The Wire

In the Life of 'The Wire' by Lorrie Moore

Realism and Utopia in The Wire by Fredric Jameson

But it is the genius of Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters) not only to solve these problems in ingenious ways, but also to displace some of the purely mystery and detective interest onto a fascination with construction and physical or engineering problem solving—that is to say,something much closer to handicraft than to abstract deduction. In fact, when first discovered and invited to join the special investigative unit, Freamon is a virtually unemployed officer who spends his spare time making miniature copies of antique furniture (which he sells): it is a parable of the waste of human and intelligence productivity and its displacement—fortunate in this case—onto more trivial activities that nonetheless absorb his energy and creative powers more productively than crossword puzzles, say. But Lester is also the type of the archivist-scholar capable of spending long hours on minutiae and in dusty files, which ultimately cracks open financial conspiracies all over the city; and he has deep, unostentatious, yet invaluable, roots in the community, as when he first uncovers an old photo of the youthful Barksdale in an old boxing hangout not many of his fellow officers would be likely to have any knowledge of: and to many of them he is also an inestimable mentor. This is then the sense in which The Wire not only offers a representation of collective dynamics (on both sides) but also one of work and productivity, of praxis. In both instances, then, there is at work a virtual Utopianism, a Utopian impulse, even though that somewhat different thing, the Utopian project or program, has yet to declare itself.  

But Lester’s creativity may also be said to have a counterpart on the other side. We have not yet mentioned Barksdale’s sidekick, Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), who is something like his executive officer or prime minister in the classic political situation: the police themselves also have a degraded version of this dual structure, where the second in command is however by no means as disinterested or as efficient as Bell...

...This episode then adds something to The Wire that cannot be found in most other mass-cultural narratives: a plot in which Utopian elements are introduced, without fantasy or wish fulfillment, into the construction of the fictive, yet utterly realistic, events.

Yet Sobotka’s Utopianism would remain a mere fluke or idiosyncrasy if it did not have its equivalents in later seasons of The Wire. (We could write it off, for example, by observing that the creators of the show, in their local patriotism, had taken this occasion to add in some more purely local statement.) But in fact it does, and at this point I can only enumerate the later incidence of a Utopian dimension in succeeding seasons. In season 3, Utopianism is certainly present in Major Colvin’s “legalization” of drugs; that is, his creation of an enclave of drug use closed to police intervention. In season 4, on education, it is to be found in Pryzbylewski’s classroom experiments with computers and his repudiation of the exam evaluation system imposed by state and federal political entities. Finally, in season 5, the most problematical, it is to be located in Jimmy’s invention of a secret source for funding real and serious police operations outside the bureaucracy and its budget—and this, despite the artificial crime panic he deliberately fosters, and also somewhat on the margins of what was to have been a series dominated by the newspaper and the media (for each season of The Wire, like Zola’s great series, or like Sara Paretsky’s Chicago crime novels, is also organized around a specific industry).

The future and future history have broken open both high- and masscultural narratives in the form of dystopian Science Fiction and future catastrophe narratives. But in The Wire, exceptionally, it is the Utopian future that here and there breaks through, before reality and the present again close it down.

Peaks, Troughs and Crisis by Krugman

One place where I do disagree with Ryan is in his desire to stop talking about Iceland. Yes, it’s a small island exporting mainly fish and aluminum. But you take your natural experiments where you find them. (Milton Friedman made his original case for floating exchange rates in part by invoking the example of, believe it or not, Tangier). Iceland was the only European-periphery country that received huge capital inflows, then responded to crisis not with a grim determination to stay on or pegged to the euro, but by devaluing. In the process it demonstrated that devaluation is a lot easier than “internal devaluation”, which is actually the main point.

Meloni finally gets his hands dirty on True Blood by Meredith Woerner

Attacking the Treasury View, Again by Dean Baker

The IMF had become an unexpected opponent of fiscal austerity. Its research demolished the intellectual basis for the claim that fiscal contractions could be expansionary. It also showed that, at least in the short term, there was no basis for preferring spending cuts to tax increases to reach whatever deficit goal was set as a target.
...

Of course getting to full employment is the key question, but in principle if we get back to full employment we can hope to be able to restore the virtuous circle of the decades immediately following World War II, in which gains in productivity translated into gains in wages. This, in turn, led to increased consumption, spurring more investment, and, therefore, more productivity growth. It is important that the public understand that whether macroeconomic policy focuses on full employment or inflation-fighting, it is very much a class issue. Those placing the priority on inflation-fighting have decided to impose higher unemployment and lower wages on ordinary workers as the price of achieving their stated goal.

No Respite for Liberals by Pamela S. Karlan

How Liberals Win by Bill Scher

Health care was not an anomaly for Mr. Obama. His original stimulus package never faced well-financed conservative opposition in part because the United States Chamber of Commerce backed the business tax cuts in the package. We got a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after Mr. Obama put Wall Street at ease by resisting proposals to cap the size of banks. New standards lifting average fuel-efficiency goals were set once the White House accepted the automakers’ demand for a review in 2021 and flexibility regarding light trucks. The food safety bill empowered the Food and Drug Administration to recall tainted items but won industry support by dropping a ban on bisphenol A, or BPA, a chemical used in food and beverage containers.

The necessity of forging coalitions with corporations is understandably difficult for progressives to accept. Every time it happens, corporations seem to quickly go back to their usual tricks. They lobby to weaken enforcement. They litigate to have rules overturned. They abandon politicians who risked compromise for them. Corporations are exasperating, irritating and untrustworthy partners.

But most of the time politics is exasperating and irritating, not euphoric and cathartic. As Roosevelt himself told a group of dissatisfied youth activists in 1940, “if you ever sit here you will learn that you cannot, just by shouting from the housetops, get what you want all the time.”

Obamacare or the PPACA was aimed at fixing two problems in the broken health care system: millions of uninsured and rising costs.

It helps more people get insurance and get the health care they need.

As Dean Baker writes:

The system put in place under the ACA would put the government in a position where it could squeeze money out of providers. It could specify prices for services and procedures and tell providers take it or leave it. Given the enormous and rapidly growing size of the Medicare market, most would likely take it.

If prices keep rising a public option can still be added to help keep them down. If that works voters may finally decide to follow advanced European countries by using a single payer system which delivers the most bang for the buck.

There will still be people uninsured after 2014 when much of the ACA takes effect. Expanding the ACA to Medicare-for-all would be a major further reform that would cover the remaining uninsured and help contain price increases.

Mexico

Yglesias has been pushing the idea that Mexico is growing faster than Brazil. Is the implication that Clinton's NAFTA worked?

Dean Baker writes:

The Post's prohibition of honest discussion of Mexico's economy is apparently continuing. In a piece on Mexico's elections today, the Post told readers:

"But annual growth during Calderon’s six years has averaged a middling 2 percent."

This statement gives a whole new meaning to word "middling." If we turn to the IMF's data and look at per capita GDP growth in the years 2006-2011, we find that on average Mexico's per capital GDP shrank by 0.1 percent annually over this period. This is not middling; this performance places Mexico dead last among Latin American countries (several countries in the Caribbean did worse.)

For some reference points, per capita growth in Argentina averaged 5.8 percent, Bolivia 2.8 percent, Brazil 3.1 percent, Ecuador 2.6 percent, and Peru 5.6 percent. There is nothing middling about Mexico's economic performance over this period; it was bad. 

Hoisted from Comments: Coercion of the States Edition by DeLong

Matt writes:

Live by the Technicality, Die by the Technicality: Orin Kerr on the ACA Decision: And that drinking age requirement [that states raise their drinking ages to 21 or have their federal interstate highway funds pulled] was enacted by none other than the sainted Ronald Reagan, and then upheld by none other than Antonin Scalia and William Rehnquist in a 7-2 SCOTUS ruling. Furthermore, it's worth noting that the 21st Amendment has always been held as giving the states the power to regulate alcohol. So unlike Medicaid, it's a federal encroachment on a power explicitly reserved to the states.

The Commerce Clause and Federal Power

Wikipedia entry on the Commerce Clause


In Obama's Victory, a Loss for Congress by James B. Stewart

Will we be entering a new Lochner era?

(Roman almost stakes Bill Compton as Roberts almost staked Obamacare.)

In this season's True Blood, the backdrop is a conflict between the vampire Authority and the vampire Sanguinista movement. The Authority desires co-existence with humans via its strategy of "mainstreaming" as a matter of survival since vampires are outnumbered. The Sanguinistas believe in the literal interpretation of the vampire bible which says that humans are no more than food and to treat them as other than such is blasphemy.

Chief Judge John Roberts just acted like Christopher Meloni's Roman, the lead "Guardian" of the Authority. Roberts saw that if the conservative judges continued to act like super Senators with super vetoes - see Bush v. Gore and Citizens United - it would provoke a backlash. It would turn the U.S. into a banana republic instantly (rather than the slow erosion of Citizens United.) Likewise, Roman concludes that the Sanguinistas have not learned the historical lesson that it would be suicidal for the vastly outnumbered vampire population to start a war with humanity.

John Roberts Saves Us All by Jonathan Chait

Two fears have hovered over American liberals since the legal case against the Affordable Care Act began wending its way through the legal system. The first was a fear that conservatives would succeed in revising what Jeffrey Rosen called (in a prescient and classic 2005 New York Times Magazine story) "The Constitution In Exile" — that it would interpret the Constitution to require right-wing economic policy. A second, and darker, fear was that five Republican-appointed justices would concoct a jury-rigged ruling in order to win a huge battle that its party had lost in Congress — that wildly partisan Bush v. Gore–style rulings would now become regular features of the political scene.

The two fears were, of course, deeply intertwined. What happened, and what nobody expected, was that they diverged. The second fear was decisively refuted. The first is very much alive.

The fearful part is that five justices ruled that the Affordable Care Act cannot be upheld under the Commerce Clause. This is a bizarre and implausibly narrow reading — if Congress cannot regulate the health-care market, then it cannot really regulate interstate commerce. By endorsing this precedent, Roberts opens the door for future courts to revive the Constitution in Exile. 

But Roberts will do it by a process of slow constriction, carefully building case upon case to produce a result that over time will, if he prevails, rewrite the shape of American law. What he is not willing to do is to impose his vision in one sudden and transparently partisan attack. Roberts is playing a long game.

But it would be unfair to attribute his hesitance solely to strategy. Roberts peered into the abyss of a world in which he and his colleagues are little more than Senators with lifetime appointments, and he recoiled. The long-term war over the shape of the state goes on, but the crisis of legitimacy has been averted. I have rarely felt so relieved.

David Brooks Never Heard of Prescription Drugs by Dean Baker

At the top of the list is patent protection for prescription drugs. These government granted monopolies raise the price of drugs by around $270 billion a year above their free market price. This is roughly five times the size of the cost of the Bush tax cuts to the rich. Patent monopolies also encourage drug companies to mislead doctors and patients about the merits of their drugs, leading to poorer quality care.

A second item that Brooks somehow missed is the inefficiency of the insurance industry, which is left in tack by the ACA. We waste between 10-15 percent of our health care spending ($250-$375 billion a year) on unnecessary administrative costs as a result of our system of private insurers, as opposed to a public Medicare type program. Of course top executives at the insurers do very well with this system.

The third obvious source of waste that Brooks failed to catch was the excess pay for our doctors, especially highly paid specialists. If the pay for our doctors was comparable to the pay of doctors in Germany or Canada it would save us around $100 billion a year, or roughly two Bush tax cuts for the rich. 

It is striking that Brooks has such difficulties noticing inefficiencies in the health care system that redistribute income to the rich.

The Real Winners by Paul Krugman

Yes we can!

Peter Edelman has a new book on poverty out.  He famously resigned from the Clinton administration in protest of welfare reform. The New York Times recently had an in-depth piece about how he was in the right in light of the recent increase in poverty after the downturn. (Looking at the number he was right even before 2008.)

In 5-4 decision, Supreme Court rules for the uninsured by Ezra Klein

And, to be sure, it’s all those things. But those stories don’t capture the effect this decision will have on ordinary Americans.

The individual mandate, by bringing healthy people into the insurance market and lowering premiums, means health insurance for between 12.5 million and 24 million more Americans than if the mandate was struck down. And as Kennedy said in his dissent that the conservatives on the Court believed the entire law should have been invalidated, it means health insurance for 33 million more Americans than if Kennedy and the conservatives had their way. 

Those are big numbers, But behind them are real people. People like Eric Richter.

After Years of False Hopes, Signs of a Turn in Housing by Binyamin Appelbaum

Housing Market Continues to Show Strength by Dean Baker

Three More Governance Questions for the Fed by Simon Johnson

(via Dean Baker)

Okay I saw another contender for saddest movie ever alongside The Sweet Hereafter and Bridge to Terabithia. It's 2001 movie titled Things Behind the Sun* and stars Kim Dickens as a messed up musician who was raped as an adolescent. It's not that these movies are tearjerkers. They're sad to an extent that they're existentially horrifying.** I've always liked Dickens who was in Deadwood among other good things.*** She's 47 and according to IMDB she "made her stage debut in a student production of David Mamet's "Sexual Perversity in Chicago" at Vanderbilt University." So maybe she graduated the year before I arrived from Chicago. I visited a friend's brother the year before attending so maybe we were at the same bar or party. Yeah probably not.

--------------------
* The title is taken from a Nick Drake song (see above). In 1999, "Pink Moon" was used in "Milky Way", a Volkswagen Cabrio commercial, leading to a large increase in his record sales. The song plays at the end of the movie or over the credits, I forget which, maybe both. The film was directed and written by Allison Anders. When writing fiction in high school and or at college (in a fiction class with New Republic writer Michelle Cottle) I'd often use pop songs as spring boards for my fiction as Anders does here. Supposedly the movie is semi-autobiographical.
** As in Edvard Munch's The Scream. One of the things that makes these movie the best sad films, is that their young characters have a redeeming humanity and resilience in the face of tragedy (Although what doesn't kill you doesn't necessarily make you stronger. It can fuck you up royally basically ending your chances at a "normal" life.)
*** I haven't watched Treme but will check it out now. A new seasons starts this fall. (Adolph Reed Jr. doesn't like the show, comparing it unfavorably with The Wire.)

What was Spain supposed to have done? by Martin Wolf

(via DeLong)

True Blood finally takes off Meloni’s shirt by Meredith Woerner

Bad news for Mitt Romney and Putin.

The Coming Oil Crash by Steve Levine

Good news! Gas prices could go down to $2 a gallon by autumn -- and that's bad news for Vladimir Putin.
...
In an email exchange, Verleger pointed me to an interview he did a few days ago with Kate Mackenzie at the Financial Times. First, he explains, the Saudis are out for blood when it comes to fellow petro-states Russia and Iran, the former for failing to help calm the fury in Syria, and the latter for refusing to go to heel and give up its nuclear ambitions; in both cases, the Saudis think lower prices will produce a more reasonable attitude. In addition, Saudi Arabia is terrified of a current U.S. boom in shale oil; it is hoping that lower prices will render much of the drilling in North Dakota's Bakken Shale and Canada's oil sands uneconomical. Finally, the Saudis are well aware that low oil prices helped to turn around the global economic downturn in 1998 and 1999, and they hope to help accomplish the same now, and perhaps win new affection from the world's leading economies.

From The Guardian

Fifty Shades of Grey leaves records black and blue

Erotica trilogy breaks weekly paperback sales record, with all three books selling more than 100,000 copies in seven days

When will Zizek write about the phenomenon?

Pearlstein Gets Europe Half Right by Dean Baker

Steven Pearlstein gets half of the story of the euro zone right, it will take renewed spending supported by euro-wide bonds to end the crisis. But that is only half. To restore the competitiveness of the peripheral countries, Germany and other core countries will have to see higher inflation.

We are not going to see prices actually fall in Spain and Italy. This means that if output in these countries is going to become competitive again in a reasonable period of time we will need to see inflation in the 3-4 percent range (possibly higher) in Germany and other core countries.

In keeping with this target, the European Central Bank should be the issuer or guarantor of the bonds. This should help to bring about the higher rate of inflation that is needed to restore balance between the euro zone regions.

Stabilizing prices is immoral by Steve Randy Waldman

It is certainly true that there are groups in our society whose purchasing power we ought to collectively insure: retirees on fixed incomes, savers with moderate nest eggs. It is great that Social Security payouts are indexed, so that retirees enjoy some protection of purchasing power. But indexing is a visible, and visibly costly, form of social insurance. Because it is visible, we transparently ration its provision and allocate its costs. I do not argue that purchasing power insurance is immoral. On the contrary, we need purchasing power insurance and the state should invent explicit means to provide it. What is immoral is to hide what is arguably the government’s largest social insurance program behind the technocratic phrase “price stability”. This a scheme that forces the most precarious members of our society to insure the purchasing power of the most secure, without any limit or even any accounting of the scale of the transfer.