Category: Rants

In his post-presidential memoirs, Dwight Eisenhower recounted the day in 1945 on which he saw his first Nazi extermination camp. Never accused of being a brilliant man, even by his supporters, Ike was nevertheless eerily prescient:

(When) I saw my first horror camp…I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that "the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda". Some members of the visiting party were unable to go through with the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton's headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and the British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.

Shortly thereafter, in a letter to Douglas MacArthur he elaborated:

The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they (sic) were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda."

In case the credibility of his own testimony was called into question, the General ordered thousands of photographs and films to be made. Additionally, he forced ordinary German citizens to parade through the camps to look at the corpses. It appears that he understood with unusual clarity that the Holocaust would eventually be questioned by members of future generations who either sympathized with its goals or those who simply could not believe that such outlandish tales of cruelty could be true.

Like everything else, the gap between events and unscrupulous efforts to historically revise them has been shrunk by technology. Now that the news cycle is measured in minutes rather than days or weeks, current events become history faster than ever before. And despite the mountains of documentation of how events play out in the modern era, the efforts to re-write history are as enthusiastic enough to win the admiration of the most fervent Holocaust denier.

The latest GOP talking point (as evidenced by Mike "Baghdad is like a summer market in Indiana!" Pence, Dick Morris, and Jim "Holy balls am I retarded" Inhofe) regarding the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is that it is "Obama's Katrina" or, as Inhofe eloquently states like the troglodyte he is, this is far worse than the Federal response to Katrina. I find this fascinating for several reasons.

First, in the present tense this disaster illustrates quite a challenge for the Republicans in Washington. They are torn between two contradictory political needs: the need to blame everything that happens on Obama and the need to fellate the oil industry enthusiastically at every opportunity. Their attacks are more confusing than effective. Is this the greatest ecological disaster since the dawn of time or is much ado about nothing, an effort by Greenpeace and other imaginary 1960s caricatures to slander their hated oil villains? So it's fun watching the Pences and Inhofes of the world pinball back and forth between those objectives.

Second, and more to the point of today's post, the conservative effort to exonerate Bush on Katrina is only going to get louder in the coming years. I've argued, and the data clearly underscore this point, that Katrina, not Iraq, ended Bush. His approval rating plummeted below 40 for the first time immediately after Katrina – and it remained in the 30s (and even 20s) for the next three-plus years. So there is clearly a need to re-imagine Katrina if Bush is to be redeemed. Why wait 30 or 40 years to start accusing the media and The Liberals of making up all of the destruction, ineptitude, and human suffering? Let's get that ball rolling now.

The great unanswered question with Obama and the oil spill is what exactly these armchair quarterbacks would like to see the president to do. Any and all technological remedies available are being tried or have been tried. The problem here is that nobody knows how to stop the goddamn thing. Not being a deep-sea geologist, I hardly see what the President has to contribute to solving the problem. In the long-term the Federal government will have a role to play, compensating people whose livelihoods have been ruined, cleaning up the oil slicks, and so on. But just as George Bush could not stop the hurricane, Obama can't stop an oil spill. The difference, however, is that Bush could have helped matters with an immediate and concerted response. There simply isn't a lot for Obama to do at the moment. What he did do that was useful – arm twisting BP into ponying up to pay for the mess – brought howls of condemnation from the right. It was a "shakedown" or "extortion."

In reality, the only way to make this "Obama's Katrina" is to radically redefine Katrina. Most people don't realize that Bush's last press conference as President – this is 2009, four full years after the storm – was about his response to Katrina. He persuaded no one, of course, as outgoing Presidents with 20% approval ratings tend to be unpersuasive. So clearly the job of revising his response to the hurricane will have to be done by others. The public has the attention span of a fruit fly, and it won't be long before they'll be receptive to tales about how Bush leaped into action after a storm that really wasn't that bad anyway (despite, of course, the fact that we can watch all of the disaster unfold on YouTube and in well-researched narratives). The only question is who will write the first book exonerating Bush of the biggest disaster of his presidency. Maybe Ann Coulter will attempt a redux of her embarrassing effort to re-imagine Joe McCarthy. One thing is for certain, though. The oil spill can't be made any worse than it already is, so to make it the "worst" leaves only one course of action: making Katrina, and by extension Bush, a figment of the hysterical liberal media's fertile imagination and twisted agenda.

The older I get, the less long term planning I do.
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Since the early Aughts, when it became apparent that the nation was heading down an unsustainable economic path, I've given up on saving for retirement and other sensible things that I used to take very seriously. This has accelerated since the economic collapse of 2008 and my foray into the post-Ph.D. job market. My employment pays just enough to keep me living in lower-middle class comfort (which is oxymoronic, given that the defining feature of this class stratum is uncertainty) and is both literally and figuratively a year-to-year arrangement.

In the back of my head I still understand that retirement savings and personal financial planning are necessary, but every time I try to wrap my head around the future I'm filled with something much more powerful than uncertainty: cold dread. With this economic downturn and our political leaders' pathetic response, I feel like the potential exists for really, really bad times ahead. Krugman has started talking about a Depression and it's a healthy sign that we are in deep trouble when one reads such an opinion and thinks, "Yep, that makes perfect sense." How can I talk myself into retirement saving when the return on traditionally safe investments (MMAs, CDs, bonds, etc) are in the 1% range? And how can I roll all of my money into the stock market when there exists a very real possibility of it collapsing when all of the short-term profit maximizing tricks have been exhausted?

Our problem is very simple, as this shockingly insightful but thin-on-solutions article from Intel big shot Andy Grove explains: we are not creating jobs. And the only political solution we are willing to accept since the canonization of St. Ronnie is to cut taxes, as if there is some magical tax break that will offset the fact that Chinese workers make a buck per day. There is already nothing made in the U.S. that can't be made more cheaply in Asia. Soon there will be nothing done in the U.S. – including the professions that the 1980s zeitgeist assured us were American for all time like accounting, engineering, and business – for which the same cannot be said. We will become an economy that consumes everything and produces nothing. What remains of this house of cards will collapse.

It is conceivable that The Worst is Yet to Come because we have absolutely no industrial policy, no economic policy, and no political solutions other than to keep cutting taxes.

This is not to say that we have a bad economic policy; we simply do not have one. We have one of the most stunningly effective propaganda machines in the history of the mass media convincing the same people getting ground up in the gears of Progress that there is no solution but to double down on the policies that brought us here. We are, in short, fucked. The idea that if only our taxes were a little lower or if only our schools produced smarter graduates we would suddenly be able to compete with Chinese and Indian wages is ludicrous. We pushed the boulder of free trade and globalization down the hill in the 1980s and now there is no stopping it.

I am not thrilled to count myself among the Sky Is Falling crowd, but the disturbing speed with which elected leaders from around the world clasped hands and agreed that Austerity is their new god among economic buzzwords has drained me of any kind of hope for the future.
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At best we are about to enjoy a protracted ten or twenty year Japan-style deflation / recession combo. At worst we're going to re-live the 1930s. It is not that the time for decisive action has passed. It is just completely obvious that the only remedies any of our elected leaders will consider are the worst possible ones, guided by an ideology that needs no actual results to sustain itself.

Believe it or not, I am not a danger to the public when I leave my house. I know that readers who have never met me might logically conclude that I frequently scream at complete strangers for having bad taste or doing things improperly, or that I dissolve into torrents of profanity at the slightest provocation. Certainly there are people in this world who have better social skills and who enjoy the company of their fellow Americans far more than I do, but it has been a solid couple of weeks since I punched someone for saying hello to me.

That last part is a joke, of course. I could never make it more than a week. *rimshot*

One thing that does make me a little less pleasant is large crowds of strangers. I'm not agoraphobic or afraid of germs or anything like that; it's just that seeing the people who make up this country face-to-face, especially since my move to the Deep South, is a little more than I can process sometimes. Think of it this way: you're on a plane at 35,000 feet. The pilot is absolutely piss drunk. Would you prefer to have the cockpit door pop open accidentally so that you could see the drunken pilot or would you prefer that the door remain closed? I am 100% in favor of the latter. You're in midair. There's nothing that can be done about the situation. The pilot is the only one who can fly the plane and if he's drunk, he's drunk. If I, the passenger, learn that he is drunk it's just going to make me panic for hours until we land. If he's going to drunkenly kill us all I would rather enjoy a peaceful, carefree flight until we plow into the ground in a ball of flame.

This is how I feel about the American public, and specifically the American voter. I don't want to see them because doing so will serve no purpose other than to make me nervous. I don't want to see their Confederate flag bumper stickers, Palin 2012 t-shirts, Left Behind books, and Insane Clown Posse tattoos. I don't want to hear them regurgitating Glenn Beck monologues, talking about what Jesus told them the other day, or punctuating their speech with "done gonna" and "nuh-uhh." In short, I do not enjoy seeing the level of ignorance that we all understand is pervasive in our society. Before you conclude that I am a terrible and misanthropic person, this is no different than the reason that you don't read YouTube comments and the message boards on Free Republic.

I spend most of my time, as do most Americans, segregated by class. I spend all day around people who have high levels of education and undergraduates who, even at their worst, are far more engaged and capable than the Average American. At night, rather than going out I tend to stay at home reading what other reasonably intelligent people have to say about the world.
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I shop at the middle class white liberal grocery store and eat at the appropriately bourgeois restaurants, reviews of which prominently feature the word "ethnic." The people who shop at Wal-Mart and eat at KFC do not cross my path, nor I theirs. Likewise I don't rub shoulders with the haute cuisine and vacation home crowd. We all live in a bubble for the most part.

Alas, people with means travel to celebrate the 4th, going to so-and-so's lake cottage or vacation rental on Hilton Head Island or whatever. I have no means, so I did what all of the other broke-ass people do – I went to the free fireworks in the park. As we enjoyed some fireworks with thousands of my fellow Georgians, I could not help but see our nation's current problems in clearer focus. As much as the good liberal inside all of us wants to sing a Fanfare for the Common Man while lecturing ourselves on the nobility and wisdom of the salt-of-the-earth types who populate this country, seeing them usually just makes me sad. If that means I am a terrible person, I am a terrible person. Toothless hillbillies in pro wrestling t-shirts. A pack of juggalo teenagers. Morbidly obese women in halter tops and jorts. Eighteen year old girls and their three children.
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Sullen, sunburned yokels slapping their children as other sullen, sunburned yokels look on, understanding the impulse and approving of the act. Baggy-panted black kids getting in fistfights. Twitchy, meth-addled white kids picking at their scabs. Mustachioed policemen harassing the former and ignoring the latter.

Accuse me of being a snob or joyously condescending people I think are beneath me if you must. It's not a question of "better" – it's simply that we have nothing in common (Whoops, now I do sound like Patrick Bateman). OK, we don't have any money. And people in the top 1% are actively trying to fuck us. We have that much in common. But sadly, and to my own detriment, I just look at it like a human zoo. It is sad to look at so many people – their infantile beliefs, their complete disinterest in understanding the world around them, their incomprehensible interests – without being able to see any common ground.

So what will we do after crossing paths on July 4th, the day on which we're all supposed to come together based on our shared American-ness? They'll go back to their daytime TV, WWE / UFC videos, Top 40 radio, and storefront churches.

I'll retreat to my organic grocery co-op, $5-per-cup coffee shops, neo-Asian fusion restaurants, and independent film series. We will spend another year separated, understanding nothing about one another, until we baffle one another again next July.

Barack Obama isn't very good at being president. Bill Clinton wasn't during his first 12-18 months either. They have one asset in common: high levels of intelligence. This suggests that they should be smart enough to learn from their mistakes and adapt their behavior in response to obvious and repetitive opposition tactics. Most analysts argue that Clinton learned his lesson and had a modestly productive six years following the two disastrous ones at the beginning of his first term. Personally I think he "accomplished" things only inasmuch as he caved in, pushed Reagan Lite legislation, and declared victory. But given the fanatically hostile Republican Congress he face, I can buy the argument that he adapted.

Obama, on the other hand, just doesn't seem to be getting it. And this shocks me. It really, really does. Not because I considered him a neo-FDR or some kind of progressive liberal poster boy – in fact, I'm on record months before his election pointing out that there isn't a lick of difference between him and Hillary Clinton's Diet Republican ideology – but because I thought he would put his hand on the glowing stove a few times, get 3rd degree burns, and then be smart enough to stop touching it. But he isn't. He just keeps putting his hand into the fire again and again under the assumption that this time it will not burn him.

I borrow this analogy from Mike, who in turn sourced it to from Dave Dayen, but Obama is little more than Charlie Brown trying to kick the football while the Lucy that is the Senate GOP holds it.

We all recall that Peanuts gag from our childhood. Sad-sack Charlie…one of these days he was going to kick that football, darn it. Even as kids we knew he would never actually get it, but that was part of his appeal. He was so earnest, and it was intended to be heartwarming to see how he trusted his friend even though we knew Lucy was going to screw him (figuratively, thanks to the FCC) every single time. What was lovable, or at least intended to be lovable, about Charlie Brown is quickly starting to look pathetic in the elected leader of the nation.

Take the recent Wall Street reform legislation. The administration catered exclusively to three Republicans – Snowe and Collins from Maine as well as Scott Brown from Massachusetts – from the get-go. In fact, they practically wrote the legislation. The White House pulled no punches in catering to their every whim. They agreed to open a Krakatoa sized hole in the Volcker Rule, at Brown's insistence, to help protect prominent asset management firms in Boston. They agreed to make the bill "deficit neutral." But when Brown realized that deficit neutrality meant a $19 billion tax on hedge funds and investment banks – and $19 billion is couch change to that industry, especially given how deeply they've partaken of the public till lately – he balked.

It is the same story over and over. Kiss the GOP's ass, give in on every issue, promise them everything they demand…and then they refuse to support it anyway. Obama does not get this. It is not sinking in. For some reason he thinks that if he is "bipartisan" enough with people like Brown and Snowe they will start working with him. And then they yank the football away and he ends up on his ass. Every time.

He is not figuring out that the opposition party, including the ones he believes are Reasonable and Moderate, has no interest in working with him and no intent to do so. He immediately yields all of his leverage in negotiations, kissing their asses from the very beginning, and then he is shocked at the end when they mug him for the last few concessions at the end. Why wouldn't Brown do this? It's painfully obvious that they can get whatever they want from Obama. Very early in his presidency I noted a disturbing tendency for Obama to immediately pull back when attacked. He proposes something, the right starts howling, and in the blink of an eye he's taking it off the table and making concessions by the dozen. It weakened his position to the point that he is practically a joke in the Senate. "We can get anything we want out of this guy. All you have to do is hit 'em hard. We've got 41 Senators and we're taking this asshole to the cleaners! Ha ha!"

Eighteen months isn't enough time to cement a legacy but it's long enough to be past the growing pains. It is starting to look like this guy just can't cut it, unless you count delivering slightly prettied-up versions of Republican legislation or massively watered down versions of Democratic legislation as success. But stick with it, Mr. President. We'll hold the football for you next time. We promise.

Thank god the Supreme Court session has ended and we can stop talking about this stuff. Soon.

So, lots of weeping and rending of garments over the Chicago anti-handgun decision. Even more hysteria about the concept of incorporating the 2nd Amendment. As I don't subscribe to the slippery slope school of logic (incorporation today = striking down background checks tomorrow) and I think this will have shockingly little impact on substantive gun control legislation, I'm more interested in the underlying issue here – everyone, save for the NRA hardliners, recognizes the need for some kind of "control" on private firearms. The big problem is that we know exactly which guns are the problem and, as Chicago just discovered, it's virtually impossible to craft legislation to restrict them.

As a kid, my family was not big on guns. I think my dad had his father's WWII .45, which was more for sentimental reasons than any of the usual motivations for gun ownership. But as a public prosecutor for many years he always impressed upon me the futility of the kinds of showy gun control legislation produced by Congress. The mid-90s "assault weapon" panic was, and still is, a textbook example of a red herring. "Assault weapons" are involved in about 0.1% of gun crime, if that. The other 99%+ primarily revolves around one type of weapon: small, cheap pistols with large magazine capacities. The movies in the 1980s convinced a lot of people that criminals and gang members were wandering the streets with machine guns and AK-47s. Such instances are rare and exceptional. By and large, violent crime is committed with the bottom of the barrel in the firearm market.

Take the Virginia Tech slayings as an example. The killer used .22 pistols. They are usually used for shooting at paper targets. A decently heavy wooden door has a chance of stopping a .22 pistol round. This is absolutely the last kind of firearm that legislation would ever try to ban. Yet the small round (which enables many to be crammed into a single magazine, giving the handguns a high capacity) works just fine against "soft" targets, i.e. someone's chest. Focusing on the guns alone and not the killer's mental issues, on what basis could legislation be written narrowly enough to ban such things?

Given the obscene number of handguns already circulating in the U.S., bans on new weapon sales can't even begin to solve the problem. And as long as people persist in the delusion that having a gun in the house makes them safer, there will be howls of protest about such laws despite their relative ineffectiveness. Our solutions appear to be:

1. Take the right-wing argument to its logical conclusion; arm everyone to the teeth and live out some kind of Mad Max scenario.

2. Ban handgun sales and ownership – a move that, as gun propaganda rightly points out, will not stop people who aren't concerned about things like laws and licenses.

3. Ban all gun ownership. Same problem, plus the Constitution makes this untenable.

It seems like we're drifting toward #1 not because the conservative majority on the Court and in Congress for the last 30 years have been successful at executing a nefarious plot to manipulate the law, but rather because the other two options are some combination of ineffective, unrealistic, and unconstitutional. We've saturated this society with so goddamn many guns – especially the worst kind for criminals to have, the small, cheap, big-magazine ones – that I don't see how we can make this country "gun free" even if we wanted to. And the 2nd Amendment clearly does confer some kind of right to individual ownership (although we could reasonably debate in what context that applies).

The problem, in essence, is that we're out of answers and we, like the Courts, appear to have settled on the least terrible one. Yet we know that it's a non-solution, even when our bluster and attempts at self delusion indicate otherwise. We know goddamn well that the pistol isn't going to protect us when someone breaks into our home as we sleep or charges in through the front door, gun in hand, as we watch TV. Deep down we know or at least should know that the odds of using a firearm to successfully execute any of the fantasy scenarios presented by NRA types are close to nil.

So what is the answer? How do we do the impossible, or at least the highly improbable, and craft legislation that addresses the massive supply of guns already in circulation while protecting the basic 2nd Amendment right and parsimoniously targeting the kind of cheap, disposable handguns that actually fuel street crime? The next good answer I hear to any of these queries will be the first.

There's not much I'd like to do less than to start writing up a Supreme Court case on a weekly basis. Two weeks ago the Court dropped Berghuis v. Thompkins on us, quietly ruling that Miranda rights must be positively invoked to protect arrestees from making incriminating statements. That was my Supreme Court fix for the first half of the year. But now, with absolutely no attention whatsoever from the media, the Court has made another incredibly tone-deaf (and 5-4) decision in favor of, well, not you.

Despite all of the condemnations of corruption and dedication to the moneyed interests among our elected leaders, the 5-vote conservative (ahem, "strict constructionist") block on the current Court is without a doubt the most reliable servant of Corporate America in our Federal government. Citizens United v. FEC made it clear several months ago that "public interest" was a figment of popular delusions in the opinions of Alito, Scalia, Clarence "What Anton Said!" Thomas, Roberts, and the "moderate" Anthony Kennedy. They live in a sterile fantasy world in which corporate rights and individual rights counterbalance one another, as though the two opposing sides are equally powerful.

Has anyone heard of Rent-a-Center v. Jackson? Anyone? I didn't think so. Let's take a brief look at this masterpiece of Bush-era conservative thinking, this window into Anton Scalia's mind.

The facts of the case are not fundamentally important. Mr. Jackson sued his former employer, Rent-a-Center, for discrimination on the basis of race. What is relevant is that as a condition of his employment Jackson signed an arbitration agreement at the time of hire, as do all Rent-a-Center employees.
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The agreement stipulates that charges against the employer are decided by an arbitrator – in short, the employees essentially surrender their right to pursue claims of discrimination, harassment, etc. in state or Federal courts. You know, just the basic "Sign here to waive certain constitutional rights" paperwork.

There's nothing illegal about such an agreement. But under the Federal Arbitration Act, employees can still ask a Federal court to rule on the fairness of their arbitration agreements themselves.

In other words, "I was forced to sign this in order to get the job" is not a valid argument, but employees could petition the Federal courts to invalidate agreements that are grossly unfair, including those that charge punitive fees, mandate arbitration hearings in distant, remote locations, or allow employers to choose an arbitrator that is clearly a kangaroo court paid handsomely to rule in the Boss's favor.

Sounds reasonable, right? Your employer gets to screw you by forcing you to sign away rights as a condition of employment but at least the law throws Joe Public a bone and lets him use the courts to ensure that he receives somewhat-kinda-slightly fair privatized justice. Just about everyone can agree about that. Everyone except America's employers and five important people in Washington.

The Scalia-authored opinion rules that is legal for arbitration agreements to stipulate that challenges to the fairness or legality of the arbitration process must be decided in arbitration. So if your boss chooses Dewey, Fuckem and Howe as the arbitrator for your claim – and you happen to notice that DFH has a flawless 100% record of siding with the employer – your challenge to the fairness of the arbitration process is heard…by the arbitrator in question. Scalia's logic, as usual, is something along the lines of "Well no one puts a gun to your head and forces you to sign the agreement." Good point, Anton. We'll just move on to one of the dozens of other jobs we have waiting for us.

Aside from the very troubling idea that employers can exploit the power imbalance inherent in employment to force their workers to waive their right to access the courts, this decision waves a bright green light in front of corporate America, practically begging them to divert their employees into the privatized pseudo justice system of for-profit arbitration. Even better, it lets them know that they can feel free to establish their own phony arbitrator or patronize an existing one with a reputation for delivering in exchange for its fee. Without access to the courts to challenge the fairness of the process, the arbitration doesn't even have to put up the pretense of fairness or impartiality. They can walk into the meeting with a giant flashing sign reading "YOU LOSE" and there's nothing you can do about it now as long as the agreement is worded to redirect all of your legal challenges to the arbitrator.

So goodbye Federal Arbitration Act.
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Striking down laws isn't activist when right-wing sycophants do it. Activism or not, any decision that whittles away at the few assets individuals have to protect themselves in the course of their employment is A-OK with Anton and the boys.

Being a Midwesterner – my first 31 years were divided among Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana – deindustrialization is something I have seen in painful detail. It's not an idea or something I need to learn about in Michael Moore movies. I've seen Youngstown, Fort Wayne, Saginaw, Buffalo, Rockford, Detroit, and the dozens of others like them. To some extent they all look the same, which is logical given that their histories are so similar. They peaked in 1950, treaded water throughout the 1960s, started to suffer from foreign competition in the 1970s, turned into post-apocalyptic war zones in the 1980s (inspiring an entire genre of white suburban revenge fantasy films like Robocop and Death Wish in the process), and were dealt the final blow in the 1990s with NAFTA.

The big problem, from a brutally realistic perspective, is that these places didn't just disappear when they were declared unnecessary by the wonders of globalization and unregulated capitalism. Their hollow, crumbling shells still exist. We can still wander around their (now vacant) 1950-vintage storefronts and the neighborhoods that have long since made the transition from working-class housing to crack dens and squatters' tenements. So even though singular events – the closing of the Big Factory in a company town, the rapid decline of a key industry – signal the death of a place like Flint, the process of dying is drawn out painfully. It takes decades, not years, for the residents to admit that It is never coming back and things are never going to be the way they used to be again. After a dozen failed "revitalization" and re-development plans, everyone just sort of…gives up.

Evansville, Indiana ("E-ville" to its residents, all desperately seeking an escape) fits the classic Rust Belt model very well despite avoiding the kind of epic, media-friendly collapse suffered by Flint or East St. Louis. Its death has been a slow process. The major employers didn't disappear overnight; they slunk away one by one. Windsor. Guardian Automotive. Zenith. Bristol-Meyers Squibb. Enfamil / Mead Johnson. And now Whirlpool. Now there's pretty much nothing left. A place that was already sad has gotten even sadder. Even the service industry jobs will disappear without a middle class to blow its paychecks around town.

Until now this story is unexceptional. It's nothing new. NAFTA, Mexico, and moving vans speeding toward Guadalajara. The wrinkle in the Whirlpool tale, however, is the $19 million they just took from the Federal government as part of the "stimulus" spending. The money was awarded to develop "smart" clothing dryers that will, like, be Green or something. In a shameless example of quite literally taking the money and running, it appears that Congress's investment in Whirlpool's business is reaping great dividends for the American taxpayers in…Mexico. Now, I understand that these two things are not directly related; the grant money is to develop a quasi-new technology while the E-ville factory made standard refrigerators. Nonetheless the disconnect is striking, with the company quite literally taking the money with one hand and handing its manufacturing jobs to Mexico with the other.

Has there ever been a single piece of legislation or act of Congress that did more to fundamentally alter our society than NAFTA? Part of me says no because it merely finished a process that had already started in the 1970s. On the other hand, the speed with which it has dropped the hammer on so much of the Northeast and Midwest is shocking, leaving cities with no time to adapt or transition their economies away from manufacturing. According to President Clinton we were going to solve this problem by "re-educating" laid off workers in some vague and unspecified way for some vague and unspecified jobs with the word "tech" in their description. Alas, the process of imbuing 45 year-old factory workers with three kids and a mortgage with the skills needed for the High Tech jobs that don't exist anyway has not been a smooth one. As much as this will shock people who opposed NAFTA at the time it was debated, the only promise that this Agreement kept was sending good American jobs to the developing world (which, coincidentally, doesn't actually appear to be Developing. But that's another story.)

Congratulations, President Clinton. Your legacy is intact.

(The following commentary was submitted by regular commenter HoosierPoli. Aside from being generally interesting – albeit considerably longer than you're used to on this site – it is relevant to the current BP situation among other Obama-related issues. As inexperienced bloggers stand to benefit the most from feedback, I'm sure that the author would appreciate your reactions. Without further ado, I present "Barack Obama Is Not Your Personal Fucking Santa Claus.")

Lately, there has been an undeniable trend in the medium of modern discourse in which I find myself writing. I lack a better term for it, so I am forced to call it the “Self-Righteous Liberal Bitch-o-Sphere” (Actually, I take that back; that IS the best term for it). Anyway, since you’re here, reading this, you know what I’m talking about: an endless procession of what passes in the US for leftists, saying at every turn how Barack Obama is actually a secret conservative Clintonite triangulator who’d just as soon sell out his dead mother to cash in on the old Washington games; a golden-tongued huckster who sold us on a Utopian ideal and then delivered more “business as usual”. I’m not sure what’s more distressing; that so-called educated and informed people have swallowed right-wing narratives hook line and sinker, or that they’ve convinced themselves that it’s actually of their own devising.

This “movement” seems to consist of a number of readily-identifiable groups. You’ve got your standard neo-hippie cranks, for whom any economic or political event only serves to further validate their Glenn-Beck-in-hemp-underwear eschatology, to the point that they will ignore actual facts and burn heretics at the metaphorical stake for DARING to suggest that perhaps man’s hubris and disregard for Gaia may not be, at this immediate point in time, destroying civilization as we know it. You’ve got your political idealists, whose first exposure to American politics in its most unfiltered form was the Obama campaign, and who, as a result, have a view of government functionality that can only be described as wildly hallucinogenic. You’ve got your lazy liberals, who feel that if they hit FireDogLake AND the Daily Kos in one day, they’ve done their part to make the world a better place. And you have, here and there, a smattering of people who either know what the fuck they’re talking about and/or actually get off their asses and help improve the world, one small piece at a time. This last group is so tiny that they really don’t fall within the scope of this criticism.

But what all these people have in common is this: They all view George W. Bush as something approaching the purest embodiment of evil in history, and if not, then he’s a close second to Ronald Reagan. They blame everything from Katrina and Abu Ghraib, to 9/11 (in various forms) and the current Gulf disaster on the Bush Administration, sometimes shorthanded to just Bush. Either way, in their minds, Bush was personally involved in or responsible for almost all of the terrible decisions and policy disasters of the last two presidential terms.

I certainly understand the allure of this narrative; in fact, I admit that I fall prey to it with more frequency than I’d like. However, this narrative is misleading, and I’m not here to defend George W. Bush, but to show how it is distorting people’s ideas about what Obama is, or should be.

There are two fundamental errors in the Bush as Antichrist mindset:

The first mistake is assuming Bush had anything to do with the disasters attached to his name.

Bush and Ronald Reagan were very different people, with very different backgrounds and ideologies. It’s easy to forget now that Bush was a born-again and Reagan barely even WENT to church. But their administrations served remarkably similar priorities, and this stems from their most important commonality: They were both absolutely STUNNINGLY incompetent executives.

Neither of them had any idea what their various appointees were doing, or even necessarily who they were. The picture that has emerged of the Bush administration since its merciful departure has been not one of calculated malevolence, but one of almost pitiable impotence. Bush and Reagan were both quite personable campaigners who couldn’t administer a government if their life depended on it. The consequence of that is that when they took power, the people around them who actually knew the score had a very easy time doing pretty much whatever the fuck they wanted with no consequences whatsoever. Reagan had his Ollie North, Bush had his Donald Rumsfeld, and these guys are not exceptions. The Minerals Management Service was not a case of the foxes watching the henhouse; it was a case of NOBODY watching the henhouse and the foxes just walking right in and doing whatever they pleased.

You can certainly argue that Bush bears MORAL responsibility for what happened on his watch, but that doesn’t really mean jack shit at this point. He had no idea what people were actually up to underneath him. They simply gave him some marginal decisions to make, he would Decide them, then kick back feeling good about himself while they kept doing whatever the fuck they wanted. Just look at the financial crisis. When the shitstorm hit in September of 08, if you listen to the people that were there, Bush had literally no idea AT ALL what was happening. Not only did he not expect it, he didn’t even understand it. And when it came time for him to be The Decider, who was it presenting him with the decision?

The former head of Goldman Sachs, a man that I guarantee you Bush did not personally select to be Treasury Secretary, but rather was a name selected for him by some Undersecretary of Buttfucking the Taxpayer, which he signed off on and gave a nice speech and then kicked back with a nice run and an evening of reflecting on how history will validate his Leadership. So Mr. Paulson shows him a plan to give tons of money to banks and Bush says “OK, whatever you think, Mr. Smart Suit-Wearing Guy”.

The point I really want to be stressing here is that at no point is one person in charge of all these terrible fucking decisions. It’s a bunch of different people, all of them assholes, most of them on the take, doing whatever the fuck they please. There’s nobody at the top, not even Cheney, and CERTAINLY not Bush. The second mistake is thinking that if Bush could get what he wanted, and Obama can’t, then Barack Obama must either be a worse executive than Bush or he must be a secret conservative.

This is a well-worn tale: “Bush got trillion-dollar tax cuts with only fifty votes in the Senate! He got the Patriot Act and gutted regulations, etc.
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He knew how to bring the hammer down to get what he wanted, and so if Obama can’t get (the public option/financial reform/energy bill/whatever) passed, he must not actually want it”.

This is a steaming crock of bullshit and it should be obvious why by now. At no point during his presidency did Bush ever get a single thing he wanted. The closest thing I can think of to an actual idea that started with Bush would be either No Child Left Behind or possibly the Mars program, and he actually got neither; neither was funded, neither has had any noticeable impact, both were basically DOA. Recently Bush claimed that he believed that oil should be phased out and wind energy is the wave of the future and, call me crazy, I think he’s telling the truth. If so, then it should be pretty fucking obvious that W was not the one calling the shots in his administration.

No, what Bush got was what OTHER PEOPLE wanted. Massive tax cuts for the ridiculously wealthy were, I promise you, not Bush’s intellectual baby. It was an idea that one of his advisors said would be a good thing, and a bunch of Congressmen agreed, and Bush signed off on it. Every major piece of legislation Bush signed was something he AGREED to, not something he specifically TRIED to get. In other words, the 8 years of Bush’s presidency, that long national nightmare, was really nothing more than bland acquiescence to an murderous and insane status quo. I expect that the outcome would have been identical if there had been no President at all.

A note about the Sympathetic Fallacy.*

The sympathetic fallacy is the very human tendency to attribute human characteristics to non-human things. It is the source of our unshakable belief that our computers can understand us when we curse at them. It is (probably) the source of belief in God (but let’s not go there today). But, most relevant to our topic, it is the reason that we insist upon attributing human characteristics to governments, which may be made up of people but absolutely do not make decisions or in any way operate in the way that a person does. We like to say that the government “wants” this or that, but a government cannot “want” anything, because it is not a person. Unfortunately, this fallacy is really more on the level of a basic psychological illusion: even if we know about it, it won’t go away. And because it is so pernicious, it even demands a face to go along with that personality, and today, the face of the Government is none other than Barack Obama.

And so we come back to our Criticism-From-The-Left Obama haters. I have culled just a few comments from a comment section at Unnamed Liberal Blog (see if you can recognize it!), which I have deemed to be representative (of course, the reader is free to make their own judgments):

"I've sadly come to regard Obama as a Rockefeller Republican, but maybe he's further to the right than that"

“It seemed clear to me during the campaign that Obama was more conservative than most of my acquaintances thought, and I think his actions since the election demonstrate that. He talks nicely, but he's just not comfortable with radical solutions to anything (with 'radical' defined in terms of "sudden, dramatic changes of course")”

“News flash folks — Obama is to the right of Clinton, and HE was to the right of Eisenhower.”

I could do this all night, but you get my point. It started very early on, grew to an absolute fever pitch during the health care deba(cle)te, and has stuck around like a 4pm wine-and-Jagermeister hangover. If Obama is synonymous with “socialist” on the right, on the left it’s synonymous with “sellout”. On everything from Don’t Ask Don’t Tell to immigration, Obama is seen as, at best, a total pussy, and at worst, a JAP (Just Another Politician).

But let’s be brutally honest with ourselves: Our last President showed us what the status quo is. Bush, by being essentially a rubber stamp (don’t let anyone get it backwards; in the 2000s, Congress did the pushing, Bush did the rolling over), demonstrated what our modern Federal government, left to its own devices, will get up to. And yet, whenever the CURRENT Federal government comes up with something that looks unpalatably familiar, the blame is instantly and unthinkingly heaped at the feet of Obama, invariably with some intolerably clever comment involving either “hope” or “change”.

Now I’m not here to be an Obama ballboy, but I do know this: Barack Obama is not a king. Barack Obama does not occupy 535 Congressional seats. Barack Obama’s opinions and beliefs about the way this country should be going, how we should be handling gay rights and global warming and Social Security, these count for EXTRAORDINARILY little when it comes to the governing process. Forget that tripe you learned as a kid about “the most powerful person in the world”; the President has got very little power beyond the ability to nominate judges and pray that he can get the head of the Ways and Means Committee to go along with his budget priorities. Our eight years of Bushanoia have given us an incredibly distorted view of what a President can actually accomplish; we just assumed that it was Bush at the wheel, when in reality he was passed out drunk in the trunk of the car. And so insofar as our government has accomplished anything even REMOTELY progressive or positive (and, in case you’ve forgotten, it has) in the past year and a half, the credit belongs to the incredible energy and discipline Obama has instilled in his administration, both directly and through his appointees.

Of course, I can already hear the (and I borrow humbly the term of the excellent Al Giordiano) poutrage machine beginning to stir from its slumber. “Fucking Obamabot” it will begin, its wit as sharp as ever. “You’re so stupid as to believe that Obama actually wants to change things. In reality, he WANTS offshore drilling, and he doesn’t want to help out gays. He wants a weak energy bill, and a crippled healthcare bill, and watered down token ‘progressive’ legislation while he bails out the bankers and screws over the working guy. He’s just another, differently colored cog in The Machine”.

To which I say: You could certainly be right.

I mean, given all the layers of abstraction and sausage-making machinery between Obama and the rest of us, there’s really no way for us to tell.
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But if you make that argument, you have to make one conceit. If you actually believe that Barack Obama personally supports everything the Congress and Federal government have done so far in his presidency, you really have no choice but to admit that Barack Obama is the most talented political leader to ever walk the Earth. Because for an executive to always get what they “really want” on every single issue would be an absolutely unprecedented miracle of governance. If that is the case, then Barack Obama is playing some 11th-dimensional chess on a scale that has never before been witnessed.

Or, if you’re like me and you prefer the more likely explanation, Barack Obama is probably a fairly progressive person (if you pay attention to what actually comes out of his mouth, especially before he ran for president, this seems reasonably probable) and, more than anything, a highly talented executive who has managed to wrangle an mind-bogglingly huge bureaucracy, based on a frail and nearly-obsolete Constitution, chock-full of ideological opponents, massive egos, fabulously wealthy interests, and just plain antagonistic assholes and backwoods idiots, and managed to do more good with it in eighteen months than anyone in the past forty years. And on that point, the record is mercifully clear.

So next time you start to go on a tear about how Obama wants this, or Obama did that, or Obama is ignoring the netroots, or Obama is defending this or that Bush policy, please remember the sympathetic fallacy. The government is not a person, and Barack Obama is not your personal fucking Santa Claus.

*I have borrowed this section in part from a much smarter and more insightful commentator than I, but unfortunately I can no longer remember the source. If anyone could let me know who I’m ripping off here, I would like to add a proper citation.

Occasionally a state legislature will pass a law so blatantly unconstitutional that even the tamest mainstream media outlets refuse to be diplomatic and pretend otherwise. It seems like a fantastic waste of time and resources to pass such legislation but it is usually an effort, driven by well-funded interest groups, to force an issue before the U.S. Supreme Court. Most of the truly wacky anti-abortion legislation – say, an Oklahoma law that allows physicians to withhold ultrasounds from pregnant women if it reveals birth defects that may lead her to consider abortion – is a transparent attempt to goad the Supreme Court into rehashing Roe v. Wade.

So when Arizona's state legislature – and by the way, Arizona must be butter because it's on a ROLL lately – proposes legislation to forbid birthright citizenship to babies born in Arizona of illegal immigrant parents, we recognize their larger goal. That a state cannot pass a law altering Federal immigration and citizenship policy is so obvious that it requires no comment. That this law is bound to work its way into Federal court is equally obvious. I'm afraid, however, that anti-immigrant people may get exactly what they want from the Courts this time.
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American citizenship is available through three avenues: naturalization, jus soli (literally "law of the ground" or "soil"), or jus sanguinis ("law of blood"). In other words one can apply for citizenship or be born with it either by being born on U.

S. territory or being born of two American citizen parents (even if born outside of the U.S.) The Arizona law would try to redefine jus soli, which, unlike many aspects of citizenship law, rests on particularly shaky ground.

Jus soli is based on the 14th Amendment, which states that, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." Like so many Constitutional provisions, there is an obvious subjective component to this language: what exactly does "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" mean? Is 'jurisdiction' being subject to the laws of the US? If so, than anyone physically present in the US meets the definition. Does 'jurisdiction' imply citizenship or legal residence?

Let's just say it would not be difficult to make that argument. Not at all.

The Court ruled on that issue in one of the most important – even if not the most well known – decisions in its history: US v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). Wong was born in California to two Chinese citizens. As an adult he was denied re-entry into the US after a visit to China because he was not a citizen by virtue of his parents' Chinese citizenship. Eventually the Court ruled in Wong's favor (following the British common law application of jus soli) stating that a child born in the U.S. of two non-citizen parents is a birthright citizen as long as the following conditions exist:

1. The parents are not born of foreign diplomats.
2. The parents are not hostile forces occupying U.S. territory by force.
3. The parents have permanent residence in the U.S.

The problem is that Wong's parents were legal residents of California, hence the decision does not tell us whether or not "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" requires residence or legal residence. "Permanent" residence does not imply legal residence, hence the decision has been interpreted to mean that anyone born on U.S. soil is an American citizen. As far as defining jus soli in the United States, this case is pretty much it. The concept of birthright citizenship rests on an interpretation of the Constitution, not the Constitution itself. The language is too vague to permit the latter. It would not be difficult to make a plausible argument that the Wong decision need not automatically apply jus soli to the children of illegal immigrants depending on what constitutes jurisdiction. To be honest, I think that's a pretty good argument.

In short, I will not be even slightly shocked if the current Court – with its four vote block of ultra-conservatives – were to offer a different interpretation of "jurisdiction" that excludes illegal residents. I am personally ambivalent about this issue. I don't lie awake at night worrying about "anchor babies" and how the imm'grunts are a-comin' to take our jobs and women. The problem of illegal immigration is caused entirely by lax enforcement (or non-enforcement) of immigration law, which in turn is a function of campaign contributions from businesses that thrive off illegal workers. So I'm willing to consider "anchor babies" an externality of the elevation of profit above all other concerns. In other words, I won't shed tears over the decision either way despite my belief that the current interpretation of "jurisdiction" is correct. For people with a stronger stake in the issue, though, the Arizona bill and the potential for this issue to reach the Supreme Court should be troubling.