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Poverty Keeps Getting Worse and Worse for Working-Age Adults

by AltaG65eacunv Posted on September 17, 2014

Mother Jones

The Census Bureau released its annual poverty report today, and the headline number shows that the official poverty rate declined from 15.0 percent to 14.5 percent. This decline was driven entirely by a drop in the number of children living in poverty.

This gives me an excuse to make a point that doesn’t get made often enough. You’ll often see charts showing that the overall poverty rate has remained roughly the same since the late 60s, and that’s true. But this is largely due to more generous Social Security benefits, which have reduced elderly poverty from over 30 percent to under 10 percent.

There’s been no such reduction among working age adults. In fact, just the opposite. The low point for working-age poverty was about 9 percent, reached in 1968, and since then it’s steadily increased. There are small variations from year to year, but basically it went up to about 10-11 percent in the 80s and then increased to 13.6 percent during the Great Recession. It’s stayed there ever since.

The safety net has helped most of these folks tread water, but it doesn’t change the fact that the market economy has gotten steadily bleaker for the poor over the past 40 years. It’s great that we’ve made such significant inroads against elderly poverty, but aggregates can fool you about the rest of the country. Among everyone else, poverty has only gotten worse and worse.

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Poverty Keeps Getting Worse and Worse for Working-Age Adults

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The Endless Rabbit Hole of Secession, Shetland Islands Edition

by JedKelliher Posted on September 16, 2014

Mother Jones

NOTE: There’s, um, a pretty important update at the bottom of this post.

Following a string of links from an Atrios post, I came across this paragraph from a piece a few months ago about the possibility of Scottish independence:

As for Mr Salmond’s fantasies about oil revenues: stocks are dwindling, fracking is driving down the price, when territorial waters are drawn up he may find some of what he thinks is his oil in the North Sea will actually be England’s, and the Shetland Islands — in whose waters much of his reserves lie — say that if Scotland goes independent, they will seek to re-join Norway.

Wait. What? Rejoin Norway? Hasn’t it been quite a few centuries since they had anything to do with Norway? I clearly haven’t been paying enough attention to this stuff. What’s it all about? Here’s a piece from earlier this year:

David Cameron today summoned Norwegian Ambassador Hårek Hardbalne to Downing Street to demand that Norway makes clear it has no territorial interest in the Shetland Islands. This follows yesterday’s extraordinary announcement by the leader of Shetland Islands’ Council, Leif Erikson, that Shetland planned to hold a separate referendum on independence from Scotland should Scots choose independence from the UK on September 18th.

….In an interview with the BBC, ambassador Hardbalne said that he did not wish to comment on the surprise move by Shetland but wished to stress that Norway has always upheld the democratic rights to self determination. The BBC reported that the threat of sanctions and exclusion from NATO already had the Norwegians running scared.

That’s Dr. Leif Erikson, by the way. In any case, apparently the Shetland Islands really have been making noises about this. If Scotland secedes in order to grab a bigger share of North Sea oil wealth, then why shouldn’t they secede from Scotland? They have the same gripe about unfair division of oil revenues, after all. This is from 2012:

The Orkney and Shetland islands could remain part of the UK if the rest of Scotland votes to separate, according to a report submitted by their MSPs to the Government. The islands could even declare independence themselves, it adds.

Alternatively, they could agree to join a separate Scotland only if they are granted a much bigger portion of North Sea oil and gas revenues, around a quarter of which lies in Shetland’s waters alone. Tavish Scott, the Liberal Democrat MSP for Shetland, agreed the threat was political “dynamite” but questioned why Mr Salmond was the only politician who could use oil wealth to argue for self-determination.

This bit of soap opera is obviously old news to anyone who’s followed the Scottish independence movement closely, but that doesn’t happen to include me. In any case, it’s an amusing confirmation of my belief that no matter how small a political unit you have, there’s always a piece of it that’s richer than the rest and feels like it should no longer have to subsidize all the rest of the freeloaders. I wonder if the Shetland Islanders would be open to an invitation to join the state of California?

UPDATE: It appears that I’ve been taken in by an April Fools post regarding the whole Norway business. Leif Erikson is not the leader of the Shetland Islands council, and Hårek Hardbalne (aka Hagar the Horrible) is not the ambassador from Norway. So sorry. But in a way, being suckered into this joke somehow makes this whole post better, doesn’t it?

As for the rest of it, there doesn’t seem to be much to that either. There’s been some talk here and there about secession and/or rejoining the UK if Scotland votes for independence, but nothing very serious. Basically, I was pretty thoroughly snookered by all this.

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The Endless Rabbit Hole of Secession, Shetland Islands Edition

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No, Ronald Reagan Was Not Just a More Amiable Version of Barry Goldwater

by SharynW08am Posted on September 16, 2014

Mother Jones

Jacob Weisberg is critical of Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge, the third volume in his history of movement conservatism from 1958 to 1980. The first two books covered Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon; the third spans the period from 1972 through 1976, which encompasses the end of Nixon and the rise of Reagan. Here’s Weisberg:

Most historians view the Nixon-Reagan transition as a break in the ideological continuum, a shift from an era in which Republicans made peace with the growing welfare and regulatory state to one in which a newly energized conservative movement effectively challenged it. Perlstein, by contrast, sees the move from Nixon to Reagan as continuity: Both men tried to reverse what the 1960s were doing to the country.

….An alternative thesis is the one Perlstein seemed to be framing up with his first, shorter, and better book: that the crucial bridge in modern Republican politics was the one leading from Barry Goldwater to Reagan. Nixon was the last important President of the New Deal Era, in the same way that Bill Clinton is best subsumed under the rubric of the Reagan Era….In his attack on government, Reagan drew very little from Nixon, and a great deal from Goldwater….Reagan’s views were not simply Goldwater’s views; they were Goldwater’s views purged of their excesses and abstraction, grounded in the country’s lived experience, and given a hopeful cast. That’s the bridge Reagan walked across and the one I wish Perlstein had tried to sell us.

I think Weisberg has missed the bridge that Perlstein is trying to sell us. Reagan wasn’t merely a better, more congenial version of Barry Goldwater. That’s part of the story, but there’s a second part as well: Reagan’s exploitation of the politics of resentment that Nixon rode to victory in 1968 and 1972. Just as Reagan sanded off the scariest edges of Goldwaterism to make it more palatable to a national audience, he also sanded off—or perhaps just kept hidden—the scariest edges of right-wing populist resentment. But make no mistake: it was there, and it was a big part of Reagan’s appeal. Intellectually, Reagan’s politics may have been the child of Goldwater, but emotionally they were the child of Nixon.

That said, I think Weisberg also makes some sharp criticisms of The Invisible Bridge. I enjoyed it, but it rings true when he complains that “for long stretches, reading this book feels like leafing through a lot of old newspapers.” It’s a little more of a pastiche than either of his first two books, and too often this is to the detriment of the bigger story.

But there was another, more fundamental, disappointment. The genius of Before the Storm, the first book in the series, is that it explained the birth of movement conservatism to a liberal audience. This is harder than it sounds. A conservative history, simply because of the unspoken assumptions that would inevitably color it, would largely leave liberal readers cold. An overtly liberal history, by contrast, would almost certainly be unable to truly explain the appeal of Goldwater and his supporters. But Perlstein threads this needle brilliantly. Before the Storm explains the rise of Goldwater in a way that conservatives consider fair but that liberals find comprehensible.

For better or worse, Perlstein abandoned this approach in The Invisible Bridge. Maybe that was inevitable as the spotlight moved first from a principled loser like Goldwater to a destructive manipulator like Nixon and then to a man who set back the liberal project in a way that’s still painful to this day. It’s just plain easier to be dispassionately curious about Goldwater than about either Nixon or Reagan. Nonetheless, this failing also makes The Invisible Bridge less interesting. Even granting the hagiographic glow that conservatives tend to demand of Reagan biographers, this really isn’t a book that very many conservatives would consider fair. And except for brief flashes of insight1 it doesn’t truly explain to liberal sensibilities just what was so appealing about the man.

It’s still a lovely book that I paged through hungrily. And let’s face it: saying that it’s not as good as Before the Storm is something you could say about nearly every book ever written. It’s still pretty damn good. But I wish Perlstein had gone a little lighter on his obvious contempt for Reagan and spent a little more time owning up—perhaps uncomfortably—to just what it was about the liberalism of the 70s that finally drove so many voters crazy.

1For example, there’s this brief bit about the White House consulting Reagan during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war:

Kissinger [] solicited him for advice on the extraordinarily delicate matter of how to frame an Israeli resupply operation that, if handled incorrectly, could lead to a military confrontation with the Soviet Union. Reagan suggested: “Why don’t you say you will replace all the aircraft the Arabs claim they have shot down?”

This was brilliant. Since the Arabs were wildly exaggerating their success, presenting them with a Hobson’s choice—saying nothing or facing international humiliation—was perfect. Reagan’s interpersonal intelligence was something to behold.

More like that, please.

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No, Ronald Reagan Was Not Just a More Amiable Version of Barry Goldwater

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Madam Secretary? Seriously?

by MichaelPn Posted on September 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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I may be off my rocker for wondering about this, but here goes. You’ve seen the ads for Madam Secretary, right? (Aside from those of you who shun TV as unworthy of your attention, of course.) Téa Leone stars as a smart, tough, engaged, down-to-earth, problem-solving secretary of state who gets results by doing the right thing.

Now, sure, her husband is not a former US president. So she isn’t quite just a gauzy, fictionalized depiction of Hillary Clinton. But she’s close! And considering that secretary of state is surely one of the least glamorous positions in the federal government—another grueling day working the phones with fellow foreign ministers, hooray!—it’s pretty hard not to see this as a fairly transparent attempt to make Hillary look like presidential timber. At least, that’s what I’d think if I were either a Republican or any Democrat thinking of running against her.

On the other hand, shows like this usually flop, so maybe it won’t work out. Or maybe Hillary will look wan and fainthearted compared to the hard charging, damn-the-politics Elizabeth McCord. I dunno. But it sure seems like a helluva coincidence, doesn’t it?

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Madam Secretary? Seriously?

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Obama Has Indeed Learned Some Foreign Policy Lessons, Just Not the Ones the Establishment Likes

by Elana51Fpzfkkub Posted on September 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over at FP, David Rothkopf has a long and critical examination of President Obama’s foreign policy. Unfortunately, it starts with a biting assessment from “one of America’s most dependable Middle Eastern allies,” which is almost single-handedly enough to disqualify it as serious analysis. Anyone who still thinks that America’s “most dependable” Mideast allies have anything but their own ancient parochial hatreds at heart really needs to find a different line of work.

But for some reason I kept reading. And as usual, among the endless parade of Obama horror stories, Syria looms the largest:

On Aug. 20, 2012, Obama met with reporters to discuss the crisis in Syria….In an unscripted moment, he suggested that he would take action against the Syrian regime if it used chemical weapons….Despite intelligence reports of multiple violations of that red line, the White House managed to ignore or sidestep the issue — that is, until exactly one year later, when, on Aug. 21, 2013, a major chemical-weapons attack claimed the lives of an estimated 1,429 people in Ghouta, a Damascus suburb.

The tripwire strung by the president himself had been clearly and unmistakably tripped. Now, his credibility was at stake.

Three days later, Obama met with his national security team and indicated that he was inclined to strike Syria….Lacking many close relationships with European or other world leaders, he called one of the few he thought he could count on: British Prime Minister David Cameron….But Obama, Cameron, and their teams would soon discover that they had moved too quickly and had badly miscalculated….Parliament rejected Cameron’s call to arms.

This coincided with the U.S. Congress’s growing doubts about the action. Some, perhaps most, of this was politics….Despite these headwinds, by the afternoon of Aug. 30, 2013, the White House appeared set to follow through on the limited-attack option….But later that afternoon, the president went on a walk around the South Lawn of the White House with his chief of staff, Denis McDonough….Afterward, when the two joined a small group of top advisors in the Oval Office, Obama reportedly announced, “I have a big idea I want to run by you guys,” and then segued into his new plan to put action on hold until he could get a formal vote of congressional support.

….”This was the real turning point for the administration’s foreign policy,” a former senior Obama advisor told me. “This was when things really started to go bad.”

With Syria festering for more than two years amid pleas to the United States for leadership and support from longtime regional allies, the media was primed to respond, and many critics immediately assailed the president for being indecisive….It also set a precedent that would seemingly require the president to seek congressional approval for future military actions, even though the War Powers Resolution explicitly notes that he does not require it.

Rothkopf takes this as a fatal error, but it’s telling what he thinks the error is. Obama has long had a fairly consistent belief that you should avoid bellicose, uncompromising rhetoric, but on August 20, 2012, he momentarily forgot that and set his infamous red line on Syrian use of chemical weapons. A year later, with his “credibility” at stake—perhaps the cause of more dumb wars than anything else in history—he was inclined to launch a military strike on Syria. But then he thought harder about it and decided to see if there was any support for the idea. As it turned out, there wasn’t. Despite the endless hectoring of Republicans, when it came time to actually support a military response, they decided that playing politics was more important. And so Obama backed down.

Rothkopf thinks this was Obama’s big mistake. But there’s an alternative reading: that setting the red line in the first place was the real mistake. It took a while, but eventually Obama concluded that maybe it wasn’t wise to let our foreign policy be dictated by a brief, intemperate remark. Figuring that out, rather than being goaded into a pointless response, is a rare sign of wisdom in a president, most of whom serve out their entire terms in endless fear of the media questioning their credibility.

The rest of Rothkopf’s piece is choppy and incoherent enough that I couldn’t really make sense of it. He thinks George Bush deserves credit for finally adopting a more diplomatic approach to foreign affairs in his second term, but criticizes Obama for continuing it. He praises Bush for adopting a more coherent foreign policy with less infighting in his second term, but criticizes Obama for basically doing the same thing from the start. He’s obscurely critical of Obama’s habit of asking everyone in a meeting for their opinions, and then not making a decision instantly. I don’t quite know why. And there’s the usual criticism of disjointed decision making and personality conflicts, which as near as I can tell has been a staple of foreign policy thumbsuckers since about the time of George Washington.

More generally, Rothkopf criticizes Obama for not learning from his mistakes, but he seems not to understand that Obama has learned from his mistakes. Among other things, he’s learned that even the limited appetite he had for military intervention in his first term was probably too much. In his second term, he’s even more reticent to use military force. But apparently this doesn’t count as a lesson learned. Not in the world of serious foreign policy, anyway.

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Obama Has Indeed Learned Some Foreign Policy Lessons, Just Not the Ones the Establishment Likes

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Friday Cat Blogging – 12 September 2014

by SheenaC94n Posted on September 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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A few of you have written to ask if we plan to get another cat. The answer is probably yes, but not immediately. And what does “not immediately” mean? There’s no telling. A new cat could walk into our lives tomorrow, or it might take a little while longer. We’ll see.

In the meantime, my mother’s cats continue to be perky and photogenic, and ever since she learned how easy it is to take pictures with her iPad and email them directly to me, I’ve been getting more photos of her brood. Below you can see the latest. Mozart has pretty plainly settled in to alpha cat status, and Ditto just as plainly isn’t quite sure he’s happy about that. But it’s too late. Ditto has the bulk, but I think Mozart has whatever indefinable feline quality it is that makes him boss. It’s his house now.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 12 September 2014

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Not-Quite-Supermoon Blogging – 7 September 2014

by ToddBainerry Posted on September 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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I didn’t actually get around to hauling out my camera for Monday’s supermoon (how many of these things do we get every year, anyway?), but I did snap a few pictures on Sunday. So in the spirit of better late than never, here’s one of them. The clouds and the colors were kind of interesting, even if the picture itself is so-so.

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Not-Quite-Supermoon Blogging – 7 September 2014

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Obama’s Iraq Speech: Light on Substance, and Maybe That’s a Good Thing

by SharronMargarot Posted on September 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Well, that was pretty anticlimactic. Here is President Obama’s shiny new plan for defeating ISIS:

  1. More airstrikes, including strikes in Syria.
  2. A few hundred advisors to work with Iraqi troops. They will provide training, equipment, and intelligence.
  3. Counterterrorism to prevent ISIS attacks.
  4. Humanitarian aid.

We are, presumably, already engaged in #3 and #4. We’re partially engaged in #1. Basically, then Obama is proposing to (a) expand the air war and (b) provide more aid to the Iraqi army. That’s really not an awful lot—which is fine with me.

Will this work? Airstrikes by themselves are obviously limited in what they can accomplish. They can frustrate ISIS plans in specific areas, but they can’t do a lot more than that. As we’ve known all along, real success depends on the Iraqi military. Unfortunately, given the fact that we spent years training Iraqi forces and ended up with an army that cut and run at the first sight of ISIS forces, I have my doubts that further training will really do that much good. But if it doesn’t, there’s little we can do anyway. So it’s probably our only option.

The big question, of course, is whether our assistance will stay limited. If the Iraqi military fails, as it may, will we start pouring in more troops? Obama was clear on this: “We will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq.” Still, sometimes events run away with things, and I’m not sure what’s going to prevent a slow accretion of more and more US forces aside from Obama’s personal convictions. This is a thinner reed than I’d like even if I believe that he’s entirely sincere in his desire to avoid escalation. We’ll just have to wait and see.

In any case, that’s really all we got tonight. I’d like to write something longer and more insightful, but there just weren’t enough specifics in the speech to justify that. The last third of the speech was mostly platitudes about partners, chairing a UN meeting, America is great, God bless the troops, etc. There wasn’t an awful lot there.

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Obama’s Iraq Speech: Light on Substance, and Maybe That’s a Good Thing

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Let’s Not Give ISIS Exactly What They Want

by RefugioDurbin Posted on September 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Yesterday I wrote a post noting that a supposedly war-weary public had suddenly become awfully war happy. “All it took,” I said, “was a carefully stagecrafted beheading video and the usual gang of conservative jingoists to exploit it.” Here’s a Twitter conversation that followed (lightly edited for clarity):

DS: Think of what you wrote: “All it took was…beheading”? I opposed W’s but this is what wars are made from & I think rightly so.

Me: Really? So any group anywhere in the world merely needs to commit an atrocity to draw us into war?

DS: On what other basis should wars be fought if not to stop groups from committing atrocities against Americans?

I’m not trying to pick on anyone in particular here, but it’s pretty discouraging that this kind of attitude is so common. There’s no question that the beheading of American citizens by a gang of vicious thugs is the kind of thing that makes your blood boil. Unless you hail from Vulcan, your gut reaction is that you want to find the barbarians who did this and crush them.

But that shouldn’t be your final reaction. This is not an era of conventional military forces with overwhelming power and no real fear of blowback. It’s an era of stateless terrorists whose ability to commit extremely public atrocities is pretty much unlimited. And while atrocities can have multiple motivations, one of the key reasons for otherwise pointless actions like one-off kidnappings and beheadings is their ability to either provoke overreactions or successfully extort ransoms. Unfortunately, Americans are stupidly addicted to the former and Europeans seem to be stupidly addicted to the latter, and that’s part of what keeps this stuff going.

In any case, a moment’s thought should convince you that we’re being manipulated. We’ve read account after account about ISIS and its remarkably sophisticated command and publicity apparatus. The beheading video is part of that. It’s a very calculated, very deliberate attempt to get us to respond stupidly. It’s not even a very subtle manipulation. It’s just an especially brutal one.

So if we’re smart, we won’t give them what they want. Instead we’ll respond coldly and meticulously. We’ll fight on our terms, not theirs. We’ll intervene if and only if the Iraqi government demonstrates that it can take the lead and hold the ground they take. We’ll forego magical thinking about counterinsurgencies. We won’t commit Western troops in force because we know from experience that this doesn’t work. We’ll avoid pitched battles and instead take advantage of our chances when they arise. Time is on our side.

Above all, we won’t allow a small band of medieval theocrats to manipulate us. We need to stop giving them exactly what they want. We need to stop doing stupid stuff.

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Let’s Not Give ISIS Exactly What They Want

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If Scotland Secedes, They Better Secede From the Pound Too

by Emily Collins Posted on September 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Scotland will be voting next week on whether to secede from Great Britain, and Paul Krugman is aghast:

Everything that has happened in Europe since 2009 or so has demonstrated that sharing a currency without sharing a government is very dangerous. In economics jargon, fiscal and banking integration are essential elements of an optimum currency area. And an independent Scotland using Britain’s pound would be in even worse shape than euro countries, which at least have some say in how the European Central Bank is run.

I find it mind-boggling that Scotland would consider going down this path after all that has happened in the last few years. If Scottish voters really believe that it’s safe to become a country without a currency, they have been badly misled.

I don’t get this either. I understand why the pro-independence forces favor continued use of the pound: it’s one less scary thing for the pro-union forces to use in their campaign. People are used to the pound, and it’s obviously a stable, well-accepted currency. Conversely, a new Scottish currency would be a big unknown, and give people one more reason to vote against independence.

It’s quite likely, of course, that the whole thing is a charade. The pro-independence forces probably feel like they need to support continued use of the pound for now, just to take it off the table as a campaign issue. But if independence succeeds, there’s a good chance that Scotland will adopt its own currency within a few years for all the reasons Krugman brings up. Being stuck in a currency union is so obviously dangerous that it will probably be abandoned once things shake down in an independent Scotland and the new government has time to focus on it.

As for Scottish independence itself, I don’t have much of an opinion. I do have a generic opinion that secession usually sounds better than it actually is in practice. Every province or state or city or neighborhood always thinks they have deep and justified grievances against whatever polity they belong to, and often they’re right. That’s the nature of large agglomerations of human beings. But often those grievances are, in truth, fairly skin deep—usually some version of “cultural identity,” the last refuge of the person with no actual arguments to make—and secession merely resolves some of them while creating whole new ones. I think it rarely accomplishes much.

My super-rough rule of thumb is this: I support secession of (a) territories that speak a different language, (b) territories that are physically distant, and (c) territories that have genuinely suffered at the hands of a brutal regime. Jokes aside on items (a) and (c), none of these really apply to Scotland, so I’d put myself down as moderately opposed to independence. But if it does happen, I sure hope currency union really does turn out to be a charade. If you’re going to have your own country, then you should have your own money and your own monetary policy. If we’ve learned nothing else over the past half decade, surely we’ve at least learned that.

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If Scotland Secedes, They Better Secede From the Pound Too

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