Month: October 2012

All that good, expensive gas wasted on the Jews!

People sometimes ask why I’m a fan of Hannah Arendt. I’ve a complicated relationship to her work, so I wouldn’t characterize myself as a complete fan. But I do love reading her, and one of the reasons I do is that she had such a brutal and unforgiving sense of irony, which she often held in reserve for only the most morally addled sectors of the bourgeoisie. (In this respect she was quite like Brecht and other Weimar modernists.) Nowhere is this more on display than in Eichmann in Jerusalem, which is probably my favorite Arendt text. Here’s a representative passage (pp. 110-111). My next story is even more to the point, since it concerns someone who was not a “leader,” […]

Suffer the Children

Steven Greenhouse has unearthed the most revealing statement of this entire controversy over employers instructing employees how to vote. David Siegel, CEO of Westgate Resorts, sent his 7000 employees a mailer warning them not to vote for Obama. Asked to explain his letter, Siegel said: I really wanted them to know how I felt four more years under President Obama was going to affect them. It would be no different from telling your children: “Eat your spinach. It’s good for you.” Got that? No different. In The Reactionary Mind, I argue that conservatism is a defense of “the private life of power,” those hierarchies in spheres like the family and the workplace that we often call private. And here you […]

American Feudalism: It’s Not Just a Metaphor

As many of you know, I’ve been calling our contemporary political order feudal for quite some time. But this post from the Roosevelt Institute’s Tim Price (h/t Alex Gourevitch) really blew my mind: That could soon be the law of the land in Pennsylvania, where the state legislature has passed a bill that would, as Philadelphia City Paper blogger Daniel Denvir describes it, “allow companies that hire at least 250 new workers in the state to keep 95-percent of the workers’ withheld income tax.” These workers will essentially be paying their employers for the privilege of having a job. Some have called this“corporate socialism,” but it also calls to mind an even older economic model that was once popular in […]

My Media Empire Expands

As some of you know, I have created a Tumblr page. I use this for short, quick posts or little quotations that capture my attention and that I don’t want to forget. In the past, I posted these on FB or Twitter. But now I’m trying to do at least some of them on Tumblr. If you’re bored or looking for fresh  material on those days (weeks) when I’m not really posting here, you can check it out.

Dictatorships and Double Standards

I’m hoping in the coming days to do a longer blog on the stories about employers instructing employees how to vote, forcing employees to attend rallies for Romney, etc. In the meantime, Gordon Lafer has one of the best pieces yet on this story. He makes the point, which came as news to me, that the Bush Administration repeatedly condemned elections in other countries where because in part bosses there were doing the exact same thing they’re doing here. The Bush Administration, for instance, rejected Ukrainian elections as illegitimate, in part because international observers found that managers of state-owned enterprises had “instructed their subordinates to vote for [the ruling party].” … One step beyond even the Kochs is GOP mega-donor […]

In Hollywood Hotel, Maids are Watched by a Dog Named Rex

From the you can’t make this shit up department: A federal agency charged with enforcing labor law has issued a complaint against the Hyatt Andaz Hotel in West Hollywood, alleging the hotel illegally implemented a new electronic tracking device that monitors productivity of housekeepers. The system, known as “Rex” because it is animated by a wagging-tailed dog by the same name, consists of tracking software managed on iPods that tells housekeepers exactly which room to clean and when. It requires housekeepers clock when they enter and exit each guest room. It can send a housekeeper and her heavy cart from one end of the hotel to the other, sometimes hundreds of yards away, potentially increasing travel time from room to […]

Kai Ryssdal, Call Me!

Employer intimidation of voters is really breaking into the mainstream media. Yesterday, Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace profiled the story. Here are some of the questions he posed to University of Florida emeritus professor Joseph Little: Is this legal? Can companies actually fire you if you don’t vote the right way? I mean I’ll be honest with you. This kind of floored me when I first read about this. … What’s the recourse? I mean I suppose you could always just try to find another job. But unemployment is almost 8 percent. … I imagine this is rare, right? I mean we’re talking the rare instance here. We’ve been talking about this topic forever around here, of course. Mr. Ryssdal, if […]

I Speak Out for Athletes Everywhere

As many of you know, I’m not a fan of the wide world of sports. But I am a fan of labor unions, and in that capacity, I have noticed that there have been quite a few lockouts over the past couple of years—four in 14 months, to be exact. I assumed that was because of the general shittiness of the sports bosses. It is, but there’s another factor, as Dave Zirin reports here: the shittiness of the sports bosses’ lawyers. A law firm called Proskauer Rose is now representing management in all four major men’s sports leagues, the first time in history one firm has been hired to play such a unified role. In practice, this has meant that […]

Things Obama Says When Famous People Die

Obama’s statement on George McGovern’s death seems awfully anodyne, begrudging, and brief: George McGovern dedicated his life to serving the country he loved. He signed up to fight in World War II, and became a decorated bomber pilot over the battlefields of Europe. When the people of South Dakota sent him to Washington, this hero of war became a champion for peace. And after his career in Congress, he became a leading voice in the fight against hunger. George was a statesman of great conscience and conviction, and Michelle and I share our thoughts and prayers with his family. There’s no mention of the fact that McGovern was the presidential candidate of Obama’s party. That he led the fight against the Vietnam […]

The Army as a Concentration Camp

Reading this terrific piece about James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity, I stumbled across this passage from Jones’s WWII, a nonfiction treatment of the Second World War: Everything the civilian soldier learned and was taught from the moment of his induction was one more delicate stop along this path of the soldier evolving toward acceptance of his death. The idea that his death, under certain circumstances, is correct and right. The training, the discipline, the daily humiliations, the privileges of “brutish” sergeants, the living en masse like schools of fish, are all directed toward breaking down the sense of the sanctity of the physical person, and toward hardening the awareness that a soldier is the chattel (hopefully a […]

How Could Mere Toil Align Thy Choiring Strings? A Breviary of Worker Intimidation

In the past few weeks, there’s been a flurry of articles about employers coercing or intimidating workers to vote for their preferred candidates (usually Republican). This is not a new topic on this blog, but the brazenness of these efforts is beginning to get a fair amount of traction elsewhere (in part because of the election). Anyway, here’s a quick roundup: 1.  Alec McGillis kicked off the most recent round of stories with this report in The New Republic on Murray Energy’s forcing its workers to support Romney. (Though I had already commented on this story back in August, McGillis has a lot of new details.) 2. Mike Elk then broke the story, in In These Times, of the Koch brothers trying […]

Forced to Choose: Capitalism as Existentialism

I’ve been reading and writing all morning about Hayek, Mises, and Menger. And it occurs to me: the moral secret of capitalism, its existential fundament, is not that we are free to choose but that we are forced to choose. Only when we are confronted with the reality of scarcity, says the Austrian economist, only when we must reckon with the finite resources at our disposal, are we brought face to face with ourselves. In deciding how to deploy those limited resources—whether they be time, money, effort—we’re compelled to answer the great questions of life: What do I value? What do I believe? What do I want in this life, in this world? (“Every man who, in the course of […]

Age of Counterrevolution

In the newest issue of the London Review of Books I have a review of Daniel Rodgers’ Age of Fracture. It’s behind the paywall, which is a pity. Not just because it’s my review, but also because it’s a terrific book. Easily the most comprehensive intellectual history of postwar American social thought that we’ve seen, it deserves ongoing attention and discussion. As I make clear in my review, it’s also a flawed book. Though he doesn’t see it this way, Rodgers’ topic is not merely fracture but counterrevolution. Here’s a taste: If you look at books published in the years between 1944 and 1963 – books like An American Dilemma, The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Power Elite, The Organisation Man, […]

The Kochs’ Libertarian Hypocrisy: It’s Worse Than You Think

In response to my last post, Gordon Lafer sent me an email: Unsurprisingly, there’s a glaring contrast between the standards that the Kochs and other employers insist on for themselves—i.e., they should be maximally free to tell their employees who’s worth supporting for public office— and what they are trying to impose on workers’ organizations around the country. For instance, Alabama’s Act 2010-761, an “ethics” law adopted in 2011 which banned payroll dues deductions for unions that engage in any type of political activity, also includes this: Any person who is in the employment of…any…governmental agency, shall be on approved leave to engage in political action or the person shall be on personal time before or after work and on […]

The Koch Brothers Read Hayek

One of the things Hayek disliked about Social Security was that it gave the government—in this case, the agencies responsible for collecting and dispensing Social Security—a ready-made vehicle for the dissemination of propaganda. Particularly propaganda on behalf of Social Security. It confers on the organization a power over minds that is in the same class with the powers of a totalitarian state which has the monopoly of the means of supplying information. As good libertarians, the Koch brothers have naturally read their Hayek. Which is why they do stuff like this. In a voter information packet obtained by In These Times, the Koch Industries corporate leadership informed tens of thousands of employees at its subsidiary, Georgia Pacific, that their livelihood […]

Libertarianism in Honduras

My friend Greg Grandin writes on Facebook: One of the stranger fallouts from the 2009 Honduran coup has been the scheme hatched by an NYU economist, Paul Romer, along with free-market libertarians—including Milton Friedman’s grandson, Patri; you can’t make this shit up—to start a bunch of “year-zero” cities in the country, free-market utopias with their own laws, etc. It’s like Empire’s Workshop meets The Shock Doctrine meets Fordlandia (except Henry Ford at least had his year-zero city provide free health care). If they were to come to fruition, they would be little more than free-trade maquila zones, like the kind that run along the US-Mexican border, except more savage. In any case, the plan has hit a snag in that […]

I Have the Most Awesome Students in the World. And You Can Help Them.

As some of you know, I have a day job as a professor. At Brooklyn College, where I teach political science. One of our cherished little secrets at Brooklyn College is that we have the most awesome undergraduates in the world. Listening to my students in class, I often feel like I’m teaching the 21st century’s New York Intellectuals: only instead of hailing from Odessa and Poland, they come from Nigeria, Grenada, Palestine, and Tajikistan. My students have gone onto Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford, graduate degrees at top universities in the US and elsewhere, transformative activism with labor unions, community groups, antiwar coalitions, Occupy, and more. I’m not the sentimental sort, but the simple truth is: I love these guys. […]

I am so loving that lesser evil!

Two Democrats—from California and New York City, no less—are leading the charge against legislation that would give domestic workers lunch breaks and paid sick days, among other things. Salon‘s Irin Carmon has the story. In fact, two policy prescriptions that are catching on across the country – modest by the standards of other industrialized nations, but radical enough to inspire feverish opposition from Chamber of Commerce types — have recently been opposed by Democrats apparently seeking to appear “pro-business.”  One is the domestic worker’s bill of rights, which passed in New York state in 2010 but was vetoed by California Gov. Jerry Brown on Sunday. It would have provided overtime pay and meal breaks to the 200,000 childcare workers and housecleaners […]

Getting on Board

Alex Gourevitch is no stranger to this blog. He was one of my co-authors, along with Chris Bertram, on the Crooked Timber post about workplace coercion. He also has a terrific blog of his own, The Current Moment, which I recommend you check out. Here, in this guest post, he does a double-take on Matt Yglesias’ double-take. • • • • • Prompted by Gary Shteyngart’s op-ed today chronicling a disastrous American Airlines flight, Matthew Yglesias produced a little nugget explaining that AA’s delays are the product of pilot slowdowns. American—well, its executives—are trying to save their hides by using bankruptcy courts to screw the unions. Pilots are fighting back by zealously following all kinds of obscure rules—what Yglesias dubs […]