The 1% think you're a marionette.

We Liberals get called Marxists a lot, particularly by Tea Baggers. It's a stupid thing to say; most of them know exactly the same amount about Marx as Glenn Beck. Because, that's where they learned it.

(all photos from Wikimedia Commons)

But the truth is, Marx is extraordinarily useful if you can ignore his pretensions. His claims that he discovered a "science of history", his predictions regarding the future course of civilization, even his analysis of the history of economic relations can all be safely dismissed. But as a critic of Capitalism...


well, he's Freud. His insights more than make up for his goofiness.

Of particular interest is his concept of commodity fetishism. This idea has been worked over and modified by a number of different thinkers since Marx, but the most simple explanation of it is this: commodity fetishization is the attribution of characteristics to a commodity which it does not objectively possess.

And, with one stroke, we can explain the phenomenon of advertising in its entirety.

Classical economists, (and apologists for the American practice of Capitalism) will insist that the primary purpose of advertising is informational. It conveys price and quality information to potential buyers, and so "lubricates" market mechanisms.

In fact, the primary purpose of advertising is the fetishization of the commodity. Motorcycles become symbols of virility. Realtors become selfless guides to a family's happiness. And you can lose your "man-card" if you don't drink a really shitty, cheap, rice-based beer fermented with enzymes. (Sorry, that one is especially laughable)

I get several different responses to this idea.

"I don't buy that stuff because of the ads, I buy it because I like it!" OK. Why do you like it? And the end point of such discussions (just before the part where they call me an asshole) is inevitably "I just do!"

"Who are you to tell me what I should like?" I don't care what you like, specifically. I am fascinated with the reasons why you like it, and what the implications are for neoclassical market theory. If demand for a commodity is more than a function of its quality and price... if demand can be stimulated by associating a product with qualities it doesn't objectively possess...

then the incentive to maximize quality and minimize price is reduced for producers. Or eliminated completely.

"If people are dumb enough to fall for that shit, they deserve it." Well, maybe. That's an opinion though, not an objective fact. And it's completely unrelated to the justifications apologists for Capitalism make for Capitalist practice.

(Capitalism apologist and welfare recipient Ayn Rand)

(Milton Friedman, who thought Democracy couldn't exist without Capitalism)

The fact of the matter is this; "capitalism", and "free market" are concepts which themselves have become fetishized. The meaning attached to the words has gone beyond mere description. They have become legitimizing symbols of the current system; when Americans hear the words something inside them stands up and puts its hand over it's heart.


But "capitalism", as practiced in the United States has nothing to do with free markets. Capitalism is rather the "privileging" of accumulated capital in the market, at the expense of actors with less capital. It is the institutionalization of power asymmetries in order to maximize the profits of capitalists, irrespective of supply, demand or quality.


And one key element in this power imbalance is commodity fetishization. They're not selling you masculinity, you dumb shit....

They're selling you a truck, when what you probably need is a car.

Pens v. Flyers, Round 1 of the '12 NHL playoffs

With apologies to regular readers of this blog who aren't hockey fans (that would be all three of you) it's the very best time of the year. The best teams in the best sport in the world are about to contend for the single most difficult championship to win of any sport since gladiatorial combat implemented the concussion rule. All stats via ESPN.

(image from mario-lemieux.com)

Even Strength: Advantage Pens

Pens Goals per Game Avg. 3.33 (1st in league) Flyers Goals Against per Game 2.74 (20th)

Flyers GPG 3.17 (3rd) Pens GAA 2.66 (14th)

This shouldn't surprise anyone, with the possible exception of Flyers fans, a loathsome collection of syphilitic congenital idiots whose collective stupidity is equalled only by their nastiness (they once booed Santa). The Pens will deploy the greatest player in the world, this season's winner of the Art Ross Trophy and no fewer than 4 additional players with 20 or more goals this year.

(image from sidcrosby.blogspot.com)

The Flyers will counter with the formidable Claude Giroux, a Jaromir Jagr on the wrong side of his expiration date, and Scotty Hartnall, assuming Hartnall hasn't been jailed by the time the puck drops.

At even strength, we're a better offensive team than they are, and we're better defensively as well.

Special Teams: Advantage Pens

Pens Power Play 19.7% (tied with the Flyers for 5th) Flyers Penalty Kill 81.8% (17th)

Flyers Power Play 19.7% (5th) Pens Penalty Kill 87.7 (3rd)

The Pens advantage is even more pronounced on special teams. The Flyers have a very good Power Play; it's almost exactly as good as that of the Pens. Their Penalty Kill is merely mediocre, however. Ours is outstanding. In theory, this should allow us to play with a little more of an edge than Philly, but the truth is these two teams hate each others guts. Both teams will be chippy, but we have a better chance to make them pay for their transgressions than they do ours. If Brooks Orpik can keep Hartnall out of the crease, the Flyers become much less scary.

Goaltending: Advantage Pens

Fleury Save Percentage .913 (26th) Bryzgalov Save Percentage .909 (32nd)

The Pens advantage here is perhaps less clear cut than in any other category. While Fleury is capable of extended stretches of phenomenal play, he's also infamous for giving up the occasional soft, fat, inexcusable goal in the first 5 minutes of a playoff game. That won't be helpful, if he does it again this year.

(image from post-gazette.com)

The Flyers won the season series against the Pens, but as any hockey fan knows, the playoffs are a brand new season. I have a tough time imagining the Flyers doing anything other than giving us everything we can handle. But the statistics indicate the Penguins will win this series in 4 games.

Reality testing Naomi Wolf.

I like to think of myself as well-informed. I read a lot. I follow the news very carefully, even obsessively. But until I started using Twitter last year, I was blissfully unaware of just how bitter the split was between Center Left Democrats and the Hard Left.

(this and unlabeled images from Wikimedia Commons)

I knew the split existed, of course. I spent the entire 8 years of the Bush administration bitching about Nader voters who delivered our country into the hands of the neocons and Wall Street grifters. But as I figured Twitter out, and began to find people to follow, I realized that many of the people on both sides of the divide *REALLY* hated each other. Fairly prominent people on the Hard Left, some of whom are national figures, refer to supporters of President Obama as "Obamabots", and regard them as sell-outs and dupes of an administration that is just as deeply in the tank for the 1% as any Republican. 

Some on the Center Left refer to people on the Hard Left as "Emo-progs", and regard them as hopelessly impractical, naive, and unwilling to do what must be done to gain control of the public policy machinery that will allow the Left to move the country in a more civilized direction. And some of them are pretty quick on the draw with accusations of racism if they feel the President is being attacked (at least from the limited perspective of a white guy who's never had to face racism).

It's a stupid fight; the two sides need each other and the fact that the split exists is evidence that ANY group of human beings will divide into smaller sub-groups when the environment has them focusing within the group rather than externally to the group. But that's not what I want to talk about at the moment...

Twitter was a great place to be during the height of Occupy Wall Street last year. It allowed me to follow the movement without the mediation of the corporate media. It introduced me to the breathtaking possibilities of social media as a tool of social change. It introduced me to the incredible power of citizen journalism. And it provided a window into the thinking of other Leftists.

It also exposed just how shallow, conspiratorial, badly informed and knee-jerk some of that thinking was. There's an entire faction of Center-Leftists that simply freak-the-fuck out at ANY criticism of the Obama Administration. And there's an even bigger faction of Hard Leftists that will not give this President ANY credit for any of his incredible achievements.

Many of these Hard Lefties are particularly angry about the Administration's intensification of the use of drone strikes, but they're pretty angry about damned near everything. These are the people that stopped fighting for ACA when we didn't get the single-payer bill we would have preferred. These are the people that cited the President's signature of NDAA as proof he was no different from the Bush Administration. And these are the people who swallowed Naomi Wolf's utterly fact-free assertion that last November's crackdown on the Occupy Movement was coordinated by the Department of Homeland Security at the behest of Congress, who were afraid that somehow OWS was going to keep them from using insider knowledge to engage in insider trading.

I had some good arguments with people on Twitter about this claim. I had some bad arguments too, but that's the nature of social media. Rather than rehash them, I refer you to  Joshua Holland, Angry Black Lady and Karoli, all of whom ably refuted Wolf's assertions at the time.

This is an old story; months have passed and the entire controversy has been buried by the controversies over NDAA, and forced trans-vaginal ultrasound, and the Republican primary battles. But yesterday, President Obama signed into law the "Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge" Act, or "STOCK" Act for short.

It's NOT a great bill, any more than ACA was an ideal solution to the healthcare crisis in this country. But like ACA, it represents an improvement in the status quo, which is really all one can hope for in a polarized country with a largely apathetic and inattentive electorate. It's an incremental step towards a much more ambitious goal.

But it represents a complete falsification of Wolf's hypothesis. She posits a Congressional reaction to a perceived threat to their ability to make money on insider knowledge. That reaction was so strong that it lead to Congressional orders to DHS to clear the OWS campsites. And yet we now have the passage of a law that limits the ability of Congress to do that very thing.

I have no faith that members of the Hard Left who swallowed this particular fish will change their mind. The speed with which Wolf's charge spread, and the uncritical acceptance of it by so many, tell us something important. The image of a nefarious conspiracy by rich politicians against an heroic popular movement is one consistent with the existing beliefs and value system of the Hard Left. They WANT to believe this; if true it would represent an affirmation of everything they believe about our society. But it's a simplistic view, as conspiracy theories always are. And Wolf's theory; of a "chain of command" that goes from DHS through Peter King (?) to Congress, is simply not consistent with the passage of STOCK.

This will convince no one who wants to believe. Cognitive Theory tells us that information inconsistent with existing beliefs is either altered so as to become consistent, or is forgotten entirely. But at the time I was having all those arguments on Twitter, I engaged in "expectational disconfirmation". I asked people who believed Wolf's interpretation of events to predict what would happen next. And every one of them predicted more action by DHS, increased illegal surveillance of the movement and the rapid movement of the United States towards a police state. Not ONE of them foresaw any action by Congress to limit their ability to act on insider knowledge.

This is why we call it Social SCIENCE. You observe, hypothesize, predict, and then you TEST YOUR PREDICTIONS. If your predictions are inaccurate, you revise your hypothesis. If subsequent events are inconsistent with your views, you admit it.

At least, that's what you do if you have any intellectual integrity.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/08/14/obama-administration-advised-police-to-not-arrest-occupy-protestors/

http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/mumsnet_live_events/1556371-Naomi-Wolf-Live-webchat-Thursday-6-September-12-midday-1pm

Meet Dennis Baxley...

Florida State Representative Dennis Baxley turns out to be a fascinating public figure.

(image from Fl. House)

I came across him while reading about the murder of Trayvon Martin (link via The Grio). This guy seems to be the epitome of everything I despise in the Republican party. Let me do the list...

(image from ervinlaszlo.com, turned up on a random search. I have no idea who Ervin Laszlo actually is.)

Baxley sponsored the "Stand Your Ground" legislation that will be the basis of George Zimmerman's defense.  This law removes the obligation of Florida citizens to avoid a confrontation. The relevant language seems (not a lawyer) to be section 3, which reads:

A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

Which this lay person interprets as the right to attack someone you think is out of line. Again, I'm not a lawyer, but if I can stand my ground till the situation has scared me, and then attack first...

this strikes me as insanely bad public policy.

(This and unlabeled images from Wikimedia Commons)

In fairness to Baxley, he may not have actually written the legislation he sponsored.  "Stand Your Ground" is part of the NRA legislative agenda of increased gun ownership, tax-payer subsidies to the NRA's "Eddie the Eagle" program, and exemption of gun manufacturers from consumer product safety liability.

But Baxley gives and he gives.  He also sponsored Florida's latest attempt to disenfranchise it's own citizens, by making it harder for likely Democrats to vote. 

I understand that people are really, really good at lying to themselves.  I understand the cognitive basis for equating your interests with the general interest. I try to resist the conclusion that people are evil, and to conclude instead that they're prisoners of their neurology. But Jesus H. Christ...

(image from Graphitti Designs)

if you're a politician, in a democracy, and your interests are served by FEWER citizens voting...

you're on the wrong fucking side. Develop some self-awareness. Looking at you, Representative Baxley.

It is a source of some perplexity to me that Baxley is a Board member of The Florida Council on the Social Status of Black Men and Boys. That seems like a strangely regressive name for an organization, but what do I know? I'm as lilly white as they come, and this is unquestionably an African-American organization with an African-American Board. I've asked them to comment on Baxley's various legislative initiatives, and will post any response they make as an update.

Baxley's in a position to do a lot of damage, and he has.  According to his site he's the Chairman of both the Criminal Justice sub-committee of the Judiciary Committee (oddly, he's not listed as a member of either that committee or that sub-committee on their web pages) and the Health and Human Services Access sub-committee of the Health and Human Services Committee. That last chairmanship has been helpful to Baxley as a launching point for anti-Choice legislation, embodied in HJR 1179.

This bill amends the state Constitution so as to prohibit public funding of abortions. Except, the laws of Florida already prohibit public funding of abortions, just as Federal law does. Even Baxley admitted that the Amendment's importance is purely symbolic.

"I think it's far-reaching and it's controversial, but we as a state will address the sanctity of life, which is a foundational issue," he said.

"That's the overriding issue, and the public should speak to it — and that's more important than how much money we spent on abortions last year."

Finally, Baxley helped push a stealth school prayer bill through the House.

I find these last two pieces of legislation of particular interest. Neither of these bills will have a significant public policy effect. Their entire purpose is the payment of symbolic deference to Christian Conservatives in the hopes of maintaining their political support, at the expense of all Florida tax-payers.

The nice way to say this is that Dennis Baxley aggressively promotes the interests of a particular constituency in the Florida State Legislature. Instead of saying who that constituency is, there's some value in examining who it isn't....

it's not black teen-agers being menaced by a racist vigilante.

It's not members of the permanent underclass attempting to exercise their right as Americans to vote.

It's not women seeking to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, or the tax-payers being forced to fund a purely symbolic exercise in interest group fellatio.

And it's not people uncomfortable with being evangalized by people convinced you're going to burn in Hell.

An Empirical critique of Libertarianism

I have a certain respect for Libertarianism that I lack for Conservatism, at least in its American form. Conservatism, like all political ideologies, is a rationalization for the interests of a particular constituency. But since Conservatism supports the interests of existing elites, it has a much tougher time articulating a coherent set of principles.

(unlabeled images from Wikimedia Commons)

REAL Libertarians (and I'm not speaking of Racism entrepreneur and anti-choice activist Ron Paul here) are the intellectual heirs to the minimal government, individual liberty thinkers of the 18th century that political scientists call "Classical Liberals".

They believe in maximum liberty.  They don't want government doing anything except enforcing contracts, and they'd be happier if there was some way to outsource that function.

But if we start with their initial postulates, we see that the stated objective and intent of their proposed Utopia are to maximize individual liberty. This is a laudable goal...

if we can agree on a definition of "Liberty", and the desirability of maximizing it, and deciding how to reconcile the liberties of different individuals, and how to avoid the Hobbes Problem.

It's also clearly a normative judgement; it's based on the judge's individual preferences, and beliefs, and biases. This is not an ideal starting point from which to analyze human social behaviors. And the analysis of such behaviors must clearly inform any attempt to create social institutions, regardless of whether the goal is the maximization of individual liberty, or order, or prosperity, or any of the other metrics proposed by 2500 years of political theorists.

My preferred analytical starting point is cognitive/biological. Human beings are organisms attempting to survive and reproduce within an ecosystem. And while the nature of that ecosystem, and the adaptive behaviors necessary to succeed within it have changed radically since the last Ice Age, we remain what biological evolution made us: social primates adapted to hunting-gathering in small groups.

Human beings form dominance hierarchies in any group you place them.  If you put 3 people in a room, one or more of them will behave as an alpha. In hunter-gatherer groups, the small size and intimacy of the group tends to keep the dominance hierarchy relatively egalitarian and informal.

But the adaptive behaviors required for human reproductive success have changed radically since the end of the Ice Age. The first new adaptive strategy came with the domestication of other social animals, and the eventual development of pastoralism as an alternative survival strategy to hunting-gathering.

Animals represent the very first form of wealth that didn't have to hauled around by you or your family. They could move livestock around under their own power. People could have more than they needed. People could be more than well-fed, they could be rich.

Herding is like anything else; some people are better at it than others, some people are luckier than others... the adoption of pastoralism created the first sharp, long-term differences in social status.

If you have a huge herd of cattle, and sheep, and goats, you can host an enormous Tony Soprano style barbecue for the entire tribe, and important people from the next tribe over, every time there's a funeral, or a wedding, or religious service. You can send the guests home with a week's worth of greasy leftovers. You can take the less fortunate some starter stock for a new herd, or food. You can reward your friends...

and you can punish your enemies.

(Okay, this image from Tony Soprano's Pizzeria. Not kidding)

So what I'm telling you is that by about 4000 BC we run into the first problem with the libertarian model. The effect of increasing inequality of circumstance, combined with human social dominance mechanics, are what lead to the earliest forms of the State which Libertarians seek to minimize or to eliminate. And I'm not guessing about this; we've got the archeological evidence for all of this.

(image from The World of Ancient Art site)

From the libertarian standpoint, things just get worse with the domestication of the Horse, and the invention of the Wheel. The quantum improvement in transportation technologies available to elites allowed them to exert their influence at greater distances. It increased the geographic range of their patron-client networks. Most importantly of all...

the world got bigger.

Transportation improvements brought together groups of previously isolated people, with different cultures and practices and life-styles. The difference between "us" and "them" got a lot sharper, as "they" became people who talked funny, and who dressed funny, and who didn't cover their dead with red ochre. These recently introduced neighbors traded.  They intermarried.  They raided each other, particularly for cattle. They competed, and that competition was lead by elites who increasingly were coming to resemble the State. 

And the technologies kept improving. Around 3200 BC some nameless genius in Egypt invented the sail. Other geniuses started using the sail on ocean going vessels. The distances across which elites could exert influence kept getting bigger. As the distances got bigger, they included more people, and the patron-client network maintained by powerful men more elaborate and less egalitarian. Finally, ancient Sumeria took the next step in making the State inevitable.

The State, (which most people think of as "the government") has been with us one hell of a long time. It is the expression of social dominance behaviors applied to very large communities. Each new improvement in communications and transportation technology has created larger communities, and in every human community there will be elites and masses. The "nation-state" is a fairly new invention, but it is the logical outcome of a process which continues today. 

The Libertarian preference for a minimal or even absent State fails to take into account why States exist in the first place. As long as there are people, and those people share membership in a community, you will have a State of some sort.

The history on this is irrefutable.

And People don't think Nebraska is interesting..

(All images from Wikimedia Commons, unless otherwise noted)

Bob Kerrey has decided against running for the Senate seat Ben Nelson is fleeing this year.
I anticipate a remix of the wailing and lamentations I saw on Twitter last year, when Nelson announced he wouldn't be running for the seat.

Concern is warranted. Democrats are defending 23 seats this year. Republicans are only defending 10 . A loss of 7 of those flips control of the Senate to the Republicans. And if you thought these assholes were an impediment to public policy when they were a minority...

well, I lack a tasteful metephor. But a tasteless metaphor might involve the term "impaction".

Of all the Democratic seats at risk however, this one always seemed like the toughest to hold. Nebraska is 86 % white, 90 % Christian, and has a 14 % registration advantage for the Republicans. Looking at this realistically, holding Nebraska's Senate seat is damned near impossible, and our best case scenario for 2012 may be to eke out a single electoral vote from their weird apportionment scheme.

This is why Ben Nelson isn't running, of course.  And it's why Kerrey, who recently bought property in the state, has decided to pass.

Nebraska is too big a lift for a DSCC with 22 more winnable races to defend, it's too big a lift for bundlers with more viable candidates desperate for their dollars, it's too big a lift for a White House distracted by its own election issues in this most lilly of white states.

Which makes it perfect for low stakes gambling.

In the 2008 presidential election, 63 % of Nebraska's electorate turned out to vote. They were and are largely white Republicans. Confronted with an untenable path to victory given the likely electorate, the obvious strategy in Nebraska must be to expand the "scope of conflict" . We need a GOTV effort aimed at habitual non-voters, and a candidate who can mobilize them. Running a younger, less blatantly cynical version of Ben Nelson isn't going to cut it; if Ben Nelson could win that seat, he'd be running for it.

I will not pretend to have done an extensive demographic analysis of Nebraska non-voters. But my suspicion is that they might be mobilized around issues of class, economic justice and income inequality.

(image from KVNO news)

A fire-breathing progressive, in  the school of Robert La Follete or Teddy Roosevelt might well be more successful in mobilizing habitual non-voters than another drab establishment Democrat, whose public policy stands are indistinguishable from those of a Republican.

And it is worth noting here...

the purpose of politics is to make good public policy, not to win elections. No policy can be made if you don't win elections. But elections that undermine good policy, don't do the country any good, either.  The lackluster, timid career of Ben Nelson detracted from the benefits that health care reform, the stimulus and filibuster reform have and will provide to the American people.

Youthful cockiness.

I keep seeing a lot of arrogance from some Progressives in the Twitterverse. Typical views are "there's no way Obama can lose" and " the Republican field can't produce a threat to Obama." I always wonder how old these people are.

(photo from Young Democrats of Maryland)

I'm old. I don't like to think about the number of elections I've seen where the best candidate lost to a clear dunce. This country elected a senile actor over a nuclear engineer. We elected Dubya over a war hero.

(Image from Countmeblue.blogspot.com)

Elections are about more than who's the best candidate. External economic factors could intervene. If gas hits $5 a gallon, very few incumbents will win, from either party. There could be a scandal. We simply have no idea who's going to win, yet. 

(Image from wikipedia)

Furthermore, we're talking about an electorate that is expending zero bandwidth on politics right now. They won't get interested until this summer, as the conventions approach.

The economic and historical "context" of a presidency is typically more important than the personal qualities of the president.

Paul Light
Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service

(at least, I think I'm echoing Dr. Light's work here.  I could be misremembering)

Finally...

the media WILL have their counter-narrative. Professional considerations will cause the media to find reasons for Obama to lose or why he should lose. It's a much higher percentage move to write a story which conflicts with the conventional wisdom than to write 1 of 100 identical CW stories, by 100 faceless writers. That's true even if you're wrong, and the CW is right.

News Media is a profit maximizing business, correct?