A Connecticut Yankee in California, Week One: research on home ownership, and a few Asian culinary adventures

Thanks to an NEH grant, I just finished up 5 days of research at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library (and birthplace) in Yorba Linda, Orange County, California.  

I stayed in Long Beach, which a) enabled me to go to Los Angeles to eat and explore a bit after work; and b) enabled me to experience Greater L.A. traffic (yippee).  

I had an off-day on Sunday (I arrived the night before), so I started off by going to a great independent bookstore in downtown LA, The Last Bookstore.  Its in what appears to be an old bank building, and in many ways resembles a smaller version of The Strand in NYC.  My goal was to get a copy of Henry Miller's novel Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, since I'm heading up the coast starting Friday.  Or, failing that, Kerouac's Big Sur.  Neither was available, so I grabbed the new Leonard Cohen biography instead.

A man can only spend so much time reading about policy and land-use law, you know?

After the bookstore, I took the advice of friends and drove up to the Griffith Observatory, which provides an amazing view of the city and the Hollywood hills.

I finished the evening up by trying something new:  yakitori!  I've heard Bourdain rave about it for years, so why not?

And boy was he right.  One of the best meals I've ever had, honestly.  I believe the literal meaning of the word is 'grilled,' but that doesn't quite convey it.  The restaurant, Shin Sen Gumi Yakitori, was small and spartan.  I sat at the counter, and watched the chef grill a very wide variety of different meats on a little brazier right in front of me.

They don't do much with the meat -- just a very simple soy/teriyaki base, as far as I could tell.  But that's part of what was so wonderful about it:  just good quality meat (chicken, pork belly, chicken heart/liver, etc), cooked simply.  In some ways its like Brazilian rodizio, just a bit less gluttonous.

So, what would Nixon do (other than bomb)?
 
Why did I go to the Nixon Library?  

As many of you know, I'm writing a book, Castles Made of Sand?  Home Ownership in the Modern U.S.   The book has two objects (warning, dear reader -- scholar-speak forthcoming.  Viewer discretion advised):  

• to examine the history of home ownership since 1928, as an idea, a policy goal, and a reality politically and economically
• to explore whether home ownership has it presently exists in the United States is sustainable -- ecologically, economically, socially, and morally.  While home ownership is often thought of as the symbol of the 'American Dream,' it has also been (and still is) a great source of racial and economic inequality, particularly because of its close connection to educational opportunity.

Home ownership is a critical part of daily life for most Americans, and an aspiration for virtually all of them.  It is so ubiquitous, so embedded in our family histories, our economy and our landscape, that it is very difficult for us to see it as an historical artifact – as something created by (and in turn shaping) the choices of individuals and institutions.  Basically, I'm looking to peak behind the curtain, and explore whether there isn't another path.  

No post-war social phenomenon has been as critical for social mobility, economic growth, the use of metropolitan space, and political re-alignment as homeownership.  Nearly ¼ of the economy is tied up in residential investment, housing consumption and housing-related expenditures.  Most of the wealth possessed by American families (such as it is) is in the form of housing equity.  Because of how homeownership is geographically structured – often taking the form of suburban sprawl, in metropolitan areas that are segregated by both race and class – it is crucially linked to issues of ecological sustainability and inequality.   

One achieves full access to America’s limited range of social rights if one obtains two things: consistent full-time employment, and homeownership. The opportunity to obtain them is powerfully shaped by race and class, but also by where you live. Those with access to these things (and the places where they are found) are able to build wealth across generations, and to make residential choices that enhance educational opportunities for their children. Those without access find themselves both literally and figuratively left behind. 

And of course, particularly in recent decades, homeownership has increasingly lashed the American way of life (and family budgets) to global finance.  This has made us more insecure individually and collectively, it has made us more unequal than ever before, and it has made financial capital so politically powerful that none of us can miss the stench emanating from the Augean stables in Washington.  

So why Nixon? 

My hypothesis is that the 1966-1975 period was a critical stage in the development of our present social geography, and the political economy of home ownership, but that it also had embedded within it a ‘path not taken.’   It remains the only period in our history (other than 1865-1877, perhaps) when the nation actually attempted to understand and unwind the consequences of our racist history.  

Pushed by the civil rights movement, high level figures in both the Lyndon Johnson and Nixon administrations acknowledged the need for a greater federal role in expanding homeownership to low and moderate income citizens, and even contemplated using the lever of the federal purse to desegregate the expanding suburbs along racial and class lines.  These ideas received substantial support among scholars and activists, and by the early 1970s seemed to be making headway in the federal courts.   

As I've discovered in my research at the Johnson Library as well as in my work in Yorba Linda this week, there was a palpable sense of dramatic change in the air during Nixon's first term.  What did I look at this week, at the Nixon Library?  Mostly, I looked at the efforts of his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, George Romney (yes, that Romney) to use federal resources to expand home ownership for working-class people in a desegregated metropolitan America.  For more on this, see my article of last year in The American Prospect.  While this sense of impending change was welcomed by some, it was feared by the suburban white majority, to which both political parties increasingly appealed for votes.

For a variety of reasons this 'open door' slammed shut in the mid-70s, and it has never re-opened.  Essentially, for the first and only time in US history, the federal government appeared to have the resources, the leverage, and the legal, scholarly and political support to begin to unwind the patterns of racial and class segregation in housing (and, by extension, public education).  But it didn’t happen.  By 1975, both the courts and the federal government had fully retreated from all efforts to challenge metropolitan segregation, with dire consequences.  As home ownership was gradually expanded to include growing numbers of black, Hispanic and poor Americans in the last three decades (particularly in the 1990s and 2000s), it was largely facilitated by financial deregulation (which gave them all of the downsides of ownership, and none of the benefits), and built on top of metropolitan segregation. 

It is my sense that many of our present dilemmas are rooted in the opportunities lost during this period.  In other words, white privilege has brought the temple down upon itself.  The wages of whiteness, as DuBois once called them, remain of great consequence -- but the pursuit and protection of those wages has been bankrupting, economically and morally.  

***********************************************

The Nixon Library itself is a nice place to work, though as my historian readers know, one archive looks pretty much like every other one.  It is plopped down on a very well-policed highway in Orange County, on a plot of land that could just as easily contain a strip mall as a Presidential Library.  

The grounds are quite beautiful:
 

Yorba Linda greeted me on Monday morning with a phalanx of state troopers aiming radar guns at me, like a battery of RPG launchers.  Seemed appropriate, though I am sadly too late to find myself on Nixon's enemies list. 

I have always found Nixon to be a sad figure; surrounded this week by photographs and paintings of the man, there is an almost palpable melancholy that seems to weigh on him.

 

At least that's what I saw.  And the whole thing was quite discomforting, because of my own reaction:  rather than feeling empathy, I experienced revulsion.  I realize this visceral reaction on my part is probably political and ideological -- but it caused me to spend as little down time as possible at the Library.  When I wasn't researching, I sat outside in the sun.

My closest encounter with Nixon was in the bathroom.  

I was standing at the urinal on Tuesday morning, when I absentmindedly glanced to my immediate right...and saw a Nixon impersonator staring right back at me.  I thankfully had the presence of mind to keep myself aimed in the right direction, though a liberal like myself doesn't get many opportunities to literally piss on Richard Nixon.  He winked at me (a bit skeezy, that), and headed out.  Apparently Tuesday August 13th was 'meet the president' day for children visiting the Museum.  One hopes their response to him was a bit more continent than mine.  

The Getty Museum, where Mark meets Clio (again):

On my last day in the Los Angeles area (today), I headed up to Malibu to visit the Getty Villa Museum.  I once visited this gorgeous place back in 1984, when I was 17, but aside from the reflecting pool and the breathtaking view, I have little memory of it.

Here's a brief video history of the Getty, if you're interested:




It has changed quite a bit in the intervening decade (as have I).  The Getty is now exclusively dedicated to statuary and artifacts from the ancient world, where once it contained a variety of European paintings and furniture.  But the beauty of the place remains, as you can see in this photograph of the Outer Peristyle:

 Getty himself was an oil baron, and one of the world's first billionaires.  He was notoriously cheap -- he once refused to pay ransom when his son was kidnapped -- and learned Arabic so as to more effectively bilk the people of Saudi Arabia out of their natural resource inheritance.  But Getty was also a scholar and admirer of the art of the ancient world, and sought to place his personal collection in a replica of the Villa dei Papiri (House of Papyrus scrolls, basically), which was destroyed by an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D.  The idea was for those who saw his collection to get a sense of how such things might have been placed in an actual Roman villa two millenia ago.

I decided to go here today, seeking a sublime zen-like moment, preferably in the sun.  And I found it.

Aside from the placidity of the Peristyle, I think my favorite space was the one with the statutes of the Greek Muses -- which included Clio, the Muse of History:

 


































Shana arrives tonight, and we drive up the coast toward the Bay Area tomorrow, bringing the work portion of this trip to an end.

next up:  wine!!!!!!

On voting rights and affirmative action, the Court leads us down a color-blind alley

A few brief thoughts on this week's Voting Rights and affirmative action rulings, as a down-payment on a much longer piece on the myth of 'color-blindness' which underpins them.

I don't know what they're going to say today on gay marriage, but the combination of the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action rulings certainly has me disappointed.  Without getting too deep into the intricacies of each, the majority opinion in each case seems to be based on two inter-related fallacies: 

1.  That race as a factor in determining life chances is behind us -- we now live in a color blind America, and our laws (and their enforcement) should therefore ignore the existence of race

2.  That laws and enforcement mechanisms that do not accept #1 do greater harm to either white people or states' rights than they do justice to people of color.

Neither of these things is even remotely true. 

The first one is the key, and it is the one that is most obviously false.  Any reasonable person would agree that one could think about #2 on a case by case basis, as long as you do NOT accept #1.  If you do accept #1 (as the majority in the Supreme Court has for some time, and as many white Americans do), then virtually every law or practice designed to further or protect civil rights will fail the test of #2. 

On this basis the court has essentially eviscerated both the Voting Rights Act and the use of race in college admissions in the past few days, all constitutional circumlocutions aside. 

People who think the court saved affirmative action the other day are mistaken. 

In the past decade the Court has narrowed, step by step, the Constitutionally permissible grounds under which race can be taken into account in pursuit of a state (public) interest.  Decades of rulings did this with K-12 school segregation, too, starting with 1974 Milliken v. Bradley and culminating in the Louisville/Seattle case of a few years ago.  As a consequence, while the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling says that separate is inherently unequal, there no longer exists any Constitutionally acceptable mechanism for actually addressing or fixing it, other than in states which have the appropriate language in their own constitutions.  The Court hasn't overturned Brown -- that would be too controversial.  But they've rendered it toothless, much like the southern Jim Crow states did with the 14th and 15th amendments from the 1870s until the mid-1960s.  The Court just did the same thing with the Voting Rights Act -- and thus, in a sense, with the 15th amendment.  In the next year or two, when the right case reaches them, they will do the same with affirmative action in college admissions.

There is a reckoning coming in the next decade or two with all of this. 

I don't know if it will be peaceful and easy, or periodically ugly and violent.  But the fact of the matter is that demographic change will soon render those folks we've generally called 'white' a minority in this country.  It is well known that by the middle of this century, 'whites' (as Americans have come to define them since World War II) will no longer constitute a majority of the population of the United States.   

On the eve of the financial crash, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that non-Hispanic whites would become a minority in the country in 2042, eight years earlier than had previously been estimated.  In many places, and among people under the age of 40 or so, this has already happened or been peacefully accepted.  Its even happening in large parts of the South -- Virginia, North Carolina, increasingly Florida, and eventually even Texas.  

To me, the rightward drift of the GOP, the emergence of the Tea Party, and the push for voter ID laws is part and parcel of a rearguard resistance movement by (mostly older, mostly privileged) whites who refuse to accept what the country is becoming.  Its quite similar to the way millions of white Americans reacted to the huge wave of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s (which included my family).  They tried desperately to hold back the tide, in ways that were ultimately inconsistent with many of their OWN values -- and finally, in the 30s and 40s, lost.  Southern whites continued to fight the same fight, this time against blacks, after that.

Much of this white resistance now is limited to the South, and to older folks nationally.  But because they have a stranglehold on one of our two national parties, and because our decentralized federal system has so many veto points that allow a small group of like-minded people to stop what they don't like, what could be an opportunity for the US to model tolerance and multiracial democracy to the rest of the world may become something else entirely.

The collision of the Great Recession with demographic change has lent our already-polarized national politics a discomforting flavor of racial apocalypse, diverting many Americans -- and most of the Republican Party -- away from the inequalities that truly matter, and toward a paranoid defense of the favored racial quarter.  We can see this in our daily lives, as American metropolitan areas re-segregate by race, while economic segregation metastasizes across the national landscape.  We can see it in the racialized rhetoric of the Tea Party.  And we can see it in the 'pull-up-the-ladder-of-opportunity' policies that the GOP increasingly recommends.  

And sadly, we can see a more 'genteel' version of it in the civil rights rulings of the Roberts court.

White Americans, of course, aren't monolithic.  While a lot of whites seem to be hunkering down in the Republicans' racial redoubt (particularly older whites), those who continue to define themselves as Democrats increasingly share the views of most blacks and Latinos not only on economics, opportunity and the role of government, but also on the issues of immigration, affirmative action and social programs.  This is particularly true for younger white voters.


My fear is that as the death rattle of white privilege gets louder, the group of white American dead-enders who continue to rage at the dying of the light will get too large and too influential, and the Republican Party will have boxed itself in.  Rather than occasionally winning elections and governing the polity in the presence of a loyal minority, they will instead choose to change the nature of the polity itself.  The temptation to pull up the ladder, close the doors, and slam shut the ballot boxes as the new day dawns will be too hard to resist.  

The result may be an effort to deprive these new Americans of their access to the levers of economic and political power, by changing the laws (through legislation and through the courts), by undermining the institutions that provide such access, and by underfunding, eliminating or 'drowning in the bathtub' the public institutions and programs that shape and underpin the opportunity structure.
 
It has happened before -- resistance, and the contraction of freedom and opportunity.  As school children we are taught that the American story has involved a gradual-but-inevitable opening up of freedom and access, from the Revolution to the present.  We have slowly if somewhat reluctantly included an ever-larger group of people into the American family, granting civil and voting rights, it is said.  

The problem with this triumphalist narrative is that it isn't true.  

Particularly with regard to the vote, there has been a hard fought ebb and flow, as Alexander Keyssar makes clear in his brilliant book The Right to Vote.  The first time this nation faced massive changes to its demography and identity, in a broader context of rising inequality and insecurity, was in the period between the end of the Civil War, and the Great Depression.  And while the reaction of some was to try to humanize industrial capitalism, and welcome the emergence of a polyglot and contested America, there was an equally strong pull in the other direction -- toward limitations on the franchise (Jim Crow in the South, voting obstacles in the North), toward immigration restriction, toward judicial doctrines and rulings that hampered government and protected capital, and toward an intense and often violent effort to protect and reinforce white privilege (lynching in the South, racially restrictive covenants, riots, and segregation in the North) and capital (strike-breaking and repression by police, state militias, the US military, and court injunctions).  

It was only when the Great Depression so thoroughly de-legitimized many of these rear-guard actions that a new path became possible.  But there was nothing inevitable about the outcome, and we would be living in a very different country today if the herrenvolk nation that millions of 'white' Americans had struggled so mightily for had carried the day, or if the United States had become the 'company town' that so many representatives of capital had sought.

The panic of the pale and privileged will surely go the way of all flesh eventually.  My hope is that they will not take the nation with them.

As long as whites in positions of power continue to believe that we now live in a color-blind nation, we face the possibility that what should otherwise be a peaceful and positive transition to a new America may instead endanger our democratic institutions.  White Americans can bring the temple down upon all of us.  Or they can strengthen it, so it protects everyone, themselves included.

We will either have a multiracial and just democracy, or we will not have a democracy.  Nor, it should be said, will we deserve one.

Actors of unusual size, Losing Their Sh*t

The unexpected passing of the brilliant James Gandolfini got me thinking about another physically imposing and scene-devouring actor:  John Goodman (who turned 61 today).

Aside from being men of unusual size, great talent, and the initials 'JG,' the two shared another memorable trait:  the ability to convey an almost comically volcanic rage.  While the scenes in which they lose their shit occupy different locations on the humor-to-absurdity spectrum (usually), and Goodman hasn't yet gotten a role like Tony Soprano, he's awfully compelling nonetheless.

Film editor Jason Bailey apparently finds powerful actors Losing their Shit hard to resist too, because he's been putting together wonderful film montages for FlavorWire.  He's already done Gary Oldham and Nicholas Cage.

And now comes John Goodman, below.  Surely John Cleese, Robert DeNiro...and James Gandolfini can't be far behind.

Enjoy. 



John Goodman Loses His Shit from Flavorwire on Vimeo.

What Cheer, heathen Yankee?

To my secular humanist peeps in Providence, I present the following. 

According to an apparently detailed survey, the capital of the Biggest Little is the 4th most 'Post-Christian' city in the US -- after Albany, Burlington VT, and Portland ME.

I am not sure where this leaves heathen New Englanders like myself who are in fact 'pre-Christian," but I digress.

You see where your 'tolerance' has led us, Roger Williams? 

I know where all good New Englanders are on Sunday morning: at farmer's markets, drinking fancy coffee, reading the Globe, and making last minute changes to their fantasy football lineups. 

Now THAT is piety.

Some of us saw it coming, and said no: on the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq

I am re-posting below the very first piece I published on this blog, nearly a decade ago.  I am doing so to remind readers that many, many people around the world saw the disaster of the Iraq invasion and occupation coming before it started -- and spoke out.

The reaction among pundits and politicians to the 10th anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq has been fascinating -- and at times sickening -- to watch.  While one expects unrepentant troglodytes like William Kristol and other neo-cons to continue to defend this war of choice, the more morally compromised reactions have come from centrists and liberals who supported the war back in 2003.  Like many of the advisers to Vietnam-era Democratic presidents, they have claimed a kind of retrospective innocence based on ignorance:  "who could have known it would have turned out this badly?"  Or, "How could we have known that the Bush Administration would be so dishonest and incompetent?"  The 'success' of the surge has provided another moral escape hatch for some of these folks, or so they assume.  They argue that while Iraq was clearly FUBAR into 2007, the surge redeemed the entire enterprise -- and thus, their position on the conflict at the outset.

Much like the Vietnam conflict, this defense is a disingenuous, self-serving re-writing of history.  It was abundantly clear to millions of Americans in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq not only that the attack was being sold under false pretenses, but that the aftermath would be an unmitigated disaster, strategically and morally.  The surge did not redeem this disaster.  It merely enabled the US to gradually wash its hands of it.  I submit that even if the war had gone swimmingly from the outset, the dishonest way in which the war was initiated did enormous -- and possibly permanent -- damage to the rule of law at home, and our reputation abroad. 

This is not hindsight.  And one should be held morally responsible for one's ignorance, if similarly situated people were capable of seeing things clearly at the time.  Some of our fellow citizens tried to stop the war from inside the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department.  Others wrote, talked and marched, in an effort to wake their fellow Americans up to irreversible rubicon that the Bush Administration was about to cross.  I was among that latter group, and vocally so -- as a leader of the anti-war movement in Spokane, and as vice-chair of the Human Rights Commission in that city.  I spoke at rallies, I wrote newspaper editorials; hell, I even criticized the war on Mark Fuhrman's radio show.

I said it 10 years ago, and I'll say it now.  The American invasion of Iraq was the greatest strategic blunder in the history of the country.  It was a criminal act, a violation of American and international law.  It was the single greatest violation of the letter and spirit of the law in the history of the American presidency.  It is an insult to the rule of the law, and the thousands of American lives wasted and wounded in Iraq, that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld still walk the earth as free men.  That they were able to falsely lead this nation into an unprovoked attack on another sovereign state is surely one of the greatest failures in the history of American democracy.  Fifty years from now, when we look back on the decline of the American way of life, I'm quite certain we will zero in on two related events:  the 2000 election fiasco, and the invasion of Iraq.  One hopes that we can use the 20th anniversary of the start of the war to harvest a bit of wisdom on the limits of American power, and military force.  We seem to have wasted the 10th.

"On Patriotism," a talk presented March 26th, 2003 at St. Al's church at Gonzaga University, Spokane WA

A 12 year-old school girl in Maine wrote the following essay last year for her 6th grade class:
“The American flag stands for the fact that cloth can be very important. It is against the law to let the flag touch the ground or to leave the flag flying when the weather is bad. The flag has to be treated with respect. You can tell just how important this cloth is because when you compare it to people, it gets much better treatment. Nobody cares if a homeless person touches the ground. A homeless person can lie all over the ground all night long without anyone picking him up, folding him neatly and sheltering him from the rain.

School children have to pledge loyalty to this piece of cloth every morning. No one has to pledge loyalty to justice and equality and human decency. No one has to promise that people will get a fair wage, or enough food to eat, or affordable medicine, or clean water, or air free of harmful chemicals. But we all have to promise to love a rectangle of red, white, and blue cloth.

Betsy Ross would be quite surprised to see how successful her creation has become. But Thomas Jefferson would be disappointed to see how little of the flag's real meaning remains.”

As an opponent of this war, and an American historian, I have spent a great deal of time recently agonizing over what patriotism demands of us. Like millions around this nation, my acts of protest before the war began have inspired accusations of disloyalty; even within the anti-war movement, many have said that all protests must stop once the first shots are fired – that patriotism demands that we support the troops, and unify behind our leaders and our soldiers. I do not agree. Or, at the very least, I do not share the same definition of patriotism, nor of ‘support.’ Indeed, it is my patriotism that drives me to speak louder now that the war has begun. The logic is simple. If it is right to oppose a wrong when it is being publicly contemplated, how much more important is it to do so when it is in the process of commission? “When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and the purity of its heart.”

It is not those who protest the war who need to justify themselves. The burden of proof is on the makers of war. As former President Jimmy Carter said recently, “war is sometimes a necessary evil. But it is ALWAYS an evil.” I’d like to share my thoughts on war, patriotism and support of the troops with you this morning. This will not simply be a plea for peace; it will also be a plea to stop THIS war. I can’t help that. I apologize if this talk will seem strident to you, but I believe it is important for those who support this war, and those who oppose it, and those who aren’t sure, to understand how much in common we share.
Why do I oppose this war? There are many reasons, but among the most important is my belief as an American in the rule of law over the rule of force. Under the new Bush Doctrine, a bold military strategy of preemptive attacks–including the possibility of a unilateral nuclear first strike– is intended to prevent any state or group of states from challenging our preeminent role in the world. The war in Iraq is the first application of this doctrine. Preemptive war, however, is unequivocally illegal. This prohibition was incorporated into the United Nations Charter after WWII as the basis for a new system of collective security in which no state retained the unilateral right to attack another–with two specified exceptions: self defense and Security Council authorization.

All of us should consider whether this radical new strategy is good for our country and the world, and whether it best represents what this nation stands for. What would happen in a world stripped of the very laws designed half a century ago to protect humanity from the carnage of unrestrained force? Can pure military might really defend us from evil and secure our freedom at the same time? The passage of the USA-Patriot Act should tell us no.

Before it is too late, we would do well to heed Sir Thomas More’s advice on the rule of law in the play “A Man for All Seasons.”

And when the last law was cut down and the devil turned around on you,
where would you hide, the laws all being flat? Do you really think
that you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

Why do I believe that it is a patriotic act to protest against this war? There are two visions of America, I believe, with deep roots in our history. One precedes our founding fathers and finds its roots in the harshness of our puritan past. It is very suspicious of freedom, uncomfortable with diversity, unfriendly to reason, contemptuous of personal autonomy. It sees America exclusively as a religious nation. It views patriotism as akin to allegiance to God. It secretly adores coercion and conformity. Despite our Constitution, despite the legacy of the Enlightenment, it appeals to millions of Americans and threatens our freedom, in peace and wartime.

The other vision finds its roots in the spirit of our founding revolution, and in the words of the Declaration of Independence. It loves freedom, encourages diversity, embraces reason and affirms the dignity and rights of every individual. It sees America as a moral nation, neither completely religious nor completely secular. It defines patriotism neither as blind obedience to government, nor as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but rather as love of one's country and one's fellow citizens (all over the world), and as loyalty to the principles of justice and democracy.

The admirable obligation human beings feel to their neighbors, their loved ones, and their fellow citizens, all too often becomes confused with blind obedience to government. Most of the evils in world history have come from obedience, not disobedience; from conformity, not from dissent. Unity, stability and order are not the only desirable conditions of social life, even in wartime. There is also justice, meaning the fair treatment of all human beings, the equal right of all people to life, liberty and prosperity. Absolute obedience to law may bring order temporarily, but it may not bring justice. And when it does not, patriotism may require us to disobey the law; and citizens may protest, may rebel, may cause disorder, as the American revolutionaries did in the eighteenth century, as antislavery people did in the nineteenth century, as Chinese students did in the last century, and as anti-war protesters are doing now.

It is this second vision which is my vision, my patriotism. It is the vision of a free society. We must be bold enough to proclaim it, and strong enough to defend it against all its enemies, even during wartime. When he spoke out against the Vietnam war, Martin Luther King explained his protest simply: “I criticize America because I love her. I want her to stand as a moral example to the world.” If we do not speak out in protest, King continued, “we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.” With Dr. King, I claim, without pretense or apology, a place in the long and honorable tradition of those who demand that American ideals apply to all and oppose the efforts of those, from whatever quarter, who try to reserve them for privileged groups and ignoble causes. The most effective way to love our country, I submit, is to fight like hell to change it. Through most of U.S. history, this brand of patriotism was indispensable to the cause of social change. As the poet Langston Hughes wrote, "Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed. Let it be that great strong land of love where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme; that any man be crushed by one above."

Given this vision of patriotism, what does ‘support the troops’ mean to me? First, supporting the troops means preparing the nation as a whole to join with the soldiers in equally and justly sharing the burdens of a democratically declared war (though this is not, as of yet, a ‘declared’ war). This should include an ongoing public debate over the rightness, the wrongness, and the feasibility of this war. This means to me, among other things, following the precedent of WWII and initiating economic and fiscal policies that call on all of us to sacrifice, and that support the troops and their families. This would decidedly NOT include a series of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and punishing budget cuts in the programs which provide social and economic security for the American working and middle classes -- who provide most of the soldiers, and build most of our weapons.

Second, Supporting our troops means seeing to it that they have jobs, and the means to re-adjust to civilian life upon their de-mobilization. Recently, the Republican majority on the House Budget Committee voted for $25 billion in cuts in the Department of Veterans Affairs budget, and a $204 million cut in the Impact Aid program that supports the education of soldiers' children. 163,000 veterans of the Gulf War continue to suffer from largely unaddressed illnesses from exposure to the fall out from destroyed chemical weapons, ammunition depots, oil fires, depleted uranium and experimental drugs. I question where the compassionate conservative support for our troops will be in a few years time, when they come back home, and seek employment, a union contract, a safe workplace, a living wage, and a labor market and system of higher education free from racial discrimination. History (as well as the President’s budget) tells us the support of our troops will fall somewhat short of this, unless we speak up for them. Supporting the troops doesn’t mean abject silence. It means seeing them as real human beings, with families, with fears, with rights, with opinions, and with moral consciences which will be stretched to the limit by the nature of modern war. And as human beings who will hopefully live long lives upon their return.

Last, and most important: supporting the troops means speaking up on their behalf, and demanding that our elected representatives do so as well. The men and women in our armed forces are duty-bound to follow the orders of our commander-in-chief. That is their job; it is their citizenship duty, and they should be honored and respected for fulfilling it, in an age when too many of us see democracy as a spectator sport. I salute them for their sacrifice on behalf of our nation. I thank them for their willingness to risk their lives. Even as I praise our servicemen and women, however, I regret that the President of the United States has ordered them to start a preemptive war fought without international support. A preemptive, unilateral war is unworthy of the honor and tradition of the U.S. military. Our armed forces should not be invading and occupying other countries. In a democracy, it is we the people that send them to war; it is we, the people, who choose when to bring them home. They die in our name, and they kill in our name. To attempt to cut off public discussion once the war starts – or even to question whether the public has any legitimate say at all – both undermines our essential values, and jeopardizes our soldiers far more than any protest ever could. We cannot shirk this responsibility, nor can we allow others to fulfill it for us. We must speak up for the soldiers, regardless of what we think about the war itself. Do you want to know how to support the troops in wartime? Do not be a cheerleader. Be a citizen. Speak up for them, in all their diversity. When we silence any of us, we silence them as well.

The idea of 'support our troops' is troubling for those who oppose this war, because it is being used by many to hammer dissenting voices into silence. Given my definition of support above, I intend to get louder, not quieter, once the war begins. It is my patriotic duty to do so.

I would like to conclude with the words of Mark Twain:

“Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak. And it is a solemn and weighty responsibility, and not lightly to be flung aside at the bullying of pulpit, press, government, or the empty catchphrases of politicians. Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country- hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

Snowpocalypse Now...or in the next 18 hours or so

I have ground enough coffee beans to last me two days. 

I have salmon sushi in the freezer. 

I have a cooler in the back yard with some fine beers, including a few beauties from Ommegang. 

I have firewood, National Geographics, and student papers for kindling. 

And we've been fattening up the children and the dog for days now...just in case we run out of protein sources.  Cold snowy night -- we can always make more (children).

I'm ready. You?

Almost ready, Raskolnikov

Tomorrow night, going to see Crime and Punishment. 

Tonight, getting in the mood for mid-19th century Russia by oversimplifying the virtues of peasants, sycophantically imitating things that seem French, and drinking homemade kvas. And contemplating a pogrom.

I'm doing none of these things.

The real American exceptionalism: our lives are stressful, unhealthy, and short

Back in October 2012, New York Times writer Scott Shane described the idea of 'American exceptionalism' as an "opiate,“ inducing a kind of hubristic national stupor that prevents us from seeing things as they truly are.

The idea that God or history has uniquely blessed the United States, justifying a proselytizing posture toward the rest of the world, is an old one.  It returned to our national discourse in the last couple of years, when conservatives accused President Obama of backsliding in his belief that Americans are the 'chosen people.'

As Shane argued, the idea that American identity is a kind of calling can have positive consequences:  “this national characteristic...may inspire some people and politicians to perform heroically, rising to the level of our self-image."  But it can also be deeply dysfunctional, as politicians of all stripes trip over one another to reassure Americans "that their country, their achievements and their values are extraordinary," while profound problems are left unaddressed.

American patriotism has always -- and uniquely -- had this 'Stuart Smalley' taint to it, but as we collectively whistle through the graveyard of apparent national decline, it seems to have over-ripened a bit.  If John Winthrop's idea of America as the 'city on a hill' drawing the "eyes of all people" was to be more than just an expression of jingoism, it demanded (and demands) a delicate balance between description and aspiration.  When it morphs into mere self-affirmation, however, we Americans become a danger to ourselves -- and to others, who increasingly keep their eyes on us for fear of what might happen if they don't.

Sadly, as a recent international health study bracingly reminds us, most of the ways in which the United States is exceptional today are negative.

The Institute of Medicine just released a study comparing American health care outcomes to other industrialized countries.  And all rhetoric about the U.S. having the 'best health care system in the world' aside, the realities are shocking.  Despite spending far more per capita on health care than any other nation, the data make it abundantly clear that the American way of life has become nasty, increasingly brutish, and comparatively short.

The optimistic takeaway here is that almost everything described below is attributable to (and capable of being ameliorated by) public policy -- in health, but in much broader areas as well.  In other words, if we can once again rediscover our aspirational identity as Americans, change is possible.

Physician Steven Woolf, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, chaired the panel that wrote the report.  He and his co-authors were "stunned by the findings."  Americans "have a long-standing pattern of poorer health that is strikingly consistent and pervasive" over a person's lifetime, the study found.

The U.S. is at or near the bottom in virtually every health outcome:  life expectancy, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and homicide.  We have much higher rates of death before the age of 50, accounting for most of the gap between the United States and our peer nations.

According to the report, most of these poor health outcomes are attributable to poor childhood health.

The USA has had the highest infant mortality rate of any developed country for several decades, due partly to a high rate of premature birth and low birth weight.  Dr. Woolf and his colleagues also note that the U.S. has by far the highest rate of child poverty, though they don't really touch on its role as a possible cause. 

Here is a graphic representation of the infant mortality gap:

This gap, interestingly, has a history.  

The gap between the United States and its peer nations was relatively wide in 1950s and early 1960s, and then rapidly closed.  Why did it close, and so quickly?  Policy -- the 'War on Poverty,' including Medicare/Medicaid, among other programs, which for the first time began to connect millions of Americans to the health care system (and to food) on a relatively consistent basis. 

And then, right around 1980, the gap re-emerged.  This coincided, not surprisingly, with Reagan-era cuts in public health and social programs; but it also coincided with an ongoing increase in economic inequality and insecurity.  Since 2000, the gap between the U.S. and its peers has expanded.  While infant mortality rates among African-American and Hispanics are high, this doesn't explain the gap -- white Americans have higher comparable rates as well.

In short, while we have continued to make progress over the past two decades, our peers have had much greater success:  “although U.S. infant mortality declined by 20 percent between 1990 and 2010,” the report notes, “other high-income countries experienced much steeper declines and halved their infant mortality rates over those two decades.”

The report doesn't really offer any explanations for the infant mortality gap, or for the poor health performance of the U.S. more generally, beyond behavioral factors like drug abuse, calorie consumption, not wearing seat belts, and the ubiquity of handgun violence.

I'm not a health expert, but I do think we need to consider one factor:  inequality.

While economic inequality within nations wasn't the focus of the Institute of Health report, we know from research by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett that it strongly correlates with (and is reproduced by) health outcomes -- such as infant mortality (see above).

This is true in two senses.

First, nations with higher rates of economic inequality tend to have poorer health outcomes across the class structure -- in other words, while health outcomes are better the richer or more educated one is, they will still be lower than those of comparably placed people in more equal countries.  The Institute of Health report confirms this.

Second, economic (and educational) inequality and health outcomes are strongly correlated within societies.  In the U.S., life expectancy for white women without a high school diploma is 73.5 years, compared with 83.9 years for white women with a college degree or more.  For white men, the gap is even larger: 67.5 years for the least educated white men compared with 80.4 for those with a college degree or better.

Because the United States is drastically more unequal than any other comparable nation, the socio-economic gradient is much sharper here -- and its getting worse.  Indeed, we now have evidence that the life span of the least educated white Americans has actually contracted, falling a full four years since 1990.  The numbers are worse for women.  Some of this is attributable to changes in the labor market:  the share of working-age adults with less than a high school diploma who did not have health insurance rose to 43 percent in 2006, up from 35 percent in 1993.  While full implementation of the Affordable Care Act in the coming years may help somewhat, the deeper problems of rising inequality and economic insecurity -- and the debilitating stress and anxiety that accompany them -- remain.

Poor health outcomes, as well as inequality, are greatly exacerbated in the U.S. by our social geography, and its intersection with the nation's original sin of race.  American metropolitan areas have become increasingly segregated by income over the past two decades.  We don't yet have a full picture of the health consequences of this trend, though it certainly is both a cause and a consequence of growing inequality during the same period.

But we do know the health consequences of America's stubbornly persistent pattern of racial segregation.  African-Americans not only have poorer health outcomes than whites overall; this is true even when income and education are held constant.  More than 100 studies over the past decade confirm that racism acts as a classic chronic stressor, with serious physiological consequences: higher blood pressure, elevated heart rate, increases in the stress hormone cortisol, suppressed immunity.  Chronic stress is also known to encourage unhealthy behaviors, such as smoking and eating too much, that themselves raise the risk of disease.  Most of these investigations have been done in the United States, but a growing body of literature originates elsewhere.  "Across multiple societies, you're finding similar kinds of relationships," David Williams, a sociologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, told the Boston Globe.  "There is a phenomenon here that is quite robust."

Racism also appears to have an impact on fetal and infant health, setting off a likely cascade of negative consequences.

Epidemiologists James W. Collins, Jr. and Richard J. David have uncovered a disturbing fact:  American-born black women are significantly more likely to have low birth weight babies than white women are, regardless of income level or education.  The cause, they argue, is steady and life-long exposure to racism and its consequences.  Since low birth weight correlates strongly with poor health (and educational) outcomes later in life, the relationship between race, place and health is clearly a big factor in the reproduction of racial inequality in the U.S.

This relationship has been confirmed more recently in a widely publicized study in the January 2013 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, on racial segregation and lung cancer.  After controlling for income and smoking rates, Dr. Awori Hayanga and his colleagues found that lung cancer mortality rates (a ratio of deaths to a population) were about 20 percent higher for blacks who lived in the most segregated American counties, than for blacks living in the least segregated counties.  The more segregated the community, the higher the mortality rate for blacks -- and, disturbingly, the lower the rates were for whites.  They surmised that differential access to health insurance and relevant and timely treatment were largely at fault.  The research of Collins and David also directs us towards the stressors of racism itself, which are in part rooted in America's unequal racial geography.

“If you want to learn about someone’s health, follow him home,” Dr. Hayanga, a heart and lung surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, told the New York Times.   This message -- about the relationship between place, health, and inequality -- was perhaps most powerfully conveyed for an American popular audience by the award-winning documentary Unnatural Causes.

In other words, our unequal and insecure American way of life is making us sick -- and more unequal.

While the mechanisms that connect inequality with poor health outcomes are many and hard to disentangle, it seems clear that stress and insecurity are critical.  Both affect the cardiovascular and immune systems, and both are found in abundance and in greater numbers in unequal societies -- and their effects are devastating on the young in particular.

Thomas McInerny, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, reacted to the Institute of Health study by pointing to recent research on the long-term impact of "toxic stress" on the health and cognitive development of babies and toddlers.   "It's becoming increasingly clear that the first 1,000 days of life are critically important for children's development, and can determine the course of their life span from then on," McInerny says. "Investing in children in the first three years of life provides higher returns, for improving their productivity as adults, compared to intervening later."

Back in 2007, UNICEF put together an index of child well-being.  It measured material and educational factors, health and safety, peer and family relationships, surveys of subjective well-being, and behavioral risks.  When Wilkinson and Pickett lined this index up with rates of income inequality, they found something striking:  the more unequal a society is, the worse its rates of child well-being -- not just among poor children, but overall:

These correlations and comparisons make one thing clear:  America's poor health outcomes, particularly for our children, can be ameliorated.  Why?  Because the differences between the U.S. and its peers, ultimately, are policy differences -- and thus are amenable to collective action.  We can make America healthier (and more productive) by making it less unequal, and by investing in pre-natal care, early childhood health, and high quality and universal pre-school.  "We already know what to do," Dr. Woolf says. "It's more a matter of having the resolve and resources to actually do it."

Notwithstanding the false scarcity of our current austerity politics, we have the resources.

Notwithstanding the libertarian and narcissistic braying of the privileged, our well-being is ultimately inseparable from that of our fellow Americans.

Whether we have the resolve to see this will ultimately determine whether the term 'American exceptionalism' serves to damn or praise our national experiment.

Same Love, Rhode Island. Same Love.

First, listen to this song.  I guarantee, it will hit you hard.  Macklemore deserves some serious respect, for bringing the message of acceptance, equality and love into a hip-hop community that has too often lacked it.



So, Washington state -- where Macklemore is from -- passed marriage equality.

So why not Rhode Island?

Change that.  Go here.

Louis CK tonight...and why white privilege is funny

Off to see Louis CK tonight in Boston, with a jolly caravan of folks.

Here's one of my favorites -- I use it in my Color Line in Modern America class. Most white males seem to intuitively get the latter part, about losing privilege. Most white males don't seem to get the first part, about having privilege.

 

Squeezing camels through the eye of the fiscal needle

It is often said that you know you have a good deal, when all sides walk away from the table a little unhappy.  If that bit of folk wisdom is true, the recently passed 'fiscal cliff' compromise appears to be a good one.

By and large, the deal Obama achieved isn't a disaster.  I will praise a few parts of it below, and criticize others.  But on balance, I think it would have been better to go over the mythical cliff, pocket the increased revenue, and then prevail upon Congress to pass middle class tax cuts and extend the payroll tax cuts.  The GOP was powerless to stop the former, and would have been hard-pressed to reject the latter.  It is now no longer possible to get increased revenues out of Congress.  And we can neither address our common needs in the coming decades, nor stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio, without them.

Let's look at the bigger picture.

First, learn a little history by going to this Dylan Matthew post on how we got here.  Trust me, its hilarious.  Seriously.

Now, back to me.  Color me skeptical about the entire state of our policy discourse at present.  I refuse to accept the legitimacy of the economic assumptions underlying this so-called 'crisis,' and fear that by engaging in this back-and-forth dealing, Obama and the Democrats have reinforced those assumptions.  Essentially, anything that doesn't reverse our slide toward austerity is bad policy.  A deal that accelerates that slide -- or that lays the ground for such an acceleration -- is a disaster.

With regard to the $120 billion in budget cuts (the 'sequester'), the can was kicked 60 days down the road.  But it will come to a spinning stop at approximately the same time that the debt ceiling crisis hits.  Ultimately, whether Obama acted responsibly in the negotiations that just concluded will be determined by what comes next.

And on that, I'm not optimistic.  While Obama did bend a bit on the size and reach of the tax increases on the wealthy (thus trading progressively-generated revenue for likely and regressive spending cuts), he didn't give in on entitlements.  He certainly sounded the right notes in the wake of the House passage of the deal.  When asked about the impending debt ceiling confrontation, Obama declared, “While I will negotiate over many things, I will not have another debate with Congress over whether they should pay the bills they’ve already racked up.”  Perhaps he will take Bill Clinton's advice, and invoke the 14th amendment to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling (or abolish it).  That is an enormous bargaining chip; let's hope he doesn't give it away at the outset.  It should be permanently invoked anyway.  From the White House's perspective, they got most of what they wanted in the fiscal cliff negotiations, by hanging tough.  Perhaps they have finally been convinced that negotiating against yourself (or assuming you are conversing with a rational interlocutor) isn't wise.

Perhaps.

I hesitate to see the deal as positive -- for Obama, for the Democrats, and for the country -- because this whole manufactured crisis relies on one central (and false) premise:  that the first economic priority for the US is to get the deficit under control.  Most Republicans (and mainstream pundits of all stripes) continue to believe that our slowly growing economy is some sort of divine punishment for our fiscally profligate ways, despite a complete lack of supporting evidence.  The idea that cutting government spending will be good for the economy right now is roughly akin to using leaches and bloodletting to cure illness.  It only makes sense when embedded within a larger paradigm, one which is internally consistent (and thus appears to be coherent to those inside it), but is otherwise empirically false.  There were no budget cuts in the deal, and Obama deserves praise -- for protecting Medicare and Social Security, in particular.  But the cuts are coming.  And the back-and-forth over the fiscal cliff deal (as well as years of precedent) hasn't given me great confidence in Obama's negotiating abilities.

The vast majority of the present deficit is attributable to 3 things:  the economy (first and foremost), the Bush tax cuts, and the wars.  The fiscal cliff deal touches only on the second part, and mostly leaves those cuts in place, relative to a return to the Clinton status quo ante.

There is, of course, a likely structural deficit over the long-term, and it must be dealt with.  But the primary culprits there are well known:  rising health care costs, the possibility of low economic growth over a prolonged period (a 'lost decade,' which the deal does little to prevent), and a tax system that doesn't raise enough revenue from the nation's wealthiest households to fund our basic needs or invest in our future.

The deal isn't a disaster, and I should praise before I criticize.  Even if one assumes Obama could have gotten a slightly better deal, under the present circumstances he did manage to keep some disastrous options off the table.  My worst fears -- an increase in the eligibility age for Medicare, a cut in Social Security benefits through the chained CPI -- didn't materialize (yet).  One can assume, however, that the GOP will try to use the debt ceiling to put this and more back on the table in the coming months.  Obama's role in all of this will ultimately be judged by his combined response to the 'fiscal cliff' and the debt ceiling negotiations.  If he caves on the latter, it will be difficult to judge the deal passed yesterday as a good one.

The immediate crisis is unemployment, not the deficit.  Most of the time, the president acknowledged this publicly.  And it is to Obama's credit that he managed to get an extension of unemployment benefits in the deal, as well as various tax credits that are generally taken by working families.  The payroll tax cut, however, is gone.  And the focus remains on budget cuts, not stimulus. 

There are of course 4 other long-term structural problems, which aren't even on the table at the moment:  inequality, our broken opportunity structure, our atrophying public sector, and the need to reboot our economic, energy, land use and transportation policies to address new climate and fuel realities.  All 4 are corrosive of our economy, and our democracy.  And all 4 require more tax revenues in the coming decades (and less defense spending).

Since criticizing the discursive environment from which the 'crisis' emerged is ultimately unproductive -- why rage against the dying of the light? -- there are two specific parts of the deal that deserve criticism:

The debt ceiling showdown was not averted.  In Obama's initial negotiations with Boehner, he made it clear that he wanted a permanent solution to this ridiculous legislative practice.  As Paul Krugman pointed out recently, "the key thing to remember — and what the GOP hopes you won’t understand — is that raising the debt ceiling only empowers the president to spend money that he’s authorized to spend by Congressional legislation; nothing more."  In the modern age, there is no good reason why there should be any debt limit, let alone one that must be raised each year.  Obama continually gave ground on this, with no corresponding concessions from the other side.  In the 'fiscal cliff' deal he gave it all away, enabling the Republicans to once again take the world economy hostage in a few months, in order to achieve policy victories that the American people clearly rejected just a few months ago.  As I noted above, he should follow Bill Clinton's advice and invoke the 14th amendment to eliminate this annual song-and-dance once and for all.

The estate tax remains way too low.  The estate tax serves two vital purposes:  it raises revenue to pay for public goods, and it helps to at least partly maintain equal opportunity over time, and across generations.

As part of the fiscal cliff deal, the estate tax will rise to 40 percent from its current 35 percent level, with the first $5 million in assets exempted ($10 for married couples).  Democrats had earlier sought a higher increase to 45 percent and a lower exemption of $3.5 million.  Had we gone over the 'fiscal cliff,' the estate tax would have reverted to Clinton-era levels (remember that socialist utopia?):  a $1 million exemption, not indexed to inflation, with a 55 percent tax rate.

First, a little background on this confusing topic.  The 2001 Bush tax cuts shrunk the estate tax dramatically.  By 2009, the first $3.5 million of the estate of an individual — effectively, the first $7 million for a couple — was exempt entirely from the tax.  A tax that had affected only the largest 2 percent of estates in 2001 touched fewer than three-tenths of 1 percent of estates by 2009.  And by 2009, the tax rate applied to the portion of an estate’s value that exceeded the exemption level had declined to 45 percent, down from 55 percent under the prior law.  Because the estate tax applies only to the value of the estate that exceeds the exemption level — and because of other tax breaks built into estate tax law — the effective tax rates faced by estates that are taxable are generally much lower than the statutory estate-tax rate.  Graduated rates for larger estates would bring this effective rate more in line with the statutory rate, while ensuring that the revenue burden of the estate tax is borne by the very wealthiest households.

We did not get a graduated rate system yesterday.

While raising revenue isn't the only -- even the primary -- justification for the estate tax, we aren't talking about chump change here.  Take a look at the differences between the various options over the next decade, in terms of money flowing into the public till, in the chart below.  The bar on the left applied in 2011 and 2012, and was set to expire on January 1st 2013.  The second from the left was Obama's negotiating position.  The one on the far right would have kicked in yesterday, in the absence of a fiscal cliff deal.

While the numbers that were ultimately agreed to aren't on this chart, one can reasonably assume they fall between $182 billion and $284 billion over the next 10 years.  Thus, the revenue difference between the new estate tax system and the one that existed when Bush took office is over $300 billion in the coming decade.  Relative to the size of the deficit (and the likely size of the economy in the coming years), this isn't a ton of money.  But when one thinks about it either in terms of what that revenue could purchase and multiply, or in terms of who will carry the burden of spending cuts, the cost is of greater consequence.  I do think one can make an argument that the exemption ($1 million) was set too low prior to the 2001 Bush tax cuts, and that a reformed version would include a substantially higher exemption with graduated rates for bigger fortunes above the exemption level.  In other words, the estate tax could be made more progressive -- affecting fewer people -- while simultaneously raising more revenue.

But that's not what we got yesterday.  Instead, the two parties and the White House agreed to pass up over $30 billion a year in revenue from the wealthiest Americans -- more, if a graduated system had been created instead.  This is revenue that the GOP will attempt to claw back from ordinary Americans in a couple of months, when we bump up against the debt ceiling.

Good rule of thumb:  every dollar in spending cuts is likely to affect working families and the economy more negatively than each dollar of tax increases on the wealthy will.  And while taxes on the wealthy just went up a bit, they also went up on everyone else, because of the expiration of the payroll tax cut. 





$30 billion a year, by the way, would get us more than half way toward a high-quality universal pre-k system.  As my father and I proposed in our 2005 book, this would be an entirely appropriate way to spend estate tax revenues.

The economy is spinning its wheels, at about $1.5 trillion below its potential.  At least 15 million people are unable to find full-time jobs.  Despite this, the debate remains fixated on the question of how to cut the deficit instead of how to restore jobs, wages, and output.  Obama must shift the focus to economic recovery, and away from austerity.  And he can't do this if his initial negotiating positions already concede recovery (and stimulus) as a lost cause.  My problem with Obama's negotiating approach isn't so much that he concedes things to the GOP when they're at the table.  That's what happens in a negotiation, though presumably one gives something up to get something.  My problem is with what he brings to the table in the first place.  One should always carry two things into a negotiation:  a wish list, and a giveaway list.  The wish list should include everything you'd want to see in a possible and realistic deal, but it should also include things you'd love to have but know you probably won't get.  And then you start the negotiations by taking things on the 'love to have' list, and either shrinking them or moving them to the 'giveaway' list, in concert with appropriate moves by the other party.

Historically, Obama has given away most of his wish list before entering the room.  He did this with the stimulus bill back in 2009.  He did with health care too.  And he did it with the Budget Control Act in 2011.  He did better this time, but we won't really know the ultimate outcome for a couple of months.

Robert Kuttner is a reluctant supporter of Obama's deal as well.  But he also acknowledges that the stakes have now been raised for next 'cliff':

Unless Obama continues to play hardball on all fronts, the risk is that he will consent to budget cuts as the price of the next deal, at a time when the economy needs more public spending, not less. He needs not only more spine; he needs to alter the terms of debate, rejecting not only the ideology of Republican right but the economic idiocy of the corporate center, which has persuaded elite opinion (including at the White House) that recovery requires debt reduction.

Do you have confidence that Obama can do this?  A lot hangs in the balance.

Newtown, and the wages of American cruelty

I really don't know what to say about the events in CT today, so close to where I grew up, at precisely the time my own children were in school. Tragic events like this are, in the end, inexplicable -- but much like the 9/11 attacks, to simply describe what happened as a consequence of 'evil' is, frankly, a moral cop-out. 

We live in a society that lays claim (sometimes a unique claim) to loving our children. But we don't. Not really. We love our own, yes. But not other people's children. Our children will learn and practice love when we provide them with institutions, laws and communities that reflect and reinforce it. We are cruel to the children of the poor, the undocumented, and the incarcerated, more so than any other developed nation. We tolerate -- even revel in -- breathtaking levels of violence and inequality, giving our young people a sense that using other human beings as a means to our own ends is OK. Its Ok in our foreign 

policy. Its OK at work. And its OK in our relationships.

Silenced by a patriarchal culture that reproduces and rewards male aggression, and that devalues and denigrates humility, doubt, interdependence and vulnerability, we underfund the treatment of mental illness while living in a society that produces it in great quantities. We continue to allow the free flow and use of firearms, far beyond any reasonable definition of self-defense and constitutional protection, ensuring that our children -- especially our poorest children -- will grow up experiencing daily stress and insecurity, perpetuating almost everything I've described above.

I don't know what lessons we're supposed to draw from the events in CT today. But I do know that the cruel and bitter edge of American society, there at its very slave-owning birth as a kind of original sin, seems to have become even sharper in the last two decades. Cruelty is all of a piece, woven together, constricting all of us, even the most privileged and safe. But love is all of a piece, too. And it simply isn't enough, in the end, for us to hoard it, household by household, like one more zero-sum game we're trying to win. Once we commit to loving ALL of our children, the society we construct out of that love will finally make this country -- finally -- a source of great hope in the world.

The needle and the damage done? PEDs and the baseball Hall of Fame

This year, for the first time, the Tainted Five of baseball's Steroid Era are eligible for the Hall of Fame:  Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, and Rafael Palmeiro.

And Royce Clayton is on there too.  This article is not about Royce Clayton.

The arguments below were handcrafted late one night in Providence's venerable Ivy Tavern, with cloudy headed input from Brad and Mason, and intellectual performance enhancements provided by the always lovely Rob Duncanson.  By the end of the evening, I had somewhat surprised myself by arriving at the following conclusion:

Clemens, McGwire, Sosa, Palmeiro and Bonds should all get in the HOF. 

Clemens and Bonds should be first ballot and unanimous Hall of Famers.

Here's the argument.

1.  Perhaps this is obvious, but let's start here:  Clemens, McGwire, Palmeiro, Sosa, Bonds, and perhaps Jeff Bagwell would all be slam dunks for the HOF if performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) were not an issue.  Clemens and Bonds would be first ballot -- even unanimous -- HOFers.  Sosa, McGwire and Palmeiro would all get in in their 2nd or 3rd years, easy.  For Bagwell, it would depend upon who was up against him (he's not getting in over Greg Maddux or Frank Thomas, for example).  In the case of Bonds and Clemens, I would argue that you have the two greatest baseball players of the post-Ruth era.  Brad argued last night that if Bonds and Clemens had both quit at precisely the time when most people believe they started using PEDs (1998-199), they would have been 1st ballot HOFers even then.  I agree. 

2.  Again, obvious, but let's just say it:  all of the above players are now eligible for the HOF, and have been connected, either directly (through testing or confession) or indirectly (rumor, second-hand testimony, sharp and immediate changes in on-field production, the leaked Mitchell Report), to the use of PEDs at some point in their careers.  Palmeiro is the only one who tested positive (in 2005) since drug testing was included in the MLB collective bargaining agreement, with clear penalties attached.  There is no concrete evidence that Palmeiro used for any period before that particular test.  And he served his suspension.  MLB policy then and now doesn't ban a player from baseball for violating the policy.  It carries a series of specific punishments.  You serve the punishment, you can come back and play.

3.  The first testing for steroids took place in secret in 2003.  The names (though not the aggregate data) were supposed to remain secret, as part of the collective bargaining agreement.  MLB officials, in a dishonest power move that both violated labor law and the confidentiality rights of individual players, chose to leak some of that information -- but not enough of it to either provide concrete evidence of guilt, or allow the players to defend their innocence.  For that reason, I don't consider the leaked names on that report to be valid evidence.  I also hasten to point out that drug tests and samples aren't 100% reliable.

4.  While baseball implicitly banned the use of steroids in 1971, and explicitly did so in 1991 (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1151761/1/index.htm), it did not put any machinery in place to enforce that ban until 2003, and didn't ban HGH until 2005.  Because of this, we have no way of knowing who used pre-2003 and who didn't, when, and how much. 

5.  We also don't know, by the way, what effect steroid use has -- on players at different positions, on players with varied skill sets, etc.  Were the career numbers of these players 'enhanced' by the use of PEDs?  Perhaps.  But since they played in an era when hundreds of others were also using (hitters against Clemens, pitchers against Bonds and rest), in an era of franchise expansion (diluting the opposing player talent pool), smaller stadiums, a lively ball, and vast improvements in nutrition, sports medicine, and off-season training, there simply is no objective and fair way to sort any of this out.  Many players have testified that they used steroids or HGH to help them stay on the field and fight through injuries.  What if that actually turns out to be the most reliable benefit of PED use?  Is that actually cheating?

6.  Should these guys be banned from Cooperstown because they 'broke the rules'?  Did they break the rules?  I'm not so sure.  Do recreational users of marijuana break the law when they smoke a joint?  Technically, yes (though thankfully the laws themselves appear to be changing).  But outside of African-American ghettos, marijuana use is fully tolerated by our entire law enforcement apparatus, and the larger culture.  As I noted above, MLB banned the use of steroids in a 1991 memo.  All players, agents, and the union received the memo.  Presumably team owners and general managers did too.  The official message was:  you are not allowed to use PEDs.  The unofficial message, however -- the one that was in actual operational practice in clubhouses and weight rooms across the league -- was that PED use was just fine.  MLB could have enforced its official ban.  It chose not to do so (in part because they profited financially from this oversight).  There is, therefore, a sense in which trying to hold these guys accountable now constitutes an unfair moving of the goalposts, of holding them accountable after the fact for things that were tolerated by all relevant authorities at the time the events took place.

7.  The Hall of Fame is not a rule or law enforcement body.  MLB has its own procedures for that.  if MLB hasn't banned a player for life, its rules should work like laws do more generally -- you break a law, you serve your time, you're done.  No double jeopardy.  Just because our bigoted mass incarceration system locks young men of color into a lifelong 2nd class status despite having already served their time, doesn't mean baseball has to do the same thing. 

8.  PED use was seen as 'just fine' by MLB because the culture of using any edge to get ahead pre-dated the period we're discussing.  Players long before the so-called Steroid Era used PEDs of various sorts.  Amphetamines were widely used for over a half-century, by players who are already in the HOF.  Steroid use began in the 1970s, when their use wasn't even illegal, let alone banned by baseball.  Pitchers cheated by scuffing balls, using spit and vaseline; teams stole signals (most famously the 1951 NY Giants); batters put cork and rubber balls in bats. 

And don't even get me started on the fact that MLB enforced a white monopoly until 1947, which really should justify giving the individual statistics of ALL PRE-JACKIE ROBINSON PLAYERS a big fucking asterisk.  White supremacy as a PED -- how is that for an argument?  Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Ty Cobb.

9.  Bonds and Clemens are, according to most people, assholes.  That doesn't disqualify them from the Hall of Fame.

A-Rod, Raffy, and PEDs in the post-Steroid Era
My argument to this point has been aimed primarily at trying to sort out the HOF credentials of players in the Steroid Era, when PED use wasn't tested or punished, and therefore was effectively legal. 

But what about players in the post-2003 era (random testing, with punishments, started in 2004 -- there were no punishments for flunking the 2003 test), on whom we have concrete evidence of use, because they flunked a test, or because they admitted use?

If you are a Hall of Fame voter, how do you evaluate these guys?  I think you have to take them on a case by case basis.  Look at the total arc of the career, the evidence you have of use at a specific time, and then assess. 

Presumably evidence of PED use during the prime productive years of a borderline HOF player might keep him out, all things considered, but that would depend upon the player.  With Alex Rodriguez, as you'll see below, you could remove his 3 best years, and he would still be a slam dunk first ballot Hall of Famer. 

I do not think it is justified to simply refuse to consider a player for the Hall of Fame, if he has once flunked a test.  Flunking the test comes with a 50 game suspension.  Once served, he has been punished.  He has not been banned from baseball.

So we assess their entire career, keeping in mind that it is essentially impossible to tell with any degree of accuracy what impact the PED use actually had on their performance.

I'm thinking here of A-Rod and Palmeiro, but perhaps also of Manny Ramirez (and some day, Ryan Braun).  Keep in mind I am disregarding, as I have noted above, the supposedly confidential 2003 test.  Manny and Palmeiro have tested positive in the mandatory testing era.  So has Ryan Braun. 

Let's pretend I'm a HOF voter, A-Rod retires tomorrow, and its 2017 -- his first year of eligibility.

A-Rod's name was on the 2003 test I'm disregarding, but he has since admitted use over a 3 year period (2001-2003) while with the Rangers -- a 3 year period that was of course prior to when players were tested and punished.  In other words, it fell during the period when MLB consciously and actively tolerated widespread PED use, when it could have chosen not to do so.  Based on my argument so far, we should just include his 2001-2003 seasons, and move on, putting him in the Hall of Fame on the first ballot.

But A-Rod actually admitted use, and gave us a specific time period.  So let's be more strict than my argument would allow.

I still don't see any way that one could argue to keep A-Rod out of the HOF, when his time comes. 

A-Rod was an astonishing, awesome baseball player while in Seattle, and during his first few years in NY, and there is no evidence whatsoever linking him to PED use while he was in either place; but as I argued above, since PED was effectively legal in MLB during his Seattle years anyway, evidence wouldn't be relevant if it did exist.  He put up ridiculous numbers in 2001-2003, when he has admitted using.  But he put up the same numbers in 2005 and 2007, during the random testing era.  And from 1996-2000, when we have no reason to think he used (and again, as I've argued, we really can't argue that it would matter if he did).

A-Rod said he used while in Texas to stay healthy and on the field, to justify that huge contract.  Perhaps, perhaps not.  The reasons aren't relevant.  How should the discerning HOF voter assess this?

Let's take a harsh look at it, and eliminate all 3 years (2001, 2002, 2003).  Pretend he didn't even play.  That is almost certainly not fair to A-Rod, since his career arc before and after indicates that he would have put up terrific numbers anyway.  And again, he used during a period when PEDs were ubiquitous, and unpunished.

His career numbers WITH those 3 years:
In 19 seasons:  2900 hits.  Almost 1900 runs.  647 HRs, and 1950 RBIs.  a .300 batting average.  and just over 300 steals.  A batting title.  5 HR crowns.  2 RBI titles.  MVP 3 times, and in top 3 three other times.

His average over 162 games:  42 HRs, 125 RBIs, 122 runs, 20 stolen bases.  Over 19 years.  CRAZY.  And did the best of it while playing short, where no one else has ever put up numbers even close to this.

His career numbers WITHOUT those 3 seasons:

His career numbers:  458 HRs.  1545 RBIs.  1516 runs.  .300 BA.  Over 200 stolen bases.  2 MVP awards.

162 game average, in 16 seasons:  36 HRs.  123 RBIs.  120 runs.  22 stolen bases.

If a guy averages -- AVERAGES -- 36 homers, 123 RBIs, and 120 runs a year FOR SIXTEEN YEARS...sorry friends, he's going in the Hall of Fame, first ballot, not close.  To give you some perspective, the best year HOFer Mike Schmidt ever had was slightly inferior to what A-Rod averaged in the 16 years we're discussing...and we've excluded 3 of A-Rod's best seasons.

The Palmeiro/PED question is much easier to parse.  While A-Rod supposedly used right in the middle of his most productive years, Palmeiro flunked one test (after passing all previous ones) in 2005 -- his last year in baseball, and at least two years past any seasons you could call reasonably productive.  In all likelihood, he took a little something to help him stay on the field long enough to get his 3000th hit.

Palmeiro wasn't the player A-Rod has been (who is?), but he ended his career with over 500 HRs and 3000 hits.  His 162 game average was 33 HRs, 105 RBIs and a .288 BA.  He didn't just reach 500 homers -- he got to 569.  Palmeiro seems almost pedestrian when measured against peers like Griffey, Bonds and A-Rod.  But when measured against everyone else (and the vast majority of players in baseball history), he was exceptional.  He should be in.the Hall of Fame.



It is a fun parlor game to try to figure who used, and when.  Fans can speculate endlessly.  We enjoy it.  But when push comes to shove, I don't believe we have the evidence or the ethical grounding to keep Bonds, Clemens, Sosa, Palmeiro and McGwire out.

Fire away, boys.