Méliès Monday: A Grandmother’s Story
This week, Méliès Monday brings you 1908′s The Grandmother’s Story.
Today In “Civil Rights Are Slavery”
Shorter verbatim Tammy Bruce: “If we are able to coerce someone, via the threat of lawsuit and personal destruction, to provide a service, how is that not slavery? If we insist that you must violate your faith specifically in that slavish action, how is that not abject tyranny?”
Actually, Bruce seems to be doing Erick Erickson one better here: not only are requirements that public accommodations serve people on equal terms tantamount to slavery, she seems to be arguing that private boycotts are tantamount to slavery. I guess the idea is that when you’re already up to your waist in derp you might as well just go ahead and submerge yourself entirely.
I hope that the “basic civil rights protections are slavery” meme becomes a prominent feature of the Republican celebrations of the imaginary Martin Luther King who was totally a Reaganite before his time that recur every January. And it’s not that Republicans oppose civil rights; they just support the Jesse Helms version, and I’m sure if Helms were alive today he’d enthusiastically agree that civil rights statutes are like slavery and denying arbitrary individual exemptions to generally applicable laws is the essence of tyranny.
Is Obama Tough Enough To Show the Leadership To Lead? With Leadership?
Mike “pay for play” Allen’s daily newsletter, as widely read among political elites as it is terrible, identifies its PARAGRAPH OF THE DAY. Can you guess the source?
The Russian occupation of Crimea has challenged Mr. Obama as has no other international crisis, and … [Republicans’ Sunday-show] advice seemed to pose the same question: Is Mr. Obama tough enough to take on the former K.G.B. colonel in the Kremlin? … Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told Mr. Obama by telephone on Sunday that after speaking with Mr. Putin she was not sure he was in touch with reality … ‘In another world,’ she said.
If you guessed that this inane foreign-policy-as-pissing-contest logic came from the Fred Hiatt editorial Paul spotted earlier, you’re sensible but wrong. Sadly, it comes from Peter Baker’s alleged straight news story in the New York Times. I think you can see why so much of the “liberal media” rolled over and died in the run up to Iraq. Say what you will about Bush, he never lacked toughioisty and resolvitivity!
Fantasy New York Times Columnist Page
As I mentioned yesterday in comments, I’ve been thinking about the pathetic state of the New York Times columnist section lately. The Washington Post op-ed page is also terrible, but it’s terrible in the way that it should be terrible–a bunch of right-wing nuts, but they are influential (more or less) right-wing nuts, representing actual consistencies in the Beltway. The Times page is just bad. We’ve all known this for years, but I was really agitated by Kristof’s idiotic column about academics not writing for the public and there are so many bad or meh columnists on the page. I think Maureen Dowd’s column about Francois Hollande not cheating on his partner in the right way had to be an all-time low point for her, although the competition is stiff. Then there’s Tom Friedman writing columns that are nothing more than job advertisements for Google. Meanwhile, Kristof is flying first class around the world saving people while consistently refusing to support people trying to improve their own lives.
So what if we could fire everyone at the Times and start over? Let’s play that game. What would it look like? Who would you keep? I want to establish a vague metric, Value over Replacement Columnist. I’m assuming what one wants in a Times columnist is an original thinker with consistently interesting things to say who also works hard at their job. You want someone people are going to talk about, brands that are interesting and provide added value to the paper. You want high VORC from your columnists. Unfortunately, there’s only one person at the times who actually works hard, has interesting things to say, and grabs your attention. Krugman of course.
Unfortunately, everyone else falls into 1 of 2 categories. Either people talk about them all the time despite or usually because they are so bad (Brooks, Friedman, Kristof, Dowd, Douthat) or they are just not very good at their jobs, writing OK columns I guess but that nobody ever or rarely talks about (Collins, Blow, Nocera, Cohen, Bruni). The former have strikingly negative VORC, the latter replacement-level VORC. Blow is a nice liberal, but there are dozens of people (if not hundreds) who could do this as well as he. And if Blow did disappear, how long would it be before anyone noticed?
I’m also setting two vague groundrules that you can accept or not at your pleasure. First, the columnist page should look more or less like it already looks. Which means you have to have conservatives. The Times has 2, so let’s keep it at that. And the page can’t be a bunch of flaming left-wingers either. Liberals of various stripes, yes. But the game isn’t about finding the people who are all ideological the same as you. Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky are not realistic options. The choices also have to provide diversity of topic. If you are keeping Krugman, you can’t have a bunch of other liberal economist types. Second, I’m going to assume the Times management isn’t going to take a lot of risks. They aren’t picking an LGM writer. Too unknown. So who already has a platform large enough to come to the Times attention?
Finally, I respect DJW’s idea that the whole columnist page is ridiculous as set up, but for monetary reasons it’s not going to go away. One can certainly argue that no one should keep the job for more than 5 years and there’s no question the Times needs to use a tighter leash. But Krugman shows that it can be done.
So who do you want? I keep Krugman and Brooks. Everyone else is gone without a second thought. Why Brooks? You have to have conservatives. And he actually does represent a certain type of Beltway constituency. He’s terrible, but again, he’s terrible in the right way. Plus he’s fun to make fun of. If you can nominate a conservative to replace him, go ahead.
Who else would I want on my Times fantasy columnist page? Despite what he says about not wanting the job, Ta-Nehisi Coates is on board. He’s too modest. Dahlia Lithwick would be awesome as well, as Scott has argued for years. Since I’m a historian, let’s add Jill Lepore. She consistently connects past and present, works hard, and is incredibly productive. Since we are dumping Friedman, we need a foreign policy person. How about Fallows? We are already raiding the Atlantic here, might as well complete the job. I’ll note that Lydia DePillis is the best writer over at WonkBlog (Evan “Unions Are Evil” Soltas is the worst. Typically, he’s the one going with Klein to his new and seemingly very centrastic site) and could be good and have a large enough platform for consideration, as well as being diverse enough in topic to not just be another Krugman. Could we add Dave Weigel as the other conservative? Is he conservative enough? I think all of these people have significant VORC potential.
I’m not picking any of several excellent choices on economic issues (DeLong, Hiltzik, etc). And this page is too white. But it’s a start. Who else should be on board?
WAPO tells Obama to do something about Ukraine
What that something might be the Editors do not say.
Seriously, very serious people get paid to write this kind of thing:
The urge to pull back — to concentrate on what Mr. Obama calls “nation-building at home” — is nothing new, as former ambassador Stephen Sestanovich recounts in his illuminating history of U.S. foreign policy, “Maximalist.” There were similar retrenchments after the Korea and Vietnam wars and when the Soviet Union crumbled. But the United States discovered each time that the world became a more dangerous place without its leadership and that disorder in the world could threaten U.S. prosperity. Each period of retrenchment was followed by more active (though not always wiser) [!!!] policy. Today Mr. Obama has plenty of company in his impulse, within both parties and as reflected by public opinion. But he’s also in part responsible for the national mood: If a president doesn’t make the case for global engagement, no one else effectively can.
The White House often responds by accusing critics of being warmongers who want American “boots on the ground” all over the world and have yet to learn the lessons of Iraq. So let’s stipulate: We don’t want U.S. troops in Syria, and we don’t want U.S. troops in Crimea. A great power can become overextended, and if its economy falters, so will its ability to lead. None of this is simple.
But it’s also true that, as long as some leaders play by what Mr. Kerry dismisses as 19th-century rules, the United States can’t pretend that the only game is in another arena altogether. Military strength, trustworthiness as an ally, staying power in difficult corners of the world such as Afghanistan — these still matter, much as we might wish they did not. While the United States has been retrenching, the tide of democracy in the world, which once seemed inexorable, has been receding. In the long run, that’s harmful to U.S. national security, too.
Notice how The Editors manage to write 800 words on the Russia-Ukraine crisis without making anything that even begins to resemble a concrete policy suggestion, while at the same time excoriating the president for failing to “lead” from his BULLY PULPIT(tm).
Democrats and White Male Voters
I suppose it’s fine to try and carve out positions that explicitly appeal to white male voters, but not if it means watering down the core values of the Democratic Party. If fighting for a higher minimum wage attracts white males, great. But if Democrats equivocate on support for gay marriage, then it’s not worth it. I’d like to say the same thing about gun control but since the major political fallout of the thousands of people killed every year but stupid gun violence/accidents in this country is Colorado state legislators being recalled for trying to do something about it, I can see why Democrats don’t center the issue.
This Day in Labor History: March 3, 1931
This post is a special request from Anna in PDX to help her work out some thorny issues she faces in her local. If this series can be of use to your local or organizing needs, drop me a line.
On March 3, 1931, President Herbert Hoover signed the Davis-Bacon Act, establishing a requirement for the government to pay local prevailing wages on public works projects. Even since its passage, it’s been tainted with an accusation of racism, which will be the subject of today’s post, as we try to untangle the complex knot of race and labor in American history.
The law was prompted by Robert Bacon, a congressman from New York who allied with former Secretary of Labor (1921-30) Senator James Davis. A contractor in Bacon’s home district built a new VA hospital. Rather than hire local workers, he brought in low wage African-American laborers from Alabama. Bacon worried about the government undermining local wages and he sought to put a stop to it. It took the Great Depression to make Bacon’s bill a political possibility. Congress rejected it the first 12 times Bacon introduced it, but the desperation of the Depression created a political force that would lead to the construction of America’s labor law regime. One of the first victories in this was Davis-Bacon. The Hoover Administration itself requested that Congress take up the bill once more in order so that it could seem like it was doing something about falling wages. The law only covered government contracts greater than $5000 (amended to $2000 in 1935) and did not force contractors to hire union labor. As federal labor law often does as well, many states created little Davis-Bacons to cover state contracts, helping to raise the standard of living for construction labor.
James Davis and Robert Bacon
From the time of its passage, opponents portrayed Davis-Bacon as a racist law intended to protect white workers from black competition. Race and labor can’t be separated in this country. The racism that has divided this country since the beginning has also divided workers. Labor deserves no more but also no less blame in perpetuating this than other American institutions, including corporations who openly used race and ethnicity to divide workers, paying black workers lower wages and constructing white workers and black workers as competition against each other. Davis-Bacon intended to stop employers from undermining local standards of living, which they often did by taking advantage of the nation’s inherent racism to bring in workers of color. Today, one certainly cannot blame these black workers for taking jobs significantly better than the cotton plantations of the Jim Crow South, but I don’t think it particularly useful to condemn unionized northern workers for protecting their own jobs either, even if those protections by definition took on a racist tone. After all, feeding their families was a completely legitimate priority.
One however can shake their head at how labor used racist rhetoric to justify what could in principle have been a very reasonable bill. AFL president William Green in supporting Davis-Bacon noted in talking about why it was needed in Tennessee, “Colored labor is being sought to demoralize wage rates.” The debate in Congress over the bill also took on the racial overtones of American life in the early 30s. Alabama Rep. Clayton Allgood said in support, “Reference has been made to a contractor from Alabama who went to New York with bootleg labor. This is a fact. That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country. This bill has merit, and with the extensive building program now being entered into, it is very important we enact this measure.” Some wished it could be extended to protect “white” labor from immigrants as well. Fiorello LaGuardia was among those expressing these sentiments, noting “the workmanship of this cheap imported labor was of course very inferior.”
The law’s wording was pretty vague and both unions and employers have fought over its meanings ever since. For the building trades, Davis-Bacon directly benefited them and they fought for its vigorous use. For contractors, “prevailing wage” was totally undefined and frustrating. It never proved easy to determine or enforce when determined. The Department of Labor was tasked to determine just what the prevailing wage was for a region, but the formulas were increasingly complex and had to cover individual job classifications. In 1979, the General Accounting Office issued an appeal to repeal the law, citing four decades of it not working well.
In 1956, Congress extended Davis-Bacon to cover highway construction, the only controversial piece of the Federal-Aid Highway Act. Southern senators like Harry Byrd sought to reduce union influence by trying to exclude Davis-Bacon from the bill. In 1964, Davis-Bacon was expanded to add fringe benefits, including medical insurance, pensions, vacations, and sick pay into the calculations. This expansion also increased the reach of the law to include the states and municipalities receiving large federal grants for capital construction projects, ranging from schools to roads.
I think the debate over the origin of the law is a separate question over its value today. There is a whole history of terrible racist laws in this country, not to mention good laws passed with racist intent. Are we going to overturn hunting and fishing regulations because they were enacted to save the nation’s game for rich white people to use and overturned hundreds of years of subsistence food traditions by Native Americans, Mexican-Americans, African-Americans, poor whites, and European immigrants? No. Neither should we eliminate Davis-Bacon. Is the law racist today? That’s the key question. And the answer is no.
The argument is basically concern trolling by businesses when what they really want is to avoid paying workers a living wage. Business hopes that by saying that labor law is racist, they can undermine unionism nationally. While northern African-Americans did often have very good reason to be suspicious of white labor unions in the past, today they are among the most union-friendly groups. Research consistently shows that unions have not hurt African-American employment over the years and that today they join unions to protect themselves from wage inequality (see Jake Rosenfeld and Meredith Kleykamp’s “Organized Labor and Racial Wage Equality in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology, March 2012) The NAACP supports the continuance of the Davis-Bacon Act. That support is a lot more important to me than the law’s overtones in 1931.
Opponents also claim Davis-Bacon openly favors union labor. Call the whaaambulance. It actually doesn’t favor union labor per se. It favors paying people the same wage rates unions have negotiated in areas where they control enough of the labor market to do so. Right-wingers use whiny arguments about taxpayers, noting that Davis-Bacon can increase public construction projects by 20 percent. Of course, usually it is less high than this, but those higher costs go back into the community through returned tax dollars, higher purchasing power, better schools, and happier citizens.
Also, high wages are needed for the building trades. Construction is seasonal labor. Without high wages during the work season, you aren’t going to convince young people to join these professions. You are going to lose skilled labor to build your house, fix your toilet, etc. These people have to live and eat and feed their families and I don’t think we should be giving any support for undoing some of the last legislation that helps provide workers with real benefits on the job. Employers should not be able to undermine local wages by importing cheap labor, just as they should not be able to decimate communities by a global race to the bottom to increase profits.
This is the 95th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.
Doesn’t Make Up for Crash, But Still….
Although I probably like Her better overall, 12 Years a Slave is an excellent choice for Best Picture.
It’s also worth noting that it the first major Hollywood production to deal with slavery in a serious way came out in 2013. And no, Amistad was not a serious depiction of slavery. Can we aim for 2 major Hollywood productions dealing with slavery in the second century of film? Even a meh biopic of Frederick Douglass?
The Resolve Fairy and the Precedent Fairy
I mention it below, but it’s worth reiterating how facile the “resolve” argument is with respect to Russia’s incursion into Crimea. The causal argument runs thus: Putin believed, because of Obama’s unwillingness to launch military strikes on Syria, that the United States would not interfere with Russia’s seizure of Crimea. Because the United States had refrained from using military force in a case where Obama had made a (relatively) clear commitment to the use of force, the US would not use force to defend an area it had no (serious) legal obligation to defend.
Phrased in these terms, the argument is very nearly self-refuting. Essentially, partisans of the Resolve Fairy are demanding that Obama create in Putin’s mind the belief that a Russian invasion will be met with US military force, despite the fact that there is nearly zero chance that any administration, in a similar position, would use force. Say what you will about Vladimir Putin, but he is not a stupid man. If the most hawkish administration in recent history failed to counter a Russian invasion of a US client in 2008, what are the chances that the United States will do so now? Any threat to use force in defense of Crimea (or Georgia, for that matter), is a bluff, and not a particularly strong one. The notion that even a wildly successful military campaign against Assad would have convinced Putin that the US would intervene in Crimea is very nearly absurd.
And it gets worse, of course. Let’s imagine a world in which cruise missiles, a no fly zone, and a few airstrikes had managed to topple Assad (just work with me). It is widely believed that the destruction of a Russian client in Libya at the hands of NATO added to Putin’s conviction to support Syria at all costs. There’s every reason to believe that the US induced collapse of the Assad regime would have made Putin more, not less, risk acceptant; prospect theory is a thing. The same people whining about Obama’s “indecisiveness” about Syria would, in this case, have drawn a clear line between the Russian setback in the Middle East and Russian aggression in Ukraine.
And while we’re here, a moment about the Precedent Fairy. Partisans of the Precedent Fairy (generally associated with either the realist school or the left), argue for the causal power of US precedent on Russian behavior. The most common argument runs thus; because the United States intervened on behalf of an ethnic enclave in the Kosovo War, the Russians feel secure in making similar interventions on behalf of their own preferred enclaves. It’s worth emphasizing that the Precedent Fairy isn’t as wrong as the Resolve Fairy, or as dangerous; international society is a complex ideational system of laws, norms, and understandings, and the behavior of major powers does often affect how other states interpret the parameters of the possible. But it’s almost certainly wrong, in this case, to try to draw a direct line between Kosovo and South Ossetia, or Kosovo and Crimea. For one, Russia began intervening on behalf of favored enclaves before the Soviet Union formally collapsed, so precedent wasn’t particularly necessary. For another, Russia cares a lot more about Crimea than the US will ever care about Kosovo. It would have ample reason to intervene even without the precedent set by NATO.
What partisans of the Resolve Fairy and the Precedent Fairy do share is a substantial over-estimation of the importance of US behavior in Russian decision-making. The US is big and important, but stuff happens in the world that doesn’t have much to do with the attitudes or behavior of the United States. Russia has a rich foreign policy history to draw on, and assuming that Russia’s behavior depends on the last three things that Obama said is almost always going to be wrong.
More Oscar Stuff To Argue About
Glenn Kenny ponders the Best Picture nominees while making the Sunday gravy. I was prepared to get on my favorite Eastwood fanatic for the overrated Million Dollar Baby, only putting it into the context of the kind of crap that typically gets honored makes me think that Eastwood fantatics have a point. I’m also happy to see that even shrewd critics were (like me) at least partially snowed by American Beauty on the first viewing. It holds up so badly it’s probably still to high on Glenn’s list, although I’d still rather watch it than snoozefests like Chicago or A Beautiful Mind or irredeemable hateful trash like Crash (if only for the humanity Benning is able to lend her disgracefully written character.)
Moving things to the present, I also liked his post about The Wolf of Wall Street, but I’ll get back to some of this year’s movies later this week…
Fixing the op-ed page
In comments on Erik’s Douthat post below, there is some discussion of the staggering and utter vacuity and general uselessness of the non-Krugman* op-ed writers there. Erik promises a post on who, ideally, should be occupying those roles. While I have some ideas myself, I want to instead question the model? Why 6-7 people writing twice a week? The defects of this model seem obvious to me. First, if you take writing with such a platform and built-in audience as seriously as you should, the demands of doing it twice a week would be quite grueling. (Coates explains why he didn’t want the job in such terms here.) This creates two problems. One, even great writers strain to find something worth saying that often. Two, it creates pressure/incentives to focus on whatever the ‘story of the moment’ is, which is often some pointless journalistic obsession about which there is very little of interest to say.
My preferred model would look something like this: a stable of 30-50 regular writers, drawing from academics, journalists, and others who have something to day, but wouldn’t or couldn’t commit to a full time op-ed job. When someone uses the platform to pursue an important story over several columns (say, Herbert on Tulia) bump them up in the rotation accordingly. Lots of rotation in and out of the pool; perhaps an “emeritus” status for people who’ve retired from regular contributions but might have something worth saying once or twice a year.
The benefits seem obvious: less tendencies toward village group-think, more thoughtful contributions, less “story of the week” silliness, more people writing about something they actually know about, etc. Insofar as Nick Kristoff identified an actual problem, it would create a venue for sustained public intellectual work by important scholars who couldn’t or don’t want to commit to the level of commitment Krugman has.
Setting aside the “feature not a bug” reasons some might want to retain the current model, I can’t really conceive of the advantages of the current model over this one.
