News, Weather and Classifieds for Southern New England

It is easy to understand why Terry Gorman, founder of nativist hate group RIILE, motivated by racism and misanthropy, would be so outraged by the influx of refugee children that he would hold weekly rallies to announce his special kind of awfulness to the world, but it is harder to understand the rationale of those who maintain that they are not motivated by unreasoning hatred, but by simple considerations of market forces and uncontrollable economic reality.

Justin Katz, appearing on Channel 10’s Wingmen recently, maintained that, “illegal immigrants” will put a burden on schools and other social services, even though the group Katz fronts for, the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity, actively seeks to cut funds for schools and social services. In his defense, Katz is merely following his economic ideas to their inevitable conclusion: Since the kinds of  policies the Center advocates for have already made it more difficult to adequately care for at-risk children presently living in Rhode Island, how can our state possibly afford to care for even more at-risk children?

What any potential influx of refugee children will reveal about the Rhode Island economy is what economist Robert Reich calls a vicious circle, a complex working of policies that reinforces itself through a feedback loop with ever more negative economic consequences, at least for most of us. (A very few will attain unimaginable wealth.) The rules in Rhode Island have been constructed to deprive the necessities of life to those deemed incapable of meaningful contributions to the all-important Economy. The arrival of hungry children simply makes this fact gallingly apparent.

This is why religious values always fail when stacked up against conservative economic values. Bishop Tobin, of the Providence Catholic Diocese, can quite clearly say, on religious grounds, “If the refugee children come to Rhode Island I hope and pray that all the members of our community will work together, in a thoughtful and compassionate way, to welcome them and care for them to the very best of our ability. The Catholic Church will do its part. Certainly the children should not be the object of our political scorn” but these words are completely ignored by members of groups like RI Taxpayers, who publicly “supports Terry Gorman and his RIILE group.”

Larry Girouard, President of RI Taxpayers, allows his website to carry such pleasantries as, “While the feds may be paying the expenses of these children, we all know it will be a matter of time before that expense will be passed to the state taxpayers. This state is under enough financial pressure with a bloated state budget. This is just another expense the taxpayers didn’t need or expect.”

How small.

What are we to make of an economic system bounded by policies that cannot value the lives of children? Are we to simply shrug our shoulders and resign ourselves to an arbitrary rule system, championed by people like Girouard and Katz, that reduces and dehumanizes refugee children to “objects of our political scorn”? If the rules are such that multitudes of people must suffer so that a very few might live in unimaginable and undeserved opulence, why are we playing by such rules? Why must we reject what is best in ourselves, our empathy, to serve the venal economic wishes of a group of small minded Objectivists more concerned with fostering human greed than human compassion?

Happily, those that would deny food and shelter to refugee children are far outnumbered by the rest of us who see caring for those in need as being essential to our very humanity. Questioning the need to offer assistance to children stuns us. It’s impossible to not see such attitudes as some kind of perverse joke and an abandonment of essential human values. “I’m not going to ruin a perfectly good pair of $200 shoes wading into a puddle to save a drowning two-year old,” is something said by villains, not decent people.

When groups like RI Taxpayers or the RI Center for Freedom and Prosperity tell us what the rules of the economy should be, we hear them talk about fairness and equity, and we assume that they are honest moral players with whom we disagree. When the pain of their policies fall on us, we bear it, because we have been bewildered by their talk of fairness. We believe that our placement in the great Economic game has been determined honestly, and that we are somehow getting what we deserve.

However, at the moment children show up at our door, hungry and without shelter and those that set the rules tell us we are powerless to help, we see the Economy for what it is: a game to keep us poor and powerless.

That’s when we wake up, and tell them we aren’t playing their game anymore.

Katz begins his piece rather elliptically, talking about how people of one time can’t be easily pigeon-holed into the societies of the past, given the obvious differences in politics and social mores. “Would Theodore Roosevelt,” Katz asks, “call himself a ‘progressive’ if he’d been born in 1958 instead of 1858?” Katz seems to indicate that counterfactual speculations have obvious limits, and that “it’s wise to be wary” of those who indulge in such speculation.

Then Katz goes on to unwisely speculate that if I were alive in a different time and place, I’d be something akin to a Nazi propagandist.

This exercise in pseudo-intellectual name calling would be funny, if I thought for a second that Katz was kidding, but he isn’t, and that’s really sad.

In writing his logical Gordian Knot, Katz composes lines such as, “I’d suggest, for example, that the real heirs of past oppressors are not the people who might share specific policy ideas with them or who are other than the Others whom the oppressors oppressed.”

To which I can only reply, “What the hell are you talking about?”

When Katz finally gets to the meat of his critique, he concentrates on the logical fallacies I supposedly committed in constructing my piece. For instance, by citing the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as an authority on hate groups, I supposedly made an argument from authority, because as Katz points out, “In reality, the SPLC is a progressive hatchet organization whose work has inspired at least one terroristic shooting.”

In fact, however, I made no such argument from authority. I presented the fact that, “The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified both FAIR and ALIPAC as Nativist hate groups based on their rhetoric.” I then went on to present some of the evidence that the SPLC presented in favor of their determination. I never said that FAIR and ALIPAC were hate groups because the SPLC said so, I presented the reader evidence (and links to further evidence) so the reader could make that determination (or not) for themselves.

Based on the evidence presented, and based on the fact that RIILE has close associations to both groups and espouses similar rhetoric, I made the claim that RIILE is also a nativist hate group.

Ah, Katz might say, rubbing his hands gleefully before attacking his keyboard, ‘But you made the fallacy of guilt by association! Just because someone is closely associated with someone else and espouses the same point of view, that doesn’t mean you can paint them with the same brush!’ (Note: the previous actions and quote by Katz were dramatizations, not actual actions or quotes.)

Katz would have you believe that I claimed RIILE is a bad group because of its ties to ALIPAC and FAIR, which are bad groups. This isn’t the case. RIILE is bad because of its ugly rhetoric, racism and policy positions, and I point out the association with ALIPAC and FAIR to show that such local groups don’t just crop up out of nowhere, they are supported by national movements. In other words, that racism and misanthropy you’re seeing at the border is being spread to our state by national hate groups preying on the fearful and gullible, the very people who make up the ranks of RIILE.

But what’s funniest about Katz’s paragraph on guilt by association is the fact that he commits that very fallacy himself in the paragraph’s first line. “In reality, the SPLC is a progressive hatchet organization whose work has inspired at least one terroristic shooting.”  Why should the SPLC be guilty of a crime committed by a gunman who picked his target off their website? Isn’t that the exact same kind of guilt by association Katz is complaining about? (Assuming of course, that Katz understands what guilt by association really is.) I’m sure Katz would never suggest that the Catholic Church, in taking a strong stand against abortion, is guilty by association of the murder of Dr. Tiller.

Katz later accuses me of an ad hominem attack when I wrote:

These then, are the people in Rhode Island who lack compassion, are ruled by fear and susceptible to nonsensical conspiracy theory. These are the people who see a humanitarian crisis and respond with thinly veiled racism, stupidity and xenophobia. These are, without a doubt, the very worst people Rhode Island has to offer, and I find solace in the fact that they are not only small in spirit, but small in number and small in support.

These are not ad hominem attacks. These are judgments I made, based on the evidence as I saw it. I presented evidence for each of the claims I made, and then plainly stated the claims. I didn’t say that the members of RIILE at the State House rally were flatulent, or on drugs, or mentally unstable. These statements, whether they were true or false, would have been beside the point, and therefore ad hominem. I was precise in my attack, and presented evidence for every charge.

Katz’s charge of argumentum ad populum, the idea that members of RIILE are wrong because they are in the minority, is also misapplied. I did not say that RIILE was wrong because they are in the minority, I said that I am glad that their opinions reflect a minority of Rhode Islanders. That members of RIILE are wrong is beside the point.

Katz’s last attack was to accuse me of dehumanizing my opponents:

On the thin gruel of his logical fallacies, Ahlquist insists that these Rhode Islanders with whom he disagrees are:

• not only misapplying their compassion, but completely devoid of it, as if inhuman
• overwhelmed with fear and lies
• primal in their racism, intellectually deformed, and fearful of fellow human beings as of a foreign species

The key point, here, isn’t exactly that Ahlquist’s rhetoric finds an eerie echo in the works of other propagandists who have targeted different minorities throughout history, but that he arrives there through tribal thinking that affirms his own sense of moral superiority. These are the evil Other, whereas he is a moral exemplar.

I do not think of myself as a moral exemplar, but I do try to speak with a clear moral voice. Whatever my failings as a person may be, like all people, I have the right to articulate my moral judgments, and if I sometimes fail to live up to the high standards I have set for myself, that makes me like everyone else on this planet:

Human.

I never said that members of RIILE were “inhuman,” I never said that they were “the evil Other” and I never called the members of RIILE “contemptibly subhuman.” These are the words Katz chose for me. The words I used were, “fearful, mean-spirited person,” “people… who lack compassion” and “the very worst people Rhode Island has to offer.”

I was careful to call members of RIILE persons and people because they are not monsters, they are in fact very, very human. People are not always nice. They are not always compassionate, brave or rigorous in their thinking. Sometimes they are mean-spirited, fearful and stupid.

***

I suspect, sadly, that Katz reacted as strongly as he did because of his own religious intolerance. Towards the end of his piece, Katz writes:

I don’t know if the zealotry with which [Ahlquist] seeks to use government to impose his atheism as the one true religion means that he would have been equally zealous in persecuting religious minorities when some other worldview held the reins of power.

Here Katz makes his ultimate argument. He hints at this throughout, but wraps it up here:

Steve Ahlquist is an evil atheist and if transplanted back in time, he would be a Nazi propagandist, or worse.

Talk about dehumanizing.

Since Katz is so keen on logical fallacies, how about these: Reductio ad Hitlerum, and Godwin’s Law.

“In a given circumstance, perhaps they should” form a union, Katz said and said the way they have been treated is “garbage from [employers].”

Katz deserves a lot of credit for this admission. Richard MacAdams, one of the board members for the vehemently anti-union political advocacy group he works for, is also on the chief legal counsel for the Procaccianti Group. I respect Katz for speaking his truth on this issue for the same reasons I respect the fired Hilton Providence workers for speaking theirs.

But, as per every episode, we also had some disagreement. Katz would prefer the invisible hand of the free market create better working conditions for the Hilton employees.

“What I don’t like the union union debate the way it sets it up unions have power to counteract business power,” he said. “If a company isn’t valuing its workers then that’s a problem with the company and we have to create an economic environment in which they suffer for that.”

In theory, everyone agrees I suppose. But from a practical point of view, unfettered capitalism simply doesn’t have an effective way to compel a multinational holdings company to pay poor people a living wage without workers organizing and making a stink about it.

News, Weather and Classifieds for Southern New England

This week we debated whether Obamacare is working (guess who suggested this topic!) and Katz articulates well where we agree on health care policy:

“What government is there to do is to say if you need help this is what these programs are set up to do,” he said. “If you need help this is a place you can go to find help.”

But he thinks the government-funded advertisements are going too far. I don’t. Especially given that conservatives like Katz are actively trying to subterfuge the program with their own ads and commercials. But leaving that aside, austerity by way of information asymmetry is a truly perverse political assertion.

Me: “I honestly think it’s unconscionable to try to keep that information from people. That’s not a cool way to save money.

Justin: “Taking people’s money to give it away to people who didn’t know they needed it is not conscionable.”

Watch the video to hear how loud Katz bangs on the table as he talks!

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For Reince Priebus, Chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), the above tweet was the last straw. He wrote a letter to Phil Griffin, President of MSNBC saying,

Sadly, such petty and demeaning attacks have become a pattern at your network. With increasing frequency many of your hosts have personally denigrated and demeaned Americans- especially conservative and Republican Americans- without even attempting to further meaningful dialogue.

After declaring that MSNBC is “poisoned because of this pattern of behavior” Priebus declared, “Until you personally and publicly apologize for this behavior, I have banned all RNC staff from appearing on, associating with, or booking any RNC surrogates on MSNBC.”

Obviously Priebus has not been tuned into the way Rhode Island conservatives and Republicans feel about the boycotting of news stations. Justin Katz weighed in recently on a similar boycott against radio station WPRO because of outrageous and demeaning comments made by John DePetro in which he called women union workers “hags,” “cockroaches” and “whores.” Arguing that elected officials are not acting in their private capacities when appearing on news shows, Katz said:

This is public officials abusing their privilege and responsibility to keep the public informed in an attempt to starve a private business of the content that constitutes its product. They have a right to interpret their responsibilities so as to allow that. But it isn’t right, and Rhode Islanders should consider it evidence that they aren’t fit for public office.

Katz went on:

It sends a signal down the line to talk show hosts — or me or you — that if you are thinking of saying anything close to the nebulous line of what’s not sayable, you might be better off softening your criticism or even going with a different topic altogether.

Peggy Price, the woman who started a petition in defense of DePetro, must be outraged at the RNC’s new policy. Writing about attempts to silence unpopular speech through boycotts by political leaders, Price wrote:

Do not allow politicians… to suppress free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment!

Should Americans consider this RNC boycott of MSNBC as evidence that RNC candidates “aren’t fit for public office”? Is Reince Priebus attempting to “suppress free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment!”? These are serious charges, and in the interest of consistency Katz and Price will either have to apply their critiques to the RNC, admit they were wrong about the DePetro boycott, or attempt to lawyer their way out of the contradiction.

MSNBC has deleted the tweet and fired the staffer responsible. That wasn’t enough for Priebus until Phil Griffin personally apologized, which he did. Priebus vows to “aggressively monitor the network to see whether their pattern of unacceptable behavior actually changes.”

Here in Rhode Island Republican gubernatorial candidates Alan Fung and Ken Block have already gone back on their promise not to appear on WPRO or DePetro since the radio jock returned to the airwaves in January. Fung provided no explanation for his turnaround and Block delivered an word salad that explained nothing.

Meanwhile, John DePetro is still on the air.

Justin Katz notes with relish a report in the Wall St Journal that places the United States for the first time out of the list of top ten economically free nations. Analyzing the data, Katz concludes that “it appears that we’re losing ground in the very areas that make it possible for families to forge their own futures” but in actual fact the Economic Freedom Index, created by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation (in concert with the Wall St Journal) does not measure the economic freedoms of families, but the economic freedoms of corporations and the one per centers.

For instance, when assessing labor freedom the Index factors the ratio of minimum wage to the average value added per worker, hindrance to hiring additional workers, rigidity of hours, difficulty of firing redundant employees, legally mandated notice period, and mandatory severance pay. Heritage gets this information from the International Finance Corporation (IFC). A look at the relevant IFC page shows that the factors under consideration have little to do with the rights of workers, but with the ease with which business owners may hire or terminate workers.

For the purpose of IFC measurements, and therefore for the Index so lauded by Katz, labor rights, such as the right to join trade unions or the right to collective bargaining, are irrelevant. The IFC assumes that the worker is fairly compensated, that is, the worker “earns a salary plus benefits equal to the economy’s average wage during the entire period of his employment.” Fair and equitable pay is assumed, and therefore outside the scope of the Index’s concern.

The Economic Freedom Index has been under fire before. John Miller, writing for Dollars and Sense, said the index “tells us little about economic growth or political freedom” and “is a slipshod measure that would seem to have no other purpose other than to sell the neoliberal policies that stand in the way of most people gaining control over their economic lives and obtaining genuine economic freedom in today’s global economy.” Miller, an economics teacher, has many more criticisms in his excellent piece, and is well worth reading.

The Index is naked punditry masquerading as economic analysis and undermines real efforts towards passing legislation that will help to reform the business climate and contain the ever growing power of the corporatist state. Moving up the Index rankings is as simple as rolling back legislation that restricts the ability of businesses to act as they please, while simultaneous ensuring that the “rule of law” and “property rights” are strictly enforced to the advantage of the “haves” over the “have nots.” Under such conditions, it would be all but impossible for all but a very privileged few families “to forge their own futures” as Katz put it.

The Economic Freedom Index is yet another conservative lie, a product made to generate the kind of headlines neoliberal pundits can use to beat the rest of us into submission. Crap like this is read with head nodding seriousness by legislators (and potential future governors) as a basis for legislative action, and it needs to be called out and resisted.

“I’m saying that’s a potential error on his part, that he’s misunderstanding how the economy functions as a practical matter. Which you’re allowed to say the Pope misunderstands a science.”

Note: Katz agrees with Pope Francis that free market economics dehumanizes people and turns them into commodities. “That’s true. That has to be tempered by social structure.” Me: “That’s what us progressives believe.”

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Of course we should! That such a question can even be debated speaks volumes about what our values are: making money. Though, as my TV arch nemesis Justin Katz points out, it would be a great follow up if that gun stock turns out to be a real dog!

News, Weather and Classifieds for Southern New England

“I think people realized that with the imminent beginning of Obamacare, that this was a critical time to make every effort to stop something,” former Ronald Reagan staffer and friend Edwin Meese told the New York Times.

According to the very insightful Times article:

Groups like Tea Party Patriots, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks are all immersed in the fight, as is Club for Growth, a business-backed nonprofit organization. Some, like Generation Opportunity and Young Americans for Liberty, both aimed at young adults, are upstarts. Heritage Action is new, too, founded in 2010 to advance the policy prescriptions of its sister group, the Heritage Foundation.

The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, have been deeply involved with financing the overall effort. A group linked to the Kochs, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, disbursed more than $200 million last year to nonprofit organizations involved in the fight. Included was $5 million to Generation Opportunity, which created a buzz last month with an Internet advertisement showing a menacing Uncle Sam figure popping up between a woman’s legs during a gynecological exam.

The Times even dug up a a Defunding Obamacare Toolkit that was put together for astroturfing (astroturfing is when in politics something appears to be a grassroots effort but it is really being funded and formulated by powerful political players).

It seems Justin Katz got some material from the toolkit for our appearance on 10 News Conference this weekend. I asked him if we both agreed that everyone should have insurance and he replied that everyone should have health care (3:00) but not necessarily insurance. Here that is, right on page 11 of the toolkit, right under “Suggested Responses to Congressional Offices & Members of the Press about Defunding Obamacare.”