By Richard Alba, July 20th, 2011 
The right, as has been frequently observed of late, has developed an “alternative-reality” view of how we have arrived at our current budget-deficit impasse, placing the blame squarely on the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats. A runaway federal budget since 2009 is the key element in their story. In a July 15th editorial (“The Obama Downgrade”), The Wall Street Journal states this view succinctly:
“The early George W. Bush years saw spending bounce up to a plateau of roughly 20% of GDP, but no more than 20.7% as recently as 2008. Then came the Obama blowout, in league with Nancy Pelosi’s Congress. With the recession as a rationale, Democrats consciously blew up the national balance sheet, lifting federal outlays to 25% in 2009, the highest level since 1945.”
The editorial is accompanied by a chart to illustrate the basic claim–witness the remarkable uptick of the curve between 2008 and 2009:
At first sight, the chart appears to sustain the WSJ charge and to indicate that federal spending under Obama is of a different order of magnitude from the past. For a moment, it shook my own antipathy to the Republican position; maybe, in all fairness, the blame deserves to be more evenly divided between the two sides of the political aisle. My curiosity aroused, I probed more deeply into the numbers (which come from the OMB website). I’d like to share what I discovered. I make no claims about any special knowledge of the intricacies of the federal budget, just an affinity with numbers.
If you have followed me this far, you may have guessed what is coming—the discovery of a deceptive use of data. It begins with a disturbing piece of disingenuousness, if not dishonesty, in the WSJ editorial, which places the responsibility for remarkably high level of fiscal year (FY) 2009 expenditures entirely at Obama’s door. But a federal fiscal year begins on October 1 of the prior year, and the Bush White House was therefore the source of the FY 2009 budget passed by Congress and responsible for spending some of the money. The budget as proposed authorized $3.1 . . .
Read more: Pushing Back Against the Right’s Narrative on the Budget
By Michael Corey, July 19th, 2011 
When I heard President Obama’s Press Conference on June 29, 2011, I wondered if corporate jet tax policies were being driven by a simulacrum or pragmatism. The references to corporate jets seemed to be more aligned with a simulacrum; and the tax policy aspects seemed to be driven by pragmatic concerns with a smattering of campaign type rhetoric. Consequently, the President’s comments generated some strong reactions from associations/lobbyists, the private sector, and unions.
On June 29, 2011, the President and CEO of the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, and the International President of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers issued a news release with an attachment of a letter addressed to President Obama which was critical of his remarks about corporate aircraft and proposed changes to the tax code. After complementing President Obama on his emphasis on manufacturing, new technology and innovation, they expressed concern that his rhetoric and proposed tax changes would negatively impact the United States general aviation industry which has about 1.2 million jobs linked to it, contributes about $150 billion annually to the U. S. economy, and is a major source of exports.
During the severe economic downturn in 2008, ill-informed criticism of corporate jets and business aviation exacerbated the challenges facing our industry, which led to depressed new aircraft sales and jeopardized very good, high-paying jobs throughout the United States. More than 20,000 highly skilled IAM members were laid off in this industry.
As our industry looks to begin a recovery and the workforce returns to their high-skilled jobs, we are very concerned that the rhetoric coming from some in your Administration will lead to similar economic difficulties. While such talk may appear to some as good politics, the reality is that it hurts one of the leading manufacturing and exporting industries in the United States. And it adds to the pain so many working families have endured.
Ed Bolen, The President and CEO of the National Business Aviation Association, a lobbyist, which represents more than 8,000 companies which serve the business aviation . . .
Read more: Is a Simulacrum or Pragmatism Driving Corporate Jet Tax Policy?
By Gary Alan Fine, July 15th, 2011 
It has now passed into the realm of political cliché that there are red states and blue states. Like so many commonplaces there is a certain truth to the analysis. We expect Mississippi to vote differently than Minnesota, Indiana differently than Illinois, and Vermont differently than New Hampshire (the last a point made elegantly by Jason Kaufman in describing the divergence of political cultures). States have different political cultures, which are based on their histories, their values, and their economies.
However, even in the most garishly red of states, Democrats often get 2/5 of the vote, and the same is true in the most azure domains for Republicans. But what are we to make of these divides and these common tendencies? A potentially more powerful way of understanding politics is to recognize that even more than geography, occupations have political cultures. It is very often true that you vote as you work. While this has been recognized by political consultants as they target their mailings and by sociologists who examine what produces individual-level voting decisions by studying broad occupational categories, the red job/blue job divide has not captured the public which thinks in terms of land.
Research from the General Social Survey run by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago asked respondents their political preferences and their occupations. Based on surveys from 1996 to 2008, sociologists David Grusky and Kim Weeden constructed occupational categories which can be compared in light of political affiliations. The surveys focus on the basic division between liberals and conservatives (and self-professed moderates, who typically comprise half to two-thirds of any occupational group). While even these categories are somewhat broader than are desired for the examination of the local cultures of work, they serve adequately for making this point.
The results demonstrate vividly that there are substantial differences between jobs. For example, fewer than 5% of all bartenders consider themselves to be conservatives, while 27% admit to being liberals. This is a ratio . . .
Read more: Red Jobs, Blue Jobs
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, July 13th, 2011 
In this post, Antonio Álvarez considers an enduring problem, the relationship between social justice and development in a country moving from dictatorship to democracy. This problem was pressing during the transitions in Latin America and the former Soviet bloc. It endures, as is evident here. The circumstances are always very specific, but the difficulties repeat themselves as is now dramatically evident in North Africa and the Middle East. A creative approach to the difficulties is considered here. -Jeff
Memory and development often seem to be in tension in Latin America. The left speaks of the need to remember the past, particularly the human rights abuses committed by dictatorships during the cold war; the right, on the other hand, is concerned that an obsession with memory will forestall economic growth. A few weeks ago, Gerardo Bleier published, via Facebook, a piece that made the old-guard of the Uruguayan left quite uncomfortable. In the post, he presented a strong and provocative argument concerning collective memory and economic development. A leftist in distinguished standing, Bleier argues that in order to achieve justice concerning human rights violations during the recent Uruguayan dictatorship, Uruguayans must focus on social and economic development. Development, he argues, ought to be seen as an instrument of justice. He has thus rejected the common sense positions of the left and the right and maps out a significant alternative.
Bleier has been a noted Uruguayan journalist since the 1980s. During the first government of the Frente Amplio (Broad Front, the left of center coalition), led by socialist Tabaré Vázquez (2005-2010), Bleier served as a high level consultant; and currently, he publishes weekly reflections about the vicissitudes encountered by the present Frente Amplio.
Importantly, he is the son of Eduardo Bleier, who was a high ranking cadre in the Communist Party. Without ever having held a gun, Eduardo was one of the many activists who disappeared, was tortured, and murdered during Uruguay’s “dirty war” of the 1960s and 1970s. He probably died the first week of July, 1976, though no one knows for sure. After being tortured in the most . . .
Read more: Uruguay at the Crossroads: No Justice without Development
By Gary Alan Fine, June 27th, 2011 
Like many, I have been moved by the touching concern of Republican leaders for preserving Medicare. They fret that unless we do something, Medicare will vanish, and when that happens, it will be a very, very bad day. Such heart-felt sentiment always brings to mind Ronald Reagan’s maxim, “Trust but verify.”
Medicare was signed into law on July 30, 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson at a ceremony in Independence, Missouri. He was in the Show-Me State to give President Harry Truman the first Medicare card.
How had we gotten to that point? Howard Dean was incorrect when he suggested that Medicare was passed without the help of Republicans. In fact, of the 32 Republicans in the Senate 13 voted “aye” and 17 “nay.” While Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen did not vote, he went on record in saying that he would have voted in favor. In the House, the Republicans were almost precisely split. Medicare demonstrated the division in the party prior to the Southern realignment. (In the Congress Democrats were more united, but seven Senators and 48 Representatives voted no).
But what was striking was the fact that the arguments against the creation of Medicare by its opponents were similar to those aimed at what some have termed “Obamacare” (I know it has a less snippy label – the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – but recognize its maker). I acknowledge Ira Rosofsky’s 2009 essay, “Medicare is Socialism” on his blog “Adventures in Old Age,” for capturing some pithy examples, which I have supplemented.
The leading opponent of Medicare as it passed was the American Medical Association, a professional association that, generally speaking, supports our recently enacted health care law. Had they been opposed, the outcome might have been very different. (Whether they were bought off or whether the . . .
Read more: Medicare: Redux or Redo?
By Vince Carducci, June 9th, 2011 
Grace Lee Boggs has taken part in just about every progressive movement in modern America – civil rights, labor organizing, women’s rights, global justice, and more. At 95 and now often confined to a wheel chair, the Detroit-based activist and visionary shows no signs of slowing down, at least intellectually. Her new book The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century sets out her ideas for making real that other world the slogans tell us is possible. Indeed, based on her experience as recounted in her book, that world is already happening and in some of the most seemingly unlikely of places.
Along with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, Boggs was a founder of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a theoretical perspective within the American left that in the 1940s identified the Soviet Union under Stalin as constituting an example of state capitalism, i.e., a system in which the state functions in essence like a gigantic corporation, therefore keeping conventional capitalist relations of production and labor alienation intact. (By contrast, the then prevailing Trotskyite view labeled it a “bureaucratic collective,” a new form of political economic organization that while not purely capitalist was not strictly speaking socialist either.) The Johnson-Forest Tendency is also identified with the emergence of Marxist humanism, which takes its inspiration from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, several essays of which Boggs, who holds a PhD in philosophy from Bryn Mawr, was among the first to translate into English. Today the bottom-up orientation of the Johnsonite view lives on most closely in autonomism. And indeed, Antonio Negri’s co-author Michael Hardt blurbed the book’s dust jacket as did Robin D. G. Kelly and Immanuel Wallerstein.
Boggs, the daughter of early twentieth-century Chinese immigrants, begins by setting out the problem and the opportunity for those of us living in the end times, that is, in the wake of the Apocalypse of the modern capitalist world-system that was the 2008 economic . . .
Read more: Grace Lee Boggs’s The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
By Rafael Narvaez, June 8th, 2011 
 Ollanta Humala, a left-wing nationalist, has won the presidency of Peru. He obtained a narrow margin, probably four or five percentage points, over his contender, Keiko Fujimori (the final official count was not available at the time of writing). As I suggested in a previous post, Keiko Fujimori, a right-wing populist and the daughter of Alberto Fujimori, ran with the goal of freeing dad and dad’s buddies from prison, where they presently spend their days on charges ranging from large-scale thievery to murder. Many Peruvians feared, myself included, that electing Keiko would be tantamount to transferring these criminals from their cells to the offices of government. For at least the next five years, the duration of Humala’s future administration, this will not happen. For now, Peru has avoided the embarrassment of legitimizing, via the popular vote, one of the worse banana republic dictatorships in Latin America.
The future with Humala is uncertain. Throughout the campaign, he was accused, again and again, of “Chavismo,” of being but a sidekick to Hugo Chavez, bent on applying the obsolete and even ridiculous Chavista template to Peru. To counter this notion, Humala, dramatically and operatically, swore on the bible to scrupulously follow not Chavez’s but Lula’s steps, promising to actually strengthen the market with private as well as with state-oriented investment, while also building programs to increase redistribution of wealth.
No one realistically expects a Brazilian miracle in Peru within the next five years. But in a deeply polarized country, with an already large and zealous right-wing opposition, Humala has no choice but to fulfill his moderate, market-oriented promises. It is likely, therefore, that the economic growth that Peru has been experiencing in the past decade will continue, perhaps after an initial period of internal market speculation and attendant problems such as devaluation and an increase of investment risk indexes.
A couple of reflections
To be very schematic, two left wings seem to be emerging in Latin America. On the one hand, there is the old-guard, populist, anti-imperialist, caudillo-dependent, big-government-oriented left wing headed by Chavez (“capitalism may have ended life on Mars”). On the other hand, . . .
Read more: Elections in Peru, the Runoff
By Michael Corey, June 2nd, 2011 
This is the first post by Michael Corey of a two-part series on the use of the phrase “skin in the game.” -Jeff
‘Skin in the game’ is a widely used and imperfect aphorism of uncertain origins. The political meanings of the phrase have been used by all sides in political debates, and each side seeks to appropriate its meaning to connect with people on an informal level. The political application is relatively new compared to its application in business, finance, betting and war. ‘Skin in the game’ has become part of the rhetoric in debates on taxes, deficits and entitlements, and its use is likely to increase as the debates heat up.
‘Game’ is a metaphor for actions of all types, and ‘skin’ is a metaphor for being committed to something through emotional, financial, or bodily commitment. Skin is also a synecdoche representing the whole being. Taken together the phrase implies taking risk and being invested in achieving an outcome. The late columnist William Safire sought the origin of the phrase and didn’t resolve the issue, but he did dispel one widely held explanation. It was not the billionaire investor Warren Buffett who coined the phrase. Buffett likes executives in companies in which he invests to also have their funds, or their skin, invested in the firm. Safire learned from a money and investment specialist that the expression is much used to “convey financial risk in any kind of venture, but you could stretch it to mean some kind of emotional investment. Can you have skin in the game of your marriage? Well, you ought to.”
Ever since humans first walked the earth, our skins have been in the game as hunters, gatherers and cultivators. Over time, animal skins were used for trade and as currencies. For instance, buckskins were monetized, giving us our current buck and the use of the word skin as slang for money. The aphorism has been widely used in informal everyday language and increasingly has become popular in political speech. Safire observed in his New York Times column that ‘skin in the game’ . . .
Read more: Skin in the Game
By Vince Carducci, May 5th, 2011 
I have a friend, a longtime resident first of Carroll Gardens and now Cobble Hill, who refers to Brooklyn as “God’s country.” This notion of the borough as a site of pristine authenticity is central to Suleiman Osman’s book The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York. Osman, an assistant professor of American Studies at George Washington University, grew up in Park Slope toward the tail end of the era he surveys, but his study is informed by a comprehensive understanding of the forces that have shaped the urban environment not only in New York but in other parts of America in the years 1950 to 1980. It is a highly nuanced investigation into the oftentimes contradictory interests at play during the period.
As opposed to many studies of postmodern redevelopment, Suleiman finds that gentrification in postwar Brooklyn wasn’t the work of a cabal of bankers, real estate speculators, and government bureaucrats but more the generally unintended result of a well-meaning grassroots effort that sought to negotiate a middle ground between the alienating effects of large-scale, top-down urban renewal projects on the one hand, and the perceived banality of life in the suburbs on the other. The culprits, if one wants to call them that, were typically lawyers, academics, artists, and other well-educated members of the postindustrial service economy looking for a sense of terroir, i.e., local rootedness, against the anomie of modernist administrative society.
The first of the so-called urban frontiers to be rehabilitated was Brooklyn Heights, the area of early nineteenth-century mansions overlooking the East River that by the end of the Second World War had physically declined, with dramatically falling property values . Many of these stately townhouses had been abandoned or subdivided and converted into low-cost rental units. But by the end of the 1940s these structures were being restored and less-affluent tenants displaced by the forebears of what David Brooks has called “Bourgeois Bohemians.” (Indeed, I, a BoBo as I live and breathe, for a while rented a much more upscale version . . .
Read more: Suleiman Osman’s The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York
By Vince Carducci, April 20th, 2011 
The issue of debt, both public and private, has been a top news story ever since the financial collapse of 2008, but especially in recent weeks with all of the reporting on federal budget negotiations and the debt ceiling. (Another noteworthy item: The New York Times recently reported student loan debt has now exceeded credit card outstandings for the first time and is likely to top $1 trillion by the end of this year.) The problem cultural critic Richard Dienst claims in his new book The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good (Verso: 2011) isn’t that debt levels are too high; it’s that they aren’t high enough.
A critical and literary theorist, Dienst expands the concept of debt from its purely economic connotation to include social reciprocity broadly understood. The “magic” of debt, Dienst asserts toward the end of the book, is that it ultimately constitutes a common good by binding us inextricably to one another. Debt as conceived under the capitalist system has in the current environment been revealed as an apparatus of capture that has reached its penultimate “terminal crisis” to use Giovanni Arrighi’s term, opening the door to new world-historical possibilities of social interdependence and human understanding.
Dienst begins by reviewing the ideas of several key theorists of late capitalism. From Robert Brenner he takes the notion of global capitalism as a system in perpetual turbulence. He places Brenner alongside Arrighi’s application of the Kondratiev Curve in the modern world-system analysis of the development of capitalism since the fifteenth century, which essentially tracks that turbulence at a macrolevel. He finds further complement with David Harvey’s recent books on neoliberalism that extend the primarily economic arguments of Brenner and Arrighi into the realm of politics and ideology. And as Dienst notes, the recent financial crisis came as no surprise to any of them.
The question Dienst raises is: If we agree that these thinkers have aptly described the circumstances that have brought us to our present state, then where do we . . .
Read more: Richard Dienst’s The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good
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