President Richard Nixon once observed, “Flexibility is the first principle of politics.” But that brings up [...]]]>

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. – Matthew 6:24

President Richard Nixon once observed, “Flexibility is the first principle of politics.” But that brings up something I notice about some right-wing antagonists: how lithe they are in debate.

It is behavior progressive talk show hosts know well, particularly when it comes to hot-button social issues. Right-wing callers dial in hoping to score a few on-air points against the liberal. If one tack isn’t working, they quickly pivot and launch into another argument they hope will get more traction – the first was disposable. And then another, almost as if they are getting paid by the talking point. These exercises are not about the truth, or even about being right. This is about winning.

There is something else that enhances their flexibility: the unholy marriage of Christianity, libertarianism and Austrian economics. What the latter two have to do with Jesus is beyond me, but the order of argument depends on the particular bent of the person doing the arguing. It goes something like this:

When it is convenient to argue from Christian morality, they argue morality. If that isn’t scoring points, they change the subject and argue personal freedom. And if that isn’t getting traction, they switch to free-market economics. And if that isn’t working, it is back to morality, or else cry socialism. This is the rock-paper-scissors of right-wing rhetoric.

I got into an online debate with a tea party supporter over the proposed Arizona law allowing employers with moral objections to opt out of offering employee insurance plans that include contraception coverage. I asked, as an employer, how it is any of my business how employees spend the compensation they’ve earned and, in a contractual arrangement, I agreed to pay? Well, first it was about freedom, then it was about morality (and hair-splitting about whether employer or employee buys coverage with the employee’s earnings), then it was about how the government offering employer tax benefits distorts the free market.

For all the moral posturing, why is it that economics dominates right-wing debates about values?

As a businessman, I am also free today not to have any employees or to offer any benefits besides cash if my morality is that big an issue. Just because there is a tax advantage doesn’t mean the government is holding a gun to my head to take it. If I have moral qualms and will lose sleep over it, I am free to drop the health benefit altogether – and if I am a free market supplicant, let the free market have its ever-lovin’ undistorted way with me. But by my choices people will know which I value more, my morals or my money.

That sort of world exists, you know. The Amish eschew electricity and automobiles out of their sense of morality. They freely choose to limit interactions with the rest of society and with the government, and that’s just fine by them. And they freely accept the consequences for their lifestyle and their bottom line. They don’t need to spout off about their values on TV and talk radio because they are too busy living them and letting the “English” live theirs. They refuse to compromise their beliefs to improve their social status, or to gain political power, or to impose their views on others, or to build their portfolios and boost the bottom line. Because their beliefs are their bottom line.

So, you want a society as free as possible from government interference – a real one, not a fictional one? (And with less anarchy than Somalia?) Where families are stable, where everybody looks like you and shares your Christian faith, where peer pressure, not law, keeps people in line, and where the government pretty much stays out of your business? Well, there it is, not in some Randian fantasy, but in Lancaster County, PA and Holmes County, Ohio.

Go for it. Show us all what you really value.

And that’s my sermon.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

Two items in the news underscore the situation. A special issue of Conscience  magazine questions whether the Obama administration’s [...]]]> One of the consequences of the creeping Religious Rightism in the Democratic Party has been the steady erosion of reproductive rights and access to reproductive health care for women, especially abortion care.  

Two items in the news underscore the situation. A special issue of Conscience  magazine questions whether the Obama administration’s policies can be considered prochoice.  And an article in the Los Angeles Times, outlining the current “torrent” of draconian antiabortion legislation being proposed, and sometimes enacted in the states.  The latter is, of course, but an indicator of the still-cresting wave of state level anti-abortion public policy work in the generation since the Casey decision of the Supreme Court, which allowed considerable, medically unnecessary, state regulation of access to abortion care.

Journalist Jodie Jacobson, writing in Conscience, reviews the highlights of Obama’s prochoice 2008 campaign stances and his record so far as president and concludes,

“The president has presided over the greatest erosion to women’s reproductive health and rights in the past 30 years, and a continuing degradation of our rights at the state level.”

None of this will surprise those who have been following Democratic Party’s dubious “faith outreach” schemes — which have sought to attract antiabortion Catholics and evangelicals,  while mostly ignoring, and marginalizing the prochoice religious community. In terms of policy, this has also led to what could be generously described as inattention to the steady decline in access to abortion services in most of the country.

Towards this end, we have seen a down playing of the so-called “culture wars” to the point of claiming, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the Religious Right is dead or dying, and that the culture wars themselves are over or just about.  This has been accompanied by calls by political consultants for eliding the phrase separation of church and state from the vocabulary of Democratic candidates for federal office because it is not in the Constitution; and even unsupported claims by some faith leaders and even candidate Obama that “secularists” are driving religious people from public life.  

All this is part of the context of the way the antiabortion term and elements of the agenda of “abortion reduction” have emerged in the Democratic Party.  In 2006, for example, a Party faith outreach consultant Eric Sapp, declared at an event sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life:  

On abortion you are seeing a shift within the Democratic Party in the way they’re talking about the issue. Talking about abortion reduction is a very effective political step, but it also moves the discussion forward; it wasn’t just talk. In the House two different legislative packages were proposed that would have truly targeted many of the core causes of abortion. It would not completely end abortion, but it would do a whole lot better than we’re doing right now.

More recently, a staffer at the liberal Washington, DC think tank Faith in Public Life claimed that the Democratic Party platform and candidate Barack Obama in his 2008 Party convention speech specifically supported “abortion reduction,” when in fact, neither was the case. The candidate and the Party promised something much different.  

Nevertheless, it has come to pass that the ostensibly prochoice Democratic Party and its prochoice Democratic president has failed to lead on abortion, while seeking to find common ground with a movement that was not interested. This should surprise no one, since the very public, public policy agenda of the antiabortion movement has been to erode access to the procedure under the rubric of abortion reduction primarily via state laws and regulations, but obviously in tandem with aggressive street level protests; harassment of patients and staff; and all in the context of violence and threats of violence.

Melanie Zurek, executive director of the Abortion Access Project told me in 2009, that while there were many proposals in play at the time regarding federal health care reform, none of them included expanding access to abortion services, which are actually unavailable in most counties in the U.S.  I wrote that the common ground agenda being promoted by elements of the Democratic Party at the time

“… required turning a blind eye to the reality that access to abortion care in the U.S. is receding, and that their approach mainstreams a fundamental concept of anti-abortion strategy and related terminology. They did this by recasting contraception and sex education as if their primary purpose was to achieve the goal of reducing the number of abortions.”

Little has changed since then, except that it is now crystal clear that the antiabortion forces, (with a very few exceptions), never bought the idea that sexuality education and contraception were legitimate ways to reduce the need for abortion.  And that is one of the core problems with the common ground initiative.  There was little common ground to actually be found, as a quarter century of previous common ground discussions had shown.

Rev. Debra Haffner of the Religious Institute wrote at the Huffington Post in 2009,  

“Abortion reduction” is promoted by those who support restricting abortion access, through such measures as parental notification, waiting periods and mandatory sonogram laws, or by making it illegal outright. No true progressive would advocate any strategy to make abortion services more difficult to obtain. For progressives, reducing the need for abortion means comprehensive sexuality education, family planning and contraceptive services to reduce the rate of unintended pregnancy. Yet conservatives insist on abstinence-only-until-marriage programs and argue that many common means of contraception are abortifacients.

… I have fought for sexual justice my entire life. It is a progressive value I hold dear. So I say to my colleagues across the religious spectrum: Join me in supporting sexual justice, or stop calling yourself progressive.

Since then, the erosion of access has continued and the abortion reduction advocates have continued to call themselves progressive.

This week, The Los Angeles Times, reported on state level antiabortion legislation:

Few initiatives are aimed at expanding access to reproductive health services, the institute said.) Fifteen of the bills introduced this year have been enacted into law, and more than 120 others have been approved by at least one legislative chamber.

We are always monitoring a huge number of anti-choice laws,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which challenges antiabortion laws. “But what we are seeing this year is some of the most extreme restrictions, and they are passing at a rather sharp clip.”

That is probably because of several factors, including the prominence of the abortion issue in last year’s health care debate, as well as gains by Republicans, both at the state and national level, in November’s election, advocates on both sides say.

For her part, Jodi Jacobson highlights Obama’s failure as president to lead on reproductive rights and details for example, how candidate Obama was against the Hyde Amendment before he embraced it as president — and even signed an executive order to underscore the banning of all federal funds from providing abortion care, as part of the deal to get his health care bill passed.  If this were not enough, Jacobson adds:  

“… his administration then went a step further.  In May of last year, abortion restrictions were applied to high risk insurance pools, the very sources of health insurance for women most likely to need coverage for abortion care due to chronic or terminal illness.

Rather than including contraception as part of the original package of preventive care required to be covered under health reform, the administration punted leaving this issue a panel that won’t deliver its decision until August.  This action effectively raises questions about whether or not contraception is preventive care, gives time to the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops to frame the debate in misleading terms and, finally, leaves the issue to be decided during the heat of the 2012 election campaign.”

Indeed, in recent months we have seen an escalating effort to prevent family planning grants and contracts at all levels of government from going to Planned Parenthood; even though  Planned Parenthood affiliates all are already barred from spending federal funds on abortion, and many affiliates do not even provide abortions.

This underscores something that often gets lost in the back and forth about politics and policy: This is not now, nor has it ever been only about abortion and contraception. The Religious Right is determined to degrade Planned Parenthood’s institutional capacity and abuse its excellent public image because it is the institutional symbol of women’s reproductive freedom.  The prevailing reduction narrative about abortion policy tends to obscure this while nothing at all is said, let alone done, about access.

Last year, Chip Berlet published an excellent essay on the state of the political realignment in the Party that has led to this situation. But let’s make no mistake, the adoption of elements of Religious Right thought in the Democratic Party is leading to elements of Religious Right outcomes.

[Crossposted from Talk to Action]

“What’s the big deal? We just showed it. Nothing [...]]]> Canada’s Sun News Network, dubbed “Fox News North” by the media, is barely on the air for half an hour when Ezra Levant, icon of the Canadian right, starts off the debut edition of his show, The Source, by broadcasting images of the Danish Mohammed cartoons.

“What’s the big deal? We just showed it. Nothing bad happened,” Levant tells his audience as a magazine spread of the cartoons appears on screen.

For Levant, this is more than what must to him seem like a spectacular opening to Sun News (if it causes riots in the Middle East, all the better for ratings, eh?), it’s also something of a personal issue. Levant was dragged in front of the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal in 2006 when the magazine he ran at the time, the Western Standard, ran that very cartoon spread. He became something of a hero to free speech advocates with his bravado performance in front of that tribunal, challenging both its notions of human rights and its legitimacy. These days, Levant prefers to parrot Glenn Beck with accusations that George Soros is a Nazi collaborator, so it’s nice to see him harken back to a time when he had more substantial things to add to the political debate.

To be sure, “Fox News North” has nothing to do with Fox News. It’s the new broadcast arm of the Sun newspapers, a chain of low-brow tabloids in Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary and elsewhere, basically a Canuck version of the UK Sun tabloid (right down to the scantily-clad page three girl), and similar in tone to the New York Post. But while both the UK Sun and the NY Post are Murdoch properties, the Sun papers in Canada aren’t. The Sun chain has been annoying Canadian progressives for nearly four decades now, and the papers have largely settled into a secondary role in the Canadian media landscape. The tabloids, along with the new network and a local TV station in Toronto called Sun TV, are owned by a Montreal-based company called Quebecor, and Rupert Murdoch has no part in it.

But right off the bat we get a sense that this network has more than a little in common with the ethos of those Murdoch properties when Krista Erickson (think “Gretchen Carlson North”), one of its anchors, appears as a page three girl in the Sun papers Monday morning. Clever marketing gimmick (maybe, if you’re not particularly interested in women viewers), but not exactly inspiring for those of us looking for evidence of serious journalism. So for me the question is just how well these stale, economically challenged and increasingly irrelevant tabloids will be able to make the jump to the brash, attention-grabbing, almost hypnosis-inducing style of Fox News.

At first glance, pretty damn well. It looks like Fox News; it feels like Fox News. The chyrons look like Fox News chyrons. The hosts are dressed like Fox News hosts. It all looks like Fox News, right down to the mild orange filter that gives the guests and hosts a healthy, tanned look. And make no mistake — right off the bat we’re engaging in the culture war. The Daily Brief, 6 p.m., hosted by David Akin, has as its first topic health care reform. “Report: Canada’s System Broken,” the chyron warns. Here we go. Time for an all-out attack on Canada’s universal health care system.

But wait a minute. What am I hearing here? Could this be a sound, rational argument about spiraling health care costs and the options available? Hold on a sec. Did someone mention raising taxes as a way of continuing to fund the system as it exists? My ears can hardly believe what they’re hearing, but I’m pretty sure someone has just made the sober point that we are probably doing ourselves a disservice by setting up a false “binary” view of health care (the Canadian system versus the US system) and that we should look to Europe for better ways to operate universal health care schemes.

Nobody mentioned “socialism.” Nobody screamed “class warfare.” For a moment, I closed my eyes and just listened, and it could have been “NPR North.”

Okay, so maybe it was just that one issue. After all, privatizing health care is a hard sell in Canada. Up next on Daily Brief is a report on Vancouver’s government-sanctioned heroin injection site. Now things are getting juicy. Sun News is clearly hitting all the big culture-war issues for conservatives. Now the sparks will fly.

But wait, what’s this? The report begins with the correspondent (blonde, attractive, well dressed) informing us of a study saying the safe injection site has reduced drug deaths in Vancouver. And I’m pretty sure that, through the fog of shock now engulfing me, I can hear Akin mention that some three-quarters of the people living around the site support its continued existence. Case closed. “Fox News North” is against the drug war.

So, hmm. Maybe it’s just their first day. Maybe they haven’t got the hang of it just yet.

Not all is lost for the culture warriors, though: No fewer than three prime time shows devote a segment to attacking the CBC, Canada’s state broadcaster, with Levant popping up to accuse CBC’s Vote Compass interactive graphic of trying to fool conservatives into thinking they’re liberals. Add to that the Sun tabloids running the same stories criticizing the CBC, and this all begins to look more like a concerted attack on a competing broadcaster than actual reporting….

But even with all that it all comes off a little too … sane. The oil sands are good, Ezra says, because we can use the profits to build schools. Almost makes sense to me. It’s all seems actually thought out in advance, too calm and too… well, Canadian. In a whole evening of viewing, the expression “government bolshevism” only grabs my attention once. So maybe this is more “Fox News Lite” than “Fox News North.” Can you even do a (somewhat) polite, (mostly) respectful, (sometimes) thoughtful version of Fox News? These hosers are damn well going to try.

So far they’ve only hit on the big hot-button issues that resonate among Canadian conservatives; tomorrow they’re going to have to start covering the election. And when they do, the Canadian political establishment will start paying attention.

But will I? Watching Sun News tonight was fun, in the sort of way watching a car wreck on the freeway is fun. But  Ezra’s going to have to do better than a lame attempt at angering Muslims if he wants me to tune in again.

So, here’s a frame. Over at AlterNet, I have a feature up arguing that labor markets only work when workers can bargain collectively. As it stands, [...]]]> Like all progressives, we obsess on the quest for good ‘framing’ quite a bit around here (when I lived in DC, even the cabbies and doormen were reading Lakoff).

So, here’s a frame. Over at AlterNet, I have a feature up arguing that labor markets only work when workers can bargain collectively. As it stands, with private-sector union density in the U.S. hovering at just 7 percent, the wages of many, many workers in this country represent a market failure of significant proportions.

By all means, read the whole thing for some lefty-bomb-throwing goodness, but for our purposes, here is the relevant passage (sorry for the long excerpt):

In economic terms, the wages of many Americans working in the private sector represent a “market failure” of massive proportions. Even the most devout of free-marketeers — economists like Alan Greenspan and the late Milton Friedman — agree that it’s appropriate and necessary for government to intervene in the case of those failures (they believe it’s the only time such “meddling” is appropriate). But the corporate Right, which claims to have an almost religious reverence for the power of “free” and functional markets, has gotten fat off of this particular market failure, and it’s dead-set on continuing to game the system for its own enrichment.

The market does work pretty well for Americans with advanced degrees or specialized skills that allow them to command an income that’s as high as the market for their scarce talents will bear. There are also people with more common skills who have the scratch (and/or connections) and fortitude to establish their own businesses — think George W. Bush or a really great mechanic who owns his or her own shop.

But that leaves a lot of people; about 80 percent of working America are hourly workers, “wage slaves” in the traditional sense. There’s no doubt that their salaries are heavily influenced by the laws of supply and demand. We saw that clearly in the latter half of the 1990s, when, under Bill Clinton, the Fed allowed the economy to grow at a fast clip, unemployment dropped below 4 percent, and for a brief period, a three-decade spiral in inequality was reversed as wages grew for people in every income bracket.

But a common fallacy is that wages are determined by market forces. They’re not, for a variety of reasons that require more explanation than space permits. I’ll focus on two: what economists call “information asymmetries” and coercion. Both are anathema to a functional free market, and both exist today, in abundance, in the American workplace.

To understand these failures of the free market, one has to go back, briefly, to basic economic theory. In order for a free market transaction to work, both the buyer and the seller need to have a good grasp of what the product being sold — in this case, people’s sweat — is worth elsewhere, who else is buying and selling, etc. In other words, they have to have more or less equal access to information. There can be no misrepresentation by either the buyer or the seller in a free market transaction. And both parties have to enter into the transaction freely, without being coerced; neither side can exercise power or undue influence over the other, whether implicitly or explicitly, through threats or other means.

Now let’s look at how that theoretical construct plays out in the real world of the American workplace. When an individual worker negotiates a price for his time, effort and dedication with any business bigger than a mom-and-pop operation, there’s quite a bit of explicit coercion (much of it in violation of our labor laws), which I’ll get to shortly. But there’s always an element of inherent coercion when an individual negotiates with a company alone, because of the power differential: a company that’s shorthanded by one person will continue to function, while a person without a job is up a creek with no paddle, unable to put a roof over her head or food on the table.

The “information asymmetries” in such a negotiation are immense — they’re actually more like process asymmetries. Companies spend millions of dollars on human resource experts, consultants, labor lawyers, etc., and they know both the conditions of the market and the ins and outs of the labor laws in intimate detail. While working people with rarified skills are often members of trade associations or guilds, read trade journals and have a pretty good sense of what the market will bear, many low- and semi-skilled workers don’t know their rights under the labor laws, don’t know how to assert them and (rightfully) fear reprisals when they do. They often have little knowledge of the financial health — or illness, as the case may be — of the company to which they’re applying for a job, how profitable it is, how much similar workers in other regions or firms earn, etc.

For the majority of Americans who lack scarce talents or a high level of education, negotiating a price for one’s time with a firm on an individual basis is anything but a free market transaction. That’s where collective bargaining comes in — when workers bargain as a group, they do so on a level playing field with employers, and the resulting wages (and benefits) are as high as the market can bear, but no higher.

Unions, like corporations, have a great deal of information about the market. They know how a firm is doing, how profitable it is and where it is relative to the larger industry in which it operates. They know what deals workers at other plants have negotiated. They have attorneys who are just as familiar with the American labor laws as their counterparts in management.

And while an individual has very little leverage in negotiations — again, most companies can do with one less worker — collectively, an entire work force has the ability to shut down or at least slow down a company’s operations if management chooses not to negotiate in good faith (as is often the case).

It’s not difficult to quantify the difference between what most hourly employees take home and what the free market would dictate. Economists Lawrence Mishel and Matthew Walters estimate the “union wage premium” — the amount of additional pay a unionized worker receives compared with a similar worker who isn’t a member of a union — at around 20 percent (that’s in keeping with other studies, using different methodologies, which put the premium in a range between 15 and 25 percent). If one includes benefits — health care, paid vacations, etc. — union members make almost 30 percent more than their nonunion counterparts.

Another way of looking at it is this: Millions of American families are scraping by on below-market wages, and if that weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be such a large group of American families among the “working poor.” In economic theory, it’s a given that a producer can’t sell his or her wares below the cost of production. The equivalent to the cost of producing a gizmo, when we’re talking about the sale of someone’s working hours, is the cost of providing basic necessities — nutritious food, safe housing and decent medical care. These are out of reach for the almost three million American families who work full-time and live beneath the poverty level. According to the Working Poor Families Project, half of the working poor have no health insurance.

So, I’m turning the free market argument around and using it against the union-busters. What do you think?