PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONISM AND TAX BURDENS: ARE THEY RELATED?*

One factor that has affected state and local politics since the 1960's is the growth of public sector unionism. Conventional wisdom assumes that the “fist generation” of public unionism has been a major cause of the fiscal problems faced by many state and local governments in the 1970's. State level cross-sectional analysis (1960–71) questions this widely held assumption with respect to the impact of strike activity and collective bargaining legislation on the tax burden across the states.     

Terror or Terrorism? The “Islamic State” Between State and Nonstate Violence

As a non‐state actor that claims its own territory, the “Islamic State” utilizes a spectrum of very different kinds of coercion and violence. Considering the group's aspirations to govern the territories controlled by it, any clear distinction between uses of force and coercion that states typically claim as their legitimate right, and implement terrorist non‐state violence, tends to blur right before our analytically‐focused eyes. This contribution discusses how the group challenges the distinction between “terror from above” and “terrorism from below” as well as the meaning of the dual character of Daesh's belief system between the ideological and the religious for Daesh's repertoire of violence.     

The Judicial Bookshelf

A persistent reality of constitutional government in the United States from practically the beginning of the Republic has been the close link between the Constitution itself and the Supreme Court. Oddly, this link derives more from the Constitution's impact on the American political system than from what the Constitution itself actually says or contains. True, Article III included cases “arising under this Constitution” in describing the proper reach of the federal judicial power, and Article VI specified that “[t]his Constitution and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land … ” ¹ But the document not only provided scant means for enforcing that supremacy, but also failed even to specify how this “supreme Law” should be interpreted. It soon became clear, however that the task of interpretation would fall upon the Supreme Court, as illustrated by Chisholm v. Georgia. ² In the face of assurances made by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Marshall, and others during the ratification debates in 1787–1788 that a state could not, without its consent, be made a defendant in the federal courts by a citizen of another state, ³ the Justices in 1793 construed the language in Article III conferring the federal judicial power in suits “Between a State and Citizens of another State” to encompass a suit brought by a South Carolinian against the State of Georgia. The uproar that ensued prompted swift ratification of the Eleventh Amendment, which reversed the Court's first excursion into the realm of constitutional interpretation. Despite this rebuke, it was only a short time before Chief Justice Marshall insisted that the judicial power encompassed the authority “to say what the law is.” ⁴ Thus, from the assumed role of expounding of the Constitution evolved the companion duty of guarding it as well.     

The Second Time as Farce: Archaeological Reflections on the New New Deal

Many connections have been made between the Great Depression and the current crisis in neoliberal capitalism, and many solutions proposed by the Left hearken to FDR’s New Deal programs. While New Deal policies had real benefits, assuming that they were uniformly beneficial to all lower class individuals is shortsighted. This is clear from the vantage point of our research in the Finger Lakes National Forest. The New Deal’s Resettlement Administration purchased these farms when implementing land-planning policies to move farmers off “sub-marginal” land to save families “stranded on sub-marginal farms.” Our research demonstrates that governmental land-use programs saved some farms by sacrificing others. This case makes it clear that solving current crises need more than nostalgic yearning for a mythic past. Solutions must come from a thorough examination of the “real concrete” past, not simply the past as imagined.     

EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY AND THE CARTER ADMINISTRATION: AN ANALYSIS OF REORGANIZATION OPTIONS

Responding to his 1976 campaign pledge, President Carter has reorganized the federal government's enforcement of equal employment opportunity(EEO) laws. He has done so by shifting some EEO responsibilities from the Civil Service Commission and the Department of Labor to create a “Super-EEOC”. This article examines why President Carter chose the EEO reorganization that he did from the standpoint of advantages and disadvantages. Also presented are alternative reform options that the President could have selected that would have involved increasing EEO coordination or reorganization entailing new legislation that would have gone far beyond the creation of a “Super-EEOC.”     

The Judicial Bookshelf

Two decades ago, in the summer of 1987, celebrations of the bicentennial of the United States Constitution were in high gear under the watchful eye of then recently retired Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who chaired the Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution between 1985 and 1991. ¹ Numerous lectures, seminars, and conferences across the land made clear not only the role and value of what Chief Justice William Howard Taft once called “the ark of our covenant” ² in the life of the nation but also the central place the judiciary had long occupied in the political system, as state and national courts confronted vital questions of public policy perplexing and dividing the people. As that astute French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville first noted in 1835, the “American judge is dragged in spite of himself onto the political field . … There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.” ³ With the “right to declare laws unconstitutional,” he explained, the judge “cannot compel the people to make laws, but at least he can constrain them to be faithful to their own laws and to remain in harmony with themselves.” ⁴     

Can Affirmative Motivations Improve Compliance in Emissions Trading Programs?

Early emissions trading programs have obtained a very high rate of compliance, in part by using continuous emissions monitors (CEMs) that automatically record emissions data on a 24‐hour basis. As they expand into a wider range of pollutants and sources, however, such policies will have to rely on less automated forms of self‐reporting. This article asks if improved “affirmative motivations” for compliance based on perceptions of a policy's fairness could reduce the likelihood of underreporting, thereby lowering verification costs without unduly jeopardizing environmental integrity. Using a computerized laboratory emissions trading market, we find that many subjects reported emissions honestly in situations where dishonest reporting would have been more profitable, as well as a statistically significant association of affirmative motivations based on perceptions of a policy's fairness with honest reporting. These results suggest that designing an emissions trading program to increase its perceived fairness among users has the potential to increase honest emissions reporting and reduce monitoring costs.     

Producing Victimhood: Landmines,Reparations, and Law in Colombia

This research theorizes Colombia's 2011 Victims’ and Land Restitution Law (the Victims’ Law) as a biopolitical program that intends to foster the lives of conflict‐affected populations through providing an array of reparation measures. Based on fieldwork with internally displaced landmine victims in Colombia's Magdalena Medio region, I highlight how the Victims’ Law constitutes the identity of which populations count as “victims” worthy of reparations, how such parameters are contested, and how landmine survivors’ sense of themselves as “victims” is mediated via their experiences with the Victims’ Law and the reparation programs it provides. In particular, I highlight the possibilities and limitations of reparation measures that hinge on small‐scale business incubation programs for landmine victims to show how a legally recognized victimhood category presupposes “self‐responsible” neoliberal subjects who must confront contexts of conflict and state neglect.     

U.S. Environmental Policy Implementation on Tribal Lands: Trust,Neglect, and Justice

This study investigates the implementation of U.S. environmental protection laws under American Indian tribal governance. The landmark laws of the 1970s that form the core of America's environmental policy regime made no mention of American Indian tribal lands, and the subsequent research literature on environmental policy has given them little attention. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has primary implementation responsibility for environmental protection laws on tribal lands, which offers a unique opportunity to study direct federal implementation apart from typical joint state–federal implementation. Further, because Indian reservations are homes to a disproportionately poor, historically subjugated racial group, analysis of environmental programs on tribal lands offers a unique perspective on environmental justice. We analyze enforcement of and compliance with the Clean Water Act (CWA) and Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) to compare the implementation of environmental policy on tribal lands with nontribal facilities. Analysis reveals that, compared with nontribal facilities, tribal facilities experience less rigorous CWA and SDWA enforcement and are more likely to violate these laws.     

“Lachkabinett” und “großes Fest” der Physiker. Walter Grotrians “physikalischer Einakter” zu Max Plancks 80. Geburtstag

“Funhouse” and “Big Celebration” of the Physicists. Walter Grotrian's ?Physical One‐Act Play”? for Max Planck's 80th Birthday. On the occasion of Max Planck's 80th birthday on April 23, 1938, a “big celebration of the physicists” (großes Fest der Physiker) was celebrated at the Harnack‐House in Berlin. The festivities were organized by the German Physical Society. Part of the ceremony was a “Physical One‐act‐play” (Physikalischer Einakter) written by the Potsdam astrophysicist Walter Grotrian. The actors of the humorous play were chief protagonists in the development of quantum theory such as Debye, Sommerfeld and Heisenberg. In this essay we analyze Grotrian's drama against the background of both the festive event and the professional and social setting of the physicists. We argue that below the level of comedy a number of characteristic and normally unexpressed aspects of the epistemic culture of the German physics by the end of the nineteen‐thirties is treated in the play.     

Rescaling regions in the state: The New Regionalism in California

A “new civic regionalism” – based on participatory, inclusive and partnership models of governance – has recently been rolled out in California to tackle the challenges of urban growth, planning and economic development across the State's diverse metropolitan and rural regions. Backed by non-profits and private foundations, California's New Regionalism has been packaged as a flexible and responsive grassroots governance initiative, which is designed to circumnavigate State and local government. Its proponents have been influenced by New Regionalist ideas and practices circulating nationally and internationally. Despite this, our explanation for the rise of the New Regionalism in California is not grounded in these wider theoretical and policy developments; nor do we see it as the outcome of a “new politics of scale” framed around the region. Instead, California's newest regionalism is part of a much longer-standing social movement spearheaded by large-scale business interests and directed at reorganizing local and State government powers particularly in urban regions. This regional reform movement has sought to rationalize land use and environmental planning, coordinate infrastructure, and make government more fiscally efficient and responsive to growth. Over the longer term, its efforts have been undermined by the fiscal fallout of the property tax revolt, Proposition 13. Our analysis calls into question some of the claims in the literature on state rescaling and suggests the value of collapsing the conceptual distinction made between new spaces of political regionalism and regional economic spaces.     

Reason and sense perception in comte's theory of mind

Hume is normally—and in my view, correctly—taken to be a legal conventionalist. However, the nature of Hume's conventionalism has not been well understood. Scholars have often interpreted David Hume as being largely indifferent to the specifics of the laws, so long as they accomplish their basic task of protecting people's property. I argue that this is not correct. Hume thinks certain systems of law will accomplish their purpose, of coordinating people's behaviour for the benefit of all, better than others. He introduces two concepts, which I call generality and convenience, to designate those features of the law that allow it to best accomplish its purpose. Of the two, generality is the more important. The ability to implement a system of what Hume calls “general laws” is a feature common to those governments he considers “civilized” rather than “barbarous.” A set of more specific criteria may be extracted from Hume's texts, which laws must meet if they are to be considered general. Many of the criteria Hume identifies later become associated with theorists of the so-called “rule of law.” Hume's conventionalism can thus be read an important development beyond that of Hobbes, one that lays a foundation upon which later theorists such as A.V. Dicey are able to build.     

NOTES ON CAMPS,OR, COUNTERFACTUAL FÜHRERS AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE JOKE

In this review essay I explore the dynamics of “normalization” in historical and fictional depictions of the National Socialist past, examining both the “organic” normalization of catastrophic events through the passage of time, and efforts to normalize the Nazi past through aesthetics. Focusing on Gavriel Rosenfeld's Hi, Hitler: How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, I argue against many dimensions of Rosenfeld's account of normalization, particularly his claim that aesthetic normalization can undermine our moral judgments regarding the Holocaust. Drawing on Sigmund Freud on jokes, and Susan Sontag on Camp aesthetics, I argue that every effort to normalize the Holocaust, especially ones that work through humor and jokes (a major topic of Rosenfeld's book), actually maintain the Holocaust's status as a series of historical events resistant to “normalization.” If “normalization” is a process through which extraordinary, or morally charged, historical events lose their moral charge, then aesthetic efforts to normalize the Holocaust actually reinscribe the special moral status that Rosenfeld believes they erase.     

Between nation and land in Zionist teaching of Jewish history, 1920–1954

The article discusses the representation of Jewish history in the Zionist school system of the Yishuv and the early State of Israel (1920–1954). In the Yishuv period the history curriculum was centered on “shifting Jewish centers” in the spirit of historian Simon Dubnow, an approach that also integrated Jewish and non-Jewish history. From the 1930s, Ben Zion Dinur and the Teachers' Council of the Keren Kayemet le-Yisrael (Jewish National Fund) attempted to make the Land of Israel the central axis uniting Jewish history, a focus that downplayed non-Jewish history. Because of the opposition to this approach within the education system, this change, which Dinur regarded as essential for the integration of the new immigrants from the Muslim countries into Israeli society, was implemented only after he was appointed minister of education in the early 1950s.     

Beneath the “Zunami”: Jacob Zuma and the Gendered Politics of Social Reproduction in South Africa

Abstract: In April 2009, African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma was swept into power in South Africa's fourth democratic general election. To date, this political “Zunami” has largely been presented as either a leftist rebellion against Mbeki's neoliberalism, a reassertion of patriarchal “traditionalism”, or an example of Zulu ethnic mobilization. This article draws on a long‐term ethnographic study to provide a critical gendered perspective on Zuma's rise. It argues that Zuma resonates with many poor South Africans, including women, in part because of his ability to connect the personal and political in ways that talk to South Africa's “crisis of social reproduction”. A key point the article emphasizes—one virtually absent from contemporary discussions about Zuma—is the profound gendering of growing class divisions, specifically the way this manifests itself in huge reductions in marital rates and heightened gendered contestations.     

The International Geographical Congress (Stockholm)

Following are excerpts from a report read by Professor Salishchev on October 14, 1960, at a meeting of the Council of the Geography Faculty of Moscow University. The omitted part of Professor Salishchev's report is substantially the same as the report of the National Committee of Soviet Geographers, printed in Soviet Geography, April 1961, pp. 40–46. Professor Salishchev's report on the work of the Commission of National Atlases, of which he is chairman, is translated in full.     

The Receiving End of Reform: Everyday Responses to Neoliberalisation in Southeastern Mexico

Abstract: This article builds upon the literature on neoliberalism and environment as well as studies on community forestry by examining the creative accommodations that rural producers have made in navigating Mexico's neoliberal turn. In contrast to previous work that emphasizes macro‐level processes (eg privatization of public natural resources) and local resistance, I employ Bourdieu's theory of practice to examine the symbolic and material dimensions of local responses to neoliberal policy reform. Drawing on research from nine communities in the state of Quintana Roo, I argue that local producers have accommodated neoliberal policies and programs by adopting hybrid logics, property regimes, forms of organization, and modes of exchange. Moreover, I contend that these creative responses constitute elements of a longstanding “culture of accommodation” to institutional change that predates Mexico's neoliberal reforms.     

Advice and reflections for a university teacher beginning an academic career

Although graduate programs typically prepare university students well for research activity, many have been less successful in educating for other aspects of academic careers. This article discusses Iain Hay's “Letter to a New University Teacher,” which has been used internationally to help new lecturers beginning their career. Prepared as an autoethnographic account for a recent graduate, “The Letter” distils principles held to underpin a successful academic career. Five university teachers and academic managers discuss critically the content and their applications of “The Letter” and make some suggestions for its use in continuously transforming higher education contexts.     

No Angst and All Play: Postmodernism and the Humanities

Abstract

There is widespread disagreement about Tocqueville's conception of human nature, some going so far as to say that Tocqueville possessed no unified conception of human nature at all. In this paper, I aim to provide the essential principles of Tocqueville's conception of human nature through an examination of the way in which he describes the power of human circumstances, such as physical environment, social state, and religion, to shape human character by extracting the principles underlying these transformations. There is no “natural man” or man “in the state of nature” but instead a set of psychic operations that reveal a picture of human nature in which human freedom, or the ability to initiate action in pursuit of important objects, lies at the heart of human life.