Month: June 2011

For someone who likes politics and devotes the better share of his life to the subject I sure do a great job of ignoring significant aspects of it on occasion. This bothers me. I feel like I should be biting my nails and paying rapt attention to the "negotiations" over the debt ceiling, but I honestly could not care less. This situation is a good example of how Washington politics are starting to feel a lot like Kabuki theater and very little like a functional, representative, multiparty government. We all said six months ago that Obama would cave on Social Security and Medicare, then cave on demanding tax increases, and then cave on any other damn thing the GOP dreams up at the last second and demands with a hearty "Ha ha, what else can we make this idiot agree to?" laugh.

Paul Krugman:

So, here’s where we are on the debt limit discussions: Democrats have agreed to large spending cuts, but are holding out for doing something about:

a rule that lets businesses value their inventory at less than they bought it for in order to lower their tax burden, a loophole that lets hedge-fund managers count their income as capital gains and pay a 15 percent marginal tax rate, the tax treatment of private jets, oil and gas subsidies, and a limit on itemized deductions for the wealthy.

And Republicans walked out.

Think about it. There’s a significant chance that failing to raise the debt limit could provoke a renewed financial crisis — and Republicans would rather take that chance than allow a reduction in tax breaks on corporate jets.

What this says to me is that Obama cannot, must not, concede here. If he does, he’s signaling that the GOP can extract even the most outrageous demands; he’s setting himself up for endless blackmail. A line has to be drawn somewhere; it should have been drawn last fall; but to concede now would effectively mean the end of the presidency.

Let's check back next week to recap how he caved on all that and more. Krugman's comment, of course, overlooks the important reality that even if Obama "draws the line" here he has already given up so much that only in Mushy Centrist Fantasy Land could he conceive of this as anything but a total, humiliating defeat. "Woo! We drew the line at tax breaks on corporate jets!" isn't exactly going to impress anyone. He turned the debt ceiling negotiations, if they can be so called, into yet another round of buying into right-wing talking points and cheerleading austerity in the vain quest to impress everyone with how Bipartisany he can be. Great.

Even Kevin Drum, the Obama-worshipping proponent of the 12th-level chess theory (that Obama's constant caving and Eisenhower Republicanism is actually some kind of complex, byzantine strategy to achieve liberal policy outcomes), has thrown in the towel and admitted that a focus on cutting spending is in fact exactly what Obama and Harry Reid want. He pulls a good quote from Yglesias:

There was a brief opportunity for the President to dig in his heels and simply refuse to compromise. Then the debate rapidly would have become “can John Boehner round up the votes in his caucus necessary to avoid a default.” Instead, the White House conceded the unprecedented point that even though Boehner and Obama agreed about the desirability of raising the debt ceiling that the White House should make concessions to the Speaker in order to obtain it.

Let's recap the Barack Obama school of governing and negotiation. First, you get the Republicans to admit that it's totally unthinkable and utterly insane to let the government default. Second, agree that 50% of the problem – the entire revenue side – is off the table. Third, let the GOP beat concession after concession out of you by bluffing about default. Fourth, get "concessions" from the GOP – in this case, I'll bet you 0 on Obama obtaining "defense cuts" that amount to snipping a few staplers and pencils from the Pentagon budget – that hand the Republicans a ready-made "He's a-cuttin' the Army while our brave men and women are in harm's way!!
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" talking point. Fifth, go to the electorate in 2012 with the message that sure, I and the rest of the Democrats signed off on hacking up Social Security and Medicare, but, um, the Republicans wanted to cut them a little more than we ultimately allowed. That sounds like a winner, right?
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The Mighty Democrats fought bravely to make sure that your benefit cuts would be slightly smaller.

Good luck with that, idiot. This presidency has been like watching a man commit suicide for three years. At first you're in a frenzy yelling "Stop!
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Don't do that to yourself!" but after a while you just want him to hurry up and get it the hell over with already.
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Being in Indiana for a couple of days has put me squarely in the epicenter of a severe outbreak of Missing White Woman Syndrome (MWWS). If "Help! Missing!" posters could bring someone back to life, we'd have like 15 Lauren Spierers by now. The case is not only a matter of tremendous local interest and controversy but it is fodder for the national media as well – CBS, CNN, Fox News, USA Today, and on and on. Three observations:

1. Remind me again why we care? Let me rephrase that: remind me again why we care selectively. People who like to pretend that our society is classless and post-racial and all that other sweet sounding pap need look no further than Jessica Lynch, Natalie Holloway, JonBenet Ramsey, etc etc for contradictory evidence. Finding exact statistics or reliable estimates is difficult, but the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children lists 920 female children who have gone missing in the last five years and have not been found. If we were to get a number including male children, adults, missing persons who were eventually found, and cases that never get reported, we would see that literally thousands of people go missing every year. Why do we fixate on a handful of them?

2. Good question, Ed. Let me answer that: because as individuals and as a society, we divide our fellow Americans into Innocent Victims and People Who Had It Coming. When young, pretty, upper/upper-middle class blond girls go missing it's a huge tragedy because We think that isn't supposed to happen to her. That's only supposed to happen to the underclass we stridently ignore. No one cares when a young black teenager disappears because, well, that's what the media and society at large expect to happen to black kids. You know, the girls all get murdered by their Pimps and eventually the boys all get shot in drive-bys or end up in prison. And We lack sympathy because We rationalize the decision to blame the victims: their parents are all Welfare Queens or they choose to live in poverty and kill each other like animals so hey, what else do you expect to happen?

Hispanic kids can disappear without notice because Hispanics are generally the invisible underclass (and backbone) of the urban economy. Besides, how can we search for some Mexican kid – they all look the same anyway!!!! Ha ha ha. But what a tragedy about poor Lauren. It's not the crime that shocks us but the shattering of our expectations. Being the victim of violence is practically the birthright of little Ebony or Luis. Lauren's birthright was wealth and privilege, so it's jarring to the average suburban Nancy Grace fan to see that she won't get it.

3. Lest you think this hoopla is harmless, the media circus and public attention impact the way the police/prosecutors operate. In fact, it guarantees that the case will be nearly impossible to resolve. When the public works itself into a frenzy over the matter the police go under the microscope – why can't they find that poor girl? They know they have to charge someone. In Spierer's case, they're just dying to charge one of the men who were with her before she disappeared. As a result, not one of them is going to cooperate with the investigation and offer information that may be useful. Every one of them has a lawyer and instructions not to say one single word (which I don't criticize – people who offer information in high-pressure situations like this usually find themselves suspects in short order). Let me throw a hypothetical at you.

Let's say I walk Lauren back to her apartment. I see her get in someone else's car and then no one ever sees her again. I tell the police "I was alone with her, and I'm the last person to see her before she disappeared. I saw her get in a car with someone I didn't know and that's all I know." That sounds like a helpful thing, right? I might even be able to describe the car or the driver. That kind of information could move the case toward a resolution. But these days – and given the mindset of cops/elected officials – the more likely outcome is that I find myself a suspect or perhaps even charged with murder for A) admitting to being the last person who saw her and B) offering information that can't be corroborated in a case where the cops desperately need to charge someone – anyone – to mollify the public. So of course my lawyer instructs me on the only logical course of action: say absolutely nothing to the police or anyone else. It doesn't matter that you're innocent and you're trying to help; they'll pin everything on you in a heartbeat if you give them the opportunity.

And with that, I'm already angry at myself for having been sucked into devoting 780 words to this case. As sad as her disappearance is for her family, the cold reality is that what happened to her is unfortunately common. I'm not any more or less concerned about her family and her fate simply because her parents are loaded and she was pretty.

(Full disclosure: I've had a festival of bad movies (including Mac & Me and Battlefield: Earth, both of which I've written about) named in my honor and I recently watched Left Behind: The Movie in its entirety. I exempt myself from none of this critique.)

Of the dozens of things that drive me crazy about politics, the gradual assimilation of our political process with the worst aspects of pop culture has to rank near the top. Over the past decade, as we've transitioned from the postmodern/ironic fads (hipsters listening to Paula Abdul and wearing hideous outdated fashions, Hollywood remaking all manner of 1970s schlock, etc.) to some sort of bizarre post-ironic age in which it is no longer possible to tell the difference between enjoying something because it's good or because it's kitschy. It's the difference between Showgirls – which was intended to be a real movie and ended up being unbelievably bad – and Snakes on a Plane, the makers of which intended to make a movie as bad as possible, capable of being enjoyed only with a wink and a nudge. We live in an era in which taking everything that people hate about advertising, bundling it into a single horrific package, and turning the volume up to 11 results in the birth of a wildly popular cultural phenomenon. Basically, this:

Is your homemade mohawk serious or a joke? Do you actually like The Darkness and Justin Timberlake or are they just, you know, awesomely bad? Are you enjoying Say Yes to the Dress or do you find yourself explaining it to your fellow snark aesthetes as a "guilty pleasure" or entertainment-by-trainwreck? Does the stuff on our TV, headphones, and bookshelves represent the best efforts of creative people, the end result of which may be either good or bad, or something cynically designed for you to enjoy how bad it is? Is that viral video an actual flash mob or just a shrewd viral marketing campaign crafted to look organic? I don't even know anymore, dude.

Maybe this phenomenon doesn't bother you. Maybe it does. I would argue that it's detrimental but if and how people enjoy watching Firefly isn't exactly an issue of Earth-shattering importance. Who ends up in the White House might be.

In a year in which not one but two separate Reality TV Stars have been treated with the utmost seriousness by the Beltway media as potential presidential candidates – fortunately Trump and, apparently, Palin are unlikely to run but happy to milk the free publicity – it is hard not to see similar trends creeping into politics. Is/Was "The Donald" a serious candidate or was his might-be candidacy all a big joke? It's impossible to tell because there is no difference. The media and public see reality TV stardom as a perfectly plausible credential for the White House…because what happens on reality shows is "real", right? So why wouldn't the guy who picks the right apprentice or the woman with all that folksy Lil' Abner-esque wisdom be a serious candidate?

Even among the field of declared candidates it is somewhat complicated to distinguish the Serious candidates from those that would have been dismissed as charlatans in the past. James Stockdale openly laughed about how he had no business being in a presidential debate while Sarah Palin's camp got indignant at the mere suggestion that she didn't belong. Everyone laughs at Mike Gravel, Alan Keyes, Lyndon LaRouche, or Dennis Kucinich when they run, but no one uses the Sunday shows as a platform to announce that, come on, people, Michelle Bachmann cannot be a serious option in any electorate that hasn't completely lost its goddamn mind.

When Trump was badgering Obama during the spring – coincidentally enough, across a time period that began with the first episode of The Apprentice and ended with its season finale – very few things were as depressing as watching the White House and media establishment respond in earnest. "This is a publicity stunt, and who the fuck is Donald Trump?" would have been the sum total of my response. However, a media, political system, and culture unable to distinguish the charlatans from the actual players has no choice but to take the former seriously despite common sense and all evidence to the contrary.

Remember back in May and June of 2010 when, amidst violent protests that produced some corpses, the Greek government agreed to impose a number of austerity measures of the kind favored by the IMF? Sure, the deep cuts in social services, pensions, and public sector salaries/benefits hurt quite a bit. However, the painful adjustment was worth it – a little over one year later the Greek economy is clawing its way back to health.

Wait. Let me check something.

No, actually Greece is more screwed than ever.

Don't worry, though. The IMF is charging over the hill like a knight and shining armor to save Greece (again!) with more helpful fiscal policy reforms. This time the magic elixir – It'll fix everything, really! – is a mass privatization program. Nothing says "building a strong economy for the future" like a fire sale of public assets. Maybe if we're lucky we'll get the chance to buy an airport or two on eBay.
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The IMF (and its proxies in the European Commission) isn't exactly a new actor on the global financial stage. It sure is interesting, though, to see its "Structural Adjustment Program" – basically a shock doctrine of the usual neoliberal jerk-off material – put to work on an industrialized, first-world nation. Their routine of coming to countries in their darkest hour offering a financial rescue package in exchange for Koch-ifying their government and letting global investors strip mine the nation's assets is not new. It has been happening to small, underdeveloped countries for decades. It works wonders. Just ask Haiti.

These international organizations intervening in domestic financial crises aren't evil, as some detractors claim. It's simply a matter of understanding their purpose.
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Their sole concern in every instance is to make sure the banks and financial institutions get repaid. That's it. It's not about rescuing Greece's economy or protecting future generations from debt. It's about preventing the country from defaulting on its debt at all costs. And the only alternative to accepting the poisoned chalice of loans from the IMF/EU/Germany/etc. for a country in Greece's current situation is to default.

I'm not exactly Johnny the Economist, but I understand the consequences of default on a national scale to be quite dire (if Argentina's example is generalizable). Nonetheless part of me wishes that Greece would look calmly and rationally at the history of countries that have accepted this kind of "structural adjustment" in return for a bailout loan before deciding whether to proceed with such radical changes.
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Is default a better option? Maybe, maybe not. I doubt that it is. The point is that no one bothers to ask the question. The conversation never takes place. All proposals to alleviate the crisis proceed from the ironclad assumption that the banks' money must be protected at all costs. The kingpins in the global financial community warn sternly of the consequences of default, and certainly there would be many for Greeks of all social and financial classes. That said, the consequences of the Fire Sale privatization and austerity plan are considerable as well, especially given that as Greece's own experience last summer argues, such plans don't actually work.

It isn't about what "works", though. It's about seizing opportunities to institutionalize conservative dogma, eliminate welfare states, and pursue the kind of failed low tax strategies that produce such a windfall for the top 1% and do so little to promote long term economic growth.
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So check back next summer when we find ourselves in the same situation yet again; after the Greeks have auctioned off the airports and highways and power/water supplies and anything else of value, then what?

In a few weeks I'll be flying to Las Vegas for Mike Konczal's bachelor party. It will be my 3rd trip to that man-made colossus in the middle of the desert. I've also been to Phoenix four or five times, which is something one endures in furtherance of being a Cardinals fan.
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I've also been through most of New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and southern California. Generally I like the Southwest immensely, although I must admit that Vegas is more depressing than fun in my opinion. What never escapes me whenever I visit these places, though, is the stark reality that none of it should be there. It's a desert.

The cities of that region, especially Las Vegas and Phoenix, are growing exponentially. In 1900, Las Vegas didn't have a single permanent structure. It was a tent mining camp of 50 souls. In 1930 it was a barren railroad depot of 5,100. In 1960, well into the development of its glitzy casino and entertainment image, it held 64,000 people. In 2010 the Las Vegas metro area (including Henderson and North Las Vegas) checked in at 2,100,000 permanent residents. Phoenix was slightly bigger historically. In 1950 it had a population of 106,000. In 2010, Phoenix and its massive, sprawling, contiguous suburbs (Mesa, Chandler, Tempe, Glendale, Gilbert, etc.) totaled 4,200,000 residents. This represents an increase of 900,000 in just ten years following the 2000 Census. And I won't even get into Los Angeles, the Imperial Valley, and southern California.

There is one and only one reason that this kind of unprecedented growth has been possible:

That isn't an oversimplification; no Hoover Dam, no Phoenix. No Las Vegas. No Los Angeles. Vegas and Phoenix barely existed in 1900 because they're in the middle of a goddamn desert. There is no water and there were no power resources. The dam brought the electricity and fresh water that allowed the growth of infrastructure, industry, and population in places that could not otherwise have any of it.
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Now, for a million bonus points, who built the Hoover Dam?

A) The Free Market
B) The Federal Government
C) State and Local Government

Congratulations, B is correct!

The passage of the legislation to build it took many years and was vociferously opposed by private utilities in Arizona and California (Nevada basically had no population to speak of until the Dam) because they feared competition from government electricity. They used allies in the media, particularly Hearst and Chandler, to label the project as socialism. Eventually Republicans in California realized that the overall economic growth of the state would be more beneficial in the long run than parochial concerns about the profits of Southern California Edison, and they threw support behind the bill that Calvin Coolidge eventually signed. In the long run I'd say that thousand-percent growth of population and industry in the Southwest has made local utilities more money than they lost to Socialist Electricity.

It casts the reactionary, ultraconservative politics of Arizona, Orange County, Utah, and Nevada in high relief to point out that the coyote population would outnumber the humans in the region if not for Big Government doing what private industry would not – elevate national, long term interests over short term profit. It also underscores how dramatically politics have changed over time, although much does remain the same.
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For example, Congress is no longer willing to elevate long term economic growth – say, the kind private industry might experience if the government took on the burden of providing health care for the population – over the limited, shortsighted interests of a small, powerful lobby.

In my blogging career I have made more than a few comparisons between the changing social, political, and economic structure in the United States since 1980 and the conditions most commonly associated with "third world" countries. I (and presumably others who make the same observations) use some creative license when saying such things. As we eliminate what made our society great we take on the characteristics of a developing country – great wealth concentrated in an ever-smaller number of hands, puppet media, mass incarceration as social control, divide-and-conquer tactics forcing the general public to fight over the scraps of the economy, etc. Nonetheless I understand that the United States is not actually a third world country. We are not a kleptocracy in sub-Saharan Africa, a Central American banana republic, or a rock-strewn post-Soviet hellhole in the Transcaucus. While our socioeconomic profile might be drifting in the direction of those countries, the U.S. has something they don't: functioning institutions of government. From the micro-level (local school districts) to the trillion-dollar institutions of the federal government, we have a government that kinda, sorta, sometimes, usually functions – even if not well – toward its intended purpose.

At least for the moment. Don't worry, Sierra Leone; we're catching up as fast as we can. A few more years of Tea Party governors and we'll be Tajikistan before you know it.

The most important institution of government that separates us from the barbarians we like to condescend is a functioning legal system. This is what We have and They do not. Despite the founders' characterization of the judiciary as the "least dangerous" branch, having neither "the sword nor the purse", it also happens to be the most important. Failed and quasi-developed states have sham judiciaries that make decisions based on fiat.

We do not. Don't get me wrong, our legal system still produces injustice by the wagon load and the bulk of our criminal laws are nonsensical. But our most important courts, the courts of appeal, make decisions based on written law. Justices have different interpretations of what that written law means in a given context, but they are making decisions based on A) previous decisions and B) a constitution and statutes. When that breaks down, and a legal system makes decisions based solely on partisan politics, then the government surrenders the pretense of being a representative one and becomes a dictatorship. Perhaps not a brutal one, and maybe even one that represents some portion of the popular will, but a dictatorship nonetheless.

Take three recent Supreme Court decisions that I personally consider terrible: Bush v. Gore, DC v. Heller, and Citizens United. In each case the majority made a decision based on its interpretation – an interpretation I believe is incorrect – of some aspect of our Constitution: equal protection, the 2nd Amendment, and the 1st Amendment, respectively. The decisions are controversial because reasonable adults can disagree on the interpretation. When does a state's discretion over the conduct of its own elections cross a line and violate its citizens' rights? Is the right to bear arms an individual right? What exactly is the limit of the 1st Amendment right to spend money as political speech? These are valid questions, and I am prepared to make a persuasive argument for my opinion on the correct answers. But people can disagree. The point is, the Court decided these cases based on the balance of competing viewpoints among its members. They didn't just make shit up.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court can no longer make that claim. They've moved on to Straight Making Shit Up in place of reasoned disagreements about the minutiae of the law. That's what Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson alleges in her dissent (The decision is available in its entirety here, with the dissent beginning on p. 31 of the Scribd document). This is not business as usual for any court to call out its own members. As Forbes notes:

It revealed, by way of written opinion, a now 'out in the open' battle between the members of the court wherein the minority opinion bluntly and directly accused the majority of fudging the facts to reach the decision they had already determined they wanted to reach. The minority opinion further alleged that the majority was driven by political motives rather than the desire to deliver a fair and judicious opinion.

In the world of the law, this is beyond huge. This is gargantuan…(t)he notion that a minority opinion would level a charge of judicial cheating against brother and sister members of the court, in an opinion that will now become part of the Wisconsin judicial body of legal authority, is positively remarkable. I’ve read more cases in my life than I could possibly count and never-and I mean never- has anything I’ve seen so much as approached what I read in this case.

Rather than rambling on about the failings of the majority argument (a noun for which it barely qualifies) I encourage you to take the time to read her dissent along with the half-assed majority concurrence from Justice Prosser. Like so much of our political discourse and rhetoric these days, the majority simply begins with the conclusion, cherry picks some facts to support it, completely ignores all of the evidence that contradicts it, and gives the rubber stamp to the ruling cabal's latest ignore-the-law-to-save-it tactics in the other branches of government. With a little creativity and a blind spot the size of Cowboys Stadium, you too can reach the conclusion that while the state legislature may have passed an open meetings act it is not subject to the act's requirements. And that part of the state constitution about all sessions of the legislature being open – well, those just don't apply here. Oh, it's also an original jurisdiction case, which I suppose is why the majority spends so much time rehashing the facts of the appellate court decision that preceded its own decision.

Our legal system allows – requires, even – competing interpretations of facts and the written law. If we're just making up our own facts and shedding even the pretense of making some kind of coherent argument based on the relevant precedent and constitution, then we don't really have a judiciary. And if we don't have a judiciary, a venue to enforce predictability and to provide a means to resolve disputes without recourse to violence, then we don't really have a functioning government. At least not the kind with representative institutions, anyway. With each passing day it becomes more obvious that large segments of the American public, professed adoration of "freedom" and "justice" notwithstanding, are A-OK with that.