What Would Durkheim Do?

Fellow dangerous professor, M. Bérubé, explains the politics of now.

Happy birthday, Charles!

As a fan of the Mets and the Seattle Mariners, it will come as no surprise that I'm not a big fan of Alex Rodriguez. So I can't say that I'm disillusioned to learn that A-Rod is actually A-Roid. Not so good for baseball, though.

It will be interesting to see what follows. The Yankees have spent close to a half a billion dollars to restore their pennant chances, proving once again that they are evil incarnate. If they keep A-Roid, it is just a cherry on the top of their own immorality.

Another of the deadly legacies of the Bush era: the war against organized labor has put us all at risk. Consider the case of the poison peanuts. Multinational corporations try to degrade labor as much as possible to lower costs, and the results are often disastrous:

An examination of the Blakely case reveals a badly frayed food safety net. Interviews and government records show that state and federal inspectors do not require the peanut industry to inform the public — or even the government — of salmonella contamination in its plants. And industry giants like Kellogg used processed peanuts in a variety of products but relied on the factory to perform safety testing and divulge any problems.

The Times story makes clear that the industry relies heavily on unskilled, temp labor and the result is lots of food safety problems. When this is combined with the usual Republican hostility to regulation, the result is a

food safety train wreck that started here and swept through the country — claiming eight lives, sickening an estimated 19,000 people in 43 states and spurring an array of recalls, including TV dinners, snack bars labeled organic and ready-made meals for disaster relief.

Thanks to Bush and his ideology of crony capitalism, we're becoming a third world country.

The US economy has gone off a cliff, pulling the world economy along with it. All of a sudden, predictions of four years of bleakness are regarded as optimistic.

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman describes the situation:

It’s hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we’re in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world.

We're circling the drain, folks.

We’re already closer to outright deflation than at any point since the Great Depression. In particular, the private sector is experiencing widespread wage cuts for the first time since the 1930s, and there will be much more of that if the economy continues to weaken.

As the great American economist Irving Fisher pointed out almost 80 years ago, deflation, once started, tends to feed on itself. As dollar incomes fall in the face of a depressed economy, the burden of debt becomes harder to bear, while the expectation of further price declines discourages investment spending. These effects of deflation depress the economy further, which leads to more deflation, and so on.

And deflationary traps can go on for a long time. Japan experienced a “lost decade” of deflation and stagnation in the 1990s — and the only thing that let Japan escape from its trap was a global boom that boosted the nation’s exports. Who will rescue America from a similar trap now that the whole world is slumping at the same time?

When capitalists panic about the global economy, politicians start wars. Watching our domestic political spectacle, one this is clear: the capitalist class is concerned about itself, not our national well-being.

Robert Reich, at TPM Cafe, explaining recent developments in our ongoing capitalist royal screw-up:

While Washington debates TARP II, the Federal Reserve Board continues to buy or guarantee or provide loans for a vast and growing pile of questionable financial and corporate assets, much of which are likely to be worth far less than the Fed has paid or guaranteed or accepted as collateral. We're talking big money here -- so far over $2.4 trillion. (The entire TARP -- parts I and II -- in combination with the proposed stimulus package come to just over $1.5 trillion.)

Taxpayers are on the hook for this Fed bailout money, too, of course. We have to pay the interest on the ever-growing debt used to make these payments or guarantees and loans.

The system fails everyone but the world's owners. When they profit, they keep the money. When they fail, we pay. Of course they are going to be irresponsible.

It is important to note, of course, that those who think of themselves as capitalists on a small scale — not the world's owners, the multinational corporations, but small business owners or the self-employed — are not capitialists in any important sense. They are getting screwed by the system as much as anyone.

It is time to toss capitalism into the dustbin of history. Alongside religion. And "reality" TV.

Wow. I believe that this is the first time in history that I have agreed with Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi about anything. He has an editorial in the Times today.

Qaddafi observes:

Thus the Palestinians believe that what is now called Israel forms part of their nation, even were they to secure the West Bank and Gaza. And the Jews believe that the West Bank is Samaria and Judea, part of their homeland, even if a Palestinian state were established there. Now, as Gaza still smolders, calls for a two-state solution or partition persist. But neither will work.

When religion and culture make a people think the land is theirs, they will use violence to secure their stake. Since both sides believe the land is theirs, they will either find peace together by living together, or will continue to try to kill each other.

Extremists on both sides (and some loopy American supporters of Israel) believe that they are justified in calling for the extermination of the other side. They are fanatics and must be treated as such by all reasonable, peace-loving people.

Jews and Arabs can live together in Israel/Palestine. As Qaddafi points out, they did before. One multi-ethnic, multi-religious state (though I hope they can come up with a better name than "Isratine") is the only lasting solution that is just.

Doghouse has some apt words directed as the asshole leaving the White House:

You, and your party, have fully insulated yourselves from the Reality community, which may help you sleep nights, but it's that community which was right about you all along. You're an intellectual disaster and an emotional trainwreck, an incurious ideologue and a criminal sociopath. You're a pathetic liar. And you're not just stupid, you're a fool.

And now you're done.

History will only deepen the judgment of the reality-based community. Bush was a total disaster. We are in for decades of suffering as a result.

He kept us safe, they say. (The 'they' being the dimwits and Christians who still think Bush is a leader.) Well, he kept us safe after we were attacked, at a time when another large scale terrorist event was unlikely, given the logistics and the inevitable response of any national government to 9/11. He might as well claim credit for keeping Earth safe from a comet impact.

A parable: A sheriff is responsible for protecting the train from robbers on its trip from New York to San Fransisco. The train gets robbed by brigands just after leaving NYC. When the train gets to SF, someone asks the lawman how the trip went. He replies, "Good!"

"Really, I heard the train was robbed."

"Well," the sheriff says, "after the robbery, I kept the train from being robbed again!"

Those tedious wingnut culture war hysterics don't know how to watch a film as art, or even as entertainment. For them, it is all about propaganda.

I am reminded of my usual conversations with my cat. No matter what I say, all she hears is blah blah blah cat chow blah blah blah.... That's just the way cats are. It strikes me that these wingnuts have the same mentality when they watch a movie or TV: blah blah blah an American flag! blah blah blah traditional gender role! blah blah blah woman having a baby not an abortion! blah blah blah....

As Roy says, let them blather about how much Americans want movies that confirm their views. They don't have any actual effect on Americans' entertainment preferences or the industry itself. We can point and laugh.

Why didn't we elect Bob Herbert as the first black President?

If you aren't reading Appletree then you deserve a kick in the ass. All the A-list blogs are filled with the same gasbags saying the same things. Appletree is the sort of place with a good mixture of politics, culture and humor. A good crowd of commenters too — including the village moral retard idiot, a whingeing conservative who is regularly exposed to the knocks of the reality-based community. Everything one needs for a groovy virtual community.

I read it several times a day. Sometimes it makes me sigh, and sometimes it makes me angry. I usually laugh though.

Get over there now and see all the picture caption contests I've won.

(Don't ask me about the corn snake controversy. I don't know what that's about. Must be a West Coast Thing.)

More good sense from ol' Doghouse Riley:

Can we have direct election of the President now? After a decade of screwed-up elections, can we acknowledge we're no longer thirteen coastal communities trying to hoodwink each other into agreeing to the amount of federal control we imagine is best for us personally? Even if that is what we still are, minus the coastal bit? Interest in voting is at a post-war high, even if that's not exactly an impossibly high standard or anything; time to use that to overhaul the system.

This would, of course, have the attendant benefit of eliminating all the fucking Red State/Blue State crap, and none of us would have to look at the Great Red Wall of the Trans-Mississippi ever again. For one thing, if you take out all the major cities of the Republic of Texas, how many people live between there and Canada? Several hundred? I would also like to suggest that if your state is responsible for both the political career of the Worst President Ever Imaginable and his phony fucking hick accent, you should recuse yourself from national elections for a decent interval, say, until he dies.

I second that last suggestion. Have some self-respect, people.

Things just keep getting better and better. Obama won the election. And, now I won the latest photo caption contest at Appletree.

I don't recall ever feeling so proud of this country. Our problems have not gone away, of course, but this is a historical moment. There does seem to be a real, concrete hope that we can take a step forward with regard to the difficult issue of race.

Congratulations Present-elect Obama.

We progressives now need to keep the pressure on to make it possible for President Obama to govern to the left of where Senator Obama campaigned.

Let's give him credit, Senator McCain gave a gracious concession speech tonight. I was happy to hear him recognize the historical significance of this election, despite his disappointment at the result of the voting.

We'll have to wait and see if the Republican base finds its better impulses. But McCain ended his campaign with honor.

What kind of country do we want? Bob Herbert directs our attention to after the election:

What Americans really have to decide is what kind of country they want.

Right now the United States is a country in which wealth is funneled, absurdly, from the bottom to the top. The richest 1 percent of Americans now holds close to 40 percent of all the wealth in the nation and maintains an iron grip on the levers of government power.

This is not only unfair, but self-defeating. The U.S. cannot thrive with its fabulous wealth concentrated at the top and the middle class on its knees. (No one even bothers to talk about the poor anymore.) How to correct this imbalance is one of the biggest questions facing the country.

The U.S. is also a country in which blissful ignorance is celebrated, and intellectual excellence (the key to 21st century advancement) is not just given short shrift, but is ridiculed.

It is time to end the sad, shameful age of Reaganism. It was a dismal failure.

We now need a new New Deal. Bring it on, Obama.

From the Nobel economist, Paul Krugman:

But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.

This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier. But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance.

I hope that the election will be a decisive rejection of the politics of prejudice. I hope that circumstances force President Obama to govern to the left of where he campaigned. If these things happen, we will end the ugly chapter of Reaganism in American politics.

The Dems are on the side of history right now. They are also on the side of demography. That may explain why the "Republican rump," as Krugman puts it, has gotten itself into such an hateful state.

You really can't parody the wingnutosphere. They will eventually sink to every imaginable depth. No opinion is too loony or hysterical. Just give them time, and someone will assert it in all seriousness.

Roy at alicublog demonstrates.

Just as Lenin said: carpooling will be the death of Capitalism.

* I know that Poe's Law was originally articulated with regard to Fundamentalists, but let's face it, the far-right blog gasbags follow the same logic.

Adia Harvey, at Racism Review, has an insightful take on what an Obama administration would mean for the U.S. It would be historical, of course, but it would not transport us magically to a post-racial society.

Harvey notes:

An Obama win, even with more white support than any candidate preceding him since Jimmy Carter, doesn’t mean that racism is over. It doesn’t mean that some of the same whites who will vote for Obama see him in ways that challenge racial inequality. Specifically, some will continue to see him as different from “most” black people, who they view as lazy, unintelligent, and immoral. It doesn’t mean that institutional, systemic racism that results in neighborhood segregation, wealth disparities, educational inequities, and racialized processes in the criminal justice system no longer exists. It doesn’t mean that Black men will stop getting beaten and harassed by police, or that Black women will no longer be disproportionately represented in low-wage, low-prestige jobs. It doesn’t mean that white privilege has disappeared or that the nation has suddenly become colorblind.

We are much more likely to get to work on issues of inequality with Obama in the White House. But it will still require a lot of work on the part of progressives. If, as I think is the case at present, the financial crisis has made racism a luxury many whites feel they can no longer afford, Obama may win, and win decisively. But if he manages to find a way out of the economic catastrophe brought on by the insanity of laissez-faire extremism, and the economy begins to recover, whites in large numbers may well feel like they can afford their familiar beliefs about race.

Obama is only the beginning of our struggle.

I realize that this is kicking a deflated soccer ball*, but the Times reports on yet more evidence that BushCo will be remembered as the worst administration in our history. The fanatics really have no limits in the Bush White House. They have no respect for American culture, or U.S. law. They have no shame.

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* I decided it was better not to say the one about the dead horse. I support animal rights. Dead animals deserve respect. The Bush Administration does not.