O Quickbeam ent, upon your feet
how bright your boots so red!
O hasty friend, your way you wend
and orcs before you fled.
From entish moot, your way on foot,
to Isengard did march.
With thoughts of wrath, you trod that path
for rowan, beech, and larch.
His fire may scorch, put friends to torch,
but we have come with war.
For rowan fair, with golden hair,
will sing for you no more.
Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that his philosophy is so stark that even young libertarian acolytes are only introduced to it after they have accepted the relatively sunny perspective of Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly). If Americans really knew what Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively his vision is manifesting under their noses, it would dawn on them how close the country is to a transformation most would not even want to imagine, much less accept…
“Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves,” he wrote in his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty….
MacLean observes that Buchanan saw society as a cutthroat realm of makers (entrepreneurs) constantly under siege by takers (everybody else) His own language was often more stark, warning the alleged “prey” of “parasites” and “predators” out to fleece them…
Suppressing voting, changing legislative processes so that a normal majority could no longer prevail, sowing public distrust of government institutions— all these were tactics toward the goal. But the Holy Grail was the Constitution: alter it and you could increase and secure the power of the wealthy in a way that no politician could ever challenge…
With Koch’s money and enthusiasm, Buchanan’s academic school evolved into something much bigger. By the 1990s, Koch realized that Buchanan’s ideas — transmitted through stealth and deliberate deception, as MacLean amply documents — could help take government down through incremental assaults that the media would hardly notice. The tycoon knew that the project was extremely radical, even a “revolution” in governance, but he talked like a conservative to make his plans sound more palatable.
MacLean details how partnered with Koch, Buchanan’s outpost at George Mason University was able to connect libertarian economists with right-wing political actors and supporters of corporations like Shell Oil, Exxon, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank, and General Motors…
At the 1997 fiftieth anniversary of the Mont Pelerin Society, MacLean recounts that Buchanan and his associate Henry Manne, a founding theorist of libertarian economic approaches to law, focused on such affronts to capitalists as environmentalism and public health and welfare, expressing eagerness to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare as well as kill public education because it tended to foster community values. Feminism had to go, too: the scholars considered it a socialist project.
To put the success into perspective, MacLean points to the fact that Henry Manne, whom Buchanan was instrumental in hiring, created legal programs for law professors and federal judges which could boast that by 1990 two of every five sitting federal judges had participated. “40 percent of the U.S. federal judiciary,” writes MacLean, “had been treated to a Koch-backed curriculum.”
Most Americans haven’t seen what’s coming.
MacLean notes that when the Kochs’ control of the GOP kicked into high gear after the financial crisis of 2007-08, many were so stunned by the “shock-and-awe” tactics of shutting down government, destroying labor unions, and rolling back services that meet citizens’ basic necessities that few realized that many leading the charge had been trained in economics at Virginia institutions, especially George Mason University. Wasn’t it just a new, particularly vicious wave of partisan politics?
It wasn’t. MacLean convincingly illustrates that it was something far more disturbing…
She observes, for example, that many liberals have missed the point of strategies like privatization. Efforts to “reform” public education and Social Security are not just about a preference for the private sector over the public sector, she argues… Instead, MacLean contends, the goal of these strategies is to radically alter power relations, weakening pro-public forces and enhancing the lobbying power and commitment of the corporations that take over public services and resources, thus advancing the plans to dismantle democracy and make way for a return to oligarchy. The majority will be held captive so that the wealthy can finally be free to do as they please, no matter how destructive…
This, as MacLean points out, requires greatly expanding police powers “to control the resultant popular anger.” The spreading use of pre-emption by GOP-controlled state legislatures to suppress local progressive victories such as living wage ordinances is another example of the right’s aggressive use of state power.
Could these right-wing capitalists allow private companies to fill prisons with helpless citizens—or, more profitable still, right-less undocumented immigrants? They could, and have. Might they engineer a retirement crisis by moving Americans to inadequate 401(k)s? Done. Take away the rights of consumers and workers to bring grievances to court by making them sign forced arbitration agreements? Check. Gut public education to the point where ordinary people have such bleak prospects that they have no energy to fight back? Getting it done.
Would they even refuse children clean water? Actually, yes.
MacLean notes that in Flint, Michigan, Americans got a taste of what the emerging oligarchy will look like — it tastes like poisoned water. There, the Koch-funded Mackinac Center pushed for legislation that would allow the governor to take control of communities facing emergency and put unelected managers in charge. In Flint, one such manager switched the city’s water supply to a polluted river, but the Mackinac Center’s lobbyists ensured that the law was fortified by protections against lawsuits that poisoned inhabitants might bring…
MacLean interprets his [Buchanan] discussion to mean that people who “failed to foresee and save money for their future needs” are to be treated, as Buchanan put it, “as subordinate members of the species, akin to…animals who are dependent.’”
Do you have your education, health care, and retirement personally funded against all possible exigencies? Then that means you…
Research like MacLean’s provides hope that toxic ideas like Buchanan’s may finally begin to face public scrutiny. Yet at this very moment, the Kochs’ State Policy Network and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that connects corporate agents to conservative lawmakers to produce legislation, are involved in projects that the Trump-obsessed media hardly notices, like pumping money into state judicial races. Their aim is to stack the legal deck against Americans in ways that MacLean argues may have even bigger effects than Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court ruling which unleashed unlimited corporate spending on American politics. The goal is to create a judiciary that will interpret the Constitution in favor of corporations and the wealthy in ways that Buchanan would have heartily approved.
“The United States is now at one of those historic forks in the road whose outcome will prove as fateful as those of the 1860s, the 1930s, and the 1960s,” writes MacLean. “To value liberty for the wealthy minority above all else and enshrine it in the nation’s governing rules, as Calhoun and Buchanan both called for and the Koch network is achieving, play by play, is to consent to an oligarchy in all but the outer husk of representative form.”
Meet the Economist Behind the One Percent’s Stealth Takeover of America
Sometimes it amazes me that the Juno spacecraft was originally designed without any cameras onboard. The JunoCam instrument has produced stunning imagery of Jupiter thus far and shows no signs of stopping soon. The latest wonder is this false-color, high-contrast animation showing the motion of Jupiter’s clouds swirling and flowing past one another.
Now, this is not Jupiter as you would see it by eye. This animation is derived from two images taken 8 minutes and 41 seconds apart. In that time, Juno covered a lot of distance, so the two images had to be mathematically re-projected so that they appeared to be taken from the same location. Then, by comparing relative positions of recognizable features in the two photos and applying some understanding of fluid mechanics, observers could calculate the probable flow between those two states. Although this is a coarse example, it’s the same kind of technique often used in fluid dynamical experiments when measuring how flows change between two images. (Image credit:
NASA/JPL/SwRI/MSSS/G. Eichstädt, source; via EuroPlanet; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)
Fact checkers have a Medicare-for-all problem
Medicare-for-all: Would it save American society money? That question has been tying fact checkers in knots over the past several weeks.
They need to get a grip.
by Ryan Cooper, 8/21/18
Medicare-for-all: Would it save American society money? That question has been tying fact checkers in knots over the past several weeks.
One recent working paper put out by the libertarian Mercatus Center unwittingly answered in the affirmative, to the tune of over $2 trillion over a 10-year period.
…figuring out what Sanders’ Medicare-for-all bill might cost overall depends on two estimates and one fact:
- how much utilization will increase [how many more people insured and using medical services]
- how much can be saved on administration [25% of US hospital budgets go to administration, as opposed to 12.4% in Canada for ex.]
- and what the provider reimbursement rates are [ medicare pays < private insurance, but > medicaid, the US largest insurer].
The first two are necessarily uncertain, but the third is simply whatever is stipulated in the Medicare-for-all legislation.
… [Blahous – the working paper author] estimates status quo NHE [national health expenditures] at $59.7 trillion over 10 years, while he estimates NHE under the Sanders plan at $57.6 trillion over the same time frame — for a savings of $2.1 trillion.
Perhaps not satisfied with this result, Blahous then put forward an alternative plan of his own in which provider payments would not be cut as much, with total NHE spending somewhat higher. Importantly, this plan has nothing at all to do with the Sanders bill. It’s just something he made up.
…That brings me to the epic fact checker faceplant. Sanders trumpeted the Mercatus finding, because it was hilarious and a good demonstration of how America could be getting universal Medicare while spending less overall
…CNN’s Jake Tapper put out a video chiding him and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for relying on the $2 trillion figure. “A reminder to all you politicians out there, you’re perfectly entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts,” tut-tutted Tapper. [for example]
This point is wildly misleading, and indeed has nothing to do with facts as such at all. The fact checker brigade is saying that provider payments will be hard to cut, and therefore Sanders might end up passing something different than his Medicare bill. Therefore he is a liar. But Blahous’s study absolutely, positively does say that the Sanders plan as written will save the American people $2 trillion. Sanders didn’t mention the more expensive Mercatus plan because it is not his plan. Vague speculation about future political negotiations has nothing whatsoever to do with the facts of the Sanders proposal, nor the empirical contents of the Mercatus study.
But that’s not even the worst part.
As part of its PR rollout of the paper, Mercatus bought buying ads for Facebook in D.C. promoting a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which Blahous baldly misrepresents his own paper, writing that the Sanders bill would “immediately and dramatically cut provider payment rates by roughly 40 percent.”
As noted above, this is absolutely false, because only about half of people are on private insurance [35% of NHE in 2015] . Medicare payments would stay the same [22%], while Medicaid [18%] and uninsured payments [13%] would go up.
Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, told The Associated Press on Monday that he’s been talking with Dean over the last few months “to hear his wisdom, the lessons that he learned and his reflections on what he saw Michael Cohen going through.”
Fact checkers have a Medicare-for-all problem
Medicare-for-all: Would it save American society money? That question has been tying fact checkers in knots over the past several weeks.
They need to get a grip.
by Ryan Cooper, 8/21/18
Medicare-for-all: Would it save American society money? That question has been tying fact checkers in knots over the past several weeks.
One recent working paper put out by the libertarian Mercatus Center unwittingly answered in the affirmative, to the tune of over $2 trillion over a 10-year period.
…figuring out what Sanders’ Medicare-for-all bill might cost overall depends on two estimates and one fact:
The first two are necessarily uncertain, but the third is simply whatever is stipulated in the Medicare-for-all legislation.
… [Blahous – the working paper author] estimates status quo NHE [national health expenditures] at $59.7 trillion over 10 years, while he estimates NHE under the Sanders plan at $57.6 trillion over the same time frame — for a savings of $2.1 trillion.
Perhaps not satisfied with this result, Blahous then put forward an alternative plan of his own in which provider payments would not be cut as much, with total NHE spending somewhat higher. Importantly, this plan has nothing at all to do with the Sanders bill. It’s just something he made up.
…That brings me to the epic fact checker faceplant. Sanders trumpeted the Mercatus finding, because it was hilarious and a good demonstration of how America could be getting universal Medicare while spending less overall
…CNN’s Jake Tapper put out a video chiding him and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for relying on the $2 trillion figure. “A reminder to all you politicians out there, you’re perfectly entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts,” tut-tutted Tapper. [for example]
This point is wildly misleading, and indeed has nothing to do with facts as such at all. The fact checker brigade is saying that provider payments will be hard to cut, and therefore Sanders might end up passing something different than his Medicare bill. Therefore he is a liar. But Blahous’s study absolutely, positively does say that the Sanders plan as written will save the American people $2 trillion. Sanders didn’t mention the more expensive Mercatus plan because it is not his plan. Vague speculation about future political negotiations has nothing whatsoever to do with the facts of the Sanders proposal, nor the empirical contents of the Mercatus study.
But that’s not even the worst part.
As part of its PR rollout of the paper, Mercatus bought buying ads for Facebook in D.C. promoting a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which Blahous baldly misrepresents his own paper, writing that the Sanders bill would “immediately and dramatically cut provider payment rates by roughly 40 percent.”
As noted above, this is absolutely false, because only about half of people are on private insurance [35% of NHE in 2015] . Medicare payments would stay the same [22%], while Medicaid [18%] and uninsured payments [13%] would go up.
Hearseeno 