I was corresponding with one of my best friends, M., who lives in Polanco. We were talking about the elections in Mexico, and M. mentioned that the absenteeism of the poor had doomed Obrador’s campaign.
I replied that, as for the poor, I have one opinion: fuck the poor.
It is a sign of the unhealthiness of liberal-left culture that the working class has been discarded as a pragmatic political category. I hated Obrador’s slogan, the poor first. What poor? We are talking here about the producers of wealth in any society whatsoever. This isn’t a simple linguistic matter – this is all about a very pernicious shift in attitudes. Once one decides to let class definitions sift out of politics – and that is something that leftists are pretty comfortable with, since there is nothing they are more uncomfortable with than, say, blue collar white guys –why, then they can pursue a fake politics of slogans and demos and endless defeat to their hearts content.
The poor, those bugeyed people with bugeyed kids thrusting out their hands create a satisfying catalytic response in many a lefty, who are able to take a sufficiently broad minded, charitable view that they are all ‘for’ the poor. Usually, this view begins by stripping these ‘poor’ of all autonomy. I have been to a lot of blog sites to see what has been said about the elections in Mexico, and there is one response that is just infuriating to me. It is that Obrador had to have been cheated since the poor would never vote PAN. Obrador was cheated, but the evidence for it is not in someone's superior view of how the poor voted. This is usually stated with smug confidence by people who are, I am sure, making above 20 thou a year and would be insulted to be told that they should be voting for tax breaks and Republicans. No, these people have a higher mindset – unlike the poor, whom they love so much, they can actually decide things for themselves. They can show some agency. But not those loveable, loveable poor people.
LI was thinking of this when we saw a movie last night: Harlan County, USA. Wonderful documentary that was directed by one of the Winter Soldier filmmakers, Barbara Koppel. The film was made in 1973-1974, and it showed a very aggressive working culture that wasn’t going to take gun thugs and state sponsored police oppression – and would buy its own guns if necessary to defend itself. The people in the movie had a firm sense of themselves as makers of wealth, living at the bottom of the economic spectrum. And Koppel had the good sense not to see these people as the poor – they would have handed her her ass if she had displayed that attitude. So, LI’s recommend today, a companion piece to recent events, is Michael Yates autobiographical essay, “Class: a personal story” in the Monthly Review. Yates was born in the forties, and benefited from the social mobility of the fifties. He can look back and see the costs and motives of what was happening to him and his family.
Here are some good grafs:
“The factory town [where his parents moved] also had a range of small businesses, and a worker could aim for the petty bourgeoisie. My uncle once opened a small restaurant with a fellow worker in an effort to escape the factory and be his own boss. My father had hopes of becoming a radio repairman and later took a correspondence school course to learn drafting. This kind of thinking and acting, while easy to understand, also sapped class consciousness.
As with the miners, the Second World War profoundly affected the ways in which workers thought and acted. On the one hand, the factory men came home from the war unwilling to tolerate the corporate despotism their fathers had suffered before unionization. They struck and filed grievances and won more control over what went on at work than they ever could have imagined before the war. I well remember the two summers I worked in the plant. My grandfather, a time-study engineer, got me a summer job while I was in college. I did mostly clerical work, cataloging accidents and analyzing accident reports to see where and when they were most likely to occur. Many children of workers got such jobs, and the company found this a good way to recruit local college kids into management (as with the miners, parents had mixed feelings about this but in general were proud to help their children to get out of the working class). My job was housed in the fire department—the factory was large enough to have its own. The firemen were typically on-call and often had few regular daytime duties. So they spent a lot of time drinking coffee and talking. The atmosphere was casual, and the supervisors never, while I was there, told the men to do anything. The union officers, themselves full-time union staffers (drawing pay from the company), stopped everyday for coffee. The firemen moved around the plant freely and were good sources of gossip that might be useful to the union. The union president was a gruff man with one arm; he had lost the other to a grinding machine. The vicepresident was a dapper man, a superlative bowler and pool player and
a chronic gambler. Conversation ranged freely from football pools to ongoing disputes with management. I was impressed with the degree of freedom the workers and the union officers had, the product of long years of class struggle after the war most of them had fought in. Without using the word in a sexist way, I would say that the war had made them “men,” and they demanded to be treated as such.
On the other hand, the war and its aftermath locked most of these workers into mainstream America. Wars are always about getting people in one country to hate those in another. If this can be done once, it can be done again; all that is needed is for the state to declare a new enemy. After the war, the new enemy was the Soviet Union and by implication, all radical thinking and acting. It was no accident that the labor movement was held up as an entity infiltrated by communists and that, further, workers would have to repudiate the reds in their unions if they were to maintain membership in U.S. society. War gets people used to obeying orders issued by the state, and this habit of mind worked to good advantage from the employers’ perspective after the war when they strove to regain the power they had lost during the heyday of the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO). Workers who insisted
on trying to deepen what the CIO had achieved before and during the war—greater control by workers of their workplaces, a weakening of racism, solidarity with workers in other countries, the beginnings of a social welfare state—were simply declared enemies of the state, on a par with the Germans and Japanese just defeated in the war. The workers in my hometown, never especially radical to begin with and deeply influenced by the war and by the Catholic Church, bought into the new patriotism of anticommunism wholeheartedly...
"To help workers embrace the Cold War, the government initiated a variety of programs aimed at giving them a greater material stake in U.S. society. The most important of these was the subsidization of home mortgages. Millions of working-class families bought homes on the cheap, usually away from the cities and towns in the new and more isolated and diffuse suburbs. Home ownership came to define the “good life” for workers, and the constant care and worry that had to be devoted to home ownership left workers with little time for anything else, except perhaps to sit around the television every night to live through the characters on the various drama and comedy shows. An enormous amount of propaganda was devoted (and still is) to the wonders of owning a house and the satisfaction to be gained by living in one with a family whose members were devoted to one another. This and the array of consumer goods needed to maintain a home were all that workers needed to be happy.”
Monday, July 10, 2006
Sunday, July 09, 2006
driving
Kein Atemholen bleibt der Kultur und am Ende liegt eine tote Menschheit neber ihren Werken, die zu erfinden ihr so viel Geist gekostet had, dass ihr keiner mehr uebrig blieb, sie zu nuetzen.
Wir waren kopliziert genug, die Maschine zu bauen, and wir sind zu pimitiv, uns von ihr bedienen zu lassen. Wir treiben einen Weltverkehr auf schmalspurigen Gehirnbahnen.
Culture cannot catch its breath; in the end, a dead humanity lies next to its works, which cost it so much mental energy to discover that it had none left to use it.
We were complicated enough to build machines, and are too primitive, to use them. We maintain the traffic of the world on narrow gauge brain rails. – Karl Kraus
In the terrible winter of ‘93, LI made one in a series of bad decisions and bought what turned out to be his last car.
I bought a 76 AMC Matador with a V-8 engine. It was an absolute and total lemon. I bought it because I was suddenly seized with 0-60 fantasies of roaring down country roads in New Mexico, one hand on the wheel, one hand on a tall boy. It is a comment on my mental state that I even got the notion that my character was malleable enough to accommodate a V-8 engine. I thought I was made of quicksilver, but I turned out to be just another shitkicking redneck. Oh well.
Since then, my days of driving cars have been reduced to various unpredictable occasions. Usually, a friend wants to be driven to the airport, and I get the friend’s car for a couple of days or a week. This happened Friday: I took S. and her family to the airport, and now have some wheels.
In this way, I have sampled, over the last fifteen years, the traffic system in this country – in New York, Connecticut, Georgia and Texas, at least – and I think I can safely say: it is a lot less fun to drive now than it used to be.
I used to love driving, when I had a chance. I can’t think of a pleasanter way of emptying my mind than listening to something loud and fast while I zip down a country road doing 80, watching the fields and trees and shacks and cows and horses and people stream away in the rear view mirror, both windows open. In Joan Didion’s Play it as it Lays, there is a famous passage about Maria, the heroine, who dopes herself on the LA freeway system:
“Once she was on the freeway and had maneuvered her way to a fast lane she turned on the radio at high volume and she drove. She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura. She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverly Hills and saw the great signs soar overhead at seventy miles an hour, Normandie 1/4 Vermont 3/4 Harbor Fwy 1. Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or once losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night she slept dreamlessly.”
Certain long lone trips – the time I contracted to drive this guy’s Cherokee from Salt Lake City to Austin, for instance – still have a strong mental presence for me – I can go back to that trip. I can go back to Santa Fe to Albuquerque. I can definitely go back to Pecos. I can do Atlanta to New Orleans without a problem.
But in the real world, there is a carrying problem. There is only so much road. And on that road, every year, there are more cars. The car drivers want ever more road, but the truth is, mostly, the places where people want to drive are already connected. The way to drive from my place to downtown Austin, for instance, is filled – there are no virtual routes left.
I’ve noticed this more in Atlanta, a city in which I have a long history of driving, than in Austin, where I rarely drive. For instance, right now, to drive on Briarcliff Road in Dekalb county (a street I have a good forty years of memory of, from the time I was a kid in a passenger seat until now) means basically joining a traffic jam – save for a few hours from 1 p.m. until around 3, and from 9 p.m. until the morning. When I was nineteen, working for my J., a former brother in law, doing roof work, Briarcliff was easy – we would zoom around the Virginia Highlands, Inman Park area in a loaded down truck, going for supplies, or to look at a house, or for lunch, and there was not five cars at every stop sign. Now you cannot take your little pickup and make that circuit mostly in fourth. What that means is that driving is much more segmented than it used to be. When I walk or bicycle, my forward motion is rarely stopped because of anything in front of me. But in a car, the very embodiment of forward motion, I seem to be stopping all of the time. The living tension between expectation and reality makes me oddly impatient. It is odd because I am really moving much faster than I normally move. There’s nothing to be impatient about. Yet the constant queuing diminishes the pleasure I get in the power of the car – in the continual flow that I want from the thing, the becoming-liquid. Liquids go with cars – the gas, the ‘flow’ of traffic. Drinking and driving, the great taboo, is also obviously a great temptation, since driving a car is already a form of getting high.
I try to reduce my impatience by really seeing what other drivers are doing. They are doing amazing things, actually. It is an amazing talent, simply to change lanes at sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour on a narrow patch of asphalt where other monstrous metal boxes are also going sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour. This is not the kind of experience our bodies are built for.
I don’t think the car will last – I do think that it will be looked back upon, at some point, as a dream. The highways will be as puzzling as the heads on Easter Island. As evidences of a civilization that couldn’t have happened. Already, though, there are differences in the experience of car history. Quantity does transform quality – I sometimes wonder if the cars aren’t bigger and bulkier as a way of recapturing a time when the roads were less crowded – as if you could carry that less crowded space with you.
My strategy, now, is to drive like an old man, deliberately keeping to the speed limit and pissing off any unfortunate sod with the bad luck to be behind me. But I am thinking of changing strategies this time. And I’m definitely thinking I want to drive up to Lake Buchanan, just to see that country. I think I’ll do that this afternoon.
Wir waren kopliziert genug, die Maschine zu bauen, and wir sind zu pimitiv, uns von ihr bedienen zu lassen. Wir treiben einen Weltverkehr auf schmalspurigen Gehirnbahnen.
Culture cannot catch its breath; in the end, a dead humanity lies next to its works, which cost it so much mental energy to discover that it had none left to use it.
We were complicated enough to build machines, and are too primitive, to use them. We maintain the traffic of the world on narrow gauge brain rails. – Karl Kraus
In the terrible winter of ‘93, LI made one in a series of bad decisions and bought what turned out to be his last car.
I bought a 76 AMC Matador with a V-8 engine. It was an absolute and total lemon. I bought it because I was suddenly seized with 0-60 fantasies of roaring down country roads in New Mexico, one hand on the wheel, one hand on a tall boy. It is a comment on my mental state that I even got the notion that my character was malleable enough to accommodate a V-8 engine. I thought I was made of quicksilver, but I turned out to be just another shitkicking redneck. Oh well.
Since then, my days of driving cars have been reduced to various unpredictable occasions. Usually, a friend wants to be driven to the airport, and I get the friend’s car for a couple of days or a week. This happened Friday: I took S. and her family to the airport, and now have some wheels.
In this way, I have sampled, over the last fifteen years, the traffic system in this country – in New York, Connecticut, Georgia and Texas, at least – and I think I can safely say: it is a lot less fun to drive now than it used to be.
I used to love driving, when I had a chance. I can’t think of a pleasanter way of emptying my mind than listening to something loud and fast while I zip down a country road doing 80, watching the fields and trees and shacks and cows and horses and people stream away in the rear view mirror, both windows open. In Joan Didion’s Play it as it Lays, there is a famous passage about Maria, the heroine, who dopes herself on the LA freeway system:
“Once she was on the freeway and had maneuvered her way to a fast lane she turned on the radio at high volume and she drove. She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura. She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverly Hills and saw the great signs soar overhead at seventy miles an hour, Normandie 1/4 Vermont 3/4 Harbor Fwy 1. Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or once losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night she slept dreamlessly.”
Certain long lone trips – the time I contracted to drive this guy’s Cherokee from Salt Lake City to Austin, for instance – still have a strong mental presence for me – I can go back to that trip. I can go back to Santa Fe to Albuquerque. I can definitely go back to Pecos. I can do Atlanta to New Orleans without a problem.
But in the real world, there is a carrying problem. There is only so much road. And on that road, every year, there are more cars. The car drivers want ever more road, but the truth is, mostly, the places where people want to drive are already connected. The way to drive from my place to downtown Austin, for instance, is filled – there are no virtual routes left.
I’ve noticed this more in Atlanta, a city in which I have a long history of driving, than in Austin, where I rarely drive. For instance, right now, to drive on Briarcliff Road in Dekalb county (a street I have a good forty years of memory of, from the time I was a kid in a passenger seat until now) means basically joining a traffic jam – save for a few hours from 1 p.m. until around 3, and from 9 p.m. until the morning. When I was nineteen, working for my J., a former brother in law, doing roof work, Briarcliff was easy – we would zoom around the Virginia Highlands, Inman Park area in a loaded down truck, going for supplies, or to look at a house, or for lunch, and there was not five cars at every stop sign. Now you cannot take your little pickup and make that circuit mostly in fourth. What that means is that driving is much more segmented than it used to be. When I walk or bicycle, my forward motion is rarely stopped because of anything in front of me. But in a car, the very embodiment of forward motion, I seem to be stopping all of the time. The living tension between expectation and reality makes me oddly impatient. It is odd because I am really moving much faster than I normally move. There’s nothing to be impatient about. Yet the constant queuing diminishes the pleasure I get in the power of the car – in the continual flow that I want from the thing, the becoming-liquid. Liquids go with cars – the gas, the ‘flow’ of traffic. Drinking and driving, the great taboo, is also obviously a great temptation, since driving a car is already a form of getting high.
I try to reduce my impatience by really seeing what other drivers are doing. They are doing amazing things, actually. It is an amazing talent, simply to change lanes at sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour on a narrow patch of asphalt where other monstrous metal boxes are also going sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour. This is not the kind of experience our bodies are built for.
I don’t think the car will last – I do think that it will be looked back upon, at some point, as a dream. The highways will be as puzzling as the heads on Easter Island. As evidences of a civilization that couldn’t have happened. Already, though, there are differences in the experience of car history. Quantity does transform quality – I sometimes wonder if the cars aren’t bigger and bulkier as a way of recapturing a time when the roads were less crowded – as if you could carry that less crowded space with you.
My strategy, now, is to drive like an old man, deliberately keeping to the speed limit and pissing off any unfortunate sod with the bad luck to be behind me. But I am thinking of changing strategies this time. And I’m definitely thinking I want to drive up to Lake Buchanan, just to see that country. I think I’ll do that this afternoon.
Saturday, July 08, 2006
the politics of liberal trivilization -- LI gets the inside stories on the celebrities YOU want to know about!
Steven Pearlstein is the smart WAPO economics columnist (Robert Samuelson is the dumb one. Fair and balanced reporting means hearing from both sides). Pearlstein is a defender of the traditional Keynesian line, for which LI has enormous sympathy. In that vision, two coordinate policy goals are set. On the one hand, free trade, that mainstay of economic orthodoxy since Adam Smith, retains its sacred place. The Keynesians call for its furthest extension, including overthrowing national barriers in the labor market as well as in commodities. On the other hand, Pearlstein supports heavy public investment in things like transportation, education, health and environmental protection. He believes that the latter is the necessary political concomitant to the former, since the market can be assumed to disadvantage, at any one time, some sector of the national economy – this is the iron logic of comparative advantage, which is never stable. Like a good Keynesian, he bemoans the blindness of the business community in not seeing the need for public investment:
“Globalization has been a big plus for the United States and many of its citizens. The gains from it,and the costs, however, have been distributed somewhat unevenly, and we have resisted mechanisms for making those more fair because of the ideological bias against government interference with the economy. So it comes down to this; as long as the Republican loving business community continues to push for more tax cuts and prevents improvement and expansion of necessary public services, like day care and good public schools and excellent public transportation and great parks and universal health care and better retirement programs -- until then, they won't get the next liberalization in trade and investment rules. Its really just that simple. Maybe that is a fine choice for them at this point -- after all, they are doing very well at the moment. But it IS the choice. They like to believe that if they can just get their message out, about how globalization benefit everyone, they can succeed. But they won't, because the facts and the feelings to support it just aren't there. People have plenty of experience with globalization in the United States, and they just aren't fully satisfied they want to go any further down that road without the kinds of things I just mentioned. So the business community is going to have to remember what it is like to operate from the political center and deal with Republicans and Democrats.”
It is at this point that one feels an ever so slight but still perceptible ‘skip’ in Pearlstein’s position, like a needle meeting a scratched groove. For the fact is that, from the rational choice perspective – the same perspective that legitimizes the expansion of free trade - the business community shouldn’t prefer to ‘operate’ from the center. To remain competitive and avoid what rational choice theory abhors – rent seeking – businesses should, on the contrary, pursue every short term advantage. Part of that pursuit is spending money that will bring a high return on investment. And that is where politics comes in – because it is relatively cheap to spend money spent to ‘buy’ politicians to create policies that produce huge advantages for businesses. Those advantages are often tax advantages. So that the public investment Pearlstein advocates cannot be funded, unless one funds them by massive government borrowing. The system we have now – tax cuts for the rich and massive borrowing for public investment – is the direct result of a uniformly rational choice economy. In such economy, the requirement that businesses make money in a competitive way – the selection pressure on ROI – inevitably tends towards exploiting any niche that lends itself to free riding, and to support of public disinvestments insofar as that removes a cost from businesses. This is why the business cycle is inevitable in capitalism – the more homogenous capitalism is, the more the real structural conflicts that it encodes will emerge in unpredictable intervals to create downturns of indeterminate depth.
There is no area within the economy that is exempt from the same economic laws that justify unlimited free trade – politics is as much of a market in the market economy as automobiles, or marriage.
All of which means that, from the neo-orthodox viewpoint, Pearlstein is simply being unacceptably finicky. However, from a more (oh, hateful term) post-Keynesian viewpoint, we can see that the terms themselves – the cards the economists are dealing each other – are marked. In actuality, and let me italicize this – "all institutional structures are rent seeking by definition.” By which I mean that institutions don't directly respond to human needs, like products or services. They require upkeep. In the course of that upkeep, they constitute themselves as attractors -- that is, they constitute themselves as independent entities with their own interests. To abolish all rent seeking is to abolish society. There’s no other way to put it. To allow rent seeking simply to flourish is to corrupt the base of society. To tow the middle line, one must not suffer from the conceptual delusion that strikes the neo-classical economist when he advises about public policy – that policymakers – unlike any other members of the genus homo oeconomicus – seek or even can seek a completely altruistic goal. Assimilation into an institution, which is how institution’s work, means identifying one’s interests, to a certain extent, with the institution.
We are living in the era of the revival of neo-classical models. These models see no good in rentseeking, and they see every good in efficiency – the golden calf the University of Chicago professors dance around. In response to the world wide collapse of labor’s bargaining power (both in the business world and in the political world), the default liberal position has become very like that outlined by Pearlstein: the state will, in essence, perform the function that unions used to perform, using taxation, education, and its other numerous instruments to put the worker on the social escalator. But one has to ask: in the absence of the power of organized labor, how do liberals expect the state to have the political credit to do this? Why should the state be expected to play this countervailing role? In a society dominated by businesses pursuing their rational choices, you get exactly the Bush culture we have now. It was a little alien embryo in the 90s, and then it burst out of its carrier body, Aliens fashion. The liberal assumption is that the part of the society with the most money will refrain from using it to exert political power – and if not, the liberal will create reforms in the process to restrain that power. However, there is nothing more porous than campaign finance regulation, for the simple reason that it is in nobody’s short term interest to obey the spirit of it.
Without abiding extra state and party pressures, liberalism becomes a matter of infinitely conferring about political processes, or it becomes a matter of trivialization. The politics of liberal trivialization, in which more attention is paid to violent teenage computer games than, say, the violence effected by a grossly unequal healthcare system on teenage health, is the current system we live under. I could complain about Hilary or complain about Senator X, and will probably do so in future posts as I’ve done in the past, but both are responding to the logic of the system – neither Hilary nor X deflated labor’s position in the modern system.
“Globalization has been a big plus for the United States and many of its citizens. The gains from it,and the costs, however, have been distributed somewhat unevenly, and we have resisted mechanisms for making those more fair because of the ideological bias against government interference with the economy. So it comes down to this; as long as the Republican loving business community continues to push for more tax cuts and prevents improvement and expansion of necessary public services, like day care and good public schools and excellent public transportation and great parks and universal health care and better retirement programs -- until then, they won't get the next liberalization in trade and investment rules. Its really just that simple. Maybe that is a fine choice for them at this point -- after all, they are doing very well at the moment. But it IS the choice. They like to believe that if they can just get their message out, about how globalization benefit everyone, they can succeed. But they won't, because the facts and the feelings to support it just aren't there. People have plenty of experience with globalization in the United States, and they just aren't fully satisfied they want to go any further down that road without the kinds of things I just mentioned. So the business community is going to have to remember what it is like to operate from the political center and deal with Republicans and Democrats.”
It is at this point that one feels an ever so slight but still perceptible ‘skip’ in Pearlstein’s position, like a needle meeting a scratched groove. For the fact is that, from the rational choice perspective – the same perspective that legitimizes the expansion of free trade - the business community shouldn’t prefer to ‘operate’ from the center. To remain competitive and avoid what rational choice theory abhors – rent seeking – businesses should, on the contrary, pursue every short term advantage. Part of that pursuit is spending money that will bring a high return on investment. And that is where politics comes in – because it is relatively cheap to spend money spent to ‘buy’ politicians to create policies that produce huge advantages for businesses. Those advantages are often tax advantages. So that the public investment Pearlstein advocates cannot be funded, unless one funds them by massive government borrowing. The system we have now – tax cuts for the rich and massive borrowing for public investment – is the direct result of a uniformly rational choice economy. In such economy, the requirement that businesses make money in a competitive way – the selection pressure on ROI – inevitably tends towards exploiting any niche that lends itself to free riding, and to support of public disinvestments insofar as that removes a cost from businesses. This is why the business cycle is inevitable in capitalism – the more homogenous capitalism is, the more the real structural conflicts that it encodes will emerge in unpredictable intervals to create downturns of indeterminate depth.
There is no area within the economy that is exempt from the same economic laws that justify unlimited free trade – politics is as much of a market in the market economy as automobiles, or marriage.
All of which means that, from the neo-orthodox viewpoint, Pearlstein is simply being unacceptably finicky. However, from a more (oh, hateful term) post-Keynesian viewpoint, we can see that the terms themselves – the cards the economists are dealing each other – are marked. In actuality, and let me italicize this – "all institutional structures are rent seeking by definition.” By which I mean that institutions don't directly respond to human needs, like products or services. They require upkeep. In the course of that upkeep, they constitute themselves as attractors -- that is, they constitute themselves as independent entities with their own interests. To abolish all rent seeking is to abolish society. There’s no other way to put it. To allow rent seeking simply to flourish is to corrupt the base of society. To tow the middle line, one must not suffer from the conceptual delusion that strikes the neo-classical economist when he advises about public policy – that policymakers – unlike any other members of the genus homo oeconomicus – seek or even can seek a completely altruistic goal. Assimilation into an institution, which is how institution’s work, means identifying one’s interests, to a certain extent, with the institution.
We are living in the era of the revival of neo-classical models. These models see no good in rentseeking, and they see every good in efficiency – the golden calf the University of Chicago professors dance around. In response to the world wide collapse of labor’s bargaining power (both in the business world and in the political world), the default liberal position has become very like that outlined by Pearlstein: the state will, in essence, perform the function that unions used to perform, using taxation, education, and its other numerous instruments to put the worker on the social escalator. But one has to ask: in the absence of the power of organized labor, how do liberals expect the state to have the political credit to do this? Why should the state be expected to play this countervailing role? In a society dominated by businesses pursuing their rational choices, you get exactly the Bush culture we have now. It was a little alien embryo in the 90s, and then it burst out of its carrier body, Aliens fashion. The liberal assumption is that the part of the society with the most money will refrain from using it to exert political power – and if not, the liberal will create reforms in the process to restrain that power. However, there is nothing more porous than campaign finance regulation, for the simple reason that it is in nobody’s short term interest to obey the spirit of it.
Without abiding extra state and party pressures, liberalism becomes a matter of infinitely conferring about political processes, or it becomes a matter of trivialization. The politics of liberal trivialization, in which more attention is paid to violent teenage computer games than, say, the violence effected by a grossly unequal healthcare system on teenage health, is the current system we live under. I could complain about Hilary or complain about Senator X, and will probably do so in future posts as I’ve done in the past, but both are responding to the logic of the system – neither Hilary nor X deflated labor’s position in the modern system.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
mexico's election - and fairy tales from Jorge Castañeda
Jorge Castañeda has turned into the teller of the Mexican establishment’s favorite fairy tale, which begins like this (I take this from his current essay in Foreign Affairs, Latin America’s Left Turn):
“JUST OVER a decade ago, Latin America seemed poised to begin a virtuous cycle of economic progress and improved democratic governance, overseen by a growing number of centrist technocratic governments. In Mexico, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, buttressed by the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, was ready for his handpicked successor to win the next presidential election. Former Finance Minister Fernando Henrique Cardoso was about to beat out the radical labor leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for the presidency of Brazil. Argentine President Carlos Menem had pegged the peso to the dollar and put his populist Peronist legacy behind him. And at the invitation of President Bill Clinton, Latin American leaders were preparing to gather in Miami for the Summit of the Americas, signaling an almost unprecedented convergence between the southern and northern halves of the Western Hemisphere.
"What a difference ten years can make. Although the region has just enjoyed its best two years of economic growth in a long time and real threats to democratic rule are few and far between, the landscape today is transformed. Latin America is swerving left, and distinct backlashes are under way against the predominant trends of the last 15 years: free-market reforms, agreement with the United States on a number of issues, and the consolidation of representative democracy. This reaction is more politics than policy, and more nuanced than it may appear. But it is real.”
The fairy tale dimension of this – for instance, that Salinas, a man 'elected' by massive vote fraud, whose delivery of the presidency was not to a hand picked successor (oops, that guy was gunned down) but to a man who had barely begun ruling when the Mexican economy cracked up – casts a blot over Castañeda’s reputation for astuteness. Perhaps he is suffering from long term memory loss. The article is, nevertheless, important. The pathological hatred that Obrador evokes among a cadre of formerly leftist intellectuals (who view themselves as a Latin American form of New Labour – strong on free trade, strong on public investment in human capital – or not so strong on the latter if there is a banking collapse that requires looting the treasury to float various private fortunes) is not interpreted, here, but radiates from such paragraphs as:
“THE LEFTIST leaders who have arisen from a populist, nationalist past with few ideological underpinnings--Chávez with his military background, Kirchner with his Peronist roots, Morales with his coca-leaf growers' militancy and agitprop, López Obrador with his origins in the PRI--have proved much less responsive to modernizing influences. For them, rhetoric is more important than substance, and the fact of power is more important than its responsible exercise. The despair of poor constituencies is a tool rather than a challenge, and taunting the United States trumps promoting their countries' real interests in the world. The difference is obvious: Chávez is not Castro; he is Perón with oil. Morales is not an indigenous Che; he is a skillful and irresponsible populist. López Obrador is neither Lula nor Chávez; he comes straight from the PRI of Luis Echeverría, Mexico's president from 1970 to 1976, from which he learned how to be a cash-dispensing, authoritarian-inclined populist. Kirchner is a true-blue Peronist, and proud of it.”
In Castañeda’s fairy tale, the populist leftists – the devil’s seed – contrast with good leftists who – unsurprisingly – are just like himself. They came from the hard left – the Communist parties of yore – but as the cold war ended, embraced the idea of reform with enthusiasm. Reform, of course, means neo-liberalism on steroids. Castañeda does some bogus comparison work to show how bad populist leftists – like Chavez – are leading their countries into the financial abyss, while good leftists – former communists pursuing Chairman Milton Friedman’s revolutionary line – have been happy homemakers.
To do this, Castañeda does things like comparing Mexico’s growth – from 1999 to 2004 – to Venezuela’s. Disingenuous is no word for it. He is so set on discrediting Chavez that he gets his dates confused:
“A simple comparison with Mexico--which has not exactly thrived in recent years--shows how badly Venezuela is faring. Over the past seven years, Mexico's economy grew by 17.5 percent, while Venezuela's failed to grow at all. From 1997 to 2003, Mexico's per capita GDP rose by 9.5 percent, while Venezuela's shrank by 45 percent. From 1998 to 2005, the Mexican peso lost 16 percent of its value, while the value of the Venezuelan bolivar dropped by 292 percent. Between 1998 and 2004, the number of Mexican households living in extreme poverty decreased by 49 percent, while the number of Venezuelan households in extreme poverty rose by 4.5 percent. In 2005, Mexico's inflation rate was estimated at 3.3 percent, the lowest in years, while Venezuela's was 16 percent.”
If Chavez came in in 1999, why are we dealing with Mexico in 1997? And where are those GDP growth figures for 2004? 2005? Argentina and Venezuela, devil states according to Castañeda, posted the best GDP figures for 2005 in Latin America. And Venezuela's inflatin problem, in 2005, surely stems from GDP growth of 17 percent in 2004 -- sorta missing from the article, eh? Since 2005 does seem to interest Castañda when it comes to inflation, surely that is a relevant statistic. Unless, of course, he is making a crooked case before a packed jury. In fact, Castañeda has been making crooked cases for a long time, now. It is his version of Foxismo.
One can agree with part of Castañeda’s fairy tale, at least. Among the many reasons that the communist party was a complete disaster in the 20th century was its inculcation of a power mad mindset among the intelligentsia. In Latin America, this meant that communists could easily move from the far left to the far right in the social and economic policies they pursued – or rather, that they allied with the powerful to pursue. J. Edgar Hoover was right – never trust a communist. He was simply wrong about the reason – Hoover thought you could always trust a communist to be communist – showing that he should have gotten out of the house and snuck away from the horsetrack set a little more often. Actually, you can never trust a communist to be communist.
Mexico is, at present, the house that Salinas built. (And speaking of houses, since Salinas has once again settled in Mexico City, it seems Castañeda has been his guest at various parties. Both men share an astonishing lack of shame.) Zedillo and Fox have both basically followed Salinas’ path of trade liberalization and an absence of state policies to either invest in human capital (in spite of the Blairist rhetoric) or to leverage the Mexican place in the global system to once again jump start wages. The state organizations that desperately did need reform in order to create strong instruments to countervail corporate interests – notably, the interface between the state and the labor unions, and the regulatory regime that should oversee environment, health, finance, etc. – have never been reformed – they have been undermined. The Salinas economy has aggravated the perennial Mexican problem of cumulative advantage and the elite, people such as Castañda, have become even harder in their attitudes. New Labour is impossible in a place where there exists no compact at all between the elite and the working class. In England, no working man would chuckle at the kidnapping and torture of some rich City banker. In DEF, however, there is a distinct schadenfreude whenever a doctor's family has to pay a ransom for the son or daughter. That's a sign that things are bad. Very bad.
It may be that this election is the end of the line for Salinas’ vision. As the more astute financial papers have perceived, the PRD has emerged as at least the second party in Mexico, displacing the PRI. In the 50/50 state, Obrador – who is not going to go away and sulk, like Cardenas did after 1988 – has the pieces to block “reform”. The PAN, at the moment, has the pieces to block Obrador’ s New Deal. This election shows the marshalling of forces, but far be it from LI to predict the next moves in the game.
“JUST OVER a decade ago, Latin America seemed poised to begin a virtuous cycle of economic progress and improved democratic governance, overseen by a growing number of centrist technocratic governments. In Mexico, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, buttressed by the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, was ready for his handpicked successor to win the next presidential election. Former Finance Minister Fernando Henrique Cardoso was about to beat out the radical labor leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for the presidency of Brazil. Argentine President Carlos Menem had pegged the peso to the dollar and put his populist Peronist legacy behind him. And at the invitation of President Bill Clinton, Latin American leaders were preparing to gather in Miami for the Summit of the Americas, signaling an almost unprecedented convergence between the southern and northern halves of the Western Hemisphere.
"What a difference ten years can make. Although the region has just enjoyed its best two years of economic growth in a long time and real threats to democratic rule are few and far between, the landscape today is transformed. Latin America is swerving left, and distinct backlashes are under way against the predominant trends of the last 15 years: free-market reforms, agreement with the United States on a number of issues, and the consolidation of representative democracy. This reaction is more politics than policy, and more nuanced than it may appear. But it is real.”
The fairy tale dimension of this – for instance, that Salinas, a man 'elected' by massive vote fraud, whose delivery of the presidency was not to a hand picked successor (oops, that guy was gunned down) but to a man who had barely begun ruling when the Mexican economy cracked up – casts a blot over Castañeda’s reputation for astuteness. Perhaps he is suffering from long term memory loss. The article is, nevertheless, important. The pathological hatred that Obrador evokes among a cadre of formerly leftist intellectuals (who view themselves as a Latin American form of New Labour – strong on free trade, strong on public investment in human capital – or not so strong on the latter if there is a banking collapse that requires looting the treasury to float various private fortunes) is not interpreted, here, but radiates from such paragraphs as:
“THE LEFTIST leaders who have arisen from a populist, nationalist past with few ideological underpinnings--Chávez with his military background, Kirchner with his Peronist roots, Morales with his coca-leaf growers' militancy and agitprop, López Obrador with his origins in the PRI--have proved much less responsive to modernizing influences. For them, rhetoric is more important than substance, and the fact of power is more important than its responsible exercise. The despair of poor constituencies is a tool rather than a challenge, and taunting the United States trumps promoting their countries' real interests in the world. The difference is obvious: Chávez is not Castro; he is Perón with oil. Morales is not an indigenous Che; he is a skillful and irresponsible populist. López Obrador is neither Lula nor Chávez; he comes straight from the PRI of Luis Echeverría, Mexico's president from 1970 to 1976, from which he learned how to be a cash-dispensing, authoritarian-inclined populist. Kirchner is a true-blue Peronist, and proud of it.”
In Castañeda’s fairy tale, the populist leftists – the devil’s seed – contrast with good leftists who – unsurprisingly – are just like himself. They came from the hard left – the Communist parties of yore – but as the cold war ended, embraced the idea of reform with enthusiasm. Reform, of course, means neo-liberalism on steroids. Castañeda does some bogus comparison work to show how bad populist leftists – like Chavez – are leading their countries into the financial abyss, while good leftists – former communists pursuing Chairman Milton Friedman’s revolutionary line – have been happy homemakers.
To do this, Castañeda does things like comparing Mexico’s growth – from 1999 to 2004 – to Venezuela’s. Disingenuous is no word for it. He is so set on discrediting Chavez that he gets his dates confused:
“A simple comparison with Mexico--which has not exactly thrived in recent years--shows how badly Venezuela is faring. Over the past seven years, Mexico's economy grew by 17.5 percent, while Venezuela's failed to grow at all. From 1997 to 2003, Mexico's per capita GDP rose by 9.5 percent, while Venezuela's shrank by 45 percent. From 1998 to 2005, the Mexican peso lost 16 percent of its value, while the value of the Venezuelan bolivar dropped by 292 percent. Between 1998 and 2004, the number of Mexican households living in extreme poverty decreased by 49 percent, while the number of Venezuelan households in extreme poverty rose by 4.5 percent. In 2005, Mexico's inflation rate was estimated at 3.3 percent, the lowest in years, while Venezuela's was 16 percent.”
If Chavez came in in 1999, why are we dealing with Mexico in 1997? And where are those GDP growth figures for 2004? 2005? Argentina and Venezuela, devil states according to Castañeda, posted the best GDP figures for 2005 in Latin America. And Venezuela's inflatin problem, in 2005, surely stems from GDP growth of 17 percent in 2004 -- sorta missing from the article, eh? Since 2005 does seem to interest Castañda when it comes to inflation, surely that is a relevant statistic. Unless, of course, he is making a crooked case before a packed jury. In fact, Castañeda has been making crooked cases for a long time, now. It is his version of Foxismo.
One can agree with part of Castañeda’s fairy tale, at least. Among the many reasons that the communist party was a complete disaster in the 20th century was its inculcation of a power mad mindset among the intelligentsia. In Latin America, this meant that communists could easily move from the far left to the far right in the social and economic policies they pursued – or rather, that they allied with the powerful to pursue. J. Edgar Hoover was right – never trust a communist. He was simply wrong about the reason – Hoover thought you could always trust a communist to be communist – showing that he should have gotten out of the house and snuck away from the horsetrack set a little more often. Actually, you can never trust a communist to be communist.
Mexico is, at present, the house that Salinas built. (And speaking of houses, since Salinas has once again settled in Mexico City, it seems Castañeda has been his guest at various parties. Both men share an astonishing lack of shame.) Zedillo and Fox have both basically followed Salinas’ path of trade liberalization and an absence of state policies to either invest in human capital (in spite of the Blairist rhetoric) or to leverage the Mexican place in the global system to once again jump start wages. The state organizations that desperately did need reform in order to create strong instruments to countervail corporate interests – notably, the interface between the state and the labor unions, and the regulatory regime that should oversee environment, health, finance, etc. – have never been reformed – they have been undermined. The Salinas economy has aggravated the perennial Mexican problem of cumulative advantage and the elite, people such as Castañda, have become even harder in their attitudes. New Labour is impossible in a place where there exists no compact at all between the elite and the working class. In England, no working man would chuckle at the kidnapping and torture of some rich City banker. In DEF, however, there is a distinct schadenfreude whenever a doctor's family has to pay a ransom for the son or daughter. That's a sign that things are bad. Very bad.
It may be that this election is the end of the line for Salinas’ vision. As the more astute financial papers have perceived, the PRD has emerged as at least the second party in Mexico, displacing the PRI. In the 50/50 state, Obrador – who is not going to go away and sulk, like Cardenas did after 1988 – has the pieces to block “reform”. The PAN, at the moment, has the pieces to block Obrador’ s New Deal. This election shows the marshalling of forces, but far be it from LI to predict the next moves in the game.
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
x ray of a news story - the mexican election
The Mexican election is proving to be an x ray of the news business.
The so called “preliminary result” showed that PAN’s candidate, and the candidate of emerging market investors, Felipe Calderon, had pulled ahead by 400,000 some votes. The number remaining to count was 800.000 votes. Hence, it looked like Calderon had an insurmountable lead.
This, at least, is what the NYT reported. And it was reported internationally. Here, for example, is the Globe and Mail (a Canadian paper for which LI has written), today:
“The party of leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador challenged preliminary results of Sunday's presidential election, accusing Mexican election authorities of failing to count more than three million votes.
Mr. Lopez Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor, has claimed victory in the divisive election even though he trailed his conservative rival, Felipe Calderon of the National Action Party, by slightly more than 400,000 votes, or one percentage point, after the Federal Election Institute (IFE) completed a preliminary count on Monday.
The official count is due to start today, but an announcement of the result is not expected until Sunday.
"Preliminary figures showed Mr. Calderon with 36.4 per cent of the vote, Mr. Lopez Obrador with 35.3 per cent and Roberto Madrazo of the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI) with 21.6 per cent.”
This is the Financial Times story, today:
“Manuel Camacho, a congressman for Mr Lopez Obrador's Democratic Revolution party (PRD) and a key strategist in the leftwing candidate's campaign, told the FT yesterday: "We are almost certainly going to contest this election . . . but we are not going to generate a dispute unless we are sure of our arguments."
"His remarks were made as Felipe Calderon, the centre-right candidate for the ruling National Action party (PAN), appeared to have taken a small but decisive lead in what is turning out to have been the closest election in Mexico's history.
A preliminary count by the country's Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) showed Mr Calderon with an advantage of 400,000 votes - about 1 per cent of the total cast - over Mr Lopez Obrador.”
These stories repeat the AP and NYT accounts from July 3. The problem is, of course, that they are false. The notion that, for instance, there is a preliminary count is a newspaper event – as we learned in today’s stories in WAPO, the NYT, and the LATimes.
From today’s LATimes“Ugalde [the head of the commission counting the votes] reminded Mexicans in a television interview Tuesday that the preliminary count issued by the institute had no legal standing. The official winner will be determined after a recount of the polling reports begins today. It remains unclear when that count will be complete.
"We still do not have a winner," Ugalde said, adding that there was never any intent to hide the vote result from the public.”
And further:
“An initial count of the ballots gave a slim but apparently insurmountable lead to Calderon. On Monday evening, Calderon was leading Lopez Obrador by 402,708 votes, with 98.45% of polling stations "processed," according to official reports.
But election authorities acknowledged Tuesday that the preliminary count did not include vote totals from more than 11,000 stations where "irregularities" were noted in official paperwork. Those stations were listed as "processed" in the official reports, but their votes were not included in the tally.
Late Tuesday, election officials added the 2.5 million votes to the public count. Lopez Obrador outpolled Calderon on these ballots by more than 145,000 votes, narrowing Calderon's lead to slightly more than 257,000 ballots, or 0.6 percentage point.”
Now, when LI first scribbled this down, we were sure that something odd was going on with the very notion of preliminary results. Apparently, the oddity stems from an agreement between the parties and the election commission. This is from a site entitled Mexdata:
"As a matter of fact, Mexico’s electoral law does not include the PREP mechanism, nor is the chairman of the board of the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) given the option to release the preliminary results publicly on the same day as the election. The decision to allow this was the result of an agreement reached with the political parties, which said four hours after the polls close each could have their data transmitted to the IFE, so that it could then release trusted preliminary result data on election night.
The PREP results do not take into consideration any challenges made by poll representatives, nor the possibility of ballots from some of those polls being annulled. However, besides the dependable information each political party knows this, through their polling place representatives, as they too have the information that supposedly corresponds with that of the IFE. Thus the PREP results are trustworthy, although not definitive."
So it is going to far to say that the newspapers were wholly inventing the preliminary results -- rather, they were giving them a false finality. The word to watch for – the word that went around the world – is “insurmountable.” As LI noted a couple of days ago, the news – especially when these kinds of coups occur – operates in a special temporal mode. Just like in your favorite fascoid action movie, the hero moves in slo-mo. This isn’t just one way of showing an event –it is an essential constituent of the event. What is otherwise unbelievable happens right before your baby blues. How can you doubt your vision? How can you doubt that ‘insurmountable’ lead – which seems, indeed, to have been cut in half, now, with 900,000 votes still waiting to be counted?
In this way, the Obrador’s complaint can be made to seem like sour grapes. Which is how the headlines, then, will cast the issue – for after the hero, some stunning Aryan, has taken care of the villain, the film jumps back to normal speed. Is the villain going to start complaining? Why, this is the way films are made. You can't turn against the very condition of your representation. That condition is inevitable. To complain about it shows a lack of the sportif! So many poor people do that. They sit around and bitch. Life’s unfair. Like, get a job is the only answer to that one.
As for the news role in making sure that there are no surprises in these elections, the end of the LATimes piece has a nice and telling detail:
“Suspicion among Lopez Obrador's supporters was heightened Monday when the investigative magazine Proceso, citing police intelligence sources, reported that senior Interior Ministry officials had attempted to shape media coverage on election night.
"Ministry officials called the news directors at Mexico's two leading television networks and requested that they not broadcast the results of their exit polls, Proceso reported.
"Interior Minister Carlos Abascal did not deny making such calls, though he said Mexico's media were free of the government controls of the recent past. The networks did not report the specific figures from their exit poll results out of a sense of responsibility, he said.
"Abascal made several oblique references to Lopez Obrador, without naming him, and insisted on the need for all parties to respect the official count. He noted that during the campaign, all parties signed an accord pledging to honor the results.
"We insist that the electoral process has to be absolutely respected, because it was transparent," Abascal said. "It is characteristic of democracy to have argument and passionate rivalry, but it is also characteristic of democracy to submit unconditionally to the referee and the result."”
The sham, here, is paper thin. As PAN already showed when they tried to impeach Obrador, the party still has not got down the PRI talent for suppressing the opposition.
LI, of course, hopes that Obrador’s share of the 900.000 still to count might just overcome the insurmountable lead of … what is it now? 257,000 votes. But the iconic 400,000 that gave Calderon his ‘insurmountable’ lead is what will stick with the media. The outlines of the story are in place, just as they were in Florida. It isn’t enough just to steal elections with the ridiculous array of problems that we saw in Ohio in 2004, say – the press – which often chuckles and tut tuts itself about being so concerned with the horse race, the scoop - is critical in shaping the story.
The horse race is fixed. The mounts are doped. And we will definitely not be listening to complaints by the 2 dollar bettors, who obviously don’t know what the meaning of ‘insurmountable’ is.
ps -- for the other side of these numbers, making the case that the votes are already counted from the 11,000 supposedly tossed out precincts, LI readers can check out Markinmexico Blog. We looked around to find some conservative commentary on Mexico, but it is all so depressingly the same hamburger. But Mark, who is pro-PAN, is actually (mirabile dictu!) an intellectually respectable source of information.
pps -- it looks like Mexico might get something that the U.S. was denied in 2000 - an open election. The turnabout for Obrador is astonishing the Mexican electorate, who are seeing a thing never seen in Mexico -- the way the election results are made. Mexico has been haunted, since 1988, by stolen elections, and by the never explained events at the end of the Salinas era. This election is going to cripple, we think, Foxismo -- that most dubious of macro-economic strategies -- even if Calderon turns out, in the end, to be the winner. Calderon is a remarkable blank in his own election -- Obrador, as either a hate figure or an adored figure, is the only politician, at the moment, who counts. Calderon's proclamation that he slept late this morning (who, me worry?) was pathetic in every way. The PAN has not had time to absorb the whole disgusting infrastrucutre of the Salinas era PRI yet - though, of course, they are financed by the same people.
Obrador, it seems to me, did the right thing in the final weeks of the campaign by bringing in, of all people, FDR to drive out the voodoo doll of Chavez that the PAN was trying to hang around his neck. In fact, Mexico does need a heavily Keynesian policy -- it cannot continue the cheap labor policy to find its niche in the world economy. That made some sense twenty years ago, but only if combined with policies that would, in effect, accumulate capital -- both private and public. This never happened. Mexico can't compete with China on the road to the bottom, and it is gong to have massive problems in those industrial areas, like Juarez, in which the working wage, if you aren't lucky enough to find a job with a drug mafia, has remained unchanged for twenty years. And along with the wage stagnation comes the stagnation in the state of manufacturing: what they are doing in Juarez is what they were doing 20 years ago. That is the failure of Salinas style neo-liberalism, a sort of wax museum of the old blue book days in the U.K., circa 1850. It is a dead end, and whether the symbolic corpse at the end of it is the 1 day wonder of Calderon, or whether the symbolic corpses are more plentiful, and composed of the butchered women of Juarez -- the fact is, that road doesn't go anywhere anymore.
The so called “preliminary result” showed that PAN’s candidate, and the candidate of emerging market investors, Felipe Calderon, had pulled ahead by 400,000 some votes. The number remaining to count was 800.000 votes. Hence, it looked like Calderon had an insurmountable lead.
This, at least, is what the NYT reported. And it was reported internationally. Here, for example, is the Globe and Mail (a Canadian paper for which LI has written), today:
“The party of leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador challenged preliminary results of Sunday's presidential election, accusing Mexican election authorities of failing to count more than three million votes.
Mr. Lopez Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor, has claimed victory in the divisive election even though he trailed his conservative rival, Felipe Calderon of the National Action Party, by slightly more than 400,000 votes, or one percentage point, after the Federal Election Institute (IFE) completed a preliminary count on Monday.
The official count is due to start today, but an announcement of the result is not expected until Sunday.
"Preliminary figures showed Mr. Calderon with 36.4 per cent of the vote, Mr. Lopez Obrador with 35.3 per cent and Roberto Madrazo of the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI) with 21.6 per cent.”
This is the Financial Times story, today:
“Manuel Camacho, a congressman for Mr Lopez Obrador's Democratic Revolution party (PRD) and a key strategist in the leftwing candidate's campaign, told the FT yesterday: "We are almost certainly going to contest this election . . . but we are not going to generate a dispute unless we are sure of our arguments."
"His remarks were made as Felipe Calderon, the centre-right candidate for the ruling National Action party (PAN), appeared to have taken a small but decisive lead in what is turning out to have been the closest election in Mexico's history.
A preliminary count by the country's Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) showed Mr Calderon with an advantage of 400,000 votes - about 1 per cent of the total cast - over Mr Lopez Obrador.”
These stories repeat the AP and NYT accounts from July 3. The problem is, of course, that they are false. The notion that, for instance, there is a preliminary count is a newspaper event – as we learned in today’s stories in WAPO, the NYT, and the LATimes.
From today’s LATimes“Ugalde [the head of the commission counting the votes] reminded Mexicans in a television interview Tuesday that the preliminary count issued by the institute had no legal standing. The official winner will be determined after a recount of the polling reports begins today. It remains unclear when that count will be complete.
"We still do not have a winner," Ugalde said, adding that there was never any intent to hide the vote result from the public.”
And further:
“An initial count of the ballots gave a slim but apparently insurmountable lead to Calderon. On Monday evening, Calderon was leading Lopez Obrador by 402,708 votes, with 98.45% of polling stations "processed," according to official reports.
But election authorities acknowledged Tuesday that the preliminary count did not include vote totals from more than 11,000 stations where "irregularities" were noted in official paperwork. Those stations were listed as "processed" in the official reports, but their votes were not included in the tally.
Late Tuesday, election officials added the 2.5 million votes to the public count. Lopez Obrador outpolled Calderon on these ballots by more than 145,000 votes, narrowing Calderon's lead to slightly more than 257,000 ballots, or 0.6 percentage point.”
Now, when LI first scribbled this down, we were sure that something odd was going on with the very notion of preliminary results. Apparently, the oddity stems from an agreement between the parties and the election commission. This is from a site entitled Mexdata:
"As a matter of fact, Mexico’s electoral law does not include the PREP mechanism, nor is the chairman of the board of the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) given the option to release the preliminary results publicly on the same day as the election. The decision to allow this was the result of an agreement reached with the political parties, which said four hours after the polls close each could have their data transmitted to the IFE, so that it could then release trusted preliminary result data on election night.
The PREP results do not take into consideration any challenges made by poll representatives, nor the possibility of ballots from some of those polls being annulled. However, besides the dependable information each political party knows this, through their polling place representatives, as they too have the information that supposedly corresponds with that of the IFE. Thus the PREP results are trustworthy, although not definitive."
So it is going to far to say that the newspapers were wholly inventing the preliminary results -- rather, they were giving them a false finality. The word to watch for – the word that went around the world – is “insurmountable.” As LI noted a couple of days ago, the news – especially when these kinds of coups occur – operates in a special temporal mode. Just like in your favorite fascoid action movie, the hero moves in slo-mo. This isn’t just one way of showing an event –it is an essential constituent of the event. What is otherwise unbelievable happens right before your baby blues. How can you doubt your vision? How can you doubt that ‘insurmountable’ lead – which seems, indeed, to have been cut in half, now, with 900,000 votes still waiting to be counted?
In this way, the Obrador’s complaint can be made to seem like sour grapes. Which is how the headlines, then, will cast the issue – for after the hero, some stunning Aryan, has taken care of the villain, the film jumps back to normal speed. Is the villain going to start complaining? Why, this is the way films are made. You can't turn against the very condition of your representation. That condition is inevitable. To complain about it shows a lack of the sportif! So many poor people do that. They sit around and bitch. Life’s unfair. Like, get a job is the only answer to that one.
As for the news role in making sure that there are no surprises in these elections, the end of the LATimes piece has a nice and telling detail:
“Suspicion among Lopez Obrador's supporters was heightened Monday when the investigative magazine Proceso, citing police intelligence sources, reported that senior Interior Ministry officials had attempted to shape media coverage on election night.
"Ministry officials called the news directors at Mexico's two leading television networks and requested that they not broadcast the results of their exit polls, Proceso reported.
"Interior Minister Carlos Abascal did not deny making such calls, though he said Mexico's media were free of the government controls of the recent past. The networks did not report the specific figures from their exit poll results out of a sense of responsibility, he said.
"Abascal made several oblique references to Lopez Obrador, without naming him, and insisted on the need for all parties to respect the official count. He noted that during the campaign, all parties signed an accord pledging to honor the results.
"We insist that the electoral process has to be absolutely respected, because it was transparent," Abascal said. "It is characteristic of democracy to have argument and passionate rivalry, but it is also characteristic of democracy to submit unconditionally to the referee and the result."”
The sham, here, is paper thin. As PAN already showed when they tried to impeach Obrador, the party still has not got down the PRI talent for suppressing the opposition.
LI, of course, hopes that Obrador’s share of the 900.000 still to count might just overcome the insurmountable lead of … what is it now? 257,000 votes. But the iconic 400,000 that gave Calderon his ‘insurmountable’ lead is what will stick with the media. The outlines of the story are in place, just as they were in Florida. It isn’t enough just to steal elections with the ridiculous array of problems that we saw in Ohio in 2004, say – the press – which often chuckles and tut tuts itself about being so concerned with the horse race, the scoop - is critical in shaping the story.
The horse race is fixed. The mounts are doped. And we will definitely not be listening to complaints by the 2 dollar bettors, who obviously don’t know what the meaning of ‘insurmountable’ is.
ps -- for the other side of these numbers, making the case that the votes are already counted from the 11,000 supposedly tossed out precincts, LI readers can check out Markinmexico Blog. We looked around to find some conservative commentary on Mexico, but it is all so depressingly the same hamburger. But Mark, who is pro-PAN, is actually (mirabile dictu!) an intellectually respectable source of information.
pps -- it looks like Mexico might get something that the U.S. was denied in 2000 - an open election. The turnabout for Obrador is astonishing the Mexican electorate, who are seeing a thing never seen in Mexico -- the way the election results are made. Mexico has been haunted, since 1988, by stolen elections, and by the never explained events at the end of the Salinas era. This election is going to cripple, we think, Foxismo -- that most dubious of macro-economic strategies -- even if Calderon turns out, in the end, to be the winner. Calderon is a remarkable blank in his own election -- Obrador, as either a hate figure or an adored figure, is the only politician, at the moment, who counts. Calderon's proclamation that he slept late this morning (who, me worry?) was pathetic in every way. The PAN has not had time to absorb the whole disgusting infrastrucutre of the Salinas era PRI yet - though, of course, they are financed by the same people.
Obrador, it seems to me, did the right thing in the final weeks of the campaign by bringing in, of all people, FDR to drive out the voodoo doll of Chavez that the PAN was trying to hang around his neck. In fact, Mexico does need a heavily Keynesian policy -- it cannot continue the cheap labor policy to find its niche in the world economy. That made some sense twenty years ago, but only if combined with policies that would, in effect, accumulate capital -- both private and public. This never happened. Mexico can't compete with China on the road to the bottom, and it is gong to have massive problems in those industrial areas, like Juarez, in which the working wage, if you aren't lucky enough to find a job with a drug mafia, has remained unchanged for twenty years. And along with the wage stagnation comes the stagnation in the state of manufacturing: what they are doing in Juarez is what they were doing 20 years ago. That is the failure of Salinas style neo-liberalism, a sort of wax museum of the old blue book days in the U.K., circa 1850. It is a dead end, and whether the symbolic corpse at the end of it is the 1 day wonder of Calderon, or whether the symbolic corpses are more plentiful, and composed of the butchered women of Juarez -- the fact is, that road doesn't go anywhere anymore.
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
happy 4th!
Happy fourth, sons and daughters of liberty!
Resolutions are made on New Year's day, so why not on the 4th? Patriotic resolutions. LI's are:
a. to keep shooting peas at the imperial nightmare we now struggle under;
b. to choke the army, overthrow illegal executive power, and end the occupation of Iraq;
c. to advance the cause of transforming the treadmill of production into an earth friendly system, so help me God;
d. to thread the narrow passages, make the crossings over the howling deserts, and water the horses of the grand old American language, my lovely tongue.
And here's some Blake from America: a prophecy:
The bones of death, the cov'ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry'd.
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst;
Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field:
Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years;
Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open.
And let his wife and children return from the opressors scourge;
They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream.
Singing. The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning
And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night;
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.
Resolutions are made on New Year's day, so why not on the 4th? Patriotic resolutions. LI's are:
a. to keep shooting peas at the imperial nightmare we now struggle under;
b. to choke the army, overthrow illegal executive power, and end the occupation of Iraq;
c. to advance the cause of transforming the treadmill of production into an earth friendly system, so help me God;
d. to thread the narrow passages, make the crossings over the howling deserts, and water the horses of the grand old American language, my lovely tongue.
And here's some Blake from America: a prophecy:
The bones of death, the cov'ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry'd.
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst;
Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field:
Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years;
Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open.
And let his wife and children return from the opressors scourge;
They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream.
Singing. The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning
And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night;
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.
Monday, July 03, 2006
Cobblestone, the magazine of pre-teen warmongering
Here’s a story that made LI’s blood pressure shoot up.
“Parents and teachers are complaining that the latest issue of a popular magazine for preteens amounts to little more than an early recruitment pitch for the Army.
Cobblestone magazine, which is put out by Carus Publishing in Peterborough, is aimed at children ages 9-14 and is distributed nationwide to schools and libraries. Its latest issue features a cover photo of a soldier in Iraq clutching a machine gun and articles on what it's like to go through boot camp, a rundown of the Army's ''awesome arsenal'' and a detailed description of Army career opportunities.”
Stories like this show pretty much what the struggle in this country is all about. On one side is a war culture proposing to grind our children into Gainsbugers. On the other side is pure goodness. Hey, it is an easy choice!
“Most controversial has been a set of classroom guides that accompany the magazine, which suggest teachers invite a soldier, Army recruiter or veteran to speak to their classes and ask students whether they might want to join the Army someday.
One of the teaching guides -- written by Mary Lawson, a teacher in Saint Cloud., Fla. -- suggests having students write essays pretending they are going to join the Army: ''Have them decide which career they feel they would qualify for and write a paper to persuade a recruiter why that should be the career.''”
Here’s a counter suggestion from LI. Invite a peace activist to the classroom. Ask students how they might react to attacks on the Constitution by their own government. Explain concepts like “mercenary,” “tyranny,” "aggressive war." Have students write essays about how they would react to having their country occupied for three or four years. Show pictures of the dead and wounded of Fallujah, Ramadi, Baghdad, Samara and other Iraqi cities. Take students on a field trip to the local recruiting station. Supply them with picket signs saying, Hell no, we won’t go. Explain hell and devils (Hint: Use photograph of Vice President as an illustration).
Seriously, there are anti-recruitment groups who are doing high school visits. This is a link to a directory of ‘opt out’ organizations (one of which is located in LI’s town – Austin, Texas).
“Parents and teachers are complaining that the latest issue of a popular magazine for preteens amounts to little more than an early recruitment pitch for the Army.
Cobblestone magazine, which is put out by Carus Publishing in Peterborough, is aimed at children ages 9-14 and is distributed nationwide to schools and libraries. Its latest issue features a cover photo of a soldier in Iraq clutching a machine gun and articles on what it's like to go through boot camp, a rundown of the Army's ''awesome arsenal'' and a detailed description of Army career opportunities.”
Stories like this show pretty much what the struggle in this country is all about. On one side is a war culture proposing to grind our children into Gainsbugers. On the other side is pure goodness. Hey, it is an easy choice!
“Most controversial has been a set of classroom guides that accompany the magazine, which suggest teachers invite a soldier, Army recruiter or veteran to speak to their classes and ask students whether they might want to join the Army someday.
One of the teaching guides -- written by Mary Lawson, a teacher in Saint Cloud., Fla. -- suggests having students write essays pretending they are going to join the Army: ''Have them decide which career they feel they would qualify for and write a paper to persuade a recruiter why that should be the career.''”
Here’s a counter suggestion from LI. Invite a peace activist to the classroom. Ask students how they might react to attacks on the Constitution by their own government. Explain concepts like “mercenary,” “tyranny,” "aggressive war." Have students write essays about how they would react to having their country occupied for three or four years. Show pictures of the dead and wounded of Fallujah, Ramadi, Baghdad, Samara and other Iraqi cities. Take students on a field trip to the local recruiting station. Supply them with picket signs saying, Hell no, we won’t go. Explain hell and devils (Hint: Use photograph of Vice President as an illustration).
Seriously, there are anti-recruitment groups who are doing high school visits. This is a link to a directory of ‘opt out’ organizations (one of which is located in LI’s town – Austin, Texas).
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