Archive for the 'USA' Category

It would give people something to talk about on Twitter?

Published
by
Mark
2 weeks, 4 days ago
in Politics and USA
. 28 Comments

Years ago, many political scientists in the US used to critique their rather free flowing party system for not offering voters a definite programmatic contest. In post-war normative democratic theory, parties were seen as able to organise and coalesce a range of interests and measures into a competing platforms which would enable citizens to make a rational choice in voting.

Of course, now that one of the two parties has started to act much more like the disciplined parliamentary caucuses found in Westminster democracies, not everyone is so enamoured of this notion.

But it’s interesting to see a bit of momentum building for a Question Time in the US, which would represent a distinctly different relation between the executive and legislature.

I wonder, though, whether many of its proponents have taken the time to watch Australia’s Question Time, or Britain’s Prime Minister’s Questions.

Teach for Queensland

Published
by
Mark
3 weeks ago
in Education, Politics, Queensland and USA
. 113 Comments

The Queensland government is pondering the introduction of the ‘Teach for Australia‘ model into state schools. The idea, trialled in Victoria and inspired by an American programme, is to fast track graduates with Bachelor’s degrees in any discipline into classrooms after six weeks’ training, with subsequent training delivered while they’re in the workforce.

I’ve been teaching at tertiary level for over a decade, I’ve taught Education students, and I’ve got family and friends who are or have been teachers. I don’t think I’d feel at all confident about going into a classroom after six weeks with a PhD as well as a few other degrees! – I’d be very well aware that I know little about child psychology and development, or classroom and behaviour management, let alone bearing the very weighty responsibilities for students’ well being and health and safety. I doubt all that could be taught in six weeks, and I doubt that you can learn it effectively through some sort of apprenticeship model, no matter how many ‘guides’ and ‘mentors’ you have.

University faculties, to my certain knowledge, already have great difficulty placing students on prac because of the additional workload on their classroom teachers, and stories about the difficulties involved are legion from teachers, academic supervisors and education students.

I believe there’s been no evaluation of the Victorian programme yet, and it’s not hard to see this as a simplistic twist on the movie fantasy of idealistic teacher saves poor kids’ lives script. The reality is that, no matter how idealistic, beginning graduate teachers have a high propensity to leave the profession in their initial years, because they’re already not adequately supported. Similarly, what disadvantaged schools need is stability, experience and professional skills in the workforce, and the fact that’s hard to secure is probably the real justification for Anna Bligh’s consideration of this policy.

How this all meshes in with Bligh’s overall goal of more rigorous teacher registration and qualifications is also a question still to be answered.

As well as insulting the professionalism of teachers, this also cynically cheapens the idealism of those who might be attracted to the programme in the cause of saving Bligh’s electoral skin. It’s particularly depressing because her earlier contribution to school education in Queensland, though susceptible to a range of legitimate criticisms, was the outstanding contribution she’d made as a Minister.

Stuff white people do; or when flying a plane into a building isn’t terrorism

Published
by
Kim
3 weeks, 1 day ago
in Disasters, Language, Media, Politics, Terrorism and USA
. 83 Comments

So the Unabomber of the Obama era (or should that be the Tea Party era?), Joe Stack, flew a plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. And there’s a rant on the intertubes to justify his deed.

But, it’s not terrorism, apparently.

raving black lunatic asks a series of questions, including but not limited to this one:

How can you fly a plane into a building out of spite, and have folks call it “suicide by plane?” That’s like calling it “suicide by portable chest bomb.”

Though for a truly bizarre discussion, you might want to consult Australia’s own Catallaxy Files.

Palin’s primary path

Published
by
Mark
1 month ago
in Foreign Elections and USA
. 38 Comments

If you like stats and maps, you should have a look at Nate Silver’s post on Sarah Palin’s chances in the primaries in 2012.

Silver doesn’t mention this explicitly, but what jumps out at me is the sheer irrationality of the primary process – so much depends on the order in which states vote and the nature of the vote (ie closed or open primary, caucus). Then there’s the unrepresentativeness of some of the states which are most important in the primaries by size and demographics, not to mention the fact that primaries tend to privilege an electorate which is closer to the ideological extreme than those voters who will actually decide the general election. All of that applies to the Democrats too, of course, but it’s unlikely they’ll have competitive Presidential primaries in 2012.

Obama’s real world economic experiment

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in Economics, International, Markets and USA
. 71 Comments

Responding to the loss of Ted Kennedy’s Massachussetts Senate seat to Republican Scott Brown, Barack Obama is set to announce a three year discretionary spending freeze. (Note that military spending is apparently compulsory not discretionary.)

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.Com thinks that the move is, politically speaking, a “brain freeze”. He also queries “the wisdom of curtailing government spending in the middle of a massive consumption deficit”.

Obama’s move will placate ‘Blue Dog Democrats’, including champion deficit hawk Evan Bayh of Indiana, whose seat is looking shaky. In a broader sense, it’s further evidence of the triumph of politics over economics, albeit in a somewhat different register; a return to a sort of pre-Keynesian mindset, or Maggie Thatcher’s petit bourgeois rhetoric of ‘household budgets’ without the monetarism.

David Dayen:

Obama is basically saying that the stimulus fixed the economy, that there will be no further government support measures and that he’ll govern like a hybrid of John McCain and Herbert Hoover for the rest of his term to curry favor with the deficit maniacs.

Andrew Leonard at How The World Works:

If ever there was a time to pull out the old Karl Marx chestnut, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce,” that moment is now. Prominent members of Obama’s own administration have warned against repeating the errors of 1937, namely, Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to cut spending and balance the budget too quickly, thus strangling a nascent recovery from the Great Depression. But with the U.S. economy far from healthy, the president has decided, once again, to bow to the political winds and make the deficit priority number one.

It’s also the effective decoupling of the US from the G20 stimulus agenda, and further proof that America is mired in the politics of domestic decline. What happens to a globalised economy when the globalisers opt out?

Incidentally, this is additionally the sort of policy u-turn the Coalition in Australia have long been advocating. If further sclerotic growth, or even a double dip recession in America, is the result, it won’t be without its ramifications for the political debate here.

Update: Robert Reich on how Obama’s political panic could ruin the economy.

Update: Michael Lind.

Update: Brad DeLong: This is such a disaster in the making.

Update: Krugman: Obama Liquidates Himself.

Bernanke’s confirmation in doubt

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in International, Markets, Politics and USA
. 15 Comments

A number of US financial blogs are reporting that Ben Bernanke faces a chance of failure to be confirmed by the American Senate for a second term in office.

James Bianco at The Big Picture has all the details, and there’s also coverage at Naked Capitalism.

What’s the big picture here?

On the short term political front, Scott Brown’s win in Massachussetts exemplifies the frustration felt by many with politics as usual. Whether it’s expressed as concern over deficits (and that’s a much more salient touch point with Indendent voters on health care than the rhetoric of the wingnuts), or just as disgust with the jobless recovery’s disjunction with business as usual on Wall Street, there’s no doubt that an election year is starting to focus minds on the politics of financial decision making.

… and that brings us to the bigger picture. Continue reading ‘Bernanke’s confirmation in doubt’

Democracy, we hardly knew ye

Published
by
Mercurius
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Law, Politics and USA
. 43 Comments

In a 5-4 decision, the US Supreme Court has brought down a ruling that puts paid to the existing framework for campaign financing, enabling unfettered donations and financing for corporations and labor (sic) organizations (sic).

Unless Congress finds a way to regulate campaign financing in a manner that the SCOTUS finds Constitutionally acceptable, there can be no legislative roadblocks to the buying and selling of candidates and legislation.

At last, all Americans have achieved equality before the law: One Dollar, One Vote.

Well, at least it’s out in the open now. The legal inviolability of corporate personhood ensures that Flesh-Americans can have all the freedom they want, as long as they don’t tread on the toes of the Leviathans who will henceforth determine who governs and what laws they enact.

This Democracy is proudly brought to you by the good people at Blue Cross, Altria, Exxon, Pfizer, the NRA and Wal-Mart.

Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat lost: The politics of anti-politics

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Culture, Foreign Elections, Politics and USA
. 88 Comments

News is just coming in that Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts has been lost by the Democrat, Martha Coakley, to the Republicans’ Scott Brown. FiveThirtyEight.Com has the margin at 52-47 and that blog will be well worth watching for analysis and breakdown of the result.

Writing for Crikey today, David Hirst observes:

Luckily for the Republicans, who doubted they had a chance at taking a seat Ted Kennedy had held for 47 years, they nominated a nobody called Scott Brown who drove a truck — a fact the Democrats somehow allowed to become an issue. Naturally Brown, equipped with political advisers as the Republicans smelled not blood but a bloodbath, drove at their behest to Wall Street, where he somehow managed to park.

It wasn’t a huge issue but it played well — the message presumably was that sophisticated people from places such as Boston were not represented by folks who drove trucks. Kennedy sure didn’t drive a truck.

The shell-shocked mainstream media better get used to it, for there are many shocks to come. That the Republicans had the sense to see “truck” and “Wall Street” and bring the two to one was clever indeed.

His analysis suggests that the result is born of the sentiment of a plague on the US political classes, bailing out banks with abandon, but doing nothing perceptible for ‘Main Street’, and the straightened economic circumstances many Americans face after the GFC. He also suggests the Republicans will be emboldened to escalate their anti-Obama rhetoric, but that they themselves have nothing effective to offer; short of pandering to anti-government sentiments deeply embedded in American political culture.

In truth, the US party system is incapable of doing anything other than slightly tacking in the direction of popular sentiment; something confounded by the hyperbolic checks and balances, whose frustration of a majority in the Senate is precisely what made this special election so important.

Previous discussion on LP: Here.

Update: Nate Silver on the swing.

Haiti

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Disasters, International, Media and USA
. 45 Comments

Numerous stories on Australian television tonight indicated that aid, rescue efforts, and medical care are all reaching Haitians belatedly, very inadequately, and in a somewhat disorganised fashion. The logistical and other challenges involved in responding to a catastrophe of this magnitude are, of course, considerable. However, La Figa cites a number of reports which have not been widely disseminated in the US and other western media*:

Flights with aid, support and life saving equipment from other nations are being turned away from the airport as thousands of armed US and US troops arrive.

Full details are here. If accurate, this is very disturbing.

Previous LP discussion of the Haitian earthquake is here.

*Update: But see also this comment from jo.

Elsewhere: The latest from Médecins Sans Frontières.

Update [dk.au]: The Boston Globe has an amazing photo editor. They’ve compiled this series of photos (via Global Soc Prof)

A byelection to watch

Published
by
Robert Merkel
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Elections, Foreign policy and USA
. 48 Comments

The chances of the United States doing anything on climate change – not to mention anything sensible on myriad domestic problems – might be about to take a beating.

Unlike most US states where the state governor can appoint a replacement Senator if they resign or die in office, Massachusetts is holding a “special election” to replace the late Ted Kennedy. Under normal circumstances, you’d expect the Democrat to be a shoo-in. The other senator was 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry. They hold the governorship, every House of Representatives district, a 144-16 majority in the state lower house, and a 35-5 majority in the state upper house. But some polls have Republican Scott Brown leading Democrat Martha Coakley by a few percentage points. Voluntary voting, and the rarity of byelections in the USA, make it somewhat difficult to read; Nate Silver at fivethirstyeight.com calls it a toss-up.

Why? Coakley isn’t apparently the world’s most charismatic candidate. There’s a bit of stench surrounding the local Democratic party. Republicans are trying to make the case that it’s about opposition to the health care plan, currently in limbo as the House and Senate sort themselves out. And, finally, there’s probably a general throw-the-bums-out anti-incumbent angst going on, given the extended US recession and the lack of perceived action on it.

Regardless, Barack Obama’s freedom of action – already limited by what he can persuade “Blue Dog” Democrats to vote for in Congress – might just become even more limited. Democrats will still hold the White House, the House of Representatives, and 59 of the 100 Senate votes. But the rules of the Senate mean that the Republican minority can filibuster anything – and, under the current rules, they don’t even have to physically perform a filibuster.

Hence, climate change legislation might just get a lot harder to pass.

Update [by MB]: New post on the result of the special election.

The Tobin Tax and the GFC

Published
by
Mark
2 months ago
in Economics, Elections, International, Markets, Politics and USA
. 3 Comments

In a recent post, I observed that the momentum for systemic reform and coordinated international regulation of the financial sector, pursued through the G20 in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, appeared to have stalled. In that context, it was interesting to read an interview in yesterday’s Financial Review with Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the IMF, where he observed that there was a need for some sort of revenue raising for a fund to draw on for future stabilisation measures.

He didn’t explicitly refer to a Tobin Tax, but I suspect that’s what he had in mind, and it’s something that has popped up higher on the agenda over 2008 and 2009. So it’s worthwhile to point to a comprehensive article by John Langmore in Inside Story on just that measure.

From my point of view, one key advantage of a tax on cross border financial transactions would be its contribution to transparency and thus the ability of states (and others) more easily to grasp what’s occurring in the ’shadow banking’ sector. Whether or not future bank bailouts are politically feasible is another question entirely. I suspect that might be political suicide in the USA, no matter how dire another financial shock.

And, incidentally, when the Democrats inevitably lose Senate seats in November, it will become more or less impossible for anything of any size to pass the US Congress.

Two strikes against ‘extreme capitalism’

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 1 week ago
in Economics, International, Markets, Politics and USA
. 23 Comments

As Derek Barry observes in a comprehensive post, the Productivity Commission has weakened its recommendations on corporate governance and remuneration. Business groups were reportedly complaining about ‘risk’ and ‘uncertainty’. (Intriguingly, those appear to be two of the most common litanies of lamentation from biz lobbies, despite the fact that they’re meant to be intrinsic to the operation of markets.)

Unions aren’t happy. Writing in The Australian today, the CFMEU’s John Sutton sees:

Kevin Rudd’s grand treatise on the failures of capitalism a few months into the global financial crisis ending with a whimper rather than a roar.

Sutton questions whether measures discussed in response to the GFC (over and above questions of executive pay and bonuses) amounted to very much. It’s an eminently reasonable question to pose.

I suspect that the economic situation in Australia has allowed Labor politicians to retreat from their previous rhetoric. In Britain, where things are still much more dire, Gordon Brown’s government has responded with limitations on bankers’ bonuses, in the lead up to this year’s election, which Labour is expected to lose. In the US, Barack Obama has continued with the big bail out of everything Wall Street, handing the Republicans a useful weapon for the 2010 midterms.

It’s an intriguing contrast.

It’s also intriguing to note that discussion of all the ‘toxic debt’ unaccounted for has gone completely missing, unless I’m missing something.

Update: The Tobin Tax and the GFC.

After Copenhagen II: Whither progressive politics?

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 3 weeks ago
in Climate change, International, Policy, Politics and USA
. 26 Comments

A predictable response to the Copenhagen fail has been calls from Australian business for *even more* ‘compensation’ as a condition for continued support of the Rudd government’s ETS. I’ll save the domestic politics of the Copenhagen washup for a later post, but I think it’s also worth reflecting on what underlies the sort of political and policy thinking which leads to bills such as the CPRS.

In my previous post, I reproduced Brian Davey’s piece from Open Democracy, which expressed skepticism about the capacities of the political system to deal with complex phenomena, permeating all sectors of the economy and lifeworld, such as climate change. I agree with the diagnosis, but I think that a different mode of politics could find solutions.

There are three similarities between the design of the CPRS and the American Health bill (and for that matter, the US cap and trade bills):

(a) Both started out with an ambit, seeking to find the limits of giveaways and concessions to political and particularly corporate constituencies; rather than from the position of a solution;

(b) Similarly, both come with implicit rhetoric that any action is a good start, and a messy compromise can later be made purer and more effective;

(c) Both seek to accommodate existing interests and shift behaviour only at the margins, rather than constructing a new frame which would require actors to reconfigure behaviours, and create new actors (and destroy or reshape old ones).

In short, this sort of approach to governance is inherently conservative, in that it seeks to match political imperatives to already existing situations, rather than to transform the situation politically. This tends not to work, for reasons which are fairly obvious. Yet, notions like ‘nudge’ and using quasi-markets to achieve social ends are the hallmarks of postmodern progressive policy wonk-dom.

Continue reading ‘After Copenhagen II: Whither progressive politics?’

After Copenhagen

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 3 weeks ago
in Climate change, Developing world, Disasters, Economics, Energy, Environment, Imperialism, International, Politics, Sociology and USA
. 39 Comments

In the wake of the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Change conference, we’re starting to see some more thoughtful analyses which go beyond the proximate causes of the imbroglio to gesture to more structural factors. Robert has already cited George Monbiot’s recent blog post.

I’d like to take a look at a couple of other articles. Naomi Klein, writing for The Guardian, argues that Barack Obama was at fault. Anticipating criticism about the difficulties of getting anything through the US Senate, she nevertheless claims that Obama missed several opportunities to put climate change response much higher on the agenda, at a time when he still had massive political capital. There’s a real sense in which this is true, but Klein doesn’t search for the underlying reasons why Obama has acted the way he has, which go beyond the reflex accusations of being a sell-out (‘triangulating wolf in the guise of a liberal sheep’, you know the drill).

We’ve all been somewhat misled by the Obama as Bush antidote theme. George W. Bush’s regime, in many ways, was the last gasp of an Imperial ideology of leading the free world, or of making war on bits of it to make them free. The collapse of the conjuring trick which was supposed to pay for all this, and the increasing realisation that the US couldn’t make its desire reality purely by will (expressed through military force and propaganda) determines the conjuncture which Obama inherited. There’s a tendency to look to him as if he will actually give flesh to the bones of the carcass of the myth of American benevolence. But, in fact, his task is managing America’s decline. Thus, his actual behaviour, as opposed to his flights of rhetoric, demonstrates that America is now a nation among nations, looking to protect its own national interest rather than project some sort of salvational salve for the world’s woes. That should have been evident from Copenhagen.

It’s important to look beyond the quotidian, and understand that the sands of political economy were actually shifting beneath the feet of the delegates and negotiators at COP. That also implies that assumptions about a future based on straight extrapolation from the position pre-Copenhagen may be as dangerous as the assumption that climate change is itself a linear process, rather than the interaction of many complex factors and systems, human and non-human. While I don’t necessarily accept all that he argues, that necessary perspective is well displayed by ecological economist Brian Davey, writing at Open Democracy. With permission, under a Creative Commons licence, I’ve reproduced his piece over the fold. It provides much food for thought, as we come to grips with our collective responsibility to shape the planet’s future.

[Please click through to the original article for hyperlinks and diagrams.]

Continue reading ‘After Copenhagen’

Is Copenhagen’s failure our fault?

Published
by
Robert Merkel
2 months, 3 weeks ago
in China, Climate change, Developing world, International and USA
. 113 Comments

Whether the Copenhagen Accord is half full or half empty is still being debated. Joe Romm takes says the glass is actually 2/3rds full. But as to why the glass isn’t completely full, George Monbiot makes the provocative claim that in part, we are responsible:

So what happens now? That depends on the other non-player at Copenhagen: you. For the past few years good, liberal, compassionate people – the kind who read the Guardian – have shaken their heads and tutted and wondered why someone doesn’t do something. Yet the number taking action has been pathetic. Demonstrations which should have brought millions on to the streets have struggled to mobilise a few thousand. As a result the political cost of the failure at Copenhagen is zero. Where are you.

Is this music not to your taste, sir, or madam? Perhaps you would like our little orchestra to play something louder, to drown out that horrible grinding noise.

Continue reading ‘Is Copenhagen’s failure our fault?’