As you might imagine, I find myself in a lot of discussions about U.S. fiscal policy, and the budget deficit in particular. And there’s one thing I can count on in these discussions: At some point someone will announce, in dire tones, that we have a ONE TRILLION DOLLAR deficit.
No, I don’t think the people making this pronouncement realize that they sound just like Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies.
Anyway, we do indeed have a ONE TRILLION DOLLAR deficit, or at least we did; in fiscal 2012, which ended in September, the deficit was actually $1.089 trillion. (It will be lower this year.) The question is what lesson we should take from that figure.
What the Dr. Evil types think, and want you to think, is that the big current deficit is a sign that our fiscal position is completely unsustainable. Sometimes they argue that it means that a debt crisis is just around the corner, although they’ve been predicting that for years and it keeps not happening. (U.S. borrowing costs are near historic lows.) But more often they use the deficit to argue that we can’t afford to maintain programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. So it’s important to understand that this is completely wrong.
Now, America does have a long-run budget problem, thanks to our aging population and the rising cost of health care. However, the current deficit has nothing to do with that problem, and says nothing at all about the sustainability of our social insurance programs. Instead, it mainly reflects the depressed state of the economy — a depression that would be made even worse by attempts to shrink the deficit rapidly.
So, let’s talk about the numbers.
The first thing we need to ask is what a sustainable budget would look like. The answer is that in a growing economy, budgets don’t have to be balanced to be sustainable. Federal debt was higher at the end of the Clinton years than at the beginning — that is, the deficits of the Clinton administration’s early years outweighed the surpluses at the end. Yet because gross domestic product rose over those eight years, the best measure of our debt position, the ratio of debt to G.D.P., fell dramatically, from 49 to 33 percent.
Right now, given reasonable estimates of likely future growth and inflation, we would have a stable or declining ratio of debt to G.D.P. even if we had a $400 billion deficit [ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/further-notes-on-one-trillion-dollars/ ]. You can argue that we should do better; but if the question is whether current deficits are sustainable, you should take $400 billion off the table right away.
That still leaves $600 billion or so. What’s that about? It’s the depressed economy — full stop.
First of all, the weakness of the economy has led directly to lower revenues; when G.D.P. falls, the federal tax take falls too, and in fact always falls substantially more in percentage terms. On top of that, revenue is temporarily depressed by tax breaks, notably the payroll tax cut, that have been put in place to support the economy but will be withdrawn as soon as the economy is stronger (or, unfortunately, even before then). If you do the math, it seems likely that full economic recovery would raise revenue by at least $450 billion.
Meanwhile, the depressed economy has also temporarily raised spending, because more people qualify for unemployment insurance and means-tested programs like food stamps and Medicaid. A reasonable estimate is that economic recovery would reduce federal spending on such programs by at least $150 billion.
Putting all this together, it turns out that the trillion-dollar deficit isn’t a sign of unsustainable finances at all. Some of the deficit is in fact sustainable; just about all of the rest would go away if we had an economic recovery.
And the prospects for economic recovery are looking pretty good right now — or would be looking good if it weren’t for the political risks posed by Republican hostage-taking. Housing is reviving, consumer debt is down, employment has improved steadily among prime-age workers. Unfortunately, this recovery may well be derailed by the fiscal cliff and/or a confrontation over the debt ceiling; but this has nothing to do with the alleged unsustainability of the deficit.
Which brings us back to ONE TRILLION DOLLARS.
We do indeed have a big budget deficit, and other things equal it would be better if the deficit were a lot smaller. But other things aren’t equal; the deficit is a side-effect of an economic depression, and the first order of business should be to end that depression — which means, among other things, leaving the deficit alone for now.
And you should recognize all the hyped-up talk about the deficit for what it is: yet another disingenuous attempt to scare and bully the body politic into abandoning programs that shield both poor and middle-class Americans from harm.
You Hate "Right To Work" Laws More Than You Know. Here's Why
From: Mark Ames TO: The Labor Desk Date: Dec 12th, 2012
Las Vegas, NV:
"From now on, white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs." — Vance Muse, founder of the "right to work" anti-labor campaign
The Michigan GOP apparently blindsided everyone with the union-busting "right to work" laws they just rammed through the state. Certainly my labor friends were caught off-guard tactically by the Republicans’ speed and choice of battleground.
For most of the county, though, the confusion has to do with what "right to work laws" are and why they’re so bad. You can see it written on the faces of the morning cable news hosts on CNN and even MSNBC — trying to pretend like they know what "right-to-work" laws actually mean, flummoxed by the brazen Orwellian neologism of the phrase and sweating over the possibility that they might have to explain it. Lucky for them, and for most of the media establishment (and for the Koch brothers), few people even know what questions to ask about "right to work laws." All they know — kinda — is that they’re bad for unions, and that those unions seem to know exactly how bad things are about to get.
Today, in most of America, unions have it bad. And part of the reason it’s bad is because we no longer know how to organize. Imagine trying to organize workers in your call center or warehouse, or your software gaming firm or your human rights NGO, as they’re doing at Amnesty International [ http://www.salon.com/2012/11/20/amnesty_international_workers_start_strike/ ]. The pressures against you — from worker cynicism and colleagues’ fear of losing their jobs, to personal relations with your boss and superiors, the bills you have to pay, and simple questions like "how do I organize" and "how do I know I won’t be screwed" — not to mention the inevitable appearance of company snitches, provocateurs, and just run-of-the-mill assholes and idiots... I’m not even talking here about your company’s ability to fire you, demote you, abolish your department, slash your pay, pretty much whatever the Hell they want ever since Reagan busted the air traffic controller’s union... This is the lot of American labor organizers in 2012 , except for in a few remaining pockets of America where union power and memory is still strong and tightly woven into the local cultural DNA.
Michigan is one of those places, which is why crushing labor power there would be as inspiring to the rightwing oligarchs who just got creamed at the polls as, say, the rise of the Tea Party was in early 2009.
So yesterday, as Michigan Republicans pushed the bill into law, labor groups converged on the capital in Lansing. According to the BBC, "police in riot gear used tear gas to control tensions among a crowd [outside the Michigan statehouse] of more than 10,000 protesters." For a lot of (once)-middle-class Americans, it’s hard to reconcile that level of anger with something as dull-sounding as "right to work laws."
"Austerity measures" are easier to fear: "austerity" is meant to sound scary and sadomasochistic. But "right to work" sounds dreary and almost redundant, like "right to pay bills."
That’s until you start to understand the history of the "right to work" movement, the racist human hagfish who brought "right to work" into our lexicon and made it happen, and the far-right fascist oligarchs who made it worth their while. Once you meet a few of these cretins — specifically, Vance Muse, the Karl Rove-meets-David Duke brains behind the whole "Right-to-Work" movement whom I’ll introduce you to a little later in this piece — you’ll understand why those thousands who converged on Lansing were acting like their state legislators just invited Count Dracula into everyone’s homes.
In terms of understanding what just happened, it would help if we were back in the 1940s and 50s, when most liberals and establishment media used — and understood — the antonym, "union security" — a descriptive phrase for the New Deal labor laws which finally gave union organizers a fighting chance, and saw the percentage of unionized workers in the US soar from single digits in the early 1930s to around 35% of the workforce by the mid-late 1940s.
The "right-to-work" movement to destroy labor unions began almost as soon as FDR passed the Wagner Act in the mid-1930s, which gave labor organizers "union security" as the old euphemism went and should still go. Again, you have to understand the historical context: Until the Wagner Act passed, when it came to workers’ rights, America in the 1930s was about half a century or more behind the rest of the West — child labor wasn’t even outlawed here until 1938.
But nothing compared to the endless massacres and murders of American labor organizers, massacres that are all but censored from the official history of this country. Maybe you’ve heard something about the Ludlow Massacre of the families of mine workers at Rockefeller’s mines in Colorado in 1913 — but you probably don’t know many of the details, like how Rockefeller’s private armed goons patrolled the miners’ miserable tent cities in an armored car with a mounted machine gun, spraying the tents and terrorizing the strikers, who demanded such radical concessions as "enforcement of Colorado’s laws," the eight hour work day, and pay for time spent working. Or how the terrorized women and children in the embattled tent city dug a giant makeshift bunker pit beneath one of the larger tents to hide out from the bullets — only to have Colorado National Guardsmen douse the tents with kerosene and light them on fire while the miners’ families were sleeping, then shoot some of those who ran out, killing over a dozen children, scores of workers and their wives, and ending with the arrests of hundreds of miners.
In the end, anywhere from several dozen to 200 were left dead. We don’t know exactly — and there hasn’t been much effort on the part of our culture to find out. This "we don’t know the death toll" marks just about all of the many killings and massacres of labor organizers and strikers in the pre-New Deal era.
The same goes with the West Virginia mine wars: whether the massacre of tent city workers in 1913 by coal miner thugs firing from armored trains passing through the tent cities, or the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, when the company raised the largest private standing army in the US, and attacked strikers with gas shells fired from artillery and dropped from bombers. President Harding followed that up by sending in federal troops and the US Air Force led by Brig. General Billy Mitchell, and when it was over, the miners’ unionization drive was dead. Along with well over 100 workers and family members — again, the exact number is "in dispute" as they say.
The "Red Scare" of 1919-20 was aimed at breaking labor unions, and specifically at equating union security — the "closed shop" where unionized companies and factories could require all workers to pay dues to the unions since they all benefited from union contracts — with Bolshevism. In contrast stood the "open shop"—where union membership was merely a "choice" strongly discouraged by employers — with "Americanism." In fact that’s what they called "right to work" back then: the "American Plan."
The Palmer Raids of those years (where J. Edgar Hoover first distinguished himself) resulted in tens of thousands of Americans illegally rounded up, beaten, tortured, imprisoned without any due process, and deported by the thousands, citizens included. Big business coordinated their PR offensive with the Palmer Raids by labeling anti-union open shop laws "American Plan."
After the 1929 crash, that euphemism became associated in people’s minds with the brutal pre-New Deal culture. So corporate America went back to their PR flaks to brand "open shop" with a new, less toxic-sounding euphemism. The phrase they came up with was "right to work," as if they were actually empowering workers with "individual liberty" by going after their unions.
History shows us what’s at stake here, and how far big business was willing to go to keep "right to work" or "American Plan" the national standard. Big business in America regarded the rest of the population and its labor pool much the same way colonial powers viewed the local Natives — as inherently hostile, alien savages whose purpose was to enrich their masters, and who must not be given even the slightest concessions, such as child labor laws, lest it put ideas in their heads about "rights"...
It was in this atmosphere that the ACLU really began as a defender of labor rights, when the ACLU equated civil liberties and Constitutional liberties with union organizing rights. Contrast that with today’s ACLU, which supports Citizens United and corporate "free speech" in exchange for massive donations from tobacco firms and the Koch brothers, while focusing on high-profile culture war cases at the expense of labor [ http://exiledonline.com/the-lefts-big-sellout-how-the-aclu-human-rights-groups-quietly-exterminated-labor-rights/ ].
By 1930, labor unions were practically dead, considered a relic of the past by the media and academic elites. The Great Depression changed all that, in part because unlike today, back then Americans had no food stamps, no unemployment insurance, no state pensions, and of course, no child labor laws and no labor protections to speak of — all the things labor unions are responsible for giving us today.
which left four workers killed and up to 50 wounded — through the Chicago Memorial Day Massacre [ http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-05-27/site/ct-per-flash-republicsteel-0527-20120527_1_gun-shots-police-officers-strikers ] of striking Republic Steel workers in 1937, in which company thugs and cops killed 10 peaceful marchers nearly all of whom were shot in the back, and wounded 60 more, billyclubbing the wounded as they crouched in the dirt — America was a savage and violent place to work if you weren’t rich.
Hearings were held in the Senate, and the LaFollette Committee Report discovered that corporations not only operated armies of spies in the tens of thousands, but that "Republic Steel Corporation [responsible for the 1937 massacre] has a uniformed police force of nearly 400 men whom it was equipped not only with revolvers, rifles, and shotguns, but also with more tear and sickening gas and gas equipment than has been purchased...by any law-enforcement body, local, State or Federal in the country. It has loosed its guards, thus armed, to shoot down citizens on the streets and highways," the Senate report observed.
That was the arsenal controlled by just a single steel company.
FDR leveled the workplace playing field some with the Wagner Act, for the first time making union security (closed shop) a reality. Labor union power and membership soared, as did wages and benefits; America suddenly had Social Security and unemployment insurance, child labor laws, a minimum wage, five day/40 hour work week, and within a few years, a powerful middle class.
To big business plutocrats, the New Deal labor laws represented a sort of political Holocaust that they never forgot or forgave. They lost their full spectrum political dominance over their workers and over the political and judicial direction of the country, and all that essentially because FDR brought to an end America’s "open shop" culture and empowered unions with "closed shop" union security.
But business vowed that one day it would have its revenge. And that revenge would be "right to work" laws.
A report I found dating back to 1962 by Group Research, Inc — one of those left-liberal outfits back in the days before the left was defunded — dated big business’ first use of this new "right to work" to 1935, when the Automobile Manufacturers’ Association lobbied against FDR’s pro-labor Wagner Act, telling the New York Times, "men have an inalienable right to work, free from coercion..."
That’s an interesting coincidence, because Mitt Romney’s dad, George Romney, owed his success to the Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, which hired him as a top lobbyist in 1939. It was from that job that Romney eventually took over his own Michigan automobile firm, AMC, took over Michigan as governor (where he oversaw the bloodiest inner city riots of 1967), told America he’d been brainwashed in Vietnam, denounced supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment as "moral perverts" and homosexuals, and yes, gifted the world with his vulture capitalist son, Willard M. Romney, or "Mitt The Impaled" as we call him here at the NSFWCORP headquarters.
But I digress. And there’s a reason I digress. Because I’ve been putting off introducing you to Vance Muse, the real brains behind the "right to work" movement that’s still plaguing Americans to this day.
Vance Muse was a racist political operative and lobbyist from the state of Texas — the native habitat for all America’s vermin —as Satanically vile as "Turd Blossom" Rove, a racist smear-peddler like Andrew Breitbart, only without Breitbart’s degenerate heart and fondness for blow.
Here is a description of Vance Muse, creator of the "right to work" movement, from a book by an old celebrated journalist, Stetson Kennedy, the reporter who famously went undercover inside the KKK and wrote a tell-all in the 40’s:
"The man Muse is quite a character. He is six foot four, wears a ten-gallon hat, but generally reserves his cowboy boots for trips Nawth. Now over fifty [this is published in 1946—M.A.], Muse has been professionally engaged in reactionary enterprises for more than a quarter of a century."
Among Vance Muse’s "reactionary enterprises": He lobbied against women’s suffrage, against the child-labor amendment, against the 8-hour workday, and in 1936, Muse engineered the first split in the South’s Democratic Party by peeling off the segregationists and racists from the New Deal party, a political maneuver that eventually led to Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, and at last a Republican right-wing takeover of the South, and with it, the collapse of the old New Deal coalition. Which worked out fine for Vance Muse, since he was a covert Republican himself, serving "for years" as the Republican Party state treasurer in Texas.
That first attempt at splitting the Democratic party by peeling away the Southern segregationist-fascists took place in 1936, when Georgia’s brutal white supremacist governor, Eugene Talmadge, organized a "grassroots" convention with Vance Muse’s help. To stir up anti-FDR and anti-New Deal hate in the South, Vance Muse used photographs he acquired showing First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt being escorted by two African-American professors at Howard University. Muse used that photo to stir up the white supremacists in Georgia, he leaked it to as many newspapers as he could, and he even brandished it around a Senate hearing he was called before in 1936. Those hearings revealed that the anti-FDR "convention" that Vance Muse put on, through his "Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution"— which featured guests of honor like Gerald L K Smith, America’s leading anti-Semite and godfather to the modern American Nazi movement — was financed not only by Confederate sponsors like Texan Will Clayton, owner of the world’s largest cotton broker, but also reactionary northeast Republican money: the DuPont brothers, J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil, Alfred Sloan of General Motors... That unholy alliance of Northeastern and Confederate plutocrat money financed the first serious attempt at splitting the Southern Democrats off by exploiting white supremacism, all in order to break labor power and return to the world before the New Deal — and to the open shop.
Incidentally, Vance Muse’s northern donors — DuPont, Pew, Sloan — were the same core investors in (and board directors of) the first modern libertarian think-tanks of the 40s and 50s, including the Foundation for Economic Education [ http://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/milton-friedman ]. DuPont, Pew and Sloan funds also seeded the American careers of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard, among others. In other words, Vance Muse’s funders built the first layer of the libertarian nomenklatura that Charles Koch later took control of — no surprise, since Koch outfits are credited with making the Michigan "right to work" law possible.
...Getting back to Vance Muse: In 1936, he incorporated in Texas another union-busting outfit called the "Christian American Association" which was closely associated with the Texas Ku Klux Klan as well as the American Legion, a far-right veterans’ group used to bust up unions and terrorize minorities and suspected Communists. It was this same Christian American Association which launched the "right to work" anti-union campaign using that very same euphemism.
The modern Right-to-Work movement and political mobilization championing this slogan...was spearheaded by the Christian American Association out of Houston in the early 1940s.
Initially, Vance Muse set the association up to create a sort of fundamentalist Christian KKK outfit to undermine FDR’s 1936 election. In 1941, he saw an editorial in the Dallas Morning News calling for Texas to pass an open shop amendment called "Right-To Work" to its state constitution.
Dixon writes:
"After traveling to Dallas and consulting with the editor, Muse was encouraged to use and promote the idea of Right-to-Work. This became their [Christian American’s] primary cause and they campaigned extensively for Right-to-Work legislation throughout the country, and especially in Texas."
Vance Muse’s fellow traveler in Texas union-busting fascism was a local big business outfit called the "Fight for Free Enterprise" and together, the two of groups passed laws outlawing picketing by striking workers and making it easy for anyone to accuse picketing workers of inciting violence, open shop "Right-to-Work" laws, and they even pushed for a Nazi-like law that would force union organizers to wear "identifying head gear (red for the CIO and gray for the AFL)."
Even as millions of Americans were fighting fascism overseas, Vance Muse in his ten-gallon hat bragged to his Confederate plutocrats about the passage of Texas’ anti-picketing bill, saying it would "keep the color line drawn in our social affairs." In 1944, he told the Houston Post that so-called "Eleanor Clubs," named in honor of the First Lady, were a "RED RADICAL scheme to organize negro maids, cooks and nurses in order to have a Communist informer in every Southern home."
Muse’s sister and partner in Christian American, Ida Darden, agreed with her brother, telling the Antioch Review she worried that the Eleanor Clubs...
...stood for "$15 a week salary for all nigger house help, Sundays off, no washing, and no cleaning upstairs." As an afterthought, she added, "My nigger maid wouldn’t dare sit down in the same room with me unless she sat on the floor at my feet!"
Allowing herself to go still further, the little lady went on to say, "Christian Americans can’t afford to be anti-Semitic, but we know where we stand on the Jews, all right. It doesn’t pay us to work with Winrod, Smith, Coughlin, and those others up North; they’re too outspoken and would get us into trouble...You’d be surprised how many important corporations support our work." - Southern Exposure, Stetson Kennedy
Indeed. That, again, from the sister and partner in the outfit that created the modern Right-To-Work movement which, decades later, just steamrolled over Michigan.
A March 10, 1945 article in the Sunday Morning Star in Delaware reported on Vance Muse’s outfit, as its first "Right-To-Work" successes started to get national attention:
"Union groups throughout the country are asking [for] an investigation of the Christian American Association which has been pushing anti-labor bills in many state legislators. Anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic literature has also been attributed to the Christian Americans."
In fact, their anti-Catholic literature was so strident that they were all but chased out of Louisiana.
But in Texas it worked: That year, 1945, Vance Muse’s Christian American Association successfully lobbied for Texas’ "Right-To-Work" law thanks to a brilliant smear campaign run by Muse himself: He arranged for a woman called Ruth Koenig, who claimed to be the head of an alleged Texas Communist Party, to testify before the Texas legislature on the Right-to-Work law. Naturally the Communist testified against the law – and thanks to that testimony Muse’s Christian American Association was able to label any Texas lawmaker opposed to Right-to-Work as a Communist. Flyers were printed up warning state residents about "Communists in the Legislature," listing their names, linking them to Koenig with the header: "Where She Leads Us, We Will Follow."
Until that day, Texas was on its way to becoming a strong union state, according to Dartmouth’s Prof. Dixon, outpacing other states in the South thanks largely to successful organizing by the CIO. After passage of the Right-to-Work law...well, look at Texas today. It’s libertarian Hell, Koch Industries paradise, home to Ron Paul and Rick Perry. Just how they like it.
The transition to our time has been seamless. Charles Koch’s father, Fred Koch, made his name in right-wing politics as one of the leaders of the Kansas Right-to-Work movement. The fight in Kansas was more bitter and protracted than in Texas — Kansas had a strong tradition of populism and farmer socialism — but in 1958, they succeeded and the law passed. That same year, Fred Koch co-founded the crypto-fascist John Birch Society with eleven other industrialists, the most powerful grassroots libertarian outfit of the postwar era until his son Charles raised libertarianism to an entirely new level.
Among other things, the John Birch Society taught that President Eisenhower was a conscious active Communist agent taking orders from Moscow; that the Civil Rights movement was a Communist conspiracy and Martin Luther King took direct orders from Moscow; and that the world was controlled by a group of conspiratorial insiders known as the Illuminati; and that America is "a republic, not a democracy."
Politically, its goal was the same as Vance Muse’s: reversing "the whole new-deal march toward state socialism" and expunging "the disease of collectivism," in the words of Bircher leader Robert Welch. In other words: union-busting, stripping government benefits and eliminating taxes on the rich. (To understand why Fred Koch and the Bircher libertarians hated Ike so much, imagine today a Republican like Eisenhower who raised the top marginal tax rate to 91%, who poured massive government investments into building roads and schools, who publicly declared his support for Social Security and denounced any Republican who opposed it — you get the point.)
The founder of the National Right To Work Committee in the mid-1950s, Reed Larson, came from Fred and Charles Koch’s base in Wichita, Kansas — headquarters of Koch Industries. Fred Koch teamed up with Reed Larson to pass Kansas’ Right-to-Work law, and Reed Larson’s "National Right to Work Committee" intertwined itself with Fred Koch’s John Birch Society.
And that sordid history of Right-to-Work, that seamless historical thread running straight out of Vance Muse’s putrid little brain right through all of the shock and misery on display in Lansing, Michigan today — that’s what’s the matter with Kansas. Dorothy’s wrong, folks: we’re all stuck in Kansas, and no one’s safe, no matter which state you live in.
* * *
One last thing: I’m ashamed to say that until this week I’d never heard of Stetson Kennedy, author of the book "Southern Exposure" that I quoted above. The old blurbs on his books from The Nation and elsewhere make it clear that he was once a big deal journalist author, largely due to the book he wrote when he went undercover inside the KKK, published in 1942, titled, "The Klan Unmasked." It was thanks to Kennedy’s book and his investigative work that the state of Georgia rescinded the Ku Klux Klan’s national corporate charter in 1947. Kennedy not only wrote for The Nation and others, but also was active in the CIO labor movement. Even Woody Guthrie wrote a song about him, called of course "Stetson Kennedy."
As years went on, Kennedy’s name faded into history. Until 2006, that is when Stetson Kennedy was 90 years old and Freakonomics author Steven Levitt wrote a hit piece in the New York Times titled "Hoodwinked?" claiming that Kennedy’s research into the KKK had been fabricated.
As the Guardian reports:
This ignited a fiery protest, with Studs Terkel angrily defending his old friend in a letter to the New York Times:
"[Stetson] could well be described as a 'troublemaker' in the best sense of the word. With half a dozen Stetson Kennedys, we can transform our society into one of truth, grace and beauty."
And sure enough:
"Investigations by several newspapers, and evidence from Peggy Bulger, director of the American Folklife Centre at the Library of Congress, generally exonerated Kennedy."
If it was anyone else besides Steven Levitt picking on a 90-year-old man and claiming his scalp by debunking 60-year-old books he can hardly coherently defend — I’d pass this off as mere contrarian dickishness.
But I know Levitt’s work too well, having profiled him with Yasha Levine at our Project SHAME [ http://shameproject.com/profile/steven-d-levitt/ ] (which we’re bringing into the larger NSFWCORP orbit, stay tuned). So when a demonstrable pig like Steven Levitt pulls a hit piece on a 90-year-old righteous labor legend like Stetson Kennedy, it smells to me much more like some sort of big business/libertarian payback for an old grievance, and here’s why.
First of all, Levitt — a University of Chicago libertarian economist who mentored under Gary Becker, one of Gen. Pinochet’s advisors and an advocate of creating a deregulated commodities exchange for human organs, I nit you shot — has a serious racism problem dating back to the 1990s, when Levitt published a highly dubious paper arguing that crime dropped in the 1990s because black women aborted lots of black babies in the 1970s. Several critics accused Levitt of legitimizing racial eugenics, and of using wildly flawed data to back up his insane claim. The Freakonomics author also was an early major advocate of turning prisoners into cheap private labor farmed out to corporations, and he advised prisons to pack and overcrowd their cells with prisoners as a way of saving money and increasing efficiency.
And that’s the problem with Levitt: He can’t be trusted. Not only has he been called out for promoting racial eugenics, but he also used his cutesy, seemingly-harmless Freakonomics platform to promote an extreme version of global warming denialism, relying on either discredited sources, or on invented quotes by credible sources who then called Levitt out for it.
And then of course there’s his Levitt’s sadistic role in helping bust the Chicago Teachers Union, one of the nation’s biggest (and most heroic) ongoing labor union battles.
It’s a perfect illustration of how far our culture has degenerated: the fact that today we celebrate a loathsome hack like Freakonomics author Steven Levitt, whose "freakonomics" haven’t done a fucking thing to help anyone’s life...and yet we don’t even remember a hero like Stetson Kennedy, who took on Southern racism head-on, championed labor rights, and was a great writer to boot.
So there we are, with tear gas flying in Michigan and Levitt helping discredit Stetson Kennedy and busting unions, and the words "right to work" on every front page from here to London, we’ve come full circle. Vance Muse lives. And we’re still in motherfucking Kansas. It’s looking like if we want to get out, folks, we’ll have to fight our way out.
In the wake of the school massacre in Newtown, Conn., and the resulting renewed debate on gun control in the United States, The Stone [ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/the-stone/ ] will publish a series of essays this week that examine the ethical, social and humanitarian implications of the use, possession and regulation of weapons.
The night of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., I was in the car with my wife and children, working out details for our eldest son’s 12th birthday the following Sunday — convening a group of friends at a showing of the film “The Hobbit.” The memory of the Aurora movie theatre massacre was fresh in his mind, so he was concerned that it not be a late night showing. At that moment, like so many families, my wife and I were weighing whether to turn on the radio and expose our children to coverage of the school shootings in Connecticut. We did. The car was silent in the face of the flood of gory details. When the story was over, there was a long thoughtful pause in the back of the car. Then my eldest son asked if he could be homeschooled.
That incident brought home to me what I have always suspected, but found difficult to articulate: an armed society — especially as we prosecute it at the moment in this country — is the opposite of a civil society.
The Newtown shootings occurred at a peculiar time in gun rights history in this nation. On one hand, since the mid 1970s, fewer households each year on average have had a gun. Gun control advocates should be cheered by that news, but it is eclipsed by a flurry of contrary developments. As has been well publicized, gun sales have steadily risen over the past few years, and spiked with each of Obama’s election victories.
Furthermore, of the weapons that proliferate amongst the armed public, an increasing number are high caliber weapons (the weapon of choice in the goriest shootings in recent years). Then there is the legal landscape, which looks bleak for the gun control crowd.
Every state except for Illinois has a law allowing the carrying of concealed weapons — and just last week, a federal court struck down Illinois’ ban [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/us/illinois-appeals-court-overturns-state-ban-on-concealed-weapons.html ]. States are now lining up to allow guns on college campuses. In September, Colorado joined four other states in such a move, and statehouses across the country are preparing similar legislation. And of course, there was Oklahoma’s ominous Open Carry Law approved by voters this election day — the fifteenth of its kind, in fact — which, as the name suggests, allows those with a special permit to carry weapons in the open, with a holster on their hip.
Individual gun ownership — and gun violence — has long been a distinctive feature of American society, setting us apart from the other industrialized democracies of the world. Recent legislative developments, however, are progressively bringing guns out of the private domain, with the ultimate aim of enshrining them in public life. Indeed, the N.R.A. strives for a day when the open carry of powerful weapons might be normal, a fixture even, of any visit to the coffee shop or grocery store — or classroom.
As N.R.A. president Wayne LaPierre expressed in a recent statement on the organization’s Web site, more guns equal more safety, by their account [ http://home.nra.org/classic.aspx/blog/342 ]. A favorite gun rights saying is “an armed society is a polite society.” If we allow ever more people to be armed, at any time, in any place, this will provide a powerful deterrent to potential criminals. Or if more citizens were armed — like principals and teachers in the classroom, for example — they could halt senseless shootings ahead of time, or at least early on, and save society a lot of heartache and bloodshed.
As ever more people are armed in public, however — even brandishing weapons on the street — this is no longer recognizable as a civil society. Freedom is vanished at that point.
And yet, gun rights advocates famously maintain that individual gun ownership, even of high caliber weapons, is the defining mark of our freedom as such, and the ultimate guarantee of our enduring liberty. Deeper reflection on their argument exposes basic fallacies.
In her book “The Human Condition [ http://www.amazon.com/Human-Condition-2nd-Hannah-Arendt/dp/0226025985 ],” the philosopher Hannah Arendt [ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/ ; http://www.iep.utm.edu/arendt/ ] states that “violence is mute.” According to Arendt, speech dominates and distinguishes the polis, the highest form of human association, which is devoted to the freedom and equality of its component members. Violence — and the threat of it — is a pre-political manner of communication and control, characteristic of undemocratic organizations and hierarchical relationships. For the ancient Athenians who practiced an incipient, albeit limited form of democracy (one that we surely aim to surpass), violence was characteristic of the master-slave relationship, not that of free citizens.
Arendt offers two points that are salient to our thinking about guns: for one, they insert a hierarchy of some kind, but fundamental nonetheless, and thereby undermine equality. But furthermore, guns pose a monumental challenge to freedom, and particular, the liberty that is the hallmark of any democracy worthy of the name — that is, freedom of speech. Guns do communicate, after all, but in a way that is contrary to free speech aspirations: for, guns chasten speech.
This becomes clear if only you pry a little more deeply into the N.R.A.’s logic behind an armed society. An armed society is polite, by their thinking, precisely because guns would compel everyone to tamp down eccentric behavior, and refrain from actions that might seem threatening. The suggestion is that guns liberally interspersed throughout society would cause us all to walk gingerly — not make any sudden, unexpected moves — and watch what we say, how we act, whom we might offend.
As our Constitution provides, however, liberty entails precisely the freedom to be reckless, within limits, also the freedom to insult and offend as the case may be. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld our right to experiment in offensive language and ideas, and in some cases, offensive action and speech. Such experimentation is inherent to our freedom as such. But guns by their nature do not mix with this experiment — they don’t mix with taking offense. They are combustible ingredients in assembly and speech.
I often think of the armed protestor who showed up to one of the famously raucous town hall hearings on Obamacare in the summer of 2009. The media was very worked up over this man, who bore a sign that invoked a famous quote of Thomas Jefferson, accusing the president of tyranny. But no one engaged him at the protest; no one dared approach him even, for discussion or debate — though this was a town hall meeting, intended for just such purposes. Such is the effect of guns on speech — and assembly. Like it or not, they transform the bearer, and end the conversation in some fundamental way. They announce that the conversation is not completely unbounded, unfettered and free; there is or can be a limit to negotiation and debate — definitively.
The very power and possibility of free speech and assembly rests on their non-violence. The power of the Occupy Wall Street movement, as well as the Arab Spring protests, stemmed precisely from their non-violent nature. This power was made evident by the ferocity of government response to the Occupy movement. Occupy protestors across the country were increasingly confronted by police in military style garb and affect [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/sunday-review/have-american-police-become-militarized.html?pagewanted=all ].
Imagine what this would have looked like had the protestors been armed: in the face of the New York Police Department assault on Zuccotti Park, there might have been armed insurrection in the streets. The non-violent nature of protest in this country ensures that it can occur.
Gun rights advocates also argue that guns provide the ultimate insurance of our freedom, in so far as they are the final deterrent against encroaching centralized government, and an executive branch run amok with power. Any suggestion of limiting guns rights is greeted by ominous warnings that this is a move of expansive, would-be despotic government. It has been the means by which gun rights advocates withstand even the most seemingly rational gun control measures. An assault weapons ban, smaller ammunition clips for guns, longer background checks on gun purchases — these are all measures centralized government wants, they claim, in order to exert control over us, and ultimately impose its arbitrary will. I have often suspected, however, that contrary to holding centralized authority in check, broad individual gun ownership gives the powers-that-be exactly what they want.
After all, a population of privately armed citizens is one that is increasingly fragmented, and vulnerable as a result. Private gun ownership invites retreat into extreme individualism — I heard numerous calls for homeschooling in the wake of the Newtown shootings — and nourishes the illusion that I can be my own police, or military, as the case may be. The N.R.A. would have each of us steeled for impending government aggression, but it goes without saying that individually armed citizens are no match for government force. The N.R.A. argues against that interpretation of the Second Amendment that privileges armed militias over individuals, and yet it seems clear that armed militias, at least in theory, would provide a superior check on autocratic government.
As Michel Foucault [ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/ ; http://www.iep.utm.edu/foucault/ ] pointed out in his detailed study of the mechanisms of power [ http://www.amazon.com/Discipline-Punish-Prison-Michel-Foucault/dp/0679752552 ], nothing suits power so well as extreme individualism. In fact, he explains, political and corporate interests aim at nothing less than “individualization,” since it is far easier to manipulate a collection of discrete and increasingly independent individuals than a community. Guns undermine just that — community. Their pervasive, open presence would sow apprehension, suspicion, mistrust and fear, all emotions that are corrosive of community and civic cooperation. To that extent, then, guns give license to autocratic government.
Our gun culture promotes a fatal slide into extreme individualism. It fosters a society of atomistic individuals, isolated before power — and one another — and in the aftermath of shootings such as at Newtown, paralyzed with fear. That is not freedom, but quite its opposite. And as the Occupy movement makes clear, also the demonstrators that precipitated regime change in Egypt and Myanmar last year, assembled masses don’t require guns to exercise and secure their freedom, and wield world-changing political force. Arendt and Foucault reveal that power does not lie in armed individuals, but in assembly — and everything conducive to that.
The maker of the assault weapon that killed 27 people in Connecticut quizzes its customers on their manhood
By Alex Seitz-Wald Monday, Dec 17, 2012 01:27 PM CST
There are lots of reasons to own guns: Hunting, self-defense, clinging purposes, but also to bolster your deflated sense of masculinity. This is not some glib liberal notion about how men only buy guns to compensate for their inadequacies, this is the explicit aim of an ad campaign from Bushmaster, the maker of the assault rifle that was used to kill 27 people last week in Connecticut.
You see, you’re not officially a man until Bushmaster tells you you are. “To become a card-carrying man, visitors of bushmaster.com will have to prove they’re a man by answering a series of manhood questions [ http://www.bushmaster.com/press-release-050710.asp ]. Upon successful completion, they will be issued a temporary Man Card to proudly display to friends and family,” a press release for the campaign reads.
Most of the quiz questions are pretty predictable and harmless, if dumb — Do you eat tofu? Can you change a tire? Have you ever watched figured skating “on purpose”? — but others are more challenging. One question gives you four possible options of how to respond if a car full of the rival team’s fans cuts you off on the way to the championship game. The correct answer [ http://twitpic.com/bmuyjn ], it turns out, is to commit arson: “Skip the game, find the other car in the parking lot, and render it unrecognizable with a conflagration of shoe polish and empty food containers.”
But watch out, manly friends. Don’t let those emotions show or that glass be full of anything but non-light beer, because your buddies can “revoke” your Man Card at any point. Revokable offenses include being a “crybaby,” a “coward,” a “cupcake” (we have no idea what that means either), having a “short leash” (presumably thanks to a wife or girlfriend), or being just generally “unmanly” (this one has a woman icon).
In the wake of the shooting, some clever Internet users have employed their revoking privileges to taking away Bushmaster’s own man card, listing their location as Newtown, Conn. “Bushmaster is run by awful human beings,” one revocation notice reads.
Nancy Lanza Firearms Purchases Show She Was Ideal Gun Industry Customer
Nancy Lanza, whose firearms purchases showed her as the gun industry's ideal customer.
By John Rudoff Posted: 12/17/2012 7:20 pm EST | Updated: 12/17/2012 7:45 pm EST
Nancy Lanza, the mother of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter Adam Lanza, was in many ways an ideal customer for the U.S. gun industry.
A divorced mother of two with plenty of disposable income, Lanza, 52, collected guns for home security and for target shooting, according to friends and relatives. Her personal arsenal included a Bushmaster .223, a lightweight military-style rifle, and several high-capacity semi-automatic handguns.
The Bushmaster was the weapon used by her 20-year-old son Adam to murder 20 children and six adults at a Connecticut elementary school on Friday, authorities said. Investigators discovered hundreds of rounds in high-capacity clips on Lanza's body after he reportedly committed suicide. Nancy Lanza was also killed, shot multiple times in the head by her son before he began his rampage, police said.
Military-style weapons like the Bushmaster, an AR-15 assault rifle once mostly limited to armed forces personnel and law enforcement, have spread far and wide in recent decades as a result of aggressive marketing by a gun industry fighting to maintain profitability in the face of a long-term decline in sales to a shrinking population of hunters.
A Bushmaster AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and ammunition is seen at the Seattle Police headquarters in Seattle.
Women have emerged as an important sales demographic for such weapons in the past decade, said Tom Diaz, a senior analyst with the Violence Policy Center in Washington.
"Women like her have been a heavy target of the industry," said Diaz. "They're always promoting getting women into the shooting sports."
A 2011 report by Freedom Group, a privately held company that owns Bushmaster, the top-selling military-style rifles, noted that sales to women were a "significant" source of growth.
"We believe that a meaningful percentage of recent firearm sales are being made to first-time gun purchasers, particularly women," the report stated. "We view this current increase in demand as having significant long-term benefits."
A spokeswoman for Freedom Group did not respond to a request for comment. The National Rifle Association disabled its Facebook page after the shooting, and did not respond to media inquiries. The National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun rights group based in Newtown, Conn., also failed to return messages requesting comment.
"Out of respect for the families, the community and the ongoing police investigation, it would be inappropriate to comment or participate in media requests at this time," said a statement on the group's website.
In the wake of the Newton massacre, a growing chorus of federal and state leaders have called for increased regulation of semiautomatic weapons and the high-capacity clips that greatly increase their lethality. On Sunday, President Barack Obama said he was prepared to push hard for tougher gun laws.
A serious clampdown on military-style semiautomatics and high-capacity pistols [ http://www.shootingwire.com/archives/2008-12-17 ] would hit gun manufacturers hard, according to industry experts. A 2008 article by the firearms trade magazine Shooting Line described gun manufacturers as "hanging onto a single category."
"If you're heavily dependent on hunting, you are hurting," the article noted.
High-capacity pistols and military-style semiautomatic rifles, however, were on back order for many gun retailers due to “incessant consumer demand,” Shooting Line said.
Overall gun ownership rates have fallen sharply in recent decades, according to some researchers. In 1980, just over half of all American households reported owning a firearm. In 2010, just one in three American homes said they kept a gun on the premises, according to a survey by the Violence Policy Center.
“The challenge to the gun industry is this: they have completely saturated their typical customer, the white male 40 or above, so they are trying to sell that guy his third, fourth, fifth, sixth or even seventh gun," said Ladd Everitt of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.
To stoke sales, the gun industry aggressively markets military-style weapons to the consumer market, using catalogs, websites and advertisements in magazines that evoke patriotic themes or stoke fears of violent crime, economic collapse and civil unrest.
"Security is more critical than ever, no matter how you define the word home. Iraq. Afghanistan. Your living room," said a 2010 advertisement for a "tactical shotgun" in Guns & Ammo magazine.
“Last time we visited with her in person we talked about prepping and, you know, are you ready for what can happen down the line when the economy collapses.”
Since then, subsequent [ http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/12/wow_waiting_for_the_apocalypse.php ] reports have suggested Nancy Lanza — the mother and first victim of Newtown, Conn., shooter Adam Lanza — may have been part of a survivalist movement known as “preppers.” And while it may prove impossible to confirm her affiliation in this loosely organized network of gun enthusiasts, back-to-the-land types and the generically cautious, the tragedy at Sandy Hook has invited increased scrutiny.
According to the American Prepper Network (APN) website, preppers take “personal responsibility and self reliance seriously.” They follow the Five Principles of Preparedness [ http://americanpreppersnetwork.com/the-five-principles-of-preparedness ], a fairly innocuous edict preaching self-reliance, thrift and keeping at least a year’s supply of “every needful thing” at the ready. But they aren’t just preparing for Cormac McCarthy-style end times; the APN considers short-term economic instability just as dangerous a threat.
Preppers focus much more on being prepared for things that will more likely be an issue – such as the family bread-winner losing their job, passing away or being incapacitated. Other primary concerns for Preppers are: death or serious illness/injury to a family member, all-consuming house fire, flooding or other natural and man-made disasters.
Our members, and others around the globe who share our philosophy of being prepared in times of emergency, are sickened by this event. We too are fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters and to associate APN or any legitimate organization that stresses preparing for emergencies with this barbaric act goes against everything we collectively stand for.
The prepper mindset is focused on Self-Reliance and Personal Responsibility, which also happens to lead right into a strong belief in the Constitution and that we need less, not more, government. Christianity also promotes Self-Reliance and Personal Responsibility.
It is difficult to say what, if any, role Nancy Lanza’s worldview played in her son’s murderous rampage last Friday. But as a public portrait [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOtIAWyyceA (next below)]
of this fractured movement emerges, it’s fair to wonder if a culture increasingly equating safety and self-reliance with self-arming will see more of this kind of tragedy.
Asheville Tea Party Response to Sandy Hook: Great Gun Giveaway!
By Leah Griesmann Posted: 12/18/2012 8:03 am
As the nation mourns the horrifying mass shooting of children and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the Asheville, North Carolina Tea Party has posted a new flyer advertising their upcoming fundraiser The Great Gun Giveaway [ http://ashevilleteaparty.org/ ].
Bob McDonnell: Guns In School A 'Timely' Discussion
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell reads a book to students at the KinderCare Learning Center August 9, 2012 in Alexandria, Virginia. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
By Melissa Jeltsen Posted: 12/18/2012 2:49 pm EST | Updated: 12/18/2012 3:11 pm EST
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) said Tuesday that he believes now is the time to talk about arming teachers.
"I know there's been a knee-jerk reaction against that, but I think there should at least be a discussion," he said. "If people were armed, not just a police officer, but other school officials who were trained and chose to have a weapon, certainly there'd have been an opportunity to stop aggressors coming into the school. "
He stressed that it was important not to overreact in the aftermath of the shooting tragedy. "Any policy changes should be based on facts and what will work," he said.
A bullet-proof Disney Princess backpack from Amendment II retails for $300, plus shipping. Amendment II
By Tim Murphy Tue Dec. 18, 2012 8:24 AM PST
"Basically, there's three models," says Derek Williams. "A SwissGear that's made for teens, and we've got an Avengers and a Disney Princess backpack for little kids."
Williams is the president of Amendment II, a Salt Lake City-based company that manufactures lightweight body armor for law enforcement and military use. But lately they've moved into a different market: body armor for kids. Six months ago, Amendment II introduced a new line of backpacks, built with the company's signature carbon nanotube armor, designed to keep kids safe in the event of school shootings. Since Friday's massacre [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/what-happened-newtown-connecticut-elementary-school-shooting ] at a Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school, sales have gone through the roof. "I can't go into exact sales numbers, but basically we tripled our sales volume of backpacks that we typically do in a month—in one week," Williams says.
With thoughts of defenseless children seared into the national consciousness, the company doesn't plan on letting the crisis go to waste. "We want to be sensitive to how we do that, but we are gonna try to get the word out that this product does exist that there are ways to at least provide our children with some protection," Williams says.
It's not like they'd have to change much. The group's promotional materials play up the utility of RynoHide armor in kid-friendly settings. Here's what the group's booth looked like at the Self-Reliance Expo in Mesa, Arizona, one of the nation's largest prepper roadshows:
Tim Murphy/Instagram
The Centurion Shield RynoHide backpack-insert goes for $199—$100 less than the armored Disney Princesses backpack. So why would you pay the extra Benjamin? As Williams explains it, "With kids, you never know when they're gonna take something out of their backpack and not put it back in."
Amendment II isn't the only company that has realized that, with the epidemic of school violence, there's money to be made in marketing kid-friendly body armor. At least a half-dozen companies hawk variations of the armored backpack, many of which explicitly play to fears of another Columbine. "My Child's Pack," from the Massachusetts company Bullet Blocker, goes for $224.99 (it's currently on sale for the holidays). Here's the main image on the front page [ http://www.bulletblocker.com/index.html ] of the Bullet Blocker website, last updated on December 17:
Bullet Blocker
Per the product description, the satchel was "designed as a tool for school safety following the shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech. It has no tags or labels indicating that it is a bulletproof backpack with a discreet layer of NIJ IIIA ballistic protection made of the same materials used in police armor vests. The BulletBlocker NIJ IIIA panel located in the main compartment. This is a good looking, unisex backpack available in assorted colors, with compartments for easy organization. School safety and protection at your children's fingertips."
Or, for just $10 more, you can pick up a LaRue Tactical Backpack Shield BP3A Level IIIA Ballistic Platem, which fits inside regularly-sized book bags:
LaRue Tactical
"Whether you're a college student, doctor, lawyer, business traveler, or concerned parent…an extra level of precaution might help safeguard your (or your loved one's) life in the event of an 'Active Shooter' situation" the company explains [ http://www.laruetactical.com/backpack-shield ]. "While you can not control when gun-related violence happens, you can choose to do something to improve your odds of survival."
In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, New Hampshire-based Black Dragon Tactical took to Facebook to market its kid-friendly backpack inserts:
The company adds, "No more victims of school shootings!"
And then there's the Rapid Armor Deployment Pack (R.A.D.) from Ares Armor ($284.95). "It's a plate carrier disguised as a bookbag/backpack," writes a Military Times [ http://militarytimes.com/blogs/gearscout/2011/03/05/ares-armor-rad-pack/ ] reviewer. "It looks like it might fit someone's mission profile out there. Heck, if your local public school has metal detectors, get one for the kids." Per the company, "If your enemy brings a gun to the fight, One up him with a full armor system and a weapon of your own." It's so cutting-edge the company won't even show a photo of it:
If you're looking for an even higher level of protection, you've still got options—but you'll have to ante up. Amendment II, for instance, offers the Centurion tactical vest, light-weight and durable, for $499:
Amendment II
But as Williams notes, this product isn't generally recommended for everyday school use. "It's more you want to take your kids to the range, take them out hunting with you, that kind of stuff," he says.
"Or, you know, a lot of people buy body armor for the breakdown of society and government."
My guess is that we're going to get a law anyway, and my hope is that it will consist of small measures that might have some tiny actual effect, like restrictions on magazine capacity. I'd also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once. Would it work? Would people do it? I have no idea; all I can say is that both these things would be more effective than banning rifles with pistol grips.
Just for the record, I would like to encourage people not to gang-rush shooters, and to instead run and hide, and any parent who would "drill it into young people" to do otherwise should be thrown in a pit.
Gads. This paragraph comes at the end of an epic wreck of a piece that just goes on and on forever. And its length is needless, given the fact that McArdle sort of gives up all hope entirely near the top of the piece when she says, "Since we can't understand it, we can't change it." In this case, "it" refers to both the Newtown shooting and a "mountain of wickedness" that is "pure evil."
From there, it's just an endless litany of despair designed to thoroughly discourage the reader from believing that anything can be done about gun violence and mass killings. "There is probably a policy" that would help, but "we are not going to implement that policy," McArdle has decided, on everyone's behalf. Most of the solutions she's hearing, she says, suffer from being too "generic." She writes: "As soon as Newtown happened, people reached into a mental basket already full of 'ways to stop school shootings' and pulled out a few of their favorite items." And you see, those ideas are just so hopelessly boring!
But what are the alternatives? There are some bolder proposals possible, but if they won't permanently end all gun violence and evil everywhere forever then why bother? There are also a lot of solutions that McArdle does not personally support, so those are non-starters, as well. Thus, there's nothing to be done about it, and no conversation to be had, other than to continue to inure ourselves to our current policy of tossing children, willy-nilly, into the path of harm.
Apparently, people she knows on Facebook got more than a little bit fed up with the way all of this languorous, bourgeois moping masquerading as thoughtful post-modern ennui came off as more than a little self-indulgent:
When I pointed out some of these things on Facebook this weekend, the responses were generally angry, or incredulous. "Megan, you're not presenting an argument, you're just poking holes in others' arguments," said one friend. "Anyone can do that. Bottom line, how do you suggest improving things?"
The answer, I'm afraid, is that I don't. I know this is a very frustrating answer. It got me a fair amount of angry pushback on Facebook, particularly since my friends know that I am in favor of much less stringent gun control than they are. It's not surprising that they feel that I'm hiding the football--poking holes in the stuff that won't work while ignoring the stuff that will, in an attempt to deceive people into giving up on a gun control that I would oppose for entirely separate reasons.
It is, I guess, much easier to defend the position of uniform helplessness and paint the hope of other people as dull or useless or pointless, than it is to actually manifest the courage to actually defend those policy preferences you prefer (that recent tragic events have rendered temporarily gauche for all those nice holiday party chats you'll be having in the weeks to come). In other words, the Newtown shootings have really proven to be a terrible and tragic inconvenience for McArdle, and she'd prefer everyone stop all this talk of change that makes her uncomfortable.
It's a funny thing! When I first read this piece I truly thought it was odd that McArdle would suggest we train kids to sacrifice themselves and run into the teeth of carnage as a policy solution to gun violence, since it seemed way out of step for anyone who places value on the idea of "rational self-interest." But upon reflection, I see that this post truly is stirring in its support of rational self-interest. The author's, anyway.
Somehow, the Fox pundit ascribes the shootings to "abortion pills," iPhones and homosexuals. Has he no shame?
By Mary Elizabeth Williams Monday, Dec 17, 2012 10:26 AM CST
In the wake of the horrific massacre in Newtown, Conn., last Friday, it didn’t take long for the gun apologist trolls to come out of the woodwork. Gun Owners of America’s appropriately named Larry Pratt insisted that an unarmed school faculty was at fault, saying, “Gun control supporters have the blood of little children on their hands [ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/15/gun_owners_of_america_gun_control_advocates_have_the_blood_of_little_children_on_their_hands/ ],” and Texas congressman Louie Gohmert declared that “I wish to God [the principal] had had an M4 in her office [ http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/12/16/texas-congressman-principal-should-have-been-armed-for-self-defense/ ].” But it took former Arkansas governor and current Fox News windbag Mike Huckabee to really torpedo our national conversation to a whole new low. It was Huckabee who didn’t just mouth off once, but kept mouthing off, clarifying his original vituperative inanity with ever more vituperative inanity from his apparently limitless supply.
First, on Friday, mere hours after the shooting, Huckabee appeared on Fox to muse, “We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools [ http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/huckabee-schools-place-of-carnage-because-we-systematically ]. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?” He added, “Maybe we ought to let [God] in on the front end and we wouldn’t have to call him to show up when it’s all said and done at the back end.” Because he’s an opportunistic, self-promoting creep.
Then, over the weekend, on his own show, he took on “the predictable left” and its “vile and vicious reaction” to his statements. He said he wasn’t merely talking about school prayer – oh, no, haters! “It’s the fact that people sue a city so we aren’t confronted with a manger scene or Christmas carol … Churches and Christian-owned businesses are told to surrender their values under the edict of government orders to provide tax-funded abortion pills [ http://www.inquisitr.com/441127/mike-huckabee-clarifies-remarks-about-linking-connecticut-school-shooting-to-lack-of-god-in-schools-video/ ].” On his Web page, he posted a version of his Fox monologue, in which he wrote, “We dismiss the notion of natural law and the notion that there are moral absolutes and seemed amazed when some kids make it their own morality to kill innocent children. We diminish and even hold in contempt the natural family of a father and mother [ http://mikehuckabee.com/mike-huckabee-news?ID=70415326-e438-41e4-9972-467097d2029f ] creating and then responsibly raising the next generation and then express dismay that kids feel no real connection to their families or even the concept of a family.” He also railed about how “our kids would rather have ear buds dangling from their ears, fingers attaching to a smartphone, and face attached to a computer screen” and “we teach that God was not involved in our origins, that our very lives are biological happenstances.”
It’s a familiar Huckabee refrain. Last summer, after the deadly shooting in an Aurora movie theater, Huckabee went on Fox to say, “We don’t have a crime problem, a gun problem or even a violence problem. What we have is a sin problem. And since we’ve ordered God out of our schools, and communities, the military and public conversations [ http://www.newshounds.us/20120722_mike_huckabee_aurora_shooting_caused_by_sin_godlessness_in_schools ], you know we really shouldn’t act so surprised … when all hell breaks loose.” This was right around the same time Huckabee was busily attempting to cleanse our great nation of the gay menace by declaring a Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day [ http://www.salon.com/2012/07/23/chick_fil_a_starts_a_culture_war/ ] to support the chain’s stance on biblical marriage and “Godly values.”
Much like ”end times” Bible “scholar” John McTernan, who back in October declared that Hurricane Sandy was the work of the gays [ http://www.salon.com/2012/10/29/pastor_blame_gays_for_hurricane_sandy/ ], Huckabee seems to honestly believe that if we could just magically make everyone heterosexual and Christian, and while we’re at it maybe do away with all the scientific evidence supporting evolution [ http://youtu.be/n-BFEhkIujA ], terrible things would stop happening. He holds loving same-sex families more accountable for the violence in Connecticut than he does a broken mental-health system or the easy accessibility of guns or even Adam Lanza himself, whose name is not once mentioned in his Fox monologue.
It’s an appalling smear of a wide variety of groups, and a breathtakingly ignorant view. And it’s strikingly similar in spirit to Mitt Romney’s response, during the presidential debates, to a question on gun violence — that “to tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married [ http://prospect.org/article/stop-gun-violence-get-married ] to someone — that’s a great idea.” It suggests that somehow prayer can prevent anybody from being mentally ill, that hetero marriage cures murder, and that having a manger in the town square can stop a gunman from blasting his way into a school. It’s grotesque and hateful, even by Mike Huckabee standards. But if he’s even remotely correct that we’ve all been so great at ordering God out of American life, what in hell do we have to do to successfully exile Mike Huckabee as well?
Sarah Palin: In Newtown Shooting Aftermath, Put Faith In God, Not Politicians And Media 'Elites'
Sarah Palin, former Governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican Vice Presidential candidate speaks at a 'Patriots in the Park' Tea Party rally at the Wayne County Fairgrounds July 14, 2012 in Belleville, Michigan. The event was sponsored by Americans for Prosperity: Michigan and the Willow Run Tea Party Caucus. (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)
By Paige Lavender Posted: 12/18/2012 9:48 am EST
Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin shared her thoughts on the Newtown school shooting Monday night, saying people should ignore politicians and the media who "really have nothing meaningful to offer" and instead focus on God.
"First, all truly is hopeless if your faith and hope are put in any politician or media elite," Palin wrote on Facebook [ https://www.facebook.com/notes/sarah-palin/the-only-hope/10151191714058435 ]. "That is because the average person is more truthful and responsible than the average politician or media elite."
The former vice presidential candidate continued, ripping the media for its "irrelevant distractions" in the aftermath of the shooting:
"Those who let themselves be terribly disappointed in political leaders as they ignore real problems, aided along with a complicit media bombarding us with irrelevant distractions in order to avoid facing the reality of a fallen culture, should know those distractions are to hide from a finger pointing to the main contributors to much of our problem. To stop distracting would result in acknowledging the political and media machine's starring roles in our failing society. So, as they too often tear down those who try to do good, while elevating and celebrating corrupt selfishness, they dumbly assume we don't know it is they who significantly contribute to our upside down world today. We've learned our lesson. Don't put your hope in Hollywood or Washington. Instead, build resolve and seek truth more aggressively than ever at such a time as this."
Palin goes on to emphasize God as the "one source of truth and real hope."
Palin wasn't the only politician to bring religion into the discussion after the Newtown school shooting. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) said [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/14/mike-huckabee-school-shooting_n_2303792.html ] he thought the massacre was no surprise because we have "systematically removed God" from public schools.
"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"
Huckabee has since backed down [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/17/mike-huckabee-sandy-hook_n_2315340.html (uh nope, see item just above)] from that explanation, clarifying that he didn't believe an increased religious presence at Sandy Hook could actually have directly prevented that particular shooting from taking place.
Our country really does seem in complete disarray. I'm not talking politically, I'm not talking about the result of the November sixth election; I am saying that something has gone wrong in America and that we have turned our back on God.
I mean millions of people have decided that God doesn't exist, or he's irrelevant to me and we have killed 54 million babies and the institution of marriage is right on the verge of a complete redefinition. Believe me, that is going to have consequences, too.
And a lot of these things are happening around us, and somebody is going to get mad at me for saying what I am about to say right now, but I am going to give you my honest opinion: I think we have turned our back on the scripture and on God almighty and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us. I think that's what's going on.
“We get all up in arms about 20 children being shot in a day care but we don’t give one good-glory rip about the 4,000 that were removed violently from the wombs of their mothers [in abortion procedures] the same day,” Morris said. “I believe they use children and Christmas and all that to pull on our heart strings about gun control. That’s what it’s all about.”
Morris went on to criticize public schools, which he said teach children about evolution, sex and "how to be a homo."
Family Research Council Sued For Sexual Harassment, Discrimination
Family Research Council president Tony Perkins speaks at the Justice Sunday III rally in Philadelphia, Penn., on January 8, 2006. (Jeff Fusco, Getty Images)
By Laura Bassett Posted: 12/18/2012 12:12 pm EST | Updated: 12/18/2012 12:20 pm EST
The former director of women’s and reproductive health at the Family Research Council, a prominent Christian conservative advocacy group, is suing the organization, claiming it retaliated against her and fired her after she filed a sexual harassment complaint against her boss.
According to court documents first obtained and reported by journalist Evan Gahr [ http://dcgadfly.blogspot.com/2012/12/exclusive.html ], former FRC employee Moira Gaul, 42, filed a complaint in 2009 with the District of Columbia Human Rights Commission in which she accused her supervisor of gender discrimination. She claimed that her boss, the director of the Center for Human Life and Bioethics at the time, referred to the use of birth control pills as "whoring around," addressed emails to her with the words "hi cutie," pressured her to attend parties, and referred to her as a "young, attractive woman."
"His attitude toward me and other women was rude, belittling, and at times, angry," she wrote in the complaint.
Gahr identified Gaul's former supervisor as prominent anti-abortion lawyer William Saunders, who now works at the anti-abortion group Americans United for Life. Saunders and his attorney, William J. Hickey, did not respond to requests for comment on the case.
The FRC fired Gaul shortly after she filed the complaint, citing a loss in federal funding for abstinence -- Gaul's area of expertise -- and the need for someone with more experience on abortion issues. Gaul claims the FRC also retroactively canceled her health insurance for the time that she was on short-term disability for systemic lupus.
Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin Now Going After Gay Troops
Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/ZUMAPress
The controversial congressman, who lost a Senate race in November after explaining how victims of "legitimate rape" don't get pregnant, is going out with a bang.
"It carves out a set of special rights for those who would want to discriminate against people on the basis of sexual orientation," says Allyson Robinson, an Army veteran and executive director of the LGBT rights group Outserve-Service Members Legal Defense Network. "What this language does is make it less clear to that unit commander on the ground how they should implement Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal."
The Senate passed a version of the 2013 defense spending bill without the Akin proposal in early December. But with both houses of Congress negotiating the final version of the bill, the two main Republican negotiators, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon (R-Calif.), want Akin's so-called "conscience clause" to remain in the bill.
"They're pushing pretty hard," said a House Democratic aide familiar with the negotiations. McCain and McKeon were both fierce opponents of allowing gay and lesbian service members to serve openly. McKeon, who donated to the Proposition 8 campaign that banned [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/house-republicans-vs-gay-troops ] same-sex marriage in California, previously threatened [ http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/10/rep-mckeons-culture-war ] to scuttle a defense bill unless it contained language banning military chaplains from performing same-sex ceremonies even if they were willing to. LGBT rights supporters view the GOP's new hard line on the Akin language as a surprise. "Despite a totally open amendment process in which more than 100 amendments were approved, no senator offered a similar amendment to the Akin language," says Ian Thompson of the American Civil Liberties Union.
The negotiations could be resolved as early as Tuesday evening.
During the debate over repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Republicans and other opponents of the move warned that getting rid of the policy would be harmful to unit readiness and cohesion, and would harm morale. Since repeal was enacted in September 2011, however, both the Defense Department itself [ http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=116291 ] and outside studies [ http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/09/study-no-negative-impact-dadt-repeal ] have found little evidence that ending Don't Ask, Don't Tell had any negative consequences at all. "My view is that the military has kind of moved beyond it," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters in May. And LGBT rights activists now contend that the Akin provision—should it become law—could cause chaos in the military.
"It turns out that after years of saying that repeal of DADT was a threat to unit cohesion a threat to good order and discipline, a threat to morale," Robinson says, "turns out that it's those anti-gay Republicans in Congress who are the real threat to unit cohesion, good order and discipline, and morale."
Thai Noodle House Restaurant In Hot Water After Racist Sandy Hook Shooting Comments
By Cavan Sieczkowski Posted: 12/18/2012 10:25 am EST | Updated: 12/18/2012 11:57 am EST
As the nation continues to mourn the death of 27 people, including 20 children, in Newtown, Conn., one Texas restaurant owner is in hot water for racist comments made regarding the victims of the mass shooting.
"I'm failing to give a damn about the CT shooting," wrote the Thailand-born Nimibutr on Friday. "I don't care if a bunch of white kids got killed. F**k Post-Racial bullshit. When kids from minority groups get shot, nobody cares. When Israel launched missiles at the school on Gaza, everybody was too busy jerking off. Why should i care about people who dont give a damn about me? Personal responsibility, right?"
“I am no fool to just feel and just believe the hypocrisy in our society the way everyone told me how to," he later posted on Facebook, according to the SFGate. "Lots of people are mad at me for the thing I said. Some called with threat of violence. I laughed at the internet tough guys, but I reported to the police. I am educated and believe in my rights of the Freedom of Speech.”
CultureMap food writer RL Reeves, Jr. attempted to contact Nimibutr at the restaurant, but was informed that Nimibutr no longer works at the location, according to CultureMap. Reeves was also told that Nimibutr was never the owner, even though he is listed as such in local directories.
My interview with MSNBC ignites a conservative media firestorm -- and exposes America's dangerous double standard
By David Sirota Monday, Dec 17, 2012 05:00 AM CST
Yesterday, during a cable news discussion of gun violence and the Newtown school shooting, I dared mention [ http://www.mediaite.com/tv/msnbc-guest-if-c-t-mass-shooter-was-not-white-public-debate-would-be-much-uglier/ ] a taboo truism. During a conversation on MSNBC’s “Up With Chris Hayes,” I said that because most of the mass shootings in America come at the hands of white men [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map ], there would likely be political opposition to initiatives that propose to use those facts to profile the demographic group to which these killers belong. I suggested that’s the case because as opposed to people of color or, say, Muslims, white men as a subgroup are in such a privileged position in our society that they are the one group that our political system avoids demographically profiling or analytically aggregating in any real way. Indeed, unlike other demographic, white guys as a group are never thought to be an acceptable topic for any kind of critical discussion whatsoever, even when there is ample reason [ http://logicalliving.blog.com/files/2011/04/Suicide-Ten.pdf ] to open up such a discussion.
The conservative response to my statement, though, is the real news here.
Let’s review: Any honest observer should be able to admit that if the gunmen in these mass shootings mostly had, say, Muslim names or were mostly, say, African-American men, the country right now wouldn’t be confused about the causes of the violence, and wouldn’t be asking broad questions. There would probably be few queries or calls for reflection, and mostly definitive declarations blaming the bloodshed squarely on Islamic fundamentalism or black nationalism, respectively. Additionally, we would almost certainly hear demands that the government intensify the extant [ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/03/yep-the-nypd-was-definitely-profiling-muslims.html ] profiling systems [ http://www.nyclu.org/issues/racial-justice/stop-and-frisk-practices ] already aimed at those groups.
Yet, because the the perpetrators in question in these shootings are white men and not ethnic or religious minorities, nobody is talking about demographic profiling them as a group. The discussion, instead, revolves around everything from gun control, to mental health services, to violence in entertainment — everything, that is, except trying to understanding why the composite of these killers is so similar across so many different massacres. This, even though there are plenty of reasons [ http://www.rolereboot.org/culture-and-politics/details/2012-07-why-most-mass-murderers-are-privileged-white-men ] for that topic to be at least a part of the conversation.
Recounting the truth of these double standards is, of course, boringly mundane, which means my comment on television summarizing them is an equally boring and mundane statement of the obvious. However, as evidenced by the aggressive attempt to turn those comments into controversial headline-grabbing news over the weekend, the conservative movement has exposed its desperation — specifically, its desperation to preserve its White Victimization Mythology.
In this mythology, the white man as a single demographic subgroup can never be seen as a perpetrator and must always be portrayed as the unfairly persecuted scapegoat. In this mythology, to even reference an undeniable truth about how white privilege operates on a political level (in this case, to prevent a government profiling system of potential security threats even though such a system exists for other groups) is to be guilty of both “injecting divisive racial politics” and somehow painting one’s “opponents as racist [ http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/12/16/MSNBC-Panel-Race-Baits-CT-Massacre ]” — even when nobody called any individual a racist.
In this mythology, in short, to mention truths about societal double standards — truths that are inconvenient or embarrassing to white people — is to be targeted for attack by the right-wing media machine.
Of course, just as I didn’t make such an argument yesterday on MSNBC, I’m not right now arguing for a system of demographically profiling white guys as a means of stopping mass murderers (that’s right, the headline at Beck’s website, the Blaze [ http://www.theblaze.com/stories/msnbc-guest-says-we-should-profile-white-men-as-school-shooters/ ], is categorically lying by insisting I did make such an argument, when the MSNBC video proves that’s not even close to true). After all, broad demographic profiling is not only grotesquely bigoted in how it unduly stereotypes whole groups, it also doesn’t actually work as a security measure [ http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/04/racial-profiling-doesnt-work.html ] and runs the risk of becoming yet another Big Brother-ish monster (this is especially true when a lawmaker is forwarding the idea of deploying a quasi-military apparatus like the Secret Service).
But the point here is that those tempered and nuanced conversations are only able to happen because the demographic at the center of it all is white guys. That is the one group in America that gets to avoid being referred to in aggregate negative terms (and gets to avoid being unduly profiled by this nation’s security apparatus), which means we are defaulting to a much more dispassionate and sane conversation — one that treats the perpetrators as deranged individuals, rather than typical and thus stereotype-justifying representatives of an entire demographic.
While such fair treatment should be the norm for all citizens, the double standard at work makes clear it is still a special privilege for a select white few. That’s the issue at the heart of my comment on MSNBC — and it is a pressing problem no matter how much the conservative media machine wants to pretend it isn’t.
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