The last ten days have been such an emotional rollercoaster! I spent the last few days in Florida, but today was the first time in ten days that I came home to an apartment with electricity, heat, water, hot water, cable, and internet. It was about eleven days ago that Hurricane Sandy hit New York; with it, my apartment, my office, and the rest of lower Manhattan, lost power. With the loss of electricity came the failure of pumps to send water to higher floors like mine and the loss of steam to provide heat to the building. The elevators didn't function and the stairwells had no emergency lighting, so I used a flashlight to illuminate the eighteen flights I learned to skip down and trudge up.
On the first day, my concerns were light: we packed up our fridge, filling three bags with things like frozen wild-caught salmon and the autumn stew I'd cooked the day before (preparing to huddle at home but without thinking through the implications of power-loss), and brought them to a friend's restaurant in midtown. We had a car, we drove uptown, spent the day with friends, found a hot shower and watched tv; returned home to our dark - yet romantic - apartment. The next day was similar, only we spent it in Brooklyn instead of uptown. The day began well; we enjoyed brunch in Fort Greene (on a Wednesday!), but by evening I was in a state of culture shock. Williamsburg was celebrating Halloween while I worried where to sleep that night. My husband was leaving that night for a business trip, and we were worried about my safety in our very dark apartment building in our very dark neighborhood. Would I be safe walking up eighteen flights of a pitch-black stairwell to a pitch-black hallway with many of my neighbors gone? We decided I'd be safe enough to sleep at home and went for a quick dinner in the closest neighborhood with power, just over the Williamsburg Bridge. In W'burg, people were dressed in halloween costumes and laughing drunkenly. They felt very far away.
On the third day of no power, I headed uptown by myself. My husband had successfully flown out, from a surprisingly-functioning JFK airport, and I braved the city on my own. Driving uptown was like passing from third-world to first-world country; the analogy that comes to mind - though I can't vouch for its accuracy - is travelling from East Berlin to West Berlin. Except here, we didn't need passports and there were no border guards; I was freely let into this other part of town that felt a world apart. Downtown had no traffic lights, and at each intersection I slowed and amicably negotiated with the pedestrians, bikers, and other cars for the right of way, happy to stop and let the pedestrians cross where I saw them. Our system worked smoothly and I grew comfortable with the opportunities to do favors for others, and felt cooperative with the other cars on the road, and made good time getting uptown. And then, I passed 39th street and suddenly, there were traffic lights and horns honking and pedestrians carrying shopping bags still in the crosswalk after the light had changed. The city was back to normal here, but I didn't feel normal and I didn't feel ready to be aggressive and fast and confident. But here I was, exiled to this place because I couldn't stay in my world. I hadn't felt this kind of culture-shock since returning home from a semester abroad in Mexico in 1997. But I spent the day with a good friend and her adorable kids, and though disorienting, it was nice to spend so much time with them.
It was getting colder, and with my husband gone, I was getting lonelier, so I spent the night with friends in Brooklyn. They'd had to return to work at their offices in midtown, so I picked them up at their offices and then picked up my food I'd left in my friend's walk-in cooler, and happily went to their apartment and had a home-cooked (my home! my cooking!) meal and wine and I felt warm and happy. I realized that there's something nice - always, but especially after you are married - about needing to rely on people, and about the opportunity to spend time with friends relaxed in their homes. I've always been a little too independent and self-reliant, and now that I am married, I seem to only rely on my husband and rarely have occasion to seek help and comfort from others.
The next day I drove them to work, because they needed transportation and I needed to have two other people in my car to be allowed back into Manhattan, thanks to the Mayor's new HOV requirements. But really I had also discovered how comforting it was to be able to help my friends, especially when they were helping me and we could be there for each other. That next day, I finally felt settled enough to look outward and try to figure out how to help others who were really suffering in the storm. I'd been disoriented and unsettled for a few days, but I knew I was incredibly blessed to have a car, and money to eat in restaurants, and friends who had opened their homes to me (and who had homes that they could share), and an apartment that had survived the storm intact, and the strength and health to go up and down 18 flights of stairs. How absurdly privileged I was that my chief concern on the first day was for my salmon and gourmet ice cream. So I decided to try to help my neighbors.
There are lots of elderly people here, most of whom bought apartments here back when the building was limited-equity, affordable housing. I was prepared to get involved in food distribution efforts by climbing the stairs that they were unable to climb. My volunteer work took a different turn, however. I began inquiring about how to help, and the next thing I knew, I was in the middle of a group of National Guardsmen distributing FEMA food (which is apparently the same as military food and looked pretty disgusting) to the hungry and devastated and low-income people in my neighborhood. When I arrived, there were ten long empty tables set up, a line of people stretching down a long block, and a tape dividing the people from the tables. Within the tape, next to the tables, were about ten civilian volunteers, about twenty-five National Guardsmen in fatigues, and one Salvation Army Captain in full regalia. They were waiting for a military truck to arrive with the food, and once it did, the Guardsmen got to work unloading boxes and stacking them on, under, and next to the table. We made quick work of organizing the boxes on the table and opening them, and then a policeman cut the tape and my neighbors began arriving to eagerly pick up their food.
In all of this, I somehow discovered a sort of leadership role for myself, not in a "bossy" way (which I always fear), but in a doing-what-needs-to-be-done sort of way. When I learned that each person would receive three food packets, I helped communicate to the other volunteers down the long tables. When I learned that each person would get 3 packets for each family members they were picking up for, I communicated that information. When I saw that many volunteers and Guardsmen hadn't understood this and didn't realize people could take food for more than just themselves (and were refusing to give them food for their family members), I tried to explain to them and then sought out the Salvation Army Captain to suggest that he clarify to everyone. When the National Guardsmen (they were so young and hard-working and earnest!) had trouble doing the math on how many packets of food per household, I helped them: a whole box! a box plus these three! remove three then give them the rest of the box! One guy, apparently stressed by this kind of math, said so genuinely, "Boy, I'm so glad you're here!" It wasn't a volunteer-task anyone would ever dare to predict ahead of time, but I'm sure that I helped make the procees run more efficiently. New volunteers arrived and approached me - me! - to ask how to get involved. When we were done, I brought one of these new volunteers to the food distribution in my building, and got involved there, similarly helping the process run smoothly. My involvement never required me to go up and down stairs, as it turned out. I felt satisfied when it was done; I had found a way to use my skills to be useful to these projects.
The next day, I flew to Florida, away from the cold and strangeness of storm-hit New York City, to warmth and to the other reality of being just a few days away from the 2012 Presidential election. I offered my services at the local Obama campaign office, and wondered how that experience would compare to my day of post-Sandy food distribution. As it turned out, in Florida there was no organizational, leadership role that I needed to search out: the campaign was well-organized, and I was one of the soldiers pounding the pavement. I got to work canvassing, knocking on doors to people identified by the campaign as Obama supporters but sporadic voters, to "get out the vote" as they say. I haven't done a lot of canvassing in my life, and learned that it is pain-staking, laborious work. This was very different than the hour I'd spent handing out FEMA food to hundreds of people. Here, I could count a handful of apparent, small victories after hours on the road: an older man who intended to vote but didn't know where his polling place was; a few people who seemed to want that additional encouragement to go vote; and going off-list to a house full of Obama yard-signs and stickers to successfully recruit another volunteer. I felt what they mean when they talk about Obama's ground-game and army of volunteers, because this kind of work requires an army to reach everyone on the extensively-analyzed lists. Each day I walked with a partner and learned more about these other Obama-supporters - two middle-aged blue-collar women. I learned more about Central Florida communities (one with mid-size homes and large trees, another with mobile homes and tiny yards) and who the Obama-supporters are in those places: nearly all white, and among the folks who were home when I knocked, many were middle-aged or senior citizens. My work and time in Florida was spent in counties that voted almost 60% for Romney, and I felt like part of a small club that looked out for its few members. As I learned, when you wear an Obama button in public in Central Florida, people approach you in restaurants to thank you for supporting the President. And when the results came in and Obama was re-elected, I felt so gratified to have been a small part of that victory, among the many, many people who put in a few hours or more to help make this happen.
The next day, this morning, I got on a plane to come back home to my apartment, now with heat and hot water. I bought a New York Times because it seemed that I ought to have a souvenir of the election results, and an airport employee approached me about it. In the end, I gave him the special Election section, which he said was excited to read on his lunch break, since I only really wanted the front page. New York still wasn't back to normal: the A train wasn't running to Manhattan, and another airport employee helped me figure out which subways I could take back to the City. (In thirteen years, I haven't admitted to needing any help navigating the subways - I can read the map! - so receiving some advice felt both unusual and comforting.)
And then, my journey nearly over, I stepped off the subway into my neighborhood and collided with the cold rain and wind of today's Nor'easter. Fortunately, this time I am comfortably secluded in a home with power, heat, and all the comforts of my home back again. And tomorrow, I'll go back to work for the first time in eleven days, and the President will still be our president, and yet I feel like so much has changed, or happened, or transformed in this time. In some ways, those changes are out there in the world, and in other ways, it is me who has been changed. I want to make sure that I remember what this topsy-turvy week felt like, even when New York, and the country, and my life seems to go back to normal.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Monday, June 18, 2012
Nimby is ugly, democracy is messy, but somehow it all works
As I just mentioned on facebook, after an hour or so of community board 3 subcommittee on liquor licensing, I am astounded that anyone ever bothers and manages to open bars and restaurants in new York City, let alone the sheer number that we see. The forces of not in my backyard negativity are astounding. As this issue has emerged concerning our immediate neighborhood, my husband and I have been commenting to each other that we moved to the Lower East Side from the suburbs of Jersey because we wanted the vibrant, mixed-use neighborhood we could only find in Manhattan. We thought it was obvious that all Manhattanites thought like us, but I am seeing just how wrong that assumption is. For example, I am now watching a request for a tiny Japanese restaurant on an East Village side street. Some of the commentators opposes to the license are remarking that there are so many Japanese restaurants in the area, we don't need another. To me, this point is more a threat that this business won't survive than a reason to discourage it in the first place. Why not let the market decide if, in fact, we need another Japanese restaurant? I am embarrassed to note that another concern voiced was that the owner, a Japanese woman, does not speak English very well so who can these people complain to? Is that not flat out nativist? What happened to the American dream, and the beautiful diversity of New York City?
As for the bar application that brought me here in the first place, my neighbors complained that we are a residential neighborhood and should stay that way; they complain that opening a bar will guarantee drunks and criminals; that the noise will disturb them; that it should be denied simply because it is a block away from schools and churches. This is New York City! I had no idea this went on here. The fact is that in our particular few-block radius, there are very few bars and restaurants. This fact is what drives many of the supporters who want more neighborhood nightlife spots. But even more so, this fact makes me impressed that these particular proprietors are willing to take the risk of opening a new business in a neighborhood that does not have a bar-going reputation. I have heard that 1 out of every 3 new restaurants in NYC fails within a year. Given this, I am amazed at the uphill battle people go through to even bother trying.
But the fact is, if you look around the city, it appears that somehow this mix of business and democracy works. People are able to have their say, perhaps even to encourage and persuade business owners to make certain concessions in the way they operate - schedule, offerings, noise control - and businesses are able to open and, with any luck, thrive. I'm just observing for now, but with an eye toward getting more involved in the community governance and institutions soon.
My questions: Just how, and how well, does this balance of democracy and business work? How much of these community reactions are simple inertia and fear of change and how much is legitimate concerns about changes that should not be permitted or concessions that should be made before a business can open? Do these community boards ultimately have any power over the licensing authority? How much influence do they have? If I were to get involved, what would be the purpose really, in terms of what I might hope to accomplish for the community (and for myself of course)?
As for the bar application that brought me here in the first place, my neighbors complained that we are a residential neighborhood and should stay that way; they complain that opening a bar will guarantee drunks and criminals; that the noise will disturb them; that it should be denied simply because it is a block away from schools and churches. This is New York City! I had no idea this went on here. The fact is that in our particular few-block radius, there are very few bars and restaurants. This fact is what drives many of the supporters who want more neighborhood nightlife spots. But even more so, this fact makes me impressed that these particular proprietors are willing to take the risk of opening a new business in a neighborhood that does not have a bar-going reputation. I have heard that 1 out of every 3 new restaurants in NYC fails within a year. Given this, I am amazed at the uphill battle people go through to even bother trying.
But the fact is, if you look around the city, it appears that somehow this mix of business and democracy works. People are able to have their say, perhaps even to encourage and persuade business owners to make certain concessions in the way they operate - schedule, offerings, noise control - and businesses are able to open and, with any luck, thrive. I'm just observing for now, but with an eye toward getting more involved in the community governance and institutions soon.
My questions: Just how, and how well, does this balance of democracy and business work? How much of these community reactions are simple inertia and fear of change and how much is legitimate concerns about changes that should not be permitted or concessions that should be made before a business can open? Do these community boards ultimately have any power over the licensing authority? How much influence do they have? If I were to get involved, what would be the purpose really, in terms of what I might hope to accomplish for the community (and for myself of course)?
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Disenchantment and the Supreme Court
Where have I been for the last month? What happened to practice, practice, practice? I'm sure there are a host of factors - laziness, distraction, premature spring making me want to be outside - but the one worth talking about is disenchantment, disillusion, however you want to call it. The events of the last month tend to inspire me to something more akin to crawling under a rock than to the critical engagement that writing requires. Shall I count them? Let's see, there was the Trayvon Martin shooting, with the less-than-inspiring conversations it begat of Florida gun laws, seemingly-backwards law enforcement, President Obama's reaction, and ... ahem... hooded sweatshirts. There has been the GOP primary, with its plethora of depressing candidates and discussion topics apparently trying to distract voters from the dismal economic situation. (Reproductive rights becoming a priority during the Great Recession? Really?) And...steeling myself...the health care arguments at the Supreme Court.
Question: What is a clear signal that you have been feeling disillusioned?
Answer: When the most refreshing voice you've heard in weeks belongs to John McCain.
So I'm listening to this week's This American Life episode and it is uber-depressing (enlightening in a "now I know about the pink slime in my hamburgers" kind of way. Oh yeah, I forgot to put that one on the list of uninspiring news topics). First they talk about how lobbying has worked in Congress in recent years, with choice facts like: Nancy Pelosi attended 400 fundraisers in 2011, typical lobbyists dodge phone calls from Congress members who are calling them to ask for fundraising and contributions (not the other way around), and the return on investment for lobbying over the American Jobs Creation Act was 22,000 %. And this is only Act I. After the break, the show goes on to discuss how Citizens United makes all of this even worse. How it ups the ante - exponentially - for Congress members' fundraising goals. How Karl Rove's super PAC is expected to spend $300 million on the various races of 2012. How Rove's Super PAC's ad-buy of $700,000 in a 2010 congressional race single-handedly increased the Republican campaign's spending by 1/3 in a single day - and of course, the Democratic was defeated.
So, into this morass comes this really great - but too brief! - interview with John McCain and Russ Feingold, sponsors of the legislation evicerated by Citizen United. After the antagonism I have felt toward John McCain since the 2008 election, it was such a surprise to feel like this guy was on my side of this dismal issue. John McCain, saying that Citizens United was "beyond ridiculous." John McCain, saying that Scalia's "arrogance" and "sarcasm" was "stunning." John McCain, calling the Supreme Court "clueless."
Ok, I realize that McCain is really the representative of a dying breed of Republicans, being pushed aside by the Tea Partiers and their Santorums. But it's refreshing to remember that it is not entirely an us-against-them world, that there are some folks on the right that have the same critiques of the Supreme Court that I have. And not just critiques, but anger, frustration, dismay.
Feingold then said something that gives a glimmer of hope to all of this. He said, "One thing that John and I experienced was that sometimes the corporations that didn't like the system would come to us and say, you know, you guys, it's not legalized bribery, it's legalized extortion. Because it's not like the company CEO calls up to say, gee, I'd love to give you some money. It's usually the other way around. The politician or their agent who's got the Super PAC, they're the ones that are calling up and asking for the money." - this quote was entirely consistent, by the way, with the reporting in part 1 of the episode - "So a lot of businesses, I think, are going to help us rebel against this and say, you know, we don't want to be a part of this mess."
Let's stop and think about that for a minute. Amidst all the cynicism I have felt that corporations will just buy government and destroy any semblance of democracy, Feingold suggests this alternate reality: businesses don't want to buy government - not at these prices anyway! - and they will become allies in the fight against the new reality. Could it be, even just a little bit, possible?
So this brings me back to the Affordable Care Act. I could devote pages to this - along with the attendant agonizing - but I'll try to be brief here.
As a lawyer, my belief in the legal system is an article of faith, a core value that I thought I shared with the other members of the legal community, and especially our leaders at the pinnacle of the profession, the Supreme Court: separation of powers, federalism, stare decisis, judicial restraint, constitutional avoidance, deciding only cases and controversies and avoiding "advisory opinions", avoiding political questions. In law school, I had the privilege of taking "Federal Courts" with Professor Shapiro, a student of the original authors of the seminal textbook on this study, Hart & Wechsler. Thinking about all I learned there makes me feel the roots of my disenchantment acutely. Fed Courts, as it is known to law students, is a notoriously "gunner" class, taken by everyone on law review, by anyone who aspires to a federal appellate clerkship, and was the most challenging class I've taken since AP calculus in high school. It is always hard to explain what makes it so challenging, but what makes it challenging is exactly what makes it so crucial to my faith in the legal system. The point of Fed Courts, as I learned it, is about how the Supreme Court has shaped the role of the federal judiciary in the American system, and much of it is about the limits on that power - deferring to the political branches on political questions, deferring to the states on state questions, not rendering opinions on constitutional questions unless absolutely necessary to deciding a case (this is the doctrine of "constitutional avoidance"), not rendering opinions on anything unless necessary to deciding a "case or controversy" before it (this is the doctrine of avoiding "advisory opinions). In recent years, the Supreme Court seems to have turned all this on its head. (I realize in my quick "research" for this blog post that for many years now scholars have been arguing that the "Hart & Wechsler paradigm" "no longer serves us well either as an account of what the Supreme Court does in Federal Courts cases or as a guide to what the Court ought to do." Perhaps I am coming to agree with that view, or the first part of it, anyway.)
These principles are part of the outrage amongst lawyers over Bush v. Gore - that the Supreme Court would ignore the centuries-old "political question doctrine" in that decision. Citizens United continues this trend. To me, steeped in the law of the Hart & Wechsler fed courts paradigm, it is the constitutional avoidance problem that has me most baffled: the statute at issue could have been construed far more narrowly to avoid the constitutional question of whether corporations have free speech rights. There was just no need to reach that issue, except to flex the Supreme Court's muscle in a manner that had been studiously avoided for, again, centuries.
And now comes the Affordable Care Act. (What is that case called, anyway? . .[quick search] . . It is two consolidated cases, the easier of which is HHS v. Florida.) In this case, precedent appears to dictate - as Obama recently noted - upholding Congress's commerce clause authority. Congress's enactment of economic laws has not been questioned since the Court's review of New Deal legislation about 75 years ago. And then there are the questions. Argh...the questions! Asking about Congress's other options, why Congress chose this method of dealing with the health care problems, asking about the costs of the program. When your understanding of the federal court is shaped by an intense study of doctrines created by the Court itself to limit its power, these questions feel like nails on a chalkboard. They are not the kind of questions the Justices are supposed to ask; they are precisely the questions they are supposed to avoid. (Click here for a good article on the Supreme Court arguments.)
The entire basis of these doctrines is that this small, unelected, tenured-for-life group - without the power of the purse or the military - secures its legitimacy only by the citizenry and the rest of government maintaining a kind of faith or trust in its legitimacy, and it maintains that respect by limiting its powers. The 5 members of the current conservative wing seem to have a different set of principles at work, and I fear that they are taking a knife to their own legitimacy. Oh what a great relief it will be if they uphold Obamacare! But based on what I've seen so far, from Citizens United to the oral arguments in HHS v. Florida, the wound has been inflicted, and whether the knife is turned remains to be seen.
And as a lawyer, as a lawyer with a tremendous faith in the deepest principles of the federal judicial system, the carving away at those tenets causes me greater disillusion than all of those other events.
Question: What is a clear signal that you have been feeling disillusioned?
Answer: When the most refreshing voice you've heard in weeks belongs to John McCain.
So I'm listening to this week's This American Life episode and it is uber-depressing (enlightening in a "now I know about the pink slime in my hamburgers" kind of way. Oh yeah, I forgot to put that one on the list of uninspiring news topics). First they talk about how lobbying has worked in Congress in recent years, with choice facts like: Nancy Pelosi attended 400 fundraisers in 2011, typical lobbyists dodge phone calls from Congress members who are calling them to ask for fundraising and contributions (not the other way around), and the return on investment for lobbying over the American Jobs Creation Act was 22,000 %. And this is only Act I. After the break, the show goes on to discuss how Citizens United makes all of this even worse. How it ups the ante - exponentially - for Congress members' fundraising goals. How Karl Rove's super PAC is expected to spend $300 million on the various races of 2012. How Rove's Super PAC's ad-buy of $700,000 in a 2010 congressional race single-handedly increased the Republican campaign's spending by 1/3 in a single day - and of course, the Democratic was defeated.
So, into this morass comes this really great - but too brief! - interview with John McCain and Russ Feingold, sponsors of the legislation evicerated by Citizen United. After the antagonism I have felt toward John McCain since the 2008 election, it was such a surprise to feel like this guy was on my side of this dismal issue. John McCain, saying that Citizens United was "beyond ridiculous." John McCain, saying that Scalia's "arrogance" and "sarcasm" was "stunning." John McCain, calling the Supreme Court "clueless."
Ok, I realize that McCain is really the representative of a dying breed of Republicans, being pushed aside by the Tea Partiers and their Santorums. But it's refreshing to remember that it is not entirely an us-against-them world, that there are some folks on the right that have the same critiques of the Supreme Court that I have. And not just critiques, but anger, frustration, dismay.
Feingold then said something that gives a glimmer of hope to all of this. He said, "One thing that John and I experienced was that sometimes the corporations that didn't like the system would come to us and say, you know, you guys, it's not legalized bribery, it's legalized extortion. Because it's not like the company CEO calls up to say, gee, I'd love to give you some money. It's usually the other way around. The politician or their agent who's got the Super PAC, they're the ones that are calling up and asking for the money." - this quote was entirely consistent, by the way, with the reporting in part 1 of the episode - "So a lot of businesses, I think, are going to help us rebel against this and say, you know, we don't want to be a part of this mess."
Let's stop and think about that for a minute. Amidst all the cynicism I have felt that corporations will just buy government and destroy any semblance of democracy, Feingold suggests this alternate reality: businesses don't want to buy government - not at these prices anyway! - and they will become allies in the fight against the new reality. Could it be, even just a little bit, possible?
So this brings me back to the Affordable Care Act. I could devote pages to this - along with the attendant agonizing - but I'll try to be brief here.
As a lawyer, my belief in the legal system is an article of faith, a core value that I thought I shared with the other members of the legal community, and especially our leaders at the pinnacle of the profession, the Supreme Court: separation of powers, federalism, stare decisis, judicial restraint, constitutional avoidance, deciding only cases and controversies and avoiding "advisory opinions", avoiding political questions. In law school, I had the privilege of taking "Federal Courts" with Professor Shapiro, a student of the original authors of the seminal textbook on this study, Hart & Wechsler. Thinking about all I learned there makes me feel the roots of my disenchantment acutely. Fed Courts, as it is known to law students, is a notoriously "gunner" class, taken by everyone on law review, by anyone who aspires to a federal appellate clerkship, and was the most challenging class I've taken since AP calculus in high school. It is always hard to explain what makes it so challenging, but what makes it challenging is exactly what makes it so crucial to my faith in the legal system. The point of Fed Courts, as I learned it, is about how the Supreme Court has shaped the role of the federal judiciary in the American system, and much of it is about the limits on that power - deferring to the political branches on political questions, deferring to the states on state questions, not rendering opinions on constitutional questions unless absolutely necessary to deciding a case (this is the doctrine of "constitutional avoidance"), not rendering opinions on anything unless necessary to deciding a "case or controversy" before it (this is the doctrine of avoiding "advisory opinions). In recent years, the Supreme Court seems to have turned all this on its head. (I realize in my quick "research" for this blog post that for many years now scholars have been arguing that the "Hart & Wechsler paradigm" "no longer serves us well either as an account of what the Supreme Court does in Federal Courts cases or as a guide to what the Court ought to do." Perhaps I am coming to agree with that view, or the first part of it, anyway.)
These principles are part of the outrage amongst lawyers over Bush v. Gore - that the Supreme Court would ignore the centuries-old "political question doctrine" in that decision. Citizens United continues this trend. To me, steeped in the law of the Hart & Wechsler fed courts paradigm, it is the constitutional avoidance problem that has me most baffled: the statute at issue could have been construed far more narrowly to avoid the constitutional question of whether corporations have free speech rights. There was just no need to reach that issue, except to flex the Supreme Court's muscle in a manner that had been studiously avoided for, again, centuries.
And now comes the Affordable Care Act. (What is that case called, anyway? . .[quick search] . . It is two consolidated cases, the easier of which is HHS v. Florida.) In this case, precedent appears to dictate - as Obama recently noted - upholding Congress's commerce clause authority. Congress's enactment of economic laws has not been questioned since the Court's review of New Deal legislation about 75 years ago. And then there are the questions. Argh...the questions! Asking about Congress's other options, why Congress chose this method of dealing with the health care problems, asking about the costs of the program. When your understanding of the federal court is shaped by an intense study of doctrines created by the Court itself to limit its power, these questions feel like nails on a chalkboard. They are not the kind of questions the Justices are supposed to ask; they are precisely the questions they are supposed to avoid. (Click here for a good article on the Supreme Court arguments.)
The entire basis of these doctrines is that this small, unelected, tenured-for-life group - without the power of the purse or the military - secures its legitimacy only by the citizenry and the rest of government maintaining a kind of faith or trust in its legitimacy, and it maintains that respect by limiting its powers. The 5 members of the current conservative wing seem to have a different set of principles at work, and I fear that they are taking a knife to their own legitimacy. Oh what a great relief it will be if they uphold Obamacare! But based on what I've seen so far, from Citizens United to the oral arguments in HHS v. Florida, the wound has been inflicted, and whether the knife is turned remains to be seen.
And as a lawyer, as a lawyer with a tremendous faith in the deepest principles of the federal judicial system, the carving away at those tenets causes me greater disillusion than all of those other events.
Monday, February 27, 2012
Bad Calls
I found this story interesting about how the a boys' basketball team from a Jewish day school in Texas will have to forego its earned-berth in the state finals tourney of the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools ("TAPP"). The Director of TAPP - an association of religious schools, mind you - did not sound particularly convincing to me when he said, "If the schools are just going to arrange their own schedule, why do we even set a tournament?" But I found the spirit of the team - as described by their coach and a dad - quite refreshing. As the coach said, "We have a pretty mature group of guys . . . They knew this could happen down the road.” According to the dad, "It’s disappointing, . . . I think the kids will be disappointed, too, but the team has this attitude of when there are bad calls, you just move on."
Digging a little further, I see that the Beren Academy's situation stems directly from the fact that the Jewish Sabbath falls on different days from the Christian Sabbath. According to this Houston Chronicle article, "Neither TAPPS nor UIL teams are allowed to play any sports on Sundays, when Christians traditionally worship." (UIL appears to be another Texas-based athletic conference.)
Is this a case of some kind of religious discrimination? The coach/athletic director says no (not altogether convincingly, though): "I don't think it has anything to do with our school being Jewish . . . We were well aware it could come to this. But one thing that gave us hope that our game time might be changed was a Seventh Day Adventist school had games rescheduled in a TAPPS state soccer tournament a few years ago." (Click here for full article.). Even the Anti-Defamation League is exercising diplomacy: "ADL recognizes that many of the private and parochial schools with TAPPS membership are faith-based institutions where religion is an extremely significant part of the education process and the lives of students who attend. . . . We are hopeful the leadership of TAPPS will keep that in mind when making a decision about Beren Academy’s request ....” (full press release here)
I am definitely not a sufficiently informed observer to attempt to draw any conclusions here about basketball and religion in Texas (or anywhere for that matter.)
But I can tell you that I appreciate how the lesson the team draws from this is not to cry foul, but to move on after a bad call.
Digging a little further, I see that the Beren Academy's situation stems directly from the fact that the Jewish Sabbath falls on different days from the Christian Sabbath. According to this Houston Chronicle article, "Neither TAPPS nor UIL teams are allowed to play any sports on Sundays, when Christians traditionally worship." (UIL appears to be another Texas-based athletic conference.)
Is this a case of some kind of religious discrimination? The coach/athletic director says no (not altogether convincingly, though): "I don't think it has anything to do with our school being Jewish . . . We were well aware it could come to this. But one thing that gave us hope that our game time might be changed was a Seventh Day Adventist school had games rescheduled in a TAPPS state soccer tournament a few years ago." (Click here for full article.). Even the Anti-Defamation League is exercising diplomacy: "ADL recognizes that many of the private and parochial schools with TAPPS membership are faith-based institutions where religion is an extremely significant part of the education process and the lives of students who attend. . . . We are hopeful the leadership of TAPPS will keep that in mind when making a decision about Beren Academy’s request ....” (full press release here)
I am definitely not a sufficiently informed observer to attempt to draw any conclusions here about basketball and religion in Texas (or anywhere for that matter.)
But I can tell you that I appreciate how the lesson the team draws from this is not to cry foul, but to move on after a bad call.
Monday, February 20, 2012
Big News on Craft Foods
(Yes, Google, that's "craft" with a C, thank you very much.)
First, here's an interesting article on this topic. Just a couple of weeks after I posted on small, artisan foods, Adam Davidson of Planet Money wrote an article for the New York Times on artisan, craft foods. "Don't Mock the Artisanal-Pickle Makers," it's called. Davidson says, "Contrary to popular belief, the revival of craft manufacturing isn’t just a fad for Brooklyn hipsters," and describes how some artisan food craftmen are able to scale up and run a healthy American manufacturing business. Davidson makes a compelling case that "craft business is showing how American manufacturing can compete in the global economy." Specifically, craft businesses avoid "direct competition with low-cost commodity producers in low-wage nations" and instead, create "customized products for less price-sensitive customers." This is a very hopeful article, and I like economic optimism.
Second, my big artisan food news is that my husband and I have decided to try our hand at becoming "artisanal food craftsmen" ourselves! We have just launched a new company, Flying Granola - as you can learn in my other blog, http://flyinggranola.blogspot.com/ - and hopefully we will be making our debut at a local craft/food fair sometime this spring. Stay tuned!
And bringing it all together, here's a link to the story of Bear Naked Granola. Personally I just like to cook, eat, and feed others, but certain other founders of Flying Granola are very inspired by success stories like this. Success in this case being 0 to 60 - that is, $60 million - in less than six years.
First, here's an interesting article on this topic. Just a couple of weeks after I posted on small, artisan foods, Adam Davidson of Planet Money wrote an article for the New York Times on artisan, craft foods. "Don't Mock the Artisanal-Pickle Makers," it's called. Davidson says, "Contrary to popular belief, the revival of craft manufacturing isn’t just a fad for Brooklyn hipsters," and describes how some artisan food craftmen are able to scale up and run a healthy American manufacturing business. Davidson makes a compelling case that "craft business is showing how American manufacturing can compete in the global economy." Specifically, craft businesses avoid "direct competition with low-cost commodity producers in low-wage nations" and instead, create "customized products for less price-sensitive customers." This is a very hopeful article, and I like economic optimism.
Second, my big artisan food news is that my husband and I have decided to try our hand at becoming "artisanal food craftsmen" ourselves! We have just launched a new company, Flying Granola - as you can learn in my other blog, http://flyinggranola.blogspot.com/ - and hopefully we will be making our debut at a local craft/food fair sometime this spring. Stay tuned!
And bringing it all together, here's a link to the story of Bear Naked Granola. Personally I just like to cook, eat, and feed others, but certain other founders of Flying Granola are very inspired by success stories like this. Success in this case being 0 to 60 - that is, $60 million - in less than six years.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
The Promised Stella D'Oro Strike Post
I am writing this blog entry, in its entirety, for the second time. After Sunday's post on deep practice, making mistakes and correcting them, you may think that I am successfully pushing myself to self-critique and revise. But no, it’s a simple case of a computer glitch losing an hour’s worth of work and – after a bit of rage, glass of wine, and good night’s sleep – forcing me to do the whole thing over again. After that post, however, I can only conclude that this was a sign that I should in fact push myself to rework and revise, and improve upon the prior version. You’ll have to take my word on the improvement part.
I promised a blog on last week’s New Yorker article, Out of the Bronx: Private Equity and the Cookie Factory, by Ian Frazier (subscription required). And as promised, I read the NLRB decision in the labor dispute, available here (.pdf). After the initial blog crash, I found some more sources - a radio interview with the striking employees, for example. (As it turns out, there is also a documentary about the strike, "No Contract, No Cookies," which I'll admit to not having seen. HBO subscription required for this one.)
And I find that the more I learn, the more questions I have.
Let me begin with a brief synopsis. Stella D'Oro began as a family-owned business in Bronx, and during that era, the employees became represented by the Bakery, Confecionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International, Local 50. At some point the family sold the business to Nabisco, which in turn sold to Kraft, which, in 2006, sold to a private equity fund, Brynwood Partners. Brynwood purchased in the middle of the term of a collective bargaining agreement, and the labor dispute arose during neogtiations for a successor contract. During those negotiations, Brynwood told the Union and employees that it needed wage and benefit concessions because the business was not profitable and, without concessions, it would have no alternative but to close down. After months of negotiating without agreement, on August 14, 2008, the employees decided to go on strike. They offered to return more than seven months later, on May 1, 2009, but Stella refused to take them back. Two months later, on June 30, 2009, an NLRB administrative law judge found for the Union (on the NLRB General Counsel's complaint), holding that Stella had violated federal labor law and was required to take the employees back to work.
This fleeting victory ends the success part of the story, for the employees. The bad part came just three months later, when Brynwood announced on September 8 that it had sold the business to another corporate bakery, Lance, Inc. Exactly one month later, the Stella plant in the Bronx closed for good. Lance moved the Stella product line to one of its factories in Ohio, and the 130-plus employees in the Bronx received a severance of one week's pay for each year of service, and set off to look for new work.
Actually, there was one more success. On August 27, 2010, the National Labor Relations Board affirmed the decision of the administrative law judge. Of course, by this point another legal feather in the cap wasn't good for very much. The legal battles, and victories, do not touch on Brynwood's decision to sell Stella, or Lance's decision to move the work to Ohio, and they can't bring the work back to the Bronx. In fact, (unless I'm missing something, a lawyerly caveat) the best that the employees can hope for as a result of the Board's decision (which is currently on appeal to the Second Circuit) is backpay giving them the wages they should have earned from the date of their offer to return from the strike on May 1, 2009, until the time when the employer shut down the business five months later. That is, five-month's wages is the all that is still at stake here, as far as I can tell.
The New Yorker article seems to contemplate whether the decision to strike was a good one. Frazier notes that two years later, "most" of the employees have either retired or "are still looking for new jobs." (The employees on the radio show reported that about 25 of their coworkers, out of 130, had found new jobs.) He goes on to muse that the Stella D'Oro strike seems "similar" to Occupy Wall Street (of which strike leader Mike Filippou is a supporter, he tells us) because both are "not about specific demands but about inequality."
This caught my attention, and I'm wondering if Frazier is correct, or if he is idealizing the Stella strike. Or is it possible that there was a hint of idealism among the strikers themselves? And if there was, is that a bad thing?
Hearing about the events, with the benefit of hindsight, it is nearly impossible to avoid concluding that the strike was the wrong choice - and I am trying to avoid viewing this entirely through the 20/20 lense of hindsight. I am reminded of the guiding image in the excellent new book by Joe McCartin (my former professor, I'm proud to report), Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers and the Strike that Changed America. McCartin uses this image of a "collision course" to describe the unfortunate trajectories of the union's and employer's positions, showing how the conflict between the union and the Reagan administration ultimately led, first to a massive strike, and then, to breaking the union and a loss for the labor movement as a whole. Though I am admittedly simplifying, this image comes to mind here.
Here, the employees were justifiably angered and motivated by what they viewed as the private equity firm's greed. I was struck listening to employees Filippou and George Kassai in the WNYC interview by how they so proudly discuss their years of commitment to the company and its product, and accuse the company of making inferior cookies after its cost cutting. In the negotiations, Filippou appeared to understand Brynwood's calculus: he remarked that the employees knew that the employer could just close the facility, sell the brand and real estate, and make a profit in the process, or it could obtain the concessions it was requesting and then still sell the company, but at an even greater profit. 355 NLRB No. 158 at 21. The employees clearly understood that Brynwood could sell the company at any time, but as I understand it, this paradoxically seemed to fuel their motivation to fight the company.
While the employer's perceived greed, the principle of fighting "inequality" (a la Occupy Wall Street), seemed to motivate the employees through the eight-month strike, the truth of this perception was ultimately their undoing. Filippou was correct that Brynwood could sell at any time and, indeed they did.
So what were the employees to do? Is the takeaway from the Stella story that every time employees go up against a private equity fund, the employees have to capitulate to whatever demands the employers makes of them?
This New York Times article looking at labor and private equity suggests - thankfully - that employees have had better outcomes in other cases. As best as I can tell from the Union website, the U.S. Foods strike profiled in the article resulted in a new contract in December 2011. These employees were fighting none other than the king of private equity firms, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. The Times article also mentions a victory by employees when Hugo Boss "reversed a decision to close a factory in Ohio after succumbing to an aggressive union-led campaign." The union, Workers United, gives credit for bringing Hugo back to the bargaining table to the findings of a NLRB regional investigation; the business press remarks that Ohio's pension fund threatened to pull the €110 millon it had invested with the private equity owner. I'll refrain from drawing conclusions from my two sentences of research, but this certainly suggests that the battle of labor against private equity must be, at the very least, fought on many fronts.
Rather than conclude with some sense of undeserved authority, let me instead share the questions that remain in my mind: what lessons can the labor movement (such as it is) take from the Stella battle? Do the Stella employees in fact regret their decision to go on strike? What would they have done differently? Was there any way to predict, at the time, the course of events that would unfold? Do private equity-owned-employers require a different calculus than typical employers for the employees and unions that try to stand up to them?
How the Lower East Side Began Shrinking...52 Years Ago Today
East Village blog EV Grieve, has an interesting post today highlighting a 52-year old New York Times Article that they claim contains the first mention (according to the research of someone named "Pinhead") of the "East Village." Apparently this area, between Houston and 14th Street, 3rd Ave. and the East River, came into existance as the 3rd Avenue El came down and the Village exapanded east (the "Village atmosphere" came to this area in "tiny, scattered islands of Bohemia" according to my favorite sentence).
For myself and other Lower East Siders, our particular angle on this - oh, and how different we are from the East Villagers! - is to note that this new term apparently changed an area that had been part of our territory to this newly-named area. The article refers to the area as the "Lower East Side" - and then goes on to say that it is now referred to as the "East Village."
And who named it "East Village"? I'll give you two guesses. . . .and it was not the bohemians themselves.
That's right, it was the "rental agents", as always. (The same people who now want to call the area north of the East Village "NoEVil" - no joke.) Apparently 50 years ago, people thought that the "Lower East Side" was "a slum area without comfort or prestige." (The horror!)
And there you have it. Realtors, money, gentrification: the East Village was born, and the Lower East Side shrunk.
For myself and other Lower East Siders, our particular angle on this - oh, and how different we are from the East Villagers! - is to note that this new term apparently changed an area that had been part of our territory to this newly-named area. The article refers to the area as the "Lower East Side" - and then goes on to say that it is now referred to as the "East Village."
And who named it "East Village"? I'll give you two guesses. . . .and it was not the bohemians themselves.
That's right, it was the "rental agents", as always. (The same people who now want to call the area north of the East Village "NoEVil" - no joke.) Apparently 50 years ago, people thought that the "Lower East Side" was "a slum area without comfort or prestige." (The horror!)
And there you have it. Realtors, money, gentrification: the East Village was born, and the Lower East Side shrunk.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
why i'm here, part 2, and how you, dear reader, can help
One of my motivations for writing a blog was to practice. To practice writing, to practice thinking analytically, to practice everything that goes into thinking about economics, society, law. The idea that these are things that require practice was planted in my mind by a book I read a few years ago, The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle. Coyle makes the argument that what we think of as "talent" is actually the result of "deep practice". The first premise is that talent is not innate, but the product of many, many hours of practice. (An example that sticks in my mind, I believe from his book thought I don't have it in front of me, is that while we think of Tiger Woods as a golfing prodigy, he learned the game at such a young age - two - that by the time he became the youngest winner of a major, he had already been playing seriously for twenty years. These numbers are from wikipedia.)
The next point Coyle makes, as set forth in the first chapter, which you can read here, is that acheiving this kind of success requires "deep practice." Deep practice, he writes, "is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted way -- operating at the edge of your ability, where you make mistakes -- makes you smarter. . . . Experiences where you're forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them . . . end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it." (p. 18). (The book, and website, go on to theorize that deep practice actually changes the structure of the brain, theories which are important and fascinating but I won't go into here.)
In that sense, I can say that this blog is a kind of "deep practice." If I have any glimmer of hope of one day writing about, say, economics and society, it won't be sufficient to simply read and think about economics and society. Listening to Planet Money and reading The New Yorker may give me some benefit, but it is not deep enough practice. Only by forcing myself to articulate my thoughts and make sure they sound coherent (and remotely interesting) will I be engaged in anything resembling the type of deep practice that Coyle says is necessary to achieve success.
To that end, each of these blog posts requires finding the delicate balance between achieving the most practiced, revised, reworked, close-to-perfect post I can create, and achieving, well, a Blog, composed of published posts. For each post I am going to try to push myself to "the edge of my ability", where I might make mistakes and have to think through difficult arguments or transitions or analyses. But eventually I'm going to hit that "Publish" button, and after that time, Dear Reader, I am going to need you to give me feedback on how I might finetune my writing and thinking the next time around.
And on that note, I'm hitting "Publish"....
Monday, January 30, 2012
Small batch food - niche economy or what?
Most recently, it was this juice that got our attention. $10 a bottle at Whole Foods. A single serving bottle. No, I'm not exaggerating. (And as a not-so-side side-note, very impressive marketing from these folks: I began my search for their website - and name for that matter - by typing "Whole Foods Juice." Guess what was the sponsored ad that popped up with just those three words? And if they've got AdSense worked out, a link might just appear next to this blog post as well.)
But I digress... this was only the most recent expensive-healthy-natural-food product; I began noticing this trend a while back in a locally-produced show about local small business foodie entrepreneurs selling their wares at the Brooklyn Flea, a market for many things, including local food (that, for the record, I have never set foot in). The products of a chocolatier featured in that program soon thereafter appeared at Whole Foods (again); two truffles for $9 if I'm not mistaken. There was also a girl selling bags of homemade granola for, oh, $9 a bag. (She seemed nice and seemed to make a good product; let me support her biz with this link.)
The granola really piqued our interest because for about six years now, I have made granola every other week and eat the homemade granola for breakfast every day. For the past four years, my husband has also eaten the granola every day, and before we lived together, he too made his own granola. (Now he eats mine, and charmingly says it is the single food he would want if stranded on a deserted .
And the juice! We also invested in a juicer (ok, my husband bought that one - it was essentially the entirety of his dowry that he brought to our joint kitchen). With that juicer, we can buy dirt-cheap apples, carrots, cucumber, ginger, kale, and more, to make our own juices. And then there's my newest hobby, making chocolates. Melt down chocolate bar, stir in spices, add in toasted almonds, chill and eat. Each of these is much more fun, more delicious, and much cheaper to make ourselves.
So we look at these businesses and think, "Why pay ten bucks a pop when we can make it ourselves for a fraction of the cost?" But it got me thinking about this trend, this artisan/fresh/healthy/local food trend. Are the businesses overpricing? Well, you can argue that, in order to stay in business, they only price at the level the market will support, so you can't blame the producer alone. Is their market only wealthy people who can afford to splurge on these things? Do people of modest income actually pay such large portions of their income on these foods? Should they be judged harshly for doing so? That is, is buying $10 servings of juice or chocolates or granola a frivolity that contributes to, say, our national failure at saving money?
Or, is there a positive value judgment people of modest incomes make that they choose to support - even when it means stretching their means - these types of entrepreneurs? It seems that there are so many stories in this post-recession age of downsized corporate types finding their true passion and calling as they embark on endeavours such as these. Do those stories resonate for folks, who spend a little extra to support these small business owners based on their story of pursuing a dream, of seeking satisfaction through artisan cooking and eschewing a cog-in-a-wheel career?
So the real question is, will businesses like these ultimately prove sustainable? Has a new market - a niche economy - developed to support these businesses, at these prices? Or will these small produces ultimately falter, discovering that a recession economy just will not support $5 truffles, no matter how delicious, and local? (Whether they will survive, scale up, and sell out is another story.)
But I digress... this was only the most recent expensive-healthy-natural-food product; I began noticing this trend a while back in a locally-produced show about local small business foodie entrepreneurs selling their wares at the Brooklyn Flea, a market for many things, including local food (that, for the record, I have never set foot in). The products of a chocolatier featured in that program soon thereafter appeared at Whole Foods (again); two truffles for $9 if I'm not mistaken. There was also a girl selling bags of homemade granola for, oh, $9 a bag. (She seemed nice and seemed to make a good product; let me support her biz with this link.)
The granola really piqued our interest because for about six years now, I have made granola every other week and eat the homemade granola for breakfast every day. For the past four years, my husband has also eaten the granola every day, and before we lived together, he too made his own granola. (Now he eats mine, and charmingly says it is the single food he would want if stranded on a deserted .
And the juice! We also invested in a juicer (ok, my husband bought that one - it was essentially the entirety of his dowry that he brought to our joint kitchen). With that juicer, we can buy dirt-cheap apples, carrots, cucumber, ginger, kale, and more, to make our own juices. And then there's my newest hobby, making chocolates. Melt down chocolate bar, stir in spices, add in toasted almonds, chill and eat. Each of these is much more fun, more delicious, and much cheaper to make ourselves.
So we look at these businesses and think, "Why pay ten bucks a pop when we can make it ourselves for a fraction of the cost?" But it got me thinking about this trend, this artisan/fresh/healthy/local food trend. Are the businesses overpricing? Well, you can argue that, in order to stay in business, they only price at the level the market will support, so you can't blame the producer alone. Is their market only wealthy people who can afford to splurge on these things? Do people of modest income actually pay such large portions of their income on these foods? Should they be judged harshly for doing so? That is, is buying $10 servings of juice or chocolates or granola a frivolity that contributes to, say, our national failure at saving money?
Or, is there a positive value judgment people of modest incomes make that they choose to support - even when it means stretching their means - these types of entrepreneurs? It seems that there are so many stories in this post-recession age of downsized corporate types finding their true passion and calling as they embark on endeavours such as these. Do those stories resonate for folks, who spend a little extra to support these small business owners based on their story of pursuing a dream, of seeking satisfaction through artisan cooking and eschewing a cog-in-a-wheel career?
So the real question is, will businesses like these ultimately prove sustainable? Has a new market - a niche economy - developed to support these businesses, at these prices? Or will these small produces ultimately falter, discovering that a recession economy just will not support $5 truffles, no matter how delicious, and local? (Whether they will survive, scale up, and sell out is another story.)
Stella D'Oro Blog Preview
I'm very excited about this article in this week's New Yorker, "Out of the Bronx - Private equity and the cookie factory" by Ian Frazier (subscription required). As the article (ever so briefly) recounts, the Stella D'Oro labor dispute was the subject of a NLRB case out of my office. Plus, the entire story concerns what happens when a once-upon-a-time-family-owned-business is bought and sold by a private equity firm. Private equity, also an important meme of January 2012. (See, e.g., this insightful article at TPM about the significance of the media confusing Romney's former firm as "venture capital" rather than "private equity".) I think the Stella case is an interesting look at the import/impact/significance of labor laws. This is a case that the employer lost, but I'm not sure that in the grand scheme of things the employees won much (I hope to be proved wrong that). So here's a preview: I'm going to finish reading the New Yorker article, then read the NLRB decision, and go from there with anything else that catches my attention, and then I'll share my reactions.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Pragmatic Idealism, without the Cynicism
I recently saw this awesome TEDx talk by Carnegie Mellon computer science professor, Dr. Luis von Ahn. This guy is amazing. So he invented (helped invent?) Captcha, that computer program that checks whether you are a real person when you try to send a message or buy tickets or post a comment (according to wikipedia, Captchas are "computer-generated tests that humans are routinely able to pass but that computers have not yet mastered"). So as he tells it, von Ahn learned how much time people around the world now spend typing in those captchas, and rather than be excited by the ubiquity of his invention, he thought to himself that it was a waste of time better spent on something more productive. So he invented "reCAPTCHA." Again from wiki: "In reCAPTCHA, the images of words displayed to the user come directly from old books that are being digitized; they are words that optical character recognition could not identify and are sent to people throughout the Web to be identified." Most recently, von Ahn tells us in this talk, he and one of his grad students invented a program called "Duolingo" that works to translate the web in the process of teaching people new languages. In short, I was blown away by this talk, and inspired.
Yesterday my husband and I were talking about how my idealism has evolved over the years, and I've become a little more pragmatic. He commented to me that the world needs all kinds of idealists, and I began to imagine this spectrum of idealism, ranging from lofty dreamers to pure pragmatists. (On my spectrum, I should add, there is no room for cynics.) I seem to be increasingly drawn to the pragmatists on this spectrum, and I think von Ahn is the perfect example of this incredible sweet spot between pragmatism and idealism (no cynicism). Rather that sit around trying to think up the biggest, most confounding problems on the planet - like so many of his fellow academics - he seems to identify a single problem, and think up a genius - and idealistic - solution to that problem. Serially, as entrepreneurs say. On repeat.
I think I am all too often surrounded by pure idealists, on the one hand, and cynics, on the other. Watching this talk gave me such an inspiring dose of pragmatic idealism. I also find this attractive in the emerging field of social entrepreneurs, who seem so different in spirit to the public interest lawyers I know much more personally. Why do lawyers so often seem beaten down and cynical, and these folks seem so much more grounded on the idealism-pragmatism spectrum? How can I incorporate more of these ideals into my life and work?
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Undervalued Currency and Manufacturing Jobs: A Long and Not Boring History
Lately I've been seeing currency issues everywhere. For starters, an interesting point from Adam Davidson's astute little essay in this week's New York Times Magazine:
"[Based on the trade deficit,] [e]very month, the United States is demanding a lot of renminbi and China is demanding few U.S. dollars. The natural result should be for the dollar to get weaker as the renminbi gets stronger. But China’s government prevents that adjustment by artificially increasing the demand for dollars, spending much of that $24 billion surplus on U.S. Treasury bonds. This sounds boring, but it effectively makes all Chinese exports somewhere around 25 percent cheaper and all U.S. imports to China, effectively, about 25 percent more expensive."
I find this quite interesting in light of a book I've been reading, Judith Stein's Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories in the Seventies. I am trying to do a close reading of this book, so my hours of laborious reading have only brought me up to page 42 so far. Nonetheless, I've taken away enough already to see these tremendous parallels between the current U.S.-China relationship and the U.S.'s post-war relations with Germany and Japan.
As Stein herself points out, "Because both countries' currencies were undervalued, like China's today, their exports were advantaged." (p.11). She explains that Japan held reserves in dollars, which actually strengthened the dollar, weakened other currencies, and thus advantaged Japanese and German exports. (p. 10-11). Stein makes the point (as I understand it) that during the 1950's and '60's, U.S. governments allowed this currency undervaluation and related trade surplus to continue (to the U.S.'s disadvantage) because successive administrations prioritized foreign policy concerns over U.S. domestic economic policy. The foreign policy concern was essentially to strengthen these countries weakened by the war so that they would not become so weak as to be a vulnerable target for Soviet takeover, and to generally maintain their alliances with the U.S. during the Cold War. This concern was easily allowed to trump domestic economic priorities because the U.S. economy was so strong during these decades. The imbalance began to appear to policy-makers (i.e., the Nixon administration) in the early 1970's. In 1971, certain Nixon advisers argued that "anemic growth, unemployment, and declining international power" in the United States were directly linked to the "expensive dollar and trade deficit" (p. 39), but the Nixon administration did not act to directly confront this problem. (At least not before page 41 of the book. I'll keep you posted.)
I find the historical parallels striking. It seems that people today speak constantly about the "threat" from China, as if this were an anomalous, unique occurrence. To review our own history and see that this is not new, but merely the most recent incarnation of an older set of circumstances provides a new way of looking at the current situation.
Just tonight I saw the play Chinglish, which explores the cultural confusions and linguistic misunderstandings that ensue when an American businessman travels to China in an attempt to do business. One exchange I found particularly interesting, and relevant here, was when a Chinese woman remarks to the American that, one day, China will become stronger than America. The American says, in disbelief (and thinking it may be a simple linguistic confusion) that China is already stronger than the U.S. This elicits a comment from the Chinese woman that a problem with the United States is that it acts weak even when it is strong. Could this be true?
I wonder if some of our fear is misplaced? The Chinese have not overtaken us (yet) in every manner. As is suggested by this fascinating series of New York Times articles (here and here), Chinese factories may have surpassed American manufacturing in technical, logistical, and labor force needs, but that is not the end of the story. In the U.S. and Europe, the industrial revolution was followed by a labor movement and other societal changes seeking a certain quality of life (or "work-life balance" in current speak) that China appears to be far from realizing. For example, the former NYT article recounts how, when Apple decided on a last-minute design change, it called its Chinese supplier, and "[a] foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day." This sort of labor force flexibility may prove attractive to U.S. businesses, but it does not make China "superior" to the U.S. U.S. society long ago made a sort of choice that we do not want to live in company dorms (or company towns, for that matter) where employees are always at the beck and call of the employer, and Americans did not want to be "roused" from sleep by their supervisors to begin the first in a succession of 12-hour shifts. With our current unemployment crisis, would some Americans make a different choice? I don't presume to know, I'll just observe that the reality, to me, does not appear that China has already overtaken us in every respect, but that China is now in an economic state resembling where the U.S. was a century ago.
Back to Adam Davidson's article. After remarking on the currency issues, he writes, "lower wages, lost jobs and crippled manufacturing employment fall on the less wealthy. The economists that I spoke to estimated that China’s currency policy has cost the U.S. between 200,000 and 3 million jobs. . . . U.S. manufacturing employment has fallen by around 6 million over the last decade. If China had allowed its currency to adjust naturally, life might be much better for many former American factory workers."
I am very intrigued by the connection between currency (under- and over-)valuations and the loss of manufacturing jobs. We often hear that manufacturing jobs have been lost because of lower wages in other countries, with a particular emphasis (as in the case of the auto industry) on the costs of the union wages, pensions, and other benefits. The New York Times articles make the interesting point that the factories themselves are superior in China. But this connection to currency valuation is so interesting to me, perhaps because it is the story that - no matter how true - many people seem to find too "boring" to bother discussing.
I am also intrigued by the sense of history repeating itself. I'll have to read on to see what happens beyond 1971, but I am fascinated by the sense of this being a continuation of an older historical trend, or a lesson we should have learned 40 years ago but did not. More on all of these themes yet to come.
"[Based on the trade deficit,] [e]very month, the United States is demanding a lot of renminbi and China is demanding few U.S. dollars. The natural result should be for the dollar to get weaker as the renminbi gets stronger. But China’s government prevents that adjustment by artificially increasing the demand for dollars, spending much of that $24 billion surplus on U.S. Treasury bonds. This sounds boring, but it effectively makes all Chinese exports somewhere around 25 percent cheaper and all U.S. imports to China, effectively, about 25 percent more expensive."
I find this quite interesting in light of a book I've been reading, Judith Stein's Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories in the Seventies. I am trying to do a close reading of this book, so my hours of laborious reading have only brought me up to page 42 so far. Nonetheless, I've taken away enough already to see these tremendous parallels between the current U.S.-China relationship and the U.S.'s post-war relations with Germany and Japan.
As Stein herself points out, "Because both countries' currencies were undervalued, like China's today, their exports were advantaged." (p.11). She explains that Japan held reserves in dollars, which actually strengthened the dollar, weakened other currencies, and thus advantaged Japanese and German exports. (p. 10-11). Stein makes the point (as I understand it) that during the 1950's and '60's, U.S. governments allowed this currency undervaluation and related trade surplus to continue (to the U.S.'s disadvantage) because successive administrations prioritized foreign policy concerns over U.S. domestic economic policy. The foreign policy concern was essentially to strengthen these countries weakened by the war so that they would not become so weak as to be a vulnerable target for Soviet takeover, and to generally maintain their alliances with the U.S. during the Cold War. This concern was easily allowed to trump domestic economic priorities because the U.S. economy was so strong during these decades. The imbalance began to appear to policy-makers (i.e., the Nixon administration) in the early 1970's. In 1971, certain Nixon advisers argued that "anemic growth, unemployment, and declining international power" in the United States were directly linked to the "expensive dollar and trade deficit" (p. 39), but the Nixon administration did not act to directly confront this problem. (At least not before page 41 of the book. I'll keep you posted.)
I find the historical parallels striking. It seems that people today speak constantly about the "threat" from China, as if this were an anomalous, unique occurrence. To review our own history and see that this is not new, but merely the most recent incarnation of an older set of circumstances provides a new way of looking at the current situation.
Just tonight I saw the play Chinglish, which explores the cultural confusions and linguistic misunderstandings that ensue when an American businessman travels to China in an attempt to do business. One exchange I found particularly interesting, and relevant here, was when a Chinese woman remarks to the American that, one day, China will become stronger than America. The American says, in disbelief (and thinking it may be a simple linguistic confusion) that China is already stronger than the U.S. This elicits a comment from the Chinese woman that a problem with the United States is that it acts weak even when it is strong. Could this be true?
I wonder if some of our fear is misplaced? The Chinese have not overtaken us (yet) in every manner. As is suggested by this fascinating series of New York Times articles (here and here), Chinese factories may have surpassed American manufacturing in technical, logistical, and labor force needs, but that is not the end of the story. In the U.S. and Europe, the industrial revolution was followed by a labor movement and other societal changes seeking a certain quality of life (or "work-life balance" in current speak) that China appears to be far from realizing. For example, the former NYT article recounts how, when Apple decided on a last-minute design change, it called its Chinese supplier, and "[a] foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day." This sort of labor force flexibility may prove attractive to U.S. businesses, but it does not make China "superior" to the U.S. U.S. society long ago made a sort of choice that we do not want to live in company dorms (or company towns, for that matter) where employees are always at the beck and call of the employer, and Americans did not want to be "roused" from sleep by their supervisors to begin the first in a succession of 12-hour shifts. With our current unemployment crisis, would some Americans make a different choice? I don't presume to know, I'll just observe that the reality, to me, does not appear that China has already overtaken us in every respect, but that China is now in an economic state resembling where the U.S. was a century ago.
Back to Adam Davidson's article. After remarking on the currency issues, he writes, "lower wages, lost jobs and crippled manufacturing employment fall on the less wealthy. The economists that I spoke to estimated that China’s currency policy has cost the U.S. between 200,000 and 3 million jobs. . . . U.S. manufacturing employment has fallen by around 6 million over the last decade. If China had allowed its currency to adjust naturally, life might be much better for many former American factory workers."
I am very intrigued by the connection between currency (under- and over-)valuations and the loss of manufacturing jobs. We often hear that manufacturing jobs have been lost because of lower wages in other countries, with a particular emphasis (as in the case of the auto industry) on the costs of the union wages, pensions, and other benefits. The New York Times articles make the interesting point that the factories themselves are superior in China. But this connection to currency valuation is so interesting to me, perhaps because it is the story that - no matter how true - many people seem to find too "boring" to bother discussing.
I am also intrigued by the sense of history repeating itself. I'll have to read on to see what happens beyond 1971, but I am fascinated by the sense of this being a continuation of an older historical trend, or a lesson we should have learned 40 years ago but did not. More on all of these themes yet to come.
Why am I here?
Well, it's the new year. I'm going to be 35 this year (I have to check the math each time I say that). I quit a major hobby a few years ago and haven't yet found a new one. I read a lot, and want to think more about what I read and how it all fits together. I want to learn, but I don't want to spend money on classes (lord knows I've done enough of that). I want to write, because I've always thought of myself as a writer, and if everyone else with a nickel and a notion of something-or-other gets to publish a book, why shouldn't I? So all this together made me think a blog was the way to get going on all these goals. I'll start small, maybe just links and summaries of things I've read, along with my reactions, and hope that my creative juices get flowing from there. Here goes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)