Politics

Feminism Defined in Charts

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I don’t agree with everything from this article at the Guardian, but I like the main point. Which is as follows:

Not a feminist

The chart above is not a valid definition of feminism. As the article says:

The test is fun, to the point, inclusive: it gets people on board and gets more men calling themselves feminists. Allies – huzzah! But it’s also kind of lying. You need to believe some other important things in order to be a feminist…

Then we get a more complicated chart:

Congratulations feminist 2

I could nitpick the chart (all the reasons for being “Not a feminist” are pretty lame), but the article is a bit more nuanced:

There are plenty of ways to be awesome without working towards equal rights for women. For example, if you answered “Who do you think is more disadvantaged by gender inequality?” with “Women, but I’m still more interested in talking about men,” that’s fine. Maybe, like Tom Matlack, who founded the Good Men Project, you are a pro-feminist: that is, someone who supports the goals and objectives of the movement for equal women’s rights, but who is actively working on male issues. Gender initiatives like the Good Men Project move us towards a more equal society, which benefits women in many ways, just like feminist initiatives benefit men in many ways.

So the point ends up being that you have to be pro-feminist in order to be a decent human being, but you don’t actually have to be feminist. I like this because it’s honest about the fact that feminism means more than “I support equal rights for women.” In doing so, it defuses the main use of the term feminism these days, which is to browbeat social conservatives into silence. Here’s how that works:

  1. Feminism means equal rights for women.
  2. Feminism also means being (for example) pro-choice.
  3. What, you’re pro-life? Then you must not be a feminist (by #2).
  4. And if you’re not a feminist, then you  must hate women (by #1).

See how that works? It’s nonsensical, but it is effective. But if, like the author of this piece, you’re honest enough to admit that there’s more going on with feminism then just equal rights for women, the tactic mostly falls apart. Which, in the long run, is good for everyone. What ever feminism means (opinions vary widely), making it something other than a subset of left-wing ideology is probably good for everyone.

DailyKos: Eliminate Corporate Taxation

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2014-08-27 General Electric

Today will forever be remembered as the day I almost agreed with a DailyKos article. Almost. It will also be remembered as the day kos became a right-wing fiscal conservative, almost.

We start off with something everyone should be able to agree on: Eliminate corporate tax, seriously. Kos cites Robert Reich for a universal, non-partisan reason to ditch corporate taxation:

But in many cases, depending on the structure of the market, a significant share of the actual burden of paying the corporate income tax is often borne instead by employees in the form of lower wages, or consumers in the form of higher prices.

This is true. No matter how good “corporate taxation” sounds, the reality is that all tax burdens are ultimately born by people.[ref]Yes, Mitt Romney was right about this too.[/ref] The most obvious problem with corporate taxation is that we don’t know who those people are. We do know that some of them are the employees and customers of big corporations, however. For this reason alone, corporate taxation is unconscionable.

Kos then goes on to make another good observation, but unfortunately this one has ideological implications that run directly counter to his belief. US corporate tax[ref]the highest statutory tax rate in the world[/ref]causes multinational companies to stock more than $2.1 trilllion in off-shore accounts.[ref]The money isn’t just in offshore accounts. It belongs to their foreign based subsidiaries. So the American parent company can’t use the money. It’s just sitting there collecting interest because they’d rather not use it at all than pay 30% to the US government.[/ref] If there were no corporate tax, they would bring most of that $2.1 tillion home. Kos calls this “one hell of a stimulus package for the country.” He’s right, but he’s sounding right-wing, and this triggers an intellectual gag reflex in the next paragraph:

However, this isn’t about free money for the corporatists. Fact is, the big companies are good at avoiding taxes by playing offshore finance games, while small businesses end up paying higher tax rates. Aside from the matter of fairness, it’s poor economics, as those small businesses—the driver of most job creation in our economy—could use that tax money to invest in new employees and equipment.

He’s right that small business drives most job creation, but small businesses are usually not C-corps and so they don’t pay corporate taxation. They are pass through organizations, so f you want to lower their tax rate you have to lower the personal income tax rate. The segue from corporate taxation to small business makes no sense.[ref]Although I find the idea of a mom-and-pop small business with a foreign subsidiary holding foreign profits in a foreign bank kind of hilarious.[/ref] Worse than making no sense, however, Kos is digging the hole deeper. Whether he admits it or not, kos is now arguing to eliminate corporate income tax (to get that $2.1 trillion stimulus) and to lower personal income tax (to reduce the tax burden on the small companies that provide most new jobs in this country). This triggers a second intellectual gag reflex:

But of course, this isn’t an effort to starve government, it’s to move the tax burden on those who can actually afford it—tax capital gains at the same levels (if not higher!) than regular income.

Lest he sound like an anti-tax right-winger, kos has to get around to sticking to the man some how. So he proposes that we make it all up in capital gains. This plan has two enormous defects. First of all, taxing capital gains lowers economic growth, which counteracts the stimulus and job-creation effects of the previous arguments he just made. Secondly, the numbers he borrows for his tax plan make no sense:

For example, a tax of $1 on every $400 of stocks traded (0.25%; one-quarter of one percent) and $1 on every $800 of currency and debt trading including derivatives (0.125%, one-eighth of one percent). This fee (tax) would have raised between $750 billion and $1.2 trillion during each of the past five years (2005 – 2009).

He’s saying: “Let’s pretend we taxed stock trades for 5 years and nobody reacted to the taxation.” Not very realistic, is it? The reality is that if you skim 0.25% of every trade off the top, there are going to be a lot less trades. And so we’re gong to raise dramatically less revenue then he suspects and we’re going to undermine the economy-expanding effects of the first two tax-cuts. All because of ideology.

The really sad thing, of course, is that it takes me (a conservative) to point that he if kos really wants to “move the tax burdn on those who can actually afford it” then he should try a consumption tax. Then we’d actually be able to offset some of the losses from the other forms of taxation and actually hit rich consumers. Oh well.

 

 

Texas and Job Creation

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The above comes from a post by economist Mark Perry in which he explains that the chart shows “the percent changes in total civil employment between December 2007 (when the recession started) and July 2014 for: a) Texas (blue line) and b) the US minus Texas. The chart tells a powerful and important story about the strength of the Texas economy, which has experienced an employment increase of more than 1.3 million workers since late 2007. In contrast, civilian employment in the other 49 states is still almost 1.3 million jobs below the December 2007 level!”

He provides another chart below: “The difference between the two charts is that the one below uses monthly nonfarm payroll employment data and I’m using total civilian employment based on the “household survey” that determines the jobless rate. Total civilian employment is a more comprehensive measure of all US workers that includes agricultural workers, the self-employed, and workers in private households. Using the more comprehensive household survey of jobs shows an even wider divide between the number of jobs added to the Texas economy (+1.3 million) and the net loss of jobs in the other 49 states since December 2007 of -1.23 million!”

 

From all of us down here in Texas: you’re welcome America.

Unlikely Allies: Iranian Tanks in Iraq

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2014-08-26 Iranian M60

The War is Boring blog at Medium has a fascinating post about Iranian M-60 tanks being spotted in Iraq on their way to help the Kurds push back ISIS militants from Iraqi territory. This means that we’ll have the following guys fighting all on one side:

  • Iraqi army
  • Iraqi militias
  • Kurdish Peshmerga
  • Iranian army
  • United States air power and special forces[ref]That’s not confirmed, but everyone I’ve seen says the US wouldn’t be conducting the kinds of air strikes it has been conducting without our own forces on the ground.[/ref]

If that doesn’t tell you how much of a threat ISIS is to the region, I’m not sure what could. But you really have to be familiar with some history of the region to understand just who truly wackadoodle this coalition is. Consider, for example, the fact that the Iranian M-60 tanks are actually American made because they date back to the time when Iran was an ally. The Kurds, for their part, have alternatively been allied with and betrayed by the Iranian government across multiple Iran-Iraq conflicts. They are currently working with the Iraqi army to fight off ISIS, but they also used the ISIS incursion as an opportunity to further solidify their autonomy and seize additional territory for themselves. Many Kurds still dream of their own homeland: Kurdistan. I don’t even know whether the Iraqi militias that have been involved in fighting alongside the formal army are Sunni or Shia. Maybe both? ISIS is Sunni, as are most Arab states in the region, with Iran being the sole major Shia holdout. Just Saturday, Iraqi Shiite militiamen conducted a massacre at a Sunni mosque in northern Iraq (maybe in retaliation for ISIS?)

It’s funny.

Except when it’s not.

Sweatshops and Prosperity

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Texas Tech economist Benjamin Powell has done extensive research on sweatshops, including a recent book on the subject published by Cambridge University. He has a new article in the Summer 2014 issue of The Independent Review titled “Meet the Old Sweatshops: Same as the New Sweatshops.” The article traces the history of sweatshops in 19th-century Great Britain and U.S. as well as post-WWII East Asia. It documents the incredible increase in living standards, to which sweatshop wages contributed. Perhaps more important, it looks at the impact labor laws had on sweatshop conditions and their eventual elimination:


The short answer is that the laws played very little role in ending sweatshop conditions. For the most part, the laws were adopted once the United States had already reached a level of development that had mostly eliminated the conditions the laws made illegal. Great Britain’s first restrictions on child labor applied only to children under nine years old, and Massachusetts’ child labor law, the first in the United States, limited the workday to ten hours only for children under twelve. The United States didn’t pass meaningful national legislation against child labor until 1938, when its per capita annual income was more than $10,200 (in 2010 dollars)…Similarly, the first federal U.S. minimum wage wasn’t introduced until 1938, and it set the minimum at 25 cents per hour when average productivity was already 62.7 cents (Cowen and Tabarrok 2009, chap. 7). The first state minimum-wage law wasn’t passed until 1912 in Massachusetts, and it applied only to women and children. Other national labor legislation didn’t come until the United States was even more developed…The same pattern is true of workplace safety regulation. Fishback finds that “[m]ost [safety] regulations appear to have codified existing practices in the relevant industry” (2007, 310–11) (pg. 17).

Despite the loud protests, research demonstrates that Third World sweatshops provide an above average standard of living for their workers compared to others within their economies. Also, as economist Alex Tabarrok has noted, “the soft-hearted demand for international labor standards often masks labor union protectionism.” This isn’t to say that we should be content with all examples of sweatshop conditions. But, as Powell concludes, “Poorer countries today would be better served if antisweatshop scholars and activists had a better understanding of how the historical process played out in wealthy countries” (pg. 120).

Check it out in full.

Cop: If you don’t want to get shot, do what I tell you.

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2014-08-21 Sunil_Dutta_Los_Angeles_Police_Department

A lot of people are pretty angry about an OpEd Sunil Dutta wrote for the Washington Post. A sampling of reactions:

– Veteran Cop: ‘If You Don’t Want To Get Shot,’ Shut Up — Even If We’re Violating Your Rights (Huffington Post)
– To the Cop Who Told Me Not to Resist: Go F— Yourself (some random politics site)
– ‘If you don’t want to get shot, just do what I tell you,’ cop with Colorado ties writes (Fox affiliate)
– Column defending cops in Ferguson sparks online fury (CNN)

Let me first point out that, although most articles just call him “cop” and that might leave you the impression that he’s a stereotypical white police officer[ref]A little hefty, sporting a buzz cut, and wearing cheap wrap-around sunglasses.[/ref], he’s actually an immigrant who was born and raised in Jaipur, India, a “scholar of Urdu mystical poetry and an Indian classical music form called Dhrupad,” and “a professor of homeland security at Colorado Tech University,” in addition to being a cop with the LAPD. For somebody with such an interesting background to show up in the midst of one of the most contentious episode of racial tension in the United States is worth noting. Life has a funny way of not fitting the narratives we expect it to.

The angry reactions to his post are also misguided. Dutta is actually making a reasonable case that doesn’t include limitless authority for cops. As he writes:

I know it is scary for people to be stopped by cops. I also understand the anger and frustration if people believe they have been stopped unjustly or without a reason. I am aware that corrupt and bully cops exist. When it comes to police misconduct, I side with the ACLU: Having worked as an internal affairs investigator, I know that some officers engage in unprofessional and arrogant behavior; sometimes they behave like criminals themselves. I also believe every cop should use a body camera to record interactions with the community at all times. Every police car should have a video recorder.

His point is simply that reacting aggressively to a cop is not a good response when the cop is issuing lawful orders and even, in almost all cases, when the cop has overstepped his or her bounds. There are checks and balances for holding individual cops accountable for individual abuse and also for holding entire units accountable for systematic abuse. Now, you could argue that those checks and balances are broken. That’s a serious consideration, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with Dutta’s argument. Even if the checks on police abuse are broken, responding by aggressively resisting police authority is illegal (in most cases) and stupid (in all cases).

Cops have wives and children they want to go home to, and they have to defend themselves in life-threatening situations. This includes situations where they are dealing with an unarmed person.

There are no national statistics on how many times officers’ guns are taken away. But the FBI says that of the 616 law enforcement officers killed on duty by criminals from 1994 through 2003, 52 were killed with their own weapon, amounting to 8 percent. (PoliceOne.com)

So the mere fact that you don’t have a gun doesn’t mean that a cop doesn’t see you as a threat. You are a threat, and cops know that because they know nearly one in 10 of their fallen brothers and sisters was brought down with their own weapon. One of the problems here is that cops understand violent encounters. Bystanders and arm-chair lawyers don’t. Civilian reactions of “couldn’t the cop have used a taser?” or “couldn’t they have shot him in the leg?” or “why did they have to shoot him so many times?” are almost invariably founded in ignorance.

The deeper reality is that government is defined by the exclusive right to exercise force. We can go back almost 100 years to the political theorist Max Weber. He defined the state as a “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” A state is defined as the group with the monopoly on violence. In practice, individual people are invested with the monopoly on violence. We call them law enforcement officers. It’s not fair and it’s not supposed to be fair. It’s a monopoly. They have broad legal rights to use force on you. You don’t, except in very narrow and practically useless situations[ref]You have a right of defense against unlawful arrest, but in practice attempting to exercise that right will get you dead.[/ref], have a right to use force on them.

Unless you reject all government, this is a state of affairs you will have to learn to live with. That doesn’t mean that we can’t change anything about our current system. Arguments about how the police use their authority to boss people around are reasonable. Arguments about whether the police can boss people around are not. Rejecting the authority of cops wholesale–which is what a lot of the anger seems to boil down to–is like getting upset that in a democracy sometimes the majority does the wrong thing. It’s s defect, but there’s no better alternative.

If there’s one criticism I have of Dutta’s piece, it’s that he acknowledges individual acts of police corruption but not the possibility of systemic injustice. That is the real issue here. It still doesn’t change his central point, however, and no amount of anger will.

Ferguson: Rushing to Rush to Judgment

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2014-08-21 Ferguson_Day_6,_Picture_12

I wanted to share a couple more thoughts on this topic. First, I was listening to Rush Limbaugh today[ref]Don’t judge. I need talk radio in the car and NPR has none in the afternoon around here.[/ref] and he was arguing that the idea that white cops are killing black kids is a myth. To back up his claim, he asked what people were using as the most recent example of police brutality prior to Ferguson. He answered his question: Rodney King. Nothing of note relating to cops assaulting or killing black men had happened, according to Rush, since 1992.

Say what?

I don’t think I’ve heard Rodney King’s name mentioned a single time, for one thing, and even I can think of multiple controversial shootings that are much more recent. OK, we’ll set Trayvon Martin aside on a technicality if you want (because George Zimmerman wasn’t a copy), but that still leaves (and these are just off the top of my head): the BART police killing of Oscar Grant (2009), the Danziger Bridge shooting (2005), and the shooting of Amadou Diallo (1999). All of those made national headlines, but the Root has a list of several more that weren’t as familiar to me (although they include security guards and tazers).

Meanwhile, on the other side of crazy, some of the critiques I’m reading from surprisingly legitimate sources are disturbing in their rush to judge everyone who hasn’t already made up their mind that Michael Brown was gunned down in cold blood. Case in point, this article featured at Quartz (which is operated by Atlantic Media Company, who run The Atlantic): 12 things white people can do now because Ferguson. In it, Janee Woods can’t figure out why white people aren’t spreading the word about the evil that was done in Ferguson, writing:

But an unarmed black teenager minding his own business walking down the street in broad daylight gets harassed and murdered by a white police officer and those same people seem to have nothing urgent to say about pervasive, systemic, deadly racism in America?

2014-08-21 PolicesignInstead of a bunch of white Americans failing to be bothered by the harassment and murder of a black kid by a white cop, might I suggest that many Americans simply aren’t sure if that’s the correct version of the events? Sometimes the cops do shoot and kill in horrific, illegal, and immoral ways.[ref]And sometimes the victim is white.[/ref] But sometimes cops also do shoot and kill because it’s what they have to do, even against unarmed assailants. In this case, Darren Wilson (the police officer) claims that Michael Brown attacked him and tried to take his gun, and that Brown was charging him when Wilson fired to protect his life. I am not rushing to judge that this story is true, but it might be. Right-wing news outlets are all saying that the officer suffered severe physical injures when Brown assaulted him, including a fractured orbital lobe, but I haven’t seen that picked up by the main stream press yet other than FoxNews.[ref]Insert obligatory joke that FoxNews <em>is</em> a right-wing outlet.[/ref]

I think it’s also worth noting that plenty of white Americans did protest early and loudly that the crowd control measures were inept and immoral. The first wave of criticisms involved a whole bunch of combat vets joking that the Ferguson cops were outfitted in more body armor than they had had in Iraq or Afghanistan. A lot of those vets were white. Meanwhile, libertarians have been attacking the militarization of the police since way before Ferguson, and (as I noted in my last piece on this topic) there were even early rumblings that this would be an issue where left and right could unite.

I don’t think it’s too early to conclude that the crowd control was wrong, and also that the rioting and looting was wrong. That’s safe. But it is too early to assume that Michael Brown’s death was a murder. It’s irresponsible and dangerous to make that assumption, let alone to accuse anyone who doesn’t go along of moral cowardice or racial prejudice.

Ferguson and Common Ground

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2014-08-18 Ferguson

I was on vacation all last week, and so I’ve been catching up on the events from Ferguson, MO over the past couple of days. CBSNews has a pretty good rundown. I’ve seen one particular article that grabbed my attention, however: What I Did After Police Killed My Son.

Yes, there is good reason to think that many of these unjustifiable homicides by police across the country are racially motivated. But there is a lot more than that going on here. Our country is simply not paying enough attention to the terrible lack of accountability of police departments and the way it affects all of us—regardless of race or ethnicity. Because if a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy — that was my son, Michael — can be shot in the head under a street light with his hands cuffed behind his back, in front of five eyewitnesses (including his mother and sister), and his father was a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who flew in three wars for his country — that’s me — and I still couldn’t get anything done about it, then Joe the plumber and Javier the roofer aren’t going to be able to do anything about it either.

Michael Bell (who wrote this piece) is absolutely correct. I hope that issues of police accountability and police militarization can provide some much needed common ground. Based on articles like this one from the New Yorker, I think that hope might not be misplaced:

But over the past two days — as the police in Ferguson have responded to very angry protests with an alarmingly heavy hand, looking and reacting as if they were not the community’s own peace officers but an invading army — something remarkable has happened. The longstanding liberal concerns about police racial hostility has seemed to merge with the longstanding libertarian concerns over police militarization. It isn’t just that no one is defending the cops. It’s that many of the criticisms from the left and the right sound very similar.

The only thing I’d add to that is that initiatives like badge cameras and independent review of lethal shootings are not about attacking the police. They are about making a better police force, and improving trust between law enforcement and the communities they seek to serve.

“The Cooperative Advantage” of International Trade

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Charles Kenney of the Center for Global Development has an excellent article in the Summer 2014 issue of the Breakthrough Journal (published by the Breakthrough Institute) on how international trade and innovation actually benefit everyone involved. He begins with a little history on the 19th-century Guano Islands Act, by which Americans were authorized to seize unoccupied islands filled with dry bat or bird poop. This was

at a time when guano was the world’s best fertilizer and source of saltpeter, a vital ingredient of gunpowder. Around 100 islands were claimed by the United States under the law, including Midway. And it wasn’t just the United States that scrambled for control of guano deposits: Peru, Spain, Bolivia, and Chile fought wars over them. That might have seemed reasonable at the time: everyone was desperate for the same source of nitrogen fertilizer. But in 1909, Fritz Haber developed a method of producing ammonia from nitrogen in the air, enabling chemists to manufacture fertilizer on an industrial scale. This new technology, the Haber process, provided the world with a less smelly and more widely replicable way to meet our nitrogen needs, slashing the strategic value of poop-covered real estate. Nonetheless, the Guano Islands Act remains on the books, representing a way of thinking about international relations that is as anachronistic as it is enduring: the idea that countries must compete for a set amount of resources, land, or wealth.

This fear-based approach to international relations fuels much of the isolationism and protectionism we see today. But Kenney argues that “the increasing success of emerging markets, in part the result of their adopting ideas and institutions pioneered by industrial economies, is binding the world’s countries together into ever closer relationships of mutual benefit.”

After reviewing the evidence, he concludes,

All of this suggests that we need to develop a new view of the international economy as a positive-sum game (to borrow from Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf), one that acknowledges that advances in wealth, technology, or wellbeing in one part of the world are likely to enhance rather than hurt prospects for progress elsewhere. Seeing the planet today through the decayed eyes of Malthus and Machiavelli — and framing engagement with developing countries as zero-sum — simply does not make sense in a non-rival, globally integrated world.

In our positive-sum world, cosmopolitanism and compassion increasingly align with self-interest. This is a far nicer situation than one in which the two conflict, and it is surely a leading reason to hope that the world will keep on becoming a better place to live. It’s time to shift our thinking about Asia, Africa, and Latin America, emphasizing cooperation and mutual gain rather than competition and fear. Thinking of the developing world’s growth in the 21st century as primarily a threat makes about as much sense as trying to run a modern empire on bird poop.

Check it out.

IMF Working Paper: Government Spending and Economic Growth

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A new study from the International Monetary Fund looks at multiple episodes of government spending “booms” across 21 different countries. It does not address whether or not “in theory public investment drives could accelerate growth, but rather whether in practice, with real governments deciding how to spend the funds and implementing investments, they have in fact accelerated growth” (pg. 62) The answer?: “probably very little”.

This conclusion pertains to the drives – the big increases in public capital spending – not necessarily to routine levels of public investment. And furthermore the evidence here  is not about whether public capital can promote growth by averting the emergence of bottlenecks.  Major public investment campaigns continue to be advocated in several countries as a major trigger  for economic growth, and on this issue, whether they have in fact triggered growth, the evidence for a  positive effect of public capital on GDP or GDP growth is weak (pg. 62).

It further states that “it is difficult to find a clear-cut example that fits the oft-repeated narrative of a public investment boom followed by acceleration in GDP growth. If anything the cases of clear-cut booms illustrate the opposite – major drives in the past have been followed by slumps rather than booms” (pg. 4).

Matthew Klein has a really good overview in the Financial Times. Check it out.[ref]This goes along quite well with previous research on government spending and economic growth.[/ref]