Not Laughing

Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them. 

— attributed to Margaret Atwood

In this week’s sift:

  • Rich People Don’t Have Jobs. I don’t care how hard you work or how productive you are; if you don’t need the money you’re making, you don’t have a job, you have a hobby.
  • The Sifted Bookshelf: “Delirium” by Nancy Cohen. A feminist historian reviews the last half century and determines that all the conventional wisdom about the culture wars is wrong.
  • Girls Heart Republicans and other short notes. Herman Cain is just the guy to explain the gender gap. Mitch McConnell puts words in the mouth of his female senators. How “low-effort thought” leads to conservative views. Free Republic revolts against Romney. Four crazy legislators. Orrin Hatch “despises” the Tea Party. Abstinence-only sex education still doesn’t work. And a grandmother recalls her abortion, while hoping that her granddaughters will have the same rights she did.
  • Last week’s most popular post. Seven Issues the Election Should Be About got 611 views. The most-clicked link went to Nicholas Kristof’s “Learning to Respect Religion“.
  • Follow-ups on past articles. Now that ALEC is drawing public attention, more and more corporations are dropping out. I love whoever noticed the resemblance between John Derbyshire’s racist rant and this clip from Twelve Angry Men. And Derbyshire causes Slate’s William Saletan to make the roughly the same observation about racial profiling that George Zimmerman evoked in me: “drawing inferences about anyone based on race, sex, religion, or any other crude category is a lousy substitute for inspecting or interacting with that individual.  If you tell people to protect themselves by avoiding interaction with the person they’re judging, you’re not just rationalizing racism. You’re perpetuating it.”
  • This week’s challenge. I know it seems pointless to contribute money to political campaigns when you read about Super-PACs raising hundreds of millions, but it’s important that ordinary people throw the stubborn ounces of their weight onto the scale. Decide how much you can contribute this year and start looking for candidates who deserve more than just your vote.
April 16, 2012 – 12:21 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (6)

Rich People Don’t Have Jobs

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.

April 16, 2012 – 12:08 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (29)

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The Sifted Bookshelf: “Delirium” by Nancy Cohen

What if all the conventional wisdom about culture-war politics is wrong? You know the stuff I’m talking about:

  • The social issues favor Republicans. Coastal elites may have progressive attitudes towards female equality, reproductive rights, guns, gay rights, and so on. But the broad mass of ordinary Americans is deeply conservative.
  • Clinton and Carter proved that Democrats have to court the Bubba vote. The angry-white-male “Reagan Democrats” are the key to winning national elections.
  • The public doesn’t trust the moral values of liberals. McGovern and Mondale went down because they were too far left, Gore was tarred by Clinton’s sins, and so on.
  • Abortion caused the Religious Right to rise up. The preachers saw Roe v Wade and knew they had to take action to defend their long-held moral values.

In Delirium: How the sexual counterrevolution is polarizing America, historian Nancy Cohen looks back over the politics of the last half-century and concludes that it didn’t happen like that. This is a rich book, full of forgotten detail, but one over-arching story comes through: It’s the Religious Right that’s unpopular with the larger electorate. When “values voters” win, they win by stealth and re-interpret the results afterward.

The clearest examples are the Republican mid-term victories in 1994 and 2010. In both cases, overall turnout was low, Religious-Right turnout was high, and the public campaigns focused on other issues. Both the 1994 Contract With America and the 2010 Tea Party stayed away from culture-war issues in public, while assuring Religious-Right leaders behind the scenes that they would act on culture-war issues once they got elected (which they have). Candidates who missed the memo on stealth — Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, and Joe Miller — went down to defeat.

The conservative formula for success is simple: You want the invisible Religious Right networks of viral email and church study groups behind you, and you want evangelicals ringing doorbells and making phone calls for you, but your public campaign should have as little to do with them and their issues as possible. In 2000, all the fundamentalists knew that George W. Bush was their man, but he won with a moderate image as a “uniter” and a “compassionate conservative”.

Conversely, Bill Clinton may speak with a Bubba accent, but he won in 1992 while publicly reaching out to both feminists and gays to a greater extent than any previous major-party candidate. And the more that Republicans tried to make Clinton’s personal sex life an issue, the more popular he got. Clinton left office with a higher approval rating than Ronald Reagan. Al Gore’s biggest mistake was to distance himself from the popular Clinton in an effort to placate the evangelicals who voted for Bush anyway.

The other striking theme from Delirium is that abortion is an issue-of-opportunity for the Right. The original issues are gender equality and sex. To hear them tell it now, the Religious Right was always against abortion because the Bible is against it. When Roe v Wade made abortion legal, leaders like Jerry Falwell knew they had to get involved in politics.

In fact, the causality worked in the other direction. The Bible says next to nothing about abortion, and gives no support to the bizarre idea of ensoulment-at-conception. (As best I can determine, no one held this belief until recent centuries, and Protestants didn’t pick it up in any numbers until the late 1970s, when their politics demanded a clearer theological reason to condemn abortion.) When Roe v Wade was decided in 1972, many conservative religious leaders supported abortion rights or had no opinion on the issue.

The Religious Right actually began when conservative Christian women began organizing against the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972. Abortion was not their major issue. Only after Lottie Beth Hobbs had established the grass-roots potential of an anti-feminist religious movement and drew its battle lines did the male preachers join in. Jerry Falwell didn’t preach his first anti-abortion sermon until 1978.

April 16, 2012 – 11:42 am Categories: The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (2)

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Girls Heart Republicans and other short notes

In case you were having trouble figuring it out, Herman Cain explained the Obama/Romney gender gap to the Fox News audience:

Yes, President Obama is very likable to most people, if you just look at him and his family. But if you look at his policies — which is what most people disagree with — it’s a different story. And I think many men are much more familiar with the failed policies than a lot of other people.

Which leads Digby to ask: “Who are those ‘other people’ (besides men) you speak of?”

You know, Digby: Girls. Those darling little ladies who swoon at pictures of Obama’s cute kids and don’t worry their pretty little heads about manly subjects like health care or the trade deficit. They say all kinds of silly things to pollsters, but come November their menfolk will set them straight and they’ll vote for Romney. (They’ll probably pout about it for a week or two afterwards — and their heads-of-household might want to be careful about eating the meatloaf on Inauguration Day — but they’ll do what they’re told.)

I’m glad Cain explained it so clearly. Otherwise, I’d have no idea why girls might not like Republicans. Well, there’s the whole we-want-you-to-carry-a-dead-fetus-to-term thing. But that’s yucky. I’m sure girls don’t think about stuff like that.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is another Republican girls ought to love. He dismissed the whole war-on-women theme by pointing to female Republican senators who agree with him:

There is no issue. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Kelly Ayotte from New Hampshire and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe from Maine I think would be the first to say — and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska — ‘we don’t see any evidence of this.’

Except … well, they actually say the exact opposite. ThinkProgress observes:

Three of the four women McConnell names have already come out against the GOP’s war on women — Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). In fact, Murkowski specifically pushed back on claims like McConnell’s, saying, “If you don’t feel this is an attack, you need to go home and talk to your wife and your daughters.”

Doesn’t that make you want to elect some more Republican senators so that McConnell can be majority leader?

You might think that a Republican woman who gets herself elected senator (like Murkowski or Snowe or Hutchison) might finally get some respect, that the men might listen to her (on women’s issues, at the very least) and not just use her as cover in a some-of-my-best-friends-are-dames way.

Think again.

A new study links conservatism to “low-effort thought”.

when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases.

It makes a certain amount of sense. In situations where you don’t have two brain cells to rub together, you default to stereotypes and justifying the status quo.

If I’m stressed or tired, it’s much harder to think compassionately or generously. Much easier to think like this: Is there a problem? Somebody ought to find out whose fault it is and kick their butts.

As ego-boosting as this study is for liberals, there might be more to learn than that: When somebody who ordinarily seems to be a good person repeats some ridiculous conservative talking point, maybe the right response is just to say: “Seriously?” Don’t slap them down, just encourage them to think a little harder.

Jim Robinson, founder of the conservative community blog Free Republic, announces an anti-Romney revolt.

I’ve stated many times since Romney started running for the presidency way back when that I’d never vote for him and I will not. … There will be no campaign for this Massachusetts liberal liar on FR!!

Uh, Jim, why?

Romney is a pathological compulsive liar. Lie after lie papered over with more lies. Doesn’t even flinch when caught in bald faced lies, simply tells another big whopper to cover up or dodge the issue. Funny thing, the man actually seems to believe his own latest lies and simply ignores the glaring record of his past actions/lies.

Check out the comments Robinson gets: overwhelmingly positive, with only the occasional “Are you nuts?” thrown in.

That “liar” meme is catching on. Steve Benen is up to #13 in his ongoing series Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity. Most of it isn’t spin or shading; it’s real that-never-happened stuff.

Crazy Congresspeople #1: Missouri’s Todd Akin explains to a constituent why his fellow Republicans in Congress hasn’t impeached President Obama yet:

I can’t speak for the other 400 and some congressmen, but I believe when they take a look at impeachment the question is do you have the votes to do it?

You don’t need, like, grounds to impeach a Democratic president, just (as Hunter at Daily Kos summarizes): “You know, stuff.”

Crazy Congresspeople #2: Florida’s Rep. Alan West knows how many “card-carrying Marxists” are in Congress: 78 to 81. He later clarified that he was referring to every member of the Progressive Caucus.

Hey, Alan: They did away with cards years ago. It’s all biometrics now. And sub-dermal computer chips. Have you checked for those? Communists have their alien allies insert them into your body while you’re asleep.

Crazy Congresspeople #3: North Carolina’s Virginia Foxx, who has

very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that.

She knows there’s no reason for it because she and her husband graduated with almost no debt back in the 60s, when states gave more support to schools like her alma mater UNC and tuition was much lower. (I’ve already told you what I think about student debt.)

Let’s add a crazy state legislator to the list: Iowa’s Mark Chelgren proposed that child-support-paying Dads should be able to demand that their ex-wives take a drug test. (No War on Women here.)

You know who’s not conservative enough now? Orrin Hatch. Not so long ago he held down the far-right end of the Senate, but the Tea Party has moved past him. “I despise these people,” he says.

Teen pregnancy is down, but it’s still highest in the states that encourage abstinence-only sex education.

A 72-year-old grandmother tells the story of her abortion in 1978 in No One Called Me a Slut. It was a difficult decision, but she was treated with respect and she hasn’t regretted what she did.

I have five grandsons and three granddaughters, and I passionately want each one of them to be responsible and have the same legal right to choose that I had.

April 16, 2012 – 11:25 am Categories: Short Notes | Comments (1)

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Things Better Left Unsaid

Democracy don’t rule the world
You’d better get that in your head
This world is ruled by violence
But I guess that’s better left unsaid

— Bob Dylan,  “Union Sundown” (1983)

In this week’s sift:

  • Seven Issues the Election Should Be About. I have to confess I have low expectations of the Romney vs. Obama fall campaign: a lot of negative ads, deception, misdirection, and bad journalism. And that’s a shame, because this country needs a good and accurate airing of liberal and conservative views on a number of important issues.
  • Democracy in Michigan: What Rachel Got Right and Wrong. Thursday, Rachel Maddow did a long segment on the abuses of democracy happening in Michigan. It’s a huge story that more people should be covering, but she also screwed it up a little. As the Daily Show used to say: “When news breaks, we fix it.”
  • Too Racist for the National Review and other short notes. John Derbyshire just proved that it is possible to get yourself fired from National Review for being too racist; you should take a look at how far he had to go. Can Koch Industries be strip-searched? The coming War on State Universities. Executive pay is still going up. And more.
  • Book recommendation of the week: I haven’t finished Nick Harkaway’s new novel Angelmaker yet, but it reminds me that Harkaway’s first novel, The Gone-Away World, is one of my favorite sci-fi novels ever. He’s John le Carre’s son, but his style resembles Neal Stephenson’s: original ideas in wild plots, lavishly written.
  • Last week’s most popular posts. Rather than one big viral outbreak, last week’s traffic was distributed among Prejudice, Bigotry, and “Reasonable” Racism (242 views), Student Debt: the New Involuntary Servitude (221), and continuing interest in Trayvon Martin: the Racism Whites Don’t Want to See (an additional 141 views to total 592). Interestingly, August’s Why I Am Not a Libertarian continues to chug along, getting about 50 views a week. It’s now up to 21,924.
  • This week’s challenge. While visiting Chicago recently, I discovered the Open Books used-book store. Its high-quality stock is donated, and its staff consists of volunteers who love books. (Every little sub-category has excellent staff recommendations, right down to “mysteries with a strong sense of place”.) Lots of cushy old furniture makes it a great hang space. With no expenses for staff or stock, there must be profits — they support literacy programs in the Chicago area. Use the comments to tell me about public-spirited non-profits in your area, or to give a shout-out to your locally-owned independent bookstore.
April 9, 2012 – 12:17 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

Seven Issues the Election Should Be About

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.

April 9, 2012 – 12:05 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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Democracy in Michigan: What Rachel Got Right and Wrong

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.

April 9, 2012 – 11:53 am Categories: Articles | Comments (1)

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Too Racist for the National Review and other short notes

It’s rare to see white racism this explicit. National Review writer John Derbyshire (writing for Taki’s Magazine, not NR; the traffic nearly brought Taki’s web site down Saturday afternoon; you may still have trouble raising that “white racism” link to the article), wrote a “non-black version” of “the Talk” parents give their kids about race. (Various black parents had previously published their version of the Talk, for example Daryl Owens.)

Among other dubious advice, Derbyshire tells his son to avoid events that are likely to attract a lot of blacks, and to leave if an unexpectedly large number of blacks show up. He should also not “play the Good Samaritan” to blacks in distress or settle in a town where black politicians are in control. And of course:

Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.

(I guess that’s why we all had to see Obama’s birth certificate and listen to his minister’s sermons — things I don’t recall ever doing for a white candidate.)

Derbyshire lays it on the line that “The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites.” And of course they hate you anyway, so always use the white clerk at the DMV if you have a choice.

Finally, on the rare occasions when you can find an IWSB — intelligent, well-socialized black (Derbyshire’s acronym) — make friends with them, because

In addition to the ordinary pleasures of friendship, you will gain an amulet against potentially career-destroying accusations of prejudice.

For some reason, that amulet didn’t save Derbyshire this time. National Review fired him. That’s what happens when you forget to use your dog whistle.

Daily Kos’ Bill in Portland puts two and two together:

The Supreme Court says corporations are people. The Supreme Court also says that people can be strip-searched for any reason whatsoever. Therefore, corporations can now be strip-searched for any reason whatsoever. Let’s start with…[Snaps rubber gloves]…oh, how ’bout Koch Industries.

Alternet’s Sara Robinson sees conservatives mobilizing for an all-out attack on state universities.

Democrats introduced an amendment to the FCC Process Reform Act of 2012 that would have allowed the FCC to block FCC-regulated companies from requiring employees to reveal their Facebook passwords. It failed, because all Republicans in the House voted against it. I haven’t found any reason beyond a general distaste for workers’ rights.

Nicholas Kristof’s Easter column “Learning to Respect Religion” is worth reading whether you are religious or not.

Executive pay: Obscenely high and still rising.

Large numbers of journalists continue to believe that it’s not their job to question whether what a candidate says is true.

April 9, 2012 – 11:45 am Categories: Short Notes | Comments (2)

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Soul Debt

Money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million.

— Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality

St. Peter don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go.
I owe my soul to the company sto’

 — Merle Travis (sort of), “16 Tons“

In this week’s sift:

  • Prejudice, Bigotry, and “Reasonable” Racism. How reasonable was George Zimmerman’s assumption that a black teen must be up to no good? And what should he have done next?
  • Student Debt: The New Involuntary Servitude. Student debt is now over $1 trillion, guaranteeing that young people trying to move up in the world will spend a big chunk of their careers under compulsion rather than freedom. The half-truths about choice and responsibility that justify this situation need to be exposed.
  • Supreme Panic and other short notes.  The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on ObamaCare this week, and liberals panicked. Should they? And what’s the right answer to the Broccoli Argument? A quantum theory of Romney. Massive solar energy spills. Hate crime laws misunderstood. “Cracked” strikes again. And more.
  • Book recommendation of the week: Drift by Rachel Maddow. The Founders wanted a peaceful republic, suspected the martial ambitions of the Executive Branch, and so invested the war-declaring power in Congress, which they expected to drag its feet rather than rush to war. How did we get from there to the current situation, where presidents make war at will and Congress begs to get a seat at the table?
  • Last weeks’ most popular post. Trayvon Martin: The Racism Whites Don’t Want to See got 451 views, and has a sequel this week. The most-clicked link was to Cara Santa Maria’s piece on the new Tennessee evolution law. (I guess that’s what happens when I describe someone as “a hot chick”.)
  • Expand your vocabulary. The distinction this week’s lead article makes between prejudice and bigotry deserves to catch on.
April 2, 2012 – 9:48 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

Prejudice, Bigotry, and “Reasonable” Racism

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.

April 2, 2012 – 9:43 am Categories: Articles | Comments (11)

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