Is America post-nonsense?

Any society which logs hundreds of hours asking itself whether it has issues with a particular topic probably has some very serious issues with that topic.

Adding insult to comedy

If Al Franken unseats incumbent Republican Norm Coleman in the Minnesota Senate race, it will be the funniest part he has ever played.

The shit: One day closer to hitting the fan

Don't quit your bidet job

Companies are grappling with a new kind of systemic risk according to the Wall Street Journal: a younger generation of workers who aren't interested in climbing the corporate ladder.

A new study suggests Japanese firms have some of the least ambitious younger workers. These employees do not feel the added pay or "prestige" of promotion is worth the costs of working longer hours or juggling extra responsibilities.

This has nonplussed upper managers and labor consultancy groups, who rely on recruitment for the health of their firms. Some companies have even pursued legal grounds to fire employees who refuse advancement.

The liberal media

Conservatives complain that the media is biased in favor of Obama, and this bias is held up as further evidence that the nation's central institutions have been infiltrated by "liberals."

The major media are undoubtedly biased toward Obama, but this should not be a problem in itself. Every organization will exhibit some institutional bias reflecting its ownership and whatever operational mandate may fall into the hands of executives. In the case of major American news outlets, these consist of several large corporations, integrated into even larger conglomerates, which distribute information from centralized operations in New York or Washington, D.C. to the rest of the country. They take different positions on different issues like anybody else.

If conservatives want to take a principled stand on the harmful effects of media bias, they would oppose the centralization of news which inevitably leads to one or two perspectives being imposed on everyone, and inevitably arises from the deregulated corporate model. Short of making this argument, conservatives merely gripe that the quasi-monopolies which distribute news don't have a different bias -- namely, whatever conservatives endorse. But because American conservatism advances the corporate model as its ideal, it cannot make a principled argument in favor of fairness. Fairness would mean introducing a range of competing viewpoints into the "news format," something that does not happen under monopoly conditions.

Scary, Pt. 1

The Grand Poobress, leading the store meeting at my retail gig, this morning said: "If you're going to go through the trouble of being here, you might as well take the opportunity to participate." She took issue with the fact that nobody wanted assemble within earshot.

Two thoughts.

First: The meetings are mandated by the company, so "the trouble" can be laid squarely at their feet; nobody wants to get up at 4am so they can present themselves to their colleagues at 6am. I wake up at 5am, but I live four blocks from the store -- hardly the case for most.

Secondly, "participation" in this case amounts to little more than applauding at regular intervals and -- at least theoretically -- listening to what is being said by management. Personally, I can't help but immerse myself in the quality of daydreaming I crafted in my formative years of public education. To my knowledge, nobody of interest speaks unless presented an "award" by management -- something I have blessedly avoided thus far. And, for the record, it depresses the hell out me when interesting people speak, because they are forever thanking all the wonderful people around them. That's roughly my estimation as well: people are the coolest part of every shitty institution devised by people so far. It saddens me when what's cool about people is conflated with what's shitty about institutions.

This note brought to you by 2/3's bottle of Yellow Tail Shiraz. Yellow Tail: "Yep, it's cheap."

In consideration of what really matters

If you look at politics as nothing more than a grudge match between two or more celebrity straw men, it is only natural that you won't want to look for very long. This is called "electoral politics," and it works by making people feel excluded at the same time it motions wildly for their support. It is a party hosted by some of the biggest frauds in the country, and it is moderated by some of the smallest minds. You will be bowled over by charts and graphs and mathematical formulae which capture the spirit of democracy all in numbers. The corpses of statesmen-past will be propped upright and paraded about the public mind, their droppings a delicacy among the pundit-caste. Every cable news anchor will clench and strain until they are quite literally filled with feces. By the time the polls close, you won't want to think about "politics" for a very long time; that is American democracy, by design.

On the other hand, if you look at politics as a glass half-full of Trappist ale, then there just might be enough left for you to get pissed and stay pissed.

Howard Zinn: Taxes!

The loudest sound

Do you want to know the noise business makes when Americans ask that they commit to the health of the nation?

"Socialism!!"

Turn on talk radio in the next two weeks and you will find the echo deafening.

Welfare-states boast greatest income equality, social mobility

Income inequality has grown substantially in many developed nations in the last 20 years despite continued economic growth, a new study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has found. Denmark and Sweden registered the smallest disparities in national income wealth, while the United States recorded among the largest (see graph, bottom) in the 30-country survey.

Reasons for the widening gulf between rich and poor include "changes in the labour market" which have eroded the quality of employment opportunities for low-skilled workers. Wealth redistribution via taxation has helped defray living costs associated with necessities, but may not be adequate as a substitute for good jobs. The OECD suggests that "welfare-in-work" programs -- receiving an income subsidy while working crap jobs -- could help make up the difference between what employers are willing to pay and what is required to mitigate poverty, at least in the interim before adequate employment is realized.

Howard Zinn on "change"

Of Human Energy



When you think about it, commuters, oil executives, seagulls -- we're all people. People just trying to get by in this topsy-turvy game called "climate change." Sure, maybe we've had one too many babies. And maybe we've bought one too many petroleum-powered entertainment systems, or, the con-artist formerly known as "SUV." But let's not play the blame game or point fingers, because, after all, we're in this together. Help us help you to not be fuck-ups anymore.

Yours truly,

The Oil and Gas Lobby

Chomsky on the economy

A note about managers

The constraints that managerial divisions place on people often make it very difficult for individuals to "do the right thing" toward each other. That holds true in any institution where the individual is expendable: when the demands of power lean one way, and ethical necessity another, you put your own safety and security in jeopardy by doing what's right.

Good managers -- in the ethical sense -- will know enough about how their organization works to be able to maximize opportunities for supporting others without unduly exposing themselves to risk. But ultimately they do take a risk -- substantially more so than the people around them who merely "do what they're told." On the other hand, the "followers" are usually least prepared when the moral bankruptcy of their enterprise is exposed (this is actually happening all the time, but only occasionally on a scale that makes it obvious to all), and that is because by following they have denied themselves the defensive benefit of independent thought and ethical awareness.

It's worth noting that there are many popular allegories for this that come from other systems, like Schindler's List, concerning Nazi Germany; or The Lives of Others, a new film about secret police activity in the former East Germany. These films are important in what they reveal about the systems they describe, but they are universally relevant in depicting the moral challenges individuals face in all hierarchies of power, especially when the individual is entrusted in some way with the maintenance of that hierarchy. Naturally, the fact that the stakes were so high in Nazi Germany or the former GDR only contributes to dramatic impact, but there is no reason why analogous stories could not come from contemporary corporate offices -- less extreme by degree but equally objectionable; and, unlike abuses elsewhere, they are things that impact our everyday lives.

Noam Chomsky on voting

Are you down with OCD?

Last week one of my middle-management betters approached me with a bit of constructive criticism with regard to one part of my job performance. I was in wholehearted agreement with him, and immediately replied with, "Yes, I agree."

He then restated himself two or three times, evidently for lack of anything else to say; or perhaps because repeating oneself from a position of authority paves the way toward consensus, in contemporary business theory. Arguments from superiors aren't meant to be sound; they are meant to remind everyone where power resides.

Fun factoids

this from Wikipedia:

Labor, i.e., human work, is considered to be an economic factor of production, alongside capital, land (including raw materials) and entrepreneurship. That is, reducing the cost of the resource contributes to the corporation's net income.

Ah, human work. What other purpose might it serve if not wholly dedicated to "the corporation's net income?" Personally, I would like give back some of my income just to see the corporation do better. Oh wait, I guess that is my stock plan. But, really, I would like forfeit some of my recent raises. I am not greedy. It is just my union that coerced me to go from $8.50 per hour to over $16 in 9 years. I wish I had been in a non-union company all along, where instead of $1 raises each year you get a beautifully choreographed song and dance -- and "pride" in being a "stakeholder" in the company. That is nice.

Rolling Stone: Embedded with the Taliban




Here is a picture of some our enemies in Afghanistan. It is hard to bomb them without killing the neighbors, but perhaps that is the price of freedom.

The anti-union tool kit

Learn the ABC's of surveilling your employees, controlling their movements and conversations, and serving up the "straight scoop" on unions with the informational video available here.

Taking the fight to Afghanistan

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has instructed US commanders in Afghanistan to offer apologies and compensation to the relatives of civilians killed by US actions there. The move came after intensified US and NATO airstrikes on suspected targets resulted in growing numbers of civilian dead over the past few months. US military officials have stressed that the air campaign strategy, which utilizes pilotless drones as well as conventional air power, is necessary without an increased commitment of ground troops in the region. Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, has condemned the airstrikes, and suggested that the resulting civilian casualties undermine popular support against the Taliban.

Attacks on Colombian labor leaders

Spreading the wealth around

That some issues don't receive the attention they deserve at the executive level within institutions owes mainly to the fact that institutions are designed in the interests of their designers -- not so much anybody else. If you cannot count yourself part of the former group, you will have to think creatively about how your concerns can "coincide" with the concerns of executive power.

For example, "poverty" was not mentioned in last night's presidential debate for several reasons. The first is that the United States government was not designed by poor people to address their needs. It was designed by European aristocrats to protect their property claims against 90% of the population, who weren't allowed a role in government based on criteria including race, gender and whether they owned any property in the first place. While the demographic scope of the electorate has since expanded, economic power has narrowed correspondingly, leaving huge parts of policy deliberation outside the public arena altogether (e.g., why we haven't adopted anything more efficient than the internal combustion engine in over 100 years of technological innovation.)

Secondly, poor people abstain from electoral politics in disproportionate numbers -- and they are further discouraged from voting in the event they should become curious. In Philadelphia, this takes the form of papering neighborhoods with "notices" that any outstanding parking tickets, fines, utility payments, or criminal history will be subject to official scrutiny, which in turn presupposes the possession of a government-issued photo ID -- something which poor people are more likely to live without.

But perhaps even more fundamentally, poor people, like most Americans, only "vote" every several years, whereas large economic actors like corporations -- the "owners" of our day -- exist in perpetual dialogue with government: they vote every minute of the day with dollars and influence.

So it is not surprising that public concerns regularly lose out, including morally urgent problems like poverty. People who spend most of their time chasing paychecks in order to survive tend not to have the time or the money to petition their representatives. This is how the system is designed, and we can each ask ourselves whether it is for our benefit.

In consideration of the McPalin mob

A recent spate of McCain fans behaving badly evokes sympathy on my part, because they are among those who have paid the highest price for the country's Republicanism of recent years. The great transfer of wealth from public budgets to private bank accounts under the guise of "less government" has pushed many working Americans into varying degrees of indebtedness, in order that they might have access to necessities like food, housing, transportation and fuel -- or what business commentators, in the wake of financial implosion, now like to call "living beyond your means." Add to this the export of industrial sector jobs which propped up the "blue-collar middle class" and drop child or two in the old Mesopotamian grist mill, and the full contours of rural, white agony are thrown into sharper relief.

So the anger is real and justified. The targets are merely the scoundrels-du-jour of the Republican Party mercenary media branch; the kind of local talk radio hosts who make their living by delivering rural audiences to business advertisers, or FOX News programmers who do the same at a national level. It's worth remembering that John McCain was the scoundrel that incurred the wrath of his party and its conservative base until it became clear he was the last man standing in line for the presidency. Four years ago it was gay marriage and "the French"; now it is ACORN and Bill Ayers, and, of course, Barack Obama. The villains change daily. But they aren't the inventions of John McCain or rural communities.

Should distressed populations know better than to trust the people who seek them out, affirm their anger, and identify the culprits as liberal elites? Should they fact check Rush Limbaugh's sources after working three part-time jobs in one day? Naturally, they should; the reality is, they won't anymore than you or I will fact check everything we hear on CNN or read in the New York Times after working all day. And we have those fuckers to thank for Iraq, among other jaw-dropping lapses of journalism. So the job of countering fiction with fact is left open to us.

Americans can't afford Christopher Columbus

This may be a day late and a penny short, but the best thing I can say about Christopher Columbus is that he was Italian. I like Italians.

One of my grandmother's closest friends is a Hungarian woman who escaped Nazi capture when an officer's dog yielded to her affections. To this day, she loves animals but is deeply skeptical of humanity. Also, nobody can say a bad word to her about the United States.

The story goes that Hitler had a strong affinity for the US government's policy toward native Americans, whom he felt occupied a space analogous to the "Jewish question" in Europe. These communities could not be reconciled with the demands that the "national progress" spelled out; as such, they were deemed obstacles to be removed, in either case. But while the United States was constrained only by distant oceans as its borders, Germany was beset with hostile neighbors on all sides, and suffered for want of "Lebensraum" -- or, "living space." As such, the Jews could not be left to rot in a corner, as the native Americans were so ably undone by the industrious Americans, but required a "creative" solution unique to the particulars of Europe at that time.

The good news is that my grandmother's friend, the survivor, will talk about it all -- quite openly -- to anyone who will listen. The bad news is that she doesn't find many takers.

Noam Chomsky: Anti-democratic nature of US capitalism is being exposed

from the Irish Times:

[T]he US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a "fundamental right", unlike such alleged "rights" as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as "letters to Santa Claus", "preposterous", mere "myths".

The conception of the inalienable right of wealth to do as it pleases, without any obligation or debt to the society from whence it came, is forever being repackaged for consumption by the average American. It is a very old song, a lullaby set to induce the kind of intellectual coma required to believe that owning a car or home creates an economic kinship with the conglomerate legal entities which effectively own the nation -- its industry, its resources, and its government. It's one of the clearest examples of how the whole concept of "private property" confuses endlessly what should be a transparent demarcation of interests: owning personal property does not threaten to infringe on the basic ability of others to survive; but owning productive property -- like factories and farm land and the resources they require -- can ultimately affect everybody in a society, thus warranting some manner of "shared" ownership.

Similarly on the subject of taxation, "cutting taxes" for lower-income workers gives them a few hundred extra dollars back -- naturally helpful -- but pitifully insufficient to buy their own health care plans, their own road maintenance, their own fire department and police services, their own libraries, or their own private schools. What across-the-board tax cuts get them is $1000 back on which they are expected to meet every basic human need imaginable. This is why the very godfather of "free markets", the Scottish economist Adam Smith, would be slandered as a communist if American business programs ever taught his actual views, including the moral necessity of progressive taxation. The tax which supports the maintenance of democratic governance was, in Smith's words, "a badge of liberty" -- evidently a sentiment lost on the McCain campaign, which ridiculed Joe Biden for the suggestion that paying taxes might constitute a "badge of patriotism."

Enjoy the show.

Making banks a public utility

Pining for the day when America becomes France

Something we're all going to hear a lot more about in the event of an Obama win is the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). For the American business community, it is probably one of the most significant bills to come along in the past 30 years, because it would make unionization a much simpler process, with less opportunity for employer interference.

From the employer's perspective, "America will become France," in the words of Home Depot founder, Bernie Marcus. France happens to have paid maternity leave, however; and I hear that's cool if you want to, like, raise your kids and feed them at the same time. It's one of the benefits people enjoy when their tax money is spent on basic public needs -- as opposed to merely making things go kablooey in far distant lands, or ensuring that the have-mores can play the stock market when they aren't cockblocking wages via executive compensation and shareholder payouts. (Just to be kind, we'll omit the kinds of public outlays required in the event of a wholesale financial Armageddon -- which happens every once in a while, too -- and restrict our criticisms to the normal, healthy functioning of a pro-business economy.)

American business is always in an awkward position when it comes to discussing its basic motivations. You will never hear any high-level executive or government hireling say: "Fuck man, we need more cash-money for bitches and bling!" You will only hear them say: "Shit dude, we're only trying to create jobs up in this piece!" And yet, no company creates jobs without an implicit guarantee (or, at the very least, expectation) of profits derived from that expenditure. In practice, the shittier the job created, the greater the profits derived. This is why unions suck from a business perspective: they impose limits on the shittiness of jobs created. In the early 20th century, this meant being able to work in a meat processing plant while enjoying a much reduced probability being processed as meat yourself. Today it might mean having some variety of health insurance for your family, even though you didn't go to college and don't deserve it -- at least from an employer's perspective.

True to form, business is framing their argument against the EFCA as a defense of workers' fundamental rights -- in this case without even disclosing their identity or self-interest in the legislation:

The deceptively titled Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) threatens to shake loose one of the cornerstones of democracy: the private-ballot vote.

For over 70 years, workers have exercised this fundamental right to privacy in deciding whether to unionize. EFCA seeks to disrupt the private ballot and use in its place a public system in which a worker's vote will be anything but private. Under EFCA, workers could be required to publicly declare their vote in front of union leaders, fellow employees, and management. This invasion of privacy is not only unfair, it is just plain un-American-and it opens the door for coercion and intimidation from both sides.

Anybody who has ever "done time" in a place of employment can tell you how long anything told in confidence to one co-worker will last before it becomes the common intellectual property of all. There is no "private option" at work unless you express nothing that you want kept private.

The same is true of union organizing drives -- especially true since perks and privileges can be distributed by managers to their subordinates in exchange for info on pro-union employees. These employees can then be sacked on whatever pretense required; and they can be sacked before the private ballot process ever begins. This is why the private ballot option is so useful to employers: organizing simply can't be done in private, and the more time employers have to disrupt the process, the better. EFCA addresses this disadvantage by establishing union legitimacy through a simple collection of signatures, or, "card check."

But if anything is evidence of an unwillingness among business concerns to negotiate with employees in good faith, it is the kind of treatment, like above, which purposefully aims at deceiving the public as to where workers stand on this issue.

Parity

In China as it is in India:

Rural land disputes, usually with local officials and their corporate allies and stemming from the ambiguous legal position of peasants' rights, have been identified by the government as a leading cause of social instability and riots.

Yeah, it's funny about republican, representative-styles of government -- especially when it comes to putting words on paper that are to be the "rules" we all live by. It's almost as if certain people are more "represented" than others, by virtue of qualities that aren't supposed to be political, at least in theory. Equality under the law is equality under the law, right?

It's really a universal phenomenon. In the old communist bloc republics, it was sardonically captured in the expression, "Some citizens are more equal than others." That one never goes out of style among the casuists at the Wall Street Journal -- who of course are guilty of exactly the same thing. If bullshit was a condiment it would be spread evenly over the breakfast bagels of every capital city in the world.

Propatainment & Infoganda

A local talk radio program asked listeners whether health care is a "right" or a "responsibility," invoking a question from last night's debate. The verdict seemed to be that health care is a "responsibility" which one meets by saving money to cover medical expenses. One caller said she had done this to address a tooth ache since "it's not government's job" to do, I was left to presume, anything people might reasonably expect of it.

The hosts welcomed the consensus. After all, in Canada people have to "wait" before they can receive free care. And look at France's stagnant economy! Why, people even come from far away lands just to receive unrivaled American care.

It struck me how consistently the callers seemed to articulate only the preoccupations of the very rich. It's inconvenient to wait for a service when you have the money to buy it, or an insurance plan which covers it, for example; and whatever will become of our gross national product!? And this from the same folks who borrow themselves into bankruptcy when their "health savings account" is put in the ring with a more serious contender than tooth decay.

It's generous that people would risk their health for the consumer prerogative of a privileged few, but I wonder how many realize just how generous these attitudes really are. They may be giving up more than they know, and for the comfort of those who are not themselves.

Yahus

Former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is moved by "a Reaganesque belief in low taxes, small government and free markets."

Reagan believed in small governments so much he tried to start his own all through Central America. They believed in low taxes, too; that is, unless you count being strung from a tree a kind of "tax." And doesn't it take putting a heckufalotta folks in jail before markets can truly be free? Yes, bringing democracy to others isn't easy, but it's a lot safer than letting people practice it themselves.

Sound familiar, Bibi?

News digest

This courtesy The Angry Arab News Service:

Trying to save her from herself, Fox News interviewed Palin again...to allow her to answer (or recite memorized answers) to questions that she could not answer on CBS last week. Among her answers, she said that she read the Economist. I believe that. And Bush reads Hegel every night before he goes to sleep. It shows on both of those two. In French presidential elections, they have debates. In the US, they have theatre and gimmicks. In the last presidential election in France, they asked both candidates during a debate this question: what is the percentage of energy that France receives from nuclear reactors? Can you imagine such questions in US "debates"?

Also brought to my attention was a NYT review of Thomas Friedman's new book, which included the suggestion that someone "remind Friedman that the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data.'" I second that revulsion.

Problems of modern management: when people resist

Here is a flavor of what the multinational corporation brings to the developing world, as summarized by today's Financial Times, and now myself; in this case relating to India:

An automobile manufacturer cuts a deal with local government in India to build a plant on land that is owned and cultivated by small farmers. The government offers the farmers compensation for their land, but many farmers refuse, either because the compensation is not agreeable, or because farming is their traditional livelihood and they don't want to give it up for factory work.

Eager to push forward with the "democratic development" of their domain, the government confiscates the farmers' land on the corporation's behalf. This prompts an unhappy reaction from the farmers, who stage large protests. The government blames the unrest on left-wing, middle-class interlopers who do not have the farmer's interests at heart: they merely harbor a reflexive animosity towards big business.

Western press outlets cover the story for weeks, marveling at the notion that simple farmers would not jump at the chance for wage-work in a modern industrial facility producing an innovative new vehicle.

The protests succeed and the company backs down. The farmers have their land but it is not the same, having already been developed for industrial use.

Western observers lament the tragic consequences the Indian farmers have surely brought upon themselves. If only they had not had a mind to question the high aspirations their corporate and government betters held for them! Now they will amount to little more than simple farmers on damaged land, rather than proud auto-company employees with a taste for consumption -- or so the story goes.

All this and more, in Asia's "greatest democracy."

What Sarah Palin means

The liberal problem with somebody like Sarah Palin ultimately comes down to class. The Democratic Party is not a convincingly working class party. Moreover, they are so unconvincingly working class Republicans can literally pluck a woman with children from the seat of local government and invent a conservative national hero out of thin air. It is a testament to the political alienation felt by poor, white rural communities that by simply acknowledging them, no matter how cheaply, you gain their loyalty.

The Democratic Party solicits this important constituency through economic policy, but insofar as unionization has declined throughout the country, there is no effective mechanism for getting this message out: there is no space on CNN for in-depth reporting on the merits of progressive taxation, for example, like there was in the labor publications which existed 100 years ago. Simply put, the labor movement is the progressive working class, or least is the best hope for it; and losing independent labor unions has always precipitated losing the working class to the narrow appeals of racism, bigotry and jingoism that the owners of industry are always dangling before them, in standard divide-and-conquer fashion.

As labor union strength has declined, the Democratic Party has turned increasingly toward big business to make up the difference, with a corresponding shift in policy commitments. Democratic Party culture has merged more completely with corporate culture, with its premise of educated managerialism, wherein those with the most education and experience are conferred with executive authority over everybody else. In essence, it is the same idea that underpins many Americans' conception of the office of the Presidency, leading to the kinds of squabbles that existed between the Obama and Clinton camps; and having more recently erupted around the selection of Sarah Palin for Vice President, who is "merely" representative of much of rural America -- and thus inadequate in any significant leadership role -- as this philosophy of power would hold.

Meanwhile the Republican Party apparatus speaks to the white lower classes everyday, primarily through talk radio, and it makes guns and immigration and national defense and gay marriage and abortion and religion and every other position that induces apoplexy among American liberals the starting point of every conversation. In other words, it leads with their concerns and interests as they stand now, and in doing so acknowledges them, rather than writing them off as a lost cause, deserving of their lot because they have not taken the necessary steps to "improve themselves" with an education they likely can't afford, or otherwise must risk their lives in a combat zone to acquire, so that someday they might not be mere hillbillies with little to offer society -- and subsequently permitted to ascend to some enviable position of power over others.

Naturally, people from this group take a different view, believing they have positive attributes in spite of whatever might be beyond their immediate reach; and many of them see these positives in Sarah Palin. Their counterargument to educated managerialism is values-based leadership -- "values" being something a person can have regardless of whether they have a master's degree, and, from a religious perspective (namely, theirs), is probably more important anyway. The Republican Party has found common cause with this perspective insofar as it helps mask their economic agenda, which is explicitly geared toward redistributing wealth to top income-earners by fleecing everyone else. The Democratic Party, however, is still too mired in its own class affiliations to know how to approach the white, rural working class except, ironically, at the level of policy, which they have no way of explaining except through their union go-betweens, who may reside at the blue-collar level but not in sufficient numbers. The Democrats may want to manage "on behalf" of lower income people, but that is only a further example of their "elitism," as the Republican-sponsored narrative goes. Barring a complete economic catastrophe -- the likes of which Obama presently enjoys -- the Republicans are winning these arguments, and will continue to do so in the future, until either the labor movement is sufficiently revived or the Democratic Party culture otherwise shifts in such a way that is not so rigidly constrained by class prejudice.

A sober reaction

Nice work by Sarah Palin. She was strong, confident, quirky and cute. She winked and smiled and used endearing colloquialisms. She made the audience laugh when she gave "shout-outs" to third graders, and crap like that. Most importantly, she managed to do it for over an hour, without really saying anything about policy. Ultimately, that was all she needed to claim success; and she did it with the combined power of her strange bouffant-bang-mullet headpiece.

Joe Biden is a pretty uninteresting, old-school politician. It does not help that the man has no color whatsoever, reminding me of Jack Nicholson finally reposed in The Shining. He should dye his eyebrows or something.

Biden was able to say more about policy, but most of it was terrifying to me personally. Bombing Bosnia was not my idea of a humanitarian intervention, and the fact that we aren't sinking billions of dollars into Afghanistan like we are in Iraq strikes me as a good thing. Finally the man mentioned LIHEAT, kitchen tables and so forth, to good effect.

People like who they like, and tend not to look generously at the other side. In principle, I like neither, so there is no similar conflict. I think Palin did more to rally her side than Biden, mainly because she held her own against a veteran and was less conventional in her deliveries. Biden, for his part, did not embarrass himself or his party, a big accomplishment. I don't know that either would have had a big impact on independents or undecideds. Some would have been drawn to Biden's "substance" and others to Palin's "charisma."

Not at all what I was expecting from Palin, and I must credit her for that.

La fin du monde

A neighborhood watering hole is rumored to feature the Vice Presidential debate this evening. Whether the occasion proves itself high-entertainment or a turgid bore, it will not matter very much because I intend to be drink-soaked.

I'm going into the charade with some sympathy for Sarah Palin. The woman is clearly not seasoned in national-stage shystery, and may well be approaching some order of mental illness, as her flailing party's shock therapists press ever more determinedly down into her small-town psyche. Frustrations reportedly abound: toward her handlers, for not letting her "be herself"; toward herself, for not being sufficiently malleable as clay; toward the party leadership, who regard her family as a nuisance and a distraction, keeping them at bay. And then there are the high-level dissenters who perceived her as a liability from the beginning. If any of this is accurate, I hardly see how Palin will be anything other than a tightly-wound ball of terror, especially in light the humiliation doled on her in casual conversation with Katie Couric. But this is why I feel generously towards her: the price we pay on the road to power is not often understood in advance, often to our regret.

And then we have Joe Biden, the Mt. Vesuvius of misspeak. Here's hoping for hilarity all around. Cheers.

Gee, that's rich

After decades of casting everything the government does with "your" tax money as a communist plot, now the Republican party can't muster enough votes to use the government when they need it most: to save their own institutions.

This is the gamble conservative politicians take by arguing that government solutions to anything are all wrong, all the time: When the private sector finally throws itself under the bus, Americans expect "personal responsibility" to be the order of the day.

If Americans lack the sophistication of thought required to accept that they be held to a different standard of accountability than the people running their country, perhaps that is because they've never been leveled with in the first place. It would appear the Republican party has caught its tiger by the tail.

Their prosperity, and ours

Chrystia "[Sarah] Palin is a true feminist role model" Freeland turns her powers of observation to the economy today when she writes: "[T]here is no denying that the financial crisis, and the Treasury and Federal Reserve's response to it, mark the end of a long, prosperous era of American laisser-faire capitalism in its purest form..." And, in fact, she is correct: there is no denying that there is a financial crisis to which the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve have responded. Unfortunately, there are plenty of grounds for denying everything else.

First of all, there has been no lasting example of "laisser-faire capitalism in its purest form" anywhere ever. For the last three hundred years there have been various moves on the part of private collectives to run national economies for their own short-term gain, with varying levels of government intervention to cope with the social problems (inequality, poverty, social unrest, "externalities," etc.) and macroeconomic challenges (monopolies, market failures) that inevitably arise.

What is packaged and sold to the ordinary citizen as a kind of self-sustaining, rationally-based system of supply and demand under the banner of "laissez-faire" or "the free-market," is really just a malignant tumor that will -- indeed -- grow tremendously until it kills its host, as history bears repeated witness. Profound government intervention in the economy is in fact the only mechanism by which "market forces" haven't completely destroyed themselves in practice, which is why all modern "capitalisms" incorporate some greater or less degree of it, by definition. As such, it is pointless to ask whether government should be involved in the economy; the appropriate question is on whose behalf should the government intervene. And this is because the government is intervening all the time.

With regard to the long era of American prosperity brought about by business groups being "free" to pursue narrow concerns with government help: it's true that this has brought about an unprecedented prosperity for the tiny minority who have wrapped the "national interest" around their needs. Yet, presumably, the "laisser-faire capitalism in its purest form" to which Freeland refers is the same period to include: the gradual break-up of the middle class; skyrocketing inequality; the illegal attack on unions; wage stagnation; the spread of unmanageable work/schedule demands; the adoption of new part-time/temp work standards; increased diagnosis of anxiety, depression and attention deficit problems as related to job insecurity; the general deterioration of public services and community welfare; and a recognition among younger generations that they will never exceed the standards of living achieved by their parents -- in other words, everything that has happened in the last 35 years or so, orchestrated to the delight of the American business classes, who took their tax cuts and made enlightened use of them by speculating so wildly they upended their own meal-ticket and now insist the rest of the population pay the bill -- thus "requiring" more social cut-backs because they kicked the country one more pass down the path of bankruptcy. Well, that's prosperity for you.

In lieu of a New Deal, a raw one

Congress and the various branches of US industry have jerry-rigged a formal response to the ongoing crisis of capitalism, with fingers crossed that it might steer the country back to business as usual.

Plenty will be said about this in the near future, with no shortage of in-depth consideration of every last detail, which, after all, is the job of the major media vis-a-vis the privileged constituencies which advertisers hope to ensnare. This is a crisis that affects the people and organizations that manage the economy of the country, so it's going to be headline news forever until it either subsides as a problem or is transcended in importance by some other concern. In this respect, it is quite different from something like, say, poverty, which is merely a crisis of the poor, and therefore an accepted reality, barely noted. Financial disasters, like most disasters, may hit the poor the hardest, but that is not the motivating impulse behind this intervention.

There is some talk among liberals that the current financial crisis coupled with an Obama win may lead to a New Deal-style resurgence of public policy geared towards public need. Unfortunately, this misses what the public was doing at the time of the Great Depression to force an otherwise business-loyal government to recognize basic public concerns: many were trying to overthrow the economic system altogether. There was widespread socialist mobilization, including a socialist party based in the American union movement; and they were organized enough to articulate an alternative vision of how the country could be run, many components of which were incorporated into the New Deal and in turn precipitated the greatest expansion of the middle-class in American history.

Where is that today? Contrary to liberal aspirations, change does not come from one good man (or woman) pulling the levers of state power. It comes by diffusing power sufficiently so that it extends into the lives of those affected by it. That means people have to prepare themselves to act on the issues that matter to them, firstly by educating each other on what they are, and secondly by having some practical method for addressing them. This is what was happening on a large scale in the 1920's and 30's which led to significant economic gains for "the rest of us" in the decades to follow, but which doesn't seem apparent today. If so, it is nobody's fault but our own.

"Once in a century" rip-off

Bill Gates saves Africa

The Wall Street Journal has "philanthropy" feature today discussing a UN/Bill Gates/Son of Warren Buffet plan to "fund [an] agriculture market for overlooked small [African] farms" -- which is basically a euphemism for "keeping the majority of the population from starving."

The article makes some remarkable statements, among them:

Small African farmers, who provide most of the continent's agricultural output, have never had a reliable market to sell their food. Many of them are in remote areas with little access to transportation rely on archaic networks of small traders who set prices.

Small African farmers have never had a reliable market to sell their food. They grow their crops, no one wants any of it -- and this has been the basis of African civilization for thousands of years. Making matters worse, they live in "remote areas" -- like inside Africa -- instead of in port cities or other locales favored by global commerce and tourism. They have to rely on "backward" methods of getting their product to market, since they don't own trucks and in some cases barely have roads, which they apparently require since they don't "have markets" of their own to begin with.

Enter Bill Gates, et al., who will generously fund a UN program to buy food from small African farmers for reuse as humanitarian aid for other starving people with no means of livelihood and no access to viable markets. Thus Bill Gates will create them.

The fact is that Africa has always had markets, the problem is that they are flooded with mass-produced foodstuffs from wealthy, industrialized countries. People go hungry when they can't sell what they grow to their neighbors, because their neighbors are buying imported food for less than the cost of domestically-produced food. It also doesn't help that they are in competition with "large African farmers," or, foreign corporations that monopolize land tracts, retooling them for the production of whatever crop will bring the highest export price, regardless of whether it is efficient or sustainable to grow them in a particular climate or region, or whether it is something the locals can eat (e.g. coffee).

These are industrial trade policies pursued by wealthy nations on behalf of whatever business groups dominate their economies, and, subsequently, their governments. That business may not be so good for the small African farmer is the direct result of the fact that it is so good for industrial producers in more powerful countries. But since mass famine can lead to political instability and chaos, business is not in favor of mass famine. It is rather in favor of low-intensity famine which it can lament as an unfortunate reality of the world we live in -- unless, of course, there is some way to integrate small producers into the global supply chain which neither 1) imposes business costs, or 2) infringes on the sovereignty of business operations.

In essence, it is left to others to clean up the mess made from profits. It is government's job to at least make certain that the mess does not become so unmanageable that the very making of profit is jeopardized. This is as true in financial catastrophe as it is in human epidemics. It is also a notable fashion among those who have already played the profit game so successfully that they leave themselves few challenges except to parlay their wealth into high-profile, headline humanitarianism. African farmers can't do it, but Bill Gates can -- never mind that African farmers are systematically denied the chance. Naturally, Bill Gates throwing money at the poor is better than Bill Gates doing nothing; but, insofar as state-facilitated profit got us into this mess (and Gates knows its treasures better than most), it is hard to look at its greatest beneficiaries with special appreciation when they seek to further capitalize on a sudden interest in others.

About voting

Voting in the United States is a lot like selecting your dinner option at a wedding reception. Much is made of the fact that you get to choose your meal. Yet there are very good reasons why people don't limit themselves to chicken or pork every time they contemplate eating: these staples can't hope to express the full range of what appeals to people about food as a subject. They also impose on those who would prefer to eat neither.

Much like food, people have a broad diversity of interests on the subject of social relations. Having two parties dominate this field at a national level inevitably imposes ridiculous constraints on anybody who wants to participate in civic affairs. The whole breadth of divergent human inquiry is crudely recast into a mold set by the deciding class, which in our case incorporates both "liberal" and "conservative" views: there are corporate executives who think "creationism" is BS and want reproductive rights for their daughters, and there are members of the US Chamber of Commerce who love shooting guns and don't believe in global warming. What they share is an understanding that they own the country; everybody else's role is to fall in line on the basis of any issues peripheral to this consensus.

We are left to decide whether we are "chicken" people or "pork" people, "red state" or "blue." It is little wonder that so many of us choose to abstain altogether.

The diagnosis of a dick

Rush Limbaugh had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week which concluded with the statement, "We've made much racial progress in this country."

I always like hearing such optimism coming from those most invested in a difficult subject. I mean, when you hear the name "Rush Limbaugh" what else comes to mind if not "racial progress?" It's as if the tobacco industry came out with a study which said, "We've made loads of progress with lung cancer in this country!" Or if John McCain's prostate declared Sheryl Crow's mammaries healed.

The moral of the story here is that even the truth can be wielded as a weapon, all things not being equal. It's true: we've made much racial progress in this country. So what hurdles has Mr. Limbaugh's race overcome lately?

A note on personal responsibility

"Personal responsibility" is one of many songs sung by the powerful to the weak as a way of diverting attention from the basic truths that keep one at an advantage over the other. If you listen closely, you will hear the music everywhere, because there is no place where power does not require perpetual defense and deflection against the natural tendency of the weak to perceive that their weakness is not wholly of their own making; that, in fact, the powerful have marshaled most of their advantage in the name of ensuring that the weak remain subordinated to their needs.

That the powerful devote so much of themselves publicly to subjects like personal responsibility owes to the fact that, in the end, the powerful do not live by the same rules as the weak. For example, the self-proclaimed "masters of the universe" justify their monopoly on economic life by arguing that markets make have made it so, all while living daily with an implicit government guarantee precisely because they monopolize the economy. "We can't let the economy get out of hand, after all" -- which is just another way of saying "out of the hands of those who have monopolized it." "Just think of what will happen to Main Street," which is certainly a valid concern when Main Street is beholden to the arbitrary whims of international finance, with little to say about it one way or the other. The rule holds true whether it is the airlines or the auto industry or industrial agriculture or banking or finance: whoever owns the productive wealth of a nation is ultimately in a position to demand that the government preserve their ownership in the face of whatever malady may arise.

Well, these are the conditions we have accepted, and so it should not come as a surprise when government by and for the possessing classes inevitably intervenes on their behalf at everybody else's expense. This is the very definition of "personal responsibility" under the circumstances: the responsibility of the working person to sacrifice for their "masters" when times are good, even more so when times are bad; and, as if that was not enough, to devote additional time in serious consideration of how their personal failings have contributed to their plight. The worker files for bankruptcy and is still liable for her debts; now she is responsible for industry's as well.

Throw the captain overboard

It must be one of the least controversial notions in history that people who assume a position of unchecked authority over others tend to use that position for their own self-interest at least as much -- though usually more -- than they do for whatever official purpose the position implies. For Americans, the concept is probably most familiar when related to the undertakings of government, due largely to the scrutiny that particular institution came under in the formation of their country, as well as its continued influence over so many dimensions of social life, right up to today.

But as ripe an occasion for abuse of power that any large, centralized government will always provide, the modern nation-state is only one avenue in US society where substantially undemocratic practices arise. In fact, much more than merely "springing up," such practices are in fact the basis of contemporary private enterprise, which is premised on the notion that a minority class should be entrusted with the fundamental workings of the society -- what is invested, what is produced, how it is distributed -- in the pursuit of short-term gain for themselves, in accordance with a theory which argues "public gains" will inevitably arise from "private vice." The public may impose constraints on the scope and nature of this activity through government regulation, but otherwise has no say in the matter. Whereas government is at least potentially democratic -- it can be influenced through participation -- the private sector is essentially unaccountable to communities, to employees, to the planet and to future generations; and, increasingly, even unaccountable to shareholders, for whose benefit the whole project is supposedly rigged; except, that is, through the indirect, johnny-come-lately hand of government, and at the level of consumer purchase -- also a very winding road when it comes to enforcing good behavior, though occasionally effective.

Well, that is a generous reading of theory. In practice, one need only scan the headlines of past weeks to see where responsibility for such a weighty entitlement -- the management of the economy for your own short-term benefit -- ultimately lies: in trillion dollar payouts from the public to their economic stewards for the explicit purpose of re-establishing their authority over an economy they lost by making it self-destruct.

So far removed from any sane conception of transparency, the underpinnings of our economy as it as been permitted to run are being handed back to these people because nobody else is in a position to offer an alternative. The public has never been invited to think about, or even understand, these issues, and the government has been paid to keep out of the way. A minority class has assumed the helm, and they have run everybody else aground, either by forcing them to toil longer and for less when times are good, or by setting fire to the ship altogether when they finally achieve their goal of eliminating any restraint that might stop them. Meanwhile the planet and its inhabitants are in various ways hurtled towards extinction, in pursuit of short-term gains for these few. Under the circumstances, one might be forgiven for doubting whether those who steer the economy even understand their own self-interest, let alone anybody else's.

Category Dumb

Once the gale-force winds of Hurricane Greenspan have quieted down and the task begins to survey the wreckage, the men of best quality will want to know: what went wrong?

Since systems of power don't naturally tend towards useful introspection, one should expect many rounds of useless exhortation.

John McCain, whose ride to the White House on a plate of pig-lips and moose-patties has begun to look premature, may well have christened the narrative destined for widest circulation: that Wall Street traders fell prey to the wrong "values," transmogrifying a Christly-inspired consumerism into a debased "casino economy." Purged of this secular slant toward the balance-sheet -- through a course of rigorous Vietnamese internment, perhaps? -- Wall Street will be ready to receive the "change," or possibly the "reform," so desperately required.

Well, this is all par for the Republican course. But now elements of the market clergy are singing a similar tune. The Financial Times culls a management professor at Wharton who notes that leadership and big-picture thinking are lacking in the financial markets -- i.e., qualities that are outside the scope of what the job demands, and more likely than not stand in direct conflict with "success" in that industry. The problem is not how success is defined, but that individual traders and their leadership did not adequately second-guess their entire profession, fall behind, and inevitably risk their livelihood for the betterment of human society. Yes, now there is a realistic prescription for preventing systemic failure in the future.

A note on American corporatism

If there is any broad lesson to be drawn from the current spate of federal-corporate bail-out betrothals, it would do well to include an acknowledgment about the kind of economic system we really have: when push comes to shove, it is government that comprises the economic foundation of modern society, not private enterprise. Without some kind of government framework, private enterprise inevitably self-destructs; in the present case, this has transpired because rules established after the Great Depression were set aside in a "financial modernization" act in the late 1990's which effectively deregulated the industry beyond what it could sustain. Now disaster has struck, it is the government, not markets, which is sifting the fallout.

The centrality of government as the facilitator of material goods -- being the insurer, the lender, the provider of last resort -- is never lost on the classes which benefit most from the relationship, which is why so much is expended on their part in lobbying the government hourly while simultaneously declaring to everyone else that it is "the problem" which we all need "out of our lives." After all, if the average American came to view the government as the only game in town when it comes to re-establishing an eight hour day, five-day week; or securing affordable health care and a guaranteed retirement income, our system of "socialism for the rich" might instead become socialism for the average Joe -- and, unfortunately for the rich, Joe outguns them numerically by a considerable margin, especially when the system is marginally democratic.

This goes a long way towards explaining the (largely successful) undertaking on the part of American business and even government to promote "anti-politics" -- or, the widespread revulsion for and abstention from politics -- among Americans generally, who are groomed to admire corporate conglomerates as some bizarre example of "individual liberty," while forfeiting a real individual prerogative to participate in the governance of their own affairs.

Observer

Now that bankruptcy is poised to edge out heart disease and adventurism as America's leading export, gentlemen of distinction want to know where the smart money is going next.

Capitalism's man on the street has a hunch that big Pharma will continue to exceed expectations for a handsome return. After all, if people were stressed-out and depressed when times were good, just think of the possibilities for the future.

Play it again, Uncle Sam

Maestro?

A note between jobs

When the worker loses her job, Wall Street cheers. When the investment banker loses his shirt, the worker has lost her home. How many homes for every shirt?

This is why I have no infatuation for society "managed" by capital; I throw my lot in with the majority.

Wall Street succumbs to 30 years of Wall Street Journal editorial page advice

The fourth largest US investment bank declared its insolvency today, the latest development in an ongoing financial crapstravaganza which former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has called a "once-in-a-century" event, with Americans enjoying the best seats in the house. The collapse of Lehman Brothers came after government-led negotiations with industry failed to secure a buyer, owing to Wall Street's bad health generally and Uncle Sam's refusal to sufficiently bankroll the transaction to their liking. Initial optimism that Bank of America might intervene on Lehman's behalf was scuttled when the country's largest commercial banker walked away in a deal solicited by Merill Lynch; similar scrambles were reported to be the practical outcome of consultations held ostensibly on Lehman's behalf.

Averting an acronymn-inspired apocalypse

To all appearances, cultivating melanoma at the Jersey shore this week in a bid to "get away from it all" very nearly made me miss the near-miss wholesale collapse of the international finance system, as the subject was not broached in either of the John Stewart or Stephen Colbert reruns I consented to in my bedchamber after dinner. Luckily, NPR made some mention of it all on the drive up; but, as often happens when NPR covers important topics, their academic expert in this case seemed scarcely able to explain the situation to himself, let alone to an audience who had never heard of government sponsored enterprises (GSE's) of a sort like the Federal National Mortgage Association, or "Fannie Mae."

The situation was not helped by an interviewer who insisted that "when we hear the word 'nationalization,' people like to think of Hugo Chavez!"; and asked "doesn't China own Fannie debt?" or whether or not we really have a "free-market" economy now that government is parceling bailouts like prescription painkillers at happy hour; all of which strikes me as neither here or nor there when the bottom line is that central agency responsible for buying up the vast majority of our home mortgages drank -- or more to the point, was permitted to chug -- the same subprime Kool Aid as the private banks who are in the game solely for profit.

True to form, congressional Republicans now assail Fannie for ever having a public purpose in the first place and point to privatization as the solution -- because we all know how well that end of the capital markets is working out. You see, the whole problem is government meddling in the economy; meanwhile Lehman Brothers looks ready to be rocketed to the great financial leper colony in the sky, with AIG and Merrill Lynch not far behind. And nevermind that it was a conspicuous lack of meddling on the part of government which precipitated the financial meltdown of 1929, thus rendering an organization like Fannie Mae necessary in the first place. Oh, history, would you just shut up for once!

Ixnay on the ack-of-experiencelay

Liberals would do well to tread softly on Sarah Palin's provincialism -- her lack of advanced degrees, her small-town background; her limited, mostly religiously-informed conceptions of world affairs -- since Republicans view this as their strongest connection to the ranks of middle-America workers to whom the election now largely belongs.

Whatever Palin lacks in political experience, she is more "like" the average blue-collar worker for precisely that reason. Republicans hope that to attack her for lack of proper pedigree is to tell working people that they suffer the same basic deficiency, owing mainly to their station in life. In an electoral process which more closely resembles a season of American Idol than any rational deliberation over policy, who people "like" is unfortunately the basis on which public appointments to the executive branch are made. Remember we are talking about a country that endorsed eight years of George Bush because he was so "authentically lacking" it evoked a familiarity of people with whom we have shared beers.

Freedom costs a Buck Oh Five

Pity John McCain. The nobler portion of his Vietnam experience has been reworked into a Passion-of-the-POW/Rapture-of-the-Rightwing mythology with everything implausible going for it except aliens. Adding insult to injury, the fable was penned by the hands of the very conservative commissars he has ostensibly loathed for just this manner of Machiavellian douchebaggery in the past, and all for the transparent benefit of the same Jesus-encrusted nutbags he most despises/has extended the office of vice presidency to. The narrative, to the degree comprehensible, goes something like as follows...

Imagine you are being digested alive in the Vietnamese equivalent of the Great Pit of Carkoon's Sarlacc, with nary a thread of patriotic zeal woven into your entire freedomless, "me-first" corporeality to help bide the time. You thought you were a whole person, self-starting and independent of mind, but only through generous application of the southeast Asian digestive enzyme were you disabused of your natural human impulses and veritably abused with the transcendental promise of the particular nation-state whose particular domestic rulers thought it wise for you to kill and/or be killed (and/or permanently molested) in their place and on their behalf; and, as it would transpire in this case, all for jack. Forty years later you have arrived on the national stage, prepared to complete this circle of life as it was revealed to you in the viscous bas-relief of your own dysentery.

That's the story, anyway -- doubtless as much a surprise to the conductor of the Straight Talk Express as it is to anyone with the cognitive wherewithal to resist chanting "USA, USA" in response to varied external stimuli. Now it is left to him to pimp the perpetual farce, perpetrate the proverbial fraud, and pummel the already impoverished perspicacity of his world-weary fellow American lest the fantasy come undone. All things he, at one point or another in his esteemed career, might have frowned upon in principle, but which the wages of great power now demand; a rigorous shaking of the geriatric "money-maker," as it were. Or as the Catholic school bully of my formative years once remarked, "The time has come to pay the piper."

The new business feminism: Work is freedom

I like how the American business community is championing women's initiatives from the early 20th century -- like the right to employment -- and repackaging them as an attractive alternative to "militant" or "radical" feminism -- which is to say women's contemporary concerns. That's right, ladies: don't let the old boys club prevent you from returning to work three days after you give birth; show them you will keep at it for their sake -- gender differences be damned!

Country first

Vietnam. Now there was a just cause.

Behold the conservative feminist

Several pieces in the business press today suggest that Sarah Palin is a feminist: indeed, a greater example of a feminist than Hillary Clinton. The reasons cited include the fact that Palin is a working mother, and, on the Hillary score, Palin got where she is today without riding the coattails of some powerful man.

What "feminism" means is never coherently explained, so subsequent arguments turn into a predictable mess, loosely smeared around the formula that women + power = feminism. This is how FT columnist Chrystia Freeland arrives at the conclusion that achieving power without a man is more feminist than the opposite.

My own understanding of feminism is that it stands in opposition to any exercise of authority which denies women the opportunity to decide for themselves on issues which primarily affect them. (This is really just a restating of the classical anarchist position toward all authority -- that power requires the consent of those affected in order to have legitimacy -- in this case as it applies to gender.) So the test of feminism is not merely whether women hold positions of authority, but whether the authority held is legitimate vis-a-vis affected women.

By this measure, it is hard to see how Sarah Palin qualifies as a feminist; certainly not by the criteria that "she works," as there is no serious systemic challenge to American women pursuing this anymore. On the other hand, whether or not women are compensated in an equivalent fashion to their male counterparts when they work is another question entirely. Where Palin falls on this practice, and what she is doing about it (e.g., speaking out, supporting legislation; or, alternatively, keeping quiet to advance her own career at the expense others), would be a much better measure of her commitment to feminism. Unfortunately, all of the efforts to paint Palin a feminist have done so by conflating a conception of "good feminism" with behavior that is in fact already socially-prescribed -- or sanctioned -- for women by others.

Sarah Palin

McCain's vice-presidential pick has vowed to pop a virtuous cap through the very glass ceiling Hillary could only swat using the hammer of popular appeal and the sickle of dirty politics. Yet the RNC's strategy certainly smacks of a Laura Croftian approach to advancing women in power: construct an oddly-proportioned female avatar attractive enough to men -- namely, one that never challenges their world view and, even better, reinforces their prejudices -- and even they can be brought round to the feminist cause!

In the early 1990's, Laura Croft shattered the glass ceiling for ample-assed video game heroines with munificent mammaries, in the title Tomb Raider. She wasn't like those cock-hating, neo-nazi militant -- probably lesbian -- feminine characters like Princess Zelda, who were forever sending one out on endless errands with little to no prospect for conjugal reward, and who worst of all, with the exception of her ears (and who cares about those), insisted on being drawn to scale. I remember reading interviews with gamers at the time who confessed they didn't mind assuming the role of woman whose default orientation towards the player was always buttock-first except in sequences where a wandering teat might block the view.

As it is with the gelatinous adolescent gamer, so it may be with the contemporary conservative male. Here is Sarah Palin, a woman after their own hearts: a former beauty contestant and pseudo-businesswoman turned politico-familywoman; a self-proclaimed Christian firearm enthusiast who eats red meat and sees patriotic petroleum as the answer to the global eco-energy catastrophe. I have to commend the Republicans for depositing some excitement into the final lap of an increasingly somnolent campaign season, even if it amounts to little more than a dolled-up version of their own erotic fantasies -- in this case featuring a live human female. Congratulations.

News Digest

Russia: In all the western coverage of the Russian-Georgian crisis, find me an analyst who argues that US missile networks in Eastern Europe are part of the problem and I will give you a person without an interview.

Denver: Bill and Hillary speak; "Can't you smell the unity!?"

BOTOX: It's all about freedom of expression... (thanks Mary Beth)

Naomi Klein on Obama

One more CEO against EFCA

Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus writes today that "America [will] become France" if a new labor bill, the Employee Free Choice Act, were ever to become law. "It would virtually guarantee that every company becomes unionized," he says in the Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Marcus' fears are reinforced by an experience he had in the 1970's, when he traveled to England only to discover "the airport workers, bus drivers and garbage collectors were all on strike." An investor in the British company he was looking to acquire remarked that "the U.K. was finished," explaining that the tax rate was 75%. This anecdote comprises the total body of evidence Marcus proffers in support of his paragraph's lead assertion that "[c]ountries other than france have suffered the consequences of bad labor laws" -- i.e., unions are susceptible to work stoppages, and employers are susceptible to hyperbole.

It's worth noting that Marcus does not explain why the EFCA is objectionable except on the above grounds that unions represent interests other than management, and that this bill could expand their base of support. As a result, he favors the current "secret-ballot" process of union certification simply because it has proven effective in achieving the opposite result: when employers have more time to respond to an organizing drive, they have more opportunities to thwart it, both legally and illegally. The EFCA would simply require majority signatures in a workplace to create a union. This can only be construed as "undemocratic" if one believes an employer should enjoy a de facto veto over the entire process.