politics

We have posted a number of times about the unequal effects of the current economic crisis: the worsening of the racial gap in homeownership, the more severely negative economic situation of African Americans and Latinos than of Whites, including among African American and White college graduates, higher unemployment for men than for women (this post also has a lot of info about race, sex, and job loss), the fact that older workers who lose their jobs remain unemployed longer than younger workers, that job losses have been accompanied by increased corporate profits, and that wealthier households have weathered the crisis better than less prosperous ones.

Dmitriy T.M. sent along an April 2011 Gallup poll that asked 1,013 Americans about their perceptions of the economy. Overall, results were more positive than when the same question was asked in September 2008, when the economic meltdown really became apparent. Though more than half of respondents said the U.S. is in either a recession or a depression, that’s down significantly from the 69% who said so in late 2008, while the 27% who said the economy is growing is an enormous jump compared to the mere 3% who thought it was in September 2008:

But perceptions of the economy differed significantly by income level. Nobody thought it was doing great; over half of every income group still thought the economy was in either a recession or a depression. However, those making less than $30,000 a year had a notably more negative outlook on the economy than those with higher incomes. Not only were they more likely to think the economy is doing poorly, but nearly half thought we’re experiencing a depression — twice as high as the proportion of those making $75,000/year who thought so:

Interestingly, perceptions of the economy also varied widely by political affiliation, with Democrats feeling much more positive about the economy than any other group, and Republicans and Tea Party supports feeling markedly more negative:

Meanwhile, the Gallup daily tracker poll on the state of the economy (which only shows overall results) shows a marked downturn in Americans’ perceptions of the economy throughout the summer of 2011, with 77% now reporting the economy is “getting worse”:

For more on the economic crisis and its uneven effects, see Philip Cohen’s post on race and job loss, differences in optimism about the future, unemployment by race/sex/education, occupation, median earnings, and race, and the geography of job loss.

Presidential hopeful and U.S. Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) made the news over the weekend arguing, among other things, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is unnecessary or, even worse, creates a kind of moral hazard in populations who come to depend on Federal relief efforts. In remarks reported Friday, Rep. Paul said that Hurricane Irene should be handled “like 1900,” the year that a large storm killed approximately 8,000 individuals in Galveston and a few thousand more onshore, when it struck the low-lying island and nearby small communities on the Texas coast.

It is certainly true that the Federal response to the destruction of Galveston was relatively minor. Systematic Federal management and provision of aid to individuals in disaster crystallized in response to the Mississippi River’s catastrophic flooding in 1927.  In 1900, it was limited for the most part to President McKinley sending surplus Army tents to house the newly homeless residents of Galveston, and loaning some ships to transport relief goods.

The nation as a whole, on the other hand, quickly mobilized relief donation efforts through newspapers, state and city governments, and the dense network of fraternal organizations that characterized American civil society in 1900. The nation’s response was along the lines of the civic and political institutions of the time, with all that entailed.

[Credit: Rosenberg Library’s Galveston and Texas History Center archives]

So, for instance, some of the citizens of Galveston who survived the storm were given liquor for their nerves and pressed into service at gunpoint by local authorities to clear dead and putrefying bodies from the wreckage; some were later partially compensated for their time with a small sum of money. Property owners, however, were exempted from mandatory clearing of debris and corpses.

Voluntary associations – often segregated by gender, race, ethnicity, and class – took care of their own members as best they could, but the broader distribution of relief supplies arriving from other areas was handled by committees of Galveston’s social and economic elites, based on their knowledge of their city’s political districts. Distribution efforts throughout the Texas coast were controversial enough that hearings were held by the Texas State Senate to investigate reports of improper relief distribution, some of which were borne out by testimony but none of which were pursued.  Survivors’ letters suggest that in some cases the nicer relief goods – the distribution of which was handled by committees of Galveston’s social and economic elites on the basis of what they knew about their city’s political districts – went to the wealthier victims’ districts, when they weren’t re-routed by less wealthy and somewhat disgruntled Galvestonians tasked with actually lugging the supplies around the city.  And Galveston’s African-American community was wholly shut out of the rebuilding process and denied a seat on the Central Relief Committee, despite efforts to secure a place in helping shape the collective destiny of the city. This is hardly surprising: poorer Americans tend to suffer disproportionately in most disasters, and are often left out of planning and rebuilding efforts.

There is much to be said for the response of Galveston’s Central Relief Committee. Under their leadership the city built the seawall that helps protect the city to this day and they initiated a series of successful municipal reforms that became widespread during the Progressive era. But we should not let unexamined nostalgia blind us to the realities of the situation in Galveston in the months after the 1900 storm.

Nor should we forget that the techniques that might have been more or less appropriate in 1900 were attuned to a society that has since changed quite a bit. It would be hard to imagine contemporary Americans pressed into service to clear bodies, barring a truly exceptional event. And despite its shortcomings, American culture is on the whole more egalitarian in 2005 than it was in 1900.

But the dense network of associations through which much assistance flowed to the city simply does not exist in the contemporary U.S. for a variety of reasons, none of which are reducible to the growth of the Federal government.  Instead, Americans support each other in crises by way of donations to highly professionalized and technically adept disaster relief organizations like the Red Cross, and by maintaining government organizations charged with preparing for the worst disasters and catastrophes with their tax dollars.

This makes sense in part because contemporary cities and the economic arrangements which undergird them are much more complex beasts than they were in 1900. The following chart property damage and deaths caused by major disasters over the 20th century:

[Source: The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned, p. 6.]

The overall trend is toward less lethal but much costlier disasters, which in turn causes significant disruptions to the ordinary functioning of local businesses and municipal governments that depend on tax revenues from those businesses. This necessitates more Federal involvement, as cities and state governments struggle to get their own houses in order, and to pay for the resources and technical know-how needed to rebuild infrastructure, modern dwellings, and businesses. As Lawrence Powell, a historian at Tulane University in New Orleans, asked of the influx of well-meaning volunteers in response to Katrina, “Can the methods of a nineteenth-century barn raising drag a twenty-first-century disaster area from the mud and the muck?”.

The 20th century history of Federal disaster policy can be described as a cycle of expansion and contraction. Increasingly complex disasters draw forth ad hoc solutions, which are then formalized and later institutionalized until they grow unwieldy and are periodically consolidated in efforts to provide more efficient, systematic, and effective services that are less prone to fraud or waste.

Small and big business, social movement organizations, academics, professionals, voluntary associations and NGOs have all helped shape the trajectory of that cycle, as when civil rights organizations successfully lobbied Congress and the Red Cross after Hurricane Camille in 1969 to provide a baseline of minimum assistance to hurricane victims, rather than the older policy that granted aid on the basis of pre-disaster assets (and which thus tended to favor wealthier victims on the basis that they had lost more than had the poor).

In recent decades, this has tended toward deregulation of coastal development in deference to free market ideals and a Congressional movement in the mid 1990s that sought to pay for disaster relief by, in large part, cutting social service programs that serve the poor. (See Ted Steinberg’s Acts of God for one good historical and political economic critique of U.S. disaster policy.)

How Federal disaster mitigation efforts can be more efficient, just, or effective is certainly a worthy conversation to hold. How best to arrange – and pay for – social relationships around economic, ecological, and technological risk is also an excellent topic for deliberation and debate. But to seriously argue that we should strive to make our disaster response regime more like that enjoyed by Americans in the early half of the twentieth century is, for lack of a better word, silly.

(For that matter, it’s hard to understand what Rep. Paul means by his call for more control by the States; the decision to request the involvement of the Federal government and FEMA already rests with the State governors, as per the Stafford Act.)

Former generations of Americans saw a patchwork of state government solutions as inadequate to managing modern disasters, particularly those that overwhelm municipal or State governments. They built Civil Defense agencies, the Office of Emergency Preparedness, and later FEMA in an effort to combine accountability and economies of scale and expertise, and to ensure that in times of disaster Americans could count on their Federal government to marshal tools and talent when local and State governments are overwhelmed and help is asked.

And as my own research shows, the efforts of these state organizations have long been understood by victims and outside observers alike as expressing and relying on bonds of fellow citizenship and civil solidarity. That in recent decades this legacy has been tarnished with cronyism and mismanagement from above says more about those political actors and the institutions of American electoral politics than it does about the inherent worth of Federal disaster management organizations.

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Brady Potts is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California. His current research focuses on the history of public discourse and narratives around risk and hurricane disasters, and the role of civic culture in American disaster response.

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Of the many people who did not or could not evacuate New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Katrina, prisoners were especially helpless.  The American Civil Liberties Union gathered testimony from 400 of the 7,000 people locked up in New Orleans Prison at the time of Katrina, including approximately 100 juveniles.

Many reported being left in their cells while the water rose above their heads; being beaten and sprayed with mace once evacuated (to state maximum security prisons); and left on Interstate-10 in the hot sun for days without food or water. An entire building with about 600 prisoners was left behind in the evacuation process and weren’t rescued for days (source).

Most of the 7,000 prisoners had been charged with misdemeanor offenses and would have been released within a few weeks, even if convicted. But Governor Blanco effectively suspended habeas corpus (due process; right to a speedy trial) for six months, so some were incarcerated for over a year – doing “Katrina time.”  “The court system shut its doors, the police department fell into disarray, few prosecutors remained, and a handful of public defenders could not meet with, much less represent, the thousands detained” (source). Prison officials deny that anyone died in the crisis, despite several reports of deaths from both police officers and prisoners (source).

The Orleans Parish Prison continues to have civil rights concerns. In 2009, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department found that conditions at OPP violate inmates’ constitutional rights. The report found that prisoners experience violence from other prisoners, excessive force from guards, are not provided adequate medical services, and live in unsanitary conditions with pests.

This hour-long BBC video documents their experiences:

Cross-posted at Caroline Heldman’s blog.  

Caroline Heldman is a professor of politics at Occidental College. You can follow her at her blog and on Twitter and Facebook.

Cross-posted at Reports from the Economic Front.

The mainstream media works hard to convince us that Republicans and Democrats are locked in heated battle, with each side advocating dramatically different economic policies.  Although there are differences between the two sides, members of both parties generally share common ground in opposing any fundamental changes to the workings of our economy.

A recent International Monetary Fund report on the U.S. economy sheds light on why this is so.  The report includes the following four color-coded charts which compare economic recoveries (including our current one) according to various criteria (each recovery is along the left; criteria of recovery are along the top; red = weakest recoveries, green = strongest recoveries).

As you can see from the red boxes in the first chart (the one titled “Real GDP and components”), our last two recoveries have been quite weak compared with previous recoveries in terms of growth in GDP, personal consumption, and investment in nonresidential structures.  This indicates a growing problem with our economic fundamentals.

The red boxes in the second chart (”Households and employment”) indicate that our last two recoveries have also not been kind to working people as measured by the growth in nonfarm payrolls, unemployment, and disposable income.

However, things look quite different in the last two charts. The green boxes in the third chart (”Business sector”) make clear that the last two expansions have generally been good for nonfinancial corporations.  And the dark green boxes in the fourth chart (”Financial”) highlight the enormous gains made by financial corporations in the last two expansions, and especially the current one.

The take-away from these charts is that business leaders experience our recent recoveries very differently than do the great majority of people.  Despite the fact that growing numbers of workers find it hard to distinguish our expansions from our recessions, business profits keep climbing.  And that is what matters to business. Not surprisingly, then, our corporate leaders are lobbying our political leaders hard not to change existing economic arrangements.  If some austerity is needed to maintain stability–so be it.  And, this lobbying has proven successful.

The connection between deteriorating economic and social conditions and high corporate profitability deserves careful study as does the question of whether this is a stable relationship. Regardless, these charts provide important insight into our national policy-making nexus.  As long as our large corporations are prospering we should not expect our political process to produce meaningful change.  The problem isnt a lack of good ideas for how to strengthen our economy and generate jobs, it is the lack of interest on the part of our elected leaders — on both sides of the aisle — to seriously consider them.  It appears that meaningful economic change will have to await either a further unraveling of our economic and social infrastructure or the rise of a powerful social movement with a new economic vision.

The vintage clipping below is a political advertisement from 1915 opposing women’s suffrage in Massachusetts. It claims that most women in the state do not want the vote, so if voting men gave women suffrage, they would be doing so against their will.  This, they claim, would be undemocratic.   This sounds ironic, but it makes sense in a world where men were suppose to be women’s political representatives.

The ad then goes on to try to demonize those women who do want the right to vote by associating them with other groups widely stigmatized at that time: feminists, of course, but also socialists, Mormons, and members of the I.W.W. The acronym stands for Industrial Workers of the World, an organization founded in 1905 as an alternative to the American Federation of Labor, reportedly consisting of anarchists, socialists, and union members (wiki).

Women in Massachusetts would be granted the right to vote on this day, August 18th, five years later, not by the residents of the state, but by Federal decree.

Via BoingBoing.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The Atlantic recently posted an article by Conor Friedersdorf about the results of polls conducted by the Abu Dhabi branch of the Gallup organization, in cooperation with the U.S. branch, on the political attitudes of various religious groups in the U.S., particularly focusing on how Muslim Americans compare to other groups. The respondents were chosen as a subsample of respondents to ongoing Gallup telephone polling of hundreds of thousands of randomly-selected Americans each year. One major caveat: though Gallup reports that the overall sample is representative of the U.S. population as a whole, the response rate for the subsample of 2,482 individuals chosen to investigate these issues in depth was low: 21% for the first wave, 34% for the second (the methodology begins on p. 57 of the full report). The authors argue the data have been weighted to ensure representativeness, but the low response rates require caution.

One set of questions looked at attitudes about violence toward civilians, whether by military or non-military groups. As we see, Muslims were more likely than any other group to say targeting civilians is never justified:

But every group overwhelmingly said it is “never” justified for a non-military group to attack and kill civilians, though Friedersdorf points out that a not insignificant minority of Americans said that targeting civilians is at least somewhat justified — a proportion that might have been lower if the word “terrorism” had been used to describe targeting civilians, I suspect.

However, Americans are much more divided on whether the military is sometimes justified in targeting and killing civilians. Muslim Americans overwhelmingly reported it is “never” justified, but the only other group where over half of respondents held that view was for non-believers/agnostics. A solid majority of Protestants, Catholics, and Mormons, and a slim majority of Jews, said that it is “sometimes” justified for the military to target civilians:

The full report includes data on a wide variety of indicators of political engagement and perceptions of quality of life and the future. Consistent with the graphs above, Muslim Americans have less confidence in the military and law enforcement agencies such as the FBI than all other groups (with non-believers/agnostics have the second-lowest levels of confidence):

One major area of difference is in perceptions of why people in Muslim countries might have unfavorable views of the U.S. Muslims Americans were the only group where a majority (65%) thought that U.S. actions were mostly responsible for such unfavorable views. For every other group, the majority thought that misinformation distribution by media outlets or governments was the major cause of unfavorable views of the U.S.:

Muslim Americans were much more likely than all other groups to believe they have experienced racial or religious discrimination. Interestingly, Muslim Americans were the only group where women were less likely than men to say they are always treated with respect by members of other religious groups:

The report authors suggest this may be partially due to Muslim women who wear hijab being visibly recognizable as Muslims in a way that may lead to negative interactions or comments from others.

However, despite higher levels of perceived discrimination, overall, Muslim Americans had a generally optimistic view of their future in the U.S.; the majority of respondents said they will be thriving in the future, and they were slightly less likely than other groups to believe they will be struggling:

I’ve just posted a few items that stood out to me here. Check out the full report for a much fuller discussion of attitudes toward the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, perceptions about quality of life in the U.S., major sources of self-identification (religion, ethnicity, citizenship, etc.), whether Muslims are loyal Americans, and more.

Cross-posted at Montclair Socioblog.

Peter Berger* takes issue with the phrase “on the wrong side of history.”  Mostly, he takes issue with those who use that phrase. Specifically, he refers to proponents of gay marriage who claim that the Defense of Marriage Act is “on the wrong side of history” (or in Berger’s acronym, OTWSOH) The trouble with this statement, Berger says, is that “we cannot know who or what is on the right side.”

Berger is correct (though he doesn’t offer much explanation) because the history that people are referring to hasn’t happened yet. The history of OTWSOH is the future, and we can’t know the future.  However — and here’s where Berger is wrong — we can make a pretty good guess about some things that will happen, at least in the short-run future. We can look at the trend — Americans becoming more accepting of gay marriage — and predict that the trend will continue, especially when we see that the young are more accepting than the old.

But beyond the short-run, who knows? It’s possible that the values, ideas, and even facts that are right today will, decades or centuries from now, be wrong.  So it may turn out that at some time in the future, people will think that gay marriage is a plague on civilization, that human slavery is a pretty good idea, that Shakespeare was a hack, and that Kevin Federline was a great musician.

The trouble with asking history, “Which side are you on?” is that history doesn’t end. It’s like the possibly true story of Henry Kissinger asking Chou En Lai about the implications of the French Revolution. Said the Chinese premier, “It’s too early to tell.”

At what point can we say, “This is it. Now we know which side history is on”?  We can’t, because when we wake up tomorrow, history will still be rolling on. Duncan Watts, in Everything Is Obvious… Once You Know the Answer, makes a similar point using the historical film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” The two robbers flee the US and go to Bolivia. Good idea? Since we know how the movie ends — that sepia freeze frame — we can safely say, “No, bad idea.”

But if we had stopped the movie twenty minutes earlier, it would have seemed like a good idea. The vindictive lawman and his posse were about to find and kill them. A few minutes later in the film, Bolivia seemed again like a bad idea – it was a miserable place. Then, when their robberies in Bolivia were easy and lucrative, it seemed again like a good idea. And then, they got killed. Butch was 42, Sundance 31.

But history is not a movie. It doesn’t end. So at least for the long run, the OTWSOH argument claims certainty  about what is at best speculation. It says, “We know what will happen, and we know that we are on the right side of history, and those who are not with us are on the wrong side of history.” Some religious folks make similar claims not about history but about God.  “We are on God’s side,” they say, “and those who disagree with us are against God.”  They tend to populate the political right.  The OTWSOH argument, Berger says, “comes more naturally to those on the left,” mostly because that is the side that is pushing for historical change.  The two sides are indulging in a similar fallacy — knowing the unknowable — a fallacy which, to those who don’t share their views, makes them appear similarly arrogant.

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* Yes, this is the same Peter Berger whose Social Construction of Reality (co-written with Thomas Luckman), published forty-five years ago, has an important place in sociology’s relatively short history.

HT: Gabriel Rossman

Cross-posted at Reports from the Economic Front.

Social Security is in Danger

The recently approved deficit reduction plan includes the establishment of a Congressional super committee that is supposed to propose ways to achieve $1.2-1.5 trillion in deficit reduction over the next ten years. Everything is on the table, including Social Security. It must complete its work by November 23, 2011.

While the committee could decide to spare Social Security, the odds are great that its final proposal will include significant benefit cuts. Most Republicans have long sought to dismantle the program and President Obama is willing to accept a reduction in Social Security benefits for the sake of deficit reduction.  Standard and Poor’s downgrade of the federal government’s credit rating only adds to the pressure.  The rating agency explained its decision as follows:

We lowered our long-term rating on the U.S. because we believe that the prolonged controversy over raising the statutory debt ceiling and the related fiscal policy debate indicate that further near-term progress containing the growth in public spending, especially on entitlements, or on reaching an agreement on raising revenues is less likely than we previously assumed and will remain a contentious and fitful process.

Why Social Security is Important

There has been little media discussion of the importance of Social Security to those over 65.  According to the Economic Policy Institute:

The average annual Social Security retirement benefit in 2009 was $13,406.40, slightly above the $10,289 federal poverty line for individuals age 65 and older, but less than the minimum wage. While modest in size, Social Security benefits comprise a substantial share of household income for most elderly recipients.

The chart below shows that the poorest 40% of households with a head 65 years or older rely on social security for more than 80% of their income. Even the middle 20% depend on social security for more than 60% of their income. In sum, cutting social security benefits will hit hard at the great majority of seniors.

How the Change Will Undermine Benefits

If the super committee does decide to go after social security, it will likely do so by proposing that social security benefits be adjusted using a new measure of inflation. Right now benefits are adjusted using the CPI-W, which measures the change in prices of goods and services commonly consumed by urban wage earners and clerical workers. The new measure is called the Chained Consumer Price Index for all Urban Consumers.

This all sounds very technical, but the basic idea is simple. The CPI-W measures the increase in the cost of a relatively fixed bundle of goods and services. The Chained Consumer Price Index assumes that consumers continually adjust their purchases, giving up those goods and services that are expensive in favor of cheaper substitutes. The chained index would produce a lower rate of inflation because the goods and services whose prices are rising the fastest would be dropped from the index or given lower weight. The result would be a smaller annual cost of living adjustment for those receiving Social Security, thereby cutting Social Security outlays.

Those who support using a chained index argue that it is a more accurate measure of inflation than the CPI-W. In reality, it just masks the fact that people are unable to buy the goods and services they once enjoyed. If we are really concerned about accuracy, we could use the CPI-E, which measures the change in prices of those goods and services commonly consumed by seniors. The CPI-E has risen much faster than the CPI-W, demonstrating that current cost of living adjustments are actually too low, not too high.

The following chart should leave no doubt as to what is at stake in this “technical” adjustment.  A medium earner retiring this year at age 65 would receive $15,132.  The retiree’s real (inflation adjusted) earnings would remain constant over time assuming that Social Security benefits were adjusted using the existing CPI-W.  If benefits were adjusted using the proposed Chained CPI, the retiree’s real earnings would steadily decline, falling to $13,740 at age 95.  By comparison, benefits would grow to $16,131 if the CPI-E were used.

Why Social Security is the Wrong Target

Social Security shouldn’t be on the cutting board at all.   It is a self-financing system, one with a large surplus.  Some analysts say that the system will not have sufficient funds to meet its obligations by 2037.  In fact, this claim is based on very extreme and unlikely assumptions about future economic activity.  But, even if we accept these assumptions, we can easily escape the predicted crisis by applying the Social Security tax to labor income above $106,800.  Currently, earnings above that amount are exempt from the tax.  Removing the tax ceiling would ensure the solvency of Social Security through the next 75 years.