The Trust Deficit - Part I

I’m trying to keep these entries accessible. Most people these days, me included, don’t have the time or patience to read 3,000 words in one sitting. So I’m breaking this piece up into several parts which cover what I believe is the most important issue facing us today and truly sits at the heart of everything that’s wrong with our democracy. The trust deficit.

The Trust Deficit – Part One

If you didn’t see Jon Stewart skewer Glenn Beck like a Kalua pig Thursday night, you owe it to yourself to check it out. It was a bonafide dipshit luau and it was all I could do to not throw on my grass skirt and fire dance around my living room like a bone-in-nose Tongan warrior. Stewart brought his A game and it was perhaps fifteen of the greatest minutes of political satire the world has ever seen.

And it’s a nice segue for me because I’m gonna take the Glenn Beck route on this one, common sense being so en vogue these days and all. Not to mention, there’s a galactic deficit of trust in this country, which means that in the current climate any article that attempts to use data to substantiate its claims is ironically less trustworthy than one that just makes good intuitive sense to people. For example, I just saw Stephen Moore – a giant lactating milk-toast Randian Reaganite – argue against CBO backed data that states that the current healthcare bill will save $1.3 trillion by 2029 by saying that it can’t because the bill covers more people. See? Fuck everything else in the bill geared towards cutting costs and fuck the CBO estimates. If it covers more people it has to cost more, facts be damned! Of course if he’d had the facts or the CBO on his side he’d have argued both at the top of his lungs. But he doesn’t, so we get the Beck treatment.

Sadly, plenty of Americans are far more amicable to such a style, and it’s not entirely unclever, if wholly bereft of legitimate content. When I heard Moore make his moronic, fact absent, data obstinate argument I cringed, envisioning millions of Americans staring vacantly at the boob tube and nodding in unison. And I get it. It sounds right, even if it isn’t. And in this day and age, where data is no longer trusted, people go with what sounds right.

This deficit of trust in the information we’re provided is, I think, the single greatest threat facing our democracy today and here’s why. We live in a world drowning in rhetoric. Fact is the one thing we can rely on to help us sort truth from bullshit. If we throw fact out the window, we’re left with persuasion and coercion as the driving forces behind our actions. And that begs the following question. In this day and age, of the people and institutions we have regular access to that provide us our information, who’s best positioned to persuade and coerce us? In other words, in a world full of rhetoric, where fact is irrelevant, who do we trust to guide us?

Certainly not the politicians, who relentlessly let us down and are plagued and mired in scandal after scandal. They’re beholden to campaign contributions in order to keep their jobs and so beholden to those who control access to media channels and campaign funding. And certainly not representatives from big business who have demonstrated without exception that they’ll screw anyone at anytime for anything so long as there’s a buck in it for them. And if you listen to the Right, you can’t trust science or the CBO or anything you learn in our liberally eschewed collegiate system. And if you listen to either party, you can’t trust anything that comes out of a think tank because they’re all partisan propaganda machines staffed by ideologues and zealots. Even organizations that were founded to be a solution to this very problem, as unbiased non-partisan hubs for information, aren’t trusted. The right will tell you that factcheck.org is a liberal outlet.

For every credible study, report, poll, piece of data, chart or graph that’s accessible, there is either another contradicting it or a trusted figure, be it pundit or politician, telling you that it can’t be trusted. It’s too much for anyone to handle. Most people who try to mine information on their own give up because there is no definitive trusted source anymore. Everything has to be vetted. This is all relatively new to us and we simply don’t have the proper equipment or training to trudge through this blizzard of bullshit on our own. In the Age of Information, with the vastness of the internet at our disposal as a resource, it’s truly more difficult than ever to find credible information.

Add to that, that Americans – those who still have jobs anyhow – work more hours per year than anyone else in the industrialized world, and that our average work hours per week has gone up consistently over the last half century. So even if we knew how to sift through all the nonsense, we don’t have the time to.

It really is the perfect storm.

We can’t trust facts and we can’t trust our leaders. So who do we turn to? The pundits! And why? Because they act and sound like they understand all the shit that we can’t. They sound like they’ve done the legwork and reached rigid conclusions based on hard data. The more convinced they sound, the more popular they are. It’s why Glenn Beck is popular.

And here’s the proof. In the drum up to the Iraq War in 2002, Fox News carpet bombed the airwaves with talk of links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. It was so effective that even in the wake of the 9/11 Commission’s report, which was released almost two years later in the spring of 2004 and stated flatly and outright that there was no link whatsoever between them, fifty percent of Americans still insisted that the link existed. You just can’t battle spin with facts when people have been corralled into trusting the former over the latter.

Illustrations like this – and there is no shortage of them – make one thing pretty clear. When media has such a dramatic impact on public opinion, and that media acts irresponsibly and only in their own interest, and facts are considered by the populous to be malleable and untrustworthy, your democracy is begging for a serious beat-down. Right now, we’re that guy in the bar whose had nine too many and keeps hitting on the lady friend of the no-neck beef stack checking ID at the door.

Part II of The Trust Deficit will be posted within the next few days.

Paul Ryan - Nationalizing Industry to Save the Free Market

Republicans and Libertarians alike are smitten. They’ve spent the last few weeks falling all over themselves for a guy that they hope is the next big thing for the Right, Congressman Paul Ryan.

A couple of weeks ago, their dream hunk gave a very interesting and very revealing response when asked by Benjy Sarlin from the Daily Beast about yes votes cast by Ryan for both TARP and the auto bailouts – both Bush initiatives - that seemingly contradict his professed ideology. “I'm a limited-government, free-enterprise guy, but TARP... represented a moment where we had no good options and we were about to fall into a deflationary spiral," he said. "I believe Obama would not only have won, but would have been able to sweep through a huge statist agenda very quickly because there would have been no support for the free-market system."

Holy Santa Claus shit, where do I start? I’ve never seen this much stupid crammed into two sentences before.

First a little background on Ryan. He’s a congressman from Wisconsin who has received millions in Wall Street contributions, no surprise there. It also bears noting that he is Sarah Palin’s favorite young Republican, also shocking. Palin loves him so much she went so far as to suggest that he aim for the presidency in 2012. Thankfully, for those of us not interested in an American future that resembles the Mad Max environment, Ryan, in a seldom witnessed act of sanity, ignored advice from Sarah Palin and has ruled out a presidential run. Although this has led some to speculate that the ticket might instead be Palin/Ryan Beyond Thunderdome. Really. God help us.

Let’s also note that Ryan voted yes for the fraudulent bank handout, aka TARP, whose investigators have opened 86 criminal investigations, 77 of which were ongoing as of December 31, 2009. As the inspector general’s report states, “These investigations include complex issues concerning suspected TARP fraud, accounting fraud, securities fraud, insider trading, bank fraud, mortgage fraud, mortgage servicer misconduct, fraudulent advance-fee schemes, public corruption, false statements, obstruction of justice, money laundering, and tax-related investigations.” Yeah, TARP was awesome. Who could have foreseen that hurling bags of cash with virtually no strings attached at the very criminals who had just completed the greatest robbery in American history would result in more fraud? Not Ryan apparently. He still believes it saved us from a second Great Depression. Oh boy…

Then he votes no, like almost every single other Republican, against the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, aka economic stimulus package, which according to a report issued by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office helped create up to 1.6 million jobs as of Fall 2009 and stoke real GDP up to 3.2 percent higher than it would have been without it. Unlike his beloved TARP, Ryan called the ARRA “wasteful spending” and then, in a story that’s getting pretty old, requested funds from it for his district in a not so shocking act of blatant hypocrisy.

Also, and as quoted above, Ryan throws down the new favorite GOP/Libertarian buzz word, “statist”, which we should take the opportunity to define because we’re going to be hearing it a lot from now on from guys like him. It incorporates the conflicting ideologies of fascism and socialism under one umbrella, conveniently skirting the issue Conservatives were having with labeling Obama as both. In fairness to the Right, Obama has only been serving in the federal government for thirteen years, which clearly isn’t enough time to ascertain whether his goal is to turn this country into present day Finland or Nazi Germany, but they know he’s up to something.

And how. At one point during the interview, Ryan attributes his votes for TARP and the auto bailouts to Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, a book about the supposed liberal origins of fascism and the Nazi Party. It’s been received more as historical fantasy than a work to be taken seriously, but I guess nobody’s mentioned that to Ryan who saw a looming second Great Depression as the perfect opportunity for the conniving Obama to enact his liberal-fascist-Nazi-socialist agenda.

Lost on Ryan apparently is the all too obvious. If Obama really did have a motive to sweep through a huge statist agenda, why would he have proposed, fought for, and signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which by all accounts kept the second Depression at bay? The economy was headed off a cliff. The ARRA effectively spoiled any opportunity for Obama to enact his “real” agenda by saving the economy from collapsing under the weight of free-market fueled greed and deregulation. So why would he do it? And these are the same guys supposedly proposing the “common sense” solutions to our problems. Right now they’re sitting in a room somewhere trying to figure out why Obama sabotaged his own master plan and how it’ll enable him to enact his “new real” agenda somewhere down the line. For someone who they don’t believe has enough sense to effectively lead this country they sure do give him a lot of credit for concocting multi-stage schemes that would make a super villain proud. They can’t decide whether he’s Forrest Gump or the unholy love spawn of Bobby Fisher and Lex Luther.

And here’s the best part. Ryan’s preventative strategy for blocking what he believed to be an impending Obama secret master plan to control the state was – wait for it - to nationalize companies from the financial sector and bail out the auto industry! So genius- a preemptive strike! He stopped Obama’s huge statist agenda by beating him to the punch and enacting one on his own!

Oh how it must have stung. If Ayn Rand gave a shit about anything but herself she would have rolled over in her grave. He admits it was the only move for him because, if there were a collapse, the citizens would have stormed the streets ready to lynch a free-market system that had just Godzilla’d the American economy as if it was Odo Island, and that’s true. But here’s the big question. How bad has free-market ideology let down its disciples when die hard Friedmanites like Ryan have to vote to nationalize industry to save their hallowed free-market? And why on Earth would any sane person want to resurrect such an obviously destructive system so clearly at odds with their supposed core values?

Like most ardent free-marketeers, Ryan probably isn't willing to acknowledge that the principles of free-market ideology - deregulation, exaltation of greed, win at all costs profiteering, etc. - were quite obviously, to anyone who isn't a blind ideologue or hasn't been deluded by the corporate fueled spin machine, at the absolute core of the economic collapse. But this guy is on a whole different level of denial.

If he really is a true believer, he’s delusional. If not, he’s a shill. Either way Sarah Palin’s right, he really is the perfect presidential candidate for the GOP. Bring him on.

True Fiscal Conservatives Vote Democratic

True fiscal conservatives vote Democratic. It’s a piece that pops up every once awhile but not nearly enough (that’s what she said). This is evident because, by and large, the conventional wisdom says that if fiscal prudence is most important to you, then you should vote Republican. As it turns out though, not so much.

The idea makes enough intuitive sense I guess. Republicans have engrained well their supposed dictum of fiscal responsibility into the collective consciousness of American society. And they’ve done an equally admirable job of fostering the self-contradictory image of Democrats, who are at the same time portrayed as both lazy, incapable, whiny cry babies who couldn’t compete in the harsh throws of the business world and a rigidly disciplined army of unstoppable malignant liberal hobos who must be stayed at all costs. A bipolar Robin Hood; on the one hand meticulously orchestrating cooperative partisan efforts on schemes to steal money from the rich and on the other acting in reckless and careless discord, tossing the stolen loot over their shoulder to any freeloader from the ghetto who can catch. While it may be said that the Democrats have done their fair share to merit their caricature, the same cannot be so easily said for the Republicans.

And for many voters who, for whatever reason, don’t have the time or inclination to dig deeper, providing anything that passes upon first glance as a logical causal explanation in support of the caricature is more than enough to keep them loyal. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are the foremost virtuosos of this technique. Their preferred tactic is to stack ad hominem attacks - which reinforce the existing party caricatures in the viewer’s mind - atop straw men arguments that sound enough like the real thing to pass for it, and wrap them up succinctly in a package of folksy appeal by stating matter-of-factly that, “It just makes good sense”. Content with the result as if they’d just finished alphabetizing their Ronald Reagan biographies, they wipe their hands with the given issue and move on in a gesture that says, “Well, that’s settled, what’s next?”

The sense that is supposed to be made is of course predicated, not from evidence or empirical data, but from the caricature itself which has no logical value whatsoever. It only seems to make sense because it's reinforced by the images we have in our heads of what Democrats and Republicans are supposed to be. This bundle of bullshit posing as logic falls apart quickly however with the most ginger tug at the strings struggling to contain it. And when it all comes apart, there in plain sight for the discerning eye is the reality, that not only are the caricatures inaccurate, but the data proves the opposite true.

Michael Kinsley, updating a previous piece that he had done for the Los Angeles Times, wrote an article for Slate in September 2008 that illustrates this point nicely. In it, Kinsley correctly points out that the metrics the report uses to define fiscal responsibility are those that Republicans themselves would define as most important. It excludes the typical so called “class warfare” metrics like income gap or real wages - which are of course completely relevant - and focuses instead on very straightforward data like per capita GDP growth, inflation, unemployment, federal taxation, federal spending, and today’s most overused buzz metric, the deficit. Or as Kinsley puts it, “There is nothing here about how clean the air is or how many children are growing up in poverty. The only point is that if you find the Republican mantra of lower taxes and smaller government appealing, and if you care only about how fast the economy is growing, not how that growth is shared, you should vote Democratic.” That the indictment can be unequivocally made based solely on the results of examining hand picked Republican data nuggets allows it to stand that much more resolutely on its own merit.

The report considers data compiled between 1959 and 2007 and factors for potential biases like lag time. Lag time is the idea that a newly inaugurated president is normally not as responsible for the state of the economy his first year in office as he is for the following four years. That’s because the policies of the previous administration tend to overlap with the new one and more strongly affect economic performance, and so on with the next administration. As we saw in 2009 when President Obama inherited an economy teetering on the brink of disaster and reeling from the late 2008 economic actions implemented by President Bush, like the galactically irresponsible TARP, lag time is legitimate.

Aside from unemployment and inflation, which can be accurately compared over time between administrations using traditional methods, Kinsley uses Change in Real GDP per Capita as his gauge for the other metrics. As he explains:

The most important measure of a nation's economic strength is gross domestic product. But comparing GDPs among various presidents would be unfair. Since the economy does tend to grow over time (or always has), more recent presidents would enjoy an unfair advantage. And every president inherits a situation; the question is what he does with it.

So the measure I use is "Change in Real GDP Per Capita," which corrects for inflation and also for population growth.

Factoring for lag time as a legitimate bias, the report yields the following results. (Detail available via link).

1. The economy grows substantially faster under a Democratic administration.
2. Unemployment is much lower under a Democratic administration.
3. Federal spending is reduced when Democrats have the presidency.
4. The federal deficit grows much faster under a Republican administration.
5. Inflation and defense spending is not strongly correlated to either party.
6. Republicans tax on average under 1% less annually than Democrats do as compared to GDP.

To anyone who hasn't been in a coma for the past thirty years these results shouldn’t be the least bit surprising. Since 1980 we’ve witnessed vast growth in the national debt under Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II. Only the detested tax and spend liberal Bill Clinton was able to reduce debt whatsoever. The big government Socialist was so effective in fact that he left a budget surplus to his successor. Bush, for his part, of course wasted no time squandering every penny of it and drove up the debt once again as a testament of his dedication to modern Republican fiscal policy.

In addition to the results from the report, everything we’ve witnessed in the last thirty years has unambiguously demonstrated that there is one party who has been fiscally responsible and another whose experimentation in implementing never before proven economic theories has had disastrous effects on our economy. How we’ve managed to confuse which was which is a tribute to the effectiveness of modern image spin.

The Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility only because they tell us that they are. They tell us every day, all day long, and through every channel imaginable. Their pundits try to prove it to us everyday and use "common sense" because if they had to use empirical data they couldn’t convince anybody.

When you peak through the facade that is image and spin, the hard facts expose Republican fiscal policy for what it is. True fiscal conservatives vote Democratic. It's just common sense.

The Republican Puppet Master

As is often the case, the Republicans spoke with one resounding voice at yesterday's Health Care Summit, and that voice said, "Start over". From the Daily Show to Hardball, news outlets picked up on this and spliced together clip after clip of the Republicans invited to partake in the ceremonies yesterday employing the tried and true method of:

1. Testing issue framing and language.
2. Crafting a simple message based on the results of that testing.
3. Repeating it over and over again.

John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Lamar Alexander, Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, and the rest of the creepy talk bots all got in line and parroted the preselected and well rehearsed party message, “Start over”.

Anyone familiar with Frank Luntz's work immediately knew what the score was. A quick Google search for "Frank Luntz Start Over" directs to his October 2009 memo detailing "Words That Work" for the ongoing healthcare debate. It is the updated version of his original piece, "The Language of Healthcare" from May 2009 which was responsible for such catchy 2009 phrases as "Washington bureaucrats standing between you and your doctor" and "Washington takeover of healthcare". Over the last year Americans have heard these phrases and many like them--all of which emanated from the Luntz doctrine-- repeated ad nauseum by Republican politicians and pundits alike in an attempt to sway public opinion, and thus the actual scope of the bills, while Congress was attempting to craft legislation on the issue.

That yesterday's talking points came from Luntz was a lock, they just had to be located in the updated playbook. Sure enough, on page 7 of the Luntz memo in the "Words That Work" section, yesterday's mantra was outlined. (The words and phrases in bold type below were those regurgitated and repeated most often at the Summit).

"Most Americans wanted to hear the president tell Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Reid and the rest of Congress that it's time to start over on a common-sense, bipartisan plan focused on lowering the cost of health care while improving quality. That's what I've heard over the past several months, in talking to thousands of my constituents."

Unsurprisingly, the message incorporates a pot shot at President Obama, attempting to take him down a peg by alluding that he doesn't have the courage to stand up to the right's favorite punching bags, Pelosi and Reid, and thereby grouping him with the hated liberal Congressional leadership.

Also particularly interesting is the part about “hearing it” from thousands of their constituents over the past several months. Identical verbiage was repeated tirelessly by the right yesterday during the meeting. This is no doubt true of course, so long as you replace "heard in talking with thousands of my constituents" with "read in a memo that I got from Frank Luntz".

Why this isn't trumpeted through the megaphones of the liberal news outlets is perplexing. Exposing the right for what they are, as a consortium of politicians so hopelessly out of touch with the people they purport to represent that they need to be told what to say, and so spineless that they can be told what to say is powerful stuff; especially when the marching orders are based on the results of focus group testing and orchestrated from on high by some porky little schlub like Luntz. The notion itself is incongruent and inimical with the Republican image of strength and individualism.

MSNBC should be running a split screen picture of Luntz on one side and clips of Republican congress members parroting Luntz’s words on the other. Luntz’s words should be streaming across the bottom of the screen with a little white ball bouncing over them like in the old Cal Worthington commercials as they’re regurgitated by the GOP talking heads. And they should run it twenty hours a day as if Luntz were Jeremiah Wright with a giant caption across the top of the screen that reads, “The Republican Puppet Master”.

This is the hammer that shatters the sacred stained glass window of Ronald Reagan that watches proudly over the Republican Party. Someone needs to pick it up and start swinging. Now.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/21886488/Frank-Luntz-Memo