Archive for November 17, 2008

Epic Radio Fail

Seriously epic. This would be something to put in the sidebar, but you really have to hear the audio yourself. Please listen to as much – or as little – of the following audio clip as you feel necessary, and, if you want, download it yourself.  Basic overview: a very, very wealthy PUMA managed to buy up some airtime on a local Pacifica radio station in Houston, Texas. For about an hour or so, she subjected my erstwhile hometown to the regular run of PUMA insanity, from primary denialism (“Obama broke the rules by following the rules that he and Hillary agreed to!”) to spinning volunteer programs as forced labor (16:50). High point: the PUMA radio host – Jennifer – claims to have a law degree, than accuses Obama of ignoring the Constitution’s rules for the orderly management of primaries.

Dear readers – please skim the Constitution, and tell me if you ever notice anything about primaries. Anyways, have a listen.

Some highlights…

• To hear a Hillary delegate who’s well-aquainted with the primary process explain why the PUMAs are wrong, over their angry objections, skip to 29:30;
• To hear a guy call them out on Hillary breaking her own rules, skip to 17:20;
• To hear why PUMAs censor comments on their blogs (hint – because they lose, hard), skip to 37:10, and keep listening through 41:00, when it becomes clear that PUMAs were pro-Iraq War (oops!).
• To hear a caller put his finger on the pulse of PUMA, remind them that Hillary & Bill asked them to stop, and Jennifer “explain it away” by saying that they’ve “moved beyond Hillary,” turn to 42:00, and stay tuned through 45:00.

Oh, and the fallout for the host station after the PUMAs took control? Have a read yourself: per their official blog, “WTF was that?”

Turning to radio programs hosted by admitted conservatives, “The Great One” Mark Levin is having about one coronary episode per minute on his show as of Friday, and jumping pretty quickly on the opportunity to throw John McCain under the bus for supporting amnesty. The ties that bind: not so strong, actually.

Martin Gets Celebrity Help

Good news: Jim Martin is happily coasting on Obama’s coattails, and appropriating tried and true Obama campaign tactics. Perhaps more importantly – Bill Clinton will campaign for Martin. Recall, runoffs are low-turnout elections dependent on enthusiasm. If the mere mention of Obama, and strategic stumping by Clinton, are sufficient to whip Georgia Democrats into a frenzy, then the race is ours. Memo to all Obama campaign volunteers: get out the vote for Martin. Sketch in time in early December to make calls from his site.

The Myth of Top-Down Culture: Why Racism is NOT Dead

We're halfway there...

It’s been a great month to be on Facebook. To be sure, Facebook’s early membership restrictions (college students only) still shape the site’s demographics, and make it a largely left-leaning community but, in the past month, partisans of both sides have been plainly on display, both for better and for worse. Among the embittered musings of defeated conservative Facebook users, one common theme stands out: I’ve seen more than a few, otherwise intelligent individuals claim that, with Obama’s election, racism is dead (conservative websites echo the argument). And not in a theoretical sense – as in, good for us, yay America – but in the practical sense, complete with suggestions that affirmative action is now unneeded, the NAACP’s job finished, and racist jokes suddenly okay. Though eventually dismissing the idea as ridiculous, NPR has mused on the same, so it bears discussing: is racism dead?

No. Treating racism as “dead” or “over with” strikes me as not only wrong, but also as dangerous. The notion that the election of the first black president implies the defeat of racism is predicated on a belief that cultural progress is directly linear, and quantized: the idea is that, like Kuhn’s conception of scientific revolutions, culture builds to a watershed moment, after which some feat is permanently accomplished, with results imputable to every member of society. Outside of Civilization IV, that’s not how culture works.

For racism to truly be dead, either Obama’s election would have to have spontaneously changed the mind of every racist in America – “oh, guess I was wrong” – or, at least, proved that the overwhelming majority of Americans is not racist. Neither is true. Most obviously, culture rarely works in a top-down fashion and when it does, it doesn’t happen overnight. President-Elect Obama may change the minds of America’s unrepentant racists over time, but the mere fact of his election will not change the mind of anyone who voted against Obama because of his race. The evidence also suggests that not all of Obama’s supporters are “post race.” Both analyses from polling sites and dispatches from reporters indicated that while many of Obama’s supporters voted for him “regardless of” his race, some were unrepentant racists who voted for him “in spite of” his race. The latter category of individual may respect our President-Elect, but may still make unfounded assumptions about the average black man on the street.

Of course, there are also those who will simply recast their racism to appear more palatable. Unfortunately, the rumors about Barack Obama being a “secret Muslim” persist in the darker corners of the internet, and I would argue that this scurrilous “otherizing” of Obama represents the same emotion, and the same harm, as racism.

All of this is to say that we’re not out of the woods yet. There are still those who will think less of an individual because of the color of their skin. One astonishing election alone is insufficient to change that, or prove otherwise. But the critical problem with jumping to the post-race conclusion is in imagining that the problem of racism is simply that people are racist. America will be post-race only when the unfortunate real-world effects of centuries of prejudice are eradicated, and that one black man was elected to the nation’s highest office does not change the fact that, for many African-Americans nationwide, the effects of slavery and prejudice endure in the form of poverty and restricted opportunity. Racism is as much one big, society-wide problem as it is thousands of big, personal problems.

While Obama’s election brings hope, it has not, yet, brought change for those who need it most, and we can’t let one victory blind us to continuing real-world problems.

Hillary for State? Yes… But No

At the risk of riling even more PUMAs than I already have, I question the wisdom of putting Hillary Clinton in the Secretary of State’s office, as many pundits are already theorizing is likely. No doubt her experience entitles her to the office, but isn’t Senator Clinton’s expertise rather in domestic affairs, like health care? Perhaps the idea is that reviving “Hill-care” would send the wrong message… whatever it is, let’s hope that she’s being seriously considered for one of those jobs. A false-start would spin poorly.

The Hits Just Keep on Comin’: State Budgets in Crisis

Palin’s alternate reality aside, being a state governor is an amazingly thankless job. While the federal government plays fast and loose with its budget, governors must figure out how to get a quarter out of a nickel from falling tax revenues and down-to-a-trickle federal funding. Today’s New York Times has an article and interactive feature detailing the budget plights of three-quarters of states. I can’t even be snarky; the news is that depressing.

Economic Stimulus: Cues from China and India

This past weekend, leaders of the G-20 met in Washington, D.C. over quail and other luxuries to discuss the deepening global economic crisis. At the summit, Bush stood firm, asserting that free-market capitalism and the U.S. are faultless for the financial meltdown, but he also made sure China’s President Hu Jintao stayed close. (Find the Summit Statement here.)

Bush deserves credit for insisting that developing economies participate in the summit, for globalization has ensured that the current crisis’s effects are felt far beyond the confines of the G-8. Of course, it is also prudent, when cash is tight, to have a rich friend nearby, even a developing one. Enter China, flush with cash.

But China is having plenty of economic difficulties of its own. Even before September’s craziness, China’s economy was slowing dramatically, with over 60,000 companies closing in the first two quarters of 2008. In light of the financial crash consuming U.S. and E.U. economies, the Chinese government announced a $586 billion economic stimulus package to be injected into the domestic economy over the next two years. The package size amounts to about 7% of China’s GDP and includes a number of monetary-supply and infrastructure-investment interventions. Some experts are questioning how innovative the stimulus package is, claiming it contains a lot of re-branding: taking existing spending and calling it something new. Other critics point to the package’s omission of funding for social-welfare programs. China’s economy has had double-digit growth for a number of years based on enormous export power, but lasting economic strength comes from growing an equally valuable domestic market. The latest stimulus package appears not to provide for improvements to social programs to promote social mobility.

Nonetheless, few, if any, analysts are denying the potential value of large-scale intervention by China’s government to shore up the country’s economy, failure of which would dangerously worsen the global crisis.

In the meantime, industry leaders in India are lobbying for a similar, large-scale stimulus package for their country. Like China, India’s economy is very much linked to the U.S. economy, though in a somewhat different manner. While China’s link to the U.S. is largely through product exports; India’s service industries connect the country to ours. Certainly, Indian industry’s wish list contains many very business-friendly requests: lower interest rates, lower deposit requirements, obliterated constraints on foreign investment. The wish list, though, also contains proposals for massive infrastructure investment, which is projected to increase GDP by two percentage points. To put such an increase in perspective, India’s GDP growth is expected to be about 7.5% in FY 2008. It was 9% in FY 2007. A two-percentage-point increase (solely from infrastructure investment) would put India’s economic growth back on a positive trajectory.

China’s plan and India’s ideas have one very important fact in common: They are built on “thinking big.” The U.S. needs such a plan: thinking big and thinking forward. There are two months until Inauguration Day. I am confident Obama’s financial advisers and transition team have their composite nose to the grindstone. I hope the plan of action they devise reflects the lessons of history, the efforts of our economic partners, and the promise of his campaign.