Blaming Hillary for Bill
Hillary apologists insist that one shouldn’t hold her responsible for abominations perpetrated by her husband, like the crime bill and the end of welfare. There’s some truth to that; she wasn’t the one with executive power. But she did praise both, extensively. Not only was there her calling ”welfare recipients “deadbeats”—there’s this chilling demand to bring “superpredator” youth “to heel.” Holding her not responsible for Bill also undermines a good bit of the argument for her “experience”—that quality we’re supposed to admire but not examine. As I write in My Turn (pp. 22–25),… Read More
Fresh audio product
Just uploaded to my radio archive: January 28, 2016 Shane Bauer on his imprisonment in Iran and how Hillary Clinton made it worse (with some remarks about solitary in the U.S.) • Jennifer Mittelstadt, author of The Rise of the Military Welfare State, on that, and its privatization from Clinton onwards
Katha Pollitt, 1996 vs. 2016
[What a difference 20 years can make. Here’s the full text of column that Katha Pollitt wrote for The Nation as welfare was being repealed. It’s full of sharp criticism of the Clinton administration, the awfulness of the Dems, the treachery of lesser-evil politics, the limits of elite advocacy—and even a little mockery of Supreme Court fetishism. Today, Katha is a big fan of Hillary Clinton and has forgotten all this. Too bad, because this is very good.] The Nation — August 26-September 2,1996 The Strange Death of Liberal America Katha Pollitt I woke… Read More
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive: January 21, 2016 Adolph Reed on reparations to black Americans (a reaction to this Ta-Nehisi Coates piece; Reed’s 2000 piece on reparations is here) • Steffie Woolhandler of Physicians for a National Health Program on single-payer, Sanders, and Clinton Inc.’s lies January 14, 2016 Isabel Hilton on the Chinese financial melodrama • Chris Maisano (author of this article) on legal challenges to public sector unions January 7, 2016 Jason Williams reports from Oregon on the rancher occupation • Toby Jones on Saudi Arabia
Pollitt responds to my response
Katha Pollitt is out with a response to my response to her review of My Turn. Once again, it’s largely free of any engagement with Hillary Clinton’s political history. It’s a short book, but there is a healthy amount of detail about some rather terrible things she’s done over her four decades in public life. Katha touches briefly on a few, but the blows are merely glancing. I understand why she might not want to engage, since those terrible things undermine some of Hillary’s supporters’ most cherished claims about her, notably all the work she’s done… Read More
SOTU for 9th graders
Back in 2013, I old-fartishly complained about the declining complexity of State of the Union Addresses: Obama is a highly literate and thoughtful guy, yet this speech adhered to the depressingly low standards of American public discourse. It was written at a 10th grade level, slightly below the 11th grade level of his 2009 speech, and even more below the 12th grade level of Clinton’s 1993 state of the union. At least it was above George W’s 9th grade level speech in 2001. (See here for the texts of all State of the Union… Read More
Katha Pollitt on My Turn
Katha Pollitt reviews My Turn in the January 25 issue of The Nation. I suppose it’s undignified for an author to take issue with a reviewer, but I’m confident that I can transcend such petty concerns. I should say right away that Katha is a friend; not only am I very fond of her personally, I’ve admired her writing (both prose and poetry) for more years than either of us would probably like to count. But she got some things wrong, which I will enumerate politely. It’s funny how often defenses of Hillary Clinton begin with confessing a… Read More
Glum job prospects, say officials
On December 8, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its employment projections for the next decade (or 2014–2024 to be precise). They don’t make for happy reading. The Bureau projects GDP growth of 2.2% a year over the decade, well under the 3.6% average that prevailed from 1950–2000, and lower even than the 2.4% average from 2000–2007, a period that contained a recession and the weakest expansion in U.S. history. And they also project that labor force participation (the sum of the employed and those actively looking for work, aka the officially… Read More
Making collective guilt palatable to liberals
Michael Tomasky, whom I’ve known over 20 years—sparring with him much of that time but liking him anyway—just wrote an awful piece which apparently aims to legitimate for liberals assertions of collective Muslim responsibility. Following the lead of the president, himself no stranger to rampant paranoia about Muslims, Tomasky basically tells Muslims to shape up or face Donald Trump. To counter accusations of tendentious paraphrase, let me quote a few choice bits: [Obama] used the usual liberal language about how most Muslims are great, but he also said that religious fundamentalism is “a real… Read More
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive: December 3, 2015 Benjamin Page, co-author of this paper, on the politics of the top 1% • Alfredo Saad Filho on the political and economic crisis in Brazil
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive: November 26, 2015 Jason Moore, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life, criticizes the idea that humans and nature are separate entities • Jennifer Doyle, author of Campus Sex/Campus Security, talks about security, paranoia, sex, and the large public university
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive: November 19, 2015 Yezid Sayigh on ISIS • Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson on efforts to bring sustainability and worker power to the Mississippi economy
POR in the news
I feel guilty about using the tragedy of the Party of the Right threesome gone very wrong to promote my own work, but here are two memoirs of my time in and around the POR. “I was a teen-age reactionary” (Bad Subjects) “Partying on the right” (The Nation)
LBO News from Doug Henwood 
Posted on December 7, 2015 by Doug Henwood
Comment on foundations
There were a couple of calls on Twitter for a transcript of what I said on last week’s radio show, following my interview with Benjamin Page. Page had said in the interview that he couldn’t find any foundations interested in funding research by him and his collaborators into the opinions of the top 1%. I’ve added a link to the Leah Gordon interview, which has a link to her book. I’ve expanded a bit on the original in this version. It’s interesting that the foundations don’t want to support research into the… Read More