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Catch-22, alive and well

Monday, February 2, 2015

This article starts out hopefully, but there's a catch:

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A federal judge expressed skepticism Friday about the constitutionality of the government’s no-fly list, suggesting that those who find themselves on it should be allowed a meaningful opportunity to clear their names.

The lawsuit challenging the no-fly list, filed by Alexandria resident Gulet Mohamed, has been winding its way through federal court for four years, and US District Judge Anthony Trenga has consistently rejected government efforts to get the suit tossed out.

The government says that Mr. Mohamed may not have a hearing because at any such hearing it would be required to reveal state secrets in order to justify his placement on the list. To prevent such an outcome, he may be deprived of his right to travel without any due process whatsoever. This is far worse than the Through the Looking Glass situation to which I referred in a recent post; this time it's sentence first, no trial afterward. He is declared guilty at the unfettered discretion of the executive branch.

What is truly amazing here, is the number of constitutional provisions this “state secrets privilege” would appear to violate. In addition to the obvious due process problems, its use in this situation sounds suspiciously like a bill of attainder, except for the government doesn't even have to go to the trouble of passing a bill. It completely evades the checks and balances process that is supposedly the bedrock of our constitution, for it is the position of the executive that neither Congress nor the courts can second guess the executive's decision.

This is a legal doctrine that was born in fraud (despite the Circuit court's contortions to avoid admitting that fact) and has consistently been invoked to prevent the disclosure, not of state secrets, but of facts embarrassing to the state, or in the case of the no-fly list, the government's inability to actually prove it has a legitimate basis for its actions.

So as I said, there's a catch, and that would be Catch-22. (Is that masterpiece of a book still a rite of passage for any thinking college student? If not, it should be). Straight from Wikipedia, here's a quote that fits perfectly:

Other forms of Catch-22 are invoked throughout the novel to justify various bureaucratic actions. At one point, victims of harassment by military police quote the MPs' explanation of one of Catch-22's provisions: “Catch-22 states that agents enforcing Catch-22 need not prove that Catch-22 actually contains whatever provision the accused violator is accused of violating.” Another character explains: “Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing.”

The latter is the Catch-22 the government is invoking in the no fly case. The district court judge may try to stop it, but odds are good that the Circuit Court will step in and rule that “they have the right to do anything we can't stop them from doing”. Or is it, in this case, “we won't stop them from doing”. Either way, it's another brick in the wall.

Filed in Creeping Totalitarianism | | Comments (0)

Krugman hearts Obama

Monday, February 2, 2015

Back in 2008 Paul Krugman put off a lot of liberals by being rather cool toward Obama; it seemed pretty clear he preferred Hillary. Lately, however, he's been one of Obama's biggest cheerleaders. Consider today's column in which he lauds Obama for proposing a non austere budget:

On Monday, President Obama will call for a significant increase in spending, reversing the harsh cuts of the past few years. He won’t get all he’s asking for, but it’s a move in the right direction. And it also marks a welcome shift in the discourse. Maybe Washington is starting to get over its narrow-minded, irresponsible obsession with long-run problems and will finally take on the hard issue of short-run gratification instead
…
It goes without saying that Mr. Obama’s fiscal proposals, like everything he does, will be attacked by Republicans. He’s also, however, sure to face criticism from self-proclaimed centrists accusing him of irresponsibly abandoning the fight against long-term budget deficits.

So it’s important to understand who’s really irresponsible here. In today’s economic and political environment, long-termism is a cop-out, a dodge, a way to avoid sticking your neck out. And it’s refreshing to see signs that Mr. Obama is willing to break with the long-termers and focus on the here and now.

All well and good, but this “good” budget just puts one of Obama's major failings into stark relief. We tend to forget that when he was elected, had he and the Democrats played hardball, particularly with the budget (Can you say “reconciliation”? Republicans can.) he could have gotten almost anything he wanted. Now, maybe the Democrats would have wussed out on him (they do tend to do that), but we'll never know, because he spent the entire time he had large majorities in both houses Desperately Seeking Susan's vote, and Olympia's, as well as the votes of the other non-existent “moderate” Republicans.

He could likely have gotten better than he got back then; he will get nothing now, so his proposed budget is nothing more than a symbolic gesture that will do him and his party no good. It's one thing to come out for things people understand (e.g., free college tuition); it's another to embrace this or that economic theory that people don't understand. Had he passed a free-spending budget in 2009 he would have reaped rewards not because what he was doing sounded good, but because it would have worked; the economy would have done far better, and he could have (rightfully, in that case) claimed credit. As it was, the good that his insufficient stimulus (but he got Susan's vote!) did was like the pony in all that horseshit; it was there somewhere but it was awfully hard for anyone but an economist to find.

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Judge Posner Rules

Monday, February 2, 2015

A friend of mine sends out daily emails with links to interesting stories. A recent email sent me to this article, in which we find that Judge Richard Posner has ruled against the union of the Administrative Law Judges that decide Social Security Disability cases:

The Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that administrative law judges for the Social Security Administration can’t pursue a grievance against their agency.

As the National Law Journal (sub. req.) reported, Judge Richard Posner compared the ALJs to workers on “a poultry processing assembly line” in rejecting their claim that high caseloads interfere with their decisional independence.

The union for the ALJs, the Association of Administrative Law Judges, had sued SSA acting commissioner Carolyn Colvin in her official capacity over a policy setting a goal of 500 to 700 “legally sufficient judgments” per judge, per year. According to the opinion (PDF), the union contends that this is really a quota because judges are penalized for not meeting it.

Such a high caseload encourages judges to approve benefits, the union argued, because an approval can’t be appealed, and therefore the opinion doesn’t have to be “appeal proof,” as Posner phrased it. As a result, the union argued, judges are encouraged to find for applicants, and their independence is compromised.

Inasmuch as most of my legal practice consists of representing Social Security claimants, I find this interesting on a number of levels. Posner is, or at least was, considered a fairly conservative judge, but he's written a number of opinions raking ALJs over the coals for the absurd reasoning in which so many of them engage. He's written a number of opinions about boilerplate language that many of them used (and still use to some extent) when assessing a claimant's credibility. They are required to assess the claimant's credibility in every case. Naturally, in almost every case, the claimant is not to be believed, for reasons that would leave most rational people baffled. The offending boilerplate essentially consists of a statement that boils down to this: I don't believe the claimant's testimony about his or her level of functioning because the claimant's testimony was inconsistent with my ultimate decision in this case. It's a little like Alice in Wonderland, except instead of having the sentence first and the verdict afterward, it's verdict first, trial afterwards. Or, as Judge Posner would have it, circular reasoning. Posner's contempt for the intellectual laziness and obvious result oriented decision making (i.e., judges searching for a way to deny meritorious claims) pretty obviously slipped over into his decision; not so much that it colored the results, but that it led to the chicken killing analogy.

I don't know if Posner did, but he could have pointed out that the ALJ's argument doesn't seem to comport with the facts. If, in fact, the caseload of the ALJs is pressuring them to grant cases, it doesn't show up in the stats. Benefit awards have declined precipitously over the past few years. My own theory is that the decline in awards is a function of a couple of things: the 60 Minutes smear job that covered a few judges with high grant rates, but ignored the judges that deny almost everyone and the consequent pressure from the higher ups to redress the non-existent problem 60 minutes uncovered; and the retirement of reasonable judges and their replacement with judges recruited from within the system, who know what their superiors expect from them.

The judges don't write their own decisions; they have people for that. Of course, the judges can modify whatever the decision writers come up with, but some are too lazy to do much editing. Many of us suspect that when the decision writers disagree with the judge they put language in the decisions that almost guarantees a successful appeal. But often, they have no choice but to make the decisons self destroying, as it is often impossible to write a coherent denial when the evidence is massively against you. The sheer irrationality of some of the decisions is truly mind boggling. I won't bore with war stories, but I could.

So, this is one time I'm not siding with a union. The ALJs may be overworked, but it hasn't stopped them from denying meritorious claims, much less weak claims.

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Bush, still the worst

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

There is something satisfying about snow days. Your choices are limited by forces beyond your control, so sitting around the house doing nothing is perfectly justifiable. For some of us, of course, the guilt inculcated by years of Catholic education threatens to bubble to the surface, but after years of dealing with it, I've learned to keep a damper on it. So, in keeping with our governor's insistence that we not leave our houses physically, I'm not leaving the house metaphorically either, and this post, rather than being at all original, will merely revisit some thoughts I emitted years ago.

A friend on Facebook linked to this article, entitled: George W. Bush: Still the worst: A new study ranks Bush near the very bottom in history, due to delusional wars, reckless spending and inflexibility. It has been my oft expressed view on this blog that George W. Bush was, indeed, the worst president of all times, so of course I followed the link with every expectation that I would enjoy the article, for, as any Fox viewer can tell you, nothing is more satisfying than having one's views reinforced.

But, alas, I was disappointed. The article was penned by Robert Merry, who was Washington correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, a fact that should immediately start the warning bells clanging.

In fact, Merry ends up being agnostic about Bush's claim to being the cellar dweller in the Presidential standings. But that's not the problem with the piece. In many ways, Merry finds fault where there is very little and minimizes or misunderstands the truly horrible.

His analysis of the Iraq war, for instance, is hopelessly compromised by his own Beltway delusions. Consider this:

Hence, the rationale of necessity collapsed after the invasion, and Bush was diminished in much of public opinion for having crafted a rationale for war that was either disingenuous or carelessly flimsy (I believe the latter).

Even characterizing the mendacity that led us to war as “disingenuous” is far too charitable to Bush (and Merry won't even go that far), and Merry never even mentions the fact that Iraq is now controlled (to the extent it is controlled at all), by a government that is allied more with Iran than it is with us, something that war opponents predicted would happen at the outset, just as many were proclaiming that no weapons of mass destruction would be found.

Merry's criticisms of Bush on the economy are more wildly off the mark, as are the relatively high marks he gives him for managing the economy in his first term. Here's the criticism (I've got no time to discuss the faint praise of the first term):

It was during the second term that things fell apart. The folly of the Iraq war became increasingly clear, and Bush’s credibility plummeted. The war sapped federal resources and threw the nation’s budget into deficit. The president made no effort to inject any fiscal austerity into governmental operations, eschewing his primary weapon of budgetary discipline, the veto pen. His first budget director, Mitch Daniels (later Indiana governor), strongly urged a transfer of federal resources from domestic programs to the so-called War on Terror, much as Franklin Roosevelt directed such a transfer when he led the country into World War II. Bush rejected that counsel and allowed federal spending to flip out of control. The national debt, which was being steadily paid down under Clinton, shot back to ominous proportions. Meanwhile, economic growth rates began a steady decline, culminating in a negative growth rate in the 2008 campaign year.

Almost none of this is really true. Whether budget deficits were good things or bad things in the Bush years, it was not the Iraq war that led to them. It was the Bush tax cuts. More fundamentally, it is hard to make the case that “fiscal austerity” was called for during the Bush years, or that it would have done anything to prevent the bursting of the housing bubble, which was the actual cause of the depression that started in 2008. No, Bush was bad for a lot of reasons, but not because he didn't hold the line on spending. In any event, Merry's historical comparison to FDR and World War II doesn't withstand scrutiny. Sure, FDR shoved money into military spending during the war, but it is more fair to say that he did it by increasing, rather than shifting, spending. That increased spending drove up the deficit (remember war bonds?) thereby increasing demand, which dragged the nation out of the Depression. Had there been no war, and had FDR borrowed the same amount to fund highway construction or some other worthy endeavor, the effect on the economy would have been the same. It is a mystery why shifting spending to the “War on Terrorism” would have equaled “fiscal austerity”; it would simply mean we had shifted money from generally more useful programs to those that were generally more useless.

In my own opinion, Bush's claim to being the worst president rests on two basic arguments. First, he was a truly bad president who led us into an unnecessary and counter productive war; cursed us with a security state beyond anything dreamed of by his predecessors (his successor, I admit, has done nothing to dismantle it); bequeathed us a Supreme Court that has destroyed any hope that we can recover our democracy (see, e.g., Citizens United); exacerbated and encouraged divisiveness; ignored the environmental crisis we face; implemented policies designed to transfer wealth to the rich.. and the list goes on with my having only scratched the surface. The second factor is the simple fact that previous terrible presidents (see, e.g., the shame of my alma mater, Franklin Pierce, who I'll use as an example), were simply not in a position to do as much harm as Bush. Bush wreaked havoc on a global scale; Pierce was simply a weak President who stood by and did nothing while the nation marched toward a civil war that might well have been inevitable in any event. At that stage in our history, a peace time president's ability to affect events, even in this country, was limited. His ability to visit destruction on the rest of the world was non existent.

One irony of Bush's presidency was that he had an ability to get just about anything he wanted out of Congress. Not for him Obama's desperate search to get reasonable minds to compromise. He made demands and they were usually met. His problem was that he almost always demanded truly awful things.

In my own opinion, our current president is on his way to earning a C+; not great, certainly, because given the times, we really needed a guy (or gal) who could get an A or better, but it still compares favorably with Bush's rock solid F, which I would rate F minus, if that made any conceptual sense.

All of this leads me to one final thought. We really do need someone to do a history of Bush's presidency now, while the memory of that parade of horrors is still somewhat fresh. I sort of cheated on my list of his atrocities, because already, I realize I've forgotten so many of them. That book must be written; but not by Robert Merry.

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John Scott serves the people

Sunday, January 25, 2015

A while ago I wrote a post about an ethics complaint filed against our newly elected Republican state representative, John Scott. Here's the opening paragraph.

As I noted in a previous post, the Democratic down ticket didn't do too well in these parts. One of our new Republican legislators is John Scott. John's campaign consisted mainly of distortions of his opponent's record. On the issues, he mainly confined himself to a fierce and unaccommodating dedication to the interests of insurance agents everywhere, but especially those in Groton.

I also noted in passing that, coincidentally, John Scott is an insurance agent.

Now, I'm pleased to report that Scott is actively engaged in advancing the interests of his constituent. You can check out the bills he's sponsoring or cosponsoring here. But let me save you some trouble and time. Here's a sampling, selected by yours truly:

Proposed H.B. No. 5062: “To require that the sale of a qualified health plan offered through the Connecticut Health Insurance Exchange be transacted by an insurance producer.”

Proposed H.B. No. 5255: “To study the potential benefits of applying Medicaid funds to the cost of health insurance for college students who are eligible for Medicaid.”

Proposed H.B. No. 5354 :“ AN ACT PREVENTING STUDENTS OF INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER EDUCATION FROM OPTING OUT OF A STUDENT HEALTH CARE PLAN FOR PURPOSES OF QUALIFYING FOR MEDICAID.
To prevent an over reliance on Medicaid when an affordable health insurance alternative is available.”

Proposed H.B. No. 5497 : “AN ACT INCREASING THE MINIMUM FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY COVERAGE REQUIRED FOR PRIVATE PASSENGER MOTOR VEHICLES”

There appears to be a common thread here, but I'll leave it to the reader to figure that out.

Back in John's final days as a Democrat, he was fiercely opposed to Obamacare because he was afraid it would cut into the money he was making selling health care to college students. Looks like he's in a position now to make sure his fears were unfounded.

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Never give the exploited an even break

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

I didn't watch the State of the Union address last night, but not for any Obama related reason. Ever since Reagan introduced the “people in the audience” crap which every President since has felt duty bound to emulate, I've been sort of sickened at the prospect of watching what has become more and more a meaningless exercise. Not that it was ever truly that meaningful, but…to get to my actual point.

I understand that Obama is casting himself as the protector of the middle class, by proposing legislation that he knows will never pass. That's all well and good. I'm all for proposing stuff that won't pass if the point is to shape the discourse and get what you want in the long term. On the other hand, Obama is still president, and there's lots of things he can do right now to help both the middle class and the rapidly expanding nameless class, which I'll call proles. (Hint for those of you who grew up without Classic Comics: read your H.G. Wells) Unfortunately, far too often when Obama could do the proles a favor with the stroke of his own, or an underling's, pen, it just doesn't happen.

The latest case in point concerns the impending bankruptcy of the for-profit Corinthian College, brought on by a slew of lawsuits or threatened lawsuits accusing it (correctly) of defrauding its students. Obama has it in his power to forgive the student loans these kids were duped into taking on to pay for the education they never really got. But these are not bankers, so apparently there will be no bailout for them. You can read the full story here. This sort of thing makes the Administration's claim to be the advocate for the bottom 99% ring just a bit hollow.

There are signs of hope, however. The Obama Administration may not be interested in helping these kids, but the progressives in the Senate have spoken out:

A group of Senate Democrats has urged the Obama administration to forgive debts incurred by thousands of current and former students at troubled for-profit schools owned by Corinthian Colleges Inc.

Thirteen Senate Democrats, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.), demanded in a stinging letter on Tuesday that Education Secretary Arne Duncan “immediately” forgive federal student loans taken out by students at Corinthian-owned schools, such as Everest, WyoTech and Heald.

The lawmakers argued that because federal and state authorities have accused the company of duping students into taking out loans by advertising false job placement rates, and federal law enables borrowers to have their loans discharged if their schools misled them into taking out federal student loans, current and former students shouldn’t be forced to repay those debts.

via The Huffington Post

The $600 million this would cost the government (assuming it could not recover anything from the banks and hedge funds behind Corinthian) sounds like a lot of money to you and me, but it's actually less than peanuts to the federal government. Besides, forgiving that debt would operate as a sort of mini-stimulus; the money those defrauded students don't pay to the government would be spent elsewhere.

This sort of issue will undoubtedly recur. It would be easy enough to stop it from happening in the future. These for-profit schools were designed for one thing only: to suck at the federal student loan teat. All we need do is restrict student loans to students attending non-profit colleges. Better yet, make state colleges and universities free, as Obama has timidly proposed doing for community colleges. But, in the meantime, it's time to give the proles a break, and Obama should jump at the chance to do so.

Filed in Corporate Crime, Inequality | | Comments (0)

Blinded in the Beltway

Monday, January 19, 2015

I like Richard Blumenthal, but like all politicians (like all people for that matter he's not perfect. Minor mistakes can be forgiven. It is nonetheless distressing to see him buy into an argument that only denizens of the Beltway could swallow. He is co-sponsoring a bill that would allow yet more H1-B workers into the country.

In what detractors are calling a “wrong turn” in U.S. policy that could lead to outsourcing more American technology jobs, Democratic U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut has signed on as co-sponsor of a bipartisan immigration bill that eventually could more than double the number of guestworkers currently allowed into the country on controversial H-1B visas.

Blumenthal, in a phone interview, defended his co-sponsorship of the bill, saying it gives him a better vantage point from which to negotiate comprehensive immigration reform – including stronger safeguards to ensure that enforcement of guestworker laws are beefed up so companies that engage in H-1B visa abuses are punished. He also said the bill includes a provision to improve science, technology, math and engineering education in the United States to ensure that more American workers with technology skills are available to hire in the future.

via The New London Day

Blumenthal goes on to defend his position on other grounds:

Blumenthal said he is concerned about past abuses of the visa program. But his approach is to try to expand the visa numbers – because so many companies in Connecticut, large and small, have approached him complaining they cannot find skilled workers – while at the same time improving and reforming the program.

Isn't it amazing that some of the poorest countries in the world, such as India, are able to supply high skilled workers that just can't be found in the U.S.A. Here's what's really happening. It's not that these companies can't find highly skilled people; they just don't want to pay them. As Dean Baker has pointed out endlessly in his blog, when there is a shortage of something, the price of that something should go up. It's called supply and demand. If the supply of skilled workers were down, their price should go up. It hasn't. Also, in the olden days, if an employer needed people to perform a specific function, the employer would train willing workers to perform that function. Nowadays they prefer to import tractable peons from overseas.

This is a bit of a hobby horse of mine. Years ago I wrote about the fact that The Hartford decided that my sister and her co-workers were no longer skilled enough and/or were unwilling to perform their jobs. It therefore hired H1-B workers from India to replace them, which they did, once the unskilled Americans whose jobs they were taking trained them. Similarly, the quoted article notes a more recent event here in my backyard:

But opponents of H1-B visa increases, citing alleged abuses in the past including the systematic outsourcing of much of Pfizer Inc.'s information technology workforce in Groton starting seven years ago, said the current bill does little to protect U.S. workers.

Also, there's this, which is basically what I said above:

“The primary, practical function of the H-1B program is to outsource American high-tech jobs,” Harrison said in a statement. “Do the bill's supporters really think that's the direction American immigration policy should go?”

H-1B critic Hira, in testimony to Congress two years ago, covered the litany of complaints about the program, including a charge that the majority of foreign workers using the visa were being hired as “cheap indentured workers”; that American workers were not being given the first shot at employment before H-1Bs were hired; that American workers with similar or superior skills were being replaced by H1-Bs to save money, and that oversight of the program “is nearly nonexistent.”

It seems to me that before passing any bill, a legislator ought to consider how he or she would game it, if it were in his or her interest to do so. In the case of H-1B, we don't need to do that, as it is being gamed before our very eyes. You can talk all you want about rooting out abuses. That's not going to happen. The net effect of this bill would just double the number of abuses.

Filed in Democrats, Economics, Inequality | | Comments (0)

Bad Moon Rising

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Pam Martens, at Wall Street on Parade, reviews the evidence for a worldwide deflationary spiral:

Collapsing yields, collapsing commodity prices are the result of distorted income dispersal, otherwise known as income inequality.

Last August, researchers at the Federal Reserve released a study showing the fragility of the U.S. consumer. The Fed’s Division of Consumer and Community Affairs found that 52 percent of Americans would not be able to raise $400 in an emergency from their checking account, savings or borrowing on a credit card that they would be able to pay off when the next statement arrived.

There is a delicate equilibrium of income distribution that sustains growing economies. When income distribution becomes insanely skewed to the top 10 percent, deflation is the inevitable outcome.

To express it another way, when workers are stripped of an adequate share of the profits of their productive labors on behalf of the corporation, they can’t consume an adequate amount of the corporate output. Supply gluts develop and deflation follows.

I have read similar analyses elsewhere, which leads me to believe that the current economic good news may be transient; we are reaping, perhaps, the benefits of lower oil prices, while we have not yet experienced the bad effects of the conditions that led to that price decline.

Income inequality, sooner or later, will come back to at least nip the hand that fed it.

Someone, though apparently it's not clear who, once said that god takes care of fools, children, drunkards and the United States of America. I'm afraid that god may very well be off his game as we look ahead, if we are indeed heading toward yet another economic downturn. Timing was fairly good the last time around; the people responsible for the Great Depression were in power when it occurred, and they were replaced by the right people as soon as the country had a chance to do so. But we mustn't fool ourselves into thinking that it was a result of rational thought on the part of the voters. Hoover was in when it happened; he promised more of the same; so people voted for Roosevelt. It just so happened that the non-existent god, in his wisdom, lined things up just right. The people who got the blame deserved it, but that was largely fortuitous.

Fast forwards to 2016, the year everyone on our side thinks will be a walk away win for us. Assume, for the moment, that the economy is in free fall. Who you gonna blame? It won't matter that it is Republican policies (and, to be honest, Democratic craveness) that have gotten us where we are, nor will it matter that they will run on the promise of giving us more of what got us into trouble in the first place. They will be pointing the finger at Obama and the Democrats, and they will win, even if they nominate a crazy person, which they likely will. All three branches of government will be controlled by people who are, to be as charitable as I can be, close to certifiably insane.

Now, there is always a silver lining. It won't take long for people to realize that the Republicans only made a bad situation worse, despite the efforts of the beltway propaganda machine to cover for them. 2018 might be a good year for us, if the Republicans don't change the laws and prevent us from voting, and 2020 might be even better. We might even be in a position to gerrymander ourselves into a Congressional majority. But by then it really might be too late. They'll be able to do a lot of damage in four years, and it could be irreperable. So, here's hoping Ms. Martens is wrong about the coming crash, but don't count on it. God has been distracted by a bunch of fools, children and drunkards, and his attention has strayed from the USA.

Filed in Dysfunction, Economics | | Comments (0)

Some lexical pushback

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Yesterday I bemoaned the tendency of the Left to allow the right to frame the terms of debate, including allowing them to abrogate warm and fuzzy words like “reform” and “pro-life” to describe themselves or their policies. Well, lo and behold, today in my in-box I got something from a group that isn't going to take it anymore.

The email below is from Dr. Mark Boslough, a physicist, climate change researcher, and Fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

Dear John,

Bill Nye and many other skeptical scientists (including me) have an important message: Climate science deniers are not skeptics.

Last month a group of 48 of us published an open letter because some members of the media are still misleading the public by wrongly using the term “skeptic.” The New York Times, for example, recently called Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) a skeptic — even though he believes in the absurd notion that climate change is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated.”

As scientists, we practice and promote scientific skepticism. As Fellows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, we encourage informed citizens to do the same. But those who reject the facts on climate change are not skeptics — they’re deniers.

We are insisting that journalists report truthfully on climate change and those who deny the science behind it. Can you add your name to support our letter?

Sign your name to tell the media: Stop referring to climate science deniers as “skeptics.”

Truth in climate reporting is already catching on among some news outlets. Recently, NPR and CBS both resisted using the term “skeptic” when it did not apply, and replaced it with the word “denier.” Now, we in the scientific community are asking other major publishers and broadcasters to do the same — and with strong, widespread public support, we can raise the bar for factual accuracy in climate reporting.

It’s time for our media to recognize climate science deniers for what they are.

Please sign on to support the letter from myself, Bill Nye, and other members of the scientific and skeptical community.

Sincerely,

Mark

Well, it was nice of Mark to write. In light of what I wrote yesterday I really had no choice but to sign the petition. In this one instance it might not do much good, but if the left loudly and persistently fought back against the right's Humpty Dumptyism, it would sink in sooner or later. We have to do to the press what the right did to it over the course of the past 50 years- insistently accuse it of conservative bias-not just Fox, but virtually all of the Beltway centric media.

By the way, if you want to sign the petition, I believe you should be able to do so by following this link.

Filed in Language, Media | | Comments (0)

Lessons from Webster’s and Humpty Dumpty

Monday, January 12, 2015

Today I stumbled upon this article in the Progressive by Connecticut's own Jonathan Pelto, detailing the way in which the proponents of public school privatization are buying political influence. Now, Jonathan is not particularly popular with some of the elected politicians I know, but despite his sometimes abrasive way of writing, I like him because he's about 95% right, which puts him only slightly behind me. There is a vast right wing conspiracy out to destroy the public school system; hand our tax money over to the plutocrats; disempower teachers thereby driving the good ones out of the profession; and eventually restrict decent real education to the rich, while doling out job training to the rest of us. Unfortunately, there are plenty on the nominal left that have joined the right in this push; one of whom is our otherwise fairly good governor. Jonathan's article is well worth reading.

But I come not to praise Pelto, but to pick a nit. Jonathan's article contains some good examples of the left's tendency to ignore or buy in to the manipulation of language by the right. Here's an excerpt from Pelto's piece:

Raimondo, who as Rhode Island’s state treasurer won national acclaim from conservatives for successfully dismantling the state employee pension fund, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from donors associated with funding the education reform movement and profiting from the charter school industry. Her running mate, Cumberland mayor Daniel McKee, one of the state’s most vocal supporters of charter schools, was elected lieutenant governor with help from many of the same donors.

Now, Pelto doesn't exactly play softball when writing about these people, but he does something the right would never do: buy in,-if not entirely, far enough- into their own characterization of their “reform movement”. The right is always eager to call what it does “reform”, because the word has a positive connotation. While one might argue that the term is value neutral, it doesn't resonate that way, and in fact, isn't even defined that way. Here are the first several definitions from Webster's unabridged:

1 obsolete : RESTORE, RENEW
2 a) : to restore to a former good state : bring from bad to good
b) : to amend or improve by change of form or by removal of faults or abuses
c) : to put or change into a new and improved form or condition
3 : to put an end to (an evil) by enforcing or introducing a better method or course of action or behavior<~ the abuses of political patronage>
4 : to induce or cause to abandon an evil manner of living and follow a good one : change from worse to better<~ a drunkard>

People on the right may call themselves “reformers”, and they may call their attempts to divert our taxes into their own pockets “reform”, but that doesn't make it so, and we should avoid using the term to describe them. Even while criticizing, we legitimate them when we allow them to pick the words by which they will be described. We seem to be amazingly blind to the emotional power of language, so we constantly cede the linguistic high ground to the forces of darkness. Education reform? Why not call them the public school destruction industry, or something similar. If a reader is already on Pelto's side, his use of the term “reform” won't matter, but it may very well make it harder to persuade the undecided or the “low information” reader who might be puzzled at the fact that Mr. Pelto is against “reform”. Who knows how much harm has been done to the cause of abortion rights by the fact that people who believe in abortion rights have allowed the right to get away with calling itself “pro-life”. We seem to be Alices while the right is Humpty Dumpty to the core:

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

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