More on Guns in America

Sadly, if predictably, in the aftermath of last week’s assassinations, gun advocates are still vociferously rejecting any proposal to restrict the distribution of guns.  Amongst the various arguments, there are two slogans that stand out:

“Guns don’t kill people; People kill People.”  and

“If guns are made illegal, only criminals will have guns.”

The remainder of this post will be devoted to discussing these two slogans.

Of course, as with almost any slogan, there are oversimplifications inherent in these.  That’s one of the problems with slogans.  On the other hand, slogans allow a general position to be stated quickly and powerfully.  These two slogans epitomize the latter point.

Let’s start by examining the first slogan — “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”  For the most part, this is true.  (Let’s neglect, for the moment, booby traps and automated gun emplacements.  For the most part, these are [for the moment] limited to battlefield situations.)  However, it’s also true that, as the recent assassin’s attack has shown, guns allow a single person to kill far more people than most other lethal weapons, such as a knife, bludgeon, or garrote.  Further, it’s also true that bombs don’t, by themselves, kill people.  Should we, therefore, allow the unregulated use and sale of explosive devices??  (It’s worth pointing out that the Second Amendment nowhere specifically mentions ‘guns’.  It states that, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”) 

Arms includes not only guns, but also grenades, bombs, and other “weapons of  mass destruction”.  Indeed, arguably the Second Amendment prohibits the government from preventing people from building their own nuclear devices.  Where should one draw the line?  Traditionally, the Supreme Court used the first phrase of the amendment to draw the line:  “A well regulated militia being necessary for the security of a free State.”  Working from this, the Court had, until very recently, held that the amendment only protected the ability of state and local governments to establish and operate their own military or paramilitary forces unimpeded by restrictions from the federal government.  I know of virtually no one who would find that reading objectionable. 

When things became problematic was when the Court’s newer “original intent” proponent justices pushed the boundary to allow unorganized individuals, not well regulated militias, to keep and bear weapons, notably guns.  Of course, the Court tried to make that reading sound more reasonable by indicating that governments could regulate what kind of guns and could also restrict who could keep and use guns — i.e., machine guns could be outlawed and convicts and the mentally ill could be prohibited from owning guns.  However, under their literal read of the Second Amendment, such “reasonable” restrictions are still infringements, and therefore violate the amendment.  In other words, the Court tried to take stake out a middle ground position that is  illogical.  Either the Second Amendment is aimed at well regulated militias and nothing else, or it’s open season for the arms market.

More broadly, the combination of  people and guns does kill people; and far more efficiently than other more “primitive” weapons.  If one looks abroad, there’s a strong correlation between countries with less regulated arms sales and those with higher rates of gun-related crimes.  While once can reasonably make an exception for guns that are not efficient for killing (or threatening) people, such as bb guns or single-shot target pistols and rifles, there’s little question that eliminating the remainder of the private arms market would reduce gun crimes, and most specifically fatal shootings.

That brings us to the second slogan: “If guns are made illegal, only criminals will have guns.”  Let’s neglect the obvious truism in the slogan — obviously if guns are illegal, if you have a gun you are, by definition, a criminal.  The argument is that criminals will get their guns one way or another regardless of their legality, while law-abiding citizens who want a gun for a legitimate purpose will be those most affected by prohibiting legal private gun ownership.

Now, of course, there are ways that a gun possession statute could be tailored to minimize its impact on legitimate gun ownership interests.  As I’ve noted, there could be an exception for single-shot weapons, especially those used primarily for hunting or target practice.  There could also be an exception for participants in a “well regulated militia”.  State and local governments often have auxiliary police detachments.  Those participating in such detachments could be authorized to own appropriate weaponry.  Such detachments would also allow state and local government to exercise appropriate control over who gets to join such groups and how they function, as well as to provide appropriate training on safe firearm storage and use that could minimize the number of accidental shootings that happen with our currently uncontrolled private gun ownership.

More broadly, however, the argument about making private gun ownership illegal could equally be applied to many other venues.  For example, “If crack cocaine ownership is made illegal, only criminals will have crack cocaine.”  Of course, crack cocaine ownership now is illegal.  So maybe we should make crack cocaine ownership legal so that those who aren’t otherwise criminals can “safely” own (and use) crack cocaine?  You can substitute your favorite illegal substance or activity into the syllogism, for example, machine guns, IEDs, or lynchings.  They all work equally well.  The point is, the argument only works when the illegality would unreasonably restrict any substance or activity that those we consider law-abiding citizens would expect to want to have or do.  Where does gun ownership fit into that?  Hunting (of animals, not people) and target practice are both generally considered reasonable activities for law-abiding citizens.  As pointed out earlier, however, it would be relatively simple to craft laws that would allow both hunting and target shooting to continue unimpeded while still prohibiting the sale or private ownership of guns like the semi-automatic magazine-carrying Glock handgun used in last week’s killings. 

Where things maybe get a little fuzzier is in the area of “self-protection”.  This is, in large measure, where the slogan is aimed.  Its focus is on people who fear being victimized by a gun-toting criminal.  Let’s look more carefully at that.  The vast majority of criminal use of guns (not counting gun battles between criminal gangs) is in armed robberies.  In most armed robberies, one of the most important elements in the element of surprise.  The person about to commit an armed robbery on a deserted nighttime street doesn’t usually walk up to you with their gun visible from half a block away.  They’ll usually wait until they’re right next to, in front of, or behind you, and then brandish their gun and demand your valuables.  Even assuming you would habitually carry around a concealed firearm, it’s probably in a holster of some sort with the safety on.  By the time you could pull it out and unlatch the safety, you’d have been shot multiple times.  In other words, a gun is of little use if the other person has, “got the drop on you.”  Even in the home burglary situation, a gun is not necessarily an unalloyed benefit.  For one thing, burglars, like other criminals, generally like to do their work undetected.  Again, the element of surprise is generally not going to be in your favor.  Even in the situation where you hear a funny noise downstairs, grab your gun from your nightstand, switch off the safety and creep downstairs; unless you “get the drop on” the burglar, you may well be looking at a gun battle where you could as easily be the victim as the victor.  If you, instead, “shoot first and ask questions later,” you may end up unintentionally shooting your family pet, or even your own daughter or son “caught” in a midnight raid on the refrigerator.  Not something most people want to have happen to them.  Further, in most neighborhoods armed burglaries are extremely uncommon.  It’d be interesting to compile statistics about how often an attempted burglary has been thwarted by a gun-toting homeowner versus other possible outcomes, including having the burglar apprehended by police, having the burglar flee when disturbed, and, conversely having an innocent pet or person shot by mistake.

The slogan also fails to consider the effect of making private gun ownership illegal on decreasing the supply of guns available to criminals.  (Virtually all of the recent mass-murderers had obtained their guns legally.)  Many guns owned by criminals were originally legal guns that were stolen from their rightful owner.  If there were no legal private gun owners, the supply of guns to the criminal community would be greatly curtailed.

The bottom lines — slogans about gun ownership sound great when ranted on a radio show or silk-screened onto a tee-shirt, but they don’t stand up well to rational scrutiny.

Strict Construction, Gun Violence, and the Second Amendment

The assassination of a federal judge and attempted assassination of a congresswoman, along with the killing of several “civilians”, once again brings to the fore the issue of gun violence and the Second Amendment.  This is especially true now that the Supreme Court majority has applied so-called “strict constructionism” to find that the Second Amendment protects private gun ownership from almost all federal and state regulation.

Justice Scalia, one of the court’s more vocal advocates for strict constructionism, argues that the Constitution’s interpretation can’t change with the times.  According to him, if circumstances change, the answer  is to amend the Constitution accordingly.  By that standard, it appears the time is overdue to amend the Second Amendment.

Back when the Constitution, and specifically the Second Amendment, was written, the primary firearm was the flintlock musket, an inaccurate, short-range, and slow-to-load single-shot gun.  There were also handguns, but they were dueling pistols and the like — again inaccurate, single-shot, and clumsy to use.  Contrast that with the ten bullet clip-carrying semiautomatic pistol used by last Saturday’s assassin, or the Uzi or M-16 type assault weapons favored for gang violence, or, for that matter, the extremely accurate multi-shot high-powered rifle used to assassinate John F. Kennedy.  There’s no comparison.  Indeed, once could argue that they shouldn’t even be described by the same word, and that “arms” as used in the Second Amendment had an entirely different meaning than the guns, IEDs, and other weaponry available to conduct modern-day violence.  Nevertheless, Scalia, the NRA, Teapartiers and their ilk insist that the Second Amendment allows free rein to gun-toters. 

Given the results of last Saturday, and looking abroad to places like Pakistan and Afghanistan, where assassinations are becoming an almost daily occurrence, the question is, isn’t it time we amended the Second Amendment?  Sure, maybe a single-shot hunting rifle or a BB gun doesn’t need regulation, but an AK-47 or semiautomatic handgun is an entirely different story.

If people like Scalia are sincere in their assertion that the proper course of action when the Constitution no longer works well is to amend it, it’s time for him, and those like him, to get behind a movement to amend the Second Amendment to assure that the kinds of weapons that can cause mass-mayhem aren’t easily available to would-be assassins.

While we’re at it, it’s also long past due to take into account the changed nature of the media and of election campaigns.  The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision of last year practically turned the U.S. political system over to corporate control.  We really do need an amendment to recognize that the nature of political campaigning has fundamentally changed.  Unregulated campaign spending might have been perfectly OK in the confines of the thirteen original states, where almost anyone could afford to run off a broadside and have it hand-distributed by volunteers.  In this era of TV and radio ads, mass-mailings, focus groups, and psychologically attuned campaign consultants, however, it is increasingly true that we have been trapped by the “golden rule” — Those who have the gold make the rules.  That certainly wasn’t what the writers of the First Amendment envisioned.  If it takes a Constitutional amendment to bring power back to the people, then we need to get started on that process.

One last thought on Scalia and his strict constructionism friends:  The writers of the Constitution were not gods.  They were men coming from divergent situations attempting to cobble together a working structure for a national  government.  The Constitution includes numerous compromises reached to accommodate the differing view of the powers-that-be in different colonies.  Those compromises, and the reasons behind them, have now been well-documented.  While some of the divergences continue to exist — e.g., between large population and small population states, between urban and rural states, others, such as those associated with slavery, have long-since vanished.  Further, we have, over time, come to realize that some of the Constitution’s structures and procedures were neither functional nor fair.  Some of the worst of these, such as having Senators chosen by state legislatures, have been corrected.  That doesn’t mean, however, that we need to accept the current Constitutional structures and procedures as God-given mandates carved in stone.  Indeed, after almost two and a quarter centuries, maybe it’s time to consider a new Constitutional Convention. … Just a thought.

Political Campaigns, Free Speech, and the Citizens United Decision

This November’s election was our first real chance to see the effects of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.  The results are ominous for the future of U.S. politics.  Bucketfuls of money poured into political campaigns, both directly and as unregulated “independent expenditures” from groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who are no longer required to even disclose where the money is coming from.  As a result, moneyed special interests are exerting an influence unparalleled since the end of the “gilded age” of the 1880s.

The irony is that the Citizens United decision is based on a fundamental misreading of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  That amendment states, very simply, that, “Congress shall make no law respecting … …or abridging the freedom of speech … .”  As with all of the provisions of the Bill of Rights, we now have over two hundred years of Supreme Court jurisprudence interpreting that simple phrase.  The U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions have made a sharp distinction between regulating the content of speech and regulating the “time, place, and manner” of speech.  While the former is subject to “strict scrutiny”, requiring that any regulation be narrowly tailored and necessary to address a clear and present danger to a substantial interest of the state, the latter allows regulation so long as it is even-handed (i.e., content-neutral — applying equally to all speech, regardless of what it’s about).

In Buckley v Valeo, the Nixon-era Court, led by Chief Justice Warren Burger, decided that money was equivalent to free speech — i.e., regulating political contributions or expenditures was the same as regulating political speech.  A moment of thought should show the error that opinion created.  Money does not create political speech, hence regulating how much gets donated or spent doesn’t prohibit speech — it just regulates how loud that speech is. 

Just as a city can prohibit sound trucks from blasting political speech (or any other kind), so it would seem that government ought to have the power to limit how much money gets contributed or spent on political campaigns.  However, the complicating factor is that, in order to be content-neutral, such regulation would have to apply to all kinds of speech; not just political speech.  For example, the FCC could promulgate a regulation limiting how much time any one advertiser could buy for on-air commercials in any particular period of time (say, for example, no more than 1% of the broadcast day).  The post office could similarly limit how many pieces of advertising mail could be mailed in any one period.  However, in order not to invoke strict scrutiny, such regulations would have to apply to all kinds of mailings, not just political advertising.  This could be problematic; but, on the other hand, it could greatly cut down on the amount of junk mail and TV and radio ads Americans have to deal with — something that I suspect would delight most people.

The other option would be to identify a justification for content-specific regulation of speech that would survive strict scrutiny.  In the past, the Supreme Court has sometimes accepted preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption as justification for limiting direct campaign contributions, but not campaign expenditure or contributions to non-candidate-based political committees.  Since the Citizens United decision, however, it’s unclear if that will still work.  The court has repeatedly rejected arguments about trying to maintain a “level playing field” for political candidates.  Evidently, the Court feels that fair play has no place in the American political process.

One wonders, however, whether there’s an argument to be made that when one side can effectively drown out the other side’s voice — the equivalent of blasting away with loudspeakers so that other people can’t even be heard — government has a right to step in to protect the free speech right of those being overwhelmed.  Perhaps there needs to be the equivalent of the Sherman Antitrust Act to protect the free market of ideas from being monopolized by one group’s raw monetary power?

IRV and the Oakland Mayor’s Race

Instant Run-off Voting (IRV for short) has made a big difference in this year’s Oakland mayoral election, and it’s not over yet.  Under Oakland’s traditional primary -> run-off system, there would have been a primary election in June, with lots of money spent.  The two top candidates (in this case, Don Perata and Jean Quan) would then have faced off in a November run-off, with a lot more money being spent in that election.  Essentially, the election could well have boiled down to who was better at raising the huge amounts of money needed to fight two back-to-back electoral battles.  In the past, that’s usually meant that the candidate with better connections to big-money special interests wins.

(Parenthetically, in very old-style elections, there was no run-off.  The candidate with the plurality of votes cast won outright.  This led to people putting up phony candidates whose main purpose was to draw votes away from the prime opponent.  Having a run-off at least allowed a clean match-up of the top candidates.)

With IRV, only one election is held, but the voters get to pick more than one candidate.  (IRV is also called ranked choice voting.)  If there first choice gets knocked out of the running, their vote  transfers to their second choice, etc.  Thus, unless all the voter’s choices are eliminated, the voter’s voice still makes a difference.   Here’s how it played out in the Oakland mayoral election this year (the first time IRV was used in Oakland).

There were ten – yes, ten, count them – candidates in the elections.  Some of them were pretty minor and ran only token campaigns; others tried to run low-budget grassroots campaign — a very hard thing to do in a city of over 400,000 people.  Most observers acknowledged there were four “major” candidates with sufficient funds and supporters to run credible citywide campaigns — former state legislator Don Perata, city council members Jean Quan and Rebecca Kaplan, and professor and media pundit Joe Tuman.  Shown below are the preliminary results of the IRV calculus.  (The results are preliminary because several thousand absentee and provisional ballots remain to be tallied.)

How IRV chose Oakland's mayor

As you can see, the IRV procedure shifted votes from lower ranking to higher ranked candidates.  Significantly, however, the shift was nonrandom.  About two-thirds of Rebecca Kaplan’s votes shifted to Jean Quan when Kaplan was eliminated, while only about one-third went to Perata.  Even more striking (although smaller) was the shift from Green Party candidate Macleay.  Quan got almost half of his 1500 or so votes, while Perata only got a little more than fifty.  The unequal distribution of second and third choice votes allowed Quan to close the gap against Perata and eventually surpass his total.  One potentially important factor in the election was candidates’ recommendations about whom to vote for other than themselves.  Several candidates, notably Quan and Kaplan, urged their supporters to choose any other candidate except Perata as a second or third choice.  It appears many voters followed that advice.

Back when ranked choice voting was being debated, Perata, and several city council members who supported him, came out in opposition to IRV.  At this point, it’s pretty clear it was in his self-interest to do so.  If not for IRV elections, it’d almost certainly now be Mayor Perata, rather than Mayor Quan.

Ballot Measure Brain Teasers

Here’s a brain teaser for you — try to find a consistent frame of reference that makes sense of all the California ballot measure results from yesterday’s election.  It’s not easy.

Some parts fit together pretty well.  Propositions 22 and 26 are part of a consistent pattern of California voters asking government to keep its hands out of our wallets unless they ask nicely and we say yes.  Prop. 22 keeps state government (meaning the legislature) from taking money away from local jurisdictions to help balance the state budget.  It was sold as protecting local government resources.  As I noted in a previous post, the unmentioned major beneficiary will be redevelopment agencies.  I wonder why the no on 22 campaign didn’t play that up more.  I find it hard to believe, in between their taking money away from other local agencies and being able to exercise eminent domain to take property away from citizens, that voters have a warm spot in their heart for redevelopment agencies. [That's not to say that they never do anything worthwhile.  To give them their due, for example, Emeryville's redevelopment agency has had a big hand in transforming that city from truckyards and factories into a retail powerhouse.]  Prop. 26 also makes it harder for the state (or local agencies, for that matter) to collect money in the form of fees.  The complaint was that there were fees being created that were really taxes, and it was a subterfuge to get around Prop. 13 and Prop. 218′s voter approval requirements.  So now most fees will ALSO require a 2/3 popular vote.  The defeat of Prop. 21 also fits with the “keep your hand out of my friggin’ wallet” attitude of California voters.  Interestingly, for both this and Prop. 26, the Bay Area’s attitudes differed from the rest of the state’s.  Here’s a link to the voting map for prop 21 on the Secretary of State’s website:  http://vote.sos.ca.gov/maps/ballot-measures/21/  .  We in the Bay Area are apparently a bit more willing to pay the fare when it comes to government services.

This might all seem consistent, but at the same time voters also adopted Prop. 25, which eliminates the 2/3 majority requirement to pass the state budget.  Thus it’ll now be easier for the legislature to pass a budget, but harder for them to have it survive the laugh test of, “So where are you going to find the revenue to make this budget balance?”  Look for many more applications of smoke and mirrors to produce a “balanced” budget in the future.  Also look for the state budget deficit to continue to grow, since Californians seem to think they can have all the services they want without having to pay for them.

Props 20 and 27, like props 21,22, and 26, but unlike prop 25, also showed voters’ distrust of the legislature.  In 2008, the voters narrowly passed prop 11, taking legislative redistricting out of the (self-interested) hands  of the legislature and putting it into the hands of an independent “citizens’ commission”.  This year, the legislature tried to convince voters that they should reverse the decision.  No such luck.  In fact, the voters turned around and took congressional redistricting out of the legislature’s hands as well.  Perhaps, with the exception of prop 25, the theme might be that the legislature is not to be trusted with doing much of anything right.  Arguably, even prop 25 could be said to reflect that attitude.  i.e., “OK, you don’t seem to be able to handle passing a budget with a 2/3 majority.  We’ll make it easy for you — just get something out with a simple majority; and if you can’t handle that, we’ll take away your pay because you clearly aren’t earning it!”

Then we’ve got two “lifestyle” initiatives.  Prop 19, that would’ve legalized recreational marijuana use, and prop 23, which would have suspended the state’s global warming law. 

On the former, early polls seemed to show voter approval, but two things appeared to turn the tide.  First were a bunch of articles pointing to flaws in the initiative’s language that would result in litigation and unintended consequences.  Second was the U.S. Attorney General’s public announcement that he didn’t care what California did; he was still going to have MJ users, growers, sellers, etc. arrested and thrown in prison under federal narcotics laws.  This could, perhaps, have stirred up a states’ rights oriented state like Alaska or Mississippi to say, “Oh yeah?  We’ll see about that!  See you in court!”  But …  California is not a big states’ rights bastion, and with law enforcement groups up and down the state saying it was a bad idea, the voters apparently had second thoughts.

Prop 23 was a different story.  For one thing, Californians have long liked to think of themselves as being an environmentally conscious group.  After all, we have Yosemite, the redwoods, the sequoias, Lake Tahoe, etc.  We were also one of the first states to block offshore oil drilling after the big Santa Barbara oil spill, and Californians have bought more hybrid vehicles, not only in toto but on a per capita basis, than any other state.  So it only stands to reason that, having passed landmark legislation to try to curb global warming, Californians would not readily turn around and say, “Oops, we made a mistake.  Let’s put that law in the deep freeze for twenty years or so until it gets REALLY hot.”  It also didn’t help that it came out very early (thanks to California’s campaign finance disclosure laws) that almost all the money financing prop 23 was coming from out-of-state oil companies.  Hey, what the heck, they were in Oklahoma or inland areas of Texas.  It wasn’t their coastline that was going to disappear under water as sea levels rose.  Bottom line, Californians decided they didn’t believe the oil companies (who have, of course, tremendous credibility already — almost as good as Enron’s).

One thing that still leaves me scratching my head is that in spite of what appears to be a set of almost Tea Party-like attitudes  about government spending, Californians still elected an entire set of Democratic state office holders.  Like I said at the start of this post, sometimes it’s hard to come up with a consistent frame of reference for California voters.

Democratic Self-destruction

There will, of course, be pundits by the dozens attempting to dissect today’s election results.  Obviously, a large segment of the American public was not happy with the Democrats’ record over the past two years.  Obviously also, Obama’s mantra that the Republicans drove the economy into the ditch and now they’re complaining about us trying to pull it back out didn’t really wash (or, at least, not on a national level).  What went wrong? and can the Democrats do better over the next two years?

My personal opinion is that the Democrats’ majority in Congress was really a ticking time bomb that finally blew up today.  Ever since the 1992 election, Democrats have attempted to win over “red” states by running candidates who were slightly less conservative than their Republican opponents.  The tactic was at least somewhat successful, so the Democrats had, until today, nominally impressive majorities in both the House and Senate.  However, many of those nominally-Democratic seats were held by profoundly conservative people; people who had little use for the agenda of  more liberal Democrats, and voted at least as often with the Republicans, especially on key legislation.   As a result, given the unified opposition of the Republicans, Obama and the Democratic Congressional leadership were forced to repeatedly water down their legislative initiatives in order to capture enough votes in their own party to get the legislation passed.

It is, to my mind, only poetic justice that some of the victims in today’s rout of the Democratic party were the very conservative Democrats who were most effective in obstructing Obama’s legislative agenda.  Democrats like Blanche Lincoln lost, even though  they fought against Obama at almost every turn, because why would conservative red state voters choose someone who looked like a Republican when they could, instead, vote for someone who was a Republican?

Of course, with the shift in the House majority, we’re going to have, as in 1948 with Harry Truman’s presidential campaign, a “do-nothing” Congress.  While the Republicans will control the House, they will probably not gain control of the Senate.  More importantly, the Democrats will have sufficient reliable votes in the Senate to maintain a filibuster and block Republican legislation.  Even more importantly still, Republicans will have nowhere near enough votes in the House or Senate to override the vetoes that Obama will almost certainly use against any conservative legislation the Republicans might happen to be able to push through.

If the Republicans were inclined to look for bipartisan “deals”, they might still be able to put through a watered-down Republican program, as happened during Clinton’s second term on issues such as welfare and tax reform.  However, the Republicans have themselves been pushed to the right by their Tea Party wing.  As a result, I would expect no compromises and that almost no substantive legislation will make it into law over the next two years.

At that point, what happens next will depend on what the effects of a stalled legislative agenda are, and who gets blamed for it.  If Obama is lucky, the legislation he pushed through in the last two years will have some positive effects, enough that people will start looking back on the 2008-2010 years as a time when some good things happened.  Meanwhile, if, as most economists seem to predict, the U.S. economy remains in the doldrums until 2012, Obama may be able to blame that stalled economy on the “do-nothing Congress” and run a re-election campaign based on letting Obama be Obama again by giving him the Congress he needs to do something.

If, on the other hand, the economy recovers without any further help, that may bolster the Republicans’ argument that government intervention was unnecessary and support a push to further “unleash” American capitalism by electing an anti-regulation president — dare I say, like Sarah Palin.  While I’m not an economist, I find it hard to believe that a rudderless American economy will do anything but bob around helplessly for the next two years while other countries with more effective legislative programs steam on ahead.  However, only time will tell.

Election Day!!!

If you’re looking at this on November 2nd, you’re probably looking for advice on how to deal with your ballot.  I’ve put up several posts with my recommendations and comments.  (However, they won’t help you very much unless you vote in California.)  Please go down through my posts until you find those of interest to you.  They start below continue from there.  Here are links (in chronological order) if you want to get there fast.  The titles are mostly self-explanatory:

http://stuflash.wordpress.com/2010/09/11/first-comments-on-the-november-election-proposition-22/

http://stuflash.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/more-on-the-november-ballot/ – statewide ballot measures

http://stuflash.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/november-election-last-installment/ – candidate recommendations

http://stuflash.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/on-the-oakland-mayoral-race/

http://stuflash.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/thoughts-on-local-ballot-measures/

A Warning to be Heeded — Or Ignored

Today’s New York Times contained an article discussing the alarming similarities between today’s economic situation in the U.S. and the situation in Japan in the late 1990s.  Here’s the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/world/asia/30japan.html

To put the article in a nutshell, in the late 1990s, just as Japan was crawling out of a severe recession brought on by an economic “bubble”, the Japanese government decided that the country’s ballooning deficit needed to be brought under control.  Consequently, the government enacted a tax increase (from 3%  to 5% in their national consumption tax) to bring in additional revenue.  The result, however, was to decrease the nation’s money supply and slam the door on economic recovery.  Here’s a direct link to a graph that shows what happened to the Japanese CPI as a result:

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/10/30/world/30japan-graf01.html?ref=asia

Essentially, the decrease in money supply led to a deflationary spiral that took years to pull out of.   Even today, more than ten years later, Japan is still suffering from anemic growth.  (Of course, the recession that began in 2008 didn’t help matters, but you’ll note that the graph only goes up to 2007, when the rest of the world was still experiencing boom-like expansion.)

What’s the relevance to the U.S.?  The current election portends an increase in Republican political power, with most observers predicting that the Republicans are poised to take over control of the House, if not the Senate as well.  Part of the Republican mantra is the prime importance of decreasing the size of the federal deficit.  While Republicans don’t propose to increase taxes — quite to the contrary, they propose to extend all of the Bush tax cuts indefinitely; they do propose to dramatically decrease federal spending, primarily by eliminating spending on federal social programs.  The reduction in federal $$ pumping into the economy will have a similar effect to a tax increase.  It will decrease the size of the money supply.  With less money available, there will be less demand for goods, and consequently prices will fall — deflation.  In short, the Republican economic strategy appears likely to result in a variation on Japan’s economic mistakes of the 1990s.  It’s possible that by 2012, when Obama is up for re-election, the stupidity of this policy will have become apparent enough that the public will repudiate the Republicans, re-electing Obama and restoring a Democratic majority in both houses.  It’s even possible that repudiation will be intense enough that it will give the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority and perhaps eliminate some of the Democrats-in-Name-Only who currently side with Republicans in obstructing Obama’s legislative agenda.  Even so, the U.S. will have lost two years of growth, as well as continuing back-asswards environmental policies at a time when that can be ill-afforded. 

Even worse, however, it’s possible that by 2012 the American public still won’t “get it” and will elect a Republican president and congress in the hope that further reducing the deficit will prove to be a cure-all.  (Americans have always loved magical thinking.)  If that happens, we can look forward to repeating Japan’s mistake in spades, and perhaps dropping off the first tier of world economic powers, to be replaced in all likelihood by China and India.

To look at the bright side, we probably will no longer be able to enforce the “Pax Americana” and there may be a little less warfare in the world overall.  Have a nice day!!

Watch out for smears!

Just a friendly reminder — The last week before election day is the absolute favorite time for campaign consultants to engage in one of their trademark behaviors: the last-minute “hit” piece.  It’s a favorite time because the consultants know that it’s almost impossible to do anything effective, so late in the game, to counter a nasty piece of literature, whether it’s true or not.  Of course, there’s already been lots of mud thrown around this campaign season.  Again, consultants do what they know works, and throwing mud has, unfortunately, been shown time and time again to be very effective in knocking down another candidate’s vote count.  The other thing smears do (and this is why they tend to be favored by Republicans) is drive down voter participation.  People get so fed up with all the nastiness, and put in such a quandary trying to figure out what to believe, that they decide not to vote at all.  Since registered Republicans are known for voting come Hell or high water, lower turn-out generally helps Republican candidates.  However, some Democrats, and their consultants, still figure it’s worth tossing the mud anyhow, because if they’re going to be covered in mud, they want their opponent to be equally dirtied.

My advice?  During the last week of the campaign, toss ALL the campaign mail directly into the recycling bin, and switch channels as soon as an election ad comes on the TV or radio.  If you want to know about a candidate or measure, go to a reliably neutral source like the League of Women Voters’ smart voter website: http://www.smartvoter.org/

We interrupt this election horserace …

With the pre-election brouhaha fast approaching a frenzy, here are a couple of articles that step back a little to look at the bigger picture.  The first, by Robert Reich (it was reprinted in today’s S.F. Chronicle), talks about something I’ve already addressed in this blog — how the wealthy are hijacking the American political system.

http://robertreich.org/post/1344561814

The second, in today’s New York Times, by The Nation contributing editor Ari Berman, talks about what might happen after the election, and how losing some of the Democrats in Congress might not be such a bad thing. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/opinion/24berman.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

This is an interesting article because it suggests that the Democrats might profit from something the Republicans did during the Reagan years — doing some ideological “housecleaning”.  It notes that starting in 2005 [IMHO, actually well before then, going back to the Clinton years and the Democratic Leadership Conference] and led by DNC chair Howard Dean and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Rahm Emmanuel, the Democrats attempted to recruit “competitive” candidates throughout the country, including the “red” states won by GW Bush.  In order to make sure their candidates were competitive, they looked for people who would fit with the red state terrain they’d be campaigning in.  As a result, Congress received an influx of so-called “blue dog” Democrats — Democrats who hewed to a center-right perspective and voted with the Republicans at least as often as with their fellow Democrats.  It was these blue dogs who watered down Obama’s healthcare reform and financial reform packages, who stymied global warming legislation, and who have contributed to having many Obama appointments stuck waiting for Congressional approval.  In short, the blue dogs have become almost as big an obstacle to the Democratic Congressional agenda as the Republicans.  Further, as Democrats, they hold leadership positions, allowing them to be more effective in their opposition than most Republicans.

While the Democrats will undoubtedly lose seats in both the House and Senate this November, a lot of those seats will be blue dog seats.  So, we’ll have Republicans instead of Republicans masquerading as Democrats.  That may not make a lot of difference.  In fact, as Berman points out, it may actually help the Democrats if it allows them to become more unified and pointed in their legislative program.  So, come November 3rd, before you start shouting that the sky has fallen, it may make sense to take a deep breath, wait a few months, and see how the new Congress shakes out.  Who knows, maybe it’ll be the Republicans’ turn to be saddled with some blue dogs?