If We Had a Judiciary Seriously Concerned With Justice

This Mother Jones article detailing the outrages of the public defender system really lays bare the fact that access to the justice system is something you have to be able to afford, not unlike health care or education or everything always.

A citizen’s ability to express her constitutional rights is as important as the right itself. To that end, access to the legal system to vindicate our various rights are critical. For too many Americans, the immiseration of labor means insufficient resources (money) to avail themselves of the legal system. If the government, or your employer, or whoever, is screwing you over, you likely can’t afford to assert your constitutional or statutory rights.

This is particularly true if you’re a poor criminal defendant. In a place like New Orleans, your overworked and underpaid public defender, the person entrusted with safeguarding your constitutional rights as a citizen, may only have seven minutes to prepare your case.

A federal judiciary that put access to justice, rather than “federalism” and “judicial economy” at the core of its jurisprudence, should never stand for this outrage. The right to effective counsel, found in the Sixth Amendment and applied to the states by the Fourteenth (in a case called Gideon v. Wainwright, so such clients or attorneys are may be referred to as Gideon clients or Gideon counsel), is no less a right than speech or free exercise or bearing arms. But it’s treated more like a mere check box on a procedural list; did you technically have counsel? Then the state satisfied the Sixth Amendment.

Rightfully, the federal courts should be accepting habeas corpus writs from state courts in every case where an indigent defendant was represented by one of these Gideon attorneys in a state with underfunded public defenders (e.g., every state) and overturning their convictions on Sixth Amendment grounds. Habeas writs from final state court decisions can be filed in federal venues where the criminal defendant can allege certain classes of constitutional violations implicated by the process leading up to his conviction. The Sixth Amendment is one of those, and a federal court has the power to invalidate a conviction on Constitutional grounds. Imagine if a state faced the prospect of every Gideon-scenario conviction being overturned by a federal court. It’s a wonderful vision of a legal system that cared as dearly for those who cannot afford to assert their Constitutional rights as it does for massive corporations it shields from class actions.

Obviously this will never, ever happen. It does seem to me to be the only way to force state legislatures to take this Constitutional right as seriously as they do the Constitutional rights of pharmaceutical companies to advertise to you or gun manufacturers to sell you military-grade weaponry.

The Little Lie at the Heart of Consumer Choice

Bless Steve Jobs. I mean, I hate his horrible, anti-competitive company, their fetish-generating products and a corporate policy that seems to suborn inhumane working conditions.

But I love him for at least one thing: he was either so in love with his counterfeit counter-culture persona, or so unawares of the governing philosophy of American capitalism, that he let this gem slip when asked how much “market research was conducted to guide Apple” in its production processes:

“None. It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

Open Government Ex Ante: My talk to Open Government Chicago

Good discussion at the end of the video too. Thanks to Joe Germuska and Dan O’Neil for the invite.

Panglesias: Let “the People” Choose to Die Grisly Deaths for Pay

I’m cheery about the future of the left, and the impending doom of the neoliberal consensus. I feel this way the more I see how neoliberal/technocratically bent writers are forced to drift into abstractions to avoid dealing with actual human conditions. Matthew Yglesias’s response to the grisly deaths of more than one hundred fifty human beings in a Bangledeshi factory is a parody of technocratic, soulless, supposedly a-political neoliberalism. What’s funny is I’m in the middle of preparing a Same Subject Unreadable Longpiece(tm) on the defense of neoliberalism (well…you’ll see I guess).

The Contingent Workforce and Comprehensive Labor Policy Reform

First of all, thank goodness for Seth Ackerman. Ackerman saved me a day of writing and a not trivial amount of frustration by writing a response to Matthew Yglesias’s latest bit of masked vulgar libertarianism. You all were saved from my less concise writing style by Ackerman’s neat and tidy takedown of Yglesias’s assertion that the economy suffers not from stagnant wages and income but a lack of productivity innovations sufficient to bring down prices of goods and services (e.g., automated cars so it’d be cheaper to…take buses, I guess?).

Ackerman does the Econ 103 (I assume 101 usually just glosses on labor markets) homework that Yglesias seems to not care for; if incomes were to go up but productivity remain where it is–in other words, if workers were getting paid a larger share of the fruits of their already historically high productivity–then runaway inflation wouldn’t necessarily negate those gains, because all that would be happening is that income would be redistributed, just not by the government, but in the workplace.

Last Words on the Subject — On that Show, Girls

Probably one of the most flummoxing things to happen in pop culture in the last year is the expectations laid on one young woman’s shoulders, for some reason that I am unable, in my limited intellectual capacity, to identify. Lena Dunham made a tv show, part drama but mostly comedy, about the women who fall “in between” Gossip Girl and Sex and the City. The show is bohemian-stylized, and strives for a sort of naturalism in how its characters express themselves and relate one to another. The comedy is “cringe-y” in the style of Curb Your Enthusiasm, but with the grittiness and pathos of the U.K. version of the Office. Layered on that cringe-y comedy is a general darkness and willingness to tell frank, and often painful stories, about self-exploration and its unhappy trailmate, self-loathing. The show’s sexuality is frank and naturalistic, in the nature of mumblecore movies going back at least to Puffy Chair in 2004*, and more recently HBO’s own Tell Me You Love Me, a show which made the news for its “realistic” and unidealized sex scenes.** I suspect that, like the IFC sketch show Portlandia, if you identify with the portrayed milieu in a positive way, the show is more viscerally enjoyable for that reason. The main characters are treated with affection even when they’re being held up for ridicule (again, not unlike the hipsters of Portlandia). If the jokes and situations in the show make you laugh, it’s funny. That seems to be the long and short of it: elements not unknown or even uncommon in contemporary culture–mumblecore/naturalistic sexual aesthetic, cringe comedy, women-in-a-group–but set in a particular age cohort and social milieu. That milieu, possibly not coincidentally, of late-20s-early-30s white people in creative fields living in a major city with little at stake economically or socially, is fairly coextensive with cultural critics, which may explained what happened before Girls even aired widely.

The Instant Pain of EveryBlock’s Demise

The abrupt death of Everyblock caused almost a sense of panic on the internet, particularly among the new media class, and for a good reason. Everyblock was a brilliant concept that instantly became an invaluable tool for people curious about their communities; and not just the internet savvy, but anybody with internet access and the facility to do a Google search. In Chicago the sudden shuttering may have been felt a little more deeply; Everyblock was one of the gems of Chicago’s new media/open data start-up community.

Outside of that parochialism, Everyblock was unique because its principals recognized one of the impossible contradictions of contemporary media: the World is at our fingertips, with the exception of our particular neighborhood. It smacks of the old poem by G.K. Chesterton, which pointed out the tension between lofty ideals and the material necessity and hard work of living in the real world: