Government Governs.

still scary. from capt Kodak's flickr.

Welcome to the technocracy: Obama is looking to govern for the sake of government as a technocrat in the center, rather than the left-wing ideologue that both the GOP and Democratic bases mistook him for.

Instead, he’s appointing Democrats and Republicans including old political rivals.  History says that non-partisan apointments get the job of government done best – which should return attention to questions about what government should be doing, if anything at all.

In many regards, left criticism has been hamstrung by George Bush in the Oval Office.  Folks got very confortable with lambasting every policy failure as a failure of incompetence or stupidity.  No doubt things will continue to go wrong under an Obama Presidency, but we don’t yet have the language to describe any impending failure in a particularly useful way.  For instance – while the current Bush-created budget problems will no doubt make Obama’s policy agenda difficult to implement, the focus on that issue alone sets us up for another 4 years of blaming Bush, rather than making forward-thinking criticisms of Obama (who, as the inheritor of the Bush Imperial Presidency and a unified government, will be the most powerful president in modern history).

Hopefully cutting off the head of the Bush-king will encourage people to think about the role of government on the whole, and reflect on whether it needs to do as much as we think.  I am encouraged by people who would like to see police officers reduced to basic first-aid responders and directors of traffic, and I think we need to do more of this type of reflection during an Obama Presidency.

Transparency, Comments and Power

'd. - none of the above'

First of all: a shoutout to techPresident for being a great resource for thinking about the relationship between technology and politics.  Full of consistently engaging and challenging work, and just generally pretty dope.

Anyways – the much-ado about Obama’s plan to use the internet to govern needs some fleshing out.  The key remains changing the internet from a tool of access and transparency into a tool for people (writ-large) to make decisions.  Questions remain about how to transform feedback and criticism into decision-making authority, and transparency into power for the people viewing.  As it stands, the folks in government being monitored by internet-tools often still have the authority to act as they please, even if hundreds of thousands of voices dissent.

At the very least, internet tools put into more explicit terms the incongruencies of power and time that define the modern bureaucracy.  In the same way that I think that Obama’s Presidency throws into better contrast certain types of exploitation (and makes certain new stridant critiques more sayable), internet transparency movements do the work of making critiques of state power more visible and potent.

Bloomberg’s Underhanded Move

a flurry of trouble. from CarbonNYC's flickr.

Anthony Wiener pointed out the real reason Bloomberg wanted to rush the term limits bill, and it had nothing to do with the need to prepare for the election ahead of time.  The real reason for the rush probably has more to do with the Presidential Campaign than anything else – Bloomberg used the news media’s total obsession with Barack Obama and John McCain to push through a bill while eyes were turned towards the election.

I wonder what the term limits fight would have looked like if it had taken place in December?  It’s certainly harder to get folks out to a protest in the cold, but it would have allowed the opposition a better platform to project their concerns about the bill, and might have marshaled enough public disdain to keep Councilmembers from bending to Bloomberg.

Fortunately, folks in and around city government paid a little more attention, and it looks like Bloomberg lost a good deal of political capital with the local folks he relies on for support.  At the very least he’ll have more trouble pushing the bills and initiatives he uses to keep in the news, and members of city government will be less willing to run cover for him leading up to the election in 09.

Civic Guilt is Bullshit

what we’ve come to.

I saw this ad riding by bike through Chinatown the other night – I think it demonstrates just how much appeals to vote have failed in America, becoming a politically impotent guilt trip rather than a serious political project. Seriously: for young people in particular it comes from all sides. You have teachers chiding you about voter registration, parents telling you that you have no ‘right’ to complain if you don’t vote, and a protracted media effort (Rock the Vote, Vote or Die, other bullshit) trying to boost engagement, but eventually coming off as merely condescending.

The Trouble with Tourism

New York City has come to rely on people that don’t live here. The Mayor’s tenacity in resisting hotel tax increases demonstrates just how city government relies on tourism and tourist spending to support its basic functions. The city hosts 600,000 college students, many on 4 year jaunts through the same New York-as-Disneyland inhabited by tourists. Students and tourists both temporarily inhabit the city – as a student, I’ve never even filed a change of address, and still vote in Texas, where I grew up.

The city’s reliance on tourist or temporary resident revenue creates incentives to ignore the interests of long term residents, enabling or encouraging disregard of the people who work/live in New York. In many regards, city residents can be considered as mere support staff for the tourist trade’s light show. Many/most of the jobs created by the tourist trade are low-paying service economy (tour guides, hotels, pedicabs, etc), and linked to the seasons, creating instability – and often vulnerability – for those working the jobs making the city run.