By brilliant, of course, I mean tactically cunning.
At the end of the day they have only one weapon: a filibuster that they can threaten to use only if they can be sure that the Democrats cannot muster one solitary vote from the GOP caucus. But the filibuster is not a trump card; everything depends on the circumstances. Even the presidential veto, which is more aptly thought of as a trump, is not absolute. Think, for example, of Clinton's confrontation with the congressional republicans over welfare reform, which he vetoed twice before being pressured by the perceived threat of upcoming elections to cave in and sign the bill that 'ended welfare as we know it'. The filibuster, which is less powerful than a veto by and large, is even more susceptible to external pressure.
If the Obama, who has been clamoring about the 'dire situation' and the 'need for action', would act in concert with Democrats to paint the Republicans as obstructing much needed reform, I fail to see how the GOP would come out on top here. This seems to me to be a losing battle for the Republicans and one that, once lost, would have further consequences for their ability to act as a serious obstructionist threat.
But this doesn't appear to be Obama's manner of proceeding. As we have seen, after the Republicans have already exacted compromises and concessions from a powerful Democratic congress and president, they are under no obligation to vote in favor of the bill. The text of the bill will be the same and since it will pass either way, the Republicans are in a position to vote 'no' and prime the pumps for even more concessions in the future. If they were to play into the 'bipartisan trap' and play nice, they would abdicate their ability to be effective obstructions of the Democrat's legislative agenda. They are doing precisely what any politically savvy opposition should do; they are ensuring to the best of their ability that the result (legislation) is as watered-down and tilted rightward as is possible under present circumstances. The Republicans use this rhetoric about 'bipartisanship' to get some influence, then after they have left their stains all over the legislation they back off and claim that: "there was nothing bipartisan about that bill at all" and self-righteously vote against it. They take the bait, get concessions and then back off such that the result appears to look exactly as it would have looked had the Democrats simply confronted the Republicans head-on.
The Republicans are doing remarkably well at this. It doesn't hurt that they have many conservative allies within the Democratic Party who are on the fence at best about whether tax breaks or spending should be paramount. The bill that is likely to pass the Senate is something like 45% tax cuts and the rest is spending. Over 200 billion in spending was cut out of the bill, although the Republicans had no problems last year with letting figures larger than that fly out of the hands of the federal government into the greedy arms of the financial industry.
We can almost already hear the magnificently moronic Mitch McConnell rejoinder, when it becomes clear that this stimulus bill doesn't 'fix' the current crisis, that 'gummint spending' simply doesn't work.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Why the Republican 'no' vote on the stimulus bill is brilliant
Friday, February 6, 2009
Althusser on Ideology
Ideology, as the term is understood generally in the Marxist tradition, means something quite different from the word's use in common parlance. Ordinarily, 'ideology' refers to any set of beliefs (usually political) that form some sort of coherent position that might be identified as Left, Right, etc. In the Marxist tradition, however, ideology has to do with the way in which dominant beliefs and values are conditioned and shaped by the political-economic structure of society. In classical Marxism, the economic organization (mode of production, relations of production, etc.) is the central site of analysis and critique. In contemporary society this means that capitalism (the dominant economic/social system) is at the center of analysis, and if we consider also that Marxists radically reject capitalism, it will not be difficult to see why 'ideology' is, on their view, anything but a term of praise.
It is difficult to summarize how a conception of ideology functions in Marx's work since he nowhere offers a fully developed, coherent theory. In his early writings, his critique of ideology takes the form of stripping appearances of their false necessity, thus demystifying and situating products of minded human beings back within the contingency of material life. In late works like Capital, the critique of ideology is aimed more to show how apparently autonomous social phenomena (culture, political systems/procedures) are actually only reflections of the economic base of society. Here it's necessary to invoke the somewhat hackneyed 'base/superstructure' metaphor, but a disclaimer is required first: it is merely a heuristic device (not to be taken too far as an authoritative guide) and it has been, on the whole, more abused and misread than it has been helpful.
Nonetheless, the metaphor is useful to spell out the bare bones of what ideology has come to mean in the Marxist tradition. The base refers to the fundamental economic structure of a society, that is, its mode of production, relations of production, etc. (Its worth mentioning that Marxists who've taken up the metaphor have tended to disagree about what features of the economic order constitute the base). The base is causally determinative such that what appears in the superstructure (ideas, values, political culture, system of government, etc.) as autonomous and free, is in fact largely determined by the fundamental economic structure of society.
What we're talking about here, loosely, is the relationship between ideas and the material world. Very crudely stated, Plato held something like the view that the material world is only a reflection of a transcendent realm of perfect Ideas. For Marx, this schema is totally inverted; our ideas are a kind of reflection of the way the material world is and not the other way around. What Marx means by 'material world' is of course the political and economic history of human societies.
But Marx was not interested in merely showing how certain ideas and beliefs vary according to different historical epochs and societies; Marx's critique of dominant ideas is motivated by a radical political project that submits existing societies to ruthless criticism. Different historical epochs and societies are not simply taken at face value, for Marx. He wants to uncover the ways in which political and economic struggles have shaped dominant ideas, and how these ideas are reflective of the dominant social groups and the prevailing economic order. Marx is anything but sanguine about history: the well-known line from the Communist Manifesto to recall here is, of course, that the history of all societies hitherto has been the history of class struggle. Marx's aim is to show how repressive, exploitative class societies (of which capitalism is the contemporary example) shape prevailing ideas and values and how these ideas, in turn, reinforce or help to reproduce or maintain social relations of exploitation and oppression. Demystifying these dominant ideas that may appear as natural or necessary is only undertaken by Marx to the extent that it facilitates emancipation and aims at freedom. The aim isn't merely to understand the world, but to change it.
So far this is all very surface-level and schematic. All of the really juicy details remain to be fleshed out. For example, precisely how (e.g. by what concrete proceses?) do prevailing ideas and ways of understanding the world attain dominance? Also, if dominant ideas are determined by the structure of society then isn't this also true of Marxism, that is, isn't Marx's work also simply determined by economic conditions (and presumably therefore unfree)? These questions only scratch the surface of difficulties and problems with the conception of ideology in the Marxist tradition. In Marx's writings, we find the beginnings of answers to these problems but no fully developed theory.
One attempt to try to develop this theory further is found in the work of French philosopher (and PCF theorist) Louis Althusser. His project very often took the form of polemics against other "Western Marxist" intellectuals like Korsch, Lukacs, Gramsci and Sartre. Althusser's version of Marxism was very influential during the 1960s and early 70s but was eclipsed (in terms of influence and popularity... neither of which should be decisive in any assesment of Althusser's work) in his own country by less Marxist versions of 'structuralism' and the rise of what is sometimes called 'post-structuralism'.
Ideology, in Althusser’s framework, is a particular organization of signifying practices which constitute human beings as social subjects and which produce the lived relations by which such subjects are connected to the dominant relations of production in society. Ideology is bound up with our affective, unconscious relations to the world: it refers to the pre-reflective, apparently ‘spontaneous’ way in which reality ‘strikes’ us.
The first thing to note here is the, perhaps, strange thought that ideology constitutes human beings as social subjects. What could this mean? Usually we take it for granted that there are people, human beings, social subjects, selves, etc. with a stable identity that they develop freely, and so on. But in Althusser's framework, individuals are neither naturally existing nor freely autonomous choosers who adopt various identities. Rather, individuals (subjects) are produced or constituted by a particular organization of signifying practices that precedes them.
But what does Althusser mean by 'signifying practices'? This is a complicated question to answer. For the sake of simplicity we can understand it as something like 'ways of understanding the world' or 'ways of making sense out of the social field'. And of course, 'ways of understanding the world' require the deployment of concepts, which individuals do not themselves construct out of whole cloth but rather inheret from their social environment, i.e. society. It will thus be crucial to specify how social practices shape as well as prescribe (require) the acceptance of certain 'ways of making sense out of the social field' rather than others. This process is one that is, for Althusser, shaped by political and economic structure of society; thus it is not politically neutral. In general, the status-quo will tend to reproduce itself and preserve the existing distributions of economic/political power.
Now if society impacts and shapes dominant 'signifying practices', then understanding and critiquing dominant ideas must require an understanding of what society is like (politically, economically and otherwise). Here, classical Marxism has a clear answer: under conditions of capitalism, social life is dominated by the economic relations borne out of markets and the class exploitation that constitutes them. Althusser's analysis of society runs along similar lines.
Althusser, in contrast to other more Hegelian twentieth century Marxists (Marcuse and Adorno, for example), retains the base/superstructure metaphor. His reading of Marx has it that a certain 'epistemological break' occurred between his early and late work, and consequently Althusser finds only Marx's mature work (particularly Capital) of primary political/theoretical interest.
According to Althusser's approach, the social field is made up of different levels or 'instances' differentiated by their respective indicies of effectivity. Althusser only retains the metaphor insofar as he believes that despite the fact that the superstructure has a kind of relative autonomy, the social field is 'in the last instance' determined by the economic base. As he puts it "the base, in the last instance, determines the whole edifice." Nonetheless, Althusser is concerned to carve out room for both the relative autonomy of the superstructure as well as the reciprocal action of the superstructure on the base. Despite this relative autonomy, however, the social field is overdetermined (invoking a psychoanalytic metaphor) by the economic base. It is clear why Althusser would want to say that the base cannot be wholly determinative, but the interesting thing will be to see if his theory can adequately explain how the relative autonomy of the superstructure.
As already mentioned, Althusser sees individuals ('the subject') as being constituted by ideology. Thus the subject is an ideological category; it is in this sense that Althusser's Marxism is sometimes called 'anti-humanist'. Ideology tells you who you are, what your origins are, what you’re place in the world is, what your role is, and so on. Subjects are not given, they are constituted, they are 'interpellated' by the dominant social order. Interpellation, drawing on the example of the police act of shouting 'hey you!' followed by a turning around in guilt, is meant to point to the way in which individuals are forcibly called-into-being by the domaint order.
Althusser's primary target in this attack on humanism is the liberal/bourgeois conception of individuals as existing prior to all social, historical and political arrangements. According to this liberal thesis, if you strip all of the marks of society and politics away from individuals, what you're left with are neutral rational agents underneath. Bourgeois economic theory proceeds in this way, via methodological individualism, to explain all of society in terms of the ‘free choices’ of rationally self-interested agents seeking to maximize their own utility. (Think of Freakonomics, or libertarians when they say things like "well if women are oppressed, its because they freely choose to be").
In stark contrast, Althusser's social theory maintains that the individual is always already interpellated (called into being by power), always already marked by the dominant structures that organize a particular social field. It is hardly surprising that this insight has been further developed and situated within the project of many contemporary feminisms that seek to reject the categories of gender/sex as either given or pre-discursive. Explicitly Althusserian versions of feminism can be found in the work of Chela Sandoval, for example. However, the most powerful development of the way in which we are called on or interpellated as gendered/sexed subjects that I've come accross is in Judith Butler's Gender Trouble.
In concrete terms, ideology functions by means of what Althusser calls "Ideological State Apparatuses" (ISA's). These refer to institutions, social practices and rituals. ISAs are not identical or strictly limited to what, in liberal theory, conform to the the State proper. To quote Gramsci:“The distinction between the public and the private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law exercises its ‘authority’”. The liberal capitalist State is neither public nor private, on the contrary, it is a condition of the public/private distinction.
ISAs include the education system (which breaks down into different public and private schools, etc), the institution of the family, the Church (in earlier epochs, this was the ISA par excellence, but it has since receded in power and efficacy due to changing economic conditions), and so on. ISA's are social institutions that tell you what your role is, how you are understand your place in society, how you are supposed to act, what 'normal' consists of, how to dress, what you should value and aspire to, etc. Think of how schools use methods of punishment, expulsion, selection, etc. to enforce some of these norms. Other ISAs of interest consist of:
-the legal system
-the political system (the relationships between different major parties, etc.)
-communications (press, radio, television, etc.)
-'culture' (sports, film, TV, literature, the arts, etc.)
For Althusser, no class or dominant group can maintain power without also exerting control over the ISAs. The role of 'Repressive State Apparatuses' (the police, army, etc.) that function by violence are clearly important to understanding the distributions of power in a society, but they are alone insufficient to understand any regime of power. By the same token, however, Althusser argues that ISAs never function wholly by ideology alone, but always also have a repressive edge (or bear some threat of repression/violence). I think considering the ways that most repressive dictatorships have functioned throughout the 20th century bears this point out well: think of how such regimes exerted tight control over media, culture and education in addition to their monopolization of repression and violence.
Bipartisanship seems to be working wonders
It’s time for Mr. Obama to go on the offensive. Above all, he must not shy away from pointing out that those who stand in the way of his plan, in the name of a discredited economic philosophy, are putting the nation’s future at risk. The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge.Aside from the partisan hackery (which is to be expected from Krugman, although I clearly am not recommending 'bipartisanship' as an alternative), Krugman's most recent article is right on. Obama and the Democrats have already squandered crucial moments of their mandate and political capital blathering about 'bipartisanship', which has had the net effect (surprise, surprise) of empowering an otherwise pummelled and defeated opponent and enabling them to try to derail the Democrat's plans. Nevermind that the plans in question, according to Stiglitz and Krugman, are grossly inadequate and far from 'audacious' enough. The result of the love affair with 'reaching accross the aisle', however, is that these tepid policies are further diluted by a pathetic congressional minority who has seen their power halved in the last four years at the polls. And its hardly just the Republicans who are diluting it: 'centrist' Democrats like Ben Nelson in the senate have been recently trying to defang the stimulus bill by swapping spending for tax breaks.
Obama claimed that he would bring in a new era of sweeping change. But so far he has willingly given over some of his own mandate to the neoliberal extremists on the Right and thus reneged on his promise for change by reaching out (even if only rhetorically) to a party that is thoroughly convinced that 'gummint spending is the problem, tax cuts are the only solution'. Reaching out to these morons means giving up even the most moderate conceptions of 'change' on the table already... it means in effect reverting back to the Bush years. I mean let's be honest: all we can expect from this language of 'change' at this point is increased spending on things like education, healthcare, infrastructure (particularly public transit) and public employment. If the Democrats cannot even deliver on these modest goals, in what sense are they even a nominally 'progressive' party at all? Everything that liberals have claimed that Democrats needed in order to really pass bold reforms has fallen in place: a heavily popular president elected in a near landslide, a House in firm control by the Dems, and a Senate that is ONE vote shy of a supermajority, heavy cheering for new Administration. Yet, what do they do right off the bat? They blather about bipartisanship. Its hardly peripheral to this discussion to note that the 'they' in question is largely a clique of bankers, ex-financial execs, tax-evaders and otherwise class-enemies of the majority of the population.
What is the point of voting for Democrats if they spend so much time worrying about whether the Republicans (or Capital) are happy?
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Why is the new art so hard to understand?
The above is the title of a marvelous short lecture delivered by Theodor Adorno in 1931 (published in English for the first time in 2001 in Richard Leppert's (ed.) huge collection of all of Adorno's writings on music). Its striking how much is packed into this short piece. It is also very refreshing to read someone as erudite (and also, not accidentally, very challenging to read) as Adorno trying to answer this seemingly straight-forward question before a very wide audience. What's interesting is that Adorno's talk is not ostensibly addressed to philosophers, theorists, academics or artists. Rather, he addresses the general public who is confronted by artworks. Think of the 'average' person wandering through a museum.
The first thing he does is delimit the scope of the talk to a specific sense of the question ('why is the new art so hard to understand?'). After all, what is "the new art' and what does he mean by 'hard to understand?'. Adorno has in mind art that is specifically modern in the "sense that it is accompanied by the shock of its strangeness and enigmatic form, the shock that is actually the basis of all the talk about its being hard to understand."
Whatever we might say about 13th and 14th century European painting, for example, the content and formal characteristics of such works are, more or less, readily intelligible to a modern Western audience. A straight-forward representational painting, or even better a painting trying to achieve perfect mimesis, would hardly strike the average viewer as shocking, strange, enigmatic or confusing.
We wouldn't expect any person on the street to say of a painting by Michelangelo or even Monet, for example, 'that's not art'. In contrast, it would not be difficult to imagine this same 'average' person on the street standing before a Pollock, or a Richter, or Rothko, Stella, etc. in a confused (or, perhaps indignant and resentful) fashion, perhaps even wondering whether there is anything of value about such works (if they are even to be considered 'art' in any meaningful sense at all). I'm reminded of numerous times when I stood before works of this sort in a state of confusion: what is this about? what is going on here?
In other words, "older art", as Adorno points out, "possesses a certain immediacy of effect that makes it understandable, while this immediacy is no longer present in the new art, and hence some kind of helping operations are required in order to penetrate its center."
For Adorno, this experience of difficulty derives from the fact that the production of art, artistic material, the demands and tasks that confront the artists as they work, etc. have all become divorced from consumption. That is, artistic production has been divorced from "the presumptions, claims and possibilities of comprehension that the reader, viewer or listener brings to the works of art." Another way to put this would be to point out that artistic production in modern capitalist society (in contrast to other eras in which artistic production was explicitly embedded in other life-activities), art is removed from all immediate use and thus from all immediate comprehensibility. After all, "art for art's sake" is not a call to make art conform to the demands of daily life activities (e.g. to force works of art, on pain of dismissal as 'useless', to have some immediate purpose such as getting stains out of clothing).
Hostility to 'modern' works of art (be they paintings, music, etc.) takes many forms, but one common reaction I've observed is the impulse to point to the past as an era (before things took a 'wrong turn') which must be recovered. I am reminded here of certain types of conservatory-student musicians, totally hostile to Webern or Berg, who might instead recommend a recovery of tonality or a return to the 'beautiful' music of earlier (Romantic, in particular) periods. Schoenberg's music is 'bad', for example, to the extent that "the chords, which are built in many layers and do not have a given function within a given key, cannot be repeated as arbitrarily as the old ones, or because the rhythms cannot be combined into regular, symmetrical forms".
Another way to characterize this attitude would be to posit the history of Western music as a continuous, internally coherent progression which made sense until the isolated aberration of artists associated with 'modernism'.
Adorno points out, however, that the relevant consideration here is not the psyche of modern artists (as deviant individuals, or as having orchestrated this 'wrong turn' into smug incomprehensibility), but rather the socio-economic situation of contemporary society itself. The difficult, challenging character of modern artworks, for Adorno, is "the result of a socio-economic development that transforms all goods into consumer goods, makes them abstractly exchangeable, and has therefore torn them asunder from the immediacy of use." In modern art's struggle to maintain its own autonomy from the demands of 9:00-5:00, from the banality of mass markets, it has generally endeavored to abjure the dictates of 'use' altogether. In earlier societies, art was bound up with ceremonial and religious functions; this is no longer the case in contemporary culture. Whereas most all consumer products (themselves a strange development: 'products made for the purpose of consumption') retain some inkling of use-value, art is purportedly exceptional precisely to the extent that denounces all considerations of 'use' in this sense.
Why is modern art alienated from use? Adorno rightly points out that to "describe how this alienation came about would be nothing less than to sketch the history of our society". But what is it about contemporary society, then, that accounts for this divestment from use and this struggle to preserve art's particularity? As suggested earlier, For Adorno it has to do with the separation of production from consumption. Production tends to behave in a way that expresses the tensions and contradictions of existing social relations prevailing in a certain society. Production, through being directly subjected to these forces often becomes the site of calls for change. Consumption, in contrast, tends to "lag behind in unchanging existence, because it does not posses the force of production, which would point beyond what is unchanging; socially consumption is merely produced without itself seriously helping to produce -and only mirrors relations whose primary need is to maintain themselves". In other words, the methods/trajectories/goals of producing tend to be a site of change more so than the tendencies of consumption. Consumption is in important respects more conservative and passive (think of someone sitting in front of a TV) whereas production tends to play a more active role in shaping/changing current consuming habits (think of the production of the TV shows in question). The interaction between the two, however, is not a one-way street. Without getting into too much detail here, the relationship is dialectical (they mutually interact with each other and causation does not proceed linearly from production to consumption). Nonetheless, 'dialectical relationship' does not mean that production and consumption are equally efficacious with respect to the other. Moreover, we must not only consider the dialectical interplay between production and consumption, but also the internal dialectic between different modes of production throughout history (i.e. the ways in which certain productive activities are influenced by/reactions to/caused by earlier productive activities).
I've taken this discussion astray a bit, so let me try to bring it back to Adorno's point about the separation of consumption and production and its consequences for art. In impressionist art, or the music of Wagner, for example, the "lines between consumption and production had not yet been cut... but were merely wired in a more complicated way... in Wagner the preexisting schema of a harmony, which always grows out of a tension and resolution, did not emerge from the work itself but was still carried by social tradition." The shock that accompanied cubism and futurism, in contrast, was qualitatively different from the "agitation over Wagner's supposedly wrong notes, or the supposed daubings of the Impressionists". The radical break between consumption and production as it regards modern art of the early 20th century, for example, was such that art no longer "had the task of representing a reality that is preexisting for everyone in common, but rather of revealing, in its isolation, the very cracks that reality would like to cover over in order to exist in safety; and that, in so doing, it repels reality". [my emphasis]
But must art be divorced from use? Why can't art continue to be embedded in the life-activities of contemporary society and take a form that is both useful and immediately comprehensible? The answer is that it can and in many cases it does; but what are the political stakes in doing so? The "really useful art, which serves the purpose of distraction -entertainment reading and kitsch prints, blockbuster films and hit dance tunes - is historically innocent and, despite all apparent timeliness of content, formally on a technical level this material is long out of date." Thus, even as certain cultural artifacts have an immediacy that seems to suggest how timely they are, they are 'historically innocent' in that they recycle old forms and endlessly re-issue slightly modified and repackaged forms as new and exciting. This repetition, banality, etc. is a feature of our current social/economic order. So,also, is this 'historical innocence' (a mode of repression, of forgetting) in which knowledge of the processes (read: political and economic struggles) by which 'we arrived at the present situation' is omitted.
Thus, rather than opting for complicity and unreflective (i.e. conservative) affirmation of the current state of society, progressive and avant-garde artistic movements of the 20th century have sought to resist the current order. Its another issue entirely how successful their strategies have been. But perhaps we could relate this question to the issue of the 'difficulty of the new art'. Consider the following objection. If art is so difficult, obscure, inaccessible, challenging and so on, that it is in many ways "secluded, off by itself", how could it play a politically progressive role if so few people can be affected by it? Adorno is worried about this problem and he notes that the "separation of art from reality endangers art itself... [this seclusion] threatens to become ideological -to be self-satisfied in a muffled, petit-bourgeois way, to forget its supportive human function, ultimately to become petrified into bad guildmanship." The danger here, in part, is that contemporary art could become all of the things that its philistine detractors love to say about it. But clearly this danger cannot be remedied by "arbitrary adaptation to the state of social consciousness... by reversion to older, outlived and outmoded way of proceeding" for in so doing art would sacrifice consciousness of itself, a sacrifice no critical art can afford to make. Moreover, we should not assume that the political solution to this problem can be solved by art alone, for it cannot. The economic/social conditions would themselves have to be changed as well; thus it is hardly a progressive position to simply chastise art for failing to 'reach out to all people as they are'. For the material, economic and political conditions would have to be different for such a widespread 'reaching out' to be a progressive move at all: it would require that the stark work/life (work versus leisure) divide of modern capitalism be abolished, that people "independent of privilege, be able to spend their leisure time occupied substantively and extensively with artistic matters." For things to be different, there would have to be an abolishment of the "demonically precise mechanism of advertising and anesthetization that -in every moment of people's leisure time- prevents them from occupying themselves with actual art".
Art alone cannot secure such a change in material conditions, but this is not to say that such conditions cannot be changed by any means. Recognizing the role that the social/economic structure of society plays in circumscribing the efficacy of art as political resistance requires also recognizing that many consumption-related 'needs' and desires are themselves the congealed effects of social/economic order on people's consciousness.
For Adorno, the argument that "the public wants kitsch" is dishonest. The need for "bad, illusory, deceptive things is generated by the all-powerful propaganda apparatus", to put the point in slightly overstated terms. In addition, the need for relaxation (instead of seeking out, during leisure time, cognitively challenging/demanding activities) is justifiable, but only because so many people are forced into "circumstances that absorb their strength and time in such a fashion that they are no longer capable of other things."
He ends the lecture with an imperative: "Let no one come back with a rejoinder about the slothful nature of human beings. For the suspicion is not so easily allayed that the consciousness of the person who responds in this way is more slothful than those on whose behalf he is responding."
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Update: Digital TV transition delayed until July
CNN reports Obama has signed an order to delay the termination of analog tv signals until July, in order to help underprivileged viewers find more time to comply with the conversion requirements, so they will not lose their free access to basic television.
In other news, Republicans continue to provide some of the most unhelpful, dismissive analysis of any situation possible:An estimated 6.5 million homes -- including many elderly, poor and disabled Americans -- would lose TV service after February 17 without the delay, supporters argued.
(...)
The Commerce Department ran out of money last month for its program to help people pay for converter boxes needed to make older TVs receive the new digital signals. There are 3.7 million homes on the waiting list for the $40 coupons, said Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat.
"It's clear that the only way to avoid a massive disruption affecting 5.7 percent of the TV viewing public is to delay the transition and provide the funding to assure that, when it occurs, it occurs smoothly," he said.
Federal Communication Commission acting Chairman Michael Copps said the delay gives the government "an opportunity to do it better."
"The additional four months provided by the law affords urgently needed time for a more phased transition, including a consumer-friendly converter box coupon program, stepped-up consumer outreach and support -- particularly for vulnerable populations -- and dealing with coverage, antenna and reception issues that went too long unaddressed," Copps said.
"If you don't know this date is coming up, you're probably not watching television," said Rep. Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican. "And if you're not watching television, you probably won't know on February 18 whether it occurred or not."Well that's a relief. Good thing there aren't any disabled, elderly, or impoverished people who might or might not know about the transition but haven't had the money/time/ability/knowledge to prepare for it...
For those who love red rock, some good news
The Obama administration has cleaned up a few more disasters left by the Bush administration today, notably removing 77 Utah oil drilling leases issued by the Bureau of Land Management in Bush's last month from auction.
In the original BLM leases offered, oil drills could've been seen from scenic Delicate Arch (pictured above) and near four other national parks in the state. Environmental groups from throughout the American west joined a lawsuit to stop the sale, but the Bush administration carried through the auction anyway. A court later halted drilling until the threat to public land could be more carefully reviewed. Today Interior Secretary Ken Salazar took the leases off the table entirely.
Capping executive pay...What's the point?
The fact that someone's pay has to be capped at $500 grand right now, and that cut will potentially drive people away to new jobs, is infuriating. I won't lie about that. How is it possible people can be so rich, even while they've driven us into financial turmoil and have no reason to care? But what's the point of limiting them? That doesn't change the power they have and the lack of power we have. It won't save these banks and it won't save our economy and it certainly won't force these companies to make stimulative investments.
It's true that the institutions receiving and requesting TARP funds have been horrible at gauging just how patient the American people are going to be with elaborate company trips and massive bonuses. But you know, maybe it isn't that they're bad at gauging these things at all. Maybe they simply don't care. In this economic structure, we rely on them to save our economic asses, and they know we have to bail them out. At the end of the day, they know who they answer to, and it isn't us, as enraged as we become with their incredible wealth while we watch others suffer.
Let's nationalize these banks, as T suggests. I'm certain that if they were run by an organization with a public stake in seeing them succeed (that doesn't mean a big bubble, it means actual wealth creation, lending, and job stability for lots of Americans), the priorities would be different.
All these other petty "regulations" and condemnations are just shallow displays of a fairly low-level populism that one could just as easily see Sarah Palin promoting. This financial crisis and the failings of these financial institutions were not caused by greed or excessive salaries or anything else. They are caused by an ideology that says the free market knows best, for you and me, and that we should trust people who have no interest in serving the public or creating long-term stability or prosperity or loyalty even to the company they work for.
Pres. Obama shouldn't waste my time with pay caps. He really ought to make some substantive demands (like say, these TARP funds can't be used for anything except consumer lending). The stark inequality between my town and Wall Street is astounding, sickening, all those things. But limiting millionaires to a half a million doesn't put any money in struggling Americans' pockets. It might feel good to pretend we're forcing those with no perspective to live within our boundaries for awhile, but it's an entirely superficial sense of satisfaction, and we shouldn't forget that.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
House Democrats: National Health Care is 'off the table' this year
Bruce Dixon rips House Democratic leaders (and the White House) for reneging on campaign promises for health care reform. Particularly searing criticism is saved for House Democratic Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) who co-sponsored John Conyers's HR 676 (single-payer) last year, but is now the one toeing the White House line and contenting himself with putting off reform.
As Dixon points out, if not now then when?:
Democrats at this moment have a popular and newly elected president, along with the biggest majority in the House and Senate they have enjoyed in a generation. If Democratic leaders are reluctant even to try to put a national health care plan on the president's desk under these favorable circumstances, when will they ever try? Mid-term elections almost invariably shrink Congressional majorities as large as these.
Workers of the world, unite!
Riding on the back of T's last post, here's Socialist Worker Online with what should be a very obvious point:
And the capitalists have us just where they want us...They are right to want to fight this recession. But the central slogan of the current wave of strike action, “British jobs for British workers”, targets the wrong people and points in a dangerous direction.
Any demand framed in terms of “putting British workers first” inevitably paints another set of workers – “foreign workers” – as the problem.
It pits British workers against Italian, Portuguese and Polish workers. It seeks gains for one group at the expense of the other.
But “foreign workers” are not to blame for mounting unemployment, rampant subcontracting or worsening pay and conditions on construction sites.
The blame for these things lies squarely with the bosses – of whatever nationality – aided and abetted by neoliberal politicians such as trade secretary Lord Mandelson, the high priest of the free market.
The slogan “British jobs for British workers” was used by Gordon Brown in his 2007 speech to New Labour’s conference. As many pointed out at the time, it has a bad track record.
It was used in the 1930s by Oswald Mosley’s fascist blackshirts to justify attacks on Jewish workers in east London and elsewhere. It was used by the National Front in the 1970s to try and force black and Asian workers out of their jobs.
These attempts to play the race card to divide workers have always been cheered on by the right, by successive governments and by the bosses.
Nativism/racism lurking in British wildcat strikes
There's been a wave of recent wildcat Strikes among British construction (and other industries) workers, brandishing signs calling for "British jobs for British Workers". While labor militancy is usually something that I categorically welcome, it is becoming clear that this phenomenon is deeply complicated by nativism, racism and xenophobia. British fascists are unsurprisingly ecstatic.
Read the UK SWP's statement on "British Jobs for British Workers" here.
Lenin's Tomb has had a series of thoughtful posts on this troubling development, the most recent of which notes that resisting the temptation to either cheerlead for the wildcat Strikers or to wholly dismiss them as racist xenophobes is the starting point for any reflective, critical analysis.
Over at Histomat, the most recent post laments that:
"Unfortunately, Britain has also been hit over the last week by 'the wrong kind of strikes' - ie. not strikes against the power of capital or even against a particular multinational or national capitalist enterprise - but a strike against er, other workers. Genius."
It's becoming a trend
Here's the newest addition to the heap.
And don't forget the former Majority Leader from Dakota.
Or the Treasury Secretary who's so keen on keeping the 'private sector private'.
Who's next? Its no problem, really. Its only that these people are supposed to be part of the new wave of 'progressive change' sweeping in to make tax policy more fair and egalitarian...
To be clear: none of this, of course, licenses the moronic 'hypocrite' arguments soon to be launched by Rush Limbaugh, et. al as 'evidence' that progressive tax policies, national health insurance, etc. are evil policies (as though the policy proposals themselves were the ones evading taxes). But this is a serious blow to the credibility of supposed reformers, its manifestly unjust and it speaks to the class-character of the Obama cabinet.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Is it possible for me to hate Christopher Hitchens any more?
I don't think so. I don't know if it's general tone, or just how consistently I find his arguments to be smug, privileged, nonsense, but there's nothing more irritating to me than his Monday columns at Slate.
Today's is no exception. A defense of John Updike, which, okay, I'm totally in favor of attempts to defend people who had bad reputations you think they were unjustified in gaining. But what is Hitchen's excuse for Updike's perceived misogyny and racism?
And yet perhaps not so incongruous for a man of wry and reserved delicacy and elegance who would prefer very slightly to be wrong on account of the right reservations than right because of the wrong ones.What.The.Hell does that even mean? Hitchens spends the column giving examples of Updike's sexism and racism, then suggesting maybe he wasn't as bad as he seemed and maybe he got better over time because you know he had African American grand kids? (eye roll. how can someone with black relatives be RACIST?!).
Of course he wasn't really a WASP to begin with—there can't be a more essentially Dutch name than Updike—but he added with typical diffidence that two of his children had married Africans and that he now had some genuinely "African-American" grandchildren. He appeared highly diverted and pleased by this thought, and I notice that the first edition of his memoir Self-Consciousness, containing that original anti-'60s essay, is dedicated "To my grandsons John Abloff Cobblah and Michael Kwame Ntiri Cobblah." These names, which I would guess to be Ashanti/Ghanaian, make one wonder if President Barack Obama missed an opportunity, and we all missed an experience, in not inviting the whole Updike clan to be present while one of the country's finest writers could still give us an "invocation."God, it's so shallow. Thinking of those African-sounding names makes him think Updike should've been at Obama's inauguration? How sentimental, Chris.
Hitchens is a rich, straight white guy whose ethos consists of something like "Give me political incorrectness or give me death." I take it doing the "right thing" for the "wrong reservation" is giving into political correctness. Hitchens never defines what the hell these "right reservations" were.
I just hate it. Why can't he just come out and say whatever it is he wants to say? Clearly he wants to say, "Updike was a racist, but that was before he loved any people of color. I'm glad he didn't give in and simply start respecting people of color just because it was the politically correct thing to do."
The only thing Hitchens is really able to hold against Updike is--get this--that Updike didn't think the U.S. was justified in attacking foreign countries for the attacks of 9/11. Yes, our beloved war monger laments, how could this maverick "be so wavering and so neutral when a true crisis came along."
Why do I keep reading these columns? I'm a masochist...
Krugman: "Bailouts for Bunglers"
Some of the highlights:
“Say I’m a banker and I created $30 million. I should get a part of that,” one banker told The New York Times. And if you’re a banker and you destroyed $30 billion? Uncle Sam to the rescue!Read the rest here. Obama's verbal scolding of the 'excessive' bonuses of Bank executives (whose 'private' institutions were recently injected with tens of billions of taxpayer money) seems to have been little more than an attempt to prepare the groundwork for a new round of bailouts (rather than nationalizations) of large banks on the verge of collapse. The first line of Krugman's op/ed is painfully clear about what's happening: If you waste immense quantities of someone else's money, according to logic of the Obama Administration you get a check for billions more dollars (preceded, of course, by a brief verbal chiding from the President).
[...]
We can’t afford to squander money giving huge windfalls to banks and their executives, merely to preserve the illusion of private ownership.
Normally when a bank is in need of capital they sell stock to investors in return for ownership shares in the returns. But apparently this isn't how it should work if taxpayers are the ones providing the capital. Bank owners should get to keep all of that money, says Geithner, because to demand joint ownership would mean, *gasp* that the banks would be (in part) publicly owned. According to Geithner, “we have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best to preserve that system.” But who is "we"? I imagine that the current owners of BoA, Chase, et. al would love to "preserve that system" (i.e. would love to continue to receive gifts (ungodly sums of money) from the Federal Government with no conditions that they relinquish control/management or any of the potential returns from the gifts they've recieved).
But what on earth, at this point, is private about these institutions? If having private ownesrhip and private shareholders, as such, is all that the Administration cares about then why not keep public funds and institutions quarantined from them in order to maintain the sacred aura of 'privateness' preserved in these shining beacons of 'free' market glory? Because the collapse of these financial institutions will cause widespread public suffering for many millions of people whose jobs, incomes, health, savings, etc depend on the health of these financial behemoths. So, any Obama or Bush administration advocate of bailouts will tell you, the motivation to bailout these huge banks has to do with (at bottom) supposedly 'public' concerns to preserve the livlihood, welfare, incomes, savings, health of millions of Americans who have no direct involvement or connection to the financial sector or these institutions.
But, any sane person would ask, why then all the bullshit rhetoric about 'preserving private ownership'?
I say nationalize them, expropriate all company holdings, and offer the newly unemployed executives entry-level jobs (i.e. teller, cashier) in the new public institution to be erected on the ashes of their private racket.
CNN likes inane polls
Tomorrow's likely CNN poll: Do you think women should be forced to have abortions?
Sunday, February 1, 2009
The Hypersexual Evangelical Movement
At Red Pepper, Don Monkerud gives a pretty general overview and analysis of the "culture war" on sex. It's an interesting step back and assessment of where we stand now and what the last decade has done to damage comprehensive sexual health (that includes freedom and pleasure in addition to resisting disease) in this country. It's helpful, even if not filled with entirely new information. I did think this observation was extremely poignant and sort of a key detail in making sense of the evangelical position on sex:
Far from being anti-sexual, today’s evangelicals push a hyper-sexualised message, complete with Christian pornography and bragging about having better sex than non-believers. Evangelical sex advice books emphasise the dangers of sex outside marriage, but revel in titillating sexual details. Even if they aren’t interested, Christian wives are told to be ‘available’ to their husbands at all times, especially for ‘quickies’, to make them feel like ‘real men’.‘Although the evangelical movement is contradictory and hypocritical, it’s important to understand that it’s pro-sex, a kind of illegitimate child of the sexual revolution,’ says Herzog. ‘The evangelicals promise physiological orgasms, called ‘soulgasms’, which combine psychological orgasms, a close emotional connection with the spouse and the blessing presence of god in the bedroom. At the same time, they’re homophobic and hostile to all sex outside marriage. They take up aspects of the old sexual revolution but twist them.’
CBS on West Bank: Follow-up
I recently heard that CBS (and in particular, those who produced the 60 minutes segment in question) have come under fire from pro-Israel groups furious about alleged 'bias' in the program.
This is an instructive moment.
The program laid bare the realities of daily life for Palestinians (e.g. that they cannot use the huge, modern highways designated only for Jewish settlers in the West Bank, that they must go through excessive and humiliating checkpoints, etc.). Bob Simon spoke firsthand with settlers, with the potential new PM of Israel, with former Israeli officials. Between what they said and the glimpse at daily life for most Palestinians (whose homes are regularly invaded by and inhabited by IDF, for example) there was enough there to dissolve the thick layers of myth surrounding the issue as it is typically discussed in most mainstream US outlets. It is unsurprising that this would anger the most hard-line Zionists. For them, this program was likely read as a surreptitious attempt to create sympathy for a people (the Palestinians) who are, at the end of the day, terrorists/competitors for the holy soil of Israel. Thus, despite the indisputable facts presented in the program (the settler-only highways, the militant expansionism and colonial mentality of the settlers, the checkpoints, the militarization of the West Bank, etc. etc.) were 'biased' precisely insofar as the program didn't buttress each and every glance into Palestinian life with a litany of ultra-Zionist propaganda ('but Israel MUST defend itself at all costs', 'Israel's post-'67 borders are immovable', 'Small, vulnerable Israel is totally surrounded by hostile, belligerent terrorists (i.e. all of the non-Jewish inhabitants of the West Bank) who want noting more than to destroy it', etc.). This is precisely why it is so fruitless to discuss/argue about the isssue with hardened Zionists. When approaching people of this political ilk, there is a sense in which it falls on deaf ears to mention to them the realities of oppression, subordination, racism, atrocities, mass killings, bombing raids, war crimes, ghetto-ization and siege, apartheid, etc. From what I can gather, that the atrocities are occuring is intelligible but is nonetheless perpetually subordinated to jingoistic slogans, religious/messianic mandates, 'us versus them' arguments, etc.
