2 Time videos 1dec10

The Right's Weird Campaign to End Elections for Senators
by Adam Cohen Wednesday, Nov. 24, 2010:Why Ending Elections for Senators Is a Bad Tea Party Idea - TIME

Prison closing, Lyon Mountain, NY



a network of local economies

"the resident" re Peak USA

Audrey Nelson on Fora TV

''Cleavage at Work? A New Dress Code for Professional Women''


Another video from Fora TV. This is Audrey Nelson. The full video of her presentation is here. Yes, the still image caught my attention.

Insecurity State

artist: Amanda Moeckel


Steve Gimbel in Philosopher's Playground, a new blog(well, new to me), notes that the World Health Organization recently assessed the healthcare systems of most member countries and ranked the US 37th. Behind virtually all Western European countries, but also behind Costa Rica, behind Chile, even behind Morocco and war-torn Colombia.

From his essay:

...insecurity is the most important force in shaping American society. It manifests itself in two ways. In the middle class, it is class insecurity. There is the sense that our kids will not only fail to have more than we have, but that they may fall from being middle class. This is why schools are simultaneously turned into prisons providing environments that are not conducive to learning and overburdening our kids with too much homework. If they don't get into the right pre-school they won't get into the right college and then they might not end up with a good job. The kids are so risk averse that they refuse to think interesting thoughts. Just get the B, just don't screw up. It is there in the way we create gated communities both in terms of actual gates and in terms of infrastructure. We can't build public transportation because then the wrong kind would have easy access to our homes and our stuff. It's all fear of losing our stuff and our kids not being able to get it for themselves. Look at our drug laws, look at the way we pay for schools through property taxes, look at the discussions around affirmative action. The group of voters who went for Reagan and Clinton are governed by class insecurity and both of them knew it and played them like a fiddle.

The middle class doesn't want health care reform, not because they think ours is the best system in the world, but because it is good enough for them and they are afraid that helping someone else would be a zero sum game and thereby cost them. It works for me and mine so don't mess with it. Insecurity leads to malicious, selfish inaction.

I think there's a bit more to it than that, since this is, to an extent, one of those "people are so X because of Y" arguments, when in fact our society is increasingly less homogeneous and that argument, irrespective of the particulars you replace X and Y with, gets increasingly harder to make. Maybe, as a sort of corollary to Gimbel's thesis, it would be interesting to explore the ways that popular media reinforces our more reactionary traits and deliberately avoids discussing contrasting qualities we have.


Nevertheless his blog looks like a fascinating place to visit and the essay is worth reading in full. Go read the rest here, "Insecurity as an American Social Force"

(via Helmut at Phroneisisaical.)

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Buick follies

I found this strangely compelling.

Naomi Oreskes and the American denial of global warming

God [darn] America

here, lazily, is the comment I left at ATR earlier tonight, apropos of a really nice post* by Bernard Chazelle referencing "the speech" Obama gave regarding Jeremiah Wright:

The speech was sheer BS-- he had a real chance to do what he does best, round off sharp edges, by saying Wright was right but the problem was in his vitriolic style, not the content. And if anybody in US politics today could have pulled that off, it was Obama.

Instead, he's playing Hillary's game and chasing the white swing voters who won't vote for him anyway, instead of being square with a slightly different demographic, the white swing voters who otherwise might vote for him.

What he accomplished instead was he demonstrated weakness. That when push comes to shove and sacred cows push, he'll let them shove him around, and will disavow his friends for votes.

In the past I've said I'll discuss thing/person/phenomenon x at greater length tomorrow, or the day after, without always following through. Nevertheless, this time I will follow up with a lengthier discussion in 24-48 hrs, tops.

*"the perils of truth-telling"— Bernard Chazelle

Salon has the text of the speech here, and the video is up on YouBiquitousTube, here.

The state of things: 29 April 2006

I originally came across this film at the internet archive, here.

Nora Ligorano, Marshall Reese


"On Saturday, April 29th the artists Ligorano/Reese installed a temporary sculpture in the garden of Jim Kempner Fine Art, located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.

Sculpted in ice and spelling out the word “Democracy” in block letters, the installation reflected on the current political state and the transience of our cultural values. Measuring 20 inches high and 120 inches in length, the word melted over 24 hours. The sculpture cracked, diminished, and ultimately disappeared, leaving as its final trace a puddle of water.

The sculpture focused on the impact of the Iraq war, how censorship, surveillance and torture are transforming U.S. society. According to Nora Ligorano, “The sculpture is emblematic of the times – our democracy is in danger of wasting away at an imperceptible rate.” Marshall Reese adds, “What stands out with this piece is that for the amount of time most people view art – 1 minute or less – the sculpture won’t seem to change, yet by day’s end, it will be gone - disappear.”

the end of the world: then and now, and maybe later

images:wikipedia, calendars of the world

Exhibit One, from our wiki friends:

1844 – Millerites and members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church* were greatly disappointed that Jesus did not return as predicted by American preacher William Miller (pictured).



The Great Disappointment was a major event in the history of the Millerites, a Christian denomination, in the United States. Around 50,000 people joined the movement that was to receive Jesus on October 22nd ,1844. Based on an interpretation of the event portrayed in Daniel 8:14, they waited to see the Second Coming as the event that was to be fulfilled on the appointed day. The specific passage reads, in the (King James Bible), as: And he said unto me, Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed. (Daniel 8:14)


The Great Disappointment is viewed as an example of how the psychological phenomenon of cognitive dissonance manifests itself through failed prophecies which often arise in a religious context. The theory was proposed by Leon Festinger to describe the formation of new beliefs and increased proselytizing in order to reduce the tension, or dissonance, that results from failed prophecies. According to the theory, believers experienced tension following the failure of Jesus' reappearance in 1844 which led to a variety of new explanations. The various solutions form a part of the teachings of the different groups that outlived the disappointment.

Initially I wanted to post this on Monday, i.e. October 22nd, but Rob had a really nice post up and I figured I didn't want to steal his thunder by announcing the end of the world, especially since, if you're 163 years late-- what's one more day? (sometimes, I like to put things off. Other times I just find I have to. One way or another it seems like the story of my life...)

Anyway: I really wish people would make more of a fuss about (the history of)the end of the world, because I think we're living in another day and age when millenarian looniness seems to be screwing with people's thinking, and a reminder of past foolishness in this area strikes me as pretty useful.

About 10 years ago I was working at such-and-such a place, and many of my co-workers were preoccupied with some dubious best-seller about hidden numerical codes in the bible, and they would invite me to their home-study sessions-cum-get-togethers in which (I guess) they discussed this, or prayed, or who knows what. (I never went.)

While I don't know particularly much about the history of religions, my impression is that the afore mentioned William Miller was the trouble maker who started the modern craze over end-times eschatology, whereas Christianity pre-Bill Miller tended to de-emphasize the rubbing of our hands together with messed-up glee and the hoping for the end of creation and the fiery deaths of people who weren't us.

(Long before I'd heard of Leon Festinger and cognitive dissonance I had a hard to define sense of unease about people who grooved on the end times-- how can it possibly be psychologically healthy to aspire all the usual things people aspire to, to make a life for themselves and maybe get married and have kids and plan aspire for the kids to have happy futures while you are simultaneously taught to long for the destruction of civilization?)


Exhibit 2, from Calendars of the World:

When will the Islamic calendar overtake the Gregorian calendar?

As the year in the Islamic calendar is about 11 days shorter than the year in the Christian calendar, the Islamic years are slowly gaining in on the Christian years. But it will be many years before the two coincide. The 1st day of the 5th month of C.E. 20874 in the Gregorian calendar will also be (approximately) the 1st day of the 5th month[Jumada al-awwal] of AH 20874 of the Islamic calendar.

.

May 1st, 20874.


About 2 years ago I came across this interesting nugget o' knowledge. It occurred to me that maybe for the religious numbers crunchers who appear so eager for Armageddon the convergence of the Christian and Islamic calendars, due in a mere 18,867 years, might be the signal from God they were looking for. And, instead of getting hyped-up to wreck the world and all that rot, they're supposed to make sure the world lasts at least another 18,800 plus years, with naturally occurring fresh water and air, trees and flowers, animals still roaming free, and maybe some peace on earth and a convergence of religions and men.

Now, I am not a religious sort per se, and I'm definitely not trying to suggest some sort of half-baked spiritual movement. We have those in abundance, and they don't strike me as being terribly useful. Call it a wistful thought experiment, designed to provoke or soothe or both. It would be nice if we could stick around and manage to civilize ourselves-- but could we do it in a mere 18,800 odd years?


*10.24 addendum: Herbert Ford notes in the comments that the Seventh Day Adventists were not formally established until 1863. (Actually the Wikipedia entry on the 7th Day Adventists notes this as well, although it describes them as having evolved from the Millerites.)

breaking the sound barrier

the Bell X-1 flew faster than mach 1 for the first time on 14 October 1947-- 60 years ago today. In my usually cursory looking about for info about the day's topic, I found out that X-1 pilot Chuck Yeager is A. still alive(and married to a woman 36 yrs his junior of whom his kids apparently disapprove) and
B. Has recently endorsed Duncan Hunter for president.(!?)



Milestones like this one, and their assorted peripheral data make me think again of a topic I often return to, of how I used to be able to appreciate things like Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier and how cool-looking the X-1 is without the disagreeable tangential reflections about all sorts of other stuff that kinda spoiled it-- how the US changed since 1947, from the New Deal and the country that mostly still manufactured our own stuff and cared about domestic job creation, to the present shaky state of things.


Yes, I recognize it wasn't all peachy in '47; desegregation was still waiting in the future and we did intern thousands of Japanese-Americans during the war years, just because people were scared and it was politically useful, to name just two things.

Still, the Bell X-1 did look pretty cool.

All those years ago

magnum photos from the 1967 war

some recent anniversaries, courtesy our wikipedia friends:

June 5th,1967 - Six-Day War begins: The Israeli air force launches simultaneous pre-emptive attacks on the air forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.

June 6th,1944 - The Battle of Normandy begins. D-Day, code named Operation Overlord, commences with the landing of 155,000 Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy in France. The allied soldiers quickly break through the Atlantic Wall and push inland in the largest amphibious military operation in history.

June 6th,1982 - 1982 Lebanon War begins: Forces under Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon invade southern Lebanon in their "Operation Peace for the Galilee," eventually reaching as far north as the capital, Beirut.

June 7th,1981 - "Operation Opera":The Israeli Air Force attacked and disabled Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor.

June 8th,1967 - The Israeli Air Force attacked the U.S. Navy intelligence ship USS Liberty in international waters, killing 34 and wounding at least 173.

Now, keep something in mind: none of these things actually happened. I'm not saying this because of the faults that many people lay at Wikipedia's feet-- the wikis held up their part of the telling, at least here. But if you watch the nightly news on TV, whether on CBS or NBC, CNN, etc, you won't hear about these things. I am lying of course; they did talk about the Battle of Normandy. CIA chief defense secretary Robert Gates was in Normandy, attending the ceremony, perhaps because the French discretely requested that it not be Cheney, after his dress code faux pas in Poland. Who knows, maybe they even scheduled the G8 shindig when they did so that George Bush,jr not be there either. The Europeans are subtle like that.

Katie Couric talked about how the father of one of the CBS nightly news staffers fought at Normandy, and they had a nice story about how dad went back to the little French town where he helped take care of a sick cow in ‘44. I’m actually not making fun, at least not in this instance-- it was a nice story.

The problem is not the story itself, nor occasional sentimentality-- but the lack of context. Television insists that we regard life as lacking context. Stuff happens, then, inevitably, other stuff happens-- not because of prior incidents, but because each day is a new day, requiring new content. And when anything bad happens it’s genuinely shocking, unpredictable, and unimaginable-- just like the last shocking, unpredictable and unimaginably bad thing.

Although I try my best to avoid keeping up with “dancing with the stars” or the latest misadventures of Paris Hilton, etc, I don’t think of myself as a snob who looks down on his fellow Americans for being dumber than a can of paint, as Xymphora very memorably suggested we were.
Yes, it’s difficult sometimes. Millions of us still believe Saddam was responsible for 9/11. Millions more voted to re-elect George Bush,jr in 2004, and supposedly over 50 percent of the US population believes the planet is no more than 6,000 years old .

Should the nightly newscasts be teaching history? Yes, insofar as current events inevitably occur in an historical context, the news readers’ reluctance to note this notwithstanding. People make fun of the news readers, although I suppose they’re a pretty easy target, shooting fish with really good hair in a barrel. We’re often told they’re excessively ambitious, possibly stupid, probably amoral.


Imagine a young reporter at a smaller-market tv station, say, in Terre Haute or Columbus or Buffalo. She isn’t exactly crazy about her job, but she’s young and maybe even comparatively naive idealistic, and even regards TV news as real journalism. So she appreciates her opportunity to gain experience and hone her skills. They ask her to do a bunch of “man in the street” interviews about some topic or other. Maybe it’s for opinions regarding a bill being discussed in congress or the state legislature. She needs to go back to the station with 3 or 4 good ones, whatever that means. She likes talking to people, and talks to well over 3 or 4, and submits 4 clips that struck her as thoughtful yet unpretentious, and edits that. The very next thing she knows, her producer is livid, chews her out, explaining that they’re all wrong, that wasn’t what she was looking for at all. The smart people make viewers self-conscious about their failings.

The producer wants, well, lunkheads. People you can laugh at for their sheer ignorance. Our young reporter reflects on all the people she talked to, and she doesn’t think ordinary people are uniformly stupid, but she also recognizes that her opinion isn’t exactly valued in this equation, and would like to keep her job(at least for now.). So she re-edits, and considers herself lucky that she did talk to some lunkheads, and doesn’t have to go out and shoot again, and manages to meet her deadline-- barely.

I’ve never worked as a tv reporter, and I don’t know if it actually works that way, but I can well imagine it might. Like our hypothetical young reporter, I don’t believe that Americans are uniformly unreflective and stupid, although distressingly many are. What’s even more distressing, however, is how big-time journalism seems like a hermetic, tightly-coiled mechanism, purpose-built to reinforce our sense of ourselves as unreflective and stupid. And apart from people getting most of their news from teevee, it seems like the other stations and programming are part of the mechanism.

A couple of examples-- one I wrote about before:
“they were the greatest generation, blah blah blah...”(feb 2003)

What is it with the History Channel? I just got back from the gym where the teevee was tuned to a documentary of sorts about the Normandy invasion entitled "Then and Now". They had the customary business of cutting between modern-day experts and stock footage of the events in question, only one of the experts sure looked like Dwight Eisenhower. ...Later they talked to Rommel's son, then eventually to Montgomery's son, and eventually cut back to the Eisenhower look-alike who turned out to be-- yes, Eisenhower's son.
(Apparently he wrote a book about the war too.)
How many documentaries about D-day already existed before this one, I don't know, but there must be many. Why this particular reshuffling of stock footage, at this time? What is this, Pavlovian conditoning? Are we supposed to respond to this procession of WWII sons as a suggestion about how "righteous" George W. Bush is, readying to liberate Iraq, the wheeling and dealing with Turkey and the counsel of the house of Saud notwithstanding? How about a program about, say, the My Lai massacre in the coming weeks? Do you think we'll see it on the History Channel? I'm not even asking about a show on the US role in Mazar-e-Sharif...

I will say one thing though. It would be nice if we had a president who was as articulate in English as Manfred Rommel is.

The second item is from the Speed Channel(which I believe is owned by Murdoch)from some time in 2005; they had a program about cars of the US presidents, including of course the fateful Lincoln Limo convertible JFK rode in. They discussed various personal and white house autos, with the customary cutting to car experts. At one point they discussed a Ford V8 convertible that FDR drove, which may have been the first car with hand controls for a paraplegic driver, and which is preserved today. Then the expert they cut to offered, just in passing, that “FDR gave people hope, even if he didn’t actually do anything about the depression.”

SON OF A BITCH. What, this car guy is suddenly an expert on the New Deal? If he was, they failed to discuss his credentials. I swear, the more you watch tv, the more you want to throw something at it.


FDR's 1938 Ford

I want to offer a solution, but I don’t have one. I don’t think it’s just an abstract problem, something for bloggers and op-ed writers to bemoan. Conditioning people to reject a sense of historical causality could help enable the nitwit-in-chief to launch a war against Iran, for one thing, and will very likely have more pernicious effects in years to come.

The other day I discussed some of these ideas with Arvin Hill, who is singularly pessimistic about it all. I tell myself that ordinary people had it far worse circa 1890, when Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to smash the railroad unions(which were still illegal), and he was the only democrat elected president from 1860 when Lincoln was elected, until Wilson came along in 1912, a period of even greater 1-party dominance.

Of course today’s 1-party state is slipperier, as it require large numbers of democrats to be shadow republicans, and the dynamic of what the parties(ostensibly) stand for today is very different from what it was in the 19th century. 21st century oligarchs have done their damnedest to learn the lessons of economics and the various social sciences, to make sure that they’ll never be caught unawares by a great depression or other phenomenon that might cast the obstacles they set for ordinary people in sharp relief.

Still. If there are any bright spots, maybe it’s found in discontent. Large numbers of people know something is wrong, even if they have a hard time articulating it. They can’t blame Paris Hilton forever-- eventually they’ll notice she never raided anybody’s pension fund or took away their health insurance. Will it happen in time? I don’t know. Will Americans look at the immigrant rallies, quit bitching about the Mexicans, and realize the illegals are doing a better job of being Americans-- demonstrating, causing a ruckus, demanding to be heard-- than most Americans?


also, see Gary Farber: “God Help Us”

Sarabeth, at 1115.org, "mirror, mirror"

Skimble:"desperate to kiss and be touched"
and the follow-up, "deleting the love"(and no, it's not worth noting just because he references me!)

Jonathan Schwarz(2005):“Now More Than Ever, It's Critical That We Learn Nothing From History”
in which he notes that Mike Gerber refers to it as the Learn Nothing From History Channel.

and, as one of Schwarz’s commenters reminds us,
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."--Philip K. Dick

Jeffrey St Clair, Counterpunch:"Israel's Attack on the USS Liberty, Revisited"

regarding Jerry Falwell

Misfit Slacker:

I began the day with a friend calling me that Jerry Falwell had died. Apparently it's heart failure. Who knew he had a heart?

Avedon Carol:

I'm not going to pretend I share anyone's feelings of loss. He was a hateful man who did evil things.

Alan Wolfe, in Salon,"The stone is cast":

Jerry Falwell spent a career demonizing others. Upon his death, what else could he expect in return?

Xymphora discusses Falwell's role in fostering the odd relationship between right-wing Christian evangelicals and right wing Israelis in "On a Learjet to Hell".

And finally, from Atrios:

Obviously sympathies to those who cared for him. Many undeserving people have good people around them. It's hard to have sympathies for those who fault other victims for their tragedies.

E.G.:"AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals."

He lived a decent-length, if not long, life. One hopes he finds that his God is a more forgiving being than he believed.

Κέρβερος

William Blake's Cerebrus, the mythological hound of hell.

from channel 8 in Grand Rapids:
"Chrysler workers skeptical of Cerberus' motives in Chrysler deal"

DETROIT -- Billy Boyd, a Chrysler worker for almost 34 years, is so skeptical about Monday's sale announcement that he might not stick around much longer.

Like many of Chrysler's roughly 80,000 employees, Boyd, 51, a machine operator at the automaker's Kenosha, Wis., engine plant, isn't sure what to make of the unusual deal. Parent company DaimlerChrysler AG is paying as much as $650 million to walk away from Chrysler by turning over the keys to his company to Cerberus Capital Management LP, a New York private equity firm.

"It sounds good," he said before work Monday afternoon. "Are they buying us to help us out or to suck the blood? It's kind of scary."

At many Chrysler plants, workers also worried about what it will cost them as word spread about the $7.4 billion sale. Many are fearful of private equity buyers, which in the past have sold off companies in pieces to make a fast buck.

As well they should be. I note that the UAW guy quoted in the Channel 8 story sounded upbeat, so we probably don't need to worry overmuch about his future. On the other hand-- while the democrats are carefully calibrating their response to GWB so that they seem to care about ending the war without seeming "vindictive" or "mean" or any of the other countless things they might be accused of by the millionaire anchormen whose approval they tremble before, couldn't they have thrown in an extra seven billion to protect a few thousand American jobs?


For much, much less than the cost of the damned Iraq war, the US gov't could have bought Chrysler outright, and federalized American healthcare, therebye making each of the big three more globally competitive. But, no, we can't do that, that's what crazy European leftists do. So much better to run our country into the ground proving we're macho.

also:Andrew Leonard, "Chrysler at the gates of hell"

Farmers branch

Occasionally I regret not discussing local happenings more often. Well, Saturday we had a pretty big local happening, when Farmers Branch passed prop 2903, designed to fine landlords that rent to undocumented immigrants, of whom I guess there are quite a few in FrB.(According to WFAA, the Dallas ABC affiliate, Farmers Branch has a population of around 30 thousand, and is somewhere around 60-65 percent white and 30 percent Hispanic, whereas they were closer to 97 per cent caucasian in 1970.)

The proposition passed pretty overwhelmingly, by a 68 to 32 percent margin, with approximately 3,000 out of about 14,100 eligible voters participating in the vote. That's about 10 percent of the population, maybe 22 percent of the eligible voters-- which is high for a municipal election.

(On a side note, I've always marveled at the strange consistency with which many people seem to avoid voting in municipal elections and are more likely to vote in national elections-- sometimes even only when it's a presidential election, and not in the "off-year" congressional elections-- even though it's precisely in the "smaller" elections in which they're more likely to have a meaningful impact on the outcome and on their day-to-day lives-- well, at least theoretically! )

But what will 2903 accomplish? Some people who've never heard of FrB will regard the little Dallas bedroom community as a hickish outpost full of mean people, while others will admire them and decide to stir similar trouble in their own communities. Presumably they don't care about the former; on the face of it, that lop-sided vote suggests that even though only about 20-22 percent of the eligible voters participated, it's probably a fairly accurate reflection of the local disposition. The Houston Chronicle ran the standard AP story with the title

"Farmers Branch voters back immigration limits", while the Washington Post ran the story as

"Anti-Illegal-Immigrant Law OK'd in Texas", which strikes me as slightly more accurate. (I would've specified "Texas suburb", as opposed to suggesting it was a state-wide referendum. Nevertheless it looks like pretty much the same story.)

But aside from the reputation of Farmers Branch, I really don't see what it will do besides make the lives of the affected individuals more difficult. Landlords will understandably resent having to enforce it, especially as several lawsuits questioning the proposition's legality are looming. A group called "Let the Voters Decide" commissioned a study about the economic impact of illegal immigrants on FrB whose results suggest that the ordinance would have an adverse economic impact on FrB. Tim O'Hare( the FrB councilman who started this whole thing late last year when he proposed the ordinance) discounted the study, citing another study by the state comptroller, which I'd like very much to see. From the WFAA story:

City Council candidate David Koch took issue with several points – chief among them was the carefully edited use of an economic study on illegal immigration by the state comptroller last December.

The Farmers Branch study noted that "labor and spending of undocumented immigrants is having a huge positive effect on the state's economy, adding nearly $18 billion annually to gross state product."

The comptroller's report, the study noted, also said that "undocumented immigrants paid $425 million more in state taxes in fiscal 2005 than the cost of providing them education, healthcare and incarceration services."

But Mr. Koch said that the original comptroller's report also pointed out that local governments take a financial hit from illegal immigration. Counties take in $513 million in local taxes and revenues – but spend $1.44 billion in indigent care and law enforcement costs, according to the comptroller's report. Cities and school districts suffer as well, the report said.

"The only thing they really look at is the financial benefit that the state incurs," Mr. Koch said. "They completely ignore all the costs shoved down the throats, at the local level, of school districts, hospitals, counties and cities."

I don't know how to evaluate the financial arguments. I poked around the internets a bit, looking for some authority-- the closest I could find was this from the Economic Policy Institute:

"Immigration and poverty: Disappointing income growth in the 1990s not solely the result of growing immigrant population"(PDF here)

But I'm suspicious of the anti-immigrationists. On the national level, I think that people like Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo are beating the anti-immigrant drum mainly as a tactic: getting the GOP rank-and-file riled up, especially now that

A. abortion appears to be tanking, and
B. The Iraq War has lost some of its conservo luster,

requiring another wedge issue to get people hot and bothered so republicans can rally their base.

Maybe I'm oversimpliying. At the national level, both the dems and the republicans favor unfettered free trade and exporting our industrial jobs overseas. They don't say so, naturally, but they both do. The argument that illegal immigrants take jobs away from Americans I have difficulty accepting. The affiliated argument, that their presence in the workforce acts to depress wages, strikes me as a more serious one. The EPI study above suggests there is a correlation, but it's far less than critics suggest.

Nevertheless, blaming immigrants for the contraction of the American workforce is easier than blaming ourselves. [via] As states deliberately underfund education and allow tuition at state-supported colleges to spiral out of control on the one hand, and politicians keep resisting federalized, single-payer health insurance that would make American industry more competitive on the other, ordinary people have a hard time identifying a simple bogeyman who can be blamed for all our troubles. But the guy who washes your dishes at the Mexican restaurant is pretty handy.(Farmers Branch and the immediate area has a lot of restarants, and I'm guessing the people who voted for 2903 just want the help to live elsewhere and keep coming to town to wait on them and clean up after them.)

Even though I don't claim to know how the actual economic equation vis-a-vis immigrants plays out, I don't doubt the utility of immigrants as scapegoats for the overwhelmed and angry. While I don't want to automatically denounce immigrant-bashers as hate-mongers, my instincts tell me this is precisely what's going on. I also note that even though a Google News search for "Farmers Branch" will yield hundreds of results from all over, at least right now, this Dallas Morning News story below is the only one that I've found that mentions the mayor of Farmers Branch and his experiences this past week:

"Mayor: No real winners in this vote"

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, May 13, 2007, Jacquielynn Floyd:

FARMERS BRANCH – Election night used to be a lot of fun for Bob Phelps.
As a popular, longtime mayor who ran unopposed for the last three of his four terms, he would spend the evening at City Hall announcing the returns.

If there were any hot races, this was the night for gracious gestures and all-is-forgiven displays of community solidarity. Mr. Phelps hasn't missed election night since 1986, when he was appointed to the town zoning board.

Until this year.This year, Mr. Phelps and his wife, Dee, left town.With what seemed like the whole nation watching and the town seething with tension, city leaders decided to let the results come directly from the county.

Besides, federal agents, sent to investigate the second act of vandalism at the mayor's house since the furor over illegal immigrants erupted, candidly told the Phelpses that out of town was perhaps the best place for them to be."These last few months have been the worst time – I don't know, maybe of my life," Mr. Phelps said a few nights ago as we sat around the kitchen table. "I've tried to do what's right. It's so disappointing."
[...]
After campaigning and leading for two decades as a fiscal conservative, he was appalled at the risk.The town has long prided itself on a "pay-as-you-go" policy. New building projects are paid for in full – Farmers Branch hasn't had to float a bond proposal in 20 years."We're already spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on attorney's fees," he said, defending against two lawsuits filed since the council first adopted anti-illegal immigrant measures a few months ago.

A few more years of vigorous litigation – after Saturday's vote, a virtual guarantee – will eat through the city's financial reserves like cows through a cornfield, he said. So, four days before the election, Mr. Phelps went public with what he had been saying privately for months: 2903 would be terrible for Farmers Branch.

"I'm getting hate mail," he said unhappily, as Mrs. Phelps leafed through a pile of printouts, reading from a few e-mails:
"You are an embarrassment to your city – please resign." "You are a pathetic excuse for a leader." "You are a traitor."

"I worry about him," Mrs. Phelps confided. "He's been under so much stress. People turned on him so fast."With a year left on his term, Mr. Phelps says he's not planning to quit, and he's certainly not considering relocation."We've been in Farmers Branch since 1955," he said. "Our friends are here."

With infinite sadness, he added: "I guess our enemies are here, too."

see also

Dallas Morning News:Farmers Branch election spending tops $57,000:
Opponents of the immigration ordinance are paying out the most

MSNBC:Texas town upholds immigration crackdown

from 2006:

Michelle Goldberg, in Salon: The Left splits over immigration

Dave Neiwert, Orcinus:"It's the Racism, Stupid"

By Susan Page,USA TODAY:"Nation splits 4 ways about illegals"

Crisis=Opportunity=Crisis*

CBS News had a special 1 hour edition tonight with Katie Couric live from Blacksburg, presumably so everybody can see for themselves how much she cares. Hey, screw the ratings boost the news gets when something interesting and terrible happens. Yes, what happened today is genuinely horrible, but how are the news networks different from more run of the mill ambulance-chasers?



As I think I've written before, I don't think George Bush,jr is stupid. He's strikes me as someone who, though narrow-minded and incurious about things that don't strike him as immediately interesting, is generally shrewd with regard to things that do matter to him. He/Cheney/Rove does(do?) strike me as someone(s) who will look at the horrible events at Virginia Tech this morning and see political opportunity, and I have a certain queasy feeling about it.

I could well see the white house calling for some ostensibly benign sounding legislation, like the "Safe Campus Initiative" or something. Legislation designed to reinforce the Patriot Act and give federal officials greater powers to inspect college facilities, including the personal effects of students, college computer systems, etc. I could even see the Bushies vaguely suggesting they'd even maybe, kind of, of sort of, maybe favor some sort of gun control.. They'd do this indirectly through a surrogate, say Elizabeth Dole or Arlen Specter. Then they'd quickly backtrack, and point out they only meant on college campuses, and maybe not even there, etc. But by then, you'd have a bunch of democratic senators who'd taken the bait, finding themselves hectored by the supposedly liberal media for not supporting the administration's initiative, now only a design to enable the feds to more easily snoop on students and faculties. Dick Morris used to call it "triangulation."

Less cynically,Helena Cobban on the events at Virginia Tech, here.



Above: more from CBS's 4.16 home page.


*I understand that the notion that the Chinese character for crisis means opportunity is not really accurate, but it still makes for a nice reference.

An end of month miscellany

photo: US Naval Observatory/Amazing Science

1.from the Guardian: an RFK conspiracy

2.Jonathan Schwarz : the U.S. and Israeli governments face a difficult challenge: how can they continue pretending they want peace, while avoiding it at all costs?

3.Mark Kleiman:
"For every one that doeth evil hateth the light":

A special treat for all you Kafka fans: the recipient of a "National Security Letter" explains how a gag order works. If there's anything nastier than a warrantless search, it's a warrantless search the victim is legally forbidden to complain about.

4.Joe Bageant: "Neurological Biocaste Blues":

As most of the world has noticed by now, very few Americans are critical thinkers. Most suffer from a collective learning disability based on the complete commodification of our consciousness by consumerism and electronic media. In this case, learning disability is a nice way of saying that we have become collectively stupid, muchless capable of insight.

Insight is scary to Americans so conditioned to rote consumption and substituting entertainment and illusion for actual involvement. When they realize something, and I mean genuine higher understanding of what the sum of the parts mean, not simply what they appear to be, their consciousness is altered and they become different inside. Suddenly the world is no longer the solid consumer state sonambulation they are accustomed to. They have no tools to deal with it. Beyond that least half of us are so conditioned we are incapable of human insight at all...

but go read the whole thing. If you've never read anything by Joe Bageant before, this piece is an excellent introduction. Bageant is a kind of southern-fried Baudrillard, only with a decidedly non Baudrillardian impatience for the apolitically ironic distancing angrier.

5.Scott Ritter: "Calling out Idiot America:"

the title is a bit misleading, insofar as this piece mainly discusses US ignorance of Islamic history. I don't entirely agree with Ritter's premises, but that's an argument for another day-- suffice to say, it's a concise overview of the history of the Sunni/Shi'a rift, and a useful read for that reason.