Me on Russia Today TV
Here I am, debating the right again—this time two of them: another Schiff and “investor” Jim Rogers, who somehow gets all the headline credit. Lots of shouting and crosstalk, in line with the show’s name. CrossTalk: Socialism for the Rich (ft. Jim Rogers).
WikiLeaks: so much in the open
Looking over this latest batch of WikiLeaks, I’m struck by how few surprises there are, and by how much of importance goes on pretty much in the open. An attentive reader of the news with a decent knowledge of history basically knows most of this stuff already.
I don’t mean this in the sense in which the bourgeois press is using it—by using the epithet “old news” to dismiss the significance of the revelations. What they want to dismiss is the truth that the U.S. (like most other nation–states, though they’re not as globally consequential) kills, cheats, and lies. It’s always useful to have documentary evidence of that truth. And it’s satisfying to get the juicy details of how Hillary Clinton signed an order to get Ban-Ki Moon’s credit card numbers.
But revelations like these are further proof that the conspiracist view of history, in which a secret cabal plans everything and everyone else is just an ignorant dupe, is wrong. Follow the news, and you’re pretty much aware of the major goings-on. Though no doubt the faithful 9/11 Truthers have a great explanation of why none of these leaks reveal how Dick Cheney wired the WTC to explode.
New radio product
Now up on my radio archives (explanatory links at original):
November 27, 2010 Paul Street on the Tea Party, the dismalness of the Dems, and Obama’s elegant personal fit with that dismalness • Cordelia Fine, author of the excellent Delusions of Gender, on how all those claims of biological roots to differences between men & women are nonsense
November 20, 2010 Monica Potts, author of this article, on (the lack of) green jobs • Yanis Varoufakis, author of this article, on a better way to do a eurozone bailout
Pacifica hires anti-union law firm
Pacifica laid off the Morning Show staff at KPFA allegedly because of a budget crisis—and they hire an expensive corporate law firm to deal with the consequences. How community broadcasting of them!
Read all about it here.
Demented press release of the day
This just in. Gosh, sometimes I wish I lived in their fantasy world…
Plenty to be Thankful for… if you’re Big Labor
Doug,
Who has more for which to be thankful this year, small businesses or Big Labor? The failure of Big Labor to move it’s job-killing Employee ‘Forced’ Choice Act through Congress despite naming it a top agenda item is certainly on businesses’ list.
Still, small businesses and workers are struggling to make ends meet as labor bosses continue to work to force unionization on workers to pocket union dues and spend frivolously on political campaigns that will ensure their bottom line.
So, Big Labor is thankful for things like Craig Becker’s appointment to the National Labor Relations Board and the strings they can pull at the National Mediation Board, all while leaving their workers’ pensions grossly underfunded.
Would you like to speak with Katie Gage or another representative of the Workforce Fairness Institute about what this year has meant for Big Labor and what these union bosses are thankful for this year?
Thanks,
Mike
Mike Mamassian
CRC Public Relations
703-683-xxxx ext. 104
Gary Null nearly killed by own product
Someone posted this news to the comments, so I had to find out if it was true. Yes, it is true—Gary Null nearly died from consuming one of his products.
Null is suing the manufacturer for negligence, specifically for allegedly including 1,000 times the recommended dosage of vitamin D. When Null first got sick, he consumed more of the stuff, hoping it would make him better. While he was suffering, his phone was ringing off the hook with complaints from irate consumers.
At first, Null’s website denied anything was wrong. When a Los Angeles Times blog noted that this claim contradicted his own lawsuit, he modified his condition report to say he was feeling better. More here.
I suppose a manufacturing error like this could happen to anyone. But that’s just the point—these natural guys are just like everyone else, except more opaque.
Daily News: Gary Null suit vs. supplement manufacturer claims Gary Null’s Ultimate Power Meal nearly killed him
ABC News: Alternative Health Guru Sues Company Over His Own Product, Claiming It Nearly Killed Him
Health lunacy: Adorno helps out
[This was originally part of this radio commentary, but I’ve posted it separately here.]
And now a bit more Pacifica arcana, though that’s only the taking-off point. WBAI, the New York station where this program ran for 15 years until the interim program director decided to cut its frequency, has brought back health guru Gary Null to do a daily noontime show. Null was fired several years ago because of a personality conflict with an earlier program director. He really made the phones ring at pledging time, and his departure was financially damaging to WBAI. So presumably bringing him back will make the phones ring again, since they’ve been pretty quiet lately. Maybe, but at a considerable price to reputation and decency.
WBAI helped make Gary Null both famous and rich. He is much admired by many, though he strikes me as a classic snake-oil salesman, with an unctuous manner and a selfless self-presentation that is actually a mask for a raging egomania. But, that aside, Null, like many health freaks, is an HIV denialist. That is, he denies that HIV is a cause of AIDS, and that AIDS is a contagious disease. He said recently on another radio show that “Everything about AIDS is a lie, it’s a fraud being perpetrated….” That sort of talk really excites the credulous, for sure. He also counsels against the use of modern antiviral therapies, without which legions of AIDS patients would be dead. So no matter what you think of the rest of the naturalist’s armamentarium, this sort of advice can kill people. That may be a rude thing to say, but it’s true. Telling people that AIDS is not a communicable disease and that antiviral therapies do more harm than good can kill people.
I’ve got personal experience of two of the “healers” he had on his show. One was the late Dr Emanuel Revici (who died in 1998). My uncle, who was dying of advanced prostate cancer, was brought to Revici by his wife (my mother’s sister). Revici saw him for five minutes, handed him three unlabeled vials of fluid, and billed him for $500. My uncle took the stuff, and died a short while later. The other: my father, who was then about 80, consulted another of Null”s “healers” because of some arthritis-like pains he felt in his knee. The healer diagnosed my father with “cytomegalovirus infection” and prescribed a round of intravenous vitamin C infusions at $100 a pop. CMV infections are ubiquitous—over 90% of Americans aged 80 and over carry the virus. And vitamin C is very cheap—the markup must have been on the order of 50 times. These two characters are nothing but quacks in a very profitable line of business.
But I promised this wouldn’t be another inside-Pacifica story, so now onto the larger point. I don’t doubt that there are all kinds of therapies and practices in the “alternative” realm that are useful and less toxic than the orthodox kind. But these need to be tested rigorously, with full disclosure of the contents of the elixirs and the results of their application. Now, Null & Co. circulate their propaganda through self-reported testimony with no outside check on their veracity. Those who died, like my uncle, aren’t called upon to be guests. And this gang of alterna-health types tap into the suspicions of the dominant discourse so prevalent on today’s left—a reflexive skepticism that’s as anti-intellectual as the reflexive credulity of so many in the mainstream.
Why is this sort of thing so popular? As I was thinking about this, the phrase “modern big-time irrationality” popped into my head. It comes from a great essay by the German philosopher T.W. Adorno on astrology—specifically the astrology column in the Los Angeles Times that Adorno read when he was in exile there during World War II. And it turns out that something in Adorno’s analysis of mass-produced occultism that bears on the popularity of quackery.
Adorno pointed out that mass consumption of an astrology column is a lot different from classical astrology, which emerged before astronomy was codified as a science, and even today lives on in the form of custom readings done by professionals. But it also co-exists with a world in which astronomy is a science, and so requires a serious degree of intellectual retrogression among the faithful. People should, in other words, know better. But one reason they don’t is because so much of what goes on in the name of rationality is actually opaque and irrational—the worlds of technology and money which leave most people dazed and confused. So in some sense, the fascination with astrology and other forms of occultism are an escape from the world of well-compensated expertise from which most people are excluded. But the escape reproduces the patterns of the larger society—even more irrationally. People accept the declarations of the astrology column (insofar as they accept them—there’s often a note of irony and self-teasing as one cites the day’s capsule summary) as a form of abstract authority. The syndicated astrologer becomes just another kind of disembodied expertise.
I think something similar is going on with the appeal of alterna-health gurus. People are confused by actual science and repelled by its debasement by the pursuit of money. Everyone knows how drug companies taint research and medical practice is distorted by fee maximization. So to escape that unpleasant reality, connoisseurs of quackery embrace the critique offered by the likes of Null, who confidently declare that the official line on AIDS is just a fraud. (In that, they can sound like climate change denialists, who think the whole story of warming is a fraud perpetrated by academics.) But the appeal of Null & Co. is one of pure authority: the word of the guru takes the place of rigorous evidence. Because for all the corruptions of science, it does depend on the disclosure of techniques, the reproducibility of results, and the scrutiny of peers. Yes, there’s a lot of authority behind the scientist in the white lab coat, but there’s also a lot of rigor. There’s none in the alterna-world.
Still, there’s plenty of money-making going on—but the adherents never look into that.
Radio commentary, November 20, 2010
Stumbling recovery continues • bourgeois theories of unemployment • who gets UI? • how the StimPak helped • models for budget-cutting
[The commentary also included an analysis of health lunacy, which I’ve posted separately.]
stumbling along
The U.S. economy continues its stumbling recovery. On Thursday, we learned that first-time applications for unemployment insurance, filed by people who’d just lost their jobs, rose slightly last week after falling decently the previous week—a fall that exactly reversed the rise of the previous week. The four-week moving average, which smoothes out the weekly volatility in this series, fell by 4,000, but is only slightly below where it was almost two months ago. In other words, it looks like the trend of modestly declining rates of job loss is continuing. But job loss, as measured by these initial claims, is still pretty high by historical standards—and there’s not much evidence that employers are picking up the sluggish pace of hiring.
Meanwhile, it looks like millions of people are going to lose their unemployment benefits (which, by the way, are a joint program of the federal government and the states). Normally, a jobless person can draw benefits for 26 weeks, but Congress often extends that period in times of high unemployment, like this one. There have been a number of extensions of that 26-week limit since the recession hit, but no longer. House Republicans blocked attempts to extend emergency benefits, so nearly a million recipients are going to lose their benefits at the end of the year, and another million a month will suffer the same fate in early 2011.
elites theorize joblessness, conveniently
There’s a ludicrous theory (prime example: here) circulating among elites—meaning right-wing economists and some, though far from all, Federal Reserve officials—that our near-10% unemployment rate is not a reflection of a sick economy, but something called job skills mismatch—that is, there are jobs out there, but our unemployed workers are just too dumb or unqualified to do them. There’s almost no evidence for this proposition—why did the number of mismatched roughly double over the last three years, anyway?—but orthodox types find it a comforting explanation.
Another popular theory among elites is that unemployment benefits are too generous, encouraging the jobless to sit back and live large on $307 a week (the size of the average check). So if we cut benefits, they’ll scurry back to work. This is vicious nonsense—I faced it in my Real News debate with Peter Schiff—but orthodox types find this one, too, a comforting explanation.
UI: who benefits?
The Congressional Budget Office is just out with a study of who gets what from unemployment benefits. They found, among other things, that just under half the unemployed drew benefits in 2009. Of those that did, the average recipient collected $6,000, accounting for 11% of their family’s income last year. That is not living largely, but that 11% translates into about a month and a half’s worth of income over the full year, which is not nothing. Without unemployment benefits, the CBO estimates, the poverty rate last year would have been 15.4% rather than 14.3%. So you can say that unemployment insurance kept well over three million Americans out of official poverty last year. Not next year, though.
Speaking of which, I was just looking at some personal income numbers. Most people don’t know this—and I didn’t know the extent of it until I looked at the figures—but tax cuts and government assistance have offered enormous support to personal incomes during the recession and weak recovery. For example, the tax share of personal income fell by three percentage points over the last several years—for that, you can thank last year’s stimulus bill. (Funny how most Americans think that Obama raised their taxes.) And what economists call government transfer payments—benefits like Social Security and unemployment insurance—rose from 14% of income before the recession to 18% now. Add that four point rise to the three point decline in taxes and you see that household incomes would be about 7% below where they are today without government action, much of it from the maligned stimulus bill. That 7% is nearly a full month’s income. Fiscal policy certainly hasn’t turned bust to boom, and it could have been a lot more potent if it’d been bigger and better designed, but still, without it, we’d be wearing barrels.
budget cuts: take food from the disabled
Meanwhile, the increasingly Murdochized Wall Street Journal had a piece the other day pointing to the states as a model for Washington on how to do budget cutting. The news pages of that paper move further rightward by the day, which is a very sad thing, because the Journal used to be a real treasure. States are taking tough measures because they have to—most are required to balance their budgets. And these measures are mean and ugly. Over the last three years, 29 states have raised fees on or cut benefits for the elderly and disabled. States have also been cutting aid to local governments, which means they in turn have to cut benefits and services. A model is Indiana, whose governor Mitch Daniels is a likely Republican presidential candidate. He’s balanced his state’s budget by ending collective bargaining rights for state employees, cutting $150 million from aid to colleges and universities, and hacking away at assistance to foster parents and the developmentally disabled. But since this is the USA, where meanness is often admired as strength of character, Daniels is a popular figure in his state. What a country.
Letter on Null’s denialism: please read and act!
Since comments on this “blog” don’t get Tweeted and such, I wanted to point out two comments from George Carter of The Foundation for Integrative AIDS Research, and organization that sponsors clinical trials of alternative therapies for HIV/AIDS. Unlike Null’s ludicrous and dangerous HIV denialism, FIAR supports conventional therapies, but also sees great supplementary value in more “natural” approaches. This seems like an eminently sensible position, but apparently not sensationalist enough to appeal to the loons in the Null set.
Carter’s first post outlines his position, and makes the point that HIV denialists, who claim that antiretroviral therapies are either useless or harmful, are outright murdering people. This should be said bluntly: as Carter puts it, Null’s ideas can kill people. And his second post lists the impressive and growing number of signers, individual and institutional, of the letter to WBAI.
There’s no direct link to his posts, so visit the comments and scroll down or search for “Carter.” And a few more emails to the authorities wouldn’t hurt:
Tony Bates, interim program director, WBAI
Berthold Reimers, interim general manager, WBAI
Pacifica national board, goes to entire Pacifica board
Pacifica death watch (cont.): Gary Null edition
Why care?
Perhaps the wider world does not share my interest in the internal goings-on at Pacifica. I do have a personal interest. I grew up listening to WBAI and it helped make me who I am, for what that’s worth. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, it was an exciting and lively thing that showed a kid growing up in the intellectual wasteland of suburban New Jersey that there was a fascinating world out there. It not only featured radical politics (of all kinds—the coverage of the early gay movement was an eye-opener) and first-rate news reporting (I have vivid memories of the live coverage of May 1968 in Paris), but also some serious high culture (the Ring Cycle on Washington’s birthday).
Now, of course, things aren’t so inspiring. Which is sad, because WBAI and its four sister stations in the Pacifica network are five strong signals in big, important cities (New York, Berkeley/the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Washington, and Houston). Its signals can reach a fifth of the U.S. population. And this valuable resource is deep into a long trajectory of decay. If Pacifica dies, it can never be reconstituted. Yeah, there’s the Internet, but terrestrial radio is far from dead.
So, because I care…
The Null set
Alternative health guru Gary Null is returning to WBAI, five days a week. Null, who was fired by the previous program director Bernard White (probably because he was a rival power center, not for any principled reason), is a classic snake-oil salesman, with an unctuous manner and a selfless self-presentation that is actually a mask for a raging egomania. His long-running show on WBAI helped make him famous and rich (he sold the premiums given away during his fundraising stints to the station “at cost,” which is a risible concept when you”re talking miracle cures).
I’ve got personal experience of two of the “healers” he had on his show. One was the late Dr Emanuel Revici (who died in 1998). My uncle, who was dying of advanced prostate cancer, was brought to Revici by his wife (my mother’s sister). Revici saw him for five minutes, handed him three unlabeled vials of fluid, and billed him for $500. My uncle took the stuff, and died a short while later. The other: my father, who was then about 80, consulted another of Null”s “healers” because of some arthritis-like pains he felt in his knee. The healer diagnosed my father with “cytomegalovirus infection” and prescribed a round of intravenous vitamin C infusions at $100 a pop. CMV infections are ubiquitous—over 90% of Americans aged 80 and over carry the virus. And vitamin C is very cheap—the markup must have been on the order of 50 times. These two characters are nothing but quacks in a very profitable line of business.
Null is also an AIDS denialist. On hearing the news that WBAI was bringing him back to the air, ACT-UP New York circulated a flyer containing some classic and recent quotes from Null on the topic of HIV/AIDS. Some delights, the first batch from a show on WNYE radio, June 4, 2010, followed by a 15-year-old observation he’s never retracted:
“All the celebrities who say yes, we need more drugs and better condom use in Africa, it has nothing to do with condoms. It has nothing to do with vaccines or drugs- the real causes of AIDS in Africa. And we’ll give you the statistics that show you all of the figures from the World Health Organization are wrong.”
“I have over 2,000 of the smartest scientists in the world… all saying the same thing in their own words. Everything about AIDS is a lie, it’s a fraud being perpetrated.”
“The evidence is overwhelming that AIDS is not contagious, AIDS is not sexually transmitted or caused by HIV.”-David Rasnick, as read (approvingly) by Gary Null“
And, this 1995 classic from Null’s website: “There is, in fact, no support for the idea that AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease anywhere in the world.”
In response to criticism (from, among others, a letter from Marilyn Ringstaff of a Georgia-based women’s health group) for giving a platform to such nonsense, the chair of WBAI’s local station board, Mitch Cohen (who describes himself as a “moderate” 9/11 Truther, which I suppose is some sort of relief), sent around a letter defending Null’s claims. (Full text, along with Ringstaff’s original letter to which he was responding, appended below.) Cohen summarizes his own position:
I certainly have many questions as to the entire history of HIV, its relationship to what is called “AIDS”, ecological impacts and causes for disease based on toxic dumping and pollution, and the appropriateness of pharmaceutical treatments for the “disease”. After all of these years, most of them remain unanswered in a way I consider to be satisfactory.
He asks a series of questions, starting with “Does HIV exist?,” moving on to “What do we mean ‘to cause’?,” and “Do anti-virals work to save people’s lives?” that suggest that Cohen thinks that science is a fraud perpetrated by idiots, and that there aren’t legions of people alive today who would be dead without modern AIDS therapies.
I don’t doubt that there are all kinds of therapies and practices in the “alternative” armamentarium that are useful and less toxic than the orthodox kind. But these need to be tested rigorously, with full disclosure of the contents of the elixirs and the results of their application. Now, Null & Co. circulate their propaganda through self-reported testimony with no outside check on their veracity. Those who died, like my uncle, aren’t called upon to be guests. And this gang of alterna-health types tap into the suspicions of the dominant discourse so prevalent on today’s left—a reflexive skepticism that’s as anti-intellectual as the reflexive credulity of so many in the mainstream.
Sad. But Null will probably bring in megabucks in the next WBAI fundraiser, so who cares?
Cohen’s letter
Dear Ms. Ringstaff,
Your letter makes a number of assertions about what Gary Null believes, let alone says over the air, without documenting your claims.
I cannot speak for Gary (and wouldn’t dare try to!), but as a former member of the Holistic and Alternative Treatments Committee of ACT UP-NY, as coordinator of the NoSpray Coalition against toxic pesticides, as a Brooklyn Green Party organizer — and as someone who has witnessed relatives, friends diagnosed with HIV and AIDS (and who are said to have died from opportunistic infections related to it) — I certainly have many questions as to the entire history of HIV, its relationship to what is called “AIDS”, ecological impacts and causes for disease based on toxic dumping and pollution, and the appropriateness of pharmaceutical treatments for the “disease”. After all of these years, most of them remain unanswered in a way I consider to be satisfactory.
I don’t see the point in shutting off that process of questioning, of challenging. In fact, I find it disastrous.
On Gary Null’s prior programs on WBAI, discussion of AIDS and HIV accounted for around 10 percent of his programs, maybe less. And, contrary to your (and others’) inferences, he never, ever promoted his line of products on the air.
No doubt he benefited financially from his on-air popularity, the same as most authors do who are interviewed over the airwaves. But Null was always careful to be very circumspect about his claims, and allowed — even invited — contrary opinions on his show (unlike many hosts at WBAI).
That is why in all the attacks upon Null that I’ve seen concerning this matter, there are very few actual quotes from Null provided by those calling for banning Null from the airwaves. And of those few quotes, not a single one actually provides evidence as to the claims they are marshalled to support.
Furthermore — and again unlike most other show hosts at WBAI — Gary Null has agreed to open up his show to those who disagree with him, and to engage in public debates on this and other issues.
Gary Null was arbitrarily fired without any sense of due process from WBAI 6 years ago NOT for making reckless scientific statements on the air, but for running afoul of the then Program Director. Many of those who decry the “arbitrary” decision to return Gary Null to his previous timeslot said nothing at the time about the arbitrary decision to fire him and his audience, along with several other popular producers (such as Robert Knight, for example). So I take such protests from those people as examples of opportunism and hypocrisy.
You write as though anyone who questions the science around HIV and AIDS are all in the same camp, or hold the same views. As you know, for many years the AIDS and HIV critics were hardly united — they had (and still have) many divisions among them, over such questions as:
– Does HIV exist?
– Does it exist according to Koch’s postulates for “isolating” a micro-organism?
– If it exists, is it always present in AIDS cases?
– Can HIV be detected in people who do not have AIDS?
– Could it be a marker for disease and not the cause?
– What do we mean by “to cause”?
– If the virus exists, could it have been produced as part of biowarfare experiments by the US Government?
– What is the role of “Co-Factors” and why are they needed to cause this disease?
– Do people die of AIDS, or from Opportunistic Infections?- What is the role of malnutrition in AIDS in Africa?
– Why are the definitions for what constitutes AIDS different in different parts of the world, unlike the definition for every other disease?
– Is AIDS a disease or a “syndrome”? What’s the difference?
– Did AZT kill more people than it helped?
– Do anti-virals work to save people’s lives?
– What are the roles of viruses in the body?
– How accurate are the tests for the virus? For antibodies?
– Are the tests themselves based on flawed science? (Kerry Mullis’ view.)
– Are the anti-virals’ side effects more debilitating than what they are supposed to be fighting?
– Can rigorous nutrition and supplements fight AIDS better than anti-virals?
On and on and on. These and other questions still haunt our lives. To shut off that debate, to assume that people’s views (including Null’s) don’t change over time as more knowledge becomes available, or that there is only one Truth and you are its emissary, is … well … let’s just say that attitude is harmful.
To preclude people from hearing contrasting views on all of this is reprehensible.
Let the people hear the arguments; let the people ourselves decide.
Mitchel Cohen, Chair, WBAI Local Station Board*
*for ID purposes only
PS. Two decades ago I’d written several articles myself on the questions I had (and continue to have) pertaining to HIV/AIDS, and published them in the journal I edited, “Red Balloon”. I also wrote a long introduction to a pamphlet I published that featured a very good alternative critique by Bob Lederer, who has since become a proponent of the mainstream view on HIV/AIDS but who had a very different view back then.
I’ll be glad to send it to you in electronic form, upon request.
Mitchel
Ringstaff’s original
November 15, 2010
To whom it concerns:
We are writing as individuals and organizations who are deeply distressed by WBAI’s recent restoration of supplement-entrepreneur Gary Null to the airwaves of WBAI Radio five days a week.
We are gravely concerned about this prospect and the consequences for people at risk of and living with HIV. Mr. Null and his frequent radio guests support the notions, among others, that HIV does not play a role in causing AIDS; that the disease is not transmitted sexually or via dirty needles; that HIV tests are meaningless; and that antiretroviral drugs are not only poisonous but can actually cause AIDS. Legitimate concerns and grievances about the pharmaceutical industry are eclipsed and diminished by this life-threatening stance.
The spread of false claims about HIV and AIDS is deadly, and particularly harms the poor communities of color most devastated by HIV/AIDS. Disinformation about HIV has caused the unnecessary suffering and death of an estimated 300,000 men, women and children in South Africa alone (see Mbeki Aids denial ’caused 300,000 deaths’ ).
Both the existence of HIV and its role in the causation of AIDS has been amply demonstrated (see, e.g., AIDSTruth.org | The scientific evidence for HIV/AIDS). Among the destructive effect of spreading these falsehoods is to reduce condom use, increase infection risk and dissuade people from the use of life-saving antiretroviral therapy (among other modalities).
We respect the station’s longstanding free-speech tradition, and support open debate on critical public health issues. We also deeply appreciate the fiscal difficulties facing WBAI and the Pacifica network. However, the notion that WBAI’s survival is dependent on relying on Mr. Null while spreading a message of death is antithetical to the mission of the station and of the Pacifica Network to which it belongs.
We call on WBAI management to immediately reverse its decision to add Mr. Null’s program to its schedule.
Signed,
Marilyn Ringstaff, CNM, JD
Women of W.O.R.T.H., Inc.
1513 Dean St.Rome, GA 30161
(706)232-3408 office
(706)512-0453 cell
mtringstaff@gmail.com
Women’s Organization for Reproductive & Total Healthcare (“W.O.R.T.H”)
a Georgia nonprofit corporation . . . because women are worth it.
Women of Worth
Thank you!
I want to thank everyone who offered me support—and who wrote to the management of WBAI and Pacifica—during my radio travails of the last couple of weeks. It was really touching. And it persuaded me to keep going, even if I had to separate myself from the rot and madness of WBAI.
Given the upheaval at KPFA, I can’t be sure how long things will go on there. But I’m exploring various options with some sympathetic and excellent colleagues.
New radio product
Freshly posted to my Radio archives (links at original):
November 13, 2010 Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters on the nomination of Cathie Black to run NYC’s public schools, and the whole education reform scam • Richard Walker on California’s crises
October 30, 2010 David Cay Johnston on the dismal state of incomes in the USA (see important update here) • Michael Hudson, author of The Monster, on the subprime beast
Radio commentary, November 13, 2010
Pacifica • deficit commission • QE2 • education “reform”
Before that, and before some comments on the news, a few words on the Pacifica situation. I did this show on WBAI in New York for 15 years. I was given the show by our late program director, Samori Marksman, who was a very intelligent and charismatic man with contacts all over the world. After his early death at the age of 52 in 1999—a death I’m certain was hastened by the pressures of Pacifica infighting—he was succeeded by an endless procession of oddballs and mediocrities. The latest in that devolving series decided that my show’s frequency should be cut in half. I was already exhausted by the endless crisis and rot at WBAI, and this was the last straw. So I quit. I’m going to continue to do the show for KPFA and what I’ve recently learned is a large, loyal, and truly global Internet audience. (I’ve been really touched over the last couple of weeks by the outpouring of support from that audience—thank you!) WBAI can run the show if and when it likes. But while the current gang remains in charge, I won’t be setting foot in their studios again.
I hope I can keep doing this show for KPFA. But I’ve also been distressed by the goings-on around here, instigated by a Pacifica leadership that seems to be way out of its depth. (Follow the story here: KPFA Worker.) This network consists of five powerful stations in very large metropolitan areas, but it looks now to be run by provincials, with the assistance of people who think that pirate radio should be our model. Being radical and listener-sponsored shouldn’t mean amateurish; marginality is no proof of authenticity. Eviscerating the show with the biggest audience and the strongest fundraising appeal isn’t the way to reverse a financial crisis and build the audience over the long term. I hope I’ll be sticking around here, but you never know, given the whimsy of management and some of the people on the local board.
Ok, enough housekeeping—though it makes a convenient pivot to observe that almost every institution in American society looks to be caught in some sort of suicide attempt.
deficit commission horror
Let’s start with the recommendations of the co-chairs of that dreadful deficit commission. Clearly Obama’s intention in appointing this thing was to create political pressure for some sort of bipartian package that would get rammed through Congress with little debate. The screaming coming from the far ends of the spectrum would bring a smile to every orthodox centrist, who loves to spread the pain (not that the smiling centrists would feel much of it themselves).
Here’s how a far leftist screams about this thing. First, it aims to cap federal spending at 21% of GDP, forever. That’s a very low number. It would preclude any sort of serious social democratic initiatives, like single-payer healthcare or good public childcare or free higher education, and it would make very difficult any sort of infrastructure or green technology invesetment program. But of course that’s part of the idea.
Its recommendations on Social Security are mostly terrible. The only good thing would be to increase the level of income over which one need not pay Social Security taxes. They’d keep some limit, just raise it. But eliminating it entirely would eliminate the system’s alleged long-term problems forever, according to the Congressional Budget Office. They’d raise the retirement age to 69. They’d change the formula for cost of living adjustments (COLAs) to a less generous version of the Consumer Price Index, even though an experimental price index for elderly households has incresed more rapidly than the official one over the last couple of decades—and they want to use an even meaner one than the official index. There’s also a sinister, but superficially just, proposal to increase benefits at the bottom and trim them at the top. That may sound good but this fits in with a long-term elite scheme to turn Social Security into a welfare program—the nonpoor would be expected to fend for themselves in retirement, which is something that rich pundits find easily imaginable, but not the rest of us. Chipping away at the top will reduce support for Social Security, and will lubricate the route towards making it a welfare program. And, as the old saying goes, programs for the poor are poor programs.
Medicare cost containment would consist of more co-pays and higher deductibles—more shifting towards consumers, the very ones whose COLAs would be cut because their expenses are allegely going up so slowly.
They also propose to cut military spending by about $100 billion a year. It’s nice to see the Pentagon on the chopping block—it’s often exempted from these exercises. But since 2000, the military share of GDP has increased by about 2 percentage points. Taking us back to 2000 levels, when the military was hardly running bake sales to fund itself, would save $300 billion a year.
On the tax side, they’d eliminate a lot of deductions and lower rates. Supposedly this would have limited distributional impact, but I doubt it. I’d love to see the mortgage interest tax deduction go—it makes no sense for the government to subsidize homeownership, and the lion’s share of the benefits go to upper-income filers—but it’s impossible to imagine such a thing getting through Congress, so it’s hard to figure why they even mentioned it.
In his New York Times column on Friday, the revolting David Brooks suggested that we need a program of national greatness, to restore American pre-eminence—a program he had the chutzpah to compare to the civil rights movement. He actually wrote this sentence: “Are you really unwilling to sacrifice your Social Security cost-of-living adjustment at a time when soldiers and Marines are sacrificing their lives for their country in Afghanistan?” Squeezing the old is heroic, like imperial war. My god. Instead of a program of national greatness, could we have one of national decency?
We do have a long-term budget problem. You can’t run giant deficits forever. But the way to solve the problem is to slash military spending and tax the rich. In Robert Penn Warren’s novel All The King’s Men, the political figure at the center of the story, Willie Stark (modeled on Huey Long), began his career delivering long, dull policy addresses. His advisor, the novel’s narrator Jack Burden, advises Stark to drop the wonkery and just say he’s gonna soak the fat boys. I love that. Let’s soak the fat boys. They’re mostly not fat anymore, and they’re not all boys, but you get the idea.
QE2
And now onto quantitative easing, known to connoisseurs of finance as QE2. Basically this refers to the Federal Reserve buying $600 billion in Treasury bonds over the coming months. (Details: FAQs.) It’s supposed to kickstart an economy that just won’t recover. This buying binge will transform the Fed into the largest holder of Treasury paper in the world, comfortably surpassing Japan and China (which, by the way, has been reducing its stock of T-bonds). What this will do is mysterious. Banks are still not eager to lend to businesses or consumers, and many businesses and consumers aren’t all that eager to borrow. So the wad of cash that the Fed’s buying will inject into the system could just sit there, or get distracted playing complex and dangerous financial games.
QE2 is a very poor substitute for fiscal policy. We need a long-term government investment program, and a state-driven redistirbution of income from top to bottom. We’re not going to get that. Instead, we get this murky program of dubious effect.
But even that bizarre attempt at economic stimulus is too much for the austerity hounds at home and abroad. Germans and other Europeans are moaning about excessive stimulus—the very people who are putting the periphery of their own continent through an austerity wringer. That austerity isn’t having the desired effect; Greece and Ireland are in deep recession, and interest rates are rising there because their recessions are hammering tax revenues. Weak revenues make it hard to service debts, and servicing debts are what austerity programs are supposed to be about. Britain, whose austerity program is still young and still not bearing serious recessionary fruit, has also seen its bond yields rise, as investors expect the worst. At least British students rioted the other day. Could we please have some of that? Why are Americans so damned passive?
Our president is also getting snubbed by his comrades in the G20. The forces of European austerity are moaning about stimulus, and Asians are lecturing him about the need for budget balancing. As he’s done at home, Obama hasn’t even tried to make a serious case for stimulus, or denounce the orthodox at the core of Europe for creating unemployment and misery at the periphery. Instead, he’s mouthing off about China’s undervalued currency, always the easy thing for a Democrat to do.
Listening to the Asians go on about profligacy is pretty funny. Their prosperity is the flip side of our profligacy. If China and the rest weren’t stuffing container ships with goods for export to Long Beach, and thence onto Walmart shelves, would they be enjoying 10% growth rates? It’s funny how the successful always attribute their fortune to their own virtue and mount the lecture platform, isn’t it? The U.S. did it for years, so I guess there’s rough justice in this.
school “reform”
[And my intro to guest Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters.]
Earlier in the week, it was announced that New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein would be leaving to go work for Rupert Murdoch. Mayor Michael Bloomberg nominated Cathie Black, head of Hearst’s magazine group, and the former publisher of USA Today, to succeed him. Amazing. Klein didn’t have any education experience when he took office, and she doesn’t either. But that doesn’t matter. They, and Bloomberg (and, by the way, Obama and his education secretary Arne Duncan) are all partisans of a marketized, competitive educational model, and they seem to think that teachers are mostly just problems, and not professionals doing hard jobs that require actual skills.
It’s important to say that their testing and privatization strategies don’t work. Haimson will talk about the testing part. But there’s also no evidence that charter schools do any better than the public schools do now. They do offer some promise for cost-cutting and union-busting though. And that is probably key to their appeal.
My own thought about all this is that the American elite have decided that there’s no future for a lot of children, especially those from the bottom half of the income distribution, so the business of the schools (and it is a business) is cutting costs while spewing a lot of high-minded rhetoric about excellence and accountability. Many experts find my analysis too cynical, but I don’t.
My farewell to Thursdays at 5
I read this intro to today’s show on WBAI:
Hello, and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. This is my last show in this timeslot, and perhaps my last show on WBAI.
Back on Monday, November 1, as I was walking to pick my kid up at school, I got a call from the station’s interim program director, Tony Bates, informing me that he and his colleague on the interim management team, interim general manager Berthold Riemers, had decided to move this show to Saturday mornings and to cut back its frequency to twice a month.
I already have a full workweek, and I didn’t feel like adding a weekend morning to it—time I’d much rather spend with my beloved wife and kid. I was also insulted by the cutback in frequency. I’d just raised more money than any producer on this station ever had, by a long shot, on the web, during the last fundraiser—from all over the country and the world, demonstrating that this show has a large, loyal, and global audience. This, and the fact that this is the only show in the entire Pacifica system that focuses on economics in the midst of the worst economic crisis in 80 years, made the cutback in frequency especially incomprehensible and insulting. In the fifteen years of doing this show, no one in WBAI management has ever uttered a word of criticism about its style or content.
So I refused the offer. I’m going to continue producing a weekly edition of Behind the News for KPFA, our Berkeley sister station where this show has been running for almost two years, and for the web, where it has listeners from Austin to Beijing. WBAI is free to take it and broadcast it when it wants. But if you’d like to continue listening to my weekly take on economics and politics, you can find it on the web at my newsletter’s site, (Radio archives), or on iTunes (Behind the News with Doug Henwood).
Enough personal business. If you want to read more, check out my blog, at lbo-news.com, that’s lbo-news.com. I did this show two weeks ago, when I was in Berkeley for a conference, from KPFA’s studio. WBAI was fundraising then, as it’s now doing one day out of every three over the course of a year, so I didn’t do a show here that week. Ok, now to that show. And I’ll see you whenever.
LBO News from Doug Henwood 
3 Comments
Posted on November 27, 2010 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, November 27, 2010
Eurocrisis: bondholders need a haircut • how Ireland helps Google pay almost no taxes • Germany must screw periphery because it’s screwed its own workers
All Eurocrisis today. I never thought I’d be saying this, but it must be conceded that Angela Merkel has a point or two. Not the way the German chancellor and many of her fellow Germans want to drive Greece, Ireland, and the other troubled countries on the periphery of Europe through the austerity wringer. Not that. But this: Merkel thinks that bondholders should take a hit. And they should. Budgets are being savaged and millions thrown out of work on the outer edges of Europe so that bondholders can remain unscathed. Ireland is pouring enormous resources into saving its busted banks. An economy can’t survive the demise of its banking system, but pouring every euro into the effort and starving everything else to fund it is insane and cruel.
cut their damn hair
So far, bank investors have taken some “haircuts,” as they say in the trade, but not enough. Germany wants to see them take more, and why not? Whenever the subject comes up, investors panic, and dump bonds of risky countries, which causes worrywarts to predict doom. But austerity also causes investors to panic, because when economies implode, tax revenues wither, and budget deficits get wider. Austerity is a credit risk too.
coddling MNCs
Another point the Germans and other European countries have: the Irish corporate tax regime is a scandal. Taxes on corporations are very low, which has prompted a number of multinationals to set up shop there. That gives them access to an educated, English-speaking workforce inside the European Union, with a tax rate of 12.5%; most other First World countries have rates above 20%.
But Ireland isn’t just a great place for a multinational to set up a branch office: it can also be a very useful place to route money through. For (egregious) example, as Bloomberg reported the other day, Google (with the permission of our IRS) has assigned much of its intellectual property rights to its Bermuda subsidiary, to which it pays license fees—fees that it can deduct from its income in high-tax countries. That Bermuda subsidiary is officially set up as an Irish company—but since it claims that the company’s management is in Bermuda, it’s largely exempt from Irish taxes. Google also routes almost all its sales outside the U.S. through its Irish subsidirary, but thanks to that Bermuda trick, claims that the Irish subsidiary makes almost no profit. And it routes those payments through a Dutch subsidiary (with no employees), allowing it to avoid some Irish taxes.
As a result of all this trickery, Google reduced its foreign tax rate to 2.4%—meaning that just about everyone listening to this pays a higher share of his or her income in taxes than Google does. This probably adds about $100 to Google’s stock price, now around $600 a share. Many other tech companies, like Microsoft and Apple, perform similar maneuvers to reduce their taxes to a fraction of the rates that are on the U.S. law books.
Nice for the companies, but what does this do for Ireland? The multinationals do provide employment in Ireland, but it’s of a very shallow sort. (Listen to this interview with Michael Taft for more.) There’s little research and development done in Ireland, or procurement of goods and services, meaning that there are no spillover effects from the multinationals’ investment. So the boom Ireland saw in the late 1990s and early 2000s was of a very superficial sort—and one that was turbocharged with a crazy housing bubble. When that burst, there was little of substance beneath the froth.
It is true that the multinationals have Ireland over a barrel. If the country does raise corporate taxes, some of them will leave, costing the country jobs and revenues when it can little afford to lose either. So it’s almost certainly going to leave the corporate tax rate untouched, while the masses suffer budget cuts and tax increases. But for longer-term health, it’s got to get off this economic crack. You can read this is Ireland’s particular case of the pickle that many countries find themselves in: the neoliberal strategy of coddling capital has hit a wall, but no one has the imagination or political nerve to come up with a new strategy.
German motives
Concerning the austerity wringer, I should bring forward a point made by the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis in our interview on last week’s show. Over the last decade, Germany has really put the squeeze to its working class. Over the last decade, prodcutivity is up almost twice as much as pay. (So too in the U.S., actually.) But that’s not true of a lot of the countries on the periphery of Europe: Italy, Portugal, and Spain have all seen wages outstrip productivity. So too Greece, probably, but there are no good statistics coming out of that country to confirm the impression. So it would be politically difficult for the German government to be seen as indulging the peripheral countries when it’s been so hard on its own population.
This sure has been a great era for the capitalists of the world.
Share this: