Synopsis after the jump.
1. Though household incomes have increased over the last thirty-five years, median incomes for males have actually dropped by $800. (Women make less still.) Household incomes have only increased because both partners are working.
2. Household savings have gone from 11% of take-home pay to -0.8%, while the contemporary family has negative savings: revolving debt has risen from 1.4% of annual incomes to 15%. From saving 11% of annual income to indebtedness of 15% of income!
3. However, contemporary households actually spend less on consumer goods than they once did: 35% less on clothing, 18% less on food (including eating out,) 52% less on appliances, 24% less on automotive expenses per car. This revolving debt is not the result of consumer society, despite what everyone would have you believe.
4. Comparing households from 1970 with households in 2006, Warren adjusts for family size by asking questions about the two parent/two child household.
5. Mortgage payments are up 76%: real estate costs are way up, but it’s not really a matter of size. Median home size has gone 5.8 rooms to 6.1 rooms, basically an extra bathroom. However, new construction is aimed at the top 20% of families.
6. Health insurance and health costs are up 74%.
7. Since more families need two cars, the lower per car cost still leads to 52% increases in automotive costs for the two-income household.
8. Child care is up 100%, but that’s just because the average two couple household had no child care costs thirty-five years ago.
9. The median family is paying 25% more taxes than thirty-five years ago.

So: single income families in the 1970s earned less money but had more disposable income. Today, the two-income family spends 3/4 of its annual income on fixed expenses, and spends the 1/4 left on food, clothing, and entertainment. They can’t pare back their spending when financial hardships arise, and if either income is lost through family illness or job loss, the 2006 family can’t pay its fixed costs!

The contemporary middle class (literally media) household works harder, its individuals make less money, it is more brittle, vulnerable to risk. All this volatility spells the coming collapse of the middle class. Bankruptcies are rising, all due to job loss, family illness, or divorce, but people aren’t admitting it. “A middle class where people are falling out and into poverty is a middle class that has less room to bring people up and out of poverty.” Poverty is intractable because the middle class is shrinking, and I think Warren is right to say that our economy is increasingly becoming a two-class society: those who don’t get sick, lose their job, or get divorced, and those who do.

One thing that’s always irritated me about broadly materialist historical explanations is the tendency to miss the importance of contingent historical events. Geography is not destiny, as Jared Diamond suggests, but rather it becomes a destiny when mixed with certain kinds of choices and chances. In The Longterm Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades, Harvard economist Nathan Nunn has shown that Africa’s exceptional poverty is directly linked to the slave trade:

if the slave trades had not occurred, then 72% of the average income gap between Africa and the rest of the world would not exist today, and 99% of the income gap between Africa and the rest of the underdeveloped world would not exist. In terms of economic development, Africa would not look any different from the other developing countries in the world.

If Jared Diamond is right, then Africa’s exposure to tropical diseases and the inadequacy of tropical agriculture suggest that investment in public health is the key to Africa’s future healthy and eventual equilibrium with the rest of the world. This thesis is popular among those who see our responsibilities towards Africa in the light of a the duty of assistance, rather than identifying some deeper obligations like recompense or reparation. It also appeals to our sense of pity, rather than invoking the much messier emotions of guilt and responsibility.

If Nunn is right, slave raiding destroyed institutions in the very most developed parts of Africa, shifting local comparative advantages in the continent away from institutionally stable, politically cohesive, and agriculturally rich coastal and agricultural societies towards remote, rugged, and difficult to access societies. Thus, we should invest in the things we destroyed: institutional stability and political cohesion in coastal and agricultural nations. I have independent reasons for supporting the institutional hypothesis, insofar as I suspect that institutions are the best tools for producing legitimate outcomes and that legitimacy has a greater impact on growth and justice than public health or the forms of production. Still, it’s nice to have some confirmation that the worst thing that human beings have ever done to each other is still the same: not genocide, which is a remarkably modern and weird form for our aggressive nihilism to take, but good, old fashioned domination.

Some short pieces derived from Nunn’s work:
Slave trade and African underdevelopment
The Blessing of Bad Geography

Aside from the conservative conspiracy theories, there are interesting consequences to the Alinsky connection. Door-to-door mobilization is more effective than house parties, but it’s what we might call derivative power: it saps the communal connections it depends upon to accomplish concrete ends. On the one hand, if you’ve got social capital to spare and the ends are good investments that will bequeath even greater power, this is a good move to make. On the other, if communities are being mobilized in ways that don’t ‘pay off’ in terms of social capital, there’s good reason to reject these moves. That’s where organization comes in: long-term investments in communities pay off in a myriad of ways, but not always quickly enough to win a particular election. One of the most attractive elements of the internet and blogosphere is that it is increasingly a tool for organization rather than mobilization. Internet activism isn’t about mailing lists so much as it is about creating and sustaining online communities.

UPDATE: Obama wrote a chapter in the book After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois.

Just look how they conclude. Pogge ends with a supplication:

The analysis shows that the problem of world poverty is both amazingly small and amazingly large. It is amazingly small in economic terms: The aggregate shortfall from the World Bank’s $2/day poverty line of all those 40 percent of human beings who now live below this line is barely $300 billion annually, much less than what the United States spends on its military. This amounts to only 0.7 percent of the global product or less than 1 percent of the combined GNIs of the high-income countries. On the other hand, the problem of world poverty is amazingly large in human terms, accounting for a third of all human deaths and the majority of human deprivation, morbidity, and suffering worldwide.

Most of the massive severe poverty persisting in the world today is avoidable through more equitable institutions that would entail minuscule opportunity costs for the affluent.

While Held concludes with a warning:

It is highly improbable that the multilateral order can survive for very much longer in its current form. [...] Instead, the test of deliberative generalisability needs to be built into reflections on “ways forward” in order to help ensure a focus on global solutions to global challenges – not just American, French, British, German, European Union, Chinese solutions. In other words, we require a multi-perspectival mode of forming, defending and defining political preferences – a mode that is in fact, other- and future-regarding.

The plight of the global poor is disheartening, even enraging… but arguments from injustice do not appear to serve as an efficacious ‘reason to act,’ certainly not ones that can motivate states to make even ‘minuscule sacrifices.’ Whereas the regime-theorist can encompass justice issues within the larger question of legitimacy, demonstrate not our moral responsibility but our mutual interdependence and the potential dangers large-scale inequalities bring to bear on our common world, and show the necessity, rather than the desirability, of solutions to address them.

Robinson’s essay focuses on the notion of ‘constitutive lack’ that has come to define political theory inf(l)ected by psychoanalysis. This notion is also sometimes referred to as ‘the Real’ and appears to function as a reified and metaphysical version of the Freudian Unconscious, since it often invokes repression, denial, compulsion repetition, and the death drive, but Robinson argues, partly following Judith Butler’s objections in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, that ‘constitutive lack’ functions as a mythologizing, obfuscating myth. Lacanian theorists see ‘lack’ as the source of continual novelty in psychic life, driving the polymorphous manifestations of perversity, for instance, or the inevitable transgression of norms. ‘Lack’ functions by supplying aleatory resistances that makes all treatment uncertain and ultimately futile, so in political theory it tends to undermine the normative force of claims regarding justice, fairness, and reform, in favor of an explanation for why the revolution has not yet occurred or is continually being coopted or corrupted. This cynicism and rejection of incremental reform often gets called anti-essentialism without any real justification, considering that it is a pretty obvious brand of structuralism.

Following Roland Barthes, Robinson performs a kind of anti-Lacanian diagnosis, while critically reviewing a number of instances when Laclau, Mouffe, and especially Zizek have invoked this myth precisely where evidence, arguments, and attention to detail were necessary to back normative claims. He describes this as an ‘order not to think,’ an authoritarian concept that irrationally takes every exception and objection as proof of the rule and protects itself from reasonable criticism through esoteric jargon, rhetorical flourishes, and ad hominem attacks on the psyche of the critic.

All of this strikes me as pretty consistent with Lacan’s own feelings about the necessity of a master in the struggle to give up on an impossible project of self-mastery. Since psychoanalysis gets invoked in political theory most often in order to justify the conflation of self-mastery with autonomy, and then to indirectly undermine autonomy through a reference to the Unconscious, I can’t help but suspect that we ought to have long ago jettisoned good old “You need a Master, I will be your Master” Jacques Lacan. There’s no obvious reason why my failure to repress every Freudian slip and irrational impulse entails that I should put myself in the hands of another human being who is, by nature, equally unmastered and flawed. Frankly, this sort of fallibilism strikes me as the best proof for autonomy: if I can’t rule myself, than certainly no one else is up to the task!

Robinson combines this basic criticism with a sort of ‘greatest hits’ of the worst excesses of the provocative attempts of Zizek et al to remain relevant by backing Stalin, anti-Semitism, mass violence, and other stupidity, while denigrating capitalism in order to preserve some sense of solidarity with progressives and level-headed leftists. Here I think he unjustly maligns Mouffe and Laclau by combining their work on antagonism and solidarity with Zizek’s ravings about show trials. Zizek may be a charlatan, but Laclau and Mouffe only came to psychoanalysis through Marxism, and I believe that Mouffe especially has substantive insights to offer to contemporary political theory. Her reification of antagonism is nothing like Zizek’s reification of the Real, because while she often uses locutions in which antagonism is a subject engaged in activities, this is a shorthand that she can and does cash out in attention to particular situations and contexts, while ‘the Real’ operates as an unsymbolizable and ineffable actor, the ‘invisible hand’ of embodied existence or somesuch mystical nonsense.

Robinson apparently believes that Deleuze and Guattari offer the best resources for providing an “active and affirmative” conception of contingency. Insofar as some political theorists will always want to invoke psychoanalytic concepts like repression, projection, aggression, and fetishization to explain racism, sexism, and capitalism, I believe that contemporary scholars like Shannon Sullivan and Kelly Oliver (both teachers of mine) offer a better model for the interaction of psychic life with public life than their Lacanian kin.

Oh, and check it out Robinson has a blog!

Seriously? Clinton is backing an inheritance tax that starts at $7 million dollars, saying that we Americans think people should have to ‘work for what you get.’ Except the first $7 million: that you get for free. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a communist. But given the record deficits we’re facing, I think maybe we could go back to the old $1 million tax-free limit without really hurting anybody. If they want to be ‘truly wealthy,’ let them earn the last $9 million themselves.

Amar was a lifelong friend of Karim’s. Three months earlier, Amar and his older brother, Jafaar, had been riding in the van of a friend, Sayeed, when a group of gunmen hailed them. Amar recognized them as Mahdi Army men, and assumed that they were coming to say hello. As Sayeed braked, the car was riddled with gunfire. Amar crouched as low as he could, as the Mahdi Army men emptied their Kalashnikovs. He was unhurt, but Jafaar and Sayeed were dead.

That night, Amar told Karim that, at the morgue, he had sworn over his brother’s body to take revenge. He had vowed to kill a hundred Mahdi men—ten for each of Jafaar’s fingers. His mother, Um Jafaar, supported him, and begged Karim to help her son. He agreed.

Their first concern was to make sure that the Mahdi militiamen didn’t suspect them. During Jafaar’s funeral procession, they shouted angry denunciations of a Sunni tribe that lived nearby. Word soon spread that Jafaar’s family and friends blamed the Sunnis for his death.

Karim and Amar also decided that it would be easier to carry out the killings if they won the Americans’ trust. Karim went to a nearby U.S. military base, and spoke to a captain. “I told the captain, ‘You help me, I help you. I love my country, my neighbors. The Mahdi have killed many of my friends, and American soldiers, too. I want to coöperate.’ ” Karim gave the captain the names of two of the men who had killed Jafaar. The captain said that, if they were detained, Karim would get some money. He refused: “If I take it, it makes me a spy, and I am a gentleman, not a spy.’ ”

Karim put the captain in touch with Amar, who directed American soldiers to the houses where the two gunmen were staying. The operation was a success. “They found many guns and pistols,” Karim said. “They took them, investigated, and they were convinced about what they were—killers. One was young, fifteen or sixteen, and had killed five or six people. He was just starting out. He is now in Bucca”—a U.S. prison camp in southern Iraq.

“Then the killing started,” Karim told me. Their first victim was the father of the younger gunman. When I asked him whether the father had anything to do with Jafaar’s killing, he looked nonplussed, and said no, but that the man had been an intelligence officer under Saddam, and had probably killed people, too. (In Iraq’s tribal vendettas, male relatives are often seen as legitimate targets.) The father was now working as a taxi-driver. Karim told Amar’s sister to wave him down as he left his house, and ask to be dropped off at a warehouse on the outskirts of a Sunni district. “Amar and I followed,” he said. “She got out, and crossed the street. I told Amar, ‘Do it now.’ ”

Amar drove in front of the taxi-driver, cutting him off. “Amar got out of the car and he shot him in the face. I had put five dumdums and four normal bullets in the gun, a SIG Sauer. One dumdum is enough to kill one man. I told him to shoot only four and keep some back, just in case, but he shot them all.” (Afterward, according to Karim, Amar apologized. “He said, ‘I couldn’t help it. I became crazy.”)

Next, they went to a Sunni sheikh whom Karim knew, whose brother was in the insurgency. The brother and his men kidnapped six Mahdi militiamen, including four who had been in the group that killed Jafaar. They took them to a house in Mansour, a Sunni district, where Karim and Amar met them. “They were tied up and their heads were covered. Amar beat them too much—not me,” Karim said. “We were pretending to be Sunni mujahideen. We told them, ‘If you tell the truth we release you, but if not we will kill you.’ Of course, this was not the truth.”

The men said that Sayeed had been their target; Jafaar just happened to be in the car. “They said they had killed Sayeed because he was a member of Badr”—the military wing of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a major rival of the Mahdi Army—“and worked with Americans. But this is not true. They killed him because he was rich and didn’t respect the Mahdi Army. They were jealous.”

Karim told me that he left before the interrogation was over, and didn’t talk to Amar until the next day. “When I saw him, he kissed me. He said, ‘I left three bodies near the train track, and two in Canal Street, to be taken to the morgue.’

“I said, ‘No. 6, where is he?’ Amar said, ‘The sheikh’s brother took him, because he thinks he killed his cousin.’ ”

The killing continued. After fifteen days, they went to Um Jafaar, Amar’s mother. “I told her who was dead and who was in jail. She was very happy,” Karim said. “Then she said, ‘Do you want me to be completely comforted?’ ” Um Jafaar asked them to bring her parts of the dead men’s bodies. Amar did what she asked.

“One man, he cut off his ear when he was still alive,” Karim said. “But I swear that Amar has never killed anyone who was innocent.”

Karim said that Amar had killed eighteen or twenty men. “After a while, I told Amar to stop this. My wife, also, was angry with me. I didn’t like to do this, either, but we had to. We had to kill these guys, because they were killing too many people. When some of them were killed, my neighbors celebrated—sometimes even the Mahdi Army guys did.”

Karim mentioned the American captain with whom Amar worked. “Amar is a friend of the captain, but he doesn’t know about this.” He added, “Amar was friends of the Mahdi—real friends. I have to be honest with you. If not for Jafaar’s killing, he still would be.”

Amar told Karim that he would not stop killing until he reached his goal of a hundred victims. “He is hungry for killing now,” Karim said. “Sometimes I think maybe he has gone a little crazy.”

Consider the story of SlimVirgin, a controversial Wikipedia administrator. The last two links tell the story of a troubled young woman, who lost a friend in the Lockerbie bombing of PanAm 103 and was personally involved in the investigation, and perhaps for a time employed by British intelligence, who then went on to create and edit Wikipedia articles related to these events that are “seriously skewed in directions that she has promoted and protected.” Alternatively, the lost friend was a cover and her work for British intelligence was aimed at disrupting the investigation, and now subsequent reports of it.

You know, I think Colbert might be on to something. Truthiness prevails.

In both cases, coffee-drinking becomes a trope associated with modern liberalism, one that must be either rediscovered or extinguished. Coffee consumption is free from constraint and ritual, it is ostensibly more purely rational than alcohol or other other intoxicants, and tied to the productivity required by early capitalists. But the most important part of coffee drinking is the possibility of community: a coffeehouse can be a place of communal interaction, but in what will become the standard refrain of liberalism, it doesn’t have to be. Coffeehouses become wholly voluntary communities, which is what is what is both right and wrong about liberalism as a whole. We might have to live together, but we need not share a cup of coffee. Yet, if we choose to do so, we can more easily sit down for a cup of java than to pray or to become drunk, both of which threaten too much intimacy and too little control over the interaction. Liberal subjects pretend that this control is and ought to be standard, and that pretension is either the genius of the modern age (Habermas) or a sign of its decline (Schmitt):

According to Habermas, the bourgeoisie consumes coffee in the transient but promising public sphere; according to Schmitt, they do so in the spurious harmony of the bourgeois interior. Both thinkers ultimately describe how those who meet over coffee tend to view themselves as human beings freed from the pressures of political discord or social constraints. One drinks coffee in a space abstracted from all contexts that predetermine relationships. For the duration of the coffee break, the conditions that normally circumscribe an existence marked by conflict and inequality are suspended, and in the resulting state one can identify a principle of a sound public sphere or an apolitical and therefore fatal utopia.

Since we’ve opted for optional politics, we ought to be thankful it comes in this form: shade grown, organic, global, sustainable, and tasty.

Maybe we should think like firefighters. They try to save every life they can, but they don’t take crazy risks. [...] A “firehouse strategy” would make triage decisions. It would deploy U.S. forces so that they aren’t caught in the middle of collapsing walls and blazing timbers. It would emphasize the training of Iraqi forces to fight the blaze. It would build firebreaks so the disaster doesn’t spread to other rooms in the Iraqi house. Most of all, a firehouse strategy would try to keep this sectarian blaze from jumping national boundaries. U.S. and Iraqi troops can create buffers by moving significant forces toward Iraq’s borders

So long as we are not the main targets or causes of violence in the region, we should remain there. So long as we can do more good than harm, we stay to clean up after our incompetent leaders. Scholars of the region agree that the current violence is sectarian, or sometimes simply feudal, in nature, and is not any sort of freedom-fighting or guerrilla-resistance aimed at a foreign occupier. The explosive violence is mostly attributable to warlords and their militias, many of whom use ethnic and religious distinctions to create loyalties, but who nonetheless are fighting for material gains for their in-group, and simply manipulating the larger Sunni/Shiite solidarities and antipathies to find sources of funding and weaponry abroad. They pursue their goals using the techniques of ethnic cleansing: terrorizing and killing the out-groups in order to create homogeneous blocs over which they can exercise their power. These guys will duke it out in Iraq regardless of our presence: their own safety depends on the destruction of their enemies, so for them it’s a fight to the death.