politics

Cross-posted at Reports from the Economic Front.

Congress has finally agreed on a deficit reduction plan that President Obama supports. As a result, the debt ceiling is being lifted, which means that the Treasury can once again borrow to meet its financial obligations.

Avoiding a debt default is a good thing. However, the agreement is bad and even more importantly the debate itself has reinforced understandings of our economy that are destructive of majority interests.

The media presented the deficit reduction negotiations as a battle between two opposing sides. President Obama, who wanted to achieve deficit reduction through a combination of public spending cuts and tax increases, anchored one side. The House Republicans, who would only accept spending cuts, anchored the other. We were encouraged to cheer for the side that we thought best represented our interests.

Unfortunately, there was actually little difference between the two sides in terms of the way they engaged and debated the relevant issues. Both sides agreed that we face a major debt crisis. Both sides agreed that out-of-control social programs are the main driver of our deficit and debt problems. And both sides agreed that the less government involvement in the economy the better.

The unanimity is especially striking since all three positions are wrong. We do not face a major debt crisis, social spending is not driving our deficits and debt, and we need more active government intervention in the economy, not less, to solve our economic problems.

So what was the deal?

Before discussing these issues it is important to highlight the broad terms of the deficit reduction agreement. The first step is limited to spending cuts; discretionary spending is to be reduced by $900 billion over the next ten years. Approximately 35% of the reduction will come from security-related budgets (military and homeland security), with the rest coming from non-security discretionary budgets (infrastructure, energy, research, education, and social welfare). In exchange for these budget cuts the Congress has agreed to raise the debt ceiling by $1 trillion.

The agreement also established a 12 person committee (with 6 Democrats and 6 Republicans) to recommend ways to reduce future deficits by another $1.2-1.5 trillion. Its recommendations must be made by November 23, 2011 and they can include cuts to every social program (including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid), as well as tax increases.

Congress has to vote on the committee’s package of recommendations by December 23, 2011, up or down. If Congress approves them they will be implemented. If Congress does not approve them, automatic cuts of $1.2 trillion will be made; 50% of the cuts must come from security budgets and the other 50% must come from non-security discretionary budgets. Regardless of how Congress votes on the recommendations, it must also vote on whether to approve a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution. Once this vote is taken, the debt ceiling will be raised again by an amount slightly smaller than the deficit reduction.

Check out this flowchart from the New York Times if you want a more complete picture of the process.

Why is this a problem?

Those who favor reducing spending on government programs generally argue that we have no choice because our public spending and national debt are out of control, threatening our economic future. But, the data says otherwise.

The chart below, from the economist Menzie Chinn at Econbrowser, shows the movement in the ratio of publically held debt to GDP over the period 1970 to 2011; the area in yellow marks the Obama administration. While this ratio has indeed grown rapidly, it remains well below the 100% level that most economists take to be the warning level. In fact, according to Congressional Budget Office predictions, we are unlikely to reach such a level for decades even if we maintain our current spending and revenue patterns.

The sharp growth in the ratio over the last few years strongly suggests that our current high deficits are largely due to recent developments, in particular the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Great Recession. Their contribution can be seen in this chart from the New York Times.

The effects of the tax cuts and economic crisis on our deficits (and by extension debt) are especially visible in the following chart (again from Menzie Chinn), which plots yearly changes in federal spending and federal revenue as a percentage of GDP (the shaded areas mark periods of recession). As we can see, the recent deficit explosion was initially driven more by declining revenues than out of control spending. Attempts to close the budget gap solely or even primarily through spending cuts, especially of social programs, is bound to fail.

To summarize:

Tragically, the debate over how best to reduce the deficit has encouraged people to blame social spending for our large deficits and those large deficits for our current economic problems.  As a result, demands for real structural change in the way our economy operates are largely dismissed as irrelevant.

Recent economic data should be focusing our attention on the dangers of a new recession.  According to the Commerce Department our economy grew at an annual rate of just 1.3% in second quarter of this year, following a first quarter in which the economy grew by only 0.3%.  These are incredibly slow rates of growth for an economy recovering from a major recession.  To put these numbers in perspective, Dean Baker notes that we need growth of over 2.5% to keep our already high unemployment rate from growing.

Cutting spending during a period of economic stagnation, especially on infrastructure, research, and social programs, is a recipe for greater hardship.  In fact, such a policy will likely further weaken our economy, leading to greater deficits.  This is what happened inthe UK, Ireland, and Greece—countries with weak economies that tried to solve their deficit problems by slashing public spending.

We need more active government intervention, which means more spending to redirect and restructure the economy; a new, more progressive tax structure; and a major change in our foreign policy, if we are going to solve our economic problems.  Unfortunately for now we don’t have a movement powerful enough to ensure our side has a player in the struggles that set our political agenda.

Last week I posted the results of a survey that found that many beneficiaries of government programs don’t recognize themselves as participating in a federal program at all. For instance, 60% of respondents who have written off their mortgage interest on their taxes didn’t see that as a government benefit or themselves as program beneficiaries. Basically, programs and policies that are disproportionately used by the middle- and upper-classes are taken for granted. I wrote,

…allowing you to write off mortgage interest (but not rent), or charitable donations, or the money you put aside for a child’s education, are all forms of government programs, ones that benefit some more than others. But the “submerged” nature of these policies hides the degree to which the middle and upper classes use and benefit from federal programs.

Brian McCabe, over at FiveThirtyEight, recently wrote a post about who benefits from the mortgage interest tax deduction program, which remains enormously popular among the general public. McCabe says,

Commentators often talk about the mortgage interest deduction as a prized middle-class benefit that enables households to achieve the American dream of homeownership. But despite their strong support for the deduction, middle-class Americans are not the primary beneficiaries of this federal tax subsidy.

If you aren’t familiar with the program, basically when you’re doing your taxes, you are allowed to reduce your taxable income by subtracting the amount you paid in mortgage interest that year. Home ownership isn’t treated equally — the tax deduction is worth more as the price of the home, and thus the amount of interest paid, goes up. McCabe points out that in 2009, this program meant that the federal government took in about $80 billion less than it would have otherwise, making it one of the most expensive tax policies and the single most expensive deduction offered to homeowners (much more than deductions for putting in energy-efficient windows, etc.).

But this expensive program is disproportionately used by relatively wealthy individuals. For instance, about a quarter of taxpayers making $40,000 – 50,000 a year claim the deduction, while over 75% of those making above $100,000 a year do:

The differences in usage is partly because the wealthy are more likely to own* homes. In addition, those with lower incomes generally buy cheaper houses and often find that they reduce their taxable income so little by writing off the mortgage interest that they’re better off taking the standard tax deduction than to itemize.

Because wealthier individuals are more likely to use the program at all, and when they do, generally have more mortgage interest to deduct, the benefits of the program go disproportionately to those with higher incomes. This image shows the proportion of all tax filers that fall into each income category, and the proportion of the total tax deduction benefit that goes to each category:

This is similar to what we see with farm subsidies: while small- and mid-sized farms benefit, the money spent on the program disproportionately goes to the largest farms.  The mortgage interest deduction program is discussed as a method for helping the middle-class achieve the American Dream of homeownership. And certainly it does make home ownership more attractive to many middle- and lower-income individuals. But it overwhelmingly benefits upper-income home buyers, at a significant loss of tax income for the federal government.

* On a side note, I find it odd that we say someone “owns” their home when they owe a mortgage on it. The second I signed a mortgage last year, I entered the much-praised category of the home-owning citizen. Yet as my mortgage-hating farm family has made me very aware, I’m not even close to truly owning my home at this point; I’m more of a special category of rent-to-own resident whose landlord is the bank or mortgage company.

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

I have criticized sloppy statistical work by some international feminist organizations, so I’m glad to have a chance to point out a useful new report and website.

The Progress of the World’s Women is from the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. The full-blown site has an executive summary, a long report, and a statistics index page with a download of the complete spreadsheet. I selected a few of the interesting graphics.

Skewed sex ratios (which I’ve written about here and here) are in the news, with the publication of Unnatural Selection, by Mara Hvistendahl. The report shows some of the countries with the most skewed sex ratios, reflecting the practice of parents aborting female fetuses (Vietnam and Taiwan should  be in there, too). With the exception of Korea, they’ve all gotten more skewed since the 1990s, when ultrasounds became more widely available, allowing parents to find out the sex of the fetus early in the pregnancy.

The most egregious inequality between women of the world is probably in maternal mortality. This chart shows, for example, that the chance of a woman dying during pregnancy or birth is about 100- 39-times higher in Africa than Europe. The chart also shows how many of those deaths are from unsafe abortions.

Finally, I made this one myself, showing women as a percentage of parliament in most of the world’s rich countries (the spreadsheet has the whole list). The USA, with 90 women out of 535 members of Congress, comes in at 17%.

The report focuses on law and justice issues, including rape and violence against women, as well as reparations, property rights, and judicial reform. They boil down their conclusions to: “Ten proven approaches to make justice systems work for women“:

1. Support women’s legal organizations

2. Support one-stop shops and specialized services to reduce attrition in the justice chain [that refers to rape cases, for example, not making their way from charge to conviction -pnc]

3. Implement gender-sensitive law reform

4. Use quotas to boost the number of women legislators

5. Put women on the front line of law enforcement

6. Train judges and monitor decisions

7. Increase women’s access to courts and truth commissions in conflict and post-conflict contexts.

8. Implement gender-responsive reparations programmes

9. Invest in women’s access to justice

10. Put gender equality at the heart of the Millennium Development Goals

Cross-posted at Caroline Heldman’s Blog.

“Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” the third installment in this $1.5 billion franchise that just set a new record for a Fourth of July weekend opening, follows what has become a Hollywood action movie tradition of virtually erasing women, despite the fact that women buy 55% of movie tickets and market research shows that films with female protagonists or prominent female characters in ensemble casts garner similar box office numbers to movies featuring men.

Only two featured characters in the large ensemble Transformers cast are women, and none of the Transformers (alien robots, for the uninitiated) are female. And the two female humans consist of an unmitigated sexual object and a caricatured mockery of female leadership.

Let’s start with “the object,” Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), the one-dimensional, highly sexualized damsel-in-distress girlfriend of protagonist Sam Wikwiki (Shia LaBouef). Carly wears stiletto heels, even when running from murderous machines (except when the filmmakers slip up and her flats are visible), and she is pristine in her white jacket after an hour-long battle that leaves the men filthy.

The movie opens with a tight shot of Carly’s nearly bare ass as she walks up the stairs:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC32Bw9uYho]

In a later scene, Carly is reduced to an object as her boss (Patrick Demsey) compares her to an automobile in a conversation with Sam:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2WI7f9eeUM]

And in case the audience doesn’t know to leer at Carly, they get constant instruction from a duo of small robots that look up her skirt and Sam’s boss (John Malkovich) who cocks his head to stare at her ass:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byC8cmWg6K8]

Sam’s “friend,” Agent Simmons (John Turturro), also ogles Carly and suggests she be frisked against her will:

[wpvideo ojm7ZvjZ]

In a disturbing scene of sexualized violence, Carly’s (robot) car sprouts “arms” and threatens to violate her:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-yEghxhpMk]

Normalization of female objectification causes girls/women to think of themselves as objects, which has been linked to higher rates of depression and eating disorders, compromised cognitive and sexual function, decreased self-esteem, and decreased personal and political efficacy. Ubiquitous female sexual objectification also harms men by increasing men’s body consciousness, and causes both men and women to be less concerned about pain experienced by sex objects.

Transformers 3 is pitched as a “family movie” and the film studio carefully disguises it as such with misleading movie trailers showing a story about kid’s toys. (Okay, I still have an Optimus Prime robot…) Young kids were abundant at both screenings I attended, taking in the images with little ability to filter the message.

************

It would have been easy for Michael Bay to positively present the second female character, Director of National Intelligence Charlotte Mearing (Frances McDormand). Instead, she is a tool to openly mock female leadership and promote female competition.

McDormand does her best to breathe some realism into Director Mearing, but the script calls for a caricature with “masculine” leadership traits – arrogance, assertiveness, stubborness, etc. – who is ultimately “put in her place” at the end of the movie with a forced kiss. Women continue to be vastly under-represented in positions of corporate and political leadership, partially due to the double-bind of women’s leadership where, in order to be considered acceptable leaders, women have to project a “masculine” image for which they are then criticized.

Director Mearing’s authority is challenged by virtually everyone she encounters in a way that simply wouldn’t make sense for a male character in her position. Sam openly challenges her in this scene:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYahdFFjZXk]

Director Mearing’s authority evaporates when Agent Simmons comments, “moving up in the world, and your booty looks excellent”:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb4m0JuROnU]

Director Mearing is even challenged by a transformer. [SPOILER ALERT: Director Mearing is the only one to challenge this transformer’s intentions, and she gets no credit when it turns out she was right.]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEz8DOa9I78]

This Transformer again puts her in her place with the dual meaning of “I am a prime. I do not take orders from you”:

[wpvideo EDGYfp2T]

Director Mearing also has a running theme of not wanting to be called “ma’am.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srsWDT6w8HI]

The “ma’am” theme doesn’t readily make sense since Director Mearing isn’t young and doesn’t appear to be trying to look young. But it does make sense when viewed through the lens of director Michael Bay intentionally mocking women’s leadership. Remember the flap when Senator Barbara Boxer at a hearing requested that a general use her professional title instead of “ma’am”?:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0CprVYsG0k]

The “ma’am” theme resurfaces in a particularly troubling scene where Director Mearing meets with Sam and Carly, who, in good double-bind fashion, challenges whether she is even a woman:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIZOWPaoiDk]

Bay does include a few minor female characters with lines – Sam’s mother, the nagging mother/wife; Director Mearing’s subservient Asian assistant; a scene with both the “Olga” and “Petra” Russian woman stereotypes; and a Latina with a bare midriff who has a “Latin meltdown”:

[wpvideo pLgrLBNm]

If Michael Bay can buy off the most accomplished actors and even musician/social activist Bono to participate in such harmful media, what hope is there in the war that pits girls/women (the Autobots) against unrepentantly sexist movies makers (the Deceptacons)?

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

It’s been a big week for stories of families denied and disrupted by the state.  Family denial came up in the form of bodily intervention (as in North Carolina’s eugenics program), border control (as when Jose Antonio Vargas‘s mother put him on a one-way plane for the U.S.), parents’ incarceration, or legal denial of family rights (the refusal to recognize gay marriage, or what I suggest we call homogamous marriage).

(1)  North Carolina’s eugenics program was the subject of hearings this week, dragging on with no compensation for the 7,600 people who were involuntarily sterilized between 1929 and 1977. A collection of literature at the State Library of North Carolina includes this 1950 propaganda pamphlet:

(2) Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, recounted his life as an undocumented immigrant. His mother put him on a plane for the U.S. with false papers, maybe never to see him again.

(3) While a judge declared the federal law against recognizing gay marriage unconstitutional, the New York legislature maybe moved toward legal recognition, and President Obama’s support of gay marriage apparently stalled.

(4) The 40th anniversary of the drug war was a bleak reminder of the millions of U.S. families separated by incarceration during that time.

The text says, “more women and mothers are behind bars than at any time in U.S. history,” from (www.usprisonculture.com).

(My graph from data in an article by Wildeman and Western in The Future of Children)

Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

Dolores R. sent in a story at about a recently-released internet campaign ad in the CA-36 special election that Talking Points Memo has called “Willie Horton on steroids,” referring to the infamous racial-fear-mongering ad released by George H.W. Bush in the 1988 presidential campaign. The CA-36 ad was released by a new super-PAC (able to raise unlimited funds), Turn Right USA. (The guy who produced it also produced a striking ad for a candidate for Alabama Agriculture Commissioner in 2010.) It attacks Democratic candidate Janice Hahn over her support for gang intervention programs. And it’s a doozy. It is definitely NSFW:

Aside from the just over-the-top racist and sexist nature of the ad, it’s also interesting because of the issues it brings up about technology and democratization of ad campaign materials. Turn Right USA isn’t directly linked to or affiliated with the campaign of Hahn’s Republican rival in the race, Craig Huey. Huey’s campaign has reacted with dismay, condemning the content and distancing themselves from it. They clearly fear a backlash that will hurt Huey’s chances (and he’s already the underdog in the race). And yet, they didn’t create the ad, there’s no evidence that I’ve seen that they worked with Turn Right USA, and they don’t have any ability to take it down or symbolically fire the producer to show how little they think of it. We saw a similar situation recently in Florida, with a mailer apparently intended to discredit a candidate who had nothing to do with it.

While non-campaign-funded attack ads clearly helps candidates in a lot of situations (for instance, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads against John Kerry in 2004), they can also hurt the candidate they’re meant to help. Campaigns can’t control their content and they can’t retract them if they sense a public backlash. Voters may blame candidates for content they didn’t approve and can’t fix. And the increasing number of third-party advocacy groups, combined with the ability to distribute materials widely over the internet instead of buying TV time, seems likely to increase the danger to campaigns of these types of ads ostensibly meant to “support” them.

Crusaders against male circumcision (intactivists) face the same sorts of challenges as activists on a wide range of other causes.  They want parents to choose not to circumcise their sons AND they want the government to prohibit circumcision — and punish adults involved in circumcisions.

[This really is a recurrent movement story: Think about animal rights activists who want to promote vegetarianism as a personal choice — as well as legal restrictions on the use of animals; think about anti-abortion activists who wish to promote adoption — as a personal choice — while simultaneously limiting legal access to abortion.]

It looks like the intactivists are making progress on the first front, individual choice — or at least riding some sort of wave of history: the percentage of newborn boys circumcised in the US has declined substantially in the last few years.  All the physicians I’ve seen quoted in the run of news accounts have emphasized parents’ choice.  With parents making different choices, boys and men are far less likely to face social stigma or discrimination on the basis of foreskin status.

Promoting non-circumcision means making that choice attractive — and making a very widely accepted choice — problematic.  Here, rhetoric matters, and strategic choices about images and language are consequential in mobilizing support — and provoking opponents.

Jena Troutman, the Santa Monica activist who abandoned her referendum campaign, pushes non-circumcision as healthy, natural, and attractive.  Her website, WholeBabyRevolution, is chock full of pictures of happy baby boys–diaperclad.

Matthew Hess, the author of the Foreskin Man comic, projects more alarm — and more vitriol.  He, literally, demonizes those who perform circumcisions, thus far, a doctor and a mohel.   Here you see his hero battling a physician who takes sadistic pleasure in performing a procedure that is, by all other accounts, quick and routine.  The rhetoric is provocative and polarizing — hardly peculiar for social movement activists — but maybe not the smartest strategy.

Most of us are not inclined to see physicians treating children as monsters who derive pleasure from a baby’s pain.  We might distrust someone who offered a portrayal at odds with our own understanding of the situation.  The portrayal of the mohel — understandably —  spurred a debate about anti-Semitic imagery.  (But Hess is clear that he has nothing against Jews or Muslims — only those who circumcise.  Arrgh.)  Identifying and demonizing an enemy is likely to inspire — and mobilize — those who already agree with you.  It’s likely to be off-putting to others, and may well provoke your opposition.

I’m ill-inclined to offer psychological explanations for why someone believes what he does.  That said, Hess’s description of his analysis and his commitments is likely to stir pause among would-be supporters.  San Diego’s City Beat reports, quoting Hess:

I was in my late 20s when I just started to notice a slow decline in sensation… Year after year, it started to get a worse and worse after sex. I went to a urologist, and he didn’t have much of an answer. It struck me that my circumcision could have something to do with this. I researched online and quickly found a lot of information about what’s lost. That made me pretty angry.

City Beat reports that Hess has been engaged in therapies to restore sensation — and, for nearly a decade, working on legislation to ban circumcision.

The extraordinarily committed are at the heart of any social movement, and opponents will look to counter a movement by disparaging its champions.  Successful movements are always comprised of coalitions, and the recurrent question is how rhetoric, tactics, and personnel aid or hinder in recruiting allies.  The controversy over Foreskin Man led Jena Troutman to put her referendum campaign on the back burner, suggesting that Matthew Hess brings energy, commitment, and liabilities to his cause.

—————————

David Meyer is a political science professor at the University of California, Irvine.  At his blog, Politics Outdoors, he tries to understand when social movements emerge, how they develop and decline, and how they sometimes matter.  You can also follow Meyer at OrgTheory.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Cross-posted at OWNI.

Something has been nagging me about the Representative Weiner (D-NY) sexting scandal: how would this story would play out differently had the sexting-congressperson been female? I wrote earlier about how differently “sexy” pictures of male and female political candidates are handled.

When Krystal Ball ran for congress, images of a past Halloween party became some of the most Google’d images in the world, unlike male politicians running for office at the same time who were also involved in scandals about images of their past behaviors. The images of women in general, and, in this case, female politicians, become poured over, detailed, dissected, analyzed and obsessed upon to a far greater extent than what is occurring with Rep. Weiner. Yes, the images he sent are being shared on and offline, but had Weiner been female the images might be shown akin to the Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction”: the media would scowl at the perversion while simultaneously showing them on a constant loop, dissecting every pixel in detail.

So let’s do quick Google Image searches for Krystal Ball and Anthony Weiner. (In these screenshots I am logged out of Google and “SafeSearch” is off, however, neither of those factors influenced the results much).

Krystal Ball’s results are dominated by the images that caused scandal. You have to scroll through pages of images in Weiner’s results to find the “offending” images. Given that Google’s resultsare based in part on popularity and website inter-linking, we have to wonder how Weiner’s post-scandal online presence would be different had he been female. [We should note that Weiner had a larger online presence before the scandal than did Ball. However, many of the top images in the search are post-scandal, so that is not a complete explanation for the discrepancy]. In fact, it is easier to find women showing skin in Weiner’s results than the so-called “lewd” images themselves.

Even Sarah Palin, who has never tweeted “lewd” photos of herself to all of the Internet, has search results more focused on her body than does Weiner.

Michel Foucault noted that sexual repression is closely related with sexual obsession; and the obsessively prying “gaze” is really the regulation and controlling of ourselves and our sex. The relative lack of obsession of the images in this scandal strikes me as evidence of the weaker regulation of the male body and men’s sex.

How else would this scandal play out differently had Rep. Weiner been female?

—————————

Please welcome guest blogger Nathan Jurgenson.  Jurgenson is a graduate student in sociology at the University of Maryland and co-edits the Cyborgology blog.