MotherJones.com | MoJoBlog - Social Issues and Political Commentary: May 14, 2006

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May 19, 2006

Florida sued over voter registration law

A law passed in Florida last year that fines nonpartisan voter registration activities under certain circumstances, is being challenged in U.S. District Court by the League of Women Voters and several other nonpartisan organizations. The law has forced the League and similar groups to discontinue all voter registration drives, while permitting partisan groups to hold such drives.

In 2004, over half a million Floridians were assisted in voter registration by nonpartisan citizens groups. The 2005 law is described as a reform: A $5,000 fine is imposed for each voter registration application that a nonpartisan group fails to submit. There are less severe fines for missing registration deadlines, which are enforced even in the event of something as catastophic as a hurricane.

The plaintiffs, however, say that the severity of the law has forced them to shut down their voter registration efforts. The suit is being filed on the grounds that the law "violates U.S. free speech rights and disproportionately discriminates against low-income, minority, disabled, and other marginalized citizens in Florida who rely on plaintiffs and similar groups to help them overcome barriers to registering to vote."

Is Sprawl Really That Bad?

Urban sprawl isn't so bad, it's just misunderstood. That's what Robert Bruegmann's arguing in a cover story for the American Enterprise Magazine. Needless to say, I totally disagree. The essay spends a lot of time fending off complaints that sprawl is ugly—"Class-based aesthetic objections to sprawl have always been the most important force motivating critics"—but then glosses over the really crucial objection here: namely, that sprawled-out cities use up a lot of energy. Bad news when we're burning up the planet.

A 2003 World Bank study comparing various cities in the United States illustrates the difference a bit of sprawl can make. Boston, for instance, isn't the most compact city around, but if its population was as spread out as, say, Atlanta's, then Bostonians would be driving about 9 percent more. If Boston had Atlanta's inferior rail system, driving would increase another 5 percent. In fact, if you could somehow wave a magic wand and move everyone in Boston to a city with all of Atlanta's sprawl-like characteristics, total driving would increase 25 percent.

The relative location of jobs and housing also matter. Bruegmann claims that when urban planners tried to create towns such as Reston, Virginia with an even mix of housing and jobs, the effort failed because people still drove their cars hundreds of miles away to find even better jobs. No data, though. Roll tape to the World Bank study: Again, a city like Boston has a fairly even mix of jobs and housing; if it were to become as unbalanced as, say, Washington D.C., total driving would go up another 9 percent.

Now part of Bruegmann's argument is that sprawl is inevitable—it happens to all cities, even in Europe—because people don't like living in crowded urban areas and want low-density subdivisions and industrial parks and freeways. Well, maybe they do. But that doesn't mean it's impossible for urban planners to constrain sprawl. Compare Vancouver and Seattle. Similar cities in similar areas with similar sorts of people. Yet the former has promoted downtown development and limited freeway expansion and, as a result, has much less sprawl. Just because Parisians are fleeing to the suburbs en masse doesn't mean it's impossible to curb sprawl, and the excessive oil consumption that comes with it.

Moreover, if you want to get political about it (and hey, who doesn't?) my own guess is that America has steadily grown more conservative over the past half-century partly because of urban sprawl. City-dwellers organize and use zoning laws to prevent new apartment complexes from being built, and developers—who would rather not amass armies of lobbyists and lawyers and community organizers just to build a new apartment complex—simply decide to start building out in the suburbs.

So that's where people start moving: out of the city. Maybe it's because they want to, as Bruegmann claims. But it's also where the cheap housing is. And it's not hard to imagine that life in the suburbs—where quality of life depends more on lower taxes and individual property rights than on public services, and where one can cloister off with one's own ethnic and religious peers—turns people into Republicans. That's unfair, of course, and suburbs aren't nearly as stale as people make them out to be (Michael Pollan's 2000 essay on this is quite entertaining), but probably not entirely inaccurate. Maybe all that money that's being spent building up left-wing political "infrastructure" should just go towards affordable urban housing. An easier fix.

But whatever. By the way, if you want to read about an utopian urban center that seems to work, do check out Bill McKibben's essay on Curitiba, Brazil, which has managed to curtail sprawl rather brilliantly with quality urban planning. "Because of its fine transit system, and because its inhabitants are attracted toward the city center… Curitibans use 25 percent less fuel per capita, even though they are actually more likely to own cars." Plus, despite being a low-income city, Curitiba's beautiful, people truly love living there, and even the slums are "clean" and "decent". If McKibben's picture is accurate, that's a place worth studying.

No Troop Reductions After All?

Yesterday Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate that maybe the United States won't withdraw large numbers of troops from Iraq this year after all. Um, okay… but are there actually enough soldiers to keep around in Iraq indefinitely? Last June, retired General Barry McCaffrey said we can expect a "meltdown of the Army National Guard and Army Reserve in the coming 36 months" unless the military draws down from Iraq. At some point one would think we're not going to have enough soldiers to conduct an endless occupation. But it's okay: Rumsfeld says Iraq has entered a "hopeful new phase." Once again.

May 18, 2006

Lone Baghdad mortuary unable to handle all of the civilian corpses

Baghdad has only one mortuary, and the staff there was able to release bodies in about five hours, prior to the war. Now, there is not only a dramatic increase in the number of dead bodies being brought to the morgue, the nature of their wounds is such that exams can take many hours or even days to complete. Dr. Fa'aq Ameen, director of the health ministry's Forensic Medicine Institute, also cites lack of storage space and a shortage of doctors as problems at the Baghdad mortuary.

Every day, an average of seventry Iraqi civilians are killed, mostly as a result of sectarian violence. The mortuary receives 1,500 bodies a month, not counting the bodies of those killed in areas north and south of the country. The morgue has storage space for 120 corpses, and unless more refrigeration units are installed, the threat of disease looms in the community. Some bodies are buried before the family can idetify them, then they must be exhumed and re-buried. There is no government agency that helps people find the bodies of the dead, and there are a lot of angry people who cannot locate the bodies of their loved ones.

This scenario is similar to the one that occurred in Louisiana after the two hurricanes hit the state in August and September. Angry families demanded the bodies of their loved ones, but an overworked temporary morgue staff had to do the best it could in examining and identifying corpses. The situation in Baghdad, however, is made worse every day, and with only one mortuary, there is no sign that it will improve.

Causing Hamas to Collapse

For awhile now, various news outlets have reported that some administration officials apparently believe that the best approach to Israel/Palestine is to try to starve the Hamas government of funds—by imposing sanctions and withholding international aid—and force it to collapse, thereby allowing something better to take its place. That's the theory, anyway, and if it sounds goofy to you, you're not alone. In Lebanon's Daily Star today, Yossi Alpher lists several reasons why this is a really, really bad idea.

Chaos in Afghanistan

In the World Policy Journal, Carl Robichaud warns that the United States—and, for that matter, the rest of the world—is letting Afghanistan slowly slip into chaos. Insurgents have been gaining strength in recent months, and violence is on the rise. The country needs an estimated 200,000 peacekeepers to provide security, and it's about 80,000 short. And the international community has failed to bolster the central government's legitimacy by spending the money to rebuild the country—11 times as much has been spent on military operations as on reconstruction, humanitarian aid, and economic assistance.

Everyone knows the history here: After the Soviet Union left Afghanistan in the face of U.S.-backed resistance in the 1980s, the United States let the country go to hell. A decade later, among other things, it had to go invade Afghanistan. One would think this is a pretty good argument for not letting the country go to hell. Apparently not.

Who's "Taking Our Jobs Away"?

One of the oft-cited arguments against allowing increased immigration is that all those immigrants will take jobs away from Americans. In the abstract, that's a somewhat misguided point. Immigration growth is very similar to having rapid population growth because of higher birthrates—both increase the number of working-age people in the United States—and we rarely hear calls for people to have fewer kids on the theory that all those youngsters will "take our jobs away." There isn't a fixed number of work in this country, and population growth means—again, in theory—more jobs for everyone.

Anyway, Mark Thoma has more on this point, and there's a good debate in his comments section (including people that don't agree that the two are exactly the same) that's very much worth reading.

Appeasement Watch

I remember when this sort of thing was denigrated as "John Kerry's foreign policy," but frankly, I'm glad to see the Bush administration acting like a bunch of grown-ups:

President Bush's top advisers have recommended a broad new approach to dealing with North Korea that would include beginning negotiations on a peace treaty, even while efforts to dismantle the country's nuclear program are still under way, senior administration officials and Asian diplomats say.

Why, it seems only a few years ago that Dick Cheney's approach to North Korea was "We don't negotiate with evil, we defeat it.'' Of course, refusing to negotiate didn't really accomplish anything, apart from giving Kim Jong Il time, opportunity, and reason to further North Korea's nuclear program. It's at least worth trying to talk (after all, if nothing comes of it, what's been lost?). Maybe Cheney finally figured that out. Hopefully he'll realize the same thing about Iran sooner or later.

May 17, 2006

Fade-Out: Jazz Fest and the African-American Future of New Orleans

Following Tuesday night's contentious debate between incumbent Mayor Ray Nagin and white challenger Mitch Landrieu, yesterday's Washington Post had a disturbing story about the changing face of New Orleans: whiter, richer and with far fewer blacks. African-Americans' neighborhoods are still devastated and too often they can't afford to return. It's not only a personal tragedy for those who lost their loved ones and for those who now can't return home, but a cultural and economic tragedy for our nation as well.

Just over a week ago, I returned from Jazz Fest, and all the infectious music in the clubs and at the festival couldn't hide the ongoing ruination of New Orleans. Yes, the reviews are in for the New Orleans Jazz Fest that finished on Sunday May 7th, with the media arriving at a consensus story-line: “New Orleans Jazz Fest emerges triumphant,” as USA Today reported. But even as the musical outpouring from stars ranging from Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon to Irma Thomas and other local treasures provided a sense of joy and hope to enormous crowds, the memory of the lost lives and devastation of Katrina was never far from the surface. The glorious music or the crowds of young revelers packing Bourbon Street with their beers and hurricanes in hand couldn’t mask the underlying desolation of a city with large swaths still in ruins, whether it was the crushed roofs planted atop cars in the Lower Ninth Ward or the block after block of abandoned and ruined homes, eerily quiet with a few white FEMA trailers scattered among them, even in the more affluent, recovering Lakeview area.

Outside of a few tourist sites, parts of the city were like a ghost town, having lost more than 60 percent of its population, mostly African-Americans – from 455,000 to about 150,000 people. Even in the once-bustling Jackson Square section of the French Quarter, where brass bands, solo musicians and street-vendors once plied their trade (and where George Bush promised to “do what it takes” to restore New Orleans), the place was nearly empty. Hotels and restaurants, the backbone of the city’s essential tourism industry, were severely understaffed, scrambling to find workers because potential employees – and those who want to return -- can’t find a place to live.

“Make Levees, Not War” was a slogan featured on T-shirts and buttons at Jazz Fest, but it was a viewpoint that hadn’t had any impact on government policy or the city’s fortunes. Less than half of the city’s 3,000 restaurants have reopened. Convention business has plummeted, and the lost revenue won’t be recouped by the new Gray Line tour, “America’s Worst Catastrophe,” that takes busloads of tourists through lakeside areas devastated by Katrina – although they’re barred by city law from touring the wrecked black slums of the Ninth Ward. And even if the Army Corps of Engineers manages to repair the levees to a pre-Katrina level in time for the hurricane season that starts in June, there’s no assurance that it will be enough to protect the city from future flooding.

“Don’t let nobody fool you,” a cab driver warned me. “After Jazz Fest, everything will be dead.”

But for now, the still-struggling city could put on its best musical showcase, the French Quarter tourist mecca remained largely unscathed by the flooding, and there were oases of life and music scattered throughout the city that could make you believe, at least for a few hours, that New Orleans was back. Here are some snapshots from New Orleans you may have missed:

On the Thursday night before the final Jazz Fest weekend, the spirit of traditional New Orleans was being kept alive in a club called Vaughn’s Lounge in the Bywater neighborhood adjoining the Mississippi River. Most of the Creole cottages and Victorian doubles that give this artsy-flavored neighborhood its charm had remained surprisingly intact, but on the drive up to the nightspot my friends and I could see the clear signs of destruction -- and a city that still couldn’t manage some basic services. There were red Xs on some abandoned or ruined homes, marking that they’d been searched after the flood for survivors and damage, while trash and debris piled up near several street-corners. But once inside the ramshackle club’s side-door entrance, the crowd of locals and music-hungry visitors were jammed alongside the long bar overlooking the small dance floor area, underneath the silvery fake garlands and twinkling Christmas lights, and they heard stomping jazz and R&B that could almost make you forget about Katrina.

Here was the heart of the music that made New Orleans a cultural landmark. The Treme Brass Band, propelled by the drumming of the legendary 85-year-old “Uncle” Lionel Baptiste, wearing shades, suspenders and a bowler hat, powered through an exhilarating gumbo of swinging jazz standards and classic New Orleans second-line songs. “I’m going to New Orleans,” the barrel-chested coronet player and front-man sang, “and we’re going to jump and shout!” Then he launched into a soaring instrumental break that drove the crowd wild, backed by a tuba, two saxes and trumpet. The determination of these musicians to play against all odds, however, hasn’t been matched by the dithering of government officials in rebuilding New Orleans.
***
The signs of decay became clearer as an air-conditioned Festival Express bus whisked tourists from the downtown area to the Jazz Fest grounds at a race-track. Over 100,000 cars were abandoned during the flooding, and hundreds and hundreds of them were towed underneath the freeway overpass, a seemingly endless stretch of rotting cars, smeared with dirt from the floodwaters, a melancholy reminder on our way to a music celebration of all the lives that had been shattered by Katrina.

But once on the festival grounds, you could see musicians – 4,000 in all performed over the two weekends – who were creating joyous music that was almost an act of defiance against the forces, both natural and man-made, that brought them and their city down. A band of traditional jazz musicians snaked among the crowd in a second-line dance, wearing white uniforms and hoisting blue parasols aloft. At the Southern Comfort blues stage, a heavy-set New Orleans refugee and blues belter, Marva Wright, now living in suburban Maryland, told the crowd after singing “Whole Lotta Shaking Going On”: “Our band, we’re scattered all over the place, but we’re here right now. If I sound a bit flat it’s because I’m full of emotion, but I’m not going to cry.” She brought her family onstage, including her brother-in-law who had returned to rescue her from her house that nearly floated away. She added, “I’m going to do this next song for my friends who are still alive – and the friends who didn’t make it.” Then she launched into a bluesy, impassioned version of the Gloria Gaynor classic, “I will survive,” and changed the lyrics near the end: “We will survive, New Orleans, we will survive!”
***
But will New Orleans ever really be New Orleans again if its black community has been decimated? To Jan Ramsey, the extroverted co-publisher and founder of New Orleans’s music bible, Offbeat Magazine, the future of New Orleans music in its hometown may be in doubt. Her entire staff fled town, but she was able to rebuild her magazine with pledges of lifetime support from longtime subscribers and backers. But from her booth on the pathway to the gospel and jazz tents, she looked around at the party-hearty, overwhelmingly white crowd and mused, “Jazz Fest is sort of a fig-leaf. You don’t see black people here.” Nearby, the African-American members of Smitty Dee’s Brass Band played on the Jazz and Heritage Stage, and Ramsey observed, “Where is that going to come from? They don’t teach that in the schools. They learn to play from the Mardi Gras Indians and the brass bands: it’s a musical community. But they don’t have a place to go back to.” To that end, Tipitina’s Foundation seeks to find housing and help for New Orleans musicians, and Habitat for Humanity’s Musicians Village aims to build over 200 homes in the Upper Ninth Ward. That will help some of today’s displaced musicians, but what about future generations? The natural resource that is the music of New Orleans is not an endlessly renewable one without the people who made it possible.

***

The city’s musical heritage continued to show its drawing power for a new generation of musical fans, especially young jam-band devotees who flocked to hear the New Orleans groove in those nightclubs that still remained. At the Howlin’ Wolf, a brilliant white hipster purveyor of funk, Papa Mali, brought on stage with him iconic New Orleans musicians, including a world-weary Big Chief Monk Boudreaux of the Golden Eagles “tribe.” Earlier in the day, word spread how he lashed out during his Jazz Fest set at the government failures and the suffering that had devastated his city, and so tonight, Boudreaux was going to try to offer a more upbeat tone. But there was still an undercurrent of anger and sadness even as he chanted some of his standard second-line songs over an insistent beat: “I need no trouble when I go downtown!”

Afterwards, he talked to me about how he lost everything in Katrina and went to Texas, but now was living with a daughter in New Orleans and working to fix up his old place. Perhaps thinking of future tourism, he adopted a more boosterish tone than before: “It’s coming back,” he said of his city. Even the black kids, he hoped, would return to New Orleans this summer -- and stay -- when school was over in other states.

The economic might of New Orleans music, its centrality to any recovery, was demonstrated forcefully at a sold-out concert featuring the reunited Meters, with guitarist Leo Nocentilli and keyboardist Art Neville, at a vast 20,000-square foot warehouse space adjoining the Contemporary Arts Center. At $35 a head, with the Robert Randolph Band as opening act, the Meters packed the space with a few thousand partying young people squeezed together and pumping their fists along to the syncopated, layered sounds of this 40-year-old group. They never had a Top 10 pop hit, but they laid the foundation for much of funk and hip-hop with songs like “Cissy Strut.” When they sang about “Fire on the Bayou,” it was meant as a tribute to street-corner good times, but now sounded more like a clarion call to overcome disaster.
***
On the final day of the festival, there was a thunderstorm shortly before Irma Thomas, the Soul Queen of New Orleans, came on stage, but it stopped just in time for her to open with one of her poignant regional hits, “It’s Raining.” Many of us saw it as an omen that miracles were possible, even in a downtrodden New Orleans. Irma lost her nightclub in the flooding, and sang with passion a song from her latest album: “My house is a lonely house…Now the rain falls around it, and loneliness surrounds it, and I’m in the middle of it all.” She looked down, barely holding in her grief, and afterwards told the crowd, “I sang this song to let you know that we’re all hurting, but we have hope.”

That blend of emotion was never more evident then when she came out later to join Paul Simon and Alan Toussaint in Simon’s encore number, “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Her powerful vocals brought new life to such lyrics as “When you’re down and out…I will comfort you.” She gave a special gospel-rooted urgency to her singing of the lines, “Your time has come to shine/ All your dreams are on their way/See how they shine!” But, outside the celebration on the Jazz Fest grounds, it seemed just as likely that the people of New Orleans, still essentially abandoned despite assorted government promises, could face a fate that Simon sang about earlier in his haunting “American Tune”: “I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered or driven to its knees.”

One much-expected sign of renewal was soon crushed: Fats Domino was too ill to close out the festival, although he came on stage to greet the crowd and apologized for not playing.
***
Yet if there was a reason for hope, it was going to be found in places like Bullet’s, a cramped neighborhood sports bar serving the remaining black community in the Gentilly neighborhood near the fairgrounds. During the first week after Katrina hit, the Bullet family kept the bar open, cooking food from a freezer with a grill and giving it away to survivors while sheltering elderly neighbors in an upstairs apartment. On the night Jazz Fest ended, the bar was thick with emotion and memories as the mostly middle-aged black residents packed inside for a homecoming and celebratory jam session featuring some returning musicians now living on the West Coast, saxmen Kirk Ford and Reggie Houston, joined by Irma Thomas’s lead trumpet player. This was the real New Orleans, the jazz soaring and blending for the mostly hometown crowd, and after one particularly hot solo, Ford leaned forward, resplendent in a white suit and fedora, and crowed into the microphone, “New Orleans, we’re back!”

By the time the tall, bald-headed showman Houston led the band marching down the aisle with his soprano sax to the boisterous melody of “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” the club, now rocking with something beyond happiness, had been transformed into a magical haven where, for now, no storm could touch them.

Ever since Katrina, this bar had become, more than ever, their new home, and the cornerstone of the community they hoped to rebuild, especially if the rest of the country does its part to help. As the bar’s owner, Rollin “Little Bullet” Garcia Jr., a short, self-effacing man, once told a local reporter, “Everybody is a shoulder to lean on, and once we get enough shoulders together, we form a wall. And no floodwater can breach that wall.” Let’s hope that he’s right, and, despite the long odds, that the spirit found that night in Bullet’s can somehow be used to help fuel New Orleans return to greatness.

UPDATE: My friend, author and filmmaker Tom D'Antoni, was my guide to the clubs and hidden treasures of New Orleans, and he has his own powerful essay at Huffington Post on what he saw and felt during our trip to New Orleans, accompanied by me, his wife Karen and his close friend, sculptor Michael Leckie. It's a must-read.

Sex, Swedish-Style

The Washington Post has a good article about how European countries with healthy attitudes towards sex—or, let's say, the sorts of attitudes that least resemble Focus on the Family's—have fewer problems with STDs and unwanted pregnancy than, say, we do here in the United States:

A 2001 Guttmacher Institute report, drawing on data from 30 countries in Western and Eastern Europe, concluded: "Societal acceptance of sexual activity among young people, combined with comprehensive and balanced information about sexuality and clear expectations about commitment and prevention childbearing and STDs [sexually transmitted diseases] within teenage relationships, are hallmarks of countries with low levels of adolescent pregnancy, childbearing and STDs." The study cited Sweden as the "clearest of the case-study countries in viewing sexuality among young people as natural and good." …

In Sweden, compulsory sex education starts when children are 10 to 12. Without parental consent, teens can get free medical care, free condoms, prescriptions for inexpensive oral contraceptives and general advice at youth clinics. Emergency contraceptives (the so-called morning-after pill) are available without a prescription.

Shocking! Think of the children! But then again, lower rates of pregnancy and STDs… Hm, tough trade-off. Of course, this sort of thing would never fly in the United States, where 35 percent of schools teach abstinence-only and don't so much as discuss contraception. Here's why:

Religion tends to insert itself less in government policy on sex education, contraception and abortion in Western Europe than in the United States, says Michaud. The Catholic Church exerted minimal influence in Switzerland's AIDS prevention campaign, he said. "All in all, the church has been very tolerant and does not really get involved in sexual matters," Michaud wrote in an e-mail.

The article also notes, interestingly enough, that European parents don't really have to worry quite as much about their children seeing sex and nudity on TV, partly because "[s]traightforward messages on how to prevent STDs and teen pregnancy help offset the impact on teens of sexually explicit ads, movies and other mass media." Wow, just think, with better education we could halt the country's long march towards total moronification. Wouldn't that be nice.

Do Immigrants Assimilate? Yes.

Tyler Cowen links to a useful study looking at how well Latino immigrants are assimilating. Pretty well, it turns out. Economists tend to agree: First-generation Latino immigrants are poorer than their native counterparts (no kidding: they've just arrived, they speak little English, and they tend to work for the most exploitative companies this country has to offer), but their kids and grandkids do much better:

In a 2003 study by the RAND Corporation, economist James P. Smith finds that successive generations of Latino men have experienced significant improvements in wages and education relative to native Anglos. According to Smith, "the reason is simple: each successive generation has been able to close the schooling gap with native whites which then has been translated into generational progress in incomes. Each new Latino generation not only has had higher incomes than their forefathers, but their economic status converged toward the white men with whom they competed."

Granted, at least in the passage above, Smith is looking at a particular time period (immigrants arriving between 1895-99, along with their kids and grandkids) that's different from the present day in several respects. Notably, there was a decent supply of stable and good-paying manufacturing jobs back then—three-fourths of Ford workers in the 1910s, for instance, were immigrants (mostly Eastern European, granted, but I assume Latinos could find similar sorts of jobs)—which can explain why the immigrant families of old could do so well so quickly.

By contrast, economic mobility today is awful, those sorts of manufacturing jobs are hard to come by, and it's reasonable to think that the current generation of Latino immigrants, most of whom arrive quite poor, will have a much harder time ensuring that their kids go to college and get well-paying jobs. But that's because it's harder for everyone on the low end of the income spectrum to do that nowadays, and it's an argument for figuring out ways to improve mobility, not an argument for restricting immigration. There's quite obviously nothing about Latinos per se that makes them "unable" to assimilate.

Now George Borjas, the favorite economist of restrictionists everywhere, has written a paper suggesting that Latinos of old faced "pressures" to assimilate that the current wave of immigrants don't. For instance, immigrants before 1965 were a more diverse lot—you had Latinos and Germans and Italians, etc.—so it was harder for immigrants to stay in their "ethnic enclaves." And there was also, in Borjas' words "an ideological climate that boosted social pressures for assimilation and acculturation" that is no longer around. Well, maybe. Nevertheless, Latino immigrants today seem to be "acculturating" just fine:

A comprehensive 2002 survey of Latinos in the United States by the Pew Hispanic Center and Kaiser Family Foundation provides additional evidence of advancement across generations, particularly in terms of English proficiency. Spanish is the primary language among 72% of first-generation Latinos, but this figure falls to 7% among second-generation Latinos and zero among Latinos who are third generation and higher.

Basically, Latino immigrants and their descendents do very well, especially once one considers that many are exploited and underpaid by their employers, and that they live in a country where economic mobility—not to mention public education—is nothing to brag about. It's also true that if the United States had decided over the past fifty years to help Latin America develop, rather than, you know, fuelling wars, installing various dictatorships, and conducting neoliberal "experiments" on countries like Mexico, then the Latino immigrants who came here would presumably be healthier, wealthier, and better educated and would have "assimilated" more easily. Fun to imagine.

May 16, 2006

Barefoot and "pre-pregnant"

The Washington Post reports (somewhat belatedly) that the CDC is asking all to women treat themselves as “pre-pregnant," regardless of whether they're currently trying to conceive.

Among other things, this means all women between first menstrual period and menopause should take folic acid supplements, refrain from smoking, maintain a healthy weight and keep chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes under control.

Set aside, for a moment, the incredibly offensive implication that all women are nothing more than incubators who should remain healthy not because it’s good for them, but because it makes for healthier babies. And note that even though the report’s first recommendation is that “each woman, man and couple should be encouraged to have a reproductive life plan,” it never calls on the government to encourage contraceptive use. Which is, uh, pretty important for family planning.

Funding for Title X family-planning clinics, which serve more than 5 million women, hasn't kept pace with inflation. And a growing uninsured population means the demand for Title X services is likely to increase. It's not surprising that unplanned pregnancies are on the rise among low-income women. The report’s authors do acknowledge that many women lack access to adequate reproductive health care, but they tell women to “manage risk factors" rather than admonish government officials who have cut funding for these programs.

Just a guess, but maybe we’d have healthier newborns if the government spent more time reducing unplanned pregnancies and less time telling women to stay away from lead paint and cat feces.

Chinese Journalist Gets 12 Years in Jail

On the 40th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, censorship of the media in China continues. Today, Yang Tianshui was sentenced to 12 years in prison for speaking out against the government—or, in official terms, the "subversion of state power." This is familiar territory for Yang, who has already served ten years in prison for the supposed crime of "counter-revolution," resulting from his public condemnation of the military’s assault on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.

The latest charges, which Yang did not appeal, stemmed from several essays that he posted on the internet in support for the "Velvet Action of China," named after the Velvet revolution that successfully defeated communism in Czechoslovakia. According to Reporters without Borders, "the arrest and trial of the cyberdissident did not respect Chinese law. Yang was picked up without an arrest warrant by Security Bureau agents in plainclothes and his trial was rushed through in three hours." Not a surprise, considering China jailed the more journalists in 2005 than any other country—the seventh consecutive year they've been on top.

Carol Fisher case suggests pattern of law enforcement/judicial irregularities

Here is some additional information on the Carol Fisher case, supplied by the Cleveland Indy Media Center. Apparently, the usual time between arrest and indictment in Fisher's county is two months, but the time for her was eight days. Also, Ohio law requires that service of an indictment must be made at least 24 hours prior to arraignment; Fisher's notice was served to her attorney the morning of her arraignment (the attorney decided to waive right to protest). Though these facts in themselves are not particularly newsworthy, the existence of such irregularities--one of them illegal--only serve to strengthen the argument that Fisher was treated unfairly because of her political beliefs and her unwillingness to be quiet about them.

Fisher was accused of attacking police officers. She agrees that she was in a physical struggle with them, and she says it is because they were hurting her with the cuffs. This type of incident happens rather frequently; the person in question is then charged with either resisting arrest or assault on a police officer--or both.

At this point, there is still no reason to question the veracity of Fisher, especially since Cleveland Heights is a known hotbed of "liberal trouble-making" in the city. A group of Cleveland Heights citizens went to the Cleveland Heights City Council to protest what happened to Fisher, to vouch for her character, and to testify that they saw her brutalized by the police.

These witnesses, referred to earlier by this blogger, were not identified because I could not find their names and their individual statements, only a general statement in the Cleveland press that there were witnesses. I have now found them, and their statements can be read here.

Bush's Immigration Speech

I didn't bother listening to Bush's speech on immigration last night, but Kevin Drum's got a handy summary:

Beef up the borders with troops and high tech wizardry but insist that it's not "militarization"; start up a guest worker program that's not called a guest worker program; introduce an amnesty program but insist that it's not an amnesty program (it's not, it's not, it's not!); and crack down on employers who employ illegal immigrants while pretending that they're actually victims of highly sophisticated fraud rather than willing coconspirators aided and abetted by the business wing of the Republican Party.

Well, let's see. He wants to deploy 6,000 National Guardsmen to the border. Let's do some counting. The United States has approximately 7,500 miles of remote and often rugged land border, plus miles of coastal and Caribbean border to patrol. The agents have to work in shifts. So… um… well, the TRAC project estimates that even 11,000 patrollers would come to one agent every four miles. This could be the most futile game of Red Rover ever devised. Maybe the guards can use those handy "motion sensors" to help out. We'll just hope they don't get tripped by wandering deer.

Bush is also expanding detention facilities for immigrants. If you want to see inhumane, check out this old interview I did with Mark Dow about immigrant detention facilities. "[E]xtreme forms of physical abuse are common." Seems like something the president could really get behind. And then there's this "guest worker program" business. Conservatives hate it, because the last time it was enacted, back in 1986, lots of illegal immigration ensued. Liberals should hate it because it’s a way for businesses to import a captive labor force, one that won't complain about low pay or poor labor standards for fear of deportation.

So those proposals are all ludicrous. Now if either the president or Congress really wanted to crack down on illegal immigration, they'd institute a national identity card and levy steep fines on employers that hired illegally. If the supply of jobs dries up, presumably fewer immigrants will come here. So that, plus a path to citizenship for current immigrants and realistic (i.e., larger) quotas for legal immigrants would help "control" the flow of people coming in. And to his partial credit, Bush did also propose something along those lines. It's not nearly as liberal as I would have liked (Bush's is a business-friendly approach rather than a liberal approach, hence the guest-worker programs), but I guess it's a start. But seeing as how conservatives are now on suicide watch over Bush's speech, it seems quite unlikely that any sort of immigration reform will pass this year.

UPDATE: The Christian Science Monitor has a good critical take on border enforcement here. I'd also note that border enforcement is often better at deterring immigrants from returning home rather than preventing them from coming in the first place. Keeping people in rather than out. So it can actually lead to a greater immigrant population than would otherwise be the case.

May 15, 2006

Can Economic Populism -- or "Authenticity" -- Save the Democrats?

Last week, some of the Democrats' most engaged proponents of pushing the Democrats leftwards -- including Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana and author Thomas Franks -- gathered to promote economic populism at a panel discussion (scroll down to see video excerpts) about David Sirota's new book, Hostile Takeover.
The book is a useful compendium of the way big-money interests have corrupted our political process, leading to the screwing of the public through such legislation as our energy policy and Medicare Part D.

But Sirota and other progressives are spending too much of their ire targeting the Democratic Leadership Council as corporate sell-outs. In fact, the DLC, even if there's a reasonable critique to be made of their free-trade policy, offers a range of sensible ideas on security, health and the economy that may have a better shot at Congressional passage and public support than some of the ideas pushed by Sirota. Remember, only two centrist Southern Democrats, such as Clinton and Carter, have been elected to the presidency since 1964. (Full disclosure: I'm a freelance policy analyst for the DLC-affiliated Progressive Policy Institute, and did a scathing critique of the Bush administration's mental health policy last year -- hardly a flack for "Republican lite" policies.)

When I asked Sirota and the other panelists about previous Democratic presidential successes and past failures of populist messages nationally, he contended, "Any candidate who makes it clear that he will stand against big-money interests will inspire people on [their] authenticity beyond economic issues." Will that be enough? Walter Mondale and George McGovern believed what they said on issues, too, and that didn't seem to inspire people to vote for them. (The American Prospect's Harold Meyerson, pointed out, rightly, that Clinton, especially, campaigned to the left of where he actually governed, thus raising his hopes that a full-fledged populist could win the presidency.)

Yet Governor Schweitzer, a straight-talking Democrat who has won in a red state, contended it was the weakness of our candidates in articulating populist messages that doomed them. "A lot of candidates do the focus groups and pick the top five issues that test well," he noted. "They have to believe the stuff. Leaders don't lead by polling you. This is why we have to have issues presented in a way that validates character -- and explain it in a way that they're sure about me as a person." In other words, authentic candidates who strongly present their case can win election support, even if people don't agree with every position they take -- as long as they trust you as a person. That's the approach Bush used in his first election campaign, no matter how much we may have disliked his phony down-home act.

Schweitzer argued, "Our candidates haven't touched our heart -- and we haven't done that since Bill Clinton. The last two candidates for president just recited the polling. Until we find a candiate who can touch hears, we'll lose elections, one after another."

But even writers for The American Prospect, which co-sponsored the discussion, have raised questions about the new quest for authenticity among progressives. Under a posting called "Authenticity is Stupdi," Sam Rosenfeld
argues, "Authenticity is a pointless thing to care about in politics. Obsessing over the personal motivations and supposed core beings of individual political actors is, in fact, close to the opposite of what politics is actually all about. Institutional arrangements and historical contingencies largely determine political (and thus policy) outcomes, and outcomes are what matter."

But it wouldn't hurt if the Democrats offered stronger, more personable and more courageous candidates. And why does it take political losses for Al Gore and John Kerry to finally find their voices? After insisting throughout his election campaign that he didn't regret his vote to give the President the authority to go to war against Iraq, he finally conceded casually last month on "Meet the Press" that it was a mistake to vote for the war. Here's the exchange:

MR. RUSSERT: Let me go back to October of 2002, when you stood up on the floor of the Senate and said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, biological, chemical, the means to deliver them perhaps to the U.S., potentially nuclear weapons, and then voted to authorize the president to go to war. Your running mate, the man you selected to be the next president of the United States, John Edwards, was on this program. He wrote an op-ed piece first in The Washington Post, and he wrote this: “I was wrong. Almost three years ago we went into Iraq to remove what we were told - and what many of us believed and argued - was a threat to America. But in fact we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when our forces invaded Iraq in 2003. The intelligence was deeply flawed and, in some cases, manipulated to fit a political agenda. It was a mistake to vote for this war in 2002. I take responsibility for that mistake.” Was it a mistake for you to vote for the war in 2002?

SEN. KERRY: Absolutely. I’ve said so many times, many times since then. [Note: except when it counted, during the Presidential primaries and national campaign, when you might have inspired the Democratic base to turn out in larger numbers for you. But I'll let that pass].

MR. RUSSERT: And you take responsibility for it?

SEN. KERRY: You better believe I take responsibility for it. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m here today, Tim. You know, last night, late at night, I went down to the Wall, the Vietnam Wall. I was amazed by the numbers of people there, 10:30, 11:00 at night, it’s incredible. You walk down that ramp, and as you go down it gets deeper and deeper, and the wall gets higher and higher, and you see these names after names after names; thousands, tens of thousands. They were added to that wall. They died after our leaders knew the policy wasn’t working. And I believe I have a moral responsibility, as we all do in America, to get this right for our soldiers.

Of all the losing candidates we've fielded -- Dukakis, Mondale, Gore, Kerry -- which one was the worst? That's not an easy call, but as comedian Lewis Black said about Kerry, in a mean-spirit, politically-incorrect comment, "What's wrong with you Democrats? Having John Kerry lose to George Bush was like having a normal person lose in the Special Olympics."

Kerry talked up populism, but not in an effective way that anybody noticed. Can we find an effective candidate out there who is a)charismatic and telegenic b)courageous and c) can effectively articulate a populist message?

I'm willing to give it a chance, even if it hasn't worked on the national level before. (Sirota has made a compelling case that it can work at the local and state level.) . But with campaign fund-raising laws rigged to favor corporate interests -- even with public financing of presidential elections -- it's going to be hard finding such a bold candidate who can summon the resources to prevail. Any suggestions?

Former weapons inspector confirms in new book that report on suspected "biolab" trailers was suppressed

A senior member of the CIA-led Iraq inspection team says that a year after the White House's "bioweapons trailers" claim was discredited, the administration continued to suppress the findings. Former U.N. arms inspector Rod Barton claims a CIA officer told him it was "politically not possible" to refute the White House claims.

Barton talks about his 2004 experiences in The Weapons Detective, which was just published by Black Ink Agenda in Australia. He is known not only for reporting that the Bush administration wove a story about weapons of mass destruction out of two ordinary trailers found in Iraq, but also for refuting Australia's claims that it had not participated in any interrogations in Iraq.

Last month, the Washington Post reported that on May 29, 2003, George W. Bush told the nation that "We have found the weapons of mass destruction." While he was justifying the war with this revelation, U.S. intelligence officials had evidence that the so-called mobile "biological laboratories" were nothing of the kind. On May 27, two days before Bush's speech, members of a secret fact-finding mission made its final report--that the trailers found in Iraq were harmless. However, this report was kept secret and put aside while Bush administration officials continued to talk about the "biolabs" for a year.

Former CIA officials deny that any information was stifled as late as 2004, before the Iraq Survey Group's final report in October.

A Post-Roe World

In the Atlantic this month, Jeffrey Rosen tries to imagine what would happen if the court overturned Roe v. Wade. Pandemonium, he says. Political upheaval. Democrats would probably capture Congress and the presidency. And so on. In other words, there's a lot in the piece about the politics of a post-Roe world, but less time spent on how overturning Roe would actually affect women. The brief argument in this passage seems quite wrong:

It’s conceivable that a year or two after Roe, as many as a dozen red states would adopt draconian restrictions on abortions throughout pregnancy, while a larger group of more populous blue states would offer the same access to abortion as they do now. What effect would this have on the national abortion rate? … "[I]n terms of national numbers, the effect would be small," [says Gerald Rosenberg of the University of Chicago].

For example, if the South Dakota ban survived the overturning of Roe, the national impact would be negligible. In 2000, fewer than 1,000 women obtained abortions in South Dakota, representing one-tenth of 1 percent of all the abortions performed in the United States. That year, there were only two abortion providers in the state, and about 30 percent of South Dakota residents who sought abortions traveled to other states, such as Colorado and Nebraska. If the South Dakota abortion ban took effect, that percentage would certainly rise.

So the idea is that South Dakota would ban abortion, but nearly everyone in the state who needed or wanted an abortion could just travel to Colorado, which is likely to protect abortion post-Roe (except, of course, for "poorer women" who can't afford it; tough luck for them), so it wouldn't matter. Maybe so. But what about a state like, say, Mississippi—which, as Rosen reports, is also likely to criminalize abortion if Roe falls?

Looking at USA Today's map here, none of Mississippi's neighbors are "likely" to protect abortion rights post-Roe. If a woman in Mississippi wanted to travel to get an abortion she'd probably have to go all the way to New Mexico or Illinois. How many women will be able to afford that trip? How many women can take that much time off? And in Mississippi, there are currently 165 abortions per 1,000 live births. That's lower than the national average, but it's still a lot of women who now have access—however restricted—to a safe and legal abortion provider. Overturning Roe would have a very large impact here, especially on poorer women (and probably on a large number middle-income women as well).

And, of course, it's entirely possible—likely, even—that if Roe fell, states such as South Dakota or Mississippi would pass laws making it illegal for women to travel out of state to get an abortion. That would create all sorts of messy interstate conflicts; presumably the federal government would have to step in at some point; and it could conceivably decide in favor of pro-life states. And suddenly state bans would have an even greater impact.

In that vein, Rosen notes that pro-lifers would probably try to pass federal legislation to restrict abortion nationwide if Roe were to fall (in other words, it's silly to think that the issue would simply be "left to the states.") That's correct. But he also thinks that federal legislation would never pass because abortion rights are so popular. Well, it's debatable whether abortion rights are really that popular, but in any case, what does this have to do with anything? The United States Congress doesn't mirror popular opinion. Among other things, the Senate is counter-majoritarian by design and is overrepresented by small red states. Small pro-life states. A national abortion ban—or something along those lines—is hardly unthinkable, even if it's fairly unpopular, and it's naïve to think otherwise.

At any rate, Rosen's piece might be focusing on the wrong issue, since, as Ramesh Ponnuru is fond of pointing out, pro-lifers seem to have largely given up trying to overturn Roe. Instead, they're following a stealth strategy—chipping away at Roe bit by bit. If the Alito-Roberts Court, for instance, ever overturned the Salerno standard for facial challenges, then states could have very severe abortion restrictions on the books for years before they were ever found unconstitutional. The effect would basically be the same as overturning Roe, but it wouldn't be quite so politically volatile. That seems more likely. But overturning Roe is certainly possible and would be much more disastrous, in practice, than Rosen's piece seems to suggest.

Believing the Worst

ABC News reports that one purpose of the Bush administration's domestic spying program might well be to keep tabs on the media:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we [i.e., reporters] call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

Administration officials, of course, continue to insist that the NSA is "narrowly designed," used only to track "terrorists," rather than, say, reporters or political opponents. And "reasonable"-minded analysts and pundits continue to assure everyone that the NSA doesn't have the time or the resources to intimidate the media or engage in political warfare. But there's every reason to think the officials are lying, while the analysts and pundits are terribly naïve.

Look: The president has previously said that the NSA program was only focused on international calls—before the USA Today story broke and we learned he was lying about the program. John Negroponte previously told reporters that the NSA was "absolutely not" monitoring domestic calls—he was lying too. Dick Cheney