raze the ladder

Writing again

2010-12-16T18:03:00.000-06:00

Check out this new blog: Permanent Crisis

Feb 2 primary endorsements

2010-02-01T17:41:00.003-06:00

County Board President
The candidates on the ballot for tomorrow’s state primary are not a very inspiring bunch, but even if you don’t vote for anyone else, you absolutely must go and vote for Toni Preckwinkle for Cook County Board President. This is the position that Todd Stroger has been making a hilarious cesspool of corruption and incompetence ever since the machine foisted him on us - and the only thing new there is the incompetence. Stroger is running again, but the bigger threat is that Clerk of the County Circuit Court Dorothy Brown might win. She’s been in trouble lately for inviting her 2100 employees to “voluntarily” donate money to her in numerous ways, and if she wins we can expect a new round of corruption and nepotism. Preckwinkle, on the other hand, is fastidiously uncorrupt and strong enough to take on the County Board. She’s also the most progressive member of the City Council. She has the best handle on the issues: she’s the only candidate who wants to make permanent the independent body monitoring the County hospitals and her other main priority is to route nonviolent offenders away from County jails. This might be the one chance in our lifetime to end the machine stranglehold on County government. Don’t waste it!

Senate
Other candidates are disappointing, but the races are important. The Senate race is between banking heir Alexi Giannoulias and former Chicago Inspector General David Hoffman (Jacob Meister dropped out yesterday and Cheryle Jackson hasn’t run a serious campaign). I don’t want to vote for Hoffman because his policies aren’t very progressive, but I will because Giannoulias’s policies aren’t any better and because he probably can’t win the general election. Giannoulias’s ties to his failing family bank are going to wreck his candidacy - he’s exactly the kind of privileged, irresponsible person people can’t stand right now. Just as important, Giannoulias is one of those politicians who won’t take a stand that hasn’t been poll-tested. Hoffman’s policies aren’t great, but I can imagine him coming to the realization once he’s in the Senate that drastic changes are required and that he needs to be a leader for fundamental reform. It's not likely, but at least it's conceivable. I can’t imagine any such thing from Giannoulias.

Governor
For governor we have Pat Quinn or Dan Hynes. Quinn has been a big disappointment - he’s mishandled a number of important policies and just doesn’t seem very good at politics. But I’m still going to vote for him because, unlike Hynes, he’s been honest with us about the need to raise taxes to fund the catastrophic budget - already crippling the provision of vital social services across the state - which is now set to fall 1/5 short of funds next year. The real problem with state government is House Speaker Michael Madigan, who blocked a sensible, progressive tax increase last year and has refused to offer any other solution. If Hynes wins, leaving Quinn a lame duck for the next nine months, there’s no way the budget will get fixed. Quinn has good values, we can only hope he’ll figure out how to be a good politician too.

Lieutenant Governor
Arthur Turner is part of the state House leadership, which means he’s connected to Madigan, which speaks poorly of him. But he also has an independent progressive base in the West Side and having a Madigan ally facilitating communication between the governor and House speaker might actually help prevent a repeat of last year’s embarrassing legislative session.

Comptroller
The job of comptroller is mostly technical in nature, its real importance is giving a politician a statewide platform from which to run for higher office. David Miller seems to be the most progressive of the candidates, he’s connected to Jesse Jackson, Jr and was endorsed by the Progressive Action Project and SEIU.

Treasurer
Same goes for treasurer. I can’t tell if Robin Kelly is more progressive than Justin Oberman, but Oberman is clearly just casting about for an elected office of some kind, and Kelly has more experience.

Cook County Assessor
Joseph Berrios is the ultimate machine candidate, and he also has massive conflict of interest in holding this position. Robert Shaw is a joke (and pretty funny if you read some of Joravsky’s reporting on this race). Vote for Ray Figueroa.

County Board
If you live on the South Side, your commissioner is probably Jerry Butler, who is a solid machine incumbent. Vote for Monica Torres-Linares.

Water Reclamation District
I don’t know anything about these candidates, so here’s the Sierra Club’s endorsements: Todd Connor, Mariyana Spyropoulos, and Kari Steele.

Theses on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates

2009-07-25T23:23:00.005-05:00

Thanks to our liberal criminal justice system, this maniac is already back on the streets.
———1) The arrest itself probably had less to do with race than it did with the fact that most cops are bullies and will become enraged if you challenge their absolute power over you.

2) Where race clearly was the dominant factor is with the person who called the police because she saw a black man pushing on a door in a fancy neighborhood.

3) But concentrating on the particulars of the case is a distraction. The reason an incident like this turns into a topic of national conversation is that it dramatizes major social issues. But instead of confronting these issues head-on, people get bogged down in irrelevant details and only indirectly express their feelings on the actual matter at hand.

4) Opinion has broadly fallen into two categories: 'if even some fancy professor who is black gets arrested for doing nothing, that proves racism is alive and well', and 'it's not racism, stop making me feel guilty about being white'.

5) The 'racism still exists' side is clearly right, especially when you consider the massive disparities in incarceration rates between whites and blacks. But more than a little of the outrage on the liberal side has to do with the fact that it was a black professional who was targeted. After all, poor blacks come in for this kind of harassment every day but it's just a matter of course. This point was nicely displayed in the comments of a white person married to a black professional, who said, “Even here in this diverse area [Chicago's Hyde Park] I’ve heard people say, ‘Look at those black guys coming toward us.’ I say, ‘Yes, but they’re wearing lacrosse shorts and Calvin Klein jeans. They’re probably the kids of the professor down the street.’ You have to be able to discern differences between people.” Or as New York Time columnist Charles Blow put it regarding his own first experience of police abuse, "We were the good guys — dean’s list students with academic scholarships. I was the freshman class president. This wasn’t supposed to happen to us."

6) In other words, many liberals would be satisfied if we could only replace racism with class hatred - in particular, class hatred directed against the ghetto underclass. No surprise here - liberals have always found race-based inequality repulsive but considered class inequality part of the natural order of things.

7) Ironically, the existence of the ghetto underclass is one of the main social phenomena that still make racist ideas plausible, and which drives the substitution of race markers for class markers that is such a striking part of the urban experience. It's this process of misrecognition that is behind some white people's casual fear of blacks (criticized by the proponent of class hatred above), as well as racial profiling by police and the hysteria at the suburban Philadelphia swimming club earlier this summer. After all, the ghetto is horrifically violent - undergoing a perpetual crisis far more disturbing than the groundless arrest of a privileged black Harvard professor. Let's say you see every night on the evening news that yet again some black kids have shot people, but you have no knowledge of history or the economy to make sense of this (lord knows the media don't provide it, and politicians, pundits, and even community activists don't discuss it). If you do have a set of racial stereotypes to draw on instead, it's not at all unreasonable to conclude that there's something about black people that makes them dangerous.

8) The point is, racism is not a communicable disease. People don't internalize ideas simply because someone tells them to. For these ideas to be compelling, there need to be social phenomena that seem to confirm them. The existence of a racially-specific ghetto underclass, in concert with nearly universal ignorance of how the ghetto was made and why it persists, and combined with the suppression of class as an explanatory variable in this country, is one of the most powerful factors behind continued acceptance of racial stereotyping.

9) If you want to eliminate this kind of racial inequality, you can't simply rail against "American racism" or demand that ignorant white people recognize the difference between good (professional) and bad (poor) black people. You have to attack the structural sources of the problem - by abolishing the ghetto.

Illinois General Assembly squanders its chance at redemption

2009-06-24T12:53:00.003-05:00

If you thought the problem with Illinois politics was Rod Blagojevich, the embarrassing denouement of the state legislature's spring session has proved you wrong.

After six years of paralysis as Blagojevich, House Speaker Mike Madigan, and Senate President Emil Jones played an infantile blame game, at the beginning of the year the General Assembly was presented with an incredible chance to undo the accumulated damage to our state. Last year Emil Jones abruptly retired (on his way out enfeoffing his son in his Senate seat, which is now apparently inheritable property). He was replaced by John Cullerton, a North Side Senator with a reputation as a reformer. Then Blagojevich was indicted and subsequently removed from office in January, replaced by reformer Pat Quinn.

The new alignment of forces in Springfield came just in time for state government to tackle an enormous budget deficit of $12 billion, caused partly by the economic crisis and partly by decades of budgetary mismanagement. At the same time Springfield had the opportunity to finally pass a state capital bill - 10 years overdue - to fund investment in roads, schools, and transit, and got its best chance in decades to make reforms that might start to address Illinois's culture of public corruption.

Four months later we can see what the legislature has done with all this promise: mostly tossed it in the garbage.

A capital bill was finally passed, and it included a slight improvement in the funding ratio of transit to roads (now 1:1.5 instead of the previous 1:2) as well as two major victories: $850 million in rail investment for Illinois and $425 million for green jobs and job training in weatherization focused on poor areas in the state. But the total funding for transit is barely enough to keep the system limping along, much less expand it to meet current needs, and the revenues are largely to be raised from a regressive expansion of gambling and sales taxes rather than the far more useful increase in the state gas tax that was discussed early on.

The legislature also passed a raft of measures supposedly aimed at eliminating corruption, including a couple of truly useful ones. But on the three most important issues - campaign finance, gerrymandering, and the overwhelming power of the legislative leaders - reforms were ignored or shot full of holes. What we need is publicly financed elections, a nonpartisan process for the drawing of legislative districts, and restrictions on the nearly dictatorial power that the House speaker and Senate president currently wield. What we got was a lot of hypocritical speechifying about how the General Assembly was cleaning up Illinois politics.

The biggest failure of all was the budget. Illinois faces a massive decline in revenues because of the economic crisis, combined with a long-term structural deficit. That leaves us with a gaping $12 billion deficit - nearly 1/4 of the state's spending is currently unfunded!

This should have been an opportunity to rectify some of the injustices of the Illinois tax system while raising the revenue needed to fund essential services. Illinois has the fifth lowest tax burden in the country as a percentage of income, but that burden is distributed by class in such a way as to make the state's already unacceptable inequalities even worse. The bottom twenty percent of state residents by income faces the fourth-highest tax burden in the country, while the top one percent ranks 40th in the country.
The problem is that Illinois suffers from a constitutionally-mandated flat tax, which skews tax assessments against the poor and in favor of the wealthy. Amending the constitution to abolish the flat tax is an urgent priority, but in the meantime the fiscal crisis gave us an opportunity to make significant reforms to the tax system, making it both fairer and more sound at the same time.

The Senate seized that opportunity and passed Senator James Meeks's bill. Meeks has fought heroically for years to reduce Illinois's appalling school funding inequalities, and this tax reform would begin that process in addition to raising revenue and making the tax burden more equitable. The Senate bill would permanently raise the personal income tax from 3 to 5 percent, but it would cushion the blow to the middle class and exempt the working poor by tripling the earned income tax credit, raising the personal exemption from $2,000 to $3,000, and doubling the state property tax credit. The bill also included $2 billion in spending cuts, in addition to the $5 billion in revenue it would raise.

Senate President Cullerton's leadership this term has been somewhat disappointing, as he maneuvered away from raising gas taxes and has issued several apologias for the General Assembly's failure to pass robust measures against corruption. But his championing of the Meeks bill, which had been driven forward by the Senate’s African-American caucus, was a strong assertion of his independence from House Speaker Madigan and a lonely progressive bright spot in the otherwise barren General Assembly performance.

Madigan, on the other hand, has once again demonstrated that, now that Blagojevich is gone, he is the problem in Illinois politics. Wielding nearly dictatorial powers over his chamber, he chose not to bring the Meeks bill for a vote and instead put forward a wholly inadequate temporary tax increase, which he then blithely allowed to meet a crushing defeat, 74-42. Madigan himself voted for this bill, but he used none of his power to bring the members into line behind it. As Rich Miller, one of the most informed and nonpartisan commentators on Illinois politics, put it:

You cannot tell me with a straight face that Speaker Madigan did any serious heavy lifting this session. When real leadership was required, he sat back and let the train of government go completely off the tracks.

Meeks himself agrees:

"You have been campaigning for a tax hike for 20 years, and nothing has happened," Meeks said. "Why? What's the one thing that has remained constant in those 20 years? Michael Madigan as a leader in the House. Everybody else in leadership is gone. If Madigan wanted this bill passed, it would have been passed."

Madigan is not the only villain here. Quinn's potential competitors for the 2010 Democratic nomination for governor, including Attorney General Lisa Madigan (Michael Madigan's daughter) and Comptroller Dan Hynes, have resorted to irresponsible demagogy against the prospect of raising taxes, as have the Republicans. But Madigan - probably the most powerful individual in Illinois politics - is the one who could have solved the problem, and has instead stood in the way.

Quinn, on the other hand, has fought doggedly, if occasionally ineptly, for a fair resolution to the crisis, and he is by far the most commendable candidate for governor next year. He continues to push for a resolution to this mess, and has called the General Assembly back into session for further negotiations and another vote next week. If Madigan again lets the tax increase die, the consequences will be dire: catastrophic cuts to state programs in healthcare, education, and aid to the most vulnerable people in the state - the developmentally disabled, poor children, recovering drug addicts, the homebound elderly, and many others.

Here is how your elected representatives voted on each of the budget bills: House and Senate. Call them and voice your support for HB 174, the Meeks bill, which is by far the best solution to this debacle. If they vote against essential state services, they have no right to your vote next year.

Sweatshops a key feature of the best of all possible worlds

2009-05-10T13:25:00.001-05:00

A comment on the previous post:

sweat shops are an easy target and are often misunderstood by outsiders. I went to a talk at Northwestern given by Nicholas Kristof on how in nearly every southeastern asian country sweat shops are the only REAL way out of prostitution (the only other line of work available to young girls there). sure sweat shops suck, but they want the work, they want the business, and its really the best we can give them.

what do you think about that viewpoint? i'm just looking at this from a realist perspective.

Is it really the best we can give them? Yes, Kristof is well-known as one of the most prominent sweatshop Candides of our time, but as usual this argument rests on an appalling reductionism in the social and economic context that produces sweatshops and a profound and debilitating pessimism about what we can do about it.

Usually sweatshop apologists ignore the coercive market forces that push people into such employment and simply say "they want the jobs". Well, if your rural economy had been destroyed by a flood of subsidized agribusiness imports or the destruction of collective forms of social security, you might "want" a degrading and debilitating job too.

But let's assume away the real social forces that produce the impersonal violence necessary to create a labor supply for sweatshops. What's wrong with legislating basic safety measures, decent wages, and a right to organize for those who work in these factories? This falls far short of establishing working conditions that might be truly self-actualizing for everyone involved, but could even Pangloss himself object to such minimal reforms?

The answer of the apologists, which is generally overplayed but has more than a kernel of truth, is that such regulations will destroy the very jobs we want to improve (more here). Even if the capacity of mobile capital to drive down work standards by playing poor countries off against each other were eliminated by establishing strictly enforced global minimum standards, the fundamental problem would remain: lower levels of exploitation means lower profits and fewer jobs. On the other hand, over the long term a high rate of exploitation yields increasing levels of overaccumulation as workers are unable to afford the products they produce, and we get crises like the Great Depression, the stagflation of the '70s, or the current disaster. On the third hand, during those periods when capitalist expansion proceeds without crisis, its distinctive style of growth steadily destroys the ecological basis of continued human life.

In other words, capitalism offers horrific working conditions for the global majority and environmentally disastrous levels of consumption for the remainder, all punctuated by crises that regularly yield social destruction on levels akin to war. Sweatshops are a necessary feature of this system, and might seem a rational solution to certain local problems created by wider capitalist dynamics. But when we view the system in its totality, we can recognize sweatshops and environmental crisis alike as just more of Krugman's "paradoxes" - phenomena that reveal the irrationality and unsustainability of capitalism as a whole.

Capitalism is irrational. Where's the paradox?

2009-05-05T01:06:00.001-05:00

Paul Krugman is the only indispensable mainstream opinion writer we have. Unlike most of the others, when you get done reading a Krugman column you don't feel like you've actually lost knowledge. Krugman combines a healthy liberal politics with a deep understanding of economics and an ability to put all this in accessible language, and he makes most other columnists look like amateurs.

But he's still a liberal, and he's still an economist. That means he's incapable of giving any sort of fundamental critique of the economic forces he's made a career of explaining. Take this passage from his column today, on a theme he's been pursuing for months now:

We’re suffering from the paradox of thrift: saving is a virtue, but when everyone tries to sharply increase saving at the same time, the effect is a depressed economy. We’re suffering from the paradox of deleveraging: reducing debt and cleaning up balance sheets is good, but when everyone tries to sell off assets and pay down debt at the same time, the result is a financial crisis.

And soon we may be facing the paradox of wages: workers at any one company can help save their jobs by accepting lower wages, but when employers across the economy cut wages at the same time, the result is higher unemployment.
Here’s how the paradox works. Suppose that workers at the XYZ Corporation accept a pay cut. That lets XYZ management cut prices, making its products more competitive. Sales rise, and more workers can keep their jobs. So you might think that wage cuts raise employment — which they do at the level of the individual employer.

But if everyone takes a pay cut, nobody gains a competitive advantage. So there’s no benefit to the economy from lower wages. Meanwhile, the fall in wages can worsen the economy’s problems on other fronts.

The language of paradox here naturalizes capitalist dynamics, distracting attention from the more fundamental question - what on earth are we doing with a system that converts individual merit into collective disaster?

These so-called paradoxes are just more examples of the perverse incentives built into market economies. Sweatshop clothes are cheaper than those produced under decent working conditions, so the rational individual will choose the socially destructive product. Companies that force the costs of the pollution they produce onto society win a competitive advantage, so the environment is steadily destroyed that the individual consumer might save 50 cents. Cutting corners on quality means higher profits - even at the cost of seriously injuring or killing the consumer - so the fairly free markets of China have churned out scandal after scandal of tainted food and drugs.

As with Krugman's "paradoxes", these phenomena illustrate a fundamental truth of capitalism - brutally rational at the individual level, it is insanely irrational as a whole. Even more terrifying, altho the economic system was created by humans and only exists thru our collective institutions and individual behaviors, its logic exists as something beyond our control, acting upon us as an external force animated by unstable, mysterious laws.

This helps explain the widespread portrayal of the economic crisis as a kind of natural disaster rather than what it is: a creation of human beings. We have to start aggressively making the point that capitalism, like the crises and social devastation it endlessly produces, is a human invention and could be ended once and for all if we so chose.

The existential dread of the health insurance industry

2009-04-08T16:13:00.001-05:00

This is worth reading:

"in 1999, Americans spent $1,059 per capita on [health insurance] administration compared with only $307 spent in Canada."

"about 85 percent of this excess administrative overhead can be attributed to the highly complex private health insurance system in the United States."

Of course, we already know that the US spends two to three times more per capita on healthcare than the other rich countries - but unlike them, it does not cover everyone and health outcomes and customer satisfaction are lower.

In other words, the government is a much more efficient provider of health insurance. So it's no surprise that the insurance companies are bringing all their power to bear against the possibility of a public health insurance option. In essence, the government would offer a Medicare account to anyone in the country who wanted to join. As long as the option weren't hamstrung from the start by constraints imposed by the insurance industry's shills in Congress, and as long as the playing field were leveled with a provision that all insurance companies must accept anyone regardless of preexisting conditions, the government would over time eliminate most or all competitors because it is a more efficient provider. In light of the bizarre resistance to socialized medicine in this country, such a long drawn-out demonstration of the merits of single-payer healthcare may be the only way to win the health system we need.

But the insurance industry understands that on a level playing field with the government, it cannot survive. So we have to expect a bitter fight against this essential reform, and we have to do whatever we can to win it. Any health reform bill that does not include a public insurance option - and only one free of insurance industry poison pills - is not worthy of the name.

Green toilet paper

2009-03-09T23:40:00.001-05:00

What's the deal with Americans? If there's some kind of behavior that's bad for the environment, we seem to always be its biggest fans. We drive the most, eat the most meat, buy the most stuff, build the most sprawl - and buy the softest toilet paper.

As far as I can tell, toilet paper made from recycled paper works just as well, but it doesn't have that soft feel that Americans apparently require. For that you have to cut down trees, including old-growth forests in Canada. So recycled-content toilet paper is a miniscule part of the American market, unlike in Europe and Latin America where it accounts for about 1/5 of sales.

According to Greenpeace, these are the brands best for the environment (the first number is percentage of recycled post-consumer waste, the second is overall recycled content. All avoid chlorine bleaching):

Green Forest 90 100
365 80 100
April Soft 80 100
Earth Friendly 80 100
Fiesta and Fiesta Green 80 100
Natural Value 80 100
Seventh Generation 80 100
Trader Joe’s 80 100

It's far more important, of course, to reduce/eliminate your driving and meat eating, buy less stuff, weatherize your home and switch your lightbulbs, etc. But if you can help save a tree you might as well.

We're far short of King's dream

2009-01-20T12:10:00.002-06:00

As we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr's birthday and the inauguration of the first black American president, it's worth remembering what exactly King fought and died for. He believed in racial equality, democratic socialism, and an end to imperialism. It's a measure of how far we still have to go until we achieve King's vision and create a truly just society that Barack Obama only supports one of these principles.

Obama endorses the culture of impunity

2009-01-12T09:31:00.002-06:00

The latest Obama disappointment is that he's not interested in investigating the crimes committed by the Cheney administration in torturing people and violating the civil liberties of US citizens. Congressional Democrats say they are more interested in enforcing the law, but given their generally spineless performance during the last eight years, I'm not holding my breath. Rule-of-law conservatives, who can marshal unlimited outrage over the similar crimes of official enemies and even over petty street crime, are nowhere to be seen.

Obama explained that violations of the law under Cheney should not be prosecuted because he believes “that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” The nation's prisoners - who constitute one-fourth of the world's total and are mostly in jail for nonviolent offenses - may be disappointed to learn that their less significant crimes do not qualify for such treatment. Philosophers of justice, however, may wish to further develop this new theory that crimes committed in the past need not be prosecuted.

More to the point, Obama explained that he has “to make sure that, for example, at the C.I.A., you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend their all their time looking over their shoulders.” He did not explain why we would want "extraordinarily talented" torturers to remain at the CIA.

In abandoning his campaign rhetoric, Obama has signaled his complete acceptance of the culture of impunity that surrounds the country's leaders. Some "extreme left-wing" Democrats who take human rights more seriously are willing to tear at the edges of this culture, but even they dare not raise the most monstrous crimes: initiating wars of aggression and extensive violations of the laws of war.

These acts are not even thinkable as crimes as long as the nationalist discourse of American righteousness remains intact. The task of human rights campaigners and progressives must not be limited to the legalistic demand of prosecuting those who break the law. It must extend to a radical critique of America's place in the world and to changing the culture of popular nationalism that has sustained the imperial agenda of presidents both Democrat and Republican for the last century and more.

Density makes great cities

2009-01-03T18:12:00.000-06:00

If you could only pick one measure to predict whether a city is awesome or not, make it density. The list below of the top 50 American cities ranked by density (population/sq mile) also gives a very rough ordering of cities stretching from great places to live to horrific suburban wasteland "cities". Of course there are problems with using municipal boundaries, which are pretty arbitrary, as the cutoff point, and things like park land or industrial areas can bring down your score. But generally speaking, lots of people close together means good architecture, diversity of culture and entertainment, good transit, more space given over to living and less to cars, more interesting stores and fewer chains, and a sense of place that cannot be found at a strip mall or TGIFriday's. Density is also a good measure of how environmentally sustainable a city is.

The best way to promote density is to discourage cars. We all should take public transit whenever possible, of course, because a strong CTA makes for a stronger Chicago, and it's one of the best ways to fight global warming in your own life. But individual action is not enough - the only way to increase density and sustainability is by increasing the cost of driving (raise the gas tax, increase the cost of parking and other fees associated with driving, implement congestion pricing), improving public transit and biking infrastructure, and focusing on transit-oriented development (including zoning for higher density) rather than sprawl. People living in the suburbs remain the biggest obstacle, because they elect politicians who are afraid to make the necessary reforms restricting car culture. We could just wait until oil scarcity or global warming make the suburbs obsolete, but the costs to the environment and future generations would be very steep. We need to start figuring out how we can get suburbanites and other drivers on our side in the fight to essentially destroy their way of life. Even New York, the densest and most sustainable city in the country, hasn't figured it out yet. So we have a lot of work to do, and despite Obama's political timidity, this can't wait until the economy starts expanding again.

1 New York City 26,403.8
13 San Francisco 16,632.4
3 Chicago 12,752.2
21 Boston 12,172.3
6 Philadelphia 11,232.8
43 Miami 10,153.2
27 Washington, DC 9,316.9
36 Long Beach 9,157.2
20 Baltimore 8,058.8
2 Los Angeles 7,876.4
44 Oakland 7,120.9
46 Minneapolis 6,969.4
11 Detroit 6,853.5
24 Seattle 6,714.8
23 Milwaukee 6,212.0
40 Cleveland 6,165.0
10 San Jose 5,116.9
49 Honolulu 4,336.7
28 Las Vegas 4,222.7
37 Sacramento 4,187.4
29 Louisville 4,126.1
35 Fresno 4,096.3
30 Portland 3,939.8
8 San Diego 3,772.4
26 Denver 3,615.6
50 Arlington 3,475.7
9 Dallas 3,470.3
15 Columbus 3,383.1
4 Houston 3,371.8
42 Omaha 3,370.8
38 Mesa 3,171.0
33 Atlanta 3,162.3
7 San Antonio 2,808.3
5 Phoenix 2,781.7
16 Austin 2,610.6
32 Tucson 2,499.7
34 Albuquerque 2,484.0
48 Raleigh 2,409.2
18 Memphis 2,327.6
22 El Paso 2,262.8
19 Charlotte 2,232.1
14 Indianapolis 2,162.8
45 Tulsa 2,152.5
47 Colorado Springs 1,943.4
17 Fort Worth 1,828.0
41 Virginia Beach 1,712.7
39 Kansas City 1,408.4
25 Nashville 1,152.6
12 Jacksonville 970.9
31 Oklahoma City 833.8

A liberal solution to the automakers crisis

2008-12-14T11:34:00.001-06:00

I've already discussed my own solution to the auto industry crisis, but what's interesting is that there is another viable solution to the problem - what we might call the liberal solution as against my radical solution. The American auto companies suffer from two key competitive disadvantages in labor compensation. The first one is that they have to pay for their employees' health insurance. Since the other rich countries all have socialized medicine (which is far more efficient, affordable, and equitable than the USA's insane system), foreign car importers to the United States have a major cost advantage.

The second disadvantage is against not just importers, but foreign automakers who manufacture in the United States as well. As this article shows, the Big 3 automakers pay their workers an average of $73/hour, while Japanese manufacturers in the United States pay only $49/hour. About half of this difference is a result of higher pay and benefits won by the unionized workforce of the American companies that the nonunionized workers of the foreign companies are denied. The rest is a result of Detroit's payment of "legacy costs" - pensions and health insurance commitments that are higher for the Big 3 because their retired workforce is much larger than that of the foreign automakers.

So the liberal solution would involve:

1) Implementing some form of single-payer health insurance, like Medicare for all. Not only is this the only way to rein in healthcare costs and extend coverage to everyone in the country, it would also remove a major burden on the carmakers and every other business that must shoulder the cost of health insurance for its employees.

2) Strengthening unions. The problem is not that Detroit's workers make too much, it's that their foreign competitors exploit their workers to a greater extent, earning them an unfair competitive advantage.

3) Make private pensions less important or eliminate them altogether. We've now seen the results of the brilliant idea that one's retirement income should rest on the whims of the stock market. Restore the public commitment to providing for the elderly.

Okay, this solution does not fundamentally challenge capitalism in any way, so it's not radical. It would simply make the automakers competitive by reconstituting the postwar Fordist production regime - a quintessentially liberal solution. So it tells you quite a bit about today's political situation that not even the so-called liberals would dare call for such modest reforms.

Well it's about time

2008-12-09T15:13:00.001-06:00

Rod Blagojevich arrested for massive corruption? If you're surprised then you haven't been following Illinois politics at all.

But this?!

At various times, in exchange for the Senate appointment [replacing Barack Obama], Blagojevich discussed obtaining:

A substantial salary for himself at a either a non-profit foundation or an organization affiliated with labor unions;

Placing his wife on paid corporate boards where he speculated she might garner as much as $150,000 a year;

Promises of campaign funds – including cash up front; and

A cabinet post or ambassadorship for himself.

Just last week, on December 4, Blagojevich allegedly told an advisor that he might "get some (money) up front, maybe" from Senate Candidate 5, if he named Senate Candidate 5 to the Senate seat, to insure that Senate Candidate 5 kept a promise about raising money for Blagojevich if he ran for re-election. . . . On November 7, while talking on the phone about the Senate seat with Harris and an advisor, Blagojevich said he needed to consider his family and that he is "financially" hurting, the affidavit states. Harris allegedly said that they were considering what would help the "financial security" of the Blagojevich family and what will keep Blagojevich "politically viable." Blagojevich stated, "I want to make money," adding later that he is interested in making $250,000 to $300,000 a year, the complaint alleges.

On November 10, in a lengthy telephone call with numerous advisors . . . Blagojevich and others discussed various ways Blagojevich could "monetize" the relationships he has made as governor to make money after leaving that office. . . .

Throughout the intercepted conversations, Blagojevich also allegedly spent significant time weighing the option of appointing himself to the open Senate seat and expressed a variety of reasons for doing so, including: frustration at being "stuck" as governor; a belief that he will be able to obtain greater resources if he is indicted as a sitting Senator as opposed to a sitting governor; a desire to remake his image in consideration of a possible run for President in 2016; avoiding impeachment by the Illinois legislature; making corporate contacts that would be of value to him after leaving public office; facilitating his wife's employment as a lobbyist; and generating speaking fees should he decide to leave public office.

This suggests that Blagojevich was not just exceptionally corrupt even by Illinois standards - and that's already quite an achievement - but that he was compulsively corrupt, that he persisted with ever-increasing levels of corruption even after any well-grounded run-of-the-mill corrupt politician would have realized that he was done for. Blagojevich, on the other hand, thought he could either get a lot of money by selling the Senate seat or appoint himself, which would help position him both to repulse an indictment and run for president. The only way to interpret this is as pathology.

Lt Gov Pat Quinn, who has called for Blagojevich to resign, is next in line for governor. That would be a marked improvement - Quinn has a reputation as a reformer in Illinois politics, he supported the constitutional convention and has spoken out on making the tax system less regressive and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Quinn may not be as aggressively progressive as we might like, but getting him the governor's mansion might be exactly what we need to start cleaning up the state and making progress on key issues like the state capital funding bill and getting rid of the flat income tax that have been mired for years in the dysfunction created by Blagojevich's megalomania.

Carless

2008-11-26T00:00:00.002-06:00

According to a report using 2000 census data, these are the top ten US metropolitan areas with households that do not own a car:

New York City - 42 percent
Jersey City - 30 percent
Waterbury, Connecticut - 16 percent
New Orleans - 14 percent
Philadelphia - 13 percent
Newark - 12 percent
San Francisco - 12 percent
Chicago - 11 percent
Los Angeles - 11 percent

Finally, some good news

2008-11-20T16:37:00.002-06:00

Progressives have taken quite a beating in the Obama cabinet announcements. Free marketeers Summers or Geithner are the options at Treasury, militarists Clinton and Kerry are top candidates for the State Department, and Commerce nearly went to Penny Pritzker, whose main qualifications were that she inherited a lot of money and was effective at convincing a lot of rich people to donate to Obama.

Fortunately, Pritzker has taken herself out of consideration after it became clear that her involvement in a collapsed bank deeply implicated in the subprime lending market might lead to bad publicity. (Update: a good article on the Pritzker family's long history of shady business dealings. It turns out they were pioneers in the use of foreign tax shelters to avoid paying their share of the tax burden - a practice, incidentally, that was a key early factor in driving the financialization of the economy because it forced the US to deregulate its banking system so rich people's capital wouldn't all go overseas.) And we might also escape Clinton because her husband's financial dealings have been so questionable. But it's cold comfort when you have to hope for self-sabotage to avoid neoliberal/corporate/imperialist nominees from an ostensibly liberal president-elect.

On another key appointment, I'm still not sure if we finally have an ally or not. Tom Daschle will be the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, and he will also be given the lead role in crafting a health reform proposal. Daschle co-wrote a book on reforming healthcare, which I haven't seen yet, but if the National Review is right, he supports

mandates on individuals and businesses to buy or offer coverage; new government-run insurance options for the under-65 population; a national governmental agency offering anyone who wants it to sign up for insurance outside of work; large new subsidy programs; and much more government involvement in determining what is and is not effective medical care.

If this is true, and if Daschle can use his experience as a former Senate leader to push reform thru Congress, then we have our first reason for optimism.

The reason I had to resort to quoting National Review is that all the other accounts focus on Daschle's plan to create a Federal Health Board, which would regulate the entire health industry and, like the Federal Reserve Board, be insulated from political pressure. While such a body could no doubt bring some order out of the absurdly complex mix of inefficient private insurers and the restricted and fragmented public insurers, it's not at all clear that creating an unaccountable body to do this is the right way to go. I will try to get ahold of Daschle's book and figure out the details. In the meantime, the best indication that Daschle might be our friend is his incredible glasses.

If the Daschle appointment is our only (ambiguous) ray of light coming from the emerging Obama administration, there is one development we can celebrate without reserve: Henry Waxman has usurped John Dingell's position as chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Dingell is an old (really old - he first joined Congress in 1955) friend of the auto industry, and has been a maddening obstacle for years to finally taking action on the climate crisis. The Democratic caucus voted 137 to 122 to bypass the seniority system and hand control to Waxman, who should help advance legislation to fight global warming. But the big question remains - will the government act forcefully enough to avert disaster, or will new laws be too little too late? We'll have to wait for more concrete signals from the Obama administration, but in the meantime we can make our demands clear on the Global Day of Action on Climate, December 6 (in Chicago at Millenium Park, 11am).

How to solve the automakers crisis

2008-11-18T21:10:00.003-06:00

Nationalize the car companies, implement parecon relations of production, and convert the factories to produce something useful, like railcars. Then arrest the executives and put them on trial for subverting democracy and destroying the environment. This is a completely serious proposal. Let it not be said that the left has no alternatives, only that our lawmakers are too ideologically restricted and hypocritical to consider them.

"Keep your enemies close" and all, but isn't it going too far to put the people responsible for the financial crisis in charge of the economy?

2008-11-16T22:43:00.005-06:00

Here's a funny story:

In 1997, a woman named Brooksley Born, who was head of a financial regulatory body called the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, proposed federal regulation of derivatives. If the proposal had been accepted, it would have significantly limited the current financial chaos.

But the people in charge of financial regulation - Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers - didn't like the idea. They told Born that even talking about regulation could damage the markets, and in meetings they harshly criticized her. According to one of Born's subordinates, "Greenspan told Brooksley that she essentially didn’t know what she was doing and she’d cause a financial crisis. Brooksley was this woman who was not playing tennis with these guys and not having lunch with these guys. There was a little bit of the feeling that this woman was not of Wall Street." (In this context it might be useful to remember that Summers, at least, has stated that women are biologically inferior to men in science and engineering. Since he wasn't addressing high finance, we don't know whether he would extend this judgment to the markets.)

But Born refused to back down, so Greenspan, Rubin, and Summers got Congress to freeze her commission's regulatory authority for six months. Later, Congress permanently withdrew derivatives from the purview of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Bill Clinton signed the bill into law. Born resigned her post.

In the years since, Summers became president of Harvard, where he alienated pretty much the entire faculty with his authoritarian style and theories about women's biological capabilities. Rubin took a job as "consigliere" at Citigroup, where he makes $10-15 million a year for offering advice like his 2006 gem on the need to increase risk and add exposure to housing market. Citigroup has taken heavy losses. Born is now retired.

Among Born, Rubin, and Summers, can you guess which two are Obama's top economic advisers and possible Secretaries of Treasury? I'll give you a hint - it's not the woman.

This is disturbing

2008-11-15T23:40:00.000-06:00

Knee-jerk support for Obama among people who are ostensibly progressive is already well under way. This post on Daily Kos is a love letter to Valerie Jarrett, a close friend of the Obama family, co-leader of transition planning, and now "White House senior adviser and assistant to the president for intergovernmental relations and public liaison". With only a couple exceptions out of over 400, the commenters agree that Jarrett is an "amazing" "talented" "impressive" "remarkable" woman. Also, "She has a dignity and grace that few people possess."

Jarrett is a creature of the Chicago political and economic elite. She rose to prominence as an important official under Daley, she moves easily among the city's corporate leaders, and even tho she is Robert Taylor's granddaughter, she has taken a leading role in destroying Chicago's public housing. The only good news is that Jarrett might do less damage as a liaison within the bureaucracy than she would have as head of HUD or Illinois Senator.

But make no mistake - Jarrett is an enemy of the progressive agenda, as are most of the other people being suggested for positions within the administration. Summers at Treasury and Clinton as Secretary of State? I didn't think Obama would be terribly good, but I had no idea he could be that bad. Progressives need to get over their Obama crush asap if we're going to provide an effective check on Obama's very centrist impulses.

The number of animals killed to make one chicken breast just keeps going up

2008-11-11T17:45:00.001-06:00

It turns out that meat production is not only a major source of greenhouse gases and severe air and water pollution, it is also undermining marine ecosystems. From a New York Times editorial:

Per capita meat consumption more than doubled over the past half-century as the global economy expanded. It is expected to double again by 2050. Which raises the question, what does all that meat eat before it becomes meat?

Increasingly the answer is very small fish harvested from the ocean and ground into meal and pressed into oil. According to a new report by scientists from the University of British Columbia and financed by the Pew Institute for Ocean Science, 37 percent by weight of all the fish taken from the ocean is forage fish: small fish like sardines and menhaden. Nearly half of that is fed to farmed fish; most of the rest is fed to pigs and poultry.

The problem is that forage fish are the feedstock of marine mammals and birds and larger species of fish. In other words, farmed fish, pigs and poultry — and the humans who eat them — are competing for food directly with aquatic species that depend on those forage fish for their existence.

It's very positive that The New York Times editorial page is devoting space to issues like this, and what's even better was their concluding remark: "The real answers are support for sustainable agriculture in the developing world and encouraging healthy, less meat-based eating habits as a true sign of affluence everywhere." This is the first time I've seen a mainstream source call for less meat-eating, and coming from the same writers who made one of the most pathetic cop-outs I've seen on the meat issue less than two years ago, it has to be regarded as progress.

Obama's Senate seat

2008-11-06T08:51:00.000-06:00

Speculation on who will replace Obama in the Senate begins (pictures of some of those under consideration). The state's 100 percent perfect constitution - which voters protected by a huge margin rather than calling a new Constitutional Convention - does not give the voters the choice of who that will be. So our endearingly-crazy-if-he-weren't-so-spectacularly-corrupt governor Rod Blagojevich will make the decision.

Names mentioned in the Tribune account include Blagojevich himself, Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, my House representative Jesse Jackson Jr, other representatives Luis Gutierrez, Danny Davis, and Jan Schakowsky, Attorney General Lisa Madigan, Comptroller Dan Hynes, Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, and Tammy Duckworth, a disabled Iraq war vet who lost her 2006 run for a seat in the House.

It would be a disaster if Blagojevich chose himself, especially since he's liable to be indicted before too long. Jarrett is a former official from the Harold Washington and Daley administrations, closely connected to Chicago's corporate elite, and played a key role in destroying the city's public housing. Another discouraging example of the kind of people Obama chooses to surround himself with.

Gutierrez has recently become mired in his own corruption scandal. I don't know his politics too well, but I've never heard anything that impressed me much. I don't know Danny Davis at all, but with the exception of a bizarre 문선명/Mun Seonmyeong (Sun Myung Moon) connection, his Wikipedia page makes his politics sound pretty good.

I'm not that familiar with the politics of Madigan, Hynes, Giannoulias, or Duckworth, but my impression is that they're all lousy centrists. So that leaves Schakowsky and Jackson, who are both among the most progressive members of the House and would both be wonderful friends to the left in the Senate - and would represent a big improvement over Obama in the Senate. I don't really know how we can influence the outcome of this über-insider decision, but we have to hope that it's one of those two.

Incidentally, unless Jackson, Davis, Jarrett, or (God forbid) Emil Jones is chosen for the seat, the Senate will once again have zero black members. Proof enough by itself that the election of Obama has not fixed America's deep racial problems.

The tasks at hand

2008-11-05T01:54:00.004-06:00

I'm just back from Grant Park, where the energy and enthusiasm were remarkable. Biking back thru the South Side, the celebration is still going. I've been skeptical of Obama from the beginning, but the Obama campaign - partly thru its own determination to campaign on a mass basis but mostly because of events beyond its control - has mobilized a degree of popular participation unprecedented for at least a generation.

The extent of this phenomenon, combined with the neoliberal economy's self-inflicted wounds, give progressives their best opening in forty years. But our obstacles are huge: we confront a reluctance among many progressives to make a clear analysis of where our problems come from, as well as Obama's own centrism and the widespread naive faith in Obama which may convince many that their continued participation is unnecessary. Consider the kind of names that Obama has floated for important positions in his administration - Paul Volcker, pioneer of neoliberalism; Bob Rubin and Larry Summers, Clinton's unrepentant champions of free capital flows; Robert Gates, who recently argued that any decrease in the military budget (now over half of world military spending) would be a historic mistake; and the Dark Prince himself, Rahm Emanuel.

And those are just the problems on "our" side. American racism, xenophobia, and fundamentalism have not been vanquished, and now that a figure like McCain is no longer restraining them, the Republicans will soon enough return to demagoguery.

The two most important priorities are now 1) channeling the remarkable energy invested in the Obama campaign into true grassroots activism, and 2) getting serious about turning the economic crisis to our advantage. Translating campaign participation into everyday participation in a progressive transformation of society from the ground up is the best way to build our power, and the only way to create the kind of society we want. And we absolutely have to start hammering away at neoliberal ideology, which has discredited itself even as the left largely remains silent. We need to fill that ideological void and offer alternatives more progressive than what we'll get from the likes of Volcker and Rubin. We can enjoy this partial victory for a moment, but complacency would be disastrous.

Five essential issues the candidates have avoided

2008-11-02T22:05:00.001-06:00

Every four years the United States carries out one of the greatest exercises in mass political participation in the world, yet every presidential election is defined by the issues the candidates choose to debate rather than the most important issues the country faces. The issues raised this year are the most urgent in several decades of presidential contests, but after three debates in which the same questions were recycled again and again, it should be no surprise that hugely important issues are still off the table. No matter who wins in November, these issues must be brought into the national debate.

Medicare for all
The United States is unique among rich countries: it does not provide health insurance to all its people - one out of every six Americans does not have coverage. Since almost 50 million people can't afford to see a doctor, you might think the US spends less on health care than other rich countries that cover everyone. But in fact American per capita health care expenses are *two times higher* than even the second-highest spender - and three times higher than other countries with universal coverage.

That means we're getting a horrible deal on health care - other countries insure everyone, spend far less money doing so, and their people are at least as healthy as Americans. The reason is that those countries' governments provide health care. In America private insurers do it, spending huge amounts of money to reduplicate each other's bureaucracy (which is mainly used to find ways to *deny* care), to pay their executives millions of dollars, and to buy advertising.

The US already has a highly efficient government health insurance program that provides care at a much lower cost than private insurers - but only the elderly are eligible for Medicare. If we extended Medicare to all Americans, our health costs would plummet and we could guarantee the right of every American to health care. Unfortunately, private insurers also spend your health care dollars on lobbying and political attack ads, which is why even those politicians who understand the right way to solve our health care crisis are afraid to support it. Only when the American people start demanding the only efficient and fair solution - Medicare for everyone - will politicians start listening.

The failed drug war
Americans have a strange relationship with recreational drugs. The two that are by far the most socially destructive - alcohol and tobacco - are legal and widely available. Meanwhile, one drug - marijuana - that unlike alcohol and tobacco is not addictive, not associated with violence, and carries less risk of chronic disease, remains illegal. Other truly dangerous drugs like heroin and methamphetamines are driven underground, where they cannot be regulated. Instead the business is controlled by violent gangs that battle each other and the police to control the market - leading to exactly the same kind of unnecessary violence that accompanied the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s. And finally, we treat those who suffer from addiction as criminals, offering them jail rather than treatment. Does anyone seriously believe that addiction is a choice, which can be pummeled out of the victim by prison?

Dangerous drugs should be legal but strictly controlled, and treatment programs should finally be fully funded. This would not only eliminate the violence involved with drugs, and it would not only begin treating drug abusers as human beings with a devastating medical problem. It would also radically reduce the amount of taxpayer money spent to fight drugs - now mostly wasted on controlling prohibition-caused violence and imprisoning nonviolent offenders - and redirect it in more effective ways.

But as we reform our drug laws we must also take steps to address the underlying social problems that make illegal drugs so socially destructive for certain communities. Right now, even though drug use is evenly spread across cities and suburbs, whites and blacks, the drug war is targeted mainly at poor urban blacks. For decades, the economy and social fabric of these communities was devastated by a toxic combination of deindustrialization, capital flight, and racist neglect. Now we imprison huge numbers of these young men for their involvement in what is often the only viable source of jobs in their community, and they then return to their neighborhoods with even bleaker prospects for a job or stable lives. The answer is not to get tougher on people with few other choices - we must target the real problem, which is economic collapse and inadequate public investment.

Sprawl
The global climate crisis and the rising price of oil (halted only temporarily by the world recession) are closely related to sprawl. The endless extension of roads and highways to serve endlessly expanding suburbs and their ever-larger houses and lawns requires an endless increase in the use of energy and resources to heat and cool those houses, to build the infrastructure to serve them, and to propel the cars whose commute distances and times are, unsurprisingly, also endlessly increasing. The longer we stay on this path, the worse global warming, air pollution, traffic congestion, and global oil shortages will become.

For the last 50 years, the government has subsidized and even mandated sprawl by building highways, using zoning regulations to discourage dense, mixed-use development, and constantly intervening in the Middle East to keep the price of oil low. Americans are now demanding more options - neighborhoods that are walkable and bike-friendly, with good access to public transit and retail and jobs close by.

But to make this kind of development cost-effective, and to fight our destructive addiction to oil, the price of gas can never again collapse to the artificially low levels of the 1980s and '90s. And that's why the candidates won't talk about this issue - the only way to address climate change, to meaningfully reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and to convince developers to invest in compact development rather than sprawl is to keep the price of gas high. A price floor of at least $4 should be established and gradually increased, so that if the price of oil drops the cost of gasoline will still reflect the social damage done by driving. Some of the revenues from this tax should be spent to help those who can least afford the transition, and the rest of it should go toward expanding public transit and Amtrak, which have both suffered from decades of underinvestment, and to research on alternative energy sources. The transition to a more sustainable lifestyle will be painful, but not as painful as if we once again wait complacently for the next oil shock.

The devastating impact of animal agriculture
Over the last 50 years the livestock industry has quietly experienced a revolutionary transformation, from the family farm to the factory farm. Now most animals are raised in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where as many animals are crammed together in as small a space as possible to maximize the profits of huge agribusinesses.

It goes without saying that these conditions are horribly cruel to the animals, who have almost no space to move around or engage in any of their natural behaviors. The cramped conditions also lead to aggression among the animals, so the livestock corporations cut off the chickens' beaks to prevent them from killing each other, and cut off the pigs' tails to keep the pig in the cage behind from chewing it off.

But the problems extend far beyond ethical bankruptcy. CAFOs are breeding grounds for disease, which leads the corporations to shoot the animals full of antibiotics, which make their way into our food and increase the risk that antibiotic-resistant diseases could emerge and devastate the food supply. Huge amounts of animal waste are concentrated in one spot, making responsible disposal impossible - so agribusiness dumps it into our rivers and streams, destroying their ecosystems. This runoff can then infect our vegetable supply, and was the source of recent deadly outbreaks of E. coli and salmonella in lettuce, spinach, and tomatoes.

On top of these dangers, the intense consumption of meat presents its own problems. The livestock industry is responsible for 1/5 of the world's human-induced greenhouse gases - a total greater than cars and planes combined. Meat is horribly energy inefficient, requiring that many times more grain be fed to animals to produce the same amount of protein and calories than a plant-based diet. And meat-eating is aggravating a growing global food crisis by diverting grain to the production of meat rather than to feeding the hungry.

Yet the government heavily subsidizes the production of meat by sending millions of dollars to agribusiness corn and soy interests that grow most of their crops to supply CAFOs. For decades government has stood idly by as factory farms swallowed up the country's family farmers and devastated the rural environment. It's time to start thinking about regulating these unethical threats to public health out of existence, and transitioning to a less meat-heavy diet.

Class war
The only class war in America has nothing to do with Barack Obama's very modest proposal to increase taxes on the incredibly super-rich. Over the last 30 years, the productivity of American workers has increased more than 70 percent, yet workers' real wages have not increased at all, and the lowest-paid have actually taken a big pay cut. What that means is that corporations are making more money, but they aren't giving any of it to their workers (corporate profits now occupy a larger share of the economy than at any time since the 1960s). Corporate executives and shareholders have seized all the gains for themselves. That's class war.

The reason that productivity and wages rose in tandem during the 1950s and '60s is that labor unions were strong, and made sure that workers got some share of the pie. But the severe recession of the early '80s and a brutal assault on organized labor by the Reagan administration crippled the unions. Free trade deals and the increasing share of low-skill nonunionized service jobs in the economy has kept workers weak ever since.

At the same time, the tax rates on the very rich have been continuously lowered, especially on the investment income that they don't actually work for (capital gains taxes). Many corporate executives now pay a lower effective tax rate than their secretaries. The theory was that these people knew how best to invest that money - a theory that produced reckless speculation and has given us the worst financial crisis since the Depression. Maybe it's time to let working people spend more of the money from the wealth they produce rather than letting rich folks wreck the economy with it.

Rebalancing the tax code to reward work rather than unearned income is a good way to start, and so is raising the minimum wage to a true living wage and indexing it to inflation. We must also remove some of the barriers to organizing unions that businesses have thrown up over the years - passing the Employee Free Choice Act, which was blocked only by a Senate minority this term - should be a high priority.

But beyond legislation, we need to start rethinking some ideas that have been taken for granted for too long. The market does not magically distribute income to those who work hardest or most deserve it, it distributes income to those with power. Over the last 30 years a large majority of the population has acquiesced in their stagnating incomes as the power of well-positioned executives, investors, and managers soared and they took more and more of society's wealth. Now that we see what they've done to economy with all that money and power, it's about time we took some of it back.

Smart Tolerant Professionals are the Real Americans

2008-10-28T11:44:00.001-05:00

Assuming Obama wins the election, we can already see one clear explanatory narrative emerging among the pundits - the McCain campaign pandered to the racism and anti-intellectualism of Americans and lost, because Americans are better than that. David Brooks has been making this argument (most explicitly here) and yesterday Frank Rich devoted his column to the idea. As Timothy Egan wrote on the op-ed page yesterday, "Republicans have been insinuating for years now that some of the brightest, most productive communities in the United States are fake American" - and it's finally going to bite them in the ass. America is increasingly a multiracial society with a knowledge economy and Republicans have permanently alienated the well-educated, tolerant professionals who make it run.

While criticizing the Republicans' conception of church-going, small-town, implicitly white "Real Americans", these writers clearly have their own favored social group. This is a wonderful wish fulfillment for these pundits: it's payback time for the smart, ostentatiously not-racist professionals that they identify with, against the Republicans who constantly demonize them. But there are two big problems here.

First, if Obama does win it certainly will not prove Rich's claim that
"despite the months-long drumbeat of punditry to the contrary, there are not and have never been enough racists in 2008 to flip this election." In case Rich has forgotten, one month ago the polls showed a neck-and-neck race, even tho McCain had just chosen a provincial lightweight with no obvious interest in any national policy issues except abortion to be his running mate, and even tho the political climate in the country was already giving Congressional Democrats big leads.

What has changed is not the sudden disappearance of the longstanding American complex of racism, xenophobia, and nationalism that had dragged Obama down for so long, but the explosion of the economic crisis. Joe Klein, writing in early September, also counterpoised the Republican fantasy of the '50s as Golden Age to "a multiracial country whose greatest cultural and economic strength is its diversity". But he lamented that this "vision is not sellable right now to a critical mass of Americans". If Obama wins comfortably, it only proves that in the midst of the worst financial disaster in 80 years, voters' fear of the Other can be overcome by their fear for their livelihoods.

The real test will come when the Republicans resume their mobilization-thru-bigotry tactics during the Obama presidency, especially if Obama's attempts to revive the economy do not immediately succeed. (And the crisis is now threatening to get so out of control that the chances of quick success are very low.) We on the left are not only going to have to fight Obama's centrist policies, we're also going to have to fight his instincts to move even further to the right in the face of Republican attacks. It would be nice if the American tradition of racism/xenophobia/nationalism really were so weak that we didn't have to worry about it. But four years ago that tradition combined with homophobia to return George Bush to the White House. Even tho the political mood is much different now, the underlying ideologies of the country haven't changed. We can't lose site of the need to keep up the culture war against these supremacist ideologies just because a black man wins the presidency.

Second, the know-nothing Republicans and their urbane critics have set up a false dichotomy between Real Americans and Smart Tolerant Professionals. I certainly agree that there's nothing wrong with people who live in cities and eat ethnic foods, and there is something wrong with the parochialism that Republicans celebrate. But both sides are ignoring a key issue here: the resentment of Smart Tolerant Professionals is not based solely, or even primarily, on their tendency to eat arugula. There is a strong and legitimate, if inchoate, class basis for this resentment.

A large majority of these professionals come from privilege and leveraged that privilege to gain access to the country's handful of elite universities. This education gave them the status and connections they needed to get one of the small number of interesting, empowering jobs in the economy. Occupying one of these jobs, they are elevated far above the working majority of the population - they are glorified by the culture, they can buy whatever they want, and in the workplace itself they hold direct and dictatorial power over their subordinates. And then they look down on those they dominate culturally and institutionally, branding them intolerant, unsophisticated, and even stupid (a recurring word in Rich and Egan's columns).

Republican demonology has twisted the class anger of the victims of this process into support for reactionary policies. But the success they've had in this project has been guaranteed by the Democrats' decision to turn their backs on the working majority. Clinton made populist gestures, but the financiers, lawyers, and technocrats ran the show. Gore and Kerry maintained the substance of Clinton's administration without his ability to hide it behind a show of populism. Obama, perhaps less clumsy than Gore and Kerry, nevertheless has not changed the formula. The historical conjuncture will probably allow Obama to win the election, but like the Clinton years it will be an empty victory if he doesn't restore the Democrats to their working-class base. All the evidence suggests that he has no desire to do so, which means that only a powerful popular show of force can push him in that direction.

Food politics more visible, still naive

2008-10-17T15:28:00.004-05:00

Last Tuesday, Oprah aired a show about California's Proposition 2, which would require livestock producers to give their confined animals enough room to stretch and move around. It was a balanced show, including both advocates of the measure and some of the factory farmers it would target, but Oprah's sympathies were clearly with the measure's proponents. Unfortunately, the alternative offered to factory farmed pork, veal, etc was free range pork, veal, etc. Not eating animals was not raised as an option. Nor did the show go into the environmental or food supply problems of animal agriculture.

Oprah could be a huge force for raising consciousness about these issues, so I encourage everyone to take a minute (even if you didn't catch the show) and write a quick comment to the show - the form is here. This is what I wrote:

Your show on factory farming was great, raising extremely important issues about the ethics of how we raise animals. But I was surprised and disappointed that you did not explore a key option for addressing these issues - eating vegetarian. Even the most humanely raised animals end their lives in the horrors of the slaughterhouse, and I believe that unnecessarily taking life is at least as big an ethical problem as unnecessarily causing suffering.

Vegetarianism not only eliminates the cruelty and killing of the livestock industry, it also solves the deep environmental problems with meat. The livestock industry produces 1/5 of human-induced greenhouse gases - making meat a bigger global warming problem than cars. In addition, meat production is a terribly inefficient use of resources, which is why it's a central cause of the current global food crisis.

I hope that you'll bring up these issues in future shows, because reducing the amount of meat we eat is the only way to a sustainable, cruelty-free society. And the best way to facilitate this transition is to expose people to the incredible diversity of delicious vegetarian food.

* * *In other food news, Michael Pollan had a cover article in The New York Times Magazine last weekend. The first half covers the same ground Pollan always covers - how perverse market and government incentives have built a food system with horrible effects for the environment, the economy, national security, and public health. The rest of the article offers a range of policy solutions that the next president should follow to dig us out of this mess.

The policy ideas are all focused on moving us back to the organic, integrated, labor-intensive kind of farming that dominated before World War II, which would both dramatically reduce the amount of oil used in food production and raise the artificially low prices of the foods destroying our health - meat and junk food. Pollan emphasizes the array of policy options available and necessary for such a profound transformation - from a complete rewriting of agricultural subsidies to the symbolic power of planting a vegetable garden on the White House lawn and announcing a weekly meatless meal for the first family.

These are all good ideas, but what Pollan does not do is grapple with the two enormous obstacles to this agenda: the extraordinary political power that agribusiness wields, and the popular commitment to a diet full of cheap meat. As urgent as these issues are, do we really expect someone as cautious - even timid - as Barack Obama to cross the farm state senators and their patrons the meat and grain corporations? Even if he did, imagine the national uproar that agribusiness could mobilize by simply pointing out that these reforms would end of cheap meat.

Capitalism gives big business a stranglehold over our politics, and Americans are almost dogmatically committed to eating meat. What Pollan needs to do, rather than simply reiterate his (admittedly very strong) arguments, is start confronting how we can overcome these obstacles. The key here is that we need to be building a movement not just of self-satisfied yuppies eating organic food in the comfort of their suburban home or big condo. Instead, if we as a society are going to get past the seduction of cheap meat, we need a movement of people who morally reject the power of corporations and the predominance of meat.

Meat means cruelty, unnecessary killing, global warming, air and water pollution, and global hunger. Corporate power undermines democracy and disfigures our culture. There's no shortage of reasons to oppose the two, but until we can mobilize people by explicitly appealing to these ideas, it will be impossible to create the political will needed to transform our food economy.

This isn't an impossible agenda. You don't have to be a vegetarian to recognize that the amount of meat Americans eat is ethically unacceptable, and you don't have to be a socialist to demand an end to corporate control of politics. But before Americans are willing to give up the era of cheap meat, they will have to make these connections. Our job is to speed up the process.

Key California ballot propositions

2008-10-03T21:40:00.007-05:00

People from California don't read this blog very often, but I think we all have a few friends living there. So pass on this link or copy this post and email it to people you know.

This November, California voters have a great opportunity to pass three ballot propositions that would be good for the state and, just as important, would make California a leading example for the rest of the country. Failing to pass them would mark a major setback for a number of urgent priorities, so talk to everyone you know who votes in California and let's get some momentum behind these important issues.

Prop 1A - High-speed rail
If passed, Prop 1A would authorize the state to raise almost $10 billion to begin construction on the country's first bullet train, between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Once completed, travelers could make the trip in only 2 1/2 hours on trains traveling as fast as 220 mph, for a one-way cost of $55. There would be stops on the Peninsula and in the South Bay, and the system would eventually be extended to San Diego, Sacramento, and Riverside County.

The United States is far behind Europe, Japan, and even China in its rail network, and we're paying the price in terms of high gas costs, highway congestion, air pollution, and an outsize contribution to global warming. Rail addresses all these problems because it gets cars off the road and moves people with far greater energy efficiency than either cars or planes. With rising population densities and clogged roads, California will have no choice but to invest large amounts of money in its transportation infrastructure in the coming years. The only choice is whether to waste money on the failed model of ever-widening highways, or chart a new path for the state and the country by supporting high-speed rail.

(Los Angeles County voters will also have the chance to pass Measure R, a half-cent sales tax increase that would fund road and public transit projects. About 2/3 of the revenue would be devoted to transit, paying for a major expansion of the rail system (extensions of the Expo Line and both ends of the Gold Line, extension of the Green Line to LAX, and building of the Subway to the Sea under Wilshire Blvd among other projects) and significant improvements to the bus system. Measure R requires a 2/3 majority to pass, but it is essential to the future viability of LA's transportation system. See http://metro.net/measurer )

Prop 2 - Humane animal agriculture
Prop 2 would require factory farms to provide their animals adequate room to tum around freely, lie down, stand up, and fully extend their limbs. Currently, veal calves, laying hens, and female pigs kept for breeding are usually confined for most - or all - of their lives in cages or pens so small that they cannot turn around or sleep comfortably. In pursuit of higher profits, factory farms have crammed as many animals together in as small a space as possible, but this unnatural crowding leads to aggression among the animals. To prevent them from killing each other, they are separated into tiny cages that deprive them of basic needs; chickens have their beaks cut off so they cannot peck each other, cows and pigs are unable to lie down or move.

Prop 2 would give factory farms six years to convert their operations to more humane methods. Such alternatives are already common in Europe and measures outlawing veal crates and sow gestation crates have been passed in several other states. Prop 2 gives Californians the chance to set an example for the whole country by eliminating the most extreme types of inhumane confinement and providing for the minimal needs of the animals we use for our food.

Prop 5 - Rehabilitation for nonviolent offenders
American prisons now confine more than 1 of every 100 adults, by far the highest percentage in the world. This unprecedented punitive approach to criminal justice has come about largely because of harsh sentences handed out to nonviolent offenders, especially those who violate the drug laws. Our laws not only expose these offenders to overcrowded and violent prisons while severely constraining their life opportunities upon release, they also impose massive - and rising - expenses on taxpayers.

Prop 5 would expand rehabilitation programs for nonviolent offenders in California with special attention to the needs of those addicted to drugs, it would relax rigid parole requirements, and would reduce marijuana possession from a misdemeanor to an infraction (similar to a traffic ticket). The state estimates that increased spending on rehabilitation programs would be offset be reduced spending on imprisoning nonviolent offenders, and once you factor in the need for fewer new prisons, Prop 5 would save California taxpayers a total of $2.5 billion or more. By passing it, Californians can do the right thing for nonviolent offenders and save money at the same time. (And remember to vote NO on Prop 6, which would make the criminal laws even more punitive and divert money from education and health to lock up more people in prison.)

Prop 8 - Outlaw same-sex marriage
Finally, don't forget to vote NO on Prop 8, which would deny some people the right to marry for no good reason but old-fashioned prejudice.

Republicans attempt to destroy capitalism

2008-09-27T21:55:00.004-05:00

Thursday's events were extraordinary. The Paulson administration had basically come to terms with the Democratic Congressional leadership on a bailout plan, agreeing to give up Paulson's demand for dictatorship over the economy and include funds for non-ultra-rich people to make the far larger funds for ultra-rich people more palatable. Then, at a meeting called to finalize the arrangement (or so the Paulson administration and Democrats thought), the Congressional Republicans proceeded to reject the whole framework in dramatic fashion - while John McCain sat silently by:

once the doors closed, the smooth-talking House Republican leader, John A. Boehner of Ohio, surprised many in the room by declaring that his caucus could not support the plan to allow the government to buy distressed mortgage assets from ailing financial companies.

Mr. Boehner pressed an alternative that involved a smaller role for the government, and Mr. McCain, whose support of the deal is critical if fellow Republicans are to sign on, declined to take a stand. . . .

Thursday, in the Roosevelt Room after the session, the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., literally bent down on one knee as he pleaded with Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, not to “blow it up” by withdrawing her party’s support for the package over what Ms. Pelosi derided as a Republican betrayal.

“I didn’t know you were Catholic,” Ms. Pelosi said, a wry reference to Mr. Paulson’s kneeling, according to someone who observed the exchange. She went on: “It’s not me blowing this up, it’s the Republicans.”

Mr. Paulson sighed. “I know. I know.”

Why would the Republicans do this? There are two explanations: because they really believe that the government shouldn't be involved so much in the economy, or because they're looking for short-term political advantage. The electoral advantages are obvious - a large majority of the country is opposed to the government bailout (55 percent vs 31 percent in favor).

But the changes that Republicans have demanded are revealing (tho completely unworkable), and they may actually believe their free market ideology. On September 18 over a hundred House Republicans wrote a letter to Paulson and Bernanke, arguing that “federal investment in such large amounts of private company stock has the appearance of a socialist and not a free market approach to managing our economy.” Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas, speaking for many of his colleagues, referred to the bailout as “the road to socialism”. If only it were so!

This represents a stunning ignorance of the nature of both capitalism and authoritarian planned economies (which is what they actually mean when they say socialism) - an ignorance that could have disastrous consequences. Thruout the 20th century, “socialism” was the bogeyman of the American elite - but it was not a single thing. Rather, it was a polemical conflation of three things: the Soviet Union's threat to American global hegemony, the threat of workers to capitalists, and the inconvenience of government regulation and spending to capitalists' free pursuit of profits.

The first two problems were, in the end, solved thru a blood-drenched history of foreign intervention and labor repression. Both were real threats to the power of the economic elite over society and internationally. But the third issue is not a threat at all - it is a periodic necessity required by the crisis tendencies of capitalism itself.

Yet much of the right wing is incapable of analytically separating these three issues, and instead interpret the world thru this polemical slogan. Thus all government programs and interventions in the economy become “socialism”, and since socialism is the enemy of all that is true and just, it must be avoided at all costs.

This kind of thinking is what turned the crisis of 1929 into the Great Depression. For three years the Hoover administration, paralyzed by its laissez-faire ideology, refused to take the aggressive action necessary to mitigate the crisis. The result was nearly the destruction of capitalism.

We are unlikely to see a repeat of this disaster - the servants of capital in the government now have decades of experience with economic intervention to prevent the market economy from destroying itself, and agreement on the bailout now seems near. But we could be seeing the birth of a new right-wing myth of betrayal.

The right never forgave FDR for saving capitalism by using government spending to co-opt popular anger and stimulate the economy. Screaming "socialism" the whole way, they fought a bitter and mostly futile rear-guard battle against the emergence of the Fordist regime of accumulation (altho it is a tribute to their hysterical anticommunist campaigns that the United States remains the only rich country without universal government-provided or -guaranteed healthcare, itself a major drain on business). The resentment at their failure to reestablish the absolute freedom of capital combined with the major challenges to American supremacy and white privilege of the 1960s to fuel the rise of the right that we now suffer thru.

If the current crisis ushers in a new era of regulation and government spending, look for the right to cast the bailout as the moment that betrayed the promise of free markets to organize their utopia of inequality. This mythical association of market economics with individual freedom is the foundation upon which all rationalizations of inequality are based, and the rock upon which our attempts to deepen democracy and reduce social divisions have repeatedly been smashed. Of all the failures of the American left, the failure to counter this myth by spreading a realistic understanding of how capitalism works is perhaps the most fundamental.

Review: There Goes the Neighborhood

2008-09-26T23:38:00.000-05:00

I've posted a review of There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America (2006), by William Julius Wilson and Richard P. Taub, on Amazon. Chicago comrades might want to read it - it's not the greatest book, but you get a good idea of the diversity of the South Side as well as some classic examples of Chicago racism, and it's a fast read.

Capitalist disaster season is here once again

2008-09-23T10:03:00.000-05:00

Five hundred years of capitalism has produced one crisis after another, an endless procession of violently deflating asset bubbles and horrific wars inextricably linked to competition over markets and resources. So it is frankly bizarre that, as the latest such crisis destroys massive amounts of wealth and threatens catastrophe to the entire world, mainstream American opinion lamely argues over whether lax regulation or the character flaws of securities traders and mortgage buyers are to blame. How many centuries marked by serious crisis every 30 years or so and punctuated by numerous smaller disasters will it take before we learn - capitalism creates devastating crisis by its very nature!

The state's role as guarantor of capitalism, as the only agency that can step in to prevent the system from destroying itself, is demonstrated anew with every crisis. What's really interesting is not this well-established phenomenon, but the cries of outrage against it. Libertarians squawk about the moral hazard of bailing out irresponsible financiers, who walk away from the disaster they created with millions of dollars apiece. This is a fascinating ideological subculture whose members actually take seriously the rationalizations used to justify the despotism and staggering inequalities required by market economies. The consistent application of their ideals would quickly destroy capitalism itself.

Liberals, meanwhile, decry the hypocrisy of a government that can come up with hundreds of billions of dollars on short notice to rescue rich people in trouble but which dismisses the everyday crisis of living poor in America as an individual problem. Don't liberals know by now? "Privatize the gains and socialize the pain" has always been the fundamental principle of free markets, and it really couldn't be any different.

The mistake of both groups is to conceptually separate the government from business. The capitalist state should be understood as fundamentally internal to the economic system, an institutional outgrowth of capitalism just as much as capital markets and commodities exchanges are. Capitalism could never function without the state to guarantee contracts, to make unprofitable investments that are necessary for commerce (especially building infrastructure and subsidizing transportation), to secure access to markets and raw materials within the system of global competition, and perhaps most important, to suppress - with violence if necessary - that discontent generated by the massive inequalities of wealth and power that markets create and to prevent the economy’s crisis tendencies from destroying the basis of accumulation. If you don’t like it, you have a problem with capitalism, not with the behavior of the government. Consider something different.

These are timeless truths for all market societies, but that doesn’t mean that capitalism always works exactly the same way. Far from it: capitalism is the most dynamic form of social organization - for both good and evil - that has ever been invented. Its periodic disasters and crises often require drastic changes to the process of accumulation, changes which then restructure the organization of society, power, and culture.

In The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey explains (pp. 119-197) that since World War II global capitalism has developed two separate “regimes of accumulation” - sets of rules and social relations that govern the operations of the economy. Emerging from the crisis of depression and war that nearly destroyed capitalism, the rulers of the economy had to make major concessions to save the system itself, leading to the economy-wide acceptance of Fordism. The Fordist economy was characterized by mutual restraint and cooperation on the part of both capital and labor - capital would provide stable jobs with good benefits and relatively low levels of abuse, and in exchange workers would accept the authoritarianism of the workplace and restrict their demands. The state oversaw the arrangement, maintained highly regulated domestic and international markets, and provided robust social insurance and collective services. Tied down by regulation, the finance sector retreated to unexciting tasks like taking deposits and making loans; making things rather than manipulating currency became the central focus of the economy, and large, cautious conglomerates became the most important players.

This arrangement provided high rates of growth and a stable basis for capitalist accumulation for 25 years. But in the end, the contradictions inherent in capitalism could not be overcome: the very productivity of Fordism doomed it as excess global capacity created by the full recovery of Deutschland/Germany and 日本/Japan and the industrialization of countries in Asia and Latin America ran up against the rigidities of the Fordist system. Combined with the oil shocks and the inflationary policies the USA pursued to address the emerging crisis, Fordism died a violent death. The stagflation of the 1970s, the severing of the dollar from gold, the collapse of the international system of fixed-rate currency exchanges, increasing diplomatic friction between the US and Japan - all flowed from the general crisis in the world economy.

To survive the crisis, business and the state joined forces to decimate the power of labor by attacking the unions and moving production wherever labor was highly repressed and exploited. The staid old conglomerates fared poorly, but smaller, more nimble companies forged ahead, pursuing new opportunities in technology, spectacle, and the exploitation of labor. The state’s role shifted from guaranteeing a stable and balanced (if still unequal) system to disciplining labor and tearing down the regulations inhibiting the flexibility that capital needed if it was to return to profitability. Freed at last, finance capital returned with a vengeance, and started down the path of reckless speculation that has culminated in the current crisis.

Harvey calls this new order “flexible accumulation”, and we can see its effects around the world in the neoliberal restructuring that has hit almost every country. Inequality has soared within societies as corporate executives and major investors - facing little resistance from devastated labor movements - have captured most of the increase in wealth. The government guarantee on basic human needs - education, healthcare, pensions, social insurance, public housing - has, where it existed, been eroded or eliminated. National boundaries have weakened, but in reaction to their weakening position many disadvantaged groups have turned to reactionary ideologies like religious fundamentalism and ethnic nationalism to organize resistance. Governments around the world, disciplined by the financial markets into austerity, have increasingly fallen behind on essential infrastructure investments and have failed utterly to address the impending climate crisis.

But all of that is irrelevant to capitalists - the important thing is whether they can continue making profits, and until the credit crisis there was no trouble on that score. But credit is the lifeblood of business, and unless the crisis eases up soon, even those whose business involves more than trading pieces of paper will have to seek new ways to survive. The question we confront is whether the shakeout will alter the ground rules that have sustained the neoliberal consensus, and how we might turn the situation to our advantage.

Progressive priorities for Chicago

2008-08-30T05:55:00.002-05:00

The coming year will be pivotal for Chicago. The rest of the country will be focusing on the presidential election over the next couple months, but in Chicago the real action is elsewhere. Sure, an Obama victory might translate into greater resources for urban development, both because Obama is presumably more interested in tackling urban problems than the Cheney administration has been or McCain would be, and because Obama might pay back the favors he’s incurred during his years in Chicago’s political mire. And, of course, electing Obama would ensure that Chicago gets a presidential library at some point down the road.

But there’s not much Chicago can actually do to influence the outcome of the race. Obama will undoubtedly win Illinois, Durbin will undoubtedly win reelection to the Senate, only a couple members of the House are in danger of losing their seats, and the only important local race, for state’s attorney, will likely be won by Anita Alvarez, who’s busy integrating herself into the Chicago machine. (There is a Green Party candidate for state's attorney, Thomas O'Brien, for those repelled by Alvarez and her Republic opponent, Tony Peraica.)

But the election is still hugely important for Chicago and Illinois because the question of whether to call a state constitutional convention will be on the ballot. Every twenty years the citizens of Illinois can choose to rewrite the constitution, an option they declined the previous time they had the chance. This time we need to seize the opportunity.

Unbeknownst to most, the state constitution is one of the strongest obstacles to progressive change in Illinois. On all of the key short-term structural problems we face - a regressive tax structure, unequal school funding, pay-to-play corruption between business and political leaders - the constitution either silently accedes to the status quo or enshrines it in law. The General Assembly’s anemic attempts to address these problems have invariably failed.

If the constitutional convention passed, two delegates would be elected from each senate district to consider changes, and the outcome of their deliberations would be put before the voters for a yes-no vote. Ideally the new constitution would:

Eliminate the flat income tax, which not only leaves the overall tax structure regressive once truly regressive taxes like the sales tax are added in, it also hamstrings the legislature in raising revenue, forcing it to consider socially-destructive options like expanding gambling;
Mandate equal school funding, a necessary but not sufficient condition for overcoming the social devastation on the South and West Sides that is now spreading to some inner-ring suburbs;
Reform the campaign finance system by switching to public funding along the lines of Maine and Arizona's clean election systems;
Implement a nonpartisan redistricting process, similar to Iowa’s.

Of course to both write a progressive constitution and get it passed would require a major progressive mobilization to counter the status quo forces (especially big business) that are already working to nip the threat in the bud by defeating the referendum. That means major efforts will be needed to pass the constitutional convention in November, and sustained efforts to influence its outcome afterward.

Progressives not only have a once-in-a-decade chance to rewrite the ground rules of politics in Illinois, we also have a once-in-a-century chance to influence the distribution of resources that would flow to Chicago if Daley wins his bid for the 2016 Olympics. But the International Olympic Committee will make its decision in 2009 October and as Ben Joravsky points out in a must-read article, Daley will assuredly not be making concessions after that point, so we have to mobilize now to win the best deal we can.

One major demand should be converting the Metra Electric Line running thru the South Side to a new CTA line - the Gray Line, which I've written about here. Theoretically this shouldn’t be a difficult victory since it seems in line with Daley’s long-term plans and would address many of the transportation problems connecting Olympic venues. Even so, the plan still has no visible political support from the relevant agencies, Chicago-area politicians, or Daley himself.

But even as we push for the Gray Line, it’s important to keep sight of Daley’s goals: he’s seeking the Olympics as a way to dramatically accelerate the gentrification of the South Side. Already the South Loop has been completely transformed in the last decade with a frenzy of new luxury highrises being built; the neighborhoods of Kenwood and Oakland have been converted to lowrise condos for professionals; and the major public housing projects have been destroyed, scattering to the four corners all those people keeping down property values (well, actually only to the southern corners).

The Olympics would extend and deepen the transformation of the South Side thru the new Olympic Village housing on the site of Michael Reese Hospital, major improvements to public parks and infrastructure (including transit), and most important the indirect spur it would give to developers and housing costs - both of which can be counted on to drive out poor and working-class people.

As long as we have to live with the massive social inequalities that capitalism necessarily creates, it’s not entirely a bad thing to bring rich folks and professionals into poor neighborhoods - their wealth draws the commerce that would redline the ghetto and their political influence keeps up basic infrastructure. But left to itself gentrification will cleanse the neighborhood of all its original inhabitants, simply displacing the social catastrophe forced upon them to neighborhoods and suburbs further south.
That’s why we need to demand solid guarantees on affordable housing from Daley to balance his vision of gentrification and to make sure the Olympics bid increases equality instead of deepening it. Communities for an Equitable Olympics, a coalition of South Side community groups, has begun organizing to demand affordable housing and preference for locals in jobs and contracts related to the Olympics. We need to expand their base of support and help them increase the pressure on Daley.

Of course we have to remember that the constitutional convention, the Gray Line, and integrating affordable housing into the Olympic plans are only preliminary skirmishes in a much more protracted struggle to remake Chicago - to stop the progress of Daley’s efforts to build a gleaming city inhabited by professionals and cleansed of the poor, and create in its place an egalitarian and participatory Chicago.

Then and now: 150 years of exploitation

2008-08-21T06:03:00.003-05:00

In the first volume of Das Kapital, Karl Marx quotes extensively from the reports of British factory commissioners, published in the 1850s and 1860s as part of the movement to regulate factories and reduce their worst abuses. It's instructive to compare some of these quotes with a recent article from The New York Times detailing conditions at the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa revealed after a federal raid against the illegal immigrants working there. Lines from the British reports are in blockquotes, page numbers refer to the 1967 New World printing of the 1887 English translation and can be found here.

"Some [under-age workers] said they worked shifts of 12 hours or more, wielding razor-edged knives and saws to slice freshly killed beef. Some worked through the night, sometimes six nights a week."

At a rolling-mill where the proper hours were from 6 a.m. to 5 1/2 p.m., a boy worked about four nights every week till 8 1/2 p.m. at least . . . and this for six months. Another, at 9 years old, sometimes made three 12-hour shifts running, and, when 10, has made two days and two nights running. (247)

"a Guatemalan named Elmer L. who said he was 16 when he started working on the plant’s killing floors, said he worked 17-hour shifts, six days a week. In an affidavit, he said he was constantly tired and did not have time to do anything but work and sleep. 'I was very sad,' he said, 'and I felt like I was a slave.'"

J. Lightbourne: "Am 13 . . . We worked last winter till 9 (evening), and the winter before till 10. I used to cry with sore feet every night last winter." (236)

"Elmer L. said that he regularly worked 17 hours a day at the plant and was paid $7.25 an hour. He said he was not paid overtime consistently."

(On 270 workers under age 18 at match factories) "A range of the working-day from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night-labour, irregular meal-times, meals for the most part taken in the very workrooms that are pestilent with phosphorus." (236)

"'My work was very hard, because they didn’t give me my breaks, and I wasn’t getting very much sleep,' [Elmer L.] said. 'They told us they were going to call immigration if we complained.'"

Maybe you've encountered people who still believe in the forward march of progress - it's a pretty strange notion in the face of evidence like this. True, there are some differences between America today and Britain 150 years ago - the management of Agriprocessors is more likely to be punished for these crimes than factory owners in Marx's time, and unlike 150 years ago, no one is willing to publicly claim that child labor, excessive hours, and dangerous factory conditions are fully justified.

Except this "progress" vanishes if you expand your view outside the United States. Conditions every bit as inhuman as those Marx analyzed are the norm in 中国/China and Việt Nam and many other countries, and the capitalists’ violent reaction to any attempt at limiting their abuses is also very similar. Opinion leaders ranging from Nicholas Kristof, who incessantly cloaks himself in the mantle of humanitarianism, to Thomas Friedman, who is the acknowledged master of explaining to business elites why everything they do is good, are every bit the match of 19th century apologists for massive inequality and shocking levels of exploitation.

It’s worth looking a bit more closely at Chinese capitalism, which at least in terms of labor relations has been functioning in a very pure form - exploiting the workers beyond their capacity to sustain themselves. Recently the state has begun making efforts to limit the natural operations of the market, implementing a new labor law that sets regulations on minimum wages, overtime pay, and freedom to fire workers, while opening new routes for workers to seek redress when their employers try to evade the law. The government is clearly concerned about the growing social instability borne of extreme exploitation, and at the same time is looking to manage a transition to higher-order production. So China won’t necessarily regret the departure of sweatshops if it can expand in more profitable sectors.

Chinese capitalists, however, share no such strategic vision of sustained and stable accumulation. This article chronicles the myriad ways they are seeking to eviscerate the new labor law:

"A lecture fee of 2300 yuan [over $300] for two days is definitely worthwhile - avoiding expenditures like overtime pay for the staff will bring profits more than a thousand times higher than the 2300 yuan fee," exclaimed business owner 王/Wang of 东莞/Dongwan at the "Strategies for enterprise managers to deal with the new Labor Contract Law" training session. . . . This kind of training already has a large market. . . . Labor law specialists and lawyers have come forward one after another to find loopholes in the law and provide confidential briefings to businesses.

The reporter then goes on to record the many techniques companies are using to evade the new labor law and squeeze greater profits out of their workers by swindling them on wages, overtime, and benefits. Exemplary cases include the factory that forced its workers to sign a contract written only in English, another that had its workers sign two separate contracts so they would work full-time in reality but part-time for legal purposes and thereby reduce overtime and benefits payments, and others that wrote out the terms of the contract illegibly or simply hid them with a piece of paper when they had the workers sign it.

Chinese capitalists also tell their side of the story - and a heartrending one it is. Businessmen are being hit from all sides: rising prices for raw materials, extraordinary wage increases mandated by the new labor law, a jump in lawsuits filed by workers under the law - all are subjecting these poor bosses to “increased pressures of management”. One maker of cellphone chips in 深圳/Shenzhen complains bitterly at being forced to raise his workers’ wages from 750 yuan/month (around $110) to 900 yuan ($130). The owner says that these workers, who will be making the fabulous sum of just over $1500/year working grueling shifts that in all likelihood span 6 days each week and 12 or more hours each day, will drive him out of business - unless (ominously) he can “think of a new way to deal with it.”

Some of these complaints are the completely predictable cries of outrage from the exploiters that always accompany any slight reduction in the rate of exploitation. Yet we shouldn’t just dismiss them out of hand - competition among the small enterprises of China is fierce, and a slight reduction in the exploitation of labor might drive some of these factories to the wall. Here again Marx is useful:

competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist production to be felt by each individual capitalist, as external coercive laws. It compels him to keep constantly extending his capital, in order to preserve it, but extend it he cannot, except by means of progressive accumulation. (555)

In other words, the brutal exploitation of labor is a product not of individual immorality, but the laws of the economy itself - the freer the market, the more desperate the plight of workers. It's as true in Iowa as it is in 广东/Guangdong, and it was as true 150 years ago as it is today.

The costs of China's development - and our Wal-Mart habit

2008-08-11T09:14:00.001-05:00

From 新华社/Xinhua, this perverse boast:

China reduced the death toll from coal mine accidents by 24 percent to 1,631 in the first seven months, Huang Yi, deputy head of the State Administration of Coal Mine Safety, said on Saturday.

So after major safety improvements, China's ravenous appetite for energy - which in no small part is driven by the demand for cheap exports to the USA - devours almost 8 lives every day.

Anyone who has not already done so should make a point of seeing 盲井/Mángjǐng (Blind shaft), which is the best film about reform-era China that I've seen.

Are paranoia and Mongol-despotism part of the Russian character?

2008-08-10T11:21:00.002-05:00

This article is worth reading on the conflict between Россия/Russia and საქართველო/Georgia. It's written by James Traub, someone as deep in the US foreign policy establishment as you can get.

On the one hand it provides good, even-handed background on the longrunning conflict between Russia and Georgia. On the other, it epitomizes the self-serving rationalizations that American leaders tell the public (and maybe even themselves) to justify their attempted takeover of the Russian empire while Russia lay prostrate from the free market blood-letting of the '90s.

Traub begins by condensing the complex history of Georgian nationalism into a couple paragraphs that miss the most important points: first, that until about a century ago there was no such thing as modern nationalism in Georgia (and even then it was a thoroughly elite affair); second, that the Советский Союз/Soviet Union itself played an enormous role in inventing nationalism in Georgia and all the other republics thru its nation-centered education, administration, and classification policies.

Traub then sets up Russia as an aggressive, paranoid bully:

The combination of Vladimir Putin’s reforms and the dizzying rise in the price of oil and gas have rapidly restored Russia to the status of world power. And Mr. Putin has harnessed that power in the service of aggressive nationalism. . . .
The “color revolutions” that swept across Ukraine, the Balkans and the Caucasus in the first years of the new century plainly unnerved Mr. Putin, who has denounced America’s policy of “democracy promotion” and stifled foreign organizations seeking to promote human rights in Russia. Georgia, with its open embrace of the West, thus represents a threat to the legitimacy of Russia’s authoritarian model. . . .
the fact that Russia views NATO’s eastward expansion as a threat to its security is a vivid sign of the deep-rooted cold war mentality of Mr. Putin and his circle.

First, Russia is not championing any kind of "authoritarian model" that Georgia's freedom and democracy imperils. Leaving aside Georgia's democratic credentials (Saakashvili violently put down large protests last year, and his "Western" economic policies have produced inequality and growing unrest), Russia could care less how it organizes its politics. The important issue for Russia - as it is for the USA and other imperialist powers - is whether Georgia acts in deference to it.

Now onto Путин/Putin's paranoia. If NATO is, as Traub claims, "no longer an anti-Soviet alliance", what is its purpose? Why does it keep expanding eastward, progressively absorbing more and more of the security zone Russia painstakingly erected after being invaded from the west twice in 25 years? NATO should have been shut down after the Soviet Union disintegrated, but its use as a seemingly multilateral framework for allowing the continued exercise of American power over Europe was too tempting. Russia was not the only target here - preventing any independent foreign policy orientation by the European Union was at least as important. But NATO's attack against Russian ally Serbia, its induction of ten former Soviet client states (including all of the strategically important Baltic states), and its flirtation with Georgia and Україна/Ukraine all demonstrate that Russian "paranoia" is solidly based in reality. If Russia started setting up military bases in Vancouver, Yucatán, and Santo Domingo, Traub might start to develop a similar level of paranoia.

Traub gives the game away when he writes, "For the West, the core issue is the survival of democratic, or at least independent, states along Russia’s frontier." None of this has anything to do with democracy, any more than the conflicts over Kosova or South Ossetia are related to the rights of minorities - except as a useful rhetorical device. As Traub admits, democracy is not the important thing, "independence" is. And he has in mind "independent" states like Georgia, i.e. those that accept hundreds of millions of dollars from the United States to equip and train their militaries and that send troops to Iraq in support of the American occupation.

Traub writes that the view of Russia as a congenitally aggressive behemoth intent on threatening its neighbors is now widely accepted:

People of all political persuasion now seem to get it about Russia. In “The Return of History and The End of Dreams,” Robert Kagan, the neoconservative foreign policy expert who is advising John McCain, writes of Mr. Putin and his coterie: “Their grand ambition is to undo the post-cold war settlement and to re-establish Russia as a dominant power in Eurasia.” Michael McFaul, a Russia expert at Stanford who is advising Barack Obama, also views Russia as a premodern, sphere-of-influence power. He attributes Russia’s hostility to further NATO expansion less to geostrategic calculations than to what he says is Mr. Putin’s cold war mentality.

Indeed, "all political persuasions" see Russia as the aggressor - from those who explicitly state their support for expanding American power to those who couch their support for expanding American power in soothing multilateral terms. And what on earth is a "premodern, sphere-of-influence power"? The sphere of influence, like the nation-state form around which it has been organized, is a preeminently modern invention. How long before we start hearing again the idea that Russian despotism is rooted in its culture, a product of its interaction with the Mongols 800 years ago?

Putin probably wishes he had the luxury of a Cold War mentality. During the Cold War, Russia maintained a stable of client states to protect itself, while the United States ranged across the rest of the globe, overthrowing unfriendly governments and equipping brutal militaries that agreed to accept its suzerainty. Now America has military allies and bases bordering Russia itself, and the economic collapse and deindustrialization that followed the end of the Soviet Union have left Russia with far fewer resources to defend itself. The real question is not why Russia perceives a threat from the USA, but how far the USA will go to defend those parts of the Russian empire it now controls.

America helps start another war

2008-08-09T07:32:00.003-05:00

Anyone trying to figure out what the hell is going on between Россия/Russia and საქართველო/Georgia should immediately read this article from the World Socialist Web Site. Whatever you think of WSWS's politics, which can be both tiresomely dogmatic and very insightful, it's hard to deny that they often do a better job providing essential contextual information in their reporting than do America's so-called papers of record. And in this case, the WSWS also does a much better job simply reporting the facts, which are surprisingly muddled in The New York Times handling of the story.

The Times portrayal focuses on Russia's attack on Georgia, so it becomes very confusing when you read that Russian sources are emphasizing the number of civilians killed and Georgian sources downplaying the number of casualties. The resolution of the paradox is that the worst violence is being committed by Georgia against the separatist region of South Ossetia, and Russia has seized upon Georgia's attack against the region to teach Georgia a lesson. But these facts clash with the American insistence on seeing Georgia as an outpost of freedom and democracy standing up to tyrannical Russia. The Times is behaving like the controlled press of an authoritarian country, which can only produce a confusing mess when reporting news that doesn't fit the official line.

The other key aspect of the story WSWS includes that is completely effaced in mainstream reports is the prominent role the United States is playing in all of this. In The Times conception, the USA is merely a concerned neutral observer speaking out against violence. From WSWS we learn that it is the huge flow of American military aid and training that has made the Georgian assault against South Ossetia possible in the first place, and Georgia's president is now calling upon his military patron to intervene against Russia.

The Georgian president declared that his country was “looking with hope” to the US. The armed confrontation with Russia, he claimed, “is not about Georgia anymore. It’s about America, its values... America stands up for those freedom-loving nations and supports them. That’s what America is all about.”

Without letting Russia, itself an imperialist power, off the hook, I think American actions have to take the most blame for these developments. In response to the collapse of the Советский Союз/Soviet Union, the United States moved aggressively to privatize the economies of the Soviet successor states (with disastrous results for the people of those countries) and to establish as its own client states the defensive ring of countries Stalin had built after World War II. The war over Kosova, the quest for a missile defense system, the insistence on the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline for extracting Azerbaijani oil, using the war in Afghanistan to establish military bases in neighboring countries, the covert support for the Color Revolutions in former Soviet states - all must be seen as part of a campaign to isolate Russia and render it vulnerable to American power. Russia has, in fact, responded with surprising restraint to these provocations - but with the US-sponsored economic catastrophe seemingly in the past and oil wealth stimulating a (deeply unequal) recovery, Russia may no longer tolerating such bullying.

The state of China as the Olympics begin

2008-08-08T09:58:00.004-05:00

United behind the spectacle, the nation, and the chance to buy stuff.

I write this as the Olympics get under way in 北京/Beijing, and 中国/China begins its "coming-out party to the world". Thus far coverage in the American media has been execrable, dwelling almost exclusively on Beijing's pollution and the "rights violation" of not allowing foreign reporters access to a handful of English-language websites. Time has also been found, of course, to report on important issues like whether government restrictions would make the Olympics "no fun" for foreign visitors and the pole-dancing craze sweeping the world of bourgeois Chinese women's fitness. When articles touching on the key issues facing China today have appeared, like this one on the eviction of many of the workers whose labor has created the Beijing cityscape but who will never enjoy what they built, or this one on China's macroeconomic juggling act, they've been superficial and completely failed to capitalize on this unprecedented opportunity to educate Americans on China's complex reality.

It's hardly surprising, tho. Concentrating on individuals and ephemeral "events" that float ahistorically in the the present, at the expense of deep contextual or structural understanding, is precisely the model of mainstream journalism. Yet the media can do - and have done - a much better job than this. Witness the outstanding New York Times series a couple years ago on the massive social tensions among the winners and losers of China's reform era. At the time I summarized and expanded on these articles and also wrote a broader critique. These are worth going back and reading, because such structurally induced conflicts remain at the root of China's tense social situation.

The Western media's obsession with "human rights" (in their usage, little more than free speech and elections) has massively distorted their portrayal of the Chinese situation. As despicable as is the persecution of internet dissidents and the like, the most serious rights violations in China today are tied to the violence created by free market competition. Severe labor exploitation, repression of independent unions, inadequate access to healthcare, unequal access to schooling, expropriation of peasants' land for development schemes, subjection to horrific pollution - these are the pressing injustices in China, and they are all variations on the theme of class warfare.

The Western media, having served as continuous cheerleader for market reforms over the course of three decades, is constitutionally incapable of recognizing this. Instead, severe class tensions are absorbed within the fatuous formulation of a "liberalizing economy alongside and an authoritarian polity". American writers evince no end of bewilderment at such a paradox. Yet if they examined the history of the last two hundred years, they might discover that in each and every case harsh authoritarianism has accompanied the early stages of capitalist accumulation. Workers do not quietly accept being dominated, at least not until relentless repression and the lure of consumerism work their magic.

To cope with these increasingly stark social contradictions, the Chinese state and its allies in the emerging capitalist class have resorted to an old formula: channel popular anxiety and rage into passions that unite those with power and those without it. For the moment, xenophobic nationalism and a putative shared culture - the most powerful examples used by many ruling elites over the last two centuries - are actually being given a relatively low profile in these efforts. Right now, none other than the Olympics is the focus of attempts to repress class conflict. The Olympics serves first as spectacle, a latter-day bread and circuses. Second, it has been promoted with almost messianic enthusiasm as a symbol of China's rise. Every citizen has been encouraged to take pride in the nation, as China's leaders have obsessively sought out whatever amenities (fancy hotels, striking buildings, immaculate toilets) are thought to command respect in the international realm. Finally, the Olympics are the focus of that other great desire that unites the entire nation - endless accelerating consumption.

How the quest to avoid class conflict will proceed after the Olympics is a hugely important question, for Chinese culture, politics, and international relations alike. The fleeting unity forged by the Olympics may be sorely tested in the next year or two if the rich countries sink into prolonged recession, causing China's export markets to contract and unemployment to rise. Yet aggressive nationalism probably cannot provide immediately relief - China has staked its international reputation (in striking contrast to the United States) on a "peaceful rise", and the ideological groundwork for a more muscular imperialism has yet to be laid.

If unrest starts to increase, the state will probably make tactical concessions, and may even start the shift from export-oriented development to concentrating on developing the internal market. Fortunately for Chinese capitalism, the state retains a powerful role in the economy and can respond far more rationally - in the interests of capitalists as a class - than would individual capitalists, who would no doubt prefer ever more brutal repression. The victims of the market have little capacity to produce something more radical - they remain extremely fragmented and the only group that might overcome this, the intellectuals, still fear them more than the state. Thus far, protesters have only infrequently turned to the rich history of revolutionary China as a resource in challenging the radical inequalities that have emerged in the reform period. But if the intellectuals find their social position deteriorating and some join the popular movement, this history could become a powerful weapon against the Chinese "Communist" Party and its capitalist running dogs.

Gray Line debate

2008-08-06T11:46:00.001-05:00

I've been defending the Gray Line proposal in comments over at CTA Tattler, under the unlikely headline of Radiohead represents the CTA. Check it out and see what you think.

How should we fight meat?

2008-08-04T10:48:00.001-05:00

The arguments against meat are overwhelming: the suffering imposed on the animals is unconscionable and the unnecessary killing of animals is ethically indefensible; there is no difference between pets and livestock that could possibly justify laws against cruelty to the one while industrialized horrors are committed against the other; meat is one of the main causes of global warming, air pollution, and the destruction of waterways, not to mention a colossal waste of resources; the production of meat is a major factor in the global food crisis, already causing widespread hunger and threatening large-scale violence if nothing is done.

Fighting meat is one of the most urgent issues we face - the crises in energy, food, and climate are deeply connected and are leading directly to a far more dangerous and impoverished world. Most urgent of all, every moment the number of innocent animals born to suffer horribly and then be killed without need is increasing. The OECD predicts a tragic 26 percent increase in meat consumption in developing countries alone over the next decade (The Wall Street Journal, 2008 August 1, “Brazilian Beef Clan Goes Global As Troubles Hit Market”).

Perhaps the arguments against meat are not convincing to right-wingers, who revel in their own selfishness, staunchly defend their right to take their pleasure at the expense of others, and delight in a violent masculinity. Yet most liberals and radicals eat meat as well, and many vegetarians eventually go back to eating meat. Despite the increasing awareness of the horrors of factory farms and the connection between meat production and both global warming and the food crisis, the percentage of Americans who are strict vegetarians remains a stagnant three percent, while the media continue to marginalize vegetarianism as a viable solution to the ethical and environmental devastation produced by meat (for the latest example, see this Chicago Tribune article, which explores every technological fix imaginable to the methane emissions of livestock while ignoring the obvious possibility of reducing or eliminating demand).

How are we to explain this? To a certain extent it’s simply ignorance - while the media have very tentatively begun to discuss meat’s connection to climate change, still only a handful of articles have been published since the news blackout started to crumble. Neither has the connection to the global food crisis captured much attention. Op-ed and editorial writers focus much anger on ethanol subsidies - a line of argument in keeping with their free-market principles - but ignore the massive inefficiency of producing crops to feed to animals, which is equally at fault for straining food supplies. Instead, the extremely high levels of meat consumption in the rich world and rapidly rising levels in 中国/China, India, and Brasil are treated as a force of nature.

If lack of information plays a part, willful ignorance may be just as big a factor. Many people are vaguely aware that the conditions at factory farms are unacceptable, but resolutely avoid exposing themselves to the many available online resources so that they can bury their guilt and keep eating meat. And even those people who feel bad about the industrialized torture of animals are perfectly comfortable with killing and eating animals if they don’t suffer. This line of thinking remains a fascinating mystery to me. Who would ever say that killing a human for pleasure is okay if it’s done painlessly? The animal itself wants to keep living at least as much as it wants to avoid pain - in supporting “humane” slaughter, whose feelings are we really protecting?

What we’re dealing with is more complicated than simply a lazy hypocrisy sustained by the old “meat tastes good” so-called argument. The fact of the matter is that human supremacy over other animals and the eating of meat is a deep-seated and intimate component of most people’s identities. How else can we understand the surprisingly defensive reaction that many people have when the subject is raised? Like racism, male chauvinism, xenophobia, antigay feelings, and other supremacies, domination over animals is both “common sense” until it meets strong organized resistance, and impossible to overcome simply thru the liberal remedy of “education”. A new culture and widely-shared identity must be forged that explicitly rejects human supremacy if the antimeat movement is to succeed.

Knowing all this, what are we supposed to do? I tried to start a conversation here and failed - the discussion here was more successful but came to no solid conclusions. Kyle’s suggestion to make common cause with other progressive issues is a good one, but the meat issue seems uniquely resistant to such an approach. For many people human supremacy is the ground upon which progressive politics are based - witness the vitriolic reaction that met PETA’s comparison of the livestock industry to the slave trade.

The obvious exception is on global warming and other environmental issues. Mainstream environmental groups have thus far been incredibly cautious on the livestock connection and refuse to even raise the issue, so putting pressure on them to discuss all the factors behind climate change is one direction forward. The food crisis is another potential line of attack, especially as high food prices increasingly hurt poor Americans, but seems to have drawn little attention so far amongst progressives.

Popular education efforts calling attention to meat's role in climate change and the food crisis are another possibility. Most people associate opposition to the killing of animals with marginalized subcultures like hippies or new age practitioners, and are unwilling to confront the fact that their eating habits are responsible for horrific animal cruelty, so framing the issue as a crisis of environmental sustainability and food security gives us a major new line of attack in raising the issue. Pamphleting during lunchtime or holding protests about the negative consequences for people of meat production is probably the most effective way of communicating with the vast majority of the population that doesn't even think twice about human supremacy. Once someone has changed enough to become vegetarian, considering the ethics of dominating animals is made far easier.

Another important target is the media. Generally reporters won’t cover anything that politicians avoid, so it will take public pressure and high-profile protests to force meat onto the public agenda. Every reporter who ignores reducing or eliminating meat-eating as a solution to these problems should be met with a barrage of emails demanding an exploration of all sides (that Tribune reporter's email address is mhawthorne@tribune.com). And reporters specializing in climate change should be constantly reminded that the livestock industry produces more greenhouse gases than the transportation sector (on the blog of New York Times environment reporter Andy Revkin (anrevk@nytimes.com), which focuses mainly on global warming, the livestock industry’s role in the crisis has not been covered once, and The New York Times has yet to publish a news article on the issue). We should also make a point to contact the editors who aren’t assigning reporters to investigative efforts that might help us understand why runoff from factory farms keeps killing people who eat vegetables, why the brutality against animals in slaughterhouses is so often mirrored by brutality against the workers there, and how factory farms have driven a complete reorganization of the agricultural economy over the last generation (this page lists editorial contacts at The Times - and don't forget to include the public editor, whose job is to provide oversight at the paper).

In some states, the best way to raise the meat issue is thru popular referenda. The run-up to a vote allows public discussion of the issues - which can range far beyond the ballot proposal and play an important role in educating the public and challenging widely-accepted ideas on the human relationship with other animals. A proposition (Prop 2) to ban tiny cages for chickens, pigs, and calves is on the California ballot this November. This is a hugely important referendum to win - both to reduce animal suffering and to energize the movement in the rest of the country. If you live in California, you should consider becoming active in the fight to pass the measure; if not, talk to any friends or relatives living in California.

Finally, we should consider using the emotional appeals that exist comfortably within the discourse of human supremacy but may be most effective at reaching people who have been taught their entire life no other way of thinking. Nicholas Kristof’s most recent column may express his own rank hypocrisy in recognizing the intelligence and individuality of farm animals while continuing to kill and eat them. Yet it also makes one of the most powerful appeals for compassion that I’ve read. Many a meat-eater might think twice after reading something like this.

I’m a farm boy who grew up here in the hills outside Yamhill, Ore., raising sheep for my F.F.A. and 4-H projects. At various times, my family also raised modest numbers of pigs, cattle, goats, chickens and geese, although they were never tightly confined.

Our cattle, sheep, chickens and goats certainly had individual personalities, but not such interesting ones that it bothered me that they might end up in a stew. Pigs were more troubling because of their unforgettable characters and obvious intelligence. To this day, when tucking into a pork chop, I always feel as if it is my intellectual equal.

Then there were the geese, the most admirable creatures I’ve ever met. We raised Chinese white geese, a common breed, and they have distinctive personalities. They mate for life and adhere to family values that would shame most of those who dine on them.

While one of our geese was sitting on her eggs, her gander would go out foraging for food — and if he found some delicacy, he would rush back to give it to his mate. Sometimes I would offer males a dish of corn to fatten them up — but it was impossible, for they would take it all home to their true loves.

Once a month or so, we would slaughter the geese. When I was 10 years old, my job was to lock the geese in the barn and then rush and grab one. Then I would take it out and hold it by its wings on the chopping block while my Dad or someone else swung the ax.

The 150 geese knew that something dreadful was happening and would cower in a far corner of the barn, and run away in terror as I approached. Then I would grab one and carry it away as it screeched and struggled in my arms.

Very often, one goose would bravely step away from the panicked flock and walk tremulously toward me. It would be the mate of the one I had caught, male or female, and it would step right up to me, protesting pitifully. It would be frightened out of its wits, but still determined to stand with and comfort its lover.

Those are some ideas, but they're not really that satisfying against a problem so enormous and pressing. Any other thoughts?

Economic foundations of the coming US-China conflict

2008-07-31T02:31:00.004-05:00

This is an interesting piece of news I wasn't aware of, which strengthens my argument against the idea that Sino-US trade links will prevent a new superpower conflict (from The Wall Street Journal Asia, 2008 July 31):

[In March 2007] the Bush administration reversed a two-decade-old policy that prevented U.S. companies from seeking protection against unfair government subsidies of goods produced in "nonmarket" - usually communist - economies. For years, the limit effectively shielded China from such complaints.

. . . the number of complaints filed under U.S. law has soared. In 2006, American companies filed five complaints similar to those pursued by [steel tube manufacturer] Wheatland, alleging unfair pricing, government subsidies - or both. In 2007, complaints jumped to 20. So far this year, 13 such cases have been filed.

Since the Carter administration, US presidents have consistently ignored 中国/China's "trade-distorting" advantages, like government subsidies, cheap repressed labor, or a fixed undervalued currency. That's because every president has sided with multinational businesses, which not only had a long-term vision of gaining access to the enormous China market but themselves benefited from China's trade advantages as they shifted production from unionized American factories to Chinese sweatshops in low-tax free trade zones.

The Cheney administration has by no means reversed this policy, but its increasing openness to the protectionist demands of smaller domestic capitalists and more aggressive approach to trade disputes (seen in the first WTO ruling against China a couple weeks ago) are revealing. And the room for trade conflicts is only going to grow. The seven-year-old Doha round of trade liberalization talks collapsed on Tuesday as China, for the first time, made a high-profile rejection of the American "free" trade agenda. As China continues to climb the value chain, it will start to threaten an increasing number of American businesses at the same time that Chinese businesses, with quiet support from their government, squeeze American companies out of the China market.

Meanwhile, perhaps the most explosive economic dispute - access to resources - continues to develop underneath the surface. China has been extremely aggressive over the last five years in securing long-term rights to raw materials across the globe (these articles cover China's activities in Africa, but it has been active from Myanmar and Indonesia to Brasil and Argentina as well). This poses no immediate threat to the United States, but in the long run Chinese and American capitalists might find themselves running up against each other in the search for production inputs, impelling their two governments to fight for control over conflicting neocolonial claims. And of course the issue of control over oil supplies will loom increasingly large unless some breakthru is made in energy technology or oil extraction.

The best way to conceptualize the emerging conflict may be to interpret China and the USA's diverging interests as an unavoidable contradiction within capitalism itself. To survive, capital must constantly expand; failure to do so leads to crisis, as even mainstream economists will admit. For the last thirty years, this expansionary process has proceeded with remarkably little resistance as obstacles like revolutionary movements and organized labor were brutally destroyed and vast new markets (China chief among them) were opened to the movement of capital. But this expansionary phase may be coming to an end as profitable new opportunities diminish and raw materials become more scarce.

If capital requires the ability to range freely across the globe in search of new opportunities, it must also remain rooted geopolitically to a certain extent. It cannot thrive without the regulatory environment provided by the state, and when it runs into insuperable obstacles it turns to the state to clear the way. Thus distinct groups of nationally based capitalists emerge, and can coexist in harmony as long as raw materials and exploitable labor are abundant. But when those essential inputs become scarce, businesses may demand their state take action to protect their supplies. Unfortunately, as we saw in the Great Depression, erecting autarkic economic blocs may secure the conditions of accumulation in the very short term, but it simply aggravates the situation in the long term by restricting capital's freedom of movement and further constraining its options for profitable deployment. The crisis of the 1930s was ended only by the massive destruction of World War II, which eliminated all of the rivals to American capital and provided fabulous new investment opportunities in the guise of reconstruction contracts.

World war is certainly not the only way to resolve these contradictions - the last major crisis in the global economic system, the stagflation of the 1970s, unfolded very differently. And economic tensions between the USA and China are only now beginning to emerge, so it will be some time before open conflict can develop. But don't discount the possibility too quickly. Those of us 30 years and younger have never experienced global capitalism in crisis or major challenges to American hegemony, so it might be easy to imagine that "globalization" or "interdependence" or some other slogan has superseded the kinds of global conflict that defined the years 1914 to 1989. But it's worth remembering that capitalism today is more similar to the capitalism that preceded the Great Depression than any other time since.

How i-bankers' foul-ups turn into recessions

2008-07-28T03:53:00.001-05:00

I hope to write more in the next couple weeks about the growing economic crisis, but for now I just want to point out this article: Worried Banks Sharply Reduce Business Loans. This is how a disaster in the financial sector gets transformed into a disaster for the entire economy.

Up until now the collapse of the housing bubble, which had been inflated thru an incredibly complex trade in mortgage-backed securities and other forms of glorified gambling in the financial sector, has mainly hurt the banks themselves, those they tricked into taking out loans they couldn't afford, and the thousands of eager young private college graduates who had been dreaming of a job in arbitrage or securities for the last four years. If you haven't been following the news closely, you might not even be aware that the entire financial system came perilously close to complete collapse, and has been saved only by the major and repeated interventions of the US government and huge capital injections from the investment funds of foreign governments. But now we're moving into that part of every capitalism-induced crisis where problems in the credit markets infect the real economy - that part where people make things and serve human needs rather than trading in fictitious capital.

Businesses rely on bank credit for everything from everyday expenses to investments in the expansion of production. When that credit dries up, they have to forgo expansion, fire people, or even go out of business. Even those businesses that can still get loans have to pay higher interest rates. What constrains or destroys one business inevitably has an impact on the whole supply chain. In the same way, consumers find it harder to borrow for big purchases, further reducing effective demand. This is what the American economy is now facing.

Earlier this year, credit extended by banks to companies and consumers was still growing at double-digit rates compared with three months earlier, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by Goldman Sachs. By mid-June, bank credit was declining at an annualized pace of more than 6 percent.

The liquidity crisis arises from the fundamental laws of capitalism: at the end of every speculative expansion, all loans become suspect as banks must rapidly increase their capital base to cover their losses in the markets. People interviewed in the article talk as if bankers are behaving irrationally in denying loans to solid businesses. But this pattern has been well-established for several hundred years, and even mainstream economists will tell you it's built into the business cycle. Massive irrationality is certainly present, but at a much more profound level than the decisions of an individual loan officer.

Add the emerging credit crisis to rising costs for food and energy, the big drop in state and municipal spending that will unfold over the next few months, and the possibility of some spectacular failure in the financial sector, and we have the worst economic crisis in a generation. It's hardly a surprise - capitalism produces these kinds of crises every thirty or forty years. The interesting question is whether the crisis will reshape the basis of capitalist accumulation, and with it all the economic, political, and cultural formations that are based upon it.

The betrayal of Chicago public housing

2008-07-23T01:47:00.002-05:00

All Chicagoans should read this article, and so should anyone else interested in fundamental urban problems. Skeptics on the left and public housing tenants themselves suspected from the beginning that Daley and the Chicago Housing Authority's Plan for Transformation - which ostensibly was going to replace the concentrated poverty of highrise public housing with the harmonious integration of mixed-income walk-up developments - was actually meant to disperse the poor and seize the valuable real estate they occupied. As the progress of the Plan for Transformation makes clear, these fears were all too well-founded.

Nine years into what was supposed to be a 10-year project, the CHA has had no trouble destroying 13,000 units of housing, breaking up the tenants' communities and forcing them to move further south into neighborhoods just as bad as the ones they left. (The wait list for public housing, which was closed to new applicants in 2001, stands at 56,000.) The CHA also had no difficulty giving developers close to Daley a wide variety of sweetheart deals on the razed properties, from selling the land once occupied by Stateway Gardens for $1 to dispensing heavily subsidized building contracts and lucrative retail concessions.

What CHA has had problems with is actually building homes for the thousands of displaced public housing tenants. Only 30 percent of the planned units have been built, and half of those were completed before the plan officially started, while the CHA was under federal supervision.

These problems could have been avoided if that single success had been made the model of the whole program. Henry Horner Homes on the West Side was torn down and rebuilt in phases, so that residents could stay on site and move into the new apartments as they became available. But it was only the organizing efforts of the residents themselves and federal oversight that forced CHA to follow this model. Once CHA, whose history is shot thru with negligence and racism, again had the upper hand it gave priority to destroying public housing communities and getting tenants off the land over replacing their homes. (Incidentally, Valerie Jarrett, one of Obama's close advisers and former top Daley official, has had a major hand in this housing disaster.)

If the city were serious about creating communities integrated along race and class lines, it would not only devote more attention to creating public housing than channeling profits to developers - it would require all new developments to include a real mix of affordable or public housing. The unspoken flaw in the Plan for Transformation all along has been the fact that rich people and professionals don't want to live near poor people, especially if they're black. Even if it hadn't been for the delays and cost overruns wrought by corruption and the implosion of the American property market, the CHA's new developments would have been a tough sell for Chicago's privileged. The only way to get around that would be to level the playing field by integrating the entire city instead of only pockets on the South Side.

Of course, residents of Lincoln Park or Streeterville would riot if poor people started moving in next door, and Daley isn't about to offend his most powerful constituency. But forcing Chicago's elites to permit enough affordable housing is more urgent than ever.

The rising price of gas and the transition to a low-carbon society will cause a massive movement of population back into the city in the next couple decades. This is a wonderful prospect, as America is finally on the cusp of reducing its unsustainable suburban expansion. But if market forces are left to operate freely, the cost of housing in the city - especially that near the Loop and convenient to transit - will skyrocket and force all but professionals and the rich to the outskirts of the city and the near suburbs. The movement of poor minorities into some south and west suburbs is already quite striking. If anything, the revival of the city will actually make these people's lives worse because they will be even more remote from good jobs and educational opportunities.

Of course even if the Plan for Transformation's rhetoric had been faithfully pursued, integration thru housing would remain a reformist measure, meant to mitigate the devastating effects of social inequality rather than to root it out. But as two generations of experience with the post-Brown v. Board ghetto has shown, the social deterioration caused by joblessness, lack of services, and crime thoroughly frustrates the revolutionary potential we might assume large concentrations of poverty would have. Integration seems like a good goal, but only if it is used to facilitate more effective organizing against the social structures that produce such massive inequalities in the first place.

The 20th century's record on rising powers: Two world wars and the Cold War. How will the 21st century turn out?

2008-07-18T08:50:00.002-05:00

The question has been raised in the comments whether there’s any chance at all that 中国/China and the USA will move toward conflict. As everyone knows, bourgeois democracy is dominated by commercial elites, and the most powerful American companies all support engagement over containment. The progress of the debate over granting China permanent “normal trade relations” in 2000 provides a lot of support for the idea. Commercial interests, piously cloaking themselves in the crackpot idea that expanded trade would cause political liberalization, steamrolled human rights, labor, and security concerns.

Yet American elites are far more divided on how to approach China than the relative calm in the media would seem to indicate. Certainly the dominant faction, based in multinational industrial and finance capital, wants to avoid confrontation so as to continue exploiting Chinese labor and taking advantage of China's weak environmental regulations. But an insistent minority based in the security bureaucracy and domestic industry view China as America's most important enemy. And that minority is likely to gain strength as China does.

You can see hints of the “China threat” group in the widespread Congressional criticism of China's exchange rate policies and the outburst that killed the 中海油/CNOOC offer on Unocal in 2006. For a better idea of these people’s solid presence in the halls of power, just skim thru some of the testimony and reports of the Congressionally mandated US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which every year warns about the growing threat from China. Support for anti-China policies is already quite deep, if not yet very broad.

It'll be interesting to see the military/small capitalist faction battle it out with the big capitalist faction - it's not a conflict that too often makes it into the light of day. Right now the engagement group has the upper hand - altho Cheney, like Clinton before him, has been quietly encircling China with military bases even as the US speaks the language of trade and cooperation. There are two things that make me worry about long-term conflict. First, any sudden crisis (over 台湾/Taiwan, say) would immediately destroy all the leverage of the accommodationists. And we shouldn’t kid ourselves - the United States will go to war to deny Taiwan to China.

Second, US economic interests in China will probably start to decline relatively soon. The Chinese government only tolerates foreign investment because it needs the capital and access to technology. China is fast catching up on technology, and if the Chinese economy can make the transition from export-led growth to sustained growth driven by domestic consumption - which I think it will - American companies will find a less inviting market. Those companies might leave on their own anyway, in search of even cheaper labor - many are already starting to move to Việt Nam.

Just think about the anti-Japan panic of the early '90s - a nearly hysterical fear gripped the whole country before the bursting of the bubble economy abruptly ended the Japan "threat". Now consider what's going to happen when China starts to pose strong competition not only economically, but in diplomatic and military affairs as well.

On the Chinese side as well, there are strong pressures toward confrontation. Popular nationalism is so strong that the government would have to take a hard line on any international crisis - especially over Taiwan - even if it didn’t want to. Chinese people themselves have almost no awareness that their country is rapidly assuming the role of imperialist power, and even less of a critical stance toward that fact. Nor do they understand the colonial character of Chinese policy in Tibet (西藏/Xizang) and شەرقىي تۈركىستان/Sherqiy Türkistan (新疆/Xinjiang), and they interpret international criticism of those crimes as a form of aggression.

Most important, China is in the midst of a capitalist revolution, which necessarily creates massive inequalities and constant cultural instability. For many people, the anxieties created by this process will be displaced onto the international sphere, and a reactionary nationalism will fill the void of ideology and provide an anchor in the turmoil wrought by commodification. For elites, nationalism is a useful direction to channel popular grievances into, and popular support for imperialism will soon enough become a necessary condition for expanding profitability.

So for the moment, capitalism prevents conflict - but in the long run it will probably require it. Maybe this time the USA will deal better with a rising power than it did with the Soviet Union after the war, or than Britain did with rising Germany in the early 20th century. But I doubt it.

Chinese spies are everywhere!

2008-07-15T20:48:00.000-05:00

This is a disturbing article from The New York Times. Essentially a scare-piece written as if to drum up paranoia against Chinese Americans and Chinese living in the United States, it largely relies on Joel F Brenner, the government's leader of counterintelligence, for the conclusion that China is pursuing an "orchestrated, deeply thought-out, strategic campaign" to steal American national security secrets and conduct industrial espionage.

The reporter suggests that American "authorities have reason to be more suspicious of Chinese researchers and students", as well as citizens of Chinese descent, whose "ethnic loyalty" is leading them to betray the United States. Brenner's claims as to the threat of Chinese spying should be taken especially seriously because of his deep understanding of the Chinese Mind. For example, in discussing the case of a Chinese-born engineer and "sleeper agent" who was convicted of selling China naval secrets after working his way up in the weapons industry, Brenner notes that this "bespeaks a patience that the Chinese are especially good at."

Perhaps Brenner was concerned that the reporter might miss his obvious Orientalism, because he goes on to illustrate China's strategy of collecting pieces of information to get a larger picture by saying, "You can get to know the dragon by its claw".

Our intrepid reporter does not provide any reason to think that the crafty Oriental who sold naval secrets was in fact a "sleeper agent" rather than someone who was contacted by the Chinese government after he reached a position that would make him useful. We do learn, however, that this threat to our national security will be jailed for 24 years - a fitting punishment for selling information that "was not classified, . . . although it was illegal to provide it to China." (In another case discussed in the article, a white man convicted of selling real secrets received a sentence of less than 5 years.)

Okay, so we have intelligence officials who learned about China primarily from 1930s movies, we have inscrutable yellow hordes infiltrating our society - but what do the Chinese want? According to Brenner, "China is especially interested in improving its naval capability against any threat from the United States and obtaining intelligence that might be important in a military confrontation in the Taiwan Strait." In addition to government-directed spying, commercial trade secrets have also been targeted.

In other words, Chinese government spying is directed primarily at countering the threat of an American attack - it is completely defensive and does not threaten the United States in any way (America's imperial interests are, of course, another story). Chinese companies are mainly interested in getting access to advanced technology, which American companies hold monopoly over by virtue the US head-start in industrialism. And yet Brenner would have us believe we face a rising threat from China to our national security, and his mouthpiece at The Times - by excluding the possibility that American counterintelligence is protecting secrets that have no right to be kept - concurs.

The real threat China poses is to the military and economic hegemony that the USA exercises over the entire world. And barring a catastrophic economic crisis in China, that threat is only going to increase. With this rising danger to American supremacy, we can expect increased fear-mongering against China and against those of Chinese descent in the United States. We must be on guard against this kind of agitation, both to prevent racial profiling and to prevent getting sucked into a new cold - or hot - war in Asia.

Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Myanmar

2008-07-06T22:20:00.003-05:00

There's certainly nothing wrong in contrasting the massive amounts of money that Myanmar's government spent on its new showcase capital with the visible poverty surrounding it and with the staggering social needs ignored by the government. I just wish Americans were as sensitive to the similar contrasts easily seen in our own capital, or to the American government's similarly consistent preference (ie predating Bush II by many decades) for military spending over spending to help the impoverished.

It's also interesting that the reporter casts the Myanmar military's suspicion of a foreign invasion as irrational paranoia - proving the point by quoting an eminently objective source, the US government's representative in Yangon. Yet not two months ago Robert Kaplan, a prominent foreign policy intellectual, published an op-ed in America's most prominent newspaper calling for the invasion of Myanmar. Now where could Myanmar's paranoia be coming from?

Not that I would object to one of the world's worst regimes being overthrown. But as with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's government, the fact that the real reasons behind an American invasion have nothing to do with helping the victims of the regime would once again lead to a disastrous occupation.

Why do powerful Americans periodically call for an invasion of Myanmar? Because it is one of the few countries left in the world that does not acknowledge American suzerainty, and - most important - it is a vital strategic asset for 中国/China. Surrounded on all sides by reliable American client states and massive American military bases, China has cultivated Myanmar as a source of raw materials and a base for projecting its power into the Indian Ocean. Toppling the Myanmar government and installing a puppet regime would complete the US cordon sanitaire around China and secure the interest of burgeoning client state India in establishing its preeminent position in the Indian Ocean.

It's a measure of how thoroughly Cheney's adventures in the Middle East have distracted his administration from larger threats that an attack on Iran is gathering steam while Kaplan's proposal was ignored. Iran poses absolutely no danger to the United States, and very little danger to US imperial interests. China, on the other hand, could very well some day seize hegemony over what is emerging as the economic center of the world, East Asia. Of course Cheney's plan to consolidate American control over the world's oil supply is in large part aimed at establishing permanent leverage over China, but to allow an obsession with Iran to distract to from the more pressing task of containing China's geopolitical reach is a remarkable strategic failure.

A Gray Line for Chicago

2008-06-24T20:52:00.010-05:00

If you had to make a list of top Chicago destinations that are not El-accessible, what would it include? Maybe Ford City Mall, which the long-discussed Orange Line extension would reach, maybe Humboldt Park or Marquette Park. The other key locations are probably McCormick Place, Soldier Field, the Museum of Science and Industry, Jackson Park, the University of Chicago, and Pullman. All these places have something in common - they're very close to a rail line that no one but commuters use, the Metra Electric Line.

Now consider the 2016 Olympics. Even tho Chicago is far less suitable than 東京/Tokyo or Madrid to host such a huge event, this time around is the Americas' "turn" (Asia has it this year, Europe will have it in 2012) and even tho South America has never hosted an Olympics, Rio de Janeiro is the only place less suitable than Chicago. So there's a decent chance Chicago will end up hosting it. But there's a big problem - most of the proposed Olympic sites, which include the Olympic village south of McCormick Place, Soldier Field, McCormick Place itself, and Jackson Park, are far from the El. However, these places are all near the Metra Electric Line.

Now take a look at a CTA map and compare it with a map of neighborhood densities. Which of the dense neighborhoods have the least El service? Aside from neighborhoods on the far West Side that could be incorporated thru a new El line on the Mid-City Transitway route and those that would benefit from a Western Ave subway, the only major areas of high density currently excluded from El service are near the Metra Electric Line.

The conclusion is obvious: we should have an El service on the Metra Electric route. Years ago Mike Payne, a working class South Sider, went to the Harold Washington CPL and typed up just such a proposal, what he calls the Gray Line. The Gray Line would finally provide rapid transit access to the most important neglected part of the city, and it could do so fairly cheaply since most of the infrastructure is already in place. It would go a long way toward solving the Olympics transportation problem. Easy transfers could be made in the Loop by extending the Jackson tunnel and installing a moving walkway to link the Blue and Red Lines with the Van Buren Gray Line stop. Convention-goers would, for the first time, have an easy route from the airports to McCormick Place. The South Side would get a much-needed transit addition. What's the downside?

I looked around but wasn't able to find any reason why the proposal wouldn't work. The only explanation for why an incredibly cost-effective expansion of transit service isn't even being studied is that it doesn't have any high-profile patrons and it would require real cooperation between the CTA and Metra. Those are some pretty lousy reasons for ignoring an idea whose merits far outweigh those of the Circle Line and airport express, which are currently Daley and the CTA's highest transit expansion priorities. There's a chance that the needs of the Olympics will convert Daley into a supporter. But failing that, public pressure is, as always, the only way to get anything done.

Big city with the lowest emissions - Los Angeles?!

2008-05-29T23:55:00.000-05:00

There's a new report out from the Brookings Institution ranking the country's 100 largest urban areas by carbon emissions from transportation and residential energy use (The New York Times article here, rankings and graphics here). Some of the results are pretty surprising, but the report only gives numbers, not explanations. Here are the top ten:

1 Honolulu, HI
2 Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA
3 Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, OR-WA
4 New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA
5 Boise City-Nampa, ID
6 Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA
7 San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA
8 San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA
9 El Paso, TX
10 San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA

At first glance, the West Coast and Southwest (including Texas) seem to be doing quite well, the Midwest and South are doing badly, and the Northeast is in the middle. As someone in the habit of demonizing sprawl "cities" like Houston, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and the concrete desert of southern California, this was a bit disorienting. Could it be that, as The New York Times article emphasized, a warm climate that obviates the need for heating is a better way to reduce emissions than compact, mixed-use cities? Don't the first three use huge amounts of energy on air conditioning? Does it make sense to build cities in the desert if it'll fight global warming?

In fact it's not nearly that simple, as indicated by the inclusion of Chicago, New York, and Boston (none of which are known for their mild winters) in the top quintile. Those cities' high density and good (for the US) transit systems help them compete with the sprawling cities of southern California and the Southwest, but that doesn't fully account for the results either.

First we have to separate transportation and residential energy. The helpful maps included in the report show that warm-weather states dominate the top quintile of residential energy use - which also includes New York - while the second quintile is evenly split between southern states and the Northeast (plus Chicago). Heating is certainly a factor, but power sources seem at least as important. Those states with low emissions rely to an unusual degree on nuclear, hydroelectric, and/or geothermal power for electricity, none of which produce carbon emissions, while those with high emissions correspond closely to the country's coal belt. (See the government's figures on energy consumption by source and by state here.)

Since nuclear and hydroelectric power both have serious drawbacks, it's not at all clear how far these emissions numbers get us toward finding green models to follow. More useful might be total per capita energy use, which you can see graphically on the maps at Nationalatlas.gov (go here, click People > Energy consumption > Residential energy per capita, then Redraw map to see use by states). Here we can see that warmer states do use less energy, but much of the Northeast uses a similar amount, while the heaviest users include both cold states and southern states like Alabama and Mississippi. I don't have any explanations for these patterns, but it would be worth looking into it to figure out the best policies for reducing energy use.

The transportation numbers, with fewer variables involved, are a bit more straightforward. Dense cities with transit networks perform the best, which means the Northeast is the hands-down winner (except for Trenton, which is dead-last in car emissions). Other winners are Los Angeles (#5), Philadelphia (#6), Portland (#10), Cleveland (#12), and Chicago (#17). The bizarre spectacle of LA ranking better on highway emissions than places like Philly and Chicago is explained by the fact that LA has very little freight traffic, so trucking emissions drag Chicago and Philly down even tho they beat LA easily when only car emissions are considered. Still, LA remains in the top 20 on cars so clearly there is a fair amount of transit use and population density is not nearly as low as many other cities. How Houston (#31) managed to beat much denser cities like Minneapolis (#37) and St Louis (#75), I have no idea.

In the end, the report reminds us that carbon emissions are spread unevenly across the country - a result primarily of differences in density, the quality of transit, and the source of electricity. It raises the difficult question of whether we should be expanding nuclear power to reduce carbon emissions. And it shows yet again that public transit is one of the best ways to fight global warming.

Why taxes are better than charity

2008-05-27T21:26:00.003-05:00

This year's graduation ceremony at Columbia University honored individuals who have made major contributions in physics, history, music, math - and money. Like the rest of the country's most prestigious universities, Columbia has been flooded with contributions from rich alumni for years now, and they barely know what to do with the money. One popular choice is to aggressively expand existing campuses, often at the expense of neighboring communities. Columbia is trying to seize part of Harlem, Harvard is building a major addition in Boston's Allston, Yale is undertaking a massive remodeling and expansion, and even the relatively poor University of Chicago is expanding its presence in Woodlawn and just bought Harper Court in Hyde Park, which it will replace with new buildings and retail. What these universities are not doing is investing in meeting the needs of the often poor neighborhoods they are expanding into.

The huge amounts of money being invested by universities - much of which has gone toward science and health research facilities - makes a strong contrast with the massive underinvestment in basic infrastructure that is plaguing the country, as bridges collapse, mass transit systems stagnate even as ridership hits record highs, and public housing is quietly dismantled. The striking difference between the capacity of private and public institutions to realize their priorities is nowhere more clear than in New Haven. As shown in this article, the impoverished city government must beg Yale for scraps and leave many important projects unfinanced, while Yale has complete freedom in its building plans.

But this contrast is simply a powerful symbol for what the neoliberal economic restructuring of the last generation has wrought. Almost all of the increased wealth of the last 30 years has gone to the super-rich, even as taxes on them have been slashed. All levels of government, starved of funds and fully captured by business interests, have cut social programs, neglected basic maintenance on infrastructure, and spent what resources they have on beautification efforts for the well-off.

Public interests are now thoroughly subordinated to the priorities of the wealthy, and investment decisions that were once made by our elected representatives have been taken over by unaccountable private interests. This does give us the chance to see the results of the conservative/libertarian fantasy of low taxes, with public needs being met by charity. Rich people aren't interested in donating their money to the sewer fund, the subway fund, or a fund to provide health insurance to the poor. In fact, for the most part they don't want to donate their money for anything - they spend most of it on luxury goods. But those who do donate tend to give money to universities, museums, arts organizations, and medical research (see this list of the top donations of 2007).

These are all worthy causes, but they tend to make the social hierarchy steeper rather than distributing resources and opportunity to those who are excluded. Good universities, good cultural institutions, and advanced medical treatment are things that the already-privileged can easily access, while members of the working class and underclass find it much harder to benefit. What they need most - good primary and secondary schools, good transit infrastructure, affordable housing, health insurance - are exactly the goods that are being neglected by both the government and by charitable donations.

So the experiment in getting rid of equity-promoting goods and services provided by a redistributory government and replacing them with the whim of rich people is a failure. But underlying this policy argument is a basic ideological issue: should we look on the distribution of personal income according to market forces as natural and just? Or should we interpret the creation of wealth as a social product that is currently distributed according to the logic of capital, which is no more "natural" than any other distributory mechanism - unless you regard the war of each against all as humanity's natural state.

Market forces decide incomes not based on merit, but according to the amount of bargaining power one has - which is why people who work incredibly hard will make almost nothing if there are many others willing to the do the job and they aren't unionized. Those crushed by the invisible hand are victims, not shirkers, so we must use the state to mitigate the injustices of the market until we attain a truly just system of producing and distributing wealth.

In the meantime, concentrating ever more wealth in the richest universities is not useful - those resources should be going to the cash-starved state universities and other unglamorous capital investments that serve society much better. Taxes should be raised sharply on the rich so we can start to undo the massive upward redistribution of wealth of the last 30 years, and those resources should be poured back into the social needs that have been starved for decades.

Foie gras legal again

2008-05-15T08:25:00.000-05:00

Yesterday morning Daley stooge and restaurant owner Alderman Tom Tunney suddenly announced that City Council would, within hours, hold a vote to repeal Chicago's ban on foie gras. Daley, lording over the Council, prevented any debate and the ban was overturned, 37-6.

Opponents claimed that the government should not be in the business of telling you what to eat. But we already have laws prohibiting cruelty to animals, and they're actually enforced pretty regularly. There's a strange ethical disconnect in this country, where outrage and legal action follow something like dog fights or puppy mills, but the industrialized torture of food animals is not only many thousands of times more widespread, its either completely legal or fully tolerated. I agree that the government should not tell you what to eat - but it should be in the business of preventing and punishing the infliction of pain on animals, regardless of the reason cited.

Since most Chicagoans have no idea what foie gras even is, much less how it's produced, the ban was probably premature, and it's not clear how effective it was. But it was symbolically powerful, and activist groups around the country could point to Chicago's example when arguing for new limits. The only aldermen who stood with Joe Moore (49th), the bill's sponsor who fought valiantly for it till the end, were Toni Preckwinckle (4th), Ricardo Munoz (22nd), Ed Smith (28th), Scott Waguespack (32nd), and Rey Colon (35th). If your aldermen is one of these fine people, please let them know you appreciate their vote against animal cruelty. Otherwise give your alderman an angry call or email and don't forget when elections come up.

Is the CTA reading this blog?

2008-04-29T23:17:00.002-05:00

One week ago I wrote, "We should also seriously look into establishing bus-only lanes on key corridors like Western and Ashland and giving buses signal priority, both of which would reduce the traffic problems that eat up so much gas."

Today the CTA announced that it would receive $153 million of federal money to implement the first ten miles of a projected 100 mile system of bus-only lanes featuring signal priority, pre-paid boarding, and fixed stops every 4-5 blocks, in addition to several other initiatives.

This is wonderful news. Altho the plan is not a true bus rapid transit since it's not grade separated, bus-only lanes thruout the city is by far the most cost- and time-effective way to extend the system. Even on routes that arguable should be served by new rail lines, experimentation with dedicated bus lanes can serve as a first step forward.

The CTA said it would establish bus-only lanes on four key corridors, but has yet to specify what these would be. To start thinking about the possibilities, check out these numbers on the routes with the highest riderships, based on average 2007 weekday boardings (both local and express):

79th (32,847)
Ashland (31,527)
Western (29,904)
Cottage Grove (23,851)
Madison (22,309)
King Dr (21,582)
Clark (21,199)
If you count the various Lake Shore Dr buses together, ridership is highest in the city.

Obviously there are other factors to be taken into account, like how easy it would be to take a lane of traffic and how bad the congestion is right now.

Except the #6 express from Hyde Park to the Loop, I've never used any of these routes so I'm not too qualified to choose. But I would very much like to see Western included, as a first step toward the long-term goal of a Western Ave subway. The South Side, deprived as it is of transit, should also get at least one.

What is wrong with this country?

2008-04-23T21:58:00.000-05:00

This graphic pretty much says it all:

Miles per gallon for new cars:
Japan 46
EU 43
China 36
USA 27.5

Miles per vehicle driven annually:
Japan 7097
EU 7829
USA 12,427

Consumption of oil since 1980:
Denmark -33%
Germany -20%
France -14%
Japan +0.2%
UK +2%
USA +21%

Ratio of American methods of commuting:
Bike 1
Walk 5
Transit 9
Carpool 21
Drive alone 154

Is transit as green as it should be?

2008-04-22T15:13:00.006-05:00

Cato Institute "scholar" Randal O'Toole recently published a report claiming to show that public transit produces about the same amount of carbon emissions per passenger mile as autos, and far more than hybrid cars. O'Toole argues that it would make far more sense to subsidize the purchase of hybrids than to keep investing in expensive new light rail systems, as many cities are doing now.

Libertarians, of course, hate public transit because it involves government planning in pursuit of the public good. So it's not surprising to find that O'Toole has deliberately distorted his data to make transit look bad. Even so, O'Toole has compiled a lot of very useful information comparing transit systems in different cities and raised an important question: are transit agencies doing as much as they should to reduce their carbon emissions? But before we get to that, let's look at why O'Toole's political agenda is so badly flawed.

O'Toole's data show that the average auto uses 3885 BTUs per passenger mile (only 3445 if you leave out SUVs and pick-ups), compared with 4365 for buses, 3465 for light rail, and 2600 for heavy rail. A Toyota Prius uses 1659 BTUs. When you average all this out, passenger cars use only one more BTU per passenger mile than transit does. And O'Toole argues that, since the fuel efficiency of cars is likely to rise rapidly in coming years and the number of light trucks will decline (probably fair assumptions if gas prices stay high), cars will soon be clearly better from a global warming perspective.

What O'Toole does not tell us (I had to email him to find out) is that the fuel efficiency numbers he's using for cars come from both urban and highway driving. This makes his comparison between cars and transit completely invalid. Cars are far more efficient on the highway, but the only kind of driving that transit replaces is the kind that involves frequently sitting in traffic and lots of stops and starts - urban driving. So O'Toole is comparing apples and oranges in an attempt to smear transit, meaning that despite the many problems with public transit, it is still far greener than driving.

Second, the biggest reason transit's already good numbers aren't higher is low ridership (as O'Toole acknowledges, most of the energy expended by buses and trains is used to move the vehicle so adding transit riders dramatically increases energy efficiency). It's not at all surprising that, with fuel prices held artificially low by a number of indirect subsidies, potential riders have chosen to drive rather than take transit (ridership figures and thus efficiency numbers have been steadily rising with the price of gas). So transit's efficiency numbers have in part been dragged down by decades of public policies favoring cars.

One big exception is the New York subway system, which is highly energy efficient because it has so many riders. And why are there so many riders? One of the main reasons is that the system is so big that it'll get you almost anywhere you want to go. Those cities only now building urban rail systems have low ridership in part because having only one or two lines is not very useful. It will take many years of investment before these systems are complete enough to attract enough riders to make them highly energy efficient. Yet O'Toole would end the process now, permanently crippling transit in these cities.

Finally, O'Toole ignores what may be the most valuable thing about transit from an environmental perspective - it makes possible a certain kind of very low impact lifestyle, namely urban living. People who live in urban areas not only drive less, they also walk more, have smaller living spaces to heat and cool, and take up less land. All of these cause far less greenhouse gas emissions than suburban-style living, but none of them show up in O'Toole's figures. Yet that kind of living is just not possible without a good rapid transit network, including rail. In Hyde Park or Cambridge I make most of my trips by bike or on foot, producing no greenhouse gases at all. That's just not possible in the suburbs, yet O'Toole's figures are incapable of reflecting the smaller environmental impact that dense development, facilitated by transit, makes possible.

Even without these considerations, it's not just the amount of energy used per passenger mile - it's also the total number of miles you need to move. People who take transit not only require less energy per mile, they also travel fewer miles overall because everything's closer together in the city. O'Toole's numbers don't include this either.

Okay, so O'Toole has both misrepresented the efficiency comparison of transit and autos, and he's ignored the key role that transit plays in making urban living possible. But if we just forget about his political agenda, he still gives transit advocates some useful information and ideas.

First, he points out that there's actually major variations in the efficiency of different cities' transit systems. The El is in the middle of the pack among heavy rail systems, a lot less efficient than New York (and Atlanta?!) but better than LA and some smaller systems like Cleveland. O'Toole doesn't explain these variations, but it's worth looking into.

Second, rail is far more efficient than buses. There are many reasons for this - rail technology is inherently more efficient, but the political imperative to extend bus service to all parts of cities even when ridership is very low is also a big factor. O'Toole makes some good suggestions for reducing buses' environmental impact, including switching to hybrid buses and using smaller buses on less popular routes (the CTA is doing both of these to a certain extent). We should also seriously look into establishing bus-only lanes on key corridors like Western and Ashland and giving buses signal priority, both of which would reduce the traffic problems that eat up so much gas.

The CTA could also follow New York's example by using green building and station design and getting actively involved in transit-oriented development. It's not enough that transit is already far greener than driving - there's a lot more progress to be made.

New York wastes a historic opportunity

2008-04-07T19:59:00.002-05:00

Global warming is probably the most important and urgent issue we face - a problem that will increase inequality, disease, involuntary migration, warfare, and starvation as people try to adjust to shrinking resources and more frequent weather disasters. While the rich countries will spend massively to deal with climate problems that could have been prevented (and I guarantee those funds will come out of social spending rather than military spending), the poor countries - which are going to bear the brunt of climate fluctuations and are least equipped to deal with it - will mostly fail to adapt. Expect millions of people to die or be displaced in places like Bangladesh and Africa. Fighting global warming is not just an environmental issue, it's also a social justice issue. Global warming will also cause mass extinctions among other species, and impose a terrible cost on future generations.

The response of those who have caused the problem - overwhelmingly the rich countries - has fallen far short of what's needed. While Europe and Japan have made halting, if inadequate, progress, the United States has actually obstructed global efforts while doing almost nothing at home. The Bush administration has been the biggest obstacle, but given the terror among legislators of being seen to raise the price of electricity or gas, it's not clear that even a liberal president would have made much progress.

That's why Bloomberg's congestion pricing proposal for New York was so heartening. Here was a politician stepping up to do exactly what's needed: raising the cost of driving and devoting the revenues to public transit. A massive coalition of environmentalist, labor, and business groups came out in support of congestion pricing, the City Council voted to endorse the plan, the governor and leader of the state senate signed on. Even so, the plan is now dead, killed by the speaker of New York's lower house without even a vote.

This is bitterly disappointing. New York could have led the way for the rest of the country, but instead we face another setback - and it's far too late in the game to once again be moving backward. I hope New Yorkers will punish their legislators at the polls, but it seems increasingly unlikely that global warming is going to be addressed until a popular and militant mobilization forces both the politicians and the public to face what they're doing. After all, politicians aren't stupid - congestion pricing didn't fail because of big oil, it failed because of popular support for car culture.

Cook Dupage corridor comments

2008-03-24T18:46:00.002-05:00

Don't forget to send in public comments on the Cook Dupage corridor transportation study - the deadline is March 31. Access the comment form here. My comments are below.

Also, the state legislature will be holding a number of public meetings in the next couple days to gather input on the state budget. Blagojevich's proposal dramatically underfunds transit - the previous capital bill funded highways and transit at a 2:1 ratio, Blagojevich would set the ratio at 10:1. If you have a chance, attend one of the meetings and demand adequate transit funding.

Chicago: South Side
3/25/2008, 5:30 p.m.
Kennedy-King College Theatre
6301 S. Halsted St., Chicago

Chicago: West Side
3/26/2008, 6:00 p.m.
Bethel New Life Auditorium
1150 N. Lamon St., Chicago

Chicago: North Side
3/27/2008, 6:00 p.m.
Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center
Olson Auditorium, 836 W. Wellington Ave., Chicago

Chicago: Southwest
3/27/2008, 6:00 p.m.
Oak View Community Center
4625 W. 110th St., Oak Lawn

Cook Dupage corridor comments

What do you think of the proposed transportation system, overall?
I strongly support the public transit components, and oppose the highway components. The current task is to make up for decades of underinvestment in transit and facilitate the Chicago region’s transition away from car dependence. Public funds are needed to prepare Chicago for the low-carbon future, which will cripple our economy if we don’t have good transit options in place. Emphasis must be placed on reducing traffic congestion by moving people onto transit, not by expanding roads that will be just as congested in ten years.

I am concerned about some specifics of the public transit components. Why has the Mid-City Transitway been proposed as a bus line rather than a new El line? Does the projected ridership of an extended Blue Line justify the costs? I am also concerned about priorities. In what order would these projects be built? I believe the Mid-City Transitway should be first in line. I also strongly urge the commission to make public key pieces of information, especially projected ridership of the different extensions and an explanation of why the Blue Line and Inner Circumferential Rail Line were proposed as rail while the MCT was proposed as BRT.

What do you think of the major projects included in the proposed system?

Elgin-O’Hare Expressway East Extension to O’Hare
I believe highway extensions should be the lowest priority - public funds should be invested first and foremost in public transit, which has suffered from underinvestment for decades but is far better in creating livable and sustainable cities.

DuPage J Line BRT (Bus Rapid Transit)

Mid-City BRT (Bus Rapid Transit)
I strongly support the Mid-City Transitway and believe it should be the highest priority because it would expand transit access to the densest areas under study, would provide a convenient link between O’Hare and Midway as well as transfers between the Blue, Green, Pink, Orange, and Red Lines, and would extend transit to a number of low income communities that are currently poorly served.

However, I wonder why the MCT has been proposed as a BRT rather than a new El line. It would have far more riders than the Inner Circumferential Rail Line, yet the ICR Line has been proposed as rail. Making the MCT a bus line might also hurt the prospects for high-density development in the neighborhoods it serves, and would make it impossible to service high riderships. What are the ridership figures reviewed by the commission? The MCT has the potential to greatly improve transit in Chicago and extend high-density development to large parts of the city, but this opportunity may be lost if we settle too easily on BRT.

I-355 BRT (Bus Rapid Transit)

Inner Circumferential Rail Line
As stated above, I wonder why this O’Hare-Midway link has been proposed as rail, while the higher ridership Mid-City Transitway has been proposed as a bus line. The ICR Line seems like a useful addition, but should be a lower priority than the Mid-City Transitway.

I-290 HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) Lanes
I oppose the widening of highways, which only encourage further reliance on cars. These funds should be devoted to public transit, not more subsidies to cars.

I-290 BRT (Bus Rapid Transit)

Blue Line Extension
Given the low density of the suburbs, I am concerned that the potential ridership of a Blue Line extension may not justify the costs. I would like to see ridership figures, and would also like to hear more details about how far apart stops would be and how often the line would run. It might make more sense to build a BRT line that connects with the Blue Line. I’m not opposed to an extension, I just don’t think the public has been given enough information to justify the expense.

Other Comments:
I am concerned that the opportunities for public input have been too few thus far. I hope that the commission will provide much more information about why it made the proposals it did, and give the public many more opportunities to participate in this important plan.

I thank the commission for its work and applaud the cooperation demonstrated by the many public officials involved in the process. I hope that unified planning will continue in this spirit of cooperation, because our region will suffer terribly if it cannot expand transit options before carbon taxes and rising gas prices make car-only transportation systems obsolete.

The dark side of congestion pricing

2008-03-22T14:25:00.002-05:00

If you follow transportation politics, you will have heard awhile ago that the Bush administration has been strongly promoting congestion pricing over the last year by disbursing funds to cities willing to expand their use of road tolling. The highest-profile initiative is New York's plan to start charging a fee for cars and trucks to enter Manhattan below Midtown, but federal money will also go to new efforts in Seattle, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Miami. (If you live in New York, by the way, right now is crunch time for the congestion pricing initiative so call your representatives in the legislature and on City Council to ask for their support.)

I admit that as I've been reading about the administration's backing for congestion pricing I never gave much thought to why a viciously reactionary regime would be pursuing policies that I strongly support. This article explains it all, and it's just as bad as we should have assumed it would be.

Basically, free market ideologues/corporate shills (they're one and the same) in the Department of Transportation have come up with a fiendishly clever plot to privatize the roads while starving transit, leading to big profits for the companies that they work for in between stints making transportation policy. Philosophically, they see roads not as a public good but as something to be rationed according to how rich you are, like any other commodity. This is why they've been promoting congestion pricing and other kinds of tolling. After establishing the principle of user fees on roads, phase two is to sell public roads to corporations, which can drive fees even higher for their own profit. The third key component is to starve public transit so people won't have any alternative but to use the privatized roads.

I should have known that the Bush administration would come up with a way to make the transportation system even worse: just as dependent on cars, but squeezing corporate profits out of everyone at the same time. The effects are already being felt - the money to fund the congestion pricing initiatives came from diverted pork barrel spending, some of which (although probably not much) financed public transit in small cities - including my hometown, which now has to rely on volunteers with cars to replace some buses. The number of major new bus and rail projects on track to get federal funding has fallen from 48 in 2001 to 17 this year. And, as Chicago residents know, the privatization of roads is a growing trend.

The best story in the article is the conflict over how a DC subway extension to Dulles airport should be done. The Department of Transportation threw a temper tantrum when Virginia decided to use a public agency to build it using toll road money instead of selling the toll road to Macquarie Holdings, a company that the general counsel at the Federal Highway Administration used to work for. The Department of Transportation killed the subway extension. Macquarie and the notorious Carlyle Group are now circling the project like vultures.

The alternative to the Bush administration's dystopian future is not, as some politicians in the article would have it, to stick with roads free and numerous. The transportation system should be a public good, it should not be commodified - but the environmental and public health costs of using it must be borne by those responsible. Congestion pricing should be a key component of shifting people away from cars and onto transit, which should also remain a public good. Ironically the Bush administration might be starting us down that path by pushing congestion pricing - but only if the next president makes a serious effort to fund the expansion of transit systems across the country.

McCain is a long-time opponent of Amtrak and has helped the Bush administration try to dismantle it, and many of McCain's advisers are free market fundamentalists like the people who run the Department of Transportation, but it's hard to predict who would actually end up making policy in a McCain administration. There is some reason to think that both Clinton and Obama would be more supportive of transit, but since they're both centrist opportunists, the political climate in the country would probably be the biggest factor in shaping their policies. Even tho transit use keeps setting records and the price of gas keeps going up, political support is still pretty anemic. It's going to depend on citizens pressuring the politicians or nothing will get done.

Cheney is a comic book villain

2008-03-19T11:06:00.002-05:00

Nice.

Raddatz [ABC News]: Two-third of Americans say [the Iraq war i]s not worth fighting.

Cheney: So?

Raddatz: So? You don’t care what the American people think?

Cheney: No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.

Supreme Court captured by business

2008-03-17T12:59:00.002-05:00

This is a good article on how the Chamber of Commerce helped push the Supreme Court from an ally of consumer groups thirty years ago into the body that recently struck down a lawsuit against the maker of faulty medical equipment. The author draws an interesting distinction between the professional classes - largely content with existing inequalities and a state that genuflects before capitalists - and the majority of the population, increasingly angered by corporations and the ever-increasing gap between themselves and the rich. Yet political elites remain responsive only to the professionals. This just points up once again what the left needs to be doing: creating strong grassroots groups and democratic businesses. Without the organizational and financial power that businesses draw on just as a matter of routine operations, the left is hopelessly outmatched. Which is why we're stuck with candidates like Clinton and Obama.

Western expansion

2008-03-11T08:06:00.005-05:00

There was some big news for Chicago in the paper two weeks ago, but no one seemed to notice. A committee of suburban mayors and county commissioners presented an ambitious proposal for long-term transit improvements on the far West Side and in the western suburbs. The plan calls for the Forest Park Blue Line to be extended up to 13 miles along the Eisenhower, to the Yorktown Mall in Lombard, and for three new north-south transit lines to make it easier for rich people from the suburbs to take transit into the city, for poor people to take transit to their degrading jobs in the suburbs, and for everyone to make intersuburban commutes.

One of those three lines is the Mid-City Transitway, proposed as a bus rapid transit (BRT) line. The other two are a rail line between O'Hare and Midway thru the suburbs, and a BRT line connecting Schaumburg, Elmhurst, Oak Brook, Naperville, and other far west suburbs. A fourth BRT line even further west and widening of the highway are also being considered. (This is the best news article - the Tribune article wasn’t worth much. The preliminary recommendations can be found here.)

The plan would be expensive - between $5.5 and $8 billion dollars - and would probably take a couple decades to complete assuming the money could be found. It’s also well back in the line of transit expansions - the Circle Line, airport express, and extensions of the Red, Orange, and Yellow Lines are all much further along. But it’s still a big deal - the plan is a product of an exceedingly rare cooperative spirit among suburban and county officials, and it would be a big step forward in the transit capacity of the Chicago area. The Cook-DuPage corridor is a major location of jobs but currently has almost no transit options outside the two Metra lines that run a couple miles north and south of the Eisenhower. The Mid-City Transitway, which I’ve argued for before, would be a particularly important expansion of service to fairly dense low-income neighborhoods that have limited transit access.

In fact the Mid-City Transitway seems far more worthy than the Circle Line, and ten billion times better than the airport express line, which should be eliminated altogether from expansion plans. But do we want a bus rapid transit line for the MCT, or should we fight for an El line? Any thoughts on the pros and cons? As for the Blue Line extension, there's still a lot of details we don't know - how far apart the stops would be or how high ridership would be in a comparatively low-density area. What do yous think about the proposals for the suburbs? The only proposal on the table that seems obviously bad to me is widening of the Eisenhower.

The commission website is here. They're accepting public comments until March 31, which can be sent to lenskiw@rtachicago.org (download a public comment form here and send it as an attachment). They're also holding public meetings, but the one in Chicago was yesterday - others are listed on the website.

Bike safety ordinance up for a vote

2008-03-10T16:07:00.007-05:00

Update The bike safety ordinance was passed today - good job everyone who called (altho, since Daley supported it, it was probably a done deal anyway). Daley defended bike messengers and then, in his inimitable style, offered some advice to everyone: "You have to be careful if you are reckless."

The Chicago city council will be voting on this ordinance Wednesday. Don't know if it will have any effect, but at the very least it's a good symbolic move. Call your alderman now.

From the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation:

The ordinance would fine motorists up to $500 for endangering a bicyclist. It identifies specific behavior, including:
Requiring a minimum of three feet of clearance while passing bicyclists
Prohibiting a motorist from opening a door into moving traffic, reducing the danger of “dooring”
Raising the fines for vehicles parked in bike lanes or marked shared lanes
Requiring motorists to yield to oncoming bicyclists when turning left, which prevents a “left hook” crash
Prohibiting motorists from turning right in front of a bicyclist, which prevents a “right hook” crash
Requiring motorists to exercise due care for bicyclists in addition to pedestrians

For fun, check out the incredibly high levels of vitriol that drivers direct at bikers in these comments.

Letter to the editor, re: Nader and popular support for progressive policies

2008-02-27T12:16:00.003-06:00

To the editors:
In your harangue against Ralph Nader (Chicago Tribune editorial, "Irrelevant at any speed", 2008 February 27), you suggest that issues like single-payer health insurance and reducing the military budget are being ignored by the major presidential candidates because they "don't see sufficient public support for them". Five minutes on the internet would have proved you wrong.

In an October 2003 Washington Post-ABC News poll, 62 percent of respondents preferred "a universal health insurance program, in which everybody is covered under a program like Medicare that's run by the government and financed by taxpayers." Polls have consistently shown that overwhelming majorities of Americans believe health coverage is a right that should be guaranteed by the government, and large majorities are also willing to pay higher taxes to accomplish this goal. Yet single-payer health insurance, if done right, would actually lower overall health costs and simultaneously accomplish universal coverage. Just ask any other rich country - they all cover all their citizens, and they all pay less for comparable levels of care.

As for military spending, a March 2007 Gallup poll found that 43 percent of respondents think the U.S. spends too much on its military, compared with 20 percent who think military spending is too low and 35 percent who say it's about right.

Clearly there are high levels of popular support for progressive solutions, which is even more remarkable in light of the fact that mainstream politicians and the media ignore them. Perhaps Nader is right after all - progressive policies are suppressed not because of popular indifference but because powerful interests like the health
industry and military lobby have a stranglehold on our politics.

Heads up on Nader

2008-02-23T09:32:00.002-06:00

Looks like Nader will be announcing a presidential run when he appears on Meet the Press tomorrow.

The vitriol from the liberals has already started. I doubt that Nader will have much of an effect on this election, since the Democrats will go all out to keep him off ballots and smear him in public, while the media will only talk to him about his chances for acting as a spoiler.

Nader will be the only high-profile candidate addressing hugely important issues like the need for single-payer healthcare, the ridiculous size of the military, and the continuing domination of corporate power over our lives. Yet I've become very disillusioned with him since the 2000 election. Certainly not for "costing Gore the election" (Gore won the election - the Supreme Court and electoral college were the real forces that cost him the election). The problem is that Nader never followed up with the real strength of his candidacy - getting disaffected people organized and involved in grassroots struggles. In 2004 Nader didn't even run on the Green Party ticket, further weakening the effort to build a real electoral alternative.

Even so, in the arguments that will follow Nader's announcement I'll definitely be defending his right to run and the importance of raising the issues he'll concentrate on. And most important, I'll remind those who hysterically condemn Nader that they should be spending their time instead demanding instant runoff voting, a simple electoral reform that would eliminate the spoiler problem and make our political system more democratic.

Suburbs still a haven of selfishness and racism

2008-02-07T23:03:00.000-06:00

Probably the biggest obstacle in America to an environmentally sustainable society (other than maybe meat-eating) is the low density of our cities. There are a handful of high-density cities built in the 19th century, but the fastest-growing cities like Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix, and Las Vegas are almost completely composed of sprawl, and even the dense cities are surrounded by their own sprawling (and rapidly-growing) suburbs.

The main problem is that building and maintaining sprawl is an incredibly inefficient use of resources. It takes more land and covers it with concrete, strip malls, and TGIFridays; it uses more raw materials to build and heat so many one-family homes and to extend the roads, sewers, and electrical lines; and worst of all it requires that cars be the main form of transportation. Public transit is only feasible under conditions of high density, when ridership is high enough to sustain regular bus and train routes, while walking or biking the extended distances of the suburbs is usually not realistic for many people.

Long Island is the birthplace of sprawl, where the first true suburbs emerged after World War II. It is also an unusually progressive suburban area, electing more Democrats than Republicans and county leaders who argue for denser, more vertical development. But the impulses that have always led people to move to the suburbs - a desire for a big home with access to good schools and a neighborhood without any minorities or poor people - are still strong even there, even in the face of an impending crisis in housing affordability. A recent survey found that

Fifty-nine percent of Long Islanders could never imagine themselves living in an apartment. Asked which type of neighborhood they preferred — one where you could walk to stores or one that required driving — 56 percent said they would rather drive. Meanwhile, only 7 percent agreed that “creating ethnically and economically diverse neighborhoods” was the major advantage of building more affordable housing. Asked what the worst disadvantage was, 20 percent said “bringing in the wrong kinds of people.”

If I were optimistic I'd say that once we get a carbon tax or its equivalent, a lot of this problem would go away. If the price of fossil fuels started to reflect their real social costs, the building of new sprawl would cease, cities like Houston or Phoenix would collapse economically and become the Detroits of the next generation, and high-density development would take off. But reading comments on Chicago Tribune articles related to transit, as I am wont to do, makes me think otherwise. Here's a fairly typical example, which the comment service identified as originating in Oak Brook, Illinois (errors of spelling and spacing preserved):

Maybe you can send all the illegals from your state [he is responding to a poster from California] and they can drive the buses and trains for $2.00 HR! Never mind we have way to many already!I hope the CTA goes down the toilet if you cant run a business with the money you have shut down we in the burbs are tired of bailing out Chicago! I'm lucky i dont buy anything in the collar counties so the only money they will ever get from is the money i cant control them from getting!I will be moving shortly from crook state!

The heady mix of antitax selfishness and anti-immigrant racism is pretty telling, and I think once the attack on car culture and sprawl starts taking off the backlash will only get worse. My fear is that we might be facing a new culture war, not over religious issues (fundamentalists may even prove to be allies), but over the sacrifices needed to combat global warming and the particular brand of anti-egalitarian, neoliberal individualism that could be called the ideology of the suburbs. It's a confrontation that will have to be made at some point, but I'm worried that getting bogged down in it might fatally delay urgent steps needed to control greenhouse gas emissions.

Electability?!

2008-01-30T18:47:00.000-06:00

Edwards is out of the race, so what do we do now? On one level it makes no difference - the most important task, as it always has been, is to organize grassroots support for progressive policies and start creating democratic businesses. Edwards wasn't a true progressive anyway - an Edwards victory would have left us in a better position to push our policies, but we would have still had to organize to hold him to his word.

But it's also worth thinking about the electability issue. I find it distasteful, because I've always believed that we should vote for people who are actually giving us something we want, not just taking it away at a slower rate. But we tried the "heightening the contradictions" approach in 2000, and Bush actually fit the bill much better than expected. I thought he'd be marginally worse than Gore, but he (or rather the people actually deciding his policies) exceeded all expectations. So what about those contradictions? All the anti-Bush outrage didn't produce a new radical movement. Instead it's gone into wonkish blogging and great enthusiasm for candidates whose policies are somewhat better than Gore's were, but fundamentally of the same reformist/capitalist/imperialist nature.

So maybe it's time to try a corporate Democrat again, and hope that this time we've learned from the shocking passivity of the left during the Clinton '90s. The question then is - would Clinton or Obama be more likely to beat McCain?

I'm pretty sure Clinton would lose to McCain. The right wing's amazing and completely irrational hatred of her is the one thing that could effectively unify it behind a candidate it doesn't really like. Meanwhile, McCain appeals strongly to independents and probably some Democrats. McCain's big potential weakness is Iraq - if things start going badly again his consistent support for the war would hurt him. Except Clinton also voted for the war, came late and unconvincingly to oppose it, and is also very right-wing on other foreign policy issues like Iran.

Obama's foreign policies are pretty much the same as Clinton's, but the popular perception of them is not. If the war became an issue again, it would tremendously help Obama against McCain. Obama is also very attractive to independents and would probably hold Democrats together better. Unlike Clinton, Obama is likely to draw large numbers of politically disengaged people into the election, which would also probably increase the Democrats' gains in Congress. The far right, without the Clinton demon to rally against, would turn out in fewer numbers. I think Obama would probably beat McCain pretty easily.

I'm certainly not arguing that people in liberal states like New York, Illinois, or California should vote for Obama on election day. If the Democrat doesn't win those states, he or she has no hope of winning the election, so go ahead and vote Green. But voting for Obama on February 5 is worth considering. I just don't know if I can bring myself to do it.

Partial breach in the news blackout on meat and the environment

2008-01-29T12:38:00.000-06:00

I've written before about the media's suppression of news on the important link between meat and global warming (here and here). Since then the blackout has remained pretty solid - a Lexis-Nexis search turned up plenty of discussion in the newspapers of Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, but only one major opinion article from the Los Angeles Times (2007 October 15) and no news articles.

This weekend, The New York Times finally published a full account of these findings, as well as a comprehensive list of the many other ways the livestock industry ravishes the environment: Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler.

The article was in the Week in Review section, so the prohibition on treating meat-related environmental destruction as news still stands, but the article is an outstanding summary of the issue. I encourage everyone to email it to anyone who might benefit.

There is clearly a lot of hunger for news on this topic - the article rose to the number 2 spot on The Times's most emailed list before falling to number 3 right now (Times readers just can't get enough of those vapid JFK-Obama comparisons). We'll have to see if there's any follow-up on the news reporting side, or if other news outlets follow The Times's lead.

The author stops well short of calling on people to stop eating meat, and in fact manages to avoid using the word vegetarianism entirely. This may be the best way to communicate with meateaters, and I won't argue against anything that reduces the number of animals tortured and killed. Even so, I'm concerned that what could become a growing movement to eat less meat for environmental reasons might completely ignore the issue of speciesism.

Meat and cars increase hunger

2008-01-20T19:18:00.000-06:00

Periodically you hear the antimeat argument that, because you have to feed around 10 times as much grain to livestock to produce the same amount of calories as if you just ate the grain directly, we could solve world hunger if we stopped eating meat and sent the resulting surpluses to the hungry. That's a lousy argument, because the cause of world hunger is not global shortages, but inadequate distribution to the hungry caused by market forces and wars.

Well, it was a lousy argument till now. Because over the last several years global shortages have appeared in key crops, a development partly caused by meat. As the price of key foods like corn and cooking oil have risen, popular unrest is starting to boil over around the world. The past several months have seen food riots in Guinea, Indonesia, Mauritania, México, Morocco, Pakistan, Senegal, Uzbekistan, and Yemen. Food is getting more expensive in the US too, as discussed here.

The causes are complex, as detailed in this fine article. But there's no question that the two great enemies of the environment - meat and cars - are also key culprits in rising food prices. Basically, the increasing demand for meat and auto fuel is straining global food markets - grain is needed to feed factory farmed animals and can also be converted into ethanol; edible oils are turned into biodiesel. At the same time, higher petroleum prices are driving up the cost of shipping food around the world.

The rising prices build on each other: America's asinine corn ethanol subsidies have led many farmers to switch away from soy in favor of planting corn, which lowers the supply of soy oil and puts pressure on an already tight market in edible oils, themselves being diverted to biodiesel. Most tragic, all these developments threaten to make global warming even worse - corn ethanol probably adds more greenhouse gases than it avoids and tropical rainforests in Malaysia and Indonesia are being burned to clear the way for palm oil plantations, releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide in the process.

Americans still aren't feeling the pinch too badly, but people in countries like México depend heavily on cheap corn, while people in Asia get a large number of their calories from cooking oils. Higher prices for these people don't mean cutting expenses by seeing one less movie every other week, it means spending less by going hungry.

So now, possibly for the first time, the desire of the world's best-off to eat meat (and drive cars) is directly causing the world's poorest to go hungry. Commodity prices are notoriously volatile, so it's too early to tell if this is an aberration or a permanent problem that will get worse with time. But even if a sudden drop in the price of oil takes some of the pressure off momentarily, the trends driving food price inflation - high rates of both meat-eating and driving in the rich countries and rapidly increasing rates of the same in China and India - are probably here to stay. If global warming wasn't enough reason to make some big changes, how about the prospect of global food conflict?

Poverty and the election: More polemics on Obama vs Clinton

2008-01-13T15:02:00.000-06:00

Lorrie Moore's op-ed today is the counterpoint to Gloria Steinem's deeply flawed argument for privileging gender over race while ignoring class and voting for Hillary Clinton. The first third of Moore's op-ed is the best opinion piece I've read in the mainstream media about the election. For a brief, shining moment, "likability", "change", "experience", the latest polls, and incessant campaign advice from so-called political analysts disappear, replaced by a harsh reminder that politics is actually a matter of life and death. Moore is the first person I've seen who raises what is probably the most urgent social issue in the country - poverty and its connections to institutionalized racism. This is a theme ignored by all the candidates except John Edwards (chastised as being too harsh by those so-called political analysts the few times they bothered to mention his candidacy), but Moore does not mention Edwards.

Moore also reminds us of what the Clinton years were like - something that many have forgotten or are too young to remember. There were a few big initiatives - the killing of around a million Iraqis thru sanctions and bombings, a variety of airborne war crimes in Yugoslavia, Sudan, and Afghanistan, military aid to state terrorists in Turkey, Colombia, and elsewhere, an unprecedented neoliberal offensive to remove all limits on the power of capital, an end to the last few guarantees to a basic standard of living. But mostly the Clinton presidency was an era of minute poll-tested policies designed to buy the electoral support of the middle class while avoiding the central problems of the time - global warming, deindustrialization, poverty, skyrocketing inequality of wealth, race and gender discrimination, punitive criminal justice laws and the drug war, rising numbers of uninsured coupled with rapid increases in the cost of healthcare, the crippling debts of the global south, the unchecked power of corporations.

In other words, the Clinton approach was to combine major negative policies with a paralysis of low expectations on central social problems. There is good reason to think a Hillary Clinton presidency would replicate this pattern - a point made nicely by Frank Rich, who notes that Clinton's top campaign strategist is a pollster - the same man who helped make the 1996 presidential election primarily about school uniforms and V-chips.

After pounding home the execrable Clinton legacy, Moore shifts gears and argues that the worst-off social group in the country is not girls but boys.

The political moment for feminine role models, arguably, has passed us by. The children who are suffering in this country, who are having trouble in school, and for whom the murder and suicide rates and economic dropout rates are high, are boys — especially boys of color, for whom the whole educational system, starting in kindergarten, often feels a form of exile, a system designed by and for white girls.

Designed by and for white girls? Moore provides no evidence for that, and it seems pretty implausible to me. Given the level of segregation in this country, most boys of color don't even go to school with any white girls. I'm even more troubled by Moore's refusal to admit that gender inequality remains a huge social problem in the US. But her point that boys of color are faring worst in our society seems pretty fair (altho Moore's failure to mention girls of color even once seems motivated exclusively by her polemical anti-Clinton, pro-Obama aim). So if you buy the idea that a president who belongs to an oppressed social group might somehow alleviate that oppression - even if his or her policies do not address it at all - then Moore seems to be on pretty solid ground in endorsing Obama.

But wait a minute. Why are these boys doing so badly? Is it because they don't have any role models in national politics? Moore herself knows the answer:

their families [have been] torn apart by harsh economics and a merciless criminal justice system. Why does it seem to be the Republicans who are more vocal about reforming our drug laws? Why has no one in the Democratic Party campaigned to have felons who have served their time made full citizens again?

I'm not sure where she's getting the idea that Republicans are calling for the reform of the drug laws, but otherwise this is a pretty good summary. Deindustrialization and the flight of capital that accompanied the creation of the suburbs robbed these communities of their jobs. The enforcement of drug prohibition, targeted primarily at people of color, and punitive rather than rehabilitative criminal justice laws imprisoned a large percentage of the community. Exploitative landlords and banks and criminally negligent public housing agencies and school systems ground these communities into the dirt. The explosion of violence surrounding the drug trade and the emergence of gangs as surrogate families ravished these communities, and left most of their young men with felony records that made it impossible for them to reintegrate into society.

The solutions are pretty straightforward: end drug prohibition or at least decriminalize drugs. Make it illegal to discriminate against felons in employment and allow them to vote. Sever education financing from property taxes and equalize funding across neighborhoods. Harshly penalize predatory commercial practices. Undertake massive investment in job creation and infrastructure in the poorest neighborhoods.

Is Obama supporting these kind of policies? This may come as a surprise to the progressives who have low expectations of Obama, but to a certain extent he is. There's a huge hole in the part of the proposal where an end to drug prohibition should be, and the job creation section seems far too weak, but Obama actually has a pretty good list of policies that would constitute a decent start to addressing the issue.

The problem is that Obama has intentionally excluded any discussion of poverty from his campaign, which continues to be built around empty rhetoric and biography. Can we really expect Obama, if elected, to spend any of his political capital pushing expensive programs to help the systematically disenfranchised underclass? If progressive forces remain silent, or demobilize in the wake of the election, I think the answer is an obvious "no".

But here's the difference with Clinton: she doesn't even have a poverty proposal. And if she ever did try to push an antipoverty agenda, she'd be tarred as an unreconstructed liberal. Ironically, Clinton is the least liberal candidate but is popularly identified as the most liberal, making it even harder for her to push good policies even if she wanted to. Obama, precisely because he is campaigning as a post-partisan candidate, would probably have more room to advance liberal policies if he were so disposed.

We shouldn't kid ourselves - to the extent Obama's policies are progressive, it's because the mood of the country is progressive and he was afraid of losing support if he didn't match Edwards's proposals. And we certainly shouldn't settle for Moore's terribly naive optimism that simply having a black man in the White House will save the victims of poverty. But if we get organized before a President Obama takes office, we have a shot at ending up with positive reforms. The chances seem much smaller if we face a President Clinton.

On voting for people based on their anatomy or melanin

2008-01-07T18:05:00.000-06:00

I think it's worth raising the question, as Naureen does, of how such a symbolically loaded thing as electing the first woman president or the first black president would affect American culture and even culture in other countries. (Naureen supports Clinton because she thinks electing her would strengthen the fight against misogyny, but she doesn't explain why electing Obama wouldn't have the same effect on racism.)

I've already written about my fear that an Obama presidency might actually make race inequality worse. What about a Clinton presidency? Clinton, like Obama, periodically panders to reactionary forces by casting herself in traditional gender terms. Last October she famously taunted her opponents, saying, "if you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen. And I'm very much at home in the kitchen." Yet her aggressive style probably does more to undercut traditional gender expectations than her obviously calculated attempts to play into those norms reinforces them. We should, however, be careful here. Do we really want to promote unprincipled triangulation and ruthless power-grabbing as the alternative to feminine docility?

In the Obama post I didn't give any consideration to the possibility that having a black man in the White House might give blacks themselves greater confidence to confront racism and capitalism, or that it might reduce the incidence of racism in white people (if only among younger white people). The same positive cultural effects on gender issues might be a result of a Clinton presidency.

At the same time, either a Clinton or Obama presidency - both likely to govern as centrists at home and as liberal imperialists abroad - might reduce the capacity of progressive forces to mobilize against their conservative policies. It might also inflame patriarchal or racist forces and increase identity polarization (this seems more likely under a Clinton presidency given the powerful and widespread personalized hatred of her - nothing similar has emerged around Obama). Whether this would be good or bad is hard to say.

How these things play out culturally is probably too complex to predict. So I think it should be less of a factor in our decisionmaking than the imperative to undertake popular mobilization and push progressive issues on whoever is the next president.

I also think it's about time the left stops using identity politics as a central organizing principle. We should recognize that identity-based inequality is still a thriving part of our culture and resolutely oppose that. But unless our goal is a society composed of a finite number of rigidly-defined identity groups that individuals "should" belong to based on their genetic heritage, we should also be criticizing the facile prescribed identities that so animated the left in the '90s.

After the caucuses

2008-01-04T19:25:00.000-06:00

It's disappointing that John Edwards's solidly progressive campaign was beaten by Barack Obama's huge advantage in money, Obama's adulation among the media, and the surprising popular enthusiasm surrounding his contentless mantra of hope and change. Edwards is basically finished now. Despite winning second place, the media only talked about the first- and third-place finishers. The only chance Edwards had of breaking thru the media's indifference and hostility was by pulling an upset in Iowa. The media don't have much interest exploring corporate domination of politics or policies that might mitigate poverty or global warming, but they will respond to a big story in the horse race.

The good news is that Hillary Clinton was beaten even more badly than Edwards. The Democratic establishment's candidate lost in Iowa, where the establishment candidate is generally safe. Morever, she lost to a black man in one of the whitest states in the country, and she was even outpolled among women (Clinton got 30 percent versus Obama's 35 percent). However, Clinton is still ahead in the polls for the New Hampshire primary, which will be held January 8.

But does any of this matter to progressives? Obama's policy proposals are nearly identical to Clinton's, and both are tied into very similar networks of political and economic power (Obama's are based in Chicago rather than New York). Obama, like Clinton, is campaigning on platitudes and biography rather than the progressive reforms that might build momentum for positive legislative change after the election.

Despite the overwhelming similarities, on policy Obama is probably still preferable. His foreign policy advisers are demonstrably less bloodthirsty than Clinton's - even if the whole lot remain American supremacists. Obama has stated his willingess to meet directly with the leaders of America's designated enemies, while Clinton has criticized him for doing so and said that using nuclear weapons against Iran should remain an option. A final, far more significant difference is that Obama has called for the abolition of nuclear weapons while Clinton has avoided any clear statements on the issue.

If we could trust Obama to follow thru on even these few commitments, he would obviously be preferable to Clinton. But even tho Obama's voting record in the Illinois and US Senates has been fairly liberal, his policy initiatives have been pretty lackluster and there's no evidence he has any particular loyalties to a progressive agenda. My impression is that Obama is an opportunist - even his community organizing stint on the South Side might best be seen as Obama positioning himself for an anticipated run for mayor of Chicago (keep in mind those were the days of Harold Washington, when being an organizer would have made sense as a way into politics).

Nevertheless, Obama seems more open to a progressive agenda than Clinton, who remains rigidly attached to centrism in her own peculiar blend of elitist ideology and opportunism. If a popular movement for single-payer healthcare, high carbon taxes, or the abolition of nuclear weapons arose, I expect Clinton would be hostile but Obama might well be supportive. Obama may have the same DLC-type associations as Clinton, but Clinton grew completely out of those networks and has flourished within their warm embrace for twenty years, while Obama is still fairly new to politics and his loyalties may still be fluid.

We should also keep in mind the incredible popular enthusiasm Obama has generated. The sight of a politician summoning huge crowds and drawing previously nonvoting constituencies into the electorate hasn't been seen for forty years. If Obama wins the nomination and the election and chooses to pursue liberal policies, he has the potential to form a powerful new progressive majority. Under the right circumstances, this majority might even take the lead and push Obama onto a truly left-wing path. I think it's obvious that a similar scenario under a Clinton presidency is laughable.

I admit that a surging radical politics associated with Obama is pretty unlikely. But in strong contrast to the previous three elections of my adult life, 2008 presents us with some hope - because Obama as (potential) nominee is not a priori hostile to the progressive agenda and because the political climate in the country is so much better (talk of universal healthcare, for example, was strictly avoided by Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry). With Obama we have about an even chance of turning things around - depending entirely on how strong popular forces are. With Clinton there is no such chance.

Progressives should use the election to mobilize people into grassroots organizations that present the Democratic nominee with hard and fast demands on healthcare, global warming, foreign policy, immigration, and poverty. They should make clear that Obama's rhetoric of unity disguises the antidemocratic forces that are a central component in his campaign. And they should prepare for the real fight, which is over the direction of the country once the new president, whoever it is, takes office.

Hard numbers on healthcare

2008-01-02T18:48:00.001-06:00

The completely unacceptable performance of the American healthcare system has been widely recognized for at least 30 years. So it's baffling that politicians and the media have almost completely ignored the experience of a dozen other industrialized countries whose approach to healthcare has produced far better results.

Baffling, that is, until we recognize what following the lead of the other rich countries would entail - the almost complete elimination of private insurance providers and perhaps private pharmaceutical companies as well. The health industry is one of the richest in the nation, with plenty of money to corrupt politicians and threaten them with massive hostile propaganda campaigns if the lure of campaign contributions is inadequate. Since the media are too timid to venture beyond the incredibly narrow mainstream political debate, there has been almost no attention to the experience of other countries that spend significantly less per person on healthcare yet manage to insure everyone.

Winning a single-payer health insurance system, which in practice would mean extending Medicare to everyone in the country, is one of the most urgent political issues we face. So it's extremely important to counter the widespread ignorance and misconceptions among Americans about government-provided healthcare in the other rich countries. Here are some hard numbers that demolish the idea that private insurance is superior to single-payer in any way.

A survey of Australia, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Britain, and the US found that the US spends twice as much per capita ($6697) as even the second-highest spending country (Canada, $3326). The other countries spend even less - New Zealand spends only one-third as much as the US. This disparity is even more shocking in light of the fact that even with our astronomical healthcare expenses we leave 16 percent of the population without coverage, while the other countries cover everyone.

What about the results of the health system? I looked at the WHO's health statistics for Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Britain, and the United States - all have universal, government-provided healthcare except the US. The US is last in life expectancy - as many as 6 years behind the leaders. The US had the highest infant mortality rate (7 per 1000 live births) - South Korea was 6 deaths per 1000 live births and the other countries were between 3 and 5 deaths per 1000 live births. Per capita number of doctors varied - France and Germany had the highest, Australia, Canada, Britain, and the US were in the middle, and Japan and Korea had the lowest.

A survey of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, Japan, Britain, and the United States gives some more information. The US had the highest number of years lost to diabetes and circulatory and respiratory diseases, as well as the largest number of deaths due to surgical or medical mishaps.

In terms of overall opinions on healthcare, Americans are less satisfied than those with universal healthcare (see the first study). 16 percent of Americans said there were only minor problems in the health system, while 34 percent said the health system should be completely rebuilt. In the other countries, around 25 percent believed their health system had only minor problems (42 percent in Netherlands), while only 15 percent or so called for fundamental changes.

Confidence in the likelihood of receiving good-quality care was about the same in countries with universal healthcare as it is in the US (it was slightly lower in Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and Britain, about the same in Australia, and much higher in Netherlands). Wait times for surgery in the US were shorter than other countries (except Germany, which was significantly shorter than the US), but the differences were not overwhelming. Even Canada and Britain, the worst performers, held 85 percent of surgeries in under 6 months - and this relatively poor performance might be because of recent conservative attempts in both countries to reduce medical spending.

Another study assigned rankings to the health systems of Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Britain, and the United States. Rating the countries on "right" (effective) care, safe care, coordinated care, patient-centered care, access, efficiency, equity, and capacity to promote healthy lives, the US scored last or second-last in all categories except right care (the US's strong performance in preventive medicine was responsible for this single bright spot).

In 2000 the WHO ranked all the health systems in the world. Here are some of the rankings: France (1), Italy (2), Japan (10), Britain (18), Germany (25), Canada (30), Australia (32), US (37). Costa Rica was 36, Slovenia was 38. Cuba was 39.

(Also check out this Paul Krugman column, which tears apart the standard arguments in favor of private insurance.)

The conclusions are inescapable: the US spends by far the most money per capita on health care in the world - 2 to 3 times more than other rich countries. Yet the US leaves 1/6 of the population uninsured while the other rich countries cover everyone; the US's health indicators are no better and often worse than those countries with universal coverage; and Americans are less satisfied with their health system than are people with government-run systems. What makes our healthcare system operate so poorly?

The main reason is that private health insurance is a remarkably inefficient way to deliver health insurance. Dr. Stephanie Woolhandler, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, notes that we spend "almost a third of every health care dollar on administration and paperwork generated by the private health insurance industry" while "[c]ountries like Canada spend about half that much on the billing and paperwork side of medicine". An even more relevant comparison is Medicare - America's own government-run insurance program for the elderly, which would be extended to everyone under single-payer insurance. Compared with the 30 percent administrative costs of private insurers, Medicare's administrative costs are significantly lower - between 2 and 5 percent depending on how they're figured.

Why is Medicare so much more efficient than private insurers? One reason is that Medicare doesn't spend millions of dollars on advertising and the ridiculous pay packages of HMO corporate executives. At least as important, Medicare benefits from economies of scale. The US has hundreds of private healthcare bureaucracies duplicating each other's work and paying thousands of employees to figure out how to deny care to sick people. Other countries do the paperwork through a single comparatively efficient government agency, with no profit incentive to deny care.

By Woolhandler's calculations, Medicare for everyone would save so much money that we could extend coverage to the 47 million uninsured and still have enough money left over to improve the coverage of those currently underinsured. So single-payer should be a no-brainer - it should look good to those who want to help their fellow Americans struck down by horrible illnesses, but it should equally appeal to those who simply want to stop spending so much on healthcare. The only reason we're denied this obvious solution is the tremendous power of the private healthcare lobby. It's up to us to organize and apply as much pressure as needed to convince our representatives to implement the only efficient and ethical answer to the healthcare crisis.

The greenwashed mayor

2007-11-09T08:03:00.000-06:00

Two weeks ago The Reader published another great article on the state of Chicago's recycling program, noting the (very slow) progress and emphasizing the many remaining problems, particularly the city's failure to enforce the legal requirement that apartment buildings offer recycling. Now we find out that even funding for the expansion of curbside recycling for single-family houses is being cut. Meanwhile, the CTA stumbles along after getting another last-minute, temporary reprieve from its doomsday service cuts and fare increases. And even if the farce in Springfield eventually comes up with the funding, CTA's growing infrastructure crisis will remain unaddressed.

So what does Daley decide to propose at this moment? A plan to reduce Chicago's carbon dioxide emissions 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. That's certainly a welcome goal, but who does Daley think he's fooling? For years Daley has been talking about making Chicago the greenest city in the country, but what has he actually done? There are some real achievements (see this article, which not only praises Daley's environmental initiatives but his authoritarianism as well). But some green roofs, median flowers, and bike lanes, as welcome as they are, do not get us very far toward a sustainable city.

Daley should take a look at Mayor Bloomberg's plan for New York. Instead of ambitious rhetoric and timid follow-thru, Bloomberg is taking steps toward sustainability that are unprecedented in the United States. In a multifaceted proposal to make New York's transit, electricity, water, air, and built environment greener, particularly noteworthy are Bloomberg's plans for transportation. He is:

promoting congestion pricing, under which drivers entering the city would pay a fee for the privilege of causing gridlock,
strengthening existing public transit system, already by far the best in the country,
replacing New York's entire cab fleet with hybrid vehicles,
building the 2nd Ave subway to take pressure off the Lexington Ave line (4, 5, 6 trains), a single line which every day provides twice as many rides as the entire El system does.

The plan is not perfect - notably absent is any initiative to reduce meat-eating - but in its ambition and in the amount of resources it commits to sustainability it is unmatched in this country. If Daley wants to reduce greenhouse gases even 1 percent, he's going to need the kind of plans New York is already carrying out. Compared to this, Daley's green initiatives are just embarrassing.

It's not news if it makes smug environmentalists uncomfortable

2007-09-03T23:05:00.000-05:00

The New York Times finally reported on the UN study that found the global livestock industry contributes more to global warming than even cars. (An editorial responding to the study was published last December, weakly concluding that there is no way to reduce the amount of meat we eat, but the paper's news section was silent until last week.) Except this wasn't an article about the UN report at all, but rather about the rift between animal rights groups and mainstream environmental organizations over whether to inform people that meat and dairy are a principle cause of global warming. Even better, it was stuck in the business section under the heading "advertising" (PETA, the Humane Society, and others are starting to run ads on the connection). Now this certainly is a legitimate news story, but it seems a bit strange that The New York Times, which has covered global warming from every other angle, will run this kind of story while otherwise ignoring the issue of meat.

Daley throws a fit

2007-06-19T09:28:00.000-05:00

This is vintage Daley. The Tribune runs a good article on the city government's failure to reduce carbon emissions, finding that instead of meeting the pledge to reduce emissions one percent/year they've actually increased by 22 percent over the last four years, and that Daley still has not followed thru on this promise to increase renewable sources of electricity to 1/5 of the total. Daley responds like a petulant child, attacking the Tribune instead of explaining how he's going to fix the problems they found. Here's a sample: "Well, they're cutting all the trees down," Daley said, referring to wood pulp used to produce newsprint. "Go talk to the Tribune. Chop another tree down. Great." . . . "We should never have built the Tribune building because it was a high-rise when it was built on Michigan Avenue," the mayor said. "They should have never [built] your printing plant in Chicago for all your [delivery] trucks in Chicago. Why are you doing that? . . . "Nothing else to write," he said.

Green Taste of Chicago

2007-06-14T19:58:00.000-05:00

The Tribune ran a letter I wrote in its online-only letters section here.

Would Obama make race inequality worse?

2007-06-08T20:25:00.000-05:00

Barack Obama is the first presidential candidate since Ralph Nader in 2000 to generate real popular excitement. Like Nader, Obama is drawing huge crowds on the order of 15,000-20,000 people to his campaign events. Obama has received campaign donations from far more people than his rivals - 104,000 in the last reporting period compared with Clinton's 60,000 and Edwards's 40,000. How can we explain this excitement? It's definitely not that Obama is offering a concrete alternative - in policy terms, he is almost indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton. (His recently released health care plan may be an exception - Clinton has yet to produce her own.) What does distinguish Obama is his image and his race.

Obama has successfully cultivated the image of an outsider, an anti-establishment candidate and a fresh face. How he has managed this I'm not entirely sure, since everything about the campaign is very much of the establishment. Half of Obama's campaign money comes from extremely rich people who can afford to send more than $2300 to a political candidate. Only 21 percent comes from those donating $200 or less (see Opensecrets.org for these numbers). He relies on the same sectors for donations as Clinton does - finance capital, lawyers, Hollywood (a good article on Obama's fundraising operation and his corporate patrons is here). Many of his top fundraisers, in fact, worked in the Clinton administration or were Clinton donors close enough to the president to be invited to the White House. Obama has deep connections to the Daley machine in Chicago. His campaign is staffed by veteran Democratic operatives. To the extent there is a difference between Clinton and Obama's political connections, it's one of region: Obama draws from Chicago capitalists, Clinton from New York capitalists.

Almost no one is talking about it, but I think Obama's race is at least as important in generating this popular excitement as his image is. There's something truly gratifying to many liberals about throwing support behind the first black man with a good chance at winning the White House - especially when his main opponent is such a staunchly establishment figure as Hillary Clinton.

However, we need to be very careful about this kind of approach. Would an Obama presidency help reduce America's stunning racial inequality? There are no clear answers, but it seems at least as likely that race inequality could be made worse under Obama.

To be fair, Obama has given some attention to the structural causes of the problem. He has spoken about how unequal school funding leads to a wide gap in education opportunities between whites and blacks. He has drawn attention to underinvestment in public goods like hospitals and infrastructure. However, in a now-familiar theme, Obama has not followed this recognition with ideas on how to address it. As The Los Angeles Times noted, "Obama did not offer specific proposals to solve the problems he described. His approach has more often relied on lofty rhetoric than real-world prescriptions."

If Obama were to someday champion policies to address the structural problems he points out, then some progress might be made. But there is another side to Obama's approach to race. In addition to speaking vaguely about the ways our society is designed to reproduce racial inequality, Obama also frequently reproaches black people for causing their own problems. Drawing on the rich language that white conservatives and black professionals have developed to fix blame for racial inequality on poor blacks themselves, Obama regularly chastises blacks to put greater value on education and stop listening to rap. According to The Washington Post,

"In Chicago, sometimes when I talk to the black chambers of commerce, I say, 'You know what would be a good economic development plan for our community would be if we make sure folks weren't throwing their garbage out of their cars,' " Obama told a group of black state legislators in a speech in South Carolina last month.

This kind of rhetoric is employed with two goals in mind. First, it is directed at whites in an effort to reassure them that Obama will not pursue radical policies to address racial inequality. Second, it is directed at the black bourgeoisie - a major source of campaign funds for Obama - to affirm members' condescending attitudes and draw them into the Obama camp for the key Democratic primaries in which they exercise great influence. Whatever the motives, the outcome is to reinforce an already strong urge within our culture to blame the victims of racism and capitalism for their own plight.

Aside from this kind of pandering, an Obama election victory might also aggravate racial inequality for reasons totally outside Obama's control. For years many whites have pointed to successful black public figures like Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, or Colin Powell to back their claim that racism is no longer an important part of society. Electing a black man to the presidency would immeasurably strengthen the rhetorical power of this claim, while doing nothing to undo the very real structural inequalities and popular prejudices that still make race one of the most important factors in the distribution of wealth and power.

Despite these dangers, I would still rather see Obama in the presidency than Clinton (Edwards, of course, is far preferable to both). We have to evaluate candidates on their policies, not on their image and not on their race. And we have to be prepared, no matter who wins, to mobilize against the many reactionary policies he or she will pursue. Falling in love with a candidate is worst possible thing to do.

Bad day for transit

2007-05-24T23:53:00.000-05:00

The CTA today announced its "doomsday scenario" of fare increases and service cuts that will go into effect in September if the state legislature refuses to cover the $110 million budget deficit. Service on the Yellow Line and Purple Line Express would be eliminated. A new fare structure with higher rates during rush hour would be implemented. Rush hour prices would be $3.25/ride on the El and $2.75 on buses, at other times it would be $2.50 and $2.25 respectively. All bus routes that currently do not run on Sundays would be eliminated.

Underfunded transit is a nationwide problem. Today Los Angeles's MTA also announced major fare increases, in some cases doubling the cost of multiday passes. Philadelphia's SEPTA yesterday postponed a final decision on its own doomsday proposal, which would raise fares 31 percent while cutting service by 20 percent. Boston's MBTA is projected to fall between $4 and $8 billion short in funding over the next 20 years. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget proposal would cut $1.3 billion from public transit.

Public transportation is not a far left-wing cause. In all these cases, business groups support adequate transit funding because they know that a working transport system is essential to a functioning economy. Yet legislators not only ignore the oncoming devastation of global warming, they even ignore their corporate patrons. The impregnable position of cars in our culture seems to be the best explanation. How do you address an injustice that the vast majority of the population embraces?

letter to the editor, re: gas prices

2007-05-21T10:57:00.000-05:00

UPDATE: My letter was published in the Trib, May 25.

The Chicago Tribune editorialized the other day about the positive side of higher gas prices, somehow ignoring all the real reasons expensive gas is good and only mentioning that buying less gas allows us "to stop being held economic hostage to the writhing Middle East". I've been writing to reporters lately and asking why they never include a discussion of how bad car culture is for our society when they write their endless articles about the crisis in gas prices (which are now nearly 1/2 as much as in some European countries. The horror!). I've had a range of replies, from quite hostile to sympathetic, but none of them have explained why they can never mention the terrible social costs of driving.

To the editors:
You are absolutely right that higher gas prices are a blessing in disguise ("The good thing about gas prices", editorial, 2007 May 20). Every day we see the terrible social damage done by cars: deaths and injuries from accidents, dirty air causing asthma attacks in children, global warming slowly building toward catastrophe.

Not to mention the fact that building our lives around cars makes for less livable cities and simply does not make sense financially. Building roads, paying for gas, wasting valuable space on parking lots and gas stations, paying higher health insurance rates to cover the public health damage of driving — all these costs would be eliminated if we relied instead on walking, biking, and public transit. The cost
of building and maintaining a comprehensive public transit system pales in comparison to all the hidden costs of car culture.

The price of gas should reflect the damage caused by driving, which is far greater than $3.50/gallon. We should substantially increase the tax on gasoline and devote the revenues to public transit.

Keep foie gras illegal

2007-05-15T14:33:00.001-05:00

Daley is stepping up his campaign to have the ban on foie gras overturned. Defending this ban is important not only to reduce demand for a product that involves horrific cruelty. It is also a hugely significant symbolic struggle.

Chicago was the first city in the country to outlaw foie gras, and the fact that those fighting foie gras elsewhere can say that even Chicago has a ban is a big advantage. It normalizes this kind of anti-cruelty law, especially since Chicagoans cannot be dismissed as "hippies" or "crazy liberals" as people in a place like San Francisco are. Just as important, the ban on foie gras establishes the principle that how we treat animals is a legitimate subject for legislation. Once relatively easy victories like the foie gras ban are securely established, we can go on to raise questions about the cruelties of factory farming and, ultimately, whether even "humane" killing is acceptable.

Of course, ending the meat industry cannot be accomplished primarily thru legislation, but the legislative battleground is also extremely important in building the social movement against meat. The loss of the foie gras ban would be a big setback. Call or email your alderman now. (Find contact info at Civic Footprint.)

Save public transit in Illinois

2007-05-08T22:02:00.000-05:00

Copy and forward to anyone who might be interested - now is the best time to call elected officials on this.

Public transit in Illinois has been chronically underfunded for decades. The cost of providing transit has risen sharply in the last 20 years, but the governor and General Assembly have consistently refused to provide the needed funds. As a result, the RTA (composed of Illinois's transit agencies, the CTA (El and buses), Metra, and Pace) has been forced to mortgage its future by dipping into maintenance funds to pay operating costs.

The predictable result has been decaying infrastructure and aging equipment, leading to declining levels of service and a looming crisis for the transit system. Without emergency funding, the RTA will implement fare increases and service cuts this year. Without a major increase in longterm financing, funding crises will continue to erupt every year.

Public transit *should* be the future of urban transportation. Cars foul the air and kill or injure thousands of people every year. They waste huge amounts of public space with parking lots, gas stations, and highways. Worst of all, they are one of the main causes of global warming, which will have devastating consequences if we don't address it soon.

The best way to solve the transit crisis is to raise the tax on gasoline. The low price of gas does not reflect the immense social and environmental damage caused by driving. Raising the gas tax and spending the money on transit would fund the creation of a world-class public transit system, and it would give people the incentive to use it. This solution has already drawn support from groups like Chicago Metropolis 2020, a coalition of businesses.

However, transit funding faces the continuing indifference of Governor Blagojevich and the General Assembly. A wide range of groups has recently begun a pressure campaign to save transit in Illinois. Now is the time to add your voice:

call Blagojevich at 217-782-0244 or 312-814-2121, and leave a comment at http://www.illinois.gov/gov/contactthegovernor.cfm

call your state legislators - find them at http://www.civicfootprint.org

and remember to voice your support for an increase in the gas tax.

More information:

Opponents of transit have often claimed that the RTA does not need more money, it just needs to be more efficient. An independent audit by the Illinois auditor general ought to put these claims to rest. The report not only emphasizes the severe and longstanding underfunding of public transit, it finds that in comparison with other American transit agencies the RTA scores average or better in measures of efficiency. It scores lower than average in service effectiveness - mainly because its equipment is much older than that of its peer agencies. (http://www.auditor.illinois.gov/Audit-Reports/Performance-Special-Multi/Performance-Audits/07-Mass-Transit-NE-IL-Perf-Exec-Summary.pdf pp. 14-21)

Other critics have questioned the priorities of the CTA and the Daley administration, which have fast-tracked expansion projects like the Circle Line and airport express that are useful to already well-served professionals, while ignoring expansion proposals for underserved communities, like the Mid-City Transitway and extensions of the Red, Orange, and Yellow lines. These complaints are well-founded - see http://razetheladder.blogspot.com/2007/02/paving-over-mid-city-transitway.html for details. However, adequate funds for existing services must be maintained even as we pressure the Daley administration to expand the system in the fairest and most effective way.

More information on the transit crisis and ways to get involved:
http://transitfuture.cnt.org
http://movingbeyondcongestion.com

Gentrification makes everyone (who matters) happy!

2007-05-07T23:22:00.000-05:00

Here's the latest article in the genre of "bad neighborhood is now safe for you [white professional] to live in!", only it's for an entire city: Not Hot Just Yet, but Newark Is Starting to Percolate.

Surely newspapers don't need reporters to write these articles from scratch every time. They should just have a template with blanks for the names of hot new restaurants, gallery owners, and loft residents. No need, of course, to leave blanks for the names of the working class and poor people who actually live in these places. Live there, that is, until the laws of economic efficiency cleanse them to make way for assholes who say things like this: "Sometimes I feel like I’m in a foreign country. Let’s just say we’re pioneers on our block."

The unconscious racism and classism of the country's comfortable classes is never better on display than in articles like this, which write the entire pre-gentrification population out of existence (except metonymically in sentences like this: "I think people finally realize Newark is more than just about crime and drugs.") "Power concedes nothing without a demand" - not even recognition of the lives it shoves aside.

Be careful what you hope for

2007-05-05T18:14:00.000-05:00

Here is my comprehensive critique of the Obama campaign, along with an argument for strategically supporting Edwards. Thanks to the fine people at The Protest for publishing it and keeping the magazine going strong.

Be careful what you hope for
Obama, progressives and the ‘08 elections

Here's an important question progressives need to ask themselves: Why are so many of us so excited about Barack Obama? Is Obama progressive? Is he offering progressive policies? Is there a better candidate for us? And most importantly — how should progressives use elections to advance our agenda?

The outpouring of support for Obama among liberals is not surprising. Unlike the other leading presidential contenders, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, Obama opposed the war in Iraq from the start. He has a commendable background in community organizing on Chicago's South Side. Should he win the presidency, he would break the racial barrier of the highest office in the country.

I must admit that during Obama's run for the Senate, I was optimistic about him, too. But everything I've learned about him since then has made me deeply skeptical. His record in the Senate, his book The Audacity of Hope, his political connections and the kind of campaign he has chosen to run have all called Obama's progressive credentials into question.

Many people are drawn to Obama's message of hope, his promise of a “new politics.” But what does that mean? Is the problem with this country, as Obama says, really a “failure of leadership, the smallness of our politics”? Or is it the radically unequal distribution of wealth and power? And the powerful networks of privilege that defy any attempts to change the status quo?

Obama should know the answer. He is deeply entrenched in these networks himself, as a glance at Chicago politics makes clear. From the start, Obama has relied heavily on patrons in the high-powered world of Chicago finance and industry. According to a New York Times investigation, some of the richest men in the country, like James S. Crown and John W. Rogers Jr., have found nothing about Obama's politics that would threaten their wealth and profits.(1) Just as damning, Obama has tied himself closely to Mayor Daley's Chicago machine: the corrupt, pro-business administration that has devoted its nearly 20 years in office to improving the lives of the city's yuppies while ignoring the thousands of destitute (or forcing them out of their homes), tolerating police brutality and torture, and allowing public transit to crumble. Most recently, Obama endorsed Dorothy Tillman, the corrupt third ward alderman who had voted against a living wage for workers at big box retailers. Voters in the ward disagreed with Obama and booted her out of office.

But let's say that Obama, once in office, finds a way to transcend the sordid political world that has brought him this far. Let's say an Obama presidency ushers in his vaguely defined “new politics.” Would it produce policies we actually want? After all, Ronald Reagan came to power based on a sunny optimism, and he inaugurated a “new politics.” Yet this new politics was used to restore U.S. militarism, aid regressive forces around the world, and rapidly accelerate the dismantling of the U.S. social safety net. Bill Clinton campaigned on a message of hope, but he failed to pass universal health care through a Democratic Congress, he maintained the sanctions against Iraq, which killed around one million people, and he did away with the last remaining welfare guarantees. Before we know whether to support Obama's “new politics,” we need to know which policies this new politics would serve.

Who is the most progressive candidate?
If we decide to participate in the Democratic primaries, the first choice we have to make is whether to back one of the three viable candidates (Obama, Edwards, Clinton) or one of the candidates who has already been eliminated from the competition by lack of money and media disinterest. While Dennis Kucinich, in particular, supports far better policies than any of the top three, investing our time and resources in a lost cause may not be the best choice, especially if one of the three viable candidates has many solidly progressive policies. Hillary Clinton can be dismissed immediately. Not only is she too conservative to consider seriously, she also has so little respect for the voters that her website has no issues section. The choice, then, is between Obama and Edwards. Edwards has already issued a series of detailed and quite progressive policies. He is by no means a perfect candidate, but nominating him would represent a dramatic change from the last several decades of relentlessly centrist Democratic nominees. What about Obama?

Obama has been notoriously vague about how he would fix all the urgent problems he points out in his speeches. However, based on the discussion in his book and the policies he has supported in the Senate, we can now draw some tentative conclusions. Progressives should pay close attention here, because if Obama ever inhabits the White House, we will have to fight hard against his very centrist agenda.

Foreign policy
Many Obama supporters think that his opposition to the Iraq war from the start sets him apart. But on what grounds did Obama oppose the war? That it's immoral to invade another country? That it's wrong for the United States to dominate other parts of the world? Not at all. In his book, Obama speaks admiringly of those men who started the Cold War and unleashed all its horrors, saying that they understood the need “to maintain American military dominance and be prepared to use force in defense of its interests across the globe.”(2) Obama fully believes the United States has the right to control other countries, and he has made clear that violence is an option when countries like Iran or North Korea defy U.S. commands. So we should hardly be surprised that although Obama calls for the withdrawal of U.S. “combat” soldiers from Iraq, he says he would keep U.S. troops in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.(3)

The next president will not only have to clean up Bush's Iraq mess, he or she will also have to decide how to manage the rise of China and the possible revival of Russian power. Again, Obama would act to protect U.S. supremacy: “So long as Russia and China retain their own large military forces and haven't fully rid themselves of the instinct to throw their weight around — and so long as a handful of rogue states are willing to attack other sovereign nations ... there will be times when we must again play the role of the world's reluctant sheriff. This will not change — nor should it.”(4)

In a brazen display of hypocrisy, Obama condemns Russia and China for behavior that — in obvious contrast to the United States — neither one has displayed for 20 years.(5) And he is completely oblivious to the fact that the country most guilty of attacking other sovereign nations in the last 15 years has been the United States — while none of the so-called “rogue states” have done so. Obama is calling for a United States that acts less like a reluctant sheriff and more like the Chicago cop who was recently videotaped beating up a bartender because she refused to continue serving him alcohol.

Obama has not proposed cuts in our enormous military budget, which is as big as the military spending of the rest of world combined. In fact, in his most recent speech he actually proposed adding another 92,000 soldiers.(6) He has not called for closing U.S. bases in Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy, the Middle East and elsewhere. He has not promised an end to the United States’ continuing attacks on progressive forces in Latin America. He has not called for global nuclear disarmament.

Obama certainly opposes the neoconservative approach to maintaining U.S. power, but his disagreement is one of strategy rather than principle. He thinks that making shows of consultation with other countries and bribing them are more effective tools for keeping the United States on top than unilateral bullying. But, like Bill Clinton, he has no scruples against sending arms to brutal militaries or even going to war should gentler approaches fail.

Unfortunately, all the viable presidential candidates have almost indistinguishable foreign policies. If we want to pick one over the others — and given the brutality promised by their foreign policies, that's an open question — we'll have to look at the key domestic policy issues: health care, energy and the economy.

Health care
Obama is sensitive to the health care crisis in this country, and he promises universal coverage by the end of his first term. However, he has steadfastly refused to reveal any details. Plenty of time remains for him to come up with a good plan, but if and when he does make a proposal we must hold it to the standard already established by John Edwards.

The Edwards plan would extend universal coverage by requiring all businesses to either provide health insurance or pay into a fund to cover the uninsured. Other costs would be paid by eliminating Bush's tax cuts on those making more than $200,000 a year. (Obama also supports ending some of the deeply regressive Bush tax cuts, but only for those making more than $250,000 a year.) Edwards would impose powerful regulations on private insurers so they can no longer cherry-pick healthy individuals or deny coverage to the ill. Most importantly, it would set up a government insurance plan similar to Medicare that would compete with private insurers.

Government-run plans are more efficient because they eliminate the wasteful overhead of private insurers, which spend huge sums on advertising, executives' pay packages and reduplication of complex bureaucracies. (The evidence isn't really up for debate — every other rich country has universal public health care while spending less per person, covering everyone and maintaining better health statistics than the United States.) So if private insurers are forced to compete against a public insurance plan, they will gradually be forced out of business and we'll finally have an efficient, universal public health system — what's known as single-payer health insurance.

Any health plan that does not chart a course to such a system is a dead end. The efficiencies of a public system and the bargaining power of a single huge insurance provider are the only way to bring health care costs under control. Other plans, like Bill Clinton's failed 1994 proposal, funnel public funds to private insurers in exchange for covering those who are currently excluded from the health system. But throwing money at a broken system won't fix it. If such a plan were implemented, it would allow costs to continue rising and opposition to universal coverage would quickly grow. Soon the system would be dismantled. Moving to single-payer is the only way to get a just and politically sustainable health system. Will Obama support a plan that could get us to single-payer? We don't know yet — but it would be hard to improve on the Edwards plan.

Global warming
I was surprised and deeply disappointed that Obama said almost nothing about global warming in his book. He acknowledged that energy policy is hugely important, but framed his arguments in terms of national security rather than the future of life on this planet. He supports a few unambitious policies to attain “energy independence,” like increased fuel efficiency standards. But, he also embraces domestic energy sources like corn-based ethanol and “clean” coal technology, which actually harm the environment. Incidentally, they also channel government funds to Obama campaign contributors Archer Daniels Midland and downstate Illinois coal interests.

In the Senate, Obama is supporting the most conservative proposal for a cap-and-trade system to restrict carbon emissions. The McCain-Lieberman bill has drawn considerable support from business, which is looking for the predictability of a national greenhouse gas policy but seeking to avoid major cuts in their emissions. Beyond this, Obama has said little on how he would fight global warming.

Again, Edwards makes a strong contrast. He has announced a detailed plan to fight warming, and his energy proposals are considerably more progressive than Obama's positions. Like Obama, Edwards backs an end to oil company subsidies and increased funding for the development of green technology. But in contrast to Obama, he supports the best Senate proposal for a cap-and-trade system on carbon emissions, the Sanders-Boxer bill. And unlike Obama, he has publicly committed to the ambitious — but absolutely necessary — goal of reducing our carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050.

The third major part of Edwards's plan is a new international emissions-reduction treaty to include developing nations. Edwards understands that the rapidly increasing emissions of countries like China and India are a grave concern, and his proposal to share clean technology with poor countries in exchange for emissions cuts is a good one. The only question is whether Edwards is willing to devote the resources in environmental aid that would be needed to make his new treaty a success.

Edwards's proposals do not go far enough. In particular, he has not faced the need to dramatically restrict the nation's car culture through increased taxes on gasoline and investment in public transit. Yet Edwards is, at least, on the right track. Obama's failure to recognize the urgency of the climate crisis is a major strike against him.

Poverty
A similar comparison emerges when we turn to the economy. As Hurricane Katrina showed, the most urgent economic issues revolve around poverty. In an unusual move for a mainstream candidate, Edwards has invested considerable energy in calling for an end to poverty in a generation. His plan to accomplish this — which includes a variety of policies from strengthening labor laws to increasing housing vouchers to creating a million temporary jobs for those out of work — strike me as a collection of worthwhile initiatives that are nevertheless utterly inadequate to the task. Moreover, Edwards stays far away from the central causes of poverty — institutional racism and capitalism. Even so, nominating Edwards would thrust the poverty agenda into the national debate. Where is Obama on this? He has not made poverty a central part of his campaign and betrays no intention of doing so. Yet again, Obama's rhetoric fails to translate into anything of substance.

On some other issues, like immigration, drug prohibition, and gay marriage, both Edwards and Obama disappoint. But I have not found a single issue where Obama’s position is better than that of Edwards. The question for progressives should not be whether to support Edwards or Obama — Edwards is the clear choice. The question is whether we should be involved in electoral politics at all.

In many ways the U.S. electoral system is rigged against the left. No candidate can become viable without attracting huge sums of money from the rich people and corporations that maintain the status quo. The media relentlessly focus on candidates' public images, their campaign strategies, and who leads the polls. They ignore candidates with unorthodox policies, making a serious discussion of the issues nearly impossible. The first-past-the-post voting system marginalizes those third parties that could force progressive issues onto the agenda by turning them into "spoilers." And the left remains too unorganized to marshal the popular support that evangelical churches, for example, can leverage.

The priority for progressives, then, should not be seeking the illusory salvation of electing a heroic political leader. We must concentrate instead on developing the economic and organizational power that would give us a real chance in elections. This should be our goal not just to win elections, but to form the foundation of a truly participatory and egalitarian society. The only way to do this is by creating democratic businesses and organizing communities rather than throwing all our energies into politicians who will just disappoint us in office.

Even so, sometimes electoral work can serve these goals instead of distracting us from them. That may be particularly true today, when John Edwards is running the most progressive, viable presidential campaign in most of our lifetimes. We have the chance to swing the Democratic Party to the left, put hugely important issues back on the national agenda for the first time in 35 years, and strengthen the left organizationally in the process. But we'll miss that chance if we continue to blindly follow Barack Obama.

References

1. Christopher Drew and Mike McIntire, “Obama Built Donor Network from Roots Up,” The New York Times, April 3, 2007.

2. The Audacity of Hope, p. 284.

3. Obama has given two speeches on foreign policy. In both he called for retaining troops in Iraq and throughout the region: Speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Chicago, March 2, 2007; Remarks to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, April 23, 2007.

4. The Audacity of Hope, p. 306.

5. Internally, of course, both the Russian and Chinese governments have been actively repressive, but they are not unique in this regard, and Obama fails to mention U.S. clients like Turkey or Colombia that have been similarly repressive. Outside the military realm, Russia has to a certain extent “thrown its weight around,” especially in the former Soviet republics. Yet the United States routinely does the same thing across the globe — including in the former Soviet republics — and the nature of the regimes it backs makes clear that freedom and democracy are only incidental (or rhetorical) concerns. As for China, with the sole exception of Taiwan (which both China and the United States consider a part of China), it has thus far been a model of restraint in the international competition for power.

6. Remarks to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

The political urgency of farm subsidies

2007-04-22T21:23:00.000-05:00

Michael Pollan has a good article explaining all the damage done by America's system of agricultural subsidies. Free markets on their own lead to bad outcomes in food production, but the federal subsidies, rather than seeking to correct the biases of markets, make them far worse. These are extremely important issues, and Pollan seems to be the only one really writing about them.

Edwards on global warming

2007-04-21T17:27:00.000-05:00

John Edwards has come out with an energy plan, once again getting the jump on Clinton and Obama in the policy arena. (Clinton and Obama have kept their lead in media coverage, mainly because they're ahead in the media coverage, altho Edwards got a boost because his wife has cancer. As the Los Angeles Times put it, Edwards's appearance in San Francisco to call for a moratorium on coal-fired power plants that are not equipped with carbon capture technology saw "a press turnout that would have been unthinkable if all he had to talk about were carbon dioxide emissions." Because we're only talking about the future of all life on the planet here. What could that amount to in comparison with a real human interest story?)

As a senator, Edwards was pretty good on the environment. He started off not so good, but proved himself fairly responsive to the environmental lobby. The rhetoric I've heard from him this year has also been a lot better than Obama and Clinton, who offer magical solutions to global warming thru research spending and ethanol. Edwards, too, supports the ethanol boondoggle, but he's also talking about real sacrifices that have to be made.

Let's take his energy plan piece by piece (the full proposal has far more details than I will cover here):

Capping greenhouse gas pollution starting in 2010 with a cap-and-trade system, and reducing it by 15 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050, as the latest science says is needed to avoid the worst impacts of global warming.

This is consistent with the best plan under consideration in the Senate, the Sanders-Boxer bill. In contrast, Obama has lent his name to the McCain-Lieberman alternative, which would institute a less stringent cap-and-trade system, thus meeting the demands of business for the predictability of a national emissions policy but with the smallest possible emissions reductions. (This article does a good job explaining the competing bills.) I don't know Clinton's position on global warming - she doesn't even bother with an issues section on her website.

Leading the world to a new climate treaty that commits other countries—including developing nations—to reduce their pollution. Edwards will insist that developing countries join us in this effort, offering to share new clean energy technology and, if necessary, using trade agreements to require binding greenhouse reductions.

Whether this is a good idea would depend entirely on how it was implemented. Edwards acknowledges that America's outsize emissions must be addressed before calling on poorer countries to reduce their own. And he's right that poor countries, especially China and India, must be included in global emissions reductions. Edwards also proposes the right way to do it: use American aid to make cleaner industrialization possible. The question is whether Edwards is willing to offer enough aid to get the poor countries on board.

This is not just important for global warming, it's also a central development issue. The rich countries, whose wealth has in large part been won thru the exploitation and repression of the poor countries, have a responsibility to help those countries industrialize and decrease global inequality. To make that process environmentally sustainable, the rich countries will not only have to give large amounts of clean technology aid to the poor countries, they will also have to substantially reduce their own consumption. Is Edwards willing to do this? His American supremacist foreign policy makes me skeptical. But in comparison to Clinton and Obama, at least he's more willing to reign in American consumption.

Creating a New Energy Economy Fund by auctioning off $10 billion in greenhouse pollution permits and repealing subsidies for big oil companies. The fund will support U.S. research and development in energy technology, help entrepreneurs start new businesses, invest in new carbon-capture and efficient automobile technology and help Americans conserve energy.

Proposals to fund research are universal among the Democratic candidates. The difference in Edwards's proposal is his plan to auction off pollution permits. If and when Clinton and Obama come out with concrete plans, carefully check to see how they will distribute the permits. If the permits are handed out rather than sold, it amounts to a huge giveaway for the corporations who receive them. The Edwards plan would sell some of the permits but give away others. It's rather vague who would have to pay and who wouldn't. We'll have to wait for other candidates' plans to compare, but I don't expect them to be better.

If a Democrat is elected, it will also be important to watch how these research funds are distributed, lest they become corporate welfare slush funds. Both Edwards and Obama have already proposed giving the car companies huge handouts in exchange for making their vehicles less polluting. That is ridiculous. We already give the car companies huge subsidies by building roads, preserving cheap oil supplies, and cleaning up the pollution they create. The government should be doing nothing more to make cars cheap.

Meeting the demand for more electricity through efficiency for the next decade, instead of producing more electricity.

This section contains a number of unspectacular but solid policy reforms to make electricity generation more efficient, including decoupling electricity utilities' profits from the amount of electricity they sell and expanding programs to upgrade the efficiency of buildings and appliances.

Overall, the Edwards plan is ambitious and rests on largely good policy. There are some bad ideas tho: encouraging corn-based ethanol, subsidies to the car companies; and there are many proposals that look promising but could go bad if they're not implemented right.

The biggest hole in the plan has to do with cars. Edwards denies the need to substantially reduce our dependence on cars: "everyone should be able to drive the car, truck or SUV of their choice". In the short term, perhaps big increases in vehicle efficiency and a widespread switch to hybrids would reduce car emissions enough (altho even these changes seem unlikely as long as gas remains so cheap). But this solution only works as long as a large majority of the world's population is mired in poverty and consumes a small fraction of what most Americans do. Giving everyone in the world an equal opportunity to consume means those of us consuming the most (especially Americans but also Europeans, Japanese, South Koreans, and an increasing number of Chinese) will have to significantly cut back. We should start moving now toward cities based on public transit, biking, and walking. The federal government would have to play a big role in this transformation, since it funds most expansions in public transit and because it doles out billions and billions of dollars in highway funds that should be shifted to transit. So it's pretty disappointing to find that the Edwards plan doesn't mention pubic transit once.

Disappointing as it is, I expect far less from the Clinton and Obama plans, if they ever come out with any. Global warming is a hugely important issue, and Edwards is the only viable candidate who is facing it head-on.

Obama's imagemaker

2007-04-01T14:22:00.000-05:00

I meant to have a moratorium on anti-Obama posts, but this article was too good to pass up. It's about David Axelrod, Obama's imagemaker and one of his closest political advisers. Axelrod is the kind of guy who

loves man-on-the-street interviews, and while digging through the tape the week before, he found one he did with a young Hispanic guy. "He gives you a — a sense of hope," the young man says, squinting past the camera, swaying slightly. "Uh, at a time when, you know, things in this country are not going so well." It’s a good message for Obama, and a good messenger, but what Axelrod likes are the stutters, the verbal hiccups: "That kind of authenticity is how you cut through."

In other words, Axelrod is in the business of manufacturing authenticity. He is also a longtime Daley aide: as a former alderman puts it, "David Axelrod’s mostly been visible in Chicago in the last decade as Daley’s public relations strategist and the guy who goes on television to defend Daley from charges of corruption". There's nothing "new" or transcendant about the company that Obama keeps.

Axelrod has also been closely involved in many other high-profile Democratic campaigns, including John Edwards's heavy-on-rhetoric, light-on-policy 2004 presidential campaign and world-class asshole Rahm Emanuel's successful 2006 campaign to retake the House for Democrats. He has a "postideological approach, and his campaigns are rooted less in issues than in the particulars of his candidate’s life. For him, running campaigns hitched to personality rather than ideology is a way of reclaiming fleeting authenticity."

Progressives should cringe at this sort of thing. It's anti-democratic, because it elevates the image of the politician over what government actually does and what should be the focus of elections, which is making policy. And it cements the Democratic Party's longtime tendency to offer nothing but symbols, and ideologically empty symbols at that.

If we care about health care, foreign policy, global warming, or any other issue, we should only support those leaders who are willing to argue for progressive policies in public. Otherwise, when it comes time to pass the law (should Obama ever propose a progressive law), the power of entrenched interests will easily overcome the ethereal "new politics" offered by the image/politician. As Obama's campaign continues to move forward almost exclusively on his "optimism", it's increasingly clear that Obama and Axelrod are hoping to avoid such a divisive thing as concrete policies.

Last week the Tribune ran a piece on Obama's experience as a community organizer on the South Side. This is the only thing in Obama's all-important biography that would give me any hope in him as president. But it's hard to know if Obama decided to become an organizer because he really believed in it, or because he was positioning himself for a career in politics (in his days as an organizer, he was already telling people that he wanted to be mayor of Chicago). In a revealing story, we hear that during his 2004 Senate campaign,

Obama, microphone in hand, introduc[ed] himself to a small group of voters at a coffeehouse on Chicago’s North Side; when the candidate told them about his work in the early 1990s as a community organizer, there was a spontaneous, sustained applause. [Axelrod says,] "You know, we hadn’t thought that was an important part of his bio, but people really responded to the fact that Barack gave up corporate job offers to work in the community."

The fact that Obama sees so little significance in his only real grassroots work tells you something. So does the fact that he respects people so little that he runs his campaign as a naked attempt to manipulate voters with his biography. The sad thing is that this manipulation is working so well.

Obama and the Chicago machine

2007-03-26T15:55:00.000-05:00

For some time now Barack Obama has been getting close to Daley's political machine. His latest favor to the machine was to endorse Dorothy Tillman in the runoff election for the 3rd ward. The ward includes much of Bronzeville, the historic black district of Chicago, parts of which are gentrifying while other parts languish in economic depression.

Tillman started out as a civil rights organizer in the '60s and was elected alderman in 1985. Since then she has spoken out strongly for slavery reparations while integrating herself ever more tightly with the Daley machine and indulging in corruption. Most recently, hers was one of the key votes that sank the big box ordinance, a bill that would have forced large chain stores in Chicago to pay their workers a living wage. As a result, labor unions have worked hard to defeat her, and may do so - no thanks to Obama, who issued his endorsement as he left a labor rally.

This comes on the heels of Obama's endorsement of Daley in the mayoral election. Before that he backed Todd Stroger for president of the Cook County Board. Stroger succeeded his father in the position, and won the primary as the machine candidate against a reformer. He has thus far distinguished himself by cutting county health services for poor people.

Why has Obama tied himself so closely to the corrupt and conservative Daley establishment? The machine's election workers will help avoid the possibility of an embarassment in the Illinois primary. Keeping in Daley's good graces also provides access to all the big political donors in Chicago - mainly large corporations, developers, and financial interests. And since the city's progressive opposition is pathetically disorganized, Obama will not pay a political price for throwing his weight behind the machine.

The real question is why would Obama not support the machine? Unless, of course, he were serious about transcending the game of power, access, and privilege that is politics.

The presidential candidates' antiwar smokescreen

2007-03-21T16:19:00.000-05:00

For some reason, the Iraq war is emerging as a key issue in the Democratic presidential primaries. American policy in Iraq, the Middle East more generally, and the entire world should be one of the main issues up for debate. But it's weird when "debate" emerges around an issue that all three top candidates agree on. (The only candidate that I'm aware of who has a different position, Dennis Kucinich, has been excluded from contention by the media and lack of campaign funds.)

Obama apparently has the edge on Iraq, since unlike Edwards and Clinton he opposed the war from the start. Yet as this article shows, Obama's actual voting record in the Senate has been timid at best when it comes to ending American involvement.

More to the point, on what grounds is Obama's opposition to the war based? That it's immoral to invade another country? That it's wrong for the United States to dominate other parts of the world? Certainly not. As his speech to AIPAC demonstrated, he fully believes that the US has the right to control other countries, and he has made clear that violence is an option when countries like Iran defy US commands. Obama has not called for cuts in our enormous military budget, which is as big as the military spending of the rest of world combined. He has not called for closing US bases in Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy, the Middle East, and elsewhere. He has not promised an end to America's continuing interference against the revival of progressive forces in Latin America. He has not called for global nuclear disarmament.

Instead, Obama's statements indicate that his foreign policy would be similar to that of Bill Clinton. Clinton would not have invaded Iraq, it's true, but he had no problem maintaining sanctions against Iraq that killed a million people. He readily sent hundreds of millions of dollars in weaponry to countries like Turkey and Colombia engaged in vicious state terrorism. He had no trouble backing Suharto in Indonesia even as the government massacred people in East Timor. Obama stands squarely in this long tradition of liberal imperialism: an aggressive and militarist foreign policy with the same basic goals as that of the neoconservatives (perpetuating American military and economic supremacy), but in which multilateral approaches to maintain American power are tried before switching to unilateral ones should our shows of consultation and bribery fail.

Clinton and Edwards have the same foreign policy orientation, and have yet to give any indication that their presidential administrations would be any different from Obama's. As I've followed campaign news and read blogs, I've seen a disturbing idealization of the Clinton years on the part of progressives. It's time for us to reaquaint ourselves with the crimes of the Clinton administration and understand that all of the viable Democratic candidates would be just as criminal. Should a Democrat win the election, the left will have to sharpen its critical eye and move beyond slogans like "anyone but a Republican", or risk falling into the collective torpor of the Clinton years that allowed terrible atrocities to be committed in our name.

On alienating homophobic voters

2007-03-15T09:19:00.000-05:00

After the 2004 election, which Republicans won based on appeals to American nationalism , xenophobia, and anti-gay bigotry, I called on the left to launch a culture war against these hatreds. I predicted that Democrats would move to the right in a pathetic attempt to "neutralize the issue", giving them no electoral advantage but deepening America's culture of intolerance.

Fortunately for the Democrats, the deterioration of the Iraq war and the Hurricane Katrina debacle turned voters against the Republicans and there was no need to swing to the right on cultural issues. But Democrats have certainly not stood up against nationalism and homophobia either.

The latest evidence is the response to comments from General Peter Pace - operational commander of the mass murdering organization called the US military - who said that homosexuality, of all things, is immoral. When asked if they agreed that being gay is immoral, both Clinton and Obama refused to answer.

Clinton said:

"We are being deprived of thousands of patriotic men and women who want to serve their country who are bringing skills into the armed services that we desparately need, like translation skills. [That's a weird thing to say. Because they're gay they can't fight, but they have a facility for language? -Jake] And one can argue whether it was a good idea when it was first implemented, but we know [sic] have evidence as to the fact that we are in a time of war -- when we really need as many people as we can to recruit and retain in an all-volunteer army -- we are turning people away or discharging them not because of what they've done but because of who they are."

But is it immoral?

"Well I'm going to leave that to others to conclude," she said. "I'm very proud of the gays and lesbians I know who perform work that is essential to our country, who want to serve their country and I want make sure they can."

And Obama:

Newsday caught Obama as he was leaving the firefighters convention and asked him three times if he thought homosexuality is immoral.

Answer 1: "I think traditionally the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman has restricted his public comments to military matters. That's probably a good tradition to follow."

Answer 2: "I think the question here is whether somebody is willing to sacrifice for their country, should they be able to if they're doing all the things that should be done."

Answer 3: Signed autograph, posed for snapshot, jumped athletically into town car.

So not only did they refuse to simply say "no", they also promoted service to American imperialism in the process.

I wasn't really expecting any better from Edwards, who like Clinton and Obama opposes gay marriage, but here's what he had to say:

Asked by Wolf Blitzer on The Situation Room whether he agrees with Pace's comments, Edwards replied, "I don't share that view."

That's not as strong as I'd like. You would think a Democrat could by now come out and say, "Homosexuality is not immoral. And our country has no place for this kind of hatred." But, as with other issues, in the face of Clinton and Obama's political cowardice, Edwards looks pretty good.

Public transit not part of the lifestyle of public transit board

2007-03-09T11:22:00.000-06:00

I don't ride the CTA much, since my commute to school is only about a mile and I normally bike or walk. Even so, I'm on a pace to take around 150 trips on the CTA this year. A regular commuter, of course, would take around 500 trips a year plus any weekend trips.

Compare that with this:

[CTA] board member Henry Chandler Jr., who gets around in a wheelchair, rode on CTA buses and trains 129 times in 2006--more than all the other board members combined, according to the ridership summary, which was provided to the Tribune.

"I think it is helpful if board members have an experience with the system. But every individual is different, and sometimes lifestyle doesn't fit into it," said CTA chairwoman Carole Brown, who rode the CTA 53 times in 2006 using her agency photo ID badge.

Okay, if they want to live in the suburbs and foul our air by driving 3-4 hours in traffic every day, fine. But in that case, providing oversight on a key urban service that they don't bother to use should not be part of their lifestyle.

Hardly surprising tho. It's always corporate executives and lawyers and other rich people who staff "public interest" boards like this or any other "civic" organization - the Olympics bid, for example. In many ways urban elites are basically the same as they were 150 years ago - a small group of "community figures" who not only control all the businesses but generously contribute their free time to running the bodies that make the decisions about urban planning and development, disbursement of grants, running of universities, museums, &c. In other words, the operational leaders of pretty much all the public and private organizations that control our lives are the same people that sit on all the boards overseeing those organizations. Since these are the people running our cities, and since the people in Congress are all bought and paid for by these same people, it starts to look like a mass delusion that Americans talk about democracy in this country.

Obama: Make US domination of the Middle East more effective

2007-03-03T12:05:00.000-06:00

Obama made his pitch to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee yesterday with a speech here in Chicago. I encourage anyone who still has illusions about Obama's great progressive candidacy to read the full text. Taken as a whole, the speech is sickening. It's not so much that Obama states his strong support for American imperialism in the Middle East and Israel's continuing repression - we're probably desensitized to that sort of thing by now. It's that he lavishes long passages on humanizing Israelis in service to the dehumanization of Arabs. There is no evidence from the text that Israel has ever committed a single questionable act, while Arabs are seen to be constantly terrorizing poor Israel.

In the speech Obama also spells out clear policies on Iran, Iraq, and Israel. He calls Iran "one of the greatest threats to the United States, Israel and world peace" and criticizes Bush administration policy for making Iran stronger. Obama's approach would include

direct engagement with Iran similar to the meetings we conducted with the Soviets at the height of the Cold War, laying out in clear terms our principles and interests. Tough-minded diplomacy would include real leverage through stronger sanctions. It would mean more determined U.S diplomacy at the United Nations. It would mean harnessing the collective power of our friends in Europe who are Iran’s major trading partners. It would mean a cooperative strategy with Gulf States who supply Iran with much of the energy resources it needs. It would mean unifying those states to recognize the threat of Iran and increase pressure on Iran to suspend uranium enrichment. It would mean full implementation of U.S. sanctions laws. And over the long term, it would mean a focused approach from us to finally end the tyranny of oil, and develop our own alternative sources of energy to drive the price of oil down.

In other words, Obama would expend considerable effort to isolate Iran and destroy its economy while conducting discussions with its government. Obama's policy would only strengthen the Irani desire for nuclear weapons to protect itself. And it's probably untenable anyway. US sanctions are already extremely strong, so the only change is that Obama would strong-arm European and Middle Eastern countries to further isolate Iran - something the Bush administration has already tried unsuccessfully. But that aside, what's revealing is that Obama supports collective punishment of the Irani people as a means of reducing their leadership - including their elected president - to subservience.

On Iraq, Obama calls for troop withdrawal to be completed by 2008 May. But, he also has this to say:

My plan also allows for a limited number of U.S. troops to remain and prevent Iraq from becoming a haven for international terrorism and reduce the risk of all-out chaos. In addition, we will redeploy our troops to other locations in the region, reassuring our allies that we will stay engaged in the Middle East.

This is a nice way of saying that altho the project of establishing Iraq as a military base from which the US could project military power throughout the region has failed, Obama has no intention of giving up the larger objective. American domination of the Middle East is the reason terrorists target the US, but just like every Republican and Democratic president since FDR, for Obama controlling the region's oil is the most important thing.

As for Israel, Obama argues that America must never apply any sort of pressure on that country - certainly not by withdrawing the massive subsidies the US provides, but not even thru toothless diplomatic pressure. "No Israeli Prime Minister should ever feel dragged to or blocked from the negotiating table by the United States", he says, and "we must preserve our total commitment to our unique defense relationship with Israel by fully funding military assistance". He also blames Lebanon for Israel's attack against it, and refuses to work with the "extremists" who Palestinians elected to represent them.

Now, Clinton and Edwards (and McCain and Giuliani) are just as bad as Obama on all these issues. But people whose critical faculties have for unknown reasons been overwhelmed by Obama's empty rhetoric about hope should pay more attention to speeches like these, in which he reveals his concrete policies. We have to wait and see if Obama comes up with anything good on domestic policy, but until that time I see no reason to support him over Edwards.

A small victory for the "human nature is good" camp

2007-03-03T01:33:00.000-06:00

A new poll shows strong support for universal health care. 65 percent of respondents rate extending insurance to those who don't have it a bigger priority than keeping health costs down for those who are already insured. 48 percent support universal health care even if their own costs increased as much as $500/year.

Republicans in the survey acquit themselves better than expected, as 30 percent support a government guarantee of health care even if it raises their own costs. On the other hand the 52 percent of Republicans along with 13 percent of Democrats and 22 percent of independents who oppose universal health care reveal themselves as the true assholes of the country. You can make a superficially plausible case that poor people are to blame for being poor - it's a lot harder to make that argument about sickness and disease. Here the pretense of personal responsibility is dropped, and we see that most Republicans are just selfish bastards.

For many years polls have consistently shown strong popular support for universal health care. Every time one of these polls comes out the media seem surprised - an indication of the deep contempt the media hold for democratic priorities when popular desires don't mesh with those of the business and political elites. In every article except those on polls like this, universal health care is assumed to be utopian. It's truly remarkable that despite being told at every opportunity that universal health care is impossible, large majorities of Americans continue to support it.

What will the Democrats do with these popular demands? Mike Davis, discussing the state of the party following the midterm elections, is probably right that as long as popular forces remain unorganized and apathetic, the Democrats will continue to pursue corporate money at the expense of any real reforms. But as I've written, John Edwards's health care plan is actually quite good. If Clinton and Obama match him (unlikely) or if they're denied the nomination because they can't find the political courage to support universal health care, we might make real progress.

letter to the editor, re: expanding public transit

2007-03-01T08:13:00.001-06:00

Hey look at that, the Tribune printed a letter I wrote. It's inferior to the op-ed, but hits the same points. Unfortunately they changed my correct spelling of the word El to the Tribune's style "L". Three of the seven letters today criticize what's going on with the CTA.

Moving the public

You argue that the CTA should take care of its basic maintenance needs before building new services ("Crosstown back from the dead," Editorial, Feb. 26). But often federal funds are available that can only be used on new construction. Adequately funding existing public transit should be the first priority, but it shouldn't distract us from the ambitious expansion plans that might someday allow the metro region to escape its destructive addiction to cars. In fact, long-term planning is going on right now—but for the wrong things. Mayor Richard M. Daley and the CTA have fast-tracked the Circle Line and Block 37 airport express. These two projects might please Daley's well-heeled campaign contributors, but they do little for the huge sections of the city underserved by public transit.

Let's spend that money instead building the Mid-City Transitway "L" line on the old Crosstown Expressway route and extensions of the Dan Ryan Red Line, the Orange Line and the Yellow Line that have been discussed for years.

[me]
Chicago