What Would Durkheim Do?

I agree with Bob Herbert that we need to treat unemployment as a crisis. It is at least as serious as the banking and mortgage crises. Herbert, in his most recent column notes:

“By May 2009,” according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, “the total number of underutilized workers had increased dramatically from 15.63 million to 29.37 million — a rise of 13.7 million, or 88 percent. Nearly 30 million working-age individuals were underutilized in May 2009, the largest number in our nation’s history. The overall labor underutilization rate in May 2009 had risen to 18.2 percent, its highest value in 26 years.”

The Obama administration has been a major disappointment as far as labor is concerned. Hardly surprising since the folks in charge of the economy are the usual suspects, among those guilty of putting us in this situation.

A society without sufficient jobs at decent wages is an unjust society. If Obama lacks the will or the ability to lead us toward a just society then there is no good reason to support his administration or the Democrats. I hope organized labor will keep this in mind when the next election rolls around.

This is a disturbing story, a young man arrested for serial killing cats. This kind of violence in young people is a sign of serious psychological illness — antisocial personality disorder. Taking pleasure in cruelty and a lack of remorse are the necessary conditions for an adult career in homicide.

This particular kid has not been found guilty, so he might not be a budding serial killer, but whoever did kill these cats is a sick, sick person.

It poses a real dilemma. What to do with the person responsible for these crimes? This is not an easy condition to treat. Sociopaths don't learn from experience, so punishment is not rehabilitating. People, and cats, need to be protected, but does that warrant long-term imprisonment or hospitalization?

More political violence today. It appears — it is still early and perhaps the story will turn out differently — that the shooter is another lunatic on the far right.

Hate and guns, this is what our nation has become. Is it any wonder that people around the world thing we're insane?

The only* difference between the US capitalist class and African autocrats is the subtlety of their — the US plutocracy, I mean — means of theft.

* I'm over-generalizing, as usual.

... is a douchebag. (And I'm not the only one who thinks so.)

A NY Daily News headline caught my eye this evening. Ex-VP and current sociopath Dick Cheney a strong supporter of waterboarding.

Put him in prison already.

It will come as no surprise that the suspect in the murder of Dr Tiller is a far-right domestic terrorist.

Eliminationist rhetoric gets translated into action by the fanatics. All those who preach "justifiable homicide" are culpable.

File this one under religion & morality too.

I think this will be seen in another decade or so as the last gasp of the culture-war right. Eventually, as with civil rights for people of color, Americans will realize that separate is not equal and can never be equal. Adults have the right to marry another adult. Anything less is just bigotry. Get over it.

This editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle explains the current situation:

The marriage rights of Californians now fall into three categories. Heterosexual couples have access to all rights, responsibilities - and the name - of marriage. Gays and lesbians who were married between May 15 and Nov. 4 can remain so - but cannot remarry in the event of death or divorce. And all other gays and lesbians are prohibited by law from marrying the partner of their choice.

There is a word for this type of unequal treatment:

Discrimination.

Let's be serious. This cannot stand. Rational people will eventually realize that homophobia doesn't make good policy; encasing bigotry is special laws is never in the best interest of society. Discrimination is un-American.

From the Times today, a story about the abuse of children in Ireland. The highlights: physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of children by priests and nuns.

Is anyone surprised that the more fundamentalist the believer, the more likely they are to favor the use of violence?

Religion is a pox on civilization. Let's be rid of it.

I'll post some photos from my recent trip to Paris soon. (It's exam week, and that means, in addition to all the grading I have to do, all those meetings that get postponed because of the end of the year crunch are happening now.) I'm working on a study of commercial streets in immigrant neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Paris for the annual meeting of the International Visual Sociology Association this summer.

(I know that this is less a post than a preview of a future post, but it is the best I can do at the moment.)

Let's get straight to the point:

And now what we see are the intended consequences of Reaganism, the idea that a temporary electoral advantage could be gained with the help of Big Money, at a cost of allowing Big Money to go on the All-Lard Milkshake Freedom Diet it kept insisting it needed to grow bigger and stronger. And now--quel surprise!--it needs those 3500 calories per sip just to stay alive, and threatens to foul itself (again) unless we cough up.

Because what the American right-wing stands for, besides torture and homophobia, is freedom for corporations and corporations only.

America's best editorialist, Bob Herbert, speaks the truth when he says of the GOP, "It’s not a party; it’s a cult."

He makes a compelling case:

This is the party of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Newt (“I’m trying to rise from the ashes”) Gingrich, and the dark force who can’t seem to exit the public stage or modify his medieval ways, Dick Cheney.

It is losing all credibility with the public because it is not offering anything — anything at all — that could be viewed as helpful or constructive in a time of national crisis. And it has been unwilling to take responsibility for its role in bringing that crisis about.

It would be hard to imagine what a worse failure than the Bush Administration would look like. But the right-wing nutjobs who dominate the public presentation of the party (including, especially the House GOP leadership) and the wingnut talkers on TV and the Internet adhere to the Rovian strategy of pathological lying as public relations. What do we end up with?

It’s a party that doesn’t seem to care about anything other than devotion to a set of so-called principles that never amounted to more than cult-like rhetoric. Waging unwarranted warfare while radically cutting taxes for the wealthy and turning the national economy into the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme may be evidence of many things, but none of them have to do with the so-called conservative principles the G.O.P. is always braying about.

Let's hope they go the way that all cults eventually do.

It appears that prosecutors in Spain will bring charges against six Bush Administration lawyers for their role in authorizing torture, says Professor Turley.

It is sad that the Obama administration has had no courage to do what needs to be done with regard to Bush criminality. I fully expect the Obama government to compound the war crimes by providing cover for them.

We are not a nation of laws. We are a nation of politics. Sad, that.

Reactionary laws that legalize rape.

I am embarrassed to admit a connection to Boston College, the university that just folded to wingnut hysterics and barred Professor William Ayers from campus. I'm an alumnus — Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, 1992 — and have contacted the school to let them know what I think about this cowardice.

The Times has an interesting article on urban development. The author, Nicolai Ouroussoff, argues that the economic crisis has given Obama the opportunity to build the foundation for a new egalitarian urbanism.

Why does it matter? Let Ouroussoff explain:

THE country has fallen on hard times, but those of us who love cities know we have been living in the dark ages for a while now. We know that turning things around will take more than just pouring money into shovel-ready projects, regardless of how they might boost the economy. Windmills won’t do it either. We long for a bold urban vision.

With their crowded neighborhoods and web of public services, cities are not only invaluable cultural incubators; they are also vastly more efficient than suburbs. But for years they have been neglected, and in many cases forcibly harmed, by policies that favored sprawl over density and conformity over difference.

The U.S. is well behind in terms of bold thinking about the future of cities. This is, in part, because our political system gives inordinate power to nonurban places. Nowhere is that more obvious than in New York state.

And, of course, our fanatical laissez-faire ideology has made it possible for corporations to put their own private profit ahead of public good. (Case in point: the intentional resistance to a national system of high-quality public transportation. The "culture of the car" is good for the pollution industries, but not so good for the rest of us.)

But I do think we are catching on to the importance of sustainability, and that will be good news to cities.

This is Matt Taibbi's apt description of contemporary America. It is hard to argue with its accuracy unless you're living in a cave, or watching Fox "News" exclusively.

I think we need to make the scale of the problem more understandable:

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

As I said before, having power is all about not facing consequences. You make the right decisions, you profit. You make the wrong decision, you profit. Someone else has to suffer. That is what the capitalist class is so desperate to preserve.

We work, they enjoy. And at this moment of crisis, they say: "Work harder!" They can't be ask to enjoy any less.

What have we learned from 8 years of Bush, the economic crisis, the poorly planned bailout, etc.? Power insulates you from responsibility for your actions. Latest proof: AIG bonuses.

Consequences are for losers.

Basically, that is the essence of the platform of the GOP. What's sad, really, is that we seem to do so many things to distract ourselves from recognizing the truth. Oh sure, our politics and mass media do their best to pretend that the world is otherwise, but reasonably smart people figure it out. But too many of us just don't want to deal with the reality that capitalism is a form of organized crime on a global scale.

The Editors, over at the 'Toot, have a splendid idea:

People who become wealthy are certainly very lucky, but they also must have done something which some people consider very useful. Maybe they are good at business, or very smart, or they can hit a baseball very well, or whatever - I doubt anybody really deserves to make $1 million a year, no matter what they do, but obviously the wallets of America disagree with me here. But being born rich is not a useful skill, and anyway, most rich kids are huge douchebags (I speak here as an expert, having seen every Bad News Bears movie multiple times). Think about the rich kids in public life: George W. Bush, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol, George Steinbrenner, Paris Hilton, etc. Dumb, angry, entitled, douchebags. So, when you think about it, taking away a burdensome inheritance and forcing them to deal with life’s problems like the rest of us is a kindness, and will help our nation’s fortunate sons and daughters be happier, more productive, and more connected to the lives and concerns of their fellow citizens. The nasty politics, the drug habits, the superior attitude - these are all signs of profound social and spiritual alienation. So while society would be taking away “their” money, they would be receiving something infinitely more valuable in return: LOVE. Because that’s what life is all about.

And also because fuck them.

If we all rise up against them, they can't stop us. There are too many of us.

I know that some of the loonier among them are talking about "going Galt" and all, but I have a better idea: up against the wall! The world would be a better place with a few less bankers.

Frank Rich has a good survey of the state of the so-called "culture war" in the Times. He notes that the political fortunes of the culture warriors is about rock bottom. I agree with his assessment that people feel like we can't afford to pay attention to the moral scolds when the economy is tanking. But I think it is more than that. I think most Americans have realized that those who represent the fundamentalist position are not just fighting popular policies — such as stem-cell research, civil unions, and climate science — but are fighting history. They are, simply put, irrelevant. It is only a matter of time, as Rich notes, before we regard the homophobia, climate change denialism, and worship of the fetus, etc., of the Republican party in the same way we regard the Prohibitionists.