Many of the gun rights advocates I come across in my readings make a claim that an armed citizenry places a check on oppressive government. Public officials, they say, including the police, should fear the population, and worry that armed insurrection is possible. They especially like the Hitler Used Gun Control to Keep Power myth, though the 1938 Waffengesetz arguably loosened gun laws in Germany and facilitated gun ownership. Government, they suggest, is not an agent of a citizenry acting as a principal and controlling it through participatory democracy. It instead has its own agency, independent of the will of the people, with interests opposing that of the people. In this formulation, the purpose of the Second Amendment, is to ensure that citizens have the tools needed to perpetuate this threat, and to carry it out in the event government becomes oppressive, since citizen participation in democratic institutions is not sufficient to direct government action. Read the rest of this entry »
Archive for category Government
Treason in Defense of Wealth
Jul 21
Tyler Durden (this guy, or maybe this guy, or both, but definitely not the Fight Club guy) approvingly links to this ridiculous screed in the latest issue of Global Custodian magazine, a trade quarterly for the international securities industry (Roissy Approved as well!).
The core point in this rambling mess is that “unlimited democracy,” whatever that is, gives too many citizens the power to vote perks for themselves, and support “counterproductive” policies (read: policies Dominic Hobson doesn’t like). For Hobson, unlimited Democracy is a “plague” which he wants to attack at its “moral foundation,” the “political equality of the citizen.”
This is a direct, and treasonous, attack on our Constitutional framework. Hobson, Durden, and Roissy would relate political equality with property on the grounds that only those with a stake in society should have voting and other political rights. This raises some interesting questions, such as how to define property, but the foundation of this argument is that only the successful (or the lucky) should have political power, as if they haven’t most of it already.
These selfish men only want to protect their wealth, and for all their talk about markets they don’t really want to compete with others for money. They want to organize a political system that allows them to construct markets to their liking, whatever it means to others. This is treason, pure and simple.
Rules for Whack Jobs
Sep 9
Roy Edroso does everyone a public service by wading through the mud of the right-wing-nutjob attack on President Obama’s speech to school kids. I’m almost sorry I clicked through to any of the blogs he cites: the stupid, it burns.
It is difficult to overstate the amount of ignorance permeating the discussions and essays on these blogs. The discussions of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, for example, suggest that few have actually read the book. Click over from WikiPedia to Amazon, folks, and order it. Read it.
James Lewis, who may be an American but is not much of a thinker (he thinks socialists are “deeply committed” to the “Internationalist Ruling Class!”), asserts that Alinsky’s prescription to “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it” has something to do with scapegoating groups:
“That slogan defines mob scapegoating, of course. It is an exact prescription for whipping up mobs — by race, by gender, by ethnicity, by religion.”
This makes, of course, very little sense. Personalizing and polarizing the target is about putting an individual, and preferably evil, face on class oppression, not about blaming rich white mortgage lenders for the problems caused by all those lazy poor people who bought houses they couldn’t pay for.
But what about Alinsky? Lewis wants to paint him as a dangerous radical who means to bring down capitalism and the American way of life with the help of his protege, President Obama. Capitalism has, of course, quite effectively begun the process of destroying itself without Alinsky’s help, thank you very much.
Lewis is bent out of shape because President Obama is scapegoating the “capitalists who run General Motors and Wall Street,” and some B-list comedienne thinks the tea partiers are racist, don’t you see. Never mind that the executives who brought down our economy by mismanaging both its industrial and financial sectors sort of brought the blame upon themselves.
Saul Alinsky wrote Rules to show the politically weak how they could effect social change despite the efforts of the powerful to hold their priveleged economic and political positions. He compared the book to The Prince:
What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.
Alinsky suggested that organizers identify privileged individuals and personalize social injustice–that is, show exactly who benefits from the perceived class differences they had organized to fight. Lewis does not support his claim that the President has decided to use this technique to demonize groups rather than individuals except by assertion: he just knows they are doing this, because this is what the Dixiecrats did to blacks, don’t you see. But the evidence suggests that people who wish to curb the excesses of Capitalism and capitalists have followed Alinsky’s lead by targeting the individual executives who made corporate decisions on things like bonuses.
This article, for example, targets Edward Liddy, the CEO of AiG, not capitalists in general. Other discussion of Wall Street bonuses challenge them on capitalist grounds by making the credible claim that the poor performance of financial wizards should preclude bonuses–they should not be rewarded for destroying their companies.
“These bonuses should be zero,” wrote one poster on the firedoglake.com blog. “Not down 44%. Zero. These banks should be using their profits to reinvest in the shoring up of their capital reserves, so that they [can] start underwriting and lending again, not paying discretionary bonuses. It’s not about keeping the “best and the brightest”…if they were that sharp, we wouldn’t be in this mess, would we now?”
Janeane Garafalo’s assertion that racism pervades the Tea Party movement also has merit–at least StormFront thinks so. They have asked members to join the Tea Parties, and along with other white supremacist groups believe they would find a fertile recruiting ground at such meetings.
In no sense can anyone characterize either as scapegoating. Neither Wall Street bonus babies nor teabaggers are taking blame for others. To the extent liberals use Alinsky’s methods to effect social change, they target the actual malefactors of wealth and privelege–along with the rubes who support an unjust system. They do not blame innocent individuals or groups for the sins of others.
Indeed, it is arguably the right that favors Alinsky’s techniques. They make a din that creates the impression of a larger movement at boisiterous town hall forums. They force rules of civil conduct on liberals even while violating them. They bully and ridicule, and attract activists who enjoy using these methods. They use any event as a reason to attack, and offer no constructive alternatives. And they picked, froze, personalized, and polarized Obama.
They also scapegoat amorphous groups–the liberal media, academic or Hollywood elites, unions, socialists, communists, and all those welfare mothers who think rich people owe them a Cadillac.
We should of course expect reactionaries–capitalists, corporatists, and religious leaders who see their base of political and economic power crumbling before changing social norms, demographics, and economic and scientific realities–to protect the foundations of their power. They have to demonize cultural, political, economic and demographic changes as socialist in order to hold the support of uninformed masses who fear out groups, “socialism,” “secularism,” and “liberal elites” more than they fear losing everything when some corporation sends their job overseas or refuses to pay for the cancer treatment because they had acne ten years ago. This is how they preserve the every-man-for-himself system that allows a small group of wealthy patriarchs to control the vast majority of US wealth. But they have no stronger a claim to America, and what it means to be an American, than liberals who believe that we can improve society by acting collectively.
And if they believe that socialism is about commitment to the “International Ruling Class,” they come to the intellectual gun fight without a good understanding of what bullets are.
Little Tent Conservatives
Apr 29
On the way back from a business meeting yesterday, I had the dubious luck of hearing the local conservative radio talk show host rant about Arlen Specter’s defection to the Democratic Party. Besides repeating the wingnut talking point that Specter switched parties because he knew former Congressman Pat Toomey would beat him in a Republican Primary, he also went on for about ten minutes about all the other RINOs he thinks should switch–guys like Chuck Hagel. He is not alone.
As Professor Sabato pointed out, conservatives are shooting themselves in the foot. Of course, some part of Senator Specter’s calculation included his own political self-interest and his slim chances of winning a primary against Toomey. But conservatives who care about the direction of public policy in the US should quietly applaud Specter’s move.
Toomey cannot win a general election in Pennsylvania. The state is trending liberal, and Toomey is a Club for Growth conservative with all the standard right-wing/corporatist/social conservative positions on taxation, collective action, abortion, bankruptcy, crime, gay marriage, and other issues. This means that without a Specter switch, Pennsylvania would probably elect a more liberal senator next year. As it happens, Specter will probably win a Democratic primary and defeat Toomey in the general election, keeping the state’s Senate members to the right of the median Senator.
Conservatives like Doc Thomspon and Limbaugh apparently think that shrinking the party will make it stronger. But making it more ideologically homogenous will not help the GOP’s election chances, except in places with strong conservative majorities. Crazy rants and strident ideology do not attract new supporters. So keep preaching to the choir, Doc, and the GOP will keep losing.
As a general matter, I do not support the legislation currently before Congress that would grant the District of Columbia a voting representative in the House. I oppose it not because I think DC residents should have no representation, or because I think such a law violates the Constitution. I oppose it because it would also create another House seat in Utah, a state already undemocratically overrepresented by its two Senators. This reminds me all too much of the sort of compromises struck before the Civil War that created new States two at a time–one free and one slave. House representation for the District is either right or it isn’t, and should be passed on the merits, without a compromise intended to match a presumably liberal seat with a presumably conservative one.
But Ed Whelan’s little screed in yesterday’s Washington Post (h/t DougJ at Balloon Juice) forces me to reevaluate. If, after all, a “constitutional scholar” like Ed Whelan thinks the law is unconstitutional, there is probably a strong argument that it is not.
As of course, there is: the Constitutional provision giving Congress “exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever” over the District, as well as other places purchased at the consent of state legislatures. Whelan argues that the Constitutional qualification for membership in the House, which requires members inhabit the state in which chosen at the time of election, precludes House membership for DC residents, since the District is not a State. This question has no clear answer, as even Kenneth Starr would agree.
But Whelan’s goal here seems to be less an argument against the constitutionality of this legislation than to take a shot at Eric Holder, a DC voting rights supporter who sought an opinion from the Solicitor General on whether he could defend the law in court, if it passed. Because the Office of Legal Counsel had issued an opinion saying that giving DC a House member without making the District a State or passing a constitutional amendment would not pass constitutional muster, Whelan calls this politicization of the Department of Justice.
Included in this screed is an attack on Holder’s role in the Marc Rich pardon–as if his role in that affair generally disqualifies him from serving as Attorney General. This is a classic wingnut attack in two ways: it has nothing to do with the issue at hand, and it fails to apply the same standard to conservatives–like Scooter Libby, who represented Rich for five years, and is arguably respondible for the pardon, or at least more so than Holder.
Whelan gets himself into high breathless dudgeon over the notion that the Attorney General would override the Office of Legal Counsel because it questioned the constitutionality of his preferred policy. But Holder did no such thing: believing that the law would pass, and then be challenged, he sought an opinion from the Solicitor General about the merits of arguments on the other side. He would, of course, have to have this information to give his boss good advice about a veto–if he felt the courts would strike it down anyway, he would have to advise President Obama to negotiate a different law or veto this one and send Congress back to work on the issue.
Holder did not change the OLC’s opinion. He didn’t even seek another opinion on constitutionality. He only wanted to know the prospects of defending the law in court–quite a reasonable question.
Whelan is something of a right-wing whiner and crybaby. He also holds the interesting view that courts attack marriage by…expanding it to new groups. So we shouldn’t be surprised when he just tosses crap against the wall to see what sticks. But the pot, who worked in the OLC when it issued torture memos and justified an enormous and unconstitutional hijacking of power by the President he liked, should resist the urge to call the kettle black by accusing Holder of politicizing Justice just because he is doing his job.
Watching President Obama make the European rounds, including a stop at the G-20 summit in London, reminds us that some level of governance and civil society exists at the global level. While heads of state meet to discuss international economic policy, including coordination of policy responses to weakening economies across the world, citizens protest militarization, economic inequality, and a banking system that helps to redistribute wealth to developed nations, and once there to wealthy individuals. While these meetings do not by any stretch constitute deliberative bodies with power to legislate, they do provide discussion and action forums where the leaders who do have to power to shape policy at the domestic level can formulate and plan implementation of public policy in a collaborative fashion.
Sometimes they even agree to take specific action to regulate or manage sectors of the global economy (paywall), and relinquish some chunks of sovereignty in the process. (h/t Mark Kleiman) In this case, the group agreed to change current banking secrecy rules and close tax havens. These are serious concessions on domestic policy by sovereign states that have apparently decided that integration into the global economy is more important than protecting domestic interests.
With things, ideas, money, and to a lesser extent human beings flowing across borders more and more easily, states and private firms look for ways to manage this interdependence by seeking ways to accomodate variations in legal traditions and systems. Sometimes, governments drive this process by adopting regulatory regimes, such as the Law of the Sea Treaty, that protects sovereignty but establishes the definitions and frameworks that make it possible for the state system to function (this, by the way, suggests that the state system may be less anarchic than many political scientists would have us believe). Often, private firms seek global regulatory regimes to protect their property rights (See Susan Sell’s Private Power, Public Law). At any rate, this often manifests itself in horizontal networks that link national officials across borders, which disaggregates the state and takes international policymaking out of the hands of legislators and heads of state (See Anne-Marie Slaughter’s A New World Order).
Global governance and civil society requires a transnational legal regime to manage contracts, criminal activity, and disputes between actors, in and out of government. Such a regime would of course partially consist of international legal agreements such as the Geneva Conventions and Law of the Sea treaties. But it would also have to include some process for adjudicating cases between actors from different legal systems. This in turn suggests a need for some domestic consideration of international legal norms and frameworks, if only because disputes between international actors are still argued in national judiciary systems.
Conservatives reject this view, as we can see from their reaction to the possiblity that President Obama might consider Harold Koh, of Yale, as a potential Supreme Court nominee, and his nomination for the top attorney position in the State Department. They argue that the US should not relinquish autonomy over US law in favor of that preferred by “Europe’s leftist elites,” whining that transnationalist justices really just want to use foreign legal principles to reach results they like, however contrary to the Constitution they might be. Mr. Gaffney can be forgiven for worrying himself over this, given that importation of prevailing international norms against torture might subject him to sanction for his role as a supporter of “vigorous interrogation techniques” and the Bush Administration’s anti human-rights regime. But both are trying to close the barn door after the horse has long since run off: transnational law is not a threat, but a reality.
To support their criticism, they cite a law review article (Why Transnational Law Matters) Mr. Koh wrote for a 2006 issue of the Penn State International Law Review which focused on changing the first year law school cirriculum to reflect increasing globalization and interdependence of the law. In the article, Mr. Koh cited some examples of the way legal principles become adopted across systems and jurisdictions. This works both ways: sometimes international principles become domesticated, and at other times domestic law is internationalized and spreads across systems from a humble beginning.
This article does leave the reader with the impression that Koh finds some value in some legal ideas that did not originate with Thomas Jefferson and the boys. But the key point he makes–which he uses to support reform of the law school cirriculum–is that this is already happening, and has more or less been a constant part of the development of legal theory since Man decided to construct legal frameworks to manage human interaction and adjudicate disputes. Moreover, the agents of transnational legal development include international actors of all shapes and sizes, including private citizens, corporations, non-govermental organizations, ethnic groups, soldiers, financiers, and anyone else who wants to operate or interact across international borders–not just elite Europeans and liberal Supreme Court Justices. The market helps to drive this process as it expands to include international economic transactions, and confining legal principles to our own understanding of things like contracts and ownership would severely limit the ability of markets to get the most efficient use out of the components of production. Transnational law is here to stay.
Which means that people like Whelan and Gaffney should stop fretting about how to stop the transnationalization of law and start trying to figure out a way to manage this process so that our system strongly influences the principles governing whatever global legal system develops. We should welcome Koh’s “transnational legal process” because it offers an opportunity to spread our legal and social system, including property rights, personal freedom, and capitalism, to other parts of the world. Instead of trying to protect ourselves from the virus of foreign legal thought, we should embrace the process and become the virus ourselves. It might help us spread democracy without killing so many potential voters.
Usury and Capital
Mar 25
Over the weekend I read two articles that gave me some new insight into how America got into its current economic fix and which policies might not just help us reverse the decline but also set the conditions for more effective markets in the future.
First, Thomas Geoghegan writes persuasively (Subscription Required) in Harper’s Magazine that the central cause of the current economic crisis is a shift of capital from manufacturing and production to financial markets after the repeal of usury laws made hedge funds and lending much more profitable than making stuff:
“That’s when we found out what happens when an advanced industrial economy tries to function with no cap at all on interest rates. Here’s what happens: the financial sector bloats up. With no law capping interest, the evil is not only that banks prey on the poor (they have always done so) but that capital gushes out of manufacturing and into banking. When banks get 25 percent to 30percent on credit cards, and 500 or more percent on payday loans, capital flees from honest pursuits, like auto manufacturing. Sure, GM is awful. Sure, it doesn’t innovate. But the people who could have saved GM and Ford went off to work at AIG, or Merrill Lynch, or even Goldman Sachs. All of this used to be so obvious as not to merit comment. What is history, really, but a turf war between manufacturing, labor, and the banks? In the United States, we shrank manufacturing. We got rid of labor. Now it’s just the banks.”
This is not a socialist argument about how corporations exploit the poor by charging high rates of interest and constructing loan agreements to give consumers more information and power to make informed choices about whether and how they should borrow money. Geoghegan is making a capitalist case that tax policy and regulatory institutions create incentives to which capital and investors will respond by shifting the components of production between sectors in search of the highest profits. He is pointing out that the invisible hand sometimes slaps us.
In the same issue of Harper’s, Daniel Brook offers an example (Subscription Required) with the story of how Allan Jones invented the payday lending industry. When Mr. Jones sought investment opportunities for his excess cash, he chose not to open a small factory, manufacturing plant, restaraunt or service industry firm (e.g., janitorial services). Instead, he decided to lend it to people at usurious interest rates. Jones might have opened his payday lending storefronts even with interest capped under 500 percent–the large numbers of transactions would deliver a profit even at a smaller margin. And a careful reading of the story suggests that the high interest rates reflect exploitation of circumstances, not pricing of risk.
All of this suggests that the market predictably moved capital to its most profitable–if not its most efficient–use. The problem then is not a structural problem with capitalism, but mismanagement of the capitalist system that delivered–whether or not intentionally–an unsustainable outcome. We need to decide whether to accept market-delivered results like this just for the sake of ideology, or to make an effort to regulate the system sensibly so that we achieve mutually agreed upon goals.
Placing limits on interest rates could bring its own unintended consequences, and it is easy to see that this would likely limit access to needed short-term or consumer loans to those who need it least. But Americans may find that moving capital back into making stuff makes the economy stronger and more resilient–and less dependent on too-big-to-fail banks.
Taking calls on Washington Journal this morning, Congressman Bill Posey (R-FL15) attempted to argue that too much regulation caused the current economic crisis. He cited the Community Reinvestment Act as an example, and agreed with a caller’s claim that the Act forced lenders to make $200,ooo loans to people making $30,000 a year.*
This Business Week article points out the silliness of this notion:
“…most subprime loans were made by firms that aren’t subject to the CRA. University of Michigan law professor Michael Barr testified back in February before the House Committee on Financial Services that 50% of subprime loans were made by mortgage service companies not subject comprehensive federal supervision and another 30% were made by affiliates of banks or thrifts which are not subject to routine supervision or examinations. As former Fed Governor Ned Gramlich said in an August, 2007, speech shortly before he passed away: ‘In the subprime market where we badly need supervision, a majority of loans are made with very little supervision. It is like a city with a murder law, but no cops on the beat.’”
So besides the nonsense of blaming a 1977 law for a 2008 crisis, it was in fact government failure to supervise subprime lending that contributed to the problem, not an Act intended to force banks to lend back to members of the community the deposits they took in from the customers who lived there.
Republicans know they can get attention by saying stupid things–this is the foundation of Rush Limbaugh’s success. But if they want to win back the confidence of Americans, they need to find talking points with some basis in reality. Blaming this crisis on goverment regulation and poor people who could not repay loans won’t help solve the problem because this didn’t cause it: unregulated investment bankers who packaged these loans into new forms of gambling instruments that could not be accurately valued did.
*Video avaliable here. Mr. Posey is first up.