Indignant Desert Birds

It seems that Mitch McConnell hates the fact that Democrats won’t go along with his ideas. The fact that his ideas are terrible is sort of besides the point. Remember that gridlock comes, not from congressional obstinance, but from legitimate disagreement about the best course of action for America. That disagreement is good and healthy, but in order to properly weigh and measure which side has the better plan, they must be allowed to implement that plan.

So McConnall has a… call it a vestige of a point. The American political system really is broken. In 2008, Americans elected Obama and a huge Democratic majority. They promised to pass a huge stimulus, pass healthcare reform, and end the war in Iraq.

We ended up with… a continued involvement in Iraq, a barely adequate healthcare reform, and a Federal economic stimulus that almost (but didn’t quite) do enough to cover the anti-stimulus being done by the various states.

The reasons for this had little to do with the leadership of Obama or Pelosi (or Reid!), and everything to do with the mechanics of Congress. It is shockingly easy for a small group of elected officials to gum up all of Congress and keep it from doing anything. Blaming Obama for this is a bit like blaming an engine installer for auto body damage.

If we tried the Democratic plan and it failed, I’d agree that McConnell should be allowed his turn to fix things. Instead, he was able to block the Democrats from implementing their plans, and is furious that Democrats are able to block his.

Tags: conservative, pestilence, politics by Punning Pundit
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In my last post I expressed some frustration with the protests. I wish to assure my fellow liberals that not only do I empathize, I sympathize. The math is as inescapable as it is disturbing. We absolutely need to change that math, because “not as bad as the Republicans” isn’t a bar anyone should feel comfortable making their voting line. It will, yes, require a (hopefully peaceful) revolution to fix.

Perhaps Wisconsin’s days of peaceful rage will be the first strike in a wider movement to reclaim and fix our broken institutions. Perhaps not. One way or the other, it’s the Good Fight. I can’t be there in person. But in solidarity with them, I’m leaving a live stream of the fight up on my blog.

GL HF, ladies and gentlemen. GL, HF

Tags: free speech, human rights, politics, war by Punning Pundit
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I remember the year 2000. I remember thinking that things were pretty good with Clinton, and Gore promised more of the same. I was a fairly raging moderate. I remember when Gore won, and how much it seemed like an injustice to stop the vote counting. (This was before I learned about the overvote situation.) Still, when Bush won, I remember thinking he can’t be as big a caricature of a conservative as the liberals would have us think. And then Bush let the arsenic back into the drinking water as a favor to mining companies. And, of course, the Iraq war. History, I think, has already shown us exactly how close the caricature of Bush the Tool came to being reality.

Then I remembered something else. The very people who were furthest-left, the ones who were the best predictors of how Bush would behave once in office were also claiming that Gore was too right-wing. Ralph Nader, for instance, would go on to write a book about how two parties are basically the same. So in 2000, the liberals didn’t show up to vote, and Bush won.

And in 2004, the liberals didn’t show up to vote, so Bush won. And in early 2005, Bush tried to destroy Social Security.

And I remember the anger in 2006. That anger caused liberals to turn out in droves. It was a red-hot palpable thing that burned away Republican majorities. And Nancy Pelosi– bless her San Francisco heart– passed some major progressive legislation. Granted, much of it was vetoed by Bush, or Filibustered in the Senate, but it did pass.

And so in 2008, we liberals were still upset. And we showed up yet again. We put a liberal in the White House! For a few days we had a filibuster-proof Senate! Huge majorities in the house! We passed a universal healthcare bill! We ended the Iraq war! We got pissed that we didn’t pass enough good stuff and didn’t bother showing up to the polls in 2010. Republicans took the House, and many governorships and state legislatures.

Are you pissed at what’s happening in Wisconsin? Are you whipped up in a furry about cuts to Planned Parenthood, NPR, and your local school district? Guess what: we knew this would happen. This is exactly what we said would happen if you didn’t show up to vote. When you don’t show up to vote, Republicans win elections and fulfill their campaign promises to be giant flaming douche bags.

So: there’s tremendous energy in Wisconsin to recall a bunch of Republicans. Fantastic! Where the fuck was that energy in 2010 when it could have put a union-friendly Democrat in the governor’s mansion?

No matter how much you may want Democrats to be further to the left than they are, no matter how little you think they do for the working person, no matter how corporate-owned you think they are: understand that institutionally, their hearts are in the right place.

How I know that Democrats wouldn’t do this? When the time came to uphold their sacred principles, the Democrats left the state, faced arrest, and dared the governor to send in the troops. We get mealy mouthed sometimes. Compromise is in our nature. When the existential threat comes, though, we recognize it, and fight with every tool in our arsenal. Remember: we got universal healthcare while the Republicans were busy patting themselves on the back for making it impossible. We lost the South– possibly forever– in order to restore the franchise to black folks.

We don’t have to like the mathematical necessity of the two party system. I personally detest it. I’m trying to get into a position where I can help smash it. But in the mean time, the math absolutely dictates that we are stuck with two parties. And given the choice between the party of cartoon evil, and the party of occasional competence, I know where I’m putting my energy. Every fucking time.

Tags: liberal, politics by Punning Pundit
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Made some small changes to the site. What do you think?

Tags: internal blog stuff, Uncategorized by Punning Pundit
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Wisconsin Labor Rally – Madison, WI – Saturday, Feb 26 2011 from ubiquity75 on Vimeo.

One of the more important conversations I had in my college career went something like:

Professor: So really, a paper is just an answer to a question
Me: So how do you generate questions
Professor: that’s the hard part.

The trick to writing a good paper is to think of a question no one has ever before answered, and then answer it. And you need to anticipate every possible objection– questions about your methodology, data, etc– and answer those, too. Want to tear a paper apart? The trick to that is not to attack the methodology, but to attack the thing I just glossed over in the “etc”*. Attacking the basic assumptions made by a thought process is the the most fundamental method of determining the strength of that thought process.

So: how big should government be? This isn’t the fundamental question, obviously. The fundamental question is “what is government”. Wikipedia provides a pretty good answer: “governments are the means through which state power is employed”. Employing state power sounds… unpleasant. So that brings up the next question “why would we want that?”

The very short version is this: government exists in order to facilitate positive-sum interactions, in cases where humans tend to default to negative-sum interactions.

There are a whole host of goods and services for which it is cheaper to buy them in bulk, or there are positive or negative externalities associated with their presence or absence**. It is almost always easier for government to set up rules for private organizations to provide those goods and services, but once we have a fabulous coercive mechanism in place, there is a temptation to use that mechanism to provide for some of those goods and services.

Once citizens decide to use the coercive power of the State to do things like pay for children to learn things, or keep unemployed people from starving to death, or keep old people from dying in the gutters, or create and maintain a system for removing excrement from our homes and transporting it elsewhere, or any of a thousand other things, we need to pay people to do these things, and (with some oversight and performance metrics ) get out of their way.

Vague talk about “shrinking government” doesn’t really enter into this equation. The question is “which services are we collectively over-paying for?” It may even be “which programs should we cease being responsible for collectively?” The question, in other words, isn’t about size, it’s about efficiency.

I don’t like paying taxes either. I don’t like paying for anything, but the people who create the goods and services I want would like some recompense for their labor. It doesn’t really matter if I’m paying a private organization or a public one– I’ve still got to pay for services rendered.

*see what I did there?
**Yeah, I’m repeating stuff I said yesterday

Tags: human rights, liberal, politics by Punning Pundit
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The thirteenth amendment reads in full:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

There’s an odd clause in there, seemingly allowing slavery to exist under certain circumstances. I don’t think it was the intention of the Abe Lincoln– or whoever wrote the actual text of the Amendment (possibly Lyman Trumbull)– intended to create a loophole allowing for slavery to exist. I’m not psychic, so I won’t pretend that I have time traveling mind reading powers, but it seems unlikely. Rather, I think it’s simply impossible to draw a bright line between prison and slavery.

Which is why this article about prison labor is so scary. There is nothing inherently wrong with prison labor, per se. The feeling of utter uselessness is perhaps the most depressing one in the world, and the ability to do something probably keeps at least a few people from going stir crazy.

So that’s one thing. Stacked against that you have “wet-suit-clad inmates repair[ing] leaky public water tanks”. I’m not sure how much it costs to hire someone to to put on a wet suit, re-breather, grab a welding torch and get to work, but I’ll bet it’s more than $29,000 a year.

This creates some awfully perverse incentives for society to create more prisoners than it otherwise might. It might sound like cartoonishly evil to imagine that a judge would accept payment in order to convict children, but such things happen.

If we’re using prison labor as free labor– if we’re selling that labor off to private companies (as is strongly implied by the article), that means that there are two people being deprived of the value of their labor: 1) the inmate and 2) the person who would otherwise be getting paid to do the job in lieu of the slave.

This is what we mean when we say that labor has dignity. The dignity of labor is one of the major differences between a slave society and a free one. It may not be the case that organized labor is the only force capable of standing up against the reimposition of slave labor– not even I will be that hyperbolic– but it is the case a well organized labor movement is capable and incentivized to stand up against the encroaching prison state.

This is what they are fighting for in Wisconsin. Not a particular wage and benefit package, but the right to stand up and say “we are worth more than slaves.” If they can’t do that, then who will?

Tags: human rights, liberal, pestilence, politics by Punning Pundit
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My lines had been empty all day. Those lines ought to have had tens of thousands of people in them, and they were empty. Field reports ought to have been reassuring, but Central Ohio has an ugly history of voter intimidation. Four years previously, the lines had been hundreds deep and hours long. Four years previously, thousands of (black) voters had been– illegally– turned away. One party stood up and said that voter intimidation wasn’t a big deal. One party, in fact, had said that they were going to solve the opposite problem– paperwork was going to be demanded of everyone before they would be granted the franchise.

That party wasn’t pushing for voter intimidation, not exactly. Just an extra bit of grit in gears of an election. Special grit that only effects people who don’t drive. You know– poor people. It was one more obstacle between citizens and the vote. Just one more thing preying on my mind as I saw empty lines.

The other party– my party– looked at those hours-long lines and shouted out “Never Again!” Well. Alright. Democrats never shout. Shouting is for socialists like Bernie Sanders. But we did sort of hint around the edges that we wouldn’t really like to see that sort of thing ever again. So we had some people sit down and draw up plans. My job was to implement those plans. But my lines were empty.

An hour before the polls closed and my lines were empty. That’s when the van showed up. 30 people in SEIU purple spilled out. Running. “Who’s in charge of this staging location” came the shouted question. I grabbed my crutches and hobbled over. I handed them some walk sheets, watch them work out logistics, grab sandwiches and hustle out to find voters to fill my lines.

There are a lot of lessons from that story. Perhaps most importantly: early voting wins elections. But the great moral lesson is this: whenever poor people need a hand, wherever working people are getting a raw deal, whenever you see someone who would like a job but is being denied, whenever money and power are being used as a tool of oppression, you will see a union fighting against that injustice. Because an injury to one is an injury to all.

Today I stand with the Dropkick Murphys (seriously, take a listen to that song!), Bruce Springsteen (He’s a fair boss), and Martin Luther King Jr. (who was murdered while helping organize an union),and the people of newly-freed Egypt in solidarity with the Workers of Wisconsin.

Without unions, the arc of history is bent less steadily towards justice. That’s everything you need to know.

Tags: Election 08, human rights, liberal, politics, war by Punning Pundit
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Follow the bouncing ball.

Imagine an American in which unions hadn’t gone into decline.

In that world, workers would have had the leverage to bargain. So instead of flat compensation for 40 years, we’d turn some of that Ever growing executive compensation into higher wages for labor.

In the world where workers have more money year over year, they don’t need to borrow money against their houses in order to afford their lifestyles.

In the world where second mortgages do not become normal, Wall Street lacks the raw material to create the CDO, and the synthetic loan.

In the world where Wall Street cannot do that, the housing crisis doesn’t happen, or if it does happen it’s effects are minimized.

In a world where the effects are minimal or non existent, We’re not facing 10% unemployment that’s causing the US government to borrow even more money.

I could go on. But you should get the point. Unions are the key by which America unlocks prosperity. We let managment break that key, but a new one can be forged. They’re doing it right now in Wisconsin.

Tags: famine, human rights, liberal by Punning Pundit
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Hurrah, hurrah, I have a new job. I’m working at a restaurant. This is not the sort of thing that’s considered a “real” job– management was shocked when they saw someone with my resume applying. Put a pin in that thought for a moment.

During the orientation, I was given a bunch of paperwork to fill out. Many of the forms I was required to sign were certifying that I had “read and understood” things like tipping laws, and the employee handbook, among others. After I had signed these forms, I was given the opportunity to read the documents I’d already sworn I’d read and understood. If I don’t like it, I can join the 10% of Americans looking for work.

Another interesting bit of paperwork I was required to sign was one waiving my right to a civil trial if I had a litigation-requiring dispute with the company. I am, of course, free to not sign these papers. Of course, most every employer requires the waiving of such rights, and individuals nearly always lack power with which to negotiate. So I signed. And generally hope that those clauses are unenforceable.

The boss told myself and my fellow trainees that “the restaurant gives you two holidays ever year. You should be happy– some restaurants are open on Christmas and Thanksgiving” That prompted me to ask “But we get overtime on Federal holidays, right?” The response is worth emphasizing:

“No. That’s only for places that have unions. We don’t have unions around here”

So about Wisconsin.

They’re not striking for wages and benefits. At least, they’re willing to negotiate and make concessions. We’re in a time of major economic difficulty, and we can’t ask rich people to foot part of the bill, so Unions need to do their part. Seems fair, right? Certainly part of the landscape in 21st century America. That’s not what this strike is about.

This strike is about the fact that every job is a “real” job. The strike is about the basic right of workers to form organizations that leverage the only power workers have: their ability to collectively walk off the job.

The thing is, most workers have enough human capital to do a whole lot of jobs competently. Which means the bargaining power of any given worker is pretty small. An organization that lacks a single person can fill that hole. An organization that lacks all workers is in a whole lot of trouble. Thus the only real power that workers have is en mass.

This strike is about the fact that your boss might care about you, but your organization cannot , does not, and is not allowed to.
The only organization which does care, can care, and must care is a union. This strike is about the fact that the governor wants to take away the only power workers have, and workers cannot let that happen.

Remember what I said a earlier about arbitration? That’s when a worker thinks an employer has harmed them in some way that isn’t illegal, and so they sue. Except that instead of going before a disinterested judge, the corporation will hire a judge– and that judge knows that if they wants to get hired again they will find in favor of the corporation. When workers are unionized, unions help pay for the judge.

And about negotiating pay? Who has the stronger bargaining position: 1) an individual and replaceable worker, or 2) an entire workforce? (hint: 2).

And finally, let’s not forget what my new boss said about federal holidays being for people in unions. In Wisconsin, they’re fighting for the basic right to wave a flag and have apple pie at a 4th of July barbecue.

Tags: human rights, personal by Punning Pundit
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The full text of the first section of the 14th Amendment reads as follows:

Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

That seems fairly straightforward, right? It defines American citizenship, and says that any right granted to citizens are granted to all citizens. In fact, given the language used (“persons”), I’m not sure that the US could refuse citizenship to sentient robots, vampires, or extra-terrestrial aliens.

Section 2 contradicts Section 1 a small bit, in that it specifically sets aside voting rights to males over the age of 21 and who haven’t “participat[ed] in rebellion, or other crime”

Sections 3 and 4 also stick it to the confederate veterans of the Civil War.

The 19th Amendment gives women the right to vote.

Both the 14th and 19th amendments have the following words as their final section “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

A plain reading of the basic text of the US Constitution would thus mandate that any law that demands employers treat employees a certain way applies to men and women. And straight people and gay people. And people of any color or ethnic background humanity cares to invent. If the Federal, or a State, government wants to allow a pair of people to form a union and become a single legal entity (marriage), then a plain reading of the Constitution demands that such a right is granted to all citizens.

Antonin Scalia doesn’t like this. He doesn’t like this at all. I won’t read his mind to state his motivations for not liking this, but Scalia reads the minds of voters 1868 and decides that “if indeed the current society has come to different views, that’s fine. You do not need the Constitution to reflect the wishes of the current society. Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that.”

None of them, eh Scalia? That’s a big statement. It’s also irrelevant. Their minds are now dust, but their words are eternal. If they wanted to codify gender or orientation discrimination into the Constitution, they should have done so. They specifically outlawed religious*, ethnic, and racial discrimination. Our ancestors have had 235 years in which to do so. They didn’t, and now we’re finally realizing that they didn’t.

I’ll even perhaps agree with Scalia that this was an oversight on the part of centuries of voters. Their blindness left a huge breach in the firewall of bigotry. Americans of the 21st century have the choice now about how much to exploit that breach, and how quickly we may be able to burn the edifice of hate. Scalia has decided to throw himself against the oncoming surge of human happiness. Oddly, he seems to give his own fears more weight than the text of the Constitution.

*Good thing for Scalia that they did so. Many people feared that by not insisting on a religious test, we might end up with a Catholic (like Scalia) as a holder of high office.

Tags: conservative, politics by Punning Pundit
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