After the Senate confirmation hearings, I would say that Eric Holder goes right at the top of my list of Obama appointments. This has nothing to do with his résumé or experience, but simply the clarity and honesty with which he faced his questioners during the confirmation. Compare this performance to Alberto Gonzales and Michael Mukasey. This type of directness and reasonableness is exactly what I expect from Barack Obama and his Cabinet; indeed, it is the principal reason I voted for him.
In response to what was really a rather pathetic line of questioning from Senator Orrin Hatch -- Some people have accused Cheney et al. of committing war crimes, but you wouldn't prosecute them, would you? -- Holder stated simply, "No one is above the law... We will follow the evidence... and let that take us where it should." Remarkably absent from Holder's entire hearing was the double-
speak and selective amnesia we have come to expect from the Justice Department.
Coming in at the bottom of my list, somewhat artificially in order to respond to this writing prompt, is the Nobel Laureate and now-Energy Secretary Steven Chu.
I must admit I am proud to see appointed someone who is a professor PhD recipient from the department that awarded me my first degree. Unfortunately, though, his background and research are totally irrelevant to energy issues. I am sure that Dr. Chu is smart enough to master the field of energy research, as well as the political issues related to energy policy, but it seems odd that Obama has chosen someone with literally no background in energy or government. His physics background will bias him towards physical solutions (e.g. nuclear) and away from chemical (e.g. ethanol) or biological (e.g. engineered cells) solutions. There were probably other, more qualified applicants, eager to solve the most important issue of our generation.
-- Jacob Levine
There are a couple things that stand out in my mind when I think back on Dubya's time as our President. (Sidenote: Remember when we called him Dubya? Before he was too sinister for that endearing nickname...)
The thing I remember most vividly is the utterly poor and disappointing performance of our news media in the wake of 9/11. It was just rampant fear and idiocy, and blind conformity (see below). As I recall, it was not until 2004, not until right after the "Atrocious Reelection" (as it should be memorialized), that the New York Times broke its first article criticizing the Bush Administration. (Worse yet, they waited until after the election to publish it).
It was during this 'moment', between September 2001 and late 2004, that comedy and satire reached what will probably be the apex of their influence and pungent hilarity in the US. It was the only mainstream outlet for dissent, for people who were deeply disturbed by the events of the world and even more disturbed by the response of the American mainstream.
Below is a 'video' clip of an audio clip from David Cross's 2002 album Shut Up You Fucking Baby. Besides being an amusing tour down memory lane (I had, for a moment, forgotten the ferocious patriotism that followed 9/11), I think what's striking is how normal much of what he says has become. This was cutting edge in 2002, and his prescience is proved by hindsight. "You cannot win a war on terrorism...at no point in time ever are we gonna go 'whew! got 'em all, everybody loves us again'...all we're doing is making more terrorists." This has only recently become conventional wisdom among the mainstream left opposition.
Also worth noting, as usual, is Jon Stewart, who in this first clip of 2003 -- the year we invaded Iraq -- declares 2003 the "Year of False Pretenses".
-- Jacob Levine
No, there will be no greater generation. After all, it was the Greatest, not the Greatest So Far. There is nothing special about Americans, only their belief that there is, and America itself is decreasingly special. Americans, like anyone else, rise to the calls of leadership and necessity. The Greatest Generation was a response elicited by a vacuum in global power. "The American Century" was multi-determined and was not the expression of an inherently gifted hyperethical "generation".
Circumstance is not on the side of our generation. America is, after all, in relative decline. This means we will necessarily not make more money than our parents. If trends are reliable, it seems we are entering an era of a multi-polar political world, which is most likely a good thing. So the confidence generated by American exceptionalism can no longer feedback to inspire Americans to greatness.
The best we ought to hope for is that we can be adequately cooperative with the world and not make horrible mistakes (cf. September 2001 – October 2008). But great leadership can get us halfway to "greatness." I think Obama's calls to a multi-faceted worldview may be this century's version of the calls to American world-stewardship. Thus, the sacrifice we should be prepared to make is to forgo the self-satisfaction of thinking too highly of ourselves. If we have a more modest view of ourselves, we may take government more seriously, allow it to provide services we earnestly need, and we may even care enough to hold our leaders accountable for their misdeeds.
-- Jacob Levine
PROGRESSIVES SHOULD BE SKEPTICAL OF ANY PROPOSAL TO EMBRACE RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM. These people just destroyed the Republican Party – why should anyone take them on board? That said, there may be reasons such proposals could survive skepticism. Evangelicals are having some success marketing their own fundamentalism in the current environmentally-conscious market, and I do appreciate this unusual alliance in order to save planet Earth. But for issues that don’t involve impending global disaster, I think fundamentalists should be left to brood over the End Times in the quiet comfort of their own organizations.
There is no question that when Christian organizations practice the actual moral teachings of Jesus Christ through various charitable activities and environmental activism, this is helpful to the recipients of said activities. Should the government finance said practices? Why on earth should it?
As I understand it, the presence of religious charitable organizations is an important justification for the horrors of free-market capitalism – a major constituent of a very small private sector of organizations that help those who are sacrificed to the creative destruction of a free-market system. So, why should they need any money from our secular government? The ‘moral sentiments’ of the capitalists ought to keep the churches bankrolled. Keep the government out of economics but subsidize the churches? Ridiculous.
Funding religious humanitarian activity gets us into some pretty awkward decisions about what churches can do with government money. And, as in the famous case of abstinence-based education for people dying of AIDS in Africa, funneling aid money through religious organizations can be fatally problematic.
I say we show our respect and appreciation for the charitable work of religious organizations by saying “Thank You!” After all, doesn’t something so cheap as money offend their lofty morals anyways?
Despite (or rather because of) his disturbingly adept ability to speak in tongues with his fellow Christians, I am put off by Obama’s ideas about religion. Obviously, I appreciate their sheer brilliant cunning. There was no question that his rhetoric was right for the time. But I hope that time will soon pass and religious fundamentalism will fall into another slumber, as it’s done before in America’s young history.
-- Jacob Levine
"We must patiently explain why taxing or regulating noble things (like work, saving, and entrepreneurial risk-taking) means you’ll get less of what makes America great and why subsidizing other things (like idleness and single parenthood) means you’ll get more of the destructive behaviors that ultimately will drag us down."
— An excerpt from a piece in the National Review by the vice president of government relations for the Heritage Foundation.
This quote is what you get when you have an imperialistic economic theory that you apply to every facet of life. If you’re an overzealous economist, then all human behavior can be explained and predicted because human individuals obey one law: maximize economic gain. If this is true, then everywhere you put an incentive, law-abiding homo economicus will follow.
Can we agree this is a bit simplistic? It’s typical of scientists to choose models that are tractable, no matter how much they distort reality.
Show me the single mother who has chosen to raise her child on her own because there’s a tax incentive. Do these econo-zealots even stop to think about how ridiculous this sounds?
Furthermore, there should be no problem resulting from taxing noble things, so long as it’s noble people who do those things. Anyone who’s read Aristotle or Nietzsche should know that the ‘noble’ man would find economic disincentive quite beneath him as a deterrent of behavior.
The problem with this hyper-extension of economic theory is that human values are much more complex and multi-determined than these reward/punishment laws can deal with. That economics is largely built on a mythical foundation is one of our society’s greatest secrets.
-- Jacob Levine
Well, it’s only less than a percent of the amount we've put into "rescuing" the financial sector, so I'm sure that $5 billion is not enough for the task. So I may not be answering the question, but I think there is one major priority for government money right now, no matter how small the amount: A public works project to build a new infrastructure for green transportation.
Ironically, this is the perfect time for an auto industry crisis. We need a major effort to not modify but reorganize the transportation infrastructure in the US. In order to replace petroleum as the energy source for our cars, we need cars that don't use petroleum and gas stations that don't pump gas. The transformation has to be concerted: the infrastructure and the cars each need the other in order to exist.
Only government and not private enterprise—at least in the real world—can orchestrate something that requires this degree of coordination.
Of course, there’s this problem: Once you have the infrastructure, what do you plug it into? That is, we still need a green source for all that energy. I am actually not too concerned about this. I think creating the infrastructure is the primary priority, because once it exists it will create the competitive space for forthcoming solutions. Coming up with clever ways to move energy around is actually not very difficult. Creating a structural-economic framework in which technological development can be instantiated is the real, pressing challenge.
-- Jacob Levine
I know what you're thinking: Bush studied physics? Probably not. As in other areas, the president's gut feelings seem to have left him with an education that is about 400 years out of date.
In Newtonian mechanics, objects obey ‘laws’ – mathematical scriptures – that ‘govern’ their behavior. The only type of causality in the Newtonian framework is mechanical. Like billiard balls, nothing in the universe moves unless it is struck by a moving thing. In this 17th century framework, hunting causes is easy: Find the thing that struck the object of interest. Your bullet wound was caused by the explosive force of the powder in the gun. Universal attraction, or gravity, is caused by tiny invisible particles that move things toward each other – because what else could cause something to move?
When events are simply determined by the mechanical causes that produce them, then it is relatively easy to make predictions about events. When an event is wrongly believed to have simple mechanical causes, then it is quite easy to make wrong predictions.
George Bush is using Newtonian mechanics to solve problems in quantum field theory.
Ahmed Rashid is just another journalist to point out recently the major error in the Bush Administration’s Iraq problem solving. They have consistently failed to apply field theory; in other words they treat US-Iraq relations as an isolated system. Kill Saddam causes Democracy causes Good. Maybe in a vacuum; most likely not in the field between Iran and Israel. Again, the context of the field must be considered when we are solving the exit strategy equations. Fortunately, I think Obama and his team have got a more up-to-date physics.
-- Jacob Levine
This year, in addition to the obvious sense of gratitude that comes with being part of the first ever white majority to put a black guy in charge, I am thankful for public transportation.
Having been in London for two months now, the integration of my daily life with the transport system is thorough. The tube is not simply a track where an occasional train shows up to give you a ride (cf. San Francisco Muni); it is an ever-flowing current that within seconds or minutes of your arrival sweeps you up and thrusts you toward your destination. Besides being remarkably efficient, the tube does something bigger. It's an integral experience of the daily lives of most Londoners and in that way unifies the consciousness of the city. It's a shared space where people, rather than seal themselves off in capsules at the end of the day, are in constant contact, for better or worse.
Also, while the unforeseen state of global economics may have thrown a wrench in this plan, there is word that Ryan Air will be offering transatlantic flights for £6 by 2009. That would be amazing.
-- Jacob Levine
Auto industry CEOs have been rightly ridiculed by Congress, the Daily Show, and everyone in between for their absurd detachment from reality.
A GM spokesman said the company is ‘very sensitive’ to ‘the symbolic issue of people showing up in Washington in corporate jets’. In fact, it is so sensitive to the irony of these failing businessmen wasting money and fuel on excessive luxury in order to beg for taxpayer money to save the ships they helped to sink, that they went ahead and sent them to Washington in corporate jets. After everyone complained that this ‘symbol’ is just too horrible to bear, GM graciously celebrated that they have cut 2 of their 5 jets.
I hope the government doesn’t bail out the auto industry – or if it does, only under the conditions that it completely transform its objectives. I would only support the idea of a green nationalized auto industry. The American auto industry has completely failed to adapt to a changing market and they don’t deserve to be in charge of how their loans are spent.
But what really pisses me off is this spokesman’s use of the word ‘symbolic’. Taking the jets to ask for a bailout is not a symbol of hypocrisy; it is ACTUAL HYPOCRISY. The jets are not a symbol of the absurd values of the upper echelon of corporate America; they are a manifestation of it. The symbolism here is the vow to cut 2 of the 5 jets – a disingenuous token of apology. 'Please take this action as a symbol of our remorse.'
By referring to the jets as a symbol, they reveal how disconnected from reality they truly are. As if their actions aren't corrupt, just perceived as corrupt. The idea that the bottom line of the company can only be calculated after all the corporate extravagances are taken care of is bad business to say the least. To take care of these ‘needs’ at the expense of worker salaries, and then beg for money for the sake of the entire economy is narcissistic to the point of psycopathy.
-- Jacob Levine
-asdfAny self-identified progressive must have had mixed feelings about the ballot returns on November 4. While the new left-of-center governing majority achieved an unprecedented landmark in racial equity, another majority rejected progressives’ attempts to achieve marriage equality for homosexual couples. It is thought that this other majority was decisively composed of religious Obama supporters. This very fact exposes an interesting tension in the new "Obama coalition."
A lot of people find this disconcerting but I don’t see it that way. I think this is a chance to redefine the progressive outlook on the issue of civil marriage and gay rights. I’ll state my position quite clearly: I don’t think civil marriage ought to be extended to homosexual couples; rather, it should be dissolved completely.
I am not nor do I pretend to be an expert on California Family Code or other relevant statutes, so this is an argument based on principle. As I understand it, California domestic partnerships allow all the rights and responsibilities of heterosexual civil marriage and are treated as equivalent to same-sex civil unions by Vermont, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, to name a few. Domestic partners in California are able to take one another's last name, file a joint tax form, and adopt a baby. As far as I can tell, the controversy over gay marriage (in California) is less about "gay" and more about "marriage." Opponents of gay marriage find it outrageous that the government would tyrannically redefine "marriage," a word whose definition their religions invented, of whose use they want to be sole guardians.
I don't see why anyone objects to religion retaining the unique right to define marriage. Regardless of whether it should be, this is a religious concept before it is a civic one. If churches wish to allow same-sex marriages, good for them. If you are a religious gay couple and wish to be married by a church that refuses, that is between you and your superstitions. The point is this: Marriage as a religious pact in contradistinction to partnership as a legal structure ought to be kept as separate as possible. Regardless of the issue of same-sex marriage, there is something uncomfortably close about the relationship between civil and legal code in the domain of marriage. That the marriage certificate is a legal document made valid by the signature of a priest is, to me, inconsistent with the principles that guide so many other aspects of our government.
The argument about the separation of church and state cuts both ways: If government can’t tell religion what marriage is (as the argument for Prop 8 goes), then religion can’t be the basis for a legal definition of marriage. Opponents of gay marriage who grant the latter often cite research on societal benefits of the nuclear family to support their definition of marriage. However, this research falls quite short of the burden of proof if one weighs the claims of its proponents against the questionable effects and problematic validity that those studies show. Furthermore, government cannot use empirical research, valid or not, without applying it consistently. For example, no one has sought to prohibit alcoholics from getting married and having children, despite research that might suggest it would be better for society if they didn’t.
The last right not afforded by California domestic partnership is the right to have the same legal appellation as civil marriage. Symbolic as it is, I think this lack is a far cry from the rights lacked by racial minorities before and since the Civil Rights Act. Nevertheless, I do believe this problem should be solved.
There are two solutions: Expand the definition of civil marriage to include homosexual couples; or expand the definition of domestic partnership to include all heterosexual couples and do away with civil marriage. Each option requires a compromise. Either opponents of gay marriage give up their definition of marriage, or gays give up their aspirations to have their unions called marriage. With the latter option, the sacrifice is shared -- everyone gives up the notion of civil marriage -- but the right of religious sovereignty over the definition of marriage is not infringed and the legal rights of homosexual couples are indistinguishable from those of heterosexuals.
-- Jacob Levine
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