A Tipping Point?

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Wow, what a day. What a week.

By now you’ve heard about Mitt’s creative tax returns and Paul Ryan being booed by the AARP. Meanwhile, at least part of the Right seems to be in circular firing squad mode. They are accusing each other of being disloyal and phony. Bill Kristol is not a real conservative. Peggy Noonan is not a real conservative. David Brooks is not a real conservative. This is all for being critical of Mitt Romney, a man of no discernible political convictions.

The only people who qualify as real conservatives right now are the demonstrably stupid (i.e., Erick Erickson), the demonstrably sociopathic (Rush Limbaugh), or the demonstrably demented (Dinesh D’Souza). At some point movement conservatism ceased being a political ideology and turned into a mass delusion/fantasy game. If you don’t play right, James O’Keefe appears to take away your magic sword, and you’re out of the game.

We’ve got 46 days to go. A lot could happen. Romney’s campaign is crumbling, and it appears the GOP’s chances of taking back the Senate are eroding by the hour. Sam Wang at Princeton Election Consortium says the GOP is in danger of losing the House, although I’m not going to hope for that until we’re a lot closer to the election.

Just as the Right seems to be breaking apart, the Dems are more unified than I have seen them since, well, decades. No Republican Lite; no triangulation; only a few of the Blue Dogs are still hanging around Washington. Praise be.

The Warren-Brown Debate

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I didn’t watch the Elizabeth Warren-Scott Brown debate yesterday, but judging from the comments I’ve read there was no clear-cut “winner.” I suspect people inclined to vote for Warren liked her debate performance, and people inclined to vote for Brown liked his.

The question is, assuming there are a couple of undecided voters in Massachusetts somewhere, what might they have thought? We’ll see if there are any changes in the polls in a couple of days; currently, Warren has a slight lead.

For anyone who really doesn’t pay much attention to politics until elections are at hand, one part of the debate may have seemed downright weird — Scott Brown’s initial shot at Elizabeth Warren was to criticize her claim of being part Native American on her mother’s side. “Professor Warren [he always called her Professor Warren] claimed she was a Native American, a person of color. And as you can see, she’s not,” Brown said.

Warren responded by saying she had always been told by her family her mother was part Cherokee and Delaware, and she had no reason to doubt her mother. I understand no one has been able to confirm or debunk the story. Brown continued to push the issue in order to question Warren’s character, however.

Maybe it’s me, but I see no reason why anyone would give a hoo-haw about this. One, it’s not at all unusual for people who look entirely “white” to find out they had nonwhite ancestors. I suspect it’s true of most of us; we’re all mutts, really.

Second, it’s entirely possible that Elizabeth Warren’s mother has no Native American in her at all, and the Cherokee/Delaware thing is just some romantic family legend. It happens. I once met a guy who believed all his life one of his grandfathers was Irish, but after he retired he researched the family genealogy and found out Grandpa was English, and he had no connection to Ireland at all.

I remember my (fair and blue-eyed) mother telling me that there was a Native American on her family tree, somewhere, but she wasn’t sure who it was. Family legend on my Ma’s side says there were some slave-owning Confederates, also, and I haven’t been able to identify them, either. This could all be somebody’s fanciful notion that somehow was passed on to the young folks.

I also understand that it used to be common for mostly white people with some African-American ancestry to explain their appearance by claiming to be part “Indian.” A lot of family legends of Cherokee ancestors may have started that way. I’m not saying that’s what happened with Elizabeth Warren, but it’s a possibility.

And as long as she’s not trying to claim a portion of casino profits, who the bleep cares? Yes, there is an implication that Warren claimed nonwhite status to get preferential treatment when she was being considered for a teaching position at Harvard in 1995. But Harvard denies this. And if she were unsuited for the position, I suspect someone would have noticed by now. And, y’know, didn’t they get a look at her in an interview?

But if you ever follow the rightie bloggers, you’d know this Native American heritage thing is a BIG DEAL to them. They went ON AND ON AND ON about it for weeks, I swear. You’d think they had found out she was an escaped felon. And this was the very first issue Scott Brown chose to bring up in the debate. It dominated some of the headlines.

Today wingnut bloggers (see, for example, William Jacobson and Little Lulu) are high-fiving because Brown chose to highlight the Native American issue. They think this is a score.

But I’m thinking an uncommitted voter who is not steeped in the Wingnut Worldview would find it puzzling that Brown even brought it up. I’m saying it’s one of those things you’d have to be a wingnut to care about at all. Obviously it’s some sort of dog-whistle to them, but it’s not entirely clear to me what they’re whistling about.

The Right used to be really good at creating a Big Deal out of some innocuous thing and using it to swing elections. (John Kerry windsurfs! Al Gore wears earth tones!), but lately it doesn’t seem to be working for them. I could be wrong, though, especially since I’m watching this from outside Massachusetts. We’ll see if the polls change direction.

Poor Whites Obey Republican Party and Die Sooner

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Seriously, this is a startling statistic — American white people without a high school diploma have lost four years of life expectancy since 1990. Four years is a lot.

And lesser-educated white women got smacked worse — they lost five years of life expectancy, while the men lost only three.

Interestingly, the life expectancy of blacks and Hispanics without high school diplomas increased in the same time period; see the charts. What appears to be happening is that the life expectancy of less-educated whites is leveling off to be the same as less-educated African Americans. It seems whiteness alone is not the built-in advantage it used to be.

The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.

Another factor to consider is that the percentage of Americans without a high school diploma is a lot smaller now than it was in 1990. Americans without a high school diploma made up 22 percent of the population in 1990 and are now 12 percent. The whites remaining in the no-diploma pool may be those who are just plain not coping with life in the 21st century very well, for one reason or another. I’d be interested to know if this group is disproportionately living in rural rather than urban areas; the article doesn’t say. And whatever is slamming the less-educated whites is not affecting less-educated nonwhite Hispanics.

New Shoe Drops: Ryan Disses Social Security, Medicare

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This is on the website of America: The National Catholic Weekly. Back in 2005 Paul Ryan made a speech to the Atlas Society in which he praised Ayn Rand and admitted that he wanted to target Social Security and Medicare to be privatized to reduce government dependency.

This is the America blogger, Vincent Miller:

It is impossible to summarize these statements without sounding like a breathless conspiracy theorist. Here’s what Ryan says. Don’t trust my bullets. Read the transcript. Don’t trust my transcript, listen to the audio on the Atlas Society site.

  • Ryan describes Social Security and Medicare as “collectivist” and “socialistic.”
  • Ryan’s strategic plan: privatize Social Security and Medicare in order to convert people from “collectivism” to believers in a “capitalistic individualistic” philosophy. So that there will be “more people on our team” who “won’t listen to” Democrats.
  • Ryan’s acceptance of Pinochet’s Secretary of Social Security José Piñera’s similar program of Social Security privatization as a “moral revolution” that made Marxists into capitalists who started to read the Chilean equivalent of the Wall Street Journal. Ryan is overheard, “Yeah” “That’s right.”

For Ryan “defined benefit” programs such as Social Security and Medicare are problems in themselves. This isn’t something he saves for gatherings of the Ayn Rand Society, such concerns about “dependency” are scattered throughout his Path to Prosperity—again hidden in plain sight. This transcript doesn’t so much reveal a secret, as highlight a clear theme in his policy rationale that is always present, but in more public settings subordinated to his prophecies of fiscal apocalypse. Thus, it is no surprise his budget cuts the safety net and radically reshapes Medicare first and addresses the deficit later.

For the audio file, go to this page, scroll down to the bottom of the post, and click on the little audio icon.

Vincent Miller has transcribed parts of the 2005 speech that were not transcribed before. Ryan really is calling Medicare and Social Security “collectivist” and “socialist,” and he is calling for complete privatization of both.

So if there were any Social Security/Medicare recipients out there who didn’t believe the 47 percent included them, this should clear things up.

Medicare Getting Stingier With Power Scooters

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It’s been a couple of years, but I’m sure many of you remember Matt Taibbi’s description of a Tea Party rally in Kentucky:

Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn’t a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression — “Government’s not the solution! Government’s the problem!” — the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.

“The scooters are because of Medicare,” he whispers helpfully. “They have these commercials down here: ‘You won’t even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!’ Practically everyone in Kentucky has one.”

A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can’t imagine it.

I’m sure that not “everybody” in Kentucky got a power scooter. But it appears the power scooter industry is very unhappy with the feds days, because they’re tightening up on the power scooter give-a-ways.

Wheelchair suppliers raised concerns Wednesday about a new government program that requires Medicare contractors to sign off before power wheelchairs can be delivered to elderly and disabled consumers.

Federal health officials countered that the changes are needed because nearly 80 percent of the power wheelchair claims submitted to Medicare don’t meet program requirements. That error rate represents more than $492 million in improper payments annually.

Reading between the lines a bit — it seems two different kinds of fraud have been going on. Some people in the motorized scooter industry are making money on improper payments, obviously. But it also appears some of the old folks are being scammed into thinking that they’re getting a free chair and only find out after delivery that they have to pay for it, because they don’t meet Medicare requirements for getting it for free.

So in a test program, Medicare is tightening up on the motor-scooter-application process. The old folks have to meet face-to-face with a doctor first, who writes a prescription for the chair. Then an authorization request is sent to Medicare by either the doctor or the chair supplier. The chair cannot be delivered until after Medicare has approved the request.

An attorney for the Scooter Store complained that every request submitted under the new program has been denied. Can’t be good for business, I guess.

I shouldn’t be too sanguine about the power scooters, since with all my back issues I may end up needing one someday. But I have long wondered about all the advertisements on the teevee, whether there was really such a big volume of Medicare-paid scooters that it warranted the advertising. So now we know, there isn’t.

Missing Video Found!

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Today the Right was making much of an apparent gap in the Mittens “parasite” video. The video is posted in full at Mother Jones (here is the transcript). But halfway through there is an apparent gap in the tape. This is noted in the transcript:

And he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like. I mean, when you ask those people…we do all these polls—I find it amazing—we poll all these people, see where you stand on the polls, but 45 percent of the people will go with a Republican, and 48 or 4…

[Recording stops.]

Romney: …and about twice as much as China, not 10 times as much like it’s reported. And we have responsibility for the whole world. They’re only focused on one little area of the world, the South China Sea, the East China Sea, that’s it.

So, there is a snip missing, we are told of one or two minutes, but there is no credible claim [although lots of utterly ridiculous claims] that the rest of the video, in which Mitt goes on and on and on without interruption, has been tampered with.

Still, desperate people will grasp at straws, and William A. Jacobson is using the gap to argue that “Maybe Romney answer was “inelegant” only because Mother Jones didn’t disclose that part of tape was missing.” In other words, Jacobson appears to be arguing that whatever we’re not seeing was so elegant it would have neutralized the ugliness in the entire 40 something minutes of raw plutocratic elitism in the rest of the video.

And I’m thinking, wow, what could Mittens have been doing while the person making the recording was fumbling with his recorder? And now I know — this must be it.

As you can see, it is a huge departure from the rest of the video and does cast Romney in a different light, as well as make him look Swedish.

Jacobson is trying to say that the initial video clip was dishonest or taken out of context or something because David Corn didn’t disclose his initial post of four snips wasn’t the entire video, although seems to me it was obvious. And Jacobson obviously is in denial that it’s the entire video that is devastating to Romney, not just the “47 percent” part. And then Corn posted the entire video and transcript. So there’s no explanation for Jacobson’s raving except that he needs to be medicated.

Life in the Box

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One of my favorite sayings, which was from my first Zen teacher, is “We all live in a box, and the walls of the box consist of who we think we are and what we think life should be.”

There are some heavy-duty spiritual implications in the quote that I’m mostly going to skip here. The important point is that the box is, in a way, a contrivance; a fantasy; a delusion. Ultimately, there is no box. Yet we live in it anyway, and stepping outside of it is unthinkable for most of us.

Civilization itself is a kind of meta-box, or net connecting all the boxes, created by our collective projections and conditionings. Civilization can be understood as an intricate net of assumptions and agreements that allow us to live together and deal with each other in complex ways. This net has been crafted from ancient times, and each generation has added a little more to it. We are conditioned from birth to accept civilization as it exists in our time, and it’s so “normal” to us we often are oblivious to what a complex and astonishing thing it has become. It’s like air to us; we take it for granted.

Remember also that we humans are social creatures, wired to form associations with other humans to survive. And I mean “wired” in a physiological sense. Infants and small children deprived of social contact have been found to have abnormal brain development. Adults isolated from other humans will develop all kinds of psychological problems. We literally need each other to be who we are.

But let’s get back to civilization. Modern civilization is elaborately integrated. The web grows tighter and tighter. Our “normal” life, maintaining the box we live in, depends increasingly on very complex interconnections with the other boxes even for basic things like food and shelter, never mind Internet connection.

As recently as 150 years ago it wasn’t uncommon for someone to build a cabin in the woods on unclaimed property and live off the land. It may have been a nasty, brutish, and short life by our standards, but it was within culturally accepted norms of the time. There may be a handful of people today who could still do that, but for the enormous majority it’s not an option. Even if they had the survival skills, which most don’t, there’s not enough wilderness left to accommodate all the disaffected people of the world. And, frankly, the box most of us live in wouldn’t allow for it, anyway.

These days, in developed nations anyway, life in the box requires connection to the power grid and clean running water brought to us from distant reservoirs. We depend on commerce to make food and clothing available. We depend on an intricate, and often capricious, legal and financial system to create shelters we can live in. We are required to find some means of adding value to the commercial and financial systems to that we can receive credits (money) to exchange for what we need and want. And we are drawn like ants to honey to new communication technologies, so that we can interconnect with each other to our heart’s content.

This is the box we live in. This is who we think we are and what we think life should be. Our dependencies on each other are not negated by money — I paid for this! Nobody gave it to me! Indeed, the paper we carry in our wallet or the numbers in our bank accounts have value only because they are integral parts of our system of inter- dependencies. Otherwise, they would be valueless. And if we were challenged to cobble our own shoes, build our own shelters, or grow our own food, most of us would make a botch of it.

This also is why Ayn Randism and the “John Galt” pledge are so ridiculous. We cannot live for ourselves alone; it is not possible, whether we like it or not. We either live for each other, or we are cut off from civilization, and we die. People who think they really are living for themselves alone are oblivious to reality. (They also tend to be assholes, but that’s another rant.)

(And, seriously, if living for yourself alone is so all-fired important to you, why bother to reach out to other people and ask them to sign a John Galt Pledge on the Web? What this tells us is that Randism is a kind of romantic fantasy, and if that’s the box you live in you want other people to buy into the fantasy and reinforce it. That’s very human, and also utterly absurd.)

So let’s look at what’s been going on with civilization in our lifetimes. Even as the net grows tighter, ancient ethnic, racial and cultural boundaries are growing blurry. We’re literally finding new ways to form tribal associations, and the old ways rapidly are losing their function and significance.

Nations still play important functions in civilization, and I don’t see the phenomenon of the nation-state dissolving anytime soon. But it may be indicative of something that nations don’t seem to declare war on each other any more. Armed conflicts are waged by extra-national movements these days. I think this indicates a significant shift in the role of the nation in human civilization, although exactly where this is taking us is hard to say.

The changes occurring to civilization, many of which are being driven by rapid technological advances, are challenging the integrity of many boxes. If the box you live in depends on clearly drawn racial divisions, for example, the blurring of racial boundaries is very distressing. And people experience challenges to the integrity of the boxes they live in as existential threats. So, while some of us embrace modernity, others of us are recoiling in horror.

And this takes us to fundamentalism. The scholar Karen Armstrong defines fundamentalism as a “militant religiosity” that is a “reaction against and a rejection of modern Western society.” I would turn that around a bit and say that religious fundamentalism is a kind of social pathology that expresses itself as religion. Although the pathology comes in a religious package, the pathology, not the religion, is the driving force. I say that because, time and time again, we see that any teachings of the religion being used as the container are ignored if they conflict with the pathology.

By the same token, I say that current “movement conservatism” is a social pathology expressing itself as political ideology. Conservatism has taken on many of the attributes scholars associate with fundamentalism, such as the view that they are engaged in a cosmic struggle between absolute good and absolute evil. They also “affirm their identity by selecting doctrines and practices from the past,” one of the markers of fundamentalism in this review of one of Armstrong’s books. They’re adopting rigid doctrines about taxes and monetary policy, often without even a glimmer of understanding how taxes and the monetary system work. They accept the doctrines of the tribe because those are the doctrines of the tribe. Oh, and freedom.

It’s getting uglier and uglier because many people are living in boxes that are utterly out of sync with the way civilization really works these days. Eventually this will fade, but not in our lifetimes. Until then, we’re going to have to put up with lots of people who are raving and fearful and irrationally thrashing about in all directions because the box they live in is threatened by modernity. So be it.

One of the things that strikes me, over and over again, about the reactionaries calling themselves conservatives these days is the degree to which they are utterly oblivious to the interconnections. You’ve got a Republican presidential ticket made up of two guys born into wealth and privilege who see themselves as self-made men, and don’t understand why everyone can’t be as successful as they are. You’ve got the baggers in Medicare-paid power scooters rallying against socialized medicine.

And then there’s the “you didn’t build that” flap. You can’t explain to the baggers that the President was talking about essential infrastructure. They deny that business needs infrastructure. Build a nail salon and they will come, I suppose. I actually ran into someone on a Web forum who refused to believe that business needs stuff like roads and utilities. They built Las Vegas in the desert, didn’t they?

This morning’s rant was touched off by a comment on this page. JETHRO212 wrote,

The ironic thing is, if you listen to the entire Obama “You didn’t build dat” thing, it gets way worse, if you listen to the whole thing he goes way off into it wouldn’t even be possible to have a business without Government.

But … it really isn’t possible to have a business, as we understand business, without government. Currency? Government. Without government, we’d resort to a barter system; we really would be taking chickens to the doctor. Contracts? Without a legal system, contracts are worthless. Legal system? Government. Someone robs your store, you call the police. Police? Government. Without government, the only people in business are mobs and pirates. Civilization itself was built on the premise that somebody is in charge and makes the rules. In recorded history there has never been a human society that didn’t have some kind of government, even if just a tribal chief who got the honor by beating up all the other chief candidates.

I have a fantasy that all the wingnuts who want to “go galt” be given a big tract of land somewhere and allowed to take whatever power generators, tools, and means to produce food they can carry, and then they can be on their own. And as long as they stay on the “res,” and didn’t interact with the rest of society, they wouldn’t have to pay taxes. They also forfeit all government benefits, of course. But they could build whatever they wanted and be self-made men (and, trust me, most of ’em would be men) all day long.

I’d give it two years, tops.