ok, here are some books that we can consider for the second half of the class:
Zakaria: Post American World
http://www.amazon.com/Post-American-World-Fareed-Zakaria/dp/039306235X
Dryzek: Democracy in Capitalist Times
http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Capitalist-Times-Ideals-Struggles/dp/0195106008/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265005531&sr=1-1
Also, something that I am really interested in is humanitarian intervention (partly due to my background). When is it justified and what are the implications for wider security considerations? Does it set a precedent? Please see below an Amazon search on this issue.
Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens on one side, and Noam Chomsky on the other make for a lively debate on the matter. The first two support intervention, while the latter likes to dissect American intentions and so forth. DT, maybe you can suggest a book on this topic.
http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1265005570/ref=sr_pg_2?ie=UTF8&rs=1000&keywords=humanitarian%20intervention&rh=n%3A!1000%2Ci%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3Ahumanitarian%20intervention&page=2
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Howard Zinn, cont'd.
Bob Herbert's column ends with a line that I regard as very true. "That Professor Zinn [based on his work as an activist and a historian] was considered a radical says more about the society he lived in than about him."
I could not agree more. This was a column I felt compelled to comment on because NPR had invited David Horowitz to say something in remembrance of Zinn upon his death. It basically said that Zinn had a chip on his shoulder about the American story and wrote an ideological tract that appealed only to the fringe left in our society. I was not the only one irritated by NPR's editorial judgement. Friday, "All Things Considered" was forced to read many of the views of people like me that saw this as idiotic and incompetent journalism, not to mention grossly unfair.
Maybe I've misread Benson's account of Herbert's column because Benson does point out how often our media are content to skim the superficial surface of our public life, not digging deeper beneath the lingo that covertly stigmatizes certain groups and certain interests without pausing to suggest a critical parsing of the words. For example, the Republican use of the phrase "tax relief for hardworking Americans." This Frank Luntz special is code for demonizing efforts to get the rich to pay their fair share of the tax burden (see my post related to Gail Collins's column on Saturday). The figures from my comments come from the AFL-CIO and Nancy Peolosi's office--a 5.6% surtax on incomes above 1 million generates $400 billion in revenue, enough to create four million jobs, and reduce the unemployment rate to 6% from its current 10%. Even though the GDP grew at a 5.6 rate in the last quarter of 2009, it was mostly due to replacing inventories so no new jobs were created. In order to get unemployment back to where it was before the Mega-recession, we'd need four consecutive years of this growth rate. In short, what has been done to fix the economy and fiscal mess is wholly inadequate. Now, why won't Speaker Pelosi or Pres Obama actually go forward with this proposal to ask to rich to pay their fair share after they've basically had a free ride for three decades? Why won't political journalists dig deeper than the Obama visit to the GOP's "lion's den" in Baltimore as if that televised exchange somehow was the national equivalent in politics of the Super Bowl? It was a pure spectacle, and you can expect each party is culling through the tape to find sound bytes and images for its 2010 Midterm ads already. But what if this is just the media's version of politics?
This is what the Capstone needs to be asking. What if The State of the Union, the showdown in Baltimore, the dust-up on Howard Zinn's death -- what if all of it is a diversionary spectacle designed to sell a journalistic product but also to keep the masses from asking the big questions? The Radicals we read about in Week One would say the same thing that Herbert did about Zinn's marginalization as a "radical." Such says more about our society than about those so stigmatized. What might lie beneath the surface of such gossipy dust-ups that warrants closer, deeper scrutiny before we pull ourselves out of the hole we're in? We'll take a stab at this in tomorrow night's class.
I could not agree more. This was a column I felt compelled to comment on because NPR had invited David Horowitz to say something in remembrance of Zinn upon his death. It basically said that Zinn had a chip on his shoulder about the American story and wrote an ideological tract that appealed only to the fringe left in our society. I was not the only one irritated by NPR's editorial judgement. Friday, "All Things Considered" was forced to read many of the views of people like me that saw this as idiotic and incompetent journalism, not to mention grossly unfair.
Maybe I've misread Benson's account of Herbert's column because Benson does point out how often our media are content to skim the superficial surface of our public life, not digging deeper beneath the lingo that covertly stigmatizes certain groups and certain interests without pausing to suggest a critical parsing of the words. For example, the Republican use of the phrase "tax relief for hardworking Americans." This Frank Luntz special is code for demonizing efforts to get the rich to pay their fair share of the tax burden (see my post related to Gail Collins's column on Saturday). The figures from my comments come from the AFL-CIO and Nancy Peolosi's office--a 5.6% surtax on incomes above 1 million generates $400 billion in revenue, enough to create four million jobs, and reduce the unemployment rate to 6% from its current 10%. Even though the GDP grew at a 5.6 rate in the last quarter of 2009, it was mostly due to replacing inventories so no new jobs were created. In order to get unemployment back to where it was before the Mega-recession, we'd need four consecutive years of this growth rate. In short, what has been done to fix the economy and fiscal mess is wholly inadequate. Now, why won't Speaker Pelosi or Pres Obama actually go forward with this proposal to ask to rich to pay their fair share after they've basically had a free ride for three decades? Why won't political journalists dig deeper than the Obama visit to the GOP's "lion's den" in Baltimore as if that televised exchange somehow was the national equivalent in politics of the Super Bowl? It was a pure spectacle, and you can expect each party is culling through the tape to find sound bytes and images for its 2010 Midterm ads already. But what if this is just the media's version of politics?
This is what the Capstone needs to be asking. What if The State of the Union, the showdown in Baltimore, the dust-up on Howard Zinn's death -- what if all of it is a diversionary spectacle designed to sell a journalistic product but also to keep the masses from asking the big questions? The Radicals we read about in Week One would say the same thing that Herbert did about Zinn's marginalization as a "radical." Such says more about our society than about those so stigmatized. What might lie beneath the surface of such gossipy dust-ups that warrants closer, deeper scrutiny before we pull ourselves out of the hole we're in? We'll take a stab at this in tomorrow night's class.
Comment of Frank Rich column, "The Comatose Republic"
In his Sunday essay in the NY Times, Frank Rich commends Obama's put-down of the Court's ruling on Citizens United (that got Alito to mouth "not true." And then speculates how Obama could turn on Congress as a case of triangulation on steroids (my phrase) IF he had positions on issues that the people who like him would be able to identify with so that the State of the Union would improve. Here's my take:
***********************************************
As your yourself note, Frank, the use of the bully pulpit to get Congress off the dime might yet rescue the comatose Republic PROVIDED that the President had strong positions on the issues that threaten our future. That he had the courage to speak out against the Court's (actually, its "strict constructionist" five's) most recent and most egregious case of judicial activism hardly makes him a populist hero or even a Democratic version of Ronald Reagan.
Reagan stigmatized and demonized without hesitation, using the Bully Pulpit with great effect in getting those who would defend government as anything other than the employer of our troops as embarrassed and voiceless in the face of an argument that was effective only because it was not challenged. Obama had an opportunity to correct this classiclly conditioned association of "government" with "puzzle palace on the Potomac" (or the widely disdained "welfare queens" anecdotally seized upon to delegitmize welfare or social spending), when the "public option" facet of healthcare reform was allowed to put the House and Senate Finance bills at odds.
The President could have used it as a teachable moment, as a perfect platform for pulling down the lingering yet emasculating view of politics and government that remains Reagan's most pernicious legacy. That he chose not to -- or that in not choosing to do so, he didn't see the political meaning implicit in that moment -- says quite a lot, the least of which is that this President may be a bright, well-spoken, and talented public figure, but as a politician, he is no LBJ.
***********************************************
As your yourself note, Frank, the use of the bully pulpit to get Congress off the dime might yet rescue the comatose Republic PROVIDED that the President had strong positions on the issues that threaten our future. That he had the courage to speak out against the Court's (actually, its "strict constructionist" five's) most recent and most egregious case of judicial activism hardly makes him a populist hero or even a Democratic version of Ronald Reagan.
Reagan stigmatized and demonized without hesitation, using the Bully Pulpit with great effect in getting those who would defend government as anything other than the employer of our troops as embarrassed and voiceless in the face of an argument that was effective only because it was not challenged. Obama had an opportunity to correct this classiclly conditioned association of "government" with "puzzle palace on the Potomac" (or the widely disdained "welfare queens" anecdotally seized upon to delegitmize welfare or social spending), when the "public option" facet of healthcare reform was allowed to put the House and Senate Finance bills at odds.
The President could have used it as a teachable moment, as a perfect platform for pulling down the lingering yet emasculating view of politics and government that remains Reagan's most pernicious legacy. That he chose not to -- or that in not choosing to do so, he didn't see the political meaning implicit in that moment -- says quite a lot, the least of which is that this President may be a bright, well-spoken, and talented public figure, but as a politician, he is no LBJ.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Is it the Media, Stupid?
Why should anyone mourn the death of a probably grumpy 87-year old who bears the Howard Zinn name-tag at these difficult times, unless he is your grandpa? If anything, such senior-citizen deaths have become commonplace that they have almost earned their acceptance into the American fabric of virtue – thanks to a careless healthcare program and an economy on its head! But, such a death would worry you if you’re Bob Herbert, sitting on a couch and gazing at the world just to locate what would space in on your NYT column.
For starters, like me, Zinn was an American historian who died this week and whose contribution to a progressive America, had faded with him into his sunset years, that only Herbert, writing in his Times’ column on Saturday January 30, could recall. Herbert eulogized Zinn, a man who spent his days writing and rallying progressive voices against discrimination of many forms, in a slap to the media for failing to tell the “true” American stories. He took a swipe at the kind of attention the media allocate to say, the “sex addiction” of Tiger Woods, or the fireside prattles around Hollywood at the behest of an American populace starving for meaningful journalism.
“Our tendency is to give these true American heroes short shrift, just as we gave Howard Zinn short shrift. In the nitwit era that we’re living through now, it’s fashionable, for example, to bad-mouth labor unions and feminists even as workers throughout the land are treated like so much trash and the culture is so riddled with sexism that most people don’t even notice it,” Herbert shrugged. But, who doesn’t know this? Or rather, who gives a heck over how the media makes its decisions? It’s the absurdity that confirms how vested interests have stolen the thunder from the motivation of yesteryears that gave birth to this vibrant society we see today. The scandal, that is the media’s honeymoon with vested interests, I will agree has hijacked the titanic of nationhood to a wild sea-route of uncertainty and private hounding.
But, so, with this broken mirror (the media), where else will society cast its eyes to take a pot shot at its looks? This question, will certainly lead to a floodgate of queries of whether the media has abdicated its vanguard role over society and what interests journalists now serve. From a broken Washinton to a crime-infested main-street the citizen has been left to himself; to the vulnerability of a scavenging bourgeois tossing at the incorporation of the media to its exclusive members’ club. Just look who owns the media, so you may know.
I guess we need more debate on this. It’s way more than Herbert’s sobs in his NYT column. The whole world is a voctim and it’s way worse in repressive regimes in the developing world or in the Maoist legacy, where the government holds the keys to everyone’s opinion. Adios!
-Benson
Comment of Gail Collins' NYT column 1/30/10
Greetings Obamadogs contribitors,
This is my pasted comment on Gail Collins piece in Saturday's New York Times. Called "An Inconvenient Truth," it is about the rise of selfishness and the decline of "social capital" in our politics and society. She concludes with a line to the effect that "It's irrelevant how we got here. We just need to get out." Here, then is my view, for what it's worth.
*******************************************
Figuring out how we got here is not entirely irrelevant to getting out. Republicans, in particular, have a short memory, sparing no audacity in acting as if the fiscal insanity of cutting taxes, passing a huge unpaid-for prescription drug add-on to Medicare and fighting two wars off budget weren't major contributors to our current predicament.
And it's important to remember that Ronald Reagan not only failed to shrink government and balance the budget as promised; instead, he allowed the national debt to triple under his Administration. The few who prospered at the expense of the many deserve to pay their fair share in repairing the damage of an economic policy that was little more than a stacked deck that Democrats didn't have the courage to call out for what is was: the very "class warfare" that would silence any move to restore fairness and shared responsibility to the tax code.
Letting the Bush tax cuts elapse is not enough; a modest 5.6% surtax on incomes over $1 million could generate $400 billion in revenue, which in turn could finance a real jobs bill able to put a decent dent in the unemployment rate, thereby cutting into the deficit by replenishing tax revenues depleted by the recession and unjustifiable tax cuts that grew the chasm between the economic haves and have-nots more than the macro-economy as a whole. Such a fiscal correction would be tagged as un-American, socialist, and an assault on economic freedom, to be sure; and yet it would fall considerably short of the progressivity in the federal tax system employed under Dwight Eisenhower. Then, as Kevin Phillips has noted, there were six brackets for the top 1% of incomes, with the highest marginal rate two and half times greater than is now the case. To deny the failure of supply-side economics to meet a fairly conventional standard that Republicans like to pay rhetorical lip-srvice to, as if only they can meet it -- spending within our means, or raising enough in means to balance with spending -- is to divert attention from a sensible and fairly traditional way of digging out of the hole we're in, by old-fashioned notions of hard work and fair play.
This is my pasted comment on Gail Collins piece in Saturday's New York Times. Called "An Inconvenient Truth," it is about the rise of selfishness and the decline of "social capital" in our politics and society. She concludes with a line to the effect that "It's irrelevant how we got here. We just need to get out." Here, then is my view, for what it's worth.
*******************************************
Figuring out how we got here is not entirely irrelevant to getting out. Republicans, in particular, have a short memory, sparing no audacity in acting as if the fiscal insanity of cutting taxes, passing a huge unpaid-for prescription drug add-on to Medicare and fighting two wars off budget weren't major contributors to our current predicament.
And it's important to remember that Ronald Reagan not only failed to shrink government and balance the budget as promised; instead, he allowed the national debt to triple under his Administration. The few who prospered at the expense of the many deserve to pay their fair share in repairing the damage of an economic policy that was little more than a stacked deck that Democrats didn't have the courage to call out for what is was: the very "class warfare" that would silence any move to restore fairness and shared responsibility to the tax code.
Letting the Bush tax cuts elapse is not enough; a modest 5.6% surtax on incomes over $1 million could generate $400 billion in revenue, which in turn could finance a real jobs bill able to put a decent dent in the unemployment rate, thereby cutting into the deficit by replenishing tax revenues depleted by the recession and unjustifiable tax cuts that grew the chasm between the economic haves and have-nots more than the macro-economy as a whole. Such a fiscal correction would be tagged as un-American, socialist, and an assault on economic freedom, to be sure; and yet it would fall considerably short of the progressivity in the federal tax system employed under Dwight Eisenhower. Then, as Kevin Phillips has noted, there were six brackets for the top 1% of incomes, with the highest marginal rate two and half times greater than is now the case. To deny the failure of supply-side economics to meet a fairly conventional standard that Republicans like to pay rhetorical lip-srvice to, as if only they can meet it -- spending within our means, or raising enough in means to balance with spending -- is to divert attention from a sensible and fairly traditional way of digging out of the hole we're in, by old-fashioned notions of hard work and fair play.
Friday, January 29, 2010
The Real State of the Union
Op-Ed Columnist
March of the Peacocks
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Friday's (1/28/01) Paul Krugman column contains the following assessment of the core problem with the state of the union, along with an indictment of the Obama administration for failing to address it. The whole column is worth a look, and a class consideration as to why the political system is unable to deal with it--linking the "why's" to our readings for Monday and from Ricci..
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The nature of America’s troubles is easy to state. We’re in the aftermath of a severe financial crisis, which has led to mass job destruction. The only thing that’s keeping us from sliding into a second Great Depression is deficit spending. And right now we need more of that deficit spending because millions of American lives are being blighted by high unemployment, and the government should be doing everything it can to bring unemployment down.
In the long run, however, even the U.S. government has to pay its way. And the long-run budget outlook was dire even before the recent surge in the deficit, mainly because of inexorably rising health care costs. Looking ahead, we’re going to have to find a way to run smaller, not larger, deficits.
How can this apparent conflict between short-run needs and long-run responsibilities be resolved? Intellectually, it’s not hard at all. We should combine actions that create jobs now with other actions that will reduce deficits later. And economic officials in the Obama administration understand that logic: for the past year they have been very clear that their vision involves combining fiscal stimulus to help the economy now with health care reform to help the budget later.
The sad truth, however, is that our political system doesn’t seem capable of doing what’s necessary.
*********************************************
March of the Peacocks
Recommend
comments
(97)
Send To Phone
Share
CloseLinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalink By PAUL KRUGMAN
Friday's (1/28/01) Paul Krugman column contains the following assessment of the core problem with the state of the union, along with an indictment of the Obama administration for failing to address it. The whole column is worth a look, and a class consideration as to why the political system is unable to deal with it--linking the "why's" to our readings for Monday and from Ricci..
*******************************************
The nature of America’s troubles is easy to state. We’re in the aftermath of a severe financial crisis, which has led to mass job destruction. The only thing that’s keeping us from sliding into a second Great Depression is deficit spending. And right now we need more of that deficit spending because millions of American lives are being blighted by high unemployment, and the government should be doing everything it can to bring unemployment down.
In the long run, however, even the U.S. government has to pay its way. And the long-run budget outlook was dire even before the recent surge in the deficit, mainly because of inexorably rising health care costs. Looking ahead, we’re going to have to find a way to run smaller, not larger, deficits.
How can this apparent conflict between short-run needs and long-run responsibilities be resolved? Intellectually, it’s not hard at all. We should combine actions that create jobs now with other actions that will reduce deficits later. And economic officials in the Obama administration understand that logic: for the past year they have been very clear that their vision involves combining fiscal stimulus to help the economy now with health care reform to help the budget later.
The sad truth, however, is that our political system doesn’t seem capable of doing what’s necessary.
*********************************************
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Altered States.....
Well, I have to give the President a B+ for his first State of the Union. It contained the stylistic Obama oratory, and it was a bit more feisty (in delivery and in substance) than previous addresses of this magnitude. It was also smartly organized and deceptively leaked with good effect: the "budget freeze" leaks had become the lead story and the source of cranky criticism from the likes of Paul Krugman, Robert Reich and Robert Kuttner. The framing of the speech with jobs first and health care and, finally, an overdue declaration of the end of the Bush tax cuts stuff folded in as part of an "Eisenhower Republican" approach to the budget -- green jobs, energy conservation and renewable energy development (including "clean coal" and nuclear power) that was far less disappointing than the diminished expectations courtesy of the "budget freeze" leaks. I'm even curious, since the "freeze" leaks came several days ago, whether there might have been substantive changes after the cool reception to the leaks. Also noteworthy was the recurring references to what the House has passed but the Senate has not, about as close as Obama can get to a public callout or expression of displeasure. Will it move health care or climate change legislation when the filibuster is now in play? Doubtful.
The President's "won't quit" theme extends yet again rhetorically to a bipartisan appeal. On this he seems to me to be missing the point. Politics demands that presidents play hardball now and then. Obama needs a new strategy that communicates resolve and shines a far brighter light -- and less subtle, nuanced one -- on the implications of the Republican party's complete abandonment of its historical reputation as a fiscally-responsible advocate of balanced budgets and proud public service.
That's my take and I'm sticking to it. What did the rest of you think?
The President's "won't quit" theme extends yet again rhetorically to a bipartisan appeal. On this he seems to me to be missing the point. Politics demands that presidents play hardball now and then. Obama needs a new strategy that communicates resolve and shines a far brighter light -- and less subtle, nuanced one -- on the implications of the Republican party's complete abandonment of its historical reputation as a fiscally-responsible advocate of balanced budgets and proud public service.
That's my take and I'm sticking to it. What did the rest of you think?
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