Can We Share the World?

a rambling attempt to get to the heart of the progressive vision

After the mid-term elections I lamented that “Republicans have a story to tell. We’re stuck with facts.” While Democrats had a lot of specific issues to sell to segments of the electorate — increase the minimum wage, protect access to health care, pay women the same as men, fix the immigration system, preserve access to abortion and contraception, subsidize renewable energy, and so on — it didn’t add up to a mythic vision on the scale of the conservative vision, which I summed up as: America is a city on a hill with barbarians at the gates.

Conservative zeal comes from a deep, almost mystical, sense of destiny thwarted, purity corrupted, and one last chance to set things right. In that vision, every tiny issue becomes a symbol of the larger struggle. When you hear about a 12-year-old Guatemalan girl fleeing the gang warfare in her country and showing up at our border, you instantly grasp her role in the cosmic threat to everything you hold dear. If somebody somewhere is scamming Food Stamps to avoid working, that’s not a fraction of a cent on your tax bill, to be weighed against all the genuinely needy people the program helps, it’s an invitation to God’s judgment against our nation.

To them, every race for every office is part of one big apocalyptic battle. That’s why their voters show up at mid-term elections and ours don’t.

But I don’t believe conservatism is inherently mythic and liberalism inherently pedestrian. I just think we’ve lost touch with the heart of our own vision and so lost our ability to tell the story of what we’re trying to do. At the end of that post, I pledged to spend my time in the metaphorical wilderness trying to get those things back.

The purpose of this post is to catch you up on what I’ve been thinking. I realize it’s less polished than the usual Weekly Sift post, but rather than wait for everything to come into perfect focus, I thought I’d toss the raw ideas out there in hopes of starting a productive discussion.

Roots of myth. I believe that the truly mythic ideas — the ones that just feel right, independent of current evidence — go way, way back. I’m agnostic about whether they have biological roots, but I think they’re older than civilization and are already present in some form in hunter-gatherer cultures.

In particular, as I meditate on my own deepest political intuitions, I find three hunter-gatherer notions at the root of both my liberal and my conservative impulses. The three don’t fit together cleanly in the modern world, which is why I’m vulnerable to framing: If an issue arises in the context of one of the notions, I might have a liberal response; but if you describe the same issue in terms of a different notion, my snap reaction my be conservative. The three notions are:

  • Nature belongs to everyone.
  • We’re all in this together.
  • The tribe has to defend its territory.

Nature belongs to everyone. In hunter-gatherer society, the forest, the lake, and the field are all there for you. If you’re hungry, go hunt, go fish, go gather. There’s no gatekeeper, no owner whose permission is required. There’s no such thing as an unemployed hunter-gatherer, because nobody has to hire you and nobody can fire you.

In the modern world, this notion cuts in both liberal and conservative directions. When Marx talks about public ownership of the means of production, or Pope John Paul II frames the ideal economy as a “Great Workbench“, or liberals want the government to be the “employer of last resort” they’re trying to preserve or restore this direct relationship to the Earth’s productive potential: If you’re able and willing to work productively, no one should be able to stand in your way.

In today’s economy, though, someone does stand in your way. Not just the forests, lakes, and fields, but also the factories, mines, malls, offices, and laboratories are all owned by someone. If you aren’t one of the owners and you want to work, someone with better access to the means of production has to hire you — and (depending on market conditions) may take a substantial cut of what you produce. If no one does hire you, you’re cut off from the productive economy in a way that no hunter-gatherer ever could be. [I explored these ideas in more depth in “Who Owns the World?“.]

That’s the liberal side of this notion. The conservative side arises when you either ignore the owner/gatekeeper role or assume that the hurdle it constructs is trivial: “You want something? Go work for it.”

We’re all in this together. A conservative take on the first notion might justify you gorging on a deer you’ve killed while less successful hunters look on in hunger. “There’s a forest out there,” you could tell them, “go get your own.”

But actual hunter-gatherers rarely act this way. Generosity gains you friendship and respect — social goods that don’t spoil like deer meat. In a world without money, banks, or privately owned land, honor among your tribesmen is the best kind of wealth you can accumulate. Some day you’ll be the hunter without a catch. Some day you’ll be the one with the bad ankle or the concussion, who needs help to get home. Having tribesmen around who owe you favors is a very valuable asset.

Today, this is the spirit behind social insurance and social goods of all sorts. Maybe today I’m the one with a job and money and health insurance. Maybe today my family is healthy and I’m still in my prime. Maybe I don’t have kids, or my kids are grown. Why should I pay for other people’s unemployment compensation and Social Security and Food Stamps and public schools? Because although there’s a lot of skill and hard work involved in success, there’s a lot of luck too, and nobody’s luck lasts forever. A society where we all look out for each other isn’t just friendlier, it’s also more secure.

Today, you are in a position to be generous. Tomorrow, someone else might be, and you might need generosity.

The tribe has to defend its territory. Hunter-gatherers usually aren’t humanists, they’re tribalists. The “everyone” in the first notion and the “we” in the second isn’t humankind, it’s the tribe. And “Nature” isn’t the whole world, it’s the tribe’s territory. Our forest, our lake, our field, our people. The tribe needs to command the resources necessary to provide its people with a good life.

Outside the tribe’s territory are strangers without number. They come and go, and they think differently. You can’t reach the kind of understandings with them that you can reach with your tribesmen. In some situations you may take pity on them and help them, but in others you may see them as wolves who want to kill our game and leave us with nothing, or as locusts or rats who will multiply to eat up any surplus we might generate.

This configuration of images and ideas also survives in the modern world, even though it’s not so clear exactly who our “tribe” is. But whoever we identify with — country, race, language group, social class, religion, neighborhood, family — it’s tempting to restrict our vision of the good life to people “like us”. We have to hang on to what we need to have a good life. What happens out there — outside the tribe, over the wall, beyond the oceans — is not our problem unless the outsiders try to take what’s ours. The world outside the tribe is full of greedy predators and teeming masses who carry strange diseases and can’t be reasoned with.

This idea is inherently conservative — it’s the root of the City-on-a-Hill-with-Barbarians-at-the-Gates vision. Under its influence, expansive notions of Nature belonging to everyone and all of us being in this together seem naive. Scarcity is the fundamental fact of economics. There is not enough for everybody, so the good life can only happen within walls, within fences, within borders. The Gospel of Malthus says that the poor will multiply to consume any surplus, so the privileged classes have to control their soft-hearted generosity. If no one is starving, then the good life that we enjoy is not secure.

If you focus on the third notion, the possibility of universal justice — justice outside the tribe — goes away. Some tribe will seize the best resources and live the good life, while pushing all the others into poverty. Will that be our tribe our some other? In the words of Humpty Dumpty: “The question is which is to be master — that’s all.”

In the context of global capitalism, this means that some comparatively small group of people will control the world’s oil, its drinkable water, its productive land. Some group will own the Great Workbench, and anyone who wants a seat there must buy it or inherit it or occupy it as a vassal for some lord. Some group of people will have their hands on the valves that control the flow of the world’s production, and can turn it on or cut it off according to its interests. Will that be our tribe, or somebody else’s?

One of the best expressions of the conservative horror of sharing the world comes from a minor character in Atlas Shrugged, a tramp who survived the fall of the once-great 20th Century Motor Company, which disastrously turned itself into a socialist enterprise. How awful it would be, he thinks, if such socialist ideas took hold on a worldwide scale.

Do you care to imagine what it would be like, if you had to live and to work, when you’re tied to all the disasters and all the malingering of the globe? To work — and whenever any men failed anywhere, it’s you who would have to make up for it. To work — with no chance to rise, with your meals and your clothes and your home and your pleasure depending on any swindle, any famine, any pestilence anywhere on Earth. To work — with no chance for an extra ration, till the Cambodians have been fed and the Patagonians sent through college.

In this vision, the needs of the outside world are infinite and will never be satisfied. What’s more, the benefits of investing in those people will never come back to you. It will never be the well-fed Cambodians who pick up the slack, and no college-educated Patagonian will ever be your doctor or invent a product you need. To see yourself as a tribesman of the World, rather than a defender of a territory sufficient to sustain your small group of people, is to be sentenced to endless labor with no hope of reward.

The small world. Today, we know some things the hunter-gatherers — and previous eras of civilization — didn’t know. We know the world is finite and has a finite number of people in it. We know that Malthus was wrong: As women become more educated and more confident that their children will survive, they have fewer of them, not more. We know that the Earth is one big productive system, and that the garbage we throw over the wall or let the waters and winds carry away isn’t really gone.

The world outside the walls isn’t vast and incalculable any more. In fact, it’s actually kind of a small world. It’s so small that the world inside the walls can’t really be managed without accounting for what’s outside.

Can we share the world? As I’m coming to see it, the liberal challenge — I’m calling it a challenge rather than a vision because I don’t think we have it that worked out yet — is to ask whether we can come to view humanity as one tribe with the Earth as its territory.

It’s tempting to jump forward right away and say, “Why yes, of course we can. In fact we have to.” But it’s a real challenge: Can we square some vision of the Good Life with what the Earth can provide for everyone? Because if not, then the City on a Hill dominating the teeming masses around it is the only good life we can hope for. If the choice is to live in hopeless squalor or to be part of the Master Race, then a sizable chunk of people in every generation are going to choose to be fascists. And who’s to say that they’re wrong?

Just as obviously, we can’t simply declare Universal Justice starting tomorrow. That really is naive. Because the world economy isn’t just a distribution system, it’s a production system, and the two are interdependent. Adding up global GDP and sending everybody a check for the average amount would be like carving a factory into pieces and sending one home with each worker.

And there really are predators in the world, and good people separated by such large and ancient walls of misunderstanding that they can’t possibly trust one another. What happens to them?

But still: One tribe with the world as its territory, offering each person a chance to work for the good life, and providing some kind of safety net for those who fail. Is there a way to make sense of that? Is there a way to get from here to there?

Don’t just say, “Yes. Of course.” If you take it seriously, you’ll see that it’s a real question, and the answer might be No.

December 8, 2014 – 10:23 am Categories: Articles | Comments (27)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

After the mid-term elections, I complained that “Republicans have a story to tell. We’re stuck with facts.” They have a mythic narrative I summed up as: “America is a city on a hill with barbarians at the gates.” Democrats answer with a bunch of small-scale policies: a higher minimum wage, increased access to health care, equal pay for women, and so on. It’s all good stuff but it doesn’t stir the blood, with the result that a lot of our voters forget to go out and vote.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently small-scale or non-mythic about liberalism, so I promised to spend some of my time in the wilderness thinking about what I called “the true story of America”.

If you thought that meant that in a few weeks I’d deliver the mythic liberal narrative wrapped up with a pretty bow, you have way too much faith in me. This week I’m posting a first tentative step in that direction, what I’m billing as “a rambling attempt to get to the heart of the progressive vision”. It’s called “Can We Share the World?” because it harks back to some of the ideas in a talk I gave several years ago called “Who Owns the World?” It’s intentionally incomplete and imperfect, and I’m putting it out there to draw comment and start discussion.

It’s also been kind of a busy week in the news, so the weekly summary is a little longer than usual. It discusses police killing black men and getting away with it, the surprisingly good November jobs report, why Hillary won’t announce her candidacy any time soon, and various religious-freedom stories that are out there.

When you’re writing a “rambling attempt” at something, it’s hard to predict exactly when it will be done. Look for “Can We Share the World?” maybe 11ish EST, and the weekly summary an hour or so later.

December 8, 2014 – 7:00 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Odd Processes

Neither in this country nor in England has the suspect under investigation by the grand jury ever been thought to have a right to testify or to have exculpatory evidence presented.

— Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia

This week’s featured post is “This Time, Will the Outrage Matter?”

This week everybody was talking about Ferguson

The grand jury decided not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown, provoking protests in several cities. My comment on the situation is in “This Time, Will the Outrage Matter?”

Five St. Louis Rams players staged their own protest before Sunday’s game with the Oakland Raiders, raising their hands in the “don’t shoot” position. A St. Louis police group is demanding the team punish the players and issue and apology, which I suspect will not happen.

and oil

OPEC had a meeting to discuss the falling price of oil, and came up with no effective strategy. That led to a further sharp drop to around $70 a barrel. The price had been consistently over $100 for most of the previous three years.

Consumers should benefit from lower gas prices. A number of troublesome oil-exporting countries — Russia and Iran, for example — will lose influence.

and new smog regulations

The day before Thanksgiving, the EPA announced tighter regulations on smog. The old rules limited ozone to 75 parts per billion; the proposed new limit is between 65 and 70.

The main thing you need to know about this is that it’s long overdue. The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to review this standard every five years. During the Bush administration, EPA scientists determined that the limit should fall from 84 ppb to around 60 or 70. But the Bush political appointees over-ruled the scientists and set the bar at 75, for no obvious reason.

The Obama administration has been balking at change ever since it took office, but the new post-election what-the-hell Obama is finally pulling the trigger.

To understand why it was balking, just look at the news coverage of the announcement, as Dave Roberts does. It focuses almost entirely on industry claims about the cost of implementing the new regulations, and not at all on the benefits, such as lives saved.

But even economically, good regulations don’t cost money, they save money. The EPA estimates that the health effects alone will save in the neighborhood of $10 billion a year for a 70 ppb standard, and $25 billion or so for a 65 ppb standard.

As for the fossil-fuel industry’s claims that the regulations will wreck the economy, they’ve cried wolf before. Roberts provides this graph:

As for the media coverage, Roberts comments:

In the odd world of political media, these two kinds of groups — one advocating for the profits of a particular business sector, one advocating for public health — are considered equivalent, mirror images. If anything, “business groups” are treated as champions of the economy, and thus all Americans, while public health groups are treated as a “special interest.”

It’s that weird inversion that makes it seem perfectly normal to begin a story about a new advance in public health with accusations from the regulated industry (and its congressional champions) about how much it’s going to cost.

and you also might be interested in …

At Thanksgiving dinner, your conservative uncle may have related Rush Limbaugh’s account of the First Thanksgiving: that it celebrated the Pilgrims’ new surplus from abandoning collective farming and embracing free enterprise. If you suspected this story was not really true, you were right.

I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that police in Pontiac, Michigan are on the job: In this video, a policeman confronts a black man who has been frightening local residents by walking with his hands in his pockets — in Michigan in November. To his credit, the policeman is polite while he carries out this ridiculous assignment and meets with considerable exasperation from the chilly walker.

Ray Rice, last seen decking his wife in an elevator, has been re-instated to play in the NFL. It’s still unknown whether any team will sign him, though ESPN reports that four teams are interested.

An exercise intended to teach grade school students about privilege went viral on BuzzFeed, getting 4.5 million hits. But Quartz’ Jeff Yang thinks the lesson may have missed a few things.

and let’s close with a new Christmas song

The a cappella group Straight No Chaser has been a good source of new Christmas music for several years now. Here, they combine with actress Kristen Bell (a.k.a. Veronica Mars) in “Text Me Merry Christmas“.

December 1, 2014 – 11:38 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

This Time, Will the Outrage Matter?

Objective people could come to different conclusions about Darren Wilson’s guilt. But no one can argue objectively that the investigation of Michael Brown’s death was impartial and conducted appropriately.

Monday night, after Prosecutor Bob McCulloch announced the grand jury decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown — my Facebook news feed exploded with anger: Wilson got away with murder. Police have free rein to keep shooting young black men. Black lives don’t count. And much more.

I had heard similar outrage when Trayvon Martin’s killer walked free. And yet, nothing changed; if it had, we wouldn’t be doing this all over again, would we? Will anything change this time? Or will we be right back here in another few months — another unarmed black youth killed by a cop or vigilante, who faces no substantive consequences?

After Trayvon, we already know how the nothing-changes path looks: Rather than evidence of systemic dysfunction, the case becomes an identity marker in the endless Red/Blue partisan battle: George Zimmerman is a racist murderer, or Trayvon Martin was a thug who got what was coming to him. There seems to be no objective truth; you just pick your side and wave its flag. To one side, the martyrdom of an innocent motivates change. To the other, failure of yet another an attempt to railroad a good man is proof that the system works, but just barely; give an inch, and the next time the grievance industry wins.

It’s already easy to see how that could happen again. If I had a different batch of Facebook friends, no doubt my news feed would have exploded with reactions of a different flavor: I always knew there was nothing to that case. It was obvious a bunch of the witnesses were lying, and when the grand jury had all the evidence in front of it, they agreed. What a shame Officer Wilson decided to resign — all the liars who smeared him should be prosecuted for perjury. The whole thing was all just an excuse to riot.

If we want anything different to happen this time, I think we need to re-establish the notion that there is an objective truth to this matter — the kind that persuades the uncommitted and converts some of the opposition — and that objectively, the system did not work. More than that, we need to argue that the reasons it did not work are not specific to the details of the Brown shooting; the same reasons will continue to endanger innocent people until something changes.

As in every attempt to speak the truth, this means choosing our words carefully, rather than saying whatever it feels good to say. That’s what I’m going to try to do.

Here’s my best statement of what went wrong: The process was rigged to get Darren Wilson off. And the same forces that created this rigged process will still be there for the next case.

Notice what I didn’t say: that Darren Wilson murdered Michael Brown. I didn’t say it because (although I suspect it) I don’t actually know that it’s true. But I have no doubt whatsoever that the process was rigged, and I believe that any person who looks at the situation objectively will have to agree.

In refusing to say that Wilson murdered Brown, I am also refusing to get into the minutia of the evidence — which witnesses were and weren’t believable, what the autopsy or the forensic evidence said, and so on. That’s one prime way that the Red/Blue debate goes nowhere: by producing fractal he-said/she-said arguments that spin off ever-smaller he-said/she-said arguments, until the larger point the case exemplifies is lost.*

You don’t have to go into any of that to see that the process was rigged at two levels:

  • The Ferguson police were more focused on getting Wilson off than finding the truth.
  • The prosecutor subverted the ordinary grand jury process in Wilson’s favor.

The police. The Washington Post outlined the ways that crime-scene protocols were ignored in gathering the initial evidence:

When Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson left the scene of the fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown, the officer returned to the police station unescorted, washed blood off his hands and placed his recently fired pistol into an evidence bag himself. … the officers who interviewed Wilson immediately after the shooting did not tape the conversations. The [grand jury] transcripts also showed that an investigator from the medical examiner’s office opted not to take measurements at the crime scene and arrived there believing that what happened between Brown and Wilson was “self-explanatory.’’

In addition, the Ferguson police violated their internal protocol by not creating a use-of-force report. As a result, Officer Wilson had the time to concoct an account of the shooting that covered all the points necessary to avoid guilt without directly contradicting the undeniable physical evidence. (Again, we do not know that he did so — perhaps his hard-to-believe story is actually true — we only know that the Ferguson police gave him that opportunity by violating all their usual procedures.)

If I had any temptation to give the Ferguson police the benefit of the doubt — maybe they were just so shocked that one of their own could be a suspect that they forgot how to do their jobs — it vanished when the police started acting as the unofficial Darren Wilson Public Relations Department. As a Justice Department spokesman put it: “There seems to be an inappropriate effort to influence public opinion about this case.” At a time when the police were still withholding the name of the officer and the number of shots fired, they released video of Brown appearing to steal cigars from a convenience store, and leaked that the autopsy had shown THC in his bloodstream. As for the false rumor (with fake photo**, no less) that Wilson had suffered a fractured eye socket — we have no way of knowing whether that came from police or not.

The prosecutor. In the day-to-day course of their jobs, prosecutors work hand-in-glove with police. So if the police have circled the wagons around one of their own, it takes a brave local prosecutor to go against them.

That’s why Governor Nixon was urged to appoint a special prosecutor, one who had no prior relationship with either Michael Brown or the Ferguson police. He refused, saying:

There is a well-established process by which a prosecutor can recuse themselves from a pending investigation, and a special prosecutor be appointed.  Departing from this established process could unnecessarily inject legal uncertainty into this matter and potentially jeopardize the prosecution.

In other words, procedural abnormalities that worked in Officer Wilson’s favor were fine, but any that might counter that bias would “inject legal uncertainty”.

As a result, Prosecutor Bob McCulloch engineered something that bore no resemblance to a typical grand jury.

The ordinary purpose of a grand jury is to determine whether probable cause exists to move on to a trial. In other words: Does the prosecution have a case that would be convincing in the absence of any defense rebuttal? For this reason, a grand jury investigation is entirely the prosecutor’s show; he is under no obligation to present evidence that favors the suspect, or to challenge the testimony of witnesses against the suspect.

As Justice Scalia (of all people) wrote in a different case:

It is the grand jury’s function not ‘to enquire … upon what foundation [the charge may be] denied,’ or otherwise to try the suspect’s defenses, but only to examine ‘upon what foundation [the charge] is made’ by the prosecutor. … As a consequence, neither in this country nor in England has the suspect under investigation by the grand jury ever been thought to have a right to testify or to have exculpatory evidence presented.

But the ordinary grand jury process assumes the prosecutor is motivated to get an indictment; it completely misfires if his intention is not to get an indictment.

Instead, McCulloch ran the equivalent of a trial, but one that had only a defense attorney, not a prosecutor. Law Professor Marjorie Cohn explained:

[McCulloch] put the grand jury in the role of being a trier of fact, which is not its role. The grand jury was put in the position of basically being a jury, but in a one-sided, closed proceeding.

Witnesses whose testimony indicated that Wilson was not in danger, that Brown was far away and surrendering when Wilson gunned him down, were grilled hard. In McCulloch’s words, they were “confronted with the inconsistencies and conflict between their statements and the physical evidence”.

But one witness was treated with unusual deference: Officer Wilson himself. His unusual story — in which Brown does everything he can to goad Wilson into shooting him — was not challenged in any way. MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Bloom tweeted that the cross-examination “Should have been a grueling session, not the tea party the transcript shows.” She focused on the conflict between Wilson’s statements about Brown’s attack and his incredible strength, and Wilson’s complete lack of injury when examined afterwards.

San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi suggests another opening that a serious cross-examination might have pursued:

Wilson’s description of Brown as a “demon” with superhuman strength and unremitting rage, and his description of the neighborhood as “hostile,” illustrate implicit racial bias that taints use-of-force decisions. These biases surely contribute to the fact that African Americans are 21 times more likely to be shot by police than whites in the U.S., but the statement’s racial implications remained unexamined.

The icing on this misshapen cake was identified by Lawrence O’Donnell: The grand jury was misled about the law. Vox summaries:

Before Wilson testified to the grand jury on September 16, prosecutors gave grand jurors an outdated statute that said police officers can shoot a suspect that’s simply fleeing. This statute was deemed unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1985; the court ruled that a fleeing suspect must, at least in a police officer’s reasonable view, pose a dangerous threat to someone or have committed a violent felony to justify a shooting.

Like the Ferguson police, McCulloch also joined the Wilson public-relations effort. Repeated leaks from the grand jury were all favorable to Wilson. His public statement announcing the non-indictment — itself a nearly unprecedented event — “read like a closing argument for the defense” according to a University of Missouri law professor.

His release of the grand jury transcripts — also highly unusual — merely reinforced the need for a trial. As The New Republic‘s Noam Scheiber put it:

The problem with this is that we already have a forum for establishing the underlying facts of a case—and, no less important, for convincing the public that justice is being served in a particular case. It’s called a trial. It, rather than the post-grand jury press conference, is where lawyers typically introduce mounds of evidence to the public, litigate arguments extensively, and generally establish whether or not someone is guilty of a crime.

Objective people could come to different conclusions about Wilson’s guilt. They might disagree about which witnesses were credible, and envision the scene differently. But no one can argue objectively the investigation of Brown’s death was impartial and conducted appropriately.

So what if the process was rigged? If you believe Wilson was justified, you may not care that Michael Brown’s killing was never impartially investigated. The reason you should is that police killings and other police violence against unarmed victims in questionable circumstances is not rare in America.

No one keeps track of the exact number, but at least 400 Americans are killed by police each year, compared to (for example) six in Germany in 2011. No one knows how many of these shootings were of unarmed and otherwise unthreatening people, but now that the world is filling up with cameras, we’re seeing more and more videos of such cases. (Conor Friedersdorf collects several.)

You and I weren’t the only ones watching the rigged process that protected Darren Wilson. Police all over the country were watching with great interest. And they learned that if they over-react and kill someone — perhaps particularly if they kill a young black man, but more generally as well — they are very unlikely to be held accountable. Their colleagues will protect them, and prosecutors will not want to take a stand against them.

Several reforms are needed, which Friedersdorf lists: lapel cameras for police, dashboard cameras for police cars, independent prosecutors in cases where police are suspects, and more.

Wisconsin has such an independent-prosecutor law, probably because that state had the perfect poster case: Michael Bell, a white retired Air Force colonel whose son was shot in the head by police in 2004 after his hands had been cuffed behind his back. With the Bell case in front of them, even white citizens understood that unjustified police violence could happen to them.

Black citizens had always known.

* It’s worth pointing out that endless argument is not a draw; it’s a victory for the side that believes nothing should change.

** The fake photo trick was also used in the Trayvon Martin case.

December 1, 2014 – 10:12 am Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

What else is there to write about this week: the grand jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown. The lead article will be “This Time, Will the Outrage Matter?” I’m not sure when it will come out.

December 1, 2014 – 8:39 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (3)

Strangers

You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

— Leviticus 19:34

This week’s featured post is “One-and-a-Half Cheers for Executive Action”.

This week everybody was talking about President Obama’s immigration move

The weirdest immigration conversation you’re going to hear was on Kris Kobach’s radio show. A caller suggested that when Hispanics become the majority in parts of America, they might do an ethnic cleansing on the whites. And Kobach took it seriously:

What protects us in America from any kind of ethnic cleansing is the rule of law, of course. And the rule of law used to be unassailable, used to be taken for granted in America. And now, of course, we have a president who disregards the law when it suits his interests. So, while I normally would answer that by saying, ‘Steve, of course we have the rule of law, that could never happen in America,’ I wonder what could happen. I still don’t think it’s going to happen in America, but I have to admit, things are strange and they are happening.

I wonder when Kobach thought the rule of law in America was “unassailable”. For non-whites, the rule of law has always been shaky and still is, as the families of Michael Brown and John Crawford can tell you.

Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post for some reason thinks that portraying Obama as the Statue of Liberty is an attack.

Senator Tom Coburn warned, “you could see instances of anarchy. … You could see violence.” It’s funny: When right-wingers don’t get what they want, any subsequent violence is the fault of the people who didn’t give them what they want. The same principle does not apply in, say, Ferguson.

Here’s what’s most dangerous about the Republicans’ over-the-top wolf-crying about “disregarding the law” and so forth: What if the next president actually does disregard the law and start making decrees? If rhetoric has already been turned up to 11 over something like this, any objections then will just sound like more rhetoric.

TPM elaborates on a point I’ve been making here: “No, Your Ancestors Didn’t Come Here Legally“.

Prior to 1875’s Page Act and 1882’s Chinese Exclusion Act, there were no national immigration laws. None.

My ancestors came to America anarchically, or pre-legally. But no, they didn’t follow the law, because there was no law.

and Bill Cosby

I’ve mostly ignored the Bill Cosby controversy, because fundamentally it’s a celebrity story. Rape is wrong; rapists should be punished; and the fact that the accusations are about Bill Cosby doesn’t interest me that much. AlterNet’s Amanda Marcotte, though, raised a question that does interest me: Similar accusations from a number of women have been out there for years, so why is the story only getting traction now?

Her theory, which I would like to believe, is that society is losing its acceptance of the kind of rape Cosby is accused of: acquaintance rape via drugs rather than violence.

A major obstacle in changing attitudes about rape is there are literally decades of cultural endorsement of the idea that sex is a matter of a man getting one over on a woman, and therefore it’s okay to have sex with unwilling women using trickery, bullying or intoxicants. … But now another conversation is happening: People are beginning to key into the fact that it’s not normal to want sex with someone who is laying there like a dead fish, crying, or otherwise giving in because she fears she isn’t getting out of this situation safely otherwise. In fact, that behavior is not funny or cool, but sad at best, and usually downright violent and predatory. A man who bullies an unwilling woman into bed isn’t “scoring” but a real creep.

There’s more to her argument, and it’s well worth your time.

Another Cosby story I found worthwhile was Ta-Nehisi Coates’ account of why he, as a journalist, wrote a story about Cosby years ago without mentioning the rape accusations, even though he believed them.

I don’t have many writing regrets. But this is one of them. I regret not saying what I thought of the accusations, and then pursuing those thoughts. I regret it because the lack of pursuit puts me in league with people who either looked away, or did not look hard enough. I take it as a personal admonition to always go there, to never flinch, to never look away.

and snow

The southern edge of Buffalo got an incredible six feet of snow in one storm. This time-lapse video taken from a downtown office building shows the amazing quality of lake-effect snow: There is a wall of snow on one side of an apparently arbitrary line, and little-to-no snow on the other side.

The photos are ridiculous, like this one:

Don’t go out there.

and you also might be interested in …

Another Benghazi report clears the administration of wrong-doing. This one comes from the House Intelligence Committee, which has a Republican majority. Will this finally be the end of it? Lindsey Graham says no.

A meaty article from 2012 that a friend pointed out to me this week. Thinking of social class in America as a ladder creates some illusions, because not everybody is climbing the same ladder. Michael O. Church describes three separate social ladders, and the relationships between them.

Australian TV-morning-news anchor Karl Stefanovic got sick of all the criticism his female co-anchor got for her appearance, so he ran an experiment: Every day for a year, he did the show wearing the same suit, changing only his shirt and tie. No viewers complained or even appeared to notice. He says:

I’m judged on my interviews, my appalling sense of humor — on how I do my job, basically. Whereas women are quite often judged on what they’re wearing or how their hair is.

I’ll bet a Kindle wouldn’t do this: After Thursday’s shooting incident at Florida State, a student found a bullet in his backpack, in the middle of some books he’d just checked out of the library.

Sunday Cleveland police shot dead a 12-year-old who had an air gun. Needless to say, the kid was black.

and let’s close with something cute

As video cameras got smaller, at some point a squirrel was bound to steal one and run up a tree with it.

November 24, 2014 – 9:29 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

One-and-a-Half Cheers for Executive Action

When democracy is failing, somebody still has to solve problems.

Imagine that something in your house’s infrastructure is broken: a pipe is leaking, an electric circuit is shorting out — something like that. There’s a guy in town who deals with such problems, but he isn’t coming. Maybe he’s too busy, maybe he doesn’t like you … whatever, he’s just not coming. You know enough to throw together a temporary fix, something that will keep the water damage from spreading or the house from catching fire, but it won’t be the right way to fix the problem and it certainly won’t be up to code.

Worse, given how things have been working around town lately, you don’t know that it will ever be up to code. You could imagine that the professional will be along to fix things the right way next week or in a few weeks, but what’s more likely is that your kludgy fix will lead to another “temporary” kludge the next time something goes wrong, and little by little your whole house will diverge from the standard practices that make houses liveable. Anybody who tries to fix anything in the future will have to know not just plumbing or electrical systems, but the specific lore of your house and the strange things that have been done to it through the years.

Knowing all this, how do you feel about your kludge? Good, sort of. You’re keeping things from falling down or burning up. But you also know you’re taking one more step down a path you don’t really want to follow.

That’s pretty close how I feel about the executive action on immigration that President Obama announced Thursday night. In the short run, I love it. If we can bring four million people out of the shadows, so that they will no longer be exceptions to the systems that keep society working properly, that will be a huge positive for all of us. But it also continues the pattern I described last year in “Countdown to Augustus“, where partisan conflict causes a tit-for-tat series of moves that are all technically legal, but which erode the social and moral norms that the republic is based on. Eventually democracy becomes so dysfunctional that the people cheer when a man on horseback sweeps it all away.

There’s a lot to unpack there, so let’s start by reviewing the immigration problem.

The shadow population. Nobody is really happy about how our immigration system has been working. I can’t think of a single major political figure who will defend it, who will stand up in public and say, “We shouldn’t change anything. Everything is just fine the way it is.”

The government estimates that 11.3 million people live in the United States without proper documentation. Most are Hispanic and more arrive all the time. The total has stayed fairly steady — and maybe even gone down a little — since the Great Recession. But that’s not a stable situation. Eventually there will be some crisis in Mexico at a time when our economy is doing well, and the in-flow will resume.

In the aggregate, these immigrants are probably good for our economy. (You can tell the story in such a way that people working difficult jobs for low wages victimize the rest of us, but that seems like a stretch to me.) It’s possible that native-born unskilled workers are hurt by the competition for jobs. But even here, it’s the shadowy nature of undocumented workers that is the real threat. An employer might prefer an undocumented worker because s/he can’t complain about abuse, unsafe working conditions, or wage theft. Pulling that worker out of the shadows makes the competition with native-born workers more fair.

The biggest problem the undocumented cause is not anything they do as individuals, but that their need to stay in the shadows gums up systems that depend on people coming forward. We have been lucky so far, but imagine if an epidemic of bird flu or drug-resistant tuberculosis got loose in the shadow population, and they not only didn’t show up at hospitals, but kept trying to work (in restaurant kitchens and as janitors and nannies) because no one gives sick days to undocumented workers. The undocumented are also unlikely to report crimes they see, either at the workplace or in their neighborhoods, for fear of being questioned about their status. And the existence of a shadow population provides a natural hiding place for the small number of border-crossers we really should be afraid of, like terrorists or drug-smugglers.

We can’t secure the border. “Secure the border” is a slogan like “end poverty” or “world peace”. It expresses an aspiration that cannot be achieved by any country resembling the current United States.

Ignore the Mexican border for a moment and just consider our Canadian border. Most of it is in remote areas that are not marked by any natural obstruction. (The green areas on the map are the places where there is no water barrier.) In the wilds of Montana or Maine or Alaska, crossing the border is just a walk in the woods; you might have to hop a fence, or you might not even know you’ve crossed. The idea that we’re going to surround our country with five thousand miles of Berlin-Wall-style fortifications is ludicrous.

People can walk into the United States. That’s not going to change anytime soon, no matter who’s president or what laws we pass.

If you don’t want to walk, come as a tourist or student and just stay; that’s how about half the undocumented got here. Are we really going to follow every visitor to Disney World or the Grand Canyon to make sure they go home? The old East German Stasi might have been up to a job like that, but no police system we want to have in America could do it.

Ditto for tracking down and arresting all 11.3 million of our current undocumented residents. A police force capable of that … what else could it do? I don’t think we want to find out, but I would love to hear the conspiracy theories if President Obama proposed a realistic — fully staffed, fully funded — plan to secure the borders and deport the undocumented. Police state! Tyranny!

So we’re not solving this problem by enforcement alone.

The irresponsibility of Congress. In my leaky-pipe metaphor, the professional-who-won’t-come is Congress. President Bush pushed Congress to do something, but it wouldn’t. Under President Obama, the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration reform plan, but the House has done nothing. I mean, literally nothing: It didn’t vote on the Senate’s bill, it didn’t pass an alternative, nothing.

Which would be dandy if the House leadership’s position was that our immigration system is A-OK and nothing needs to be done. If you think nothing is the right solution, then fine, do nothing. (That, for example, is how the global-warming debate is going. Congressional Republicans think no action is needed, so they block any attempt at action. They’re wrong, but at least their position is internally consistent.)

But if you are an official branch of government and you think the country has a serious problem, then you have a moral obligation to work on a solution. The House has totally failed to meet that obligation. House Republicans would rather have the impossible “secure the border” slogan to run on than take responsibility for any constructive action.

So there’s President Obama, watching his pipes leak and knowing that the plumber isn’t coming. So he does something. It’s a kludge. It is meant to be temporary, but might have to hold up for a long time. How should we feel about that?

What the order does and doesn’t do. President Obama’s executive order does not grant anyone legal status under our immigration laws. No one becomes a citizen or permanent legal resident. People who would have been near the bottom of the deportation list anyway — mainly parents of U.S. citizens or permanent residents who have been here four years or more, but also a smaller class of students and other people with economically valuable skills — are invited to come forward and apply for a temporary deferral of deportation. If that request is granted, they will then have legal permission to work in the United States while their deportation is deferred.

The administration estimates that about four million people could qualify.

Is it legal? Last week, before the policy was announced, The Wall Street Journal challenged President Obama to produce “the missing memo“, the opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel on whether he had the power to do this — implying that he might be so lawless that he had not even asked for a legal analysis. And much has been made of a 2011 townhall meeting President Obama had with Hispanic students, in which he seemed to admit that such an action would be illegal:

With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case.

The OLC memo was released before Obama’s speech, and it makes refreshing reading (for those of us who read such things). Moreover, it supports both Obama’s executive order and his townhall statement.

Before I get into the details, I’d like to recall the kinds of memos the OLC was writing during the Bush administration: ones explaining how the President could unilaterally nullify the Convention Against Torture, or why the President had the power to declare American citizens to be “enemy combatants” and lock them up indefinitely without charges or trials. One standard feature of those memos was that they were open-ended: They explained why the President could do what he wanted now, but never described the limitations he might run into if he wanted to do more later. In one, for example, the OLC’s John Yoo wrote:

Article II, Section I makes this clear by stating that the “executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” That sweeping grant vests in the President the “executive power” and contrasts with the specific enumeration of the powers — those “herein”– granted to Congress in Article I.

In other words, Bush’s OLC believed the President’s constitutional powers were “sweeping”, while Congress’ powers were limited to the ones specifically enumerated.

By contrast, the Obama OLC’s immigration memo lays out the principles limiting the President’s power, and says that some of what had been suggested is legal and some isn’t. (The part that isn’t — deferring deportation of parents of the “Dreamers” who were the subject of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals order of 2012 — had been rumored to be part of this executive order, but was left out — possibly because the OLC determined it was beyond the President’s power.)

Quoting numerous Supreme Court decisions, the memo lays out four principles that limit the kind of executive action that had been proposed:

  1. “enforcement decisions should reflect ‘factors which are peculiarly within [the enforcing agency’s] expertise’.”
  2. “the Executive cannot, under the guise of exercising enforcement discretion, attempt to effectively rewrite the laws to match its policy preferences. … In other words, an agency’s enforcement decisions should be consonant with, rather than contrary to, the congressional policy underlying the statutes the agency is charged with administering.”
  3. “the Executive Branch ordinarily cannot, as the Court put it in Chaney, ‘consciously and expressly adopt a general policy that is so extreme as to amount to an abdication of its statutory responsibilities’.”
  4. “a general policy of non-enforcement that forecloses the exercise of case-by-case discretion poses ‘special risks’ that the agency has exceeded the bounds of its enforcement discretion.”

If, for example, the President were to simply stop deporting people — “just suspend deportations through executive order”, as he put it in 2011 — he would violate Principle 3. The law says to deport people, so the President can’t just say no. But Congress has not provided the resources to deport everyone who is in the country illegally.

DHS has informed us that there are approximately 11.3 million undocumented aliens in the country, but that Congress has appropriated sufficient resources for ICE to remove fewer than 400,000 aliens each year, a significant percentage of whom are typically encountered at or near the border rather than in the interior of the country.

As a result, the executive branch has to prioritize which 400,000 undocumented immigrants it wants to go after each year. Its prioritization can’t be arbitrary, and can’t rely “on factors which Congress had not intended it to consider”. Past Congressional action has emphasized deporting terrorists and other violent criminals, so there’s no problem putting them at the top of the deportation list. Deferring deportation for “humanitarian” reasons has also been recognized by Congress, and keeping families together has been recognized as humanitarian. Also, there is a long history (recognized by Congress) of deferring deportation of people who are in the middle of a lengthy process that might eventually grant them legal status.

Unless they are dangerous criminals, parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents fit all these criteria. And the executive branch will continue deporting people at the rate its resources allow, giving temporary deferrals — revocable on a case-by-case basis — to low-priority enforcement targets.

But OLC doesn’t find that the same humanitarian concerns apply to parents of the beneficiaries of DACA.

Many provisions of the INA reflect Congress’s general concern with not separating individuals who are legally entitled to live in the United States from their immediate family members. … But the immigration laws do not express comparable concern for uniting persons who lack lawful status (or prospective lawful status) in the United States with their families.

The DACA executive order did not (and could not) give the Dreamers legal standing to petition for the admission of their parents, as citizens and legal residents can. So there is no basis for deferring the parents’ deportation while we wait to see what happens to that petition.

Is this a bad precedent? Vox considered the question: “What could a Republican president do with Obama’s executive power theories?” Their answer is: not much that Bush wasn’t already doing.

Various ideas have been floated for what the executive orders of a Republican president might do through selective enforcement: change the tax laws, give polluters carte blanche to violate the Clean Air Act, waive all the requirements of ObamaCare, etc.

The problem in most of the cases is that debts and penalties accumulate rather than evaporate. Maybe President Perry wouldn’t prosecute you for failing to pay more than whatever flat-tax number he had in mind, but your debt to the IRS would keep accumulating until some future president made you pay, plus interest and penalties. So taking advantage of the offer would not be a prudent move.

In general, I’m not afraid of what a Republican administration might do if it sticks to the four limiting principles the OLC laid out. So the problem is more political than legal: To the extent that Republicans convince the country that Obama is doing something illegal, the next president will have rhetorical justification for doing illegal things too.

That is in fact the longer-term pattern: When conservatives falsely accuse liberals of something, they’re usually laying the groundwork for really doing something similar themselves later on. For example, liberal Supreme Courts were accused of “making up rights” for women and minorities; so when conservatives took over the Court, they felt justified in making up rights for corporations.

Now they’re telling us that the Democratic president is writing his own laws. Whether that is true in some literal legal sense or not — and I don’t believe it is — in their own minds the groundwork is being laid for future Republican decrees.

What to do? The frustrating thing about the pattern laid out in “Countdown to Augustus” is that there’s never a good place to make a stand against it. The encroachments are usually in the realm of norms rather than laws. Typically, you see a disaster looming or an injustice happening, but your opponents have taken some legal-but-unprecedented action to block the usual way the Republic would take action against it. You have the legal power to act anyway, but in a way that just isn’t done. If you act, your opponents feel themselves put in a similar situation, and they then look for further norms they can break to regain the upper hand. Eventually, people are finding loopholes in the laws against murder and treason.

But do you let your opponents gain advantage by breaking norms, without responding? Do you let the injustices continue or the disasters strike, just to preserve a norm of political behavior that the other side won’t respect anyway?

President Obama has patched a pipe in a kludgy way. In an ideal world, it would only have to hold until the plumber can get here. But the plumber’s not coming. So I’m glad the patch is there. But I’m not happy.

November 24, 2014 – 8:25 am Categories: Articles | Comments (12)

Tagged |

The Monday Morning Teaser

Maybe the most depressing post in Weekly Sift history is “Countdown to Augustus“. It extrapolated from the then-current legal back-and-forth between the President and the Senate about recess appointments and the possibility of nullifying laws by refusing to confirm anyone to enforce them, to the more general problem of the erosion of the political norms that a republic depends on to function.

Oversimplifying a little for brevity: Partisan gridlock creates a dysfunctional republic. Leaders then can’t solve problems without cutting corners, but in the long run the corner-cutting increases the dysfunctionality. The bad example to avoid is Rome, where a century of gridlock between the self-serving patricians of the Senate and a series of populist reformers from Marius to Caesar eroded the norms of republican government to the point that Augustus was able to sweep it all away.

Like I just said, it was depressing. And it’s topical again, because of the recently announced immigration reform by executive order.

Obama was in the typical Roman-populist-leader situation of either watching a problem fester (and convincing the electorate that politics is useless), or doing something that is legal but against the usual norms. So he did something. And I’m happy he did rather than leave the problem festering, but I also see the longer-term erosion continuing.

So I’ve written another depressing post: “One-and-a-Half Cheers for Executive Action”. No doubt you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

It should appear shortly. Later this morning, the weekly summary will discuss the reaction to Obama’s reform, Bill Cosby, the Buffalo snow, and a variety of other things.

November 24, 2014 – 7:55 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

So Much That Ain’t So

It is better to know less than to know so much that ain’t so. — Josh Billings
(ironically, the line is usually attributed to Will Rogers or Mark Twain)

This week’s featured post is “Rethinking Immigration“.

This week the audacity of hope was back

With his administration’s final election behind him, President Obama has started acting like he’s President of the United States or something. I’m picturing him like the high school girl who finally gives up on getting asked to the big dance, and goes back to acing her tests, running cross country, working on her novel, and just generally being her amazing self again.

I guess we’ll never know whether a Democratic Party centered on this Obama would have done better in the midterm elections. Anyway, here’s what he’s been up to.

Net neutrality. It started Monday with his net neutrality statement. He called on the FCC to implement net neutrality rules that preserved four principles: no blocking (if a web site is legal, an ISP can’t keep you from accessing it), no throttling (an ISP can’t intentionally slow down some sites and speed up others), increased transparency (monitoring what happens to internet traffic up and down the line, rather than just at the “last mile”), and no paid prioritization (a web site or internet service can’t pay a fee to have its content delivered faster).

What this comes down to is a debate over what kind of economy we want to have and how we want people to make money: Do you get rich by creating innovative new products that people want, or by getting control of a choke-point where you can charge a big toll? (I described that choice here two years ago.) Comcast and Verizon are building a big toll gate that will prosper at the expense of whoever is creating the next FaceBook or NetFlix. Net neutrality is about preventing that.

In order to have the legal authority to implement these net neutrality principles, the FCC needs to re-classify ISPs as providing a telecommunications service rather than an information service. Courts have already said the FCC can do that (as I explained here).

The FCC is an independent agency that can do what it wants. So Obama’s statement is a bully-pulpit thing, not a unitary-executive thing. But net neutrality is a struggle between organized people and organized money. If it happens in the dark, Comcast/Verizon money will certainly win. So the spotlight Obama is shining on the issue might make a big difference.

Funny or Die has the cleverest approach to this issue: “Porn Stars Explain Net Neutrality“. Whether it’s safe for work or not depends on where you work.

Carbon and China. Until Wednesday, the final argument of the do-nothing-about-global-warming crowd was: “Even if we cut our carbon emissions, it won’t make any difference because China won’t.” On Wednesday night’s All In, Chris Hayes collected video clips of congressional Republicans making that argument.

That framing makes climate change fit the barbarians-at-the-gates story I described last week: Environmentalists want to handicap the United States in its economic death-struggle against the Yellow Peril. It never made sense, though, because China has an internal motivation to get its emissions under control: Its major cities are choking on their own coal dust. According to the Boston Globe:

China now holds two seemingly contradictory titles: It creates the most greenhouse gas pollution of any country, and it has developed more renewable energy than any country.

It is the largest producer of wind turbines, followed by the United States and Germany. It produces the most photovoltaic solar panels. It has shut down inefficient old manufacturing plants. And the agreement it announced Wednesday follows other ambitious — and largely successful — long-range planning goals to cut carbon.

But Wednesday, the U.S. and China agreed on mutual goals for carbon-emission reduction. Vox gives more context, and Grist outlines the pressure the U.S./China agreement puts on India.

Next up: Immigration and Impeachment. Speculation is always more fun than reporting on something real, and you never have to issue an embarrassing correction when your speculation turns out to be wrong. (Just move on and speculate about the next thing.) So most of the media jumped ahead to the immigration executive order Obama hasn’t issued yet, and how Republicans will respond to it. They speculate that the order will be bigger than most people expected, and that the Republicans will respond by either shutting down the government or starting impeachment proceedings.

This should all sound familiar. Two years ago, when Obama was about to issue an executive order about guns, right-wingers panicked that he was going to order an unconstitutional confiscation and threatened to impeach him when he did. His actual order was well within his powers and the Republican response was minimal. So let’s wait until he does something before we get excited.

Among people upset about Obama’s possible immigration moves, National Review‘s Mark Krikorian takes it to a whole other level:

With all due respect to Andy McCarthy, impeachment is out of the question; there is almost nothing the first black president could do that would lead to his impeachment. Yes, it’s a double standard, but Obama was only nominated and elected because of his race, so his de facto immunity from impeachment should not come as a  surprise.

Because when white presidents like Ronald Reagan did the exact same thing, they were impeached immediately. Weren’t they?

This is how the racial thing has played out all through the Obama administration. The Right doesn’t hate him because he’s black; they hate him because everything he does seems unique and horrible to them. And it seems that way because he’s black.

Meanwhile, everybody was talking about a comet

The European Space Agency landed an unmanned probe on a comet, which had never been done before. (Remember when we used to lead the world in stuff like that?) Unfortunately, the solar-powered probe landed in a shady spot, so its battery is dead now (though it may get enough occasional light to perk up later). Sky and Telescope gives full geeky details, and Vox explains why the mission is already a huge success.

and Democrats were talking about fixing the Party

Here’s one plan:

But I’m going in a different direction. Last week’s “Republicans have a story to tell. We’re stuck with facts.” was the kick-off to a long, vague project that will proceed at no particular pace: What story of America should Democrats be telling?

The reason it will proceed at no particular pace is that I want the historical parts of the story to be true, and its projections into the future to be based on the way the world actually works. If the problem were just to make up some bullshit that might fool some low-information voters into voting Democratic, I could probably do that now, and so could a lot of other people.

So this week’s “Rethinking Immigration“, which reviews Aviva Chomsky’s Undocumented, is part of the background for that project. We need to understand how things really are before we start trying to explain them to the public.

Meanwhile, other people have been outlining the biggest problem that needs to be addressed: Why doesn’t rising productivity lead to higher wages, like it used to? (That’s a root cause of the pervasive middle-class anxiety I described last week.) Josh Marshall posted this graph:

and commented:

[A] stark reality: Democrats don’t have a set of policies to turn around this trend. Republicans don’t either, of course. But they don’t need to. Not in the same way. As a party they are basically indifferent to middle class wages. … But you cannot make middle class wage growth and wealth inequality the center of your politics unless you have a set of policies which credibly claims some real shot at addressing the problem. At least not for long.

Economist Alan Blinder lists “Seven ways to raise wages“, but whether his plan — education, unions, higher minimum wage, fiscal stimulus — would fix things or just tinker around the edges, it doesn’t sound like a fix. And that’s a big chunk of  the problem.

One thing did come clear to me from reading these articles: The standard Republican response to any of the stuff on Blinder’s list is that it would hurt productivity growth. We can argue, but that’s not the right conversation to have. The right answer to the productivity objection is: “So bleeping what?” If increases in productivity don’t benefit ordinary people any more, why should we care about them?

and ObamaCare’s second season

ObamaCare enrollment season started Saturday, which of course means that the second-year premiums are out. How to read those numbers varied a lot from one source to the next. One set of NYT writers led with the negative:

The Obama administration on Friday unveiled data showing that many Americans with health insurance bought under the Affordable Care Act could face substantial price increases next year — in some cases as much as 20 percent — unless they switch plans.

While another NYT writer led with the positive:

Early evidence suggests that competition in the new Affordable Care Act marketplaces is working, at least in some areas. Health insurance premiums in major cities around the country are barely rising.

TPM was positive with caveats:

Taken in the aggregate, Obamacare premiums for the 34 states using Healthcare.gov are almost completely level in 2015 compared to 2014, according to a new analysis from Avalere Health.

That comes with a lot of caveats. Premium changes vary widely from state to state, and individual consumers who are re-enrolling might need to shop around to avoid substantial spikes in what they pay next year.

But ThinkProgress was just positive:

For the second year in a row, Obamacare premiums are lower than anticipated and millions of Americans can expect to find affordable health insurance options during the second open enrollment period.

And CBS was just negative:

With the Affordable Care Act to start enrollment for its second year on Nov. 15, some unpleasant surprises may be in store for some.

That’s because a number of low-priced Obamacare plans will raise their rates in 2015, making those options less affordable.

The gist, as best I can piece it together from these Rashomon-like accounts, is that a few insurance companies are raising rates substantially, but even if you are one of the affected consumers, you should be able to keep both your cost and level-of-coverage relatively stable if you are willing to switch to another insurer. Averaged over the whole country, premiums will increase, but far less than the average premium was increasing before ObamaCare.

I guess that must make a crappy headline or something.

and you also might be interested in …

I know that what everybody was really talking about: Kim Kardashian’s internet-breaking photo shoot. I tried to come up with an insightful comment about that story’s deep cultural significance, but I got nothing. I thought about not even providing a link, but that would just be acting out against the trivialization of news, which is a real thing. Go ahead and look. Promise me you’ll come right back.

October numbers are in: another global temperature record. 2014 continues on pace to replace 2010 as the hottest year ever.

Former coal executive Don Blankenship was indicted for his role in the safety violations that killed 29 miners in 2010. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Subtext in this story: why industry can’t regulate itself, and why we need to get money out of politics. Here’s an account of Blankenship buying a state supreme court judgeship for an ally in 2004.

and let’s close by singing the blues

or maybe by letting a toddler sing them for us.

November 17, 2014 – 11:05 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (11)

Rethinking Immigration

We don’t understand “illegal”. We just think we do.

My favorite books are the ones that take the stuff everybody knows and ask “Really?”.

David Graeber’s Debt: the first 5,000 years was like that. At a party in Westminster Abbey, an activist lawyer says to Graeber, “Surely one has to pay one’s debts!” as if nothing could be more obvious, no matter how liberal you are. His entire book is a challenge to that certainty: Really? What is debt? Where does it come from? He finds that the history of debt is all tangled up with slavery, and that even today debt is often an expression of power relationships that we would challenge in any other setting.

Aviva Chomsky’s* Undocumented is another “really?” book. What everybody knows about immigration is that undocumented Hispanic immigrants have broken the law, and there have to be consequences for that. “What part of ‘illegal’ don’t you understand?” demand the protest signs. We have to secure our borders, and you can’t just let people walk into the United States.

Really? Chomsky writes: “The purpose of this book is to denaturalize illegality.” In other words, we don’t really understand “illegal immigrant”; we just think we do. Realizing how strange an idea it is, and the historical freight it carries, is a step forward.

So before we even start imagining our future immigration policy, we have some things to unlearn about the past.

1. For the longest time, we did just let people walk into the United States. Whether they became citizens or not depended on their race. If you’re white and your family has been in the U.S. for several generations, you probably think they came “the right way”, through some sort of legal process comparable to our current immigration procedures. That’s not true. Back in the 1840s, my German ancestors didn’t get visas or put their names on the waiting list for the next year’s German immigrant quota. They just got on a boat and came.

Before the Civil War, it was taken for granted that white people who turned up on our doorstep would become citizens and non-whites wouldn’t. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited naturalization to “free white aliens” of “good character”. White people could just show up, and if they lived here for two years (later extended to five) without incident, they could apply to any local court for citizenship.

Of course the rules were different for blacks, who were mostly slaves in the South, and weren’t wanted as citizens in many northern states. Indiana’s constitution of 1851 said “No Negro or Mulatto shall come into, or settle in, the State, after the adoption of this Constitution.” In the West, the cheap labor was Chinese; and while they weren’t exactly slaves, they were never going to become Americans either.

The 14th Amendment changed all that, making any baby born in the United States a citizen (except for Indians). So suddenly it was important who was allowed across the border. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 kept out the Chinese, and the Immigration Act of 1917 extended the ban to all Asians. The early 20th-century flood of immigrants from Eastern Europe — Jews! Catholics! anarchists! — was throttled in 1921 by restricting annual immigration from any country to 3% (later 2%) of the number of Americans who claimed that ancestry on the 1910 (later 1890) census.

So (except for Asians) national origin replaced race as the decisive factor. But the national origin of American blacks was defined in such a way that the annual immigration quota from all of non-Egyptian Africa was only 1,100.

That law was the baseline for refusing entry to Holocaust survivors after World War II: Nothing against you personally, but (even though you’re Jewish) we classify you as Czech, and the quota is low because there weren’t many Czech-Americans in 1890.

2. Mexican immigration has always been a special case. Until 1965, the law didn’t consider Mexicans who crossed the border to be immigrants at all. They were migrant workers who would someday return to Mexico. So there was no reason not to let them in, no reason not to deport them whenever the economy went south, and no clear path to citizenship for the ones who stayed. 

By 1965 our openly racist immigration laws had become an embarrassment, so we changed them. For the first time, Mexicans were considered immigrants, and seasonally wandering back and forth across the border became illegal. The “illegal Mexican immigrant” was born — not because a flood of law-breaking Mexicans surged over the border, but because we re-classified the traditional migration pattern of many Mexican workers.

Chomsky points out that some of the stereotypes about fence-jumping Mexicans are wrong.

  • The easier way to cross the border is to get a tourist visa, fly in, and forget to leave. About half of our undocumented residents got here that way. They tend to be the wealthier ones. But if the incentives are high enough, just building a wall isn’t going to stop people from coming.
  • A lot of undocumented immigrants were recruited to come here by middlemen working for American employers. Some from more remote areas didn’t even know they were breaking our rules.
  • Free-trade agreements have flooded Mexico with cheap American corn, making many small-scale Mexican farms unsustainable. A set of rules that allows us to keep out the Mexican farmers made destitute by our exports isn’t really fair.

3. Our current policy maintains a two-tier labor market that has its roots in slavery. Throughout our history, America has had two classes of workers; one that had a chance to move up and one that didn’t. Chomsky writes:

From the eighteenth and, especially, the nineteenth centuries on , the United States benefited from its place in the global industrial economy, and white people in the United States benefited from their place in the racial order. A dual labor market developed in which some workers began to become upwardly mobile and enjoy the benefits of industrial society, while others were legally and structurally stuck at the bottom.

The Northeast mechanized, and lower-tier work that was hard to mechanize (mostly in fields or mines) shifted to the South (where it was done by blacks, first as slaves and then as victims of Jim Crow) or the West (where Chinese and then Mexicans did it).

The justification for separating the two tiers of workers has shifted with time. Originally the separating criterion was race, then partly race and partly national origin. Now it’s legal status. In spite of what our laws say, our economy still creates and depends on millions of sub-minimum-wage jobs where first-tier standards of job safety and protection against abuse don’t apply. They aren’t limited to the South and West any more, they’re everywhere. But they’re no longer done by blacks or Chinese or even Mexicans (per se); they’re done by illegals.

From Chomsky’s point of view, the point of our laws about “illegal immigrants” isn’t to get rid of these people or even to keep more from coming; it’s to make their labor more exploitable. Being “illegal”, they can’t demand their rights or complain about their mistreatment.**

4. So the place to start isn’t “What are we going to do about these people?”. It’s “What are we going to do about these jobs?”

Our fundamental argument about the “illegals” bounces between two poles, neither of which is quite right.

  • They steal American jobs.
  • They do necessary jobs that Americans won’t do.

The truth is that the terms offered to undocumented workers — wages, working conditions, etc. — would be unacceptable (and often even illegal) for American workers. If the undocumented workers weren’t there (a situation dramatized in the movie A Day Without a Mexican, and played out in real life in Georgia, until the old ways re-asserted themselves), those jobs — and the economy based on them — would have to change.

Some of those jobs would go away. If, say, you could only hire documented American residents to be your live-in nanny — even if you could hire the same undocumented woman suddenly documented, protected by American laws, and open to a wider range of employment opportunities — you might decide a day-care center was a better option. Maybe farmers would conclude that growing certain labor-intensive crops in the U.S. isn’t economical (or is economical only in small quantities for foodies willing to pay high prices), so we would import more Mexican vegetables and fewer Mexican workers. Those farmers would grow something else, buy more machinery, and probably make less money; the market value of their land would go down accordingly. Some loans collateralized by that land would go underwater, and some banks might fail.

Others jobs would upgrade, and the products based on them would become more expensive.*** You might have to pay more at restaurants, or more to get someone to clean your house. But the wages paid for those upgraded jobs would increase demand for the kinds of things American workers buy, creating new jobs that might or might not balance the ones that went away.

In short, it’s not just a question of “kick them out” or “secure the border” or even “crack down on the employers”. The whole economy would change if we had a one-tier system of labor rather than the two-tier system we’ve had for our entire history. Until we’re ready to face that change, all our debates about “illegals” will go round in circles. Because if you don’t want the people, but you do want their labor, you’ve got a problem.

* Yes, she is related to Noam. He’s her Dad.

** There’s an obvious parallel to prison labor, whose workers are similarly limited and unprotected because of their legal status. Prison labor is also largely non-white, as Michelle Alexander explains in The New Jim Crow.

*** Though maybe not by as much as you think. William Finnegan writes in The New Yorker: “But in Denmark McDonald’s workers over the age of eighteen earn more than twenty dollars an hour—they are also unionized—and the price of a Big Mac is only thirty-five cents more than it is in the United States.”

November 17, 2014 – 9:25 am Categories: The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (18)

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