Quote of the Day

Frank Luntz, from an Op-Ed in the WaPo:

It is unfortunate that the Republican Party is currently dominated by hyperpartisan, gut-punching professional politicians and expert technicians whom I wouldn’t want to face at the dark end of the electoral alley. They specialize in the flawless execution of “wedge” politics.

Geez, Frank, how do you think that might’ve happened?

Giuliani 2008

In the past, now-near-Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani has said the following:

“We don’t care about the root causes of terrorism. When you act in a way that kills innocent civilians, you have just excluded yourself from civilized countries.”

Amadou Diallou.

Of course, what Giuliani means when he says “you” is “non-white people” and when he says “innocent civilians” he means, mostly, “white people.”

Giuliani is a dangerous authoritarian. In addition to excusing the murder of an innocent man, he also excused the torture – and later led character smears of -  Abner Louima. His statements on terrorism show that this is all of a piece: that to his mind there are good people and bad, and that the bad deserve whatsoever the good decide to do to them. A funny kind of morality, but there you are.

Digby is right (as per usual) that Giuliani would be a perhaps uniquely dangerous successor to George W. Bush:

All that “unitary executive” power in the hands of a wingnut prosecutor with little respect for the bill of rights is a truly dangerous propect…

George W. Bush knew almost nothing of the world when he became President, and has managed to get the United States into two destabilizing wars (so far). Giuliani knows little about the world other than the fact that it is a place full of people who deserve to be punished – that it is made of “civilized” peoples and then those who are not “civilized” and who must be “excluded.”

This isn’t a man who should be President – especially not now.

Quote of the Day

“…watching interior designers compete is a little bit like listening to comparative literature grad students debate the relative merits of Hegel vs. Deleuze. We hate them a little bit more with each word.”

here.

Politics is “Amusing” to the Press

In a chat at washingtonpost.com today, Michael Fletcher makes an unwitting but very revealing comment sprining from President Bush’s (latest) use of “Democrat Party” to refer to the Democratic Party:

Toronto, Canada: Is using “Democrat Party” instead of “Democratic Party” dog-whistle language aimed at the Republic, I mean Republican base?

Michael Fletcher: Funny. I find that whole controversy amusing. But it really does get some people riled up.

The controversy is “amusing” to Fletcher, the observer from on high, though it does get “some people” (people, presumably, not as mannered as Fletcher – dirty fucking hippies perhaps) riled up. Haha, a great laugh.

As Hendrik Hertzberg detailed last year,

“Democrat Party” is a slur, or intended to be—a handy way to express contempt. Aesthetic judgments are subjective, of course, but “Democrat Party” is jarring verging on ugly. It fairly screams “rat.”

…

Luntz, who road-tested the adjectival use of “Democrat” with a focus group in 2001, has concluded that the only people who really dislike it are highly partisan adherents of the—how you say?—Democratic Party. “Those two letters actually do matter,” Luntz said the other day. He added that he recently finished writing a book—it’s entitled “Words That Work”—and has been diligently going through the galley proofs taking out the hundreds of “ic”s that his copy editor, one of those partisan Dems, had stuck in.”

This is no mystery. “Democrat Party” is, as Hertzberg says, a slur intended to inflame Democrats. And it does. These are the facts, the facts of modern American political discourse: Republicans do many things intended primarily to annoy Democrats. Fletcher, a political reporter at one of the United States’ most prominent and influential newspapers (one that conservatives still assail as part of the “liberal media“), finds this personally “amusing”, the corrollary to which is that it is inconsequential – nothing to truly be concerned with – blown out of all proportion – by “some people.” Those people being Democrats, whose proper role in Fletcher’s universe is, presumably, to sit by and be insulted by Republicans while the news media laughs.

Mores

Mark Schmitt, on Newt Gingrich:

…the right has never seemed to care who you sleep with as long as you say the right things about who other people should sleep with.

MySpace Panopticon Plugin and Police State Powers

Fred asks,

“Do we really need to track our children, monitoring their logins on computers around the world? And what does it really get us?”

I’ll let Digby handle exactly what this (and things like this) gets us:

“…the most dangerous thing we have done to ourselves domestically since 9/11 is to hugely expand our policing powers and throw unlimited funds at the agencies who will find a reason and a way to flex their new, expensive muscle. It is a law of nature. If you build it they will use it.
…
We are building a well funded national police state apparatus at the same time that we are giving unlimited money and power to our military and foreign intelligence agencies to operate in the United States. This is incredibly dangerous…”

The only really “good” thing about this particular situation is that, while MySpace has pretty wide adoption, it is ultimately an “opt-in” system in a way that being Joe Citizen isn’t. Nonetheless, the central fact that Digby hammers home again and again applies: if you build a police state, it will get used. It’s not even a question of “abuse” – these sorts of monitoring powers are by their very nature abused; it’s almost more difficult to imagine a situation where these powers aren’t used for bad purposes.

To play devil’s advocate for a second: if “internet child predators” are such a huge problem, why create a system that allows discrete tracking of individual children in physical space? And don’t tell me that it’ll be “secure”…

Appearances and Their Effects

Erving Goffman in “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” defines “front” as an important element of the self – that is, the (often physical and context-specific) appearance that individuals give off and expect to have received by others in an expected context. He also notes,

“…appearance and manner may tend  to contradict each other, as when a performer who appears to be of higher estate than his audience acts in a manner that is unexpectedly equalitarian, or intimate, or apologeti, or when a performer dressed in the garments of a high position presents himself to an individual of even higher status.”

Once again, I couldn’t help but think of the current occupants of the United States’ executive branch, and the ways in which they repeatedly have violated the expected norms of status and manner. Perhaps the most egregious and direct example was Dick Cheney’s appearance at Auschwitz, but George W. Bush – a man whose image has been perhaps more aggressively managed than any otherPresident – is guilty of his own mismatches between presentation and appropriateness. I speak, of course, of Bush’s penchant for receiving/having designed for him innumerable jackets, hats, shirts, etc. emblazoned with his name and, most especially, “Commander-in-Chief.”

There has been in many conservative defenses of Bush a particular emphasis on how critics must respect (or are not respecting) the “office of the Presidency” or “the Commander-in-Chief.” Many draw on this as a particularly authoritarian line of defense, and while there is some of that, what’s more striking is the yawning disconnect between  these demands for “respect” and Bush’s own conduct. To be blunt: in some regards, he seems to treat the Presidency as an opportunity for souveniers. One could hardly ask for a behavior more demystifying of the United States’ highest office (and more indicting and affirming of the culture’s basest tendencies) than this sort of display of pure materialism. Wearing article of clothing after article of clothing that announces – in the same manner one might announce with a t-shirt from a midway tourist trap – the identity of the wearer is, by any standards: tacky. It’s not a reach to conclude that beneath this particular behavior lies a terrible insecurity – an insecurity over Bush’s deserving-ness of the office, and of the respect that his defenders demand be accorded him by virtue of the office – expressed in the most basic way possible: repeated written reminders that Bush is, indeed, the Commander-in-Chief.

Helplessness and War

In her book “Self-Therories,” Carol Dweck describes two broad categories of students – those who display helpless responses in the face of difficulty, and those who display mastery-oriented responses. They are roughly equal in their prevalence and overall intelligence and performance, and together account for 85% of students – these are, it seems, the two basic typologies of self among students and learners. She writes,

“…the helpless response is not just an accurate appraisal of the situation. It is a reaction to failure that carries negative implications for the self and that impairs students’ ability to use their minds effectively.”

It’s not difficult to see the parallels to contemporary political discourse in this statement. On any range of issues – and on either and both side of many debates – we see the helplessness response pop up, time and again. Many committed environmentalists regard global warming as “too big” a problem to possibly even address; many Democratic activists before last November’s elections invented scenarios grand and small for why they would never be able to regain power; many social conservatives regard American culture as “too sick” to possibly survive; etc., ad infinitum.

But the blade cuts both ways, and the helpless response can also result in tremendous obstinancy, as Dweck demonstrates with an historical example:

“Richard Nixon, in the wake of the Watergate hearings, was facing almost certain impeachment and conviction. Yet for a long time he refused to give up his presidency, saying, “You’re never a failure until you give up. He was equating giving up not simply with failure but with being a failure.”

The parallels from this particular obstinancy to the present day are also obvious – as Atrios has been saying for a long time (at least a year):

We will never leave Iraq while George Bush is president, because they’ve decided that leaving is losing.

Is all politics really this simple – is it possible to explain the most important, life-and-death, war-and-peace issues based on a simple typology of childhood learning styles? I’m coming around to the belief that perhaps this is the case.

Culture and Culpability

These next few months, I’m going to be focusing especially on culture and identity…because the raw bits of the several thousand pages of reading I do on that stuff is gonna have to go somewhere.

Atrios yesterday pointed out something that’ll probably be getting a lot of play in coming weeks:

Not going to place bets either way, but it will be interesting to see how wingnuttia responds to Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book. From the back cover blurb of the book which showed up in my mail today;

The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11.

There you go.

This didn’t come from nowhere, either. It’s a meme that emerged as early as…well, as early as two days after 9/11, when Jerry Falwell said,

“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”

He apologized, but the die was cast – and it didn’t come from nowhere. It’s important to recognize that this isn’t just a case of crazy people being crazy, but that in a very important way, this claim – this kind of claim – is true to some people. It’s the same way of thinking that ascribes blame for the United States’ defeat in Viet Nam to the forces of the cultural left, who “undermined the will” of the country to fight, and is already doing the same regarding the debacle in Iraq.

This way of thinking is thrives both on triumphalism – the belief in the inherent rightness of the views and actions of its preferred parties and actors – and martyrdom – the belief that any episodes of failure can only be attibutable to insidious undermining forces from within. Given such a mindset, it is a short step to the next logical rhetorical strategy – eliminationist rhetoric. For if it is only insidious internal forces that stand in the way of eternal success, what option is there but to do away with those dissenters?

This is, needless to say, a dangerous and inherently anti-democratic outlook, superstitious in the extreme and not even acknowledging things like reason and empiricism (indeed, these are often the tools of the undermining forces). But it is nonetheless a major trope in contemporary American discourse, and ought to be acknowledged and addressed as such. That it is also the rantings of the vaguely mad does nothing to change the fact that it holds a powerful sway over our national conversation.

Base of the (American) Pyramid in Financial Services

No, not that pyramid – I’m talking about the vast majority of people on this planet, the very poor, viewed mostly as non-persons by even their governments. And while very few in the United States live on less than a dollar a day, as several billion around the world do, many residents of this country face similar challenges. Especially among illegal (or semi-legal) immigrants, access to officially sanctioned identity – and thus access to the broad range of services most of us take for granted in our middle-class lives (bank accounts, cell phones, etc.) is difficult or impossible.

In many less-developed countries, this is changing, and it’s only logical that similar approaches would be adopted Stateside, especially in immigrant communities. The New York Times focuses on one such approach:

Since coming to this country eight years ago, Jose Dimas has bristled at the $8 fee he often must pay to cash his paycheck. He stews over the $10 charge he faces whenever he wires $150 home to his parents in Mexico.

Daunted by the requirements to open a bank account, Mr. Dimas had long kept his savings hidden in his apartment, and had worried that his money would be stolen.

But now Mr. Dimas, 32, a food preparer at a catering company, has a new tool that has eased his discomfort with all things financial. It is a special debit card, provided not by a bank but by a nonprofit worker center here, enabling hundreds of immigrants without checking accounts or credit cards to keep their cash somewhere safer than beneath their mattresses. The card also makes it easier to shop at stores as well as online.

“This card is better for me for a lot of situations,” Mr. Dimas said. “You don’t have to pay those big charges to send money back to Mexico. And it will be much safer. I don’t like keeping my money in my home. Someone could go steal the money.”

The worker center, called New Labor, normally focuses on preaching about worker solidarity and safety, but after seeing all the hassles that immigrants face with finances, it pioneered the new debit cards. In a survey of 480 immigrants who were members of New Labor and similar worker centers, 47 percent said they had no bank accounts.

Since November, New Labor has provided cards to 200 immigrant members, including some who are here illegally. Three other centers — in Hempstead, N.Y., Chicago and Los Angeles — have begun offering the cards as well, and organizers say they hope to make them available to tens of thousands of immigrants at 140 worker centers nationwide within the next few years.

Several financial experts said the new debit cards — named “Sigo,” combining the Spanish word for “yes” and the English “go” — are an ideal tool for 30 million workers, both foreign-born and native, who lack bank accounts and often face high check-cashing fees and frustrating obstacles in paying bills.

Sigo cards can also help so-called “unbanked” immigrants develop financial sophistication and eventually move into the banking system, these experts said, perhaps to obtain a mortgage or small business loan.

“It’s not just about reducing your financial costs and making your financial life easier, it also helps give you opportunities to get ahead,” said Jennifer Tescher, director of the Center for Financial Services Innovation in Chicago, which provided a grant to develop the program. “It saves you time and makes more products and services available to you.”

Like department store gift cards, the Sigo card has stored value, but unlike those cards, it is reloadable, meaning more money can be added. Users can reload the cards by having paychecks deposited directly into their accounts or by making cash deposits — for fees ranging from 50 cents to $5 — at a local pharmacy or worker center.

The Sigo card requires a PIN number and is affiliated with MasterCard, and can be used wherever MasterCard is accepted.

Cardholders face a maximum liability of $50 if their cards are stolen.

In essence, Sigo cards create a checkless checking account, allowing bills to be paid over the Internet or by having companies deduct directly from the accounts. That can save significant time among a population of workers who often take a day off from work each month to trek from office to office to pay electricity, phone and rent bills in cash.

…
While many American banks require two United States government documents to open an account, immigrants can obtain a Sigo card with just one form of identification, including birth certificates, passports or other records from their home country.

…
Cardholders can send a second card to relatives abroad, who can then make withdrawals at a local A.T.M. Several workers said it cost $15 to send $300 to Mexico through Western Union. But with the Sigo card, the card’s sponsors say, it will cost about $4.50 — the fee for using the A.T.M. in Mexico.

…

Companies like Western Union and Citibank already offer similar reloadable cards, but organizers at the worker centers say they believe they are better positioned to persuade immigrants to try their card. One of the biggest issuers of such cards is NetSpend, a Texas company that lets cardholders check their balances by cellphone.

One of the most interesting aspects of this kind of development is that – well, wouldn’t you like to be able to do this? To not have to deal with banks and absurd fees and constant demands to prove you are who you say you are; to do all your financial transactions via cell phone and online? And you will, of course – but such is the nature of the world today that some of the most innovative business practices and products come first to those groups who have been, until now, entirely unserved.

It makes sense: these are, after all, “high-risk” populations, or at least populations that the established players don’t know how to talk to. So NGOs and firms without the same capitalization  – but with knowledge of the populations they’re serving – fill the breach, and  start by offering terms they know that those populations can afford and understand. Meanwhile, the established markets slog along, more-or-less unchanged (because, of course, the established players are making a healthy profit the way things are now), until either their customers start noticing these other services and demanding them of their fancy “real” bank accounts and such – or until the previously-undercapitalized new players have gotten a solid hold on the previously-underserved markets, and start looking for
new pastures to plow.

Meanwhile, their previously-underserved customers have gained a degree of financial autonomy and savvy, and start looking further “upmarket” for additional services – which maybe these firms begin to provide, and start competing directly with established players, who in turn finally notice this great “new” market under their noses that they’d so carefully avoided for so long. And maybe then, with a new consciousness of the changing nature of the financial marketplace, they start thinking about ways they can hold onto their existing customers, and maybe, just maybe, dealing with banks and credit card companies will become something slightly nicer than emergency dental surgery.

I’m not holding my breath, of course – but hey, it could happen.