Income inequality is bad for rich people too

Plutocrats would do themselves a favor by being taxed at higher rates

By Yves Smith

One of the major fights in the debt ceiling battle is how much top earners should contribute to efforts to close deficits. Australian economist John Quiggin makes an eloquent case as to why they need to pony up:

My analysis is quite simple and follows the apocryphal statement attributed to Willie Sutton. The wealth that has accrued to those in the top 1 per cent of the US income distribution is so massive that any serious policy program must begin by clawing it back.

If their 25 per cent, or the great bulk of it, is off-limits, then it’s impossible to see any good resolution of the current US crisis. It’s unsurprising that lots of voters are unwilling to pay higher taxes, even to prevent the complete collapse of public sector services. Median household income has been static or declining for the past decade, household wealth has fallen by something like 50 per cent (at least for ordinary households whose wealth, if they have any, is dominated by home equity) and the easy credit that made the whole process tolerable for decades has disappeared. In these circumstances, welshing on obligations to retired teachers, police officers and firefighters looks only fair.

In both policy and political terms, nothing can be achieved under these circumstances, except at the expense of the top 1 per cent. This is a contingent, but inescapable fact about massively unequal, and economically stagnant, societies like the US in 2010. By contrast, in a society like that of the 1950s and 1960s, where most people could plausibly regard themselves as middle class and where middle class incomes were steadily rising, the big questions could be put in terms of the mix of public goods and private income that was best for the representative middle class citizen. The question of how much (more) to tax the very rich was secondary – their share of national income was already at an all time low.

And the fares of the have versus the have-nots continue to diverge. A new survey found that 64% of the public doesn’t have enough funds on hand to cope with a $1000 emergency. Wages are falling for 90% of the population. And disabuse yourself of the idea that the rich might decide to bestow their largesse on the rest of us. Various studies have found that upper class individuals are less empathetic and altruistic than lower status individuals.

This outcome is not accidental. Taxes on top earners are the lowest in three generations. Yet their complaints about the prospect of an increase to a level that is still awfully low by recent historical standards is remarkable.

Given that this rise in wealth has been accompanied by an increase in the power of those at the top, is there any hope for achieving a more just society? Bizarrely, the self interest of the upper crust argues in favor of it. Profoundly unequal societies are bad for everyone, including the rich.

First, numerous studies have ascertained that more money does not make people happier beyond a threshold level that is not all that high. Once people have enough to pay for a reasonable level of expenses and build up a safety buffer, more money does not produce more happiness.

But even more important is that high levels of income inequality exert a toll on all, particularly on health. Would you trade a shorter lifespan for a much higher level of wealth? Most people would say no, yet that is precisely the effect that the redesigning of economic arrangements to serve the needs at the very top is producing. Highly unequal societies are unhealthy for their members, even members of the highest strata. Not only do these societies score worse on all sorts of indicators of social well-being, but they exert a toll even on the rich. Not only do the plutocrats have less fun, but a number of studies have found that income inequality lowers the life expectancy even of the rich. As Micheal Prowse explained in the Financial Times:

Those who would deny a link between health and inequality must first grapple with the following paradox. There is a strong relationship between income and health within countries. In any nation you will find that people on high incomes tend to live longer and have fewer chronic illnesses than people on low incomes.

Yet, if you look for differences between countries, the relationship between income and health largely disintegrates. Rich Americans, for instance, are healthier on average than poor Americans, as measured by life expectancy. But, although the US is a much richer country than, say, Greece, Americans on average have a lower life expectancy than Greeks. More income, it seems, gives you a health advantage with respect to your fellow citizens, but not with respect to people living in other countries….

Once a floor standard of living is attained, people tend to be healthier when three conditions hold: they are valued and respected by others; they feel ‘in control’ in their work and home lives; and they enjoy a dense network of social contacts. Economically unequal societies tend to do poorly in all three respects: they tend to be characterised by big status differences, by big differences in people’s sense of control and by low levels of civic participation….

Unequal societies, in other words, will remain unhealthy societies – and also unhappy societies – no matter how wealthy they become. Their advocates – those who see no reason whatever to curb ever-widening income differentials – have a lot of explaining to do.

It’s easy to see how “big status differences” alone have an impact. The wider income differentials are, the less people mix across income lines, and the more opportunties there are for stratification within income groups. Thus a decline in income can easily put one in the position of suddenly not being able to participate fully or at all in one’s former social cohort (what do you give up, the country club membership? the kids’ private schools? the charities on which you give enough to be on special committees?). And lose enough of these activities that have a steep cost of entry but are part of your social life, and you lose a lot of your supposed friends. Making new friends over the age of 35 is not easy.

So a perceived threat to one’s income is much more serious business to the well-off than it might seem to those on the other side of the looking glass. Loss of social position is a fraught business indeed.

Robert Frank has also pointed out that the issue is relative status. Changes that hit all members of a particular cohort more or less the same way does not disrupt the existing social order:

As psychologists have long known, individuals typically find belt-tightening painful. But recent psychological research suggests that if all in that group spent less in unison, their perceptions of their standard of living would remain essentially unchanged….

With less after-tax income, top earners also wouldn’t be able to spend as much on cars or their children’s weddings and coming-of-age parties. But why did they feel compelled to spend so much in the first place? In most cases, they simply wanted a car that felt spirited, or a celebration that seemed special. But concepts like “spirited” and “special” are inescapably relative: when others in your circle spend a lot, you must spend accordingly or else live with the disappointment that results from unmet expectations.

And the costs of living in more unequal societies extend beyond health, although that impact is particularly dramatic. If you look at broader indicators of social well being, you see the same finding: greater income inequality is associated with worse outcomes. From a presentation by Kate Pickett, Senior lecturer at the University of York and author of The Spirit Level, at the INET conference in 2010:

You might argue: Why do these results matter to rich people, who can live in gated compounds? If you’ve visited some rich areas in Latin America, particularly when times generally are bad, marksmen on the roofs of houses are a norm. Living in fear of your physical safety is not a pretty existence.

Japan, which made a conscious decision to impose the costs of its post bubble hangover on all members of society to preserve stability, has gotten through its lost two decades with remarkable grace. The US seems to be implementing the polar opposite playbook, and there are good reasons to think the outcome of this experiment will be ugly indeed.

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The Oscars’ hated savior

After several years of disaster, the ceremony is in crisis. Billy Crystal may be their best hope forward

By Brian Raftery

Billy Crystal (Credit: AP)

Topics:Oscars

The most surprising moment of last year’s Academy Awards broadcast occurred a little bit past the halfway mark, when a well-tanned, kewpie-faced Billy Crystal showed up for an unbilled cameo. It had been a long night: Hosts Anne Hathaway and James Franco had been struggling, sometimes nobly, through a series of erratic comedy bits, while many of the other presenters had reverted to that dead-eyed, forced-gravitas zombie-state unique to awards shows and North Korean news reports. So when Crystal stepped into this humdrum thunderdome, the response was a sustained, rapturous standing ovation—the sort of outpouring Oscar attendees normally reserve for the newly and/or nearly dead. The message was clear. These people wanted Billy back.

And yet, in the months since Crystal was announced as this year’s Oscar host — his first such stint in eight years — the general reaction has been somewhere between a shrug and a wince (which, coincidentally, are two of Crystal’s go-to comedic tics). No one seems to be fully dreading his return to the Oscars this year, but no one seems really excited for it, either. “The forces of nostalgia have won out again,” sighed Gawker, which predicted “another milquetoast year.” The New York Post, meanwhile, dubbed Crystal a “hoary old host.” Perhaps the most passionate naysayer was New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, who accused Crystal of lacking “cultural currency,” and instead suggested Madonna as a possible host (this seems impractical, seeing as Madonna’s own cultural currency is about as stable as the euro, and that she’d likely blow the show’s budget on a “Tree of Life”-inspired opening number featuring a half-dozen costume changes, three Bronx high-school choirs, and the members of Odd Future crotch-grabbing a dinosaur).

It’s easy to understand why Crystal would strike some Oscar watchers — particularly younger ones — as a lame choice. He hasn’t made a decent movie in more than a decade, and somewhere along the ‘90s, his powder-dry sarcasm was replaced with cloying self-seriousness. Crystal’s worst comedic tendencies are perhaps best exemplified by a 2006 charity appearance in which he “portrayed” an African-American musician displaced by Katrina — a mawkish miscalculation that prompted a hilariously incredulous rebuttal from radio DJ Tom Scharpling.

But a bigger reason for all the animosity-slash-ambivalence toward Crystal stems, in part, from the disappointment over Eddie Murphy’s decision last fall to abandon the job. The prospect of Murphy — once a live-wire genius, now a sadly tranquilized fart artisan —being set loose again on TV was exciting, and with middlebrow hustla Brett Ratner as producer, the show had the potential to be surprising again, even if it had turned out to be a disaster. Either way, at least we would have gotten a few decent hashtag games out of it.

Instead, the producers panicked and turned to Crystal, he of the show-tune parodies and Nicholson-needling running gags. But despite the collective, ambient meh surrounding the decision, the show producers didn’t have any other choice. Because after last year’s fiasco, the Oscars don’t need a splashy name, they need a savior.

It won’t be the first time Crystal’s been asked to swoop in and save the day. In fact, when the Oscar producers first brought him onboard, in 1990, his mission was to not only crack “Dances With Wolves” and lambada jokes, but to perform a sort of public-image triage. The previous year’s show had opened with an astonishingly taste-deprived musical number in which Rob Lowe, Snow White and several dancers dressed as nightclub tables performed “Proud Mary” (imagine what would happen if Julie Taymor and Corky St. Clair were stuck on a Carnival Cruise ship and force-fed experimental CIA drugs). Reviews for the Lowe show were uniformly terrible, and the hope was that Crystal might represent a fresh start. His comparatively tasteful, genially funny debut routine wound up getting him rehired for the next three years.

Last year’s Franco-Hathaway show may not have reached quite the same dinner-theater nadir as the 1989 show, nor was it as bad as Whoopi Goldberg’s unadventurously vulgar 1999 stint, which also prompted Crystal to come back. But the 2010 show was widely considered a misfire, one that comes after several years’ worth of wobbly Oscar ceremonies. In fact, for the last decade or so, the Academy has been in the throes of a visible identity crisis, one brought on by an unshakable sense of encroaching irrelevancy: Ratings for the broadcast, while never fully abysmal, have yet to come near the record high of the 1998 show, when “Titanic” won best picture. And in terms of buzz, the always stuffy, always talky Oscars now compete against a glut of shock-stoking, performance-driven awards shows that dominate the winter-TV schedules. Most young viewers, it turns out, would rather watch the day-glo dry-humps of the Grammys or the VMAs than listen to some British character drone on about how cinematography is “the dance of light.”

The Academy’s response has been to try to shake up the show in any way possible. Last year, there were the pointless backstage tweets and labored smartphone jokes. In 2010, the show opened by trotting out big-name stars like George Clooney and Sandra Bullock and displaying them like district offerings in some Dubai-set version of “The Hunger Games.” And then there was the tacky decision to have the nominees’ pals and costars come to the stage and spout embarrassingly loving spiels; this, in a show that doesn’t exactly want for self-congratulatory behavior (even Crystal’s appearance last year was, essentially, an Oscar presentation about the greatness of past Oscar presentations).

Occasionally, such attempts to stretch the Oscars have paid off: Hugh Jackman’s 2010 musical number – co-written by “Community” creator Dan Harmon — was joyously goofy and riskily weird. And Jon Stewart’s two hosting gigs found him wittily tweaking Hollywood traditions without insulting them, as exemplified by the 2006 sketch highlighting the gay subtexts of classic old westerns. For the most part, though, the Oscars’ attempts to enliven the show have felt strained and dishonest, like a 56-year-old dad trying to get into chillwave (or a 36-year-old writer trying to joke up a sentence by dropping an outmoded underground reference like “chillwave”).

But by bringing back Crystal, the Academy members are making it clear they’ve stopped believing in evolution — at least for now. After all, this is a guy whose hosting approach has remained largely unchanged for nearly a quarter-century: He opens the night with a showbiz-specific monologue, veers into a medley of best picture-inspired song parodies, and then fills out the evening with running-joke one-liners, audience pow-wows and visual gags (in recent years, he’s also added a montage in which he digitally interacts with the nominated films). Crystal’s M.O. is reliably square, and after all of the recent trying-too-hard coolness, that squareness feels weirdly comforting this year.

And, lest we forget, Crystal is really, really good at his job. He may not be the edgiest comic of our time — heck, he wasn’t even the edgiest comic of 1986 — but he excels in a role few others would even attempt to try: that of a mass-appeal, four-quadrant satirist, someone who can examine our increasingly disparate moviegoing culture, and locate the common comedy within.

It’s a tricky task, but one for which Crystal is uniquely qualified, in part because he comes off as both an insider and an outsider. Raised in Long Island, and having broken into showbiz via stand-up and TV, he’s not wholly indebted to Hollywood studio system, but he’s not resentful of it, either. This comes through in his monologue jokes, which are packed with cozily knowing showbiz references — Julia Phillips, Orion Pictures, Jeffrey Katzenberg — but often underscored with a subtle populist zing. Because he’s pals with half the room, Crystal can get away with flaying the crowd for their greed, their self-satisfaction, their childish behavior — sometimes so quickly, they barely have time to notice (“Gentlemen, start your egos,” he barked in 2004, before quickly jumping into a musical number). By doing so, he lets the viewers at home know that, just like them, he finds this whole thing at least somewhat ridiculous. For a left coast millionaire, Crystal can be amazingly relatable.

Because of this, Crystal can often succeed where the studios’ marketing teams and P.R. execs fail, by making even the most alienating movies palatable — or at least comprehensible — to a large audience. For the 1997 Oscars, Crystal was faced with an especially unfunny crop of best picture nominees, including “Shine,” “Secrets and Lies” and “The English Patient.” None were major box-office hits, meaning they’d be unfamiliar to most home viewers (and, most likely, to some of the stars sitting in the theater).

Crystal dealt with this in his opening medley, which not only mocked the nominees, but also helped explain them: The plot of “Secrets and Lies” was spelled out using the theme to “The Brady Bunch,” while “Fargo” was synopsized via Frank Sinatra’s “My Kind of Town.” Depending on your patience for musical parodies — and your tolerance for cornball one-liners — such medleys are either lowly shtick or ingeniously idiosyncratic pop-culture satire (personally, I’m in the latter camp, having grown up on a steady regiment of “Weird Al” Yankovic, Statler & Waldorf and Mad magazine). But either way, they function as a clever framing device, allowing Crystal to draw in casual moviegoers who aren’t exactly rushing to check out the latest Mike Leigh joint.

And while Crystal is, for the most part, genial, family-friendly and mostly apolitical, it would be a mistake to write him off as completely milquetoast. At times, he’s used his hosting stint to take a few well-earned jabs at his own industry. In 1992, he scolded the Academy, albeit in musical form, for not nominating Barbra Streisand as best director for “Prince of Tides,” despite the film having been named in seven categories — a baldly sexist move, no matter what you think of the movie. (He made the same point when directors James L. Brooks and Rob Reiner were similarly overlooked, but the Streisand point was made with a far greater sense of WTF vigor.) And in 2004, he tweaked the all-powerful Weinstein brothers (“evil wizards”) as well as copyright-obsessed MPAA head Jack Valenti, noting that Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow character represented “Valenti’s worst nightmare: A slightly gay pirate.” These aren’t scathing attacks, obviously, but considering how sensitive the Oscar audience can get — this is a group that once murmured disapprovingly at an innocuous joke about Walt Disney being preserved on ice — such lines qualify as at least semi-dangerous.

For those who still need reassurance about this Sunday night’s awards, that 2004 opening is worth a look. Sammy Davis Jr. gag aside, it’s a swift, silly reminder of why Crystal got this job in the first place, and why bringing him back was the only option. No one will deny the show is in need of a serious upgrade: The music numbers never fail to drag, while the middle section grows more pear-shaped each year (and surely, there’s a more tasteful way to honor the dead then subjecting them to a posthumous “In Memorial” clap-off contest, especially when they have to compete against Rod Steiger, who I’m pretty certain has died every year since 1998). But this year, radicalizing the show will only make things worse. The Oscars need only to hit the reset button, and it might as well be by the hand of Crystal. The show he’s about to reclaim is a lot like America: a suspiciously organized democracy that’s controlled by an illuminati of grumpy old white men, and in serious danger of being outpaced by foreigners (or, at least, the Golden Globes). And, like America, the show desperately needs to correct course. Crystal may not be the leader we want, but he’s definitely the one we need.

: Brian Raftery (@brianraftery) is a contributing editor at Wired magazine. More Brian Raftery

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Why the U.S. should not pull out of Afghanistan

A female parliamentarian says the Taliban would return to power and undo the gains in women's rights.

By Fawzia Koofi

Afghan Parliament Member Fawzia Koofi (Credit: AP)

Topics:Aghanistan

President Obama’s recent announcement that he plans to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan by 2014 will not only prove disastrous for Afghanistan, a country which I fear will slide back in the abyss of either Taliban rule or civil war. It will also be disastrous for the United States; without international support Afghanistan may once again become the playgound for international terrorism.

One of the most common misperceptions about my nation is that democracy was forced on an unwilling population by the West after the defeat of the Taliban in 2001. The fact is Afghanistan has a long history of democratic traditions. At local level we have a system of Arbabs. An Arbab is usually a village elder who acts as representative to the others. He makes low level decisions on behalf of people and he represents his village at the Jirga, a local council where elders from neighboring villages meet and discuss problems or solve disputes. Anyone can bring a problem or dispute to a Jirga – the Jirga council will listen to both sides of the debate and make a judgment. Their decision is final.

At national level we have Loya Jirga – grand council. This system brings together regional leaders from all over the country. Our country is richly in culture (over 40 different languages are spoken with around 200 dialects). Immediately after the fall of the Taliban we had a constitutional Loya Jirga which included representatives from all the different ethnic groups and where the new democratic constitution of Afghanistan was agreed and voted upon. Most recently there has been a national Peace Jirga which included village elders together with politicians from all over Afghanistan who came together to discuss the ways forward as insurgency and insecurity grows.

Today many Afghans have lost or are losing faith in their government. But that’s got nothing to do with not wanting democracy. It has everything to do with how little has changed for ordinary people despite the billions of dollars of international aid money that has been spent in Afghanistan in recent years.

Most people still do not have access to clean water or electricity, even in Kabul, the capital city. In part this is due to government corruption. Afghanistan is now ranked one of the most corrupt countries in the world. But it is also a failure of the international contracting firms that built the roads, many of which were too small to allow farmers to pass trucks to get produce to market. Some used such poor quality asphalt that the roads need rebuilding already. Even in central Kabul the main road which runs between the airport and a central district called Wazir Akbar Khan is so badly pot-holed that visitors think it is due to war damage. The asphalt of the road, built a few years ago, has already worn away.

Many hospitals were so also so badly built they failed to include basics like plumbing and are not fit for patients. Yet these firms still took their profit. On a recent visit to Badakshan I visited one such institution. The walls were cracked, the door frames did not fit the doors and the piping didn’t work. Every time a tap was turned on water flooded. These things happen because foreign aid workers can no longer visit many places due to insecurity, so they must rely on corrupt local officials to tell them a project such as a school or hospital has been completed properly. The local official – who may have stolen half the funds for himself – reports back that it has been, no one makes a further check, a report is filed and the contracting firm is paid. It is a corruption that starts at village level and ends at international level. And because of this poor people do not get the help that was promised to them. They see a half built hospital and wonder how this could happen?

If Afghan people are cynical today, these are just some of the reasons why. But they still risk their lives to vote in elections. I represent Badakshan, one of the poorest and most remote provinces of Afghanistan, where many people are illiterate. Yet they still love to talk about politics, especially about so-called peace talks with the Taliban.

Last year the Taliban pulled out of previous talks with President Hamid Karazi but, more recently, the Taliban have opened a political office in the gulf state of Qatar, a key US ally. The current strategic thinking of NATO is that the only way to achieve lasting peace in Afghanistan (and allow a smooth foreign military pull-out) is to bring the Taliban into talks and allow them to participate in government. I feel strongly this is not the right approach.

I do not believe the Taliban will share power or will participate in democracy. The Taliban have tried to assassinate me and other female MPs, liberal MPs, and any opponents of their ideology Only a few weeks ago Taliban gunmen attacked my car. I was inside for 30 minutes not knowing if I would live or die. Three Afghan policemen were killed in the battle. Can I really be expected to believe a Taliban representative would take a seat in parliament alongside me?

According to one United Nations estimate, nearly 90 percent of Afghan women suffer from some sort of domestic abuse – some analysts believe that number may be even higher – making Afghanistan one of the most dangerous places to be a woman. Nonetheless, small but important gains have made in women’s rights in the past ten years.

Today around 2.7 million girls are now in school, compared to just a few thousand during the time of the Taliban. In the new Afghan parliament, 27 per cent of MPs are female – far higher than the world average. Thousands of women now go out to work in offices, a few drive cars (although this is not common) and glamorous women wearing lipstick with shiny bouffant hair visible underneath their headscarves are once again seen on TV as news anchors and journalists (all female voices and faces were banned during Taliban time). These women are role models to many young women in Afghanistan.

And of course women now have access to healthcare, in places where it is available. In the time of Taliban women were banned from visiting male doctors and female doctors were banned from practicing, effectively denying 50 per cent of the population any medical care whatsoever. In my view that was as good as attempted murder of a gender. Those who claimed to men of God had no respect for one of God’s greatest creations – women. By allowing the Taliban back as a legitimate force in government we would undo all of those gains and it would be a betrayal of Afghan women.

The problems of my nation are vast, but they are not insurmountable. In my view we need to continue to support the fragile democratic gains and structures of recent years, not give up on them. We need continued Western support. In time we will be ready to go it alone—but not yet. Plunging us back into the darkness of Taliban rule is not the answer.

: Fawzia Koofi is Afghanistan's first female Parliament speaker and the author of the recently-released "The Favored Daughter: One Woman's Fight to Lead Afghanistan into the Future" (Palgrave Macmillan, January 2012). She is a candidate for the president in the 2014 elections. The mother of two girls, she lives in Kabul. More Fawzia Koofi

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Santorum flip-flops on family planning

He was against Title X before he was for it. Or something. Why his "I won't ban birth control" vow can't be trusted

By Joan Walsh

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum (Credit: AP Jae C. Hong)

Topics:Rick Santorum, contraception

Whatever else he is, culture warrior Rick Santorum has never appeared to be the flip-flopper in the 2012 GOP nomination battle. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are Flip and Flop, so often have they changed their tune on healthcare policy, individual insurance mandate, climate change and other issues. (Only Gingrich, to be fair, has flip-flopped on his marriage vows.)

But Santorum is now vying for the flip-flop championship thanks to his remarkable change of heart on Title X family planning funds during Wednesday night’s debate in Mesa, Ariz. You’ll recall that over the last few days he’s been bragging about his support for Title X, to prove that mean feminists and shifty Democrats are wrong when they say he wants to take away your birth control. Strange bedfellows Rush Limbaugh and the Washington Post’s Melinda Henneberger have claimed that it’s Democrats who are making an issue out of Santorum’s contraception beliefs.

Santorum himself insists that he does not want to ban birth control. “It’s funny that I’ve been criticized by Governor Romney and Ron Paul for actually having voted for something called Title X, which is actually federal funding of contraception,” he told Charlie Rose. On Fox News he said, “I support Title X, I guess it is, and have voted for contraception and although I don’t think it works, I think it’s harmful to women, I think it’s harmful to our society.” In his 2006 book “It Takes a Family,” Santorum also touts his support for Title X.

But when Rep. Ron Paul criticized him for that stand Wednesday night, Santorum came out as an opponent of Title X. You need to read the whole exchange to appreciate Santorum’s mendacity:

SANTORUM: As Congressman Paul knows, I opposed Title X funding. I’ve always opposed Title X funding, but it’s included in a large appropriation bill that includes a whole host of other things, including…

(BOOING)

… the funding for the National Institutes of Health, the funding for Health and Human Services and a whole bunch of other departments. It’s a multi-billion-dollar bill….

ROMNEY: Just a — just a brief comment. Senator, I just saw a YouTube clip of you being interviewed where you said that you personally opposed contraceptives but that you — you said that you voted for Title X. You…

(CROSSTALK)

ROMNEY: But you used that as an argument, saying this is something I did proactively. You didn’t say this is something I was opposed to; it wasn’t something I would have done. You said this — you said this in a positive light, “I voted for Title X.”

(LAUGHTER)

SANTORUM: I think it’s — I think I was making it clear that, while I have a personal more objection to it; even though I don’t support it, that I voted for bills that included it. And I made it very clear in subsequent interviews that I don’t — I don’t support that…

(BOOING)

… I’ve never supported it, and — and have — and on an individual basis have voted against it.

So there you have it. Santorum and his friends have run to Henneberger and other journalists to whine about Salon distorting his views on contraception. Henneberger wrote not one but two pieces defending Santorum and citing his vote for Title X as proof he’s not coming for our birth control. But at a GOP debate – where the classy right-wing crowd booed the mere mention of contraception, the way they’ve booed gay soldiers and cheered for uninsured people dying as well as the death penalty – he tells us “I opposed Title X funding. I’ve always opposed Title X funding.”

I hope that clears up whatever confusion may still exist about Santorum’s views on contraception – as well as about his honesty. The debate certainly cleared up questions about whether he can win the nomination. What a debacle.

: Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More Joan Walsh

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The latest lies in the war on choice

The GOP debate made clear that the goal of the new culture war is preventing women from controlling their own lives

By Irin Carmon

U.S. Republican presidential candidates former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (Credit: Joshua Lott / Reuters)

Topics:contraception, Sex, Abortion, Abstinence

Why did the audience groan when John King asked in last night’s CNN debate whether the Republican candidates believe in contraception? It probably wasn’t because it was an asinine formulation (“Since birth control is the latest hot topic, which candidate believes in birth control, and if not, why?” as if birth control were a unicorn). It’s likely because the audience seems to have realized that it’s not a good look for Republicans to be so obviously engaged in curtailing women’s rights — which is why the candidates, or at least Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, started talking about “out of wedlock” births. And though linking births outside marriage to contraception may have seemed like a non-sequitur, it wasn’t.

Santorum said, “What we’re seeing is a problem in our culture with respect to children being raised by children, children being raised out of wedlock, and the impact on society economically, the impact on society with respect to drug use and all — a host of other things when children have children.” And Romney, having started with a by-now-half-hearted defense of “religion freedom,” jumped in eagerly to defend abstinence-only education and say, “We have to have a president who’s willing to say that the best opportunity an individual can give to their unborn child is an opportunity to be born in a home with a mother and a father.” Bonus points for raising the spectre of abortion when asked about contraception. (By comparison, Ron Paul sounded halfway sane when he said immorality, not birth control pills, kills families. Or something.)

You might wonder if contraception isn’t logically a way to reduce potential unwanted pregnancies. But this subject change is one that some social conservatives have been trying to push for awhile. It involves conflating teen pregnancy and adults choosing not to marry when they become parents, and low-income women’s access to contraception with their “failure” to marry. (And drug use, why not?) But most crucially, it involves a nostalgia for the days where women neither had a choice over when they got pregnant nor had much of a choice but to try and marry the father.

Santorum even doubled down on the suggestion that more access to contraception leads to an increased “breakdown of the family,” citing to Greta van Susteren, again, the New York Times story about the high rate of children born outside of marriage. Then teen pregnancy got thrown in, with Van Susteren asking, “Are you saying that with contraception there’s more sexual activity? That young people will be less sexually active without contraception?” Santorum replied, ”That certainly was the case in the past.”

Inconveniently, teen pregnancy is at a 40-year low, so you might wonder which past Santorum is longing for. It’s true that between 1971 and 1988, more teenagers were having sex than before, but according to public health researchers, “At the beginning of the 1990s this trend reversed.” The data also indicates that it’s not an accident, so to speak, that the U.S. still has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the world: ”A mid-1990s analysis of five developed countries showed that adolescents in the United States initiated sexual activity at an age similar to that of adolescents in Sweden, France, Canada and Great Britain but that they used contraceptives less frequently.” A 2007 study in the American Journal of Public Health concluded that between 1995 and 2002, “the decline in pregnancy risk among 18- and 19-year-olds was entirely attributable to increased contraceptive use. Decreased sexual activity was responsible for about one quarter (23 percent) of the decline among 15- to 17-year-olds, and increased contraceptive use was responsible for the remainder (77 percent).”

As for the number of adults engaging in sexual activity outside marriage, it’s also been pointed out that the trend of later marriage — which also happens to correlate to a more lasting one — is on a “collision course” with abstinence-until-marriage doctrine. (Rick Santorum may have eight children, but he married at 32, for what that data point is worth). That Times piece about how more than half of births to women under 30 are outside of marriage (though a majority of women across the age spectrum are married when they have children) summed up the debate as follows:

“The forces rearranging the family are as diverse as globalization and the pill. Liberal analysts argue that shrinking paychecks have thinned the ranks of marriageable men, while conservatives often say that the sexual revolution reduced the incentive to wed and that safety net programs discourage marriage.”

Birth control, of course, is used as a stand-in for the sexual revolution, but the suggestion is that without the pill, women might have been better able to coerce men into marriage in exchange for sex, whether those men are equipped to be partners and parents or not. Now, of course, they no longer need to solely rely on a man to support themselves (although two-partner households can certainly enjoy major economic advantages). How many women who lived through that earlier, more limited set of options would wish it on their daughters and granddaughters, as Santorum and apparently Romney do?

Conservatives also have suggested that the lure of no-strings-attached sex may have tricked women, too, into giving the milk away for free and saddled them with a baby or an abortion instead. “It is possible that women who are more confident in the reliability of their contraceptives may engage in sexual activity more often,” speculated National Review contributor Michael J. New last year in seeking to explain why the abortion rate had risen for low-income women while it had dramatically dropped among more affluent women. The implication was that Planned Parenthood handing out pills to sluts had encouraged them to wildly have sex, get pregnant and hightail it to an abortion clinic. Wealthier women, who are more likely to be married, did… what, exactly? Abstained? In fact, married couples report having sex more often than either single or partnered people, and according to census data, 78 percent of them use contraception. (There are still a million unplanned pregnancies that occur within marriage, and almost four in 10 of them end in abortion.) Meanwhile, contraceptive use among unmarried women overall is up, from 80 percent in 1982 to 86 percent in 2002.

As I wrote earlier this week, the evidence suggests that the key to reducing unplanned pregnancies, within and outside of marriage, is not less contraception — it’s more and better contraception, made more accessible alongside better information, all of which happens to correlate to your class situation. The substantive part of this “do you believe in birth control” nonsense is that the Obama administration has taken solid steps to correct the financial disparities in birth control access, by mandating that insurers fully cover it. And the fact that reproductive rights, when fully exercised, ultimately help women make choices for their own lives — whether to have children, whom to have them with and when — rather than making biology their inexorable destiny is what really rankles these Republican men.

: Irin Carmon is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @irincarmon or email her at icarmon@salon.com. More Irin Carmon

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Julian Assange prepares his next move

The WikiLeaks founder is doing TV, building a news organization and preparing his algorithmic legal defense

By Douglas Lucas

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Credit: AP)

Topics:WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, Internet Culture

In a few weeks, the U.K. Supreme Court rules on the final appeal for Julian Assange, the editor in chief of WikiLeaks; if he loses, he will be extradited to Sweden to answer questions about alleged sexual misconduct. His legal team fears extradition to Sweden ultimately would mean extradition to the U.S., where Assange is the subject of a grand jury investigation in northern Virginia.

Meanwhile, Pfc. Bradley Manning, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst, has been recommended for court-martial, accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified or otherwise restricted documents that WikiLeaks then published. Assange’s London-based lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, told a law and media seminar in Houston that he believes the humiliations and the nine months of solitary imposed on Manning were an effort to make him “falsely confess to being groomed by Assange.” (Robertson said Assange offered to answer the Swedish prosecutor’s questions by phone from the U.K., but she refused without further explanation.)

A U.S. prosecution of Assange, an Australian citizen, might involve charges of conspiring with Manning, perhaps under the 1917 Espionage Act. The law targets anyone who (or any conspiracy to) “communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated” to a “foreign” government, faction or person information “relating to the national defense which … could be used to the injury of the United States,” without proper authorization. It’s punishable by any number of years imprisonment or by death. The U.S. used the broadly written law to convict and execute the Rosenbergs for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets and to prosecute Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers. At Manning’s preliminary hearing, the prosecution argued Assange and Manning collaborated electronically to steal sensitive government information.

The prosecution has linked raw material its experts found on assorted equipment owned or used by Manning to several WikiLeaks publications. The Collateral Murder video shows a U.S. helicopter firing on several Iraqis, killing, among others, two Reuters journalists and a van driver who tried to rescue one of the pair. The classified reports of the Afghan War Diary and the Iraq War Logs detail several years of military action. Cablegate, with over a quarter-million secret State Department cables, showed U.S. Sens. John McCain, Joe Lieberman and others promising Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi military hardware. They captured Hillary Clinton instructing diplomats to swipe biometric data, passwords and credit card numbers from foreign dignitaries at the United Nations. They documented Canada’s covert promise of aid for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The Gitmo Files are memoranda describing prisoners held by the U.S. Joint Task Force at Guantanamo.

Possible criminal prosecution over this material is just one battlefront before Assange. Since December 2010, Bank of America, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union have blockaded donations to WikiLeaks, destroying, the organization says, 95 percent of its revenue. Kristinn Hrafnsson, an official WikiLeaks representative, said average monthly donations in the year before the blockade exceeded €100,000 (about $130,000) and then dropped to under €10,000 (about $13,000) afterward. In small ways, supporters have managed to maneuver past the blockade as just another pay wall, tipping WikiLeaks through the social micropayment service Flattr, purchasing official WikiLeaks T-shirts and coffee mugs, and using other creative tactics. But costs for WikiLeaks and Assange — legal fees, server upkeep and more — continue to mount.

Fighting back, DataCell, an Icelandic company that handled credit card donations destined for WikiLeaks, lodged an antitrust complaint against Visa and MasterCard in cooperation with WikiLeaks in July 2011. Visa and MasterCard, Hrafnsson said, control 97 percent of the European cardholder market. Sveinn Andri Sveinsson, a lawyer for DataCell, told me the European Commission has yet to reply, and that the Commission said in January that it needed more time. Assange has said donations bound for WikiLeaks and those for his legal defense are separate, and the organization’s website reflects this.

The separation reinforces the picture of WikiLeaks as a media organization and Assange as just one of its journalists, albeit the famous one. If the U.S. can break that picture and cast Assange as an electronic thief or as someone who solicited Manning for classified material, the nascent U.S. prosecution against him likely would have more strength. Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said at the seminar that the “U.S. government has shown the more you are acting like a journalist, the more they leave you alone. Assange putting himself in the position of a journalist puts him in a better position if he were to be charged in the United States.” (The First Amendment allows the press to publish leaks, though acts of leaking classified material may still be illegal.)

Robertson, in what seemed a forecast of Assange’s legal strategy, described three positions between journalists and sources. “First is that the journalist receives the information unknowingly such as through the traditional brown paper envelope or through the Internet. It seems no one would suggest the publisher should be liable.” A second involves intermediary contact between journalists and sources. “The source might say, ‘I’ve got information of importance; how can I get it to you?’” and “the journalist says, ‘Drop it in a certain place at midnight.’” This “arranging to receive information,” Robertson continued, “should not be criminal.” But a third position, where a “journalist contacts the source and persuades him or her to breach confidentiality of government or bribes him, then that is soliciting and that should fall under the scope of the Espionage Act.”

Assange’s electronic methods keep sources anonymous, Robertson said. “You could waterboard him for weeks, and he couldn’t name his source, because he wouldn’t know.”

Eric Schmitt, a New York Times reporter who worked with the Afghan War Diary and Iraq War Logs material alongside Assange, stated at the seminar the Times’ position that Assange was but a source for the paper. “It was impossible to know just what he’d done,” Schmitt said, and added that the Times “was not part of a crusade or the Musketeers or anything like that.”

Reporters from Der Spiegel, the Guardian and Le Monde worked with Assange and Schmitt to publish stories based on the documents. Assange considers these and other news outlets media partners, arguing that an attack on WikiLeaks becomes an attack on all free press.

In January, Assange announced a move into a more traditional medium. He’ll host a TV show titled “The World Tomorrow,” 10 weekly episodes of half-hour conversations with “key political players, thinkers, and revolutionaries from around the world,” according to a WikiLeaks press release. He’s filming the show from house arrest in England with Quick Roll Productions, whose origins are unclear. (Quick Roll Productions hasn’t replied to my request for information.)

Russia Today, rebranded to the more neutral-sounding RT in 2009, licensed the show, giving Assange an audience of over 430 million worldwide. Since the Kremlin funds RT, the licensing has drawn loud criticism. Julia Ioffe in the Columbia Journalism Review describes RT as the Kremlin’s “soft-power tool to improve Russia’s image abroad” and as often just a way for Russia “to stick it to the U.S. from behind the facade of legitimate newsgathering.” Legitimate or not, RT’s Alyona Minkovski certainly criticizes the U.S. from a pro-WikiLeaks standpoint. The young hostess has given sympathetic airtime to hackers hitting American companies over the WikiLeaks banking blockade, for example. WikiLeaks says its show “is independently produced and Assange has control” and that WikiLeaks offers a “Broadcasters license, only”; RT’s chief editor said Assange is “not an empolyee [sic]. We bought the show.” The RT deal, then, may just be a profitable way for him to get a gigantic retweet.

Though the sale might help Assange fight the banking blockade, it also fuels the narrative that he’s a glutton for personal attention. But his background is that of an intellectual activist for whom public relations is just another war zone. Victory for Assange consists in advancing “scientific journalism“ — an emphasis on primary sources — and making conspiracies distrust their internal communications due to leaks. He reasoned toward these aims while steeped in the cypherpunk email scene — discussions with other brainy, computer-programming subversives who advocated social change through the cryptographic protection of individual privacy.

As a cypherpunk, Assange wrote a deniable encryption file system that’s indicative of his mind-set. It’s named Marutukku after an Akkadian protective spirit. Imagine a “Rubberhose squad”: accusers wielding rubber hoses demand a defendant hand over his incriminating files. In his password-protected files, the defendant is hiding incriminating information along with unimportant data. If he’s using Marutukku, he can’t prove he’s surrendered all his passwords. Therefore, Assange reasons, the defendant shouldn’t reveal any of them or, depending on the squad’s psychology, just a few of the unimportant ones. Surrendering anything incriminating would encourage the squad only to beat more passwords out of him, so he has no incentive to cooperate or to sell out confederates. Once the squad understands this, they can decide between giving up or beating him just to see him suffer.

Similar logic underpins WikiLeaks: If Robertson is right, Assange can’t prove who his sources are. If Assange winds up on the witness stand, the world likely will watch him deploy with steely calm algorithms he developed years in advance for an end game just like this.

It wouldn’t delay his extradition, but Assange can make an application to the European Court of Human Rights if the U.K. Supreme Court decides against him. He also still might have an ace up his sleeve. In 2010 WikiLeaks released a file named insurance.aes256. AES-256, a currently unbreakable encryption scheme, appears to keep the file scrambled until a password is published. Assange has said little about insurance.aes256, but he did say “insurance files” would be released in a certain scenario: “If something happens to me or to WikiLeaks.”