CNN; The Most Trusted Name in Disseminating the Yammer of Blowhards (Part I)

I have to sigh whenever I peruse the commentaries on CNN.com's website. The vast majority of them range from wimpy center-right to outright crazy wingnut. How is that we regularly pillory outlets like Fox News, who at least say their self-serving opinions out loud, but do not critique more ostensibly objective media outlets like CNN who serve up a lot of the same ideas with less bluster and more passivity? I find myself becoming angrier and angrier with CNN as they publish and promote opinions that are full of bluster, confabulation, and just plain muttonheaded thinking. Here are a few recent examples:

1) John Feehery, who is apparently some kind of lobbyist in D.C. We don't really know what he does because his work is so vaguely characterized, but he has some strong opinions on political matters. In his latest commentary, he poses four "uncomfortable questions" that he feels we all need to confront because we are, apparently, a nation of wussies who won't face up to the awful truth.

The complete commentary is here, but I wanted to respond to his "uncomfortable questions" individually.

The first one is :

First, why do we let people retire too early and then expect them to live so long without working?

Feehery's contention is that we let people stop working too early, and that in the good old days, people worked longer and had less retirement time. He quotes a statistic that, in 1910, the average retirement age was 74, and that in 2002 it was 62. Thus, people now take too much time off and should be expected to work longer, as they did in the past.

This is true on the surface, and may sound reasonable for a moment, until he then reveals that the average life expectancy in 1910 was 55, and that in 2002 it was 77. See a problem here? When you actually go and examine the statistics' context, you find out that about 99% of the male population did not reach retirement age because they were DEAD. Only 1% of the population got to retirement age in 1910 (hmmm. . . wonder who those guys were?). Today, about 15% of the population gets to retirement age, and their retirement is roughly 2 1/2 times longer than the fat cats of 1910.

So, how does this interact with his first question? Feehney implies that people today are lazy bums who should be put back to work. But he has not thought about how this would affect the larger economic system; if more people stay in their jobs longer, where do younger people find work? How do companies balance payrolls, benefits, etc.? And, honestly, what long-term reason do people have to work in our generally mind-numbing economic environment? One of the major incentives for slaving away for a big company or institution is that retirement lies at the end of the servitude. After three or four decades of ignoble labor the reward is that you can actually take some time to enjoy life. That is the carrot dangled in front of people by our system of affluence. Perpetuate the system, work with it, and eventually, you will be able to leave it, hopefully with enough money to live at least a few of your dreams.

In the end, what makes the system more productive?

The second question is

Second, why do most Americans spend so much of their health care expenditures in the last three months of their life?

This question seemed to me the scariest, and also the most self-obvious. Having watched both of my parents succumb to cancer, and seeing the huge bills afterwards, incredulity at the incredible cost of a dying person's medical expenses is completely warranted. But Feeheny is not just incredulous, he is apparently annoyed. Without really explicating what he means, he calls for a "more rational way to look at end-of-life care," which sounds like someone dancing around the issue, and maybe even suggesting we need to cut costs in ways that some folks would find unpalatable. Shadows of health care rationing seemed to creep across his "answer" to this question.

But the self-obvious part of the question is that we KNOW why this happens. Hospitals, medical professionals, and our elaborate death industry charge enormous amounts of money for this care. It is often the case that the medical system strives to keep patients alive and in the system regardless of quality-of-life concerns. When my mother was diagnosed with cancer her doctor admitted that treatment had only a slim chance of helping her, but she clutched at the possibility and the cost of her care skyrocketed. The treatments did not extend her life, and because of the sudden collapse she experienced at the end of the treatments we could not get her into a hospice to end her days in comfort. Instead, she died in a spartan hospital room after major surgery surrounded by beeping machines. And it cost an obscene amount of money for that care. Most of it was covered by insurance, but that cannot be used as a cover for an expensive system that frequently does not give people the kind of ending to their lives that they would prefer.

Third question:

Third, why do so many people pay nothing in federal income taxes?

This is the most boneheaded question of the four. Feehney's point with asking this question is that most people who don't make a lot of money are leeches on the rich and that at some point, the rich can be taxed no more! Without taxing these bums, and without the ability to reform taxes to make them pay, we are in trouble, he believes.

While some part of the population indeed pay no federal income taxes, they do pay other taxes, and every income quintile contributes to tax income. And while it is true that the top 20% of income earners pay 69% of the tax burden, "filers making more than $1 million will enjoy a 7.7% average boost in their after-tax income" next year because of tax cuts, according to CNN. It is easy to play percentages, but when one person takes home $15,000 year after-tax, and another takes home $150,000 despite a bigger tax burden, it is hard to feel bad for the richer person. Feehney's arguments are just specious when you look at the bigger tax picture.

Fourth question:

Fourth, why is it more profitable to work in the government than to work in the private sector?

I am not a fan of government, but I find this question, and Feehney's discussion of it, distasteful and insulting. The initial assumption is that people working for profit should not make less than those working for the public. But Feehney's real point is that they are overvalued and should make as little as their private counterparts. They "are vastly overpaid" and are one of the reasons everything is going to hell.

By now, you should know what's coming: once again Feehney is playing with statistics. He cites "one study" that comes from a USA Today story. This is a study from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the data is decent, but at no point do they assign the same idea to the data that Feehney does: that public employees are overpaid. Feehney interprets this through his own ideas, using the fact that the benefits amount rose from the previous year. But given that companies have been cutting not just jobs but benefits with the economic downturn, it could also be that public benefits were less affected by executive decisions about the profit margin. One could argue whether or not the government should be as whimsical as the private sector in this regard, but a single explanation with very selective evidence is a poor way to make a point.

And that, in the end, is what's wrong with this entire commentary.


NEXT: Ed Rollins, the Snarling Pimp of Republicanism.

The Need for Obama to Release the Torture Memos was Great. . . and Quite Strategic

So, I have been reading a lot about the release on Friday of several Bush-administration memos that detail how intelligence operatives and contractors were allowed to mistreat and abuse prisoners during interrogations.

Glenn Greenwald does some fine analysis of the documents and also discusses the importance of their release and the concomitant statement that practitioners would not be prosecuted for acts as a result of these memos. There are a number of chilling aspects to these documents, in terms of both content and the fact of their release. While we can give the administration some due for their release, we have to remember that this was not done willingly, but as the result of an ACLU FOIA lawsuit that led to their gradual, negotiated release. The transparency here was granted after much internal debate, and with significant qualifiers.

Where I disagree with Glenn is in his statement that there is "little political gain" for the administration in releasing these memos. I believe that there is a vast amount of gain to be acquired by their release, in terms of rhetoric and power. The administration demonstrates tight control and an ability to control the message surrounding their revelation. They prove to groups like the ACLU that great effort needs to expended to obtain such information. And the memos' release also has a number of potential strategic political benefits. Briefly:

---Making these memos public shows the world that the new administration means to reveal prior abuses. This could convince people that the current administration is concerned about these abuses. Obama make this explicit in his comments about shedding light on a "dark and painful" past.
---This process of shedding light on the past also allows the administration to contrast itself with the previous government, thus setting itself up in some sense as the good guys who will lead us away from the troubled yesterday.
---Simultaneously, this action allows the government to retain the stance of menace, both external and internal. The administration continues to embrace the Bush-era rhetoric of crisis and peril, and through both the publication of the memos and the assertion that torturers will not be prosecuted, extends the narrative of the war on terror using slightly different terms and standpoints. The idea of great evils that threaten our way of life is maintained, but also the idea that our government will do violence in any form it can sanction. The forms shift slightly; Obama wants to redefine right action, but in a way that will allow his administration to create their own forms of it. So, pending further review, walling and diet control are beyond the pale, but drone bombings are fine. Renditions will be suspended, but we will continue to hold innocent people without charge. The government's power to do what it will is maintained with this veneer of threat.
---As a commenter over at Common Dreams wrote: "Obama's two decisions - to reveal the details of the tortures and to issue blanket immunity from prosecution for committing them - are a warning to those who would challenge the power he represents." The greater strategic benefit from this act is that the government maintains control: of the message, of the notion of legality, and of the citizenry itself. The promise of transparency is used to permit the government to shape the discourse and perspective of events and call it something else. Disclosure here is assiduously controlled, framed and qualified by officials' statements. The immediate assurance that those who do bad things with the government's blessing will face no punishment makes the revelation of these documents not an act of contrition , but an exculpation and a warning to both our enemies and our citizens. Obama reaffirms the idea that the government can create rules to do what it pleases, and that those who follow them will not only go unpunished, but be lauded for their service. Peppering his statement with praise for the intelligence agents who followed these orders informs the citizenry that acts of cruelty and excess are acceptable with government sanction.

I think that there is more to unpack here, but that's all I have time for right now.

War is a Force That Really Sucks

(with apologies to Chris Hedges):

War is bad.

That pretty much sums up my perspective. I generally do not find reasons to make it more complicated than that. When you read history, you realize that just about every war could be averted. Not easily, but probably more easily than the actual outcome. People often cite hallowed myths or assorted complexities that only serve to reify war's necessity or inevitability. But war is neither necessary nor inevitable; we make it that way with our assumptions and our actions.

This was affirmed for me today by reading Chris Hedge's column in Truthout and Mickey Z's response to a Howard Zinn piece. The latter is rather strident and could use more analysis, but I think his point is spot-on. Obama has given us no promises to halt the pace of American warmongering; he just wants to change the focus from a war that is "bad" to one that is "good." He does not want to end the damaging "war on terror," but rather wants to continue and apparently expand it. He wants to "cut military spending," by which he means still spend lots and lots but eliminate some waste, which is all well and good but does not focus on the problem of enormous military expenditures going from totally insane to just nutty.

There is a lot of excuse-making and admonitions to "wait and see" what Obama will actually do in terms of national security and the military, but he is choosing advisors and staff who do not seem interested in actual change. And I don't think this is some form of bipartisanship; there is a real agenda here, which is I think is also the case with Senate Democrats, who are not spineless at all but unprincipled and perhaps lacking the heart for change (and are, in important ways, not too different from their Republican peers). Based on what he said during the campaign, and his actions so far as president-elect, I do no think we will see a lot of "change" in the area of American imperial military adventurism.

So war will continue under an Obama administration. I think he realizes the need for a certain postmodern bread-and-circuses approach that reallocates some defense spending and other inefficient outlays of money towards social programs that quell some of the electorate's dissatisfactions with the system. Rather than bringing substantive change to the system, he will bring some change in the management, and it how that system allocates some small amount of the enormous resources it gathers to the citizenry. Simultaneously, he exploits both cultural and political assumptions that the war on terror must go on, that war is somehow patriotic, that inflicting massive violence on other human groups will make them better people and create a better world.

I am not sure how this qualifies as change.

A Brief Discourse On What The Heck This Is

Welcome.

As I was making dinner this morning (slow-cooker beef shanks with root vegetables), I was thinking about the future. I do that a lot; I have been a (more peripheral than I desired) participant in the Superstruct game and the blog I created for that will continue as a way to keep thinking about the future (hopefully in conversation with other players and interested folk). I write speculative fiction and study groups that look to the future as a place of possibility. And, I am going to have a daughter in a few months. All of these things kind of slammed together in my brain this morning, and I realized that it was time to do something I have hesitated to do: write about politics.

I have a Livejournal account where I often post political news stories with a snippet of commentary. But I hesitate to talk about politics in-depth there because, in all honesty, my perspective is very radical and it is thus hard to get a good discussion going with friends about the topic. Even when discussing important ideas on pollitical communities the trolls and muttonheads overwhelm most opportunities for critical exchanges. LJ is great for memes and little posts about funny things and a bit of rambling about life, but it is not well-suited to political discourse. So, I have decided to create a blog especially for talking about politics. And this is it.

So, I will talk politics here. Sometimes I will post a news story, sometimes a postulate, sometimes a rant. I do not rant enough and it is time to do that more, for no other reason than to get the ranty stuff out of my head. I will always try to provide enough intellectual food for thought to contextualize the matter being discussed. My perspective, which I will discuss in more detail later, is primarily anarchistic, in a rather classical sense. There is a dash of marxism, a sprinkle of socialism, and a healthy disdain for most forms of organized political thought systems (including those just mentioned). I despise the accumulation of power and champion local solutions. I am suspicious of large organizations and excessive technology and nurturing of ideas that involve people in their own fates and make groups of humans work better together.

In the end, politics should be about survival, improving lives, and making a future we can all live in with as little discomfort and as much joy as possible. My goal here is to talk about the things that get in the way of these goals, and to suggest how we might change things to fulfill them. That is why politics is worth discussing, and worrying about, and sometimes even arguing over. I am sure I will do all three of these things in this blog.