Neither Democrat Nor Republican But An Obama


Barack Obama won re-election by 3.7% (outside of the margin of error in most national presidential polls), snaring 332 electoral votes to Mitt Romneys 206.   While the GOP maintained control of the House- due solely to gerrymandering by Repub-controlled state legislatures- Think Progress notes "Based on current tallies,Democrats now lead Republicans 59,343,447 to 58,178,393 in total votes cast for their House candidates — meaning that the American people preferred Democrats over Republicans by nearly a full percentage point of the total vote."

The results of Senate elections were even more lopsided and impressive.   The Democratic Party had to defend 23 seats, Republicans only 10, in the 33 contests.   A year ago, one might not have been able to get odds on Democrats picking up two seats in the U.S. Senate; it might have been, as gamblers put it, "off the board."  It was considered likely the GOP would gain undisputed control of the chamber with 51 votes and very likely would snatch the 51 seats necessary for the majority it would need if the Democratic president were to be re-elected.  Yet, the Democratic Party picked up two seats, ending up with 55.

Now it is approximately six weeks since Election Day and President Obama addresses the nation after the Repub caucus rejected "Plan B."  He maintains

In 10 days, under current law, tax rates are scheduled to rise on most Americans.  And even though Democrats and Republicans are arguing about whether those rates should go up for the wealthiest individuals, all of us -- every single one of us -- agrees that tax rates shouldn't go up for the other 98 percent of Americans, which includes 97 percent of small businesses. Every member of Congress believes that.

A few moments later, he would add "Averting this middle-class tax hike is not a Democratic responsibility or a Republican responsibility.  With their votes, the American people have determined that governing is a shared responsibility between both parties."

With their votes, the American people did nothing of the sort, instead declaring the Republican agenda too extreme.  In contrast, when Democrats got creamed in the 2010 off-year elections, President Obama rushed to label it a "shellacking.   Now that Republicans have been rejected, Americans have politely asked that everyone work together, and they all want the same thing.  Sure they do.

Nancy Pelosi has been trying to get the House GOP leadership to sign a discharge petition so that extending the tax cuts on middle-class incomes, approved months ago by the Democratic Senate, can receive a vote in the lower chamber. Thus far, though, Republicans have refused to go along, preferring that taxes on all incomes rise in the new year.    On Thursday, Speaker Boehner pulled his bill to allow taxes to rise (only) on incomes above $1 million because it was clear he did not have majority support in his caucus. Given a chance to give a break for all- taxes would fall on the first $1 million for everyone, wealthy or not- most Republicans were ready to say "nyet."   If taxes have to go up for millionaires, they must go up for everyone.

"Every single one us agrees" that tax rates shouldn't go up for "the other 98 percent of Americans," President Obama asserts.  Republicans and Democrats (except himself, of course) all agree.  They're all the same, equally to blame in Barack Obama's evaluation.   Democrats finally can undermine the image of the GOP as the agent of middle-class tax cuts and enhance their own reputation as the protector of social insurance, defenders of Medicare and Social Security. by drawing useful distinctions between the ideologies and values represented by the two parties.  Instead, Barack Obama says "There's a mismatch right now between how everybody else is thinking about these problems-- Democrats and Republicans outside of this town -- and how folks are operating here. "

President Obama put on the table cuts to Social Security and Medicare in his quest for the "grand bargain" with Speaker Boehner which eventually fell apart.  He took $716 billion out of the Medicare program (not in direct benefits) to help fund the Affordable Care Act and was attacked by presidential candidate Mitt Romney, despite his running mate's inclusion of it in his own budget.  Now the President is proposing chained CPI in order to reduce Social Security benefits.   Barack Obama has run his last race, but not so other Democrats, who will have to suffer the consequences of a President whose policies and rhetoric seem designed to sink what is ostensibly his own Party.





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Calling Their Bluff


Wayne LaPierre has spoken, and we now have an answer from the NRA.  The director of the nation's largest crime advocacy organization, responding to the growing outcry for gun control legislation, urges Congress (transcript of speech, here) to enact legislation placing an armed police officer inside every public and private elementary, middle, and high school in the land.

It could have been worse.   There are people- no kidding- across the country who have suggested that one individual, or every teacher, in each school be armed.   That would be far worse, as unruly students happily disarm educators more focused on teaching than on classroom security.

The NRA's recommendation appears spurred by a few misconceptions.  LaPierre claimed "a child growing up in America witnesses 16,000 murders and 200.000 acts of violence by the time he or she reaches the ripe old age of 18."  It's a wonder the child has time to eat, sleep or do much of anything else.   He contends, further, "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."  Not all non-shooters are good guys and not all guys with a gun are bad guys, something LaPierre apparently momentarily forgot.   And alas, these official "bad guys" are reluctant to walk around wearing a sign reading "Bad Guy- Take Cover."

The falsehoods evidently extend to Cleta Mitchell, whom The Washington Post described as "a Washington lawyer and NRA board member who said she participated in the discussions of the proposal."   She says liberals

always connect the wrong dots and blame the same people when their idiotic 'solutions' don't solve problems. No one bothers to ask why the Clinton assault weapons ban didn't prevent Columbine.  Same question now:  Why didn't the Connecticut gun laws prevent these killings? It is because gun laws don't stop bad guys with guns from killing people.

Ignore, for now, the irony of someone decrying "idiocy" trotting out the tired, debunked "guns don't kill people, people kill people" cliche.   Consider, instead, the notion that "the Clinton assault weapons ban didn't prevent Columbine."   The Associated Press compiled, and the Associated Press reported, a list of mass shootings worldwide in the past 45-50 years.   Of those having taken place in the United States, eight (8) occurred from August 1, 1966 to 91/13/94, when the assault weapons ban was enacted; none from that date until the Columbine atrocity on 4/20/99, nor any from then until 9/13/04, when the assault weapons ban expired; and seven (7) since that date.      Mitchell's slick rhetoric brings to mind Napoleon's great line of propaganda to his fellow animals in George Orwell's Animal Farm:

Do you know what would happen if we pigs failed in our duty? Jones 
would come back! Yes, Jones would come back! Surely, comrades," cried 
Squealer almost pleadingly, skipping from side to side and whisking his 
tail, "surely there is no one among you who wants to see Jones come back?"

Jones' reign, as you might recall, was no worse- and probably better- than that of Napoleon, just as the incidence of mass killings indicates the assault weapons ban probably was reasonably effective, notwithstanding Mitchell's implication.

There is an argument to be made for having a law enforcement officer in every school.    But with national hysteria over the deficit and $1.2 trillion in defense, medicare, medicaid, social security, and non-defense discretionary cuts due to begin on January 2, 2013, LaPierre envisions an armed officer in up to 135,000 public and private schools, and says little regarding how such an ambitious undertaking would be funded.   The left, therefore, could issue a counter-proposal to the NRA:  an armed police officer in every public school in the U.S.A., to be funded by a tax surcharge on millionaires.  Then we would find out how truly committed Wayne LaPierre and his organization are to children.





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Sinking Along With Labor


You've heard or read some of the numbers.  Data compiled by the CBO demonstrate that over the period 1979 (the first for which such information is available) and 2007, the rich have gotten richer and have left most of the rest of us behind.   The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities noted that the CBO's numbers indicate

- after adjusting for inflation, the average after-tax incomes for the top 1 percent rose by 281% ($93,700 per household), by 25% ($11,200 per household) for the middle fifth of households and 16% ($2400 per household) for the bottom fifth;

- the share of the top 1 percent of the nation's total after-tax household income increased from 7.5% to 117.1% while the share of income going to the middle three-fifths (60%) of households declined from 51.1% to 43.5%, the share to the bottom fifth from 6.8% to 4.9%, and the share going to the bottom four-fifths from 58% to 48%;

- in 2007, the share of after-tax income going to the top 1 percent rose to its highest level- 17.1%- since 1979 while that going to the middle one-fifth of Americans declined to 14.1%, its lowest level during this period.


It wasn't always thus.   The chart below, from Jacob Hacker of Yale University and Paul Pierson of the University of California, Berkeley (posted by Mother Jones' Kevin Drum) depicts what incomes would have been had all income groups seen the same growth rate in 1979-2005 as they had in previous decades.

Reasons for the decline of the middle class are many, of course, including automation/computers, "free" trade, offshoring, outsourcing, privatization, federal tax policy, a stagnant minimum wage, and- yes- immigration.   These factors depress wage rates, which would have dropped even further had not productivity among American workers grown 69.1% from 1979 through 2011.

But let us now turn to arguably the most important, the decline of organized labor.    The graph below, from the Center for American Progress Action Fund (whose source CAP indicates here), demonstrates that in the period of 1967-2011 the union membership rate declined in tandem with the middle class share of the national income.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that the middle class in the State of Michigan, with an economy heavily dependent on union workers in the automotive industry, took an even greater hit from 1979 to 2010 than in the nation as a whole.  Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute found that the increase in income of the top 5 percent was larger in Michigan than nationally while the income of the typical household actually fell.   He noted "Michigan's middle class had incomes 13 percent above the nation in 1979 but 6 percent below in 2010."

Obviously, unionized employees earn higher wages and receive better benefits because they can bargain collectively and are likely to have at least some protection against arbitrary work rules and termination.   Further, Mishel explains

Collective bargaining affects the wages and benefits of those not directly covered by an agreement when employers meet standards set by collective agreements or at least improve their compensation and labor practices beyond what they would have provided in the absence of collective bargaining. A more general mechanism through which collective bargaining has broadly affected pay and practices is the institution of norms and established practices that become more generalized throughout the economy, thereby improving pay and working conditions for the entire workforce.

There are few better explanations for the strong causal relationship on the macro level between the rate of unionization and the strength of the middle class than that of Drum summarizing the 2010 Winner Take All Politics of Hacker and Pierson:

1. In the 60s, at the same time that labor unions begin to decline, liberal money and energy starts to flow strongly toward "postmaterialist" issues: civil rights, feminism, environmentalism, gay rights, etc.  These are the famous "interest groups" that take over the Democratic Party during the subsequent decades.

2. At about the same time, business interests take stock of the country's anti-corporate mood and begin to pool their resources to push for generic pro-business policies in a way they never had before. Conservative think tanks start to press a business-friendly agenda and organizations like the Chamber of Commerce start to fundraise on an unprecedented scale. This level of persistent, organizational energy is something new.

3. Unions, already in decline, are the particular focus of business animus. As they decline, they leave a vacuum. There's no other nationwide organization dedicated to persistently fighting for middle class economic issues and no other nationwide organization that's able to routinely mobilize working class voters to support or oppose specific federal policies. (In both items #2 and #3, note the focus on persistent organizational pressure. This is key.)

4.  With unions in decline and political campaigns becoming ever more expensive, Democrats eventually decide they need to become more business friendly as well. This is a vicious circle: the more unions decline, the more that Democrats turn to corporate funding to survive. There is, in the end, simply no one left who's fighting for middle class economic issues in a sustained and organized way. Conversely, there are lots of extremely well-funded and determined organizations fighting for the interests of corporations and the rich.

The Republican Party has aided and abetted the decline of the labor movement and is always ready to undermine the middle class.   The Democratic Party is better, but with a Democratic President recommending cuts to Social Security and its House leader falling in line, anyone who isn't wealthy better hold on to his or her wallet.



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Keeping Hope Alive


Yesterday was a very good day for President Obama and potentially for the nation as he announced (video and transcript of press conference, here)

That is why I have asked the Vice President to lead an effort that includes members of my cabinet and outside organizations to come up with a set of concrete proposals no later than January. Proposals that I then intend to push without delay

This is not some Washington Commission. This is not something where folks are going to be studying the issue for 6 months and publishing a report that gets read and then pushed aside.

This is a team that has a very specific task. To pull together real reforms right now.
I asked Joe to lead this effort in part because he wrote the 1994 crime bill that helped law enforcement bring down the rate of crime in this country.

That plan, that bill also included the assault weapons band that was publically supported at the time by former presidents including Ronald Reagan

The good news is there is already a growing consensus for us to building from.

A majority of American support banning the sale of military style support weapons. A majority of American support banning the sale of high capacity ammunition clips. A majority of Americans support laws requiring background checks before all gun purchases so that criminals can’t take advantage of legal loop holes to buy a gun from somebody who won’t take the responsibility to do a background check at all

I urge the new Congress to hold votes on these measures next year. In a timely manner.
And considering Congress hasn’t confirmed a director of the bureau of alcohol, firearms and tobacco in six years, the agency that works most closely with state and local law enforcement to keep illegal guns out of the hands of criminals. I suggest that they make this a priority early in the year.

Given the President's order to set up a task force, have it chaired by Vice President Biden, and demand a report- with "concrete proposals"- by the end of January, we can forgive him for maintaining "I believe the 2nd Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms."  Erroneously, the Supreme Court agrees with him, by a majority of one.  That would be the same majority that shut down vote counting in Florida in 2000, thereby determining that the loser of the national popular vote and the of the popular vote in Florida should be anointed President.   And it was the same majority which decided that the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution does not permit the federal government to mandate the purchase of health insurance.  Five Justices can be wrong- disastrously wrong.

Following the President's statement, ABC's Jake Tapper unsettled Obama by asking

It seems to a lot of observers that you made the political decision in 2008 [...] to not talk about gun violence,   You had your position on renewing the ban on semi-automatic rifles that then-Sen. Biden put in place, but you didn’t do much about it. This is not the first incident of horrific gun violence of your four years [...] where have you been?

Why, the President was just too busy with other things, Obama replied, contending

Here’s where I’ve been, Jake – I’ve been President of the United States dealing with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, an auto industry on the verge of collapse, two wars — I don’t think I’ve been on vacation. And so I think all of us have to do some reflection how we prioritize what we do here in Washington, and as I said on Sunday, this should be a wakeup call for all of us.  If we aren’t getting right the need to keep our children safe, then nothing else matters.

Even before the atrocity at Sandy Hook Elementary School, plenty of children in this country were not "safe," whether because of attack from a stranger or, more often, someone they know.   The President, it seems, has only now awakened to the problem of criminal violence in the nation.

And that is, or should be, a little hard to understand from a President whose defense of his inaction is that there have been other problems (a severe recession, auto industry disintegration, and wars) to which his attention has been drawn.   It is not so long ago- four years, roughly- since GOP presidential nominee John McCain asked that a presidential debate be suspended, citing the financial crisis on Wall Street.  And when Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama responded by noting "

I believe that we should continue to have the debate.   It is my belief that this is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person who, in approximately 40 days, will be responsible for dealing with this mess.  It is going to be part of the president’s job to deal with more than one thing at once.

Then, it was to be "part of the president's job to deal with more than one thing at once."   Now, he has just been too darned busy saving the country while murder and assault remain a daily threat to millions of Americans in their communities.

The irony, of course, in the President's patronizing response is that it came on a day in which he announced a promising new- and vital- initiative.   The plan should be welcomed additionally because the group is to focus on one topic (firearms) and therefore is more likely to produce concrete proposals, as the President demands.   Consideration of the more abstract issues of mental illness or the coarsening of the culture can take place on a separate front.  For now, for this moment, President Obama does seem to have a strategy. It is a start, and is the right place to start.





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The Tough Guy Act, Again


Where have we heard this sort of thing before?   Ezra Klein writes

A few weeks ago, the Obama administration was firm that they wouldn’t budge on tax rates for income above $250,000 and that they wouldn’t budge on the debt ceiling. They’ve since budged on both. Republicans increasingly think the White House will concede more now, and that if they don’t concede more now they’ll definitely give Republicans a better deal if threatened with debt default. Whether or not that’s true, it pulls Republicans — and Boehner — to the right, as it makes it harder for Boehner to argue for a compromise now.

In his first White House speech after Election Day, President Obama had declared

But as I’ve said before, we can’t just cut our way to prosperity.  If we’re serious about reducing the deficit, we have to combine spending cuts with revenue -- and that means asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more in taxes.  (Applause.)...  I am not going to ask students and seniors and middle-class families to pay down the entire deficit while people like me, making over $250,000, aren’t asked to pay a dime more in taxes.  I'm not going to do that.  (Applause.)

Apparently, the President wasn't so firm on that $250,000 thing (and that is on taxable, not gross, income and in 2009 dollars).  When Obama met with corporate executives a couple of weeks ago and addressed the threat of debt default, he boasted, testosterone ablaze, "I will not play that game."  Evidently, he wasn't quite so firm on that, either.

We don't have to ancient history to find President Obama playing his macho man act before backing down.    At his first press conference in November, President Bluff asserted

If Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham want to go after somebody, they should go after me, I’m happy to have that discussion with them. But for them to go after the U.N. Ambassador, who had nothing to do with Benghazi, and was simply making a presentation based on intelligence that she had received, and to besmirch her reputation is outrageous.

It is outrageous, the President declared, as he protected his gal, challenging his critics to "go after me" instead of her.   How chivalrous.  And how disingenuous.  Dan Rather laid it out (program transcript, here) when he told Rachel Maddow (video, below, from Down With Tyranny!) last Thursday

Well, the most important thing that just happened is that President Obama has once again been backed down and away. Let`s make no mistake.

This is chalk one up for the Republicans. They can hopefully in private smile, even smirk, wink at one another. They have the professional scalp of Susan Rice now hanging on their door. They backed President Obama down and away.

President Obama for whatever reasons -- and I thought Andrea Mitchell laid out, a lot of the potential reasons for it -- chose not to fight it to the end. There will be any number of people, and not all of them Democrats, who say this tells us something about President Obama.  He was not for a friend, a close friend, a long-time supporter, someone who was eminently qualified, Rhodes Scholar, the whole -- public servant. Somebody who made a lot of money on the outside but has dedicated herself to public service.

He indicated in his press conference after the election, he made a tough talk, he didn`t back it up.

The tentative tentative (no typo) deal Klein reported may be only a trial balloon and not form the basis of a deal on the fiscal slope.   More certain, however, is Rather's observation that Barack Obama's decision accepting Rice's withdrawal from consideration suggested "he's not a guy who's going to put up much of a fight, even when he feels strongly about it.  Even when he has a strong emotional and loyalty quotient, won't fight for it."   Republicans believe, Rather observes, "President Obama can be rolled for his wallet and his watch."

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Huckabee, Eyes Diverted



Mike Huckabee is not giving up.   After arguing the Newton, Ct. shooting spree ensued because "we've systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee went back on Fox News Saturday and clarified

It's far more than just taking prayer or Bible reading out of the schools. It's that fact that people sue a city so we're not confronted with a manger scene or a Christmas carol, and lawsuits are filed to remove a cross that's a memorial to fallen soldiers. Churches and Christian-owned businesses are told to surrender their values under the edict of government orders to provide tax funded abortion pills. We carefully and intentionally stop saying things are 'sinful' and we call them 'disorders.' Sometimes we even say they are normal. And, to get to where we have to abandon bedrock moral truths, then we are asked, well 'where was God?' And I respond that, as I see it, we've escorted Him right out of our culture and we've marched Him off the public square and then we express our  surprise that a culture without Him actually reflects what it has become...

Riddle me this:  If we have "escorted Him right out of our culture," what has He been replaced with?

Of course, as Think Progress points out, there is no "government funded abortion pills," inasmuch as the Affordable Care Act does not provide abortifacients.  Further, the mandate in the ACA that health insurance companies provide birth control services without a co-pay reduces unwanted pregnancy and abortion, the latter outcome which, presumably, Mr. Huckabee would support.

But Huckabee's larger point is about the larger culture: God has been abandoned, aided and abetted by government.    So we'll play that game and concede, for argument's sake, that violence has wracked our nation because "bedrock moral truths" have been abandoned.   Earlier this year, The New York Times reported

In September 2005, a senior Wal-Mart lawyer received an alarming e-mail from a former executive at the company’s largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. In the e-mail and follow-up conversations, the former executive described how Wal-Mart de Mexico had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance. In its rush to build stores, he said, the company had paid bribes to obtain permits in virtually every corner of the country.

The former executive gave names, dates and bribe amounts. He knew so much, he explained, because for years he had been the lawyer in charge of obtaining construction permits for Wal-Mart de Mexico.

Wal-Mart dispatched investigators to Mexico City, and within days they unearthed evidence of widespread bribery. They found a paper trail of hundreds of suspect payments totaling more than $24 million. They also found documents showing that Wal-Mart de Mexico’s top executives not only knew about the payments, but had taken steps to conceal them from Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. In a confidential report to his superiors, Wal-Mart’s lead investigator, a former F.B.I. special agent, summed up their initial findings this way: “There is reasonable suspicion to believe that Mexican and USA laws have been violated.”

The lead investigator recommended that Wal-Mart expand the investigation.

Instead, an examination by The New York Times found, Wal-Mart’s leaders shut it down.

Neither American nor Mexican law enforcement officials were notified. None of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s leaders were disciplined. Indeed, its chief executive, Eduardo Castro-Wright, identified by the former executive as the driving force behind years of bribery, was promoted to vice chairman of Wal-Mart in 2008. Until this article, the allegations and Wal-Mart’s investigation had never been publicly disclosed.

But The Times’s examination uncovered a prolonged struggle at the highest levels of Wal-Mart, a struggle that pitted the company’s much publicized commitment to the highest moral and ethical standards against its relentless pursuit of growth.

Under fire from labor critics, worried about press leaks and facing a sagging stock price, Wal-Mart’s leaders recognized that the allegations could have devastating consequences, documents and interviews show. 

Hint of bribery and obstruction of justice insufficient?   Wal-Mart has long been known for varied abuses, especially of employees.  Most recently

In the midst of worker strikes in several cities and the looming threat of a mass employee walkout on Black Friday (one of the busiest shopping days of the year), the world's largest retailer has been hit with a class action lawsuit affecting temporary workers in the Chicago area.

The filing accuses Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. and two temporary staffing agencies in the region - Labor Ready Midwest Inc. and QPS Employment Group, Inc. -  of breaking minimum wage and overtime laws for temp workers by making them show up early and work through lunch breaks. The lawsuit also alleges that Walmart failed to pay contracted workers the requisite four hours minimum in wages.

But at least they have jobs (such as they are), some conservatives will protest.  Late in the recent presidential campaign, Mitt Romney was outraged- outraged! that Jeep "sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build jeeps in China.  That was grossly misleading, as well as a subtle swipe at "Italians."  But in 2007 the Economic Policy Institute found

The world’s biggest retailer, U.S.-based Wal-Mart was responsible for $27 billion in U.S. imports from China in 2006 and 11% of the growth of the total U.S. trade deficit with China between 2001 and 2006. Wal-Mart’s trade deficit with China alone eliminated nearly 200,000 U.S. jobs in this period.

The manufacturing sector and its workers were hardest hit by the growth of Wal-Mart’s imports. Wal-Mart’s increased trade deficit with China eliminated 133,000 manufacturing jobs, 68% of those jobs lost from Wal-Mart’s imports. Jobs in the manufacturing sector pay higher wages and provide better benefits than most other industries, especially for workers with less than a college education.

China has achieved its rapidly growing trade surpluses by purchasing more than $1 trillion in U.S. Treasury bills and other government securities over the past few years in order to artificially and illegally reduce the value of its currency and thereby lower the cost of its exports to the United States and other countries. It has also repressed the labor rights of its workers and suppressed their wages, making its products artificially cheap and further subsidizing its exports. Wal-Mart has aided China’s abuse of labor rights and its violations of internally recognized norms of fair trade behavior by providing a vast and growing conduit for the distribution of artificially cheap and subsidized Chinese exports to the United States.

But this isn't a post about Wal-Mart, owned by a family with the combined wealth of fully 41.5% of the American people.   It already has been exposed as an emperor with no clothes. Instead, consider that once upon a time, presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was attacked by the corporate front Club for Growth and responded by labeling it the "Club for Greed."  That Mike Huckabee was not only more humane than the current one, but also sounded a lot less foolish.   That Mike Huckabee remembered

Do not lay up for yourselves measures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in and steal... No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.  You cannot serve God and money.

If Mike Huckabee wants to target sin in a "culture without Him," he ought to address a corporate culture whose love of mammon is its top value, and which has expelled God with no help from government.




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Shutting Down The Pump


Digby seems to have figured out something, a truth that dare not be spoken.  She began a post Saturday with a medical story from mid 19th century Great Britain.  In 2003, Kathleen Tuthill wrote

British doctor John Snow couldn’t convince other doctors and scientists that cholera, a deadly disease, was spread when people drank contaminated water until a mother washed her baby’s diaper in a town well in 1854 and touched off an epidemic that killed 616 people.
[...]
Dr. Snow believed sewage dumped into the river or into cesspools near town wells could contaminate the water supply, leading to a rapid spread of disease.

In August of 1854 Soho, a suburb of London, was hit hard by a terrible outbreak of cholera. Dr. Snows himself lived near Soho, and immediately went to work to prove his theory that contaminated water was the cause of the outbreak.

“Within 250 yards of the spot where Cambridge Street joins Broad Street there were upwards of 500 fatal attacks of cholera in 10 days,” Dr. Snow wrote “As soon as I became acquainted with the situation and extent of this irruption (sic) of cholera, I suspected some contamination of the water of the much-frequented street-pump in Broad Street.”

Dr. Snow worked around the clock to track down information from hospital and public records on when the outbreak began and whether the victims drank water from the Broad Street pump. Snow suspected that those who lived or worked near the pump were the most likely to use the pump and thus, contract cholera. His pioneering medical research paid off. By using a geographical grid to chart deaths from the outbreak and investigating each case to determine access to the pump water, Snow developed what he considered positive proof the pump was the source of the epidemic... Snow was able to prove that the cholera was not a problem in Soho except among people who were in the habit of drinking water from the Broad Street pump. He also studied samples of water from the pump and found white flecks floating in it, which he believed were the source of contamination.

On 7 September 1854, Snow took his research to the town officials and convinced them to take the handle off the pump, making it impossible to draw water. The officials were reluctant to believe him, but took the handle off as a trial only to find the outbreak of cholera almost immediately trickled to a stop. Little by little, people who had left their homes and businesses in the Broad Street area out of fear of getting cholera began to return.

Dr. Snow did not filter the water, nor cleanse it in any way.  It was still contaminated- but people stopped dying.   Human nature was not altered but behavior was transformed because the pump was shut down.  

Just as Dr. Snow met with resistance when he advocated a practical step to deal with an emergency, thee is considerable reluctance by politicians now to take  plainly necessary action. On Sunday's Up With Chris Hayes, The Nation contributor and MSNBC host began yet another extraordinary segment (video below) by observing

So there can be political pressure responding to this tragedy.  One thing I can see playing out and I can already see it a little bit- if you look at the way the Virginia legislature responded to Virginia Tech- Virginia is a state where you can't do anything about guns because of the politics there, there was this focus on mental health.

Of course there was, because focusing on mental health is an effective way of avoiding the big issue (and one more easily modified by public policy), gun control.  Stressing mental health adroitly switches the conversation to one requiring public officials to regulate firearm sale, possession, and use to one concentrating on the individual.  It is one not likely to offend an organized interested group, such as the NRA or the Gun Owners of America.   As a more comforting path, it is particularly tempting, a concept explained by one of Albert Camus' characters when he remarked

Do you know that the firing squad stands only a yard and a half from the condemned man? Do you know that if the victim took two steps forward his chest would touch the rifles? Do you know that, at this short range, the soldiers concentrate their fire on the region of the heart and their bullets make a hole into which you could thrust your fist? No, you didn't know all that; those are things that are never spoke of.  For the plague-stricken their peace of mind is more important than a human life.  Decent folks must be allowed to sleep easy o'nights, mustn't they?  Really it would be in shockingly bad taste to linger on such details.

Though Hayes in the segment added "focusing on mental health is great," he probably, and should have, meant "seriously addressing" mental health.  Keeping firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill is essential but, as Hayes went on to explain, a focus on mental health can lead to profiling people in the name of protection against terrorism.  Further, the distinction between the mentally ill and the mentally healthy can be relatively small and open to interpretation, and the ability to correct (or even alleviate) emotional disturbance is unhappily limited.   Psychiatrists, moreover, often disagree with each other and laypeople often describe as "crazy" an individual whose ideas they find absurd or outrageous.

So going down that road of obsession over mental health can lead us to a dead end while precious time is wasted.   Digby recounts circumstances in Australia, which suffered several massacres from 1984 to 1986, which bear similarity to our own.  In Port Arthur in 1986, "thirty five people were killed and 21 wounded when a man with a history of violent and erratic behaviour beginning in early childhood opened fire on shop owners and tourists with two military style semi-automatic rifles."   In response, serious gun control measures were enacted. Predictably

This did not solve the problem of mental illness or end the primitive capacity of human beings to commit murder and mayhem. Those are huge problems that their society, like all societies, is still grappling with every day. But it did end the epidemic of mass shootings. They have not had even one since then. 

The lesson is this: End the epidemic and then we can --- and must --- talk about root causes and mental health facilities and our violent culture. But first things first --- shut down the damned pump.

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