Month: October 2014

Suzanne Maloney provides “an anatomy of Iran’s eleventh-hour nuclear negotiating strategy.” She admits that, by “sticking to its guns, Tehran has gone from supplicant to sought-after in the talks, with Washington and its allies scrambling to devise formulas that might meet the supreme leader’s imperious mandates”:

Still, it seems unlikely to me that Washington will acquiesce to Iran’s obstinacy on enrichment. The Obama administration has already extended major concessions to Tehran in devising a formula that Tehran could claim acknowledged its nuclear rights and in backing away from previous American insistence on a suspension or end to all enrichment on Iranian soil. Any deal that fails to redress the breakout timeline would gainsay a decade of efforts to deter Iran from nuclear weapons capability, as well as the strong preferences of America’s regional allies.

And more importantly, I think the presumption that the Obama administration is so desperate for a foreign policy victory, so feeble in its assertion of American interests and the security of our allies, or so eager for Iranian cooperation on other regional challenges that it will accept a hollow deal represents a profound misinterpretation of this administration’s foreign policy and the capabilities of the United States.

For that reason, I believe that Tehran’s four-point hedging strategy is a dangerous bluff, and one that will ultimately fail. I suspect that will not prove the end of diplomacy with Iran, but neither will it facilitate the end of Iran’s self-imposed forfeiture of its rightful place in the world.

Gareth Porter maintains that the “key to understanding Iran’s policy toward nuclear weapons lies in a historical episode during its eight-year war with Iraq”:

The story, told in full for the first time here, explains why Iran never retaliated against Iraq’s chemical weapons attacks on Iranian troops and civilians, which killed 20,000 Iranians and severely injured 100,000 more. And it strongly suggests that the Iranian leadership’s aversion to developing chemical and nuclear weapons is deep-rooted and sincere.

A few Iranian sources have previously pointed to a fatwa by the Islamic Republic’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, prohibiting chemical weapons as the explanation for why Iran did not deploy these weapons during the war with Iraq. But no details have ever been made public on when and how Khomeini issued such a fatwa, so it has been ignored for decades.

Now, however, the wartime chief of the Iranian ministry responsible for military procurement has provided an eyewitness account of Khomeini’s ban not only on chemical weapons, but on nuclear weapons as well. In an interview with me in Tehran in late September, Mohsen Rafighdoost, who served as minister of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) throughout the eight-year war, revealed that he had proposed to Khomeini that Iran begin working on both nuclear and chemical weapons — but was told in two separate meetings that weapons of mass destruction are forbidden by Islam.

Yesterday, Drezner worried that Iranian and American legislatures won’t agree to a deal. Larison adds his two cents:

Since the Senate GOP is opposed to a final agreement with Iran that doesn’t include their impossible conditions, the prospect of their takeover could adversely affect the final stage of the negotiations this year. If the Iranians see that Republicans are poised to win control, they might be more likely to stall or walk away from the talks all together. In the worst case, there might be no deal because the Iranian side assumes that the U.S. won’t be willing to fulfill the rest of its side of the bargain, or there could be a deal reached that is then blown up a few months later as it becomes clear that there will be no action on sanctions relief from Congress.

The popular thread continues with a new angle – sexual shame:

I can only remember one time I was spanked. It’s an early memory of running away and cowering in the corner while my very sweet and kind father came towards me. I was so scared. The spanking wasn’t terrible but that image will stick with me forever. That and the humiliation. I still can’t reconcile it with my father’s otherwise extraordinarily loving personality. And I have no memory of why I was punished. Clearly the “lesson” didn’t stick. But that image always will.

As an absolute aside, has anyone noticed that hitting someone’s buttocks is an oddly sexual place to hit someone? Could it, even unintentionally, be a form of sexual abuse? Certainly that element adds to the humiliation of being spanked.

Another can relate to that humiliation:

My parents never paddled me with an implement, or whooped me with a switch, or a belt.

My father spanked me, bare-bottom, bare-handed over his knee until I was about six. For some reason, the recent discussion about child abuse and corporal punishment treats spanking as a lesser act, like a kindly “slap on the butt”. I couldn’t disagree more.

My earliest emotional memories are the terror and shame I felt as my dad tore down my pants and spanked my bare bottom. The anger and rage he expressed terrified me. I didn’t understand. It didn’t teach me anything, except to fear my father, who surely had loving thoughts of his son. It took ten years before I could get to know my dad, and I wonder often how it might have been different. And he wasn’t otherwise a frightening figure. He was a bookish lawyer from a good family.

There’s a sexual element to corporal punishment that is difficult to confront. Society nearly admits as much when witnesses are required for female students to be spanked. Maybe small children haven’t formed sexual identities yet, but I am certain the sexual shame of bare beatings is felt, even if it can’t quite be articulated.

Update from a reader:

Without delving into the question of whether spanking across the buttocks constitutes sexual abuse, intentional or otherwise, there is a practical reason for striking someone there. The sciatic nerve runs over the gluteus muscles in the buttocks, meaning that a blow delivered to that spot can deliver a fair amount of pain without causing lasting damage.

If you’re not familiar with the cultural meme yet, College Humor has you covered:

Noreen Malone looks closer:

It seems to me that while what it pretends to criticize is unoriginality of thought and action, most of what basic actually seeks to dismiss is consumption patterns — what you watch, what you drink, what you wear, and what you buy — without dismissing consumption itself. The basic girl’s sin isn’t liking to shop, it’s cluelessly lusting after the wrong brands, the ones that announce themselves loudly and have shareholders they need to satisfy. (The right brands are much more expensive and subtle and, usually, privately owned.)

The basic girl is also someone who isn’t into androgyny.

She likes being a woman, or at least she buys the products that are so inherently female-skewing they don’t even NEED to be explicitly marketed to women, like low-calorie margaritas invented by Bravo heroines. She delights in all the things that men dismiss as unserious or that don’t often even register for them as existing — celebrity gossip, patterned disposable cocktail napkins that mean something sentimental. She expresses traditionally feminine desires, like wanting to get married or to have kids. She doesn’t have a poker face when it comes to those things, and doesn’t see the point in trying to develop one. She likes what she likes and she doesn’t care if it doesn’t make her outwardly special.

The word basic has become an increasingly expansive stand-in for “woman who fails to surprise us,” as seen in this Vice tournament of basic bitches that includes Gwyneth Paltrow and Mother Teresa and Shirley Temple and both Michelle Williamses, among others. And so the woman who calls another woman basic ends up implicitly endorsing two things she probably wouldn’t sign up for if they were spelled out for her: a male hierarchy of culture, and the belief that the self is an essentially surface-level formation.

Nate Silver analyzes the latest Senate fundraising totals:

Among the most hopeful signs for Democrats this year have been the strong fundraising totals for their Senate candidates. Through June 30, the Democratic incumbent Mark Udall of Colorado had raised $7.9 million in individual contributions to $3.2 million for his Republican opponent, Cory Gardner. In Iowa through the same date, Democrat Bruce Braley had raised almost three times as much ($5.6 million) as his opponent, Republican Joni Ernst ($2.1 million).

But the latest numbers show Republican fundraising catching up with, and sometimes surpassing, Democratic totals in Iowa, Colorado and other key states. … FiveThirtyEight’s Senate forecast model uses fundraising totals as one of the “fundamentals” factors it analyzes along with the polls. The fundamentals receive little weight in the model at this stage of the race, but they nevertheless help to explain some of the polling movement we’ve seen in certain states.

At this point, should the Democrats pull off an upset, Charlie Cook will largely credit their ground game:

There is no question that while the 2004 Bush-Cheney reelection campaign had the most sophisticated voter-identification and get-out-the-vote presidential campaign operation in history, the GOP’s state-of-the-art capabilities atrophied over the next eight years, with the Obama-Biden campaign outgunning the Republicans greatly in both 2008 and 2012. Earlier this year, Senate Democrats announced a $60 million voter-ID and GOTV program (labeled the Bannock Street Project) with the goal of paying 4,000 workers to use techniques employed by DSCC Chairman Bennet in his 2010 race in Colorado—techniques that were greatly expanded by the Obama campaign in 2012. While some Republicans have scoffed at Democrats’ ability to mount such an effort, they concede that the Democratic ground game was superior two years ago and that, in midterm elections, if Democrats can crank up turnout among young, female, and minority voters—with young, single women a prime target—their chances of success increase.

Short of some “black swan” event that changes the dynamics, the result of this election may come down to whether Democrats can replicate their past successes in midterm elections—in many cases in non-swing states, with candidates who, for all their fine qualities, are not inspirational, aspirational, or charismatic.

Carl Zimmer considers the question:

[Last] week in the New York Times, I write about new research on why invasive species thrive. Some scientists argue that native ecosystems have to be weakened for aliens to take hold. Some favor the idea that alien species gain an advantage by leaving their parasites and predators behind.

But a pair of ecologists, Jason Fridley and Dov Sax, argue that something else may be going on. It may simply be that the invasive species are superior. …

Fridley and Sax have drawn on some remarks by Darwin to develop what they call the Evolutionary Imbalance Hypothesis. They argue that species in different parts of the world have adapted to similar physical conditions. East Asia is a lot like Connecticut, for example, in terms of its climate. The species in both places have evolved, as natural selection improved their ability to survive, grow, and reproduce. It’s conceivable that a species in one place might get better at all that than a species somewhere else. It would be, in other words, superior. That doesn’t mean that this species would be some kind of Platonic ideal, or that it was a kind of Aryan paragon. It simply produced more offspring under identical conditions than another species.

The possible implications of this research:

One of the things that make ecosystems worth saving is the services they provide us with. If a superior species swoops in, it may do a better job at some of those services than native ones. An alien plant might draw more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it away in the soil, for example. Maybe we’ll be better off with an invaded ecosystem? I may not be fond of the barberry infiltrating the New England forests, but maybe our decisions about managing the wilderness have to be based on more than aesthetics.

(Photo by Katie Ashdown)

This story has been making the rounds:

Noncompete agreements are typically reserved for managers or employees who could clearly exploit a business’s inside information by jumping to a competitor. But at Jimmy John’s, the agreement apparently applies to low-wage sandwich makers and delivery drivers, too.

By signing the covenant, the worker agrees not to work at one of the sandwich chain’s competitors for a period of two years following employment at Jimmy John’s. But the company’s definition of a “competitor” goes far beyond the Subways and Potbellys of the world. It encompasses any business that’s near a Jimmy John’s location and that derives a mere 10 percent of its revenue from sandwiches.

Neil Irwin comments:

What’s striking about some of these labor practices is the absence of reciprocity.

When a top executive agrees to a noncompete clause in a contract, it is typically the product of a negotiation in which there is some symmetry: The executive isn’t allowed to quit for a competitor, but he or she is guaranteed to be paid for the length of the contract even if fired.

Jimmy John’s appears to have demanded the same loyalty as the price of having a low-paid job hourly job making sandwiches, from which the worker could be fired at any time for any reason.

However, Clare O’Connor reports that Jimmy John’s noncompete clause is probably unenforceable:

“There’s never a guarantee, but I can’t see any court in the world upholding this,” said Sherrie Voyles, a partner at Chicago firm Jacobs, Burns, Orlove & Hernandez. “Every state law is different on this issue, but the general idea is that it’d only be upheld if it’s reasonable. The test would be, is there a near-permanent customer base? No. Customers at Jimmy John’s are probably also customers at Subway.”

Voyles said she can’t imagine any Jimmy John’s outlet actually enforcing this non-compete clause (indeed, there’s no evidence any have tried), but can’t see any reason it’d hold up in court.

Drum is puzzled:

[W]hat’s the point? I’ve not heard of a single case of Jimmy John’s actually taking someone to court over this, and it seems vanishingly unlikely that they would. That seems to leave a couple of options. First, it’s just boilerplate language they don’t really care about but left in just in case. The second is that they find it useful as a coercive threat. Sure, they’ll never bother going to court, but maybe their workers don’t know that—which means they’re less likely to move across the street to take a higher-paying job. In other words, it’s a handy tool for keeping workers scared and wages low.

Matt O’Brien’s sees the noncompete clause as the kind of thing that happens “when workers have zero bargaining power”:

Now, economists used to think that the balance of power between labor and capital was pretty fixed. In other words, workers would always get a certain share of their company’s earnings, and owners would get the rest. For most of the postwar period, this certainly seemed to be the case: the split between labor and capital stayed roughly the same throughout, although it did start to slowly shift in management’s favor during the 1970s. Despite that, labor’s share of income was still close to its longer-term average in the late 1990s.

But, as you can see below, labor’s share plummeted at the turn of the century. What changed? Well, for one, globalization really got going. China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, and the cost of its increased trade with the U.S. was an estimated 2 to 2.4 million jobs here, mostly in manufacturing. All this offshoring, of course, let U.S. multinationals pay their shareholders more at the expense of U.S. workers. And then the financial crisis all but finished labor off. That’s because the government did enough to save the economy, but not the unemployed, so companies could squeeze their workers even more while booking record earnings. Not only that, but, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the middle-class jobs we lost during the Great Recession have just been replaced by low-paying ones during the not-so-great recovery. That’s kept labor from catching up at all the past few years.

So the crisis has let Corporate America gobble up an even bigger slice of the income pie for itself, while the rest of America is stuck hoping for some wage crumbs.