Brian Stouffer

Exploitation in the video game industry provides a glimpse at how many of us may be working in years to come.

For being such a big deal, the video game industry isn’t treated very seriously.

Let’s not make any mistake here: the industry is a big deal. Globally, yearly sales rival or surpass those of the Hollywood. Entire cities are planning on making video games the cornerstones of their new economies. They’re played at least as much by adults as by children.

Yet there’s a dearth of rigorous coverage of the industry. The video game press, such as it is, remains mired in a culture of payola and ad revenue addiction, outside of a few outlets like Gamasutra. The one television station devoted to industry news, G4 (which has moved away from covering only video games), seemed committed to proving every gamer stereotype true, with an endless parade of uncritical corporate press releases punctuated only by sophomoric oral sex jokes.

All of which is a shame, because something in the industry is wrong. Here, as in few other places, we see the kind of exploitation normally associated with the industrial sector in creative work. Already subject to lower wages when compared to the broader tech sector, video game studios’ management maintain the status quo by consciously manipulating the desires of writers, artists, and coders hoping to break into a creative field. The profit vacuumed up goes to ever more bloated management salaries and the unremittingly glitzy, tacky spectacles churned out by gaming’s PR departments.

The exploitation in the video game industry provides a glimpse at how the rest of us may be working in years to come.

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Few outside of the video game industry would think of gaming as a site for major labor abuse and exploitation. The real state of things occasionally bubbles up into the mainstream press when the situation becomes too great to ignore, as with the infamous EA Spouse controversy a decade ago – the first time the industry’s labor practices were discussed on a national scale.

EA, the largest, most successful video game company in the world at that time, was revealed (through a blog post by a software engineer’s wife, herself a game developer) as a place which insisted on permanent “crunch time,” cutting costs by insisting on up to 80-hour work weeks from employees rather than hiring more workers to make production schedules. The story broke at a time when EA was buying up small studios throughout the industry, enforcing its particularly draconian standards on workers with little say in the matter.

After lawsuits filed in the wake of the scandal, EA was forced to soften its practices. The titular EA Spouse, Erin Hoffman, formed a small watchdog group, hoping to monitor abuses. Once the media inevitably lost interest, however, the industry as a whole returned to its culture of inhumanly long hours, too little pay, and high burnout – and remains there today.

I came into the video game industry in 2007 through working at Funcom (where I did not witness anything extraordinarily abusive). I entered as a blank slate, not knowing what to expect or why I did it other than the fact that I liked video games and it seemed like a cool job.

I was a QA engineer, and a QA’s job is to break things in-game, record how the things were broken, and then pass the information to the content creation team, who would hopefully fix them. It’s a common entry-level gig in the industry, one which gives you a broad knowledge of how things work to eventually launch something more specialized.

Most of my coworkers viewed their gigs at Funcom as having “arrived.” Almost all of them had come through Red Storm, one of the most respected studios in the country and an industry linchpin in North Carolina. The stories they told were galling: gross underpayment, severe overworking, and middle management treating the cubicle farm as a little fiefdom all their own.

Red Storm at the time employed the bulk of their QAs as temps. Lured in by promises of working their way up the ladder, scores of college kids and young workers would come in, ready to make it in the new Hollywood of the video game industry. The pay was minimum wage. The hours were long, with one of my immediate supervisors casually stating that he regularly worked at least 60 hours a week during his time there. Being temps, there were no benefits.

This would go on for the duration of a project, usually the final four months or so. When the temps weren’t needed anymore, it was common for groups of them to be rounded up, summarily let go without notice, and told that a call would be forthcoming if their services were needed again.

There were other stories – strange and mean ones, like the producer who waltzed into the QA office and asked if anyone was heading for the dumpster. When no one answered, she dropped a big bag of garbage in the middle of the floor, snarled, “I guess I’ll just leave this here, then,” and stalked off; the QA lead chewed them out since the woman was a producer, a project manager.

Everyone who came through related the same story of QA’s complete sequestration from the development team; nobody was allowed to speak to a “dev” directly, only through intermediaries, nor to enter the dev side of the building. The QA temps were a clear underclass on one floor, while full-time “real” video game workers occupied the other.

The IGDA’s board rotates and consists largely of luminaries from the industry’s management class (perhaps unsurprising, given its more or less explicitly anti-unionization stance). A CEO or manager comes in for a bit, rolls out when his or her term is up, and is replaced by another with similar views on labor.

One such board member was particularly big: Mike Capps, then head of Epic Games. Capps is a major figure in the industry, with Epic being a major gaming company. Rich, outspoken, and powerful, in a 2008 panel, while serving on the board, he let slip what everyone running the industry thinks but won’t say for matters of decorum.

The exact quotes have weirdly disappeared into the ether, scrubbed from the IGDA’s minutes, but Capps stated bluntly that Epic would not hire people willing to work for less than 60 hours a week; that this was not a quality of life issue but a matter of Epic’s corporate culture, and that it was patently absurd that anyone getting into the industry shouldn’t expect the same.

The furor over the comments was immense. Greg Costikyan, a writer and industry critic, delivered a scathing rebuke. He was followed by others, from all corners of the gaming world. This was too much, apparently; as with EA Spouse, the industry’s mask had slipped too far for the incident to pass without comment.

Capps was forced to run damage control, particularly after the head of the IGDA, the person most responsible for setting the tone of the organization, gave tacit approval to his comments, stating that “work/life balance also goes far beyond the number of hours worked. Quality of life also varies significantly according to the individual.” Though the incident drew attention at the time, the follow-up interviews, where Capps doubled down on what his expectations and payoffs for industry workers were, were largely ignored.

“Games like Gears, you know, it’s one of the best reviewed games of all-time… You don’t get a game out like that with a bunch of people who don’t have any passion about the quality of the product and don’t want to spend that one extra night,” Capps states.

The p-word, “passion,” is used three times in the interview.

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Again and again, when you read interviews or watch industry trade shows like E3, “passion” is used as a word to describe the ideal employee. Translated, “passion” means someone willing to buy into the dream of becoming a video game developer so much that sane hours and adequate compensation are willingly turned away. Constant harping on video game workers’ passion becomes the means by which management implicitly justifies extreme worker abuse .

And it works because that sense of passion is very real. The first time that you walk through the door at an industry job, you’re taken with it. You enter knowing that every single person in the building shares a common interest with you and an appreciation for the art of crafting a game. Friendships can be built immediately – to this day, many of my best friends arose from that immediate commonality we all had on the job.

This is an incredibly enticing proposition; no one who goes in is completely immune to it, no matter how far down the totem pole of life’s interests gaming is. And there are few other jobs quite like it.

Geek culture takes such strongly held commonalities of interest and consumption far more seriously than most other subcultures. I recently wrote a piece for this publication which was, in part, about the replacement of traditional class, gender, and racial solidarity with a culture of consumption. Here, in the video game creation business, is the way capital harnesses geek culture to actively harm workers. The exchange is simple: you will work 60-hour weeks for a quarter less than other software fields; in exchange, you have a seat at the table of your primary identifying culture’s ruling class.

It would be a bad socialist, indeed, who would dismiss people working on something they love as worthless. Fulfillment and choice are pillars of a just labor market. That is what makes the actions and comments of managers like Capps so nasty. It is hard for someone working on a game, perhaps after a lifetime dreaming of such a job, to take an objective look at the situation and realize that, with a few outliers, the industry stinks.

And it does stink. Hard data on the industry is notoriously hard to come by, given the general uselessness of industry-wide organizations such as the IGDA and many figures lumping video games together with either general software or entertainment, but they do exist. Game Developer Magazine, a now-defunct sister publication folded under Gamasutra, has done yearly surveys of wages, gender participation, and other figures. The sample sizes aren’t huge, but they’re the best available to the public:

• 12 percent of respondents had been laid off within the last year. That’s over twice as high as the national mass layoff rate and higher than the national unemployment rate. Of those, 12 percent were still unemployed at the time of survey publication – again, well above national unemployment rates.
• While the overall salary numbers are only slightly lower than what workers in other software fields make, the entry level salaries for each position are consistently and significantly lower in the video game industry.
• The gender gap is massive and inexcusable. The job with the most female representation, producer, clocked in at just 23 percent and an average salary $7,000 less than males’. Female programmers stand at 4 percent; QA, the front door to a career in the industry, at a woeful 7 percent.
• Indie games, the only currently viable ticket to breaking the stranglehold of the big studios, are a ticket to poverty. The average indie worker made $23,000 a year.
• A whopping 84 percent of respondents work “crunch time,” those notorious 41+ hour work weeks which line up with the end of big projects. Of those, 32 percent worked 61-80 hours week (and usually goes on for months).

First and foremost, employees at all levels of the industry must organize. The first step is to abolish the IGDA wholesale. Darius Kazemi, a former board member, eloquently laid out why recently, but it boils down to the IGDA being an organ of management. It is, bluntly, a sham, a sop given to the workers in order to let them feel that change is imminent through quiet debate – a classic “company union,” for and by the gaming companies.

Real unionization, involving an alliance between middle-rung workers and those itching to take their jobs below, is not just desirable but necessary, not only for the workers enmeshed in twelve-hour days, but to save the industry from tottering over the edge into obsolescence.

Many observers pin their hopes on indie studios. But working in a five person shop making small games is no guarantor against the same sorts of abuses the corporate players truck in. The rise of indies must be married to a just and equitable approach to work and employment if they are to serve as a collective counterweight to corporate abuses. Given the size of most indie studios, radical approaches such as cooperatively owned studios and flat hierarchies are within easier reach than most anywhere else in the wider tech sector.

Secondly, women (and, though no data on them currently exists, racial minorities) must be better represented in the workforce. The survey results regarding women are unacceptable. Any “grownup” industry would see those figures plastered on major news outlets, irrefutable proof of a complete lack of commitment to equity’s most basic measures. A commitment to gender equality is not necessary simply for basic reasons of fairness; a just labor movement must be an inclusive labor movement.

The industry is not a helpless bystander in this. The common refrain from the tech world, that more women would be hired if only more women applied, is a poor excuse. Companies can recruit women more actively, make certain that the workplace is not hostile, and help work with local colleges to lobby hard for female students.

Thirdly, traditional colleges and universities should begin to displace the for-profits’ programs in this field. Video game programs are such a big part of for-profit marketing and enrollment pushes because traditional schools have not filled the gap.

Finally, media of all sorts must begin to treat the industry seriously. The industry’s practices must be examined seriously. The dearth of hard data and obfuscation in the education figures come directly from this tendency to dismiss the video game industry as something not worth covering seriously. There is real money here, with real people’s lives altered by how it flows.

At the moment, as with much of the tech sector, video game workers tend to fall into a familiar trap: reliance on beneficent management as a replacement for worker organization. For all the rotten practices, there are some genuinely rewarding places to work. But such environments exist at the sufferance of management rather than through any threat of collective action by workers. That is a tenuous situation to cling to – one which leaves workers completely helpless when management’s whims shift.

That said, there are possibilities of more radical approaches to both content production and labor reform in the industry. While the tech sector tends to skew libertarian, there seems to be a real thirst for more leftist approaches to reform in certain quarters, though it is not yet loud enough to alter the discussion on a large scale.

The very real possibility that such a transformation would affect the broader tech sector leaves the enticing proposition that the video game industry, ignored or mocked by so many, might actually prove an important struggle in the 21^st century.

Eloquent after a fashion:

“The plan is to allow those things that had been proposed over many years to reform a health-care system in America that certainly does need more help so that there’s more competition, there’s less tort reform threat, there’s less trajectory of the cost increases, and those plans have been proposed over and over again. And what thwarts those plans? It’s the far left. It’s President Obama and his supporters who will not allow the Republicans to usher in free market, patient-centered, doctor-patient relationship links to reform health care. “

Er, that’s it.

Lisa Miller checks in on Newtown. A glimpse of the inevitable infighting that follows such tragedies:

As grief settled on the town, so did money. Cash poured in from everywhere, arriving in envelopes addressed to no one. To Newtown. The town of Newtown. The families of Newtown. There were stories of cheerleaders, having sponsored fund-­raisers, walking around with $30,000 in their pockets. A guidance counselor at Newtown High School reportedly opened the mail to find $1,000 in cash. Around the country, people sold ribbons, bracelets, cupcakes, and sent in the proceeds, five and ten dollars at a time. The Davenport West honor society in Iowa sent in a check for $226.69, and the parents of a 3-year-old named Lillian sent $290.94, donations from her birthday party. According to the Connecticut attorney general, about $22 million has flooded the town since December 14, finding its way into about 70 different charities set up in the wake of the massacre. Very quickly, the matter of disbursing these funds became something else, a proxy fight over how to evaluate grief. …

The biggest fund by far was the one set up by 9 p.m. the day of the attack, under the auspices of the United Way of Western Connecticut. By April, it held $11 million, and local psychiatrist Chuck Herrick was named president of the board of the fund, a position that has made him one of the most unpopular men in town. It was Herrick, along with a handful of others, who had to help calculate the disbursements to the parents of murdered children, and who had to defend those calculations when the bereaved accused the United Way of being unfair, insensitive, condescending, elitist, paternalistic and, in a mantra recited by the grieving, of “raising money on the backs of our dead.”

It’s his father, Rafael Cruz. One of Rafael’s many insane rants, which David Corn reported on last week:

A Ted Cruz spokesman claims that these “selective quotes, taken out of context, mischaracterize the substance of Pastor Cruz’s message.” Corn thinks that response isn’t going to cut it:

Does Ted Cruz believe it’s a joke to accuse the president of trying to destroy God? Or that his father was kidding when he suggested Obama is “wicked,” asserted that the president is attempting to “destroy American exceptionalism,” said he wants government to be God, and insisted that “social justice is a cancer”? As for attacking the son with the father’s statements, the senator did not explain why it’s unfair to hold him accountable for remarks made by a person Cruz’s campaign routinely deployed as an official surrogate. According to campaign disclosure records, Cruz’s Senate campaign paid Rafael Cruz about $10,000 in traveling expenses in 2012 and 2013. And in August the conservative National Review noted that the father-son duo had forged a “political partnership,” reporting: “Cruz has kept his father, a 74-year-old pastor, involved with his political shop, using him not merely as a confidant and stand-in, but as a special envoy. He is Cruz’s preferred introductory speaker, his best messenger with evangelicals, and his favorite on-air sidekick.” Put it this way: Rafael Cruz is far closer to Ted Cruz and his political endeavors than Jeremiah Wright was to Obama and his campaigns.

What I find fascinating about the Cruzes is that they really do have a unified Christianist-Tea-Party worldview.

Rafael Cruz is a Dominionist, who believes that America is a Christian (not a Judeo-Christian) nation, and that its laws should be a version of Christian sharia, not secular arrangements for a diverse society. Ted Cruz, for his part, wants to shred the post-FDR safety net, balance the budget now, even during a lingering depression, and return to a bare-bones federal government that he believes was the intent of the Founders. Both are fundamentalists with fundamentalist texts: the entire Bible, including the Old Testament, and the Constitution as viewed by Americans more than two centuries ago. Both these belief-systems are responses, it seems to me, to the bewildering complexity of modern life, the globalized economy, and resentment of the claims of the poor and sick and needy. And for these very reasons, they are absolute and rigid. In a time of widespread economic distress, they are also very potent populist appeals to an imagined past that was once simple, Christian and just.

They are best seen, to my mind, as prophets, not pols. Only a prophet would risk throwing the entire world economy into a second Great Depression, shutting down the federal government, and wrecking the credit of the United States in order to protest a duly enacted law. But prophets are dangerous in politics – and Cruz is a very gifted demagogue. He was, after all, brought up by one.

What a surprise that the herbal supplement/alternative medicine industry is filled with hucksters, scam artists, and grifters, the likes of which American medicine hasn’t seen since the days of patent medicine before the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration in 1906

For the study, the researchers selected popular medicinal herbs, and then randomly bought different brands of those products from stores and outlets in Canada and the United States. To avoid singling out any company, they did not disclose any product names.

Among their findings were bottles of echinacea supplements, used by millions of Americans to prevent and treat colds, that contained ground up bitter weed, Parthenium hysterophorus, an invasive plant found in India and Australia that has been linked to rashes, nausea and flatulence.

Two bottles labeled as St. John’s wort, which studies have shown may treat mild depression, contained none of the medicinal herb. Instead, the pills in one bottle were made of nothing but rice, and another bottle contained only Alexandrian senna, an Egyptian yellow shrub that is a powerful laxative. Gingko biloba supplements, promoted as memory enhancers, were mixed with fillers and black walnut, a potentially deadly hazard for people with nut allergies.

Of 44 herbal supplements tested, one-third showed outright substitution, meaning there was no trace of the plant advertised on the bottle — only another plant in its place.

Many were adulterated with ingredients not listed on the label, like rice, soybean and wheat, which are used as fillers.

In some cases, these fillers were the only plant detected in the bottle — a health concern for people with allergies or those seeking gluten-free products, said the study’s lead author, Steven G. Newmaster, a biology professor and botanical director of the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario at the University of Guelph.

Unfortunately, we live in a society of extreme individualist consumerism where the everyday person thinks they can make their own medical decisions based on whatever information then glean from the internet and Jenny McCarthy appearances on The View, ignoring the advice of real doctors, refusing to give vaccinations to their children, starting public health crises, etc. That there’s a market of corporations openly taking advantage of these people is hardly shocking. What would shocking is if people realized medicine should not be a consumer choice to be taken lightly.

Of course, if we had a well-funded FDA with greater power to investigate, inspect, enforce, and punish, these products would be safe, even if they didn’t do anything for you. But returning America to the Gilded Age means undermining the FDA and opening up new markets for those selling adulterated foods and medicines. Poisoning consumers is the definition of freedom for this world view.

Spain’s Marinaleda may not quite be a utopia, but it beats “reality” hands-down.

Back in 2003, a friend and I acquired jobs at an avocado packing facility in a village in Andalusia not far from where two of my father’s relatives were executed by Franco. For three and a half euros an hour, we stood by a conveyor belt and alternately clipped avocado stems, arranged the fruit in boxes, and arranged the boxes on wooden pallets.

Each activity was accompanied by unironic reminders from the factory bosses to work como una máquina, although they eventually realized that such rhetoric was less effective in increasing our output than the provision of boxed wine and cognac in plastic cups.

Our spare time was spent consuming the same refreshments in other venues where elderly villagers reminisced about periods of mass regional starvation and counted the number of days remaining until the Christmas lottery. Andalusia appeared permanently and inevitably repressed by the state, the aristocracy, the euro, and a host of related demons. Beyond palliative cognac and lottery ticket purchases, there seemed little that could be done.

Not once did we hear of nearby Marinaleda, star of a new study by Dan Hancox called The Village Against the World. A self-proclaimed “utopia towards peace,” the central Andalusian village currently boasts 2,700 inhabitants and some delusions of grandeur. Hancox notes, “In most parts of the capitalist world, ‘another world is possible’ is just an idealistic rallying cry. In Marinaleda, it’s an observable fact.”

The utopian experiment began following the demise of Franco, who had been “happy to let [Andalusia] rot” as punishment for the region’s anarchist tendencies. Radical ideology appealed to so many Andalusians because the class disparities in the region were so egregious – between landless laborers, whose “poverty was often fatal,” and the aristocracy, whose massive estates were often reserved for activities like firearms target practice rather than those that could help sustain human life.

Faced with grave food shortages and over 60 percent unemployment in the late 1970s, the citizens of Marinaleda decided to act. At the helm of the struggle was village mayor Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, the proprietor of one of Hancox’s many satisfying metaphors: “a beard that could topple empires.”

Through the local fieldworkers’ union, the marinaleños defied elites with a seemingly unending sequence of strikes, land occupations, airport occupations, train station occupations, palace occupations, marches, and road blocks. A 1980 “hunger strike against hunger,” in which 700 villagers (including children) went without food for nine days, propelled Marinaleda into the international spotlight.

The state caved to villagers’ demand for an emergency payment to Andalusia’s unemployed and the marinaleños pressed on with the fight, gaining intermittent concessions throughout the 1980s and setting the stage for a stunning triumph in 1991: Marinaleda was awarded 1,200 hectares of farmland, formerly owned by Spanish royalty, by the Andalusian government.

The farm is now run by the village cooperative, which has typically paid workers more than double the Spanish minimum wage, and crops are chosen with the aim of maximizing labor opportunities rather than profit. The village also has an olive oil processing plant, a vegetable processing and canning factory, various stadiums and sports facilities, a park, an amphitheatre for film screenings, two schools, and 350 casitas – family homes built by the villagers themselves with government-provided materials and entailing a 15 euro-per-month “mortgage” payment.

Comparing this cooperative system to the housing situation in the rest of contemporary Spain, Hancox writes:

Nationally, up to 400,000 families have been evicted since 2008… [U]nder Spanish housing law, when you’re evicted by your mortgage lender, that isn’t the end of it: you have to keep paying the mortgage. In final acts of helplessness, suicides by homeowners on the brink of foreclosure have become horrifyingly common – on more than one occasion, while the bailiffs have been coming up the stairs, evictees have hurled themselves out of upstairs windows.

Marinaleda’s unemployment rate of between 5 and 6 percent has also caught the attention of crisis-stricken Spain (where, for example, the national youth unemployment rate exceeds 56 percent), especially when Sánchez Gordillo updated his repertoire in 2012 to include the organized confiscation of goods from supermarket chains for donation to hungry families.

Continuously reelected since 1979 and a survivor of various assassination attempts and arrests, the mayor is described by Hancox as seeing “no… discrepancy in devoting as much attention and passion to the local specifics of the pueblo – the need to start planting artichokes this month, not pimentos – as he does to the big picture, persuading the world that only an end to capitalism will restore dignity to the lives of billions.”

Beyond vegetables and revolutionary slogans, Sánchez Gordillo is a subscriber to the notion of a “human right to joy,” as Hancox puts it, stressing that “we throw a lot of parties and party collectively.”

There’s also virtually no crime in the village, leading to the abolition of the police force in violation of national law. And there’s free Wi-Fi.

So just how excited should we be about Marinaleda?

Citing Orwell’s reflections on “‘that strange and moving experience’ of believing in a revolution,” Hancox offers the reader a rare chance to believe, to relive his own encounter with the village and the mayor who “drained the capitalist-realist defeatism out of me and carried me halfway back to adolescence.”

Given the details of life there, the designation of Marinaleda as a “utopia towards peace,” the slogan emblazoned on an archway over the town’s main thoroughfare, seems to reflect reality. The propaganda of other subversive locales, like the billboards in Cuba affirming that thousands of children die everyday in the world but that not one of them is Cuban, don’t inspire the same confidence.

Hancox’s assessment of the village isn’t uncritical. He argues that Marinaleda is not fully communist nor totally utopian. Private enterprise is permitted to an extent, barring attempted incursions by, say, Starbucks. And Sánchez Gordillo’s utopian narrative inevitably simplifies the struggle and exaggerates the level of public cohesion in the village.

According to Mariano Pradas, one of two elected councilors who don’t belong to Sánchez Gordillo’s party Izquierda Unida, Marinaleda’s general assemblies, where citizens participate in town decision-making, are procedurally democratic, but are only attended by marinaleños who recognize that attendance will lead to procuring work and staying on the “right side” of the town’s leadership.

But it’s difficult to contend that the “right side” is not, in fact, right when, as Hancox points out, Spain outside Marinaleda consists of “a society pummeled, impoverished and atomized, pulled into death and destruction by an economic system and a political class who do not care, and have never cared, whether the poor live or die.”

Another complication arises from the paradoxical nature of Marinaleda’s relationship with the state and the regional government. Hancox explains that many of the town’s amenities, which have enabled the marinaleños to obtain leisure opportunities and infrastructure that would normally be allocated to a village five times its size, have come through protest and sizable financial demands made of the Spanish administration.

At the same time, the state is defied and despised for “its intrusions, its determination to throttle their liberty, rights and local culture, and its historic enmity to the autonomous spirit of the pueblo.” (Of course, when a system is characterized by profit obsession, inhumanity and rampant elite corruption, demands of meager financial contributions to the general wellbeing of the populace seem completely justified. Why the hell not demand an indoor swimming pool complex?)

The perils of depending on the state to maintain one’s utopia have become increasingly apparent during the crisis. Spain’s budget cuts have naturally affected Marinaleda’s incoming funds and compounded problems of recent poor harvests. Still, if Spain were to hold a crisis-weathering competition, utopia would beat reality hands-down.

Remarking on the less-than-ringing endorsements of work in the fields and on the factory production line from the citizens of Marinaleda, Hancox observes that “[a] change in socio-political context or labor organization, however dramatic, does little to change the nature of work itself.” He adds:

“But not a single marinaleño I met neglected to mention the socio-political context of that work, the history of the struggle to create it, or the parlous situation in the rest of crisis-hit Spain. The lament about work being boring, tiring or unstimulating was always followed by a ‘but’: but at least we have it here. But at least we have it now. But at least we have it together. But at least we fought and won it for ourselves.”

At the very least, then, we might say Marinaleda is a utopia-in-progress. Far from being the least-bad option, it’s actually pretty damn good.

Sánchez Gordillo’s recent illness has prompted speculation over the project’s sustainability in the absence of its iconic mayor. Despite Marinaleda bordering on a leadership cult around Sánchez Gordillo, Hancox notes the town’s “politics are, above all, the primacy of people power.” This power just happens to be executed “most passionately, and most successfully, when Sánchez Gordillo is holding the megaphone.”

The confluence of historical, personal, and environmental factors that has enabled a complex communist experiment in a minute Andalusian village clearly isn’t entirely replicable on a mass scale. But the idea that neoliberalism can be effectively contested is exportable.

According to Hancox, the Spanish crisis made it impossible to dismiss Marinaleda as “a rural curiosity run by a bearded eccentric”; instead, it became an alibi for protesters in confrontation with the neoliberal establishment: “‘What are your demands? What is your alternative?’ barked the dogs of capitalist realism. And, especially in the south, the indignados were able to respond: ‘Well, how about Marinaleda?’”

For Hancox, the reality of Marinaleda was once again made vivid in a discussion with an olive oil factory employee nicknamed El Bigotes (“The Mustache”) of the village’s first years of struggle. El Bigotes “transmitted a similar excitement to that I’ve seen on the faces of young members of Spain’s indignados: the intense thrill that comes from determinedly standing together against the status quo and announcing you are going to make something new. The ineffable, irrepressible subjectivity of solidarity.”

That kind of effervescence is the stuff that makes a life in struggle worth living. Marinaleda – that “liberated space, a laborers’ island in a sea of latifundios” – is a reminder that the only way to make the world right is to make it left.

This is one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen in political journalism. Juan Williams, one of America’s least interesting political writers when he was at NPR, went to Fox News after he was let go. Anyone could see what was coming — churn out a couple “the party left me” pieces as lazy as your previous work, and happily cash your fatter paychecks.

What seems to have happened — and I can’t explain it, but would be very unfair of me not to acknowledge it — is that Williams has been jostled into writing stuff that’s actually liberal and smart, while challenging the premises of his bosses:

But some people losing their current policies [and being offered better coverage] are going to have to pay a higher price. Taking crocodile tears to a new level, ObamaCare opponents are now rushing to their defense and calling the president a liar.

These critics include Republican politicians who did not vote for ObamaCare; these are Republican governors who refuse to set up exchanges to reach their own citizens; these are people oppose expanding Medicaid to help poor people getting better health care; these are people who have never put any proposal on the table as an alternative fix for the nation’s costly health care system that leaves tens of millions with inadequate medical coverage and tens of millions more totally uninsured.

The fact is if you are one of the estimated 2 million Americans whose health insurance plans may have been cancelled this month, you should not be blaming President Obama or the Affordable Care Act.

You should be blaming your insurance company because they have not been providing you with coverage that meets the minimum basic standards for health care.

Let me put it more bluntly: your insurance companies have been taking advantage of you and the Affordable Care Act puts in place consumer protection and tells them to stop abusing people.

Well, damned if that isn’t both right on the money and a perspective you’re unlikely to see very often in the mainstream media. Fox News actually adding value — who would have predicted that would ever happen?

Let’s go to Kentucky, a deep red state which has nonetheless set up one of the best systems for getting health insurance for the poor. We have heard an awful lot of gripes from those with insurance on the individual market, and those with Cadillac-style plans who have been forced to adjust. But the people we haven’t yet truly seen or heard are those getting affordable insurance for the first time in their lives. Maybe I’m a squish, but this report from the NYT helped put some of the political cock-fighting into perspective:

The woman, a thin 61-year-old who refused to give her name, citing privacy concerns, had come to the public library here to sign up for health insurance through Kentucky’s new online exchange. She had a painful lump on the back of her hand and other health problems that worried her deeply, she said, but had been unable to afford insurance as a home health care worker who earns $9 an hour.

Within a minute, the system checked her information and flashed its conclusion on Ms. Cauley’s laptop: eligible for Medicaid. The woman began to weep with relief. Without insurance, she said as she left, “it’s cheaper to die.”

What price can you put on that? Or on this:

So far, [insurance agent Donald Mucci] has enrolled just a few longtime customers in exchange plans. They include Mrs. Shields, 49, a widow who had been rejected by insurance companies because she has diabetes. She is paying $745 a month for coverage through a program for people with pre-existing conditions, but the program will end in January.

Mrs. Shields, who has an annual income of about $17,000, qualified for a monthly premium subsidy of $232 a month. With Mr. Mucci’s help, she chose a silver-tier plan offered by Anthem that has a $2,450 deductible and a $4,500 out-of-pocket maximum. She will pay a monthly premium of $151 after the subsidy.Mr. Mucci said he would get a commission of $18 from the transaction. Before the health care law, he said, he would typically receive a lot more.

“Is it a win?” he said. “For Judy, it sure is.”

At the core of this technocratic edifice is something quite simple: the lifting of intense anxiety, the restoration of personal dignity, the chance to live better and longer, the opportunity to be free of physical pain. In the end, though I remain skeptical about whether the ACA is the best possible solution to the plight of those in such need, it is the only solution at hand. I want it to work. And I find the brutal attacks on it to be devoid of any true sense of what it feels to be alone and sick and terrified.

(Photo: Affordable Care Act navigator Adrian Madriz (R) speaks with Lourdes Duenas, who is looking for health insurance, during a navigation session put on by the Epilepsy Foundation Florida to help people sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act on October 8, 2013 in Miami, Florida. By Joe Raedle/AFP/Getty.)

Well, that was an ugly week.

As I say in the piece, Harry Edwards’s dissent in the Freshway case is very good.  He does a particularly good job of clearly laying out why whether the contraceptive mandate can satisfy a strict scrutiny standard is beside the point because it doesn’t place anything remotely resembling a substantial burden on the free exercise of religion:

There are three reasons why the Mandate does not substantially burden the Gilardis’ “exercise of religion.” First, the Mandate does not require the Gilardis to use or purchase contraception themselves. Second, the Mandate does not require the Gilardis to encourage Freshway’s employees to use contraceptives any more directly than they do by authorizing Freshway to pay wages. Finally, the Gilardis remain free to express publicly their disapproval of contraceptive products.

Because the Mandate does not require the Gilardis to personally engage in conduct prohibited by their religious beliefs, this case differs from every case in which the Court has found a substantial burden on religious exercise.

Checkmate — these arguments should be dispositive. In theory, these arguments should also be attractive to Scalia, given his preference for clear rules and his much-maligned but wise opinion in Smith. Unfortunately, the “principle” Scalia uses to decide cases dealing with the Affordable Care Act seems to be “Broccoli Cornhusker Kickback Obama stole my car keys!”

And with both Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla Owen stretching the law into unrecognizable form to read the most recent platform of the Texas Republican Party into the relevant legal text, it’s worth noting once again that the “Gang of 14″ deal involved Senate Democrats getting rolled about as badly as it’s possible to be rolled, which didn’t stop Republicans from being outraged about it.

This is a very important point:

The employer-based health-insurance system is much more popular than the individual market. It’s also much more redistributive. The 25-year-old male in the loading dock has to pay the same premiums as the diabetic 60-year-old in accounting. Is this injustice an important part of the political discourse? How often do you hear people complain about it?

Every iteration of an alternative conservative health-care proposal would impose far more disruption on the status quo than would Obamacare. Most conservative plans involve drastically curtailing the tax deduction for employer-based insurance. That would create cancellation notices for many times the number of people currently seeing them. Even the more modest plans to scale back Obama’s regulation of the individual market would run the GOP into a political minefield. Which regulations do they want to strip away? Discrimination against people with preexisting conditions? Discrimination against potentially pregnant women? Mental-health parity? Every single one of those changes creates millions of angry potential victims.

This is exactly why the actual Republican Party health-care plan is not repeal and replace, but repeal and cackle. Republicans are on strong ground exploiting fear of change. They have understood perfectly well that they must avoid having to defend a different set of changes to the status quo. They have kept their various replace ideas safely to the side for exactly that reason.

I’d also note that there’s nothing in the status quo ante that guarantees that you could keep your existing insurance. You could, for example, lose your job.

And this is also crucial. A lot of anecdotes about “cancelled insurance” aren’t actually going to pan out.

Tales from the New Gilded Age:

Last week, childlike Business Insider boss Henry Blodget publicly bemoaned the fact that a fancy New York restaurant employs bathroom attendants. Now, Henry’s dream has come true: the bathroom attendants are all getting fired. Great . . .

Thus, Henry Blodget, a millionaire, has successfully convinced Keith McNally, a millionaire, to fire several low-wage employees, in order to avoid any potential inconvenience to Balthazar-dining millionaires in the future.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand several people who probably don’t have the option of becoming the publishers of crappy internet publications or hedge fund managers are now unemployed. On the other, the jobs they lost consist of quasi-feudal make-work that wouldn’t exist in any tolerably egalitarian society, whose primary function is to make the Masters of the Universe feel more potent than the ED pills they wash down with bottle service champagne.

Mike Konczal usefully summarizes Gordon Lafer’s new report on the Tea Party’s class warfare. Although the media and most blogs have focused on Tea Party legislators’ work to undermine voting rights and reproductive rights, typically their work undermining employee rights has gone underreported. An excerpt:

Crucially, as Lafer emphasizes, this isn’t about what we colloquially refer to as “conservative values.” Rather than rolling back the state, tea party Republicans are calling for extensive observation and disciplining of unemployed people.

Tennessee conservatives and business interests, for instance, are pushing “the Unemployment Insurance Accountability Act of 2012 [which] would add scenarios that disqualify a worker from receiving unemployment in the first place [and] call for audits of 1,000 claimants weekly.” So much for smaller government and more privacy.

And for all the conservative talk about making programs as local as possible, what is often referred to as “subsidiarity” or “devolution,” that principle is ignored when it comes to repealing labor protections. Many conservative states have pushed laws designed to override localities that seek to create or increase their minimum wages, prevailing wages, living wages or mandatory sick days. Given that many states have big cities where more extensive labor protections exist, this matters for many people.

Effectively, the purpose of the Republican war on workers is to recreate the Gilded Age, a project going quite smoothly for the plutocrats, even if they are having trouble controlling the electoral implications of the angry people they’ve unleashed.

For all the debate on the effects of the tea party's and the Republican party's march to the far right at the federal level, it’s their impact at the state level that will probably be with us the longest.

Back in 2010, 11 states — Alabama, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Wyoming — put Republicans in control of all branches of state government. Other states saw their center of gravity move much farther to the right. And in the years since, those states have pushed an all-out conservative agenda.

Some elements of this this fight are well-covered and understood, particularly on voting rights and abortion. As Norm Ornstein observes, we are seeing “a new era of voter suppression that parallels the pre-1960s era — this time affecting not just African-Americans but also Hispanic-Americans, women, and students, among others.” And, as the Guttmacher Institute notes, “issues related to reproductive health and rights at the state level received unprecedented attention in 2011."

Less well-covered has been the assault on workers' rights as part of a coordinated, strategic, national and ideological program. There’s been excellent coverage of efforts by individual state legislatures, particularly efforts to roll back unionization for public-sector workers in Wisconsin and Michigan. But there hasn’t been a solid overview of how all these efforts hang together and how extensive and coordinated they are.

That has changed with a remarkable paper by the University of Oregon’s Gordon Lafer for the Economic Policy Institute, titled "The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011 2012." Lafer documents how extensive anti-labor efforts have been with the wave of newly conservative state governments, and he paints a picture of the forest that arises out of all these anti-labor trees.

As Lafer documents:

Four states passed laws restricting the minimum wage, four lifted restrictions on child labor, and 16 imposed new limits on benefits for the unemployed. With the support of the corporate lobbies, states also passed laws stripping workers of overtime rights; repealing or restricting rights to sick leave; and making it harder to sue one’s employer for race or sex discrimination, and easier to deny employees’ rights by classifying them as 'independent contractors.'

These states also fought laws pertaining to sick leave, workplace safety standards and, as mentioned above, time for work meals.

So what should people draw from these actions? What extends across specific states to a general, nationwide, ideological agenda?

First, this isn’t just about public-sector workers, a subject that has long sparked political battles. These recent efforts are actually focused just as much, if not much more, on private-sector workers who aren’t in a union. Efforts to roll back everything from minimum wage laws to unemployment insurance affects everyone who works for a wage, and this is where the coordination across states has been particularly intense.

It’s also not just a matter of tighter state budgets. This is crucial to understanding the situation. For instance: 2011 saw the largest one-year decline in the number of state-level public-sector workers since records start in 1955. But the Republican-governed states that were most aggressive in laying off state workers had some of the smallest budget deficits.

The 11 states that went all-Republican in 2010, plus Texas, account for 70 percent of public-sector layoffs. Yet those states account for only 12.5 percent of the aggregate state budget gap. The most aggressive efforts to roll back public-sector workers were in places with strong funding of pensions, like Wisconsin.

And rather than cutting services simply to bring their states into solvency, many of these conservative states immediately tried to cut taxes afterward. Arizona, for example, cut health services and education, eliminated its state-funded pre-kindergarten program, and then immediately cut corporate taxes and commercial property taxes. Texas is moving to do the same things.

Crucially, as Lafer emphasizes, this isn’t about what we colloquially refer to as “conservative values.” Rather than rolling back the state, tea party Republicans are calling for extensive observation and disciplining of unemployed people.

Tennessee conservatives and business interests, for instance, are pushing “the Unemployment Insurance Accountability Act of 2012 [which] would add scenarios that disqualify a worker from receiving unemployment in the first place [and] call for audits of 1,000 claimants weekly.” So much for smaller government and more privacy.

And for all the conservative talk about making programs as local as possible, what is often referred to as "subsidiarity" or "devolution," that principle is ignored when it comes to repealing labor protections. Many conservative states have pushed laws designed to override localities that seek to create or increase their minimum wages, prevailing wages, living wages or mandatory sick days. Given that many states have big cities where more extensive labor protections exist, this matters for many people.

As Lafer points out, this agenda is being pushed by a combination of traditional business lobbies such as the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, in conjunction with ideological organizational groups like the Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity. Organizing middlemen groups like ALEC coordinate the legislative approach. This kind of approach is exactly what was called for in the Powell Memo, and as intellectual historian Jason Stahl notes, was always the purpose of conservative think tanks like Heritage.

As Lafer summarizes, conservative governments pushed changes that “undermine the wages, working conditions, legal protections, or bargaining power of either organized or unorganized employees.” The conditions that emerge from these states will determine the day-to-day lives of people living in red states, and will be with us for decades. How liberals and labor respond will be equally important.

Mike Konczal is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, where he focuses on financial regulation, inequality and unemployment. He writes a weekly column for Wonkblog. Follow him on Twitter here .

Jonathan Cohn argues that most Republican healthcare plans would be more far disruptive than the ACA:

With Obamacare, a small number of people lose their current insurance but they end up with alternative, typically stronger coverage. Under the plans Republicans have endorsed, a larger number of people would lose their current insurance, as people migrated to a more volatile and less secure marketplace. Under Obamacare, the number of Americans without health insurance at all will come down, eventually by 30 or 40 million. Under most of the Republican plans, the number of Americans without insurance would rise.

Honest Republicans would justify their policies by arguing that Medicaid is a wasteful, inefficient program not worth keeping—and their changes, overall, would reduce health care spending while maximizing liberty. In other words, forcing people to give up their coverage is worth it. I don’t agree with those arguments, but they are honest. But they should stop pretending that it’s possible to address the problems of American health care without disrupting at least some people’s insurance arrangements—because, after all, they want to do the very same thing.

Chait thinks this is why Republicans have failed to propose a real Obamacare alternative:

Every iteration of an alternative conservative health-care proposal would impose far more disruption on the status quo than would Obamacare. Most conservative plans involve drastically curtailing the tax deduction for employer-based insurance. That would create cancellation notices for many times the number of people currently seeing them. Even the more modest plans to scale back Obama’s regulation of the individual market would run the GOP into a political minefield. Which regulations do they want to strip away? Discrimination against people with preexisting conditions? Discrimination against potentially pregnant women? Mental-health parity? Every single one of those changes creates millions of angry potential victims.

This is exactly why the actual Republican Party health-care plan is not repeal and replace, but repeal and cackle. Republicans are on strong ground exploiting fear of change. They have understood perfectly well that they must avoid having to defend a different set of changes to the status quo. They have kept their various replace ideas safely to the side for exactly that reason.

Beutler piles on:

[S]mart conservatives — which is to say, policy wonks without much cachet on Capitol Hill — would replace all insurance with subsidized catastrophic coverage and tax-preferred health savings accounts. Nobody with private insurance or Medicaid would get to keep what they have, no matter how much they like it.

Reihan objects:

To be sure, there are some people who think that government policy should lean against comprehensive insurance. David Goldhill, author of Catastrophic Care, favors something like single-payer catastrophic coverage. Brad DeLong has floated the idea as well. The conservatives I think Beutler has in mind certainly like the idea of catastrophic insurance. It’s just that they have no problem with allowing people to buy comprehensive insurance if that’s what they’d like to do with their money, and they recognize that low-income and disabled individuals will need larger subsidies than other people. …

One can definitely imagine alternatives to Obamacare that would be more disruptive than Obamacare. If consumers were banned from purchasing comprehensive health insurance, for example, there would definitely be a lot of disruption. But by and large, “reform conservatives” favor more modest measures that are designed to ease the transition to a more sustainable system.

So way back in 2009, we decided to help fire up the lads for a big game against the Naval Academy with a rousing sea shanty.

The main goal of the project, besides playing with a cardboard sea serpent, was to remind the gang that with just enough willpower, we could will the horrifying 2007 loss to Navy out of existence and pretend that the 44-game winning streak was still alive.

All things being equal, I think we did a rather good job of driving home that point, and everything was pretty much fine and dandy ever since. Let's take a second to re-watch that wonderful hit from 2009. Such innocent times.




Well, then reality hit like a ton of bricks, and the Irish dropped two straight to Navy, each more inexplicable than the last. Some think that the insane hubris of the Sea Shanty was responsible for the barrage of red zone turnovers and defenses forgetting how to tackle, and they're probably right.

At any rate, we thought we'd revisit that wonderful song, and break you off a little preview of the remix, which our cool and awesome DJ friend from London who I assure you is totally real mashed up with our original tracks and some sticky phat beats (I am assured that's what the kids are saying these days). Enjoy.

Mike Konczal says most of what needs to be said about the underlying sources of Obamacare’s complexity, which in turn set the stage for the current tech problems. Basically, Obamacare isn’t complicated because government social insurance programs have to be complicated: neither Social Security nor Medicare are complex in structure. It’s complicated because political constraints made a straightforward single-payer system unachievable.

It’s been clear all along that the Affordable Care Act sets up a sort of Rube Goldberg device, a complicated system that in the end is supposed to more or less simulate the results of single-payer, but keeping private insurance companies in the mix and holding down the headline amount of government outlays through means-testing. This doesn’t make it unworkable: state exchanges are working, and healthcare.gov will probably get fixed before the whole thing kicks in. But it did make a botched rollout much more likely.

So Konczal is right to say that the implementation problems aren’t revealing problems with the idea of social insurance; they’re revealing the price we pay for insisting on keeping insurance companies in the mix, when they serve little useful purpose.

So does this mean that liberals should have insisted on single-payer or nothing? No. Single-payer wasn’t going to happen — partly because of the insurance lobby’s power, partly because voters wouldn’t have gone for a system that took away their existing coverage and replaced it with the unknown. Yes, Obamacare is a somewhat awkward kludge, but if that’s what it took to cover the uninsured, so be it.

And although the botched rollout is infuriating — count me among those who believe that liberals best serve their own cause by admitting that, not trying to cover for the botch — the odds remain high that this will work, and make America a much better place.

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What a surprise that billionaire sports owners would steal from their poorest employees:

Two Major League Baseball clubs–the San Francisco Giants and Miami Marlins—are under investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor for possible federal wage law violations. The investigations come amid wider concern about questionable pay practices throughout professional baseball, according to interviews and records obtained by FairWarning under the Freedom of Information Act.

Labor Department spokesman Jason Surbey confirmed the investigations of the Marlins and Giants, but would not give details. However, emails reviewed by FairWarning show that possible improper use of unpaid interns is a focus of the Giants probe. It is the Labor Department’s second recent investigation of the Giants over pay practices involving lower level employees.

An attorney for the Giants said the team would not comment on the current investigation. A Marlins spokesman said the club does not believe “that any of the Marlins’ current labor practices are improper….We can confirm that the Marlins have been and will continue to cooperate fully with the Department of Labor.” Major League Baseball officials could not be reached.

Officials with the department’s Wage and Hour Division announced in August that the Giants had resolved the prior case by agreeing to pay $544,715 in back wages and damages to 74 employees. Many were clubhouse workers the agency said were paid at a daily rate of $55, but who sometimes worked so many hours that they got less than minimum wage and no overtime. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.

Football players at Grambling State University did they only thing they could do — they went on strike.

Athletes are workers. Whether the commodification of play as sport is inherently and simply a socializing function of capitalism is neither here nor there: the fact remains that playing football — either as professionals in the NFL or the semi-professionals of the NCAA — is fundamentally an act of labor. Ostensibly the NCAA exists to protect and advocate for student-athletes; in reality, however, it only serves to insulate and isolate the unpaid labor-force of an industry that generates an estimated $6 billion in revenue annually.

The only recourse these athletes have is to strike — which is exactly what the football players of Grambling State, a historically black university in Louisiana, have done. This, even in the face of potentially having their scholarships revoked.

Last Tuesday, according to the Shreveport Times, the team walked out of a meeting with university president Frank Pogue, athletic director Aaron James, interim coach George Ragsdale — who started the season as running back coach — and student government president Jordan Harvey.

On Wednesday, a player critical of the previous day’s meeting was kicked out of morning weight-training. His teammates walked out in solidarity; they subsequently refused to attend the afternoon’s practice. Players boycotted practice the next day as well, while Ragsdale was replaced as interim coach by defensive coordinator Dennis “Dirt” Winston.

Pogue said Friday morning the game would go on, but the players made a liar of him when they refused to board the buses waiting to take them up to Jackson State to get beat up on. (Jackson State is 6-2 on the season and 6-0 in the SWAC; Grambling is 0-7 and 0-4 in the SWAC.)

The team lists their grievances in a letter. Their concerns are varied: the floor in the weight-room is “coming apart,” causing players to trip and fall while they are working out; uniforms are not properly cleaned, spreading staph infections; athletes have had to pay for their own Muscle Milk and Gatorade, and drink water from a hose underneath the bleachers; they had to travel by bus to play games in Kansas City, Miss. (14 hours), and Indianapolis, Ind. (17 hours).

Many of these conditions have been brought about by budget constraints. School spokesman Will Sutton has referenced a cumulative 57% budget reduction, cumulative over the past several years. The athletics department was spared until this year when it was forced to cut $335,000 from its overall budget of $6.8 million; football was cut by $75,000 to about $2 million.

Family, friends, and alumni who wish to help out via donation, however, are rejected, because they “want to put their money toward a specific cause, not the university or athletics as a whole.” Moreover — according to the letter — both the president and athletic director traveled to Kansas City and Indianapolis by plane.

Still, there is a sense that this is bigger than football. Describing what the team is concerned with, Ant McGhee tweeted, “its DEEPER than football wins or losses even facilities that’s a SMALLER scale of things!” Meanwhile, referencing criticisms from an alumnus that the team was acting soft, that back in his day they played every game going uphill in the snow, linebacker Steve Orisakwe tweeted, “Dude is talking about the 99 team and he’s saying they had the same stuff as us!  That’s not a problem?!!?”

These athletes are competitors: not only do they want to play, they want to win. And yet when they advocate for themselves in an attempt to be given the chance to do so, they are punished. (It is unclear what the state of the players’ scholarships is.) It seems ludicrous — but then again, is it so strange that workers would be denied the resources necessary to execute their labor in the most efficient, fulfilling way possible? One does not have to look too far to find yet another iteration of the great absurdity of capitalism: that the myopic focus on revenue streams and profit undermines itself, alienating workers who want to succeed and to flourish in their work. “Let ‘em play, ref,” indeed.

The Shreveport Times reports that the team will start practicing again today, encouraged by former coach Doug Williams. The promise of “updated facilities” isn’t much of a concession, but the strike could have wider ramifications for an NCAA goliath built on unpaid labor.

I think Ezra and Atrios have this right. To the extent that budget negotiations are viable, there’s no reason that tax increases should be the first Democratic priority, even leaving aside that insisting on tax increases makes any deal inherently impossible. I don’t oppose upper-class tax increases, but there are other Democratic priorities, such as infrastructure spending or a public option or spending on programs for the poor, that are significantly more important.

I’ve been arguing this for years, but there’s another reason why making tax increases the primary Democratic “get” in a “Grand Bargain” negotiation is a terrible idea: namely, that any upper-class tax increases are only good until the next time Republicans control the House of Representatives and the White House simultaneously. Well-constructed social programs become entrenched. Infrastructure spending isn’t, but once you’ve spent the money you get the nice things. Tax increases to decrease the deficit, conversely, don’t really work, because the money you save will just go to future tax cuts. Since Republicans don’t care about deficits, you can’t make a “Grand Bargain” based on deficit reduction that won’t be a terrible trade. But if you ignore deficits — which in the current economic context you pretty much can — you might be able to get something worthwhile. And if you can’t make a deal, that’s far better than cutting Social Security in exchange for evanescent tax hikes.

Ahoy, gang. Hopefully you're all enjoying the bye week as much as we are. Bye weeks are a great time to reintroduce yourself to your wife and child, get that haircut and shave you've been putting off for eight months, and give yourself thrice-daily stem cell injections in your liver to try to regrow as much tissue as possible until the next time your team makes you drink yourself half to death.

Unfortunately, we've been so busy taking care of our honey-do lists that we haven't been able to shoot a new episode for you. Sorry about that. But we care about keeping you entertained, so here's one from the archives: a rerun of one of our favorite episodes of Stuffing the Passer, which originally aired on October 20, 1988. Enjoy!


I admire your piety, Mr. Zorich.

Still no resolution on the debt ceiling, and I think people are still too optimistic here. Republicans still aren’t willing to walk away from this without some kind of trophy, so they can claim victory; the whole point of Obama’s position is that you don’t get anything, not even something trivial, as a reward for threatening disaster.

Meanwhile, Republicans are getting a lot of pressure from business, which doesn’t like what’s happening. And some pundits are already speculating about the possibility either of a split within the GOP or a kind of coup in which the business-backed party elders take control back from the crazies.

So I’ve been thinking about this, and have managed to convince myself that it’s wishful thinking.

Now, it’s true that Republicans are bad for business — and they didn’t start being bad for business when the latest hostage crisis erupted. Ever since Republicans retook the House, federal spending adjusted for inflation and population has been dropping fast:

This is exactly the wrong thing to be doing in a still-depressed economy with interest rates at zero; my back of the envelope says that GDP would be at least 2 percent higher, and corporate profits at least 6 percent higher, if this wrong-headed austerity weren’t taking place. So even before the current crisis Republican obstructionism was costing corporate America a lot of money.

But here’s the thing: while the modern GOP is bad for business, it’s arguably good for wealthy business leaders. After all, it keeps their taxes low, so that their take-home pay is probably higher than it would be under better economic management.

Also, when you make as much money as the 0.1 percent does, it’s no longer about what you can buy — it’s about prestige, about receiving deference, about what Tom Wolfe (in an essay I haven’t been able to find) called “seeing ‘em jump.” And there’s clearly more of that kind of satisfaction under Republicans; under Democrats, as Aimai at No More Mister Nice Blog points out, tycoons suffer the agony of having to deal with people they can’t fire.

In a way, this is an inversion of the usual argument made by defenders of inequality. They’re always saying that workers should be happy to accept a declining share of national income, because the incentives associated with inequality make the economic pie bigger, and they end up better off in the end. What’s really going on with plutocrats right now, however, is that they’re basically willing to accept lousy economic policies from right-wing politicians as long as they get a bigger share of the shrinking pie.

This may sound very cynical — but then, if you aren’t cynical at this point, you aren’t paying attention. And I suspect that the GOP would have to get a lot crazier before big business bails.

Update: And my thanks to readers, who pointed me to that Tom Wolfe article, “The ultimate power: seeing ‘em jump,” which is as good as I remembered.

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This is what in sports is known as running up the score.

Update: The Times has edited the original story to walk it back a bit, from a straight out rejection on the WH’s part to a “failure to agree.” This strikes me as a largely cosmetic distinction, but we’ll see.

But they like it.

theadventuresofmichaelpawlak:

I want to begin with a simple quote, a letter from Abraham Lincoln, facing a very similar constellation of forces as president Obama does with today’s nullification party, and sounding remarkably like his 2008 successor from Illinois:

What is our present condition? We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices. In this they are either attempting to play upon us, or they are in dead earnest. Either way, if we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum.

This is the challenge today. Not to out-last these vandals, but to vanquish them. To vanquish them to end this preposterous excuse for a political party, to expose their lack of any constructive alternatives for the challenges we face, to indelibly mark them as vandals of the very constitution they dare to celebrate, and as saboteurs of this constitutional democracy. We have a chance now to show the kind of scorching sunlight on these creatures of ideological certainty and personal hubris that they scurry back to the dark holes from which they have recently emerged and be consigned to the moral margins their rancid racism finds most congenial.

To wit: their callousness; their transparent racism; their assault on reason; their contempt for democracy; and their inversion of conservative virtues.

Today was a traffic stunner with our top post being “The Nullification Party” and the second “What Kind Of World Do These People Live In?”

Oh, and Tina Fey is a genius; and Aaron Paul makes me want to cry.

See you in the morning, if the Republicans allow it.

(Photograph: A U.S. Park Police officer stands guard at the Lincoln Memorial, October 1, 2013 in Washington, DC. The National Mall and all monuments and large sections of the government will close due to government shut down after Congress failed to agree on spending. By Mark Wilson/Getty Images.)

Another predictable demand has been added to the GOP’s ransom note:

House Republicans have added a measure aimed at limiting contraceptive coverage to the spending bill coming up for a vote Saturday night, a spokesman for Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kansas, told CNN.

A senior House leadership aide confirmed that development.

The so-called “conscience clause” would allow employers and insurers to opt out of preventative care for women which they find objectionable on moral or religious grounds. That prominently includes birth control, which most insurers are required to provide for free under current Obamacare rules.

Like Atrios, I’m so old I remember when the hot proposition among centrist pundits was a “Grand Bargain” in which pro-choicers would agree that abortion was gross and should be made arbitrarily less accessible to poor women in exchange for greater access to contraception. In addition to the first part being a terrible idea, the crucial flaw in the plan has always been that most actually existing American anti-choicers care about regulating female sexuality, not protecting fetal life. You can’t get anything by trading someone something they don’t want and greater access to contraception for women is emphatically something most American proponents of criminalizing abortion don’t want.

And don’t call it a “conscience clause.” It’s a “denial of healthcare people are legally entitled to” clause and an “imposing one’s religious beliefs on others” clause.