Tag: Premium

Abolish Police Unions

by Will Wilkinson

There’s a solid leader in this week’s issue of The Economist on the need for reform in American law enforcement. The Economist endorses rolling back police militarization, more fastidious record-keeping about police killings, and the deployment of body cameras. There’s also this, under the heading of accountability:

[I]t must be easier to sack bad cops. Many of America’s 12,500 local police departments are tiny and internal disciplinary panels may consist of three fellow officers, one of whom is named by the officer under investigation. If an officer is accused of a crime, the decision as to whether to indict him may rest with a local prosecutor who works closely with the local police, attends barbecues with them and depends on the support of the police union if he or she wants to be re-elected. Or it may rest with a local “grand jury” of civilians, who hear only what the prosecutor wants them to hear. To improve accountability, complaints should be heard by independent arbiters, brought in from outside.

I agree with every bit of this, but none of it’s going to happen as long as police unions are allowed to exist. Just as teachers’ unions block almost every conceivable democratic reform to the public school system, police unions continually stymie attempts to resist the corrupt, praetorian tendencies of American law enforcement. Nationwide, police unions fight tooth-and-nail to keep even the most abusive cops on the streets. So good luck “sacking bad cops” with police unions in the way.

Other reforms face similar resistance. In Miami, the police union has opposed, and continues to oppose, a popular initiative to equip the police with body cameras. Or how about the ex-cop private investigators, working for a law firm representing more than 120 California police-officers’ unions, who tried to frame a Costa Mesa city councilman for drunk driving. Why? Because he tried to mess with police pensions. Steven Greenhut of the San Diego Union-Tribune asks:

This raises an important question: How widespread is this kind of behavior? At a Costa Mesa press conference last year, elected officials from other cities made allegations of police using disturbing tactics to achieve their political goals.

“What kind of world do we live in when the people we give guns and badges to hire private investigators to surveil public officials?” asked Righeimer. Calling it “unseemly,” OC prosecutor Robert Mestman said this case is significant because the victims “are democratically elected city council members.” Mensinger said it seemed Orwellian: “Public officials should not be extorted over public benefits.”

The Costa Mesa story may be about pensions rather than the conduct of routine police work, but it is indicative of the gangsterish anti-democratic pressure police unions routinely exert within the political system. In New York City, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association is currently sending a not-so-subtle “nice place you got here” message to Mayor Bill de Blasio in response to his failure to signal complete obsequious deference to the union after a grand jury declined to indict the police officer who was filmed killing the unarmed and submissive Eric Garner with a chokehold. The union has asked its members to fill out a form requesting that the mayor stay away from his or her funeral should he or she be killed in the line of duty. “Due to Mayor de Blasio and Speaker Mark-Viverito’s consistent refusal to show police officers the support and respect they deserve, I believe that their attendance at the funeral of a fallen New York City police officer is an insult to that officer’s memory and sacrifice,” the form reads.

Such drama! Such entitlement! All because the mayor publicly demonstrated some modest, measured sympathy for those protesting the crookedness of a system in which police are able to kill with impunity. Such disrespect for the uniform! The message the union is sending to the man duly elected to, among other things, oversee the city’s police is clear: fall in line or get out of the way.

I have long argued that government employees ought not be allowed to unionize. When public employees collectively bargain, who are they bargaining against? Their public employers, which is to say, the democratic public, which is to say, us. The point of a democratic government is to govern in a way that more or less tracks the public interest. The point of a government employee union is to organize against the public interest, to get in the way when the democratic public’s notions about its interests conflict with the interests of the union’s members. When a public-sector union is strong, government of the union’s domain is effectively ceded to the union itself. When that domain is the armed, business end of the law’s coercive authority, that’s a giant problem. It shouldn’t be allowed.

The political problem with abolishing police unions is obvious enough. Democrats reflexively defend unions, and Republican antipathy to public-sector unions disappears when it comes to cops and firefighters. Heroes, you know, every one. This rare bit of bipartisan concord leaves police unions spectacularly well-defended against reform. Until one party or the other begins to see the damage unions do, and becomes willing to fight it, anything more than superficial change is impossible.

A Republican Pop Quiz

by Dish Staff

A reader sent this in:

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Can you answer which Republican figure said each quote? Answers after the jump:

On Obamacare:

1. Sarah Palin, former half-term governor of Alaska, vice-presidential nominee, reality show star

2. Ben Carson, surgeon and 2016 presidential contender. (Though his exact words were: “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”)

3. Bill O’Brien, New Hampshire state representative

4. Michele Bachmann, congresswomen

On torture:

1. Marco Rubio, senator

2. Palin

3. Peter King, congressman

4. Steve King, congressman

(Though the following quote from Dick Cheney would have made a better pick: “What are we supposed to do kiss him on both cheeks and say ‘please, please tell us what you know’?”)

Those “Notable Books Lists”? They’re Useless

by Michelle Dean

Those end of the year book lists are lumbering around the internet right now, coming soon to a friend’s Facebook wall near you. NPR’s list of 2014 Great Reads numbers 250; the New York Times Book Review offers the slightly more conservative 100 Notable Books of 2014. The hugeness of these lists betrays something: their uselessness. My eyes always cross at lists that number above, say, 25. It certainly doesn’t narrow down the Christmas shopping list much.

Plus, these lists get to be disquieting documents of the Way We Publish Now. I would love to believe that we live in a publishing environment where we were producing at least a hundred well-edited, well-considered books a year. Unfortunately, as Ursula K. Le Guin recently put it to the shocked horror of most at the National Book Awards ceremony, writers instead work in an industry controlled by “commodity profiteers [who] sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.” It’s not an amazing environment for the production of literature. Mostly, publishers are throwing all sorts of stuff at the wall to see what sticks. I find it overwhelming and kind of sad to receive as many bad galleys as I do, often bought by a publisher for a great deal of money, but landing on my doorstep with the undignified plop of thawed turkey.

Listing so many books as “notable,” given that context, smacks of desperation.

It’s certainly always been the case that publishers churn out tons of books a year that flame out and die in the remainder piles. But even the largest pinch of salt, 2014 has seemed particularly bad. Precisely three newly published books have managed to take up permanent residence in my head this year: Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings, Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation, and Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald. And while other people might compose their lists differently, or count in their own findings five, ten, or even fifteen notable books, listing a hundred or more just feels… careless. It feels like the work of marketers, not of people who care about identifying good books.

If you are looking for new book recommendations, you’ll find yourself much better off consulting The Millions’ Year in Reading columns. There recommendations do not have to meet some insane artificial round number. No one is constrained by what happens to be on the publishers’ lists. In fact if anything the books they recommend tend to skew old. Michael Schaub, for example, wants you to read some Galway Kinnell. Jayne Anne Phillips has been re-reading Stephen Crane. Tana French got around to Strangers on a Train.

If someone asked me, for example, I would have told them that Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, is the book that changed my life this year. I had to consult it for some book research and then never stopped quoting it. I’ve become quite annoying on the subject and am desperate for someone else to talk about it with. Isn’t that what you want to hear, anyway, from someone recommending a book to you, rather than two tossed-off lines of plot summary in a sea of 99 other books?

Warning: This Tomato May Contain Blood, Sweat, And Tears

by Dish Staff

Reporter Richard Marosi and photographer Don Bartletti spent a year and a half investigating the awful conditions under which farm workers in Mexico labor to bring fresh produce to the American market. The first installment of their massive four-part exposé in the LA Times outlines the numerous human rights violations they discovered and calls out major US retail and restaurant chains, including Walmart and Subway, for buying produce from the offending farms:

At the mega-farms that supply major American retailers, child labor has been largely eradicated. But on many small and mid-sized farms, children still work the fields, picking chiles, tomatillos and other produce, some of which makes its way to the U.S. through middlemen. About 100,000 children younger than 14 pick crops for pay, according to the Mexican government’s most recent estimate. During The Times’ 18-month investigation, a reporter and a photographer traveled across nine Mexican states, observing conditions at farm labor camps and interviewing hundreds of workers. At half the 30 camps they visited, laborers were in effect prevented from leaving because their wages were being withheld or they owed money to the company store, or both. …

The practice of withholding wages, although barred by Mexican law, persists, especially for workers recruited from indigenous areas, according to government officials and a 2010 report by the federal Secretariat of Social Development. These laborers typically work under three-month contracts and are not paid until the end. The law says they must be paid weekly. The Times visited five big export farms where wages were being withheld. Each employed hundreds of workers. Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, bought produce directly or through middlemen from at least three of those farms, The Times found.

Part 2 focuses on one particularly Dickensian labor camp, where those too sick to work were reportedly denied food and medical care, and where asking for a few extra tortillas for her children could earn a worker a beating. Tom Philpott stresses how heavily Americans rely on Mexican farms for our cheap and abundant fruits and veggies:

The US now imports nearly a third of the fruit and vegetables we consume, and Mexico accounts for 36 percent of that foreign-grown cornucopia, far more than any other country. And we’re only growing more reliant on our southern neighbor—imports of Mexico-grown fresh produce have increased by an average of 11 percent per year between 2001 and 2011, the USDA reports, and now amount to around $8 billion. The Times investigations demonstrates, with an accumulation of detail that can’t be denied or ignored, that our easy bounty bobs on a sea of misery and exploitation.

These revelations, Erik Loomis argues, strengthen the case for an international legal framework to hold American companies accountable for doing business with human rights abusers:

As I argue in Out of Sight, these conditions are precisely why central to our demands for a just world must be international labor standards enforceable in U.S. courts. Anything else will keep workers in these conditions. If Subway wants to use tomatoes grown in Mexico, fine. But those tomatoes have to be produced in conditions that stand up to a basic test of human rights. If wages are stolen, workers threatened, bathing facilities not provided, etc., then workers should have the right to sue for recompense in American courts. Subway, Safeway, McDonald’s, etc., must be held legally responsible for the conditions of work when people labor in growing food for them to sell. This has to be a legal framework. Mass movements are useful only in the short term because we will move on to the next issue.

The Peril Of Yak Poop

by Dish Staff

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Eric Holthaus explains:

Yak dung, when used as fuel, is arguably dirtier than coal but is definitely much cheaper. Particulate pollution from burning animal dung greatly increases the risk of lung cancer and other respiratory ailments, the occurrence of which can be slowed by switching to cleaner ways of heating homes. …

A new paper accepted for publication in the journal Atmospheric Environment provides some of the first quantitative data on both black carbon and indoor air pollution during the cool season in Tibet. Via air samples and a survey of households in the Nam Co region of Tibet—the name means “heavenly lake”—researcher Eri Saikawa and her team learned things were even worse than they suspected. Her survey admittedly had a small sample—just 23 households responded—but is nevertheless illuminating.

A majority of residents had access to improved cookstoves, even solar power, but yet every single respondent still used yak dung for heating. Saikawa explains this by noting that average annual income per household is just $890 a year. Yak dung is simply the cheapest fuel available.

Previous Dish on poo-based energy here and here.

(Photo by Lyle Vincent)

The Casual Classism Of “You Had One Job”

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

As hashtag memes go, #YouHadOneJob (see also) seems like a lighthearted bit of fun. For the uninitiated: The hashtag is meant to collect instances of hilarious on-the-job fails:

https://twitter.com/swhammerhead/status/538064512235343872

Yes, I laughed. Then again, my sense of humor is such that an out-of-context roll of toilet paper on its own could also have that effect.

But the hashtag often gets used for more run-of-the-mill customer-service gripes, of the they-got-my-order-wrong variety. (I don’t wish to start a shaming cycle, so no specific links to those tweets. A glance at the hashtag will provide copious examples.) While these are indeed among the less clever uses of the meme, they’re not exactly out-of-place. After all, the butt of the joke is someone with a low-skilled job. More than that: Part of the joke is the job itself.

It’s supposed to be hilarious that someone’s honest-to-goodness job is lining up tiles properly or spelling a sign correctly; the ineptitude at the simple task is just icing. The “you” of the meme doesn’t refer to a readily identifiable worker (and thank goodness), but the implied worker would probably be – or perhaps was – fired for the mistake. On the rare occasions when it’s used to refer to a failure at a complex task, the joke falls flat, because clearly making a flu vaccine is not just “one job” in the sense the meme requires.

The question is, why this mean-spirited (if sometimes quite funny) meme, and why now? Aren’t we supposed to be living in an era of hypersensitivity? Why hasn’t the privilege of users of this hashtag been called out? (According to a few minutes of Googling, it has not.) Does #YouHaveOneJob tap into employment anxieties of those who are or have been un- or underemployed? Or is it just yet another example of the online quest for affirmation?

Illiberalism In The Art World, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Elizabeth Nolan Brown highlights a case of political correctness gone awry at the University of Iowa, where a sculpture of a Ku Klux Klansman was labeled “hate speech” and taken down because apparently the very shape of a racist symbol, even when used to make an anti-racist statement, is now deemed too offensive for college students to handle:

Created by Serhat Tanyolacar, a UI visiting professor and printmaking fellow, the klansman sculpture was decoupaged in newspaper coverage of racial tension and violence throughout the past 100 years. The piece was meant to highlight how America’s history of race-based violence isn’t really history and “facilitate a dialogue,” as Tanyolacar told university paper The Gazette. But no matter: After several hours, UI officials decided that the display was “deeply offensive” and needed to be removed. …

To me, this case provides a good reference point for why we shouldn’t curtail freedom of expression even when it comes from despicable groups like the Klu Klux Klan. When you start casting for exceptions to the First Amendment, you never know what kind of other speech—perhaps speech designed to address the very problems you’re fighting against—will get caught up in the net. Unfortunately, the kids and faculty at UI seem to have learned a different lesson: reacting to the statue as art or as a political statement was a reflection of cluelessness, insensitivity, and white privilege.

Tiffany Jenkins picks up on a similar trend of art censorship in Europe:

The travelling Exhibit B, by the white South African artist Brett Bailey, is a recreation of a human zoo from the 19th century that features 12-14 African performers from the host city and a choir of Namibian singers exhibited as artifacts. It’s meant to provoke a conversation about slavery, colonization, and present-day racism, but many protesters accuse it of being racist itself. In London in September, the Barbican pulled the entire run of Exhibit B after a petition calling on the arts center “not to display” the work achieved 22,988 signatories and criticized Exhibit B as “simply an exercise in white racial privilege.” …

Such debates aren’t new, of course, but there are important differences between the demands for censorship of the past and those of the present. Historically, those calling for censorship were often concerned that an artwork—perhaps of a sexual nature—would have a coarsening effect and a negative moral impact. Today’s activists have a different rationale. They argue that they are the only ones who have the right to speak about the experience depicted—and thus, have the right to silence those who have no comparable experience. So those protesting Exhibit B suggest they, as members of the black community, are the only ones who can create an artwork exploring slavery and colonization.

Previous examples of illiberalism in the art world here and here.

The Whole Sontag

by Dish Staff

Reviewing the new documentary, Regarding Susan Sontag, J. Bryan Lowder argues that it demonstrates how much of her swagger was a “carefully (and wisely, for a woman in a man’s trade) crafted façade, behind which lived and wrote a person who, despite the kind of career most writers can only dream about, felt as inadequate as the rest of us”:

That Sontag harbored such self-doubt can almost feel offensive—such as when a confidant reveals to the director that, after publishing the remarkable book On Photography, Sontag could only worry that it wasn’t as good as Walter Benjamin’s work.

But if you can get past that initial bristling response, Kates’ documentary offers fascinating and crucial insight into the psychology and motivations of one of the previous century’s greatest, and most mercurial, thinkers. Indeed, the film is so attentive to Sontag’s personal life, so committed to pushing past her decades-long PR campaign, that at moments it felt like a violation. But then, there’s something important about placing the kind of person who is more-than-willing to pronounce upon everyone and everything else under a similar scrutiny, something irresistible in regarding the critic, the figure whose job description is to regard the rest of the world.

And what does Kates see when she looks at Sontag? For one thing, she discovers a woman whose sexuality clearly informed her orientation to culture and who yet declined to directly come out as queer (some oblique textual gestures aside). Though the film is not exactly angry about this omission, it refuses to respect it, dedicating a considerable portion of the run-time to interviews with Sontag’s many female partners and lovers.

The Economist‘s Y.F. has more on Sontag’s sexuality:

While on a fellowship at Oxford in her early 20s, Sontag made her first trip to Paris, where in the 1950s so much of America’s avant garde seemed to find a natural home. Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, the writer’s first lover, accompanied her to France and recounts that the day before they were due to host an expat party she punched Sontag in a jealous rage. At the party, noticing Sontag’s bruise, Allen Ginsberg asked Zwerling, “Why’d you hit her, she’s younger and prettier than you.” Zwerling replied, “That’s why.” Sontag possessed a magnetism that even in their moments of greatest candour the film and the people in it—some of them deeply hurt by her—seem unable to withstand.

While much has been made of Sontag’s desire to remain private about her sexuality, she also wrote about it often and gave it an enshrined place in her life and intellectual development. Wayne Koestenbaum, a writer, wryly sums the situation in the film: “Does the author of ‘Notes on Camp’ have to come out?” The film takes us through her experiences as a very young undergraduate in Berkeley and San Francisco in the late 1940s, discovering the area’s underground queer culture and her own place within it. “Everything begins from now…I am reborn,” she writes, “I have been given permission to live…” Of its connection to her writing she observed, “My desire to write is connected to my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon to match the weapon that society has against me. I am just becoming aware of how guilty I feel being queer.”

The Stubbornness Of Class Snobbery

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Freddie recently complained about his Facebook friends sharing a jokey item that conflated “think[ing] Olive Garden is fancy” with being a racist. Freddie’s post title, and seemingly straightforward request, is, “keep your classism out of my antiracism.”

I share his sentiment, but am pessimistic about the prospects of separating classism from not just antiracism, but social justice advocacy more generally. It’s not that sometimes, well-meaning progressive sorts slip up and accidentally insult one group while helping another. Rather, it’s that a certain kind of chic progressivism (or pseudo-progressivism) has fused with class snobbery. The chance to engage in a bit of class signaling is a feature, not a bug.

We see this in so many arenas, the most obvious being a certain kind of anti-commercialism that seems to be about defending those who can’t afford flashy-fancy items, but is in fact about those who prefer discreetly high-end items (or better yet, experiences) looking down on those whose tastes aren’t so impressive. See: Black Friday. See also: the “basic bitch,” and Noreen Malone’s spot-on explanation. The thing these days is to sneer at the schmancy in a way that seems at first to be about supporting the underdog, but that’s in fact the opposite. “Gourmet” is no longer indicative of high-end, nor are designer logos. So you’re not actually taking the pro-underdog position of you prefer Bushwick farm-to-table to special-occasion restaurants (that may well cost less). A gigantic engagement ring, a McMansion, an SUV, these are the things one can evoke as examples of how “we” i.e. Americans over-consume, but the person ostensibly including himself in this first-person-plural actually has plenty of money, status, and whichever stuff does interest him. It’s simply not done to insult the actual poor. So all the classist energies have gone towards insulting this nebulous (and unless otherwise specified, white) middle class, all the while claiming to be concerned about the environment, labor, etc. Yet those remain, for others, true concerns. The difficulty is sorting out which is which.

We also see this play out in social-media issues-of-the-day discussions. Specifically, the “privilege” conversation, which is often, as we have seen, a way for those with the right manners and terminology to exclude everyone else. Class signaling and social-justice advocacy have, on Twitter and most especially on Facebook, started to look, at times, almost indistinguishable.

An Actual War On Women, Ctd

by Dish Staff

The Islamic State’s “Research and Fatwa Department” is circulating a pamphlet on what the jihadis are allowed to do to the thousands of women and girls they have captured and enslaved in their rampage through Iraq and Syria:

Much of the pamphlet talks about ISIS’ policy on having sexual intercourse with a female slave, something that the group cites the Quran to justify. “If she was a virgin, he (the owner) can have intercourse with her 1(355)immediately after the ownership is fulfilled,” ISIS explains. “If she was not a virgin, her uterus must be purified (wait for her period to be sure she is not pregnant.)”

There are other rules as well, like that two men who co-own a captive can’t both have sex with her and that a man can’t have intercourse with his wife’s slave. As to girls: “It is permissible to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn’t reached puberty if she is fit for intercourse,” the document reads. “However, if she is not fit for intercourse, he (the owner ) can only enjoy her without intercourse.”

An English translation of the evil document, via MEMRI, is available here. Jamie Dettmer notes how many women ISIS is believed to have kidnapped:

According to Nazand Begikhani, an adviser to the Kurdistan regional government and researcher at the University of Bristol Gender and Violence Research Center, ISIS has kidnapped more than 2,500 Yazidi women. Yazidi activists, meanwhile, say they have compiled a list of at least 4,600 missing Yazidi women, seized after they were separated from male relatives, who were shot.

The women were bussed, according to firsthand accounts of women who have managed to flee, to the ISIS-controlled cities of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, and chosen and traded like cattle. Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq say they have freed about 100 Yazidi women. In October, ISIS justified its enslavement of the women—and of any non-believing females captured in battle—in its English-language digital magazine Dabiq. Islamic theology, ISIS propagandists argued, gives the jihadis the right, much in the same way that the Bible’s Ephesians 6:5 tells “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling.”

Katie Zavadski finds some perspective on the ghastly situation:

The pamphlet may be part of a response to a recent condemnation of the group by Islamic scholars from around the word, according to UMass Lowell security studies professor Mia Bloom. Instead of engaging with centuries of Islamic theological debates, ISIS is reverting to seventh-century norms, at which point “women would have fallen under the rubric of war booty.”

She also doesn’t rule out the possibility that some foreign fighters might find these guidelines attractive. “Maybe they think that this is a recruiting tool,” she says, for frustrated men from abroad. But Bloom worries that this cycle of sexual violence will be difficult to stop. “They are creating a very perverse incentive system,” she says, noting the uptick of domestic violence complaints in postwar Serbia.

Previous Dish on the Islamic State’s barbaric view of women here.