I’m Being Oppressed!

Nothing unites conservatives and defines their collective mindset more than the shared notion that the United States is controlled by a legion of liberals with no self-restraint and a vendetta against conservatives.

This shared worldview at once explains the relative strength of the conservative coalition compared to the loose confederation of individualistic liberals (nothing pulls people together like a common enemy) and demonstrates how vapid contemporary conservatism is as an ideology: conservatives aren’t so much pro-life as they are anti-abortion (why else this flagrant disregard for impoverished children and the eldery, not to mention staunch opposition to healthcare for every citizen?); they aren’t so much in favor of responsible government as they are opposed to big liberal government; even their enthusiasm for guns and bombs is overshadowed by their resolve to fight any sort of gun control.

This newsflash should come as a devestating blow, then, to conservatives: you aren’t oppressed anymore.

Though she draws ridiculous conclusions, Peggy Noonan’s column in today’s Wall Street Journal features an astute observation from a conservative perspective:

[The New York Times is] not what it was. Once it was such a force that it controlled the intellectual climate. Now it’s just part of it.

Rather than celebrate the apparent victory for conservatives this would indicate (the far-right editorializing and reportage of papers like the Journal and the Washington Times are no longer overshadowed by the mammoth influence of the Times), Noonan of course opts for the negative path. The diminishing influence of the Times on America’s “intellectual climate” can only mean one thing: the paper has gotten worse and is finally reeping what it sowed as seeds of liberalism.

Noonan completely misses the real story, as most pundits (and the White House) have this week. The real story is that the New York Times no longer needs to be singled out by right-wingers as an instrument of their continued oppression. All this inane faux-indignation directed at the Times (while the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and deeply conservative Wall Street Journal all ran with the financial espionage story as well) is a waste of breath. Conservatives no longer need to fear the New York Times. They need only fear one thing: that the end of their oppression, which has been realized, may be the cripling blow to their movement they never expected.

Campaigning on a Budget

The Supreme Court struck down Monday a Vermont law that would severely restrict campaign spending within the state. (State senator candidates, for instance, would not be permitted to spend more than $4,000 on their entire campaign.)

The decision was, of course, predictably praised by Right-leaning OpEd pages, including The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times, who called the decision a “Free Speech Victory” and “A Victory for the First.”

It doesn’t take a strict constructionist to see that such a violent act of judicial review resembles an act of legislating from the bench. After all, states’ rights suffer in the wake of this decision. Worse, these OpEd pages don’t appear to mind judicial activism when their agenda benefits. To review the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech…

That’s “Congress” with a capital “C.” If the grounds for nullifying the state law rested on the First Amendment, it would be a stretch to assert that a Vermont law was an instance of the U.S. Congress abridging the freedom of speech. It turns out that the victory was for the Fourteenth Amendment, which includes this section:

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The First Amendment gets all the attention, but this Fourteenth is the one to watch these days. It is this Amendment which has been co-opted to grant protection to corporations as legal “persons,” and it is this Amendment which improperly has been used to violate, at opportune times, the rights and sovereignty of individual states and shore up federalist advances. Interestingly, the Fourteenth Amendment ends with these words:

The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Strange, then, that the Supreme Court has assumed that power, with scant legislative backing from elected representatives.

Of course, another question lingers: “Does spending money really count as speech?” The answer is obviously “no” until one looks at reality. In today's civic world it is difficult to find venues where you can speak before a public audience (or reach them through other media) for free (the Internet is a cause for hope). With that anxiety, it is difficult to imagine a grassroots campaign effectively ousting a well-known incumbant with a scant few thousand dollars to spend. At the same time, the money-as-speech view would concludes that fundraising skills are as important as a candidate's ability to communicate with a constituency. Should it be any wonder then that our halls of government are filled with men and women with money always on their minds?

With the Law on Our Side

The European Union is poised to hit Microsoft with yet another antitrust ruling, one that could cost the megacorporation $2.5 million a day. (To make matters worse for Microsoft, it is in Europe more than anywhere else that the popularity of the GNU/Linux free operating system is causing them great anxiety.)

In the press, this news is being contextualized by Warren Buffett’s recent announcement that he’ll be giving some $30 billion in stock to Bill Gates’s foundation. But to me, the context is slightly different.

For me, this comes on the heels of two other events. The first is a move by New York City Councilman Joel Rivera to use zoning laws to restrict the number of fast food restaurants in the city and where they may be located. His proposal has been garnering a surprising amount of support from the mayor and New Yorkers in general, all of whom are concerned with rising obeseity, especially in children here.

The second is Barry Lynn’s article in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine (discussed below), “Breaking the Chain: The Antitrust Case Against Wal-Mart.” Lynn makes a clear argument for legal prosecution which is easy to imagine actually happening in the not-too-distant future.

With those two pieces of context, the news of the EU antitrust ruling against Microsoft indicates that two underutilized tools in the protection of current-day democracy and public wellness may be antitrust laws and zoning ordinances. Both have been used in the past to shape the political culture of the United States and the world, and perhaps we will see a continued rise in their use and effectiveness in the coming months.

A Judicious Review

Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter is a case study in how to succeed in national politics without toeing the party line. When he deviates from the Republican plan, he demonstrates that he thinks critically, for himself. I’ve had my share of disagreements with his stances, but I respect his example when it comes to bucking partisan politics.

While some in the GOP are advocating prosecution of institutions of our free press (The New York Times tops the list, unsurprisingly), Specter is sticking with an older story—the Bush administration’s warrantless wire tapping project. He indicated his plans to pursue judicial review for the Bush wiretapping program yesterday, probably through the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court, who should have reviewed the program when the evesdropping started.

It’s interesting to note that Thomas Jefferson (and, obviously, James Madison) vehemently opposed the landmark Supreme Court rulling in Marbury v. Madison that instituted the now-entrenched doctrine of judicial review. Jefferson feared that it would vest too much power in a single branch of government, the judiciary. To the extent that we have witnessed a good deal of “legislating from the bench” ever since, Jefferson’s concerns were well-justified and ought to be remembered. At the same time, judicial review repeatedly has turned out to enable a truer system of checks and balances. We can only hope that in this case of warrantless wiretapping, the perhaps excessive power of the judiciary will reign in this excessively autocratic act of a too-powerful executive.

Standard Oil Redux; Court Strengthens Workers Rights

Anadarko Petroleum today acquired Kerr-McGee and Western Gas, making it now the largest “independent” energy company in the United States. It is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, with its total shares worth upward of $458 million. Kerr-McGee has a strong natural gas operation centering in the Rocky Mountain region. This acquisition makes the number of players in the energy field that many fewer, and makes the notion of “competition” in the industry that much more ludicrous. What’s more, since Anadarko’s focus is on the United States, I’m sure their extra strength will be used as increased bullying power to convince Congress to open the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling. (Nothing like turning a “refuge” into anything but.)

In better news, the Supreme Court yesterday unanimously ruled in favor of a female forklift driver who lost her job after making a sexual harassment claim. It is a clear and much-needed victory for workers rights.

Monopoly Monotony

We’ve lost track in the post-Reagan years of what antitrust laws are meant to protect. Yes, they’re intended to protect consumers from overly-inflated prices. But they’re also intended to protect manufacturers and workers.

In the July Harper’s, Barry C. Lynn lays out in clear and powerful terms the case for breaking up Wal-Mart by supplimenting existing antitrust law and enforcing them. Our biggest complaint should not be that Wal-Mart is a monopoly, limiting consumer choice, but rather that it is a monopsony—a market situation in which manufacturers and distributors are subjected to the whims of a single dominant buyer. Setting up a monopsony is exactly what Wal-Mart has done. Even such manufacturing and producing giants as Procter & Gamble (P&G), Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, and Levi Strauss & Co. are in a majority of respects today micromanaged by Wal-Mart.

Such control in the economic marketplace takes power out of the hands of citizens and puts it in the artificial hands of a mega-corporation. Such political consequences are the most obvious danger, but so is the very existence of a true monopsony:

Even if the American people did choose to bear the extreme political costs of monopoly, the particular type of power wielded by Wal-Mart and its emulators makes no economic sense in the long run. On the surface, it may seem to matter little who wins the great battles between such goliaths as Wal-Mart and Kraft, or between Wal-Mart and P&G. Yet which firm prevails can have a huge effect on the welfare of our society over time. The difference between a system dominated by firms built to produce and a system dominated by firms built to exercise monopsony power over producers is extreme. The producers that dominated the American economy for most of the twentieth century were geared to build more and to introduce new, to protect their capital investments against overly predatory investors, to raise price faster than cost, to show some degree of loyalty to workers and outside suppliers and communities. Wal-Mart and a growing number of today's dominant firms, by contrast, are programmed to cut cost faster than price, to slow the introduction of new technologies and techniques, to dictate downward the wages and profits of the millions of people and smaller firms who make and grow what they sell, to break down entire lines of production in the name of efficiency. The effects of this change are clear: We see them in the collapsing profit margins of the firms caught in Wal-Mart’s system. We see them in the fact that of Wal-Mart’s top ten suppliers in 1994, four have sought bankruptcy protection. [Harper’s Magazine, July 2006, pp 34-35]

What’s more, Lynn cautions against some of the traditional civic responses to Wal-Mart’s abuse of power, including:

• encouraging “yet more mergers among its suppliers and competitors” to increase their bargaining power in proportion to Wal-Mart’s


• micromanaging Wal-Mart via state and local governments—“requiring it, as Maryland recently did, to devote 8 percent of its payroll to health insurance”


• making it “easier for its workers to unionize”

These actions could spell disaster for the antitrust cause against Wal-Mart: “super-consolidated suppliers” will have the same political and economic interests as Wal-Mart itself, labor unions will suddenly be interested in Wal-Mart’s success rather than its end, and government agencies that regulate Wal-Mart will be likely to allow the corporation to continue to exist now that it is being regulated.

If we agree that the consequences of such actions would be bad for our democractic republic and for our way of life, Lynn posits that we have only one remaining choice—“We must restore antitrust law to its central role in protecting the economic rights, properties, and liberties of the American citizen, and first of all use that power to break Wal-Mart into pieces.” I heartily agree.

Trying to Take Over the World

Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt oversaw the League of Nations’ transition to the United Nations has the Secretary-General been a high-profile world citizen prior to holding the post. Being a relative unknown has been an unofficial prerequisite to nomination.

Current Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s second term expires at the end of this year, and the candidates nominated to fill the position may create a break with this tradition.

Word has it that Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and French President Jacques Chirac all have an eye on the slot, though they all recognize how risky a candidacy could be, and have not announced any intention of seeking the position.

So far, four candidates have officially been nominated:

• Shashi Tharoor, the current U.N. Under Secretary-General for Communications Public Information, of India


• Ban Ki-moon, a Harvard grad, of South Korea


• Jayantha Dhanapala, a former U.N. Under Secretary, of Sri Lanka


• Surakiart Sathirathai, current Deputy Prime Minister of Thailand

Additionally, there are three strong yet unannounced candidates:

• José Ramos Horta, current the Foreign Minister of East Timor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate


• Kemal Dervis, Secretary-General of the U.N. Development Program, of Turkey


• Niranjan Deva-Aditya, Sri-Lankan–born member of the British parliament

All seven of these likely candidates meet the “relatively unknown” pseudo-requirement.

Pocket Money

The House debated today on next year’s U.S. defense budget. It’s a long bill, as usual, since the thing consumes around half the entire federal budget. This year's version weighs in at $381.7 billion. Since that’s about nine and a half times the entire gross domestic product (GDP) of North Korea, I’m not too concerned about their nuke anymore.

Of course, the $381.7B figure isn't hard-and-fast, as the bill allows Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld room to spend up to a trillion dollars—literally more money than you or I could imagine.

There are some nice little nuggets in the bill, too:

• $1,939,830,000 for the Army for "Other" expenses


• Gas & repairs are lumped in with money for recruiting, for a total of more than $12 billion between the various branches.


• The Air Force gets $24,457,062,000 to try new shit out.

We’ve certainly put our money where our magnetic ribbons are. Remember this appropriations bill next time you wonder whether or not we are adequately supporting our troops.