Enlighten Radio:Jackson Browne -- ALL Day Bootlegs

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Blog: Enlighten Radio
Post: Jackson Browne -- ALL Day Bootlegs
Link: http://www.enlightenradio.org/2018/10/jackson-browne-all-day-bootlegs.html

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What is to Be Done? Fifteen Authors in Search of a Solution. [feedly]

What is to Be Done? Fifteen Authors in Search of a Solution.
https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/26/10/2018/what-be-done-fifteen-authors-search-solution

The Great Regression Edited by Heinrich Geiselberger. Wiley. 2017. 

In a slender volume edited by Heinrich Geisenberger "The Great Regression", fifteen, among  the most important left-wing social thinkers of today, ask the  following question:  what is the future of social-democracy now when global neoliberalism is crumbling and the forces of nationalism and xenophobia are on the rise? I would not be letting you in on a big secret, nor do I think I would undermine the book's appeal, if I say that they do not have an answer; neither individually, not collectively. The reason is simple: the answer, as of now, is elusive, and it might even seem that it does not exist.

The contributors to this very good volume which, as I said, gives an excellent insight into the intellectual thinking of the left are (in alphabetic order): Arjun  Appadurai, Zygmunt Bauman, Donatella della Porta, Nancy  Fraser, Eva Illouz, Ivan Krastev, Bruno Latour, Paul Mason, Pankaj Mishra, Robert Misik, Oliver Nachtwey, César Rendueles, Wolfgang Streeck, David Van Reybrouck and Slavoj Žižek.

Not all contributions are, in  my opinion, equally interesting, I find Zygmunt Bauman's writing, as always, very convoluted and difficult to read. Ivan Krastev seems like an odd man out among this group of writers: he disagrees with Trump and Brexit but from what seem fully certifiable neoliberal positions.

It would not surprise the reader that the names that are often mentioned in the volume are Polanyi and Gramsci, with Erich Fromm with his "Escape from Freedom" coming back from a long oblivion. Be ready to see Fromm quoted more and more.

I would like to highlight three contributions that seem most interesting to me. Nancy Fraser has written an excellent and bold essay on the ideological background to Trump's victory. She sees the main competitors to be "progressive neoliberals" and "reactionary populists". Progressive neoliberals are the creation of Clinton's "New Democrats" and his innumerable triangulations that eventually brought together "progressives" who cared about identity,  gender and racial equality, and sexual rights together with the most hard-nosed Wall Street types. This was, at the origin, an unlikely coalition: LBGTQ activists together with Goldman Sachs. But it worked.  The "progressives" enjoyed their newly-found influence. They got Goldman to pay lip service to equal rights, promote a few persons of "color" to top positions, and even realize the advantage, for its bottom-line, of being more open to diverse talent.* Goldman Sachs made the money. This is what in the 1990s and early 2000s went under the slogan of "socially liberal and fiscally conservative".

Who played the serpent to  this "progressive neoliberal" paradise? Those left out of  economic success, that is, losers of globalization, and those unable or unwilling to accept the new screeds of "progressivism". The alliance of progressives and financial-sector neoliberals created, almost by definitions, its counterpart among those who were maladjusted: either economically or socially, So long as "the maladjusted" accounted for 20% or so of the electorate  and made lots of noise with little political success ("The Tea Party"), they could be ignored by the winning coalition. It is one of the ironies of life that "the maladjusted" found in Donald Trump somebody who was able to express, and use that resentment.

But, as Nancy Fraser shows, this alignment of forces totally ignored the left. The left was co-opted by the Clintonite and Obama's grand coalition of sexual liberators and money bagmen, and whenever it threatened to get out of that coalition it was faced with the specter of terrible things to come. It became a hostage of progressive neoliberals. This completely neutered the left. It could not get out of Clintonite coalition without bringing racists and xenophobes to power, and it could not nudge the Clinton-Obama coalition left.

In this excellent analysis Fraser openly puts the responsibility for Trump's rise on the "unholy alliance of 'emancipation' with 'financialization'". What to do next?: "To reach out to the mass of Trump voters who are neither racists nor committed 'right-wingers' but the casualties of a 'rigged system'" (p.48).

Wolfgang Streeck analysis for Europe is very similar to Fraser's for the United States. The costs of "la pensée unique" adopted by social-democrats  across the continent are being paid now through the absence of a credible social-democratic alternative that could attract the votes of "malcontents" and consequently check the  rise of the right. In the opinion of "the progressive neoliberal" alliance, Streeck writes, "the fact that the Great Unwashed, who for so long had helped promote the progress of capitalism passing their time with the Facebook pages of Kim Kardashian…had now returned to the voting booth, appears to be a sign of an ominous regression" (p. 161).

Streeck is very critical of the use of the term of "populist".  He sees it, rightly in my opinion, as a useful shorthand to reject "en bloc" everybody who is against TINA ("There Is No Alternative").  The term of "populist" is useful to the "progressive-neoliberal alliance" because it makes no distinction between the left and the right, and because  both Trump and Sanders can be dismissed as populists who are providing "simple answers to a complex reality".  Everything but TINA is simple and wrong because that immeasurably complex reality is understood only by neoliberals.  "'Populism' is diagnosed in normal internationalist usage as a cognitive problem" (p. 163). In other words, questioning TINA is seen by the elites as a symptom of some deep cognitive issue. Not surprisingly , there are calls to ditch the universal franchise and replace it by "gnosocracy": vote given only to those who can show to be sufficiently smart. (Streeck quotes such instances).

Solution: None at the moment. We are in the Gramscian interregnum  when "familiar chains of cause and effect are no longer in force and unexpected, dangerous and grotesquely abnormal events may occur at any moment" (p. 166).

Paul Mason (whose excellent "Postcapitalism" I have reviewed here) has  penned a beautiful  essay that draws on his, and his father's, personal experiences. It is a story of the English working class, bound together in its contempt for the rich, swindlers and government, open to foreigners like themselves, and with strong social ties. All of that was, according to Mason, destroyed by Thatcherism. Companies went bust, coal mines were closed, work for which these people were prepared became hard to find, jobs got off-shored, social solidarity frayed, and atomization set in. Some left these now desolate places looking for better alternatives in the cities, others espoused the new dogma of financialization and easy money. Local rugby clubs folded. Instead of a rich social fabric, there was now a desert.

The description is strong and poignant. Mason wants things to go back to the way they were in the 1960s and 1970s. He is frank in stating that the left must undo globalization, bring back the jobs, forget about developing countries, and get rid of  East European immigrants. The latter come for a special critique, unlike the earlier African and Sub-Continental  immigrants because, through no fault of theirs, they came to the UK when the country was transiting from manufacturing to service economy: they thus could not be included into an essentially working-class ethos described by Mason because that world had by then ceased to exist. But Mason does not like them because he sees them also as being  too pliant to the demands of globalized capitalism and too acceptant of neoliberal dogmas. Forget about the blond Polish baristas, give us back a strong, beer-swelling Kenyan worker!

But what kind of leftism, one could ask, is that, so indistinguishable from Marine Le Pen's Front National?

The question left to the reader at the end of the book is, should the social-democratic left maintain its internationalism, in which case it would have to go back to Wall Street elites and ditch national policies of redistribution, or should it focus on domestic malcontents in which case it would move towards policies of national socialism? Or will be able to find a narrow path, between the two, that would combine internationalism with domestic redistribution?

 

* Fraser (p. 41) speak contemptuously of "corporate feminism focused on 'leaning in' and 'cracking the glass ceiling'".

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Is Trump leading the country toward fascism? [feedly]

I agree with Joe Sims on this. However I wonder about its implications for politics, and for many  formerly non-political dimensions of life: faith, family, friendship, culture, values, etc, as well.  How does it impact elections? Political allies and friends? Legal vs 'maybe illegal or semi-legal associations (with immigrant communities, and workforces, for example, etc)?

How will  this analysis affect relations with neighboring  nations, if they were in agreement with it?

Is Trump leading the country toward fascism?
http://www.peoplesworld.org/article/is-trump-leading-the-country-toward-fascism/

I've never been comfortable with the description of the Trump administration as "authoritarian." Why? One reason is that the concept, taken by itself, is classless. In today's world, governments as varied in outlook, social system and democratic practice as capitalist Turkey and socialist China are routinely called authoritarian.

In the not-too-distant, past Baby Doc's dictatorship in Haiti was authoritarian as was Mobutu's reign of terror in the Congo. But were they the same as the regimes of, Salazar in Portugal, or that of Pinochet in Chile?

Not really. One major difference is that the dictatorships in Europe and Latin America were fueled by racism, anti-Semitism and last, but not least, anti-communism. They also represented the capture of the state by specific sections of the ruling class.

Each of these elements is extremely important, but all three are given little attention in even the best analyses of the Trump administration. Marxists have always pointed to the emergence of fascism as a particular feature of capitalism's rule. They have drawn attention to the role of the banks in particular. Can we do less today?

The classic definition of fascism was offered by Georgi Dimitrov at the 7th World Congress of the Comintern in 1935: "Fascism is the open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary sections of finance capital," he said.

Here, Dimitrov was speaking of fascism full-blown, a situation not now present in the U.S., as many correctly point out. Some raise the point to dismiss the applicability of Dimitrov's analysis to our current circumstances. But it's the processes in motion that are important here. Imagine how Dimitrov would have responded if someone had said three years earlier, in 1932, that Hitler wasn't a fascist or that fascism wasn't a threat.

Both Trump's campaign and administration have direct ties to reactionary sections of finance capital.

Both Trump's campaign and his administration have direct ties to reactionary sections of finance capital, as witnessed by the support of the New York hedge fund Mercer family and Trump's appointment of their agent, Steve Bannon, first as his campaign CEO and later as his strategist-in-chief. Bannon, of course, remains a sort of prime minister of the so-called "alt-right" (read neo fascist) Breitbart news crowd.

Then there's the feature of white supremacy (or white nationalism, as it's commonly called these days). Even conservative Joe Scarborough admits that ruling class racism is a central organizing principle of the Trump administration.

Anti-socialism and anti-communism remain foundations of domestic and international policy.: Witness the recent red-baiting by Trump of even the Democratic Party – let's not forget that he was a protege of Roy Cohn. And then there's the recent news about attempts to intervene militarily in Venezuela.

Yale professor of philosophy Jason Stanley's recent book, How Fascism Works, points to some of its basic distinguishing features: the conjuring of a mythic past ("Make America Great Again"); sowing racial and national division; and an attack on the truth, in other words, the Big Lie. A deadly trifecta.

Stanley correctly points to the danger of normalizing these features, in other words, of folks getting used to it. A New York Times reviewer of his book writes, "By calling Trump a 'fascist' … Stanley is trying to spark public alarm. He doesn't want Americans to respond to Trump's racist, authoritarian offensives by moving their moral goal posts. The greater danger, he suggests, isn't hyperbole, it's normalization."

By using the "F" word, instead of "authoritarian", to describe Trump, the Yale professor is sounding the alarm. Luckily, others are striking that bell as well. Adele M. Stan, writing in the American Prospect an article entitled "Trump and the Rise of 21st Century Fascism" importantly points to some of the financial interests involved:

"With Rupert Murdoch's media empire (which owns Fox News) and the Koch brothers' donor network of private capitalists bought into the Trumpian project, you have another element of fascism: the promise of protection for capitalist elites, which in this administration is displayed in the massive deregulation project the White House has undertaken."

This is key, even with the Koch brothers most recent dissatisfaction with Trump.

If it walks like a dog and barks like a dog, it's a dog.

Thus, some things haven't changed, e.g., the location of emerging fascism's base among banking capital and sections of the lower middle class. Studies – both just after the election and more recently – have given lie to the notion of Trump's support being based mainly among economically distressed white workers.

As Anita Waters recently pointed out, authoritarianism is not a working-class characteristic. It is, however, a feature of class rule. Fascism, on the other hand, is clearly class rule, a horse of another color.

In the U.S., fascism is not fully formed, but it is present in the corporate boardrooms, in the mass rallies, in the online forums of Breitbart and Fox News, and in government. In New York, it was located in the Proud Boys beating of protestors on the upper East Side. The Proud Boys, by the way, were celebrating the anniversary of the murder of a Japanese socialist leader.

As the old saying goes, "If it walks like a dog and barks like a dog, it's a dog." And this dog's got teeth.

Some, looking to Germany as a universal model of fascism's rise to power, argue that in the U.S. there's no direct threat to capitalist rule. However, they seem to have forgotten that when Mussolini marched on Rome, capitalism was not under siege notwithstanding the Turin factory occupations. Rather, Italian fascism's rise was more of a preventative measure.

However, historically, there are no universal models of fascism, fit for every situation. Rather, there are trends, tendencies, patterns. What all have in common is capitalist crisis and attempts by ruling elements to manage it, some by "fair" means, others foul. In the U.S., one would do better by looking for this foulness in Birmingham in the '30s, instead of in Berlin.

Authoritarianism is a symptom. The disease is fascism, infecting a terminally ill patient: late-state monopoly capitalism and rule by the most reactionary elements of the .1 percent. Finance capital – that's what we're fighting.

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Enlighten Radio:Jazz All Day Til the SECOND "NO NAME YET" Dinner Out show

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Post: Jazz All Day Til the SECOND "NO NAME YET" Dinner Out show
Link: http://www.enlightenradio.org/2018/10/jazz-all-day-til-second-no-name-yet.html

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The Economic Consequences of Mr. Trump [feedly]

...a worthwhile discussion of economic variables in play

The Economic Consequences of Mr. Trump
https://www.project-syndicate.org/videos/the-economic-consequences-of-mr-trump

With unemployment at a 50-year low, wages starting to pick up, and the stock market booming, the US economy has defied expectations since the 2016 election. Nobel laureates Angus Deaton and Edmund Phelps, along with Barry Eichengreen, Rana Foroohar, and Glenn Hubbard, ask why, and whether what looks like a robust recovery is masking another crisis in the making.

** This film was created in collaboration with the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University during the Center's 16th annual conference. **

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Don’t Fall for the GOP’s Cheap Tricks on Preexisting Health Conditions [feedly]

Don't Fall for the GOP's Cheap Tricks on Preexisting Health Conditions
http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/don-t-fall-for-the-gop-s-cheap-tricks-on-preexisting-health-conditions

Don't Fall for the GOP's Cheap Tricks on Preexisting Health Conditions

1 Comment

Dean Baker
Truthout, October 22, 2018

See article on original site

The Republicans, who are famous for telling us that tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves, are tossing us another one from their cheap trick bag this election season. They tell us that they want to guarantee that people with preexisting conditions can get health care.

This is exactly the opposite of the policies they are pursuing. The Republicans are doing everything they can to make it so that people with serious health problems pay more for their health insurance.

The basic point is very simple. There is an enormous skewing of health care costs based on people's health. Most of us are lucky enough to be in reasonably good health most of our lives. That means we can generally count on facing low health costs in any given year.

Insurers love healthy people for the simple reason that they don't cost them any money. A person in generally good health is essentially just sending the insurer a check every month for nothing.

On the other hand, they really hate the people who have health problems like heart conditions, epilepsy, cancer, etc. These people cost them lots of money.

This is the reason that before the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), insurers often either refused to insure people with serious health conditions or they charged them premiums based on their expected costs. This could mean premiums of tens of thousands of dollars a year, which are unaffordable to all but the rich.

The ACA was designed to make it so that insurance would be affordable for people with health problems. This required two parts. The first was to prevent insurers from discriminating based on people's health. They were required to charge the same rate, regardless of health, for people of the same age.

The other part of the story was requiring that everyone be in the same insurance pool. Including people with health issues in the pool raises the cost, which means that many healthy people will opt not to get insurance given the choice.

The ACA did not give people this choice. It required that healthy people buy insurance. Including healthy people in the pool is the only way to keep insurance affordable for people with health problems.

The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are working as hard as they can to make it possible for healthy people to get out of insurance pools. This is exactly the reason that they have promoted "short-term" insurance plans that do not meet the general requirements for the ACA.

These short-term insurance plans, which the Trump administration proposes to allow people to renew for up to three years, are not governed by the same rules that apply to the insurance plans in the exchanges created by the ACA. They do not have to cover a wide variety of conditions. They are designed to be unattractive to people who have serious health issues.

In other words, the whole point of the short-term insurance plans is to allow relatively healthy people to get out of the insurance pools that include people with serious health issues. This means that the standard insurance pools that are required to accept people with health issues will have a much less healthy mix of people.

And, then the cost of insurance will have to rise to cover the cost of serving a less healthy population. This means that people with serious health conditions will again find insurance unaffordable, just as was the case before the passage of the ACA.

None of this is an accident; it is by design. The Republicans are trying to make insurance unaffordable for people with preexisting conditions, just as surely as Tom Brady is trying to get touchdowns and Max Scherzer is trying to get strikeouts. This is exactly the point of their policy of giving healthy people the option to get cheaper insurance.

So, when Republicans say they want to protect people with preexisting conditions in this election, they are lying. This is a classic fox guarding the chicken coop story. The Republicans are all about making people with health problems pay more for their insurance. That is their explicit agenda, and voters need to know this.

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Sexual harassment in academic contexts [feedly]

Sexual harassment in academic contexts
http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2018/10/sexual-harassment-in-academic-contexts.html

Sexual harassment of women in academic settings is regrettably common and pervasive, and its consequences are grave. At the same time, it is a remarkably difficult problem to solve. The "me-too" movement has shed welcome light on specific individual offenders and has generated more awareness of some aspects of the problem of sexual harassment and misconduct. But we have not yet come to a public awareness of the changes needed to create a genuinely inclusive and non-harassing environment for women across the spectrum of mistreatment that has been documented. The most common institutional response following an incident is to create a program of training and reporting, with a public commitment to investigating complaints and enforcing university or institutional policies rigorously and transparently. These efforts are often well intentioned, but by themselves they are insufficient. They do not address the underlying institutional and cultural features that make sexual harassment so prevalent.

The problem of sexual harassment in institutional contexts is a difficult one because it derives from multiple features of the organization. The ambient culture of the organization is often an important facilitator of harassing behavior -- often enough a patriarchal culture that is deferential to the status of higher-powered individuals at the expense of lower-powered targets. There is the fact that executive leadership in many institutions continues to be predominantly male, who bring with them a set of gendered assumptions that they often fail to recognize. The hierarchical nature of the power relations of an academic institution is conducive to mistreatment of many kinds, including sexual harassment. Bosses to administrative assistants, research directors to post-docs, thesis advisors to PhD candidates -- these unequal relations of power create a conducive environment for sexual harassment in many varieties. In each case the superior actor has enormous power and influence over the career prospects and work lives of the women over whom they exercise power. And then there are the habits of behavior that individuals bring to the workplace and the learning environment -- sometimes habits of masculine entitlement, sometimes disdainful attitudes towards female scholars or scientists, sometimes an underlying willingness to bully others that finds expression in an academic environment. (A recent issue of the Journal of Social Issues (link) devotes substantial research to the topic of toxic leadership in the tech sector and the "masculinity contest culture" that this group of researchers finds to be a root cause of the toxicity this sector displays for women professionals. Research by Jennifer Berdahl, Peter Glick, Natalya Alonso, and more than a dozen other scholars provides in-depth analysis of this common feature of work environments.)

The scope and urgency of the problem of sexual harassment in academic contexts is documented in excellent and expert detail in a recent study report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (link). This report deserves prominent discussion at every university.

The study documents the frequency of sexual harassment in academic and scientific research contexts, and the data are sobering. Here are the results of two indicative studies at Penn State University System and the University of Texas System:

The Penn State survey indicates that 43.4% of undergraduates, 58.9% of graduate students, and 72.8% of medical students have experienced gender harassment, while 5.1% of undergraduates, 6.0% of graduate students, and 5.7% of medical students report having experienced unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion. These are staggering results, both in terms of the absolute number of students who were affected and the negative effects that these  experiences had on their ability to fulfill their educational potential. The University of Texas study shows a similar pattern, but also permits us to see meaningful differences across fields of study. Engineering and medicine provide significantly more harmful environments for female students than non-STEM and science disciplines. The authors make a particularly worrisome observation about medicine in this context:

The interviews conducted by RTI International revealed that unique settings such as medical residencies were described as breeding grounds for abusive behavior by superiors. Respondents expressed that this was largely because at this stage of the medical career, expectation of this behavior was widely accepted. The expectations of abusive, grueling conditions in training settings caused several respondents to view sexual harassment as a part of the continuum of what they were expected to endure. (63-64)

The report also does an excellent job of defining the scope of sexual harassment. Media discussion of sexual harassment and misconduct focuses primarily on egregious acts of sexual coercion. However, the  authors of the NAS study note that experts currently encompass sexual coercion, unwanted sexual attention, and gender harassment under this category of harmful interpersonal behavior. The largest sub-category is gender harassment:

"a broad range of verbal and nonverbal behaviors not aimed at sexual cooperation but that convey insulting, hostile, and degrading attitudes about" members of one gender (Fitzgerald, Gelfand, and Drasgow 1995, 430). (25)

The "iceberg" diagram (p. 32) captures the range of behaviors encompassed by the concept of sexual harassment. (See Leskinen, Cortina, and Kabat 2011 for extensive discussion of the varieties of sexual harassment and the harms associated with gender harassment.)

The report emphasizes organizational features as a root cause of a harassment-friendly environment.

By far, the greatest predictors of the occurrence of sexual harassment are organizational. Individual-level factors (e.g., sexist attitudes, beliefs that rationalize or justify harassment, etc.) that might make someone decide to harass a work colleague, student, or peer are surely important. However, a person that has proclivities for sexual harassment will have those behaviors greatly inhibited when exposed to role models who behave in a professional way as compared with role models who behave in a harassing way, or when in an environment that does not support harassing behaviors and/or has strong consequences for these behaviors. Thus, this section considers some of the organizational and environmental variables that increase the risk of sexual harassment perpetration. (46)

Some of the organizational factors that they refer to include the extreme gender imbalance that exists in many professional work environments, the perceived absence of organizational sanctions for harassing behavior, work environments where sexist views and sexually harassing behavior are modeled, and power differentials (47-49). The authors make the point that gender harassment is chiefly aimed at indicating disrespect towards the target rather than sexual exploitation. This has an important implication for institutional change. An institution that creates a strong core set of values emphasizing civility and respect is less conducive to gender harassment. They summarize this analysis in the statement of findings as well:

Organizational climate is, by far, the greatest predictor of the occurrence of sexual harassment, and ameliorating it can prevent people from sexually harassing others. A person more likely to engage in harassing behaviors is significantly less likely to do so in an environment that does not support harassing behaviors and/or has strong, clear, transparent consequences for these behaviors. (50)

So what can a university or research institution do to reduce and eliminate the likelihood of sexual harassment for women within the institution? Several remedies seem fairly obvious, though difficult.

• Establish a pervasive expectation of civility and respect in the workplace and the learning environment
• Diffuse the concentrations of power that give potential harassers the opportunity to harass women within their domains
• Ensure that the institution honors its values by refusing the "star culture" common in universities that makes high-prestige university members untouchable
• Be vigilant and transparent about the processes of investigation and adjudication through which complaints are considered
• Create effective processes that ensure that complainants do not suffer retaliation
• Consider candidates' receptivity to the values of a respectful, civil, and non-harassing environment during the hiring and appointment process (including research directors, department and program chairs, and other positions of authority)
• Address the gender imbalance that may exist in leadership circles

As the authors put the point in the final chapter of the report:

Preventing and effectively addressing sexual harassment of women in colleges and universities is a significant challenge, but we are optimistic that academic institutions can meet that challenge--if they demonstrate the will to do so. This is because the research shows what will work to prevent sexual harassment and why it will work. A systemwide change to the culture and climate in our nation's colleges and universities can stop the pattern of harassing behavior from impacting the next generation of women entering science, engineering, and medicine. (169)

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