Snowden’s Treatment by “Journalists” and “Progressives”

A lot has been said about the hostility shown by “journalists” and “progressives” toward whistleblower Ed Snowden, so I won’t rehash old battles here.  I did want to touch on a couple revealing incidents, though, that mostly flew under the radar.

I only see ideology when it undermines my ideology

On June 30th, New York Times pop culture and media writer David Carr published a piece titled “Journalism, Even When It’s Tilted” where he uses Glenn Greenwald as a muse to discuss the role of advocacy in journalism.  Although Carr tries to stand on (his self-defined) middle ground – saying Greenwald “is an activist who is deeply suspicious of government and the national security apparatus” but “also a journalist” – he ultimately reinforces the standard narrative that only pro-government, militarist, pro-corporate journalists can operate without ideologies. To Carr, Greenwald’s defense of whistle-blowing in the face of attacks by pro-government journalists “seems more like a campaign than a discussion of the story he covered” where his “primary objective remains winning the argument.” Meanwhile, “an economic incentive for information absent a political agenda,” (i.e. the corporate tv, newspapers etc..) allows an “independent press” which is now eroding as the decline of traditional media gives way to the proliferation of “digital enterprises” with “partisan agendas.”

The issue with this line of reasoning is obvious – where the fuck have Carr and all the other MSM journalists now screaming “advocacy” and “bias” been while their newspapers pushed us into wars, totally missed the looming housing crisis, vilified worker organizing, gave platforms to anti-teacher zealots et cetera, et cetera.  The only reason he’s writing this article is because Greenwald happened to challenge, rather than enforce, Carr’s own ideology.  The thousands of stories every day which fly across his laptop screen praising corporate America or parroting leaks from administration officials give him no pause because he’s so immersed in mainstream ideology he doesn’t even notice.

Stay down, sit down. Don’t stand up for your rights

In addition to the ridiculous awakening of mainstream journalists to the dangers of ideological biases (that challenge their own), the other point I wanted to touch on is how many “progressive” supporters of president Obama have revealed their tiny, tiny balls.  A great example is the Campaign for America’s Future’s Bill Scher, who displayed hummingbird sized lluevos in a Bloggingheads.tv conversation with the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis when he said of Ed Snowden

“I feel sad about what’s going to happen to him. Because he has basically traded his personal freedom, he will probably be incarcerated eventually because of a political opinion he has… This poor guy [throws] away his entire adult life” by saying “I can’t abide by this it’s not worth living in this world if it’s like this therefore jail and speaking my mind is a better option, which I just find painfully sad and misguided.”

Wow, so this is what “progressives” have come to – a complete refutation of idealism in any form.  This type of technocratic pussiness is pervasive among Democrats (and mainstream Republicans), but it’s rare that someone will just come out with it.  I understand being too scared to stand up for your own beliefs, but your fear of shame should at least illicit a fucking head nod and muttered “right on” or something when you hear about someone else doing it.  Scher’s complete discounting of principled political actions is just another sign of the American Left’s drift away from any coherent ideology worth defending.

The pro-establishment bias of most journalists and many prominent liberals comes as no surprise, but it is being cast into stark relief by the NSA revelations.  There are about a thousand other NSA-related topics I’d also love to get into, but I’ll save that discussion until the next big Greenwald story drops.

Shotgun Monday: Soda Banistas and Greedy Pensioners

Let the government tell you what’s best

Philosophy Professor Sarah Conly dismisses soda ban opponents in her piece “Three Cheers for the Nanny State” by accusing them of putting forward “large cups of soda as symbols of human dignity.” [Apparently she’s never tried Arizona competitor and contestant for “most depressing instance of crass social movement commercialization” Peace Iced Tea).  Ban opponents hold onto the “false” notion that we’re all “free, rational beings who are totally capable of making all the decisions we need to in order to create a good life,” not realizing that humans suffer from a raft of cognitive biases that render them incapable of doing so.  The answer is for soda-lovers to “[give] up a little liberty” for the good of the majority, recognize “that successful paternalistic laws are done on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis” which “the government has the resources to do,” and let the government “help us get where we want to go.”

So much to criticize, so little time.  First off, the ban decision was not made by a benevolent technocratic people’s champ.  It was proposed by a multi-billionaire as a way to decrease the healthcare cost of treating poor people without having to put any taxpayer (read: Bloomberg) money up.  The masses being skeptical of “we know best” proposals put forward by elites that just so happen to benefit those very same elites is a healthy thing.  Second, the question of which paternalistic laws are put forth or enacted is critical.  If we wanted to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of all potential nanny-state laws, I would guarantee things like mandatory psychiatric counseling for Wall Street bankers, emissions controls on mega-mansions and strict limits on speculative trading would top the list.  What are the chances in hell of any of those passing?  Why?  Finally, although society should encourage certain behavior and discourage other behavior, there’s many ways to do this.  Education campaigns, provision of better alternatives, the modification of prices and laws that are not 100% enforced can all do the trick.  Even though there’s a law against speeding, I have the freedom to push it to 120 (or 67 in my ‘84 Buick Regal) m.p.h. and risk the consequences.  There isn’t a limiting mechanism in my car that prevents it from going above 75 or 80 m.p.h. (unless that limiting mechanism is being a Geo Metro… boom!) and there shouldn’t be.  It’s this kind of choice, free from the meddling of manipulative political and economic elites that Americans are seeking to preserve.

Linguistic tricks to stick pensioners

The New York Times also ran a piece Sunday titled “Pension Funds Wary as Bankrupt City Goes to Trial” about the upcoming battle between pension funds and municipal bond holders over “who takes the losses” in Stockton, California’s impending Chapter 9 bankruptcy.  Wall Street bondholders and bond insurers like Franklin Advisers, Wells Fargo Bank and Assured Guaranty obviously want police officers, fire fighters and office clerks to take a hair-cut on their retirement, and the folks that represent pensioners who actually lived and worked all their lives in Stockton think the outsiders should pay more.

While the article does a decent job of explaining the fight as “workers and retirees” vs. “municipal bondholders,” (though it could easily be “rich investors”) it focuses almost exclusively on the unsustainability of pensions and uses right-wing talking points and vocabulary to describe the situation.  The authors label pensions “budget-busters,” which perfectly echoes the right-wing attack on public workers.  They also use a classic rhetorical maneuver by saying that in 2011 “Stockton paid a little more than $20 million to [its pension fund] – about double what it paid to run its public libraries.”  You might as well have said “about ten times what it paid to protect victims of domestic abuse” or “about fifteen times what it paid to provide meals to starving children.”  Needless to say the Wall Street bankers, whose obnoxious demands for recompense from career public servants kick off the debate and finish the article, are not subject to the same heart-wrenching comparisons.  This oldie vs. poor dichotomy is a favorite of the center-right technocratic set, who often pit Medicaid against discretionary spending for the poor (which could actually be a hilarious Celebrity Deathmatch ripoff with an army general and robber baron watching and cheering from just outside ringside) during budget fights.  This framing is unfortunate, but predictable, as establishment reporters are disproportionately influenced by powerful institutions.

Public Opinion, Power and Ideology in Pushing the Iraq War

George W. Bush launched his attack on Iraq ten years ago Tuesday.  Since then, there has been an endless stream of commentary and critique surrounding the loss of American life, hundreds of billions in wasted tax dollars, failure of the U.S. to achieve some of its geopolitical goals, and occasionally even a discussion of the more than 100,000 dead Iraqi men, women and children.  I’d like to reflect for a second on what the war says about public rationality, the relationship between power and credibility, and the ability of powerful ideologies to obfuscate a straight-forward understanding of institutional incentives.

Americans supported the war because they were relentlessly lied to

Public opinion favored the war because American people were duped into our attack on Iraq.  Despite extensive documentation of the parade of lies trotted out by the Bush Administration and servilely repeated and amplified by major media institutions, pessimists continue to argue that the American public is bloodthirsty by nature.  If the president, vice president, secretaries of everything, senior members of both political parties, leading think-tank bullshiterati, national newspaper editorial boards, cable news programs and almost every other elite all say that Iraq is a WMD-wielding threat with ties to the guys who just blew up 3,000 Americans a year earlier, how can you possibly expect the American public to see through it or be properly informed?  Is Chad Whitesworth supposed to just stroll down to his Topeka-area Revolutionary Books and grab a copy of Chomsky’s (who he’s never even heard of) latest anti-imperialist tome?

You can see the manipulability of public opinion by considering Iran and conducting a thought experiment on Iraq.  Warmongers have been pushing lies about Iran’s nuclear program for years, but without (until?) a sustained war push by political elites and the press, the American public continues to oppose a unilateral or multilateral strike (unlike Iraq).  Presented with a slightly less skewed set of facts, Americans choose peace.  Now imagine if in 2002, President Bush said Iraq wasn’t a threat, major editorial boards called a war unnecessary and Brookings scholars said it would be a tremendous strategic blunder (all true).  Could you possibly argue that, presented with these facts, Americans would have supported an attack on Iraq?  Of course not.

Media organizations and opinion makers favored powerful interests over truth

The relationship between power and credibility has also been made starkly clear in the years after the American attack.  Simply put, the more powerful an institution or its defenders are, the more credibility they gain in popular discourse.  Neo-cons promoted American military power, the military-industrial complex and big oil interests by banging the war drum, and they lost almost zero credibility despite the fact that Iraq cost orders of magnitude more lives than 9-11 and more than a trillion dollars in wasted funds.  Bill Kristol was rewarded with a regular column in the New York Times, Ken “Threatening Storm” Pollack is still an “expert on Middle Eastern political-military affairs” at Brookings, and Richard Perle is looking even creepier at the American Enterprise Institute.  Imagine what their media reception would’ve been like if they’d advocated an $800 billion dollar airdrop of U.S. food and medical supplies into Iraq that ended up killing 100,000+ civilians and 5,000 U.S. aid workers, instead of opening up Iraqi oil fields for U.S. investment and providing a great global reminder of why you don’t fuck with the U.S. government.

Elites buy into ideological justifications over clear-headed rational analysis of institutional incentives

The run-up to our attack on Iraq also demonstrated how challenging it is for elites to apply incentive-based, marginal benefit/cost analysis to powerful institutions.  American control of oil was clearly central to the Bush Administration’s decision to overthrow the Iraqi regime (why not attack Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Congo etc…), but political and media elites attacked this idea as a lie or conspiracy theory.  A similar willful blindness prohibits frank discussion of the possibility that Wall Street firms regularly commit fraud or insider trading as a part of business (to earn above market returns), or that politicians make policy decisions based on campaign contributions or future job opportunities.  CEOs and politicians are instead taken at their word or dismissed as bad apples if any corruption is uncovered.

Using an incentive based framework, all of this unethical behavior make sense.  The world’s leading consumer of oil needs to secure future reserves, Wall Street executives gain multi-million dollar bonuses by boosting stock prices, and politicians without wealthy backers are dead in the water, facing a future in academia rather than a lucrative lobbying gig or million dollar pay day on Wall Street.

American elites helped pave the path to war by favoring ideology over incentive-based thinking, bowing to powerful interests over truth and actively participating in the manipulation of public opinion.  Anti-war advocates should endlessly point to Iraq’s boy-who-cried-wolf examples as military attention is turned to Iran.  Progressives should also refuse to engage with thinkers and policymakers who advocated for the Iraq War.  Finally, anyone who wants to challenge powerful institutions should stick to marginal benefit/marginal cost thinking and advocate for policies grounded in providing strong material and social incentives for military generals, politicians and corporate executives to act in the interests of the American people.