Cockroach People
Rants and ruminations by a classical liberal with radical Chicano tendencies
Good Government Groups & People of Color
In: corruption|economics|jobs|philosophy|politics|Public policy
2 Mar 2012
I’m sitting at an interesting symposium hosted by the University of Illinois’ Institute of Governmental & Public Affairs. The Symposium is part of a roundtable convening movement called the Illinois Integrity Initiative.
All the big names in good government, i.e. the goo goos, are here: Dick Simpson, Gov. Jim Edgar, Theresa Amato, Paul Green, Kent Redfield and more.
The agenda? First assess the problem of corruption and answer these questions: 1) is there a culture of corruption beyond just illegal acts? 2) if so, can anything be done about it?
While there are certainly some the greatest minds in Illinois who care about democracy reform here, I think there is something missing: people of color, youth, and lower income folks. It’s easy enough to notice that at this moment, I’m only one of two colored folks in the room, but understanding why diversity isn’t here is more complicated.
As someone who has spent nearly two decades organizing people of color and poor folk to participate in society, I understand that until recently good government issues seemed remote from the day to day work on the street, e.g., helping people deal with gun violence or lack of health care. What else keeps us from seeing issues like campaign finance reform, redistricting reform, ethics reform, etc., as our issues? How can we change that?
Super PACs: The Sport of Kings
In: angry white men|Law|media|philosophy|politics|Republicans
20 Feb 2012First published at CommonBlog.com
Dave Weigel has a point: SuperPac money has certainly made the Republican Primaries interesting. But Weigel’s larger point—that Super PACs are good for Democracy–ultimately falls flat.
Here’s what Wiegel got right:
- Super PACs have made it more difficult for the Republican Establishment to anoint Mitt Romney as the inevitable candidate.
- Super PACs have allowed a handful of other rich people to make their voices heard, which is in a twisted way, an expansion of democracy, i.e. the net effect is that more people have a voice in the process.
But here’s what Wiegel got wrong–very wrong. Democracy isn’t about diversifying the group of rich people that have already captured our once hallowed halls of government. Our Democracy, our Republic really, is about the majority of citizens having the opportunity to influence and even control the agenda pursued in those halls.
Whether it’s the Republican Establishment’s rich guys or the other maverick rich guys that Wiegel points out; we still have the makings of a true plutarchy (plutocracy + oligarchy = plutarchy). Even if we cede his point about the expansion of voices thanks to SuperPacs, we get a plutocracy at best.
Every lover of freedom—especially libertarians—ought to lament the loss of true Democracy through manipulation of the laws by the richest among us.
The ancients had a word for the kind of state that functions under laws that have been shaped by one person or one class: thrasymachan. Classics buffs will recognize the reference to Thrasymachus, a devil-like character in 
opposition to the Justice of which Socrates spoke and the fundamental freedoms necessary for public life. For Thrasymachus, justice was defined as the interest of the stronger; in other words, might makes right.
The thrasymachan state is evil because in it freedom is sacrificed for the preferences of a person or a class. The laws are rigged for them and those who do not challenge such unjust laws and obey them blindly are not free people; in fact they could be best described as slaves.
SuperPacs may have angered the Republican Establishment, but their success in the Republican primaries reminds us that it is the super-rich who have the most to gain from them—not the average citizen. SuperPacs, even if they do occasionally get exposed by the Fourth Estate (or at least what’s left of it), are designed to promote the interests of the stronger. Their very existence is an attack on our ability to be free people.
A friend and I were discussing the urge to privatize just about everything in Chicago–schools, health care, parking meters, etc. My friend said that free market thinking is evil, but I responded that the sort of privatization we are seeing is not anything close to a free market since the government is intertwined with these deals and competition is pretty much eliminated (especially in Chicago where cronies are privileged). I am no economist, but this privatization buzz does not seem to follow anything I’ve read by Hayek or Friedman. In fact, it feels like a perversion of both free market thinking and socialist/social democratic thinking.
Thanks to the folks at Crooked Timber for putting this argument more clearly and forcefully:
As neoliberals have been unable to convince the public that government should simply stop providing key collective goods, and instead leave them to the market, they have instead opted for intermediate arrangements, such as privatization (but with regulators) and the contracting out of government work…This argument leads directly into a damning (and to me entirely convincing) indictment of the UK government’s privatization and ‘marketization’ of public services from Margaret Thatcher on. These have not created true markets. Instead, they have resulted in a kind of horrid chimera of government and private actor, with no obvious lines of accountability. The UK government turns to the private sector for project financing – but the private sector firm which leases the relevant facility back to the government has control for 20 or 30 years, under a fixed contract. “Long PFI contracts bring in private firms while limiting the role of the market, again demonstrating how the neoliberal policy shift is more about firms than about markets.” Lengthy chains of contracting and subcontracting relations mean that no-one is really accountable. The businesses who win these contracts win because they have a comparative advantage – in winning government contracts.
Note that not only is this hybrid creature just plain strange, the CT folks point out what I think was really bothering me all along, the lack of accountability. No accountability on the government end. No accountability through the market.
So the next time one of your colleagues or opponents is going on and on about “market-based approaches” and “privatization,” politely remind them that these arrangements are neither and call the approach by its proper name: ABOMINATION.
Photo Margaret Thatcher, The Iron Lady (ironically, a big fan of Hayek)
Obama Could Win Without Latino Vote.
In: African-Americans|angry white men|barack obama|immigrants|Islam|Jewish|latinos|politics
24 Aug 2011
In case you missed the news a while back, Chicago has a New Mayor, Rahm Emmanuel. He just completed his first 100 days; so the media here are obsessing about the definition of “delivered” with respect to his delivering on his campaign processes.
But how soon they forget all the craziness of the election that saw the first Jewish Mayor get elected by a mostly Black and White electorate, with most Latinos voting for their multiple Latino candidates, with only 38% voting for Emmanuel. I still wonder, deep down, whether Rahm’s dominance provided him with a mandate that allows him to pretty much ignore Latinos. I mean seriously, if you had got elected with mostly non-Latino votes and Latinos and their local representatives all endorsed Gery Chico (Del Valle got a few too) or no one , would you feel pressure to deliver on Latino demands? Well, so far I haven’t seen anything that proves my secret thought, but we just finished 100 days so it’s all too soon to tell (though Sylvia Puente of the Latino Policy Forum said his establishment of the Office of New Americans is “symbolic”).
But that brings me to the POTUS. A lot of folks seem to think that Barack is in deep @#@$ because he has been slow to address the deportations that have apparently been revved up under his administration. Sure he is worried about this becoming too big of an issue, hence the recent administrative order to use prosecutorial discretion in deportation cases with an emphasis on deporting only serious criminals. But does Barack’s strategy consist of winning over the majority of Latinos? Probably not. My guess is that the Axelrod strategy that Emmanuel used might hold in this election. It could look like this:
- Latinos are disgusted because of the immigration issue; so , many will not vote, period. The conservative ones on the other side of the immigration issue will not vote for Barack anyway. We have always had low turnout, so there is little hope of Latino voters descending on the polls in droves. The ones that will vote will probably be the most political and therefore could vote for Barack as the lesser of two evils.
- Black folks are going to vote for Obama overwhelmingly if they vote at all. I think it will be hard to get them as excited as they were when they had the opportunity to elect the first Black president. The energy will just not be the same, even if his approval ratings were high. But most that do vote, will be voting for Obama.
- I’m not sure about Asians, but they generally vote Democrat except for the Vietnamese who still vote Republican.
- I know there is a sleeping giant, Muslim vote but I can’t see them being excited about Barack anyway thanks to heightened security measures of this administration as well as the aforementioned immigration policy. There’s no way in hell they are voting for a Republican.
- Angry, tea-partying white folk will vote Republican but normal, independent white folk who are upset with Obama will only do so if a somewhat sane candidate wins the GOP nomination. But I’ve yet to see one–Perry looks the best, but his best is crazy and Perry is already polling badly with them.
Anarchy in the USA?
10 Aug 2011Thanks to the Monkey Cage for posting this fantastic paper by Jacopo Ponticelli and Hans Joachim Voth titled AUSTERITY AND ANARCHY: BUDGET CUTS AND SOCIAL UNREST IN EUROPE, 1919-2009.
The main conclusion is that indebted governments in Europe that implemented recovery measures that appeared to be heavy on austerity, were paid back with civil unrest and riots. While this makes perfect sense, what I found strange is that the actual officials who proposed such measures were NOT punished at the polls. The paper also argues that the media’s fixation on the rioting and looting (sound familiar) didn’t facilitate the rise of protest movements.
Thinking about the folks back in London who are probably more like us than they are like their neighbors on the continent, I wonder if riots and chaos will make it across the pond. Perhaps our media organizations and our politicians are too good at confusing the public about how the ridiculous policies we have been adopting (e.g. the debt ceiling non-deal) will affect them.
Interestingly, the London Riots appear to have been exacerbated by the killing by police of a black man, Mark Duggan, at Tottenham Station (see this funny clip of Darcus Howe telling the BBC that the riots were obviously going to happen in racist, classist Ole England ). Jack Goldstone makes the point here that the riots look creepily like the LA Riots of 1992 when a black man, Rodney King, was beaten by police and riots ensued after the cops went on to be acquitted of any wrongdoing.
Americans are not generally the type to rise up in the Greek fashion, but with London now in flames and our own politicians insisting on balancing the budget on the backs of poor people while enabling the super rich to continue to live tax-free, the tension is palpable.
Off With Their Heads!
5 Aug 2011
NewPopulationBomb’s Jack A. Goldstone argues here that the United States is starting to look like France on the eve of its revolution. There will be metaphorical blood on the streets, he says, if the rich don’ t become reasonable about taxes and shared burden.
And what of the consequences of the elites ‘no new taxes’ mantra? The US is about to move into 2012 with four factors coming into view – an unemployment rate over 9%, a trillion-dollar increase in taxes over ten years on ordinary workers when Obama’s social security tax cuts expire (see my previous post), the expiration of long-term unemployment insurance for those out of work for two years, and the continuation of a $42 billion per year tax cuts for the rich if the Bush tax cuts are not allowed to lapse. Just as the French elites could not see that their actions would fuel an extreme populist backlash, so today’s Republicans don’t seem to realize that this combination will likely bring a populist backlash against the rich that will make any prior talk of ‘class warfare’ seem like a weak metaphor.
While I think Goldstone is correct in channeling Alexis de Tocqueville‘s assessment that the French elites “spoke as if ordinary people were deaf and blind to what they were saying,” I think he underestimates the modern rich. As the Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch have demonstrated, one can make pro-rich policies look populist by funding groups like the Tea Party and slanting the news media to one’s cause. As for what the future holds, I am starting to think that Orwell–not Tocqueville–had the best insights.
Smart on Crime
In: African-Americans|crime|economics|education|latinos|Law|Public policy
4 Aug 2011Wow, I bet you never thought you’d hear this spiel from a career prosecutor:
I know that our criminal justice system is broken and that people of color are disproportionately represented as both victims and perpetrators.Nearly half of all homicide victims in the United States are African American; the numbers for Latino victims are just as bleak. And therefore, African Americans and Latinos have an equal stake in what I describe as a smart on crime approach to fixing the system. We need to move beyond the false choice of asking: Are we tough on crime or are we soft on crime? We need to start asking: Are we smart on crime? When we’re smart on crime, we take steps to prevent crime from happening — like keeping our kids in school. When we’re smart on crime, we look beyond the one-size-fits-all solution to crime and punishment. We do more correcting and less collecting of prisoners.
That statement is from California Attorney General, Kamala D. Harris. Well, kudos to her for saying what other attorneys general and state’s attorneys (that means you Anita Alvarez) are usually to afraid to say. Her piece is basically a defense of public investment and redemption rather than a “lets coddle the criminals” rant. Thank goodness that it wasn’t. I’m tired of the false extremes in the criminal justice debate–well, actually, I’m tired of them in pretty much every debate in America these days.
Read the full article here.
Study: Blacks, Latinos, Asians Increasingly Segregated from Whites
In: African-Americans|Asians|economics|housing|immigrants|latinos|Public policy|racism
3 Aug 2011So it turns out that most Blacks, Latinos, and Asians–even the affluent–tend to live in poorer neighborhoods with few Whites. Here are some highlights from US 2010 Study by Brown University:
• As black-white segregation has slowly declined since 1990, blacks have become less isolated from Hispanics and Asians, but their exposure to whites has hardly changed. Affluent blacks have only marginally higher contact with whites than do poor blacks. • Asians and especially Hispanics have become more isolated from whites as their numbers have grown, and they both have markedly lower exposure to whites now than they did in 1990. Income is moderately associated with these patterns for Hispanics (that is, affluent Hispanics experience lower isolation and higher contact with whites). Asians’ level of concentration in Asian neighborhoods, however, is unrelated to income, and exposure to whites is only modestly greater for higher-income Asians. • With only one exception (the most affluent Asians), minorities at every income level live in poorer neighborhoods than do whites with comparable incomes. Disparities are greatest for the lowest income minorities, and they are much sharper for blacks and Hispanics than for Asians. Affluent blacks and Hispanics live in poorer neighborhoods than whites with working class incomes. There is considerable variation in these patterns across metropolitan regions. But in the 50 metros with the largest black populations, there is none where average black exposure to neighborhood poverty is less than 20 percent higher than that of whites, and only two metros where affluent blacks live in neighborhoods that are less poor than those of the average white.
The study goes on to conclude that segregation lowers the quality of life even for affluent minorities:
Residential segregation is not benign. It does not mean only that blacks and Hispanics, Asians and whites live in different neighborhoods with little contact between them. It means that whatever their personal circumstances, black and Hispanic families on average live at a disadvantage and raise their children in communities with fewer resources
I think there is a cultural pressure for many of us to not “sell-out” and leave the neighborhood. For the well-educated, fear of adding to the brain-drain on the community you come from is sometimes reason enough to stay. But, I have never really been one to get angry at someone who made the choice to live in a safer neighborhood with better schools. It’s a personal choice. If you make it, and if the neighborhood you are eyeing doesn’t prevent you from moving there through informal, racist screening processes, then that’s really none of my business. In any case, this report shows that most of us aren’t allowed choosing to live in more affluent, white neighborhoods anyway. Thus, there is no point in lamenting the one Latino or Black family that does.
Read the full report here.
The Debt Deal–Elites Win, America Loses
In: barack obama|economics|health care|politics|Public policy
1 Aug 2011I’m having a hard time seeing how Americans actually win with this debt deal. Even the White House could only say that previous Republican proposals “would have placed the sole burden of deficit reduction on lower-income and middle-class families.” But, without a revenue component, it does just that.
While it may look great that there are some cuts to defense spending, thus making the cuts in places besides social services, the President and Congress seem to have forgot that much of that spending also goes to middle class families. Specifics weren’t laid out in the White House memo, but you can be assured that things like raises for soldiers and health care coverage will be affected. In fact, I have been having this conversation with my mother for a while with regard to her TRICARE Prime coverage. That coverage which was once at the Cadillac level, is slowly but surely looking like Ford Fiesta. I’m no fan of big military spending, but make no mistake, these cuts are not going to impact the big contractors making all the money in direct defense costs. Programs like TRICARE will just get cut yet again.
So while military spouses like my Mom and poor people who benefit from social services will feel the “burden of deficit reduction,” the super-rich will still pay little to no taxes.
That’s not a shared burden. That BS.
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About this blog
While some people look at cockroaches as disgusting pests, I view them as resilient organisms that predate humans and will likely outlive us as well. People of color, the poor, the downtrodden, and the oppressed, much like cockroaches, are often despised, feared and in some cases have been the objects of extermination.
I started this blog as an attempt to understand the complicated world we live in. Things have changed since the old days of conquest, colonization, and slavery. Anonymous living, consumerism, and mass media have made it difficult to identify the forces that make modern-day oppression possible. Thus, posts here tend to focus on corruption, media, bureaucracy, ethics, economics, law, human rights, etc...in short, I try to take a second-order inquiry into assumptions and systems that some of us take for granted. I also take time to challenge stereotypes that function to place us in a box. Occasionally, I just rant.
Thank your for reading!
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- reylc: Thanks Kathay, I'm pretty sick of the bickering too. P.S. I look forward to working with you so [...]
- Kathay Feng: Thanks for making me think about this deal a litle more deeply. I think I wanted the bickering to s [...]
- Jackie: In most interviews that I have seen with Sofia, she's always bragging about being a “natural” bl [...]
- HispanicPundit: I still wonder, deep down, whether Rahm’s dominance provided him with a mandate that allows hi [...]
- Dali: Ah don't know if my other comment went through but i was looking for anything else of sofia's comm [...]
- Good Government Groups & People of Color
- Super PACs: The Sport of Kings
- Stop SOPA!
- Privatization of Public Services: an Abomination?
- Obama Could Win Without Latino Vote.
- Anarchy in the USA?
- Off With Their Heads!
- Smart on Crime
- Study: Blacks, Latinos, Asians Increasingly Segregated from Whites
- The Debt Deal–Elites Win, America Loses