For the Record

Socialized medicine is civilized medicine

Telling anecdotes from a Canadian and from various US-ers. 

Warning: latter stories will cause blood pressure to rise.  For-profit health care is killing people, people!

UPDATE: More stories as gathered by Bernie Sanders here.

Policy-making: science vs. ideology

Lately I've been wondering why it is that certain theses that seem to have been fairly well empirically established are still treated as if they were somehow still up for debate.

Isn't it obvious already that "trickle-down" economics is a factual misnomer, with supposedly activity- and jobs-generating tax breaks rather going directly into the already deep pockets of CEOs or other head honchos, and most of the remainder going to any shareholders there might be?  Why were further tax cuts to business any part of the discussion of how to resuscitate the economy?

Isn't it completely clear that single-payer (with, if you must, room for privateers to accommodate the overly wealthy, impatient, or wedded to life) is the best health care system, with "best" tracking almost every dimension except "with respect to guaranteeing massive profits for head honchos and shareholders associated with certain corporations"?

Don't we know by now that torture doesn't work?  And that military invasions and occupations are the most destructive and counter-productive forms of foreign policy?

Why, then, are there continuing "policy" discussions over the right way to go over these issues, and worse, why do these discussions typically proceed by first taking the best (see afore-mentioned understanding of 'best') options off the table?

One straightfoward answer is, of course: money.  Money often talks louder than facts.  Hence those in charge of setting policy all too often pocket the dough and look the other way.  (See Larry Summers, AIPEC, and Max Baucus.)

But that can't be the whole story.  Plausibly, no amount of campaign-contributed money will inspire a U.S. senator or representative to encourage policy that would make it OK for Christian Scientist parents to fail to take their ailing children to a doctor or hospital.  What's the difference, then, between the latter kind of "no go" policy and those we face concerning economic, foreign, and health-care policies, which seem weirdly disconnected from the facts?

It's useful to consider the increasingly defunct "debates" over whether there is climate change, whether such change is problematic, and whether such change has various human activities as a significant contributing cause.  Again, we've seen a lot of wrangling from rightwingers over whether there is sufficient evidence for affirmative answers to these questions, but slowly but surely the noise is dying down... after awhile denial just starts to seem too irrational, given the empirical evidence.

This suggests that the main tool whereby policy-makers and lobbyists and journalists get away with treating certain theses as "subject to debate"  is by treating the disciplines associated with the theses as somehow less than fully scientific.

One could digress here into the interesting question of whether there are any criteria demarcating science from other disciplines (which may be either  better and worse "confirmed", in some sense of the word).

More to the point, one could observe that policy-makers and others seem to have certain paradigms of "real science" in mind.  That would be quantitative physics, of course.

Sadly for us, most of the disciplines treating of phenomena of most importance to our day-to-day lives are such as to fail to "measure up" to such standards of precision.

Hence it is that it may turn out that vindicating the special sciences as tracking robust causal joints in reality may be of more than mere theoretical interest.  Onward, non-reductionists!

A new modal category: "stupidly possible"

We philosophers are well familiar with the space of physical, nomological, and metaphysical possibility.  However, we have failed to sufficiently attend to and theorize about the space of the "stupidly possible", which itself is context or comparison-dependent.  So, for example, it is highly plausible that the space of possible (action) worlds which are even stupider than the worlds which Bush II dragged us through is relatively small:

It seems fair to grant that even a guy like Krugman, who anticipated a lot, could not predict that only a tiny handful of the imponderably multitudinous possibility branches that filled a time-space light-cone centered on the 2001 attacks could out-stupid the next six years of Bush.

Of course it's torture

Enough already.

How to steal wealth

I'm thinking about going on a burglary spree. With the right tools, some stealth, and a bit of luck, I could get that flat screen TV, upgrade my camera equipment, and bling out the fam.

My neighbors would, of course, end up worse off as far as their possessions are concerned, but too bad for them.

But this might earn me a dog bite (or a visit from the local constabulary).

Better idea: buy a printing press, print up a lot of money, and pay it to myself. Then I'd be rich! 

I could buy a lot of stuff, and vacation in Mustique. This would -- let us postulate -- have no effect on the quantity of real goods/services in existence. In that case, I would command a bigger share of the pre-existing quantity of goods/services than before. Less would be left over for everyone else. They would be worse off, in real terms. They wouldn't be any poorer in cash terms than before -- I didn't steal any money from anyone, I just paid fresh money to myself. The worsening of their condition would manifest in everything becoming a bit more expensive than it had been -- in "inflation".

While putting me at minimal risk of canine attention, I might still receive a visit from the Secret Service.

Third try: a rather more roundabout, and legally less risky, approach: open a bank, and start issuing loans. This would also expand the amount of money in circulation (money being debt, after all). Collecting the interest on these loans, I would thereby have paid myself a wee bit of the total new money created.

Now this tiny payment to myself won't obviously make everyone worse off. If my transactions cause more real goods and services to come into existence, I might not have thereby made everyone else worse off than before -- that is, if the total amount of real stuff created exceeds the amount I have paid to myself. (This is, of course, the essence of capitalism: the greatest means of wealth creation known to man!) 

But that's a big if! While often the whip-hand of the debt collector drives us on to ever-more-energetic spectacles of production, it's far from obvious that this will happen in any particular case (let alone in general or globally), and it's certainly the last of my concerns. What do I care if my lending makes everyone else worse off?

Which sorts of loans make both the banker and the rest of society better off, and which sorts make the banker better off at the expense of the rest of society? I don't know, but one would speculate that among the purposes of sensible banking regulation is to encourage the former sort of "productive" lending and discourage the latter sort of "confiscatory" lending.

It's obvious to anyone with a TV and the ability to use it that bank regulators have snoozed out over the last several years. But a big macro respect of regulation failure has been a failure, in the US, over the last few decades, to force lending into productive and away from confiscatory patterns. This has allowed bankers to expand the money pool, while paying more of this expansion to themselves than proportionate to the amount of real wealth created.

In a slogan: banks have inflated the currency and captured the new money for themselves. 

(In a slightly more complex slogan, banks have inflated the currency and captured a share of the new money for themselves that is massively out of proportion to the wealth created by the economic activity made possible in part by their loans.)

Some evidence:

• Quantitatively, the debt--GDP ratio through all sectors of the economy has more than doubled since 1981: so clearly much lending activity has not been accompanied by proportionate follow-on growth. (Note the relatively tiny portion of this debt owed by the government, so don't believe the hype that spending our way out of the Great Recession will lead to hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is already here in the explosion of household and interbank debt.) 
• The "phenomenological" effect of this is a condition we have observed before: against the prevailing pattern in the period before 1980, running a household requires two incomes. This is due to big increases in the costs of housing, medical care, education, and insurance. (Costs of consumer goods have been kept low by pouring vast quantities of petroleum into their manufacture and shipment, making it possible to fire middle management, cut inventory, and shed capital; and by shifting manufacturing to areas with ultra-low labor costs. Eventually these games will play out their string -- a revived global economy will see petroleum back at its Summer '08 prices or higher; labor arbitrage will end either by Chinese wages increasing or US wages decreasing or both -- and refrigerators will start to be priced more in line with real estate and education.)
• By contrast to the stagnation in income -- really, decline in purchasing power -- in the productive economy, asshole bankers have been vacationing in Mustique and driving up the cost of everything that can't be made out of cheap plastic by Chinese wage-slaves.

Inflate the currency, pay the excess to yourselves, and drive everyone else out of the market for real wealth. Vastly more efficient than "retail" burglary -- and with zero risk of dog bite!

The Obama code

Don't miss this fascinating analysis by George Lakoff.

Time to divest from the Israeli occupation

I recently received an email update from Mazin Qumsiyeh:

It is sometimes really hard to even begin to describe our feelings living under brutal Israeli occupation and noting the indifference, complicity, and hypocrisy of so many people in Israel, in America, in Europe and elsewhere. Every day, the Israeli “system” violates dozens of the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Examples just in the past week include imposing a curfew on Jayyus village and terrorizing its population (this after confiscating most of its very rich agricultural lands), kidnapping of over 100 Palestinians in a spat of four days (to add to the 11,000 political prisoners held in Israeli torture cells), denial of right of movement, continued siege on Gaza strip, denial of rights of education, more land confiscation, pillaging a big portion of the humanitarian aid and much more.  If I was to write details of these violations, many readers would stop reading very quickly.  Visitors to this area think that Israel is doing these things “to defend itself” and sometimes may go overboard in “security measures.” Security measure that puts millions under a siege.  This maddening description is like saying the Apartheid White South Africa or Nazi Germany in occupied Poland were acting in self defense and sometimes they went a bit too far. Occupiers and colonizers do not have the right of self defense against the resistance of people who they occupy and colonize.

Indeed.  Forty-two years on, just what does Israel expect?  And how is Palestinian resistance (such as it is) to the illegal and brutal occupation supposed to justify yet more illegal and brutal actions? 

For the sake of both Israelis and Palestinians, the occupation must end.  I agree with Naomi Klein that

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.

On Feb 7, Hampshire College became the first U.S. institution of higher learning to pledge to divest from companies based on their activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. You can write to President Hextor in support of this action here.

UPDATE: Here's a film, 'Closed Zone', by Israeli Yoni Goodman, that brings certain effects of the Gaza blockade to animated life.

All hail al-Zaidi

There was never a better reason to throw a shoe:

Zaidi, whose unusual protest overshadowed Bush's final visit to Iraq, insisted he had not planned the December attack.

Instead, he said, Bush's smile as he talked about achievements in Iraq enraged him as he thought of "the killing of more than a million Iraqis, the disrespect for the sanctity of the mosques and houses, the rapes of women.

"He was talking and at the same time smiling icily at the (Iraqi) prime minister. He said to the prime minister that he was going to have dinner with him," Zaidi told a three-judge panel, a small army of 25 defence lawyers lined up next to him.

"Suddenly, I saw no one in the room but Bush. I felt the blood of innocents was running under his feet while he was smiling coldly as if he had come to write off Iraq with a farewell meal."

Zaidi added: "After more than a million Iraqis killed, after all the economic and social destruction ... I felt that this person is the killer of the people, the prime murderer. I was enraged and threw my shoes at him."

At the time, Zaidi shouted at Bush that the shoe-throwing was a "goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog."

One of the things I love about Toronto is that the Star publishes stories like this all the time.

Petition in support of Hilda Solis for Secretary of Labor

Senate Republicans are trying to block Solis, who has the nerve to actually support and represent the interests of working persons.  Please sign the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) petition in support of her appointment here.

Pro-union efforts

More good news from the Obama administration.

Happy days are here again

OK, maybe that's a bit pollyanna of me.  Still, one can't but feel optimistic after Barack's first week in office brought these tidings of great joy (among many others):

Obama signs executive orders closing Guantanamo, closing CIA detention centers around the world, and banning the use of torture in interrogations.

Obama's first call to a foreign leader is to Mahmoud Abbas; he chooses Lebanese-American George Mitchell as special envoy to the Middle East; he speaks up for Palestinians.

Obama reverses the "gag order" on funding to organizations providing abortions or abortion information.

Obama pledges to lift ban on federal funding of stem cell research.

Obama announces plans to fast-track regulation of the financial industry.

You can keep up with the good news here.

Epic fail

Nick Burbules (editor of the invaluable Progressive Blog Digest) is devoting today's post to summarizing some of the truly astonishing low-lights of the catastrophic Bush presidency.  Goodbye and good riddance to that illegally installed ignoramus and his malignant manipulators.

Of course, the Bush/Cheney "legacy" will long be with us---in millions of lives destroyed and relatedly, in a fundamentalist Islamic community that has been handed all the ideological ammunition it could ever want; in an economy trashed by deregulation; in government offices heavily populated with incompetent cronies; and so on.

Perhaps the biggest legacy, in the long run (putting aside the now increased possibilities of world-wide destruction, of both climatic and non-climatic varieties) is not so different, when you think about it, from that the Germans inherited: the knowledge that our government can be hijacked, and that many of us will go along for the ride, cheering along the way.

Here, as there, the biggest questions for the future are: can we prevent this from ever happening again?  And if so, how? 

I don't have an answer to the second question (though again, we might look to Germany for some ideas).  However, it seems that a necessary condition on the bare possibility of future prevention is that we recognize, not just as individuals but as a nation, that in the installation and the implementation of the Bush/Cheney regime gross wrongs occurred.  Without public recognition of that fact---of the sort that effective investigations, into (a) the crimes of the Bush administration, and (b) of the institutional and personal mechanisms (within the judiciary, the legislature, the military, governmental offices, and the media as well as the executive offices) allowing the associated gross wrongs, might be expected to produce---no change to these mechanisms will occur, and the conditions for future usurpation of our government in service of vile and unconscionable ends will remain intact.

Grateful for small favors

More house members stood up to Israel today than in 2006.

Where's the 'science' in political science?

Krugman says:

[O]nly about 60 percent of the Obama plan consists of public spending. The rest consists of tax cuts — and many economists are skeptical about how much these tax cuts, especially the tax breaks for business, will actually do to boost spending. (A number of Senate Democrats apparently share these doubts.)

Skeptical?  Doubtful?  The U.S. and most other countries have been doing trickle-down for decades now.  Why isn't the efficacy (or not) of these sorts of manoeuvres an empirically established fact?  I take it that, as a matter of fact, big tax cuts typically don't end up much stimulating the general economy, but evidently it's better to pretend that there is a live debate about all this, and better yet to pretend that the debate is grounded in ultimately "partisan" concerns.  Better, that is, than simply admitting that the real function of the cuts is to buy off conservative and business elements---in this case, so that the real job of spending-based stimulation of the economy can get done.

Cheney hotfooting it on out

Thank god -- I can't wait for Cheney to retire and leave the world alone.  Check out Vanity Fair's oral history of the Bush legacy, and in particular Lawrence Wilkerson's brilliant commentary on how effectively Cheney inserted himself into the vacuum he knew would be left by Bush.  That Cheney would say that Bush "called the shots" is completely in line with Wilkerson's on Cheney as the ultimate Darth Vader bureaucrat: a master of under the radar manipulation.   That guy is one evil SOB.  I only advise that no one go near the rivers he plans to fish in---you might end up with a hook in your face.

Get yer pro-union talking points

here.

Elizabeth Warren

We're a big fan in this space: see her incredibly data-charged and sympathetic lecture on how the rising cost of mandatory expenses (health, education, housing) is strangling middle income workers here. She'll be on the bailout oversight board. Yahoo!

Hooray!

So excited! Good luck, President Obama.

Vote!

Chill!

Nate Silver's Hour by Hour Guide to Election Night.

Daily Kos Election Day resources and crib sheet.

Don't let them stop you from voting.

Crucial information for getting polling information or reporting weird activity.

From Benj: Barack votes at Shoesmith Elementary! That's where my mama used to take me so I'd become a small-d democrat.

And remember: ain't no line too damn long.

Yes we can

It's wonderful to contemplate the transformative effects that will attend Barack Obama's being elected president tomorrow, as now seems inevitable.  Three are of particular note.  First, the return to sanity and competence as regards national and foreign policy and implementation, along pretty much every dimension.  Second, the rise of a respectful, issues- and fact-based model for political discourse.  Third, and surely most importantly, the deep-tissue cracking of the racist "schemas" (to use Sally Haslanger's term) that have been so foundationally undermining, for so long and for so many.  Here's to the end of these long national nightmares!!

This "hope diary" has all sorts of wonderful embedded visual tidbits.  Enjoy!