Homo Economicus

If people took and kept jobs solely because for monetary reason, Chris Rickert's marginally coherent column in today's WSJ wouldn't be the insulting bit of nonsense it is. People work at whatever for reasons of social stature, sense of personal fulfilment and so forth.

Consequently, teachers are taking early retirements because for years now the Conservative and their flim flam educational "reformers" have been attacking teachers for years now.  And now armed with the power granted them by a mendacious dope and unopposed by administrators who ought to know better, they are harassing teachers by arbitrarily changed conditions at work, like start and planning time, and, in general, pursuing a series of policies designed to destroy moral.

Chris Rickert: Missing the Point

In his column today, Chris Rickert furthered his reputation for missing the point and engaging in obfuscation. On the Cronon affair he writes:

The state Republican Party responds by seeking to comb through his university email account and suddenly everyone from the New York Times editorial page to The Atlantic magazine is condemning the request as a fishing expedition aimed at intimidating Cronon and his learned ilk from speaking out.
It was. But so what?

When one party to a dispute is engaged in wrong-headed behavior you criticized them for it. No one should, and as far as I know, no one has argued that professors ought never be subject to open records requests. For example, emails and other documents dealing with hiring, promotion, and tenure decision are, regardless of motivation, clearly legitimate. In this case, however, as Rickert understand there is no misuse of office and the Republicans are engaged in intimidation. He, and the WSJ more generally, ought to condemn this.

So he is a bit dim. But he is also dishonest. Remember It Happened One Night? Clark Gable played a sort of loud-mouthed know-it-all reporter who really didn't know it all. He was constantly saying he could write a book about, for example, hitch hiking even as he failed to get a ride. Rickert tries to engage know it all and cynical discourse and, of course, he fails to understand what is really at stake.  In the same column, Rickert writes:

A heretofore below-the-radar UW-Madison history professor named William Cronon writes a blog post saying that — surprise! — political parties sometimes take their cues from ideological organizations and seek to crush their opponents.

But here's the thing, Walker and his ilk, the real party of let them eat cake, represent themselves as independent voices for what Wisconsonians and Americans more generally really want. By linking their agenda to a shadowy group of ideological fanatics Cronon exposed this claim as a lie. Walker and his cronies and their political allies are, in fact, acting as the agents of outsiders who have dedicated their lives to advaning the interests of a tiny minority of extraordinarily wealthy men and women even though this means that they have to legislate against the vast majority of their fellows' material, moral, and political interests.

Much like Gable's character, Rickert, predictably really, fails to understand why the Republicans are so upset at Cronon: he exposed the men and women behind the Great and Powerful Oz. And he fails to understand the damage this does to the Republicans' claims of independence, honesty, and forth-rightness.

What is is about Neoliberals and their persistent inability to face reality?

Here in Wisconsin: Press Blackout Edition

Today's Wisconsin State Journal has an editorial explaining why they haven't said word one about the Cronon Affair. Phil Brinkman's argument:

First, recipients of open records requests seldom welcome such intrusions. It’s invasive, it risks exposing them and others to embarrassment or worse.

This, obviously, doesn't hold true for Cronon. He tap dances a bit about the special problems in grabbing a professor's emails, because of chilling academic freedom and students' rights to privacy and then asks and answers the key question:

Is the party’s use of the records law in this case “nakedly political,” as Cronon asserts? Most assuredly.

The fact that the Republican Party is seeking to use a legitimate tool that promotes transparency to attack a critic even as their most recent anti-worker bill is under judicial scrutiny for violating the State's laws concerning legislative transparency isn't a story? No wonder newspapers are in trouble.

Brinkman is also clear that

So why not cover the debate itself? Over the years, this newspaper has made hundreds of records requests, many of them unwelcome and unpleasant experiences for the recipient. It would be hypocritical for us to suggest — and a story would suggest it — that some records requests are beyond the pale.

I just don’t believe that.

 This is just remarkably incoherent.  He accepts that the open record request is nakedly political and that the opr can or will have the effect of stiffling debate yet rejects that notion that political parties attacking citizens for engaging in criticism of the political party is a story worth covering. Amazing really.

Also Chris Rickert's (humorous?) suggestion that the UW-Madison fire random people is further evidence that the WSJ hates it's readers.

Neoliberalism Also Hates the Truth

Ronald Reagan had difficulty telling the truth. Why? Because much of what he did was immoral and the rest idiotic. Take, for example, his violation of the Constitution.

"The charge has been made that the United States has shipped weapons to Iran as ransom payment for the release of American hostages in Lebanon, that the United States undercut its allies and secretly violated American policy against trafficking with terrorists....  Those charges are utterly false....  We did not--repeat--did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we."
--President Reagan, television address, November 13, 1986

"... [I] was not fully informed on the nature of one of the activities."
--President Reagan, referring to the fact that money from weapons sales to Iran was diverted to the contras, November 25, 1986

"The simple truth is, 'I don't remember--period.'"
--President Reagan, responding to a question about when he authorized arms shipments to Iran, February 2, 1987
"A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages.  My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not."
--Reagan in a television address is forced to acknowledge "the facts and the evidence" uncovered by the commission that Reagan appointed to look into the matter, March 4, 1987
"I told you all the truth that first day after...everything hit the fan."
--President Reagan, June 11, 1987

Sure, he told the truth when he was caught lying. 

The same is true of his record of tax increases.  He couldn't face the fact that the Neoliberal economic theory didn't work; so he introduced the idea of "revenue enhancers" to replace tax increases. George Will actually approved of this sort of intellectual dishonesty.  Of course, Will aided and abetted Reagan's dishonesty.

More recently, Republicans have begun to accuse their opponents of doing what the Republicans are, in fact, doing. Cronon becomes a bully because independent news agencies and other take rightfully abject to their bullying of Cronon. As just one of the many examples.

Why do I bring this up? The other day, I suggested that Chris Rickert was an idiot. On further consideration, I have concluded that he is, in fact, someone with either a sketch grasp of reality or someone who, like Reagan, enjoys obfuscating and, like the Republicans, argues that black is, in fact, white.

A couple of days ago, in a column in which he insisted that the protesters are morally no better than the forces seeking to destroy workers, he wrote:

I admit I've been taking the protesters to task, though I don't necessarily oppose their aim. Mostly, I'm just temperamentally given to rooting for the underdog (in Madison, that would be conservatives), just as I suspect a lot of the louder protesters (especially those who don't belong to unions) are temperamentally driven by the need to be part of something bigger than themselves.

See what he did there? The protests aren't "liberal" Madison versus some besieged minority of Conservatives. Its workers versus Republicans dead set on destroying their incomes. He may "suspect" that a lot of the protesters are motivated by, what he sees as a base, desire to matter. But the fact of the matter is that almost all of the protesters are motivated by the desire to stop Neoliberals from destroying workers wages, which -- to be fair -- is "something bigger than themselves but that's actually a good thing.

In his column on letting the UW-Madison become part privatized and, I'd argue, eventually destroyed, he asserted

I say, let the cake-eaters have the UW-Madisons of the worlds. There are plenty of people out there like my wife who would succeed without them.

It's not clear who the "cake-eaters" are supposed to be, although the most likely candidates are the students, facaulty, and staff at UWM. The other referent here is, obviously, Marie Antoinette, who didn't say anything like that even though myth has it that she did. What he's done here  is to ignore that it is the Republicans who, in an orgy of salary cutting and budget slashing, are the the contemporary Marie Antionettes and the current students, faculty and staff the victims of their short-sighted budget slashing and related etc.

In just two columns he manages to recapitulate the worst of Neoliberal rhetorical flourishes. WSJ readers deserve better.

Here in Wisconsin: Chris Rickert is an Idiot Edition

Rickert is a columnist for the Wisconsin State Journal as near as I can make out he is a Neoliberal. Today he rails against the "elitism" of the UW-Madison, because it is a great school it must be elitist, and he thinks that it becoming a part-private and more expensive school is great because, like all Neoliberals, he hates him some edumacated elites. This is all bad enough, and his recent columns have been increasing pointless and badly written, but in the course of his misdirected hatred of the elites, he writes:

I don’t know if she would be able to afford to do the same today, but I do know she would have been just as successful in life had she been forced to attend a cheaper, less prestigious school.

How, on earth, could he know something like that? The evidence right now suggests that students who attend "elite" institutions are over represented in the halls of government and business. The last thing in the world we need to do is take a great institution of higher learning and give and privatize; rather we need to work to  better distribute society's wealth and stop thinking like profit mongers, who are next but one to war mongers in their responsibility for the mess in which we are currently mired.