harpojaeger.com

Just a teaser for my most recent Jewschool post.  One of these days I promise I’ll write something here.

I’ve issed a correction and a reflection on my last Jewschool post.

Here’s my newest post for Jewschool.

I wrote this post for Jewschool about a week ago.

I’ve differed with Richard Silverstein before, and I find myself doing so again today.  I joined an FB group he created, but upon further thought, I’ve decided to leave it.  This is due to a very specific grievance; the second item on the group’s manifesto reads “2. that the U.S. government condemn unequivocally the attack on a Turkish ship in international waters; and join other EU countries in withdrawing our ambassador.”

I’ve got no problem with the U.S. unequivocally condemning the attack.  While I blame the activists for not remaining nonviolent (which they clearly didn’t) from both a moral and tactical perspective (if they had stayed peaceful, this could have been an incredible way to draw attention to the cruelty of the blockade), that doesn’t excuse Israel’s actions in the first place.  All parties involved in yesterday’s events made clear that they have no interest in a peaceful resolution to the conflict.  It’s going to take a lot of work to get them there.

And this is something we already know.  Which is why I can’t support any kind of intentional deterioration in diplomatic relations right now.  Crises like this one make the moral and practical imperative for productive dialogue even more pressing.  I object to the group’s belief that we should withdraw our ambassador.

I urge Richard to remove the second part of second item of the group’s beliefs.  Only then will I feel comfortable rejoining, because only then will the group truly be advocating for peace.

You can’t plan for everything.  We know that BP avoided paying $500,000 for a piece of safety equipment that’s mandatory in other countries, a remote shutoff valve that might have been able to prevent the worst of what we’re seeing now.  Clearly this is a pretty loud cry for better regulations.  And while I certainly don’t think this is Obama’s fault, I’m also reluctant to blame the Bush administration:

BP and its employees have given more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

I’m not saying this to advance some sort of crazy conspiracy that Obama conspired to blow up the rig to improve the chances of banning offshore drilling and getting a comprehensive energy-climate bill through (because somehow in this country’s political discourse, 11 dead workers and massive environmental and economic damage is a reason to drill more, not less, and it looks like this is going to make Kerry-Graham-Lieberman harder, not easier), or that the response was deliberately slow (it wasn’t [and if you only read one of the links from this piece, it should be that one]), just that a culture of deregulation has been normal for a long time.  Notwithstanding smaller regulatory moves like this (which in my opinion are what differentiate this administration from the last), I don’t think that it’s fair to blame the laxity of American corporate (especially energy) regulations entirely on Bush.

What we have a chance to do now is to reclaim the externalities.  It’s time to impose a windfall profits tax on all non-renewable energy companies, and mark all revenues collected for clean energy R&D and investment.  That’s going to be hard with people like Mary Landrieu and John Boehner holding as much sway as they do because of bizarre and misused parliamentary procedures, but it needs to be done.  A price on carbon would be nice too.  We need strong leadership from Obama right now.  His history with offshore drilling is complicated, but I really do believe he wants it ended.  It’s a question of political feasibility.  And this is his chance.

If we let the GOP (read: the ones calling for expanded offshore drilling) get away with painting themselves as the true bearers of a “comprehensive” (and their plan is anything but), it won’t just be a political defeat.  Cap-and-trade (which I continue to defend as the best system out there) will be dead, and if the GOP gains a majority in the House this year (which is looking increasingly likely), we may not get a comprehensive energy-climate bill until it’s too late.

A while back, I wrote about why I thought conservatism as a set of ideological principles was functionally obsolete.  Several recent events have highlighted to me some pretty glaring contradictions on the part of prominent conservatives which I think deserve highlighting.  My purpose here is not to argue that all people who argue for limited government are always wrong (there are cases where I do the same), merely that blind adherence to this principle is just as dangerous as blind adherence to any other.  Conservatives have managed to paint themselves as the exception to this rule, and I think that’s a big problem.

Okay, here we go.  Case number one is Bobby Jindal.  I swear that I noticed this contradiction all on my own, but Salon.com has a good piece about it, which I’ll excerpt here:

Remember when Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal briefly became a right-wing hero for threatening to refuse stimulus money that would boost unemployment payments?

Ah, yes.  Good old ideology-over-results.  Well, that’s not a purely conservative flaw.  Everyone’s been guilty of that.  Give the guy a break.  NYTimes, any commments?

Governor Jindal of Louisiana had declared a state of emergency on Thursday and mobilized the Louisiana National Guard to participate in response efforts.

On Friday, Mr. Jindal also requested federal assistance for state fishermen, asking the Secretary of Commerce to declare a commercial fisheries failure.

I’m not suggesting that Jindal should have just let his citizens (and wildlife) get all oily because of his principles.  No, I think he did exactly the right thing by calling the Guard and asking for federal assistance.  Furthermore, I’m not assailing him for changing his mind, because I don’t think he did.  I think he was lying through his teeth to begin with.  He turned down the stimulus money as a political move, but as soon as he saw a tangible benefit to accepting federal help, he jumped at it (like any sane person responsible for other people’s lives would).  Yes, it’s petty politics.  But there’s a good case to be made the stimulus had some pretty damn tangible benefits too, they just weren’t as obvious as ducks covered with oil, which make for a pretty sad cover story.  Whether Jindal’s putting his reputation or his ideology before his citizens, he’s doing the wrong thing.

Let’s move on to someone a little closer to my heart, or at least my hometown.  My old governor, Mitt Romney, passed a health care bill that’s remarkably similar to the one that ultimately was signed into law in March.  In fact, here’s Romney quoted by NPR shortly after passing the thing in ’06:

After studying the problem, Romney says, he came away with a key insight: “People who don’t have insurance nonetheless receive health care. And it’s expensive.”

Some good sense from a businessman, who, for all of his failings, wasn’t actually that terrible of a governor.  Yes, our health care wait times have gone up, but, as BZ so aptly pointed out on a Jewschool comment thread, “Without insurance, the wait for a doctor’s appointment is infinite!”  If the cost of covering everyone is that I have to wait a little while longer, I’m really okay with that.

Further evidence of Romney’s practical approach to HCR in MA:

“We’re spending a billion dollars giving health care to people who don’t have insurance,” Romney says. “And my question was: Could we take that billion dollars and help the poor purchase insurance? Let them pay what they can afford. We’ll subsidize what they can’t.”

Perhaps this pleases me because it’s such a vindication of liberal policy ideas: that the government can actually help poor people in some way other than deregulating large financial firms and waiting for their executive bonuses to trickle down (I suppose in the form of the minimum wage paid to Lloyd Blankfein’s personal head-shiner [seriously, if he doesn't have one of those, he really should]), but it could also be that Romney was embracing a concept that a lot of people thought was a really good idea (and has worked pretty well).

In promoting the plan, Romney brushes off those in his party who attacked the plan as just another big-government scheme. He emphasized that those who can afford insurance should get it.

“Otherwise you’re just passing your expenses on to someone else,” Romney said. “That’s not Republican, that’s not Democratic, that’s not Libertarian. That’s just wrong.”

Damn, Romney.  I couldn’t have said that better myself.  I’m sure glad that someone with as much interest in the substance of policy and making a difference in people’s lives is probably going to run for national office.  We could use more pragmatic Republicans like you, especially on matters of importance like health care.

“An unconscionable abuse of power,” Romney declared while asserting that the president “has betrayed his oath to the nation.”

Well, that’s current-day Romney, with an about-face covered in another great Salon.com article.  Fortunately, the GOP base doesn’t care that much about facts, so he probably won’t have a very hard time convincing them that his health care plan is nothing like the national one, thus conveniently distancing himself from the tyrannical socialists he’ll be running against.

Jon Kingsdale was appointed by Romney in 2006 to run the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority, which operates the state exchange that serves as a health insurance marketplace for Massachusetts citizens. Kingsdale announced Thursday that he is stepping down from that position to pursue opportunities in implementing the national reforms, according to reports.

Ouch. And it gets worse.

“We should all feel very proud of having created the model for national health reform,” Kingsdale wrote in his resignation letter, the Washington Post reports. “The power of the Bay State’s example is enormously consequential. I believe that national reform would not have happened without it.”

So now one of the people with the best understanding of the day-to-day operation of MA’s health insurance exchanges, which were the model for the ones that the Patient Protection Act institutes in all other states, has drawn a direct parallel between them.  And of course Romney hasn’t stopped distancing himself from something that he actually did a good job on.  Yet another case of conservatives realizing that reality is catching up, in the form of sensible policies that just aren’t quite libertarian enough for the increasingly rabid right-wingers the GOP is courting.

Trouble is, as Stephen Colbert said (and in front of W, no less), reality has a known liberal bias.  I might modify that slightly to say that reality has a known reasonable bias, and that reasonable lawmakers are always vindicated if they just stick with being reasonable. But given today’s increasingly uneven party dichotomy, where a core group of liberal pragmatists looking to get things done squares off against a group of disciplined conservative ideologues ready to ignore any facts that stand in their way, asking said ideologues to remain reasonable is just a little too much.  Whether it’s Arizona empowering its police to ask anyone for identification at any time for pretty much any reason, Oklahoma allowing doctors to lie to a pregnant woman about possible fetal birth defects if they think the truth would incline her to consider abortion (not to mention requiring that she see be shown an ultrasound of the fetus and hear a verbal description of some of its body parts [and that ultrasound?  If a normal one isn't good enough, the doctor has to perform a vaginal ultrasound, which, if you haven't heard of it (I hadn't), sounds pretty damn scary]), or the government deciding which of the various types of people who fall in love should be allowed to get married and visit each other in the hospital, it’s just another example of conservative inconsistency.  Legislate women’s bodies all you want, restrict consenting adults from getting married, and feel free to detain brown people on street corners, but don’t you dare close the gun show loophole, or think about putting a price on carbon.

And keep your government hands off my Medicare.

Eugene Robinson has what I think is so far the best analysis of the new immigration law in Arizona:

Arizona’s draconian new immigration law is an abomination — racist, arbitrary, oppressive, mean-spirited, unjust.

I’d recommend reading the whole thing; he goes into some pretty specific detail, and also mentions something that’s otherwise absent from the debate.

Let me interrupt this tirade to point out that while Arizona has unquestionably done the wrong thing, it is understandable that exasperated officials believed they had to dosomething. Immigration policy and border security are federal responsibilities, and Washington has failed miserably to address what Arizonans legitimately see as a crisis.

It’s a good point.  Looking at this as a deliberate attack on illegal immigrants (and a deliberate attempt at racial profiling) would be misleading.  I don’t think the people who passed this law actually favor legalized discrimination against Latinos, at least not consciously.  But the law’s passage reveals something about ethnocentricity and Americanism – that we still see whiteness as the “default” in this country.  Somehow, the existence of other races and cultures is a threat to “American-ness”.  Clearly this is a load of junk; this country was built on immigrants and continues to thrive off of their cheap labor.  In the present day, easier paths to legalization would lead to significant economic benefits.

Opposition to flexible and fair immigration policies is in my experience associated with an extreme form of nativist patriotism; the idea that America is intrinsically better than other countries.  I’m the first person to defend the Constitution as one of the finest documents on which to establish a government, and I think there are in fact intrinsic advantages to the American judicial and legal systems.  But that’s not the same as saying that this country is better by virtue of its existence, or is fated to be that way.  We got a lot of stuff right that a lot of other countries didn’t.  We also got a lot of stuff wrong.  And like every country, we should be trying to fix the things that are wrong, and we should be helping others do the same.  In a way, this means that I see America’s “greatness” not as a gift, but as a privilege that implies many important responsibilities.

So here’s where I get confused: if the type of uber-patriots I’m talking about really think America’s so great, they should have no problem with allowing others access to it.  If this is really the greatest country in the world, how can a bunch of poor people who want a better life be that much of a threat?  The answer is that American nativists believe that they’re special by virtue of having been born here, and immigrants are somehow “less American”.  Obviously illegal immigrants aren’t citizens, but don’t forget that what makes this country fundamentally different from the world of nation-states from which it arose is that the only thing required to be part of it was to want to.  In practice, there were and are a fair amount of obstacles to this rather lofty dream, but it’s undeniable that we have gotten and continue to get closer and closer to it.

For modern-day nativists to claim that American-ness should be restricted to those of us who are already here is totally contrary to the principle of equal access and to the historical trend towards this principle.  It’s a disguised form of racism, a historical tendency to view whiteness, and only whiteness, as “true American-ness”.  While the definition of who is and is not white has changed over time (historically excluding, to name a few, Catholics, Irish, and Jews, all of whom are considered “white” today), it’s sure that Latino immigrants aren’t included in it now.  Comprehensive federal immigration reform would be a good opportunity to affirm that whiteness is no longer required to receive the full benefits of citizenship.  Obviously it won’t fix racial inequalities in and of itself, but a progressive immigration policy would do a lot to put us on the right track.

For some more interesting reading on the economic implications of immigration policy (an angle I haven’t really explored in much depth here), check out this terrific Free exchange piece in response to Krugman and Yglesias.

I’ve been toying for a while with the idea of macroethics in journalism.  What I mean by this is not the sort of day-to-day ethics we associate with individual journalists, but the larger ethics of the journalistic industry.  In an era where information is freely dispensed over the Internet, public understanding of important realities continues to be dominated by large news organizations.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  Although I have a high opinion of many Internet-only sites, and I consider them at least as authoritative as major news outlets, there is definitely still a place for organizations like the New York Times, if for no reason other than accountability.  Large editorial structures can be beneficial in holding individual journalists to high ethical standards.

Arguably, the fact that a productive political discourse existed before the Internet is pretty good evidence that however useful the internet is, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the large-organization model.  But there is an aspect of that model that I think is a problem in the age of the internet: its profitability.  News organizations have been for-profit entities for a long time, but they’re now competing with a host of other sources for airtime.  I’d argue that this is why they’ve turned to increasingly showy (and increasingly less substantive) programming (I’m focusing mainly on TV news here).

Certainly the internet is not “the problem.”  In its ideal form, it is a forum for sharing ideas democratically (Twitter probably represents this better than any other technology).  But it would be naive to assume that the whole picture is so rosy.  Media organizations who used to have a stranglehold on (and whose editorial processes at least attempted to assure the quality of) information are forced to find different ways to make money.  Showier advertisements, more appealing programming.  In short, selling out.  They have to cover what people will pay to watch, giving journalistic discretion a lower priority.

One idea I’ve tossed around as a potential solution would be requiring news agencies to be nonprofit.  Obviously nonprofits are still responsible for revenue, because they have to pay the people who work in them, but they’re not beholden to any shareholders, and no one enters them to get rich.  In an ideal world, a nonprofit functions as a way for people to do something they enjoy and be paid enough to live on while doing it.  This would appear to fit quite well with the goals of an idealized journalistic institution.  The question is how to apply it.  I’ve thought about a law mandating that news organizations be nonprofit, but this creates all sorts of new problems.  How would you define what is and is not a news organization (Fox comes to mind)?  What about bloggers?

It would be nice to just leave it up to citizens to create their own nonprofit news organization (such things exist).  Clearly, however, companies like CNN and Fox are way too big to be taken down by such an upstart.  Furthermore, it’s unlikely that citizens would have any interest in switching to a new media organization.  The idealized free-market model that predicts that the consumer will go where the best value is requires that they actually know how to judge value.

Short of such a large-scale government intervention, however, I’ve been unable to come up with any idea on how the national discourse in this country can improve as long as the media keeps on doing what it’s doing.

If you’re not reading Climate Progress already, you should be.  Period.  CP is pretty much the best source out their for the politics and policy of energy, climate, and their economic impacts.

Joe Romm’s post on the DC climate rally got me thinking about media coverage.  More specifically, how should media organizations make decisions on what to spend their airtime/journalistic space covering?  Clearly, decisions on this subject are complicated and the responsibility for making them doesn’t rest on a single person.  It’s thus rather irresponsible to denounce a news organization as partisan or having an agenda based on a single editorial decision.  Smart people can and do disagree on what deserves reporting.

But faced with the overwhelming lack of reporting on the threat from and policies intended to combat climate change, it’s hard to excuse any news outlet from ignoring or downplaying the the issue.  As Romm puts it:

Yes, the biggest single climate rally in U.S. history is dismissed by comparison with the hypothetical cumulative turnout of dozens of future rallies on immigration.  Who says the media isn’t fair?

Now, the obvious response to this is that the size of a protest shouldn’t really determine how much coverage it gets.  For example, I don’t dismiss Tea Party protest because they’re not big enough (in fact, I think they’re alarmingly large), I dismiss them because they have no idea what they’re talking about. I find it difficult to believe that any journalist takes the grievances of the Tea Party as seriously as the threat from climate change, but that sure is what it seems like based on the quantity (the New York Times doesn’t appear to have much coverage at all) of coverage.

Bottom line: if you think that socialism is a greater threat to this country than climate change, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you.