The ObamaCare risk corridors provide subsidies to insurance companies that make losses on the marketplaces while collecting revenues from those that make above-normal profits. Until recently, everybody—from the CBO on down—knew that the risk corridors would generate multi-billion dollar surpluses for the federal government. Now everybody knows, and has always known, that they would generate multi-billion dollar losses for the federal government.
Some random googling brought to one’s attention a controversy from 2011 involving same-sex marriage, one’s favorite blogger, the most inconsistent—for good or ill—magazine in the world, and the most infuriatingly inconsistent—for good and ill—writer for that magazine. Somehow one had missed the entire kerfuffle at the time. But it is never too late to weigh in on it, perhaps throw in a few personal observations on the value of personal observations, and score the melee!
Sometimes people—even competent, intelligent people with responsible positions—just don’t know things one really would expect them to know. A recent incident reminded the author to be mercifully when judging those who exhibit such lacunae.
The title is one of the favorite and oft-repeated sayings of Prof. Scott Sumner of The Money Illusion and EconLog. Yet, it bears repeating for many financial journalists and even economists too often ignore it with predictably confused results.
One commonSee, for example, here for the usually much more astute Ilya Somin embracing this fallacy. trope of reporting on the scientific illiteracy of Americans goes something like this:
When surveys ask American adults to pick between the statements (A) the earth orbits around the sun and (B) the sun orbits around the earth, a large minority of about 25% pick statement B, rather than the correct statement A. This proves how shockingly ignorant many Americans are of scientific issues.
That conclusion may very well be true, but the argument proves no such thing; rather, it is merely sneering of the semi-educated at the honestly ignorant.
A common trope in economics reporting is to claim that this or that figure had risen at some multiple, usually double, of the rate of inflation. For example, the New York Times reported:
As part of the ongoing series of posts demonstrating the dubious value of Ms. Lithwick's commentary to anybody in search of intelligent argument, here is another example.
As recently as last year, in the course of belittling Ms. O'Donnell's Senate candidacy, Ms. Lithwick—informedly, a law school graduate—deemed it advised to mock as "weird" the candidates views:
I have been fascinated by Christine O'Donnell's constitutional worldview since her debate with her opponent Chris Coons last week. O'Donnell explained that "when I go to Washington, D.C., the litmus test by which I cast my vote for every piece of legislation that comes across my desk will be whether or not it is constitutional." How weird is that, I thought. Isn't it a court's job to determine whether or not something is, in fact, constitutional? And isn't that sort of provided for in, well, the Constitution?
Decoding Christine O'Donnell, Slate (Sept. 22, 2010).
Setting aside the question of whether a bill's constitutionality should be the sole basis for a legislator's vote—surely there must be constitutional yet inadvisable bills: let's say incorporating Mickey Mouse into the flag of the United States?—it hardly seems remarkable that a legislator, who has sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution, should at least give some thought to the issue before voting.
But then Ms. Lithwick deemed any such legislative cogitation to be no less than in violation of the Constitution itself. Now, however, Ms. Lithwick informs us of the opposite conclusion, bewailing the fact that:
Gone are the days in which legislatures at least attempted to ensure state regulations conformed to the broadest interpretation of the Roe constraints.
The Death of Roe v. Wade, Slate (April 19, 2011).
So it appears to be Ms. Lithwick's position that it is weird and unconstitutional for legislators to consider whether the bills they are voting on are in violation of the Constitution itself, but a necessity for law makers to only advance bills which are in full conformance of recent and controversial Supreme Court interpretations of the Constitution.
If there is any rational basis for Ms. Lithwick's position other than a complete and unprincipled disregard for the Constitution except when useful as a stick to beat upon political opponents, it escapes this author.
As part of an ongoing series belaboring the same obvious point, let me repeat that for an alleged legal professional who gets paid by a nationally read publication to explain the law and Constitutional issues, Ms. Lithwick really does not appear to be awfully familiar with either.
From her latest wail:
Say what you want about how Congress forced Obama's hand today by making it all but impossible to try the 9/11 conspirators in regular Article II courts.
Cato...? Anybody...? Would you please send Dahlia a copy of the actual Constitution? She talks a great deal about it, but she might be surprised to learn what is in Article II. Or Article III.
Bonus Lithwick Inanity: We shall not even inquire for a justification of her statement that Citizens United created special laws for corporations.
Regardless of the merits of the decision, which are considerable, it indisputably only permits corporations (and unions) to do what everybody else is constitutionally entitled to do—spend money to criticize or praise candidates or policies.
The demonstrated intellectual limitations of Slate's legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick are a subject of frequent amusement in the blogosphere these days, so—before anybody else jumps in—let me offer an example from her most recent column "Lady Killer." In it she laments the cultural and institutionalized sexism which so often condemns innocent women to death for offenses as trivial as murdering one or more family members:
While women are sentenced to death far less frequently than men, often the offenses for which they are sentenced are also rooted in antiquated gender stereotypes. When women are sentenced to die, say experts, it tends to be for the most sexist reasons. Often, their crimes involve the murder of a spouse or a child, which comes with the assumption that they are bad mothers or unnatural wives. Experts say that men on death row, by comparison, have more often than not killed a stranger and done so in the commission of another crime. Why the double standard? Maybe it's because, from the days of the Puritans, Americans have thrilled to stories of fiendish and beastly women who killed their loved ones. The culture expected white women to be "kindly, passive, virtuous caretakers," writes Phyllis Goldfarb, a professor of law at George Washington University. When they committed murder instead, she writes, "execution seemed utterly appropriate."
Spot the basic statistics error? The high-profile "legal correspondent" didn't!
To obtain probabilistic evidence of gender bias in death sentences for murders of family members, look at the fraction of those charged with (or convicted of) family murders who receive the death sentences. If courts and juries really have sexist biases, then the fraction of women convicted of family murders that receive a death sentence should be higher than the fraction of men similarly convicted that receive a death sentence.
But that is not the measure that Lithwick looks at. She looks at the fraction of men on death row for family murders compared to the fraction of women on death row for family murders. The women's fraction being higher she cries "SEXISM!" But that is no evidence at all. In fact it is entirely expected if men—as is universally conceded—commit more stranger (or more generally, outside-the-family) murders.
To see that, consider a simple stylized example. 100 men commit family murders. Every single one of them receives a death sentence. 100 women commit family murders. Half of them receive a death sentence. In addition, 900 men receive death sentences for other murders. Hence, only 10% of men on death row are there for family murders, while 100% of women on death row are there for family murders. Do we conclude that the "system" judges women particularly harshly for family murder? Not at all. To the contrary, in this example, women are much more likely to receive leniency for family murder than men are.
Bonus Lithwick Math blunder:
Lithwick originally wrote:
Hard to imagine even the staunchest feminist insisting that if women commit 10 percent of the murders, they should die 10 percent of the time for it.
I can take no credit for spotting this one. It was apparently reported by a sentient reader or editor after publication of the article and corrected to:
Hard to imagine even the staunchest feminist insisting that if women commit 10 percent of the murders, they should compose 10 percent of those executed for it.
Postscript: Ms. Lithwick reportedly received a law degree from Stanford University in 1996. Wasn't a reasonable LSAT score required to attend a highly selective law school back then or did it not have logical and quantitative sections? If so, it is difficult to conceive how she was admitted.
One wonders where all the new Free Speech, Freedom of Religion and Property Rights absolutists—and, by the way, come right in and welcome to the party!—who have turned up to defend the Ground Zero Mosque and heap contempt on its opponents were when Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church were not only criticized, but criminally prosecuted for demonstrating against U.S. policies contrary to their deeply held religious beliefs.
Or... what is that? Wrong religion to have? Wrong opinions to express? Wrong policies to criticize? Ah, clearly the First Amendment has no application there.
Recently I had a novel experience: Actual hope that liberaltarianism might have positive future. Even more uncharacteristic than the emotion was its trigger, a perfectly sensible New York Times(!) article praising the success of the 1990 cap-and-trade acid rain program as a model for successful market-based environmentalism:
Most famously, a 1990 bill signed by the first President Bush forced coal plants to buy permits if they were going to emit the sulfur dioxide that caused acid rain. With the price of emissions suddenly higher, the plants looked for innovative ways to reduce pollution — and succeeded more rapidly and cheaply than experts had predicted.
This history is the basic argument for putting a price on carbon today, and the next several weeks are likely to determine whether that happens. The chances of Congress’s passing a permit — or cap-and-trade — system that applies to the whole economy are low. But it could still create a version that covered power plants, if not factories and transportation. That would be no small thing.
David Leonhardt, Saving Energy, and Its Cost, N.Y. Times (June 15, 2010). But the best part of the article was the following quote:
"Instead of leaving it up to the government to identify the solution and tell people what to do, you are leaving that decision to the people who know best," says Nathaniel Keohane of the Environmental Defense Fund. "A bureaucrat would never have enough information to do as good a job."
Id. If hard-core environmentalists at EDF can understand and unashamedly say this, there could be hope for cooperation and sensible policy. However, this week we are informed that:
The original U.S. cap-and-trade market, which succeeded in slashing the power-plant emissions that cause acid rain, is in disarray following the issuance of new federal pollution rules.
The collapse in the pioneering market where power producers trade permits that allow them to emit sulfur dioxide and other pollutants that cause acid rain comes as policy makers seek to establish a similar market to curb the emissions of carbon, a cause of climate change.
The acid-rain market has struggled for the past two years as utilities, states and investors waited for the Environmental Protection Agency to issue new rules. The rules, released last week, put tougher limits on emissions by power plants but rely less on trading. As a result, the allowances that utilities now trade to allow them to emit sulfur dioxide are expected to become worthless.
Mark Peters, Changes Choke Cap-and-Trade Market, Wall St. J. (July 12, 2010). (h/t Greg Mankiw). Apparently they were just kidding about seeking market-based solutions.
If thanks in part to the good-faith support of environmentally inclined libertarians—a small but not entirely uninfluential group— any form of carbon cap-and-trade or Pigouvian carbon tax is enacted, expect to see a Bobby-Bird style command-and-control regime to be imposed on every activity generating CO2, one of the most common substances on earth, within 15 years.
In an unfortunately over-elaborate comment on another fine blog, I responded to an argument against using racial, gender, religious, and age profiling against terrorism (such as, for example, in airport screening). Namely, that if such profiling was undertaken terrorist organizations would just switch to using agents which don't fit the profile and we'd all be worse off. I've been repeatedly surprised that this argument arises not only in idle blog comments, but is also made by otherwise more sensible people (e.g., Bruce Schneier) in far more elevated forums. As I'd hate to deprive my devoted readership of several individuals of any pearl of wisdom, let me explain in revised form why that argument makes very little sense.
Before dealing with the argument, let's aside a silly straw man often combined with it: That our only choices are (1) complete disregard for evident surface characteristics or (2) that we rely on stereotypical characteristics of terrorists to the exclusion of all other evidence. Option 2 means performing cavity searches on every young man with a tan and allowing grannies to carry bazookas over their shoulders onto airplanes as long as they also wear a cross, so it follows that Option 1 is the only sensible.
That is—of course—nonsense. Nobody advocates ignoring other indicators of suspiciousness or that any individual, regardless of appearance should be given an automatic pass. The question is whether stereotypical appearance factors should never be given any weight in making any discretionary investigatory decision or that sometimes they should be given some weight—i.e., to use a racial/ethnic/religious/age/gender profile.
To start with what we know: The vast majority of operatives of terrorist organizations seeking to murder Americans (and others) identified from past attempts are young Arab Muslim men. And most of the rest are at least three of the four.
From this it follows that persons of this description must be among the most plentiful, available, and easy to use resources available for such organizations. In other words, this demographic has the highest ratio of reward (in terms of dead or terrorized infidels) to organizational effort (in terms of money, time, and other resources). If another demographic had a better ratio, the terrorist organization would already have switched to them and costlessly increased their effectiveness.
That does not mean that there aren't blond-haired blue-eyed Norwegian grannies who converted to Islam and are now all hot to kill for Allah—surely there must be. What it does mean is that they must be much rarer, harder to use, and generally more expensive means of murdering infidels. If Osama Bin Laden had a granny brigade at his disposal he would already have unleashed it, rather than relying on such a non-diverse and identifiable set of operatives.
So what happens if we institute profiling? Young Arab Muslim men become much more likely to get caught and hence less useful tools. At the same time grannies, given the same amount of total enforcement effort and hassle, become at least a little less likely to get caught and hence more useful tools.
These two effects, while in opposite directions, are not of equal magnitude: The terrorist organization is much more hurt by the declining effectiveness of its chief type of asset than it is helped by the increased effectiveness of a type of recruit it already hardly used because of other reasons. So while there is presumably a shift in the terrorist organization's allocation of efforts, it will on net be worse off (and we better off) after the shift.
How much this hurts them (and helps us) depends on how much more expensive (in the above sense) grannies were for the terrorist organization than young Arab Muslim men before profiling. If currently there was only a slight advantage to using the latter, then the net harm on terrorist organizations of profiling would also be small and so would the net help for us.
While that is possible, this seems unlikely. Terrorist organizations are likely to very much prefer using their current demographic (and hence be hurt a great deal by profiling) for several reasons.
First, there is a substantial individual dispersion within each demographic. If the difference in average between recruits from the two demographics were small, the distributions would likely overlap and grannies would be underrepresented in the sample of terrorist, but still a substantial presence. Instead, we see them hardly at all. That means that the difference in average between the two demographics is likely large and shifting from one to the other would impose a large cost on the terrorist organization.
Second, the difference in inherent characteristics between the demographics as to suitability as terrorist agents are likely to be substantial. While there likely are some socially contingent factors, others are so fundamental and significant that I'd estimate them to have a large effect. Lutherans are inherently less likely to consider the majority population of Europe and the U.S. to be infidels worthy of death than Muslims are. Arabs and Muslims today have a far greater cultural acceptance and valorisation of suicide attacks and even terrorism in general. Norwegians are far less likely to feel—rightly or wrongly—profoundly racially alienated from Americans than Arabs are. And throughout history and almost all known cultures, the young and men have always shown far greater propensity—again for good or ill—for the sort of physically dangerous but potentially glorious pursuits like suicide terrorism.
Finally, and most importantly, it does not matter if my predictions—admittedly based in part on broad cultural stereotypes—for the effectiveness of racial/cultural/gender/religious profiling are correct because the practice itself will demonstrate the correct point for stopping:
At the point of maximum harm to terrorist organization efforts to kill us—and for us the optimum amount of profiling—grannies and young Arab Muslim men and everybody else will have become equally (in)effective. At that point, we would expect to observe terrorist organizations to use all demographics equally. By no means should one pursue profiling beyond that point as it would only help the terrorists.
In other words, keep profiling until the demographics of apprehended terrorists look like America. If it is good enough for the U.S. cabinet, it is good enough for Al Qaeda. And just think how pleased their diversity management consultants will be!
More seriously, I've discussed a superior way to compensate the vast majority of innocent young Arab Muslim men (and others) who are inconvenienced by profiling twice before.
I realize that this will come to some of my readers as a revelation on the order of the statement that all other things being equal, on average and in the long run, evidence seems to indicate that water is wet. This post is principally for the benefit of those of my gentle, educated and clever friends and—I hope, at least occasional—readers who take the opposite view that this claim is a vile slander on the integrity of our recent and most honest recipient of the Swedish Riksbank's Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, crying out as a lone voice of reason and sense on the campus of a clown college small community school and in one of the last bastions of unbiased reporting, albeit it a provincial circular.
The latter should read the most recent issue of Econ Journal Watch and in particular the article When the White House changes party, do economists change their tune on budget deficits?
Economists differ on the risks and benefits of budget deficits on fundamental grounds and even when there is fundamental agreement economists may reasonably change their opinion on the issue depending on economic circumstances. Given that much leeway, much of the variability in the urgency and frequency of counsel for or against deficit yields only limited evidence of political bias. The most glaring exception appears to be our dear Herr Doktor Professor Paul Krugman whose views on the issue appear to follow changes in the party currently in control of the White House with almost acrobatic alacrity. Those who still take his popular writings as a reliable source of economic intelligence may just want to bypass the middle man and just read the DNC's press releases on the subject straight.
But the principal reason for this blog post is that it gives me an opportunity to quote the article's opening epigraph:
A true party-man hates and despises candour; and, in reality, there is no vice which could so effectually disqualify him for the trade of a party-man as that single virtue. The real, revered, and impartial spectator, therefore, is, upon no occasion, at a greater distance than amidst the violence and rage of contending parties. To them, it may be said, that such a spectator scarce exists any where in the universe. Even to the great Judge of the universe, they impute all their own prejudices, and often view that Divine Being as animated by all their own vindictive and implacable passions. Of all the corruptors of moral sentiments, therefore, faction and fanaticism have always been by far the greatest.
It is hardly an original observation, but the New York Time's Ethicist, Randy Cohen, is a near-endless source of instruction on how not to reason about ethics.
His most recent eructation concerns a college tutor who, after the student has grown attached, demands a hefty pay raise on threat of quitting.
The Ethicist approves wholeheartedly. This may be one of those rare and challenging circumstances in which the Ethicist manages to reach an ethical conclusion—a rare, but not impossible occurrence, much like dialing numbers randomly on your phone might happen to connect you to the love of your life.
His reasoning however is worth repeating:
There’s nothing untoward about requesting a raise even after only a short time on the job. Why is itblackmailwhen the tutor suggests a fee, but acceptable when you do the same? You, like he, can simply decline any proposal. Or, if you want to retain him at a certain wage, then offer a contract specifying both his hourly rate and his length of service.
We look forward to the Ethicist column airily defending the mirror image—an employer unilaterally and under threat of termination cutting an employee's wages once the employee has made relationship-specific investments, such as moving to the new place of employment. No doubt an Ethicist so devoted to universal moral standards will offer the same approval.
In yesterday's commentary on Mr. Lowenstein's blovitations in the New York Times, we inexcusably neglected to mention the funniest tidbit in the entire piece, one which he rightly saved for last:
Roger Lowenstein, an outside director of the Sequoia Fund, is a contributing writer for the magazine
So here's our proposition for the Sequoia Fund: We'll perform Mr. Lowenstein's duties as outside director for half of what you compensate him right now. Also, we know what a lot of those finance-y words actually mean, so we promise not to get that dazed-and-confused slowly-turning-to-anger look that old Rodge always gets whenever you mention one of those concepts.
Deal? Contact us at the e-mail address on this site!
The New York Times, despite being headquartered in one the world's principal financial centers, once again delivers itself of a lecture [to] the public on sciences which he has still the very alphabet to learn,
to wit finance and its purpose. Today's lecturer is Roger Lowenstein and his subject is Who Needs Wall Street?
The piece opens unpromisingly enough:
Mike Mayo is a veteran of six Wall Street banks. In the wake of the street’s disaster, he found refuge at a boutique brokerage and has lately taken to startling his peers with the question "What part of Goldman Sachs is good for the country?"
How Mr. Mayo's serial unemployment qualifies him to ask that question, much less to implicitly answer it in the negative, is not explained. Nor is it why any private person or enterprise should be under an obligation to explain its right to live and work to the satisfaction of the populace or the New York Times. Perhaps Mr. Mayo's peers—he is not mentioned again—would be equally startled
should he query them as to why Batman always sells pink ice cream. But let's pass over that.
Because some people have savings and others need capital, some unifying force must bring the two together. Royalty once taxed its citizens and chartered corporations.
Mr. Lowenstein in turn might be startled to learn the meaning of chartered
and how little it involved taking tax payers funds out of the royal purse and giving it to corporations. The investors have always been with us.
Goldman, which, from its founding in 1869 through recent decades, epitomized, with only rare slip-ups, the best of American finance. Serving the client was its lodestar, and its bankers were pillars of society, more conversant in literature than in the vagaries of, say, mortgage securities.
One hopes that Mr. Lowenstein employs a different standard for what "epitomizes ... the best of American" medicine. Or perhaps, he would consider the physician who can quote baseball statistics with abandon—fine achievement that though may be—superior to one familiar with the vagaries of his trade—organs and grubby stuff like that.
Most famous was the trading that stemmed from complex derivatives (like mortgages) with only a remote connection to the underlying product.
At the point at which the author refers to "mortgages" as "complex derivatives", it would behoove any sentient being to conclude that Mr. Lowenstein knows not whereof he speaks and stops reading. We recommend the same to you, in particular as we did not and offer a few more amusing highlights.
Among the crimes and misdemeanors confessed to by the new evil Goldman is:
"In our market-making function, we are a principal. We represent the other side of what people want to do." He went on to say that when Goldman sells a security that subsequently goes up (i.e., on which the other party makes money), "we wish we hadn’t sold it."
One can only hope that all securities Mr. Lowenstein ever bought subsequently fell in price and all he ever sold rose. Otherwise he very much ought to be as ashamed of himself as he thinks Goldman should be of itself.
Modern markets are more likely afflicted with too much trading. Think of oil and its dizzying fluctuations. As the volume from speculators and momentum traders dwarfs that of long-term investors, prices gyrate further from fundamental value.
It seems hard to believe, but Mr. Lowenstein seems to be unaware of the very first law of speculation: A speculator who buys high and sells low will not remain a speculator long. The only way to speculate successfully is to buy low, thereby increasing low prices, and selling high, thereby decreasing high prices. In other words, the only way to make money speculating is to dampen swings. If Mr. Lowenstein is looking for a scapegoat for volatility, he better look elsewhere.
The casino charge is most plausibly leveled at credit-default swaps, the bête noire of A.I.G., Greece and others.
The charge that the CDSs are at the root of the Greek crises, raised by the New York Times here not for the first time, has been refuted too often to need it done another time here. The only rational explanation for its repetition is that New York Times financial writers cannot tell the difference between currency swaps (which the Greek government did use to hide its corrupt public finances) and credit default swaps (which could not have caused the crises but did help in uncovering it).
Such swaps let traders bet on the odds of default (of a corporate or, indeed, a sovereign bond). If swaps traded in Las Vegas — if bets against, say, Goldman’s bonds swamped the casino, causing Goldman’s lenders to refuse it credit — an uproar would ensue. This actually happened to banks in 2008.
Of course trading in Goldman CDS is perfectly legal and doubtlessly does occur without any uproar.
The reason it has not made the papers is that—to damn with faint praise—Goldman management is more honest, ethical and trustworthy than that of the Greek state.
The social utility of credit-default swaps is ostensibly the insurance function. (Fear that a bond will default? Buy a swap that pays out in the event.) But most traders do not own the bond, and they have nothing to "insure." Like the fellow who takes a policy on his neighbor’s house, they are simply betting on disaster.
No, the purpose of the market in CDS is to attract and summarize the best available information on the riskiness of a bond. The only way to do that is to allow anybody in the possession of such knowledge (and sufficient capital to back their bet) to trade CDS. That managements, corporate or governmental, would rather not have this information leak out is a reason to encourage the trading of naked CDS, not to outlaw it.
Swaps are used by banks as a hedge against risky loans, but the effect is problematic. The danger of hypertrading is that it affords an illusion of a continuously available exit; investors feel less need to scrutinize their assets. So it is with bankers. If every loan can be traded away, why worry about risk? Thanks to swaps, banks write more suspect loans and, over all, society is more exposed.
Yes, this is doubtlessly the effect that would occur if all investment managers, entrusted by their clients with billions of dollars in capital, thought as shallowly as New York Times finance columnists and, also, every CDS had only one side. Neither of these being the case, the conclusion does not follow. As long as somebody else has to buy the risk somebody else sells and the price of that transfer reflects the magnitude of that risk, the concern over a debt's risk has not disappeared; it has merely shifted.
The question is whether the social balance would improve if Wall Street were less devoted to games of chance.
Certainly—if you believe that investment should be abolished or put into the hand of central planners. But as long as individuals can reach their own conclusion about the likelihood of outcomes in the uncertain future and back their conclusions with their own money, we'll have Wall Street, uncertainty, and chance.
The two standard talking points against the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United—(1) Money isn't Speech! (2) Corporations Have No Rights!—are so easily refuted at even the most rudimentary level of legal analysis that their frequent, thoughtless repetition is little more than an indication that the speaker has been living in an echo chamber unexposed to any critical thought.
Money isn't speech? Indeed it isn't. Yet, regulation of money can restrict or even strangle the exercise of constitutional rights and thereby violate the Constitution, as it was found to do in Citizens United.
If you find this difficult to understand, look at constitutional rights against which you are not currently at war, such as the right to counsel or the right to abortion. Laws which banned criminal defendants from paying lawyers or pregnant women seeking abortions from paying abortionists would undoubtedly be found unconstitutional. I shudder to think that any law school graduate would consider “Money isn't Counsel!” (or “Money isn't Abortion!”) to be killer arguments to the contrary.
Corporations Have No Rights? Really? Anybody outraged at the thought that corporations can bring claims under the First Amendment must have been boiling over for quite some time.
One notorious corporation controlled by a secretive ultra-wealthy family with a ideological agenda to change this country has been hiding its machinations behind the First Amendment for decades! What's worse, this powerful ideology-driven corporation has been bamboozling the Supreme Court to grant its schemes constitutional protection again and again.
I am referring of course to the New York Times Corporation. In New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), the Supreme Court granted this corporation (and others like it) a privilege to violate long-standing and democratically enacted libel laws based on its alleged “First Amendment” rights. In New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971) , the Supreme Court again invoking these imaginary “Corporate First Amendment Rights” held that the corporation could freely violate the democratically enacted Espionage Act of 1917 to publish the classified so-called “Pentagon Papers.”
I'm sure you are as outraged about these judicial usurpations on behalf of corporations as you are about Citizens United (though strangely most of you have managed to contain their outrage for the last forty, fifty years or so). Or perhaps not.
Seriously, if you believe that there would have been a First Amendment issue if the Republican Congress had passed a law requiring all New York Times editorials to be pre-approved by Dick Cheney, you believe that corporations can bring valid First Amendment claims. Don't embarrass yourself by embracing the silly talking point to the contrary.
Thomas Frank delivers himself of the usual progressive advice to Barack Obama in the pages of the WSJ:
What you need to do now is pick a fight, preferably one that forces the obstructionists of the right to take the side of privilege. You need a battle that will expose their populism and their protest for the pretenses they are. Your target is obvious: the financial industry, from Wall Street to the credit card companies. Yes, taking them on will cost you campaign contributions for 2012, but take Wall Street down a few pegs and Americans might start to remember what it was their grandparents loved about Democrats all those years ago.
In all my years of reading right-wing punditry I have never heard any of the groups conventionally deemed to be the go-to scapegoats of the right (ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, welfare recipients) or even Al-Qaeda denounced as readily and unashamedly as progressives gleefully demagogue banks and the rich. Much less have I read in any respectable publication that the soundest strategic counsel to the Right would be to focus public scorn on a particular despised minority and ride the wave of hatred to electoral success.
Yet, progressives like Mr. Frank do so shamelessly and will at the same time claim the mantle of dispassionate reason and adopt an attitude of vast superiority to the slavering Republican-voting hordes with their hate-filled minds.
How does that work?