Boys will be boys ...

The Democratic Governors' Association seems to think they can rally activists to "fight the right" by putting this out. It's a hoot.

Obviously they haven't noticed that women are more likely than men to be Democrats, regardless of age or other variables.

In case we'd forgotten, there's a war on ...

While politicians play the blame game, some people are taking matters into their own hands.

Waffaa Bilal, an Iraqi-American artist whose brother died in Iraq, has repeatedly tattooed himself to draw attention to the casualties of war. On his body are marks for each dead Western soldier, and 100,000 dots representing Iraqi casualties. [3:30] RT

Masters of the universe ...

in the Junior High School bathroom line.

I don't know what they are really doing, but it isn't their jobs. As the new Economic Security Index reveals, one in five of us is screwed. Where's the urgency, guys? Get to work!

Pic via Ezra Klein.

How to respond to a PR crisis

The Obama administration has been enduring public humiliation, having rushed to force the resignation a black USDA employee falsely charged with racial bias against white dirt farmers, only to have been shown to have swallowed a rightwing hoax and had the charges refuted by both the evidence and the dirt farmers. Pretty bad. Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack has now offered the wronged employee a public apology and a job. He sounded quite contrite.

"I asked for Shirley [Sherrod's] forgiveness, and she was gracious enough to extend it to me," Vilsack said, accepting "full responsibility" for forcing her to step down.

"This is a good woman," he said. "She has been put through hell. I could have done and should have done a better job." ...

"I did not think before I acted and for that reason this poor woman has gone through a very difficult time," he said. "This was my decision, and I made it in haste."

In this last bit, he's defending the White House from charges that it pressed him to deep-six Sherrod in order to quiet the furor rightwing media were ginning up. The denial isn't likely to be believed, but otherwise, Vilsack seems convincing.

The other day I ran across a succinct description of how an institution should handle a public relations crisis. I saved it, not knowing when I might find it interesting. Now I know. Here's the prescription. (I've cut the specifics of the incident described to extract the general principles).

Acknowledge the mistake, apologize for it, and explain how you won't let it happen again. ... Do this emphatically and repeatedly for a while. Avoid the passive voice, or qualifiers to your apology or explanation. Embrace the bottom line -- you screwed up, you're sorry, you won't do it again, and you're implementing substantive changes. Let the aggrieved parties know that you really care about them. Then shut up and listen for a while. Make at least some of the changes those aggrieved parties recommend.

Having gone through this process with clients a few times, I know it's a lot harder than it looks. People have pride. They may feel that not all the facts are getting out there. They may be worried about liability, and they retreat to a bunker, thinking they should remain silent until the whole thing blows over. Sometimes they feel they really haven't done anything wrong, even if the wrongdoing is obvious to everyone else. When it's your company, or your organization, or your reputation, these are all understandable reactions. The actions these reactions prompt, however, typically make matters much worse.

My emphasis. If that's the standard, and I think it is, it looks like the Obama folks were able to sink their pride and fairly quickly take a better course. Any other action would not only have been wrong -- it also would have been a terribly damaging admission of inability to respond to a minor but telling crisis.

Much of my criticism of the Obama administration has arisen from shock that the crisis management apparatus that so deftly managed the 2008 campaign (any campaign is a minefield of unexpected eruptions) had apparently dissolved once the Prez took office. Let's hope this little episode presages a revival of past sure-footedness.

Budget short takes: Recognizing limits

It's nice to see Congressman Barney Frank, a guy who actually has influence in Congress, telling some home truths about where the federal government can save money if it wants to.

"We need a thoughtful, non-rancorous discussion about the appropriate mission," said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.).

Frank has been actively promoting ideas to cut the defense budget. In April, he put together a group of scholars to look specifically for defense cuts, unlike President Obama's deficit-reduction commission, which appears to be focusing elsewhere. The group issued its report last month, outlining nearly $1 trillion in defense budget cuts over the next 10 years.

"What should we be doing? What policy should we be setting? We have not had that conversation," Frank said Tuesday.

He's got the point: if, after more people get back to work, you want to reduce what the government spends, take a knife to the bloated military establishment. The thing grows in all directions, seemingly immune from concerns about why and for what purpose.

A machete is called for, not a scalpel.

What I was looking at last week this time ...

Slow blogging today ... I'm busy regrouping after a mini-vacation.

War drums rumbling

Marc Lynch has more confidence in the powers-that-be than I do. The usual suspects -- U.S. admirers of the Israeli right, the inveterate imperialists, the bellicose bullies -- are talking up bombing Iran again. Lynch, a professor at George Washington University and editor of Foreign Policy's Middle East Channel, notes the rising noise level. But he is confident that this is merely the reflexive gibberings of Washington's perennial warrior chest thumpers.

An attack on Iran would still be a disaster, unnecessary and counterproductive, and the White House knows that, and it's exceedingly unlikely that it will happen anytime soon. But the real risk is that the public discourse about an attack on Iran normalizes the idea and makes it seem plausible, if not inevitable, and that the administration talks itself into a political corner. That shouldn't be allowed to happen.

In the broad scheme of things, this administration's job has been, and remains, to extricate this declining power (yes, that's us -- the ever-so-powerful U.S.) from imperial overstretch. The world has moved on; we don't run it. We live in it, among other peoples, many of whom are on their way to their own special glories and challenges.

When Lynch says "the White House knows," he is exaggerating. U.S. politicians aren't allowed to "know" the real constraints within which their country is operating. They must run a con game (usually even on themselves), either promising glorious triumph over the enemies of the moment or deflecting attention from challenges while managing intractable realities. The current set in power -- we hope -- is an ascendancy of the second type.

As has been the case throughout our history, the U.S. people have to interject themselves into this charade. Though we enjoy chest thumping and the violence of American football, we, usually, don't much like wars if forced to notice them. We don't want our own getting killed in faraway places. We learn, over and over, that, as that tough old bird General Smedley Butler concluded: "War is a racket."

Politicians are always surprised when we notice the wars of empire. But despite occasional outbursts of xenophobia, at root "we just want to get along." Can the White House keep that in mind? It is never easy.

A DC jobs program

So I guess we can say we do have a bipartisan jobs program out of our government:

• Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

• An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

• ...at least 1,700 federal employees and 1,200 private contractors work at Liberty Crossing, the nickname for the two headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and its National Counterterrorism Center. The two share a police force, a canine unit and thousands of parking spaces.

• The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, has gone from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 today. The budget of the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, doubled. Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces became 106.

• Not far from the Dulles Toll Road, the CIA has expanded into two buildings that will increase the agency's office space by one-third. To the south, Springfield is becoming home to the new $1.8 billion National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency headquarters, which will be the fourth-largest federal building in the area and home to 8,500 employees. Economic stimulus money is paying hundreds of millions of dollars for this kind of federal construction across the region.

• More building, more expansion of offices continues across the country. A $1.7 billion NSA data-processing center will be under construction soon near Salt Lake City. In Tampa, the U.S. Central Command’s new 270,000-square-foot intelligence office will be matched next year by an equally large headquarters building, and then, the year after that, by a 51,000-square-foot office just for its special operations section. Just north of Charlottesville, the new Joint-Use Intelligence Analysis Facility will consolidate 1,000 defense intelligence analysts on a secure campus.

All these items are direct from the Washington Post's blockbuster report: Top Secret America. The whole thing is worth reading.

Unfortunately, none of this actually makes us any safer, since, according to investigative reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin, its sheer volume defies useful understanding, coordination and effective action. The Christmas underpants bomber showed up at 16 points in the chain of information lost somewhere in there, but it took an alert civilian fellow passenger to stop the guy.

I sure hope Paul Krugman is right when he says it doesn't much matter what the government spends money on, that pure waste is as good as a stimulus as productive investment in our present dire economic condition.

Remarkably unconvincing spin on Afghanistan

Kyle Spector from Third Way, a think-tank outfit that mostly works to enhance the Democratic Party's Republican-lite tendencies, dispenses prize blather about the U.S. public's growing recognition that President Obama's Afghanistan adventure is a fruitless sink of lives and treasure. Sure there's a way to explain that the polls don't say what they say, you see ...

... Americans are following the stream of negative news out of Afghanistan, which will tighten the already-slim margins of support the president still receives on his Afghanistan policy. Clearly and consistently reminding the public of the reasons for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and the gains being made in taking the fight to al-Qaeda and the Taliban could go a long way in maintaining support for the president's strategy. Equally important will be communicating results and letting the public know that there is an endgame in Afghanistan that most could support: bringing U.S. troops home responsibly after neutralizing the terrorist threat.

Now how is the administration supposed to remind us of "reasons for the mission" when there is no coherent "mission" and communicate "gains" and "results" when there aren't any?

CIA Director Leon Panetta recently estimated the number of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan to be "60 to 100, maybe less."

Robert Haass, Newsweek

For this we have a war costly $100 billion annually plus a bloated "National Security" spook apparatus costing another $75 billion mostly to pay private contractors? How is the U.S. military supposed to find and kill 60-100 terrorists in a country it can't control that is home to 30 million fiercely nationalistic Afghans?

No amount of spin is going to get Obama off the hook for his misguided escalation of this war. Cut your losses, Mr. President.

The wisdom of Seuss

I have to wonder if this guy would have been fired if he'd done this under Prez George W.? The ranger is reading Dr. Seuss's anti-corporate fable, The Lorax, to a small group of attentive kids and their parents, after pointing out the peaks.

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It is not.

Here's the setting, a large granite lump called Lembert Dome in Yosemite National Park. It's both dramatic and easily scaled.


That's Tuolumne Meadows down below.

I'm back from a week in the mountains, recharged.

It hurts to care a whole awful lot, but caring and acting is the only hope of making it better. Dr. Seuss knew.

When science trusted in its own virtue ... and subjects could not

Writer Rebecca Skloot describes her narrative, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, as "a logistical and organizational nightmare." It certainly is expansive, episodic, complicated, nuanced, informative, intelligent, easy to read, and morally sensitive. I'm not going to pretend to summarize beyond passing on this description, from Skloot's website:

Henrietta was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells [labeled as HeLa], taken without her knowledge, became one of the most important tools in medicine, with disastrous consequences for her family. Today, her family can’t afford the health care advances their mother’s cells helped make possible.

That is, this is about what happens when poor black people meet modern science and scientists; we know who starts off one up and who stays one down. The book chronicles that relationship as first observed and then felt intimately by a white, well-educated, science journalist -- and it works in the sense that readers of similar background to the author's can journey through that turf with Skloot. Readers will get a glimpse of the chasm of race, class and educational privilege that separates their world from that of generations of Black people in this country. Along the way, we can also learn a lot about our high-end science and its ethics.

One of the episodes that made the strongest impression on me concerned cancer research in the mid-1950s. Perhaps because my partner is an ethicist who serves on an Institutional Review Board assessing scientific experiments, I found this tale shocking:

In February 1954, [Dr. Chester] Southam loaded a syringe with saline solution mixed with HeLa. He slid the needle into the forearm of a woman who'd recently been hospitalized for leukemia, then pushed the plunger, injecting about five million of Henrietta's cells into her arm. Using a second needle, Southam tattooed a tiny speck of India ink next to the small bump that formed at the HeLa injection site. That way, he'd know where to look when he reexamined the woman days, weeks, and months later, to see if Henrietta's cancer was growing on her arm. He repeated this process with about a dozen other cancer atients. He told them he was testing their immune systems; he said nothing about injecting them with someone else's malignant cells. ...

All those who were injected grew tumors at the pinprick sites. Most, but not all, of these resolved on their own. Some Southam removed surgically. Having collected his results from cancer patients, Southam went looking for healthy subjects into whom to inject Henrietta's cancer cells.

So, in May 1956, he placed an ad in the Ohio State Penitentiary newsletter: Physician seeks 25 volunteers for cancer research. A few days later he had ninety-six volunteers, which quickly increased to 150. ... Research on inmates would come under scrutiny and start being heavily regulated about fifteen years later, because they'd be considered a vulnerable population unable to give informed consent. But at the time, prisoners nationwide were being used for research of all kinds-from testing chemical warfare agents to determining how X-raying testicles affected sperm count. ... Southam gave multiple cancer cell injections to each prisoner, and unlike the terminally ill patients, those men fought off the cancer completely....

In the coming years, Southam injected HeLa and other living cancer cells into more than six hundred people for his research, about half of them cancer patients. He also began injecting them into every gynecologic surgery patient who came to Sloan- Kettering's Memorial Hospital or its James Ewing Hospital. If he explained anything, he simply said he was testing them for cancer. ...

No patients died from these experiments, so the doctor didn't feel he was doing anything wrong. He was advancing science; if patients had been told they were being shot up with live malignancies, he feared they would not have let him do it.

Fortunately, three young Jewish doctors, grimly aware of the Nuremberg trials' verdicts condemning Nazi doctors for experimenting on captive human subjects, blew the whistle on Southam and the medical establishment that saw nothing wrong with his activities. The experimenting doctor received no more than a slap on the wrist, suffering no professional penalty for his conduct.

But the episode led the National Institute of Health to require that proposals for government funding of scientific research should be approved by review boards that included laypeople from diverse races, classes and backgrounds as well as doctors and scientists. Out of this ferment, the modern concept of "informed consent" in medical research was born.

Scientists howled that progress would cease if there were such restraints on their work; but the curbs were enacted and research chugged along. Many people are at least somewhat willing to give consent, though questions always remain about how well most of us understand what we consent to.

However, as Skloot explains, even harder issues lurked in questions about individual privacy and commercial exploitation of bits of our bodies when they are handed over to the medical profession. Henrietta Lacks concludes with a careful afterward about the contemporary shape of these issues that should be required reading for scientists and concerned citizens. As research progresses deeper into unraveling the human genome, these questions will become ever more urgent.

Again, Skloot explicates the problem succinctly on her website:

The thinking in science has always been that everyone should participate freely in tissue research -- giving freely of their cells and tissues -- because it helps medical progress. When you go and have a biopsy taken at a hospital, you sign a form that says my doctor can dispose of my tissues any way he sees fit or use them in research, those tissues are stripped of your identity and used in research.

The attitude has long been that everyone should allow their tissues to be used for the good of science because everyone benefits, since the research leads to important drugs, vaccines, etc.

But the thing is, not everyone does benefit in the United States, because we don’t have universal access to health care. There is an imbalance in this country, which means many of the medical advances coming from tissue research aren’t available to everyone, sometimes including those who provided raw materials for the research.

My emphasis. That's the fulcrum of Henrietta Lacks' story. Rebecca Skloot has told it with balance and complexity.

Saturday scenes and scenery: Street food in the Mission

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on healthy food in the 'hood. The food available in San Francisco's Mission from diligent vendors may not be quite so healthy, but it's tasty!


The corn on the cob probably isn't bad for you.


Neither are the tamales this woman patiently hawks from her cart at the 24th Street BART [subway] station.


But these bacon wrapped hot dogs are heart attack specials.


And popular all around the street.


Follow that hot dog with an ice cream bar.


The ice cream guys work this stuff off, pushing their carts around the neighborhood.

Friday critter blogging: Coraline came to visit

With her friend.

She is a Silken Windhound puppy and an enthusiastic lap sitter.

My Congresswoman shows a glimmer

Because Nancy Pelosi's real constituency is the Democratic caucus in Congress, those of us she nominally represents -- because we can and do (mostly) vote for her -- often feel under-represented. I certainly have.

But sometimes even if inelegantly, the Congresswoman lets us know she understands which end is up:

"It just can't be that we have a domestic agenda that is half the size of the defense budget," [Pelosi] said. "If you take away entitlements, the domestic discretionary non-defense budget is about half the defense budget, and maybe that's what we need to protect the American people. But in terms of the war now in Afghanistan, which is a growing part of it, that we have to say how can we carry this and can we carry this on the backs of children's nutrition. I'm not even talking about unemployment, there's so much else that is at stake."

Huffington Post

Wars and more wars and military bases everywhere are luxuries we simply can't afford if we want to feed kids.

Okay -- so now do something about it Congresswoman!

Diane Ravitch has changed her mind

When I was employed during the 1990s working for racial equity in public education, Diane Ravitch was one of the leaders of what we saw as the enemy camp. A veteran of George H.W. Bush's Education Department, we saw her as part of a cabal of "reformers" who wanted to impose homogenous high-stakes testing, privatization by way of vouchers and charter schools, and authoritarian management practices on messy, but democratic, institutions that we too thought needed changes. There were people with good ideas out there like testing skeptics at FairTest, the progressive practitioners at Radical Teacher, and the academic advocates like Linda Darling-Hammond then at Columbia and Christopher Edley, then at the Harvard Civil Rights Project. Ravitch was then a heavy hitter against their ideas.

So when I heard she'd changed her mind on most of that I figured I should read her new book: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Her rejection of past enthusiasms is thorough. Some specimens:

• On the "No Child Left Behind" federal law that sets the framework for education reform: "

  ...To date, there is no substantial body of evidence that demonstrates that low-performing schools can be turned around by any of the remedies prescribed in the law. ...
  
  Its remedies did not work. Its sanctions were ineffective. It did not bring about high standards or high accomplishment. The gains in test scores at the state level were typically the result of teaching students test-taking skills and strategies, rather than broadening and deepening their knowledge of the world and their ability to understand what they have learned. NCLB was a punitive law based on erroneous assumptions about how to improve schools.

• On charter schools:

  Charter schools in urban centers will enroll the motivated children of the poor, while the regular public schools will become schools of last resort for those who never applied or were rejected. The regular public schools will enroll a disproportionate share of students with learning disabilities and students who are classified as English-language learners; they will enroll the kids from the most troubled home circumstances, the ones with the worst attendance records and the lowest grades and test scores.

• On the mania for standardized tests:

  The problem with using tests to make important decisions about people's lives is that standardized tests are not precise instruments. Unfortunately, most elected officials do not realize this, nor does the general public. ...
  
  The consequence of all this practice is that students may be able to pass the state test, yet unable to pass a test of precisely the same subject for which they did not practice. They master test-taking methods, but not the subject itself. In the new world of accountability, students' acquisition of the skills and knowledge they need for further education and for the workplace is secondary. What matters most is for the school, the district, and the state to be able to say that more students have reached "proficiency."

Most of Ravitch's new views are conventional among progressive reformers, but novel coming from her.

The part of the book from which I learned the most concerned the big foundations that have moved into educational policy in the last 15 years. Ravitch calls Gates, Walton and Broad "the Billionaire Boys' Club" and her attitude toward their interventions is scathing.

Each of the venture philanthropies began with different emphases, but over time they converged in support of reform strategies that mirrored their own experience in acquiring huge fortunes, such as competition, choice, deregulation, incentives, and other market-based approaches. These were not familiar concepts in the world of education, where high value is placed on collaboration. The venture philanthropies used their funds assertively to promote their goals. Not many school districts could resist their offers. ...

And so it happened that the Gates, Walton, and Broad foundations came to exercise vast influence over American education because of their strategic investments in school reform. As their policy goals converged in the first decade of the twenty-first century, these foundations set the policy agenda not only for school districts, but also for states and even the U.S. Department of Education.

There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society's wealthiest people; when the wealthiest of these foundations are joined in common purpose, they represent an unusually powerful force that is beyond the reach of democratic institutions. These foundations, no matter how worthy and high-minded, are after all, not public agencies. They are not subject to public oversight or review, as a public agency would be. They have taken it upon themselves to reform public education, perhaps in ways that would never survive the scrutiny of voters in any district or state. If voters don't like the foundations' reform agenda, they can't vote them out of office. The foundations demand that public schools and teachers be held accountable for performance, but they themselves are accountable to no one. If their plans fail, no sanctions are levied against them. They are bastions of unaccountable power.

I have to wonder whether these epiphenomena of our present age of growing inequality will ever mellow in their philanthropic enthusiasms? The residue of the previous Gilded Age (such as the Ford, Mott, and Carnegie foundations) have moderated their arrogance to some degree, noticed a few failures, incorporated some diverse influences. But the new outfits are still feeling their oats, ricocheting around in the enormously complex arena of our kids' education with lots of money and without any need of exercise any of the less dramatic virtues such as prudence or doubt. I pity the kids (and teachers) who are the butt such well-intentioned experiments.

Calling out foundations' autocratic interventions is not something that most policy analysts can afford to do -- literally. Ravitch has the standing to speak truths that would cost less prestigious advocates their jobs. She does the vision of a public education system a great service with this denunciation of destruction passing as reform. Unfortunately, in public education the Obama administration is augmenting the failed policies of its predecessor so such voices are needed as much today as ever. ***For all my gratitude for the stance Ravitch has chosen to adopt in this book, I should add that, as in the 1990s, Ravitch subsumes any attention to the lack of racial equity in all phases of the school experience under the category "achievement gap." When many children of color are still (within the law) relegated to schools without textbooks, enough chairs, or even heat in winter, while white students attend gorgeous modern facilities and meet less harried, better paid teachers, race still matters in public education. She must know this, but it still doesn't seem to have penetrated to the center of her educational concerns.

The crises of capitalism

You wouldn't think an exposition of the world's current economic (and governance) crisis could be fun, but this is. If you've got a platform, REPOST IT! as I did from Cogitamus.

A movie not to be missed

The film Stonewall Uprising is currently showing as many places as it ever will. Catch it before it disappears.

Why this documentary? Because filmmakers Kate Davis and David Heilbroner have framed the story of the famous riot in 1969 in Greenwich Village where gays fought police repression just as we need to have it framed today if we're not to buy into historical distortions.

Stonewall was about the crazy-making dissonance between a youth culture that was exploding with exuberant sexual liberation (and a nod to peace and racial justice as well) but that did not yet include LGBT people. If everyone else got to glory in loving and fucking freely, why not the queers? The moment was ripe for rebellion and the fags, drag queens, trannies and other rifraff at Stonewall brought it.

All of this not the message of contemporary, and necessary, LGBT civil rights agitation. We do need to be able to join the military and get married if we wish. But first we had to just BE in all our raunchy perfection! Stonewall Uprising tells that tale.

Full disclosure: Kate and David (straight folks by the way) are friends and we've been hearing about the making of the film for a couple of years.***
Tuli Kupferberg, best known as the founder with Ed Sanders of the 60s rock band the Fugs, died today at age 86. The Fugs were a classic of the era that made Stonewall possible. As Kupferberg explained to an interviewer:

our message: love, sex, dope.

Is this what U.S. troops are dying for?

An Afghan actor and film maker wanted to expose the corruption of the Afghan police. So he bought a police uniform in the market, set up a fake checkpoint in Kabul -- and offered the drivers he pulled over an apology for police corruption and a $2 tip. He made a lot of unsuspecting men happy with this daring caper. You can watch the performance in the short clip from CNN.



According to Dion Nissenbaum's McClatchy news blog from Kabul where I saw this:

When asked again this weekend about the open -- and illegal -- sale of police uniforms in Kabul markets, Afghan Interior Ministry spokesman Zemeri Bashary said the problem was one for the Kabul police to tackle...

Deficit hawkery: It's just a political game

I don't usually do this; I usually try for, if not originality, at least added value on this blog. But here I'm just going to reproduce a cogent statement from the wise Meteor Blades that lays out why Republicans (and dumb Democratic elites) are blocking all efforts to mitigate economic pain these days.

Foes of extending unemployment benefits keep spouting two excuses. First, benefits create hobos, layabouts who enjoy spending every day watching cable, drinking six-packs of brew and luxuriating on an average $315 a week instead of looking for a job. For a three-person family, that comes in at $16,380 a year, a couple of grand below the poverty line. Cushy, eh? The second excuse, which we've been barraged with for weeks, is that America cannot afford another extension because of the federal deficit. Between now and November, the extension would cost $33 billion.

These excuses are mere cover for what Republicans who have blocked the extension really want – to make life hard as possible until November. This, they believe, despite their disgraceful record at holding out-of-work Americans hostage to their ideology, will somehow give them cachet to trash the Democrats. And for what? For failing to achieve economically what Republicans have done everything in their power to keep them from achieving. They take their leader Rush Limbaugh seriously.

Paul Krugman describes them as "the coalition of the heartless, the clueless and the confused." Right on the first count. But unconvincing on the second two. The heartless are neither clueless nor confused. They have a clear-headed agenda: economic terrorism. They're the real-life version of Saw. And their shameless goal is straightforward: worsen the economic situation for millions of Americans' in hopes of scoring more seats in Congress so they can cause even more damage to people's lives.

Thinking about the U.S. deficit

Actually, as economists more devoted to reality than to apologetics for greed have been insisting loudly, we shouldn't be thinking about the U.S. deficit right now. The Administration should be moving heaven and earth to spend more, to bailout the states, to save and create jobs, and to push the Federal Reserve to do the same if they don't want us mired in recession for the foreseeable future.

But if you remain curious about ways to bring down the national debt sometime in the future when we are more prosperous, I recommend exploring the Deficit Calculator created by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. This outfit describes itself as aiming

to promote democratic debate on the most important economic and social issues that affect people's lives.

The calculator shows what percentage of annual Gross Domestic Product-GDP (a standard measure of economic activity) the debt would be in 2020 under various policy options. At present, projections are that the debt to GDP ratio will hit 85 percent in 2020. The U.S. debt to GDP ratio is currently about 53 percent. By comparison, Japan currently sits at 185 percent of GDP, Greece (considered a basket case) is at 113 percent, and Argentina and Poland check in the 40s.

For the European Union, the standard countries must aim for has long been set by the Mastricht Treaty at 60 percent -- and any number of economists will tell you that this has been inflexibly low, privileging Germany at the expense of other member states.

So here's what happened when I played with the deficit calculator. Your mileage may vary ...

1) How about applying a small tax on financial speculation? Hey, that gets us down to 75 percent of GDP right there! Here's what that would work according to CEPR:

This is a modest tax on financial transactions like trades of stocks, options, futures and credit default swaps. A modest tax on these trades (e.g. 0.25 percent on the sale or purchase of a share of stock) would be barely noticeable to long-term investors. However, this sort of tax would be very costly to people who buy and sell stock by the hour or even the minute.

2) Let the Bush tax cuts die at the end of 2010. If Congress does nothing, federal income taxes will revert to the levels that existed the 1990s -- not a bad decade for business or people. Add this to the previous action and we'd be down to 69 percent.

President Bush's tax cuts lowered tax rates across the board by 15 percent. These cuts expire at the end of 2010. President Obama has proposed leaving the cuts in place for low and middle income families, but allowing the cuts to expire for families with incomes of more than $250,000 a year. This proposal would leave the cuts in place for high-income families as well.

3) Bring back the inheritance tax. Rich people in the U.S. benefited all their lives from the stability their society provided. They wouldn't have got rich if they had to live in Somalia or Kazakhstan. After the first few million dollars are exempted, their heirs can afford to share some of the loot with the society that made their lives possible. That would get us down to 67 percent. Again, Congress could do this by doing nothing!

The estate and gift taxes were phased out under President Bush's tax cut. However, the taxes are to return to their original levels after 2010.

4) End our unnecessary, purposeless wars. A quick end to Iraq and Afghanistan would get us down to 62 percent.

This proposal would reduce combined troop strength in the region to 30,000 by 2013.

5) Missiles and missile defense are awfully expensive, especially since we outspend the whole rest of the world on weapons. Cuts would get us to 62 percent.

This proposal would reduce strategic nuclear force to 1000 deployed weapons on 160 land-based missiles and 7 ballistic missile submarines; limit planned upgrades to weapons industry infrastructure and research.

6) The really big potential savings are in health care and it doesn't have to complicated. Simply using the bargaining power of the Medicare to bring down drug costs (plus all the measures above) would get us down to 52 percent -- exactly where the debt to GDP ratio sits today!

This option would have Medicare negotiate lower prescription drug prices for drugs purchased under the Medicare prescription drug plan. Currently people in the United States, including those taking part in the Medicare drug plan, pay close to twice as much for the same drugs as in countries like Canada or Australia that negotiate prices with the drug companies.

If deficit reduction is the right policy goal, this exercise shows it is possible without destroying general well-being and/or gutting Social Security and Medicare.

There are two simple principles that should underlie any deficit reduction:

• the rich have the money and the purpose of civilized government is ensure that they share;
• the U.S. should get out of the business of world domination by military power projection.

Do those things, and we can stop worrying about excessive national debt.