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Bhaskar Sunkara, Editor of Jacobin Magazine

January 20, 2013 by Leave a Comment

But the height gods, among others, didn’t smile in his favor. So in 2009, during a medical leave from his sophomore year at George Washington University, Mr. Sunkara turned to Plan B: creating a magazine dedicated to bringing jargon-free neo-Marxist thinking to the masses.

If that hardly seem less of a long shot at fame, let alone fortune, he’s the first to agree.

“I had no right to start a print publication when I was 21,” he said in an interview in a cafe near his apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “Looking back, I see it as a moment of creative ignorance. You have to have enough intelligence to execute something like this but be stupid enough to think it could be successful.”

The resulting magazine, Jacobin, whose ninth issue just landed, has certainly been an improbable hit, buoyed by the radical stirrings of the Occupy movement and a bitingly satirical but serious-minded style. Since its debut in September 2010 it has attracted nearly 2,000 print and digital subscribers, some 250,000 Web hits a month, regular name-checks from prominent bloggers, and book deals from two New York publishers.

It has also earned Mr. Sunkara, now a ripe 23, extravagant praise from members of a (slightly) older guard who see his success as heartening sign that the socialist “brand” — to use a word he throws around with un-self-conscious ease — hasn’t been totally killed off by Tea Party invective.

“Bhaskar’s a really remarkable — I want to say kid, but that sounds condescending,” said the MSNBC host Chris Hayes, who gave Jacobin a shout-out in Rolling Stone last June before inviting Mr. Sunkara onto his show. (Mr. Sunkara skipped part of his college graduation to appear.) “He’s got the combination of boastful assurance and competence of a very good young rapper.”

And the praise doesn’t come only from the left-hand side of the spectrum. The National Review blogger Reihan Salam, who has linked to numerous Jacobin articles, called Mr. Sunkara “an almost hilariously savvy character who knows how to deploy mockery and flattery to great effect.”

The magazine’s injection of a “vital left-of-left-of-center” viewpoint into the conversation, he added, “has been very fun to watch.”

In writing Mr. Sunkara can come on like a one-man insult-comedy squad, whether the target is regular whipping boys like the Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein (“a young liberal with a lust for properly punctuated policy memos”) or the capitalist vampire squid itself.

But in person he’s more straightforwardly earnest and quick to emphasize that the magazine he founded in his dorm room has evolved into a collective endeavor. Jacobin’s success, he said, springs from the highly cohesive politics of the four co-editors he has recruited and their shared commitment to advancing a critique of liberalism that is free of obscurantist academic theory or “cheap hooks.”

Not that Mr. Sunkara, who is also the magazine’s publisher, dismisses the value of pop-culture come-ons (the new issue includes a radical analysis of the Onion’s online reality-television satire “Sex House”) or good visuals. The sleek design by Remeike Forbes, an M.F.A. student from the Rhode Island School of Design who e-mailed Mr. Sunkara out of the blue in 2011 offering to design a Jacobin T-shirt, has been essential to getting people to take the magazine seriously, he said.

And when Seth Ackerman, a graduate student at Cornell University, turned in a scathing analysis of the Constitution’s inherent conservatism for the second issue, Mr. Sunkara knew it needed something to really pop.

“Seth had a title with nine words and a semicolon,” he recalled. “I crossed it out and wrote ‘Burn the Constitution.’ ”

That article, along with “Zombie Marx,” a critique of chapter-and-verse Marxist economics by Mike Beggs, a young lecturer in political economy at the University of Sydney who Mr. Sunkara met (like Mr. Ackerman) through the e-mail list of Doug Henwood’s Left Business Observer, got some pickup on blogs. But it was a packed Jacobin-organized panel on the Occupy movement, held in a downtown Manhattan bookstore three weeks after the protests began in Zuccotti Park in September 2011, that really put the magazine on the map, drawing attention from Politico and Glenn Beck.

“The purpose was to force people to actually talk about ideology, about which ideas Occupy would stand for, about whether there should be any ideology at all,” Mr. Ackerman said, adding that many people he sees mentioning Jacobin on social media come from “Occupy-ish” circles.

Meanwhile the magazine was also attracting attention from more established figures on the left, who saw it as raising fundamental questions that had been off the table since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Corey Robin, an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College who became a contributing editor last winter, pointed in particular to articles by Mr. Ackerman and Peter Frase, another early Jacobin recruit, debating the possibility of a post-capitalist economy involving, among other things, drastically reduced working hours.

“So many people are not working or already getting wages subsidized by the state — maybe there’s something already at play that we haven’t paid enough attention to,” Mr. Robin said.

Mr. Sunkara, the son of middle-class South Asian immigrants who was voted “most likely to succeed” in high school, traces his politics less to experience than to reading. In seventh grade a stray reference in an introduction to “Animal Farm” sent him to Trotsky’s own writings. By his freshman year of college he was editing a blog for Democratic Socialists of America and writing for Dissent.

His multitasking work ethic hardly shows signs of flagging. In addition to his position as a staff writer for the progressive monthly In These Times his 2013 projects include an essay collection for Metropolitan Books (edited with Sarah Leonard of Dissent), to appear in September; a series of Jacobin-branded books published by Verso; a $7,500 fund-raising drive; and, if he gets around to it, a podcast called “This American Strife” — ideally followed, he likes to say, by a lawsuit from Ira Glass.

Mr. Sunkara also plans to keep writing for Vice magazine, where he has compared outrage over rich professional athletes to outrage over “overpaid” public-sector employees, all of whom he sees as just trying to negotiate their fair share.

That time, Mr. Sunkara’s editor wrote the headline, the Vice-like “Jeremy Lin Is Not Greedy, You’re Just Stupid.” But when it comes to Jacobin’s goal of smuggling radical analysis out of the intellectual ghetto and into the mainstream Mr. Sunkara’s motto seems to be: by any means necessary.

It helps, he said, “that liberals think we are relatively sane.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 20, 2013

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to a headline from Vice magazine. It should have read “Jeremy Lin Is Not Greedy, You’re Just Stupid.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/books/bhaskar-sunkara-editor-of-jacobin-magazine.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Obama and Boehner Split on Fiscal Plan

December 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The impasse was clear as Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner separately spoke to the television cameras instead of each other, after a weekend of private negotiations amid grieving over the shootings in Newtown, Conn., had narrowed their differences enough to raise optimism about a far-reaching deal to stabilize the nation’s debt.

First Mr. Obama and then Mr. Boehner faulted the other side for the impasse, and ultimately the failure, if a year-end deal could not be reached to stop automatic tax increases and the indiscriminate spending cuts in military and domestic programs known as the “sequester.” The president, saying he had gone “at least halfway” toward Republicans’ demands, evoked Hurricane Sandy and the Newtown school massacre to prod lawmakers to compromise for the nation’s benefit.

“When you think about what we’ve gone through over the last couple months — a devastating hurricane, and now one of the worst tragedies in our memory — the country deserves us to be willing to compromise on behalf of the greater good,” he said during an appearance at the White House to discuss gun control.

“Frankly, up until a couple days ago if you looked at it, the Republicans in the House and Speaker Boehner were in a position to say, ‘We’ve gotten a fair deal,’ ” the president said.

About two hours later at the Capitol, Mr. Boehner delivered a surprisingly brief but sharp retort to Mr. Obama, after which he took no questions from reporters. He started by saying that on Thursday, the House would pass the fallback bill that he has called his Plan B, which would extend the Bush-era tax cuts, which would otherwise expire on Dec. 31, for all incomes up to $1 million — although later his leadership team was scrambling for votes.

“Then the president will have a decision to make,” he said. “He can call upon Senate Democrats to pass that bill, or he can be responsible for the largest tax increase in American history.”

The Boehner bill does hold tax benefits for those with a yearly income above $1 million. It would repeal two Clinton-era tax provisions that limit the personal exemptions and deductions that wealthy taxpayers can claim; extend the lower tax rates on inherited estates rather than allow them to revert to the pre-Bush administration level; and set a 20 percent tax rate for the dividends and capital gains of households earning at least $1 million a year.

The speaker’s package would raise about $300 billion in additional revenue over 10 years, compared with extending the Bush tax rates for all income, as Republicans long espoused. That is about $500 billion less than Mr. Boehner’s original offer for $800 billion. It is about $700 billion less than would be collected under Mr. Obama’s proposal to extend the Bush rates only for incomes below a $250,000 threshold for couples, and $200,000 for individuals. In the talks with Mr. Boehner, he moved that line to $400,000.

Mr. Boehner’s statement suggested confidence that Republican leaders would have the votes to pass his plan. But lawmakers who were counting votes for the leadership said the tally was short, and House leaders were adding provisions to the speaker’s bill to mollify dissidents.

Some Republicans, for example, objected that the plan would do nothing to prevent the automatic military cuts, about $50 billion, from taking effect in January. To satisfy Republican hawks, leaders will hold a separate vote on legislation, nearly identical to a bill passed earlier this year, that would cancel those cuts and instead shift them to domestic programs, a decision likely to amplify Democratic opposition.

Even if the House Republican majority passes the speaker’s measure, it probably faces doom in the Democratic-controlled Senate, making Mr. Obama’s threatened veto moot. Mr. Boehner’s office has countered that Congressional Democratic leaders in 2011 had supported a $1 million threshold for higher tax rates. Democrats said those proposals were largely intended to show that Republicans would not raise taxes even for millionaires.

While Mr. Boehner scrambled to unify his party, Mr. Obama faced unrest as well from liberals who said he had broken a campaign pledge to keep Social Security out of the deficit-reduction talks. Mr. Obama had given tentative support to Republicans’ demand that the government adopt a new inflation formula for calculating cost-of-living adjustments for federal benefits. The new formula would slightly reduce the growth in Social Security benefits from what it would be under the current inflation index.

Recalling his campaign, Mr. Obama countered, “What I said was that the ultimate package would involve a balance of spending cuts and tax increases. That’s exactly what I have put forward. What I have said is, in order to arrive at a compromise, I am prepared to do some very tough things, some things that some Democrats don’t want to see, and probably there are a few Republicans who don’t want to see them either.”

The president said he would continue to have discussions with Mr. Boehner and others. But on Wednesday, even the chief staff negotiators for the two leaders were not speaking.

In trying to line up votes, Republican leaders circulated word that the longtime antitax advocate Grover Norquist had blessed Mr. Boehner’s plan as compliant with his “Taxpayer Protection Pledge.” Because most Republican candidates sign the pledge not to approve any tax increase, Mr. Norquist effectively has long locked in their votes.

But Mr. Norquist seemed to bend his principles to issue the endorsement, perhaps to maintain his relevance in tax debates. Even senior Republicans lately have denounced Mr. Norquist as a deterrent to resolving the nation’s fiscal problems, given increasing bipartisan agreement that higher tax revenues are required to control debt growth.

Even so, the Club for Growth, a conservative group, said on Wednesday that it considered even Mr. Boehner’s scaled-back plan a tax increase bill and that it might work to defeat Republican lawmakers who voted for it.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/20/us/politics/obama-says-republicans-given-fair-deal.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,

Letters: Beyond Common Ground on Health Care Costs

June 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Beyond Common Ground
On Health Care Costs

To the Editor:

In “Seriously, Some Consensus About Health Care” (Economic View, June 19) N. Gregory Mankiw contended that Democrats and Republicans might be wrong in agreeing that health care costs can be reined in, even as they disagree about how such control is achieved. He then asks, “if controlling the cost of health care fails, what is Plan B?”

I would suggest that Plan B should be to examine how other advanced democracies have managed to provide health care coverage to all, while spending less of their gross domestic product on health care than we do in the United States.

No one should say that controlling health costs may be futile when so many countries have already done so through various combinations of competitive forces and government regulatory action. And while the United States leaves millions of people uninsured, these countries provide coverage for all.

Craig Ramsay

Columbus, Ohio, June 19

The writer is a professor of politics and government at Ohio Wesleyan University.

•

To the Editor:

N. Gregory Mankiw provides a helpful perspective on the politics of health care reform, but does not include an important point about the way free-market competition works.

Perfect competition requires perfect information, which is not part of the health insurance market. Supporters of President Obama’s health care law don’t necessarily believe private competition is good in this arena; they may simply take it as a political given.

In the new law, choosing among private plans in a regulated exchange is an improvement over the current system, in which comparison is difficult for lack of information. The plan is an effort to make competition work.

Jennie Kaufman

Brooklyn, June 20

To the Editor:

In comparing the recent health care reform law to the Medicare proposal by Representative Paul D. Ryan, the column posed this question: “If choosing among competing private plans on a government-regulated exchange is a good idea for someone at age 50, why is it so horrific for someone who is 70?”

First, 50-year-olds who seek to buy health insurance are most likely near the peak of their earning power and thus more capable of paying in one way or another for their insurance — which might not be too expensive because of the relatively modest cost of insuring someone who is that age.

But people who are 70 are generally retired, living on stagnant or reduced income.  Their insurance would be far more expensive because of the higher use of services at their age.

The plan to treat retired Americans the same as 50-year-olds for health insurance purposes misses this crucial difference. Dene F. Karaus

Wayne, N.Y., June 19

Letters for Sunday Business may be sent to sunbiz@nytimes.com.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=df65296743df10547e347d31713f183b

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,