New radio product
Freshly posted to my radio archives:
April 16, 2011 Joel Schalit, author of this piece, on Israeli identity and the problems with saying that the country may be turning “fascist” • Michael Heaney, co-author of this paper, on how Obama demobilized the antiwar movement • Roger Lowenstein, author of The End of Wall Street, on the financial crisis and its aftermath
David Brooks can’t add
Fact-checking David Brooks could be a full-time job. Just yesterday, he wrote this about the federal budget problem:
Raising taxes on the rich will not do it. There aren’t enough rich people to generate the tens of trillions of dollars required to pay for Medicare, let alone all the other programs.
Almost every word of this is wrong.
Medicare doesn’t require “tens of trillions,” unless your budget horizon is something like twenty years. This year, Medicare will cost $572 billion. In 2020, according to the CBO, it will cost $949 billion. Over the next ten years, it will cost $7.6 trillion, which isn’t even a ten of trillion, much less “tens of trillions.” (And that doesn’t include “offsetting receipts”—$80 billion this year, and $1.2 trillion over the next ten, which reduce those outlays significantly. Supporting spreadsheet is here.) Right now, the top 1% of the U.S. pop has something like $1.4 trillion in income. The next 4%, $1.3 trillion. The next 5% has almost a trillion. (Computed from Piketty and Saez data here.) In other words, you could entirely fund Medicare by hitting up the top 1% for about a third of its income. Yeah, I know that’s politically impossible, but they’ve got the money—we just can’t have any of it.
As for the rest of it, Social Security is a trivial budget problem, if it’s one at all. Medicaid is a problem, but, as with Medicare, the best way to solve that budgetary problem is with a single-payer system, which wouldn’t require any new tax revenue at all, but would actually save money by eliminating administrative costs.
Brooks has a hard time getting anything straight. Back in 2006, Sasha Issenberg fact-checked his Bobos book and found it rather challenged (“Boo-Boos in Paradise”). Some choice excerpts: “False.” “Entirely manufactured.” “[I]t became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home.” “Brooks, however, does more than popularize inaccessible academic work; he distorts it.” “Brooks satisfies the features desk’s appetite for scholarly authority in much the same way that Jayson Blair fed the newsroom’s compulsion for scoops.”
For some reason, though, the New York Times seems to think that giving op-ed space to this mediocre fiction writer is an apotropaic charm against being accused of liberalism. And for some other reasons, liberals find Brooks to be a tolerable conservative, presumably because he doesn’t move his lips when he reads. But, really, never believe anything this guy says without checking his sources. Newspaper editors were once expected to do that sort of thing, but some combination of economic pressure and ideological anxiety earns Brooks a pass.
Against catastrophism
This is the text of my introduction to a panel on catastrophism that (Catastrophism and the Crisis of the Left) that I MC’d at the Left Forum, March 19, 2011, at Pace University, New York.
Events in Japan have gotten me thinking about crises in general. At first, I thought that it might promote the realization that finding clean, renewable forms of energy may the most urgent task facing us today. But then I thought back a bit to other energy-related crises. One of my beefs with the peak oilers, aside from the empirical one in which I suspect that they’re just wrong about hydrocarbon production, is that impending scarcity doesn’t make people more amenable to rational argument—it inclines them to desperate measures. Polls (e.g. U.S. Oil Drilling Gains Favor With Americans) now show more Americans support offshore drilling and opening up the Alaska wilderness to oil exploration than have in a long time. The BP spill had no lasting effect. Gas over $3.00 a gallon is a far more potent influence on public opinion than is a fading memory of dead fish thousands of miles away. Of course its effects were a lot more profoundly damaging than that, but that’s the way memory treats it now—memory in the sense less of recalling events than as some sort of psychological defense mechanism. Besides, in the words of the wonderful poet A.R. Ammons, who wouldn’t turn up the voltage when you know the lights are going out?
That, of course, is a set-up for talking about economic crisis. Back about 20 years ago, as the manic leveraging of the 1980s was being undone in a long recession, many people expected the worst. Around 1991 it became clear to me that the worst wasn’t going to happen. I wrote a piece about that for Left Business Observer (“After non-collapse”) and my friend Patrick Bond wrote me a letter—quaintly, one inscribed on paper—imploring me, “Say it ain’t so!” He just didn’t want to believe that this wasn’t the Big One.
Of course, we’ve just gone through a bigger one. The recent economic crisis has caused a lot of juices to run on the political left. For the last couple of years, as it looked like both the financial system and real economy were in meltdown—a curious word, given the news from Japan—a certain subset of radicals have been very excited. For years, many of them have hoped for some sort of bone-crunching crisis, some rerun of the 1930s, that might have fortunate political effects.
The mechanisms of that fortunate transformation are rarely specified, but presumably they invovle some sort of productive disillusionment. The masses, once duped by a plenitude of consumer goods supplemented with a lot of snazzy ideology produced by the consciousness industry, would come to their senses once that narcotic flow was interrupted. Presumably, that coming to sense would involve an embrace of some sort of anti-capitalist agenda, and not some desperate longing to return to the status quo ante. Given the absence of any widespread radical critique or organization going into the crisis, it’s not clear how those would suddenly materialize in the midst of one, but no matter. This is a story of some magical intervention, a deus ex machina that would do the work that all our efforts at agitation to date have yet to accomplish.
That has not happened yet, neither here nor anywhere. That’s not surprising, since the historical evidence mostly shows that crises are good for the right, not the left. Crises make people want to retreat to the familiar, not strike out in new directions. So here and in many other places around the world, we’re seeing an upsurge in nativism and xenophobia, not solidarity. The 1930s were an exception, but that’s because things got really really awful then, with the unemployment rate maxing out at 25%. Times have been bad here lately, but nothing like that. Do we really want to see the unemployment rate more than double because it might be good for politics?
Ok, events in Wisconsin are encouraging—though recall that they’re in reaction to the ascendancy of a very right-wing governor. I do hope that this upsurge continues, and spreads. But there’s a risk that it will get siphoned off into support for Democrats, who, if they find their way back into power, will just do watered-down versions of the Gov. Walker agenda.
And now we’re seeing pronouncements from some very smart people who are saying that the economy will never recover. Maybe it won’t; I presume, against all recent evidence, that capitalism isn’t an eternal social formation. But you’ve got to hand it to the thing—it’s been remarkably inventive over the centuries. To read some of the gloomsters, you’d think that capitalism hasn’t been able to generate any growth for the seven or eight centuries of its existence. I think it’s a very unwise move to bet against its resilience.
We need a critique of capitalism that works when the thing is doing reasonably well, which it does most of the time. Because when it’s doing well, it’s still appalling: unstable, destructive, alienating, and violent. If you can’t devise an indictment of capitalism when things are going well—meaning that there are no visible threats to its reproduction from day to day—then you might as well give up. Because it’s going to outwit you.
New radio product
Freshly posted to my radio archives:
April 9, 2011 Carrie Lane, author of A Company of One, on how unemployed tech workers see themselves (as heroic, self-reliant questers, mostly) • Adolph Reed on the uselessness of TV liberals, the limits of spontaneity in politics, and the sponginess of race as a politlcal and analytical category
Susie Bright & me, tonight
I’ll be interviewing Susie Bright about sex, politics, and memory, to celebrate the publication of her book, Big Sex, Little Death. Tonight at 7, at the Strand Bookstore, 828 Broadway (at 12th St.), Manhattan.
The Strand event page: Strand Books.
WBAI not paying Chuck D
So the person who “confirmed” to me that WBAI was paying Chuck D $2,000 a week mistyped: he said “Chuck D is getting $2,000 a week” when he meant to say “Chuck D is not getting $2,000 a week.” What a difference four keystrokes make. He was getting $2,000 a month until October 2010; now he’s getting nothing. He’s still not fundraising, though.
Sorry.
Another purge at WBAI
WBAI’s program director Tony Bates has ousted another critic of his fondness for quackery and conspiracy theories: Bill Weinberg’s Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade has been “terminated.” Read about it here.
It’s highly likely that these purges—coming along with those at KPFA (recap here)—are being directed by Pacifica management. It all makes me wonder how much longer I’ll be on at KPFA.
So a radio network with strong signals in five major metropolitan areas, with the capacity to reach about 20% of the U.S. population on terrestrial radio, is being turned over to advocates of chemtrails, 9/11 lunacy, oregano oil, and elixirs that can nearly kill their creator (if you get the wrong batch).
New radio product
Freshly posted to my radio archives:
March 19, 2011 Abe Sauer, who’s been covering Wisconsin for The Awl, on Walker, the protests, privatization • Steve Early, author of The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor, on the fights in & around Andy Stern’s SEIU
More Zimbabwe solidarity
Scott McLemee asked me to circulate this, as a follow-up to this post from earlier in the week: Solidarity With Zimbabwean Political Prisoners. They’re getting screwed and they need support.
Me at Bluestockings…
…though just as supporting cast: Sasha Lilley, Greg Albo, and me, talking about Sasha’s book Capital and its Discontents: Conversations with Radical Thinkers in a Time of Tumult, a collection of her excellent interviews for Against the Grain.
Sunday, March 20, 7–9 PM
Bluestockings
172 Allen St, New York
More info here.
Me at Left Forum
I’m on three – count ’em, three! – panels at this weekend’s Left Forum:
Catastrophism and the Crisis of the Left
E. Panel Session 2—Saturday 12:00 p.m. – 1:50 p.m., W626
Sponsored by: Retort
• Doug Henwood—Left Business Observer
• Eddie Yuen—San Francisco Art Institute
• James Davis—Retort
• Ramsey Kanaan—PM Press, Retort
• Sasha Lilley—Retort, Spectre
Post-Financial Crisis: Neoliberalism and the Global Economic Recovery
O. Panel Session 7—Sunday 3:00 p.m. – 4:50 p.m., student union
• David Harvey—Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center; Author, A Companion to Marx’s Capital
• Doug Henwood—Left Business Observer
• Mark Weisbrot—Center for Economic and Policy Research
…and, just added to the program because of the recent death of the great Bob Fitch (and not yet in the official listing):
Bob Fitch: A Retrospective
Session 6, Sunday 12-2 PM, W618
• Stephen Eric Bronner-Rutgers
• Doug Henwood—Left Business Observer
• Manny Ness-Brooklyn College
• Michael Hirsch-UFT
• Christian Parenti-journalist
• Jane LaTour-journalist
Please come!
My tribute to Bob Fitch
My tribute to Bob Fitch, who died on March 4, is now up at The Nation‘s website: “Remembering Robert Fitch.”
Solidarity with Zimbabwean political prisoners
[Scott McLemee asked me to circulate this.]
Six people in Zimbabwe are now imprisoned on charges of treason for organizing a meeting to discuss the mass movements in Tunisia and Egypt. For this “crime” they face a possible death sentence. They have been tortured and are now in solitary confinement.
An international day of action to demand their release will be held on Monday, March 21, when they are scheduled for a court hearing.
Our message is simple and urgent: We demand that the government of Zimbabwe drop all charges and release them immediately.
Plans are underway for demonstrations in a number of countries. We urge concerned people everywhere to join us in organizing meetings and demonstrations in solidarity with the prisoners. Please translate and distribute this appeal as widely as possible. Let us know know what you are doing at the contact addresses below.
The worldwide significance of the struggle to free the Zimbabwean prisoners is reflected in a recent statement of support from the Congress of South African Trade Unions. “The Egyptian and Tunisian experience have inspired many workers and poor people all over the world to stand up and demand an end to dictatorship, corruption and injustice of whatever kind.”
The arrest and prosecution of the six may seem like only the latest round of repression by Robert Mugabe’s government against opponents. But it is also an attack on the spirit of Tahrir Square, which has inspired people all over the world. The six prisoners include trade unionists, intellectuals, and activists in the struggle for women’s rights. The effort to suppress them – and even to kill them, whether by execution or through torture and denial of medical treatment while in custody – is a vicious assault on all of us.
To learn more about the six prisoners and the struggle for their release, see the website Free Them Now! and the Facebook group (open to non-Facebook users) Calling for the release of Zimbabwean Activists.
To join the March 21 actions, please send a message to both of these addresses: Zim Treason Trial and Solidarity.
Meanwhile at KPFA…
Two updates on the KPFA situation (and apologies to those of you who find Pacifica news sleep-inducing):
• A few weeks ago, I reposted the news, which I originally got from KPFA Worker, that “Amit Pendyal resigned because Pacifica executive director Arlene Engelhardt wouldn’t let him do his job.” Official circles denied this. An example of such: WBAI board chair Mitch Cohen commented, “[H]ere’s what a member of the KPFA Board just wrote to me when I inquired: ‘It’s not true. He is still on the job, despite efforts by Doug’s allies to exasperate him enough to quit….’” Now comes this oddly worded news from Engelhardt, in an email to the KPFA staff: “I received word from Amit last week that he will not be able to return as General Manager at KPFA.” Sure looks like the original report was right.
• A few months ago, Engelhardt fired the old paid Morning Show staff and replaced them with volunteers, including 9/11 Truther Peter Phillips. That saved the station about $80,000 a year. But in the recent fund drive, pledges during the morning drive time—for which the Morning Show was the anchor—were down by $139,000. Details here.
WBAI fundraiser: snake oil sells
WBAI—where I used to do my radio show until program director Tony Bates got other ideas—just finished a fundraiser. Management—meaning Bates, station manager Berthold Reimers, and local board chair Mitch Cohen—have been bragging about its success, and the station’s return to financial health. Close examination of the results make you doubt this analysis.
Management has circulated a spreadsheet showing the fundraising results by show. Here it is, for those wanting to score at home (and those are my calculations of the Null vs. ex-Null performance at the bottom of the sheet called “Details2”—the rest is the original doc):
Yes, the station surpassed its $800,000 goal, by almost $30,000. But the entire reason they did was the return of health pundit (and AIDS denialist) Gary Null. Null brought in over $300,000, or 37% of the total. They ran his show, live and reruns, for 99 hours—four full days out of twenty-two. If you turned on WBAI at any time during the marathon, you had a 1-in-6 chance of hearing the voice of this snake oil salesman, a man who was nearly killed by consuming one of his poorly manufactured supplements.
Had the time occupied by Null pulled in pledges at the average for the non-Null segments, the fundraiser would have fallen $150,000 short of its goal. And some of those non-Null segments did very poorly. The morning drive-time show, which should really pull it in because that’s when radio audiences are typically their largest, raised just $1,218 an hour, 60% less than Null and 8% below the marathon’s average. My replacement, Robert Knight, who was given four days a week between 5 and 6 PM, raised $1,434 an hour, which is what I used to raise on a bad day, and about half what I averaged. Bates had said that he wanted star power in that time slot, and it looks like he’s gotten anything but. And Bates’s own special, which was no doubt very special, raised a middling $1,575 an hour.
So while Null’s return looks to have saved WBAI’s financial ass, it’s not a sign of a healthy station that over a third of its income now comes from the frequently repeated exhortations of a man who believes that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS.
LBO News from Doug Henwood 