Read Blair’s response here and the full text of AMW’s comment below the fold. What do readers think?

DEAR BLAIR JACKSON,

An Occupy Your Mind column starting with a Bill O’Reilly quote? Progressive minds, not to mention precious column space, occupied by the rants of one of the extreme right’s most prominent henchmen?

What is this, an attempt at persuading O’Reilly or his followers that you are not a socialist? You gotta be kidding. O’Reilly and his ilk are not taking part in a debate of any kind, in which facts and arguments have any currency. They are engaged in propaganda. By quoting and discussing their straw man arguments and other lies and distortions, all you are doing is giving them legitimacy they don’t deserve. This column is another stark example of American liberals’ and progressives’ self-defeating tendency to allow the extreme right to frame the debate and dominate the public discourse.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has done the right thing: they have started framing the debate on their own terms — “We are the 99%!” — instead of allowing the 1 percent to push their agenda on the whole country. Polls show that they are in fact expressing ideas that vast majorities of Americans share: 66 percent of the public say that wealth is not fairly distributed, two-thirds consistently say that the rich are not paying their fair share in taxes, 70 percent say that Congressional Republicans favor the rich, 80 percent say that Wall Street and large corporations have too much political influence, and so on and so on. OWS have put the corporate elites, the 1 percent and their enablers on the defensive. Finally, the voices of two thirds of the people are starting to be heard — voices that have hitherto been drowned out in the mainstream media and left virtually without representation in Congress.

It seems that the Free Weekly hasn’t gotten the memo yet: Stop wasting your time responding to the same tired old right wing talking points! End the occupation of the public discourse space by Fox News and other corporate shills! Expel O’Reilly from your mind! Put out your own vision!

Arkansas Media Watch

"They don't know why they are protesting"

This cartoon (cortesy of Think Progress) expresses well how the corporate media are trying to shape the narrative about the inconvenient Wall Street protesters. Regardless what one’s political opinion on the issues, nobody in their right mind can claim that the protesters don’t express specific grievances and propose specific policies how to address them unless they are intellectually dishonest (not to mention systematic liars like ADG’s Mike Masterson).

What is more, polls show very clearly that a majority of Americans agrees with some of OWS’s core messages:

• A recent New York Times/CBS poll found that 46% of the public think OWS reflects the views of most Americans. 34% disagreed and 18% had no opinion. Only 27% think the Tea Party reflects the views of most Americans.
• Two-thirds of the public said that wealth should be distributed more evenly in the country.
• Two-thirds object to tax cuts for corporations and a similar number prefer increasing income taxes on millionaires.
• 84 percent disapprove of Congress and 71 percent of the public say the Republican party does not have a clear plan for creating jobs.
• Seven in 10 Americans think the policies of Congressional Republicans favor the rich.
• In a more recent CBS poll 35 percent had a favorable impression of the OWS protest movement. Only 16 percent could say the same for Wall Street and large corporations. 29 percent had a favorable impression of the Tea Party movement, and 21 percent of government in Washington.
• In terms of unpopularity, Wall Street/large corporations tied with Washington government, with 71 percent of those polled saying they had an unfavorable impression of them. The Tea Party movement got a 50 percent unfavorable response, and Occupy Wall Street protesters 40 percent.
• 74 percent of those surveyed believe Americans who are not wealthy have too little influence on politics, while also saying Wall Street and large corporations (80 percent) and PACs (74 percent) have too much influence. Responses over the political influence of labor unions was divided – 39 percent said they have too much, 22 percent said they have too little, and 38 percent said they have about the right amount.

It seems that the corporate media, with their generally anti-union, pro-Wall Street, pro-corporate bias, are fighting an uphill battle on behalf of the 1%. Expect more of the nasty bad-smelling variety from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

UPDATE: Another excellent take on corporate media deafness by Tom Tomorrow:

"But what do they want?"

So how does the local paper, the Southwest Times Record, cover the exit of one of its largest employers? With stories that read like they were written by Whirlpool’s PR department. (…)
The Times Record gives Whirlpool’s top flack the second, third, fourth, and fifth paragraphs, and then gives seven of the remaining eight paragraphs to rewriting the press release. Not one worker is quoted in the story.

“Flack-driven” coverage, as CJR’s Ryan Chittum puts it, is a common occurrence in business reporting. The analysis is well worth reading.

LITTLE ROCK — I’m sold on one man’s proposed name for that unwashed, whining, smelly mob occupying and infesting Wall Street because they either:
1. Are being paid by big-bucks special interests to be there and create violent confrontations or…
2. Have no jobs, are bored and have nothing better to do but hang out together and screech “Pervert!,” “Boycott!” and “The world is watching!” as they intentionally pick fights with police to create headlines (and Internet videos for the 2012 election) or…
3. Are harboring free-floating anger about life as free Americans and are in search of scapegoats for their rage. Or, all of the above.
Yep, the calculated hatching of America’s newly named “Flea Party” seems to fit this mob. And shazam! It rhymes with Tea Party.

The unwashed, smelly mob (as seen in Little Rock)

Without any sense of irony, Masterson goes on to complain about lack of civility on the part of those he just insulted. Also devoid of irony is his made-up claim that protesters are puppets of “wealthy, ultra-liberal power brokers” (hint: Masterson’s wife is a Tea Party activist employed as Director of Grassroots for Arkansas by Americans For Prosperity, the front group funded by the billionaire Koch brothers).

Mike Masterson "Flea Party" column, ADG October 18, 2011

Editor Paul Greenberg, famous for his literary sensitivity, might want to remind Masterson that comparing political opponents to parasitic bugs has kind of gone out of fashion after 1945. Although I have the hunch that he doesn’t really mind fascist rhetoric being employed on his editorial page.

UPDATE: On December 6, Masterson was once again caught with his pants on fire, using his position as editor of the Dem-Gaz opinion page to spread a piece of propaganda that is demonstrably a lie: He wrote in his column that Occupy NWA, the Northwest Arkansas sprout of the Occupy Wall Street movement, had falsely claimed the support of hundreds of local businesses. Not so. Occupy NWA had expressed its own support for local business but never claimed or implied that these businesses were in turn supporters of the movement.

The issue was covered sufficiently at Blue Arkansas and Street Jazz. I would add, though, that liberal observers still seem to delude themselves about right-wing spinmeisters like Masterson. Masterson does not, as Richard Drake suggests, need “political bifocals”. He knows what he is doing and so does his boss, Paul Greenberg. Masterson lies because lying is what he does, lying is what he is good in, and lying is what he is paid for. That’s all there is to it.

Loyal Arkansas Democrat-Gazette readers will now have to endure the raging right-wing extremism of the ADG opinion page tempered only by the centrism of John Brummett, who recently rejoined the newspaper. Whether the supply of sufficiently masochistic readers is sufficient to ensure the survival of the paper remains to be seen. Greenberg apparently hopes that enough Arkansans cherish the economic illiteracy of columnist Bradley Gitz and the undisguised pro-corporate agenda of opinion editor Mike Masterson.

It also ran a subhead, “Too loose to last? wonder some,” that doesn’t reflect the views of anyone quoted in the story. In fact, the fifth paragraph of the story notes that the “growing cohesiveness and profile” of the protest has “caught the attention of public intellectuals and veterans of past social movements.” Finally, where other subscribers of the AP elected to accompany the story with a picture of protesters holding signs or a photo of veteran activists, the Democrat-Gazette ran a picture of a man demonstrating how to break free from plastic hand restraints during the protests.

This is a stark example of the flaw in Fellone’s position. The decisions an editor made in the Occupy Wall Street story might not be a reflection the Democrat-Gazette’s conservative editorial posture, but at the very least, they’re the product of an editor bringing his subjective views to a story.

Even less subtle examples of politically slanted ADG front page news reporting are not hard to find. Arkansas Media Watch pointed out ADG headlines during the debt ceiling impasse wrongly claiming that both parties in Washington refused to compromise when the newspaper’s own reporting clearly indicated the opposite.

Here’s another one. Yesterday, the ADG front page had the following headline concerning new trade agreements:

“3 trade pacts win approval of Congress – Panama, S. Korea, Colombia deals touted as job creators”

The problem with that headline is that there is no evidence that these trade agreements are “job creators”. The article itself reports:

“The economic benefits are projected to be small. A federal agency estimated in 2007 that the impact on employment would be “negligible” and that the deals would increase gross domestic product by about $14.4 billion, or roughly 0.1 percent. (…) The commission [the U.S. International Trade Commission, a federal agency that analyzed the deals in 2007] predicted that U.S. farmers would benefit the most, because of increased demand for dairy products and beef, pork and poultry. Conversely, it predicted that the pacts would eliminate some manufacturing jobs, particularly in the textile industry. Opponents, including textile companies, said that the deals would harm the economy by undermining the nation’s industrial base. They argued that South Korean companies would benefit much more than American companies because they were gaining access to a much larger market.”

The article also quotes several sources, including Congress members from Arkansas and Secretary of State Clinton, asserting that the agreements will create US jobs. It quotes other sources asserting that they will, on the contrary, harm US workers, and remarks that “populist protesters oppose the trade agreements because of the potential for American job losses”. It further points out that President Obama “cited similar concerns in criticizing the agreements during the 2008 presidential campaign.”

Economist Dean Baker comments:

While politicians from both parties, including President Obama, have called these trade pacts job bills, it would be very difficult to find any economist anywhere who is not obviously on someone payroll who would claim that these deals would lead to any notable number of jobs ever, and certainly not in the next few years. Most analyses show that these deals will have very little impact on jobs and it is entirely possible that they will end up as net job losers in the short-term as has been the case with past trade deals.

Bottom line is that there are wildly differing opinions among policy makers and experts as to the impact of these trade deals on American employment, and the most expertly, unbiased source consulted in the article says that the impact is “negligible”. Yet the editor made the decision to associate the deals with job creation. The subhead elevates a contested opinion to the status of fact or at least consensus view. That editorial decision was indefensible.

Pryor said various tax breaks have created a system in which 45 percent of Americans don’t pay taxes. “It’s hard to have a fair tax system where only about half the people are paying,” he said.

This blog pointed out that most Americans do pay taxes (payroll taxes, gas and sales taxes etc.), even those too poor to pay federal income taxes. The issue of wrong or misleading statements about tax fairness has been in the air lately. Pryor’s Senate colleague John Boozman is on record with a similar wrong statement: “51 percent of the public don’t pay any federal taxes”. A recent, well researched New York Times editorial pointed out the fallacy in these claims.

Arkansas Media Watch has not only criticized the two Senators for making inaccurate statements, but also the local media for letting them get away with inaccurate statements. Pryor’s office has now maintained that Pryor was misquoted. Arkansas Media Watch has contacted NWA Times (editors Greg Harton and Lisa Thompson and publisher Rusty Turner) twice (on August 24 and 29) and requested clarification. No response.

Instead, today, NWA Times published an unsigned editorial attacking those who set the record straight:

“Pryor spoke to the Rogers Rotary Club last week and talked about the nation’s debt crisis. During his presentation, he made the logical argument that part of the solution lies in reforming the federal tax code. As an example, Pryor commented that the code allows 45 percent of citizens to pay no federal income tax and relies on the remaining 55 percent to pony up. That, he reasonably concluded, appears to be unfair and in need of reform. It was clear to everyone in the room that Pryor was talking about federal income taxes. The story about the speech that appeared in this newspaper also makes the reference clear.”

That is not true. The NWA Times report does not make any reference to federal income taxes, just to the “tax system”. (The original article is not online available any more so I posted a cutout, below.)

“However, a self-described liberal blogger issued a withering rebuke of Pryor’s remarks, saying that he was pandering to the largely conservative Northwest Arkansas business community by repeating a canard that poor people don’t pay taxes. Using the time-tested strategy of selective omission, the blogger excoriated Pryor for throwing poor people under the bus, that the Senator knows good and well that they pay all kinds of taxes, even if they are exempt from the federal income levy.”

It is unclear which blogger they refer to here. This blog has not accused Pryor of “pandering to the largely conservative Northwest Arkansas business community”, nor has Blue Arkansas or Arkansas Blog. None of these blogs taking up the debate have employed “selective omission” – they all simply quoted from NWA Times’ own report. A google search of the phrase “pandering to the largely conservative Northwest Arkansas business community” doesn’t turn up anything either. These editors are clumsily building a straw man, attacking an unnamed blogger and laying words in their mouth that nobody actually used. Tellingly, the editors cannot quote a single statement that the unnamed blogger actually got wrong. Their strategy is to dismiss the blogger’s criticism on ideological grounds. That is a lot easier than making an argument and backing it up with factual evidence. It’s just another example of how the Murdochized media operates.

This editorial looks like a pretty desperate attempt at damage control by a newspaper that got caught screwing up in its core business – which, one assumes, consists in informing readers and reporting facts (and notably, they just had to retract from another screw-up involving judge Mary Ann Gunn). Two points deserve special attention: first the editors’ childishly referring to unnamed bloggers, apparently afraid that people might actually want to read for themselves who got it right. Second, the real issue at hand – that the working poor may not be paying federal income taxes but they do pay plenty of taxes and accusing them of free-riding is lowliest demagoguery – gets obfuscated by a bunch of editors who care more about saving their own face than about the truth. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Finally, for some reason, Boozman’s transgression doesn’t get the attention it deserves, with the debate focusing on Pryor.

Further reading/viewing:

• Perfidious poor, a good article by Ernest Dumas in Arkansas Times
• Refuting the “50% don’t pay taxes” Canard, by fayfreethinkers.com
• The New Resentment of the Poor, New York Times
• Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult
• Soaking the poor, state by state

The World of Class Warfare – by Jon Stewart

• The Daily Show – World of Class Warfare – Warren Buffett vs. Wealthy Conservatives
• The Daily Show – World of Class Warfare – The Poor’s Free Ride Is Over

Cutout of the NWA Times front page article in question:

AMW has asked NWA Times editor Greg Harton and journalist Larry Henry for confirmation what Pryor actually said and they have not responded. This is not reassuring. The newspaper pretends to have a policy of correcting any factual mistakes. So far this hasn’t happened. Let’s hope that the newspaper takes the incident seriously and is more careful in its future reporting.

On the other hand, Pryor’s clarification still raises some issues. Pryor expresses concern “that 1,470 taxpayers who earned $1 million or more paid no federal income taxes in 2009″. But a statement like “It’s hard to have a fair tax system where only about half the people are paying”, assuming it is meant to only refer to the federal income tax, seems to imply that more of the working poor and the elderly should be paying income taxes. Or does Pryor think half the people are millionaires? When you care about tax fairness, why would you single out just one component of the tax system? Why discuss only “the inequities in the federal income tax system, [as opposed to] city, state or even sales or excise taxes” – not to mention federal payroll taxes?

The full statement from Mark Pryor’s office below the fold:

I’m happy to provide clarity regarding Senator Pryor’s remarks at the Rogers Rotary last week. He supports a progressive tax system and believes everyone should pay to their ability. When talking about federal tax reform last week, it was very clear he was talking about Federal income taxes and special tax deals for corporations. He was there to discuss, in part, the inequities in the federal income tax system, not city, state or even sales or excise taxes.

There is no disputing the fact that there are a number of Americans who don’t pay federal income tax. In its analysis of IRS 2009 tax data, the Tax Policy Center shows that 46 percent of taxpayers paid no federal income tax. Approximately three-fourths of these individuals are elderly or the working poor. On the flip side, the IRS reports that 1,470 taxpayers who earned $1 million or more paid no federal income taxes in 2009. It is maddening that hundreds of millionaires pay virtually no federal income taxes, and this should change.

The entire tax reform discussion in Rogers was focused on creating a more fair federal income tax system and eliminating as many special deals for special interest which are adding to our debt. One example was the fact that Wal-Mart pays over 30 percent in federal taxes and GE paid none last year. His point was that GE should be paying its fair share.

Senator Pryor also said that the Republicans and the Democrats are wrong on taxes. The Republicans are wrong when they say that we shouldn’t raise any taxes at any time and under any circumstance. And the Democrats are wrong by saying taxing millionaires more will solve all of our debt and spending problems. He believes that we should put everything on the table when discussing tax reform, including $1.1 trillion a year in special interest tax breaks.

The resulting attacks from the Rogers Rotary article from ideological sources should be taken with a grain of salt. Given your mission, I’m sure you understand that reporting on an event second-hand falls short and does not allow reporters, columnists or anonymous bloggers to get the full context of a discussion. Many times these pieces serve only to advance inaccuracies, stir up unnecessary concern and damage the author’s credibility.

Please contact me if I can be further assistance.

As an aside, Senator Boozman’s misleading statements (reported here) are not in doubt because audio recording is available.

Since this has already been a long post, let’s finish with some excerpts from an excellent New York Times editorial right on topic:

The New Resentment of the Poor

In a decade of frenzied tax-cutting for the rich, the Republican Party just happened to lower tax rates for the poor, as well. Now several of the party’s most prominent presidential candidates and lawmakers want to correct that oversight and raise taxes on the poor and the working class, while protecting the rich, of course. These Republican leaders, who think nothing of widening tax loopholes for corporations and multimillion-dollar estates, are offended by the idea that people making less than $40,000 might benefit from the progressive tax code.(…)

Representative Michele Bachmann noted recently that 47 percent of Americans do not pay federal income tax; all of them, she said, should pay something because they benefit from parks, roads and national security. (Interesting that she acknowledged government has a purpose.) Gov. Rick Perry, in the announcement of his candidacy, said he was dismayed at the “injustice” that nearly half of Americans do not pay income tax. Jon Huntsman Jr., up to now the most reasonable in the Republican presidential field, said not enough Americans pay tax.

Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, and several senators have made similar arguments, variations of the idea expressed earlier by Senator Dan Coats of Indiana that “everyone needs to have some skin in the game.” This is factually wrong, economically wrong and morally wrong. First, the facts: a vast majority of Americans have skin in the tax game. Even if they earn too little to qualify for the income tax, they pay payroll taxes (which Republicans want to raise), gasoline excise taxes and state and local taxes. Only 14 percent of households pay neither income nor payroll taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center at the Brookings Institution. The poorest fifth paid an average of 16.3 percent of income in taxes in 2010. (…)

The real problem is that so many Americans are struggling on such a small income, not whether they pay taxes. The two tax credits lifted 7.2 million people out of poverty in 2009, including four million children. At a time when high-income households are paying their lowest share of federal taxes in decades, when corporations frequently avoid paying any tax, it is clear who should bear a larger burden and who should not.

What NWA Times doesn’t mention at all, however, is that they recently uncritically supported Gunn in an editorial in which they claimed that no harm was ever done by broadcasting drug court proceedings on television. The transcript showing that Gunn at least in one case tried to coerce a defendant into agreeing to be on television against her will embarrassed these editors as much as Gunn – and one hopes they’ll be more careful in future to do their journalistic homework before going public embracing this or that local celebrity.

UPDATE: NWA Times on August 31 followed up with a strong editorial rebuke of Judge Gunn, concluding: “Gunn’s actions were an abuse of both power and public trust.”. (Brantley’s response)

UPDATE 2: John Brummett interviews Gunn.

Brummett to Pryor’s defense

Arkansas Media Watch has attracted some attention for pointing out, and refuting, false claims by both Arkansas Senators about half the population allegedly not paying taxes. At least Senator Pryor has been forced to backtrack, claiming through his aide Michael Teague to have been misquoted. The somewhat clumsy attempt at damage control was executed by Democratic-leaning columnist John Brummett in the Northwest Arkansas Times. As a result, there are now two versions of Pryor’s remarks both reported in the same newspaper. If Pryor was indeed misquoted, NWA Times, which claims to abide by a factual accuracy policy, needs to publish a correction. If not, it needs to publish a correction.

UPDATE: NWA Times editors now deny that the newspaper said what it said.

We’ll have more to say on this issue. For the moment, let’s take a breath and note that blogs can indeed have an impact. The local media are paying attention and are sometimes – too rarely – forced to correct themselves or report some under-reported issue. Politicians are sometimes forced to react. This blog’s posts about Pryor‘s and Boozman‘s wrong and insulting remarks have been noted and expanded on by Arkansas Blog, Blue Arkansas, Fayetteville Free Thinkers, and even quoted (if selectively) by an avowed right-wing blog. And when you google “Senator Boozman” or “Senator Pryor”, Arkansas Media Watch ranks third in both cases. Fortunately, our Senators can still count on the corporate media to cover their behinds.

Lynch confirms end of his column He says editorial page editor Paul Greenberg said the reason was economic. “I am not angry with Paul or anybody else,” Lynch wrote.

It’s easy to believe that cutting off one of two liberal voices from the state’s de-facto monopoly newspaper’s opinion page (the remaining one being Gene Lyons) while keeping about a gazillion right-wingers ranging in opinion from conservative Republican to Tea-Party extremism is a purely economic decision.

Worth pointing out that back in April, another column was cancelled after columnist Cathy Frye had criticized education budget cuts (“Everyone pays when states cut school aid”), a position that ADG publisher Walter Hussman is known not to be fond of.

Btw I should apologize for the bad pun in the title – sometimes it’s hard to resist.

Pryor said various tax breaks have created a system in which 45 percent of Americans don’t pay taxes. “It’s hard to have a fair tax system where only about half the people are paying,” he said.

This is a whopper. After Pryor’s colleague Boozman wrongly declared half Americans don’t pay federal taxes, the nominally Democratic Senator found a way to frame himself as even more politically extreme by claiming that half Americans don’t pay any taxes, which is of course completely false and an insult to a significant portion of Pryor’s voters and constituents. With political leaders like Boozman and Pryor, who either don’t have the slightest clue about how the tax system works (which consists of income taxes, payroll taxes, sales taxes, gas taxes, etc. etc.) or are deliberately lying, prospects for any economic recovery in the United States are all but non-existent and a double-dip recession, if not depression, is looming on the horizon. One has to conclude that the leaders Americans have elected to help solve their problems live in a fantasy world completely disconnected from the reality ordinary (and tax-paying) people experience day by day.

The NWA Times reporter, Larry Henry, has nothing to say to correct Pryor’s wildly inaccurate statements. Unfortunately we don’t have a mass media in this country any more that has the integrity and courage to challenge politicians on their lies, hold them accountable, and act as a corrective and a check on their power. This is maybe the really scary part of it because in a functioning democracy with a media system that does its job, Washington insiders like Boozman and Pryor would be in trouble.

UPDATE: A rare case of a newspaper doing its job: New York Times today published editorial “The New Resentment of the Poor” which actually gets all its facts right. It singles out Bachmann, Perry and Cantor but might as well have named Boozman and Pryor for threatening to raise taxes on the poor.

UPDATE 2: Pryor’s office maintains he was misquoted.

Cutout of the NWA Times front page article in question

Brantley quotes extensively from court transcripts that seem to show that Gunn didn’t always honor the wish of defendants who refused consent. In fact, Gunn comes across as quite a bully and it seems highly dubious whether any of the defendants truly had the choice to consent or not. This is precisely the problem that motivated the Supreme Court to rule against televising court proceedings. Moreover, the NWA Times’ stance that the court recordings are commercial property is ludicrous on its face. Even if defendants agreed to being televised in the drug court context, they clearly didn’t agree to their appearance being commercially exploited for a reality TV show years later.

The picture that emerges is that of a local media outlet aggressively pandering to a local celebrity and commercial enterprise, disdainful of the rights of vulnerable individuals, giving the powerful the benefit of the doubt instead of doing journalistic research and asking the hard questions.

UPDATE: NWA Times rebukes Gunn

More on Judge Gunn
More media reporting from Arkansas Times

By far the most brazen distortion out of the Senator’s mouth comes in response to a question about taxing billionaires, at 10:15 in the podcast:

“51 percent of the public don’t pay any federal taxes right now.”

This of course is not true. Boozman meant to say that half the public don’t pay federal income taxes. This would still be highly misleading. The federal income tax is by design a progressive tax which mostly falls on earners of mid and high incomes, based on the principle that everybody should contribute according to their means. But all working people in America pay significant amounts in federal payroll taxes (which fund Social Security and Medicare), federal gas taxes (which fund interstate highway construction and maintenance), and others including state and local sales and income taxes. Most of these taxes disproportionately burden low income workers. For example, incomes above about $106,800 are exempt from payroll taxes! As a result, as documented in an earlier post, the US tax system taken as a whole is not progressive at all: the rich pay about the same overall tax rate as the poor.

Any statement about people not paying federal income taxes is deliberately misleading. Worse, Boozman actually claimed that half the public don’t pay any federal taxes, which is a lie and an insult to all the working Americans paying their share of taxes despite having to make do with declining incomes in a terrible economy. In addition, Boozman has the chutzpah to make that false claim in response to a question about whether billionaires should pay their fair share in taxes, claiming that “there’s not much money there”. Apparently, in Boozman’s universe, it is easier to balance the budget by taking the money from child nutrition programs (such as WIC – Women Infants and Children) than from the corporate elite swimming in money.

The vast majority of Americans and even a majority of Republicans wish, according to numerous polls, that the rich should contribute significantly more to balance the federal budget. Boozman’s congressional colleague Steve Womack, representing the most Republican-leaning House district in Arkansas, recently admitted: “I have had phone calls from constituents all across the Third District suggesting we raise taxes.” Top income and capital gains tax rates are at their lowest since World War II, while income and wealth are now more concentrated at the very top than at any point in 80 years. Americans care deeply about fairness. Boozman, Womack and other Washington insiders who take their marching orders from the rich, rather than listening to their constituents, can only resort to lies and distortions in an attempt to justify a deeply unjust status quo.

Roby Brock didn’t challenge Boozman on any of his dubious claims – he just treated them as if they were factual. Unfortunately this is standard fare in our media environment. There is hardly a radio host in the state of Arkansas who would have reacted differently – the idea of journalism as a means of holding elected officials accountable, of speaking truth to power, must seem ridiculously old-fashioned to today’s media professionals. Nothing is more indicative of this situation than the fact that we have to turn to a comedy show merely to get accurate information about fiscal matters. The clips below are among the most informative, as well as entertaining, to have been seen by a mass audience. Enjoy.

The World of Class Warfare – with Jon Stewart

Does it matter, when a politician puts a quote said to be from Hitler on facebook, whether it is authentic or not? Recall that this quote was specifically fabricated for the very purpose that Bell used it: to insinuate an affinity between liberals and Nazis. A Rabbi Daniel Lapin invented the quote in a fictional letter in 2004:

I [the fictional Hitler] said that as long as we explain how the government is working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation. It is truly heartwarming to see how well this lesson has been learned by some Americans. In the name of “the children,” incursions into the private lives of American citizens have been made that we Nazis would have gazed at with open-mouthed admiration.

To be sure, even if the quote somehow were authentic (and Hitler may have said all sorts of things), it would be outrageous to use it in the way Bell (and Lapin) used it. How genuinely deranged does a person have to be to liken traffic restrictions to Nazi death camps?

But the fact it’s a fabrication matters for two reasons:

1. Right-wingers fabricate Hitler quotes in order to use them as propaganda tools, and
2. Nate Bell would believe anything he reads on the internet.

One would think that any journalist, when reporting or commenting on such a matter, would invest a few seconds in a google search to find out about the quote in question. One would be wrong.

“There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.”

The quote can be found on numerous internet sites but none of them seem to give a precise source. Wikipedia classifies the quote as unsourced and doesn’t allow it to be attributed without authentication. Assuming it is authentic, however, it can be deduced what Feynman was actually referring to: namely, you guessed it, Reagan deficit spending. Reagan was the first and only president during Feynman’s lifetime (1918-1988) to exceed the 100 billion dollar national deficit mark, and the first and only to exceed the trillion dollar debt mark. Not that you’d know it from reading Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorials.

The editorial is titled – wait for it – “The Road to Serfdom” and is written as if no president before Obama had ever had a budget deficit or raised the debt ceiling. Whatever. One old old old right-wing argument is being trotted out prominently:

At last report, the richest 5 percent of American earners were already paying almost 60 percent of federal income taxes, and the top 10 percent were paying 70 percent. How much more can government take without reducing the private sector, the real revenue-generator and jobs-producer of the American economy, to insignificance? To use a metaphor as old as Aesop, how long can taxes on the largest incomes be raised without killing the goose that lays the golden eggs? (…) After a while, there just aren’t enough rich folks to soak. While the high earners are paying a larger and larger percentage of income taxes, the bottom half of American taxpayers-50 percent-pay only 2.7 percent of all income taxes collected.

Ok let’s play the “find the mistakes” game.

1. How can the rich be overwhelmed by taxes, “reduced to insignificance”, when their tax rates are in fact the lowest in 60 years (see chart below)? The decade since 2001 – not just the 2007 recession but the whole decade – has been the worst performing for the American economy since World War II while income tax rates on the rich have been at their lowest in that period (the top rate was 91% during Eisenhower). So much for the “goose laying golden eggs” fairy tale.

2. The editors also fail to mention that the rich are paying an increasing share of income taxes because they have managed to dramatically increase their share of the national income (read Hacker/Pierson, Winner-Take-All politics).

3. Most importantly, the figure about the income tax share of the rich versus the poor is extremely dishonest because low-income Americans, while paying little income tax, pay significant amounts in Social Security taxes, sales taxes, gas taxes, and so on. State taxes are notoriously regressive: in all states, the poorest 20% of residents pay more – often significantly more – of their income in state and local taxes than the richest 1%! (see Soaking the poor, state by state)

When all these taxes are taken together, the share of the poor and middle class is much higher. In fact, when all taxes are accounted for, all income groups pay taxes about proportional to their income share (see chart below). Further, the effective tax rate (all taxes actually paid taken together) is in many cases higher for low-income workers than for billionaire hedge fund managers.

In other words, according to ADG economic genius, the super-rich, making more money and paying lower tax rates than any time since at least WWII, really can’t contribute even a cent more to deficit reduction. There really is no other alternative than to soak the poor.

Nice hack job. Can these guys sleep at night?

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That [debt crisis] debate floated down the Arkansas River where liberals turned out to demonstrate at a republican leadership summit on the Arkansas Queen. Things almost got ugly on the banks of the river when a brief clash broke out between demonstrators and North Little Rock police.

The rally in Riverside Park started peaceably enough. Protesters carried signs that said things like “Hands off Social Security” and “We are not expendable.”

The KARK video clip, as well as the clips posted at Blue Arkansas, does not show any evidence of a “clash” with police or of things getting “ugly”, unless citizens exerting their First Amendment rights by peacefully assembling, holding signs and chanting slogans are considered “ugly” by the KARK reporter. There is a brief scene of a policeman talking to a protester but no “clash” whatsoever. What seems to have happened was that the North Little Rock police tried to impose a so-called “free speech” zone on protesters. That very expression is of course Orwellian since it really signifies the curtailing of free speech. Apparently the police wanted to protect Republican politicians from hearing what their constituents had to say to them. A participant, Samuel Kauffman, has called the police action “outrageous and undemocratic”:

It goes against the very nature of our Republic, and it violates the purpose of police and government. The entire group should have been allowed to assemble peacefully anywhere in the public park, as the Constitution encourages.

He further notes that “After asking for an officer’s badge number, the police and Bureau stopped their unconstitutional harassment.”

I don’t have firsthand knowledge of the event but the video evidence provided by KARK itself clearly contradicts its narrative of a “clash” and “things getting ugly”. Instead of reporting the facts, the TV station made something up that didn’t happen. It did indeed engage in sensationalist reporting, as Blue Arkansas alleges, but even more troubling is a tendency to defer to authority and malign citizens for exerting political rights. Whatever happened to the ideal of journalism speaking truth to power and giving ordinary citizens a voice?

KARK should publicly apologize for its misconduct and give those protesters an opportunity to tell their side of the story.

As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.– Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler

In response to the post, Bell has defended his choice of quotable statesmen in the following remarks on his facebook page:

“Comparing Dems to Nazis is wayyyy to easy. Let’s start with banning cell phone use while parked in a school zone. After all, it’s for the children. How about banning soccer goals in the entire state? Banning texting while walking? Banning private ownership of monkeys? The state determining how long my hamburger MUST be cooked? Banning wearing headphones while jogging? These were all Democrat bills introduced this session. Dems use children to pass bad legislation regularly.”

And:

“Apparantly there are some on the left who can’t see the irony in the fact that their side agrees with Hitler. I feel sorry for those who are so blinded to reality that they somehow see posting this as supportive of Nazism.”

Okay, lets get this logic straight.

1. Hitler allegedly said that pretending to care about children was a good propaganda strategy.
2. Therefore, anybody who claims to care about children must be a veiled Nazi, or at least belongs to the side that “agrees with Hitler”.
3. Food safety regulations, traffic laws and the like are the road to Nazism because they might prevent children from dying, which is exactly what Hitler was all about.

One wonders whether in Bell’s opinion, that also means that the Arkansas Family Council, which has tried to ban gay adoption in order to “protect the welfare of children”, “agrees with Hitler”.

But, before we all capitulate before the flawless logic of Nate Bell’s reasoning, let’s point out two facts:
1. Caring about children wasn’t in fact a big topic of Nazi propaganda. Much more important was propaganda based on national security, racial fears, and traditional family values.
2. The alleged Hitler quote is a fabrication. Not of Bell’s making, heaven forbid – he just copied and pasted it from one of hundreds of right-wing-nut internet sites.

So what do we have here? A Republican politician using a fabricated Hitler quote to smear his Democratic opponents as veiled Nazis who exploit people’s concern for their children in order to turn Arkansas into a Tyranny by proposing food safety and traffic laws. Quite a mouthful but accurate.

UPDATE July 26:
Democrats demand an apology from Nate Bell. Bell so far refuses. John Burris, Republican House minority leader, also refused to condemn the Nazi-Democrat comparison.
Arkansas Online (Stephens Media) today reports the story but misses the fact, first pointed out by this blogger, that the “Hitler quote” is in fact a fabrication.
Arkansas News also reports on the story. Author Rob Moritz points out that “not all of the proposals listed by Bell were filed by Democrats. Just two of them actually became law, and one apparently does not exist.” However he also misses the quote fabrication.

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So far, this story isn’t media related (although it will be interesting if and how the media report on it – especially the fact that the quote is a fabrication). But it reminds me of a long essay by Paul Greenberg published some time ago in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette in which Greenberg wasn’t ashamed to reproduce Nazi propaganda posters in order to smear American labor unions. See, his argument went as “logically” as Bell’s, Nazis expressed concern about workers in their propaganda, therefore anybody who also is concerned about workers’ rights and protections and living standards is really on the side of the Nazis. It doesn’t matter of course for the purposes of Greenberg’s blatant anti-union propaganda that all unions were banned only months after the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, and that labor leaders were among the first to be murdered or incarcerated in concentration camps. Greenberg must certainly know this. His desecrating the memory of so many labor leaders who sacrificed their lives in resistance to Nazism surely marks the all time low point of Greenberg’s journalistic career.

I cannot link to the article because the ADG archives aren’t publicly accessible but I’d love to document it for posterity as a particularly disgusting example of the viciousness of contemporary right-wing extremism in the United States.

“Governments don’t reduce deficits by raising taxes on the people; governments reduce deficits by controlling spending and stimulating new wealth.”

Excellent joke – I never thought Paul Greenberg had a sense of humor. Reagan of course never balanced a budget, on the contrary he was responsible for record deficits as high as 6% of GDP, almost tripling the national debt. Neither did he control spending – he presided over a 69% increase in federal spending, much of which went to the military. He raised taxes on the people no fewer than 10 times during his tenure, including a massive tax hike in 1982 in the middle of a recession. No question, Reagan knew what he was talking about. He’s exactly the right person to ask for advice about balancing the federal budget precisely because he never managed to balance his budget, just as in our little Arkansas media world, ADG columnist Bradley Gitz is the right person to lecture Obama on economics precisely because he declared bankruptcy a few years ago. Yes, bankrupt deficit spenders are the fiscal experts of the hour. We need to hear more of their advice!

Oh wait, What are you saying?

It’s not a joke? The editors are dead serious about looking to Ronald Reagan for fiscal advice??? Well that explains a few things.

Which raises the question, the one that I’m sure almost every reader of ADG editorials must have asked themselves, the big famous question as intractable as whether the egg or the chicken came first (please leave a comment if you think you have an answer):

Are Paul Greenberg and his clique really that dumb, or do they think we are that dumb?

For facts, figures and charts on Reagan, go to the Bradley Gitz post.

UPDATE: NYT Article on Reagan’s deficit dreamscape, worth reading

And the Arkansas Times recently ran a long cover story The ruin of Reaganomics by economist David Cay Johnston.

One addition: Whether Reagan stimulated wealth depends on one’s point of view. On the one hand, his hard dollar monetary policy pushed unemployment into the double digits during his first term. But undoubtedly, Reagan’s policies did stimulate wealth concentration. A tiny elite of super-rich Americans enjoyed fantastic wealth accumulation while most of the rest saw their real incomes stagnate. The share of wealth held by the top one percent of the population was about 20% in 1979. It exploded to 32% by 1986 and 36% in 1989. Income also became markedly more concentrated, as economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez have documented (see The World Top Incomes Database): the share of the national income of the top one percent increased from 8% (1980) to 13% (1988) thanks to Reaganomics. Could that explain why Reagan is in high demand today? Might it be that ADG’s boss, Walter Hussman, and his right wing zealots editors don’t care an iota about debt and deficits? Apparently, Reagan’s (and of course GWB’s) deficits were okay because their policies helped the rich get richer. An eye-opening book about wealth concentration in the United States is Hacker and Pierson’s Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.

Here’s a bold prediction: as soon as the next Republican is installed in the White House, the Tea Party and their ADG cheerleaders will stop pretending to worry about debt and deficits. Instead, they’ll revert to quoting Dick Cheney: “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.”

UPDATE 2: It is remarkable that the chart about the federal deficit that the ADG regularly uses (e. g. on July 14 and on March 11) inexplicably ends in 2002. Thus readers are not shown the high deficits of the Reagan era and the balancing of the budget under Clinton. The misleading time scale was criticized in a recent letter to the editor but ADG news editors don’t seem to care.

UPDATE 3: In 1980, neoconservative leader Irving Kristol wrote an article entitled “The Battle for Reagan’s Soul” in which he recommended deficit spending. He had this to say about fiscal responsibility (source):

“And what if the traditionalist conservatives are right and a Kemp-Roth tax cut, without corresponding cuts in expenditures, also leaves us with a fiscal problem? The neo-conservative is willing to leave those problems to be coped with by liberal interregnums. He wants to shape the future, and will leave it up to his opponents to tidy up afterwards.”

This is the script that all Republican presidents since Reagan have played by.

Still no give in debt impasse
As deadline nears, 2 sides remain dug in

This followed a very similar headline just two days ago:

Neither side blinks in debt showdown

This is nonsense. There is one (1) side that is dug in, and that’s the Republicans. They have declared that they won’t vote for any raise in revenues (fn1) no matter what. As ADG reported on Tuesday:

“House Speaker John Boehner stood firm in opposition to higher taxes. (…) Said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor: “We are not going to raise taxes. That’s all. (fn2)
Obama called on Republican leaders to show flexibility, saying he has “bent over backwards” to accommodate them in deficit talks. “I’m prepared to take on significant heat from my party to get something done, and I expect the other side should be willing to do the same thing if they mean what they say”, Obama said.

Obama has already offered wide-ranging budget concessions, including Social Security and Medicare cuts. The ADG storyline of “2 sides” unwilling to compromise is simply inconsistent with the facts.

Let’s be clear here. How one judges these facts is as always a matter of opinion. Is Obama’s willingness, and the Republicans’ unwillingness to compromise a good or a bad thing? Is Obama acting like a “moderate Republican”, as Paul Krugman says? Has he abandoned his principles and caved in? Or does he show himself to be a grownup on a playground dominated by Tea Party kids, as John Brummett thinks? Are Republicans holding the nation hostage in a cynical power play (Gene Lyons), or are they standing up for what is right (numerous right-wing commentators)? These are matters of judgment and interpretation. A newspaper frontpage is supposed to report the facts truthfully and comprehensively so that readers can form their own opinions.

But the ADG doesn’t give its readers the facts. Instead, it uses its front page headline to play politics. No, it is not true that “2 sides remain dug in”. If anything, it is the newspaper’s political bias that is “dug in”.

UPDATE: Excellent post by Paul Krugman about the media’s “cult of balance”.

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(fn1) Including taxing corporate jets, reducing Big Oil subsidies, and taxing billionaire hedge fund managers at the same rates everybody else is taxed

(fn2) Cantor was holding up a sign reading “… you don’t raise taxes in a recession.” Ronald Reagan raised taxes ten times during his presidency, starting in 1982 in the middle of a recession. Maybe he was wrong to do so but I have never heard a Republican say so. Apparently, it’s only wrong when a Democrat is in the White House.

Gitz is a regular ADG columnist whose right-wing extremist views are well known. I won’t waste time examining these views. I continue to believe that the Gitzes of the world are entitled to their opinions but not to making up their own facts. We’ll consider his factual statements only. How many mistakes can you catch in just the following paragraph?

“As Milton Wolf notes in a perceptive column for the Washington Times, when Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in 1981 the nation was experiencing an especially severe recession featuring double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment. Reagan’s response was to implement a recovery program consisting of tax, spending and regulatory cuts coupled with a strong dollar monetary policy. Recovery came quickly enough for him to win 49 states in 1984, by which time the country had also embarked upon what would become two decades of virtually uninterrupted economic growth and wealth creation.
Barack Obama came to office facing comparably difficult economic circumstances.”

Here are the main factual inaccuracies in that single paragraph (scroll down for charts on unemployment, debt and deficits):

1. In 1980/81, as Reagan took over the presidency from Jimmy Carter, the nation did not experience a severe recession and unemployment was not in the double digits.

2. In fact, a severe recession started after Reagan had taken office. “The early 1980s recession was a severe recession in the United States which began in July 1981 and ended in November 1982. The primary cause of the recession was a contractionary monetary policy established by the Federal Reserve System to control high inflation” (in other words, what caused the recession was precisely the strong dollar monetary policy that Gitz praises.) (wikipedia)

3. Unemployment had been 6% in 1978 and 1979 and was below 8% in 1980 (Carter presidency). It shot up to almost 10% during the early Reagan years (1982 and 1983), which is higher than it has been at the height of the current crisis. It started declining in 1984.

4. The “two decades of virtually uninterrupted economic growth and wealth creation” were in fact interrupted by the 1981/82 recession (Reagan), the 1990/91 recession (George H. W. Bush), and the 2001 recession (George W. Bush), to be followed by the Great Recession that started in 2007 (again under George W. Bush’s presidency). Only the Clinton-years from 1993 to 2000 were recession-free.
UPDATE: Paul Krugman weighs in with a chart showing GDP long term growth rates. Reaganite growth rates were anything but miraculous. See also Richard S. Grossman debunking similar claims made in the Wall Street Journal.

5. Reagan did not cut federal spending, at least not in the aggregate. The federal budget continued increasing under his watch, mainly due to massive increases in the military budget. In total, Reagan presided over a 69% spending increase. Federal spending as a share of GDP reached an unprecedented 23.5% in 1983.

6. Reagan did enact tax cuts but also tax increases. He started with a major tax cut in 1981 (The Economic Recovery Tax Act) but this was followed by a series of no less than ten (10) tax hikes, beginning in 1982 (during the recession) with the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which collectively took half of the 1981 tax cut back (source).

7. Reagan never managed to balance the budget. His tax cuts and military spending were deficit financed. All of Reagan’s deficits were higher than all of Carter’s and all but one of Clinton’s. On average, Reagan’s deficits were 4.3% of GDP, compared to Carter’s 2.4% and Clinton’s 0.1%. The federal deficit reached an unprecedented 6% of GDP in 1983. In the words of Dick Cheney, Reagan “proved deficits don’t matter”.

8. In consequence, the federal debt almost tripled under Reagan’s watch, from about $1 trillion to $2.85 trillion (not adjusted for inflation).

9. Obama came to office inheriting from his predecessor the worst recession since the 1930s, triggered by a global financial crisis worse than anything seen in 80 years. Recall that the recession officially lasted from late 2007 to mid 2009, while Obama took office in January 2009. Reagan did not face a recession at all, let alone a crisis comparable to the Great Recession, when he took office in 1981. In fact, the main difficulty he faced was high inflation, which he brought under control at the price of a recession. Obama, in contrast, faced deflation. Does Gitz even know the difference?

In other words, you can’t possibly go wrong when you rely on Professor Bradley R. Gitz (PhD University of Illinois, “William Jefferson Clinton Professor of International Politics” at Lyon College), as long as you take the exact opposite of his claims to be true. Let’s point out the obvious. If any of us regular folks who actually work for a living, instead of being employed by a right-wing propaganda machine, managed to make so many mistakes in so short a time, we would be fired in an instant. Is there any kind of accountability at the Arkansas Democrat Gazette? Nope. None at all.

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Charts

Unemployment Rates (for monthly rates, check the BLS)
The chart indicates Republican vs. Democratic presidencies by red/blue shading. Try looking for “double digit unemployment” during the Carter years (1977-1980). You’ll actually find it in 1982/83.

Federal Receipts, Outlays, and Deficits
Try looking for Reagan’s “spending cuts” – the orange line goes steadily up. Recessions are indicated by shading. Notice that only the Clinton years were uninterrupted by any recessions.

UPDATE: Federal Spending as % of GDP
Due to military spending, the federal government was bigger under Reagan than under both Carter and Clinton. More precisely, the average of federal spending as share of GDP was 22.3% for Reagan compared to 21.2% for Carter, 21.9% for Bush I, and 19.4% for Clinton.

Gross Federal Debt
How did Reagan (as well as both Bushes) pay for tax cuts? Easy – by raising the national debt.

Womack challenges Democrats for its Medicare plan

Rep. Steve Womack, criticized Sen. Mark Pryor on Tuesday for “lashing out” at a Republican plan to privatize Medicare. (…) The Republican said Democrats have no plan to save Medicare, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects to be insolvent as early as 2020. (…)

The Democratic Senator [Mark Pryor] was quoted in Tuesday’s Democrat-Gazette saying if the Ryan plan were passed into law, the elderly would pay for about 68 percent of their health care costs, up from the about 25 percent they currently pay. (…) “It greatly, greatly shifts the burden of paying for your health care to you and takes away the Medicare system,” Pryor said. “Shifting the cost to seniors is not the answer, it’s not the solution.”

“I don’t know where he’s getting those numbers”, Womack said after Tuesday’s Bella Vista town hall-style meeting. “Pryor said he can’t support our plan. Well, where’s his plan?”
Womack said he didn’t know if the numbers cited by Pryor are accurate.

Yep, Womack says we should support his “plan” but he doesn’t even know whether it’s true that it would shift 68% of health care costs on the elderly (in other words, it would ruin and/or deny health care to millions of retired persons, most of whom could never afford to pay for two thirds of their health expenses out of pocket). If he really doesn’t know, he must have lived under a rock for the past couple months because the 68% figure has been widely reported. If Womack really doesn’t know where Pryor got his numbers, he must be ignorant, incompetent, and not doing his job, and a cynical hypocrite on top of all that. The numbers are, of course, the result of an analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), as anybody who has paid any attention to this issue would know.

This of course raises the question whether the journalist (Bill Bowden) knows these facts. He certainly should, and if he doesn’t, he should have asked Pryor where he got his numbers. One would think that it was the journalist’s duty to provide the crucial information (where the numbers came from and how credible they are) to readers. But he doesn’t. Instead, the journalist leaves readers with the impression that this is all say-so and nobody really knows. It’s another sad case of “he said/she said” journalism: Democrat claims 2+2=4, Republican either denies it outright or counters that he has no idea where D got those numbers from, and newspaper titles “Views differ over the result of 2+2″. In this case, just look at the headline the ADG came up with: Instead of “Womack confesses ignorance”, it is “Womack challenges Democrats”.

The article further down attempts a summary of the Ryan budget plan. It states that

“it wouldn’t balance the government’s books until 2040, in part because it also would cut corporate and individual tax rates.”

Ok but can you be a bit more specific? By how much does Ryan propose to cut tax rates, and who would benefit? Ryan is specific about that and so should the newspaper: the top tax rates would be cut from 35% to 25%, massively benefiting the rich and the super-rich.

Does the ADG think its readers can’t handle the truth?

His column published today is written in the form of a letter to an unnamed University of Arkansas professor who apparently objected to Greenberg’s editorial attacks on the University’s changed curriculum requirements (these attacks have become kind of an idee fixe of Greenberg’s). Of the unnamed professor’s emails, Greenberg quotes only about ten lines, incoherently and out of context, but insinuates that if he quoted more of them, they would be “embarrassing enough”, “revealing of a particular cast of mind among the American professoriate”. But readers never get the chance to decide for themselves whether this unnamed professor’s views are really that embarrassing because Greenberg writes mainly about himself, basking in his own smugness, reveling in the power his editorial perch gives him to insult others who don’t have nearly the same clout to fight back.

Or do they? The unnamed professor could have had his/her view published as an opinion piece but refused, says Greenberg:

“As for your informing me that “I do not approve my previous emails to be published in the Arkansas Demokrat-Gazette,” I have to tell you we don’t need your approval to publish them – not in a free country with a First Amendment.”

Greenberg is of course wrong here. The First Amendment gives us the right to speak or be quiet, but it doesn’t give Greenberg the right to publish another’s speech against that person’s wish. There is something called copyright, and it is illegal in this our free country to publish a substantial piece without the author’s (or copyright holder’s) permission. Incidentally, if I ever were inclined to copy articles from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette verbatim on this blog here without the paper’s express approval, I wouldn’t have to wait long for mail from their attorney. The unnamed professor was fully within his/her right to demand his/her emails not be published. There are exceptions to be sure – Greenberg might claim that the professor was a public figure and the emails were of sufficient public interest to override copyright. But that decision would have to be justified by the news editor, not the opinion editor.

Greenberg chides the unnamed professor for deciding “not to join this free-for-all, otherwise known as the vortex of public opinion, and (declining) to exercise your First Amendment rights on this occasion”. “Just for the record”, we need to point out that Greenberg is being dishonest here. Those who disagree with the ADG’s editorial line are frequently denied their First Amendment rights – by Greenberg and his colleagues. Which is precisely why this blog came into being.

So what we are left with is Greenberg’s one-sided account of an email exchange with an unnamed person who refused consent to publish his/her emails for reasons we don’t know. Why is that fodder for a column? Because it gives Greenberg a chance to talk about himself, which is probably his preferred topic anyway. And I wouldn’t mind if he stuck to his egocentric little world, instead of venturing into issues he doesn’t understand, if he could refrain from insulting others along the way. I do hope though that the unnamed professor changes his/her mind and takes Greenberg up on his challenge by sending him a pointed rebuttal, as insulting as it needs to be, with permission to publish. If Greenberg refused then, he’d be exposed. If not, we might finally get to read something worth reading on the Ark Dem-Gaz opinion page.

These data are good news, and they are not a “myth” – they are the most reliable figures we have. Then why is Dana Kelley in such a gloomy mood?

The greater misfortune is that while crime is ostensibly down nearly 11 percent over the past two years, it is far from low – but you wouldn’t know it from the published reactions of criminology experts. James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, termed the latest drop “remarkable”.

Is it not? Apparently not in Dana Kelley’s universe. Crime is still “far from low”, he says, but by what standard?

How about as low as, say, 1965? That was only a couple of generations ago, for heaven’s sake, but in terms of violent crime, it is worlds away from the so-called “low” rates these experts are dumb-founded over.

Why 1965? Why not 1925 or 1985? Kelley doesn’t explain. Of course,  the 1960s were economic boom times with full employment whereas we are now in a deep economic crisis with record unemployment and record inequality. We know that crime rates tend to be higher during bad economic times, which makes recent declines even more remarkable.

Looking at FBI crime statistics from 1990 to 2009 (2010 figures are not included because they are preliminary), one sees a quite dramatic reduction in crime rates in all categories: Murder, from 9.4 to 5.0; Forcible rape, from 41.1 to 28.7; robbery, from 256.3 to 133.0; property crime, from 5073.1 to 3036.1. If this isn’t “remarkable” in Kelley’s eyes, I don’t know what universe he lives in. Sure, you can always see the glass as half empty instead of half full. It is hard to argue with the sentiment that every crime is a crime too many. But when writing a column about crime statistics, surely you would at least want to mention the good news?

One wonders whether there could be a political explanation for Kelley’s gloominess? After all, the biggest drops in crime rates occurred during the Clinton years. The Bush years have seen crime rates stabilize but not improve. Murder rates slightly increased from 5.5 in 2000 to 5.8 in 2006, and have fallen to about 4.7 in 2010 (my calculation based on FBI and census data). Could it be, could it really be, that Kelley has trouble acknowledging good things happening under a democratic president?

So what about Kelley’s 1965 baseline? Is it true that we are “worlds away” from the good old early 1960s? Here is a table with crime statistics from 1960 to 2009 (scroll down to the rates per 100,000 Inhabitants). Comparing 1965 with 2009, vehicle theft and burglary are about the same; aggravated assault and robbery are about 100% higher; forcible rape is 130% higher; murder is slightly lower (it was 5.1 in 1965). Kelley correctly points out that violent crime in the aggregate, while at its lowest since 1974, is twice as high as it was in 1965. But he does not mention that the 2010 murder rate was actually lower than in 1965.

Murder rates, of course, are our most reliable crime figures because they are most likely to be reported. Rape or assault are to a large extent under-reported which makes comparisons across time tricky. To be sure, the US murder rate is still high in international comparison (two to four times the rate of Canada or Western Europe). My contention is absolutely not that we should be happy with current crime levels. But it puzzles me why columnist Kelley is so intent on cherry-picking his comparisons to make rather good news look bad.

Addendum: An older post at StreetJazz has this to say about Dana Kelley:

The whiter-than-white columnist who writes a regular column for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (and other papers) is regularly suspected of harboring racist tendencies. Rarely does a month go by when he does not write sneeringly of minorities, especially when it comes to  crime and punishment.

Update June 21: no single root cause will ever explain crime but apart from economic factors, which do affect crime rates, an important factor is the war on drugs. A letter in today’s Arkansas Democrat Gazette makes that point well:

In a recent column, Dana Kelley wonders why the U.S. crime rate is two to four times (depending on the category of crime) what it was in 1965. I guess the obvious can be hard to see. It’s the same reason that the U.S. incarceration rate has grown to be the highest in the world. A reason that I suspect most of his readers saw instantly. The modern “war on drugs” began in the late 1960s during the Nixon administration. The Drug Enforcement Agency was founded in 1973. Obviously, the answer to Kelley’s query is drug prohibition, and the only way to get back to lower rates is to re-legalize drugs. As Portugal’s amazing success shows, drug dependency is better treated as a mental health issue, not a law enforcement issue.

BILL ORTON Fayetteville

The editorial is titled “Eat the shrimp, people”, and its primary showcase of alleged waste is so embarrassing one wants to cry. It concerns a study titled “Impaired Metabolism and Performance in Crustaceans Exposed to Bacteria”, awarded to Karen Burnett at College of Charleston.  The researchers study the metabolism and immune response of crustaceans under stress from hypoxia and bacterial infections. What’s wrong with that? Honestly, I don’t know and I bet neither do comrades Greenberg and Coburn. Greenberg certainly doesn’t waste column space explaining why exactly he opposes studying crustacean metabolism. Instead he explains that shrimp should rather be cooked in skillets than studied in labs, thus proving his half-wits to the half-wits who think that’s a funny joke.

What’s crazy? The Arkansas Democrat Gazette inoculating its readership with anti-scientific sentiment to make sure none of them will ever understand the physical world around them nor even the need to use the tools of science to better understand reality. As long as they can live in the fantasy world brought to them by Fox News and the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, no need to understand shrimp as long as you can cook them in butter.

What’s crazy? A senator bought and paid for by the oil industry, and the corporate media hacks at the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, crying foul about research spending they don’t like while supporting tax-payer subsidies for Big Oil to the tune of billions a year.

To read more:

Attacks on science and Coburn’s ignorance

Sen. Coburn and GMA attack Science and the NSF

How a shrimp on a treadmill became a Web sensation

Coburn’s NSF Idiocy

UPDATE:

Americans like to fret about the alleged under-performance of the public education system. Everybody’s favorite scapegoat these days are the teachers and their unions. Which makes sense until you think about it for two seconds: teachers have very little power in the system. They aren’t the ones who set education policy, they don’t get to write the curriculum, they have no power over funding levels and priorities, they don’t control how children spend most of their time. May I suggest that a large portion of the blame lies squarely with a political class and a punditocracy inoculating American culture with anti-intellectualism on a permanent basis.

Think about it. Today’s school children are being told day in day out that science and reason are worthless, that you can make up your own facts if you like, that evolution and climate science are just matters of opinion. The political and media discourse is to a large extent controlled by anti-intellectuals and science-haters like Coburn and Greenberg. What do we expect our school children to make of that? How would they develop an interest in learning and science in a culture that treats education as a handicap, learning as nerdiness, and disinterested research as government waste?

Mike Masterson wants us to believe that oil industry profits are not high enough: they only make “a nickel on each gallon of gas”, he claims. If that number sounds suspiciously low, given near record prices of roughly $100 a barrel and $4 a gallon at the pump, it is because it is a fabrication. Let’s look at the actual figures and do the math.

According to the Energy Information Administration, US petroleum consumption in the first quarter of 2011 was 19.0 million barrels per day, a total of 1.7 billion barrels or 72 billion gallons. A nickel for each gallon would amount to $3.6 billion in oil industry profits. That’s according to Mike Masterson. Here is what they really made in profits: ten times as much! According to recent profit announcements, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips alone made $34 billion in profits in the first three months of 2011 – a huge number, up 42 percent from a year ago. Companies like Exxon make an obscene windfall profit on every barrel of oil they extract because the world market price is far above the actual cost. According to Phil Weiss of Argus Research, in the first quarter, Chevron reaped $25 in profit for every barrel of oil it sold, compared with $20 for ExxonMobil. A barrel of oil is 42 gallons so those numbers represent 48 to 60 cents per gallon. It is difficult to exactly quantify the per gallon profit because Exxon and its sister companies know how to obfuscate these numbers for example by selling their own oil to their own refinery and then to their own distributor so that profits end up being booked on the cost side of the ledger. But the record profit numbers published and celebrated by Big Oil year after year belie the paltry “nickel per gallon” fairy tale numbers.

Why do we hear media commentators like Masterson speak up in defense of unearned Big Oil profits, spreading lies on behalf of the corporate establishment? It is part of a propaganda war. Corporate elites, along with the politicians they have bought wholesale and the propaganda organizations and pundits they control, are working tirelessly on wealth redistribution – away from hardworking Americans and towards the establishment. President Obama suggested revoking $21 billion in tax payer subsidies to Big Oil – and wouldn’t you know it, the Republicans are dead opposed to such an act of fiscal sanity. Republicans, including our own Boozman and Womack, would literally take food and medicine out of the mouths of poor children (they voted to cut the Women, Infants and Children Health and Nutrition program, which serves 9.6 million low-income women, new mothers, and infants each month) in order to guarantee a healthy kick-back to their Big Oil and other corporate paymasters.
Ordinary Americans have been forced to make sacrifices in order to bail out and restore the profitability of the financial industry. We have suffered the worst economic crisis in 80 years but corporate profits have already reached, or even exceeded, their pre-crisis levels while unemployment remains at a record high, real wages are declining, the Middle Class is losing ground and tens of millions continue struggling to even survive. At the same time, the superrich are doing just fine, having secured another tax cut windfall thanks to Republican deficit racketeers.

What we need to understand is how corporate attitudes towards America have changed. For most of the post-war period, corporate interests tended to agree that some measure of shared prosperity was good for everybody – good for the country and good for their bottom line. They created jobs and paid taxes to support public investments such as education and infrastructure, supported a strong and vibrant middle class, kept the lid on excessive inequality (CEO pay in 1965 was about 26 times the average worker’s salary, not 500 times as is common today), and tolerated the New Deal’s basic social safety net. That is no longer the case. There is now a growing fraction among the corporate establishment who don’t care anymore if the country is transformed into a failing banana republic of Third World living standards, torn apart by unmitigated inequality. They no longer have much of a stake in the common good because their profits come from plundering the economy, looting our natural resources, and pillaging the treasury. They have learned that greed is good and recklessness gets rewarded. And the Mike Mastersons of the media world are their willing accomplices.

(Note: Mike Masterson is opinion editor of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette’s Northwest edition. His editorial is accessible to subscribers only. The letter above was sent to the newspaper and was not considered for publication. My request for the newspaper to publish a factual correction was ignored.)