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Jesus Shrugged — why Christianity and Ayn Rand don’t mix

April 30, 2012 – 12:19 pm

To a sizable number of conservatives, Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged is practically scripture. To another sizable number, Christian scripture is a law higher than the Constitution.

If you want to appreciate just how strange that is, consider the passage that gives Atlas Shrugged its title:

“Mr. Rearden,” said Francisco, his voice solemnly calm, “if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders – what would you tell him to do?”

“I … don’t know. What … could he do? What would you tell him?”

“To shrug.”

Both Francisco d’Anconia and Hank Rearden are heroes of the novel. Ultimately, Francisco convinces Hank and many other right-thinking capitalists to vanish and let the success-punishing world economy fend for itself without their genius and productivity. Francisco’s exit is particularly dramatic: He destroys all the assets that he can’t take with him into hiding.

The capitalists are Atlas. They shrug and let the world economy collapse. (Well, Francisco does a bit more than shrug. He didn’t just let those copper mines collapse. But never mind.)

Now imagine entering the novel to ask this question: “Mr. d’Anconia, if you saw Jesus, whipped and with a crown of thorns on his head, his knees buckling, his arms trembling, but still trying to drag his cross down the streets of Jerusalem to Golgotha – what would you tell him to do?”

To shrug?

That impossible image – Jesus shrugging off the cross and returning to Heaven six weeks early – sums up the incompatibility of Randism and Christianity. Rand taught that the powerful bear no obligation to the helpless. Jesus had other ideas.

Rand held private property rights to be absolute. That’s how Francisco can guiltlessly blow up his mines. They’re his. Forget superstitious nonsense like Psalm 24’s “The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” Property is not something you hold in trust for a higher power. Owning property entails no moral responsibility at all. It’s yours. Do whatever you want with it.

Short of pure Orwellian doublethink, there’s no way to square that with Christianity. Rand herself didn’t even try. She found “the inviolate integrity of man’s soul” and “a code of altruism” to be “a great, basic contradiction in the teachings of Jesus”.

This is why men have never succeeded in applying Christianity in practice, while they have preached it in theory for two thousand years. The reason of their failure was not men’s natural depravity or hypocrisy, which is the superficial (and vicious) explanation usually given. The reason is that a contradiction cannot be made to work.

And that brings us to Rep. Paul Ryan’s recent go-round with the Catholic bishops and the Jesuits of Georgetown University.

Ryan is a Randist whose budget plan Francisco d’Anconia would love. As Paul Krugman sums up, “it slashes taxes for corporations and the rich while drastically cutting food and medical aid to the needy”. It deals with the resulting deficit increase by closing unspecified tax loopholes that lobbyists will undoubtedly manage to keep open once they get specified.

But Ryan also claims to be a good Catholic, so now he’s trying to make that work too. Like Peter denying Jesus, Ryan now calls his Randism “an urban legend“. But that trick is hard to pull off in the Age of Google, when everything you’ve been saying for years is easily retrievable. You know who started that urban legend? Paul Ryan.

Unfortunately for Ryan’s attempt to wash his budget in the blood of the lamb, popes have been handing down bleeding-sacred-heart encyclicals on economic policy since Rerum Novarum in 1891. (You can get the general flavor from this week’s Sift quote or  my article on John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens.) Worse, the Church has actual experts who keep track of these things, so you can’t just cherry-pick the Catholic tradition for out-of-context quotes and expect nobody to call you on it.

Ninety members of the Georgetown faculty called Paul Ryan on it:

we would be remiss in our duty to you and our students if we did not challenge your continuing misuse of Catholic teaching to defend a budget plan that decimates food programs for struggling families, radically weakens protections for the elderly and sick, and gives more tax breaks to the wealthiest few. … In short, your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The particular doctrine Ryan misuses is called “subsidiarity” (first enunciated in Rerum Novarum). As theologian Meghan Clark explains it:

According to the principle of subsidiarity, decisions should be made at the lowest level possible and the highest level necessary.

And BeliefNet editor David Gibson elaborates:

[Subsidiarity] argues that lower levels of society (individuals, families, communities) should be allowed to carry out social functions that they can fulfill and larger society (state and federal governments), meanwhile, should provide help (“subsidium,” is the formal Latin term) to cover things the smaller units cannot. … If Washington has to do it, so be it; if Mayberry can do it, all the better. But if Mayberry can’t, then Washington has an obligation to step in.

Conservative policy genuinely based on subsidiarity would work upward from below: As local churches, charities and neighborhood organizations developed plans and raised resources to care for the poor and helpless, local governments could re-purpose their resources on services that the state now provides. States could similarly replace federal programs, and the federal government would shrink because there was less for it to do.

None of that is actually happening in any significant way. Instead, conservatives at all levels cut programs and taxes, using the excuse that problems would be better handled further down the chain. But down-the-chain conservatives are not reaching up to take the responsibilities that up-the-chain conservatives are dropping.

I could sympathize with, say, Ryan’s desire to cut federal services for the poor in his district if conservative Governor Scott Walker were eager to expand Wisconsin’s state programs to take up the slack (and raise state taxes to pay for them) as subsidiarity demands.

But is he? I don’t think so.

If elected at all levels, conservative officials from the president to the councilman would shrug and let responsibility for the poor drop like a stone. That’s not subsidiarity, and it’s not Catholic or any other kind of Christian.

Francisco d’Anconia, though, could probably give a great speech about it.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (40)

How Understanding Should Liberals Be?

April 30, 2012 – 11:54 am

In a polarized world, it’s tempting and satisfying to think: My side is right and the other side is wrong. We represent truth, justice, and all that is good; they represent lies, corruption, and all that is evil. So the most direct way to improve the world is for Us to kick the crap out of Them.

As a liberal, though, I sometimes find it just as tempting (and satisfying in a different way) to think: No one has a monopoly on Truth; there are wise and good people on all sides. Democracy doesn’t work without compromise, and for any conflict there’s usually a higher Truth that transcends both poles. So it’s important for the wise and good people on all sides to stay in dialog and work towards understanding and consensus. Only then can we achieve the kind of win/win solutions that move humanity forward.

On one path, anger and self-righteousness provide energy and direction. On the other, identification with the yet-to-be-discovered wisdom of the future yields a softer (but perhaps more lasting) determination.

Each attitude (if I’m being really honest) offers its own kind of ego boost. In one, I’m superior to those stupid and corrupt conservatives; in the other I’m superior to everyone who hasn’t been to the mountaintop and seen my vision – or at least the vision that I plan to see when I get to the mountaintop.

In the blogosphere, kick-the-crap-out-of-them liberals and find-the-higher-truth liberals have their own polarization, which often manifests in bitter fights between idealists and pragmatists. So in this post, I’m doing what any good meta-liberal would do: I’m searching for the higher truth that transcends the conflict between crap-kicking liberals and conflict-transcending liberals.

The text for my sermon is Jonathan Haidt’s recent book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Obviously, Haidt hails from the conflict-transcending tribe. He describes himself as a life-long liberal from academia, but living among the common people in India opened his eyes to the worthiness of conservative values like in-group loyalty and respect for authority, and the data he has collected since convinces him that there is wisdom on both sides.

Now if only all the wise and good people could transcend polarization and get into dialog.

Not so fast. If Haidt had completely convinced me, I would write a polemic about how conflict-transcending liberals need to kick the crap out of the crap-kicking liberals who poison the dialog that we otherwise could be having with wise and good conservatives.

But I also read Charles Blow’s post in February, showing that compromise itself is a liberal value conservatives don’t share. In poll after poll, Democrats say their leaders should compromise to get something done, while Republicans say their leaders should stick to conservative principles.

Given that difference, the path of least resistance is for Democrats to compromise and Republicans to move ever further to the right. So the Heritage Foundation’s conservative alternative to HillaryCare begets ObamaCare, which Heritage now denounces as an unconstitutional Marxist plot to take over the economy.

I sometimes imagine inviting the Ricks (Santorum and Warren) to a dialog aimed at finding a truth that transcends both my secularism and their Christianity. It’s a non-starter. To the Ricks, the very idea of a truth transcending Christianity is Satanic. Even liberal Christianity might be Satanic.

Worse, you can’t negotiate with Wisdom and Goodness when Lies and Corruption are in the driver’s seat. Think about climate change: The “controversy” over global warming comes not from the laboratories of dissident scientists, but from the board rooms of Exxon-Mobil and Koch Energy.

Corporations are sociopaths; they aren’t influenced by arguments about truth and goodness. So whatever evidence emerges, fossil-fuel companies (and their PR firms, lobbyists, and senators) will challenge the scientific consensus on global warming until they’ve sold the last trainload of coal to the last power plant to run the last air conditioner.

How do you find common ground with that? Don’t we just have to win?

Haidt’s case. Armored with appropriate skepticism, then, let’s look at what Haidt has to say.

Haidt has very artfully organized his book to illustrate his own principles. He believes people first react to an idea intuitively, and only then engage their rational minds to justify their reaction. So Haidt knows that if he turns people off on page 1, none of the evidence he offers later will get a fair hearing. So instead he engagingly tells the story of how he got to his conclusions while saving the conclusions themselves until the end.

He offers (and supports with data) a model of how this all-powerful moral intuition works: Humans have evolved to ‘taste’ six different moral ‘flavors’. Four are easy to describe:

  • Care/harm. Don’t hurt the innocent, especially if they’re cute and helpless.
  • Loyalty/betrayal. Don’t break your agreements or sabotage the team.
  • Authority/subversion. Don’t get uppity and disrespect your betters.
  • Sanctity/degradation. Don’t break your community’s fundamental taboos.

Haidt spells out the emotions these flavors evoke – violations of sanctity evoke disgust, for example, while violations of loyalty evoke rage – and how these responses (even the ones that contradict others) might have evolved.

Originally fairness was a fifth flavor, but eventually he realized that this word is used ambiguously for two different flavors.

  • Liberty/oppression. Nobody is inherently better than anybody else. Example: Count each person’s vote equally.
  • Fairness/cheating. Rewards should be proportional to contributions. Example: People who worker harder should make more money.

The punch line is that liberal moral arguments focus on Care and Liberty, while conservatives season their arguments with all six flavors. (Again, there’s supporting data.)

Politically, Haidt’s book has two big takeaways for liberals: (1) We should learn how to appeal to a wider palate. (2) Conservatives aren’t evil, they just taste different flavors of morality.

Not so fast, part II. I can buy (1), but I’ve got problems with (2). First, I taste those other flavors, I’m just deeply ambivalent about them, because I understand how they can serve evil purposes as easily as good: Being a team player and respecting authority can be bad (say, when you’re in Nazi Germany). Sanctity provides the ugh-factor that justifies oppression of out-groups like homosexuals. Distributing rewards proportionately to contributions can hide an unequal distribution of the opportunities to contribute.

I love a good strong salty taste, but it makes me worry about the value of what I’m eating.

Second, go back to my Exxon-Mobil example: Corporations don’t taste any flavors of morality, they just know how to manipulate the people who do. Fry up some pink slime, add a bunch of salt, and it tastes great!

How understanding do I want to be? But now I’m leaning too far over in the crap-kicking direction. I promised some transcendence. So here’s how much of Haidt I take to heart:

First, liberals need to distinguish what we’re fighting for from who we’re fighting with.

That dittohead friend from high school or the cousin who forwards right-wing viral emails – you probably already realize that they’re not bad people. If you can stand to talk politics at all with them, Haidt has a lot to tell you: You’re never going to convince them by yelling your liberal values back at them. To be convincing, you need to understand what flavor of morality they find in the positions they’re taking, echo that value to the extent you honestly can, and then detach it from the case at hand while you add liberal flavors to the stew.

But lies are poison, no matter how they’re flavored. You can cut some slack for the woman in the next cubicle who tells you Obama is a Kenyan. But you can’t cut any slack for the lie itself. “Why do you believe that?” invites dialog, but “You might be right” just surrenders.

And that TV-talking-head that a Koch-Brothers astroturf group pays to lie for them? He’s evil. Don’t waste your compassion trying to understand anything deeper about him than his paycheck.

Compromise on proposals, not principles. There’s nothing wrong with supporting the best proposal you can pass, even if the other side also manages to get some of its agenda in as well. That’s how democracy works.

For example, the 15th Amendment guaranteed black men the right to vote. Some feminists opposed it, because it should have given women the right to vote as well.

In principle, they were right: It should have. But I’m glad the 15th Amendment passsed, especially since the 19th Amendment eventually followed.

But no post-Civil-War liberal should have said, “It’s good that the 15th Amendment doesn’t apply to women.” Pass as much as you can, but never surrender your intention to come back for more.

Liberal/conservative isn’t symmetric. Haidt is right that six-flavor conservatism has an inherent advantage over two-flavor liberalism. We just don’t have as many ways to provoke a knee-jerk response. That’s why conservatism corrolates with low-effort thought.

That’s also why we can’t just invert the knee-jerk arguments of the right. The correct response to “Black people are bad” isn’t “White people are bad.” “America is always right” shouldn’t lead to “America is always wrong.”

Our side needs nuance. We need to engage thought rather than shut it down.

In particular, we need nuance when we respond to books like The Righteous Mind. The proper response to “Conservatives are good people” isn’t “Conservatives are bad people.” It’s “In what cases and what ways are conservatives good, and how can we engage them there without betraying our own values?”

By weeklysift | Also posted in The Sifted Bookshelf | Tagged , | Comments (10)

The Narratives of November

April 23, 2012 – 1:25 pm

All across the Commentariat, I’m hearing the same message: “The pregame warm-up is over.” The Obama vs. Romney show-down has finally arrived, so it’s time to get serious about the November election.

It’s fascinating, though, to see what “getting serious” means to different people. For some, it means getting down to the nuts and bolts of the electoral college. We actually hold 51 presidential elections – don’t forget D.C. – or even 56, once you realize that Maine and Nebraska award one electoral vote for each congressional district plus two for the winner of the statewide election.

People who get electoral-college-serious are already drawing their swing-state maps, like CNN’s above, where they give Obama 196 EVs, Romney 159, and leave 183 up for grabs in 15 swing states. If you want to try your own scenarios, go to 270towin.com. (Here’s mine: Arizona, Indiana, Missouri, and North Carolina only go to Obama in another landslide. Ditto for Romney taking Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. So I start with Obama 242, Romney 206 and eight swing states worth 90. I think it will ultimately come down to Ohio and Virginia.)

Other people get demographic-serious. These folks focus on the Latino vote, the gender gap, and the turnout of Obama’s “new voters” (mainly blacks and young people) who showed up in 2008 but not in 2010.

You can also get characteristic-serious. People’s voting choices might still be in flux, but Obama is more “likeable” than Romney (56%–27% in a recent poll), and is also seen as “more honest and trustworthy” (44%–33%).

Here’s the way I’m looking at the race: April head-to-head polls are fun, but a lot can happen before November. Unless you’re a professional campaign strategist, it’s also too early to get electoral-college-serious. That’s a game to play in October, when it merges with demographic-seriousness and you start talking about the Hispanic vote in Colorado or how the urban/rural split is playing out in Virginia.

Characteristic-seriousness is only part of the story. Nobody liked or trusted Richard Nixon, but in 1972 Tricky Dick had one of the biggest landslides ever. Nate Silver says favorability predicts the outcome in October, but not so well in April. (Maybe we talk ourselves into liking a candidate after we decide to vote for him.)

So instead, I’m getting narrative-serious. To me, this phase of the campaign is about fleshing out four stories: Why you should vote

  • for Obama
  • against Obama
  • for Romney
  • against Romney.

Come November, one of those stories is going to sound a lot more believable than the other three. Whoever benefits from that story is going to win.

The candidates’ characteristics matter, but only as the building-blocks of their stories. So Mitt Romney’s message can’t be: “You should vote for me because I’m a regular guy like you.” That loses, because we’ve all already decided we don’t believe it.

Losing campaigns are characterized by images that crystalize the unbelievability of some part of the candidate’s story: Mike Dukakis in a tank. John Kerry hunting geese. Mitt Romney trying to look like a regular guy is a similar image waiting to happen.

This didn't help.

But Romney doesn’t have to be a regular guy to win. FDR wasn’t and neither was JFK. Neither, for that matter, is Obama. So Romney could have a winning message like this: “This country is going the wrong way and Romney is a smart executive who knows how to turn things around.” People who don’t like Mitt at all might believe that story and vote for him.

Who says aristocrats can't win?

Vote for Romney. The Romney smart-executive message depends on a couple of things. The more the economy appears to need saving, the better it works. Plus, Romney has to look and sound like that guy. He needs to win the debates, and he needs some economic proposals that seem new.

Obama’s allies can throw sand in Romney’s gears in two ways: (1) By pointing out that Romney wasn’t a turn-around executive, he was a vulture capitalist who profited from deals that destroyed jobs. (2) By identifying Romney’s don’t-tax-the-rich, don’t-regulate-BP policies with the Bush administration. If Romney’s so smart about the economy, why does he sound just like George W. Bush?

Vote for Obama. Obama needs to portray himself as a reasonable guy who did well under difficult conditions, and who has kept his eye on the country’s long-term goals. He needs to contrast how the economy is now (middling) with how it was on Inauguration Day (in free fall).

No matter what the Supreme Court does with it, he needs to defend Obamacare as the only progress recent presidents have made on reforming our broken healthcare system. Make Romney (or the Court) own all the problems of the pre-Obamacare system.

Obama can also point to foreign policy successes that have no parallel on Romney’s resume: We’re not fighting in Iraq any more. We’re winding down Afghanistan. And Osama bin Laden is dead.

Romney’s allies can counter this by exploiting any bad news and blaming it on Obama. They need voters to judge the economy on an absolute scale rather than a relative one. Who cares how things were under Bush? They’re bad now.

Vote Against Romney. You should vote against Romney because he’s not on your side. His policies favor the rich because he’s rich, he’s always been rich, and the rich are the only people he understands or cares about.

A simple “he’s rich” argument won’t work, because nobody cares. Every big name in politics, Obama included, is rich by most people’s standards. But if Romney’s wealth and general stiffness can be tied to his pro-1% policies, he loses.

In the primaries, Romney interpreted every such attack as envy of his success, not resentment of his being on the wrong side. That was sufficient for a Republican audience, for whom the rich are heroes. (But even there you have to wonder what would have happened in Michigan and Ohio if Santorum had hammered economic issues rather than wandering off into Jesusland.) But he’ll have to come up with a better answer in the general election.

The Obama campaign will make sure that specific groups are reminded of the extreme positions Romney took against them when he needed right-wing support. Women will hear a lot about what Romney-supported “personhood” laws would do to contraception, and Latinos won’t be allowed to forget his self-deportation policy. These attacks will be hard to counter without feeding the Romney-will-say-anything meme.

Vote Against Obama. There are two anti-Obama messages. The one for general consumption is that he hasn’t performed well enough to deserve a second term. The economy is still bad, the deficit is high, the wars have fizzled rather than ending in victory, and Iran is still on track to get the bomb.

That all works better if there is bad news to tie it to: a new downturn, a big bankruptcy, a terrorist attack, and so on. (Karl Rove thinks Obama can be beaten on foreign policy, but it’s hard to see how that happens without some striking event.)

The second anti-Obama message needs to be carefully targeted to the white Christian population:  In Obama’s vision of America’s future, you’re not on top any more. Working-class whites in particular feel insecure and long for an imagined past. Romney needs to (subtly) cast Obama as the reason that past can’t come back.

What Works? It’s possible one campaign will just be better than the other at telling its stories. The anti-Obama story will have a ton of corporate money behind it, and that might make a difference.

But if both campaigns are competent, it’s going to come to events. If the news between now and November is neutral or positive, Obama’s stories work. But if there’s major bad news, voters may decide that Romney deserves a first chance more than Obama deserves a second.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (11)

Jobs, Hobbies, and Reflections on a Viral Post

April 23, 2012 – 12:12 pm

Last week I wrote Rich People Don’t Have Jobs to point out one of the most important distinctions in American life: the one that separates the people who work out of necessity from the people who either don’t work or work purely for personal satisfaction.

Usually, a distinction that basic corresponds to a pair of one-syllable words: young/old, boy/girl, rich/poor, black/white, smart/dumb, gay/straight, and so on. People like to talk about important categories, so they give them nice short names.

But what happens when there’s a distinction people don’t talk about? Then the words are longer and sound like scientific classifications. When I was young, nobody was supposed to talk about men who love men or women who love women, so they were homosexuals rather than heterosexuals. I first heard the word gay (in that sense) in the 70s, right about the time it became OK to talk about gays.

You know you’ve really hit a taboo subject when you can’t think of a word at all. Picture Freud laboriously searching his dictionary, looking for the word that describes a boy’s lust for his mother. Sorry, Sigmund, you’ll have to coin oedipal yourself.

That’s where I was. I’m not as creative with mythology as Freud, but I suppose I could have hyphenated something: necessity-workers and satisfaction-workers, say. It would have sounded sociological, an academic distinction rather than something people butt their heads against every day.

The other approach is to be outrageous. Gay was outrageous, back when it was coined. It made boys smirk at the idea of donning “gay apparel” at Christmas, or Fred and Barney having “a gay old time” down in Bedrock. A lot of people hated the homosexual community’s appropriation of a perfectly good one-syllable word – as if homosexuality were something people should want to talk about, as if English should reconfigure itself to make those conversations easier.

I decided to be outrageous. So I called work-you-do-out-of-necessity a job and work-you-do-for-satisfaction a hobby. “Rich people don’t have jobs,” I said, “they have hobbies.”

I heard from a lot of people who hated it. (And others who loved it.) Many wanted to talk about the words rather than what they represented. Some accused me of saying that rich people don’t work. (I didn’t.) Or of denigrating well-to-do “hobbyists”. (Why anyone would feel denigrated to be classed with Warren Buffett and Tiger Woods escapes me.) There were the usual write-offs of “class warfare”. Some of the wilder comments I saw were by Facebook friends of my article-sharing Facebook friends. (One thought the point of my post was to beatify my mother and demonize Ann Romney.)

Here’s what I think is going on: America is in denial about inequality and class. It’s fine to talk (occasionally) about rich and poor, but only as a difference of degree. The one has a new BMW and the other an old junker, but they both get where they’re going. The one eats at a four-star restaurant while the other has a bag lunch, but they both eat.

What’s taboo is to suggest that there’s something qualitatively different about living with money. We’re fine with the idea that a concierge doctor will come out to see a billionaire while a waitress goes to the emergency room — a little more convenience, that’s what money gives you a right to expect. But it’s taboo to suggest that the billionaire will live in situations where the waitress will die.

If we don’t talk about those qualitative differences, though, the conversation gets distorted. Inevitably it tilts towards justifying the privileges of the rich, because they appear to be so much better at life than the working poor.

Take the situation I focused on: the necessity-driven working-class housewife versus the wealthy stay-at-home mom. Picture how each might cook for her family. All day, the less affluent one has been juggling the laundry, the chauffeuring, and the baby-minding. Running out of time, she combines the left-over hamburger from last night’s tacos with a jar of Ragu and serves a spaghetti good enough to keep body and soul together for another day.

Meanwhile the wealthy woman sends her cook home early, shops for fresh organic ingredients, and then spends all afternoon in the kitchen trying out what she’s been learning in her Italian cuisine class. The meal she produces is better in every way: tastier, healthier, more artfully presented. Proud of her achievement, she is a more pleasant dinner companion than the harried working-class mom.

If you imagine that the two women are doing the same thing, then you’re forced to conclude that the rich woman is doing it better. Not only is her product of higher quality, it’s superior for virtuous reasons: She devoted more time, searched for better ingredients, and applied more expert knowledge.

It’s that way across the board. If you imagine that necessity-driven families and surplus-enjoying families are doing the same things, it’s obvious that (on the whole) the richer families do them better. Once you accept that frame, you’ll be driven to the conclusion that wealthier families are just superior at doing the stuff life is made of. From there it’s a short jump to the conclusion that each family gets the life it deserves.

But they’re not doing the same things. In America, class differences are qualitative, not just quantitative. Rich and poor lead different lives.

College students who spend the summer manning a cash register or an assembly line are not doing the same things as the middle-aged people they work next to. Living on ramen while you finish your MBA is not the same as living on ramen from now on. Scrimping to save for your Caribbean vacation is not the same as scrimping to pay off what you owe the dentist. The “jobs” of CEOs who choose not to retire to the Hamptons (yet) bear no resemblance to the jobs their secretaries and salesmen do.

The fundamental difference between the classes in America is not the difference between steak and hamburger. It’s the difference between choice and necessity, between striving for fulfillment and striving for survival.

We need qualitatively different words to express those differences. Jobs and hobbies — not perfect, maybe, but better than any alternatives I can think of.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (5)

Rich People Don’t Have Jobs

April 16, 2012 – 12:08 pm

The news hook for this post is the Hilary Rosen/Ann Romney flap, but in truth just about every week offers some hook for the following observation: Rich people don’t have jobs, they have hobbies.

If any multi-millionaire CEOs and investment bankers read the Sift (love to hear from you), they’re probably screaming at me: “What do you mean I don’t have a job? I have the toughest job in the world! I work 80 hours a week, and the stress follows me home. Waitresses and coal miners are slackers compared to me.”

Maybe so.

Whenever the national conversation turns to inequality, the corporate media gives us gobs of stories about and testimonies from the hard-working 1%. Probably some of it’s exaggerated – waitresses and coal miners don’t have publicists, after all – but maybe a lot of it is true.

By all accounts, Bill Gates was very focused during those years when he turned his first Microsoft billion into fifty more. Warren Buffett may spend every waking hour researching Berkshire Hathaway’s next big investment. For all I know, Kobe Byrant and Tiger Woods train like maniacs.

It doesn’t matter. Rich people have always devoted a lot of time and effort to their hobbies. That doesn’t mean they have jobs.

You know what a job is? It’s something you do because you need to eat, or because your family is counting on you. You don’t necessarily hate it, and maybe you’d even keep doing it if you didn’t have to. (I used to get my hair cut by an 80ish guy who just liked feeling useful and talking to people. He told great stories about barbering on luxury trains back in the day.) But that’s the whole point: If it’s really a job, you do have to.

That’s the only test that counts. It’s not how hard you work, it’s what happens if you stop. If quitting means real hardship for you or your family, you have a job. If you keep at it even though you could spend the rest of your life skipping rocks at your house by the lake, you have a hobby.

I’ve got nothing against hobbies. The Weekly Sift is a hobby. One way to describe the Marxist vision of Utopia is that we’d all be hobbyists, and the world’s work would get done by people who just wanted the satisfaction of doing it. (That vision even works sometimes: Wikipedia, open source software, and so on.)

People have hobbies for fulfillment, for identity, to get out of the house, to make the world a better place, to test themselves against worthy adversaries, and for a lot of other creditable reasons. People have jobs because their kids need braces.

It’s not a difficult concept.

And that brings me to the Romneys.

Like most Republican politicians, Mitt Romney has been having trouble figuring out how to respond to the fact that women don’t like him. Across the country, Republicans have been pushing policies that (at best) are insensitive to the needs and desires of the vast majority of American women. Democrats have packaged that as a “War on Women”, and polls show that their message is working. In particular, it’s working against Mitt, who had to endorse a lot of War-on-Women policies to compete with Rick Santorum for the votes of social conservatives.

What to do?

Romney still has problems on his right flank, so he can’t just shake the Etch-a-Sketch and draw a more feminist set of policies. Instead he’s been touting Ann as his connection to the women of America. (That’s patronizingly close to a some-of-my-best friends-are-women defense, but it’s all he’s got.) Women, Ann tells him, don’t care about so-called “women’s issues” like contraception or equal pay:

My wife has the occasion, as you know, to campaign on her own and also with me, and she reports to me regularly that the issue women care about most is the economy.

On CNN’s AC360, liberal talking-head Hilary Rosen objected that even if we shift away from social issues to economic issues, Ann Romney is not the best person to represent women’s interests.

Guess what? His wife has never actually worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing.

And that brought down a hailstorm of outrage, because it allowed Republicans to brand Democrats as anti-Mom. How dare Rosen say Ann Romney has never worked? Ann raised five boys – that’s work enough for anybody! And so on.

All of which is beside the point, because the job/hobby distinction applies as much to within-the-home work as to work-for-money.

Yes, a lot of effort goes into raising five boys to adulthood, and Ann may have done a fair piece of it herself. For all I know, she could have changed all the diapers, nursed all the colds, and packed all the lunch boxes. If so, she must have been reasonably good at it, because the kids seem to have turned out fine.

But here’s what makes all the difference: She didn’t have to. If Ann lifted a finger around the kitchen or nursery, it was because she wanted to. She found it satisfying, it was part of her identity, or she had some other motive unconnected to necessity. If her search for fulfillment ever turned her in a different direction, an upscale domestic-help agency could have dispatched an armada of well-qualified maids and cooks and nannies to Romney Manor in no time at all.

So whatever vomit-wiping, homework-correcting, and cheese-sandwich-grilling Ann did was part of her hobby, not her job. If it ever became too much for her – for one night, a weekend, or forever – she had the option to become Lady Ann and have the servants call her whenever the boys did something cute or fun.

It isn’t like that for most American moms, whether they work inside the home, outside the home, or in somebody else’s home. They have jobs.

It wasn’t like that for my Mom, a housewife who differed from Ann Romney in about a quarter of a billion ways. Mom took pride in providing a good home for her family, but it was a job, not a hobby. Dad worked two jobs of his own, so most of the time there was no back-up.

Cooking in particular was a job. Mom took pride in keeping us well fed, but she rarely bought cookbooks or experimented with recipes. She had an adequate repertoire and stuck to it. Early in their marriage, she nixed Dad’s suggestion of camping or rent-a-cabin vacations. “If I have to cook,” she said, “it’s not a vacation.”

It’s too late to ask her, but I doubt Mom would have picked Ann Romney to be her voice in the halls of power. I don’t think they had a lot in common. Hobbyists and job-workers rarely do, even if (by all outward appearances) they’re doing the same things.

Maybe someday everybody will live in Wikipedia World, where the work gets done by hobbyists and nobody is driven by economic necessity. Some of us get to spend a lot of time there now.

But most people don’t. They have jobs – in the home, in the factory, in the office, or out in cyberspace somewhere. Working a job is a central fact about their lives — which is precisely why you won’t figure out what they want or need by talking to hobbyists. Not even hobbyists who work very, very hard.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (29)

Seven Issues the Election Should Be About

April 9, 2012 – 12:05 pm

You may not have noticed, but the general election campaign started this week. I say that for two reasons:

  • Mitt Romney’s victory in Wisconsin pretty well seals his nomination. Republicans understand now: No white knight is coming to save them. It’s Romney or four more years of Obama.
  • President Obama’s speech Tuesday was essentially a keynote address for the fall campaign.

We can already see what that campaign will be like. Romney won the GOP nomination by raising massive amounts of money and carpet-bombing any prospective rival with negative ads. President Obama is projected to raise just under a billion dollars. In either case, you really can’t spend that kind of money on warm, fuzzy stuff. Constant advertising annoys people, so the best you can hope for is to transfer their annoyance to your opponent.

Given how politics has been going, we can anticipate that major issues will be dodged, misrepresented, and even lied about. The media, which ought to be ferreting out the information voters need to make a wise choice, will instead focus on whatever gaffes or stinging comebacks they can find or manufacture, no matter how irrelevant or trivial.

That’s a shame, because there really is an important debate to be had. I don’t claim to know what Mitt Romney believes in his heart – recently his campaign has suggested that we don’t know his “real views” yet – but I know what his party and the conservative movement stands for. Similarly, I’m never sure exactly how much liberalism President Obama is going to defend, but I have a good idea what liberalism means.

It’s a significant contrast. A honest debate between those two worldviews, resulting in a clear choice by a well-informed electorate, would be a tremendous plus for this country.

OK, it won’t happen. But we shouldn’t just shrug and let the candidates off the hook. Even as we see the waters start to circle around the sewer drain, let’s review what this campaign should be about.

1. Inequality. We’ve been in a vicious cycle for 30 years now: The rich get richer; they use that money to buy more political power; and then they use that political power to lower their taxes, weaken the the regulations they have to follow, and otherwise game the system in their favor – plus make it easier to buy political power.

The Republican Party has been the main (but not the only) vehicle for the rich, so it will be interesting to see whether President Obama succeeds in raising this issue, or if conservatives manage to label it all as envy and class warfare. I thought Obama laid it out pretty well Tuesday:

In this country, broad-based prosperity has never trickled down from the success of a wealthy few. It has always come from the success of a strong and growing middle class. … And yet, for much of the last century, we have been having the same argument with folks who keep peddling some version of trickle-down economics. They keep telling us that if we’d convert more of our investments in education and research and health care into tax cuts — especially for the wealthy — our economy will grow stronger. … Now, the problem for advocates of this theory is that we’ve tried their approach — on a massive scale. The results of their experiment are there for all to see.

2. The National Security State. At a time when government is supposed to be tightening its belt, we continue to spend more on defense than all our potential enemies put together. Is that really necessary? How much money could we save with a less aggressive foreign policy that didn’t inject us into every conflict?

Would the world really be a worse place? We’ll never know how the Arab Spring would have handled Saddam if we hadn’t spent all that blood and treasure in Iraq.

And then there’s the internal effect on our liberty and democracy. Government surveillance gets ever more intrusive, and more and more of the government’s actions are secret. How necessary is that?

The opposing case is that the world is a dangerous place, and would be even more dangerous if the US didn’t police it. Maybe Norway can keep its freedom defended with (and from) a relatively small security force, but the US doesn’t have that option.

It’s President Obama’s fault that we won’t have this discussion. (Ron Paul was the only Republican candidate who wanted to talk about it.) He has largely continued the Bush national security policies rather than challenge them.

3. Climate change. There are lots of legitimate liberal/conservative issues to hash out concerning how to deal with climate change: Should we lower CO2 by market mechanisms (cap and trade), by a carbon tax, or by direct government regulation? Should we bargain hard to get other countries to do their part, or should we take the lead? What CO2 level should we be shooting for and how fast should we try to get there? How do we balance the expense of current CO2 reduction versus investments in future research? Can geo-engineering play a role?

We aren’t having those debates because the fossil fuel corporations have spent enormous amounts of money to make the existence of climate change the issue, when in fact the science is well established. The Republican Party has been acting as a wholely-owned subsidiary of the fossil fuel companies, and some Democrats have also been either bought or intimidated by energy-industry cash.

4. The Deficit. Elsewhere I’ve presented the idea that the deficit is not the doomsday device many would have you believe. But it is a symptom of a broken political process. Congress’ main job is to figure out what we as a people want to buy and how we’re going to pay for it. If it can’t do that, what can it do?

A big chunk of the problem is the misinformed electorate. Survey after survey shows that we grossly overestimate how much money is spent on welfare, foreign aid, and whatever National-Endowment-for-the-Arts-type program we find most offensive. We also grossly underestimate how many government services we use personally, and we’re misinformed about how our taxes compare to Americans of recent decades. (Hint: Our taxes are far lower, especially for corporations and the wealthy.)

About half the country thinks we can eliminate the deficit with spending cuts that don’t touch “programs that benefit people like you”. That wishful thinking allows candidates to get away with proposing big-but-vague spending cuts that exempt defense, Social Security, and Medicare — just about everything we spend big on.

5. Immigration. Both liberals and conservatives are conflicted about immigration. There is no ideologically pure answer to our immigration problem, which is why the conversation never goes anywhere.

The centuries-old dream of American employers is to have a workforce that can’t vote. So their ideal is to have temporary foreign-worker programs: We bring people in for ten years or so, get them to work hard for very little money, and then send them home.

But working-class whites see immigrants-taking-American-jobs as one of the social changes they want the Republican Party to protect them from. Hence the rhetoric about rounding up the millions of undocumented Hispanic workers and sending them home.

The last thing the Republican Party wants is millions of poor, non-white new citizens — who would probably vote for Democrats. Democrats would like that, but the unions that support Democrats probably wouldn’t, for the same reason as conservative working-class whites.

Everybody agrees that we shouldn’t have millions of undocumented people wandering around. It’s a security risk, makes our worker-protection rules unenforcible, and generally undermines the rule of law. But since neither side has a solution it wants to take to the voters, both will posture about the issue rather than try to make progress.

6. Health care. Our health care system is a mess. We spend way more per person than any other country, and we get worse results. This is a great country for someone as rich as Dick Cheney to get a heart transplant, but it’s a terrible country for a poor pregnant woman to get pre-natal care. When you average it out, our life expectancy sucks and we lead the industrialized world in unnecessary deaths.

ObamaCare (like the RomneyCare it’s based on) is an imperfect first step at reform. I think it gives away far too much to health insurance companies and drug companies, but that’s politics. If Congress repeals it or the Supreme Court throws it out, we’re essentially nowhere, because the “replace” part of the Republican “repeal and replace” slogan is just a word; there is no actual plan that addresses any of the substantive issues.

And liberals shouldn’t let Obama say “Done now.” ObamaCare has a lot of holes that need filling.

7. The future of democracy. This issue runs through a lot of the others. Ideally, individual voters would educate themselves about the issues that concern them and elect candidates to represent their views. If they really felt strongly, they’d donate $20 or $50 to a campaign.

We’re far, far away from that ideal, and moving farther all the time. The Supreme Court has ruled that money equals speech, and that more speech is better than less. So elections are dominated by massive spending that produces better propaganda — not better educated voters.

In addition, while voters may wake up in time for an election, the big-money interests never sleep. Defeat some special-interest measure like SOPA, and within a few months it will be back in a different form. The big banks can hire entire staffs of lobbyists to write loopholes into new regulations. Voters don’t have the time to ferret that stuff out, and if they did, they couldn’t organize themselves fast enough to do anything about it.

We aren’t having this discussion because no candidate who took it seriously could raise enough money. Worse, neither party even has an ideal vision of how to handle it. The closest thing to a practical reform vision I’ve seen so far is Lawrence Lessig’s.

Resist. Chances are, this election will be decided by something stupid: a blip in the unemployment numbers, a new Romney gaffe on the Etch-a-Sketch scale, or Obama’s inability to prove that he is not a shape-shifter from the Gamma Quadrant. Heck, we’ve had elections decided on the Pledge of Allegiance.

But we don’t have to give in to that. Collectively, social networking ought to give us Arab-Spring-level power, if we exercise it.  We can refuse to respond to nonsense. We can keep coming back to the real issues. It may not work in this cycle. But eventually, we might be able to drag the candidates back to what’s important.

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Democracy in Michigan: What Rachel Got Right and Wrong

April 9, 2012 – 11:53 am

Thursday, Rachel Maddow devoted 15 minutes to a very important story that no other national news source was covering, so I made it the Link of the Day on Saturday. Unfortunately, she only got it mostly right. So rather than just link you to her video, I need to write a whole article.

Briefly, democracy in Michigan is in trouble for two reasons, one that Rachel has been covering for about a year, and one she just noticed Thursday.

Local Dictators. The year-old problem is the Emergency Manager law. As the Nation summarizes it:

Signed into law in March 2011, it granted unprecedented new powers to the state’s emergency managers (EMs), including breaking union contracts, taking over pension systems, setting school curriculums and even dissolving or disincorporating municipalities. Under PA 4, EMs, who are appointed by the governor, can “exercise any power or authority of any officer, employee, department, board, commission or other similar entity of the local government whether elected or appointed.”

Basically, when a city or town gets into bad enough financial trouble, the state appoints a dictator who replaces the entire local government.

In addition to the taxation-without-representation aspect of the law (local people continue to pay local taxes, but have lost the ability to elect the officials who spend their money), there’s an unfortunate racial outcome: The communities most likely to suffer the dire economic conditions that trigger the law — Pontiac, Benton Harbor, Detroit — are those where white flight has left behind a black underclass.

I doubt this represents a conspiracy to disenfranchise blacks, but a similarly large group of disenfranchised whites could probably get more public sympathy. So, Rachel points out,

If you are an African-American living in Michigan, there is a 50-50 chance that this year, the state of Michigan has considered scrapping … your right to elect local officials to represent you.

(I haven’t figured out yet what “considered” means in this context. It may refer to concessions Detroit’s local government made to the state in order to avoid being replaced.)

Fake supermajorities. Here’s the newly-revealed part: The Michigan Constitution delays laws going into effect until 90 days after the legislative sessions ends — which could be a year or more after they pass. But there’s an “emergency” provision that allows a 2/3 super-majority to give a law “immediate effect”.

But then something funny happens. Since Republicans took control of the state legislature and the governorship at the beginning of 2011, 546 of 566 bills — including the Emergency Manager law — have been passed with immediate effect. The funny business isn’t just that there haven’t been 546 authentic emergencies, but that Republicans don’t have a 2/3 majority in the House.

How did they do that? Well, you see an example beginning around the 12:30 mark of Rachel’s segment: The Republicans pass a bill, the floor leader asks for immediate effect, the chair ignores Democrats calling for a roll call, asks all those in favor to rise, and within four seconds gavels that it has passed. The House journal records a 2/3 super-majority that probably never existed.

Wait a minute. Rachel is incensed, and so was I when I first watched. But then I had the same reaction as Kevin Drum:

When I first heard this, my BS meter tingled pretty hard. Maddow characterized her story as a scoop, but that made no sense. I mean, Michigan still has a Democratic Party. If this were a huge abuse of power, they’d be yelling about it, right? So what’s really going on?

OK, this is outrageous stuff, but it’s outrageous stuff that’s been happening since January, 2011 and the Michigan Democrats only sued at the end of March. (Monday they got an injunction, which the Republicans are appealing on the grounds that courts have no right to interfere in the workings of the legislature.) What’s up with that?

The Detroit News reports that the Democrats had similar percentages of immediate-effect bills when they were in power in 2009-2010, even though they also were short of a 2/3 majority. Democratic legislator Jeff Irwin was asked about this and responded:

Has this been done before? Yes. Violating the clear terms of the Constitution has become commonplace in the Michigan House of Representatives. The big difference now is that since the Senate follows the Constitution, there was always one chamber where immediate effect votes would be counted and extremely divisive bills would not earn immediate effect in the Senate.

But the Republicans really do have 2/3s of the Senate, so miscounting in the House makes a real difference now. Anyway, Irwin says:

I’m new to the Michigan House and I’ve always thought this practice of declaring votes successful without any actual voting is bogus.

What I think it means. Anybody who looks at the numbers and the video has to conclude that the Michigan House is violating the Constitution. That’s a bad practice no matter who is doing it, so it has to be stopped.

But it isn’t a sudden Republican coup. The House let itself get into the habit of miscounting supermajorities and so violating the Michigan Constitution — probably because the delayed effect the Constitution calls for was viewed by both parties as a procedural nuisance. So the House has been operating illegally for a while, even when Democrats controlled it.

Republicans should have protested this when Democrats did it, but it was easier just to block stuff in the Senate, or to wrangle extra concessions there in exchange for allowing bills to take effect immediately.

After the 2010 Republican sweep, though, they haven’t had to negotiate with anybody or concede anything. (The Emergency Manager law is evidence of that.) So Democrats have started refusing to cooperate in the illegal procedures, and the Republicans have been illegally running over their non-cooperation.

So anyway: It’s bad and it needs to stop, so Rachel was right to call attention to it. But she should have done a little more homework before she went public with it.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Prejudice, Bigotry, and “Reasonable” Racism

April 2, 2012 – 9:43 am

As the national argument about the killing of Trayvon Martin continues, the people who sympathize with Martin’s killer keep bringing up this point: Yes, it’s racist to be suspicious of young black men for no reason beyond their youth, blackness, and manhood – but given the crime statistics, isn’t that reasonable?

Before I start addressing that question, I need to tell you that I spent nearly six years as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, which at the time (the Eighties) was an oasis of middle-to-upper class, integrated-but-mostly-white America, surrounded by a predominantly black ghetto. (Since then, the siege has been lifted by an army of gentrifiers marching south down Michigan Avenue from the Magnificent Mile.) Just about everybody I knew had been a crime victim at some time or other. Personally, I was never threatened with bodily harm, but I had a car stolen once, and my bike was stolen out of my girlfriend’s car.

Like just about all my classmates, I developed a special awareness of young black men (despite the fact that one of them was a fellow grad student whose office was just down the hall from mine). I spotted them at a great distance, and might cross the street if I couldn’t figure out what they were up to.

Sometimes, my wariness turned out to be so ridiculous I had to laugh at myself. Once, I remember, closer inspection showed that the “young men” were more like 12, and the mysterious objects they were carrying were musical instruments. What they had done to raise my suspicion was mill around on the sidewalk waiting for someone to unlock the door to their recital.

Clearly I had been just minutes from death.

Prejudice. During those years I came to understand that there is a difference between prejudice and bigotry. Prejudice is exactly what it sounds like: a pre-judgment, an opinion that you have before you learn any specific facts about the situation. Your prejudices may be justified or unjustified, they may save your life or create dangerous confrontations out of nothing. But you can’t help having some, because the human mind constantly creates expectations of the near future. A well-trained mind will base those expectations on facts if it has some, but if it doesn’t it will expect something anyway.

So anybody who tells you that they’re not prejudiced is blowing smoke. Everybody is prejudiced. Your prejudices may or may not be racial (though if you grew up in America they probably are), but if you’re dropped into a situation you know nothing about, you’ll react to it somehow, based on some pre-judgment.

Bigotry. Prejudice is universal, but bigotry is more sinister; it’s an attachment to your prejudices. Sometimes people fall in love with their prejudices to the point that they don’t want to know the facts. If confronted with facts that conflict with their prejudices, they will ignore them and make up new facts.

So imagine that you’re a white admissions officer at an Ivy League college. Your mail today includes two applications, one from a white student at an upscale suburban high school, the other from a black student at a ghetto school. If your snap expectation is that the white kid will have higher SAT scores than the black kid, that’s prejudice.

But what you do next determines whether or not you’re a bigot. When the test scores become available, do you look? If it turns out that the ghetto kid’s scores are higher, do you accept them or do you assume something funny must have happened? Do you scour the application looking for evidence that he’s not really that smart?

If you’re not a bigot, you look at the scores and change your opinion accordingly. And the next time you get an applicant from the same ghetto high school, your prejudice will be a little less sure of itself.

Everybody has prejudices. But reasonable people hold those prejudices lightly, re-judge a situation when facts become available, and continually re-train their prejudices to be more accurate.

Zimmerman and Martin. OK, now imagine you’re George Zimmerman doing your Neighborhood Watch thing. You spot a black teen you’ve never seen before, and it sets your alarm bells ringing. That’s prejudice, but so what? Maybe it’s got some reasonable basis.

When I listen to Zimmerman’s 911 call, though, I hear bigotry. He can’t point to a single suspicious thing Martin is doing, but he’s trying hard to interpret anything he sees so that it will confirm his prejudice. Mostly, he reports judgments rather than facts. Martin is “up to no good”, he “looks like he’s on drugs” and so on. (Actually, we know, Martin is staying with someone in the neighborhood, has been to the store and is on his way back. He’s talking to his girlfriend on the phone, which might be why he’s in no hurry.) “They” always get away with it. And so on, right up to the much-debated “fucking coons” comment.

So anyway, I’m willing to cut Zimmerman some slack for his original suspicions. Who knows, maybe I’d have been suspicious too. But what should he have done then?

How about this: No gun, no 911 call. You just walk up to Martin with a smile and say, “Hi, I’m with the Neighborhood Watch. I didn’t recognize you so I thought I’d introduce myself. I’m George Zimmerman and I live over on XYZ Street. Do you live around here or are you visiting someone?” Maybe you get an answer and go on your way. Maybe Martin tells you to go fuck yourself. Maybe he runs. Maybe (for all you know before you ask) he really is the thug you’re afraid of, and he pulls a handgun out of his hoody and starts blasting.

I think that’s the chance you have to take. If you’re not brave enough to take it, you’ve got no business being out there in the first place. Stay home, lock your door, and let somebody else watch the neighborhood.

When is racism reasonable? Finally, we come to the question of whether suspicion of blacks is a reasonable prejudice in the first place. After my Trayvon Martin post last week, a reader emailed me a link to FBI crime statistics broken down by race. If that’s where your analysis ends, being suspicious of black men looks reasonable.

But chaunceydevega on Daily Kos went a little further and challenged the basis of those statistics. How much black crime do police find simply because they are looking for it?

As compared to white neighborhoods, black and brown communities are also subject to more severe surveillance and aggressive police tactics.

And how often is a white let off with a warning where a black might be charged? (It seems particularly ironic to quote crime statistics when discussing Martin and Zimmerman. So far, Zimmerman killing Martin doesn’t register as a crime. How many similar cases don’t draw national attention and so never show up in crime statistics?)

Sometimes when illegal drug use is measured in ways unrelated to the criminal justice system, whites turn out to be at least as guilty as blacks and Hispanics. Yet, they are arrested, charged, convicted, and jailed far less often. Maybe that’s true of other crimes as well.

So where does that leave us? In my Chicago days, I doubt chaunceydevega’s arguments would have convinced me. (Even though I never actually saw the people who stole my car. For all I know, Saul Bellow and Bruno Bettelheim took it for a midnight joy ride. Their alibis were never checked.) I thought I knew what I thought I knew, so young black men scared me.

As any white-knuckle flier can testify, telling scared people not to be scared usually doesn’t work very well, even if you have statistics. Or reason to challenge the prevailing statistics.

Here’s my hope: Maybe encouraging scared people to be brave works a little better. Whether you think your prejudices are justified or not, keep your eyes open and try not to give in to fear too quickly. Hold your prejudices lightly. Watch carefully for evidence that contradicts them.

Otherwise you might end up running from 12-year-old musicians. Or shooting Trayvon Martin.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (11)

Student Debt: The New Involuntary Servitude

April 2, 2012 – 9:09 am

From colonial times, enterprising Americans have used a tried-and-true method to enslave immigrants: You find desperate people in some other country and offer to pay their passage. When they get here, they owe you and they have no jobs. But that’s OK because they can work off their debt in your mines or sweatshops or brothels. Naturally, you set the wages in those places, you control the cost of living, you keep track of the interest on the debt. And somehow (no matter how long or hard they work) the debt never clears.

Now picture the professional class as a destination and college as the way lower-class young people immigrate into it. See the resemblance?

IOU $1 trillion. In March the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reported that student debt now tops $1 trillion. This happened because (through a decades-long process) the Powers That Be decided things should be this way.

Half a century ago, in-state tuition was zero in the University of California system and negligible at most other state universities, but the Powers pushed the state legislatures to cut university support and raise tuition. At the federal level, the agreement that ended last summer’s budget showdown significantly cut Pell grants, and here’s the latest idea:

The plan proposed by Ryan (R-Wis.), who chairs the House Budget Committee, would chop away at Pell grant eligibility, thereby reducing total Pell grants by about $200 billion over the next decade; allow the interest rate for federally subsidized Stafford loans to double; end student loan interest subsidies for those still in school; and make Pell spending discretionary — instead of mandatory — allowing further cuts down the line.

Put it all together, and even a student who works part-time and attends a second-rate state university can easily graduate owing over $100,000.

Welcome to the professional class, kid. Just don’t expect to keep any of the money you make. And I almost forgot to mention: We’ve let public transportation go to hell, so you’ll need to buy a car. (Here’s another loan.) We’re letting public schools fail, so if you have kids and want them to stay in the professional class, you’ll need to send them to private schools (Here’s another loan.) And we’re going to toss that national-health-care idea out on its ear, but don’t worry, if you get sick you can put it on your Visa.

Oh, and since you’re so far in debt, you can’t be choosy about what you do. I know you had thoughts about making the world a better place and yadda, yadda, yadda, but you’re in debt. So screw all that stuff about ideals and morals. You need money, so you have to do whatever Corporate America wants and thank them for letting you do it.

The justifying half-truths. Anyone who objects to this new form of involuntary servitude is bound to hear the usual collection of half-truths: Nobody’s forcing you to borrow that money. Nobody owes you a living. And (David Graeber wrote a whole book about this one): People have to pay their debts.

All these statements are true in some other context, and that’s what makes them so dangerous.

It’s not just the rich who say these things. They’ve pounded those ideas into everyone’s head for so long that the indebted young grads even repeat them to each other. A few weeks ago I participated in a Facebook conversation about the proposed Student Loan Forgiveness Act. A recent graduate made what sounded like a very common-sense comment:

we all agreed to the terms of these contracts, and now we have to pay back what we borrowed. You can’t just have free money. We all knew what we were signing up for, nobody forced us to borrow $100,000 and go to college.

Half-truth 1: Choices. Here’s the thing about choices: The you-made-your-choice argument doesn’t have any moral force if all your options were bad.

Say you’re a bright kid whose parents have no money. You can do what exactly? Take your chances in the unskilled job market, where wages will always be low and jobs disappear at the whim of the 1%? Join the Army and hope you don’t have to kill anybody who’s innocent or die in a war you don’t believe in? Or you can try college and start your life massively in debt, with no guarantee that the skill you bought will still be marketable by the time you have it.

Did I miss the good choice? What were today’s debt-to-the-eyeballs 20-somethings supposed to do?

Half-truth 2: Owing a living. But of course, that’s not something Society needs to worry about, because “Society doesn’t owe anybody a living.”

Yes it does. Not in the peel-me-a-grape sense, but in the sense that everybody has a right to what Pope John Paul II called “a seat at the Great Workbench”. (Don’t tell anybody, but Karl Marx had the same idea and called it “access to the means of production.”)

I’ve explained this at length elsewhere, but let me summarize here: The private property system is a tremendously efficient way to organize production, but it’s based on a fundamental injustice (in religous terms, an original sin). We’ve all grown up with that injustice, so we take it as the natural state. It isn’t.

Morally, every child comes into the world with an equal claim to the world’s natural riches and to the intellectual legacy of the human race. For many, being born with a special claim to a small portion of the Earth instead of a vague claim to a share in all of it is a good deal. But if you’re born without property, it’s not a good deal.

It also was not a deal you consented to. Other people seized title to the Earth before you were born. Fait accompli. Tough luck.

The way modern society repays a child for the usurpation of its inheritance is to give it access to the means of production in other ways: by maintaining a broad-based economy with many opportunities, and by providing education to allow it to take its place in that economy. With that repayment, a private-property system once again becomes a good deal. “We may have stolen your inheritance, but we have no practical way to give it back, so we offer you something we think you’ll like better.”

That’s the deal we’re reneging on when we make education an expensive luxury. Instead, property owners usurp the inheritance of the unborn, then bind them into the servitude of debt.

Half-truth 3: Debt. No matter how we got here, though, we can’t let the students off the hook because “People have to pay their debts.” The book-length answer to that half-truth is David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

The quote from that book that sums it up best:

There is no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt — above all, because it makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.

Think the reference to “violence” is over the top? Then go claim your share of the world and see how long it takes the police to show up.

Summing up. Working-class kids who borrowed money to go to college should be let off the hook. They had no good alternatives, and Society put them in that situation by usurping their equal claim to the World. Now they’re in debt slavery.

We need to free them. And stop the process that enslaved them.

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Trayvon Martin: the Racism Whites Don’t Want to See

March 26, 2012 – 1:38 pm

I tend to filter out crime stories, because so often they get more coverage than they deserve, like O. J. Simpson. So I’ve been slow to catch on to the significance of the Trayvon Martin story. But lately this has turned into a meta-story: reactions to the killing say even more about our country than the killing itself did.

The basic facts are simple: A white-Hispanic neighborhood-watch volunteer (George Zimmerman) got suspicious of a 140-pound black teen-ager (Trayvon Martin) for no apparent reason. He called 911, and the dispatcher told him not to follow the kid. Zimmerman followed anyway. Some kind of confrontation ensued and he shot Martin dead. Martin was unarmed and had nothing easily mistaken for a weapon, but the police accepted Zimmerman’s self-defense claim (in spite of at least one witness who denied it) and let him walk away. That all happened back on February 26, there’s still been no arrest, and the local African-American community is getting pretty upset about it.

The story points out the continuing presence of racism in America. To some segment of the population, being black raises suspicion all by itself. Probably Zimmerman is not the kind of racist who would go out hunting black teens at random. Probably he really believed that Martin was planning some kind of mischief, and that Martin must be armed, so that he had to shoot first once the confrontation started. But why did he think that? Why did he frame the situation in such a way that shoot-to-kill seemed sensible?

And why did the police find his story credible and his actions excusable? You’re an armed white adult chasing an unarmed black teen-ager you outweigh by about 100 pounds. Naturally, you would feel threatened.

That’s the kind of racism that is still endemic in every nook and cranny of America. We’re almost entirely past the “I don’t hire niggers” phase, but still in a phase of “he just doesn’t look trustworthy to me”. What would look like a well-deserved break for a white employee is goofing off when a black does it. An ordinary mental glitch becomes evidence of low intelligence, and so on.

Being black is no longer three strikes against you, but it’s still one or two.

By and large, White America doesn’t want to believe that. Last year a poll found that 51% of whites (also 60% of Republicans and 68% of people who name Fox as their most trusted news source) say that reverse discrimination against whites is at least as big a problem as discrimination against minorities.

You can see just how badly White America doesn’t want to believe in its continuing racism by how it has reacted to the Martin story. Fox News did its best to ignore the whole thing. ThinkProgress totaled up how much attention each cable news network gave the Martin story during its first three weeks:

Compare this to Fox’s obsessive coverage of a series of scary-black-people stories. For example, it devoted 95 segments totaling 8 hours of air time to the trumped-up voter-intimidation charges against the New Black Panther Party.

Or check out how the Glenn-Beck-founded blog The Blaze has covered Martin’s death. Searching on the word “Trayvon” got me 15 stories, five of which were about the scary ways black people are reacting to the incident — the New Black Panther Party (of course), Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, Barack Obama, and the New Black Liberation Militia. The Sharpton post ends by raising more suspicion about Martin. (He was on a 10-day suspension from school, and “Sources sympathetic to Martin say he was suspended for ‘excessive tardiness’.” But the Blaze makes sure we know all the more serious stuff that a 10-day suspension could be about.)

A sixth Blaze post quotes Beck himself, who is worried not about white vigilantes, but about black extremists “winding everybody up”:

“We have this extremist African-American militia group that says they’re just going to come in and handle it. You’re got Al Sharpton winding everybody up. You’ve got Color For Change winding everybody up.” … Beck ceded that the man who shot Trayvon could indeed be a racist, but that many of his detractors are driven by a racial agenda too, and thus are everything they claim to stand against.

Got that? You should focus not on what actually happened to an innocent black teen, but on what “extremist” black groups might do. Zimmerman could be a racist, but blacks and liberals upset by the Martin story are racists.

So the beat goes on: For the part of the media that panders to I-am-not-a-racist whites, the Martin story is just one more example of racism against whites and one more reason for white people to be afraid of black people.

Among the presidential candidates, only Newt Gingrich directly pandered to white racists by turning the incident into a reverse-racism story. President Obama had reached out to Martin’s parents, saying “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Gingrich’s response:

Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn’t look like him? That’s just nonsense dividing this country up. … When things go wrong to an American, it is sad for all Americans. Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it appalling.

Gingrich glossed over the whole walking-while-black angle that makes the story important: If Trayvon Martin had been white, he might not have been shot at all. George Zimmerman “turned it into a racial issue”, not President Obama.

While researching this case, I learned something interesting about the law: Self defense falls into a class known as affirmative defenses. In other words, at your trial you’re not just looking at the state and saying “Prove I did it”, you’re making assertions about facts that are supposed to exonerate you. When you do that, part of the burden of proof shifts to you.

So the state does not have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman did not act in self defense. In making a self-defense plea, Zimmerman would be conceding that he killed Martin, and he would then need to convince the jury of his self-defense claim by a preponderance of evidence (not beyond reasonable doubt).

Want some background music to read this piece by? Try Eminem’s “White America“:

Look at these eyes:
Baby blue, baby, just like yaself.
If they were brown, Shady lose,
Shady sits on the shelf.

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