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Immigration Reform’s Big Tent

by Elias Isquith on April 21, 2013

FarmLabor

Here’s a pretty good New York Times piece on whether or how the Boston Marathon bombing has affected their views on immigration reform. (It’s got a touch of Jane Goodall with the plebes; but, well, it’s the Times.) If the piece is anything to go by, it looks like most folks’ opinions haven’t been changed one way or the other. People who hated immigration reform before hate it even more now. Those that supported it before still support it now. Surprise!

It’s nice, though, that there’s a wide-ish swathe of support for reform of some kind. As tends to be the case with large political coalitions, however, there’s a lot of variation among people’s understanding of what, exactly, they’re supporting. This gentleman from Malvern — near where I grew up! — probably doesn’t envision a post-reform America the same way, say, Jose Antonio Vargas does:

Like nearby Wayne, Malvern is part of a suburban belt that has grown more Democratic in recent elections. Attitudes toward immigration reform seem to be changing, in part along generational lines. Frank Cunningham, a 27-year-old accountant, said that he, unlike his father, favors a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country.

“The way I was raised, my dad says, ‘If you come into the country illegally, you don’t deserve to be here,’ ” Mr. Cunningham said. “But I’m wondering who is going to do those jobs?”

It is what it is, as they say. Or: politics makes strange bedfellows. Whichever.

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The Grand Bargain’s Best Last Chance

by Elias Isquith on April 13, 2013

Obama talking Medicare Social Security cuts

I’ll be honest: when it comes to President Obama’s willingness to use Social Security as a bargaining chip, my outrage reserves are tapped. I understand why people are upset over the New York Times report that Obama’s budget will include cuts to Social Security; and I wouldn’t ask folks to be quiet since causing a ruckus is the essence of activism. I’m also on-record (a.k.a. the internet) in my belief that progressives should go total Tea Party-level obstructionist in the face of such a cut.

All the same, I related to Jonathan Chait’s response to the news, which was to call Barack Obama’s willingness to trade Social Security for higher taxes no news at all. Obama’s said as much for years. Examples are easy to find, and Digby has been tracking them since at least 2009. What they all show is that this news is not news. And it’s certainly not a reversal; or at least it’s not a reversal from the position taken at the beginning of the first term. As long as he’s been president, he’s been this way.

My take on the partisan politics is similar to Chait’s, too. There’s a flailing characteristic to the leak. For one thing, the proposal is a textbook case of lipstick on a pig politics; Republicans already turned this framework down during the fiscal cliff negotiations. As Chait puts it:

Mainly this appears to be a message strategy aimed at advocates of BipartisanThink, who have been blaming Obama for failing to offer the plan he has in fact been offering. The strategy is that, by converting their offer to Boehner from an “offer” to a “budget,” it will prove that Obama is Serious…

[T]his strikes me as completely ridiculous.

It is completely ridiculous. But if Republicans were to actually realize what’s within their reach — getting a Democratic president not only agree to cut but offer to cut Social Security — and took yes for an answer, the ridiculous would become the real all too quickly.

But a Grand Bargain can’t become law unless it gets through the House. And no bill that conservative Republicans regard as a sell-out to Obama would get out of the House without significant Democratic support. Without the Party’s Progressive Caucus’s support, the numbers even on the Democratic side don’t add up.

What it all means is that if third time’s the charm when it comes to Obama’s Grand Bargain, there will be an empire’s worth of pressure on Congressional liberals to get with the program — even if the program is cutting a sacred Democratic-created program. The logic will somewhat approximate that described so memorably by Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight and his monologue about “the plan”:

On that score, Greg Sargent of the Washington Post reports progressive leader Raul Grijalva laying down a line in the sand, refusing to vote for a cut, full stop. But it unfortunately sounds like Grijalva is speaking very much for himself:

Asked if he would vote against any deal containing Chained CPI, Grijalva said: “I’ve made the commitment that if this is part of it, I will not vote for it. I can’t support it.”

However, asked if he thought a sizable bloc of liberals would vote No, Grijalva demurred, and — in something that will bring back bad memories for the left — cited the health care debate as an example. “At this point, I don’t know,” he said. “We’ve been through this before with the public option. The motivation will be there to close ranks and support the president.”

Oh, Tea Party Republicans, don’t fail us now…

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The Politics Of Envy

by Elias Isquith on April 30, 2012

Anti-union

Have you noticed the strain of contemporary right-wing thinking in which the speaker purports to be advocating something egalitarian in nature, but is actually using envy to fuel even greater inequality? It’s a slightly more sophisticated version of the “We must repeal Obamacare in order to save our children” line. When done correctly, it’s really an impressive move — the kind of trick the word “sophistry” only begins to describe. And if you haven’t seen it done yet, you will soon. Ever since the crash in ’08 sent deficits and debt sky-high,self-styled fiscal conservatives have been tossing out this bait-and-switch like little old ladies toss breadcrumbs to pigeons.

Speaking of little old ladies: most of the time, the tactic is used as an excuse to gut the New Deal and the Great Society and its intended audience is youngins like me. Depending on their level of integrity, these advocates of generational struggle point to Medicare and/or Social Security as, in one of their favorite locutions, ticking time-bombs just waiting to blow up (in about 20-30 years) and ruin America’s future. In and of itself, their argument may be hysterical, but it’s not absurd. The trajectory of Medicare expenditures is problematic, what with the Baby Boomers’ joints getting creakier by the hour; and Social Security, while in much better shape than many have been led to believe, could use some tweaks between now and two-to-three decades from now.

But if you listened to some of these people, you’d think Chicken Little was a study in even keel composure.

Anyway, what got me thinking about all of this was a recent piece by Connor Kilpatrick of Jacobin and The eXiled Online, a mea culpa of sorts inspired by a recent Esquire broadside against Baby Boomers. Kilpatrick had written a similar analysis focusing on the widening generational gap in futures and politics; but while his was a kinda/sorta tongue-in-cheek (i.e., like any other piece in eXile) call for actual war between these different cohorts, the writer in Esquire ended up using many of the same points to reach a very different conclusion:

Stephen Marche’s Esquire essay, “The War Against Youth,” left me feeling queasy, and by the end of it, I was ready to commit seppuku over a dog-eared copy of Das Kapital. So please excuse me while I indulge in a little Maoist self-criticism.

Marche’s essay hit all the same notes I hit. He even used the same David Frum quote. (Hi, Stephen!) And yes, he wants you to know that he stands firmly with the young and righteous Millennials. So how is it that his conclusions are straight out of a Wall Street Journal editorial? It was like being forced to watch my doppelgänger hack up an innocent: I didn’t do it, but jesus—except for the whole fiendish-grin and no-pupils thing, that looks a hell of a lot like me swinging that axe.

Kilpatrick’s article is a fun read in its entirety, but here’s the part where my mind went “ding!”:

Generational politics allows the ruling class to dress up our economic catastrophe as simply an ‘imbalance’ between two generations of wage-earners. And once they’ve spun that tale, then they can go in and clean everyone out in the name of fiscal and intergenerational harmony.

And it’s not just the liberals. Even the GOP indulges in Millennial concern-trolling, though you won’t see them shed a crocodile tear for Occupy—unlike their Democratic peers they never made it with a hippie. But most every week, turn on C-SPAN and you can hear some House Republican screeching about how “entitlements” shackle our grandchildren with debt. So they, too, are “on our side.”

This is where our era’s brand of puritanical liberalism–with all its moralism about consumer culture and finger-waving about greed and excess–clears a path for this con. Just another variation on the same Protestant theme. So you can understand why overlords like Pete Peterson want you to see the Boomers as living the life on your dime. Not so that you’ll demand the same and more, but to convince you that healthcare on-demand and a decent retirement are luxuries no one should have–except for the wealthy, of course.

OK, so here are the two places I went. First, because I am who I am, I thought of Bob Dylan. Specifically, I thought of Dylan’s “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” this line in particular:

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he’s in

And the second thing I thought of was this Walter Russell Mead post (full disclosure: former Professor of mine) on the ongoing brouhaha between staff and ownership of the New York Times:

Schadenfreude alert: readers, and especially those who don’t much like the New York Times, should make sure they are not eating soup or holding hot liquids before viewing the video below. Uncontrollable gales of laughter stemming from excessive levels of schadenfreude may cause spilling and staining. …

New York Times staffers, like suffering proles all over the world, belong to a labor union, and over the years the union has negotiated a very comfy defined benefit retirement plan. The staffers love the plan.

But economic reality is intruding. Times management, perhaps reading the coverage in its own pages about the companies and cities going bankrupt due to unsustainable union-bargained pension systems, wants to make a change. It wants to offer a defined contribution plan, instead. Workers and the company pay into a 401(k) plan, workers invest it, and when they retire, that is the amount they have towards their income.

It’s an entitled blue deer, meet onrushing truck kind of moment. …

Nobody in the video talks about the changes in the news business that threatens to drive the Times into a deep dive. Nobody talks about the prospect of future significant staff cuts if costs can’t be contained. None of them discuss the incongruity between their own naive sense of entitlement and what is going on in the cities, companies and countries they cover.

They just want the money.

Annoyingly, the video embed in the original post isn’t working, so we can’t see for ourselves what an “entitled blue deer” looks like. (Probably like this.) But that’s not really the point.

Instead, notice how Mead frames all of this: employees of the Times are entitled, naïve, and probably a bunch of other not-so-good things Mead had to constrain himself from writing because they have the audacity to protest when management wants to change their contract even though life sucks for a whole bunch of other people. How dare they protest against switching to a 401(k) — which, incidentally, might actually not be such a great system — when there are so many people out of work, out of their homes, out of options, and so on? And for what? Money! Only a union member…

To Mead, the bad circumstances afflicting millions is not seen as a tragic and unnecessary ongoing crisis; it’s the yardstick by which any and all of us not-so-unlucky ones are expected to gauge our own circumstances and demands. Mead actually goes further — he implies that the whole reason we’re in this mess to begin with is because of rapacious unions. (This is a running theme of his, portraying the United States’ relatively meager welfare state and labor movement as the source of our impending destruction.) There are perhaps better examples of Marx’s theory that unemployment in a capitalist society serves as a tool through which workers are cowed into submission, but this one is still pretty damn good.

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Solitary Confinement In California: The Beginning Of The End?

by Elias Isquith on April 3, 2012

An encouraging report from the New York Times indicates that the tide may be turning — slowly — against the widespread and near-indiscriminate use of solitary confinement in prison:

Ernesto Lira is not a murderer. He has never participated in a prison riot. The crime that landed him behind bars was carrying three foil-wrapped grams of methamphetamine in his car.

But on the basis of evidence that a federal court later deemed unreliable, prison officials labeled Mr. Lira a gang member and sent him to the super-maximum-security unit at Pelican Bay State Prison, the state’s toughest correctional institution.

There, for eight years, he spent 23 or more hours a day in a windowless 7.6-by-11.6-foot cell, allowed out for showers and exercise. His view through the perforated steel door — there were 2,220 holes; he counted them — was a blank wall, his companions a family of spiders that he watched grow, “season by season, year by year.”

Mr. Lira insisted that he was not a gang member, to no avail. He was eventually vindicated and is now out of prison, but he still struggles with the legacy of his solitary confinement. He suffers from depression and avoids crowds. At night, he puts blankets over the windows to block out any light. “He’s not the same person at all,” said his sister Luzie Harville. “Whatever happened, the experience he had in there changed him.”

California has for decades used long-term segregation to combat gang violence in its prisons — a model also used by states like Arizona with significant gang problems. Thousands of inmates said to have gang ties have been sent to units like that at Pelican Bay, where they remain for years, or in some cases decades. But California corrections officials — prodded by two hunger strikes by inmates at Pelican Bay last year and the advice of national prison experts — this month proposed changes in the state’s gang policy that could decrease the number of inmates in isolation.

Depending on how aggressively California moves forward — critics say that the changes do not go far enough and have enough loopholes that they may have little effect — it could join a small but increasing number of states that are rethinking the use of long-term solitary confinement, a practice that had become common in this country over the past three decades…

“California really pioneered the mass segregation of gang members,” said David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project. “So California could start to show the way out.”

There’s a lot about today’s correctional system that I believe posterity will look upon with confusion, shame, and horror. It’d be a gross exaggeration to say the endurance of the present system is a collective moral failure on the level of slavery or Jim Crow — but it’s on that continuum. It’s our era’s shame.

And, as Atul Gawande laid-out a few years ago in the New Yorker, prolonged isolation is one of the most hideous aspects of the status quo. Though it’s debatable whether or not it fits today’s legal definition of torture, anyone familiar with the repeatedly documented, consistent effects of the practice would struggle to deny that, by any common sense understanding of the term, it is cruel punishment of the utmost degree.

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Ladies’ Man: Rick Santorum And His Female Companions

by Elias Isquith on March 24, 2012

There’s a grating air of clueless exoticism to this New York Times profile of Rick Santorum’s female supporters, as if the reality of socially conservative women strikes the Times as a kind of American dodo; but the piece also offers a valuable glimpse of a worldview that is most decidedly not my (nor, I’d guess, your) own. Still, I think there’s something overdetermined about the way in which the author tries to ascribe Santorum’s relative popularity amongst women — which is inconsistent as well as relative — to characteristics of Santorum himself, rather than the paucity of options for a Christian Right voter to choose from.

Of course, with his nearly half-decadecentury-long marriage, five children, and squeaky clean personal life, you’d imagine Values Voters would find Romney to be more than acceptable. And it would be so, if not for the whole Mormon thing. So that leaves them with Ron Paul, a man whose hard-right religious views often go under-appreciated or unknown, but who also has focused his campaign primarily on esoteric notions of Constitutionalism and Austrian economics rather than social issues. (He supports ending the War on Drugs, to boot.) And it leaves them with Newt Gingrich, whose past transgressions Values Voters never could fully forgive, despite momentary flirtations with the idea earlier in the campaign.

With Bachmann long-gone, Huckabee a DNP, and Herman Cain’s revealing himself to be either a sexual predator, a serial philanderer, or both, there’s really no one left on the stage for these people to claim as their own but Santorum. He’s their Mitt Romney; they’re settling.

For the few women who are unabashed fans of Santo, however, the appeal seems to be less-grounded in rational estimations of maximizing value. In place of such economical thinking, they substitute an appropriately old-fashioned vision of what it means to be a leader: virile, uncompromising, dominant. There’s a touch of the Sarah/Trig Palin appeal, too, with Santorum’s trisomy 18 positive daughter, Bella. The idea of Santorum as a He-man Conqueror is pretty absurd when you remember that this is the man who has brought sweater-vests to the forefront of 2012′s political pop culture; but I suppose beggars and choosers and all that.

Anywho, there was one quote in particular in the piece that caught my eye. It reminded me of Corey Robin’s oft-repeated claim that conservatism has historically been about power struggles in the private rather than public sphere, and it’s opposition to the loss of dominion in the former rather than the latter that truly animates — defines, even — the Anglo-American Right. Check out how one of the two songstresses above describes Santorum’s manifest superiority:

When the Harris sisters’ song, “Game On,” got wide attention on the Internet this month, it made them minor celebrities in conservative circles. People sing along to the words, “We’ve finally got a man who will stand for what is right.”

“If he can run his household, he can run the country. Amen!” Haley Harris, 18, told the Mandeville crowd.

Recall what was one of the late Christopher Hitchens’ more effective lines of attack during his frequent public debates over religion, calling life under God — at least as most fundamentalists portray Him — to be like living in “a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea.” For the time being, Santorum is as close as women like Harris are going to get to really making the United States God’s country. Thank Heavens.

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Is Social Mobility Overrated?

by Elias Isquith on January 5, 2012

Socialmobility

A pretty good piece in the New York Times today about social mobility in America or, more accurately, the lack thereof. While the article cites the same studies and charts about European vs. American mobility that most people with a passing interest have already seen, it also adds some welcome nuance in just where along the economic spectrum this increasing lack of mobility is concentrated. Like most things in life, it’s not a fair or equal distribution:

Even by measures of relative mobility, Middle America remains fluid. About 36 percent of Americans raised in the middle fifth move up as adults, while 23 percent stay on the same rung and 41 percent move down, according to Pew research. The “stickiness” appears at the top and bottom, as affluent families transmit their advantages and poor families stay trapped….

What’s more, the piece does a good job of, in broad strokes, outlining just why it is that Americans at the bottom find it so inordinately hard — for a wealthy, developed nation, that is — to climb their way up (notice the almost laughable amount of information condensed into this first graf):

Poor Americans are…more likely than foreign peers to grow up with single mothers. That places them at an elevated risk of experiencing poverty and related problems, a point frequently made by Mr. Santorum, who surged into contention in the Iowa caucuses. The United States also has uniquely high incarceration rates, and a longer history of racial stratification than its peers.

“The bottom fifth in the U.S. looks very different from the bottom fifth in other countries,” said Scott Winship, a researcher at the Brookings Institution, who wrote the article for National Review. “Poor Americans have to work their way up from a lower floor.”

A second distinguishing American trait is the pay tilt toward educated workers. While in theory that could help poor children rise — good learners can become high earners — more often it favors the children of the educated and affluent, who have access to better schools and arrive in them more prepared to learn….

The United States is also less unionized than many of its peers, which may lower wages among the least skilled, and has public health problems, like obesity and diabetes, which can limit education and employment.

Perhaps another brake on American mobility is the sheer magnitude of the gaps between rich and the rest — the theme of the Occupy Wall Street protests, which emphasize the power of the privileged to protect their interests. Countries with less equality generally have less mobility.

It’s interesting that the journo here put the OWS-approved explanation last; I’d imagine that, simply because of what’s dominated the news and the blogosphere for the past few months, many of us would think most immediately about the wealth accumulated by the .01%.

But in response to the article, Matt Yglesias raises an issue I’d not yet thought of (at least not in these terms) and that I think is pretty fascinating. He claims that conservatives once denied the mobility problem but nowadays instead emphasize that absolute rather than relative mobility is most important. The difference between the two might be obvious; but in case it’s not, the Times uses Reihan Salam of The Daily and The National Review as a representative of this strain of conservative thought:

Skeptics caution that the studies measure “relative mobility” — how likely children are to move from their parents’ place in the income distribution. That is different from asking whether they have more money. Most Americans have higher incomes than their parents because the country has grown richer.

Some conservatives say this measure, called absolute mobility, is a better gauge of opportunity. A Pew study found that 81 percent of Americans have higher incomes than their parents (after accounting for family size). There is no comparable data on other countries….

Mr. Salam recently wrote that relative mobility “is overrated as a social policy goal” compared with raising incomes across the board. Parents naturally try to help their children, and a completely mobile society would mean complete insecurity: anyone could tumble any time.

Anyway, Yglesias wonders whether or not it’s true that progressives — if they really stopped and thought about it — would actually agree with Salam:

At a minimum, I think speaking in these terms might help clarify the debate a bit. My suspicion, living and working in mostly progressive circles, is that most of the people upset about “inequality” are actually bothered by what they see as missed opportunities to raise living standards at the bottom or at the median. But it’s not totally clear. There’s a lot of ideological diversity on the left, and perhaps some people are in fact saying that it would be a good tradeoff to make America more equal even if that meant lower absolute incomes for middle class and poor families. But I don’t think that’s really something most of the people who say they’re bothered by inequality are bothered by.

My instinct is that Yglesias is right, and that I’m one such progressive liberal who’d rather have the poor living better than the rich living worse. Now, I’m not so sure this really changes in any tangible way how liberals should operate in today’s politics. I think most of those who have signed-up at least in part with the Occupy Movement have come to the conclusion that the wealthy can’t have such an enormous leg-up on the poor because, when they do, the political system becomes provincial and corrupt.

But to “clarify the debate,” as Yglesias says, would still be useful. For one thing, if the left and the right can at least superficially agree to desiring the same results, it’ll become much easier to see who among us — on both sides — are truly interested in raising the standard of living for the poor

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Class war, one step at a time

by Elias Isquith on November 1, 2011

Classwar

This came to mind while I was following the discussion going on in the comment threads over higher education. From the New York Times‘ Economix blog:

[T]he Joint Economic Committee of Congress has released a report showing that the workers most likely to be hurt by free trade are the same groups that will have the most difficult time getting new jobs.

According to the report, “Nowhere to Go: Geographic and Occupational Immobility and Free Trade,” the workers most likely to lose their jobs as a result of increased trade are older workers and those without a college education. The most obviously affected industry has traditionally been manufacturing, where workers tend not to have college degrees and an increasing number are 45 or older.

Particularly in this dismal economy, finding new jobs is a challenge for these workers. According to Labor Department data, the unemployment rate among those with just high school diplomas is 9.7 percent, more than double the rate among those with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

It’s always seemed to me that globalization, for all its many advantages, nevertheless presented to the US economy and society a massive problem. America could raise high its tariff walls and protect its domestic working class from overseas competition — a great undertaking with many possible downsides; or the US could, as it has, open itself up to the global market and consequently imperil the tens of millions of working class citizens who had not a chance in hell of competing with the labor force in Asia and elsewhere.

Doing option 1 would demand a massive exercise of political power, since this is manifestly not the route most conducive to large businesses’ interests; but option 2 would be no less daunting, since those millions and millions of workers — and their children, grand-children, etc. — could not be expected to simply sit on the sidelines and accept their bad luck. Since they cannot compete in manufacturing with the global labor market, they’d have to compete in professional, white-collar work.

OK, fine; but here’s another problem. American public education has always been middle-of-the-pack. But this didn’t matter so much when the US had an enormous manufacturing base, and a devastated field of competitors, to make-up for the deficiencies. What option 2 would demand, however, is for the American educational system to become, for the first time, the best in the world. And that’s as lofty an ambition as anything else discussed here, to say the least!

What we’ve got going right now, though, is, if not quite the worst of both worlds, disconcertingly close. You’re not going to get the globalization genie back into the bottle, clearly. But you also can’t just keep trudging ahead as if you’re not heading towards a cliff. You can’t pretend that having a class of professionals benefiting from American power and prestige on the one hand, and a larger class of would-be workers with nothing much to do and little money with which to do it on the other, is not going to result in a profoundly acrimonious and divided political society.

Class war isn’t some buzz-phrase Frank Luntz crafted out of thin air. And while I, myself, have not personally experienced it, I’ve read a few history books in my non-blogging spare time, and I get the distinct impression that class war sucks.

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The NYPD is out of control

by Elias Isquith on October 29, 2011

Nypd

Another banner day for the New York Police Department:

A three-year investigation into the police’s habit of fixing traffic and parking tickets in the Bronx ended in the unsealing of indictments on Friday and a stunning display of vitriol by hundreds of off-duty officers, who converged on the courthouse to applaud their accused colleagues and denounce their prosecution.

As 16 police officers were arraigned at State Supreme Court in the Bronx, incensed colleagues organized by their union cursed and taunted prosecutors and investigators, chanting, “Down with the D.A.” and “Ray Kelly, hypocrite.”

As the defendants emerged from their morning court appearance, a swarm of officers formed a cordon in the hallway and clapped as they picked their way to the elevators. Members of the news media were prevented by court officers from walking down the hallway where more than 100 off-duty police officers had gathered outside the courtroom.

The assembled police officers blocked cameras from filming their colleagues, in one instance grabbing lenses and shoving television camera operators backward.

The unsealed indictments contained more than 1,600 criminal counts, the bulk of them misdemeanors having to do with making tickets disappear — in common parlance — as favors for friends, relatives and others with clout. But they also outlined more serious crimes, related both to ticket-fixing and drugs, grand larceny and unrelated corruption. Four of the officers were charged with helping a man get away with assault.

Jose R. Ramos, an officer in the 40th Precinct whose suspicious behavior spawned the protracted investigation, was accused of two dozen crimes, including attempted robbery, attempted grand larceny, transporting what he thought was heroin for drug dealers and revealing the identity of a confidential informant.

One thing I can tell ya—as self-conscious as the Times tends to be about appearing liberal, they stop genuflecting before “real Americans” like the boys in blue when they (and not damned hippies or people of color) are the ones the receiving end of some of the NYPD’s less subtle means of expression.

Whining about the New York Times aside, this story is just another—albeit more brazen—example of the NYPD’s hubris. More and more, this is looking like an almost rogue branch of government. The spying, the ticket fixing, the (acquitted) rape defendants, the incident over recommended Brooklyn dress codes, the shamelessness of their attempts at intimidation and assault upon the Occupiers. It all adds up to a rather ugly picture. But when you give them power like this (among many other things), can you blame ‘em for letting the power get to their heads?

It’s worth keeping in mind that the spark that set off both the Egyptian Revolution and the London Riots was egregious behavior by police. It would seem that there’s something about grossly unequal societies that breeds a police force fundamentally antagonistic towards the people. I guess there’s one element of the state that our Galtian Overlords won’t need to bother privatizing after all.

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Change you can believe in

by Elias Isquith on October 28, 2011

Change

From the New York Times:

Despite a pledge not to take money from lobbyists, President Obama has relied on prominent supporters who are active in the lobbying industry to raise millions of dollars for his re-election bid.

At least 15 of Mr. Obama’s “bundlers” — supporters who contribute their own money to his campaign and solicit it from others — are involved in lobbying for Washington consulting shops or private companies. They have raised more than $5 million so far for the campaign.

Because the bundlers are not registered as lobbyists with the Senate, the Obama campaign has managed to avoid running afoul of its self-imposed ban on taking money from lobbyists.

But registered or not, the bundlers are in many ways indistinguishable from people who fit the technical definition of a lobbyist. They glide easily through the corridors of power in Washington, with a number of them hosting Mr. Obama at fund-raisers while also visiting the White House on policy matters and official business.

As both a candidate and as president, Mr. Obama has vowed to curb what he calls the corrupting influence of lobbyists, barring them not only from contributing to his campaign but also from holding jobs in his administration. While lobbyists grouse about the rules, ethics watchdogs credit the changes with raising ethical standards in Washington.

But the prevalence of major Obama fund-raisers who also work in the lobbying arena threatens to undercut the president’s ethics push, raising questions about whether the campaign’s policies square with its on-the-ground practices, some of those same watchdogs say.

“It’s a legitimate concern,” said Craig Holman, a registered lobbyist for Public Citizen, a nonpartisan ethics group in Washington. “The campaign has to draw the line somewhere, but the reality is that the president is still relying on wealthy special interests and embracing those people in his campaign.”

That lobbyists now have to slightly shift their modes of behavior in this way—becoming high-profile bundlers rather than working in the Administration itself—is change. That the end-result is more or less the same is something I’d imagine even the most idealistic among us have no trouble believing.

 

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In case you forgot: the “Washington Consensus” is d-e-a-d, dead

by Elias Isquith on October 15, 2011

Nyt

Although this New York Times editorial was published yesterday, I only came across it today; and let me just say—wow. Of course, in a sane world, austerity economics would have been discredited long, long ago, after its implementation—at the insistence of Western financial institutions (most conspicuously the IMF)—during the 1990s in the Southern Hemisphere led to economic chaos and widespread suffering. But since we live in a half-sane world at best, it’s taken the ongoing collapse of the eurozone alongside the continued economic malaise of the UK to finally convince not just Leftists but many of the Serious Mandarins of US economics to abandon the once hegemonic theory.

There have been inklings of this previously, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything that underlines just how severe the about-face has been than this piece. I mean, this is the New York Times, here—not The Nation or The New York Review of Books. And the piece is noteworthy not just because it’s from the Times. It’s worth reading because, simply put, it’s damn good:

For a year now, Britain’s economy has been stuck in a vicious cycle of low growth, high unemployment and fiscal austerity. But unlike Greece, which has been forced into induced recession by misguided European Union creditors, Britain has inflicted this harmful quack cure on itself.

Austerity was a deliberate ideological choice by Prime Minister David Cameron’s ruling coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, elected 17 months ago. It has failed and can be expected to keep failing. But neither party is yet prepared to acknowledge that reality and change course.

Britain’s economy has barely grown since the budget cuts began taking effect late last year. The most recent quarterly figures showed the economy flat-lining, with growth at 0.1 percent.

New figures released this week reported Britain’s highest jobless numbers in more than 15 years. Independent analysts expect unemployment — now 8.1 percent — to keep rising in the months ahead. The government has kept its promise to slash public-sector jobs — more than 100,000 have been lost in recent months. But its deficit-reduction policies have failed to revive the business confidence that was supposed to spur private-sector hiring.

Drastic public spending cuts were the wrong deficit-reduction strategy for the weakened British economy a year ago. And they are the wrong strategy for the faltering American economy today. Britain’s unhappy experience is further evidence that radical reductions in federal spending will do little but stifle economic recovery.

Good writers they are, they save the best for last:

Austerity is a political ideology masquerading as an economic policy. It rests on a myth, impervious to facts, that portrays all government spending as wasteful and harmful, and unnecessary to the recovery. The real world is a lot more complicated. America has no need to repeat Mr. Cameron’s failed experiment.

Again—The New York Times. Wow.

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