[Pen-l] Forget union wages; they want their wages of whiteness back

[raghu]

As centrist, as neoliberal as Obama is, he is a radical in the way that
matters most of all in the US.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/03/how_donald_trump_happened_racism_against_barack_obama.html
---snip
Barack Obama is many things, but conservative rhetoric aside, he’s no
radical.

We can’t say the same for Obama as a political symbol, however. In a nation
shaped and defined by a rigid racial hierarchy, his election was very much
a radical event, in which a man from one of the nation’s lowest castes
ascended to the summit of its political landscape. And he did so with heavy
support from minorities: Asian Americans and Latinos were an important part
of Obama’s coalition, and black Americans turned out at their highest
numbers *ever* in 2008

.

For liberal observers, this heralded a new, rising electorate, and—in
theory—a durable majority. “The future in American politics belongs to the
party that can win a more racially diverse, better educated, more
metropolitan electorate,” wrote

Harold Meyerson in the *Washington Post* after the 2008 election. “It
belongs to Barack Obama’s Democrats.”
For millions of white Americans who weren’t attuned to growing diversity
and cosmopolitanism, however, Obama was a shock, a figure who appeared out
of nowhere to dominate the country’s political life. And with talk of an
“emerging Democratic majority,” he presaged a time when their votes—which
had elected George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan—would no
longer matter. More than simply “change
,”
Obama’s election felt like an *inversion*. When coupled with the broad
decline in incomes and living standards caused by the Great Recession, it
seemed to signal the end of a hierarchy that had always placed white
Americans at the top, delivering status even when it couldn’t give material
benefits.
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Re: [Pen-l] What is Cuba's GDP? [question posed on prog econ list

[raghu]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 11:37 AM, Eugene Coyle <e.co...@me.com> wrote:

> Raghu, I apologize for any unkindness.  As for being unfair, perhaps we
> were always looking at this from different perspectives and seeing
> different things.
>


Dear Gene,
No apology necessary. Just pointing out that in this instance, we are
talking past each other - and that's perfectly ok - because we happen to be
interested at the moment in different questions.
-raghu.





> On Mar 21, 2016, at 7:56 AM, raghu <mragh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Sun, Mar 20, 2016 at 8:48 PM, Eugene Coyle <e.co...@me.com> wrote:
> > Yes, but is the problem different for Per Capita GDP?  What is it the
> reader is supposed to do with these numbers??  Talk about how rich or how
> poor a particular geographical location is?
> >
> >
> > Gene,
> > You are being extremely unfair and unkind here. I have patiently pointed
> out that yes, "Per Capita GDP" is indeed different in the sense that one
> can define it precisely unlike "median GDP". Nathan  Tankus said it very
> well earlier in the thread in case my own explanation was unclear.
> >
> > I have also explicitly and painstakenly pointed out that my query here
> is a narrow technical one. I think I made it very clear that I was not,
> repeat NOT, arguing that "per capital GDP" was a useful or meaningful
> number.
> >
> > I see you now arguing that narrow technical discussions have no place on
> PEN-L. Either that or you are asking me to defend a claim that I never made.
> > -raghu.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > > On Mar 20, 2016, at 10:16 AM, raghu <mragh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Sun, Mar 20, 2016 at 12:08 AM, nathan tankus wrote:
> > > "I am afraid I am still confused. My question is a purely technical
> one: how do you define median GDP?"
> > >
> > > the point I think Raghu is making is you can assign personal income
> and benefits to individuals but you can't assign plant and equipment, parks
> and roads, exports and imports to individuals for the purposes of a median
> measure. median personal income and median personal disposable income are
> workable concepts.
> > >
> > >
> > > Precisely!
> > > -raghu.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > ___
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> > > pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu
> > > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
> >
> > ___
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> >
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Re: [Pen-l] What is Cuba's GDP? [question posed on prog econ list

[raghu]

On Sun, Mar 20, 2016 at 8:48 PM, Eugene Coyle <e.co...@me.com> wrote:

> Yes, but is the problem different for Per Capita GDP?  What is it the
> reader is supposed to do with these numbers??  Talk about how rich or how
> poor a particular geographical location is?
>


Gene,
You are being extremely unfair and unkind here. I have patiently pointed
out that yes, "Per Capita GDP" is indeed different in the sense that one
can define it precisely unlike "median GDP". Nathan  Tankus said it very
well earlier in the thread in case my own explanation was unclear.

I have also explicitly and painstakenly pointed out that my query here is a
narrow technical one. I think I made it very clear that I was not, repeat
NOT, arguing that "per capital GDP" was a useful or meaningful number.

I see you now arguing that narrow technical discussions have no place on
PEN-L. Either that or you are asking me to defend a claim that I never made.
-raghu.





>
> > On Mar 20, 2016, at 10:16 AM, raghu <mragh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Sun, Mar 20, 2016 at 12:08 AM, nathan tankus wrote:
> > "I am afraid I am still confused. My question is a purely technical one:
> how do you define median GDP?"
> >
> > the point I think Raghu is making is you can assign personal income and
> benefits to individuals but you can't assign plant and equipment, parks and
> roads, exports and imports to individuals for the purposes of a median
> measure. median personal income and median personal disposable income are
> workable concepts.
> >
> >
> > Precisely!
> > -raghu.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ___
> > pen-l mailing list
> > pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu
> > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
>
> ___
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Re: [Pen-l] What is Cuba's GDP? [question posed on prog econ list

[raghu]

On Sun, Mar 20, 2016 at 12:08 AM, nathan tankus wrote:

> "I am afraid I am still confused. My question is a purely technical one: how 
> do you define median GDP?"
>
>
>
the point I think Raghu is making is you can assign personal income and
> benefits to individuals but you can't assign plant and equipment, parks and
> roads, exports and imports to individuals for the purposes of a median
> measure. median personal income and median personal disposable income are
> workable concepts.
>


Precisely!
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] What is Cuba's GDP? [question posed on prog econ list

[raghu]

I am bit confused by this. GDP is an aggregate quantity representing total
economic activity.

You can define a mean GDP per capita by taking the total GDP and dividing
by population. How exactly would you define median GDP?

By analogy, total earnings for a company is an aggregate quantity. You can
divide by number of employees and come up with a number like "Microsoft's
annual earnings are $500,000 per employee". But how would you even go about
defining a quantity like "median earnings per employee"?

It seems to me that the concept does not really make sense. Unlike say,
median earnings, where it does make sense.

What am I missing?
-raghu.







On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 9:59 PM, Maxim Linchits <mlinch...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Certainly. The median numbers from Gallup are very useful. Cuba has not
> been sampled, since Gallup's question would not make sense in Cuba.
> Gallup's question is also more applicable to some countries than to other,
> so international comparisons are not necessarily straightforward.
>
> But what does that says about the plausibility of a GDP figure of 21K for
> Cuba? Since Cuba is a far more equal country than most of those sampled
> (its median GDP will be closer to its mean, relative to most other
> countries), the comparison of median incomes will yield some spectacular
> results. You will find that median income in Cuba is not all that far from
> the US. That's expecting Cuban socialism to perform miracles, and  it flies
> in the face of everything we know.
>
> I sense a certain defensiveness your part, no? The question is not about
> the quality of life in capitalist countries, but about the output of the
> Cuban economy. Living standards in Cuba are reasonably high relative to
> much of Latin America. Its economic performance is a different matter. At
> the same time, there output is not unrelated to living standards . And it's
> something that has to be quantified. You really have to leave any
> ideological predispositions at the door to even begin thinking about this
> question.
>
> -Original Message-
> From: pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu [mailto:
> pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu] On Behalf Of Eugene Coyle
> Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2016 4:51 AM
> To: Pen-l Pen-L <pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu>
> Subject: Re: [Pen-l] What is Cuba's GDP? [question posed on prog econ list
>
> These numbers seem to be MEAN PPP, not median.  Gallup has numbers for
> several countries showing median PPP, but behind a paywall.
> For the USA, compare mean and median GDP, never ming PPP and see the
> difference.  And then reflect that half the population is below the median.
>
> Gene
>
>
> > On Mar 16, 2016, at 6:40 PM, Maxim Linchits <mlinch...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Thanks Michael. I looked at those numbers too, and realized that  a
> number like 7K is not only formally inadequate (who looks at nominal GDP,
> besides journalists?) but also unintuitive. But 21K? If we follow the
> eyeballing method, the answer will be in eye of the beholder. And I think
> most observers would expect to see much more “stuff” for 21K, including
> cars, computers, internet access, construction etc. Health and education
> are highly important stuff, but there’s lots of other stuff one would
> expect to see for that kind of money - unless you live in the US.  I’d
> expect to see much more consumption, given that Cuba is vastly more
> egalitarian than the GINI champions you mentioned.
> >
> > So perhaps there is more to discuss. Has anything been written on Cuba’s
> national accounting methodology? How accurate is the data on purchasing
> power?  I remember seeing a paper from the 1980’s on Cuban national
> accounting practices, but I assume a lot has changed since then. The most
> recent account I could find is “Measuring Cuba’s economic performance” by
> Jorge F Perez.: https://books.google.ru/books?id=fqx0BQAAQBAJ I have not
> read it yet and I don’t expect this source to give  an unbiased assessment,
> but it seems to be the only serious study of the topic in print.
> >
> > Reducing relatively open capitalist and relatively closed socialist
> economies to a common denominator is a challenge worth exploring, but it
> seems little has been done on that front since the collapse of the USSR.
> For what it’s worth the CIA World Factbook implies that Cuba’s output
> should be around 11-12K today. I doubt this figure is the product of
> painstaking research, or that the figure even comes from the CIA, but it
> does not seem implausible.
> >
> >
> >
> > From: pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu
> > [mailto:pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu] On Behalf Of michael a.
> > lebowitz
> > Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2016

[Pen-l] A new Santelli rant, this time citing the good book

[raghu]

This is comedy gold. We could enjoy it more if we didn't know that this
ass-clown kicked off the Tea Party idiocracy with his original famous rant..

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/03/14/santelli_we_are_living_atlas_shrugged_those_with_intellectual_property_are_fed_up_where_is_john_galt.html
snip
But, what was the point of the book? The point of the book was, those that
made the trains run on time. Those that had the big patents. Those that had
the intellectual property. They got fed up. They couldn't do their job. And
the government forced certain businesses to buy inferior products from
other businesses. Any of this sound familiar? Think Apple, think the FBI.
We are living *Atlas Shrugged*. Why is it so important? Because I would
hate for the country to have that rhetorical question, where is John Galt,
who is John Galt? John Galt is all of us.

We need to understand that in the end, if we're going to make a positive
difference in the future, we can't have election cycles where one side, the
middle and the right side, they talk trash. And I don't mean they're
talking trash in the form of what they want people to do, how they want
people to act. I'm talking about whether it's entitlements, whether it's
fracking, whether it's energy. You know what, all the banks and Wall
Streeters that get this big bulls-eye in their back, read *Atlas Shrugged*.
You know why? Because maybe Ayn Rand had a good idea.

Maybe we should shut Wall Street down for 24 hours, see how everybody who
blames Wall Street for everything likes that. Maybe we should shut energy
down for 24 hours, see how people like that. Because in the end, these are
great industries and they are run well. Can you imagine if our energy
companies were run like third-world companies with all the corruption? Let
them have their 10% return on capital. Small price to pay. Lights go on
every time I hit the switch. Gang, back to you.
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Re: [Pen-l] What is Cuba's GDP? [question posed on prog econ list

[raghu]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 12:05 PM, Eugene Coyle wrote:

> As far as Raghu’s point  I have no quarrel, except when he veers into his
> Microsoft analogy.  Just get a list of all the employees’ salaries and
> discover the median.  What am I missing? to repeat Raghu’s question.



I am afraid I am still confused. My question is a purely technical one: how
do you define median GDP?

In my Microsoft analogy, I understand fully well how mean compensation per
employee is defined as well as the corresponding median. I also understand
why median is perhaps more informative than the mean.

But it doesn't seem to me to make sense to talk about Microsoft's "median
revenue per employee". As in, I don't see how to define such a thing in a
mathematically reasonable way. Whereas the corresponding *mean* can be
precisely defined in a reasonable way..
-raghu.





> We often see comparisons of CEO pay and some proxy for what workers at the
> coal face are getting, although that is usually expressed as the mean of
> some subset of employees.  And that’s because we don’t get to see each
> employee’s pay stub, information is very closely held.
>
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Re: [Pen-l] Matt Taibbi on the NYT and Bernie Sanders

[raghu]

Some snippets to whet your appetite:

snip
The *New York Times *ran a piece about Bernie Sanders Monday, a sort of
left-handed compliment of a legislative profile. It was called "Bernie
Sanders Scored Victories for Years Via Legislative Side Doors

.

"I took notice of the piece by Jennifer Steinhauer because I wrote
essentially the same article nearly 11 years ago. Mine, called "Four
Amendments and a Funeral
,"
was a *Rolling Stone *feature. Sanders back then was anxious that people
know how Congress worked, and also how it didn't work, so he invited me to
tag along for weeks to follow the process of a series of amendments he
tried (and mostly succeeded) to pass in the House.

[...]

Given how tough the *Times *has been on Sanders this election season (in
October, the paper even sank to writing an article about his failure to
kiss enough babies
),
the Steinhauer piece was actually sort of flattering. Sanders himself linked
to the article
.
Maybe the paper was coming around?

Not so fast! As noted first in this piece on Medium ("Proof That the New
York Times Isn't Feeling the Bern
"),
the paper swiftly made a series of significant corrections online. A new
version of the piece came out later the same day, and in my mind, the
corrections changed the overall message of the article.

First, as noted in the Medium piece, they changed the headline. It went
from:

Bernie Sanders Scored Victories for Years Via Legislative Side Doors


to:

Via Legislative Side Doors, Bernie Sanders Won Modest Victories


Then they yanked a quote from Bernie's longtime policy adviser Warren
Gunnels that read, "It has been a very successful strategy."

They then added the following two paragraphs:

"But in his presidential campaign Mr. Sanders is trying to scale up those
kinds of proposals as a national agenda, and there is little to draw from
his small-ball legislative approach to suggest that he could succeed.

"Mr. Sanders is suddenly promising not just a few stars here and there, but
the moon and a good part of the sun, from free college tuition paid for
with giant tax hikes to a huge increase in government health care, which
has made even liberal Democrats skeptical."

This stuff could have been written by the Clinton campaign. It's stridently
derisive, essentially saying there's no evidence Bernie's "small-ball"
approach (I guess Republicans aren't the only ones not above testicular
innuendo) could ever succeed on the big stage.









On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 11:18 AM, Carrol Cox  wrote:

>
> Even if you don't care about Bernie Sanders, this is a nice case study of
> the NYT "political editing process."
>
> Why do you think so? I'm not going to the trouble of accessing the NYT
> without more reason than you give here.
>
> I'm getting seriously sick and tired of this endless stream of naked or
> near naked links from you & Lou. This sort of (non)-post seems like a
> deliberate attempt to forestall actual conversation on the mail list.
>
> Carrol
>
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Re: [Pen-l] Dan Kaufman @NYT on labor, NAFTA/TPP, Sanders/Clinton/Trump in MI/WI

[raghu]

On Sun, Mar 13, 2016 at 1:19 PM, Robert Naiman wrote:

> “I’m worried about Trump versus Hillary,” Mr. Poklinkoski said. He noted
> that at home Governor Walker had successfully portrayed himself as an
> anti-tax, blue-collar politician, an image that helped him divide
> Wisconsin’s workers during the state’s labor battles. “If you have a
> right-wing populist, you can beat a corporate Democrat,” Mr. Poklinkoski
> said. “Scott Walker did it three times here.”[...]
>



This is an informative article overall, but I am not sure I get this
description of Scott Walker as a "right-wing populist". Where is the
populism in anything he guys says or does?
-raghu.





>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/opinion/campaign-stops/which-side-are-you-on-hillary.html
>
> Which Side Are You On, Hillary?
> By DAN KAUFMAN
> MARCH 12, 2016
>
> “We’ve got to stand up for unions,” Hillary Clinton declared in her
> closing statement during the Democratic debate in Milwaukee last month. The
> line offered the labor-friendly audience a comforting rebuke to Gov. Scott
> Walker’s relentless attacks on Wisconsin’s unions. It generated passionate
> applause.
>
> But Mrs. Clinton’s show of support contrasted with her long indifference
> to the concerns of organized labor. The results of Michigan’s primary last
> week highlighted this problem; exit polls showed that Mrs. Clinton narrowly
> lost union households to Senator Bernie Sanders. Over all, nearly 60
> percent of Democratic voters thought free-trade agreements, which Mrs.
> Clinton has generally supported, caused job losses. Mr. Sanders won a
> majority of those voters, too, which raises the possibility of further
> upsets on Tuesday in primaries in Illinois and Ohio, where opposition to
> free-trade pacts is strong.
>
> Mrs. Clinton’s troubles with labor began before she arrived in Washington.
> From 1986 to 1992, as a corporate lawyer in Arkansas, she served on the
> board of Walmart. By then, Sam Walton, the company’s founder, was notorious
> for his anti-union fervor; in the early 1970s, Mr. Walton hired an attorney
> named John E. Tate to break up an organizing campaign at two Missouri
> Walmart stores. For decades afterward, Mr. Tate drove Walmart’s successful
> anti-union strategy. In 1988, Mr. Tate joined Walmart’s board, where he
> served alongside Mrs. Clinton.
>
> During Mrs. Clinton’s first presidential run, a former Walmart board
> member told ABC News that he could not recall her ever defending unions
> during more than 20 private board meetings. “She was not a dissenter,”
> Donald G. Soderquist, the vice chairman of the board during Mrs. Clinton’s
> tenure, told The Los Angeles Times in 2007. “She was a part of those
> decisions.”
>
> “I’m always proud of Walmart and what we do and the way we do it better
> than anybody else,” Mrs. Clinton said at a 1990 shareholders meeting in
> Fayetteville, Ark. But over the years, as Walmart’s reputation was sullied
> by allegations of unsafe working conditions, overtime theft and sex
> discrimination, Mrs. Clinton distanced herself from the company. Still, the
> Walton family’s fondness for her endures; in December, Alice L. Walton, Mr.
> Walton’s daughter, donated more than $350,000 to the Hillary Victory Fund.
>
> It is Mrs. Clinton’s past support for free-trade agreements, though, that
> has most antagonized labor. In 1996, she said that the two-year-old North
> American Free Trade Agreement was “proving its worth,” a position she
> reaffirmed years later as a senator. In 2000, while running for her Senate
> seat, Mrs. Clinton supported China’s entry into the World Trade
> Organization and granting the country Permanent Normal Trade Relations.
>
> More recently, as secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton praised the 12-country
> Trans-Pacific Partnership repeatedly (at one point she called it the “gold
> standard” of free-trade deals) and lobbied foreign governments for its
> adoption. But last October, Mrs. Clinton announced that she opposed the
> agreement.
>
> During her 2008 presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton also publicly opposed
> free-trade agreements with Panama, South Korea and Colombia, the last of
> which was opposed by human rights groups as well as organized labor in
> Colombia and the United States. “I will do everything I can to urge the
> Congress to reject the Colombia Free Trade Agreement,” she said at a
> gathering of the Communications Workers of America in Washington.
>
> But recently released emails from Mrs. Clinton’s private server show that
> as secretary of state Mrs. Clinton lobbied Congress to support the
> agreement with Colombia, which passed in 2011. Describing her effort to
> sway Representative Sander M. Levin, Democrat of Michigan, Mrs. Clin

Re: [Pen-l] WaPo: Gabbard gave Sanders endorsement. He gave her platform on war & peace

[raghu]

On Sun, Mar 13, 2016 at 8:19 AM, Anthony D'Costa wrote:

> Thanks for this. The sanitized version from the Washington Post seemed too
> good to be true. And this is not from a Leon fan:)
>
> Incidentally the BJP and its foot soldiers are causing havoc. A strange
> divide has descended into the country.
>


Oh wow, this is quite eye-opening.. Thanks indeed for sharing.

A few months back I called peak-Modi and I stick to that call, but we (the
world, but especially India) is stuck with these lunatics for quite a while
before they are consigned to the trash heap of history and who knows what
damage they will do in that time. Truly scary times in India right now..
-Raghu.




>
> On Sun, Mar 13, 2016 at 3:35 AM, Michael Yates <mikedjya...@msn.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Gabbard's endorsement would seem to be a
>> mixed blessing, at least in terms of the "political
>> revolution" Sanders claims to be leading.
>>
>>
>> http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/curious-islamophobic-politics-dem-congressmember-tulsi-gabbard
>>
>> But no doubt the writer is a Trotskyist who should have
>> committed suicide.
>>
>>
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>
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Re: [Pen-l] Fwd: On Bernie Sanders's "political revolution" | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant

[raghu]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 12:56 PM, Carrol Cox <cb...@ilstu.edu> wrote:

> Do you ever tire of creating silly straw-men to argue with?
> == -raghu.
> 
> I browsed in the IHE article, but thought it was rather trivial. Then I
> came across the pollywogs on this list preening themselves on their
> superiority to a handful of undergraduates.  What pomposity, and I couldn't
> resist pricking it.
>


You are doing a fine job of sounding pretty pompous yourself just now.

I don't see the student activism silliness as a trivial matter at all.

You want to know what *real* student activism looks like? Try:
http://kafila.org/2016/02/15/why-our-universities-are-in-ferment/

<https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l>
-raghu.
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[Pen-l] Fake Tenure comes to Wisconsin

[raghu]

It is now official, but in case you are wondering, the tenured faculty at
the flagship Madison campus get their own special campus-specific policy
that protects something like real tenure but only for themselves.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/11/u-wisconsin-board-regents-approves-new-tenure-policies-despite-faculty-concerns
---snip
John Robert Behling, board vice president and chair of the tenure policy
task force, objected to Evers’s proposal, however, saying that the creation
of another committee would diminish the “flexibility, flexibility,
flexibility” campus chancellors need to make decisions in light of the $250
million cut to higher education in the current state budget.

[...]

James M. M. Hartwick, professor of curriculum and instruction and Faculty
Senate chair at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, said via email
that he was “shocked and appalled that the board would not adopt a single
amendment that the all the elected faculty representatives and all the
faculty members on the [task force] requested.”
[...] Evers’s amendments weren’t necessarily game changing, he said in an
interview, but if passed would have sent a clear signal that the board
wasn’t an ideological arm of the state government that slashed tenure
protections in the first place.

Instead, he said, many board members’ comments seemed to echo those of
state politicians, particularly their use of the terms “flexibility,”
“tool” and “accountability.”

“The regents made a strategic error and it’s going to come back to haunt
them,” Radomski said. He predicted that program closures would soon begin
at the state’s regional campuses, bringing even more negative attention to
the university system and further impacting its ability to recruit and
retain top faculty.

[...] The board will next consider whether a Madison-specific tenure policy
adopted
in November is in line with the new system-wide policies. Radomski said he
thought it would pass, if only to allow the regents to save face with
faculty members in light of Thursday's vote.
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Re: [Pen-l] Latest Pew survey of Israeli opinion

[raghu]

Very interesting throughout. Thanks for sharing.

In addition to the items you highlighted, I found the below noteworthy:

Where Jews place themselves on the political spectrum – on the left, in the
center or on the right – is strongly correlated with their views on the
expulsion of Arabs. Among the 8% of Jews who say they lean left, an
overwhelming majority either disagree (25%) or strongly disagree (61%) that
Arabs should be expelled. By contrast, roughly seven-in-ten of those on the
political right agree (35%) or strongly agree (36%) that Arabs should be
expelled or transferred.






On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 4:25 PM, Marv Gandall  wrote:

> The headline - "Israel's religiously divided society" - is profoundly
> sanitized and misleading. The real headline is buried in the text: "Nearly
> half of Israeli Jews say Arabs should be expelled or transferred from
> Israel, including roughly one-in-five Jewish adults who strongly agree with
> this position...Overwhelming majorities among both West Bank settlers (85%)
> and other Israeli Jews (79%) agree or strongly agree that Jews deserve
> preferential treatment in Israel."
>
> http://www.pewforum.org/2016/03/08/israels-religiously-divided-society/
>
>
> ___
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Re: [Pen-l] Fwd: On Bernie Sanders's "political revolution" | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant

[raghu]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 5:51 PM, Carrol Cox <cb...@ilstu.edu> wrote:

> Would it be possible for Sanders even to begin to satisfy the hopes he has
> raised among his supporters?
>

No, of course it wouldn't be possible. And your point is?




> Serious believers that Sanders could transform the conditions of u.s. life
> have little reason to mock the foolish ness of some undergraduates of some
> Washington university.
>

Do you ever tire of creating silly straw-men to argue with?
-raghu.





-Original Message-
> From: pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu
> [mailto:pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu] On Behalf Of Marv Gandall
> Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2016 3:37 PM
> To: Progressive Economics
> Subject: Re: [Pen-l] Fwd: On Bernie Sanders's "political revolution" |
> Louis
> Proyect: The Unrepentant
>
>
> On Mar 10, 2016, at 12:16 PM, Charlie <charles1...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
> > "My problem is with his decision [Sanders'] to run as a Democrat."
> > Typically, we get "my" instead of "our." Guess what, Senator Sanders
> > will never sit down to talk to L.P. (nor me). More importantly, the
> > article does a great  job of putting off any newly active fan of
> > Sanders who might happen to read it, while it reflects not at all on
> > how to work among the millions of Sanders' supporters.
> >
> > I chatted briefly with a stranger in front of her car bearing a Feel
> > the Bern sticker, the day after Sanders' Michigan win. We enjoyed the
> > victory for a moment. Then I asked how could Sanders if elected get
> > things done. That provided all the opening one needed.
>
> Louis, in the name of Debs, would say your Sanders supporter would be
> wasting her vote. She should instead be throwing her support to Green
> candidate Jill Stein. I'd put greater odds of your friend engaging with
> your
> question than wanting to pursue his tortured rationale for the Green Party.
> Louis puts great store on the Democratic label and history (as though the
> Greens would somehow behave differently than other left-centre parties if
> they came close to vying for government) while disdaining the unfolding
> political differentiation within and around the party and the opportunities
> it presents to consistently provide the kind of opening you describe.
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[Pen-l] Yet more idiocy in campus activism - Western Washington U edition

[raghu]

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/10/western-washington-university-students-push-sweeping-demands
--snip
Now a student group there calling itself the Student Assembly for Power and
Liberation has sent a list of far-reaching demands

to the university’s president after criticizing the administration
 for an
inadequate response to threats.

The list comprises some of the most of the most expansive -- and resource
heavy -- demands put to a university’s administration. Among them:

   - A new College of Power and Liberation to focus on “the study of
   histories and communities that continue to be mis- and underrepresented
   into the mainstream curriculum at Western.” In addition to the college
   itself, the list calls for “a cluster hire of 10 tenure-track faculty,” a
   new building to house the college and that the Student Assembly for Power
   and Liberation have “direct input and decision-making power over the hiring
   of faculty for the college.”
   - That $45,000 be allocated to compensate students and faculty “doing
   de-colonial work on campus,” which is defined as “providing space and
   resources to learn alternate histories, supporting students' nonacademic
   work, emotional and intellectual labor that is not about publishing or
   service to the institution, providing often unrecognized trainings,
   workshops and/or interventions on behalf of students.”
   - The creation of a 15-person student committee called the Office for
   Social Transformation “to monitor, document and archive all racist,
   antiblack, transphobic, cissexist, misogynistic, ableist, homophobic,
   Islamophobic and otherwise oppressive behavior on campus.” Using a
   three-strike system, the committee would have the power to take
   disciplinary action up to and including dismissal against faculty members
   who receive citations for creating “an unsafe classroom environment.”
   - A mandatory online survey conducted by the faculty and administration
   that would “allow Western Washington University community members to
   confidentially express concerns of discrimination and safety.”
   - A new “multicultural residence building,” applications to which would
   be overseen by the new Office for Social Transformation.
   - And finally that the university provide tuition reimbursement to “any
   Western Washington University student who has been targeted by, harassed by
   or has experienced excruciating acts of violence that [were] racialized,
   sexualized, gendered, based on ability, employment status, citizenship
   and/or mental health from the university.”

The petition also included several uses of the words "persxn" and
"hxstory," which some online were quick to mock
.
Replacing certain letters in pronouns or some other words (like "Latinx"
for Latino or Latina
)
with an X is strategy to avoid gendered language. Changing other words,
like "person" and "history," in that way does not appear to be a very
common at all, however: neither "hxstory" nor "persxn" have been used often
enough to be graphable by Google Trends.
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Re: [Pen-l] Corey Robin on Sanders' victory in Michigan

[raghu]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 8:36 AM, Carrol Cox <cb...@ilstu.edu> wrote:

> I suggest that there exists an even worse witness: someone spoke of
> "common sense," which is a synonym for superstition.
>

So says a guy who spends his days in fear and loathing of an amorphous
entity called the "Democratic Party".




> It does seem to me that Robin is crystal-ball gazing.


Why try to actually engage with anything that Robin actually says when you
can make an empty proclamation instead?

-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Corey Robin on Sanders' victory in Michigan

[raghu]

Glad to hear Corey Robin add his voice to what really should be basic
common sense.
-raghu.




On Wed, Mar 9, 2016 at 2:16 PM, Robert Naiman <nai...@justforeignpolicy.org>
wrote:

>
> Corey Robin: it's not just a victory over the Establishment; it's an
> opportunity to school the Left.
>
>
> https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/03/michigan-primary-bernie-sanders-nomination/
>
> [...]
>
> The Left loves social movements. I do, too. But social movements don’t
> happen in a political vacuum; they’re not immune to the mood and medium of
> electoral politics. There’s nothing quite like a presidential campaign for
> taking pots and kettles long simmering on the Left’s back burner and
> bringing them to a furious boil
> <https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/03/bernie-sanders-primary-socialists-third-party/>
> .
>
> That means two things. First, we do have to remain focused on primaries
> and delegate counts. It’s only so long as there is a viable campaign that
> we have the opportunity for a conversation on such a massive scale. There’s
> a set of leftists who think the revolution will come from small
> conversations in socialist study groups and reading circles, that the way
> to radicalize is by simply “talking to people” — which really means talking
> at people — in the absence of some galvanizing question that brings those
> people to the table.
>
> Anyone who’s selling you that line is either out of touch or trying to
> sign you up for their classes. They want to make you believe you can just
> get people to think and argue and reflect in a vacuum, without some real
> taste of power in the here and now. That’s not how it works.
>
> [...]
>
>
> ___
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Re: [Pen-l] Greek Stalinists "explain" homosexuality

[raghu]

On Mon, Mar 7, 2016 at 11:01 AM, Carrol Cox <cb...@ilstu.edu> wrote:

> "   Admittedly this is all self-indulgent speculation on my part. But
> I would be very interested in leaning about what Marxism has to say about
> the future of the nuclear family or more generally families and kinship
> groups in a socialist society."
>
> Marxismis not a TOE. Moreover, this kind of interest in the daily life and
> detailed social relations of a socialist society smacks of authoritarianism.



When Marxists offer commentary about, say the environment, or farming or
medicine under capitalism, they are implicitly stating a vision for these
issues under a future socialism. That does not necessarily imply a
blueprint or formula, much less an authoritarian desire to impose some such
formula.

It was in that sense that I asked what I think is a perfectly reasonable
question.

Let me try again and rephrase: what is the historical relationship between
the small nuclear family as a cultural norm and the development of
industrial capitalism, and how have various workers movements in the past
grappled with the development of new family structures?

I'd appreciate thoughtful responses, but please no sermons.
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Fwd: Who is the Italian pol Trump most resembles? (Hint–it is not Mussolini) | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant

[raghu]

On Sun, Mar 6, 2016 at 6:48 PM, Charlie <charles1...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

>  From the lead: "Like Berlusconi, Trump exploits the backwardness of the
> average boob tube addict who tends to think in the sort of crude terms
> we associate with reality TV programs like Trump’s 'The Apprentice'."
>
> [...]
>

>
It is awful to blame people who are deeply wound up trying to deal with
> their plight. They don't have time to read pedantic summaries of old
> Leon nor to try and unravel the involuted sarcasm that passes for
> thought from an upper west side keyboard.
>



Indeed. A lot of commentary about Trump voters seems incredible patronizing
and offensive..
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Greek Stalinists "explain" homosexuality

[raghu]

On Sun, Mar 6, 2016 at 8:14 AM, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

> "Objectively a child that is raised by a same-sex couple, from the first
> determinative years of its life, acquires a distorted perception of the
> biological relationship between the sexes. A correct perception of this
> relationship is an essential ingredient for its smooth psychosomatic and
> social development."
>


This is true of course: a child brought raised by two men is in historical
terms quite abnormal and it is not at all clear how such an upbringing
would affect a child's "psychosomatic and social development".

The thing is though, that the same thing would be equally true of a child
raised by a man and a woman.

The small nuclear family is historically a weird and abnormal thing. Where
is the multi-generational family unit? Where are the grandparents, and the
uncles, aunts and cousins? Where are the other members in your extended
kinship group?

The interesting question is: when did the nuclear family become the
cultural norm in the US? Is it a peculiarly capitalist institution that is
destined to fade away when capitalism does?

Conservative society basically says every person is allowed one other
person with whom they can have an intimate relationship not mediated by the
market (sort of..). There are signs that the younger generations are
rebelling against this type of norm.

Admittedly this is all self-indulgent speculation on my part. But I would
be very interested in leaning about what Marxism has to say about the
future of the nuclear family or more generally families and kinship groups
in a socialist society.
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Fwd: Trump wants to make America more like Denmark - The Washington Post

[raghu]

On Thu, Mar 3, 2016 at 8:32 AM, Anthony D'Costa wrote:

> Name calling doesn't get anything done! Call a spade a spade phrend.
>


I do not endorse Naiman's outburst, but there is one thing about this
thread that bothers me.

Surely it is possible to accept that (a) the Scandinavian welfare system
has many racist and exclusionary elements, and (b) the same systems still
stand as living proof that socialialized health care and pension systems
are not a utopian fantasy and can and do work very well.

It seems to me that acknowledging (a) in no way negates (b). So I am
puzzled why anyone would use Scandinacian racism as an argument against
Bernie Sanders' welfare state policies..
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Conservative policy threat --Universal Basic Income

[raghu]

What's the progressive argument against the UBI again? Doesn't the same
argument apply to, say, Social Security?

I understand well the argument against an *inadequately low UBI*, but
surely, in principle, a decent basic guaranteed standard of living is the
socialist ideal, right?

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"?
-raghu.





On Wed, Mar 2, 2016 at 1:19 PM, Eugene Coyle <e.co...@me.com> wrote:

> There is a consistent and powerful conservative policy threat to left
> unity.  Not about supporting or not supporting the Democrats but more
> fundamental.
>
> Conservatives  — and the establishment economists whether they consider
> themselves liberals or conservative — see the Guaranteed Annual Income or
> Basic Income Guarantee or Universal Basic Income as a way to deal with lack
> of jobs and the advance of robots, digitization and artificial intelligence.
>
> This I find frightening, for it appeals as well to those with poor job
> prospects or no job prospects, pacifying them in the struggle over fair
> income distribution.  It splits the population into those willing to settle
> for scraps and those with a profound resentment of those willing to settle
> for scraps.  Endless resentment on both sides, yet not directed at
> capitalism.
>
> Milton Friedman was a champion of Negative Income Taxes.  The Earned
> Income Tax Credit (EITC) was and is an introduction to this but only for
> those with  income in  the first place.  A more recent proposal, popular in
> the WSJ, was a plan to head off a fight against globalization by reducing
> the employees’ share of payroll tax.  Many economists have even more
> recently proposed a universal income as a way to deal with productivity
> gains eating jobs.
>
> The Universal Basic Income (UBI) as it is being called in today’s NYT
> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/03/technology/plan-to-fight-robot-invasion-at-work-give-everyone-a-paycheck.html?hp=click=Homepage=story-heading=mini-moth=top-stories-below=top-stories-below
>
> Conservatives recognize the income distribution issue as a deep threat and
> seek to have the public discussion about UBI rather than the alternative of
> cutting working hours with no cut in pay.  The 1% can keep their money and
> let the 99% fight over who gets a decent job and who gets subsistence.  And
> fight as well about what is the minimum subsistence to keep the pitchforks
> from coming out.
>
> Even worse, the UBI does not lead on to changing the system but preserves
> it.  Cutting working hours is a path to system change.
>
> On these lists we spend much time disputing supporting or not supporting
> Sanders as a Democrat.
>
> Supporting or not supporting Universal Basic Income is a discussion we
> should be having.  The alternative for dealing with the job shortage is to
> sharply reduce standard working hours to raise wages and redistribute
> income.
>
> Separately, cutting working hours is the most promising way, the only
> promising way to deal with global warming.
>
> Gene
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Re: [Pen-l] DNC Chair Joins GOP Attack On Elizabeth Warren's Agency

[raghu]

I am waiting for someone to denounce Bernie Sanders because Debbie Wasserman
Schultz sucks. Because Democrat.
-raghu.





On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 2:49 PM, Robert Naiman <nai...@justforeignpolicy.org>
wrote:
>
>
> Looks like there is some serious organizing going on in Florida around
predatory lending.
>
>
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/debbie-wasserman-schultz-paylenders-cfpb_us_56d4ce38e4b03260bf77e8fc?49ebfbt9
>
> DNC Chair Joins GOP Attack On Elizabeth Warren's Agency
>
> WASHINGTON -- Payday lenders have been gunning for the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau since the day President Barack Obama tapped Elizabeth
Warren to set up the new agency. They've had plenty of help from
congressional Republicans -- longtime recipients of campaign contributions
from the payday loan industry. As the CFPB has moved closer to adopting new
rules to shield families from predatory lending, the GOP has assailed the
agency from every conceivable angle -- going after it's budget, attempting
to tie its hands with new layers of red tape, fomenting conspiracy theories
about rogue regulators illegally shutting down businesses and launching
direct attacks on payday loan rules themselves.
>
> To date, the GOP blitz has resulted in a few close shaves for the young
agency, but no actual defeats. But the industry has cultivated a powerful
new ally in recent weeks: Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie
Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.).
>
> Wasserman Schultz is co-sponsoring a new bill that would gut the CFPB's
forthcoming payday loan regulations. She's also attempting to gin up
Democratic support for the legislation on Capitol Hill, according to a memo
obtained by The Huffington Post.
>
> LISTEN to HuffPost's analysis of the bill in the latest episode of the
"So That Happened" politics podcast below. The discussion begins at the
53:35 mark:
>
> Subscribe to HuffPost's weekly politics podcast here.
>
> The DNC chair isn't the first Democrat to defend payday lenders. A
handful of House Financial Services Committee members consistently join the
GOP's payday loan boosterism. But support from such backbenchers has been
politically impotent. Wasserman Schultz, by contrast, is the nominal head
of the Democratic Party. Her support undercuts efforts by liberals in
Congress to draw contrasts with Republicans on economic issues.
>
> The misleadingly titled Consumer Protection and Choice Act would delay
the CFPB's payday lending rules by two years, and nullify its rules in any
state with a payday lending law like the one adopted in Florida. The memo
being passed around by Wasserman Schultz staffers describes the Florida
state law as a "model" for consumer laws on payday loans, and says the CFPB
should "adjust their payday lending rules to take into account actions
Florida has already taken."
>
> Consumer groups are appalled by the bill. The Consumer Federation of
America, the NAACP, The National Consumer Law Center, The National Council
of La Raza, The Southern Poverty Law Center and hundreds of others wrote a
letter to every member of Congress in December urging them to oppose the
legislation.
>
> "The problem here is that Florida's law is a sham," says Gynnie Robnett,
director of the Campaign to Stop the Debt Trap at Americans for Financial
Reform. "It was backed by the industry."
>
> Wasserman Schultz's spokesman Sean Bartlett defended the bill in a
statement provided to HuffPost.
>
> "As a state lawmaker, she helped write Florida’s law that has sharply
reduced the need to go to bad actors, curbed predatory practices and
created standards and protections for low-income borrowers," Bartlett said.
The Congresswoman wants to work with the CFPB on the way forward, and
believes the Florida law is an example of how to achieve their shared goals
of balancing strong consumer protections with preserving access to credit
in underserved communities."
>
> The CFPB is yet to formally issue its payday lending rules. But the
agency's proposed outline is designed to prohibit a cycle of debt in which
borrowers take out a single payday loan expecting to pay a one-time fee,
but end up taking out several more loans when they are unable to make ends
meet at the end of the loan period.
>
> Florida's law has not ended this vicious cycle. According to AFR, about
76 percent of the payday loans issued in the states are "turned" loans,
meaning they are issued to help a borrower pay off a previous loan.
>
> Data compiled by the nonpartisan Pew Charitable Trusts is similarly
dismal. A typical Florida payday loan customer ends up taking out nine
payday loans a year and is stuck in debt for nearly half of that year,
according to Pew. The average interest rate on Florida's payday loans is
304 percent -- only slightly better than the 390 percent annual average.
Critically, the av

Re: [Pen-l] New Blog Post: Bernie Sanders' "Political Revolution"

[raghu]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 12:21 PM, Marv Gandall <marvga...@gmail.com> wrote:

> At the most basic level, I would like to know why Carrol and Jan, who were
> active in the LRS which strongly influenced the Jackson campaign, were
> unable despite their best efforts to disabuse a single LRS member - not one
> member! - of their “illusionary” and “idiotic” hopes of pushing the DP to
> the left? And, in light of this, why continue to insistently sell an
> evidently failed strategy then as a winning one today?
>


Who exactly is trying to "push the DP to the left" anyway? This is a lazy
insult used by Carrol et al to shout down anyone who disagrees with them.

Also notice how careful they are to avoid saying specifically what group of
people they are referrring to with "DP". The Democratic Party leadership or
the roughly 40% of the US public who identifies themselves as Democrats?
They won't say.
-raghu.




On Mar 1, 2016, at 8:51 AM, raghu <mragh...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 10:24 AM, Carrol Cox <cb...@ilstu.edu> wrote:

> In very concrete terms Sanders is a serious obstacle to any attempts to
> build mass movements of opposition to the current policies of Austerity &
> Imperialism. He is doing much more damage to leftist politics than Trump in
> the white house could do.
>


Repeating fallacious arguments over and over again does not make them any
better.

I notice that you did not have the courtesy to answer any of the very
specific responses I had to Michael's blog.

And if you say "Sanders" and "mass movement" in the same sentence again, I
am going to SCREAM!
-raghu.




In 1988 I was on Jackson's delegate slate in this congressional district;
> Jan & I were members of LRS, and that was why Jackson's last speech of the
> primary campaign was delivered here in Bloomington/Normal Illionois: LRS
> controleed Jackson's speaking schedule. Jackson was far to the left of
> Sanders (at least verbally), but LRS did not gain a single member from that
> campaign; in fct, to this day I believe the illusion (or delusory) hopes
> generated by that campaign, along with the exhaustion created by electoral
> activity, was the primary cause of the collapse of LRS a year or so later.
> For 80 years the idiotic hope of pushing the DP left has been the death of
> all mass political action, beginning with the CPUSA and the CIO.
>
> Carrol
>
> -Original Message-
> From: pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu [mailto:
> pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu] On Behalf Of raghu
> Sent: Monday, February 29, 2016 3:25 PM
> To: Progressive Economics
> Subject: Re: [Pen-l] New Blog Post: Bernie Sanders' "Political Revolution"
>
> On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 8:48 AM, Michael Yates <mikedjya...@msn.com>
> wrote:
>
>
> Some say that those of us who don't actively support the
> Sanders' campaign are "ultra-leftists." I disagree. And for
> the record, I am not and have never been a Trotskyist! Though
> I have friends who are and were.
>
> cheapmotelsandahotplate.org/2016/02/29/bernie-sanders-political-revolution/
>
>
>
>
>
> Hi Michael,
>
> I usually much enjoy and agree with your blogs, but this time, I am
> afraid, I find you arguing with strawmen far too much.
>
>
>
>
> Is the Sanders’ phenomenon a radical movement? If not, will it
> soon give rise to one? There are reasons to be skeptical.
>
>
>
> Fair enough, but you are setting the bar ridiculously high here. If any
> political activity must constitute a radical movement in order for it to be
> worthwhile at all, this is an argument for paralysis basically.
>
>
> I think you need to argue against a more reasonable bar: is the Sanders
> campaign meaningfully advancing the prospects for a radical movement? The
> answer to that surely has to be Yes.
>
>
>
>
>
> Second, all campaigns are now driven by television and social
> media, both of which devote little time to the serious analysis that might
> educate us. They feed the public sound bites, over and over, ad nauseam.
>
>
> This is way too cynical. What you say above is true of cable and network
> TV, but social media?? And I am not even sure about the relevance to the
> Sanders campaign.
>
>
>
>
>
> However, might it not be just as reasonable to argue that
> dedicated activists within the working class, through years of hard and
> tireless efforts had already built militant, albeit not radical
> organizations, and it has been these that have energized the Sanders’
> campaign and not the other way around?
>
>
>
> Does it matter which is cause, and which effect? And does it have to be
> either/or

Re: [Pen-l] New Blog Post: Bernie Sanders' "Political Revolution"

[raghu]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 10:24 AM, Carrol Cox <cb...@ilstu.edu> wrote:

> In very concrete terms Sanders is a serious obstacle to any attempts to
> build mass movements of opposition to the current policies of Austerity &
> Imperialism. He is doing much more damage to leftist politics than Trump in
> the white house could do.
>


Repeating fallacious arguments over and over again does not make them any
better.

I notice that you did not have the courtesy to answer any of the very
specific responses I had to Michael's blog.

And if you say "Sanders" and "mass movement" in the same sentence again, I
am going to SCREAM!
-raghu.




In 1988 I was on Jackson's delegate slate in this congressional district;
> Jan & I were members of LRS, and that was why Jackson's last speech of the
> primary campaign was delivered here in Bloomington/Normal Illionois: LRS
> controleed Jackson's speaking schedule. Jackson was far to the left of
> Sanders (at least verbally), but LRS did not gain a single member from that
> campaign; in fct, to this day I believe the illusion (or delusory) hopes
> generated by that campaign, along with the exhaustion created by electoral
> activity, was the primary cause of the collapse of LRS a year or so later.
> For 80 years the idiotic hope of pushing the DP left has been the death of
> all mass political action, beginning with the CPUSA and the CIO.
>
> Carrol
>
> -Original Message-
> From: pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu [mailto:
> pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu] On Behalf Of raghu
> Sent: Monday, February 29, 2016 3:25 PM
> To: Progressive Economics
> Subject: Re: [Pen-l] New Blog Post: Bernie Sanders' "Political Revolution"
>
> On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 8:48 AM, Michael Yates <mikedjya...@msn.com>
> wrote:
>
>
> Some say that those of us who don't actively support the
> Sanders' campaign are "ultra-leftists." I disagree. And for
> the record, I am not and have never been a Trotskyist! Though
> I have friends who are and were.
>
> cheapmotelsandahotplate.org/2016/02/29/bernie-sanders-political-revolution/
>
>
>
>
>
> Hi Michael,
>
> I usually much enjoy and agree with your blogs, but this time, I am
> afraid, I find you arguing with strawmen far too much.
>
>
>
>
> Is the Sanders’ phenomenon a radical movement? If not, will it
> soon give rise to one? There are reasons to be skeptical.
>
>
>
> Fair enough, but you are setting the bar ridiculously high here. If any
> political activity must constitute a radical movement in order for it to be
> worthwhile at all, this is an argument for paralysis basically.
>
>
> I think you need to argue against a more reasonable bar: is the Sanders
> campaign meaningfully advancing the prospects for a radical movement? The
> answer to that surely has to be Yes.
>
>
>
>
>
> Second, all campaigns are now driven by television and social
> media, both of which devote little time to the serious analysis that might
> educate us. They feed the public sound bites, over and over, ad nauseam.
>
>
> This is way too cynical. What you say above is true of cable and network
> TV, but social media?? And I am not even sure about the relevance to the
> Sanders campaign.
>
>
>
>
>
> However, might it not be just as reasonable to argue that
> dedicated activists within the working class, through years of hard and
> tireless efforts had already built militant, albeit not radical
> organizations, and it has been these that have energized the Sanders’
> campaign and not the other way around?
>
>
>
> Does it matter which is cause, and which effect? And does it have to be
> either/or? Surely the more reasonable guess would be that there is a little
> bit of both?
>
>
>
>
>
> won’t the new recruits be spending their time for the foreseeable
> future trying to win converts to the election cause? When exactly will the
> movement building begin?
>
>
>
> Don't you think you have a very narrow conception of what constitutes
> "movement building"? Also, aren't you begging the question here by making
> assertions without evidence about everyone "spending their time for the
> foreseeable future" on the "election cause" which is taken to be
> intrinsically inimical to this thing called "movement building"?
>
>
>
>
>
> Why is anything different this time around? Yes, Sanders is a
> better choice for president than Hillary Clinton.
>
>
>
> Didn't you just answer your own question there?
>
>
>
>
> But he is running as a Democrat, as part of a party tha

Re: [Pen-l] New Blog Post: Bernie Sanders' "Political Revolution"

[raghu]

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 8:48 AM, Michael Yates <mikedjya...@msn.com> wrote:

> Some say that those of us who don't actively support the
> Sanders' campaign are "ultra-leftists." I disagree. And for
> the record, I am not and have never been a Trotskyist! Though
> I have friends who are and were.
> cheapmotelsandahotplate.org/2016/02/29/bernie-sanders-political-revolution/
>



Hi Michael,
I usually much enjoy and agree with your blogs, but this time, I am afraid,
I find you arguing with strawmen far too much.


Is the Sanders’ phenomenon a radical movement? If not, will it soon give
> rise to one? There are reasons to be skeptical.
>

Fair enough, but you are setting the bar ridiculously high here. If any
political activity must constitute a radical movement in order for it to be
worthwhile at all, this is an argument for paralysis basically.

I think you need to argue against a more reasonable bar: is the Sanders
campaign meaningfully advancing the prospects for a radical movement? The
answer to that surely has to be Yes.



Second, all campaigns are now driven by television and social media, both
> of which devote little time to the serious analysis that might educate us.
> They feed the public sound bites, over and over, ad nauseam.


This is way too cynical. What you say above is true of cable and network
TV, but social media?? And I am not even sure about the relevance to the
Sanders campaign.



However, might it not be just as reasonable to argue that dedicated
> activists within the working class, through years of hard and tireless
> efforts had already built militant, albeit not radical organizations, and
> it has been these that have energized the Sanders’ campaign and not the
> other way around?
>

Does it matter which is cause, and which effect? And does it have to be
either/or? Surely the more reasonable guess would be that there is a little
bit of both?



won’t the new recruits be spending their time for the foreseeable future
> trying to win converts to the election cause? When exactly will the
> movement building begin?
>

Don't you think you have a very narrow conception of what constitutes
"movement building"? Also, aren't you begging the question here by making
assertions without evidence about everyone "spending their time for the
foreseeable future" on the "election cause" which is taken to be
intrinsically inimical to this thing called "movement building"?



Why is anything different this time around? Yes, Sanders is a better choice
> for president than Hillary Clinton.
>

Didn't you just answer your own question there?


But he is running as a Democrat, as part of a party that is rotten from top
> to bottom.
>

True, but why is this an indictment of Sanders?

The DP happens to the gateway to the left 50% of the US public. The
gatekeepers are corrupt, but they are not omnipotent. Indeed one of the
great services that the Sanders campaign has performed is to bring a
spotlight to just how corrupt the DP elites are.



If Sanders and those who support him were serious about building a radical
> movement, they would use his campaign to engage in a parallel crusade of
> critical education. [...] If Sanders and his “Sandernistas” wanted a
> “political revolution,” they would use his campaign to begin the long,
> arduous process of radical education. There would be teach-ins and public
> meetings in towns large and small. No political event, no protest, no rally
> would be fail to have an educational component. Sanders’ talking points
> could be used to deepen understanding, by asking questions and pushing the
> discussions toward fundamental causes. And connections between inequality
> and a host of other problems, including the environmental catastrophes that
> are raining down upon us and threaten the viability of human life itself,
> could be made.


Funny you should say that, because that's exactly what Sanders and many of
his supporters claim to be doing. Maybe your real complaint is that they
are not doing it very well. Fair enough, but that's very different from
saying that the Sanders campaign should be ignored or opposed.

-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Posner on Scalia via David Shemano

[raghu]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 7:14 PM, Tom Walker <lumpofla...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I liked the Posner article because it confirmed my bias, which is
> precisely why a Scalia fan wouldn't like it. My bias is based on the
> suggestion in much political philosophy of the usefulness to the statesman,
> prince, legislator or courtier (or judge?) of duplicity (Machiavelli,
> Castiglione, Gracian... more recently Leo Strauss). And let's not forget
> Adam Smith
>


Indeed and I'd also point out that there is a meta aspect to this: Shemano
(and Scalia) are/were employing precisely this kind of duplicity in making
the argument for textualism as a coherent and objective legal theory.
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] POSNER on SCALIA

[raghu]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 6:23 PM, Shemano, David B. wrote:

> This is why I get a kick out of you guys.
>

How condescending!




> I get attacked for “motivational reasoning”, but your first reflex is to
> go find a sympathetic voice that supports your preexisting position and
> convince yourself that you have proved your point.
>

First of all, it is "motivated reasoning". This one sentence is so
revealing in so many ways about the writer. If the writer was the
introspective sort, he would be well-rewarded to reread that sentence
carefully and slowly.




> Scalia’s reputation came out fine.
>

That settles it then. David Shemano says so, therefore it must be true.
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] "Scalia was an intellectual phony"

[raghu]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 11:20 AM, Shemano, David B. wrote:

> No.  That comment is far beneath you.  Take the time to read the Citizen
> United opinions.  The New York Times is a corporation.  Harvard University
> is a corporation.  If corporations do not have 1st Amendment rights, the
> government could censor those entities, notwithstanding the language of the
> 1st Amendment is not qualified.  Scalia’s concurrence addresses, and is in
> great part predicated upon, this issue, including an examination of the
> historical evidence of the common understanding of corporate speech in the
> 18th Century.
>


Sorry for the snark.

But I don't find this type of all-or-nothing reasoning terribly convincing.
If you take this seriously, then bribery of public officials is a
constitutionally protected right under the First Amendment! If you
criminalize bribery, then no citizen will ever be able to make a petition
to any public official!

I continue to agree with the article cited at the head of this thread that
Scalia's overall record is most consistent with the "cynical liar"
hypothesis than the "sincere commitment to originalism" one.

-raghu.



*From:* pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu [mailto:
> pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu] *On Behalf Of *raghu
> *Sent:* Monday, February 22, 2016 8:06 AM
> *To:* Progressive Economics
> *Subject:* Re: [Pen-l] "Scalia was an intellectual phony"
>
>
>
> On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 4:00 PM, Shemano, David B. wrote:
>
> 2.   Citizens United.  According to the logic that corporations do
> not have constitutional right,  the government could prohibit the New York
> Times from publishing articles criticizing public officials.  There is
> nothing in the text of the Constitution, including the 1st Amendment, that
> would support that view, and no contemporary jurist, even the most liberal,
> will go there.
>
>
>
> If we don't accept money is speech, newspapers would cease to exist!
>
> What a brilliant piece of legal reasoning!
>
> -raghu.
>
>
>
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[Pen-l] A Rising Call to Cut Liberal Arts Funding

[raghu]

Isn't it funny that when right-wing politicians want to bash "useless"
degrees, they always pick on sociology, anthropology or philosophy, never
marketing, finance or law?

Apparently we have too many anthropologists, but we can never have enough
advertising executives..

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/business/a-rising-call-to-promote-stem-education-and-cut-liberal-arts-funding.html
--snip
What has incensed many educators

is not so much the emphasis on work force development but the disdain for
the humanities, particularly among Republicans. Several Republicans have
portrayed a liberal arts education as an expendable, sometimes frivolous
luxury that taxpayers should not be expected to pay for. The Republican
presidential candidate Senator Marco Rubio, for example, has called for more
welders and fewer philosophers
.
Gov. Rick Scott

of Florida criticized anthropologists,

and Mr. McCrory belittled gender studies.
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Re: [Pen-l] "Scalia was an intellectual phony"

[raghu]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 2:36 AM, Shemano, David B. wrote:

> Since the criticism was self-evidently silly, I addressed the actual point
> that the author was trying to make, which is that, notwithstanding Scalia’s
> pronouncements regarding methodology, Scalia would always rule in a way
> that coincided with his political preferences.
>

Since you got the actual point the author was making, the "self-evidently
silliness" clearly was in the deliberately obtuse reading rather than in
the criticism itself.





> I simply pointed out that if that is the charge, the liberals are far more
> guilty, certainly compared to Scalia.
>

Assertion without evidence.




> BTW, I encourage you to actually read Scalia’s opinions in Heller and
> Citizens United (which by the way was a concurrence, not the main
> opinion).  In each of those opinions, it is clear that Scalia expressly
> thinks he is doing a textual analysis, as opposed to ignoring the text and
> going off on his own.  You may disagree with the result itself, and you may
> even disagree that Scalia’s textual analysis was the correct textual
> analysis, but that does not mean Scalia was unfaithful to his own
> methodology in those opinions.
>
<http://www.robinskaplan.com/>
No doubt when a textual pretext was available for his reactionary opinions,
Scalia would use it. He was also happy to use non-textual pretexts on other
occasions, which is why he is a fraud.

-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] "Scalia was an intellectual phony"

[raghu]

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 4:00 PM, Shemano, David B. wrote:

> 2.   Citizens United.  According to the logic that corporations do
> not have constitutional right,  the government could prohibit the New York
> Times from publishing articles criticizing public officials.  There is
> nothing in the text of the Constitution, including the 1st Amendment, that
> would support that view, and no contemporary jurist, even the most liberal,
> will go there.
>


If we don't accept money is speech, newspapers would cease to exist!

What a brilliant piece of legal reasoning!
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] "Scalia was an intellectual phony"

[raghu]

On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 12:46 PM, Carrol Cox <cb...@ilstu.edu> wrote:

> The attitude of the 1% (on global warming, for instance) seemed to be an
> analogue to "After me the deluge -- with the assumption that their
> grandchildren would simply build a high wall around Manhattan to  keep
> ocean out.
>


There may also be an aspect of the "shooting the elephant" phenomenon i.e.
the elites may be rendered powerless to act by the logic of the same system
that made them powerful..

Btw, here's a more detailed critique of Scalia's intellectual dishonesty
(this one was apparently written before Scalia's passing..):
http://wakeforestlawreview.com/2015/09/will-the-real-justice-scalia-please-stand-up/

-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] "Scalia was an intellectual phony"

[raghu]

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 8:57 PM, Shemano, David B. wrote:

> I always find these criticisms amusing – the accusation by someone who
> does not believe in textualism that Scalia not a sufficiently consistent
> textualist.
>


No, that's not the accusation. Scalia is not a hypocrite; he is simply a
fraud.

Scalia was in fact extremely consistent in following his ideological
belief; he simply lied about what that belief system was.

This belief system had nothing to do with textualism or originalism; it can
best be described as reactionism. "Comfort the affluent, afflict the
powerless." In following this system, Scalia was consistent indeed.

Btw Tom Walker is right: while it is true that all justices follow their
political differences, it does not immediately follow that they are all
equally partisan in that regard. It is not just a binary either/or; there
are degrees.

The article I cited describes three specific examples of rank partisanship
on the part of Scalia. And there are many more where those came from. All
we have from you is an assertion - without any proof or justification - of
similar partisanship from the "liberal" justices.

This is like all those centrist reporters claiming an equivalence between
the Republican and Democratic Parties. It is completely bogus.
-raghu.





> Apparently, Scalia’s problem was not his judicial philosophy, but his
> occasional hypocrisy.  Perhaps he occasionally strayed – he was human,
> after all -- but if you evaluated all the Judges and tried to correlate
> their political preference and their judicial holdings, you would probably
> find Scalia had the largest deviation.  I challenge you to find a single
> time that Ruth Bader Ginsburg (or Brennan or Marshall or any of the liberal
> judges) ever made a material ruling inconsistent with her political
> preferences.
>
>
>
> David Shemano
>
>
>
> *From:* pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu [
> mailto:pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu <pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu>]
> *On Behalf Of *raghu
> *Sent:* Friday, February 19, 2016 11:20 AM
> *To:* Progressive Economics
> *Subject:* [Pen-l] "Scalia was an intellectual phony"
>
>
>
> This needed to be said.
>
>
> http://www.salon.com/2016/02/18/scalia_was_an_intellectual_phony_can_we_please_stop_calling_him_a_brilliant_jurist/
>
> --snip
> George Orwell once noted that when an English politician dies “his worst
> enemies will stand up on the floor of the House and utter pious lies in his
> honour.”  Antonin Scalia was neither English, nor technically speaking a
> politician, but a similar tradition can be witnessed in the form of the
> praise now being heaped on him.
>
> [...]
>
> One of Scalia’s many obnoxious qualities as a jurist was his remarkably
> pompous, pedantic, and obsessive insistence that the legal principles he
> (supposedly) preferred – textualism in statutory interpretation,
> originalism when reading the Constitution, and judicial restraint when
> dealing with democratically-enacted legal rules – were not merely his
> preferences, but simply “the law.”
>
> [...]
>
> But this kind of question-begging nonsense was the least of Scalia’s
> judicial faults.  For the truth is that, far more than the average judge,
> Scalia had no real fidelity to the legal principles he claimed were
> synonymous with a faithful interpretation of the law.  Over and over during
> Scalia’s three decades on the Supreme Court, if one of his cherished
> interpretive principles got in the way of his political preferences, that
> principle got thrown overboard in a New York minute.
>
> I will give just three out of many possible examples.  In affirmative
> action cases, Scalia insisted over and over again that the 14th Amendment
> required the government to follow color-blind policies.  There is no basis
> for this claim in either the text or history of the amendment.  Indeed
> Scalia simply ignored a rich historical record that reveals, among other
> things, that at the time the amendment was ratified, the federal government
> passed several laws granting special benefits to African-Americans, and
> only African-Americans.
>
> No honest originalist reading
> <http://prospect.org/article/scalia-and-thomas-originalist-sinners> of
> the Constitution would conclude that it prohibits affirmative action
> programs, but Justice Scalia was only interested in originalism to the
> extent that it advanced his political preferences.
>
> Similarly, the men who drafted and ratified the First Amendment would,
> it’s safe to say, been shocked out of their wits
> <http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/Strine_812.pdf> if
> someone had told them they were granting the same free sp

[Pen-l] "Scalia was an intellectual phony"

[raghu]

This needed to be said.

http://www.salon.com/2016/02/18/scalia_was_an_intellectual_phony_can_we_please_stop_calling_him_a_brilliant_jurist/
--snip
George Orwell once noted that when an English politician dies “his worst
enemies will stand up on the floor of the House and utter pious lies in his
honour.”  Antonin Scalia was neither English, nor technically speaking a
politician, but a similar tradition can be witnessed in the form of the
praise now being heaped on him.

[...]

One of Scalia’s many obnoxious qualities as a jurist was his remarkably
pompous, pedantic, and obsessive insistence that the legal principles he
(supposedly) preferred – textualism in statutory interpretation,
originalism when reading the Constitution, and judicial restraint when
dealing with democratically-enacted legal rules – were not merely his
preferences, but simply “the law.”
[...]

But this kind of question-begging nonsense was the least of Scalia’s
judicial faults.  For the truth is that, far more than the average judge,
Scalia had no real fidelity to the legal principles he claimed were
synonymous with a faithful interpretation of the law.  Over and over during
Scalia’s three decades on the Supreme Court, if one of his cherished
interpretive principles got in the way of his political preferences, that
principle got thrown overboard in a New York minute.

I will give just three out of many possible examples.  In affirmative
action cases, Scalia insisted over and over again that the 14th Amendment
required the government to follow color-blind policies.  There is no basis
for this claim in either the text or history of the amendment.  Indeed
Scalia simply ignored a rich historical record that reveals, among other
things, that at the time the amendment was ratified, the federal government
passed several laws granting special benefits to African-Americans, and
only African-Americans.

No honest originalist reading
 of the
Constitution would conclude that it prohibits affirmative action programs,
but Justice Scalia was only interested in originalism to the extent that it
advanced his political preferences.

Similarly, the men who drafted and ratified the First Amendment would, it’s
safe to say, been shocked out of their wits
 if
someone had told them they were granting the same free speech rights to
corporations they were giving to persons.   Again as a historical matter,
this idea is an almost wholly modern invention: indeed it would be hard to
come up with a purer example of treating the Constitution as a “living
document,” the meaning of which changes as social circumstances change.  In
other words, it would be difficult to formulate a clearer violation of
Scalia’s claim that the Constitution should be treated as if it is “dead
dead dead.”

Finally, and most disgracefully, Justice Scalia played a key role in the
judicial theft of the 2000 presidential election.  He was one of five
justices who didn’t bother to come up with something resembling a coherent
legal argument for intervening in Florida’s electoral process.  A bare
majority of the Court handed the election to George W. Bush, and the judges
making up that majority did so while trampling on the precise legal
principles
 Justice
Scalia, in particular, claimed to hold so dear: judicial restraint,
originalist interpretation, and respect for states’ rights.

These examples are not rare deviations from an otherwise principled
adherence to Scalia’s own conception of the rule of law: they were the
standard operating procedure for the most over-rated justice in the history
of the United States Supreme Court.
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Re: [Pen-l] Kashkari goes rogue on Wall Street reform

[raghu]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 3:50 PM, Marv Gandall <marvga...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Which, incidentally, begs the question as to why Sanders, in fact, is
> defending these measures as “socialism” against your better advice and
> without much noticeable effect on his campaign.
>
> That aside, I’d welcome these reforms if they proved as easy to defend and
> implement, as you seem to believe.
>


I am neutral on this question. Sanders' decision to embrace the "socialist"
label is an interesting one. Does it hurt him more than it helps? I don't
think there is clear evidence either way.

I see this as a purely instrumental question: if it advances your politics
to use the label "socialist", I say by all means go for it. Likewise with
"Democrat" or "liberal".

Who cares what you call yourself? What's important is what you stand for.




> If for no other reason, in an ideal world, I’d love to see a Corbyn or
> Sanders government pass these measures and then be confronted with this
> choice if, as you say, that’s the best we can presently hope for.
>


The problems and challenges that would be faced by a Corbyn or Sanders if
they should get elected into office would be quite similar to the problems
and challenges that would come with any attempt to build Socialism, so such
an opportunity should indeed be welcomed by all leftists.
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Kashkari goes rogue on Wall Street reform

[raghu]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 1:17 PM, Marv Gandall <marvga...@gmail.com> wrote:

> it would be helpful if, for example, you could specify what regulations
> you would impose on the financial or energy industries -and, in particular,
> why would these would be politically more capable of realization than
> public ownership?
>


This is an interesting, but purely technocratic question. I think the
following would go a long way:
 - Financial firms: regulate CDSes as a form of insurance and require loss
reserves. Institute a Tobin tax. Bring back criminal prosecution of execs
for securities law violations. Bring back usury laws for credit card rates
and car loans. Reform the bankruptcy code.
 - Pharma: Price controls and a cap on profit rates on drugs under patent.
 - Energy: A carbon tax and windfall profits tax in time for the next oil
price bubble.

These are actually pretty close to Sanders' campaign promises I believe and
these are easy to defend on technocratic grounds without having to get into
arguments over socialism.

-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Kashkari goes rogue on Wall Street reform

[raghu]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 12:47 PM, Marv Gandall <marvga...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Feb 18, 2016, at 10:31 AM, raghu <mragh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> That's precisely the point: they would immediately recognize the
> expropriation for what it is, irrespective of what it is called. I think
> it’d be a good idea for progressives to likewise avoid getting distracted
> by semantic distinctions.
>
>
> I see you as saying that it’s essentially one and the same thing when
> private owners are subjected to to varying degrees (usually modest) of
> regulation or stripped of their property. I don’t see it that way, and
> don’t think anyone else across the political spectrum would either if the
> event actually occurred.
>



Come on Marvin. Here's what I actually wrote earlier in the thread: "a
sufficiently well-regulated private enterprise is indistinguishable from a
public one".

"Sufficiently well-regulated" is basically the exact opposite of: "varying
degrees (usually modest) of regulation".

I claim the difference between "regulation" and "expropriation" is a matter
of degrees; you claim it is one of kind.

This disagreement is not an unimportant one: it has implications for your
rhetoric and your politics. But we can disagree on this without mis-stating
the argument.
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Kashkari goes rogue on Wall Street reform

[raghu]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 12:19 PM, Marv Gandall <marvga...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I have my suspicions that if US government were to announce that it was
> “regulating”  JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and
> Goldman Sachs by taking 100% ownership and consolidating them under new
> state-appointed management as the Bank of the United States, their current
> directors and shareholders and the right wing generally would not see the
> expropriation as a matter of mere semantics.



That's precisely the point: they would immediately recognize the
expropriation for what it is, irrespective of what it is called. I think
it'd be a good idea for progressives to likewise avoid getting distracted
by semantic distinctions.
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] 18 -- Interview re Bernie's campaign

[raghu]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 12:01 PM, Carrol Cox  wrote:

> Of course, fascism was/is just one species of the very large genus of
> authoritarian regimes. Campaigning for Lesser Evils or becoming hysterical
> over the possible election of Trump is a weak way to respond to the
> peculiarly u.s. version of authoritarianism. After all, the Obama
> Administration has _institutionalized_ the ad hoc attacks on freedom of the
> Bush administration! Seriously, Trump, not Clinton, may well be the lesser
> evil.
>


There is indeed a very good case to be made that Trump is more progressive
than Clinton in everything except rhetoric. But the rest of the above is a
non-sequitur, part of this silly campaign to deliberately harm working
class interests in elections.

http://www.racplus.com/news/trump-would-tax-carrier-for-mexico-move/10002948.fullarticle
--snip
According to Reuters
,
Trump said: ”I’m going to tell them, ’Now I’m going to get consensus from
Congress and we’re going to tax you,’” Trump said. “‘So stay where you are
[in Mexico] or build in the United States.’ Because we are killing
ourselves with trade pacts that are no good for us and no good for our
workers.”




-Original Message-
> From: pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu
> [mailto:pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu] On Behalf Of Louis Proyect
> Sent: Thursday, February 18, 2016 10:13 AM
> To: Progressive Economics
> Subject: Re: [Pen-l] 18 -- Interview re Bernie's campaign
>
> On 2/18/16 10:58 AM, Michael Meeropol wrote:
> >
> > The danger of fascism is real.
>
> Not really. Bourgeois democracy is working quite well to maintain the
> status quo. Fascism arose in Germany because the workers supported
> parties that make Bernie Sanders look like Donald Trump by comparison.
> The Social Democratic governor of the state of Saxony collaborated with
> Communists in 1923 to seize power, a scheme that was unfortunately
> ill-conceived. The German bourgeoisie then began to funnel money to the
> Nazi party as a last resort against proletarian revolution. Today, the
> average worker is not interested in proletarian revolution. He or she is
> interested in how the NY Yankees will do, the fate of characters on
> shows like "Gray's Anatomy" and whether their kids can get a job in a
> shitty economy. The last of these worries is tied to the crisis of
> capitalism but hardly at the point where a bus driver or a sanitation
> worker begins to think in terms of challenging capitalist rule.
>
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Re: [Pen-l] 18 -- Interview re Bernie's campaign

[raghu]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 9:58 AM, Michael Meeropol wrote:

> SIMILARLY -- if Sanders loses (even if as a result of undemocratic voting
> by superdelegates) the nomination, it is ESSENTIAL that his supporters not
> lose hope and rally around Clinton (and I say this with a clothespin suck
> strongly on my nose) to (again) defeat fascism.
>


This may very well be the case, but now seems like a very bad time to have
this discussion. I say cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now,
avoid anything that distracts from fighting the immediate enemy - the
Clinton campaign!
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Kashkari goes rogue on Wall Street reform

[raghu]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 5:28 PM, Marv Gandall <marvga...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I’m still not persuaded that the American people, given a lead, would not
> support targeted nationalization of the polluting energy sector, the
> price-gouging pharmaceutical sector, and the loan-sharking financial
> sector. The most radical proposals for regulation coming from Sanders and
> others are equally perceived as unrealistic given the power of these
> lobbies. There are no easy answers because of the power imbalance which has
> greatly widened between the classes in the past three or four decades.
>



I have a somewhat different take on this. I am inclined to think of
regulation and nationalization as points on a continuous spectrum, rather
than as stark binary either-or choices.

To put it somewhat provocatively, my claim is that a sufficiently
well-regulated private enterprise is indistinguishable from a public one.
>From a practical perspective, is there really that much of a difference
between a profit rate of 0.1% and 0.0%?

If the nationalization is considered too radical (because Socialism!),
there is an easy way around it - just call it regulation! My sense is that
the right wing perceives this very clearly. It is only the Left that seems
obsessed with words and labels.
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Interesting Interview about the Sanders' campaign with Steve Early and Rand Wilson

[raghu]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 1:17 PM, Marv Gandall <marvga...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Feb 17, 2016, at 9:33 AM, Michael Yates <mikedjya...@msn.com> wrote:
> https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/labor-activism-sanders/
>
>
> Thanks for posting. An antidote to those Bolsheviks de l’internet who
> haven’t had an ounce of experience in or around working class organizations
> but who have no hesitation in stridently denouncing and abstaining from the
> unfolding political struggles of their most active members and smugly
> offering strategic advice drawn from their own purely theoretical baggage.
>


Indeed. Thanks to Michael for the link.
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Doug Henwood: NYT Rounds Up 'Left-Leaning Economists' for a Unicorn Hunt

[raghu]

The NYT is comparatively restrained compared to the Washington Post which
seems to be on a crusade against both Sanders and Trump. Here's their latest

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/18/top-democratic-economists-just-launched-a-blistering-attack-on-bernie-sanders/

Unfortunately, the mainstream economists (and the Post) have a point on
this latest one. Sanders appears to have blundered into a self-inflicted
wound by highlighting a dubious economic analysis that predicts 5% GDP
growth rates.

Why, Bernie, why?
-raghu.





On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 3:55 PM, Robert Naiman <nai...@justforeignpolicy.org
> wrote:

>
> http://fair.org/home/nyt-rounds-up-left-leaning-economists-for-a-unicorn-hunt/
>
> -- Forwarded message --
> From: FAIR <f...@fair.org>
> Date: Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 1:42 PM
> Subject: NYT Rounds Up 'Left-Leaning Economists' for a Unicorn Hunt
> To: nai...@justforeignpolicy.org
>
>
> Is this email not displaying correctly?
> View it in your browser
> <http://us10.campaign-archive1.com/?u=8c573daa3ad72f4a095505b58=04eb46bfa0=a5b8fb6b33>.
>
>
> <http://fair.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=8c573daa3ad72f4a095505b58=8dbca6fb3f=a5b8fb6b33>
>
> NYT Rounds Up 'Left-Leaning Economists' for a Unicorn Hunt
> [image: NYT: Left-Leaning Economists Question Cost of Bernie Sanders’s
> Plans (photo: Isaac Brekken/NYT)]
> <http://fair.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=8c573daa3ad72f4a095505b58=af2cae0910=a5b8fb6b33>
>
> *To be fair, as a New York Times reporter, Jackie Calmes probably doesn’t
> meet many left-leaning economists, so she may not be sure what they look
> like. (photo: Isaac Brekken/NYT)*
>
> With Hillary Clinton ramping up her attacks on Bernie Sanders as a
> budget-buster—in the February 11 debate
> <http://fair.us10.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=8c573daa3ad72f4a095505b58=ce0a2596b7=a5b8fb6b33>,
> she claimed  his proposals would increase the size of government by 40
> percent—the *New York Times* (2/15/16
> <http://fair.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=8c573daa3ad72f4a095505b58=efafb22e40=a5b8fb6b33>)
> offered a well-timed intervention in support of her efforts: “Left-Leaning
> Economists Question Cost of Bernie Sanders’ Plans.”
>
> While the “left-leaning” is no doubt meant to suggest critiques from those
> who would be inclined to sympathize with Sanders, all the quoted economists
> have ties to the Democratic establishment. So slight is their leftward lean
> that it would require very sensitive equipment to measure.
>
> Opinion pieces critical of Sanders often begin with a pledge of allegiance
> to his “impracticality.” This story, by *Times* reporter Jackie Calmes,
> is an “objective,” newsy version of that:
>
> With his expansive plans to increase the size and role of government,
> Senator Bernie Sanders has provoked a debate not only with his Democratic
> rival for president, Hillary Clinton, but also with liberal-leaning
> economists who share his goals but question his numbers and political
> realism.
>
> Though Sanders wants to increase federal spending on infrastructure,
> college tuition and childcare, as well as other programs, the bulk of his
> proposed increase would be for establishing a single-payer healthcare
> system, and that’s what Calmes’ piece focuses on. It would replace the
> current mix of multiple forms of public insurance (Medicare, Medicaid,
> state and local programs) and private insurance with a unitary federal
> system, much like what Canada has. It would not nationalize doctors and
> hospitals, as in Britain; only the payment side would be socialized.
> Sanders refers to it as Medicare for All, which is a simplification, but
> close enough for politics.
>
> The liberal-leaning economists that Calmes rounds up suggest that Clinton
> may have been too modest in her accusation that Sanders wants to jack up
> the size of government by 40 percent. No, Calmes warns that “the increase
> could exceed 50 percent, some experts suggest, based on an analysis by a
> respected health economist that Mr. Sanders’ single-payer health plan could
> cost twice what the senator…asserts.”
>
> As if that wasn’t scary enough, Calmes turns to mockery: “Alluding to one
> progressive analyst’s criticism of the Sanders agenda as ‘puppies and
> rainbows,’ Mr. Goolsbee said that after his and others’ further study,
> ‘they’ve evolved into magic flying puppies with winning Lotto tickets tied
> to their collars.’”
> [image: Detail from The Unicorn Defends Itself (The Cloisters)]
> <http://fair.us10.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=8c573daa3ad72f4a095505b58=46a19bdc8d=a5b8fb6b33>
>
> *Paul Krugman illustrated his column (2/16/16
> <http://fair.us10.list-manage1.com/track/cl

Re: [Pen-l] Kashkari goes rogue on Wall Street reform

[raghu]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 12:04 PM, Marv Gandall <marvga...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The central issue is not the size of the overweight financial industry,
> but that it needs to be nationalized, rationalized, and reoriented to serve
> public needs rather than private interests. Despite their being conditioned
> to regard public ownership in the abstract as anathema, I’m convinced that
> most Americans would rally to the takeover of the unpopular financial,
> pharmaceutical, and energy industries were any US politician improbably
> bold enough to propose these as solutions.
>


Hi Marvin,
The question of nationalization is more interesting and complicated than
you suggest. After all Henry Paulson's Treasury had no qualms about
nationalizing Fannie and Freddie when they ran into trouble. So it is not
as if the idea is politically impossible or anything like that.

Why were Lehman Brothers, AIG and the other major Wall St firms treated
differently than Fannie and Freddie? Certainly the legal status of FNMA was
somewhat different than than of Lehman, but I don't think that is the whole
story.

I think the real answer to why Lehman and others were not nationalized has
to do with the fact that many of the activities of these entities were
purely speculative and have no public utility whatsoever.

If this is true, then what we really need is a good portion of Wall St to
be shut down, not nationalized..
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Not a sign of full employment

[raghu]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 10:30 AM, Eugene Coyle  wrote:

> Amid all the worry that  the USA is running out of workers, having arrived
> at full employment, here’s a story from today’s WSJ that reports the
> availability of 1,200 reliable folks.
>
> "Daimler to Lay Off More Than 1,200 at North Carolina Truck Plants
> Falling demand for Freightliner trucks as U.S. industrial activity slows
>



In case you missed this one:
http://boingboing.net/2016/02/12/watch-tone-deaf-manager-annou.html
---snip
In this video, employees at the Carrier Air Conditioner factory in
Indianapolis are gathered together by a manager who explains that the
company's profit-margins dictate that all 1400 of them will lose their jobs
as their factory is moved to Mexico.

The manager's prepared remarks are fantastically tone-deaf, almost
unbelievably so. Although there's not really any good way to spin the news
that a company is moving a factory to a place where workers are paid less
and enjoy fewer employment and industrial safety rights, there are surely
bad and worse ways, and the manager here chose virtually the worst way
imaginable.

Short of actually wiping his ass with their pink-slips, that is.

The speaker repeatedly stresses that moving the plant to Mexico will make
the company's owners richer by increasing their profit margins, as though
this will somehow seem to be a comfort to the workers who will soon be
unable to feed their families or save for their retirement -- workers whose
labor made every dime of the company's profits to date possible.
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Re: [Pen-l] Fwd: Bernie Sanders pulls his punches | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[raghu]

On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 5:17 PM, Louis Proyect <l...@panix.com> wrote:

> After skimming through it, I am beginning to wonder if Sanders is
> fighting with one hand behind his back. Hillary Clinton has figured out
> that by wrapping herself in Obama’s banner she can line up Black votes.
> In the PBS debate,  she kept demanding that he kneel before the
> President under whom Black poverty has increased geometrically and who
> has made zero impact on curtailing the cops shoot Black people with
> impunity.
>


This seems like a bit of a gamble on both sides: it is true that Obama is
hugely popular among Black people in the US (for complicated reasons that
really have not been sufficiently well-studied..), and remains so even
though it is widely recognized that he has done very little to directly
improve the economic and social condition of black people.

BUT - will Obama's popularity transfer to Hillary by proclamation? I think
that remains to be seen. Likewise, are the limited and restrained
criticisms that Sanders has offered of Obama really going to hurt him among
Black voters? Maybe, but it does not seem all that clear cut to me at all.

I think Sanders chances of getting the Black vote has more to do with
whether he can convincingly present himself as a credible and legitimate
candidate who can really win. A bit of a chicken and egg question..

I agree with looking at these elections like a sport. A very interesting
sequence of games are coming up..
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Democracy, the Democratic Party, and superdelegates

[raghu]

On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 10:07 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenw...@panix.com> wrote:

> A friend who's working for Sanders tells me they don't want to go too
> negative on HRC.
>


We can sit here all day and make a list of all the terrible things that
Sanders has supported or endorsed in the past and present. The list no
doubt would be a long one, and would include all the sordid collaborations
he has engaged in with corporate Democrats in his political career. It
would also include his pro-Israel positions. I'd add to that his
cluelessness on systematic racism, but some may disagree about that.

The point of such an exercise would be what exactly?

Sanders definitely holds his punches on Clinton in a way that she does not
seem to reciprocate. Why does he do that? Who knows? It probably has
something to do with the state of the Republican race.

This is not about Sanders. He is a symbol for something bigger than
himself. Not everyone can be such a symbol: you need a person who seems
fundamentally decent and does not reek of personal ambition and corruption
the way Hillary Clinton does.

Sanders is good enough to meet that standard. Obsessing over his personal
weaknesses is a distraction.
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Democracy, the Democratic Party, and superdelegates

[raghu]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 5:35 PM, Carrol Cox <cb...@ilstu.edu> wrote:

> At one time elections only drowned out politics for about 6 months. Now
> it's between 18 and 24 months.
>


That assumes that election campaigns somehow make "politics" impossible.
That assumption is being proved wrong as we speak, but why let reality get
in the way of comfortable ideological beliefs?
-raghu.
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[Pen-l] “I’m proud to say Henry Kissinger is not my friend”

[raghu]

Good for Bernie.

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/02/12/hillary-clintons-ties-to-henry-kissinger-come-back-to-haunt-her/
snip

When Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, she relied on Henry A.
Kissinger’s counsel. He would send her “astute observations about foreign
leaders” and “written reports on his travels.” She would joke with him that
smartphones would have made his covert Cold War trip to Beijing impossible.

The two diplomats had a cordial, warm and respectful relationship, based on
writings about their interactions during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure at the State
Department.

“Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as
secretary of state,” Mrs. Clinton wrote in The Washington Post, in a positive
review
of
his book “World Order.”

The friendship came back to haunt her in the Democratic presidential debate
on Thursday night, when Senator Bernie Sanders pointedly questioned Mrs.
Clinton’s foreign policy judgment, saying President Richard M. Nixon’s
secretary of state had enabled genocide in Cambodia under Pol Pot.

“I’m proud to say Henry Kissinger is not my friend,” Mr. Sanders said.
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Re: [Pen-l] Democratic disunity

[raghu]

>
> On Feb 9, 2016, at 1:18 PM, James Creegan <turb...@aol.com> wrote:
> I think Marv may be missing part of what's going on here. Isn't the very
> same lesser evilist *realpolitik *in whose name voters are perennially
> urged to vote for Democrats also being invoked as a reason to support
> Hillary as the "electable" candidate?
>
>
Reductio ad absurdum fallacy alert. "Lesser Evilism" taken to absurd
extremes results in absurd outcomes, same as any other "ism" taken to
absurd extremes. Proves nothing.




> And isn't an entire cohort of mostly younger voters showing itself to be
> oblivious to precisely such "pragmatic" arguments, to the utter
> incomprehension and frustration of the Democratic establishment?
>
>
You never would have found this out now, would you, if Bernie did not
participate in the primaries of the hated Democratic Party?

-raghu.
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[Pen-l] Flint hero Marc Edwards says public science is broken

[raghu]

I expected a boring interview with a generous helping of self-promotion and
smugness, but Prof. Edwards seems to be a genuinely interesting and
provocative person.

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Water-Next-Time-Professor/235136
snip
Q. [...] Do you see this as an academic success story or a cautionary tale?

I am very concerned about the culture of academia in this country and the
perverse incentives that are given to young faculty. The pressures to get
funding are just extraordinary. We’re all on this hedonistic treadmill —
pursuing funding, pursuing fame, pursuing h-index — and the idea of science
as a public good is being lost.

This is something that I’m upset about deeply. I’ve kind of dedicated my
career to try to raise awareness about this. I’m losing a lot of friends.
People don’t want to hear this. But we have to get this fixed, and fixed
fast, or else we are going to lose this symbiotic relationship with the
public. They will stop supporting us.

Q. Do you have any sense that perverse incentive structures prevented
scientists from exposing the problem in Flint sooner?

A. Yes, I do. In Flint the agencies paid to protect these people weren’t
solving the problem. They were the problem. What faculty person out there
is going to take on their state, the Michigan Department of Environmental
Quality, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency?

I don’t blame anyone, because I know the culture of academia. You are your
funding network as a professor. You can destroy that network that took you
25 years to build with one word. I’ve done it. When was the last time you
heard anyone in academia publicly criticize a funding agency, no matter how
outrageous their behavior? We just don’t do these things.
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Re: [Pen-l] Query RE: Democratic disunity

[raghu]

On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 1:00 PM, Carrol Cox <cb...@ilstu.edu> wrote:

> What happens down the road when "the lesser evil" is someone to the right
> of Jeb Bush. That is the kind of slippery slope on which "lesser evil"
> politics stand. Every few years the "lesser evil" gets more evil, the
> alternative choice more insane. How do you propose to escape that slope?
>


I have the same answer to that question as you do: mass struggle. And I am
no less clueless than you are about exactly how to go about doing that.

The best I can come up with is: keeping trying shit until you stumble upon
something that works. Be humble and do not rule out the possibility that
mass movements may arise in unlikely places - even from bourgeoisie
electoral politics.
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Democratic disunity

[raghu]

On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 11:33 AM, Marv Gandall <marvga...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, maybe. These half-hearted Democrats would be prime material for the
formation of a viable third party as the economic crisis drives them to the
left. But the much greater threat they perceive to their historic gains and
present welfare from the Republicans will more likely keep them voting
Democratic even if the party establishment forces a Clinton nomination down
their collective throat.



I don't understand this weird obsession with the party label. If Bernie is
unable to win in a Democratic primary which involves the left 40% of the
US, then what chance would he have in a general election? Surely the latter
is rigged at least as much as the former is.

So why is it important that a good Leftist should contest as a third party
candidate in the general election - where he is likely to be completely
ignored, instead of doing what Bernie is doing right now to very good
effect?
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Pharma Bro goes to Washington

[raghu]

On Thu, Feb 4, 2016 at 5:34 PM, Marv Gandall <marvga...@gmail.com> wrote:

> He was like a composite caricature of the Wall Street villain films that
> have been in vogue since the financial crisis. Anyway, hardly something
> worth spending a lot of time on.
>


Agree about the caricature observation, but symbols like this guy are
important in their own way.
-raghu.





>
> > On Feb 4, 2016, at 1:27 PM, Ian Murray <transconsist...@outlook.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > He tweeted his sneer after the event.
> >
> >
> > > From: marvga...@gmail.com
> > > Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2016 13:08:23 -0800
> > > To: pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu
> > > Subject: Re: [Pen-l] Pharma Bro goes to Washington
> > >
> > > The smirking twit didn’t say anything about Congress, truthful or
> otherwise. I saw his performance, and would never have thought it possible
> for a witness to out sleaze the sleazes.
> > >
> > >
> > > > On Feb 4, 2016, at 12:22 PM, Ian Murray <transconsist...@outlook.com>
> wrote:
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2016 13:50:46 -0600
> > > > From: mragh...@gmail.com
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > I predict that Pharma Bro Shkreli is soon headed to jail for a long
> time.
> > > >
> > > > Greed may be Good, but clumsy displays of arrogance such as this
> cannot be tolerated..
> > > >
> > > > =
> > > >
> > > > What's arrogant or illegal about stating the truth about congress?
>
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Re: [Pen-l] U. of Wisconsin Faculty Members Fear Gutting of Tenure

[raghu]

On Fri, Feb 5, 2016 at 8:23 AM, Louis Proyect <l...@panix.com> wrote:

> (Maybe this will finally get tenured professors to make common cause
> with adjuncts.)
>


Sadly the exact opposite is more likely to happen: tenured faculty in the
flagship Madison campus will probably get themselves good tenure
protections and leave the rest to fend for themselves.
-raghu.







>
> Chronicle of Higher Education
> U. of Wisconsin Faculty Members Fear Gutting of Tenure
> By Peter Schmidt FEBRUARY 05, 2016
> Mike De Sisti, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
>
> U. of Wisconsin educators and supporters protested last summer as
> lawmakers considered a bill that ultimately stripped away tenure
> protections that had been part of state law. Faculty leaders now say the
> policies devised to replace those protections leave professors too
> vulnerable to layoffs.
>
> Faculty leaders in the University of Wisconsin system are sounding
> alarms that its governing board appears poised to leave unrepaired much
> of the damage that state lawmakers did last year to professors’ job
> security and shared-governance powers.
>
> The Wisconsin Legislature stripped faculty powers and tenure protections
> from state law as part of an overhaul signed by Gov. Scott Walker,
> prompting the university system to move to adopt such policies on its
> own. Faculty members warn, however, that the policies being considered
> by the Board of Regents on Friday are weak replacements for what
> lawmakers removed, and would leave professors vulnerable to arbitrary
> dismissal.
>
> The strongest faculty objections to the proposed policies focus on their
> provisions dealing with posttenure review and with faculty layoffs in
> the event of program cuts.
>
> Faculty leaders have criticized the posttenure-review policy as
> unnecessary, too focused on possible negative outcomes, and not offering
> professors enough assurance that their tenure would remain intact.
>
> 'This represents a new vision of what a public university should be. It
> is not a vision that I and my colleagues share.' The proposed policies
> on program cuts have come under fire for letting such decisions be based
> on financial considerations rather than educational ones. They’ve also
> been accused of making it too easy for the system to shed tenured
> faculty members by starving academic programs seen as not meeting the
> state’s job needs.
> "This represents a new vision of what a public university should be. It
> is not a vision that I and my colleagues share," said David J. Vanness,
> president of the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s chapter of the
> American Association of University Professors.
>
> But Regina M. Millner, the board’s president, on Wednesday dismissed
> many of the criticisms of the proposed policies as unfounded, saying
> that they mirror the policies in place at public universities in other
> states and that some faculty leaders would have complained about them
> "no matter what we wrote."
>
> The board’s education committee plans to discuss the proposed policies
> on Friday, to fine-tune them before an expected board vote on them in
> March. Given tensions between the system’s faculty leaders and the
> board, which consists primarily of gubernatorial appointees, it remains
> unclear whether the policies will be tweaked enough to overcome faculty
> objections.
>
> Overcoming Uncertainty
>
> The proposed policies’ potential threats to job security are just the
> latest source of stress for the University of Wisconsin system’s
> instructors, who have endured decades of meager salary growth and were
> stripped of their collective-bargaining rights under legislation pushed
> through by Governor Walker, a Republican, in 2011.
>
> "I wish UW faculty had something to smile about," said Ken Menningen, a
> professor of physics at the system’s Stevens Point campus who served on
> the panel of faculty members and administrators that drafted the
> policies. "We’ve had a string of multiple decades with budget cut after
> budget cut, and we’ve been paid below-average salaries for as long as I
> can remember, and now it’s easier to get laid off?"
>
> Many faculty leaders say the system’s campuses are already losing their
> ability to recruit and retain faculty members. Nicholas Sloboda, a
> professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Superior and the
> chairman of a systemwide panel of faculty representatives, said every
> campus of the system had seen faculty members leave in response to
> tenure uncertainty and relatively poor compensation. Many job searches
> underway at system campuses have seen their finalists withdraw in
> response to similar consideration

[Pen-l] Pharma Bro goes to Washington

[raghu]

I predict that Pharma Bro Shkreli is soon headed to jail for a long time.

Greed may be Good, but clumsy displays of arrogance such as this cannot be
tolerated..

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/02/pharma-bro-goes-to-washington/460011/
---snip

At a hearing at the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on
Thursday morning, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Republican from Utah and chairman
of the committee, asked former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli a
question that was, perhaps, not really a question at all:

“What do you say to that single, pregnant woman who might have AIDS, no
income, and she needs Daraprim in order to survive?”

And likewise, he got a non-answer in return.

“On the advice of counsel, I invoke my Fifth Amendment privilege against
self-incrimination and respectfully decline to answer your question,”
Shkreli said.

“Do you think you've done anything wrong?” Chaffetz fired back.

“On the advice of counsel,” Shkreli responded, “I invoke my Fifth Amendment
privilege against self-incrimination and respectfully decline to answer
your question.”

He continued thus a couple more times, until Rep. Trey Gowdy, a Republican
from South Carolina, asked him if his name was pronounced “Sss-kreley”

“Yes sir,” Shkreli said.

“See, you can answer some questions,” Gowdy said.

“I intend to follow the advice of my counsel, not yours,” Shkreli said.

[...]

Hard to accept that these imbeciles represent the people in our government.
— Martin Shkreli (@MartinShkreli) February 4, 2016

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Re: [Pen-l] Coates on Sanders and Clinton

[raghu]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 3:57 PM, Marv Gandall <marvga...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Not intended as sarcasm at all. Du Bois, Douglas, Morrison, Hughes,
> Wright, Walker, Hurston, Ellison, Baldwin et all constitute a genuinely
> rich literary tradition. I thought the article was quite balanced in how it
> dealt with the dual strands in the history of the black struggle which is
> why I linked to it.
>


Thanks again. It is an interesting read, especially the part about the
lynching poetry.
-raghu.





> On Jan 27, 2016, at 1:45 PM, raghu <mragh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 9:17 PM, Marv Gandall <marvga...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Darryl Pinckney reviews Coates’ new book against the backdrop of the
>> “opposing visions of the social destiny of black people” expressed in its
>> rich literary tradition.
>>
>> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/02/11/the-anger-of-ta-nehisi-coates/
>
>
>
> Hi Marvin,
> Thanks for the link, but I can't tell if you are being sarcastic in your
> reference to "rich literary tradition".
>
> I noted with disappointment that in his interview with Adolph Reed, Doug
> Henwood joined his guest in a mocking reference to Coates' “literary
> writing style”. In the same interview, there is another unfortunate
> accusation of pandering to “guilty white liberals".
>
> It is sad to see this sort of lazy caricature in places where you'd expect
> intelligent and thoughtful discussion.
> -raghu.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> > On Jan 26, 2016, at 10:45 AM, Maxim Linchits <mlinch...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > And Coates expects a deeply racist, fragmented and economically
>> stagnant society to pay meaningful reparations to one politically
>> marginalizes group? What do people even mean by reparations? Cutting a
>> one-time check a la Friedman, Murray et. al. (which is still utopian, but
>> ideologically appealing in some quarters)?
>> >
>> > I don’t see any meaningful rebuttal from Coates. Wheread Reed is blunt
>> and to the point – Coates twists and turns and it’s just painful to read.
>> The racial wealth and income gap is enormous in both Europe and America.
>> Unless the redistributive policies are thoroughly racialized – as they were
>> during the New Deal – redistributive and class-affirmative policies will be
>> a major boon to oppressed racial minorities. And not just Blacks – but also
>> American Latinos.
>> >
>> > Coates asserts that meaningful class-first policies are a mere “band
>> aid” for racial problems. Why? He cites the example of “failed policies” of
>> European social Democracy and Clintonism , both of which have failed to
>> address the plight of racial minorities. Guess what – they also
>> SPECTACULARLY “failed” to address the plight of working people in general,
>> in the past decades.  And calling class-first policies  a “band-aid” for
>> anything is a truly Orwellian turn of phrase.
>> >
>> > As for the Sanders campaign – what would be the point of him calling
>> for reparations? Just to pander to black voters, making a promise he cannot
>> possibly keep? To fragment his base and distract people from the problem of
>> wealth inequality – which hits minorities ten times as hard?
>> >
>> > From: pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu [mailto:
>> pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu] On Behalf Of raghu
>> > Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2016 7:24 PM
>> > To: Progressive Economics <PEN-L@lists.csuchico.edu>
>> > Subject: [Pen-l] Coates on Sanders and Clinton
>> >
>> > Coates directly addresses the stupid claim that anyone criticizing
>> Sanders is a Clinton stooge:
>> >
>> http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/bernie-sanders-liberal-imagination/425022/
>> > ---snip
>> > What candidates name themselves is generally believed to be important.
>> Many Sanders supporters, for instance, correctly point out that Clinton
>> handprints are all over America’s sprawling carceral state. I agree with
>> them and have said so at length. Voters, and black voters particularly,
>> should never forget that Bill Clinton passed arguably the most immoral
>> “anti-crime” bill in American history, and that Hillary Clinton aided its
>> passage through her invocation of the super-predator myth. A defense of
>> Clinton rooted in the claim that “Jeb Bush held the same position” would
>> not be exculpatory. (“Law and order conservative embraces law and order”
>> would surprise no one.) That is because the anger over the Clintons’
>

Re: [Pen-l] Coates on Sanders and Clinton

[raghu]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 5:19 PM, Maxim Linchits <mlinch...@gmail.com> wrote:

> What do you think of Reed’s idea that just because racism caused the
> problem (economic inequality between racial groups), it does not mean that
> we should necessarily look to racially targeted policies as the main
> solution?
>


Reed is of course correct on this, but he is arguing with a strawman. I
don't know of anyone who argues for a politics solely or mainly consisting
of racially-targeted issues. The point is simply that they should not be
summarily excluded.
-raghu.







> It seems to me that you a making an argument for the “propagandistic”
> effect of calling for reparation (ie putting the issue of race on the
> table), as opposed to arguing for reparations as a comprehensive solution
> to race-based economic inequality. In that case it’s fair to ask what
> effect such “propaganda” will have in the current political climate. One
> could also look back to the actual “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” in
> South Africa. It’s positive political effect cannot be overstated (then
> again – the political  situation in the US is not remotely comparable), but
> it’s consequences for the economic plight of ordinary South Africans ware
> zilch.
>
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Re: [Pen-l] Coates on Sanders and Clinton

[raghu]

On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 12:45 PM, Maxim Linchits <mlinch...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> And Coates expects a deeply racist, fragmented and economically stagnant
> society to pay meaningful reparations to one politically marginalizes
> group? What do people even mean by reparations? Cutting a one-time check a
> la Friedman, Murray et. al. (which is still utopian, but ideologically
> appealing in some quarters)?
>


You really should read Coates at more length.

The point of the demand for reparations is precisely to have this public
discussion, this historical accounting. A process like a "Truth and
Reconcialiation Commission" for the US.

If you give this matter even a little bit of thought - and the reason the
demand for reparations is so important is precisely that no one has ever
bothered to give this much thought at all - you will quickly be forced to
conclude that no one-time payment will ever come close to being enough.

So what could reparations consist of? Coates makes the case that housing
discrimination and segregation has been especially important, so perhaps
making a strong effort at combating that? The criminal justice system is
another area that comes to mind.

The overall point, especially as it concerns Sanders is: take racism
seriously as a issue. It is not just a side-effect of inequality or class
conflict something like that.

-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Noam Chomsky Says GOP Is 'Literally A Serious Danger To Human Survival’

[raghu]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 8:44 AM, Carrol Cox <cb...@ilstu.edu> wrote:

> Noam Chomsky Says GOP Is 'Literally A Serious Danger To Human Survival’  <
> https://portside.org/2016-01-26/noam-chomsky-says-gop-literally-serious-danger-human-survival
> ’>
>
> The GOP in power might or might not be as immediately destructive as (say)
> Sanders. But if the measure is "human survival," i.e. a long-term standard,
> then the differences between Sanders and Trump narrow to zero.
>


In the long run, every species is extinct, then the differences between
capitalism and socialism narrow to zero.

Is this what intellectual discourse on PEN-L has come to?
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Coates on Sanders and Clinton

[raghu]

On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 9:17 PM, Marv Gandall <marvga...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Darryl Pinckney reviews Coates’ new book against the backdrop of the
> “opposing visions of the social destiny of black people” expressed in its
> rich literary tradition.
>
> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/02/11/the-anger-of-ta-nehisi-coates/



Hi Marvin,
Thanks for the link, but I can't tell if you are being sarcastic in your
reference to "rich literary tradition".

I noted with disappointment that in his interview with Adolph Reed, Doug
Henwood joined his guest in a mocking reference to Coates' “literary
writing style”. In the same interview, there is another unfortunate
accusation of pandering to “guilty white liberals".

It is sad to see this sort of lazy caricature in places where you'd expect
intelligent and thoughtful discussion.
-raghu.







> > On Jan 26, 2016, at 10:45 AM, Maxim Linchits <mlinch...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > And Coates expects a deeply racist, fragmented and economically stagnant
> society to pay meaningful reparations to one politically marginalizes
> group? What do people even mean by reparations? Cutting a one-time check a
> la Friedman, Murray et. al. (which is still utopian, but ideologically
> appealing in some quarters)?
> >
> > I don’t see any meaningful rebuttal from Coates. Wheread Reed is blunt
> and to the point – Coates twists and turns and it’s just painful to read.
> The racial wealth and income gap is enormous in both Europe and America.
> Unless the redistributive policies are thoroughly racialized – as they were
> during the New Deal – redistributive and class-affirmative policies will be
> a major boon to oppressed racial minorities. And not just Blacks – but also
> American Latinos.
> >
> > Coates asserts that meaningful class-first policies are a mere “band
> aid” for racial problems. Why? He cites the example of “failed policies” of
> European social Democracy and Clintonism , both of which have failed to
> address the plight of racial minorities. Guess what – they also
> SPECTACULARLY “failed” to address the plight of working people in general,
> in the past decades.  And calling class-first policies  a “band-aid” for
> anything is a truly Orwellian turn of phrase.
> >
> > As for the Sanders campaign – what would be the point of him calling for
> reparations? Just to pander to black voters, making a promise he cannot
> possibly keep? To fragment his base and distract people from the problem of
> wealth inequality – which hits minorities ten times as hard?
> >
> > From: pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu [mailto:
> pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu] On Behalf Of raghu
> > Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2016 7:24 PM
> > To: Progressive Economics <PEN-L@lists.csuchico.edu>
> > Subject: [Pen-l] Coates on Sanders and Clinton
> >
> > Coates directly addresses the stupid claim that anyone criticizing
> Sanders is a Clinton stooge:
> >
> http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/bernie-sanders-liberal-imagination/425022/
> > ---snip
> > What candidates name themselves is generally believed to be important.
> Many Sanders supporters, for instance, correctly point out that Clinton
> handprints are all over America’s sprawling carceral state. I agree with
> them and have said so at length. Voters, and black voters particularly,
> should never forget that Bill Clinton passed arguably the most immoral
> “anti-crime” bill in American history, and that Hillary Clinton aided its
> passage through her invocation of the super-predator myth. A defense of
> Clinton rooted in the claim that “Jeb Bush held the same position” would
> not be exculpatory. (“Law and order conservative embraces law and order”
> would surprise no one.) That is because the anger over the Clintons’
> actions isn’t simply based on their having been wrong, but on their craven
> embrace of law and order Republicanism in the Democratic Party’s name.
> >
> > One does not find anything as damaging as the carceral state in the
> Sanders platform, but the dissonance between name and action is the same.
> Sanders’s basic approach is to ameliorate the effects of racism through
> broad, mostly class-based policies—doubling the minimum wage, offering
> single-payer health-care, delivering free higher education. This is the
> same “A rising tide lifts all boats” thinking that has dominated Democratic
> anti-racist policy for a generation. Sanders proposes to intensify this
> approach. But Sanders’s actual approach is really no different than
> President Obama’s. I have repeatedly stated my problem with the “rising
> tide” philosophy when embraced by Obama and liberals in general. (See here,

[Pen-l] Coates on Sanders and Clinton

[raghu]

Coates directly addresses the stupid claim that anyone criticizing Sanders
is a Clinton stooge:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/bernie-sanders-liberal-imagination/425022/
---snip
What candidates name themselves is generally believed to be important. Many
Sanders supporters, for instance, correctly point out that Clinton
handprints are all over America’s sprawling carceral state. I agree with
them and have said so at length. Voters, and black voters particularly,
should never forget that Bill Clinton passed arguably the most immoral
“anti-crime” bill in American history, and that Hillary Clinton aided its
passage through her invocation of the super-predator myth. A defense of
Clinton rooted in the claim that “Jeb Bush held the same position” would
not be exculpatory. (“Law and order conservative embraces law and order”
would surprise no one.) That is because the anger over the Clintons’
actions isn’t simply based on their having been wrong, but on their craven
embrace of law and order Republicanism in the Democratic Party’s name.

One does not find anything as damaging as the carceral state in the Sanders
platform, but the dissonance between name and action is the same. Sanders’s
basic approach is to ameliorate the effects of racism through broad, mostly
class-based policies—doubling the minimum wage, offering single-payer
health-care, delivering free higher education. This is the same “A rising
tide lifts all boats” thinking that has dominated Democratic anti-racist
policy for a generation. Sanders proposes to intensify this approach. But
Sanders’s actual approach is really no different than President Obama’s. I
have repeatedly stated my problem with the “rising tide” philosophy when
embraced by Obama and liberals in general. (See here, here, here, and
here.) Again, briefly, treating a racist injury solely with class-based
remedies is like treating a gun-shot wound solely with bandages. The
bandages help, but they will not suffice.

There is no need to be theoretical about this. Across Europe, the kind of
robust welfare state Sanders supports—higher minimum wage, single-payer
health-care, low-cost higher education—has been embraced. Have these
policies vanquished racism? Or has race become another rubric for asserting
who should benefit from the state’s largesse and who should not? And if
class-based policy alone is insufficient to banish racism in Europe, why
would it prove to be sufficient in a country founded on white supremacy?
And if it is not sufficient, what does it mean that even on the left wing
of the Democratic party, the consideration of radical, directly anti-racist
solutions has disappeared? And if radical, directly anti-racist remedies
have disappeared from the left-wing of the Democratic Party, by what right
does one expect them to appear in the platform of an avowed moderate like
Clinton?
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Re: [Pen-l] Corey Robin on Clinton-Sanders

[raghu]

On Sat, Jan 23, 2016 at 8:52 PM, Robert Naiman <nai...@justforeignpolicy.org
> wrote:

> Sanders has gotten a lot of heat from the left for saying he’s against
> reparations. It’s a complicated issue, the substance of which I don’t want
> to comment on here.
>
> Instead I’ll just note that in 2008 another presidential candidate was
> asked about his position on reparations. Here’s what he had to say
> <http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/obama-opposes-reparations-slavery-article-1.314179>
> :
>
> Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama
> <http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Barack+Obama> opposes offering
> reparations to the descendants of slaves, putting him at odds with some
> black groups and leaders.
>
>

Yes, Obama did (and still does) oppose reparations. Obama also said "n"
in a public interview. Doesn't mean Sanders gets to say it.

I noted and commented on this in an earlier thread. Briefly, taking a
position on reparations involves making a political statement NOT a draft
legislation. The effect of a legislation is the same no matter who
introduces it. In contrast, the same political statement can mean two very
different things depending on who is making it.
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Natural laws of science as dogma

[raghu]

On Sun, Jan 24, 2016 at 12:47 PM, Carrol Cox <cb...@ilstu.edu> wrote:

> To say, "X is a Science,"  is meaningless, since there are a number of
> conflicting understandings of what "science" and "scientific method" are!
> Science is not a bundle of facts, since no facts exist except as they are
> brought out by one or another theory. Theory is necessarily a precondition
> for recognizing a fact.
>



That's true but I wouldn't go so far as to declare that "X is a Science" is
ALWAYS meaningless. With context and clarification, it can be made a
perfectly meaningful assertion. Charles, however, fails to do this.

In practice, many claims of the form "X is a Science" turn out to be rather
pathetic attempts to claim the authority and prestige of the natural
sciences for one's favorite beliefs. Charles' attempt here to claim such
intellectual prestige for Marx by making silly comparisons to Einstein and
Newton is a great example of this.
-raghu.







> -Original Message-
> From: pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu [mailto:
> pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu] On Behalf Of ronpeters...@comcast.net
> Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2016 12:21 PM
> To: Progressive Economics
> Subject: Re: [Pen-l] Natural laws of science as dogma
>
>  "Charles Brown" <cb31...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> >So, as a SCIENCE, Marxism has basic principles , theories and laws ( see.
> _Capital_  ) that are rigorously adhered to by MARXISTS. This does _ not_
> make Marxists's politics a religion, but rather it is critical to it being
> a science.
>
> Marx held that his method was best understood from Capital and he held
> that his method was the scientific method. Since Marx was making a model of
> the
>
> capitalist economy he had to be careful at what was the most basic
> components
>
> of the economy. He didn't choose gold, energy, or land, he chose labor
> time.
>
>
> --
>
>Ron
>
>
>
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Re: [Pen-l] Bernie's Black problem

[raghu]

On Sat, Jan 23, 2016 at 11:08 AM, Robert Naiman wrote:

>
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/01/21/how-killer-mike-answered-ta-nehisi-coates-on-bernie-sanders-reparations/
>
>
Seems like a love-fest of agreement. I agree with Killer Mike that Sanders'
cluelessness on racism does not change the fact that he is by far the most
Black-friendly candidate in the field, which is, I believe, also Ta-Nehisi
Coates' position.

Killer Mike does not seem to have any fundamental disagreement with Coates
argument I linked to other than that Sanders is being unfairly singled
out.  I say that yes, Sanders is being singled out, but that's because no
one else is even remotely worth the trouble. That's a compliment to
Sanders, not an insult.

Btw, KM is wrong that Barack Obama has never been asked about reparations:
he has been and it is well-documented that he came out against. That is not
the same thing as Sanders coming out against. Remember these are political
statements NOT draft legislations.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/obama-opposes-reparations-slavery-article-1.314179

-raghu.



On Sat, Jan 23, 2016 at 11:01 AM, raghu <mragh...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think the always insightful Ta-Nehisi Coates nails it. And btw I think
> Coates' critique of Sanders applies to many well-intentioned PEN-Lers
> (Charlie Andrews?) who also like Sanders swear by the "class first"
> approach.
>
>
> http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/bernie-sanders-reparations/424602/
> -snip
> For those of us interested in how the left prioritizes its various
> radicalisms, Sanders’s answer is illuminating. The spectacle of a socialist
> candidate opposing reparations as “divisive” (there are few political
> labels more divisive in the minds of Americans than socialist) is only
> rivaled by the implausibility of Sanders posing as a pragmatist.
>
> [...]
>
> This is the “class first” approach, originating in the myth that racism
> and socialism are necessarily incompatible. But raising the minimum wage
> doesn’t really address the fact that black men without criminal records
> have about the same shot at low-wage work as white men with them; nor can
> making college free address the wage gap between black and white graduates.
> Housing discrimination, historical and present, may well be the fulcrum of
> white supremacy. Affirmative action is one of the most disputed issues of
> the day. Neither are addressed in the “racial justice” section of Sanders
> platform.
>
> Sanders’s anti-racist moderation points to a candidate who is not merely
> against reparations, but one who doesn’t actually understand the argument.
>
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[Pen-l] Corey Robin on Clinton-Sanders

[raghu]

Good stuff.

http://crookedtimber.org/2016/01/22/bile-bullshit-and-bernie-16-notes-on-a-dismal-campaign/
-snip

1. *Clintonite McCarthyism*

According to *The Guardian
*
:

The dossier, prepared by opponents of Sanders and passed on to the Guardian
by a source who would only agree to be identified as “a Democrat”, alleges
that Sanders “sympathized with the USSR during the Cold War” because he
went on a trip there to visit a twinned city while he was mayor of
Burlington. Similar “associations with communism” in Cuba are catalogued
alongside a list of quotes about countries ranging from China to Nicaragua
in a way that supporters regard as bordering on the McCarthyite rather than
fairly reflecting his views.


This is becoming a straight-up rerun of the 1948 campaign against Henry
Wallace. Except that Clinton is running well to the right of Truman and
even, in some respects, Dewey. It seems as if Clinton is campaigning for
the vote of my Grandpa Nat. There’s only one problem with this strategy:
he’s been dead for nearly a quarter-century. As was true of McCarthyism,
it’s not really Sanders’s communism or his socialism that has got today’s
McCarthyites in the Democratic Party worried; it’s actually his liberalism.
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[Pen-l] Bernie's Black problem

[raghu]

I think the always insightful Ta-Nehisi Coates nails it. And btw I think
Coates' critique of Sanders applies to many well-intentioned PEN-Lers
(Charlie Andrews?) who also like Sanders swear by the "class first"
approach.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/bernie-sanders-reparations/424602/
-snip
For those of us interested in how the left prioritizes its various
radicalisms, Sanders’s answer is illuminating. The spectacle of a socialist
candidate opposing reparations as “divisive” (there are few political
labels more divisive in the minds of Americans than socialist) is only
rivaled by the implausibility of Sanders posing as a pragmatist.

[...]

This is the “class first” approach, originating in the myth that racism and
socialism are necessarily incompatible. But raising the minimum wage
doesn’t really address the fact that black men without criminal records
have about the same shot at low-wage work as white men with them; nor can
making college free address the wage gap between black and white graduates.
Housing discrimination, historical and present, may well be the fulcrum of
white supremacy. Affirmative action is one of the most disputed issues of
the day. Neither are addressed in the “racial justice” section of Sanders
platform.

Sanders’s anti-racist moderation points to a candidate who is not merely
against reparations, but one who doesn’t actually understand the argument.
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[Pen-l] Stand with Missouri update: Oberlin College edition

[raghu]

You know that you have gone far off-track when a university administration
manages to sound eminently reasonable while rejecting your "non-negotiable
demands" out of hand:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/21/oberlins-president-refuses-negotiate-student-list-demands
-snip
The 14-page list of demands at Oberlin was detailed and contained many
controversial items. Among other things, it demanded the immediate firing
of some Oberlin employees, the immediate tenuring of some faculty members,
specific curricular changes, a review and possible revision of the grading
system (to be overseen by students), the creation of "safe spaces" for
black students in at least three buildings on campus, the creation of a
program to enroll recently released prisoners from a nearby prison as
undergraduates, divestment from Israel, and a requirement that black
student leaders be paid $8.20 an hour for their organizing efforts.

The students also demanded changes at Oberlin's noted conservatory. For
instance, the list of demands said that students should not be required to
take "heavily based classical courses that have minimal relevance to their
jazz interests." Stating that classical music students are not required to
study jazz, the list of demands says that students of jazz "should not be
forced to take courses rooted in whiteness."
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[Pen-l] Krugman, single-payer and the nature of political demand-making

[raghu]

Krugman seems to be on the warpath against the Sanders health plan, in
apparent response to a backlash against his hit-job from yesterday:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/lessons-from-vermont/

Superficially his piece is eminently reasonable: Krugman says that for a
variety of reasons, single-payer health-care in the US is politically
impossible. I'd agree with his conclusions on that: aside from the
insurance cos and other usual suspects ganging up against any such plan, I
don't even think there will be popular support for something like that.

Specifically, I'd bet that if a "Medicare for all" proposal is put on a
popular referendum in the US, it will fail. It will fail because rich,
white people who already have decent insurance as well as poor white people
who want to prevent black people from getting equal access to health care
will vote it down.

But all of that is beside the point. Sanders' health plan is not a draft
legislation; it is a political statement and should be evaluated as such.
Krugman surely understands this. Yet he persists in attacking it.

-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Krugman's hit-job on Bernie Sanders

[raghu]

On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 12:59 PM, Robert Naiman <
nai...@justforeignpolicy.org> wrote:

> This is now making the rounds again:
>
> Paul Krugman’s Shocking, Revisionist, and Obscurantist Views on Single
> Payer
> http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/10/46940.html
>


I know from reading this blogs, that Krugman is a fan of Obamacare,
overstates its achievements and understates its deficiencies. But that I
can understand: Krugman is no radical. He is a (small c) conservative
liberal. I don't think that's such a bad thing.

What he is doing now seems rather different and much more distasteful: he
seems to be attacking Sanders and promoting Hillary..

-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Krugman's hit-job on Bernie Sanders

[raghu]

On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 10:45 AM, Robert Naiman <
nai...@justforeignpolicy.org> wrote:

> Look on the bright side: it's good to remind the democratic socialist
> masses every now and then that Krugman is not a reliable ally. :)
>



Is Krugman angling for a Cabinet position in a Hillary administration? He
would sure be a big improvement over Larry Summers, but if you have to sell
your soul for it..
-raghu.




On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 10:38 AM, raghu <mragh...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Krugman shows his political side every once in a while and when he does,
> it is never pretty..
> http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/19/weakened-at-bernies/
> snip
>
> On health care: leave on one side the virtual impossibility of achieving
> single-payer. Beyond the politics, the Sanders “plan” isn’t just lacking in
> detail; as Ezra Klein notes
> <http://www.vox.com/2016/1/17/10784528/bernie-sanders-single-payer-health-care>,
> it both promises more comprehensive coverage than Medicare or for that
> matter single-payer systems in other countries, and assumes huge cost
> savings that are at best unlikely given that kind of generosity. This lets
> Sanders claim that he could make it work with much lower middle-class taxes
> than would probably be needed in practice.
>
> To be harsh but accurate: the Sanders health plan looks a little bit like
> a standard Republican tax-cut plan, which relies on fantasies about huge
> supply-side effects to make the numbers supposedly add up. Only a little
> bit: after all, this is a plan seeking to provide health care, not lavish
> windfalls on the rich — and single-payer really does save money, whereas
> there’s no evidence that tax cuts deliver growth. Still, it’s not the kind
> of brave truth-telling the Sanders campaign pitch might have led you to
> expect.
>
>
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[Pen-l] Krugman's hit-job on Bernie Sanders

[raghu]

Krugman shows his political side every once in a while and when he does, it
is never pretty..
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/19/weakened-at-bernies/
snip

On health care: leave on one side the virtual impossibility of achieving
single-payer. Beyond the politics, the Sanders “plan” isn’t just lacking in
detail; as Ezra Klein notes
,
it both promises more comprehensive coverage than Medicare or for that
matter single-payer systems in other countries, and assumes huge cost
savings that are at best unlikely given that kind of generosity. This lets
Sanders claim that he could make it work with much lower middle-class taxes
than would probably be needed in practice.

To be harsh but accurate: the Sanders health plan looks a little bit like a
standard Republican tax-cut plan, which relies on fantasies about huge
supply-side effects to make the numbers supposedly add up. Only a little
bit: after all, this is a plan seeking to provide health care, not lavish
windfalls on the rich — and single-payer really does save money, whereas
there’s no evidence that tax cuts deliver growth. Still, it’s not the kind
of brave truth-telling the Sanders campaign pitch might have led you to
expect.
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Re: [Pen-l] IPA: Clinton Doubling Down on False Healthcare Statements about Sanders

[raghu]

Clinton's strategy here seems puzzling: when you have a serious primary
challenge from the left, aren't you supposed to turn leftwards yourself?
Isn't this the absolute worst possible time to remind the left wing of the
Democratic Party [1] what a sellout you have always been in the past and
are likely to be in future?

I can think of only two explanations:
 (1) Hillary thinks that basically her nomination is a done deal and no
matter what she says or does, there is no way Sanders is a credible threat.
 (2) Hillary thinks that there is simply no popular support for leftist
policies like "Medicare for all".

Neither of these seem politically smart: (1) implies a level of arrogance
that seems hard to believe given her experience in 2008, and (2) seems
factually incorrect.

The only other possibility is that her corporate puppet-masters are forcing
her to take a stand even if it is politically risky.


[1] Please, this is a question about political strategy. If you are not
interested in vulgar questions like this, please ignore this message and
save your snarky comments about how there is nothing Left about the DP etc,
for another thread..

-raghu.






On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 10:28 AM, Robert Naiman <
nai...@justforeignpolicy.org> wrote:

> -- Forwarded message --
> From: Institute for Public Accuracy . <accur...@accuracy.org>
> Date: Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 10:06 AM
> Subject: Clinton Doubling Down on False Healthcare Statements about Sanders
> To: naiman.u...@gmail.com
>
>
> Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Thursday night on
> MSNBC claimed
> <http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/rachel-maddow-hillary-clinton-sanders-health-care>
>  regarding
> Sen. Bernie Sanders' healthcare proposals: "The bulk of what he is
> advocating for is a single payer health care system, which would probably
> cost about $15 trillion. ... it would basically end all the kinds of health
> care we know, Medicare, Medicaid, the CHIP program, children’s health
> insurance, TRICARE for the National Guard, military, Affordable Care Act
> exchange policies, employer-based policies. ... It would take all that and
> hand it over to the states."
>
> Clinton is apparently echoing a *Wall Street Journal* piece from last
> year: “Price Tag of Bernie Sanders’ Proposals: $18 Trillion
> <http://www.accuracy.org/release/how-wsj-is-off-by-18-trillion-on-sanders-proposals/>,”
> which relies on the analysis of Professor Gerald Friedman, quoted below.
>
> In under 24 hours, a RootsAction.org <http://rootsaction.org/> petition, "Tell
> Hillary Clinton to Stop Lying About Single-Payer
> <https://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=11924>,"
> has gained nearly 10,000 signers. "A single-payer health plan covers
> everyone and lowers costs. It does not deprive anyone of health coverage or
> empower any governor to do so. Unless you're in the top 5 percent for
> income, you save more by tearing up your health insurance bills than you
> pay in higher taxes under single-payer."
>
> See Politifact debunking of similar claims from the Clinton camp: "Chelsea
> Clinton mischaracterizes Bernie Sanders' health care plan
> <http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jan/14/chelsea-clinton/chelsea-clinton-mischaracterizes-bernie-sanders-he/>
> ."
>
> GERALD FRIEDMAN, gfrie...@econs.umass.edu, @gfriedma
> <https://twitter.com/gfriedma>
> Professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst,
> Friedman’s work was cited by the *Wall Street Journal* about Bernie
> Sanders’ proposals for government spending. Last year he was featured in an
> accuracy.org news release: "How WSJ is off by $18 Trillion on Sanders’
> Proposals
> <http://www.accuracy.org/release/how-wsj-is-off-by-18-trillion-on-sanders-proposals/>
> ."
>
> Today, he told accuracy.org: "The statement that Sanders 'would take
> all that and hand it over to the states' is wrong. What Clinton is doing is
> shameful. Sanders' plan would end or transform those programs, but more
> importantly end employer based healthcare -- and that's good. The gold
> standard of single payer plans is HR 676, Medicare for All, which actually
> enhances Medicare and covers everybody. What Sanders has done is take that
> proposal and -- in an apparent attempt to make it palatable to some
> Republicans -- let the states administer the new, comprehensive program.
>
> "Obamacare allowed coverage for 15 to 20 million people, and that was
> a good step. But it's by no means what is really needed. We have 30 million
> people who are still uninsured and tens of millions who are under insured.
> The insurance companies still dominate how h

Re: [Pen-l] Shorter working time on PEN-L

[raghu]

On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 3:35 PM, Tom Walker <lumpofla...@gmail.com> wrote:

> "Ok, but what then? "
>
> At the risk of totally alienating the hipsters on this list with my
> "certain lack of imagination", I will take the liberty of mentioning that I
> wrote a BOOK on this topic, the unpublished manuscript of which has been
> available on SCRIBD for about five years
>

Wow, a lot of things to process there. First of all, so *I* am the
mysterious hipster on PEN-L? I had no idea. I looked up the term and I am
not sure if I should be flattered or insulted. But I will do my best to
play my part I guess.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hipster

Secondly, Scribd??? You are clearly no hipster!



> Most of my posts to PEN-L on the topic have gone without reply.
>

Gee, you think that should tell you something? If I wrote a lot of blog
posts that furiously insisted that the earth is round, should I be
surprised or indignant if  they went without reply?



> What I have proposed instead is the formation of new kinds of collective
> institutions that have ample precedent in existing institutions.
>

Perhaps you could indulge me and give me one example of what one such
collective institution should look like and more importantly how it
translates into politics that I can get involved in. And I mean that
sincerely: I am fully convinced by your program. I simply do not know how
to accomplish it. You have a plan? Tell me how I can help.



I have no objection to policy proposals like paid family leave. They may
> even open space for more in depth discussion of the issue of working time.
> But such policy proposals do not begin to address the fundamental problem
> of the ecological unsustainability of wage labor, capital accumulation and
> industrial-scale conversion of habitat to toxic waste.
>


I am genuinely glad to hear this. They are not much by themselves, but you
are wrong: they do *begin* to address the fundamental problems. The point
is they are just a beginning and the question is what are you going to do
with them? Mock and dismiss them, or build on them?
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Bernie Sanders economic advisors

[raghu]

On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 8:50 AM, Carrol Cox <cb...@ilstu.edu> wrote:

> "... and paid family leave = less work hours. Both Bernie and Hillary have
> called for this on national TV. "
>
> This is really pathetic and makes a mockery of the very discussion of
> sorter work time.
>


Eugene Coyle referred to "reducing the standard of hours of work" at the
top of this thread. I read that to mean a reduction in the amount of time
workers spent in the service of employers and increase in the amount of
leisure and non-work time.

So yes, increased vacation time does indeed mean "shorter work time". How
does it not? Why exactly is that pathetic and in what way is it a "mockery"
of the very discussion? This is argument by assertion at its finest.

As I stated earlier in this thread, I am fully convinced by the arguments
for shorter work times. But to repeat myself from earlier in the thread,
what then?

The "campaign for a 20 hour work week" is a slogan not a political
movement. In contrast, a campaign for paid sick leave is not a mere slogan.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/20/news/economy/paid-sick-leave/index.html

Yes, it is a small campaign with very modest ambitions. But at least it is
real and there are many more like that.

You can either learn about these campaigns and think about how to build on
them, or you can mock and disparage them and keep fantasizing about a
perfect mass movement that exists only in your imagination. Your choice.
-raghu.








> Retirement equals shorter work time.
>
> Sick leave equals shorter work time.
>
> Unemployment equals shorter work time.
>
> This makes a mockery of discussion as such. It is really pathetic.
>
> Shorter work time can only mean that _everyone_, all the time, works fewer
> hours. (Probably around 20 hours per week  is the tipping point into a
> damaged human life. For the first 200K or so of human life the work week
> was zero. Labor did not exist prior to the fall into agriculture.
>
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Re: [Pen-l] Bernie Sanders economic advisors

[raghu]

On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 4:21 PM, <ronpeters...@comcast.net> wrote:

> David W Terrell says:
>
> In place of Clinton’s 200 economists, who is it that Sanders listens to?
> He mentions several. Paul Krugman
> <http://www.nytimes.com/column/paul-krugman>, he says, would make a good
> secretary of the Treasury. Krugman won a Nobel Prize in economics, teaches
> at Princeton and writes for *The New York Times*. Sanders uses the advice
> of Joseph Stiglitz <http://www.josephstiglitz.com/>, who also won a Nobel
> in economics, teaches at Columbia and writes the most lucid and compelling
> popular books on the economy one can find.
>
> Can't Bernie find some better economists?
>


Is there any concrete political or policy issue on which the advice of Paul
Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz would differ materially from the advice of
Michael Perelman?

I can't think of any.

That leaves us with the main complaint that PEN-L purists have with Krugman
and Stiglitz: that they are not writing columns and giving speeches calling
for the abolition of private property.

Words and rhetoric in other words, not any concrete ideas or policy
differences.

-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Bernie Sanders economic advisors

[raghu]

On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 2:23 PM, Eugene Coyle <e.co...@me.com> wrote:

> The first type of response, from the hipster element, has been a sneer.
>
> The second type of response, from Carrol Cox mainly, has been to support
> the idea but dismiss it because the political campaign to achieve it has
> not been described or specified.
>


Oh you forgot the third and most common type of response: it is impossible
to make any advance towards short working hours as long as the capitalist
system is in place. Until the working class recognizes this great truth, no
politics along these lines is even possible. So we all need to go back and
start organizing (:-).


But seriously, I don't think your criticism is entirely fair. Can you point
to one example of a "hipster" type on PEN-L who "sneered" at the idea of
reduced work hours? (Are there hipsters on PEN-L?)

It IS fair on your part to feel that the idea of reduced work hours does
not get the attention it perhaps deserves in terms of discussion time on
PEN-L. My own instinctive response to previous discussions of that topic
can be described as a "shrug" (as distinct from a "sneer"): after years of
observing the terms of this argument, I find that I wholeheartedly agree
with it in principle. Ok, but what then? The second type of response you
refer to above is not without merit and I submit it shows a certain lack of
imagination on the part of the promoters of this idea i.e. yourself, Tom
Walker et al.

You are also being unfair in another way: a campaign for a "30 hour work
week" is not the only way to achieve shorter work hours. Reforming and
tightening overtime policies would be a modest but important step in this
same direction. Legally mandated *regularization* of work hours for e.g.
retail and fast food employees would make the lives of lots of people much
better even without a shortening of the work week. An earlier retirement
age for soc sec and medicare eligibility would help too. Mandated vacation
time, sick leave can all help towards this same goal. Etc.

These things do get a fair amount of attention on PEN-L, but because they
are not explicitly stated as being about "shorter work hours", you don't
seem to credit those..
-raghu.





> Pen-l seems more interested in opining on the nice distinctions of policy
> on Syria, Turkey, Gaza, Israel, etc., without including much, if any,
> economic analysis.
>
> Gene
>
>
> > On Jan 9, 2016, at 10:27 AM, raghu <mragh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 4:21 PM, <ronpeters...@comcast.net> wrote:
> > David W Terrell says:
> >
> > In place of Clinton’s 200 economists, who is it that Sanders listens to?
> He mentions several. Paul Krugman, he says, would make a good secretary of
> the Treasury. Krugman won a Nobel Prize in economics, teaches at Princeton
> and writes for The New York Times. Sanders uses the advice of Joseph
> Stiglitz, who also won a Nobel in economics, teaches at Columbia and writes
> the most lucid and compelling popular books on the economy one can find.
> >
> > Can't Bernie find some better economists?
> >
> >
> > Is there any concrete political or policy issue on which the advice of
> Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz would differ materially from the advice of
> Michael Perelman?
> >
> > I can't think of any.
> >
> > That leaves us with the main complaint that PEN-L purists have with
> Krugman and Stiglitz: that they are not writing columns and giving speeches
> calling for the abolition of private property.
> >
> > Words and rhetoric in other words, not any concrete ideas or policy
> differences.
> >
> > -raghu.
> >
> >
> >
> >
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[Pen-l] "white privilege performance art"

[raghu]

Awesome description of the Oregon standoff - and one might argue - the
Donald Trump presidential campaign.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/what-s-changed
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Re: [Pen-l] Patients Struggle With High Drug Prices

[raghu]

On Thu, Dec 31, 2015 at 7:58 AM, Louis Proyect <l...@panix.com> wrote:

> Leukemia patient Michele Steele ’s doctor prescribed Imbruvica last year
> after she finished her fourth round of chemotherapy. Though shocked at
> the nearly $8,000 out-of-pocket expense for the year, [...]
>
>
[...] But it turned out the couple’s combined income of around $82,000 was
> just below the cutoff point.
>


I will take a contrarian view on this that is sure to be hated by my PEN-L
audience.

Anyone who thinks that being forced to pay $8000 out of a $82,000 income to
treat a life-threatening disease is a great human tragedy really needs to
go out more.
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Patients Struggle With High Drug Prices

[raghu]

On Thu, Dec 31, 2015 at 11:49 AM, Marv Gandall wrote:

> > On Dec 31, 2015, at 8:48 AM, raghu <mragh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I will take a contrarian view on this that is sure to be hated by my
> PEN-L audience.
> >
> > Anyone who thinks that being forced to pay $8000 out of a $82,000 income
> to treat a life-threatening disease is a great human tragedy really needs
> to go out more.
>
> This is certainly a contrarian - and wrongheaded - view. It’s common
> knowledge that most of that $8000 is pure profit for the drug companies who
> spend more on marketing than on research and development.
>


Oh, I don't disagree at all about the drug company profiteering. And not
only drug companies, insurers, hospitals and all kinds of for-profit
operators skim huge amounts of money out of the dysfunctional US health
care system.

There are many victims produced by the actions of these operators. Many of
those victims are homeless, black, undocumented, uninsured or
under-insured. These groups are probably largely invisible to the average,
liberal, middle-class NYT reader. But surely we on PEN-L can do better?

Someone reading this NYT article may be forgiven for thinking that the
worst thing that can happen to you under the US health care system is being
stuck with a copay that is about 10% of your annual income.

And that seems like a cruel joke considering the kind of outrages that
actually on everyday in this system. If you want to read about some true
horror stories, try this classic 2013 Time magazine piece: (the specific
practices outlined in this article are probably not possible anymore
because of Obamacare, but I suspect they have just been replaced by a
different set of hustles. Where are the journalists on this beat?)

http://www.uta.edu/faculty/story/2311/Misc/2013,2,26,MedicalCostsDemandAndGreed.pdf
snip
The $21,000 Heartburn Bill

One night last summer at her home near Stamford, Conn., a 64-year-old
former sales clerk whom I’ll call Janice S. felt chest pains. She was taken
four miles by ambulance to the emergency room at Stamford Hospital,
officially a nonprofit institution.

After about three hours of tests and some brief encounters with a doctor,
she was told she had indigestion and sent home.

That was the good news.

The bad news was the bill: $995 for the ambulance ride, $3,000 for the
doctors and $17,000 for the hospital — in sum, $21,000 for a false alarm.
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Re: [Pen-l] Patients Struggle With High Drug Prices

[raghu]

On Thu, Dec 31, 2015 at 2:01 PM, Charlie <charles1...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> Okay, just add 1) so couples with more typical incomes like $40,000 have
> no hope at all, and 2) this foundation charity for health care is an
> attempt to humanize things that only highlights the inhumanity.
>


That's kind of my point - surely it should be possible for these reporters
to find a better case study than this to showcase the effects of
pharma-industry price gouging?

To their credit, it looks like these reporters did try. They explicitly
state in the article that "For many of the poorest Americans, medicines are
covered by government programs or financial-assistance funds paid for by
drug companies."

I suspect that the problem is that to find the true horror stories, you
have to look beyond the "middle class" broadly defined; you have to look at
disadvantaged and marginalized populations, groups that are too often
completely overlooked by WSJ reporters.

-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] What It's Like to be Noam Chomsky's Assistant

[raghu]

Thank you for sharing this very interesting story.
--Raghu.

On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 3:36 PM, Michael Meeropol <mamee...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> My Chomsky story is quite old but worth re-telling.
>
> In 1974, my brother and I had just emerged from privacy to declare
> ourselves sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.  WE were suing Louis Nizer,
> whose book, The Implosion Conspiracy, was a best seller.   Nizer had used
> parts of our parents' prison correspondence without permission -- we owned
> the copyright to the published edition that he had quoted.  In his defense
> of our lawsuit he claimed "Fair Use" --- using parts of copyrighted
> material as part of an historic exercise.   Our response was to seek out
> historians (or well known students of history and the use of language) to
> argue that Nizer was making "unfair use" of the letters and that his book
> was not a serious work of history at all.  I had the idea to approach Noam
> Chomsky (who I had never met) based on his reputation as a serious
> intellectual and his work as revealed in American Power and the New
> Mandarins.
>
> I called him at home out of the blue and asked him if he would be willing
> to read THE IMPLOSION CONSPIRACY and give us the benefit of his thoughts as
> to whether it was a serious work of history or not.  He said, well, "I'm
> flying to Washington tomorrow, I guess I can read it on the plane."   (This
> is a 500 page book and the flight from Boston was probably no more than 2
> hours at the most -- now it's an hour and a half.).
>
> Well, he read, it, thought about it -- and within days we had received a
> notarized affidavit with a detailed analysis of why the book was not a
> serious work of history (his cover letter said -- "What a load of garbage.
> Hope this helps.")---The affidavit included a detailed analysis about how
> Nizer (an experienced trial lawyer) used different linguistic devices to
> privilege the testimony of the prosecution witnesses and denigrate the
> testimony of the defense witnesses in his narrative description of the
> trial.
>
> Our lawyers were blown away and determined on the spot to have him as a
> witness at the trial of the lawsuit.   Unfortunately, for a variety of
> reasons we settled out of court --- I still wish we'd had a trial!
>
> But that's neither here nor there.  My point is that Noam is incredibly
> generous with his time.   Annie and I have gotten to know him and Carol
> over the years and have visited off and on --- He says that he often stays
> up very late catching up on e-mails, even from high school students who
> want to know about "his philosophy" for a paper (!!).
>
> Reading the negative comments on the Chronicle Website make me very sad
> --- the very people who should be reading his stuff are steered away by
> right wing talking points about him being a self-hating Jew (ridiculously
> disgusting and totally wrong) and/or holocaust denier (the Faurisson issue
> --- all that proves is that he's a first Amendment fundamentalist -- and
> totally opposed to any government criminalizing belief -- no matter how
> bizarre and disgusting) or someone who has nothing good to say about the US
> (wrong -- it's the US government he criticizes).
>
> (sorry to vent --- I didn't get to the Chronicle website before they shut
> down the comments).
>
> Thanks to whoever posted it.   I don't read the Chronicle regularly and
> probably would have missed it.  (You can bet Noam would never have
> mentioned it.)
>
>
> By the way --- Noam once had an interesting experience with the Harvard
> Economics department.
>
> He had been brought in by Juliet Schor to talk about the responsibility of
> intellectuals and at the end of his talk, he brought up a subject (I'm sure
> it was tongue in cheek) that he was wondering about.  He noted that
> virtually the entire economics profession takes the David Ricardo view of
> comparative advantage and blows it up into the argument that free trade is
> the route to prosperity.   He says that his reading of history is that
> there is not one example of any country who followed great Britain into
> "development" that followed the free trade model.   From the American 19th
> century to the Japanese industrialization, these governments all interfered
> more or less with free trade.   He ended by saying, I'm sure there's
> something wrong with this analysis but that's the way I see the actual
> historical experience.  The way he reports it is all the economists there
> said his point was very interesting but no one took him up on the obvious
> invitation to correct the historical record as he had outlined it.
>
> He once had a talk with Paul Samuelson in which he said Sa

Re: [Pen-l] Fwd: Supreme Court Justices’ Comments Don’t Bode Well for Affirmative Action - The New York Times

[raghu]

I am not that convinced that affirmative action policies are very important
for the struggle for racial justice, so I am not that invested in the
outcome of this case.

(The NYT presents some evidence that these policies may affect the
proportion of admitted minority students, but the most dramatic examples
are from Berkeley and UCLA during a time the UC system was going through
dramatic financial crises, so I am skeptical about a direct causal
relationship there. The evidence from other states show some effect, but
not that great:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/06/24/us/affirmative-action-bans.html
)

Nevertheless, the comments of some of these judges are quite shocking.
Forget John Roberts, try Scalia for the most outrageous quotes.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/scalia-race-affirmative-action

"It does not benefit African-Americans to -- to get them into the
University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go
to a less-advanced school, a less -- a slower-track school where they do
well."

"Most of the black scientists in this country don't come from schools like
the University of Texas. They come from lesser schools where they do not
feel that they're -- that they're being pushed ahead in -- in classes that
are too -- too fast for them"


These quotes seem like they were pulled out of The Bell Curve. It is
interesting to imagine a university administrator making these kinds of
comments - they would be fired the next day and rightly so.
-raghu.






On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 9:04 AM, Louis Proyect <l...@panix.com> wrote:

>
> Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. questioned the value of diversity in
> at least some academic settings. “What unique perspective does a
> minority student bring to a physics class?” he asked.
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/us/politics/supreme-court-to-revisit-case-that-may-alter-affirmative-action.html
>
>
> WALTER BENN MICHAELS, AGAINST DIVERSITY
> http://newleftreview.org/II/52/walter-benn-michaels-against-diversity
>
>
> A critique of Walter Benn Michaels
> http://louisproyect.org/2009/09/04/a-critique-of-walter-benn-michaels/
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Re: [Pen-l] Systemic considerations underlying the Paris climate talks

[raghu]

On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 11:58 AM, Marv Gandall  wrote:

> On Dec 7, 2015, at 9:01 PM, Patrick Bond  wrote:
> > Marv, reports I'm getting - e.g. from Bolivia's former UN ambassador
> Pablo Solon (below) - are the contrary: elites gathered in Paris at the
> Conference of Polluters 21 are not willing to seriously consider phase-out.
> Not just in the North, especially in the BRICS, where the carbon-pricing
> process moves next:
> http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/04/climate-change-casino-carbon-trading-reborn-in-new-generation-mega-polluters/
>
> Interesting links. Thanks, Patrick. Of course, the bourgeoisie is not
> monolithic; as always, there are sectoral, geographic, and other divisions
> within it. The major extractors, polluters, and commodity producing nations
> are generally opposed to any meaningful curbs on emissions,



Actually even the major extractors may be coming around:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/even-exxonmobil-says-climate-change-is-real-so-why-wont-the-gop/2015/12/06/913e4b12-9aa6-11e5-b499-76cbec161973_story.html
---snip
No one would confuse the oil and gas giant with the Sierra Club. But if you
visit Exxon’s website  , you will find
that the company believes climate change is real, that governments should
take action to combat it and that the most sensible action would be a
revenue-neutral tax on carbon — in other words, a tax on oil, gas and coal,
with the proceeds returned to taxpayers for them to spend as they
choose.With no government action, Exxon experts told us during a visit to
The Post last week, average temperatures are likely to rise by a
catastrophic (my word, not theirs) 5 degrees Celsius, with rises of 6, 7 or
even more quite possible.

“A properly designed carbon tax can be predictable, transparent, and
comparatively simple to understand and implement,” Exxon says in a position
paper titled “Engaging on climate change.”

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[Pen-l] More Stand with Missouri - Yale edition

[raghu]

(I am sorry if this is uninteresting and/or off-topic for PEN-L. Just let
me know if that's the case and I will stop bothering the list with so many
messages on this topic.)

https://twitter.com/CoreyRobin/status/672959459526885377

Cory Robin, formerly a stalwart defender of student activists' demands
after Missouri thinks this incident "crosses the line".

More analysis here:
http://academeblog.org/2015/12/07/on-the-resignation-of-erika-christakis/
snip
And while I still believe that the Halloween controversy was more about
concerns over racial insensitivity than free speech, I find news of Erika
Christakis’s resignation deeply troubling.  In an email to the Washington
Post
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/12/04/with-her-words-this-instructor-helped-set-off-protests-over-race-and-a-debate-over-free-speech-now-shes-leaving-yale/>,
she wrote: “I have great respect and affection for my students, but I worry
that the current climate at Yale is not, in my view, conducive to the civil
dialogue and open inquiry required to solve our urgent societal problems.”
To be sure, Yale’s administration has publicly declared its support for the
Christakises and pledged that it would take no disciplinary action against
either of them, but Erika’s resignation from her teaching position (as a
non-tenured lecturer) cannot help but raise concern that the
administration’s behavior behind the scenes might have been less supportive
than its public stance.

Douglas Stone, a professor of physics at Yale, told media that Christakis’s
resignation from teaching was “a very disturbing development.  Last year,”
he wrote,

Erika Christakis’s classes were shopped by over 300 students and many who
wished to take them were turned away.  She has received truly exceptional
teaching evaluations.  This year she planned to teach additional sections
to handle the demand.  The attacks she has received, not just on her ideas,
but on her character and integrity, have led to the decision not to teach
…. Those who mounted the campaign against her have significantly reduced
educational choice for all Yale undergrads.

“Several undergraduates have told me in conversation or by email that they
feel scared to express their honest opinions relating to current events
that have raised racial issues because of the likely negative and
aggressive response of peers,” Stone added, suggesting that there may be
“substantial barriers to free exchange of views on these issues at Yale in
the current climate.”











-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Fwd: The Myth of Leftist Academia

[raghu]

Marshall Feldman offers a detailed rebuttal of the right-wing caricature of
academia as hotbeds of leftist radicalism.

This caricature was never really true, and Marshall offers interesting
anecdotal evidence against it. And in the last 20 years or so, the
corporatization and neoliberalization project have gained tremendous
momentum which makes suggestion of radicalism in academia seem somewhat
ridiculous.

What is, however, true is that US universities do nurture a certain kind of
moderate liberalism, and even tolerate - upto a point - certain types of
radicalism. There is lots of evidence for this. See e.g.:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/liberal-bias-or-neoliberal-bias-neil-grosss-why-are-professors-liberal-and-why-do-conservatives-care

There is an interesting theory for why it makes structural sense for
academics to be slightly liberal: to keep capitalism dynamic. Capitalists
want workers to be dynamic, creative and critical, but not too critical
that they may start questioning and challenging the power structure itself.
In other words, for universities to optimally serve capitalist society,
they have to maintain a delicate balancing act.

I find this theory superficially appealing. I'd love to hear comments.
Here's a good statement of this theory:
http://www.aaup.org/article/small-fish-big-pond
---snip
Indeed, a slightly liberal university offers compelling advantages to
business, so long as it is firmly contained within a larger conservative
milieu. And a slightly liberal university system in a largely conservative
political-economic and cultural milieu is exactly what the United States
has.

I underscore “slightly.” One of the more striking aspects of Gross’s book
is just how low the “liberal” bar is set. Gross lumps together “radicals,
progressives, and center-lefters” as the “left-liberal flank” of US
universities and concludes that 54 percent of the professoriate belongs
there. Of this group, less than 10 percent are self-identified “radicals,”
clustered almost entirely in a few humanities and social science fields. A
somewhat larger contingent, 14 percent of the “left-liberal flank,” are
described by Gross as “center-left,” a group that includes those who
typically vote Democratic but may oppose abortion, same-sex marriage,
immigration, or affirmative action and favor the death penalty. A “liberal”
tent this large suggests that party affiliation, essential to Gross’s data
analysis, is a rather weak indicator of “politics” in a country that has
only two parties, practically speaking.

My conclusions are thus quite different from Gross’s. The question of
professorial politics cannot be separated from the larger political ecology
of the United States and how a liberal university can be made congruent
with the interests of corporate elites even when the content of the
challenges posed by individual professors is incongruent. Neither
functionalism nor conspiracy theory are required to explain how dissidence
might be *hegemonized *by dominant culture, as Frank and others have shown.
Hegemonization also explains why the economic challenges to the university
have, in general, been so much more successful than the overtly political
ones: the elite hegemonic imperative is to limit the liberal university,
not to destroy it. For this reason—and certainly this won’t come as news to
most readers— our politics cannot remain within the university only, where
it is effectively contained.












On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 7:58 AM, Marshall Feldman  wrote:

> What gets me about the myth is the complete disregard for the 800-pound
> gorillas in the room.
>
>- How many universities have business schools but not even a single
>course in running non-profits or workers' cooperatives, let alone how to do
>good (centralized or decentralized) economic planning?
>- How many have departments of government or "political science," with
>a sanguine view of the state, but no courses, let alone departments of
>anarchism, self-management, or syndicalism.
>- How many universities are beholding to corporate interests for 50%
>or more of their physical plant, as even a casual noting of the names of
>university buildings readily attests.
>- How many are more concerned about their multi-million dollar sports
>business than academics?
>- How many "land grant" colleges today ignore the enabling
>legislation's intent that they provide a liberal education to working-class
>students, with "liberal education" understood as education suitable for
>free persons, and instead focus on what's "practical and applied" and leads
>to jobs in the corporate economy, justifying this orientation by the
>Morrill Act's requirement that participating states offer instruction in
>"agriculture and mechanic arts," when Morrill himself said this was
>included just as a way "to tempt" students to attend college at a time when
>

Re: [Pen-l] Fwd: Book review – “My Turn” by Doug Henwood — Crooked Timber

[raghu]

Nice cover. And excellent title.

(Don't have much more to add not having read the book (yet)..)
-raghu.





On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 7:18 AM, Louis Proyect <l...@panix.com> wrote:

>
>
> http://crookedtimber.org/2015/12/02/book-review-my-turn-by-doug-henwood/
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Re: [Pen-l] Princeton protests: misplaced priorities?

[raghu]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 9:45 AM, Robert Naiman wrote:

> I agree 100% that teachers shouldn't be fired for expressing their views
> in class, even if they're racists, even if they're KKK, even if they're
> Nazis. First Amendment, academic freedom, until death.
>

Actually, I wouldn't go that far at all. If this instructor at Kansas was
out there spouting white-supremacist theories or something like that, I'd
totally understand students demanding that she be disciplined or terminated.

This is not about some abstract "free speech" principle; rather the merits
of the case simply don't support calls for this instructor's termination.



But: I think it's important to recognize that that might not be the entire
> story.
>

That's completely irrelevant. This instructor may very well be an awful
person, guilty of all kinds of misconduct and may very well deserve to be
fired. If so, let's see that case being made and we can have that
discussion.

Right now the issue is a different one: should this instructor be fired for
the reasons these students want her to be fired? I think the answer to that
is clearly no. And the students behavior in this case is extremely
problematic.
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Princeton protests: misplaced priorities?

[raghu]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 11:13 AM, Robert Naiman wrote:

> 1. That's not what I mean by saying that it's not the whole story. I mean
> that the students might be raising and giving life to legitimate issues,
> even if their demand that the instructor be fired is unjust.
>


Maybe, but the way they are going about it is very problematic.





> 2. How can you say that it's a free speech issue, and yet say that it
> wouldn't be a free speech issue if the person were a Nazi or a white
> supremacist? Either it's a First Amendment issue or it isn't, either it's a
> free speech issue or it isn't, either it's an issue of academic freedom or
> it isn't. If it is, then it doesn't matter what the political content is,
> right? If you wouldn't defend her if she were a Nazi or an open KKK
> admirer, then it's a slam dunk that what the students are doing is fair
> game.
>


It all comes back to drawing lines, doesn't it? You don't shout "Fire!" in
a crowded concert hall, and you don't spout racist propaganda in a
classroom without consequences. And yes, you do have to make intelligent,
subjective, case-by-case judgments about what constitutes "racist
propaganda". So what?

I thought it was only intellectually lazy libertarians who resort to
simplistic and absolute rules without making allowance for specifics of a
situation and historical context..

-raghu.





On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 11:04 AM, raghu <mragh...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 9:45 AM, Robert Naiman wrote:
>
>> I agree 100% that teachers shouldn't be fired for expressing their views
>> in class, even if they're racists, even if they're KKK, even if they're
>> Nazis. First Amendment, academic freedom, until death.
>>
>
> Actually, I wouldn't go that far at all. If this instructor at Kansas was
> out there spouting white-supremacist theories or something like that, I'd
> totally understand students demanding that she be disciplined or terminated.
>
> This is not about some abstract "free speech" principle; rather the merits
> of the case simply don't support calls for this instructor's termination.
>
>
>
> But: I think it's important to recognize that that might not be the entire
>> story.
>>
>
> That's completely irrelevant. This instructor may very well be an awful
> person, guilty of all kinds of misconduct and may very well deserve to be
> fired. If so, let's see that case being made and we can have that
> discussion.
>
> Right now the issue is a different one: should this instructor be fired
> for the reasons these students want her to be fired? I think the answer to
> that is clearly no. And the students behavior in this case is extremely
> problematic.
> -raghu.
>
>
>
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Re: [Pen-l] Princeton protests: misplaced priorities?

[raghu]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 8:51 AM, Robert Naiman wrote:

> Here's someone offering a different perspective on "free speech
> absolutism." I offer this as someone very sympathetic to free speech
> absolutism and very sympathetic to Greenwald in particular. But I think
> there's something to be said for having 2% skepticism here, leaving the
> door open to the possibility that free speech absolutism is not the whole
> story.
>


I am afraid I don't see the relevance. Can you explain more what you are
trying to say?
-raghu.





>
> Greenwald’s Free Speech Absolutism and Twitter’s Foley Ban
>
> https://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2014/08/24/greenwalds-free-speech-absolutism-and-twitters-foley-ban/
>
>
> Robert Naiman
> Policy Director
> Just Foreign Policy
> www.justforeignpolicy.org
> nai...@justforeignpolicy.org
> (202) 448-2898 x1
>
> On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 11:14 AM, raghu <mragh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Carrol Cox tries to pass off his lack of reading comprehension as
>> profound insight. If he had actually bothered reading this discussion, he
>> would have known that the idea of the Princeton (and Yale and other)
>> protesters "standing with Missouri" is one that is disputed by exactly no
>> one. That idea was in fact the explicit starting point of this discussion.
>>
>> The real question is what exactly does it mean to "stand with Missouri"?
>> Is that unambiguously a good thing?
>>
>> If you want an intelligent take on this, try Corey Robin, not Carrol Cox:
>> http://coreyrobin.com/2015/11/21/what-we-owe-the-students-at-princeton/
>>
>> TL;DR version: thanks to the Princeton protesters, we are talking about
>> Wilson's repulsive racism, and also about how such ideologies are deeply
>> embedded in Princeton's history. I think he gives the protesters too much
>> credit, but his piece is definitely worth reading.
>> -raghu.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Nov 21, 2015 at 11:19 PM, Maxim Linchits <mlinch...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I see that I've been  ignorant, but there is so much to me than that
>>> little passage.   I'll do work twice as hard to become more aware, and then
>>> I hope we can put this shameful episode behind us. Please understand and
>>> forgive me.
>>>
>>> -Original Message-
>>> From: pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu [mailto:
>>> pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu] On Behalf Of Carrol Cox
>>> Sent: Saturday, November 21, 2015 11:30 PM
>>> To: 'Progressive Economics' <pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu>
>>> Subject: Re: [Pen-l] Princeton protests: misplaced priorities?
>>>
>>> Maxim Linchits writes:
>>>
>>> Great find! It’s a perfect illustration of how American politics has
>>> become completely unhinged from reality. Liberal “anti-racism” is now
>>> essentially the struggle for political correctness, i.e. a war on symbols
>>> rather than substance. What other issues are they working on these days -
>>> writing angry letters in response some insensitive comments by Bill
>>> O’Reilly? Have they concluded their campaign to condemn Kanye West
>>> Halloween costumes? They need to save some of that outrage for real issues.
>>> With many people it seldom gets beyond “I can’t believe what I just heard,
>>> that’s so racist.” This is not a struggle against racism; it’s a struggle
>>> to save your own precious little ears and eyes.  [clip]
>>>
>>> ===
>>>
>>> Maxim writes out of sheer ignorance of how movements beging & grow.
>>>
>>> Every single one of the campus demonstrations, regardless of specific
>>> demands has had one and only one fundamental content: We are with you
>>> Missouri!
>>>
>>> Until you have grasped this you have nothing of interest to say about
>>> U.S. politics at this time.
>>>
>>> Carrol
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
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Re: [Pen-l] More "Stand with Missouri"

[raghu]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 1:06 PM, Robert Naiman <nai...@justforeignpolicy.org
> wrote:

> But the graduate students who wrote this letter _are_ raising
> institutional questions. You might not agree with their critique, but that
> is different from saying that they are not talking about institutions. They
> are, indisputably, talking about institutions.
>
>
> https://medium.com/@schumaal/what-follows-is-a-letter-collectively-written-by-the-students-currently-enrolled-in-coms-930-at-the-8f4914d4bbd5#.ou1d31sq2
>
>

Please don't lose sight of the main objective of these students' actions:
they are trying to get this instructor fired because she is insufficiently
sensitive to their feelings on some subjects. Read this for all the ugly
details:
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2015/nov/20/ku-communications-prof-who-used-n-word-class-discu/

And oh yeah, the students' open letter cites the notorious *Garcetti v.
Ceballos *decision in support of their petition.

This is a witch-hunt, with what should be disturbing similarities to what a
very different interest group did to Steven Salaita. Phyllis Wise says
"civility", these grad students says "hostile learning environment". The
effect is the same.


-snip
Graduate students gathered with other communications faculty and
administrators for a town hall of their own on Monday, to which Quenette
was asked not to come.

At the next class meeting, on Tuesday, the graduate students demanded that
Quenette read aloud their letter, “An Open Letter Calling for the
Termination of Dr. Andrea Quenette for Racial Discrimination.”

Quenette said she began reading the letter but stopped partway through,
stating that there were legal implications and that she would not read any
more.

She then listened as some students read personal statements aloud.

“I feel terrible, upset and sad that I had hurt their feelings and made
them feel uncomfortable, because I do care about them as people,” Quenette
said. “I felt frustrated by some of the things written in the letter that I
don’t remember happening like they described.”

Quenette had prepared a statement of her own to clarify her comments and
apologize.

But she said several students said they didn’t want to hear her apology.

“Someone said, ‘No, this is over,’ and they all got up and left,” Quenette
said.

Schumacher said students insisted Quenette read their letter aloud “to make
sure that she got it.”

She described Quenette as calloused, dismissive and scoffing despite “pain”
visible on students’ faces. Schumacher said it became clear that Quenette
still was not respecting the students, so they told her they did not want
to hear her statement and left.





-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] More "Stand with Missouri"

[raghu]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 12:55 PM, Maxim Linchits <mlinch...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> The “antiracists” have more power than they let on. This is almost
> certainly due to the fact that their activism is completely in sync with
> the dominant ideological framework: zealously regulate individuals and
> words and ignore institutions and actions.
>


Exactly right.
-raghu.
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[Pen-l] More "Stand with Missouri"

[raghu]

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/11/23/u-kansas-professor-leave-after-comments-race-result-5-complaints
-snip
Several administrators have lost their jobs in the last month amid campus
protests over issues of race. Now a faculty member at the University of
Kansas finds her job status uncertain after five graduate students filed
complaints against her and organized a public campaign for her to be fired
-- over comments she made in discussing recent campus protests.

[...]

An open letter calling for Quenette's dismissal says that she said: “As a
white woman I just never have seen the racism. … It’s not like I see
‘nigger’ spray painted on walls. …” Via email Quenette said that she did
use the slur, but did so in comparing the University of Kansas to the
University of Missouri, where many students reported seeing and hearing the
word -- and citing that as an example of the discrimination they face.
Quenette stressed that she never directed the word at anyone and used it as
an example of a slur, not to hurt anyone.

Quenette also raised questions about a complaint made by many black
students at Kansas: that the discrimination they face is one reason why
their graduation rates lag those of other groups. [...]

While the exact phrasing is in dispute, Quenette and her critics agree that
she questioned the discrimination explanation for the graduation rate
variance, and said that academic preparedness might also be a cause.

Reaction to the class session was intense and immediate. Five students
filed complaints with the university, charging Quenette with creating a
hostile environment.
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[Pen-l] T Jeff is next!

[raghu]

Now this is getting interesting. Unlike Corey Robin, I am not willing to
give the Princeton protesters all the credit for this, but the debate is
unquestionably a good thing.

Annette Gordon-Reed (the famous biographer of Sally Hemings) has an
interesting take at the end of the article:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/11/23/thomas-jefferson-next-target-students-who-question-honors-figures-who-were-racists
snip
Paul Finkelman, author of *Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in
the Age of Jefferson *
(Routledge), said that he couldn't judge how colleges should deal with
Jefferson statues, but he said the history is clear.

"I don't think you go around honoring people for behavior that was truly
awful, and Jefferson's relationship with slavery and race was truly awful,
even from his own times," Finkelman said. "This is not looking back from
now," he stressed.

[...]

Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of history and the Charles Warren
Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, is the author of
two books -- *Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy
*
(University of Virginia Press) and *The Hemingses of Monticello: An
American Family *
(W. W. Norton) -- that have criticized previous generations of scholars for
ignoring evidence or downplaying the story of Jefferson's relationship with
one of his slaves.

Via email, Gordon-Reed said that she didn't think Jefferson statues should
be taken down. Further, she said it is important to distinguish Jefferson
(whatever his record on slavery) from figures associated with the
Confederacy or Jim Crow, for whom there may not be any reason for honors on
campuses to continue.

"I understand why some people think his statues should be removed, but not
all controversial figures of the past are created equal," Gordon-Reed said.
"I think Jefferson’s contributions to the history of the United States
outweigh the problems people have with aspects of his life. He is just too
much a part of the American story … to pretend that he was not there. This
conversation about statues and symbols really got going with calls to take
symbols and figures from the Confederacy out of the public sphere. Then it
shifted to every famous person who was an enslaver and/or white
supremacist, basically letting the Confederates off the hook. That's a lot
of people to be disappeared. There is every difference in the world between
being one of the *founders* of the United States and being a part of group
of people who fought to destroy the United States."

She added: "It’s a line-drawing function, but we draw lines all the time.
Statues and buildings for Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun? No. Statues
and buildings for Thomas Jefferson? Yes, but with interpretation and
conversations about all the meanings of his life and influences -- good and
bad. The words of the Declaration of Independence that blacks have made use
of over the years and Monticello, his home, a slave plantation that has now
become a site for substantive discussions about race and slavery, exist
together as a part of our history, just as he was. He drafted the
declaration, he was a president, he founded a university, he championed
religious freedom. The best of his ideals continue to influence and move
people. The statues should be a stimulus for considering all these matters
at William & Mary and the University of Missouri."
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Re: [Pen-l] Princeton protests: misplaced priorities?

[raghu]

Carrol Cox tries to pass off his lack of reading comprehension as profound
insight. If he had actually bothered reading this discussion, he would have
known that the idea of the Princeton (and Yale and other) protesters
"standing with Missouri" is one that is disputed by exactly no one. That
idea was in fact the explicit starting point of this discussion.

The real question is what exactly does it mean to "stand with Missouri"? Is
that unambiguously a good thing?

If you want an intelligent take on this, try Corey Robin, not Carrol Cox:
http://coreyrobin.com/2015/11/21/what-we-owe-the-students-at-princeton/

TL;DR version: thanks to the Princeton protesters, we are talking about
Wilson's repulsive racism, and also about how such ideologies are deeply
embedded in Princeton's history. I think he gives the protesters too much
credit, but his piece is definitely worth reading.
-raghu.




On Sat, Nov 21, 2015 at 11:19 PM, Maxim Linchits <mlinch...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> I see that I've been  ignorant, but there is so much to me than that
> little passage.   I'll do work twice as hard to become more aware, and then
> I hope we can put this shameful episode behind us. Please understand and
> forgive me.
>
> -Original Message-
> From: pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu [mailto:
> pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu] On Behalf Of Carrol Cox
> Sent: Saturday, November 21, 2015 11:30 PM
> To: 'Progressive Economics' <pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu>
> Subject: Re: [Pen-l] Princeton protests: misplaced priorities?
>
> Maxim Linchits writes:
>
> Great find! It’s a perfect illustration of how American politics has
> become completely unhinged from reality. Liberal “anti-racism” is now
> essentially the struggle for political correctness, i.e. a war on symbols
> rather than substance. What other issues are they working on these days -
> writing angry letters in response some insensitive comments by Bill
> O’Reilly? Have they concluded their campaign to condemn Kanye West
> Halloween costumes? They need to save some of that outrage for real issues.
> With many people it seldom gets beyond “I can’t believe what I just heard,
> that’s so racist.” This is not a struggle against racism; it’s a struggle
> to save your own precious little ears and eyes.  [clip]
>
> ===
>
> Maxim writes out of sheer ignorance of how movements beging & grow.
>
> Every single one of the campus demonstrations, regardless of specific
> demands has had one and only one fundamental content: We are with you
> Missouri!
>
> Until you have grasped this you have nothing of interest to say about U.S.
> politics at this time.
>
> Carrol
>
>
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Re: [Pen-l] Princeton protests: misplaced priorities?

[raghu]

On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 3:27 PM, Robert Naiman <nai...@justforeignpolicy.org
> wrote:

> For example: as someone who has lived in Champaign-Urbana much of my adult
> life, I can see how someone far away might see the struggle over the Chief
> Illiniwek mascot as a struggle over a mere symbol.
>


You raise a good point. I certainly do not want to trivialize all issues
regarding offensive symbols in general. I do however, believe that some
offensive symbols (e.g. the Confederate flag) are more offensive than
others (Woodrow Wilson's name).

(For what it is worth, I'd put the Chief Illiniwek alongside the
Confederate flag. I have been following the Salaita affair fairly closely
and I have come to learn that the same repulsive characters who have lined
up against Salaita also happen to love the Chief mascot. Funny how that
works..)

I fully understand that this is a subjective judgment and perhaps even an
arbitrary one. But what choice do we have? We have to choose our battles,
which means we do have to make such distinctions.

This entire country was built on the blood and tears of enslaved Africans,
dispossessed Native Americans and other groups. If you go looking for
offensive symbols, you will find them literally everywhere.

E.g. we are all walking around with pictures of slave owners in our
wallets. (And the one guy who was not a slave owner, they want to replace
his picture with someone else's..) What are we going to do?

To me the most important criterion for whether some such symbol is worth
caring about is its present-day significance and local context. In Wilson's
case, I just haven't heard a convincing story or context that makes me want
to care.

Maybe as Carrol Cox implies, that is just my own ignorance of the local
context. Or, just maybe, some of these wars over symbols really do reflect
political correctness taken too far.
-raghu.






> But as someone living here, it's painfully obvious that "the past didn't
> go anywhere, it's not even past." It's totally obvious that the resistance
> to getting rid of the Chief mascot was deeply intertwined with majority
> investment in a particular way of seeing the indigenous population of the
> United States, an investment that has tangible negative consequences for
> their descendants who are alive right now.
>
> With that experience, I can empathize, for example, with why some students
> at Amherst would demand getting rid of a mascot named after a guy who
> advocated giving small pox-infested blankets to the indigenous population,
> even if that is not why the school was named after him.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Robert Naiman
> Policy Director
> Just Foreign Policy
> www.justforeignpolicy.org
> nai...@justforeignpolicy.org
> (202) 448-2898 x1
>
> On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 3:10 PM, raghu <mragh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 3:00 AM, Joseph Catron <jncat...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Personally, I often share Raghu's instincts when it comes to challenging
>>> historical figures and symbols, from Woodrow Wilson to the Confederate
>>> flag. But then, I'm white and none of these things feel like attacks on me
>>> or my community. That's not an insignificant distinction.
>>>
>>
>>
>> I'd say Wilson's name and the Confederate flag are not quite comparable.
>>
>> Wilson's racism is not the reason his name is on those buildings and
>> centers.
>>
>> The Confederate flag on the other hand was specifically put on those
>> state flags relatively recently as an explicit and affirmative assertion of
>> white supremacy.
>>
>> I think that context matters.
>> -raghu.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
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Re: [Pen-l] Princeton protests: misplaced priorities?

[raghu]

On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 9:29 AM, Maxim Linchits <mlinch...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Great find! It’s a perfect illustration of how American politics has
> become completely unhinged from reality. Liberal “anti-racism” is now
> essentially the struggle for political correctness, i.e. a war on symbols
> rather than substance. What other issues are they working on these days -
> writing angry letters in response some insensitive comments by Bill
> O’Reilly?
>



Maxim,
Thanks for the note. It is good to know that I am not the only one who
finds these things disturbing.

Sometimes it gets much worse than just a war on symbols. It can turn into a
witch-hunt or censorship. Like what happened to this guy at Missouri. He
arguably made a mistake, but the angry reactions to him seem way over the
top:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/11/12/grow-up-tweets-legendary-mizzou-football-star-to-students-who-hounded-hero-professor/

Or this from last year:
http://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/university-of-iowa-artist-behind-kkk-statue-discusses-fear-of-art-20150224

-raghu.






> Have they concluded their campaign to condemn Kanye West Halloween
> costumes? They need to save some of that outrage for real issues. With many
> people it seldom gets beyond “I can’t believe what I just heard, that’s so
> racist.” This is not a struggle against racism; it’s a struggle to save
> your own precious little ears and eyes.
>
>
>
> Political correctness has it’s value of course. Living in Russia, where PC
> is nonexistent, I sort of wish that people here didn’t blurt out the first
> racist idiocy to come into their heads, or at least felt some shame
> afterwards. But in the US the, elevated importance of PC over all other
> issues is truly bizarre. It always reminds me of the example of John
> McCain. Killing scores of Vietnamese from the sky is nothing to be ashamed
> of. Calling them “gooks”? Now you crossed a line!
>
>
>
> End rant
>
>
>
> *From:* pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu [mailto:
> pen-l-boun...@lists.csuchico.edu] *On Behalf Of *raghu
> *Sent:* Thursday, November 19, 2015 7:28 PM
> *To:* Progressive Economics <PEN-L@lists.csuchico.edu>
> *Subject:* [Pen-l] Princeton protests: misplaced priorities?
>
>
>
> I don't know what to make of the actions of student protesters at
> Princeton and elsewhere.
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/nyregion/princeton-students-hold-sit-in-on-racial-injustice.html?_r=0
>
> On the one hand, it is heartening to see student activism like this.
> Apparently inspired by events at Missouri, these events bring attention to
> racism and prejudice that would otherwise go unnoticed.
>
> But on the other hand, look at these demands!
>
> "Change the title of those who oversee its residential colleges to “head”
> from “master”"?
>
> "Removal of Woodrow Wilson’s name from anything named after him at the
> university"?
>
> That's it???
>
> Nothing about opening the doors of that exalted institution to a larger
> number and more diverse group of students?
>
> Nothing about ending legacy admissions?
>
> Nothing about the obscene size of Princeton's endowment fund?
>
> Nothing about Princeton's part in EdX and the role the latter is playing
> in undermining public funding of higher education in places like San Jose
> State U?
>
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Re: [Pen-l] Princeton protests: misplaced priorities?

[raghu]

On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 3:00 AM, Joseph Catron <jncat...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Personally, I often share Raghu's instincts when it comes to challenging
> historical figures and symbols, from Woodrow Wilson to the Confederate
> flag. But then, I'm white and none of these things feel like attacks on me
> or my community. That's not an insignificant distinction.
>


I'd say Wilson's name and the Confederate flag are not quite comparable.

Wilson's racism is not the reason his name is on those buildings and
centers.

The Confederate flag on the other hand was specifically put on those state
flags relatively recently as an explicit and affirmative assertion of white
supremacy.

I think that context matters.
-raghu.
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Re: [Pen-l] Princeton protests: misplaced priorities?

[raghu]

Oh, I am sure it all makes perfect sense in whatever planet Carrol Cox
lives on.

After all, Princeton is located on a remote Pacific island and events on
that campus surely have no conceivable bearing on events in the US or the
rest of the world.

Also, by the same impeccable reasoning, if you don't live in Ferguson, MO,
you cannot have any legitimate position on the shooting of Michael Brown.

And if you do not work for WalMart, you cannot have a legitimate opinion on
the struggle of the workers there for better working conditions.

Etc. Or something.
-raghu.





On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 7:20 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenw...@panix.com> wrote:

>
> > On Nov 19, 2015, at 6:25 PM, Carrol Cox <cb...@ilstu.edu> wrote:
> >
> > Anyone on this list who has nothing better to do than squawk about some
> Ivy League protesters has obviously no priorities at all, misplaced or
> otherwise.
>
> Says a guy who knows nothing about the Ivy League.
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