Americans Anti-Big Business, Big Gov't

Americans' satisfaction with the size and power of the federal government is at a record-low 29% and their satisfaction with the size and influence of major corporations remains near the all-time low at 30% -- making both highly susceptible targets for politicians and presidential candidates in this election year.

via gallup.com

People, not profits: A response

A letter-writer responds to the Scripps Howard column on Mitt Romney and Bain Capital:

History shows that the "People not profits" slogan does "bear up under examination" contrary to Joel Mathis' assertion that it just "sounds cool". For example, KB Toys, an American company founded in 1922, employed manufacturing line workers, designers, engineers, and a host of supply chain jobs for thousands of workers. With health care and profit sharing for employees, KB was clearly a company that understood that when you consider people, profits come as a by-product. KB Toys wasn't in deep trouble, but the boom in electronic toys prompted KB to seek out Bain Capital for an infusion of money to bring the company in line with manufacturing more high-tech toys. Bain soon seized control of the company, off shored jobs, raided the company's pension fund, and eventually turned it into what is now Toys R' Us where you'd be hard pressed to find toys made in America or workers that are paid much more than minimum wage or have a benefit or profit sharing package. Ben Boychuk lauds Romney and Bain Capital for jobs created at Staples and Sports Authority as "how a dynamic economy works and grows". Both companies also pay workers minimum wage, offer no benefits, and sell goods manufactured mostly offshore. This is the free market capitalism Romney, conservatives, and the GOP envision for America.

David P. Lewis
Long Beach

Ben points out the KB deal was done after Romney left Bain.

Bill Kristol doesn't understand how to fight the war he loves so much

Bill Kristol is good at finding new ways to be contemptible. It's bad that Marines in Afghanistan urinated on dead Taliban, he says, but you know what really makes him mad? The Obama Administration apologizing for it. 

So perhaps, as Rep. Allen West, once a battalion commander in Iraq, put it last week, all the sanctimonious Obama administration bigwigs “need to chill.” Did Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta really need to speak up at all? Couldn’t comment have been left to some junior public affairs officer at Camp Lejeune? And once he decided to weigh in, did Panetta need to condemn the Marines’ action as not just deplorable but “utterly deplorable”? Perhaps he felt a need to match Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who expressed not just dismay but “total dismay.”

Maybe, our current civilian leaders should spend a little less time posturing and a little more time supporting the troops who’ve been sent abroad to fight at the direction of their administration.

Kristol is congenitally unable to praise Democrats, and the overall piece veers dangerously close to being an apologia for corpse desecration. (Patton pissed in the Rhine, after all!) But what he seems not to understand is that the Obama Administration very vocally deplored the urination video because it's otherwise it's a huge victory for the Taliban.

Even Kristol's fellow warmonger Max Boot understands this:

The Marines are fighting not a total war but a counterinsurgency in which their goal is not only to militarily defeat the enemy but to win over the population. This could potentially make that job harder. 

The Marines often speak of the “strategic corporal”–the notion being that decisions made even by a lowly corporal can have high-level repercussions. This is a perfect example; indeed, one of the urinating Marines was a corporal.

The reason top-level administration figures weighed in was because the acts of a few stupid Marines was potentially devastating to the war's strategic aims, one of which is winning over the population. (Afghan President Hamid Karzai is also pretty good at loudly condemning U.S. errors in order to shore up his own position.) Contrition from senior, recognizable figures was required to minimize the damage.

Kristol, though, turns this incident into one of Obama not loving the troops enough. "He and his administration have a responsibility to err on the side of supporting our troops, rather than competing to chastise them sanctimoniously," Kristol writes. But if those troops commit an act that actively aids the enemy, what the hell else is there to do? Bill Kristol wants his war in Afghanistan. But maybe he just mostly wants to use it as a cudgel against Democrats. Because this column makes clear that he has no clue about—and maybe less interest in—achieving victory.

Gary Schmitt, the forever war, and the First Amendment

Let's gut the First Amendment forever! That's not precisely what Gary Schmitt says today in The Weekly Standard, but that about covers the gist of it:

Congress and the president should enact a statute that straightforwardly makes it illegal to publish or circulate materials that support, praise, or advocate terrorism as long as we are still formally at war with al Qaeda and its allies.

Schmitt says such a statute could be "narrowly drawn" so that we don't go back to the bad old days of seditious libel. Maybe. But we still don't know which circumstances would cause the United States Congress to end the "war" authorizations spelled out in the AUMF and various other laws. Given the way our leaders have interpreted that so far, it might be a crime to praise the Muslim Uighurs who have rebelled against the Chinese government, or the Chechnyan Muslims who have revolted against rule from Moscow. More likely it might be used to prosecute Americans who praise Hamas. And that's where we start to get into plausibly scary territory.

Generally speaking: We don't know that the "war" will ever end. Which means a statute that sunsets when the war does is basically a statute on the books forever. Wanna draw First Amendment considerations a little more narrowly? You may well have the power to do so. Just don't pretend it's a temporary state of affairs.

Those dead Iranian scientists

I've been struggling with what to think—and how to express my thoughts—about the wave of assassinations directed at Iranian nuclear scientists. I think that war is bad and killing is bad, but I'm not the complete pacifist I was in my Mennonite days—back, that is, when I thought God would make everything OK in the end, making it easier to accept certain evils and injustices on Earth. Perhaps it's the Mennonite poking through, but the assassinations strike me as ... unsavory. Yet, unlike Glenn Greenwald, I'm not prepared to quite condemn it either. This troubles me. I like my moral conundrums easily resolved.

I suspect we could live with a nuclear-armed Iranian state. I don't think the mullahs are suicidal. I think they—like the U.S. and the old Soviet Union—would use the threat of nuclear arms use to throw their weight around the region and the world. But: The more nuclear weapons there are in the world, the more countries that get their hands on them, the more opportunities there are for something to go disastrously, genocidally wrong.

So what's the death of a few scientists compared to an averted genocide?

Yet, something doesn't feel quite right about that to me either. I found myself rubbed wrong by Jonathan Tobin's praise of the assassinations yesterday. He wrote: "Anyone who believes Iran should be allowed to proceed toward the building of a nuclear bomb has either lost their moral compass or is so steeped in the belief that American and Israeli interests are inherently unjustified they have reversed the moral equation in this case. Rather than the alleged U.S. and Israeli covert operators being called terrorists, it is the Iranian scientists who are the criminals. They must be stopped before they kill."

Wait. The scientists are criminals? That doesn't strike me quite right, either. It's entirely possible they're patriots, with all the good and bad that implies. (And I've heard a few experts suggest that the end of theocracy in Iran wouldn't necessarily mean the end of the pursuit of nuclear weapons; it's kind of rational for a country to want to have the ultimate weapon to use in its defense.) Or it's entirely possible, authoritarianism being what it is, that the assassinated scientists simply didn't have much choice about their participation: Show a talent for math or physics, and voila! You're working on a planet-killer. Do we have evidence that these scientists are, well, mad scientists, bent on the world's destruction? I'm not sure we do. Ascribing criminality to those individuals—instead of the regime they serve—seems a way of making us feel better about the awful thing that has happened.

But as awful as that hypothetical genocide?

I don't have a good answer to this. There's the certainty of the awfulness now, weighed against the (again) hypothetical danger avoided. It's a guessing game, but one in which a few lives or many might be sacrificed.

Rod Dreher gets at it better than I can here:

To be sure, I’m against war with Iran, and the main reason I would never vote for Santorum is that he relishes the thought of war with Iran. However, I am by no means certain that it was wrong for the Israelis to have killed this scientist, given that they are in a state of de facto war with Iran, and that the Iranian leadership has publicly and repeatedly vowed to exterminate the Israelis. My point here is that even if the killing of the Iranian scientist is justified as self-defense, it is nothing to be called “wonderful.” A grim, tragic necessity? Perhaps. But “wonderful”? We must not allow ourselves to bless these things, much less glory in them, as Santorum has done.

That sounds close to right to me. One reason I'm pretty sure I'll never become a certain variety of conservative is because I have enough Mennonite left in me to disdain glorying in such things. But I've also got enough distance from that faith to suspect that sometimes bad things must be done. I feel remorse about the death of the scientists. And I hope that their deaths served the (apparent) intended purpose. I suspect they'll just be another trigger in an endless cycle of recrimination that might one day end up immersing us in the awful violence we seek to avoid. I'm not sure we'll ever know the right answer.

Mom? Dad? MOM!?!?!?

In fact, people over 60 are now the fastest-growing group contracting sexually transmitted diseases, according to government agency figures. Since 2002, syphilis has tripled in the over-65s in the UK, and HIV is up by 60%.

via guardian.co.uk

It really is getting worse

After adjusting for inflation, the typical male college graduate earned about 12 percent less in 2009 than his counterpart did in 1969. Sounds pretty bad, right?

The numbers are even worse for men without a bachelor’s:
 

Inflation-Adjusted Change in Median Earnings for American Men, 1969-2009
	Weekly Earnings, Full-time, Full-year Male Workers	Annual Earnings of All Male Workers	Annual Earnings of Male Population
Ages 25-64	-1%	-14%	-28%
Ages 30-50	-5	-16	-27
Less than High School	-38	-47	-66
High School	-26	-34	-47
Some College	-17	-24	-33
College Degree	-2	-7	-12
Married	-1	-2	-13
Not Married	-2	-14	-32

Source: Adam Looney and Michael Greenstone, Hamilton Project

As you can see from the last column in this table, the median man whose highest educational attainment was a high school diploma had his earnings fall by 47 percent in the last four decades.

via economix.blogs.nytimes.com