Obama, Elkhart, and the Economic Crisis

For some reason I feel compelled to write something. Not sure what exactly, but the fact that President Obama chose my hometown of Elkhart, IN as his venue of choice to talk about the economy, well, freaks me out a little. The stat I keep hearing is that Elkhart’s employment is among the worst in the nation, going from around 4 percent in Dec 07 to over 15 percent in Dec 08.

So Obama is using Elkhart as a geographic symbol of the economic pain being suffered around the country and no doubt, increasingly the globe. He campaigned there and now he is back to promote the stimulus bill in congress. Back to make good on his campaign promises. His speech sounded like a stump speech from the start, but then he broke it down to specifics:
1) extend unemployment benefits and health care, job training programs
2) tax relief for “middle class workers and families.” $1000 per families and 2500 for college expenses
3) create or save jobs (80,000 for indiana), 90 percent in the private sector. Jobs to rebuild infrastructure.
4) work toward energy independence. alt energy sources and efficiency programs.
5) rural broadband expansion.

Meanwhile, the democrats in the senate are “compromising” away with republicans on getting a version of the stimulus bill passed.

Obama said he recognizes that the bill that comes out won’t be perfect, but it needs to be passed asap. “Doing nothing is not an option.” And this bill is just the beginning, recovery will take years.

Here is a link to a video of the speech

Obama Wins!

It’s hard to find the words to describe this right now. Amazing.

But this is only the start. We need to do our part, hold people accountable, and keep the faith.

For those who kept asking: Who is the real Obama?

Well, I think a better question is not “who is the real Obama,” but instead, who is the real citizenry of the United States and what are their biggest priorities? I doubt Obama could have ever been elected twenty years ago, but America today is different place. I’m not trying to be a jerk here, but it’s not like he beat McCain by a narrow margin; voters made a decisive choice. So I am asking, who exactly is the “real” America? Maybe the “center” is shifting to the “left.” No doubt we still have a fair amount of our xenophobic “I won’t vote for no Muslim” jackasses, but they either are not the majority or they didn’t vote.

But frankly I am tired of the rigid notion of liberals versus conservatives. From my perspective, the real problem is the mounting social inequality that results from governmental acquiescence (or blatant subservience) to elite corporate interests. And we see this from liberals and conservatives alike. This inequality is what people are against. If you want to call that “liberal,” that’s fine, but if that’s the case then there are a lot more liberals out there than you’d like to think. Obama holds out the promise to not only move beyond left/right, but more importantly to even the playing field for millions of people who are frustrated by a political economic system that simply isn’t working in their best interests. And I hope he can make some steps to do it, but it is all of our jobs to hold him to these tasks in the face of what will be immense resistance from the entrenched power holders.

All I know is that it feels damn good to finally be from a blue state! Maybe those doors I knocked on even made a difference. What a concept.

Lessig Keynote at National Conference for Media Reform

Senate GOP blocks windfall taxes on Big Oil

Blind adherence to “free market” principles continue to muck up our political system.
Senate GOP blocks windfall taxes on Big Oil

WASHINGTON – Saved by Senate Republicans, big oil companies dodged an attempt Tuesday to slap them with a windfall profits tax and take away billions of dollars in tax breaks in response to the record gasoline prices that have the nation fuming.

GOP senators shoved aside the Democratic proposal, arguing that punishing Big Oil won’t do a thing to lower the $4-a-gallon-price of gasoline that is sending economic waves across the country.

The Democratic energy package would have imposed a 25 percent tax on any “unreasonable” profits of the five largest U.S. oil companies, which together made $36 billion during the first three months of the year. It also would have given the government more power to address oil market speculation, opened the way for antitrust actions against countries belonging to the OPEC oil cartel, and made energy price gouging a federal crime.

…

The bill’s supporters argued that their proposal was different from the windfall profits taxes of the early 1980s that thwarted domestic production and led to a rise in imports. The oil companies could avoid the tax by using their “windfall” to push alternative energy programs or refinery expansions, they said.

In addition to the proposed windfall profits tax, the Democrats’ bill also would have rescinded tax breaks that are expected to save the oil companies $17 billion over the next 10 years. The money would have been used to provide tax incentives for producers of wind, solar and other alternative energy sources as well as for energy conservation.

We are overly dependent on oil, especially foreign oil. Prices are skyrocketing yet oil companies are making RECORD profits. This can only mean that they are passing all of the excess costs to consumers, who now pay $4 a gallon at the pump. As large multinational corporations with huge Washington lobbies, the oil companies can, without penalty, defer the added costs of oil to the unorganized, apparently under-represented consumers and still make billions. This bill would have taxed these gross excesses of profit (at the public’s expense) and forced Big Oil to either redistribute some of their ill-gotten wealth or even better, skip the taxes by way of investment in alternative energy, which we desperately need. Instead, republicans killed the bill.

But it gets even better:

Shortly after the oil tax vote, Republicans blocked a second proposal that would extend tax breaks that have either expired or are scheduled to end this year for wind, solar and other alternative energy development, and for the promotion of energy efficiency and conservation.

What the hell is going on? This is a text book example of how unrestrained capitalism creates inequality. The republican congresspeople clearly feel no accountability to a majority of their constituents, i.e. average people who can’t afford lobbies. They need to be held accountable at the polls. This is so damn frustrating.

Bad News: I’m a fascist

Woo hoo! That unbelievable moron Bill O Reilly called me a “lunatic,” a “fascist,” and “anti-American.” Does this mean I have now arrived as a progressive?

I just got back from the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis – an amazing event. Paraphrasing McChesney and Nichols, “media reform” describes the broad goals of a movement that holds that consolidated ownership of broadcast and cable media, chain ownership of newspapers, and telephone and cable-company colonization of the Internet are bad for our culture and for democracy.

Apparently this is “lunacy” and “far left” to O Reilly, which shows that he is is a total jackass, and more importantly, that he is completely out of touch with the actual “center” of American politics. The only people who believe that big media are beneficial to the public are the people who own them and their sock puppets like O Reilly. Word.

How Taxes Really Work: email forward and response

About a week ago an email list of close friends got an interesting forward about the tax system. Perhaps you’ve seen this floating around the interweb. A friend of mine came up with a pretty great response, to which I added a post script. See what you think:

Original “Tax Lesson” forward:

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten
comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go
something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing. The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3. The seventh would pay $7. The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18. The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the
arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. ‘Since you are all
such good customers,’ he said, ‘I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily
beers by $20. Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.’

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the
first four men were unaffected.

They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men – the
paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone
would get his ‘fair share?’ They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33.
But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and
the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.

So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill
by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each
should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings). The
sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings). The seventh now pay $5 instead
of $7 (28%savings). The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings). The
ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings). The tenth now paid $49
instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before and the first four continued to
drink for free, but once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare
their savings. ‘I only got a dollar out of the $20,’ declared the sixth man.
He pointed to the tenth man, ‘but he got $10!’ ‘Yeah, that’s right,’
exclaimed the fifth man. ‘I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he
got TEN times more than I!’

‘That’s true!!’ shouted the seventh man. ‘Why should he get $10 back when I
got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!’

‘Wait a minute,’ yelled the first four men in unison. ‘We didn’t get
anything at all. The system exploits the poor!’

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down
and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they
discovered something very important….they didn’t have enough money between
all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax
system works.

The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax
reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just
may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where
the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

Here is my friend’s reply (with just a bit of editing):

Hmm…
The problem with this analogy is that that #1 poor guy and the #10 rich guy are drinking in the same bar, which would never happen.

In reality, the #10 guy pays more so he can have:
roads built to get him to his swanky bar, public works to clear the snow from the valet stand and clean the streets around the bar, police and fire resources to keep his bar safe, public transit into his downtown bar so his table gets cleared by busboys and so that a nice #2 can hand him a towel to dry his hands, homeless shelters to keep the “bums” out of the alley behind his condo, schools to help the #1’s kids grow up to be #4s that don’t need the help, prisons to keep his #10 family “safe”…

…And all with enough money left over to make sure that high real estate prices and gated communities keeps those #1-#4s out of their neighborhoods.

But I see your point…

To which I would only add:

But you forgot one important part of the story. #10 got rich in the first place because the company that’s been in his family for a few generations happens to know people in Washington, who happen to arrange the sub-contracting (aka “privatizing”) of most government functions like paving those roads or running health care or rebuilding newly destroyed middle eastern countries. So really, all that money in #10’s bank roll is actually the redistributed taxes of the bottom 9. I can make a flow chart if you want.

How controversial…

Blogging during the streaming of the democratic debate

I’m currently typing this as I’m staring at the nbc peacock-turned-loading wheel symbol that tells me to “wait for a few minutes and if we’re not back, just wait longer.”

I don’t have cable. It’s expensive and Comcast, the only provider, clearly mistreats their subscribers. Plus TV would be a serious distraction. Instead I get wireless “broadband” from a different anti-consumer company, ATT (my only other choice). So I planned to watch the debate on MSNBC’s website. At first it was all good. I had to sit through one ad at the start, but I can handle that. After the ad, for 5 minutes the debate streamed beautifully, so then I got a little adventurous and clicked the full-screen button. Then, as if by some miracle, the picture got bigger, the resolution was decent, and the stream didn’t degrade.

I watched full-screen, live, streaming video for about 10 minutes. Clinton and Obama were even talking back and forth about specific issues regarding health care policy and not about Brian Williams’ empty horse race fluff.

It felt like I was peering into some glorious future. I was timid, but I dare not look away.

Then the video started to break up and the audio began to stutter. Quick as a flash I minimized, but to no avail. The audio began chirping. So I closed out and went back again. Watched another ad and got back to the debate. 5 minutes went by, and it started to break up again. I closed out, went back, watched ad. This ritual repeated every 5 to 10 minutes, but each time, somehow the ad managed to come through no problem.

Now I’m just watching the peacock twirl. In the middle of an Obama rebuttal, the stream just dried up, his movements slowed to crawl, and then … nothing. Ridiculous. There is no good reason why we shouldn’t be able to get decent broadband in this country. Is this the ISPs fault? Most likely. Is it the FCCs fault? Right again. Is it MSNBC’s fault? Not sure. Is it the consumers’ fault, as firms like Comcast and ATT would suggest, for “hogging bandwidth?” No it is not.

We need to get this problem fixed, because if we let the regulators and the providers continue to hold hands all the way to the bank, our service will never improve.

Wow, now its back. But the aspect ratio is off, the picture is stretched. The candidates heads look a little wide; Tim Russert’s takes up the entire window. : )

Lessig, Change, and why I like Obama

http://lessig08.org/

This is a video by a law scholar from Standford, Lawrence Lessig. He is pretty famous in law and communications for his work on copyright and culture in the changing technology environment. But after his last book he decided to change his research focus to figuring out where our *system* of government fails. What he comes up with is the corruption of basically good people via an inherently flawed system of corporate interference in campaign and policy-making processes. Now he is considering actually running for a congressional seat in California, but my point here is that he addresses so clearly our problems of governance at the structural level. And this is exactly what I see in Obama that I see in no other candidate: the glimmer, even if at the rhetorical level, of recognition that the wheels fell off a long time ago and the system itself needs an overhaul. What I like about this video is the Lessig spells out how he thinks it might be done. Maybe he’s right, maybe not, but calling it out feels like a big step to me.

I got fired up tonight for some reason.

Presidential Debates on the Web

In an interesting collaboration among new (and old) media, Yahoo, Slate magazine (owned by Washington Post), and blogger/citizen journalism supersite The Huffington Post are comming together to host the first ever presidential debates on the web. Sometime after Memorial Day, Democrats and Republicans will take to the web in separate debates in what seems to be something like last night’s Democratic event on MSNBC. Read the Press release from Yahoo.

Validation of the politcal viability of the net? Maybe.
Opportunity for branding coverage of politics on the web? Definitely.

No time to read Obama’s books?

Read this brief article on Barack Obama’s personal history. This article tells the short version of his roots through the voices of those around him at the time he was coming up as a community organizer in Chicago.

This is where the rubber meets the road

The other day my neighbor handed me this article from NYU Sociologist Eric Klinenberg in the March/April Mother Jones magazine. Here’s the headline/byline:

Breaking the News: It’s not the Internet that’s killing newspapers. It’s the equity-chasing investors and their friends at the FCC who have put outsize profits before a free press.

This piece is excellent – it most likely stems from Klinenberg’s new book Fighting For Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media. I haven’t read it yet, but it seems to encapsulate a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, which is incorporating ethnographic research and media analysis to form a basis for institutional media critique. I need to find out who else is doing this, but clearly Klinenberg is a master in this area. I heard him interviewed on Bob McChesney’s Media Matters radio program, he described the goal of book is to

turn media consolidation from an abstraction into the kind of thing we recognize as affecting our lives. No matter how many times we see those charts of media ownership that show how 5 or 6 companies dominate the system and own lots and lots of subsidiaries, a key challenge for those who care about this issue is to tell human stories about it that really resonate, especially with people who aren’t already convinced that there’s a problem. The kind of media system that we have deprives us of these stories, so we need to find a way to get them told.

Here is where qualitative approaches – ethnographic works – get at the heart of issues like media ownership and telecom policy that can seem so far removed from everyday life.

This is a model to emulate…

Help Stop Public Broadcasting Budget Cuts

From this article at Common Cause:

February 7 -President Bush’s proposed federal budget includes a cut of approximately $145 million for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which serves as a source of information for millions of Americans who rely on its diverse viewpoints, hard-hitting investigative journalism and quality children’s programming.

The CPB helps to fund both NPR and PBS. Take action, use this free service set up by Free Press to easily email your congressional representatives to let them know you care about public broadcasting.

Just to contrast, the total proposed defense budget is $481.4 billion.

The Nation.

The front cover of this week’s Nation magazine has no photos or illustrations. There is only the translucent image of some sort of official-looking seal, perhaps the seal of the president. Superimposed are these words:

World opinion is against the US escalation in Iraq. The American people are against it. Congress is against it. The Iraqi people are against it. The Iraqi government is against it. Can a single man force a nation to fight a war it does not want to fight, expand a war it does not want to expand? If he can, is that nation any longer a democracy in any meaningful sense? If not, how can democratic rule and the republican form of government be restored?

One suggestion is to begin to reform the media in such a way that questions like these are no longer relegated to lefty weeklies. This is one dissident voice, but it is alluding to so many more. Where the hell is CNN with this? Damn.

Web Video Important for 2008 Campaign

This article from the Washington Post, On the Electric Campaign Trail, gives examples of the way some politicians are using the video capabilities of the Internet to reach potential voters. Mitt Romney used a video message to defend attacks from opponenets. John Edwards, Hilary Clinton, and Barack Obama, have all used the web to, dare I say it, outline their positions on issues. Issues! (See my previous post of Sen. Dorgan’s video re: net neutrality.)

I haven’t heard of any yet, but there must also be plenty of political attack ads on the way, in all their abrasive, low-budget glory.

Media Ownership and Reform Act

Article from The Raw Story

“Media reform is the most important issue confronting our democratic republic and the people of our country,” Representative Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) said at the Free Press National Media Reform Conference held in Memphis, Tennessee last weekend.

Hinchey told RAW STORY he plans to reintroduce the Media Ownership Reform Act (MORA) that would break up media monopolies and restore the Fairness Doctrine, which was eliminated by the Federal Communications Commission under the Reagan administration.

So what exactly is the Fairness Doctrine?

The Fairness Doctrine required that broadcasters give equal time to people who wished to express an opposing viewpoint. “Under the Reagan administration, the FCC wiped out that rule and said only businesses that operate stations can express their view,” Hinchey noted. Congress passed a bill that would have required the FCC to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, but that bill was vetoed by Reagan.

This all sounds amazing. But a sea change bill like MORA will never pass. Here’s why. In addition to reinstating the Fairness Doctrine, the bill would also:

… reinstate a national cap on ownership of radio stations, lower the number of radio stations that one company can own in a local market, and reinstate the 25 percent national cap on television ownership, among other restrictions. The bill’s no-grandfathering provision would compel media conglomerates to divest to comply with new ownership limitations.

Big Media has worked the lobby circuit for decades to get where they are, and they’ve done so in the cradle of neoliberal economic ideologies that are much larger than any one industry. The idea that they would agree to this is insane and the power they exude in Washington is real.

Taken out of context, this bill seems great. But we live in a country that fully subscribes to, and greatly benefits from, the world capitalist economy. We need to think about realistic media reform initiatives or else we’re wasting resources and momentum.