Outside baseball ... waaaaay outside: High ERAs, low averages, a 22-man all-season roster, and managers who have been known to trade players for catfish may not sound like great sport, but for fans who are tired of major-league machinations, the independent baseball leagues could be just what the commissioner ordered. For ten years these small, struggling but often financially successful leagues have thrived at the margins, sometimes outdrawing minor league neighbors and -- in Minnesota, anyway, where the St. Paul Saints sell out their seasons on a regular basis -- even major league competition.

Independent ball isn't a replacement for major-league ball, where home run kings rule and the occasional pitching duel is still fought on the sward, but its rough-and-tumble play, loyal fan base, and collection of no-name hopefuls, once-promising AAA players, and off-the-reservation major leaguers looking for one last shot at glory make it the kind of baseball America hasn't seen since the last time they revised the sac fly rule. And even its frequent mishaps -- Fort Worth Cats pitcher Matt Harrington, who once spurned a $4 million signing bonus from the Rockies, gave up five earned runs, three walks, and hit a batsman in a single one-and-a-half inning relief appearance against the Springfield Ducks -- are somehow endearing, in an "overwhelming underdog" kind of way. Plus, it's cheap, with even the most expensive tickets less than a hot dog and a Coke at any major-league park.

So, next year at the ballpark?

 
Y'all come back now, y'hear? In the 1930s, when impoverished farm families clawed their way westward to try and eke out lives in the fruit orchards of the Golden State, Californians dismissed them as "Okies," an epithet that can be heard even today. So perhaps it's not surprising that CBS is attempting to resurrect The Beverly Hillbillies as a reality series to star "real live rubes from the South."

According to the article, "The [as-yet unselected] family will be given money -- exactly how much hasn't been determined -- with which to buy expensive cars and designer suits, hire maids and personal assistants, and dine at hot West L.A. eateries." But, should their Nielsens drop, they're going to have to hightail it back to Appalachia: "CBS has also not decided what to do with its new Clampetts once the network is through with them. ... [T]hey could be allowed to take away their various purchases."

 
A place in the sun: Over the past few weeks, the WaPo has been tracking "the social changes that have led to the rise of moderate black politicians,"

Terry Neal's excellent "Talking Points" column argues that "[t]he black electorate is increasingly independent and moderate, scornful of old-style machine politics, and ultimately, less responsive to the civil-rights era rhetoric that ushered the first significant wave of black politicians into office in the 1960's and early 1970's." Though some politicians may contend that they lost to that conspiratorial favorite of black radicals, the Jewish lobby, that is at best a "facile oversimplification." The real problem for them is that they are "to the left of many of [their] black, middle-class constituents."

An article from the news desk takes a different angle, discussing how elected officials can find themselves tagged with an unwanted "black leader" label, marginalizing them and shutting the doors on sources of power and funding.

Both articles show how the black electorate is finding itself increasingly disserved by civil rights leaders whose political philosophies stand at odds with those of the voters, but also how that same electorate retains a not unreasonable mistrust of the GOP, despite their philosophical consonance with the Republican party.

Younger black voters are wealthier, better-educated, and more market-oriented than the older generations, and they don't feel the same attachment and indebtedness to civil rights figures their parents and grandparents do. The affluent "generation Y" voters now approaching their thirties come from economic and social backgrounds that are more Cosby's "Ghost Dad" than Ellison's "Invisible Man," and their needs and preferences have shifted as a result.

Here in Dallas, former Mayor Ron Kirk exemplifies this shift. A popular two-term mayor and former Texas secretary of state, Kirk rose to power with the backing of Dallas' business community and the support of the affluent northern sector of the city. The telecom boom of the '90s brought in a large number of well-educated voters whose position in the telecom meritocracy was largely insensitive to matters of race and national origin; one MCI executive I knew was a black American heading company operations in Mexico (from Dallas) with a group of largely Indian, Pakistani, and Chinese software developers. These voters helped Kirk develop the weak mayor's office into a bully pulpit from which he fought with a fractious city council riven with racial and class hatred. In 1994, Dallas, perhaps the most conservative if not reactionary cities in Texas, was also the first major Texas city to swear in a black mayor -- without race even being a topic of discussion. Today, Kirk is in a dead heat with Republican John Cornyn in a solidly GOP state. Even if Kirk loses, his showing is an indication that the political game has changed for black politicians.

The problem for the GOP, of course, is that they retain a reputation as the party of pale plutocrats, which cripples them in the contest for the "majority minorities" coming to compose the American electorate. If the party can't get past the mistrust of the voters, they will almost inevitably cede the territory to the Democrats.

The only way for the GOP to fight for those voters is to show sincerity, and that means both distancing itself from the more unsavory elements of the Southern Strategy -- such as those infamous speaking fees from the Council of Conservative Citizens -- and showing black Americans how conservatism provides a better tool for reducing poverty and improving American culture. Whether the party has the energy and vision to promote a plan that extends beyond the next electoral cycle remains to be seen.

 
41, 42, 43, Zero: The Administration must have seen it as manna from heaven: a Judicial Watch FOIA request for documents dealing with Clinton's last-minute pardon of -- let's all say it together -- "fugitive financier" Marc Rich. With the Administration constantly narrowing the area in which FOIA requests are even considered, reportedly to protect documents dating from the elder Bush's tenure as well as its own well-sealed workings, this was a golden opportunity to extend executive privilege to include "not only advice given to a president about individual pardons, but also government papers he has never seen and officials he has never talked to." This immunization of ultra camera documents and information from FOIA requests has already sparked both legal and public-relations challenges from the gadfly organization, which has embroiled both the Clinton and Bush administrations in numerous official misconduct lawsuits. This will no doubt be worth following as it wends its way through the courts and Congress.

 
JAG'd Edges: For over twenty years, Harvard Law School has forbidden the United States military to recruit through its Office of Career Services (OCS -- yes, it's a confusing acronym in this context) due to the School's opposition to the military's stance on homosexuals in the service. But now, faced with the potential loss of $328 million per year in government funds for the University, the School has backed down. Dean Robert C. Clark, in an open letter to the faculty and students, said yesterday that "the Law School will welcome the military to recruit through OCS" while still "condemn[ing] the military's discriminatory practices." Meanwhile, gay student groups plan to wreak havoc with the recruitment efforts, employing such tactics as "filling all interview slots with [their] members when military recruiters come to the campus."

Perhaps I'm just cynical, but the HLS ban on recruiting -- a nominal ban at best, since the military was still able to recruit through the offices of a veterans' student group -- seems to represent the worst of limousine-liberal activism. This is, after all, not only one of the most powerful and influential educational institutions, but one of the most powerful and influential institutions, period, in America. (With alnost $20 billion in Endowment reserves and $2 billion in yearly revenue, the University wouldn't be all that far from the Fortune 500, were it ranked as such.) One might think that, if this issue was important enough to the School for it to get involved in the first place, they could devise a more active policy than ensuring that the military couldn't actively recruit Cambridge's best and brightest for public service.

 
"A house on the hill and a Coupe de Ville." Last week's reparations rally on the Mall did little more than underscore the weakness of the movement as a political phenomenon. (The attempt to get reparations through legal settlements and trials moves alone and apace.) But it was packed with enough fringe-dwellers to occasion second thoughts in even otherwise enthusiastic reparations supporters -- from The American Prospect, no less!

 


The Ten Percent Solution. It's worth spending a few minutes to consider Horowitz's comments on the economic aspects of slavery, since they appear to have touched off a minor firestorm, both from Scoobie Davis' post on the matter, and Horowitz's response.

I should begin by saying that I don't believe Horowitz is a racist, unless you care to use the expanded CRS definition of racism. I also find no small proportion of his work to be thoughtful and well-done (as well as congenial to my political prejudices, so you may take my opinion with a copious helping of salt). However, he is ideologically, or at least emotionally, blinkered on many issues of race, which can lead, on one hand, to terrible misalliances or, on the other, to a tendency to demonize his opponents, no matter their sincerity (his attacks on Randall Robinson being one example). What made his statement on Crossfire so distasteful to many on the left is that it was offered with no context, no doubt misleading many into believing that Horowitz, as he put it sardonically, thinks "slaves should be grateful because food, housing and clothing were provided to them." I don't doubt that Crossfire is not the place to provide nuance or complexity, but Horowitz tried to condense two and a half pages of argument -- already rather condensed -- from his book Uncivil Wars into a single sound bite; an ill-advised tactic.

As for his response: leaving aside for the moment Horowitz's characterization of the contributors here as "post-modern nitwits" (though I don't find any here to be the latter, and neither Scoobie Davis nor the Rittenhouse Review are in any way the former), I should firstly defend the provenance of the quote. It was taken from the CNN transcript of the Crossfire Mr. Horowitz appeared on, and there is no question that Mr. Davis read the entire exchange between Horowitz and reparations advocate Ron Walters. The quote in question reads,

[T]wo economotricians[sic] won the Nobel Prize for studying slavery and they came up with the figure of 10 percent of a slave's wages were unpaid labor because the slave, after all, got food, clothing and housing.

Horowitz is referring to Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, who wrote Time on the Cross, a controversial study of slavery that concluded that the "peculiar institution" was not, as popularly asserted, an economically moribund tradition, but a very efficient (albeit morally repugnant) enterprise.¹

In their afterword to the 1989 edition of the book, Fogel and Engerman said they regretted not providing more than a pro forma moral indictment of slavery in TotC, choosing instead to emphasize the purely econometric aspects of their analyses. Horowitz would do well to heed those words; when we seek to change the frame of a debate, it is incumbent upon us to where our views, and those of our intellectual opponents, lie on the new ground. Else, we leave ourselves open to charges of mendacious ommission.

Fogel and Engerman concluded that ~12% of an enslaved American's "wages" (one of the more controversial aspects of Fogel and Engerman's analysis, as noted by such critics as economist Richard Sutch, is the nature and extent of the underlying data used) were expropriated by the slaveholder, with most of the remainder going to subsidize the costs of slave management, and a small percentage appearing as cash or kind payments to slaves (such as artisans). This amounted to an exploitation of around $750 (2002 dollars) over the life of an individual, on a lifetime "income" of around $9000. Fogel and Engerman's analysis and conclusions are far from universally accepted by their peers, but it does no harm in this context to accept them as settled.

When Horowitz quotes TotC but maintains that "slavery was not a very profitable economic system (this is one of the reasons it is no longer with us)," he is either genuinely mistaken, or is being disingenuous. Pace Horowitz, a 10% margin above the cost of free labor -- especially since, as Fogel and Engerman show, slaves were hard workers with an efficiency well above that of small tenant farmers -- is a huge competitive advantage, large enough to keep the moral nightmare of slavery alive well into the life of a nation that was founded on principles utterly opposed to that practice.²

According to the 1860 census, there were approximately four million enslaved Americans. At an average lifetime exploitation of $36 (1860 dollars) per slave, that comes to a total expropriation of $144,000,000, or $2,727,630,589 in current dollars. Of course, there were far more than four million Americans who lived in slavery, and not all of them were enslaved for all their lives due to Emancipation, but this suggests that the amount of money under discussion is not, as Horowitz seems to suggest, a trivial value. An Economist article from earlier this year provided these numbers:

Robert Fogel ... estimates that from 1780 to 1860 slaves in America were paid (in food, shelter and other basics) about 10 percent less than free workers got for similar jobs. He calculates that slaves' expropriated wages would have totalled US$24 billion in 1860. Compound interest over 142 years at an interest rate of three percent a year would take the total bill for reparations to US$1.6 trillion. At six percent, the bill would balloon to US$97 trillion, nine times the size of the US economy.

There are many reasons to assume that these figures should be amended over the long term -- for example, roughly half of the value of Southern investments was lost during and immediately after the Civil War -- but no matter how we slice the numbers, there are some very large dollar values at stake. As well, the ~12% figure doesn't take into account other losses, such as the potential economic loss of income suffered by individuals who are unable to receive training, choose their occupation, change locations, or bargain for their wages.

It's not my intention to debate reparations in this space and, were I to do so, I would be arguing against N'COBRA, not Horowitz, but there are certainly some serious objections to be raised against his selective use of TotC.

During Crossfire, Horowitz also went on to say the following:

Now, you and I ... pay -- 30 percent or 40 percent of our labor is unpaid because it goes to the federal government.

This argument was tendentious and unconvincing when Fogel and Engerman first advanced it, and they did so with qualifications that Horowitz did not provide. Such a statement implies a moral equivalence between the economic exploitation of slavery and the tax system of a free nation. There are two primary arguments against this statement.

First, taxes are not appropriated for personal use by government agents, but for provision of public services, including, of course, the common defense. The ~12% expropriation over free wages suffered by enslaved Americans went to subsidize the European consumers of Southern cotton and tobacco and, to a lesser degree, the lifestyles of slaveowning planters.³

Second, though none of us enjoy paying taxes, and virtually everyone disagrees with at least some small part of government expenditures, the point remains that, as a democracy, we have recourse to the polls to lower our taxes and change our national spending. Taxes are, at a very high level, a voluntary enterprise. Slaves had no such freedom, of course, and one doubts that anyone would take slavery with a 10% expropriation over freedom with a 30% tax rate.

 
Kulturkampf, ja! Freiheitkampf, nein! Paleocon Thomas Fleming has a new editorial up at Chronicles, decrying what he calls an "entirely fictive opposition" of Republicans and conservative elder statesmen to the possibility of invading Iraq. Like all paleocons, Fleming is deeply isolationist -- see his long-standing defense of the Serbians and his attacks on American action in the Balkans -- and the possibility of Americans dying in any region of the world with so much as a connecting flight to Israel turns him into a right-wing Noam Chomsky: "[T]he reality is that the American people do not want anyone to die for an American empire."

 
Del-Orwellian: Details are still sketchy, but the AP is reporting that the city of Wilmington has been targeted by civil rights groups due to a police database containing "names, addresses and photographs" of "people who police believe are likely to break the law ... many of whom have clean slates." As if Delaware needed more bad press right now .... (Oh, yeah -- should Jonathan Chait read this, you can also add that Delaware was one of only three states at the beginning of Independence that disenfranchised by statute women who otherwise met voting criteria.)

Addendum: A detailed and even-handed article on the practice is here.

Blogrolling for Doughnuts. It's like Campaigns & Elections, but without the horrible typesetting: Skippy the Bush Kangaroo (hey, I still have no idea) links to author and political advisor Taegan Goddard's excellent Political Wire site. Check 'er out.

 
Chasing the wires to Baghdad: The NYT leads with a story that follows an AP piece on Iraqi urban combat from a week and a half ago. To cope with a weakened military, and to play up its few strengths -- the remaining RG and SRG forces, and an air defense capability reconstituted thanks to clandestine Chinese aid -- Iraq is reportedly going to dig its forces into urban areas to up the costs for any invasion. Although the Iraqi military could likely slow any offensive by taking the war into urban terrain and using Iraqi citizens as human shields, there's no chance of them stopping a determined assault, especially once the WMD complexes outside the cities are taken. Whether Saddam would be willing to risk the danger of moving chemical and biological weapons into his own cities has yet to be seen.

O, Tempora! The Times on the Times: Is the NYT publishing false information? Are its columnists acting as conduits for semi-official government leaks and trial balloons, in the grand old tradition of James Reston? Perhaps so, according to ... the New York Times. Mickey Kaus suggests that previous op-ed salvos against the news desk were evidence of conflict between personalities in the two organizations; if so, consider this as one of the first return shots in the war.