How the Gun Industry Profits Off the Carnage its Product Creates

It's one of the gun lobby's and firearms industry's most successful scams; the "fear buying" marketing campaign. The way it works is this, you convince a certain cowardly subset of the population that there's some imminent threat to their safety or that the government is minutes away from scooping up all their guns and said cowardly subset will run out in a fit of panic buying, like people who get into fights over water before a big storm.

And how do we know it's the same subset every time? Because the numbers are too contradictory any other way. After a string of high profile and extremely shocking killings in 2013, it started to look like some real action was about to take place in the arena of gun safety. That this didn't happen is a matter of national shame, but the panic buying set in, making 2013 a banner year for firearms sales.

So, did everyone run out and buy a lot of guns and ammunition? Actually, no. Hardly anyone did. A study launched by the General Social Survey showed that gun ownership was actually at a 40-year low. Logic dictates that these are the same panicky grandmas out buying guns in a Pavlovian response to perceived danger -- danger that the guns would become illegal, danger that some other unhinged shooter would attack them, or both. And the gun-buying was in no way rational. If you're extremely skilled, you might be able to use two firearms at once, but record sales after record sales, combined with the number of gun-owning households in free fall, suggests these people have a lot more guns than two, which means a lot more guns than they can use at any given time.

So the "safety" conferred by gun ownership starts to look a lot more talismanic than utilitarian. In other words, the "guns keep you safe" argument basically becomes superstition.

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The Marketers of Fear

Maybe it got lost in the annual post-Holiday news outage, but Yahoo! News reported on the second day of the new year that a study by the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center at Texas State University shows a definite uptick in the occurrence of mass shootings in the United States. According to the report, investigators counted only those sorts of crimes that immediately come to mind when you hear the term "mass shooting." These are a separate sort of crime, distinguished by more than the death tolls.

"Researchers considered only active shootings in public settings where the primary motive appeared to be mass murder and at least one of the victims was unrelated to the suspect. Shootings during crimes such as bank robberies, drug deals, and gang violence were excluded," Yahoo reported -- i.e., crimes where the sole purpose was to kill people. Incidences rose from five a year in 2000-2008 to sixteen a year in the period of 2009-2012.

Of course, this undercuts the gunners' claims that the opposite is true. And even those claims are cherrypicked. They cite the work of Northeastern University Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law and Public Policy James Alan Fox. Fox does not weed out the "bank robberies, drug deals, and gang violence" that ALERRT did. He does, however, recommend gun control policies -- a fact the gun apologists conveniently skip over.

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Mitt Romney, Obvious Elitist

The first three paragraphs of an L.A. Times piece about a Romney fundraiser could've been written by a Democratic ad copy writer -- not because it's so biased, but because the facts fit the Democratic narrative of Romney as the candidate of the 1% so well. It's hard to counter the "out-of-touch, wealthy elitist" charge when you actually are an out-of-touch, wealthy elitist.

As protesters assembled on a beach in advance of Mitt Romney's evening event at the home of conservative billionaire David Koch, the candidate slipped to East Hampton for his first of three fundraisers on this tony stretch of Long Island.

The line of Range Rovers, BMWs, Porsche roadsters and one gleaming cherry red Ferrari began queuing outside of Revlon Chairman Ronald Perelman's estate off Montauk Highway long before Romney arrived, as campaign aides and staffers in white polo shirts emblazoned with the logo of Perelman's property -- the Creeks -- checked off names under tight security.

They came with high hopes for the presumed Republican nominee, who is locked in a tight race with President Obama. And some were eager to give the candidate some advice about the next four months.

The only variation from Democratic messaging would be the conclusion of the final paragraph. You don't buy the right to give "advice" with a minimum $25,000 ($75,000 for an evening fundraiser), you're probably looking to buy the right to give marching orders.

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Fracking: Bad for You, Good for China

The Marcellus shale formation is a huge deposit of rock that formed from the floor of a prehistoric sea. And it's massive. Taking up a large chunk of (mostly) the northeastern United States, it stretches from Alabama to New York, laying under vast swaths of many of the states in between:



Like any ocean, the ocean that formed the Marcellus was heavily populated by lifeforms, and this means that the lifeforms left behind organic chemicals -- which means fossil fuels. In this case, natural gas.

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The Absurdity of Corporate Personhood

The Citizens United ruling can be boiled down to one simple and crazy idea; that this...



...is virtually indistinguishable from this:



I'm guessing you don't really see the resemblance. Neither do I. In fact, Bank of America has more rights than Skeezix here, by virtue of being an adult. Apparently, corporations are born into full adulthood -- another obvious difference we're all supposed to ignore.

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Stealing America Right From Under Our Noses

"Yes, 'there's class warfare, all right,' warns Warren Buffett. 'But it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.'"

That quote, much beloved by liberals concerned with economic justice, opens a piece at MarketWatch by Paul B. Farrell. Farrell then goes on to agree with Buffett and take the argument further; there's a "new American Civil War between the rich and the rest." Buffett, the billionaire investment capitalist behind Berkshire Hathaway, issued his warning in a New York Times op-ed back in 2006. It was true then, but it's much truer now. Led by gains at the state level, Republicans are moving to strip the poor and the middle class of things they've paid for with their tax dollars or worked for at their state jobs, then take all that money and give it to the wealthy.

But that's only the start. Writes Farrell:

Not just the 16 new GOP governors in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Florida, and across America fighting for new powers. Others include: Chamber of Commerce billionaires, Koch brothers, Forbes 400, Karl Rove's American Crossroads, Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform -- which now has 97% of House Republicans and 85% of the GOP Senators signed on his "no new taxes" pledge -- the Tea Party and Reaganomics ideologues.

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If You Think America Can Have a Well-Funded, Tightly Regulated Nuclear Industry, You Haven't Been Paying Attention

Sooner or later -- if it hasn't happened already -- someone is going to write the words "the ongoing nuclear incident at the Fukushima power plant is producing fallout of a non-nuclear sort." There ya go, pun committed. You don't have to do it now. The nuclear industry and their apologists are trying their damnedest -- despite all evidence to the contrary -- to convince everyone that nuclear power is safe. Their best defense, at this point, is the "it's not as bad as Chernobyl" line. This is like appearing in court and arguing your innocence based on the fact that you aren't Jeffrey Dahmer. It's not extremely convincing because it's not remotely logical -- especially if you're the second worst serial killer in history.

And that's the best parallel -- remove Chernobyl and Fukushima is the worst nuclear plant incident in history. And it puts a crimp in nuke backers' plans.

It was going to work like this: spurred on by fears of global warming and high oil prices (as if power plants run on gas), the world was poised to begin what many called the "nuclear renaissance," where extremely complex triumphs of technology would soon be boiling water all over the world (that's all a nuclear plant does, by the way; run a boiler to turn an axle -- it's basically a steam engine). But if the prospect of radioactive tea kettles whistling from Des Moines to New Delhi seemed like a tolerable idea before, it's become a lot less attractive now.

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The GOP's $100 Billion Lie

Yesterday, I mentioned that Republicans began their first day of their new House Majority by breaking one of their oaths made in their Sacred Pledge. Where the party had sworn in their "Pledge to America" to make cuts that "will save $100 billion in first year alone," they now say the number -- which they'd apparently reached into their pants to retrieve -- was merely "hypothetical."

But words mean things. The only way that number could be hypothetical would be if the GOP had asked voters, "If we promised you an insanely large, made-up number -- say, $100 billion -- in spending cuts, would you elect us?" But they didn't. At least, not straight out like that. "Will save" means "will save," not "could save." It's a definite statement and, when written in the body of a signed document with the word "pledge" in the title, constitutes a concrete promise. Once again, Republicans -- with the help of a credulous and/or uncritical media -- lied to the American people. Clearly, there was no math behind the figure, no one sat down at a ledger book and added up all the savings. It was merely an impressively large number that could be used for a bait-and-switch.

If you doubt that $100 billion was an invented number, consider that the new House Republican Budget Czar, Paul Ryan, has no idea what they're planning on cutting. "That is what is gonna happen in the appropriations process down the road," he said when asked for specific cuts. "So I can't tell you the answer to that because, as a budget committee person, we simply lower the cap and then those things go down. We're gonna be reducing all domestic discretionary spending. I can't tell you by what amount and which program, but all of it is going to be going down, and the aggregate amount will be back to 2008 levels before the spending binge occurred."

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Major Insurer Sounds Global Warming Alert

There are a lot of industries that would be adversely affected by global warming -- agriculture, fishing, real estate development, tourism, and timber all come immediately to mind. Shifting weather patterns means greater uncertainty for industries that rely on weather and a rising sea level means the redrawing of maps. As the world changes, the ancient evolutionary law kicks in -- adapt or die. Many of these industries may be able to adapt, but behind them all stands a second industry; the insurance industry.

As we all know from the dragged out healthcare debate, insurance isn't about avoiding risk, so much as it is shared risk. It's simple math -- bad things happen, but they don't happen to everyone. If only X in ten people suffer a heart attack in their lives, for example, those who don't have heart attacks pay into a fund that helps pay for the victim's treatment. It's like a bet -- you bet you'll have a heart attack, even though the odds are against it. And, because the insurer is willing to give you odds, the money is worth it, since the payout is the only way you'd be able to afford the consequences of winning the bet.

This is also the reason why you can't buy insurance for some eventualities. You can't insure your car against rust or the paint on your house against peeling. These are things that happen to almost everyone and are practically unavoidable. You can insure against death, but the bet there is that you'll die earlier than most people, before you've paid in the amount that the insurer pays out, not that you'll die eventually. The concept of insurance is, at its heart, mathematical and rational.

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Taking Exception to the Concept of "American Exceptionalism"

I've been watching Adam Curtis' four part BBC documentary, The Century of Self, which you can watch here. It's a fascinating, but depressing, look at the history of propaganda and public relations. To boil things down about as much as you can, it tells us how a group of powerful people came to the conclusion -- based on now discredited psychological theories -- that democracy was deeply flawed. The reasoning was based on a belief that the vast majority of people were irrational and had to be guided by an enlightened elite or democracies would devolve into mob rule, which in turn would lead to fascism or communism. The average person, the thinking went, was not persuaded by rational arguments and had to be influenced in their decisions by emotional arguments. Put simply, you are dumb. You're basically nothing more than a clever monkey and, if left to your own devices, you'll eventually wind up throwing your feces at random people on the street.

The problem of course, was that this was entirely wrong. People weren't incapable of understanding rational arguments, what was happening was that many of the arguments put forth by this ruling elite weren't very good. These were simply political disagreements, but the flawed thinking of the time would have it that everything a person did had a psychological basis. So a logical, rational disagreement with a political argument was seen as a symptom of a mental illness that nearly all human beings shared. You didn't disagree because you'd come to a different conclusion based on the set of facts put forth, you disagreed because you were insane -- just like everyone else who hadn't been "cured" of their inherent mental illness.

I don't want to get too far into the weeds with this -- if you're interested in all this stuff, you can just watch the documentary yourself -- I just want to lay down the background to what is happening right now. This all exists right now. There is a would-be ruling elite in America -- an unholy alliance between the corporate and the governmental -- that believes that you aren't rational, that you're incapable of logic, and that you must be tricked into making the right decisions. If you doubt that, explain to me why a majority of voters in the 2010 elections believed things that simply were not true. There's a concerted effort to get people to vote based on fear, because there are those who believe you're not capable of rational thought. Propaganda appeals to emotion, not logic, so whether its true or not is irrelevant.

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Megaleak

According to Wikipedia, Wikileaks was founded in 2006. That sounds about right to me. I remember reading about it at the time and thinking it was a good idea -- a sort of investigative journalism without the journalist middleman. I checked it from time to time, but soon found that -- ironically -- all that raw info was a little hard to make use of without someone taking the time to weed out all the trivia. In short, what I'd originally thought of as direct journalism required a journalist to make sense of it.

Still, in just four short years, Wikileaks has gone from a backwater site of interest to few to an international controversy. Founder Julian Assange has become an international fugitive on Interpol's Most Wanted list, for rape charges which may be trumped up. He's a frontrunner for Time's "Person of the Year" for 2010. He's hated by some and beloved by others. To lift a line from an ad campaign, he is "The Most Interesting Man in the World."

It's probably a mistake to think of Assange in journalistic terms. A former hacker, he's more of an information extremist. After releasing video of US soldiers mistakenly gunning down journalists in Iraq, Wikileaks had to move their site to the same host that filesharing site The Pirate Bay uses -- Pirate Bay founders are likewise free-information activists. It's a strange world these people operate in, where legal and illegal aren't as important as right and wrong and there's no need to obey unjust laws. The very existence of both Wikileaks and The Pirate Bay are acts of civil disobedience and protest. And, while they're making enemies around the world, they're gaining political support and power elsewhere, mostly as part of global anti-corporate and transparency movements.

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Private Contractors Failing Just as Spectacularly in Afghanistan

Let's talk about how superior the private sector is to the public sector for a bit. We're going to hear a lot from Republicans about how government is evil and corrupt and incompetent, and how the private sector is the only entity that can really get things done -- and does it cheaper. The first problem here is that the math doesn't work at all. Let's say a project will cost X when all is said and done. You look at materials, labor, equipment you may need, gas, etc. and that's what you wind up with. A private contractor would need X + profit to get the job done. Government can do it for X, because it doesn't have to turn a profit. Last time I checked, X + anything is more than just X, so the idea that a private company can do the same thing for less doesn't really pan out, arithmetically. The only way you can pull this off is to subtract from X -- and that means skimping on something somewhere and winding up with a cheap piece of crap. Doubt it? Then explain why military personnel were being electrocuted in showers in Iraq or why they were served rotten meat.

In 2006, Business Week reported, "The losses to fraud and waste in Iraq are almost certainly in the billions, current and former government officials agree. The Special IG for Iraq Reconstruction says it has more than 80 open investigations and has referred 20 more cases to the Justice Dept. for prosecution. A spokesman for the criminal investigative arm of the Defense Dept. says that office expects a 'rise in referrals of potential fraud or corruption cases' because of the recent deployment to Iraq of additional Pentagon investigators and FBI agents."

Billions in waste and fraud, often covered by unfinished and unusable projects, doesn't really strike me as big savings. It strikes me as waste and fraud. The military used to do a lot of this stuff themselves -- do we really need to outsource mess halls and laundry duty, for example? -- but now it has, for reasons nobody seems to be very good at explaining, become completely impossible. The military can fire a long range missile straight down the chimney of some terrorist hide out with pin-point accuracy, but they couldn't possibly cook a damned hamburger.

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ExxonMobil's Ever-Shifting Strategy on Climate

I've always felt that one of the best examples of human foolishness was offered by international oil corporations. At the same time they were spending millions on a PR campaign to deny that global warming was even happening, they were drooling over all that open water that warming was creating in the oil- and gas-rich Arctic Circle. In 2007, ExxonMobil was exposed as having earlier launched a massive disinformation campaign; coincidentally the same year that McClatchy reported "the melt [had] reached record levels," as "the ice shrank to the second smallest area on record." Exxon knew this of course, because McClatchy also reported, "The arctic accounts for 13% of undiscovered oil, 30% of undiscovered natural gas, and 20% of undiscovered natural gas liquids," as the following graphic shows:



McClatchy also reported that the melt had resulted in an increase of arctic shipping serving the oil industry. It's impossible to believe that Exxon was out of that loop.

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Keep Your Mitts Off My Slice of Pie

There are currently two schools of thought on reducing the deficit. The first is to actually reduce the deficit in a meaningful way, by letting Bush's tax giveaway to the top 2% expire. "You have to pay your bills; you can't keep borrowing from the rest of the world at that magnitude, year after year after year. So in light of all of those facts, I say we can't afford the Bush tax cuts," says former Reagan budget director David Stockman. The gap between the very rich and everyone else grew dramatically under George W. Bush, with all the benefit going to the very wealthy -- who, by the way,  are also the ones who ran the economy off the cliff with crazy get-richer-quick schemes.

"Two years after the crisis on Wall Street, it has been announced that bonuses this year will be $144 billion -- the highest in history," Stockman points out. "That's who's gonna get this tax cut on the top, you know, 2 percent of the population. They don't need a tax cut. They don't deserve it. And therefore, what we have to do is focus on Main Street."

Of course, the other school of thought on deficit reduction is to pretend to reduce the deficit with penny-pinching plans that punish everyone but the rich. But keep those tax cuts for the top earners, because to do anything else just wouldn't be fair. Taking from you to give to some Wall Street suit is apparently "fair." Raising the retirement age for Social Security, for example, screws you pretty bad, but it's not much of a hit to Mr. Moneybags here. But worse, it also hurts you more by making the job market more competitive. The principle of supply and demand dictates that this will drive wages down -- another loss for you, but a win for Moneybags who likes the cheap labor. In other words, you pay a penalty for being responsible and you pay it to the economic kamikaze pilots on Wall Street. I'm with Stockman here, they don't deserve the tax cuts and they don't deserve a bite out of your piece of the pie.

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Driving Elections While Hammered on Foreign Money

Imagine a world much like our own. In this world, drunk driving is just as illegal as it is here. Everyone agrees that intoxicated drivers are a menace and the world would be a much safer place without them. But, in this world, it's also illegal to pull a driver over and check to see if they're intoxicated. People who aren't crazy argue that this check would be essential to enforcement and we ought to start doing it, while people who are crazy argue that enforcement is unnecessary -- after all, drunk driving is illegal, so no one will do it, right? If someone's weaving all over the road, they probably have a good reason and pulling them over to see what that reason is would be an invasion of their privacy. Drunk driving has been eliminated by making it illegal and, if you need proof of that, then just look at the record -- no arrests ever. Success!

This alternate reality may strike you as a little on the stupid side, but welcome to the world of American politics post-Citizens United v. FEC. Foreign money in federal elections is still illegal, but there's no way to pull a candidate over to find out if they're soused on foreign money. Candidate X may be positively hammered on Bahraini dinars or Russian Rubles, but -- by the easiest money-laundering scheme in the world -- there's no way to prove it, because there's no way to check.

That's what we're beginning to see play out with the US Chamber of Commerce. The Chambers is running millions of dollars worth of attack ads across the nation and no one can find out for sure where the money comes from.

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Every GOP Senate Candidate a Flatearther

I've decided that exercise is bad for you. Every time you light a candle, it gets shorter. Every time you take a drink of water, the glass gets emptier. Every time you draw off a battery, it's useful life gets shorter. Besides, I'm not the world's biggest fan of exercise, so this works out better for me.

Of course, this requires ignoring decades of research and the established opinion of the medical community. But I don't need some fancy-pants, ivory tower elitist medical degree. Common sense tells me that the more I work out, the worse off I'll be. It's a declaration I feel totally qualified to make: stop exercising everyone, it's killing you. It's all just a big scam to sell gym memberships and Gatorade. I don't care what your doctor might tell you, I'm just relying on good old American horse sense. And isn't that always better? It's certainly easier to understand than this pie-in-the-sky science stuff.

The above is basically the argument offered by global warming deniers. Sure, there are a few actual scientists who don't believe in global warming, but the vast, vast majority accept it. And the majority of people offering opinions contrary to the scientific consensus aren't scientists. So the odds are extremely good that anyone speaking against anthropogenic global warming is basically making my "no exercise" argument -- I'm ignoring decades of research, I'm ignoring the opinions of experts, and I'm going with my gut on this one. Besides, global warming is just as inconvenient for me as Al Gore said it was, so the science must be wrong. End of story.

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Republicans, Blue Dogs Engage in Class Warfare

Republican and Blue Dog Democrats want to extend Bush's tax giveaway to the wealthy -- yay for bipartisanship! Unfortunately, this is proof that bipartisanship for the sake of bipartisanship is pretty useless. It also proves that conservatives are out of touch when it comes to economic issues. Extending the tax giveaway isn't the most popular idea out there. Worse, while Republicans don't want to pay for this at all, the Blue Dogs suggest doing this "responsibly" by cutting spending elsewhere. Since we're talking about a tax cut that would blow a $36 billion hole in the deficit, we're also talking about deep cuts someplace.

"Look, I'm glad Blue Dogs don't just want to cut taxes for the wealthy with more deficit financing, but their priorities don't make any sense," Steve Benen wrote this weekend. "They want to cut spending (which improves the economy) in order to pay for breaks for the wealth (which doesn't improve the economy)." We may be out of the recession, but we aren't out of the woods. Demand is still low, which is driving the unemployment crisis. Cutting government spending means reducing demand further, while extending the tax giveaway doesn't really do anything. If it did, the Bush economy wouldn't have been so stagnant until it finally crashed. If there's one thing that should've become obvious by now, it's that supply-side economics is basically a superstition -- we've watched it fail for about a decade, if not longer. Extending Bush's tax cuts to the richest Americans won't do a damned thing for the economy. At least, not anything positive.

Still, we've got those who FDR called "economic royalists" working to help the wealthiest at everyone else's expense. For them, economics works like this: the very wealthiest people are the most important people ever and the rest of the world is just a support system that makes their lives possible. The end.

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Voting Against the Fat Cats

If you follow this blog even occasionally, you're probably familiar with the truism that people don't vote for things, they vote against things. Like all simple rules, it's probably not 100% correct 100% of the time, but it's true enough to help understand what would otherwise be confusing behavior on the part of the electorate. In fact, if you need some way to understand the way voters are behaving in this cycle, you really don't need to look any farther. People are voting against Democrats, not for Republicans; it's just that this is a two party system and voting against one requires casting your vote for the other.

For example, a new New York Times poll [pdf] shows that 51% disapprove of President Obama's performance on the economy and 55% would vote out (i.e., against) incumbents. And then it gets interesting.

Greg Sargent, The Plum Line:

But the internals show the public disapproves of the GOP even more (68 percent), overwhelmingly thinks the GOP lacks a clear plan to solve our problems (72 percent), and opposes GOP policies like extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich (53 percent).

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Fact: Republican Economic Policies Suck

If you give the rich tax cuts, they'll create jobs. That's what we keep hearing. But, like all political and media debates these days, no one is required to bring any facts, no one has to demonstrate why this is so or how it supposedly happens. It's a discussion of theology, not economics, and it's only true because Republicans believe it so strongly. St. Reagan said unto the multitude that it was so and lo, it was manifest. The dogma must not be questioned.

If facts are unwelcome, then a recent report will be taboo. It turns out that people who are well-to-do are wealth collectors and don't spend money they don't have to. Not much of a surprise there. I suppose that's one reason why they're rich.

Bloomberg News:

Tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 under President George W. Bush were followed by increases in the saving rate among the rich, according to data from Moody's Analytics Inc. When taxes were raised under Bill Clinton, the saving rate fell.

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Two Parties, Big Differences

One thing I've been seeing a lot in comment threads lately is the idea that there's no real difference between Republicans and Democrats. On too many issues, you could legitimately argue that there isn't enough of a difference between the two, but to say there's no difference is just plain wrong. Part of what's driving the perception is the fact that Democrats made big gains in the last few election cycles, which practically guaranteed that Democratic incumbents would make up a wider band of the political spectrum. In a two party system, both parties have to be coalition parties and, as a result, the larger party will have more centrists. It will also have more people who would normally belong to the other party, but either couldn't get elected in that party in their districts or differ from party orthodoxy on a key issue -- say, abortion or environmentalism.

But I suppose I should've said that "in a two party system, both parties have to be coalition parties most of the time." Republicans did so poorly in recent elections that candidates in all but the most conservative districts lost, for the most part. It acted as a party purge, driving out the ideologically impure and leaving a party where all members are in agreement on almost everything. In short, Democrats look like a lot like the Republicans used to, because the political middle had swung so far toward the Democratic pole that it took some of the Republican coalition with it. And that's what's swinging back again. Check the results in November; you'll see that very few actual progressives have lost, but that many centrists and Blue Dogs will be joining the ranks of the unemployed. A lot of those centrists and Blue Dogs will be replaced by extremely conservative candidates, but that's because the GOP and the Tea Party are only allowing the most ideologically pure wingnuts to run and win their primaries. They're getting way ahead of that swinging middle and I wouldn't expect those gains to hold. In fact, if the gains are as great as some believe, the House of Representatives will become gridlock central -- at the worst possible time -- and the GOP will take most of the blame. While the economy burns, House Republicans will be fiddling with doomed bills to allow guns in churches, declare global warming a hoax, and privatize Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and -- oh, I don't know -- national parks or something.

But if you really need convincing that there's no difference between Republicans and Democrats, here ya go:


Click for full size

Tell me -- with a straight face -- that the stimulus would've passed in a Republican-controlled congress.

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