Don’t talk to the police

Anyone who is approached by the police and asked about the Jordan Miles case, or especially about the fake press release controversy, should simply invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to talk to the police.

For those who don’t know, a recap. Last year, high school student Jordan Miles was beaten to within an inch of his life by three Pittsburgh police officers. They ambushed him, failing even to identify themselves, and Miles ran, thinking he was being robbed. Typically, the police afterward claimed that they thought Miles’s can of Mountain Dew was a gun, or some nonsensical bullshit like that. Ever since, there has been a campaign on Miles’s behalf to achieve justice. The Fraternal Order of Police, true to form, has defended the three thugs unconditionally. Around the time of the first anniversary of the assault, a clever and anonymous satirist issued a fake press release stating that the FOP was reversing its previous position on the issue, on the grounds of the  plain visual evidence in the Miles assault, which was indeed pretty gruesome. The FOP was incensed about this, and in retaliation, the Computer Crimes division of the police department launched a punitive raid on a Bloomfield coffee house in an attempt to find the individual responsible.

No non-laughworthy statute could possibly apply here, since satire of public figures — including the heads of police organizations — is Constitutionally-protected activity, and unambiguously so. This will not prevent the police from making their victims’ lives a living hell in service to their private vendettas, however. And since the Crazy Mocha/Dreaming Ant location is a well-known Internet hotspot for anyone in the East End with a laptop, and is used by dozens of people on any given day, there are plenty of people who are now potential targets of this petty (or potentially more serious) harassment. One pseudonymous commenter on Chris Potter’s blog at the City Paper writes (1/20/2011, 8:13 PM):

I was working at Crazy Mocha when this happened. About 7 cops came in. They did take Dreaming Ant’s computer and router, but the router also belonged to Crazy Mocha. . . . Also, one of my customers politely asked one of the cops standing around whether the raid had anything to do with the press release hoax, to which they responded, “you are now our #1 suspect and you need to give us your information before you leave here.” As if listening to the news (which is where he heard about it) is a crime.

The bottom-line lesson of this is: Do not talk to the police.

In case there is any confusion about this, I should clarify: THIS MEANS YOU.

Contrary to what you might think, you are not the exception to this rule. The cops are clearly in a vindictive mood, and your innocence or “guilt” does not matter. If you talk to them, they could end up framing you or someone you know based on something you say, or at least otherwise make your life an investigative hassle for the foreseeable future. It is important to note that you are not unusually slick, either, and that you are not going to talk to the police in such a way that your words will not be fraught with peril for yourself or for someone else. If the cops ask you about this, you need to tell them you have nothing to say, making clear that the conversation is over. And then you probably should consult a lawyer as well.

There is a Center for Constitutional Rights pamphlet that explains why this is good advice, if for some reason you think I’ve not gone into enough detail. It is written with Federal agents in mind, but the principle applies here as well.

UPMC-China

“Typical of the old capitalism, when free competition held undivided sway, was the export of goods. Typical of the latest stage of capitalism, when monopolies rule, is the export of capital.”

– V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

See here.

For Martin Luther King Day: Segregation in Pittsburgh and the Mon Valley, Early 21st Century

Racial Segregation in Pittsburgh and the Mon Valley, Early 21st Century

If you know Pittsburgh at all, it’s pretty easy to guess what the differently-colored dots represent. See the original on the Flickr site of digital cartographer Eric Fisher, along with similar maps of other US cities. These caused a small but well-earned online stir when they came out a few months ago.

Jordan and the Three Pigs

Jordan and the Three Pigs. A Mid Winters Night Scary Story!

by Paradise Gray on Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Here’s a little story that must be told

about 3 little pigs on a night so cold,

It started last year in jan-u-ary,

On A Night just like this, it was sooo scary!

Jordan Miles ventured out, on his way to his Grandmothers house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse,

It wasn’t the Big-Bad Wolf whose car came screeching to a halt,

Out jumped the 3 pigs, who say the whole thing is Jordan’s fault,

He was dangerously armed with an imaginary bottle of Mountain Dew,

Jordan tried to flee! That’s true, but what would you do,

If on a cold winters night, 3 Pigs came at you.

Demanding the Drugs, the guns and the money!

would you have found it frightening, would it have been funny?

The little boy ran, he ran as fast as he can,

Faster than the gingerbread man, he ran, as if for his life!

the 3 three pigs pounced on him and beat him

as if he had threatened to cut off thiers tails with a carving knife,

And they wasn’t going out like that, Pigs don’t act like mice!

They remember Rapunzel, Rapunzel, The Maiden so fair,

They made sure that Jordan could never go there,

They huffed, and they puffed and they yanked out his hair,

3 strong men, I frightened boy, the fight was not fair!

Did the little boy have any chance to win?

Not by the hairs of my chinny, chin, chin.

200 pounds they X 3, 150 lbs. soaking wet he,

They danced and they pranced as they beat him with glee,

They hand cuffed him, I’m being robbed & kidnapped, thought he.

He recited the lords prayer, they hated the sound!

Then they choked poor Jordan and smashed his face on the ground,

But that didn’t deter young Jordan, as he lay there:

Tazed, beaten with a branch, kicked, punched, yanked out hair,

He mustered a whisper into the cold winter air. “The lord is My Shepard, I Shall NOT!

Whoaaa!! This aint No Disney story, you won’t find Jordan Miles in 7Eleven smiling at you from the side of a slurpee cup,

A second pig choked him, smashed his face on the ground and reminded him, “Didn’t he just tell you to shut the F up?

The moral of the story is: tell all the children to be carefull on cold winter nights,

When on the way to grandma’s house you are not in their sights.

They’ll kick you and punch you and beat you with twigs

They do not fight fair, they’ll pull out your hair,

You better watch out for those 3 little pigs!
– Paradise Gray

Vigil and Protest on Anniversary of Police Beating of Jordan Miles

Pittsburgh, PA – Upset by the lack of justice a year after the beating of Jordan Miles, the Alliance for Police Accountability (APA) will hold a vigil and protest in Homewood:

Wednesday, Jan. 12 – 7:00 pm. Corner of Tioga & Rosedale St.

Web: www.justiceforjordanmiles.com

In defense of Michael Vick

Forced to make the unpleasant choice, would you rather have a family dog maimed by Michael Vick, or be raped by Ben Roethlisberger?

That’s an unfair question, I realize. Unfair to Michael Vick, that is, because Vick did not actually kill or maim any dogs, let alone anyone’s family dog. I am not one to argue that this mitigates what he did; if anything, financing and profiting from repulsive activities ought to merit penalties as onerous as directly participating in them. (This is why Don Blankenship should be in jail for murder.) As a society we do a lot of awful things to animals, the ethics of which can be debated endlessly, and perhaps more fruitfully some day when the problems more urgently facing our own species have been dealt with. We do, after all, kill animals by the millions for food, and the excuse that there are domesticated animals bred for that purpose could apply just as easily to the dogs that Vick’s collaborators bred for fighting. If it’s objectionable to kill or maim animals for entertainment purposes, then there is something awry when there are people who excoriate Vick but still find something endearing in a politician because she hunts (or rather pretends to).

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that what Vick did is still unacceptable. (I will agree with that personally, though yours truly is not a member of the vegetarian faction of the left.) If you go back to my initial question, you still have to answer it in Vick’s favor, don’t you?

Note that I did not qualify it by saying that if you’re a man, you should consider whether a female loved one of yours would be raped by Roethlisberger. No, the question, no matter your gender, should be whether you would be raped. Empathy by its very definition requires that you put yourself in another person’s shoes. And anyone who responds to this by saying that we should imagine ourselves as the dogs is revealing a lot about his (or — less likely — her) attitude toward women.

In making this point, I do not intend to imply that there is anything wrong with thrilling to the on-field performance of either of these two men. Since September, Michael Vick has gone out there every week and proven that while Ben Roethlisberger plays on the best football team in Pennsylvania, Roethlisberger is the state’s second-best quarterback. Roethlisberger’s above-average competence is sufficient, combined with the Steelers’ stellar defense, to make Pittsburgh a Super Bowl contender year after year. Vick’s outright brilliance carries the Eagles. (You’ll note that I’m writing this the day before the Eagles’ playoff game; everyone has their bad days, and Vick could have one on Sunday, though he could also have a brilliant one. I figured I’d write this now, to memorialize what everyone understands at this moment, which is that Vick has been scintillating.)

Pennsylvania sports fans shouldn’t have to turn away from their teams simply because their players aren’t examples of personal rectitude. The aesthetics of sports have a value to the fans independent of the athletes, just as much as the arts have value whatever the personal or political foibles of artists. The USA’s greatest living film director has a notoriously unpleasant personal history. On a personal level I can say that I have found considerable pleasure in the work of V. S. Naipaul, despite his racism and colonial apologetics, and despite his singularly distasteful personality. And it is impossible for anyone of genuine musical sensibility not to recognize Richard Wagner’s genius; he was nevertheless a horrible human being, and his eventual posthumous adoption by the Third Reich was due not solely to Hitler being a horrible person with good taste in music, but to Wagner’s own disturbing worldview.

At the same time, Oscar Wilde’s claim that “all art is quite useless” bends the stick too far in the other direction. The best art always carries with it a profound social significance, and the same can be true for sports. It is easy to point out the many socially negative features of professional sports in particular: ostentatious commercialism; the arrogant and frequently anti-social behavior of millionaire athletes; the even worse behavior of multi-millionaire owners who suck up public subsidies for their stadiums and arenas. But there have also been events of great social weight: Who can forget Jackie Robinson breaking the color line, or Smith and Carlos at the 1968 Olympics? And Pittsburgh can claim one of its adopted sons, Dennis Brutus, who straddled the art and sports worlds, with both his politically-committed poetry and his leading role in getting the South African apartheid regime banned from international sports.

And so the Roethlisberger/Vick contrast does say something about this society. Not only did Vick do time in Federal prison while Roethlisberger’s latest accuser decided not to pursue criminal charges. And not only did the NFL suspend Roethlisberger for an eventual four games, while indefinitely suspending Vick and accepting him back only after he had undergone Jesus therapy under the tutelage of Tony Dungy. But while Roethlisberger took a serious hit to his reputation, including in Pittsburgh, there’s no denying that — when you adjust for geographic differences — it is Vick who has experienced disproportionately high-intensity popular revulsion. Protests follow Vick everywhere he goes. The continuing resistance to Roethlisberger has been anemic at best. (I will refrain from too much Bolshevik fulmination against the self-indulgence of anarchist protesters; it is true that if one is interested in actually changing some minds, rather than engaging in overweening moral witness, then advertising your “vegan tailgate” is not the best idea. But even absent such adventurist tactical stupidities, the protests against Roethlisberger would still have been weak.)

The explanation is twofold. At least part of it is the perverse degradation of some human beings to the point where their rights are seen as less worthy of respect than those of pit bulls: in this case, women have fewer rights than dogs. But there is another issue here, the big one that gets shouted down every time someone tries to point it out, but which will never go away, despite any vigorous denials. And that brings me to the second question, which is the companion of the first one I asked above:

What if Michael Vick were white, and Ben Roethlisberger were black?

Once again, this is not quite a fair question — to Michael Vick. Because we also need to add the assumption that the hypothetical black Roethlisberger’s victims were also white. So with that amendment, how do you answer this question?

Is there any doubt that the entire conversation would be entirely different?

Everyone who knows anything about US society, and is also honest, will readily acknowledge that the proportion of outrage in these two cases would be reversed. More than reversed, in fact. And who really thinks that the white Michael Vick would have spent time in Leavenworth?

So with that, I anticipate that this post may end up the most widely-read item on either this blog or its predecessor. And I don’t expect the reaction to be very positive. But if Wilde was wrong when he said that “all art is quite useless,” he was right when he said that “there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” So bring it on.

Cop takes money from people he’s supposed to be policing; says he’ll be “fair”

Like Sarah Palin running to 19th Century Fox, Tom Corbett chooses a friendly venue for his first post-election interview: Richard Mellon Scaife’s toy newspaper. A PR flack for Range Resources here says of Corbett: “I think he’s going to regulate us the same way he’s approached everything,” which does at least qualify as the literal truth. Even the Trib can’t ignore Corbett’s intimate ties with the industry, and publishes a handy guide with photos of Corbett transition team members who are connected to the industry.

In this interview Corbett describes himself as a “cop” who will see to “fair enforcement” of Marcellus Shale regulations. This amounts to saying two things: (1) no more regulations, since the current ones are anemic enough, and (2) enforcement will conform to the commentary of Anacharsis on Solon: “Laws are spider-webs, which catch the little flies, but cannot hold the big ones.”

In fact, Corbett goes the extra mile in his service to the industry. Even Tom Ridge, who is getting paid $900,000 a year by the Marcellus Shale Coalition, says that an extraction tax might be acceptable. Corbett disagrees.

The folly of utility deregulation and “market” environmentalism

In a few days, the last of Pennsylvania’s rate caps for electricity generation will expire. This is the culmination of the state’s electricity deregulation process, which began in the mid-1990s — the days of ascendant Gingrichism and the early Tom Ridge, when laughable nostrums about “competition” in the electricity “market” basked in the rosy dawn of untested crackpottery, before Enron deliberately caused the “rolling blackouts” in the California of actually-existing electricity deregulation in 2000-2001.

Say what you want about Bud George, but when the man is right, he is right. And for a short primer on the electricity deregulation fiasco in Pennsylvania, you can do worse than to read one of his reports. (This report is available on his website, though I have also just housed it on this website.) When the power companies spun off their generation from their transmission and distribution operations, they mostly just created holding companies to own the transmission/distribution and the generation operations. Yet they still hit up the state for the ability to charge customers for their “stranded assets” — that is, their expensive and uneconomical power plants, mostly nuclear. As Senator Lisa Boscola has noted, these total payments are approaching $12 billion, and their parent holding companies used that money to buy up power generation in other states. The utilities achieved prodigious profits during this time, and Wall Street rewarded them with stock value increases well above the Dow Jones average for utilities. There is a graph from the Bud George report which shows the stock prices for some of them compared to this average; I’ve reproduced it here. (Note that the dip in 2008 coincides with the financial crisis that affected the entirety of Wall Street, in every industry.)

Growth in stock value for PA utilities has greatly outpaced the national average since deregulation

In exchange for the ability to collect payments for “stranded assets,” the companies agreed to a series of rate caps. But in the course of the past couple of years, those rate caps have expired, with the last of them — covering the majority of ratepayers in the state — set to expire this coming January 1. What will be the consequence?

The most infamous example in Pennsylvania occurred when rate caps in the Pike County Light & Power Company region expired in 2005. The increase was 129% for generation rates and a 79% increase overall. Rate increases are not going to be that drastic next year for two reasons: (1) the depressed economy has put a damper on demand, and (2) the price of natural gas has fallen precipitously because of the drilling boom in the Marcellus Shale and elsewhere. This means that greater rate increases will be on the agenda when the economy picks up again, and in the meantime it is cold comfort that ratepayers are shielded from especially bad price-gouging only because the economy as a whole is in such poor shape, and because much of the state’s drinking water is under assault from drilling by Texas-based natural gas companies.

Which brings us to an especially gloomy portion of this story. In 1996, deregulation got a boost from some of the establishment environmentalist organizations, who thought they saw an opportunity to promote renewable energy through “market solutions.” The theory of how this was supposed to work goes like this:

Deregulation would allow competition to enter the marketplace for electricity generation. By allowing consumers to shop around for electricity generation companies, the companies would be obliged to keep prices reasonably low through the operation of the good old competitive pricing mechanism. And most promisingly, a market could emerge for eco-friendly power generation companies, where consumers could choose power generated by renewable energy sources.

I may be simplifying this argument, but I am not misrepresenting it. And it is impossible to mince words about this: It is imaginable that self-interested people could promote this argument; in fact, they inevitably will. But it is scarcely believable that anyone could honestly believe it, and at the same time not be smoking crack.

And yet, as a man of experience once said, cocaine is a hell of a drug. Take this breathtakingly disingenuous statement from PennFuture, from a report entitled “Consumers Win: A Decade of Electricity Competition”:

In 1996, Pennsylvania’s electric rates were 15 percent higher than the national average. Now thanks to innovative policies like the Competition Act that increased wholesale and retail competition to promote efficiency and end monopolies, Pennsylvania’s electricity rates, allowing for inflation, are 5 percent lower than the national average and have remained relatively stable.

Go back and read that again. Pennsylvania’s flat electricity rates, according to the state’s leading foundation-funded environmental organization, are attributable to “increased wholesale and retail competition.” But back on the Spaceship Earth that PennFuture says it wants to save, Pennsylvania electricity rates stayed low because of the rate caps which are now expiring.

Later in the same report, PennFuture cites still-low or even decreasing rates in some of the areas where the rate caps are already expired, including the Duquesne Light service area. But they make no mention of the real reasons for this: the atrocious economy and the plummeting price of natural gas, owing to widespread Marcellus Shale drilling. We scarcely need to note the reasons why acknowledging these realities might not look so good on PennFuture’s next grant application.

Incidentally, no environmentalist should be proud of another predictable byproduct of electricity deregulation, which was the steep reduction in revenues under the Public Utility Realty Tax Act (PURTA). The power generation facilities formerly paid into a fund in lieu of property taxes, a large portion of which went to fund mass transit in the state. After deregulation, the power generation facilities were no longer considered public utilities, and PURTA revenues declined by about 70%. This hit to public transit alone must be ultimately responsible for more environmental damage than could ever be made up for by any dubious “benefits” from utilities deregulation.

Elsewhere, PennFuture and other deregulation apologists try to have it both ways on the effect of rate caps. First, they say, the rate caps should expire because they keep the price of energy “artificially” low. (You have to love how social processes become uncontrollable forces of nature in the favored language of people like this; perhaps this is because it is the only part of the “natural” world that “market environmentalism” has had much success defending?) Once the overbearing government regulators stop with all of their artificial price controls, competitors of the previously-incumbent monopolies will now rush in to Pennsylvania because they see an opportunity to make money in the deregulated market. Then this competitive process will bring down electricity rates, “naturally”!

See the logic there? The government is keeping competitors out of the market because it won’t let them charge higher prices, so when they’re allowed to charge higher prices, they will come in and create competition, which will in turn lead to lower prices.

You might think that this is harebrained. And you would be right. But that’s just a sign that you’re an old-fashioned big-government ideologue, stuck in the past. Because it doesn’t work for the government to just cap the rates. Only a Rube Goldberg contraption we call “market forces” really works to bring down prices. Why? Because market solutions are the only thing that works. And why is that? Because, that’s why.

I scarcely exaggerate. Is there a way out, short of the socialist revolution that I favor and you probably do not (yet)? Or even short of straight-out state takeover/nationalization of power systems, which is already short of socialist revolution (no matter what Glenn Beck would think)?

Bud George proposes one solution to the price problem, which is to create a state agency analogous to the “public option” that surfaced and was killed in the nationwide fight over health care this year. Since maintaining the rate caps is no longer possible, George proposes a Commonwealth Energy Procurement and Development Agency, which would be responsible for buying wholesale power from multiple sources as part of a portfolio (in the way that the rural cooperatives already do, incidentally), and then presenting itself as an option for consumers. In other words, taking the claim for the superiority of “competition” seriously, and offering a public option in that competitive marketplace. Unsurprisingly, the vested interests in electric power generation will not take kindly to real competition in this market, and will seek to block it. In the new fully Republican state government, they will almost certainly succeed.

Bud George’s proposal would be a good first step in addressing the issue of utility company profiteering, and for any genuine environmental movement, it would be the first step toward a sustainable energy future. But this is not the direction that the foundation-funded wonks want green organizations to follow. Why is this?

The establishment environmental organizations threw in their lot with the deregulation crew 15 years ago, in the hopes that an eventual spike in energy prices would cause people to reduce energy consumption — a piece of “market” conventional wisdom every bit as ludicrous as the right-wing fad for health savings accounts as the solution to the health care cost crisis. (Though unfortunately this is a fad that has not abated.) The establishment environmental groups also believed that they could use “competition” to foster a “market” for renewable energy sources. Both of these notions betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the world works and a warped idea of the responsibilities of social movement organizations (and environmentalism must be a social movement, or it is nothing).

In the real world, vested interests like the utility companies will only change their habits if they are forced to do so, and the government needs to make them do it. And if the government will not act, the people need to stand up and demand that they act. We need to demand that the government force the utility companies to invest in power generation from renewable resources, and threaten to take them over if they do not. This may seem difficult to pull off; indeed, it is very difficult to pull off, with the right wing in positions of elected power, with social movement organizations in retreat, and with the population atomized, isolated, and politically unaware or demoralized. Overcoming these political difficulties will take real commitment, and the kind of organizing that is required will not likely be funded by the foundations. Yet it is the only kind of work that has ever achieved any kind of social change, and despite its difficulties, it is easier to get enough people together to effectively make demands on the government, than it is to pull together enough consumer demand among atomized consumers to produce a “market” incentive for the power companies to invest in renewables.

In the final analysis, there is still no substitute for mass struggle, and that struggle is a political one. To paraphrase another wise man, the power companies concede nothing without a demand. They never have and they never will.

Neither Kotkin nor Florida, but proletarian urbanism

Those who keep track of the ideological obsessions of Richard Mellon Scaife may have noticed over the years that his toy newspaper has a special fondness for urban theorist Joel Kotkin. Kotkin believes that stories of the death (in the USA) of manufacturing and similar unsexy “traditional” sectors of the economy have been greatly exaggerated. This is a worthwhile observation as far as it goes, and it is tempting to reach for any antidote to the self-congratulatory “creative class” pop-theorizing of Richard Florida.

Yet there’s a reason Kotkin is a Scaife favorite: he’s a partisan of suburban sprawl, ridiculing green development nostrums and high-speed rail projects as the obsessions of a narrow elite, who will seek public subsidy for their loft-dwelling existences in the urban core even as the 21st-century real life of the US majority gets dispersed to the suburbs. This analysis is not without real-world resonance: anyone who has lived in a US big city has met people like this, or at least seen some of them elected to city council in or near the university districts. Hating — or at least resenting — people like this is an enticing form of warped class warfare, but there is nothing new under the sun: it’s the latest species in the genus of right-wing populism, what Bebel in another time and context called “the socialism of fools.”

This becomes obvious when Kotkin talks about solutions. The solution to the parochial narrowness of urban elites ought to be massive government investment in green energy and technology, a retooling of the entire residential layout and mass transit infrastructure of the country, and affordable housing everywhere. In other words, hundreds of billions — or more likely trillions — of dollars in investment to ensure that the benefits of an ecologically sustainable economy flow to everyone, and aren’t just a “lifestyle choice” of a narrow demographic that can afford to shop at Whole Foods on a regular basis. That’s not Kotkin’s idea, though: instead, he thinks we need less regulation, and a lot more of what they have in the poorly-planned (in fact, unplanned) conurbations of the Sunbelt. This is the kind of reactionary utopia that he was advocating three years ago when — then ensconced at a think tank run by a white-collar criminal who was part of the inspiration for Gordon Gekko — Kotkin told the Trib that other cities ought to imitate Houston, with its “low taxes, minimal zoning and an expanding highway network.”

If we’re left with a choice between Joel Kotkin and Richard Florida, we’re better off siding with Mercutio: A plague on both your houses.

Indeed, what does Kotkin’s favored city look like now, more than two years into world capitalism’s current crisis, and three years after he sung its praises in the pages of the Trib? I noted at the time that the Scaife paper — out of commitment to its contradictory political obsessions — made no mention of a key ingredient of Houston’s economy, and indeed the economy of all Sunbelt cities: its huge army of low-wage undocumented workers. But now Houston is showing greater signs of stress and failure. Just today the Wall Street Journal — which cannot be accused of championing either my brand of “big government socialism” or anyone else’s — uses Houston as a case study of municipal dysfunction: “In Houston . . . some flood-prone roads are in such disrepair that signs warn drivers, ‘Turn around, don’t drown.’”

Incidentally, this leads off an article about municipalities’ attempts to impose fees on non-profits for the services they consume, a policy turn where Pittsburgh might be well-advised to imitate Houston after all. The non-profit problem is a nationwide problem, but few cities can match Pittsburgh for having a giant poster-child of a company masquerading behind the legal fiction of non-profit status as a convenient way to accumulate capital, making a few doctors and other well-placed insiders rich while disregarding their supposed charitable mission. All of this is a discussion for another day and another post; in fact, I’m sure there will be many. But the fact remains that the fight for the future of the US city should not be between Richard Florida’s “creative class” and the traditional ruling class that Joel Kotkin wants to unleash with further deregulation, lower taxes and public sector layoffs. It’s a fight to take the city away from all of them alike, in the interests of the rest of us.

The Bush/Obama tax hike on working families

Tonight, the editors of The Wall Street Journal might be visited by three ghosts, but until that happens, they will still be publishing stories like the one today blaming public-sector workers’ pensions for local property tax increases. They lead with the example of a suburban Philadelphia municipality, and since this is the news division of the paper instead of the loony editorial page, they do attempt some even-handedness, for instance by allowing an AFSCME leader from Illinois to have his say. But there can be no doubt about the emphasis, with the headline that “Pensions Push Property Taxes Higher.”

Of course, the headline could just as easily have read “Wall Street malfeasance leads to middle-class tax increases at local level,” since pension funds around the country are in trouble mostly because they were plowing money into the speculative investment banks’ insane schemes. And because the firms that used to insure municipal bonds don’t have such high credit ratings after all, restricting municipalities’ access to credit. And because tax revenues are shriveled because of the rotten economy brought on by Wall Street’s irresponsibility and the corporations’ refusal to hire despite their enormous cash reserves. And so on. But this would not be a congenial line for the demographic that usually reads the Journal (your present commentator is an exception, to say the least). You can get a flavor for how that demographic does think by reading the troglodyte comments that accompany the article, but I would not recommend it.

There is a lot that can be said about this; it has thousands of variations everywhere, including cities like Pittsburgh; everywhere you turn, there are no good choices. Attempts to take it out on the workers are maddening: While it’s true that public sector workers have pensions while private sector workers increasingly do not, shouldn’t the point be that everyone deserves a pension, rather than that no one does? And shouldn’t everyone be angry that corporations are sitting on $2 trillion in assets, while teachers are being laid off in New Jersey and elsewhere? Doesn’t it amount to an obscenity when Chris Christie, Scott Walker and Tom Corbett call for “sacrifice” from teachers and firefighters, while “investment” bankers are getting tax breaks?  Not only is the carefully-stoked resentment against public-sector workers galling when you look at the big picture, it is a combination of downright silly and dangerous when you get to the specifics: If a part of you resents that firefighters get to retire at 50, have you really thought through your resentment? Does anyone really think it would be a good idea to remove the option for public safety workers like this to retire at an age when they’re still in top physical condition — with the result that we’ll have firefighters on the job well into their 50s or even later? If Xanadu Richard Mellon Scaife’s house catches on fire, does he really want a geriatric battalion to be handling the water hoses? Even he must not relish the thought of having to buy a new mansion.

Also of interest in the Journal article are the examples of local property tax hikes, all of which — quite apart from pension difficulties and even the current economic crisis — are the latest in a long-term trend: the steady increase in the tax burden on the working class since Bush increased taxes on the majority to pay for his tax cuts for the rich.

This is not something that meets with widespread discussion or even acknowledgment, but it is true. It is relatively common knowledge that the Bush tax policies, while they lowered the income tax rates for everyone, still gave much more in tax breaks to the wealthiest people in the country who need it the least. But it is not as well-known that without enough Federal support for essential services, state and local taxes go up to make up the difference, unless there are service cuts instead (and often, it is both). The Federal government has the “No Child Left Behind” unfunded mandates for standardized testing in schools, for instance; and there are expensive Homeland Security requirements on local governments as well. With the tax cuts mostly for the rich at the Federal level, and consequently less money available for funding these state and local programs, states and localities need to raise revenue to cover the gap. The result is that for most families, the lower taxes at the Federal level under Bush are more than offset by local and state tax increases.

This story varies from state to state and town to town, but the overall pattern is unmistakable. Federal taxes have become less progressive since Bush, but state and local taxes are spectacularly unfair and getting worse. In Pennsylvania, for instance, we have a flat state income tax (grossly unfair, since higher-income people who can afford to pay more end up paying the same rate as people with lower incomes, who need the income more); the state also relies on sales and tobacco taxes, which are even more regressive than a flat income tax percentage-wise, even when you take into account the sales tax exemptions for food and clothing (exemptions which some Republicans have proposed to eliminate in the past). I designed the following chart based on some data in an Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy report from November 2009 (I think my chart is a little easier to understand than theirs); it shows what Pennsylvania families paid in state and local taxes in 2007.

Source: Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, November 2009

This means that if you’re a family in the middle — making around $50,000 a year, say — then you paid nearly twice as much a share of your income (9.6%) in Pennsylvania state and local taxes as a family that made over a million dollars that year (5.0%). The poorest people in the state (average family income: $10,500) were paying even more than that, with more than 11 cents on the dollar going to state and local taxes. Note that this is before you take the Federal deduction offset into account; if you do, you’ll find that the wealthiest 1% of Pennsylvania households paid less than 4% of their income in state and local taxes in 2007, and that the differences between the income cohorts are even larger.

All of this is why I am unconvinced by progressive apologetics for the recent agreement on taxes between the White House and Senate Republicans. Fairness demands that we should apportion most of the blame to the Republicans: they are the ones who pushed for the extension of Federal tax breaks for the higher brackets, so that Federal taxes on everyone else would also have increased if they did not get their way, and they also held up extended unemployment benefits for the victims of this recession. Yet fairness also demands that while the effective tax increase on working families was initiated by Bush nearly ten years ago, Obama must now “own” this as well, since he is the one who hammered out this agreement with the Republicans and advocated for it strongly against Congressional opposition coming from his left. On balance, it would have been better to allow all of the Bush tax rates to expire, and then taken the fight directly to the Republicans, correctly blaming them for the Federal tax increases on middle-income people, and also demanding extended unemployment benefits. To do this would have taken some organized pressure from the left, and frankly I find it to be an academic (in the worst sense) question whether the President is open to such a fight; in fact I think he is ideologically comfortable in the so-called “center,” but that is less important than the fact that organized pressure from the left would have required a response from him as well as the Republicans. Taking a stand and fighting on tax policy and unemployment insurance would have been a course involving real risk, but not as much risk as the actual deal just concluded.

Why do I say this? Because of stories like the one highlighted in The Wall Street Journal. The tax deal contained enormous waste, with a quarter of the tax benefits going to the wealthiest 1% of households, which was exactly what the Republicans wanted. In return, the potentially stimulative provisions came in the form of extended unemployment benefits (unambiguously a good thing) and the payroll tax “holiday” (of dubious value, since it will be hard to rescind, and the Republicans can use it to set us all up for Social Security benefits cuts). Yet the stimulative effect of all of these is going to be more than offset by the fiscal crisis at the state and local level, which is bad enough to begin with and is about to get worse. Let’s remember that the best and most effective portions of the 2009 stimulus bill — which was not big enough — were the portions granting Federal aid to the states. To take the largest example, in the Medicaid program, the Federal government subsidizes part of the cost in the form of the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP); the stimulus bill has increased this Federal contribution to state budgets for the last several years, and those increases are going to expire. The Republicans will not be interested in renewing extended FMAP, unless perhaps the rest of us agree to turn over even more money to the rich.

The result is that the already awful state budget situation will get much worse. Cuts in services, increases in regressive state and local taxes, hiring freezes and layoffs of public sector workers, cuts in public sector wages and pensions: all of this is going to be a drag on the economy that will very likely outweigh the potentially positive effect of the “good” elements in the Federal tax deal.

No one is talking about the obvious solution here, which is for the government to tax the rich and start directly creating jobs. It is not as if there isn’t plenty of work to do in rebuilding neglected infrastructure, making the transition to cleaner forms of energy, and investing more in education rather than laying off teachers. If the wealthy and their corporations won’t put their hoarded money to work in doing this, then the rest of us should take it away from them and put it to better use. Why not stand up and demand this? That’s the kind of tax revolt I can get behind.

Against counterproductive wonkery

A wise man once observed that “ignorance never yet helped anybody.” Truer words were never spoken, except for the time he also said that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” Or put another way: “Practice without theory is blind; theory without practice is sterile.”

I am reminded of these sayings from scripture (as it were) anytime I hear talk of “raising awareness” or “educating the public.” Education is always a good thing, but too often educational methods are not sound from the standpoint of what people need to know to act effectively in the world.

So recently we learned that the Colcom Foundation is setting up a $1 million fund to “educate the public” about the environmental impact of natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale. The first issue that arises here is that the Colcom Foundation is an old-money organization with a creepy Malthusian agenda, founded originally by Richard Mellon Scaife’s deceased (and sometimes-estranged) sister Cordelia May. Unlike Richard Mellon Scaife and the foundations he controls, Cordelia May and her foundations were and are favorable to ecological concerns; but like Richard Mellon Scaife, their fondness for Planned Parenthood is borne not of concern for women’s rights, but of alarm at the fecundity of the lower orders. Colcom has sent money to racist anti-immigrant organizations like the so-called Federation for American Immigration Reform. Snakelike anti-immigrant operatives — throwbacks to the “blood and soil” ideology of a more frightening age — have operated on the fringes of the environmental movement for years, and they attempted a (thankfully unsucessful) takeover of the Sierra Club in the recent past. Before any environmental activist or organization applies for any of this money, they need to seriously consider whether taking it will tar them for all time.

This fairly important point aside, let’s assume good faith and acknowledge that it is OK to take money from jagoffs so long as you don’t act like one. What kind of environmental work should be funded by foundations? And here I am talking of the legitimate do-gooder ones, not just the creepy ones like Colcom.

It seems to me that we need less of what usually passes for “education” among the “white paper activism” crowd. (I’ll be nice and not name names, though a lot of people who end up reading this probably have seen enough to know what I’m talking about, and you can let ‘er rip in the comments thread.) There are already enough studies about the dangers of fracking, for instance — enough to make headway with the people we need to reach, anyway. It is true that the industry is responding with a barrage of their own agitprop, all of it either misinformation or appalling feel-good bullshit like the Range Resources commercials with happy rural landowners collecting their royalty checks. But it will not do for us to respond with media statements of our own — mass “education” campaigns that maybe get people the information, but don’t include a plan for what they can do. The industry already controls the legislature and the governor’s mansion, in addition to most of the borough and township supervisors and county commissioners in the areas it needs to do the drilling. Three-quarters of the people could know the real facts about ecological damage, but if they don’t do anything about it, it doesn’t matter.

Yet the happy fact is that they are starting to do something about it, even if they are late in the game and not good at coordinating with one another. It is not only in places like Pittsburgh — a dense city where any kind of natural resource extraction seems ridiculous on its face, and where there is also a ready-made progressive voter base — that people are beginning to rise up. They are considering drilling restrictions in tiny towns like St Marys. The industry has bought off a handful of landowners, but the overall mood of most people in these areas is wary of the ecological consequences of this industry. It is their drinking water, after all. It is all very NIMBYistic and behind the curve, because all of the critical decisions have already been made in Harrisburg. Yet these people deserve some support in what they’re doing, even if they seem like a doomed peasant revolt that might drive the exploiters out of their own town, but get overwhelmed when they pop up again elsewhere, because the peasants can’t coordinate.

How is it that the people waging this fight can’t get the consistent support of people with experience in big fights? When was the last time you heard of a large environmental organization dropping one or several skilled organizers onto the ground in places like this, helping to get people moving, keep their spirits up, and link up with people all around the state who are doing the same thing? Even the likes of Sam Smith and Joe Scarnati would be obliged to listen to their constituents at least as much as their campaign contributors, if only their constituents were speaking with an organized voice.

It’s hard to blame the environmental organizations, except insofar as they haven’t built a base in a way that counts, and that is a fault common to the progressive forces in all social sectors. They don’t have the money to field organizers, and to the extent they can chase down some money from the foundations, it is not for organizing work. It is for more studies, more white papers, more “advocacy” and more meetings with politicians who the “advocates” hope would listen to reason if only they had the facts — when in the real world, it is power that counts, and in the absence of organized people, the money of the vested interests translates into the only real power. By and large the grantmaking staff of the do-gooder foundations are well-meaning liberals, but the people among them who understand organizing are as rare as the endangered Indiana bat, and any experienced organizer in the universe of progressive non-profits has multiple stories about what happens in the rare instance when you’re able to score some grant money to do real organizing, and the foundation people then stick their noses into your program.

So, if any of those same foundation people ever end up reading this for some reason, here is the message: it’s time to start funding real organizing. The people in the Marcellus Shale region already know that something is wrong, and they are taking action, if blindly. Fund an organizing program that will send some trained organizers their way — or better yet, a program that will hire some of the better natural organizers from among the people in the affected areas to do this organizing full-time. There is plenty of research to be done, too, but it is not of the “big picture” kind; we already know enough about that for our purposes. We need people who know how or will learn how to scrutinize environmental impact statements; how to dig through property records and zoning regulations; how to do the nitty gritty work of following the money in campaign contributions from the natural gas drilling outfits to politicians at both the state and local level. Research, in other words, should be campaign-driven.

You’ll note that I haven’t gone into detail about what this movement should demand; I won’t be that prescriptive, especially since movements are dependent on democratic initiative, so people are going to have to work some of that out for themselves, with the leadership of organizers. But it’s not hard to imagine a movement that aims to place strong curbs on drilling, with strong right-to-know provisions and enforceable protections for the drinking water and wildlife. I’m not so utopian as to think we’re going to halt drilling altogether, even though that is what we ought to do, in conjunction with massive government investment in alternative sources of energy. But we can do better than we’re doing now, even in the short term.

One thing that definitely ought to be doable is enacting a severance tax. Once again, the masses are already there, and the politicians in the pocket of the Marcellus Shale Coalition are far out of step with the public. There are going to be arguments about where the severance tax money should go, with Republicans in the central part of the state agitating in their usual racist code language about how taxes from shale gas extraction in the hinterland shouldn’t go into the General Fund and thus get distributed to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Some eventual concessions to rural demands — say an allocation of a portion of the money to environmental remediation in affected areas — will no doubt eventually be necessary if the tax has any hope of passage, since the people who are going to need to stand up and fight if we are going to win this at all are, by and large, in those affected areas. But a real social movement that embraces this demand can prevail even in the face of Corbett/Scarnati/Smith servitude to the drilling companies.

Let’s recall the “Severance Tax Ticker” from the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, which I first referenced back in June. At that time, the failure to enact an extraction tax had cost Pennsylvania $55.2 million.

As of this writing the ticker is at $116.8 million, and there are going to be people reading this months after the fact who can click through and see an even higher and more scandalous figure.

If we do not act now — and act in the fashion I have described — then the natural gas drillers in the Marcellus Shale are going to do the same thing to Appalachia that the coal companies did: they will take vast natural resources from beneath the earth, along with multiple millions of dollars in profits, and they will leave nothing behind for the people who live there apart from a permanently-wrecked environment.

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