Move Something (Anything!)

“This ain’t the time or place for you to prove somethin’, cut the star-gazin’ yo move somethin’”

One of the great, and terrible things about this moment is that because everything and their mother is under attack (geddit?), there are about a million things, wherever you are, that you can get involved with to participate in the great upsurge that is going on.  I hope that the movement that is being stirred by the fight for Wisconsin public employees’ rights to workplace democracy also embraces and supports the numerous other resistance movements that were initiated by attacks against both their funding streams and very integrities in the rush to fiscal ‘austerity’.  That’s certainly the indication I get from Van Jones, but let’s hope there’s some follow-through.

I say this because we have seen, over the last couple of years, no shortage of assaults on not just isolated organizations, communities, and individuals, but assaults on our sources of power, mobilization, and movement capacity, what Chris Bowers calls the ‘Progressive Feedback Loops‘; assaults that have left our ability to respond to further assaults weaker than before.  The destruction of ACORN, the witch hunts against Van Jones and Shirley Sherrod, and all the attempts to degrade and undermine Obama and progressivism in general, was not just about taking out random institutions.  It was about knocking the wind out of progressive organizers, it was about demobilizing and taking out the engines and fuel supplies of the movement that is so much more than Barack Obama.  And so far we have not seen the rush that we see now to support, on a national level, those key communities that are under attack, all at once.  We are all in this together, and they’re attacking us all for the same reason- to diminish our ability to fight back.  Let’s remember that going forward, and know we can’t afford to lose a single piece of progressive infrastructure.  With that being said, here are just a small slice of the struggles that are going on, and a small sample of the ways to get involved:

“The Movement for ‘Hope and Change’ has a Rare, Second Chance… All Who Love This Country Need to Do Everything Possible to Spread the ‘Spirit of Madison’ to All 50 States”

If they can, we can

Weeks ago, I wondered if the spirit that had transported Egypt would catch on in America, where, for many reasons, it is equally urgently needed.  And we are so blessed that that looks to be happening.  I’ll admit that earlier, at the time, I would have thought that given the crisis our country’s youth faces (from unemployment, climate change, health insecurity, deportation, incarceration, debt), and the energy with which we delivered Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008, the spark would be lit by my generation again.  But if the fire that’s spreading across the world has any single lesson it’s that you won’t be able to guess where it catches on next.  So thank God for Wisconsin, for Madison, for Egyptian pizza-benefactors, and for the public employees unions out there.  You find yourselves in excellent company.

From The Realm Of Hungry Ghosts To The Blessed Community: Who Do We Want To Be?

“So I admit it seems I’m no citizen functionin’, but the common law works against my every flaw”

A while back, in my early academic exploration of environmental justice (thanks Crystal!), I saw a graph that really blew my mind, both because the immediate implications of the graph were horrifying, and also because it was the kind of data point that has the power to deeply shift the terms of a number of debates by both undermining conservative cynicism about human nature and character (ie: poverty as a result of character defect or essential inferiority, and the primacy of base ‘self-interest’) while also tying together seemingly discrete issues of health, environment, justice, education, planning, poverty, and equity.  At once, the graph was a disturbing indictment of current conditions while also serving as a sign-post towards a better approach to addressing social ‘problems’.

U-6 Unemployment- Way Worse Than Your Garden-Variety Unemployment

I’ve read articles for a while, particularly by the consistently interesting Leo Hindery, that kept citing an unemployment rate about twice as awful as the ‘official’ unemployment rate, but I wasn’t sure exactly what this ‘real’ unemployment rate really was.  Thanks to Andy Kroll, I now have the link that explains it all, just like Clarissa:

The U-6 measure of unemployment counts “Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force“, or, if you don’t speak wonk: folks who don’t have a job or have less of a job than they’d like, who were forced into that situation by the terrible job market.  And it covers over one in six Americans.

So, for future reference, this is what I, and others are talking about when we talk about ‘real’ vs. ‘official’ unemployment (which just covers folks who don’t have a job and are actually looking for one).  ‘Real’ unemployment covers a broader group that could be pretty viably considered to be oppressed by economic circumstance and lack of options, if you want to look at it that way.

Peace,
Joel

ps. Totally unrelated note, check the About page.  As this blog has changed in scope, I thought it was time for a new About page that fits my current lack of clarity about the best approach for ‘normal’ citizens(as opposed to political junkies and ultra-advocates)to take in responding, if they even feel as though they need to respond, to the political stagnation and slow cycle of preventable collapse it feels as though we’re dangerously close to entering.  I hope it stays relevant for a while.  Also, if you think my mission sucks, let me know.  I won’t necessarily change it, but I might work to convey it better.

pps. I joked on Facebook, but in all honesty, if this isn’t the perfect metaphor for the United States as an insecure and immature young adult deeply out of touch with itself, I don’t know what is.  It’s sad, really.

Who Are We, Really?

Good post up on OpenLeft by Mike Lux, The Mystical Center.  When talking with more moderate friends, I’m constantly reminded that America is a conservative country, that leftist policies are inaccessible and unpopular, that while we can all wish that Democrats would be leftier, at the end of the day they really need to be centrist in order to get elected and bring about incremental change.

And I’ll concede that there’s an element of truth to that, yes, we do have to balance some of our rhetoric and our more pie-in-the-sky proposals (alas, single payer, we hardly knew ye after ye were locked out of the initial conversations and forcibly removed by police) to remain palatable.  But I will continue to challenge the idea that America is necessarily a conservative country, and assert that liberalism, when described in terms of policies and beyond ambiguous rhetoric, is much more palatable than conventional wisdom allows.

Because when you look at the polling data Mike quotes in the article above, it should be clear that the vaguer the question, the more conservative the response (for example: ‘did Obama/Democrats try to have government do too much, or should they have tried to have government do more?’)  Whereas when you ask questions that deal with specific policies that might be labeled liberal and conservative, it seems clear that there is strong support among so-called ‘swing voters’ and ‘the center’ for the more liberal position (‘Swing voters supported a message about challenging China on trade, ending subsidies to corporations that send jobs overseas, and stopping NAFTA-like trade deals over a message about increasing exports, passing more trade agreements, and getting government out of the way by 59-28′).  We’re conservative only inasmuch as we call ourselves conservative, but when it comes down to what we believe, it turns out we’re a lot more damn liberal than we thought (collectively).

This doesn’t solve anything, really.  We’ve been having the tired conversation about why we keep getting reamed despite pushing for policies that obviously favor the majority interest for an exhaustingly long time.  But that’s where the challenge lies, is recognizing that we should have a strength (popular support for progressive policies) that we don’t, and figuring out how to really maximize that strength.

A lot of this has to do with the fact that, when your party doesn’t actually follow through on the popular progressive policy (like those mentioned above), it’s hard to run on those achievements and half-hearted values.  A lot of this also has to do with simply terrible communication that this is where we actually stand.  And finally a lot of this has to do with a conventional wisdom that I’d argue we all have a responsibility to fight- that we are a conservative country and so the whole thing is hopeless.  No way.  No freakin way.

Peace,
Joel

NEW SERIES, Redefining America, Episode I: Tolerance And Mobility

This one’s for Vanessa.

In my new series, Redefining America, I take cherished qualities we hold dear and talk about how our policy and public opinion belie those qualities.  As with Profiles in Awesome (which, with rare exceptions a la Bernie Sanders, profiles ordinary people and organizations doing the work that keeps our country moving forward), I hope for this series to embody Howard Zinn’s spirit.  One of the most important things he brought us as a historian and thinker was self-reflection on a national scale- directly addressing the ways in which we bear responsibility for things and thus have the opportunity to affirmatively take action to make them better.  Our national myths only delay the point of time where we confront our issues head on.

Today’s episode highlights what is to me a disturbing degree of disdain for the working poor, as contrasting the US and Europe:

Before taxes, incomes in the United States are more unequal and more volatile, which would seem to call for more, not less, redistribution. Some argue that America has less redistribution because disadvantaged Americans find it easier to climb out of poverty, but poor Americans are actually less likely than poor Europeans to move up the income ladder.

We concluded that the redistribution gap between the United States and Europe could best be explained by America’s greater ethnic heterogeneity and more conservative political institutions. Countries with more ethnic diversity generally spend less on social programs.

Before welfare reform, US states with more African-Americans were significantly less generous to their welfare recipients. My colleague Erzo Luttmer found that people in the United States who live around poor people of a different race are more likely to oppose welfare spending. There is a long historical literature, written by scholars like C. Vann Woodward, documenting the role that racial divisions have played in blunting the appeal of populist redistributors in the United States and elsewhere…

Over decades, the success of the left in Europe and the right in the United States has led to wildly different beliefs about the nature of poverty and success. We found that 60 percent of Americans thought that the poor were lazy, while only 26 percent of European share that view. Fifty four percent of Europeans think luck determines income; only 30 percent of Americans concur. These differences don’t reflect economic reality. The American poor work longer hours than their European counterparts. They instead reflect the long-run ability of politics to shape public opinion. Institutions, like proportional representation, that empower the left do a good job of explaining which nations have opinions associated with the left, like the view that chance determines success.

A year ago, I wondered if the Obama victory signaled the declining significance of race and an American lurch to the left. But countries change slowly. In 2009, a Pew survey found that only 29 percent of Americans think that success comes from forces outside their control, as opposed to 52 percent of French respondents and 66 percent of Germans. No one should be surprised that American voters, even in Massachusetts, pushed back against a progressive agenda. By world standards, we are a conservative nation. Those who would change that fact need to dig in for a long fight.

I would actually disagree with the author’s final conclusion.  I’d say it’s more likely that yes, conservatives were empowered in Massachussetts but that that speaks as much to the fact that many of us are more progressive than the Obama agenda, more of us are disgusted by what are really conservative approaches to economics, and that progressives tuned out because 1) it was an off-election, 2) Coakley sucked, 3) the DNC sucked.

As with my post on conservative identity politics and bipartisanship, it’s not so much that we are a conservative nation as that we are a contradictory and often-selfish nation (which the article above affirms by showing how heterogeneity- living with others- decreases support for social spending, which is perceived as benefiting others).  But I may be arguing semantics at that point.

Peace,
Joel

Follow-Up On Teabaggers And Race: On The Link Between Anti-Taxes And Anti-Freedom

Paul Rosenberg reflects on the picture I pointed out in a recent post, and expands on a point I was trying to make- that social and economic policy is often tied up intimately with racial privilege and bigotry, and that they are historically connected.  Here’s the picture, as a ‘refresher’:

What Dale doesn't realize is that he's only the latest in a long line of douchebags to link their economic freedom with others' economic disenfranchisement. Silly Dale!

But on to more, uh, incisive commentary:

But even without exhaustive searching, I’m pretty darned sure that this point hasn’t been made a whole lot:  Slaveholders themselves are the origin of America’s anti-tax/anti-government tradition. This history has been well documented by Robin Einhorn in her book, American Taxation, American Slavery, which is a penetrating look at what policies were actually implemented by which politicians…

[From Einhorn herself] People who lived in freer societies (little or no slavery) with more democratic governments (annually elected local officials) were more comfortable with taxation than people who lived in less free societies (lots of slavery) with less democratic governments (appointed local officials). Liberty and democracy actually produced better and higher taxes in early American history!

This stikes at the heart of privilege, and illustrates the major problems in teabagger and libertarian ‘freedom’ rhetoric.  What does freedom even mean when it does not provide protection from oppression by private and institutionalized interests?

Happy weekend!

Peace,
Joel