Month: August 2009

by Conor Clarke

One of the odd things about the public debate over "death panels" — panels that will rain death by bureaucracy once Obamacare is passed — is that, like some curiously inverted version of OJ Simpson's If I Did It, it has become totally and strangely hypothetical. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, will no longer publish something saying the administration or Congress is proposing actual, bona fide death panels. Because, well, no one is proposing them. Instead, the Journal publishes an Orwellian short story — fiction on the Journal op-ed page! — about a man standing before some hypothetical future death panel, being deprived of life saving care.

Now you might wonder, "What on earth does a a piece of fiction on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page tell us about the current and ostensibly non-fictional debate over health care?" And you might answer: "Absolutely nothing." But Journal author Andrew Klavan has a different answer, and it goes something like this:

Well, as a member of the apologist media who has spent a fair amount of time making fun of people who say there will be death panels, let me make a couple of observations about this.

First, it's worth noting that the debate over the death panels didn't start with hypotheticals. It started with the utterly false claim, advanced by Betsy McCoughey and others, that mandatory end of life counseling was part of the House's health-care bill. So, to some extent it's gratifying to see that the death panelists have been beaten back into the realm of fiction. But it's also a testament to the slipperiness of the debate.

Second — and this gets to the heart of the slippery debate — hypothetical arguments are totally non-falsifiable. It Betsy McCaughey says the text of the House health-care bill will create death panels, it's pretty easy to prove her wrong. But if Andrew Klavan then pops up, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, with the Hegelian argument that the "logic" of history points towards death panels … well, that's rather more difficult, and rather more frustrating. The "logic" of history might point toward many things. But until time machines come along, I'm of the opinion that we should stick to the text of the bill.

Third, I think Klavan — and the many others who are now worrying about death panels "in the future" — imagine a future without checks and balances. But one of the nice things about American democracy is that signing a health-care bill doesn't mean signing away the Constitution. If he is disappointed with a health-care reform bill, he can always vote for the non-fascist candidate in 2012. Or he can write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.

If he's still allowed to, of course.

by Patrick Appel

Lawrence Glickman, Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, e-mails:

I've been following the thread on the "Whole Foods" boycott on "The Dish" and other sites. My just-published book, "Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America" (University of Chicago Press), which is an examination of boycotts from the American Revolution to the present, offers some historical perspective on some of the issues raised by this boycott. I examine the question of the efficacy of boycotts and argue that two kinds of boycotts are most likely to be successful: very local efforts and national campaigns whose goal is often to score political rather than economic points. (The UFW grape boycott would be a good example.) Aside from their efficacy, I believe that boycotts are an expression of what I call "long distance solidarity" and show that American citizens don't take consumption to be a private or apolitical zone.

I also examine the issue of counter-boycotts and show that, from the time the word boycott was coined in 1880, counter-boycotts were a common occurrence. For example, I tell the story of the boycott of one Esther Gray, who ran a bakery on the Upper West side of NYC. The Knights of Labor boycotted her shop in 1886 and this boycott drew national, mostly negative, attention. Newspapers around the country picked up the story of the "plucky" Mrs. Gray and Charles Crocker, the California RR magnate, sent $50 and a letter of support, which was widely reprinted.

[During George Bush's presidency, conservatives] wanted a revolution, but instead they got NCLB. And a wimpy stem cell compromise. And Sarbanes-Oxley. And McCain-Feingold. And a huge Medicare expansion. And complete gridlock on Social Security.

Not exactly what they signed up for.

The tax cuts were great, of course, but what about abortion and gay marriage and entitlement reform and slashing the size of government and ANWR and the Endangered Species Act and everything else on the conservative wish list? They got most of what they wanted on the national security front (missile defense, big Pentagon budget increases, a couple of nice wars), but on the domestic front most of them felt like Bush ended up delivering almost nothing.

It wasn't quite that bad, of course. They did get the tax cuts, after all. And they got a new bankruptcy law and a bunch of right-wing judges. But for the most part, their domestic agenda crashed on the shoals of the status quo too. 

by Conor Clarke

I'm sure Niall Ferguson is a fine historian. But his real talent, it seems, is for digging ditches. Paul Krugman and Jim Fallows have written good posts on this already, but it strikes me as worthy of further attention that Ferguson is now doubling down and defending his original argument that what "pretty much sums up" the 44th president of the United States is that, like Felix the Cat, he is "not only black" but "very, very lucky."

Basically, Ferguson's response to the original criticism was to write a snippy blog post, and then email Henry Louis Gates to confirm that Felix the Cat was not African American, and, thus, that Ferguson is not a racist. Swell. Emailing Gates for help is really a whisker's length away from an explicit "but I have black friends!" argument, but let's put that aside for a moment. Ferguson's response has also done an impressive job of missing the point.

The problem with Ferguson's original analogy was not that it's "racist." And, certainly, the "race" of Felix the Cat (if we want to meditate over the profoundly dumb question of whether cats have a "race" to begin with) was never really of great interest. If we cut the cat out of the equation, Ferguson is saying: "What pretty much sums up the president of the United States is that he is black and lucky." This is not so much racist as stupid.

Black and lucky: Does that strike you as a fair and informative characterization of the president? Do you think the defining characteristic of the Obama presidency has, so far, been a combination of luck and blackness? My vague feeling is that some other stuff might have happened in the past six months, too. But Niall Ferguson, a professor at Harvard and a columnist for the Financial Times, continues to believe that it's "pretty much" all about being black and lucky.

by Patrick Appel

A reader strikes the right balance:

The usefulness of the organic standards relies largely, I think, on how they are interpreted by the consumer and on what you can expect from them. On the on hand, if you perceive organic farming as the ultimate pinnacle of sustainable agriculture, restoring food production to a proper ecological and socioeconomic balance, it's a pretty substantial failure.  (Julie Guthman probably has the most comprehensive treatment of this in Agrarian Dreams. ) If, on the other hand, you look at the federal organic standards as one tool in the toolbox, and one best applied to industrial-scale agriculture, it's a pretty damned useful metric.

Look, we cannot, even in the wildest dreams of sustainable agriculture enthusiasts, convert our food production system over to small farms, local foods, and sustainable techniques overnight.  I'm in the middle of trying to start a cooperative grocery store at the moment, and that fact is deafeningly clear every time we look at how we'll source our food.  Even if you somehow did, in a relatively short period of time, do all the necessary education of farmers and workers, redistribution of land ownership, and conversion of farm machinery, you would utterly break systems of transportation, processing, and distribution.

The organic label is least useful with small farms such as the beef cattle rancher your reader discussed.  There, local networks and closer food network distances are a far better guarantor of sustainability than the organic label.  Where it is most useful is in putting some meaningful standards on the largest agribusiness farms.  I suppose I could be convinced otherwise, but I would maintain that in the comparison between large organic and large non-organic farms, the organic ones are more sustainable, better for workers, and probably produce better food.  And for these large production farms, the organic standards are the best tool we have to improve sustainability and responsible growing.

Other readers took issue with this reader's comment. Critique one:

The reader who sent in this comment is misinformed about the requirements for maintaining USDA organic certification.  Organic farms can treat sick animals with antibiotics without losing their certification; what’s forbidden is pumping whole herds of healthy animals full of prophylactic antibiotics, a practice which leaves measurable traces of antibiotic in meat and milk and which is likely contributing to new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.  (In fairness to the reader, there’s confusion about this issue on both sides of the food-politics debate.  See the paragraph towards the end about the intern in Florida who tried to report her boss for treating sick sheep.)

This isn’t to say that there doesn’t need to be a debate over organic certification. As Michael Pollan points out in Omnivore’s Dilemma there are plenty of giant corporate organic farms that adhere to the letter of organic regulations but are still basically factory-farm monocultures, with all or nearly all the problems that come with conventional industrial agriculture. There are also a lot of enterprising small farmers for whom the costly and obviously confusing organic certification process serves as a barrier to market entry.  These issues need to be addressed.

I ordered Pollan's book a few days ago because so many readers thought it was scandalous to raise this subject without first reading it. Let me know if you have other recommendations, especially for books I'm not likely to come across on my own. Another reader:

Just wanted to chime in regarding your reader's anecdote about his family friend who won't raise organic cattle because "He'd be forbidden to use any antibiotics, even if it was to treat an infection that was easily treatable."  This is not true.  As the USDA's standards for organic farming state, if an animal intended for slaughter is given antibiotics for medical reasons, the animal cannot be be labeled or sold as organically produced. Nowhere is it indicated that the farmer would be "forced to let cows and calves suffer and even die of simple infections."  He just couldn't sell the meat as organic, which makes sense given that a key reason people buy organic meat is to avoid ingesting antibiotics. Now, it may make it impractical for the farmer to administer the antibiotic if he can't recoup costs by selling the meat as organic (though I suspect he could sell it as conventional, somehow), but rhetoric like "forced to let cows and calves suffer" is the sort of hyperbole that discussion of this important subject could do without.

Another reader defends Round-Up ready GM crops, which were labeled by an earlier reader as environmentally unfriendly:

I'm a corn/soy farmer in Minnesota and raise Angus cattle for grassfed beef, so I have one leg on each side of the fence regarding organic and mainstream farming. The argument for reduced pesticide use with Roundup rests on the fact that Roundup is a contact herbicide which degrades easily, relatively speaking. For example, our use of Roundup on corn replaces several residual herbicides that bind with the soil, thus being a greater danger in runoff, etc. The total pounds of herbicide used may or may not vary, but the dangers to soil, farmer and food have changed for the better with the advent of Roundup Ready. Most of the farmers I know have the same unease with food safety as others, and a greater unease with Monsanto's tactics.

John McCain’s August 29 announcement of Palin as his running mate surprised the Republican establishment, the media, and especially voters. She made a strong first impression: she enjoyed high approval ratings after her acceptance speech, and the percentage of voters saying that they intended to vote Republican skyrocketed. But within days of the speech, her ratings began a precipitous slide from which she—and the McCain campaign—never recovered. Throughout the rest of the campaign, vote intentions were closely tied to Palin’s approval ratings: each major Palin approval drop was followed, within a day or two, by a drop in McCain vote intention. No other factor moved McCain support with such precision. 

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

You write “You can't get a celebrity spokesman to proudly proclaim he only smokes US-grown pot…” and it occurs to me – why not?  We are a celebrity worshiping country that takes pictures of our celebrities holding bags of poop they’re so interesting.

We all know Bill Maher smokes weed – he says so every few episodes of Real Time.  Others, like Woody Harrelson and Matthew Matthew McConaughey probably are carrying illegal drugs at this very moment (and local law enforcement knows this, but doesn’t want to be the guy that arrests Woody).  Keeping in mind that it’s so called “conservative” ideology that is keeping weed illegal right now, and such conservatives are not likely to listen to the “Hollywood elite,” why isn’t there a mass movement of celebrities donating their time and energy to legalization?  Somehow, with few exceptions (Tommy Chong, who from what I read was BEGGING to be arrested) we hear very little about high profile celebrity pot busts.

A Clooney, a Pitt or a Spielberg in a glossy advertisement outside of left – leaning magazine looking sober, rational and successful arguing for a policy shift on marijuana could go a long way.  George Clooney could convince my mother (a 50+ southern woman decidedly on the wrong side of this issue) that the moon was made of cheese.  One easily shot commercial with Danny Ocean looking into the camera could change more than a few minds.

by Patrick Appel

Two Weeks – Grizzly Bear from Gabe Askew on Vimeo.

Democratic politics is a messy business. It's disorganized and frantic and unpredictable and frustrating. Politics is a matter of shouting, and dissent, and deal-making, and strategy, and slippery rhetoric, and compromise. It is not a matter of deciding on the "right" policy and then making it so — even when your party controls the White House, the House, and the Senate.

This is especially true when making substantial changes in the operations of a sixth of the economy — a sector that potentially affects not only people's daily lives, but their very survival. 

It's not that people enjoy this; in fact, it seems to turn a lot of people off. As Robert Putnam wrote, “Most men are not political animals. The world of public affairs is not their world. It is alien to them — possibly benevolent, more probably threatening, but nearly always alien." But to a large extent, the spasms and outbursts and irritations that come with the political process are inevitable — no matter who's in charge, no matter what the polls and pundits and politicians say.  

Given my libertarian streak, I'd also add a final thought: The way to avoid the maddening convulsions of politics isn't to change them, or rise above them, or move past them, or transform them, or whatever the trendy term of art is on any given day. It's to avoid them — and reduce their power to hold sway over how we live. And the more decisions about our lives and welfare we put in the hands of politicians, the harder that will be to do.