THROW ANOTHER LOG ON THE FIRE BOYS...

It seems only appropriate to take a moment to mark the way, way, way untimely death of one of the most virulent, racist, homophobic, misogynistic politicians of recent American history, Jesse Helms. Most North Carolinians believe in a just God: and if they are right, She has dispatched the late Senator to the place where evildoers find no respite from their sins.

To Jesse's shade, I offer up "Wallace"--a song told from the vantage point of the Devil himself (who has a Wallace bumper sticker on his Cadillac--and no doubt a Helms one too). The song is from Southern Rock Opera, one of the greatest albums by the greatest Southern band of Jesse's last decade, The Drive-By Truckers. So throw another log on the fire boys...George Corley Wallace has company.

Throw another log on the fire, boys, George Wallace is coming to stay

When he met St. Peter at the pearly gates, I'd like to think that a black man stood in the way.

I know "All should be forgiven", but he did what he done so well

So throw another log on the fire boys,

George Wallace is a coming…

P.S. A little more on Jesse: examples of his vile rhetoric, the Helms-McCain connection, and a really smart post about Jesse Helms's long history of racism.

SIX PERCENT FOR INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY

I count it a great few days that my readers have come from across the political spectrum. A recent study suggests that left-wing bloggers spend most of their time among their ideological kin and rightist bloggers spend most of their time with their ilk. Only 6% of political blog readers regularly visit both left and right blogs. So thanks to new neoconservatives,Rustbelt liberals, and Canadian feminist-socialists for finding their way here. I'm happy to be part of the proud six percent. I'll be visiting your sites regularly.

TALKING ABOUT MY GENERATION

Is the academy destined to become a haven for bland, apolitical scholars?

The NYT reported today on a study of political beliefs among academics by sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons. Gross and Simmons found a generational gap between academics who came of age in the 1960s and those who came of age in the 1990s. The former are more likely to self-identify as liberal and consider themselves as activists. A majority of the latter call themselves moderates.

I am not a child of the 1960s (except in the broadest sense that everyone in our time lives in the era's shadow). The whole world wasn't watching me and my generation. I inadvertently drooled through Kennedy's last year, learned to walk just a few months before LBJ took office, and was forbidden from watching the evening news coverage of the Vietnam War. I was too young to join the 60s protests, occupy campus buildings, and party with the counterculture. I don't really remember 1968, other than watching the Detroit Tigers win the World Series, and that's not because I spent the year in a smoky haze of pot. I didn't inhale.

But I am not a child of fin-de-siecle America either. As a young academic at a rich university, I found myself uncomfortable in the 1990s, in an era that was the zenith of neoliberalism, when income inequality was taken for granted, when students from super-rich families believed that they were "middle class," when hyper-professionalization ran amuck through undergraduate and graduate education, and when uncritical acceptance of market values shaped even people with whom I share many common political and social values.

In age, I am closer to the younger scholars, but politically I am closer to the older ones.

In many respects, the implications of Gross and Simmons's study are depressing--and not because I hold some romantic brief for the 60s generation. In both print and in public forums, I have pointed out many of the blind spots of boomer politics and scholarship. One of the greatest failures of the 60s left was that it was too suspicious of power, deeply anti-institutional, and too uncritical about grassroots resistance, local control, and the power of the "people." The left's suspicion of organized politics, in particular, exacted a high price. To paraphrase Todd Gitlin (in one of his better moments) while the right was taking over government and the media, the left was taking over English departments.

Don't get me wrong: I am not calling for the reassertion of liberal or leftist hegemony in the university. Overall, academia is not diverse enough politically for my taste. I am all for robust debate among people of differing political vantage points. I have many colleagues whose politics I find problematic, but we share the common goal of fostering intellectual discussion and training our students to examine their assumptions, whatever they may be, with rigor. My political skills are sharper because I spend time with people who disagree with my politics--forcing me to express my ideas more clearly, carefully, and subtly. There's nothing more intellectually deadening than spending all your time preaching to the choir.

But the trend that Gross and Simmons identify: the dominance of political moderation among academics, bodes ill for the intellectual life of the university. Moderation spells blandness to me. The one thing to be said about boomer academics is that, even when they are wrong, they are passionate. They argue like it matters--and sometimes it does. Passion is an essential ingredient of their intellectual life--and it should be of ours too. I'll take scholarship that tries to engage the central problematics of our day--that has political implications--over bland, if technically competent work, that eschews risks.

The leftists and left-liberals of the 60s generation believed that the university could be the seedbed of revolution. They were naive--and wrong. But I hope that as they pass into retirement that their passion for engaged scholarship, for bringing the world into the ivory tower and climbing out of the ivory tower and spending time in the messy, non-academic world does not disappear into a sea of blandness. That would be a real loss.

OBAMA AND FAITH-BASED SOCIAL SERVICES

Yesterday Obama announced his support for continuing, in modified form, the faith-based initiatives of the Bush administration. Progressive religious leaders, like Jim Wallis, have praised Obama's plan. But predictably, it has taken hits from the religious right for his argument that organizations taking federal funds should not be permitted to discriminate on grounds of religion or use the funds to proselytize. And he has also taken flack from staunch advocates of church-state separation who argue that no religious organization should receive federal support, no matter how worthy its work.

Both sides overdraw their case. To the conservatives: the federal government (and all grantmakers, for that matter) have the right to put strings on the funding that they provide. If you are unwilling to accept the strictures in service of your scriptures, then simply don't take the money. During the Bush administration there have been too many religious groups gorging at the public trough for whom service provision is a thinly-veiled cover for conversion or which are pursuing wholly religious-based programs like abstinence-only sex education that do not serve the public good.

But the church-state absolutists go too far in the other direction. Spend anytime in the inner city and you'll find some of the most effective social service provision coming from faith-based organizations. Churches provide lunches, shelters, anti-substance abuse counseling, and assistance to victims of abuse. Many of the counselors and support personnel employed by these programs are part of the communities they serve. They are knowledgeable--and their neighbors trust them. They know how to reach out to the people. Obama's South Side Chicago is full of effective church-based programs, just as is my neighborhood in Philadelphia.

There is a risk that church-based social programs will compete with or supplant more effective governmental programs. Religious groups should not be the sole or primary providers of social services. Most church groups have the will but not the capacity to address social problems as effective as larger-scale organizations and, dare I say, even the government itself. There are many non-faith based nonprofits that do as good or better a job as their religious counterparts--and they should not suffer government favoritism toward religious groups. And to reiterate a point: all private-sector service providers need to be monitored, regulated, and especially evaluated. This is especially true with groups like church-based social service agencies that might, if left unsupervised, be tempted to use federal money inappropriately. Accountability is key. Regulation matters.

One last church-state point. The U.S. government already provides a massive subsidy to churches, one that dwarfs any amount of money that an Obama administration will provide to faith-based initiatives. That is, of course, the U.S. tax code, which exempts religious organizations from paying taxes and which allows private contributions to churches to be tax deductible. This federal tax expenditure channels billions of dollars into proselytizing efforts, creationism, anti-gay and lesbian programs, and religious fanaticism of every variety. Other than the loosely-enforced IRS provision that churches can lose their tax-exempt status if they engage in political campaigning, there are no checks on what, in effect, you and I are subsidizing through our tax policies. This is a far more problematic aspect of church-state relations than well-regulated, carefully monitored, non-discriminatory religious-based social services like those Obama proposes.

BITTERNESS WATCH

Just as I had surmised, the supposed uprising of bitter women, implacable in their anger at the Obama triumph over Hillary Clinton, is the product of sleazy Republican machinations. Of course, many feminists were justifiably angry at the misogyny directed toward candidate Clinton--and for good reason. But the idea that they would rush to the embrace of anti-feminist, sexist, and retrograde John McCain is yet another perverse example of MSM women-bashing (women are SO irrational and emotional that they would support sexist McCain) and lazy reporting. It took blogger Amanda Marcotte just a few minutes to do what major newspapers and the broadcast news--too credulous and too feckless--could not do. She unearthed the Republican roots of the supposed feminist avengers of Hillary. But this is just the beginning. It's just a matter of time before we hear from "civil rights" leaders for McCain...and so on. Let the swift-boating and ratfucking begin.

POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY

Political statistician Andrew Gelman has produced very interesting graphs of economic and social politics by state. Graph 1 plots the average economic social and economic positions of adults. Some of the results are obvious: Massachusetts is the most liberal and Idaho (those black helicopters are coming) is the most conservative of states. For Democrats hoping to make inroads into Southern states like Georgia, the data are not promising. But swing states Nevada, Virginia, New Mexico, and, yes even North Carolina, show up right in the middle. They could be in play.



When the data are broken out by party (graph 2), the results are a reminder of the biggest difference between Democrats and Republicans: the economy. "Democrats are much more liberal than Republicans on the economic dimension: Democrats in the most conservative states are still much more liberal than Republicans in even the most liberal states," writes Gelman. "On social issues there is more overlap (although in any given state, the average Republican is more conservative than the average Democrat)."

Republicans since Nixon have played the faux populist card, but the GOP is the party of economic special interests. McCain is not anywhere close to winning over swing voters on economic issues. But I worry that the Obama campaign's bipartisanship will consist of ceding ground on the economic issues that still define grassroots Democrats' sense of what is right, while continuing to let the Republicans define the terms of the debate. I hope not.

WEEKEND UPDATE

I have just a few minutes this beautiful but very hot Saturday afternoon. Here are a interesting detours along the information superhighway where I encourage you to linger for a few minutes.

Phil Klinkner at the Monkey Cage follows up his discussion of race and the election with an analysis of data from a recent Roper Poll. His finding: Obama might lose four to five points against McCain in the polls because of white racism.

Kai Wright at The Nation writes a brilliant, sobering piece on the devastating consequences of the mortgage crisis for blacks.

Jericho Parms (great name) at the Brooklyn Rail introduces Clayton Patterson, a documentary photographer who captured New York's Lower East Side as it went through the throes of gentrification and struggle against it. Also worth reading is editor Theodore Hamm's interview with hip hop politico Kevin Powell.

EYES ON THE CITY

I spend a lot of time exploring urban neighborhoods. As much as possible, I drive down side streets and avoid expressways. The back way is invariably the most interesting way. When I visit cities for the first time (or the first time as a sentient adult), I find a well-informed, historically and sociologically savvy tour guides to show me around. And in cities that I know well, I gladly reciprocate. For those who can't join a tour, I try in my prose--as well as I can with words--to put the visual into text.

I wish I were a decent photographer, but alas I'm not. Fortunately, I have had the gift of spending hours driving around Detroit, Camden, and Philadelphia with photographer Camilo José Vergara. Several years ago, Camilo won a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant." Usually when the list of MacArthur winners is published, I scratch my head wondering what went through the minds of the selection committee. But not with Camilo. In my reckoning, a genius is someone who can introduce you to a whole new way of looking at the world. Whether the view is from the roof of one of his dinged up rental cars or in the pages of one of his subtle photo essays, Vergara leads me to see familiar places through a completely different pair of eyes. I know Detroit better than all but a handful of people, but still Camilo takes me to places that I thought I knew and forces me to reinterpret them altogether. From closeups of security bars to panoramic views of decaying streetscapes over time, Vergara captures the essence of the Rustbelt in both the micro and macro. His series on urban billboards in his monograph, American Ruins, re-interprets urban life through one of its most ubiquitous and banal forms. His photographs in How the Other Half Worships of storefront churches, converted synagogues, decaying cathedrals--along with graffiti murals of Christ and Martin Luther King, Jr.--capture the vitality of urban religion, whose practices and forms are too often reduced to bland generalizations about red states and blue states, values and morality.

Vergara is, at heart, a romantic: someone who finds sublime beauty in decay. His photographs of Camden, New Jersey's long-closed Carnegie Library, a beaux-arts monument constructed in 1903, captures the grandeur of a building whose architecture reflects its grand aspirations as a great civic institution and the loss of that vision over the last half century. (Vergara's Camden photos, especially his historical series, capture the transformation of the Rustbelt brilliantly). Vergara is not solely or primarily a photographer as social commentator, though some have compared him to Jacob Riis. He is a visionary, an artist of the highest order. His stunning vision of the interior of the library, showing three symmetrical trees growing from what was the floor of the main reading room, is the freshest and most interesting contribution to one of the oldest genres in art: the four seasons. Above is "summer."

FEMINIST OBAMA VERSUS SEXIST MC CAIN

There are still rumblings of bitterness about the Obama campaign among some former Hillary supporters (or more likely McCain supporters engaged in the Nixonian art of "ratfucking" and pretending to be Hillaryites). And the McCainiacs, led by shill Carleton Fiorina, are doing their best to fan the flames of victimhood (identity politics is bad unless, of course, it benefits the G.O.P.). But when it comes to the issues--and to questions of fundamental respect for women--Obama is so obviously better than his Republican opponent. For those who need to be reminded of McCain's chronic sexism, TPM just reposted the video of McCain's infamous response to the "bitch" question last fall. His smarmy, snarky, smirky response is damning. Watch it.

More to the point, Obama's speech on women's issues yesterday makes the distinction between the two candidates unambiguous. Obama supports equal pay, anti-discrimination protections, and most importantly paid family leave. Amen. Here's an excerpt:

Now Senator McCain is an honorable man, and we respect his service. But when you look at our records and our plans on issues that matter to working women, the choice could not be clearer.

It starts with equal pay. 62 percent of working women in America earn half – or more than half – of their family’s income. But women still earn only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. In 2008, you’d think that Washington would be united in its determination to fight for equal pay. That’s why I was proud to co-sponsor the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, which would have reversed last year’s Supreme Court decision, which made it more difficult for women to challenge pay discrimination on the job.

But Senator McCain thinks the Supreme Court got it right. He opposed the Fair Pay Restoration Act. He suggested that the reason women don’t have equal pay isn’t discrimination on the job – it’s because they need more education and training. That’s just totally wrong. Lilly Ledbetter’s problem was not that she was somehow unqualified or unprepared for higher-paying positions. She most certainly was, and by all reports she was an excellent employee. Her problem was that her employer paid her less than men who were doing the exact same work.

John McCain just has it wrong. He said the Fair Pay Restoration Act “opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems.” But I can’t think of any problem more important than making sure that women get equal pay for equal work. It’s a matter of equality. It’s a matter of fairness. That’s why I stood up for equal pay in the Illinois State Senate, and helped pass a law to give 330,000 more women protection from paycheck discrimination. That’s why I’ve been fighting to pass legislation in the Senate, so that employers don’t get away with discriminating against hardworking women like Lilly Ledbetter. And that’s why I’ll continue to stand up for equal pay as President. Senator McCain won’t, and that’s a real difference in this election.

As the son of a single mother, I also don’t accept an America that makes women choose between their kids and their careers. It’s not acceptable that women are denied jobs or promotions because they’ve got kids at home. It’s not acceptable that forty percent of working women don’t have a single paid sick day. That’s wrong for working parents, it’s wrong for America’s children, and it’s not who we are as a country.

I’ll be a President who stands up for the American family by giving all working parents a hand. To help with childcare, I’ll expand the Child and Dependent Care tax credit, so that working families can receive up to a 50 percent credit for their child care expenses. I’ll double funding for afterschool programs that help children learn and give parents relief. And I’ll invest $10 billion to guarantee access to quality, affordable, early childhood education for every child in America.

And with more and more households headed by two working parents – or a single working parent – it’s also time to dramatically expand the Family and Medical Leave Act. Since more Americans are working for small businesses, I’ll expand FMLA to cover businesses with as few as 25 employees – this will reach millions of American workers who aren’t covered today. We’ll also allow workers to take leave to care for elderly parents. We’ll allow parents to take 24 hours of annual leave to join school activities with their kids. And we’ll cover employees who are victims of domestic violence or sexual assault.

I’ll also stand up for paid leave. Today, 78 percent of workers covered by FMLA don’t take leave because it isn’t paid. That’s just not fair. You shouldn’t be punished for getting sick or dealing with a family crisis. That’s why I’ll require employers to provide all of their workers with seven paid sick days a year. And I’ll support a 50-state strategy to adopt paid-leave systems, and set aside $1.5 billion to fund it. I have a clear plan to expand paid leave and sick leave, Senator McCain doesn’t, and that’s a real difference in this election.

WHITE RACIAL ATTITUDES AND THE ELECTION

The question of race and electoral politics is the subject of much speculation, but little hard evidence. Yesterday's WaPo presents the results of the first detailed survey of race and public opinion since Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee. The findings: "nearly half of all Americans say race relations in the country are in bad shape and three in 10 acknowledge feelings of racial prejudice..." The findings follow patterns in most previous surveys of race relations: namely a divergence between black and white assessments of the state of race relations in the United States. The WaPo found that most whites (53 percent) think that race relations are good, but that only a little more than a third of blacks (36 percent) agree.

The most relevant finding was on the impact of racial attitudes on white support for Obama and McCain. The WaPo constructed a "sensitivity index," combining answers to survey questions on prejudice, the existence of racial discrimination, and cross-racial friendships and found that those who ranked lowest in those three categories support John McCain two-to-one.

At the Monkey Cage, two political scientists offer different opinions on the question of the impact of race on white electoral behavior. One of the country's best scholars of race and politics, Phil Klinkner, highlights the WaPo's finding that "racial attitudes have a big impact on whites’ candidate preferences, even when you control for partisanship." His colleague John Sides, by contrast, cites three studies of white preferences for black candidates and offers a more optimistic prognosis. But those studies might not shed much light on this year's election. One comes focuses on white voters in cities whose experience with black mayors leads them to change their voting behavior, a group that accounts for a very small segment of the white electorate. Most white voters in America have never had the chance to respond to a black incumbent because they live in overwhelmingly white communities, state legislative districts, and Congressional districts. The second, of House races in 1996 and 1998 found that white voters were not less likely to vote Democratic when the candidate was black. But it is quite likely that those districts are atypical: whites who live in majority black districts are quite different than their counterparts who have chosen to live in overwhelmingly white places. The third study--of black candidates in statewide races--draws from only 12 races--is too thin.

For now, I think Phil probably has it right--but there's a lot more research to be done.

PRESSURE, PRESSURE, AND STILL MORE PRESSURE

The always astute Kathy G. has a post on Barack Obama that everyone should read and circulate widely.

Her take home point is grounded in an understanding of the limitations of the presidency and a realistic view of the critical role that social movements have played in fostering progressive change in the American past. Our political aspirations should be greater than throwing the bums out of office. As the great A. Philip Randolph put it, social change comes about through "pressure, pressure, and still more pressure." Regime change is necessary but not at all sufficient.

The nub of Kathy's argument is here:

If we want real change in this country, the place to look for it is not in our so-called leaders, but in ourselves. What we need, in short, is a movement. Without such a movement, President Obama is not going to be able to achieve a whole lot more than President Clinton or President Carter did. But with such a movement, we may actually get somewhere. FDR was able to achieve great things because he had the strong support of a powerful labor movement. Similarly, the civil rights movement was the wind at LBJ's back. But I ask you, what will President Obama have?

It's time to organize.

RUSTBELT PLACE OF THE WEEK: CLEVELAND

Rustbelt urban life is full of juxtapositions, often jarring. The great cities of the Northeast and the Midwest were the boomtowns of the industrial age. Their cityscapes reflect the tremendous capital of the robber barons and industrial titans of a century ago. It's a risk to romanticize the corporate leaders of yore, for the Gilded Age was a time of staggering inequality. Working conditions in turn-of-the-century factories were abysmal. Debilitating industrial accidents were commonplace and, in the era before workers' compensation and insurance, a severed hand or a lost eye meant a lifetime of abject poverty. And urban environments were appalling and degraded because of unregulated industrial pollution. Rivers ran multi-colored with effluvia from factories, coal soot fell like black snow, and city skies were often dark with sulfur-laden pollutants. You can still see the traces of the industrial past on unrenovated limestone and marble buildings, discolored by pollution and often scarred by the effects of years of acid rain. But Robber Barons expressed their vanity by engaging in great civic ventures. Nearly every Rustbelt city, big or small, is chock full of museums, symphony halls, and--especially--libraries, open to the masses but bankrolled by the classes.

Cleveland, my Rustbelt Place of the Week, embodies this history. Its cityscape is littered with abandoned houses, ruined commercial districts, and rotting factory buildings. Like many industrial cities, it laid waste to much of its waterfront. The Cuyahoga River, so polluted that it once caught on fire, was the butt end of Cleveland's industry. Large stretches of the Cuyahoga, between the semi-gentrified Flats downtown, and the parkland south of the city, are still ruined by decades of industrial neglect. And the Lake Erie shorefront from downtown several miles eastward, is mess of highway, industrial and commercial land (much of it unused), and a little-trafficked airport. The disinvestment that has ravaged most Rustbelt cities has left its mark on Cleveland's downtown, though some of the fine nineteenth century, buildings once home to warehouses and factories, has been converted into apartments and restaurants. Still, it is striking, coming from the East Coast, at how little retail exists in downtown Cleveland. Other than the Tower Center (which has had a troubled recent past) it's damn nigh impossible to shop downtown.

Still, Cleveland is a beautiful city--one that does not deserve its long time moniker, "the mistake by the lake." It's West Side Market (pictured above) is one of the great urban markets in America. Last fall, I had a fabulous bratwurst sandwich from a little stall there, before heading over to the nearby Great Lakes Brewery to wash it down with a locally-brewed ale. Cleveland has some quirky and characterful neighborhoods. Just south of downtown is the Slavic Village, a neighborhood that is a hodgepodge of worker-built homes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And the jewel of Cleveland is the cultural district around Case Western Reserve University, home to all of the institutions built and richly endowed by Cleveland's once mighty upper class. There is enough cultural vitality in that part of Cleveland to support a lively Cinemateque, a weekly gathering of cineastes who can watch classic, obscure, and recent films that would never, never make it into a suburban multiplex. And Cleveland is home to one of the most robust movements for community economic development--a fact visible in the new housing and rehabilitation in many of its working-class neighborhoods.

Cleveland has more than its share of problems: chronic crime, deteriorating schools, housing abandonment, an inadequate tax base, and a deep and still-unresolved history of racial segregation. Yet, like all troubled cities, a visitor can find there too the signs of a great past, a vital present, and maybe, just maybe a more promising future.

GROUND CONTROL TO MAJOR TOM

From the blogosphere into space...Rustbelt Intellectual will be on satellite radio this evening.

Listen to Sirius Satellite Radio Indie Talk Channel 110 for the Rustbelt Intellectual in real time, talking about blogging. The program is "Blog Bunker," 5:30pm EDT, Thursday, June 19.

I'M WORRIED

I am still worried about the ways that race is going to play out in the fall election. Today a friend from Blue Jersey reported his conversations at a recent party with a mix of middle-aged and older white New Jerseyans. There were some die-hard Republicans and unwavering Democrats in the mix. Their political preferences were clear. But many of the folks, those independent voters, expressed concerns about supporting a black candidate. My friend was amazed that in a non-media, non-political wonk, non-blogging South Jersey crowd how many people spontaneously raised the spurious Michele Obama "whitey" story. Clearly they missed her witty response:
"I mean 'whitey'? That's something that George Jefferson would say."

The most worrisome question came from one of the party-goers, a moderate who will probably support Obama, opined that he expects that many whites will find it unacceptable to vote for a black candidate no matter what his positions. The question for him--and for the country--is how big is the "some"?

The polls are looking good for Obama right now, including in swing states like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. But it's early--and a lot can happen between now and November. In the meantime, I'm going to worry.

WE HAVE NOT OVERCOME

All of the talk about "post-racial" America and the dawn of the "post-civil rights era" is belied by grim statistics on race and the mortgage market just reported by the Economic Policy Institute. Blacks and Hispanics are nearly twice as likely as blacks to hold high-cost, subprime home loans. In fact, more than half of home loans to blacks and just a little less than half of home loans to Hispanics in 2006 were subprime. The table above compares the percentage of each group holding subprime mortgages.

The cause: persistent discrimination in the home loan market. The EPI's analysis is sobering.

"Recent studies suggest that creditworthiness—alone or in combination with factors other than race—cannot account for these disparities. When researchers from the Federal Reserve and the Wharton School of Business conducted an analysis that took into account the percent of adults in a neighborhood who were a very high credit risk, they still found a positive relationship between the prevalence of subprime loans and the share of minorities in a neighborhood. An analysis by the Center for Responsible Lending found that even after taking into account individual credit scores and other characteristics, Hispanic and African American borrowers were more than 30% more likely to receive higher-rate subprime loans. These and other studies, coupled with the long history of racial discrimination in lending, raise the prospect that discrimination may be a factor in the high rates of subprime loans among Hispanics and African Americans."

We have a long way to go before we can claim that we have overcome.

NOT-SO-HAPPY BIRTHDAY MINIMUM WAGE

Seventy-five years ago, just a month before my father was born to working-class immigrants in the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act, one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history. The NIRA created the minimum wage. In soaring rhetoric that recognized the dangers of inequality in America, FDR argued that a "self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no economic reason for chiseling workers’ wages.” Amen.

Check out today's Times for a superb op-ed by Adam Cohen on the New Deal and the troubled history of the minimum wage. We are no longer a "self-supporting and self-respecting democracy" in the Rooseveltian sense. Cohen points out that the net effect of the Bush administration's economic policies has been chiseling workers' wages. (At the same time, Republican tax giveaways have lined the pockets of the richest with the proceeds). Cohen makes the sensible argument that "there should be talk of tax credits and health care — and the minimum wage. Advocates for the working poor argue for a better raise than the one Congress passed last year — perhaps one set at half the national average hourly wage, which would bring it roughly to where it was in the 1960s, and tie it to the rate of inflation." That Cohen's argument sounds radical is a reminder of how impoverished our political discourse has become after decades of neoliberal economic policy, especially after seven plus years of Bushism.

One of the unexpected benefits of the prolonged Democratic primary is a renewed interest in the problem of economic inequality. This week's issue of The Nation is indispensible reading for those concerned about the growing gap between rich and poor. Emanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, two superb economists, find that the the economic gap in the United States has not been as high since the Great Depression. Their data are presented in the graph above, available in a larger, more readable version here. Left Business Observer's Doug Henwood, a rigorous economic analyst who knows Wall Street from the inside and outside, contributes a piece comparing today with the Gilded Age which ends with the sober reflection that the major difference between the two is the lack of robust social movements challenging inequality today. The expansion of regulation in the Progressive era took the form that it did because of pressure from below. The same goes for the Great Depression and the New Deal. The take-away point from the sum of The Nation articles is this: if we elect Barack Obama in the fall, pressure from the left is necessary to pave the way for systemic reform. If there is a Bush/McCain White House--with a renewal of tax and economic policies that favor the richest segment of the population--one can only hope that the left does not remain quiescent on economic issues. We can't afford to be silent as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, while the ideal of economic democracy languishes.

GET REAL: MOVE TO HYDE PARK

Several times a year, early and often as the machine pols would say, I make my way to Chicago. The Windy City is an incomparable place, home to some of America's greatest architecture--including Frank Lloyd Wright's most important houses and the exquisite Monadnock Building, an early skyscraper built with load-bearing masonry walls. Chicago is also one of America's most diverse cities: it has a white minority, a large African American population still concentrated in some of America's most segregated neighborhoods, a rapidly-growing Hispanic population--mainly Mexican--and sizable enclaves of immigrants from South and East Asia. Chicago is a gritty place, despite the glitz of the Loop, the Miracle Mile, and the luxury apartments of Lakeshore Drive. Its economy was ravaged by deindustrialization and the remnants of its once-mighty past as the workshop of the world can be found hulking over the South and West Sides. Chicago has staggeringly high rates of poverty and unemployment, especially among its African American population. It's a city that embodies the contradictions at the heart of modern American society: wrenching poverty amidst great wealth, racial segregation and extraordinary diversity, disinvestment and conspicuous consumption.

The Windy City--or a little section of it--is the subject of a cloying article in the current Weekly Standard. Andrew Ferguson jetted into Chicago to visit Barack Obama's neighborhood, Hyde Park, assiduously gathering material to offer another version of the tired but endlessly recycled conservative argument that the Democratic presidential candidate is an out-of-touch elitist. In Ferguson's telling, Hyde Park is a weird place peopled by an "alarmingly high number of men wandering about looking like NPR announcers--the wispy beards and wire rims, the pressed jeans and unscuffed sneakers, the backpacks and the bikes." (I don't know many NPR announcers, but my guess is that there isn't a dress code there. And who wears pressed jeans?) "The place seems unrooted," continues Ferguson, in a stream of blather that I won't keep quoting.

Although Hyde Park is one of the few racially diverse neighborhoods in the country, Ferguson finds even that problematic. Ferguson substitutes coffee shop ethnography for real research and points out that: "It's not often noted that the neighborhood's diversity has its limits. 'In Hyde Park,' a resident told me, '"integration" means white people and black people." The nation's fastest growing ethnic group, Hispanics, is scarcely represented at all; same for Asians." Rustbelt Intellectual Standard Warning No. 1: Andrew, data is not the sum of anecdote. Hyde Park, as one of its more rigorous social scientists and sharp-tongued bloggers reminds us, has a sizable Asian population and some Hispanic residents. It's also class heterogeneous in a way that most American neighborhoods are not.

To highlight Hyde Park's "isolation," Ferguson drives the half hour from Obama's "mansion" to Trinity UCC, Obama's former church, which is in a blue-collar, African American neighborhood--to Ferguson further evidence of Obama's out-of-touch lifestyle. Should Obama be living in a little, rundown bungalow instead of Hyde Park? Then, somehow, he would be one of the people.

In his prattle about Hyde Park's "isolation," Ferguson misses a very important point. Hyde Park is a distinctive place that contrasts with the surrounding, mostly poor and working-class black neighborhoods that dominate Chicago's South Side. But Hyde Parkers, unlike residents of America's truly isolated suburban communities, are part of a polity that is economically, socially, racially, and ethnically diverse. They pay their taxes to Chicago--rather than skipping across city lines and, in the process, avoiding responsibility for the city, its poor and elderly populations, and the social services that they require. They are called to serve on juries whose composition reflects, to some extent at least, the diversity of their city. In other words, Hyde Parkers are not in the slightest bit isolated politically.

The real elitists are people like John and Cindy McCain who live in a $4.72 million luxury condo in Phoenix. Or George W. Bush, who pretends to be 'jes folks, but lived in lily white, upscale Highland Park, Texas before he made it to the White House and spends his spare time at the "Western White House," usually described as a humble ranch, but which includes two 4000 square foot houses, one custom built for the Bushes, a large swimming pool and more--all on a property of more than 1100 acres. Bush is still a member of the posh Highland Park Methodist Church, in one of Dallas' richest suburbs. He doesn't see little bungalows on his way to worship. His God dwells in the land where yes, the camel and the rich man can both find their way through the eye of the needle and make it to heaven. McCain and Bush are the true, out of touch elitists. To them: get real: move to Hyde Park.

IN DEFENSE OF REGULATION

In the campaign season of 2008, regulation is a decidedly unsexy topic. Yet the outcomes of the presidential and congressional races this fall matter because of the divergent positions that Republicans and Democrats take on the question of the regulatory powers of the state.

The collapse of two construction cranes in New York, the fact that sports utility vehicles are not subject to the same anti-pollution controls as smaller passenger cars, tomatoes infested with salmonella, lead-painted Thomas the Tank Engine toys, the spread of subprime lending and the ensuing foreclosure crisis, and downer cows in meatpacking firms--these are all diverse examples of regulatory failure.

Changing Society, one of the smartest academic blogs, offers an astute analysis of the "two imperatives that work against public health and safety in most modern societies: the private incentive that the provider has to cut corners, and the perennial temptation of corruption that is inherent within a regulatory process. On the providers’ side, there is a constant business incentive to lower costs by substituting inferior ingredients or materials, to tolerate less-than-sanitary conditions in the back-of-restaurant areas, or to skimp on necessary maintenance of inherently dangerous systems. And on the regulatory side, there is the omnipresent possibility of collusion between inspectors and providers."

Changing Society poses three key questions: "how effective are the systems of regulation and inspection that we have in our key industries — food, pharmaceuticals, hospitals, transportation, and construction? How much confidence can we have in the basic health and safety features of these fundamental social goods? And what sorts of institutional reforms do we need to undertake?"

Regulation is one of the most important issues at stake in November. Since the late 1970s, and accelerating during the Reagan/Bush years and again in Bush II, the Republicans have worked assiduously to limit the regulatory power of the federal government on the grounds that it creates inefficiencies and hinders capital accumulation. Liberals justifiably fret that Republican-appointed federal judges will whittle away at the precarious right to reproductive freedom. But Bush's newest appointees are, above all, characterized by their suspicion of federal regulatory agencies and their power.

John McCain is not as intensely anti-regulation as our current president, although on the financial industry, he holds his own with the deregulators--or as he put it earlier this year, “our financial market approach should include encouraging increased capital in financial institutions by removing regulatory, accounting and tax impediments to raising capital.” That doesn't bode well for a McCain administration. It's also highly likely that should he be elected, McCain will continue to fill the federal bench with judges hostile to regulation.

We have seen the negative consequences of the deregulatory impulse, particularly over the last seven and a half years. It's time to stand in defense of regulation.

RACE AND THE RACE

Paul Krugman should stick to writing about economics. In today's Times he joins the "we have overcome," "America is a postracial society," there's no more need for divisive civil rights politics bandwagon.

Krugman writes: "Fervent supporters of Barack Obama like to say that putting him in the White House would transform America. With all due respect to the candidate, that gets it backward. Mr. Obama is an impressive speaker who has run a brilliant campaign — but if he wins in November, it will be because our country has already been transformed. Mr. Obama’s nomination wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago. It’s possible today only because racial division, which has driven U.S. politics rightward for more than four decades, has lost much of its sting." Wishful thinking Paul. Maybe in Princeton and New York, but spend a little time in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. It's not quite so pretty out there.

And then the predictable bouquet: "Part of the credit surely goes to Bill Clinton, who ended welfare as we knew it. I’m not saying that the end of Aid to Families With Dependent Children was an unalloyed good thing; it created a great deal of hardship." It's true that the GOP doesn't welfare bait anymore, but I don't think its good policy to sell out poor women and their children for the sake of silencing GOP critics of welfare.

More evidence for the change: "I don’t think a politician today could get away with running the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad."

No doubt there have been significant changes in racial discourse in the United States in the last twenty years. In fact, since World War II, there has been a steady redefinition of what can and cannot be said in polite company and in print about race in American society. But racial practices, such as where you live and where you go to school, have changed much, much more slowly. Rates of black-white residential segregation declined somewhat in the 1990s throughout the U.S., but most major metropolitan areas in the country have very high rates of segregation. Rates of segregation are particularly high in big metropolitan areas in many of the key battleground states. Public education has resegregated since the 1970s. The results are reflected in the still staggeringly high gaps between blacks and whites by nearly every measure: socio-economic status, health, mortality, poverty, unemployment, and joblessness.

Quick note to Paul: Reverend Wright is the Willie Horton of 2008. The ads are already out there. Poke around a bit on the web. The worst is yet to come. And remember Harold Ford. A DLC type Democrat, in tune with his state politically, but undone (in part) by a race-baiting ad. Obama might run a brilliant campaign and he might be elected. But it's going to be despite the racial politics that run like a bitter current through American society, not because we have overcome.

My advice to Paul: Stick to economics.

PS No time for links today. But check out my previous posts on race for some of the sources that back up my arguments here.

THE BACK OF THE BUS

In 1968, before political campaigns were completely scripted, Robert F. Kennedy insisted on taking his entourage through some of the country's most impoverished neighborhoods. These were not just pass-throughs or convenient photo ops, but chances to get out and meet people. RFK disregarded the advice of his advisors and campaigned in impoverished Indian reservations. He spent real face time in places like Bed-Stuy. He spent hours with Cesar Chavez and strongly supported the cause of Mexican-American farmworkers. Even though RFK had begun his career with a spotty record on civil rights and had authorized the FBI wiretap of King as attorney general, Kennedy's openness to the plight of impoverished and poor blacks won him widespread support among black voters in 1968.

The night that Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, April 4, 1968, RFK had one of his most extraordinary and unscripted moments, breaking the news to a stunned crowd. In a preternaturally low voice, haunted by his brother's death, he nearly wept as he recited a poem from Aeschylus. Listen to it. It's profoundly moving. The crowd listened in stunned silence. Such powerful moments are rare in American politics.

Flash forward. John McCain has taken his superficial tours to Selma, Alabama; Inez, Kentucky; Youngstown, Ohio; and New Orleans. And Obama started his career on Chicago's South Side, still one of the grittiest and most troubled neighborhoods in the country. But in this years' highly scripted campaign, expect both candidates to spend most of their time "hunting where the ducks are," that is in mostly white, suburban and exurban places.

I'm scribbling these notes from Baltimore, one of my favorite Rustbelt cities (now immortalized on HBO's brilliant series, The Wire). As I do in every city, I ride public transportation (today, the bus) across Baltimore. It's the best way to get to know a city and its working-class and poor population. I sat next to a guy who looked like Stringer Bell (who would never set foot on a bus) and across the row from someone who looked like Omar's grandmother, minus her shot-up Sunday crown. In the mid-afternoon, the bus was full of elderly people, many with canes and coughs. I struck up a conversation with a young woman in a security officers' uniform heading to work the 3pm-11pm shift who supports Barack Obama but isn't sure if she's going to vote in November. The bus headed up Charles Street, passing the shabby but still grand architecture along the ungentrified stretches of Charles north of Penn Station.

If I had my way, I would ask all of our leading candidates to stand around waiting a long time for the bus, riding down the potholed streets, and striking up conversations with the people they met. For sure, they would be reminded of the critical importance of the public transit for millions of Americans. And maybe, just maybe, they would see the need to bolster the meager federal spending for our woefully underfunded bus and train systems. And if they could get a few moments of quiet and stare out the window, like I did, they would see a beautiful city whose physical resources are unnecessarily wasted and whose people are still suffering too much. But I dream. But maybe, on this anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's untimely death, I can dream of a country where poor and working people aren't left at the back of the bus--a bus that is running too slow and too late on a road that is very bumpy. We should hope and fight for better.

GRIM PROGNOSIS

The grim consequences of racial and economic inequality in the United States are especially visible in our health care system. By every measure, the health gaps between blacks and whites are stark. And to a great extent in the United States, where you live determines your access to goods and resources, the quality of social services, and the accessibility of affordable and decent health care. That America is still balkanized by race, despite the gains of the long struggle for civil rights, plays an important role in the maldistribution of resources by place. But just as important are wide disparaties in health, social services, and education by state and, within states, by locality, the long term consequence of America's distinctive form of governance that relies on the states to bear much of the cost of social provision.

As for the impact of place on health care, George Washington University researcher Bruce Siegel has it just right: “health care is local, just like politics, so you’re going to see a lot of differences in what communities do.”

Two pieces in today's NY Times make clear the high costs that being born the wrong color or being born or living in the wrong place have for health care. One reports on a Dartmouth medical school study of medical disparities found that "blacks typically were less likely to receive recommended care than whites within a given region" and also that health care outcomes ranged widely from state to state. Not surprisingly, some of the grimmest outcomes are in those Southern states that have spent relatively little on medical care. For you real wonks, the 2008 Dartmouth Atlas is available here.

The other Times piece offers a bleak report from California--a stark reminder that health care opportunities vary widely from place to place. LA hospitals, like USC, Cedars-Sinai, and UCLA, offer some of the best medical care in the world. But for residents of the mostly black and Hispanic South Central neighborhood, health care has gotten worse. Since 2000, 15 hospitals have closed, most of which serve the city's poorest and sickest residents. The result is that sick and often uninsured people have flooded local health clinics. Adding insult to injury, Governor Arnold Schwarznegger is threatening to cut state Medicaid funding, which will both limit health care options for the poor and cut revenue into the dwindling number of hospitals that serve them. California's Medicaid payments are already low.

These stories highlight the need for universal health care. One difference between the Obama and Clinton campaigns was that her health care reform proposals were more far reaching than his. I'm hoping that candidate Obama visits an inner-city hospital or two, talks to some of the doctors and nurses serving impoverished communities, and puts forth a set of reforms that looks more like Clinton's. It's the least he and we can do for places like Mississippi and South LA.

BARACK AND A HARD PLACE

Over the years, I've had substantive differences with political journalist Jim Sleeper. I won't outline them here because I'm way, way late with a book review. But Sleeper deserves props for his eloquent take on Obama and the possibility that his candidacy offers a third way between racial particularism and false universalism, via Habermas from Turkey.

Here in Istanbul, as Habermas held forth against two perils facing Europe -- the Scylla of a radically racialized multiculturalism that assumes that merely having a color means having a culture, and the Charybdıs of an absolutist, secularistic universalism that arrogantly rejects the ineluctable lure of ethno-racial belonging and the allure of religion -- I couldn't help but think of Obama as an American Odysseus, steering a wise and crafty course between those extremes.

Obama will have other rocks and hard places to navigate, especially the treacherous Scylla of globalization and the Charybdis of economic isolationism. To mix my Homeric metaphors, let's hope that he resists the Siren song of neoliberalism.

PROFESSOR RUSH'S REVISIONIST HISTORY

Civil rights, the New Deal, affirmative action. I thought I knew a lot about these topics. But it's time to completely revise my work.

I refer to Professor Rush Limbaugh and his arguments that 1) The smashing political success of Barack Obama is the consequence of affirmative action, a program that is barely hanging on by a thread because of sustained challenges in the legislatures and in the courts by the right; 2) Women's suffrage is responsible for "big government." If we only hadn't given all of that power to blacks and women, then America could be great again.

From Media Matters (which includes a lengthy transcript from Rush's show):

On the June 2 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio program, while discussing Sen. Barack Obama's presidential candidacy, Rush Limbaugh asserted that the Democratic Party was "go[ing] with a veritable rookie whose only chance of winning is that he's black." As Media Matters for America noted, Limbaugh said on his May 21 broadcast that "Barack Obama is an affirmative action candidate" and asserted during his May 14 broadcast that "[i]f Barack Obama were Caucasian, they would have taken this guy out on the basis of pure ignorance long ago."

Also during the June 2 broadcast, while referencing a May 26 column written by John Lott Jr., Limbaugh stated, "John Lott Jr. has this theory. He's done some research and found out that the growth of government can be traced to when women got the vote." Limbaugh later asserted, "The one observation you can make about this whole business, because he proved it. I mean, it's -- the growth of government started like crazy when women got the right to vote. Which just proves: Size does matter to 'em."

I'm gonna preregister for Professor Rush's constitutional law class next. Seriously, this is but the beginning of what will be a long, ugly campaign of politics by smear. I'm not looking forward to a whole political season of white male victimology. But expect it to start now.

JOHN MC CAIN: SEXIST

Barack Obama, as I have argued, needs to spend much of the next few months reachin