‘It is quite clear that Illinois has passed the point of no return, even if Connecticut has not. But owing to the embedded political powers, little if anything can be done to salvage a situation that is careening toward disaster. Fortunately, the damage will be confined within the borders of the state unless the United States supplies an ill-advised bailout. That’s the beauty of our federalist system.’
-A link for Michael Lewis’ article about California politics, public pensions and Schwarzenegger’s time in office.
David Harsanyi at Reason has more on the GM bailout. Non-union employees pensions got raided and taxpayers foot the bill, so that Obama and the UAW can maintain power.
I don’t believe education fits under Milton Friedman’s intellectual net, but I like seeing how he comes at the problems of scarcity of resources, students failed by the system, and entrenched educators:
Just a brief re-cap on some of ‘The People’ whom NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio’s been siding with:
First, a man changes over time, but this quote is from the NY Times:
‘Bill de Blasio, then 26, went to Nicaragua to help distribute food and medicine in the middle of a war between left and right. But he returned with something else entirely: a vision of the possibilities of an unfettered leftist government.
and:
‘His activism did not stop. In the cramped Lower Manhattan headquarters of the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York, where he volunteered, Mr. de Blasio learned to cause a stir. He and a ragtag team of peace activists, Democrats, Marxists and anarchists attempted to bring attention to a Central American cause that, after the Sandinistas lost power in a 1990 election, was fading from public view. “The Nicaraguan struggle is our struggle,” said a poster designed by the group’
As of December 8th, de Blasio’s still pushing, and here’s a gem of a quote:
‘In New York, “animal politics always trumps any other issue except racial politics,” says Mitchell Moss, urban policy professor at New York University.’
Witness the spirit of one lone Irishman willing to stand-up for the dignity of honest work, the sacred bond between man and beast, and the nameless, faceless Joes (and the Teamsters) crushed under the bootheel of Big Red Bill DeBlasio, Big Parking and Big Animal Activism.
Earth-shaking stuff (yes, there’s a little sarcasm here):
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DeBlasio’s managed to get money set aside for universal Pre-K, so he’s siding with the teacher’s unions first, over many other interests.
Walter Russell Mead had an interesting analysis a while back, on some of what’s going on in New York City, and I think the conflict between police unions and their interests on one hand, and De Blasio and his interests on the other (activist, race-based protest movements and quite far Left coalitions of ‘the People’) can help to clarify some of what’s been going on lately.
‘The good government upper middle class, the entrenched groups with a solid stake in the status quo and the marginalized working or non-working poor with no prospects for advancement apart from the patronage of the state: this is the mass base of the blue electoral coalition — and the groups in the coalition don’t seem to like each other very much.
Ties That Bind
What all three groups share is a burning desire for more: a hunger and demand for ever larger amounts of government revenue and power. Money and power for the government enable the upper middle class good government types to dream up new schemes to help us all live better lives and give government the resources for the various social, ecological and cultural transformations on the ever-expandable goo-goo to-do list that range from a global carbon tax to fair trade coffee cooperatives and the war on saturated fat. All these programs (some useful in the Via Meadia view, others much less so) require a transfer of funds and authority from society at large to well-socialized, well-credentialed and well-intentioned upper middle class types who get six figure salaries to make sure the rest of us behave in accordance with their rapidly evolving notions of correct behavior.
The Times reporters represented the goo-goos at the Bronx courthouse. Sixty years ago the reporters would have had more in common with the cops, but the professionalization of journalism has made these jobs the preserve of the college educated and the upwardly mobile in status if not so much in money.
The angry and determined unionized cops represent what used to be the heart of the blue coalition: the stable urban middle middle class. In the old days, this group included a much bigger private sector component than it does now. The disappearance of manufacturing and the decline of skilled labor in most of New York means that the middle middle class, so far as it survives, depends largely on revenue from the state. The cops, the teachers, the firefighters, the sanitation and transit workers: these are most of what remains of the backbone of what used to be the organized working class.
Police tactics have perhaps peaked as hot-button issue across the country, touching on issues of overreach and abuse of State power against individuals for many libertarians, and often abuse of power against individuals as members of minorities and victim-classes for many progressives. Regardless of the sad facts of the Eric Garner case, which has been ruled a homicide, some of the pressure is going to come against current NYPD Commisioner William Bratton’s Broken Windows policing strategy which MacDonald has already written about.
From her current piece:
‘Theanti-cop forces have shifted the focus of attention from the tactics used to subdue Garner after he resisted arrest—which is where attention should stay—to the very enforcement of misdemeanor laws themselves, such as the one against illegal cigarette sales. The New York Times’s lead editorial on Saturday, “Broken Windows, Broken Lives,” exemplifies this opportunistic turn against quality-of-life enforcement: “How terrible it would be if Eric Garner died for a theory, for the idea that aggressive police enforcement against minor offenders . . . is the way to a safer, more orderly city.”
Progressive sentiment and the need to keep the crime-rate low may pull de Blasio in competing directions, MacDonald reasons. I’m guessing that De Blasio can’t be seen as too far ahead of his activist coalitions, nor the kinds of sentiment expressed at the Times.
Some were speculating that the Big Apple is headed back to 70′s-style crime rates, fear and seediness. Myron Magnet, at the City Journal, recalls what it was like for him during those days, and hopes De Blasio stays strong on crime so that NYC can keep heading in the right direction.
‘But he was best known for his research on the behavior of police officers and lawbreakers. Probably his most influential theory holds that when the police emphasize the maintenance of order rather than the piecemeal pursuit of rapists, murderers and carjackers, concentrating on less threatening though often illegal disturbances in the fabric of urban life like street-corner drug-dealing, graffiti and subway turnstile-jumping, the rate of more serious crime goes down.’
MacDonald is still focusing on the victims of crime.
***Bonus-If you like hearing two local Daily News reporters discuss NYC politics with bemused and fairly cynical eyes, regardless of your political leanings, this one’s for you.
Full piece here (soon behind a paywall…addition: As a friends puts it: The neo-liberal eye of The Economist has passed over you, Detroit citizen, as an illuminating beam cast over the economic seas from lighthouse London upon your listing freighter of a city. Be grateful for its brief warmth and piercing wisdom. Behold and rejoice.)
‘After a judge approves a bankruptcy plan objectors have 14 days to file appeals. Yet appeals are unlikely at this stage as the tough battles with retirees and creditors have all been fought. Many are now optimistic about Detroit’s chances for recovery. “It can be done,” says Mr Spiotto. His colleague, Mr Pottow, compares the city to an alcoholic who has sobered up. The question is whether Detroit will have the strength and support to avoid past temptations of profligacy, mismanagement and corruption.’
Best wishes, Detroit, but you’ve got to clear out the rubble.
Over five years ago, when GM stock was selling at $2 a share and the debt-holders had been wiped out, this blog put up the video below. Here’s a brief 2:00 min explanation by Bill Ackman of Pershing Square on why the GM bailout was likely a bad idea.
Politicians reward their friends, and some of the same Detroit ideas we’ve taken national. Americans in general are likely not going to think well of their politics for awhile, but we could first stop the bleeding, create less incentive for those looking to oversee the spoils, laws, and regulations, and figure out how to grow the economy at a faster rate:
————
You Can Have It
My brother comes home from work and climbs the stairs to our room. I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop one by one. You can have it, he says.
The moonlight streams in the window and his unshaven face is whitened like the face of the moon. He will sleep long after noon and waken to find me gone.
Thirty years will pass before I remember that moment when suddenly I knew each man has one brother who dies when he sleeps and sleeps when he rises to face this life,
and that together they are only one man sharing a heart that always labours, hands yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?
All night at the ice plant he had fed the chute its silvery blocks, and then I stacked cases of orange soda for the children of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time
with always two more waiting. We were twenty for such a short time and always in the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.
In 1948 the city of Detroit, founded by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died, no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,
for there was no such year, and now that year has fallen off all the old newspapers, calendars, doctors’ appointments, bonds wedding certificates, drivers licenses.
The city slept. The snow turned to ice. The ice to standing pools or rivers racing in the gutters. Then the bright grass rose between the thousands of cracked squares,
and that grass died. I give you back 1948. I give you all the years from then to the coming one. Give me back the moon with its frail light falling across a face.
Give me back my young brother, hard and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse for God and burning eyes that look upon all creation and say, You can have it.
There’s definitely some Spanish influence here, by way of Antonio Machado. Perhaps there’s also some labor/alienation sentiment for the working man on the factory floor, but hey, it’s Detroit and it’s a well-crafted poem.
Just because I love to highlight the generally Left-Of-Center political philosophy over at PBS and NPR, there’s a link to this PBS piece about life on the factory floor and Levine’s poem. Here’s a Paris Review interview with Levine.
Are you looking at beautiful photos and feeling sorry for Detroit, and yourself? See Time Magazine’s photo essay by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre (less porn-like, more thoughtful).
‘If the Supreme Court had found the scheme to be constitutionally permissible, the implications would have been enormous. Doctors who accepted Medicare or Medicaid could have been forced by gubernatorial executive order or state legislation to accept a particular private organization as their lobbying agent. Moreover, doctors could have been forced to pay mandatory dues and fees to such an organization.’
Richard Epstein has a piece and podcast on the ‘Libertarian Moment.’ He’s been lately making a good case for classical liberalism/libertarianism. For my piece, if individuals, aided by technology, are increasingly disconnected from the Charles Murray-esque traditional civic and religious structures, voluntary associations and obligations of small-town American life, does it follow these individuals will embrace libertarian reasoning?
My guess is, a majority clearly doesn’t, and perhaps never will. Will the libertarian coalitions forever be tilting at windmills?
I suppose we’ll see.
Addition: Two angry emails already. I’m just trying to be realistic, here, people.
Another quote that jumps out from the below video from Reason’s Nick Gillespie interviewing Ken Burns, whose pieces often end-up on public television:
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In the video Burns discusses how he is primarily an artist, not an historian. He does, believe, however, that his work has other goals besides art. He sees himself as:
“…rooted in a humanist tradition of American History..that includes not just the old top down version, but the bottom up version that acknowledges women and labor and minorities….”
I’m guessing such a vision of the public good acts as a beacon for many at PBS, NPR, and other people interested in speaking for all of the public. Usually they end up, like all of us, presuming their ideals are universal and forming coalitions of self-interest, money, sentiment, political influence etc. Their ideals have clear limitations and consequences.
Who among us can speak for all the public, or design some rational framework upon epistemological foundations that could ever do so?
To my ears, it’s pretty clear Burns’ ideals lead him to his own top-down version of things. It would seem Big Labor, Left-liberal Woody Guthrie-like populism, coalitions of 60’s activists, feminists, environmentalists etc. tend to prosper under such a vision.
At what cost to me, to you, to those who might not share in the ideals?
‘…much of progressivism is straightforwardly organized around the idea of the state-as-liberator, and inclined to see “the private life of power” as a greater threat to true liberty than either the tyranny of the majority or the kindly despotism of the administrative state.’
One of this blog’s primary concerns is that modern liberalism, as practiced with its progressive, collectivist and activist roots, has not addressed vital concerns between the individual and the collective, which can soon lead to the ‘tyranny of the majority or the kindly despotism of the administrative state’ as Douthat points out.
It’s not always as grave as that, but current liberal politics, with pressure from below, has been busy dragging 60’s feminist, environmentalist, and Civil Rights activism back into political discourse (to say nothing of New Deal, Big Labor, and other, older entitlement programs).
Perhaps Douthat’s piece also highlights a gap between many libertarians and conservatives that will very tough to bridge: Some libertarian ideas lead to anarchic consequences, and a vigorous libertarian defense of the individual contradicts many social and religious conservative organizing principles as well.
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On that note, if you want to see where labor activism in progressive politics can lead (unions and politicians generally fighting for the cause, their paychecks and their pensions first, the actual concerns of children later), look no further than California:
‘But after those basic protections were enshrined in law decades ago, labor leaders pushed legislators to expand rights and entitlements for public school teachers—at the expense of educating kids. In the last ten years, only 91 teachers out of about 300,000 (.003 percent) who have attained permanence lost their jobs in California. Of those, only 19 (.0007 percent) have been dismissed for poor performance
This is neither economically nor politically sustainable, and places impossible demands upon our institutions. As for the mayor of New York City:
‘The people are to show “the leaders the path.” But, it turns out, there is only one, progressive path, already marked out with thick hedges on each side. All we’ve really got to do is make sure everybody’s in the lane–get’em all signed up. The means has become the end–“universal” enrollment, not universal achievement–and the work of the good neighbor a matter of paperwork, not particular care or love’
‘San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed’s promising ballot initiative to fix California’s municipal pension problems went down in flames this weekend, before it even had a chance to come up for a vote. The initiative would have amended the state constitution to allow cash-strapped municipalities to restructure pension promises.’
‘And without Wolfe, we would not understand California-or the California-ized modern world. At the time of his most frequent visits the state was undergoing a profound change, one that affects it to this day and whose every aspect has been exported throughout the country and the globe. Both have become much more like California over the last 40 years, even as California has drifted away from its old self, and Wolfe has chronicled and explained it all.’
A good post on Robinson Jeffers from Malcolm Greenhill, which highlights how the rugged and vast beauty of California makes it easier to imagine what culture is, and what it ought to be on this outpost of Western Civilization.
The people who promise solutions to poverty and homelessness seem to be engaged in a utopian cost-shifting exercise which favors their interests and overlooks crime, violence and personal responsbility…hardly a way to balance the budget: Repost-Heather MacDonald At The City Journal: ‘The Sidewalks Of San Francisco’…
‘It also shows that if politicians hadn’t been busy robbing the city blind and milking it for patronage, the city’s problems probably could have been dealt with outside of bankruptcy court. The disaster in Detroit was caused by bad governance, by the corrupt response of the city’s Democratic machine to a series of economic challenges brought on in large part by the intransigence of the UAW, with an assist from the mismanagement of the U.S. car industry. If the city had been proactive about addressing its problems years ago, it could have avoided relying on the extraordinary charity of foundations to save its art. At this point, however, this is probably as good as it’s going to get.’
Over five years ago, when GM stock was selling at $2 a share and the debt-holders had been wiped out, this blog put up the video below. Here’s a brief 2:00 min explanation by Bill Ackman of Pershing Square on why the GM bailout was likely a bad idea.
Politicians reward their friends, and some of the same Detroit ideas we’ve taken national. Americans in general are likely not going to think well of their politics for awhile, but we could first stop the bleeding, create less incentive for those looking to oversee the spoils, laws, and regulations, and figure out how to grow the economy at a faster rate:
————
You Can Have It
My brother comes home from work and climbs the stairs to our room. I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop one by one. You can have it, he says.
The moonlight streams in the window and his unshaven face is whitened like the face of the moon. He will sleep long after noon and waken to find me gone.
Thirty years will pass before I remember that moment when suddenly I knew each man has one brother who dies when he sleeps and sleeps when he rises to face this life,
and that together they are only one man sharing a heart that always labours, hands yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?
All night at the ice plant he had fed the chute its silvery blocks, and then I stacked cases of orange soda for the children of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time
with always two more waiting. We were twenty for such a short time and always in the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.
In 1948 the city of Detroit, founded by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died, no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,
for there was no such year, and now that year has fallen off all the old newspapers, calendars, doctors’ appointments, bonds wedding certificates, drivers licenses.
The city slept. The snow turned to ice. The ice to standing pools or rivers racing in the gutters. Then the bright grass rose between the thousands of cracked squares,
and that grass died. I give you back 1948. I give you all the years from then to the coming one. Give me back the moon with its frail light falling across a face.
Give me back my young brother, hard and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse for God and burning eyes that look upon all creation and say, You can have it.
There’s definitely some Spanish influence here, by way of Antonio Machado. Perhaps there’s also some labor/alienation sentiment for the working man on the factory floor, but hey, it’s Detroit and it’s a well-crafted poem.
Just because I love to highlight the generally Left-Of-Center political philosophy over at PBS and NPR, there’s a link to this PBS piece about life on the factory floor and Levine’s poem. Here’s a Paris Review interview with Levine.
Some links on this site: Charlie LeDuff, Detroit’s populist, citizen journalist’s youtube channel here. At least he’s sticking around.
Are you looking at beautiful photos and feeling sorry for Detroit, and yourself? See Time Magazine’s photo essay by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre (less porn-like, more thoughtful).
Walter Russell Mead takes a look at the blue model (the old progressive model) from the ground up in NYC to argue that it’s simply not working. Check out his series at The American Interest
‘Gov. Brown should save the money that would be spent on building a 20th century throwback project and instead spend some of it on making repairs to our current infrastructure. That would be the visionary thing to do’
So the more free-thinking Jerry Brown on display in the video below, back in the 70’s, is a far cry from the practical politics of the Golden State today:
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Victor Davis Hanson’s suggestions still sound quite reasonable: So reasonable they’d be very difficult to implement:
‘The four-part solution for California is clear: don’t raise the state’s crushing taxes any higher; reform public-employee compensation: make use of ample natural resources: and stop the flow of illegal aliens. Just focus on those four areas-as California did so well in the past-and in time, the state will return to its bounty of a few decades ago. Many of us intend to stay and see that it does.’
-A link for Michael Lewis’ article about California politics, public pensions and Schwarzenegger’s time in office.
-A map from Immodest Proposals on how to divide California. Just some suggestions.
The people who promise solutions to poverty and homelessness seem to be engaged in a utopian cost-shifting exercise which favors their interests and overlooks crime, violence and personal responsbility…hardly a way to balance the budget: Repost-Heather MacDonald At The City Journal: ‘The Sidewalks Of San Francisco’…
On that GM bailout and the $10 billion loss to taxpayers:
‘The administration gave the UAW billions more than bankruptcy law calls for. Typically, bankruptcy reduces union compensation packages to competitive rates. However, GM’s existing union members made few concessions on pay. As the UAW put it, the contract meant “no loss in your base hourly pay, no reduction in your health care, and no reduction in pensions.’
So, what’s the strategy for American growth and prosperity here in the face of manufacturing decline?
I mean, just look at Detroit.
Over five years ago, when GM stock was selling at $2 a share and the debt-holders had been wiped out, this blog put up the video below. Here’s a brief 2:00 min explanation by Bill Ackman of Pershing Square on why the GM bailout was likely a bad idea.
Politicians reward their friends:
————
David Harsanyi at Reason wrote more here. Non-union employees pensions got raided and taxpayers foot the bill, so that Obama and the UAW can maintain power. Cronyism on the taxpayer dime at its finest.
Walter Russell Mead takes a look at the blue model (the old progressive model) from the ground up in NYC to argue that it’s simply not working. Check out his series at The American Interest
