Month: August 2011

Why I’m Not Laughing with Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart’s takedown of conservatives who complain that 51 percent of American households don’t pay any income taxes is getting a lot of laughs from the left. Color me unamused. On this one, I’m with the right. Well, sort of. Let’s just say—as a teacher used to say of my papers—they’re right for the wrong reasons. It actually is a scandal that 51 percent of American households are not paying income taxes. Not because it means the majority of Americans are free-loaders but because it means the majority of Americans don’t make enough to money to pay taxes. (Though as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, that statistic comes from 2009, which wasn’t a good year for […]

My Own Munchings (that’s for you, Mom)

I’m supposedly on vacation this week and next, yet I somehow find myself caught in the interwebs. Anyway, a few things of mine came out recently that you might have missed. Once upon a time I wrote a book on fear. I hadn’t been thinking much about that book  in recent years, but Sasha Lilley, host of the fantabulous radio show “Against the Grain” out in the Bay Area, tracked me down for a one-hour interview about it. Turned out to be one of the most engaging interviews I’ve done, all thanks to Sasha’s excellent questions. It’s every author’s dream to be interviewed by someone like Sasha. You might want to check out some of her other interviews as well. […]

One Less Bell to Answer: Further Thoughts on Neoliberalism By Way of Mike Konczal (and Burt Bachrach)

Mike Konczal has an excellent post on Mitt Romney’s proposal to replace unemployment benefits with unemployment savings accounts. The idea is: While you’re working, money would be automatically taken out of your paycheck and put into an individual account. When you’re unemployed, you could make withdrawals from it. As one of Konczal’s readers points out in the comments section, Romney’s proposal would merely add to the satchel of work-related accounts people already have—401k’s, IRA’s, education accounts, health care accounts, childcare accounts, and so on—and that weigh them down so much as it is. And that may be the point. But more on that in a minute. Konczal uses Romney’s proposal to compare left-liberal approaches to the economy with the dominant […]

Sam’s Club Republicanism Died Because It Never Had a Life to Live

Now that Tim Pawlenty’s candidacy is dead, the media is performing an autopsy on “Sam’s Club Republicanism.” That’s the notion—made famous by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam in a 2005 Weekly Standard article, which they later turned into a book—that the GOP needs to reconnect with the working-class and independent voters who made it a majority party under Nixon and Reagan. These voters are conservative, but they’re worried about paying their bills and making ends meet. They’re not opposed to government: they just want it to do something for them, as opposed to for the rich. As Pawlenty put it in 2002, the GOP needs “to be the party of Sam’s Club, not just the country club.” Thus was an […]

Ten Years On, We’re Still Getting Nickel and Dimed (and Still Can’t Pee on the Job)

On the tenth anniversary of its publication, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed is being re-released with a new afterword. Before reading Nickel and Dimed, I considered myself fairly well-versed in the coerciveness of the American workplace. But Ehrenreich schooled me in a whole other dimension of barbarism on the job: that, for example, in the United States workers do not enjoy a basic right, the right to go to bathroom when they need to go. Turns out, that’s a privilege, not a right. And it still is. I reviewed Ehrenreich’s book, along with Jill Andresky Fraser’s White-Collar Sweatshop, in Dissent.  Based on the two books, I concluded thus: Against critics—inspired by Michel Foucault—who focus on disciplinary institutions like prisons, hospitals, […]

The Economic Cure That Dare Not Speak Its Name

If you don’t know Gordon Lafer, you should. He’s an associate professor at the University of Oregon,  a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, and in 2009-10 was a Senior Labor Policy Adviser to the House of Representatives. He’s also one of the leading experts in the country on the labor movement and labor politics. I asked him over the weekend to comment on a new report, just out in the American Sociological Review, that’s getting a lot of play in the media.  This is what he had to say. Last week a new report came out showing that economic inequality is largely caused by not enough people having unions.  For a dry statistical study, this one got a […]

Obama: WTF? A Facebook Roundtable of the Left

This morning, my Facebook page exploded. It all started when I posted this excellent piece by Glenn Greenwald about Obama and the debt-ceiling deal. Greenwald says that those who think Obama is weak and lacks backbone, or that he got suckered by the Republicans or is somehow being held hostage, are full of shit.  With a few exceptions, Obama got what he wanted. Greenwald has a lot of evidence to back up his claims, but I wasn’t entirely convinced. So I put the question to my FB friends.  Is Obama politically inept or does he want these massive cuts? And if he wants them, is it because of political calculation? Is he a true believer in neoliberal economics? A hostage […]