Cogitamus

Dreaming of a White Halloween, the Odious Middle, and Weekend Open Thread

 

"State Trooper" - Steve Earle

A tremendous cover of a great Springsteen song.  I also love the youthful Earle's intro where he explains to those who aren't familiar with his work that "he made all of these songs up" other than State Trooper -- it is a description of creation that is at once evocative and self-effacing. 

We are having a spectacularly crappy weather day here -- it's about 35 degrees and has alternately rained and snowed all day.  No accumulation to speak of, but seriously cold and wet in a way that it really never is here in October.  Ugh.  (Our average high here in October is 68 and average low is 51 -- snow is not usually an option.)

- Speaking of public intellectuals, I saw Paul Starr today at Politics & Prose, my neighborhood bookstore discussing his latest work,  Remedy and Reaction, a book about health care reform and its history in the United States.  Starr, a professor of sociology at Princeton and one of the co-founders, along with Robert Kutner and Robert Reich, of The American Prospect, first came to widespread attention with his 1984 Pulitzer Prize winning book The Social Transformation of American Medicine.  Remedy and Reaction atempts to explain American "exceptionalism" in the area of health care, i.e., why the United States is such an outlier in the industrial world with respect to providing health care to its citizenry.  I asked Starr if he thought that there would have been any merit to attempting either a "Medicare for Everyone" approach to health care reform or a substantial public option.  Starr, who worked for the Clinton Administration during its health care battles, gave me an unequivocal no.  He indicated that whatever its flaws -- and he understands that there are flaws -- the Affordable Care Act was as good as we were going to be able to get in the political environment of 2009-10 and that he believes that should it survive this election cycle, can form the basis of a fairly meaningful move toward universal and more affordable coverage.  He was pretty complimentary about Obama's efforts on this score.  He also expressed bewilderment at the Republican lunacy on this issue, noting that they are completely out of step with other conservative parties throughout the world.  He's a very good and genial speaker, so if you get the chance to see him on his book tour by all means do so.

- There are few organizations in DC that I despise more than "Third Way" -- the Thomas Friedman of think tanks here.  I was amused to read this report -- linked to yesterday by Jay Ackroyd at Eschaton -- prepared by them in 2007 called The New Rules Economy, a Friedmanesque encomium to the global economy.  Essentially the message was don't worry about the middle class -- it's doing great in the global economy.  I'd love to see how those statistics they relied upon look in the harsh light of the post-2008 crash. 

- Speaking of Friedman, the degree to which Paul Krugman openly takes the piss out of him and Brooks these days is a constant source of amusement to me.  His most recent slap, in which he crosses out the words "find a wise taxi driver to explain everything" made me almost spit out my morning coffee.  One gets the sense that the Nobel Prize winner really has contempt for his page mates at the Times.  And rightfully so.

- Charles Blow, on the other hand, has continually improved as a columnist for the Times.  Today's column -- and more importantly, its accompanying graph -- gives the lie to the gaseous optimism contained in that Third Way monograph. 

- Oh, and Joe Nocera makes up a bit for his odious "Borking" column of a few days ago with this stomach turning story of a Buffalo law firm whose main practice is mortgage foreclsoures, where the employees have a Halloween party in which dressing up as foreclosure victims is thought the height of good fun.  the mind boggles at this kind of institutional sadism.

Well it sounds like the precipitation may have stopped.  Time to grab Stanley and try to take advantage of the break before grabbing a little warm mulled wine with which to unwind.

What's up with you my friends? 

Who Are These Public Intellectuals Who Might Have To Fend For Themselves, And When's The Last Time They Did Us Any Good?

Via an apparently sympathetic Brad DeLong, Sam Harris plaintively blogs:

Writers, artists, and public intellectuals are nearing some sort of precipice: Their audiences increasingly expect digital content to be free. Jaron Lanier has written and spoken about this issue with great sagacity. You can purchase his book here, which most of you will not do, or you can watch him discuss these matters for free. The problem is thus revealed even in the act of stating it.  How can a person like Lanier get paid for being brilliant? This has become an increasingly difficult question to answer.

Skipping past my first question, "who the $#@! is Jaron Lanier?", the more important question here seems to be, "OK, what of value will we lose if all the so-called public intellectuals have to find day jobs like the rest of us have, and be limited to writing Deep Thoughts in their spare time?"

With all due respect to these revered ladies and gentlemen, my tentative answer is: "next to nothing."

I'm racking my memory of the events of the last decade or so, and trying to come up with an instance in which such a person has gone on record in a way that (a) made a difference (b) of a positive sort (c) on an issue of national significance.

Can you think of any?  I'm sure pulling a blank.

If any public intellectuals have spoken out about the outrage of having one-sixth of our workforce unemployed or underemployed for nearly three years, their voices have gotten lost in the din and have made no appreciable difference.

I'm sure some public intellectuals must have spoken out about the outrage of the Bush Administration's use of torture, but if it shifted either public or elite opinion an iota from where it would have been anyway, I see no evidence of it.

Whatever opposition there may have been from public intellectuals with respect to our march to war in Iraq, or the expanding of the national security state's ability to spy on us all under the Bush Administration, you can't prove it by me that it made the slightest bit of difference to our national dialogue about these issues.

Ditto on the ever-increasing funneling of our wealth to an ever-diminishing slice of our richest citizens. Ditto on millions of Americans getting kicked out of their homes when we've got empty houses galore.  Ditto on the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform Act turning bankruptcy into a form of debt peonage for many, rather than an opportunity for a fresh start.  Ditto a bunch of other things I can think of, but let's cut the list off before it goes on forever.

Let's face it, there's nobody out there with the cachet to move the debate one iota in our wingnut-poisoned politics.  The people on the right are only willing to listen to you as long as you're singing from their hymnal.  (We recently had a perfect example - physicist and climate change skeptic Richard Muller put out his much-anticipated Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (BEST), found that the climate scientists were if anything understating the degree of climate change, and went from wingnut hero to persona non grata on the right.  Overnight.)  And such people on the left who have been hoping for someone reasonable on the right to talk to have long since come to the awareness that reasonable conservatives quickly wind up speaking for almost nobody besides themselves.  Someone like Paul Krugman who, in a better world, would be regarded as a public intellectual, is painted by his opponents as simply another wild-eyed leftist. 

So if public intellectuals have to make their own way in the world, just like the rest of us (and it's hardly that bad: a good many public intellectuals, such as they are, have tenured professorships with light teaching loads), I can't see that the loss is something that we'll notice.

We will undoubtedly lose some things of value in the transition from a print world to a digital world.  Small newspapers are going out of business, and many others are producing less original reporting.  It's hard to say whether or how people 20 years from now will learn what's really going on in their city halls and statehouses.

But public intellectuals having to work a day job?  Excuse me while I dig out the world's tiniest violin.

Wednesday Musings and Open Thread

 

"Call to Love" - Crooked Fingers

- John Cole concisely explains once again that whatever our disappointments with the Obama Administration, it is imperative that he win in 2012.  In sum, he must win because the other guys are fucking crazy -- individually and collectively.  Cole also links to a Krugman column in which he makes a point that I have tried frequently to make -- that the Republicans are an ideologically driven, Leninist-style party, where reality has long since ceased to matter and where completely contradictory attacks on their enemies -- the atheistic supporters of sharia law -- are delivered with a completely straight, if foam-flecked, face.     

-   And more garbage from David Brooks, whom I believe Krugman took another veiled swipe at in the linked column.  Yes, what Obama really needs to do to win is vow to privatize Social Security. 

- Romney's continued lack of conviction -- about anything -- smart move or deadly in a Leninist party?  I am truly at a loss to see how the GOP nomination battle is going to play out.  The smart money would continue to be on Romney by default, but I still can't quite believe he can make the sale.  Update:  Multiple Choice Mitt moves somewhere beyond self-parody on the flip-flopping front. 

- Lately one or two have fully paid their dues:  I must admit to being a bit mystified at the hand-wringing over the death of Muammar Qaddafi, brutal as it was.  Shockingly enough, if you govern as a monster, you are liable to meet a monstrous end, assuming you are stupid or delusional enough to let your people get their hands on you.  I guess my attitude would be succinctly summed up as "fuck 'im." I assume Bashar al-Assad is taking note of the Colonel's demise.  And it certainly wouldn't break my heart to see him go out the same way.   

- New recommendations for boys to also receive the Gardasil vaccine against HPV.  We actually did this with our son a couple of years ago, but had to push a little bit with the doctor's office to get it for him.  I will be curious to see what the response is to this.    

- Contrary to the author's claim, I find this kind of anti-abortion argument -- but "you wouldn't have been born if your mother had an abortion canard" -- to be horribly solipsistic and jejune and not in the least persuasive or even discomforting.   If my mother had had an abortion I wouldn't give a shit about the issue.  Rachael Larimore's presence on Slate is another reason not to read it. 

What's bugging you? 

Monday Open Thread

 

"Sweet Tooth" - Kids on a Crime Spree

I love this Buddy Holly meets the Jesus and Mary Chain sound.  And clocking in at a very concise 2:13.

I saw "Margin Call" yesterday and would definitely recommend it. It is a very micro look at the financial crisis, not an attempt to draw bigger conclusions, but works well as a story.  Very well acted too.

- Speaking of which, I liked this piece on OWS in TNR by William Galston on OWS as an act of revolt against the irresponsibility of America's business and political elite.  Although this sounds bad coming from someone on the left, I think that a great deal of the success that the United States has enjoyed has been attributable to often having better elites than most societies -- elites that tended to have some sense of broader social responsibility.  I think OWS rightly taps into anger that our current problems were caused by an incredibly irresponsible financial elite, aided and abetted by a political class that has grown addicted to the campaign money that they produce. 

- I find this kind of treatment of OWS -- also in that schizophrenic rag, the New Republic -- that it's a big hippie fest that is going to alienate real American to be a tiresome replay of the battles of the Sixties, with no sense that the culture has changed markedly from where it was forty or so years ago.  One of my law partners was up there the other day and ran into members of two of the city's building trades unions, both of whom were prominent participants in the "Hardhat Riot" of 1970, in which unionized construction workers (to what should have been their great shame) attacked students protesting the Vietnam War.  This time around, the construction workers (who, by the way, are far more likely to sport long hair. tattoos and earrings these days than the average college student) are with the hippies.  This is not to say that the rifts of the Sixties are fully buried -- but times do change and so do institutional and cultural responses.

- It was interesting today to hear a story on N(ever) P(issoff) R(epublicans) about Obama's swing through Nevada to promote another attempt at mortgage relief and the question of what the GOP response would be.  The story hinted at, but naturally never quite explicitly said, that the Republican plan is the one articulated by smug, entitled prick Mitt Romney -- let the foreclosures proceed and the miracle of the markets will do this work.  Once again, the defeat of bankruptcy cram down by the Conservadems in the Senate continues to hurt the economy and the President's prospects for re-election.  Again, though, Obama appears to be fortunate in his enemies.

- Which also leads me to wonder why his opponents think there is any mileage to be gained from attacking the President for removing all troops from Iraq by the end of the year.  The Republicans already have the votes of Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer -- who the fuck else thinks keeping troops in Iraq is a good idea?

- I am not even going to bother to link to it, because he pisses me off so much -- I'll link to the great Mr. Pierce instead -- but David Brooks had a column about Americans returning to a "moral"  approach to economics, i.e. people are not using their credit cards so much.  He does not seem to realize this is a bad sign -- that it indicates consumers who are tapped out and fearful.  But it was an interesting insight into the way that the well to do journalistic community in DC thinks about these matters.  Moral rectitude is achieved through pain -- pain of course suffered by others.  I'd like to see David Brooks go without a paycheck for a year and see how virtuous he feels at the end of it.  (It was also rich coming from a writer who once celebrated consumption as a kind of artistic commentary on life in the U.S.)    

What's happening with you on this fine Monday?     

A Fantastic Puzzle

 

 

This is not actually a video, but it's my favorite mix of this song.  I've been listening to it over and over all morning, and wanted to fit in around here, so there it is at the top of my post.  

 

Almost everything I have written about Occupy has been negative, but I can't stop thinking about it.  I can't put my finger on it, but I think there's some there there.  I want to rise to the challenge here, even as it rubs my natural squareness the wrong way.  In the meantime until I feel like I have some idea what to think, I'll quiet down with the soul-searching, and only write up the actual revelations.  I'm trying to pick fights with the Occupy Boise Facebook group, and hope I can get something out of that.  

I'd Like to Kick them in the Tote Bag

 

"Exhuming McCarthy" - REM

Re: former Cogblogger Lisa Simeone - I know we did not see eye to eye, and parted company as a result, but this strikes me as absolute bullshit.    The assertion by npr that it had nothing to do with Lisa's termination by Soundprint just doesn't ring true with me.  If that is the case, why are they in conversation with WDAV about Lisa's role as the host of Opera Today? 

The degree to which a ludicrous double standard prevails in these matters is incredible.  As Lisa put it: 

"I find it puzzling that NPR objects to my exercising my rights as an American citizen -- the right to free speech, the right to peaceable assembly -- on my own time in my own life.  I'm not an NPR employee.  I'm a freelancer.  NPR doesn't pay me.  I'm also not a news reporter.  I don't cover politics.  I've never brought a whiff of my political activities into the work I've done for NPR World of Opera.  What is NPR afraid I'll do -- insert a seditious comment into a synopsis of Madame Butterfly?

"This sudden concern with my political activities is also surprising in light of the fact that Mara Liaason reports on politics for NPR yet appears as a commentator on FoxTV, Scott Simon hosts an NPR news show yet writes political op-eds for national newspapers, Cokie Roberts reports on politics for NPR yet accepts large speaking fees from businesses.  Does NPR also send out 'Communications Alerts' about their activities?"

Sadly, npr continues to run scared from anything that might subject it to criticism from the right.  Its new President, Gary Knell, doesn't exactly inspire confidence in this regard.  (I do think Lisa should have been aware that this was likely to blow up on her -- I hope it was at least knowing naivete and not an utter shock.)

I am happy I stiffed them again during this most recent fundraising week. 

The Disconnect

There was something implied in the occupation of Zuccotti Park.  Picketing, protesting, marching - you do that until your demands are met.  I've been reading about consensus-building, and while it's fascinating and a promising model for organizing, I'm having a hard time getting on board.  If the process is the purpose, then I don't know if anyone will get more than participation ribbons within the next five years.  The most cynical thought I have had about consensus-building is that it's the terrifying result of Special Snowflake-ism.  Occupy is anti-hierarchical, which I'll admit is sort of hard for me to wrap my head around.  Anti-hierarchy seems in this instance to be anti-power, and therefore anti-empowerment.  I held out a little hope after reading this interview with Marina Sitrin on historical use of consensus-building, only to have it totally dashed by Ted Rall later on.

 

    There are precedents of consensus-building working out beautifully.  But I don't think that will happen at Zucotti Park.  It's the very last thing I want to say "I told you so" about.  I'd love to be proven wrong. I've spent hours this week trying to convince myself that I am.  

 

    OWS has indeed empowered people to make their pain known.  I'll say unequivocally that is an accomplishment.  If I may be flip, America has been in need of a pity party.  (Tongue in cheek!  You can have a pity party about an actual problem.)  But it doesn't appear that this is all OWS has set out to do; there are still people camping out on Wall Street.

 

    I read an article by Ted Rall today about how consensus-building is basically useless at making things happen, but super-fun and important anyway I guess.  I read this in the latest Boise Weekly, which is running a series on empowering people with intellectual and cognitive disabilities to vote.  Amusingly, Rall's article (wherein he made a snide remark about having to listen to the mentally-handicapped during the occupation) was on the opposite page of the first installment of the series.  

Globalize This and Open Thread

 

"The Royal Scam" - Steely Dan

From their boats of iron they looked upon the promised land where surely life was sweet.

- Steve Ratner, who oversaw the GM bailout, had a piece in the New York Times last Sunday that I wanted to comment upon.  The shocking thrust of his article was that globalization has losers as well as winners.  No shit!  Ratner notes the continued bleeding of manufacturing jobs to low wage markets overseas and, seemingly, laments it.  But he rejects any attempts to protect domestic manufacturing jobs via tarriffs or any government intervention, like industrial policy, to stem this decline.  Indeed, he offers really no solutions at all -- just a half-hearted endorsement of more education and possibly tax credits for creating good jobs.  It doesn't amount to much.  Here's a pretty good critique of the piece.  At some point, the free trade zealots are going to have to describe how we preserve a middle class society in a world in which jobs can be sent overseas with very little effort.  I am not sure what the answer here is, but I am pretty convinced that unfettered globalization will not inure to the benefit of the vast majority of Americans.

- Evil Governors (Part 1) - This story makes me really happy.  If we can shove this anti-union law up John Kasich's ass a great good will have been done.  If the further result is that cops, firefighters, and teachers will go out and start voting for Democrats 75-80% of the time, this will really represent a major misstep by Republicans.

- Evil governors (Part 2) - I see that Florida's asshole crook of a governor is backing off his promise to create 700,000 jobs -- now he is promising to boldly stop Florida from losing jobs.  The Republican gubernatorial class of 2010 is really quite a bunch. 

- Watching this incident last night during the Republican debate, I couldn't help but think that if Rick Perry were the manly man his supporters claim him to be he would have knocked Mitt Romney on his lilly-white ass for touching him.

What's going on with you?   

Sunday Open Thread

 

"Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye" - The Decemberists

It's been a gorgeous fall weekend here, but I've spent the bulk of it inside trying to bleed out a brief.  I'm totally aggravated with myself for procrastinating and struggling.  I'm way too old for both things.  So I'm afraid I've barely glanced at the newspapers and, amazingly enough, have bascially not been online for the entire weekend.

- I did want to comment on this piece by Kate Bolick in the Atlantic that was getting a fair amount of play in the blogs the other day.  It's a rambling affair, a muddle really, discussing both the fact that Bolick is single at the age of 39 and the growth in the percentage of unmarried adults in the U.S. generally.  Bolick palpably laments having broken up with someone at the age of 28 for no real reason that she can recall, an act for which she seems to blame feminism.  Indeed, the entire piece seems like yet another in a series of attacks on feminism for having given women too many choices.    A couple of things jumped out at me -- first, Bolick takes her own personal situation and conflates it with the circumstances of a lot of other women who do not strike me as similarly situated.  Second, she doesn't seem to understand that the kind of personal decision she made in her twenties about marrying someone is not unique to women -- many of us had serious relationships at that age that ended for the same kinds of reasons, the difficulty of saying "yes, this is the one."  Believe it or not, this is a profound thing for men too.  And finally, it drives me nuts when people write as though the one night stand originated in the 1990s (or later).  Here's Bolick: "The early 1990s witnessed the dawn of “hookup culture” at universities, as colleges stopped acting in loco parentis, and undergraduates, heady with freedom, started throwing themselves into a frenzy of one-night stands."  No, no, no, a thousand fucking times, no!  As someone who started college in 1978, married to someone who started college in 1976, I can assure Bolick that universities were not acting "in loco parents" during the Ford and Carter years.  The 18-year old drinking age was in effect in many places, one could walk down the street in many major American cities and smoke pot without fear, quaaludes were abundant, soon to be followed by cocaine, and AIDS was unknown.  A good time was had by many.  And strangely enough, many of us also got married later on.

(One of the things that surprised me in taking my son on college tours last year was the degree to which colleges actually seem to be involved in the lives of students now.  When I was in school, it was pretty much sink or swim time -- our parents didn't email revised papers to us and our professors really didn't give a shit if we came to class or not.) 

I find these kinds of articles lamentable.  The freedom to make decisions, even ones that we  subsequently find regrettable, is the hallmark of a genuinely adult existence.  Women have fought fiercely for this autonomy -- when smart successful women like Bolick indulge in this kind of public self pity and attempt to imbue it with broader cultural significance, it just plays into the hands of the many who would prefer a return to a Victorian world.  I liked Amanda's take on it.   

What's grabbing your attention?     

Friday Open Thread

 

"Substitute" - The Who

Watching the continuing inability of "Mr. Inevitable" Mitt Romney to really sell himself to the Republican electorate made me think of this song. 

Up to my eyeballs in work and familial responsibilities, but will try to write this evening.

In the meantime, tell me what's going on. 

Douthat's Short Memory

Ross Douthat's columns are charaterized by all manner of annoying things -- his peurile nostalgia for a time that never really existed, his lack of worldliness, his discomfort with all things sexual, his utter lack of understanding of economic realities for most Americans -- a host of tendencies to dislike.  But perhaps the most irritating of all is his completely partisan nature, an absolute inability to see the Republican Party for what it is accompanied by a need to portray the Democratic Party as an equivalently hyper-partisan organization.  In his most recent column, Douthat lays out a counter-factual scenario of what might have happened if John McCain had prevailed in the 2008 election and concludes that Democrats would have been so embittered by such an event that they too would have done everything to block any recovery agenda put forward by McCain.

One can't help but be struck by Douthat's short memory.  Democrats actually experienced the kind of bitter electoral defeat scenario he imagines way back in the ancient days of 2000-01, when George Bush was awarded the presidency despite having lost the popular vote by over 500,000 and on the strength of the U.S. Supreme Court halting the Florida recount in one of the most dubious constitutional decisions in the nation's history.  Bush assumed office with scant legitimacy in the eyes of most Democrats and, speaking personally, I can assure Douthat, that his elevation to office via a 5-4 Supreme Court vote was an extraordinarily bitter experience. 

And yet, when it came to enacting Bush's domestic agenda, one did not see anything like the endless and uniform obstruction that has characterized the Republican congressional caucus since day one of the Obama Administration.  The No Child Left Behind Act was passed with huge bipartisan support and the leading liberal spokesman in Congress, Ted Kennedy, co-sponsored the legislation. Medicare Part D passed the Senate despite not having 60 votes and received the support of ten Senate Democrats.   In the House, Part D passed on the strength of nine Democrats breaking ranks with their leadership, allowing the bill to pass despite the defection of 19 Republican members.  Finally, the first Bush tax cut was passed in the Senate by a 58-33 vote with twelve Democrats supporting it and it passed the House by a vote of 240 to 154 with 28 Democrats voting in favor -- a mere six months after Bush illegitimately grabbed the presidency.

So in fact, we have seen how Democrats reacted to just the type of factual scenario that Douthat sketches out and it is clear, for better or worse, that the Party's congressional members felt the need to allow the President to govern.  Would that the same could be said about Douthat's fellow Party members.  

Tuesday Open Thread

 

"Crash Years" - New Pornographers

Sorry for the radio silence.  Got back from Miami yesterday and had to head into the office -- after retrieving Stanley of course -- and then spent the day in Richmond.  I see that Obama's jobs bill was filibustered to death.  Predictable.  And yes, Republicans are deliberately trying to destroy the economy and should be called out on it.  But what the fuck is Tester doing, voting with Ben Nelson?  Do either of them think that this sort of vote is going to help them in their re-election bids?

- I thought this piece in Mother Jones, highlighting what the one percent make and, more importantly, what they own, is amazingly instructive.  In light of it, it seems truly pathetic to see someone like Eric Erickson trying to make common cause with them as someone who is one of the "53%," i.e. someone who pays federal income tax.  What a pathetic asshole.  And yes, Eric, I pay federal income taxes -- lots and lots of them.  Probably more in most years than you make at your "three jobs."  Ugh, evidently these guys all think "the 53%" is inspiring and not just comedy gold. 

- I did not have a chance to comment on Palin's decision not to run.  I had tried to let Roy down gently a couple of weeks ago when we had the pleasure of meeting and having a couple of beers -- it's hard to kill a man's dream.  But let's face it, running for president is hard work and if there is anything we have learned about Palin over the last three years it is that she is allergic to hard work.  Although she would have fit in nicely with the Republican field, where several other unemployed people -- Gingrich, Santorum, Cain, and Romney -- are also seeking the job.

- This article in the Atlantic by Taylor Branch about the grotesque greed and hyprocrisy of the NCAA and its shameless exploitation of revenue sport athletes (primarily African-American and poor) is well worth a read.  It may make pulling for your alma mater a little more difficult on a Saturday afternoon.

- And this is a really chilling article in the New Yorker about how the money of one right wing asshole (James "Art" Pope) can literally transform the political landscape of a state (North Carolina).  Read it and weep regarding what our post-Citizens United world could look like. 

So who watched the debate?  Tell me what else is happening.

School of Hard Knocks My A#s and Open Thread

 

"Missed the Boat" - Modest Mouse

Well nothing ever went
Quite exactly as we planned
Our ideas held no water
But we used them like a dam

I heard this song today and kept thinking it was a summary of the Republican platform.

So Scott Brown acts like a pig vis a vis Elizabeth Warren, while also trying to play the faux man of the people, complaining that he didn't go to Harvard but rather went to the "school of hard knocks."  No, actually Brown went to Tufts, the 28th ranked university in America according to U.S. News & World Report and Boston College School of Law, the 27th ranked law school.  Warren, like Brown, grew up in modest circumstances and went to the University of Houston and Rutgers School of Law.  (I remain puzzled how a dumb ass like Brown got into both schools -- although I do know he played basketball at Tufts -- perhaps I'm bitter because BC Law rejected me a year after Brown got in.)   Anyway, I've got to believe that if he hits this theme again, Elizabeth Warren is going to shove it up his Cosmo-posing ass.  (The belittling of Warren's appearance is really not well calculated to attracting women voters methinks.)

On a similar note, Herman Cain's statement regarding Occupy Wall Street -- "Don't blame Wall Street, don't blame the big banks, if you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself. It is not someone's fault if they succeeded, it is someone's fault if they failed" -- strikes me as one of the less well constructed bits of electoral politics I've seen recently.

Well. I am heading off to South Beach for the long weekend -- but don't be hatin' on me -- I'll let you know how the other half is living.  Or 1% as the case may be.

What else is going on?

Taking it to the Streets and Thursday Open Thread

 

I'm sitting here in the airport in Charleston, West Virginia (where Fox News is blasting -- it is literally a non-stop attack on Obama), and finally have a moment to weigh in a bit on the protests that are gathering momentum throughout the United States.  (I also thought you might enjoy this stirring little bit of video that nancy pointed out to me the other day in comments).

Several of you have asked my thoughts on the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon.  I am definitely sympathetic and supportive of the effort.  I think that at this point anything that helps to give voice and presence to the widespread disgust with our economic and financial elites is a good thing.   I am also quite pleased to see unions joining in the effort and doing so as supporting and supportive players -- not trying to dictate the direction of the movement, but lending heft and organizational power to the nascent efforts. 

I think public protests serve a few different purposes.  The first, and most obvious one, is to push a cause or an issue, especially where conventional political routes are unresponsive.  Protests also serve as a way of engaging the broader society, raising awareness and garnering allies -- with the hope, again, of both changing the terms of debate within the culture and generating political responsiveness. Finally, protests serve the role of giving visibility to a group of like-minded citizens -- which serves the dual purpose of making those in a cause feel their own strength -- there is an intoxicating quality to being in a throng of the like-minded, especially for people who might be in a minority in their own cities and states -- and to display that strength to others, especially office holders.  I have been in a few of the larger protests held in the United States in the last couple of decades -- two huge marches for reproductive rights and the last "Solidarity Day" organized by the AFL-CIO -- and being in a crowd of several hundred thousand people on the national mall is really energizing.  (Having said that, I am skeptical that any of these marches had much impact -- at least none to which I can obviously point.)

So what can the Occupy Wall Street and related protests accomplish?  Truthfully, I am not certain.  But I think there is value in giving public expression to the justifiable anger so many Americans feel.  I would like to think that it could also be a vehicle by which people can learn more about the reason that misery is so widespread and why the economic system seems to be working for so few people.  I also think it may help expose the lie that the "tea party" phenomenon is in any way a populist expression of dissatisfaction with Wall Street  and business as usual -- when pressed, tea party types will almost surely reflexively side with the business elite, because they are just traditional Republicans in new packaging.   

Ultimately, I think any succesful protest effort has to result in electoral and legislative victories.  And that's where I feel a little bit of trepidation with respect to OWS.  The movement seems a bit divorced from concrete policy steps.  What would constitute victory for the protestors here?  I think that it would be useful if there was some sort of policy hook attached to the demonstrations -- my own personal choice would be mortgage relief, a revisiting of the idea of reforming mortgages via bankruptcy.  It's a simple idea, it is one for which there is still a desperate need, and it is a concrete area in which the bailed-out banks have stood steadfastly against the broader public interest.  It won't be enacted in the present environment, but it is an issue with which the public can be educated and sides can be drawn.

What do you all think?      

More Friedmania and Tuesday Open Thread

 

"Tuesday Morning" - The Pogues

(WIth Spider Stacey on vocals rather than Shane McGowan.)

Everyone should read this fine piece on Thomas Friedman by Tom Junod over at Charles Pierce's new Politics blog at Esquire -- a really welcome addition.  Pierce is a great and funny guy -- hearing from him regularly should be a treat. 

Junod really captures the manner in which Friedman appeals to a certain upper middle class sensibility -- the anxiety-riddled strivers who make up our professional class and who desperately want to transmit their own success to their offspring.  These are Friedman's people -- smart, but not intellectuals, prosperous, but still in need of a paycheck, worldly, but not really.  Not to go all David Brooks on them, but these are people who have by and large played by all the rules and it has paid off for them, but they retain a sense -- appropriately -- of insecurity, especially about their kids.  

And Friedman is their go-to guy to explain the world to them -- not so much as a public intellectual (although he appears to be what passes for one these sad days), but as a kind of bourgeois moralist.  Friedman's message is that the world is constantly threatening to shift from under your feet -- no matter how good you are at what you do, some kid in Shanghai or Bangalore is out there ready to do it better and cheaper.  Or more painfully for this set, better than your kids can.  Junod perfectly captures Friedman's ability -- the "make your kids do more homework, it's their only hope" schtick -- to stir angst in the hearts of this demographic as the center of his appeal.  (The New York Times Op-Ed page is currently crammed with these upper middle class moralists -- David Brooks and Ross Douthat work the same beat in different fashions.)

What Friedman can't say -- probably because he doesn't really understand it -- is that this is a sucker's game that no one can win.  Well, they can win via luck and happenstance, but not likely just on the basis of their own efforts.  The global ebay for people's services that he describes is really a nightmarish Hobbesian vision.  In essence, a world in which someone, somewhere will always be available to do what you do more cheaply.  What's not to like?

Junod also does some good work discussing the endless allure of the sensible center and how people like Friedman and Jon Stewart continually fall prey to this delusion.  Neither can seem to admit that what is needed now is for people to engage in concerted, effective political activity in which a vision of the world that is humane, egalitarian, and founded in notions of solidarity is the only way to avoid the nightmare of rapacious global capitalism.       

- Tim Noah is also now blogging over at TNR -- it's great to see him back with a steady gig.  Interestingly, he has a piece today about one of the great investors of the age, Bill Gross of PIMCO, arguing that what we really need is not the world that Friedman embraces, but rather one in which labor is paid well for its efforts.    Only then, Gross notes, can investors be assured of decent returns on capital.  What a radical notion.

Once I figure out how to do it, I'll be adding both of these guys to our blogroll. 

What's going on with you? 

Sunday Open Thread

 

"See How We Are" - X

- Here's a scary story about the "due process" required to execute someone in Alabama -- a place where appointed counsel got $1,000 to represent Corey Maples in a capital murder case.  That's about what I would charge to research and write a memo that would require four or five hours time -- and my rates are about 30% of what the DC federal court will award as attorneys' fees in cases.  Even worse, this poor bastard thought he he had gotten a lucky break when a couple of associates from big ass NYC firm Sullivan & Cromwell took his appeal.  Those two attorneys subsequently left the firm and failed to keep track of what went on with the case, Alabama counsel inexplicably ignored deadlines, and no one at S&C bothered to notice the communications sent to the firm addressed to the former associates.  As a result of this extraordinary neglect, Maples is possibly going to be executed without having a single federal court review his case.  [This kind of thing really pisses me off -- my own firm, which has never numbered more than 31 lawyers, took a death penalty habeas case and ran with it for ten years -- racking up over $1 million in attorney time (at our very low rates) and going out of pocket over $100,000 for depositions, experts, etc., before finally prevailing in front of the Supreme Court.  Sullivan & Cromwell should have their asses sued off over this and the bright young things who took the case should be disciplined by the bar.]

I'm sure Ross Douthat would tell me not to sweat it.

- One of the things that I find continually amazing about right wing academics who blog -- see e.g. Victor Davis Hanson, Glenn Reynolds, Ann Althouse, is the sloppy writing and thinking that characterizes their work, their comfort with racist and sexist tropes, and the degree to which their politics are informed -- if one can use that term -- largely by visceral, culture war resentments, rather than serious discussions of policy.  Read Roy's latest take down of the insufferably pompous Hanson -- and the comments of course.  I particularly enjoyed Hanson's put down of his students from 1985 who he claims had no aspirations higher than to work for the state -- an evidently disgraceful lack of ambition.  Leveled, of course, by a guy who taught for many years at Cal State Fresno.  Reynolds and Althouse, too, are tenured professors at law schools at state universities.  An appreciation for irony has never been the strong suit of the right wing sensibility.  (No one seems to have informed Hanson that welfare reform was passed more than 15 years ago in this country -- those "welfare queens" of yesteryear get a maximum of 60 months of exceedingly modest benefits.  As of 2010, there were barely more than 4 million Americans receiving TANF.  The notion that our taxes are supporting a vast army of welfare recipients living the good life is a cruel and laughable fantasy -- and racist to the hilt.)   

- Speaking of which, Douthat is dismayed at the failure of any of the exemplars of "right wing populism" to make a compelling case to the Republican electorate thus far.  Douthat seems to miss the fact that there really is no such thing as right wing populism in policy terms -- well, at least among this crowd.  There is not a leading Republican out there who is interested in curbing the corporate power for the benefit of ordinary people.   As has long been the case, right wing populism consists of appealing to people's resentments and prejudices, not offering economic policies that would help the average person.  Token demagoguery about "crony capitalism" -- with no plan but to continue embracing it -- does not populism make.

- I don't think he realizes it, but Thomas Friedman offers us a description of a dystopia for most Americans looming out there.  

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