ConConCon: Can the Grass Roots Find Common Ground?

I think the fundamental problem in American politics is the corruption of our political system. It’s a corruption that makes it impossible for the Left to get what the Left wants and the Right to get what the Right wants. — Lawrence Lessig to Cenk Uygur at the ConConCon

Left and Right alike have proposals that poll well, but never make it through Congress: taxing the rich and a public option for health care on the Left, a balanced budget amendment and (in some polls) harsher immigration policies on the Right. The grass roots on both sides object to corporate personhood (79% in one survey) and were appalled when their government responded to the 2008 financial collapse by dishing out money to the same bankers who had screwed things up.

Originally designed to be the People’s voice, Congress has become a bottleneck controlled by special interests. Consequently, Left/Right political competition has only a limited amount of meaning. No matter how many seats either party wins, we won’t see single-payer healthcare (Left) or a flat tax (Right).

On the other hand, some ideas with little-to-no public support get through Congress easily. Lessig’s favorite example is the Sonny Bono Copyright Act of 1998, which extended the life of copyrights issued since 1923 — keeping valuable characters like Mickey Mouse and Superman out of the public domain. Copyright is a temporary monopoly that the government grants to encourage creativity, but extending the copyright of works that already exist serves no public purpose whatsoever. (“No matter what the US Congress does with current law,” Lessig observes, “George Gershwin is not going to produce anything more.”) The extension, amounted to a gift from Congress to Disney and Time Warner, who lobbied for it like 10-year-olds in December.

So who gets what they want out of Congress? Lessig calls them “the Funders” — the entities that finance political campaigns. And how can the People change the system to regain control of their government? By getting Congress to pass new laws or Constitutional amendments?

Good luck with that.

That’s the origin of this idea: Without minimizing the significance of their philosophical differences, can grass roots from the Left and Right come together in a campaign to make democracy meaningful again?

Tea Party? Lessig’s Rootstrikers organization explored this idea by getting together with Mark Meckler’s right-wing Tea Party Patriots to co-sponsor a discussion of a way to end-run Congress and fix the system another way: via a constitutional convention called by the States. Hence the Conference on the Constitutional Convention held in late September at Harvard Law School. (I “attended” via the live feed on the Web. I had hoped video of the sessions would be posted by now, but they aren’t. Consequently, all quotes are from memory or my hastily scribbled notes.)

I find that whenever I mention this co-sponsorship, people jump to the conclusion that the goal must be to generate some kind of homogenized, centrist agenda. To explain, I came up with this metaphor: Imagine two swordsmen dueling over a great prize. While they swashbuckle their way around the arena, focused on each other, somebody else walks past them, calmly stuffs the prize into a sack, and walks out.

The duel is real, but it becomes pointless if the swordsmen can’t ally to protect the prize.

The Civics of Article V. The possibility of a constitutional convention is embedded in the Constitution itself.

on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, [Congress] shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments

Once proposed by the convention, amendments would follow the same ratification path as constitutional amendments approved by Congress: They’d have to be ratified by 3/4ths of the states — 38 of the current 50. So any 13 states could block any of the convention’s amendments.

Because this would be an orderly process authorized by the current Constitution, speakers began referring to it as an “Article V convention” rather than a general constitutional convention that could spring from nowhere and make up its own rules. (The hallowed convention that produced our current constitution was unauthorized by the Articles of Confederation that it replaced. In particular, the Articles said that any change had to be approved by all 13 states. But the new constitution wrote its own rules and said it would go into effect if only 9 states ratified it.)

Article V is about as vague as the rest of the Constitution. But since no such convention has ever been called, Article V has two centuries of rust on it rather than the reams of precedent and case law that interprets most constitutional provisions. So there are a lot of open questions, which the ConConCon’s legal panel spelled out:

  • How do 2/3rds of the states “apply” for a convention? Every now and then, some legislature passes a call for a convention to consider such-and-such an amendment. If you total all those up, we’ve already had calls from more than 2/3rds of the states. But the general opinion is that the state’s applications have to be similar in some way; they have to be calling for the same convention, not just a convention. How similar do they need to be? Lessig proposes that states pass similar wordings that call for a convention in general, and then (in a second clause) urge the convention to consider the particular amendments popular in that state.
  • What if Congress ignores the applications? A lot of the Constitution assumes that people will act in good faith, and doesn’t specify what happens if they don’t. For example, the 12th Amendment specifies that (in the presence of Congress) the President of the Senate counts the votes of the Electoral College — the final step in electing a president. What if Senate President counts the votes wrong and declares himself president? All Hell breaks loose, I think.
    Similarly, what if Congress looks at the States’ applications for a constitutional convention and says, “Not gonna happen”? Or calls a convention under rules that make it unworkable? It’s not clear that anything other than public furor keeps Congress in line.
  • How do the conventioneers get chosen? Maybe that’s defined in Congress’ call. If not, nobody knows.
  • What if the convention breaks the rules set out in Congress’ call? Again, we’ve got a good-faith issue. Probably nothing happens; if 3/4ths of the states go ahead and ratify the amendments anyway, they become part of the Constitution.

Runaway conventions. The big question everybody asks is: What if a “runaway” convention goes wild and designs some whole new country for us? What it declares a socialist republic or a Christian theocracy or something?

The simple answer is that 13 states refuse to ratify it and the whole plan goes into the dustbin of history. There are at least 13 blue states and 13 red states, so nothing could pass without bipartisan support.

This only gets tricky if the convention does what the original convention did: writes new ratification rules for itself. (Example: What if the new constitution says it will be ratified by majority vote in a national referendum?) Then you get into the fuzzier question of legitimacy: At some point the country just ignores the process and the old government continues.

What a convention could do. The consensus of the legal panel was that constitutional amendments should be about the mechanics of government, and that more specific proposals (like Prohibition) are better left to legislation that can be easily repealed if it doesn’t work.

But the Supreme Court has boxed us into a situation where the corruption of our system can’t be rooted out without constitutional changes. So we should be looking for structural changes that make legislative change possible.

In particular, Lessig wants public funding of campaigns, through a voucher system similar to the one Ackerman and Ayres proposed in Voting With Dollars.

Fear of democracy. Lessig argues that the fear of a runaway convention results from an underlying fear of democracy and fear of each other, which the Powers That Be encourage and profit from. This is backwards, he argues: The Powers That Be (and not our fellow citizens) have proven that they’re not to be trusted.

We are used to a managed democracy, where the People only choose after the options have been very tightly scripted. (As Cake put it: “Some people drink Pepsi, some people drink Coke. The wacky morning DJ says democracy’s a joke.”) A constitutional convention would be deliberative, not managed. The conventioneers would have real responsibility, and a chance to shape the questions rather than choose from a prepared list of answers.

Lessig has faith in the deliberative powers of ordinary people, and supports Sandy Levinson‘s idea that the best way to choose conventioneers would be randomly, as juries are chosen. (The one jury I’ve served on supports his case; we rose to the occasion and did a good job.)

You got a better idea? Even Lessig is not wild about a ConCon. He’s been driven to it by the failure of everything else. Would it work? Or would it be taken over the same forces that distort the rest of our political system? Would it all come to nothing or produce some crisis of legitimacy?

He doesn’t know. But he doesn’t think we can keep doing what we’re doing.

Lessig’s keynote address was one of the most inspiring speeches I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, the most inspiring part was in the question session, which that link doesn’t include. I’ll try to fill in from my notes and from a similar talk elsewhere.

This is how he answered the will-this-work question. First, he admitted that it probably wouldn’t. But then he asked:

If a doctor told you that your child had terminal brain cancer and there was nothing you could do, would you really do nothing? Just look at the doctor and say OK?

No you wouldn’t do nothing, because that’s what it means to love: to have the willingness to act compassionately for something, even if it seems impossible.

I am acting on the faith that all over America there are people who have this kind of love of country.

It is very rare to hear a liberal grab hold of the patriotism theme like this, and to attach it to having the courage to trust each other rather than the vicarious “courage” to send soldiers into somebody else’s country. I got shivers. It’s a powerful emotional argument.

But it also makes sense. If we can’t trust each other, then we can’t be a democracy. Where does that kind of thinking lead?

October 3, 2011 – 12:58 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (10)

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Execution Without Trial

Anwar al-Awlaki is dead. Good news? Bad news? It’s complicated.

Al-Awlaki was a major figure in Al Qaeda in Yemen, where he was killed on Friday by a missile fired from an American drone aircraft. But he was also born in America and still held American citizenship.

He was a radical Muslim cleric whose followers might have included Major Nidal Malik Hassan (who killed 13 people in the Fort Hood Massacre of 2009) and Faisal Shahzad (who unsuccessfully planted a car bomb in Times Square in 2010). Maybe. At least, we know Major Hassan regularly corresponded with al-Awlaki and Shahzad found his writings inspiring.

And that points to the second complication: Al-Awlaki was an idea guy, a religious leader whose teachings inspired and justified the violent actions of others. An anonymous American official said, “We’ve been looking at his important operational role.” But looking is not exactly finding, much less proving. Glenn Greenwald comments:

Despite substantial doubt among Yemen experts about whether he even has any operational role in Al Qaeda, no evidence (as opposed to unverified government accusations) was presented of his guilt. When Awlaki’s father sought a court order barring Obama from killing his son, the DOJ argued, among other things, that such decisions were “state secrets” and thus beyond the scrutiny of the courts.

In short: Al-Awlaki is dead because the President signed a piece of paper saying that he was a bad man. I suspect he probably was a bad man, so it’s hard to be all that broken up about his death. But in theory, the President (or some future president) could sign a piece of paper saying that I’m a bad man too. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some due process about that?

Because drone-fired missiles are a crude way to kill people, we also killed some of al-Awlaki’s bodyguards, plus Samir Khan, described by the NYT as “an American citizen of Pakistani origin who was the editor of Inspire, Al Qaeda’s English-language Internet magazine.” Was Khan a bad guy? Maybe. Did he have an operational role too, or did he just Inspire the wrong people?

Rachel Maddow, in a piece Wednesday about the death penalty and prisoner abuse in American jails, summed up the political problem like this (around the 7 minute mark):

This is why it’s hard for anybody to make political hay, to get political traction, out of alleged bad treatment of allegedly bad guys. … The political defense against claims that you are badly treating criminals or suspects or protesters or prisoners has always been to point at those people and say: “You’re taking these guys’ side? These are the bad guys. You’re going to take their side?”

If that’s true for domestic criminals, how much more does it apply to suspected terrorists? If they really did what they’re suspected of doing, then yes, they are the bad guys. If al-Awlaki really was trying to figure out how to park car bombs in Times Square, then who can be sad that he isn’t doing it any more?

I think I’ll let Thomas Paine answer that one. He concluded his Dissertations on First Principles of Government (1795) with this:

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

If Anwar al-Awlaki can be executed without trial, in a place nowhere near a battlefield, in a country with which we are not at war, then so can I and so can you. It’s that simple.

“But President Obama would never do that to you or me,” I imagine you thinking. And you’re almost certainly right. But I don’t want my life to depend on the President being a nice guy or believing that I’m a nice guy. I want to have rights that are defined by law rather than by the good will of government officials.

I don’t see how to claim those rights without granting that Anwar al-Awlaki has them too.

Or at least he did until Friday.

October 3, 2011 – 12:44 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

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The Brilliance/Pointlessness of Occupying Wall Street, and other short notes

Occupy Wall Street is starting its third week and I still don’t know what to think. By not putting out a list of demands, it is challenging Americans’ whole notion of what a protest is. This is either brilliant or pointless. Let me think about it some more.

In the meantime, here are some links to help you make up your own mind: The original call to protest is here. Matt Stoller describes OWS as “a church of dissent, not a protest”. Nicholas Kristof provides his own set of demands. Pruning Shears thinks the act of occupying Wall Street says enough by itself: “We object to what has gone on here; we do not agree with it and do not support it; we want it to change.”

But the Mahablog is having none of that: “If you don’t have a clear message attached to an actual call to action, then it’s just protest theater. The dilettantes will make some noise for a while and go home, and nothing will change.”

Continuing the poor-poor-bigots theme from last week: AlterNet debunks another religious-right claim of oppression at the hands of the gay agenda.

Of course, Frank Turek’s Constitutional right to say and write what he pleases is in no danger – there are no thought police after him. But Gallagher apparently wants him to enjoy an additional “special right” that appears nowhere in any Constitution: the right not only to say offensive things, but to do so without others taking offense.

The majority often forgets what majority privilege means: You get used to the idea that your opinions are not controversial, so you assume there is no price to be paid for expressing them whenever and however you want.

If the minority starts speaking up, though, your views become controversial, and then controversy-shunning business clients start shunning you. Suddenly you have to watch your tongue like everybody else does. It feels like oppression, but really it’s just the loss of a special privilege.

Diebold voting machines are even worse than we thought: If you have access to the machines long enough to slip a cheap gadget inside, the gadget’s remote control can change votes as they are cast. Removing the gadget afterwards hides the hack. The machine’s total is what it is and there are no ballots to recount.

These vulnerable machines, Salon says, are used by “as many as a quarter of American voters”. Funny that all the Republicans worried about the kind of vote fraud that never happens aren’t interested in this.

New figures are out on amenable mortality (deaths preventable by health care). The U.S. still ranks last among wealthy nations. Basically, 85,000 Americans died last year because they weren’t French.

Think about the furor over less than 3,000 deaths on 9-11 or 5,000 American deaths in Iraq since 2003. Combine them, add a zero, and you still don’t equal the number who die every year from the inadequacy of our healthcare system.

Cut that wasteful government spending: Texas no longer serves a special last meal to inmates about to be executed. And a Montana Senate candidate is worried about families defrauding the school lunch program.

Your biases are part of all your instinctive decisions. Example: White umpires squeeze the strike zone on black pitchers. Intentionally? Probably not.

Constitution? What constitution? An Alabama town gives low-level offenders a choice between jail and attending church for a year. So far all the churches in the program are Christian.

It’s not class warfare, Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite argues, it’s Christianity.

The Christian magazine Relevant publishes a refreshingly frank and realistic article: Just-say-no abstinence isn’t working even for young-adult Christians. Now what?

And because I’ve been way too relentlessly serious this week, a moment of cute:

October 3, 2011 – 12:35 pm Categories: Short Notes | Comments (5)

Tinkering with Death

From this day forward, I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death.

Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun
dissenting opinion in the capital punishment case Callins v Collins (1994)

In this week’s sift:

  • Talking About Killing. Troy Davis’ execution galvanized death-penalty opponents. But they’re still talking past (not to) death-penalty advocates.
  • The Sifted Bookshelf: The Hour of Sunlight. How Israeli prison made a peace activist out of Sami al Jundi.
  • Poor, Poor Bigots and other short notes. Why military chaplains are not the victims of DADT repeal. The Republican debates are making the party “sound like crazy people” and hurting Rick Perry. The outrageous lie that put Herman Cain’s campaign back on the map. Amusing political images. Elizabeth Warren goes viral. And more.
  • The previous Sift’s most popular post. Six True Things Politicians Can’t Say was on its way to a respectable showing when it suddenly took off last Monday, got 8000 hits in an hour, and set a Weekly Sift record with (so far) 66,000 views. Economics Works Backwards Now got over 400 views, which would have made it the top post of a typical week. Both were voted onto the recommended list when reposted to Daily Kos — the first time I ever hit that list two days in a row. Meanwhile, One Word Turns the Tea Party Around was having a third burst of popularity, and is now up to 17,000 views. I don’t know how long I can resist the Hollywood urge to write “Six More True Things Politicians Can’t Say” or “Another Word Turns the Tea Party Around”.
  • This week’s challenge. Check out a couple of proposals that could use your support: The People’s Rights Amendment declares that only “natural persons” (not corporations) have constitutional rights. And the National Popular Vote Bill circumvents the Electoral College through a compact among the states.
September 26, 2011 – 11:55 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Talking About Killing

The execution of Troy Davis on Wednesday unleashed a wave of anti-death-penalty articles (I’ll link to the best ones I found as they become relevant), and a few defenses of capital punishment (or at least of the process that found Troy Davis guilty). Some even suggested that this case would be a turning point in Americans’ support for the death penalty.

I’ve got my doubts about that, because the two sides are still talking past each other — arguing with straw men rather than saying anything that might turn an opponent around. The real issues remain in a visceral realm where they can’t be discussed because they aren’t fully verbalized.

You can tell that people are talking past each other when they affirm the same principles, but imagine that the other side is denying those principles. A productive discussion can’t even get started until those agreements are recognized. Then the real disagreements stand out rather than remaining unspoken in the background.

Here are some principles held by death-penalty advocates and opponents alike:

  • Innocent life should be protected.
  • The state should affirm the value and dignity of life, not undermine it.
  • Actions should have consequences, and similar actions should have similar consequences.
  • Murder is a horrific crime in general, and many specific murders are acts of incredible inhumanity.
  • The people who loved the victim deserve our compassion.

On either side, if the bulk of your argument emphasizes one of these general claims, you’re probably just talking to yourself. No one disagrees with you. The disagreement is about where those principles lead.

Some of the surface-level disagreements concern questions that could be resolved by evidence, if anybody could gather and evaluate the evidence fairly. The biggest ones are to what extent the death penalty deters future murders, how many innocent people get convicted, and the roles that race and class play in determining who gets executed.

But the root disagreements, the ones that cause everyone to misrepresent evidence and project straw men onto each other, are very basic:

  • We disagree on the continuing worth of an ancient principle of justice: Suffering pays for suffering and blood pays for blood. 
  • We disagree on how to weigh the risk of punishing the innocent against the risk of insufficiently punishing the guilty.

Our arguments go round and round because these questions are not amenable to logic or evidence, no matter how much both sides wish they were.

Recognizing the agreements. A great deal of pro-death-penalty energy is devoted to horror stories about murders, as if death-penalty opponents believe that murderers are basically decent people who deserve our sympathy. (If somebody somewhere believes that, I haven’t met them.)

Similarly, death penalty advocates agree in principle that innocent people should not be convicted and that execution should not depend on the race or class of either the murderer or the victim. But they disagree about how perfectible the process is and how to balance those risks against the risk that the guilty will be insufficiently punished.

The real difficulties come with the principles that pull both ways. How should the state affirm the dignity and value of life? Those who believe blood-pays-for-blood think that not killing the murderer devalues the life of the victim. (And they project that devaluation onto DP-opponents).

But DP-opponents believe that life is affirmed at the extremes: Even the murderer should not be intentionally killed by the state; that’s how valuable life is.

Similarly, how should we protect the innocent? By deterring future murderers with the threat of death, DP-advocates say. By not executing any innocent people, DP-opponents counter.

A hidden agreement. One false assumption — that death is the worst punishment we can inflict — sneaks into the discussion and hides an area of agreement by producing a false either/or: We either should or shouldn’t inflict the worst possible punishment on murderers.

In fact, no current execution method approaches the worst possible. We could flay the murderer alive, for example, or let him be eaten slowly by rats.

Many of the same arguments would apply: The murder-victim’s family might take satisfaction in a more gruesome execution, and it might be a better deterrent than, say, lethal injection. But who advocates these more extreme punishments? Overwhelmingly, both sides agree that we should not inflict the worst punishment possible.

Evidence-based disagreements. Because we all want to be provably right, both sides exaggerate their evidence-based points. It would help if we could all admit two things:

  • Truly innocent people are a very small fraction of those executed. Even in the Davis case, we don’t know he was innocent; we’re just not sure he was guilty.
  • If the death penalty has a deterrent effect, it’s tiny. If deterrence worked, Texas wouldn’t lead the nation in executions year after year.

If you want to see a real deterrence effect, look at interceptions in football. It’s been 29 years since the same player led the NFL in interceptions two years in a row, and I don’t think three years in a row has ever been done. After you intercept a few passes, quarterbacks stop throwing in your direction. But Texans never stop committing murders.

Deep disagreement: weighing our mistakes. Every human process will make mistakes. (Andrew Cohen’s Atlantic article shows just how fallibly human our capital-punishment process is. Repeated attempts to fix it led Justice Harry Blackmun to write, “From this day forward, I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death.”) One of the most basic liberal/conservative differences is whether you want to err on the side of mercy or strictness. A liberal would rather feed ten moochers than turn away someone genuinely in need. A conservative would do the reverse.

This issue shows up all over: unemployment payments to people who might be able to find jobs, torturing those who are probably terrorists, the number of civilian deaths that are acceptable “collateral damage” in war, and so on. The proper balance is a deep intuition, not a conclusion based on logic or evidence.

This is why the Davis case will not turn be a turning point. It may be obvious to DP-opponents that a single execution of an innocent man invalidates the whole capital-punishment process. But DP-advocates can look squarely at that possibility and remain unconvinced.

Deep disagreement: Only blood pays for blood. Scales became a symbol of justice from crimes of property: If a measure of grain was taken from you, you got the same measure back; that was justice. Metaphorically, this got extended to crimes of violence — an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Justice means balancing the scales.

This principle is so old that many people don’t realize it’s a metaphor. Killing the killer does not balance anything literal. Nonetheless, many Americans feel deep down that justice has been circumvented if a murderer lives. He got off cheap, or perhaps the victim’s life was valued cheaply. Any talk about “victim’s rights” (or the rights of the family, which stand proxy for the victim) or any comparison between the murderer and his victim (“how much compassion did he have for my daughter?”) is implicitly invoking the scales-of-justice metaphor.

This issue is complicated by the dogmatic needs of fundamentalist Christianity. If blood isn’t a necessary payment, then what was the crucifixion about? Deep down, fundamentalists know that if they give in on the death penalty, their whole religion is undermined.

Strategy. When a disagreement is not amenable to evidence or logic, evidence and logic become distractions. So there’s no point arguing about the statistics of deterrence or racial imbalance if the root disagreement is whether blood is necessary to pay for blood.

When you reach that point, a DP-opponent really has only two options. If you are comfortable with the religious or mythological language the other person thinks in, you can sometimes get your point across that way. (Example: Even though God told Cain “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground“, God did not answer that cry by killing Cain. Quite the opposite, God put a mark on Cain to prevent anyone else from killing him. It was the original example of executive clemency.)

But there is an alternative: Simply being in the presence of an alternate moral vision can change a person, particularly someone who has never taken seriously that another view is possible. To employ this strategy, you have to shed the projections DP-advocates throw at you, and refuse to be distracted by issues-of-fact that won’t change anybody’s mind. Eventually you need to make clear that you see what the other person sees, but you just don’t make the same judgment: Blood does not pay for blood. The scales of justice are a metaphor; we have a choice about whether to apply it.

Letting someone else see the example of your alternative moral vision may not be as satisfying as crushing them in an argument about facts or logic. But in the long run it may be more effective.

September 26, 2011 – 11:51 am Categories: Articles | Comments (10)

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The Sifted Bookshelf: The Hour of Sunlight

The Hour of SunlightWhen extremists have been shouting — and sometimes shooting — at each other for generations, the center is a hard position to hold. Each side has its own version of history, which begins with its own people minding their own business and being horribly victimized by the other side. Each side has its own framing of law and justice and human rights, in which it has always been right and the other side has always been wrong. Even the horrible things that are undeniable — the killing of innocents, the torture of helpless prisoners — were only done to prevent (or in reprisal for) something worse perpetrated by the other side.

Sami al Jundi believes that people need to tell each other their personal stories, and that when they do, they will empathize with each other and start trying to find common solutions. That’s what he does in The Hour of Sunlight. Al Jundi is a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, and a secularized Muslim. His story is hard to pigeon-hole or stereotype, and that is the strength of his book. It made me wonder how many other stories of ordinary Israelis and Palestinians don’t fit into any of the standard molds.

Sami was a boy when Israel conquered East Jerusalem in the 1967 war. He grew up with family stories of leaving Deir Yassin in 1948 after a massacre that some Israeli writers say never happened. He grew up with a resentment against Israel and a desire to strike back. When he was a teen-ager, his two best friends went to Syria for a few days of training, and came back determined to make bombs. They blew themselves up. One died, while Sami and the other boy were badly injured. Sami got some experience of Israeli interrogation techniques and a ten-year prison sentence.

Prison, oddly enough, is where al Jundi gets his education in politics, in history, and eventually in non-violence. The political-prisoner community had a strong sense of identity, a strong education program, and the most idealistic democratic process al Jundi ever runs into. After a few years, though, an influx of new prisoners from Gaza produces a new regime and a paranoid search for collaborators. This is the first of many disillusionments about his own people that al Jundi suffers.

A greater disillusionment happens after he is free, and the Oslo agreement seems to promise peace. Al Jundi’s initial euphoria dissolves from both directions: The Israelis continue to push Palestinians out of Jerusalem neighborhoods, and the Palestinian Authority replaces the indigenous semi-democratic Palestinian underground leadership with the corrupt authoritarianism of the newly-returned PLO exiles.

His idealism leads him to work with Seeds of Peace, a group (founded and largely funded by American Jews) that brings Israeli and Palestinian youths together in workshops in Maine, where they learn nonviolence and listen to each other’s experiences. Al Jundi tries to keep the “seeds” (as the youths are called) integrated after they return to Israel/Palestine, and several invite each other to speak at their high schools.

This too falls apart from both sides. The Israeli government is upset that Jewish seeds are becoming conscientious objectors to military service, and Palestinians accuse al Jundi of being a “normalizer” — someone who wants to defang Palestinian resistance without overcoming Israeli oppression. Eventually, he is dismissed because Seeds of Peace can no longer countenance employing someone with his criminal record.

If Hour of Sunlight followed formula, this setback would be the prelude to an even bigger victory. But, at least so far, it hasn’t been. Al Jundi retains his faith in peace-making, in non-violence, and in democracy. But how he will manifest these ideas in the future remains unclear.

September 26, 2011 – 11:35 am Categories: The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (5)

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Poor, Poor Bigots and other short notes

Whenever human rights advance, bigots feel victimized because they are no longer entitled to treat people badly. Case in point: This editorial is “concerned” about the rights of anti-gay military chaplains now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is history.

Glenden Brown wrote a full takedown on One Utah, so I’ll just sum up: At the root of the chaplains’ complaint is a fundamental misunderstanding of their role. Their paychecks are not issued by God or by their denominations. They work for the U.S. military and their duty is to serve our troops. If you bear that mission in mind, all their issues evaporate.

Chaplains who aren’t right-wing Christians have always felt a tension between serving the soldiers and pushing their own beliefs or the dogma of their particular sect. (Examples: this Quaker chaplain and this Unitarian Universalist.) If right-wing Christian chaplains are feeling a tension now too, that isn’t discrimination.

This weekend I attended (via the Web) Lawrence Lessig’s Conference on the Constitutional Convention, which was interesting both for outside-the-box thinking about political change and because it raised the possibility of a left/right alliance for basic reforms. (Lessig’s co-host was Mark Meckler from Tea Party Patriots.) Details next week.

Surprise! Some of the things said by the Republican candidates in Thursday’s debate were not true.

In fact, the moment that “won the debate” for Herman Cain was also the most outrageous lie of the evening: He claimed that if ObamaCare had been in force in 2006, he would have died from colon cancer because “government bureaucrats” would have delayed his treatment.

Reality: Cain is a multi-millionaire businessman with private health insurance. He will continue to have the same insurance under the Affordable Care Act. And even if insurance-company (not government) bureaucrats get in his way, nothing in the ACA prevents Cain himself from paying for whatever treatment he wants.

Kate Conway elaborates:

It’s kind of twisted that Cain uses his against-the-odds recovery to condemn a policy that could help others less fortunate than him beat similar obstacles.

And Kevin Drum draws the conclusion:

[T]his is a real problem for liberals. Sure, we cherry-pick evidence, we spin world events, and we impose our worldview when we talk about policy. Everyone does that. But generally speaking, our opinion leaders don’t go on national TV, look straight into the camera, and just outright lie about stuff. Theirs do. … It’s awfully hard to fight stuff this brazen … especially when the mainstream press no longer seriously polices this stuff, and isn’t much believed even when it does.

I used to worry that the Republican primary campaign would dominate the airwaves the way Obama/Clinton did after McCain locked up the nomination in 2008. But so far that’s working in the Democrats’ favor. Each debate offers new evidence that the GOP has left mainstream America far behind: cheering for executions, calling to let the uninsured die, and (Thursday) booing an American soldier in Iraq because he has come out as gay now that the law allows him to do so.

William Kristol reported getting an email from “a bright young conservative” saying “We sound like crazy people.” Noticed that, did you?

Crazies can infiltrate any crowd, but here’s the real problem: At none of these moments did a candidate stand up to the mob and defend basic decency. How hard would it have been to tell the gay soldier: “Although we disagree on some issues, I honor your service to our country”?

Rick Santorum’s actual answer to the gay soldier was incoherent, and raised the “special rights” canard. David Tharp refutes:

[DADT repeal] doesn’t give gay and lesbian soldiers any “special privileges;” it only allows those soldiers to be honest about who they are. Straight soldiers are allowed to wear wedding rings, talk about their spouses and acknowledge their sexuality. Now, finally, gay and lesbian soldiers have the same rights.

Conservative commentators were ready to bury Rick Perry after three bad debates, and his nationwide standing against President Obama is slipping. There was some question whether rank-and-file Republicans agreed with their commentariat, but after Perry lost a Florida straw poll to Herman Cain and a Michigan poll to Romney, maybe they do.

I ran across a lot of amusing political images this week, like this Rick Perry poster (“because George W. Bush didn’t do enough damage”). Or this pie chart explaining the consequences of gay marriage. The most amusing same-sex marriage signs are collected here.

This looks cool as a poster: “I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one.” And I loved: “They only call it class warfare when we fight back.“

You should never read too much into the phase-one trials of any treatment, but this NYT story of a miraculous leukemia remission via an immune-system treatment is pretty amazing.

Pro Publica looked at the question of whether regulations kill jobs. Conclusion: Not really.

Add this to my continuing series on Libertarianism: SF author David Brin uses conservative/libertarian principles to argue against “the idolatry of property”.

For Brin, markets are a means, not an end. The Soviet failure taught him that an economy is too complicated for central control; markets allocate resources better through distributed processing. But when a handful of corporations come to dominate an economy and their CEOs all play golf together, you’re back to central control.

Jon Stewart covers the plight of “this nation’s most vulnerable wealthy”. If only a Subway mogul could find some inexpensive way to feed his family …

If you’re feeling excessively cheerful today and want fix that problem, look at Doom by TNR’s John Judis. The governments of the world are repeating the mistakes of the Great Depression, and the only policies that might turn things around are politically impossible.

Surely everybody on FaceBook has seen this by now, since it went viral sometime last week. But new Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has captured the liberal-populist message better than anybody so far.

September 26, 2011 – 11:17 am Categories: Short Notes | Comments (9)

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Turn the Crank

No Sift next week. The Weekly Sift returns on September 26.

In truth then, there is nothing more to wish for than that the king, remaining alone on the island, by constantly turning a crank, might produce, through automata, all the output of England.

— Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde Sismondi
New Principles of Political Economy (1819)

In this week’s sift:

  • Economics Works Backwards Now. It used to be about working to produce scarce goods. Now what’s scarce is work.
  • Six True Things Politicians Can’t Say. Remember how in high school you sometimes couldn’t say obvious things, because the other kids would ridicule you for it? Politics is like that.
  • Toucan Sam Turns Evil and other short notes. Toucans can’t symbolize a Guatemalan educational non-profit, because they already symbolize Froot Loops. Also: I avoided 9-11 coverage, my reservations about Obama’s jobs strategy, some funny Rick Perry signs, a TED talk using iPods and magic, left-wing libertarianism, why the center keeps moving right, and a poster about common sense.
  • Last week’s most popular post. The whole site still lives in the shadow of Why I Am Not a Libertarian, now up to 18,000 views, and One Word Turns the Tea Party Around (8000). But though last week’s Rootworms, Monsanto, and the Unity of Existence (231) and Blowing Smoke About Clouds (165) posted much more modest numbers, both did well when reposted on Daily Kos.
  • This week’s challenge. The next significant campaign is the Ohio referendum called Issue 2, which will be voted on this November. Issue 2 is the old S.B. 5, Ohio’s union-busting bill, which was passed by the legislature and signed by Gov. Kasich, but is still in limbo now that enough signatures have been gathered to force a referendum. Find out how you can help at WeAreOhio.com.
September 12, 2011 – 12:43 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

Economics Works Backwards Now

Do you ever think about how strange it is to worry about “creating jobs”? Wednesday, Douglas Rushkoff observed this:

Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff — it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

Originally, economics was supposed to be about scarcity. People didn’t have enough food, clothing, housing, or tools. So you worked to make some, and then traded your surplus for somebody else’s surplus of the things you needed.

Today it’s all backwards. We produce plenty of goods, and if necessary we could dial the process up and produce more. What’s scarce now is work.

Try to imagine that on a personal level: It’s dinnertime. You’re hungry. There’s so much good food in the frig that you worry about it spoiling. But you haven’t justified your meal yet and you can’t think how you’re going to do it. So you have to sit there and be hungry until you can create a task for yourself.

Or on a family level: The kids each had jobs to do to help with dinner. But then we got a dishwasher, so now Jenny doesn’t get to eat dinner because we haven’t found a new job for her yet.

Crazy, isn’t it?

This week the big news was President Obama’s jobs speech, the Republican reaction, and the various economists who mostly told us that these were pretty good ideas.

But think about that speech’s focus. Not that we need to grow more food or make more cars or build more houses because those things are needed, but that we need to produce more of something so that people can be employed producing it. He tried to justify the needfulness of the jobs, but all the same it would miss the point if Obama could accomplish the same things by snapping his fingers instead of hiring people.

Rushkoff again:

it seems to me there’s something backwards in that logic. I find myself wondering if we may be accepting a premise that deserves to be questioned.

I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks — or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?

John Kenneth Galbraith was making similar observations half a century ago. In The Affluent Society he described the following paradox: We judge our nation’s economic success by how much it produces, and we justify production because it satisfies demand. But demand has to be created by advertising, because without constant hectoring people would not want all the things we produce.

After a certain point, Galbraith said, “Production only fills a void that it has itself created.”

So why are we doing all this? In theory, our society could work less, produce less, advertise less, and we’d have no more unmet desires than we have now. But then there wouldn’t be as many jobs.

If production is a paradox, productivity as an even bigger one. On the one hand, productivity is our best friend. The reason the standard of living today is so much higher than in the Middle Ages is that an hour of work now (with the assistance of machinery, electronics, fossil fuels, and a better-organized society) produces so much more than an hour of work did then. Beyond an occasional hobbyist project, why would you choose to work all week making something that you could buy for 20 minutes worth of your salary?

But productivity and new technology kills jobs. Rushkoff begins his essay talking about the Post Office, which faces massive layoffs because email and electronic bill payments don’t require human sorters and couriers.

Again, that’s not a new idea. The French economist Sismondi satirized the pure productivity-is-good view in 1819 in New Principles of Political Economy:

In truth then, there is nothing more to wish for than that the king, remaining alone on the island, by constantly turning a crank, might produce, through automata, all the output of England.

That fantasy gets closer and closer to reality. In his 1995 book The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin wrote:

The quickening pace of automation is fast moving the global economy to the day of the workerless factory.

Sismondi’s image of the king turning a crank captures the social problem of the workerless factory: The only reason to care whether it is in Topeka, Taipei, or Timbuktu is who owns it and who gets to tax it. Wherever it is, it will make goods, but it won’t provide jobs.

So even if “the output of England” stays the same, all the value of it now belongs to the crank-turning king (or maybe to the Workless Factory Corporation). No matter how plentiful those goods are, what can the people of England trade in order to get them?

In 1930, at the depths of the Depression, John Maynard Keynes wrote the hopeful essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren“:

We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come — namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.

But this is only a temporary phase of maladjustment. All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem.

Imagine if humanity really did “solve its economic problem”. Suppose we got off the hamster wheel of ever-increasing desires, and kept improving our productivity until we could comfortably supply everything people really wanted.

Now imagine that we could do all that with only a few people working. The way we’re currently organized, that would be Hell. Whoever owned the machines and the natural resources would have the whip hand over the rest of us, who would scratch and claw to get the few remaining jobs.

So I want to suggest this: Yes, in the short-to-medium term we really do need to create jobs. But maybe our economic problems seem so intractable because we’re using economic tools to attack what is really a social problem. Currently (because in centuries past scarcity seemed eternal and the production system needed as many workers as possible) jobs organize our lives, give us our identities, and (most of all) allow us to prove that we deserve to eat.

But unless we either outlaw progress or keep inflating our desires until we consume the planet, eventually we’re going to have to rethink our lives, our identities, and the system that distributes goods. Otherwise we’re headed for Cornucopian Hell.

September 12, 2011 – 12:24 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (13)

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Six True Things Politicians Can’t Say

Remember how things were in high school? If a truth was unpopular, you’d be ridiculed for saying it, no matter how obvious it was. Even people who knew you were right wouldn’t defend you, because then they’d be ridiculed too. They might even think they had to speak against you, just to be safe.

Politics is like that, but mostly just on one side. The rich and powerful can emphasize the effect when it works for them (by hiring professional ridiculers) or minimize it when it works against them (via spokesmen and front groups who absorb ridicule until things are safe for conservative politicians). If the PR professionals do their jobs well, the pro-wealth politicians don’t have to offer evidence or answer opposing arguments, they can just laugh and scoff — like the cool kids used to.

But a popular lie that damages the poor or even the middle class can go unchallenged for a long, long time. If we want to hear the corresponding truths, we’ll have to start saying them ourselves.

1. Most government money is well spent. The opposite idea — that government pours money down a rat hole — is broadcast every day. But strangely, anybody who sets out to find this wasteful spending and eliminate it ends up firing teachers, getting rid of food inspectors, letting bridges fall down, or cutting off somebody’s medical care.

I’m sure the people in the path of Texas’ wildfires appreciate the “waste” Gov. Perry managed to cut from the budgets of volunteer fire departments and the Texas Forest Service. When the antibiotic-resistant plague gets rolling, I’m sure we’ll be similarly grateful to House Republicans for the “waste” they’re finding at the CDC.

Speaking this truth in public takes courage, because the ridiculers can point to famous anecdotes of government waste — bridges to nowhere, $600 toilet seats — and nearly everyone knows some story of a mismanaged local project, an acquaintance who scammed disability, or a lazy civil servant who can’t be fired.

But the private sector has its own examples of spectacular waste. How many welfare cheats would it take to equal the $300-500 million CEO Dick Fuld “earned” by managing Lehman Brothers into extinction and touching off the 2008 financial collapse? I can find waste in my own apartment — things I didn’t need, never used, or paid too much for. A certain amount of waste is the natural friction you’ll find in any human activity.

Government is a human project, so it has waste in it and always will. Except for unnecessary wars, is it more wasteful than the private sector? Does its inevitable waste cancel out the vital services it performs? Could we get those services without waste? No.

2. Regulations save money and lives. Corporations can often make a short-term profit doing something that eventually costs the public far more than the corporation makes. (The guy at Hooker Chemical who suggested burying toxic waste at Love Canal saved the company a bundle. He probably got a raise.) Stopping those bad deals is what government regulation is all about.

We hear every day how much companies spend complying with regulations, as if that were the whole story. What we gain from that spending is far more valuable. In the 60s and 70s, the auto companies fought tooth and nail against making cars safer. A car with seat belts used to cost extra. Air bags weren’t even an option, much less standard equipment. Hard, unpadded, and sometimes even sharp steering wheels killed thousands.

Traffic deaths in the U.S. peaked in the late 70s, even though the number of people, cars, and miles driven keeps going up. That’s government regulation for you.

Or consider this: Taking the lead out of gasoline has made American children measurably smarter. What’s that worth to our future economy? What’s that worth personally, to them and to us?

3. The rich are job destroyers, not job creators. You can’t have a mass-production economy if the masses can’t afford the products they make. So when the rich get too rich, growth suffers.

The last time the rich captured this much of our nation’s income was 1929 — the last time the economy crashed this badly. It’s not a coincidence.

4. Rich heirs are parasites. In political rhetoric, rich people are all hard-working, risk-taking entrepreneurs. Because politicians need contributions from the rich, they can’t point out just how useless most second-and-third-generation millionaires and billionaires are.

We are encouraged to resent the unemployed worker who doesn’t try hard enough to find a new job, but not the heir who never works. We’re encouraged to resent the black or Hispanic who gets into Harvard through affirmative action, but not the “legacy” Ivy Leaguer whose test scores are even worse.

Our plunging inheritance tax has increased inequality in the worst possible way, and makes us more like the hereditary aristocracies of 18th-century Europe. In spite of the pop-culture vampire revival, we’re still missing the underlying social metaphor of the original Dracula: Those exotically beguiling aristocrats are sucking our blood.

5. The U.S. government can’t go bankrupt (unless it decides to). Even President Obama has been invoking the spectre of government bankruptcy, but it can’t happen in any literal sense.

Why? The overwhelming majority of federal government’s expenses are in dollars. Its debt is in dollars. So what are dollars? Whatever the Federal Reserve says they are.

The Fed creates dollars the way that Delta creates frequent flier miles: It enters them on a spreadsheet. The U.S. Treasury has an account at the Fed, which the Fed can replenish by creating dollars to buy government bonds. Or it could just let the Treasury’s balance go negative. No sparks would fly out of the Fed’s computers. Negative numbers work just fine.

The only way the U. S. government can go bankrupt is if it creates a crisis for itself, like the recent debt-ceiling debacle. As long as Congress is willing to authorize the government to pay its debts, the government can pay its debts.

Though it can’t go bankrupt, the government could pay a penalty for running a big deficit in two ways: The markets could drive up interest rates (which isn’t happening), or the Fed creating dollars could increase inflation (which isn’t happening, but should).

6. Some inflation right now would be a good thing. The official mandate of the Federal Reserve is to balance inflation against unemployment. It doesn’t. The Fed goes on red-alert at every hint of inflation, but the current unemployment is not inspiring similar alarm.

An easier money policy would lower unemployment at the “cost” of inflation — which would actually be a benefit. Anybody who lived through the 70s remembers the mindset inflation brings: You don’t sit on piles of cash. You buy or invest now, because stuff is only going to cost more later.

Corporations are sitting on a trillion dollars of cash. Rich people are probably sitting on even more. A little fear of inflation would get that money moving again.

7. Fill in your own unspoken truth. …

September 12, 2011 – 12:16 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (68)

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