Civil Rights Do Not Come in Separate Boxes

I don't really refer to myself as a 'liberal' anymore, though I certainly believe in core values that can be described as liberal in today's political metrics. This is not because the word is no longer 'cool' in American politics, but rather because I have drifted further to the left than the mainstream of American political liberalism. I would say they have drifted to my right, but I have to recognize that my political maturation has been a step by step journey further to the left.

I certainly refuse to call myself a 'progressive', both because I reject the utopian underpinnings of the original meaning of the word and because I reject the more modern notion that 'liberalism' and 'progress' are automatically synonymous. Not all change is automatically good, and quite a bit of human progress has been counterproductive. One can't turn back the clock or hold back the future, but we need to try to make better decisions.

Never the less, it really made me happy to see someone else make sense on the key left wing issue of civil rights.

Writing in The American Prospect, Ann Friedman writes:

In the wake of the passage of the House health-reform bill and its attached anti-choice Stupak-Pitts Amendment, the conversation happening among progressive women was viscerally angry and palpably fearful. The broader liberal conversation was very different -- one in which the amendment was regrettable but unavoidable in the interest of the greater good. It is moments like this, with Democrats in control of Congress and a nominally progressive president in the White House, when it becomes painfully clear that in reality we do not all take on the same level of responsibility for securing the rights in which we claim to believe.

We rely on gay-rights groups to battle it out alone for marriage rights in Maine. We expect feminists to secure abortion rights in health-care reform legislation. We look to the NAACP to effectively respond to racist statements about Obama. And yes, those groups will work hard for those goals. But when they fall short, they are not the only ones to blame. It's fair to look at the entire progressive coalition and ask the hard questions about our movement: What's the use of having a community, a coalition, if you aren't going to fight for each other? Are we amplifying the voices of those whom we hope to empower or silencing them? Whose "greater good" are we really pursuing?

Shout it a little louder. Please. I don't think most people on the left right now are really listening closely. At least, not the ones in actual positions of power.

In the specific case of Stupak-Pitts, the problem is relatively simple: health care is such a massively important issue that it is easy for a pragmatic policy-maker to say 'I am going to do whatever it takes to pass health care reform, because health care reform is better than no health care reform.' This is laregly a correct moral and intellectual position. The problem is that the purpose of health care reform is to serve society as a whole and the rights of the individuals within society. So when one makes a compromise that undermines the very purpose behind health care reform by undermining the individual rights of the Americans the policy is supposed to help, one is not really serving the interests of health care reform at all. One is undermining it. As a very smart fellow said before me: these kinds of violations of individual rights are exactly what conservatives foretell with gloom and doom when they predict the dangers of government intervention. The irony that conservatives oppose health care reform because of the danger of restrictions on patient-doctor decisions about care and that it was conservatives who colluded to actually place them there should be voiced more clearly and more often.

Instead of a fundamentally united civil rights lobby, we have a badly divided set of individual lobbies for the rights of specific groups. Instead of adopting a comprehensive civil rights platform for all Americans, the Democratic Party (and the liberal coalition within it) have instead established 'women's rights' platforms, 'minority rights' platforms, and 'gay rights' platforms that all work at cross purposes. I understand the political circumstances that have brought this about, but it is immensely counterproductive. We need a simple, basic, comprehensive platform supporting human rights: equal recognition of the natural rights of all Americans.

I am reminded of something from one of the last HBO specials of the late George Carlin:

"Rights are an idea. They are a cute idea, but that's all they are. Let's say you do have rights; where do they come from? Oh, you say, they come from God, they're God given rights... Personally, folks, I believe that if your rights came from God he would have given you the right to some food, he'd have given you the right to a roof over your head; God would've been lookin' out for ya!"

I both disagree and disagree with the philosopher Carlin. Rights are an idea. They are an idea borne of human intellect and human imagination. Yet I believe that human intellect and human imagination are God given, and that the notion of natural rights is entirely valid. It is better to agree to accept a 'cute idea', in this case, then to accept the far too obvious alternative:

"If you still think you do have rights, one last assignment for you. Get on the computer. Go to Wikipedia. When you get to Wikipedia, in the search field, I want you to type in 'Japanese Americans 1942' and you'll find out all about your precious fuckin' rights, okay?"

Since Blogger does not allow one to include a link in a quote block, I include this for the edification of my readers.

This is precisely the alternative to the cute idea of rights and is a point that should escape no one on the left. The internment of Japanese Americans happened precisely because the majority of American citzens were so focused on the 'big picture' and the 'necessary compromises' to achieve their greater goals that they pissed all over the basic premise of America itself. Health care should not become the same kind of clusterfuck.

Health care is not the point, however. It is merely one example that illustrates the point. The Japanese American internment is another. So is the somewhat soft commitment of many liberals to genuinely equal rights for gay Americans. The difference between a 'civil union' and a 'civil marriage' is such a tenuous fiction that it becomes useless to maintain it; unless one really intends to deny gay couples the full rights of interpersonal partnership.

One can go on. The willingness of 'liberals' to pander to nativist policies regarding illegal immigration deserve some attention, perhaps. The unwillingness of liberals to put real effort into passing laws to protect workers' rights to bargain fairly with their employers also come to mind.

As Ann Friedman writes:

"After all, "special interest" issues do not exist in separate silos. Labor rights are tied to gay rights are tied to women's rights are tied to immigrants' rights. If what binds us together as progressives is our vision for a more just society, it is our commitment to all of these issues that will define us."

Forgetting this is a fundamental betrayal of basic principles. One can even call it a fundamental betrayal of basic American principles and leave the word 'progressive' out entirely. I'd far prefer that she had done just that.

Ultimately, however, even Ms. Friedman loses her way:

"We can't work from sweeping visions of liberalism on down. We have to work from concrete rights and opportunities on up. Think of it this way: White men are the least likely Americans to identify as progressives. The people most likely to identify with the liberal worldview -- women, people of color, LGBT people, disenfranchised workers -- are those who have experienced a lack of freedom and opportunity themselves. They are then motivated to broaden their scope and see how injustice also affects other Americans. It is the progressive movement's commitment to these people -- its base, its core -- that will ensure its long-term survival. If we continue to compromise on the concerns of those people, or dismiss them as "special interests" working against an imaginary greater good, we will ultimately render our shared concept of liberalism totally meaningless. After all, if each group within the coalition is actually just in it alone, what's the point of subscribing to a common ideology at all?"

Most of this is dead on the money, but it fails to make the most important point. What is not needed is a renewal of the commitment to protect the rights of each member of the 'liberal coalition.' What is needed is a new and genuine commitment from all members of the coalition to protect the basic, common rights of individuals within society. True social justice requires us all to shed our labels. Even those of us 'priveleged' to be 'white men.'

Real social justice requires we all be willing to share the label 'human' without claiming our own precedence. Even if we really want to get Blue Dog votes for health care reform or badly want blue collar whites in the Rust Belt to vote for us.

Do you? Do you really?

My father's favorite line, when talking politics, is, 'I'm a fiscal conservative, but a social liberal.'

My father voted for Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. He may have even voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Starting in 1984, however, my father has not ever voted Republican in a presidential election. Starting in 1994 (he voted for Pete Wilson for governor of California in 1990, something he tremendously regretted after he saw what kind of governor Wilson was), I don't believe he's voted Republican at all. Despite having never changed his party registration.

My father, like many people of his generation, does his best to say what he actually means and to actually mean what he says. Not everyone is so straight-forward in their thinking or communication.

From Bob La Follette (both of them), to Thomas Dewey, to Nelson Rockefeller, to John Anderson there has historically been representation for this view within the Republican Party. At some times, such as during the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy years, it has been the professed platform of the Republican Party.

This is no longer the case. The Republican Party has done its best to purge them. Arlen Specter, who once slapped Anita Hill around (figuratively) on behalf of the religious right, was driven out of the GOP earlier this year for compromising with Democrats on economic policy.

More recently, in the New York 23rd Congressional District, Dede Scozzafava became the figurative punching bag for the national conservative establishment... despite being the candidate endorsed by Newt Gingrich. Once again, the big issues on which she was attacked were economic... along with a ridiculous character attack with only a loose basis in 'fact.'

The economy is, naturally, an issue which concerns all of us quite a lot these days. We are in a major recession and may have only just missed (or still be teetering on the precipice of) a genuine depression. Does that make it the most important issue on the American table?

Barry Goldwater once said that American freedoms were far more important than security or life itself. He said that Americans would rather die than sacrifice their own freedoms. This turned out to be somewhat naive. It might be more accurate to say that some Americans would rather sacrifice the freedom and equality of others in order to save a few bucks on their taxes.

Or rather, some Americans would rather deprive others of their individual personal liberties than pass health care reform.

The problem is this: if you claim to be a 'social liberal' or to support equal respect for the personal freedoms of all Americans, what are you doing about it?

I don't like litmus tests and I am personally uncomfortable with abortion. However, I've written the frank truth on the matter. The only rebuttal as frank is the Phyllis Schlafly-esque argument that equality between the sexes is undesirable and the status quo is better for women. I can certainly appreciate the mathematics of that argument from a utilitarian perspective, but I believe this to be an issue of principle rather than utility. If one believes in gender equality then abortion (along with a slough of rights to which some feminists object, which are a topic for another post in the future if I don't just decide that Wendy McElroy explains it much better than I do) is a necessary part of equality of opportunity and choice in a free society.

Gay marriage in and of itself is arguably of little consequence. There are gay rights advocates who agree with me on this one. The greater issue of equal rights under law for all Americans, however, is a very serious issue indeed. Regardless of what you think about gay marriage, if you believe in equality before the law then you cannot legitimately argue against legal civil marriage for any consenting adults who wish to marry and understand the commitment. The popular moderate compromise of 'civil unions' might be unconsitutional, if one were to understand the basic premise of Brown v. Board of Education to strike down any discriminatory law that relies on the premise of 'separate but equal.' This is not to say that I don't believe civil unions are a valid option if this is what gets a consensus on the issue, but the difference between 'civil union' and 'civil marriage' is such a minor semantic that one has to ask one's self why a distinction would be necessary. The answer doesn't say good things about us as people.

Homophobes love slippery slope arguments. Here's one for them, and I really want to hear their answer because I think they have plans for the future: if we amend a state's constitution to deprive one portion of society of its personal freedoms, who is next?

There are Republicans (even conservatives) who say they support gay rights. There are Republicans (even conservatives) who claim to want to see abortion rights protected and even accuse the left of being the chauvinists and misogynists.

The problem with this claim is my earlier question: Well then, what are you doing about it?

If the answer is voting for strictly conservative primary candidates who virulently oppose such rights, then people are going to question your sincerity. If you advocate for reactionaries over moderates who share your expressed views, people are going to question your sincerity. If you express support for candidates or pundits who are entirely opposed to your expresed views, people are going to question your sincerity. If you subscribe to every right wing political and media trope and conspiracy theory, people will question your sincerity... and they will have a very strong basis for doing so.

The justification for laisezz faire economic policies expressed by its advocates is 'freedom.' Economic freedom, however, is not an obvious no-brainer. Freedom for business can mean restrictions on the freedom of both consumers and employees, while the protection of consumer and employee rights requires a framework of law within which corporations must operate. Much as we have laws against robbery and rape, we have (or should have) laws against larcenous or rapacious behavior in the business sphere. While the most hardcore anarchists and libertarians would say that laws against robbery and rape go too far (and that we should all just have the right to shoot anyone who tries to steal from us or assault us), most mainstream conservatives advocate a law and order stance based on the classical liberal notion that government should protect the property rights of private citizens. A law and order mentality of this sort is not any more restrictive of freedom because it protects private property from corporate criminals the same as private criminals.

Yet it is support for laisezz faire and the 'freedom' engendered by same that motivates these self-proclaimed conservative supporters in individual freedoms to vote and advocate for candidates and organizations totally opposed to their professed social beliefs. It is difficult not to interperet this as a mistake in priorities. One's mileage may vary to a certain degree, but at some point one believes in something or one does not. There are far more moderates who support laisezz faire and individual freedoms than there are conservatives who support individual freedoms with full-throated gusto. Indeed, most conservatives oppose them quite forcefully in practice.

If you've managed to bear with my rather disjointed rambling (which I hopes manages to convey a message which appeared rather coherent to me when I started writing) then I have a question I don't consider radical at all:

If you say you support a woman's right to choose, gay marriage, equality before the law, or any of a dozen more real issues of personal liberty in the face of intrusive government control and you don't ever vote for or support candidates who share that position I just want to know...

Do you? Do you really?

Defending the Indefensible: When Partisan Politics Trumps Professed Principle

Approximately a week and half ago, I posted about an amendment in a defense appropriations bill. The amendment, offered by Senator Al Franken (D-MN), would bar defense contractors from using their employment agreements to shield themselves from liability in claims made against them by employees. The specific example that spurred the amendment was a case in which defense contractor KBR is claiming that its employment agreement (which requires all disputes between management and employees and liability by employees to be settled by an internal corporate arbitration process) protects it from any and all liability in a case where one employee was allegedly gang-raped by her fellow employees in Iraq.

I've written about the nature of agreements between employees and corporate employers before as well, particularly when attacking the conservative position (held by too many in both parties) of the sadly shelved Employee Fair Choice Act. I've also mentioned them in passing or in some detail in multiple other postings.

I'll recap here again: an agreement which grants a corporation ambiguously limited power over its employees while allowing the corporation to define the means by which its employees can negotiate on their own behalf is not an honest contract. It should not be a legal agreement at all, but that is another topic for another post.

I can understand some of economic arguments on the other side, though I tend to believe many of them are specious. That is not the point, however. A line needs to be drawn and we should all be able to agree that the alleged victim of a violent crime has a legitimate expectation to a certain degree of assistance from their employer (on whose watch the alleged crime occurred) in seeing justice done, specifically if the alleged incident involved fellow employees. When the employer fails to provide the proper assistance it should not then be able to use an employment agreement to shield it from its responsibilities.

30 Republican senators did not agree. I discusses this in the original posting on this topic.

Now, some are going even further: they are accusing those who would defend the notion that an employment agreement cannot shield a corporation from its share of culpability in an atrocity of politicizing rape.

Jenn Q Public writes:

This current smear campaign began when Sen. Al Franken (D-SNL) proposed S. Amdt. 2588, a measure ostensibly inspired by the horrific gang rape reported by Jamie Leigh Jones while she worked in Baghdad for defense contractor KBR, then a subsidiary of Halliburton. Franken contended that “her KBR contract banned her from taking her case to court, instead forcing her into an ‘arbitration’ process.”

It was a lie.

No employment contract can be used to force criminal complaints into arbitration. Not in America. But that didn’t stop the disingenuous left from immediately seizing upon the talking point that Republican opponents of the amendment want to deny rape survivors their day in court. Commentators pretended to be mystified as to how any rational human being could vote against rape victims.

Of course, it wasn't a lie and this kind of intellectual dishonesty attempts to ignore the actual issue of whether or not a corporation can shield itself from liability by forcing its employees to sign away their rights to sue it in return for their jobs. Franken did not ever claim the company somehow blocked criminal prosecution or that the agreement prevented the victim from filing charges. The alleged victim's lawsuit does accuse them of failing to properly and impartially investigate the incident. If this accusation is true then the corporation would be culpable if the case proved impossible to prosecute and might be guilty of obstruction of justice; but it's not the point of the amendment.

The point of the amendment is that corporations who believe their immunity from lawsuit trumps a thorough investigation into the truth of rape allegations should not be doing business with the US government. It's a damned good point. It's a damned good amendment. The 30 Republicans who opposed it were not only wrong, they were expressing implicit approval of such an attitude. Writing in their defense and attempting to spin the issue into a left-wing politicization of rape is also an implicit approval of such an attitude.

A principled government would not do business with such people. A principled political party would understand that. Principled activists and writers would call the party out when it made such a horribly wrong-headed decision en masse. Particularly those writers who accuse the opposition of being misogynists and claim to be champions of 'real' feminism.

Jenn Q Public continues:

It is the foot dragging of the United States Department of Justice that is keeping Jamie Leigh Jones from facing her attackers in court, not her KBR employment contract and not Republican legislators.

Well, this is not what the alleged victim claims in her lawsuit.

(As a note, the above link is the same link in the quoted text.)

KBR specifically contends that Jamie Leigh Jones was not raped:

KBR is disputing Jones' claims. They said she was a willing participant in the sex act, and they said the incident only involved only one man.

When the employer who ran the only investigation into the matter possible under the existing circumstances claims that no rape occurred, this could be seen as a barrier to effective prosecution. The facts of time and geography make an investigation difficult as well. KBR could cooperate to make such an investigation easier. Instead it is defending its procedures in order to protect itself from a lawsuit it claims is not valid anyway.

This may not be the 'KBR contract' to blame, but it certainly suggests the possibility that KBR could in fact be obstructing justice in this matter. KBR's 'investigation' essentially involved accepting the claims of the suspect as totally truthful and dismissing Jones' accusation. So it is not surprising that Jones would feel the need to sue, nor should anyone believe that KBR could possibly be trusted to properly adjudicate the internal abritration process the contract dictates.

Jones also claims in her lawsuit that KBR submitted a rape kit that may have been improperly handled during the testing process. KBR denies it. Once again, not something that they can be trusted to effectively adjudicate internally as their employment agreement dicates.

The idea that, under all these circumstances, KBR should be immune from actual civil liability in this matter is ridiculous. The argument that corporations should be able to maintain the kind of control over accusations made against their own conduct of such matters that Jenn Q Public defends is also ridiculous. The truth of these matters is best determined in actual court, not through corporate arbitration procedures.

A woman says she was raped and the corporation says she was not. They don't say they feel terrible but are not liable. They say she was not raped. They are saying her claims have no validity and should not be given credence.

Yes. They are clearly the innocent victims of persecution that the author seeks to portray them as being:

Franken’s primary objective was not to ensure justice for rape victims, but to strike a blow at the company that sits at the top of every rank and file liberal’s hit list: Halliburton. The legislation is an overly broad political sledgehammer designed to ban the disbursement of federal funds to Halliburton when narrow wording addressing arbitration in assault cases would have received bipartisan support.

Yes, Halliburton (along with KBR) is specifically mentioned in Senator Franken's amendment. This is because Halliburton owns KBR and KBR's activities in this matter can safely be said to reflect on its parent company in the absence of action by said parent to rectify the problem. It's certainly legitimate to name KBR in the amendment, as KBR is the company that has specifically behaved in the manner the amendment is supposed to address. Of course they would be mentioned in the memo.

Here we have it, the real reason Republicans voted against the amendment and the real reason that a conservative blogger is attacking Franken and the Democrats for 'politicizing rape.' They want to defend a company they have been deep in bed with for years, precisely because they have been so deep in bed with it. This kind of cynically partisan political response by Republicans is not, entirely, unexpected. A cynically partisan attack on those who criticize it, by a blogger who professes to be a 'real' feminist battling left-wing misogynists is more surprising.

It's also even less acceptable. If there is something worse than 'politicizing rape', it is cynically defending a corporate culture that brushes rape under the rug and then claims it can't be sued for doing so... because of one's politics.

There comes a point when one's personal positions on civil liberties mean nothing at all if one consistently cooperates with those who trample all over them.

One Year Later: Lies Defeat Individual Liberties Coast to Coast

A year ago, in California, those Americans who believe that they have the right to intrude into the personal lives and family choices of their neighbors amended the state constitution to deprive individual Americans of their personal freedoms. They did so based, primarily, on a lie: they claimed that banning gay marriage was necessary to prevent ministers from being legally forced to perform religious marriages for gay couples against the tenets of their faith. This was untrue and the people making the argument knew it. Thanks to their efforts and their lies, California became the first state in American history to amend their constitution to deprive American citizens of their natural rights.

That ugly record has still not been broken, but this morning the results were made official on a Maine ballot measure to repeal a state law explicitly protecting the rights of individuals to marry whom they choose.

As in California, the bigots won.

As in California, they won basing their entire campaign on a lie.

In Maine the issue was not religious freedom, but something even scarier to those with even the smallest touch of homophobia:

In addition to reaching out to young people who flocked to the polls for President Barack Obama a year ago, gay-marriage defenders tried to appeal to Maine voters' pronounced independent streak and live-and-let-live attitude.

The other side based many of its campaign ads on claims — disputed by state officials — that the new law would mean "homosexual marriage" would be taught in public schools.

Yes. That's right. They told voters that if gay marriage was legalized, then schools would start teaching their kids to be gay.

The voters are as much to blame as those advocating the bill, of course. They chose to vote to deny their fellow Americans basic personal freedoms that everyone in a free country should rightfully possess. They did so because they were bigoted enough, regardless of how many 'gay friends' they may have or how much money they've donated to AIDS research, to feel their skin reflexively crawl at the idea that their kid might be 'made gay' by the school system. They were also foolish enough to believe a lie designed to frighten them rather than vote based on principles of individual liberty.

Yet it is impossible for me to ignore the lie. The reason for the lie is simple, of course: there is no legitimate way to argue the legalistic denial of adult Americans free choice in their private lives and there is no legitimate way to argue against the American principle of individual liberty. Since every honest argument from the right would come down to these issues, lies are necessary. Lies are always necessary to support bigotry. Bigots must lie to others, each other, and themselves in order to feel secure and moral in their bigotry. If they had to truly face and understand the truth they would not be able to live with themselves.

This is not merely about bigotry, however, nor is it merely about lies.

The notion that it is acceptable to deny individual Americans their rightful liberties as human beings is not one that should be considered valid at law by Americans, liberal or conservative. The traditional conservative policy of governmental non-intervention in the personal sphere is utterly at odds with such policy. Those of us on the left, who advocate for a more just economic, legal, and social system should be offended.

Unfortunately, individual liberty is too radical for the people of Maine... if it means someone might teach their kids to be gay.

Human Resources: The cult of management and why fixing the economy is not enough.

From a Privates Committee during the elections for delegates to the Pennsylvania State Constitutional Convention, quoted in A People's History of The United States (by Howard Zinn):

"An enormous proportion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the rights, and destructive of the common happiness, of mankind; and therefore every free state hath a right by its laws to discourage the possession of such property."

Clearly, not all of revolutionary America was so unflinchingly capitalist as modern conservative authors would like us to believe. One can witness impulses toward socialism not only in the quote above, but also in the writings of Thomas Paine and in the class warfare of pre-revolutionary Boston. For the latter, Founding Father James Otis in 1762:

"I am forced to get my living by the labour of my hand; and the sweat of my brow, as most of you are and obliged to go thro' good report and evil report, for bitter bread, earned under the frowns of some who have no natural or divine right to be above me, and entirely owe their grandeur and honor to grinding the faces of the poor.. .."

Otis, of course, was defending the rights of the young professional and entrepreneurial class against the entrenched power of landed gentry. His words could serve equally as well today, however, as the indictment of that very professional class by the working class. Class prejudice and class struggle have changed very little since 1762 or 1776 even as many other facts of everyday life have become entirely different. The elite of the professional class look down on the middle and lower echelons of their own profession with the same frosty superiority in Scrooge's eyes when he looked down on Bob Cratchit. That hasn't changed since Dickens' time, even though Bob Cratchit V is better paid these days and Ebenezer Scrooge IV probably gives more money to charity. Yet even Bob is able to look down on the old lady who fries his morning breakfast or the kid taking his money at the register.

One of the most fundamental and least attractive facets of human nature is the need to look down on someone else as inferior in order to feel that we ourselves are superior. This hasn't changed as society has grown more technically advanced, it's merely taken new and stranger forms. Yet it also takes forms that would be very recognizable to the Pennsylvania Privates Committee of 1776, not new or strange at all.

One of those that I am most certain would be quickly understood is the concept of 'human resources.' This is the practice of treating those who work for a company as corporate assets rather than as individual human beings. This concept was pioneered during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, as the first great American corporate powers were expanding too fast and too greatly for the classic negotiation between entrepreneur and employee. They turned to the ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the pioneer of 'managed efficiency' and the inventor of the modern concept of 'scientific management.'

Taylor was not a sociologist but an engineer, and his approach to business was that of an engineer to a machine. Believing that there was 'one best way' to do everything and certain that all one had to do was find that way and then systematize it, Taylor developed four rules from which to run his system. For the purposes of our discussion, the fourth rule is the most important.

4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks.

This was the birth of our modern concept of management and the beginning of the development of the modern concept of human resources as well. Since management was a science, the manager had to be right in their projections and any failure to meet those projections was obviously the fault of the workers. Where supervisors and managers had previously been drawn from the ranks of skilled workers who were promoted for their skills, everything changed. Now it was the understanding of the principles of scientific management that mattered and the manager only needed a broad understanding of the work to be done and not a detailed knowledge of the work itself. Since management was a science, the manager had to be right in their projections and any failure to meet those projections was obviously the fault of the workers.

This was not, strictly, Taylor's intent. It must be noted that his (utopian and probably unrealistic) goal was a partnership between management and labor designed to improve working conditions as much as productivity. The problem was human nature. The human need to feel superior, thus to see others as inferior, is just too powerful to be ignored. When one is responsible for planning and supervising and someone else is responsible for actually doing the work then one is going to feel important and powerful. One will then seek to exercise that power in a myriad collection of petty tyrannies in order to feed that feeling. A modern sociologist would have pointed this out to Taylor immediately, but the social sciences were still in their infancy in Taylor's day.

The results of the application of scientific management is that there are two separate professional classes today. The productive professional class (lawyers, doctors, accountants, salesmen, architects, designers, etc) who actually do something and the managerial class who take credit for a job when it is done. Whereas managers were once intimately acquainted with every aspect of the work being done because of their personal experience in the field, they are increasingly specialists in management without a detailed understanding of the actual work. This means that they are not necessarily truly qualified for their positions, they are simply applying formulae they are taught to believe work. 'Scientific management' has become religious management.

In many ways, it is a cult. Its members are indoctrinated with revealed truth and then warned of the risks of deviating from that truth. When facts or reality collide with the 'truth' they have been taught, their faith denies the real in favor of the 'true.'

Which brings us back to the issue of 'human resources.' Systems do not deal with people, they deal with components. Workers (and even many professionals) become parts in the corporate machine. Managers are charged with operating that machinery. Like many specialized technicians, they are so confident in their own ability that any failure is the fault of inferior tools. Therefore, a suspecialty of technicians is created to put the components of the machine together and make sure that they are functioning properly. The very nature of their job requires a combination of detatchment and understanding that is very nearly impossible to balance. Since it is easier to do the job by being too detatched than by being too understanding, the imbalance rarely works in the favor of the employees of a company.

This is so alien to the spirt of Enlightenment that you may ask why I believe the Pennsylvania Privates Committee of 1776 would recognize such a thing. Well, it was quite common in 17th and 18th century America. It simply was called by a different name.

Perhaps you think that, by comparing the modern attitude of corporate management to corporate employees to slavery, I am being so sensationalistic that this piece is unworthy of being taken seriously at all. Certainly today's workers are enjoying conditions far better than the slaves of antebellum America. Perhaps you believe that the contractual agreement between employer and employee gives employers the right to ask certain sacrifices from employees. I would not totally disagree with that.

The problem is that one cannot have a valid contract with a machine component. One cannot systematize contracts so that everyone is treated precisely the same according to a strict pattern; that is antithetical to the very concept of negotiation and of the contractual relationship. Nor can a one-sided agreement that places the employee at the employer's absolute whim until they choose to quit but offers no restriction on those whims be truly called a 'contract.' This is particularly true if one party can void the contract 'at will' but the other can only do so without penalty when specific conditions are met.

When employees are 'resources' and not human beings, then employers feel the entitlement of ownership. While there are practical questions that certainly make some infringement on the personal sphere of employees necessary, while they are working, there is also a moral line to be drawn between the genuine interests of the business and the infringement of basic human dignity for the bottom line.

As long as this does not change, then it really does not make a huge difference whether we are in recession or enjoying tremendous economic growth. Some people will enjoy vastly more of the American freedoms we take for granted than others. Those people will bear the bulk of the responsibility for the mistakes and failures of American society while the cogs in the machines they operate will bear the bulk of the burden of the consequences of those failures.

The people most responsible for economic downturn will bear the least risk of it actually harming them. As our own recent economic experience has shown.

Rapacious Capitalists in Defense of Rape: Why defense contractors want to protect their employees' right to rape one another

Whenever I have had the opportunity, I have always tried hard to draw attention to the inherent abuses inseparable from the current relationship between American business and American government. Well, the opportunity has presented itself once again. They've presented us a with a classic 'good news/bad news' scenario.

First, the good news:

Senator Al Franken (D - MN) added an amendment to a comprehensive defense appropriations bill that would prohibit defense contractors who proactively prevented employees raped by other employees from suing the corporation from receiving defense contracts. This is another bit of proof (the first being Franken's excellent bill to provide disabled veterans with service dogs, co-sponsored with Sen. Johnny Isakson ) that Franken is shaping up to be a very good senator who offers his constituents and the nation more than just another Democrat in the majority. With all due respect to Stuart Smalley, Franken is a much better political thinker, satirist and policy wonk than he is a mainstream comic. Since a gift for acid barbed satire can only lead to a better attitude from which to approach Washington D.C, the Senate is where he almost certainly belongs.

The bad news:

Apparently, major defense contractors do not believe that strong-arming their employees into not bringing suit against them for on-the-job rape by co-workers or superiors is an inappropriate corporate policy. So they are attempting to strong-arm Congress into dropping or weaking the amendment. Does it say more about them or about me that I am not terribly surprised? While I admit to a certain level of misanthropic cynicism about life in general, specifically when it regards corporate activity, I admit it could be the latter... but in this case I really think it says more about them.

Thirty Republicans in the Senate voted against including this amendment in the bill at all and it is very important for everyone suggesting that the GOP is somehow stronger on feminism than liberals to keep that in mind.

However, the Republicans who voted against the amendment (and lost) are less important than corporate pressure and one Democratic senator.

As noted in the link above, the primary target of corporate pressure to weaken or remove the amendment from the bill is Democratic Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii. He has received a fair amount of money from defense contractors and may be amenable to said pressure. If he is, and if he folds under said pressure and weakens or eliminates the amendment, he will be far more culpable an accessory to violent crime than any of the Republicans who voted against the amendment when it was offered. He will not only be joining them in becoming an accessory after the fact, but he will be betraying one of the most liberal constituencies in the nation for campaign donations.

The real point of this, however, is not how the Republicans are so in thrall to corporate power that they vote against denying business to companies that force rape victims to forfeit their legal rights. Nor is it that a Democratic senator from a 'liberal' state may be no better when the rubber hits the road. The real point is the question of what kind of corporation would pressure lawmakers to prevent an amendment being passed to deny business to corporations that effectively condone rape and make themselves accessories after the fact. What kind of corporation is so obsessed with protecting itself from 'liability' that it would feel the need to 'protect' itself by the means this amendment would deny companies defense contracts for using?

The fact that we have to ask these questions is the answer to them. American corporate culture is so obsessed with liability, so determined to defend the bottom line, that questions of decency and morality are meaningless in the face of money. More importantly, this is precisely what the corporate apologists on the right are telling us is moral and proper. The economic priveleges and powers of corporations are inherently of more value than the rights and basic dignity of their employees. This is volia at its most glaringly honest.

I have somewhat more faith that the amendment will not be either excised or emasculated despite the pressures of defense contractors and the rumors out of Washington. I prefer to think better of Senator Inouye until he proves me wrong. If and when that happens, he will have proven himself to be every bit as bad as the rapists who created the issue themselves.

I don't think that is a radical statement at all.

'The Worst Person in the World?' - Certainly one of the worst in Louisiana

I live in the South, specifically the Hillbilly Triangle (the Kentucky-North Carolina-Tennessee-Virginia border, more specifically the Tri-Cities of TN), and I have some awareness of the local cultural attitudes. I read frequent protestations online, from right-wing Southern circles, about how racism is no more prevalent in the South than anywhere else even if one hears more low-class honesty about it in some parts of society. I find this has both true and false elements.

The true elements are pretty basic: people are people and human beings are naturally flawed. The rest of the nation is not magically free from racism. Economic segregation has largely kept urban black and Hispanic populations in their ghettoes despite the civil rights movement. Racial violence turned formerly middle-class black suburbs like Watts into extensions of the ghetto during the civil rights era and its aftermath. The reason that racial violence was such a major problem outside the South in the years following the heyday of the civil rights era is simple: in the absence of legal segregation the federal government never forced the same desegregation on the urban North to the same degree it forced such action in the South. Whether one approves or disapproves of the forcible action to reverse legal segregation or the lack of forcible action to reverse economic segregation, it led to unequal integration of society. Southern society often is more integrated than Northern as a result.

Many people, however, confuse lack of segregation with lack of racism. Economic segregation in the North does not automatically imply more racism anymore than greater forced integration in the South automatically implies less. The fact that integration was forced, in fact, contributes to resentments that create new racists.

I've now gone three paragraphs without leading into my main topic, which is something I've been trying to cut down, but for those of you have have borne with me I'm going to start making my real point: a justice of the peace would not be allowed to continue to deny marriage licenses to interracial couples for two and a half years in California.

I don't know if everyone has read about Keith Bardwell or not. If your home page is or includes a news aggregator, odds are that you have. If you haven't, I'll briefly recap: he is a Louisiana justice-of-the-peace who will likely soon be facing a civil rights charge from the US Justice Department for refusing to grant a marriage license to an interracial couple. If you have, you know the man is pretty despicable and his defense of his actions is pretty lame.

"I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way," Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. "I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else."

Now, I shouldn't have to dissect this for most of my readers. It speaks for itself. I will anyway, because it pisses me off and because I am a pedantic geek even when not pissed off.

Justice-of-the-peace Bardwell is not a racist. He's just an anti-misceganist. Of course, the concept of miscegany is a racist concept itself. Subscribing to belief in the concept and opposing it is racist and there isn't a nice way to say it. A statement like Bardwell's is self-condemnation of not only racism, but also a total failure to understand racism. While it may or may not be a tribute to Bardwell's open-mindedness and racial toleration that he does not have a 'Coloured' toilet installed in his home, it is certainly proof of his ignorance of even simple good manners that he believes we should be impressed with him because of it.

Bardwell is also either less than totally honest or less than totally intelligent when he claims he didn't do anything wrong.

"I've been a justice of the peace for 34 years and I don't think I've mistreated anybody," Bardwell said. "I've made some mistakes, but you have too. I didn't tell this couple they couldn't get married. I just told them I wouldn't do it."

If he had granted a license but not performed the ceremony, this would be correct. The problem is that he refused them a marriage license. Now, someone of strong libertarian leanings can and should be outraged that the US government requires people to pay for licenses to get married. It's also certainly a legitimate (if incorrect, in my view) libertarian argument to say that the justice-of-the-peace is not forced to marry a couple if he disapproves, as long as he grants them the license to get married. However, denying a marriage license is explicitly telling a couple they cannot be married even if Bardwell knows or believes someone else will grant that permission. That's what the license is: permission to get married.

It's hard to decide whether Bardwell is stupid or whether he thinks we are. Either way, there is a real problem.

This is not a partisan issue, thankfully. Republican Governor Bobby Jindal has called for Bardwell's firing. I'm no fan of Governor Jindal's, but he clearly understands racism when he sees it. He is certainly doing the right thing here.

Partisan issue or not, it is certainly an issue that should have Americans angry.

The real problem, however, is not Bardwell himself. Bardwell speculates that for the two and a half years he has been denying interracial couples permission to marry he has denied about four couples' licenses. Only one couple has complained? No one in the clerk's office has question these denials? That says something about racial attitudes in Lousiana that can't totally be ignored or wiped away. If this were an isolated incident, then one could say it said nothing about anyone but Bardwell. It's not. It's happened three times before and went by without comment. That suggests a larger problem.

I don't think it's terribly radical to say that Governor Jindal should be calling for an audit of peace court records in Bardwell's corner of the state and not just Bardwel''s firing.

The New Elitism: Yes, right-wingers think they are better than you.

In a couple of my recent offerings (On Truth and 'Is Conservatism Brain Dead?') I've made mention of 'populism' and 'elitism' in the same phrase. I know that 'populist elitism' sounds like an oxymoron. It is, however, the defining cornerstone of Republican political strategy. It is also the defining cornerstone, specifically, of the motivations of the religious right.

The right has accused the left of 'elitism' for years, generations even. Thomas Jefferson, in many ways the founder of 'neoconservatism', was accusing Alexander Hamilton of seeking to foster an aristocracy before the ink on the constitution was dry. I've drawn attention to the irony of Jefferson's claims on behalf of 'the common man' and his attacks on Hamilton as an 'aristocrat' before and I probably won't ever get tired of it. Jefferson's own deeply ingrained elitism was plain to see in the fact that the straight-forward effect of Jeffersonianism is to protect the entrenched wealth, power, and privelege of the upper classes. The fact that Jefferson himself may have been ignorant of this and genuinely believed himself to be a 'yeoman' is open to debate, much of his writing and policy suggest a naive utopianism that makes this very possible. It does not change the effect of Jeffersonianism on society.

So, as we can see, even the tactic of steeping elitism in populist rhetoric is not new. What is new and interesting is the growing practice, on the religious right, of cultural elitism coloring every aspect of a populist movement. The core facet of this is, of course, an absolute faith in their own moral superiority.

There are those on the right who deny this aspect of the modern conservative movement and who occasionally seek to distance themselves from it. Yet they consistently buy into its key tropes; from the victimization of Sarah Palin to the idea that the words 'Democrat' and 'liberal' are somehow interchangeable because nearly everyone who doesn't accept core conservative dogmas has already been run out of the GOP. There are quite a few Americans who are far from 'liberal' who have gravitated to the Democrats not because of their 'liberalism' but because they don't believe that the ideas espoused by the 'conservative' and 'libertarian' blocs of the GOP are either conservative or libertarian. As a pragmatic democratic socialist and a philosophical anarcho-socialist, I can assure you that the Democratic Party is a very long way from being a 'liberal' party... let alone 'communist.'

The issue is not about 'communism' or even 'liberalism' as much as some right wing crackpots would like you to believe that it is. It is not even about 'secularism', though secularists are naturally going to drift away from religious extremism of any kind. It's about the belief that one American subculture has the right to force its interpretation of religion and morality onto the rest of American society.

With a tiny number of possible exceptions, the majority of the leaders of today's conservative movement (and the Republican Party, either actively or by their association with and defense of the movement) are concerned with one of two objects:

The first is the furthering of this brand of populist elitism and establishing the 'proper' stamp on American moral values. They would establish this by law and thus deprive all those who do not believe as they do of key constitutional rights. One doesn't just have to look at Proposition 8 in California for proof of this. One can look at the activities in school boards and educational associations all over the nation as they seek to 'democratize' the classroom to conform to their moral totalitarianism. As a Christian, I believe their view of religion is incorrect and dangerous. As a believer in American values, I believe their agenda is totally at odds with constitutional government and natural human rights.

The second is the exploitation of the former brand of 'populist' elitism to further genuinely elitist aims. As I mentioned above, aristocrats have been exploiting populism since Jefferson. It is only natural that today's elitists (who are 'managers' rather than 'aristocrats') seek to do the same thing. Many forms of 'individualism' and 'libertarianism', by placing too much faith in the free market and ignoring coercive power other than that of government, naturally further this kind of oligarchy. Indeed, supporting an oligarchic 'managerial' system of government and society through populist rhetoric is an even older tradition than Jefferson. It goes back to the Roman Senate of the Roman Republic. The modern neoconservative movement is more brazen, as they embrace the managerial culture and its bureaucratic elitism in naked and dirty hands.

One of the best examples of this embrace of the cultural, moral, and religious elitism embraced by this populist conservative movement is this: so far, of the various potential, declared, or projected candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 only one has not either expressly committed to a personal belief in literal Biblical creationism or advocated its teaching in schools. The lone holdout, Mitt Romney, has presumably not done so because the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (along with the Roman Catholic Church and those other Catholic churches in communion with it and Orthodox Judaism) acknowledges scientific evolution as one of its doctrinal tenets.

The 'elitism' feared by the religious right and many conservatives who have whole-heartedly embraced their tropes is best summed up by someone whose views on religion were at least as wrong as theirs:

“From the naturalistic point of view, all men are equal. There are only two exceptions to this rule of naturalistic equality: geniuses and idiots.” -- Mikhail Bakunin

After all, let's face it. Those on the right who are terrified by science, education, individual freedom of conscience and believe their moral standard should be applied to all Americans of all faiths regardless of their beliefs?

They aren't geniuses.

This Land Was Made For You and Me: Some thoughts on poverty.

As the sun was shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving, and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting, a voice was saying
(Might have been Woody!)
"This land was made for you and me!"

-- As sung by Peter, Paul, and Mary

Just after Martin Luther King Day I wrote a brief piece about Dr. King, Woody Guthrie, and poverty. I had intended to write a longer piece on poverty, but was sidetracked and instead wrote a very angry piece about the truth of what the Bible says about wealth vs the prevailing right wing political theology of prosperity. I often write with a focus on economics. This makes it very easy to outline the practical aspects of what I am saying but it can obscure the emotion that motivates it. I don't want the fact that I am a pedantic geek to give anyone the idea that I don't care.

As I noted in the original piece, Guthrie wrote during the Depression and his work was filled with a biting anger at the state of poverty in which many Americans found themselves. Guthrie was also angry at the wealthy, whom he felt were so concerned with protecting and increasing their wealth that they made the plight of the poor worse. The fact that many of the poor of the Depression had not been poor before the Depression made him even angrier. The wealthy and the powerful were not only hardening their hearts against the poor but also against their former neighbors and friends. This was not just greed or lack of compassion. This was betrayal.

This not the Great Depression, but it is the worst economic disaster to befall the United States since. Journalists and op/ed writers alike have taken to calling it 'The Great Recession.' The most fundamental difference between Great Recession and Great Depression is in the economic status of the victims. During the 1930s, many wealthy and powerful people were reduced to penurious vagrants because they were the people to whom the stock market catered. The middle and working classes were collateral damage. The poorest Americans were least affected, their circumstances had not been much better before the Depression. Our current economic plight is very different: the middle and working classes have taken the bullet for the wealthy. Many who have not lost their houses or their jobs have seen their retirement benefits reduced to pennies on the dollar because those benefits were invested in the financial markets that took the hit.

Guthrie was angry about something else too. There were poor Americans before the Great Depression and poor Americans after it. Poverty did not go away because the Depression ended. This still has not changed. Poverty was with us before the Great Recession and it will be with us after. Poverty is a problem that needs to be addressed independently from the economy. Simply getting the economy back on track will not make things better for everyone. Robert Reich has noted that economic recovery on Wall Street does not mean things are better for the rest of the country. Even Reich fails to mention that there are many people whose quality of life will not change in a meaningful way even after the economy has made a complete recovery.

Bill Clinton came into office during a recession and left office with the budget in surplus and the economy strong. Yet this made very little difference for many people whose quality of life was made much worse by the gutting of the American social safety net that greatly facilitated those budget surpluses. A strong economy does not buy groceries or pay rent for a family of four in Butler, TN.

'The Great Society' envisioned by Lyndon Johnson included victory in the 'War on Poverty.' One can argue that this was utopian dreaming with no chance of true success if one wishes, but one cannot justify the slow transformation of Johnson's 'War on Poverty' into the modern right wing war on the poor. The poor number the vast majority of the victims of both crime and the criminal justice system that is supposed to protect them from criminals. Access to the full protection of the law and full enjoyment of one's constitutional rights become difficult when one cannot afford a lawyer to defend those rights. There is a whole industry of pawnbrokers, paycheck advance loan offices, and other loan sharks (legal and illegal) who profit from American poverty.

I do not pretend to know the solution to the problem, though there are certainly programs designed to address other problems that would definitely help. Meaningful reform in areas of health care, employment law, education, and criminal justice would go a long way toward helping the poor without bringing back 'The Great Society.'

As a critical realist I know the problem of poverty cannot be completely solved. Laws of economics mean that there will always be poor people. That doesn't mean we should like it and not do the best we can.

The National Security State: Remember when Ike said something about this?

Former Colorado Senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart has started a blog: Matters of Principle. Senator Hart has cogently contributed to the Huffington Post for some time. The transition to his own blog is an obvious next step and I am eager to see how the undertaking goes. I liked his this offering, which was also posted on HuffPo, very much.

Senator Hart outlines what he calls 'the national security state.'

"The National Security Act of 1947 was the statutory basis for defining America’s role in the world post-World War II and for conducting the Cold War. It established a new Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, and the United States Air Force as a new military service. For more than six decades, it has also been the source of authority for the president as commander-in-chief."

Though the American Civil War was the prototype for the 'imperial presidency' and the model for the dominant picture of the 'American President' in the 20th Century was drawn by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt, because of the Great Depression and WWII, enjoyed unprecedented national and global power. He was elected president four times, also unprecedented. Only Ulysses S. Grant had run more than twice and Grant was not even nominated by the Republican Party on his third try. Roosevelt was the defining personality of the 1930s and the 1940s, even after his death. The National Security Act of 1947 was written with the view that the president would manage the Cold War the way President Roosevelt had managed WWII.

Here comes the rub: FDR was a wartime president who enjoyed broad wartime powers based on a situation of worldwide emergency. Even before the US entry into WWII, the rest of the world was at war for a period of two years. When America entered into the war it became the dominant force among the allies. Due to American resources and British and Soviet need, Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the Duke of Marlborough on a global scale. The National Security Act of 1947 was written during peacetime. The powers granted the president through the NSA has given American presidents wartime powers in time of peace to the best of their ability to wield them ever since.

Can you see why this is inherently dangerous?

If you can't, then consider this:

"Despite the fact that our Constitution, Article I, section 8, gives Congress solely the power to “provide for the common defense” and “declare War,” it is not accidental that no declaration of war has been authorized since 1941, even while we waged war in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and dozens of other venues. Presidents now decide when and where we will wage war."

Due to the power given to the executive through the NSA, the single defining change in the law post-WWII, the president has been able to fight wars at his discretion without a Congressional declararion. For this the justification was the Cold War and the tool that made it possible was unprecedented peacetime authority and a vastly expanded national security apparat. As Hart says, all of this power is a trap for the man who wields it all. He can exercise authority over this national security apparatus, as Hart says, but he can't get away from it.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, the last president to command an army personally, understood this. It was very much the point of his last speech as president. Everyone knows the famous line:

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Much of our history since Eisenhower is based not on remembering this warning, but forgetting it. Many of the crimes, failures, and tragedies connected to the Iraq War and the Bush Administration as a whole were intimately connected to the failure of subsequent American presidents to heed this warning. In the wake of WWII, every American president has used this national security apparatus to advance its own agenda around the world. While this was justified first by the Cold War, then the so-called 'War on Drugs, and now the 'Global War on Terror' it is really all the same thing.

As Hart says:

"This helps explain the demented insistence on the part of the Bush administration to create, or perhaps merely ratify, the “unitary executive,” a notion based on the premise that all executive power resides in the president and Congress has no authority to question his actions as they relate to national security. In this context “national security” is so broadly defined as to include virtually everything.'

This is the consequence of the concept of President-as-Generalissimo. Even President Obama, who ran against this concept, has been unable to escape it. Hart makes comment on this. It is echoed by this piece from Ron Chusid at Liberal Values.

Hart puts his finger right on the current situation:

"All this might make some plausible sense, but only if two things were true: one, that we are now locked into a kind of semi-permanent era of conflict and danger; and two that James Madison and his colleagues had not gone to considerable pains to create a genius system of checked-and-balanced government where power is concentrated in no single branch."

Hart finishes by saying that our chief concern should be what James Madison would think of this, but I strongly disagree.

Our real chief concern should be whether the concept of a 'semi-permanent era of conflict and danfer' is something that we, as American, can afford to accept. This concept has prevailed since the beginning of the Cold War. The only exception has been the brief period between the end of the Cold War and the 9/11 attacks. Americans who grew up during the Cold War find the return to that mentality unremarkable.

That desperately needs to change.

Labor Day Musings

This will be even more disjointed and rambling than my usual offerings because I am simply rattling individual thoughts off the top of my head. I've done this once before and I will likely do it again in the future. So hold on for the ride.

Labor Day is intended to celebrate the contributions of working men and women, and labor unions, to the American economy. Yet our government does nothing to defend many of worker's rights from corporations on a national level. Taft-Hartley still allows the government to assist employers in busting unions. Congress won't pass the EFCA. States are immensely inconsistent in the protections they give to the rights of employees. Yet the federal government has explicitly given credence to the ridiculous joke of corporate person-hood, entitling business entities with the sovereign rights of individual citizens. Why do we go through the fiction of the holiday?

Our workplaces increasingly exhibit more and more common qualities with our schools and prisons (whose resemblance to each other is already frightening) and yet it is 'libertarian' to support corporations over actual human workers?

What cuts into corporate profits more, do you think? The total wages of factory employees making eight dollars an hour or the total wages of executive officers making six and seven figures before bonuses? Why is it always the former who get laid off when times are hard?

I'm entirely aware of all the arguments against forcing people to join unions and they are all great... BUT... who is going to represent that employee's interests and advocate for them against a bureaucratic corporate establishment if they have no union to do so and to ensure proper due process is followed?

Why don't they call 'right to work' something along the lines of 'right to work for minimum wage' or call 'at will employees' something more along the lines of 'disposable?' Are they worried that honesty might not be the best policy?

Anyone else have any musings?

Case Study of An Immigrant: Abner Mares

It's only fair to start out with an obvious comment: Abner Mares did not come to the United States to pick fruit, wash dishes, clean someone's house, or work in a meat packing plant.

On the contrary, Abner Mares is a professional boxer who represented Mexico in the Olympics when he was an amateur. All the same, he is the perfect archetype of the Mexican immigrant to the US. He came to the States to get a job and to escape poverty. His mother brought him (along with his six siblings) to Hawaiian Gardens, CA (a mix of working class/lower middle class neighborhoods and barrio in otherwise affluent Orange County) and worked two jobs to support them. Mares became a boxer in hopes of something better for himself and his family. He was good enough to become an Olympian, and he has parlayed that into a professional career. He has overcome adversity (a detached retina suffered in the course of his career) and has persevered in his chosen profession. He has learned lessons of life and experience and has certainly not asked the United States to pay his tab. His mother worked two jobs to pay her tab. He has fought, literally, to pay his own.

Naturally, most Mexican immigrants to the United States are not gifted athletes with professional careers ahead of them. Nor is Mares' success in his chosen career guaranteed, anymore that of any other professional plying their trade in America. He has that in common with his countrymen. They have something in common with both him and his mother:

As I have said before, Mexicans come to the United States to work. More of them come illegally than not, because of the restrictions on immigration to the US from Mexico and other Latin American countries. Like Mares' mother, they work hard. Most of them use their earnings to start businesses that become part of and help to support the American economy. Their children, like Mares himself, seek to further develop their gifts and take advantage of the opportunities that comparative prosperity (the barrio in Hawaiian Gardens is still safer and more affluent than any barrio in Mexico) offers and strive to succeed beyond their parents. Mares grew up in Hawaiian Gardens, but now he lives in Norwalk, CA. While Norwalk is not Beverly Hills, it is a step up the ladder.

Of course, this is the history of America. Immigrants from foreign lands (whether they be debtors fleeing imprisonment, as the founders of Georgia; or religious refugees, as the founders of New England, Pennsylvania, and Maryland; or simply looking to make a buck, as the founders of Virginia and the Carolinas) have come to America and worked their asses off to make good. While more of them have failed to build the American Dream than have succeeded, they have nearly always succeeded in building a better life for their children. Whether or not they have failed to build the American Dream, they have always succeeded in helping to build America itself.

They do so to this day, even when they aren't here legally.

Politics and Race: Does 'the Left' or 'the Right' Have A Moral Monopoly?

Strangely enough, the fact that we have a president who happens to be a black man has not ended the discussion of race in America despite that president's high-minded 'post-racial' attitude on the subject.

That was sarcasm, yes.

Obviously, a black president is going to guarantee that race is very much on everyone's minds for the four-to-eight years of the Obama Administration. That would be true even if that president's name were 'Barry Huntley Owens' instead of 'Barack Hussein Obama.' The first black president is a big deal, and people of all kinds and all racial attitudes are going to be talking about race constantly as a result. Some of this may be good and some of it may be bad, but it's all unavoidable. Anyone who actually believes a bi-racial president with an African father and a lifetime steeped in white American culture magically brings on an instant sea change in American racial politics is really, really naive. High minded post-racial rhetoric is good and a post-racial world is a worthy goal, but we're a long way from it.

That said, while dirty racial politics is to be expected and exacerbated under the current conditions, we don't have to like it. One of the constant ploys from the right is the desire to deliberately cast the left as racist, as devoted to stirring up racial hatred for political purposes, or both. One of the constant ploys from the left is to repeatedly bring up individual examples of racists on the right in an attempt to paint all conservatives with this brush. Both of these moves are 'politics as usual'... which means each side considers their own activities to be entirely above reproach and the other side's to be vicious and inhuman.

The fact is that both sides' attacks on the other tend to be more inaccurate than accurate. Today, here and now, racists are more likely to be Republican than Democrat because the 'traditional American values' championed in many red states include unfortunate racist legacies. However, President George W. Bush (this may be the only time you ever see me say anything good about the man, so keep reading) advocated amnesty for undocumented immigrants as part of his flawed immigration reform package. He was defeated by a bi-partisan hue and cry of aggressive nativism with both conscious and unconscious racist implications. Moderate and conservative Democrats are as guilty of such pandering as Republicans, and Hillary Clinton specifically attacked other candidates for the Democratic nomination who supported Bush's amnesty and immigration reform package. The locales in which the attack was given suggest a deliberate pandering to nativist white voters. Racism is a two-party problem.

There is, however, a fundamental difference between the approaches of the mouthpieces of both sides of the left-right debate to racism. Liberal writers nearly all agree that racism is a genuine problem. Conservative writers dismiss it as an occasional aberration. Liberals believe that action taken to ameliorate the effects of racism and to protect individual civil rights is desirable and necessary in a free society, while conservatives dismiss such action as unnecessary or attack such protections as unfairly depriving whites. The debate over Sonia Sotamayor's confirmation, the publicity surrounding the overturning of the case brought most prominently into the press by her nomination, and many of the absolutely moronic attacks on her person and character by conservatives included baldly ugly racist overtones that can't be dismissed or denied and these aspects were not disavowed by many (if any) conservatives.

I have been, and will continue to be, critical of the Democratic Party's approach to civil rights issues. I believe that treating black issues, Hispanic issues, women's issues, and LGBT issues as separate and independent agendas is fundamentally counterproductive. If the goal is increased protection of individual rights, then the narrow focus this approch creates is potentially disastrous. Civil rights issues are civil rights issues, and one coherent approach to individual civil rights is the only way to attack the problem. However, liberal Democrats are correct in acknowledging that there is a problem and seeking to take action to address it.

The single biggest problem (which conservatives recognize, though they support and perpetuate the problem rather than attacking it boldly) is the economic problem. Institutional racism is frequently unconscious, due to the simple fact that disproportionate numbers of black and Latino Americans are poor and that our society has gone out of its way (especially in the last twenty-five years) to stigmatize poverty and scapegoat the poor. Conservative 'reforms' intended to change the way the government address poverty have exacerbated the problems of the inner city. The Randian ethic of prosperity/virtue vs poverty/sin embraced (ironically) by both secular libertarians and Christian conservatives is tremendously damaging to minority Americans and serves to buttress institutional racism that has been slow to die.

In one sense, liberals are to blame. In 1865, the Republican government that freed the slaves decided against compensating freed slaves in order to attempt to preserve the support of pro-Union conservatives in slave states. This perpetuated a huge inequity between black and white Americans that has never been addressed properly since and may be impossible to fully rectify now.

However, it is conservatives who argue against even trying.

Some Issues Only Matter During Elections: Immigration Policy in America

Have you ever noticed that the topic of immigration reform takes on a very different shape prior to and during elections than it does for most of the year between? I'm not saying that the usual crackpots (your Tom Tancredos and Virgil Goodes come to mind immediately) aren't fulminating on the topic or the Minute Men and the 'border wall' go away. I'm saying that those of us not completely obsessed with that single issue tend not to give it the attention it deserves between election cycles. The voices calling for election reform during and prior to the last presidential election have fallen largely silent. It can be argued, of course, that the snarling reaction that reformers got from nativists in both major political parties is what led to the ringing silence on the issue. It can be argued, solely by poll data and election results, that too many Americans are in the nativist boat for the advocates of reform to be too vocal.

All the same, what do those of us who talk about immigration reform do with the topic between elections? I have to note, to my discredit, that I have not written on the topic of immigration policy since the Democratic primary. I don't even remember the original post to find and link it without digging through my entire backlog, since it is part of that portion of the blog I have not yet catalogued by label. This certainly is not something of which I am terribly proud.

However, I thought about the topic again the other day because a conservative asked (in the course of a question about former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum's (R) possible run for the White House in 2012) if a statement that Santorum was 'anti-immigrant' or 'anti-illegal immigrant.' My initial reply on some of the details and history of the issue led to a brief runthrough of matters and because I had too many thoughts to share coherently on someone else's blog (this conversation was on Ron Chusid's Liberal Values), I decided I would post something more in depth here.

I think the reason that most of us on the pro-immigration side of the reform debate don't say much between elections, is that despite the fact that we'd like to see the laws changed to make it easier for people to get here and prevent the people already here from being legally persecuted (in many cases regardless of their actual immigration status, on the thesis that because they are Latino they might be illegal) is that those of us not obsessed with the 'burning crisis of illegal immigration' are happier with the status quo than we should be. People come here, people work, people raise families, everyone is happy most of the time and we really don't stop to think about the legal status issue unless it obsesses us. Most of those who are obsessed by it tend to be on the nativist side, and most of them can be observed to have pretty baldly racist motives for their obsession. Whether people agree or disagree with them, on the political questions of immigration, most people simply do not take Tom Tancredo or Virgil Goode seriously and there is a reason for that.

However, the fact that the 'crisis' being manufactured by the nativist voices in our country is (as it always has been, since the days of the Know-Nothings) a manufactured crisis built on a primary foundation of prejudice, that does not make the immigration issue a real issue worthy of attention. Especially since far too many people are unaware of the reason there is even a question of comprehensive immigration reform or border security in the first place. While we have issues of illegal immigration with Asian nations, for instance, there is neither a call for reform on our Asia policy nor widespread fear-mongering on the topic.

While this many come as a surprise to many today, prior to WWII there was no immigration quota on applicants from other American nations. Immigrants from Canada, Mexico, and Latin America could (and did) cross the American border in unlimited numbers as long as they met basic immigration requirements. In many areas, transit across the border was easy and unregulated. In California (both the US and Mexican states), there was a large migrant worker population that travelled from the southern peninsula to the Oregon border (and points north) following the seasonal work. This was a core component of the West Coast agricultural economy in both the US and Mexico and while much of the migrant labor was Mexican, there were Americans who followed the same route as well.

After WWII, an America flush with victory and revelling in its destiny and exclusivity as never before changed its immigration policy vis a vis Latin America. Strict quotas were set, immigration guidelines toughened exponentially, and the borders patrolled with increasing vigour. With strict new labor laws, as well as flush economic opportunities, the local American labor pool dried up. This confluence of legal reform in labor law with counter-reform in immigration law had a two-fold effect. It served to simultaneously reenforce the dependence of West Coast agriculture on a migrant labor force consisting primarily of Mexican nationals and to criminalize that same labor force. There are those who posit complex conspiracy theories that this was the intended result, but I think it more likely that lawmakers did not foresee all the consequences of labor reform laws when coupled with the immigration restrictions.

Without the immigration restrictions, of course, this would have meant a significant rise in the standard of living of the migrant labor force and a significantly higher legal immigration rate. Coupled with the reformed labor laws, however, it created a situation where it made far more economic sense (from the point of view of a farmer) for farmers to hire illegal labor and pay their workers in cash, under the table, than to hire American citizens or documented residents and pay them according to the new labor regulations. This led to major economic exploitation that, itself, led to the unionization of much of the migrant labor force... an ironic situation, a legal union that represented many illegal workers. A balance was ultimately found, one where cheap agricultural labor and farmers could co-exist and both profit from the relationship.

It is terribly important to recognize how central this process was to maintaining stability in the agricultural economy of the West Coast during the 1950s. Prices for farm produce were kept down even as demand increased to a greater degree than ever, which meant significant regional growth. The region of Southern California called 'the Inland Empire', where I myself was born and raised, was built up and developed because of agricultural profits made possible by illegal labor. In many ways, the economic success and massive growth of California, post-WWII, is as dependent on illegal labor as it is on the aircraft industry. While many of the old agricultural communities have urbanized or suburbanized, the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, Riverside County, the Imperial Valley, and San Diego County all contain significant agricultural sectors. Even the heavily urbanized counties of Los Angeles and San Bernardino maintain at least minimal agricultural activity. When one factors in the large agricultural sectors of the Oregon and Washington economies, one starts to have an even greater sense of just how illegal immigration supports the American middle class when they go grocery shopping.

The sad economic facts make exploitation by American business in the United States preferable to many Mexicans over exploitation by American or Mexican business (or unemployment) in Mexico. This isn't something than can be changed by law enforcement budget hikes or crazy racist quasi-terrorists policing the border. It's also important to note, from a critically realistic point of view, that actually putting an end to the current system of migrant labor could have grave economic consequences for both the US and Mexico and could pose a significant politcal and social problem in Mexico. Therefore, whatever the solution to a genuinely morally repugnant siutation might be, it's not throwing law enforcement or military dollars at the problem. Nativist political activists who insist otherwise are simply showing their ignorance of the real situation.

Thus immigration policy is a difficult choice between three options:

1.) Maintain a morally repugnant but mutually beneficial (in a purely economic sense) system of exploitation of illegal workers to preserve the highly successful status quo. Most people in politics, in both the United States and Mexico, have consistently chosen this option. From a purely utilitarian viewpoint, it is very hard to argue against this choice. By simple, zero-sum measurements, everyone wins with this system... except that it is the most morally repugnant agribusiness system in American history since slavery. Which makes stark utilitarianism less appealing. Moreover, while the 'crisis' of undocumented workers 'stealing American jobs' and overburdening American social services is manufactured crap, it is true that this system allows corporations to switch from legal to illegal labor if they choose to take that option... and some corporations have. This has a real economic cost, but it is intellectually dishonest to blame the immigrants and doing so is incorrectly defining the problem. In these cases, the real issue is not undocumented workers but corporations who smuggle them into the country. It is worth noting, as well, that many of the workers exploited in such a fashion are not part of the Mexican influx of which the nativists complain, but Asian laborers specifically smuggled into the country by or for corporate clients.

2.) We can spend a massive amount of money on the kind of enforcement and interdiction policies the nativists advocate... and have largely the same situation that exists now, with a police state mechanism incorporated that poses a real risk of forcing Latino Americans to prove their citizenship on demand. First of all, this is unconstitutional (yes, despite my disregard for the intent of the Framers in many constitutional questions I do believe the document itself has value). It is a bill of attainder, acting to stigmatize a specific class of citizens and not the rest of the population. It is also in violation of the 14th Amendment, denying one section of citizens their full share of their civil rights. Before you argue otherwise, consider... who will asked to prove their citizenship before receiving medical care or when pulled over by a traffic cop? The odds are that it won't be people who 'look like Americans.' Beyond the constitutional problem, this also vastly increases law enforcement costs and will necessitate far more public spending than the share illegal immigrants currently consume.

3.) Take a deliberate, critical, and holistic look at the situation and work to actually define the problem. The definition of the problem will be a key step toward finding the solution and the current definition of the problem, as given by nativists and accepted by many Americans, is pure bullshit. The share of public spending that goes to provide social services for illegal aliens is too tiny to justify massive spending on enforcement and deportation operations or writing a new set of Jim Crow laws targetting Latino Americans. So the question becomes the chief object of any policy undertaken. Is the problem the economic issue of corporate criminality and loss of opportunity for the American labor force? Is the problem the humanitarian issue of the economic exploitation of undocumented workers by American employers? Is it a combination of the two? Is it simply that lack of legal access and legal opportunity creates the demand for illegal access and illegal opportunity? Clearly, different problems require different policies and any policy with any potential for success must, automatically, consider issues over which we do not have direct control in this country: the Mexican government's border security, the Mexican economy, the highly charged atmosphere of violence currently permeating many northern Mexican cities due to the drug war?

Repeatedly, for reasons that only become obvious when one considers the degree to which American agriculture relies on the status quo, the American government has chosen option #1. This is a purely utilitarian decision that can be criticized on several different grounds, but is very easy to understand when the situation is considered in its proper depth. Full and careful consideration of the situation also requires that one admit just how counterproductive and wasteful option #2 really is, in addition to being entirely at odds with the spirit of the laws that govern our nation and tell us how we can and should govern our nation. Even the 'enforcement first' compromise approach to immigration reform offered by John McCain during the presidential election would require an effort and expense not justified by the problems posed. So the choice really becomes between option #1 and option #3.

In all likelihood, because of the real undercurrent of nativism in both political parties (witness both the violent reaction of the GOP against Bush and McCain's varying amnesty and reform proposals and the vicious attacks on her primary opponents over this very issue by Hillary Clinton), it is unlikely that option #3 is forthcoming anytime soon. This particular prejudice is one that heavily colors American thinking across the political dividing line and which cannot be labelled a 'conservative' or 'liberal' vice.

That said, I believe real immigration reform is ultimately the choice that the country must take. We are a country of immigrants, except for what amounts to a tiny handful of the population we are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. The American exclusivity which drive the nativist current that has always inhabited American politics is built on ethnic and religious prejudices which are not the sort of political ideals compatible with America as a country or a concept. Utilitarian economic necessity may force that reform to be a knee-capped guest worker program of the kind proposed by President George W. Bush the final decision America reaches, and if it does that would be better than the situation as it exists now. However, in my opinion, the real solution is the removal of the quotas imposed on immigration to America from Latin America in the wake of WWII. The original thinking behind the original policy was that all of us, from Canada to Argentina, are in some sense 'American' and that our doors should be open to our neighbors. That this is no longer a feeling broadly shared throughout our national society is... upsetting.

Regardless of whether we choose option #1 for many years to come or what form we decide option #3 should take, it is time for another amnesty. The people here are part of our society. They have done jobs we have not wanted to do for pay that we would not be willing to do it, and their willingness to do so is part of what puts food on our table. Anyone who argues against this, Democrat or Republican, is simply wrong. Perhaps they don't understand the real nature of the situation, as many of us simply trying to live our every day lives do not. Perhaps they are something worse, like Tom Tancredo or Virgil Goode. Either way, they are not the people who should be given the forefront in this discussion and it's time America stops simply taking their line at face value without really considering the reality of the situation.

Adopting the slash and burn enforcement policies of nativists would be biting the hand that feeds us.