Month: January 2013

Readers push back:

This is a red herring if I ever saw one.  So we shouldn’t pass comprehensive immigration reform, then?  Ridiculous.  This feels a lot like bait-and-switch, divide-and-conquer Republican politics.  Let’s let the minorities fight it out amongst each other.

If that’s an unjust characterization, I suggest that if you want to get serious about black unemployment, low wages, and incarceration, you have many other tools in your toolbox, such as minimum wage increases (perhaps indexing to inflation), radically changing the prison industrial complex (especially abolishing for-profit prisons – talk about moral bankruptcy), and funding better job retraining programs.  Where do the funds come from?  Start making corporations pay taxes again, for starters.

Also, I recently saw this forum on CSPAN, and I would appreciate it if you would give it a shout-out.  Regardless of your opinions of Smiley and West, I think it’s undeniable that there’s a bipartisan agreement in Washington to ignore poverty as a public policy issue.

Another:

That Seeing Red AZ post on blacks and immigration reform was awful.  In particular, it was loaded with three assumptions, all of which were highly questionable:

1) That increased immigration has a negative effect on the unemployment rate for people born in the US;
2) That the primary impact of immigration reform will be to increase the number of immigrants in the US;
3) That African-American voters are primarily focused on narrow economic self-interest rather than any kind of broad understanding of civil rights and equality.

On the first point, the argument that immigration takes jobs away from the country is one of those points that seems logical and therefore continues to hold currency among the public even though it has been repeatedly shown to be factually wrong.  Indeed, according to the Immigration Policy Center, “the most recent economic research indicates that immigration produces a slight increase in wages for the majority of native-born workers” because immigrants are rarely directly competing for the same jobs, and because immigrants expand the economic pie and thus create more overall jobs.  See also this piece extensively documenting the non-relationship between immigration and minority employment and wages.

On the second point, the most important question on immigration reform is how our society is going to treat the ~11 million people who are currently here without legal documentation.  The current situation, in which many of these 11 million work under the table for below-market and sometimes below-legal minimum wages and conditions, is terrible not only for the immigrants themselves but also for the few native-born low skill workers who do actually compete with immigrants for jobs, as well as for anyone who is trying to organize low-skill labor.  Getting these immigrants normal, legally recognized jobs is an essential step towards improving working conditions for all people who do the kinds of labor performed by immigrants.  It may also be true that providing a pathway to legal status for immigrants will increase incentives for illegal immigration (not a bad thing!). But that view is far more speculative than the fairly clear gains that immigration reform would mean to working-class people, which is why the AFL-CIO has completely come around on reform.

The third point is perhaps more in a realm of speculative opinion, but honestly, I find it pretty offensive and kind of stupid to think that black people would look at situations such as the current dynamic in Arizona, where a white majority is imposing increasingly burdensome restrictions on a rising Latino population – many of which (such as racial profiling) are identical to some of the core historical injustices that black people have faced – and identify with the white majority.

Obviously whenever two ethnic groups are living next to each other in crowded cities and competing for attention from political leaders for their priorities there is going to be some tension, but the idea that blacks are gettable votes for Republicans on immigration reform strikes me as insane even before you consider the influence of President Obama on black public opinion.

Another:

You cite a 2006 paper by George Borjas and coauthors. But that was only one salvo in a long-running and contentious debate among labor economists. For an overview, see the section starting “A contentious debate has emerged over whether immigrants have an impact on the wages or employment levels of non-immigrants” on page 4 of this report [pdf]. For lots, lots more, Google “card borjas debate”.

Ben Birnbaum nods:

These were the first Israeli elections since the 1967 Six-Day War in which Israel’s conflict with its Arab neighbors (and with the Palestinians in particular) did not figure prominently in the public debate. While the relatively strong showing of the center-left parties is good news for potential concessions on the peace front, it’s worth noting that the only two parties that emphasized the issue—Meretz and Livni’s Movement—won a combined 14 of the Knesset’s 120 seats.

Brent E. Sasley differs:

Contrary to what seems to be the conventional wisdom on the Internets, I also think the election results open up some small space to keep the peace process moving forward. Bibi has shown himself open to signing agreements in the past (Wye River, Hebron), and as I’ve said, I’d call him a “pragmatic opportunist” more than anything else. If he can keep Jewish Home out of the coalition, and bring in parties like Shas and Yesh Atid that are open to peace talks and not committed to settlements all over the West Bank, there’s a basis for discussion with the Palestinians. Bringing in Tzipi Livni—who like Lapid must do something out of the election otherwise her political career is quite possibly over—would strengthen this likelihood even more.

A primer:

Ezra Klein wishes Congress would abolish the debt ceiling:

[T]he debt ceiling is a hard, unpleasant vote that needs to be taken in good times and bad. As such, it’s a hard, unpleasant vote that can go wrong at any time, simply because the politics of the vote are completely out of whack with the necessity of the vote. Republicans are admitting that when they choose to “suspend” the debt ceiling rather than raise it — this way, no one can accuse them of raising it, even though that’s exactly what they’ve done. The only problem with their plan is it doesn’t go far enough. We shouldn’t suspend the debt ceiling for three months. We should suspend it forever, completely eliminating the threat that this hard, unpleasant, confusing vote could go wrong and unleash economic havoc.

Bouie notes that “the number of students who are suspended or expelled nationwide has been on the increase for the last decade.” He suggests that on-campus cops are one reason why:

Schools with more police might be safer from violence, but there are also unintended consequences to exposing students to law enforcement. “With the increase of police in schools, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in school-based student arrests, particularly of youth of color,” writes Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil-rights group. “Instead of addressing infrequent, serious threats to safety, police officers in schools often respond to minor student misbehavior by handcuffing, arresting, and criminalizing the very young people they are intended to protect.”

“Criminalizing” is the key word here; police aren’t arresting students for illegal behavior as much as they are detaining them for breaking rules and violating codes of conduct.

Andrew Marantz covers Animal Planet’s Puppy Bowl. He writes that, for “every ten Americans who want to watch large men concuss one another, there is one who wants to surrender to cuteness”:

“Most of the magic happens in the editing room,” [executive producer Melinda] Toporoff said—ninety hours are condensed to less than two. The magic does not reliably happen on the field, because puppies are unreliable. They can be aggressive one minute—an offscreen American Humane Association observer breaks up fights, usually by clapping—and listless the next. Trying to put a hopeful spin on several scoreless minutes, Schachner said, “It’s a defensive battle!” It looked more like a sniffing-and-napping battle.

Elizabeth Preston analyzes claims of the popular liquid diet:

Apparently, a body that’s becoming healthier looks a lot like one that’s unwell. Symptoms of detox may include fatigue, headaches, nausea, hives, decreased bowel movements, increased bowel movements, strangely colored bowel movements (“Did you just drink some of our beet juice?”), dry mouth, runny nose, and canker sores. I should ignore those symptoms, drink herbal tea, and be reassured that I’ll soon be skinnier. Sorry, healthier.

The science doesn’t hold up:

[Y]our body does its own cleansing via your kidneys and liver. The wastes and unwanted materials those organs filter out leave you via the toilet—not through your sweat glands or the soles of your feet or water blasted up your colon. And depriving yourself of calories doesn’t make the process go any faster. If anything, it’s the opposite, because fasting slows your metabolism.

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Richard Schiffman is optimistic about technologies designed to remove carbon dioxide from the air:

[Dr. Klaus Lackner] showed me a palm-sized mockup for an “artificial tree,” which mimics the photosynthesis of real trees by chemically sucking carbon dioxide out of the air. A single such tree-sized device left standing in the wind would remove one ton per day of carbon from the atmosphere, the equivalent of the greenhouse gases produced by 36 automobiles. This carbon-capture technology is not a risky geo-engineering scheme, according to Lackner. It simply amounts to cleaning up after ourselves, and repairing the damage that we already have done.

Ed King is cautious about large-scale deployment of these technologies:

While the essentials of [Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS)] technology are well understood, translating these into a commercial scale project has proved slower than many anticipated. Shell is building a billion-dollar CCS project linked to oil sands production in Alberta, but electricity producers are wary of investing heavily in the technology given high capital costs and reduced flexibility once it is in place.

With no global price for carbon, incentives for the private sector to invest are limited, although anyone who manages to make the technology work on a commercial basis is likely to be well rewarded.