You may know about Third Way. It is a supposed centrist party that doesn’t fall into the trap of the supposed extremist Democratic and Republican parties. The problem is that when they talk about policy, it turns out that it is what the Democratic Party establishment already supports. Now this is an indictment of the Democratic Party, because it shows that it is not liberal, at least on economic issues. But the reason that Third Way doesn’t just get behind the Democratic Party is that they aren’t really for centrist policy. Instead, they are professional centrists who get their gravitas by pretending to be the mean between the two extremes. They have never been able to explain how the modern Democratic Party is extreme, except in that the Republicans say it is and that they disagree in some small ways.

Over the weekend, the top two people at Third Way, Jonathan Cowan and Jim Kessler, wrote an OpEd in The New York Times, Capitalize Workers! They argue that low wage workers don’t need no stinkin’ minimum wage increase. What is really behind income inequality is that low wage workers aren’t vested in the stock market. So they propose forcing employers to pay 50¢ per hour into a private investment account for employees. They claim this will result in an annuity worth $790 per month at retirement.

Note first how they frame the debate in a way that appeals to their base: the business interests. Raising the minimum wage would actually move money from corporate profits to worker wages. But forcing employers to add 50¢ to every hour worked would end up getting taken out of the employee wages. So this is a way of just forcing workers to invest some part of their earnings and not requiring anything from employers. Note also: all of the proposals to raise the minimum wage are a lot more than 50¢ so even at its best, this proposal is yet another attempt by economic conservatives to do as little as possible to help low wage workers.

But it’s much worse than this. Dean Baker goes through all the numbers and shows that the annuity would be far less—perhaps only half as much. And it is a huge giveaway to Wall Street. It represents between $25 and $50 billion per year in fees for the investments. And then another $25 to $50 billion for turning the investments into annuities at retirement.

Last December, the same two men were at The Wall Street Journal arguing, Economic Populism Is a Dead End for Democrats. So they are very much aware that Obama and the Democratic establishment push policies that are effectively identical to their own. And they are afraid that populism of the Warren and de Blasio type might break out—because they would be bad for their corporate base. So it is clear where they are coming from.

Sadly, the media generally treat Third Way as though it had something useful to say. But this goes back to a point I’ve argued for a long time. Elite media figures are upper class urbanites. They see their interests represented by third way: economic conservatism and social liberalism. Of course the actual people of the country are the opposite; they are economic liberals and social conservatives. And that’s why the Third Way boys push this investment nonsense: it’s a great way to confuse people into thinking that the government is doing something for the working poor, when it is actually just stealing money from them.

This morning I saw that Jonathan Chait had a new feature in New York Magazine. Normally, that is something to celebrate. He’s an excellent writer with a lot of great insights. But this article was, The Color of His Presidency. It is about race in politics—an issue that Chait hasn’t exactly distinguished himself on recently. And more than anything, it is an example of his own special genre of articles, “See how liberal I am? I’m beating up on liberals!”

It is kind of hard to get to the bottom of the article. It’s something like this. The very basis of the Republican Party is racism. Pretty much everything they do has racist motivations to one extent or another. But talking about this just makes the Republicans claim that all accusations of racism are invalid. So we shouldn’t criticize them for their racism or the criticisms we don’t level against them won’t be effective. Or something. It’s hard to say.

Not surprisingly, the article is being eaten alive by liberals. Ed Kilgore wrote, Conservatives, Race, and “Winners” and “Losers.” His basic argument is that conservatives are determined to be resentful of liberals, so trying to make them less resentful is a ridiculous goal. Jamelle Bouie goes after the whole white-liberal-elite focus of the article, Color Blind. He doesn’t say this explicitly, but his argument is that pretending that these racial issues are nothing more than ideological battles just cedes the battle to the white power elite.

The most vicious attack against Chait comes from Joan Walsh, Jonathan Chait’s Epic Race Fail: How a Story About Racism and Obama Goes Horribly Wrong. She meets him on his own terms and, frankly, tears him apart. She summarizes his argument, “If only MSNBC would stop crying racism, then…” To which she responds:

I agree with everything written by these three writers. And I am so tired of Chait’s efforts to claim the liberal high ground by attacking other liberals. It’s just his own personal way of being a Serious Centrist. But what’s especially horrible is that tomorrow (assuming he’s working), he will post an article in which he defends himself against all his attackers. And if Ta-Nehisi Coates decides to weigh in, it’s going to get bloody, and I’m not going to enjoy watching Chait flailing around impotently.

Update (9 April 2014 8:56 am)

Chait is back with this obligatory defense, Obama, Racism, and the Presumption of Innocence. There’s not much to it except that he attacks everyone I quoted in this article. Poor Jonathan.

Billie Holiday was born on this day in 1915. After all these years, she is one of my very favorite singers. Here musical phrasing was entirely new and it continues to fascinate me. And I’m hardly alone. I love both Frank Sinatra and Madeleine Peyroux. But in a fundamental way, they are just ripoffs of Holiday.

But there is more to Holiday than the music. There is the outrage that her life was made by the government of the United States. After social conditions pushed Holiday into prostitution while still a young teen, she was imprisoned for it. And then, after she became famous as a singer, she was harassed by the police resulting in federal prison for a drug charge. And then, while dying in a hospital, the police searched her apartment and allegedly found drugs. Her hospital room was searched and she was placed under arrest. There was an officer guarding her like she was Dillinger.

It’s hard not to conclude that Holiday was treated like this because she was black. After all, all of her crimes were cultural. She wasn’t harming anyone else’s property or person. Meanwhile, while the government did a great deal to harm her, it did nothing at all to protect her. I can’t see a 14-year-old prostitute as anything but a victim. And as for her use of heroin, that wasn’t what killed her. Her excessive drinking caused her liver and heart disease. If the government had spent one-tenth the effort on helping her that it spent on oppressing her, she might have lived a good deal longer and better.

One could argue that she wouldn’t have been such a great singer if it hadn’t been for her hard life. That’s nonsense. First, it’s just a rationalization. Second, there is really no reason to think that being a child prostitute is any more likely to produce great art than having your heart obligatorily broken in high school. And most of the abuse came long after she had perfected her art. No, it’s just another example of how America does everything it can to destroy outsiders. We claim to value the individual in this country, but it is only true in is much as the individual decides to conform.

Now is the time when we enjoy a Billie Holiday song. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of good video of her online. But this version of “Travelin’ Light” is pretty good:

Happy birthday Billie Holiday!

Now you know where Ukraine is. But maybe you already did. Most readers around here are pretty liberal and are not inclined to think that going to war over the slightest provocation is a good idea. I say this because a The Monkey Cage conducted a new poll that found that only 16% of Americans could locate Ukraine on a map, and the further off they are, the more likely they are to think that we ought to “intervene with military force.”

According to the article:

They also indicate (if you look behind the numbers) that more Americans think that Obama is a Muslim (18% as of 2010) than know where Ukraine is. So it is very sad indeed. Just the same, they did find that college graduates were 50% more likely to know where Ukraine was, with 22% being able to find it on a map. But being a college graduate doesn’t make someone smart. I suspect that what is driving the correlation between “location ignorance” with the “go-to-war mentality” is general stupidity. I mean, what are we to make of the people who thought that Ukraine was inside the United States?

H/T: Political Wire

Warren Buffett famously noted that his secretary paid a higher income tax rate than he did. It was a good illustration of the reason we have such high income inequality in this country. As one goes very high in earnings, one’s tax rate goes down. This is primarily because we don’t tax capital gains as much as we do earned income. The government is implicitly saying that owning is more valuable than working. Yes Virginia, we have a very screwed up country.

Conservatives struck back with one primary argument, “If Warren Buffett wants to pay more taxes, no one is stopping him.” It is a shaming argument implying (and sometimes saying explicitly) that Buffett is trying to force others to pay more in taxes and that he ought to just shut up. The argument has a certain appeal because it is technically right. It does make Buffett sound a bit hypocritical.

There are a couple of problems. The most obvious is that in saying this, Buffett is using himself as an example of how the policy is bad. He is making a policy argument. But no one ever makes this argument against the Koch brothers. They argue that their taxes should be lower and so no one can say that they should just pay less than they have to. So the argument here is that rich people can’t advocate for higher taxes but they can advocate for lower taxes.

What’s more, the idea behind the shaming argument is simply to take attention off the cruelty of the policy. By saying that Buffett should just pay more taxes himself and shut up, they are implicitly saying that it is just fine that the Koch brothers pay less tax than their secretaries. Since conservatives have no reasonable arguments for why this ought to be that way, they simply change the subject. It isn’t about the middle class getting screwed for the benefit of the rich; it’s about the rich getting screwed by that old meanie Warren Buffett.

Most conservative arguments on any issue come down to a belief that any privilege that the powerful have is God given. And in this case it is worse because Buffett is supposed is seen as a class traitor. The only way that the low capital gains tax can be a given is if everyone who matters agrees about it. It doesn’t matter what the poor think, because they just don’t get it. But if rich people break rank on this issue, it undermines the definitional aspect of low capital gains taxes. Thus Buffett must be destroyed as a hypocrite who could choose to pay more in taxes. No rich person should question God’s law.

Listen up everyone! It is Roger Corman‘s 88th birthday today. And you should care, because he is an amazing guy. He made all those great early-1960s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations with Vincent Price that Richard Matheson wrote. And he did so much more. He is the very definition of an exploitation filmmaker. He did a great deal with very little.

I especially like Corman because he shines a very bright light on what a film director really is. This is illustrated best by Corman’s commentary on the film The Pit and the Pendulum. It mostly consists of him talking about how they reused things from House of Usher. And you can see this in his films: they tend to look the same. I’m sure that he had the scripts tailored to fit with the resources his company already had. And this is why so many of his films are set in castles, even though it doesn’t make any sense.

In some circles Roger Corman is held up as a visionary director. I don’t think this is true at all. He was just a guy trying to get films made that people would enjoy. And he was very successful. But he didn’t have a “vision,” and I doubt that any other director does either. If you look at the late films he produced, you see some the same tricks, even though they are directed by a number of other people. It’s still the same formula: make the most of what you have. And it is amazing how effective it is. I doubt that most people watching the newer films even realize just how claustrophobic they are. A bit of money spent for context goes a long way to making a small set interesting.

I wish Hollywood would learn what Corman perfected. Most films anymore have huge canvases on which they paint, but I don’t think anyone really cares. The fight scenes in The Matrix Reloaded were interesting, but it was the straight dialog scenes where the drama was. And that’s true of just about any action film you can think of. Corman understands that and so his films always look better than they cost. And that is a remarkable thing in the film industry.

Here is a scene from one of my favorites, The Raven:

Happy birthday Roger Corman!

After gushing a bit about Brendan Gleeson, JMF recommended that I watch The Guard. And so I did. It is an amusing and interesting film, written and directed by John Michael McDonagh. It is hard not to compare the film to the work of his brother, Martin McDonagh. And it makes me wonder if I hadn’t read too much into In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths. Because despite all of its charm and intelligence, The Guard is something of a muddle.

The film tells the story of Gerry Boyle (Gleeson), a police officer in Ireland who is difficult in that way that the Irish can be. He’s always funny and honest and offensive, but inside beats the heart of a romantic hero. When a major cocaine deal is going to go down in the area, he’s the one guard who isn’t paid off because he’s thought to be too unpredictable. Meanwhile, FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) has come to the area in search of the drug dealers. Everett is probably a good portrait of how the Irish see Americans. He’s smart and committed and even maybe heroic. But he’s also something of a stuffed shirt with no sense of humor.

In the hands of Hollywood, this film would take a very tired course. Think The Heat. (See my review, Thematic Problems in The Heat.) Here, the film is mostly a character sketch. It wanders around without much point until an event at end of the second act that pushes Boyle into action. And the third act is then very much a Spaghetti Western parody, but more A Fistful of Dynamite than A Fistful of Dollars.

The first two acts remind me rather a lot of Bill Forsyth, who is essentially a character driven storyteller. McDonagh adds to that a genre element that both provides dramatic momentum and more thematic depth. But I don’t think it fully works here. Because ultimately, the film gets too involved in its plot and it never resolves what exactly it is trying to say about Boyle. To me, the character is a lost soul. So the heroic denouement seems forced. Comic book characters go from lost to hero; real characters go from lost to less lost.

Another problem is that Everett isn’t a very effective character. He seems to have been thrown into the narrative for the purpose of making the third act work. There is only one sequence until the end where he is not paired with Boyle. And although it is amusing, it sticks out as a distracting subplot. Most of the lesser characters have far more to them. Everett is almost entirely functional.

The film is at its best when Boyle and Everett are at each other. Boyle is never so funny as when he’s winding up Everett. And Everett’s mystified reactions to Boyle are some of the best things in the film. Because of this, it is quite an enjoyable experience. And the ending is playful meta fun. But under the surface, there isn’t much to get. And I think McDonagh means for there to be. I will be keen to see what he offers up in the future.

Afterword

I hate ratings like “Four Stars!” But I can see their uses. When I write things like this, most people will think that I didn’t like this film, even though I very clearly say that I did like it. But because I focused on the problems in the film, many people will get the idea that I didn’t. That gets to the problem with ratings. How do you rate a film that works but has problems. And what does it really matter if I like a film? I try to give an idea of what a film is about and if it works. Taste is, well, taste. So unless its Netflix, which combines my simplistic ratings with what other people who tend to like the kind of films I like, what is the point?