for any tax deductions or exemptions. A less obvious mistake was failing to realize that even under the 1999 law, tax brackets would have been adjusted for inflation every year. To get a valid apples-to-apples comparison, the Tax Foundation compared taxes due under the Bush cuts with what would have been owed under the 1999 law with brackets adjusted for inflation as scheduled.


Distorting the Big Picture


Not only does this seemingly authoritative e-mail message get all the details wrong, it also falsifies the bigger picture. It says, "If any democrat is elected, ALL of them say they will repeal the Bush tax cuts." It goes on to say that people in the income categories specified are about to experience a "scam" and suggests they have been subjected to "brain washing."

Actually, neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton has said they favor the repeal of all the Bush tax cuts. They've only proposed repealing them for high-income taxpayers. In fact, both are promising additional tax cuts for most or all of the persons who fall into the groups itemized in the e-mail.

Obama promises a $500 tax cut for the large majority, according to his Web site:

Obama Web site: Obama will restore fairness to the tax code and provide 150 million workers the tax relief they need. Obama will create a new "Making Work Pay" tax credit of up to $500 per person, or $1,000 per working family. The "Making Work Pay" tax credit will completely eliminate income taxes for 10 million Americans.
And Clinton says she'll "let the Bush income tax cuts expire for those making more than $250,000," while further lowering taxes for "middle income" families:

Clinton Web site: Hillary will extend middle class tax relief, the child tax credit and marriage penalty relief, and reform the AMT to ensure people don’t face stealth tax increases.

We can't say whether either of the leading Democrats actually would deliver on these promises. We haven't forgotten Bill Clinton's undelivered promise of a "middle-class tax cut" from his first run for the White House. In a 1991 speech at Georgetown University in Washington he said: "I will offer middle-income tax cuts. ... The average working family's tax bill will go down about 10 percent, a savings of about $300 a year." He included the idea in his early advertising, too, but then ditched it after sewing up the Democratic nomination. He eventually pushed through a large tax increase, though it fell almost exclusively on the top 1 percent or 2 percent of incomes.

Nevertheless, whether one believes Obama or Hillary Clinton or not, both are promising just the opposite of what this factually challenged mass e-mail states.

- Brooks Jackson

Sources
Gerald Prante and Alicia Hansen, "Comparing Income Taxes under Bill Clinton and George Bush" Tax Foundation 19 Feb 2008.

"The 1992 Campaign: On the Trail; Clinton Disavows Idea of Middle-Class Tax Cut," New York Times 19 June 1992.

Michael Kelly, "CLINTON'S ECONOMIC PLAN: The Campaign; Gambling That a Tax-Cut Promise Was Not Taken Seriously," New York Times 18 Feb 1993.

Hillary for President. "Shared Prosperity for American Families." 14 Feb. 2008.

Hillary for President. "Hillary Clinton’s Economic Blueprint for the 21st Century: Rebuilding the Road to the Middle Class." 27 Oct. 2007.

sadly needed in this day and age...

Excellent post...

By Brian Leiter defending John Yoo from the zealots..."American Freedom Campaign" Organizing E-Mail-Campaign to Fire John Yoo

Nobody likes defending the speech rights of the KKK, and certainly nobody likes defending the academic work and tenure of a guy who underwrote torture by the American government.

Its tough work but somebodies got to do it kudos to Leiter!

If Professor Yoo's arguments to "encourage the use of torture" and his "fundamental lack of respect for the rule of law" are the reasons he should be terminated, then he is to be terminated precisely for his "views", views which he has expressed in law reviews, as well as to Bush. Are we really to believe--fifty years after the McCarthyist witch hunts!--that academics should be punished because their bad ideas are then used by bad people to do bad things? Dean Edley's remarks on this score are pertinent:

As critical as I am of his analyses, no argument about what he did or didn't facilitate, or about his special obligations as an attorney, makes his conduct morally equivalent to that of his nominal clients, Secretary Rumsfeld, et al., or comparable to the conduct of interrogators distant in time, rank and place. Yes, it does matter that Yoo was an adviser, but President Bush and his national security appointees were the deciders.

As longtime readers of the blog know, I certainly think that Bush and his gang of war criminals deserve to have their status confirmed by a court of law. If Professor Yoo is convicted of a crime, then this would be a different case. But it is not even clear (for the reasons noted by Dean Edley) that he is guilty of any crime, and he has, quite plainly, not been convicted of any. Anyone calling for him to be fired is calling for him to be punished for his ideas, and nothing else. Attempts to claim it is more "complicated" are just attempts to rehabilitate the idea that having bad ideas, even bad ideas others act on, is a crime.

(I'm sticking this under contending conservatism since I think banning speech and firing people for their views comes out of Conservative philosophy not that of the Enlightenment)

Dean Baker on farm subsidies...

The NYT Takes Back Its Harsh Criticism of Farm Subsidies

Well, they didn't actually acknowledge that they had been wrong, but the NYT today complained that high food prices (partly the result of biofuel subsidies) are having a devastating impact on the developing world. The NYT used to run editorials on a regular basis that complained that farm subsidies "harvest poverty" in the developing world.

Okay, here's the problem. Subsides lower prices. Let's say that again (I know it seems simple, but many highly credentialed people get it wrong), subsidies lower prices. The farm subsidies that the NYT harshly condemns lead to lower worldwide food prices.

The NYT can complain about high food prices leading to hunger for people who can't afford food. It can also complain about low food prices stifling agricultural development in poor countries. But, it cannot complain about both high and low food prices and expect anyone to take its views seriously.

The reality is that rich country agricultural subsidies have a mixed impact on the developing world. Their elimination would benefit producers and provide a net benefit to some countries, but this would not be the boon the NYT, along with the World Bank and some NGOs, implied. It would be a great step forward if this issue could be discussed more seriously in the future.

McCain: On his Vote Against MLK Holiday

Policy Blunder #8987 from the Bush Administration

I'll outsource this to TPM

Today's Must Read

Would the Bush administration politicize an intelligence report? Don't answer that.

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq says the surge is working, but Dems think it's funny that the report omits the Iraqi government's recent failed offensive against Sadr's Mahdi Army.

4 more years of Bush Era Republicans is a bad idea.

Its time to take control from the Republican Economic Policy

Inequality is reaching levels not seen since the 1920's. Not only does it mean that hard work and determination don't pay off for the majority of Americans, but it sends up red flags. Dramatic levels of inequality harm the economies productivity and long-term sustainability.

Its time we say no to people like John McCain who think business as usual is good for our Country.

I'll just hat-tip over to Dana Milbank for more on this issue...

philosophy lecture online...

European Thought and Culture in the 20th Century

Interesting... might be something to this...

TPM post Damn Statistics gets into the race issue for Obama...

What I take to be implicit in Sirota's argument is that racially polarized voting increases with the size of the black population in a given state. That leaves Obama winning a lot of states with few blacks. But once the black population gets into the high single digits, racialized voting kicks in and Obama then can't get enough of the white population to win. Only when blacks approach 20% of the population does the black population get large enough to make up for and often overcome the increased white resistance to voting for Obama. (After all, I don't think Sirota is saying that Mississippi and Louisiana are models of racial harmony.) Of course, these are Democratic primaries, not general elections. And that is the key. Because that means that in most cases the percentage of the black electorate is roughly double what it is in the general election.