September 11 Remembered

September 11 should not pass without remembrance of honorable people who died in an act of disgraceful cowardice. A building symbolic of democratic government had its dome blown to bits. A respected president died of an apparent suicide in the face of probable execution at the hands of thugs. Then followed concentration camps and inquisitions, and a fascist government installed – one of the great criminals of the 20th century, Augusto Pinochet, came to power.

September 11, 1973 was the day the democratically elected government of Chile was overthrown in a US backed coup d’etat. It is a dark day in history.

May we never forget Pinochet or the thousands of victims left in his wake. May we 36 years later vow that it never happens again.

And not to know it …

This quote came to mind as I thought about Big Swede’s comment below, and I think it applies to a certain Professor Natelson as well:

To be a spoiled person is not to be well-off or favored by fortune or protected from brute realities. It is to be well-off or favored by fortune or protected from brute realities and not to know it. (Christopher Hitchens)

Negotiate this …

The private health insurance system is fatally flawed by adverse selection – the tendency of healthy people to avoid buying insurance, and of sick people to seek it out. (Selling insurance to workers through employers, who tend to hire healthy people, is a neat way to avoid this problem.)

Actually, adverse selection is only one of three fatal flaws in the private health care system – the other two being the necessity of insurance companies to deny claims to preserve their bottom line, and their need to dump costs on other entities, such as government and doctors and hospitals, again to preserve the bottom line. These two fatal flaws are really dual expression of one flaw – to succeed, a private insurance company needs to avoid paying health care costs.

But sticking to adverse selection, if private insurance is to succeed, it needs the force of government behind it. Outside the workplace, people either have to be very healthy or be denied coverage … or, government has to force everyone to buy the products offered by insurance companies.

Friend Bob did a little legwork (that we non-journalists find off-putting), and found that the Baucus health care plan has a draconian feature regarding adverse selection: the IRS.

Here’s what Bob found, from the Baucus plan Description of Policy Options published by Senate Finance Committee:

Coverage and Enforcement. All individuals would be required to purchase coverage through (1) the individual market, meeting requirements of at least a lowest cost option, (2) any
grandfathered plan, or (3) in the group market, a plan that has an actuarial value equal to the lowest coverage option, with no annual or lifetime limits allowed. Exemptions from the coverage requirement would be allowed for religious objections that are consistent with those
allowed under Medicare, and for undocumented aliens.

Consequences of Non-Coverage. In order to ensure compliance, taxpayers would be required to report the months for which they have the required minimum coverage for themselves and family members on their federal income tax returns. In addition, the insurer would be required to report months of qualified health coverage to the individual covered and to the Internal Revenue Service. A similar reporting requirement would apply to employers with respect to individuals enrolled in group health plans if the reporting is not provided by the insurer (for example in the case of self-insured plans).

The consequence for not being insured would be an excise tax equal to a percentage of the premium for the lowest cost option available through the Health Insurance Exchange for the area where the individual resides. The excise tax would be phased-in and would equal 25 percent of the premium for the first year that the requirement is in effect; 50 percent of the premium for the second year; and 75 percent of the premium for the third year and subsequent years. The penalty would apply for any period for which the individual is not covered by a health insurance plan with the minimum required benefit but would be prorated for partial years of noncompliance.

Individuals could apply for an exemption from the penalty in three circumstances: (1) where the lowest cost option available to an individual exceeds 10 percent of income; (2) where an individual is below 100 percent of poverty; and (3) hardship.

Effective Date. The individual requirement would be effective beginning January 1, 2013 (or sooner if possible).

Note that there is no mention in this paragraph of any public alternative to the private mandate. Nor is there any mention in this Kaiser summary of news reports on the issue.

There is a block of Democratic senators (28 of them) trying to have some input into the Baucus closed-door hearings on the matter. But 28 is not enough – not even to filibuster. (This is why I laugh at the notion that having 60 Democrats in the Senate has any meaning.)

The private insurers intend to ram their plan to force us to buy their products down our throats, using the IRS to enforce it.

Their point man? Max Baucus.

So, Matt Singer and Wulfgar, it appears you are on the outside of closed-door hearings. Negotiate that. And do be clever about it.

Econ 101 (Why Marx was right and so very wrong, all at once)

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.”(Marx, Capital, Chapter 3

Marx is passe’, I know. Turning the reins of power over to uneducated workers led to a system of imprisonment that taught us all a lesson. So I don’t hold much respect for worker-controlled societies. As in Russia, uneducated workers soon give way to right wing militarists, always waiting in the wings.

There’s really no escape from rule from above – there is only the ability to offset some of the ill effects with progressive policies instituted by force of public will and through government – progressive taxation, universal health care and education, and breakup of monopolies, to name a few. In those societies where such policies have succeeded, people are happier, and even though it sticks in the craw of the right wing, their high rates of taxation have not diminished their individual liberties.

So I am not a Marxist in the sense that I think good governance comes from the uneducated masses. But I do believe in one of the prime precepts of Marx – that wealth is created by labor, that capital is derived from that wealth, and that labor and capital together create new wealth in exponential progression. But I am a Marxist in this sense – Marx very accurately described what we call “capitalism” – the absence of restraints on accumulation. He was just wont to come up with a viable alternative. His solution, communism, was a profound human tragedy on the scale of World War II, maybe even equaling the ill effects of European colonization.

But we have indeed come up with a viable alternative: let the marvelous engine do its thing, but regulate it. Tax the accumulators at high rates to prevent them from gaining too much power. (Accumulators invariably think that they are the producers of wealth, and want us to cede power to them on that premise. This is the essence of Rand.) Equalize some of the benefits by offering health care and education to everyone, to give everyone a firm footing on which to do their life’s work.

The end result, if the post below is any indication, is that we can have what Marx wanted – freedom from want. But to achieve our goals, we need to keep the accumulators (and the politicians and economists and philosophers in their service) at bay. In the U.S., we’re not doing a very good job. We are #23 on the list in the post below – not a bad showing, as we do have a social safety net here.

But our social safety net is under persevering attack, and has been since 1980. As a result, I would guess that our direction on that list is downward, and further that we once sat much higher on the list. Perhaps we were number one.

A Feisty Exchange

MtPundit (Shackleford – who else?) put up a post on Megan McCain, calling her a “painfully stupid attention whore”. As usual, Shackleford turned it all on the left, over whom he looms as the great new intellectual in the sky, or Coobs reincarnate.

I am impressed by all the liberals that think she’s like, totally kewl ‘n stuff!! “I’m mean, ZOMG!1! If more Republicans were as rad as Meghan, I’d totally be a Republican…cuz, like, she totally hangs out with Perez Hilton!1! Quit bein’ so square GOP…be totally rad and hip and off the chain like Meghan!!″

Seriously…nobody sees anything wrong with the Left gushing over this little ignoramus?!? “No, no! If you do it this way, then there’s a waaaay better chance of winning!! Here, let us help you!!” Um…no? If the advice of liberals were taken to heart, then we’d all end up as liberals.

And worst of all…she likes shitty movies…

Who the hell thought Benjamin Button was a good movie? Such a waste of time! I should just assume if Judd Apatow didn’t direct it, its bad.

…
That is why I am already nominating “The Hangover” for best oscar, even if it hasn’t come out yet.

That is all.

I am “Tomatoguy” over there – and thought it appropriate to introduce to them an example of intense stupidity:

Let me give an example – in one of her speeches during the campaign, Sarah Palin made a haughty arrogant comment about public money being wasted on research involving fruit flies. She had no clue that the research being done would affect her own disabled child.

Now, that is merely ignorant, I grant you, but I’ll take it one step further – the information she needed to process what was being done with fruit flies is beyond her – a place she will never go because it will never occur to her. The world of science and Sarah Palin will never intersect.

And that is because in addition to being ignorant, she is stupid.

Now I leave it to each of you to try to begin to comprehend what you don’t know. I’ll wait.

The answer I got:

You’re off-topic…try to keep up.

PS: Benjamin Button was indeed, in my humble opinion, a terribly boring movie. Brad Pitt must have been preoccupied with the seemingly inescapable situation he got himself into with a psycho bitch and seven kids. Now the kids will suffer, and the paparazzi of the future have a fertile feeding ground.

Herding Sheep

I was posting a long reply to a comment over at Electric City Weblog (“All of You Voted For Me), and when I clicked “submit”, the connection was interrupted, and so the world now suffers. All that I wrote was lost.

Here’s the comment that set me off – in true blog form, it is written by “anonymous”, probably someone fearing “the man” – the boss knowing that he is blogging during work hours:

You know what is amusing is that Fox news is always accused of “lying” but I can’t think of it being involved in the sort of big whoppers that other major news organizations have been guilty of.

All news organizations make mistakes, that’s just part of the nature of the beast, when you are putting together a lot of information on deadline. But Fox hasn’t had anything close to the Dan Rather fiasco, or fiascos at other media outlets.

The New York Times had the reporter who was making up stories for months and months, Jason Blair. The Times still hasn’t lived down the famous Walter Duranty, I think his name was, who covered the Soviet Union in the 30s and 40s, and it was later discovered that he was sugarcoating and making up things up in order to make Stalin’s Soviet Union look a lot better than it really was. He won a Pulitzer, and many feel the Times should return the award for the phony reporting.

CNN had the Tailwind scandal and the situation where it admitted going soft on Saddam in order to keep reporters in Iraq.

NBC claimed GM trucks had unsafe gas tanks, and in the course of its investigation, it turned out that they rigged the tanks with explosives to make them look more dangerous than they really were.

The Washington Post’s Janet Cook won a Pulitzer for her reporting on an impoverished young boy, and then later admitted she made the whole story up.

The New Republic has had several writers who were discovered to simply be making up stories out of whole cloth. (One of them was the basis for a pretty good movie…Shattered Glass I think was the name)

Now, an impartial observer might say that Fox is the only news organization that doesn’t lie. Only a hyperpartisan would say that, compared to others, Fox is a lying news source.

I suggested to Anon that the right wing, in addition to not being able to handle nuance, was susceptible to anecdote as well. Every word that he wrote might be true, and yet mean squat. All those isolated incidents tell us nothing about the news gathering process. Who are the people who give us news? Who do they work for?

Most news gathering organizations are public corporations mostly owned by the investing class. Their most influential people within are their management and boards of directors. There are very few “liberals” among them. The boards especially are an interlocking set of corporate moguls and retired military officers and politicians (collecting service rewards). (NPR and PBS, supposedly independent of this structure, are heavily funded by the same people in the form of grants. In addition, conservative politicians watchdog them and create a stink should they step out of line.)

The public interface with news organizations are individual reporters and talking heads. But behind the reporters are authority structures, and they are subject to largely unwritten rules of behavior regarding what is a viable story, what is not. They have flexibility, but for the most part they live in their boundaries. If one were to ask any of them about their perceived independence, the answer would be “No one tells me what to report and write. No one!” This leads to the overall impression on the right wing that the media is comprised of liberals working for themselves.

And there is considerable leeway within the system. Abu Ghraib was exposed (and then covered up). Torture has been exposed, though we only saw the tip of a massive iceberg. (It is now covered up again.) But for the most part, reporters cover conventional stories in a conventional manner – they collect news from government and corporate authorities, reword it, and pass it on to us as original reporting.

The vetting system for advancement within news organizations is very similar to the system for advancement in our school systems: In our schools (outside of those seeking purely scientific careers), people are graded on how well they comply and submit to authority and internalize our propaganda system. Those that don’t do so well are given bad grades, and these days are drugged into compliance. ADHD they call it – inability to conform.

In American news coverage, there are times when the velvet glove is removed, and the steel fist is apparent to everyone in the business. When the decision was made to invade Iraq, all of our news organizations went into compliance mode. There was no debate about the legitimacy of the objective or the motives of the officials carrying it out. It was no different when Clinton attacked Serbia in 1999, or when we invaded Vietnam in the 1960’s, Korea in the 1950’s.

(Interesting footnote: In 1998, Clinton was set to launch rocket attacks on Iraq. His Secretaries of State and Defense, Albright and Cohen, attended a town meeting in Dayton, Ohio, that had been infiltrated with protesters. It was supposed to be a propaganda rally, like a two-minute hate, but instead, Cohen and Albright were jeered and heckled and sat stone faced while being confronted with actual tough questions. This was unacceptable, of course. Later the Clinton Administration remarked that CNN had “dropped the ball.”)

So the media is largely a monolith controlled by the investing class but submissive to government control. Why on earth do we get the babble about it being “liberal”? I suspect that the ownership of these organizations like that perception, as it masks their role and identity. I have asked conservatives repeatedly to explain to me why the most conservative organizations in the country allow a liberal slant on the news. I am yet to get an answer.

What we get is anecdote. Yes, most reporters are probably left-leaning, but living as they do in the shadow of power, they are severely constrained in what they can report. They have to internalize this authority structure, and so aggrandize their motives and pass out numerous awards to one another for high-skilled job performance. But they are nothing more than the American version of Soviet commissars.

What is really fascinating is to watch how government officials manage the media. They control them by allowing or denying access to information and the people in power. At the same time, they lavish praise on them for the wonderful work they are doing. Obama at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner was very forthright in talking about how he is so often displeased by some coverage he is receiving, but how he recognizes that reporters are just doing their job.

I just — I want to end by saying a few words about the men and women in this room whose job it is to inform the public and pursue the truth. You know, we meet tonight at a moment of extraordinary challenge for this nation and for the world, but it’s also a time of real hardship for the field of journalism. And like so many other businesses in this global age, you’ve seen sweeping changes and technology and communications that lead to a sense of uncertainty and anxiety about what the future will hold.
Across the country, there are extraordinary, hardworking journalists who have lost their jobs in recent days, recent weeks, recent months. And I know that each newspaper and media outlet is wrestling with how to respond to these changes, and some are struggling simply to stay open. And it won’t be easy. Not every ending will be a happy one.

But it’s also true that your ultimate success as an industry is essential to the success of our democracy. It’s what makes this thing work. You know, Thomas Jefferson once said that if he had the choice between a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, he would not hesitate to choose the latter.

Clearly, Thomas Jefferson never had cable news to contend with — (laughter) — but his central point remains: A government without newspapers, a government without a tough and vibrant media of all sorts, is not an option for the United States of America. (Applause.)

So I may not — I may not agree with everything you write or report. I may even complain, or more likely Gibbs will complain, from time to time about how you do your jobs, but I do so with the knowledge that when you are at your best, then you help me be at my best. You help all of us who serve at the pleasure of the American people do our jobs better by holding us accountable, by demanding honesty, by preventing us from taking shortcuts and falling into easy political games that people are so desperately weary of.

And that kind of reporting is worth preserving — not just for your sake, but for the public’s. We count on you to help us make sense of a complex world and tell the stories of our lives the way they happen, and we look for you for truth, even if it’s always an approximation, even if — (laughter.)

He’s only been in office a few months, and he has already adopted the tone and pitch.

Baucus gets tough … on progressives

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Protesters demanding single payer health care disrupted Chairman Max Baucus’s hearing on health care reform today, pissing the senator off. There are sixteen people in his group talking about health care reform, and not one advocating single payer.

Generally, I think that protests are a demonstration of weakness and that people on the outside looking in need to be more creative in their disruptions. But this one was appropriate.

Here’s the choice Max gives single payer advocates: You can either be on the outside looking in and shut up, or you can be on the outside looking in and make a ruckus. If you do the latter, you’ll be gaveled down, and if you persist, you’ll be arrested.

If nothing else, it points out how bought Baucus is, so afraid of genuine progressives that he shuts them out of the process. He’s been doing that with environmentalists for years, but health care advocates are not so passive. I hope they do more … I’d like to see them picket and protest Forward Montana for its (and Matt Singer’s) subservience to the Baucus agenda.

Journalists: You lead, we’ll follow

An entry at MetaFilter provides the following quote, but does not give its source:

“The reason many people worry that the written form is dying, and the reason most writers consider online publication second-rate, is that no journal has yet succeeded in marrying the editorial rigors of print to the freedoms of the internet.”

It then links to a new online literary magazine, the Wag’s Revue. It looks interesting, and I hope it satisfies the gist of the quote leading us there.

Those words capture some small part of truth. Another field, journalism, has long endeavored to install professional rigor on the business of collecting news. They are serious people. However, they have largely failed. And more so than any other profession that I’m aware of, journalism seems on the far edges of fogginess about itself, almost completely lacking self-awareness. They give out more awards to one another than Carter’s famous pills.

At the same time, they fail to do the one thing we hired them for: To report to us what powerful people are doing. The reason is obvious: They must answer to those powerful people, and not us. As a result, most news, even in the vaunted print media, is a distraction.

Many people have noted how shallow TV news coverage is, how they operate like pack animals and pounce on trivialities instead of important stories. There’s a reason for that – it’s like squeezing a balloon – the air goes to the place where there is least resistance. Bush/Cheney et al … desk murders, torture, illegal invasions, wiretapping all of us and all of the news media … don’t go there. OJ? All over it! The New York Times used a woman who appeared to be no more than a CIA plant – Judith Miller – as their lead reporting on the attack on Iraq. They sat on the wiretapping story in 2004 – a story that probably would have changed the outcome of the election that year. Not only are they not reporting to us, they seem in league with the powerful.

News reporters chose not to challenge Bush on Iraq. (Better said: They knew better.) They brought in the generals, fired Phil Donohue, and before that Bill Maher (who are not journalists but who are willing to say things that might be true). They didn’t question the motives of the leaders. Instead, they repeated lies. They failed us, utterly and miserably.

On some level, they know this. That’s why they have awards for door stops. They do what most of us do in response to anxiety-causing problems in their lives … compensatory behavior. Award banquets.

That’s broad-brushing, I know. There are many people of integrity in the business. Probably most of them. The paradox is this: How do they put that integrity into print or on air? The answer is that mostly, they can’t. So they dance around the the edges of power, mostly looking outward, and intuitively understanding their own failures. They affirm! their integrity to one another. Pass the salt, please, and the Pulitzer too. I’ll have a Peabody while you’re at it.

I work in a less glamorous profession that is riddled with similar conflicts of interest. Accountants are called upon to audit public corporations, yet those corporations are allowed to hire and fire auditors at will. As a consequence, the early part of this century was littered with accounting scandals like Enron, Global Crossing, and WorldCom. It’s a principle known by all to be true, yet systematically ignored: “conflict of interest”: we cannot serve two masters.

In the case of journalism, they cannot both report on powerful individuals and corporations and yet be owned by them. And when powerful corporations have a stranglehold on government, we have a double-conflict: Not only do we get no reporting on the corporations, but none either when governments are serving the corporate will, as with the Wall Street bailout – perhaps the Iraq invasion itself. Instead, government reporting is reduced to the slavish, drooling White House press corps.

So when I read about the web failing to live up to journalistic standards, of failing to marry the “editorial rigors of print to the freedoms of the internet”, I can only agree. All I can say in response is please, show us the way. You start, you lead. We’ll follow.

Today would be a good day.

Post #1,000 – An Examination of the Meaning of Blogging – What is it All For?

On Second Thought – here’s a slow motion video of a laughing baby.  Happy Spring.

More on State Funded Porn

Not really.

I just want more traffic on the blog.

ZING!!(?)