Blog #95 – Given the Electoral College, who “won” the 2016 Election

#95 – Given the Electoral College, who “won” the 2016 Election

This blog, and the blog after it, Blog #95a – Questioning “So-Called President” [1] Donald Trump’s Mandate: Immediate actions, Long-Term Possibilities, Constitutional Questions,–summarize the findings of Blogs #92a to #95. [1] on “so-called President” Donald Trump’s claim to have won the election as president of the United States, and suggests some Immediately practical reforms of the Election Process in the United States They raise some longer-term issues about the constitutionality of the Electoral College per se, issues whose results in the 2016 election deserve wide discussion

This blog argues that the figures as to who would have won the national election in 2016 if that election procedure had been fair are clear. If every vote was counted fairly, so at every non-Trump vote counted for the same Electoral College vote as every pro-Trump vote, if, for instance, the election were simply decided by the results of the present national popular ,Trump would not have won that election {See Blog #94}.

Under present procedures of the Electoral College:
For Trump, his actual popular vote 62,980,160, produced 304 Electoral College votes
Or one popular vote produced 0.0000048 Electoral College votes.
Thus it took only 207,172 actual votes to produce each of his Electoral votes.

But for Clinton, her actual popular vote, 65,845,063 produced only 227 Electoral College votes,[2]
Or one popular vote produced only 0.0000034 Electoral College votes.
Thus it took all of 290,066 popular votes to produce each of her Electoral votes.
Each of Clinton’s popular votes was worth only 34/48, or 71%, of what one of Trump’s popular votes was worth.

Result: Trump wins 2016 Electoral College vote Trump 304 Clinton 227, and gains the Presidency.

But if every actual vote cast by a voter counted for as much as every other vote, not the 34/48 ratio above,–if all persons’ votes were equal)[3] , Trump would come in a clear second, behind the first place winner by over 2,5000,000 votes. If each vote actually cast for Clinton carried the same weight in the Electoral College as each vote cast for Trump, the Electoral College vote would have been Trump 304, Clinton 314;[4]

Result: Clinton would have won the Presidency.

Trump “won” the Presidency in a procedurally unfair election. Only the distortions of the Electoral College, specifically its abandonment of the one person –one vote principle, permitted his victory.”
What difference do all these numbers (e.g, 71% weight given to a vote in one camp compared to 100% weight given to to the other) make, now that Trump has been inaugurated?
See Blog #95a – Possible Actions for Democratization and Questions of Constitutionality of Trump’s electoral “victory.”

[1 ] The six most relevant recent blogs, all at pmarcuse.wordpress.com, are:
#91 – Explaining the Election in 10 Sentences – Preliminary
#92a – Electoral Reform: Outing the 1%
#93 – Election Figures Show Trump with Only 27.2% of Eligible Voters-What Mandat
#94 – In What Ways is the Electoral College Illegitimate Today?
#95 – Given the Electoral College, who “won” the 2016 Election?
#95a – Questioning “So-Called President Donald Trump’s Mandate, Immediate Actions+
[2] Calculations based on http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=2016 . http://www.270towin.com/news/2017/01/06/donald-trump-officially-wins-presidency-as-electoral-votes-counted-by-congress_440.html#.WIQkTn2kyio.
[3] As they are in the popular vote .
[4] Actually, the totals have to add to 538, so this would be 45.94%*538 = 247 Trump and 48.03%*538 = 258 Clinton . In either event, Clinton would have won .I thank Aaron Marcuse- Kubitza- for the point, and help generally on the calculations

Blog #94 – In What Ways is the Electoral College Illegitimate Today?

Blog#94 – In What Ways is the Electoral College Illegitimate Today?
The Electoral College itself is illegitimate and vitiates a key principle of constitutional law: “one person, one vote,” grounded in part on the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and arguably underlying the Fifteenth Amendment as well.[1]

Trump lost the 2016 election by a popular vote. He only won the Presidency because of the distortions of the Electoral College. The Electoral College distorts election results, and violates the principle of one-person one – vote, in the following ways:

1. Voting in the Electoral College is by states, not by counting individual votes. The number of votes a state has does not reflect the choices of its voters, but is skewed in favor of smaller states, who have three votes (paralleling the number of Senators and the minimum of one Representative each state has), and is thus skewed in favor voters in smaller states.
2. Voting in the Electoral College is by states, not by counting individual votes. In each state, all its electoral votes are cast in favor of the party with the majority of votes, and the votes of any member of the minority party in that state are disregarded, and without influence in the national result. It’s winner take all in the Electoral College vote count, which means losers’ votes don’t count at all.[2]
3. The Electoral College was provided for in the Constitution by the framers as a compromise with the interests of the slave -holding states, and with intent to insert a buffer between a popular vote and a theoretically more deliberative small body, out of an open fear of direct democracy.
4. The numbers show that the net effect of the Electoral College procedure is to give the vote of each African-American and Hispanic citizen in each state significantly less weight in the final election result compared to the vote of each of the majority white citizens. The votes of Trump voters counted more, per person, than the votes of Clinton voters.
5. The Fifteenth Amendment, passed during Reconstruction, may well be considered to void this Electoral College arrangement, opening up to questions of the legitimacy of its results in 2016.

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[1.] See http://www.theconstitutionproject.com/portfolio/one-person-one-vote/; “
An examination of the Supreme Court’s dilemmas and tensions as it stepped into the “political thicket” of voting and representational equality, establishing the practice of what has become a core American principle: “One person, one vote.” It has the echo of a core American belief. It rings with the same distinctively American clarion call for equality and individual empowerment that reaches back through the ages to the nation’s founding: “…of the people, by the people, for the people”, “All men are created equal” S But it wasn’t until 1963 that “One person, one vote” became a widely articulated core principle of the Constitution when it was first spoken by Chief Justice Earl Warren’s Supreme Court.”
[2.] “For example, Blacks constitute about 36 percent of the Mississippi electorate, the highest Black voter percentage in any state in the country. About 90 percent voted for Clinton. But whites are 64 percent of the state’s votes, and about 90 percent of those chose Trump. Trump therefore handily won 58 percent of the state’s total vote and all [100 percent] of its Electoral College votes. In 2016, as for decades, the Electoral College result was the same as if Blacks in all the southern states except Virginia and Maryland had not votes at all.” Bob Wing and Bill Fletcher Jr., “Rigged, The Electoral College,” Z Magazine, January 2017, p. 2.

Blog #91: Explaining the Election in 10 sentences – preliminary

Explaining the election (in parentheses: to pursue):

1. A critical shift in the organization of the economy post 1968, from industrial to hi-tech capitalism (occupational structures?).
2. Leaving many dependent on the old economy hurt and at a loss, largely the white working class, hold-over racism and sexism accentuated as scapegoats. (foreclosures, evictions, bankruptcies, struggling suburban homeowners – not the really poor, homeless)
3. They reacted with anxiety and an emotional attachment to the past Deep Story (their traditional identity?)
4. They blamed, quite rightly, “the” establishment, although not clear as to its membership, pushed by media etc. to blame “government” (social media, TV, not press?)
5. Trump as politician picked up on this, despite his own membership in the new establishment (motivation? pathological egotism? Business).
6. The anxious white ex-working class built up a deep story, a vision, abetted by Trump and the media that was heavily emotional (shaping identities?)
7. That story, built on real anxiety-inducing experience, mis-interpreted history, and built a psychological/ideological barrier that facts and reason could not penetrate (high school or less education?). Trump offered the charismatic fairy tale leader, believe me, trust me, not them, they have failed you (over 30 years? 8. Since Reagan? since Johnson?)
9. Hillary offered no vision that addressed the grounded anxiety (health care costs? Real unemployment levels?).
10. But Trump’s allegiance as a businessman is and always was to the new elite establishment, and he will unify the Republican Party around it. The holdouts will be those with a personal repugnance to Trump’s personal behavior, which they will swallow. (social circles, clienteles, customers, tenants?)

The Blog #90 series will deal with some of these isssues in more detail.

Blog #90a – The Three Trumps – The Individual, the Businessman, and the Political Campaigner

How do we explain the wide success that Trump has achieved, despite everything that we know about him today?

The argument here is that there are basic lines of division and conflict in society, divisions that have shifted dramatically in the last half century or more from an industrially—based old economy to a high-tech consumption based new economy, profiting some groups at the expense of others, and shifting the lines of division among them (see Blogs #90d and #90e). In reality, Deep down under, those shifts explain how people act politically, including how they vote in elections. Trump has taken advantage of these shifts to promulgate a Deep Story that justifies his own behavior and now underlies his campaign for the presidency. As a businessman, he takes full advantage of the new consumer-based economy while he continues to exploit those in the old economy with whom he has direct business dealings. In his political campaigning, he holds himself out as working for those hurt by the economic change, the loss of industrial jobs, the newer and greater exploitation in the processes of consumption. And as an individual, he claims that his conduct as an individual is an irrelevant and largely malicious topic that should not be related in any way to his activities as a businessman nor his qualifications for the public office for which he campaigns.

So  there are in fact three Trumps: Trump The Individual, Trump the Businessman, and Trump the Political Campaigner, and he keeps the three quite separate so, that their real contradictions do not become painfully obvious, distorting the Deep Story he trumpets on  Twitter, in which his individual characteristics are not relevant politically, his business activities in fact entitle him to public leadership even though they are largely anti-social, and his campaign rhetoric is almost transparently opportunistic

Trump embeds the businessman the campaigner displays in a seductive new Deep Story: the story of a past great America where everyone had job and people knew their places and were happy with them, a Deep Story in which Trump promises as part of a fairy tale to restore a better old world with a sweep of his magical (small?) hand. And many of those hurting from the change from old to new economy, seeing no alternate rescue in sight, buy his new Story, even though, analyzed, it is a jumble of incoherent and little thought out impulsive Twitter feeds..

To look at the Three Trumps one at a time:

To begin with, what sort of person is Trump the Individual? Repulsive, conventionally sexist and racist, with really no self-awareness, ability to see himself as others see him, to the point of obvious excess. That’s Trump, as an individual, an aging bundle of prejudices and jumbled ideas and values, of uncontrollable tics. That’s Trump the Individual. He’s the one who, intrudes on women in the dressing rooms of beauty contestants and gropes them on airplanes and in elevators, insults virtually every minority group in society and one majority group, lambasts war heroes and makes fun of disabilities and displays an egregious egotism and inability to accept criticism.

Perhaps we may also see him for that very reason, as sad, even pathetic, out of control by the forces that control him. And a lot of discussion and theorizing has gone into his psychological make-up, what makes him behave as he does, so often irrationally. Trump the Individual is not, however, the one on whom this article wants to focuses.[1] Rather it is Trump the Businessman who is of concern, the one whose conduct ought theoretically to repel precisely those who proclaim their allegiance to him. He’s the Trump whose actual business policies, writ large, are so much at odds with concepts of social justice

As for Trump the Businessman, the purported billionaire, the real estate mogul, the restless entrepreneur, the competitor and winner in the world of big business, the winner and loser in real life games with large odds, he’s independent of the other two, although he doesn’t fail to have is campaign activities contribute to the income from the various private enterprises n which he has an interest  as a business  matter. And the three Trumps are fundamentally out of sync.

And Trump the Campaigner is of concern even more, the public figure, the candidate for high public office, even trying to imagine what policies he might pursue or endorse as President produces nightmares. . Trump the Individual may have engaged in locker room talk about groping women, but according to Trump the Campaigner he had never, never, never actually done such things. Trump the Campaigner is the one who knows more about military strategy than  the generals, who alone can right the economy, produce jobs, handle Wall Street, deal with Putin. And Trump the Campaigner is not  Trump the Businessman , who exploits his workers, makes money by manipulating banks and credit  institutions extensively uses governmental assistance and  subsidies  in those businesses he actually runs, takes advantage of the bankruptcy laws to avoid paying his creditors when his businesses fail.

What follows is an attempt to go beyond any one of these three views, which deal separately with Trump the Individual, Trump the Campaigner, and Trump the Businessman.  I focus below first on Trump the Businessman with an under-explained pattern of conduct, and then turn to the reality that underlies his business activities and finally to the political implications for Trump the Campaigner of the changes in that reality. I take a key underlying line of division in that reality to be the line that divides a base in the traditional industrial capitalist economy from one based on the new less industrially -based higher-tech market economy.

My hypothesis is that Trump the Businessman represents the distilled essence of the modern businessperson in a post-industrial more market-based economy and neo-liberal political society, and that Trump the Campaigner appeals to an audience suffering from the transition from the preceding industrially-based society to its present new form, producing an intrusion of populist rhetoric in a presentation that fundamentally serves his business purposes in the changing economy. What is happening is essentially a real conflict between those involved in the class conflicts of the old industrial capitalist system as it the have evolved in the new less-industrially based market system. The contradiction between Trump the Campaigner and Trump the Businessman is a widely accepted paradox, that a billionaire should be leading the downtrodden, the ignored, the insecure.

(Whether there is now in fact a “new” class structure in creation, or simply a new aspect of the on-going development and transmogrification of the old capitalist and working classes, is still a matter under serious debate, but  the answer is not critical for the present analysis, at least in the near future. Likewise, whether today’s economy is post-industrial or not is a matter of much dispute, but by-passed here, simply differentiating the old from the new by the terms “industrial capitalist” vs. “market,” accepting the fact that the two are inextricably mixed.)

The election, and the distribution of support for Trump among the electorate, is unfortunately not a good test of the hypothesis, because Trump the Individual features much more prominently in voters’ decision-making than it does in the analysis here. You might think, if the hypothesis above is correct, that Silicon Valley and the hedge fund industry would be strongly pro-Trump as all participants in the new economy, but with minor exceptions they aren’t. Nor should blue-collar working class members be supporting a candidate who has never lifted a finger in his extensive business dealings or as an individual to show any concern for their welfare. But they do support him.

One explanation for this apparent logical discrepancy lies in the image of Trump the Individual and his conduct and rants. It may be that Trump loses support among the college-educated because of the danger they see to the rational conduct of public affairs if he is elected, which may over-ride such other affinities they may have with him as a businessman. Or it may simply be that I, as a college-educated blogger with a real fear of a Trump presidency, simply assume that others similarly situated would be as afraid of a victory by Trump as I am. Or there may be some antipathy for Hillary Clinton, having nothing to do with her actual substantive platform, whose cause lies outside anything discussed here. In any case, election results are not an easy way to test the three-Trump hypothesis.

Neither are the frequently developed analyses of the elections that uses demographic divisions among citizens to predict voting–age, color, gender, generation, education, ethnicity, for example, useful in testing the hypothesis about economic divisions among the electorate. While such divisions are easily analyzed statistically for their level of correlations with voting behavior, some may conceal more fundamental divisions along economic, income, and occupational as well as racial and gender lines.

Demographic categories used statistically, such as millennials, or male and female, or 1% and 99%, or college educated and more and high-school educated or less, are only marginally useful, and their importance needs an explanation if they are to be seriously considered. Categories such as middle class themselves demand explanation if they are to be useful. The prevalence of demographic analysis to explaining political behavior leaves a lot to be desired.

But superficial attributions of cause and effect to demographic changes are only part of the explication of why the Deep Stories that Trump trumpets, described in detail in Blog #90f, have been as effective as they have been in attracting his supporters.

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In what follows, then, we begin first with  Trump the Businessman, then turn to Trump the Campaigner, , and then view how Trump tries to bring the two together in the Deep Story that he assumes will  justify the actions of both.

So what does a modern businessperson like Donald Trump do in a consumer-based post-industrial economy?

See Blog #90b – Trump the Businessman: The Commodification of Every-day Life.

Blog #90 – The Paradox of Trump and his Followers

What follows is a Work in Progress  attempting to explain a quite  apparent paradox: how is it that Donald Trump, a billionaire real estate developer,  whose claim to fame includes popularizing the slogan : “You’re fired!” can  end up leading a right wing populist following that in fact is plagued by the very  activities he as businessman epitomizes? How it is so many people enthusiastically and vociferously support him, in apparent contradiction to their own interests?

The argument here begins by suggesting that Donald Trump is in fact operationally three different persons, three Trumps (perish the thought, if taken literally!), three entities he has struggled to keep separate: Trump the Individual, Trump the Businessman, and Trump the Political Campaigner. His individual psychological characteristics, idiosyncrasies, if not neuroses, have been extensively examined elsewhere, and are not examined here.

As Businessman, Trump’s activities are a combination of conventional exploitation, underpaying workers in the conventional businesses he operates, principally managing real estate, and an entrepreneurial instinct expanding profit-making by commodifying desires for consumption, for luxury activities providing status over and above actual use. He seeks support as a Political Campaigner for his political ambitions as well as for his businesses, by exploiting conventional aspirations for economic security and social safety, both linked to private enterprise and dreams of wealth accumulation.

As Political Campaigner Trump gains support by latching onto what might be called a Deep Story, an emotionally held ideology and set of values that explains, rationalizes, and legitimates how the world works. Such a Deep Story has long existed as to how the industrialized capitalist world works.  Trump has modified that old Story to proclaim a New version counting on the vulnerabilities of voters and popular media to changes in the economies of the world that have frightened masses of ordinary people seeking assurances that the supposed promises of the old Deep Reality, seemingly vanishing, could be restored quickly and easily by his authoritarian rule. He has used promises of “Making America Great Again” to propagate a new right-populism and a New Deep Story appealing to those susceptible to promises of quick and easy solutions to deeply threatening and hard to understand changes.

Major economic and social developments in the Deep Real Economy have underlain Trump’s success as a Businessman. In these developments profit is derived not primarily from industrial  production but also in the process of its realization in user consumption. The commodification of luxury consumption in which Trump specializes, and the financialization which he is adept at manipulating, is then justified by a New Deep Story resting on a widespread popularly accepted account of how the changed reality works.

I hope in the next week to flesh out the argument here in a series of perhaps six blogs, perhaps as follows

This Blog #90 – The Trump Series: The Paradox of Trump and His Followers

1. Blog #90a – The Three Trumps: Individual, Campaigner, Businessman
2. Blog #90b -Trump the Businessman: The Commodification of Luxurious Living
3. Blog #90c – Trump the Campaigner and his Opposition
4. Blog #90d – The Deep Realities and The Deep Story of Industrial Capitalism
5. Blog #90e – The New Deep Realities of the New Economy and its New Deep Story
6. Blog #90f The Philosophic Explanation of the Persuasive Power of the new Deep Story
7. Blog #90g The Alternative Reactions to the New Deep Reality: Right, Middle, and Left

****   WORK IN PROGRESS   ****

Blog #81e. – Towards Transformative Approaches to Unjust Inequality.

Blog #81e. – Towards Transformative Approaches to Unjust Inequality.

Given that the conservative responses to unjust inequality essentially accept its existence, that the liberal  does something to ameliorate the results of unjust inequalities but does not address their causes, and that the progressive response does even more, but both within  severe limits that leave the production of such inequalities essentially untouched, and finally given that radical responses, although  they do address the causes of unjust inequality, are not  on the real world agenda anywhere in the world today, what can be nevertheless be done to achieve a more desirable handling of issues of equality than  our present system presents?

The suggestion here is to push for actions that are immediately possible, but that point transformatively to the more radical proposals necessary to eradicate unjust inequalities.. At least four modest but theoretically promising types of efforts in that direction are already under way, although their transformative potential is not always stressed: 1) transformative electoral activities; 2) transformative demands in the active day-to-day political arena; 3) transformative  pilot projects attempting to model in limited practice solutions  that would be radical if comprehensively adopted; and 4) transformative educational efforts involving teaching , research, writing, public debates, on the real sources of unjust  inequalities and the possible steps to their eradication – and the development of theory. These might be considered four fronts in the effort to tackle the unjust inequalities that characterize our present societies.

1)      Transformative electoral activities.

The progressive democratic-socialist campaign of Bernie Sanders for the presidency in the United States would be an example. If it is seen simply as a normal campaign for the election of a particular individual with a particular attractive platform, it may have limited impact, and may not survive a likely electoral loss. If the electoral campaign is seen as accompanied by a political revolution, as its rhetoric in fact proclaims is necessary, it points to broader and deeper issues, and opens the door to consideration of radical possibilities going beyond the progressive.

Historically , the record of radically-oriented national election campaigns  has not been good, although they have a long tradition behind them, just this  century, the Socialist Party, the Peace and Freedom Party, The Progressive Party, Jesse Jackson’s campaign, all had very limited influence.  Today, the Working Families Party is active in electoral campaigns in some states, but it remains small. In crass political terms, the experience seems to be that the more radical the platform the less effective the electoral impact. Efforts are beginning to evolve to have the Sanders campaign itself lead to some type of on-going organized involvement both in future elections and/or in current political issues. Whether it will be an exception to the rule remains to be seen.

2)      Transformative demands in the active day-to-day political arena

The individual issues that are fought over in any even formally democratic society usually center on specific concerns, but may or may not be seen as parts of more fundamental societal arrangements, and may then, very much context dependent, have a transformative impact.  The criticism of the role of money in political campaigns could point to a full public funding of campaigns, with limits on private money going far beyond simple calls for transparency. Calls for a $15 minimum wage may open the door to an on-going push for a livable wage and beyond, to a truly equitable distribution of compensation for work done, and minimums set on the basis of an expanded definition of what such a wage should provide. Single-payer insurance provision to cover the cost of health care could raise the question of whether health care should not from the get-go be free, not provided on a fee-for-service basis but as a public good, as basic public education is provided, or police or fire protection or the building of streets and highways. Modest proposals for participatory budgeting could raise the question of whether all budgeting decisions could not be made with grass-roots democratic involvement. Support for the creation of Community Land Trusts as owners of land could raise the question of simple public ownership of all land, as a natural resource.[1]

Keeping Liberal and Progressive proposals expanded to their radical fullest regularly in sight, while still getting ones hands dirty in the struggles to achieve what can be done day –too-day, would be a way of making many existing political efforts not only more appealing in the present but also transformative to what might be done in the future to fully end unjust inequality.

3)      Transformative pilot projects attempting to model radical alternatives.

The history of utopian communities is extensive and rich. They are rare today. But the attempt to try out radical ideas on a limited scale, with the transformative goal in mind of leading to their wide-spread and comprehensive adoption, remains important. Indeed, utopian thinking and puzzling out what ideal cities or countries or neighborhoods might look like is an exercise that might be more important now than ever, now that any new idea is likely to be met with the charge that nothing like that has ever been done before, where’s the data to support it, let’s stick to doing things that we know can be done in the world that we have, not the world we want. In limited practice, solutions that seem utopian might in fact be tested and shown to work on a small scale, and would be very radical if comprehensively adopted. The work of Gar Alperovitz and the Democracy Project,[2] and the New Economy efforts, are provocative. Learning from such efforts could indeed be transformative on the way to broader change.

But there are severe limits to most pilot models, involving, viability today in the here and now. Dangers lie in the context of a competitive profit-driven society, with constant down-ward pressures on wage to maintain financial viability. Even short-term, internal democracy in e.g. co-ops, and more, may end up at risk. And how the transition might be made from pilot project to its broader environment. The  temptation and often apparent necessity of building fortified silos of justice in a desert of unjust inequality  to broad social change is under-discussed.[3], [4] Pilot models are a good and helpful step towards a just and equal society, but do not inevitably lead us there.

4)      Educational efforts and the development of theory.

Most of those reading tis blog, and certainly its writer, have not been brought to concerns about the unjust inequalities discussed in these blogs by their own material deprivation, by the kinds of physical exploitation and immiseration that classic images of revolutionary subjects evoke. As this is written, The New York Times headlines a front-page story about “How the G.O.P Elites Lost the Party’s Base” and describes how “Working Class Voters Felt Ignored by Republican Leaders.” The Republican Party having deserted its “traditional blue-collar working class base—“its “most faithful voters, blue-collar white Americans.”[5] The descriptions set conventional social theory about class relations on its head.  But it reflects a current reality: the wide gap between undying material relationships of class and power, on the one hand, and the ideological interpretations and their psychological reflections that characterize so many political disagreements and rationalize the unjust inequalities that we see today. It is a gap that is ideologically, in the broad sense of the term, created, and it requires ideological counters if there is to be any hope of serious social change.

Ideological efforts to confront unjust inequalities have two aspects: one involving educational work, the other theoretical work.

Education is a somewhat awkward term for public information or savvy use of the media to tell a story, to convince readers or listeners or watchers, to convey the news in critical depth, to undo prejudices and stereotypes analyse conventional wisdoms. It may involve letters to the editor, journal articles, phone calls, panels, or, research, funded or not.

Theoretical work overlaps with the educational somewhat, but has a different audience and somewhat different audience: It may be educational, in the above sense, but it is also directed at those already concerned and active, and involve itself in clarify cause and effect relationships as a guide to strategy and tactics in ideological/political confrontations. Research of course has standard of logic and fact-finding that are necessary for credible work, but in the choice of subject matter and willingness to draw conclusions relevant to issues of equality that radical research show its usefulness. As the social psychological processes of one-dimensionalization grow in importance, the counter processes of logical analysis and exposure become ever more important.

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Transformative might thus be the name of such blended proposals aimed at dealing with unjust inequality in a politically feasible fashion. . It would characterize ideas, demands, program proposals, legislative actions, social movement demands, which would marshal political power behind immediate demands for liberal or progressive measures coupled with a consistent and open consideration of the political feasibility of forwarding the goals of the Radical approach and building the foundation for struggles for radical action

A Transformative approach would add a recurring footnote, as explicit as the political situation will allow, to Liberal and Progressive demands. It can help to maintain awareness of the depth of the problem of Unjust Inequality and of the need for each individual program and proposal to recognize that the ultimate goal is actually the elimination of Unjust Inequality altogether. It can help keep pressure on the arc of history to bend ever more towards social justice and just equality..

 

ds Transformative Approaches to Unjust Inequality.

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[1] For further examples of potentially transformative demands , see my Blog #30: Beyond Immediate Proposals: Some Transformative Provocations

[2] See http://garalperovitz.com/ and Gar Alperovitz “The Question of Socialism (and Beyond!) Is About to Open Up in These United States”, April 13, 2013 Truth out News Analysis

[3] For my own views of the potentials and limits of the pilot project approach see Marcuse, Peter. 2015 “Cooperatives on the Path to Socialism?” Monthly Review, vol. 66, No. 9, February, pp. 31-38

[4] For a further discussion, see also Blog# 58a: From Immediate Demands to Utopias via Transformative Demands

[5] March 28, p. 1.

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This blog is one of a set of five dealing with Unjust Inequality:

Blog #81a: What’s the Problem? Not Just Inequality

Blog #81b: Inequality: What’s the Answer? Economic or Racial? Conservative or Liberal-Clinton?

Blog #81c – From Clinton Liberal to Sanders Progressive Responses

Blog #81d – Inequality: A Radical Response

Blog #81e. – Towards Transformative Approaches to Unjust Inequality.

Blog 77c -Summary to Explain Donald Trum in 5 Paragraphs

Blog 77c Explaining Donald Trump in 5 short summary points.

 

1. There are really two consistent but separate Donald Trumps – A Real Trump, a cold-blooded, shrewd, profit-focused, businessman, logically power-seeking in his own interest, the Trump of casinos, luxury hotels and residence, exclusive golf courses, hedge funds, global investments, and on the other hand a Trumpeting Trump, vociferously projecting an image of luxury and riches, and spouting eternal verities as common sense entirely independent from his own interests, but which he is willing to share for the good of the citizenry, the Trump of walls around Mexico, freedom from government regulation, anti-foreigners, religious bigotry, nationalistic Americanism, winners and losers. How the Real Trump got his billions is however not a subject for discussion by either one.
2. The failure of his competitors for the nomination to take his central ideas on boldly and directly, to expose his self-interest in his trumpeted ideas, arises not out of fear of combat or concern for the good of the Republican Party, but out of the realization that his ideas are in their own self-interest also, and too deep criticism would amount to self-criticism for them.
3. The racial and ethnic and moral bigotry running through Trump’s trumpetings are functional for him in identifying a scapegoat for the ill functioning of the system he is defending and a moral justification for the harm that his ideas, if implemented, would clearly cause to many.
4. Trump’s bigotry is bought by some of his supporters at the bottom of the economic ladder because having a prominent Presidential candidate espouse similar feelings. It is functional for them because it legitimates their own many material frustrations and insecurities. His bigotry is bought by others of his supporters high up on that ladder because it directly serves their own private material interests.
5. In media terms, Trumpeting Trump’s bigotry affects primarily moderate Republican and Democratic voters who aren’t likely to vote for him anyway, and distracts attention and appropriate investigation from the Real Trump’s self-interest as a billionaire in avoiding discussion of his own route to his billions and the actual conflicts of interest he has with many of his supporters.

 

This summary builds on the arguments in two previous blogs as pmarcuse.wordpress.com:

Blog77a The Real Trump and the Trumpeting Trump,   and

Blog 77b Why is Trumpeting Trump so appealing?

 

Blog 77b Why is Trumpeting Trump so Appealing

Blog 77b Why is Trumpeting Trump so appealing to so many (including himself)?

The facts of Blog 77a seem very clear, and ought to be the matter of much greater public knowledge and analysis than it is. But there is another aspect to the relationship between the Trumpeting Trump and Real Trump, one that is more speculative, but worthy of reflection. Granted that those talks and ides directly benefit Real Trump in his fundamental business activities, which in turn define his life, there is still a vehemence in the way in which Trumpeting Trump is conducting himself in public which goes beyond play-acting or deliberate self-deception.

This all deserves exploration

Real Trump may even believe at least a part of what Trumpeting Trump is telling him. But Real Trump is smart, understands the world, can see what he is and is not doing. Can he really believe that terrorism is responsible for all of what ails the world, or that keeping Muslims and Mexicans out is a good direction for public policy in the United States (he employs many Mexicans himself)?

And how can it be that so much of what he trumpets receives such an enthusiastic welcome from so many Republican voters and even some Democrats, when the evidence and logic both show that it does not serve them well. Trump says little that would help poor people or non-union workers or the elderly, or student, and yet demographic studies of his supporters show many support him Why?

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One answer may be that those ideas appeal particularly to those who are discontented with their own positions in real life, who see Trump’s withering complaints about the status quo as reflecting and indeed justifying their own situations. Bigotry is thus a possible reaction to material problems: laying the blame on others, different from themselves, immigrants, black and brown people, intellectuals, and government administrators, for their own difficulties. Having a candidate for President articulating similar views legitimates their own reactions. Hence Trump’s apparent success in the polls so far. (Although rich people also support Trump because he’s good for them.)

Both Trumpeting Trump and his followers are using their rhetoric – let us call it, admittedly oversimplified, bigotry – as a substitute for revealing other feelings, reactions, circumstances with which they are deeply unhappy. It may be a stretch, but is it not possible that, deep inside, Real Trump has doubts about what he is doing, about how satisfying pursuing ever more wealth accumulation is, what he can do with all that money except acquire more? Is it not possible that ultimately he has a need, as a human being, for feelings of solidarity, of support, of compassion, of kindness, perchance of love, values that go beyond the brute pursuit of wealth, of greed, which one might unkindly term the dominant value being pursued by Real Trump and endorsed and validated by Trumpeting Trump?

And might not Trumpeting Trump ’s vehemence in the expression of his ideas be, oddly enough, an upside-down form of the same bigotry and scapegoating, blaming all he looks down on for his own having to be so hurtful, so scathing, to those that make him act as he does, legitimating his own self-serving exploitation of others?

Or, perhaps less naively, might it not be that, just as Trump’s bigotry serves him as a legitimation of greed and the power that successful greed brings, .e.g. to say “you ’re fired” to even more people, by escalating the quest for not only private but also public powerIn a society in which the open defense of wealth accumulation – “greed is good” – is frowned on by most, the pursuit of political power is still accepted asa perfectly natural driving force for aggressive action, can serve as a moral cover for actions that, in reality, are driven by greed, a greed for money and for both as inseparable twins?

As to the Trumpeters enthusiastic followers, might it not be that they find in it an explanation and legitimation of their own difficulties, real difficulties in making a living, in finding rewarding work, in finding security, in finding desirable housing, getting an affordable education, enjoying life as they would like to life it? Then hearing Trumpeting Trump blame blacks, or Mexicans, or those of minority sexualities, for what is keeping America from being great is in a sense a validation of their own fears of others, of the way things are, of the government, validating their own tendencies at the blaming bigotry because here this eloquent forceful widely heard and shown and listened to leader, is saying what they are themselves tempted to say but are afraid to?

Material conditions, specifically the facts of class, race, gender, determine what Trump does in real life and has his façade say, and they produce a need for a legitimating vision, a rationale, for doing what he does: blame it on the world. In parallel fashion, the facts of class, race, gender for many of Trump’s followers underlies own their frustrations and insecurities, and hearing Trump express his views legitimates their own holding of those views as a way to endure and justify their position –blame it on the world. . Trump’s bigotry covers his need to defend the greed and lust for power, with their lack of morality in Real Trump’s real life , and Trumpeting Trump’s follower’s bigotry covers their need to a rationale for why they do not have the lives that their own visons would lead them to desire.

The material and the social-psychological come together to produce what we see every day on our screens. It is not the product of an aberrant mind nor are his followers stupid, but what both he and his followers say and do results from a very painful and very real material historical logic.

 

 

 

Blog #75 – “Blaming an Un-named “System” for Police Shooting Blacks

This Blog #75 – “Blaming an Un-named “System” for Police Shooting Blacks Is A Cop-0ut,” argues responsibility rests in three areas: Individual perpetrators (the policeman, in the case of the killing of minorities ), the social institutions (police departments, the criminal justice system, and the underlying social, economic, and political system. All need to be named and addressed. They will not all be resolved at once, but transformative measures may begin to address them within the existing system
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In a recent The New York Times opinion piece ii, Professor Mullainathan, in “Police Killings of Blacks: What the Data Says” seems to be joining liberals, and even radicals. He argues that the data shows that, although African-Americans are only 13.2% of the population, they are 28.9% of those arrested by the police, and 31.8% of those shot by police. As possible explanations he points to the risks of living in “a high-poverty neighborhood,” the social institutions that “tie race to crime,” the economic policies that limited opportunities.” He concludes “removing police racial bias will have little effect on the killing rate,” presumably because of all these other factors.
“. . [After]… accounting for why some of these encounters [of police with blacks] turn into killings, [racial bias] is swamped by other, bigger problems that plague our society, our economy, and our criminal justice system.”
So far so good.
But he ends the piece with
“…there are also [my italics] structural problems underpinning these killings. We are all responsible for those. “
“We are all responsible.” What started out as a fairly radical move to enlarge the approach to the problem beyond the mere bias of individual policemen, ranging over a whole set of social institutions, and finally pointing to the bigger problems that plague our society, ends up with no idea about what is to be done, no conclusions about what it is that produces these plagues, no allocation of responsibility to any human agency. If we are all responsible, no one, no group, no interests, are responsible, no specific forces “plague our societies.” The system is not wrong; it is plagued by a disease. The disease is not named. The sub-headline for the piece summaries it as “finding some blame in persistent systemic issues.” The system is to blame. The system remains anonymous, incorporeal, inhuman, somehow natural, just there. It is not named or addressed. Blaming it is a cop-out.
The formulation “we are all responsible” is simply wrong. Some benefit from it; others suffer under it. It is man-made (less woman-made), defined by those with power, power which is very unevenly distributed. The 99% are not responsible for it, the 1% are. The formulation “blame in persistent systemic issues” is not a radical criticism of the system, but rather a cop-out,iii undercutting efforts to identify who is actually responsible, avoiding identifying the real changes that might address the roots of the problem the data identifies.
Going beyond the cop-out of blaming “the system,” three actions are needed: first, the actors that implement it need to be specified, second, the institutions that are the framework of their actions need to be confronted, and thirdly the system that underlies their actions needs to be named. Finally, of course, the purpose of all this is to formulate a viable political responses to change he present patterns.
We may look at the human agents responsible for these killing of blacks at three levels:
1) the individual perpetrator, the policeman firing the shots in our case;
2) the social institutions which directly produce, promote and constrain the individual perpetrator’s behavior, in our case the police departments, the criminal justice system, the schools, the housing, and
3) the underlying system, economic, social, political, cultural, which for present purposes I would name the racist/capitalist system (more on its definition below).
1. Firstly, as to the individual responsibility:
it is true that it is “too large a problem to pin on any specific individual officers.”iv But it is individual officers that do the shooting. They are at the flashpoint where the damage is done. Do they have the intent to kill blacks? Perhaps not. They are indeed constrained and subordinate to the system. Yet they have a certain amount of free will. But it is not a matter of an intent to kill blacks, but rather of the actual and predictable and known impact of they actually knowingly dov. In Fair Housing legislation, the law prohibits not only actions undertaken with the “intent to discriminate” but also actions “having a disparate impact” on members of the protected group. The standard for a police officer should be no lower than the standard for a planner or zoning administrator or developer. Certainly, the individual police officer is also subject to the social institutions and agencies– the courts, the legislatures, the schools, and the overall set of criminal justice policies, budget cuts, and social patterns. And is further moulded by the underlying system, with its inequalities, its insecurities and fears and perverse incentives. But holding the single individuals responsible for the direct result of their actions when they have in fact a realistic choice would surely be fair and a major help in avoiding those results. The courts are an appropriate institution to do the fact-finding and the balancing of individual choice against the social and constitution constraint required to deal with the specifics of individual situations, and if they are biased, the tools to deal with that bias are certainly known and in general available.
2. Secondly, as to the social institutions:
If, as Mullainathan and many others properly argue, more or better education is required, it should be provided, if the courts are not doing their jobs as they should, then the judicial system should be reformed; if police departments were reformed and trained, controlled, incentivized, not to shoot and kill, there would be less killing; if a gun culture is partly responsible, it should be addressed by appropriate legislation and civil society condemnation. Such reforms will certainly not be adopted without conflict. There are vested interests, both public and private, behind the institutions as they are, and serious reforms will meet serious opposition from powerful opponents. The distribution of power, rather than the search for justice, makes the fair resolution of these issues difficult. But these institutions have been made by human beings, and they can be changed by them.
While underlying systemic factors mould both the actions of specific actors and of specific institutions, placing some blame for their result properly points to the complexity of the problem, “blaming the system” is no reason not press for remedial actions and reforms, which could ameliorate even the most difficult of the issues involved .. They are not all structural systemic, and it is counter-productive to assume they are, or to think they cannot be significantly alleviated even with the existing underlying system.
3. But, thirdly, as to the underlying systemic issues
Systemic structural issues clearly are involved. There are some problems arising from the underlying system that cannot be solved by simple piece-meal reforms, problems such as inequality, poverty, exploitation, and oppression along class or racial or national or cultural lines, perhaps climate change and environmental degradation. The difficulties even of piece-meal reforms, reformist reforms, are immense as the conflicts about racial segregation reveal.vi
Even the Catholic Church, to the extent that Pope Francis today speaks for it, acknowledges that
If the system is to be properly blamed and then addressed, it must first be named and its key characteristics understood. Karl Marx had a comprehensive analysis, and would simply call the system capitalism. In today’s discussion, movements such as Occupyvii and Pope Francis have somewhat similar approaches:
“While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, that of the majority is crumbling. This imbalance results from ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and thus deny the right of control to States, which are themselves charged with providing for the common good.viii.”
“When money, instead of man, is at the center of the system, when money becomes an idol, men and women are reduced to simple instruments of a social and economic system.”ix
“[S]ome people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance economic power and in the sacralised workings of the prevailing economic system.”x
The issues raised here, and underlying the Occupy movements 1%/99% cry, are truly systemic: the level of inequality, the ideology of the free marketplace, the limits on the power of democracy over the state, the role of economic power, the lack of inclusiveness among peoples and groups, are deeply embedded in the system, whichever name is used for it. It is not any old “system” that has the characterisitics of ours today, and should be blamed, but a very specific one that is responsible..
It might take an old-fashioned revolution really to get at the roots of these problems, to do it comprehensively, for they are all interlocked, as the current discussion of intersectionality stresses.
And a revolution is perhaps a theoretical possibility in this period. The new left of the 60’s certainly thought it was fifty years agoxi; the Black Panthers saw themselves as “Vanguards of the Revolution”. Many social activists and their theoretical supporters, from anarchists to Marxists, believed that the seeds of profound change were here then, and their reasoning might well apply today. Today’s systemic economic crisis would provide some grounds for such an expectation. But a revolution does not seem exactly in the cards right now; indeed, one from the right seems much more likely than one from the left, in many places in the world.
The reason revolution is not likely deserves extensive examination, much more than there is room for here xii Those with a vested interest in the present underlying system are powerful, and have convinced many, probably the majority, that they benefit from lt also. The system seems to be producing the goods, as Herbert Marcuse formulated it. But it does not follow that, because we can’t have a revolution right now, nothing can be done to change things as they are, and perhaps even move today to a point in time where the radical changes implied by a revolution could indeed be brought about.
Nor does it help to say: “We are all responsible” for these system-based ills that we are all to blame for them. “We”xiii are not all to blame, at least not in anything like equal measure, and ignoring that fact is both wrong and counter –productive in dealing with the issues. There are specific interests , specific groups, perhaps classes, perhaps the 1% or the .1%, that stand behind the institutions needing change that block that change, block reform. Ignoring their identity undercuts the process of dealing with those who are in fact responsible and to blame for the problem: Their identities are not obscure: the anti—regulators, the low-wage employers in manufacturing and services, the real estate ghetto builders and maintainers, the politicians still seeing advantage in their bigotry, hedge funds and financial speculators. Yes, “we” certainly need to act to change the system, but to get there we need to hold accountable those that are in fact responsible for it’s being the way it is. Much can be reformed within the existing underlying system, even if it is not easy to do and inevitably will be controversial
4. Formulating Responses: Transformative Goals.
But the system is not God-given, nor a natural beast, but one of a number of alternate systems, which may have their own pros and cons, be variably achievable and sustainable, but can be actively pursued here and now by those ill served by the present system. It may take a revolution to achieve the major changes necessary to go to one or another of the alternatives, but it can be done. Legislatures are likely to be the sites of many of these
battles, and the normal mechanisms of liberal democracy, including particularly the electoral procedures, which would need to be used strategically to the fullest extent possible.
“Transformative” is a useful term for the kinds of demands and approaches that bridge the need to deal with all three levels of responsibility outlined above.xiv Two complementary avenues might be envisioned: one pursuing loaded reforms, the other exemplary reforms.
Loaded reforms address directly individual perpetrators and social institutions but stressing their connection with the underlying causes and pointing in the direction of change, pointing out causes, exposing, not only what is happening but why it is happening, who the actors are for and against, what the lines of struggle ultimately are, just who the 1% are, what power they hold and how they benefit from the system, who the 99% are and how they suffer from it. Their hallmarks are seeking the immediately feasible within the system but naming the obstacles to real success: the remaining inequalities and the long-orange systemic alternatives that are ultimately needed for real success.
Such reforms are loaded in the sense that they acknowledge their own limitation, at the same time pointing to the further changes that would be required for substantial structural change. In the shootings of African-Americans by police, reforms in the training of police, in the punishment of offenders, in the availability of guns, etc; but reforms acknowledging that poverty, frustration, misunderstood but real grievances, a search for security as well as safety in the system as a whole, are causes of the police actions and the judicial systems responses that also need to be addressed.
Exemplary reforms bring into existence relationships among individuals and groups , patterns of organization and doing business, rules of behaviour, that pre-figure within the existing system possibilities that can only be fully developed beyond it, but can have real if limited impact within it. Projects such as worker-owned cooperatives, community land trusts, radical educational offerings, participatory budgeting, will not produce structural change by themselves, but will show that real alternatives are available to existing structures and behaviours.
Again, in the police treatment of minorities, projects such as community control of the piece, Planned diversity in housing, full citizenship rights for all residents, are examples that can support movements for more wide-spread and deeper extensions of such approaches.
Blaming “the system,” without naming it, without going beyond addressing individual ills as isolated unrelated problems, will not do. It will not go far to address underlying social issues. Seeing who is responsible for social ills, who benefits from their existence, what institutions need change, are all necessary, and beyond that, pressing for solutions that are transformative, policies that are loaded progressively and exemplary in reality, are needed.

—references

ii October 18, 2015, The Upshot, p. B6
iii I only realized the pun after I used the term: it lets the cop out of responsibility…
iv Mullainathan, supra.
v A paraphrase of the general sense of what creates liability in civil law, on a continuum with culpability in criminal law. For a concise discussion, see Paul H. Robison, Mens Rea, at https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0ahUKEwjmuZCs1L7JAhVKcT4KHfEpB0gQFggvMAI&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.law.upenn.edu%2Ffac%2Fphrobins%2Fmensreaentry.pdf&usg=AFQjCNFnYj1gAqCw_JFTrIBZBVXDr4MtVQ&cad=rjt
vi See blog #70 – The Causes of Discrimination. And they are global in scope, on segregation alone see most recently https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/02/how-the-rise-of-american-style-segregation-is-feeding-division-in-europe/
vii See Blogs #1-10, supra
viii https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2013/may/documents/papa-francesco_20130516_nuovi-ambasciatori.html
ix https://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/pope-francis-catechism-for-economics/
x http://fortune.com/2015/09/14/pope-francis-capitalism-inequality/. And quotes collected at http://gawker.com/here-are-11-top-screw-capitalism-lines-in-pope-franci-1471888334
xi See Herbert Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, and Peter-Erwin Jansen and Charles Reitz, eds. 2015, Herbert Marcuse’s 1974 Lectures at Vincennes University.
xii See also, even more briefly, Blog #74 – On the Relevance of Herbert Marcuse
xiii See Blog #35 – Watch your Language, Krugman, and the Rest of Us, and Blog #37 – Lopsided Language.
xiv See Blog #30: Transformative Proposals in Nine Areas, at pmarcuise.wordpress.cm.

Blog #71 – Fair Housing – Remedies and Solutions

Fair Housing – Remedies and Solutions

This Blog #71 – Fair Housing – Remedies and Solutions, then proposes some immediate remedies, and then some principles for real solutions.

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Turning to remedies and solutions, one way of looking at the reasons to be restrained in celebrating the Court’s decision and the new Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Regulation is to ask the question:

“If the Federal government itself were obligated by law to do everything within its legal power to affirmatively further fair housing, what would it be doing?”

There are some immediately available and known policies that could be of substantial help.

They are immediately practicable ideas that might be politically viable even today.

They include, just for instance:

1. closing the loopholes in the new Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Regulation,
2. requiring a fair housing impact statement analogous to an environmental impact statement for all actions affecting housing provision;
3. a housing speculation provision in the income tax law denying capital gains treatment or imposing progressively steeper taxes on profits from speculation in land ;
4. expansion of public housing, housing directly and permanently owned by government, with increased roles for tenant participation in management;
5. a federal housing trust fund, available to provide subsidies for location actions necessary to prepare and implement fair housing plans;
6. legislative endorsement of the various Declarations of Rights of the UN;
7. model local legislation on building codes, affordability, zoning, tax policies, eviction policies, comprehensive planning;
8. Specific financial and technical support for the preparation of comprehensive local master plans covering land use and the key sectors of public engagement,^[1]

[1] The new AFFH Regulations already contain provisions for such assistance, but are focused on data provision and analysis, not a comprehensive planning process.

But these are remedies; they operate in a situation in which discrimination in housing is recognized as part of the existing landscape. To be effective, however, such actions need to be based on a recognition of the causes of that situation, and incorporate specific substantive prnciples so that they do not become simply empty paper-work bureaucratic requirements. The next Blog, E. suggests what such further action, looking to solutions rather than just remedies, might look like.

To be effective, however, such actions need to be based on specific substantive principles so that they do not become simply empty paper-work bureaucratic requirements.

At least ten concrete principles could address the six weaknesses of the present court decision and governmental regulations:

1. Close the loopholes in the law and the regulations and the Supreme Court decision that leave open to undesired interpretation terms such as “adverse,” “disproportionate ,” “legitimate purpose,” “reasonable alternative,” “racial” and “ethnic,” etc. Perhaps a blanket provision stating the constitutional priority to be given to the goal of eliminating discrimination in housing might suffice.
2. Recognize the unjust and discriminatory way in which the housing system as a whole now operates, face up to the limitations of the private market as the mechanism for determining land uses and more broadly the direction of urban development, as matters of fundamental public policy., limiting the perks of private property[2] standing in the way of the development of alternatives.

Apply the standard used in defining fair housing, and the consequent affirmative obligations of government, to the other major policy areas involved in urban life, acting in recognition of the intersectionality of housing, education, environmental quality, accessibility, aesthetics, economic development, health care, security, the administration of justice, campaign financing, electoral procedures, essentially all sectors that ought to be under public control in a democracy.

Plan comprehensively, re-examining and expanding on the tradition of master planning and the experience in making such planning participatory and democratic. Intersectionality might suggest separate “sections” interacting; the reality is that each “section” is from the beginning entwined with all others from the beginning, and they should be planned jointly, not separately.

Provide the funds to implement fair housing goals. If the major problem creating unfair housing is the inequality of wealth and income, we have the power at least to ameliorate its consequences by redistributing some of that wealth and income, and the tax code is can be a major way to do that. By taxing at the top, with a steeply progressive tax system perhaps in this case focusing on income and wealth created within the housing system and redistributing the proceeds, perhaps through a targeted federal Low Income Housing Trust, adequately funding programs such as public housing which permanently take housing out of the profit -driven housing market, could go vastly further than it has – perhaps from 3% of all housing to 30-70%, in spirit from the 1% to the 99%.

Use the tax code to attack directly the maldistribution within the housing sector at its source by confiscatory taxation of speculative profit in the buying and selling of land and interests in land, monopoly profits from the ownership and management of housing, steeply progressive real property taxation of megahomes and ultra-luxury apartments.

Power must be explicitly taken into consideration. Given the obvious pre-existing inequalities in wealth and political, only exacerbated by the Communities United decision, any remedy for local governmental action must deal with the relations of power of the various groups involved, and minorities will generally , in the large picture , be near the bottom of the totem pole. If the undiluted warm welcome given the new Regulation is to be earned, the actions of the Federal government under the provisions of the FHA must deal with the distribution of power. It must be clear that the Federal government is indeed interfering in local matters, is indeed imposing standards of conduct meeting national priorities and national values. Indeed local input is vital, and necessary for effective implementation, but Federal rules must govern. Choices among decisions not contradicting the intent of the Federal law should indeed be left as fully local as reasonably possible, but it is entirely consistent with the distribution of powers among branches of government in the Constitution that issue of national concern, such as the full implementation of the 14^th and 15^th Amendments, be in the hands of the Federal government.

Recognize and welcome as positive the dominant role of the Federal government in setting the guidelines   for how housing should be produced, financed, managed, located, and distributed, and enforce those guidelines aggressively. Local discretion (but not autonomy.) is desirable within the framework of national if not global principles, e.g. an enforceable Declaration of Human Rights in Housing.[3]

Spell out, in theory and as implementable guides to practice, what values are intended to be covered by the general concepts of “fair”. Concepts such as justice, democracy, equity, diversity, growth, and sustainability are clearly involved, but their meaning and applicability to action public actions needs to be publicly debated and become ever present considerations in public and private actions.[4]

9. Require social justice impact statement of all public actions affecting housing and land use, learning from the environmental movement the possibilities of having such statements, as well as an awareness of their limitations with enforcement measures behind them

These nine actions could virtually constitute an agenda for future fair housing and civil rights activity.

Such actions are recognizably not on the immediate political agenda of any social movement, political party, or advocacy group. They sound very theoretical and very idealistic, whether that term is used pejoratively or literally.

But these are actually radical proposals, if their implications are thought through. They call into question fundamental assumptions and values taken for granted in capitalist society, such as the sacrosanct rights of private property, the importance of growth, especially measured in economic terms, as a priority for governmental action, the profit motive as the most effective vehicle for securing efficiency in production and service provision, , the desirability of the market as a mechanism for the allocation of housing or any of the necessities of civilized life, the meaning of equality in the satisfaction of needs.

In Andre Gorz’s phrase, there are reformist reforms and non-reformist reforms. These are reformist reforms; the six concrete principles suggested before them tend towards non-reformist reforms. Even more radical reforms, such as public ownership of all land, income based on need, work based on ability, government based on direct democracy, while perhaps still theoretically attractive, are hardly imaginable in countries such as the United States today.

Making the transition from principles to practice, from reforms to non-reformist reforms , is a major challenge to those critical of the status quo, and goes beyond the discussion here. But one simple suggestion might be useful. The difference between the two is essentially that reform still leave much more to be done; no-reformist reforms are more comprehensive, seek to address the roots of our problems, not just the branches – although those branches are what immediately hurts, and must be addressed before the roots can be gotten at. Making this point, and make it continually and emphatically, is perhaps a way of opening a door to the consideration of more, of non-reformist reforms   whose need is made apparent by the limitations of the reformist.

Some reforms lend themselves to opening the door more than others:[5] a speculative property tax on land begs the question of why profit should be made on the sale of land to begin with, zoning issues implicitly raise the question of the priority of exchange over use values, social welfare programs lead to the question of what standard of living we after all want to have everyone be able to have. How far this can be done in any given situation is a question of strategy; its desirability seems to me apparent.

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This Blog is part of a set of five:

[Blog #68 – Evaluation of Recent Developments, examined the reception the Court’s decision and the AFFHR have received and their respective roles in dealing with housing discrimination.

Blog #69 – Fair Housing: Limitations of Supreme Court decision and AFFHR, took up the limited scope of the AFFHR, the weaknesses in the Court’s decision and the problems of implementation for both.

Blog #70 – The Causes of Discrimination, opens an analysis of the current causes of discrimination, and the attribution of causes to both the legacy of slavery and to the present actors behind discrimination, and then the structural context in which they operate.

Blog #72 – Beyond Fair Housing: Some Elusive Principles for Societal Change, will raise some questions about elusive general principles for societal change.]

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[1] The new AFFH Regulations already contain provisions for such assistance, but are focused on data provision and analysis, not a comprehensive planning process.

[2] Michel Sorkin’s striking phrase.

[3] Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights could be the beginning of such a process. For a comprehensive survey, see: United Nations Housing rights legislation, Review of international and national legal instruments, publications in support of the Global Campaign for Secure Tenure No. 05. Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Nairobi, 2002 available at http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/HousingRightsen.pdf

[4] Susan Fainstein’s The Just City and David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City are current major steps in this direction. See also Peter Marcuse, James Connolly, Johannes Novy, Ingrid Olivo, Cuz Potter, Justin Steil, eds. 2009. Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice. Oxford: Routledge.

[5] Nancy Fraser has termed such reforms “transformative,” and I have used that term also from time to time. Susan Fainstein, in the opening chapter to her The Just City, has an insightful general discussion of a similar approach.