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Last night, progressive television pundit Rachel Maddow took advantage of the public's being uninformed on the issue of student debt to spread misinformation, aimed at scoring partisan points and defending Biden's indefensible vote-buying scheme by disguising it as compassionate policy. The post Maddow Spreads Misinformation on Student Loan Cancellation appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.
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Following the Senate's lead, the House approved the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Friday, thereby authorizing $886 billion in military spending for fiscal year (FY) 2024. By comparison, the FY2021 iteration of the bill — the last NDAA under Trump — authorized $740 billion. While Trump had managed to spike annual military spending by an incredible 20 percent in four years, Biden just accomplished the same feat in three. (Another $62 billion in Pentagon funding is included in Biden's foreign aid bill, which is still being debated in Congress.)This is undoubtedly good news for the arms industry. Over the last decade, 55 percent of U.S. military spending went to military contractors, and there's no reason to expect contractors' share of the $886 billion budget for FY2024 to be much (if any) different.The annual military budget is the lifeblood for the arms industry, their golden goose. This is especially the case for the largest military contractors. For example, Lockheed Martin — the largest federal contractor, military or otherwise — derived 72 percent of its revenue from government contracts last year.To ensure a continuation of Pentagon largesse, weapons companies reinvest a portion of their state-subsidized profits back into the political system. The arms industry bankrolls influential think tanks, retains more lobbyists than Congress has elected officials, and spends tens of millions of dollars on political campaign contributions every year.Campaign cash in particular is associated with "buying influence," a practice top recipients in Congress typically deny exists, insisting the corporate checks stuffed in their suit pocket have no impact on how they vote. The data suggest otherwise. I compared the recent House and Senate NDAA votes with the political donations each representative and senator received from the arms industry so far this election cycle. On average, House members who voted to authorize $886 billion in military spending took four times more money from military contractors than members who voted against the bill. Senators who supported the NDAA took five times more arms industry cash than the senators who opposed it.Military contractor cash certainly helps to smooth out partisan differences on the NDAA. However, the average disparity in takings between "yea" and "nay" votes was slightly more pronounced among Democrats. House Republicans who supported the $886 billion bill took five times more money from military contractors than Republicans who opposed the measure, and House Democrats who voted for it took seven times more than their Democratic colleagues. In the Senate, Republicans who voted for the NDAA took five times more than their caucus peers, and Democrats who supported it took six times more than other Democrats.Almost every elected official in Congress takes money from military contractors, but these firms don't take a spray-and-pray approach to political giving. Rather, they target the people with the most influence over the size and scope of Pentagon contracts. The House and Senate Armed Services Committees have the most control over what military policies make it into the NDAA and how much funding is authorized for each one. Little wonder, then, that seven of the top ten House recipients of arms industry money so far this election cycle sit on that committee. In the Senate, six out of the top ten recipients do.The top earner of military contractor cash so far in the 2024 Senate election cycle is Jack Reed (D-R.I.), who has raked in more than $590,000 in campaign and PAC contributions from military contractors. Senator Reed is chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Coming in second is Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker (R-Miss.). Senator Wicker has accepted more than $534,000 in political donations from the military industry this election cycle.Out of the 428 representatives who cast votes on the FY2024 NDAA, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), received the second most from military contractors (behind Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), chair of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee), hauling in over $355,000 so far this year. Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-Wash.) ranks fourth (just behind Rogers' vice chair, Rob Wittman (R-Va.), collecting more than $151,000 from the arms industry.The stark correlation between money and votes on the FY2024 NDAA isn't an anomaly. A similar relationship exists on every NDAA vote since Biden entered office, during which time the amount authorized by the annual bill has grown by $146 billion. Congress overwhelmingly approved yearly hikes in military spending despite there never being more than 1 in 5 Americans interested in doing so, according to Eurasia Group surveys from 2021, 2022, and 2023. More than twice as many people want the Pentagon budget to shrink than want it to expand. This disconnect between popular sentiments and elite behavior clarifies the role of arms industry donations. Military contractors aren't just asking politicians for votes, they're asking them to reject public opinion. Too many in Congress are happy to oblige.
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That certain things just do have to be done by government is true. For there are things that have to be done and also only government can do. We are not, after all, anarcho-capitalists around here. But a generally agreed idea around here is that government should be limited to only those things which must be done and also can only be done by government. One practical reason for this being that government's not very good at doing things.Breakdowns caused by potholes have risen by almost a third in two years, according to the AA, as Britain's worsening roads snag tyres and wreck cars' suspension.Jakob Pfaudler, the chief executive, said callouts linked to Britain's broken roads had risen by 30pc in the past two years.He welcomed Rishi Sunak's plan to spend £8bn mending holes in roads, saying it would be appreciated by his customers.Mr Pfaudler said: "We were pleased that there's investment in road infrastructure, particularly potholes, that's something our members are very concerned about."The Prime Minister recently set out plans to spend some of the billions that were earmarked for HS2 on fixing Britain's broken roads, after axing the Northern leg of the rail project.The above being just an example of why this is so. Government is terrible at maintenance. That just general and boring grind of making sure that the little bits are tidied up around the edges, that things we've already got get fixed and stay fixed at that micro level. For look at what is happening. Government currently spends around 45% of GDP. That's 45% of everything. They tax motorists multiples of what it costs to enable people to be motorists - fuel duty, the VAT on it and so on is vastly, hugely, greater than the roads budget. But look at what then happens.Firstly, as we know, the tax revenue from this activity is used to finance other lovely things for other lovely people. That's a part of politics, using other peoples' money to buy the votes of a third party. Secondly, and more importantly, that good, service or infrastructure just never is properly maintained. For maintenance just isn't one of the things that allows public posturing - that essential in vote buying. As no politician can cut a red ribbon over a pothole repair then pothole repairs don't get done.Until, obviously and as here, it's possible to dress up that myriad of £50 repairs as a national £8 billion plan. Politics, the political system, just never does deal with the fifty quid things. That's why it's such a bad way of actually running something.
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On the subject of HS2:In 2010, when a high-speed rail line from London to the north – HS2 – was proposed by the outgoing Labour government, I wrote an article arguing that the numbers didn't add up. The environmental benefits had been inflated by a series of blatant accounting tricks and concocted figures. What the government called the "business case" for the scheme was in fact a cost-benefit analysis, in which the supposed economic benefits had been amplified by outright assaults on common sense. The case for HS2 always was a baggage train of bullshit.After reading all available documents and finding no justifications for the assumptions the Department for Transport had made, I pressed it for an explanation. After a flurry of panicked phone calls, it eventually told me there was a model for justifying its analysis, but this was "frightfully complicated". It did not volunteer to send me a copy. The books, it seemed to me, were cooked – thoroughly and fatally.Well, one of us did read the cost benefit analysis and as we pointed out here, it didn't pass the most basic CBA tests. And let's be honest about it, if your economic argument is such that even George Monbiot can see through it then you've not got a strong case.But as ever with George he doesn't grasp how right he is. He identifies a larger problem from this:I think it is one instance of the endemic disease that plagues this country, a disease that withstands changes of government, democratic scrutiny and the Tories' austerity programmes. It's a disease whose name everyone knows in Brazil, where I used to work and learned my politics. But it is seldom diagnosed here, though it seems just as prevalent. Clientelism.Yep, we're fine with that. Not with it happening, but with the identification. The favours can be widely distributed: a government might buy the votes of a particular interest group with pre-election handouts. Or, in the case of elite clientelism, they can be targeted at a few key players.Yes, quite so. Which is, of course, the case for small government neoliberalism. Sure, we all agree that there are some things that must be done and that also only government can do. But we should - must - limit government only to those things which meet both tests. Because government - in any form of democracy, another valuable idea - is going to be run by politicians. Whose interest is always going to be gaining those who will vote for them.That's exactly the clientelism George is complaining about - state money, taxpayer's money, being spent upon buying votes. Could be unions with promises of higher pay, bureaucrats with more clipboards to carry, grifters wanting to build something without value for money checks, possibly even greenies who want renewables at thrice the costs of fossil fuels. But that's what the game is, deploying that 45% of the economy that the state commands in order to buy votes for those doing the deploying. Clientelism.This is not exactly new, panem et circenses as political advice is a couple of millennia old by now.The reason we mention this at length is that Monbiot has shown himself, at times, to be amenable to reason and evidence. We therefore still nurture that hope - extreme as it is - that we can get him over to that side of righteous small government liberalism before too long. As anyone motivated by reason and evidence does become. For just look at what government does when given free rein.
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The Senate approved the national security supplemental on Tuesday night, by a vote of 79-18. The legislation combined the four bills that were approved by the House over the weekend. After months of pushing the Biden administration to do more to pressure Israel to change its conduct in its war in Gaza, Democrats in Congress ultimately approved $26 billion in aid for Israel, including approximately $9 billion in global humanitarian aid (how much would go to Gaza, to be determined). In the Senate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tried to introduce two amendments — one that would remove all offensive military aid for Israel and another to restore U.S. funding for UNRWA. "What we are doing today is aiding and abetting the destruction of the Palestinian people," he said on the Senate floor Tuesday night.No Democrats, including some who have raised concerns about Israel's war, supported Sanders's effort, saying that they wanted the package to move forward without delay. In the lead-up to the votes, pushback was more prevalent in the House. Perhaps most notably, on April 5, 39 voting congressional Democrats circulated a letter that urged President Joe Biden to stop sending offensive arms to Israel until an investigation into the strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen staffers was completed. In addition, the members also urged Biden "to withhold these transfers if Israel fails to sufficiently mitigate harm to innocent civilians in Gaza, including aid workers, and if it fails to facilitate — or arbitrarily denies or restricts — the transport and delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza."On Saturday, 37 Democrats (along with 21 Republicans) voted against the Israel aid bill — a significant total given the history of bipartisan support for Israel in Congress. But the large majority of the caucus, 173 in total, voted to advance it (3 Democrats did not vote). Of those in support, 20 of the members had signed that letter to Biden earlier this month. Securing another tranche of aid for Ukraine has been a long-term policy priority for the party, and some Democrats may have been willing to swallow more aid for Israel as a price for accomplishing that goal. But the vote over the weekend gave Democrats an opportunity to follow through on their rhetoric and vote against sending Israel more military aid without compromising any other piece of legislation.But many Democrats nonetheless retreated from the line they had set earlier this month. Signs of a shift in rhetoric from some of these members came in the aftermath of Iran's strikes on Israel on April 13."Iran is a terrorist nation. They have just launched a disproportionate terrorist attack against our ally Israel. The free world and the United States will stand against this terrorist nation and the tyranny that it promotes," said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) on X on the night of the attacks. "We must pass Biden's supplemental appropriation funding now that covers Israel, Ukraine, and Gaza among others." This followed her signing of the April 5 letter urging Biden to hold aid.Others stayed noticeably quiet following the exchange of attacks between Iran and Israel, but their calculus on aiding Israel clearly changed between April 5 and last weekend. "I will always support our allies against enemy attacks — especially with potential nuclear threats. Iran's attacks against Israel necessitated that we approve the emergency aid package without delay," Rep. Alma Adams (D-N.C) told RS on Tuesday. "I additionally chose to do so because it provides for over $9 billion in humanitarian aid. I trust that President Biden will ensure this aid is dispensed to those most severely impacted by this conflict."Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-Conn.), told RS that the Iran attacks changed her calculus as well. "Earlier this month, I signed a letter asking President Biden to withhold offensive weapons until there was an investigation into the airstrike that resulted in the death of seven World Central Kitchen humanitarian aid workers. I still maintain that any funding the United States provides to our allies must be used in accordance with international law," she said. "The situation changed when Iran launched an attack against Israel and further escalated tensions in the region," she added. "Providing aid to our allies around the world, including Israel, is of vital importance to our national security. This does not negate the need for assurances of how aid will be used. The national security supplemental I voted for last week ensures Israel has the resources to combat Hamas and provides crucial humanitarian aid to vulnerable people around the world, including the civilians in Gaza. We can and must continue to do both."Six of the 20 signatories who eventually supported the bill have not issued public statements about their votes, including Reps. Jackson Lee, Adams, and Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Tony Cardenas (D-Calif.), and Robert Garcia (D-Calif.)Four others, including Pelosi, as well as Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas), and Hayes (D-Conn.) released statements celebrating the passage of the series of national security bills without explicitly explaining or justifying their positions on Israel aid. Pelosi's office published a transcript of her floor speech on Ukraine aid but did not mention Israel."Speaker Pelosi has a long record of strong support for Israel and its right to defend itself. Speaker Pelosi signed the April 5 letter to call for a pause on offensive weapons transfers until there was an independent investigation into the attack on the World Central Kitchen heroes, steps the administration has taken and is taking," a spokesman for Pelosi told RS, explaining her vote. "Speaker Pelosi's position is fully consistent with her vote in favor of the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act." Three other Democrats — Reps. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.), and Kevin Mullin (D-Calif.) issued short statements emphasizing the $9 billion in humanitarian aid, some of which will go to Gaza — but not mentioning or explaining their support for the military assistance to Israel. Besides Adams, Hayes, and Pelosi, none of the other members who did not clearly state their rationale for the vote responded to requests for comment. Avoiding an explanation of controversial votes is nothing new for Democrats."The GOP mentioned the country in the title of its press release and sixteen times in its summary of the bill. But the House and Senate Democrats' press releases don't mention Israel at all," Stephen Semler noted in Jacobin when Congress passed a $1.2 trillion funding bill that included almost $4 billion in military assistance for Israel and cut off all funding for UNRWA, the most important supplier of humanitarian aid in Gaza. "Clearly, Democratic elected officials were afraid to cop to the contents of the bill." The other six members who voted for the aid package explained their decisions more clearly to the public. Reps. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) explicitly criticized the inclusion of funds that Israel could use for offensive weapons, but said that the defensive aid for Israel and the humanitarian aid present in the bill were necessary."While I have deep concerns about the bill that includes additional security assistance to Israel, the funding in this bill is urgently needed to address the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza," said Schakowsky. "I am concerned by the inclusion of $3.5 billion in funding for Israel that could be used to obtain offensive weapons. While this funding will not be disbursed to Israel for several years, I reiterate my calls for the U.S. to halt all offensive weapons transfers to Israel until and unless it can be confirmed that U.S. weapons are being used in accordance with domestic and international law and that the Israeli government is not impeding the entry of U.S. humanitarian aid into Gaza.""While I'm deeply concerned about further military assistance to Israel, I couldn't in good conscience vote against this lifesaving humanitarian assistance when millions of people around the world are suffering," added Jacobs. Reps. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.), Veronica Escobar (D-N.Y.), Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), and Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.) all supported the measure but urged Biden to keep pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu to follow international law and protect civilians during the war. Stansbury paired her statement on the supplemental's package with a letter she wrote to Biden saying that she understands "that the funding provided in the supplemental is defensive in nature and will not be used to support offensive weapons in Gaza." The legislation earmarks approximately $3.5 billion for buying "advanced weapons systems."Escobar said that her "support for the Israel package comes with [her] continued calls on the administration to use its leverage with Israel to allow more life-saving humanitarian aid to enter Gaza.""I continue to have concerns with Prime Minister Netanyahu's lack of a strategy to protect innocent civilians and bring this war to a swift end. I will continue to press for increased accountability and call for the immediate return of all hostages," added Barragán. "Today, it was necessary to prioritize our national security, deliver critical humanitarian aid to where it is needed most, and ensure America continues to stand with our democratic allies around the world."Democrats who opposed the measure on Saturday made the case that taking the rare opportunity to register clear, widespread opposition to weapons packages like this one is how opponents of funding Israel's war can provide Biden with the necessary leverage to push Netanyahu. "I hope this vote will show the world that there is a really significant segment of the United States that doesn't want to see expanded and widening wars," Rep. Greg Casar told the New York Times before the vote. Following the vote, a group of 19 Democrats who voted against the aid issued a statement stating, in part: "Today is, in many ways, Congress' first official vote where we can weigh in on the direction of this war. If Congress votes to continue to supply offensive military aid, we make ourselves complicit in this tragedy." Editor's note: This story previously said that Rep. Nanette Barragán had not issued a public statement. It has been corrected to include Rep. Barragán's statement.
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The next moves have been played in the Bossier City term limits drama, but don't change the dynamics that put reformers in the driver's seat.
Last week, Republican Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry's office replied to a City Council resolution of Aug. 15 seeking a legal opinion of the status of a petition certified Jul. 10 by the parish registrar of voters. The city, relying both on its city attorney Charles Jacobs and an outside opinion written by a lawyer who had worked with the city previously but who has no particular expertise in this area of law, questioned whether the petition followed state law and the charter.
The AG's office declined to assess that, stating that it represents registrars of voters and therefore could not involve itself. Whereupon GOP Mayor Tommy Chandler placed back on the Council's Aug. 29 agenda an item passed over two weeks earlier: calling an election to have the electorate consider the petition's lifetime three-term limit, past and future, on elected officials.
But that also will share space with a resolution proposed by no party Councilor Jeff Darby – who along with Republicans David Montgomery, Jeff Free, Vince Maggio, and Democrat Bubba Williams previously had voted down an attempt by Chandler to put tardily on the Aug. 1 agenda the other method to amend the charter by petition, by a Council vote within 30 days of petition certification – to call for a charter review commission. That would launch a months-long process that could add some form of term limits to the charter after voter approval, along with any other items the commission backs.
This signals, at the very least, the Council majority resisting term limits feels sufficiently threatened by the petition to feel it operates from a position of weakness. If the petition language successfully passed voter muster, four of those five would be out of a job come 2025. Proposing this alternative attempts to negotiate a settlement short of this outcome.
The likely deal behind closed doors is for petition backers, both on the Council and within the public, to abandon the effort to put the petition on the ballot in exchange for the commission recommending limits – even though limits backers Chandler and Republican Councilors Chris Smith and Brian Hammons could appoint only four of the nine commission members, short of the needed majority to make recommendations. Thus, the Council majority would pledge to appoint members in support of limits, but only if these apply starting with the 2025 term, or perhaps with the commission unlikely to have everything ready prior to 2025 elections the item could be a retroactive lifetime limit, but starting with the 2029 term, buying time for the graybeards, who by then all will have hit ages to draw Social Security full retirement benefits, to stay one more term if they win reelection.
That being the case, Smith, Hammons, and citizen backers should approve of Darby's measure – and also Chandler's, because they hold all the cards. The charter's language on the matter is unyielding:
Where the petition contains a request that the ordinance be submitted to a vote of the people, if not passed without veto by the City Council, the City Council shall either pass without veto the ordinance without alteration within thirty (30) days after attachment of the certificate of the registrar of voters to the petition; or forthwith after the registrar of voters has attached his/her certificate to the petition, the City Council shall call an election to be held within ninety (90) days thereafter.
A certified petition was received Jul. 10 and stands before the Council. Since it didn't pass into amendment an ordinance prior to Aug. 9, the Council now must resolve by Nov. 7 to have a referendum on the petition language – setting up a Mar. 23, 2024 election during presidential preference primaries, or if passed by the Sep. 19 regular Council meeting it could make the Nov. 18 statewide general election runoff ballot – to comply with the charter. The charter doesn't make exceptions for petitions believed to have legal infirmities; it addresses only certified petitions. Failure to pass that resolution by Nov. 7 violates the Charter and opens the city to litigation. It has no option not to do this unless it deliberately chooses to violate the law.
Jacobs, perhaps delivering a message on behalf of the Council majority, repeatedly has said litigation will ensure if the election is approved, along the lines of years down the road a disqualified councilor under the petition language will sue to get on the ballot. Well, guess what? That litigation will come sooner if the Council doesn't put that language on the ballot.
And if Jacobs, et. al. worry about potential future legal challenges to a petition that voters put into the Charter, the commission could take care of that by addressing term limits. Of course, what term limits backers should do is load up recommendations popular with voters – ordinarily term limits themselves in any form undoubtedly will pass any citizen vote – but anathema to the Council graybeards, such as ethics reform that curtails the chance to make a fortune off of taxpayers as has Montgomery – and dare the Council majority commission representatives, who will have a 5-4 majority, to vote these down to leave only watered down term limits that would amend stronger limits voted in previously, and if that happens then lobby the electorate to deep six the commission's recommendations at the polls. Better, they could get a tradeoff of weaker term limits (at least for a few years) in exchange for a whole bunch of structural reforms making Bossier City government far more prudent, less insider, and more transparent and accountable to the people.
Even if the Council majority wants to play hardball and votes down the resolution calling the election, this doesn't forestall litigation and the very act puts them on the record not only opposing term limits but also acting illegally. Neither would look good for attempted reelection bids, if eligible, in 2025.
The combination of Smith and Hammons must bring up and second the agenda item calling the election – which temporally follows the Darby commission item on the agenda – and put the Council majority on the record, if not on the hook. They and other term limits backers shouldn't let blandishments by a power-hungry, untrustworthy Council majority tempt them to throw away a winning hand that could pay off far beyond the issue at hand.
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Anyone who has ever taken or taught a philosophy class is familiar with the claim "[Blank] is subjective" in which the [Blank] in question could be anything from literary interpretations to ethical norms. This response effectively ends any and all cultural and philosophical discussion, which is why it is so aggravating. One response is to argue against this claim, to point out that not every interpretation of a poem, novel, or film, is authorized, that there are better or worse interpretations, with respect to cultural version. With respect to the ethical or political arguments it is tempting to point out that the very existence of ethics, of society, presupposes norms that are shared as well as debated and challenged.What if we took a different perspective? Instead of arguing against this view, ask the question of its conditions. To offer a criticism in the Marxist sense. By Marxist sense I mean specifically the criticism that Marx offers of idealism, of philosophy, in The German Ideology. In that text Marx gives the conditions of how it is that the world appears so upside down that ideas and their criticism rather than material conditions drive and determine history. So we could ask a similar question, how has subjectivity, subjective opinion and perspective, has come to appear as so prevalent and powerful. How did we come to live under the reign of subjectivity?In a move that will surprise no one who has read this blog that I find a useful starting point for answering this question Frank Fischbach's book Marx with Spinoza. In that text Fischbach argues that rather than seen alienation as an alienation from subjectivity, a reduction of a subject to an object, it is subjectivity itself that is an alienation, an alienation from objectivity, a privation of the world. As Fischbach argues:"The reduction of human beings, by this abstraction, from natural and living beings to the state of 'subjects' as owners of a socially average labour power indicates at the same time the completion of their reduction to a radical state of impotence: for the individual to be conceived and to conceive of itself as a subject it is necessary that it see itself withdrawn and subtracted from the objective conditions of its natural activity; in other words, it is necessary that 'the real conditions of living labour' (the material worked on, the instruments of labour and the means of subsistence which 'fan the flames of the power of living labour') become 'autonomous and alien existences'"And also: "This is why we interpret Marx's concept of alienation not as a new version of a loss of the subject in the object, but as a radically new thought, of the loss of the essential and vital objects for an existence that is itself essentially objective and vital....Alienation is not therefore the loss of the subject in the object it is the loss of object for a being that is itself objective. But the loss of proper objects and the objectivity of its proper being is also the loss of all possible inscription of one's activity in objectivity, it is the loss of all possible mastery of objectivity, as well as other effects: in brief, the becoming subject is essentially a reduction to impotence. The becoming subject or the subjectivation of humanity is thus inseparable according to Marx from what is absolutely indispensable for capitalism, the existence of a mass of "naked workers"—that is to say pure subjects possessors of a perfectly abstract capacity to work—individual agents of a purely subjective power of labor and constrained to sell its use to another to the same extent that they are totally dispossessed of the entirety of objective conditions (means and tools of production, matter to work on) to put to effective work their capacity to work."At the basis of subjectivity, of subjectivity understood as an abstract and indifferent capacity, there is the indifferent capacity of labor power. Behind the figure of the subject there is the worker. I have already argued elsewhere on this blog that this reading of the Marx/Spinoza connection could be understood as one which reflects and critically addressed our contemporary situation in which subjecitivity, a subjectivity understood as potential and capacity, is seen as the condition of our freedom rather than our subjection. What Fischbach suggests through a reading of Marx and Spinoza that such capacity, capacity abstracted and separated from the material conditions of its emergence and activity, can only really be impotence. Just as a worker cut off from the conditions of labor is actually poverty, a subject cut off from the conditions of its actualization is impotence. What now I find provocative about this analysis is that if we think of it as a general schema in which an objective relation, a relation to objects but also others, is transformed into a subjective potential or capacity it is possible to argue that the constitution of subjectivity through labor power is only one such transformation, and that the current production of subjectivity is itself the product of several successive revolutions in which subjective potentials displace objective relations. One could also talk about the creation of subjectivity as buying power, as a pure capacity to purchase. I know that criticisms of consumer society from the fifties and sixties today seem moralistic and often passé. I am thinking here of Baudrillard, Debord, Lefebvre, and of course Horkheimer and Adorno. It is worth remembering, however, that some of the early critics were less interested in moralizing criticisms of materialism as they were in this kind of constitution of subjectivity. As Jean Baudrillard wrote in The Consumer Society, 'It is difficult to grasp the extent to which the current training in systematic, organized consumption is the equivalent and extension, in the twentieth century, of the great nineteenth-century long process of the training of rural populations for industrial work.'One person who continued such an an analysis is Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler even uses the same word, "proletarianization" to describe both the loss of skills and knowledge by the worker and the loss of skills and knowledge by the consumer. As I wrote in The Politics of Transindividuality:"At first glance, the use of the term proletarianisation to describe the transindividuation of the consumer would seem to be an analogy with the transformation of the labour process: if proletarianisation is the loss of skills, talents, and knowledge until the worker becomes simply interchangeable labour power, then the broader proletarianisation of daily life is the loss of skills, knowledge, and memory until the individual becomes simply purchasing power. Stiegler's use of proletarianisation is thus simultaneously broader and more restricted than Marx, broader in that it is extended beyond production to encompass relations of consumption and thus all of life, but more restricted in that it is primarily considered with respect to the question of knowledge. The transfer of knowledge from the worker to the machine is the primary case of proletarianisation for Stiegler, becoming the basis for understanding the transfer of knowledge of cooking to microwaveable meals and the knowledge of play from the child to the videogame. Stiegler does not include other dimensions of Marx's account of proletarianisation, specifically the loss of place, of stability, with its corollary affective dimension of insecurity and precariousness. On this point, it would be difficult to draw a strict parallel between worker and consumer, as the instability of the former is often compensated for by the desires and satisfactions of the latter. Consumption often functions as a compensation for the loss of security, stability, and satisfaction of work, which is not to say that it is not without its own insecurities especially as they are cultivated by advertising."For the most part Stiegler considers this deskilling to take place in the automation of the knowledge and skill that makes up daily life. Everything from cooking to knowing how to navigate one's own city is now more or less hardwired into precooked meals and the ubiquitous smartphone. Other cultural critics have pointed to the general deskilling of daily life through the decline of repair, tinkering, and mending. The effect of all this is to change the consumer from someone who buys things based on knowledge and familiarity to a pure expression of buying power, an abstract potential. Just as the worker is separated from the means of production, from the objective conditions of their labor to be the subjective capacity to work, the consumer is separated from the knowledge to consume to become a personification of buying power. As with work the conditions to realize this buying power are outside the control of the consumer. We do not decide what to buy based on our knowledge of our needs and desires but on what is advertised to us as a need or desire.As much as the worker and consumer are opposed, making up two sides of economic relations under capitalism, they are unified, connected in the tendency to transform work to abstract labor power and consumption into abstract buying power. While abstract subjectivity is how these two sides of the capitalist economic relation function it is not how they are lived. They are lived as profoundly individual, subjective in the conventional sense of the word. What one does for a living is in some sense considered to be one's identity: "What do you do?" is in some sense equivalent to "Who are You?" Being reduced to abstract labor power, to capacity for work, is lived as a concrete and highly individualized condition, as my particular job and career. If for any one of the myriad reasons what one does is inadequate to constitute an identity, remains just a day job, then consumption or the commodity form steps in to supply the necessary coordinates for an identity. From this perspective we can chart not only the historical progression of the two identities, but also the structural similarities. With respect to the first, consumer society, consumption, and the myriad possibilities to construct an identity through consumption, comes after the worker, after the formation of capitalism. Any attempt to read Marx's Capital for consumer society, for the common sense understanding of commodity fetishism as the overvaluing of commodities, is going to have a hard time navigating the dull world of linen, coats, corn and coal. The consumer comes after the worker. However, it is also possible to see a similarity of a structural condition. In both case subjectivity is abstracted from, or separated from, objectivity, from not just objects, but objective spirit, in Hegel's sense, institutions, norms, and structures. This abstraction is lived as a highly individualized identity, in some sense work and consumption form the basis of individuality as such. However, it only has effects, only functions in the aggregate. As a worker one only has effects, both in terms of the creation of value, and in terms of any disruption of exploitation, as part of a collective. The same could be said for consumerism, even though it is through consumerism that we are encouraged to believe that we can have ethical effects as individuals, green consumerism, cruelty free products, etc. Consumers only matter as a mass, at an economy of scale, even in the age of niche marketing. This can be seen in the impotent attempts to bring back cancelled products, or to change corporate strategies through boycotts. The only demands that make sense to corporations are those that are already effective in terms of buying power. I am wondering if one can see a similar structure of abstract/individual subjectivity in other aspects of society. I am thinking of politics, in which individuals are abstracted from any real connection to their communities and societies only to be constituted as "voting power," an abstract aggregate that is lived as a highly individualized identity. I will have to think more about that one. My point here is to connect the often asserted claim "that everything is subjective" back to its material conditions, to the production of subjectivity in both work and the reproduction of everyday life, production and consumption. It is not just a matter of a bad reading of Nietzsche that is behind such claims, although it is often that as well, but an effect in the sphere of ideas and discussion of what is already at work in the sphere of production. Abstract subjectivity is a material condition before it is an intellectual interpretation. The thread running through both is connection between power and impotence. If everything is subjective then I can offer any interpretation, create my own moral code whole cloth, live as I prefer, but if everything is subjective then I can do very little, nothing at all to alter or change anything. This is the fundamental point of intersection between Marx and Spinoza, subjectivity, individual subjectivity, is not the zenith of our freedom and power, it is the nadir of our subjection. Updated 4/15/24I happened to be rereading Tiqqun's Introduction to Civil War which offers the following on this last point, on the political subject as a subject constituted in alienation. As they write:"In order to become a political subject in the modern State, each body must submit to the machinery that will make it such; it must begin by casting aside its passions (now inappropriate), its tastes (now laughable), its penchants (now contingent), endowing itself instead with interests, which are much more presentable and, even better, representable. In this way, in order to become a political subject each body must first carry out its own autocastration as an economic subject. Ideally, the political subject will be reduced to nothing more than a pure vote, a pure voice."Tiqqun offers an expression of this idea, and in doing so captures what I was starting to think about before. However, they also offer me some reservations, especially in their tendency towards deriving an ontological or existential situation from a social condition. As with work and consumption, the pure subjectivity, the pure labor, buying, or voting power, is presented as the zenith of a kind of power, a capacity, maximize your labor power, express your preferences with consumer choices, and, most absurdly, vote harder, but this power is entirely determined by the existing labor conditions, market relations, and political structures.
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As the fig leaves fall away and the threats escalate, the battle about term limits on Bossier City elected officials has mutated from a veneer of concern over legal obligations to a process driven by reelection concerns on both sides, although opponents have captured a monopoly on hypocritical self-interest that continues to erode their political fortunes while giving Mayor Tommy Chandler a tremendous opportunity to boost his own.
This week a Council majority of graybeards – councilors Republicans David Montgomery and Jeff Free, Democrat Bubba Williams, and no party Jeff Darby who all will have served at least 12 years by 2025 – plus their pet rookie Republican Vince Maggio, in concert with their consigliere City Attorney Charles Jacobs hope to go all Cosa Nostra in their endeavor to defeat the effort to give voters a say on a three-term lifetime and retroactive limit in office. They combat a petition certified by Bossier Parish Registrar of Voters Stephanie Agee that the city charter forces the Council to approve placing such an item on the ballot by Nov. 7.
But this majority bloc resists, because such a vote of taken within the next 14 months almost certainly will pass the measure and end the political careers of the graybeards. And the excuse they try to use is the petition didn't directly have the birth years of signers listed as stated specifically in the relevant state statute, although it did list the voter identification numbers unique to signing individuals that includes the birth year of them, providing an indirect listing that complies with the spirit of the law if not its exact wording.
Until recently, the bloc went to great pains to frame their opposition in terms of legal niceties, principally that every letter needed correct crossing and dotting or else sometime in the indeterminate future some otherwise ineligible candidate (read: any of the graybeards) would sue to get on the ballot, citing defectiveness of the petition process. However, this fig leaf cannot overcome the fact that the charter says they must put the contents of a certified petition on the ballot by a certain date or they are in violation of the charter, and they have just such a petition at hand.
Further, Chandler won't leave them alone, pricking at them to do their duty to their public embarrassment. At the Council's last meeting, he introduced a resolution to fulfill the charter's imperative, which the bloc voted down but was supported by Republicans Chris Smith and Brian Hammons. So, he reintroduced it for the very next one, and he may keep doing it every single meeting as long as the Council doesn't comply. Every time he does this, he reminds voters he will fight for term limits and gives a chance for Hammons and Smith to do the same. And every time he does this, he reminds voters that not only do Darby, Free, Maggio, Montgomery, and Williams oppose term limits, but also that they repudiate their own oaths of office requiring them to uphold the charter.
Thus, to contain the damage Chandler keeps inflicting the bloc must dispense with the chimera of neutrality it has tried to sell and instead attack the petition itself. Adding a layer of hypocrisy to its quest, at the upcoming meeting it wants to pass a resolution – which failed to make the agenda as a late addition last meeting – to ask Agee to "decertify" the petition. The resolution's language doesn't hide that, despite no legal judgment to verify this, it declares its request valid "due to the petition failing to meet all the requirements of Louisiana Revised Statute 18:3."
Note that until now Jacobs and the bloc have claimed they oppose a move to put the petition language onto the ballot out of strict adherence to the law, but now they expose themselves as taking a side by asking Agee to do something for which registrars don't have the legal authority which appears nowhere in statute. It is an extralegal process invented out of thin air that does anything but adhere to the law, but which fulfills a purely political purpose.
However, this is only the veiled threat, akin to a mobster visiting Agee and telling her something like she has a nice registrar's office and it would be a shame if something happened to it, which she could avoid by following the bloc's wishes (assuming it passes that resolution, which given the numbers assuredly will happen). Because another resolution on the agenda carries the threat through by empowering Jacobs to litigate against the petition, which involves suing the registrar.
Of course, the resolution in many respects is both empty and meaningless. Under the charter, the city attorney doesn't have to have such a resolution in hand to pursue litigation, but rather it is a political gesture that carries both risk and reward. It attempts to avoid further damage to Jacobs, who has come under ethical fire for his manipulation of Council affairs at odds with the Charter and his publicly spreading false information in the course of his duties, by giving him the appearance of an imprimatur to procced, but it also puts the bloc again on record against term limits utilizing an unambiguous attempt to sabotage the democratic process.
And it would appear objectively as a futile gesture. How does the city have any standing to do this; who is harmed by having a certified petition? And because the law is silent about reversing petition certification, there's no valid mandamus claim that government fails to do its duty. The legal gymnastics involved even to present a plausible challenge will prove challenging.
Finally, and again involving a display of hypocrisy, last meeting the bloc muscled through a call for a charter review commission that would assess, among other things, term limits. Thus, why doesn't the majority let the vote take place, and during the campaign as a reason to vote down the measures (councilor and mayor terms) cite its allegation of invalidity and that the commission will come up with its own version of limits to correct that? And regardless of whether these pass, it can present its own version if different through the commission for voter approval (which it can guarantee through its selection of commissioners)? Why does it insist on bending and twisting the law instead?
Of course, the end goal in any legal machinations is not to defeat the petition's validity, which ultimately seems unlikely under the spirit of the law, but to delay having to put its language on the ballot until either it becomes subject to a low-stimulus special election that provides its lowest chances of success – which means a delay of at least six months but no more than nine because national elections will drive the election calendar next year and provoke high turnout – or it gets pushed past city elections in 2025. With Jacobs' past as a 26th Judicial District judge, he can hope his comradeship with that bench will pay off with a former colleague producing the ruling he wants that accomplishes the amount of delay desired.
Perhaps the bloc will succeed through all of this in buying its members the chance to win another term. Yet if this victory comes, it may be pyrrhic, for the resulting bad publicity and easy explanation to voters – X number of times voting against term limits, Y number of times voting to violate the city charter, all the while looking out for their own self-interests at the expense of the people's using taxpayer dollars – could cause the bloc members to lose the war of reelection. Aided by Chandler, who every time he twists the knife in by contrast further solidifies his chances of reelection.
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Many countries with scheduled elections this year face a difficult choice in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic: how to balance public health considerations with holding a free and fair election. Learn more from NDI Senior Associate and Director of Electoral Programs Pat Merloe and Program Director Julia Brothers as they talk about democratic back-sliding during this crisis, electoral integrity, and ways civil society organizations can still make a difference. Find us on: SoundCloud | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | Google Play Pat Merlow: In the public health crisis, especially where governments are weak or people are suspicious of governments, trusted voices are really important to get out accurate information. Julia Brothers: Hello, this is Julia Brothers. I'm the Program Director for Elections at the National Democratic Institute. Welcome to Dem Works. JB: Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic is sewing insecurity among the public, which can be exploited by authoritarians to consolidate power in sideline democratic institutions. It also poses severe technical, political, and social threats to elections themselves. In many countries, the effects of the virus may strain citizen relationships with government and elected [inaudible] officials, intensify political tensions and the potentials for violence, disenfranchise voters and increase conditions for democratic backsliding. Today I'm joined by Pat Merlow, senior associate and director of electoral programs at NDI. Welcome to the podcast, Pat. Thank you for being here. Pat Merlow: Hi, Julia. JB: So the COVID-19 crisis is causing enormous challenges for every country, including those with scheduled elections this year. What are the biggest concerns deciding whether to hold or postpone elections? PM: Elections must be held in ways that safeguard public health and in ways that ensure genuine opportunities for the electorate to vote. Universal and equal suffrage, which is in every modern constitution, means inclusion, not exclusion. So we have to also hold elections in ways where the political parties and the candidates have a fair chance to compete for votes without a playing field that's being manipulated or intentionally or unintentionally tilted in one party's favor. So striking a proper democratic balance of public safety and credible election processes is different and really difficult in every country. Depends a lot on the level of economic and technological development in the country on the nature of social cohesion versus divisions in the country and political polarization. So in many countries where NDI works, the concern is whether authoritarians will rush through elections with undue public health risks in order to gain an electoral advantage or to postpone elections under conditions that advantage their attempts to gain and maintain more power. A second troubling circumstance in countries that are unstable or prone to various kinds of violence, where constrains of the public health crisis can be used by malign actors to flood the population with this information... I mean we're hearing this term infodemic; also hate speech and other means to scapegoat religious or ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people or women in order to gain political advantage. That's not all the countries where NDI works, but even those are neither authoritarian nor fragile states, the COVID-19 crisis is still posing gigantic challenges both on the public health and to electoral integrity. JB: Right. I mean these factors present themselves as challenges to electoral integrity, not just where there might be bad faith actors that are trying to utilize this crisis to consolidate power, but also just in addressing basic issues related to how to make sure that you're maximizing participation during a public health crisis. What are some of the factors that these countries would need to think about in terms of actually implementing elections either during a public health crisis or immediately after. PM: There really are a number of factors that have to be considered. So the first thing that comes to everybody's mind of course is what do you do? Can people actually go to polling places or should they be under some sort of the shelter in place lockdown-like circumstances. That doesn't just affect whether to vote. That really has to do with whether you can register to vote safely or not. In countries where there are not a high level of electronic engagement where the digital divide falls really widely across broad swipes of the population, gathering those people into places to register to vote or to vote is really the only means of doing it. So the question of a postponement becomes really an operative question. Then we're concerned with what are the conditions for the postponement and how does that interrelate with the declarations of states of emergency, whether they're being done properly with the kinds of constraints on limitations on powers or whether they're being done in ways that usurp power. JB: Yeah. I think one of the major concerns, especially thinking about citizens being able to participate in the process, is that during a pandemic, if voters are concerned about going out to vote, chances are that that's not going to be an equal distribution among the population, where there are a vulnerable populations that will be more impacted. You'll see disproportionate levels of low turnout among certain communities like senior citizens or persons with disabilities or women who disproportionately have the burden of childcare and are in a situation where you don't have options for even temporary childcare because of social distancing regulations. Well, this seems like a good place to take a short break. For more than 35 years, NDI has been honored to work with courageous and committed pro-democracy activists and leaders around the world to help countries develop the institution's practices and skills necessary for democracy success. Welcome back. JB: So we talked a bit about the postponements that we're seeing around the world in terms of electoral timelines. Are election observers relevant during electoral delays, especially if there's restrictions on movement in the population if they're under some form of shelter in place or lockdown. PM: Yeah. So Julie, you mentioned that NDI works in more than 70 countries and in fact, working with nonpartisan citizen groups and coalitions and various organizations is one of the hallmarks of NDI's work over more than 35 years now and certainly the 25 years where I've been involved. There's a network of citizen election observers, there are nine of them in various regions of the world and they're amalgamated in more than 250 organizations from 90 countries. Those organizations have been sharing best practices and ideas about what can be done. So let me just quickly mention a couple of them. There are four areas where they have been able to focus. One are ways to assist; that is, to assist public health agencies and the electoral authorities to bring about safe elections and fair elections. The second is ways to address authoritarian opportunism and how states of emergency and various conditions are being used by those who would usurp the citizens of power. The third are ways to address disinformation, hate speech and attempts at hyperpolarization that influence and create unfair conditions for elections. The fourth way is to address, as you mentioned earlier, examples of where a health crisis can lead to disenfranchisement or further tilt the playing field so that it's an unfair circumstance. JB: Yeah, I mean you mentioned especially tracking the authoritarian leaders who are potentially taking advantage of the health crisis to grab power and subvert democracy and in some unstable countries, this can threaten heightened instability. What can election servers be doing to address that or what are they currently doing to address that? PM: The most important thing is citizen election observers in all kinds of countries have been time tested and over the series of elections cycles two, three, even four in many countries, they've built national networks and they've established themselves as trusted voices. In a public health crisis, especially where governments are weak or people are suspicious of government, trusted voices are really important to get out accurate information from the health authorities, accurate information from the electoral authorities about what to do, where to do things and so on. Also, they have networks that can collect information; even during lockdowns. You and I were in a conversation with one of the partner organizations with whom we work in Sri Lanka just last week. The head of that organization is working on a civil society task force. That task force is considering how to gain access to women's shelters, to older people's homes, to places where there's foster children's care, drug treatment centers, and so on because these are vulnerable populations that are being hit hard by the crisis. One of the things that he pointed out in our conversation is that the government is taking advantage of the postponement of the election for electoral advantage by handing out dry goods to citizens and even medical supplies through the political party rather than as an impartial governmental service to the people. So the question that he posed was, even during lockdown, is there a way that our network of over 1,000 people could begin to document this and report it so that we can lift up to the public the nature of this problem that's coming about and see if we can't get some accountability and get them to cut back. So even during a lockdown, it's possible for the citizen observer groups to do things that are extraordinarily relevant. JB: Yeah, I mean it seems like there are certainly opportunities for electoral observers to be monitoring the kinds of things that they would normally be looking at in a pre-election period when their elections are delayed... Issues related to is the government still helping to create conditions for a credible and competitive process in the midst of a public health emergency. Are conditions being put in place to ensure that marginalized populations are not sidelined from the process. But it also kind of expands it a little bit too in that there are these potentially other issues that that groups may consider looking at. Like you mentioned, how health resources are being distributed and what kinds of policy changes are being made and how were those being made? What's the decision-making process around things like delaying the elections, around emergency voting procedures? Are they inclusive? Are all the parties being brought in to them? Is civil society be brought into these discussions and taking a look at some of these new conditions that observers may otherwise not necessarily be monitoring in a pre-election period. I think the other issue here is there are constraints here in terms of potentially being able to deploy a bunch observers out into the field to collect information if you're in a lockdown situation. So it's been interesting talking with groups to see how they're thinking creatively about how they can collect some of this information remotely. What kind of data exists that you can collect whether it's open data sources from the government looking at budgets, looking at how budgets are changing and how resources are moving. You mentioned looking at disinformation, being able to monitor social media and seeing what data could be collected from that. It's been interesting to see how citizen election observers around the world are getting creative and still doing their jobs while being sometimes trapped at home. PM: Absolutely. You mentioned the disinformation... One of the things that we've been seeing is that in Russia for example, they have been making use of the COVID crisis to begin to track people even more carefully to introduce facial recognition technologies and cameras. The term that's been throwing around is cybergulags being created there. With China's facial recognition technologies and the way that's been used to suppress the weaker minorities, China has been introducing that working with governments and other places in the world to try to get that into voter registration so that you have biometric voter registration data that includes facial recognition technology. So in this era, getting access to government decision making, getting access even to the health data and disaggregated by gender, by vulnerable groups and so on is part of the work that election observers normally do. Demanding open electoral data can lead easily to the same kinds of advocacy around open health data. One of the other things I thought that you've touched on that's interesting is the states of emergencies and the relationships between that and postponement. There's more than 45 countries at this point that have postponed elections at the national and sub-national level. Not all of them are problematic by any means, but in a lot of countries, there have been extended states of emergency without any end date. The postponements have no end date on them. One of the things that election observers can do is to join with... And many of them are human rights organizations and bringing about the rules that have been established in the international arena for limiting the duration of states of emergencies, that the measures that are taken have to be proportionate to the nature of the threat to the nation to bring those issues up and do advocacy around them and to help those of us in the international arena be aware of where these problems are in various countries. JB: With that, I think we'll take a quick break. We'll be back after this quick message. One of the things that Secretary Albright has said is that it's absolutely essential for young people to understand that they must participate and that they are the energy behind democracy. You can hear more from other democracy heroes by listening to our Dem Works podcast. It is available on iTunes and SoundCloud. So before the break, we were talking about the role that citizen election monitors are playing in the COVID-19 crisis and its impact on electoral integrity. Are there other considerations that citizen election groups should be thinking about in the need for electoral integrity in their countries? I'm thinking especially related to how groups can make sure that their observers are safe while also being able to collect information and an advocate for critical processes and good governance. PM: That's really a critical question, Julia. A good example that comes to mind is in Mali, which has had very few reported cases of COVID-19, there was a parliamentary election just two weeks ago. The government, for national security reasons, has had to postpone those elections for almost two years and they were really in a phase of saying we need to push it ahead. In fact, there had not been a reported COVID-19 death until just a few hours before the election date. So it went forward and the citizen observers with which NDI has been working in that country in the weeks leading up to that advocated that the polling stations had to have masks for the staff; had to have gloves; had to have hand sanitizers or hand washing stations because hand sanitizer is hard to get in a lot of places in Mali. They made sure that their observers had those materials themselves. I think 1,500 observers went out to polling stations across the country. In their own headquarters and gathering data, there was social distancing that took place and they did a lot of checking in with their observers about how they were doing, how they were feeling over the course of the day. So one thing that the citizen observers can do is to join with organizations that are health advocates for those places where either voter registration is about to take place or voting is about to take place to ensure that the conditions minimize the risk. We just saw this over this past weekend in the elections that were held in South Korea. Whether or not you might think that the election should go forward, there was a country where there's a lot of public confidence in what the government has been doing and in the integrity of the election authorities and voter turnout was not terribly affected by this. So there is something that can be done immediately and as you have mentioned, there are numerous things that can be looked at by citizen observers without ever really leaving their homes or their headquarters. One of those, as you mentioned, is disinformation. Our partners in Georgia, for example, have uncovered a link between Russian propaganda, which has gone up around disinformation around COVID-19 and linking it to destabilizing public trust in Georgia's government. There's a really interesting report that they came out with just last week on that front. So how does COVID-19 and elections interface is something that can be explored in a number of dimensions. JB: We've talked mostly about the work of nonpartisan civil society organizations and their own countries that are confronting this challenge. Is there a role for international election observers on terms of electoral oversight during a public crisis, especially knowing that they will have some of the same if not even more constraints than citizen election monitors? PM: It's a very difficult role at the moment for international election observers. We've been in touch with our colleagues at the African Union and the European Union, at the United Nations and Organization of American States and so on. Many of them have been bringing teams home from countries. Some of them have been postponing or canceling sending teams out. At the same time, there are a number of things that international observers can do. As you mentioned, you can look at things from a distance. You can review the legal framework, which is part of what every international election observation and citizen observers do. You can compare what has been done over the past few cycles of elections, where recommendations have been made, whether those recommendations were acted upon or whether you find the same problem repeating in the next report and prioritize the issues that you might look to and even be able to inform diplomats and others about things that they should be raising with government. You can look at disinformation and other information disorder, hate speech and so on, from afar. Certainly you can tune in with what the critical people inside a country who are working on these issues have been doing. You can conduct some long distance interviews with key people in the citizen groups and in the election authorities and the political leaders to learn their opinions about what the state of play is in the country and their concerns going forward. But when it comes time to put people on the ground, we have to look at travel restrictions. We have to look at countries where foreigners have been seen as people who bring in COVID-19 and there's been violence against them; so security of observers is important. And the numbers of people who may go or where they may be deployed depending upon hotspots in the country and so on. So this is something that over the course of this year will be a challenge. And the next thing will be a challenge for international election observers is that as so many elections are being postponed, they're being postponed probably towards the end of this year or the beginning of next year, which already has many scheduled elections. So there may be an overwhelming demand for which the supply of financial and human resources runs short. JB: It does seem like at this point, especially knowing that international election observers in a lot of the places just can't deploy right now, one of the roles to play here is really trying to raise the voices of the citizen groups on the ground that are able to actually do some on the ground observation. Also keeping in mind, especially for the places we're concerned about authoritarian overreach, thinking about how we can use some of these international mechanisms to push back on democratic backsliding and mitigate tensions in places where it could potentially be a bit more unstable with the current situation. PM: You're right. That's the contribution that the international community can do, too... To really amplify the voices of the citizenry and to augment their efforts to bring about respect for civil and political rights. When you have a network of thousands of citizens who have taken the time and the effort to go out of their homes, into the street, to look at what the nature of the threats of violence or vote buying or intimidation to document how these things of disproportionally driven women or restricted women's political and electoral participation, would they have taken the time to go into polling stations, sometimes under threat or coercion? These people have become a solid core of citizen empowerment in so many countries around the world, and each of those citizens, of course, is using WhatsApp and other ways of talking and they're influencers within a country. They can gather information, they can give accurate information out, but as they report up through their networks, if there's good collaboration between the reputable citizen groups and the credible international election observers and the international community more broadly, we can use that cooperation that we've been working on over the years to try to bring attention, even when it's hard to shine a light directly on problems in countries that are being affected by this crisis and facing political challenges and stress. JB: Well, thank you again, Pat, for joining us. I think this has been a particularly relevant discussion. I'd also like to say thank you to our listeners. To learn more about NDI or to listen to other Dem Works podcasts, please visit our website@www.ndi.org PM: Thank you, Julia and thank you to the listeners.
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The Government's Levelling Up & Regeneration Bill includes substantial planning reforms, setting out frameworks for the levelling up missions and introducing a range of devolution measures. The amendment of its "nutrient neutrality" rules was under fire from rebels and Tories, with the bill currently in the House of Lords, for blocking much-needed housebuilding. As housing targets are made advisory only and a reduction in housing requirements over the next few years, 100,000 more houses will be able to be built thanks to Michael Gove's agreement to the amendment (NC77). On the other hand, environmentalist groups are outraged by the amendment as they claim it would further increase water pollution, despite the fact that this new road has opened up the property market and will benefit the economy by approximately £18 billion. Over its 13 years in power, the Conservative Party has continuously been divided over the subject of housing. This recent change is undoubtedly a huge victory for rebels led by former cabinet minister Theresa Villiers. "It will enable thousands of new homes to be built which are currently blocked, while also securing real progress on cleaning up our waterways" according to Villiers. It has been obvious that a retreat was coming since the first sign of mutiny emerged a few weeks ago when Gove postponed a Commons vote out of fear of losing. Additionally, several of the leading Tories were furious. During Liz Truss' brief office, Sir Jake Berry, the former party chairman, fumed: "Conservatives need to deliver for the next generation if we ever expect them to vote for us." It was a key pledge in the Tories' 2019 manifesto and supporters claimed it was in keeping with Margaret Thatcher's crusade for a property-owning democracy and new homes for younger voters. Thus, Truss's Levelling Up Secretary Sir Simon Clarke blamed the failure to build more homes for the Tory vote in London collapsing, accusing the party of "pulling up the ladder" for younger voters. Contrastingly, Labour's shadow housing secretary Lisa Nandy further accused the government of being "weak", calling the move "unconscionable in the middle of a housing crisis". In accordance with regulatory requirements, Natural England and the Government are collaborating with local planning authorities (LPAs) to ensure that wastewater produced by new homes does not increase pollution in our rivers and coasts while also allowing for quicker decisions that enable the construction of the homes the nation needs. To establish the legal context for this matter, it is necessary to go back in time to 1974 when the Control of Pollution Act initially seized control of waste disposal. When it took effect, a lot of old landfills were discreetly shut down and, for the most part, forgotten about—perhaps by residents of the area. The Government now also plans to cooperate with the housing sector to make sure that larger developers contribute fairly and appropriately to this programme during the ensuing years. In order to put protected sites on the road to recovery in the most affected catchments with the highest housing demand, Natural England will develop new Protected Site Strategies, and the government will then accelerate work on full site restoration. London councils who support the amendment see it as a method for them to set their own planning fees to cover the cost of the service provided, improve performance, and solveresource and capacity shortages in local planning departments as well as to cover costs associated with the service. However, the proposal might result in a new infrastructure levy rather than more affordable housing, which would mean fewer new affordable houses. However, it would provide local authorities the authority to demand that a certain amount of the infrastructure charge be delivered on-site. In a time when there is widespread concern that poverty and health disparities have gotten worse, housing policy can either help to increase disparities in society or be a method to reduce them. According to a source in the housing sector, "This is undoubtedly good news for Britain's housing supply. The only question is why it has taken so long for the government to get around to doing something about this". The District Local Network, meanwhile, welcomed the news and pointed out that in some local areas, nutrient neutrality regulations have limited the supply of affordable homes and raised the price of new homes for purchasers. Local authorities in hundreds of protected regions across England have been encouraged to not approve any new construction that is anticipated to increase river nutrients like phosphates and nitrates, either through wastewater from new residences or runoff from construction sites. The EU first imposed such rules in an effort to stop the growth of harmful algae and other plants that can suffocate aquatic life. Existing regulations required builders to reduce increasing nutrient loads brought on by expanding populations in homes, either on-site or in other parts of the same catchment. By making investments in new wetlands or by establishing buffer zones along rivers and other watercourses, they can achieve this. This has been criticised by builders as being expensive and time-consuming. Former cabinet minister and ASI Patron Sir Brandon Lewis, MP for Great Yarmouth, told PoliticsHome Gove's proposals were welcome and a "really good move". As opposed to theoretical proposals for a long-term plan, Lewis said scrapping nutrient neutrality would allow the Government and developers to build more homes very quickly."It's not a solution to everything, but it releases 100,000 to 140,000 homes. That's a lot of homes, a lot of jobs, and a lot of opportunity." The neutrality announcement also included a £280 million increase in support in Natural England's nutrient reduction programme, which helps builders reduce the impact of developments on water pollution. Additionally, farmers and water businesses will receive incentives totaling £166 million for slurry infrastructure. Katie-Jo Luxton, director of conservation at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said: "If nutrient neutrality rules are scrapped, pollution will accumulate unchecked and our rivers face total ecological collapse." In agreement with Luxton, Doug Parr, policy director at Greenpeace UK said "Who would look at our sickly, sewage-infested rivers and conclude that what they need is weaker pollution rules?". He acknowledged that it would necessitate requiring water companies and home builders to utilise their revenues to upgrade treatment facilities and pipes to the level that a modern, functional nation would demand. Developers contend that farming is a considerably greater source to the pollution in question while asserting that Natural England is enforcing the regulations in such a severe manner that they have been compelled to halt the construction of up to 120,000 new houses. In response to protests from developers, ministers introduced a mitigation programme in 2022 that allowed builders to purchase "credits" in order to obtain clearance for their projects. However, according to those developers, the procedure for buying such credits has occasionally resulted in unforeseen repercussions, such as the acquisition of farmland to put it out of production in an effort to lessen water run-off. In order to reduce the likelihood of slurry leaks, they will provide payments totaling around £400 million to farmers and waterbusinesses. They will also spend about an additional £300 million assisting developers in reducing the effects of their projects. According to the Dasgupta review, investing in nature leads to wealth since it serves as the foundation for all we do. Leonardo Da Vinci once remarked that "water is the driving force of all nature" and that no society can function effectively without it. Nutrient pollution does not affect the bulk of house projects nationwide, but in 74 of England's 333 Local Authorities, pollution levels in some areas with abundant natural beauty are so high that additional mitigation measures are required. However, along with the elimination of the nutrient neutrality rules, new environmental measures will be implemented, such as increasing investment in and developing Natural England's "Nutrient Mitigation Scheme" (NMS), a programme that enables developers to purchase credits to offset nutrient pollution from housing development. Therefore, while the government moves forward with its housing ambitions, the neutrality statement has in fact slowed down environmental initiatives. To improve opportunity and the nation's environment, however, a number of mechanisms have been adopted to absorb the loss when pollutants and houses are built. In conclusion, despite objections from environmental groups, the amendment that was agreed upon was generally a good decision. Mr. Gove thanked backbenchers in a statement for "their hard work and support to drive forward these much-needed changes to create a planning system that works for all". More affordable housing offers a respite from the dark clouds of rising interest rates and inflation. So, while still investing in a healthy environment, we can see how the removal of the "nutrient neutrality" laws will be good for the economy and for the people in the long term.
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There is never a boring year for a scholar of international relations, but, wow, this year was something. The invasion of Ukraine was eclipsed by the Hamas attack and Israel's response. The former created much consensus and unity except for the random tankie. The latter has been incredibly divisive. It was a year of expectations unmet and exceeded. And it was an incredibly angering year as so much could have been avoided, and so much awful has been amplified. I am lucky and privileged, so Musk turning twitter into a far right hellscape was annoying to me but only hurt my hit rate here at the spew. For others, it was quite destructive with death threats and actual violence. Seeing folks start to flee Substack due to tech billionaire greed -- hey, the Nazis pay! -- makes think I was right never to move, and then I have to remember that blogger is owned by google, and google has done a fair amount of evil via gaming its algorithms to get more hits via anger--youtube sending folks to the extremes.Anyhow, that is part of the context for this review. The rest of the context: I blog far less than I once did, averaging a bit more than 2 posts a month, when I used post several times a day. I theoretically have more time to blog as I have been on sabbatical since July, but I haven't. Why not? Partly I write on other social media--bluesky now instead of twitter. Partly because my first reaction is to write something ... that I have written before. I don't need to write a "GOP is the Party of Bad Faith" post since I have already written it. Unto the year in review, which has at least one enthusiastic reader ;)One of the basic rules of legislative politics is not to hold a vote if you think you are going to lose it. Yet Kevin McCarthy held how many rounds of votes to get to be Speaker of the House.... for a while? It made me ponder the Humiliation Index--comparing various actors in how much humiliation they tolerate/encourage.One of my favorite parts of blogging is taking ideas from one place and adjusting them to apply elsewhere. Also one of my fave parts of poli sci-ing and professing. One reason I do media stuff and encourage the sharp people I know to do so is that, well, they and I are, in my not so humble opinion, better than the average pundit. This idea was in my head for sometime, but unlike most such ideas, I hadn't written about it before--value over replacement pundit.Speaking of media stuff, I vented my spleen about a particular journalist who considered himself above the fray, able to judge who is pure of heart (himself) and who isn't (pretty much everyone else).One of the consistent themes of this year, more than any except perhaps the year I went to Israel, was struggling with my Jewish identity as a non-believer. In May, I realized that at least I remember the cardinal lesson of the Holocaust: never again. Which makes me a better Jew than Republican Jews who align with white supremacists.The biggest change in my life this year was the absence of ultimate. I stopped playing in 2022 due to aging out--I can still run, but changing speed or direction or both quickly pull one tendon or muscle too much. So, I had chatgpt wax poetically about the end of my ultimate career and a summer sans ultimate.Another milestone was my first defence trade show! I went to CANSEC thanks to a former participant of the CDSN Summer Institute. No, I didn't buy anything, but I met sharper Carleton students who were part of the sales teams of various producers. The amazing thing was the diversity of products from ammo and artillery and drones to food and clothing and cable (yes, the wires between things) and more. Did going compromise my ability to criticize the defence industry and the government's messed up procurement system since I am a card carrying member of the military-industrial-academic complex? I don't think so, but read my stuff to judge.Speaking about hanging out with the military, I joined a junket (does it count as a junket if my grant money pays and not the hosts?) to Latvia to see what was going in with Canada and with NATO and with the latest in Strategic Communications. I had been there before so it was interesting to see what had changed both in the NATO setup and the base itself. The Latvians were mostly open about stuff, and we all were waiting to be disappointed by the Canadian government (and it did disappoint) as the expected defence review didn't happen. I did write about what I wanted to see in the review, so I got to be extra-disappointed.The highlight of the year was the trip to Spain. First time Mrs. Spew and I euro-tripped! Great food, amazing sights seen. Oh, and a lot of sangria.One of the bigger disappointments of the year was the replacement of Anita Anand as the Minister of National Defence by Bill Blair. Yes, Blair has made some progress on some of the important files, but the more people I talk to in the CAF and DND and the more my first impression was right--this was a hell of a bad signal to send. And then the budget cuts, including those imposed by Anand from her new spot at Treasury Board, helped to demoralize folks further. The P-8 decision--buying an existing plane rather than the vaporware that Bombardier was trying to flog--was the right one and surprising given the temptation to pander to Quebec voters. But overall, people are pretty miffed about how sidelined DND/CAF are now in Canadian priorities at a time where the world is, yes, more threatening. The CDSN highlight of the year is always the Summer Institute, which keeps getting better. It is a great chance to hangout with sharp people from all over the Canadian defence and security community as we had both speakers and participants from the military, from DND, from academia, and from other parts of the government. I get a lot out of it even as we tend to cover similar material from year to year. Just a terrific group this year in large part due to the recruiting efforts of last year's visiting defence fellow--Colonel Cathy Blue.One of the strangest things of 2023 was how politicization of the military became all about ... me? I get accused of thinking everything is about me, which is why I used to joke here about how I am a narcissist, but on this matter, well, oy. It started by my writing about politicization of the US military, as analyzed by Michael Robinson, a very sharp military officer who is a hell of a social scientist (and with whom I have a long lingering project on Japanese public opinion and the Self-Defense Force). It then led to an op-ed where I argued the Conservative Party of Canada should not give a platform at its convention to a cranky retired general. The cranky retiree, Michel Maisoneuve then wrote an op-ed of his own, which was directly aimed at ... moi! Because it was such a crappy argument, I could not resist the temptation to grade it. Oh, and other folks responded as well so I discussed what could not fit into the op-ed.The other strange thing, consistent with the larger theme of "it didn't have to be this way" was the Musking of Twitter. I finally had to leave--too much far right shit from the very top and too much empowering of the same bullshit from other folks. So, I looked back and the moved on to bluesky.One of the best parts of the year was the new kitchen!! The counters took much longer to arrive, but they look great and are easy to clean. The rest of the kitchen was operational in June thanks to our great contractor--Ron. My fave parts are the island with heaps of deep drawers for appliances and baking stuff and its shelves for Nigella and the rest; the double oven so I can make pitas and fillings for the pitas at the same time; the corners that now stow a heap of pots and pans in one and reserves of flour/sugar/chocolate/etc in the other; and the huge sink. And the lighting! Really thrilled with how it worked out with the planning and buying dominating the winter of 2023. Oh, and it made the ever-growing cookiefest so much easier to execute, perhaps encouraging the madness.Heaps of travel towards the end of the year with only short breaks at home. The biggest trip was Seoul and then Copenhagen. First time one trip took me around the world as I flew across Asia from Korea to Denmark. The research in Seoul was challenging--getting people to identify who is really running the military was not easy. The case study remains only partially written due to the difficulty plus heaps of distractions--professional (Year Ahead conference, etc) and personal (skiing with my sister in Utah!). The South Korea research definitely made it clear to me that we are onto something--a relevant, interesting topic.While surveys have shown that academics are censoring themselves about Israel-Palestine, my initial reluctance to write/talk about it was more about confusion/ambivalence/anger. So, when I saw references by both sides to "From the River to the Sea," s, building on my old work on irredentism. And then I just wrote angry.Another recurring theme for the past few years but especially this one: maybe there are two sides to the political spectrum, but one side is where the danger is coming from. It is not close.The year ended with a special anniversary--30 years of being a PhD. I am increasingly aware of how long I have been doing this. Earlier in the year, I was very conscious of how lucky I have been, how much I owe people, and just being grateful. And, with a great ski trip crashing my sister's ski clinic and heaps of cookies, the year ended well and I am very, very grateful. The next year will also be full of travel and skiing and three months of Europe. Hopefully, a book contract too. Enjoy your holidays and happy new year!
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Mickey Levy's excellent WSJ oped leaves some thoughts. Inflation has fallen, though I still suspect it may get stuck around 3-4%. But prices "are 18.9% higher than its [their] pre-pandemic level." And some important prices have risen even more. "Rental costs continue to rise in lagged response to the 46.1% surge in home prices." Those who are taking a victory lap about the end of inflation (the rate of change of prices) are befuddled by continuing consumer (and voter) anger. Well, prices are not the same thing as inflation. Our current monetary policy has, for decades, forgotten past mistakes. If inflation surges to 10%, and prices rise 10%, it is considered a victory, and battle over when inflation gets back to 2%, though prices are still 12% higher than they were. It wasn't always this way. Under the gold standard, prices were stable for long periods, which means that bouts of inflation were quickly followed by bouts of deflation. I'm absolutely not advocating for the gold standard, but it's worth remembering that price stability rather than inflation stability is possible. Why the fuss? As Mickey points out, not all prices rose the same amount. In particular, "Increases in wage and salaries ... haven't kept pace with the CPI and have resulted in a decline in real wages." No wonder "the public isn't pleased." This offers an interesting moment to rethink the basic idea of bygones will be bygones in monetary policy. Wages are, by common agreement, a lot more sticky than prices. Eventually wages will catch up, but it will be a long and contentious process. Wouldn't it be better, after a bout of inflation, for prices to come down quickly, to match the current level of nominal wages? "Real wage restoration" has a nice ring to it that even Fed doves and inequality worriers might appreciate. MortgagesMickey also points to a fascinating puzzle of our mortgage markets: Tens of millions of homeowners who locked in mortgages at rates below 3% between 2020 and 2021 are now unwilling to sell. The result is a shortage of homes on the market and higher prices. ..That in turn has impaired labor mobility, historically an important factor for production and labor-market efficiencies.In the US, if you wish to protect yourself against rising mortgage interest rates by buying a fixed rate mortgage, you can only do it bundled with one particular house. You cannot easily say, "I don't want to get hit by interest rate rises, but I might want to move and still be able to afford a big house." So we are stuck with this interesting puzzle, that higher interest rates to combat inflation lead to people staying parked in houses they really don't want, unwilling to move to take a better job somewhere else, to downsize, to cash out of a house-poor expensive area (Palo Alto), to upsize for more children or elderly parents, and so on. 30 year fixed rate non-transferrable mortgages with a complex option to prepay and refinance when interest rates go down, and little consequence for default (whew) are not a law of nature. It is not this way around the world, and I've been fascinated to talk to economists at other central banks about their very different worries. In many countries almost all mortgages have floating rates, that quickly catch up to any rise in short term interest rates. In many of these countries, it is not easy to default. If interest rates rise from 2% to 6% and you can't afford to triple your monthly payment, you can't just give the bank the keys as you typically can in the US. In Sweden, I was told, if you default on a mortgage, the bank will grab all your other assets, and also garnish your wages for several years. You will live on their minimum social assistance income, about $15,000 at the time of this conversation, for several years. As a result, central banks in these countries have a completely different set of worries about raising interest rates. Rather than worry about defaults that will imperil banks, they worry that people will stop spending on everything else before defaulting on their mortgage. So monetary policy (raising interest rates), surprisingly ineffective right now in the US, can be dramatically more "effective" with that sort of mortgage market. (Yes, inducing a fall in consumption is the point of raising interest rates.) I don't know of mainstream models that include this distinction but it seems first order for the effect of interest rates on the economy. Central bankers also worry a lot more about public backlash when mortgage costs for the whole population can swiftly double or more. Back to the US. Why can you not keep your mortgage when you change houses? Why must protection against interest rate rises -- a form of insurance, really -- be tied to staying in one house? Put that way, you can come up with a dozen legal, regulatory, and perhaps even economic reasons. The 30 year fixed rate itself is an invention of 1930s federal housing policy. Banks hold very few mortgages. Pretty much the whole mortgage market gets securitized with a credit guarantee by federal housing agencies (Fannie, Freddy, etc.). So if their rules for acceptable mortgage says you can't change houses, well, you can't change houses, no matter what demand. Subsidies for a particular version of a product kill product innovation. One real estate economist I asked this of suggested that the mortgage originators like it this way, as it forces you to pay fees to move. And one can speculate that lenders don't want you to substitute a worse house as collateral. I don't think that holds, because acceptability of the house follows simple rules, but it's possible. So, today's bright idea: Why don't banks also routinely sell retail fixed for floating swaps? These are standard financial contracts that have been around for decades. Here's how it works: You take out a floating rate mortgage, at say 2%. Fixed rate mortgages are, say, 3%. So along with your mortgage, you agree with the bank that you will pay the bank 3% a year, fixed for 30 years, and the bank will pay the floating mortgage rate. That's 2% now, but if interest rates rise, the bank has to pay 5% and you keep paying 3%. Now you can sell the house. When you get a new house, you use the floating rate (5%) to pay the new higher mortgage on the house, while you keep paying 3% out of pocket. We have synthesized a portable mortgage. Why doesn't this happen? I await your speculation in the comments. Banks trade fixed for floating swaps among themselves all the time, so laying off the risk is not hard. As usual, I am drawn to wonder what tax or regulation is in the way. I can think of a few. First, you will get the mortgage interest tax deduction only on the actual mortgage. The actual 3% fixed mortgage lets you deduct the whole 3%. You will pay income tax on fixed for floating payments. This is really an insurance payment, like fire insurance, which shouldn't be taxable, but the IRS will likely treat it as such. Perhaps if insurance companies sold the product they could lobby Washington for rules to extend the tax exemption, but then you lose some of the efficiency of banks doing what is properly the business of banks. Heaven knows how bank regulators and consumer financial protection regulators will do to tangle up a perfectly sensible product. The Fed finally caved in to political pressure to put climate in financial regulation: banks must manage their balance sheets for physical risks from climate change, such as flooding or drought, as well as the "stresses to institutions or sectors arising from the shifts in policy, consumer and business sentiment, or technologies associated with the changes that would be part of a transition to a lower carbon economy."...Shifts in policy? OK Citi, what will happen to your balance sheet if a Republican gets elected and cancels electric vehicle mandates? Oh, maybe that's not the "change in policy" banks are supposed to anticipate. Banks will also have to conduct a "climate-related scenario analysis"—don't call them stress tests—that extend "beyond the financial institution's typical strategic planning horizon" and account for potential losses in "extreme but plausible scenarios." Well, if anvils fall from the sky... But I digress. With this sort of thing coming from regulators, who has the time to create and get approval for a new product that might actually serve homeowners and help to unlock housing supply in places where it's scarce? If you can think of other regulatory (or economic) barriers, comment away. Or maybe, just maybe, we're waiting for a sharp fintech company to figure out that floating + swap is a product consumers would want. (Swaps also require counterparties to post collateral, i.e. put in enough cash that the other side can be sure the payment stream keeps going, and in the event of default come out even. On the household side, equity in the house should serve as it does for mortgages; it would be like a second mortgage claim on home equity. That's a reason to bundle retail swaps with the mortgage issuance. One could have banks post collateral too, though enough priority in bankruptcy should do the trick as these are retail contracts. ) (The madness of refinancing fixed mortgages is also puzzling. I know a lot of very good financial economists, and not one can figure out the optimal time to refinance a fixed rate mortgage. Why not just sell mortgages that adjust down but not up? Sure, you'll pay a few basis points extra, but we save a lot of complexity and the costs of getting that option wrong. The same answers as above may apply.) Update:I long ago proposed "health status insurance," which is insurance against health insurance premium increases. If you get sick and your health insurance increases, the premium insurance pays the higher health insurance, or a lump sum so you can do it. What I'm suggesting here is also "mortgage rate rise insurance." Get a floating rate mortgage and separate mortgage rate insurance. If the mortgage rate rises, the insurance pays the higher rate, or a lump sum so you can do it. While we're at it, the major difference between buying and renting is that buying allows you to stay in the house no matter if rents go up, where renters bear the risk of higher rents. It's puzzling that you can get long-term commercial leases, but residential leases allow the rent to rise each year. Rent increase insurance could work the same way. Rent for a year, buy rent increase insurance, and if the rent goes up, rent increase insurance pays the difference or pays a lump sum so you can do it. (Renters synthesize this somewhat by renting and then voting in rent control!) Update 2:As many commenters point out, another way to handle the problem is for borrowers to be able to buy their own mortgage back, as is done in Denmark.
