By Chad Alan Goldberg, June 8th, 2012 
I want to take this opportunity to respond to two recent blog posts which reflect upon the usefulness of electoral politics in the wake of the Wisconsin recall election: one by Jeffrey Goldfarb (“On Wisconsin,” June 6, 2012) and the other by Doug Henwood (“Walker’s Victory, Un-Sugar-Coated”). I am in basic agreement with Jeff Goldfarb’s main points, though I have a few of my own to add. With Doug Henwood, I am in strong disagreement.
Elections matter, as Jeff Goldfarb argues, and not just presidential elections. Elections are what enabled Republicans to gain power in state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010. Their electoral success in Wisconsin is what empowered them to legislate a radical assault on labor and public services there. Unless they are dislodged from power through elections, they will continue to use their power in familiar ways. But ironically, even as the right demonstrates the effectiveness of electoral politics, some radicals are now arguing that the left should abandon elections.
Following Walker’s victory on Tuesday, a longtime friend of mine wrote that Wisconsin’s unions should have organized a general strike instead of fighting Walkerism by means of elections. This is almost surely an erroneous conclusion. Exit polls showed that 38 percent of voters from union households voted for Walker in the recall election, suggesting that solidarity was neither broad nor deep enough to pull off a general strike. Moreover, rather than forcing a repeal of Walker’s anti-union legislation, a strike in Wisconsin would more likely have ended like the 1981 PATCO strike, another iconic instance of government union-busting that reportedly inspired Walker. I do not oppose strikes and other forms of disruptive protest under all circumstances; I only insist that anyone who cares about the consequences of their actions must use these methods intelligently. Their effectiveness depends on the ability of protesters to surmount a host of practical obstacles, well documented in sociological studies of social movements, including the likelihood of severe . . .
Read more: Lessons of the Wisconsin Uprising
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, June 6th, 2012 
The people have spoken, and they have decided that “fat cat teachers,” and not greed gone wild on Wall Street and beyond, are the source of their problems. A deep disappointment. A defeat. This was my initial response to the results of the special recall election in Wisconsin.
I noticed a Facebook post blaming Obama and the Democratic Party. They betrayed the grassroots. He who engages in a crazy militaristic foreign policy killing innocents abroad was denounced. This is irrational, self-defeating and irresponsible. Politics is about alternatives, and the direction the country would go if it follows Wisconsin’s lead last night is profoundly problematic. There is a deep seeded problem in our political culture that must be addressed at the grassroots and in the Democratic Party.
Big money surely played a role, as John Nichols at the Nation quickly declared, reflecting on whether people’s power can overcome money power. But something more fundamental is at issue. How the broad public understands the problems of our times. Somehow in Wisconsin, at least last night, the Tea Party’s diagnosis of our problems made more sense than the view of those engaged in and inspired by Occupy Wall Street. This was my first reaction this morning.
This afternoon I feel a bit less alarmed, though still deeply concerned. There is considerable evidence that the campaign itself made a difference. With the 7 to 1 spending advantage of the Republicans, many Wisconsinites seemed to be critical of the idea of the recall absent major malfeasance in office. They, along with Walker’s most passionate supporters, prevailed. The Democrats were not as united as they needed to be. Their message was muddled. Yet, despite this, in fact, there was a progressive advance. The Democrats took control of the State Senate. Governor Walker won’t be able to count on the rubber-stamp approval of his proposals anymore.
And oddly polls indicate that if the election were held today, Obama would win in Wisconsin . . .
Read more: On Wisconsin
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, June 4th, 2012 
The jobs report on Friday was bad, as David Howell analyzed here. This immediately was interpreted across the board as good news for Mitt Romney and his party, bad news for President Obama and his. It’s the economy stupid, and bad news about employment means that Obama’s chance for reelection has declined precipitously. And things are worse then that. It’s now or never. It is in the summer that the public’s perception of the economy is locked in for Election Day. Even if things improve in the fall, there won’t be enough lead-time to change the public’s perception.
I know that this is based on solid evidence. Considerable scholarly research has demonstrated the strong correlation between the state of the economy and election results. But the way this research has been directly applied in daily political commentary is troubling, especially because it can become a political factor itself. As the “Thomas Theorem” posits: If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. I add, especially when they are doing the defining on television.
This concerns me as a scholar and as a partisan. As a scholar, I worry about the philosophic anthropology of this. The voting public is being depicted as simpletons, not capable of critical thought, of the most basic examination of the facts. There is a kind of economic determinism involved and the determinism is quite mechanical. People vote their pocketbooks and they don’t think critically about it. They don’t wonder about the causes of their economic woes and just vote the bums out. It amazes me how in the same broadcasts talking heads suggest both that the job numbers are a result of long-term trends beyond the control of the President and that Obama’s chances of victory have greatly diminished because of the state of the economy as indicated by the latest job report. They propose a simple Pavlovian stimulus and response vision of voters, . . .
Read more: It’s More Than the Economy, Stupid
By David Howell, June 1st, 2012 
In this morning’s press release on the employment numbers for May, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ lead was “no change”: non-farm employment “changed little (+69,000)” and “the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 8.2%.” But little change in a severely depressed labor market is very bad news for workers. Even worse news for the Obama Administration is that the labor market so far in 2012 shows no sign of the turnaround he needs.
While it’s true that the increase in employment of 69,000 was not much below April’s increase of 77,000, it was 143,000 in March and higher than that in February. The unemployment rate’s increase from 8.1% to 8.2% can be viewed as essentially unchanged because it’s small, but if these figures hold up, the data still show 220,000 more unemployed than the month before.
Unfortunately, this bad news is likely to hold up because the same trends appear across lots of related indicators: the recently unemployed (less than 5 weeks) increased from 2.54 to 2.58 million; seasonally adjusted initial unemployment insurance claims rose by 10,000 (to 383,000, about where it has been stuck for the last 6 months despite the tightening of eligibility requirements by many States); the long-term unemployment rate (27+ weeks) increased quite substantially, from 5.1 to 5.4 million), as did the median duration of unemployment (from 19.4 to 20.1 weeks). Significantly, the rate of those working part-time but want a full-time job also increased, from 7.8 to 8.1 million. And to top it off, average hourly pay for non-supervisory workers has been flat at $19.70 (up 3 cents from March).
The problem, of course, is that while private sector employers have not been hiring at a pace that offsets the massive job destruction of 2008-10, austerity politics is actually leading to absolute reductions in government employment, and at an accelerating rate. Obama is in a tough spot, since even if employment picks up dramatically, the unemployment rate could continue to increase as millions of discouraged workers re-enter the labor force.
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, May 31st, 2012 
An interview recently published in the Polish online journal, Kultura Liberalna, posted here, provides an interesting insider’s view of how the political situation there is understood from the point of view of Putin’s opposition. Lukasz Pawlowski, a Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw and a contributing editor to Kultura Liberalna, interviews Lilia Shevtsova, a political scientist and expert on Russian politics. She served as director of the Center for Political Studies in Moscow and as deputy director of the Moscow Institute of International Economic and Political Studies. Currently she is a senior associate at the Moscow office of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is the author of numerous publications including her latest book Change or Decay: Russia’s Dilemma and the West’s Response (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2011).
This interview raises a number of significant issues, concerning the problems of democratization and the problems of Russia. Most fundamental is that the democratization of Russia requires Russian action. Outsiders, “the West,” and specifically the United States, cannot do much about this. This is a theme we have been observing in many parts of the world. Consider, for example, how Elzbieta Matynia reflects on the issue as it applies to Egypt, Poland and South Africa.
And then the interview gets into the particulars: critically appraising the strengths and weaknesses of the democratic opposition Russia, reflecting on the Medvedev – Putin relationship, and how each of these figures challenge the democratic project, judging the short and long term prospects of democratic movement in Russia, and the necessity of change from the bottom up. One of Shevtsova’s more provocative claims is that Russia is better off with Putin than Medvedev as President.
To read the interview of Lilia Shevtsova “Do Not Democratize Russia: We Will Do It Ourselves,” click here.
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, May 31st, 2012 An Interview from Kultura Liberalna
Lilia Shevtsova, a senior associate at the Moscow Carnegie Center and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, on Russian politics, democratic opposition and on why Putin may be better than Medvedev
_________
Lukasz Pawlowski: Why haven’t the mass protests prevented Mr. Putin from winning the presidential election for the third time?
Lilia Shevtsova: Because the protest tide was weak, it wasn’t a real tsunami. The December movement had no structured leadership and no concrete agenda. It wasn’t strong enough to force political leaders in the Kremlin even to think about some serious change at the moment. Nonetheless, it shocked them and proved the society has awakened although luckily for the Kremlin it is not that frightening yet.
In Russia there are numerous parties and non-governmental organizations working against the regime for democratization. There have been there for many years and now when they got a marvelous opportunity to achieve at least some of their goals they missed it. They have been working long to get Russian society out in the streets and when they finally managed to do that they seemed completely surprised.
Everybody was surprised, maybe with exception of some people, who – just like myself – have been telling themselves every year, every month: “it will come, it will come, the bubble will burst”. But even we were not sure, when it will happen. The number of people that took to the streets was some kind of revelation. Even sociological instruments failed to reveal, what was happening beneath the surface of the society. The most respectable survey institution, Levada Center – the best in Russia, and maybe even in Europe – before the parliamentary elections in December estimated that the Kremlin party, United Russia, will get about 55% of the votes, while in the end it got officially only 45% and in reality less than 35% of the vote. So yes, for many people in the society, even in the opposition the events that followed parliamentary elections were unexpected.
But why has the opposition failed in their hour of trial, despite the fact, that we have so many movements, groups and parties? Why have they failed to get together, to . . .
Read more: Do Not Democratize Russia: We Will Do It Ourselves
By Gary Alan Fine, May 23rd, 2012 
Marriage season is now upon us, and in year 2012 there are stirrings. Perhaps not in heteronormative quarters, where divorce remains a spectator sport, but unfecund passion is blooming where moral fences and rocky laws abound. Just recently our president, commander-in-chief of the bully pulpit, revealed that he has evolved, no longer uncomfortable with what was once termed, with slight derision, gay marriage, but is now known as “marriage equality.”
Perhaps President Obama was pushed to catch up to his verbose Veep or perhaps he saw this revelation as a strategy to open the promiscuous wallets on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, but he was historic, rhetorically. So much for Barack Hussein Obama as closet Muslim fundamentalist. True, he did not call on states to act on his pronouncement and certainly didn’t call on the Supreme Court to do so, but the occasion was remarkable partly because here as elsewhere Obama was leading from behind. But leading still.
When I teach classes on social movements, I attempt a dangerous feat. I ask students to imagine how not so very long ago – indeed, in my conscious remembrance, a half century back – American citizens could believe that segregation was right and proper. While many other citizens disagreed, the defenders of segregation in 1962 were not wild-eyed, in-bred, or illiterate. They were, some of them, responsible, highly educated, and often compassionate. Most were soon to decide that they were wrong, even if they did not phrase their racial conversion narrative in that way. But in the American South between 1964 and 1972, many former segregationists recognized that they were standing on the “wrong side” of history, or, as Leon Trotsky acidly phrased the matter, in the “dustbin” of history.
Perhaps we need be grateful that contemporary students have so much difficulty in figuring out how a plausible segregationist argument was possible. Today such a policy seems more than wrong; it seems inexplicable.
And perhaps we are at a branching point today – or soon – in that much the same will be said of our current marriage debate. Someday students may puzzle . . .
Read more: Marriage Equality and the Dustbin of History
By Jim Arrowsmith, May 2nd, 2012 
Arrowsmith was an economics professor at the City College of New York. After he left that position, he worked for many years as a business economist for a multinational oil company, where, like most corporate economists, he used a macroeconomic framework essentially based on Keynes. -Jeff
Whatever can explain the rise of mass hysteria over the U.S. national debt and federal deficits? To be sure, debt/deficit issues give the Administration’s political opponents a grand weapon in the gladiatorial contest that constitutes the nation’s public politics, but the issue only works because of a virulent public antipathy to serious macroeconomic analysis that has developed over the past four decades. In 1971, President Nixon announced “now I am a Keynesian,” but by 2011, President Obama (in his State of the Union address) said “Every day, families have to live within their means. They deserve a government that will do the same.”
In this environment, as the U.S. continues to suffer from massive unemployment of labor and underutilization of physical and intellectual capital, political survival almost requires economic policy-makers to pay obeisance to the most primitive anti-Keynesian economic theology.
The proverbial Martian certainly would not anticipate such widespread disdain for serious macroeconomics from the overall educational endowment of the American population. By historical standards, the U.S. population is highly educated, with over 40 percent of the labor force having completed tertiary education as of the end of the last decade and annual four-year college graduations reaching 1.6 million. While only about 3-5 percent of U.S. undergraduates major in economics, a far larger proportion experience some exposure to economics. Although data are far from perfect, the best estimates suggest that half undergo a one-semester introductory course and as many as one third of the total cohort take a two-semester sequence. At first blush, even with the most cynical view of the seriousness of students or their instructors, this suggests that a substantial part of the electorate might be expected to have assimilated central theoretical concepts such as the intrinsic difference between the national economy and the individual household and the potential use . . .
Read more: It’s the Economy, Stupid: But Why So Stupid?
By Richard Alba, April 16th, 2012 
It’s sometimes said that presidents don’t control the economic weather but rather it controls them. We have reached the moment, however, when magical powers are going to be attributed to the presidency, and the current incumbent, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, will be charged with incompetence in using them. One manifestation of this thinking is the Romney campaign’s recent claim that women have suffered more than 90 percent of the jobs lost since Obama became president, a blatant attempt to undermine his lead among women voters. This claim involves two distortions; and most of the mainstream media have caught what I view as the smaller one—namely, that the claim ignores the full history of the recession and the huge job losses borne by men when George Bush was president.
The larger distortion has generally gone unnoticed, indeed, it has been mostly accepted. According to it, some 740 thousand jobs have been lost on Obama’s watch. This claim is another expression of the Republican mantra about a “failed” presidency. And it involves some statistical crafting to fit the data to the argument, manipulating data in a way that we are likely to see a lot more of as the campaign proceeds, especially given the huge amounts of money available to hire “researchers” to come up with “facts.”
The Romney campaign arrives at the estimate by attributing to Obama all of the job losses since February 1, 2009, even though he had barely taken office at that point and there was not enough time for any of the new administration’s policies to have an impact. To understand how much timing matters in this case, recall that Obama entered the White House when the labor market was already in a swoon, and the number of jobs lost that February was more than 700 thousand, on a par with the losses for the final months of Bush’s second term. If we tally the jobs record of the current administration from March 1 instead of February 1, then the jobs deficit under Obama shrinks dramatically to 16,000 and, with any luck, will be erased in coming . . .
Read more: Phony Data on Jobs and the Obama Administration
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 13th, 2012 
Remember Preston Brown? He is the senior lifeguard at the Theodore Young Community Center, where I go for my daily swim. For a long time, Preston and I have been joking around about current events, joking with a serious punch. I play the role of the privileged white liberal, he, the skeptical black man. We first developed our parts in a year-long confrontation over the Obama candidacy. The skeptical Preston laughed at my conviction that Obama would be the Democratic nominee, and he thought it was absolutely hysterical that I thought that Americans would likely elect either a black man or a white woman to be President. As I have reported here, we made a couple of bets, which became the source of general community interest, and which Preston, to the surprise of many, paid up. We had a nice lunch at Applebee’s. It ironically, but presciently, ended with a small racist gesture coming from our waiter. We celebrated together, and we sadly noted that while things had changed, the change had its limits.
As a participant observer of Solidarność in Poland, the great social movement that significantly contributed to the end of Communism around the old Soviet bloc, I appreciate limited revolutions. Solidarność called for a self-limiting revolution. Perhaps this is even the time that I should approve of Lenin: “two steps forward, one step back.” Yet, I must admit, I have been disappointed with the stubborn and sometimes very ugly persistence of open racism after the momentous election of President Obama. While I think there is more to the Tea Party than racism, the calls to “take our country back” and the refusal of many to recognize Obama’s legitimacy have been extremely unsettling. Preston’s skeptical view was wrong about the majority of Americans, but he was right about a significant minority. And his concerns have a lot to do with the recent doings in Sanford, Florida.
Yesterday, Preston and I had a brief discussion about Trayvon Martin, which revealed to me, once again, how it is that race is . . .
Read more: Race and Racism in Everyday Life: Talking about Trayvon Martin
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