The American Bear

Money doesn’t solve, salve, cure, stabilize, forge peace, make or keep promises. And aid packages, no matter how much they’re needed or with how much philanthropic goodwill they’re sent, will not help anyone by themselves. It matters as much in whose hands the money falls as fast as it flows. The United States State Department should have considered this when deciding to continue to fund and arm the Egyptian military regime.

As pivotal as Egypt has been as an historical ally and an advocate for various degrees of peace in the region, and as necessary as the country may be as a counterweight to the militant authoritarianism of Iran, the United States cannot afford to fund another oppressive regime. Or, rather, it can afford it, but it shouldn’t. And funding is what the Obama administration and Hilary Clinton are doing: sending 1.3 billion dollars of military assistance to the military regime despite clear evidence of human rights abuses.

House Republicans have passed the Paul Ryan budget resolution, a sweeping plan that slashes long-term mandatory spending, goes under the discretionary spending targets set by the debt limit deal, cuts taxes for the rich and corporations, changes Medicare to a voucher program, eliminates Pell grants for hundreds of thousands of students, and generally authorizes just about every conservative wet dream you can name. And after all that, Ryan’s budget doesn’t even balance until 2040, because it’s nearly impossible to do so without anything on the revenue side.

The vote was relatively close, with the budget passing 228-191. Ten Republicans voted against the budget resolution, up from four last year. Here they are:

Walter Jones (NC), Jimmy Duncan (TN), Tim Huelskamp (KS), Chris Gibson (NY), Justin Amash (MI), Todd Platts (PA), Ed Whitfield (KY), David McKinley (WV), Denny Rehberg (MT), Joe Barton (TX).

Not too many of those votes are because the budget wasn’t conservative enough: that explains Huelskamp, Amash and maybe Barton. The others face tough re-election battles, or in the case of Rehberg are running for Senate in Montana. Walter Jones is just idiosyncratic. But I agree with Dave Weigel, 10 Republicans out of 238 isn’t that many, considering they’ve opened themselves up yet again to charges of ending Medicare as we know it (regardless of what Politifact says).

It’s up to Thomas Perez to bring Trayvon Martin’s killer to justice. Perez runs the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights division, which is leading an inquiry (in concert with the FBI) into the tragic shooting of the black teen from Miami. If the state attorney’s office in Florida declines to file charges against the gun-wielding George Zimmerman—the beneficiary of questionable police work and broad firearm and self-defense regulations—Perez and his colleagues in Washington could step in and file any number of charges, including police misconduct or even a hate crime.

It should come as a relief to Martin’s family that Perez is on the case; there are few lawyers in the nation better suited to manage an investigation of this nature. Since taking over the politicized and demoralized Civil Rights division in 2009, Perez has reinvigorated what Eric Holder once called the “the conscience of the Justice Department,” enforcing loads of civil rights laws intentionally ignored by the Bush administration. And as a young prosecutor working in the department he now leads, the Buffalo native racked up several high-profile convictions in cases targeting shady cops and white supremacists, including the arrest in 1994 of three Lubbock men who attempted to launch a “race war” by luring African-American locals to their car and firing a shotgun at them from a short distance, killing one and injuring two others.

Martin’s murder isn’t the only racially-motivated shooting Perez is currently investigating, either. Less than 30 days ago, his staff issued a fresh series of indictments in a notorious 13-year-old cold case, a double-murder described by a Las Vegas homicide detective at the time as “one of the more heinous crimes” his wicked city had ever experienced (Las Vegas Review-Journal, January 11, 2001). It’s a heart-wrenching story about skinheads, anti-racist activism, and two charismatic young men taken well before their time. Tabling the obvious fact that the states’ suspects are presumed innocent until proven otherwise, let’s revisit this fascinating and newly-relevant massacre. [revisit →]

So far four appellate courts have dealt with [the Affordable Care Act]. Two say it’s fine, one declared it unconstitutional and one said it can’t be ruled on until it goes into effect in 2014 and someone is forced to pay penalties the following year. The only place in America now with an individual health care mandate in effect is Massachusetts (Romneycare) and it seems to be working poorly. More people are covered but medical costs have risen faster than anywhere else in America and the biggest beneficiaries are— you guessed it— the insurance industry. This is what Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, had to say about it in 2009:

There would be no need for an individual mandate in a single-payer system, since everyone would be covered automatically and it would be paid for through their income and payroll taxes. So asking me, a supporter of a single-payer health system, about mandates is a little like asking someone whether he’s stopped beating his wife. But even within our current system, I’m troubled by the notion of an individual mandate. I live in Massachusetts, where we have one. It requires people to buy private insurance at whatever price the companies choose to charge. As might be expected, this is a windfall for the insurance industry. Premiums are rising much faster than income, benefit packages are getting skimpier, and deductibles and co-payments are going up.

Many people can’t afford the premiums for the best plans, and so have to choose bare-bones, low-premium plans with high deductibles and co-payments. They are then left with insurance that they might not be able to afford to use, but have to purchase anyway.

A mandate is also extremely regressive. In Massachusetts, mandated insurance and co-payments can amount to nearly a third of income. Income taxes apportion the costs of public services more fairly, and I see no reason not to adopt that approach in paying for health care. To be sure, President Obama has said he would exempt people from the mandate who couldn’t afford to purchase their own health insurance. But aren’t these precisely the people most in need of it? Massachusetts has exempted 62,000 people from the mandate for that reason.

I would hope the President and Congress would come up with something less regressive and truly universal, and stop holding the rest of us hostage to the private insurance industry.

That’s the progressive argument— not “but Obama and the Democrats want it so it must be good.” The Democrats adopted a bad Republican idea to move the ball on universal health care. It was a cowardly (and, it being DC, corrupt) decision when they should have been passing single payer. The Republicans— always partisan hacks and obstructionists— bailed on their own idea and left the Democrats holding their bag of shit. And now the media and the political parties have turned it into a partisan circus with team red vs team blue, something to which not even the Supreme Court judges seem immune. Or are they?

As Mark Twain might say, reports of Obamacare’s demise are greatly exaggerated. While the conservative justices expressed considerable reservations about the law’s scope, Justice Kennedy, the key swing vote, also noted, near the very end of the argument, that the unique context of the healthcare market may be sufficient to validate the “individual mandate.” The biggest challenge the government has faced in defending the law has been the articulation of a limiting principle, and by argument’s end it seemed that Justice Kennedy might have heard one that he could sign on to. If he does vote to uphold the law, it’s possible that Chief Justice Roberts will join him, in the interest of not having the case decided by a single vote, in which case the vote would be 6-3.

Kennedy began his questioning by asking [Solicitor General Don] Verrilli whether Congress could “create commerce in order to regulate it,” echoing the challengers’ contention that while Congress can regulate commerce under the Commerce Clause, it should not be empowered to require people to “enter into commerce”—by purchasing health insurance against their will—in order to regulate them. If Congress has that power, the challengers maintain, there would be no limit to the federal government’s power. It could require people to buy broccoli, health club memberships, cellphones or burial insurance—all hypotheticals posed to the solicitor general by the Court’s conservative justices. And one of the Constitution’s most basic premises is that the federal government is a government of limited powers. As Justice Kennedy asked Verrilli, “Can you identify any limits on the Commerce Clause?” To get Kennedy’s vote, there has to be an affirmative answer to that question.

There is a limiting principle, however, and Verrilli and several of the justices articulated it during the two-hour-long argument. The nature of healthcare is such that we are all inevitably participants in the healthcare market (save for the Christian Scientists, and they are exempt). No one can avoid the need for healthcare, no one can predict when he or she will need it, and virtually no one can afford it when he or she does need it. And ultimately, the healthcare market provides free care to those who cannot pay for it (principally at hospital emergency rooms). Of course nothing is truly free, so hospitals and healthcare providers pass on the cost in higher fees and premiums to those who do pay. As such, those who do not buy insurance shift the costs of their care to the rest of us, increasing the average insured family’s costs by about $1,000 per year. So unlike the markets for broccoli, health clubs and cellphones, this is not a market anyone can truly avoid, and doing nothing ends up harming others by shifting one’s own costs to those who carry insurance.

Given those realities, to uphold this law would not give Congress unfettered power to require us to eat granola, purchase electric cars or join health clubs. Participation in the markets for those products is not inevitable, nor does one person’s choice not to purchase such products impose substantial and foreseeable costs on others because he will be able to get the product for free even if he doesn’t buy it. Upholding the individual mandate would simply establish that where a national market is the victim of such a free-rider problem, Congress may address it as part of its general authority to regulate that market.

I am sorry we used up all the oil.  It took a million years for those layers of carbon goo to form under the Earth’s crust and we used up most of it in a geological instant.  No doubt there will be some left and perhaps you can get around the fact that what remains is already distant, dirty, and dangerous, but the low-hanging fruit will be long-gone by the time you are my age.  We took it all.

There’s no excuse, really.  We are gas-hogs, plain and simple.  We got hooked on faster-bigger-more and charged right over the carrying capacity of the planet.  Oil made it possible.

Machines are our slaves and coal, oil, and gas are their food.  They helped us grow so much of our own food that we could overpopulate the Earth.  We could ship stuff and travel all over the globe, and still have enough fuel left to drive home alone in trucks in time to watch Monday Night Football.

Rocket fuel, fertilizer, baby bottles, lawn chairs: we made everything and anything out of oil and could never get enough of it.  We could have conserved more for you to use in your lifetime.  Instead, we demonstrated the self-restraint of crack addicts. It’s been great having all that oil to play with and we built our entire world around that.  Living without it will be tough.  Sorry.

A new study out from the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) provides some of the clearest accounting yet of the United States’ covert war on terror in Yemen, including the use of drone strikes. It shows that seventy-five percent of US drone attacks there have taken place since May 2011 during the instability created by the uprising in Yemen.

Altogether, TBIJ finds 44 US attacks have taken place in Yemen. About 34 of them have happened since May of last year. Somewhere between 275-390 people have been killed. Fifty-four to one hundred of those have been civilians while 221-289 have been “alleged militants.”

Data on recent attacks reveals an escalation in drone strikes this month. The number of attacks are now equal to, if not more than, the number of CIA drone attacks in Pakistan.

[Besides] the larger debate over abortion, concerns about contraception have been germinating in some quarters for several years. In 2003, on the 30^th anniversary of Roe V. Wade, Cristina Page, of the National Abortion Rights Action League, and Amanda Peterman, from Right to Life Michigan, co-wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, titled “The Right to Agree.” In this op-ed, Page and Peterman wrote of finding common ground on such issues as support for single mothers, affordable child care, an end to violent rhetoric and actions, and supporting legislation that would require that health insurance plans cover contraceptives. While there was reportedly little strong response from pro-choice organizations, Peterman found herself ostracized from her fellow activists.  Page has subsequently written about how this chain of events helped her to realize that much of the purported anti-abortion activity actually is not focused on abortion per se, but on larger anxieties about families and sexuality.

So what does this have to do with the world outside? Despite the very low rates of abortion (and sexually-transmitted diseases) in the Netherlands, that country’s policies of sex education, along with subsidizing and promoting contraception, do not endear themselves to American conservatives. The exact opposite is true. While the Times, in a 2006 article titled “Contra-Contraception” highlighted the ethical reasons for such seeming cognitive dissonance, it also seems likely that there is a subconscious (and sometimes very conscious!) strategic explanation. In other words, if the Netherlands, and many other countries in Europe and around the world, manage to prevent abortions by preventing pregnancy, that is not considered an acceptable strategy, partially because the resulting low fertility rates allegedly leave such countries open to conquest by Muslim immigrants.

This hypothesis, sometimes awkwardly referred to as “Eurabia” (most Muslim immigrants, like most Muslims in general, are not Arab), has become a staple of right-wing rhetoric in the past decade. Pat Buchanan has mentioned this trope repeatedly, beginning with his book Death of the West in 2001.  Mark Steyn has largely built a career on this sort of thing; he made a considerable impact with America Alone in 2006, and was continually invoking concerns of low fertility, though without explicitly mentioning an Islamic takeover, in recent months. Numerous other authors have added their voices to this chorus of fear, and opponents of the idea also responded in kind. Indeed, such fears are not only misplaced, they are comprehensively wrong across the board. The numbers regarding fertility and immigration patterns, as well as the social and political beliefs of many Muslims in Europe, do not even remotely support the hypothesis of people like Steyn, and yet their ideas have stuck in the minds of many. Anders Behring Breivik and the English Defence League share these concerns. Perhaps more importantly, so does the American Christian Right, the most bellicose demographic in America, and the same one responsible for the wave of legislation targeting contraception and abortion. […]

American conservatives seem to want “more babies” more than they want fewer abortions, partially due to fear that the wrong people are reproducing too often. This is one reason, though not the largest, why Cristina Page and Amanda Peterman had such a brief opportunity to agree.

There are many hundreds of pages on this subject in Marx, and many tens of thousands in commentaries and analyses of his work, so my summary of his views is of necessity cartoonishly compressed and simple. Marx’s model works like this: competition pressures will always force down the cost of labour, so that workers are employed for the minimum price, always paid just enough to keep themselves going, and no more. The employer then sells the commodity not for what it cost to make, but for the best price he can get: a price which in turn is subject to competition pressures, and therefore will always tend over time to go down. In the meantime, however, there is a gap between what the labourer sells his labour for, and the price the employer gets for the commodity, and that difference is the money which accumulates to the employer and which Marx called surplus value. In Marx’s judgment surplus value is the entire basis of capitalism: all value in capitalism is the surplus value created by labour. That’s what makes up the cost of the thing; as Marx put it, ‘price is the money-name of the labour objectified in a commodity.’ And in examining that question he creates a model which allows us to see deeply into the structure of the world, and see the labour hidden in the things all around us. He makes labour legible in objects and relationships.

The theory of surplus value also explains, for Marx, why capitalism has an inherent tendency towards crisis. The employer, just like the employee, has competition pressures, and the price of the things he’s selling will always tend to be forced down by new entrants to the market. His way of getting round this will usually be to employ machines to make the workers more productive. He’ll try to get more out of them by employing fewer of them to make more stuff. But in trying to increase the efficiency of production, he might well destroy value, often by making too many goods at not enough profit, which leads to a surplus of competing goods which leads to a crash in the market which leads to massive destruction of capital which leads to the start of another cycle. It’s an elegant aspect of Marx’s thinking that the surplus theory of value leads directly and explicitly to the prediction that capitalism will always have cycles of crisis, of boom and bust.