Comments Elsewhere

Again, if you get the other guy what exactly do you win?

I don’t know. But we did already get this guy, and what we “won” was (1) a string of broken promises, (2) no policy advances at all, and (3) a President who has administered what is quantitatively the worst administration ever for immigrants in the history of the United States of America. It seems to me that this is a good reason to conclude that voting to (re-)elect this guy, instead of the other guy, is not a reliable means for achieving pro-immigrant policy goals.

And it also seems likely to me that if the immigrant activist community continues putting out the message that we will reliably tamp down criticism whenever and wherever it might possibly affect the (re-)electoral prospects of Democratic politicians, no matter what they actually do in office, then that is sure to guarantee a situation in which Democratic politicians have no reason at all to care what we think. If we cannot criticize political figures when the criticism might possibly have some effect on political outcomes, then when can we criticize them? And what incentive do they have to care even a little bit about what we have to say, if we decline to say it when it might make a difference for their electoral prospects? We’ve tried this strategy for years, and it seems to have gotten us exactly what we have — nominally pro-immigrant politicians who in fact treat our community like a captive constituency, who routinely promise reform and play off fear of “the other guy,” while delivering policy records that are substantively just as bad, or even worse, than the results delivered by overtly Right-wing administrations. (I don’t just mean Obama, either. Operation Gatekeeper, for example, was Bill Clinton’s project.)

Does anyone have a favorite Spanish etymological dictionary or word history reference they’d like to recommend? (It’s fine if the text is in Spanish.)

Nathan:

I agree that more specifics on Chavez would have been helpful. To be fair, this article is intended as an op-ed for circulation in magazines, and given the constraints of the format it's hard to work in a lot in the way of the background. But, if it helps, here's a (very long) report from a former Bolivarian/Chávez sympathizer. It's somewhat out-of-date, since it was published in July 2006 based on a discussion of the situation in January-March 2006, but it should provide a lot of useful starting points and a great deal of detail about the story up to that point: "Venezuela, Socialism to the Highest Bidder" by Nachie, for the Red and Anarchist Action Network.

If you can read Spanish there are of course Venezuelan radical publications that have repeatedly addressed these issues. El Libertario is one of the longest-running critics; you might check out their election-season editorials in the most recent issue (Sep/Oct 2012), their running commentary on the "Boliburguesïa" (Boli-bourgeoisie or Boli-bosses), etc.
My recent post Shameless Self-promotion Sunday

(Here's a pretty good article that came out several years ago on the weird demands set by the old USDA regulations: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2003/01/unhappy-meals . See in particular the stuff about the surplus buy-up program and about the perverse incentives the system creates for menu planning. Of course it's Mother Jones, so they think the way to fix this is to reform the rules while keeping the corporate subsidy program in place, which is kind of like having government set a fire in your house, and then -- responsible reform! -- run to the kitchen and grab a pot full of water to douse it with, in the hopes that will put it out. But probably it would have a better idea, and certainly less damaging for all concerned, just not to set the fire in the first place.)

I'm sure it is an example of federal overreach but it's hard for me to see how it represents an increase in federal overreach compared to the status quo ante. The contents of meals in the school lunch program have always been closely regulated and mandated by USDA; previously, the main intent of the regulation was to require that meals would include certain portions of each "food group" (with each "group" representing a different agribusiness lobby: dairy farmers, cereal growers, produce growers, and then cattlemen and the meat industry). The ratios were rigged to ensure that dairy and meat got an artificially big cut, because USDA is committed to buying up a certain amount in surplus per year as a price support to agribusiness. Now the administration is pushing to put through a different set of regulations, which alter the mandated ratios, supposedly in the interest of better nutrition. (But then, the old four-food-groups ratios were also supposedly set in the interest of nutrition; it's just that government nutritional guidelines have a curiously strong tendency to reflect whatever the balance of power between the different agribusiness interests happens to be at the moment.)

The results are probably not going to be any better in the end than the results of the old system. But the old system was also a micromanaging government monopoly, so it's hard for me to see how they are worse, either. Really there is no way to solve the problem at all except to get political control out of school lunches entirely. But you can't get that by reverting to the old rules; you can only get it by dropping the USDA surplus buy-up program. There's no right way for the federal government to manage a subsidy.

Every time I peek in one, I become more convinced that Facebook “discussion” groups are like an amazing mechanical device that takes human differences as input, and produces the most obnoxious, least productive possible forms of interaction as output. The more participants, the more efficient the machine.