Category: Rants

I like teaching, generally. One of the best things about it is the discretion it allows. Yes, there are certain things one must include in a course – I can't teach American government without talking about the Constitution or how a bill becomes a law – but there is a wide amount of latitude. No one hands me a script and says "You are obligated to tell the students that evolution is just a theory." There is no standardized test to prepare for. I like that because it means I never feel like a fraud, telling students that something is true when I believe otherwise.

It's getting increasingly difficult with time to talk about the presidential nominating process. I have to do things like take the Iowa Caucuses seriously and pretend that the primaries are interesting to me.
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They aren't. Not at all. This is all a big circus to me. The candidates are so bad it's almost surreal, the outcome isn't terribly relevant (Hell, it barely matters which party wins, let alone which candidates the parties choose), and most of the so-called "contenders" haven't a chance in hell of winning the nomination anyway. But most of all, the process itself is simply ludicrous.
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The pre-McGovern-Fraser system, which allowed party insider delegates to hand pick nominees irrespective of public preferences, was hardly a great one. Compared to what we do today, however, at least its incestuous politics and corruption had some semblance of dignity since most of the dirty work happened behind the scenes. What we do now is just embarrassing. It makes no sense whatsoever.

I get paid to pay attention to this stuff and it's supposed to be interesting to me, and even given those circumstances I can't muster the energy to get into it right now. These candidates are so bad, the amount of money in the process so absurd, and the failure of the media so complete that I'd be lying if I said I took it seriously or thought the outcome was important.

Sifting through the waves of misinformation and accounting for the idiosyncratic rules of the Caucus itself (which make polling particularly ill-suited to predicting the outcome) is far more trouble than it is worth.

When will this process get so absurd that it will change? It's not impossible. It happened in 1824, it happened during the Progressive Era with the introduction of primaries, and it happened in 1968. The question is, given the current health of our political system and electorate as a whole, would we end up replacing it with something worse? The evidence suggests that we would. And that has become the guiding principle in American politics – disgust followed by detachment, apathy based on the conviction that we can always make things worse by opening them up to change.

You know how little I like the "Here, I'm gonna copy someone else's writing rather than generating original content" posts, but I've been trying to improve upon this ("A Tale of Two Systems") for the past week and I don't think I have much to add to it.

American autoworkers are constantly told that high-wage work is an unsustainable relic in the face of a hyper-competitive, globalized marketplace. Apostles of neo-liberal economic theory — both in the public and private sectors — have stressed the message that worker adaptation is necessary to survive. Indeed, Steven Rattner, President Obama’s “car czar” during the restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler in early 2009, spoke last week of his regret that the federal government had not required the United Auto workers to take a wage cut at that time to enhance the competitiveness of those companies, comments similar to those he made in a recently published book (after the outcry created by last week’s remarks, Rattner yesterday backed away from them, though reiterating his view that more “shared sacrifice” would have bolstered American competitiveness).

Governments, too, the globalists have contended, should not think that markets can or should be controlled. As Remapping Debate reported earlier this year in an article about the role of large consulting firms in the promotion of the notion that national policy can and must allow global capital a free hand, McKinsey & Co. was already arguing back in 1994 that “a national government has no choice but to move forward to embrace the global capital market unless it wants to harm its own citizens, its economy and its own purposes.”

But the case of German automakers — BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen — tells a different story. Each company produces vehicles not only in Germany, but also in “transplant” factories in the U.S. The former are characterized by high wages and high union membership; the U.S. plants pay lower wages and are located in so-called “right-to-work” (anti-union) states.

It turns out that “inevitability” has nothing to do with the differing conditions; the salient difference is that, in Germany, the automakers operate within an environment that precludes a race to the bottom; in the U.S., they operate within an environment that encourages such a race.

OK, two things.

First, "Car Czar" Rattner is a jagoff, despite the fact that I greatly enjoyed his book Overhaul. He apparently believes that the UAW should have taken bigger wage cuts so…so what, so that the bondholders could take a smaller haircut? The GM bondholders got more than half, when in any other bankruptcy they'd be entitled to (and receive) exactly jack shit. Convenient fact to omit with all the sweet talk of "shared sacrifice".

Second, as always the elephant in the room is the cost of private health insurance and health care overall. American neoliberals and assorted other Heritage-affiliated pud pullers love to whip out the "total compensation" canard to make wages look equal across borders. Of course Americans make a fraction of their European counterparts in terms of actual, you know, money. But I guess we should feel well compensated because the few employers that still provide insurance have to pay out the ass to do it. Awesome.

Gotta love the moral of the story, though: German auto manufacturers can obviously afford to pay workers in their American factories $30+ hourly…but why bother when people in Alabama and South Carolina are stupid enough to do it for half that? They know a rube when they see one, wrapped in a XXL-sized "These Colors Don't Run" t-shirt and clutching a Bible.

Many Americans below the age of thirty would probably be shocked to learn that the federal government used to control the entire airline industry. And when I say "control" I don't mean in the abstract; an agency called the Civil Aeronautics Board, which in 1967 was integrated into the Department of Transportation, determined which airlines would service each route/destination and set passenger ticket prices that were standardized across the industry. Consequently the industry was dominated by a small number of very large operations – Pan Am, TWA, Delta, and so on.

The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 changed all of that, of course, and set the stage for the bankruptcy-riddled, shambolic industry we have today.

One thing that Congress realized when passing the ADA was that major airlines would quickly drop unprofitable routes. In order to receive highly profitable routes under regulation – New York to Chicago, or whatever – the CAB would require airlines to provide service to Joplin, MO or Saginaw, MI or some other such isolated red ink route. Absent the government mandate, Delta and United would find it in their interest to abandon such routes immediately. To prevent that from happening, and recognizing the value of having a national network of scheduled air service, Congress created the Essential Air Service (EAS). That sounds like some kind of team of highly trained covert operatives and would be a fantastic band name to boot. The reality is more mundane, though.
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The EAS program simply subsidized service to populous but remote locations that would not otherwise get scheduled service from airlines. This is the sole reason that passengers can fly to places like Muscle Shoals, AL and Bismarck, ND. The program is not large in the context of the federal budget, but it clocks in at a not-insignificant $100-120 million annually. (Curious to know if your airport is one of 110 in the Lower 48 that receives EAS money? Look here.)

Raise your hand if you know where this is heading.

The Essential Air Service program began in 1978 as a temporary way to help small airports survive federal deregulation. Rep. Tom Petri, chairman of the House aviation subcommittee, says the program is obsolete.

"Why should the government have to pay for all this?" asks Petri, a Wisconsin Republican.

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What comes next is stupid even by the standards of modern House Republicans from rural Wisconsin:

Being from a big state, Petri is very aware that small airports are important to rural voters. What does he tell them when they complain about his plan to cut subsidies?

"Up in northern Wisconsin, a number of people weren't happy about this sort of thing," he admits. "I say well … my part of the state, Appleton, had air service and it was canceled numerous times and each time it was canceled people got together and started a new airline themselves. It's not that hard. You just need a pilot and a small plane."

Let that sink in for a moment. OK? Good.

It's important to move past the prima facie stupidity of that statement and explore its very deep ignorance of the history of the industry since deregulation. Airline startups boomed in the 1980s; I remember names like Midwest Air, Air Illinois, Midway Airlines, Chicago Air, Ozark Airlines, and ATA in my neck of the woods as a kid. A funny thing happened to these airlines, as you might have guessed already looking at that list: every goddamn one of them failed. Some of the larger ones were purchased by major carriers to serve as feeders once they could no longer survive on their own. Most of them just went belly-up and disappeared. This happens because providers that serve small markets inevitably discover that A) providing the level of service people expect from major airlines is too expensive and B) to make money you have to cut costs, well, everywhere. Cheap planes, cheap maintenance, cheap wages, cheap safety procedures…that's how you make money flying from Helena to Denver. But the funny thing about "cheap" and "airline" is that when you try to combine the two, planes have a tendency to fall out of the sky. Turns out that the deicing equipment couldn't last three months beyond its spec replacement date, and those 100 hours in the simulator didn't really prepare Captain Bob (who was working an office job six months ago) to fly an ATR at night in the snow.

But perhaps the problem is that people who don't have the decency and good sense to live near an airport that major carriers can profitably serve just expect too much. Maybe "a pilot and a small plane" is all they need. Remember, It's not that hard. To start an airline. Would-be passengers can just show up at the airport and say "Hey, can someone fly me to Minneapolis today?" Then they can clamber on board some guy's Piper Cub for a no-instrument adventure flight to the big city.

Sounds like the kind of transportation experience we should have here in this industrialized country that touts itself as the greatest, most advanced, and most economically powerful in the world.

In keeping with yesterday's post about the Establishment Republican view of what ails us economically, here's Ron "Can you believe I beat Feingold? Me neither!" Johnson explaining why the minimum wage is just fine where it is:

JOHNSON: Bottom line: when you’re a good worker you don’t stay at minimum wage for long. Trust me on that. (Crowd laughs)

It’s not universal. It’s not universal, but trust me as an employer, as an employer I certainly didn’t want to lose good employees. And so you actually have a better marketplace. And so if your employer is not paying you good wages and you’re a good worker, you go look for other places. Now that’s hard to do, that’s hard to do when we have such high levels of unemployment. But again I would get back to we don’t have a very attractive place for business investment.

To summarize, being a "good worker" means that you'll make more money. If you are stuck at a low paying job, by implication you are a Bad Worker.

Bad! We do that outside, mister.

When I hear logic such as this I always wonder…do people like Gingrich and Johnson actually believe that this is the way the world (or at least the economy) works? That the job market and wages are as described in Chapter 3 of a junior high economics textbook? Or do they realize that the worldview they're promoting is ludicrous but do it anyway because it's politically expedient?

If it's the former, from where did this understanding of the economy arise? In Johnson's case it certainly isn't from personal experience; he married into a rich family that put him at the top of the family business. I guess that was his reward for being a Good Worker.

I reference Horatio Alger often on here – he of the classic 19th Century juvenile literature exemplified by Ragged Dick, wherein plucky, bootstrap-pulling protagonists rise from vagrant or shoe shine boy to powerful socioeconomic status using nothing but their own "luck, pluck, and diligence." The reason I so often reference him here is that his oversimplified worldview, packaged and aimed at children (today we'd call him a Young Adult author, although that genre is now known as Teen Paranormal Romance) as it was, perfectly summarizes the modern conservative understanding of social class, labor markets, economics, and the state. Everyone who works hard makes it! The world is a fundamentally Good place and it will reward the deserving! A magnanimous rich or powerful person will notice your outstanding qualities and pull you up the social ladder!

Alger is widely scorned today, much as we can assume that modern authors aiming at tweens will be scorned by future generations. However, America during the Industrial Revolution was a ready market for his literature – simple, inspirational stories intended to make young people feel like life might hold something other than misery for them.
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But his books were stories, not empirical studies. Even Alger himself, ever the chipper fellow, understood that his fiction for kids was not an accurate representation of how the world really worked. Yet here we are more than a century later and the gospel of wealth and social mobility in a classless society has become a rare trope in fiction…but a disturbingly prominent one in real life, if the attitudes of our ruling class are any indication.

Listening to various members of Congress argue in favor of recent legislation declaring the United States a battleground in the open ended war against an enemy – a concept, really – that cannot be defeated, I am stunned to realize that in the past decade American politicians have failed to discover just how goddamn creepy it is when they refer to this country as "the Homeland."

That term, popularized by George W. Bush in the immediate wake of 9-11, always stands out like a sore thumb in my mind. It is like an air horn going off in the middle of a piano recital. I do not think this is because I am overly sensitive to choices people make in the use of language; I think it is because "Homeland" sounds dissonant, clumsy, and totally unrepresentative of any concept one might reasonably associate with the political culture of the United States. It sounds more like the kind of language used in fiction and nonfiction alike to mark unmistakably those who stand in opposition to the American Way: Japanese and their Home Islands, godless Communists and their Motherland, evil Nazis and their Fatherland, and so on.

OK, so aside from facile observations about how a word sounds like other creepy words, what's the problem here? Isn't this sufficiently interchangeable with generic terms like "nation" or more common specific phrases like "American soil" or simply the United States? No. Look no further than the basic definition to see some of the problems:

Dictionary.com:
1.one's native land.
2.a region created or considered as a state by or for a people of a particular ethnic origin: the Palestinian homeland.
3.any of the thirteen racially and ethnically based regions created in South Africa by the South African government as nominally independent tribal ministates to which blacks are assigned.

Merriam-Webster:
1 native land
2 a state or area set aside to be a state for a people of a particular national, cultural, or racial origin

Hmm. "Homeland" has to do with the idea of being "native".

Well, the last time I checked there is no common ethnic, cultural, or racial origin in the U.

S., and to say that our country is "an area set aside for people of a particular national origin" is at once head-slappingly obvious and incorrect.

After all, national "origin" implies membership at birth, which of course is only one aspect of American citizenship.

Calling this The Homeland makes no practical or rhetorical sense, unless of course one's conception of America is as a land of a single cultural (European) and racial (white) identity.

Some people think that way – hell, throw in our single religion (Christianity) and you've pretty much summed up the Tea Party and Christian conservatism. But here in reality American culture and citizenship are defined by shared ideals and values.

Ideals and values are about as far away from the idea of identity based on soil – that America is the patch of dirt on which it is situated – as you can get.

There is a very simple reason that no American citizen or resident calls this country The Homeland. We don't call it a homeland because it is more than that. Other nations might be crass enough, in the American chauvinist's way of thinking, to define themselves by history, borders, and patches of land, but not us. Until now, that is. What we're seeing is a symptom of a political class relying increasingly on jingoistic appeals and language and a population learning how to define itself, its nation, and its citizenship in the basest terms – you are One of Us or One of Them. You Belong or you are The Other. It's the mindset of a populace that is warming up to the idea of arbitrary arrest and detention of its own members in the name of order, security, and preservation of the social order.

In 1988 the crew of the US Navy missile cruiser Vincennes shot down an Iran Airlines passenger jet, an Airbus A300, with two surface-to-air missiles. All 290 people on board died. The crew of the ship claimed that the aircraft appeared to be an attacking enemy fighter plane, despite the fact that it was in Iranian airspace, climbing, and on its normal daily flight path. It was also, you know, a passenger jet. Which doesn't look much like the F-14 Tomcat that the Navy claimed to think it was.

You can read up on the incident (and its primary cause, the sociopath/Captain of the Vincennes) if you care to; an exhaustive account is not necessary here. What makes this incident interesting to me is its use as a classic example of a phenomenon called "scenario fulfillment." In highly regimented organizations like the military, individuals are a part of a larger system. In order for that system to work effectively, participants are trained extensively. They go through drills, simulations, and live exercises ad nauseum until carrying out their responsibilities becomes second nature. In the context of Iran Air 655, however, the crew of the ship were so locked into the drill that taking it to completion – fulfilling the scenario of "enemy fighter attacking" that they had probably repeated a thousand times in training – was simply the logical end.
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And "completion" in this case means shooting down the enemy plane. That's what they're trained to do, and as soon as someone said "We're being attacked!" their training took over. Of course, avoiding "mistakes" like this is the reason the military has officers who are supposed to use their judgment based on the available information, but I guess that safeguard isn't very effective when the officers are belligerent. But I digress.

The past three decades have seen unprecedented changes in American law enforcement. Among the most notable is the militarization of police. The police, despite being civilians by definition, have adopted the equipment, weapons, tactics, and attitudes of the military. We now have suburban police departments purchasing IED-proof armored vehicles designed for Afghan war zones.

Helicopters, armor, high-velocity rifle ammunition, stun grenades, "less lethal" weaponry – you name it, and cops have gotten their hands on it. Why? Well, thanks to the War on Drugs they've decided over the years that all of this is necessary. The only limit to what they require is imagination. If you can dream up a threat, you can justify more weapons, more equipment, and more paramilitary tactics to put it all to use. It doesn't matter that a coordinated terrorist attack on the Pigsknuckle County Courthouse is as likely as the second coming. In a world in which the Supreme Court is making decisions based on hypotheticals from Jack Bauer and the writers of 24, the public and political system accept just about anything police ask for at face value.

The point among all of this is simple: police essentially do what they are trained to do. The more they are trained in military-style tactics, the more options for the use of force they are given (rubber bullets, batons, chemical sprays, grenades, etc.), and the more their training focuses on the possible rather than the probable, the more likely they are to carry out their jobs in ways that contradict their mission to Serve and Protect. Cops don't break up crowds with swinging batons and CS grenades (adopted with their launcher directly from the military hardware market) because the situation calls for it. They do it because that's how they're trained to break up riots. It doesn't matter if the crowd is violent or not; every crowd becomes a riot in their minds once the training scenario begins to happen in real life. They break down doors and enter homes with weapons drawn because that's how they're trained to serve warrants. They pepper spray or tazer anyone who appears remotely aggressive (Or not, you know. Either way.) because that's how they're trained to deal with aggressive people.

The above image is of the UC-Davis police before the infamous pepper spraying incident. These are campus cops – ask any cop and he will giggle while explaining that campus police are the lowest form of life in his profession – with the full array of modern, military-style riot gear and weapons. Where is the campus on which they work? Kabul? The Sudan? Yes, campus police face the prospect of having to break up a drunken 3 AM congregation now and again, and breaking up a crowd can be dangerous. But clearing out the morons gathered in the street at bar time is not exactly going door-to-door through Normandy in 1944.

The more they are trained to apply force, the more often it will be applied. The more force they have to apply, the more they will apply. The more they are militarized, the more they will act like Delta Force operatives in Tora Bora rather than street cops in Des Moines. The farther American police go in this direction, the more ordinary citizens will get that unsettling feeling that leads your more radical friends to declare that we live in a Police State controlled by storm troopers. Because to an alarming extent, they are starting to have a point. Bearing in mind that police are public servants, why has this gone unchecked?

I think the answer is simple enough. An inattentive public isn't interested as long as it happens to someone else. The political system is fanatically eager to Get Tough on Crime. And the people who are supposed to be in charge of law enforcement, to lead it, have eschewed judgment for the indulgence of their wildest "What if?" fantasies. The scenarios for which they train might or might not be reality, but they will certainly become reality given the time. Maybe that's why the number of riots instigated by police seems to dwarf the number that they've protected society from – give a man a hammer and oddly enough all of his problems start to look like nails.

As an ideology conservatism makes sense. That's not an endorsement, merely a recognition that it is an internally consistent set of ideas. This is surprising only inasmuch as conservatives themselves – at least of the American variety – are about as logical and internally consistent as Mars Volta lyrics.

Being a modern American conservative is an exercise in holding contradictory viewpoints without an ounce of self awareness. They believe in fiscal conservatism and stratospheric levels of military spending. They believe in individual freedom and that the government should legislate Christian-approved morality. They preach about the Constitution and rights but love it when the government infringes upon them in the name of security. Yes, the contradictions are many, but none is more reliably amusing than belief that government is oppressive, nefarious, and untrustworthy combined with blind, fanatical support of the police, military, and other forms of gun-wielding authority.

Over on the ol' Gin and Tacos facebook page (which you should totally follow, if you do not already do so) I posted a picture of the UC-Davis police officer pepper spraying passive, seated students blocking a sidewalk (oh, the horror!) Since I happened to be among the first wave of people to post the picture, many G&T fans shared the post on their own Facebook walls. As a result, it was seen by a vast number of people who are…not part of my regular audience. Think of every crazy uncle and right wing knucklehead on your Facebook friend list and you'll see where this is headed.

I can't say it surprised me that people defended the cop. There are always people who will defend the cop. Believe it or not, I was taken aback by just how stupid their arguments were even though such things should not surprise me anymore. Most of all, though, it's amazing the extent to which these people who believe that government is pure evil will argue that A) the role of the citizen relative to the police is one of absolute, unquestioning obedience, B) the police are to be taken at their word at all times, and C) whatever type and amount of force the police choose to use is inherently right.

If one of the defining characteristics of government is possession of a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its borders, then the police are government at its most elemental. They are the government's way of perpetuating itself and enforcing rules and social order. If government is evil, oppressive, or misguided then by definition the police – the muscle behind the corrupt system – must be as well. Yet rather than seeing the state using questionable (to put it charitably) levels of force against its own citizens as another sign of a brutal, corrupt, and broken system – which, for the record, is what they see when police/military are used to crush popular demonstrations in other countries – they cheer on its excesses and defend it to the last man.

Maintaining this curious set of beliefs depends on their equally curious understanding of what exactly the police are for. To the average conservative – old white people, suburbanites, the wealthy, moral traditionalists, etc. – the police are a personal valet service charged with protecting them from the brown people, the poor, the homeless, and the punk kids with their boom-boom music and bouncing cars. The rights of those groups are not an issue, you see, because they have no rights. Only "good, hard working Americans" truly have rights, and others forfeir their rights by their actions. If the police ask you to move from the sidewalk and you don't, then you no longer have any rights. They can do whatever they want and it's your own fault.

Of course that might be a more convoluted, less helpful way of restating Adorno's ideas about the authoritarian personality type: submissiveness to authority, aggression toward outgroups defined by that authority, and the unwavering belief that others should conform to one's own understanding of socially acceptable behavior. Thus we have Nixon's "Silent Majority", at once scared, angry, and aggressive, filling our social and political discourse with the mantra that the government that they worship blindly and submit to completely is inherently evil. I suppose it makes more sense if you don't understand how logic works.

The last few years have seen a bull market for Sadness Journalism – stories of foreclosures, medical bankruptcies, layoffs, homelessness, hunger, and a host of other woes that were invisible when they happened to the underclass but are now polite conversation since they're happening to middle class people. The narratives inevitably follow one of a few well established frameworks. The sad story (man loses job, descends into alcoholism, accidentally kills loved ones/ends up in prison). The downshifting story (well paid professional loses job, realizes she is happier living in a small house with a garden and no car). The it's-your-fault story (the lavish wages and benefits of a group or individuals are presented as justification for why Mr. Spacely had to move the Sprocket factory to Uttar Pradesh). And lastly, my own personal version of hell: the It's Was the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me story, wherein the protagonist gets a pink slip, overcomes the urge to wallow in sadness, and then (with luck, pluck, and diligence straight out of Ragged Dick) starts a new business (or more rarely, finds a new job) far better and more lucrative than the old one.

For the laid off or otherwise unemployed, optimism is a good thing.
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It can hardly help to feed them a steady diet of WASF stories in the news every day. There's nothing wrong with a Success Story to remind people who may be cast adrift that all is not necessarily lost. But success stories, like lottery winners, are useful examples only when the odds involved in their success are downplayed or ignored altogether.

This Forbes piece, while remarkably thoughtful (for a Forbes piece) in recognizing in a very non-confrontational and investor-friendly way the challenges that one might encounter when 55 and suddenly jobless, is a good example of what happens when the narrative drifts from optimism to condescending bromides.

Being the boss gives Bitter the flexibility to spend more time with her husband (a 30-year veteran of IBM), adult children and grandson. “When boomers get over the fear of losing the corporate parent and all the benefits, they may find that what’s on the other side fits them better,” she says…

Williams counsels “desperation entrepreneurs”—laid-off fiftysomethings who have finally realized they aren’t getting back into the corporate world. He advises them: Don’t waste retirement savings on lavish offices or buying an existing business or a franchise. Instead, work from home, selling a skill or a product you already know…

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Ken Proskie, 59, is a Williams client who was laid off in 2004 from his job as a health and safety manager for a large manufacturer. He spent only ,000 of nonretirement savings to buy equipment and furnish an office in his Evanston, Ill.
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home.

Perhaps the tone of this article reflects the expected audience of Forbes-reading professionals with salable skills. Maybe this is a realistic depiction of what one kind of worker can do when laid off, even if it isn't realistic for the great masses. But even with that caveat, I'd love to see some data here. Of fiftysomething corporate types who get laid off, what percentage will end up doing better as bedroom-and-garage entrepreneurs? How many will find equivalent employment elsewhere? And what share of them will end up doing much, much worse, with a low paying job that neither utilizes whatever skills they possess or supports even a downshifted lifestyle?

Some stories have happier endings than others. I doubt, however, that being over fifty and getting fired qualifies as the best thing that ever happened to anyone except corporate propagandists and uncritical journalists.