The letter that is so stupid only the Oklahoman would publish it

Part-time columnist Mike Jones of Oklahoma City is at it again, writing what is one of the dumbest letters the Oklahoman has ever run:

If government programs, bills and laws were named according to what their effects would be, the National Labor Relations Act would be the 'Union Members Can Force Employers to Pay Unreasonably High Wages and Provide Unreasonably Generous Benefits Which Will Cause Inflation Which Will Nullify the Pay Raises and Will Make it So Hard for American Companies to Compete with International Companies That Some Will Go Out of Business But Will Provide Lots of Union Money Being Donated to Democrat Politicians Act.'

Holy shit. It's stunning enough that someone actually believes this, and it's more shocking that someone felt like writing this letter using this childish rhetorical trick would be a good idea. The only thing that isn't shocking is that the Oklahoman decided to run it.

We'll skip addressing the lame and tired rhetorical element: it's childish and unsophisticated and no real newspaper would run this sort of thing. But the Oklahoman isn't a real newspaper. What's more interesting-- and pathetic-- is how Jones has chosen to describe the "programs, bills and laws" that he selected. For instance, let's look at the National Labor Relations Act, which founded the NLRB. It was founded in 1935 to "protect the rights of employees and employers, to encourage collective bargaining, and to curtail certain private sector labor and management practices, which can harm the general welfare of workers, businesses and the U.S. economy." These are all good things: in earlier times, the situation for workers wasn't ideal.

But for Jones, this meant that people could force employees to give "unreasonable" salaries and benefits, which just leads to inflation, businesses going under, and money being donated to "Democrat" politicians. It's almost laughable how stupid these claims are. A basic understanding of economics tells you that the most common type of inflation is the "demand-pull" variety-- the classic case of too much demand and not enough supply. What Jones is talking about, though is what is called "cost-push" inflation, and attempts to link unions to inflation have generally failed (except among the right-wing fringe. Which...). Indeed, in an excellent paper on inflation, it is made pretty clear (see footnote 11) how this doesn't quite happen how Mike Jones imagines.

And does anyone really think that American companies "can't compete" with international companies because of unions? Sure, American manufacturing has changed quite a bit as US companies have looked to places like China and Mexico and their cheap labor, but is that what Mike Jones wants? For American workers to make $2 an hour?? This sort of mentality is baffling. The rise of the middle class in the post-war era was due almost entirely to unions making sure that workers earned good wages and had good benefits.

But Mr Jones has a long history of ignoring reality for the sake of the plutocracy:

The Environmental Protection Act would be known as the 'Drive Conservative-Supporting Companies Out of Business Act.'

Wait. What? The EPA is out to get "conservative-supporting" companies? The EPA? Which was signed into law by Richard Nixon? This borders on paranoia.

This same name could be given to the Internal Revenue Service Restructuring and Reform Act.

Ugh.

The push for Common Core standards would be known as 'Let's Further Indoctrinate Public School Students to Become Atheistic Socialists Who Will Vote for Democrats.'

Really? So this thing that Jeb Bush supports is really part of a nefarious plan to "indoctrinate" students so they'll be atheists and socialists? And part of a ploy to get people to vote for Democrats? At some point, one has to look into whether Mr Jones is taking his meds. For him, everything is a giant conspiracy to get persecute conservatives and get people to vote Democrat. (Oh, and Mother Jones was right!)

The push for immigration reform would be known as 'Let’s Encourage Illegal Immigrants Because Most of Them Would Vote for Democrats.'

See?! This is nuts. (Also, notice how he's even lost his focus: earlier he was talking about "programs, bills and laws" and now it's morphed into just "any political or social movement that I want to talk about"-- and, of course, these are all part of the grand anti-conservative conspiracy.)

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) would be known as the 'Drive Health Insurance Companies Out of Business and Lower the Quality of Health Care and Raise the Average Citizen's Costs by Forcing Him to Choose Between Paying the Entire Doctor Bill or the Entire Hospital Bill Out of His Own Pocket Act.'

This is priceless-- notice how he has to clarify that the Affordable Care Act is better known by a pejorative, and then he launches into his stupid made-up name.

And man, is it stupid. Let's see-- are health insurance companies going out of business. A search for headlines shows a lot of right-wing websites claiming it's bound to happen, but we know how they have been about predictions of late. And we've talked about the pre-ACA situation already. The greatest healthcare in the world? Puh-lease. But then, I don't even get the last part-- raising costs by "forcing him to choose" between paying the entire doctor or hospital bill out of pocket? Does that even make sense to anyone? Does he imagine that under the ACA, a guy does to a hospital-- which, I guess, charges him?-- and then sees a doctor-- who has his own fees?-- and then some private insurer says that it will only pay for one?

Truly. Mike Jones is an idiot. He concludes:

This no-win choice is exactly what will happen when the waivers expire. Why the waivers? Ask Abraham Lincoln. He said the quickest way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it strictly.

Wait. Waivers? Why are we talking about waivers? Was he talking about waivers before??!? What the fuck is this. And @T$23t4cr3q2!@#E#! Abe Lincoln?!? As usual, idiot writers to the Oklahoman just make shit up when it comes to quoting people. Does the Oklahoman care? No. Hell, if Rush said it, it's good enough for the lazy, incurious, dull-witted editors of the state's largest newspaper.

Why people like Mike Jones continue to be published is a mystery. He's an embarrassment to the state. But then again, so is the Oklahoman.

If only people wanted jobs

Today, the Oklahoman ran what is, on the surface, a rather inoffensive letter from B. Max Dubroff of Edmond. (Unrelated aside: Going by first initial-middle name-last name is TOTALLY cool. No sarcasm. If I could get away with it, I totally would.)

As I said, this is not-- on the surface-- the typical plutocrat/theocrat letter that the paper loves to print. It starts out, though, using some of the lamest rhetorical devices there are:

While the media focus on the minimum wage, we hear little discussion about skills and education development. The cart has gotten before the horse! If the horse isn’t strong enough to move forward, it won’t, no matter how nice or attractive the cart is. There needs to be more focus on preparation for existing jobs that employers are having difficulty finding qualified people to fill.

Ugh. So we get the "cart before the horse" thing-- it's a perfectly fine idiom. But then he tries to force some more metaphor out of it and it gets awkward and forced, and doesn't related to his final thought, that somehow, there are lots of open jobs that are unfilled because people just don't have the right preparation.

It's a common thought among many, but the question is: is it true? The short answer is NO. AS Krugman notes:

But the belief that America suffers from a severe “skills gap” is one of those things that everyone important knows must be true, because everyone they know says it’s true. It’s a prime example of a zombie idea — an idea that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die. 

Nevertheless, we get this from Mr Dubroff:

People who have the skills and character that employers need won’t be worried about minimum wage, because of healthy competition that will drive higher pay. One way to see an increasing emphasis on developing skills and education is through a workforce investment board. These boards bring together leaders from business, education, economic development and other agencies to ensure workforce development and job training programs meet the needs of employers.

And there it is: the zombie idea trotted out using standard "the market cures everything" phrasing. Never mind that most of the discussion about minimum wage is about low skill jobs like those offered at Wal-Mart of McDonalds, according to Mr Dubroff, if we just trained people in new skills, they could go to (better?) jobs, and the low-end, no-skills places like fast food establishments would-- through the miracle of the free market!-- be forced to offer higher wages.

Unfortunately, this is a pernicious idea that, Krugman states, "does a lot of harm" to American workers:

Think about what we would expect to find if there really were a skills shortage. Above all, we should see workers with the right skills doing well, while only those without those skills are doing badly.

 Of course, this just isn't the case. And that's the point.

Yes, workers with a lot of formal education have lower unemployment than those with less, but that’s always true, in good times and bad. The crucial point is that unemployment remains much higher among workers at all education levels than it was before the financial crisis. The same is true across occupations: workers in every major category are doing worse than they were in 2007. 

Some employers do complain that they’re finding it hard to find workers with the skills they need. But show us the money: If employers are really crying out for certain skills, they should be willing to offer higher wages to attract workers with those skills. In reality, however, it’s very hard to find groups of workers getting big wage increases, and the cases you can find don’t fit the conventional wisdom at all.

 You can read Krugman yourself and see that he's right. What's important here is that this is the sort of lazy line that the slightly sane section of the right wing plutocracy likes to push: if people would just get the right skills, they could all find work. The reality, though, is that this is just a distraction from what really would fix things: government spending on important things like infrastructure, education, and, hell, even the military.

That's because right now, the problem isn't unskilled workers-- it's demand. No demand means no one needs to hire new people-- regardless of if you are a grocery store cashier, a nurse, or an electrical engineer. But when demand goes up, all of those jobs come back into play.

The Oklahoman has always had its economics wrong, as it continually argues for low taxes on the super-rich, no regulations on business, and limited rights for the worker. Suggesting that our employment problem is just a skills issue allows the Oklahoman and its plutocratic overlords to pretend that they are Very Serious People about something, instead of admitting that really addressing the problem means, well, taxing the super-rich a bit more to expand government investment in the country's infrastructure, and making sure that the lower classes have access to things like real healthcare and affordable education.

Mr Dubroff's letter isn't atrocious like most Plutocracy Now! letters are to the Oklahoman-- you know: Obama is a socialist, we are going to end up like Greece (remember when that was a meme among right-wing idiots??), Nazi Germany is right around the corner, etc., etc., etc. But while it is stated without harsh zealotry or hyperbole, it still pushes an argument (our unemployment problem is just because workers don't have the right skill-sets!) that has no factual support. But that meme lets the plutocrats off the hook for higher taxes to pay for things we really need, and the end result is that thousands of Oklahomans-- people who read this paper-- remain out of work when they could be employed. If only some greedy plutocrats cared.

Vacation to stupidity

Today, the editors of the Oklahoman ran a rather pathetic letter by Ron Sills of Edmond that pushes a tired anti-Obama meme:

Regarding 'Military paying steep price for policy decisions' (Our Views, March 30): Retired U.S. Air Force officer Dick Newton, in reviewing the impact of budget cuts on our national defense, noted that more than a dozen USAF squadrons were grounded last year due to a lack of funds for fuel. It would be interesting to know how many of these squadron planes could have flown training missions if the fuel expended on flying the Obama family on vacation all over the world on Air Force One had been used for military purposes instead!

Before addressing the "merits" (zing!) of this letter, let's look at what the editors titled it:

Obama family's flights of fance

That's cut-and-pasted straight from the on-line edition. Flights of fance? Obviously the editors meant "flights of fancy" which is an idiom that refers to "an idea which shows a lot of imagination but which is not practical or useful in real situations." Given that the letter-writer is talking about literal travel, an idiom like this doesn't make any sense here. However, the editors were trying to use "fancy" as some sort of pejorative to push that whole Democrats-are-elitists thing. But since the editors are so stupid, someone actually imagined that "fancy" was spelled "fance"-- like, I guess, fanc-e? That, or they really imagine that the idiom is actually spelled just "fance" or something. It is absolutely pathetic, and no real newspaper should stand for such ineptitude. But the Oklahoman isn't a real newspaper and so we are left with this propaganda-driven embarrassment.

Anyhow, back to the actual letter. One good thing is that it's actually topical, addressing one of the paper's editorials (even if the paper still refuses to link to such things). Aside from that, though, it's pretty pathetic. 

This isn't the place to question the logic of the editorial, though it pushes a typical jingoistic line that you see from a lot of right wing outlets: that we need to cut government spending on everything but the military, because somehow, even though the US spends more on its military than China and Russia (and the UK, and Germany, and Italy, and Japan, etc., etc.) combined, cuts to our military-- all in the name of crazed economic lunacy (we are passing all this debt to our grandchildren!) that the right wing itself is driving-- will somehow mean that we could be invaded.

So anyway, yes, according to an Air Force PR guy, "over a dozen squadrons were grounded last year because the Air Force lacked the funds to fuel them." There's a lot of context missing in that statement that is causing Mr Sills such stress. For instance, there are about a hundred active squadrons in the USAF. When the Air Force PR guy talks about having a dozen grounded, what does that mean? We can read here-- again, from a pro-Air Force propaganda publication-- about some of the results. It sounds dire on the surface, but it also sounds sort of ridiculous. Like:

Air Force officials had warned that mandatory budget cuts would lead to a reduction of flying hours by 18 percent, with readiness dropping to 'sub-optimal levels,' according to information provided to Congress. The drop in flying hours would mean that it could take up to six months to repair the damage to readiness, the Air Force warned lawmakers in a February presentation.

Oh the humanity!! Obviously the Air Force isn't going to say "cool, we have been over-doing it anyhow, so it's fine if you cut back." So they are naturally going to dramatize cuts as being catastrophic even though everyone knows they won't be.

But more importantly-- and we can get to the crux of Mr Sills' idiocy: what does this have to do with Obama's "vacations" and Air Force One? Well, we can look at this chart and have some idea whether this letter makes any sense or not:

So, uh, yeah. I mean, it's hard to complain about the number of vacation trips that Obama has taken. He's taken far fewer than the previous president, and fewer, even, than St. Reagan! Yet for some reason, it's fashionable for those on the right to attack Obama for his vacations. The reasons for this are hard to know. Some of it probably stems from the basic "I hate Democrats" stance that guys like Sean Hannity will always take. Some also comes from a bit of latent racism: it no doubt draws significant ire from the wealthy power brokers on the right-- who have spent over a generation using the racist dog whistle as part of its "southern strategy" to win elections-- to see a black guy jaunting around to Hawaii on a fancy (or is that fance?) private jet paid for by the American people. If Bush does it to go to his "ranch" in Texas, it's cool-- he's a rich white dude. But Obama? No sir!

And moreover, is it really the case the if Obama took fewer vacations, somehow we'd be able to fund some more Air Force squadrons? I mean, a typical fighter jet costs ca. $35,000 an hour to fly. Air Force One flies as a cost of ca. $180,000 an hour. So that's like 5 fighter jets-- or, perhaps, half of a squadron. But Obama has only taken 15 trips during his presidency. So if one trip would fund half a fighter squadron for a few hours (a trip from DC to Hawaii is about 10 hours), then 15 trips would fund about 7 squadrons for a few hours. But from the article cited above, the Air Force is talking about "spending cuts that have eliminated more than 44,000 flying hours." Uh. OK. Well if one Air Force One hour is about 5 fighter jet hours, and Obama has taken 15 trips of 20 hours (there-and-back) each, that's 300 hours, or 1,500 fighter jet hours (5x300). Which is about 0.03% of the total reduced hours. I'll say that again: 0.03%!!!

So when an idiot like Mr Stills writes "It would be interesting to know how many of these squadron planes could have flown training missions if the fuel expended on flying the Obama family on vacation all over the world on Air Force One had been used for military purposes instead" THE ANSWER IS ABOUT 0.03% MORE, or VIRTUALLY NOTHING.

A real paper would know that this is a totally lame letter just pushing a slightly racist meme for no other reason than to, well, keep that southern strategy working. But the Oklahoman isn't a real newspaper and so we get stupid letters from stupid people like this.