Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 950

From “great world religion” to “barbarism”: Watch the candidates’ very varied responses to Paris attacks

The GOP’s devious Wall Street welfare plan: Why the future of the economy hangs in the balance

You wouldn’t know it, but this is a consequential week for the future of financial regulation, and in a larger sense, the future of the economy. Republicans have pulled out a successful playbook, and are planning an assault on Wall Street regulations. They’re doing it with the avowed support of a lingering faction of conservative Democrats. And the level of that support, which will be tested in House votes this week, is key to the success of the plan. The game plan is simple: stick as many riders onto two must-pass bills as possible, holding them hostage to conservative ideology. The bills include a long-term reauthorization of the Highway Trust Fund, which expires shortly, and a package of appropriations bills to keep the government funded, which have a deadline of December 11. Even if the Obama Administration forces some riders out, plenty of other policies would pass into law that would never have a shot on a straight-up vote.   The highway bill has already passed the House and Senate and needs to get through a conference committee.Congress looks set to pass a two-week patch to finalize the conference, but the deadline is fast approaching. The House version has a series of goodies for Wall Street attached, including a package of 15 bills that loosen minor rules. The White House’s Statement of Administration Policy on the House bill makes no mention of the financial services package, suggesting that it wouldn’t be a deal-killer. So conferees have a free hand to insert that into the final bill. I think of this way: When you want to unclog a pipeline, you send down what they call a “pig” to clear the way for the flow of oil. This financial services package is the pig in the pipeline, testing the system and proving the hostage-taking concept. It’ll make it easier for the flood that Republicans have cooked up for the year-end appropriations bills. This includes attacks on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the subject of a memorably bizarre ad during last week’s GOP debate. Republicans want to change the leadership structure to a five-member panel (the better to insert friendly regulators into the decision-making process) and put the agency’s budget into the appropriations process (the better to gut agency resources). The President of the American Action Network, who funded the ad, admitted that he wants to stop the CFPB from regulating mandatory arbitration clauses in consumer contracts, to use one example. Republicans have other aims, as well. They want to exempt some mid-size banks from annual “stress tests” that gauge their resilience in a crisis. They want to raise the asset threshold for automatically labeling a “systemically important financial institution” (SIFI) from $50 billion to $500 billion, giving big firms relief from expanded regulation under Dodd-Frank. They would also give existing SIFIs ways to wiggle out of the designation. Another idea gives banks a loophole to avoid CFPB’s “qualified mortgage” (QM) rules, legal protections for borrowers against loans with high upfront fees, balloon payments or other nontraditional features. As long as the bank holds the mortgage in their own portfolio, they would not be subject to QM. This sounds deceptively sensible, given the role of securitization in the crisis. But if banks can structure loans with high upfront fees and make their profits on the front side without any legal risks, they can peddle bad loans to borrowers and ignore the underlying loan quality. On the Senate side, Elizabeth Warren has already rung the alarm on the active participation in this strategy from conservative Democrats Joe Donnelly, Heidi Heitkamp, and Jon Tester. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby met with those three last week to determine how many of these ideas he can stuff into the appropriations package. Donnelly told the Wall Street Journal “common ground exists” for such maneuvers. The meetings don’t include Sherrod Brown, the ranking member of the committee. Shelby has an existing “financial regulatory relief” bill that includes lower standards for community banks and credit unions, but combines them with these long-sought rollbacks. He needs only five Democrats for a filibuster-proof majority. “We're negotiating to try to figure out as much stuff as we can get done,” said Republican Senator John Boozman, who chairs the appropriations subcommittee on financial services. Whether Democrats side with Shelby could hinge on a couple votes this week in the House. The “qualified mortgage” bill, H.R. 1210, is on the schedule. So is another bill, H.R. 1737, which would repeal CFPB’s efforts to end racist auto lending. CFPB issued a guidance enabling them to go after banks that fund car loans where dealers charge higher markups to African-Americans and Hispanics. H.R. 1737 would repeal that guidance. Moreover, it would dictate to CFPB what it can and cannot regulate, setting a dangerous precedent. The House votes are for show, to gauge the level of support for the appropriations gambit. If dozens of House Democrats support the bills, Wall Street’s hand will be strengthened. Given the bipartisan support, Shelby could persuade his Democratic friends to support his entire suite of deregulation. H.R. 1737 got 13 Democratic votes in the Financial Services Committee, against only 9 Democrats in opposition. H.R. 1210 got only four supportive Democrats. But that rump faction of pro-Wall Street Democrats – including Kyrsten Sinema, John Delaney, Ed Perlmutter and David Scott, who supported both bills in committee – will surely whip additional support from the rank and file, eager to please their financial sector contributors. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because the Republicans used precisely the same tactic last year. In the 2014 “CRomnibus” spending bill, conveniently timed around the holidays when nobody pays any attention to Washington, Congress passed and President Obama signed a repeal of derivatives rules enshrined in Dodd-Frank. Citigroup lobbyists actually wrote the repeal legislation. Warren and Rep. Elijah Cummings last week released a report finding that this led to $10 trillion in derivatives trades staying on the balance sheets of the largest banks, increasing systemic risk. The White House’s role is crucial here. In public, the President has demanded no riders on the appropriations bills. But last year’s signing of the Dodd-Frank rollback shows how such demands can be malleable. “We are open to discussions about things that are truly technical, but we are very much opposed to anything that would undermine any of the core architecture of Dodd-Frank,” said Treasury Secretary Jack Lew last week. But the White House and the financial reform community may draw that line differently. The worst outcome would be a kind of horse-trading, where the White House accepts some deregulation in exchange for shielding of others. For example, Republicans have a rider canceling the Department of Labor’s proposed rule to force investment advisors to act in their clients’ best interest. Would the Administration give up CFPB authority or expanded bank regulation in exchange for protecting the Labor rule? We know that stronger rules for consumer protection and financial stability help safeguard the U.S. economy. These rollbacks represent a threat, hearkening back to decades of bipartisan deregulation that ushered in the 2008 financial crisis. Will Democrats hand over a free pass to Wall Street in the hopes of a few campaign donations? Will the Obama Administration make a distasteful choice over what parts of the financial sector to make riskier? Will the Warren wing’s clout mean anything? Stay tuned.You wouldn’t know it, but this is a consequential week for the future of financial regulation, and in a larger sense, the future of the economy. Republicans have pulled out a successful playbook, and are planning an assault on Wall Street regulations. They’re doing it with the avowed support of a lingering faction of conservative Democrats. And the level of that support, which will be tested in House votes this week, is key to the success of the plan. The game plan is simple: stick as many riders onto two must-pass bills as possible, holding them hostage to conservative ideology. The bills include a long-term reauthorization of the Highway Trust Fund, which expires shortly, and a package of appropriations bills to keep the government funded, which have a deadline of December 11. Even if the Obama Administration forces some riders out, plenty of other policies would pass into law that would never have a shot on a straight-up vote.   The highway bill has already passed the House and Senate and needs to get through a conference committee.Congress looks set to pass a two-week patch to finalize the conference, but the deadline is fast approaching. The House version has a series of goodies for Wall Street attached, including a package of 15 bills that loosen minor rules. The White House’s Statement of Administration Policy on the House bill makes no mention of the financial services package, suggesting that it wouldn’t be a deal-killer. So conferees have a free hand to insert that into the final bill. I think of this way: When you want to unclog a pipeline, you send down what they call a “pig” to clear the way for the flow of oil. This financial services package is the pig in the pipeline, testing the system and proving the hostage-taking concept. It’ll make it easier for the flood that Republicans have cooked up for the year-end appropriations bills. This includes attacks on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the subject of a memorably bizarre ad during last week’s GOP debate. Republicans want to change the leadership structure to a five-member panel (the better to insert friendly regulators into the decision-making process) and put the agency’s budget into the appropriations process (the better to gut agency resources). The President of the American Action Network, who funded the ad, admitted that he wants to stop the CFPB from regulating mandatory arbitration clauses in consumer contracts, to use one example. Republicans have other aims, as well. They want to exempt some mid-size banks from annual “stress tests” that gauge their resilience in a crisis. They want to raise the asset threshold for automatically labeling a “systemically important financial institution” (SIFI) from $50 billion to $500 billion, giving big firms relief from expanded regulation under Dodd-Frank. They would also give existing SIFIs ways to wiggle out of the designation. Another idea gives banks a loophole to avoid CFPB’s “qualified mortgage” (QM) rules, legal protections for borrowers against loans with high upfront fees, balloon payments or other nontraditional features. As long as the bank holds the mortgage in their own portfolio, they would not be subject to QM. This sounds deceptively sensible, given the role of securitization in the crisis. But if banks can structure loans with high upfront fees and make their profits on the front side without any legal risks, they can peddle bad loans to borrowers and ignore the underlying loan quality. On the Senate side, Elizabeth Warren has already rung the alarm on the active participation in this strategy from conservative Democrats Joe Donnelly, Heidi Heitkamp, and Jon Tester. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby met with those three last week to determine how many of these ideas he can stuff into the appropriations package. Donnelly told the Wall Street Journal “common ground exists” for such maneuvers. The meetings don’t include Sherrod Brown, the ranking member of the committee. Shelby has an existing “financial regulatory relief” bill that includes lower standards for community banks and credit unions, but combines them with these long-sought rollbacks. He needs only five Democrats for a filibuster-proof majority. “We're negotiating to try to figure out as much stuff as we can get done,” said Republican Senator John Boozman, who chairs the appropriations subcommittee on financial services. Whether Democrats side with Shelby could hinge on a couple votes this week in the House. The “qualified mortgage” bill, H.R. 1210, is on the schedule. So is another bill, H.R. 1737, which would repeal CFPB’s efforts to end racist auto lending. CFPB issued a guidance enabling them to go after banks that fund car loans where dealers charge higher markups to African-Americans and Hispanics. H.R. 1737 would repeal that guidance. Moreover, it would dictate to CFPB what it can and cannot regulate, setting a dangerous precedent. The House votes are for show, to gauge the level of support for the appropriations gambit. If dozens of House Democrats support the bills, Wall Street’s hand will be strengthened. Given the bipartisan support, Shelby could persuade his Democratic friends to support his entire suite of deregulation. H.R. 1737 got 13 Democratic votes in the Financial Services Committee, against only 9 Democrats in opposition. H.R. 1210 got only four supportive Democrats. But that rump faction of pro-Wall Street Democrats – including Kyrsten Sinema, John Delaney, Ed Perlmutter and David Scott, who supported both bills in committee – will surely whip additional support from the rank and file, eager to please their financial sector contributors. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because the Republicans used precisely the same tactic last year. In the 2014 “CRomnibus” spending bill, conveniently timed around the holidays when nobody pays any attention to Washington, Congress passed and President Obama signed a repeal of derivatives rules enshrined in Dodd-Frank. Citigroup lobbyists actually wrote the repeal legislation. Warren and Rep. Elijah Cummings last week released a report finding that this led to $10 trillion in derivatives trades staying on the balance sheets of the largest banks, increasing systemic risk. The White House’s role is crucial here. In public, the President has demanded no riders on the appropriations bills. But last year’s signing of the Dodd-Frank rollback shows how such demands can be malleable. “We are open to discussions about things that are truly technical, but we are very much opposed to anything that would undermine any of the core architecture of Dodd-Frank,” said Treasury Secretary Jack Lew last week. But the White House and the financial reform community may draw that line differently. The worst outcome would be a kind of horse-trading, where the White House accepts some deregulation in exchange for shielding of others. For example, Republicans have a rider canceling the Department of Labor’s proposed rule to force investment advisors to act in their clients’ best interest. Would the Administration give up CFPB authority or expanded bank regulation in exchange for protecting the Labor rule? We know that stronger rules for consumer protection and financial stability help safeguard the U.S. economy. These rollbacks represent a threat, hearkening back to decades of bipartisan deregulation that ushered in the 2008 financial crisis. Will Democrats hand over a free pass to Wall Street in the hopes of a few campaign donations? Will the Obama Administration make a distasteful choice over what parts of the financial sector to make riskier? Will the Warren wing’s clout mean anything? Stay tuned.

Continue Reading...

Just one attack away from the abyss: America is on the brink of a revived politics of fear

A few weeks ago, I spoke with the New York Times’ Charlie Savage about “Power Wars,” his new book on the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies. Savage’s book is long and dense (in a good way), but rather than try to encompass its whole narrative in our relatively brief conversation, I focused instead on the Christmas Day attack of 2009. And if that strikes you as odd, just take a gander at how American politics has responded to the atrocities perpetrated against innocent civilians in Paris last week. But before we turn to Paris, let’s talk about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s unsuccessful attack first. Aside from introducing the phrase “underwear bomber” into our lexicon, that near-miss disaster’s influence on our culture has been negligible. But according to Savage, that attempted mass murder, despite its ultimate failure, was like “Obama’s 9/11.” From that day on, his approach to the policies that make up the “war on terror” — surveillance, military commissions, drone strikes, etc. — would never be the same. One reason why has to do with the attack itself. More specifically, it has to do with the fact that Abdulmutallab’s failure, according to Savage’s reporting, was entirely his own. He wasn’t thwarted because of anything having to do with U.S. policy; he simply got unlucky (thank God). If “Rick & Morty” is correct, and there is an infinite number of alternative universes out there — well, in most of them, Obama’s first Christmas as president features the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. The other reason why the underwear bomber has had such an outsize influence on the present administration has to do with the way the news was greeted by Obama’s political foes. His attempts to reform some of Bush’s practices were being stymied already; and many in the administration worried about time and energy being drained from other priorities, like the Affordable Care Act or Dodd-Frank. The underwear bomber made everything worse, and tipped the administration’s internal balance of power in the skeptics’ favor. Here’s how Savage put it to me during our chat:

Republican critiques that [Obama] was dismantling some of the things that Bush had put into place suddenly got a lot sharper; and the sense was, if there was another attack, and if it succeeded, the blood would be on his hands … So inside the Obama administration, [it came to be believed that if] there is another attack, and it actually succeeds, Obama [would] be a failed, one-term president … [E]verything he came in there to do, including things that [had] nothing to do with national security, would fail.

There’s no doubt that civil libertarians and other critics of the national security state will find that justification severely lacking. Although we all know it’s true, no one wants to admit (or accept) that political expediency usually trumps fundamental rights. But it’s worth looking back on the episode from today’s vantage, especially in the wake of the terrorist attack in Paris. Because Obama realized something in 2009 that is just as relevant today. And it’s something I think many progressives have forgotten. Despite all the death and suffering, despite our promises to never again make the same mistakes, American politics is still just one step removed from the abyss. One successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil; that’s it. That’s how close we are to a return of the toxicity that poisoned this country in the years after 9/11. That’s how close we are to the dark days of 2002, when our politics was characterized by a nightmarish combination of hysteria and belligerence. If you don’t believe me, I think this list of recent stories can give you a good sense of the way America’s responded so far to the massacre in Paris. Jeb Bush, who supposedly represents the sensible adults within the Republican Party, is reiterating his call to discriminate against refugees on the basis of religion. Meanwhile, the party’s 2016 front-runner, Donald Trump, is vowing to “strongly consider” shuttering some American mosques if he becomes president. The governors of Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi and Texas have all vowed not to accept Syrian refugees. And in Congress, a powerful GOP senator wants to shut down the government for the same reason. In other words, the norm against explicitly discriminating against Muslims — which was admittedly always rather weak — has been essentially abandoned. Remember how George W. Bush would insist, repeatedly, that Islam was “a religion of peace”? Those days are gone. When it comes to Muslims, the GOP has discarded any pretense of opposing a war of religion. The Lindsey Grahams of the world, who want the U.S. to lead a “religious war,” have won. Easily. If you’re hoping that the media will perform more admirably now than it did in the years after 9/11, when jingoist groupthink nearly became a requirement for inclusion in the mainstream? Sorry, but the news isn’t better there, either. The New York Observer, for example, recently published an Op-Ed recommending France consider “harsher measures,” like “the internment of potential jihadists”; elite journalists, such as Politico’s Ben White, are sounding like they did in the run-up to Iraq. A leading reporter for CNN is demanding the president explain why he won’t just “take out these bastards.” The racism, the bigotry, the fear-mongering, the fantasies of redemption through violence — anyone who lived through the immediate post-9/11 period remembers it all too well. They remember how this willful embrace of militarism, suspicion, tribalism and fear led to unprecedented human rights abuses — at home and abroad — as well as a war that cost trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives, and accomplished nothing beyond replacing Saddam Hussein’s evil with one that, impossible as it seems, is somehow even worse. Keep in mind: This was all in response to an attack in Paris, the capital of a country most Americans have never visited — which, as recently as last week, was nothing more than a means to get a cheap laugh from conservative audiences. I shudder to imagine what the reaction would be like if what happened in Paris had taken place in Los Angeles, New York or Dallas instead. Obama is routinely described as a treasonous crypto-Muslim as it is already; if an attack happened on his watch, impeachment proceedings would begin within weeks. Now, whether Obama’s response to the Christmas Day attack of 2009 was right — both morally and in terms of policy — is a profoundly difficult question. And it’s one about which reasonable, intelligent and civic-minded people can differ. But to anyone who didn’t know it already, America’s response to the heinous violence in Paris should leave no doubt: We have not outgrown the war on terror, not remotely. We are just one attack away from being pulled back into that void once again.A few weeks ago, I spoke with the New York Times’ Charlie Savage about “Power Wars,” his new book on the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies. Savage’s book is long and dense (in a good way), but rather than try to encompass its whole narrative in our relatively brief conversation, I focused instead on the Christmas Day attack of 2009. And if that strikes you as odd, just take a gander at how American politics has responded to the atrocities perpetrated against innocent civilians in Paris last week. But before we turn to Paris, let’s talk about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s unsuccessful attack first. Aside from introducing the phrase “underwear bomber” into our lexicon, that near-miss disaster’s influence on our culture has been negligible. But according to Savage, that attempted mass murder, despite its ultimate failure, was like “Obama’s 9/11.” From that day on, his approach to the policies that make up the “war on terror” — surveillance, military commissions, drone strikes, etc. — would never be the same. One reason why has to do with the attack itself. More specifically, it has to do with the fact that Abdulmutallab’s failure, according to Savage’s reporting, was entirely his own. He wasn’t thwarted because of anything having to do with U.S. policy; he simply got unlucky (thank God). If “Rick & Morty” is correct, and there is an infinite number of alternative universes out there — well, in most of them, Obama’s first Christmas as president features the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. The other reason why the underwear bomber has had such an outsize influence on the present administration has to do with the way the news was greeted by Obama’s political foes. His attempts to reform some of Bush’s practices were being stymied already; and many in the administration worried about time and energy being drained from other priorities, like the Affordable Care Act or Dodd-Frank. The underwear bomber made everything worse, and tipped the administration’s internal balance of power in the skeptics’ favor. Here’s how Savage put it to me during our chat:

Republican critiques that [Obama] was dismantling some of the things that Bush had put into place suddenly got a lot sharper; and the sense was, if there was another attack, and if it succeeded, the blood would be on his hands … So inside the Obama administration, [it came to be believed that if] there is another attack, and it actually succeeds, Obama [would] be a failed, one-term president … [E]verything he came in there to do, including things that [had] nothing to do with national security, would fail.

There’s no doubt that civil libertarians and other critics of the national security state will find that justification severely lacking. Although we all know it’s true, no one wants to admit (or accept) that political expediency usually trumps fundamental rights. But it’s worth looking back on the episode from today’s vantage, especially in the wake of the terrorist attack in Paris. Because Obama realized something in 2009 that is just as relevant today. And it’s something I think many progressives have forgotten. Despite all the death and suffering, despite our promises to never again make the same mistakes, American politics is still just one step removed from the abyss. One successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil; that’s it. That’s how close we are to a return of the toxicity that poisoned this country in the years after 9/11. That’s how close we are to the dark days of 2002, when our politics was characterized by a nightmarish combination of hysteria and belligerence. If you don’t believe me, I think this list of recent stories can give you a good sense of the way America’s responded so far to the massacre in Paris. Jeb Bush, who supposedly represents the sensible adults within the Republican Party, is reiterating his call to discriminate against refugees on the basis of religion. Meanwhile, the party’s 2016 front-runner, Donald Trump, is vowing to “strongly consider” shuttering some American mosques if he becomes president. The governors of Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi and Texas have all vowed not to accept Syrian refugees. And in Congress, a powerful GOP senator wants to shut down the government for the same reason. In other words, the norm against explicitly discriminating against Muslims — which was admittedly always rather weak — has been essentially abandoned. Remember how George W. Bush would insist, repeatedly, that Islam was “a religion of peace”? Those days are gone. When it comes to Muslims, the GOP has discarded any pretense of opposing a war of religion. The Lindsey Grahams of the world, who want the U.S. to lead a “religious war,” have won. Easily. If you’re hoping that the media will perform more admirably now than it did in the years after 9/11, when jingoist groupthink nearly became a requirement for inclusion in the mainstream? Sorry, but the news isn’t better there, either. The New York Observer, for example, recently published an Op-Ed recommending France consider “harsher measures,” like “the internment of potential jihadists”; elite journalists, such as Politico’s Ben White, are sounding like they did in the run-up to Iraq. A leading reporter for CNN is demanding the president explain why he won’t just “take out these bastards.” The racism, the bigotry, the fear-mongering, the fantasies of redemption through violence — anyone who lived through the immediate post-9/11 period remembers it all too well. They remember how this willful embrace of militarism, suspicion, tribalism and fear led to unprecedented human rights abuses — at home and abroad — as well as a war that cost trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives, and accomplished nothing beyond replacing Saddam Hussein’s evil with one that, impossible as it seems, is somehow even worse. Keep in mind: This was all in response to an attack in Paris, the capital of a country most Americans have never visited — which, as recently as last week, was nothing more than a means to get a cheap laugh from conservative audiences. I shudder to imagine what the reaction would be like if what happened in Paris had taken place in Los Angeles, New York or Dallas instead. Obama is routinely described as a treasonous crypto-Muslim as it is already; if an attack happened on his watch, impeachment proceedings would begin within weeks. Now, whether Obama’s response to the Christmas Day attack of 2009 was right — both morally and in terms of policy — is a profoundly difficult question. And it’s one about which reasonable, intelligent and civic-minded people can differ. But to anyone who didn’t know it already, America’s response to the heinous violence in Paris should leave no doubt: We have not outgrown the war on terror, not remotely. We are just one attack away from being pulled back into that void once again.

Continue Reading...

“My infant died. He should have been with me”: The horror too nightmarish to comprehend

Yesterday, Amber Scorah published an essay about the death of her infant son under circumstances that are almost too nightmarish to bear: On the day she returned to work after three months’ maternity leave, only a few hours after being left at daycare for the first time, her son stopped breathing and died. The piece, which was published in the New York Times’ Motherlode blog, is both heartbreaking and unnerving. There are no accusations of abuse or neglect, there is nothing violent, nothing out of the ordinary. Instead, Scorah, with tremendous composure, leaves us only with a question: Why did she have to send her son to daycare in the first place? Why was she forced to leave her son in the care of people who were, however well-meaning, strangers?

 The harsh answer, which Scorah acknowledges, is that she had to go back to work to keep her job and her health insurance. Her partner freelanced and did not receive benefits. Still, the unease she felt at the prospect of parting with her son did not relent. Scorah asked her employer for additional leave, without pay, but the request was denied because according to the HR department, "there was no system in place that allowed for extending maternity leaves." She managed to find a daycare close to her office so she could visit her son during the day and breast-feed. In essence, she did all she could short of leaving her job to stay close to her son. But after half a day apart Scorah’s son was lost permanently.

 Scorah does not condemn her employer or the daycare or the people working there. Rather, her critique is of a culture of employment that places a negative value on parental leave. Many people assume that parents in this country are not given longer or more flexible paid parental leave because it’s simply too expensive— too expensive for companies and too expensive for individual workers. This turns out not to be true. Others might assume that longer leaves are not offered because they’re not necessary or beneficial to babies and mothers, that infants and young children do just as well within our country’s patchwork, improvised, unregulated and wildly uneven system of daycare centers and facilities. This is also not true. As Scorah herself points out, parental leave reduces infant death, gives us healthier, more well-adjusted adults and helps women stay in the workforce. And yet despite these proven benefits, our country persists as one of the most unaccommodating and unsupportive among industrialized nations when it comes to parental leave.

For all the risk that is inherent in raising a child, for all the safeguards we try to install, literal and metaphorical, for the hours spent agonizing over everything from shoes to schools, we still live in a moment of explicit paradox: Parents are expected to do everything they possibly can to keep their children safe (and can face legal repercussions for failing to meet arbitrary, ad hoc standards of safety) but are often given little opportunity to be with and care for their children if they want to remain in the workforce and advance in their careers. Despite our idealization, fetishization and sentimentalization of parenthood and childhood, we often don’t seem to actually like or value parents and children, or so it would seem from a policy perspective. At the very least, we remain deeply ambivalent about the roles parents and children play in our society, the sacrifices we (we as individuals, we as employers, we as public servants) are willing to make for them, and the importance we assign to integrating them into our workplaces and communities.

Scorah admits that she has no way to know if her son would be alive today if she had not left him that day, or if the care he received at the daycare contributed in any way to his death. It is entirely possible, she admits, that the timing of the tragedy was not causal but coincidental. And yet this insistence hardly makes her story less harrowing or mitigates the awfulness of what she now must endure, not just the loss of her child, but the uncertainty and second-guessing and endless self-interrogation, the curse of wondering how things might have been different if she’d been given more options. She writes simply: "My infant died in the care of a stranger when he should have been with me: our culture demanded it.” It requires only a slight remove to view the coldness and cruelty of this demand, a demand far too many working parents face.

Why, Scorah asks, “should parents have to play this roulette with their weeks-old infant? To do all they can possibly do to ensure that their baby is safe, only to be relying on a child-care worker’s competence or attentiveness or mood that day?” More specifically, she wonders why the mother of a weeks-old or months-old infant, a mother who does not feel that she or her child is ready for sustained separation, be forced to choose between her infant’s well-being and her job.

It is a question that gnaws at every working parent, one that is almost as existential as it is practical. The offices of pediatricians are filled with pamphlets about proper installation of carseats and the benefits of breast-feeding and the ill effects of screentime, but there is no flier called, “So You’ve Decided to Entrust Your Infant to a Stranger.” Mountains of books and exabytes worth of blogs implore us to know the facts, to stay informed, to be vigilant and responsive and alert. We are told never to let them out of our sight or to allow them to talk to strangers, to wear them, to swaddle them, to feed on demand, to let them self-wean, to help them self-regulate, to build their self-esteem. And we are told, most of all, to trust our instincts, to follow our gut. We are told, or at least I was, that every mother should do what’s best for her own child and should make decisions accordingly. But when we say this to each other, we don’t really mean it. Or, we mean it when it’s convenient, when a mother’s instinct and preference don’t challenge the status quo, or undermine convention, or force an employer into the uncomfortable position of having to be flexible, accommodating or human.

Scorah does not know why her 12-week-old son died the day she left him. She only knows that the day it happened, she did not feel ready to be apart from him. She asked her employer for a little more time, just a couple more months of unpaid leave. It hardly seems like an extravagant request. And while she points out that the 12 weeks she was given was generous by American standards, the callousness of the response she received points to a larger, unacknowledged and disturbing cultural trend— a growing incompatibility between American capitalism and healthy parenting. Most parents will do anything within their power to assure nothing bad happens to their children. We make sacrifices to our own freedom and our children’s freedom in this regard, and we condemn parents who take unpopular or unsanctioned risks. But what happens when our culture forces parents to assume risks for the benefit or convenience of those in power? And what happens when a culture that implores us to protect our children from all perceived harm, offers us neither the tools, nor the flexibility, nor the support this requires?          

 

           

Continue Reading...

Chris Christie is winning the a**hole primary with his callous refugee stance: Not even “3 year old orphans” welcome

It's off to the races. Republican elected officials across the country spent the better part of Monday out-demagoguing each other on the issue of Syrian refugees in the face of Friday's terror attack in Paris and President Obama's defiant call to reject the “dark impulse” to turn our backs on the thousands of refugees fleeing war. But with hours still left to go, it's safe to say that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie wins the distinction of most callous GOP response of the day. In an apparent reversal of his position from two months ago, Christie now says that the United States is not capable of accepting any Syrian refugees for fear of importing terrorism, not even "three year old orphans." Christie's callous dismissal of the plight of war orphans stands in stark contrast to his own sentiments from weeks ago. "We saw the image of that 4-year-old little boy drowned in Syria," Christie said back in September, referring to the harrowing image of a young child laying motionless on a beach shore. "We can’t have those kinds of things.” But in an interview with conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt today, Christie gave these revised comments: https://twitter.com/hughhewitt/status... Earlier in the day, President Obama chided Republicans who rushed to conflate Syrian refugees with Friday's terror attack or ISIL. “When I hear folks say maybe we should accept the Christians but not the Muslims. When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who is fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that’s shameful, that’s not American, that’s not who we are” Obama said. Christie joins a growing list of Republican governors who have declared their states Syrian refugee free zones: Ohio https://twitter.com/FoxBusiness/statu... Louisiana https://twitter.com/BobbyJindal/statu... Wisconsin https://twitter.com/ScottWalker/statu... Kansas  https://twitter.com/govsambrownback/s... Arizona  https://twitter.com/dougducey/status/... Indiana  https://twitter.com/GovPenceIN/status... Arkansas  https://twitter.com/AsaHutchinson/sta... https://twitter.com/AsaHutchinson/sta... Alabama  https://twitter.com/GovernorBentley/s... Texas https://twitter.com/GregAbbott_TX/sta... Florida  https://twitter.com/FLGovScott/status... North Carolina https://twitter.com/PatMcCroryNC/stat... Michigan https://twitter.com/onetoughnerd/stat... Idaho https://twitter.com/ButchOtter/status... Georgia https://twitter.com/GovernorDeal/stat... Nebraska  https://twitter.com/GovRicketts/statu... https://twitter.com/GovRicketts/statu... Massachusetts  https://twitter.com/cbsboston/status/... Illinois  https://twitter.com/wics_abc20/status... Oklahoma  https://twitter.com/PCornellCNN/statu... Mississippi https://twitter.com/courtneyannj/stat... Tennessee  https://twitter.com/3onyourside/statu... Maine https://twitter.com/WCSH6/status/6663... New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan is the only Democrat to have called for a halt of the Syrian refugee resettlement program so far. Rand Paul announced he planned to introduce legislation barring all visas, including student and travel visas, from 30 so-called "high-risk nations." “I’m getting calls nonstop from my state saying we don’t think this a good idea to bring in refugees when we’re not certain they aren’t coming here to attack us,” Paul said explaining the move. The United States has only extended a welcoming hand to an additional 10,000 refugees from the war torn nation over the next two years, but every Republican presidential candidate has either called for only allowing Christian Syrians to enter the country or halting resettlement all together. According to World Vision, 12 million refugees have fled Syria since the war began in 2011 and the organization estimates half of those fleeing refugees are children.It's off to the races. Republican elected officials across the country spent the better part of Monday out-demagoguing each other on the issue of Syrian refugees in the face of Friday's terror attack in Paris and President Obama's defiant call to reject the “dark impulse” to turn our backs on the thousands of refugees fleeing war. But with hours still left to go, it's safe to say that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie wins the distinction of most callous GOP response of the day. In an apparent reversal of his position from two months ago, Christie now says that the United States is not capable of accepting any Syrian refugees for fear of importing terrorism, not even "three year old orphans." Christie's callous dismissal of the plight of war orphans stands in stark contrast to his own sentiments from weeks ago. "We saw the image of that 4-year-old little boy drowned in Syria," Christie said back in September, referring to the harrowing image of a young child laying motionless on a beach shore. "We can’t have those kinds of things.” But in an interview with conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt today, Christie gave these revised comments: https://twitter.com/hughhewitt/status... Earlier in the day, President Obama chided Republicans who rushed to conflate Syrian refugees with Friday's terror attack or ISIL. “When I hear folks say maybe we should accept the Christians but not the Muslims. When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who is fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted, when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution, that’s shameful, that’s not American, that’s not who we are” Obama said. Christie joins a growing list of Republican governors who have declared their states Syrian refugee free zones: Ohio https://twitter.com/FoxBusiness/statu... Louisiana https://twitter.com/BobbyJindal/statu... Wisconsin https://twitter.com/ScottWalker/statu... Kansas  https://twitter.com/govsambrownback/s... Arizona  https://twitter.com/dougducey/status/... Indiana  https://twitter.com/GovPenceIN/status... Arkansas  https://twitter.com/AsaHutchinson/sta... https://twitter.com/AsaHutchinson/sta... Alabama  https://twitter.com/GovernorBentley/s... Texas https://twitter.com/GregAbbott_TX/sta... Florida  https://twitter.com/FLGovScott/status... North Carolina https://twitter.com/PatMcCroryNC/stat... Michigan https://twitter.com/onetoughnerd/stat... Idaho https://twitter.com/ButchOtter/status... Georgia https://twitter.com/GovernorDeal/stat... Nebraska  https://twitter.com/GovRicketts/statu... https://twitter.com/GovRicketts/statu... Massachusetts  https://twitter.com/cbsboston/status/... Illinois  https://twitter.com/wics_abc20/status... Oklahoma  https://twitter.com/PCornellCNN/statu... Mississippi https://twitter.com/courtneyannj/stat... Tennessee  https://twitter.com/3onyourside/statu... Maine https://twitter.com/WCSH6/status/6663... New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan is the only Democrat to have called for a halt of the Syrian refugee resettlement program so far. Rand Paul announced he planned to introduce legislation barring all visas, including student and travel visas, from 30 so-called "high-risk nations." “I’m getting calls nonstop from my state saying we don’t think this a good idea to bring in refugees when we’re not certain they aren’t coming here to attack us,” Paul said explaining the move. The United States has only extended a welcoming hand to an additional 10,000 refugees from the war torn nation over the next two years, but every Republican presidential candidate has either called for only allowing Christian Syrians to enter the country or halting resettlement all together. According to World Vision, 12 million refugees have fled Syria since the war began in 2011 and the organization estimates half of those fleeing refugees are children.

Continue Reading...

“Why can’t we take out these bastards?”: Why the media’s apocalyptic Paris response should be making you very nervous

"Why can't we take out these bastards?" CNN's Jim Acosta asked President Obama at a press conference on Monday. Acosta's language may have been rougher than some might have used, but he was speaking for a press corps whose thirst for an apocalyptic confrontation with ISIS has been let loose by last Friday's attacks in Paris.

Ever since that terrible day, much of the establishment media has eagerly reverted to its default position when it comes to foreign policy: the more hawkish, the better.

The Sunday shows were dominated by such talk. NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton turned up on both CBS and ABC's Sundayshows, warning darkly that if spy agencies couldn't monitor cell phone communications, ISIS might be able to attack New York more easily. Unsurprisingly, he was met with little skepticism. ABC viewers were then treated to the sight of Bill Kristol, a pundit who  would invade his local grocery store if he had a problem with it, calling for 50,000 American troops to combat ISIS.

On Monday morning, subscribers to Politico's highly influential Playbook newsletter were greeted with Mike Allen's pronouncement that the best person to listen to about Paris was former deputy CIA chief Mike Morell, now on the CBS payroll. If they turned on Allen's favorite show, MSNBC's "Morning Joe," they could have seen Joe Scarborough ask James Stavridis, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, if NATO should go to war with ISIS. Surprise! Stavridis thought that was a great idea.

It's not just American media, either. British viewers watching Sky News on Sunday were treated to one of the more blatantly warmongering interviews you are likely to find anywhere, as anchor Dermot Murnaghan demanded that Diane Abbott, a left-wing member of the opposition Labour party, sign up to British bombing in Syria. "Even if it's just a gesture, why not join?" he asked—a stunningly casual way to discuss deadly military action—adding later that any strategy to combat ISIS should involve "trying to kill as many of them as you possibly can."

Listen to the language being used here. "Kill as many of them as you possibly can." "Take out these bastards." This is the hyper-macho language of some two-bit action movie, not a foreign policy strategy. It's also evidence of the way that a supposedly "objective" press can reinforce one very narrow view of the world through its own ideological insularity.

It has been said many times before, but it's worth saying again: what do these people think has been going on all this time? Despite the current narrative that paints Obama as some pacifist hippie, the US is currently conducting military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and god knows where else. We have been in Afghanistan for 14 years. We have been in Iraq for 12 years. What has any of this gotten us? For one, it got us ISIS. It should hardly be controversial to say that the rise of ISIS is directly connected to the American-led destabilization of the Middle East. It didn't even exist a few years ago. Does Jim Acosta seriously believe that more of the same would stamp it out?

It now appears that the overwhelming majority of the people involved in the Paris attacks were Europeans, people whose relative luxury and safety in the world were nevertheless overwhelmed by intellectual and ideological forces whose complexity far outmatches the force of any weapon. Does Bill Kristol think we should pulverize Belgium back to the Stone Age?

It takes ideas and emotions of immense and terrible power to convince someone that they should murder people in a concert hall one by one, or blow themselves up outside a stadium. How many bombs, how many guns, how many troops, how many Orwellian tactics do the hawks now crying out for "something to be done" think will be useful in fighting that ideology, when decades of war has helped to fuel it?

It is a real tragedy that, rather than attempt to grapple with any of this, so many in the elite media beat the same drums we always seem to hear at times of crisis. We are in desperate need of new ways to think about this fragile world of ours. Instead, we get "take out these bastards." Some things never change.

Continue Reading...

The disgraceful Charlie Sheen “tigerblood” jokes have started already: The actor reportedly will reveal he’s HIV-positive tomorrow

Charlie Sheen will reportedly announce tomorrow during a “Today” show appearance that he’s HIV-positive.

TMZ reported that Sheen’s appearance—teased in an NBC press release to be a “revealing personal announcement”—will pertain to today’s National Enquirer cover story on Sheen’s suspected diagnosis and 4-year cover-up.

UPDATE: TMZ now reports that sources say Sheen will reveal that "he beat the disease because it's undetectable in his system." Twitter reactions have been decidedly polarized. On one hand, you have words of empathy support, even from folks who might not normally find themselves in a position to defend Charlie Sheen:

[embedtweet id="666349883083853824"] [embedtweet id="666348384366813185"] [embedtweet id="666327341950464000"] [embedtweet id="666321172175302657"] And then you have the cheap shots — easy cracks involving Sheen's own catchphrases like "winning!" and "tiger blood" and referencing his sexual history. [embedtweet id="666311243892936705"] [embedtweet id="665415283331436546"] [embedtweet id="666347480754335745"] [embedtweet id="664464743420284928"] [embedtweet id="666353574318841857"] [embedtweet id="666353571668090880"] [embedtweet id="666353542400049152"] Sheen's reported diagnosis is undoubtedly tragic for all involved. Worse yet, though, Sheen's promiscuity is already being misused to stigmatize his HIV status, which feels like the worst kind of callback to the 1980s. Matt Lauer interviews Sheen tomorrow morning on "Today."

Charlie Sheen will reportedly announce tomorrow during a “Today” show appearance that he’s HIV-positive.

TMZ reported that Sheen’s appearance—teased in an NBC press release to be a “revealing personal announcement”—will pertain to today’s National Enquirer cover story on Sheen’s suspected diagnosis and 4-year cover-up.

UPDATE: TMZ now reports that sources say Sheen will reveal that "he beat the disease because it's undetectable in his system." Twitter reactions have been decidedly polarized. On one hand, you have words of empathy support, even from folks who might not normally find themselves in a position to defend Charlie Sheen:

[embedtweet id="666349883083853824"] [embedtweet id="666348384366813185"] [embedtweet id="666327341950464000"] [embedtweet id="666321172175302657"] And then you have the cheap shots — easy cracks involving Sheen's own catchphrases like "winning!" and "tiger blood" and referencing his sexual history. [embedtweet id="666311243892936705"] [embedtweet id="665415283331436546"] [embedtweet id="666347480754335745"] [embedtweet id="664464743420284928"] [embedtweet id="666353574318841857"] [embedtweet id="666353571668090880"] [embedtweet id="666353542400049152"] Sheen's reported diagnosis is undoubtedly tragic for all involved. Worse yet, though, Sheen's promiscuity is already being misused to stigmatize his HIV status, which feels like the worst kind of callback to the 1980s. Matt Lauer interviews Sheen tomorrow morning on "Today."

Charlie Sheen will reportedly announce tomorrow during a “Today” show appearance that he’s HIV-positive.

TMZ reported that Sheen’s appearance—teased in an NBC press release to be a “revealing personal announcement”—will pertain to today’s National Enquirer cover story on Sheen’s suspected diagnosis and 4-year cover-up.

UPDATE: TMZ now reports that sources say Sheen will reveal that "he beat the disease because it's undetectable in his system." Twitter reactions have been decidedly polarized. On one hand, you have words of empathy support, even from folks who might not normally find themselves in a position to defend Charlie Sheen:

[embedtweet id="666349883083853824"] [embedtweet id="666348384366813185"] [embedtweet id="666327341950464000"] [embedtweet id="666321172175302657"] And then you have the cheap shots — easy cracks involving Sheen's own catchphrases like "winning!" and "tiger blood" and referencing his sexual history. [embedtweet id="666311243892936705"] [embedtweet id="665415283331436546"] [embedtweet id="666347480754335745"] [embedtweet id="664464743420284928"] [embedtweet id="666353574318841857"] [embedtweet id="666353571668090880"] [embedtweet id="666353542400049152"] Sheen's reported diagnosis is undoubtedly tragic for all involved. Worse yet, though, Sheen's promiscuity is already being misused to stigmatize his HIV status, which feels like the worst kind of callback to the 1980s. Matt Lauer interviews Sheen tomorrow morning on "Today."

Charlie Sheen will reportedly announce tomorrow during a “Today” show appearance that he’s HIV-positive.

TMZ reported that Sheen’s appearance—teased in an NBC press release to be a “revealing personal announcement”—will pertain to today’s National Enquirer cover story on Sheen’s suspected diagnosis and 4-year cover-up.

UPDATE: TMZ now reports that sources say Sheen will reveal that "he beat the disease because it's undetectable in his system." Twitter reactions have been decidedly polarized. On one hand, you have words of empathy support, even from folks who might not normally find themselves in a position to defend Charlie Sheen:

[embedtweet id="666349883083853824"] [embedtweet id="666348384366813185"] [embedtweet id="666327341950464000"] [embedtweet id="666321172175302657"] And then you have the cheap shots — easy cracks involving Sheen's own catchphrases like "winning!" and "tiger blood" and referencing his sexual history. [embedtweet id="666311243892936705"] [embedtweet id="665415283331436546"] [embedtweet id="666347480754335745"] [embedtweet id="664464743420284928"] [embedtweet id="666353574318841857"] [embedtweet id="666353571668090880"] [embedtweet id="666353542400049152"] Sheen's reported diagnosis is undoubtedly tragic for all involved. Worse yet, though, Sheen's promiscuity is already being misused to stigmatize his HIV status, which feels like the worst kind of callback to the 1980s. Matt Lauer interviews Sheen tomorrow morning on "Today."

Continue Reading...

Spare us your French flag filter: The self-indulgent social media performance doesn’t help anyone

My Facebook profile picture is a white cat. It’s not a real cat. It’s a cat-object created out of rabbit fur, a quirky birthday gift my niece received from one of her tween classmates. She insisted that I use her photograph of it as my Facebook avatar. So there it is, and it will probably stay the rabbit-cat until the next time my niece gets an Idea in her head. It has not been French-flagified on Facebook. I am not about to change it. My niece is half French. My brother-in-law is French, from France. Through them, I have family-in-law in Paris and its environs. One of them lives in the 10th arrondissement, where the worst of the terrorist carnage unfurled. The French relatives are not French-flagifying their pictures on Facebook. It is ludicrous to assume that their indifference to screening a tricolor flag over their profile photos--a move that, bluntly, requires more tech-savvy than I care to use up brain cells to learn--somehow suggests that they are secretly sympathizing with the terrorists. They’re simply too sorrowful, too exhausted to worry about the semiotics of their social media usage. More to the point: Since when has an affirmative declaration that one is #Standing with X, Y, or Z, or announcing #Je suis Charlie, #Je Suis Paris, etc., become a performative requirement on Facebook, at the risk of being trolled by outraged strangers policing the allegiances being pledged inside Facebook nation? That emotional energy is not only misplaced, but ironically demonstrates self-involvement masquerading as empathy for others. For even as I write these words, my niece is sitting in French class at school conversing en français, unaware that a few blocks away, the Yard at Harvard University is being evacuated due to an unconfirmed bomb threat. My niece would panic if she knew, because her mother—my baby sister forever, no matter how old we both get—works there. This morning, a similar bomb threat was issued for Cambridge Public Schools, though that threat was dismissed as a hoax, and the public schools remained open. My niece is too young to be on Facebook and even if she were, the fact that I did not overlay my profile picture with the French flag would mean very little to her. She wants and needs adults to be in the room. A digitized French flag over that weird rabbit-cat she adores will do nothing to assure her that the world is not collapsing, and that her friends and family are safe. French-flagifying your Facebook profile is a nifty way to let others know that you’re standing with France or whatever, but it is an empty signifier of sympathy that rings hollow in the face of ongoing and very real threats of violence erupting around a world that now includes our backyards. And so, as Claire Bernish wrote pointedly:

“I refuse — despite my partial French heritage — to cloak myself in nationalism of any stripe or star, particularly not now. Because, besides victims in Paris, an incomprehensibly astronomic number of people have been grieving loss of the highest order for some time — in places whose names roll off our tongues as if it’s accepted that violence simply happens there — and a majority likely couldn’t guess the colors on these victims’ flags.”

These are the flags of Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Afghanistan, Yemen, and so on, places where explosive, unexpected violence is a daily occurrence, and emotional exhaustion has become the default. In the wake of the latest attacks on Paris, the New York Times reported,

“Monuments around the world lit up in the colors of the French flag; presidential speeches touted the need to defend “shared values;” Facebook offered users a one-click option to overlay their profile pictures with the French tricolor, a service not offered for the Lebanese flag.”

Thanks to social media, nonetheless, the ideological uses of patriotism stand starkly illuminated, throwing into high relief the political limits of the claim “all lives matter.” (For how long? To whom?) Frenchify your avatar to your heart’s content, or leave it the way that it has always been. Either way, the attacks on Paris illuminate one terrible new reality: that #Je Suis Paris is now literally true. Pledging allegiance to the red, white, and blue does nothing but make you look good to people with the time to criticize you. Meanwhile, Harvard Yard stands locked and emptied, as bewildered students mill around helplessly, watching as the Boston and Cambridge Police, Homeland Security, the Fire Department, Department of Mass Transportation, and heavily armed officers gather to assess the threat. It looks a war zone. Because to all extents and purposes, it is.

Continue Reading...

This is why Ben Carson lies: The dark, disturbing reality of race, religion and today’s right-wing

For months now, Ben Carson has been rising in the polls, but as long as the far more flamboyant Donald Trump was ahead of him, the chaos engendered by Trump focused almost all attention around him. Last week, all that changed as Carson clearly emerged to top Trump, and finally started getting a level of attention and scrutiny he's warranted for some time. It has not been pretty. No one doubts the core truth of Carson's Horatio Alger narrative—a child of the underclass who became a world-renowned neurosurgeon. But that only makes the surrounding, objectively unnecessary lies all the more puzzling to many. Why lie about having been a violent youth—even stabbing someone—when no one else remembers him that way? Why lie about being offered a full West Point scholarship, when no such thing exists, and he went to Yale anyway? And when such questions are raised, why complain that “I do not remember this level of scrutiny for one President Barack Obama,” when, as Bill Moyers noted on April 25, 2008, “More than 3,000 news stories have been penned since early April about Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama.” As Kevin Drum explains, one reason Carson tells “unnecessary lies” is that for his evangelical base, they're anything but unnecessary, they're essential:

Serious evangelicals really, really want to hear a story about sin and redemption. That requires two things. First, Carson needs to have been a bad kid. Second, redemption needs to have truly turned his life around.

Which is the purpose of anecdotes such as his story about a professor giving him $10 when he was flat broke for being “the most honest student in the class" of 150 students—a story that now appears was based on a humor magazine's hoax. If such stories sound wildly implausible, well, they are—and that's a feature, not a bug:

No one who's not an evangelical Christian would believe it for a second. But evangelicals hear testimonies like this all the time. They expect testimonies like this, and the more improbable the better. So Carson gives them one. It's clumsy because he's not very good at inventing this kind of thing, but that doesn't matter much.

Indeed, Carson's clumsiness readily gets reinterpreted as “authenticity.” But there's another suspect aspect of the Carson candidacy that deserves much more scrutiny: his role as the “some of my best friends are black” candidate, to help cover for the GOP's unrelenting racial hostility, as the nation grows more diverse, and the GOP grows increasingly antagonistic. Black commentators like Christopher Parker see this in terms of tokenism. Carson is “way too far out of his depth to be taken seriously as a political leader,” he writes, citing some of Carson's wilder claims. “By serving as tokens, Carson and other black Republican candidates allow racist whites to continue to hide from their racism,” he argues, and in the end:

By continuing to represent the GOP as a black man who is patently unqualified, his candidacy does more to perpetuate racism than undo it. His political incompetence is on public display for all to see. It’s very much akin to a show in which black performers were complicit in their own degradation. And since blacks are almost never afforded the opportunity to be seen as individuals, the humiliation is often extended to blacks as a group.

But, of course, Carson's evangelical base does not see him as a political incompetent. Parker's sense of humiliation as a black professional is valid and real. But something more complicated is going on. The tokenism charge is accurate, but tokenism takes on many different forms, and since it overwhelmingly serves white needs, it helps to pay attention to the white side of the story, which, after all, is where Carson's political appeal lies. White supremacy, after all, is overwhelmingly a white problem. Funny how hard that is to remember. When I was kid in the late 1950s, first encountering racial politics, I was exposed to two types of racists: those who proudly despised blacks, and those invariably prefaced their racist attitudes with the words, “Some of my best friends are negroes, but....” Given that I lived in Northern California communities with almost no blacks for miles around, it wasn't just my gut telling me that adults saying that had no such black friends, and every word they said was probably a lie—a fairly transparent one. I figured that deep down, they were every bit as racist as those who freely used the N-word, they just felt compelled to hide it—more from themselves than from anyone else. I can't help but see the same sort of dynamic at work bolstering Ben Carson's candidacy today. After all, the primary purpose of imaginary black friends is to help defend against imaginary black devils, and for most of the GOP base, there has never been an imaginary black devil quite like President Obama, who has now become the very embodiment of the Democratic Party. It's no accident, then, that Carson first gained national attention for rudely attacking Obama directly at the National Prayer Breakfast, an explicitly non-partisan event where politics are supposed to be completely set aside. The Wall Street Journal immediately proposed him for president, and now the right-wing masses have followed suit. But my take here is not just based on my own particular childhood experience. First, the notion that “some of my best friends are black,” or Jews, or gay, or whatever proves anything at all has long been a subject of ridicule. After all, George Zimmerman had a black friend who vouched for him, and four years ago the New Republic published a brief history of the defense, and how it's been mocked. It included mention of John Roach Straton, the Baptist preacher who popularized the notion that Al Smith, the 1928 Democratic presidential nominee, was “the candidate of rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” but who subsequently told the AP, “Understand I am not a foe of the Catholics. Some of my dearest friends are Catholic.” So, there's nothing new, unusual or idiosyncratic about my reaction to this particular lie. Second, the whole history of white supremacy in America is shot through with numerous examples of similar face-saving strategies, whenever the core logic gets too ugly to be defended without apology. Any time blacks advance their own leadership, white supremacists look for black allies to substitute for them—allies they can claim as bosom buddies, who fully endorse their anti-black politics. When there were slave rebellions, it was docile, relatively privileged house slaves who were turned to, which helps explain why so many plantation owners felt betrayed after the Civil War, when freed slaves abandoned their plantations in droves—including those many slaveowners claimed were “like part of the family.” During the civil rights and black power era, the relentless hostility toward black leadership was paired with attempts to prop up alternative “representatives” to strike deals with. In fact, a crucial part of the behind-the-scenes work in desegregating Birmingham, for example, consisted of countering such efforts to split the black community. It took many months to lay the groundwork for the necessary unity, and even then that unity was sorely tested in the battle. Indeed, Martin Luther King's famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail” was written in response to a public letter from eight local clergymen who called the demonstrations he led “unwise and untimely,” and went on to say, “We agree rather with certain local Negro leadership which has called for honest and open negotiation of racial issues in our area.” With this in mind, there's little surprising in how Republicans have reacted to Barack Obama, going back to when he first ran for U.S. Senate, in 2004. Obama won the Democratic primary with a clear majority, 52.8 percent, more than double the second place candidate, while the Republican candidate, Jack Ryan, won the GOP primary with just 35.5 percent, ahead of two other strong contenders in the 20s. Yet, when Ryan unexpectedly dropped out for personal reasons (the release of divorce proceedings alleging he had taken his wife to public sex clubs), the state party leaders ignored both of them, and instead took six weeks of precious campaign time to select and secure Alan Keyes, a carpetbagger from Maryland, for no other apparent reason than that he was black, and would attack Obama in an all-out manner that no white candidate would dream of doing in the 21st century. As the L.A. Times reported:

Desperate to find someone to compete against Harvard-educated Obama, the Republicans "needed to find another Harvard-educated African American who had some experience on the national political scene," said Republican state Sen. Steven J. Rauschenberger. "We need that because the Democrats have made an icon out of Barack Obama. The only way to fight back is to find your own icon, and that is not an easy thing to do."

Like Carson, and Herman Cain (Remember him? 9-9-9?), Keyes had no experience in elected office—though, in his case, not for lack of trying. The Times noted that Keyes had lost badly in two previous Senate runs in Maryland. "In 1988, he got 38% of the vote; in 1992, he got 29%." Some icon! But he had managed to make a decent career out of being a black conservative, as have many others as well. In fact, the Times reported:

In 1992, Keyes was criticized for using campaign funds to pay himself a monthly salary of $8,500 -- an unusual, though legal, strategy at the time. Illinois GOP officials said that Keyes had assured them he wouldn't do that during this campaign.

Not only was Keyes a carpetbagger, he was a carpetbagger with a record of denouncing carpetbagging. When Hillary Clinton first ran for Senate in New York, Keyes said, "I deeply resent the destruction of federalism represented by Hillary Clinton's willingness to go into a state she doesn't even live in and pretend to represent the people there. So I certainly wouldn't imitate it." What Keyes did have (foreshadowing Carson) was a religious conservative message—and the claim that he, not Obama, represented the authentic African-American experience, since Obama's ancestors hadn't been slaves. "Barack Obama claims an African American heritage, yet stands against the very things that were the basis for [stopping] the oppression of my ancestors," Keyes told George Stephanopoulos, going all-in on the religious right effort to equate abortion with slavery—a popular position among white evangelicals, that tends to make many black religious conservatives a good deal more uneasy, just as religiously conservative Jews tend to denounce, not embrace, antiabortion "holocaust" rhetoric. Carson entertains some of the same confluence of attitudes. His notorious claim that Obamacare “is slavery, in a way” appears to be partially rooted in the same sense that he, Carson, is the authentic African-American, descended from slaves, instinctively freedom-loving, as opposed to Obama, who is an imposter, an interloper—which ties in with birtherism as well. This isn't to claim that Carson himself is a birther, only that his questioning of Obama's authenticity synergizes with that coming from the broader, white right-wing base. Similarly, a white conservative casually equating Obamacare with slavery would be savagely condemned in a way that Carson was spared, simply because he is black. There is a back-and-forth exchange of “likely stories” that facilitates the creation of an elaborate shared fantasy, in which, among other things, all the outrageous things Carson says are true, and white conservatives defending him prove that liberals, Democrats and the vast majority of blacks are the “real racists” after all. And if Carson can help them to really believe that fantasy, well, maybe he really is one of their best friends after all. At least that's what today's GOP would like to believe.

Continue Reading...

Our frustrated emoji year: A laughing-through-tears smiley face is the Oxford dictionary “word” of 2015

It’s been a big year for our culture. A huge year, one might say. Within the course of less than twelve months, we’ve witnessed history-making steps in the name of civil rights and social progress in both forward and backwards directions. We’ve become increasingly accepting of expressing sexual fluidity, and champion those willing to advocate for individual rights and question the norm. Yes, it’s been a big year -- quite possibly indescribable in some cases. As it turns out, the Oxford Dictionaries agree. This year’s Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year isn’t a word at all. (A brief pause while you re-read that sentence, I couldn’t believe it either. Okay, let’s pick up.) The “word” best reflecting the cultural year in language is the “face with tears of joy” emoji. Seriously. Other contenders on the short list of potential winners included “Brexit,” a term for the hypothetical departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union; the phrase “on fleek,” used as an adjective to describe something extremely attractive or stylish; and “refugee,” used in the standard sense to describe a person who has been forced to leave their country to escape war, persecution or natural disaster. These candidates ultimately missed the mark in being named the top word of 2015, which says a lot about our culture’s current emojinal state. “You can see how traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually focused demands of 21st century communication,” says Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Dictionaries in a release. “It’s not surprising that a pictographic script like emoji has stepped in to fill those gaps—it’s flexible, immediate, and infuses tone beautifully.” One of the major draws of utilizing emoji is the adaptability of the symbol. It can be used to soften blows of sarcasm, as a more aesthetically-pleasing expression of “LOL”, and also to express frustration. There’ve been many times when girlfriends recount text exchanges with would-be suitors over brunch or cocktails, and follow up describing a particularly sarcastic statement with “Well, I sent the crying while laughing emoji, so he knew I was kidding.” In other situations, the emoji reflects situations that are a bit more grim. “Laughing through tears” is frequently used as a buffer to express frustration at social injustices, a form of humor to deflect from the stark reality that we’re faced with situations so dire our language fails to accurately articulate the emotional implications. The 2014 word of the year was “vape,” based on the rising popularity of electronic cigarettes. The top word of 2013 was “selfie,” which continues to dominate both our lexicon and Instagram feeds. It’s not surprising that we’ve reached the cultural moment where an emoji most accurately captures the values of our culture. Utilizing the cutesy symbols used to be exclusive to teenage girls, but linguistic shifts now have emoji being used in meaningful ways by the likes of potential presidential candidates such as Hilary Clinton. This year saw a solution to the backlash against light-skinned emoji bias, when the standard set was replaced by a broad spectrum of skin tones we can now choose from. This update not only reflected company’s receptivity to feedback from users, but showcased what seems to now be universal use of emoji based on multiple demographics. Emoji are so popular that it’s now possible to use them for weblinks. I wonder about the future of emoji. Given the ubiquity of “selfie” and “vape,” it’s possible that in a few years we’ll see a movement away from the myriad tiny faces and objects currently used to express our emotional complexities. For many reasons I hope we do. While I enjoy the convenience and colorful display of emoji, there’s something derivative about it, limiting the value of a statement’s or expression’s potential impact. I was at a party this weekend where a friend of mine read a poem that I’m still processing because of the way he pieced together his words and images. It made me realize how much I miss being gutted by language. Other listeners were similarly affected, reaffirming the power of words to take our breath away. So while the “face with tears of joy” emoji may be the most common expression in our language, I’m willing to hold out for those rare moments that elicit actual tears of joy. I’d rather be written a love letter than sent a heart eyes emoji any day.It’s been a big year for our culture. A huge year, one might say. Within the course of less than twelve months, we’ve witnessed history-making steps in the name of civil rights and social progress in both forward and backwards directions. We’ve become increasingly accepting of expressing sexual fluidity, and champion those willing to advocate for individual rights and question the norm. Yes, it’s been a big year -- quite possibly indescribable in some cases. As it turns out, the Oxford Dictionaries agree. This year’s Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year isn’t a word at all. (A brief pause while you re-read that sentence, I couldn’t believe it either. Okay, let’s pick up.) The “word” best reflecting the cultural year in language is the “face with tears of joy” emoji. Seriously. Other contenders on the short list of potential winners included “Brexit,” a term for the hypothetical departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union; the phrase “on fleek,” used as an adjective to describe something extremely attractive or stylish; and “refugee,” used in the standard sense to describe a person who has been forced to leave their country to escape war, persecution or natural disaster. These candidates ultimately missed the mark in being named the top word of 2015, which says a lot about our culture’s current emojinal state. “You can see how traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually focused demands of 21st century communication,” says Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Dictionaries in a release. “It’s not surprising that a pictographic script like emoji has stepped in to fill those gaps—it’s flexible, immediate, and infuses tone beautifully.” One of the major draws of utilizing emoji is the adaptability of the symbol. It can be used to soften blows of sarcasm, as a more aesthetically-pleasing expression of “LOL”, and also to express frustration. There’ve been many times when girlfriends recount text exchanges with would-be suitors over brunch or cocktails, and follow up describing a particularly sarcastic statement with “Well, I sent the crying while laughing emoji, so he knew I was kidding.” In other situations, the emoji reflects situations that are a bit more grim. “Laughing through tears” is frequently used as a buffer to express frustration at social injustices, a form of humor to deflect from the stark reality that we’re faced with situations so dire our language fails to accurately articulate the emotional implications. The 2014 word of the year was “vape,” based on the rising popularity of electronic cigarettes. The top word of 2013 was “selfie,” which continues to dominate both our lexicon and Instagram feeds. It’s not surprising that we’ve reached the cultural moment where an emoji most accurately captures the values of our culture. Utilizing the cutesy symbols used to be exclusive to teenage girls, but linguistic shifts now have emoji being used in meaningful ways by the likes of potential presidential candidates such as Hilary Clinton. This year saw a solution to the backlash against light-skinned emoji bias, when the standard set was replaced by a broad spectrum of skin tones we can now choose from. This update not only reflected company’s receptivity to feedback from users, but showcased what seems to now be universal use of emoji based on multiple demographics. Emoji are so popular that it’s now possible to use them for weblinks. I wonder about the future of emoji. Given the ubiquity of “selfie” and “vape,” it’s possible that in a few years we’ll see a movement away from the myriad tiny faces and objects currently used to express our emotional complexities. For many reasons I hope we do. While I enjoy the convenience and colorful display of emoji, there’s something derivative about it, limiting the value of a statement’s or expression’s potential impact. I was at a party this weekend where a friend of mine read a poem that I’m still processing because of the way he pieced together his words and images. It made me realize how much I miss being gutted by language. Other listeners were similarly affected, reaffirming the power of words to take our breath away. So while the “face with tears of joy” emoji may be the most common expression in our language, I’m willing to hold out for those rare moments that elicit actual tears of joy. I’d rather be written a love letter than sent a heart eyes emoji any day.It’s been a big year for our culture. A huge year, one might say. Within the course of less than twelve months, we’ve witnessed history-making steps in the name of civil rights and social progress in both forward and backwards directions. We’ve become increasingly accepting of expressing sexual fluidity, and champion those willing to advocate for individual rights and question the norm. Yes, it’s been a big year -- quite possibly indescribable in some cases. As it turns out, the Oxford Dictionaries agree. This year’s Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year isn’t a word at all. (A brief pause while you re-read that sentence, I couldn’t believe it either. Okay, let’s pick up.) The “word” best reflecting the cultural year in language is the “face with tears of joy” emoji. Seriously. Other contenders on the short list of potential winners included “Brexit,” a term for the hypothetical departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union; the phrase “on fleek,” used as an adjective to describe something extremely attractive or stylish; and “refugee,” used in the standard sense to describe a person who has been forced to leave their country to escape war, persecution or natural disaster. These candidates ultimately missed the mark in being named the top word of 2015, which says a lot about our culture’s current emojinal state. “You can see how traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually focused demands of 21st century communication,” says Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Dictionaries in a release. “It’s not surprising that a pictographic script like emoji has stepped in to fill those gaps—it’s flexible, immediate, and infuses tone beautifully.” One of the major draws of utilizing emoji is the adaptability of the symbol. It can be used to soften blows of sarcasm, as a more aesthetically-pleasing expression of “LOL”, and also to express frustration. There’ve been many times when girlfriends recount text exchanges with would-be suitors over brunch or cocktails, and follow up describing a particularly sarcastic statement with “Well, I sent the crying while laughing emoji, so he knew I was kidding.” In other situations, the emoji reflects situations that are a bit more grim. “Laughing through tears” is frequently used as a buffer to express frustration at social injustices, a form of humor to deflect from the stark reality that we’re faced with situations so dire our language fails to accurately articulate the emotional implications. The 2014 word of the year was “vape,” based on the rising popularity of electronic cigarettes. The top word of 2013 was “selfie,” which continues to dominate both our lexicon and Instagram feeds. It’s not surprising that we’ve reached the cultural moment where an emoji most accurately captures the values of our culture. Utilizing the cutesy symbols used to be exclusive to teenage girls, but linguistic shifts now have emoji being used in meaningful ways by the likes of potential presidential candidates such as Hilary Clinton. This year saw a solution to the backlash against light-skinned emoji bias, when the standard set was replaced by a broad spectrum of skin tones we can now choose from. This update not only reflected company’s receptivity to feedback from users, but showcased what seems to now be universal use of emoji based on multiple demographics. Emoji are so popular that it’s now possible to use them for weblinks. I wonder about the future of emoji. Given the ubiquity of “selfie” and “vape,” it’s possible that in a few years we’ll see a movement away from the myriad tiny faces and objects currently used to express our emotional complexities. For many reasons I hope we do. While I enjoy the convenience and colorful display of emoji, there’s something derivative about it, limiting the value of a statement’s or expression’s potential impact. I was at a party this weekend where a friend of mine read a poem that I’m still processing because of the way he pieced together his words and images. It made me realize how much I miss being gutted by language. Other listeners were similarly affected, reaffirming the power of words to take our breath away. So while the “face with tears of joy” emoji may be the most common expression in our language, I’m willing to hold out for those rare moments that elicit actual tears of joy. I’d rather be written a love letter than sent a heart eyes emoji any day.It’s been a big year for our culture. A huge year, one might say. Within the course of less than twelve months, we’ve witnessed history-making steps in the name of civil rights and social progress in both forward and backwards directions. We’ve become increasingly accepting of expressing sexual fluidity, and champion those willing to advocate for individual rights and question the norm. Yes, it’s been a big year -- quite possibly indescribable in some cases. As it turns out, the Oxford Dictionaries agree. This year’s Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year isn’t a word at all. (A brief pause while you re-read that sentence, I couldn’t believe it either. Okay, let’s pick up.) The “word” best reflecting the cultural year in language is the “face with tears of joy” emoji. Seriously. Other contenders on the short list of potential winners included “Brexit,” a term for the hypothetical departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union; the phrase “on fleek,” used as an adjective to describe something extremely attractive or stylish; and “refugee,” used in the standard sense to describe a person who has been forced to leave their country to escape war, persecution or natural disaster. These candidates ultimately missed the mark in being named the top word of 2015, which says a lot about our culture’s current emojinal state. “You can see how traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually focused demands of 21st century communication,” says Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Dictionaries in a release. “It’s not surprising that a pictographic script like emoji has stepped in to fill those gaps—it’s flexible, immediate, and infuses tone beautifully.” One of the major draws of utilizing emoji is the adaptability of the symbol. It can be used to soften blows of sarcasm, as a more aesthetically-pleasing expression of “LOL”, and also to express frustration. There’ve been many times when girlfriends recount text exchanges with would-be suitors over brunch or cocktails, and follow up describing a particularly sarcastic statement with “Well, I sent the crying while laughing emoji, so he knew I was kidding.” In other situations, the emoji reflects situations that are a bit more grim. “Laughing through tears” is frequently used as a buffer to express frustration at social injustices, a form of humor to deflect from the stark reality that we’re faced with situations so dire our language fails to accurately articulate the emotional implications. The 2014 word of the year was “vape,” based on the rising popularity of electronic cigarettes. The top word of 2013 was “selfie,” which continues to dominate both our lexicon and Instagram feeds. It’s not surprising that we’ve reached the cultural moment where an emoji most accurately captures the values of our culture. Utilizing the cutesy symbols used to be exclusive to teenage girls, but linguistic shifts now have emoji being used in meaningful ways by the likes of potential presidential candidates such as Hilary Clinton. This year saw a solution to the backlash against light-skinned emoji bias, when the standard set was replaced by a broad spectrum of skin tones we can now choose from. This update not only reflected company’s receptivity to feedback from users, but showcased what seems to now be universal use of emoji based on multiple demographics. Emoji are so popular that it’s now possible to use them for weblinks. I wonder about the future of emoji. Given the ubiquity of “selfie” and “vape,” it’s possible that in a few years we’ll see a movement away from the myriad tiny faces and objects currently used to express our emotional complexities. For many reasons I hope we do. While I enjoy the convenience and colorful display of emoji, there’s something derivative about it, limiting the value of a statement’s or expression’s potential impact. I was at a party this weekend where a friend of mine read a poem that I’m still processing because of the way he pieced together his words and images. It made me realize how much I miss being gutted by language. Other listeners were similarly affected, reaffirming the power of words to take our breath away. So while the “face with tears of joy” emoji may be the most common expression in our language, I’m willing to hold out for those rare moments that elicit actual tears of joy. I’d rather be written a love letter than sent a heart eyes emoji any day.

Continue Reading...