This Week in America

This Week in America (Vol. 4, Week 13.5, What Happened in Flint Happened in Phoenix)

 

This Week in Governmental Malpractice

The point of government isn't to "save money," and taxation isn't theft. When you live in an organized society, there are functions that are best performed by a governing body. In the US, which is a representative democracy, one of the most important of those functions is running elections. Another vitally important one is providing safe drinking water. In Phoenix this week, we learned what happens when a local government tries to "save money" on elections.

The New York Times reports, "Days later, angry and baffled voters are still trying to make sense of how democracy is working in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous, where officials cut the number of polling places by 70 percent to save money — to 60 from 200 in the last presidential election. That translated to a single polling place for every 108,000 residents in Phoenix, a majority-minority city that had exceptional turnout in Tuesday’s Democratic and Republican primaries." In Maricopa County as a whole, the statistic was one polling place for every 21,000 voters. As the NYT said, there were 200 polling places in Maricopa County for the 2012 presidential election, but for the 2008 presidential election there were 400. The population of the county has not decreased during those years. Horrendous lines should not have come as a surprise.

Arizona, of course, is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. In 2016, we'll have the first presidential election since the Supreme Court foolishly gutted the Voting Rights Act, allowing states that had required preclearance by the Justice Department before changing their voting laws (because those states--including Arizona--had been openly discriminatory in their voting practices) to change their laws at will, without any DOJ input. Again from the NYT: "Arizona has a long history of discrimination against minorities, preventing American Indians from voting for much of its history because they were considered 'wards of the nation,' imposing English literacy tests on prospective voters and printing English-only election materials even as the state’s Spanish-speaking population grew."

The conservative SCOTUS justices who struck down that part of the Voting Rights Act are of the opinion that more governing should be done on the local level, vs. the federal--that the government in closest proximity to the people is best able to make decisions for them. That's a common conservative belief--and a deeply flawed one, as Arizona and Michigan both demonstrate. In Flint, the (federal) EPA couldn't act to fix the water supply issue because a Republican Congress had tied its hands when it came to interfering with decisions made by state governments. The decision made by the state government that time--to install an "emergency manager" in Flint, who overruled the city's elected representatives and changed the city's water supply in order to "save money" proved disastrous. And expensive. So much for saving.

In Maricopa County, AZ, the upshot is that the primary election was an unqualified disaster. Turnout was good, but not huge--not general election-sized, at any rate--so if the county doesn't get the problem fixed by November, that day's voting will be much, much worse. Which the overwhelmingly Republican state legislature might not have a problem with, because the city of Phoenix--the biggest population center in the state, is  a majority-minority city that tends to vote Democratic. And all over the country, Republican legislatures have been passing laws designed to make it harder for Democratic-leaning people to vote. Usually the excuse is to prevent nonexistent "voter fraud," but to "save money" is every bit as valid.

That "local is better" approach to government doesn't always hold, when local governments try to do things that right-wing legislatures don't approve of. This week's insultingly stupid legislation in North Carolina--passed in an "emergency" session in the legislature, as if the "threat" of trans women assaulting women and children in public restrooms was anything more than some conservative legislators' private fantasies--was the state's effort to prevent the city of Charlotte from enforcing nondiscrimination laws it had passed. In Alabama, they passed a bill preventing cities from raising their minimum wages. Back here in AZ, the legislature is trying to do the same thing, as well as to prevent cities from enforcing gun safety laws that they pass.

But a bigger issue than hypocrisy is incompetence. Conservatives in general don't believe in government. They think of government as an occasionally necessary evil, and they would prefer not to collect taxes (especially from the rich, as evidenced by the tax plans of all three remaining Republican candidates for president, which vary primarily in the size of the tax giveaways to the wealthy and the corresponding burden on the poor and middle class). So instead of trying to raise enough revenue and provide enough funding for the basic functions of government, they try to "save money"--thereby proving their point: that government doesn't work.

Of course it doesn't work if you hamstring it from the start. Of course it doesn't work if you starve it of necessary resources.

But when government's primary goal is to "save money," someone always pays the price. That someone is always the people most in need of a functional government. The rich don't tend to suffer when government can't do its job. But the rest of us do.

It's time we remembered that government performs necessary functions, and that people who believe in it and want to make sure it does its job should be the ones we elect to run things. People who want to restrict voting should never be elected to office, and if they're already there, they should be soundly rejected the next time around.

 

Side Note 1: The Campaign for America's Future has a piece on a similar theme here, describing failures of government in places well beyond Phoenix and Flint, all stemming from the same source: "government might not work so well when you have people who hate it in charge."

Side Note 2: Here's a rundown of some of the voting obstacles facing First Americans nationwide. They were, remember, not just the First Americans, but the last Americans to be granted the vote. Often they still can't exercise the franchise.

 

This Week In Terror

This week, ISIS struck in Brussels, Belgium, the city that was probably the most vulnerable in all of Western Europe. Brussels has a large immigrant Muslim population, largely confined to a single neighborhood and poorly integrated into Belgian society (which is, in turn, poorly integrated with itself--it's French- and Flemish-speaking peoples never have learned to get along). The government there is barely functional; as a result, law enforcement and intelligence services are a mess. Brussels is policed by six different agencies that don't speak to one another. Most of the young Muslim men in the Mollenbeek neighborhood are unemployed--selling hashish is the main occupation, which doesn't exactly make them receptive to law enforcement. As a result of these factors, they're easy prey for ISIS recruiters, who promise them a paycheck and--more importantly--a way to add meaning to an otherwise empty life. More Muslims have left Belgium to fight for ISIS, then returned, than from any other European country.

Brussels, in other words, is a singularly easy target. And yet, the Republicans running for president reacted as if bombs had gone off in their own hometowns. Donald Trump used the occasion to call for more torture. Ted Cruz said we should "patrol and secure" Muslim neighborhoods in the US. (Actually, Ted, we should patrol and secure all neighborhoods in the US, but we shouldn't single out members of any particular religious minority for extra "patrolling and securing"--Muslim communities here are very well integrated into American society, and we should do more of that, not push them into a defensive crouch). John Kasich probably said something, too, but probably nobody was listening. If Marco Rubio was still in the race, he probably would have repeated his plea for more frigates and man-o-wars in the US Navy.

Borderline insane comments from these people are nothing new. It wasn't that long ago that Cruz said he wanted to carpet-bomb ISIS, then tried to explain that carpet-bombing doesn't target innocent civilians, somehow failing to grasp that carpet-bombing by definition doesn't "target" anyone in particular; the whole point is that it's the indiscriminate bombing of an area of interest. Cruz also said he wants to see if "sand can glow in the dark," which sounds perilously like a threat to use nuclear weapons. Trump won't rule out the use of nuclear weapons against ISIS, either. And it wasn't that long ago that Cruz said, "I recognize that Barack Obama does not wish to defend this country. He may have been tired of war, but our enemies are not tired of killing us." 

The facts, of course, are not on their side. Barack Obama has been defending this country, and he's been better at hunting down and killing terrorists than any other president in our history.  NBC News reports:

ISIS' finance minister was killed during an operation this week, defense officials announced Friday, a major score for the U.S.-led coalition as it tries to erode the terror group's grip on the region.

In addition to the death of Haji Iman, the Pentagon confirmed the killing of another top leader — Omar al-Shishani — in an earlier operation.

"Striking leadership is necessary, but it's far from efficient," Defense Secretary Ash Carter said at a news conference, adding that the U.S. is "systematically eliminating" ISIS' cabinet.

"Leaders can be replaced, however, these leaders have been around for a long time," Carter said. "They are senior. They're experienced. So eliminating them is an important objective and achieves an important result."

 

And according to the Washington Post:

In the latest setbacks for the militants on Thursday, Syrian government troops entered the outskirts of the historic town of Palmyra after a weeks-old offensive aided by Russian airstrikes, and U.S. airstrikes helped Iraqi forces overrun a string of Islamic State villages in northern Iraq that had been threatening a U.S. base nearby.

These are just two of the many fronts in both countries where the militants are being squeezed, stretched and pushed back.­Nowhere are they on the attack. They have not embarked on a successful offensive in nearly nine months. Their leaders are dying in U.S. strikes at the rate of one every three days, inhibiting their ability to launch attacks, according to U.S. military officials.

Front-line commanders no longer speak of a scarily formidable foe but of Islamic State defenses that crumble within days and fighters who flee at the first sign they are under attack.

WaPo adds: "The U.S. military estimated earlier this year that the Islamic State had lost 40 percent of the territory it controlled at its peak in 2014, a figure that excludes the most recent advances."

 The fight against ISIS is being won. Small-scale terror attacks in European cities--and possibly here--will still happen for a while, because they're not that hard to pull off and they make a lot of people (primarily Republican presidential candidates, it seems) afraid, and then those people offer bits of wisdom that feed right into the ISIS propaganda machine. And the places that have borne the brunt of Islamic terror attacks, like Iraq and Afghanistan, will continue to have problems with them. But ISIS's big selling point was the Islamic caliphate they were building, and without that, their rationale for existence goes away.

That doesn't mean we won't still have jihadists out there. The Middle East is still undergoing the throes of modernization, trying to resculpt itself after decades of colonialism, and it'll take a while to sort itself out. But ISIS is not a threat to western civilization, as Rubio was fond of saying. It's not an existential threat to the United States, which remains by far the strongest nation on Earth. And the kind of overreaction the presidential candidates display only plays into their hands. They want us to be afraid, to live our lives in fear of what they might do. The worst thing they could do to us is to persuade Americans to elect Donald Trump president. That would truly be a victory for the terrorists. We can't let them win.

This Week in Bears

Okay, pandas aren't technically bears, but it's close enough--especially when Tian Tian, a panda at the National Zoo in Washington DC, gets to enjoy a bubble bath.

This Week in America (Week 13)

 

This Week in Cuba

Conservatives across the nation were outraged this week when a photograph from President Obama's history-making Cuba trip included part of an image of Che Guevara.

 

Republican presidents, it seems, have always been able to control where they stand when appearing in foreign countries, because obviously having your picture taken in proximity to something means you believe in whatever that object represents.

Funny... we've seen President Obama photographed in front of the American flag more times than before any other background. When will conservatives admit that he's a patriotic American?

 

Official White House photographer Pete Souza's photographs of the first day in Cuba are here.

This Week in America (Week 12, Trump's Reflection)

 

This Week in Willful Blindness 

The Republican Party establishment  is tearing itself apart over its frontrunner for the presidential nomination, who the party establishment both fears and despises. They don't like the guy in second place any better--some of them hate Ted Cruz more than they do Donald Trump, in fact--but the guy they wanted, Marco Rubio, couldn't get people to vote for him in meaningful numbers no matter what he did. What appeared to be a skilled politician with a promising career during the Tea Party wave of 2010 turned out to be an empty suit with no national appeal (and very little appeal back home--he lost 66 of Florida's 67 counties. At least he came in second there--in each of Tuesday's other primaries, he came in dead last).

Trump will either go into the Republican convention with the 1237 delegates necessary to win the nomination outright, or Cruz and Kasich will pick off enough delegates to deny him first-ballot success. In that case, they go to a contested convention. That's literally the best scenario party leaders can hope for now, and new names are being floated as possible draft choices at the convention--Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan. Should the will of the overwhelming plurality of Republican primary voters be denied and anyone other than Trump become the nominee, many of those primary voters will refuse to support the nominee, and will either stay home on election day (Trump threatens--or is it promises?--riots if he's denied). Or perhaps Trump will decide to mount a late third-party campaign, and his followers will vote for him anyway.

Neither event is acceptable to the party elites: a Trump candidacy is anathema, but any non-Trump nominee hopelessly fractures the party. If he were willing to run, Michael Dukakis could beat whoever this year's Republican nominee is. Another Democratic president is almost a given (which does not, of course, mean Democrats should become complacent. One never knows what the fall will bring, and something like a major terror attack might just push enough fearful people into the Trump camp to elect him even without support from the party establishment).

But instead of honestly assessing how they came to this place, they're approaching the problem like they do virtually every other issue. They don't want to deal with climate change, so they pretend it's a hoax, a secret conspiracy involving basically all of the world's climate scientists and all the world's elected officials (except elected Republicans in the US). They don't want to admit that their economic policies don't work, so they continue to promote the same failed policies, as if just repeating the words will somehow overcome the lessons of experience. They see 20 million Americans protected by health insurance now who didn't have it five years ago--and no evidence whatsoever that it's "killing jobs" (in fact, coinciding with the longest stretch of private sector job creation in history)--and insist at the tops of their lungs that Obamacare is a job-killer that must be repealed for the good of the country.

It's denial on such a broad scale that it can't all be theater. There must be some people among those speaking the loudest--the politicians and the pundits--must sincerely believe in the snake oil they're selling. That said, they didn't all just roll out of the hills in horse-drawn wagons--there surely are many among them who know they're telling lies to the American public, playing vast swaths of their base for suckers.

Now we have a vacancy on the Supreme Court, and they're playing the same games. The Constitution tells us what's supposed to happen in that instance. Article II, Section 2 says (emphasis ours), "He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments."

Not "may nominate." "Shall nominate." In the law, that's an important difference. "Shall" means "must." He's not allowed to not nominate. It's a constitutional duty, not a constitutional right or privilege.

Those same Republicans we were talking about know that. They've read the Constitution, many of them. They know how this works. The president nominates, and the Senate vets the nominee and votes on him or her, based on the individual's qualifications for the job.

But they're approaching the issue like they do climate change or economics or Obamacare: substituting lies for fact, and hoping their base won't catch on.

This week, the Republican National Committee released an astounding statement. According to Roll Call:

Republicans aren’t waiting for President Barack Obama to name a Supreme Court nominee before laying the groundwork to turn him or her into a piñata.

The Republican National Committee is teaming up with America Rising, a conservative political action committee known for particular expertise in opposition research, to go on the offensive against any Obama nominee.

“This will be the most comprehensive judicial response effort in our party’s history,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement. “If the president wants to break with decades of precedent by pushing through a nominee in an election year, we’re going to vet that person and put their real record on display.”

The RNC effort will involve a fully array of tactics, from radio and digital commercials to robocalls to surrogate efforts in key states, according to an RNC official.

The Associated Press adds, "Priebus said the RNC would 'make sure Democrats have to answer to the American people for why they don’t want voters to have a say in this process.'”

This is snake oil on any number of levels. Take that last statement first. Democrats "don't want voters to have a say in this process?" Does anyone believe that Priebus has forgotten that President Obama won two presidential elections with clear majorities? The American voters knew he might be nominating Supreme Court justices--they picked him because they wanted him to be able to do that. The voters have had their say. Priebus and the RNC are the ones trying to deny the will of the voters here, and they know it.

As for "breaking with decades of precedent," that's bogus, too. And they know it. Just last week, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R/SC) warned Senate Republicans that by refusing to even consider Obama's nominee, they were "setting a new rule" that would come back to bite them some day, and Sen. Ron Johnson (R/WI) admitted that if they were dealing with a Republican president they'd be much more accommodating, even in an election year.

If it's president Obama's pick, the Republican senators won't do their jobs. But the RNC, in concert with outside interest groups, will "vet that person and put their real record on display."

That is exactly what the Senate is supposed to do. Not the party, not outside groups. The Senate.

Elected Republicans know that, and so do their mouthpieces in the media. But they'll pretend they don't. They'll lie to the public and to themselves. They'll deny, as surely as they do climate change and other uncomfortable realities.

If they can't be honest with themselves, if they constantly lie to their own base, why are they surprised that their frontrunner is a dishonest* windbag with fascist tendencies?

The party has made clear for too long that it considers the truth to be a worthless concept. They're entirely uninterested in dealing with the real world. In 2012 they nominated the most singularly dishonest candidate in our lifetimes. Now someone has come along who lies easily and virtually always, who has internalized the Republican lack of interest in the truth to his core, and they act like he's some sort of anomaly.

But he's not. Trump is a mirror, and he's reflecting them back to themselves, and they don't like what they see.

Nor should they.

Instead of trying to change, though, they're just doubling down again.

This won't end well for them.

 

*Politico spent a week fact-checking Trump, an assignment for which any journalist should receive hazard pay. They report:

The result: more than five dozen statements deemed mischaracterizations, exaggerations, or simply false – the kind of stuff that would have been stripped from one of our stories, or made the whole thing worthy of the spike. It equates to roughly one misstatement every five minutes on average.

From warning of the death of Christianity in America to claiming that he is taking no money from donors, the Manhattan billionaire and reality-show celebrity said something far from truthful many times over to the thousands of people packed into his raucous rallies. His remarks represent an extraordinary mix of inaccurate claims about domestic and foreign policy and personal and professional boasts that rarely measure up when checked against primary sources.

This Week in SCOTUS

President Obama's pick, Merrick Garland, was announced Wednesday. The Senate confirmed Garland to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on a 76-23 vote. He's a moderate with an unblemished reputation. When his name was floated prior to Obama's last two picks, he was praised by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R/UT) as a "consensus nominee," who "would be very well supported by all sides." As ThinkProgress reports, Hatch's opinion hasn't changed much since then. "Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), the longest serving Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, offered his own thoughts on who President Obama should nominate to fill the seat left open by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia last week. '[Obama] could easily name Merrick Garland, who is a fine man,' Hatch told the conservative news site Newsmax, before adding that 'he probably won’t do that because this appointment is about the election. So I’m pretty sure he’ll name someone the [liberal Democratic base] wants.'"

Chief Justice John Roberts served with Garland on the DC Court, and has said, “anytime Judge Garland disagrees, you know you’re in a difficult area.” It would be hard for Senate Republicans to come up with enough negatives on Garland to vote him down, so instead they want to simply not consider him. They'd prefer a Trump nominee to someone who--if he were nominated by any other president--would be a shoo-in. More on Garland here and here and here.
(Thanks to TWiA special judicial correspondent Marcy Rockwell for that last one.)

The point is, he's a nominee who would be perfectly acceptable under any other circumstances. Some Republican senators have already said they would support him if he were nominated by the next president, but they won't while Barack Obama is president. There's no justification for such a position--they don't like Obama, and that's all the rationale they seem to need. By selecting Garland, Obama not only has chosen someone eminently qualified for the position (though, at 63, on the older side for a new SCOTUS justice), but someone whose very nomination demonstrates to the country the insanity of the Republican position.

Also, Garland has already made the ultimate sacrifice--to put himself through Harvard, he had to sell his comic book collection. The man's suffered enough. Give him the job.

This Week in Climate

Did February feel a little warm to you? There's a reason for that:

"The global temperature in February took its greatest leap in 136 years of record-keeping, rising 1.35 degrees Celsius (2.43 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1951-1980 average. As a result of the gigantic temperature jump, it became the warmest February on record by a landslide."

This Week in Gun Safety

At The Trace, Olivia Li reports:

On March 9 at 11 p.m., two gunmen opened fire on dozens of people enjoying an unseasonably warm night at a family cookout in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. Armed with a .40-caliber handgun and an AK-47-style rifle, the assailants killed five, including a pregnant woman, and wounded three. Investigators have yet to piece together a motive, leaving area officials little to do except sympathize with the pain of the victims and promise to bring the shooters to justice.

Dramatic incidents of gun violence are often followed by public commitments to try to stop the next shooting. John Thompson, the mayor of Wilkinsburg and a member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, said in the aftermath, “I can say for certain there is more we can do to reduce the senseless violence that claims 91 American lives every day.” But just how much Pennsylvania’s local officials can do in pursuit of that goal is sharply constrained: Thanks to a unique, year-and-a-half-old Pennsylvania law, any city or town that attempts to take gun safety into its own hands risks a costly lawsuit from the National Rifle Association.

Passed by the State Assembly in November 2014, Act 192 allows any resident of Pennsylvania — or, crucially, any larger organization of which he is a member, such as the NRA — to sue a township or city over its gun restrictions, even if the plaintiff lives outside the township or city’s jurisdiction.

The legislature of TWiA's home state of Arizona is considering a similar bill, which would allow the NRA to sue any municipality that tries to protect its citizens from gun violence. We call the NRA a pro-gun death organization, and they make that position clearer and clearer all the time. It has morphed from an organization interested in the safety and rights of gun owners into an evil cabal trying to inflate the profits of gun and ammunition manufacturers at the price of human lives. President George H.W. Bush gave up his lifetime membership in disgust years ago, and he was right to do so. Any politician today who claims NRA support or membership should be voted out of office, and the organization itself should be declared a terrorist group.

* * *

A new piece in Pacific Standard shows how three simple federal laws could potentially make a big difference in the horrific number of gun deaths Americans suffer every day.

 

 

This Week in America (Week 11 or Thereabouts, Beware the #Undead!)

This Week in Veterans

Would it surprise you to learn that much of the "scandal" discovered in the VA health system was manufactured for private profit? How about if we told you the Koch Brothers were involved? Starting to make sense now?

The CVA [Concerned Veterans for America--ed.], it turns out, is the creation of David and Charles Koch’s network. The Koch family has famously poured hundreds of millions of dollars into think tanks, candidates, and advocacy groups to advance their libertarian views about the virtues of free markets and the evils of governments and unions. Seldom, however, has one of their investments paid off so spectacularly well as it has on the issue of veterans’ health care. Working through the CVA, and in partnership with key Republicans and corporate medical interests, the Koch brothers’ web of affiliates has succeeded in manufacturing or vastly exaggerating “scandals” at the VA as part of a larger campaign to delegitimize publicly provided health care.

The Koch-inspired attacks, in turn, have provided the pretext for GOP candidates to rally behind the cause—only recently seen as fringe—of imposing free market “reforms” on the federal government’s second largest agency. The attacks have also damaged the reputation of the VA among the broader news-consuming public, and, not coincidently, undermined morale within the agency itself. And they succeeded in stampeding bipartisan majorities in Congress into passing legislation in 2014 that under the guise of offering veterans “choice” has instead created a deeply flawed and unworkable process of outsourcing VA care while also setting in motion a commission that seems intent on dismantling VA-provided health care altogether.

All this has been happening, ironically, even as most vets who use the system and all the major veterans’ service organizations (VSOs) applaud the quality of VA health care. Adding to the perverse twists of the story is a mountain of independent evidence, including studies mandated by the 2014 law itself, showing that while the VA has an assortment of serious problems, it continues to outperform the rest of the U.S. health sector on nearly every metric of quality—a fact that ought to raise fundamental questions about the wisdom of outsourcing VA care to private providers.

The VA has had a long history of providing excellent care, and it was perhaps never better than when the agency was run by Clinton appointee Dr. Kenneth W. Kizer.

To implement these changes, Kizer radically decentralized power within the VA, pushing it out of the central office in Washington and into the field. For example, Kizer embraced a dissident, previously persecuted subculture of front-line employees, known as the “Hard Hats,” who had been experimenting with using their personal computers to improve the practice of medicine. The result was software written by doctors, for doctors, that pushed the VA roughly twenty years ahead of the rest of the U.S. system in its use of what we today call electronic medical records and telemedicine. Kizer also allowed regional managers far more autonomy over the operations of local VA hospitals and clinics, while at the same time using the VA’s new capacities in information technology to hold managers accountable for meeting measurable performance metrics.

During the Kizer era, the major veterans’ service organizations joined health care policy wonks in applauding the high quality of care offered by the VA. Indeed, the American Legion, while initially skeptical of his reforms, would wind up giving Kizer a lifetime achievement award, while measures of patient satisfaction generally showed the VA outperforming Medicare and the private insurance plans. Veterans also applauded the decision made by the Clinton administration in 1996 to relax eligibility standards, so that any honorably discharged veteran could receive VA care for life, no questions asked.

Under George W. Bush’s administration, studies continued to show the VA outperforming the rest of the U.S. health care system on most metrics of safety, quality, health IT, and patient satisfaction. Often, the administration seemed not quite sure what to do with this fact. In 2004, when Bush announced an initiative to push for greater adoption of electronic medical records throughout the U.S. health care system, he did so by traveling to the Baltimore VA Medical Center and showcasing the world-class health IT in place there. “I know the veterans who are here are going to be proud to hear that the Veterans Administration is on the leading edge of change,” Bush explained, without showing any evident discomfort with praising the largest actual example of socialized medicine in the United States.

Yet behind the scenes, the administration took many measures to undo the quality transformation that had occurred under Kizer’s leadership, including the freedom given to front-line employees. Partly this was the result of the tendency of top managers in all large organizations to want to exercise control. But it also reflected the Bush administration’s commitment to outsourcing more and more VA functions.

Bush’s political appointees at the VA, for example, quickly squashed software innovation in the field by reconsolidating bureaucratic control over all things digital in Washington and then contracting with venders of private, proprietary software. At one point, the VA even lost control of its own lab software system to Cerner, a private corporation that dramatically ramped up spending on lobbying during the middle of the last decade.

And, increasingly, Bush’s political appointees at the VA began outsourcing more care to private health care providers, often with unhappy results. For example, between 2002 and 2008, the Philadelphia VA outsourced its prostate cancer unit to a team from the University of Pennsylvania. Investigators later found that of the 114 patients who went through the treatment, ninety-two received either too much or not enough radiation to the prostate, and in some cases the physician missed the prostate altogether. Outsourcing also led to financial waste and fraud. For example, the VA inspector general found that in the last year of the Bush administration, 37 percent of the $3.2 billion the VA spent on outsourced care was improperly paid.

The Bush administration's push to privatize virtually every aspect of government has led to, among other things, the vast network of private contractors who do work that was formerly done--more efficiently and inexpensively--by the military. The administration was, fortunately, prevented from privatizing Social Security. But VA care wasn't as lucky. Elected Republicans and the CVA have long been trying to privatize its functions, and the first step was making it look like there was a real problem, regardless of how dishonest they had to be.

Then, on April 9, 2014, at a hearing in the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, Representative Miller (R/FL) dropped the bomb. He announced that his staff had been quietly investigating the VA hospital in Phoenix and had made a shocking discovery: some local VA officials had altered or destroyed records to hide evidence of lengthy wait times for appointments. And worse, Miller claimed, as many as forty veterans could have died while waiting for care.

This latter charge guaranteed screaming headlines from the likes of CNN, but was later shown to be unsubstantiated. An exhaustive independent review of patient records by the VA inspector general uncovered that six, not forty, veterans had died while on waiting lists to see a VA doctor, and in each of these six cases, the IG concluded that “we are unable to conclusively assert that the absence of timely quality care caused the deaths of these veterans.” In other words, the reality behind the headlines had little, if any, more significance than the fact that people die every day while waiting for an appointment to see their tax accountant or lawyer.

Those who showed up on waiting lists usually turned out to have been waiting for a routine visit with a primary care doctor rather than facing an urgent health care problem. Moreover, among those shown as waiting to see a primary care physician, many turned out to be already under the active care of a VA or non-VA specialist. In only twenty-eight out of the more than 3,000 patient cases examined by the inspector general was there any evidence of patient care being adversely affected by wait times. During the worst of the “crisis,” fully 89 percent of patients received appointments within thirty days of their preferred date. There was a long backlog of people waiting to see a urologist, but the nation as the whole faces an acute shortage of specialists in that field.

Moreover, the wait times in Phoenix were not typical of the system as a whole. Capacity constraints, for example, were greater in Phoenix than in most of the rest of the country due to the large number of retirees who had moved to the area in recent years, including “snow birds” who used the Phoenix-area VA system only during the winter months. In most VA facilities, wait times for established patients to see a primary care doc or a specialist were in the range of two to four days, which compares favorably to the experience of most patients seeking care outside the VA. For the VA system as a whole, 96 percent of patients received appointments within thirty days.

In short, there was no fundamental problem at the VA with wait times, in Phoenix or anywhere else. But there was evidence of specific VA employees in Phoenix and other facilities using unorthodox scheduling practices to make wait times look shorter than they were, just as had happened during the Bush administration. Under Shinseki, the VA’s central office tried to crack down by issuing flurries of admonishing memos. Unfortunately, however, these edicts had little effect, in part because Shinseki had upped the ante. His metric demanding that all newly enrolled patients within the VA be offered an appointment with a primary care doc within fourteen days was a benchmark worth striving for, and one that few other health care providers would dare hold themselves accountable for meeting. But in trying to impose this ambitious goal on already-overstrained employees and facilities, the VA made itself vulnerable to enemies who were already set to pounce.

The VA has a long history of providing cost-effective health care to our veterans. But industry groups--and the Koch Bros--think the profit motive should be a bigger part of veterans' care. We don't see how that's likely to make it better. It will make it more expensive, and more importantly for those involved, it will push more Americans' hard-earned dollars into the pockets of the wealthiest few. The Koch Brothers and their allies are beyond shame--but next time someone runs down the VA, it couldn't hurt to point out that the freer from private-sector interference the agency was, the better the care it provided.

This Week in Voodoo Economics

It's probably not surprising that voodoo economics won't stay dead.

During last week's Republican presidential measuring contest--to call it a "debate" is to overly glorify it--Chris Wallace rightly questioned candidate Donald Trump on his absurd economic plan, which would do the opposite of what Trump promises--it would add to the national debt and the deficit, not subtract. Wallace pointed out, using facts and charts, how Trump's numbers don't add up, to which Trump's response was to deny the truth of Wallace's facts.

It was, for Fox "News," a rare moment of public service. But it didn't go far enough, because the other three men on that stage all propose counterfactual fiscal policy. They all want the rich to pay less in taxes and to cut government regulation and spending--the approach that George H.W. Bush called "voodoo economics."

Apparently 2008 is too long ago, and they don't remember the George W. Bush recession.

But all they'd really have to do is look around at the states that are practicing what the candidates themselves are preaching. The evidence is all around us--most recently reported in Louisiana, where the brand-new governor is trying to deal with the fiscal calamity that governor and (briefly) presidential candidate Bobby Jindal (R) left him.

The Washington Post describes the mess pretty well:

BATON ROUGE, La. — Already, the state of Louisiana had gutted university spending and depleted its rainy-day funds. It had cut 30,000 employees and furloughed others. It had slashed the number of child services staffers, including those devoted to foster family recruitment, and young abuse victims for the first time were spending nights at government offices.

And then, the state’s new governor, John Bel Edwards (D), came on TV and said the worst was yet to come.

Edwards, in a prime-time address on Feb. 11, said he’d learned of “devastating facts” about the extent of the state’s budget shortfall and said that Louisiana was plunging into a “historic fiscal crisis.” Despite all the cuts of the previous years, the nation’s second-poorest state still needed nearly $3 billion — almost $650 per person — just to maintain its regular services over the next 16 months. Edwards  gave the state’s lawmakers three weeks to figure out a solution, a period that expires March 9 with no clear answer in reach.

Louisiana stands at the brink of economic disaster. Without sharp and painful tax increases in the coming weeks, the government will cease to offer many of its vital services, including education opportunities and certain programs for the needy. A few universities will shut down and declare bankruptcy. Graduations will be canceled. Students will lose scholarships. Select hospitals will close. Patients will lose funding for treatment of disabilities. Some reports of child abuse will go uninvestigated.

“Doomsday,” said Marketa Garner Walters, the head of Louisiana’s Department of Children and Family Services. If the state can’t raise any new revenue, her agency’s budget, like several others, will be slashed 60 percent.

How did this happen? It's not complicated. Louisiana was temporarily flush with billions of federal dollars of aid after Hurricane Katrina. But instead of coming up with a plan to sustain the state's economy after that money ran out, Gov. Jindal and his friendly Republican legislature decided to apply the usual conservative prescription, apparently having not noticed that it never works anywhere. The WaPo reports:

Many of the state’s economic analysts say a structural budget deficit emerged and then grew under former governor Bobby Jindal, who, during his eight years in office, reduced the state’s revenue by offering tax breaks to the middle class and wealthy. He also created new subsidies aimed at luring and keeping businesses. Those policies, state data show, didn’t deliver the desired economic growth. This year, Louisiana has doled out $210 million more to corporations in the form of credits and subsidies than it has collected from them in taxes.

Imagine that. And how does Louisiana's still-Republican legislature want to deal with it? You'll never guess.

Edwards noted that he recommended about $160 million in spending cuts, along with tax hikes and the use of onetime dollars, to erase the shortfall. But he said some lawmakers say “we can cut our way out of this.”

The House on Thursday, with little discussion, approved a $100 million spending cut bill sponsored by House Appropriations Committee Chairman Cameron Henry, R-Metairie.

The legislation first called for a $44 million cut in state aid for public schools. Before the final vote, the bill was revamped to require a $44 million reduction for the state Department of Education.

Top state education officials said such a move, an 85 percent cutback, would decimate the agency, including dollars for vouchers and student testing.

At this point, more spending cuts are bound to happen, because the legislature can't raise taxes enough to make up the shortfall. And it's the people of Louisiana--the non-millionaire people, that is--who'll pay the price for that. Take education, for instance, which more forward-looking states consider an investment in the future:

In Louisiana’s capital, on a university campus just seven miles north of the government offices, is perhaps the most acute evidence of the funding cutbacks — and the mounting concern about what will happen next. At Southern University and A&M College, a historically black institution along the Mississippi River, mold spreads across building walls, and rats scurry through dormitories. Eighteen buildings have roof leaks; in two, raw sewage occasionally belches onto the floor. An entire section of the library is off limits because of a perpetually broken fire alarm.

“One elevator has been broken since 2013,” said Taysia Marie, a junior nursing student. “I’ve never seen it working.”

Since the 2007-08 school year, Louisiana has cut funding for higher education by 44 percent, the sharpest pullback in the nation; Southern has seen its funding cut 49 percent. During that time, the burden of supporting education has flipped: Whereas the state once provided 70 percent of the money its schools spent, now the students support the bulk of the costs — in the form of higher tuition.

Those least able to bear the burden are, of course, being asked to take the brunt of it:

On Jindal’s watch, nearly every agency in Louisiana shed employees, and state lawmakers say some teetered because of the losses. The Department of Children and Family Services shrank to 3,400 employees, from 5,000 in 2008, and social workers began carrying caseloads larger than national standards. The state also cut funding for youth services and mental health treatment.

“When you cut those programs, it doesn’t change the need for people to get those services,” said state Rep. Walt Leger (D). “It just means you’re no longer providing them. Those folks end up in jail or wandering the street, not being treated for mental health issues, and all of those things have a huge societal cost.”

More spending cuts are not ultimately the answer to the Jindal disaster. Reasonable tax increases at the right time would have helped, but it's too late for that. Careful investments could have helped, too.

What's important to remember is that what Jindal did is not something new and innovative--it's standard conservative economics (the same thing is having the same effect in Kansas. In Michigan, it's the kind of thinking that's dooming the futures of kids in Flint, MI).  They want to cut taxes for the richest among us, give corporate welfare to the biggest corporations, and make it up by slashing services to those who need them.

Regardless of which Republican candidate wins that party's nomination, that will be the basis of his economic plan. As Matt O'Brien reports in the Washington Post this week:

If this is a revolution, though, it's a funny kind of one. That's because the new boss sure does look a lot like the old boss, at least when it comes to what the Republican establishment cares about the most. And that's cutting taxes for the rich. Indeed, the two "anti-establishment" candidates are even more orthodox on this than the establishment ones. You can see that in the chart below. Trump and Cruz would both, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, cut taxes for the top 1 percent by twice as much as Rubio would. And though they all would give the top 0.1 percent a $1 million-plus tax cut, it's the putative outsiders who would give the plutocrats the most.

O'Brien adds:

Consider this: the top 1 percent would get 40 percent of all the tax cuts under Rubio's plan, 39.8 percent under Trump's, and 49.8 percent under Cruz's. People of more modest means, though, would not be so lucky. The bottom 40 percent of households would only get 5.3 percent of Rubio's tax cuts, 5.3 percent of Trump's, and 0.8 percent of Cruz's. And no, that last number is not a typo. Cruz's plan would, on average, increase taxes on the bottom 20 percent. It's a reverse Robin Hood: raising taxes on the poor to slash them for the rich.

And:

George W. Bush's top-end tax cuts didn't make middle-class incomes grow even though the economy did. And neither have Kansas and Louisiana's when they tried the same thing at the state level. Growth hasn't increased, deficits have, and those state and local governments have had to drastically cut back on basic services like, for example, keeping elementary schools open.

Which is why we can't let any of them win the presidency. The country would have a hard time recovering from having Louisiana recreated on a nationwide scale.

This Week in Education

Take what the Republican presidential candidates don't understand about economics and double it, and you'll have what they don't understand about Common Core. This article focuses on Trump's lack of comprehension, but in truth they've all made statements about it totally at odds with reality.

Trump repeated his nonsense at this week's Republican debate in Miami. It's still wrong.

Side Note: In other nonsensical statements at the debate, Marco Rubio reiterated his call for the US Navy to build more frigates and man-o-wars, and Ted Cruz claimed that the White House returning the bust of Winston Churchill that had been loaned to President Bush was somehow a problem (the other Churchill bust, by the same sculptor, remains at the White House), and claimed once again that President Obama went on an apology tour, which only happened in Cruz's mushroom-induced hallucinations. Trump continued to claim that his economic plan would cut the deficit, and he continued to be wrong.

This Week in the Wall

Speaking of "at odds with reality," could Trump's border wall ever be built? Answer: No.

This Week in Bears

It's been a while since we've had any bear news, but this week brings a bright spot. The population of Louisiana Black Bears (the inspiration for the "teddy bear," when Teddy Roosevelt refused to shoot one that had been tied up for a bear "hunt") has recovered sufficiently that it's been removed from the list of protected species under the Endangered Species Act.