Special request: London riots

This post is in response to a reader's request that I say a few words about the London riots.

On the one hand, there are very legitimate reasons to protest and occasionally to riot. On the other hand, these days, so often, the people with the will to riot are not the people who know how, when, or why to riot.

One sad feature of left wing politics throughout Europe and North America is that the kernel of progressive movements: organizing and leading people who are frustrated, marginalized, and angry to constructive political action, has been mostly lost as the working-class manufacturing base of progressive parties faded demographically and progressives struggled in the 80s and 90s to appeal to middle-class voters. I want to quote a passage from the NYT that I just keep coming back to over and over:

“There’s an illusion that grass-roots activity just begins spontaneously, that people get mad and suddenly say, ‘I’m not going to take it anymore!’ ” says Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University. “But that’s not how it happens.”

Intellectuals used to play a big role in organizing labor. In the 1930s, Communists and socialists were a major force. Later, labor unions stepped in.

But today’s unions are not set up to serve the unemployed; they generally organize around workplaces, after all.

I think what we've seen with the London riots and with riots in the suburbs of Paris and elsewhere are that, without solid organization and leadership from left-wing activists, they often amount to little more than looting and a bad PR stunt for rough urban areas with a lot of minorities.

This is actually a very dangerous situation for everyone, because as the economy worsens (and it looks like it will), there will be more frustration, more widespread chronic unemployment, and perhaps more rioting and protesting. A lot of people have nowhere to turn and nothing to lose. With no major political organization containing and directing this energy, it will just end up legitimating right wing politics and prejudices about the unemployed, poor, urban youth, and immigrants.

Just to make it absolutely clear though, I don't blame the rioters. I think many of them have very real frustrations. I think it is the left's collective responsibility to take a much more proactive stance in leading these people to more constructive political action. On a broader scale than just this riot, a lot of us on the left have this idea that a more progressive society will rise out of the ashes of capitalism. This is very far from the truth. If people are not mentally prepared and organized into an effective political force, it could just as easily lead to an end of law-and-order or a strong, authoritarian right-wing counteraction (witness the calls for a military response and Cameron's response...)

With this goal in mind, one thing we can all do is be a lot more honest with ourselves and with the people around us about what we believe. Today's left needs desperately to reevaluate its values and reestablish its core principles so that it can make a strong, constructive response to the right wing's vandalizing of government's most basic functions.

Here's the NYT article I keep mentioning in full. Right wing bloggers have picked up on it to try and shame the NYT for saying the unemployed ought to turn to communism. It's really worth a read: The Unemployed Somehow Became Invisible

***Update: Prime Minister David Cameron, also known for having said that multiculturalism has been a failure, called the riots "criminality, pure and simple," but is criminal behavior ever simple? Isn't crime, in all its forms, always tied to broader sociological, economic and cultural issues? Although it saddens me to see peaceful protests degenerate into looting, Cameron denying that this has anything to do with larger issues in the UK and Europe insures that the government will do little to address the underlying issues.

Also, this is a hilarious interview on the topic:

1. We’re not alone: A plurality of Americans are democrats

This is my first post in an ongoing series on public perception of the democrats and the misconception that the US is generally a right-leaning country.

Other developed nations have been racing ahead of us when it comes to enacting progressive policies; left-wing politicians in the US regularly face charges that they are not patriotic, that they are socialists–New England, Ivy League elites out of touch with mainstream, mainstreet Americans. And if you spoke out against the Iraq War, like I did, chances are you felt like an isolated heretic in a sea of conservatives. Heck, that’s how I still feel most of the time when I turn on the news and hear about what’s going on with the Tea Party!

But believe it or not, polls tracking partisan trends sends 2004 show that a consistent plurality of Americans identify with democrats. When these polls are expanded to include sympathizers (people who generally vote republican/democrat but aren’t necessarily members of either party), we find the same trend: with very few exceptions, more Americans sympathized with the democrats than with republicans from 2004-2010. When sympathizers are included, we also find that for most of the 2004-2010 period either a majority of Americans or a very significant plurality (almost a majority) supported the democrats.

Here are two well-regarded polls tracking partisan trends. Rasmussen shows a more consistent democratic trend in the US, unbroken until November 2010; Gallup includes the sympathizers and shows a strong democratic trend despite a little bit of variation.

The Gallup poll: http://www.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx

The Rasmussen poll: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/archive/mood_of_america_archive/partisan_trends/summary_of_party_affiliation

Of course, both polls show that since 2010, there has been a lot more back and forth between republicans and democrats. For now though, let’s content ourselves with the knowledge that from 2004-2010, more Americans identified with democrats than with republicans. I’m going to have to write an entire post later on why things started getting mixed up: what’s happened since 2008 on the right is unprecedented in American history and deserves a much closer look.

Now, what about before 2004, you ask? The Pew Research Center has shown that more people supported democrats from the 1930s all the way up until 9/11, when republican affiliation jumped to about 30% and democratic membership fell to 31%. They point out that, actually, it wasn’t until 9/11 that republicans had even close to the membership of the Democratic Party. Since then, as shown above, more Americans support democrats than republicans, but the margin is much smaller.

As the study points out, since Republicans have higher voter turnout rates, the smaller advantage of the democrats puts them at risk in elections. I'm sure we all remember Bush/Gore, when the country consistently polled democrat, even voted democrat, and yet still lost the election by a hair's width.

Granted, for a good deal of the period in the Pew Research Center study (1930s and on), the democrats and republicans did not represent what they do today. Many people switched sides during the Civil Rights movement, thanks in part to the Southern Strategy–republican pandering to the rise of the white middle class in the south and their racial prejudices. Still, since that realignment and up until 9/11, the democrats solidly trounced republicans when it came to the raw number of people identifying themselves with either party.

The Pew Research Center study: http://people-press.org/2003/11/05/part-1-party-affiliation/

Historically then, America is not a conservative nation, and certainly not a republican nation. If you’re a progressive out there feeling lonely, you’re definitely not alone. You shouldn’t be afraid to speak out for what you believe–much of the alienation is self-enforcing: conservatives tell us we are marginalized extremists out-of-touch with mainstreet so we don’t speak our minds when we’re around “normal” people, and we probably often mistake solid democrats for republicans.

The fact that so many of us live in the closet politically also means that a large swath of the population, folks who aren’t particularly keen on politics and aren’t sure who believes what and who they agree with, don’t know what progressives stand for. As it turns out, many progressive policies, such as raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, are very popular, even amongst conservatives. Undoubtedly, if we spoke out more in our everyday lives, more people will know what we stand for, and consequently, more people will realize they already support some of the fundamental tenets of the American left.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the democrats’ voter base, which draws heavily on minorities and women, and how this might feed into the perception that we are so isolated.

Financial markets, or the cockroach optimism of American capitalism

We hear a lot from the right that, if government would just stop meddling, the markets would correct themselves and everything would be hunky-dory. Today I’m going to try to break down, in the most basic way possible, why the free market, especially in the form of the stock market, inherently tends towards the catastrophic situation we’re in now.

Remember, I’m making the most basic argument for government regulation of the markets. I’m not an economist, and I don’t understand the crazy things going on in the upper echelons of finance these days, but I don’t think that’s really necessary to understand why the market inherently tends towards bubbles.

First off, the free market assigns all goods a monetary value. Obviously, there is no way to perfectly tie the money value of, for example, an umbrella, to what the umbrella is actually worth. Conservatives will try and talk about the markets correcting themselves through supply and demand, but the underlying truth is that the money value of an umbrella is never a perfectly accurate reflection of its worth.

So, when merchants buy a product, they can mark up the price and try to convince someone else that that’s what it’s really worth. With something like an umbrella, the markups eventually stop, because you, the consumer, buy the umbrella and put it to use. In the stock market however, the markups keep going on and on, with each stock broker trying to convince the next guy in line that the stock is worth more than it was originally purchased for.

The seller always has a strong incentive to inflate the actual value of what is being sold. As a result, there is an inherent tendency in the market towards bubbles: the seller can sell for whatever price he can convince someone else to pay, no matter how ridiculously inflated and abstracted from the original value of the product it actually is. Making matters worse, today, we have all sorts of strange financial products that aren't even based on something concrete like an umbrella. That makes it even harder to tell what the thing being sold, for example a bundle of mortgages, is actually worth. As we've seen, it's pretty easy to hoodwink people into thinking it's worth a heck of a lot more than it is.

So, the markups go on until eventually some schmuck buys the stock for a price that no one else in their right mind would ever pay.

So when a conservative tries to tell you that the market regulates itself, you should translate it to mean, “Eventually, in the free market, some poor schmuck gets burned.”

If you think grade inflation has been a problem recently, you should take a close look at the stock market before 2008. Since everyone is trying to convince the next guy in line that the stock is worth more than it was originally bought for, the markets are inherently optimistic: "sure it's not worth $100 today, but tomorrow you'll definitely be able to sell it for $110." And I don’t mean optimistic in the sense of the glass is half full. I mean deliriously optimistic, the kind of optimism that lives through three nuclear wars and still comes out thinking the human race is God’s most perfect creation. It’s cockroach optimism.

Well, it’s cockroach optimism combined with the herd mentality of lemmings. Because, after 50 years of generally positive economic growth, pretty much everyone started thinking that the markets could only go in one direction: up. Everything was based on the fundamental assumption that if you bought something today (especially houses!), it would be worth more tomorrow, so you were fine taking out loans to buy it today. A lot of people got hugely indebted, and enough people got burned to make us all feel the pain as the shocks spread through the markets to the rest of the economy.

Cockroach optimism + lemming herd mentality = 7 billion schmucks.

If we’re going to have stock and financial markets, it’s absolutely necessary for the government to regulate them. Without government intervention, there is an inherent tendency towards bubbles, or “corrections” as conservatives will name them. Right now, China, which has a much more realistic approach to government intervention in the economy, is intervening in its markets to slow down  overinflated growth that might otherwise generate a nasty bubble.

In America on the other hand, the bubble burst in 2008 and we’ve just rolled over and said, “Gimme some more!” If you haven’t already seen John Oliver’s skit on the Obama administration’s efforts at regulating the markets, you really should: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-july-28-2011/dodd-frank-update

(Obviously, I haven’t even mentioned insane things like derivatives, futures, and all the other abstract financial products and bets that are out there and were major players in 2008. Let me just say that, when I was studying political theory in college, business majors used to always tell me the things I was studying were too abstract. Well, I think we all know now that some of the esoteric things going on in the market make Aristotle look like a block of concrete.)

What to do?

If we want financial regulation, we’re going to have to make a much stronger argument for our vision of government. The left is on the defensive: we're having to justify all the things the government is already doing. Until we turn that discussion around, we won't be able to talk about how we want to expand the role of government in the stock and financial markets. We've got to speak out a lot more and try to make basic arguments that most people can understand if we're going to have any hope of changing the political dynamic in this country. Let's get to it!

Why I don't blame Barack Obama

After disappointments in the extension of the Bush tax cuts, budget deal, and especially the deficit deals, liberal bloggers have started castigating Barack Obama for his incompetence at the bargaining table. Although I agree that the results in these recent deals were disappointing, I don't blame Barack Obama.


I never expected much out of Barack Obama. As someone who believes fundamentally in the progressive nature of the free market and, like most democrats, thinks the government should only protect people from the worst excesses of the free market, he was never going to come along and drastically change the way Wall Street works. He wasn't going to impose heavier taxes on the rich (repealing the Bush tax cuts is just the start, since they really only amount to a few percentage points off the historically low tax rates rich people pay now); he wasn't going to launch a massive works program to make sure everyone had a job; he wasn't going to be a vocal critic of corporate influence in American politics.

At the very best, we can only expect Obama to put off the nation's backslide into the economic abyss. Granted, I thought he would be able to turn things around for maybe 5 years or even a decade and never expected that we'd already be facing a recession now, but then again, who could have predicted the disturbing and wacky events of the past two years. Death panels? Michelle Bachmann? Donald Trump? Birthers? Threatening to not raise the debt-ceiling? One of the reasons the left is still so unorganized is that many of our minds are still trying to figure out what the f*** is going on, which I fully sympathize with. But it's definitely time to stop staring at the freak show on the right and get down to business.

If we had elected McCain, the crisis we're expecting to start on Monday would have come two years ago, when republican leaders were struggling to wrangle enough votes on the bailouts and stimulus to keep us from backsliding into a depression.

In short, the first reason I don't blame Obama is that we, as voters on the left, should know we are electing representatives who are very moderate historically speaking. FDR democrats had a much more progressive vision of the world and were more willing to make drastic changes in the economy. We have let the wild cries of "socialist!" on the right go to our head, such that we go out of our way not to appear as extremists and not to elect extremists. But now we've seen that, no matter how moderately conservative Barack Obama becomes, the right is still going to call him a radical Kenyan Islamic communist.

The second reason I don't blame Obama is that the left is not fired up at all about what is happening. We are entering a new phase of American politics, one in which civic involvement is going to become increasingly important. If the 51-52% of us who sympathize with the left don't want to see our values steamrolled, we are going to have to speak out a LOT more to combat this stereotype that the US is inherently conservative.

Whereas the Tea Party has been turning out to town halls and launching protests, we just sit at home despairing about how inherently conservative the US is. Hogwash! Most polls show a plurality* of Americans sympathize with the democrats. The only reason the right is dominating the debate is that they are louder and more organized. It's high time that we started to respond in kind with the massive protests and civil disobedience that we are known for.

Protesting and engaging in civil disobedience will raise the profile of the progressive side of American politics and drown out a good bit of the "libtard" mentality that currently gets so much coverage in the media. It will also go a long way to making Obama's job easier, because, let's face it, even as the moderate he is, he hasn't been able to do most of the things he wanted since he got elected because of the unprecedented opposition he has received from the right.

You hear that noise? It's me tapping my foot impatiently. Let's get on the move! Let's go stand up for what we believe!

*Edit: changed "majority" to "plurality" in  the third to last paragraph. More on polling, partisan affiliation, and support for democratic priorities to come.

Unemployment

America was built on the dream of 0% unemployment. Back in Europe, there was no land that didn't already belong to someone, someone who was a lot richer and a lot more powerful than the people who moved across the Atlantic. In America, the government was practically giving away land to whoever wanted it. If you lost your job, fell out with your neighbors, broke the law, or just felt like a change, you could always pick up and move to the frontier. If you wanted to work and provide for your family, chances were high that, with a bit of hard work and ingenuity, you would succeed: clear some land, build a cabin, do a little farming, hunt... we've all played Oregon Trail.

But, somewhat ironically, by trying to escape the strict delimitation of land into parcels of private property in overcrowded Europe, the settlers brought that model to America, not unlike the various pests, rodents, and diseases that hitched a ride on the boats. Two centuries later and we have to dramatically rethink what the United States represents. Everywhere you look, everything you look at belongs to someone. If you can't find work, you can't just move west and start over. Sure you can still try, but if you think unemployment is a problem in New York, have fun in California!

So what is someone who can't find a job and doesn't own any land to grow food on supposed to do? These days America is a lot more like the Europe our ancestors were so fed up with: all the land is claimed, we have high, chronic unemployment and, increasingly, an underclass of people with nowhere to turn. Most importantly, people have less say over the course of their lives. 99.99% of us worked just as hard on Friday as we will on Monday, but because the US debt credit rating was downgraded, the stock market will probably crash on Monday and many of us will have to face pink slips in the coming weeks. And we can't help but wonder, what does this credit rating have to do with us?

Despite the fact that we have less control of the direction our lives will take than previous generations, we still have it ingrained in our political conscious that people who work hard in America will be able to find a job, have a house and maybe some land, and pursue the American dream. Just give people enough freedom and independence and they'll figure things out for themselves. We don't hear that argument now so much as it's reverse: if you're poor and/or unemployed, it's because you're lazy, lack talents that will make you employable, and have no motivation. I've heard this lobbed at women who work all day, then come home to care for their children; I've heard it lobbed at recent graduates who thought that, to be successful, all they had to do was go to a good university and get good grades; I've heard it lobbed at men who have such tough callouses that you're liable to get cut if you shake their hands. It's not just insulting nonsense, it's insulting nonsense that prevents us as a nation from addressing our problems, because let's face it, the first step to taking action is admitting that there is a problem and that not everything can be boiled down to the personal irresponsibility of the millions of people suffering economically right now.

If you look at North Africa, Greece, Spain, Israel, France, or Chile right now, you see educated young people getting frustrated that no matter how hard they work, the economic situation prevents them from succeeding in life. They've taken to the streets to demand their governments focus on jobs, not debt. But this isn't happening in the US yet. There are hardly any protests; young people aren't banding together to talk about these issues and make a plan for action. Instead, we're letting the older generations who already have jobs and houses tell us that we're lazy and apathetic, and so far we seem to be believing it. But there's some good news: up until recently the same thing was said about the people our age in Chile, Spain, and many other places. Almost overnight, young people decided they'd had enough. In Israel they are angry they can't find apartments, in Spain they want jobs, in Chile they want education reforms, in Syria they demand political freedoms and economic reforms, and at much greater risk than we would face if we picket Congress! The Tunisian youth let out a cry that has spread across the Mediterranean into Western Europe and Chile, it's time the young people of America add our voices to the chanting of our peers around the world demanding the most basic of human rights: a place to live and some work to do to help our families!

What is wrong with a society that, the people cry out, "We want jobs! We want to contribute to our societies and build a better tomorrow!" And the governments respond, "No!" like the guard at the door in Kafka's story. Shouldn't our governments and elders be praising us for wanting to work, for wanting to contribute something to society?

We have a right to work, a duty to work, a burning need to work, and if the free market can't keep employment at 100%, then our governments have a responsibility to step in and make sure that everyone who wants a job gets one. When the government did this in the New Deal, it jump started the economy and resulted in some major, lasting improvements in the nation's infrastructures and national parks which we still benefit from today. What are we waiting for? Let's demand the same for our unemployed friends and family!