Our First Socialist VP: Baked Alaska Please

Philip Gourevitch's fascinating Letter from Alaska: The State of Sarah Palin, The peculiar political landscape of the Vice-Presidential hopeful, in the latest issue of the New Yorker, raises a little noted feature of Sarah Palin's experience as governor. The largest source of wealth in Alaska is its massive energy reserves (mostly oil and gas). Unlike most commodity based economies however, Alaska owns these resources for the benefit of all the people of Alaska. Alaskan's of sufficient residency in the state receive an annual cash benefit from the state's energy development. Indeed it was her success at negotiating a larger revenue stream for some of the development, resulting in larger annual checks, that has lifted Sarah Palin to very high approval ratings.

In short, thanks to its New Deal constitution, Alaska is a socialist state that operates for the benefit of its citizens, not property owners and capitalists. As Sarah Palin explained to Gourevitch (in a conversation weeks before her sudden fame after John McCain named her his running mate):

....Alaska ---we're set up, unlike other states in the union, where it's collectively Alaskans own the resoures. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs...Our state constitution---it lays it out for me, how I'm to conduct business with resource development here as the sate C.E.O. It's to maximize benefits for Alaskans, not an individual company, not some multinational somewhere, but for Alaskans.

You want Mavericks? What if McCain and Palin announced their intention to apply the Alaska model to American? No President since Richard Nixon has toyed with the idea of directly funding American families as a citizenship right.

What kind of state does this create? Alaskans are not rich. Indeed, many Alaskans, even with their share of the energy wealth, live at a subsidence level on hunting and fishing. It is worth noting however that notwithstanding Palin's national launch, Alaska appears to be a state little wracked by culture wars against demonized minorities, nor an aggressive war on crime. Indeed, growing marijuana for personal use was legal as late as the 80s (when Palin admits to trying it), the state has no death penalty, and has a smaller portion of its population then California or Texas.

Living the War on Crime

The traditional left critique is to see the war on crime and governing through crime as exclusively about governing the poor. I've always argued that the real significance of governing through crime is its hold on middle class life.

Thanks to Warren Rosenblum for this dispatch from Nancy Cambria's reporting in the St. Louis Dispatch:

WENTZVILLE — The trampoline outside the model home sits idle without a child in
sight — and so does the patio's kid-sized table scattered with storybooks
including Bambi and The Poky Little Puppy.

From the vantage point of the home's surveillance camera, one might wonder,
Where did the children go? Did the monitor in the kitchen just show a strange
car driving down the street?

In a home with ample views of cows grazing in a nearby farm, child abduction
scenarios might seem like the wrong sales pitch for a new subdivision in
Wentzville — a city where the murder rate last year was zero and violent crime
at the hands of a stranger is nearly nonexistent.

But inside the meticulous model home, real estate agent Joanie Graflage can't
stop talking about kidnappings, break-ins, peeping Toms, petty theft and any of
the other "God forbids" that haunt the hearts of parents.

"It may not all be about child abduction, but someone could break into your
home," she says.

Graflage is selling homes for the Villages of Hampton Grove, a neighborhood
that's being marketed as Missouri's first fully camera-secure subdivision.
Three surveillance cameras resembling tiny, black shower nozzles come standard
on the exterior of every home.

The Media, the Mayor, the Iron Fist: Its How Governing through Crime Gets Done

-- A San Francisco court's ruling that a 14-year-old drug suspect from Honduras should be considered an abandoned youth - entitled to shelter rather than deportation - was thwarted Wednesday when the city turned him over to federal immigration authorities.

In SFChron, Jaxon Van Derbeken covers the City's new juvenile deportation practice, a change in policy Van Derbeken helped drive with a series of alarmest stories that pilloried the City for having applied its "sanctuary" policy to undocumented juvenile delinquents.

His first stories picked up federal complaints that San Francisco was privately flying undocumented juvenile delinquents back to their countries to avoid detention and deportation by ICE the federal Immigration Control and Enforcement Agency, as well as sending such juveniles to unlocked private juvenile rehabilitation facilities from which some had escaped by walking a way.

Subsequent stories turned up that one of these juveniles that benefited from the sanctuary policy now stands accused of a horrendous murder of a father and two sons.

Facing a possible gubernatorial run in 2010, SF Mayor Gavin Newsom beat a quick retreat on the policy after Van Derbeken's stories appeared. Newsom ordered the city's juvenile probation office to cooperate with federal authorities in deporting all such juveniles.

The resulting practice, now "covered" as news by Van Derbeken, is pure governing through crime. Agents of the executive (who appears as the champion of the people in their identity as potential crime victims), flouts the lawful orders of a court and the individual details of a vulnerable young person's life, handing over a 14 year old to ICE detention practices that have regularly resulted in deaths, and ultimately to being forced on an airplane and taken to a country in which he has no responsible family.

Fear of Crime

I'm reading Richard Perlstein's mammoth book, Nixonland, on how defeated Nixon in 1962 won a landslide second term to the Presidency a decade later and the political transformations of the American public that coincided with that rise (a review will have to wait time to complete the more than 700 page tome). A big component emphasized by Perlstein was the perception that violent crime in America's large cities was galloping out of control.

It is hard not to feel political chills picking up the morning paper in 2008 to read of the East Bay's continuing series of armed robberies of restaurants and the growing public and political response. In the SFChron staff writers Henry K. Lee,Tyche Hendricks summarize the recent developments to include the pistol whipping of employees at a nail salon in North Oakland and 5:15 in the afternoon, robberies at a seafood restaurant Sunday night, and a pizzeria Saturday, a protest in affluent Rockridge after the robbery last week of a pasta restaurant especially popular with families, and the fact that the City of Oakland has openly asked the retro vigilante organization, the Guardian Angels, to help patrol the city.

Holy Cow Batman, is it 1968?

August '68

The sounds of August 1968 were on the radio this morning during a segment of NPR's Morning Edition on the demonstrations at the Democratic convention in Chicago that summer, and next week's convention in Denver. The segment includes some snippets of original broadcast coverage as well as an interview with protest leader and later California State Senator, Tom Hayden.

The emphasis of the story was on the violence that week in Chicago and its impact on protest movements, but the scarier memories it brought back were about the police. First, consider the scale. According to Hayden, the much publicized call for protesters to come to Chicago netted something fewer then 1,000 visitors. At various points they were swelled to 10,000 by Chicago's large progressive community (my parents, then in their late thirties, and my older brother, then 16, among them). Mayor Daley in contrast had amassed a force of nearly 24,000 men, 12,000 police, 6,000 National Guard reserve soldiers, and astoundingly, 6,000 US Army troops.

What I remember, and what comes across in the snippets of broadcast tape in the NPR story, was the incredible sense of malice behind this unprecedented and probably unconstitutional force of state power. There was an anger toward the demonstrators, and toward the left-wing of the Democratic Party that anticipated the more lethal violence to come in America (Attica, Kent State, and Georgia State) and internationally (Argentina's dirty war).

Listening this morning, I found the voice of a network correspondent describing the police moving in on demonstrators outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel (where many delegates and much of the press was staying) nothing short of terrifying as it was to me as a 9 year old boy. Like something out of Night of the Living Dead, the correspondent describes the Chicago Police wading into the crowd of unarmed and hapless young people and bashing them repeatedly with their heavy wooden batons, "he won't be getting up again," the audibly shocked reporter says.

At the time the actions of Mayor Daley and LBJ were denounced by many, including Senator Abraham Ribicoff who analogized the police to the Gestapo on the floor of the convention. A national commission ultimately laid much of the blame on the police. But as the NPR focus on the demonstrators suggests, the stigma ended up largely on the protesters not the "forces of order".

Notes from Italy (2)

By Alessandro De Giorgi,
Professor of Justice Studies,
San Jose State University
Special Correspondent to GTC



Another significant step toward a reduction of rights and liberties has been taken in Italy last week. In fact, following the “security package” approved by the Berlusconi III government, among other unconstitutional measures to be used in the ongoing war against “illegal” immigrants and their supposed dangerousness, a new directive has been issued by the Ministry of Interior (08/05/2008), providing city mayors with increased discretionary powers in matters of public safety and urban safety.
In Italy, public order has always been a prerogative of the Polizia (the civilian police controlled by the Ministry of Interior), and the Carabinieri (the military police controlled by the Ministry of Defense).
However, locally each town has its own municipal police – traditionally an unarmed and “friendly” force, in charge of traffic regulation and other minor tasks – whose deployment and rules of engagement are decided by mayors and by local police chiefs, within the limits defined by the State’s law.

Berlusconi III’s “security package” has widely extended those limits, providing that mayors have the power and duty to deploy their (now armed) local police forces against:
a) Conditions of urban decay which are known to contribute to the emergence of street crimes, such as alcohol abuse, drug dealing and “aggressive” begging;
b) Situations in which the general quality of life has deteriorated as a consequence of vandalism (i.e., graffiti) or damage to public buildings and infrastructure;
c) Illegal occupation of abandoned buildings;
d) Unlawful street-selling activities;
e) Behaviors which offend public morality (such as street prostitution) or endanger safe access to (and use of) public spaces such as streets, parks, etc.
Mayors – both from the right and the left – have been quick to make immediate use of these increased powers, issuing citywide ordinances such as the following ones:
1) in Novara (Northern Italy) it is forbidden for groups of 3 or more people to be in public parks after 11pm;
2) in Venice, it is forbidden to carry bags containing goods for sale (a measure against unauthorized street-sellers – in 99% of cases, immigrants);
3) in Rome, it is forbidden to search for food or recyclable items in garbage cans;
4) in Florence, it is forbidden to wash windshields at street corners;
5) in several Northern Italian towns, call-centers – obviously used almost only by immigrants to call home – must now have two restrooms and a private parking lot in order to be legal (of course, none of this applies to restaurants, boutiques, or other “locally owned” activities).

A very “soft” critique of these measures – which target exclusively the immigrant population – has been expressed by the Democratic Party – the only parliamentary opposition left after the crisis of the left in Italy. Once again, the most surprising aspect is the degree of support these measures seem to receive from an emerging silent majority.

In the last two decades or so, many (post)-critical criminologists in Europe have been arguing – often under ambiguous labels such as “situational crime prevention”, “community policing”, “safe-cities”, etc. – for a shift from the national to the local level in matters of urban security and crime control: the idea was that more “democratic” and “grassroots” strategies of crime prevention and conflict resolution could emerge from the local level, where citizens would express their needs and concerns (i.e. fear of crime) directly to local administrators who would take those concerns seriously, but less constrained by the dangerous temptations of symbolic politics than national politicians.

However, the recent developments in Italy have shown once again that local crusades for urban security can be as exclusionary and discriminatory as the ones launched nationally, and that sometimes, contrary to some assumptions of self-proclaimed realist criminologists, public fears should be contested and deconstructed, rather than being “taken seriously”…

Dazed and Confused: Broke California faces an 8 Billion Dollar Prison Hang Over

I can understand the pain and shock that many Californian's felt this morning as they perused headlines in their local paper and took in the number 8 Billion, as in an 8 Billion dollar court order to pay that the state, currently in full budget crisis mode, may have to pay immediately (read Mathew Yi's reporting in the SFChron).

Its like reading the fine print on your credit card website as you try to comprehend a massive change in the interest rate being charged on your huge balance. Only times millions.

The state's revenues, flush during the long real estate boom, are now as dry as the creeks here at mid-summer. Even the most insulated public institutions, like the UC system, are taking a 10 percent "haircut" on their budgets.

For decades now prison spending has expanded regardless of where the state was in the economic cycle. The 88 prisoners in the state for every 100 thousand free people, when I moved here to attend college at Cal in 1977, had grown by more then six-fold when I moved back to teach at that college (for the best account of how the real estate surpluses fed the prison boom, see Ruth Gilmore's Golden Golden Gulag: Prisons Surplus, Crisis, Opposition, in Globalizing California). But during most of those years the pains of that growth were smoothed by budget surpluses in the good times and bonds in the bad, readily agreed upon by elected officials who mostly agreed that prison spending was good for Californians, sort of eating your vegetables, very very expensive vegetables.

But now a huge amount of money is being called due, not by smiling politicians who claim to have our back, but by a law professor who answers to a federal judge, who answers to the Constitution. Nobody's claiming this will make us safer (the usual spoon full of sugar) but instead, legal, even moral obligations that we haven't been told to worry about for a long time. Welcome Guantanamo, California style.

The money, which will pay for some eight new prison hospitals, and a dental facility, as well as massive remodeling of existing prison medical facilities, is a testament not only to the length and depth of this prison boom but to the total disregard for anything other then locking people up as cheaply and rapidly as possible. Governor George Deukmeijian, (1983-1991) used to quip that it was better for the state to have worry about how to house criminals, than for citizens to find criminals in their houses. That sounded like common sense, and it may be true (at least for the minority of prisoners who were burglars on the outside), but now that so many of our houses are in foreclosure, and the state's fiscal house is in full crisis, we must look at this commonsense with new eyes.

Start with what a loss this will be. The 8 billion which would have paid a substantial portion of the cost for bringing health insurance to all Californian's will pay for facilities that will only be used by prisoners and which will become mostly useless if we can ever succeed in shrinking the base of our massive prison population to something even remotely reasonable.

In the short term, that massive economic signal to medical professionals everywhere to come join the ranks of the prison health system, will raise the costs of health care for every single Californian and probably all but dry it up in the poorer corner of the state.