Month: January 2013

A constant thread of anti-intellectualism runs through the mass media.  Mass media writers seem to embrace anti-intellectual assumptions: They pretend that simple math is hard.  They call good students “over-achievers” and “nerds” (a derogatory term now embraced by many who are academically inclined, just as many GLBT have embraced “queer”).    “Smart” characters such as the four fictional “Big Bang” scientists are depicted as inept with women, uncool and uncoordinated.  Science writers demean their own profession.

A recent New York Times Book Review provides a stunning example of anti-intellectualism embedded into the premise of an article. It’s in a book review of a biography of the 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge.  Muybridge, whose eccentricities bordered on madness, is known for setting up a row of cameras to take a series of photographs that showed how a horse runs. His work helped to develop the conceptual framework for motion pictures, which are created by taking photographs so fast that when played back one after another at the speed they were taken will produce the illusion of movement.

Here is how the book reviewer, Candace Millard, opens her piece:

Genius, it seems, is almost always accompanied by eccentricity, if not madness. Those rare instances of genuine brilliance that we find scattered throughout history — in the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, the mathematical equations of John Nash — often appear to have come at great cost to the minds that produced them. The work of Eadweard Muybridge is no exception.

Setting aside the question of whether Muybridge is a case of genuine brilliance or just a good and innovative photographer, let’s examine this paragraph: Millard uses the common propaganda trick of selecting only the details that help her case. She lists a composer, painter and mathematician. But what about Bach, Picasso and Isaac Newton? These men were all quite happy and completely normal. Or Mozart, Titian and Bertrand Russell (who, BTW, was quite the ladies’ man)? Or Charles Ives, Turner and Gauss?  Interestingly enough, in the case of the painters and mathematicians, the names I have thrown out are usually considered to be much more important—greater geniuses—than the ones who Millard uses to try to make her case.

Yes some geniuses have lived unhappy lives or suffered from mental illness. Others like Albert Einstein have had their small eccentricities, but so do we all.

It is just not true, however, that “genius is almost always accompanied by eccentricity, if not madness,” as Millard states. In insisting on this point and then graduating Muybridge to the top rank of intellects to provide additional proof of it, Millard continues the long-time American myth of the mad or cursed genius.

As a piece of fiction, the mad genius works well in a classic Aristotelian way, because like the fictional Nash in the 2001 movie, “A Beautiful Mind,” the genius is undone by himself, a case of twisted hubris.  But it’s no more than a myth, as false and odious as the myth that Jews or Chinese are smart or that African-Americans are not.

The myth of the mad genius is part of the ideology of anti-intellectualism that the mass media promulgate on an almost daily basis.  I’m going to speculate that the mass media keep the myth of the mad genius and other manifestations of anti-intellectualism alive  because denigration of intellectual activity is a form of social control. The media and its owners want people to focus on buying stuff. They want people’s minds to remain undeveloped, so that they become good-little sheep-like consumers. They want the intellectual to be an outsider, someone off in his own little world that has nothing to do with the bigger more important world of mindless consumerism.

The media owners may also want to reserve the top jobs for their own kind, which is hard to do in a meritocracy unless you can discourage poor kids from seeking true knowledge in school (as opposed to credentials). They want a world in which money and not knowledge rules.

 

 

“We give up our rights one piece at a time,” a West Virginia banker named Charlie Houck stated to West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin recently during a meeting the Senator was holding in Beckley, WV on gun control.

Yes, we do, Mr. Houck.

Let’s go over some of the many rights we have already given up, one piece at a time:

We’ve given up the right to force ourselves sexually on other people.

We’ve given up the right to murder someone else.

We’ve given up the right to abuse children.

We’ve given up the right to take anything we want from anyone too weak to defend her or himself.

We’ve given up the right to drive an automobile without insurance or a license. We’ve given up the right to just keep driving—speed limits, red lights and stop signs deter us.

We’ve given up the right not to hire someone just because she or he is a racial or ethnic minority, a woman, disabled or gay.

We’ve given up the right to sell food that’s spoiled or adulterated or to sell products that don’t meet safety standards. Or to sell products that don’t do what the sellers say they will do.

We’ve given up the right to burn down our neighbor’s home.

We’vegiven up the right to steal words and images that other people created and say that we did it.

I could go on and on for pages about the rights we no longer have, some of which we gave up millennia ago, some of which we gave up before recorded history.

And I for one am delighted that all these rights have gone, because without these restrictions on rights and hundreds of others, we—the people—could not have a civil society. Civilization is all about restricting rights.  When we are part of society, we agree to restrict our rights for the greater good and to protect ourselves from the harm that others would inflict on us if they exercised those “rights.” It’s called the social compact.

Rights change over time. In the past, many societies, including much of the United States, had the right to own slaves.  No more, thank goodness.   Through much of the history of the United States, employers had the right to hire children, work them long hours and pay them pennies. No more, thank goodness.

Many of these restrictions evolved as society changed. For example, when automobiles first came out, there were no rules of the road, no stop signs, no red or yellow lights, no speed limits. But soon there were so many cars around, we had to develop rules and we had to require that those operated cars have insurance.

Often we give up one set of rights to gain another one, or some people gain rights at the expense of others. For example, when minorities and women gradually gained workplace rights, racist and misogynist employers lost the right to discriminate. And it’s a damn good thing they did!

At this point in time, only extremists (like me) want to outlaw private ownership of guns. What mainstream organizations and elected officials are asking for is to restrict the absolute right to own and carry a gun—for the safety of society. What’s so problematic about requiring that there is a background check before all gun sales? Why should anyone have a problem with restricting the right to carry a loaded weapon in public places such as college campuses, hospitals, malls and schools? Why should gun owners object to paying insurance to cover the damage done to people in gun violence?

And why can’t pro-gun extremists see the necessity of outlawing a type of weapon responsible for most of the mass murders in the United States, a weapon that, as Senator Manchin has noted in the past, is not used by hunters or target shooters?

As society evolves, we—the people—uncover more rights we have to give up and more rights to give to ourselves. That’s called progress. We already have given up the 18th century views of women’s rights, slavery and intellectual property. It’s about time that we progressed from our 18th century mindset when it comes to guns.

 

 

What do KPMG, Exxon-Mobil, Rolex, Barclay’s Bank and Calloway Golf have in common?  All of these corporations are paying tons of money to Phil Mickelson to say nice things about them. 

Mickelson is a professional golfer who has won more money playing golf than all but one other person in the history of the game. But his big pay-off comes from lending his name to products and companies. Mickelson earned a total of $53 million in endorsements in 2011 in addition to the $9 million he made playing golf that year. Mickelson routinely has made more than $40 million per annum for years.

And yet he’s complaining that his federal and California state taxes have gone up. After a golf tournament this past weekend, Mickelson made a veiled threat to change his public life because his taxes are too high. His exact words: “There are going to be some drastic changes for me because I happen to be in that zone that has been targeted both federally and by the state and, you know, it doesn’t work for me right now.”

Some pundits think he’s threatening to retire from golf, while others think he’s threatening to relocate to a state that has lower taxes than California.

What’s he really threatening to do is become the poster child for tantrum-throwing selfishness.

Mickelson complains that his tax rate is 62% or 63% of his income.  That percentage is completely bogus, of course, because it doesn’t include the many deductions he probably takes and it applies the highest tax rate for both California and federal income tax to all his income, not just the amount above the floor for the highest marginal (or incremental) rate.

But even if we assume that Mickelson is actually paying 63% of all his income in taxes, that means that he and his family would have to get by on a mere $14.8 million a year, assuming he continues to make his low end of $40 million income before taxes.  Does that mean more hamburger helper and Top Ramen for the Mickelson household?  Of course, he could always supplement the budget by dipping into his estimated $150 million net worth.

Mickelson’s problem could be that he lives in a hermetically sealed environment of golf courses, resorts, country clubs and gated communities in which he only interacts with other golfers and a lot of rich folk who love golf.  He may never see the maid who cleans his hotel room, the guy who mows the green, the crews that repair the roads on which he drives or the TV engineer who makes sure his swing is transmitted to the millions of fans watching the tournament on TV. He may have never thought about how much—or how little—money his children’s teachers make, or how much or little the cashier makes who works the cash register where the hired help buy his family’s groceries.

Mickelson may have not done the math, so let’s do it for him: The $14.8 million that he would pocket a year if he only earned $40 million gross and he was taxed 63% on it computes to about 285 times what the average employed Californian earns before taxes.  

In his sequestered and rich little world, Mickelson may not be aware of the fact that our roads and bridges need work, that our public schools have been starved of funds, that we need to develop new technologies to address the threat of global warming, that the cost of public colleges is skyrocketing primarily because of a cutback in state support or that millions of people are unemployed or underemployed.

Mickelson may not know that he would have paid more in taxes in 1980, before Ronald Reagan began the conservative retrenchment that has led to the growing inequality of wealth in America. Mickelson may not know that he would have paid more before the Bush II tax cuts for the wealthy. He may not know that he would pay more taxes in virtually any other industrialized country.

I’ve had my fill of selfish a__holes like Phil Mickelson.  As far as I’m concerned he can follow the tax avoidance strategy of that overrated French actor Gérard Depardieu, who, rather than pay French income tax, has given up French citizenship and now makes his home in Luxemburg.  Maybe like Depardieu, Mickelson will be granted Russian citizenship by Vladimir Putin. 

I say, let Mickelson play 18 holes somewhere in Siberia.

Walmart is making a big deal about two moves it announced this week, for which it is demanding applause and gratitude.  You could call it the Walmart private sector economic stimulus plan. The trouble is, it’s nothing but smoke and mirrors.

Walmart’s first contribution to the American economy is a pledge to buy an additional $50 billion in goods and services from American companies over the next 10 years. It seems like a lot until you run the numbers, which I am not the first to do. It works out to $5 billion a year, a drop in the bucket of more than $250 billion in goods and services that this modern leviathan buys each year. Walmart is making a big deal about what for them is a minor adjustment that will make but a minor ripple in the U.S. economy.

More odiously self-serving is Walmart’s announcement that it will hire 100,000 veterans, or every veteran who left the service with an honorable discharge this past year. Sounds like a great combination of patriotism and economic growth until you start to think about it. Walmart literally has more than 2.2 million employees. Between growth and turnover, in any given year it is going to be hiring 100,000 people as greeters, cashiers, stockers and other in-store positions. Walmart has not created a single job, it has just said that it would give special consideration to one demographic group—recent veterans.

I’m also not the first to point out that the type of job that virtually all these vets will get at Walmart is low pay and with minimal or no benefits and little chance for advancement. Is this the best that we can do for those who have risked their lives on the frontlines of the wars prosecuted in our names?

The most interesting aspect of the Walmart hiring veterans announcement is what it will do to the demographics of its workforce: In the overall economy, more than 50% of all jobs today are held by women, and yet women are only 20% of the armed forces and therefore about 20% of the veterans in any given year. The disparate impact of hiring veterans is that the Walmart workforce will begin to skewer towards the male. Given the many past and ongoing lawsuits accusing Walmart of discrimination against women, the focus on veterans could make one begin to wonder if Walmart’s motives were less than patriotic.

Like the executives of many large companies, Walmart’s leaders could easily get lost in the internal rhetoric of the company, which lauds itself with the inexorable regularity with which parents laud four year olds for finishing their plates and zipping up their flies after potty.  These guys might actually get themselves to believe that it’s a big deal to bump up domestic purchases by a small amount or to focus hiring on one demographic group. And they probably thought the U.S. news media and public would believe it, too.

But it doesn’t matter how thickly Walmart’s public relations flaks paint the happy face on Walmart’s announcements. The news media and the public are more cynical after decades of seeing Walmart destroy small towns, bankrupt small business owners, squeeze suppliers and pay low wages.

Coke’s two-minute commercial telling us what it’s doing to fight the epidemic of obesity sweeping across America must contain two hundred people—all happy, many engaged with a Coke product, and none of them obese, or even overweight. Okay, okay, maybe two of the hundreds of people in the ad could stand to lose a few pounds, but even these still-happy few were in pretty good shape and shown being active.

Imagine. If instead of getting attractive models to shill their messages about a wider variety of smaller portions and lower calorie drinks, Coke had shown a cross section of the population—or better yet, a cross section of their drinkers—we would have seen a mesmerizing montage of saggy and billowing mid sections, big tushes, thunder thighs and quadruple chins. In short (and in large) one third or more of the happy Coke drinkers (shown or implied) in the commercial would have been obese and another third would have had more pot-gutted waddle than spring in their step.  That’s what all the statistics say: about a third of us are obese and another third are overweight.

Unfortunately for Coke, in the ideal world depicted in its commercial, a world of all healthy and happy people, there is no room for Coke or its products, other than the unscented water. The 100% juices that Coke mongers substitute a less healthy way to consume fruit—drinking it—for the healthier and lower calorie option of eating a real piece of fruit.  The sugared sodas are empty calories and the low-calorie ones have chemical substitutes that make people crave more food, so both lead directly to weight gain.

The ad and Coke’s overall campaign repeat the Big Lie that gets told whenever food companies get involved in an anti-obesity campaign. The big lie is to overstress the importance of exercise in losing weight. Don’t get me wrong: everyone should exercise a lot because it’s good for the brain, the heart and the psyche, and it does work off calories.

But exercise can only go so far. It takes about a half an hour on a tread mill to work off one chocolate chip cookie. So for the two thirds of Americans who already have a problem, exercise is no substitute for eating less…a lot less. If you want to lose weight, you have to eat less. And what better place to start reducing what you eat than to stop consuming the empty calories of Coke products?

The absurdly ironic impact of politics on the justice system shines brightly on the front page of today’s New York Times. First we learn that, of the 80,000 Americans who the Justice Department (DOJ) knows committed the federal crime of lying or providing inaccurate information on gun purchase background checks in 2010, only 44 were charged with a crime. And surprise, surprise, those who lie on background checks are more likely to commit violent crimes than the average person.

The 80,000, of course, are only the ones who got caught lying.  Some unmeasured number succeeded and thereby own guns that should legally not be in their possession.

Certainly many of the 80,000 were telling little stretchers and don’t deserve prosecution, but I’m betting that a goodly number were involved in identity theft, had a record or a restraining order or were under the care of a therapist. Prosecuting a large number of people who lie on their gun background applications would certainly send a message. It would lead to fewer people prone to lie on background checks filling them out. If we required background checks for all sales, it would lead to fewer guns in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.

Now that’s a message that the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the rest of the moneyed anti-gun control lobby doesn’t like.  Few lawmakers have the guts to support gun control and insist that we go after these lawbreakers. And as with the environment and global warming, Obama talks a good game but has actually done nothing about gun control except commiserate with victims and do a little tough-talking.

While I’m hopeful that the Biden Task Force will lead to some action (finally!) on controlling the proliferation of guns with inadequate regulation, I’m also wondering how in the world the DOJ is going to be able to summon up the resources to investigate those who lie on gun purchase background checks, given shrinking federal budgets.

To our good fortune, the Times provides the answer right there on the very same front page in a story about federal prosecution of a California businessman who has all his state licenses, follows all state laws and regulations to a tee, keeps pristine records, pays all taxes, files his forms on time  and yet faces years in jail because his business is growing and selling medical marijuana. The prosecution of Matthew R. Davies for being a sharp but law-abiding entrepreneur is only the latest in DOJ efforts to squelch the use of medical marijuana in states in which it’s legal. Barack Obama and his attorney general Eric Holder seem to hold a special animus for those who facilitate the legal use of marijuana, as if they have a kind of juvenile envy of people allowed to puff the magic dragon. No study links pot smoking with violent crime or even any increase in crimes (except the crime of buying/selling/using it where it s not legal or under illegal conditions). The DOJ thus does nothing to help make our lives safer and more secure by going after California or Colorado pot entrepreneurs.

Let’s review: Instead of prosecuting people who are willing to lie to get their hands on a loaded gun, the DOJ goes after a business person who has broken no state law and is supplying a medical service.

Perhaps the folks at DOJ have been smoking a bit too much of the stuff they’re confiscating.

One sure sign someone has remained on stage too long is when they begins to embarrass themselves. Exhibit One this week is Jeff Greenfield, long-time political pundit who has worked for both ABC and CNN news and for the New York Times, Time and Slate.com.  In a cranky article titled “Why I never voted for Barack Obama,” Greenfield admits that he has not voted in any election since 1996. His excuse: it enables him to distance himself from the candidates because he isn’t going to vote for either one.

It’s not the first time Greenfield has admitted he never votes. He did so in an article in late October 2012 in which he asked the undecideds to stay home. 

What is more embarrassing? That Greenfield admits to not voting? That he thinks he has a great excuse?  The smugness with which he declares his objectivity and implies his superiority? Or the very fact that he doesn’t get it.

He doesn’t get that a big part of the code ethics of any professional—journalist, attorney, accountant, physician, architect, advertising guy—is to set aside beliefs when practicing the profession.  Moreover, in Greenfield’s case, having an opinion and expressing it is part of the job title. We know Greenfield isn’t objective and, since he’s a pundit, we wouldn’t expect or want him to be. We know his work bubbles with opinions and assumptions, and like virtually all mainstream pundits, the opinions express a narrow right-centrist view.  

Greenfield must hold himself in pretty low self esteem: he’s afraid that voting for a candidate is temptation enough for him to lie, to build an argument which he doesn’t really believe or to withhold material evidence.  Only in the severe purity of non-voting will Greenfield not succumb to the temptation of  unethical reporting.

Greenfield wants us to admire the sheer Zen objectivity he achieves through the consecrated act of not voting. Instead, all we see is a cranky guy abdicating his freedom and his responsibility as an American citizen.  And bragging about it.

In today’s New York Times, Adam Liptak details another case in which judges and prosecutors obstinately defend a wrong decision and thereby put a man’s life at stake.

The headline of the article, “Lawyers Stumble, and Clients Take Fall” says it all:  A man on Alabama’s death row may fry because his attorney—addicted to meth at the time—missed a filing deadline for appealing his sentence. At issue was the fact that the jury voted the man a life sentence and a judge overruled it and gave him the death penalty.

The Atlanta appeals court ruled 2-1 that the guy can not pursue a challenge to his conviction, even though our ultra-right U.S. Supreme Court has twice rebuked the same court for its rigid attitude regarding filing deadlines in capital cases.

Whenever I read about another case in which prosecutors and/or judges persist in upholding a wrong decision, I wonder where their sense of justice is. While the defense attorney is supposed to represent the defendant, the mission of the prosecutor and the judge should be to represent the state and the people. It must be in the best interest of the state and the people to get it right, even if that means admitting that an original decision to prosecute or seek the death penalty was wrong, or even if that means, as in this case, using a looser interpretation of the rules. In this case, the prosecutor did not have to object to the late filing and could have recommended waiving the rule, knowing that the attorney was at fault. The judges, chastised on this issue already, could have also given the guy a break. After all, a man’s life is at stake. But prosecutor and judges preferred to an extremely strict interpretation of the law.

The inflexibility of prosecutors and judges is a leading argument against capital punishment. While many are in favor of capital punishment, few approve of executing anyone who is innocent or whose crimes do not meet the legal standard for the death penalty.  How can we ever be absolutely certain of a capital conviction given the sad reality that our judicial system seeks convictions and executions, and not justice?

Every month another example of an injustice hits the national media. A few weeks back it was the man with an I.Q. of 51 who has been in jail 30 years, unconvicted of any crime, waiting for a new trial after his first capital conviction for murder was overturned.  The Texas state government is appealing a recent ruling that would either finally give the guy a new trial or free him. Texas would rather see a man convicted of no crime continue rotting in prison.

These two cases involve unfair treatment of defendants. Even worse is when the state suppresses evidence that shows the defendant or convict is innocent.

These cases of unfair treatment or suppression of exonerating evidence tend to occur to the poor, minorities or those with severe mental disabilities, and they tend to happen in the south. This lack of consistency—of fairness—represents another argument against the death penalty.

Many believe, and I count myself among them, that the best argument against capital punishment is the moral one—that society should not stoop to the level of the murderers and engage in state assassination, and that cost of housing a convicted killer is a small price to pay for remaining human and humane. But even if one rejects the moral argument, the practical ones remain: the cost of making certain the innocent are not executed is too high in a venal world in which justice gives way to the preference of prosecutors, judges and states for preserving their own record of infallibility or pursuing some blood thirsty political agenda.

Whenever there is a contentious issue between the two dominant political parties, the Democrats and many Republicans immediately depict their positions as better for the middle class.

Below you’ll find a few of the thousands of quotes which put the middle class front and center in the recent “fiscal cliff” confrontation. I place “fiscal cliff” in quotation marks because the term hides the true battle between those who want to continue starving government and the economy so that the rich can pay historically low tax rates and those who want to return the country to the firm and equitable financial footing it had before the Reagan revolution by making the rich pay their fair share. If the “fiscal cliff” negotiations were really about the deficit and if the deficit were really so important, our leaders would have let us fall over the cliff, which was erected a few years back to enforce deficit reductions. But in fact both sides realize that government support of the economy is important.

Here, then, is a sprinkling of quotes on the “fiscal cliff” in which the “middle class” is evoked as if it were a magical incantation:

•  “We’ve stopped that middle-class tax hike”/ President Obama
• “Our first and foremost priority is protecting the middle class”/House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
• “President Obama sold out the Middle Class for the wealthy.”/Tony Katz, a political columnist
• “The decline of the middle class threatens our ability to fund health and retirement programs, to maintain a safety net for the most vulnerable and to invest in our future.”/an AARP newsletter
• The most recent negotiations saw a massive grassroots effort that successfully protected Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits and investments in the middle class.”/Minnesota Representative Keith Richardson
• ‘This deal is the right move to protect America’s middle class families, who were facing a New Year with higher taxes, and to prevent two million Americans from losing their unemployment benefits.”/Service Employees International Union president Mary Kay Henry
• “Thus far, negotiations suggest that the fight for the middle class in the fiscal cliff ring may in fact be a draw.”/Sharon Poczter in Forbes

If you review media coverage of the presidential election campaign, the last debt ceiling deadline and the debates on the government stimulus, aid to college students and healthcare reform, you will consistently find this same focus on meeting the needs of the middle class, especially byDemocrats.  Republicans will often focus on one part of the middle class—small businesses—in an attempt to tie the interests of the middle class to those of the wealthy.

My question: what about the poor—those who need the help of society?

No one seems to want to help the poor very much, and Republicans like Santorum, Gingrich, Bachmann and even Romney constantly demonize them.

To those who say that what we should want to do is  lift people out of poverty into the middle class, my answer is—help the poor then, not those already in the middle class.

Certainly the Democrats are interested in protecting and expanding programs for the poor, but their rhetoric always puts the concerns of the middle class first and foremost.

We can see the poor getting the shaft in the “fiscal cliff” compromise. The working poor may not pay income tax, but they do pay payroll tax, which will go up by two percent, ending the temporary cut instituted two years ago. Our elected officials were extremely and profoundly concerned about making sure that the income tax increase did not affect the middle class, but cared not a whit about keeping money in the pockets of the working poor by agreeing to keep the two-percent decrease in payroll tax in place for those earnings less than $40,000 or $50,000 a year. Another solution would have been to remove the cap on income that is taxed for Social Security. Removing the payroll tax cap would have had the double benefit of 1) allowing the poor to keep pumping money into the economy by spending the payroll tax cut; and 2) providing funding for the Social Security system during the “Baby Boom” years, when the large number of retirees compared to workers will burden the system.

But while thoughts of helping the poor may have entered the minds of Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Reid, Boehner, McConnell, et. al., the idea of actually helping them never crossed their lips.

That’s what’s called business as usual.