Current Affairs

by hilzoy

I happened on this excellent site earlier this evening — blogs from all over the world — and as I was wandering around some blogs from Africa, I ran across a story with the astonishing headline: Zimbabwe State Security Agents Seize Sanitary Pads. I thought: huh? (or, as Sokwanele, whose blog it is, wrote, rather more articulately: “Does the Zanu PF government expect Zimbabweans to believe that sanitary ware for women is now an issue of national security – that tampons and pads are lethal weapons?”) Apparently so:

“The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions has just received news that state security agencies last week seized a consignment of sanitary pads meant for distribution to farmworkers in Zimbabwe’s farming areas of Concession and Mvurwi.

The pads were allegedly seized by police and later the dreaded Central Intelligence Organization was drawn into the matter. The ZCTU had given the General Agricultural and Plantation Workers’ Union of Zimbabwe (GAPWUZ) its allocation of the pads sourced with the help of international partners.

On seizure, the farmworkers were told that the pads had been poisoned by former white commercial farmers, which is a blatant lie as the ZCTU, with the help of international partners and friends sourced for the sanitary ware.

However, the ZCTU is disturbed by this development because the sanitary pads were meant for women who cannot afford them. We deplore the actions of government, done through its security arms.”

On further investigation, it turns out that this is part of a longer story, which I had completely missed, and will outline below the fold.

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by hilzoy

In honor of World AIDS Day (which might be over by the time I post this, since my browser just crashed), here’s a piece of good legislation that now, finally, has a chance to pass: H.R. 5674: the Protection Against Transmission of HIV for Women and Youth Act of 2006. It does two things: first, it requires the administration to adopt a strategy to ensure that HIV prevention funding is spent in a way that meets the needs of women and girls, and second, it repeals the current requirement that 33% of all HIV prevention funding be spent on abstinence programs.

This second point is really important, for reasons I’ll explain below the fold.

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by hilzoy

In my last minimum wage post, the discussion veered off onto several related points: (1) who would an increase in the minimum wage actually affect? and second, to what extent can the poverty of minimum wage workers be ameliorated by their taking sensible measures like getting a rice cooker or moving in with roommates? (To be fair, discussion of this second point started out as a discussion of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickled and Dimed, and it wasn’t always clear where discussion of Ehrenreich in particluar left off and discussion of poverty in general began. But statements like “I don’t see any reason to deform public policy so that Ehrenreich and people like her can avoid doing perfectly normal things” at least suggested that it was meant to have some broader application. In what follows, I’ll be responding to a hypothetical person who did suggest this, and who should not be assumed to be identical with the actual Sebastian.)

As to the first question: the Economic Policy Institute has calculated the characteristics of people whose wages would go up as a result of the minimum wage, either because they are presently making less than $7.25/hour or because of spillover effects:

“An estimated 14.9 million workers (11% of the workforce) would benefit from an increase in the federal minimum wage to $7.25 by 2008. Of these workers, 6.6 million would be directly affected and 8.3 million would indirectly receive raises due to the spillover effect of a minimum wage increase. Of the total affected workers, 80% are adults and 59% are women. Over half (54%) work full time and another third (30%) work between 20 and 34 hours per week. More than one-quarter (26%) of the workers who would benefit from an increase to $7.25 are parents of children under age 18, including 1,395,000 single parents. The average minimum wage worker brings home over half (58%) of his or her family’s weekly earnings.”

Moreover:

“Among families with children and a low-wage worker affected by a minimum wage increase to $7.25, the affected worker contributes, on average, over half (59%) of the family’s earnings. Forty-six percent of such workers actually contribute 100% of their family’s earnings.”

And:

“The federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) combined with the minimum wage helps to reduce poverty, but the EITC is not a replacement for a minimum wage increase. For example, in 1997, a single mother of two children working 40 hours per week year-round at the minimum wage would have earned $9,893 (after Social Security and Medicare taxes) and would have been eligible for the maximum EITC of $3,656, which would have put her family income at $13,549, a mere 5% above the 1997 poverty threshold of $12,931 for a family of three. But because the minimum wage has not kept up with increases in the cost of living since 1997, the same family is now below the poverty line. In 2005, a single mother with two children would have combined earnings and EITC of $14,177, or 11% below the 2005 poverty threshold of $15,735 for a family of three.”

Now, on to the rice cookers.

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by hilzoy

Since the Democrats are talking about raising the minimum wage, I thought it might be a good time to round up some good discussions of the question: does raising the minimum wage cause employment to fall? As far as I can tell, everyone agrees that, other things equal (and assuming that demand is not perfectly inelastic), when you raise the cost of something, demand for that something tends to decline, and thus that raising the minimum wage should have some negative effect on employment. As far as I can tell, no one disputes that; and so when people argue about the effects of the minimum wage, it’s generally not helpful to point out that raising the price of something obviously causes demand for that something to drop. As an a priori argument about what happens when other things are equal, it’s true, and no one I’ve been able to find seriously disputes it.

The argument for the claim that the minimum wage does not cause employment to fall grants this basic point, but goes on to say: in the actual world, other things are not equal, and so we need to ask: does raising the minimum wage by the kinds of amounts people normally propose have other effects on employment that tend to counterbalance or even outweigh this negative effect? If it does, then arguing that since (other things equal) raising prices tends to lower demand, raising the minimum wage must reduce employment would be exactly like arguing that since, other things equal, cutting someone open with a knife tends to make that person less healthy, surgery can never improve your health. As I can attest, having an appendectomy does have negative consequences for your health. I was laid up for ten days after mine. But someone who kept pointing to the fact that opening someone’s abdomen up with a knife necessarily harms that person would be missing the point of appendectomies, namely: that those negative effects are vastly outweighed by the benefits of not having your appendix rupture and kill you. Same here.

Whether or not raising the minimum wage does have effects that outweigh its costs is, of course, an empirical question. Luckily, Kash Monsour has assembled some of it in a series of posts. He explains his starting point at the outset; I think it’s exactly the right one:

“When I started my graduate studies in economics, I was perfectly accepting of the classical economic analysis that illustrates why a minimum wage should cause low-income people to lose jobs. But by the time that I had finished grad school, I had learned that there are economic theories that lead to different conclusions, and I felt that I had seen enough evidence to call into question the classical prediction of the effects of raising the minimum wage. Since then, the additional evidence that I’ve seen has tended to generally confirm that minimum wage laws only have a very small negative impact (or very possibly no impact at all) on employment.

This is a subject on which I have tried to let the empirical evidence guide my opinion. And personally, I’m persuaded that the benefits of a higher minimum wage for low-income individuals (and the distribution of income more generally) outweigh any possible negative employment effects.”

He then presents some of that empirical evidence, which I’ll summarize below the fold (with helpful graphs, which I copied from him.) If you prefer arguments from authority to annoying graphs, you could just read this statement (pdf), signed by 650 economists, including five Nobel laureates.

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by hilzoy

Via Ezra Klein at TAPPED, an interesting study (pdf) on union card-checks versus elections. Ezra is more quotable than the study:

“A poll commissioned by American Rights at Work (a pro-union org), Rutgers University, and Jesuit Wheeling University surveyed 430 randomly-selected workers from worksites where employees had sought unions either through the NLRB election process or card-check. The survey included workers who voted both for and against the union, and included campaigns in which the unions both won and lost. The Eagleton Research Center and Rutgers conducted the calls over a couple of weeks in 2005.

The results were telling: 22% of workers surveyed said management “coerced them a great deal.’ 6% said the same for unions. During the NLRB election, 46% of workers complained of management pressure. During card check elections, 14% complained of union pressure. Workers in NLRB elections were twice as likely as workers in card check elections to report that management coerced them to oppose (it’s worth noting that in card-check elections, 23% of workers complained of management coercion — more than complained of union coercion). Workers in NLRB elections were more than 53% as likely to report that management threatened to eliminate their jobs.

Even more interesting, fewer workers in card check campaigns said coworkers pressured them to join the union (17% to 22%). Workers in card check elections were more than twice as likely to report the employer took a neutral stance and let the workers decide. So, in fairness to Megan, neither options is perfect. But these results show that one is decidedly less perfect than the other.”

The argument against card check, as I understand it, just is that workers will be more likely to feel coerced by their co-workers under card check. One counter-argument is that the types of coercion available to co-workers pale in comparison to those available to management. Co-workers can’t threaten to fire people who don’t vote their way, for example. But actual evidence about rates of coercion is the obvious way to settle the argument. And if this study is right, workers not only feel a lot less coercion under card-check, they feel less coercion from co-workers than from management under both systems, and they feel less coercion from their co-workers under card-check than under elections.

This matters a lot. I would imagine that most people would agree, in principle, that whether they like unions or not, it’s much better to have a fair system of rules governing unions than an unfair one. Aside from the fact that employers engage in more coercion under elections than under card check, elections about whether or not to be represented by unions, under current law, are hugely time-consuming, with endless points of dispute that need to be arbitrated. Moreover, the penalties for employer violations of labor law are so small that lots of companies just disregard them.

Whatever one’s views on unions, I would think that letting workers decide whether they want a union or not, enforcing existing laws, and changing them to make collective bargaining more straightforward and less of a feast for labor lawyers would be an unqualified good. If no one wanted to join a union under fair conditions, fine. If a lot of people did, that should also be fine with conservatives: both sides, it seems to me, should be able to agree that it’s the workers’ views, not ours, that should matter here.

However, I think there are lots of reasons to think that effective representation for workers would be a good thing right about now. I’ve put one, also via Ezra, below the fold.

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by hilzoy

So North Korea might have tested a nuclear device. Great. All over the conservative blogs, people are saying things like this:

“Prediction: The Democrats will come out tomorrow morning and place the blame for NoKo’s test squarely at the feet of President Bush in an attempt to capitalize politically on this turn of events.”

And this:

“I haven’t looked for the commentary that attributes fault to the Bush administration or characterize North Korea’s conduct as Karl Rove’s October surprise, but I’m sure it’s out there somewhere.”

And this:

“The Left quickly attempted the shopworn tactic of pinning the blame on the Bush administration’s rhetoric or unwillingness to bribe Kim Jong-il.”

Those ridiculous knee-jerk Democrats. Why on earth would they think that the person who has had complete control over America’s foreign policy for the last six years should be blamed in any way for a foreign policy disaster of enormous proportions? Who could imagine that there could possibly be anything wrong with our policy towards North Korea?

This is one of the things that has always puzzled me about some right-wing bloggers: for them, the discovery that someone has some motive that might have induced them to lie or exaggerate implies that everything that person says can be dismissed in its entirety, without requiring any investigation into whether or not it is, you know, true. If someone has ever contributed money to any Democratic candidate, or written a book, or given a talk before any one of the many organizations that have at one point or another gotten a small grant from George Soros, then that fact suffices to make any consideration of what they say superfluous. In reaction to the Foley scandal, they have taken this to its logical conclusion: the fact that some event or claim helps the Democrats is taken to show that it’s the result of a Democratic dirty trick, in the absence of any actual evidence that Democrats had anything to do with it. The result? It’s impossible that anything could ever happen that they would regard as a reason to criticize Bush.

Since I still cling to quaint, antiquated notions like personal responsibility, I do want to know who is responsible for the fact that North Korea probably has nuclear weapons.Obviously, the person primarily, responsible is Kim Jong Il. Since (I hope) we did not actually give him nuclear weapons, our foreign policy can only help or hinder him in his pursuit of them. That said, however, our policy towards North Korea has been a complete and unmitigated disaster.

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by Charles

Last Friday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) announced a makeover:

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today announced the launch of a new brand identity and logo. The new identity focuses on openness, professionalism and the pursuit of mutual understanding and justice.

If CAIR were serious about openness, they would open their books and tell us where their money comes from. For example, last June, CAIR announced a $50 million expenditure:

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by hilzoy

Even before the horrible bombing at Qana, the conflict in Lebanon was shaping up to be not just a catastrophe for Lebanon and its people, but a disastrous mistake for Israel and the US. In addition to everything else I’ve already said, Hezbollah seems to be fighting Israel to a draw so far, and Israel has not managed to make a dent in the number of rockets Hezbollah fires over the border. For a country that depends as heavily as Israel on its army’s reputation for invincibility, that’s an enormous problem.

Our policy has been just as disastrous for us. I suppose that the charitable interpretation of our policy would be: we wanted to let Israel strike a devastating blow to Hezbollah, after which Israel would have one less serious threat on its borders, Lebanon would no longer have to bother with a large armed militia on its territory, Syria and (especially) Iran would be chastened and deprived of one of their most important proxies, and other groups (like, oh, Hamas) could look at Hezbollah and rethink the idea of confrontation with Israel. I guess. Here’s an alternate version:

“As explained to me by several senior state department officials, Rice is entranced by a new “domino theory”: Israel’s attacks will demolish Hizbullah; the Lebanese will blame Hizbullah and destroy its influence; and the backlash will extend to Hamas, which will collapse. From the administration’s point of view, this is a proxy war with Iran (and Syria) that will inexplicably help turn around Iraq. “We will prevail,” Rice says.”

This “strategy”, if you can call it that, has several of the hallmarks of this administration: it greatly overestimates the degree to which political results can be achieved by military force; it does not take into account the sheer hatred that wars can produce, or the fragility of political structures in weak countries; its basic assumptions range from the wildly optimistic to the downright delusional; and it has no plan for what to do if those assumptions turn out to be wrong.

The less charitable way to describe it would be like this: imagine that a fire breaks out in someplace like New Jersey: heavily populated, and full of fuel tanks, large ammunition depots (including stashes of chemical and nuclear weapons), chemical storage facilities, and all sorts of other things that make a fire much more than usually dangerous. Unlike New Jersey, however, the locations of most of these hazards are unknown. Moreover, whereas New Jersey is a nice temperate place, our hypothetical New Jersey is very hot, very dry, and chock full of dried kindling and other flammable things just waiting to catch fire. The fire chief in New Jersey has already set a rather large fire in one part of the state, and it is burning out of control. Now a new fire breaks out.

Normally, when fires start in this part of the world, people put them out as quickly as possible. It’s only sensible: when fires burn, people die. Moreover, putting out the fire quickly avoids the absolute worst case scenario, which is that several of the unknown caches of oil, gas, ammunition, and chemicals all go up at once, and the entire state is destroyed. This time, however, the fire chief says: no, just let it burn. We have to deal with the root causes of the fire: all that fuel and kindling lying around. If we don’t let it burn out now, we’ll just be back here again in a year or two. And besides, I have some great new landscaping plans for the state.

People are aghast: there are people trapped in the burning areas; the fire is spreading and might soon be out of control; and above all, the risk that the fire will hit one of the storage tanks or fuel refineries always looms in the background. But the fire chief just thinks they’re being short-sighted: he is playing in a longer-term game than they are. As the fire rages, his spokesman puts out this statement:

“He mourns the loss of every life. Yet out of this tragic development, he believes a moment of clarity has arrived.”

Oh, and I should mention this: the fire chief is safely out of harm’s way. He can afford to be cavalier. The first responders who actually fight the fire, however, are in the field, along with the many, many inhabitants.

The war is far from over, but a lot of the costs are already clear. To Lebanon: destruction, hundreds of dead, thousands injured, 800,00 people fleeing for their lives, billions of dollars in damages. To Israel: scores of dead and wounded, the destruction of its reputation for military invincibility, the strengthening of an enemy, and the complete disappearance, for the foreseeable future, of any hope of a decent relationship with a democratic Lebanon. In what follows, though, I want to focus on the costs to the United States of George and Condi’s Excellent Adventure.

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by hilzoy

From today’s Presidential press conference:

“QUESTION: Mr. President, three years ago, you argued that an invasion of Iraq would create a new stage of Arab-Israeli peace. And yet today there is an Iraqi prime minister who has been sharply critical of Israel. Arab governments, despite your arguments, who first criticized Hezbollah, have now changed their tune. Now they’re sharply critical of Israel. And despite from both of you warnings to Syria and Iran to back off support from Hezbollah, effectively, Mr. President, your words are being ignored.

QUESTION: So what has happened to America’s clout in this region that you’ve committed yourself to transform?

BUSH: It’s an interesting period because, instead of having foreign policies based upon trying to create a sense of stability, we have a foreign policy that addresses the root causes of violence and instability. For a while, American foreign policy was just, “Let’s hope everything is calm” — kind of, managed calm. But beneath the surface brewed a lot of resentment and anger that was manifested on September the 11th. And so we’ve taken a foreign policy that says: On the one hand, we will protect ourselves from further attack in the short run by being aggressive in chasing down the killers and bringing them to justice. And make no mistake: They’re still out there, and they would like to harm our respective peoples because of what we stand for.

In the long term, to defeat this ideology — and they’re bound by an ideology — you defeat it with a more hopeful ideology called freedom. And, look, I fully understand some people don’t believe it’s possible for freedom and democracy to overcome this ideology of hatred. I understand that. I just happen to believe it is possible. And I believe it will happen.

And so what you’re seeing is, you know, a clash of governing styles. For example, you know, the notion of democracy beginning to emerge scares the ideologues, the totalitarians, those who want to impose their vision. It just frightens them. And so they respond. They’ve always been violent.

You know, I hear this amazing kind of editorial thought that says, all of a sudden, Hezbollah’s become violent because we’re promoting democracy. They have been violent for a long period of time. Or Hamas? One reason why the Palestinians still suffer is because there are militants who refuse to accept a Palestinian state based upon democratic principles. And so what the world is seeing is a desire by this country and our allies to defeat the ideology of hate with an ideology that has worked and that brings hope.

And one of the challenges, of course, is to convince people that Muslims would like to be free, that there’s other people other than people in Britain and America that would like to be free in the world. There’s this kind of almost — kind of a weird kind of elitism that says well maybe — maybe certain people in certain parts of the world shouldn’t be free; maybe it’s best just to let them sit in these tyrannical societies. And our foreign policy rejects that concept. And we don’t accept it. And so we’re working.

BUSH: And this is — I said the other day, when these attacks took place, I said it should be a moment of clarity for people to see the stakes in the 21st century. I mean, now there’s an unprovoked attack on a democracy. Why? I happen to believe because progress is being made toward democracies. And I believe that — I also believe that Iran would like to exert additional influence in the region; a theocracy would like to spread its influence using surrogates. And so I’m as determined as ever to continue fostering a foreign policy based upon liberty. And I think it’s going to work unless we lose our nerve and quit. And this government isn’t going to quit.”

Wow.

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