Jah Wobble, one of the most amazing musicians to come out of the United Kingdom in the last thirty years, has recently had his autobiography released in the United States. I managed to get a copy, found it was “a cracking good read” as they said in a bygone era, and decided to post this review in an attempt to get more people to read it, not least because I think many of you would enjoy his music if you heard it.
To give you a brief synopsis of Jah Wobble’s life, John Wardle was born in the grim postwar environment of Stepney, East London in the year 1958. He grew up in a working-class family and was working irregularly as a laborer until music and luck changed his life. He was a friend of two members of the Sex Pistols when the punk rock fad broke in 1977, and in fact his “Jah Wobble” nickname was given him by John Simon Ritchie, generally known as Sid Vicious, as a drunken mangling of “John Wardle.”
In 1979, having played bass for maybe a month, his childhood friend, drinking buddy, and fellow troublemaker John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon recruited Wobble into his new post-Sex Pistols art-rock band, Public Image Ltd., the infamous “PiL.” From PiL’s first record, Metal Box, and Wobble’s subsequent departure, it was a short step to making a record with Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebzeit of the German band Can, playing on reggae songs, and cranking out a series of increasingly jaw-dropping solo albums.
All told, Wobble went from being a non-player to a name-dropped pro in virtually no time at all, and by the mid-1980s, had produced twelve records in eight years. Then, burned out on the financial chicanery of the music business, with a wife and daughter to support, and increasingly befuddled by drug and alcohol problems, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous and got a day job. For most musicians, that’s where the music ends—they get “real jobs,” write off their chances of ever doing a world tour, and leave the stage and studio behind.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once pontificated that “There are no second acts in American lives. Wobble’s a Brit, so he’s allowed a second act if he wants one.
The first thing Wobble did after turning his back on the music industry was to sell his bass and put the money through his wife's mail-slot while he went off to get sober. The second thing he did was get a job. His ‘straight jobs’ lasted several years and included stints as a truck driver, warehouse manager (fired for punching out the owner’s obnoxious son), and a term on the London Underground which has attained near-legendary status. He worked day shifts and night shifts and played in bands with friends in his off-time.
In 1988, a sober and divorced Wobble fought his way back into the music business on a full-time basis with Without Judgment, a powerful live album mostly recorded on his vacation time from the London Underground. With a lot of work and a lot of luck, he embarked on what was almost an entirely new career at the head of the globe-trotting Invaders of the Heart, the ensemble he would captain for about eight years.
Following that, he started his own record label 30 Hertz Records, released two albums of poetry set to music (The Inspiration of William Blake and The Celtic Poets, both of which I consider essential listening), a requiem mass, a string quartet, collaborations with Laotian and Chinese musicians, remarried, released at least one album per year for fifteen years, had two sons. In 1999 sadly, the Wardle family was eventually forced to move out of his beloved East London, squeezed out between gentrification driven by New Labor and the ethnic ghettos. In 2010, now based in the north of England, Jah Wobble is still at the top of his game and hunting down new challenges with the intensity of Blake’s burning-eyed tiger of the night.
Where Memoirs Of A Geezer is a world-beater is that the geezer himself gives you a fearless moral inventory (to use his own phrase), well-laced with sarcasm and dry wit, of who he is, where he comes from, and all the wheres, whos, and whyfores of his life.
Some of the story is not what one would expect. Wobble is, if nothing else, a man who keeps himself in tune with his surroundings, and he writes extensively about the context in which he moves. The first third of the book includes a detailed discussion of Wobble’s family, the harsh life of postwar Britain (wartime food rationing only ended in the UK in 1954), how Blitz-ruins still littered the city blocks, his struggles in a Catholic school where corporal punishment was more common than pencils, the punks-vs.-teddy boys brawls, police corruption and abuse, and the generally miserable life of working-class youth. The later chapters include a scrutiny of the economic and cultural changes in his beloved East London borough, including the influx of Bangladeshis, violent Islam, the crack epidemic that began in 1992, and so on. This is the sort of detail that doesn’t make it into most books about musicians.
It’s just plain fun to read, in a way that doesn’t depend on the reader admiring the subject. You can easily imagine being parked next to Wobble in a pub somewhere, as he tosses out aphorisms, jokes, bits of pub-booth philosophy, musings about music, and stories from his past over a cup of tea (having been sober for a quarter century).
There are a few self-deprecating tales of the sort of chemically-induced excess that fuel the music industry, it is true, but Wobble puts it into a new light. As he tells it, he grew up in a working-class, East London environment where everyone drank from an early age (his Christmas encounter with a bottle of chartreuse at the age of thirteen is amusing, but rather ominous), and where people split their home lives between their flats and their pub.
Wobble is certainly a man of strongly-held opinions, and not above making a stand on principle. As with most Britons, race mattered less than class or economic standing. He didn’t like Thatcherism and its callous disdain for the working classes, or New Labor and it’s oily institutionalized greed, and he certainly doesn’t much like most “toffs” or “public-school boys,” whether politicians or Peter Gabriel, which is understandable since most of the grief in Wobble’s life, came directly or indirectly at the hands of the Old Etonian clique who dominate the UK’s leadership. He finds race and racism depressing. It must have come as quite a shock to the man who once berated white skinheads for their “Paki-bashing” to himself be assaulted and hospitalized by a mob of Bangladeshis in his own old neighborhood of Tower Hamlets twenty years later.
It is particularly refreshing to have a book written by the author as an honest and unpretentious autobiography, without heavy-handed ghost-writing or the elaborate reworking a PR machine. Wobble is perfectly capable of writing on his own—he has written book reviews for the UK’s Independent newspaper for many years, and has a BA in Humanities from Birckbeck College—and this book certainly reads like it was written by the geezer himself.
If the book has a central theme, it is “I am a geezer (a regular guy) and I come from somewhere.”
I would like to close with an observation. Wobble claims to have introduced a young Sting to reggae music in the late 70s, while working as a roadie for Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, with whom the Police were touring. Their paths then diverged; Sting earned millions of dollars and global name recognition, and has sold millions of records since. Wobble, admittedly, made a living but didn’t do as well. The difference is that Sting has to play “Roxanne” every night, else the promoters or the audience will shoot him, while Wobble hasn’t had to play a song off of Metal Box in three decades.
That is a kind of freedom that most musicians would deeply appreciate.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Glenn Beck, The World's Greatest Authority on Slavery
I saw a clip on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown program last night that made me want to bang my head on the table, even though my head already hurt.
He played a clip of Glenn Beck, America’s own Roderick Spode, discussing slavery. I reproduce Beck’s monologue below under the Fair Use doctrine:
Now I know from having heard Beck’s monologues, rants, sermons, and Jimmy Swaggart-style tearful breakdowns that he really just doesn’t know much about history. He’s demonstrated his remarkable gullibility and willingness to make stuff up more times than I can count. Case in point, his disingenuous claim that Thomas Jefferson intended the US to be run on Christian principles by citing one-countem-one example of a document dated "in the year of our Lord Christ.” Never mind that this document was a pre-printed form issued by the Dutch government, not the United States, and which Jefferson merely filled in.
As a side note, one would think that a nation run with Biblical law and Protestant customs well in mind would have had a rather more ‘old-fashioned’ take on one Joseph Smith, founder of Beck’s own Mormon religion. Old-fashioned, perhaps, in the sense of John Calvin’s regime in Geneva, under whose authority the philosopher and astronomer Michael Servetus was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1553.
Still, this comment about slavery really pushes the envelope—but then again, when you’re in the middle of a midterm election season that many conservatives see as a war for the preservation of civilization, and if you want to keep your audience well-fed on populist bile, and if you’re really just not that bright to begin with, you have to be able to take any topic and relate it back to conservative talking points. It’s Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with history, politics, economics, philosophy, religion, you name it.
In typical Beck fashion, he manages to avoid any specifics—he speaks of court orders and the like. What court orders? Without data, it’s just hot air from another right-wing blowhard. Then again, most if not all of what Beck says, week in and week out, probably can’t survive facts.
The fact is, slavery is a result of the free market. More precisely, it is the product of what we today would consider to be a part of the free market, since the concept of the free market didn’t really exist in the modern sense in the early 17th Century.
Many of the colonies that later became the United States were the result of land grants by European governments, made to aristocrats, speculators, and other parties (what we might term venture capitalists), by which the rulers hoped to turn a profit from all this trackless wilderness. William Penn, for example, was given what is now Pennsylvania (and much else besides) as repayment of a 16,000-pound debt floated to Charles II, the perpetually profligate king of England. Never mind that Penn didn’t want land, he wanted cash, and had no idea at first what to do with the land.
The point was simple—give someone land, charge him with the responsibility for populating it and making it productive, and then get some tax revenue out of it. Welcome to capitalism, even when it was cameralism or mercantilism.
Most of the Hudson River valley in New York State, for example, was originally settled under the Dutch government of New Amsterdam, and was divided into vast ‘patroonships,’ where absentee landlords rented land out to tenant farmers on terms only slightly better than serfdom (for example, the tenants could only bring complaints against landlords in the courts run by the landlords). Many of these quasi-feudal landlords’ rights lingered on well after the American Revolution, until the Anti-Rent movement of the 1840s. Some of these estates were immense almost beyond belief—the “Manor of Rensselaerswyck” covered almost all of present-day Albany and Rensselaer counties and parts of present-day Columbia and Greene counties.
Good arable land was perhaps cheaper than at any time in history; Charles II, James II, William III, Anne, and George I all handed out vast tracts without a second thought, and often without even knowing where the borders were. Many of the colonies were originally chartered to extend all the way to the Pacific Ocean. In some areas, such as New England, land could be had in freehold simply by building a house on it and filling out the appropriate paperwork, provided you had all the livestock, tools, seed, and other necessities for making a go of farming. One bad crop, though, and you would probably have to sell your land and continue as a tenant or hired hand.
The major problem was labor. Colonial America was chronically short of manpower, since most of the potentially valuable land was trackless wilderness inhabited only by Native Americans. Whether you are growing sugar cane or tobacco, or growing foodstuffs rather than cash crops, you need people to do the work and extract the valuable stuff from the land. Without workers, land was worthless, and each worker represented an investment. This was a time period when “human resources” would have meant something rather different to what it means now.
Workers—slaves, freeholders, hired hands, or indentured servants—were industrial capital, the equivalent of manufacturing equipment or the tractors and combine harvesters on an agribusiness facility (after all, a 16,000-acre tract of land, staffed by 150 people from veterinarians to mechanics, with an operating budget in the millions of dollars and owned by a Delaware corporation can hardly be called a farm without laughing).
As bad as things were in Europe for many in the lower social classes, in the absence of a motivator like ready plunder (the Spanish colonies) or religious fervor (the Pilgrims) it is a tough prospect to encourage hundreds of people to pack up and move to a wilderness on the other side of the planet, likely never to see home again. It’s also expensive to ship them and all the necessary equipment across the Atlantic, so establishing a colony was a major undertaking, usually underwritten by stocks or bonds sold in London or Amsterdam.
Indentured servants were an attempt to recruit manpower for the nascent agribusinesses of the New World, and something over half of the immigrants to the English New World between 1650 and 1750 were indentured servants. In theory, a plucky young volunteer from Dorset or Lincolnshire would sign up, sail across the sea, work on a plantation for some years in order to pay off the cost of his trip, and muster out with enough savings to set up on his own freehold. Unfortunately, the prospect of selling oneself into a life of unremitting toil to pay off your sea passage’s cost never recruited as many willing hands as the venture capitalists of the 17th and 18th Centuries had hoped, and certainly nowhere near enough to keep up with the demand for tobacco, the fortune-making boom product of the English New World’s agribusiness.
A finite supply of labor meant that the supply of commodities was limited—if you have X field hands, you can only grow Y tobacco—which thus limited the amount of tobacco you could sell and the amount of money you could make. Expanding production meant expanding the labor force.
Slave labor had been an option in the New World for centuries—the Spanish and Portuguese dominions had been shipping Africans to the Caribbean since the early 16th Century, within decades of Columbus’ first voyage. British and French colonies in the Caribbean had followed suit in the late 17th Century, when establishing sugar plantations on islands such as Jamaica, which was essentially one immense sugar plantation by 1700. The first slaves to be shipped to Virginia arrived in 1619, the year before the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
The London business community had been waist-deep in the slave trade since the 1570s, but by 1700 the London Exchange saw sufficient potential revenue in a monopoly of the slave trade that gaining control over the asiento, or the official contract to supply slave labor to the Spanish New World, became a major policy goal of the English government. The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession (known in most of the English-speaking world at the time, and to two centuries worth of beleaguered high school students, as Queen Anne’s War) granted the asiento to the United Kingdom, who promptly turned it over to the South Sea Company, a London-based corporation, most of whose stockholders and directors were members of Parliament or otherwise creatures of the British establishment.
This accomplishment was actually one of the biggest and most remarkable financial shenanigans in history The British government (no longer English, the Act of Union with Scotland having been passed in 1707) took advantage of the historically fuzzy line between the British government and the financial community to create the South Sea Company in 1711, as part of an elaborate scheme to bankroll the national debt and keep the nearly bankrupt government afloat during wartime. The Lord Treasurer Robert Harley and a number of other government officials, acting in what was officially their private capacities as businessmen in the London Exchange, chartered the company, sold stock, and used the proceeds to buy up 11.7 million pounds sterling worth of the government’s debts, keeping the government solvent for the last several years of the war. Once the war was won and Spain signed over the Asiento to the government, the government promptly signed the Asiento over to the South Sea Company. The effect is similar to, say, the US Secretary of the Treasury or the Chairman of the Federal Reserve conniving with Wall Street to buy up federal bonds during the occupation of Iraq and receiving in exchange a monopoly on the Iraqi oil industry.
Starting in 1714, cheap slaves became readily available in the English New World in unprecedented numbers—an estimated 645,000 people over a century’s time. While slaves were present in all of the English colonies, their greatest impact was the southern colonies, where they flooded the labor market and contributed to the rapid increase of the plantation system, which grew as fast as slaves could be shipped and land could be cleared. Plantations sprouted like toadstools between the coast and the Appalachian Mountains before the American Revolution, and spread to the Mississippi and beyond in the half-century after independence, all built overwhelmingly by slave labor, and at tremendous profit.
Slavery meant not just cheap and readily available labor, but labor that was more easily controlled than a group of indentured servants who remembered what life was like in Dorset or Lincolnshire, and who insisted on having personal freedoms and legal rights. Indentured servants, after all, had a notorious habit of pulling up stakes and moving out to the fringe of settlement to start out on their own, understood the concept of a legal contract, and could only be pushed so far.
A slave could be fed the worst food capable of sustaining life, could be beaten nearly to death as punishment, or sold on a whim—in other words, slaves could be subjected to the sort of treatment that no European would put up with. As a simple contrast, the Rensselaers of the Hudson Valley depended on private courts and legal arm-twisting to control their tenants, while slaves in the Carolinas or Virginia could simply be beaten or tortured, or (more rarely) hanged as an example. Hanging slaves in other than extreme circumstances was generally seen as wasteful, akin to shooting a valuable and healthy horse, which is why punishment usually stopped short of death or crippling injury.
By introducing chattel slavery into the economy, the slaveholders created a permanent underclass of biped humanoid who was in many respects outside the definition of ‘human being,’ a legal distinction supported by theological and philosophical sophistry (c.f. the Aristotelian hair-splitting of the Valladolid Controversy), embraced by the financial world because it was useful. Slaves were property except when it suited their masters to claim them as human beings. For example, witness the Three-Fifths Compromise in the United States Constitution, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a human being for electoral purposes, thus granting the southern states an artificially inflated congressional delegation, which was dominated by the slave-owning interests until the Civil War.
Slavery, which was never as prominent in the colonies north of Virginia, died out in the northern colonies shortly after the American Revolution. Even where it wasn’t abolished by popular vote, it faded into extinction because it wasn’t economically viable in a region unsuitable to cash-crop monoculture, and where the main economic sectors were logging, shipping, quarrying, fishing and whaling, and manufactures, which were unsuitable for slave labor.
At the other end of the seaboard, however, the southern ‘plantocracy’ had a good racket going and knew it—with a permanent, cheap (slaves cost money, but did not have to be paid) and tightly-controlled labor force and a near monopoly on several sought-after commodities, such as tobacco, indigo, and of course cotton, they buttressed their financial interests with an enormous legal and regulatory infrastructure dedicated to keeping slaves in their place (literally). State and federal laws were rammed through by slaveowner-dominated legislatures, ultimately culminating in the odious Dred Scott decision, arguably the nadir of American jurisprudence.
In other words, the plantocracy used the ‘freedoms’ won in the Revolution to keep another class of people in chattel slavery, essentially using government to support and maintain their economic arrangements.
The worse part is that the United States was one of the last countries in what 19th-Century Europeans would have considered the ‘civilized’ world to abolish slavery, and the second to last in the Western Hemisphere. Great Britain abolished the slave trade in all Britain’s colonies and possessions in 1807, and abolished slavery itself in 1833. France abolished slavery in 1848. The former Spanish colonies abolished the practice during their wars of independence from Spain. Tsar Alexander II freed the Russian peasantry from serfdom in 1861. Brazil held out until 1888.
Mr. Beck, all of this sounds a lot like series of calculated policy decisions made by educated businessmen who had their eyes firmly on the bottom line, and who knew full well what they were doing and why. How exactly is this not evil?
What regulations are we talking about? The colonists and the Old World didn’t ship free Africans here only to enslave them later. They were slaves when they got on the boat in Africa. They were slaves when they got off the boat in Charleston, Savannah, Norfolk, or Portsmouth, and they were slaves when white colonists bought them for a labor force. That sounds evil from the get-go.
Slavery was the answer to a labor shortage experienced by colonial agribusiness. That’s an answer. That might not be the answer Glenn Beck likes, but at least it has the benefit of being a documentable truth.
The long and short of it, Mr. Beck, is that the analogues of the free market and capitalism from three centuries ago are what brought slavery to North America in the first place, not your boogeyman of government regulation.
He played a clip of Glenn Beck, America’s own Roderick Spode, discussing slavery. I reproduce Beck’s monologue below under the Fair Use doctrine:
The President is exactly right when he said ’slaves sitting around the campfire didn’t know when slavery was going to end, but they knew that it would. And it took a long time to end slavery.’ yes it did. But it also took a long time to start slavery.
And it started small, and it started with seemingly innocent ideas. And then a little court order here, and a court order there and a little regulation here and a little more regulation there. And before we knew it, America had slavery.
It didn’t come over in a ship to begin with, as an evil slave trade. The government began to regulate things because the people needed answers and needed solutions. It started in a court room then it went to the legislatures. That’s how slavery began. And it took a long time to enslave an entire race of people, and convince another race of people that they were somehow or another, less than them. But it can be done.
I would ask you to decide, are we freeing slaves? Or are we creating slaves? That’s a question that must be answered.
Now I know from having heard Beck’s monologues, rants, sermons, and Jimmy Swaggart-style tearful breakdowns that he really just doesn’t know much about history. He’s demonstrated his remarkable gullibility and willingness to make stuff up more times than I can count. Case in point, his disingenuous claim that Thomas Jefferson intended the US to be run on Christian principles by citing one-countem-one example of a document dated "in the year of our Lord Christ.” Never mind that this document was a pre-printed form issued by the Dutch government, not the United States, and which Jefferson merely filled in.
As a side note, one would think that a nation run with Biblical law and Protestant customs well in mind would have had a rather more ‘old-fashioned’ take on one Joseph Smith, founder of Beck’s own Mormon religion. Old-fashioned, perhaps, in the sense of John Calvin’s regime in Geneva, under whose authority the philosopher and astronomer Michael Servetus was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1553.
Still, this comment about slavery really pushes the envelope—but then again, when you’re in the middle of a midterm election season that many conservatives see as a war for the preservation of civilization, and if you want to keep your audience well-fed on populist bile, and if you’re really just not that bright to begin with, you have to be able to take any topic and relate it back to conservative talking points. It’s Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with history, politics, economics, philosophy, religion, you name it.
In typical Beck fashion, he manages to avoid any specifics—he speaks of court orders and the like. What court orders? Without data, it’s just hot air from another right-wing blowhard. Then again, most if not all of what Beck says, week in and week out, probably can’t survive facts.
The fact is, slavery is a result of the free market. More precisely, it is the product of what we today would consider to be a part of the free market, since the concept of the free market didn’t really exist in the modern sense in the early 17th Century.
Many of the colonies that later became the United States were the result of land grants by European governments, made to aristocrats, speculators, and other parties (what we might term venture capitalists), by which the rulers hoped to turn a profit from all this trackless wilderness. William Penn, for example, was given what is now Pennsylvania (and much else besides) as repayment of a 16,000-pound debt floated to Charles II, the perpetually profligate king of England. Never mind that Penn didn’t want land, he wanted cash, and had no idea at first what to do with the land.
The point was simple—give someone land, charge him with the responsibility for populating it and making it productive, and then get some tax revenue out of it. Welcome to capitalism, even when it was cameralism or mercantilism.
Most of the Hudson River valley in New York State, for example, was originally settled under the Dutch government of New Amsterdam, and was divided into vast ‘patroonships,’ where absentee landlords rented land out to tenant farmers on terms only slightly better than serfdom (for example, the tenants could only bring complaints against landlords in the courts run by the landlords). Many of these quasi-feudal landlords’ rights lingered on well after the American Revolution, until the Anti-Rent movement of the 1840s. Some of these estates were immense almost beyond belief—the “Manor of Rensselaerswyck” covered almost all of present-day Albany and Rensselaer counties and parts of present-day Columbia and Greene counties.
Good arable land was perhaps cheaper than at any time in history; Charles II, James II, William III, Anne, and George I all handed out vast tracts without a second thought, and often without even knowing where the borders were. Many of the colonies were originally chartered to extend all the way to the Pacific Ocean. In some areas, such as New England, land could be had in freehold simply by building a house on it and filling out the appropriate paperwork, provided you had all the livestock, tools, seed, and other necessities for making a go of farming. One bad crop, though, and you would probably have to sell your land and continue as a tenant or hired hand.
The major problem was labor. Colonial America was chronically short of manpower, since most of the potentially valuable land was trackless wilderness inhabited only by Native Americans. Whether you are growing sugar cane or tobacco, or growing foodstuffs rather than cash crops, you need people to do the work and extract the valuable stuff from the land. Without workers, land was worthless, and each worker represented an investment. This was a time period when “human resources” would have meant something rather different to what it means now.
Workers—slaves, freeholders, hired hands, or indentured servants—were industrial capital, the equivalent of manufacturing equipment or the tractors and combine harvesters on an agribusiness facility (after all, a 16,000-acre tract of land, staffed by 150 people from veterinarians to mechanics, with an operating budget in the millions of dollars and owned by a Delaware corporation can hardly be called a farm without laughing).
As bad as things were in Europe for many in the lower social classes, in the absence of a motivator like ready plunder (the Spanish colonies) or religious fervor (the Pilgrims) it is a tough prospect to encourage hundreds of people to pack up and move to a wilderness on the other side of the planet, likely never to see home again. It’s also expensive to ship them and all the necessary equipment across the Atlantic, so establishing a colony was a major undertaking, usually underwritten by stocks or bonds sold in London or Amsterdam.
Indentured servants were an attempt to recruit manpower for the nascent agribusinesses of the New World, and something over half of the immigrants to the English New World between 1650 and 1750 were indentured servants. In theory, a plucky young volunteer from Dorset or Lincolnshire would sign up, sail across the sea, work on a plantation for some years in order to pay off the cost of his trip, and muster out with enough savings to set up on his own freehold. Unfortunately, the prospect of selling oneself into a life of unremitting toil to pay off your sea passage’s cost never recruited as many willing hands as the venture capitalists of the 17th and 18th Centuries had hoped, and certainly nowhere near enough to keep up with the demand for tobacco, the fortune-making boom product of the English New World’s agribusiness.
A finite supply of labor meant that the supply of commodities was limited—if you have X field hands, you can only grow Y tobacco—which thus limited the amount of tobacco you could sell and the amount of money you could make. Expanding production meant expanding the labor force.
Slave labor had been an option in the New World for centuries—the Spanish and Portuguese dominions had been shipping Africans to the Caribbean since the early 16th Century, within decades of Columbus’ first voyage. British and French colonies in the Caribbean had followed suit in the late 17th Century, when establishing sugar plantations on islands such as Jamaica, which was essentially one immense sugar plantation by 1700. The first slaves to be shipped to Virginia arrived in 1619, the year before the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
The London business community had been waist-deep in the slave trade since the 1570s, but by 1700 the London Exchange saw sufficient potential revenue in a monopoly of the slave trade that gaining control over the asiento, or the official contract to supply slave labor to the Spanish New World, became a major policy goal of the English government. The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession (known in most of the English-speaking world at the time, and to two centuries worth of beleaguered high school students, as Queen Anne’s War) granted the asiento to the United Kingdom, who promptly turned it over to the South Sea Company, a London-based corporation, most of whose stockholders and directors were members of Parliament or otherwise creatures of the British establishment.
This accomplishment was actually one of the biggest and most remarkable financial shenanigans in history The British government (no longer English, the Act of Union with Scotland having been passed in 1707) took advantage of the historically fuzzy line between the British government and the financial community to create the South Sea Company in 1711, as part of an elaborate scheme to bankroll the national debt and keep the nearly bankrupt government afloat during wartime. The Lord Treasurer Robert Harley and a number of other government officials, acting in what was officially their private capacities as businessmen in the London Exchange, chartered the company, sold stock, and used the proceeds to buy up 11.7 million pounds sterling worth of the government’s debts, keeping the government solvent for the last several years of the war. Once the war was won and Spain signed over the Asiento to the government, the government promptly signed the Asiento over to the South Sea Company. The effect is similar to, say, the US Secretary of the Treasury or the Chairman of the Federal Reserve conniving with Wall Street to buy up federal bonds during the occupation of Iraq and receiving in exchange a monopoly on the Iraqi oil industry.
Starting in 1714, cheap slaves became readily available in the English New World in unprecedented numbers—an estimated 645,000 people over a century’s time. While slaves were present in all of the English colonies, their greatest impact was the southern colonies, where they flooded the labor market and contributed to the rapid increase of the plantation system, which grew as fast as slaves could be shipped and land could be cleared. Plantations sprouted like toadstools between the coast and the Appalachian Mountains before the American Revolution, and spread to the Mississippi and beyond in the half-century after independence, all built overwhelmingly by slave labor, and at tremendous profit.
Slavery meant not just cheap and readily available labor, but labor that was more easily controlled than a group of indentured servants who remembered what life was like in Dorset or Lincolnshire, and who insisted on having personal freedoms and legal rights. Indentured servants, after all, had a notorious habit of pulling up stakes and moving out to the fringe of settlement to start out on their own, understood the concept of a legal contract, and could only be pushed so far.
A slave could be fed the worst food capable of sustaining life, could be beaten nearly to death as punishment, or sold on a whim—in other words, slaves could be subjected to the sort of treatment that no European would put up with. As a simple contrast, the Rensselaers of the Hudson Valley depended on private courts and legal arm-twisting to control their tenants, while slaves in the Carolinas or Virginia could simply be beaten or tortured, or (more rarely) hanged as an example. Hanging slaves in other than extreme circumstances was generally seen as wasteful, akin to shooting a valuable and healthy horse, which is why punishment usually stopped short of death or crippling injury.
By introducing chattel slavery into the economy, the slaveholders created a permanent underclass of biped humanoid who was in many respects outside the definition of ‘human being,’ a legal distinction supported by theological and philosophical sophistry (c.f. the Aristotelian hair-splitting of the Valladolid Controversy), embraced by the financial world because it was useful. Slaves were property except when it suited their masters to claim them as human beings. For example, witness the Three-Fifths Compromise in the United States Constitution, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a human being for electoral purposes, thus granting the southern states an artificially inflated congressional delegation, which was dominated by the slave-owning interests until the Civil War.
Slavery, which was never as prominent in the colonies north of Virginia, died out in the northern colonies shortly after the American Revolution. Even where it wasn’t abolished by popular vote, it faded into extinction because it wasn’t economically viable in a region unsuitable to cash-crop monoculture, and where the main economic sectors were logging, shipping, quarrying, fishing and whaling, and manufactures, which were unsuitable for slave labor.
At the other end of the seaboard, however, the southern ‘plantocracy’ had a good racket going and knew it—with a permanent, cheap (slaves cost money, but did not have to be paid) and tightly-controlled labor force and a near monopoly on several sought-after commodities, such as tobacco, indigo, and of course cotton, they buttressed their financial interests with an enormous legal and regulatory infrastructure dedicated to keeping slaves in their place (literally). State and federal laws were rammed through by slaveowner-dominated legislatures, ultimately culminating in the odious Dred Scott decision, arguably the nadir of American jurisprudence.
In other words, the plantocracy used the ‘freedoms’ won in the Revolution to keep another class of people in chattel slavery, essentially using government to support and maintain their economic arrangements.
The worse part is that the United States was one of the last countries in what 19th-Century Europeans would have considered the ‘civilized’ world to abolish slavery, and the second to last in the Western Hemisphere. Great Britain abolished the slave trade in all Britain’s colonies and possessions in 1807, and abolished slavery itself in 1833. France abolished slavery in 1848. The former Spanish colonies abolished the practice during their wars of independence from Spain. Tsar Alexander II freed the Russian peasantry from serfdom in 1861. Brazil held out until 1888.
Mr. Beck, all of this sounds a lot like series of calculated policy decisions made by educated businessmen who had their eyes firmly on the bottom line, and who knew full well what they were doing and why. How exactly is this not evil?
What regulations are we talking about? The colonists and the Old World didn’t ship free Africans here only to enslave them later. They were slaves when they got on the boat in Africa. They were slaves when they got off the boat in Charleston, Savannah, Norfolk, or Portsmouth, and they were slaves when white colonists bought them for a labor force. That sounds evil from the get-go.
Slavery was the answer to a labor shortage experienced by colonial agribusiness. That’s an answer. That might not be the answer Glenn Beck likes, but at least it has the benefit of being a documentable truth.
The long and short of it, Mr. Beck, is that the analogues of the free market and capitalism from three centuries ago are what brought slavery to North America in the first place, not your boogeyman of government regulation.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Is Offshore Drilling a Legitimate Enterprise?
Offshore oil drilling has, in the last two years, attracted more attention from the general United States public than it has had at any point in its history. Even before the April 20, 2010 disaster that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon drill rig and unleashed a torrent of crude oil into the waters and beaches of the Gulf of Mexico, offshore drilling had developed into a significant battleground issue with economic, cultural, and political dimension.
Depending on one’s point of view, offshore drilling is a necessary evil, a legitimate exploitation of natural resources, a second-best option forced on the oil and gas industry by excessive regulation of possible onshore oilfields, or a dangerous process justified only by profit and the US’s dependence on petroleum.
The dispute over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve in Alaska has recurred in Congress every few years since drilling was first proposed in 1977, and was a major rallying point for liberals after the Bush administration endorsed the idea in 2005. The chant of “Drill, baby, drill,” first heard at the 2008 Republican National Convention, likewise served as a rallying cry for conservatives during the latter part of the 2008 election and on through the first years of the Obama administration, right up until the news of the Deepwater Horizon disaster hit the world news on the morning of April 21, 2010.
This public tumult comes at a time when offshore drilling has, for all its hazards, become a vital part of the United States’ energy economy. A steadily increasing percentage of domestically-produced oil and natural gas comes from offshore sources: in 2009, 31% of the nation’s domestically-produced crude oil and 11% of its domestically-produced natural gas came from offshore wells in the Gulf of Mexico alone. Data gathered by NOAA and MMS accounts for 3,858 oil platforms in just two of the “planning areas” in US waters in the Gulf of Mexico. According to a 2009 Minerals Management Service report, “proved reserves in the Gulf of Mexico Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) are estimated to be 20.30 billion barrels of oil and 183.7 trillion cubic feet of gas from 1,229 proved fields,” or roughly twice as much oil and seven times as much natural gas as the Prudhoe Bay cornucopia on the northern shores of Alaska was estimated to contain when that oilfield was first developed in the 1960s.
The complexity of offshore drilling has also grown immensely in the last several decades. In 1983, the deepest offshore well in the world was drilled in 760 feet of water, 13 miles off the coast of San Pedro, CA. A quarter century later, dozens of new wells are being installed each year in deep-sea locations (1 to 1.5 miles deep) and much further offshore; depths that were once extraordinary are now perforce normal. In 2009 alone, over three hundred new production wells were drilled in US waters in the Gulf, and nearly two-thirds of the active oil leases in the Gulf are in water more than 1,000 feet deep.
These deepwater locations are comparable to the one that blew out in April 2010 –designated MC 252-- during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, since most of them are being installed in the same oil and gas bearing geological formations. The deeper the water and the deeper the drilling, the more complex, expensive, and dangerous the operation becomes. Somewhat ironically, the last well the Horizon had completed prior to beginning the fateful one was the deepest well yet drilled at the time, a whopping 30,918 feet into the seabed under 4,132 feet of water.
The reason drilling in such difficult or sensitive areas has increased so dramatically is simple. The global oil economy is rapidly approaching “Hubbert’s peak,” a phenomenon first predicted by the scientist M. King Hubbert in 1956 and commonly known as “peak oil.” While new oil and gas resources can still be found, much of the accessible oil – the “reserves” or “proven reserves” in industry and governmental language-- has been consumed or is currently being extracted. In order to expand production or to replace wellfields that have ceased producing worthwhile quantities of oil and gas, the petroleum industry has to look to other sources, and what is left is more difficult and expensive to get. The days when a wildcatter in Texas or Wyoming could find vast new oilfields simply by looking for oil sheens on creeks are long gone. In many cases ‘new’ sources such as those in ANWR or the tar sands of western Canada have been known about for decades, but the cost/benefit balance that would render them profitable didn’t work out until oil became more scarce, driving up the worth of a resource that in earlier decades was of negligible value and making it cost-effective to exploit the resource.
On June 4, Sarah Palin complained on her Facebook page that “Extreme deep water drilling is not the preferred choice to meet our country's energy needs, but your [referring to ‘radical environmentalists’] protests and lawsuits and lies about onshore and shallow water drilling have locked up safer areas. It's catching up with you. The tragic, unprecedented deep water Gulf oil spill proves it." This allegation is simply not true. What is true, though, is that most of the allegedly “safer” areas are already producing, already exhausted, or are too inaccessible, small, or difficult to be worthwhile. Most of them aren’t actually any safer, when all things considered.
The dilemma of whether to drill in ANWR or the ocean is a complex one. In either case, there is the potential for irreversible destruction of the environment—neither area is truly ‘safer’ than the other. Each area is home to numerous rare species of animal and plant life, who would be trampled and poisoned.
Other concerns include possible incompatibilities with other uses of the areas. The Gulf of Mexico, for example, is both a major commercial fishing area and crosshatched with scores of shipping lanes, and freighter captains enjoy navigating hundred-thousand-ton cargo ships through an obstacle course of oil platforms about as much as fishermen enjoy pulling up nets full of oil-poisoned shrimp.
Drilling in the ANWR or other remote areas is also not much simpler or cheaper than drilling in mile-deep water tens or hundreds of miles out to sea, or for that matter, not much easier than drilling at the South Pole. Consider the Prudhoe Bay oilfields, where a massive infrastructure of roads, pipelines, well complexes, oil storage facilities, supertankers, and company towns had to be constructed in a bitterly hostile arctic environment in order to extract the oil and get it to market. The 800-mile Trans-Alaskan Pipeline System alone cost $8 billion. All of this infrastructure is extremely expensive to operate and maintain. There is even a television show about the truck drivers who regularly ferry supplies north across the ice and tundra. The truth is that as profitable as it has proven, Prudhoe Bay wasn’t considered economically worthwhile until the gasoline shortages of the early 1970s drove petroleum prices up sharply.
The oil industry routinely weighs the costs of a offshore drilling against on-shore drilling, based on the amount and quality of oil and gas that could be extracted, and the cost to get it out of the ground and onto the market. A fifth-generation mobile drill rig such as the Deepwater Horizon—built at the cost of half a billion dollars, and with a billing rate of nearly half a million dollars a day for the rig, her crew, and all the support ships and other necessities—is a major item on any budget sheet. Add to that against the costs of having to fit out another arctic oilfield on the scale of Prudhoe Bay. BP is, in fact, contemplating exactly such a project, involving constructing an artificial island in the Beaufort Sea off the northern coast of Alaska.
Offshore drilling is an intrinsically dangerous and environmentally risky process. It can be done safely, if the proper safeguards are in place to prevent spills or to clean up pollution before it does too much damage. The problem is that the equipment and infrastructure to cope with oil pollution on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon’s simply does not exist. While a great deal of thought and effort has been put into devices such as blowout preventers and “Christmas trees,” which are intended to prevent spills, it is surprising to see how little the art and science of cleaning a spill up has advanced since the late 1960s, when the primary source of spills were leaks from ships in harbors rather than the relatively few and comparatively small offshore drilling and production rigs in use at the time. Despite the media attention given to “magic boxes,” “top hats,” and similar devices used in attempts to shut off the flow of oil and gas from the well, the primary tools for cleaning up spilled oil are still containment booms, skimmers, pumps, and brute manpower, and they are wholly inadequate for combating spills of the current magnitude.
Congressman John Culbertson of Texas described the Deepwater Horizon disaster as a ‘statistical anomaly’ in a June 18 open letter to President Obama, in which he protested the federal government reinstating its off-again, on-again moratorium on new offshore drilling. In one sense he is correct—only one of the thousands of wells in the Gulf blew out. On the other hand, consider the amount of damage this one well has done, the inability of BP and the federal government to cope with the disaster, and the amount of destruction that even three or four more blowouts of the same size could wreak.
In the long run, however, the choice between wildlife preserve and ocean will ultimately disappear, once scarcity and the inevitable depletion of existing oilfields has driven the cost of oil up and availability down. The situation will change from an either/or decision to a both/and situation, in which the US is forced by economic necessity to drill everywhere there is oil, regardless of the increasing costs to extract it.
Prudhoe Bay is estimated to be four-fifths depleted. Unless the US can reduce its dependence on petroleum, it will ultimately face the need to drill in both areas regardless of cost and consequences, simply because it cannot do without the oil. Bearing that sad truth in mind, the nation should seriously attempt on a large scale what has been often talked about over the last twenty years, but towards which nothing has been done—developing renewable energy sources and reducing the need for fossil fuels.
Depending on one’s point of view, offshore drilling is a necessary evil, a legitimate exploitation of natural resources, a second-best option forced on the oil and gas industry by excessive regulation of possible onshore oilfields, or a dangerous process justified only by profit and the US’s dependence on petroleum.
The dispute over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve in Alaska has recurred in Congress every few years since drilling was first proposed in 1977, and was a major rallying point for liberals after the Bush administration endorsed the idea in 2005. The chant of “Drill, baby, drill,” first heard at the 2008 Republican National Convention, likewise served as a rallying cry for conservatives during the latter part of the 2008 election and on through the first years of the Obama administration, right up until the news of the Deepwater Horizon disaster hit the world news on the morning of April 21, 2010.
This public tumult comes at a time when offshore drilling has, for all its hazards, become a vital part of the United States’ energy economy. A steadily increasing percentage of domestically-produced oil and natural gas comes from offshore sources: in 2009, 31% of the nation’s domestically-produced crude oil and 11% of its domestically-produced natural gas came from offshore wells in the Gulf of Mexico alone. Data gathered by NOAA and MMS accounts for 3,858 oil platforms in just two of the “planning areas” in US waters in the Gulf of Mexico. According to a 2009 Minerals Management Service report, “proved reserves in the Gulf of Mexico Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) are estimated to be 20.30 billion barrels of oil and 183.7 trillion cubic feet of gas from 1,229 proved fields,” or roughly twice as much oil and seven times as much natural gas as the Prudhoe Bay cornucopia on the northern shores of Alaska was estimated to contain when that oilfield was first developed in the 1960s.
The complexity of offshore drilling has also grown immensely in the last several decades. In 1983, the deepest offshore well in the world was drilled in 760 feet of water, 13 miles off the coast of San Pedro, CA. A quarter century later, dozens of new wells are being installed each year in deep-sea locations (1 to 1.5 miles deep) and much further offshore; depths that were once extraordinary are now perforce normal. In 2009 alone, over three hundred new production wells were drilled in US waters in the Gulf, and nearly two-thirds of the active oil leases in the Gulf are in water more than 1,000 feet deep.
These deepwater locations are comparable to the one that blew out in April 2010 –designated MC 252-- during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, since most of them are being installed in the same oil and gas bearing geological formations. The deeper the water and the deeper the drilling, the more complex, expensive, and dangerous the operation becomes. Somewhat ironically, the last well the Horizon had completed prior to beginning the fateful one was the deepest well yet drilled at the time, a whopping 30,918 feet into the seabed under 4,132 feet of water.
The reason drilling in such difficult or sensitive areas has increased so dramatically is simple. The global oil economy is rapidly approaching “Hubbert’s peak,” a phenomenon first predicted by the scientist M. King Hubbert in 1956 and commonly known as “peak oil.” While new oil and gas resources can still be found, much of the accessible oil – the “reserves” or “proven reserves” in industry and governmental language-- has been consumed or is currently being extracted. In order to expand production or to replace wellfields that have ceased producing worthwhile quantities of oil and gas, the petroleum industry has to look to other sources, and what is left is more difficult and expensive to get. The days when a wildcatter in Texas or Wyoming could find vast new oilfields simply by looking for oil sheens on creeks are long gone. In many cases ‘new’ sources such as those in ANWR or the tar sands of western Canada have been known about for decades, but the cost/benefit balance that would render them profitable didn’t work out until oil became more scarce, driving up the worth of a resource that in earlier decades was of negligible value and making it cost-effective to exploit the resource.
On June 4, Sarah Palin complained on her Facebook page that “Extreme deep water drilling is not the preferred choice to meet our country's energy needs, but your [referring to ‘radical environmentalists’] protests and lawsuits and lies about onshore and shallow water drilling have locked up safer areas. It's catching up with you. The tragic, unprecedented deep water Gulf oil spill proves it." This allegation is simply not true. What is true, though, is that most of the allegedly “safer” areas are already producing, already exhausted, or are too inaccessible, small, or difficult to be worthwhile. Most of them aren’t actually any safer, when all things considered.
The dilemma of whether to drill in ANWR or the ocean is a complex one. In either case, there is the potential for irreversible destruction of the environment—neither area is truly ‘safer’ than the other. Each area is home to numerous rare species of animal and plant life, who would be trampled and poisoned.
Other concerns include possible incompatibilities with other uses of the areas. The Gulf of Mexico, for example, is both a major commercial fishing area and crosshatched with scores of shipping lanes, and freighter captains enjoy navigating hundred-thousand-ton cargo ships through an obstacle course of oil platforms about as much as fishermen enjoy pulling up nets full of oil-poisoned shrimp.
Drilling in the ANWR or other remote areas is also not much simpler or cheaper than drilling in mile-deep water tens or hundreds of miles out to sea, or for that matter, not much easier than drilling at the South Pole. Consider the Prudhoe Bay oilfields, where a massive infrastructure of roads, pipelines, well complexes, oil storage facilities, supertankers, and company towns had to be constructed in a bitterly hostile arctic environment in order to extract the oil and get it to market. The 800-mile Trans-Alaskan Pipeline System alone cost $8 billion. All of this infrastructure is extremely expensive to operate and maintain. There is even a television show about the truck drivers who regularly ferry supplies north across the ice and tundra. The truth is that as profitable as it has proven, Prudhoe Bay wasn’t considered economically worthwhile until the gasoline shortages of the early 1970s drove petroleum prices up sharply.
The oil industry routinely weighs the costs of a offshore drilling against on-shore drilling, based on the amount and quality of oil and gas that could be extracted, and the cost to get it out of the ground and onto the market. A fifth-generation mobile drill rig such as the Deepwater Horizon—built at the cost of half a billion dollars, and with a billing rate of nearly half a million dollars a day for the rig, her crew, and all the support ships and other necessities—is a major item on any budget sheet. Add to that against the costs of having to fit out another arctic oilfield on the scale of Prudhoe Bay. BP is, in fact, contemplating exactly such a project, involving constructing an artificial island in the Beaufort Sea off the northern coast of Alaska.
Offshore drilling is an intrinsically dangerous and environmentally risky process. It can be done safely, if the proper safeguards are in place to prevent spills or to clean up pollution before it does too much damage. The problem is that the equipment and infrastructure to cope with oil pollution on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon’s simply does not exist. While a great deal of thought and effort has been put into devices such as blowout preventers and “Christmas trees,” which are intended to prevent spills, it is surprising to see how little the art and science of cleaning a spill up has advanced since the late 1960s, when the primary source of spills were leaks from ships in harbors rather than the relatively few and comparatively small offshore drilling and production rigs in use at the time. Despite the media attention given to “magic boxes,” “top hats,” and similar devices used in attempts to shut off the flow of oil and gas from the well, the primary tools for cleaning up spilled oil are still containment booms, skimmers, pumps, and brute manpower, and they are wholly inadequate for combating spills of the current magnitude.
Congressman John Culbertson of Texas described the Deepwater Horizon disaster as a ‘statistical anomaly’ in a June 18 open letter to President Obama, in which he protested the federal government reinstating its off-again, on-again moratorium on new offshore drilling. In one sense he is correct—only one of the thousands of wells in the Gulf blew out. On the other hand, consider the amount of damage this one well has done, the inability of BP and the federal government to cope with the disaster, and the amount of destruction that even three or four more blowouts of the same size could wreak.
In the long run, however, the choice between wildlife preserve and ocean will ultimately disappear, once scarcity and the inevitable depletion of existing oilfields has driven the cost of oil up and availability down. The situation will change from an either/or decision to a both/and situation, in which the US is forced by economic necessity to drill everywhere there is oil, regardless of the increasing costs to extract it.
Prudhoe Bay is estimated to be four-fifths depleted. Unless the US can reduce its dependence on petroleum, it will ultimately face the need to drill in both areas regardless of cost and consequences, simply because it cannot do without the oil. Bearing that sad truth in mind, the nation should seriously attempt on a large scale what has been often talked about over the last twenty years, but towards which nothing has been done—developing renewable energy sources and reducing the need for fossil fuels.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Some thoughts on Proposition 8 and gay marriage
Most of you have by now read about the August 4, 2010 decision on Perry v. Schwarzenegger, more commonly known as “The Proposition 8 case.” I am pleased to say I quietly rejoiced at Judge Vaughan Walker’s decision, and (rather foolishly) stayed up late into the night reading his 138-page findings. This made the following workday a little challenging.
Proposition 8 was a bad bit of law that should never have been passed in the first place, and which got as far as it did only because of a moral panic created in the last weeks of the 2008 election season by wealthy conservative religious groups, including the strange bedfellows of fundamentalist Christians and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as the Mormons, who poured millions of dollars in from outside California to buy ad time and influence the state’s voters. It is, simply put, a mean, selfish, and vindictive attempt to take away a right, enjoyed from birth by everyone else, that a community long denied that right had recently gained after an exhausting struggle. It is also a conscious attempt to establish prejudice and discrimination in the law before which all humans are supposed to be equal.
It is also an outstanding object lesson in why some things are, in a sense, too important to be put to a vote. It sounds counterintuitive in a republic in which the popular vote is often seen as the ultimate expression of the peoples’ will and the country’s values. The popular vote is not perfect, nor is any other part of our electoral system. Some rights are, however, so important that they cannot and should not be subject to the variable whims of the electorate—for example, the Bill of Rights, the 14th Amendment, and so on. The people should no more be able to vote away their own inalienable rights (or anyone else’s, for that matter) than they should be able to vote themselves ten feet tall and purple. In fact, most of our system of government is constructed as a system of checks and balances, such as judicial review, which are intended to put the brakes on popular enthusiasms, an intent that predates even the Constitution itself (c.f John Locke and Edmund Burke).
As an analogy, consider the hypothetical situation in which white Southerners (for example) had at some time in the past sponsored an amendment to the US Constitution that defined human beings as including white people only. They could quite easily have done this, as it would have reflected widespread popular sentiment at the time. The Commonwealth of Virginia, for that matter, for many years had invasive genealogical criteria for determining the race of an individual in support of laws against interracial marriage.
Referenda such as Proposition 8 are in a sense even more troublesome than simple elections, because they circumvent many of the other balancing organs of government. In this instance, a process that was originally intended to give people more of a direct voice in government was used by to strip part of the population of their existing civil rights and impose discrimination based on simple prejudice.
“Animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate," as Judge Walker wrote. In condensed language, “prejudice doesn’t make good law.”
That’s exactly the issue here. The law. Not religion. Not popular prejudice. Not rumor. Not some half-mythical rose-colored view of the United States’ past as a continent-spanning Mayberry.
When you strip away all the religion, the histrionics, and the flag-waving paeans to American culture and pare the matter of gay marriage down to the issue that really matters—equal protection under the law—what becomes clear is that there is no adequate explanation for why gay men and women should NOT be allowed to marry, any more than there was any adequate explanation for bans on interracial marriage. “Civil unions,” for their part, fail the equality test.
Marriage is, as far as federal, state, and local government goes, strictly a matter of civil law disposing a contract between two people. That’s strictly it. Legal rights. Leviticus is nowhere to be found in a court of law.
The Catholic Church, the Mormons, the Southern Baptist Convention, the conservative Islamic community, and the Hasidic Jews don’t have to marry homosexuals in their rites if they don’t want to, because they’re not the government and they don’t (and shouldn’t) deal in civil rights. Personally, I am of the opinion that any church that involves itself in politics should lose its tax-exempt status. Religion isn’t the government’s business (at least, it isn’t until someone gets violent about it, at which point the ghost of Matthew Shepherd will rise again). That’s the flip side of the separation of church and state—religion is to be protected from the government as much as the government needs to be separate from religion.
More to the point, if you’re interesting in marrying another man, you’re probably not likely to belong to one of those religious groups that so vituperatively disapproves of the practice in the first place, rendering the point of the objection moot.
Anyways, the dramatis personae in Perry v Schwarzenegger:
Plaintiffs (people bringing the suit): Kristin Perry, Sandra Steir, Paul Katami and Jeffrey Zarrillo, two couples who were denied marriage licenses because they were intent on same-sex marriages.
Proponents aka the Defendants (supporters of Proposition 8) included the official proponents of Proposition 8, organized as a group named Protect Marriage. Oddly, although the suit itself named Governor Schwarzenegger and a number of other state government officials (in their capacities as heads of state agencies) as defendants, California’s Attorney General, Jerry Brown, declined to defend Proposition 8 because in his office’s view the amendment violated the state constitution. None of the other state officials named in the suit lifted a finger to defend the amendment, which is probably a good metric for how much official support Proposition 8 ever enjoyed in government. The result was that Protect Marriage, an intervening defendant (someone not named in the suit but who asserts a right to participate in the trial process because it involves them) wound up as the sole defenders of the Proposition 8 amendment—which in my opinion is only as it should be. Proposition 8 was their baby—they should defend it.
It was, on the face of it, the proponents’ fight to lose, which they did in a most spectacular fashion. In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of the case is how it highlighted the intellectual bankruptcy of the Proposition 8 supporters, who offered no hard evidence, no real experts, no data, and no first-person testimonials from people affected by the issues at hand. As the proponents learned to their humiliation, prejudice will only get you so far. A court of law is not like an election. Every statement and fact is ruthlessly scrutinized and tested to the breaking point, so while it is easy to splash anti-gay falsehoods all over the commercial breaks in the 6 o’clock news, it is a different matter to attempt the same wholesale slander and demagoguery in a courtroom.
The plaintiff’s lawyers amassed a mountain of evidence to support their case, with nine expert witnesses and seven lay witnesses, addressing everything from economics to history, psychology, and the prejudices and obstacles encountered in everyday life as a gay person.
The proponents of Proposition 8 called only two witnesses during the entire process, and both of those received short shrift from the judge because they had no evidence for their testimony. Judge Walker singled out David Blankenhorn of the Institute of American Values for some particularly scathing criticism, finding that Blankenhorn “lacks the qualifications to offer opinion testimony and, in any event, failed to provide cogent testimony in support of proponents’ factual assertions,” and that Blankenhorn’s testimony “should be given essentially no weight.”
One would assume that in a case of this magnitude, the proponents would have called out their biggest guns and leading intellectual lights, men of the caliber of William F. Buckley or William Jennings Bryan, who understand law and society and who can have an informed discussion on the great issues of the day. Such brains were nowhere to be found on the proponents' side-- in the case of a cause as odious as Proposition 8, maybe they don't exist. Instead, with nobody in their camp to call upon but (apparently) a clutch of bigots and dupes, the proponents brought the proverbial knife to a gunfight.
Several of the expert witnesses the proponents deposed before the trial began subsequently refused to testify in support of the proponents’ case. The plaintiffs promptly entered these witnesses’ depositions as evidence on the plaintiffs’ behalf, since their testimony appeared to support the plaintiffs’ case better than the proponents’.
The high (or low, depending on whose side you’re on) point of the trial was when the plaintiffs called Mr. Hak-Shing William Tam, one of the proponents and an organizer of Protect Marriage, as an adverse witness. Mr. Tam, who is secretary of the America Return to God Prayer Movement, a fundamentalist Christian organization, did a spectacular job of showing himself to be an uneducated, theocratic bigot who could point to nothing more specific than “the Internet” as a source for his statements linking homosexuality to child molestation, polygamy, incest, and Satanism. Satanism is obviously a major theme of concern in civil rights. Consider it this way: Mr. Tam is one of the heavy lifters behind Proposition 8, but he is such a blatantly ungrounded religious fanatic that not even the proponents' lawyers wanted him to testify on behalf of Proposition 8.
In other words, the proponents got pwned, and pwned so thoroughly and dramatically that reading Judge Walker’s decision actually made me laugh out loud.
In the end, the proponents failed to prove that gay marriage caused any significant harm, while the plaintiffs proved that forbidding gay marriage was first, discrimination, and second, inflicted social, economic, and other harms on the people involved, and that it therefore violated the California State Constitution.
If you ask me, the good guys won this one.
Proposition 8 was a bad bit of law that should never have been passed in the first place, and which got as far as it did only because of a moral panic created in the last weeks of the 2008 election season by wealthy conservative religious groups, including the strange bedfellows of fundamentalist Christians and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as the Mormons, who poured millions of dollars in from outside California to buy ad time and influence the state’s voters. It is, simply put, a mean, selfish, and vindictive attempt to take away a right, enjoyed from birth by everyone else, that a community long denied that right had recently gained after an exhausting struggle. It is also a conscious attempt to establish prejudice and discrimination in the law before which all humans are supposed to be equal.
It is also an outstanding object lesson in why some things are, in a sense, too important to be put to a vote. It sounds counterintuitive in a republic in which the popular vote is often seen as the ultimate expression of the peoples’ will and the country’s values. The popular vote is not perfect, nor is any other part of our electoral system. Some rights are, however, so important that they cannot and should not be subject to the variable whims of the electorate—for example, the Bill of Rights, the 14th Amendment, and so on. The people should no more be able to vote away their own inalienable rights (or anyone else’s, for that matter) than they should be able to vote themselves ten feet tall and purple. In fact, most of our system of government is constructed as a system of checks and balances, such as judicial review, which are intended to put the brakes on popular enthusiasms, an intent that predates even the Constitution itself (c.f John Locke and Edmund Burke).
As an analogy, consider the hypothetical situation in which white Southerners (for example) had at some time in the past sponsored an amendment to the US Constitution that defined human beings as including white people only. They could quite easily have done this, as it would have reflected widespread popular sentiment at the time. The Commonwealth of Virginia, for that matter, for many years had invasive genealogical criteria for determining the race of an individual in support of laws against interracial marriage.
Referenda such as Proposition 8 are in a sense even more troublesome than simple elections, because they circumvent many of the other balancing organs of government. In this instance, a process that was originally intended to give people more of a direct voice in government was used by to strip part of the population of their existing civil rights and impose discrimination based on simple prejudice.
“Animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate," as Judge Walker wrote. In condensed language, “prejudice doesn’t make good law.”
That’s exactly the issue here. The law. Not religion. Not popular prejudice. Not rumor. Not some half-mythical rose-colored view of the United States’ past as a continent-spanning Mayberry.
When you strip away all the religion, the histrionics, and the flag-waving paeans to American culture and pare the matter of gay marriage down to the issue that really matters—equal protection under the law—what becomes clear is that there is no adequate explanation for why gay men and women should NOT be allowed to marry, any more than there was any adequate explanation for bans on interracial marriage. “Civil unions,” for their part, fail the equality test.
Marriage is, as far as federal, state, and local government goes, strictly a matter of civil law disposing a contract between two people. That’s strictly it. Legal rights. Leviticus is nowhere to be found in a court of law.
The Catholic Church, the Mormons, the Southern Baptist Convention, the conservative Islamic community, and the Hasidic Jews don’t have to marry homosexuals in their rites if they don’t want to, because they’re not the government and they don’t (and shouldn’t) deal in civil rights. Personally, I am of the opinion that any church that involves itself in politics should lose its tax-exempt status. Religion isn’t the government’s business (at least, it isn’t until someone gets violent about it, at which point the ghost of Matthew Shepherd will rise again). That’s the flip side of the separation of church and state—religion is to be protected from the government as much as the government needs to be separate from religion.
More to the point, if you’re interesting in marrying another man, you’re probably not likely to belong to one of those religious groups that so vituperatively disapproves of the practice in the first place, rendering the point of the objection moot.
Anyways, the dramatis personae in Perry v Schwarzenegger:
Plaintiffs (people bringing the suit): Kristin Perry, Sandra Steir, Paul Katami and Jeffrey Zarrillo, two couples who were denied marriage licenses because they were intent on same-sex marriages.
Proponents aka the Defendants (supporters of Proposition 8) included the official proponents of Proposition 8, organized as a group named Protect Marriage. Oddly, although the suit itself named Governor Schwarzenegger and a number of other state government officials (in their capacities as heads of state agencies) as defendants, California’s Attorney General, Jerry Brown, declined to defend Proposition 8 because in his office’s view the amendment violated the state constitution. None of the other state officials named in the suit lifted a finger to defend the amendment, which is probably a good metric for how much official support Proposition 8 ever enjoyed in government. The result was that Protect Marriage, an intervening defendant (someone not named in the suit but who asserts a right to participate in the trial process because it involves them) wound up as the sole defenders of the Proposition 8 amendment—which in my opinion is only as it should be. Proposition 8 was their baby—they should defend it.
It was, on the face of it, the proponents’ fight to lose, which they did in a most spectacular fashion. In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of the case is how it highlighted the intellectual bankruptcy of the Proposition 8 supporters, who offered no hard evidence, no real experts, no data, and no first-person testimonials from people affected by the issues at hand. As the proponents learned to their humiliation, prejudice will only get you so far. A court of law is not like an election. Every statement and fact is ruthlessly scrutinized and tested to the breaking point, so while it is easy to splash anti-gay falsehoods all over the commercial breaks in the 6 o’clock news, it is a different matter to attempt the same wholesale slander and demagoguery in a courtroom.
The plaintiff’s lawyers amassed a mountain of evidence to support their case, with nine expert witnesses and seven lay witnesses, addressing everything from economics to history, psychology, and the prejudices and obstacles encountered in everyday life as a gay person.
The proponents of Proposition 8 called only two witnesses during the entire process, and both of those received short shrift from the judge because they had no evidence for their testimony. Judge Walker singled out David Blankenhorn of the Institute of American Values for some particularly scathing criticism, finding that Blankenhorn “lacks the qualifications to offer opinion testimony and, in any event, failed to provide cogent testimony in support of proponents’ factual assertions,” and that Blankenhorn’s testimony “should be given essentially no weight.”
One would assume that in a case of this magnitude, the proponents would have called out their biggest guns and leading intellectual lights, men of the caliber of William F. Buckley or William Jennings Bryan, who understand law and society and who can have an informed discussion on the great issues of the day. Such brains were nowhere to be found on the proponents' side-- in the case of a cause as odious as Proposition 8, maybe they don't exist. Instead, with nobody in their camp to call upon but (apparently) a clutch of bigots and dupes, the proponents brought the proverbial knife to a gunfight.
Several of the expert witnesses the proponents deposed before the trial began subsequently refused to testify in support of the proponents’ case. The plaintiffs promptly entered these witnesses’ depositions as evidence on the plaintiffs’ behalf, since their testimony appeared to support the plaintiffs’ case better than the proponents’.
The high (or low, depending on whose side you’re on) point of the trial was when the plaintiffs called Mr. Hak-Shing William Tam, one of the proponents and an organizer of Protect Marriage, as an adverse witness. Mr. Tam, who is secretary of the America Return to God Prayer Movement, a fundamentalist Christian organization, did a spectacular job of showing himself to be an uneducated, theocratic bigot who could point to nothing more specific than “the Internet” as a source for his statements linking homosexuality to child molestation, polygamy, incest, and Satanism. Satanism is obviously a major theme of concern in civil rights. Consider it this way: Mr. Tam is one of the heavy lifters behind Proposition 8, but he is such a blatantly ungrounded religious fanatic that not even the proponents' lawyers wanted him to testify on behalf of Proposition 8.
In other words, the proponents got pwned, and pwned so thoroughly and dramatically that reading Judge Walker’s decision actually made me laugh out loud.
In the end, the proponents failed to prove that gay marriage caused any significant harm, while the plaintiffs proved that forbidding gay marriage was first, discrimination, and second, inflicted social, economic, and other harms on the people involved, and that it therefore violated the California State Constitution.
If you ask me, the good guys won this one.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Dispatches from the front line of the recession.....
My name is Tom, and I worry a lot. With the way the world is these days, I’d be a fool if I didn’t worry. In fact, I’m outright scared about the future.
I’m 31 years old, and probably typical of my generation. I grew up in the family construction business and am no stranger to hard work. I have degrees from a couple of good schools, at which I worked very hard and partied depressingly little, and had very good grades. Merit scholarships and federal student loans paid for most of my education. I work for an engineering company in a complicated and evolving technical field-- finding and cleaning up oil spills and toxic waste, a demanding and sometimes dangerous job. Through my job, I get a 401k and health insurance. I have a few other investments, but I play it safe--no risky high-yield CMBs or CDOs, just blue chips, CDs, and a few select tech stocks. I keep a budget and stay out of debt.
So why am I scared? I’ve worked hard, played by the rules, lived within my means, and generally been a good little capitalist trying to live the American dream. By the logic of the Republican Party and Tea Party, I’ve done everything right and kept the faith with the religion that is American-style capitalism.
I’m scared for three reasons.
The first reason I’m scared (and also very angry) is because someone else screwed up my future by playing drunken baccarat with the stock market and real estate. This country had a hell of a party between 2001 and 2008, but now the hangover has set in and the bar tab is waiting to be paid. The economic picture shows no real signs of improvement, and in fact promises to get worse. I’ve never had to collect unemployment—fortunately—but I don’t expect that lucky streak to continue much longer. Something like a quarter of my friends are unemployed, as one economic sector after another succumbs to the crippling starvation of the recession– manufacturing, construction, real estate, even professionals like engineers, architects, and lawyers.
The second reason I’m scared (and very frustrated) that the economy has me on a treadmill that makes it progressively harder for people like me to get ahead, or even to stay afloat.
The problem isn’t how hard I work, but that for most people the same amount of work gets you less these days than it used to. The Economic Mobility Project, an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts, found that the average income for men in their 30s in 2010 is 12% less than it was than for the same age group in 1974. Real wages have remained essentially stagnant, rising only about 3% since 1999. Inflation for the same period was 28.5%. The median wage, when adjusted for inflation, actually declined 2% between 2003 and 2006, during the glory days of the Bush Bubble.
Case in point—it’s virtually impossible for a couple in their 20s or 30s to afford a home on one salary now, since real estate prices and inflation left salaries behind fast enough to leave Back To The Future-style flaming tire tracks. In 1975, a married couple could make it on one salary, but just try that now and you’ll see how much things have changed. For thirty years we bridged the widening gap between income and costs by turning to home equity loans, credit cards, borrowing against 401ks and IRAs, and shenanigans like second mortgages, trying to rob Peter in order to pay Paul, but none of that changed the bitter reality that our own economy was leaving us behind. Even our investments have gone fallow, as the artificially low interest rates which the Federal Reserve maintains in order to encourage lending have reduced the return on investments.
Out of those proportionately smaller wages, we have proportionately higher mandatory expenditures—taxes and other things that we’re required to shell out on. I’m not really that worried about taxes—I have a realistic idea of how much of my income goes to taxes and what I get out of them. Roads, for example. I like roads. I like sewers and snowplows and fire departments and clean drinking water too. I haven’t seen any of the supposed socialist overtaxation that has the Tea Party all worked up, and in fact I pay less percentage wise than I would have paid thirty years ago. The amount I pay in taxes is tiny when compared to health care, rent, and other necessities.
Of all my financial responsibilities, health care scares me the most, and not just because I spend on it several times what I pay in taxes. It’s hard to get treatment in the US if you don’t have health insurance, which most working people get through their jobs like I do, and premiums consume larger and larger chunks of our shrinking incomes. As it is, health-care premiums for families have risen 119% since 1999, while inflation has risen 28.5% and real wages are, like I said, essentially stagnant. Our company’s health care plan premiums increased by 40% in 2009. That’s hard to swallow. To make matters worse, if I lose my job, I also lose my health insurance. Since I live in Massachusetts, where health insurance is required by law, I would have to either pay out of pocket for private insurance at a migraine-inducing rate, or apply for public insurance. This is why I supported a public option, and still do.
This situation is why I have a good full-time job, but do not own my own home, and drive a ten-year-old car. I probably could buy a house now, but haven’t done so because if I lose my job, as is possible, mortgage payments would put me under sooner or later. I have no real security. One major illnesses, bad investment, or big risk could wipe out everything I’ve managed to save.
I’ve resigned myself to the truth, which is that I just won’t be able to afford the same stuff my parents could. Forget the vacation cottage (my favorite spot on Planet Earth). Forget the big house in the country, the boat, early retirement (or any retirement at all) and a couple of hobbies—all the brass ring stuff that’s supposed to be the reward Americans work towards. Unless things take a major, long-term change, my generation will be the first to have a standard of living that’s not as good or better than their parents’.
The third reason I’m scared (and pessimistic) is that I don’t know whether things will get better or worse over the next few years. This is where we step beyond my life into the jungle of economics.
The US economy is fundamentally consumer-driven these days, fueled by sales of consumer goods and services to ourselves—the US doesn’t really sell much to other countries anymore. What happens to the economy when consumers’ pockets and credit have been so thoroughly drained that they can’t afford to consume at the same rate? The whole economy runs out of gas. The laid-off construction worker can’t buy a new car, which leads to lower auto sales, layoffs of care salesmen and factory workers, and so on. That’s the sort of trickle-down economics that matter these days, not the Reagan-era wishful thinking. Robert Reich agrees with me on this.
To his credit, President Obama was refreshingly forthright when he warned the country to expect a slow recovery, since that’s the only kind we’re likely to get. The comparatively quick and stimulus-free turnaround of the early 1990s was an anomaly, not the rule. Still, there are ominous rumblings that that the Obama administration’s Keynesian “pump-priming” stimulus programs will be shut off at the tap by deficit hawks and politicians eager to score easy points by describing the unemployed as lazy drug addicts.
I have to say I’m extremely skeptical when it comes to the gospel of extreme free-market deregulation preached by Rand Paul and some of the Republicans in Congress. That’s what got us here in the first place. Capitalism is not perfect and the free market is blatantly fallible--most of the regulations that corporations find onerous were created in order to prevent a disaster like the Crash of 1929 from happening again. For example, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 (repealed in 1999) required separation between banks investment and depository organs, and in doing so prevented exactly the sort of bad-investment apocalypse that happened in 2008.
If their god is ‘market forces’ and their religion is free-rein capitalism, then I’m sorry to have to say it, but their god failed, and turned out to be a real jerk in the process. It gave us stagnant wages at home, millions of jobs outsourced to China as a way for corporations to save a buck, and an economic system increasingly balanced against the middle class.
If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather lose sleep over nuclear annihilation than over my health insurance.
I’m 31 years old, and probably typical of my generation. I grew up in the family construction business and am no stranger to hard work. I have degrees from a couple of good schools, at which I worked very hard and partied depressingly little, and had very good grades. Merit scholarships and federal student loans paid for most of my education. I work for an engineering company in a complicated and evolving technical field-- finding and cleaning up oil spills and toxic waste, a demanding and sometimes dangerous job. Through my job, I get a 401k and health insurance. I have a few other investments, but I play it safe--no risky high-yield CMBs or CDOs, just blue chips, CDs, and a few select tech stocks. I keep a budget and stay out of debt.
So why am I scared? I’ve worked hard, played by the rules, lived within my means, and generally been a good little capitalist trying to live the American dream. By the logic of the Republican Party and Tea Party, I’ve done everything right and kept the faith with the religion that is American-style capitalism.
I’m scared for three reasons.
The first reason I’m scared (and also very angry) is because someone else screwed up my future by playing drunken baccarat with the stock market and real estate. This country had a hell of a party between 2001 and 2008, but now the hangover has set in and the bar tab is waiting to be paid. The economic picture shows no real signs of improvement, and in fact promises to get worse. I’ve never had to collect unemployment—fortunately—but I don’t expect that lucky streak to continue much longer. Something like a quarter of my friends are unemployed, as one economic sector after another succumbs to the crippling starvation of the recession– manufacturing, construction, real estate, even professionals like engineers, architects, and lawyers.
The second reason I’m scared (and very frustrated) that the economy has me on a treadmill that makes it progressively harder for people like me to get ahead, or even to stay afloat.
The problem isn’t how hard I work, but that for most people the same amount of work gets you less these days than it used to. The Economic Mobility Project, an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts, found that the average income for men in their 30s in 2010 is 12% less than it was than for the same age group in 1974. Real wages have remained essentially stagnant, rising only about 3% since 1999. Inflation for the same period was 28.5%. The median wage, when adjusted for inflation, actually declined 2% between 2003 and 2006, during the glory days of the Bush Bubble.
Case in point—it’s virtually impossible for a couple in their 20s or 30s to afford a home on one salary now, since real estate prices and inflation left salaries behind fast enough to leave Back To The Future-style flaming tire tracks. In 1975, a married couple could make it on one salary, but just try that now and you’ll see how much things have changed. For thirty years we bridged the widening gap between income and costs by turning to home equity loans, credit cards, borrowing against 401ks and IRAs, and shenanigans like second mortgages, trying to rob Peter in order to pay Paul, but none of that changed the bitter reality that our own economy was leaving us behind. Even our investments have gone fallow, as the artificially low interest rates which the Federal Reserve maintains in order to encourage lending have reduced the return on investments.
Out of those proportionately smaller wages, we have proportionately higher mandatory expenditures—taxes and other things that we’re required to shell out on. I’m not really that worried about taxes—I have a realistic idea of how much of my income goes to taxes and what I get out of them. Roads, for example. I like roads. I like sewers and snowplows and fire departments and clean drinking water too. I haven’t seen any of the supposed socialist overtaxation that has the Tea Party all worked up, and in fact I pay less percentage wise than I would have paid thirty years ago. The amount I pay in taxes is tiny when compared to health care, rent, and other necessities.
Of all my financial responsibilities, health care scares me the most, and not just because I spend on it several times what I pay in taxes. It’s hard to get treatment in the US if you don’t have health insurance, which most working people get through their jobs like I do, and premiums consume larger and larger chunks of our shrinking incomes. As it is, health-care premiums for families have risen 119% since 1999, while inflation has risen 28.5% and real wages are, like I said, essentially stagnant. Our company’s health care plan premiums increased by 40% in 2009. That’s hard to swallow. To make matters worse, if I lose my job, I also lose my health insurance. Since I live in Massachusetts, where health insurance is required by law, I would have to either pay out of pocket for private insurance at a migraine-inducing rate, or apply for public insurance. This is why I supported a public option, and still do.
This situation is why I have a good full-time job, but do not own my own home, and drive a ten-year-old car. I probably could buy a house now, but haven’t done so because if I lose my job, as is possible, mortgage payments would put me under sooner or later. I have no real security. One major illnesses, bad investment, or big risk could wipe out everything I’ve managed to save.
I’ve resigned myself to the truth, which is that I just won’t be able to afford the same stuff my parents could. Forget the vacation cottage (my favorite spot on Planet Earth). Forget the big house in the country, the boat, early retirement (or any retirement at all) and a couple of hobbies—all the brass ring stuff that’s supposed to be the reward Americans work towards. Unless things take a major, long-term change, my generation will be the first to have a standard of living that’s not as good or better than their parents’.
The third reason I’m scared (and pessimistic) is that I don’t know whether things will get better or worse over the next few years. This is where we step beyond my life into the jungle of economics.
The US economy is fundamentally consumer-driven these days, fueled by sales of consumer goods and services to ourselves—the US doesn’t really sell much to other countries anymore. What happens to the economy when consumers’ pockets and credit have been so thoroughly drained that they can’t afford to consume at the same rate? The whole economy runs out of gas. The laid-off construction worker can’t buy a new car, which leads to lower auto sales, layoffs of care salesmen and factory workers, and so on. That’s the sort of trickle-down economics that matter these days, not the Reagan-era wishful thinking. Robert Reich agrees with me on this.
To his credit, President Obama was refreshingly forthright when he warned the country to expect a slow recovery, since that’s the only kind we’re likely to get. The comparatively quick and stimulus-free turnaround of the early 1990s was an anomaly, not the rule. Still, there are ominous rumblings that that the Obama administration’s Keynesian “pump-priming” stimulus programs will be shut off at the tap by deficit hawks and politicians eager to score easy points by describing the unemployed as lazy drug addicts.
I have to say I’m extremely skeptical when it comes to the gospel of extreme free-market deregulation preached by Rand Paul and some of the Republicans in Congress. That’s what got us here in the first place. Capitalism is not perfect and the free market is blatantly fallible--most of the regulations that corporations find onerous were created in order to prevent a disaster like the Crash of 1929 from happening again. For example, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 (repealed in 1999) required separation between banks investment and depository organs, and in doing so prevented exactly the sort of bad-investment apocalypse that happened in 2008.
If their god is ‘market forces’ and their religion is free-rein capitalism, then I’m sorry to have to say it, but their god failed, and turned out to be a real jerk in the process. It gave us stagnant wages at home, millions of jobs outsourced to China as a way for corporations to save a buck, and an economic system increasingly balanced against the middle class.
If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather lose sleep over nuclear annihilation than over my health insurance.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Obama vs. Carville vs. BP vs. Me.
I saw this on the Huffington Post this morning, and since I generally find James Carville about as pleasant as an ingrown hair, I wanted to offer a few comments on some of his comments about President Obama.
Carville, a Louisiana political commentator who was an advisor to the Clinton presidency, has blasted the president for a “lackadaisical and naïve” approach to the Deepwater Horizon disaster that killed eleven men, has shut down one of the nation’s largest fisheries, and threatens to ruin the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico.
Whatever any of their other shortcomings may be, neither the President nor the federal government should be held responsible for what has happened to date, because up to this point (and probably continuing for the near future) the federal government has not been in charge of the situation-- BP has, because BP created the mess in the first place.
The federal government became involved for two reasons. First, certain federal agencies, such as the Coast Guard, have jurisdiction over environmental disasters that occur in the waters of the United States. This, I should point out, in no way excuses Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen for his practice of simply parroting whatever BP says. The second reason is that the sheer scale of the disaster has made it into a problem for the entire region.
Fox News and other right-wing news outlets have given a great deal of attention to the concept of the Deepwater Horizon being “Obama’s Katrina,” a reference to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina which devastated the Gulf coast, rendered the city of New Orleans uninhabitable, and revealed the egregious and criminal incompetence of the Bush administration in so plain a fashion that it probably cost the Republican party the 2006 midterm elections as well as the 2008 elections. “Heckuva job, Brownie.”
The essential difference between Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon disaster is, of course, that the oil spill is manmade. More to the point, it is the result of man’s—whether BP, Transocean, or Halliburton is moot—negligence and complacency. The particular “men” involved are the private sector, not the government. This isn’t Obama’s Katrina, this is the oil industry’s Katrina.
Over the past month, since the explosion and fire which sank the Deepwater Horizon occurred, BP has continuously downplayed and obfuscated details of the magnitude of the spill, such that the quantity of oil and gas released per day is now known to be an order of magnitude larger than BP’s initial estimates. There is no excuse for that—any engineer could calculate the daily volume of oil simply by looking at the size of the pipe and the rate the oil was exiting it, which is child’s play when you have a camera-equipped robot staring right at the blown-out well. BP didn’t release footage of their observations of the well until three weeks after the blowout and fire, but even so it was plain even from just what was visible on the water’ surface that BP’s estimates were bogus.
Investigations and whistle-blowing have also revealed that much of the drill rig’s safety equipment didn’t work, and that BP and its contractors skipped important tests that would likely have warned of the impending disaster. That may sound like Monday-morning quarterbacking, but there is a very good reason that safety equipment and well logging are standard practices in the oil drilling industry—they prevent disasters and save lives. Likewise, there is no excuse for BP not having proven contingency measures ready to go, so that they would not have to resort to trying one bit of oilpatch jargon (“junk shot,” “top kill,” etc) after another, only to watch them fail because the water is too deep or the blowout too intense. Even relatively simple things required by BP’s permit, like as-built blueprints or having barges laden with spill booms and crews trained to lay them properly, turned out to be deficient or missing entirely.
The federal government’s error, as evidence has shown, lay in taking BP at its word, trusting the oil company to do (and to be able to do) what it said it would do. BP signed the lease for the oilfield, took out the permit, claimed it could drill safely, said it had contingency plans if anything were to go wrong, and assumed the responsibility for handling leaks or spills. Bear in mind, however, that BP arguably has the worst safety record of any major petroleum company in the United States—in just the last five years, it has had several major spills, one refinery explosion in 2005, and another refinery shut down out of safety and pollution concerns. Exxon was responsible for the Prince William Sound disaster, it is true, but at least Exxon learned from the experience and, for whatever its other faults, now at least walks the walk on safety and emergency preparedness issues.
None of this bears directly on the President—he is, after all, the President, and not a BP engineer or an EPA spill-response coordinator. While the spill has turned into a major regional disaster, the cleanup mechanisms are several dozen pay grades below the Oval Office. If Carville wants to vent his spleen at anyone, I would suggest BP, the Minerals Management Service, the Bush Administration (who authorized the drilling), or perhaps the Coast Guard. He should remember, however, that the sins of these various government agencies consist in that they trusted BP too much, and that the ultimate fault therefore devolves on BP.
BP doubtless has its own motivations here—to restore the immense damage to its reputation, which has turned the company into a pop culture laughingstock, and to save money by stopping the release in the most expeditious way possible. Some of these motivations are, at best, tangential to the desires of the government and the public, who want the spill cleaned up, the environment restored, and the fishermen and others whose livelihoods have been disrupted to be compensated. BP, meanwhile, wrote a blank check to its Gulf-area franchises and subsidiaries to deluge the media with advertising, ostensibly on behalf of gulf states’ tourism boards, advertising open beaches and fresh seafood.
It’s the very old story. Greg Palast recently summed it up thusly:
Americans want government off our backs ... that is, until a folding crib crushes the skull of our baby, Toyota accelerators speed us to our death, banks blow our savings on gambling sprees and crude oil smothers the Mississippi. Then, suddenly, it's, "Where was hell was the government? Why didn't the government do something to stop it?”
I wonder…. If you give people enough rope, they can proverbially hang themselves with it. Does the same apply to giving BP enough boom?
Carville, a Louisiana political commentator who was an advisor to the Clinton presidency, has blasted the president for a “lackadaisical and naïve” approach to the Deepwater Horizon disaster that killed eleven men, has shut down one of the nation’s largest fisheries, and threatens to ruin the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico.
Whatever any of their other shortcomings may be, neither the President nor the federal government should be held responsible for what has happened to date, because up to this point (and probably continuing for the near future) the federal government has not been in charge of the situation-- BP has, because BP created the mess in the first place.
The federal government became involved for two reasons. First, certain federal agencies, such as the Coast Guard, have jurisdiction over environmental disasters that occur in the waters of the United States. This, I should point out, in no way excuses Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen for his practice of simply parroting whatever BP says. The second reason is that the sheer scale of the disaster has made it into a problem for the entire region.
Fox News and other right-wing news outlets have given a great deal of attention to the concept of the Deepwater Horizon being “Obama’s Katrina,” a reference to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina which devastated the Gulf coast, rendered the city of New Orleans uninhabitable, and revealed the egregious and criminal incompetence of the Bush administration in so plain a fashion that it probably cost the Republican party the 2006 midterm elections as well as the 2008 elections. “Heckuva job, Brownie.”
The essential difference between Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon disaster is, of course, that the oil spill is manmade. More to the point, it is the result of man’s—whether BP, Transocean, or Halliburton is moot—negligence and complacency. The particular “men” involved are the private sector, not the government. This isn’t Obama’s Katrina, this is the oil industry’s Katrina.
Over the past month, since the explosion and fire which sank the Deepwater Horizon occurred, BP has continuously downplayed and obfuscated details of the magnitude of the spill, such that the quantity of oil and gas released per day is now known to be an order of magnitude larger than BP’s initial estimates. There is no excuse for that—any engineer could calculate the daily volume of oil simply by looking at the size of the pipe and the rate the oil was exiting it, which is child’s play when you have a camera-equipped robot staring right at the blown-out well. BP didn’t release footage of their observations of the well until three weeks after the blowout and fire, but even so it was plain even from just what was visible on the water’ surface that BP’s estimates were bogus.
Investigations and whistle-blowing have also revealed that much of the drill rig’s safety equipment didn’t work, and that BP and its contractors skipped important tests that would likely have warned of the impending disaster. That may sound like Monday-morning quarterbacking, but there is a very good reason that safety equipment and well logging are standard practices in the oil drilling industry—they prevent disasters and save lives. Likewise, there is no excuse for BP not having proven contingency measures ready to go, so that they would not have to resort to trying one bit of oilpatch jargon (“junk shot,” “top kill,” etc) after another, only to watch them fail because the water is too deep or the blowout too intense. Even relatively simple things required by BP’s permit, like as-built blueprints or having barges laden with spill booms and crews trained to lay them properly, turned out to be deficient or missing entirely.
The federal government’s error, as evidence has shown, lay in taking BP at its word, trusting the oil company to do (and to be able to do) what it said it would do. BP signed the lease for the oilfield, took out the permit, claimed it could drill safely, said it had contingency plans if anything were to go wrong, and assumed the responsibility for handling leaks or spills. Bear in mind, however, that BP arguably has the worst safety record of any major petroleum company in the United States—in just the last five years, it has had several major spills, one refinery explosion in 2005, and another refinery shut down out of safety and pollution concerns. Exxon was responsible for the Prince William Sound disaster, it is true, but at least Exxon learned from the experience and, for whatever its other faults, now at least walks the walk on safety and emergency preparedness issues.
It is not now, and has never been, the role of the federal government to hover over every well, refinery, pipeline, or filling station, or to immediately jump on every oil spill. The federal government is not a first-responder service. The government’s job is to set a standard of care (in the form of statute and regulations) that is intended to keep manmade disasters to a minimum, and the private sector is supposed to obey the regulations. Regulations are not in force only when the MMS or EPA inspector is onboard the rig—they are in force all the time, and drillers must obey them all the time. Blaming the government for BP’s failures and negligence is akin to the man who built a house badly, only to have it fall down, blaming the building inspector for not forcing him to build a better house.
None of this bears directly on the President—he is, after all, the President, and not a BP engineer or an EPA spill-response coordinator. While the spill has turned into a major regional disaster, the cleanup mechanisms are several dozen pay grades below the Oval Office. If Carville wants to vent his spleen at anyone, I would suggest BP, the Minerals Management Service, the Bush Administration (who authorized the drilling), or perhaps the Coast Guard. He should remember, however, that the sins of these various government agencies consist in that they trusted BP too much, and that the ultimate fault therefore devolves on BP.
BP doubtless has its own motivations here—to restore the immense damage to its reputation, which has turned the company into a pop culture laughingstock, and to save money by stopping the release in the most expeditious way possible. Some of these motivations are, at best, tangential to the desires of the government and the public, who want the spill cleaned up, the environment restored, and the fishermen and others whose livelihoods have been disrupted to be compensated. BP, meanwhile, wrote a blank check to its Gulf-area franchises and subsidiaries to deluge the media with advertising, ostensibly on behalf of gulf states’ tourism boards, advertising open beaches and fresh seafood.
It’s the very old story. Greg Palast recently summed it up thusly:
Americans want government off our backs ... that is, until a folding crib crushes the skull of our baby, Toyota accelerators speed us to our death, banks blow our savings on gambling sprees and crude oil smothers the Mississippi. Then, suddenly, it's, "Where was hell was the government? Why didn't the government do something to stop it?”
In short, the federal government has to take over because the private sector failed…….. again. That should be quite clear by now, at least to anyone short of Rush Limbaugh or Rand Paul—the former has alleged that environmentalists blew the oil rig up, and the latter has, in a spate of fundamentalist libertarianism, called Obama’s supposedly harsh approach to BP’s actions “un-American” for assaulting a corporation that plays a big part in the American economy.
In one sense I agree with Rand Paul’s extreme syndicalist outlook—certainly not one unreimbursed cent of public money should be spent on cleaning up a spill caused by a private sector operation which was engaged in exploiting for profit resources owned by the public.
I wonder…. If you give people enough rope, they can proverbially hang themselves with it. Does the same apply to giving BP enough boom?
Monday, May 17, 2010
Iron Man II
I saw Iron Man 2 this past weekend.
I must admit that I used to be much more nervous about seeing movies made out of comic books. Batman—and by which I mean the ORIGINAL Batman, with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson—was for many years the only decent example to come to mind. The latter few Batman movies, prior to the Christian Bale reboot, were just plain awful. The one-dimensional Eric Bana “Hulk” movie was one prolonged special effects fight scene orgy. Ghost Rider is best described in scatological terms. The two embarrassingly bad Fantastic Four movies had comic book fans and baby boomers furious at the pillaging of their childhood out for blood. The saccharine and trite Spider Man movies will not age well.
Iron Man is a little different. For one thing, even though he’s dying, Tony Stark comes across as anything but a sympathetic character. If anything, he’s the biggest asshole you’ve seen on the screen in a long time. Robert Downey Jr. has Tony Stark down pat—a hyperactive genius playboy with more tics and obsessions than he has substance abuse problems. The result is somewhere between Howard Hughes and Tom Swift. The movie version plays up Stark’s thinly-veiled contempt for most other human beings, while condensing his rather tiresome alcoholism problems into one scene at a birthday party. If you ever want to see Robert Downey Jr. mugging as a boorish drunk while wearing battle armor—this is the movie for you. Downey’s so good at playing a hyperactive, drunken asshole that I’m starting to wonder if he wasn’t typecast for the role.
Downey’s performance is, unfortunately not matched by all of the rest of the cast. Scarlett Johansson is irritatingly blank and robotic as an undercover intelligence operative, who very predictably massacres a platoon of hulking security guards in one of those precisely-choreographed bits of martial arts hyperbole of which Hollywood is so fond. Mickey Rourke hams it up, grunting and smirking as a metal-toothed and tattooed Russian expatriate with a vendetta against Stark and his family, and has maybe three coherent lines in the whole movie. Gary Shandling plays an oleaginous senator, a role for which he is uniquely suited. Samuel L. Jackson, recovering from his nadir in the Star Wars prequels, does a magnificently abrasive job of bringing Nick Fury to life. Sam Rockwell plays Justin Hammer, traditionally a malevolent also-ran to Stark, as almost a sort of comic relief. This is the part of the movie with which I had the most trouble. Even aside from the comic books’ depiction of Hammer as a sort of satanic Lee Iacocca, an eminence grise of the military-industrial complex, Rockwell’s Hammer is too young, pompously inept (the weapons he sells never work, in a gag that runs through the whole film), and stuffed with Wall Street buzzwords, malapropisms, and lame jokes to take seriously. This isn’t a nemesis, it’s a character from The Office.
The choice of villains may seem rather strange, particularly to those who know the comic books. For a character whose nature revolves entirely around technology, Iron Man has a remarkably diverse enemies list, running the gamut from industrial espionage through Cold War opposite numbers like the Soviet Crimson Dynamo to an ancient Chinese wizard. In this case, Rourke plays Ivan Vanko, a pastiche of Backlash and the Crimson Dynamo. Backlash generally floats in the lower regions of Stark’s enemies list, somewhere in the region of Count Nefaria, the Beetle, and Stilt-Man. Most of these guys date from Iron Man’s early days--by the time Stark had upgraded his armor to the point where he could give the Hulk a thumping or go toe-to-toe with an alien warlord, an organized crime enforcer with an electrically-charged whip hardly seemed a challenge.
Iron Man is and has always been an odd sort of hero— more than most, he has to change to keep up with the times. If anything, the problem for the Iron Man mystique over the last twenty years has been keeping far enough ahead of the Silicon Valley and Seattle avalanche to maintain the cutting-edge reputation. Tony Stark wouldn’t be caught dead running last year’s Linux (though, if so, why does the man who can build an armored suit that can fly across continents drive an Audi?)
The movie hits on a number of themes that not only resonate with the current state of the world, but which ran through most of Iron Man’s comic book life as well: the interdependence of humanity and technology in shaping the world; government paranoia, as equally present in the War on Terror years as it was in the Cold War; the unhealthily cozy relationship between the military-industrial complex and the federal government, the world of big business, and the moral tension between making money, and what the money comes from—in Stark’s case, he inherited a chunk of the military-industrial complex. It also deals, in one way or another, with many of the themes more particular to Stark himself—Stark is usually dying of one thing or another, he is a poor businessman who has gone bankrupt or faced hostile takeovers many times, and his inventions are constantly pilfered, copied, and pirated—in short, the “Demon in a Bottle” “Circuits Maximus,” and “Armor Wars” storylines from the comic.
The two Iron Man movies have also done an excellent job of planting Iron Man firmly in the here-and-now, which is a welcome challenge for a character created when solid-state electronics were mostly well in the future (yes kiddies, in 1963 Iron Man’s super-gimmicks were electromagnets and transistors). The movie itself is studded with modern pop culture references, from a cameo by Jack White to a Shepard Fairey painting of Iron Man. If this updating of the character means cleaning out the Augean stables filled to bursting with the leavings of almost fifty years’ of Marvel Comics, that may be a very good thing. It’s much like the recent Star Trek movie—if you bow and scrape to every precedent in a canon, eventually you so hem things in that Kirk has no room to be Kirk, or Stark has no more room to be Stark.
That aspect of storytelling hasn’t changed much since the Roman poet Horace published his Ars Poetica circa 18 BC. He advised:
Either follow tradition, or invent consistently.
If you happen to portray Achilles, honoured,
Pen him as energetic, irascible, ruthless,
Fierce, above the law, never downing weapons.
Make Medea wild, untameable, Ino tearful,
Ixion treacherous, Io wandering, Orestes sad.
If you’re staging something untried, and dare
To attempt fresh characters, keep them as first
Introduced, from start to end self-consistent.
What matters are not details so much as the essential nature of the character himself. Stark is a jerk and a genius. Superman is the ultimate boy scout. Batman is the brooding misanthrope. If you change that, you wind up with someone who isn’t Batman.
In the end…
…… there is an easter egg, about which I will not speak, save to say that it gave me a bad case of Kirby Dots.
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