Month: June 2014

Tim Fernholz discusses Daniel Drezner’s new book, The System Worked: How the World Stopped Another Depression. In it, Drezner posits that the global system of economic governance was to thank for preventing a major catastrophe in 2008. Fernholz:

But wait—wages, growth and jobs are still lagging in the United States and the European Union. That has a lot of those countries’ citizens blaming globalization and the institutions that support it, such as the International Monetary Fund. Don’t blame globalization, Drezner says: Blame your governments.

In the recovery stage of a financial crisis, growth is expected to be slow—clearing debt off balance sheets takes longer than responding to other kinds of shocks. Hastening growth requires policies that were not fully adopted in either the US or Europe, as austerity dominated policy debates. (It’s worth noting that the IMF was long a critic of US fiscal policy, calling for more near-term stimulus and longer-term efforts to deal with debt.) And the EU, with its mixed record of addressing its own debt crisis and recession—Drezner calls it “an unmitigated disaster”—is more of an actor in global governance than an example of it. …

There are good signs that global governance will get stronger. For one, institutions are adapting: the IMF has relaxed some of its traditionally neoliberal arguments and is a more broad-based institution; the G20 provides a platform for the BRICs and the G7 nations to coordinate; Basel III has put a floor on bank regulation. For another, countries are recommitting to the global system with a flurry of bilateral and regional trade deals under discussion, even if Edward Snowden’s revelations have clearly chilled US talks with Europe.

Aaron Renn contends that over-regulation and generous government benefits have hampered the state’s economy:

Depending on the month, Rhode Island has either the worst or second-worst unemployment rate in the nation: 9.3 percent, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics figures. Since 2000, the state has lost 2.5 percent of its jobs, and what jobs it has created are mostly low-paying. The job situation is so dire that entire local economies have become dominated by the benefits-payment cycle. In Woonsocket, for example, one-third of residents are on food stamps.

Rhode Island boosters cite its per-capita income of $45,877—4.9 percent above the national average and 14th-best in the country—as evidence of the state’s economic strength. But this number is misleading. It’s driven in part by high levels of government-transfer payments: everything from retirement and disability insurance to workers’ compensation and unemployment, veterans’ benefits, and the whole panoply of federal grants (Medicaid, food stamps, SSDI). Rhode Island ranks third in the country in such transfers per capita. Incomes have also been stagnant for decades. As late as the 1930s, Rhode Island’s per-capita income was nearly 50 percent greater than the national average. By the mid-1940s, though, it had declined to just a tick above the U.S. average, where it remains.

In an interview, Randal Jelks discusses his biography, Benjamin Elijah Mays: Schoolmaster of the Movement, about the Morehouse College president whom MLK Jr. considered his spiritual and intellectual father. How Mays laid the theological groundwork for the civil right movement:

He went to India and met and interviewed Gandhi in 1936 and came back and wrote about his encounter. He talked with Gandhi about what a nonviolent social movement looks like and how it should take place.

Martin King was 15 when he came to Morehouse. The war was beginning to affect enrollment, and Mays, at an all-men’s college, used early admissions to find talented teenagers to enroll. King and other students were often invited to Mays’ house to sit at table when dignitaries were visiting. The students had to learn about the visitor beforehand and were expected by Dr. and Mrs. Mays to ask questions. The great civil rights activist Dorothy Height remembers meeting Martin King at 15 sitting at the Mayses’ dining room table. This was not peculiar to King. Many other students tell you the same.

If Jelks’ biography discusses what came before Dr. King, Matthew J. Cressler argues that the religious dimension of debates about racial justice didn’t end with his death, but extended to what came after it – including the Black Power movement:

Journalists were quick to contrast what they took to be the irrational rage of urban youth shouting “Black Power!” with caricatures of a more palatable southern Christian nonviolence – needless to say, neither of these characterizations approximated the reality of either.

The first generation of post-civil rights scholarship reproduced this juxtaposition between secular anger and religious love, black violence and Christian nonviolence.  Even as more recent scholars have challenged many of the classic binaries separating Black Power from civil rights, the secular/religious divide usually persists since it serves as a convenient category for marking the elusive shift from one style of social justice struggle to another. (The convenience of this argument depends on presuppositions about the inherent peacefulness of “real” or “proper” religion that are built into the modern study of religion itself, but that is a conversation for another time.)

Convenience notwithstanding, Black Power was actually taken up by a number of black religious communities almost immediately after its first iteration.  On July 31, 1966, not long after Carmichael’s famous statement, the National Committee of Negro Churchmen published their own statement expressing deep disturbance over the manufactured controversy surrounding “Black power” and what they called the media’s “historic distortions of important human realities.”  They argued that “what we see shining through the variety of rhetoric is not anything new but the same old problem of power and race which has faced our beloved country since 1619.”  They identified the hypocrisy of “the assumption that white people are justified in getting what they want through the use of power, but that Negro Americans must, either by nature or by circumstance, make their appeal only through conscience.”  Two years later this same committee, now named the National Committee of Black Churchmen, officially affirmed emergent Black Theology as a “theology of black liberation.”

Even the Black Panthers – often presented as the paradigmatic foil for (the popular, sanitized version of) the Christian nonviolence of Martin Luther King – met in churches and collaborated with religious people and communities from the get-go.

(Photo of Mays via Wikipedia)

I haven’t seen The Case Against 8 yet, because they won’t send me a screener, but this review is a beaut. Two passages stand out:

Chad Griffin, founder of AFER and since 2012 the president of the Human Rights Campaign, wonders—when the group faces initial opposition from other campaigning groups who think in 2010 it is “too early” to pick marriage as the central gay rights fight to have—why gay groups spend more time fighting each other than “right-wing nut jobs.”

One hopes this is just a misunderstanding. Marriage had been the central gay rights fight since president George W. Bush announced support for the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004. No one ever disputed that. The only question at issue by 2010 was whether it was worth trying to get the Supreme Court to issue a federal ruling on the entire matter at that juncture. Griffin, Boies and Olson bet on that – and lost, when their case was dismissed on the minor ground of standing. Which brings one to the following paragraph from the review as well:

The directors told me the most difficult scene to film was the last. The couples had just won their 2013 ruling in the Supreme Court, which struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and rejected Proposition 8, and now they wanted to get married—the women in San Francisco and the men in Los Angeles.

But the couples in Perry did not succeed in striking down DOMA; and one hopes the Beast will run a correction. The review tells us that there is no account of the other side in the case, there is no criticism of the Prop 8 team –  “We are not only on the side of the good guys, but we are only ever on the good side of the good guys”, and that there is nothing actually revealing on the couples involved. In other words, it appears to be exactly the propaganda Griffin tried to peddle through Becker.

Well, I guess they’ll let me see the film at some point, won’t they?