Great video on the Employee Free Choice Act

Great video on the Employee Free Choice Act, the most important piece of legislation since the Great Society:

Larry Summers floated as possible Obama Treasury Secretary: Please, tell me you're joking!

Although Obama defeated McCain just three days ago, there has already been a lot of speculation as to what his cabinet might look like. Given the current state of the economy, which seems to get worse every day, one of the most talked about cabinet posts is naturally the Secretary of the Treasury. Indeed, discussion of likely candidates for Treasury Secretary under an Obama Administration began weeks before Obama was elected. One of the prime candidates for the position, according to New York Magazine and other sources, is Lawrence Summers, former Treasury Secretary under Clinton and President of Harvard University. That Obama might legitimately be considering this guy, indeed that this guy is at the top of the list of candidates for this position, ought to strike fear in the hearts of progressives.

Dean Baker has a great post today that discusses Summers's record and current and former policy positions and folks, let's just say it ain't pretty. As a member of the Clinton administration, Summers contributed to the the 2001-02 recession by doing nothing to contain the stock market bubble and also helped bring about the current economic crisis, through his support for reckless financial deregulation. More generally, if Summers is chosen as Treasury Secretary it will signal that the Obama administration will look a lot like a second Clinton administration. The Clinton years were certainly better than the Bush years, but I and many Americans, including Obama's strident and unyielding supports in the labor movement, expect much better from Obama than 8 more years of neoliberal corporate globalization with a bit of a human face. We want real, fundamental change.

In addition to his contributing role in the past two recessions, Summers has other skeletons in his closet which ought to be equally, if not more horrifying for progressives. Yesterday, Max Blumenthal pointed out in his blog on the Huffington Post a little known fact about Summers:

On December 12, 1991, while serving as chief economist for the World Bank, Summers authored a private memo arguing that the bank should actively encourage the dumping of toxic waste in developing countries, particularly "under populated countries in Africa," which Summers described as "UNDER-polluted." Summers added that public outrage over the heightened rates of prostate cancer caused by his proposed dumping would be mitigated by the fact that poor people in developing countries rarely live long enough to develop prostate cancer.

That's right, I haven't copied it wrong, Summers actually said countries in Africa were under-polluted, as if some level of pollution is optimal for human welfare. In 1992, Brazil's Secretary of the Environment, Jose Lutzenburger, responded to the Summers memo with great eloquence:

Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional 'economists' concerning the nature of the world we live in... If the World Bank keeps you as vice president it will lose all credibility.

Furthermore, there's Summers's 2005 speech he gave before the National Bureau of Economic Research on Women and Science. You can find the full text of the speech here. In essence, Summers advanced the argument that women are underrepresented in the hard sciences because they're just not as smart as men and in the case that they are as smart, they're too unwilling to put in the long, hard hours away from their families. Anyone who's even vaguely feminist will no doubt be taken aback by such statements. What maddened me most about his speech was that his reasoning was fundamentally flawed and he used statements that are scientifically false to back up his claim that science venerated his prejudices.

Back in 2005 when Summers gave that speech, I was enrolled in an introductory course on Social Psychology (the one and only psych course I took in college). My professor at the time decided to make the Summers speech the subject of one day's lecture and we were asked to examine what he said in light of the basic psychological theories we'd been taught. Why? Because she thought it was pretty much BS. What stood out to me most from that speech was his truly maddening assertion that human beings are more likely to attribute human behavior and achievement to environmental causes than intrinsic/genetic ones:

First, most of what we've learned from empirical psychology in the last fifteen years has been that people naturally attribute things to socialization that are in fact not attributable to socialization. We've been astounded by the results of separated twins studies. The confident assertions that autism was a reflection of parental characteristics that were absolutely supported and that people knew from years of observational evidence have now been proven to be wrong. And so, the human mind has a tendency to grab to the socialization hypothesis when you can see it, and it often turns out not to be true.

Anyone who's taken an intro to psychology course or has even a basic familiarity with the subject will immediately recognize that the above statement is utterly ridiculous and patently false. Why? For many years, Psychologists have known about a phenomenon known as the Fundamental Attribution Error. In essence, this empirically verified and universally accepted theory states that people tend to attribute the behavior of others to their disposition and their own behavior to environmental factors. For instance, if on your way home to work one day there's a driver on the road who cuts you off and speeds ahead, people tend to think the driver is overly aggressive, a jerk, or perhaps worse. However, if you yourself behave that way, you probably have several possible explanations: you're late picking up your kids from soccer practice, just had a really stressful day at work, etc. Or let's think about this a bit more broadly. For many, many years people believed that persons of African, Latino, or even Irish decent were inherently less intelligent and/or lazier than whites, native-born Americans, protestants, etc. Does our long history of ignorance on racial and ethnic issues, which is certainly far from over, illustrate a natural human tendency towards attributing environmental causes to human behavior over intrinsic ones? Or how bout our long history of ignorance as humans, at least in the west, with regard to the status of women? To anyone willing to sit and think about what Summers said for just a second, they'd realize it's totally bogus.

From my incredibly influential and wide-reaching platform that is this blog, I offer this advice to Obama: don't pick Larry Summers. A neoliberal sexist who advocates dumping toxic waste in poor countries is not change we can believe in.

Senate updates

First of all, way to go Jeff Merkely on becoming Democrat #57 (including Sanders and Lieberman) in the U.S. Senate! I've heard good things about this guy, and of course, the closer we get to a Filibuster proof majority the better, particularly on vital issues like Universal Healthcare and the Employee Free Choice Act.

Also, if anyone is as obsessed with the Minnesota Senate race as I am, you can come right here to my blog to get the most up to date information on the status of the race anywhere on the web. How can I make such a strong claim? Because I've provided a link right here to the Minnesota Secretary of State's website, which is where everybody else its getting their information.

Lastly, Norm Coleman is a total jerk: Go Franken!

Congratulations!

Despite all of my problems with Barack Obama, I, like so many people around the world, am absolutely thrilled that he won and will be our 44th president. I'm also happy that the Democrats expanded their majority in the House and finally knocked off New England's last Republican congressman, Chris Shays, in my home state of Connecticut. And of course it's great that the Democrats have expanded their majority in the Senate as well, and I've still got my fingers crossed that in the face of steep odds, Franken can win in a recount in Minnesota, that Jim Martin can win if in fact a runoff is held in Georgia, as appears likely, and that Merkely can pull off a win in Oregon once they finally finish counting the votes. Does anyone know, by the way, why it's taken so long to tabulate the votes in Oregon?

The true purpose of this post, though, is to congratulate the people that helped make last night's Democratic victory possible. In particular, I'm talking about the many people who volunteered some of their time and energy to hit the campaign trail, most importantly, my friends from the good old UFCW, Taylor Leake, who spent last week canvassing for Obama in Virginia, Scott Johnson, who campaigned last week for Obama in New Hampshire, and Nate Banditelli (Nate, do you have a blog?), who pounded the pavement for Obama out in Nevada. Not coincidentally, Obama won in all three states, and was the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Nevada since 1996 and the first Democrat to win Virginia since LBJ in 1964. Way to go guys! I owe all of you a beer the next time our paths cross.

Obama!

Let's all hope the polls and predictions are right and enough people turn out to vote to thwart the criminal Republican conspiracy to steal the election. Go vote! Obama!

Having some fun with Youtube

I'm a pretty big fan of youtube as I assume nearly all members of my generation are, and the best thing about youtube, I think, is that you can easily stumble upon very interesting political videos. And I'm not just talking about presidential debates and news clips from the mainstream media (which you can find of course) but also really great, independently compiled videos on topics not often discussed in the mainstream press and videos of speeches given by radicals and visionary thinkers. The sorts of things that many people, including myself, would not have access to if it were not for youtube. Plus, they're free!

As a result of youtube I've been able to watch several speeches and interviews by my favorite intellectual, Noam Chomsky. Below I've posted two clips of Noam Chomsky material that I've found over the past two days (the answer is yes, I am that much of a nerd that I do this in my spare time). The first is a speech on globalization and its impact on working people (contains only audio) titled "Class War: The Attack On Working People". The second is a debate on the Israeli occupation of Palestine between Noam Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz. I highly recommend both! Though Dershowitz, whose arguments largely consist of historical distortions, the application of double standards for Palestinian and Israeli behavior, and childish insults of Professor Chomsky, is a bit hard to stomach at times.

"Class War: The Attack On Working People" (1/6)


"Chomsky and Dershowitz Debate Israel and Palestine" (1/14)

For many American families, economic crisis is nothing new

The current state of the American and World economy has become the main topic of news coverage and the most important issue on the campaign trail for several weeks now. As Dean Baker regularly points out in his excellent blog, Beat the Press, much of this coverage is erroneous and overly focused on the recent decline in the stock market and not enough on how the crisis is truly affecting American families. No doubt this reflects the pervasive elite bias of even the most "liberal" segments of the mainstream media. Whether accurately describing the current crisis or not, what much of the recent coverage on the economy misses is that under the current neo-liberal political economy in the United States, a startlingly large share of American families are constantly faced with economic crises, in good times and bad.

The Economic Policy Institute, a labor-affiliated Washington think tank that, to its credit, proclaims that "spreading the wealth around" is one of its main goals (EPI's mission is "To inform and empower people to seek solutions that will ensure broadly shared prosperity and opportunity") has just released a report showing that nearly a third of American families don't earn enough income to achieve a basic standard of living. The report is EPI's latest installment in its long-standing research on family budgets. In essence, using a variety of data available from governmental and non-governmental sources, EPI has for many years aimed to calculate exactly how much a family needs to make to fulfill their basic needs, based on family size and geographic location. The number they come up with for the cost of life's basic necessities is what they call a basic family budget. It is a welcome alternative to the current measure used by many public and private institutions to measure basic needs, the Federal Poverty line, which is quite out of date, does not adjust for differences in cost of living throughout the country and is thus largely meaningless in today's economy.

The items included in the Basic Family Budget include: Food, Child care, Transportation, Health care, Taxes, and other necessities such as: "clothing, entertainment, personal care products and services, reading materials, educational materials, and other miscellaneous but mostly necessary items". On average, EPI finds that a 2-parent, 2-child American family needs an annual income of at least $48,778 to meet their basic needs, over twice the official poverty line for a family of that size, $21,027. However, Family Budgets vary widely throughout the country. According to EPI:

In major urban areas, expenses for this four-person family range from $42,106 in Oklahoma City to $71,913 in Nassau/Suffolk, N.Y.; families in small towns and rural areas start from a low of $35,733 in Marshall County, Miss. to $73,345 in Nantucket and Dukes Counties, Mass.

Using income data from the 2007 census, which it should be noted, was the best year for the economy under the Bush Administration, EPI found that 29.8% of American families don't earn enough to meet the basic family budget. That number jumps to 43.7% for families with only a high school degree, 53% for African-Americans, 57.4% for Latinos, and 74.7% for single-parent, two child families. Given that most observers expect the economic situation in the United States to continue to get worse for at least another year, it is highly likely that the percentage of American families that fail to make ends meet will increase in 2008 and 2009. Nonetheless, the point I'm trying to make, which is clearly borne out by the data, is that even when the economy is performing well in the aggreggate (ie a high rate of GDP growth), 1 in 3 Americans suffer from privation.

Obviously the current economic crisis is terrible for nearly everyone involved, but I hope that something positive will come from it. As Naomi Klein has been saying a lot recently, I, hope that the current crisis causes us to fundamentally rethink the economic model we've adopted in the United States since Reagan and cast it, like Soviet-style central planning, to the dustbin of history. Our current unregulated, bubble-driven, and highly financialized economy clearly does not provide for the basic human needs of the American population. I'm not certain what an ideal alternative economic model would look like, but I am sure that it would little resemble the model we've lived under for the past 30 years, which has yielded stagnating wages and skyrocketing inequality, as well as even greater corporate dominance of our lives. I hope all Americans will come to the same conclusion I have that we are not experiencing a temporary bump in the road, but the manifest failure of an economic model and ideology. This crisis calls for the charting of a new course economically. That, my friends, would be change we can all believe in.