Soylent Green Is People

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In another sign of how the country is going to hell in a handbasket, Robert Pear writes in today’s New York Times:

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said Wednesday that employers could reduce or eliminate health benefits for retirees when they turn 65 and become eligible for Medicare.

The policy, set forth in a new regulation, allows employers to establish two classes of retirees, with more comprehensive benefits for those under 65 and more limited benefits — or none at all — for those older.

More than 10 million retirees rely on employer-sponsored health plans as a primary source of coverage or as a supplement to Medicare, and Naomi C. Earp, the commission’s chairwoman, said, “This rule will help employers continue to voluntarily provide and maintain these critically important health benefits.”

Let us pause and reflect upon Ms. Naomi C. Earp’s words. In fact, I was so taken with what Ms. Naomi C. Earp said that I went to the EEOC web site for more. And lo, there’s a press release with the head:

EEOC MOVES TO PROTECT RETIREE HEALTH BENEFITS
Implementation of Final Rule Ensures Age Bias Law is No Barrier to Employer Insurance

And in the body of this press release I read:

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) today announced the publication of a final rule allowing employers that provide retiree health benefits to continue the longstanding practice of coordinating those benefits with Medicare (or comparable state health benefits) without violating the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA). The regulation, which safeguards retiree health benefits, was published in today’s Federal Register and is available on the EEOC’s web site at www.eeoc.gov.

“Implementation of this rule is welcome news for America’s retirees, whether young or old,” said Commission Chair Naomi C. Earp. “By this action, the EEOC seeks to preserve and protect employer-provided retiree health benefits which are increasingly less available and less generous. Millions of retirees rely on their former employer to provide health benefits, and this rule will help employers continue to voluntarily provide and maintain these critically important benefits in accordance with the law.”

The EEOC proposed the rule in response to a controversial decision in 2000 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Erie County Retirees Association v. County of Erie. The court held that the ADEA requires that the health insurance benefits received by Medicare-eligible retirees be the same, or cost the employer the same, as the health insurance benefits received by younger retirees. After the Erie County decision, labor unions and employers alike informed the EEOC that complying with the decision would force companies to reduce or eliminate the retiree health benefits they currently provided – leaving millions of retirees aged 55 and over with less health insurance, or no health insurance at all.

Ah, I see. The Bushies are protecting retired people from discrimination by allowing their former employers to cut off their health benefits. Robert Pear continues,

Premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance rose an average of 6.1 percent this year and have increased 78 percent since 2001, according to surveys by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Because of the rising cost of health care and the increased life expectancy of workers, the commission said, many employers refuse to provide retiree health benefits or even to negotiate on the issue.

In general, the commission observed, employers are not required by federal law to provide health benefits to either active or retired workers.

Because health care costs are ballooning, the burden of providing health insurance for retirees is too much for many businesses to bear — no doubt this is true — so the EEOC says it’s OK for the companies to cut the retirees loose and let them fall back on Medicare. But because Bushies are Bushies, they can’t just come out and say it that way. Instead, they crank out some Orwellian doublespeak pretending this is all for the retirees’ own good.

And, of course, wingnuts want to eliminate Medicare also. As Rich Lowry so well explained, spending on big government programs like Medicare siphons off money that could be better put to use maintaining a big military to spread American hegemony around the planet and allow all people to enjoy our superior way of life. Until, of course, they are too old to be productively making money for Halliburton. I believe the plan at that point is to set the old folks adrift on ice floes, although given global warming I’m not sure how that’s going to work, either.

Robert Pear continues:

AARP and other advocates for older Americans attacked the rule. “This rule gives employers free rein to use age as a basis for reducing or eliminating health care benefits for retirees 65 and older,” said Christopher G. Mackaronis, a lawyer for AARP, which represents millions of people age 50 or above and which had sued in an effort to block issuance of the final regulation. “Ten million people could be affected — adversely affected — by the rule.”

The new policy creates an explicit exemption from age-discrimination laws for employers that scale back benefits of retirees 65 and over. Mr. Mackaronis asserted that the exemption was “in direct conflict” with the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967.

Seems that way to me. Weirdly, the AFL-CIO supports the Bushies’ plan. I say they have some ‘splainin’ to do.

Just yesterday I stumbled on a group discussion on single payer health care. Righties wittily asked if the government would also provide them with free lunches and congratulated themselves on having the prescience to get jobs with health benefits. Spoken like people who have no experience whatsoever dealing with the health care system. And the wingnuts have no clue what the current “system” is doing to our economy. Ultimately a single payer system would be better for employers and entrepreneurship generally. Righties can’t see anything beyond their own limited experiences and needs, which is what makes them righties.

Speaking of the AARP and Medicare, I found this press release on the AARP site —

“The American people deserve better. It is a shame that our elected officials will go home for the holidays without helping low-income beneficiaries get the care they need by strengthening programs directly targeted at the most vulnerable older Americans.

“It also is discouraging to millions of older Americans that the administration was unwilling to consider any reductions in the billions of dollars in excess payments to Medicare Advantage plans—particularly to private fee-for-service plans, which do not have to coordinate care and have been the subject of widespread marketing abuses—in order to help improve Medicare.

Bushies don’t see old folks as citizens; they see them as an exploitable resource. But I guess as long as they’re an exploitable resource they won’t be marched off to the Soylent Green factory.

Hang on Tight

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Forget about Christmas sneaking up on you. Do you realize the Iowa Caucuses are a week from tomorrow? Enjoy this holiday week as the calm before the storm. Unless you live in Iowa, of course.

Most recent poll results basically say all the races in Iowa are tightening up. One poll says that Mike Huckabee is losing support — mostly to Ron Paul — among male voters. It may be that Huckabee peaked a bit too soon. Although he may not win in Iowa, I still say Mitt Romney is the most likely eventual winner of the nomination, because he seems to be the GOP establishment’s choice.

Regarding Huckabee, Quinn Hillyer wrote a couple of days ago,

Amazingly, Huckabee remains at the top of the polls despite receiving strong and repeated criticism from the entire spectrum of conservative leaders (yes, there is a spectrum; these are people who on intra-conservative-movement issues often disagree with each other). Lined up as strong critics of Huckabee are George Will, Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer, Robert Novak, Rush Limbaugh, David Limbaugh, Michael Reagan, Peggy Noonan, Phyllis Schlafly, Donald Lambro, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Mark Levin; the vast majority of top conservative bloggers from sites such as Red State and Powerline; and most of the writers from the top conservative political magazines: the American Spectator, Human Events, National Review, and the Weekly Standard. National Review, the flagship of the great William F Buckley, has been particularly scathing about Huckabee, with Rich Lowry, Jonah Goldberg and Kathryn Lopez leading the way.

I wrote awhile back about Lowry’s consternation over Huckabee’s popularity. Hillyer continues,

The roots of this bizarreness lie in Washington. Since 1998, the majority of congressional Republicans have shown they have no clue about what motivates most right-leaning voters and even less of a clue about what constitutes good public policy. Pork-barrel spending that garners almost no votes, but plenty of campaign cash, still abounds. Ethical reforms are ignored or run around. With strong GOP support, Congress passes farm bills and energy bills and all sorts of other legislation that are monstrosities containing no internal logic, no discernible philosophical basis, and no serious provisions for efficiency or effective oversight. Meanwhile, President Bush never has been a fiscal conservative or a foe of big government, meaning the old Barry Goldwater wing of the party – still the largest subset of the conservative coalition – has had no champions in Washington except those toiling from the back bench.

Hillyer was writing for The Guardian of the UK; you don’t see this kind of bare-assed honesty about conservatism in US media.

It’s never been entirely clear to me what “big government” actually means. I infer from this Rich Lowry column from spring 2006 that “big government” means one with a big and inefficient bureaucracy. He argues that lean and efficient government would be stronger than cumbersome, bloated government. If those are your only two choices, then he’s probably right. However,

Some government programs actually promote strong government. A large, capable military is a foundation of national power. The Patriot Act and the National Security Agency spying program — by updating governmental capabilities to deal with a new national security threat — represent strong, flexible government. It is also possible to foster desirable values through government programs. Welfare reform promoted responsibility among welfare recipients.

On the other hand, spending money on domestic programs is bad.

It creates a self-perpetuating appetite for even more government. The prescription-drug plan hasn’t placated seniors, but whetted their appetite for an even more generous program. As spending increases, so does pressure for higher taxes.

Conclusion:

When the GOP begins its post-Bush departure — roughly after the midterm elections in November, when the 2008 presidential nomination race begins — “big-government conservatism” will probably end up on the ash heap. The party will have to relearn what it used to know: A strong government is a limited government [emphasis added].

Except we don’t want to limit spending that’s going into the pockets of corrupt government contractors, and we don’t want to limit government violation of citizens’ rights. Those parts of government must be unlimited, Lowry says. Perhaps you can see why I am confused about the “big government” thing.

Anyway, I think what Lowry et al. don’t get is that their “movement conservative” ideology never was as popular as they believed it was. Hard-core movement conservatism always was a minority faction in America. Conservatives won elections by whipping up hysteria on some issue or another to drive the soft-headed and under-informed to the polls. In my lifetime I’ve seen one scoundrel after another elected by means of anti-Communist hysteria, racist hysteria, religious hysteria, anti-abortion hysteria, anti-gay hysteria, and most recently terrorist hysteria. Many of the voters who gave winning margins to conservative politicians didn’t give a hoohaw about Lowry’s precious if inscrutable notions of “limited government.”

Last week Amy Goldberg pointed out that many of the same conservatives running away from Huckabee’s religiosity sang a different tune in the recent past.

Rather than wringing their hands about the decline of reason in our civic life, right-wing opinion-mongers have, until now, heartily celebrated the volkish virtues of an archetypal Nascar-loving, megachurch-attending, Darwin-denying Ordinary American. Noonan has been the high priestess of mawkish religio-nationalist kitsch, titling her collection of post-9/11 columns, A Heart, A Cross and a Flag: America Today. In one piece, lamenting the fate of a man she encountered on an airplane, she writes: “I bet he became an intellectual, or a writer, and not a good man like a fireman or a businessman who says ‘Let’s Roll.'”

Last year Lowry ridiculed a spate of books about the growing political power of the religious right (including, I’m flattered to say, my own): “When the theo-panic passes, maybe a few of them will regret their hysteria.” In defending Christmas against its supposed antagonists, Krauthammer has chastised “deracinated members of religious minorities” who “insist that the overwhelming majority of this country stifle its religious impulses in public”.

Krauthammer these days is twisting himself into rhetorical pretzels trying to explain why Huckabee’s religious expression goes too far.

Here Goldberg is brilliant —

As mainstream conservatives recoil from what they’ve created, their cynicism is revealed – to us, but also, perhaps, to themselves. Obviously, some right-wing leaders always saw the pious masses as dupes who would vote against their economic interests if they could be convinced they were protecting marriage and Christmas.

But there there’s also a certain species of urbane Republican who live in liberal bastions and, feeling terribly oppressed by the mild contempt they face at cocktail parties, imagine a profound sympathy with the simple folk of the heartland. They’re like alienated suburban kids in Che Guevara t-shirts who fantasize kinship with the authentic revolutionary souls in Chiapas or Cuba or Venezuela. Confronted with the actual individuals onto whom they’ve projected their political hallucinations, disillusionment is inevitable. Whatever their nostalgie de la boue, the privileged classes never really want to be ruled by the rabble. They want the rabble to help them rule.

Spot on. See also Jane Hamsher on the Huckabee-Limbaugh feud.

Anyway, now we have Rush Limbaugh. He’s been putting out the message on behalf of the GOP to millions of the AM radio faithful so long he thinks he’s one of them, a “man of the people,” or as he likes to say, “part of the Cape Girardeau [Missouri]-Middle America axis.”

But Rush is no such thing. Unless his audience is composed of a lot more people making $35 million a year than I’m aware of, he’s an ugly weld spot between the corporatists and the rank-and-file within the party. Huckabee knows that audience rather better than Rush does, at least the Southern contingent, and given the fact that the GOP has become largely a regional party, that’s a significant portion of Rush’s base.

The Limbaughs of Cape Girardeau have been wealthy and prominent going back many years, btw. Cape Girardeau may well be in the “heartland,” but the Limbaughs were strictly privilege bubble people.

Rush eats left-wing hate like candy. It only makes him more popular with the true believers — it’s tribal, a sign that he’s “one of them.” But when Rush wasn’t looking, the left crafted a narrative about him (in a swift akido move employing many of the themes Rush himself popularized) that has now been picked up by Huckabee, who has the ability to carry it into the heart of the beast. Huckabee is a messenger who will be taken seriously in a way the left never could, and I imagine also in a way that Rush is going to have a hard time competing with.

Rush is betting that his listeners will see him as “part of the Cape Girardeau [Missouri]-Middle America axis.” The GOP elite have told him to take down Huckabee, and his ego is so engorged with money and seven years of right wing hegemony he thinks he can win that battle. He doesn’t see the weld spot preparing to crack.

Anyway, I take it the Right is gearing up to run the 2008 campaigns on illegal immigrant hysteria rather than terrorism hysteria, which is bad news for Rudy Giuliani. We’ll see how it works for ’em.

Team Players

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Sarah Baxter writes for the Times of London:

THE CIA chief who ordered the destruction of secret videotapes recording the harsh interrogation of two top Al-Qaeda suspects has indicated he may seek immunity from prosecution in exchange for testifying before the House intelligence committee. Jose Rodriguez, former head of the CIA’s clandestine service, is determined not to become the fall guy in the controversy over the CIA’s use of torture, according to intelligence sources.

It has emerged that at least four White House staff were approached for advice about the tapes, including David Addington, a senior aide to Dick Cheney, the vice-president, but none has admitted to recommending their destruction.

Vincent Cannistraro, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA, said it was impossible for Rodriguez to have acted on his own: “If everybody was against the decision, why in the world would Jose Rodriguez – one of the most cautious men I have ever met – have gone ahead and destroyed them?”

That’s the downside of a life in a reviled lame duck administration — the fall guys stop falling.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer, believes the scandal could reach deep into the White House. “The CIA and Jose Rodriguez look bad, but he’s probably the least culpable person in the process. He didn’t wake up one day and decide, ‘I’m going to destroy these tapes.’ He checked with a lot of people and eventually he is going to get his say.”

Johnson says Rodriguez got his fingers burnt during the Iran-contra scandal while working for the CIA in Latin America in the 1980s. Even then he sought authorisation from senior officials. But when summoned to the FBI for questioning, he was told Iran-contra was “political – get your own lawyer”.

Not that I expect much to happen if Rodriguez does name Addington, but having facts on the record is better than nothing. Jeralyn at Talk Left has more analysis.

On the same subject — the Washington Post gives us a terrifying glimpse into the mind of Bob Novak. The Reptile writes,

Chairman Silvestre Reyes and other Democrats on the intelligence committee join Hoekstra in demanding investigation into the tape destruction in the face of the administration’s resistance, but the Republicans stand alone in protesting the CIA’s defiant undermining of President Bush. In its clean bill of health for Iran on nuclear weapons development, the agency acted as an independent policymaker rather than an adviser. It has withheld from nearly all members of Congress information on the Israeli bombing of Syria in September. The U.S. intelligence community is deciding on its own what information the public shall learn.

It appears that the Bush Administration was complicit in the Israel-Syria operation. One suspects someone in the Agency is still loyal to the Bushies.

The Reptile insinuates there are traitors in the CIA:

Intelligence agencies, from Nazi Germany to present-day Pakistan, for better or for ill, have tended to break away from their governments. The Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s World War II predecessor, was infiltrated by communists. While CIA tactics were under liberal assault in Congress during the Watergate era, current accusations of a rogue agency come from Republicans who see a conscious undermining of Bush at Langley.

Then the Reptile falls back on revisionist history.

The CIA’s contempt for the president was demonstrated during his 2004 reelection campaign when a senior intelligence officer, Paul R. Pillar, made off-the-record speeches around the country criticizing the invasion of Iraq. On Sept. 24, 2004, three days before my column exposed Pillar’s activity, former representative Porter Goss arrived at Langley as Bush’s handpicked director of central intelligence. Goss had resigned from Congress to accept Bush’s mandate to clean up the CIA. But the president eventually buckled under fire from the old boys at Langley and their Democratic supporters in Congress, and Goss was sacked in May 2006.

I’m sure you remember Porter Goss and The Saga of Dusty Foggo. Conventional wisdom says the primary reason Goss was fired was that he butted heads with John Negroponte. And I’m sure the Reptile knows this perfectly well. Yet he still spins the Goss episode into “evidence” that the CIA is disloyal to the Bush Administration.

Goss’s successor, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, restored the status quo at the CIA and nurtured relations with congressional Democrats in preparation for their coming majority status. Hayden, an active-duty four-star Air Force general, first antagonized Hoekstra by telling Reyes what the Democrats wanted to hear about the Valerie Plame-CIA leak case.

What Democrats wanted to hear? Like the truth, Bob?

There is no partisan divide on congressional outrage over the CIA’s destruction of tapes showing interrogation of detainees suspected of terrorism. Hoekstra agrees with Reyes that the Bush administration has made a big mistake refusing to let officials testify in the impending investigation.

Yes, Bob, the Bush Administration refused to let CIA officials testify.

Republicans also complain that the National Intelligence Estimate concluding that Iran has shut down its nuclear weapons program was a case of the CIA flying solo, not part of the administration team. …

…In a June 21 address to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Hayden unveiled the “CIA’s social contract with the American people.” Hoekstra’s explanation: “The CIA is rejecting accountability to the administration or Congress, saying it can go straight to the people.”

Bob is miffed because some parts of the Washington bureaucracy are no longer willing to lie, cheat and steal for his team, but have decided that the integrity of the nation is more important. See, Bob, ultimately the CIA does not work for the President, but for We, the People of the United States of America. And wouldn’t we all be better off now if the CIA hadn’t been such good team players before the invasion of Iraq?

Update: See also Larry Johnson at No Quarter.

On Hair and Privilege

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There’s no better illustration of the intellectual bankruptcy of the Right than a comparison of Mitt Romney and John Edwards.

And yes, I’m talking about the hair. Righties cannot speak of Edwards without calling him the “Breck girl.” Surely Mitt goes through as much shampoo as John. The point, of course, is to feminize Edwards, but I say if either of these two leans more toward yin than yang, Mitt’s the guy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

And speaking of guys with hair …

We could analyze all of the presidents and their coiffures, but I suspect there is little correlation between hair quality and job performance. Or masculinity, for that matter. John Kennedy’s alleged lasting contribution to men’s fashion was the death of the hat (Snopes questions this). Whatever the cause, fedoras for daytime wear did disappear suddenly about the time JFK was elected — the better to see a guy’s hair, my dears. But no one has ever questioned JFK’s manliness, as far as I know.

No matter. Someone introduced the “Breck girl” comment into American political discourse, and righties (plus Mo Dowd) picked it up and can’t let go of it.

And then there’s the wealth issue. David Leonhardt writes in today’s New York Times that Edwards and Romney both made fortunes in the 1980s. Yet Edwards is running on economic populism an Romney is a “free markets” guy.

The two men represent a clear divide between the Democratic and Republican parties over whether the government should redistribute more wealth, from the rich downward, now that economic inequality is greater than it has been since the 1920s.

I’d like to point out that ordinary working people created most of that wealth. Inequality doesn’t grow because the wealthy are somehow more deserving and working stiffs less so; it grows because the wealthy are able to control the wealth distribution system to their advantage. The role of government is not to take money away from the rich to give to the poor, but to keep the wealthy from gaming the system.

And this is good for us all in the long run, primarily because a nation with a large and upwardly mobile middle class is likely to be a politically stable nation; a nation in which most of the population is shut out of enjoying the wealth they create with their labor is asking for revolution.

Mr. Romney and Mr. Edwards also represent a divide among the affluent themselves. Many of the new wealthy — the great majority, in all likelihood — see their success as a sign of this country’s economic strength. Yet there is also a minority — including Mr. Buffett and William H. Gates Sr., Mr. Gates’s father, who have both opposed eliminating the estate tax — worried about inequality. …

… Every leading Democratic candidate has proposed rescinding the Bush administration’s tax cuts on households making at least $250,000, saying the money can be better used on programs to help the middle class. Every leading Republican candidate favors making the tax cuts permanent, saying that tax increases would hurt economic growth and, by extension, the middle class.

It may be significant that Edwards is the son of a mill worker and Romney is the son of an automobile executive. Romney explicitly denies there are two Americas, but it’s possible he’s never lived in America. Instead, he has lived his whole life in the Privilege Bubble.

Yet, on the Right, Edwards is called out for being a prissy poseur. Byron York wrote in September:

By the way, Edwards’s line, “I was brought home to a two-room house in a mill village” was carefully crafted, a reflection of his years of experience as a personal injury lawyer. Yes, after he was born he was brought home to a small house. But within a year his family moved to a better house as his father, a mill worker, began a rise that eventually made him a supervisor.

Did I mention Mitt’s dad was an auto executive? But the implication is that because Edwards has money now, he can’t possibly be sincere about wanting to help working people get a fair deal. Or else people who wish to help the poor are supposed to be poor. Or something. But in American history there have been other well-off people who fought plutocracy and tried to even the playing field.

Theodore, in fact, made a point of stepping out of the privilege bubble to hang out with cowboys and woodsmen. Franklin’s point of view likely was shaped by polio. Along with the various Roosevelts, the Kennedys — wealthier, I believe, than the Roosevelts — also came to be a fairly liberal/populist group.

The Right cannot honestly debate Edwards’s proposals, or much of anything else, so they fall back on criticizing Edwards’s looks and lifestyle without bothering to examine their own guys in the same light. Did I say something about intellectual bankruptcy? I believe I did.

Update: An editorial from the Concord Monitor — “Romney should not be the next president.”

A Conspiracy So Immense

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Tim Weiner writes in tomorrow’s New York Times,

A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.

Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.

Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.

“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said. …

… Hoover’s plan called for “the permanent detention” of the roughly 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons.

There is no evidence suggesting that President Truman approved any part of this proposal.

Reaction from the Power Tools was predictable: “Hoover was too quick to judge people disloyal–it would be interesting to get a look at the list of 12,000–but some may feel nostalgic for a time when disloyalty was at least acknowledged to be a bad thing.”

I feel nostalgic for a time when shredding the Bill of Rights was at least acknowledged to be a bad thing.

Regarding the 12,000 — from 1950 to 1953 J. Edgar Hoover leaked copious amounts of information and names to Sen. Joe McCarthy, who then “investigated” and held “hearings” in which he bullied and smeared his targets. McCarthy’s sidekick, the infamous Roy Cohn, also had contacts in the bureau, who gave him access to confidential FBI reports.

Much of what [McCarthy] got came directly from the FBI, which had a habit of leaking information to favored politicians. Not only was Joe friendly with J. Edgar Hoover, but several of his aides had either worked for the Bureau or built up good contacts there. Roy Cohn, for example, was very close with Lou Nichols, the assistant director. One source said that Cohn knew

    … all about FBI lists of supect Communists and has a fantastic memory for the names and backgrounds of practically all the important ex-Communists in the country. My friend has frequently been with Cohn when he picks up the phone, calls the FBI and demands to know the whereabouts of some ex-Communist or suspect Communist. Within a half hour or so the Bureau will call him back and give him the name of the special agent who is riding herd on the particular individual and Cohn will shortly thereafter get a call from the agent.

Despite his repeated denials, Cohn also had access to confidential FBI reports. One agent revealed that his colleagues “put in long hours poring over Bureau security files, abstracting them for Roy Cohn.” And Ruth Watt, chief clerk of the Government Operations Committee [chaired by McCarthy], recalled that “we had a lot of FBI reports because we could get them, you see.” Watt added that “Roy and J. Edgar Hoover knew each other pretty well, so it was not too difficult to get these things.” [David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy [Free Press, 1983], p. 257]

One suspects that if J. Edgar Hoover were seriously concerned about these 12,000 people, then information on at least some of them ended up with McCarthy and Cohn. And McCarthy and Cohn held investigations and hearings pretty much nonstop until the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. But not one of McCarthy’s investigations resulted in a conviction of espionage. And none of the many charges McCarthy brought against individuals were ever proved, even by the release of the Venona files. So it’s a good bet that the bulk of those 12,000 people that Hoover wanted to detain permanently were innocent.

Thinking

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Yesterday, Paul Krugman made the connection between the subprime lending crisis and Ayn Rand cultism.

“Fed shrugged as subprime crisis spread,” was the headline on a New York Times report on the failure of regulators to regulate. This may have been a discreet dig at Mr. Greenspan’s history as a disciple of Ayn Rand, the high priestess of unfettered capitalism known for her novel “Atlas Shrugged.”

In a 1963 essay for Ms. Rand’s newsletter, Mr. Greenspan dismissed as a “collectivist” myth the idea that businessmen, left to their own devices, “would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings.” On the contrary, he declared, “it is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for honest dealings and a quality product.”

It’s no wonder, then, that he brushed off warnings about deceptive lending practices, including those of Edward M. Gramlich, a member of the Federal Reserve board. In Mr. Greenspan’s world, predatory lending — like attempts to sell consumers poison toys and tainted seafood — just doesn’t happen.

Randians have a remarkable capacity not to notice that we human beings very often do things contrary to our own self-interest. It would be to our own self-interest, for example, not to commit crimes of any sort, as we’re likely to get caught eventually. It would be to our own self-interest not to smoke or use drugs or eat too much trans fats. The fact is, if we all acted according to our own self-interest the world would be a paradise. Alas, the number of human beings on the planet today who truly and only act in their own self-interest is probably in the dozens. The rest of us are busily self-destructing, one way or another. This is what’s called “human nature.”

Krugman continues,

But Mr. Greenspan wasn’t the only top official who put ideology above public protection. Consider the press conference held on June 3, 2003 — just about the time subprime lending was starting to go wild — to announce a new initiative aimed at reducing the regulatory burden on banks. Representatives of four of the five government agencies responsible for financial supervision used tree shears to attack a stack of paper representing bank regulations. The fifth representative, James Gilleran of the Office of Thrift Supervision, wielded a chainsaw.

Also in attendance were representatives of financial industry trade associations, which had been lobbying for deregulation. As far as I can tell from press reports, there were no representatives of consumer interests on the scene.

Two months after that event the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, one of the tree-shears-wielding agencies, moved to exempt national banks from state regulations that protect consumers against predatory lending. If, say, New York State wanted to protect its own residents — well, sorry, that wasn’t allowed.

Generations of real-world experience says that securities and markets need some kind of regulation to keep them honest or the forces of greed will take over and tear them apart. We saw this in the late 19th century during the age of the Robber Barons. We saw this in the Coolidge Administration. We saw it during the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s.

Yet Rand culties and other wingnuts simply will not learn from real-world experience. They cling to their ideologies come hell or high water. The Narrative is their only truth.

For example, Michael Barone writes,

… the preference for smaller rather than larger government is not as ample as it used to be. The strongest case against big government has been its failures in the 1970s, typified by gas lines and stagflation. But the median-age voter in 2008 was born around 1964, so he or she never sat in those gas lines or struggled to pay rising bills with a paycheck eroded by inflation. That demographic factor helps explain why Democrats today are promising big-government programs, unlike Bill Clinton in 1992, when the median-age voter remembered the 1970s very well. …

… Republicans, facing an electorate half of which doesn’t remember the 1970s and most of which has not appreciated the generally good economy we’ve had since 2001, have yet to muster persuasive arguments for their policies.

Barone’s thinking is so sloppy one wonders if he can tie his own shoes. He blithely connects “big government” to 1970s gas lines and “stagflation,” but OPEC caused the gas lines and I see no consensus that “big government” — whatever that means — caused stagflation.

On the other hand, all those median-age voters probably do remember the country was a lot better off before the wingnuts took over.

I find myself speculating if right-wing polemicists like Barone are deliberately being deceptive, or if they are functioning on autopilot and never honestly stop to think through, say, what the connection between “big government” and 1970s gas lines might have been. If the latter is true, shouldn’t we be rounding these people up for further study? How exactly does the wingnut brain work? How can a man be bright enough to graduate from law school and still be utterly unable to think?