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A horrible, very bad idea

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Smoking would be prohibited in public housing homes nationwide under a proposed federal rule announced on Thursday, a move that would affect nearly one million households and open the latest front in the long-running campaign to curb unwanted exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke.

via The New York Times

I am second to no one in my loathing of tobacco smoke. I vividly remember trying to hold my breath as my mother filled our car with smoke, and I remember too, since almost every adult smoked in those bygone days, all of us kids leaving wedding receptions for the outdoors so we could breathe. I count it as one of our nation’s great accomplishments that we have banished the smoker from our restaurants and other public places.

But, this truly is a terrible, horrible idea.

I happen to represent a public housing authority, so it would be my client’s, and by extension my, sad duty to enforce such a ban. Smoking is an addiction, foisted on many by the tobacco companies that are no better than pushers. It afflicts the poor in disproportionate numbers, so it is statistically the case that a greater proportion of housing authority tenants will be victims of this legal, addictive drug, than in the general population.

There is only one sanction open to the housing authority if a tenant ignores the rules and continues to smoke, and that is eviction. The policy of our housing authority is to avoid eviction whenever possible. If a person is behind in his or her rent, we have a standard repayment policy, allowing for repayment, under a court stipulation, over the period of a year. Miss a payment and you risk losing your house, but most people don’t miss a payment.

If this policy goes into effect, we will have two options: ignore it, or enforce it. If we enforce it, we must enforce it in an even handed manner. One of the reasons we stick to our standard repayment agreement is that it helps us avoid any claim of discrimination. No matter your gender, religion, color or sexual orientation, if you are behind in your rent, you will be offered a one year repayment plan. Take it or leave it. Pretty much everyone takes it.

By the way, not enforcing is not really an option. When people live close together, neighborly feuds tend to develop, and it’s certain as night follows day that some Hatfield will demand enforcement against the McCoy next door.

So, what do we do about smoking? It is highly unlikely that most smokers will be able to simply stop because we impose a rule on them. Once we get them to court we could put them on a sort of probation, but the likelihood is extreme that they’ll fail that. It is an addiction, after all, and a powerful one. So, ultimately, they’ll lose their homes, and to what end? Perhaps the smoke in my next door neighbor’s apartment poses some slight health risk to me, but is it really good policy to inflict homelessness on people because they are addicted to tobacco? Moreover, this is a policy that operates primarily on the poor, and a like policy would never be imposed on the middle class, much less the privileged rich.

It would be bad public policy to outlaw smoking altogether. We need only look a the devastating effects of the “war on drugs” to prove that. But at least outlawing tobacco altogether would be non-discriminatory. Sometimes the best plan is to do nothing.

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Big Numbers

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

As most of us know when we think about it, a million dollars isn’t what it used to be. Not that I would mind having a million or so, but nonetheless..

People have trouble with big numbers. It’s likely an individual thing, but for almost everyone there’s a large number that is emotionally indistinguishable from much larger numbers. This makes it easy for people to be misled into thinking that something is far more important than it truly is. Dean Baker has commented on this frequently, pointing out that more salient information is passed on when numbers are put in context, usually by expressing them as percentages of a whole. The New York Times actually promised to change it’s ways, but it never did.

Which brings us to the subject of today’s post: the fact that the Obama Administration recently gave a $102 million dollar hand slap to Goldman Sachs owned Education Management Corporation, a for profit “education” company. Like the other “educational” for-profits, EDM’s business plan is built upon fraud.

It recently agreed to pay the aforesaid $102 million to settle a fraud claim brought by the Justice Department. The Department loudly trumpeted its great work, and the press for the most part covered it as a triumph of good over evil. But, in fact, the penalty was a fairly tiny fraction of the billions EDM has gained by fleecing taxpayers and students:

If you read that the DOJ required a loan-forgiveness program from Education Management Corporation, you might think that the Obama administration is seriously cracking down on for-profit education companies. However, the pool of students who will share in “the $102.8 million loan forgiveness program” is so restrictive that Education Management will not be held liable for the plundering of federal and personal loans totaling in the billions of dollars over the past few years. In short, the corporation has profited from its fraud, just as Wall Street financial firms – as BuzzFlash has frequently documented – have engaged in deceitful practices that resulted in profits exceeding government fines.

In fact, the overlap between Wall Street and for-profit firms is actually transparent, since the revenue-seeking firms in question are generally traded on stock exchanges. Furthermore, as The New York Times report points out: 

In resolving the federal and state complaints, Education Management, which is owned partly by Goldman Sachs, did not acknowledge wrongdoing. Doing so would have meant that individual students would have had potential grounds to discharge their loans taken out to attend the colleges, potentially costing hundreds of millions [actually billions] of dollars.

Here, then, is a model of how Washington enables fraudulent financial and for-profit educational activity – and how they overlap. Education Management, in which Goldman Sachs has an investment, is allowed to continue to operate, with a lot of its revenue ill-gotten – most of which represents federal loans to students – largely intact. 

via Truthout

When you or I break the law, say by stealing a few billion dollars, odds are we’ll go to jail. When banks and corporations break the law, they pay a fine that is piddling in relation to the amount of the profit they’ve made by doing so, and some of the payments they make can be tax deductible. It’s a cost of doing business and often just a tiny part. Yet because the amounts sound so very big, many of us can be convinced that the government has really meted out a punishment. We wouldn’t be similarly snookered if we read in a newspaper that someone stole a thousand dollars and was fined a dollar for doing so.

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Lindsey won’t be silenced, more’s the pity

Thursday, November 12, 2015

There are times when I feel like beating dead horses, mostly because there are very few live horses left to beat. So, let us return to a recurring theme: media “balance”.

If future historians ever spend time watching old television news shows, they will surely wonder why so much TV time was devoted to getting the opinions of John McCain and Lindsey Graham, two mediocre men who have, at least to this point, had almost zero effect on what has happened in this country and this world, and who are chiefly remarkable for having been proven wrong about almost every assertion they have ever made.

Now cometh Chuck Todd to tell us that though Lindsey Graham cannot muster enough support from the lunatic fringe to even make it to the JV debate, he “will not be silenced” because Chuck Todd is going to give him yet more airtime to demonstrate why even Republicans find him wanting. He is going to discuss “his strategy going forward”. If Chuck were around in 1876 he’d probably have interviewed Custer on the same subject. Might I suggest that Graham’s best strategy would be to gracefully exit the race, or perhaps gracelessly exit the race by saying he didn’t make the cut because though he is clearly as incompetent as the competition, he is not as clinically insane as the rest of the field.

But I haven’t made my point about balance.

Did you know there is a person running (I think he’s still running) for the Democratic nomination whose support is as wide and deep as Graham’s? His name is Lawrence Lessig. He’s a Harvard professor who is drawing about the same percentage of support as is Graham. Lessig does differ from Graham in one crucial respect: he is not always wrong about everything. Now that’s unfair to Lessig, it’s more fair to say that he is similar to Graham in only one respect: he has no chance of getting his party’s nomination and everyone knows it, including him.

Amazingly, despite Lessig’s snowball chance of getting the Democratic nomination, he is not a regular on the Sunday talk shows. In fact, he is pretty much ignored by the media. Now, I’m not suggesting the media should do anything but ignore him; I’m merely suggesting that as between the two people under discussion, he is actually the superior individual, so if the media (and remember, we’re not talking about Fox here, Todd works for a network that some sane people watch) is going to subject us to Lindsey Graham’s strategizing about his hopeless cause, shouldn’t we be hearing about Lessig’s strategy too? I would submit that at least Lessig would have something different to say; something Todd’s viewers have not heard a zillion times before. What is it that the beltway bozos see in people like Graham, and why is it that they seem congenitally unable to appreciate the fact that the rest of the country doesn’t see whatever they see.

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He’s Number One

Sunday, November 8, 2015

Hands down, the worst president ever.

Yet, we have 15 potential presidents, all of whom could give him a run for his money, and one of whom will of necessity be nominated. 

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How is a Bill O’Reilly like a stopped clock?

Sunday, November 8, 2015

Answer: not at all. O’Reilly is only right once a year.

But that rare event may have happened recently.

George Will is in a kerfuffle because in “his” latest book, O’Reilly claims that Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s disease was affecting him during his presidency to such an extent that his advisers were thinking of invoking the 25th Amendment to replace him.

Now, far be it from me to claim that O’Reilly’s latest is anything but fiction (or actually written by him, for that matter), and I have no reason to believe that O’Reilly’s theory that Hinckley’s bullet accelerated the process of the disease has any validity. But the core claim, that Reagan was losing it during his presidency, is, in the humble opinion of this leftist for whom O’Reilly is now carrying water, more likely than not to be true.

I remember watching Reagan’s very early press conferences, and being amazed at how out of it he was. During one of his debates with Mondale, he clearly lost it on camera, when he told a meandering and pointless story about a drive he took near the California shore. And can we forget that part of the claim pushed sub silentio to absolve him of responsibility for the sale of weapons to Iran was that he was not aware of what was going on around him. I’m not saying he was totally out of it; I am saying that the disease was creeping up on him, which made it easier for his handlers to pull his strings, as they’d been doing during his entire presidency. Anyone who listened to him objectively could see that his mind was wandering more than a president’s mind ought.

Of course, this runs counter to the Reagan was god meme pushed by the Republicans, so naturally they’ll go after O’Reilly. The fact that his book is probably poorly sourced will make that easy, which is a shame, because someone really should take an honest look at the underlying question O’Reilly raises.

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A ray of hope

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

So, yesterday was a bit of a disaster, locally, though we intend to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and come back swinging. 2016 should be a good year, or, if not, it should spell the end of the Republic.

But things were not bad everywhere, and one election in particular gives reason to hope for the future. A few years ago, faraway Jefferson County, Colorado, made the mistake of electing several right wingers to the school board. It can happen, since these people often operate under the radar, and don’t show their true colors until they get elected. Also, people don’t really pay attention to local elections, as we Democrats in Groton learned to our sorrow yesterday.

Anyway, the right wing school board in Jefferson County proceeded to try to turn the high school AP history course into a sham, teaching fantasy history instead of real history. The result gives hope for the future. The students refused to be propagandized. The teachers and parents joined in their protests, and yesterday the entire board was recalled, and replaced with sane people. The vote was by a huge margin (64-36) and came despite (or one would wish, because of) tons of Koch Brother’s money being spent to support the forces of darkness. So, the folks in Jefferson County did themselves proud. It is greatly to be hoped that they are not outliers, and that the rest of the country (the ignorant Southland, of course, excepted) will be ready to follow their lead.

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Not news, but fit to print

Monday, November 2, 2015

The New York Times is running a series of articles about the fact that the giant corporations in this country have successfully opted out of the civil justice system by making consent to arbitration a part of every contract. I recently bought a hard drive, and saw some fine print to the effect that merely by buying the hard drive I was agreeing to arbitrate any claims I might have against the maker. I don’t know if that dodge will stand up, but the provisions in credit card contracts have been proof against all attack. Arbitration requirements constitute a “never go to jail” card for giant corporations, because it is usually too expensive to go after them for the amount of money involved in a typical claim (class actions, of course, strictly forbidden) and a waste of time to do so because the arbitrators are in the pockets of the corporations.

The Times should be commended for publishing this series. Who knows, Congress might even do something about it, though the likelihood is that if the present Congress does anything, it will make it easier for the corporations to demand arbitration. It is also possible that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could step in, at least with regard to credit card contracts, but it’s almost a given that the Roberts court would set any such action aside.

There are a number of things that go on in the public sphere about which everyone knows the truth, but around which grow, at least in certain quarters, an unspoken agreement to pretend to believe a false but convenient narrative. The recent Benghazi hearings are a good though trivial example. Everyone knew that the hearings were a politically motivated hatchet job, but until forced to do so, the media happily pretended that it was a serious investigation. The movement to arbitration is supported by a similar unspoken agreement between giant corporations and hard right judges. The corporations will insist that the arbitration system is far better for consumers. Everyone knows they are lying, including the judges who hear these cases, but the judges of the Scalia ilk (and they are all that matter these days) will repeat the lie to justify stripping Americans of their rights to legal recourse in an imperfect, but not totally rigged judicial system.

But, while it’s great that the Times published this article, it’s not news. The destruction of the American system of justice has been common knowledge in the legal profession and has been, I know, the subject of multiple left wing blog posts over the years. It’s great that the Times is on the case, but the fact is that the article has uncovered something that was hiding in plain sight for years.

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Republicans whine, Dems silent

Sunday, November 1, 2015

It’s a given that Democrats are better at governing than Republicans, though these days that’s not saying much. That has been the case at least throughout my lifetime, but it has not always been the case that Republicans were far better at playing politics than Democrats.

A couple of days ago the Republican Party told NBC it would not participate in an planned debate, because they didn’t like the questions they were asked during the CNBC sponsored debate. By any measure, the questions were reasonable. It is a fact that the media has been so often accused by the Republicans of liberal bias that it in fact has bent over backwards to be “fair and balanced”, thus the surplus number of Republicans on the Sunday talk shows and the media’s willingness to pretend that the Benghazi witch hunt was a straight investigation.

Now, let us imagine if Democrats did the unthinkable, and accused the press of bias at one of their debates. I say the unthinkable, because Democrats never attack the press, even when they have ample reason to do so. As a result, the press feels no compunction about, for instance, amplifying memes about Hillary Clinton’s dishonesty, while pretty much ignoring the blatant lies told by each and every Republican candidate.

But I digress.

If the Democrats did what the Republicans did, the first thing you’d hear is charges from every corner of right winglandia that the Democrats were afraid to answer tough questions. How, we’d hear, can we expect [candidate X] to stand up to Putin when he or she wilts before a tough question from the media. We’d also hear loud demands that the press not let up; that the Republicans will be watching, and that if the hard questions aren’t continued, it will be more evidence of liberal bias. The message would be coordinated and constant.

Do you hear this type of talk coming from Democrats today? Maybe, but I haven’t. The Democrats have this heart warming belief that they can count on people behaving rationally, and their faith cannot be shaken, no matter how many times they are proven wrong.

Now, there are two quite predictable results of this failure of pushback. First, the media will in fact start lobbing softballs at the Republicans. Second, in order to prove how fair and balanced they are, they will more aggressively question Hillary and Bernie. These things are almost certain to happen. The fact that the Democrats have not already pounced on this is proof of massive incompetence at the DNC.

UPDATE: Good News. Looks like Obama reads my blog.

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Remind me of a folk song I once heard

Friday, October 30, 2015

When will they ever learn?

Oh, when, will they ever learn?

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Lying liars, but IOKIYAR

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Those of us who survived the 2000 election recall the determined efforts of the media to paint Al Gore as a serial liar. Although he never said he invented the internet, they repeatedly claimed that he had, and cast him as a liar. There were other examples, most of them equally specious. But it became the meme of the campaign, and considering that Gore didn’t win by enough to get by the Supreme Court, it may have been the difference between victory and defeat for Gore, and sane government and Bush government for the rest of us.

So, right now it looks like Ben Carson is leading the Republican pack. Like the rest of his rivals (not just looking at you Carly), he is a serial liar. Check out the video here for absolute proof. So, that raises the question: will any one of the Republican candidates, Carson in particular, get the kind of treatment the media dished out to Al Gore? The media often insist that there’s really no difference between the parties. They are, within the media and beltway bubble, equally to blame for the governmental paralysis that is, in fact, solely the product of right wing machinations. Yet the media does seem to see one difference between the parties. It’s still okay, if you’re a Republican. Carson’s blatant lie will be quickly forgotten. And if you think they’ve changed their approach to Democrats, consider the eagerness with which the New York Times reported that Hillary Clinton was under criminal investigation (reminiscent of the same paper’s poorly sourced Whitewater stories), and the reluctance of the media generally to recognize the Benghazi committee for what it was. If they ever caught Hillary in a lie as clear and unambiguous as Carson’s, we would literally (and I mean “literally” in the sense of “literally” and not “not literally”) never hear the end of it.

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