Everyone thinks they are in the middle class

One of the enduring puzzles is why so many poor and middle class people are so supportive of policies that benefit only the rich. The often cited reasons are that these people are either stupid or that they have a fantasy that they will be very rich someday and are protecting their future interests.

But via Kevin Drum, I heard about a new study that suggests another reason, which is that people have a highly distorted idea about where they themselves stand in the economic pecking order. The study asked people in Argentina in the ten income deciles to rank themselves as to which decile they thought they were in. “They found that everyone thought they were basically middle class. Poor people consistently overestimated their rank, and rich people consistently underestimated their rank.”

Why is this? “The authors suggest that this misperception may be related to the types of people respondents interact with, and therefore use as a reference point. If you’re mostly exposed to people earning about as much as you, you’re likely to think your earnings are average.”

The solution? Make people better aware of their true position. “In the Argentina study, for example, respondents were eventually informed about whether their own rankings estimates were too high or too low. This news changed people’s policy attitudes. People who thought they were relatively richer than they actually were started to demand higher levels of income redistribution when told they were actually relatively poor.”

These results are consistent with a study done in the US that I wrote about late last year which showed that people here think that wealth is more equitably distributed than it really is.

Why the health care law is constitutional but may be overturned

Northwestern University professor of law Andrew Koppelman has a long article in the Yale Law Journal arguing that the constitutional objections that have been brought against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) health care reform package have little legal merit but that this does not mean that the current Supreme Court will uphold the law, given the propensity of some of the judges to create convoluted legal justifications to arrive at political conclusions.

The constitutional objections are silly. However, because constitutional law is abstract and technical and because almost no one reads Supreme Court opinions, the conservative majority on the Court may feel emboldened to adopt these silly objections in order to crush the most important progressive legislation in decades. One lesson of Bush v. Gore, which did no harm at all to the Court’s prestige in the eyes of the public, is that if there are any limits to the Justices’ power, those limits are political: absent a likelihood of public outrage, they can do anything they want. So the fate of health care reform may depend on the constitutional issues being understood at least well enough for shame to have some effect on the Court.

He then outlines the objections to the reform and why they cannot be sustained. He concludes with a nice summary.

What will the Supreme Court do? There is no nice way to say this: the silliness of the constitutional objections may not be enough to stop these Justices from relying on them to strike down the law. The Republican Party, increasingly, is the party of urban legends: that tax cuts for the rich always pay for themselves, that government spending does not create jobs, that government overregulation of banks caused the crash of 2008, that global warming is not happening. The unconstitutionality of health care reform is another of those legends, legitimated in American culture by frequent repetition.

The Republican Party, once a party of intellectuals and ideas, is now the captive of crazies driven by blind ideological prejudices in the service of the oligarchy. The Democratic Party has taken the place of the former Republican Party as the subtle agents of the oligarchy.

NJ governor won’t say if he believes in evolution or creationism

Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, was asked at a press conference if he believes in evolution or creationism and he replied with his characteristic rudeness and arrogance “That’s none of your business”.

While I would not have said it the way he did, I do agree with him on the substance. There is no reason why elected officials should have to publicly state what they privately believe on any issue that a reporter might be interested in. We are only entitled to know what they do in their official capacities and the reasons they advance for doing it. Issues should be debated on the merits of the competing proposals and on publicly stated arguments in favor of the options and their underlying beliefs are not a necessary part of the discussion.

Having said all that, I was curious as to the implications Christie’s reluctance to answer the question. If he truly believes it is none of the reporter’s business, I agree with him. But what if he instead felt that giving an honest answer might cause him embarrassment or political difficulties? There are two options here. One is that he believes in evolution but felt that saying so would alienate a major bloc of his supporters. The other option is that he believes in creationism but felt that denying the fact of evolution would make him look like an anachronism in this modern scientific age.

The former represents crass political calculation, the latter demonstrates that to deny evolution is no longer something that is intellectually respectable. Both options are signs of science’s progress.

Puzzled dog

A dog tries hard to coax a man seated on a bench holding a ball to play fetch. The problem is that the man is a statue.

Via Matthew Cobb, who adds that the statue is that of Alan Turing, the brilliant computer scientist and Artificial Intelligence pioneer who committed suicide in 1954 supposedly by eating a cyanide-laden apple (which is the ‘ball’ in the statue) because of a British government prosecution over his homosexuality.

In 2009, the government apologized.

Looking closely at the Bible

In a previous post, I said that two things lead to greater disbelief in god. In it I discussed the one where people start to take a skeptical attitude towards their most cherished beliefs.

In this post I want to discuss the other group, which consists of people who develop increased knowledge of what the Bible and other religious texts actually contain. This can be revelatory for those who grow up with just their Sunday school knowledge of a benevolent god who did a few miracles here, a few good things there, and generally told people to behave themselves in a manner he approved of if they wanted to go to heaven after they died. But as soon as one starts to examine religious holy books more closely, one cannot help but conclude that what they contain lack any solidity and are pure wind. What is more, they are not at all in keeping with the Sunday school image of god.
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Violence and religion

Take a look at this image.

new-reliquaries-4.jpg

Did you notice that the synagogue has been made out of bullets and guns and other weaponry? It is one example of the work of sculptor Al Farrow, in which he uses the tools of violence to create religious buildings in order to make the point that religion and violence are so closely intertwined.

The link where you can see many other works by Farrow was sent to me by blog reader John. The multiple close up views of a bombed mosque are quite exquisite.

Corporations should not have the same rights as people

The doctrine that corporations are ‘persons’ and thus have the same rights as human beings originated in 1886 under dubious circumstances and there is a movement to repeal it. Greg Coleridge of the American Friends Service Committee has forwarded to me a petition to repeal this doctrine.

Dear friend,

In May 1886 United States Supreme Court clerk J.C. Bancroft Davis, former president of the Newburgh and New York Railway Company, inserted a headnote to the United States Reports pertaining to the Court’s decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company.

Thus without a formal court ruling, this simple act set a precedent and effectively established corporations as legal persons entitled to the same rights as living, breathing persons under the 14th amendment.

What has followed is 125 years of case law giving corporations Constitutional Rights leading to the destruction of our democracy at the hands of greedy corporations. The most recent, of course, is the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission that opened the floodgates of corporate money in elections. From the environment, energy, and healthcare to jobs, education and the economy, the greed of big multi-national corporations is laying waste to the American dream, and our democracy.

The 125th anniversary of the Santa Clara Railroad case is upon us. AFSC has for more than 15 years been addressing corporate constitutional rights. As an endorser of Move to Amend, we at the Northeast Ohio AFSC hope you’ll mark this anniversary by signing the petition at Move to Amend.org. Our shared goal is to collect 125, 000 signatures for the 125th anniversary of corporate personhood.

We must come together to reclaim our democracy for living, breathing, people by eliminating corporate personhood through Constitutional amendment.

Whatever issue arises, at its root you’ll find a corporation standing between “we the people” and the solution. If we are to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and posterity,” then we must put an end corporate personhood.

Please sign the Motion to Amend

Democratically yours,

Greg Coleridge
Director

PS – You can help Move to Amend get to 125,000 signatures. Find out more here!

I have added my name to the list of over 111,000 signatures. I hope you will too.