Category: Attitude

Rand Paul Civil Rights Act retrospective

Townhall.com has a pretty interesting set of reactions to the kefuffle over Rand Paul’s initial equivocation on the public accommodations portions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act:

They’re interesting partly because they are better than the usual charges of media bias that follow a conservative embarrassment in “gotcha moment.”

For my money, Goldberg is the funniest (not surprisingly) and closest to my view of the deepest meaning of this pretty shallow episode:

[T]he only people who are really jazzed to reopen the argument about the Civil Rights Act are liberals.

And they have good reason: They won that argument, politically and morally. This is a fact liberals never stop reminding us, and themselves, about. Like a paunchy middle-aged man who scored the winning touchdown in the high school championship, nostalgic liberals don’t need an excuse to bring up their glory days (which were not the Democratic Party’s glory days, by the way). Give them a living, breathing politician who suggests, no matter how imprecisely or grudgingly, that the Civil Rights Act wasn’t perfect, and they’ll talk your ear off like a drunk uncle at a wedding.

How many activist groups insist that their plight is sublimely analogous to the civil rights struggle? How many times did the Democrats try to make health-care reform a continuation of civil rights? …

What really makes this debate remarkable is that someone has volunteered to be the straw man liberals are always creating.

But Harsanyi’s opener is good, too:

Isn’t it time we started querying our political candidates on issues that really matter?

Let’s start with this one: If you were a convention delegate in 1778, would you have voted to ratify the Constitution of the United States?

If the answer is yes — and you don’t hate America, do you?! — it’s only fair we conclude that you support restricting voting rights to male landowners exclusively. Surely, from your position, we can also deduce that you support slavery.

A City the Devil Built

If the Devil created an anti-city, a place where people would feel least human, Atlanta would surely be that place ….

So William Howard Kunstler opens his blog this week, but not so much to excoriate Atlanta as to introduce it as, ironically, the site of the 18th Congress of the New Urbanism. The blog is a pretty good 30,000-foot view of what’s most endearing about Kunstler’s thought. If you want an overview with spoken words and pictures, check here.

Or rummage through your own wetware if you’ve ever walked Boston’s Freedom Trail or Beacon Hill, or gawked at the dense cheek-by jowl homes of New York’s Greenwich Village, or ambled through Charleston’s Battery neighborhood, smelling the linseed oil of summer painting, or strolled, sweating, under the Live Oaks of Savannah’s old streets near the River (out in “Garden of Good and Evil” territory). There’s something human about those places, and it’s not just nostalgia — though nostalgia plays its part.

The New Urbanists, in my conviction, are advocating something — the only thing I know of — that makes sense for urban living, as opposed to the urban-suburban auto treadmill, waiting for the Oil Fairy to make peak oil go away. It needn’t be rank imitation of the places I just named, but they’ve got the scale right.

As my friend, Practicing Human, wrote this morning:

[W]e would be doing well to ask about consumption of energy resources on a micro-, meso- and macro-scale.  Managing our energy diet towards a sustainable rate means more than just changing our light bulbs.  We can think creatively about building and community design.  And we can adjust national priorities, which always proves to be incredibly difficult.

America is a country working foremost in a consumptive paradigm.  Until we can think differently about standards of living, then we are going to recreate the same problems.  But I think a different economic paradigm is still very far removed as it requires a significant leap in economic, political, and sociological thinking.

Sadly, the economic crisis is hurting the good guy developers along with the bad. Kunstler again:

I heard a lot of stories during the meeting in Atlanta last week but one really stood out. It was about the money and revealed a lot about what is going on in our banking system these days. A New Urbanist developer had gotten a small project going for a traditional neighborhood. Despite the global financial [crisis], the developer was able to meet the payments of his commercial loan.  But the FDIC sent bank examiners around America and they told the small regional banks that if they had more than twenty percent of their loans in commercial real estate (CRE) they would be put out of business. The banks were ordered to reduce their loads of CRE by calling in the loans and liquidating the assets. Ironically, the banks only called in their “performing” loans, the ones that were being regularly paid off, because they were ignoring and even concealing the ones that weren’t being paid.

The developer in question had his loan called in when the FDIC descended on his bank. He couldn’t pay off the $3 million in one lump, of course. The FDIC’s agents are going to seize and sell off his project if he can’t get it refinanced in short order.  He can’t get it refinanced because there is now such a shortage of capital in the banking system that no one can get a loan for anything. Also, since it is now well-known that the bank failed, the vultures are circling above his project hoping to buy it for a discount, so even the few private investors who have money won’t throw him a lifeline. By the way, the FDIC agents told him they are doing this because they now expect that virtually all commercial real estate loans in the USA will fail in the months ahead. Pretty scary story, huh?  And he was one of the good guys.

I suppose it was a tragic thing that the New Urbanists made themselves hostage to the same banking system that was behind suburban sprawl …

I have no great overarching point, but if people will read Kunstler, we are likelier to make the paradigm jump we need.

Paradigm Busters

My crystal ball has never worked very well, but the part of me that longs, that aches, for something better than our Ponzi-scheme economy refuses to give up on dreams of a humane future.

This sort of thing – rumored for weeks – could be it:

PITTSBURGH – The United Steelworkers (USW) and MONDRAGON Internacional, S.A. today announced a framework agreement for collaboration in establishing MONDRAGON cooperatives in the manufacturing sector within the United States and Canada.  The USW and MONDRAGON will work to establish manufacturing cooperatives that adapt collective bargaining principles to the MONDRAGON worker ownership model of “one worker, one vote.”

“We see today’s agreement as a historic first step towards making union co-ops a viable business model that can create good jobs, empower workers, and support communities in the United States and Canada,” said USW International President Leo W. Gerard.  “Too often we have seen Wall Street hollow out companies by draining their cash and assets and hollowing out communities by shedding jobs and shuttering plants. We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities.”

Josu Ugarte, President of MONDGRAGON Internacional added: “What we are announcing today represents a historic first – combining the world’s largest industrial worker cooperative with one of the world’s most progressive and forward-thinking manufacturing unions to work together so that our combined know-how and complimentary visions can transform manufacturing practices in North America.”

Highlighting the differences between Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) and union co-ops, Gerard said, “We have lots of experience with ESOPs, but have found that it doesn’t take long for the Wall Street types to push workers aside and take back control.  We see Mondragon’s cooperative model with ‘one worker, one vote’ ownership as a means to re-empower workers and make business accountable to Main Street instead of Wall Street.”

Both the USW and MONDRAGON emphasized the shared values that will drive this collaboration.  Mr. Ugarte commented, “We feel inspired to take this step based on our common set of values with the Steelworkers who have proved time and again that the future belongs to those who connect vision and values to people and put all three first. We are excited about working with Mondragon because of our shared values, that work should empower workers and sustain families and communities,” Gerard added.

In the coming months, the USW and MONDRAGON will seek opportunities to implement this union co-op hybrid approach by sharing the common values put forward by the USW and MONDGRAGON and by operating in similar manufacturing segments in which both the USW and MONDRAGON already participate.

…

About MONDRAGON:

The MONDRAGON Corporation mission is to produce and sell goods and provide services and distribution using democratic methods in its organizational structure and distributing the assets generated for the benefit of its members and the community, as a measure of solidarity.  MONDRAGON began its activities in 1956 in the Basque town of Mondragon by a rural village priest with a transformative vision who believed in the values of worker collaboration and working hard to reach for and realize the common good.

Today, with approximately 100,000 cooperative members in over 260 cooperative enterprises present in more than forty countries; MONDRAGON Corporation is committed to the creation of greater social wealth through customer satisfaction, job creation, technological and business development, continuous improvement, the promotion of education, and respect for the environment.   In 2008, MONDRAGON Corporation reached annual sales of more than sixteen billion euros with its own cooperative university, cooperative bank, and cooperative social security mutual and is ranked as the top Basque business group, the seventh largest in Spain, and the world’s largest industrial workers cooperative.

About the USW:

The USW is North America’s largest industrial union representing 1.2 million active and retired members in a diverse range of industries.

Here’s the Ocholphobist – a guy who’s experienced at making beautiful objects with his hands, but who seldom writes on such things any more – weighing and balancing the workers’ cooperative model:

I recently spoke with an old Catholic Worker friend of mine who told me of a talk given recently in which he heard that Mondragón is worried that an EU style bailout of Spain along the lines of what happened in Greece would actually hurt the cooperatives (Mondragón is not the only one) in Spain. Large financiers generally do not like cooperatives like Mondragón because they do not run with the sort of debt load and constant large debt shifting that a typical corporation does, and the debt they have tends to be decentralized – spread out over a number of smaller financial institutions (note that one of the “four areas of activity” Mondragón is engaged in is finance – this is common among worker cooperatives in Europe — just as many communities and groups of workers in America have local credit unions and many large corporations have their own finance divisions) . And these EU bailouts, like the American bailouts, buttress large finance, with the de facto result that midsize, small, and micro finance options are left in a less competitive position than they would be were there no bailouts, or less centralized bailouts.
The labor movement in the U.S. has little leverage against corporations and its impotence is increasingly pathetic. Often in the American context, when a union does manage to maintain some real power it uses it in as corrupt and abusive a manner (often abusive toward their own, these days) as corportatist power brokers do. But usually American unions are in the business of losing what power they have had so this is less and less a concern. It seems to me that if there is to be any future in workers organizing for their own protection and aid in the United States it will primarily be along the lines of models such as the one Mondragón provides. But I rather doubt that will happen beyond a few small scale efforts and the occasional lipservice. Worker cooperatives do not really fit into the destructive plutocratic order in which we find ourselves today.
It should be noted that in most worker cooperatives (I daresay nearly all of them that last for more than a few years) there is not a utopian vision of financial egalitarianism. There is still a meritocracy at play, arguably more so than in current corporatist models. A worker (or a small worker owned business seeking membership in the cooperative) is not guaranteed to be vested in the cooperative, but must earn it over years and invest himself or herself in a manner which shows to others competence and seriousness and follows well established protocols, with a system in place to curb abuses and address complaints. One will see in a worker cooperative, however, more money staying within the communities where the cooperative is found, and nothing like the radical disparity between the wages of workers and the salaries of executives such as we see in most U.S. corporations, in which execs are paid for their skills in social networking and an ability to manipulate government and lying to the public with that perfected air of banality we routinely see from our suits.
All that said, the ethos of Mondragón Corp has undergone something of a change since EU integration and taken something of a more EU character. The EU is a sly dog. Within the EU constitution there is a mandate which requires the EU to follow the principle of subsidiarity, but as we see with the recent bailout of Greece (along with a host of other moves), the EU is often the furthest thing from an institution which follows the principle of subsidiarity. There is the possibility of a convenient use of subsidiarity rhetoric whilst actually following centralized, top-down, corporo-statist models. It is quite conceivable that cooperatives could be formed which, on paper, look like cooperatives, but which actually function more like corporations.
It is now not uncommon for American Orthodox to argue how neo-con, paleo-con, or libertarian political and/or economic orders are somehow in keeping with Orthodoxy. I suppose an Orthodox embracing subsidiarity would simply be another act in that circus. The chief fault of subsidiarity, as I see it, is that the notion is too vague to be of serious use when applied to any macro-economic vision. One finds both Leftists and those on the Right espousing the ‘true’ version of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity works best as a flexible guiding model in particular micro-economic environments, a part of an economic order with a wide array of labor structures, such as we see with Mondragón Corp in the context of Spain. I have a friend who says he would never fly Distributivist Air, were there such a company. I am not sure that a well run worker cooperative airline would be any less safe than the typical corporate airline, but I have worked for a family owned business of which the thought of the coworkers I had at said business owning that business sends shivers down my spine. Another business I once worked for did go for a varient of the subsidiarity model, and is now in dire straights with half of the staff let go, instead of being sold to a friend of mine who could have actually kept the business thriving, seeing as how he had run it successfully for some years. The original owner, instead of selling to my friend, decided to follow a hasty subsidiarity minded scheme presented by an employee with many ideals and little actual experience in the business and now, out of desperation, the company mimics corporate stores more than it ever did. I suppose that in business, as in most of life, there is a charism to doing things well and any economic order can get in the way of a given charism at a given time.
I was unaware of this book until the Ochlophobist linked it. It’s on my wish list now. And here’s more about Mondragon (in a Wikipedia article that the Wikipedia poobahs would like to see rewritten for greater objectivity).

Red Tories | Front Porch Republic

I haven’t decided yet whether I like The American Conservative enough to renew my subscription, but the June issue is excellent, and I’d recommend that you pick it up before the next issue rolls around.

The feature article of the June issue is “Shattered Society,” an essay by Brittish philosopher and politics wonk Phillip Blond, who styles himself a “Red Tory.” The subhead is “Liberalism, Right and Left,  has made lonely serfs of us all,” and asks “Does the Red Tory tradition offer a remedy?”

The article is powerful. The responses (e.g., Daniel McCarthy, Nicholas Capalidi) are provocative. Like Daniel Larison at Front Porch Republic, I thought Capaldi’s response was badly misguided. I even though it was condescending psychobabble, probably a calculated hatchet-job commissioned by corporate interests. That’s why I blog while Daniel Larison blogs and can actually get a job writing professionally. He insinutes the same sort of thing but does it more nicely.

Porn on my mind

I have pornography on the mind lately.

You might say “tell us something surprising” or “aren’t you a little old for that?” But that would miss the point of why I have it on the mind. One obituary and a news mailing from my Law School did it to me.

Until just a few years ago, my hometown still had an independent bookstore and magazine stand downtown, City News. It was mostly magazines, frankly, and about 15% of it, as I recall, was pornography. One of the brothers who owned it until it finally closed died May 11.

City News and I had some history together. As a young adolescent, I was keenly interested in the — ahem! — “adult” material they had, and they were lax about underage browsers (this was before the brothers owned it). As a professional working half a block away decades later, I resented the pornography, but I realized that City News probably wasn’t viable without it. And I see that the brother who died, of complications of ALS, was pretty darned smart (Duke, magna cum laud) and had a pretty admirable life that I didn’t know about.

As I mused aloud on this, my wife reminded me that as a journalism major, she interviewed the female owner of a similar news stand in Peoria. Asking about the porn (which as I recall was “harder” by the standards of that day than what City News ever carried), she got the answer “I have a disabled son who is very costly to raise. Without pornography, the store dies and I’m out of work.”

Even Barnes & Noble and Borders have a small stash of what today qualifies as soft core, prudently wrapped in plastic bags.

I write this from a Marriott Hotel in L.A. Marriott is under Mormon ownership, as I recall. There was no Gideon Bible for my morning devotions, but I could have viewed pornography on the TV had I wished. I know offhand of no exceptions to “pay-per-view” porn in major hotel chains. The market apparently demands it.

I thought of this, too, as I saw a photo of my law school classmate, Scott Flanders, arm-in-arm with the Dean, with the caption declaring that he is CEO at Playboy. Scott was a libertarian-type conservative. Perhaps he still is. How wide the gulf between cultural conservatives and others of the “conservative” label!

Porn is everywhere. Yesterday before leaving for L.A., I attended a Daybreak Rotary meeting to receive a grant check for Matrix Lifeline, a pregnancy resource center I’ve been affiliated with for nearly three decades. Another grant recipient was the PEERS Project in Lafayette. It and all similar programs are losing their federal funding (elections have consequences). Mike Boston, the leader in Lafayette, trying to convey what they’re up against, said “just watch MTV for seven minutes if you can stomach it. No, just three minutes is enough.”

My wife just told me, as she leafed through an L.A. travel guide, that there’s a Porno Hall of Fame on Santa Monica Boulevard not too far from where we sit.

I hate it. We have lost all sense of shame seemliness. Some things are meant to be kept in private. Time was, not long ago, that the Dean of a good law school would have hesitated to be photographed with the CEO or a porn empire. Time was that a news stand could have survived without trafficking in porn.

I don’t accept market demand as an excuse. There are some things the market should not provide, demand be damned. And there are some trades less honorable than ditch-digging, even if they’re more remunerative.

Brother Jim, requiescat in pacem. I can’t really approve of the choice you made, but your Judge knows exactly how to factor in the spirit of the age.

Alternate energy follies – and a cold slap in the face about current cars

The Wall Street Journal must have an imp running around the office tying knots in knickers.

First, in The Price of Wind, the Editorial Board (I assume; it’s unsigned) inveighs about wind power at Nantucket Sound. It’s not because they’re NIMBY liberals, who have ferociously opposed it (seemingly for selfish aesthetic reasons), but because of the intricate subsidies and the cost of the power produced – double power from conventional sources.

There’s comic irony in this clean energy revolution getting devoured by the archaic regulations of previous clean energy revolutions. But given that taxpayers will be required to pay to build Cape Wind and then required to buy its product at prices twice normal rates, opponents might have more success if they simply pointed out what a lousy deal it is.

Then Homan Jenkins greets the reader with “Congratulations. You’re about to buy a fancy new Nissan Leaf or Chevy Volt . . . for someone else.” He is shocked that the first wave of electric cars won’t cost $40,000 after all, but roughly 70% of that, because of – gasp! – subsidies!

And so a boondoggle is born. Last month, after a meeting with White House Car Czar Ron Bloom, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers produced a multipoint proposal for how the handouts can be made to flow more or less in perpetuity.

“In perpetuity“? Can you think of another transportation subsidy that’s perpetual (until the collapse that’s surely coming)? No, not Amtrak. Bigger than that.

How about roads, highways, streets, block after block of lovely downtown buildings leveled to make room for public surface parking or parking garages, and such? Do you think that our auto-centric communities happened naturally and spontaneously? Gimme a break!

What iPads Did To My Family – Chuck’s Blog

Departure point: What iPads Did To My Family – Chuck’s Blog.

I’m a gadget guy. I occasionally feel oppressed by how many I have, and I cherish the gadget that can replace multiple other gadgets – such as my iPhone, f’rinstance, which for me pretty much replaced:

  1. Cell phone
  2. PDA or Pocket Calendar
  3. iPod
  4. E-Book reader
  5. Notebook computer (if just e-mail monitoring is needed)

But if a guy as tech-savvy as Chuck Hollis, with his tech-savvy family, can buy an iPad as a toy and then find his whole tech-savvy family waiting turns to use it, then I may have to regress, eventually, to iPhone and iPad instead of just iPhone.

Or maybe I could finally figure out how to use Skype?

Gushing wells and debt crises: epiphenomena of living beyond our means

Patrick Deneen, who is capable of even deeper stuff than this, today eloquently points out that two current crises — the Gulf oil spew and the Greek debt situation — are rooted in “our collective inability to live within our means”:

All accounts of the “spew” suggest that in our insatiable search for replacement of declining amounts of crude oilavailable in places where it’s relatively easier to bring it to the surface (i.e., on land), we are now increasingly forced to probe for oil in highly inhospitable places where the odds of just such disasters are substantially increased. Our national policy of “drill, baby, drill” in deep sea environments – endorsed alike by such political “opponents” as Sarah Palin and President Obama – can only be expected to result in growing numbers of such accidents, just as a nicotine addict can be expected to burn his fingers when he probes more deeply at the bottom of an ashtray for a butt that still might have something left to inhale.

The Greek debt crisis – what many “in the know” believe to be the first of several, and even many such national crises, likely to be replayed in some form in Spain, Portugal, Ireland, even England and possibly even the U.S. – is quite simply a consequence of a nation that has grown accustomed to living beyond its means for a long time, and which now believes itself entitled to that condition on a more or less permanent basis.

Just so. I have for a long, long time suspected that our prosperity was less a matter of divine favor and Puritan work ethic than it was of our occupying an unspoiled continent, abundant in resources, at a fortuitous historic juncture. I enjoy all the modern amenities, but try to cultivate an “easy come, easy go” attitude as I anticipate at least a gradual, and probably a screeching, halt to les bontemps. Those intuitions or premonitions were long on the back burner, but the rapid return of American insouciance after 9/11 was deeply disturbing and ominous.

The 2 x 4 failed to get our attention. The 4 x 8 failed, too. What will it take? Will we just blame the dirty-neck politicians — who we elected largely in proportion to their absurd promises of either endless prosperity (Red State) or metaphysical equality at high prosperity levels (Blue State) — or will we see the culprit in the mirror?

Thus these two crises are even more deeply connected than a glance at the newspaper might reveal, as the worldwide belief that we could live permanently beyond our means was literally fueled by our brief and exuberant burning of most of the world’s supply of “easy oil.” Over the half-century or so, the world has enjoyed seemingly unlimited economic “growth” whose source was most fundamentally a sea of accumulated sunlight that was never “ours,” but which we treated as the property of the living generation without regard for the effects of our massive addiction upon the substance for future generations. This accumulation of millenia – allowing us to live for a time under the impression that humans no longer were dependent upon or governed by the earth – was tapped over the course of 150 years at increasing rates that led to its greatest amount in the early 2000’s (and the stock market at its highest level), and then suddenly began its inevitable decline with $150/barrel oil and a predictable economic crash whose inevitability was discernible to anyone who knew that the age of growth was over, and that our debt could only be repaid (if at all) by a long and painful time of austerity. We are living through the aftershocks of a world pressed by limits to growth, and – addicted to that condition of permanent thoughtlessness, and having been told that the permanence pf growth was ensured by the solidity of industry and government alike – today demand increasing debt to make up for declining wealth. The worldwide deleveraging that we have sought to forestall by means of “stimuli” and financial chicanery will be all the more painful and dislocating with every day that we put off our reckoning.

The ancient Greeks were the source of a kind of wisdom about self-government that today’s Greeks – and the rest of the world – have forgotten, only after Europeans and Americans (especially) over the past several hundred years explicitly overturned their influence – particularly the legacy of that inheritance in Christendom. Bans against “usury” – now regarded as quaint and incomprehensible – were most fundamentally bans upon current generations stealing from future generations. Limits upon debt were established to prevent people from living beyond their means, to constrain their appetites to what was appropriate within the limits of the world. It is an ancient teaching that we are rediscovering not by dint of wisdom and a habituated capacity to embrace self-rule, but by dint of having no other choice.

Several nights ago, Wendell Berry spoke to a packed – overflowing – auditorium in the Arlington library. Some hope is to be found in the fact that the audience was overwhelmingly composed of young people, wanting to hear from that older man some words about what we are now to do. And he concluded a marvelous evening of reflections and thoughts with a response to a question about Oil and Limits with the reply that he was waiting – as we should all be waiting – for someone to tell us that “we’ve got to use less,” that someone must make a criticism of our “standard of living” and speak in terms of “limits and context.” The context of which he spoke explicitly was that nature was speaking – “very noisily” – to those who would listen, and that the “news from the world” was quite clear that we needed to begin speaking and living under self-imposed limits – or those limits that would be violently imposed upon us.

Amen.

Making Money

I’ve been intrigued, and troubled, by the concept that “banks literally lend money into existence” ever since I first heard it.

Today a very occasional contributor to Front Porch Republic lays out how it’s done and how the confluence of that and some other factors leaves the economy in great structural peril still. Better yet, he tells how we can get out of it with minimal pain – at least initially.

The contributor, Eric Zencey, is a novelist, essayist, and Visiting Associate Professor of Historical and Political Studies for Empire State College in Europe and New York. His writing in environmental history and political theory has been supported by grants from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and Bogliasco Foundations. Today’s essay is a glimpse into his forthcoming book The Other Road to Serfdom: Essays in Sustainable Democracy (University Press of New England, Fall 2011).

That banks lend money into existence is not necessarily a secret worthy of outrage. It is a conscious policy decision at the national level to loosen the federal grasp of a traditionally sovereign prerogative, seigniorage: the difference between the face value money and its cost of production; the profit that comes from creating money.

But outrageous or not, allowing banks into the game changes it pretty fundamentally, especially when the banks are backed by the FDIC is they get so far out there as to create a crisis of confidence and consequent “run on the bank.”

Zency lays it out well if you’re interested. It seems to me that this is a major factor in our manic-depressive economic mood swings.