Thursday, April 21st, 2011 
Amy Stuart in her reply to my response to President Obama’s speech on the deficit pointed out the need to clarify what the political left, right and center mean. I think she’s right. The terms have been used loosely and quite imprecisely. But on the other hand, their continued use suggests that there may be good reasons for the continued use of the schema.
I, myself, became convinced, after the fall of the Soviet Union, that the terms left and right were obsolete. I thought (it turns out incorrectly) that since it was becoming clear to just about everyone that there was no systemic alternative to capitalism, to the modern market economy, and since there really were simply alternative capitalisms, that we might best abandon the terms. Then we would pragmatically address the practical problems of the day, and express, identify and pursue various specific political commitments, e.g. individual freedom and social justice, and not put them in the large baskets of the left and the right. I thought that the terms hid more than they revealed, that it was too hard to find and consider specific commitments in these very large bins.
Yet, given the systematic polarization of our political world, I am convinced that I was wrong. These old categories still have life, helping illuminate distinctions and commonalities in the political landscape. And there is an additional benefit as it applies to the present American scene. The distinction between left, right and center provides a way to understand the creative political action of Barack Obama, who in this regard is a leader.
The notion of the political left and right has a history, dating back to the French Revolution: Monarchists, right; revolutionaries, left. It was used to understand the Manichean battles of the Twentieth Century: Communists and their sympathizers, left; Fascists and their sympathizers, right. And it also has been used to understand ordinary domestic politics: Republicans, right; Democrats, left, very conservative Republicans, far right, very progressive Democrats, far left (though I think this is a small group at best).
The notion of center is less sharp. Vaguely, it . . .
Read more: Left, Right and the Creative Center: Understanding the Political Landscape in the Age of Obama
Wednesday, 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
Tuesday, April 19th, 2011 
During the Presidential election campaign of 2008, I thought I saw four reasons why Barack Obama had significant potential to be a transformational President.
First, I thought that he would change the definition of what it means to be a typical American. He was reinventing American political culture by reimagining the American dream by addressing the problems of the great American dilemma, the continuing legacies of slavery.
Second, I thought he would move the political center from right to left on the great issue of the relationship between state and markets. He would demonstrate that government is not primarily the problem, as the Republicans since Reagan have maintained, but a major democratic institution that can help address the pressing problems of our times.
And third and fourth, I thought that the way he did politics and the way he spoke about politics, the way he was supported by a mobilized social movement wanting fundamental change, using what I call “the politics of small things,” and the way he used eloquence against sound bits, also marked a great political transformation. The form of his politics would be as significant as its contents.
I wonder what the readers of Deliberately Considered think at this time. I present here my preliminary judgments.
On formal issues I think he has delivered, in the case of eloquence, against his opponents, in the case of “the politics of small things,” with them.
The Tea Party and the Obama campaign are opposed in many ways, but they have in common that their power is generated by ordinary people meeting, speaking to each other and developing a capacity of acting in concert, i.e. they generate power in the sense of Hannah Arendt. I passionately support the ends of one of these movements and oppose the other. But a new, more democratic form is with us.
When his opponents attack him using sound bites, from the denunciations of “Obamacare,” to the birthers and the like, Obama’s reasonable responses seem to be at least as powerful. At a minimum, he shows that traditional eloquence has a fighting . . .
Read more: Barack Obama and Political Transformation
Monday, April 18th, 2011 
Ollanta Humala, a left-wing nationalist, and Keiko Fujimori, the daughter and number one fan of a former right-wing dictator, will shortly compete for the presidency of Peru, after having obtained the first and second places, respectively, in the first electoral round (which took place on Sunday, April 10th). Notoriously unpredictable as the country is when it comes to politics, no one can foresee the results of the runoff. But given the correlation of political forces and interests today, Fujimori has a good chance of winning the elections. This would entail, as Mario Vargas Llosa puts it, “opening the prisons for all the thieves, murderers and torturers –beginning with her father, Alberto Fujimori, and the sinister Montesinos [Fujimori’s lieutenant]– for them to take the streets once again, to show their tongues to everyone who has defended democracy in Peru. The criminals would go directly from prison to the government.”
Keiko Fujimori, a populist vaguely speaking on behalf of liberal capitalism, has a main goal in mind: liberating dear Dad, who is in prison for having led one of the most corrupt and violent administrations in the world –a mafia state whose dealings (as suggested in a previous post) were meticulously recorded by the administration itself, particularly via videos from the Intelligence Service, which were at some point leaked to the press, setting in motion the inevitable, but perhaps temporary, collapse of the regime.
Consider a couple of glimpses into Alberto Fujimori’s administration: Transparency International calculates that Fujimori embezzled roughly 600 million dollars from public funds, which would rank his regime as the seventh most corrupt of the past twenty years –worldwide. Beyond “normal” channels of embezzlement and piracy, Fujimori also used his creativity to procure illegal funds in almost risible ways. For example, he set up a charity organization in Japan to collect funds for “poor children in Peru,” funds that then he gluttonously diverted to his personal account. He reminds me of Garcia Marquez’s Patriarch, in The Autumn of the Patriarch, a banana republic character at once comical and evil, a childishly wicked being who . . .
Read more: Presidential Elections in Peru
Saturday, April 16th, 2011 
Thursday, I considered President Obama’s speech, informed by William Milberg’s analysis of Senator Ryan’s budget proposal. My conclusion: the terms of the political debate for the 2012 elections are being set to the President’s strong advantage. I am pleased, but even more pleased because two serious opposing views of America and its public good will be debated. A rational discussion about this seems likely. There will be smoke and mirrors to be sure, but this is a time for grand politics in the sense of Alexis de Tocqueville and a grand political contest we will get.
This is especially important given the present state of affairs in the United States and abroad. But Presidential leadership will not solve all problems. Indeed, much of the politically significant action occurs off the central political stage, in what I refer to as “the politics of small things.” This dimension of politics has been on our minds this week in the form of three very different cases: the Tea Party in the United States, and The Freedom Theatre and the International Solidarity Committee in occupied Palestine.
The Tea Party is a looming presence in American politics. But it is in a sense “no thing”, as Gary Alan Fine puts it. It is a social movement that emerged in response to major changes associated with the election and early administration of Barack Obama, and a response to the global economic crisis. Fine and I disagree in our judgment of the “Tea Party patriots.” Indeed, I, along with Iris, am not sure how rational they are, but that is actually a political matter. As an objective observer of the human comedy, i.e. as a sociologist, I am particularly intrigued by the no thing qualities of the Tea Party which Fine considers.
A media performance occurs. An agitated announcer denounces policies said to be supporting losers, calling for a new tea party demonstration. People, who can’t take it anymore, come together in small groups all around the country, using . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: Ryan’s Budget, the President’s Speech and the Tea Party between Two Assassinations
Friday, April 15th, 2011 
Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian peace activist, was abducted in Gaza City yesterday, and then killed, apparently by a Salafist group opposed to Hamas. The news already has shaken Italy and Europe, and it will also make for some somber headlines here in the USA.
Arrigoni arrived in Gaza three years ago as part of the International Solidarity Movement, a network of foreign activists who deliberately choose to live in the heart of the occupied territories to bear witness to the continuing harassment of the Palestinian population at the hands of the Israeli occupier (be they military or of the radical settler movements). Some of these activists live in remote villages, some accompany ambulances through checkpoints. Often IDF soldiers let the vehicles through simply because there is a ‘white’ person onboard. Others organize protests around Israel’s Separation Wall or in Palestinian villages, such as Budrus, Ni’lin, non-violently protesting. All confront the apartheid nature of the occupation. For this reason, Israel tries to prevent them from entering its territories, attempting to silence these annoying witnesses.
Arrigoni was such a witness-activist. Choosing Gaza as the place of his activism, he was one of the very few non-diplomat foreigners present during the Operation Cast Lead (Dec. 2008-January 2009). His blogs and reports were published on the Italian leftist daily Il Manifesto for which he kept sending reports.
Gaza has been off limits to most foreigners and at times fully inaccessible to journalists and even ambassadors. Israel controls all of the borders around the Palestinian territories. Based on his experience in the 2008-2009 war, Arrigoni published a poignant book entitled Restiamo Umani, which can be translated in the affirmative as “We Remain Human” or in the imperative form as “Let Us Stay Human.” Giving a human face to the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza was Arrigoni’s mission. His was an urgent sense of witnessing the ordeal of ordinary Palestinians.
But why would a Palestinian group execute him? The official line is that a radical Salafist group, opposed to Hamas, had captured him hoping to exchange his release for the release of . . .
Read more: On the Assassination of Vittorio Arrigoni: We Remain Human
Thursday, April 14th, 2011 
Barack Obama is a centrist, trying to move the center left, defending it against the right. Health care reform has been his great legislative “left moving” achievement. Though far from perfect, he established the principle of universal coverage.
In the past months, he has been primarily on defense, fighting back against the Republican attack on government. Obama is not a left-winger, to the dismay of many on the blogosphere. He is now defending a new center, which he helped establish, against right-wing attack.
The opening shot of the attack was the Tea Party protest against the bank bailout, the stimulus package, and “Obamacare.” In the recent elections, Obama and the Democrats suffered a defeat, a “shellacking” as he put it. But now as we are approaching the main event, the Republican attack has taken the form of Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget proposal.
William Milberg asserted here that with this proposal the President is just about assured re-election. I have talked to a number of friends and colleagues about this. Their response, put bluntly: “from his mouth, to God’s ears.” But just perhaps, God won’t have anything to do with it. Perhaps, it will be a matter of leadership and political direction, along with the political economic fundamentals Milberg highlighted. The quality of the leadership was revealed in Obama’s speech on the deficit yesterday.
In his speech, the President was forthright in his rhetoric and policy recommendations. He addressed the problems of the deficit, emphasizing that deficit reduction will require taxing as well as cuts in spending. He drew a sharp distinction between his and the Republican plans. The contrast was stark. The political thrust of the speech was clear.
Obama and the Democrats promise to defend Medicare and Medicaid, while the Republicans will dismantle them. The Ryan budget provides many tax advantages for the rich, while what they present means that “50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit.”
As the President declared:
“And worst of all, this is a vision that says even though . . .
Read more: President Obama on Taxing and Spending, and the American Center
Wednesday, April 13th, 2011 
Time marches so quickly that it is unsettling to recall that barely two years ago, there was no Tea Party. Then on February 19, 2009 in a rant heard round the nation, CNBC business news editor Rick Santelli from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange called for a popular rebellion against what he considered an out-of-control government that was then refinancing mortgages (see below). He asked traders to hold a tea party, dumping derivatives into the Chicago River. Soon there was a Tea Party, or many Tea Parties, or no Tea Party. But what IS the Tea Party?
Today there is much debate as to whether the Tea Party is growing in popularity or shrinking in consequence. Freudians once plaintively asked, “What do women want?” Today pundits echo Sigmund’s question, “What does the Tea Party want?” And in a year in which the politics of budgets will dominate domestic debate, our imaginaries of the Tea Party matter.
Space opened for a small government movement as many middle-class Americans felt that government spending, controlled by liberals, was spiraling out of control. Money was being spent too fast. There was the bank bailout, the automotive bailout, refinancing mortgages, and, most dramatically, the stimulus bill, cleverly renamed by some conservative commentators as the “Porkulus” bill. Rather than targeting government spending on easily justified projects, such as infrastructure, repairing aging bridges and highways, the government spent money without a plan. Republicans and independents argued that the Democrats dusted off their personal wish lists, lying in the bottom of their file cabinets, and proclaimed that those projects would save the republic. Any spending seemed to suffice to rescue the economy. Academics know fortunate colleagues who received stimulus spending to support their graduate students. Fairs and festivals were awarded tax dollars. Such a wild increase of the deficit was all-too-easy to mock. But beyond mocking, opponents made the argument, a serious one that even the President now embraces, that such spending poses existential dangers for the national welfare. When the unemployment rate sped (and remains) above the 8% level that President Obama promised would . . .
Read more: The Tea Party is No Thing
Tuesday, April 12th, 2011 
The headlines this week were devoted to the high-stakes drama in D.C. that led to (literally) an 11th hour deal to avert a federal government shutdown and an $38 billion spending cut for 2011-2012. But the real news was that the 2012 Presidential election was effectively thrown to the Democratic incumbent (who also announced the launch of his campaign this week) when the leading fiscal policy visionary on the Republican side issued his long-term plan for the role of government over the next ten years. Congressman Ryan’s plan is so extreme in its proposed cutbacks on health insurance coverage and so regressive in its proposed reform of income and corporate taxes that it leaves most of the American political spectrum open to President Obama for the taking. He will no doubt begin the journey to this vast expanse of political turf with his speech on Wednesday.
Ryan’s plan has been much discussed in the press. It calls for a privatization of Medicare, with drastic reductions in funding. The key will be in how this funding reduction is distributed, and there is no indication that it would be done in a progressive way. This the major fault line of the plan, that it would put an even greater burden on the poor and middle class in accessing health care than is the case today. The plan calls for reducing the income tax on the richest individuals and corporations to the extremely low level of 25%. Finally, the projected effect of the plan on budget deficits hinges on wildly unrealistic assumptions that have already been questioned by the Congressional Budget Office.
We are in such a moment of political frenzy over the fiscal deficits that we often forget two basic economic fundamentals about deficits. The first is that deficits are not a function simply of spending levels but mainly of economic growth rates, since it is these that largely determine revenues. The second is that shrinking deficits generally reduce the economic growth rate and slow the creation of jobs.
. . .
Read more: Obama Wins!!
Monday, April 11th, 2011 
“As I came to Jenin in 2003, I found a swamp, a jungle, steaming with struggles to survive. Here they need hospitals, not a theatre, I thought.” Mr. Juliano Mer-Khamis, in an interview to the Berlin Newspaper Tagesspiegel in early 2010 in Jenin, re-published after his assassination on April 6, 2011.
Mr. Mer-Khamis (53), an Israeli and Palestinian actor, was shot dead on April 4 by masked militants at the entrance to the theatre he built in 2006 in the west bank city of Jenin, “The Freedom Theatre.” He started the theater in Jenin in 2006 following a call from his friend Zakaria Zubeidi, an Al-Aqsa-Brigades fighter, or what we Israelis usually think of as a terrorist. Moving with his wife and children to live in the refugee camp of Jenin, Mr. Mer-Khamis said in several interviews, was a choice he made between being on the side of the soldier and the checkpoint, or on that of the little girl who has no future and no hope.
I first read about the assassination in the Israeli press, linked on friends’ Facebook pages. I was surprised to discover how many of “their friends” reacted directly to the question of whether Mer-Khamis’s actions were just (many users expressed their loathing of his activism, much like replies to the same articles in Israeli news sites).
Journalists and bloggers also asked themselves whether this terrible murder stands as a warning sign to not mix art and politics as Mer-Khamis did in his acting in Israeli theaters, and to not openly criticize both Israeli militarism and the occupation and Palestinian society for its religious narrow mindedness.
There were two camps mourning the murder. On the one hand, there were those who concluded that it was the result of the inhuman, dark and theocratic Palestinian society. It could not tolerate boys and girls acting and playing together and rejected the secular content of the Freedom Theatre’s plays. The other camp lamented the tear in the very identity of Mer-Khamis himself. He tried to be a bridge between the “impossible worlds” in his . . .
Read more: On the Assassination of Juliano Mer-Khamis: Fighting for the Freedom of the Everyday
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