Chickens, Eggs, Prosperity

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Democrats are becoming the party of choice for the wealthy, according to several recent op eds. Let’s review.

It’s already been noted that business sectors, with the exception of petrochemicals, are donating more to Dems and less to Republicans for the first time in a great many years. People with profits in mind think the Republicans are far too stuck on God, guns, and gays.

But wealth is also about protecting and exploiting its advantages, and Dems are ready to help. Yesterday Paul Krugman asked if Dems were “wobbled by wealth.”

The most conspicuous example of this influence right now is the way Senate Democrats are dithering over whether to close the hedge fund tax loophole — which allows executives at private equity firms and hedge funds to pay a tax rate of only 15 percent on most of their income.

Only a handful of very wealthy people benefit from this loophole, while closing the loophole would yield billions of dollars each year in revenue. Retrieving this revenue is a key ingredient in legislation approved by the House Ways and Means Committee to reform the alternative minimum tax, something that must be done to avoid a de facto tax increase for millions of middle-class Americans.

A handful of superwealthy hedge fund managers versus millions of middle-class Americans — it sounds like a no-brainer.

But as The Financial Times reports, “Key votes have been delayed and time bought after the investment industry hired some of Washington’s most prominent lobbyists to influence lawmakers and spread largesse through campaign donations.” It goes on to describe how Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, was “toasted by industry lobbyists” (and serenaded by Barry Manilow) at a money-raising party for his special fund to help Democrats get elected next year.

Is this the shape of things to come?

No, it’s not the shape of things to come. It’s the shape of what’s been going on for a long time, in both parties.

But Michael Franc wrote in yesterday’s Financial Times that “Democrats wake up to being the party of the rich.”

The decision by Senate majority leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat, surprised many Washington insiders, who saw the plan as appealing to the spirit of class warfare that infuses the Democratic party. Liberal disappointment in Mr Reid was palpable at media outlets such as USA Today, where an editorial chastised: “The Democrats, who control Congress and claim to represent the middle and lower classes, ought to be embarrassed.”

Far from embarrassing, this episode may reflect a dawning Democratic awareness of whom they really represent. For the demographic reality is that, in America, the Democratic party is the new “party of the rich”. More and more Democrats represent areas with a high concentration of wealthy households. Using Internal Revenue Service data, the Heritage Foundation identified two categories of taxpayers – single filers with incomes of more than $100,000 and married filers with incomes of more than $200,000 – and combined them to discern where the wealthiest Americans live and who represents them.

Democrats now control the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional jurisdictions. More than half of the wealthiest households are concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats control both Senate seats.

The Financial Times implies that the concentration of wealth in Blue states also is a new thing, but it isn’t. Massachusetts and California didn’t become more liberal and more prosperous than Alabama and Mississippi last week. The more affluent states have tended to be more liberal for a long time. I’ll put the chicken ahead of the egg and say that these states are not more likely to elect Democrats because they are more affluent, but rather are more likely to be affluent because they elect Democrats. States that are more willing to tax themselves and provide better public education, well-maintained infrastructure, wider “safety net” programs and other social services will, in the long run, be more prosperous generally than states that let let education, infrastructure, etc., rot.

Yes, Democrats, like Republicans, are too influenced by Money, but they’re not as “wobbled” by right-wing ideology as are Republicans.

I’ve argued many times, such as here, that the U.S. became the world’s biggest economic powerhouse in the 20th century because, for a time, we invested in ourselves. And we are in danger of losing that status because of our own stinginess to each other.

A blog called “Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science” shows us another factor:

It is characteristic of the east and west coasts that the richer areas tend to be more liberal, but in other parts of the country, notably the south, the correlation goes the other way. A comparable journey in Texas would go from Collin County, a suburb of Dallas where George W. Bush received 71% of the vote, to rural Zavala County in the southwest, where Bush received only 25%. … there is a clear pattern [in Texas] that poor counties supported the Democrats while the Republicans won in middle-class and rich counties. …

… By comparison, the next graph shows the counties of Brooks’s home state of Maryland: here there is no clear pattern of county income and Republican vote. We have indicated Montgomery County, the prototypical wealthy slice of Blue America, in bold, and it is not difficult to find poorer, more Republican-supporting counties nearby as comparisons. Rich and poor counties look different in Blue America than in Red America.

Consider also this old Paul Krugman column. On the whole Red states receive more federal aid than they pay in federal taxes; wealthier Blue states pay more federal taxes than they get back. “Over all, blue America subsidizes red America to the tune of $90 billion or so each year.” But Red states tend to have more social problems — “Children in red states are more likely to be born to teenagers or unmarried mothers — in 1999, 33.7 percent of babies in red states were born out of wedlock, versus 32.5 percent in blue states. National divorce statistics are spotty, but per capita there were 60 percent more divorces in Montana than in New Jersey. ”

My understanding is that in more affluent states, wealthier people more often vote Democratic and poorer people more often vote Republiican, but in poor states it’s the other way around. I postulate that one reason many poor states are poor is that they’ve been run by a right-wing establishment for a long time. The wealthy of the poorer Red states, members of the establishment, align themselves with Republicans to keep their plutocratic power and privilege. The wealthy of the more affluent Blue states are more likely to appreciate the higher overall standard of living that a reasonably progressive government can enable.

At the same time, the less wealthy of Red states may have a greater appreciation of economic populism than their counterparts in Blue states.

Even so, in election cycles from 1976 to 2004, Democrats did much better among the poor than the rich in the nation overall. Maybe that difference is narrowing. But suddenly declaring that the Dems are the party “of the rich,” as the Financial Times is doing, strikes me as the cheap promotion of a cooked-up talking point.

Elsewhere, Jonathan Rauch asks “Can Democrats Own Prosperity?” Since the 1950s, he says, pollsters have asked the question “Looking ahead for the next few years, which political party do you think will do a better job of keeping the country prosperous?” And Rauch provides a chart that shows Dems generally owned that question until Ronald Reagan came along.

The chart begins in 1951, when Harry Truman was president, and it shows how decisively the Depression and New Deal had bestowed “party of prosperity” status on the Democrats. Only occasionally did the Republicans even touch them. The Democrats’ prosperity advantage seemed to be their birthright, part of the natural order of things, unlikely to be challenged or changed. Even well into the 1970s, as stagflation set in, few Democrats foresaw the trouble ahead.

That trouble arrived in the person of Ronald Reagan, whose greatest political achievement was to seize prosperity for the Republicans. He knew what he was doing when he made famous the phrase, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” By the time he was finished, Reagan had exorcised Herbert Hoover’s ghost. Now it was the Democratic Party, once seemingly synonymous with modern economic management, that seemed inept and obsolete.

A recession and a bumbling Republican campaign nonetheless helped put a Democrat in the White House in 1993, and the succeeding eight years brought the Democrats news both good and bad. The good news was that a turbocharged economy lifted them back to parity. The bad news was that a turbocharged economy lifted them only to parity. Perhaps the memory of stagflation was too fresh in the public’s mind; perhaps divided government muddied the picture. For whatever reason, by the time George W. Bush took office, the Democrats had not made the sale. The country had no party of prosperity.

Seeing opportunity, Bush set out to recapture and fortify Reagan’s redoubt. His weapon was tax cuts—large and aggressive ones. That, plus five years of economic growth, should have pleased the public.

The results? Devastating. Crushing. Not only did Bush and his party fail to make the sale, the public slammed the door in their faces. Just why is hard to say. Worries about economic insecurity, and the failure of the median household income (adjusted for inflation) to rise during the Bush years, undoubtedly played a part. Bush’s personal unpopularity and the public’s displaced anger over the Iraq war may also figure.

In any case, by September 2006, Democrats had opened up a 17-point lead on prosperity. This September, the gap widened to 20 points, confirming that the change was no fluke. Democrats enjoy a lead on prosperity whose like they have not seen in a generation.

Rauch suggests that to maintain this advantate, Dems need a prosperity “narrative.” The right-wing “supply side” narrative is no longer selling, but Dems have yet to come up with a counter-narrative.

Various bits and pieces are in circulation. Fix health care. Improve income security. Restrict trade. Raise taxes on the rich. Democrats hope to speak to middle-class America’s feelings of economic vulnerability, which is probably the right tree to bark up. But while some Democrats strike notes of class resentment, others seem to blame foreigners. No candidate has found a package and a tone that tell a story not primarily about populism or nationalism but about prosperity: raising the tide to lift all boats.

I’ve got one: Let’s invest in ourselves. The ad running in the left-hand column says “Invest in the Home Front,” but I’d like to get away from war metaphors.

As for the influence of the malefactors of great wealth on politics, this is an old and deeply entrenched problem that probably will never go away completely. Public campaign finance would help minimize the beast, however.

See also BooMan and Kevin Drum.

MSNBC: Going Our Way?

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Jacques Steinberg (great name!) writes in today’s New York Times that MSNBC wants to create a nightime lineup that liberals can love. I’m not sure they’ve figured out how to do this, however.

Riding a ratings wave from “Countdown With Keith Olbermann,” a program that takes strong issue with the Bush administration, MSNBC is increasingly seeking to showcase its nighttime lineup as a welcome haven for viewers of a similar mind.

Lest there be any doubt that the cable channel believes there is ratings gold in shows that criticize the administration with the same vigor with which Fox News’s hosts often champion it, two NBC executives acknowledged yesterday that they were talking to Rosie O’Donnell about a prime-time show on MSNBC.

Um, Rosie O’Donnell? She raised viewership while she was on “The View,” Steinberg says. Yeah, but that was daytime. I agree with Jeralyn that Rosie would be a huge mistake. One of Jeralyn’s commenters suggested either David Schuster or Rachel Maddow. My only objection is that if David Schuster becomes a regular program host he’ll have less time for reporting.

But even without Ms. O’Donnell, MSNBC already presents a three-hour block of nighttime talk — Chris Matthews’s “Hardball” at 7, Mr. Olbermann at 8, and “Live With Dan Abrams” at 9 — in which the White House takes a regular beating. The one early-evening program on MSNBC that is often most sympathetic to the administration, “Tucker” with Tucker Carlson at 6 p.m., is in real danger of being canceled, said one NBC executive, who, like those who spoke of Ms. O’Donnell, would do so only on condition of anonymity.

Well, OK, Carlson is a complete waste of time. That’s the one time slot O’Donnell might improve.

Having a prime-time lineup that tilts ever more demonstrably to the left could be risky for General Electric, MSNBC’s parent company, which is subject to legislation and regulation far afield of the cable landscape. Officials at MSNBC emphasize that they never set out to create a liberal version of Fox News.

Note that Faux News, which is nothing but the propaganda arm of the GOP, doesn’t have to worry about legislation and regulation.

The NBC executive in charge of MSNBC, Phil Griffin, says that the cable channel didn’t set out to favor any political position. He implies the apparent move to the left is being driven by ratings. I suspect that’s true. For years they tried to compete with Faux News by being Faux News Lite. Olbermann has showed them the real way to compete is offering viewers something they can’t see on Faux News. Like, you know, truth and facts and stuff.

MSNBC’s other evening stars, Chris “Tweety” Matthews and Dan Abrams, are hardly fellow travelers of Noam Chomsky, and both still give plenty of time to right-wing mouthpieces. I find Abrams less annoying than Matthews, however. Those of you who miss Joe Scarborough (anybody?) probably already know he moved to mornings awhile back.

Meanwhile, at the Los Angeles Times Jonah Goldberg laments that “fake news,” a la Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, is becoming the new standard in news reporting.

Indeed, while the network news broadcasts are sustained by the consumers of denture cream, adult diapers and pharmacological marital aides, it’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” that have a grip on the hip, iPhone crowd. And plenty of those younger viewers seem to believe that they can deduce what’s going on in the real world from jokes on a fake newscast. It’s no longer funny because it’s true. It’s true because it’s funny.

He had it right the first time — it’s funny because it’s true. Great satire functions by cutting through sugar-coatings and qualifiers to find the absurdities inherent in unvarnished truth. Satirists don’t make up jokes. They reveal The Joke.

For example, in the next paragraph, Jonah blames the problems of modern journalism on the old TV sitcom “Murphy Brown.”

When Brown had a baby out of wedlock, Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the writers of the show. Liberals then reacted as though Quayle had insulted a real person. Ever since, journalists and politicians have been playing themselves in movies and TV series, perhaps trying to disprove the cliche that Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.

He’s serious, mind you, and there’s The Joke. You can’t make this shit up. I couldn’t, anyway.

Irony Is Dead, Embalmed and Buried

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Amanda at Think Progress:

White House Tells Musharraf: Never ‘Restrict Constitutional Freedoms’ To Fight Terror

During today’s White House press briefing, spokeswoman Dana Perino condemned Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s declaration of “emergency rule” in Pakistan. She said that the administration is “deeply disappointed” by the measure, which suspends the country’s constitution, and believes it is never “reasonable” to “restrict constitutional freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism”:

Q: Is it ever reasonable to restrict constitutional freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism?

MS. PERINO: In our opinion, no.

And she can say this with a straight face.

Neither

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I just received the November issue of Reason magazine. I don’t know why, since I don’t subscribe to it. But the cover is stunning, and not in a good way. It’s a photograph of Rudy Giuliani with the blurb, “The Liberal Candidate: Is Rudy Giuliani a new Barry Goldwater or a new Bobby Kennedy?”

Um, Reason magazine? Are you people nuts?

The article, which is not yet online, is written by David Weigel. I’ve only skimmed the article, but Weigel seems to take the Giuliani-Bobby Kennedy comparison seriously. Among other things, Giuliani “considers the crusading Kennedy the model for how to use power.”

Please.

Michael Tomasky has a more accurate view.

[Giuliani] will say and do anything he feels he needs to say and do to get power.

Newspapers write that he was “liberal” on social issues in his mayoral days, as if his positions on abortion and immigration were matters of conviction. Nonsense. He took the positions he needed to take to be elected in an overwhelmingly Democratic city. (Although to grant him a speck of humanity, I’d guess that his pro-gay rights views were more or less genuine: anyone living in the city gets to know many gay people.)

And now he is saying and doing whatever he needs to say and do to get millions of rightwing Americans to support him. He recently told a meeting of social conservatives that his reliance on God “is at the core of who I am”. As mayor he was known to attend mass almost never, he obviously cheated serially on the wife (wife No 2) he married in the Catholic church, and the only occasions on which I can remember him invoking God when he was mayor were the two times he was forced to say “so help me God” in taking the oath of office.

But forward he will charge, telling more lies with even more impunity. And immunity, because in a culture where a sense of history is largely limited to remembering certain stirring television images, he will for the most part get away with it, confident in the knowledge that the main thing most Americans will ever recall about him is the film clip of him running from the rubble of the World Trade Centre on September 11. A far smaller percentage will know that the reason he had run was because he had catastrophically decided to place his emergency command centre in the tower complex – the only building in New York that had previously been the target of a major terrorist attack.

Tomasky’s title: “This is one dangerous man: it’s George Bush with brains.”

Weigel admits that Giuliani is not a libertarian, but he seems to want to believe that Rudy would be sorta kinda libertarian in some ways — a “liberal” who will cut taxes and be tough on national security.

A few months ago there was a lot of nonsense scattered about the web about Giuliani’s “libertarianism,” but I had thought the libertarians had started to catch on to the Truth About Rudy. At least Lew Rockwell isn’t fooled —

After Giuliani spoke, the red-state fascists in the audience all started whooping up the bloodlust that the politicians have been encouraging for the last six years – a mindless display of Nazi-like nationalism that would cause the founding fathers to shudder with fear of what we’ve become. These people are frantic about terrorism and extremism abroad, but they need to take a good hard look in the mirror.

Ye shall know the tree by its fruit.

Cabbages in Greenland

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Greenland Thaws is a series of 13 photos by John McConnico on the NYT website, that will give you pause. I photoshopped a few of them, including captions:

Greeland Farmers

Greenlandic farmers are experimenting with vegetables that have never been grown commercially in the country. Kenneth Hoeg, the region’s chief agriculture adviser, says he does not see why southern Greenland cannot eventually be full of vegetable farms and viable forests.

Greeland Sheep Are Fatter

Ewes are having fatter lambs, and more of them every season. The growing season, such as it is, now lasts roughly from mid-May through mid-September, about three weeks longer than a decade ago.

Greenland Decorative Cabbage

People come from all over to gape at the plants, like these decorative cabbage, growing at [agricultural research station] Upernaviarsuk.

Local Produce

A Greenlandic supermarket is stocking locally grown cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage this year for the first time.

Back in the early 1960s, when global warming was only a theory, scientists predicted that the effects would be most dramatic in the polar regions. This is borne out by the dramatic lengthening of the growing season in Greenland, versus lower latitudes.

This posting is kind of a Rorshach test. Those from a limited perspective may see this single data point as evidence of human ingenuity and adaptability in the face of change, a triumph of free market economics, and conclude that global warming is not as serious as some make it to be. Those from a larger, planetary perspective, will likely be alarmed, for they understand that the earth’s climate is a large and complex system, with many feedback loops and interdependencies, and that a change at one point can trigger dramatic, and less benign changes elsewhere. The world’s leading scientists have articulated many of them.

I’m not a climate scientist, but I am a student of chaos mathematics and physics. I wish I could tell you where I first heard this, but a useful analogy is to envision the earth’s climate as a beach ball at rest between a particular set of sand dunes. It has mostly been in this stable state – resting between a particular set of dunes – since the last ice age. A few breezes may have rocked the ball from time to time, creating mini ice ages for example, but the earth’s atmospheric and oceanic currents have remained in the same configuration since the end of the last ice age.

Global warming represents a large enough energy input that could cause this ball to move, potentially kicking it into the air, where it would ultimately come down and find a new equilibrium, a new resting spot, possibly between a new set of sand dunes. As the beach ball moves to a new resting point, the ocean and atmospheric currents are reconfigured, dramatically altering worldwide weather and habitat.

The ice ages, and the intervening, opposite periods of relative warmth – are similar reconfigurations from the past, times when the beach ball was kicked into a new region on the beach. Transition periods – when the climate is seeking a new equilibrium – when the old pattern is dissolving and the new has yet to emerge – analgous to times when the beach ball is in motion – is the disaster scenario that disrupts everything, not just the lives of farmers in Greenland.

No one knows whether the climate has reached this particular tipping point – whether the ball is airborn and seeking a new equilibrium, invoking this disaster scenario – but it’s significant that the system has feedback loops, amplifying the inputs which push it toward this point of no return.

Al Gore is more optimistic than I, regarding our ability to deal with global warming. It would be one thing if we had a functioning, forward thinking government that could lead the world’s richest, most able nation – as well as the rest of the planet – into something approaching ecotopia, but we’re presently cursed with the most backward, unconscious leaders this country has ever seen, and lots of inertia and brokenness after they leave. This doesn’t even consider Lord Cheney’s demonic lust for a massively bigger conflagration in the Middle East by attacking Iran.

Despite the Democrats’ likely sweep in 2008, and despite the relative sanity of the leading Democratic candidates, my fear about 2008 is that it may be too little, too late – all the moreso if a triangulator like Hillary wins. I hope I’m wrong. I’d be more optimistic if the leading candidates were serious about getting out of Iraq, which is a proxy for admitting and coming to terms with America’s oil addiction, a root cause of global warming. I’d be even more optimistic if the leading candidates were serious about atoning for our country’s shameful acts overseas – necessary to move past war, and to get to cooperation, and to begin to make real progress on living in harmony on the earth. It can be done, if we want it. If the leaders are unwilling, we individual citizens will have to find ways to do this from the grass roots.

If we don’t change course in time, I foresee a period of resource wars – Iraq is the opening battle – which will ultimately be trumphed by the accelerating effects of climate change. It will spread well beyond farmers blessed with cabbages in Greenland. Erratic weather, disease and starvation – the horsemen of the apocalypse – will trumph and finally put an end to war, as people will be too busy simply trying to survive. The Hopi call it the time of Purification, which will either be achieved peacefully, or by force, until we humans get the message. And evolve.

Free to Be

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An anti-abortion rights letter in today’s Washington Post speaks volumes about the right-wing mind. Jonathan Imbody of the Christian Medical Association writes,

If a revival of federalism sent the abortion issue back to the states, states such as Virginia would not be likely to follow the Left Coast’s lead in denying the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to the unborn.

Dr. Imbody, exactly what rights to “liberty” and “the pursuit of happiness” does a fetus require? (I discuss “right to life” below.)

This reminds me of the scene from “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” in which Stan (Eric Idle) announces he wants to be called Loretta.

JUDITH: Well, why do you want to be Loretta, Stan?

LORETTA: I want to have babies.

REG: You want to have babies?!

LORETTA: It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them.

REG: But… you can’t have babies.

LORETTA: Don’t you oppress me.

REG: I’m not oppressing you, Stan. You haven’t got a womb! — Where’s the fetus going to gestate?! You going to keep it in a box?!

LORETTA: [crying]

JUDITH: Here! I– I’ve got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can’t actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody’s fault, not even the Romans’, but that he can have the right to have babies.

FRANCIS: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother. Sister. Sorry.

REG: What’s the point?

FRANCIS: What?

REG: What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can’t have babies?!

FRANCIS: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.

REG: Symbolic of his struggle against reality.

A great moment in cinema. Anyway, Roe v. Wade allows states to ban elective abortion when a fetus has reached the point in gestation — late in the second trimester — when it might be viable and survive separated from mother. This is, IMO, a sensible and even conservative point at which one might decide a fetus has “rights.” (Arguably, the “pursuit of happiness” begins when an infant first perceives discomfort and expresses a desire to be made comfortable — at birth, in other words.)

But I wanted to call out Dr. Imbody’s letter because it exemplifies several common features of rightie rhetoric.

First, words like freedom and liberty, not to mention rights, don’t actually mean anything to righties. Such words are merely rhetorical devices, planted like flags in otherwise untenable arguments. For example, to righties, warrantless surveillance is OK if it’s done for “freedom.”

Also, notice that at no point in this letter does Dr. Imbody mention women. When women do appear in rightie anti-choice rhetoric, they are either helplessly brainless children who need men to protect them from their bad decisions, or hopelessly selfish “wacko women” who enjoy killing babies. Remember, once righties take an ideological position, anyone who gets in their way must be demonized, trivialized, and swift-boated. Recently there’s been a trend to simply not mention women at all. (On the other hand, tender solicitation is given to the fetus, which is endowed with sentience, free will, and remarkable verbal skill.)

Dr. Imbody also writes that because only some states would criminalize abortion,

Overturning the injustice of Roe would result in a network of safe-haven states where inalienable rights and equal protection are accorded to all members of the human race.

Translation: Women are not members of the human race with inalienable rights and who deserve equal protection.

Dr. Imbody continues,

As with slavery, Americans regret the injustice of abortion on demand. A Gallup poll released in June showed that an overwhelming (2-to-1) majority of Americans consider it “morally wrong.”

A majority might find abortion morally wrong, but Gallup also found “Most Americans oppose the idea of passing laws to outlaw abortion and they soundly reject the idea of overturning Roe. v. Wade.”

Also, unless Gallup released two polls about abortion in June 2007, Imbody is flat-out lying about the “overwhelming” majority. Gallup: “At the same time, a slight majority (51%) believes abortion is morally wrong; only 40% say it is morally acceptable.”

This illustrates another common feature of rightie rhetoric; several features, actually. The outright lies are common enough. But what is more common is what we might call selective use of facts in support of deceptive conclusions. For argument’s sake, let’s pretend Imbody was not lying that an “overwhelming” majority of people think abortion is morally wrong. He implies — without specifically saying so — that this opinion demonstrates regret over legalization of abortion. “Like slavery,” abortion should be outlawed. A person reading Imbody’s letter would likely conclude that the Gallup organization found a majority opinion in favor of criminalizing abortion. Imbody leaves out Gallup’s finding that “Most Americans oppose the idea of passing laws to outlaw abortion and they soundly reject the idea of overturning Roe. v. Wade.”

This is a variation on warrantless surveillance for “freedom.” In this case, Imbody is telling lies for “truth,” truth being whatever Imbody wants to believe it is. He probably doesn’t consider his lies to be lies, because people ought to be for criminalizing abortion, so it’s just a technicality that they aren’t.

In the real world, life doesn’t sort itself into a series of neat binary choices — good/bad, black/white, right/wrong. We humans are messy and complicated creatures, and we exist within complex webs of relationships and responsibilities that affect our personal and “moral” decisions in countless ways. I think most people understand that, which is why many Americans who consider abortion to be “morally wrong” are still reluctant to criminalize it. We need only to look at the real-world consequences of criminalizing abortion to see the harm caused by shoving abortion underground.

As I argued here, the interests of morality and legality are sometimes the same, but sometimes not. Civilization requires enforcement of some matters — respect for ownership of property, enforcement of contracts, assurance that citizens cannot slaughter each other without penalty. Without these basic social agreements we humans wouldn’t be able to live in communities at all. We’d still be guarding our caves from other cave dwellers. But when governments go too far to control citizens’ behavior, even for benevolent purposes, it can backfire. Restrictions can cause bigger social problems than the ones the restrictions were supposed to solve. Prohibition is a classic example. Many of us would agree that the “war on drugs” is another example. The experiences of women in nations that ban abortions reveal that the bans do nothing to stop abortion but do create other problems — death and mutilation from back alley abortions, a black market for abortifacient drugs, women who hesitate to seek medical help after a miscarriage for fear they’ll be prosecuted for abortion.

Awhile back Scott Lemieux argued,

If the goal of abortion [law] is to protect fetal life, criminalization is at best an ineffective and grossly inequitable means of achieving this goal, and the bundle of policies favoring reproductive freedom (including legal abortion) generally produces lower abortion rates than the illegal abortion-no rational sex ed-limited access to contraception-threadbare welfare state usually favored by the American forced pregnancy lobby. If, on the other hand, you’re in it more for the injuring women than for the protection of fetal life, then criminalizing abortion makes good sense.

What about the “right to life”? The concept of “rights” is one that evolved slowly over the past several centuries. Though Jefferson’s “endowed by their Creator” is a lovely phrase, mankind was not aware of this endowment until some Enlightenment philosophers thought up the Rights of Man.

This essay on Rights from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy makes intriguing reading and demonstrates that we’re still struggling to define what “rights” are and how they are justified. However you define “rights,” they are usually about personal autonomy and the exercise of free will. A “right” extended to an organism incapable of free will, and even of sentience, makes the word right as meaningless as rightie usage of freedom. Also, the rights of one person can clash with the rights of another, which means that the exercise of rights cannot always be absolute.

The philosopher Ronald Dworkin proposed that rights are like a trump card that override other considerations. But the Stanford Encclopedia Essay says,

Dworkin’s metaphor only requires that rights trump non-right objectives, such as increasing national wealth. What of the priority of one right with respect to another? We can keep to the trumps metaphor while recognizing that some rights have a higher priority than others. Within the trump suit, a jack still beats a seven or a three. Your right of way at a flashing yellow light has priority over the right of way of the driver facing a flashing red; and the right of way of an ambulance trumps you both.

This metaphor of trumps leads naturally to the question of whether there is any right that has priority to absolutely all other normative considerations: whether there is an “ace of rights.” Gewirth (1981) asserts that there is at least one such absolute right: the right of all persons not to be made the victim of a homicidal project. For such a right to be absolute it would have to trump every other consideration whatsoever: other rights, economic efficiency, saving lives, everything. Not all would agree with Gewirth that even this very powerful right overrides every conceivable normative concern. Some would think it might be justifiable to infringe even this right were this somehow necessary, for example, to prevent the deaths of a great many people. If it is permissible to kill one in order to save a billion, then not even Gewirth’s right is absolute.

Anti-choice arguments insist that the “rights” of an embryo at any stage of development trump those of its mother. Those of us who are pro-choice think a woman’s well being and free will trump any honorary “rights” of an embryo or fetus prior to viability. Brushing rights aside, plenty of real-world examples show us that criminalizing abortion has a widespread, detrimental impact on the health of women, even women who don’t choose to terminate pregnancies. Indeed, an absolutist “right to life” position is detrimental to the health of embryos. That, to me, settles the argument.

But this takes us to one more point about right-wing rhetoric — the extent to which righties have adopted liberal rhetoric to defend illiberal views. For example, creationists have adopted “liberal” language about “inclusiveness” and “balance” to argue for teaching creationism in science class. Human rights are the most liberal of all liberal values. There’s a kind of evil genius at work when “rights” become an instrument of oppression.

More Suggestions

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A couple of editorials in tomorrow’s New York Times that will get your heart pumping … first, “Playing Games With Toy Safety“:

With the holiday season approaching, there is more bad news about the federal agency charged with protecting children from unsafe toys. Nancy Nord, acting chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, joined industry lobbyists in opposing a Senate bill intended to strengthen her enfeebled agency. That was followed by the revelation that Ms. Nord and her predecessor took free trips from the toy industry.

Second, “Republican Tricks on Children’s Health“:

For weeks now, the president and his Congressional allies have charged that the Democrats are unwilling to negotiate a compromise on expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-chip, because they want to use Republican opposition as a campaign issue. But it is the Senate’s Republican leaders who are doing their best to block any compromise.

They clearly would prefer to have no bill enacted — and provide ammunition for the president’s campaign to depict Congress as a failure — than do anything meaningful to help children.

Words fail.

Surviving

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Yesterday I wrote about claims and counter-claims being made about cancer treatment. A number of statistics say that the United States leads the world in successful treatment of cancer, and those stats have become beloved of righties who argue that our crippled, hemorrhaging behemoth of a health care system is still The Best Health Care System in the World.

I suspect part of this success comes from an initiative signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1971, the National Cancer Act, also known as the “war on cancer” act. Nixon dedicated a considerable chunk of taxpayer money to cancer research and treatment. Among other initiatives, a military biological warfare facility was converted into an internationally admired cancer treatment center, and the National Cancer Institute was given unique autonomy and special budgetary authority within the National Institute of Health. Although many specific drugs and treatments are manufactured by private industry, much of the basic research that made those drugs and treatments possible was underwritten by taxpayer dollars.

Gotta love those big gubmint programs, huh?

So today, U.S. citizens with cancer enjoy superior diagnosis and treatment … as long as they have insurance. Otherwise, tough luck, buddy.

Bob Herbert writes in his column today about Lonnie Lynam, a self-employed carpenter in Pipe Creek, Texas, whose cancer went untreated because he didn’t have insurance. Lynam put off seeing a doctor for his headaches, so the tumors in his brain went undiagnosed until the pain was unbearable. Even after the cancer was discovered, he received spotty, hit-and-miss treatment because he had no insurance.

Betty Lynam flew to Texas as often as she could to be with her son. She said he needed chemotherapy and radiation treatment, but since he couldn’t afford it, he couldn’t always get it.

“He was trying to pay a little bit at a time for the doctors and for the different treatments,” she said. “But he didn’t have a savings account or any collateral, except for his tools.

“I’d ask how he was feeling, and he’d tell me, ‘Well, I didn’t get the treatment today.’ And I’d say, ‘Why?’ And he’d say, ‘Well, I got in there and they found out I didn’t have any insurance and the woman told me I’d have to come back another time because she’d have to check with the doctor or somebody.’

“He suffered a great deal. Yes, he did.”

Lynam died in March, at the age of 45.

Cancer is no longer the all-but-automatic death sentence that it once was. Extraordinary progress has been made in fighting the myriad forms of the disease.

But, as the American Cancer Society has recently been stressing, the health coverage crisis in the U.S. is a major drag on this fight.

“A woman without health insurance who gets a breast cancer diagnosis is at least 40 percent more likely to die,” said John Seffrin, the cancer society’s chief executive.

According to the cancer society: “Uninsured patients and those on Medicaid are much more likely than those with private health insurance to be diagnosed with cancer in its later stages, when it is more often fatal.”

The uninsured (and underinsured) are also much less likely to get the most effective treatment after the diagnosis is made.

There are 47 million Americans without health insurance and another 17 million with coverage that will not pay for the treatments necessary to fight cancer and other very serious diseases.

The bottom line, said Mr. Seffrin, is that “the number of people who are suffering needlessly from cancer because they don’t have access to quality health care is very large and increasing as I speak.”

In fact, the American Cancer Society is so alarmed by our failure to treat the uninsured that it recently launched an initiative to call attention to the problem. From the ACS web site:

The new initiative aims to draw attention to plight of the 47 million Americans who have no health insurance at all, and the millions more whose coverage isn’t adequate to meet their health care needs. If cancer strikes, these people may have to do without necessary treatment because it’s too expensive, or put themselves into deep financial debt to pay for care.

That’s what happened to Raina, one of the patients highlighted in the new campaign. Her insurance didn’t cover all the costs of her thyroid cancer treatment, and her family couldn’t afford the payments.

“Basically, on every medical bill that I have, they’ve turned it over to a collection agency,” says Raina, who will join Seffrin and other ACS officials at Monday’s conference.

“No one should have to choose between taking care of their health and paying their bills,” says Richard C. Wender, MD, national volunteer president of ACS and another conference speaker.

The consequences of being uninsured or underinsured can be dire. Recent American Cancer Society studies found that people with no health insurance and those with only Medicaid coverage were more likely to be diagnosed with advanced cancer than people who had private health insurance. The more advanced cancer is when it’s found, the harder it is to treat — and the more expensive, in both personal and financial costs.

It’s an article of faith among righties that the uninsured are, somehow, getting medical care, somewhere. They can always go to emergency rooms, right? Going to the ER is OK if you’ve got a broken leg, but for catastrophic or chronic illnesses it’s not working. By law, emergency rooms are required only to stabilize everyone who comes in the door. They aren’t set up to provide free chemotherapy.

Last May, righties were linking proudly to a report that said American cancer patients survive at higher rates than anywhere else because our patients get advanced drugs not available elsewhere. Captain Ed wrote,

A new study by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden shows that the American health care system outperforms the socialized systems in Europe in getting new medicines to cancer patients. The difference saves lives, and the existing Western European systems force people to die at higher rates from the same cancers, although the Telegraph buries that lede (via QandO).

As Dr. Luba helpfully pointed out yesterday, the “survivor” rate Captain Ed is so proud of is not a measure of people who are cured, but of how many people with a given cancer survive 5 years. When the Center for Disease Control gives a survival rate of 97% and a mortality rate of 26.5 for prostate cancer patients, it’s telling you that a chunk of the “survivors” will die of their cancer eventually.

The hype from May was that U.S. cancer patients lived longer because they had better access to new oncology drugs. The Telegraph reported:

The researchers, whose report is published in the journal Annals of Oncology, found that Austria, France, Switzerland and the US were leaders in using new cancer drugs.

The greatest differences in the uptake of drugs were noted for the new colorectal and lung cancer drugs.

The proportion of colorectal cancer patients with access to the drug Avastin was 10 times higher in the US than it was in Europe, with the UK having a lower uptake than the European average.

Score one for the private pharmaceutical industry, say the righties. But this article from Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News says these results are less glorious than they might appear.

The clinical reality for metastatic colorectal cancer is that the FDA-approved combination regimen of IFL (irinotecan, bolus fluorouracil, and leucovorin) plus Avastin increases median overall survival by 4.7 months. This small increase comes with a host of side effects, which impinge upon quality of life, as well as placing a burden on the patient and the healthcare system.

While this small increase is hailed by the FDA as being impressive, the clinical reality is that there is no cure for metastatic colorectal cancer. The much-vaunted blockbuster drug Avastin is simply an antibody supplement incorporated into an already complex chemotherapeutic drug regimen that may slow down the cancer process depending on the genetic constitution of that individual. The cost of drugs for metastatic colorectal cancer alone would exceed $1.5 billion per year if all the patients in the U.S. received treatment.

The clinical reality for metastatic breast cancer is similar. The latest treatment with Herceptin followed by lapatinib and capecitabine only increased the median time to progression from 4.4 to 8.4 months. Furthermore, 70% of patients do not respond to Herceptin, and resistance develops in virtually all patients.

Of these two big killers, both remain incurable, and this sobering fact contrasts with the glowing reports on Avastin and Herceptin emanating from the financial and tabloid media.

Headlines in the popular press and blogs said that new cancer drugs like Avastin are “saving lives.” But I think most of us would agree that a median overall increase of survival by 4.7 months, while nothing to sneeze at, is not “saving lives.” This is especially true when the for-profit system that generated the 4.7 months for some patients is kicking other patients to the curb. (See also “Unhealthy Care“)

After one of my recent health care rants a rightie commenter wrote, “Life expecvtancy has little to do with health care. Cancer survival rates do. Post them.” Here you are, dude. Enjoy.