Tag Archives: Journalism

Something About Politics That Can’t Be Said Too Often

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The Guardian is a British newspaper, so I’m not sure if columnist Michael Cohen is an American (not that it matters). American or not, he makes a point that more columnists and commentators should be making about the state of our nation:

What is the single most consequential political development of the past five years?… It is the rapid descent of the Republican party into madness.

Never before in American history have we seen a political party so completely dominated and controlled by its extremist wing; and never before have we seen a political party that brings together the attributes of nihilism, heartlessness, radicalism and naked partisanship quite like the modern GOP. In a two-party system like America’s, the result is unprecedented dysfunction.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/03/republican-party-demise-continues

The rest of the column is a recitation of recent Republican misdeeds. It’s Mr. Cohen’s calling a spade a spade that is refreshing and deserves repeating.

(Note:  According to Wikipedia, the expression “calling a spade a spade” was introduced into English in 1542 and refers to a small shovel: “the Macedonians wer feloes of no fyne witte, they whiche had not the witte to calle a spade by any other name then a spade”.)

Want to Read Something Really Depressing About America?

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Journalist George Packer’s new book, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, has been compared to the U.S.A. Trilogy, the novels in which John Dos Passos used experimental techniques to capture the state of our union in the early 20th century. Except that The Unwinding is nonfiction.

To quote the publisher:

American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown … (Packer) journeys through the lives of several Americans, (interweaving) these intimate stories with biographical sketches of the era’s leading public figures … and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics….The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation.

Packer summarizes his view of the past 30 years in the newspaper column below: “Decline and Fall: How American Society Unravelled”. He doesn’t meet Marx’s challenge in these few paragraphs to change the world (not merely understand it): such as explaining how to get more people to vote intelligently, how to overcome the power of money in our democracy, how to avoid a race to the economic bottom in a global economy. But maybe more of us need to clearly understand what’s happened before we can do something about it.

(Or should we simply get out of the way, relying on our children and their children to do what needs to be done? Like the man said: “Your old road is rapidly agin’, please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand, for the times they are a-changin’ .”)

When we talk about America’s decline, it’s tempting to wonder if the situation is as bad as it seems. Packer’s book and the column below are honorable attempts to counter that temptation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/19/decline-fall-american-society-unravelled

Squeaky Right-Wing Wheels and the Noise They Make

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Jon Stewart and his writers do a very good job making fun of right-wing fools and knaves. Stephen Colbert and his writers do an even better job. You’d think that if the people they make fun of ever saw themselves being made fun of, they’d mend their ways. But that doesn’t happen.

There is a popular left-wing website called Daily Kos that features an almost continuous stream of news and commentary, much of which calls attention to the ridiculous behavior of right-wing fools and knaves. There are many positive stories, but I often end up reading the negative ones. So I get to learn a lot about Fox News and Mitch McConnell.

The problem is that I’d rather know a lot less about Fox News, Mitch McConnell and their ilk. They are a blight on our nation. So I’ve stopped watching Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and I’m trying to stop looking at Daily Kos. 

You could argue that it’s my responsibility as an American citizen to stay informed about current events, so it would be better to pay attention to what the right-wing knaves and fools are saying. But what these people and organizations do is mainly generate noise, which distracts us from more important things.

For example, it’s more important to know that the incredibly wealthy Koch Brothers want to buy the Los Angeles Times and turn it into a right-wing propaganda machine than it is to hear the latest stupid remark from Michele Bachmann, sponsor of the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act. 

A few days ago, New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote about Rep. Bachmann’s decision not to run for re-election next year:

In honor of her departure, Michele-watchers around the country rolled out their favorite Bachmann quotes. Mine was her contention that the theory of evolution was disputed by “hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes.”

We may not see her like again. Or, if one shows up, we may decide not to pay attention.

Collins often writes entertaining but depressing columns about the latest Republican offense against justice or rationality. But wouldn’t it be better if she and we paid less attention (not no attention, but less attention) to what right-wing fools and knaves have to say?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/opinion/collins-michele-heres-the-bell.html

Understanding the I.R.S. “Scandal”

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Journalists without a political ax to grind have been trying to explain what actually happened at the Cincinnati I.R.S. office. After reading some of these articles and looking at the official report issued by the Treasury Department’s Inspector General (see the links below), it’s reasonable to conclude that the so-called “scandal” amounts to some relatively over-worked, relatively low-level bureaucrats (aka accountants) trying to do their job (what Congress told them to do) but not quite following the rules (which are hard to understand).

Every application to be considered a tax-exempt “social welfare” organization under Federal tax code section 501(c)(4) is reviewed by the I.R.S. There are a few thousand such applications every year. One of the benefits of being granted this tax-exempt status is that an organization’s donors don’t need to be made public.

Some of these applications receive extra attention, often because they are suspected of being political groups masquerading as social welfare groups. A 501(c)(4) organization is allowed to engage in more political activity than a 501(c)(3) group like the Red Cross, but isn’t supposed to be “primarily engaged” in political activity (note the vagueness of the phrase “primarily engaged”).

In trying to figure out which 501(c)(4) applications needed extra attention, I.R.S. employees in Cincinnati devised some criteria to “be on the lookout for” (i.e. to help determine whether the group would be “primarily engaged” in politics or not).

Since the number of applications was steadily increasing, and there were lots of applications coming from groups associating themselves with the Tea Party and Glenn Beck, the criteria included references to “Tea Party”, “Patriots” and “9/12 Project” (a group created by Beck). The criteria for further review also included references to government spending, debt and taxes; educating the public by advocacy or lobbying to “make America a better place to live”; and statements “criticizing how the country is being run”.

So the immediate question is whether using these criteria would tend to identify groups whose main purpose was “political” rather than “social welfare”. Common sense suggests that the answer is “Yes”.

Roughly 1/3 of the applications that received extra attention included the terms “Tea Party”, “Patriots” or “9/12 Project”. The extra reviews took a long time and sometimes featured burdensome questions from the I.R.S., but the principal issue, according to the Inspector General’s report, was that:

“The IRS used inappropriate criteria that identified for review Tea Party and other organizations applying for tax-exempt status based upon their names or policy positions instead of indications of potential political campaign intervention.”

One might argue that referring to yourself as a Tea Party or Project 9/12 group or claiming that your main purpose is to fight government spending is a good indication that you might be spending most of your time trying to affect political campaigns, especially in an election year. But, according to the Inspector General’s report, this wasn’t the correct way to identify such groups.

I’m not sure how the I.R.S. accountants are supposed to  predict which 501(c)(4) groups will primarily engage in improper political activity. At any rate, all of the applications getting this questionable special attention were ultimately approved or are still being evaluated.

This is the “scandal” that some foolish and/or unscrupulous politicians and journalists are making such a big deal about. The especially noxious Peggy Noonan recently claimed that this, along with some right-wing contributors being audited, is the biggest scandal since Watergate (the I.R.S. audits between 1 and 2 million individual tax returns every year, so it isn’t surprising that some of the taxpayers involved are right-wing contributors).

What should be a scandal receiving Congressional and media attention is that several 501(c)(4) groups, such as Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, spend millions of dollars intervening in political campaigns, but (apparently because they can afford talented lawyers) don’t pay taxes and don’t have to say who their donors are. 

It’s politics as usual in the Greatest Country in the World.

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Those links I promised:

The differences between 501(c)(3), 501(c)(4) and political organizations:

http://www.mffh.org/mm/files/AFJ_Comparison-of-501C3S-501C4S.pdf 

The Inspector General report:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/05/15/us/politics/15irs-inspector-report.html

What went on in Cincinnati:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/us/politics/at-irs-unprepared-office-seemed-unclear-about-the-rules.html?hp

Some context and commentary from the Columbia Journalism Review:

http://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/the_other_irs_scandal.php?page=all

It’s Nice When the World Makes Sense

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Even if the underlying facts aren’t so great at all.

Case 1: Paul Krugman ties together two recent stories: how the economic evidence for cutting government spending during a recession is non-existent, and how cutting spending on programs like Medicare and Social Security is the preferred strategy of the rich. It probably won’t make any difference that the scientific support for government austerity during an economic downturn has been demolished, since facts don’t necessarily trump ideology. For the most part, the political class is subservient to the upper class. Marx, who helped generate a vast number of ideologists himself, wasn’t wrong about everything.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/opinion/krugman-the-one-percents-solution.html?ref=paulkrugman

Krugman cites the study I wrote about under the title “What the 1% Want from Washington”:

https://whereofonecanspeak.com/2013/04/07/what-the-1-want-from-washington/

Case 2:  According to the New York Times, the Boston police commissioner admitted this week that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (joh-KHAHR’ tsahr-NEYE’-ehv) and the boat in which he hid were both in the 20-block search perimeter all along. It’s not clear why Tsarnaev wasn’t found during the manhunt, but it wasn’t because the boat was 1 block outside the search perimeter, as the Watertown police chief claimed. (See the post below, which includes a transcript of the police discussing where to search.)

In this case, it didn’t make sense that a small army of police failed to search an area 2 or 3 blocks from where the guy dumped his getaway car. What didn’t make any sense now makes some sense. People make mistakes and then make excuses. No shock there.