Freedom Isn’t For the Little People

George Mason University’s conservative Mercatus Center has just published a report on “Freedom in the 50 states” and guess what – the liberal bastions of New York and California are running dead last for the second year in a row!  But fear not severely repressed Angelenos and New Yorkers.  The study says far more about the contemporary Right’s distorted views on freedom than it does about the range of choices available to Americans.

Freedom is for the rich…

The report’s main revelation is that conservatives equate freedom almost exclusively with “the freedom to spend money as you see fit (especially if you’re a business).”  More than two-thirds of the freedom score is based on fiscal and regulatory “freedom,” with a blunt measure of the overall state and local tax burden alone accounting for almost 30%.  Under Mercatus’ rubric, things like allowing businesses to harm consumers with reduced consequences, banning free speech on private property and not paying for health insurance that allows people to live fuller lives are freedom promoting.  Giving new mothers family leave to spend with their children, assuring workers the right to speak freely in the workplace and providing tax dollars to poor people for benefits like food stamps or childcare subsidies, these are all freedom reducing.

Freedom is for the powerful…

This gets at a larger point that comes increasingly into focus as you read through the reports details:  Conservative freedom is freedom for the wolf, not the sheep.  Freedom is the right of your boss to fire you for your political beliefs, not your right to express your political opinion at work.  Freedom is the right of rentiers to jack up your rental rates, not your right to have an affordable place to live.  Freedom is the right of a business to pay you as little as they want, not your right to a minimum wage that dramatically expands the choices of you and your family.  Primacy is given to business and the wealthy consumer, with only indirect scraps of freedom left to workers and other citizens.

Freedom is not your grandpappy’s freedom…

Items one traditionally associates with freedom – civil liberties, free speech laws, civil rights, freedom from unjust incarceration – are either completely absent or given short shrift.  Restrictions on police and judiciary power are only important as they relate to the victimless crimes of drug and alcohol use.  If you so much as think about lifting that 7-11 Twinkie though, your ass can rot in a cage for 25 to life with nary a dent in “freedom.”  Totally fine to have police fly mini-drones down your suburban street or place recording devices on all downtown light poles, but god help Lady Freedom if the local town council mandates that businesses have to marginally limit the size of their neon beer signs.  Also absent from the report’s analysis is racial/gender/sexual orientation discrimination, which dramatically impacts a person’s freedom to live where they want, have the job they desire and gain access to things like bank loans.

Freedom is not applicable in your daily life…

This seemingly glaring oversight is only possible because Mercatus’s “freedom” relates exclusively to freedom vis-à-vis business and (to a lesser extent) individual interactions with government.  There is no room in this conservative framework for freedom in spheres where most of us spend our time:  at work, in our community or interacting with large corporations.  Racial bigotry or misogyny doesn’t restrict freedom in the right-wing worldview, as long as it’s perpetuated by landowners, businesses or dominant social groups (and not the government).  Similarly, the dictatorial workplace power of business owners, who can fire employees for their party affiliation or the color of their hair, doesn’t budge the free-o-meter because freedom doesn’t extend to the work sphere.  Culturally, conservatives view San Francisco’s nose-ring wearing, tattooed green anarchists as less free than blue-haired Tennessee churchgoers because they completely ignore the role of progressive social/cultural heterogeneity in giving people the freedom to live without oppressive social norms.

… and freedom is definitely not for the masses

Overall then, the right-wing vision for freedom is a sad one.  Gone are the enlightenment emphases on freedom of speech, freedom of association and the broader right of the little man to be free from interference by large institutions.  Instead, conservative freedom is largely freedom for business owners and the rich to exercise control over their property, workers and money.  For the rest of us, Mercatus carves out a tiny free-space where we can consume unregulated corporate products, work long days for shit pay for said corporations, and smoke, drink, and gamble away the pain of losing real control over our lives.  Who’s ready to vote Libertarian!?

Shotgun Monday: Soda Banistas and Greedy Pensioners

Let the government tell you what’s best

Philosophy Professor Sarah Conly dismisses soda ban opponents in her piece “Three Cheers for the Nanny State” by accusing them of putting forward “large cups of soda as symbols of human dignity.” [Apparently she’s never tried Arizona competitor and contestant for “most depressing instance of crass social movement commercialization” Peace Iced Tea).  Ban opponents hold onto the “false” notion that we’re all “free, rational beings who are totally capable of making all the decisions we need to in order to create a good life,” not realizing that humans suffer from a raft of cognitive biases that render them incapable of doing so.  The answer is for soda-lovers to “[give] up a little liberty” for the good of the majority, recognize “that successful paternalistic laws are done on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis” which “the government has the resources to do,” and let the government “help us get where we want to go.”

So much to criticize, so little time.  First off, the ban decision was not made by a benevolent technocratic people’s champ.  It was proposed by a multi-billionaire as a way to decrease the healthcare cost of treating poor people without having to put any taxpayer (read: Bloomberg) money up.  The masses being skeptical of “we know best” proposals put forward by elites that just so happen to benefit those very same elites is a healthy thing.  Second, the question of which paternalistic laws are put forth or enacted is critical.  If we wanted to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of all potential nanny-state laws, I would guarantee things like mandatory psychiatric counseling for Wall Street bankers, emissions controls on mega-mansions and strict limits on speculative trading would top the list.  What are the chances in hell of any of those passing?  Why?  Finally, although society should encourage certain behavior and discourage other behavior, there’s many ways to do this.  Education campaigns, provision of better alternatives, the modification of prices and laws that are not 100% enforced can all do the trick.  Even though there’s a law against speeding, I have the freedom to push it to 120 (or 67 in my ‘84 Buick Regal) m.p.h. and risk the consequences.  There isn’t a limiting mechanism in my car that prevents it from going above 75 or 80 m.p.h. (unless that limiting mechanism is being a Geo Metro… boom!) and there shouldn’t be.  It’s this kind of choice, free from the meddling of manipulative political and economic elites that Americans are seeking to preserve.

Linguistic tricks to stick pensioners

The New York Times also ran a piece Sunday titled “Pension Funds Wary as Bankrupt City Goes to Trial” about the upcoming battle between pension funds and municipal bond holders over “who takes the losses” in Stockton, California’s impending Chapter 9 bankruptcy.  Wall Street bondholders and bond insurers like Franklin Advisers, Wells Fargo Bank and Assured Guaranty obviously want police officers, fire fighters and office clerks to take a hair-cut on their retirement, and the folks that represent pensioners who actually lived and worked all their lives in Stockton think the outsiders should pay more.

While the article does a decent job of explaining the fight as “workers and retirees” vs. “municipal bondholders,” (though it could easily be “rich investors”) it focuses almost exclusively on the unsustainability of pensions and uses right-wing talking points and vocabulary to describe the situation.  The authors label pensions “budget-busters,” which perfectly echoes the right-wing attack on public workers.  They also use a classic rhetorical maneuver by saying that in 2011 “Stockton paid a little more than $20 million to [its pension fund] – about double what it paid to run its public libraries.”  You might as well have said “about ten times what it paid to protect victims of domestic abuse” or “about fifteen times what it paid to provide meals to starving children.”  Needless to say the Wall Street bankers, whose obnoxious demands for recompense from career public servants kick off the debate and finish the article, are not subject to the same heart-wrenching comparisons.  This oldie vs. poor dichotomy is a favorite of the center-right technocratic set, who often pit Medicaid against discretionary spending for the poor (which could actually be a hilarious Celebrity Deathmatch ripoff with an army general and robber baron watching and cheering from just outside ringside) during budget fights.  This framing is unfortunate, but predictable, as establishment reporters are disproportionately influenced by powerful institutions.

Stop and Frisk is about Values not Numbers

A federal district court this week began hearing testimony in a class action lawsuit questioning the constitutionality of the New York Police Department’s “stop and frisk” (S&F from now on cause I’m lazy) tactic.  NYPD officers conducted 533,000 stops in 2012.  Eighty-seven percent of New Yorkers stopped were black or Latino, and eighty-nine percent of those stopped were innocent of any crime.  Critics and defenders of the tactic have often faced off over its effectiveness and legality, but the real focus should be on whether stop-and-frisk violates the fundamental values of freedom and equality.

The framing of the stop and frisk debate assumes that effectiveness equals legitimacy

The New York Times provides a great example of how framing of the S&F discussion actually masks the fundamental issues involved.  The Times recruited six experts in July 2012 to answer the question “Does Stop and Frisk Reduce Crime.”  Implicit in this question is the assumption that the right or wrongness of S&F depends on how useful it is at stopping crime, not whether, regardless of impact, it has a place in a free and equal society.  Supporters argue that it has dramatically reduced crime, while opponents disagree and offer better ways to fight crime.  However, as soon as people accept this framing, the question of whether S&F is legitimate if it proves to be effective has already been answered in the affirmative.

America’s about being free, not risk-free

Policies like this, which rely on distorted utilitarian calculations about harm reduction to trample all over fundamental freedoms, have no place in America.  I’m sure if we locked everyone in a 6×6 dog cage (or fluid-filled Matrix dreampod), and played 2 ½ Men re-runs all day long, crime would be drastically reduced.  But that’s not the fucking goal of the American experiment.  Even if the state employed Orwellian monitoring systems or Minority Report-esque crime prediction models that allowed citizens to walk about “freely” unless they decided to commit a crime, this would STILL be completely unacceptable.  Freedom’s important because its freedom, not because of some marginal benefit/marginal cost calculus.  Forcing people to spread eagle in front of their parent’s house while they humiliatingly have their pockets checked for the 2% chance they might have a weapon is fucking anti-freedom and un-American.

Stop and frisk violates equal treatment before the law

The other major (and oft-cited) problem with S&F is that it’s racist as shit.  These aren’t upper Westside society ladies getting patted down for pills; these are black and brown kids being systematically stopped and harassed by the police.  The question of whether more crime is committed by/against black and Latino youth is totally irrelevant.  By the time you’ve started debating whether the percentage of X-type people stopped is higher or lower than the percentage of crimes committed by X-type people, you’ve already conceded that utilitarian notions of safety trump equal rights.  In America, everyone is equal before the law.  Everyone should be treated as an individual, and no one should be immediately judged, intimidated and manhandled by a heavily armed group of badge-wearing street enforcers, based solely on their race.

We’re becoming a society that tosses aside freedom and equality to obsess over utilitarian measures of security

America, especially in the post-9/11 era, has been sliding steadily away from a focus on freedom and equality towards a coldly-calculating techno-rationalism myopically focused on absolute safety (typically for the powerful or the majority).  This can be seen in the opinions of people like jury foreman Joseph Cote, who argued during an Islamic radicals’ trial in 2006 that “it was ‘absolutely’ better to run the risk of convicting an innocent man than to let a guilty one go.”  It can be seen in the plurality of public support for domestic drone surveillance, which sacrifices freedom for all-seeing security.  And it can be seen in the dramatic jump in “preventative” stops by the NYPD in the years after 9/11.  We must completely reject this thinking and the false utilitarian calculus that underlies it, or America will risk overturning decades of progress on freedom and equality.

Public Opinion, Power and Ideology in Pushing the Iraq War

George W. Bush launched his attack on Iraq ten years ago Tuesday.  Since then, there has been an endless stream of commentary and critique surrounding the loss of American life, hundreds of billions in wasted tax dollars, failure of the U.S. to achieve some of its geopolitical goals, and occasionally even a discussion of the more than 100,000 dead Iraqi men, women and children.  I’d like to reflect for a second on what the war says about public rationality, the relationship between power and credibility, and the ability of powerful ideologies to obfuscate a straight-forward understanding of institutional incentives.

Americans supported the war because they were relentlessly lied to

Public opinion favored the war because American people were duped into our attack on Iraq.  Despite extensive documentation of the parade of lies trotted out by the Bush Administration and servilely repeated and amplified by major media institutions, pessimists continue to argue that the American public is bloodthirsty by nature.  If the president, vice president, secretaries of everything, senior members of both political parties, leading think-tank bullshiterati, national newspaper editorial boards, cable news programs and almost every other elite all say that Iraq is a WMD-wielding threat with ties to the guys who just blew up 3,000 Americans a year earlier, how can you possibly expect the American public to see through it or be properly informed?  Is Chad Whitesworth supposed to just stroll down to his Topeka-area Revolutionary Books and grab a copy of Chomsky’s (who he’s never even heard of) latest anti-imperialist tome?

You can see the manipulability of public opinion by considering Iran and conducting a thought experiment on Iraq.  Warmongers have been pushing lies about Iran’s nuclear program for years, but without (until?) a sustained war push by political elites and the press, the American public continues to oppose a unilateral or multilateral strike (unlike Iraq).  Presented with a slightly less skewed set of facts, Americans choose peace.  Now imagine if in 2002, President Bush said Iraq wasn’t a threat, major editorial boards called a war unnecessary and Brookings scholars said it would be a tremendous strategic blunder (all true).  Could you possibly argue that, presented with these facts, Americans would have supported an attack on Iraq?  Of course not.

Media organizations and opinion makers favored powerful interests over truth

The relationship between power and credibility has also been made starkly clear in the years after the American attack.  Simply put, the more powerful an institution or its defenders are, the more credibility they gain in popular discourse.  Neo-cons promoted American military power, the military-industrial complex and big oil interests by banging the war drum, and they lost almost zero credibility despite the fact that Iraq cost orders of magnitude more lives than 9-11 and more than a trillion dollars in wasted funds.  Bill Kristol was rewarded with a regular column in the New York Times, Ken “Threatening Storm” Pollack is still an “expert on Middle Eastern political-military affairs” at Brookings, and Richard Perle is looking even creepier at the American Enterprise Institute.  Imagine what their media reception would’ve been like if they’d advocated an $800 billion dollar airdrop of U.S. food and medical supplies into Iraq that ended up killing 100,000+ civilians and 5,000 U.S. aid workers, instead of opening up Iraqi oil fields for U.S. investment and providing a great global reminder of why you don’t fuck with the U.S. government.

Elites buy into ideological justifications over clear-headed rational analysis of institutional incentives

The run-up to our attack on Iraq also demonstrated how challenging it is for elites to apply incentive-based, marginal benefit/cost analysis to powerful institutions.  American control of oil was clearly central to the Bush Administration’s decision to overthrow the Iraqi regime (why not attack Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Congo etc…), but political and media elites attacked this idea as a lie or conspiracy theory.  A similar willful blindness prohibits frank discussion of the possibility that Wall Street firms regularly commit fraud or insider trading as a part of business (to earn above market returns), or that politicians make policy decisions based on campaign contributions or future job opportunities.  CEOs and politicians are instead taken at their word or dismissed as bad apples if any corruption is uncovered.

Using an incentive based framework, all of this unethical behavior make sense.  The world’s leading consumer of oil needs to secure future reserves, Wall Street executives gain multi-million dollar bonuses by boosting stock prices, and politicians without wealthy backers are dead in the water, facing a future in academia rather than a lucrative lobbying gig or million dollar pay day on Wall Street.

American elites helped pave the path to war by favoring ideology over incentive-based thinking, bowing to powerful interests over truth and actively participating in the manipulation of public opinion.  Anti-war advocates should endlessly point to Iraq’s boy-who-cried-wolf examples as military attention is turned to Iran.  Progressives should also refuse to engage with thinkers and policymakers who advocated for the Iraq War.  Finally, anyone who wants to challenge powerful institutions should stick to marginal benefit/marginal cost thinking and advocate for policies grounded in providing strong material and social incentives for military generals, politicians and corporate executives to act in the interests of the American people.

The Emergence of Emergency Managers

On Thursday, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder appointed Washington, D.C. bankruptcy lawyer Kevyn “I guess it’s better than Kyevn” Orr as the emergency manager of Detroit.  Under Michigan law, the governor can appoint a quasi-dictatorial local government or school district “emergency manager” who has the power to cancel contracts, sell off public property, strip elected officials of pay or their position, and violate collective bargaining agreements.  Governor Snyder cited Detroit’s large fiscal deficit and long term debt load as triggers for the move, making Detroit Michigan’s eighth governing body to be usurped by the state.

Governor Snyder Goes Corleone

The takeover builds on a ballsy political strategy taken by Snyder, whose brazen power moves make Tony Montana look like a TIAA-CREF Roth IRA salesman plotting his COLA pitch.  Swept into power by the Republican wave of 2010, Snyder and Michigan’s Republicans have managed to vastly expand the state’s emergency manager law to include union-smashing capabilities, re-pass a slightly revised version of the same law a month after voters rejected it in a statewide referendum, gerrymander the shit out of Michigan’s congressional districts to give Republicans a 9-5 House advantage in a state that Obama won by 16 points, and pass union-defunding right to work for less money legislation in the birthplace of the UAW… in two years.  That would be like Democrats winning the state house in Alabama for one random congressional cycle and promptly collectivizing all farmland, establishing a 50% quota for female representatives and planting a giant rainbow flag on top of the statehouse.

Right Wing Governors Have Their Balls and Their Word

Snyder’s gangsteritis is shared by rust-belt contemporaries Scott Walker and Mitch Daniels.  The success of these governors in typically pro-labor, populist Midwest states demonstrates that voters in this time of crisis want decisiveness and a clear narrative from politicians.  Walker didn’t fret about pushing his agenda too hard and he didn’t worry about reflecting the stated views of his constituency.  He went rich-guy HAM, gutting worker rights for public employees and sticking to his guns.  Voters facing an anxiety-producing recession rewarded this decisiveness with a nearly 10 point reelection in 2012.  The right-wing narrative ascribing the region’s economic decline to overpaid government workers, job-killing regulations/unions and corrupt local officials may not reflect reality, but it’s repeated hundreds of times a day by hundreds of Republican officials who also conveniently provide policy solutions.

Detroit’s Real Problem is Running Rich People and Industrial Decline

In order to take back power in Detroit and the greater Midwest, the Left must accurately assess the problem and provide relevant answers.  Detroit is in trouble because of a combination of white/rich flight, de-industrialization and a huge drop in the tax base.  Although Detroit city’s population has plummeted by 61% since 1950, the greater Detroit region actually added hundreds of thousands of people over the same period.  In effect, most of the region’s poor people have been penned off in the city.  At the same time, the big three automakers and other regional manufacturers began their long decline, leading to a big drop in jobs.  No rich people + no jobs = no taxes, and thus was sired Sir Kevyn Orr, Czar of Motor City.

Source: Southeast Michigan Council of Governments and Census Bureau

The Answer is Redistribution, Democracy and Industrial Growth

The answer to industrial decline and suburban population shift is a redefinition of polity boundaries, re-commitment to democracy and introduction of vigorous industrial policies.  Detroit is poor because most of the region’s poor people have been left in Detroit.  The state of Michigan and federal government should redistribute tax revenue from the burbs to the city to prevent the rich from carving local regions into an increasingly segregated system of economic bantustans.  In addition, Michigan should recommit to democracy.  Local corruption is not the main issue (It’s not like the mayor was banging his chief of staff, lying in court and running criminal enterprises out of his office or anything… oh wait) and elections are not responsible for Detroit’s problems.  Instead of the state government throwing in with the leader principle, why improve governance by putting state funds to use for civic education, voter registration, revitalization of civil society or support of watchdog media groups?  Democracy provides checks and balances, accountability and representation, and it’s rejection during a period of economic decline is extremely dangerous.  Finally, the rust-belt needs an effective national industrial policy to bounce back from the decline of manufacturing.  This entails government investment in new technologies, subsidies for cutting edge industries and massive vocational training, not tax giveaways to circling corporate vultures.

Kevyn Orr may prove Kevyn Oro or he may prove Kevyn Mierdapequena, but unless progressives galvanize behind a program of democracy and industrial expansion for the Midwest, the region is in for a lot less say at the ballot box, a lot less pay in the workplace and a continued decline into economic stagnation.

Beyond Ethnic Studies

U.S. Circuit Court Judge Wallace Tashima recently found Arizona’s ban on K-12 ethnic studies classes (read: ban on Latino studies classes) largely constitutional.  The ban purports to target courses that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, advocate ethnic solidarity instead of individualism or are designed primarily for students from a particular ethnic group.  In reality, it was largely aimed at abolishing the Mexican American Studies (MAS) program at Tucson Unified School District (surprisingly AP Latin remained unscathed).

The law was pushed by a group of borderline (if not well over the borderline) racist white officials in Arizona who, in a completely unrelated way, also happened to support Arizona’s anti-Latino SB 1070 legislation.  While this type of right-wing, race-specific ban on progressive educational programs should be fought tooth and nail, the necessity of ethnic studies programs in the first place is in some senses a sign of left-wing weakness.

Latino students in MAS performed better than their peers.  Those who went through the MAS program had better standardized test scores, graduation rates and college prospects than non-participants, standing in contrast to the Tucson school district as a whole, where Latino students lag academically.  A quick look at the college-level curricula and passionate professional teaching for MAS supports this statistical evidence of MAS’ positive impact.

However, there are additional reasons MAS and other ethnic studies programs succeed in inspiring Latino kids where regular classes fail.  A lot of it is that students perform better when they can identify with the protagonists of the history and literature they’re learning in class.  Latino kids like learning about Latino civil rights activists, women enjoy hearing about the feminist movement and young Republicans relate to anything before 1865.  For former MAS teacher Lorenzo Lopez, the MAS program was “a process of consciousness-building” where “he tried to instill in his students a sense of pride in their Latino heritage.”  This identification represents a defensive reaction to mainstream curricula which reflect America’s “powerful white man” national narrative.

The Chicano movement and ethnic nationalist groups like MEChA formed during the 1960’s in response to an even more pro-white national narrative.  They focused on creating a Latino and Mexican-American cultural heritage to empower Latinos.  Ethnic studies programs were a part of this general movement to build a Latino identity to withstand the damaging teachings of a pro-white society.  However, the persistent salience and strength of this race-based identity reflects the failure of the left since the 1960’s to construct new identities that unify people of all races in challenging economic and political power.

The goal for progressives today should not be to create more enclaves of ethnic-based progressive thought, like MAS, to protect kids from mainstream teachings that glorify the powerful.  Getting a progressive education through ethnic studies programs is better than getting a conservative education, but it’s still reactionary.  The goal should instead be to transform mainstream teaching itself so that it highlights all of the fighters and thinkers that have helped America progress from an aristocratic slave state to its present much freer incarnation.

Get Your Hands off My Slurpee Bro

The New York State Supreme Court struck down Mayor Bloomberg’s cherished large sugary beverage ban Monday, saying the NY Health Department lacked the “sweeping and unbridled authority to define, create, authorize, mandate and enforce” the ban, and calling the proposal “arbitrary and capricious” because of its many loopholes.  Fat revelers took to the streets in celebration, spraying fountains of Orange Crush and sloshing around buckets of Arizona Peach Tea.  They were right to celebrate, as Mayor Bloomberg’s ban threatened freedom, fell predictably on the poor, would’ve led to self-defeating unintended consequences and represented the wrong approach to improving health.

The soda ban epitomized American nanny state overreach in the 21^st century.  Already living in one of the most heavily regulated and rule-following countries in the world, Americans have been forced to face a slew of new impediments to their freedom in recent years.  Big cities deploy fleets of ice-hearted meter maids to rob citizens for petty infractions, keystone cops chase down grandmothers for going 67 in a 65, cigarette smokers are hunted like fleeing gazelles 30 feet from every store entrance and there are more areas you can’t walk, bike or run in America’s parks than areas you can.  Add to these formal restrictions the cultural restrictions on everything from eating butter to enjoying a grilled cheese sandwich, and it’s clear that people’s freedom to make decisions for themselves is being increasingly impinged.

However, everyone’s freedom is not being restricted equally.  The target of this ban, as with so many others, is poor people.  Who do you think enjoys ice cold 24 oz. Arizona Watermelon Drinks and one liter Mountain Dew Code Reds outside NYC’s bodegas?  The CFO of Morgan Stanley [that would be tight if he actually did]!?  Who cracks Steel Reserve Tall Cans or Mickey’s 40’s in downtown Seattle or DC?  Fucking Bill Clinton and Bill Gates?  Of course not!  Here’s an idea Mayor Bloomberg:  Instead of focusing all your energy taking away the goddamn Cherry Coke-Blue Rasberry megamix Slurpee I patiently created, why don’t you take a few minutes out of your day to go after the thousands of criminals who fraudulently robbed America blind and are currently walking Scott fucking free to their office buildings down on Wall Street!?

Percentage of neighborhood residents consuming. Source: NYC Community Health Survey 2009-2011

Besides inappropriately targeting the poor, these bans are almost always plagued by unintended consequences.  The U.S. government tries to restrict importation of clove-flavored cigarettes because they’re allegedly a teenage gateway to smoking.  What happens?  Clove manufacturers make their cigarettes even harsher, re-label them cigars (same packaging) and sell fewer per pack at a higher price.  DC bans the sale of malt liquor singles.  What happens?  Every corner store from Anacostia to Northeast now sells two packs of OE tall cans, forcing public drunks to get truly tailored instead of barely buzzed.

So what is to be done?  If bans restrict freedom, target the poor and typically fail, how can we as a society fight obesity and improve our health?  First, we should recognize that cultural changes are already occurring.  As a professor, I used to offer my college students diet Cokes at office hours and they’d look at me like I’d just tried to slang them iodized prune juice.  Second, instead of battling cheap and delicious corn syrup drinks, the government should shift subsidies away from corn to healthier fruits and vegetables [although 50 bucks says Coke would come out with Bell Pepper syrup within 6 months].  Third, local governments should promote fresh produce in poor communities, subsidize the construction of grocery stores, install water fountains and make it easier for people to make healthy choices.  Fourth, public awareness campaigns can be annoying and cheesy, but they can also work.  And finally, we need to implement a single payer or other truly universal healthcare system so that every gravy-guzzling uninsured person doesn’t turn diabetic and cost society an arm and a leg.

Demographics Aren’t Destiny

Since the 2012 election, there has been a lot of discussion of demographic shifts cementing the rising power of “liberals” and consigning conservatives to historical dustbins. The crudest (and most offensive) form of this argument assumes that Latinos in America only give a shit about their immigrant brethren, and that Democrats own the immigration issue. The more sophisticated version points to a new Democratic coalition of BEBOAC (Basically Everybody but Old Ass Crackers) voters ushering in a new multi-cultural, socially tolerant America. The problem with “demographics as destiny” exponents is that they falsely argue that demographic changes necessarily lead to policy changes, and that the new “majority coalition” signifies a major victory for the left.

American history is littered with examples of successful social movements that have no relation to changes in population. The Civil Rights movement didn’t happen because of a sudden influx of black people, Feminism didn’t rely on a jump in the female birthrate and today’s gay rights movement doesn’t rely on more gays. Movements live and die because of dedicated organizations of people successfully challenging status quo ideology and motivating large groups to support their struggle. Even the widespread working class unrest during the depression, which was fed by millions of newly poor people, was instigated by the labor unions, social democrats and communists.

Additionally, although the background of politicians certainly influences their voting, changing the face of a politician is not a way to challenge entrenched power structures. Alan Keyes, Marco Rubio, Margaret Thatcher and the history of post-colonial Africa aptly demonstrate that economic and political power can adapt to a rapid evolution in racial and gender norms/dynamics without fundamentally changing.

Multiculturalists, civil rights activists, feminists, gay rights activists and BEBOAC voters have made significant gains in the last few decades, but this leftist coalition has not succeeded at challenging entrenched financial and political elites. The traditional stream of progress has been forced to flow around these powerful interests, leading to increased economic inequality, declining worker power in the workplace, increased revolving door political corruption, greater influence of money on politics, an expansive surveillance state and a decline in economic opportunity for most Americans. A fall in the population share of white Americans will not change that.

Gini Source: Census Dept
Union Membership: BLS

Replacing white bankers with Latino bankers, or multimillionaire old whiteys with multimillionaire old black ladies won’t fundamentally change American power dynamics. The goal can’t be to just provide access to the existing system for everyone – the goal must be to change that system for everyone. What will signal a revival and potential victory for the Left is a mass movement led by popular organizations demanding freedom, opportunity and democracy for all in America’s workplaces, communities and corridors of political power.

Judges Have a Moral Responsibility to Step Down Over Excessive Mandatory Sentencing

In recent years, various parts of the judiciary, government and public have begun questioning the ethics of harsh mandatory sentencing. In 2010, President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act which reduced the crack – powder cocaine sentencing disparity and eliminated mandatory minimums for possession. Last year, California voters overwhelmingly approved an amendment to the state’s three-strikes law that would require the third offense to be violent or serious. The federal judiciary has also launched some internal reforms, with a number of federal judges beginning to refer non-violent drug offenders to drug courts. However, sentencing in many states remains incredibly harsh and the wheels of justice turn slowly. Judges forced by law to lock people in cages for years or even decades have a moral responsibility to campaign against these laws and resign rather than enforce them.

US judges sentence more citizens to prison per capita than any other nation in the world, including public execution aficionado Saudi Arabia, totalitarian China and beacon-of-freedom Belarus. Horror stories abound of people receiving 45 years for purse snatching, 70 years for stealing a tuna fish sandwich and 25 years to life for theft of a VCR. The black-robed officials who stand in judgment of their fellow man and sentence him to spend significant chunks of his life in the Thunderdome-esque nightmare of U.S. prisons are morally culpable for their actions regardless of whether they have legal discretion or not.

Judges cannot claim duty, ignorance or necessity drives these decisions. The “I was following orders” or “I was obeying the law” excuse has been thoroughly debunked by Hannah Arendt, Robert Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr. and many others. Judges are intelligent and discerning, so they should be expected to recognize the gross injustice of depriving an individual of liberty, shattering a family and disrupting a community over petty offenses. They will not face intense financial or personal hardship for doing the right thing. They’re not some impoverished Palestinian day-laborer choosing to construct the fence that will seal off his village rather than go hungry.  They’re not a front-line U.S. soldier facing court-martial for disobeying her superior’s questionable commands. The worst a judge would face is a transfer to a less prestigious courtroom or an early retirement spent sipping pink umbrella drinks in Palm Springs.

Some judges acknowledge the murky morality of enforcing mandatory sentences. Stefan R. Underhill, a federal judge in Connecticut, said recently that “when you impose a sentence that you believe is unjust, it is a very difficult thing to do. It feels wrong.” That’s because it is wrong.  Howard Broadman, a conservative ex-judge from Tulare County, California gave young father Shane Taylor a third strike 25 years-to-life sentence for possession of five grams of methamphetamine. Broadman emotionally told a New York Times reporter that Taylor’s “first two offenses were not significant, and I made a mistake, and I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” Sorry’s not going to give Shane Taylor 15 years of his life back, not going to give his daughter a father and not going to give his wife Shelly Hayes her husband. Judges like Broadman have acted in a deeply amoral way and deserve partial blame for what happens to the Shane Taylors of the world.

What is a morally righteous, powdered-up peoples’ champion to do then? First, they should either refuse to issue excessive mandatory sentences by recusing themselves from relevant cases, issue morally acceptable sentences despite the law or resign if necessary. Second, they should use their credibility as a judge to publicly advocate for sentencing reform, the repeal of blanket mandatory sentencing and retraction of three-strikes laws. Finally, they should advocate for these positions with their fellow judges and through legal/judicial organizations. There’s plenty of blame to go around concerning America’s harsh penal system, but judges who follow unjust laws are as guilty as anyone.

Three Years for $13.50

A middle-aged married couple in Portage, Indiana has been charged with felony theft after attempting to pull the old two-for-one trick at the local theater after finishing their first movie. Off-duty police caught Lendsey and Delilha Harbin waiting for “Warm Bodies” to start after leaving another theater where they had just watched “Snitch”. Despite admitting to their crime and cooperating with the police, the married couple was booked in Porter County jail and charged with a felony.

Potentially life-ruining incidences like this happen by the hundreds every day in America, and they happen overwhelmingly to poor folks and people of color. Could you imagine the police planning a sting, arresting and booking a few white teens causing mischief or a couple of cosmopolitan young professionals looking for a thrill? Fucking Lendsey just wanted to take his old lady out to a little appetizer of Dwayne Johnson-led entertainment before finishing it off with a main course of undead romancing to set the mood. Is that so bad!? Meanwhile elites committing actual crimes are treated like royalty. They can torture people, launder drug and terrorist money, and commit multi-million dollar fraud without so much as catching a musky whiff of an ‘06 Crown Vic.

If convicted, the Harbins will face a harsh litany of restrictions that will threaten their livelihood and very freedom. For a class D felony in Indiana, they could spend up to three years in prison. They also won’t be able to exercise their right to vote while incarcerated. Even worse, a felony theft conviction would all but disqualify them from any but the most menial jobs, permanently restricting their ability to earn a middle class living.

This type of state-sanctioned barbarity exacted against the poor and downtrodden is a stain on the American dream. The judicial and penal systems reserve incredibly harsh treatment for regular Americans who step even a millimeter out of line while allowing elites to get away (sometimes literally) with murder. That’s not the rule of law, that’s not justice, but it is a day in the life of modern America.