Tag: politics

Don’t Let Nobody Walk All Over You

Here’s a heartening story from the old neighborhood:

An 82-year-old great-grandmother cried tears of joy Friday as nearly 200 neighbors rallied in her support on the day she was to be evicted. Mary Lee Ward was granted a reprieve when the owner of the Brooklyn house where she lives agreed to continue meeting with her lawyers next week. “You have to stick with it when you know your right,” Ward told the cheering crowd. “Don’t let nobody walk all over you.” 

Ward, who fell victim in 1995 to a predatory subprime mortgage lender that went under in 2007, has been battling to stay in the Tompkins Avenue home for more than a decade. A city marshal was supposed to boot Ward from the one-family frame house Friday, but didn’t show as her lawyers sat down with an assemblywoman and the home’s owner. … “I hope they realize that they can never really win,” Ward said. “I will not compromise.”

Why don’t we see more of this kind of thing? There are millions of families with homes in foreclosure, and millions more heading that way. Being forcibly evicted from your home has got to be one of the most wrenching experiences there is. And yet as long as you’re in the house, you have some real power. And the moral and emotional claims of someone like Ward to her home are clear, regardless of who holds the title. Someone just has to organize it. Here, I think, is where we are really suffering from the loss of ACORN — these situations are tailor-made for them.

Still, there is some good work going on. I was at a meeting recently of No One Leaves, a bank tenant organization in Springfield, MA. Modeled on Boston’s City Life/Vida Urbana, this is a project to mobilize people whose homes have been foreclosed but are still living in them. Homeowners who still have title have a lot to lose and are understandably anxious to meet whatever conditions the lender or servicer sets. But once the foreclosure has happened, the homeowner, paradoxically, is in a stronger negotiating position; if they’re going to have to leave anyway, they have nothing to lose by dragging the process out, while for the bank, delay and bad publicity can be costly. So the idea is to help people in this situation organize to put pressure — both in court and through protest or civil disobedience — on the banks to agree to let them stay on as tenants more or less permanently, at a market rent. In the longer run, this will discourage foreclosures too.

It’s a great campaign, exactly what we need more of.

But there’s another important thing about No One Leaves: They’re angry. The focus isn’t just on the legal rights of people facing foreclosure, or their real chance to stay in their homes if they organize and stick together, it’s on fighting the banks. There’s a very clear sense that this is not just a problem to be solved, but that the banks are the enemy. I was especially struck by one middle-aged guy who’d lost the home he’d lived in for some 20 years to foreclosure. “At this point, I don’t even care if I get to stay,” he said. “Look, I know I’m probably going to have to leave eventually. I just want to make this as slow, and expensive, and painful, for Bank of America as I can.” Everyone in the room cheered.

Liberals hate this sort of thing. But it seems to be central to successful organizing. Back when I was at the Working Families Party, one of the things the professional organizers always talked about was the importance of polarizing — getting people to articulate who was responsible for their problems, who’s the other side. It was a central step in any house visit, any meeting. And from what I could tell, it worked. I mean, it’s foolish of someone like Mary Lee Ward to say, “I will not compromise,” isn’t it? Objectively, compromise is how most problems get solved. But if she didn’t have a clear sense of being on the side of right against wrong, how would she have the energy to keep up what, objectively, was very likely to be a losing fight, or convince her neighbors to join her? Somebody or other said there are always three questions in politics. You have to know what is to be done — the favorite topic of intellectuals. But that’s not enough. You also have to know which side you are on, but that’s not enough either. Before you devote your time and energy to a political cause, you have to know who is to blame.

A while back I had a conversation with a friend who’s worked for the labor movement for many years, one campaign after another. If you know anyone like that, or have been part of an organizing drive yourself, you know that in the period before a union representation vote, an American workplace is a little totalitarian state. (Well, even more than usual.) Spies reporting on private conversations, mandatory mass meetings, veiled and open threats, punishment on the mere suspicion of holding the wrong views, no due process. And yet people do still vote for unions and support unionization campaigns, even when being fired would be a a personal catastrophe. Why, I asked my friend. I mean, union jobs do have better pay, benefits, job security —  but are they that much better, that people think they’re worth the risk? “Oh, it’s not about that,” he said. “It’s about the one chance to say Fuck You to your boss.”

Hardt and Negri have a line somewhere in Empire about how, until we can overcome our fear of death, it will be “carried like a weapon against the hope of liberation.” When I first read the book, I thought that was pretty strange. But now I think there’s something important there. Self interest, even enlightened, only takes you so far, because when you’re weak, your self-interest is very often going to be in accomodation to power. I’m not sure I’d go as far as Hardt and Negri, that we have to lose our fear of death to be free moral agents. But it is true that we can’t organize collectively to assert our rights in our homes and our jobs as long as we’re dominated individually by our fear of losing them. Some other motivation — dignity,  pride, anger or even hatred — is needed to say, instead, that nobody is going to walk all over you.

Some Thoughts on Negotiation

I don’t claim to be any expert on the negotiating table. But I was, about ten years ago, the lead negotiator for my graduate employee union (~3,000 members.) I’ve spent plenty of time around unions, before and since. And in my years at the Working Families Party, where I was the designated wonk, I inevitably had some involvement with negotiations over the terms of bills. From which I derive an observation that’s perhaps relevant to the debt-ceiling talks.

The principals are never at the table.

Maybe because they’re busy; very likely because they’re diffuse; or maybe they’re only constituted through the negotiating process. In any case, there are not one but three negotiations going on: between the two agents at the table, and between each of those agents and their respective principals.

So for instance, the question for me as Local 2322 representative was not just what I think of this deal, but whether I can sell it to the membership. Even worse when you’re trying to nail down health care legislation; the union at least has a defined membership roll but the coalition exists only insofar as there’s a chance of passing something. In either case, your problem as a negotiator is the same: When you go back to your constituents, you have to convince them that the deal (1) is good enough and (2) is the best you could have got. What I’m talking about here is the tension between 1 and 2.

Let’s say you’ve got some big demand — a 20 percent pay raise, let’s say. And let’s say, miraculously, the employer agrees to this the first day of negotiations. This tells you two things: First, the deal you have now is better than you expected; but also, that the payoff to continued negotiations might be better than expected too. If they gave you this for just sitting down, they must be desperate; who knows what they would give if you could really hold their feet to the fire. So it’s not actually easier for you to convince your principals to ink a deal at this point. You’ve got an easier time selling them on (1), but a harder time selling them on (2).

Now you might say this is irrational, unfortunate, people should know how to say, Yes. But I don’t agree. The principal is not negotiating not just this once. So knowing which agents, or which kinds of agents, are reliable may be every bit as important as getting the best possible deal in this round. So they’re observing, Did the negotiators keep pushing until the other side was ready to walk away, as much or more as, Is the outcome acceptable. From the principals’ point of view, an early concession from the other side is a signal that this side’s agents need to ask for more to prove they are doing their jobs.

In this sense, even if you (the agent now, like Obama) are happy to agree with everything the other agents have proposed to you, it’s in your shared interest (yours and theirs) to only concede it at the last moment, and in return for the most costly concessions, to help them sell it to their principals.

Bottom line: Even if you intend to concede X, it’s in everyone’s best interest – including the negotiators on the other side — that you don’t give up X until the last possible minute. Conceding it early actually makes it harder for the other side to accept. This sounds like a paradox but I think it’s really a perfectly logical and inevitable implication of the negotiating situation.

It’s a broadly-applicable problem in economics, that a change in price has opposite effects if it’s considered once and for all vs if it’s considered as a proxy for future changes. Whatever the model says, one has to think a change in prices might continue. This is how bubbles get started. Just so, politically, current concessions makes the current deal look better — statically. But the relevant question is, do they make the current deal look better, with respect to some future deal? To the extent that conceding now makes both look better, that effect is indeterminate.

So, Obama’s a bad negotiator, then? Maybe. I have to admit, there;s something appealing, in a poetic-justice sense, to the idea that the decline of the labor base of the Democratic Party has led to a fatal loss of practical negotiating skills. The other, more obvious possibility, is that he is not trying to get the best outcome for the Democrats in the sense that most people understand it — that he shares the Republicans’ essential goals. But I might put it a little differently — Obama’s bargaining position is weak precisely because of his independence, the fact that he doesn’t answer to anyone. Digby asks, quite reasonably, if we have any idea at this point what the President’s principles are. I might put it a little differently: it’s who are his principals.

Some Should Do One, Others the Other

A friend writes:

In August 1968 I was on an SDS trip to Cuba, one of about 30 student activists from around the US. One day we went to the mission of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam in Havana (it had been called the National Liberation Front but had recently taken on a new name). We decided to see if the NLF, as we called them, could settle some debates in the US antiwar movement. After exchanging pleasantries with the representative of the PRG/NLF, we had the following exchange.

SDS students: We have a debate in the antiwar movement. Some of us think we should organize militant, obstructive demonstrations that are openly in support of victory for the NLF. Others argue we should organize much larger, peaceful, legal demonstrations around the demand of immediate US withdrawal from Vietnam. Which should we do?

PRG/NLF rep: Some of you should do one, and others should do the other.

SDS students: We have another debate in the antiwar movement. When a male antiwar activist gets a draft induction notice, some of us think he should refuse to serve, either going to jail or going to Canada. Others of us argue that he should quietly go into the military to organize among the soldiers for an end to the war. Which should we do?

PRG/NLF rep: Some of you should do one, and others should do the other. And when an antiwar activist goes into the military and ends up in Vietnam, there are ways to arrange contact between the activist and the local NLF fighters.

After that exchange, I began to see why the NLF was so successful in their struggle to force the US out of Vietnam.

Here is a parable for the Left! How many pointless debates about tactics could be avoided if someone just said, “Some of you should do one, and others should do the other.” Except in the case of a specific, finite resource, and a decision-making body able to allocate it, the merits of one approach aren’t an argument against another.

Peaceful demonstrations, or direct action? Challenge foreclosures in court, or block them in the street? Work within the Democrats, or build a third party? Support organizing and contract fights by AFL-CIO unions, or help build rank-and-file insurgencies? Try to shift the Obama administration from the inside, or pressure it from the outside? Debate the economics mainstream, or build a heterodox alternative? Nationalize the banks, or shoot the bankers? Fight for women’s access to male-dominated professions, or for greater social recognition of traditionally female activities? Well-funded public universities, or an end to credentialism? Green capitalism, or cooperatives? Theory, or practice? Recycle, reuse, or reduce? Some of us should do one. And others should do the other.

Is Liberalism Done Yet?

I don’t have much to add to Mike Konczal’s respectful but thorough rebuttal of the idea that the passage of health care reform marks the end of the liberal project; Yglesias is so clearly wrong, for so many reasons. Most immediately, the health care bill as passed will leave 8 percent of the population uninsured, so even if universal health insurance is the finish line, we haven’t crossed it yet. More generally, there are clear areas where expansion of public provision and regulation is almost inevitable, whenever the political climate turns favorable. Most obvious is childraising (and caring labor more generally), where our current system of uncompensated household labor is being steadily eroded by the acid of the market, even while the demands on it increase. In a few years, universal childcare will be seen by liberals as essential to a civilized society, just as universal health coverage is now.

More broadly, I’m reminded of Stephen Resnick’s story of his fellow MIT grad student Stephen Hymer going in to Robert Paul Samuelson’s office (this would be the early ‘60s) and asking him if there was anything important in Marxism that you couldn’t talk about using conventional economics. Samuelson’s answer: “Class struggle.”

Liberals and radicals do disagree over ultimate ends – more stuff, more equitably distributed, for them; the full and free development of human capacities, for us. But the more salient disagreement, at least in the current conjuncture, is over means. Liberals believe that the political process is ultimately a form of rational debate, in which the objectively best ideas win out and are then executed by a neutral administrative mechanism. Political engagement means situating yourself within shouting distance of the seat of power, and then making the case that your preferred policy is in the best interests of everyone. Who you are doesn’t matter, just the merits of your views. Carl Schmitt, interestingly enough, gives one of the clearest statements of this conception of politics:

All specifically parliamentary arrangements and norms receive their meaning first through discussion and openness. This is especially true of the fundamental principle that the representative is independent of his constituents and party… The characteristic of all representative constitutions … is that laws arise out of a conflict of opinions, not out of a struggle of interests. … Conduct that is not concerned with discovering what is rationally correct, but with calculating particular interests and the chances of winning and with carrying these through according to one’s own interests is … not discussion in the specific sense.

Schmitt, the anti-liberal, saw better than liberals that this mode of politics is specific to the particular institutional context of parliamentarianism. A context that remains very important, of course, outside of the formal political domain as well as within it. [1] But it’s not universal, and in particular it can’t be the last word in a society that is divided by fundamentally conflicting interests.

Radicals, by contrast, see the conflict of interests as fundamental. Or rather, we see it as inescapable in politics as long as it exists in economic life and society generally. From this point of view, arguments are won in parliament only thanks to the rioters, literal or figurative, in the streets outside. And liberalism as a concrete political project is a compromise between opposing interests, one that’s always open to renegotiation when the balance of forces changes. So unlike in science (liberalism’s implicit ideal), progress is always reversible, so no political struggle is ever definitely finished. Any given compromise is only sustainable to the extent that there are social forces striving for a horizon beyond it.

[1] For example, I’m current serving on a university hiring committee, and the norm that discussions must be conducted only in terms of differing opinions, never opposing interests, is very strongly felt.

The atrophy of the liberal imagination, a continuing series

My buddy Mark Engler wrote an interesting piece for the Dissent blog on why the left should oppose the Kagan nomination. Interesting, but not convincing, at least not to me. It’s not that I like her, altho I’ve been more or less convinced by people who know the academic-law world from the inside that her publication record is perfectly adequate. On substantive political issues there’s not much to say for her, and that’s on Obama, not the “process”.

What I don’t see, tho, are what are the principled demands being made here. “Liberal justice” is almost an empty signifier; I suspect that beyond the important, but fairly narrow, areas of civil liberties and executive power, most of us on the labor or socialist left will find a wide range of legal issues on which our views and Glenn Greenwald’s sharply diverge. Just as importantly, what is the public debate that this is clarifying or polarizing? Will this fight help develop a left opposition in Congress? Does it mobilize people? Could we win? Looks like no on all counts, to me.

Being on the left can’t just mean bitching about everything, it’s got to mean staking out clear, principled positions, organizing people around them, and having concrete victories to show for it. Opposing Kagan does not seem to meet this test.

Anyway — the reason for this post, or at least its title — I was going to say all this in a comment to Mark’s Dissent post. But it turns out the Dissent blog has no comments section. Yes, Dissent does not allow comments. Doesn’t that say it all?

Health bill thoughts

Short version: It’s an expansion of Medicaid, with some doodles in the margin.

Longer version:

Today, the US has the world’s highest medical spending and poor-to-mediocre health outcomes. It’s the only rich country where health coverage is provided by private insurers; where most people’s coverage is linked to their jobs; with a large number of people without health insurance; where millions of people lack any health coverage; and where medical problems often mean financial catastrophe. When this legislation is fully phased in, by 2016 or so … it still will be.

We know what the bill won’t do: fundamentally change the structure of health coverage and finance. But what will it do? My own bottom line is, Enough to be worth passing.

The bill’s provisions break down into half a dozen major categories: (1) new insurance regulations; (2) health insurance exchanges; (3) individual and employer mandates; (4) Medicaid expansion; (5) Medicare (and Medicaid) spending cuts; (6) tax on high-cost insurance policies, plus a bunch of other smaller taxes; and (7) a grab bag of experimental measures to improve the efficiency and quality of health care. And then there’s the provision that’s not there, (8), the public option. There are serious questions about the logic and impact of most of these provisions, many of which I have not seen analyzed seriously. As time and inclination permits, I’ll dig more into the most glaring ones. The bottom line, per the CBO, is that the uninsured would fall from 19 percent of the population today to 8 percent after 2015. [1]

I was thinking of walking through the major provisions of the bill one by one. But you can find that elsewhere. (Start here.) I might come back and write up a full summary, but in the meantime, I want to flag a half dozen important issues and questions that I haven’t seen discussed much elsewhere.

1. The individual mandate — is it really necessary to make community rating and related regulations work?
2. the distribution of new Medicaid spending, which is highly unequal between states.
3. The cuts in DSH payments, which could be catastrophic for some urban hospitals.
4. The crazy-quilt employer mandate.
5. Why the public option mattered.
6. How meaningful in practice are the limits on out-of-pocket costs, premiums, and medical loss ratios?
7. How much do insurance companies gain?

There are a couple other issues that have gotten a bit more discussion, where I don’t think I have anything much to add.

First, what is the role of insurance companies under this system? It seems they no longer have access to the two main choice variables on which they maximize profits currently: the terms on which they offer coverage, and the mix of benefits they will pay for. If they must offer policies on publicly-fixed terms with a publicly-set package of benefits, there’s no margin left for them to operate on. (Which doesn’t mean they won’t be profitable, just that their profit will depend on federal policy, not on factors under their direct control.) Two possibilities here: First, they will find ways to continue selecting healthier populations and limiting payments; the medical loss ratio restrictions won’t bind; in short, the status quo. Second, the insurance companies become essentially vestigial, simply taking a cut off the top of what is basically a public system. Purely parasitic insurance isn’t something anyone would propose, but it does have to be admitted it’s an improvement on insurance companies that take their cut and try to increase it by denying people health coverage.

Anyway, this is looking at the bill through the lens of universal reform — what is the logic of the system it creates? Whereas it plainly isn’t fundamental reform, and it doesn’t create a system with any particular logic, just tweaks the system that’s formed itself willy-nilly.

Second, the abortion restrictions. It’s clear that for some women, the bill will actually make things worse — it will restrict abortion coverage compared with the status quo. How much, for how many? I don’t know. But I did want to flag this lovely quote from The New Republic: “Poor people pay surprising amounts for cell phones and cable TV. They can be surprisingly resourceful in paying for abortions, too.”

[1] Also, at The New Republic, Jonathan Cohn writes, “For nearly a hundred years, the political system has been debating whether access to basic medical care should be a right all citizens enjoy. When reform passes, the political system will finally render its verdict: ‘yes.'” But 92% — or even 94%, if you don’t count undocumented immigrants — is not “all”. This kind of dishonest rhetoric has been all too common among those defending the bill.