Monthly Archives: December 2011

The Payroll Tax Bill and Other Crises

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Yesterday there seemed to have been a deal, but today it’s falling apart. Let’s review — Congress is working on a bill that would —

  • Extend the payroll tax cut for two months. The President wants the payroll tax cut to stay in effect throughout 2012, which would save working taxpayers an average of $1,000.
  • Extend employment benefits for two months.
  • Approve the “doc fix” for two months. The “doc fix” is the annual vote to override cuts to Medicare reimbursement that were mandated by a law passed during the Clinton Administration. Every year since 2003 Congress has voted to defer the cuts, and if the eight years’ of cuts were to all go into effect at once, the reimbursement rate would be cut by 27 percent.

The Senate passed the bill by 89 to 10 yesterday. But now the House is planning to revolt.

In a private conference call on Saturday afternoon, rank-and-file House Republicans complained bitterly about the contents of the deal, which would extend through February the president’s Social Security tax cut, unemployment insurance and Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors. The sweetener of a provision requiring the president to expedite consideration of the Keystone XL oil pipeline wasn’t enough to offset the bitterness of a deal that gives the president two more months to pillory Republicans on a tax cut that is one of his most popular policies.

Before the conference call yesterday, House Speaker Boehner said he approved the Senate bill. Now he’s saying that Congress should stop kicking the can down the road and pass a bill for all of 2012. And yeah, they should do that. But of course, there’s going to be a catch. No House Republican can sleep at night before he’s done something to screw American workers.

ASPCA — huh?

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This is a bit off topic for this site, but it’s been nagging at me, so here goes — I’m a big mush about animals. Usually, if I hear about mistreatment of animals, I’m as outraged as anybody. However —

Currently there’s a growing movement to end the horse-drawn carriage rides in Manhattan. There’s an article about this at the Guardian that implies the carriage business is unregulated and the horses overworked, suffering, and maltreated generally. It portrays the animals pulling boatloads of tourists in all kinds of weather and then going home to dirty little stalls in somebody’s basement.

I did some googling and learned —

The horses may not work in temperatures above 89 degrees F or below 19 degrees F. They are not allowed to work in blizzards. The Central Park website advises tourists, “Often the authorities will send the carriages home at 87 degrees…. ASPCA has, on occasion, sent horses home on short notice when it snows.”

They may not pull more than four adult (as in over 12 years old) passengers at once. NYC carriage horses come in all sizes, but most of the ones I’ve seen run toward heavier builds, with some probably weighing as much as 1,500 pounds. They keep to a moderate pace. They work 9-hour days, which includes time standing in the shade on Central Park South waiting for fares.

Carriage horses must be between the ages of 5 and 26. They must be seen by a vet twice a year. The size and condition of their stabling is regulated. According to a recent NY Times editorial,

The horses are well treated and monitored closely by the city. We dropped unannounced into Clinton Park Stables, one of four allowed to provide city carriages, and saw that the horses are treated better than advertised. They have large stalls, water that flows with the nudge of a nose and plenty of hay. “These horses were bred to pull a carriage,” says Dr. Dennis Farrell, a veterinarian who helps the city with its large horse population (think police, etc.).

The down side is that most of the year the horses have no free time in a pasture. Per a new ordinance passed last year, they must get five weeks of vacation in country pastures every year.

The carriages are not allowed south of 34th Street. They tend to stay in or near Central Park, sometimes venturing into other parts of midtown. Generally air quality is pretty good, for a city, around there. No smog or toxic smells. People are always jogging in Central Park, after all. There are occasional incidents with cars, but I can’t find an example of an accident in recent years that injured the horse. A recent incident in which a taxi struck a carriage resulted in severe injury to the driver, but the horse was fine.

So while this may not be horsie utopia, it doesn’t strike me as extreme abuse, either.

Now, here’s where it gets weird. Earlier this year a carriage horse named Charlie, aged 15, was being walked to his job in the park when he collapsed and died. All I know about Charlie’s history is that he had spent most of his life as an Amish farm horse. The ASPCA released results of a necropsy that said Charlie had had a chipped tooth and a stomach ulcer and had died in pain.

However, very recently the veterinarian who did the necropsy issued a retraction:

Dr. Pamela Corey, the ASPCA’s head equine vet, tried to retract statements made in the official ASPCA press release. She claimed that she was under intense pressure while writing the release and that, in fact, there was no evidence Charlie was in any sort of pain before he died.

The ASPCA then suspended Corey without pay, and sources said the veterinarian has filed a formal complaint against the agency with the attorney general’s office.

Although not conclusive as to the cause of Charlie’s death, the full necropsy results indicate some scarring of the liver that is “of unknown clinical significance.” It also mentions stomach issues, though not an ulcer specifically.

“Though the visual examination of the stomach showed gastritis (inflammation of the stomach), much of what was seen visually may have been the result of tissue breakdown after death,” the ASPCA statement read.

The statement also said that Charlie was in “good nutritional condition,” and there was no evidence of a heart condition. It is possible, the report continued, that Charlie was exposed to something toxic or suffered an allergic reaction or that he had an abnormal heartbeat.

The New York ASPCA joined the opposition to the carriage horse trade awhile back. And now they’re pressuring their vets to issue bogus necropsy results for The Cause?

If the life of a Manhattan carriage horse really does amount to maltreatment, I’d support stopping the business. But I wonder if some of the opposition to the carriages isn’t a bit fanatical. I think some people might have read Black Beauty a few too many times.

Update: Here’s another article about the movement to ban the carriage horses. There’s definitely something screwy going on. One of the people involved in the movement is a real estate developer named Nislick who wants to get his hands on the land where the stables are now. I’m disappointed the SPCA got sucked into this.

The Slow Wheels of a Big Democracy

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Jonathan Bernstein writes something about Iraq that I think a lot of activists will scoff at, but I think he’s right —

… as it turns out, the decision to leave casts quite a bit of light on how Madisonian democracy works in the US, both for good and for bad. It’s a story in which the ocean liner metaphor people use was absolutely apt. It took a whole lot of pushing, but this certainly appears to be the case in which citizen action, working through a political party, ended a war.

We did?

The story goes like this. Acting in presidential primaries and other primaries in 2004, liberals made it clear that the ambivalence (or, in some cases, solid support) for the war that was evident in Congress in 2002 was absolutely unacceptable within the Democratic Party. That accelerated in the 2006 primaries, with the sort-of-defeat of Joe Lieberman showing exactly where the party was. As a consequence, when Democrats won majorities in Congress in 2006 – in large part because unhappiness with the war had severely damaged George W. Bush – it was an almost solidly antiwar caucus.

The establishment Dems still didn’t get it then, and criticized bloggers and activists for working so hard to get rid of Lieberman. But …

Under the Madisonian system, Bush, who had two more years in the White House, was just as legitimate an elected official as were the new Democrats in Congress (as were the remaining Republicans on the Hill, for that matter). But the result wasn’t, as it happened, deadlock; instead, much to the frustration of antiwar voters, the result was a surge into Iraq and increased American casualties. And yet as much as it didn’t appear so at the time, the truth was that the surge was the beginning of the end: there’s a straight line from the surge through the agreement with Iraqis that yielded steady troop reductions under Bush, continued pullback under Barack Obama, and the final official handover today.

Antiwar sentiment helped put Barack Obama in the White House, and the drawdown continued. “The point is that the war ended because citizens, acting mainly through the Democratic Party, ended it,” Bernstein writes.

And so today’s outcome is the very direct, if distant, triumph of the Deaniacs way back in 2003. It’s the triumph of party actors who enforced an antiwar line on Democratic candidates in 2004 and 2006. A triumph of all the people who worked so hard for Ned Lamont in Connecticut. It’s a triumph of those who did it again in 2008 despite the frustrations of 2007 – it’s a triumph of those who didn’t walk away when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and the rest of them were apparently stymied by George W. Bush, but instead went out and tried to reinforce their numbers in the Senate and the House and to put an ally in the White House.

Here’s the critical part:

I’ve said this before, but I’ll repeat it: elections aren’t plebiscites on public policy issues. They don’t actually tell us “what the people want” in any kind of direct way…that’s just not something that mass-electorate contests are capable of doing. But they can be used by citizens, especially acting through political parties, to take action. To make history. And it’s damn hard; it’s a nation of over 300 million, and many of them really, really, don’t agree with you – and even more just don’t actually care about whatever it is that you believe is critically important, as hard as you may find that to believe. That’s not a flaw of democracy: that is democracy. But it’s also democracy to keep working, in and out of electoral politics, to find allies, to build coalitions, and to keep trying to win no matter how frustrating it gets.

Yes. And that’s why I get so disgusted with people who sat home and let the Right take back the House in 2010, and who say they’ll sit out the next election, or vote for Nader or some other loser to “send a message,” because they voted in 2008 and the country didn’t instantly turn into progressive utopia. It took the Right several election cycles and a huge investment in media and other organization to take over the country and dominate politics. It’s going to be a long, slow slog to take it back. And yeah, pulling the Dems in our direction can feel like trying to move a glacier. But it can be done.

Kvetching About Israel

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It’s been a while since I read Tom Friedman, but I see the Israel First contingent is up in arms about something he wrote, so I thought it was worth checking it out.

Friedman writes that while American politicians are tripping all over themselves declaring total subservient loyalty to whatever the government of Israel wants, American Jews are conflicted and ambivalent.

I’d never claim to speak for American Jews, but I’m certain there are many out there like me, who strongly believe in the right of the Jewish people to a state, who understand that Israel lives in a dangerous neighborhood yet remains a democracy, but who are deeply worried about where Israel is going today. My guess is we’re the minority when it comes to secular American Jews. We still care. Many other Jews are just drifting away.

This is the passage that is getting the most attention:

I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.

Here’s the rest of the paragraph, generally ignored:

The real test is what would happen if Bibi tried to speak at, let’s say, the University of Wisconsin. My guess is that many students would boycott him and many Jewish students would stay away, not because they are hostile but because they are confused.

Friedman goes on to say that a lot of worrisome stuff is going on in Israel that is making it look less like the western-style democracy that we like to pretend it is. You can read Friedman for details. I think Friedman hits a lot of nails square on the head in this column.

Naturally, Jennifer Rubin is beside herself in outrage of biblical — nay, Michelle Malkin — proportions. You can almost hear the steam coming out of her ears.

The neocon Elliott Abrams also is fuming, to the point that he is stumbling to express himself in English:

… what in the world except prejudice can lead Mr. Friedman to make the ugly charge that support for Israel in Congress, need support for Mr. Netanyahu in Congress, is “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby?”

Oh, I don’t know. Truth, maybe?

BTW, the war in Iraq is officially over. Thought I’d mention it.

Update: David Frum, currently filling the role as the “reasonable” conservative, bashes liberals as anti-Semites by framing any criticism of Israel’s Likud government as “antisemitism.” This is, of course, a slick way to slap down open and honest discussion of how much the U.S. is subordinating its own interests to support right-wing radicalism in Israel. See also Andy Sullivan.

Update: Remarkably, nearly all of the comments to Frum’s op ed are pointing out to Frum that he’s full of it.

OWS and Democracy

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Let’s talk for a bit about democracy. Democracy is defined in the dictionary as “A system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.”

The history books tell us that a long time ago, places like ancient Athens attempted democracy without elected representatives, so that every citizen who showed up could have a say in how laws were made. But Athens was a relatively small place, and only a minority of residents qualified as citizens.

More recently, democracies have gone the elected representative route. This system works pretty well under the right conditions. The right conditions include an informed citizenry that gives enough of a damn to show up and vote in elections. It also assumes that factual and honest information about what’s going on is available to citizens, and that elections are mostly honest.

Of course, democracies can be corrupted all kinds of ways, but so can any other human institution. There may be incorruptible individuals, but no collection of people ever born could not be corrupted or co-opted, in whole or in part, sooner or later.

When democracies function well, they do a pretty good job of enabling people to direct their government to serve the public good. People often disagree, and sometimes mistakes are make. But on the whole, if not overwhelmed by corruption, democracies do have a proven track record of being able to hold nations together in a reasonably stable way, so that the people living in those nations can make the best of their lives. I think most of us would say we much prefer to live in a democracy than in a monarchy or a dictatorship.

Put another way, when working properly democracy provides a stable framework within which people and communities can live and grow and innovate, with optimum personal freedom.

There are some kind of human endeavors that don’t lend themselves to a democratic model. I am thinking of the community chorus I sing with. To be in a chorus means that you agree to sing the way the director tells you to sing. The chorus does not vote on whether a passage should be sung allegro or adagio, and it’s certainly not left up to individuals to follow their own bliss.

You can say the same thing about the military, although letting the troops vote on whether they will attack the enemy or just go home might (or might not) have shortened a lot of wars. The same thing goes for workplaces. Even employee-owned businesses have leadership hierarchies.

My point is that when a group of individuals are directed to complete some kind of task or otherwise work to a particular purpose, the democracy model probably won’t work. And that’s OK, because democracy is a principle of government, and a group working together to complete a task is a very different thing from a group of people living within a government.

From its beginning, I’ve been impatient with Occupy Wall Street’s fixation on “horizontal democracy” and “radically decentralized structure.” I remember feeling dismay when I read this interview in which a woman goes on and on about building horizontalism and working groups and such.

The way in which we’re organizing is part of our politics. If you’re placing demands on an institution or the state, you’re creating a kind of dialogue, rather than creating an open space for democratic discussion within the plaza.

One, we’ve already been creating a new kind of dialogue here in the blogosphere for the past ten years or so, and it’s a hell of a lot more effective, and open to participation, than OWS could ever be. Further, in U.S. history there have been all kinds of social and communal movements that experimented with new kinds of societies and organizational structures. If you want to do likewise, throw your money into a pot and buy some land in Nebraska, and then go there and form working groups on the prairie to your hearts’ content.

But if you want to be a movement that actually accomplishes something, you have to be willing to submit to a less than democratic organizational structure. There’s no getting around that. Deal with it.

The Nation has an article on “The Fracturing of Occupy Wall Street” that describes the original Manhattan crew as divided between “activists” and “occupiers.” The activists have found office space on Broadway and are planning actions such as Occupy Our Homes. The occupiers are at loose ends:

In the month since the New York Police Department violently forced the occupiers out of Zuccotti, the people whose residence was Liberty Plaza Park have nowhere to go. Some of them had previously been homeless. Others left their homes to join the movement. But deprived of the food station, the medical tent, the things that once fulfilled their needs for basic survival, they have rapidly lost faith in Occupy Wall Street’s much-vaunted democratic process to provide the supportive community that once existed here.

The activists have found shelter for some of the occupiers, but some among the occupiers seem determined to disrupt any attempt to re-organize.

… every meeting I’ve recently attended—and from what I gather, every recent meeting I have not—has been brought to a grinding halt, the basic ability to debate and consent to proposals crippled by a determined few who will not to let things proceed until their issues are addressed. This is the reason for the backed-up business. The people shouting about their needs over the debate.

A small number have taken to obstructing everything for reasons that are not entirely clear. But my impression is that the occupiers just plain need help. For a little while they felt they had a purpose, and something important to do, and that got yanked away from them, and they are angry about that. And the occupiers with resources and education and organizational skills now are in the Broadway office with the activists, leaving the rest to mostly fend for themselves.

So you’ve got some who want to challenge the capitalist establishment; and some who seem to want another go at the old Oneida Movement; and some who want food, shelter, and purpose. Those are all valid things, but this is the work of three different organizations. And at least two of those three are not going to be functional as a “horizontal democracy.”

Mitt Romney, Serial Liar

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If it isn’t too painful, try to remember the 2000 presidential campaign for a moment. If you can do that, you might remember that Al Gore was persistently called a “serial liar” in the mainstream press.

Bob Somerby has a good background article on how that happened. According to Somerby, the “serial liar” meme that was built around allegations that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet or was the inspiration for “Love Story” originated in an editorial in the New York Post, the same rag that more recently went overboard churning up dirt on OWS. And as we all witnessed, the bobbleheads picked up each alleged example of the Vice President’s lies, and repeated them over and over, even after the alleged example was debunked.

What was especially pathetic, as Somerby points out, was that the so-called lies were all about trivial matters that had little to do with Gore’s policy proposals. They were just bits of trivia taken out of context, distorted beyond recognition, and then repeated endlessly by every “pundit” or reporter covering politics.

Meanwhile, George W. Bush could make claims about his economic proposals that were false on their face, and the mainstream media (except for the New York Times‘s new economics columnist Paul Krugman) said not a word. And as I remember, Krugman complained later that his editors wouldn’t allow him to say that Bush was lying.

These days there should be headlines when a Republican tells the truth, since it’s such a rare occurrence. But Steve Benen points out today that a large part of Mitt Romney’s campaign shtick amounts to repeating long-debunked lies about President Obama. So can we all call Mittens a “serial liar” now?

The Rise of Ron

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Just when you (maybe) were adjusting to the idea that Newt Gingrich is the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, Public Policy Polling announces that Newt’s frontrunner status is being challenged by … Ron Paul.

I keep thinking that Tim Pawlenty must be kicking himself 24/7 these days. But Steve Kornacki says the biggest reason Romney can’t close the deal is that southerners think he is a space alien. Romney is so not southern he makes Barack Obama look like Foghorn Leghorn.

I personally don’t think the Mormonism is the whole story. Speaking as a hillbilly myself, I think most of my people could handle a Mormon candidate if he seemed human and could push the right cultural buttons. Mittens strikes me as someone who would show up at a backyard barbeque wearing a suit and then eating his ribs and chicken with a knife and fork. Like I said, a space alien. Plus, he speaks French.

The rise of Paul is supposed to help Mittens in Iowa, but it’s the South that’s going to really matter.