By Lisa Aslanian, September 6th, 2011 
In The Atlantic, several prominent music critics reviewed “Watch the Throne,” the fabulous collaboration between Kanye West and Jay Z. Again, critics are angry about the subject matter. The song “That’s My Bitch” met with this reaction — it is the only song where Jay sings about B, and in the song, he does not adequately sing the praises of monogamy. First, he does more than sing about B (his wife, Beyoncé Knowles) — he enters her, as a black woman, into the pantheon of women men dream about (like Marilyn Monroe) and second, yes, he is “crass” and “protective” because he is saying, with cheek and guile, “that’s my girl.”
A host of questions ensue. Do we really associate musical maturity with our image of a monogamous family man? Do we ask our artists to promote social constraints, or do we want our art to articulate fantasy and felt experience? Does the egregiously simple image of maturity= monogamy play on a host of stereotypes about black men — not being monogamous, leaving their families, etc. and even if these stereotypes are partially true — is it the place of music and its’ critics to address them?
Jay Z has assumed enormous social responsibility. He openly discusses his early years dealing crack, cautioning young people not to do it by saying “you will end up in jail or dead.” He is philanthropic. Must we ask that his music, his fantasy, his creativity — his art — be as pedestrian and unambiguous as his politics?
Here is another loopy bit from the monogamy-happy review — another reviewer decided that the rapper in a steady marriage (Jay) sounded happier than the rapper who has yet to wed (Kanye). Huh? I have gone back repeatedly in search of this happiness (because the reviewer does not ground the comment) and for the life of me I cannot figure out what the hell she means — they both sound happy — at the top of their games.
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Two years ago, young Jeezy and . . .
Read more: More on Rap: The Matter of Maturity
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 27th, 2011 
 As a rule, we do not post on weekends. But because of the rapidly approaching hurricane and the likelihood of a power outage, I offer today these thoughts inspired by Michael Corey’s last Deliberately Considered post, celebrating the new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the Washington Mall, and by Cornel West’s op.ed. piece criticizing the Memorial and Barack Obama in yesterday’s New York Times. -Jeff
I am not a big fan of Cornel West. I liked and learned from his book The American Evasion of Philosophy, but most of his other books and articles involve, in my judgment, little more then posturing and preaching to the converted (I in the main am one of them). He does not take seriously the challenges political life presents. As he shouts slogans, cheers and denounces, I am not sure that he persuades. His and Travis Smiley’s ongoing criticism of President Obama seem to me to be first personal, then political, more the work of celebrity critics than critical intellectuals. That said, I think West’s op.ed. piece has a point, though not as it is directed against Obama and against the importance of symbolism.
“The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy…
As the talk show host Tavis Smiley and I have said in our national tour against poverty, the recent budget deal is only the latest phase of a 30-year, top-down, one-sided war against the poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes and cutting spending for those already socially neglected and economically abandoned. Our two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule.”
This is unserious. The two parties are very different, and Obama has clearly been trying to address the needs of the socially and economically abandoned in his battle against the Republicans and so called moderate Democrats in Congress: on healthcare policy, financial regulation and jobs. A debt default would not only have hurt Wall Street and Main Street businesses. It would have profoundly affected the poor and working people for whom . . .
Read more: In Review: Cornel West, Barack Obama and the King Memorial
By Benoit Challand, August 24th, 2011 
A third irremovable Arab president has fallen. Muammar Qaddafi’s final fate, like that of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh currently in Saudi, recovering from an attempted assassination, is still unknown. But one thing is pretty sure: like Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Husni Mubarak, Colonel Qaddafi is the third political victim of the Arab spring. Quite a deed, if one remembers the proliferation of de facto monarchical republics in the Arab Middle East in the very recent past.
While there is much to rejoice in this news, many questions arise concerning the political and military developments of these last months in Libya. In this post, I will focus on the media coverage in and around Tripoli. Next week, I will analyse the emerging Libyan leadership.
It is striking to see how the most recent military developments in Tripoli are mostly portrayed as a “rebel-driven campaign.” To be sure, we are told of how NATO allies coordinate aerial attacks in their support for this the apparently final offensive, but very little is said about the active role that Qatar, France and England have taken in arming, equipping and training the Libyan rebel forces (not to mention intelligence gathering and strategic planning). It is, in fact, probably as much a victory of the Transitional National Council (TNC) as it is of the countries which have thrown in their lots in the hope of securing a substantial share of the (oily) pie and to obtain a prominent role as future regional leaders. Yet, very little has been said about the active role of the U.S. in the unfolding events. “Leading from behind,” Obama’s unique strategy, is perhaps more of a media performance than a military reality. The U.S. has been very much involved.
One can find evidence that the USA is not waiting, arms crossed, to see what will happen in the Cyrenaica and Tripolitana. An article in yesterday’s New York Times reveals pro-active American involvement in planning the future of a post-Qaddafi Libya:
With . . .
Read more: Who Won the Libyan war?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 15th, 2011 
On Friday, I intended to use some posts from the past to illuminate the political events of the week, but found myself writing about more private problems, about the human condition and my own incapacity in understanding it. Today, I return to more familiar terrain, thinking about the changing American political landscape.
Viewing the Republican presidential debate in Iowa on Thursday, I was reminded why the 2012 election is so important. What the Republicans propose on the economy, on American identity and principles is strikingly different from President Obama’s promise and performance. Day to day, it has seemed that Obama is losing his focus. But I am convinced that he is accomplishing a lot and that the alternative is stark. In April, I presented my guide for judging his Presidency. I think it still applies.
Trying to figure out the stakes in an election requires understanding the issues, and judgment of Obama’s leadership and the Republican alternatives, but also, and perhaps more importantly, it requires an understanding of imagination. Governor Paul LePage of Maine gave clear expression of the right-wing imagination when he ordered the removal of murals celebrating labor at the Maine department of labor – not fair and balanced. These murals are not even particularly provocative. Images of the banned murals were presented in a post by Vince Carducci.
Cultural works that don’t depict a specific worldview offend the Tea Party imagination. And work that can’t be supported through the market, following Tea Party wisdom, is without real value. The cultural and market fundamentalism present a major civilizational challenge.
While this challenge must be met rationally, politics isn’t and shouldn’t be only about reason. Feelings, along with imagination, also are of telling import, as James Jasper explored in a post last Spring.
I feel strongly about the Tea Party, as the Tea Partiers feel strongly about their commitments. I know this is important. How the . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: The American Political Landscape
By Rafael Narvaez, August 10th, 2011 
The strength of the United States, Barack Obama said during his Presidential campaign, lies neither in its arsenal nor in its banks, but in the ideas that have defined its history. Max Weber and Alexis de Tocqueville would have recognized this as no mere rhetorical gesture. To simplify, the institutional apparatus of the country rests on the concepts of equality and freedom. In the United States, equality and freedom are not simply ideas in a book, de Toqueville argues, but instead, are the root of everything. The judicial, economic, educational, and religious systems are largely governed by these ideas, which throughout history have been progressively institutionalized, internalized, always emphasized, and of course sometimes distorted. The country largely revolves around principles such as economic, religious, and cultural freedom and the principle of equality before the law. This leads me to wonder, might the U.S.’s greatest strengths also be its most significant vulnerabilities?
 As a foreigner, I am sometimes mystified, and sometimes awed, by the radical consequences of the foundational freedoms in the U.S.. For instance, the freedom to say anything, including, to cite a recent Supreme Court decision, the freedom to hurl anti-gay slurs at mourners attending a funeral. Even such speech acts are protected under a firm system of liberties, the firmest that I know of. On the other hand, I am also bemused when friends at a restaurant divide the bill to exactly reflect what each one of the eaters has consumed, dollar by dollar, with due attention to the price of each and every item. A “depraved taste” for equality, de Tocqueville would say.
De Tocqueville argues that liberty and equality are always in tension in America; economic liberty, for example, may go against the principle of equality, as it often does. Or, vice versa, the push for equality may curtail some liberties. But the system, he adds, has built-in mechanisms designed to keep the needed equilibrium in place. Again, I am being schematic: of course the system is more complex and there is more to America’s history than . . .
Read more: Thinking like a Terrorist
By Richard Alba, July 29th, 2011 
From the fracas in Washington, it would be impossible to know that Americans still live in the world’s richest country. In 2010, the U.S. GDP was about two-and-a-half times that of its nearest competitor, China—you know, the country that’s building new cities everywhere and a bullet train system to ferry citizens among them. But to listen to the political discourse that currently dominates the airwaves, the U.S. is facing financial collapse, if not now then in another decade, and it cannot afford another dollar for many collective goods, whether an improved mass transportation system or health care for senior citizens.
As a number of commentators have observed, the political crisis over the debt ceiling is a distraction from graver and more urgent problems: especially the stagnation of the economy, which is not generating enough jobs to make much of a dent in the unemployment rate or to give young workers solid footing for the beginning of their career climbs. The Great Recession, supposedly over, is threatening to turn into a Japanese-style stagnation that could endure for a decade or more.
The state of the U.S. economy is bound up with the plight of the American middle class, as Robert Reich has acutely observed. That plight has been developing for decades, a lot longer than the debt problem, which dates back just a decade, to George W. Bush’s entry into the White House. The economic gains since the 1970s have been concentrated at the top of the income distribution, in the top few percent, and little has trickled down into the middle class. One widely cited statistic has it that the top 1 percent now take home about a quarter of the national income, up from just 9 percent in 1976; the distribution of wealth is even more unequal. (By the standard statistical measure of income inequality, the Gini coefficient, the U.S. is now considerably more unequal than any other economically developed country and more resembles a developing nation like Nicaragua.)
![]( "Man at eulogy for the Middle Class, Santa Fe, New Mexico © </i></strong></em></b>. . .
<p>Read more: <a href=") Loading the Debt Problem onto the Backs of the Middle Class
By Gary Alan Fine, July 28th, 2011 
If it can be said that the devil is in the details, Barack Obama is on the side of the angels. It has been legislative tradition for the party out of power to complain with piss’n’vinegar about raising the debt ceiling on American borrowing, and even in symbolic fashion to vote against the rise, as pre-presidential Obama did to his lasting regret. In the end the vote is anti-climatic. The debt ceiling is raised and despite promises to do better, politicians relying on the short memories of their constituents go their merry way. Depending on which party is in power, they continue to tax and spend or merely to spend.
But summer ‘11 is different. Unlike most Julys, this is not the Silly Season. The fresh crop of Republicans has that most dire of all political virtues: sincerity. It is not that these freshmen are insane or are terrorists, as flame-throwers on the poetic left suggest. Rather they share a perspective on government that, even if it is not always explicitly or candidly presented, is certainly a legitimate view of how a quasi-libertarian state should be organized. As boisterous tea party rebels, they are children of Ron Paul and, with less intellectual gravitas, of Milton Friedman. It is the task of Speaker John Boehner to hide their deep desires – currently unlikely to be enacted – from the public. These politicians wish broad principled cuts. Call them “radical” if you reject them, but, after all, this rhetoric mirrors the self-enhancing distinction: I am firm, but she is stubborn. As the Speaker’s plans evolve, it is increasingly unclear when and where these billions of cuts will derive. One can’t but imagine that this is a shell game with the American public as the marks. Boehner is the adult in the room, but like so many parents, he tries to misdirect his offspring’s attention hoping against hope that the promises will be forgotten.
![]( "Tea Party Protest, Hartford, Connecticut, April 15, 2009 © Sage Ross | </i></strong></em></b>. . .
<p>Read more: <a href=") The Suckers March: Show Us the Cuts
By Gary Alan Fine, July 25th, 2011 
I’m puzzled. For as long as I can recall I have been assured that the Grand Old Party will do just about anything to advantage their wealthy friends and benefactors. Of course, no party desires no taxes – not even Republicans — and none – not even Democrats – want full confiscation. So the issue always comes down to the question of how one will square the circle. Should the top marginal rate be 35% or 40%? Aside from the flat tax advocates and a few outré progressives, few are now arguing for 25% or 50%.
Statecraft inevitably involves a distribution of responsibilities and benefits. And, as I have noted, it is traditionally the case that Democrats ask for more sacrifice from the wealthy and Republicans advocate for fewer benefits for the needy.
This being part of our political logic, how then do we explain a central feature of the Republican plans for Medicare and for Social Security, and how do we explain the hesitancy of most elected Democrats to embrace this plan?
One area in which there appears to be some measure of agreement between President Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner is that means testing Medicare and perhaps even Social Security should be “on the table” – a Thanksgiving turkey, as it were. The argument is that the wealthy might receive fewer benefits or should have to ante up more in the way of co-payments. What’s up with that? In important ways, one should appreciate why Democrats would like that idea and why the Republicans should resist, but things have not quite transpired in that logical way.
Despite the element of soaking (or at least dampening) the rich, some Democrats have pushed back on the idea of means testing Social Security and Medicare. One could readily make the argument that it is unjust or undesirable for the federal government to send out checks to those same rich folks on whom Democrats wish to raise the marginal tax rates. Couldn’t receiving fewer benefits be a form of shared sacrifice so integral to Democratic talking points?
. . .
Read more: Means Testing: The GOP’s Surprising Class Warfare
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?
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