The Boston bombers – V

John Cassidy of The New Yorker has a must read counterfactual reflection on what the fallout from the Boston bombing would have been had

the Tsarnaev brothers, instead of packing a couple of pressure cookers loaded with nails and explosives into their backpacks a week ago Monday, had stuffed inside their coats two assault rifles—Bushmaster AR-15s, say, of the type that Adam Lanza used in Newtown. What would have been different?

For starters, a lot more people would have been killed. But would the Tsarnaevs have been labeled “terrorists” (as Adam Lanza and Aurora shooter James Eagan Holmes were not)? Would their AR-15s have been designated as “weapons of mass destruction” (as the Tsarnaevs’ IED has been)? And what would have happened to the gun control bill in Congress? Read Cassidy’s examination here. And marvel once again at what a crazy country America is when it comes to guns.

Nate Silver had a post the other day on his FiveThirtyEight blog with poll data showing that Americans have a growing resolve to live with the threat of terrorism. In other words, Americans are, in fact, less hysterical over incidents of terrorism than the media makes them out to be. And they are certainly less so than politicians.

John Avlon of TDB has a column that is not really related to Boston—but is to the subject of my previous post, of politicians being idiots—, in which he expresses concern over adherence to conspiracy theories by growing numbers of GOP elected officials. “GOP lawmakers embrace the crazy.” I think we’ve known that for a while now.

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Boston Bombing Idiot Watch

I’ve been stocking links over the past week of particularly idiotic, asinine statements made by American commentators and politicians over the April 15th Boston bombing and the identification of the Tsarnaev brothers as the perpetrators. The bombing was certainly horrible but in terms of casualties was not quite on the same level as what happens on an ordinary day in Syria or Iraq. And it was not comparable to the wave of terrorist bombings in France in 1986 or 1995—or even of Mohamed Merah last year—, though which did not provoke in France anything approaching the unhinged reactions of high-profile US pundits and pols in the wake of Boston.

Of all the idiocies mouthed over the past week, the one whose author most deserves to be punched in the face—figuratively if not literally—is Bill Maher. Maher—whom I will admit to having found amusing and on target on occasion over the years—is apparently considered a liberal, but what he says here about the “dangerous doctrines” of Islam—as if “Islam” is some organic being that thinks for itself and above and beyond its 1.5 billion or whatever believers—is proof in the pudding that liberals can be as idiotic as conservatives. Anyone who can mouth such essentialist bullshit—and on national television no less—is not only an idiot but a raving idiot, and who is forever discredited in my intellectual book.

Another liberal idiot is Bob Beckel, Fox News talking head and onetime Dem politico, who says that the US should suspend the granting of visas for a period of time to foreign Muslim students wishing to study at US universities. So US visa forms will henceforth ask applicants to state their religion—as do a handful of countries in the world, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran—and with consular officials no doubt posing the question orally… Sure. I’m sorry but anyone who can seriously advance this proposition—and again, on national television no less—is an idiot. And a bigot too. End of discussion.

Despite these two nominally liberal nitwits—and I’m sure there are more—the great majority of idiotic statements have, of course, come from the right. E.g. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who is considered a hot prospect for ’16, also evoked a visa suspension. If Rubio is indeed elected POTUS down the road, how much would one like to bet that he implements this? My personal assets are not considerable but I will lay them all on the line that he will have no memory of having made such a statement back in ’13. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), for his part, was the first off the bat last week, with his batty statement about 19 year-old American citizen Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s “ties to radical Islamic thought” justifying him being tried as an “enemy combatant.” Likewise with Sen. Dan Coates (R-IN), which prompted IR prof and blogger Daniel Drezner to ask “Will the Senator from the state of half-assed thinking please go sit in a corner?“

Um, whatever happened to the US Constitution and its Bill of Rights? I thought these people considered it to be a quasi sacred document.

And then there were the digs at Boston liberals, notably by Arkansas state rep. Nate Bell, who tweeted that they were probably cowering at home wishing they had AR-15s with high-capacity magazines. When I read stuff like this my visceral view that the wrong side won the Civil War—that America would be a much better country without the South and Southerners—is reinforced.

But there are plenty of boneheaded idiots in the North as well, e.g. NY state senator Greg Ball—a GOPer, of course—, who asserted that not only should torture be applied to Dzhokhar T. but that he (Ball) would administer it personally. I would submit that Sen. Ball should be strapped up to the gégène himself. Pourquoi pas?

Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter have also said crazy ass stuff but that’s normal for them and needs no mention, let alone links.

On the overall Weltanschauung of the right on the Boston bombing, Jon Stewart summed it up here. Touché!

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American conservatives and France

Conservative commentator Rod Dreher explains (via The Dish) why so many American conservatives have a problem with France. In short: France has a great culture and which makes some Americans insecure. The French also know how to live the good life and Americans are suspicious of that. Watch here.

The Dish post also links to a piece Dreher wrote for NRO in 2003, “I like France: A defense of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” in which, while denouncing France’s Iraq policy, he defends the country’s culture. I will wager that Dreher would probably want to take back his criticism of the French on Iraq (which France was of course right about), as well as his line about them “find[ing] it difficult to stand up to Islamic terrorism,” a domain in which the French have won kudos even from American conservatives.

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The Boston bombers – IV

A couple of links. Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Carola Suárez-Orozco, dean and professor respectively at UCLA, have an op-ed in the NYT on “Immigrant kids, adrift,” in which they discuss a study of theirs that finds

that the second generation — American-born kids of immigrant parents — assimilate, and even excel, to a greater extent than the “1.5 generation” (children who immigrate in or before their early teens).

This seems true from my own observations over the decades. Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were members of the 1½ generation.

And the WSJ has a most interesting reportage on how Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s “Turn to religion split [his] home.” After converting to radical jihadism Tamerlan succeeding in convincing his mother to don the hijab but his father sharply opposed his new posture, and which, it seems, led to the parents’ divorce. This dynamic is not infrequent in Muslim immigrant families in North America and Europe.

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The Boston bombers – III

Just links today, no commentary. Except for one little bit on this FBI wanted poster, where one notes the DOB of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: July 22 1993. My daughter was born in 1993, as were most of her childhood friends. My daughter is a kid—for me at least—, as are her childhood friends. Now I can accept that someone born in 1993 could possibly be a terrorist. But a sufficiently dangerous terrorist to lock down a major US metropolitan area? This I cannot accept. It is thoroughly nonsensical.

On the lockdown, Harvard prof and Über-IR specialist Stephen Walt has an understated blog post on “America the skittish.”

Nahum Barnea, one of Israel’s leading commentators, has a column on Ynet in which he says that Americans act “As if they caught another bin Laden.” The lede: “Americans’ reaction to capture of teenage Boston terrorist [is] exaggerated, sends dangerous message.”

In TNR John Judis interviews the always interesting French Islamologue Olivier Roy on the Boston bombings.

The NYT has a reportage datelined Dagestan on how “Search for home led suspect to land marred by strife.”

The suspect, of course, is Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The Boston Globe reports on how he disrupted services at the Cambridge mosque. He was a bit of a hothead. An outlier.

In a somewhat of a correction to what I wrote yesterday about America possibly being a nation of p**sies, WaPo has an article on how “Americans [are] react[ing] to Boston bombings with confidence and resilience.” C’est bien.

And finally, Richard Falk, Princeton emeritus professor and current UNHRC Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, has “A commentary on the marathon murders” in Foreign Policy Journal, in which just about everything he has to say is irrelevant and has nothing to do with anything. Richard Falk is a broken record who has been droning on about the same goddamned thing for decades. He is also a nutbag and a whack job whose UNHRC position only further discredits the already discredited UNHRC. Ban Ki-moon would do well to terminate his UN employment. Immediately.

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The Boston bombers – II

(AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

Having been tweaked all day by a critic on FB for yesterday’s post on the Boston bombers, I am going to refrain from offering my own commentary for the next 48 hours, until the dust has settled a bit. So in lieu of my pertinent observations here are a few good articles I’ve read today.

The most ‘must read’ one is John Cassidy’s commentary in The New Yorker on the Boston lockdown, on how the “Terrorist hunt [sent] America over the edge.” Money quote

From one perspective, I suppose, [the lockdown] was just a sensible precaution. During the overnight shootout, many details of which remain unclear, one police officer had been killed and another one had been injured. The police believed Dzhokhar to be armed and dangerous. But does that justify locking down an entire city? America is a violent place. Practically every day, somewhere in the country, cops are looking for armed and dangerous men who have just killed one or more innocent members of the public. But when a gunman runs amok in East L.A., say, they don’t close down Brentwood or Santa Monica. The very thought is absurd.

Ah, you may say, Tsarnaev wasn’t just an ordinary criminal or lunatic; he was a terrorist, and, according to some reports, he had one or more explosive devices, possibly including a bomb vest. Now we are getting to the crux of things. Whenever the word “terrorist” is mentioned in this country, reason tends to go out the window, and many other things go with it, too, such as intellectual consistency, a respect for civil liberties, and a sense of proportion.

The Boston lockdown was insane. Totally unhinged. Even America’s Israeli friends are shaking their heads in dismay, wondering if the great hyperpower is a nation of p**sies. Whether Americans are this or not, terrorists the world over have now been informed: if you want to bring the United States of America to its heels, to sow mass hysteria and chaos and inflict tens of billions of dollars of economic losses subsequent to mass lockdowns, just plant a few simultaneously exploding homemade bombs across the country (in shopping malls, high school sporting events, wherever) that can be labeled “terrorist” (and better yet, Islamic jihadist terrorist). Could this possibly happen in the coming years? What do you think?

If such a scenario does come to pass—and particularly if there are a few of them in rapid succession—America could indeed witness a suspension of constitutionally guaranteed liberties, or at least intense pressure in this direction. And on this, I have no confidence whatever in the American political class, and particularly on the right side of the political spectrum.

In the wake of the Boston bombing and attendant hysteria, Emily Bazelon in Slate asks “How much civil liberty should we give up?” The lede: “Not much. The truth is it doesn’t appear that greater powers would have helped the authorities stop the Boston bombing.”

On the lockdown, Sandy Tolan has a post on his blog asking some questions about martial law in Boston. And a former student of mine, who will be graduating from Harvard next month, posted this FB status update today in regard to the Saudi marathon man who was briefly detained last week

It was startling to see how few people (on campus) raised objections to the treatment of this man. When the stakes of catching the “bad guy” were so painfully evident and when violence touched close to home, people seemed to care a LOT less about racial profiling…

Dismaying.

David Cay Johnston has a timely article in The National Memo on “How the NRA impeded the Boston bomber investigation.” And retired FBI agent Coleen Rowley has a not uninteresting piece in Consortiumnews.com on “Chechen terrorists and the neocons.”

And as a useful reminder, an Atlantic piece from last June has been circulating on how “Americans are as likely to be killed by their own furniture as by terrorism.”

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The Boston bombers

Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
(Photos: Julia Malakie/The Lowell Sun via AP; FBI via AFP/Getty Images)

So they turned out to be Chechens. Or, more specifically, ethnic Chechens from Kyrgyzstan. Of all the ridiculous speculation since Monday as to the identity of the bomber(s)—if he/they were Arabs, Muslims, homegrown American extremists (à la Timothy McVeigh), whatever—I doubt anyone thought they’d be this (the only thing that was clear from the outset was that the perpetrators had to be from the Boston area). Okay, so they’re Muslims—which will warm the hearts of Pamela Geller, Steven Emerson, Daniel Pipes, and certain persons I know personally—but so what? If the alienated, angry Tamerlan hadn’t been a radicalized Muslim with access to jihadist websites, he would have likely committed his massacre the all-American way, by acquiring assault rifles and mowing people down à la Sandy Hook or Columbine.

In respect to the Columbine killers (today is the anniversary of that massacre, BTW), they were such outliers—so statistically insignificant in terms of what they did—that no lessons could be drawn from it (except in regard to the ease with which Americans can acquire an arsenal of weapons). Their motivations were psychological (and with one of the killers being the psychopath who hatched the plan). It looks to be likewise with the Boston bombers. One does learn that Tamerlan didn’t have American friends and that he felt alienated from America. This sometimes happens with immigrants who arrive in their mid teens. It’s a delicate age and fitting into the American teen life is not easy if one comes from a different culture, particularly one from Asia. But Tamerlan was doubly deracinated, as even back “home”—in Kyrgyzstan and Daghestan—he was, as an ethnic Chechen, an outsider. So he had some psychological issues and, unlike the Columbine killers—whose massacre was rendered possible by America’s gun culture—, not much could have been done to prevent him from making and planting his homemade bomb once he decided to do so.

I’ve read a few worthy articles on the subject today, one being the NYT’s reportage on the “Boy [Dzhokhar] at home in the U.S. [being] swayed by the one who wasn’t [Tamerlan].” And on the NYT opinion page is an op-ed by journalist Oliver Bullough, who has covered the Chechen conflict, “Beslan meets Columbine.”

In The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has a comment, “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, lost and found,” in which he makes this observation

And it was an American story, too, in what could only be called a hysterical and insular overreaction that allowed it to become the sole national narrative. I happened to be in London on 7/7—a far more deadly and frightening terrorist attack—and by 7 P.M. on that horrible day, with the terrorists still at large (they were dead already, but no one knew that) the red double-decker buses were rolling and the traffic was turning and life, though hardly normal, was determinedly going on. The decision to shut down Boston, though doubtless made in good faith and from honest anxiety, seemed like an undue surrender to the power of the terrorist act—as did, indeed, the readiness to turn over the entire attention of the nation to a violent, scary, tragic, lurid but, in the larger scheme of things, ultimately small threat to the public peace.

Yes, America’s wild, hysterical overreaction to terrorist attacks, however few people end up being killed. The lockdown in Boston was insane. No such lockdown is conceivable in any other country in the world—or even in the US if it were just an ordinary killer on the loose. Or even a serial killer.

À propos, I am reminded today by DC friend Dan Brumberg of the October 2002 sniper attacks that terrorized the Washington area. Quoting Dan on FB

The Boston story and the fate of the 19 year old arrested last night reminds me of Lee Boyd Malvo, 17 years old when he teamed up with his murderous “father figure” [John Allen Muhammad] to terrorize DC for weeks. I remember sitting at an outdoor cafe wondering if we would be shot…the entire thing was surreal more than scary…Places we normally passed through or shot at were scenes of death.

Yet there was no lockdown in DC at the time. Nor, needless to say, was there a stigmatizing of blacks or Caribbean immigrants on account of the killer’s race and racial motives in committing his crimes.

Also in The New Yorker are comments by Jeffrey Toobin, “Could we have foreseen the Boston attack?” (answer: no) and David Remnick, “The Brothers Tsarnaev,” in which he focuses on the Chechen angle.

Writer Alyssa Lindley Kilzer, who knew the Tsarnaev family, has an account on her blog, “I’ve met the Boston bombers,” and which has some interesting information.

And if anyone hasn’t seen it by now, here’s the must watch interview with Ruslan Tsarni, uncle of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar.

More to follow.

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Health care costs, America vs. France

Ezra Klein has republished a post on his WaPo Wonkblog from a year ago on “Why an MRI costs $1,080 in America and $280 in France.” He thinks it’s worth rereading now and it is. Americans don’t pay more because they receive superior care, are sicker, or visit the doctor more often. They pay more because the predatory American health care system is rigged to cheat them. Americans get shafted at the hospital and they’re powerless as individuals to do anything about it. So much for the free market. Klein mentions and links to Time magazine’s mega 24,000 word investigative report “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” which is a must read if anyone hasn’t seen it by now.

Re my own out-of-pocket health care costs over the past two months—related to my recent mishap—, they so far add up to €470. This is the total amount I’ve had to write checks for. A good part of it will be reimbursed by the Sécurité Sociale and mutuelle (if it hasn’t already; I’ll have to check). The other day I received a bill for €44 from the ER for services rendered when I was taken in on Jan. 18th. I should be reimbursed for that.

À propos, I received an email yesterday from a friend in the US, age 87, who wrote about receiving her medical bills from France after  a sudden week-long hospitalization at the Hôpital Salpêtrière in Paris while visiting in 2011, during which time her condition was quite serious. The amount she owed was $32,000 (fortunately covered by her US insurance). She said the bill at her hospital in the US would have easily been half a million dollars.

How anyone can defend the present financing of the American health care system is beyond me. In fact, they shouldn’t even try, because they can’t.

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Django Unchained

[update below]

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: I really liked this movie. It is highly entertaining and with great acting, is funny, offbeat, zany, you name it. It made my top 10 list of 2012 and was my pick for Oscar best picture (though having yet to see ‘Zero Dark Thirty’). But I have just now finished reading a biting critique of the film by political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. of the University of Pennsylvania, which, while not causing the film to fall out of my top 10, is, I will readily admit, very good, indeed excellent. In addition to skewering Quentin Tarantino’s film Reed also does a number on ‘The Help’—a film I appreciated rather less—and delivers a few body blows to ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’—which I did not unreservedly like—and other race-themed Hollywood pics while he’s it. His dense, learned, wide-ranging essay—title: “Django Unchained, or, The Help: How ‘Cultural Politics’ Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why“—is very long—clocking in at almost 14,000 words, plus substantive endnotes—but is well worth the time and effort.

In a nutshell, Reed argues that

Django Unchained trivializes slavery by reducing it to its most barbaric and lurid excesses…[and that] perpetrating such brutality was neither the point of slavery nor its essential injustice. The master-slave relationship could, and did, exist without brutality, and certainly without sadism and sexual degradation. In Tarantino’s depiction, however, it is not clear that slavery shorn of its extremes of brutality would be objectionable. It does not diminish the historical injustice and horror of slavery to note that it was not the product of sui generis, transcendent Evil but a terminus on a continuum of bound labor that was more norm than exception in the Anglo-American world until well into the eighteenth century, if not later.

Central to Reed’s argument is the linking of the films in question to the increasing ideological predominance of neoliberalism over the past three decades. His analysis here is very interesting. I liked this passage in particular

Libertarianism is a shuck, more an aesthetics than a politics. Libertarians don’t want the state to do anything other than what they want the state to do. And, as its founding icons understood, it is fundamentally about property rights über alles. Mises and Hayek made clear in theory, and Thatcher and Friedman as Pinochet’s muse in Chile did in practice, that a libertarian society requires an anti-popular, authoritarian government to make sure that property rights are kept sacrosanct. That’s why it’s so common that a few bad days, some sweet nothings, and a couple of snazzy epaulets will turn a libertarian into an open fascist.

Absolutely on target. À propos, I had a post in Sep. ’11 on libertarianism and fascism, in which I (and Michael Lind, to whom I linked) said much the same thing.

Reed is really very smart. I remember well his book The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon, which I read during the 1988 Democratic primary campaign. Most of my lefty friends enthusiastically supported Jesse’s candidacy that year but I most decidedly did not (I backed Dukakis after Hart pulled out of the race, though did, as a symbolic gesture, vote for Jesse in the 1984 IL primary), and found Reed’s critical stance toward Jesse a breath of fresh air.

Back to Tarantino’s film, TDB had a piece last week on “Django Unchained’s bloody real history in Mississippi.” The lede

Critics have carped that Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained is outlandish history, but two new books show that, in fact, Mississippi was even more violent and bizarre in that period. Historian Adam Rothman on a bloody incident of mob justice and slavery.

The new books are Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Belknap Press) and Joshua D. Rothman’s Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (University of Georgia Press).

The upshot: the South sucked. And it still does. It was—and remains—the most reactionary, retrograde, and all around depraved region of the Western world. The continuum of the slave owners and their petits blancs enforcers—such as depicted in ‘Django Unchained’—and today’s southern GOP base is manifest. Ça ne se discute même pas.

In his essay Reed takes issue with the positive assessments of Tarantino’s film by some of his academic associates, including this one by Lawrence D. Bobo, the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. IMHO, Bobo’s review isn’t bad.

UPDATE: Hussein Ibish, in a rather critical review, asks “Who’s really exploited in ‘Django Unchained’?” Answer: you, the spectator. (March 5)

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Maurice Taylor: idiot

That’s Maurice “Morry” Taylor, CEO of the Quincy IL-based Titan Tire Co., who wrote a rather insulting letter to Arnaud Montebourg earlier this month—a copy of which was obtained by Les Echos—, explaining why he wasn’t interested in investing in the money-losing Goodyear plant in Amiens, as the workers there “get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three…” (see here and here). In other words, French workers are slackers. The story is getting a lot play in the French news today, and with everyone naturally indignant. Americans, Brits, and others, for their part, are no doubt snickering and guffawing but it’s bullcrap. Yahoos outre-Atlantique may not be aware but French labor is among the most productive in the world. This is a fact (as for the Amiens Goodyear plant, it is indeed the case that its staff is working three hours a day at the present time, but, as one learned on the France 2 news this evening, this has been imposed by management). Morry Taylor—who, as it happens, was a short-lived GOP presidential candidate in 1996—is a jingoistic ignorant idiot (and that Arnaud Montebourg, in his trenchant reply, told him in so many words). If you have any doubts on this, watch this Titan ad with Morry himself. Quel con.

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The tax flight myth

Gérard Depardieu, tax exile, showing off his new Russian passport in Saransk,
6 January 2013 (Photo: Krasilnikov Stanislav/Itar-Tass/ABACA)

[update below]

The NYT has a bull’s-eye article debunking the notion that countries—or American states—with high tax rates are witnessing an exodus of high earners (the Ayn Randian right’s “makers”) to countries—or American states—with lower tax rates. The notion of tax flight, which is tenacious among neoliberals and the right, is fueled whenever a high-profile rich French businessman or celebrity decamps to Belgium or Switzerland—or in the case of Gérard Depardieu, to that land of low taxes and economic freedom, Russia—, or when the like happens in the US, e.g. with CEOs apparently fleeing high tax California to lower tax states (as Walter Russell Mead gleefully reported on his blog the other day). But as the NYT asserts, it’s all a myth. Money quote

It’s an article of faith among low-tax advocates that income tax increases aimed at the rich simply drive them away. As Stuart Varney put it on Fox News: “Look at what happened in Britain. They raised the top tax rate to 50 percent, and two-thirds of the millionaires disappeared in the next tax year. Same things are happening in France. People are leaving where the top tax rate is 75 percent. Same thing happened in Maryland a few years ago. New millionaire’s tax, the millionaires disappeared. You’ve got exactly the same thing in California.”

That, at least, is what low-tax advocates want us to think, and on its face, it seems to make sense. But it’s not the case. It turns out that a large majority of people move for far more compelling reasons, like jobs, the cost of housing, family ties or a warmer climate. At least three recent academic studies have demonstrated that the number of people who move for tax reasons is negligible, even among the wealthy.

The NYT article links to the 2011 report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Tax Flight Is a Myth: Higher State Taxes Bring More Revenue, Not More Migration,” which is a must read on the subject. As for those CEOs and celebrities who do move for tax reasons, all one can say is good-bye and good riddance! Bon débarras ! The number of tax exiles from France is insignificant in any case—a few hundred a year—, as the graph below indicates. A drop in the bucket.

As for those apparently fleeing California, the map below, which dates from 2010, shows both the influx into and outflow from the L.A. area, the latter of which is not only to lower tax states but also to other parts of California and the west coast. In commenting on the map, the right-wing nativist Peter Brimelow speculated that the driver of the exodus from the L.A. could be immigration rather than taxes (of white folks fleeing Latinos and Asians), and which he does suggest in the case of low tax south Florida (next map down). All goes to show that people of an ideological bent will read into data what they want to read into it.

Back to Walter Russell Mead, he had a blog post last week extolling an article in the conservative City Journal on the economic boom in Texas and all the high-skilled workers who are moving there. Mead, who is on a crusade against something he calls the “blue model,” favorably compares Texas to California. Well, if the influx of highly educated workers into Texas continues over the coming years, this will be a positive development in my view, as it will hasten Texas’s transformation from a deep red state into a competitive one and, by the middle of the next decade, into a safe blue state. Bring it on, I say!

UPDATE: The Feb. 19th WaPo has an article entitled “Will higher taxes on the rich derail California’s economic comeback?” Answer: No. Money quotes

Yet many economists and some young executives in the state say they don’t worry about that high [income tax] rate chilling growth. Other factors loom much larger for California’s business and economic health, they say, including whether the state can maintain deep pools of highly skilled talent and, in complicated but important ways, the renewed upward march of housing prices in the Bay Area and beyond….

Ask [Sifteo co-founder Dave] Merrill what he worries might disrupt his business in the next year, and he ticks off a list: Political changes in China that might raise the cost of manufacturing products there. A plunge in consumer confidence in America. A rapid decline of big-box retailers that stock his products.

He does not worry, he says, about tax increases…

…many Golden State economists say the tax hikes won’t drive away companies. A Stanford University study last year found no link between tax rates and wealthy Californians’ decisions to leave the state, and the state has a history of tax increases not affecting growth, including under a Republican governor — Ronald Reagan.

“The evidence is, from past tax increases, that it makes very little difference,” said Jerry Nickelsburg, a senior economist at the UCLA Anderson Forecast, who predicts only a slight scrape to state growth from the new rate increases. Since 1967, he added, tax hikes and cuts in the state have had a “second-order effect” on growth.

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The Unlearned History of the United States

This is what historian Sean Wilentz says Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s revisionist history of the US should be properly entitled. When I first heard about Stone and Kuznick’s book (and documentary) these past couple of months I declined to read about it. Oliver Stone is a fine filmmaker—I’ll see just about anything he does—but when it comes to politics and history, he’s out to lunch. A simple-minded gauchiste given over to conspiracy theories (e.g. his ‘JFK’: good cinema, trash history). But Wilentz has done the dirty work in the latest NYRB and taken Stone and Kuznick’s bullshit to the cleaners. He rubbishes their book. Stone and Kuznick’s interpretation of history was in vogue in the 1970s—when I came of age intellectually and politically—and I adhered to it at the time and into the ’80s, e.g. the argument that the US was responsible for the Cold War (William Appleman Williams, Walter LaFeber, Joyce and Gabriel Kolko et al). But I evolved intellectually and politically, and left all that behind. But many lefties out there—aging red diaper babies and others, who were stunned and bewildered by the fall of the Berlin Wall—have not. They should read Wilentz’s review.

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Is the enemy us?

This is the title of Claire Berlinski’s review in City Journal of Bruce Bawer’s The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind. I have not seen this book and am not likely to, not after having read through Bawer’s 2007 While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within (verdict: thumbs down). I had several quick comments on Claire’s review and that I was about to post on the comments thread of her FB post of it, but have decided to post on AWAV instead. So voilà

Quoting Claire

This inability of many young Americans to express a simple or even grammatically coherent thought, in Bawer’s view, owes to a variety of academic fads that in the early 1980s captured the American university.

The problem does not begin in university, or even in high school. The poor writing skills of American college students—the majority of them—is a source of dismay for anyone who has to grade their papers. And poor writing is often accompanied by inadequate verbal skills and muddled thinking. The problem, I think, lies in the American educational system but also somewhere in American culture, where being well-spoken and able to write well is not culturally valued in the way it is elsewhere. E.g. in France speaking and writing well are taken very seriously—they are primordial—and particularly when seeking employment (for jobs necessitating at least some higher education). In France, persons who cannot express themselves well or write coherently are not taken seriously. A politician in France with the verbal skills of George W. Bush would get nowhere, and certainly nowhere near the summit of the state (whereas on the American right, being an intellectual nitwit tends to be viewed positively, when not celebrated outright). If I have been dismayed by the writing and verbal skills of my American students, I have been impressed by those of my French students when writing in their own language—and who are far more verbally articulate than their American counterparts. Part of it is shaped by culture—of what is culturally valued—but also the educational system, from primary through high school. The French system has its problems and is not superior to the American overall—not to American public schools in well-to-do communities—but it does teach students how to write, as well as how to structure their thoughts. E.g. there are almost no multiple choice or true-and-false tests in French schools. Everything has to be written out and in full, grammatically correct sentences. And even if one gets the right answer, one will be marked down for errors in writing. It’s severe and not always fair, but at least the kids come out of the system knowing how to write their native language properly. And the baccalaureate exam at the end of high school is a week-long marathon of writing. No American high school student—which I was myself way back when—has ever had to go through such a grueling process (as my daughter did last June).

Then arrived the minor idea of hegemony, conceived by the minor Marxist intellect Antonio Gramsci, who argued that modern liberal democracies are no freer than the most ruthless of totalitarianisms. The oppression was merely unseen.

WADR, Antonio Gramsci was a major Marxist intellect, more so than any of his Marxist contemporaries (and far more so than Lenin or anyone who came out of Russia). The Gramscian concept of hegemony is also mischaracterized here (I think there’s a confusion with Marcuse). On this, I will let my friend and former professor Frank Adler—who taught the first-ever college course on Gramsci in an American university, and which I took 35 years ago (one of my best university courses ever)—respond in detail, should he choose to.

The Marxist post-colonialist Frantz Fanon completes the intellectual trio.

I recently read Les Damnés de la terre, of which I had read parts three decades ago but not too seriously. It was a book for its time— and heavily driven by the Algerian experience—and no longer has much relevance, but is quite interesting nonetheless. I was expecting to find much in it to object to, but surprisingly did not.

I don’t know what precisely the problem is, only that there is a problem. But having observed this condition from abroad—as Bawer has—I can think of only one place that would allow me to study the issue at leisure, in peace, and in depth: the universities.

None of this, of course, makes me yearn to spend time among the Fat Studiers. But they remain the outliers; they are a trend; and they are unlikely to produce much of value. Reading the works on the comparative literature syllabus at the California State University, Long Beach, on the other hand, will surely do those students quite a bit of good.

I entirely agree. American universities, for all their problems—the prohibitive costs of tuition being the greatest—, are the best in the world. They’re wonderful places. When it comes to higher education, America rules. And that’s not going to change, not anytime soon. And it is the case that Gender, Queer, Fat, Chicano etc Studies are the exception. They’re in a ghetto and most students don’t pay attention to them. One problem in higher education—and about which there is nothing to be done—is hyper-specialization. Few academics of my generation—not to mention the younger ones—have a broad education or deep knowledge base outside their disciplines—or even within them—and are often uninterested in teaching broad survey courses (e.g. the kind of introductory, interdisciplinary course I teach on modern France to American undergraduates each semester; students from elite or flagship state universities have told me that no such course is offered at their schools; and I am not a recognized academic specialist of France), if they’re even able to. There are no professional rewards in it. One gets an academic job by being specialized, and moves up the promotion ladder and receives tenure by maintaining and refining that specialization. Almost none of my academic contemporaries possesses the English gentleman-type level of intellectual cultivation and worldliness of my professors at Chicago who went to college and graduate school in the 1940s and ’50s (well, there is one exception to this among those I know personally—here—but he’s European…). Just about everyone I know who has had a successful academic career has been hyper-specialized, working and publishing on single subject areas for years, if not decades (something I am incapable of). But then, just about every profession is hyper-specialized nowadays, not just academia.

And when it comes to the discipline I was trained in, political science, there is the hegemony of mathematics—of quantitative methods, formal modeling, game theory, etc—, such that nowadays one almost has to have mastered econometrics to get a Ph.D. in politics, but don’t get me started on that…

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The Twinkie Manifesto

Paul Krugman has a great column in today’s NYT, that merits being posted on my blog in its entirety

The Twinkie, it turns out, was introduced way back in 1930. In our memories, however, the iconic snack will forever be identified with the 1950s, when Hostess popularized the brand by sponsoring “The Howdy Doody Show.” And the demise of Hostess has unleashed a wave of baby boomer nostalgia for a seemingly more innocent time.

Needless to say, it wasn’t really innocent. But the ’50s — the Twinkie Era — do offer lessons that remain relevant in the 21st century. Above all, the success of the postwar American economy demonstrates that, contrary to today’s conservative orthodoxy, you can have prosperity without demeaning workers and coddling the rich.

Consider the question of tax rates on the wealthy. The modern American right, and much of the alleged center, is obsessed with the notion that low tax rates at the top are essential to growth. Remember that Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, charged with producing a plan to curb deficits, nonetheless somehow ended up listing “lower tax rates” as a “guiding principle.”

Yet in the 1950s incomes in the top bracket faced a marginal tax rate of 91, that’s right, 91 percent, while taxes on corporate profits were twice as large, relative to national income, as in recent years. The best estimates suggest that circa 1960 the top 0.01 percent of Americans paid an effective federal tax rate of more than 70 percent, twice what they pay today.

Nor were high taxes the only burden wealthy businessmen had to bear. They also faced a labor force with a degree of bargaining power hard to imagine today. In 1955 roughly a third of American workers were union members. In the biggest companies, management and labor bargained as equals, so much so that it was common to talk about corporations serving an array of “stakeholders” as opposed to merely serving stockholders.

Squeezed between high taxes and empowered workers, executives were relatively impoverished by the standards of either earlier or later generations. In 1955 Fortune magazine published an essay, “How top executives live,” which emphasized how modest their lifestyles had become compared with days of yore. The vast mansions, armies of servants, and huge yachts of the 1920s were no more; by 1955 the typical executive, Fortune claimed, lived in a smallish suburban house, relied on part-time help and skippered his own relatively small boat.

The data confirm Fortune’s impressions. Between the 1920s and the 1950s real incomes for the richest Americans fell sharply, not just compared with the middle class but in absolute terms. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, in 1955 the real incomes of the top 0.01 percent of Americans were less than half what they had been in the late 1920s, and their share of total income was down by three-quarters.

Today, of course, the mansions, armies of servants and yachts are back, bigger than ever — and any hint of policies that might crimp plutocrats’ style is met with cries of “socialism.” Indeed, the whole Romney campaign was based on the premise that President Obama’s threat to modestly raise taxes on top incomes, plus his temerity in suggesting that some bankers had behaved badly, were crippling the economy. Surely, then, the far less plutocrat-friendly environment of the 1950s must have been an economic disaster, right?

Actually, some people thought so at the time. Paul Ryan and many other modern conservatives are devotees of Ayn Rand. Well, the collapsing, moocher-infested nation she portrayed in “Atlas Shrugged,” published in 1957, was basically Dwight Eisenhower’s America.

Strange to say, however, the oppressed executives Fortune portrayed in 1955 didn’t go Galt and deprive the nation of their talents. On the contrary, if Fortune is to be believed, they were working harder than ever. And the high-tax, strong-union decades after World War II were in fact marked by spectacular, widely shared economic growth: nothing before or since has matched the doubling of median family income between 1947 and 1973.

Which brings us back to the nostalgia thing.

There are, let’s face it, some people in our political life who pine for the days when minorities and women knew their place, gays stayed firmly in the closet and congressmen asked, “Are you now or have you ever been?” The rest of us, however, are very glad those days are gone. We are, morally, a much better nation than we were. Oh, and the food has improved a lot, too.

Along the way, however, we’ve forgotten something important — namely, that economic justice and economic growth aren’t incompatible. America in the 1950s made the rich pay their fair share; it gave workers the power to bargain for decent wages and benefits; yet contrary to right-wing propaganda then and now, it prospered. And we can do that again.

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L’Affaire Petraeus

I have not been closely following the David Petraeus affair, mostly reading the headlines but skipping the text. I find sex scandals not interesting, except when they raise larger issues. One such issue is that of online privacy—or the absence of it—, which is the subject of an analysis in today’s NYT. And I thought this commentary by Katie Roiphe in Slate, “Stop judging, you prudes,” was on target. She writes that “it is difficult to separate the outsized fantasies of a puritanical nation from legitimate questions of national security,” and that “if we are being honest, this is not even a ‘sex scandal’; [t]his is just sex.” Évidemment.

UPDATE: The Nation has an article by Jeremy Scahill, “The Petraeus Legacy: A Paramilitary CIA?” The lede: It was the CIA director’s relationship with JSOC—not Paula Broadwell—that should have raised concerns.

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Dirt Diggers Digest

A stateside friend, who works with unions, highly recommends the blog Dirt Diggers Digest: Chronicling Corporate Misbehavior (and how to research it). It is put out by Philip Mattera, director of the Corporate Research Project, who my friend says is the best anti-corporate researcher among progressives. So for anyone interested in the subject, check it out.

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Welcome to America, take a number

A commentary in today’s NYT by Malte Lehming, the opinion page editor of the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel, Emphasis added at the end

This fall my newspaper sent me to the United States to cover the elections. I brought my wife and two daughters, ages 8 and 9, with me.

Since the children were born here, while I was working as my paper’s Washington correspondent, they have American citizenship, and the trip seemed a good opportunity for them to get to know their homeland a little better.

This is the same homeland where conservatives have been howling about how the Obama administration is pushing America ever closer to European socialism. Europeans, they say, have the longest vacations (Germany), the highest debt (Greece), the highest taxes (Scandinavia) and the most bureaucracy (Brussels). Europe and socialism: the two appear in American conservative rhetoric almost as synonyms.

But as a German citizen who has now fought fierce battles with American telephone companies, the Department of Motor Vehicles and the public schools, I find it strange that Americans fear a socialist state. Because Europe’s bureaucratic nightmares have nothing on America’s.

For example, it took an entire day for my wife and me to get our visas processed. We had to answer dozens of detailed questions online: the exact dates of our previous stays in America, the dates of trips to other countries where we had needed visas, the complete birth names of our grandparents. And if we took too long to answer and didn’t save our work in the meantime, the Web site automatically shut down and we had to start all over again.

Then there was the little matter of getting our daughters into public school. The pile of forms weighed nearly two pounds. Our pediatrician back home had to certify all vaccinations, which again had to be authenticated by a second doctor, certified in the United States. And the entire family had to be present at each of these appointments.

And don’t ask about getting a phone line installed before our arrival. Our landlord tried to help, but it took him weeks of bouncing between Comcast and Verizon.

Nothing, however, reminded me more of the worst parts of the German system than the Virginia D.M.V. Its Web site helpfully said that if I had a German driver’s license, as well as authorized proof of residence, I could trade it in for a state license without further tests.

What it didn’t say, though, was how long the process would last. In the meantime, my entire file was lost.

None of this would be out of place in many European countries. But citizens of those countries, which embrace the notion of a larger government, also benefit greatly. We pay high taxes, but we get great infrastructure in return.

I spent half a day hunting for a store with flashlights in stock, because a storm had knocked out our power. In five decades in Germany I have never experienced a single power failure, because the power lines are usually underground and well maintained.

Yes, we have long holidays. But we probably still work more than our American colleagues, because our buildings are intact, the infrastructure works and we don’t sit around in traffic jams every day because of road work.

So why do Americans look only at the bad side of Europe? Done right, with enough money, it is punctual, efficient and organized. One may call it socialist, but it makes life easier.

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Hardheaded socialism makes Canada richer than U.S.

In my previous post I linked to a Marxist-sounding op-ed by the dean of the University of Toronto’s business school. Hard to imagine any of his American b-school counterparts writing such words. In thinking about Canada, I am reminded of a piece from Bloomberg.com last July on how Canada’s “hardheaded socialism” has made it richer than the US, that the net worth of Canadian households was now greater than those south of the border. The author, Stephen Marche, described the approach of conservative Canadian governments, including the present one. Money quote [emphasis added in bold]

Both liberals and conservatives in the U.S. have tried to use the Canadian example to promote their arguments: The left says Canada shows the rewards of financial regulation and socialism, while the right likes to vaunt the brutal cuts made to Canadian social programs in the 1990s, which set the stage for economic recovery.

The truth is that both sides are right. Since the 1990s, Canada has pursued a hardheaded (even ruthless), fiscally conservative form of socialism. Its originator was Paul Martin, who was finance minister for most of the ’90s, and served a stint as prime minister from 2003 to 2006. Alone among finance ministers in the Group of Eight nations, he “resisted the siren call of deregulation,” in his words, and insisted that the banks tighten their loan-loss and reserve requirements. He also made a courageous decision not to allow Canadian banks to merge, even though their chief executives claimed they would never be globally competitive unless they did. The stability of Canadian banks and the concomitant stability in the housing market provide the clearest explanation for why Canadians are richer than Americans today.

Martin also slashed funding to social programs. He foresaw that crippling deficits imperiled Canada’s education and health-care systems, which even his Conservative predecessor, Brian Mulroney, described as a “sacred trust.” He cut corporate taxes, too. Growth is required to pay for social programs, and social programs that increase opportunity and social integration are the best way to ensure growth over the long term. Social programs and robust capitalism are not, as so many would have you believe, inherently opposed propositions. Both are required for meaningful national prosperity.

Social programs were cut not to gut them—and certainly not for ideological reasons à la the American right—but to perennialize them. And no one on the Canadian right is talking about replacing the country’s single-payer health care system with something akin to what presently exists in the US.

On Canadian banks and regulation—of Canada not going off the deregulatory cliff—, business reporter Theresa Tedesco and Paul Krugman had analyses in ’09 and ’10, respectively (here and here). Should the US Congress be so inspired.

On current right-wing praise for “socialist” Canada, conservative onetime press baron Conrad Black had an op-ed last weekend in the conservative New York Sun, misleadingly entitled “How Canada Has Eclipsed America In the Obama Years” (misleading because Black dates the beginning of the eclipse well before Obama took office). Money quote  [emphasis added in bold]

the United States has fumbled away its gentle overlordship of the world these last 15 years. [i.e. through the entire Bush-Cheney period] Huge current account deficits and colossal federal budget deficits arose, and while the United Sates is generally successful [sic] in real wars, its habit of calling policy attacks on sociological problems “wars” has led to the conspicuous failures of the wars on crime, poverty and drugs.

The Canadian dollar has risen from 65¢ American to par, and Canada’s comparative standard of living has inched upwards, and its wealth is much more evenly distributed. The jagged nature of American democracy left 40 million African Americans unsegregated but still the subject of institutionalized discrimination, and 70% of people with magnificent (free) medical care and 30% with access to care but on a pretty stingy and erratic basis.

American education has become very uneven, American justice has degenerated into a turkey shoot for the benefit of a prosecutorial class that terrorizes the country and has given America 10 times the average number of incarcerated people per capita of other advanced prosperous democracies. Sixty million basic manufacturing and service jobs have been out-sourced while 20 million unskilled peasants were admitted illegally to the country, and trillions of dollars of worthless real estate-backed securities inundated the world, pumped out by Wall Street and certified as investment grade, almost asphyxiating the American financial industry while trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives were squandered in the sanguinary Quixotry of nation-building in the Middle and Near East.

Okay, an American conservative may retort to this that Black is Canadian—or he used to be, until he became a Brit—so whaddaya expect?! But still…

Black then offers this

Prudent, hesitant Canada, ran 14 federal government surpluses in a row. We are the pigs in the brick house — it isn’t a heroic position, neither daring nor stylish, but Canadians are peering through the portals of their stout solid home, transfixed and astonished.

Astonished at America. My, even libertarian Cato Institute types (e.g. here; h/t for the above image) are praising the Canadian way of running the economy. Now they do deplore the government-run health care system and government spending that amounts to 42% of national output, but the fact remains that Canada is prospering—and in the estimation of the libertarians—despite the government-run health care system and high levels of government spending. Which, ergo, means that economies and countries can indeed prosper with government-run health care and high levels of government spending. Or under what American conservatives call “socialism”…

One is reminded of American right-wing dissing of Canada in the last decade, most famously expressed by Patrick Buchanan, who referred to the country as “Soviet Canuckistan” back in ’02. This was at least humorous. Less humorous was a cover story on Canada in the National Review, also in ’02, entitled “Wimps!” In the screed author Jonah Goldberg opined that what Canada needed was “a little invasion” by the US

It’s quite possible that the greatest favor the United States could do for Canada is to declare war on it. No, this isn’t a tribute to South Park, the TV cartoon that popularized a song — Blame Canada — calling for an outright invasion of America’s northern neighbor. A full-scale conquest is unnecessary; all Canada needs is to be slapped around a little bit, to be treated like a whining kid who’s got to start acting like a man. Why would such a war be necessary? The short answer is: to keep the Canadians from being conquered by the United States. In effect, it would be a war to keep Canada free.

Other tidbits from the screed

Canada is barely a functioning democracy at all: Its governmental structure, if described objectively, is far more similar to what we would expect in a corrupt African state with decades of one-party rule.

And this

Despite Canada’s self-delusions, it is, quite simply, not a serious country anymore. It is a northern Puerto Rico with an EU sensibility.

And this

If the U.S. were to launch a quick raid into Canada, blow up some symbolic but unoccupied structure — Toronto’s CN Tower, or perhaps an empty hockey stadium — Canada would rearm overnight. Indeed, Canada might even be forced to rethink many of its absurd socialist policies in order to pay for the costs involved in protecting itself from the Yankee peril. Canada’s neurotic anti-Americanism would be transformed into manly resolve. The U.S. could quickly pretend to be frightened that it had messed with the wrong country, and negotiate a fragile peace with the newly ornery Canadians. In a sense, the U.S. owes it to Canada to slap it out of its shame-spiral. That’s what big brothers do.

Goldberg naturally did not spare “Canada’s disastrous health-care system.” Other US right-wingers also jumped on the Canada-bashing bandwagon, such as Ann Coulter, who informed Canadians that they were ”lucky we allow them to exist on the same continent,” and Tucker Carlson, who snickered that ”without the U.S., Canada is essentially Honduras” (see here).

Voilà a slice of the American right’s Weltanschauung. To Goldberg, Coulter et al the only thing I have to say to them is this.

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Savage ads

I’ve been reading today about the controversy over the anti-Islam ads (above and below) that have been posted on New York City buses and in subway stations by a group led by the Muslimophobic crackpot Pamela Geller.

I find it appalling that a federal judge ruled that New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority could not refuse the ads. These ads are manifestly hateful toward the believers of a religion. They constitute hate speech, stigmatizing a religion and its believers—implying that they are “savages”—, and are rightly seen this way by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. While the ads should not be banned (and cannot be), public authorities should not be legally obligated to post them on billboards. They should have the right to make a well-considered and argued decision to reject them. There is a huge difference between these ads, on the one hand, and Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons and the trailer of a film no one has seen, on the other. The multitudes who were outraged by CH’s cartoons and/or the trailer had either never seen them or actively went looking. Billboard-size ads are in-your-face and in public. And it should stand to legal reason that one has a right not to have racist images and/or speech shoved in one’s face. If this is legal, then why not subway station ads of, say, naked women? One can find plenty of magazines with this in the newsstand on the subway platform, so what’s the problem with having it up on the wall for all to see? Rhetorical question, of course. Parisians will be reminded of the billboard ads a decade ago for a brand of thong underwear and that were quite explicit. When I first saw one of the ads, on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, I was taken aback and felt that it went too far. Many others felt the same way, including my wife and Ségolène Royal, who called the ads degrading to women (see here). A public controversy ensued, leading the association of advertisers that oversees ethical standards in the profession to ask the company to take down the ads (here). I have long been bothered by the blown-up covers of XXX magazines on the sides of newsstands in France and elsewhere in Europe. Children should not have to see this, nor anyone else who doesn’t wish to. In the case of magazines bordering on pornography, there should be a legal regulation on how they’re advertised. If one wants it, go into the kiosk and buy the magazine.

Back to the NYC ads, I cannot approve of the response of Mona Eltahawy, who publicly spray painted them in one subway station, attracting the attention of everyone—certainly her intention—and which got her arrested (here and here). I am an admirer of Ms. Eltahawy but this is not the right approach. It achieves nothing and is grist for the Muslimophobes’ mill. And spray painting a subway station—or any public place—can never be condoned.

A much better response is to surreptitiously “rebrand” the ads, as someone or some group has been doing (below; for more, see here). Excellent initiative!

This happened in the Bay Area last summer in a similar controversy, though in a more explicitly political manner. I would love to see the reaction of Pamela Geller’s kindred spirits to a mass ad campaign in New York City calling for the elimination of the state of Israel and its replacement by a Palestinian state governed by Islamic law…

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Chicago teachers strike

[update below] [2nd update below] [3rd update below] [4th update below] [5th update below] [6th update below] [7th update below]

I would normally not pay much attention to a teachers strike in an American city—or in any city (not even my own in the Paris banlieues, now that my daughter is out of the system)—except for (a) the obvious national political context plus the identity of Chicago’s mayor, and (b) the fact that Chicago is my city in the US and to which I am affectively attached (and where I have also been a registered voter for the past 30 years). When it comes to strikes, I normally support them—in the US and in the private sector—, out of a reflexive support of trade unions (and simply because I am on the left side of the political spectrum and have working class roots on more than one side of my family). And I remember the Chicago teachers strike of 1987, which was so obviously justified in view of the miserable salaries teachers earned ($14,000/year was the beginning salary at the time). But I’m not sure about this one. Having lived in France for 20+ years has soured me on public sector unions—I specify public sector—, and particularly teacher unions (les syndicats des enseignants). And despite the fact that I had a college internship at AFSCME HQ in Washington way back when. Now the situation of public sector unions in France and the US is not the same—in France public employee unions can call strikes at the drop of a hat, for any goddamned reason, and at any time, and the public be damned—, but still…

So I’m trying to figure this one out. NYT columnist Joe Nocera had a convincing commentary against the teachers strike but Rick Perlstein in Salon and Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker had equally compelling commentaries supporting the teachers. I also think of Diane Ravitch, the (moderate) Republican education policy analyst and historian—and who served in the Bush 41 administration—, who has substantially revised her views on education reform (and specifically charter schools) in recent years. And earlier today I asked David Kusnet, whose views on such matters I hold in high consideration, for a quick take of the Chicago strike. His response: “From a distance, seems like a cry of pain from people who do a thankless job and feel disrespected. Education reform should stress collaboration, not conflict.”

So like I said, I’m figuring this one out. Views of Chicagoans who have (or have had) kids in the public school system are welcome.

UPDATE: I’ve received feedback from a few old Chicago friends. This from Tim

Hey Arun. Screw the out of town columnists who are trying to fit this into some national political narrative. I’m with the teachers 100% and I have two kids missing school (which I can’t say for Rahm and most of his big contributors). Carol Marin does a good job summing up how we got here.

Carol Marin is a sharp, longtime Chicago political reporter. Here are the views of Madeleine, who worked professionally for a number of years on school reform in the city

I don’t fault the teachers for striking. There was no contract by deadline, what would you have them do? I don’t think they were being particularly unreasonable in demands or negotiations, or were looking for a strike. My impressions of Rahm in this – first, overall, that he sees his job as being about money, money, money – raising revenue, cutting costs (understandably b/c were headed for fiscal cliff, hence timing of Daley’s retirement). However, his job is actually to look out for the welfare of the city as a whole, which is not exactly the same thing. And Rahm & teachers -Rahm came out swinging (oddly, unprovoked). One of the first things he said after election was that he wanted a longer school day, no salary increases as if he were ‘taking on’ the teachers. Really? Huh?…At this point it’s feeling like an existential struggle over what teaching/learning will be like in Chicago schools. But it may go back to being about an employment contract before it’s all resolved – and no reason that couldnta happened before now. ps I’m pro-charter -but not anti-union. Union is not what keeps us from successful schooling.

And this from Marcia, who was a longtime city employee

Hi Arun, As for public sector unions, AFSCME was the only protection we had as city employees from patronage and corruption. How many strikes have there been? This is it in the last 25 years. Now that UIC faculty have voted for a union, I’m in a public sector union again. I don’t see us going on strike, but the union is a offering us a voice of sanity and reason in an insane State system.

Well, I’m convinced. Also, the fact that Rahm Emanuel is the union’s adversary here almost reflexively causes me to side with the teachers.

2nd UPDATE: Diane Ravitch has a short post on her blog asking “What does Mayor Rahm want?” She links to a useful analysis by Valerie Strauss in The Washington Post on “The real problem with Rahm’s school reforms in Chicago.”

3rd UPDATE: I like the image below. (h/t Roane Carey)

4th UPDATE: Harold Meyerson has a hard-hitting column in WaPo on the Chicago strike and its implications for the Democratic party. He is not tender toward Rahm Emanuel.

5th UPDATE: Jordan Weissmann, associate editor of The Atlantic, has a column defending teacher strikes, in which he asserts that “some issues can only be resolved fairly in a public fight.” This passage is particularly important

But public sector unions also have redeeming qualities that arguably make them essential. For one, they’ve historically helped make government compensation more equal with the private sector, which is crucial if you believe in attracting talented people to public service. They create transparency by forcing state and local governments to negotiate contracts, which set concrete standards that allow the public to understand why specific workers are paid what they’re paid. And, sometimes best of all, they get in the way of reforms. Politicians come up with awful ideas for how to make government run better, and it’s important to have a conservative, countervailing force. Unions help make sure that local and state government’s aren’t run via management fad.

This echoes what Marcia said in the 1st update above, about public employee unions offering protection—for public employees and taxpayers alike—from patronage and corruption (which is particularly important in a city like Chicago).

6th UPDATE: Kevin Drum in Mother Jones asks “Why do people hate teacher unions?” Political scientist Corey Robin asks the same question on his blog and provides the answer: “Because they hate teachers.”

7th UPDATE: Diane Ravitch, to whom I defer on education issues—and whom Corey Robin in the link above correctly calls “indispensible”—, settles the matter of the Chicago strike in a post on the NYRB blog, “Two visions for Chicago schools.”

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