“If we lack purchasing power, we lack everything…. There is just one thing to do: Take incomes from where they are and place them where we need them.”

Tugwell was one of FDR’s “brain trust”; he was speaking of the depression of the 1930s, but he could have been speaking about today.

Quoted in William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, p451. Manchester adds, “To save the country by saving the banks, he [Tugwell] added, was like trying to revive a dying tree ‘by applying fertilizer to its branches instead of to its roots.’”

“We so soon become used to the thought of want . . . that an evil which grows greater to the sufferer the longer it lasts becomes less to the observer by the very fact of its duration.”

Quoted in Henry George, Progress and Poverty.

A strange choice of words.

Allen, if you’re reading this, here’s a guide to how conservatives like you refer to liberals, depending on when you’re doing it:

Until 1917: Anarchists

1917-1925 or so: Bolsheviks

1926-1932: Anarchists

1933-1945: Dictators

1945-1989: Communists

1990-2000: Liberals, but said with a smug, vicious sneer, like you’re saying “pedophiles.”

2001-present: Terrorists.

Seriously, Allen, what’s so hard about that? Did you not get an eleven-year-old memo?

Get it right next time, please.

From the article:

The boycott targets Elsevier, the publisher of popular journals like Cell and The Lancet,  for its aggressive business practices, but opposition was electrified by Elsevier’s backing of a Congressional bill titled the Research Works Act (RWA). Though lesser known than the other high-profile, privacy-related bills SOPA and PIPA, the act was slated to reverse the Open Access Policy enacted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2008 that granted the public free access to any article derived from NIH-funded research. Now, only a month after SOPA and PIPA were defeated thanks to the wave of online protests, the boycotting researchers can chalk up their first win: Elsevier has withdrawn its support of the RWA, although the company downplayed the role of the boycott in its decision, and the oversight committee killed it right away..

In another life I’m a medical writer, and while some medical journals provide all or some of their articles for free, others only make them available to subscribers, or charge ridiculous amounts for every article. And yes, Elsevier is the big villain here–when you see the Elsevier logo, you know that you’re not getting access to anything except the abstract.

Well, you might say, so what? Elsevier is a business; one couldn’t demand that Time or the New Yorker provide content for free (although in real life they do), so why demand it of Elsevier or other science publishers? If the New Yorker decided to charge thirty bucks for 24 hours of access to a single article, who would we be to say that it shouldn’t?

The answer, obviously, is that Time and the New Yorker pay for their content. In science, researchers provide their research for free, and reviewers review for free.

Yes, journals do editorial work (although less than they used to in my experience grumble grumble), and yes, science journals still print hard copies. But on the other hand, they also make money from ads. And, these articles can literally mean the difference between life and death. And these days, without science journals scientists would still find ways to get their results out (in fact, they are doing that very thing now, hence the possibility of a boycott).

So really, although science journals once served a function, now they simply sit between creators and consumers of their product, paying the creators nothing and charging monopoly prices from their consumers. (Sort of like the music companies, come to think of it.)

So here’s hoping that the boycott continues, and that scientific content, at least, becomes free.

I’ll take the liberty of reprinting it, for those who don’t want to click on the link. It’s copyright etc. the Smithsonian magazine.

The Club of Rome was, notably, not Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb at around the same time. Ehrlich said that the world was already in a crisis of scarcity brought on by population growth. He famously lost a bet to one Julian Simon, who believed the opposite–that more humans meant more chickens, not fewer, and that we would see abundance in the future, not scarcity. (Ehrlich bet on the prices of commodities going up, Simon bet they would go down; by the 1980s, they had gone down.)

Ehrlich’s lost bet became famous, and was used to discredit everyone who said, hey, maybe resources aren’t unlimited.

Which is a shame (using the definition of “a shame” that means “something that may very well kill most of us”). Unlike Ehrlich, the Club of Rome argued that, although growth could continue for some time longer, we would hit limits in the near-to-medium future. They predicted, among other things, an economic collapse followed by population decline in 2030.

As of 2000, as the link above shows, we were not exactly on schedule, but close.

I’m not sure why the chart in the link isn’t brought forward to 2010; the data must exist now.

EDIT: The data are old, it turns out, because the analysis is several years old. I violated my own principle of always going back to primary sources before giving an opinion.

Also, the Club of Rome gave several predictions based on different assumptions. The scenario that’s played out so far has been the “business as usual” scenario. As opposed to, say, the “everybody becomes sane and actually starts to deal with these problems” scenario, which must have seemed at least achievable in the 1970s.

Finally, this is testable: If the model is correct, we should be looking at a decline in industrial output within a few years, followed by a decline in global food per capita soon after.

“If all Americans want is security, they can go to prison.”

Quoted in William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, page 745

He said that in the 1950s; he no doubt didn’t mean it to be a prediction.

Let’s start with the objection to mandates. Paul Krugman gives the counterarguments here. To quote:

Is requiring that people pay a tax that finances health coverage OK, while requiring that they purchase insurance is unconstitutional? It’s hard to see why — and it’s not just those of us without legal training who find the distinction strange. Here’s what Charles Fried — who was Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general — said in a recent interview with The Washington Post: “I’ve never understood why regulating by making people go buy something is somehow more intrusive than regulating by making them pay taxes and then giving it to them.”

I would only add that while the government can directly compel us to buy things, it generally doesn’t, for a very good reason: It’s irritating. And that irritation–our dislike of being told what to buy, an intrusion that is softened if we simply pay taxes and get the thing instead–is the control on government power here. That is, we’ll only put up with such obvious intrusion in certain special cases.

In fact, one might expect conservatives to argue that every government program should be mandated like this, in order to make the government intrusion clearer and more irritating. And in fact, the idea for mandates came from the neanderthal-right Heritage Foundation. And replacing Social Security with private accounts? The darling idea of conservatives everywhere? Yup, that would involve mandates.

So the argument against mandates comes down, not to any principle it violates, but to the fact that it’s Obama who wants them.

But that’s not the craziest part.

The Supreme Court–or those appointed by presidents named Bush or Reagan–seems to be actually listening, seriously, to another argument. Marty Lederman on Balkinization explains it clearly. To paraphrase:

• Way back when, Congress made Medicaid money available to the states, with conditions on how it be spent (i.e., they had to spend it on something resembling Medicaid, not on hookers and blow).
• States could refuse the terms by refusing the money. This is not federal coercion in any possible sense of the word.
• The current law will, in 2014, provide more money, with new conditions for that money.
• The money is provided all together–states can turn it all down, but not just the new money.
• The states with Republican attorneys general are saying that this is unacceptable coercion–they want (or say they want) to turn down the new money without losing the existing money.

But what if Congress had simply:

1. Cut off Medicaid funding in 2014,
2. Immediately instituted a new program, with more funding, that covered the same bases and more,
3. Allowed states to opt out of the new program if they chose (I say “allowed” just to stress the point–in fact states have a clear and unchallenged right to opt out)
4. Called the new program Medicaid in order to save on letterhead?

That would be exactly the same thing.

Given that steps 2, 3, and 4 are clearly constitutional, the state AGs are arguing that step 1 is unconstitutional coercion.

Which means saying, essentially, that Congress cannot ever stop funding something once the states have gotten used to the money.

This is so far from sane law, common sense, and even conservative ideology that I’m wondering whether the state AGs deliberately made pathetically weak arguments. That would make sense: any state AG who said, “hey, this program means a lot of money for our state and we shouldn’t fight it” would have no career in the Republican party, but that doesn’t mean that, as individuals, they actually want to fuck over their own states. They may have figured that the Supreme Court would reject their arguments. Their careers are intact, their states get that sweet federal money, everyone wins.

But if that was the plan, the joke is on them: many justices are treating their funhouse arguments as grave and sensible.

And why should we be surprised? This is the court that decided, in Bush v Gore, that George W. Bush should be president and fuck you. Of the five justices who gave us that travesty, three are still on the court. The two who left were replaced with worse ones.

The sad thing is, it’s 2012. The health care bill passed two freaking years ago, but the best parts–the parts that actually insure most of the uninsured–still haven’t gone into effect and won’t until 2014. And some will take longer than that. If they had gone into effect–if more people saw the benefits in their own lives–fighting it would be political poison. (The state AGs aren’t fighting the existing program, because the existing money is popular. It’s the program that we haven’t seen that they can fight, for the exact reason that we haven’t seen it.) The right wing has had years of opportunities to kill decent healthcare before it’s born because it has taken such a ridiculous time to *be* born.

I can’t help but quote my own post from 2009:

It’s not that fixing a health insurance plan really takes that long—nine years (2009-2018) was enough time to create a military from scratch, fight World War II, dismantle the military, and rebuild it for the Korean War. Back in the thirties, nine years was enough time to create important programs like the Works Progress Administration, the Public Works Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps, have them do their work, and dismantle them.

On the other hand, the long delay gives the forces against reform time to undermine it, and an entire freaking presidential election campaign to replace pro-reform politicians with ones more amenable to their interests. One doesn’t have to be paranoid to think that maybe this is the point.

I didn’t think of the legal aspect at the time. More fool me.

The privatizers squawk that USPS has gone some $13 billion in the hole during the past four years — a private corporation would go broke with that record! (Actually, private corporations tend to go to Washington rather than go broke, getting taxpayer bailouts to cover their losses.) The Postal Service is NOT broke. Indeed, in those four years of loudly deplored “losses,” the service actually produced a $700 million operational profit (despite the worst economy since the Great Depression).

What’s going on here? Right-wing sabotage of USPS financing, that’s what.

In 2006, the Bush White House and Congress whacked the post office with the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act — an incredible piece of ugliness requiring the agency to PRE-PAY the health care benefits not only of current employees, but also of all employees who’ll retire during the next 75 years. Yes, that includes employees who’re not yet born!

No other agency and no corporation has to do this. Worse, this ridiculous law demands that USPS fully fund this seven-decade burden by 2016. Imagine the shrieks of outrage if Congress tried to slap FedEx or other private firms with such an onerous requirement.

This politically motivated mandate is costing the Postal Service $5.5 billion a year — money taken right out of postage revenue that could be going to services. That’s the real source of the “financial crisis” squeezing America’s post offices.

I would only add a couple of things:

1. I pay ten cents to send a freaking text message. The recipient, depending on the plan, might also pay ten cents. So, the “magic of the market” charges more to send three text messages than stodgy old government does to carry an actual physical letter across the country.
2. We love to complain about the Post Office, but in my experience it’s more reliable than Fedex. That guy who threw the (clearly marked) TV over the fence, rather than open the gate or ring the bell? He didn’t work for the government–he worked for dynamic private industry.
3. In my experience, the Post Office is *far* more reliable than UPS, which has the “hey, we lost your package and we don’t give a shit and there’s nothing you can do” attitude that, if the econ texts were correct, would only be seen in socialism.
4. I don’t think conservatives in Congress want to kill the Post Office because it’s failing. Failing public programs don’t challenge their worldview. I think they want to kill it (and are killing it) because it’s succeeding–because it’s a daily reminder that their entire ideology doesn’t pass the smell test.

So I guess I disagree with this, from the article:

The corporatizer crowd doesn’t grasp that going after this particular government program is messing with the human connection and genuine affection that it engenders.

I think they understand that very well indeed.

“They call that man a statesman whose ear is tuned to catch the slightest pulsations of a pocketbook, and denounce as a demagogue any one who dares to listen to the heartbeat of humanity.”

Quoted in Jason Goodwin, Greenback, page 275 of the hardcover edition.

Who is Jim Yong Kim? Apparently he’s a physician and an expert on health, which might be good to have at the head of an institution whose mission is to actually do good instead of just make a profit.

But he could be a bag of rocks and I’d be happy, because he’s not Larry Summers, who was rumored to be one of the top candidates. The same Larry Summers whose policies boiled down to taking care of Wall Street. The guy who’s a large part of the reason we’re in the mess we’re in today.

For that matter, he’s not Jeffrey Sachs, another frontrunner. There’s more to like about Sachs than about Summers, but Sachs was a big advocate for “shock therapy” after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The shock therapy that turned out to be all shock and no therapy, that devastated Russia’s economy and wound up ending its democracy.

This is maybe the first time that one of Obama’s big economic appointments went outside the circle of usual suspects. Maybe he’s starting to question his own decision to listen to the Summerses, Sachses, Bernankes, and Geithners of the world. Which is all to the good. After all, they had their chance. They blew it. They should get off the stage and give someone else–anyone else–a shot. I wish Obama had realized that three years ago, but if he’s realizing it now, heck, that’s better than nothing.