Persian Culture and Iranian Behavior

We had dinner the other night with a friend who had lived in the same city in Iran where I had. We missed each other there by a few months. We were talking about the tense situation in the Persian Gulf and what they might do.

Carl asked what I thought an Iranian who had been insulted would do in response. I don’t have much farsi left but the words “qorbani shoma” came out of my mouth. I knew how to use it but not what it meant. Carl explained that it means “I sacrifice myself for you.” In other words a typical Persian response would be to shame the other with an excess of courtesy. Not the only response, certainly, but a common one. 

I commented that there was another Persian expression I did know the meaning of and resisted using, “Chashm.” My wife related that the Persians said that when the Mogul rulers conquered their country they responded to any statements or behavior they disliked by putting out people’s eyes. “Chashm” literally means “On my eyes,” short for if I don’t do what you ask you may put my eyes out. I hate that expression and the cruelty it recalls. It doesn’t necessarily mean they will do what they promised. It’s a form of hyperbole now but they’ll do what they please. 

We shared a third memory, of bargaining for the things we wanted. Over tea and over several days, gradually testing each others’ limits. Unless either of us mistakenly identified whether we were acting American-style or Persian-style. 

These memories prove little about what Iran will do now. But they bespeak a subtle and sophisticated culture. Persians certainly make mistakes, like we all do. Their leaders often say preposterous things, but I think they’re crazy like a fox, not stupid. They know the face of danger. They certainly seek their own ends. They may have been involved in bombings around the world, bombings that have been somewhat difficult to prove. But make war? Not if they can avoid it. They are not only a subtle and sophisticated people; they also have quite a lot of experience with and in the west, including this country. 

The 1979 seizure of the American Embassy took on a life of its own and had unintended consequences but it was done against the background of history that few Americans knew but Persians did. They acted to prevent a counterrevolution being launched from the Embassy like the coup that Americans organized from the Embassy in 1953 when the Eisenhower Administration ousted their Prime Minister. So they certainly can and did make mistakes, and miscalculate, but I’d be very surprised if they want to start a war.

Their image is not high in the rest of the Middle East right now. The best thing we can do is to stay calm, speak the language of greater courtesy, and try to figure out what bargains are possible.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, January 24, 2012.

Race & Economic Justice, for Martin Luther King

Yesterday was Martin Luther King day. That actually led me to think some more about the Occupy Movement and their slogan, the 99%.

Movements for economic justice have repeatedly had their backs broken over the race issue. In the 19th century, the surging Populist Movement tried to ignore race and bring poor whites and blacks together. But it was destroyed in the South over race. We limped into the 20th century without major reforms although the Progressive Movement that brought Woodrow Wilson to the White House enacted pieces of the Populist creed and the Roosevelt Administration enacted more.

But the Roosevelt Administration also steered clear of race in ways that would have an enormous impact on America. It cut blacks out of the major improvements for labor – Social Security, hours and wages legislation and unemployment insurance – by excluding from coverage the types of work that most blacks did, namely farm and domestic labor. Those programs helped to start white workers on the path toward saving. As many scholars have shown, it marked the beginnings of the shift of wealth to labor, white labor.

The GI Bill at the end of World War II began to give some blacks the leg up they needed, but the federal government’s role in blocking blacks from moving to the suburbs as whites were doing isolated a large part of the black community from jobs. And the redlining of black city neighborhoods meant there would be systematic disinvestment where they lived and a much more serious racial problem for the rest of us to deal with on top of pre-existing racism.

The civil rights movement of the 40s, 50s and 60s had its back broken, in turn, by battles between blacks and whites and arguments about what “we” are doing for “them.” In the wake of that battle, for which succeeding Republican Administrations used affirmative action as their wedge issue to break the black-white coalition that had passed civil rights laws, the alliance for economic justice began to fail. Reagan announced that a new class of economists much more favorable to the wealthy, the so-called monetarists were now in fashion. George H. W. Bush famously called that “voodoo economics” and he was right, as the current depression is making clear to many more people. And with the monetarists, all the things that our government had been doing to improve the economy and mitigate the damage of recession to working people were now passé and they deflected the attention of the working classes and so-called blue-collar Americans from economic justice to a variety of social issues.

Not everyone of course sees social issues as a euphemism for black-white conflict. But enough do. The Tea Party is strongest in the states of the old Confederacy and many of the advocates are plain enough in their claims and their backgrounds. Whether you have seen social issues as a neutral way to target any benefits for blacks or not, it has functioned as a major distraction from the growing economic disparity in this country.

That was Martin Luther King’s great insight – that we are all in this together. That ultimately we had to fight for economic justice for everybody. It has always been the case that the great majority of the poor are white. Though you’d never know it from the bombast. And it has always been the case that ignoring the poor threatens the rest of us by lowering the wage floor and pulling all our salaries down. And so it is also the Occupy Movement’s great insight – we are almost all in the 99%, and we are all affected by social and economic justice for all. Vive the 99%.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Midday Magazine, January 17, 2012.

Steve Gottlieb will be back on January 13

Taxes and the Price of Success

With a deal in process about state taxes amid shouts about which state’s taxes are highest, let me point out some basic facts. New York is expensive. My employers had to pay me well when I worked in New York City so that I could afford to live and work there. Same when I worked in Boston. Why? Taxes? Actually that’s not the big issue which is real estate.

New York and Boston are expensive because homes are expensive, expensive to buy, and expensive to rent. Given the cost of New York and Boston real estate, businesses have to charge more to cover the costs. There’s a never ending battle between businesses and the owners of the realty – the better your business, the more your landlord thinks he or she should get. It isn’t solved by buying the property – that just turns it into the cost of carrying the mortgage or what economists call the opportunity cost of not selling at a good price.

Realty is expensive because places like New York, Boston and San Francisco are happening places, alive in the many ways that make them attractive. There’s plenty to do, and specialists in everything you’d ever want from doctors to watchmakers. There’s high brow, low brow and all sorts of middle brows. There are opportunities to work and play with like-minded people and organizations, and jobs with big time opportunities. There are business opportunities because so many of the people that businesses want to deal with are already there – customers, employees, suppliers, consultants, shippers, traders – all there.

Lively places draw people, people jack up the price of space, and high priced space drives up the cost of everything else. That includes government workers. Years ago when I left St. Louis for a public service job in New York City, my boss and I had to figure out how much more expensive that would be. It didn’t matter that the job was in the public sector. I still had to be able to take care of my family and myself. And that cost money, a good deal more than I earned a thousand miles to the west.

Of course if government employees have to be paid more, and if all the services that government has to buy in New York and Boston cost more, that also means higher taxes.

In other words, although we keep fussing about it, high New York taxes are partly an index of success. If we provided the same services that, say, Mississippi provided, save only cost of living adjustments, we would be much more expensive than they. But of course if we only provided the same services as Mississippi, New York would hardly be the destination that it is now for so many Americans from all over the country. And they wouldn’t make the large contributions to our economy that they do.

In other words, we could lower our taxes and our services, but we’d all be poorer. The really important issue isn’t whether we pay more in taxes than some other state, most of which are much less successful than New York or Massachusetts, for example. The real issue is the wisdom of the investments we make here, and the wisdom of the investments we don’t make. Are we selling ourselves short? Or are we building a state that will be attractive to people and business for years to come? There’s a lot more than taxes in that calculation. Think about it.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, December 13, 2011.

Our Stake in Europe

Do we have a stake in what is happening in Europe? Some countries, particularly in southern Europe are having trouble paying their debts in a recession. It shouldn’t be a surprise – taxes shrink in a recession. Of course in some places it is pathological – Greeks refuse to pay the taxes they owe in such large numbers that they are bankrupting their country. But the problem is wider, with deep roots in the recession.

As a result other countries have been reconsidering their participation in the Euro and even in the European Union itself. Should we care?

The Economy has hit a Republican Wall

Did you hear Republican Senator Pat Toomey’s recent weekly Republican radio address. He announced that “the economy has hit a wall.” Exactly. It hit a Republican wall. Everything our government has done to bring us out of recession for the last eighty years he and his fellow Republicans have said “no” to.

• Unemployment compensation. No extensions.
• Spending on infrastructure. Not a penny.
• Regulation of corporate shenanigans. No.
• Regulation of bankers’ shenanigans. No; nothing to clean up the financial system.

Instead the Republicans want to spend your hard earned money, if you’re lucky enough to have a job, on tax breaks for people who don’t need it. Toomey, echoing the Republican PR phrasebook, called taxes on the portion of income that exceeds a million dollars “job killing taxes.” Watch out – I think he’s trying to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge. Taxes would kill jobs if the taxpayers would actually spend the money in ways that would employ people. In fact they are quite well aware that isn’t true, can’t be true.

I had the opportunity to ask a member of former President Bush’s top leadership, how do the newspapers say it, a high Administration source. I asked him if they had data indicating what the Bush tax cuts were actually being used for? It was a private, off the record conversation and I appreciated his candor. He lowered his voice and told me “McMansions.” Wealthy beneficiaries of the Bush tax cuts built themselves bigger houses. Thanks. They contributed to the housing boom – and bust. They did not contribute to the economy. My source added something which should be obvious – there has been plenty of money available to invest.  Those who have the money have never needed more so they could invest. They have it. They’re not using it. The money is not being productively used in this country and the reason has nothing whatever to do with taxes – they need a market. And when the economy is tanking, there isn’t much of a market – until we hit bottom. Tax cuts for those at the top – a rip-off.

Actually the value of taxes depends on what you do with them. Tax the middle class to support the lavish living of those who pay a smaller proportion of their income and the economy will stay in the tank. But put idle funds to work, building the infrastructure, supporting the major R&D that our government has been very good at, preparing America for the major challenges that lie ahead, and the whole country wins.

So thank you to the Occupy movement. They’re asking the right questions and pointing in the right direction. We need to use the ballot box to push out of office the Republicans who insist on leaving the economy in the doldrums while they line the pockets of their friends, Republicans who think it is more important that the country do poorly while Obama is in office than that we take care of the needs of our people. Shame on them. Let’s occupy their public space and build a movement that pushes them out of the news into the dustbin of history.

—    This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, Nov. 29, 2011.

Cheers for David Soares

I should begin by making clear that many of the people involved in the dispute I’m about to discuss are graduates of Albany Law where I teach, including the Governor, the District Attorney and some of the Occupiers, and I know some of them, including the District Attorney.

In this dispute about the handling of the Occupy Albany movement, I have nothing but praise for David Soares, District Attorney for Albany County. Soares has refused to prosecute people for participating in Occupy Albany and making plain their objection to government policies and massive inequality. Clearly Soares has better things to do.

Occupy Wall Street vs. Have a Tea Party

A bumper sticker said “I work so that someone on welfare doesn’t.” No, I work to support captains of finance who make costly problems for everybody else, threatening their jobs, their homes and the food on the table. What the titans of finance caused doesn’t compare with what little the rest of us can do to affect the economy.

Should we let government attach their GPS’s to our cars?

Earlier today the Court heard arguments in United States v. Jones. For a solid month, the feds tracked Jones with the aid of a GPS device hidden on his car. And they got him. He dealt drugs. The feds figured it out and convicted him. Why should anybody care? GPS data can be very revealing. Shouldn’t we cheer?

Eye-witness Testimony

I’m delighted that the Occupy Wall Street movement has shifted the discussion from the demands of those who want to accumulate ever larger shares of the wealth of America, leaving less and less to most Americans, to the vision of those who understand that the true wealth of America is in the welfare and the future of its people. It requires a degree of willpower to call your attention to something else. But there are a couple of cases being argued in the U.S. Supreme Court, one tomorrow and one next week, that deserve a word. So this week let me address the one tomorrow.

Perry v. New Hampshire will be argued tomorrow at 10. The question is whether the trial judge was required to pass on the reliability of eye witness identification before letting the testimony go to the jury.