Obama’s Deceptions

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With all the talk about how to stimulate it, you’d think that the economy is a giant clitoris. Ben Bernanke may not employ this imagery, but the immediate challenge–and the issue bound to replace Iraq and immigration in the presidential race–is how best to get the economy engorged and throbbing again.

It would be irresponsible to say much about Bush’s stimulus plan, the mere mention of which could be enough to send the Nikkei, the DAX, and the curiously named FTSE and Sensex tumbling into the crash zone again. In a typically regressive gesture, Bush proposed to hand out cash tax rebates–except to families earning less than $40,000 a year. This may qualify as an example of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism,” in which any misfortune can be re-jiggered to the advantage of the affluent.

Barbara Ehrenreich, January 22, 2008

On positions from Iraq to health care, the policy differences between Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama are minute. Much of the debate between them has involved making these molehills look mountainous or clashing over who-shifted-when.

The one most significant difference between them can be found in how they would approach the presidency – and how the nation might respond.

Hillary Clinton has been a policy wonk most of her life, a trait she has carried into the U.S. Senate. As her debate performances have shown, she has intelligence and a deep understanding of many issues. Her efforts in New York focused first on learning her adopted state’s issues in detail, and pursuing legislation that would not necessarily grab headlines.

But we also have a good idea what a Clinton presidency would look like. The restoration of the Clintons to the White House would trigger a new wave of all-out political warfare.

The State’s Endorsement of Barack Obama, January 22, 2008

It’s become a kind of cliché that the national media first develops a narrative around every presidential race and then pursues that story at any cost. The outlines of the story are becoming increasingly clear. Edwards is angry and so ineffective. The Clintons are self-serving and divisive. Obama is the peace maker.

The New York Times has endorsed Clinton, so maybe the narrative is not yet fixed. On the other hand, she’s a popular New York Senator, so that’s an predictable exception. What bugs me about Obama is that, as someone like Barbara Ehrenreich reminds us, his rhetoric is more deceptive than substantively progressive.

The Clintons, again as the cliché goes, are wonks and they don’t pretend to be otherwise. They are selling expertise and experience. Edwards is selling a fight that is logically unavoidable. Obama, though, is selling the false idea that progressive policies can be enacted without fundamentally challenging any of the powers-that-be.

The rhetoric of his supporters is telling. “From terrorism and climate change to runaway federal entitlement spending, there are big challenges to be faced,” The Sun endorsement begins (as quoted on Obama’s website), as if all of these things were part of a single syndrome.

“Terror” in this case refers to a kind of rhetorical trick pulled by Republicans to justify what can only be called criminal behavior on their part. “Runaway federal entitlement spending,” is more Republican code for the ongoing decimation of public services. “Climate change” seems to mean corn-ethanol and legalized price gouging. It’s hard to figure what this ‘peace’ is supposed to be, even rhetorically.

Posted in: Economics, Language, War, Writing

Faith-Based Bribery

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The fears of those who predicted that billions of dollars in faith-based subsidies distributed by the Bush Administration to churches across the country would build a Republican patronage machine in white constituencies, and severely blunt the prophetic edge of the Black Church, may be coming to pass. Where once Black pastors were among the few who could speak truth to power with little fear of economic retaliation, many may now have ministries with governmental funding streams to worry about, while the least principled among them have been emboldened to ape the talking points and political interventions of white right wing ministers. In the current context, given the flood of corporate money available to pliant African American politicians, and the lack of local news coverage that might facilitate their being held accountable, the interventions of the Black Church into politics only threaten to take those politics further and further away from the desires of African American constituencies.

Bruce Dixon, Black Agenda Report, Wednesday, 16 January 2008

The Rev. Herbert H. Lusk II is a maverick black minister who took to his pulpit in Philadelphia in 2000 and pledged his support for a Bush presidency, a speech broadcast live at the Republican National Convention. Two years later, Mr. Lusk was criticized when he received a $1 million grant through the president’s new religion-based initiative to run a housing program for the poor.

This Sunday, Mr. Lusk has offered his church in Philadelphia as the site for a major political rally intended to whip up support for the president’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., whose confirmation hearings begin on Monday. […]

Mr. Lusk said he agreed to be the host of the event at his Greater Exodus Baptist Church more out of loyalty to Mr. Bush – “a friend of mine” – than out of support for Judge Alito.

“I don’t know enough about him to say I actually think he’s the right man to do the job,” Mr. Lusk said in a telephone interview on Wednesday about Judge Alito. “I’m saying I trust a friend of mine who promised me that he would appoint people to the justice system that would be attentive to the needs I care about” – stopping same-sex marriage, assisted suicide and abortions for minors, and supporting prayer and Christmas celebrations in schools.

Meet Herb Lusk, Steve Benen, January 5, 2006

No one likes a curmudgeon. And there ought to be a lot to celebrate with a woman and an African American doing so well. Perhaps the news is never quite as good as it seems. Maybe the worst news is the way Bush and his cronies have tried to drive a wedge into the progressive African American community through its funding of so-called faith based initiatives. We can only hope that whoever is elected realizes that their constituencies are not identical with their corporate sponsors.

Posted in: Economics, Miscellaneous, Online Places

Class Tells

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One of the many things we find hard to talk about — not only here in Princeton, but nationally — is class. That helps to explain why we do such a bad job when we try to talk about the social mission of elite universities. Take Drew Faust — the excellent historian who recently became president of Harvard. As a scholar and a writer, Faust uses words with great skill and care — so well that her most recent book was published by Alfred Knopf in New York, one of the few remaining bastions of quality in the trade. But when Harvard announced its new financial aid policy, aimed at students whose families earn between $120,000 and $180,000 a year, President Faust declared that by showing that higher education remains an “engine of opportunity,” it would help a “middle-income group.” In this case, her language was not its usual crisp and accurate self — and the fault is not hers alone, but one shared with most members of the chattering classes.

Anthony Grafton, The Daily Princetonian

In a sense this is pretty-self explanatory. You can also use ZipCodeStatistics to verify that the median income of Princeton, New Jersey, is $90,000. Just as Grafton suggests, in this sector of education, people who make $100,000 are ‘middle class.’

They are also 77% white, 4.3% Hispanic/Latin, 11.3% Asian and 1.8% ‘multiracial’ More than 70% of the population has either a bachelor’s degree or is a graduate from a graduate or professional program. Not a representative bunch at all.

In fact, Grafton estimates that the new program is geared towards people wealthier than “95 percent or 96 percent of American households.” Why focus on the ‘chattering classes’– aka the media? Not that the media covers these sorts of issues well.

It would nice, though, if more precise language were used, as Grafton suggests, and these programs were described as aid for the wealthy. It would be even nicer if Historians of Grafton’s stature began to question the entire superstructure of material and social privilege on which institutions like Princeton rests.

Posted in: Composition, Language, Professional, Writing