I've never been quite as angry at President Obama, or regretted as
much having voted for him in 2008, as when I saw and read this part
of his speech in Brussels yesterday.
Let's skip the introduction, in which
he congratulates himself for having opposed our invasion of Iraq, and
go directly to the substance of his remarks.
But even in Iraq, America sought to
work within the international system.
Yes. We
presented our case to the United Nations, they said “no,” and we
went ahead and invaded anyway. Is this morally superior to not
having asked? It is our failure to abide by the terms of the UN
charter that makes the invasion of Iraq a clear violation of international law.
We did not
claim or annex Iraq's territory.
True, but . . .
We did not
grab its resources for our own gain.
This is false. One of the first things we did was insist that Iraq's
oil, which previously belonged to the Iraqi people, be privatized and the drilling rights sold to American and international oil companies.
Of course, energy corporations were not the only ones to profit from
the war. Millions of dollars went to weapons manufacturers and
politically connected contractors such as Halliburton. Among those who didn't benefit were the American people. According to the Pentagon, 4487 soldiers lost
their lives in Iraq, and tens of thousands more suffered life-changing injuries. The
American people are also left with more than $3 trillion in debt.
I think we can now say without fear of contradiction that control of
Iraqi oil was the primary reason the Bush administration went to war
in Iraq. If you have not yet seen Rachel Maddow's March 13
documentary, Why We Did It, you should watch it.
Instead, we ended our war and left Iraq to its people . . .
. . . in a fully sovereign Iraqi state that can make decisions
about its own future.
We also left them with a totally devastated infrastructure, contaminated by depleted uranium which will leave future generations of Iraqis to suffer from
cancer and birth defects. We unleashed sectarian violence which
continues to kill Iraqis almost every day. Whether the future of
Iraq will include democratic elections remains to be seen. Their
current President Nouri al-Malaki, running for a third term, seems to be systematically eliminating his competition from the upcoming elections.
How many people
died and how much property was destroyed during the annexation of
Crimea? And speaking of people determining their own future, we are told that 83% of
Crimeans voted in the March 16 referendum, and 97% of those who voted
chose annexation by Russia. Even if those figures are not entirely
accurate, or are tainted in some way by the presence of Russian
troops in the country, no one is seriously denying that annexation by
Russia was the overwhelming preference of the Crimean people.
I saw a former American diplomat (whose
name I unfortunately don't recall) interviewed on television by Chris
Hayes. When he parroted the administration's claim that the
annexation of Crimea violates international law, Hayes asked him the
obvious question about American hypocrisy, given our past history in
Iraq and other places. His answer was, basically, “Yes, but two wrongs
don't make a right.” Wouldn't it have been refreshing had Obama
said something similar, something like this?
We were wrong to
invade Iraq, and in doing so, we contributed to the breakdown of
international law which made the takeover of Crimea seem more permissible.
But our foreign policy will change. We will not engage in illegal
wars during the remainder of my presidency.
The most interesting question that
remains to be answered about Barack Obama is this:
Is his dramatic conservative shift in attitudes the
inevitable result of time spent in the office of the presidency, or
did he actively deceive the American people about his intentions
during his two political campaigns?
Update (3/29/14):
I now believe the diplomat I referred to was Michael McFaul, former Ambassador to Russia. He has written an op-ed that mentions the difficult he had defending international law in Russia when they always asked, "What about Iraq?"
One of my academic heroes, media theorist Stuart Hall died Monday
at the age of 82. He was diabetic and had been ill for some time.
Hall was born in Jamaica, came to England in 1951 as a Rhodes
scholar, and stayed on as the leader of the Cultural Studies
movement. From 1964-1979, he was the director of the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. He taught at
the Open University from 1979 until his retirement in 1997. He was
the founding editor of the New Left Review.
Generally speaking, cultural studies is
about how people are taught to categorize one another by
nationality, class, gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. Hall was
one of the first scholars to take popular culture seriously. We do
not perceive the world directly, but through the lens of media
representations. A lot of what seems to us to be “common sense”
is actually the opinions and perspectives of our culture transmitted
through the media. The “common sense” viewpoint is usually
motivated by social class interests that attempt to manipulate our
consciousness for ideological reasons. Cultures conceal their
ideologies, however, behind a veil of “nature,” claiming that
their own cultural practices are “natural” and everyone else's is
“unnatural.” (“Of course”Santa Claus is a White man.)
Hall originated the encoding-decoding model. This model proposes that the mass media audience is not
passive, but actively participates in understanding and interpreting
the text. Messages are constructed (encoded) by media producers and
interpreted (decoded) by audiences. Since every media text is
polysemic, or many-layered, there is considerable variability
in how a message can be decoded. Hall divides readings of a text
into three broad categories. Think, for example, of a television
commercial.
The preferred, dominant
or hegemonic reading is one in which the audience fully
accepts the producer's message. The reader accepts the dominant
ideology and “buys” the product.
An oppositional or
resistant reading is
one in which the reader uses an alternative frame of reference to
decode the message in a totally contrary way. The reader challenges
the dominant ideology, for example, by thinking that all
advertisements are lies.
A negotiated reading is a
mixture of acceptance and rejection of the preferred meaning that
was encoded in the text.
A key concept in Hall's theory is representation. The media do not reflect the real world, they
represent (or “re-present”) it. Prior to Hall, the older view
was that media representations can be compared to reality, and any
discrepancy between the two constitutes media bias. But Hall
questioned whether politically-charged events have any reality
independent of the media. What is the “true meaning” of the
conflict between Israelis and Palestinians? Both sides watch the same newscast and see it as biased against them. Hall would argue
that there is no fixed meaning of the conflict, and no way of
reaching consensus on what would be an unbiased representation.
Hall's theory was that the true meaning
of an object or event is determined largely by how it is
representated, or as he says, the representations are constitutive
of the event. Media practices serve to define reality for us. The mass media are owned and controlled by a small number of giant corporations. The people who direct these corporations attempt to
fix meaning for their own ends and interests. Collectively, our
representations of the external world constitute ideology—the
set of beliefs and values by which people make sense of the world
they live in. The dominant ideology is the version of events
used by the ruling class to maintain or improve their social
position, which is, of course, the representation of the world
presented by the corporate media.
Examples are easy to find. What the
media define as realistic public policy is actually only a small
segment of what is possible, a segment defined by the space between
our center-right political party (called “Democrats”) and our far
right party (“Republicans.”) Social class differences, when
discussed at all, are presented as justified by the superior
abilities and effort of the rich. Social problems such as crime and
poverty are seen as caused by personal defects of the
individual, rather than by situations or structural arrangements.
Personal problems are “solved” through purchase of a consumer
product, as when loneliness is cured by mouthwash. Entertainment is
used as a distraction from depressing life circumstances. A
person with no personal power can still get satisfaction by watching
the Steelers beat the crap out of their opponent on a Sunday
afternoon.
Not surprisingly, Hall was particularly
interested in how Black people are represented in the media, and
wrote about the culural, political and economic interests that are
served by creating irrational fear of young Black men, i.e., the
“prison-industrial complex.” Although people can always
talk back to the media, Hall saw media representations as a highly
effective way of controlling thoughts and behavior, often leading to
a false consciousness in
which people vote in ways that are contrary to their self-interest.
In 2010, social psychologist Eric Knowles and two colleagues published a study showing that some of the
opposition to health care reform results from prejudice toward
African-Americans and dislike of Barack Obama. The research was a
panel study in which participants were interviewed several times over
the internet.
During the first contact, Knowles
measured implicit prejudice against blacks using a variation of the
Implicit Association Test. This test measures an automatic tendency
to associate white Americans with the concept “good” and black
Americans with the concept “bad.” This bias this is
unintentional and occurs without our awareness. Knowles found that
the people high in implicit prejudice toward African-Americans
reported more negative attitudes toward Obama before the 2008
election and were less likely to vote for him. This is one of
several studies to show that racial prejudice influenced votes in both the 2008 and 2012 elections.
These negative attitudes toward blacks spilled over onto Obama's policies. People high in implicit
prejudice were more opposed to health care reform in 2009, before the
Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed. How do we know their
opposition to health care reform was due to prejudice rather than
political conservatism, which is highly correlated with prejudice in
this country? Knowles did an experiment in which he described a
health care plan. For half the participants, it was presented as
Bill Clinton's 1993 plan and for the other half, it was presented as
Obama's plan. (The actual description was of features that both
plans had in common.) Implicit prejudice had no effect on attitudes
toward the “Clinton” plan, but when it was attributed to Obama,
the more prejudiced participants were more opposed to it. This study was replicated two years later with the same results.
Fast forward to 2014. Aaron Chatterji and colleagues just published a study asking why members of the House
of Representatives did or did not vote for the ACA. The study only
included Democrats, since only one of 177 Republicans voted for the
bill. The researchers looked at whether three variables were related
to the legislators' votes: (1) the percentage of their constituents
without health insurance, (2) Obama's margin of victory or defeat in
the 2008 election in their district, and (3) political contributions
from health insurance companies. The statistical analysis also
controlled for eight demographic variables, such as the age and
racial composition of the district, and five Congressperson
characteristics, such as their own 2008 margin of victory. The results were:
Percentage of constituents without
health insurance was unrelated to the legislators' votes.
Obama's margin of victory made a
significant difference. The 219 Democrats who voted for the ACA
came from districts in which Obama's average margin of victory was
+30%, while the 39 Democrats who voted against it came from
districts in which Obama lost by slightly under 10%. Obama's margin
of victory accounted for 47% of the variance in these
Representatives' votes.
Political contributions from the
health insurance industry also had no relationship to voting.
The authors note that if the
Congresspeople had the best interests of their constituents in mind,
there should have been greater support for the ACA from
Representatives whose districts contained a higher percentage of
uninsured people. At different places in the article, they refer to this as either ignoring their constituents'
preferences or ignoring their constituents' needs. The latter is more accurate,
since they have no measure of voter preference. Maybe some of the people who needed the ACA did not prefer it (or did not know they
preferred it). It is primarily the needs of their poorer
constituents that these legislators ignored. This is no surprise,
since there is a growing body of research showing that politicians
votes are consistent with the opinions of their constituents in the
top third of the income distribution, but the opinions of the lower
and middle thirds are disregarded.
Of course, Obama's margin of victory or
defeat is also a salient indicator of constituent preferences, and
these Congresspeople were very responsive to it. However, the
presidential election was not a referendum on health care reform,
which played only a minor role in the campaign, but is more
reasonably regarded as a measure of Obama's popularity. It appears
that the legislators voted for or against the ACA based on the
evidence of Obama's popularity in their district.
The common thread among both studies is
that both citizens' and legislators' attitudes toward health care
reform seem to be less influenced by the substance of the policy than
by attitudes toward the President himself. At the present time, politicians in 24 states (including Pennsylvania) are ignoring the
needs of their poorer citizens by refusing to implement the ACA's
provision to expand Medicaid. Is this decision also driven by
attitudes toward the President?
By the way, the fact that political
contributions from insurance companies had no effect on voting
doesn't really contradict the hypothesis that politicians are
influenced by campaign contributions. The health insurance industry
never clearly favored or opposed the ACA, since it has both
advantages and disadvantages for them. In fact, the authors never
predicted whether health insurance money would make a Congressperson
more or less likely to vote for the bill.
In an article appearing today in the
London Review of Books, Hersh
accuses the Obama administration of “cherry picking” intelligence
to support the conclusion that the Syrian government of Bashar
al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack in Eastern
Ghouta last August, said to have killed somewhere between 280 and 1400 people. This conclusion was used to
justify the threat of US bombing of Syria. His article begins this way:
Barack Obama did
not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case
that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack
near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important
intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most
significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US
intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in
the country's civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a
UN study concluded—without assessing responsibility—had been used
in the rocket attack.
That other party is al-Nusra, a group
affiliated with al-Qaeda, that is part of the coalition of rebel
groups trying to overthrow Assad that the US government supports.
Hersh doesn't say Assad was not
responsible for the attack, just that the US doesn't have enough
evidence to threaten to start a Middle Eastern war. In effect, he is
saying the Obama administration was as foolish and/or dishonest as the George W. Bush administration was during the buildup to the
American invasion of Iraq. You might say it's deja vu all over again.
You should read the article, but I'll try to summarize: The US had
wiretaps intended to monitor coversations of the Syrian high command,
and sensors in the ground near chemical weapons facilities designed
to detect any movement of these weapons. The wiretaps, and possibly
the sensors, were discovered and neutralized sometime earlier in the
year, so if the
Syrians carried out the attack, the US was taken by surprise. Two
days after the attack, the US used computer keywords to analyze
several thousand radio communications from the Syrian army, looking
for evidence of the attack. In other words, they started with the
assumption that the Syrian government was responsible and look for
confirming evidence—a clear example of confirmatory bias.
They then assembled a scenario of what the Syrian army would have
done if they had carried out the attack, based in part on a training
exercise that the Syrians carried out the year before. This scenario
was presented as if the US had monitored it in real time, which of
course they did not. Hersh says the US also ignored evidence that
the shells said to have been used to deliver the sarin had a shorter
range than they claimed.
At the same time, another suspect,
al-Nusra, has emerged. Hersh cites US intelligence sources claiming
to be certain that al-Nusra has sarin, and others stating that the
evidence is inconclusive. Those who claim al-Nusra does have sarin
refer to the presence in their ranks of Ziyaad Tariq Ahmed, a
chemical weapons expert from Iraq—a bit of possible “blowback” from the Iraq War. Needless to say, the US didn't try to construct a case
implicating al-Nusra. They probably didn't have the necessary data.
As journalist Marcy Wheeler points out,
Hersh's story helps to answer such questions as why our European
allies did not support our threat to attack Syria, and why Obama
surprisingly backed off from the threat, agreeing to take the
question to Congress, where he faced almost certain defeat, and
eventually accepting the Russian plan for dismantling Syria's
chemical weapons that is now being carried out. As Hersh puts it:
Do we have the
whole story of Obama's willingness to walk away from his 'red line'
threat to bomb Syria? He claimed to have an iron-clad case but
suddenly agreed to take the issue to Congress, and later to accept
Assad's offer to relinquish his chemical weapons. It appears
possible that at some point he was directly confronted with
contradictory information: evidence strong enough to persuade him to
cancel his attack plan, and take the criticism sure to come from
Republicans.
Hersh's article appears in a journal
unlikely to be encountered by many Americans. (Why was it not
published by The New Yorker,
his usual outlet?) It will be interesting to see how many American
media cover this article, and how it is covered. The corporate media
usually jump on any story likely to embarrass the President. But in
this case, the story conflicts with their usual unquestioning loyalty
to the American security state. We'll probably hear a lot of
anonymous denials coming from Washington in the next few days.
Update (12/10):
The corporate media have been largely silent about Hersh's article. The exceptions are interviews he did on Democracy Now (see the interview below, in two parts) and CNN. As expected, a national intelligence spokesperson denied everything.
The most interesting facts to emerge so far are that the piece was turned down by both The New Yorker and The Washington Post. The Post told Hersh the sourcing of the article did not meet their standards.
We will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses,
because in the United States of America, no one should go broke
because they get sick.
Barack
Obama (2009)
One of the most important consumer
protections used to sell the Affordable Care Act was the annual limit on the out-of-pocket health care costs that insurance companies were
allowed to charge consumers. The ACA states that, beginning in 2014,
insurers cannot ask clients to pay more that $6,350 annually per
individual, or $12,700 per family, in health care expenses—a sum of
money that is already well beyond the means of many American
families.
Insurance
policies that currently have no limits on out-of-pocket health care
costs may continue not to have any limits.
Policies
which have separate out-of-pocket limits for different components of
coverage, i.e., separate limits for hospital costs and prescriptions
drugs, may continue to apply these separate limits even though they
total more than $6,350 per individual and $12,700 per family.
The
people who will be hit hardest by this change are people with
disabilities or chronic medical conditions, who will no doubt
continue to go bankrupt at the current rate.
The
reason given for this postponement is almost absurd in its cynicism.
More than three years after the ACA was signed, we are asked to
believe that insurers “need more time to comply” with the law
because some of them “have separate computer systems that cannot
communicate with one another.” (I would guess that insurance
companies could reset their computers in three weeks
if there were money to be made by doing so.)
The
Times quotes an unnamed administration official as saying, “We had to balance the
interests of consumers with the concerns of health plan sponsors and
carriers, . . .” But it's hard to see much balance in these two
recent changes to the ACA. Rather, they are best described by the title of a July 2 blog by Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett: “We're
Listening to Businesses About the Health Care Law.” Once again,
the interests of Americans suffering from serious health problems are
subordinated to American corporations' insatiable drive to maximize
profits.
The Obama administration quietly announced on Tuesday that there will be a one-year delay—until
after the 2014 midterm elections—in the implementation of the
employer mandate, the provision of the Affordable Care Act
(ACA) that requires employers with 50 or more employees to provide them with health care coverage or pay a fine. The decision
leaves intact the individual mandate,
which requires most Americans to have health care in 2014 or pay a
tax penalty. Employers get a reprieve, but not workers.
The New York Times quotes Sara Rosenbaum, professor of health policy at George Washington
University, as follows: “I am utterly astounded. . . . This step
could significantly reduce the number of uninsured people who will
gain coverage in 2014.” It's hard to say at this point how many
people will lose coverage. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates
that there are 230,000 firms with 50 or more employees who do not
offer health insurance, employing about 1.4 million workers. It's
unlikely that many of them will voluntarily offer coverage with the
penalty for noncompliance removed. It's even possible that some
companies that currently offer health care will drop it in 2014.
What
will happen to those workers? They will be required to find coverage
on their own or pay a fine. Those who do will most likely pay more
for comparable insurance. One of the arguments in favor of the
employer mandate is that businesses can negotiate a cheaper group
rate than workers can obtain on their own. Those workers with lower
incomes—$88,000 or less for a family of four—may be eligible for
government subsidies, which is why some critics are complaining that
this decision will cost the government money. However, the whole issue of subsidies quickly becomes very complicated. For example,
people who would have been eligible for Medicaid under the ACA, but
whose states—like Pennsylvania—rejected Medicaid expansion, will
not be eligible for any subsidy, even though others in their
states with higher incomes will be. We won't know until after the
fact how many Americans will lose coverage, and therefore, how many will die, as a result of this action.
Photo by seiuhealthcare775nw
It
seems likely that this decision will help to reinforce a central part
of Obama's legacy: his reputation as a wimp who caves in easily to
political pressure. Of course, in this case, the pressure came from
a powerful source—U. S. corporations with 50 or more employees.
These are the “corporate persons” who control both mainstream
political parties—who, in effect, run the country.
Newspaper accounts attribute the postponement in part to threats from companies
hovering around the 50 employee mark to lay off full-time workers or not hire new ones in order to
avoid the employer mandate. But that threat is unlikely to go
away next year, especially since Obama has caved in several times on
various provisions of the law. Republicans, sensing weakness, are again calling for repeal of the ACA. It's certain to be an issue in the
2014 Congressional elections. Americans for Prosperity, the Koch
brothers' advocacy group, is rolling out an aggressive new advertising campaign next week attacking Obamacare. “We think that
once we incorporate the new bullet points about how the president is
already delaying key aspects of the law, it will be even more
effective,” said Tim Phillips, the group's president.
Of course, it was a huge mistake to
ever merge health insurance with employment. Dave Steil, President of Health Care for All PA, has written about how inconvenient the employer mandate is for businesses. It may discourage the creation of small companies. It introduces needless
and expensive complexity into the system—which is one of the things
businesses are now complaining about. It distorts labor markets, for
example, by giving employers reasons to discriminate on the basis of
age, income and health status. It reduces individual choice, since
your employer determines your coverage. It encourages employers to
meddle in their employees health decisions, for example, by refusing
to cover abortion. It reduces tax revenue, since the cost of coverage is tax-exempt.
This in turn encourages overly generous coverage for highly paid
employees—the kind that pays $100 a month for gym memberships.
All of these problems could have been avoided with a single payer
system that provides uniform coverage for everyone.
Update (7/12/13):
Not surprisingly, Republicans are trying to exploit the obvious unfairness of postponing the employer mandate but not the individual mandate. House Speaker John Boehner asked, "Is it fair for the president of the United States to give American businesses an exemption from this health care law's mandates without giving the same exemption to the rest of America? Hell no, it's not fair." Republicans are calling for cancellation of the individual mandate as well, knowing full well that this will bring down the entire ACA. You can't have guaranteed issue—health insurance available to all regardless of preexisting conditions—without the individual mandate.
This latest Republican gambit is outrageously hypocritical. They bend over even further for corporate America than the Democrats. And just yesterday, Boehner and his gang once again ground their heels into the faces of the poor by refusing to fund the food stamp program.
Since I've been beating up on the Obama
administration for the last 18 months, I should report that they have finally dropped their opposition to the over-the-counter sale of Plan
B One-Step, the morning after contraceptive pill, to teenage girls.
You can follow this story by reading my three previous posts on this
issue, listed below.
However, before you start popping the
champagne corks, here's the grim reality.
The manufacturer first applied to
have these pills sold over the counter in 2003. The Bush
administration rejected their application in 2006. President Obama
reaffirmed the Bush position in 2011. There is no way of knowing how
many unwanted children have been born to teenagers as a result of
this ten year delay.
In opposing over-the-counter sale
to minors, Obama rejected the unanimous advice of the FDA's
scientific advisory board, which had sound research showing that
adolescent girls had no difficulty using the product appropriately.
This decision stood in sharp contrast to his campaign promise to
allow policy decisions to be guided by scientific evidence.
The President is still listening
to the voice of his inner Republican. An administration spokesperson told the Washington Post
that he has not changed his position, but has merely conceded that
there is no realistic possibility of overturning the U. S. Court of
Appeals' ruling that reversed Obama's decision.
Photo by kaymoshusband
Jeff Cohen published an op-ed today called “Playing the Obama Bumper
Sticker Game.” Whenever you see a car with an Obama campaign
bumper sticker, look for any additional bumper stickers that are
present. “It's uncanny,” says Cohen. The cause advocated on the
second bumper sticker is always one that Obama has betrayed during
his presidency, i.e., “War is Not the Answer,” “We are the
99%,” “Ban Fracking,” etc. You know the rest.
At the end of our last episode, 24 days
ago, U. S. District Judge Edward Korman had overturned the Obama administration's decision to deny girls under 17 access to morning
after birth control pills without a prescription. The judge
correctly noted that the age restriction contradicted the unanimous recommendation of the scientific advisory board of the Food and Drug
Administration, which was in turn based on studies showing that
adolescents had no difficulty understanding how to use the pills,
called Plan B One-Step. The judge gave the Obama adminstration until
May 6 to make the pills available over the counter to women of all
ages.
Yesterday, the Obama administration attempted to compromise. They announced a change in the age limit.
The pill will now be available without a prescription to girls 15 and
over, provided they can prove their age. In addition, drug stores will be allowed to display Plan B on their shelves, rather than keeping it under the counter with the pornography. But this decision has at least two
problems.
Girls 15 and over must produce
identification to prove their age. (The package will actually
prompt the cashier to verify the customer's age.) For most people,
this is a driver's license, but many teenage girls will not have a driver's license because they are too young, their family is poor,
or they live in an urban area. The fallbacks are birth certificates
and passports, but producing them would probably require parental
help and might cause a delay of more than 72 hours after intercourse
which would make the pill ineffective.
The result of this decision is to
increase the likelihood of an unwanted pregnancy, but only for girls
14 and under. This is awkward from both a moral and a social policy
perspective. If we assume that unplanned pregnancy is the result of
an unwise decision, it's not clear that younger girls should be
punished more for their poor judgment than older girls.
It's also pretty obvious that the younger the girl, the greater the
disaster an unwanted pregnancy is for her personally, her child, and
the society at large.
Strangely, the Obama administration
announced that this regulatory change was not a response to Judge Korman's ruling. (Why do governments make such preposterous
statements?) They also did not announce whether they would appeal
the decision. I guess it's now up to the judge to decide whether he
will accept these new rules. The Center for Reproductive Rights,
which filed the lawsuit, has announced that they will continue to
fight against any age restrictions on morning after contraception.
The second-ever post on my new attempt
at blogging was a Bronx cheer for the Obama administration's decision
to overrule the unanimous recommendation of the scientific advisory
board of the Food and Drug Administration and refuse to allow Plan B
One-Step, the morning after contraceptive, to be sold to girls under
17 without a prescription. The decision was announced by Health and
Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, but President Obama
publicly supported the move, describing it as “common sense” (which, of course, trumps science every time).
The petition to make the morning-after
pill universally available was orginally filed in 2001. Judge Korman
accused both the Bush and Obama administrations of acting in “bad
faith” by delaying action on the petitition for over a decade.
“Indeed, it could be accurately described as an administrative
agency filibister,” he said.
Needless to say, the judge's decision
was applauded by women's groups and criticized by the religious
right. However, the prize for the most illogical response goes to
the Catholic Church. A spokeswoman for the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops claimed, “Plan B does not prevent or treat any
disease, but makes young adolescent girls more available to sexual
predators.” How's that again?
Press Secretary Jay Carney said
yesterday that the President still supports Secretary Sebelius's
decision. The Justice Department must now decide whether to appeal.
The ball is in your court, Mr. Black Republican.
President Obama, in his State of the
Union speech, made two proposals that will reduce inequality, and
that have strong research support—raising the minimum wage and
universal pre-school. The main difference is that raising the
minimum wage is a short-term, direct solution to inequality. It
proposes to help the working poor by ensuring that they make more
money. Universal preschool, which I'll discuss in a future post, is
about making kids more socially mobile 20 years from now. Not
surprisingly, more things can go wrong with that plan.
The current federal minimum wage is
$7.25 per hour, which is $15,080 per year—well below the federal
poverty level for a family of three, and well below the minimum wage
in most industrialized countries. The value of the minimum wage in
this country peaked in 1968 at $10.56 per hour in inflation adjusted
dollars. But worker productivity has risen sharply since 1968. If
the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity growth, it would be
$16.50 per hour. Obama proposes to raise it gradually to $9 (24%) by
2015—hardly a radical proposal—and index it to the rate of
inflation thereafter, so that it increases with the cost of living
without requiring action by Congress. For comparison, the top 1% increased their real income (adjusted for inflation) by 281% between
1979 and 2007. Although every income group lost money during the
Great Recession, during the economic recovery (2009-2011), income
increased by 11.2% for the top 1%, but declined by -.4% for the
bottom 99%.
In a 2012 survey, raising the minimum
wage to $10 in 2014 and indexing it to inflation thereafter was
favored by 73% of Americans, with 20% opposed and 7% undecided.
Support is strongest among Democrats and those who would be helped
most by the proposal—women, minorities and young adults.
Unfortunately, there is an incorrect
argument about the effect of raising the minimum wage that appeals to
the conventional wisdom. It states that raising the minimum wage
causes employers to hire fewer workers or lay off existing workers.
House Speaker John Boehner reacted to the President's proposal by
saying, “When you raise the price of employment, guess what? You
get less of it.” Fortunately, this is an empirical question, and
Boehner is wrong.
The fact that the minimum wage has
stagnated since 1968, while bad for the country, has been a boon to
research on its effects. Some states and cities have raised the
minimum wage above the federal level. This variability makes it
possible study whether raising the minimum wage depresses employment.
The modern history of this research begins with a before-after comparison group design by Card and Kreuger. New Jersey increased
its minimum wage in 1992 while Pennsylvania did not. The authors did
a telephone survey of employment in fast food restaurants in counties
along the NJ-PA border. (Restaurants were chosen because they are
the business that experiences the greatest increase in cost when the
minimum wage goes up.) They found no evidence that NJ's minimum wage
reduced employment relative to PA.
Of course, this could be an atypical
case. But Dube, Lester and Reich published a study in 2010 comparing
restaurant employment in 318 state borderline pairs of counties in
which the minimum wage differed, essentially replicating the Card and
Kreuger study over a much larger sample of times and locations. They
found no employment effects. In recent years, there have been two meta-analyses of minimum wage studies, one of which summarizes 1492
separate tests of the minimum wage hypothesis. They find no
significant overall effect on employment among low income workers,
teenage workers, or anyone else. (By the way, 80% of minimum wage
workers are adults.)
These studies are now well accepted by
economists, but they raise the question of why the conventional
wisdom is wrong about the effects of raising the minimum wage. The
most likely reason is that, for most owners, the cost of increasing
the minimum wage is small relative to other costs affecting their
business. Schmitt has suggested 11 “adjustment channels” that
might explain the lack of a minimum wage effect. Here are the four
that he feels have the greatest research support.
Increasing the minimum wage
reduces turnover, an important cost savings for employers.
Workers who are paid more increase
their productivity, either on their own, since the job is more
important to them, or in response to employer demand.
The cost is passed on to consumers
in the form of increased prices. Does this cause inflation? Yes,
but not very much. One study found that a 31% increase in the
minimum wage increased restaurant prices between 1% and 2%, at worst
increasing the cost of a $10 meal to $10.20.
In the long run, employers
compensate by reducing wages paid to higher wage workers. This
results in “wage compression,” or less wage inequality within
the organization.
Of course, Boehner's comments suggest
that the President's plan is dead on arrival in Congress. But let's
imagine we lived in a country where some wage relief for the working
poor were possible. If the minimum wage is to be indexed to
inflation, it is important that it start from a baseline that is high enough to be fair to low income workers. The data in the second
paragraph suggest that $9 is too low. Wicks-Lim has suggested that
businesses could easily adjust to a 70% rise in the minimum wage to
$12.30 per hour. Raising the minimum wage could be seen as a form of
reparation for the harms caused to low wage workers by the successful
class warfare waged by the rich for the past 30 years.
A new study published by Michael Tesler
in the Journal of Politics
suggests that, for the first time in many years, old-fashioned racism
is having an effect on party preference and voting behavior in the
United States. Specifically, old-fashioned racists are more likely
to be Republicans and vote for Republican candidates.
Old-fashioned racism (OFR)
refers to the endorsement of statements that are obviously and
blatantly racist, such as the belief that blacks are genetically
inferior to whites, that blacks and whites should be segregated and
maintain social distance from one another. OFR has declined steadily
in this country since World War II. The most likely reason is that
OFR has always been positively related to age. Old-fashioned racists
have not changed their attitudes; they have died. Another
contributing factor in the decline of OFR is that it has become less
socially acceptable to state obviously prejudiced attitudes in a
survey.
Sometimes
the mass media present the decline of OFR as evidence that prejudice
is no longer a problem in this country. However, OFR has been
gradually replaced by modern
(or symbolic) racism
(also known as racial
resentment). Modern racism is
prejudice revealed in subtle, indirect ways, such as the claim that
blacks do not respect traditional American values, or in opposition
to social policies perceived to help black people. It allows people
to express beliefs and endorse policies that are harmful to
African-Americans, but still deny being prejudiced. Modern racism
has been related to voting behavior and party preference ever since
the civil rights era. Richard Nixon's “Southern strategy” was
designed to help the Republican party to take advantage of racial
resentment, and the strategy remains successful today.
Tesler
begins his article by noting that OFR has never been related to white
Americans' partisan preferences in the post-civil rights era.
Although modern racists have tended to vote Republican, old-fashioned
racists have been evenly distibuted among the two parties. However,
that appears to have changed since Barack Obama became president in
2008. To make this point, Tesler presents three studies.
The first study looked at the effect of OFR on candidate preference in
the 2008 election. Tesler reanalyzed data collected by the Pew
Research Center in early 2008. In this study, OFR was measured by
endorsement of items stating that whites and blacks should not date
or intermarry, an undeniably racist belief still held by about half
the white population. The study asked participants their preferences
in two hypothetical presidential contests, John McCain vs. Hilary
Clinton, and John McCain vs. Barack Obama. Results showed that OFR
had a significantly greater effect on the McCain-Obama contest than
the McCain-Clinton matchup. The difference between those highest and
lowest in OFR was 10% on the McCain-Clinton question, but 35% on the
McCain-Obama question. This difference was statistically reliable
even after controlling for the effects of party preference, political
ideology and modern racism.
The
remaining two studies looked at the spillover effect,
sometimes referred to as the racialization
of politics. It refers to the possibility that racial attitudes will
affect political behavior in contexts having nothing obviously to do
with race. For example, since President Obama is associated with
health care reform, the spillover effect predicts that old-fashioned
racists will oppose the Affordable Care Act, even after controlling
for the influences of party preference, political ideology and modern
racism.
In Study 2, the Pew data were used to examine the relationship between
OFR and party preference from 1987 through 2009. From 1987 through
2007, there was no significant relationship between OFR and
partisanship. However, in 2009, there was a significant association
between OFR and self-identification as a Republican. Further
analysis showed that, consistent with the spillover hypothesis, this
relationship is mediated
by attitudes toward President Obama. That is, when the effect of
evaluation of President Obama is statistically removed, the
association between OFR and partisanship disappears. (See my earlier post for a more thorough explanation of mediation.)
Finally,
Tesler did a survey of his own in which respondents were asked
to state their preference for candidates for the House of
Representatives in the midterm election of 2010. This study
contained a manipulation designed to test the spillover hypothesis.
Before stating their voting preference, a randomly selected half of
the respondents were reminded that President Obama had been
campaigning for Democratic candidates in the midterm election and
asked whether this affected their preference. This reminder, called
the “Obama prime,” was omitted for the other participants.
Without the Obama prime, OFR had no effect on voting intentions in
the midterm election. However, with the Obama prime, those
highest in OFR were 13% less likely to prefer the Democatic candidate
than those lowest in OFR.
It is
important to note that Tesler is not saying that OFR has increased in
recent years. As far as I know, it is still slowly declining.
However, prior to 2008, old-fashioned racists were randomly
distributed among the two political parties. Since many of them are
what are euphemistically called “low information voters,” some of
them self-identified as independents. The effect of the Obama
presidency and related changes in the political culture, such as the
rise of the Tea Party, has been to drive these folks into the
Republican party. Thus, being a Republican is now associated not
only with modern racism but with OFR as well. Since party
identification tends to persist throughout the life cycle, this
realignment may affect our politics long after Obama's presidency.
Tesler also predicts an increase in overtly racist rhetoric, since it
is now useful in mobilizing the Republican base.
I am in this race
to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda
in Washington are over. I have done more than any other candidate in
this race to take on the lobbyists—and won. They have not funded
my campaign, they will not fund my White House, and they will not
drown out the voices of the American people when I am President.
Four years ago,
President Obama talked about changing business as usual in
Washington. Consistent with this pledge, he banned corporate and union
contributions to his inauguration. He also published the names of
individual donors and the amounts of their contributions.
Individual gifts were limited to $50,000.
Change has come to the Obama administration.
This year, the fundraising goal was $50 million, and the ban on
corporate and union contributions was lifted. The upper limits for "sponsorship" are $250,000 for individuals and $1 million for institutions. Corporations such as
Exxon-Mobil, Microsoft, AT&T, Bank of America, and unions such as
the American Federation of Government Employees, are paying to play.
Many of them are federal contractors, or have immediate business
pending with government agencies, i.e., United Therapeutics, which
has a new drug awaiting FDA approval "within the next four years.". How much are they
paying? This year the donors are listed,
but not the amounts of their gifts.
Following the massacre of 12 people in
an Aurora, Colorado movie theatre, President Obama condemned the
killings, and said, “(T)he federal government stands ready to do
everything necessary to bring whoever is responsible for this heinous
crime to justice.” Here are the President's complete remarks.
While it is obvious that the defendant
should be brought to justice, these remarks are hard to accept coming
from a president who has involved the United States in a program of
targeted assassination of suspected al-Qaeda members and
sympathizers, including American citizens, without due process of
law. Using unmanned aircraft, or drones, the program targets
several countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia and
Yemen. It could be argued that we are not engaged in a legal war
with any of those countries, certainly not the last three, and that these
are war crimes under international law. The drone program even bears
some eerie similarities to the Aurora massacre. It unleashes sudden,
violent death, on what often seem to be randomly selected innocent
people. It is responsible for the death or maiming of unknown
numbers—probably in the thousands—of innocent civilians.
During the eight-year presidency of
Dick Cheney, the U. S. became a nation of torturers. Under President
Obama, we have become, in Jeremy Scahill's words, “a nation of assassins.” Unlike the ethically-challenged behavior of the Bush
administration, the drone program has escalated virtually without
criticism from progressives.
Needless to say, the program is
entirely futile as a way of fighting terrorism, since it instills
deep hatred of the United States in the citizens of these countries.
This guarantees that for every terrorist “leader” we kill,
hundreds will stand ready to take their place.
The drone assassination program is presented in detail in a May 29 New York Times article by Jo
Becker and Scott Shane. It describes President Obama as personally
approving the selection of each target of so-called personality
strikes, using biographical sketches on note cards, referred to by
his aides as “baseball cards.” It's much easier to get on the
other type of kill list—to become the target of a so-called
signature strike. If
you are a young man, you merely have to fit a vague profile of
suspicious behavior. One source joked that a satellite photo of
“three guys doing jumping jacks” is sufficient to label a
location as a terrorist training camp.
One reason we don't know how many
civilian casualties have resulted from the drone attacks is that the
administration has developed a self-serving and deceptive definition
of enemy combatants: all military-age males are assumed to be guilty
“unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them
innocent.” (Of course, no one looks for such evidence.)
Here is lawyer and journalist Glenn
Greenwald discussing the targeted killing program, and Jeremy Scahill
defending his claim that the United States is engaged in “murder.”
For a more thorough discussion of the
drone program, I recommend Scahill's 40-minute speech at the Drone
Summit in Washington, D. C., in April. Here is part one. You
Tube will lead you to the remaining three parts. See also
Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050,
by Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt.
It is widely speculated that the
details of the drone program were leaked to the New York Times
by administration sources in order to bolster the President's
tough-guy image for the upcoming elections. Apparently, the Obama
campaign thinks that Americans consider being a mass murderer an
important qualification for the office. However, the article may
have unintended consequences.
Becker and Shane make it clear that the
President personally supervises every detail of the drone program,
including the kill list. In the past, international war crimes
tribunals have had difficulty establishing a clear link between the
actions of national leaders and atrocities committed on their behalf,
since they are usually separated by several layers of bureaucracy.
This article supports the claim that President Obama is personally
responsible for these assassinations. This could come back to haunt
him after he leaves office. As is the case with Henry Kissinger and
George W. Bush, Obama may have to refrain from most travel abroad,
since he could be arrested at any time and charged with war crimes
under international law.
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