Class matters.

The Associated Press reports today:

The average income of American families, after adjusting for inflation, declined by 2.3 percent in 2004 compared to 2001 while their net worth rose but at a slower pace.

The Federal Reserve reported Thursday that the drop in inflation-adjusted incomes left the average family income at $70,700 in 2004. The median, or point where half the families earned more and half less, did rise slightly in 2004 after adjusting for inflation to $43,200, up 1.6 percent from the 2001 level.

The median, or midpoint for net worth rose by 1.5 percent to $93,100 from 2001 to 2004. That growth was far below the 10.3 percent gain in median net worth from 1998 to 2001, a period when the stock market reached record highs before starting to decline in early 2000.

This news will not come as a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention. Although if you are a typical news consumer you'll have to be paying very close attention indeed to be well informed on this bundle of issues. The press coverage is bad as measured by absolute standards--# of stories, # of column inches. It's even worse if you measure it by what really matters--public knowledge. Most US Americans are delusional about the class system. Maybe the news in the world couldn't counter the weight of ideology. It would be nice to give it a try.

The interesting thing to me is that the median rose while the average fell. Of course the average is way above the median because of the sheer size of incomes at the top of the scale. The decline in the average would be explained by the stagnation of investment income in the years after the dot.com bust. The rise in the median, meanwhile, is pathetically small, and amounts practically to a recession in household income because the adjustment for inflation fails to take into account the generation of new needs--the essence of a capitalist economy. You can get some measure of that factor by looking at the growth in credit card debt.

News happens best when the upper middle class is threatened. I state that as a general proposition. The well being of the working class has been under stress for decades now. But media attention comes into sharp focus only when the better off have something to wail about. So you'll hear a lot about the alternative minimum tax this year. You'll hear little or nothing about the minimum wage, even if there's a serious election-year move to raise it. This class bias in the news is not remarkable; I can't say for sure if anyone even bothers to dispute it. If it's explainable by market forces, then it's ok, or so the dominant discourse seems to think.

Living abroad convinces you immediately of a few things. First, the vaunted wealth of the US doesn't seem like much when you consider the value of the publicly provided goods and services that most of the world enjoys. Second, the US has a fetish about home ownership that makes little economic sense. Third, the US has lost a lot by turning over so much of its retail to big box stores. Consumers get more choice on one level but far less variety on the more important cultural level.

The scary thing is that the US economy depends on consumer spending for about 2/3 of its action. What will happen when people stop spending money they don't have on shit they don't need?

None dare call it racism...

when it involves Arabs. There's a nifty little firestorm in the US just now over the fact that a state-owned company from the UAE has bought a company that operates some major US ports. Democrats are seizing on this as an opportunity to portray the Bush administration as lax on safeguarding US shipping against terrorist attacks. Many conservatives agree, and the Bush administration is so off-balance that it's denying today that Bush himself knew anything about the government's approval of the sale.

So why is it that this is a big deal? Because it's Ay-rabs, that's why. No other reason. No one claims that the UAE is a rogue state, or even soft on terrorism. Quite the contrary.

Extremists and terrorists may be of any race, ethnicity, or nationality, but only Ay-rabs are presumed to be terrorists. (And of course Iranians, who are treated as Ay-rabs because of, not in spite of, the racial illogic involved.)

Again I'll mention the uproar over the cartoons of the prophet. People who riot over images and the sacred may be of any race, ethnicity, or nationality, but Ay-rabs are presumed to do so because of a clash of civilizations. This is classic racist illogic, the same kind of reasoning that says that anyone can be a drunk, but in the Irish it's a national trait; or anyone can be in organized crime, but Italians are different.

It seems to have legs.

I'll admit to some surprise over how long the controversy over the cartoons of the prophet has run. Just when it seems about to die down, something--a new provocation, a weekend--happens to prolong it.

This past week an Italian minister unbottoned his shirt on tv to reveal a t-shirt printed with the infamous cartoons. Over the weekend rioters in Libya attacked an Italian consulate and were fired on by Libyan security forces. The minister was forced to resign, with Berlusconi himself requesting the resignation, along with many members of the opposition. And today La Repubblica has published a long letter by the main opposition candidate, Romano Prodi, commenting on the controversy.

This is the sort of document that just doesn't appear in US politics anymore. In the US, a proxy--maybe George Will--would write a column trotting out similar arguments, but a candidate would never risk such fulsome expression. The whole point of every utterance from a US candidate for almost any office is to say the most obvious things without pissing anyone off. Even a strongly worded speech by a potential candidate--say Al Gore--is treated like a tantrum. And, of course, no major politician would actually write his or her own stuff in the US.

There's something to be said for unscripted politics. It obliges you to pay attention to what people actually say, rather than to dismiss all the overt content in a pointless search for their strategies. On the other hand, unscripted politics is dangerous. Roberto Calderoli, the minister of "reforms" who wore the offending t-shirt, is a case in point. Here is a guy going freelance on Rai 1, the Italian equivalent of the BBC. As Prodi points out, you can't blame the Islamic world for considering the performance of an Italian minister on state-owned tv an official act.

Let's suppose it was a swastika on his t-shirt. I'd've freaked. Wouldn't you?

Would the swastika be such a weird thing in Italy? Wander through any public park in parts of northern Italy and you'll see them spray-painted on all available surfaces. A parking-lot bar in Bardolino, one of the key tourist stops in the lakes region, sells bottles of local wine with labels like "Fuhrer" and "Hitler." It's hard to take this seriously, of course. But, in a continent where many countries have made Holocaust denial a crime, it's also hard to think that public expression is "just words." I'll believe that the day a US presidential candidate declares herself an atheist.

Comparing the US and Italy.

Today's a particularly rich day for political news in these two remarkable countries. The UN has issued a report condemning the prison at Guantanamo Bay, a story which the Italian press features along with a report about the new photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib. Meanwhile, European regulators are examining an energy company and Italian communications companies for antitrust violations. In the past week, Berlusconi has compared himself to Napoleon Bonaparte and Jesus Christ. But Dick Cheney shot and, depending on what you make of it, almost killed the man who funded Karl Rove's first political business venture. Now I wonder what Berlusconi would have said in similar circumstances. And, apparently oblivious of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and the NSA wiretapping scandal, the Senate seems about to renew the USA Patriot Act. And in Italy it is against election laws to discuss polling results without identifying publicly the pollster and the data, a rule which Berlusconi has broken by bragging that his private polls show him in the lead--the rising from the dead that make him similar to Jesus. Christ. His pollster appears to be Frank Luntz, who crafted for him a "Contract with the Italians," patterned on the 1994 Republican "Contract with America." Minuscule amounts of each seem to have been enacted.

This morning, taking my daughter to school, I picked up the newspapers, and the cover of one had a picture of an unidentifiable Iraqi civilian corpse, burnt beyond recognition ("Daddy, is that a man or a woman?") by white phosphorous. I began my day by trying to explain what that picture meant. Another paper featured the latest Abu Ghraib pictures. As far as I can tell, unlike the British, the Italian military and electorate seem untouched by this kind of scandal. The Iraq War is a far smaller campaign issue than the controversy over a high-speed rail line in northern Italy.

The big ink today was spilled on Berlusconi's links with right-wing extremists, and the featured picture showed him with Mussolini's granddaughter. This would never happen in the US. The electoral system works to homogenize the parties. In Italy and other parliamentary countries, of course, the system allows small parties to represent the less cultivated areas of the political spectrum, and a communist can call herself a communist. Winning power usually requires some support from the ideological hinterlands. So a lot of attention gets paid to the cracks in the coalitions, just as in the US, but the cracks are much bigger. Does this make politics healthier? Wait and see....

I wonder how many stories there are like this one (from Editor and Publisher):

Laura Berg, a clinical nurse specialist for 15 years, wrote a letter in September to a weekly Albuquerque newspaper criticizing how the administration handled Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq Wwr. She urged people to "act forcefully" by bringing criminal charges against top administration officials, including the president, to remove them from power because they played games of "vicious deceit." She added: "This country needs to get out of Iraq now and return to our original vision and priorities of caring for land and people and resources rather than killing for oil....Otherwise, many more of us will be facing living hell in these times."

The agency seized her office computer and launched an investigation. Berg is not talking to the press, but reportedly fears losing her job.

The article says she is being investigated for "sedition," which is an overreach, to say the least. Is there some special oath that VA employees take that prevents them from advocating the proper functioning of the judicial system?

Today's NYTimes carries these two items in its international news in brief:

MEXICO: GUNMEN STORM BORDER NEWSPAPER Two heavily armed men burst into the Nuevo Laredo offices of the border city's largest newspaper, El Mañana, on Monday night, threw a hand grenade and sprayed bullets at more than 20 reporters and editors. One reporter, Jaime Orozco, was shot and seriously wounded. Several others were injured by flying glass. The gunmen escaped, their motive unknown. Officials at the newspaper said the use of heavy weapons suggested that the attack had been ordered by drug dealers. President Vicente Fox condemned the assault and ordered his attorney general to investigate. "To organized criminals, I say again, you will not defeat the people of Mexico," he said. JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. (NYT)

EUROPE

TURKEY: TRIAL OF JOURNALISTS BEGINS The trial of five newspaper columnists charged with insulting the country's courts got under way in Istanbul in what is seen as another test of the relationship between Turkey and the European Union, which has called for increased rights to free expression in Turkey. The journalists — Ismet Berkan, Murat Belge and Haluk Sahin of the liberal newspaper Radikal, and Hasan Cemal and Erol Katircioglu of the center-right newspaper Milliyet — had criticized court rulings that tried to block an academic conference on the Armenian genocide, its first public discussion in Turkey. They are charged under the same law as was the author Orhan Pamuk, who publicly questioned Turkey's official denial of the genocide, and face prison terms of 6 months to 10 years if convicted. The case against Mr. Pamul brought Turkey international scorn, and his charges were dropped last month. A group of European Parliament observers is attending the current trial, which was adjourned to April 11. (AP)

It's an interesting juxtaposition, suggesting accidentally that these two items are part of a single larger story. Um, that would be the story of the fight for freedom of the press in the darkest third world. Problem is that Nuevo Laredo isn't exactly the third world--I've been there, strange to say--and neither is Turkey, which comes under the heading "Europe." Turkey is easier to place as third world, of course, because of the whole Islam thing. But the free press item where there's actual bloodshed is the Mexican one, where the cause of the assault on the newspaper is the organized supply of a very first world demand, i.e. the drug trade.

One recurring theme in mainstream reporting on 3rd world assaults on press freedom is a belief that they come from a kind of uncivilized popular opinion--that is, that it's the fault of the people in the 3rd world, who just aren't mature enough to know that it's only words. Hm. Is that really so 3rd world? I don't think so. But without arguing that point, check out what this position implies about public opinion.

There is an assumption that public opinion simply exists, like a fact of nature. Because the 3rd world don't believe in free expression, spontaneous riots appear. Riots are a simple and direct expression of public opinion.

I set out to research exactly this sort of thing twenty years ago, and ten years ago I published a book called Violence against the Press. One of the things I found was that the important incidents of violence against the press were never "spontaneous" and were almost always political. They grew out of long and deep struggles over power. The violence itself was not an expression of public opinion but a moment in a struggle over representing public opinion.

And that's the point. Public opinion never exists until it is represented. It's not like my opinion and your opinion, which simply exist whether anyone knows them or not. I DO have an opinion about CBS news, whether anyone knows it or not. It's not public opinion until it is represented publicly. Two hundred years ago everyone knew this. In the so-called 3rd world, everyone still knows this. In the so-called 1st world, people have willfully forgotten this, believing that, because Gallup and Roper call you at home, public opinion is simply the aggregation of everyone's private opinion. I'm very glad it's not. Who knows what our racial politics would look like then, for instance?

POSTSCRIPT: an earlier post noted that moments like the current protest against caricatures of the prophet usually produce martyrs. In the Italian press, much attention has been paid to an Italian priest, murdered in a church by a 16-year-old who confessed and said he was motivated by outrage over the caricatures. Nothing I say should minimize the awfulness of acts like these. They are crimes. In Turkey's case, the crime is being prosecuted in an orderly fashion, but then, again, it's Europe.

I wonder where the Plame case went....

Media matters notes that the news media haven't been giving recent hints of where the Plame investigation is going much notice. Why is that?

If you think of the Plame investigation as being about the outing of a CIA agent, then it's not that big a deal. Perhaps it's rotten to out a spy, but you could disagree about that, especially if, like most journalists, you're an avowed enemy of official secrecy and consider it your job to urgently seek out exactly the kind of inside dope that Libby et al. were leaking.

But if you think about the Plame investigation as being about how the Administration distorted intelligence in order to facilitate an ill-conceived invasion, then it IS a big deal, and every dribble should echo in the media.

So clearly our news professionals don't understand what this is all about. Let's hope the prosecutors do. Then the journalists will eventually catch up.

Freedom of expression is one of the issues I write about as a scholar. So these are interesting times on more than one front.

One is the matter of privacy and surveillance. Here the interesting thing is the Pres-o-Dent's NSA initiative. Today's WashPost has a piece with significant new information in it that's getting a lot of attention in the b'sphere. The part that caught my attention came toward the end, discussing the sorts of "acoustic" information the NSA's mechanical surveillance analyzes:

A published report for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said machines can easily determine the sex, approximate age and social class of a speaker. They are also learning to look for clues to deceptive intent in the words and "paralinguistic" features of a conversation, such as pitch, tone, cadence and latency.

This kind of analysis can predict with results "a hell of a lot better than chance" the likelihood that the speakers are trying to conceal their true meaning, according to James W. Pennebaker, who chairs the psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin.

"Frankly, we'll probably be wrong 99 percent of the time," he said, "but 1 percent is far better than 1 in 100 million times if you were just guessing at random. And this is where the culture has to make some decisions."

Egad. Is comment even necessary? Suffice it to say that I don't know anyone who doesn't show "paralinguistic" evidence of "intent to deceive" on the phone. And really, hasn't the culture already decided that 1 in 100 is not worth the price? Or am I misreading all the history I know?

Still, the pollyanna in me must speak: we're still not back to Nixon.

And, as Juan Cole pointed out today, we're still not back to Ayodhya. That is, the ruckus over Danish cartoons of Muhammed still hasn't produced riots where thousands died, which what happened in India a dozen years ago when Hindus rioted over a dispute over a religious site and thousands of Muslims were killed. A sense of proportion, please.

In cases in which the exotic threaten the freedom of expression of the media, an outsized reaction always follows IN THE MEDIA. Sometimes this outsized reaction in turn produces an outsized reaction in the world. The spiral of outrage-inflation will usually exhaust itself in a couple of weeks with minimal bloodshed, though sometimes with an authentic martyr.

But in the meantime there will be (welcome) affirmations of the right to free expression (often from the same people who will instantly condone suppression in the interest of national security or who don't give a shit about the way markets stifle expression) and (unwelcome) contrasts between the civilized and uncivilized portions of the world. About which I'll make a couple of points I've made elsewhere. First, everyone draws the line somewhere. Second, everyone thinks everyone else's line is arbitrary. Third, even though the media are increasingly sensitive about threats to the safety of journalists, writers, etc., in any historical sense those professions are safer than ever. And finally, if you look at the actual threats to journalists and other professional communicators, it's still the governments and their armies that are at the top of the list, and then movements of the right come in second. Certainly in the US it isn't Muslims that journalists need to fear but neo-Nazis and others on the extreme right--and you're still more likely to get killed with (or by) the army.

I was surprised to see the US State Department coming out with a (soft) condemnation of inflammatory cartoons yesterday; I haven't found the text of that announcement yet. The State Department's website isn't transparent to the novice....

Testing the health of the public sphere.

History occasionally tosses us test cases for the public sphere. One that I’ve written about elsewhere is the US debate over slavery. Because slavery was so much a part of the fabric of everyday life, and because the western religious and political tradition as institutionalized in the US at its national birth seems in retrospect so unequivocal, if there had been a healthy public sphere in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, it would have produced consensus on the abolition of slavery and on racial equality. People had ready access to information; they expressed values that should have guided their consideration; and they enjoyed access to plenty of public media. They should have made their state and federal governments get rid of slavery.

Of course, nothing like that happened. If there was a consensus among white citizens, it was in support of racial supremacy. All of the proslavery whites and a large percentage (I’d argue a super majority) of the antislavery whites believed in black inferiority. A large chunk of the freesoil movement was frankly racist, and didn’t want western territories polluted by black slavery. And even with a large majority of the citizenry at least passively opposed to slavery, there was absolutely no prospect that it would be abolished by political means. Abraham Lincoln, elected by a mere 37% of the popular vote, did not even call for abolition, and moved slowly to embrace it, even during the Civil War itself.

What made public discourse fail in the case of slavery? The party system. It's as simple as that. DeTocqueville pointed this out. Because both parties angled for majority support, and because neither major party believed that embracing abolition would win it more support than it would lose, both parties wanted to silence the abolitionists in their own ranks. Sometimes they did this by convincing them that agitation would be inopportune; at other times they raised mobs. When the Republican party succeeded the Whig party, this calculus changed a bit, but still a hard line was drawn well short of embracing the annihilation of slavery.

So the US public sphere before the Civil War failed its big test. This was the one that really counted--whether the public sphere could handle a debate on the tariff was relatively unimportant. We're still trying to wash the blood off our hands.

What are the test cases of our own day? The two that jump out at me are the environment and health care. Both have the same large moral stakes that the slavery debate held. In both cases ordinary people encounter plenty of information in their everyday lives to make up their own minds. There is more public support for environmental action and health care reform than there ever was for abolition. But in both areas there isn't much action. Why?

Vested interests--that's the obvious explanation. On both the environment and health care major industries have spent a lot of money in seducing public opinion and lobbying legislators. But is that a sufficient explanation?

Culture explains a lot, though I won't try to be too precise now about what culture means. Take the culture of the automobile, for instance: the reason why US Americans drive so much has to have something to do with a kind of irrational pleasure they derive from it. It's certainly not efficient. Many of us take on car payments as big as mortgage payments--not including the cost of insurance, gas, and upkeep. And we'll spend a lot of time sitting in our cars getting fat. Rationally, we should all prefer public transportation. But we won't take the bus, and therefore our bus service is generally lousy.

Culture (again, not being precise) can also make some things invisible while heightening the visibility of others. In the US, this is easily seen in the ideology of freedom of choice. It is assumed that freedom consists in having choices, and that whatever choices people make will be free choices. So people choose to have crappy public transportation because they don't take the bus, and people choose to have crappy television because they watch Fox instead of PBS, and so forth. But does any individual really choose the system of transportation, or the media system? Would any rational individual choose the systems in the US today? People feel free as they make their choices from moment to moment, but they certainlydo not feel free when they think about the world they live in and what they can do to change it. Instead they feel completely helpless.

Health care reform is a good example of this. In the US, almost any proposal for large scale reform will have to overcome tremendous resistance, because people don't believe that they are capable of achieving meaningful change through the political system. Their very disbelief makes them right.

When the Pres-o-dent made energy and health care cornerstones of his State of the Younyun address the other night, he placed a bet against the health of the public sphere. He bet that people would take his small bore proposals as, well, the best that you can hope for, and not rise up and demand change. He and his advisers have been right so far when they've bet against the public sphere, though they've been wrong about virtually everything else.

The media have a special role to play in promoting and supporting a healthy public sphere. The media are not themselves the public sphere, although they pretend that that's the case. Professional journalism especially. But more on this another time. Would things be different if they were doing their jobs better?