Transparency International Rankings for Kleptocracies have left off some key figures - like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld...it seems as though Dick Cheney is movin' on up.
An analysis released by a Democratic senator found that Vice President Dick Cheney's Halliburton stock options have risen 3,281 percent in the last year...
libertypost.org carries the water on yet another sterling example of neoclassical modernist humanism...,
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) asserts that Cheney's options -- worth $241,498 a year ago -- are now valued at more than $8 million. The former CEO of the oil and gas services juggernaut, Cheney has pledged to give proceeds to charity.
“Halliburton has already raked in more than $10 billion from the Bush-Cheney Administration for work in Iraq, and they were awarded some of the first Katrina contracts," Lautenberg said in a statement. "It is unseemly for the Vice President to continue to benefit from this company at the same time his Administration funnels billions of dollars to it. The Vice President should sever his financial ties to Halliburton once and for all.”
Cheney continues to hold 433,333 Halliburton stock options. The company has been criticized by auditors for its handling of a no-bid contact in Iraq. Auditors found the firm marked up meal prices for troops and inflated gas prices in a deal with a Kuwaiti supplier. The company built the American prison at Guantanamo Bay.
The Vice President has sought to stem criticism by signing an agreement to donate the after-tax profits from these stock options to charities of his choice, and his lawyer has said he will not take any tax deduction for the donations.
However, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) concluded in Sept. 2003 that holding stock options while in elective office does constitute a “financial interest” regardless of whether the holder of the options will donate proceeds to charities. CRS also found that receiving deferred compensation is a financial interest.
Cheney told "Meet the Press" in 2003 that he didn't have any financial ties to the firm.
“Since I left Halliburton to become George Bush's vice president, I've severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest," the Vice President said. "I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had, now, for over three years.”
Cheney continues to received a deferred salary from the company. According to financial disclosure forms, he was paid $205,298 in 2001; $162,392 in 2002; $178,437 in 2003; and $194,852 in 2004. (1 image)
More than 38 million Americans go hungry, including nearly 14 million children....,
Waltham, MA, Oct. 28, 2005 –Hunger in American households has risen by 43 percent over the last five years, according to an analysis of US Department of Agriculture (USDA) data released today. The analysis, completed by the Center on Hunger and Poverty at Brandeis University, shows that more than 7 million people have joined the ranks of the hungry since 1999.
The USDA report, Household Food Security in the United States, 2004, says that 38.2 million Americans live in households that suffer directly from hunger and food insecurity, including nearly 14 million children. That figure is up from 31 million Americans in 1999.
"This is an unexpected and even stunning outcome," noted center director Dr. J. Larry Brown, a leading scholarly authority on domestic hunger. "This chronic level of hunger so long after the recession ended means that it is a man-made problem. Congress and the White House urgently need to address growing income inequality and the weakening of the safety net in order to get this epidemic under control." According to the Center on Hunger and Poverty, food insecurity increased by nearly a million households from 2003 to 2004. Rates of hunger increased in almost every single category of household during the same time, with single mothers and those living in or near poverty continuing to suffer from severely high rates of both food insecurity and hunger.
California, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, North Carolina, New Mexico, Oklahoma and South Carolina all have food insecurity and hunger rates that are significantly higher than the national average. The lone bright spot in the nation is Oregon. Once considered to have the worst hunger in the country, Oregon has shown significant decreases in food insecurity and hunger since 1999-2001.
"With this astonishing level of food deprivation in America," Brown concluded, "we need President Bush to step up to the plate. If he now asks Congress to cut federal food programs, hunger will increase even further. We need the moral leadership to stem this crisis."
A full copy of Household Food Security in the United States, 2004 is available at http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err11/
To obtain a bulletin of the analysis by the Center on Poverty and Hunger, visit http://www.centeronhunger.org, or email hunger@brandeis.edu. The author of this bulletin can be contacted at bhall@brandeis.edu or by phone at 781-736-8680.
The Red Cross took in about 1.2 billion dollars for Katrina relief. The Red Cross spent about 2 billion dollars for Katrina relief. Now they want a loan to cover the shortfall.
After the Red Cross was caught hoarding money sent in for 9/11 relief, and accusations of mispending money, is it now safe to say the Red Cross is shady for other than handling blood supplies?
Oh, wait... There's still that HIV tainted blood thing...
So, I'm standing in line, waiting to board an airplane when I hear a CNN news reader mention an idea to modify the mortgage tax deduction.
The panel found that current tax breaks for homeowners, such as the mortgage interest deduction, encourage wealthier taxpayers to buy bigger houses and do little to help others purchase homes.
That contributes to rising home prices and pushes less wealthy taxpayers toward risky loans, said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab. “We are starting to see some significant pain here,” she said.
One change discussed would lower the $1 million limit on mortgages eligible for the interest deduction to an amount closer to average housing prices, with adjustments for geographical differences. The panel also considered converting the current deductions into a credit, among other ideas.
What's missing is the amount the "average housing prices" is listed as being. The number I've seen is $350K.
Well, in my area, most of the homes being built, start above that price. However, I don't live in a "rich neighborhood". I live in a middle class neighborhood.
This would cause a housing market crash you would not believe. This would follow with a recession or depression.
This proposal is a "soak the rich" scheme that will catch ordinary middle class people. This is up there with the AMT.
A simple question:
All other things being equal, what would you rather have corporations fund with respect to their compensation packages?
a. Retirement benefits
b. More entry level jobs
c. Higher overall wages
Pick one. Explain.
After the criticism of his disastrous handling the Katrina disaster, President George Bush promises a reconstruction programme of $200bn for areas destroyed by the hurricane. But the first and biggest beneficiaries will be businesses that specialise in profiting from disaster, and have already had lucrative contracts in Iraq; they will gentrify New Orleans at the expense of its poor, black citizens.
THE tempest that destroyed New Orleans was conjured out of tropical seas and an angry atmosphere 250km offshore of the Bahamas. Labelled initially as “tropical depression 12” on 23 August, it quickly intensified into “tropical storm Katrina”, the eleventh named storm in one of the busiest hurricane seasons in history. Making landfall near Miami on 24 August, Katrina had grown into a small hurricane, category one on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, with 125 km/h winds that killed nine people and knocked out power to one million residents.
Crossing over Florida to the Gulf of Mexico where it wandered for four days, Katrina underwent a monstrous and largely unexpected transformation. Siphoning vast quantities of energy from the Gulf’s abnormally warm waters, 3°C above their usual August temperature, Katrina mushroomed into an awesome, top-of-the-scale, class five hurricane with 290 km/h winds that propelled tsunami-like storm surges nearly 10m in height. The journal Nature later reported that Katrina absorbed so much heat from the Gulf that “water temperatures dropped dramatically after it had passed, in some regions from 30°C to 26°C” (1). Horrified meteorologists had rarely seen a Caribbean hurricane replenish its power so dramatically, and researchers debated whether or not Katrina’s explosive growth was a portent of global warming’s impact on hurricane intensity.
Although Katrina had dropped to category four, with 210-249 km/h winds, by the time it careened ashore in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, near the mouth of the Mississippi river on early 29 August, it was small consolation to the doomed oil ports, fishing camps and Cajun villages in its direct path. In Plaquemines, and again on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Alabama, it churned the bayous with relentless wrath, leaving behind a devastated landscape that looked like a watery Hiroshima.
Metropolitan New Orleans, with 1.3 million inhabitants, was originally dead centre in Katrina’s way, but the storm veered to the right after landfall and its eye passed 55km to the east of the metropolis. The Big Easy, largely under sea-level and bordered by the salt-water embayments known as Lake Pontchartrain (on the north) and Lake Borgne (on the east), was spared the worst of Katrina’s winds but not its waters.
Hurricane-driven storm surges from both lakes broke through the notoriously inadequate levees, not as high as in more affluent areas, which guard black-majority eastern New Orleans as well as adjacent white blue-collar suburbs in St Bernard Parish. There was no warning and the rapidly rising waters trapped and killed hundreds of unevacuated people in their bedrooms, including 34 elderly residents of a nursing home. Later, probably around midday, a more formidable floodwall gave way at the 17th Street Canal, allowing Lake Pontchartrain to pour into low-lying central districts.
Although New Orleans’s most famous tourist assets, including the French Quarter and the Garden District, and its most patrician neighbourhoods, such as Audubon Park, are built on high ground and survived the inundation, the rest of the city was flooded to its rooftops or higher, damaging or destroying more than 150,000 housing units. Locals promptly called it “Lake George” after the president who failed to build new levees or come to their aid after the old ones had burst.
Inequalities of class and race
Bush initially said that “the storm didn’t discriminate”, a claim he was later forced to retract: every aspect of the catastrophe was shaped by inequalities of class and race. Besides unmasking the fraudulent claims of the Department of Homeland Security to make Americans safer, the shock and awe of Katrina also exposed the devastating consequences of federal neglect of majority black and Latino big cities and their vital infrastructures. The incompetence of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) demonstrated the folly of entrusting life-and-death public mandates to clueless political appointees and ideological foes of “big government”. The speed with which Washington suspended the prevailing wage standards of the Davis-Bacon Act (2) and swung open the doors of New Orleans to corporate looters such as Halliburton, the Shaw Group and Blackwater Security, already fat from the spoils of the Tigris, contrasted obscenely with Fema’s deadly procrastination over sending water, food and buses to the multitudes trapped in the stinking hell of the Louisiana Superdome.
But if New Orleans, as many bitter exiles now believe, was allowed to die as a result of governmental incompetence and neglect, blame also squarely falls on the Governor’s Mansion in Baton Rouge, and especially on City Hall on Perdido Street. Mayor C Ray Nagin is a wealthy African-American cable television executive and a Democrat, who was elected in 2002 with 87% of the white vote (3).
He was ultimately responsible for the safety of the estimated quarter of the population that was too poor or infirm to own a car. His stunning failure to mobilise resources to evacuate car-less residents and hospital patients, despite warning signals from the city’s botched response to the threat of Hurricane Ivan in September 2004, reflected more than personal ineptitude: it was also a symbol of the callous attitude among the city’s elites, both white and black, toward their poor neighbours in backswamp districts and rundown housing projects. Indeed, the ultimate revelation of Katrina was how comprehensively the promise of equal rights for poor African-Americans has been dishonoured and betrayed by every level of government.
A death foretold
The death of New Orleans had been forewarned; indeed no disaster in American history had been so accurately predicted in advance. Although the Homeland Security Secretary, Michael Chertoff, would later claim that “the size of the storm was beyond anything his department could have anticipated,” this was flatly untrue. If scientists were surprised by Katrina’s sudden burgeoning to super-storm dimensions, they had grim confidence in exactly what New Orleans could expect from the landfall of a great hurricane.
Since the nasty experience of Hurricane Betsy in September 1965 (a category three storm that inundated many eastern parts of Orleans Parish that were drowned by Katrina), the vulnerability of the city to wind-driven storm surges has been intensively studied and widely publicised. In 1998, after a close call with Hurricane Georges, research increased and a sophisticated computer study by Louisiana State University warned of the “virtual destruction” of the city by a category four storm approaching from the southwest (4).
The city’s levees and stormwalls are only designed to withstand a category three hurricane, but even that threshold of protection was revealed as illusory in computer simulations last year by the Army Corps of Engineers. The continuous erosion of southern Louisiana’s barrier islands and bayou wetlands (an estimated annual shoreline loss of 60-100 sq km) increases the height of surges as they arrive at New Orleans, while the city, along with its levees, is slowly sinking. As a result even a category three, if slow moving, would flood most of it (5). Global warming and sea-level rise will only make the “Big One”, as folks in New Orleans, like their counterparts in Los Angeles, call the local apocalypse, even bigger.
Lest politicians have difficulty understanding the implications of such predictions, other studies modelled the exact extent of flooding as well as the expected casualties of a direct hit. Supercomputers repeatedly cranked out the same horrifying numbers: 160 sq km or more of the city under water with 80-100,000 dead, the worst disaster in United States history. In the light of these studies, Fema warned in 2001 that a hurricane flood in New Orleans was one of the three mega-catastrophes most likely to strike the US in the near future, along with a California earthquake and a terrorist attack on Manhattan.
Shortly afterwards, the magazine Scientific American published an account of the flood danger (“Drowning New Orleans”, October 2001) which, like an award-winning series (“The Big One’) in the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, in 2002, was chillingly accurate in its warnings. Last year, after meteorologists predicted a strong upsurge in hurricane activity, federal officials carried out an elaborate disaster drill (“Hurricane Pam”) that re-confirmed that casualties would be likely to be in the tens of thousands.
The Bush administration’s response to these frightening forecasts was to rebuff Louisiana’s urgent requests for more flood protection: the crucial Coast 2050 project to revive protective wetlands, the culmination of a decade of research and negotiation, was shelved and levee appropriations, including the completion of defences around Lake Pontchartrain, were repeatedly slashed.
Washington at work
In part, this was a consequence of new priorities in Washington that squeezed the budget of the Army Corps: a huge tax cut for the rich, the financing of the war in Iraq, and the costs of “Homeland Security”. Yet there was undoubtedly a brazen political motive as well: New Orleans is a black-majority, solidly Democratic city whose voters frequently wield the balance of power in state elections. Why would an administration so relentlessly focused on partisan warfare seek to reward this thorn in Karl Rove’s side by authorising the $2.5bn that senior Corps officials estimated would be required to build a category five protection system around the city? (6).
Indeed when the head of the Corps, a former Republican congressman, protested in 2002 against the way that flood-control projects were being short-changed, Bush removed him from office. Last year the administration also pressured Congress to cut $71m from the budget of the Corps’s New Orleans district despite warnings of epic hurricane seasons close at hand.
To be fair, Washington has spent a lot of money on Louisiana, but it has been largely on non-hurricane-related public works that benefit shipping interests and hardcore Republican districts (7). Besides underfunding coastline restoration and levee construction, the White House mindlessly vandalised Fema. Under director James Lee Witt (who enjoyed Cabinet rank), Fema had been the showpiece of the Clinton administration, winning bipartisan praise for its efficient dispatch of search and rescue teams and prompt provision of federal aid after the 1993 Mississippi River floods and the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake.
When Republicans took over the agency in 2001, it was treated as enemy terrain: the new director, former Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh, decried disaster assistance as “an oversized entitlement programme” and urged Americans to rely more upon the Salvation Army and other faith-based groups. Allbaugh cut back many key flood and storm mitigation programmes, before resigning in 2003 to become a highly-paid consultant to firms seeking contracts in Iraq. (An inveterate ambulance-chaser, he recently reappeared in Louisiana as an insider broker for firms looking for lucrative reconstruction work in the wake of Katrina.)
Since its absorption into the new Department of Homeland Security in 2003 (with the loss of its representation in the cabinet), Fema has been repeatedly downsized, and also ensnared in new layers of bureaucracy and patronage. Last year Fema employees wrote to Congress: “Emergency managers at Fema have been supplanted on the job by politically connected contractors and by novice employees with little background or knowledge” (8).
A new Maginot Line
A prime example was Allbaugh’s successor and protégé, Michael Brown, a Republican lawyer with no emergency management experience, whose previous job was representing the wealthy owners of Arabian horses. Under Brown, Fema continued its metamorphosis from an “all hazards” approach to a monomaniacal emphasis on terrorism. Three-quarters of the federal disaster preparedness grants that Fema formerly used to support local earthquake, storm and flood prevention has been diverted to counter-terrorism scenarios. The Bush administration has built a Maginot Line against al-Qaida while neglecting levees, storm walls and pumps.
There was every reason for anxiety, if not panic, when the director of the National Hurricane Centre in Miami, Max Mayfield, warned Bush (still vacationing in Texas) and Homeland Security officials in a video-conference on 28 August that Katrina was poised to devastate New Orleans. Yet Brown, faced with the possible death of 100,000 locals,-exuded breathless, arrogant bravado: “We were so ready for this. We planned for this kind of disaster for many years because we’ve always known about New Orleans.” For months Brown, and his boss Chertoff, had trumpeted the new National Response Plan that would ensure unprecedented coordination amongst government agencies during a major disaster.
But as floodwaters swallowed New Orleans and its suburbs, it was difficult to find anyone to answer a phone, much less take charge of the relief operation. “A mayor in my district,” an angry Republican congressman told the Wall Street Journal, “tried to get supplies for his constituents, who were hit directly by the hurricane. He called for help and was put on hold for 45 minutes. Eventually, a bureaucrat promised to write a memo to his supervisor” (9). Although state-of-the-art communications were supposedly the backbone of the new plan, frantic rescue workers and city officials were plagued by the breakdown of phone systems and the lack of a common bandwidth.
At the same time they faced immediate shortages of the critical food rations, potable water, sandbags, generator fuel, satellite phones, portable toilets, buses, boats, and helicopters, Fema should have pre-positioned in New Orleans. Most fatefully, Chertoff inexplicably waited 24 hours after the city had been flooded to upgrade the disaster to an “incident of national significance”, the legal precondition for moving federal response into high gear.
Far more than the reluctance of the president to return to work, or the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, to interrupt a mansion-hunting trip, or the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, to end a shoe-buying expedition in Manhattan, it was the dinosaur-like slowness of the brain of Homeland Security to register the magnitude of the disaster that doomed so many to die clinging to their roofs or hospital beds. Lathered in premature, embarrassing praise from Bush for their heroic exertions, Chertoff and Brown were more like sleepwalkers.
As late as 2 September, Chertoff astonished an interviewer on National Public Radio by claiming that the scenes of death and desperation inside the Superdome, which the world was watching on television, were just “rumours and anecdotes”. Brown blamed the victims, claiming that most deaths were the fault of “people who did not heed evacuation warnings”, although he knew that “heeding” had nothing to do with the lack of an automobile or confinement in a wheelchair.
Despite claims by the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, that the tragedy had nothing to do with Iraq, the absence of more than a third of the Louisiana National Guard and much of its heavy equipment crippled rescue and relief operations from the outset. Fema often obstructed rather than facilitated relief: preventing civilian aircraft from evacuating hospital patients and delaying authorisations for out-of-state National Guard and rescue teams to enter the area. As an embittered representative from devastated St Bernard Parish told the Times-Picayune: “Canadian help arrived before the US Army did” (10).
A conservative New Jerusalem
New Orleans City Hall could have used Canadian help: the emergency command centre on its ninth floor was put out of operation early in the emergency by a shortage of diesel to run its backup generator. For two days Nagin and his aides were cut off from the outside world by the failure of both their landlines and cellular phones. This collapse of the city’s command-and-control apparatus is puzzling in view of the $18m in federal grants that the city had spent since 2002 in training exercises to deal with such contingencies. Even more mysterious was the relationship between Nagin and his state and federal counterparts. As the mayor later summarised it, the city’s disaster plan was: “Get people to higher ground and have the feds and the state -airlift supplies to them.” Yet Nagin’s Director of Homeland Security, Colonel Terry Ebbert, astonished journalists with the admission that “he never spoke with Fema about the state disaster blueprint” (11).
Nagin later ranted with justification about Fema’s failure to pre-position supplies or to rush buses and medical supplies promptly to the Superdome. But evacuation planning was, above all, a city responsibility; and earlier planning exercises and surveys had shown that at least a fifth of the population would be unable to leave without assistance (12). In September 2004 Nagin had been roundly criticised for making no effort to evacuate poor residents as their better-off neighbours drove off before category-three Hurricane Ivan (which fortunately veered away from the city at the last moment).
In response, the city produced, but never distributed, 30,000 videos targeted at poor neighbourhoods that urged residents “Don’t wait for the city, don’t wait for the state, don’t wait for the Red Cross, leave.” In the absence of official planning to provide buses or better, trains, such advice seem to imply that poor people had to start walking. But when, after the breakdown of sanitation and order in the Superdome, hundreds did attempt to escape the city by walking across a bridge into the white suburb of Gretna, they were turned back by panicky local police who fired over their heads.
It is inevitable that many of those left behind in drowning neighbourhoods will interpret City Hall’s unconscionable negligence in the context of the bitter economic and racial schisms that have long made New Orleans the most tragic city in the US. It is no secret that its business elites and their allies in City Hall would like to push the poorest segment of the population, blamed for high crime rates, out of the city. Historic public-housing projects have been razed to make room for upper-income townhouses and a Wal-Mart. In other housing projects, residents are routinely evicted for offences as trivial as their children’s curfew violations. The ultimate goal seems to be a tourist theme-park New Orleans, Las Vegas on the Mississippi, with chronic poverty hidden away in bayous, trailer parks and prisons outside the city limits.
Not surprisingly, some advocates of a whiter, safer city see a divine plan in Katrina. “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans,” a leading Louisiana Republican confined to Washington lobbyists. “We couldn’t do it, but God did” (13). Nagin boasted of his empty streets and ruined neighbourhoods: “This city is for the first time free of drugs and violence, and we intend to keep it that way.”
A partial ethnic cleansing of New Orleans will be a fait accompli without massive local and federal efforts to provide affordable housing for tens of thousands of poor renters now dispersed across the country in refugee shelters. Already there is intense debate about transforming some of poorest, low-lying neighbourhoods, such the Lower Ninth Ward (flooded again by Hurricane Rita), into water retention ponds to protect wealthier parts. As the Wall Street Journal has rightly emphasised, “That would mean preventing some of New Orleans’s poorest residents from ever returning to their neighbourhoods” (14).
Epic political dogfight
As everyone recognises, the rebuilding of New Orleans and the rest of afflicted Gulf region will be an epic political dogfight. Already Nagin has staked out the claims of the local gentrifying class by announcing that he will appoint a 16-member reconstruction commission evenly split between whites and blacks, although the city is more than 75% African-American. Its “white-flight” suburbs (social springboards for neo-Nazi David Duke’s frightening electoral successes in the early 1990s) will fiercely lobby for their cause, while Mississippi’s powerful Republican establishment has already warned that it will not play second fiddle to Big Easy Democrats. In this inevitable clash of interest groups, it is unlikely that the city’s traditional black neighbourhoods, the true hearths of its joyous sensibility and jazz culture, will be able to exercise much clout.
The Bush administration hopes to find its own resurrection in a combination of rampant fiscal Keynesianism and fundamentalist social engineering. Katrina’s immediate impact on the Potomac was such a steep fall in Bush’s popularity, and, collaterally, in approval for the US occupation of Iraq, that Republican hegemony seemed suddenly under threat. For the first time since the Los Angeles riots of 1992, “old Democrat” issues such as poverty, racial injustice and public investment temporarily commanded public discourse, and the Wall Street Journal warned that Republicans had “to get back on the political and intellectual offensive” before liberals like Ted Kennedy could revive New Deal nostrums, such as a massive federal agency for flood -control and shoreline restoration along the Gulf coast (15).
The Heritage Foundation hosted meetings late into the night at which conservative ideologues, congressional cadres and the ghosts of Republicans past (such as Edwin Meese, Ronald Reagan’s former Attorney General) hashed a strategy to rescue Bush from the toxic aftermath of Fema’s disgrace. New Orleans’s floodlit but empty Jackson Square was the eerie backdrop for Bush’s 15 September speech on reconstruction. It was an extraordinary performance. He sunnily reassured two million victims that the White House would pick up most of the tab for the estimated $200bn flood damage: deficit spending on a scale that would have given Keynes vertigo. (It has not deterred him from proposing another huge tax cut for the super-rich.)
Bush wooed his political base with a dream list of long-sought-after conservative social reforms: school and housing vouchers (16), a central role for churches, an urban homestead lottery (17), extensive tax breaks to businesses, the creation of a Gulf Opportunity Zone (18), and the suspension of annoying government regulations (in the fine print these include prevailing wages in construction and environmental regulations on offshore drilling).
For connoisseurs of Bush-speak, the speech was a moment of exquisite déjà vu. Had not similar promises been made on the banks of the Euphrates? As Paul Krugman cruelly pointed out, the White House, having tried and failed to turn Iraq “into a laboratory for conservative economic policies”, would now experiment on traumatised inhabitants of Biloxi and the Ninth Ward (19). Congressman Mike Pence, a leader of the powerful Republican Study Group which helped draft Bush’s reconstruction agenda, emphasised that Republicans would turn the rubble into a capitalist utopia: “We want to turn the Gulf Coast into a magnet for free enterprise. The last thing we want is a federal city where New Orleans once was” (20).
Symptomatically, the Army Corps in New Orleans is now led by the official who formerly oversaw contracts in Iraq (21). The Lower Ninth Ward may never exist again, but already the barroom and strip-joint owners in the French Quarter are relishing the fat days ahead, as the Halliburton workers, Blackwater mercenaries, and Bechtel engineers leave their federal paychecks behind on Bourbon Street. As they say in Cajun, — and no doubt now in the White House too — “laissez les bons temps rouler!”
Mike Davis is the author of ‘The Monster at Our Door. The Global Threat of Avian Flu’ (New Press, New York, 2005), ‘Dead cities, and other tales’ (New Press, 2002), ‘Late Victorian holocausts : El Nino famines and the making of the third world’ (Verso, London and New York, 2001), ‘Ecology of fear : Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster’ (Picador, London, 2000) and many other works.
(1) Quirin Schiermeier, “The Power of Katrina,” Nature, no 437, London, 8 September 2005.
(2) Editorial note: legislation dating from the New Deal obliging public employers to respect the minimum local wage.
(3) Though Louisiana voted for Bush in 2004 (56.7%), New Orleans is traditionally Democrat.
(4) Study by engineering professor Joseph Suhayda described in Richard Campanella, Time and Place in New Orleans, Gretna, Los Angeles, 2002.
(5) John Travis, “Scientists’ Fears Come True as Hurricane Floods New Orleans”, Science, no 309, New York, 9 September 2005.
(6) Andrew Revkin and Christopher Drew, “Intricate Flood Protection Long a Focus of Dispute,” New York Times, 1 September 2005.
(7) “Katrina’s Message on the Corps,” New York Times, 13 September 2005.
(8) “Top Fema Jobs: No Experience Required,” Los Angeles Times, 9 September 2005.
(9) Congressman Bobby Jindal, “When Red Tape Trumped Common Sense,” Wall Street Journal, 8 September 2005.
(10) Melinda Deslatte, “St Bernard Parish residents overflow the Capital,” Times-Picayune, 12 September 2005.
(11) New York Times, 7 and 11 September 2005.
(12) Tony Reichhardt, Erika Check and Emma Morris, “After the flood,” Nature, no 437, 8 September 2005.
(13) Congressman Richard Baker (Baton Rouge) quoted in “Washington Wire,” Wall Street Journal, 9 September 2005.
(14) “As Gulf Prepares to Rebuild, Tensions Mount Over Control,” Wall Street Journal, 15 September 2005.
(15) “Hurricane Bush,” Wall Street Journal, 15 September 2005.
(16) Editor’s note: rental vouchers were issued, backed by Congress-approved funds, to 20,000 homeless after the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake to pay for rent anywhere in the state.
(17) Editor’s note: a plan to distribute federal land to those who would pledge to erect a house on it and could afford to do so. It is estimated that this would provide about 4,000 sites for 250,000 displaced people, 125,000 of whom were renting.
(18) Editor’s note: a zone in which relief is related to private financial initiatives.
(19) “Not the New Deal,” New York Times, 16 September 2005.
(20) John Wilke and Brody Mullins, “After Katrina, Republicans Back a Sea of Conservative Ideas,” Wall Street Journal, 15 September 2005.
(21) Editorial, “Mr Bush in New Orleans,” New York Times, 16 September 2005.
Right now, one of the things being discussed in the aftermath of Katrina is race.
Well, as usual, it's infantile if you ask me.
But, THIS is what should be watched. This is race in America, 2005: Old-line families plot the future. Note the class issues that are also involved.
The power elite of New Orleans -- whether they are still in the city or have moved temporarily to enclaves such as Destin, Fla., and Vail, Colo. -- insist the remade city won't simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters.The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says. "I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out."
...
Black politicians have controlled City Hall here since the late 1970s, but the wealthy white families of New Orleans have never been fully eclipsed. Stuffing campaign coffers with donations, these families dominate the city's professional and executive classes, including the white-shoe law firms, engineering offices, and local shipping companies. White voters often act as a swing bloc, propelling blacks or Creoles into the city's top political jobs. That was the case with Mr. Nagin, who defeated another African American to win the mayoral election in 2002.
In the Baltimore-Washington region, some local news stations are reporting overnight gasoline price increases of $0.20.
Gouging.
Plain and simple.
Unless they are saying that the refinery to gas station reserve is no more than 3 or 4 days.
Of course, that reserve seems to become months worth when the price per barrel price drops.
Now, let's turn our attention to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to the annual Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank meeting. (My invitation got lost in the mail again this year.) For the last four years, Greenspan has given his clearest, easiest to understand speech for that year at Jackson Hole. This year was no exception. His speech was on the evolution of central bank policy decision making.
The man has spoken. The end is near for this absurd housing market bubble. Many of us, by the way we act, appear to have lost our minds in the dopamine fog of blissful diregard for the hard lessons of the dotcom bubble. You've been warned, now ack like you know!!!! hmm.., I wonder what TD Jakes has told his flock to do?
Moreover, in glancing at your 2003 post re: Ujamaa, I would reject the notion that cooperative economics is lacking as a strategy for liberation. The opposing positions are ahistorical and untenable.
In point of fact, a good friend has done just that - with a Papa John's in Harlem - this after a successful stint at the Federal Reserve Bank...so, there's more to this than is meeting the eye.
But - here we go again...I don't think cobb's well thought out arguments actually hold up because in too many cases, it's a question of apples and oranges or flawed assumptions. still, the contours of the discussion merit discussion and flushing out.
The absolute favorite discussion of mine, more than Conservatism, more than just about anything else that touches on black identity and who we are supposed to be is right here. It is a discussion I have tried to sustain anywhere and everywhere on the net, in person, via email, in forums, in dorm rooms. I have yet to be able to sustain this conversation and so have consigned it to the pile of black intellectual curiosities that I am heir to. It is the question of black economics.
Like with my 3x4x5 demographic, I also have a notion of the various strategies of black economic destiny.
I have wrote most recently about Ujamaa, The Problem Child and came to the conclusion, somewhat disdainfully, that the winner in the sweepstakes is 'Blackface Capitalism'. But perhaps we are just a generation too soon. I think the critical question lies with understanding whether or not we will lose our willingness to aggregate and our ability to network before we become as indistinctly mainstream as everyone else who is 'not a minority'. I should also note that America is swinging our direction, big time. It won't be long before King Day means beer. (Just today I saw a TV commercial for Red Stripe whose tagline was 'Teaching our white friends how to dance for 70 years'. I swear to god.)
So let's break it down:
A Small Refresher
Blackface capitalism would be Revlon through their 'Dark & Lovely' product line. White owned and controlled but strictly for the benefit of black consumers.
Ujamaa is small time, cooperative economics. It means going to the black owned barbershop instead of Supercuts.
Black capitalism is best exemplified by some of the black owned and operated car dealerships in Atlanta that I hear on the black radio station with black voices using black vernacular to attract black customers.
My position is that they are all good but black capitalism is best. I would add that there is a fourth, which is 'invisiblack' capitalism in which black controlled corporations provide goods and services to the mainstream in which the race of the management team is black but unknown and materially irrelevant. American Express, Avis, AOL Time Warner are all run by black men, few people know, it makes no impact on their marketing.
Which is running things?
On the most segregated day in the country, a thought just occurred to me.
Some accuse "Hollywood liberals" of being racist because Blacks and other "people of color" have a very hard time getting roles. But Hollywood is a very capitalist system, meaning those who generate money, get money to generate more money.
If "Hollywood liberals" give Blacks and other "people of color" fewer roles, maybe it's because they think that Blacks and "people of color" won't generate the type of revenue that they are seeking. And if that's the case, is it Hollywood, or the audience, who is to blame?
The latest news out of Italy concerns the role played the head of the Italian central bank in reviewing buy-out bids by competing Italian and Dutch interests.
The following story provides an interesting glimpse into how the judicial machinery of a nation-state can encroach upon the nationalist imperatives of that same nation-state in the arena of international capital. There is also a good deal more about this story than will be revealed in the short term.
I can only imagine that if Allen Greenspan were to do something along the same lines and it were caught on tape, the biggest question here would be, "Who decided to bug big Al?" As it stands, Antonio Fazio is on the hot seat. We shall see how long he remains.
I had a thought this morning, after spending much of yesterday on 125th Street in the Mecca (HARLEM, USA) about the limitations of "Buy Black" campaigns in the US. The thoughts were brought on by an argument I had with a colleague years ago upon his return from Korea. He was of the opinion that Koreans were more entrepreneurial and more culturally grounded - and as evidence he submitted the emergence of South Korea as an industrial/technological nation of some consequence.
That South Korea serves a role similar to Israel and Iran - under Reza Pahlevi, seemed not to matter. US subsidies financed substantial development on the southern end of peninsula to ensure it's stability as a counterweight against China and North Korea. And the story of Korean grocers in New York and Los Angeles is hardly the story here.
The levels of education, literacy, and numeracy in the Korean population exceed that of most nations - East or West. It's not clear, however, that this is a function of indigenous drive - or a function of external support - or a considerable measure of both.
Korea has been able to build large scale economic and development projects through the use of government-subsidized funds to prominent, wealthy families who provide leadership, consolidation and networks for expansion in particular industries. The emergence of Samsung, far from being attributable to the beauty and simplicity of the flip phone is also a function of these subsidies.
Which brings me back to 125th Street. It seems that Buy Black campaigns are much like "Get out the Vote" campaigns. The voter registration campaigns DO NOT deal with the issues and interests of the black community, generally speaking, except to say that voting is important. Voting, in an of itself, however, is largely meaningless. Bill Gates, for example, does not have to cast another vote in his life to have considerable political influence. So, these voting campaigns are non-specific, decontextualized exercises in reaffirming the status quo. That notwithstanding, there is some value here.
With respect to "Buy Black" campaigns, shoppers are enjoined to buy from black merchants - regardless of their financial structure, business model, degree of customer service, aesthetics, quality of product, etc. And, irrespective of what is known as "the white man's ice is colder" syndrome, Black shoppers have been asked to do the impossible. It would be entirely irrational to make consumer decisions outside of these obvious considerations. Still, what amounts to a black boycott of black business has been crippling.
David Horowitz' article deriding the call for reparations for slavery states that the GNP for American Blacks would rank this collective as the 10th largest nation in the world - but we know that dollars in the Black community are not recirculated and that Black WEALTH is roughly 10% of white Americans. So, there are significant limitations to this 10th place finish among nations.
To the point, my thought was that Buy Black campaigns should be organized around providing Black firms possessing viable business models, structures, products with an infusion of capital to strengthen their ability to compete internationally...the result of this infusion would lead to consolidation in the industry and increased competition - ostensibly increased market share and incentives to innovate, hire talent and diversify operations...Successful Black firms in industries with higher barriers to entry and exit would be the primary candidates for this kind of support...in addition, firms whose business model imposed a high cost to costumers for changing vendors (ie. Microsoft and its corporate clients; NetFlix and personalized customer service) would be another class of firms worthy of considerable support.
certainly there is still enough $$ to help "mom and pop" operations, but Mom and Pop don't hire...they may have to retire. They may have to choose a business based on what is needed - versus what they want to do. If an infusion of capital could lead to the development of national franchises and improved standardization of services, some enterprises could begin to reap tremendous benefits for Black folk. It's not enough to buy based on phenotype - but I believe many of our community based businesses could be international leaders with the right support.
More on this later. It's always about the HOW??
I believe in customer service.
On weekend, my future wife and I went to New York to see a play. We decided to eat dinner in the theatre district and then walk to the play. I chose to go to a French restaurant that turned out to be a 4 star establishment. The food was great and the service was even better. I paid the most I had ever paid for dinner that evening. Including the tip, I paid $175, and I didn't mind at all.
Fast forward to today. Today I got a teenager fired.
I went to McDonald's to get a side salad. I avoid the drive thru window, but I took the chance and went to the window.
When I order the side salad, I was asked which dressing I would like to have. I asked for the choices. At this time, "the voice" gave me the options in a rapid fire manner. I didn't understand the choices and asked again.
"The choices are the same as before, they are..."
I was livid. I told him that he was rude and canceled the order. He apologized. I then told him I was coming inside to tell his manager, which I did. He was fired.
I'm glad that he was fired. I don't care if I pay $0.99 for something or $175, I want good service.
Think about this for a moment.
We want cable "so bad" that we are willing to accept a "4 hour window" to get the cable installed or repaired.
We are willing to accept an appliance repairman or a plumber giving a "4 hour window" for them to take our money to fix something for us.
We are willing to go through all sorts of inconvenient to get a contractor to work on our homes. Have you gone through that hell?
I wanted to get a full bathroom put into the basement and to have the laundry room/storage room in my basement to be fixed up. I contacted 6 contractors. One came at the time he said he would, walked through the details, took good notes, presented options, presented his bonding, insurance, references, and pictures, and said he would call back in 2 weeks to give an estimate. When I called him back in 3 weeks, he acted as if HE was being inconvenienced.
Another contractor had trouble returning my calls, came late for the inspection, was rude, and gave a telephone estimate promising he would follow through with a detailed estimate. It never came, but he did call later wondering when I wanted him to start work.
The contractor I chose was on time, provided all of the information as the first contractor I mentioned, provided a written estimate on the spot and followed up with a letter giving more details and a thank you note. His company was the most expensive and they got the job.
So, in response to "Business Econ 101", Spence kinda sorta spanked me for not providing enough meat.
Here is my response to him, and at his request, at it's own entry.
Don't ask politicians to do what shouldn't take you more than a fifteen minute google search to find.
The problem is, you have LAWMAKERS making LAWS that they have no clue about nor the potential impact nor the numbers behind what they support. And, when they are put on the spot, they spout, what I can term nothing else but nonsense and show no degree of understanding business and how it operates.
I asked my district representative's office about the bill and was not impressed with the lack of business knowledge and health care costs knowlege.
Above, I gave the cost of what I pay for health insurance.
From the link:
http://www.ufcw.org/issues_and_actions/walmart_workers_campaign_info/facts_and_figures/walmartonbenefits.cfm
Employees must pay $218 per month for family health care coverage from Wal-Mart.
That's less than what I pay. I also have looked into paying my own health costs, directly, for a number of reasons, one being I tend to job hop and I want to have medical care consistancy. Paying for health care for my family, the cost would be slightly higher than what I pay now. Either way, both are more than what WalMart workers pay, if that link is correct. (When paying for my own coverage, it is still group insurance).
More than 60 percent of Wal-Mart employees--600,000 people--are forced to get health insurance coverage from the government or through spouses’ plans—or live without any health insurance.
1. They don't break down the percentage of how many are "forced" to get it from government, spouse or live without.
2. Of those who live without, they don't give a breakdown of how many do so by choice.
3. "Forced" to get health care from their spouse? Uhhh.... My wife and I made a decision who had the best health coverage and that was the one we went with. If they are still covered, so what?
Wal-Mart has increased the premium cost for workers by over 200% since 1993
That's a lot, but I think that's better than the averge.
That link was from a union backed web site.
Here is another link:
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/walmart/health_insurance_program.php
Detractors point out that Wal-Mart covers only 48 percent of its employees. But according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, in the retail sector overall only 45 percent of workers receive health coverage from their own employer. Still, why do more than half of Wal-Mart's employees opt out of the company's health insurance?
For one thing, part-time workers who make up 25 percent of Wal-Mart's workforce are not eligible until after two years. Then there is the cost. Wal-Mart pays 67 percent of the cost of health insurance for employees, about equal to the retail industry average of 68 percent for family coverage—but, for individual health insurance, far below the 77 percent that retailers contribute on average.
Many employees opt out because they are otherwise covered. The company says that two-thirds of its employees are second-income providers, college students, and senior citizens. Many of these have health insurance through their spouse's employer, parent's plan, or retirement and Medicare programs. Thus about 40 percent of the company's workers are covered apart from Wal-Mart's plan.
Business exists to provide a product and or service. In general, they exist to make money. When something happens that negatively affects their ability to make money, the businesses make adjustments.
In the case of WalMart, they have delayed creating a distribution center in Maryland because Maryland politicians, supported by Giant Foods, a WalMart competitor, decided to create a law that affects only Giant.
The politicians determined how much WalMart was spending on health insurance and then decided to pluck a percentage out of the air, a percentage that was more than WalMart spends, and made it a basis of a bill. The bill says that "big employers" must spend at least 8% of its payroll for the health care costs of their employees, or give the difference to Maryland or pay a fine. Gov. Ehrlich vetoed the bill as being anti-business. And he is right. It is anti-business. Maryland, which has an anti-business reputation anyway, made the national news because of this bill.
Additionally, other states are looking at the outcome of this to determine if they are going to do the same thing.
This is stupid.
The WalMart distribution center would be located in a county that has the second highest unemployment rate in the state. If the state legislation over rides the veto, potentially 800 jobs would be lost.
And, the real heart of the matter, for some anyway, is that WalMart is taking a big bite out of the competition. Giant didn't care about WalMart until WalMart started selling food. That's when Giant went whining to the politicians for help. The politicians found an "out" using health care and there it was, a serious dent to Giant's competitor.
Oh, and it should be noted that after the bill was passed and the legislative session ended, Giant announced it was moving its administration offices to another state and closing some of its warehouse facilities.
Now, compare that to this news about Hyundai.
Hyundai's non-unionized plant, for example, will pay most of its 2,000 employees a starting wage of $14.46 an hour, far below the $20-plus hourly wages for comparable United Auto Workers members in Michigan. The Hyundai workers also will have to contribute $14.54 every two weeks for health coverage, which is free to employees under UAW contracts.There is no pension available to the Hyundai workforce; instead, employees have a 401(k) plan.
By contrast, GM, Ford and the Chrysler Group of DaimlerChrysler AG carry more than 800,000 retirees and family members on their pension rolls at a total cost of $11 billion per year. The companies estimate that about $1,500 of the cost of building each vehicle goes toward health care -- several times what Hyundai pays.
That's part of the reason Hyundai can offer a laundry list of safety features on the new Sonata, quality that ranks near the top of the auto industry and a price that undercuts competitors at Honda and Toyota -- and still make more profit than GM.
Maryland politicians tried to get many of the foreign companies to build plants in the state, but all efforts failed. One reason for the failure is the anti-business reputation of the state. A second reason is that Maryland is a strong union state while states further south are "right to work" states.
If the legislation overrides the veto and makes it law, how long will it be before the politicians decide to raise the 8% level? How long will it be before the politicians decide to lower the number of employees a company has? How long before the number of employees level starts to impact small business? And how long will it take for businesses to pack up and leave the state of Maryland because of the law?
When that happens, jobs will be lost, unemployment levels will rise, and who will be the most impacted? The lower economic levels and the middle class.
The Democratic politicians in Maryland did this to show support for their union money spigots. They didn't do this for people lacking health care. WalMart is used by the poor and middle classes because of the lower prices. If WalMart has to raise its prices in Maryland, who are the people who get hurt?
Quickie:
They don't like the power these tribes are obtaining.
It's about economics. That's the real power of this country.
That's why is so asinine that a minority of vocal Blacks speak about the ills of capitalism, the ills of the U.S., the "lack of power" of Blacks and then spout socialist economic theory nonsense.
Hat tip: P6
I don't have a great deal of time to spare, so instead of responding over at Cobb, or at Baldilocks, or at Prometheus6, where we're continuing an interesting discussion about Sowell, I'm going to post something here in response to some of the comments brought up by others.
Ed: (and I'm paraphrasing) No one has really cut Sowell other than calling him names. The peer review process for books is the same as that for journal articles.
Chap: If one wanted to make a change and was in Sowell's position what would one do?
Jeff Foxworthy: When do you know you're a redneck?
No.
In order:
Critiques of Sowell aren't that hard to find. Prometheus does a good job in a sentence or two. And no. Getting a book in print vs. an article are two different animals. The social science peer review process for articles goes something like this. You send an article out, three people review it through a double blind process...and they cut it to shreads.
The editor rejects it. You send it out to another journal.
The three reviewers take their knives to it again. The editor rejects it.
You send it out yet again. To another journal. With another set of editors, and another set of reviewers.
This time? You get a revise and resubmit.
So you make changes...if the editor (and the blind reviewers) think the changes are ok? You get it published. You get "a hit." The process I just detailed to you takes about 3 years on average to get a single article placed. I've gone through this process successfully between 7-10 times. It's like running a marathon each time.
The book process? The book process for ACADEMIC presses is not a TENTH as rigorous. But even IT is much harder than the regular press--which is more interested in bottom line profit margins than anything else. I recall John McWhorter talking about...I forget the title of his first major book after he'd made a name for himself as a racial conservative. He was talking about how the pieces in there were so raw most of them barely were a month old before he sent them out (and got them all accepted).
Now does this sound like the process is the same?
Chap: I am not in Sowell's position, but am on that path. I plan to do three things: publish rigorous work in academic journals and academic presses, rigorous work in popular presses, and pop culture type stuff (like what I'm doing over at Black Voices and on NPR). And help organizers organize. But every step of the way my effort is going to be driven by RIGOR rather than ideology.
Jeff: You know what? It's late. I think my last post will suffice for now on the problems with the "culture" vs. "race" thing.
Given the thrashing we've been administering to (Uncle) Thomas Sowell, Cobb steps in with the question of all questions. What good is Thomas Sowell? His answer? Unless we've got somebody better up our sleeve Thomas' plan is as good as any we've got going.
But the thing is, I'm not looking for him to have a plan. I KNOW enough economists personally to know that they--just like most of us political scientists--are far more interested in getting interesting answers published in top notch journals than they are in planning and strategizing. The best public economist for my money is Paul Krugman, but I don't read him for his plans, I read him for his critiques.
So when Cobb asks, Who is better than Sowell? I've got two answers. On the straight academic tip--the only one that matters to me--I'd point to Glenn Loury (who is not only fiercely independent but who HAS published in top tier economic journals), Steven Levitt (who, while not black still asks novel questions about black urban life with novel data), even Roland Fryer. My real money is probably on Bomani if his ass would get his dissertation finished. But again, I'm not looking for plans from any of these joes. I'm looking for interesting questions, interesting answers, theoretical novelty, and fit (that is, the answers plausibly respond to social reality).
To that degree, Sowell doesn't pass the smell test. Period. And it doesn't matter whether anyone is better as far as "planning". Kind of like asking who was a better point guard, Mike Piazza or Tiger Woods. What the hell would we ask that question for? We've talked over and over here about how we're trying to come up with an independent mode of black leadership, a form of leadership that revolves around cell based organization.
Why would we want a two bit economist who has written the same book for the last thirty years without a journal article to his name, participate in that project? Check out what Brad Delong has to say about Levitt. We can quibble about the details, but this is what I'm looking for in an economist. Does Sowell even come close to this type of greatness? On the best day of his life...not even close.
Next.
Thomas Sowell has come out with a new book arguing that culture explains racial differences better than race or racism. My colleagues at Polysigh have weighed in as well as Baldilocks, Prometheus6, and God knows who else.
A couple of comments:
1. This argument isn't new, even for Sowell. He's been writing on the same subject for the last 30 years. He's been arguing that black culture is to blame for black outcomes in most of his works on the subject. When Baldilocks notes that it is a "new perspective" I assume she means that it's new to her. Which is still mildly surprising given that he is the pre-eminent black conservative scholar of his generation. Which brings me to 2.
2. Sowell is the preeminent black conservative scholar of his generation. So why the hell hasn't he published a single economics journal article of note in his career? I've said this before--econ guys don't give a damn about books. I think it's that his argument (he only has one) doesn't really stand up to peer review. It could be ideology--but economics is the most conservative social science of the lot.
3. On to the argument. Sowell is the master of the anecdote. One of the anecdotes he uses to prove that it is culture rather than racism is to note that the most successful students at Harvard are now black ethnics rather than black Americans. If the central argument is that racism impedes the progress of black Americans, I'm not sure exactly what this proves. I recall an anecdote in which Dizzy Gillespie walked into a white only restaurant in the South and sat down to eat. When they tried to kick him out, he faked an African accent...and they let him eat. He wasn't a Negro you see. He was African. I'd also be interested in knowing about the backgrounds of the immigrants. Class DOES exist within black communities--and we shouldn't necessarily expect the sons and daughters of pipefitters to fare as well as the sons and daughters of diplomats. We wouldn't expect this of whites would we?
4. More on the argument. When we're talking about culture exactly what are we referring to? Sowell made the mistake before of using culture in one way when he was excoriating black people (saying for example that their artistic pursuits didn't mean a thing), but using it another way when he was applauding whites (saying for example that Beethoven and Mozart represented proof of the strength of European culture).
This is the type of work that can be used neatly to lay bare the oxymoronic nature of black conservative scholarship.
...on at least one point.
Slate ran a small snippet designed to amp up interest in the book. I plan to pick it up, perhaps by reviewing it for Africana.com. One of the academic articles that Levitt has made the rounds presenting looks at the impact of black names. What does naming a child Taquiesha for example mean for that child as far as economic impact? While the social psychology research says that people with names like this tend to be hired less often than those without those names, Levitt argues that it isn't the names but the economic status of the parents that do the naming.
Taquiesha isn't poor because her name is Taquiesha, she's poor because her parents are most likely poor.
Levitt is both correct...and off his rocker.
Take a given neighborhood in California, where Levitt took his data from. A neighborhood in South Central, one very poor, and black. The people in that neighborhood are not only likely to have children who themselves will be poor and without resources for most of their lives, those children are likely to have black names.
Fine.
But those aren't the only children with those names. Furthermore SOME OF THOSE CHILDREN MAKE IT OUT. So what happens to THEM?
Here is where the social psychology research comes into play. WHen a given individual with a black name steps up to the plate it doesn't matter what his qualifications are, he is at a deficit solely because of his name. Now we don't know WHY he is at a deficit. Could be that the person making the decisions is racist. Could be that he is classist (Jack and Jill types don't give their kids names like Tyrone on average). Could be both. COuld be something else.
But it is NOT correct to say that "names don't matter." They DO. The question is, what should we do about it in the meantime?
(As an aside, Prometheus slyly rakes Levitt for not putting Fryer down. For what it's worth I don't think Fryer should've been co-author for Freakonomics at all. Not just because he didn't contribute much, but because Fryer doesn't have tenure yet. Books don't mean jack to economists. It's all about the articles. Ask Bomani.)
Run a quick scan of any mid- to major-market city newspaper over the last six months, and I'm sure you'll run into stories about how so-and-so is considering moving from X to Y and will be given tax abatements as part of the enticement. Whenever a ball squad (be it base- foot- or basket-) considers moving, you can bet your bottom dollar that the owners are looking for tax incentives. YOU build it and WE'LL come.
What we're gradually seeing is a turning back of the tide. As it stands, citizens feel they are over burdened with taxes, and they believe that corporations aren't paying their fair share. And they're actually more right than wrong.
What the Maryland deal--which asks WalMart to either pay for a share of the health costs of their employees or pay a tax to the state--represents a long needed return back to sanity. As long as corporations are viewed as legal persons, states should make every effort to treat them like legal persons--which means giving them rights AND responsibilities. We give individual deals to corporations all of the time. Time to go the other way. Especially because the current way doesn't work.
Now, why in the world would any politican want to do something this stupid?
Maryland lawmakers yesterday approved legislation that would effectively require Wal-Mart to boost spending on health care, a direct legislative thrust against a corporate giant that is already on the defensive on many fronts nationwide.
"We're looking for responsible businesses to ante up . . . and provide adequate health care," said Sen. Thomas M. Middleton (D-Charles), the Finance Committee chairman, as the Senate approved the measure with a majority wide enough to survive an anticipated veto. A similar bill has cleared the House of Delegates, and legislators expect to reconcile their differences easily.
Lawmakers said they did not set out to single out Wal-Mart when they drafted a bill requiring organizations with more than 10,000 employees to spend at least 8 percent of their payroll on health benefits -- or put the money directly into the state's health program for the poor.
But as debate raged in the Senate yesterday, it was clear that the giant retailer, which has 15,000 workers in Maryland, was the only company that would be affected.
It's one thing to have the "not in my back yard" nut jobs crying about WalMart (while shopping there!), it's totally another thing to create a bill targeting ONE COMPANY and dictating what they have to provide, IN THE FORM OF BENEFITS to the employees!
There are no laws, until now, that requires a company to provide health care! In fact, to me, it makes no sense!
This is going to come back and bite Maryland WalMart shoppers, MANY OF WHOM ARE FINANCIALLY STRAPPED, in the ass.
Why?
Do you think WalMart is going to eat this cost? No. They are going to pass the expense on to the customers!
Or, they will do something like provide it's own health care service, which turns out to be no damn good.
Unbelievable.
OK here's the deal. I think social mobility in America is fairly good but that people don't necessarily respect the mobility they have. But I also believe that there is a certain arrogant humility that most Americans don't have and don't strive for that restricts their social mobility.
'Arrogant humility' sounds oxymoronic don't it? Well, it is something of an ineffable quality, but that's the best handle I can put on something real that I've noticed in people in my line of work. But let's get racial for a moment in order to undermine some political correctness that I suspect might be lurking in everyone's thinking as I 'go there'.
A long time ago, not long after I made friends with an impressive, but rather ordinary looking white guy named John, I wondered how I would cope with America if I were an ordinary looking white guy named John. It occured to me that if that were the case, I would have nowhere to go, and nothing to distinguish me except my skills. Just like Hilary Swank in 'Million Dollar Baby', just like Richard Gere in 'An Officer and a Gentleman'; nowhere else to go. You're nobody until somebody loves you.
Since I am something of a social climber in a society whose rules and expectations I often challenge just by showing up, I pay close attention to my peers. It has been a long time since I was in that prep school where the last names actually did connect. When they said O'Melveny it was *that* O'Melveny. When they said Crosby it was *that* Crosby. And now I find myself often in the company of guys who went to Kentucky U. rather than Yale. And yet they are successful by any measure of Americans. What you do when you are in the middle is that you simply assume the position.
How arrogant humility works is that you submit yourself to the process. If there is a career path, you follow it. If there is a manual, RTFM. Call yourself a square, play fair and try your hand, always assuming what? May the best man win. That's keeping it real middle America style.
Now there's a great deal of sentiment out there that this formula only works for ordinary white guys named John. In fact, the sentiment is almost hegemonic. But it's so plainly false that I have to keep pointing out the other thing that everybody knows to. It's easy to sell out. It's easy to be a Tom, a brown-noser, a toady, a kiss ass, a bootlicker, a stooge, a flunky and a pawn. In fact it's so easy that millions of not particularly intelligent Americans get mortgages. If they were anywhere else on the planet, there's no way that they could get a loan for $200,000 just for driving a truck.
There's the second key. You have to work the system. You have to understand what you get out of it and you have to bend your life around that. Just remember this: You're just an ordinary white guy named John. You've got nowhere else to go. You are forced to be humble, you're just an American citizen and that's all you got going for you. Your parents can't help you, you can't marry into success, you've got no title. All you've got is your honest face and elbow grease. And if the bastards in your little hick two horse town won't give you a break, you move to the city. Get in where you fit in.
I don't see what Americans under the influence of the hegemony don't understand about these facts.
Ahh but there's the arrogance. There's a very definite crabby mentality in the humility of John. See, since he can't get away with anything, he doesn't want you to get away with anything either. See, he's bitten the bullet and put his big red neck on the line and he doesn't see why you should take a different path. After all, you're none of the things he wants to be when he grows up. And so John will do what he can to insure that the system that worked for him only works that same way, it's only fair right?
I've found the past couple days' assessment and response to Roland Fryer immensely gratifying. It's not that I care about Fryer. I consider much of economics to be *just-so* storytelling limited by the specific cultural psychology over which it is mapped. To me, economics is less universal science of the human exchange of goods and services than it is western post hoc rationalization of the uniquely western instantiation of methods for the exchange of goods and services. Much of the back and forth, round and about on the rigor or insightfulness of Fryer's work bears this contention out.
What tickles me enough here to comment about it, is that I believe I see a digitally-accelerated, racially-motivated instantiation of the following;
1. JUST FOR KICKSIn 2002, a team of researchers led by psychiatrist Gregory Berns from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, used brain imaging to find out what is going on inside our heads when we cooperate. They discovered that when players work together in the prisoner's dilemma game (see Diagram), the active parts of their brain include the orbitofrontal cortex and the striatum - areas associated with processing reward (Neuron, vol 35, p 395). And, last year, economist Ernst Fehr and psychologist Dominique de Quervain of the University of Zurich discovered that we get a similar mental buzz when we punish cheats, even when it means incurring a personal monetary cost (Science, vol 305, p 1254).
2. IT's GOOD FOR THE IMAGEPunishing others who don't toe the line can boost your reputation, as a recent study by anthropologists Rob Boyd and Karthik Panchanathan of the University of California at Los Angeles shows. Using computer simulations, they explored the benefits of a strategy of punishment that entails simply shunning others with a bad reputation and helping those with a good reputation. By doing this, individuals can enhance their own standing, they found. What's more, by altering their behaviour according to people's reputations, these individuals minimise the cost of meting out punishment and gain the edge over indiscriminate cooperators who help anyone regardless of reputation (Nature, vol 432, p 499).
The article in its entirety focuses on the structural and functional basis of cooperation. It's economics alrighty, or game theory at least, but anytime you add the fMRI data and watch what the old noodle is up to whilst the sapiens are sapienting, BLAM!!! it kicks it up just that extra little notch required to give me a mental buzz and make me feel like we're no longer in the land of just-so storytelling, but have meandered into the domain of an objective science..., oh, and I very much respect the Punisher role itself..., I think we'll see more and more of this as we enter the twilight of the western era..., and that's a good thing!!!
Keep movin', movin', movin', Though they're disapprovin', Keep them dogies movin', rawhide. Don't try to understand 'em, Just rope 'em, throw, and brand 'em. Soon we'll be livin' high and wide. My heart's calculatin', My true love will be waitin', Be waitin' at the end of my ride.Move 'em on, head 'em up,
Head 'em up, move 'em on,
Move 'em on, head 'em up, rawhide!
Head 'em out, ride 'em in,
Ride 'em in, let 'em out,
Cut 'em out, ride 'em in, rawhide!Keep rollin', rollin', rollin',
Though the streams are swollen,
Keep them dogies rollin', rawhide.
Through rain and wind and weather,
Hell bent for leather,
Wishin' my gal was by my side.
All the things I'm missin',
Good vittles, love and kissin',
Are waiting at the end of my ride.Move 'em on, head 'em up,
Head 'em up, move 'em on,
Move 'em on, head 'em up, rawhide!
Head 'em out, ride 'em in,
Ride 'em in, let 'em out,
Cut 'em out, ride 'em in, rawhide!
RAWHIDE!!!
The Senate voted yes on drilling in ANWR:
The provision would allow oil companies to drill in a coastal plain that covers about 1.5 million acres of the wildlife refuge, which encompasses a total of about 19 million acres in northeastern Alaska. More than 10 billion barrels of crude oil are estimated to lie under the refuge, and President Bush today urged that they be tapped to help ease high fuel prices and reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil.
Big whoop. Let's suppose drilling in ANWR happens. Will it really reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil?
Uhh... no?
Think about this for a bit.
Global companies will extract the oil. The oil will be refined at locations that can be any place in the world. It may be refined in the U.S. or it may be refined outside of the U.S. But that still doesn't matter.
The global companies will then send the refined products to where ever the market dictates that it go.
There is no guarantee that the refined product will go to the U.S. for further refining (turning into plastic products) or consumption (fuel).
Thus the opening of ANWR and reducing U.S. dependency on foreign oil can't be determined because the oil will go where the market determines it needs to go.
Some believe that China will be the place that it goes because of the growing demand and the growing economy.
It's more oil on the market, but ANWR doesn't appear to be a big enough reserve to make a difference on the global market.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea to drill in ANWR, I'm just saying people are being given vaporware.
Hat tips: Ramblings Journal
The loopey Democrats in the state House and Senate of Maryland, decided to take advantage of a special session on medical malpractice lawsuit reform to create a bill that taxes the health care providers in the state, 4% for the services provided.
Republican Gov. Erhlich, rightly, vetoed the bill, saying it does nothing to address malpractice lawsuits, and it would wind up being passed on to the customers of the health care providers.
The loopey state Democrats decided to override the veto.
Guess what? The health care providers have applied to the state insurance commission to raise their rates enough to cover the 4% tax. And now the state Democrats are mad.
Well... DUH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Common sense should have told the fols that the businesses would pass the cost along!
Today was a very fertile one for discussion. My colleagues at Lucy Florence engaged in a wide-ranging discussion about Jews, Israel, China, Tanzania and Ujamaa. I'll simply excerpt one salient point I'd like to establish.
As my man mentioned, it was like pulling teeth to get Negroes to wear afros ('naturals') in the 60s and 70s. He said that black beauty shops hated the black consciousness movement. They figured that could never make money if blackfolks weren't going to get conked any longer. He recalled the turning point, when even James Brown cut off his permed hair. A great deal of energy was spent in changing blackfolks orientation to themselves.
I agree strongly, but I also think a bit too much energy was spent without revising that vision. In particular as black activists left the streets to start integrating and turing the tide at universities, they spent too much on a Marxist vision. This is the reason so many blackfolks are unsatisfied with 'black leadership'.
To my way of seeing the progress of black intellectual progress we went fro