The court's decision, which fits well within established legal precedent (apparently many court-watchers were surprised they took the case to begin with), was exactly right.
But before I get to the substance of the matter, there's a few facts which should be clues for any progressive as to which side to take. First, the case was brought by the libertarian Institute for Justice, the litigation arm of the "Constitution-in-exile" movement (recently profiled in a very scary New York Times Magazine cover story), which quite literally wants to overturn the twentieth century ("in exile" refers to the alleged misinterpretation of the constitution in allowing the New Deal). Second, that all four liberals (Souter, Bryan, Ginsburg, and Stevens) on the court sided with the majority, and that the tree troglodytes (Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas) dissented.
So the cast of characters should already have us raising eyebrows. But beyond that, consider the basic constitutional question at issue. The power of eminent domain, under the Fifth Amendment, allows governments to take private property (so long as the owners are fairly compensated) for "public use". Here's a gut check: when phrases like "public use" and "common good" are at stake, do we want them interpreted broadly to allow an activist role for government, or narrowly so as to serve private property interests?
We as leftists are defined largely by our desire to use government as instrument of social change, especially when it comes to economic mattters. That means, as a general rule, that we want the government to retain broad powers to pursue the public interest. Eminent domain is one of those powers -- a sometimes necessary tool for government to guide economic development, rather than sit back and watch while the market leaves urban neighorhoods blighted while building Walmarts and McMansions in the hinterlands.
And yes, sometimes that means that property taken for the purposes of economic development will be sold to developers. Why? Because most municipalities lack the political and financial capital to become landlords themselves.
Have governments sometimes used eminent domain badly, to serve the wrong interests? No doubt, just as the Bush administration has used most of the constitutional powers available to it (and some that aren't) rather badly. But that's not cause to give up on government -- it's cause to elect political leaders who will do a better job.
For more on the case, see Nathan Newman's postings here and here.
]]>Anyone for a reading group?
(Via Billmon.)
]]>"You can see both sides, but it's a problem for the unions when they fight so much among each other," said Scott D. Carmichael, vice president of Labor Relations Institute Inc., a consulting service that helps businesses fight union organizing drives. "From talking to peers in my circle, we figure we've got eight to 10 years of a career left. After that, we'd better retire because we won't have anything left to do."]]>
But we live in a moment of great darkness. In a world awash with social and political violence, Jesus is being crucified all around us. And for American Christians, the tables are turned; the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" is still our own government, just as Martin Luther King publicly acknowledged almost forty years ago.
That our aspiring Caesar calls himself a born-again Christian is an offense, quite literally, against all that is holy. That the overwhelming majority of those who worship weekly voted to re-elect him is a sign of a cancer upon what scripture teaches is to be the living body of Christ: the church.
But today, five months after that re-election and three years after the invasion of Iraq, with few signs of hope on the horizon, we are jarred by an unlikely reality: Christ is risen!
That reality has sustained generations of Christians through times of great torment and trial -- most far worse than our own -- and led many to bravely follow the gospel, even at the cost of their own lives. Among these was King, who was fond of saying that "the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice." But today, my mind turns to another -- Archbishop Óscar Romero, and the words he preached the day before he died:
Easter is itself now the cry of victory. No one can quench the life that Christ has resurrected. Neither death nor all the banners of death and hatred raised against him and against his church can prevail. He is the victorious one! Just as he will thrive in an unending Easter, so we must accompany him in a Lent and a Holy Week of cross, sacrifice, and martyrdom. As he said, blessed are they who are not scandalized by his cross. Lent, thus, is a call to celebrate our redemption in that difficult combination of cross and victory. Our people are well prepared to do so these days: all that surrounds us proclaims the cross. But those who have Christian faith and hope know that behind this Calvary of El Salvador lies our Easter, our resurrection. That is the Christian people's hope.
Amen.
]]>If I am rendered comatose and determined to be in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) for a period longer than one month and if no imminent cure is forthcoming, I do not wish to be kept alive by artificial means including but not limited to nourishment, hydration, etc.
However....
If, due to the absurd political state of affairs in this country, my persistent vegetative state and impending unplugging can be parlayed into some sort of political leverage, I wholly endorse using my predicament in whatever way possible for the purposes of passing legislation favorable to my general political and ethical outlook. Here is a list of top-tier causes I support and will continue to support, both while in my PVS and after my eventual death:
(Follow the link for the full list.)
To which I can only add: me too. Oh, and also the abolition of the death penalty -- a pro-life cause if I ever heard one.
]]>Ralph Nader had a scolding applause line in the 2000 campaign, aimed at any young people in the audience: "if you don't turn on to politics, politics will turn on you." I arrived at Hampshire in the Fall of 2001, just before 9/11, anxious to take up his call. A funny thing has happened in the intervening period. Politics turned on us in any number of major ways (from cutting Pell Grants to the war in Iraq) -- and we're either yawning or gazing at our navels. If anything, Hampshire is a less politically active campus today than it was when I started here.
In fact, most of you have already turned the page to read the latest installment of barely-coherent drivel about reality television. Some of you are still focused on my simplistic and problematic use of categories such as "politics" and "us", a practice which is bound up in systems of hierarchy and social privilege. (That was sarcastic, folks.)
It could be because I'm a reclusive Div III just returned from field study, but I'm not even witnessing any extended serious conversations about our role in shaping the political future of a nation which is now almost completely controlled by the radical right.
It's possible this is the only progressive institution in America where those conversations aren't happening. Environmentalists are abuzz over a speech by the former president of the Sierra Club proclaiming the death of their movement. Feminists are arguing passionately about a recent essay calling for a radically different rhetorical approach to the political debate over abortion. Gay rights groups are struggling to settle on a new political and legal strategy in the wake of the anti-gay marriage backlash. Labor unions are considering huge structural changes in an attempt to become relevant again. Even the Democratic Party, in a political tailspin, just chose Howard Dean, who was something of a national joke this time a year ago, to chair its national committee.
All of this is happening out in the open, and not just among political elites: pragmatic, profound conversations about how to build a new American left are happening everywhere, from cyberspace to coffee shops. Virtually everyone I know at Hampshire has at least some interest in the political groups mentioned above. And the conservative movement, having seized control of the federal government and bullied the press into submission, is now turning its fire to academia, which means we have a vested self-interest in fighting back. But we're still not engaging in the realities of national politics, preferring to fight the same provincial battles and continue the same irrelevant conversations using an academic vocabulary that hasn't changed in decades.
Hampshire aims to "graduate men and women with the skills and perspectives needed for understanding and participating responsibly in a complex world." We're very good at the perspectives and the understanding. It's a shame we can't seem to get serious about the skills and the participation.
]]>A review of fines levied by other federal agencies suggests that the government may be taking swear words a bit too seriously. If the bill passes the Senate, Bono saying "fucking brilliant" on the air would carry the exact same penalty as illegally testing pesticides on human subjects. And for the price of Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during the Super Bowl, you could cause the wrongful death of an elderly patient in a nursing home and still have enough money left to create dangerous mishaps at two nuclear reactors.
So here's the approach we need. We know that House Republicans won't agree to elminating the payroll tax cap, so there is no danger that proposing it as a reform will be met with any real negotiation on the issue. But we can slam the conservatives for supporting such a regressive policy.
And since progressives don't believe there is a crisis, we don't think there needs to be any new revenue raised TODAY, so any rise in revenue from eliminating the payroll tax cap should be matched with an overall cut in payroll tax rates paid by average workers-- probably equivalent to saving them 2-3% of their income.
Yes, Dems should be proposing a TAX CUT! You want wedge politics, you've got it.
Brilliant. Bold. Srangely obvious. And yet I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the Congressional leadership to push for it.
]]>(Joe Trippi, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything)
It was something more than just finding ideological soul mates. It was learning how to act: how letters got written, how doors got knocked on, how co-workers could be won over on the coffee break, how to print a bumper sticker and how to pry one off with a razor blade; how to put together a network whose force exceeded the sum of its parts by orders of magnitude; how to talk to a reporter, how to picket, and how, if need be, to infiltrate - how to make the anger boiling inside you ennobling, productive, powerful, instead of embittering. How to feel bigger than yourself. It was something beyond the week, the year, the campaign, even the decade; it was a cause. You lost in 1964. But something remained after 1964: a movement. An army. An army that could lose a battle suck it up, regroup, then live to fight a thousand battles more.
(Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus)
]]>For the first time in a long time, we have an administration articulating a bold and forceful foreign policy objective: spreading liberal democracy around the globe, at gunpoint if necessary. Bush's inauguration address was a brilliantly written, if flatly delivered, declaration of a new role for America in the world.
It's easy to tear the speech apart as hypocritical and impractical. The anti-war left does a decent job attacking the administration on the first front and the Democratic Party foreign policy establishment does a marginal job attacking it on the second.
What's not so easy is to articulate an appealing alternative. Let's try a thought experiment: if John Kerry, or even Howard Dean, had decided to turn his inauguration speech into a foreign policy vision, what would he have said? What themes would he or she emphasize? Undoubtedly, two themes would figure prominently:
(There is also a third theme which neither major party wants to touch: disentanglement, perhaps even to the point of isolationism. I'm having trouble finding a suitable quotation, but the basic line here would be something like: "Today, many of the national security threats we face are of our own making: terrorism breeds on resentment towards continued American support for despotic governments. We must return to our roots as a modest republic and stop meddling in the affairs of other nations across the globe." This would be a more fundamental break with the administration, but it ain't gonna happen.)
Both themes expresses a certain degree of wisdom. But neither is the stuff that dreams, or even doctrines, are made of. They have a "yes, but..." quality to them (as in "yes, let's invade Iraq, but let's get France on board first and make sure we've got a plan for the occupation"), which makes for ineffective political communcation. But more importantly, they're both missing the "vision thing." Bush wants use the military and economic might of the United States to bring democracy to the world, and we want to? Err... um... do so more politely?
Moreover, they reflect, as Dick Cheney would say, a pre-9/11 mindset towards public opinion. We no longer live in a country where most people could care less what goes on outside our borders. (Note that this does mean most people have a reasonable understanding of what goes on outside our borders.) As a result, the bar is raised for Democrats when it comes to national security. Simply appearing credible isn't enough anymore.
What the left, broadly constituted, needs is a foreign policy vision which builds on the obvious criticisms of the administration's policy while also demonstrating our ability to lead. Like the Bush vision, it must be presented, first and foremost, as a strategy for combatting anti-American terrorism, even if -- again, like the Bush vision -- it has other important goals which the public cares little about.
I'm hardly the best person to come up with such a vision, but I'm arrogant enough to try:
"While continuing to use the best intelligence and law enforcment tools available to combat terrorism, the United States must embark on a massive campaign to eliminate the causes of terrorism around the world. The forces of anti-Americanism in the Middle East are strengthened by corrupt governments fed by the outrageous prices we pay for their oil. Terrorists finds recruits among the poor and the desperate, in societies where young men and women have no opportunity to get ahead in life. We must free our nation from the dangerous shackles of dependence on foreign oil, undermining terrorists overseas and creating jobs at home. And we must show the world our generosity by leading a global effort to fund education and economic development in countries with devastating levels of unemployment."
The idea here is to integrate tough, bold, and patriotic language with the Democrats' core appeal on domestic policy: economic fairness. Moreover, it can be tied into a cohesive attack on the Bush administration policy as hypocritical, self-serving, and inconsistent for playing nice with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia while talking about freedom and democracy.
Lest I sound like a starry-eyed leftist, consider Thomas Friedman's column in this Sunday's New York Times:
Yes, there is an alternative to the Euro-wimps and the neocons, and it is the "geo-greens." I am a geo-green. The geo-greens believe that, going forward, if we put all our focus on reducing the price of oil - by conservation, by developing renewable and alternative energies and by expanding nuclear power - we will force more reform than by any other strategy. You give me $18-a-barrel oil and I will give you political and economic reform from Algeria to Iran. All these regimes have huge population bubbles and too few jobs. They make up the gap with oil revenues. Shrink the oil revenue and they will have to open up their economies and their schools and liberate their women so that their people can compete. It is that simple.
I'm not sure it's quite that simple (and I'm not with him on nuclear energy), but it's a damned good start.
]]>Dean enthusiasts are going to be in for a very rude awakening when they discover the DNC's irrelevance in setting the party's message and policy agenda. For the moment, the people to keep an eye on are Pelosi and Reid, both of whom progressives have good reason to be ambivalent towards.
Meanwhile, we need to keep an eye out for good presidential material. As the Dean campaign showed, early grassroots support from progressives can define the primary race. Kerry, Clinton, Bayh, and Biden are all totally unacceptable as political incompetents with blood on their hands when it comes to Iraq. Russ Feingold, who I'm increasingly drawn to, is making noises and being talked about.
]]>]]>"Music," [Jeff Tweedy] explained, "is different" from other intellectual property. Not Karl Marx different - this isn't latent communism. But neither is it just "a piece of plastic or a loaf of bread." The artist controls just part of the music-making process; the audience adds the rest. Fans' imagination makes it real. Their participation makes it live. "We are just troubadours," Tweedy told me. "The audience is our collaborator. We should be encouraging their collaboration, not treating them like thieves."
He uttered this with the passion of a teacher explaining the most fundamental truths. Words echo in this poet's mind many times before they are spoken. These words had echoed many times before. But when I asked him to explain the extremism in this war, passion faded and disbelief took its place. Commenting on a court decision to ban all music sampling without a license, he said one word: racism. And he seemed genuinely confounded by those who use the courts to punish their fans. "If Metallica still needs money," he almost whispered, "then there's something really, really wrong." He would protest this extremism, he explained, by living a different life. By inviting, by creating, by inspiring music, and by ignoring wars about plastic.