Cogitamus

It's All About the Supreme Court and Open Thread

I have been doing my best to digest the various end of term decisions by the Supreme Court and everything else that has been going on.  After several months of what seemed like an incredibly trivial political landscape, chockablock full with phony scandals and bullshit news, the last couple of days have been a vivid reminder of the real stakes of politics -- who one can marry, whether one can be forced to bear a child against one's will, how many obstacles can be placed in the way of exercising the franchise, etc.  And perhaps the most salient lesson all -- that control of the Supreme Court is paramount.  I have not had a chance to give all of the Court's opinions this week a thorough reading and lawyerly analysis.  But the beauty of blogging is that it does not keep me from having strong opiinions.

- On the VRA, I will subcontract the work to Scott Lemieux.  It seems to me that Roberts has crafted an utterly cynical opinion, wholly lacking in anything resembling intellectual coherence, relying on an analysis of state "sovereignty" that I thought had been rendered obsolete at Appomattox, while seemingly reading the 15th Amendment out of the Constitution.  I think it is fair to say that at least three of the Court's members -- Scalia, Alito, and Roberts -- are Republican activists by other means and completely comfortable with attempts to suppress the minority vote.   It's a nearly 50-year old Republican tradition, and one which Roberts' predecessor cut his teeth on back in 1964.  Clarence Thomas is even worse -- a man who identifies with the oppressor so completely that he is always willing to go a step further than even his white brethren when it comes to betraying African Americans.  Thurgood Marshall must be spinning in his grave.  Kennedy seems to need to parcel out his votes between both sides.  Sadly, he chose the wrong side here.  

I think that this decision will spawn all manner of mischief, but remain hopeful that in the end it will have the same impact as similar efforts in 2012 -- an angry and energized minority community, filled with determination to thwart those who have spit on the graves of those who sacrificed their bodies and their lives to win the right to vote.

- Kennedy did deliver the goods in the DOMA case.  One gets the sense that the advocacy that was aimed squarely at him, really did the trick.  I know there was quibbling about the analysis in the decision but I thought its theme of the dignity of same sex couples and its clear attack on the anti-gay animus that spawned DOMA was both moving and persuasive.  Nothing drives the right crazier than the notion that their hostility to gays is simply another ugly form of bigotry with no place in a civilized country.  See Scalia's opinion if you have any doubt of this. 

The momenturm for marriage equality continues unabated.  Soon between a third and half of all Americans will live in states in which same-sex marriage is recognized.  At some point, the Court is going to require that these marriages be afforded full faith and credit throughout the fifty states.

If, that is, Democrats continue to control the presidency over the next couple of terms.  If not, expect more Scalias, more Alitos, and more Thomases to fight a reactionary rear guard action that will complicate deeply the path to equality.

I don't have time to address the Texas filibuster, the passing of the (likely doomed) immigration bill by the Senate, Ed Markey's win in Massachusetts, and the very long layover of Edward Snowden,  But feel free to comment on any of them.    

Sunday Open Thread

Well, the allure of the sun and sea and fine  French cooking have conspired to keep me away from the computer most of the week.  That and reading old fashioned books.  Still have a couple of more days to go and then on Tuesday head back to the world of responsibility -- hopefully it will not be one of those travel days that mentally undoes the vacation, but all recent experiences flying suggest that this will be the case.

- I thought that this New Yorker article by George Packer that bbw pointed out in comments about the political attitudes prevalent in the tech community of Silicon Valley was quite interesting and I recommend it notwithstanding its length.  It reminded me of a discussion that we had in comments a couple of weeks ago on the lack of sophistication that seems to be common in this hermetically sealed world of large company campuses and ridiculously affluent neighborhoods.  It also highlights the general contempt for electoral politics, governance, coalition building, and persuasion that seems to permeate this class -- as well as to the kind of silver bullet, technocratic private solutions that seem to hold endless attraction in this world.  It is as if none of these young millionaires or billionaires seems to even grasp that the tool by which they made their vast fortunes, the Internet, was created by the government using tax dollars. 

- I would also recommend this piece by Erik Loomis descrribing the slow motion time bomb that was and is the Taft-Hartley Act.  Passed in 1947 by the first Republican congressional majority since the start of the Great Depression (with extensive support from Southern Democrats), the law banned many of the weapons that had made labor such a force to be wreckoned with in the United States -- the secondary boycott, mass picketing, and the closed shop prominent among them.  Unions also lost control of their own pension plans (they had to be governed by boards of trustees with equal representation by management).  Most destructively, the law included so-called "right to work" laws ("right to shirk"), which helped encourage free riders that deeply undermined unionism in the southern and Rocky Mountain regions of the U.S.  It was an insidious piece of legislation -- passed over Harry Truman's veto -- that took a long time to really hit its target, but in the end has proven to be a devastating attack on union organizing and militancy.     (The only other right wing piece of legislation that I can think of that has had comparable impact is the anti-tax initiative Proposition 13 in California, which gutted that State's progressive institutions and spawned a rash of imitators.)

- So does anyone else reading pieces like this about Edward Snowden begin to feel that he is less interested in civil liberties and more invested in harming the U.S. government generally.    He is apparently fleeing Hong Kong and taking a veritable flying freedom trail to escape extradition -- Russia to Cuba to Venezuela.  Obviously the man is deeply dedicated to political liberty.  In the meantime, Glenn Greenwald is shocked that the U.S. government is charging Snowden with espionage.  Because, of course, China, Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela, all would have respeced Snowden's right to divulge sensitive information to Glenn Greenwald. 

Well, I am going to hit the gym and then the beach.  What's on your minds?   

The Cultural Hegemony of the Market

I have been meaning to comment on this recent David Brooks column in which he expresses discomfort with the fact that professional and economic success has come to essentially crowd out all competing hierarchies in the culture, be they traditional notions of piety or the working class pride that once signaled a distinct proletarian culture in the United States.  One cannot be helped but be a bit astonunded at the intellectual bad faith (although it is a Brooks specialty) at the heart of this argument -- Brooks is a University of Chicago graduate and a lifelong conservative Republican, who as a youth threw his lot in with the "Reagan Revolution."  What other outcome did he expect from the faith he adopted as a young man?

The rise of conservatism from the 1980s through the present has been fueled throughout by the worship of the market as the ultimate arbiter of things, the cult of efficiency, of (allegedly) heroic entrepeneurialism, and the need for an unfettered capitalism have been at the very heart of this endeavor from the start.  And although lip service was paid to piety and to the virtues of "real" i.e. working class, Americans, the conservative movement has fought an unrelenting war against anything like genuine working class consciousness, while exiling as well religious notions of social justice, opting instead for a kind of traditionalist religious authoritarianism as a useful political tool for organizing the rubes.  Right wing evangelical churches stood not in opposition to money, but in alliance with it, a phenomenon most grotesquely illustrated via the "prosperity gospel" preachers and churches.

The destruction of unions -- a goal of the right forever and one that has come close to fruition -- has left the nation's working class -- particularly of the white male variety -- with little in the way of positive cultural identity at this point.  Hard but skilled physical work, once a source of pride, is a continuously devalued commodity, one the market presses day after day to be cheaper and more effiicient.  It is the province of suckers, endlessly replaceable and lucky to have what the job creators deign to throw their way. 

But how could it be otherwise, when the accumulation of wealth and the veneration of those who have it is the centerpiece of our politics?  And how can anyone on the right express surprise or dismay that it has come to this?  Things have gone exactly as they hoped -- why doesn't Brooks see that and look upon his creation with satisfaction?

The inherent destructiveness of naked capitalism, its disregard for security, dignity, traditon, and morality, really should not be shocking to anyone, particularly those who proclaim themselves "conservative."  And yet all manner of right wing political observers -- Brooks, Douthat, Dreher among others -- seem puzzled and uncomfortable that what their political allies have wrought is ugly and unstable, destructive of family life, inimical to human dignity, and conducive to a vapid and trivial culture. 

I recently had the pleasure of attending the apprenticeship graduation of one of my clients.  Union members and their employers got together to celebrate the age old advancement of these young people into journeymen status at their craft, the kind of work that has been a source of pride and succor for generation upon generation.  The message to these young men was that they had mastered something that will give them a career, skills that no one can take away from them.  But, of course I thought grimly, that doesn't mean these skills can't be deeply devalued or rendered obsolete -- because that's the dream isn't it?  To get everything more cheaply and more profitably.  Mammon has kicked God's ass.  Brooks should be happy. 

Father's Day Open Thread

Happy Father's Day to all the other dads out there!  What's your son up to this summer, SC?

This dad stuff just keeps getting better.  My son (who turns 6 next month) and I were playing a fairly complex game called Mermaid Beach last night.  It's got good and bad mermaids, sea monsters, waves, seaweed, beach toys, and other fun stuff, and in the past few months he's gone from finding a game like this being a real challenge, to being a skilled player.  It's a real joy to see him take big steps forward like that.  Can't believe the kid starts first grade in the fall.

We'll be going over for Father's Day brunch with my dad later this morning, and that's kind of bittersweet: at just shy of 88, it's increasingly clear that there probably won't be many more Father's Days with him.  He's been fighting Parkinson's through most of his 80s, and the combination of that and the normal slings and arrows of old age are really starting to limit him physically.  My stepmom, who is 12 years younger than he is, is having a big 88th birthday party for him in a couple of weeks, and it's hard to miss the subtext that she's doing this because she doesn't expect him to be well enough to really enjoy a big party at 90.

My dad and I have had a very complicated relationship over the years (among other things, he once threatened to disown me, and I responded by walking out of his life for a year and a half), but we somehow found our peace with each other about a decade back.  There's still a lot we don't see eye to eye on, but those things have become less important to us than the things we share. 

So that's my Father's Day.  How are yours shaping up?

Tuesday Trivia and Open Thread

 

"Marquee Moon" - Television  (Live in 1978)

Fantastic version of this song.  One of the joys of youtube is to search things after a several month hiatus and see what pops up.  I had looked for live recordings of Television from this era and they were scant and of poor quality.  But this is crystal clear and shows just how dynamic Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd were as a guitar combo and how terrific the rhythm section was.  It was very different stuff from that being produced by their fellow New Yorkers at the time. 

- Nancy and Linkmeister both noted this post by Digby regarding the outsourcing of spycraft to private firms.  I find this sort of thing very troubling -- in the same way that I find private prisons revolting (and I think unconstitional) and the use of private armies in battle even more so.  This kind of intelligence work, if it is to be done, should surely be in the hands of people employed directly by the government that authorizes it. 

- Josh Marshall has a good and thoughtful piece about Eric Snowden and Bradley Manning and how differently people on the left react to them.    Like Marshall, I found the elevation of Manning to martyr for freedom a bit difficult to swallow (although I did not approve of his pre-trial treatment).  And I find it really difficult to understand why some people think he shouldn't have been prosecuted.  The notion that the hugely indiscriminate dumping of thousands of classified documents into the public realm by a member of the military could be tolerated seems hopelessly naive to me.   I think the issues raised by Snowden's revelations are very much worthy of debate and I am inclined to believe that we have unduly elevated security concerns over privacy concerns.  But that does not mean that I don't think we need to have some type of security apparatus -- indeed, the American people demand it (and seem rather blase about Snowden's revelations).  I'm a bit uncomfortable at the idea of a free-lancing Ron Paul supporter deciding what should be made public in such matters.

- In other news, I was pretty shocked at the size of the pro-immigration reform vote in the Senate.  I have been pretty convinced that this bill was going nowhere in the House.  The 82-15 vote makes me wonder if I am wrong.  It will be interesting to see if Boehner observes the Hastert Rule on this one.

- Media Matters shows in one handy chart why the Sunday news show not on MSNBC are completely useless.

What say you?   

So, Is The Obama Administration Going To Crack Down On Booz Allen Hamilton?

Of course not!  Don't be silly.  Just because they gave some guy who'd been working for them for less than three months access to all the details of a massive secret government surveillance program, doesn't mean they did anything they should be penalized for, nosirree bob. 

I'm sure the national security government contracts will keep on rolling in, and the money will keep on flowing to them, just as it has been for the past dozen years, despite their willingness to share a metric ton of national secrets with the most recent of new hires.

The new hire, on the other hand, will be thrown into the pokey as soon as he's extradited from Hong Kong, or wherever he runs to from there.

One system of justice for those who are too big to punish, and one system of justice for everyone else.  To some extent it's always been that way, but it doesn't seem like they're even trying to pretend it's otherwise anymore.

Open thread.

So What Do We DO About Our Surveillance State? And Open Thread

There's been plenty of discussion since Wednesday about the continuing revelations about how our government is Hoovering up a great deal of data on all of us, and has instant, unencumbered access to a great deal more data that it isn't actually Hoovering up.

Needless to say, I'm not happy about this. Largely unsurprised (OK, surprised just a little bit by the scale of it all, but other than that, not really), but depressed.

I don't really expect a popular backlash against this.  Remember what happened when we found back in 2007 or 2008 that the government had this capability, but was allegedly only collecting data where one end of the call was outside the country.  There was a brief bit of sound and fury, and then Congress responded by legalizing the program.  At which point there was outrage from the lefty blogosphere, but otherwise...crickets.

I'd like to believe that this time, the government's really overreached, and that people are upset that it knows everybody we call on the phone (landline or cell, makes no difference), and how long and how often we talk to them, and that they've also been scooping up data from Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. about us whenever they damned well please.  And the credit card data, and who knows what else.

But I'll believe it when I see it.

And let's face it, one of our two parties is totally fine with this stuff, and most of the other one (clearly including our President) is, too.  There's really nobody we can lean on to attach some consequences to politicians' condoning this data-sweeping: if we fail to support Dems in retaliation, we get Republicans who are just as bad on this, and worse on a shitload of other issues.  And the Dems running against incumbent Republicans with any chance of winning are the sorts of Dems who will also support this stuff.

It seems that the surveillance state as an issue has been effectively removed from the sphere of practical politics.

Sorry for being such a wet blanket on a beautiful Sunday morning.  I think I'll go outside for awhile.

Open thread.

Matt Yglesias Gets Shrill

No sarcasm intended - I couldn't have said this better myself:

[T]he point is that the actual deficit and debt situation is totally different from the situation that obtained at the time the Simpson-Bowles Crew was first unleashed upon the universe, and yet the political dialogue on the subject doesn't seem to have changed at all.

This is the point at which, I think, it would be helpful to stop being polite (in the manner of a think tank PDF) and start getting real (in the manner of a blog). The dialogue hasn't changed because the elites steering the discourse don't care, even slightly, about deficits or debt.

What they care about is reducing the federal government's fiscal commitment to bolstering the living standards of elderly people. The Powers That Be hate Social Security and always will because its a program whose entire purpose is to pay people money to not work. That's not a perverse consequence of Social Security. It's not a contentious partisan claim about Social Security. It's not a dubious interpretation of what Social Security is all about. That's the point. It's to give people money so they can retire with dignity. "Retire" being a fancy word for "not working". You're never ever going to persuade business leaders to stop agitating for cuts in a program that has this feature. Business leaders want people to work! At a minimum, if people are hoping to not work business leaders are going to want people to save (i.e., loan funds to business leaders) in order to achieve that purpose. Taxing people who are working in order to pay money so that people can enjoy retired life in peace is the antithesis of everything business elites want out of public policy.

That's pretty shrill, especially for Matt, but it's hard to disagree with him.

The movers and shakers of the corporate world have to have known years ago that a better employment situation would be good for their bottom line - with more people earning and spending money, they'd be able to sell more stuff and make more money - but they'd rather have millions of unemployed workers waiting to fill any vacancy, to keep the fear of God and unemployment in the hearts of the workers they've got.  Controlling the proles means more to them than more money, and they don't want a rising tide that raises all boats if it means that the workers get uppity; they just want a tide that raises just their own boats - and they've got it.

And it's hard to see their continued attack on Social Security and Medicare as anything else but another variant on that, given that we've got our debt under control, at least for the next decade or so.  They don't want the proles having a decent retirement to look forward to: a worker who thinks, "after I turn 66, I can live off my Social Security," is a worker who has some modest ability to tell his employer to fuck off, if 66 isn't that far away.  And of course if the Social Security retirement age is raised to 70, that's a few more years' worth of workers who will join the fierce competition for the handful of available jobs.

It'll mean that old people will have less money, and be able to buy less stuff, which will be bad for the corporate bottom line, but it'll help even more to keep the proles in line.

As Matt concludes:

We've done things to reduce budget deficits, but we haven't really acted to make it tougher for people to retire. But people don't like to say they want to make it hard for people to retire so instead they talk about "the deficit" and they're not going to stop.

Impeach the Senate!

Yes, I know that's impossible.  But it sure would be a good name for a movement right now.

The Senate has effectively abandoned its Constitutional responsibility of advice and consent to Presidential nominees to Federal courts and Executive branch positions. 

This has two unequal parts, as we all know:

The Republicans don't want government to work, so they block Obama's nominees by the truckload, and a good part of the reason with respect to Executive branch positions is to ensure that the government doesn't have the people in place to enable it to function.  And in the Judicial branch, they're perfectly happy to have courts whose judges have largely been appointed by Republican Presidents, and don't want to give Obama the chance to even things up.

The GOP would at least have an argument that they were providing advice and (non)consent if they allowed almost all nominees to proceed as far as a floor debate before filibustering them, but of course even that is infrequent.

While the GOP is abusing the process, the Dems have the ability to stop the abuse by ending the filibuster, at least with respect to Presidential appointments.  While it's true that the overwhelming majority of Democratic Senators favor filibuster reforms going well beyond what Harry Reid's been willing to push for so far, they unfortunately don't appear to constitute a majority of the Senate as a whole.

One wonders if drawing a greater degree of public attention to the failure of the Senate to perform its Constitutional obligations might nudge a few of the Democratic holdouts to support the 'constitutional option' that would bring all Presidential nominees to a vote.  Can't hurt.

On edit: the settings for this post say comments are open, but when I open the thread, it says comments are closed.  I hope y'all are able to comment.  If and when you can, it's an open thread, as usual.