US Politics

Matt Yglesias explains what Bush’s three-step plan for Social Security entails, “in terms adapted to the meanest understanding”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/02/understanding_t.html. It’s a very good post, and you should read it. Regular observers of the present administration will not be surprised to find that by the end, Matt is saying things like this:

bq. If you are in the top one or two percent of the income pyramid, this may be a good deal for you anyway since phase one allows you to keep your income taxes lower. The other 99-98 percent of us are getting the shaft. … This is also good for you if you are a manager or major stockholder in a company that will be managing the private accounts. It also might be good for you if you own a great deal of stock already (i.e., you’re rich!) and this program winds up increasing the share of national wealth invested in the stock market.

Funny how analyses of recent domestic policy always tend to conclude along those lines. It’s almost like there’s a pattern or something.

In the conclusion to his “state of the union address”:http://mywebpages.comcast.net/duncanblack/sotu.txt last night, President Bush invoked Franklin Roosevelt’s words from his second inaugural: “each age is a dream
that is dying, or one that is coming to birth.” Here’s a bit more from that speech by FDR:

Instinctively we recognized a deeper need-the need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization. Repeated attempts at their solution without the aid of government had left us baffled and bewildered. For, without that aid, we had been unable to create those moral controls over the services of science which are necessary to make science a useful servant instead of a ruthless master of mankind. To do this we knew that we must find practical controls over blind economic forces and blindly selfish men.

We of the Republic sensed the truth that democratic government has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable. We would not admit that we could not find a way to master economic epidemics just as, after centuries of fatalistic suffering, we had found a way to master epidemics of disease. We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster. …

In fact, in these last four years, we have made the exercise of all power more democratic; for we have begun to bring private autocratic powers into their proper subordination to the public’s government. The legend that they were invincible-above and beyond the processes of a democracy-has been shattered. They have been challenged and beaten. …

In that purpose we have been helped by achievements of mind and spirit. Old truths have been relearned; untruths have been unlearned. We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics. Out of the collapse of a prosperity whose builders boasted their practicality has come the conviction that in the long run economic morality pays. We are beginning to wipe out the line that divides the practical from the ideal; and in so doing we are fashioning an instrument of unimagined power for the establishment of a morally better world.

As they say on the internets, “read the whole thing”:http://www.search.eb.com/elections/pri/Q00114.html.

I heard Chuck Hagel speak at the World Affairs Councils meeting in Washington DC yesterday (C-Span link “here”:http://www.cspan.org/search/basic.asp?ResultStart=1&ResultCount=10&BasicQueryText=Hagel&image1.x=0&image1.y=0&image1=Submit ), and thought it was pretty interesting. The content was vague, as is typical for US politicians warming up for a run at President, but in tone. Hagel was very clearly setting out his stall as the anti-Bush on foreign policy issues. He began his talk by talking about the need to focus on the allies, then spoke of how US public diplomacy had “lost its way,” of how our experience in Iraq should give us pause about trying to impose democracy by force etc etc. Most interesting in the short term, he hinted at some openness to the idea of Senate hearings on the disaster in Iraq, speaking at length about how Senator William Fulbright had come in for enormous criticism from his own party for holding hearings on Vietnam back in the day, but had been vindicated over the longer run. In Hagel’s words, we “should not be party to a false consensus on Iraq, or any other issue.” I’ve no idea of whether anything will come of this – but Hagel seemed to me to be presenting a possible opening for Democrats and reality-based Republicans.

“What do you mean a ceremony at Auschwitz? I was just about to go dig out the driveway.”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43247-2005Jan27.html

Something’s been bugging me about private accounts. Correct me where I’m wrong here.

It’s difficult for me to imagine that any version of Social Security private accounts would offer account holders complete flexibility with their assets. Managing and ensuring the safety of millions of small accounts will be expensive under the rosiest assumptions. The fees don’t have to look like Chile’s, but they’re going to be considerable[1]. It seems reasonable to assume that any sensible administration would limit costs by limiting investment options to a small number of funds, something like a 401K plan.

The most appropriate investment vehicle would be a broad-based index fund such as the Wilshire 5000, which invests in pretty much every public company in the US, weighted for market capitalization. Index funds have a history of better returns than actively managed funds, and the broad footprint of the investment would minimize market distortions from the impact of (eventually) trillions in new investments. Most importantly, it keeps the government out of the business of picking winners and losers. The temptation to misuse trillions of investment dollars for political leverage will be awesome. A blind investment strategy also minimizes the reciprocal pressure on businesses to scramble to please the current administration in order to get under the umbrella of investments in a managed SS fund.

As an investment strategy, this would work pretty well for most Americans. However, a mandatory savings program isn’t for most Americans, it’s for all Americans. Since it’s a forced program, administrators will have to answer the question, “Why is my money being taken out of my paycheck to support X?”[2]

[click to continue…]

More on trade-unions as the Bush administration tries to “restrict collective bargaining”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39934-2005Jan26?language=printer at the Department of Homeland Security, and ask Congress “to grant all federal agencies similar authority to rewrite civil service rules governing their employees.”

bq. Yesterday, union leaders decried provisions that would curtail the power of labor unions by no longer requiring DHS officials to negotiate over such matters as where employees will be deployed, the type of work they will do and the equipment they will use. They also object to provisions that would limit the role of the independent Federal Labor Relations Authority and hand the job of settling labor-management disputes to an internal labor relations board controlled by the DHS secretary.

After going back and forth on this, I’m coming to the conclusion that this is of a piece with tort reform and the privatization of social security. They’re all part of a massive experiment in conservative cultural engineering, which aims to transform the Democratic party into a permanent minority by eviscerating the political power of its key constituencies (trade unions, trial lawyers) and transforming ordinary citizens into a new investing class. As I’ve “said before”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002698.html, I don’t think that this will work – but I’ve no doubt that the administration can do some serious damage to Democrats’ ability to raise funds, and (much more important) get volunteers out on the streets to canvas for votes. I’ve no doubt that the Democratic party could live without the trial lawyers – but if the administration succeeds in crippling unions, it will very seriously hamper Democrats’ ability to win back the Presidency and other offices in 2008. I suspect that many middle class bloggers simply don’t realize how important unions are in organizing and getting out the vote in the Midwest and elsewhere. As Sam Rosenfeld has “said”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002698.html, it’s frustrating that the Democratic leadership in the Senate isn’t saying anything about strengthening labour law – improving the bargaining position of unions is clearly in the long term organizational interests of the Democratic party.

Update: “Sam Rosenfeld”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/01/index.html#005333 has more to say on this story too.

There was a minor kerfuffle among left-bloggers a couple of days ago about the dearth of blogging on trade union issues. “Nathan Newman”:http://www.nathannewman.org/laborblog/archive/002098.shtml suggested that it reflected the lack of interest of middle class liberals in trade unions. This is part of the story but only part. I suspect that the lack of media coverage of union issues, or, sometimes, of “good information from the unions themselves”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_02/003241.php, are equally important in explaining why people don’t blog on this as much as they should. Bloggers tend to rely on their morning newspapers to find out about the world – when those newspapers don’t cover union issues, bloggers are unlikely to focus on them. Which is why I hope that this recent NYT “story”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/25/business/25cnd-meat.html?ex=1264395600&en=be604e7e1355a7eb&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland describing a Human Rights Watch report on the US meatpacking industry gets the attention that it deserves from lefties, and indeed from “union-friendly conservatives”:http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2003/10/the_la_strikes_.html.

bq. The report also concluded that packing companies violated human and labor rights by suppressing their employees’ efforts to organize by, for example, often firing employees who support a union. The report asserted that slaughterhouse and packing plants also flouted international rules by taking advantage of workers’ immigration status – in some plants two-thirds of the workers are illegal immigrants – to subject them to inferior treatment.

Original Human Rights Watch report available “here”:http://www.humanrightswatch.org/reports/2005/usa0105/ (interested readers should also check out Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, which has a trenchant and detailed discussion of how meatpacking firms abuse immigrants).

Update: “Nathan Newman”:http://www.nathannewman.org/laborblog/archive/002101.shtml suggests that bloggers should sign up for email updates from “American Rights at Work”:http://www.americanrightsatwork.org/, an organization which I hadn’t heard of, but which seems to be doing excellent work on union-related issues.

I know it’s considered poor sport to shoot fish in a barrel, but what on earth is David Brooks talking about?

With that speech [i.e., the inaugural offering], President Bush’s foreign policy doctrine transcended the war on terror. He laid down a standard against which everything he and his successors do will be judged.

When he goes to China, he will not be able to ignore the political prisoners there, because he called them the future leaders of their free nation. When he meets with dictators around the world, as in this flawed world he must, he will not be able to have warm relations with them, because he said no relations with tyrants can be successful.

His words will be thrown back at him and at future presidents. American diplomats have been sent a strong message. Political reform will always be on the table. Liberation and democratization will be the ghost present at every international meeting. Vladimir Putin will never again be the possessor of that fine soul; he will be the menace to democracy and rule of law.

Because of that speech, it will be harder for the U.S. government to do what we did to Latin Americans for so many decades – support strongmen to rule over them because they happened to be our strongmen. It will be harder to frustrate the dreams of a captive people, the way in the early 1990’s we tried to frustrate the independence dreams of Ukraine.

It will be harder for future diplomats to sit on couches flattering dictators, the way we used to flatter Hafez al-Assad of Syria decade after decade. From now on, the borders established by any peace process will be less important than the character of the regimes in that process.

I mean, I love Austin as much as the next girl (well, OK, a lot more than the next girl), but it has always been my distinct impression that the scope of things you can do with words has been, hmm, let’s say, overstated by his would-be popularizers. Naming ships? Hell yeah. Transforming U.S. foriegn policy by shaking democracy-supporting fairy dust on everything? Not so much. Or maybe we’re on a 40’s crooner tip, with the classic “Wishing Will Make It So“? Seriously, though, does Bobo believe this, or what?
Note to outraged defenders of liberty: I think it would be great if the U.S. stopped coddling dictators in the name of stability or anti-terrorist bona fides, but that’s because I’m a silly, utopian leftist. What’s your excuse?

UPDATE: from the Washington Post, “Bush Speech Not a Sign of Policy Shift, Officials Say; Address Said to Clarify ‘The Values We Cherish'” Right.

Last night, I attended a presentation by Ray Takeyh, Senior Fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations, on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. It was put on by the Houston World Affairs Council about Iran’s nuclear program. (Short plug- Houstonians with sufficient interest in public affairs to read blogs really ought to look into HWAC. It’s one of the best deals in town.)

Shorter Ray Takeyh: Iran is unlikely to stop weaponizing its nuclear program. From our perspective, all options stink.

Longer Ray Takeyh after the break.

[click to continue…]

I’m going to take advantage of my God-given right to quote my betters. From Kevin Drum:

I happen to think that liberals have basically won the church-state argument, and all that’s left is fighting over scraps that aren’t worth it. It just feeds the religious right’s feeling of righteous besiegement while gaining almost nothing in practical terms. Who really cares if Roy Moore plops a Ten Commandments monument in front of his courthouse?

Still, even though I feel that way personally, someone is going to take this kind of stuff to court. There’s just no way to stop it. And if I were a judge, what choice would I have then? The damn thing is pretty clearly unconstitutional whether it offends me personally or not. Ditto for Intelligent Design, which any honest judge would conclude after only cursory research is nothing more than creationism with a pretty face.

In the end, then, even though I agree with Nathan that some of the fringe issues being litigated today are probably counterproductive for liberals (though I’m less sure I agree with him about some of the core rulings of the 60s), I’m still not sure where this leaves us.

Ain’t that the truth. I’m looking at P.J. O’Rourke this morning, a writer whom I’ve always liked. (via Pandagon.) The self-described fun-loving Republican Party Reptile wrings a whole outraged column out of the Ten Commandments case from the summer of 2003. (Time flies, huh?) It’s part of his general thesis that the true opponents of Republicans are “jerks.” O’Rourke doesn’t seem to like the fact that jerks[1] wouldn’t let Moore install the Ten Commandments in front of a courthouse. Or, maybe he’s just responding to the wailing of jerks when exposed to the Ten Commandments in any capacity, wailing so high-pitched that only hackish[2] conservative pundits can hear it.

I’m not a Bush supporter. Rightly or wrongly, I don’t think of myself as a jerk. I wouldn’t have minded if the case hadn’t gone anywhere. What would O’Rourke like me to do? Picket the courtroom?

fn1. Incidentally, let’s not pussyfoot around about who’s to blame here. The jerks in question are the Southern Poverty Law Center, District Judge Myron Thompson, the Alabama Supreme Court, Alabama’s Court of the Judiciary, and every single judge except Moore who touched this stupid case in any capacity. I hope that they are all ashamed of themselves.

fn2. “The jerks have begun praising marriage lately. But only if the bride and groom each have a beard.” P.J. O’Rourke, channelling Ann Coulter. Shamefully hackish.

Jim Henley says it “in plain English”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2005_01_09.html#005789.

bq. All together now: Saddam was worse! In terms of body count in Iraq this is true, though the man had a big head start on us, so we ought to be allowed a couple of decades to catch up. But what about the world ? Is it better? And are we? We have gone from a time in which the tyrant of an oil patch with a broken army and 23 million inhabitants practiced a tyranny which all decent people abhorred, to a time in which the largest and most powerful country in the history of mankind justifies torture and contemplates assassination teams – we should call them terror squads – as official policy. And the people who most consider our virtue unchallengeable are the quickest to publically avow our need to torture and murder.

“CNN cancels Crossfire”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/06/business/media/06crossfire.html?ex=1262754000&en=0f719be53ea0367c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland.

bq. Mr. Klein said the decisions to part company with Mr. Carlson and to end “Crossfire” were not specifically related, because he had decided to drop “Crossfire” regardless of whether Mr. Carlson wanted to stay on.

…

bq. Mr. Klein said he wanted to move CNN away from what he called “head-butting debate shows,” which have become the staple of much of all-news television in the prime-time hours, especially at the top-rated Fox News Channel.

….

bq. Mr. Klein specifically cited the criticism that the comedian Jon Stewart leveled at “Crossfire” when he was a guest on the program during the presidential campaign. Mr. Stewart said that ranting partisan political shows on cable were “hurting America.”

bq. Mr. Klein said last night, “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise.” He said he believed that especially after the terror attacks on 9/11, viewers are interested in information, not opinion.

Update: “Giblets”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005_01_02_fafblog_archive.html#110505535614467682 laments our great loss.

bq. So Giblets is sitting down in front of the library TV with a box of commandeered Cheezoids to enjoy the intellectual repaste that is CNN’s Crossfire when he sees a news item telling him that soon there will BE no Crossfire! Outrage, perfidy, treason! What will replace it? Coverage of actual news? Can you even CALL it “news” without whack-a-mole sound effects, cartoonish repetition of talking points and a prompted studio audience? Delirium, lunacy, madness!

NORML founder and longtime head Keith Stroup is stepping down in favor of younger leadership. Keep fighting the good fight, dude. The following quote is dry, but charming:

Meanwhile he’d begun smoking pot and marching in antiwar demonstrations, sometimes simultaneously.

No. Way.
I never knew they’d gotten this close:

In 1975, five states — Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine and Ohio — removed criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of the weed. In 1976, Jimmy Carter, who during his campaign had advocated decriminalizing pot, was elected president. In 1977, Stroup visited the White House to meet with Carter’s drug policy adviser, Peter Bourne. Soon NORML would be playing the White House in softball.

It seemed like high times for NORML. Publicly, Stroup predicted that pot would be legal in a couple of years. Privately, he and his NORML pals joked about forming an advocacy group for another drug they’d begun to enjoy — cocaine.

OK, coming clean here, I favor legalization of all drugs, so I’m not mocking him. And who knew that about Carter? A candidate who took the Peter Tosh line got elected in my country?!
Then Stroup got busted and stuff. In the words of the Beastie Boys, “Customs jailed me over an herb seed/Don’t rat on your boys, over some rat weed.” Wait, but why are government officials quoting The Big Lebowski?

Tom Riley, official spokesman for federal drug czar John Walters, agrees. “Keith and people like that have banged their heads against the wall for years saying ‘Legalize pot.’ But they’re farther behind now than they were 20 years ago.”

Riley says Stroup’s career reminds him of a line from the movie “The Big Lebowski”: “The ’60s are over, Lebowski. The bums lost. My condolences.”

We’ve appointed John Waters Drug Czar? Oh, Walters. But yeah, and that guy’s never toked up? Riiight. The Dude Abides. I mean, just say no. [Link to picture of Nancy Reagan in Mr. T’s lap.] Finally, I’d just like to echo the plaintive query of a thousand stoners: “how can you make a plant against the law?” “Workings of Democracy for $100? By passing a law.” “Dude, that packs meager.” It does, people. It packs meager. When I’m Drug Czarina, all this is going to change. (It’s like being Drug Czar, but way more tiaras.)

John DiIulio of ‘Mayberry Machiavellis’ fame has a short article on ‘Attacking “Sinful Inequalities”‘ in the current issue of “Perspectives on Politics”:http://www.apsanet.org/perspectives/dectoc.cfm.

bq. Bible-believing Christians are supposed to heed the call to “be not afraid” of any worldly challenge. Whether you are a person of whatever faith or no faith, if you believe that inequality is a moral problem, and you are convinced that it is a real problem in America today, you should not be afraid to say so – and not be afraid to recommend whatever policies or programs you believe might make a real and lasting difference. In the post-1980 debate over inequality, at least as I have experienced it, it is liberals, not conservatives, who have normally lacked the courage of their true convictions, some for fear of being accused of favoring “big government” or having other thoughts out of season.