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12:46 pm February 10th, 2011
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Changing blogs *again*

Originally published at The Benfell Blog. You can comment here or there.

For some reason, this site is just way too slow getting off the home page. I don't know why; my server doesn't seem overloaded when it's doing this.

But it's reasonable to argue that Drupal is overkill for what I'm doing here anyway. So as I write this, I'm migrating to a WordPress blog at a simpler address. If you go there now, you'll see some really old entries because I'm still importing them from my really old blog, which I'm thinking I probably won't update from here on out—so you'll need to come to DisUnitedStates.org.

It's too bad. I'm quite fond of the theme I came up with for the Drupal site, even if it does have some bugs on administration pages that I was never able to iron out.
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02:56 pm February 4th, 2011
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Admiral Janeway's new U3

Originally published at The Benfell Blog. You can comment here or there.

This is a very different version of this chart than you may have seen before. It is based on different underlying data.

When I went to do my usual thing with the unemployment data this morning, I found that the data file the Bureau of Labor Statistics has made available in the past was no longer there. Instead, casting around, I found monthly data going back to 1948 in multiple forms.1

So things are going to be different—and I think better—from here on out. But it remains important to be intelligent with this data, so here's what I've done.

  • I am not using seasonally adjusted data. When landlords start "seasonally adjusting" their rents, when bankers start "seasonally adjusting" their mortgates, when people start "seasonally adjusting" their needs for food, and when bill collectors start "seasonally adjusting" their bills, I will consider accepting "seasonal adjustments" as legitimate. Until then, people who need work still need work, and "seasonal adjustments" belong on the bookshelf along side Alice in Wonderland. This is one factor making this chart considerably messier than in the past.

  • I am using monthly data that the BLS has made more easily available. In combination with the lack of seasonal adjustment and with the compression of time since 1948 across the chart, this makes rates appears as more of a band than a line. I have a sneaking hunch this is closer to the truth.

  • My calculation methods remain the same, but because I'm using non-seasonally adjusted data, my calculation of the BLS U3 comes to 9.79 percent rather than the more widely reported 9.0 percent.2

  • As before, I assume that given a reasonable opportunity, the highest labor force participation rate to date is a more honest reflection of the proportion of the population that is available to work. In order to preserve precision (the BLS rounds the number off at three significant digits), I recalculate this from the supplied population and labor force sizes. I use this number in calculating Admiral Janeway's U3 (named for my cat, who is in turn facetiously named for the Star Trek character) and in the unemployment rate that counts people who "want a job now" but whom the BLS excludes from the labor force. When conditions improve for the middle and working classes such that they no longer have as great a need to work, this assumption will deserve reconsideration. But as of now, we're still headed in the opposite direction.3

  • Also as before, these statistics do not consider people who are working fewer hours than they need or would prefer. Classically this means part-time workers who want or need full-time work. Nor does it consider people who are working at jobs below their skill levels because they have not found work for which their qualifications are appropriate. Notably, Gallup currently shows an underemployment rate of 19.2 percent (and an unemployment rate of 9.9 percent).4

  • I also found a statistic the BLS has apparently been collecting since 1994 of people it excludes from the labor force but who "want a job now." I add it to the number of people the BLS counts as unemployed (and in the labor force) and divide it by the labor force size I calculate as described above. The relationship between this measure and others is best illustrated in a version of the above chart that covers the period since 1994:

  • Finally, I do not know what adjustments the BLS may have made to its supposedly "unadjusted" data. But not all adjustments are seasonal adjustments and given the dichotomy with "seasonally adjusted" data, it is unclear to me which side these other adjustments fall—I distrust them all. And when economists try to claim that they've been through this, that economists have reached a consensus on these adjustments,5 it is important to remember that economics is not only the "dismal science" but is also in a contest with political science for recognition as the most ideological "science."

With all this, Admiral Janeway's U3, at 15.34 percent, indicates by far the worst unemployment picture since 1948. The previous peak was in January 2010, at 15.16 percent.

I am disappointed by the "want a job now" statistic (which counts people who want a job but whom BLS excludes from the labor force), which I add to the number of people the BLS counts as unemployed. Until November 2003, it was consistently higher than Admiral Janeway's U3. Since then, the record is more mixed. It still does occasionally exceed Admiral Janeway's U3, most recently in July 2009. But even it shows a high proportion, 13.28 percent, of people who want work. But it was higher in January (13.80 percent) and February (13.68 percent) 2010.

As for the BLS U3, it is worth considering that its labor force participation rate is sinking towards levels last seen in early 1984. At 63.90 percent, it falls between the levels of April (63.73 percent) and May (64.30 percent) 1984. The trough in 1984 was in January at 63.25 percent; 1983 saw levels that were worse. A low labor force participation rate is a major factor holding down the headline U3.
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11:41 pm February 3rd, 2011
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Cast-off people

Originally published at The Benfell Blog. You can comment here or there.

Society has an odd way of dealing with human beings it is casting off. It pretends to help them, but in fact sabotages them.

I remember back when I was living the experience of poverty that would resonate so strongly later after I returned to school and started turning over scholarly rocks on social and economic injustice. A relatively mild but particularly visible example was on those occasions when I was relying on public transportation and a group of so-called "developmentally disabled" people got on the bus. I could spot them a mile away, not simply because of their mannerisms, and not simply because they always traveled in groups, but because their thrift store clothing and lousy haircuts betrayed bureaucratic decision making that prefers cost-cutting to human dignity.

We aren't supposed to judge people by their appearance, but in fact, the way they appear—which probably no one would choose for oneself—reinforces a sense that these people are "others," to be isolated even amongst the other passengers on a bus by their oddity and homeliness.

Similarly, very few well-off people work graveyard shift jobs. Typically, people who work the night shift are in low-level jobs, such as in janitorial or security guard work. These are the people who most need reliable bus service, but are forced to purchase old, unreliable cars and try to keep them operational to get to work because bus service drops off dramatically after around 8 or 9 pm.

And there's certainly an unreality to the social "safety net" in the United States, that effectively reduces the indigent to begging or to crime. And if they sleep in their vehicles, they are prone to be rudely awakened at 3 am by police who, to be brutally frank about it, see homeless people as easy targets.

I'm reminded of all this, this week, by my experiences on Golden Gate Transit. I usually catch the bus in Novato, at Redwood and Olive, to go to school in San Francisco. I go down three times a week, at different times because I have classes at different times on different days of the week. I drive to this location rather than catching the bus in Sonoma County, closer to where I live, because there are more buses running to Marin County—even north Marin—than to Sonoma County. I burn more gas but I'm a lot less likely to be left stranded.

On Monday, after class, I caught a complicated series of connections to try to get back to Sebastopol to check my mail before the mailbox place closed because a textbook still hadn't arrived. I've been wondering a lot about the relationship between the published schedule and when the buses actually run—it seems to be loose, at best, making a complicated set of connections such as this rather risky. It actually worked; I caught BART at Civic Center and rode it to the Embarcadero Station and fast-walked to Fremont and Mission for Golden Gate Transit route 54, which arrived within a very few minutes of the time I got there. I then got off to transfer at the Alameda del Prado bus pad. I noticed the 54 had gotten me there seven minutes early. I also noticed that the 71 I was to transfer to (which took me back to Redwood and Olive) was ten minutes late. But I made it to the mailbox place in time to find the textbook still hadn't arrived.

On Tuesday, I arrived ten minutes early for the route number 70 bus. And I waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, when the bus was five minutes late, I decided I couldn't take the chance of waiting any longer. I got back in my truck and headed south.

The 70 is one of several lines that runs mostly along Highway 101, and I was driving down 101 when I saw a bus ahead. As it took the Ignacio exit, I could barely make out that it was the 70, the bus I should have caught at Redwood and Olive. It had either gone by the stop ridiculously early or not at all. Since the main Novato stop is at Redwood and Grant and the northern end of the route is on San Marin, the northernmost Novato exit, it probably just completely blew off that final leg of the trip to turn around and head back south.

So I drove to San Rafael, somewhat miraculously found a parking space in the downtown Park and Ride lot, and walked a couple blocks to the San Rafael Transit Center. I was in plenty of time to catch the 70 there. And while I was waiting, there were two boisterous drunks who were being loud and obnoxious.

The bus eventually arrived and one of the drunks put his bicycle on the rack on the front of the bus and boarded after me. The driver forcefully warned him to keep his voice down and his language clean. I settled down with some reading I had to do.

After a few minutes, I noticed we hadn't left the Transit Center. And in fact, the driver was missing. The 70 usually doesn't wait at the Transit Center; it just makes the stop and continues south. But in this case, we must have been there fifteen minutes before the driver returned.

It was not a banner day for Golden Gate Transit. As we traversed San Francisco, the driver had to maneuver around a route 101 bus that I assume had broken down on Van Ness. About that time, the drunk got into some kind of altercation with another passenger; he claimed to have been threatened. The driver was, of course, not amused and reprimanded the both of them.

There were further disturbances as each of them got off the bus, thankfully at different stops, as each of them had to tell his side of the story to the driver (whom I doubt cared).

And in the end, I got to class five minutes late.

On Wednesday, I caught the route number 101 south. This bus runs a similar route to the 80, but omits a number of stops in Marin County. Even so, for some reason, they always change drivers on this route at the San Rafael Transit Center. The process of changing drivers eliminates the time savings from having skipped all those other stops. And it isn't a big deal if the relief driver is there waiting like (s)he is supposed to be.

But he wasn't. I could see the driver who had gotten us this far on his cell phone telling someone that the relief driver had missed the shuttle that I guess Golden Gate Transit provides for its drivers. After a considerable delay, the shuttle returned and a driver got off of it. But the driver who is supposed to be being relieved had to bellow at him across the Transit Center because he was walking in completely the wrong direction as if he was expecting to drive a different route. Eventually he came over and they had a conference for what seemed like five minutes.

Eventually he got on the bus and started driving it south. His driving was okay, but I noticed he was blinking as if he was having a hard time seeing. Considering that he was the one about to drive me into San Francisco, certainly no less a challenging driving environment in a bus, this was far from reassuring.

These are all minor incidents. But even in daylight, they do not form a picture of a reliable bus service, something that low-level workers, for whom tardiness can be a job-ending event, can rely upon. Even for a Ph.D. student like myself, walking into class late draws an undesirable form of attention.

All this experience reinforces a picture, or more correctly, a series of photographs I once took for a geography class. The assignment was to use a photograph to show how humans use geography and as the teacher was discussing the assignment an idea popped into my head. I was stretching the assignment a bit—the teacher remarked that I had completed the assignment the hard way, but pulled it off—but I actually started at 6th and Bryant Streets in San Francisco, by the Hall of (so-called) Justice, and drove northbound, snapping pictures with my PDA out my driver side window. This route included what I think are the two most impoverished blocks in San Francisco, between Howard and Market, proceeded across Market Street onto Taylor Street, by a now-closed "adult" bookstore and through the Tenderloin, and up to the top of Nob Hill. Nob Hill, of course, is a very rich area, and I used these photographs to illustrate how the rich literally look down upon the poor (criminalized at the beginning of the series at the Hall of Justice).

Along the way, one of the pictures I took was of an obviously disabled couple making their way down the sidewalk in the most impoverished neighborhood in San Francisco, a neighborhood that strongly resembles a "skid row" archetype. It is emphatically not what most people would characterize as a "safe" neighborhood. I perceived this couple, with their obviously broken bodies, as having been chewed up and spit out by capitalism (though I didn't interview them and don't actually know their stories) and left to fend for themselves in a situation where they were very vulnerable.

And when I see drug addicts, I see people who may well have become addicts in an attempt to anesthetize themselves against the brutality of our society. That includes those drunks at the San Rafael Transit Center on Tuesday.

Probably a great many of these people have stories that simply don't fit the dominant narrative of a society that claims to provide equal opportunity for everyone to get ahead if they work hard. And so they are cast aside, with only token efforts at assistance—such as unreliable bus systems.

But as cast-offs in an undesirable setting which many people will not choose to approach, they also serve as exemplars,1 warning the rest of us to toe the line, to work hard, to keep to "the straight and narrow," to not make waves.2

  • 1. Herbert J. Gans, "The Uses of Underservingness," in Great Divides: Readings in Social Inequality in the United States, 3rd. ed., ed. Thomas M. Shapiro (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2005), 85-94.
  • 2. Sonja K. Foss, Karen A. Foss, and Robert Trapp, Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric, 3rd ed. (Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2002).
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11:08 am February 1st, 2011
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Water

Originally published at The Benfell Blog. You can comment here or there.

Alice Outwater apparently and I would very much like to see a world in which beavers dammed streams across North America, old-growth forests reclaimed vast tracts across the continent, rivers and streams were restored to their natural meanderings, prairie dogs helped to maintain natural grasslands that bison would graze upon, mussels and alligators were plentiful, and humans did not dump so many pollutants into the air and the water.1 But complexity theory informs us that the whole of a system does not equal the sum of its parts; that there are unexpected losses and unexpected gains from that sum, which we call emergent properties; and that when positive (destabilizing) feedback occurs, we should look for the possible establishment of new systems with new equilibriums sustained by negative (stabilizing) feedback.2 Outwater's approach subtracts the factors listed and adds modern fertilizer and pesticide-intensive agriculture, domesticated livestock, cities, industry, water treatment, and sewage treatment. As such her solution appears to be a restoration of a natural solution that predates modern transportation, infrastructure, and not only a population that is much larger than the indigenous pre-contact population (whose size can only be guessed at) but an increasingly urban and suburban population who often professes admiration for wilderness but is aghast when mountain lions and coyotes forage in their communities or when wolves are thought to kill sheep. I can only wish that Outwater was correct; surely even the malarial swamps of Iowa and Illinois were less hazardous than are Chicago politics today.

Outwater begins to grasp the cultural difficulties as she documents how the fur trade decimated the beaver population, how North American Indians were readily enticed into participation in this trade in exchange for European technology, and how the European American civilization viewed “[w]ilderness . . . as mysterious and frightening,”3 indeed as Timothy Beal might suggest, as a monstrous “other” to be suppressed through technology.4 But Outwater also inadequately expresses the assumptions of the European American civilization which imposed itself upon North America and which appeared to view its resources as infinite and as existing for human exploitation, assumptions which would surely need to change if there is to be any hope of a restoration of a verdant paradise in which all living things, not just humans and domesticated animals, can have access to the clean water we all depend upon. Further, in her advocacy of buffalo meat over beef, she neglects that a world population rapidly approaching 7 billion5 and facing climate change needs to consume less meat rather than different meat.6

So even as Outwater has meticulously described a number of ways in which European settlement has altered the ecological system as it relates to water, she has not described a system humans can realistically aspire to that is healthy for humans and other living things. Her picture is partial in that while she describes the myriad impacts when a culture that radically privileges—even worships—technology7 displaces an indigenous one, she barely examines the cultural values that have proven so detrimental to our world.

As I read Outwater's work, I found myself wanting an exploration of the hierarchical notion of “natural” and “moral” order that places humans over nature, and how that fits in with other aspects of hierarchy;8 and attention to how an economic system that privileges competition over cooperation might manifest in a race to destroy the environment. And finally, if disease is indeed such a major factor in decimating indigenous populations and reducing their will to resist modern encroachments as Outwater (and others) suggest, what can it be that the bacteria Fritjof Capra credits for having repeatedly adapted to metabolize toxins, for playing crucial roles in natural systems at all levels, and for providing negative (stabilizing) feedback for earth's ecosystem are up to?9

  • 1. Alice Outwater, Water: A Natural History (New York: Basic, 1996).
  • 2. Fritjof Capra, Web of Life (New York: Anchor, 1996); Joanna Macy, Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: The Dharma of Natural Systems (Delhi, India: Sri Satguru, 1991); and Edgar Morin, On Complexity (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2008).
  • 3. Outwater, p. 36.
  • 4. Timothy K. Beal, Religion and Its Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2002).
  • 5. Population Reference Bureau. http://prb.org/
  • 6. Cornell University, "Diet With A Little Meat Uses Less Land Than Many Vegetarian Diets," ScienceDaily, October 10 2007. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071008130203.htm; University of Chicago. "Study: Vegan Diets Healthier For Planet, People Than Meat Diets," ScienceDaily, April 14, 2006. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/04/060414012755.htm
  • 7. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964); Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1992).
  • 8. George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002).
  • 9. Capra, Web of Life.
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02:51 pm January 29th, 2011
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Time to think of a new Middle East?

Originally published at The Benfell Blog. You can comment here or there.

At this writing, it is still too early to know the outcome of the uprising in Egypt, where Hosni Mubarak has called in the military to reinforce (or substitute for) police forces that have failed so far to quiet the unrest. What role the military will actually play remains unclear. At least one unit appears to have sided with the protesters. Other units have taken up positions guarding national heritage sites and government buildings. But on the second day of this intervention, I have yet to hear of any clashes involving the military.1 2

I have seen specific reports of unrest in Jordan, Libya, and particularly in Yemen.

Stratfor, a realist (think realpolitik) think tank, has carried a report it says is unverified that the Rafah border crossing into the Gaza Strip is now unguarded, and that Hamas is linking up with the Muslim Brotherhood—which has so far, apparently, played only a peripheral role in the protests.3 Whether or not that report proves to be true, I'm thinking any new regime in Egypt would be far less likely to support Israeli policy—including a brutal ongoing blockade of the Gaza Strip—towards the Palestinians than the Mubarak regime.4 5

Indeed, if these uprisings—driven in part by escalating food prices,6 which some blame on climate change,7 8 9 and hence principally on the largest greenhouse gas emitters in the world—replace authoritarian regimes with governments that are less willing to be bought off by the United States, the status quo which enables Israel to act as a regional bully may be upended.

These governments may also be far less willing to take the blame for U.S. drone attacks against their people.10 Indeed, the U.S. policy of unlimited, endless war anywhere in the world11 12 may be undercut in the very region that the Islamophobia of the United States focuses upon.

And that the United States, for all its financial and military assistance, manifestly cannot guarantee the survival of authoritarian regimes will not go unnoticed by those who have acted to mitigate Arab anger at the United States. Nor will it go unnoticed by those who rise up against those regimes. And it will not go unnoticed by those closer to home who perceive a loss of U.S. influence.

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11:56 pm January 27th, 2011
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It cannot just be the government

Originally published at The Benfell Blog. You can comment here or there.

Of course I'd heard that the U.S. government had been behind the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. But just because some people I trust believe something to be the case doesn't mean there's actual backing for the claim. I'd managed not to know that the matter had actually gone to trial. The King Center has transcripts and an outline of the trial. The juicy part is here:

After hearing and reviewing the extensive testimony and evidence, which had never before been tested under oath in a court of law, it took the Memphis jury only 1½ hours to find that a conspiracy to kill Dr. King did exist. Most significantly, this conspiracy involved agents of the governments of the City of Memphis, the state of Tennessee and the United States of America. The overwhelming weight of the evidence also indicated that James Earl Ray was not the triggerman and, in fact, was an unknowing patsy.1

I don't know what became of this verdict. I assume that the U.S. government at all levels continues to deny the allegations.

So when I see something on the World Socialist Web Site headlined, "US pursues two-track policy to suppress protests in Egypt and Tunisia,"2 I'm a little less inclined to dismiss it as hyperbole—even if it does call for Trotskyite organizing in Egypt. Indeed, there can be little mistaking Obama administration sympathies in the case of Egypt, a key ally in U.S. policy on Israel.3 4

And when I see Mark Weisbrot write, "Haiti's infamous dictator 'Baby Doc' Duvalier, returned to his country this week, while the country's first elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is kept out," and that the U.S. role in evicting Aristide from power on two occasions is well-documented,5 6 I'm inclined to say the burden of proof lies with the U.S. government.

But when I combine this with the serial criminality of the Bush administration,7 whose policies have been embraced and extended by the Obama administration, and with the nearly permanent condition of war of the United States that extends from before it was even a country,8 I'm led to another conclusion. This government must truly reflect the people who continue to acquiesce to it. At some point the claim that elites can go on doing all this for hundreds of years and nobody can do anything about it wears thin.

If the people of the United States truly cared about democracy, they would rebel rather than tolerate the transfer of wealth and power not from the rich to the poor but from the poor to the wealthy.9 In the past, they would have.10 But no more.

If the people of the United States truly cared about democracy, if they truly believed in the United States as a "shining city on the hill," whose system of government is universally beneficial to all humans,11 they would demand a stop to the continual support of foreign dictatorships12 and to its resistance to democracy in other countries.13 14 15 But they don't.

If the people of the United States truly love peace, then why have there been only sixteen calendar years in which the U.S. has not had its military forces on some sort of killing expedition somewhere?16

It is common to attribute all this to ignorance—after all, I was unaware of that civil trial that found the government guilty of conspiracy in the Martin Luther King, Jr., assassination—and there's not much question that the mainstream media serve as agents of power.17 18 19 20 Charles Reich projected an image of people exhausted by work and pacified by the illusions of riches on their television screens.21 But then I see all these examples from around the world of uprisings by people who are at least as subject to censorship as those in the United States, by people whose lives are at least as hard, by people who are nonetheless not fooled. And yet I am to suppose that people in the U.S. are fooled.

Again and again the question keeps arising. Why do the Greeks shut down their capital city rather than acquiesce to an "austerity program" that ensures that bankers get paid while their economy collapses?22 Why did Iranians rise up against vote fraud, judicial violence, corruption, and repression?23

I now lean instead towards the idea of pacification that Reich suggested. But Reich thought that this repression of the working class would be unsustainable, that inevitably a new consciousness would arise.24 It never happened. Because as near as I can tell, people in the U.S. want nothing more than to be cannon fodder and to be cogs in the corporate machine, all to preserve an illusion.

And even as the social safety net that should protect them from the ravages of devastating unemployment is eviscerated,25 26 they will join their brothers and sisters on the off ramps and the median strips of the nation's highways and its city streets with their cardboard signs.

But they'll be loyal "Americans."
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08:07 pm January 20th, 2011
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Obama and the Power of Prayer

Originally published at The Benfell Blog. You can comment here or there.

A reason for reading Dennis Loo and Peter Phillips' Impeach the President1 is to see how much of that case remains applicable today—against the current administration of Barack Obama. It seems we spent much of 2009 and all of 2010 engaged in a debate over whether Obama has betrayed the left or is "governing." In September 2009, David Swanson argued that Obama has embraced and extended so many Bush policies that we were effectively living in "Bush's third term."2 Towards the end of 2009, Glenn Greenwald wrote, noting Matt Yglesias' argument that it is the role of Congress to check the executive branch,

I agree with Matt's explicit point that Congress has an important role to play in checking presidential abuses -- a role they've clearly abdicated no matter which party was in control. He's also right that Presidents don't easily relinquish power. But it's hardly unreasonable to object when someone runs for high political office based on clear and repeated promises that they have squarely violated. Whatever else is true, watching Obama embrace extremist policies can still be "disappointing" even if one isn't surprised that he's doing it. I could understand and accept a lot more easily this blithe acquiescence to Obama's record if it weren't for the fact that progressives and Democrats spent so many years screaming bloody murder over Bush's use of indefinite detention, military commissions, state secrets, renditions, and extreme secrecy -- policies Obama has largely and/or completely adopted as his own. One can't help but wonder, at least in some cases, how genuine those objections were, as opposed to their just having been effective tools to discredit a Republican president for partisan and political gain.3

And about a week and a half later, on the emotional attachments that many on the left have for Obama—which he parallels with those on the right for George W. Bush and, more recently, Sarah Palin,

These outbursts include everything other than arguments addressed to the only question that matters: are the criticisms that have been voiced about Obama valid? Has he appointed financial officials who have largely served the agenda of the Wall Street and industry interests that funded his campaign? Has he embraced many of the Bush/Cheney executive power and secrecy abuses which Democrats once railed against -- from state secrets to indefinite detention to renditions and military commissions? Has he actively sought to protect from accountability and disclosure a whole slew of Bush crimes? Did he secretly a negotiate a deal with the pharmaceutical industry after promising repeatedly that all negotiations over health care would take place out in the open, even on C-SPAN? Are the criticisms of his escalation of the war in Afghanistan valid, and are his arguments in its favor redolent of the ones George Bush made to "surge" in Iraq or Lyndon Johnson made to escalate in Vietnam? Is Bob Herbert right when he condemned Obama's detention policies as un-American and tyrannical, and warned: "Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House"?4

The left's criticism of Obama didn't let up. By August 2010, well on the way to a disastrous November election, which Obama used as an excuse to betray yet another campaign promise,5 White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was complaining that those who say Obama is "like George Bush . . . ought to be drug tested."6 In September, as progressive fury built, Susie Madrak of Crooks and Liars was accusing David Axelrod of "hippie-punching," saying, "We're the girl you'll take under the bleachers but you won't be seen with in the light of day,"7 and Vice President Joe Biden was telling progressives to "stop whining."8 But it is hard to imagine a more quintessentially progressive issue than a woman's right to choose abortion, an issue Obama has been weak on in the past,9 and David Dayen pointed out the hypocrisy of Democrats appealing for votes on the grounds that Republicans would erode that right10:

I don’t think anyone doing this explicitly voted for, say, the Stupak amendment. But I don’t think women and abortion rights advocates have forgotten about the outcome of that in the health care bill. They haven’t forgotten that they expected the Obama Administration’s tenure to spell the end of the Hyde Amendment, only to find it extended dramatically, in ways that could mean the end of all insurance coverage of abortion permanently.11

One difference between Bush and Obama, however, appears in the role of evangelical Protestantism. Obama pandered to evangelicals on abortion, but at the very least, we do not hear of Obama White House aides wandering down the corridors reading the Bible. It might have been Ron Suskind who coined the phrase "faith-based presidency;" he definitely painted a picture of the Bush White House as governed by a certainty based not on facts but on faith, a faith that apparently played well on the campaign trail.12 To the extent that Obama has extended and expanded Bush policies, he is extending and expanding that faith-based presidency.13 And in what might be the weakest chapter of Loo and Phillips' book, Mark Miller argues only in passing that Bush's criminality exceeds by far that of any previous president; he focuses instead on how Bush has transformed the federal government into a theocracy.14

To suggest that Miller's chapter might be the weakest in this book is almost not a criticism; the book—and even Miller's chapter—is that powerful. The passage that concerns me however is,

Whereas the neocons have no grass-roots constituency, the Christianists command a seasoned national army of devoted troops who have long since infiltrated the political establishment at both the state and federal levels and who now run both the GOP and the [Bush] regime's executive departments, while also dominating Congress and, increasingly, the Supreme Court. The neocons, in other words, do not comprise a full-blown movement but are nothing more, or less, than a highly influtential coterie, and so to cast them as the theocrats' full partners is to overstate their numbers and their power.15

This seems to be true, as far as it goes. But it also seems to understate the role of neoconservatives and corporations. Miller defends this arguing that neither the military nor corporations share evangelicals' apocalyptic suicidal influence.16 But if anything is apparent since financial deregulation, it is that corporate quarterly results outweigh long term considerations, even those which ultimately make corporate activities unsustainable—these are dismissed as "externalities" even as the environment that sustains human (and all other) life is destroyed and even as the socioeconomic systems that sustain the economy and the financial system are hollowed out.17 18 That surely is a form of suicide. And while Miller points out how evangelicals have permeated the Army, Marines, and Air Force,19 neoconservatives Vice President Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom strongly advocated the wars that Miller (probably rightly) sees as so destructive for the military, date back to the Nixon administration20 and it is only reasonable to believe that fellow neoconservatives have been finding their way into various levels of federal government service for at least that long.

The problem here is that Miller seems to see the federal government in dichotomous terms. It is either neoconservative or it is theocratic. We might consider instead the possibility that it is quite large enough to be both. And then we must consider that Obama inherited institutions substantially staffed by believers of the one kind or the other which were on a trajectory towards a unitary executive that Barbara Bowley discusses in her chapter.21

But it would assume negligence on Obama's part to suggest he did not realize as a candidate that this would be what he was getting into. And it is particularly criminal for this former professor in constitutional law to run on a promise of change on many if not all of these points and then to 1) continue Bush's program of amassing executive branch power, 2) do next to nothing to alter the trajectory he seems to have inherited,22 23 24 and 3) refuse and resist any investigation of those crimes.25 26 27

With a Democrat as president, any excuse Democrats had for evading responsibility for their complicity in Bush policy has now evaporated. They, along with the Republicans, fully deserve not just impeachment, but criminal charges for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
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11:47 pm January 17th, 2011
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Playing with nuclear fire

Originally published at The Benfell Blog. You can comment here or there.

The argument that a criminal political system remains the only option for change came to mind as I read Larry Everest's chapter, "Iraq: Phase Two in an Unbounded War on the World," in Dennis Loo and Peter Phillips' book, Impeach the President. Everest discounts this possibility and calls for mass protest to compel policymakers to action.1

Everest's chapter remains important today because he highlights how all the justifications for the war on Iraq were false, how the war on Iraq was a criminal act (among the many of which the Obama administration resists investigation2 3 4 5) and because he explains the unstated reason that "the U.S. establishment felt that [Saddam] Hussein's regime was undermining its control of the Middle East and impeding its ambitions globally."6 It is the latter of these reasons that is most interesting to me today, because not even eight years after the invasion of Iraq, it is now abundantly clear that 1) the threat to attack the next country on the neoconservative hit list, Iran, lacks any credibility whatsoever;7 8 2) the U.S. paid a very high price, in both blood and treasure, to enhance Iranian political influence in Iraq, presumably to the detriment of U.S. interests;9 10 11 12 and 3) the at best dubious outcomes in the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan have undermined the status of the U.S. as the world's sole superpower.

Indeed, while most U.S. citizens continue to view their country as "exceptional," entitled to lead the world towards "democracy," they "believe the U.S. is currently at risk of losing its unique character."13 As the cognitive dissonance of their country manifestly becoming something other than what, pledging allegiance every morning in school, they were raised to think it was, the question of what happens next, particularly for those who have access to military weapons becomes urgent.

In the past I have worried that the transition from superpower status to that of just another country combined with climate change-induced food shortages and mass migrations14 might lead some apocalyptic evangelical Protestants, notably in the U.S. Air Force,15 16 17 18 to bypass the human-designed permissive action links on nuclear weapons and to launch them. If anything, the decline of the U.S. has been more precipitous than I anticipated, both in geopolitical and economic terms,19 while mass migration has yet to make itself apparent.

But a renewed focus on the link between violent political discourse and violent political actions has appeared with the attempted assassination of Representative Gabrielle Giffords. While most discount the relationship, and indeed most people are not motivated to political violence by such words, it seems that aggressive people might be.20 And while neoconservatives should not be confused with isolationist capitalist libertarians, who in turn should not be confused with social conservatives (of, for example, an evangelical Protestant variety), it appears that self-described conservatives themselves are often not so clear on these distinctions.21 It would be unreasonable to expect that some of the most aggressive Tea Partiers—13 percent of whom think violence against the current U.S. government is justified22—are not in the military; some in the military and in some police departments call themselves "Oath Keepers" and they include "birthers" and "truthers" and capitalist libertarians.23 24 It simply would not take that much to impel them to action.

What all this means is that under certain circumstances, a right wing militia uprising might find support from elements in the U.S. military and in local police departments. It might draw upon nuclear-equipped units. If enough soldiers' families sense what Hacker and Pierson have to say about government transferring wealth from the poor to the rich,25 support for this uprising might spread like wildfire among the troops. It might find support elsewhere. But any assumption that any such rebellion could be immediately put down by forces loyal to the government should be more carefully considered.

A prudent government would take steps to relieve the pressure on the working class that feeds the desperation that feeds a sense that people will need to take matters into their own hands. It doesn't appear that our government is prudent.26 27

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03:25 pm January 15th, 2011
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The Obama administration is as dangerous as the Bush administration

Originally published at The Benfell Blog. You can comment here or there.

Dennis Loo was remarkably prescient when he wrote,

Even if somehow the Democrats miraculously win the next presidential election [in 2008], and even if, hypothetically, the Democratic president wishes to curb the radical-right's agenda, the radical right has entrenched itself so thoroughly and strategically int he government, in the military, in business, and in the media that any moves to curb its power and its agenda will be met with the ferocity of a really pissed-off vampire. Look at how angry and vituperative its practitioners are right now, and they have power!1

There is, of course, more. Hacker and Pierson point to how the extremely wealthy organized and funded lobbyists to convert a republican system of government into oligarchy. Their solution is for progressives to respond in kind, which would mean at least matching the money and sustaining the level of organization of the extremely rich at the same time as the rich are sucking ever more money away from everybody else.2 Setting aside the practicalities of achieving media penetration to create a necessary sense of urgency among people who are exhausted from having to work longer hours just to get by,3 4 I don't think it is even possible for the numbers to come out on that.

But apart from the suffering of the unemployed, particularly those who fail to find work quickly or those who are over 50,5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Loo points out

that as the New Deal-Keynesian Welfare State is systematically dismantled by the neoliberal state—the political expression of globalization—as privatization takes the place of social programs, as deindustrialization and downsizing and speedups and take-aways proceed, as insecurity of job and livelihood becomes the norm rather than the exception, as the positive incentives, in other words, for normative behavior (jobs and decent pay, and so forth) are increasingly shredded, the state and the corporate world have no choice but to rely more and more heavily upon coercion to ensure cooperation and to forestall rebellion and revolution. coercion itself must be used more, but even coercion doesn't work in all instances, and sheer terror must be employed given their overweening ambitions for world domination.14

Rational people would, of course, realize that increasing pressure in this manner can only end in an explosion. Loo doesn't refer to the apocalyptic end times eschatology of some evangelical Protestants but quotes Bruce Prescott's belief that,

Many [reconstructionists] seem to be biding their time until public sentiment turns decisively against the kind of reforms they are seeking. When that happens, I believe that some, if given the opportunity, will be willing to take up arms and wage another civil war.15

Loo also points to a New York Times article in which an unidentified Bush administration advisor infamously said,

That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.16

In that article, Ron Suskind reveals a mindset of destiny. Not only, as Loo observes, did the Bush administration see itself as able to "make reality" but it saw itself as carrying out the will of the god of Abraham. And when we see the irrationality with which the Obama administration continues, extends, and expands Bush administration policy, we can only conclude that the phenomenon of a "faith-based presidency" has carried forward not just across administrations, but between parties.

Indeed, how else can we explain the callousness of Obama administration policy towards the unemployed, that accepts high unemployment as the "new normal," that doesn't just enable foreclosure fraud, but uses a phony loan modification program to expedite those foreclosures?17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 This is an administration, which like its predecessor, perceives itself as immune from the consequences of its policies.

This isn't just reckless, it isn't just criminally insane; it is a recipe for an extremely violent uprising.
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01:32 am January 15th, 2011
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Pushing government luck

Originally published at The Benfell Blog. You can comment here or there.

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.1

While Mona Eltahawy, in an op-ed for the Washington Post, a newspaper sometimes accused of a neoconservative slant, says of Tunisia that the country "is not a major U.S. ally,"2 the New York Times reports, "The country, which is determinedly secular, is a close United States ally in the fight against terrorism. But on Friday, after reports that Mr. Ben Ali had fled, President Obama made strong statements in support of the protesters."3

The timing of Obama's remarks is critical. Eltahawy continues:

On Jan. 7, the State Department said it was concerned about the regime's online and real-life crackdown. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Jan. 12 that Washington would not take sides, infuriating those who saw a double standard in the vocal U.S. position on Iran.

But others saw encouragement from Washington's reticence. U.S. leaders are "supporting us with their silence," a Tunisian told me on Twitter. "If they say anything, we will lose."4

What is clear is that Ali's regime was the nasty sort of regime that the U.S. seems inevitably to support but which no one now defends. Playing both sides, neoconservatives will undoubtedly embrace Eltahawy's depiction:

For decades, a host of Arab dictators have justified their endless terms in office by pointing to Islamists waiting in the wings. Having both inflated the egos and power of Islamists and scared Western allies into accepting stability over democracy, those leaders were left to comfortably sweep "elections." Ben Ali was elected to a fifth term with 89.62 percent of the vote in 2009.

All around him is a depressingly familiar pattern. Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi (68 years old) has been in power since 1969; Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh (64) has ruled since 1978 and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (82) since 1981. Algeria's Abdelaziz Bouteflika (73) is a relative newcomer, having been in power only since 1999. Not so much fathers as grandfathers of their nations, these autocrats cling to office - and are increasingly out of touch with their young populaces.

No doubt, every Arab leader has watched Tunisia's revolt in fear while citizens across the Arab world watch in solidarity, elated at that rarity: open revolution.5

Indeed, both CNN and the BBC report that Ali has landed in Saudi Arabia.6 7 But there is a larger message for those in government who, rather than any measure of economic justice for their people, instead work to enhance the riches of the wealthy.

According to the Times, "the mounting protests quickly evolved from demands for more jobs to demands for political reforms, focusing mainly on the perceived corruption of the government and the self-enrichment of the ruling family." WikiLeaks revelations "of the first family’s self-enrichment and opulent lifestyle" did not help. And Tunisia, it seems, is a largely secular, middle class country.8

In the United States, it is the 150th anniversary of the South's secession from the Union. A number of articles have emerged affirming that a primary motivation for secession was the preservation of slavery.9 10 Apparently, this is disputed by those whose ancestors fought for the Confederacy despite not owning slaves, though Robert McElvaine argues that they were duped into fighting against their own interests just as they are now duped into voting against their own interests.11

What we know is that a desperate, combustible anger that occasionally erupts into violence is widespread across the white working class. It is largely founded in class issues even when it is directed at women and people of color.12 13 14 15 16 17 18 It is an anger that will not be assuaged by pieties such as,

Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let’s use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.19

It is in fact an anger that has been sorely provoked by a political system that bailed out the banks while leaving ordinary people to twist in the wind. If people were surprised by what happened in Tunisia, they should reflect on what might happen in the United States.
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