Friday, July 20, 2012

On the Importance of Jill Stein

This past week, I watched my Facebook newsfeed fill up with links iSideWith.com, an app that provides a presidential election quiz. After completing the quiz, Facebook users can post links announcing the candidate they side with. Surprisingly neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney were the most common results posted. Instead, it was Jill Stein, candidate of the Green Party, whose face was all over my newsfeed. It seemed everyone, from committed communists to disillusioned liberals, had found Jill Stein's platform at least nominally compatible with their views. While normally I would be suspicious of a candidate attracting such a breadth of sympathizers, the trend of the election quiz's results has given me hope that there may finally be a genuine Left alternative to Barack Obama. Assuming the app continues to gain popularity, and assuming more and more disillusioned liberals find they have more in common with Jill Stein than with Barack Obama, Jill Stein could stand a significant chance of making a noticeable political impact.

Moreover, as national media attention has focused away from Occupy, Jill Stein's open endorsement and participation in Occupy's struggles could bring attention back to the movement. Occupy was criticized constantly in the mainstream press for lacking a leader and, later, for failing to transition from direct action to legislative action. Though many involved with Occupy reject legislative avenues and view the idea of an "Occupy candidate" as antithetical to the movement's commitment to horizontalism, Jill Stein could be the voice of the movement's reformist tendencies and the link between the movement's activists and the rest of the public. Her platform - A Green New Deal - translates many of the grievances voiced by the Occupy movement into concrete policy proposals. Stein calls for "an immediate halt to all foreclosures and evictions"and has vowed to create "a federal bank with local branches to take over homes with distressed mortgage and either restructure the mortgages to federal levels...or...rent homes to the occupants." Her Full Employment Program is designed to "create 16 million jobs through a community-based direct employment initiative that will be nationally funded, locally controlled, and democratically protected against conflicts of interest and pay-to-play influence peddling." The aforementioned proposals address the concerns of Occupy. Both activists and the media should look to Stein's candidacy as a crystallization of an Occupy electoral platform.

The very idea of an electoral platform for the Occupy movement undoubtedly upsets a lot of people involved with the movement. And that is fine. Occupy participants who are committed to effectuating social justice outside of the legislative or mainstream political framework will be able to continue their radical activism regardless of whether Stein is on the ballot. But for Occupy participants who have grown weary of having no concrete platform, Jill Stein's candidacy is a chance to finally engage in the electoral process under an unabashedly left-wing banner.

Occupy's skeptics of organization and hierarchy, despite their disagreements with Stein's proposals, should nonetheless pay attention to Stein's rhetoric and the values espoused by the Green Party. Decentralization and local control have long been Green Party pillars, in contrast with the platforms of other left-wing parties. While not horizontalist, Stein and the Green Party share many of the more radical Occupiers' values. And that is a good thing. Stein's presidential campaign puts a pragmatic spin and concrete platform behind a set of criticisms and ideas that have been derided in the press as vague or idealistic and ignored by many. It would be a mistake for the Left to disregard her candidacy, especially when faced with the false choice between to servants of corporate interests and the wealthy.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Lifeguards and the Logic of the Shared Responsibility Payment

In a widely reported incident last week, a Florida lifeguard was fired for rescuing a man who had been swimming in an "unprotected" part of a beach. The Right has been quick to portray the incident as an example of the nefariousness of regulation and intrusive laws. Corey Robin notes, "Jonah Goldberg uses it as an opportunity to rail against liability law and union regulations. Even though no unions were involved and the major culprit here, it seems, is the privatization of public services." One could even argue Mr. Lopez's firing has to do with the nature of contracts and restrictions on conduct in the workplace (for more on this issue check out this post at Crooked Timber). 

Contrary to Goldberg's laments about the "the legal regime in this country that's creating a headwind against basic human decency," the sorry case of a lifeguard fired for saving someone's life illustrates the logic of the shared responsibility payment.

A person who chooses to go without insurance is like a person who chooses to swim in the "unprotected" part of the beach. In theory, both do so at their own risk. The swimmer makes a choice to disregard the signs alerting beachgoers to swim at their own risk just as someone makes a choice to disregard the risk of getting sick while uninsured. And yet, if something happens to either person, someone must perform a rescue. For some, like members of the crowd at a GOP debate who yelled "let him die" in response to a question about healthcare for the uninsured, letting someone needlessly die isn't a problem. But for those who care about others, and even, I suspect, for Mr. Goldberg, there is a moral obligation to save the drowning swimmer and the sick uninsured. 

Saving the drowning swimmer in the "unprotected" area requires that the lifeguard leave his post and at the same time put the beachgoers in the formerly protected area at risk, unattended. Likewise, providing care to the sick uninsured requires that resources and personnel be allocated from somewhere else to care for the uninsured patient. In both instances, the people who ignore the risks associated with their behaviors expect and require society to foot the bill for their rescue. The shared responsibility payment acknowledges the societal cost incurred by the uninsured's risky behavior, and requires that the uninsured pay for the care he will receive, should he fall ill. Extending this logic to the case of the lifeguard, a shared responsibility payment made by the risky swimmer to the lifeguarding company would have provide the necessary resources (e.g. another lifeguard, an extra buoy) to eliminate an instance when a lifeguard would have to leave his post to rescue a risk-taking swimmer. 

The shared responsibility payment is a natural outgrowth of a market-oriented society. Places that were once public, like beaches, are privatized and under corporate control. Goods and services that would otherwise be guaranteed to any member of a polity, like healthcare, are now sold with little regard for basic human need. In a capitalist economy, the value of which the Right and people like Mr. Goldberg incessantly praise, everything can be commoditized. The shared responsibility payment represents a full embrace of the idea that healthcare is a commodity; to a receive a service, even one that is lifesaving, absolutely necessary and entirely non-volitional, costs money. The Right's discomfort with this idea suggests either that they are less comfortable with the increasing commodification of all aspects of daily life than they pretend to be, or that they really would prefer to let the sick uninsured die and the risk-taking swimmer drown.

Monday, July 2, 2012

Quotes of the Day - July 2, 2012

I've graduated from high school. The summer has started. This can only mean one thing: more time to read. My first book of the summer is The Vital Center, by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. I'm a bit more than halfway through, and I'm enjoying it. Schlesinger has an immense command of history, and incorporates useful tidbits of his knowledge into his analysis of the political problems of the 1950s. The book, though, is very much a product of its time. Many of the anxieties - related to mass media, the rise of consumerism, the first taste of a post-industrial age, etc. - that surfaced in the 1950s (the book was first published in 1949) have either been addressed or have disappeared. Still, more than fifty years after its publication, The Vital Center has a number of valuable insights for the political observer today.

The first chapter, entitled "Politics in an Age of Anxiety," begins with a description of man's current situation. 
Western man in the middle of the twentieth century is tense, uncertain, adrift. We look upon our epoch as a time of troubles, an age of anxiety. The grounds of our civilization of our certitude, are breaking up under our feet, and familiar ideas and institutions vanish as we reach them, like shadows in the falling dusk. Most of the world has reconciled itself to this half-light, to the reign of insecurity. Even those peoples who hastily traded their insecurities for a mirage of security are finding themselves no better than the rest. Only the United States still has buffers between itself and the anxieties of our age: buffers of time, of distance, of natural wealth, of national ingenuity, of a stubborn tradition of hope.
Fifty years later, globalization has erased the buffers. The United States entered the age of anxiety years ago. Times has caught up with the country. Its industrial production has waned. Its distance from the rest of the world has been minimized by technology. Even the United States's vast natural wealth has begun to seem limited. Ingenuity is left to entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, who are idolized and hailed as job-creators despite their lack of civic contribution. Hope faded after 9/11 and the War on Terror. It grew fainter still after the financial crisis.

Despite these changes, Schlesinger's analysis of modern life can be adapted for post-industrial life.
The velocity of life has entered into a new phase. With it has come the imperative need for a social structure to contain that velocity - a social structure within which the individual can still achieve some measure of self-fulfillment.
Now, with our increasingly atomized existences despite our instantaneous interconnectivity, we express a similar need. What do we do with our time? How do we related to technology and the internet? Isolated and stuck behind screens, what can we do create some kind of meaning? (Of course, the question of whether being stuck behind screens actually isolates us is still up for debate: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-irl-fetish/)

The industrial corporation - the hallmark of Fordist production - is now an artifact.
It gave the new impersonality an institutional embodiment; a corporation as the saying went, had neither a body to be kicked nor a soul to be damned. "Corporations will do what individuals would not dare to do," the richest man in Boston wrote with candor a century ago.
But now, even though corporations are people, impersonality remains.
The impersonality of the new economic system meant, in brief, that no one had to feel a direct responsibility for the obvious and terrible costs in human suffering.
The economic system isn't new anymore. And in 2008, we may have had a taste of its demise. However, before systemic change occurs, things can only get worse.
As organization became more elaborate and comprehensive, it became increasingly the instrumentality through which moral man could indulge his natural weakness for immoral deeds. 
Schlesinger writes at the beginning of the time during which the American capitalist began to adopt the humanitarian guise. Describes the birth of neoliberalism:
The modern American capitalist as a result has come to share many values with the American liberal: beliefs in personal integrity, political freedom and equality of opportunity. This process is reflected in the general support for the Marshall Plan, in the establishment of liberal business organizations like the Committee on Economic Development, in the proposals of some of the more forward looking Republican politicians.
The modern capitalist shares the values of the American liberal because conventional liberal values have turned out to be effective weapons in the arsenal of capitalist exploitation. Today, arguments for market liberalization and decreased regulation are often colored by liberal language and talk of freedom. Cuts to social services are reframed by capitalists as issues of liberty, not in the interests of those who stand to suffer from the cuts but of those who stand to profit from the suffering of others.


Schlesinger was a Democrat, but much of his book is devoted to challenging the Left. His insight and criticism of progressives has hints of radicalism.
Too often the Doughface really does not want power or responsibility. For him the most subtle sensations of the perfect syllogism, the lost cause, the permanent minority, where he can be safe from the exacting job of trying to work out wise policies in an imperfect world.
This critique isn't new, but it did surface again recently when it appeared SYRIZA in Greece was could win a general election. For many Leftists, and even liberals and progressives, there is no plan for what happens once the election is won or the party is in power. At protests there is always a slew of statements announcing opposition to this policy and or that idea. Rarely is there a constructive platform put forward for what a progressive future might look like.

But that maybe progressives don't actually want the future for which they claim to fight. Schlesinger argues that progressives treat politics as just an intellectual game.
Because politics is for the Doughface a means of accommodating himself to a world he does not like but does not really want to change, he can find ample gratification in words.
Perhaps, this is beginning to change. Intellectuals, like Corey Robin and even the editors of N+1, have challenged the Left to surrender their privilege and take radical action: http://coreyrobin.com/2012/06/07/a-challenge-to-the-left/http://nplusonemag.com/death-by-degrees.
It remains to be seen if Leftist heed the call to action.