Cogitamus

The Real Victims and Weekend Open Thread

 

"American Weekend" - Waxahatchee

It's dark now but we made it that way
with what we drink and how we think and what we say.
We degrade ourselves
and then expect help.

- The essence of right wing politics -- its very core -- for the last fifty or so years -- has been racism.  It is the tie that binds among the disparate elements that make up the Republican coalition.  The last couple of weeks, watching the Trayvon Martin trial coverage, the appalling food stamps vote in the House, and the avidity with which the "we don't need no stinkin' immigration reform, we just need more white votes" meme posited by Sean Trende has been embraced by the wingers, has been quite the ugly little show.  I enjoyed as well the "blacks are the real racists" poll by Rasmussen and this bizarro twist on it by James Taranto.   There is something about the fact that blacks were historically victimized throughout American history that seems to make conservatives nuts.  They cannot stand to have their mythical America shown to be flawed from inception.  Perhaps more importantly, they cannot stand to not be the victims, the oppressed, the beleaguered.  After all, people make fun of them on the internet.  What's a couple of hundred years of slavery followed by terrorism and apartheid versus some snarky tweets.  I don't really understand this latter phenomenon, but it is real as the day as the day is long. 

So what's going on with you all?

Monday Miscellany and Open Thread

"Can't Win" - Richard Thompson

(I was at this show at a small club in Georgetown -- a great evening.)

- The situation in Egypt strikes me as incredibly complex and fraught with all kinds of danger.  Naturally, in the eyes of John McCain (and lots of others in DC) though it is nothing that can't be solved with presidential leadership.  I am happy to have the Administration keep a low profile and not act like this is all about the United States -- it's about the people of Egypt and they are going to have to figure this out.  I grow tired of the notion that every story, every crisis, every upheaval in the world is somehow crying out for American leadership. 

- I must adimit to being continually mystified by the business model of the Washington Post in the Donald Graham/Fred Hyatt era.  In one of the most liberal areas of the country, the Post constantly pokes its liberal readers in the eye.  Today's example -- The Post Magazine has what must be the longest story I have ever seen in it -- a good 12 or 13 pages -- devoted to important American Ted Nugent. WTF?  How does one explain this in any way? 

- Well, I guess if Weiner can do it. 

- The Sunday New York Times had a piece by James Atlas bemoaning the class stratification of air travel.  And really, who is going to make the case that flying in coach today is much fun.  But there is something really tiresome about the nostalgia for air travel in the old days, when "stewardesses" had to retire at age 32 and a man could enjoy his leg room.  The reality is, that contrary to Atlas's protrayal, very few people could afford air travel in these halcyon days.  I never got on a plane until 1979, following deregulation (championed by the way by Ted Kennedy and the Carter Administration) and that was true of a huge swath of people, who now crowd poor Mr. Atlas on his flights.  There are all kinds of class issues that bother me about America -- from access to health care to quality education -- the fact that some people get to spend an exhorbitant amount to fly first class isn't one of them

What's up with all of you?

Ambivalent Tuesday and Open Thread

Let's try again. 

- I am a bit torn by the current situation in Egypt with the standoff between the military and President Morsi.  I do not think that Morsi has ruled wisely or magnanimously and I have real doubts about the ability of the Muslim Brotherhood to be a part of a truly democratic society.  But I am pretty much reflexively opposed to military coups -- even soft ones.  I could see this going really badly.  I do not envy Obama having to sort the U.S. position out here.  I would be inclined to the old lead from behind strategy once again. 

- Speaking of ambivalence, this pretty amazing article in the Sunday Post detailing the battle between Chevron and influence peddling law firm Patton Boggs was rather riveting reading.  First of all, it was a revelation to me that there are hedge funds financing plaintiff's litigation out there.  Second, I didn't know who to root for in the battle between a smug and amoral law firm -- I've litigated against them (and won) -- and a huge, bullying oil company.  Kind of like the battle between Glenn Greenwald and David Gregory.  (Okay, I side with Greenwald -- he's holier than thou and a brutal self-promoter, but Dancin' Dave pretty much embodies all of the things that are wrong with the Village press.)  Similarly, I guess I would lean towards Patton Boggs in a battle against sheer corporate muscle, but it sure doesn't seem like anyone covered themselves in glory in this fight.

- Does anyone else think that Edward Snowden might be in over his head?   

What else is going on?  (Given my bad luck with my last post, I am keeping this one short for now -- why tempt fate?) 

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.

Oh, the Humanities and More Thread

 

"Step" - Vampire Weekend

(Yes, they are a little precious, but I still like them.)  (Embarrassing typo corrected.)

- Erik Loomis brought to my attention a graduation speech given by Leon Wieseltier at my alma mater recently.  In it, Wieseltier makes a passionate case for the humanities and decries our love affair with technology and our embrace of what he describes as "scientism," i.e. the ideological embrace of science as an explanation of all things, an attack largely directed at evolutionary biology. Wieseltier seems to me in many ways to be opposing the world view embraced by my fellow Brandeis alum Thomas Friedman and possibly his page mate David Brooks, respectively two of the great popularizers of the view that "the internet changed everything" and "evolutionary biology explains everything."  Loomis believes that Wieseltier pulls punches with respect to the real culprit here, the ever-assertive forces of capital and its allies attacking the last bastion of anti-capitalist thought in America.  Although I am sympathetic to much of what Loomis writes with respect to the very real attempts by right wing politicians in some state university systems to undermine the liberal arts, I think he is unfair to Wieseltier's broader point here -- the perils of technology and the reductivism associated with economics and evolutionary biology are more than just a capitalist plot -- they are a popular way of viewing the world that saps life of much of its depth, beauty, and mystery.  In confronting the big questions of our lives and deaths and how to make sense of them, reducing the world to game theory and genes does more harm than enabling capitalists. 

What else is going on out there? 

 

This and That and Weekend Open Thread

 

"Upstarts" - Johnny Marr

Happy Memorial Day weekend to you all.  In DC it is starting off by reminding me of Memorial Days past in Massachusetts -- cold and dreary.  But I think we will see 70s this weekend as opposed to 50s today, so not too bad. 

Spent the last few days up in the City of Brotherly Love, including about six straight hours on Wednesday of doing nothing but flipping through checks, bank statements, and receipts for a client who is being audited by the Department of Labor.  (Yes, folks -- non-tea party groups, yea, even groups that enthusiastically supported the President are nonetheless subject to fairly invasive government scrutiny.)  I was noting to the clients that lawyer shows on TV simply never show the kind of tedious work that is a staple of law practice.  I propose a kind of Warholian verite, a half an hour of just watching a lawyer sit at a conference table reading bank statements.  Multiply by sixteen and you have a realistic day in the life.  It will drop law school enrollment faster than Paul Campos could ever hope to.   Incidentally, as I noted in comments below, I have also had extensive dealings with the Cincinnati IRS office regarding the continued confirmation of tax exempt status for pension plans.  I found the office to be fine to deal with but rather slow.  Most applications took about two years to process.  Again, these were constituencies allegedly favored by the Administration.  The slowness seemed to stem from chronic understaffing, something that is usually viewed as a virtue by the tea party types.

- i have generally considered Michael Kinsley to be one of the brighter lights in "this town" over the last couple of decades.  Oh sure, he's got the annoying contrarian thing going and he was knee deep in neo-liberalism, but he has quite often shown a great deal of skill in cutting to the heart of things and he has an admirable writing style.  As a result, I was surprised -- his old Slate gig notwithstanding -- to see him peddle absolute idiocy with respect to the issue of austerity and then, when brutally called on it, to double down on his position with the weakest of arguments -- roughly, I'm a good liberal and a smart person, so when I say this sort of thing it deserves respect.  Although humilitating for Kinsley -- at least it should be -- the two pieces did have the virtue of revealing the kind of thinking -- or non-thinking really -- that prevails around a journalistic set of people who are simply not very deep or analytical thinkers.  Deficit spending to stimulate the economy violates Kinsley's sensibilities for reasons that amount to a feeling -- that it is somehow just not right, a sin of sorts for which there needs to be atonement.  Kinsley doesn't really explain so many things, but chief among them is why those who have sinned -- Wall Street, the banks, and their enablers -- don't have to do the atoning.

- I have not read all of President Obama's speech from the other day on the various aspects of the "war on terror" that need to be addressed from GITMO to drone strikes to winding down involvement in Afghanistan.  What I have seen struck me as thoughtful and frank in a way that such speeches by presidents seldom are.  It seems to me that Obama has come to the conclusion that he has fully established all of the "toughness" bona fides that he needs and that it is time to try and walk back so much of what became normalized in the post-9-11 environment.  I know that progress on this front has been entirely too slow for the tastes of many on the left and to a degree I sympathize.  But I think that Obama's sense of timing is pretty good.  If he can by the end of his secod term end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, close Guantanamo, curb the militarization of anti-terrorism efforts in favor of law enforcement, and establish a generally anti-interventionist enviroment, while still being able to boast of having taken out bin Laden and crippled al Qaeda, I think he will have accomplished much.  If he can do this and also get the American people to accept that random acts of terrorism, especially of the Jihadi variety, may continue but will not succeed in turning the world upside down in the U.S., then he will have rendered a great service to the country and the world.

- Why is TPM reporting Ed Markey's tax deductions like they were a scandal?  It looks like he basically had large deductions for mortgage interest payments and property taxes.  Is there something wrong with this?  Oh, he also got $11,600 in Social Security benefits -- well, he's 66 for Christ's sake.  Is he supposed to forego the benefits that he has earned?  Really stupid stuff and very disappointing given the source.

What's up with all of you?    

Maybe There Is No Sixth-Year Jinx

One of the enduring memes in politics is that the Presidential party really takes it on the chin in the midterms in Year 6 of a Presidency.  People get tired of the incumbent, scandals inevitably reach critical mass, and the President's party pays the price.

The main objection raised against this alleged truth is: what about 1998?  The answer is always: it was a special case, what with the Republicans impeaching a President that the public supported.

But I just don't think there's actually a pattern, just the illusion of one.  Here's my argument:

I'll be 60 when the 2014 midterms roll around.  (I hardly feel that age, I'm glad to say.  Moving on...)  During my lifetime, all nearly 60 years of it, there has been only one Democratic President to reach Year 6 of his Presidency.  That President, of course, was William Jefferson Clinton, and his party lost no ground in the 1998 midterms, despite a major scandal that was the culmination of six solid years of the hunting of that President.

If one wants to bend a rule and treat Kennedy-Johnson as a single Presidency, you could point to 1966 as well.  I don't buy that: I remember 1966, first of all, and it just doesn't fit the mold.  LBJ had been President for only 3 years (and had been practically invisible as Veep), so people weren't tired of him.  There wasn't a critical mass of scandals: sure, Bobby Baker, Billy Sol Estes, but no sense that they were more than peripheral.  And the 1966 midterms were more a reversion to the mean after the GOP's Goldwater debacle in 1964, than a public upset with the President.

Meanwhile, on the Republican side, what do we have in sixth-year Presidencies?

When it comes to scandals, we have the real thing: Watergate in 1974, Iran-Contra in 1986, and pretty much everything in 2006.  And in the last case, a public that had thoroughly had enough of George W. Bush.

You've got to go back to Eisenhower to get a 'typical' sixth year.  Minor scandals by today's standards (Sherman Adams), a mild recession, a sense (that Kennedy would soon take advantage of) that perhaps the old general had lost his energy with age...if there's a genuine year-six jinx that's independent of truuly major scandals and Presidential fuckups, this is your only data point in the past six decades to back it up.

And (a) one data point isn't a pattern, and (b) 1958 was a long time ago.  The world has changed a bit since.

Not to mention: if there's a pattern emerging in recent Democratic administrations, it's to screw the pooch electorally in Year 2, and to only gain minimal ground back in Year 4 while holding onto the Presidency. 

IMHO, the real reason why the GOP didn't and couldn't blow it open in 1998 was that there was little room for them to have another blowout, after having just had one in 1994.  I suspect the same is true for Obama in 2014: the GOP picked up most of the marginal seats there were to win in 2010, and just don't have a target-rich environment in the House in 2014.  (They do in the Senate, but potential quality challengers are shying away in droves from running for Senate in 2014.)

But I don't think there's any clear pattern that says a President's party has to get its ass kicked in Year 6.  The immediate circumstances will tell, not any overarching pattern.  What the Dems have to worry about in 2014 is getting their base to show up, given that midterm voters tend to be older and whiter than the electorate in Presidential years, not scandal and sixth-year public fatigue with the President.

Can We Kick Rahm Emanuel Out of the Democratic Party?

Dave Zirin, in The Nation:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel [who is] overseeing the closing of fifty-four schools and six community mental health clinics under the justification of a “budgetary crisis” has announced that the city will be handing over more than $100 million to DePaul University for a new basketball arena.

That's pretty loathsome, even for a Republican.  But if you can do stuff like this and you're still a Democrat in good standing, then what exactly is the point of being a Democrat?  We really only need one pro-oligarch party.  I'm all for a big tent, but not one big enough to encompass the very things a party that's on the side of the people is supposed to be fighting against.

We should kick this worthless scum out of the party, the way we kicked Lieberman out.  As far as I'm concerned, he's already self-deported.

Open thread.

The Suckitude of the Liberal Media and Open Thread

 

"Winter Windows" - Sea Wolf

This is the world, this is the world we live in
It's not the one I choose but it's the one we're given

I find this one a bit haunting.

Okay, so I have to admit that the combination of the schedule and what is happening politically is just killing both the time for and the desire to write. 

I think political blogging on the left side of the aisle was largely inspired by a sense of frustration with way in which the mainstream media trivialized politics and policy all the while viewing the world through a right wing lens.  For a while, lefty blogging seemed largely therapeutic, a place of respite and solidarity from Bush apologetics and war fever.  By 2008, however, it seemed that left bloggers had actually had some impact on the world of media and that of politics.  It was a heady time and one could actually envision that journalism was altered by it as bloggers attained toeholds in places where DFHs had been treated with scorn.  But having watched the Obama "scandals" coverage of the last couple of weeks, it has become apparent that no real change has taken place.  Indeed, I read something like this and wonder if the last decade really registered with any of these mainstream clowns. 

I used to think that I would like the New York Times to survive while the Washington Post perished.  Now I wonder if there is any reason other than Krugman to want the Times to endure. 

What's on your minds?

The Freedoms You Think Are Precious, I Just Don't Understand

Bobby Jindal, who wants the GOP to stop being the stupid party, apparently things the problem with that is that it doesn't go far enough.  He wants the GOP to be the stupid and mean party.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) on Saturday will call for jail time for Internal Revenue Service officials who engaged in improper targeting of conservative organizations.

“You cannot take the freedom of law-abiding Americans, whether you disagree with them or not, and keep your own freedom,” Jindal will say in a speech at the Virginia Republican convention, according to Politico. “When you do that, you go to jail."

Whose freedom, and what freedom, was taken? At worst, someone's new nonprofit got classified as a 527 rather than a 501(c)(4).  Which means someone else didn't get to claim a tax deduction for their contributions to that group.

That's the dastardly offense that Jindal thinks someone ought to go to prison over.  We don't even know any laws were violated, but someone didn't get to claim a tax deduction on account of some bureaucrat's fuckup. 

Yep, that's the sort of thing that deserves a prison sentence in GOP-world.

I wonder how outraged Jindal got over the robo-signing scandal. where illegal acts were unquestionably committed, nobody went to jail, and the resulting loss of freedom was that ordinary Americans got kicked out of their freaking houses. Foreclosed on. Put out on the street.

No, that's not the truth.  I don't wonder that. I'm really quite sure I know.

Fuck you, you amoral little cretin.

And he's not the only one - apparently Orange John has gone there too:

His remarks echo those made earlier this week by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

"My question isn't about who is going to resign," Boehner told reporters. "My question is who's going to jail over this scandal?"

That's our modern GOP.

ETA: And it seems that some of them - big surprise! - were partisan political groups after all.

A Whole Bunch of Things Matt Yglesias Is Wrong About

Sorry for the prolonged absence.  Not only has work been insanely busy, but for some reason my office's net nanny software has been blocking CogBlog, so I can't participate here even in those few moments that I can sneak from work.  And at home, we've had a run of weekends where neither of our two excellent and usually quite available babysitters has been available to spell us for a few hours, so there's been no free time on the home front either.  (Yeah, I know how lucky we are to have two reliable babysitters on tap most of the time.  Trust me.)

As you know, I've got a higher opinion of Matt than most of you do.  He's got his blind spots, but I've also picked up a number of powerful insights from him over the years.  And when someone moves my own thinking forward, I appreciate it.

But this week has been Matt's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week, the sort that really ought to have him considering a move to Australia.  He's been bad every which way, without much to put on the positive side of the ledger, either.

Consider his squib on the state of the media:

As I've said before, when you take off the nostalgia-tinted lenses these are the glory days of American journalism. There is more and better stuff to read than ever before.

As Matt says in the piece at his own link, "This viewpoint is not wrong, exactly, but it is mistaken."  Matt confuses what's available with what's influential, and with the news that most people actually receive. 
 
Not to mention, it misses the whole point of journalism, which is to inform. 
 
Sure, the relative handful of us that are discriminating consumers of information who are willing to reach beyond the standard sources to find out about the world have a banquet of news sources that we couldn't have dreamed of 20 years ago.  
 
But most people aren't like that. They're still getting news from the networks or their websites, and that news is of pretty crappy quality. Even worse, a substantial segment of America is getting its news from Fox and from Rush Limbaugh; they would probably be better off if they didn't get any news at all. 
 
And finally, there's the question of what news sources drive the policy debates.  Given the nature of Village conventional wisdom on most issues, it's clear that bad, slanted, dishonest news sources rule in Washington. 
 
The electorate in general, and our policymakers in particular, are extremely poorly informed, and the latter group as well as much of the former believes many things that are factually wrong in ways that cause harm.
 
The very idea that these are the glory days of American journalism is, in short, ludicrous.  Matt's said something quite true about the tallest tree in the forest, but completely missed the fact that the forest as a whole is in shitty shape in ways that have consequences for those that depend on it.

Or take his sanguine take on how most people will fare in a world where robots have taken over most of our jobs:

Which means that I think the right thing to ask is what scarcities remain in robotopia. Drum speaks of "capital-biased technological change" which could lead one to believe that the returns will go to the owners of the robots. But I don't think that's right. Robots themselves will be plentiful and not all that valuable. But all the robots in the world won't change the fact that some parcels of land front onto lovely beaches. In the richer world of tomorrow, more people than ever will want a nice vacation at the beach but beachfront land will be as scarce as ever. You want to be the guy who owns that beachfront.

The problem is, the ability to create widespread abundance doesn't mean abundance will actually be widespread.  Right now, in the U.S.A. of 2013, we could have an economy where everybody's working, and where we're producing a lot more stuff than we are now.  But we're not in that alternate reality, because many see the economy as a morality play where we've got to suffer for our previous (and largely imagined) excesses, and other movers and shakers are simply dead set against a world where people have better choices than to do their bidding.  Many of the people who run our world are quite happy for our economy to run at well under peak efficiency, so long as it puts them and their interests in the driver's seat.

Robots aren't going to change that.  They're just going to increase the number of people who don't have an income of their own, and those people aren't going to be much better off in robotopia than they are now.  Maybe they can get a cheap taxi ride in an autonomous car, but they still need a place to live, and they can still get foreclosed on.  They still will need food, and while maybe robot-grown food will be slightly cheaper than migrant-grown food, the reality is that labor is a pretty small share of the cost of the food you buy in the grocery store.  Robots won't help much there, either.  And robot-produced clothes probably won't be much cheaper than those produced by Bangladeshis in deathtrap sweatshops.

Unless we change things politically, Robotopia is likely to leave a lot of people on the outside of abundance, looking in, and new morality plays will be spun to explain why we shouldn't help them.  Matt just kind of assumes the political change, but such change is always extremely hard when the interests of the people are on one side, but the interests of big corporations and the moneyed classes are united on the other side.

And finally, there's his post, "Seasonal Guest Workers Don't Create Low Pay, Low Pay Creates Seasonal Guest Workers."

I did want to respond to this cranky email received by Kevin Drum:

Farm laborers in Australia make much more than American ones. And yet they still have a functional agricultural sector. It turns out that allowing companies to import an unlimited number of foreign workers desperate to work at a wage of epsilon will create shitty working conditions and low wages!

I of course know what Drum's correspond means here, but he's dead wrong. It's not the foreign workers who create shitty working conditions and low wages, it's the shitty working conditions and low wages that make people willing to serve as imported labor. Prohibiting workers from working in the United States keeps them stuck in even worse working conditions for even worse pay.

OK, so low pay elsewhere creates seasonal guest workers here.  No doubt about it.  But they still pull down wages here.  If you paid people $20 an hour to work in the fields, I guarantee you that plenty of Americans would be working in the fields.  And it is the availability of people who are much more desperate than American workers are yet, and who are willing to work for much less than American workers will work for, that results in a system where farm labor pays well under what even poor Americans are willing to do it for.

Matt adds:

Now, again, many people appear to take the view that immigration policy should be made without reference to the interests of actual or potential migrants. That's an interesting debate to be had. But people shouldn't talk about the economic consequences of immigration without so much as mentioning the consequences for the migrants. The impact of keeping seasonal farm workers out of the United States will be to take a very poor slice of the world's population and make them even poorer. I think it reflects something of an impoverished imagination if one can't think of any smarter strategies for benefitting low-skilled Americans than ones that involve simultaneously harming the economic interests of the global poor and the interests of America's food-eating middle class.

Actually, I do think aiding immigrants or guest workers in a way that undermines the well-being of Americans is ultimately self-destructive, even for the immigrants.  There will always be far more people who want to come to the U.S. than we can help by allowing them in.

Since I don't have an impoverished imagination, here's my proposal: we allow immigration and guest workers at times of full or nearly full employment, when low-skilled Americans have no trouble finding better jobs than working in the fields.  Then when we bring them in, everybody benefits.  And the rest of the time, American farmers will have to pay what it takes to hire those workers who are already here, which will reduce unemployment, minimize the impact of recessions, and get us back to full employment faster, so that we can bring immigrants in to participate in a vibrant economy, rather than make a sick economy even sicker and increase the leverage that employers have over workers.

There were more ways that Matt was wrong this week, but these three suffice too well.

ETA: I just remembered that this is Matt's birthday.  He can consider this his present. :-)

And on a more friendly note, happy anniversary, Kevin and Marian Drum!

Monday Miscellany and Open Thread

 

"Love is the Law" - The Suburbs

Hey, time to check in.  Sorry for no Mother's Day shout out -- I was pledged and duty bound to tend to chores around the homestead and then it was off to dinner.  (The son, sadly, was up to his eyeballs in finals preparation, so it was Mother's Day sans child.) 

- As expected, the Minnesota Senate passed marriage equality today and Governor Mark Dayton is expected to sign the bill into law tomorrow.  It's one of the few political things that is making me happy these days, what with all the Benghazi and IRS bullshit permeating the airwaves.

- Jamelle Bouie has a chilling piece about the possibility of the Republicans trying to impeach Obama on the strength of these bogus scandals.  It would be madness of course, but  madness is exactly what I expect from these assholes.

- Jamelle also has a succinct piece on racist researcher Jason Richwine.  See also TNC, who puts Richwine's work in its ugly historical context. 

- Also at the Prospect, a good take on the "upside down economy" by Harold Meyerson. 

- But in the interest of always leaving 'em laughing, I have to say there has been a treasure trove of fun with Thomas Friedman in the past few days.  First, the great Taibbi piece in Rolling Stone seeking the best Friedman porn title.  I then discovered the Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Generator, which is inspired. And then for dessert, Tom Tomorrow does "Thomas Friedman, Private Eye."  An embarrassment of riches. 

What's on your minds?

 

And Now Minnesota Joins the Parade

 

"Jungle Love" - Morris Day and the Time (Minneapolis Natives)

So the Minnesota House just passed a marriage equality bill, two days after Delaware recognized same sex marriage.  The Minnesota Senate is expected to the pass the same bill on Monday and Governor Mark Dayton has pledged to sign it into law.  It's just part of an amazing manifestation of legislative support for the love that once did not dare speak its name.  It's a fantastic development.

A couple of thoughts.  Having just spent Monday at a memorial service for a member of a longtime gay union -- one where the couple had recently taken advantage of marriage equality in DC -- it heartens me to see the love and commitment that many of my friends have enjoyed being recognized as fully the equal of heterosexual unions, because it is.  Quite simply it is.  The bonds -- and the burdens -- of a lifetime are actually pretty much indistinguishable, regardless of sexual preference. 

Second, I wonder if these dramatic democratic developments leave the Supreme Court more inclined to render a narrow verdict in the Prop 8 and DOMA cases? 

And finally, although my emotions associated with this progress are by and large joyful and without malice, there is a small part of me that is also reveling in the crushing of our enemies -- I'd say 90% large-minded happiness, 10% spite-driven euphoria.  This small part of me relishes the marginalization of those on the other side, savors the alienation they must be feeling, finds happiness in their spittle-flecked rage as it dawns on them it truly isn't their country anymore.  Slowly -- and then not so slowly -- they are consigned to the ghettoes of reaction, the disreputable neighborhoods of ignorance and prejudice, offering a world view that has come to be seen as an embarrassment in polite company.  I revel in their exile.

There is still work to be done and the likelihood that the marriage equality movement will hit a temporary wall at a certain point, once the blue states are converted.  But the wall will be temporary -- the generational momentum will ultimately overwhelm even the most reactionary bastions.

I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it during my lifetime.  The triumphs of the civil rights movement, remarkable as they were, never fully eradicated the racial animus that to this day remains a feature of much of American life.  One senses a sea change here that is truly transformational, with a younger generation coming to maturity that is truly lacking in homophobia.  It's a great thing. 

Thomas Friedman's Dystopia and Open Thread

 

"Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side" - Magnetic Fields

As you know, Thomas Friedman irritates me more than just about any human being alive.  Oh not because he writes the stupidest or most dishonest stuff that is featured in the Times -- Douthat, Brooks, and Dowd all top him in that category.  It's because he writes the stupidest shit that more moderate people mistake for wisdom.  And really, the man is a monumental dumbass, a clueless enabler of our rapacious corporate culture and the inside the Beltway ideology that sustains it.

Last week, Friedman issued another magnum opus extolling the virtues of individual choice that technology and the free market are providing to us, which he titled "It's a 401(k) World" as if that were a good thing.  In it, Friedman suggests that the economy of the day requires us all to pass a bar exam of sorts and that if we do, presumably pennies will rain from heaven into our 401(k)s.

Now just so any Randist types reading this don't get any false ideas, I've passed two bar exams (2 for 2 and retired undefeated) and have a pretty healthy balance in my own 401(k) -- I have not been buried by Friedman's economy, for which I feel rather fortunate.  But I don't mistake this for virtue on my part.  I see a lot of luck, the good fortune to have had enough disposable income to fund a retirement in the most horrible of investment eras, and enough professional knowledge because of what I do for a living to have avoided horrible mistakes after initially being crushed in the 2008 onslaught.  (I have 100% of my retirement money in stocks, as I have had through my entire career -- I lost 41% in 2008 alone and probably from the height of the market in 2007 through its low point on March 9, 2009, I was down about 60%.  Fortunately I hung in there and recouped my losses -- but if the market hadn't bounced back I would have been screwed as so many people were.)

Friedman glibly assumes that we are in some golden age of opportunity:

What’s exciting is that this platform empowers individuals to access learning, retrain, engage in commerce, seek or advertise a job, invent, invest and crowd source — all online. But this huge expansion in an individual’s ability to do all these things comes with one big difference: more now rests on you.       

If you are self-motivated, wow, this world is tailored for you. The boundaries are all gone.

Seriously -- "the boundaries are all gone."  Try telling that to twenty-somethings all throughout the developed world as they struggle to find work.  Try telling it to the 600 or so poor souls crushed to death in Bangla Desh as a result of their societal wager in favor of wealth versus worker safety -- talk about the world being flat.*  Basically the world that so excites the husband of the billionaire heiress -- Tommy is much more a traditionalist than you might imagine -- is one in which there is zero job security, zero retirement security, and a smaller social safety net as a result of grand bargains that Friedman and his ilk long to see struck.  What does this world offer to the vast majority of people -- not just the average person, but pretty much anyone who has to work for a living?  Here is how Friedman describes it (seemingly with approval):

Last week, The Economist quoted one labor expert, Peter Cappelli of the Wharton business school, as saying that companies now regard filling a job as being “like buying a spare part: you expect it to fit.”

People, by and large, do not want to have a life filled with economic adventure, much less being treated as spare parts.  Most people crave some sort of stability and security in their work lives, the oppornity to have a career, to settle down somewhere, to not be an eternal and ever-disposable free agent.  The economy is not some capricious creature of nature, but rather a man-made construct that should, ideally, serve to make our lives better.  The notion that we should embrace a world in which all of us are going to have to continuously reinvent ourselves and claw our way from job to job as careers disappear and free agency becomes the norm is a nightmare. 

As someone who has spent the last 28 years working with defined benefit pension plans, I can assure you that whatever their flaws, they have proven vastly superior to the 401(k) in terms of fulfilling their intended purposes, i.e. the retirement security of millions of workers, while 401(k) plans have by and large been an abject failure.  It is a mark of just how out of touch he is that Friedman views the 401(k) as any kind of societal model.  (And the idea that it is a great thing for the average person to be the investment manager for his or her own retirement is just nuts.)

The "flat, hyperconnected" world that Friedman imagines as some sort of golden age of opportunity is far more likely to prove to be a Hobbesian nightmare.  My suggestion to all of you is do as Tom did -- marry rich.  It beats the hell out of enhancing your brand every day. 

*Sarcasm.   

Weekend Open Thread

With a little Friday Frank for you.

 

 

I'm about to go be a chaperone on my son's class field trip, which is just a walk along the Chesapeake Bay, a stone's throw from the kid's school.  What's up with you guys?

Open thread.

Lazy Sunday Open Thread

It looks like another sunny, perfect day in the DC area.  We've had banana pancakes and bacon, and later on, we're taking the kid to the playground to meet up with some of his friends.  He lost his first tooth last night, and is looking forward to showing off his gap-toothed grin to his buddies.

Finally got some tomato plants in the ground yesterday afternoon, and the kid helped with that, too.

What's up with you?

More Thoughts About the Freedom to Work in a Collapsing Building

Note: what I originally intended as a comment on SC's post turned into something that I thought was worth front-paging.  But I've turned comments off for this post, so that the discussion can be all in one thread, the one that SC's already started.

Matt:

what happened in Bangladesh is a tragedy and a human disaster, and to the best of my knowledge it's also quite literally a criminal disaster under the existing laws of Bangladesh. The perpetrators ought to be punished. More broadly: Bangladesh ought to enforce its laws. Even more broadly than that: Bangladesh's citizens deserve honest and uncorrupt government rather than government that's excessively under the sway of the interests of apparel factory owners.

Which is the long way of saying: things over there ought to be better than they are, and that ought to just magically happen.  We've got no role in making it happen, and if it doesn't happen, it's not our fault.

To which I say: bull.shit. 

U.S. corporations are outsourcing this work to places like Bangladesh because they don't want to pay U.S. (or even Chinese, fercryinoutloud) wages, nor do they want to abide by U.S. (or even Chinese) safety standards.

They do this so they can make big piles of money even in the middle of the worst world recession in the past 70 years, and still not have to put people back to work here in America, and in exchange for going along with this, we get to pay a few bucks less for our sneakers and toaster ovens.

It has everything to do with us, and if we let ourselves be bought off that easy, then shame on us.

No, of course we can't tell the government of Bangladesh what to do.  And saying it ought to have a government that's not excessively under the sway of its monied interests (when we can't even seem to manage that trick ourselves, alas) is saying that things ought to fix themselves.

But we Americans are, in theory, responsible for the behavior of American corporations.  I would hardly expect them to impose, say, the standards of the Americans With Disabilities Act on a Third World factory that their goods are produced at.  But they can damned sure make sure that those factories aren't deathtraps.

And here's how I'd propose to enforce it:

If a workplace in Country Y that helps produce goods for Corporation X has a disaster resulting in multiple deaths from one incident, then Corporation X loses its rights to import goods produced in Country Y, in whole or in part, for three years.

If, during those three years, it's found that they have been having stuff worked on in Country Y, then having it further worked on in Country Z and having it imported from there, then they lose their importation rights from Country Z for three years, and the clock is reset back to zero on their three-year import moratorium from Country Y.

I know it's a pipe dream, since we can't even seem to make life difficult for companies like the one that owned that facility in West, Texas that blew up last week, since monied interests have corrupted our government almost as surely as they've done that of Bangladesh, with a big hand from our bought-and-paid-for press (h/t Charles Pierce).

But it's the sort of thing we could and should be doing.  Because the Bangladeshi factory worker values his life just as much as Matt Yglesias values his own, but as SC has already said, he's forced by desperation into choices that Matt never will have to face.

There are some choices that no one should ever have to face.  And maybe we can't fix that for everyone in the world, but at least we don't have to have a hand in perpetuating that reality, for nothing more than saving a few bucks on sneakers.  People, even people on the other side of the world, shouldn't be dying to preserve the American standard of living.