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Louis Proyect | 1 Jun 2009 02:20
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Swan's Release: June 1, 2009

Swans Commentary http://www.swans.com/ June 1, 2009

***  Thank you Michael DeLang, Charles Pearson, and Walter Trkla for 
your  financial contributions. Please, good readers, support our work 
financially.  Check our Donation page: 
http://www.swans.com/about/donate.html. ***

Note from the Editors:  "We make war that we may live in peace," 
according to  Aristotle. Yet, after millennia of war, when will we 
finally see that peace?  After a fiery, no-win debate amongst Swans 
contributors that began over the  use of pilotless drones, Raju Peddada 
came out fighting in one corner on  behalf of the merits of war as a 
means to peace and as an inherent part of  the natural world, while 
naturalist Martin Murie countered that it is  civilized, proper, and 
timely to oppose wars in the service of empire.  Warriors, we are told, 
are peace-loving individuals, and you always find  people lauding their 
virile courage and even justifying torture in its name.  Michael Doliner 
invokes, with the help of a dark-humorous allegory, the kind  of mindset 
and power structure that it takes to use torture despite its 
ineffectiveness and unintended consequences. Louis Proyect exposes that 
very  mindset and power structure that has brought us slavery and racism 
in his  review of David Roediger's "How Race Survived U.S. History." 
Those versed in  French should read the 1861 Victor Hugo letter 
regarding the destruction and  spoilage of the Chinese Summer Palace by 
the French and the British in the  name of "civilization" and the 
cherished freedom to accumulate.

To counter the war proponents, we find it fitting to republish works by 
Boris  Vian and Tiziano Terzani -- a powerful collection from two 
dissidents that  spans from the 1950s to 2002 and which serves as a good
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Louis Proyect | 1 Jun 2009 15:38
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Neo-Liberal Economic Policies in the United States

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/21584
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Louis Proyect | 1 Jun 2009 16:20
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Are we in a post-racial America?

Are We In A Post-Racial America?
by Louis Proyect

Book Review

Roediger, David: How Race Survived U.S. History: from settlement and 
slavery to the Obama phenomenon, Verso 2008, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-275-2, 
240 pages.

(Swans - June 1, 2009)   As part of the euphoria surrounding the 
election of Barack Obama, members of the punditocracy speculated that 
the U.S. had entered a "post-racial" epoch. Typical was The Washington 
Post's Jim Hoagland who editorialized on Election Day last year:

     Barack Obama has succeeded brilliantly in casting his candidacy -- 
indeed, his whole life -- as post-racial. Even before the votes have 
been cast, he has written a glorious coda for the civil rights struggle 
that provided this nation with many of the finest, and also most 
horrible, moments of its past 150 years. If the results confirm that 
race was not a decisive factor in the balloting, generations of 
campaigners for racial justice and equality will have seen their work 
vindicated.

After deploying data in his introduction to How Race Survived U.S. 
History to the effect that racism continues unabated (one in three 
children of color lives in poverty as opposed to one in ten of white 
families, etc.), David Roediger poses the question: "How did white 
supremacy in the U.S. not yield to changes that we generally regard as 
constant, dramatic, and, in the main, progressive?" The remainder of his 
brilliantly argued and researched book gives the definitive answer to
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Jim Devine | 1 Jun 2009 17:03
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"Cheat Neutral"

>From Robert Frank's NYT column:
>... A British Web site called Cheat Neutral (www.cheatneutral.com) parodies the concept — by offering
a service under which someone who wants to cheat on his partner can pay someone else who will refrain from
committing an act of infidelity. The site’s founders say they wanted to use humor to demonstrate why the
market for carbon offsets is a moral travesty...

> AT last count, Cheat Neutral, the British infidelity neutralization Web site, said it had offset 65,768
cheats, and had recruited a roster of “9,002 faithful people ready to neutralize your
misdemeanors.” The Web site draws out the parallel this way: “When you cheat on your partner you add to
the heartbreak, pain, and jealousy in the atmosphere.” Cheat Neutral claims that its plan
“neutralizes the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience.” <

[Frank thinks that the analogy with carbon offsets is inaccurate.]
--

-- 
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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Jim Devine | 1 Jun 2009 17:11
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PK on Reagan

IMHO, it's wrong to blame Reagan. But it's right to blame ReaganISM
(neoliberalism, Calvin Coolidge Capitalism), as the proximate causes,
since that includes the Reaganism of the Clinton & Dubya eras. Beneath
the surface of Reaganism, of course, lurks the vested interests of a
lot of financiers and rich folks, seeking short-term gain and not
caring about long-term consequences for others (and even for
themselves, since hope springs eternal if you're rich).

Op-Ed / The New York Times / June 1, 2009

Reagan Did It By PAUL KRUGMAN

“This bill is the most important legislation for financial
institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution
for troubled thrift institutions. ... All in all, I think we hit the
jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St.
Germain Depository Institutions Act.

He was, as it happened, wrong about solving the problems of the
thrifts. On the contrary, the bill turned the modest-sized troubles of
savings-and-loan institutions into an utter catastrophe. But he was
right about the legislation’s significance. And as for that jackpot —
well, it finally came more than 25 years later, in the form of the
worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the
clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis
inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years.

Attacks on Reaganomics usually focus on rising inequality and fiscal
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Jim Devine | 1 Jun 2009 17:41
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a preeminently predictable "pickle"

Pen-pals have been predicting this problem for more than a decade. (In
addition, the article notes that "California was mulling its
governor’s cost-saving plan to outright abolish programs of cash
welfare and children’s health insurance." Our Noble and Wise
Gubbernator is also considering eliminating the state’s
welfare-to-work program, CalWorks.) The solution, of course, is for
poor people to declare themselves to be banks or auto companies.

> The New York Times / June 1, 2009

The Safety Net:  Slumping Economy Tests Aid System Tied to Jobs

By JASON DePARLE

WASHINGTON — For nearly two decades, Americans have built a safety net
that is tough on those who fail to work and rewards those who do.

Insisting that the poor should work and agreeing that work should pay,
policy makers spent the 1990s cutting welfare rolls while pouring
billions of dollars into programs like wage and child care subsidies
aimed at the working poor.

But joblessness, not welfare dependency, is now the national scourge.
And as a poverty conference convened here last week, custodians of the
safety net confronted an obvious question: If aid is reserved for
people with jobs, what happens when the jobs go away?

“We have a work-based safety net without work,” said Timothy M.
Smeeding, an economist at the University of Wisconsin. “We’re really
in a pickle.”
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Michael Perelman | 1 Jun 2009 18:01
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Re: PK on Reagan

Reagan's ideology, to be sure, is responsible for the mess, but Clinton 
was probably more effective in putting it into practice.
--

-- 
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
michaelperelman.wordpress.com
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Jim Devine | 1 Jun 2009 18:03
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kill, kill, kill for Life

from SLATE:
All major US newspapers front > the murder of George Tiller, one of
the few doctors in the country who provided late-term abortions.
Tiller, who had survived numerous attacks throughout the years, was
shot and killed yesterday in the lobby of his church in Whichita,
Kan., where he was serving as an usher. Police later apprehended a
51-year-old man. Police believe the gunman acted alone, but they're
still investigating to see whether he had any connections to any one
of the anti-abortion groups that frequently protested outside Tiller's
practice was one of only three in the country that, under certain
conditions, provided abortions to women in their third trimester. Of
course, prominent anti-abortion groups denied they had anything to do
with this and condemned the act. Tiller, 67, provided abortions for
more than three decades and was often on the receiving end of threats
and harassment from the most virulent opponents of the practice. His
clinic was bombed in 1986 and he was shot in both arms in 1993. Tiller
also successfully defended his practice in a number of legal
challenges.

> Tiller is the fourth abortion provider to be killed in the United States since 1993 and the first since
1998. The LA [TIMES] notes that the murder, "plunges the debate over legalized abortion back in time," to
an era when attacks on abortion providers were distressingly commonplace. Attorney General Eric Holder
said last night that the U.S. Marshals Service will move to protect abortion providers and facilities to
"help prevent any related acts of violence." Some note that while attacks may have dropped when abortion
foes had an ally in the White House with President Bush, that doesn't mean it couldn't increase again now
that there's a pro-choice president. "When social movements feel they're not getting anywhere, they get
desperate," one sociology professor tells the LAT. "This is deeply tragic but unsurprising." Others
caution against tying the acts of radical extremists to political trends.

> Slate's Emily Bazelon writes in Double X that the killing of Tiller "is a reminder, as if we needed one, of
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Jim Devine | 1 Jun 2009 19:15
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Re: Literary criticism and economics [was: It's the metonymy, stupid!]

On Sat, May 30, 2009, Sandwichman wrote:
> Mirable dictu! So it turns out that you and I actually agree, Jim. What you
disagree with is a distortion of my position ("as Tom seems to do").
You reject economic growth as a normative concept. I reject economic
growth as a  normative concept. You agree with my position that
rejecting economic growth as a useful concept only makes sense if
there is an alternative concept to do the work previously done
(however badly) by the concept of economic growth.<

For what it's worth, this is what I have been saying for a long, long
time: I reject economic growth as a normative concept. I don't
understand why this has been missed. (The only normative content is
that if real GDP does not rise sufficiently (or if it falls), all else
equal the unemployment rate rises, by all standard measures.)

FWIW2, when I use such phrases as "as Tom seems to do," I mean it
literally: I use such phrases because I am unable to read people's
minds simply from their prose. I do not pretend to be able to
represent anyone's positions accurately, except my own. (Somehow
people still misunderstand what I write. My poor prose!)

> Where we may differ is that I maintain there is indeed such an alternative
but that it makes no sense to stipulate that the alternative can only
be  justified *from the perspective of economic growth as a normative
concept*.
In other words, the alternative stands on its own feet. It is in no
way  subordinate to the concept of economic growth or its constituent
parts. That
would be like having to justify the Copernican system *in terms of* the
Ptolemaic one. Both impossible and absurd. So although economic growth
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Jim Devine | 1 Jun 2009 19:23
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Re: Neo-Liberal Economic Policies in the United States

In the article at
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/21584, Kim Scipes
writes that >The case of the United States is particularly useful to
examine because its elites have projected themselves as "first among
equals" of the globalization project (Bello, 2006), and it is the
place of the Global North where the neo-liberal project has been
pursued most resolutely and has advanced the farthest.<

is this true? my impression is that the neoliberal project has been
pursued most resolutely where resistance to it has been weakest.  For
example, the World Bank and the IMF have been running roughshod over
sub-Saharan Africa for decades. It's Bolivia, not the U.S., where the
privatization of water supplies was tried.

(Of course, it _has_ been privatized in the US in the sense that
marketeers convinced many of us to buy bottled water using scares
about pollution in the public water supply. But we can still drink
from the tap with minimal cost.)
--

-- 
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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