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Go Ahead, Vote Your Identity

by Elias Isquith on May 20, 2013

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Give Jessica Valenti credit; she’s not afraid to be ahead of the curve. At least that’s one explanation for her piece at The Nation, “Why I’m Voting for Her.” We’re all to assume, as indeed we all do, that “her” is Hillary Clinton, and the voting in question is for the 2016 presidency. But Valenti’s piece isn’t about Clinton.

Or rather it’s only about Clinton insofar as she’s the most viable female presidential candidate. What Valenti’s really voting for — despite the easily levied charges of vulgar identity politics — is what she hopes are the transformative consequences of having a woman as ostensibly the most powerful person on the planet. On a less refined level, what she’s voting for is a big fuck you to misogyny, both on the individual as well as the institutional level:

Voting for a woman with the sole purpose of breaking the most important political glass ceiling in the country—possibly the world—does give me pause…And the insistence on putting gender above all other identities often means that white women take the lead…I still believe that…expecting women to vote for a female politician simply because they share the same gender is cynical and shortsighted.

But I’m also absolutely exhausted. Why?

Because campus rapists are being “punished” by research papers, not prison. Because the man in charge of curbing sexual assault in the Air Force was himself charged with sexual battery. Because the leading cause of death for pregnant women is murder by a partner. Because the Obama administration would rather play politics than make emergency contraception available to all women. Because “legitimate rape.”

It’s not that these intractable problems would magically disappear if we had a woman president. But it just might make the relentless sexism easier to bear. Maybe, despite the seemingly endless misogyny and the daily offenses, a female president would be a hopeful reminder of progress made. Because right now, I don’t see any.

Democratic and Republican parties tend to have agendas that transcend any one candidate, which is one explanation for why President Obama’s tenure has often felt like Clinton’s third term. Whether it’s candidate Clinton or candidate Cuomo or candidate O’Malley, the Democrats of 2016 will very likely be proposing a policy menu that includes legislation tackling climate change, gun safety, some new financial taxes, and maybe universal pre-K. (There will also, of course, be a bunch of stuff I can’t foresee.) If you doubt me, go back and immerse yourself in the 2007-2008 primary fight. You’ll find the substantive differences were a hell of a lot smaller than you remember.

With that in mind, the reason to pick between candidates of the same party isn’t quite so much about policy as it is about personality, temperament, culture. Having a woman as president would no doubt have an incalculable, if perhaps subtle, affect on American politics and culture. And if Valenti’s hopes prove out, it would change the world — not just the USA. Just so long as you’re otherwise OK with her party’s policies, that’s more than enough reason to vote for Hillary Clinton.

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Revising History’s First Draft: Debt Ceiling Edition

by Elias Isquith on May 18, 2013

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Journalism is the first draft of history. Or something.

OK, well, if that’s true — and despite the rather widespread antipathy most folks have toward The Media, I believe it is — then it’s pretty important that, as much as possible, we get that first draft right. This recent medium-picture piece from WaPo, on President Obama’s relationship to executive power, does not do that:

Some liberals were frustrated with Obama’s unwillingness to use his power in 2011 at the height of the showdown between the White House and GOP lawmakers over raising the debt ceiling. House Republicans were threatening to block the borrowing limit increase unless Obama agreed to major spending cuts to Medicare and Social Security.

Many Democrats believed Obama should have used his executive authority to lift the debt ceiling — a move advocates argued was legal under the 14th Amendment. Former president Bill Clinton said at the time he would have invoked that authority and “force the courts to stop me.”

Even the threat of invoking the 14th Amendment would have neutralized the GOP’s leverage, many felt. And yet Obama, believing such a move to be unconstitutional, ruled out the idea. White House aides said it was not only illegal, but also impractical for the president to take such a drastic step.

I’ve written about this before, and it’s something Digby also harps on, but it’s just not true, the idea that Obama’s timidity is the reason the summer of 2011 descended as it did. For it to be true, we’d have to believe that the president didn’t really want a Grand Bargain; and we’d have to do this in the face of basically all available evidence. Or the fact that he’s trying to get one still!

On the contrary, Obama made a conscious decision during that summer to enter into Grand Bargain negotiations, choosing to use the debt ceiling as a kind of motivator, the idea being that global financial chaos would put the Fear of God into recalcitrants on both sides. Why he wanted a Grand Bargain — whether it was out of political cravenness, principled deficit hysteria, or a combination of both — only he can really say.

But make no mistake: he wanted one. And he was fine with using the debt ceiling to get it.

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New Labor Laws in Bangladesh

by Elias Isquith on May 13, 2013

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With the death-toll having passed four digits, it looks like the government of Bangladesh, responding to its people, has decided that at least in some cases it’s not OK for Bangladesh to have different safety laws than those in wealthy democracies:

Bangladesh’s government agreed Monday to allow the country’s garment workers to form trade unions without prior permission from factory owners, the latest response to a building collapse that killed more than 1,100 people and focused global attention on the industry’s hazardous conditions.

The Cabinet decision came a day after the government announced a plan to raise the minimum wage for garment workers, who are paid some of the lowest wages in the world to sew clothing bound for global retailers. Both moves are seen as a direct response to the April 24 collapse of an eight-story building housing five garment factories, the worst disaster in the history of the global garment industry. It’s worth noting that these changes don’t have any direct connection with the disaster, which itself wasn’t the consequence of a lack of safety laws so much as a lack of enforcement. But the fact that the government’s response to an unprecedented public outcry has been raising the minimum wage and allowing trade unions — two things Bangladeshi workers no doubt wanted before 1,100 of their colleagues perished — should tell you a lot about whether or not the capital-p People of Bangladesh decide their own working conditions. Excepting a rare moment after a world-historic tragedy, they don’t.

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Wonkblog’s Blind Spot

by Elias Isquith on May 12, 2013

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Its existence is a clear net-plus for American journalism, but I must admit I have a soft-spot for snarking on Ezra Klein’s technocrat fiefdom:

Wonkblog informs us of the latest in poli-sci literature that ostensibly proves that politics pretty much has no meaning.  We already knew that it makes absolutely no difference what the president says (the “bully pulpit is bullshit” thesis.) And we know that the presidency, indeed the whole government, is completely powerless if even one small rump opposition group bands together in opposition.  We also know there is nothing we can do about it. (Well, maybe we could end the filibuster but other than that it’s all baked in the cake.)

I know she’s joking, but I admit I was a little surprised to see Digby scoff at the idea that the game is rigged. She knows, of course, the often tawdry, sometimes immoral compromises and extortions that birthed the Constitution of the United States. Isn’t it conceivable that, more than 200 years ago, a collection of fallible men came together and drafted a national constitution finely tuned to protect some people and subjugate others? Whether it’s the 18th century or today, humanity always proves itself all too human.

Digby’s main point is right, however. Wonkblog does frequently reduce politics to a bunch of superficially neat and tidy intersections of data. What she calls the “psychology, culture and heuristics” of politics are ignored, because they cannot be quantified. Wonkblog is thus like an observer to a great game of chess who watches two masters work their art, yet still insists the game is all about the rules.

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Guatemala Makes History

by Elias Isquith on May 11, 2013

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Assuming the human race is able to stave off its evident death wish for a few generations more, what happened in Guatemala on Friday may one day be seen as a major historical event. For the first time ever, a former head of state has been convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, is the man, and these are his crimes:

The villages of the Mayan highlands endured the worst of the army’s brutality in the early 1980s, the darkest period of Guatemala’s 36-year civil war. During much of the 17 months of General Ríos Montt’s rule, the army intensified a scorched-earth policy to flush out leftist guerrillas fighting from the hills.

In the cities, security forces had identified labor and student leaders as enemies of the state and snatched them off the street to be killed or disappeared.

But the military campaigns against the Mayan communities did not bother to select their targets. Military planning documents simply described all the Ixil as guerrilla supporters.

The carnage Montt not only unleashed but directed are unfathomable, but those with strong constitutions are encouraged to read Corey Robin in the London Review of Books to experience an all too visceral depiction. The numbers — 5.5 percent of the Maya Ixil, gone — can’t truly convey the depths to which Montt and his partisans sank. And he had help. Whether its perpetrators or accomplices — whether it’s death squads or enhanced interrogation units — crime on this scale requires a team effort:

In reopening such a searing chapter of Guatemala’s history, the trial deepened the already profound abyss between Guatemala’s left and right.

Allies of General Ríos Montt published newspaper supplements celebrating the army’s fight against communism. The country’s deeply conservative oligarchy, represented by a business association known by its initials as Cacif, declared in a statement that it was important to “know how to leave behind the past.”

What with its urging to move forward and not look behind, Cacif sounds like they’ve been getting some PR lessons from the White House. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that a US president has sided with the authoritarian rightwing of Latin America. As Robin shows, Montt had no bigger fan than a former POTUS, the Gipper himself:

On 5 December 1982, Ronald Reagan met the Guatemalan president, Efraín Ríos Montt, in Honduras. It was a useful meeting for Reagan. ‘Well, I learned a lot,’ he told reporters on Air Force One. ‘You’d be surprised. They’re all individual countries.’ It was also a useful meeting for Ríos Montt. Reagan declared him ‘a man of great personal integrity . . . totally dedicated to democracy’, and claimed that the Guatemalan strongman was getting ‘a bum rap’ from human rights organisations for his military’s campaign against leftist guerrillas.

“The next day,” Robin continues, “one of Guatemala’s elite platoons entered a jungle village called Las Dos Erres and killed 162 of its inhabitants, 67 of them children.”

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Senator Chuck Grassley Is a Silly Man

by Elias Isquith on May 10, 2013

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Anyone vaguely familiar with the internet might already know that, on Twitter at least, Chuck Grassley is a deeply, earnestly, unpretentiously silly man. But wouldn’t you believe it — the same holds true for his conduct as a United States senator

Years back, there was the time he obliquely sanctioned talk of death panels by decrying a hypothetical government mandate to “pull the plug on granny.” Now we have this, his first legislative salvo in opposition to immigration reform:  

Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said he worried that the current bill is “legalization first and enforcement later.”

“We need to work together to secure the border first,” said Mr. Grassley, the ranking Republican on the committee. “People don’t trust the enforcement of the law.”

Mr. Grassley has offered 77 amendments, including one that was approved Thursday that would require continuous surveillance of 100 percent of the United States border and 90 percent effectiveness of enforcement of the entire border. Currently the 90 percent rate applies only to high-risk sectors of the border.

Deploy government resources sparingly, precisely, and intelligently — no, no a Republican would never advocate such a thing. So why only 90 percent effectiveness? Why settle? Go for 110 percent, I say! No — make that 125! Until the border is patrolled by drones who have their own drones; and until all the drones’ drones have heat-seeking lasers, we cannot go forward with immigration reform. Thank goodness Chuck Grassley is around to make sure that doesn’t happen.

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Niall Ferguson’s Broken Compass

by Elias Isquith on May 7, 2013

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Tip of the hat to Jonathan Chait for making this connection in his response to Niall Ferguson’s self-beclowning:

Ferguson views debt as a moral issue, and thus despises Keynes, and Obama, for treating it as a macroeconomic tool rather than a symbol of virtue. There is always a place for superstition-riddled fulminations against immoral debt. But there isn’t much of a place anymore for such fulminations served with a side of gay-bashing.

One thing I’ll note about Ferguson’s understanding of morality — which was already quite suspect before he slipped loose on Keynes — is that it doesn’t have much time for actual living, breathing, suffering human beings. Ferguson’s got outrage to spare when it comes to those amorphous future generations to which we owe so much (but not quite enough to tackle climate change, which is another matter). But as concerns the millions upon millions of people currently suffering in some way due to Ferguson’s chosen policy, austerity, he’s got nothing much to say at all.

Similarly, while Ferguson himself might not be a day-to-day homophobe, and might not consider himself politically anti-gay, his comments on Keynes (recent and previous) indicate that when dealing in abstractions — Keynes as the historical and intellectual figure rather than the person sitting next to him at a Pete Peterson roundtable — he’s pretty comfortable relying on lazy and lizard-brained bigotries. To put it bluntly, Niall Ferguson’s moral compass has led him into becoming a bit of a dick.

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Medicaid in Oregon: Does it Really Matter?

by Elias Isquith on May 5, 2013

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God help me, I just don’t understand conservatives sometimes. I disagree with them most of the time, but I usually understand where they’re coming from. But sometimes my best acts of imagination pale in comparison to their given task. Human beings are complicated, mysterious, even phenomenal creatures; explanations that boil down to Because They’re Bad won’t cut it.

And yet, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why conservatives have seized on this Oregon Medicaid report with such tenacity and glee.

Which is not to say I don’t get the politics of the move. Those are all too easily understood. While the study found that access to Medicaid improved the mental and financial health of 10,000 Oregonians accepted into the program on a one-time basis, it also found that their overall physical health did not improve at a level deemed statistically significant. For seemingly 90-plus percent of conservatives, the end of that sentence was all they heard. It was all they needed.

That’s unfortunate, of course, because, well, the results were a lot more mixed than that! As stated, people’s mental health improved (dramatically) once they got on Medicaid. Their finances too. In fact, Kevin Drum argues that the physical health effects were more consequential than the “statistically significant” qualifier would lead you to believe: “the study showed fairly substantial improvements in the percentage of patients with depression, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and high glycated hemoglobin levels [but] the sample size of the study was fairly small, so the results weren’t statistically significant at the 95 percent level.”

Now, I’ll admit having some biases here, being someone with not-always-awesome mental health and not-always-disaster-proof personal finances — but I’m comfortable with these biases; millions of others have them too. And speaking for us hand-to-mouth sad-sacks, the prospect of greater happiness and decreased stress sounds mighty fine indeed. Certainly reason enough to support a reasonable change in public policy. Increasing happiness and stability; is that really so bad?

If the question is put in those terms, obviously, it’s a bit loaded. But most of the smarter conservative trumpeters of this report aren’t addressing this question differently, they’re more or less ignoring it altogether. A debate over whether or not it’s proper for government to expand opportunities for happiness and stability is in danger of being subsumed into a secondary, less-important, and technical issue of statistical significance. That fact that, in this study, access to Medicaid did not clear a threshold for reducing high blood pressure, this is being shoehorned into a larger argument against Medicaid itself.

It’s a red herring, an argument proffered by those who seem to understand that if the debate were held on its basic, most democratic level, they would lose. I think they’re right.

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Obamacare’s Bad Politics

by Elias Isquith on May 2, 2013

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With the implementation of Obamacare soon to really begin in earnest, some conservatives have begun preemptively crowing over what they’re convinced will be a disastrous transition period. Considering they’ve spent the past three years gumming up the bureaucratic works as much as possible, they very well may be right.

But even if they aren’t, the American Prospect’s Paul Waldman worries that the bedtime story liberals tell themselves about Obamacare, that it will soon be just as beloved by the masses as Medicare and Social Security are today — and that Republicans will consequently shy from attacking it head-on — is going to look foolish in hindsight:

One of the biggest problems…is that Obamacare isn’t a single program like Medicare that people can come to love. It’s a whole bunch of pilot programs and new regulations, many of which involve private insurance or existing programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and when people are affected by those changes they won’t necessarily see them as being part of Obamacare…Your relationship with the insurer you choose will certainly be affected deeply by the ACA’s regulations, but most people still won’t understand exactly how.

Among the consequences are that Republicans will be absolutely free to continue to blame every problem anyone has with the health care system on Obamacare, without concern of producing a backlash from the law’s supporters. Compare that to how they talk about Medicare, a program they’ve hated since the moment it was proposed. Because they know how much seniors love their Medicare, they have to pretend they would never harm a hair on the program’s lil’ ole head…

That ridiculous kabuki Republicans are forced into is what protects Medicare from the shivs they’d love to jam into its hide. But nobody is going to shout, “Take your hands off my Obamacare!” because Obamacare isn’t going to be perceived as a thing you have. It’s just a bunch of rules governing how other things run.

I recall this argument being raised a few years ago, back when wild supposition about a bill years away from implementation was still cool. I thought it was probably right then, and still think so now.

It’s certainly a fact of American politics that the public, by and large, has no idea idea how much and what their government does. And when you’ve got a program like Obamacare, one that in so many ways embodies what is called the submerged state, a disconnect between what the public gets and what it thinks it gets — and why! — is highly likely if not outright inevitable.

So let’s stipulate that the public will never conceive of a thing called Obamacare, that Obamacare is a panoply of changes, most of them bureaucratic, that will improve people’s lives to a degree almost inverse to its presence in their consciousness. Next question is easy: why did Democrats put so much at stake for a bill that, just on the political level, is kinda-sorta terrible?

Well, this is where ideology comes in — particularly the fact that America remains very much enthralled to the ideology behind the free market. I know a lot of true-blue market absolutists would find conflating Obamacare with the free market risible; but that’s a product of temporal partisan bickering rather than a true philosophical divide. And while more than a few liberals went overboard, it’s still true that, fundamentally, Obamacare is patterned off of center-right proposals.

Living as we are in a time when, at least among elites, free-market dogma seems immune to the intellectual disfavor you’d expect after the worst financial crisis in 80 years, the prospects for progressive legislation that doesn’t take the form of the submerged state are simply lousy.

To put it simply, what chances could a less market-oriented, more statist plan truly have in an environment where Obamacare, a consummately neoliberal (i.e., liberal ends through conservative means) bill is fast-transformed into the trojan horse with a panel of Dr. Kevorkians inside? Until that question seems like an outlandish, Cassandra-esque hypothetical, the submerged state is probably the best liberals can hope to get.

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There Is No Politics of Austerity

by Elias Isquith on April 29, 2013

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I don’t mean to turn this blog into Shit My Krugman Says, but this, on the underlying politics of austerity, is just too on-the-mark to ignore:

[T]he anti-Keynesian position is, in essence, political. It’s driven by hostility to active government policy and, in many cases, hostility to any intellectual approach that might make room for government policy. Too many influential people just don’t want to believe that we’re facing the kind of economic crisis we are actually facing.

I think you can extend it further. Because the other side, the folks Krugman is lumping together as “pro-Keynesian,” are trumpeting policies they’d support even if the economy was better. (I’m excluding economists from this latter group; for them, the term Keynesian holds a very specific meaning, one removed from partisan politics.) I’d think the idea of giving money to the poor was a good one even if unemployment were at 4 percent. And I’d want to raise taxes on capital gains and sundry financial transactions even if quarterly growth were robust instead of middling.

As a result of my thinking this way, I don’t take seriously any talk of “austerity politics,” as if it were something fundamentally new or distinct from politics during times of plenty. It’s not — not really. Liberals wanted more-active government during the years of bubble-fueled growth, and they still do now. Conservatives wanted low taxes and fewer government services when incomes were rising, and they still do now.

The economy contracts and grows. Individual politicians ascend and fall. The surroundings and the players change. But the song remains the same.

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