From Eric Alterman, The American Prospect <[email protected]>
Subject Altercation: The Myth of Those Lazy UI Recipients
Date July 2, 2021 1:41 PM
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

The Myth of Those Lazy UI Recipients
A Wall Street Journal story demonstrates how not to prove that
unemployment benefits deter job-seeking

Politico Playbook

began the week by noting that "the NYT and WSJ both published stories
Sunday focused on Missouri that explored whether cutting federal
unemployment benefits is helping employers fill vacancies. And ... they
reached opposite conclusions."

Here's what the Politico smarty-pants didn't tell you: Yes, Patricia
Cohen's story in the Times

and Eric Morath and Joe Barrett's story in the Journal

both reported on the results at the same jobs fair at the Element Hotel
in St. Louis and reached differing conclusions about whether cutting off
unemployment benefits spurred people to look for jobs. In making the
case that "Americans are leaving unemployment rolls more quickly in
states cutting off benefits" and thereby "ending the aid could push more
people to take jobs," however, the Journal story relied on some
decidedly sketchy evidence. First, it noted a drop in the number of
those applying for jobless benefits, which it tied to Missouri's
cutoff, but the article's authors relied on a statistic that actually
predated that cutoff. (They tied it simply to its announcement.) Second,
in noting a significant rise in the number of applicants at the Element
jobs fair over its previous one, the article failed to mention that the
hotel had instituted two separate wage hikes in the previous months
(including one that occurred just two days earlier), thereby making the
jobs it was offering far more attractive. For her part, Cohen actually
traipsed down there to interview the people who attended the fair and
found that most of them were not collecting unemployment benefits. Even
so, the Journal piece will likely be deployed by Republican legislators
looking to "inspire" people to seek shitty jobs by cutting off their
benefits.

Morning Consult has released an extremely useful eight-country survey
headlined "U.S. Conservatives Are Uniquely Inclined Toward Right-Wing
Authoritarianism Compared to Western Peers: Global Morning Consult data
reveals a distinctive authoritarian bent in the American right
."
Highlights include the facts that "26% of the U.S. population qualified
as highly right-wing authoritarian ... twice the share of the No. 2
countries, Canada and Australia," along with the fact that "the beliefs
that voter fraud decided the 2020 election, that Capitol rioters were
doing more to protect than undermine the government and that masks and
vaccines are not pivotal to stopping COVID-19 were similarly prevalent
among right-leaning Americans and those that scored high for right-wing
authoritarianism."

You can see what they mean in this nutty article in Tablet, which argues
that "the Biden administration has made a point of treating the
nonviolent Jan. 6 offenders more harshly than other Americans who have
come to the Capitol to exercise their First Amendment rights." That's
right: They are "America's new political prisoners
,"
as Tablet laments. You can see some of that nonviolence in this
incredible Times video
.
(Also, unrelated, but bonus points to the same Trump-friendly Jewish
website for its stories explaining that, sadly, "Trump's defeat is
likely to embolden those grifters who prospered most in this corrupt
intellectual environment
."
We are also informed that "progressives could legalize polyamorous
marriage by October even if Congress opposed it
."
I suppose we should be grateful that this story does not sound the alarm
for "man on dog
"
marriages as well.

Anyway, back to authoritarianism: The Morning Consult survey should
inspire an update on the argument over Seymour Martin Lipset's 1968
argument about "working-class authoritarianism
,"
For more background on the concept, here

is a nice short comment on the predictive power of the Frankfurt
School's writings on the topic-particularly Max Horkheimer and
Theodor W. Adorno's edited volume The Authoritarian Personality
, discussed by Alex
Ross in a New Yorker comment at the dawn of Trump's presidency. And
here
's a
lengthy academic study that will require library or some other access.
In any case, any careful analysis of contemporary trends needs to take
note of just how much improved over Hillary Clinton's numbers were
Biden's 2020 totals among white non-college educated voters
,
something Eric Levitz

points out that George Packer's new book totally misses, to the
considerable detriment of his thesis.

In related research, this study
, which
you will need to access through some sort of research consortium or
university, indicates something we "knew" but which now has been
demonstrated with peer-reviewed evidence. Its authors put it thus: "[A]t
least in a US context, we do see evidence of a decrease in information
effects on key, political issues-immigration, same-sex adoption and
gun laws, in particular-in the period 2004-2016. This offers some
novel, empirical evidence for the 'post-truth' narrative." What that
means is that right-wing disinformation is succeeding in convincing
people of the lies its purveyors are peddling. (I believe I was the
person who coined the term "post-truth presidency" in my 2004 book When
Presidents Lie
,
nicely reviewed by John Dean here
.

Related, alas, to all of the above is the fact that a court has ruled
that what goes on inside Fox News is just as toxic as the pollution it
spews forth into the news ecosphere. Despite Fox News's claims to have
repaired the company's poisonous workplace culture since the firing of
founder and chairman Roger Ailes

in July 2016, Rupert Murdoch
's
media empire has effectively admitted to ongoing misconduct that
includes sexual harassment, discrimination, and retaliation against
victimized employees
,
and has agreed to pay a million-dollar fine for what New York City's
Commission on Human Rights called "a pattern of violating of the NYC
Human Rights Law." (Alleged "sex criminal" Ed Henry has more to say
about the network's behind-the-scenes funhouse here
.)

The settlement agreement, reached last week with the human rights
commission, contains the largest-ever financial penalty assessed in the
agency's six-decade history, and also requires Fox News to remove
mandatory confidential arbitration clauses from the contracts of on-air
talent along with other employees and contributors for a period of four
years when they file legal claims under the city's human rights law
outside of the company's internal process. (It does not get into the
problem of Tucker Carlson receiving messages from aliens speaking
through his wisdom teeth; at least I think that's what this story

says.)

It's time yet again for an update on Mets pitcher Jacob deGrom's
potentially best season ever in the modern era, the estimable Bob Gibson

notwithstanding. To wit:
* On June 26 against the Phillies, deGrom retired the side in order in
the first inning, making it 37 straight batters that he's retired in
the first inning across his last seven starts.

* DeGrom's 13 consecutive starts with two earned runs or fewer allowed
to start the season is tied for the sixth-longest such streak since
earned runs became official in 1913.

* DeGrom's 0.50 ERA through his first 12 starts was the lowest by any
pitcher

since at least 1913. It is now 0.69, or about half of what Gibson
achieved in his best season.

* DeGrom allowed three hits or fewer in 11 straight starts, the longest
streak ever by a non-opener starting pitcher.

* Going back to last season, deGrom has not allowed more than five hits
in 18 consecutive starts, the second-longest streak of all time.

* He's allowed five base runners or fewer in all 13 of his starts.
Excluding openers, no other starting pitcher has had more than nine
starts in a row allowing five base runners or fewer.

* Oh, and he's hitting .414.

I got those stats here
.
You know who has barely touched this incredible story? This newspaper
, the one that thinks the
imperialistic, overcharging, underperforming, Steinbrenner-owned Yankees
are the only baseball team in the city.

Odds and Ends

Speaking of deGrom's casting of a pall-like silence
on the streets of Philadelphia
,
I don't want to gush over Springsteen's reopening Broadway, what
with a top ticket price of over a thousand bucks. I'd prefer to note
that 16 years ago this week, in yet another (this time real-life)
installment of "Legends of Springsteen
," Bruce played six songs
to airport staff in the middle of the night during a layover in Iceland.
It remains the only time Bruce has ever "performed" in that cold
country. You may have heard that the Foo Fighters reopened Madison
Square Garden and played this horribly cheesy version of the Bee Gees'
"You Should Be Dancing ."
Compare its lameness with the seriously wonderful version of "Stayin'
Alive " Bruce and the band
did in February 2014 in Brisbane. Also, I'll bet you never heard
Bruce's song " Freedom Cadence
" before. I hadn't.
It's from the 2017 movie Thank You for Your Service
.

The late great Pete Hamill got a street in Park Slope, Brooklyn, named
after him this week. Here
he is with (the also great) Jonathan Schwartz speaking about the
even-greater-than-both-of-them-put-together Frank Sinatra
(saluted by guess which
fellow New Jersey native) on the occasion of the publication of Pete's
book Why Sinatra Matters
.
It's a good little book, but in this opinion, the best thing about it
was that its commercial success led its publisher to say to his staff:
"Who else can we get to write about someone else that 'matters.'"
The answer from my editor, "How about Eric Alterman on Bruce Springsteen
?"
has led to a constant stream of tiny checks, now 22 years later.

Finally, here 's the video of the talk I
did with professors Tom Patterson and Robert Shapiro on June 24
sponsored by the Network for Responsible Public Policy that was inspired
by this Altercation column
.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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