Kaus, Obama, income inequality and immigration

I think I've mentioned before that 2011 will be my year of reading about income inequality and the welfare state. I've already got a running head start with the Christmastime purchase of Paul Krugman's "The Conscience of a Liberal." My plan is to read a serious of books along the political spectrum -- William Voegeli's "Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State" is next on the list.

But the national discussion is currently outracing my attempts to build a foundation for my own contributions to the debate. Today, Mickey Kaus weighs in with his own suggestion about what President Obama can really do if he wants to address income inequality: Put a clamp on illegal immigration:

 A major enemy of tight labor markets at the bottom is also fairly clear: unchecked immigration by undocumented low-skilled workers. It's hard for a day laborer to command $18 an hour in the market if there are illegals hanging out on the corner willing to work for $7. Even experts who claim illlegal immigration is good for Americans overall admit that it's not good for Americans at the bottom. In other words, it's not good for income equality.

I suspect that there's something to this, but not in the way that Kaus thinks. Part of the reason that illegal immigrant labor is so cheap -- and thus contributes so mightily to income inequality -- is that employers hold pretty much all the power in the employer-employee relationship. They're generally content to overlook a worker's immigrant status as long as they provide cheap labor. But if those workers started agitating for higher pay or tried to unionize (options available to their naturalized colleagues), well, it's not too difficult to imagine a manager making a call to the authorities to get rid of the rabble-rouser, is it? So illegal workers keep their heads low and their hands busy, because the pay is still far better than what they'd make back at home. Otherwise, why would they be here?

Cracking down on illegal immigration might solve the supply-demand problem that affects income inequality, I suppose, but it seems to me also possible that a smart, always-talked-about-but-never-implemented guest worker program might do quite a bit to affect the dynamic as well. If illegal workers knew that they could fairly bargain their labor for pay without worrying about deportation or prison, the result might be higher pay. That would bring up the incomes of the lowest-earning workers, yes, but it might also give illegal workers less of a workplace advantage over similarly skilled American citizens who might require a bit more money to do the work. You don't have to build a high fence to address income inequality, in other words: Just make the immigration system make more sense.

Shmoogy Noir

Taken at Almaz Cafe

About Vick, Obama and prisoner rehabilitation

Dave Weigel onPresident Obama's praise of Michael Vick

The Vick/Obama is only interesting at the level Obama meant it to be interesting -- as the start of a discussion on prisoner rehabilitation. Vick will be fine, because he has several years left to play football better than almost anybody in the country. He gets a comeback, on national television, with an array of writers eager to chronicle it. How useful is the Vick situation for starting a discussion about prison reform, or the rights of felons? Does it make a discussion of felon re-enfranchisement any less toxic? It can, and it's really the only way that Democrats -- especially Barack Obama -- can start a discussion on this without coming out of the gate as soft-on-crime wimps.

I suspect that this discussion won't get too far with Vick as its leading example. "Rehaibilitation" is relatively easy to come by when A) you're likely to secure a multi-million dollar contract upon your release from prison and B) employers are motivated to give you that contract because of the possibility you'll help them generate millions of dollars more in ticket sales, team paraphernalia (if, as is happening with Vick right now, you take a team to the playoffs) and other opportunities. But Michael Vick is the only recent felon to whom those conditions apply. There are incentives out there for employers who hire recently released convicts, but lots of companies remain skittish about those prospects. I'm not sure how Michael Vick's example serves as a good starting point to fixing those problems.

Dennis Prager answers the question: What do women want?

I'm on record as having a fair amount of contempt for the relationship writings of conservative radio host Dennis Prager, so I braced myself when he started writing a series of columns -- posted at National Review -- about what men and women most want in the world. His column today on the second part of that question (what women want) turned out to be not as awful as I feared, but still off-target. 

What a woman most wants is to be loved by a man she admires.

The notion that a woman most wants a man, admirable or not, has been scoffed at. This was encapsulated by the famous feminist slogan, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” Even feminism that did not agree with the fish-bicycle metaphor communicated to young women that an “authentic” woman would not have as her greatest desire to bond with a man.

It is problematic enough to say that a woman most wants a man. But that pales compared to the claim that she most wants man whom she admires. That seems to affirm gender inequality. The image it conjures up is of a woman looking up to her man as if he were some sort of lord and she his serf.

Yet any woman who believes that she is married to an admirable man would laugh at such a dismissal. Admiring one’s husband doesn’t render a woman a serf. It renders her fortunate.

I have no doubt that some women, many women, want most to be loved by a man they admire. Furthermore, I have little doubt that in the conservative circles Prager runs in, there are many, many women who profess as much. (I went to an evangelical Mennonite college in the Midwest where women regularly said they were seeking a husband who could provide "Christian leadership." I know that lots of folks like this exist.) Where Prager goes wrong, I think, is in his apparent implication that he could pluck any woman out of a crowd and know that's what she wants most -- or if she doesn't, she's clearly been brainwashed by feminism.

First of all: Not every women wants to be loved by a man. 

Second: Love isn't necessarily the highest goal of every remaining straight woman. Different people prioritize things differently.

Third: Prager is right that the word "admires" does conjure some of the cognitive trouble he expected. If he'd used the word "respects" -- and I think it would've covered many the aspects he intends by the word -- I might not quibble. Much. 

But all of this, as I said, is incidental to Prager's foundational problem: His belief that he knows what women want. Modern conservatism, as a political tradition, tends to very strongly emphasize individual rights and responsibilities -- rhetorically, at least, it recognizes that different people want different things, and wants them to be free to pursue those different things in their own way. Prager doesn't seem to really belong to this tradition, though. Instead -- whether he realizes it or not -- he's the reason that feminism came into being in the first place: Because some women wanted the freedom to make and pursue different choices than the ones expected of them in a male-dominated society.

It may be that many women want what Prager believes they want; but his framing doesn't allow for the possibility that healthy women may make other choices, may want other things. Indeed, he pretty clearly holds such differing ideas in contempt. So while some of his advice might seem sound -- dudes, work hard to improve your lot in life! -- it's founded in a worldview that seems to deny women their individuality. Because of that, I'm not really interested in taking his relationship advice.

Netflix Queue: 'Restrepo'

Three thoughts about 'Restrepo,' coming up after the trailer:

• This movie is a documentary about the life of an American Army platoon stationed in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley in 2007. Americans weren't paying as much attention to Afghanistan at that point: Iraq was consuming most of our attention. But the war there was every bit as real and intense for these soldiers; the combat footage is some of the most harrowing I've ever seen -- not unflinching, exactly, because we're not shown much of actual death or wounds, but it does walk right up to the line of what American viewers will find acceptable in depicting combat deaths. It is devastating.

• Watching 'Restrepo,' though, I realized how much of my understanding of war is generally shaped by war movies, and because of that by the language of Hollywood generally. There were several moments throughout the documentary that I thought were foreshadowing an imminent violent death -- because that's how those moments would've been used in a Hollywood production. 'Restrepo' eschewed such tricks, for the most part: If violent death was coming, it used its narrators -- soldiers from the unit, reflecting on their experiences months later in studio interviews, from the relative safety of an Army base in Italy -- to tell us precisely what was coming. Only then were we shown. 

• The movie's most emblematic character is Capt. Dan Kearney, leader of the squad that we follow. He arrives in Afghanistan looking a bit dim but well-intentioned -- he tells viewers he read nothing about the Korengal Valley before deploying there, because he wanted to approach the problems there "with an open mind" -- intending to do the "nice guy" work of counterinsurgency: meeting weekly with local elders, promising jobs and building projects in exchange for their help. By the end, though, the intentions have gone awry: He tells the gathering of elders he doesn't give a fuck about their protests of the arrest of a local man they say is innocent of anti-American activity. He can't claim any real victories during his time in Afghanistan, so he talks about "changing the dynamics" of what is clearly still a deadly place for American troops.

And one can't help feel, as Kearney makes regular promises of future "progress" to Afghan elders, that the elders aren't all that interested in the kind of progress he clearly intends to be an enticement to their cooperation. There's a memorable line in "Full Metal Jacket" -- there's Hollywood war again -- that inside every enemy fighter is an American trying to scratch its way out. Forty years have passed since the war depicted in that movie, but there are moments in 'Restrepo' that suggest American hubris hasn't been tempered too much in the decades since. That's not what 'Restrepo' is about, though: It's about the daily horror experienced by the men who serve that hubris. Perhaps fittingly, the movie's happy ending is when our soldiers finally get to leave Afghanistan.

A note about Mitch McConnell's last-ditch effort to block the DADT repeal

A last-ditch effort by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to complicate the repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy was blocked Tuesday night after Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) objected, Senate aides said.

McConnell attempted to add an amendment to the so-called stripped-down defense authorization bill that would have required the consent of the military service chiefs to proceed with "don't ask" repeal. Under legislation passed by the Senate last week, certifications are required from the president, the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. All the incumbents in those positions support repeal.

"It was a McConnell proposal," a GOP aide confirmed. "There was an attempted to get unanimous consent for it to be included in the defense bill and someone objected."

via politico.com

Perhaps I'm missing something here, but it appears Sen. McConnell tried to amend the law to give the military service chiefs veto power over the decisions of their civilian superiors. He lost this round, but isn't the effort itself Constitutionally suspect?

America is a little more American today

President Obama signed the landmark repeal of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy Wednesday morning, handing a major victory to advocates of gay rights and fulfilling a campaign promise to do away with a practice that he has called discriminatory.

Casting the repeal in terms of past civil rights struggles, Obama said he was proud to sign a law that "will strengthen our national security and uphold the ideals that our fighting men and women risk their lives to defend."

He added: "No longer will our country be denied the service of thousands of patriotic Americans who are forced to leave the military - regardless of their skills, no matter their bravery or their zeal, no matter their years of exemplary performance - because they happen to be gay. No longer will tens of thousands of Americans in uniform be asked to live a lie, or look over their shoulder in order to serve the country that they love."

via washingtonpost.com