Thieves in the Temple.

Readings for January 9, 2023.

Mike Lofgren at Salon reminds us that isolationists like the late Sen. Robert Taft (R-OH), once dubbed “Mr. Republican,” have always been with us. He also reminds us that we shouldn’t think their isolationism sincere, merely because they don’t indulge in anti-Semitism or love of fascism out loud. We have all succumbed to the temptation to think that Republicans Used to Be Better in The Good Old Days – I can’t tell you how many sentences I began with “at least Reagan didn’t” during Tha Bush Mobb’s reign of terror – but we would be wiser to take the 30,000-foot view here. I’ll only add that if Mr. Taft had ever condemned Father Coughlin, it wouldn’t have been useless. Even if he didn’t mean it!

From Julia Rock at The Lever we learn “How Big Pharma Actually Spends Its Massive Profits.” Long story short: “Between 2012 and 2021, the 14 largest publicly-traded pharmaceutical companies spent $747 billion on stock buybacks and dividends — substantially more than the $660 billion they spent on research and development.” So no more of this ZOMG BUT TEH INNOVASHUNZ!!!!! crap! Must I add that the money a corporation spends on research and development can’t be taxed by any government? Because it’s an expense?

Sonali Kohatkar at Raw Story reveals “The Disturbing Truth About How Much Unearned Wealth and Power Has Been Accrued by Elites.” Said disturbing truth is nepotism: “some of the most dramatic success stories began with a parent using their wealth or connections to give their child the upper hand,” she reminds us, and not just our most famous tech zillionaires like Jeff Bezos ($250,000 from his parents) or Mark Zuckerberg ($100,000 loan from his parents), but also Donald Trump – remember how he said, out loud, that his father had given him a “very small loan” of $1 million to jump-start his real estate career? And, thanks to said father’s tax evasion schemes, little Donald had been a millionaire since he was a small child! So no more of this ZOMG BUT THEYZ EARNEDZ ITZ!!!!!! crap. Better to call nepotism an affirmative action program for the well-off.

When Marick Masters at The Conversation wonders if the last year’s surge in union elections and strikes “mark a turning point for organized labor,” I’m tempted to say: only if we make it so! But Mr. Masters does us a great service by pointing out that for all the media coverage of strikes and elections lately, the numbers of these are only a little bit up from the last 40 years – as late as 1980, the year before President Reagan broke the air traffic controllers’ strike, we saw 200 major work stoppages, compared to 20 in 2022. So maybe the pandemic hasn’t driven union membership upward the way we would have liked – or the way the Depression and World War II did. A possible “ace up labor’s sleeve”? More folks like unions and/or want to be in unions than in a very long time. We should work to ensure that doesn’t just mean people tend to like what they don’t have.

Jonathan O’Calllighan at IFL Science evaluates a study suggesting that octopuses are actually aliens from outer space, and finds it wanting. Yes I also got a kick out of that viral video showing an octopus escaping through a crevice in a boat’s deck, but when a scientific paper about an animal counts 33 scientists among its authors but zero zoologists, red flags should go up. And when a study points to “gaps in the evidence” and then fills those gaps with speculation, that isn’t the same as filling them with, you know, evidence. The “we can’t explain it, so it must be aliens” argument may even remind you of “intelligent design.”

Finally, the incomparable Matt Stoller relays some good news for American workers, as our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) has proposed a new rule that would bar “non-compete” agreements in employment contracts, meaning that workers would have more freedom to work where they like, rather than being barred from working for competitors. And of course, with “non-compete” clauses already being unenforceable in at least 12 states and with many actual bosses being fairly sympathetic to the new rule, America’s “free” market votaries are applauding the rule change, right? I kid, of course – they think the “free” market only means “freedom” for overpaid executives, not actual freedom for workers to make more money, and maybe even one day become bosses themselves! (Don’t believe any hype about “employees stealing trade secrets,” either, because other laws cover that.)

Around the table: in which we contemplate the *real* Dr. King, among other matters.

On this, the day after we celebrate the birth of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., we should consider, as Michael Harriot does at The Guardian, how the real Dr. King would be received by today's America. Of course, Dr. King's approval ratings with whites were underwater every day of his life, and a lot of folks who venerate him today would have claimed the Fair Housing Act "went too far" in the '60s, but Dr. King also vocally fought police brutality whereas too many of today's Americans respond to yet another police killing of a Black man for brandishing a cellphone with I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!! He also railed against poverty and the Vietnam War, to which too many folks back then responded we gave them the vote; what more do they want? And they'd respond the same way today.

And now perhaps the best headline of 2022 so far, from Janine Jackson at FAIR: "Elite Media Remember Lani Guinier as 'Embattled' — and Forget How They Battled Her." You may remember Ms. Guinier, who passed on January 8, as the Clinton nominee who voiced "extreme" opinions about voting, redistricting, and affirmative action; if you do not remember her as the first Black woman to get tenure at Harvard, for example, that may be because our "liberal" media repeated all the right-wing whining about her 1993 nomination to head our Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, only evaluating her writings more honestly after the drama prompted President Clinton to withdraw the nomination. (And I suspect he nominated her more to help create all that drama than solve problems in America, but Ms. Guinier would probably disagree with me.)

I've blamed the unvaccinated in America for most of the problems we're facing today, but Sarah Lazare at In These Times suggests that blaming the unvaccinated may be a way of failing to blame the Biden Administration for its leadership failures, such as failing to overcome intellectual property barriers in getting vaccines out to the rest of the world, which will allow new COVID variants to flourish, and failing to extend safety net programs (like hazard pay for those we all call "essential" workers!) that help a civilization endure a pandemic. And yet I can't stop blaming those folks who remain unvaccinated because they're still throwing their tantrums about Joe Biden winning the 2020 election. I remember how many vaccine slots were open in red states this past summer, and while I wouldn't expect poor folks from blue states to be able to scarf those up, I still think we should expend some effort blaming and shaming those close to us who have failed us.

Good news: DirecTV will stop carrying the so-called One America News (or OAN) network when their contract expires in April. AT&T is still OAN's sugar daddy, and Verizon FIOS still carries OAN, and all the cable corporations still carry the Fox News Channel, so we have more work to do to Make America Less Toxic Again (hey, that spells an actual word! Ring my promoter!), but we should celebrate our successes as we achieve them, and even though we hear that DirecTV wants to provide fewer offerings as a way to offer lower prices and compete with streaming services, this success definitely belongs to us.

Did Mike Pence really compare Democratic efforts to end the filibuster with the January 6 attempted coup? Yes, Virginia, he did, in that they are both "tragic." For Mr. Pence, of course, voter fraud is a real thing, and not just a slab of racist booga-booga Republicans always trot out because they don't have any ideas worth sharing. Even worse, state efforts to curb mail-in ballots are, for Mr. Pence, "common sense" reforms, even if they're not the "common sense" reforms he'll actually enumerate -- or, indeed, are not actually "common sense" in a world where Colorado has run its elections entirely through the mail for years.

Finally, swing-district Democrats want to break up the Build Back Better Act into elements that might pass because they're so popular, and that's not a bad strategy! They mention "curbing prescription drug costs and extending the child tax credit," and though they didn't say "let Medicare negotiate drug prices" and "extend the CTC expansion that was plopping $250 checks in millions of bank accounts every month," I would find it profoundly useful to force votes on these individual initiatives -- plus paid family medical leave, though the swingsters didn't mention that, apparently. And even though all of these bills will die in our Senate (unless they decide to pass them under reconciliation rules), at least then we can all see, once again, exactly which Senators are creating all the drama. Put these folks on the spot again and again and again until they yield, that's what I say.

Around the table: why have COVID guidelines become so confusing? The answer may surprise you!

Matt Stoller breaks down the price-fixing lawsuit against 16 elite American hedge funds with universities attached universities. The suit's key allegation: these universities (which include a lot of Ivy League schools) violated "need-blind" admission policies by considering admission for children of rich folks who might have donated to them if they accepted their kids, which surely ain't a "need-blind" process, since those slots going to rich kids are, each of them, keeping someone less financially secure (but probably more talented!) out. Also, "when universities move away from the consensus methodology for calculating the cost of college" -- a methodology you might also call "price-fixing," and maybe even collusion -- "the price they charge goes down." And folks who whine about affirmative action when it helps Black and Brown folks might want to train more of their ire on "legacy admissions," i.e., rich kids getting into their dad's school. You know, like George W. Bush.

I'm a bit puzzled to read that "COVID's Latest Surge Spreads an Epidemic of Confusion," because all the "conflicting advice and clashing guidelines coming from government, science, health, media and other institutions" has one obvious cause: big corporations want their workers back to work. That's why we quarantine for five days instead of two weeks and schools rush to re-open -- if parents are home with their kids, they can't make money for the bossman. Anyway, it's not like the information we had at the beginning didn't shift. And no, I feel no solidarity with right-wingers who have been imbibing bad information, or pushing it on the rest of us, for the better part of two years.

Paul Rogat Loeb at Op-Ed News says that opposing Build Back Better could well end the political careers of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, and I, too, have been thinking a lot lately about how all the shenanigans Messrs. Nelson and Lieberman pulled in 2010 led directly to their retirements in 2012. Lesson: doing the bidding of corporatists isn't a recipe for longevity, except for the corporations, of course. Don't feel sad, though -- Mr. Manchin is well-off enough that he doesn't need to work after he retires/gets blown out in 2024, and the ever-adaptable Ms. Sinema will surely consult on some scam designed to separate venture capitalists from their money. No, not crypto; she'd find that gauche.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) says he'll kick Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell and Ilhan Omar off a few committees if he becomes Speaker after November, and maybe he will and maybe he won't, but his saying so aims squarely at the Primary of One, not so much to get Mr. Trump's endorsement per se (he's in trouble if he needs that in his district!), but to get the endorsements of all the Trumpholes who'd make him the Speaker of a new House majority. But yeah, knock yourself out explaining why you'd kick Ilhan Omar off Foreign Affairs -- people might actually discover they like her better than the chattering class does, since unlike Marjorie Taylor Greene, she makes sense.

Peter Doocy asks Biden Administration Press Secretary Jen Psaki that since he and Ms. Psaki were both triple-vaxxed and still got COVID, how Mr. Biden can call this stretch of the pandemic a "pandemic of the unvaccinated." It's a good thing you only need two counter-examples to obliterate any broad trend! Seriously, she handled that so easily -- "(y)ou are 17 times more likely to go to the hospital if you’re unvaccinated, 20 times more likely to die" -- that I'd say generally he ought to keep that mask on, lest someone want to punch him in the face.

Finally, Future Crunch gives us "99 Good News Stories You Probably Didn’t Hear About in 2021," and if the news is a bit overwhelming, well, gosh, let's have good news be overwhelming, for once. The Mississippi River is much less polluted than it was 30 years ago! The European Parliament banned predictive policing! Malaria and ebola vaccines came out this past year! I didn't hear about most of these, but perhaps signing up for every-two-weeks emails will change that. I'll certainly pass along as much good news as I can! It'll be just another way Thieves in the Temple differs from the Fox News Channel.

Around the table: more lessons from the election, plus bonus EPA oppression of activists.

Joan C. Williams at the Harvard Business Review describes "What So Many People Don't Get About the U.S. Working Class." It is a really eye-opening article, and I won't be able to summarize all its necessary insights, but here are some: white working class folks "resent() professionals but admire() the rich," white working class men retain more traditional notions of manliness than most Democrats understand, and white working class folks aspire to middle-class jobs and pay, not minimum-wage jobs and pay, and see the poor as a drain on them. Of course, the right Democrat could remind people that rich folks aren't necessarily successful at anything useful -- they're just very good at redistributing workers' wealth upward to themselves.

If you've got a few minutes, check out this story of a Mississippi environmental activist apparently ramrodded into jail by our government. Tennie White got 40 months for allegedly falsifying three lab test results, but you might well come away from the story thinking she got 40 months for being a thorn in our government's side as they dragged their feet making certain local corporations clean up their mess (and these messes are worse in Mississippi than almost anywhere else). Note well, also, that this was Mr. Obama's EPA ringing her up -- though I suppose Mr. Trump's EPA will ring a lot more of them up.

Daniel Golden at ProPublica writes about how the problem of "legacy admissions" to colleges has only worsened over the last decade. The most famous legacy admission in America right now might be Trump advisor Jared Kushner, who got into Harvard the year after his father made a $2.5 million donation to the school, and Mr. Golden's 2006 book found this phenomenon quite rampant at America's universities; now fewer legacy admissions get in, but they still get in at a higher clip than the general population. So the next time someone complains to you about affirmative action, you can trump (so to speak!) them with legacy admissions. (Hate to pile on, but this is also yet another argument for the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income: if we have fewer folks with too much money to begin with, we should have fewer legacy admissions as well.)

Peripherally-related to the item from the other day in which Rick Perlstein warns us against making casual connections between past and present, Robert Borosage presents "Lessons from the Reagan Years" as we "Tak(e) on Trump." I agree that Democrats shouldn't "accomodate" Mr. Trump for short-term gain in 2018, not necessarily because there'll be no short-term gain in 2018 under any circumstances, but because you don't fight a radical by appearing "sensible" and "reasonable." Of course, these days you barely even have Republican moderates -- the Republican moderate caucus in the Senate when Mr. Reagan took office was two dozen strong; today, that "caucus" is Susan Collins of Maine, who rarely bucks leadership.

Finally, Paul Krugman says that "a bit more populism" won't solve the Democrats' problems with white working-class voters. Problem is, Mr. Sanders's proposal to "stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry," isn't a "bit" more populism for Democrats, it's a lot more -- Democrats don't stand up to any of these actors because they're afraid of losing their money. Also, while his pessimism about the "liberal" media actually covering "changed policy positions" is understandable, it's not the attitude that helped get rid of slavery, either.

Around the table: more Brexit, and now also Texit.

John Pilger at Counterpunch calls the Brexit vote "an act of raw democracy," and notes that the British elites who "can't" understand why "these people" wanted Brexit "are the products of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, groomed in the fakery and political treachery of post-modernism." At least one member of the British "liberal" media just comes out and says "(n)ow surely we can agree referendums are bad for Britain." Always Our Glorious elites stroke themselves over their love of democracy -- until it gives them the results they don't want, and then they turn on it. If children did that, we'd call them spoiled brats.

In a related note, Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept reminds us that Brexit is "a glaring repudiation of the wisdom and relevance of elite political and media institutions" which "have spawned pervasive misery and inequality, only to spew condescending scorn at their victims when they object." The good news? Some "liberal" media outlets are starting to suspect that maybe they should share some of the blame for what happened. I doubt that spreads, though, at least not in the short run. Right now, it looks a little like a safety valve, a typical trick of Our Glorious Elites who pretend to "understand" our grievances and "care" about us right as they're about to put the screws to us again.

Even a House subcommittee thinks that a fraud case against Exxon Mobil is little more than a "conspiracy" to deprive Exxon Mobil of First Amendment rights Remember: this isn't about ExxonMobil honestly analyzing the climate situation and honestly finding nothing wrong, but about them honestly analyzing the climate situation and finding things very wrong and lying about it to their shareholders and to the rest of us. And this bears repeating: fraud is not "speech." What's next? Are we going to call murder "speech"? How about pollution? Or burglary? This is what happens when courts are so hot to declare money "speech." It's also what happens when courts declare that corporations have the "rights of people," as disgusting a fiction as I've ever heard. What's next? Is my chair going to have the "rights of people"?

California prepares to launch experiment to find out whether it can replace the gas tax with a per-mile charge. I suppose it would be less regressive (but only if poor working families can get a rebate), but it'd be a boondoggle for privacy reasons -- your government could track your movements with it. I'll brook no if-you've-done-nothing-wrong-you've-got-nothing-to-fear, because you know our government always "discovers" things you're doing to be "wrong" when their backs are to the wall. (Of course, with California, I can't complain that taxes on millionaire income aren't high enough, because they are. But I'd still look at their corporate welfare giveaways.)

Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the University of Texas's method of considering race in college admissions, ProPublica reminds us of Nikole Hannah-Jones's 2013 article on the subject, in which we learn that the white student who alleged that she didn't get into UTexas-Austin because she was white was very likely full of soup. Key facts: of the 47 students with lower grades and test scores than Ms. Fisher who got in ahead of her in 2008, 42 were white; more than 160 black/Latino students did as good as or better than Ms. Fisher also didn't get into Austin; and Ms. Fisher didn't actually graduate in her high school's top 10 though more than 90% of Austin's admittees that year did. And note how cavalier her lawyer is about the quality of his own argument. Nice work if you can get it!

Finally, at least one ardent Texas secessionist is heartened by the Brexit result. To which I say the same thing I always say: if you wanna leave, then go! Make your Oklahoma relatives get a passport to come to Texas, and don't count on any more federal assistance with your public schools. Also, prepare to lose the Cowboys, so they can remain "America's Team." I think Las Vegas would be the perfect landing place for them -- unless the Oakland Raiders get there first.

Supreme Court strikes down Section 4(b) of the 1965 Voting Rights Act as unconstitutional, arguing that making several states and counties pre-clear electoral law changes with the federal government made sense in 1965, but that the specific discriminatory conditions 4(b) addresses have improved in those areas such that 4(b) places a burden on those areas today. The best I can say for the majority opinion is that it reads 4(b) very, very narrowly; the worst I can say for the dissent is that it takes eight pages to start winning the argument. The decision does open the door for Congress to pass a revamped 4(b), though I won't hold my breath.

Senate Agriculture Committee narrowly passes Begich/Murkowski GMO salmon labeling amendment to agricultural appropriations bill. Since the ag-approp bill is a must-pass, and the amendment passed with more than one Republican's support (Ms. Collins and Mr. Kirk also voted yea), GMO salmon labeling will likely pass the entire Senate -- though if the House passes a different bill, the amendment could be conferenced out. Still, good news.

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit again rules in favor of an obscure firm named Ultramercial which claims to have patented the idea of running web ads instead of charging website visitors for content. Now Ultramercial gets to file frivolous lawsuits against anyone else who might have this absurdly common idea, just as our Founders intended. Next up: I patent breathing, and sue everyone!

ProPublica's Nikole Hanna-Jones explains why class-based affirmative action may not be the sword that slices the Gourdian knot of American ambivalence over race-based affirmative action. Long story short: poor white kids generally don't get sequestered in bad neighborhoods and bad schools, and white/Asian kids account for more than four out of five poor kids who do well in school, suggesting that class-based affirmative action won't be de facto race-based as often as I'd have presumed.

From the EVERTHING IZ TERRORIZM!!!! file: Tennessee Department of Environment official claims that baseless complaints about water quality comprise "an act of terrorism" "under Homeland Security." I guess if Mr. Smith feels "terrorized" by what most bureaucrats would find irritating, he can always go see a therapist -- unless, of course, he's just trying to intimidate folks into keeping their mouth shut about water so bad they have to boil it.

Paul Ryan blames Democrats for the farm bill's defeat in the House -- ignoring the poison pill amendment Republicans rammed through mere minutes before the vote -- but also reminds us that he didn't vote for the farm bill, either. Then he treats us to a paragraph of bloviating about Congressfolk "keeping their word" with each other, instead of the more pertinent problem of whether Congressfolk keep their word with the people they represent.

Republican Congressional aide still calls himself the "undisputed SNAP challenge champion," even though he actually failed to feed himself on food stamp money for a week. He had "an unexpected trip," after all, and so he couldn't do it the way he was supposed to. These Republicans, always needing to bend the rules to get anything done! Anyone heard of Donny Ferguson before this week? No? Now let's never speak of him again.

ProPublica tells us just about everything we need to know about Abigail Fisher's affirmative action case, which the Supreme Court just bumped back down to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Long story short: Ms. Fisher's whiteness almost certainly didn't keep her off the University of Texas's Austin campus, or her lawyers would have spent more time arguing that -- and she didn't even finish in the top 10 percent of her class or get a gang-busters SAT score, which somewhat undercuts her own "work hard and be rewarded" argument.

Finally, Maine Gov. Paul LePage has announced he'll no longer comment on stories published by three newspapers who have lately published stories critical of his Administration. Does Mr. LePage ever remember that he won with 38% of the vote?