Month: July 2012

Who’s the big winner?

by digby

At least we can cling to the fact that the big winners in our economic lottery aren’t decent people of good conscience:

The former top director at Progress Energy Inc. blasted merger partner Duke Energy Corp.’s quick change of CEOs after the deal closed, calling it “an incredible act of bad faith.”

The comments, in a letter sent to the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, came after Duke’s board removed former Progress Chief Executive Bill Johnson from his post atop the combined company just hours after he started the job. The board then replaced him with Jim Rogers, who was Duke’s CEO before the merger.

Mr. Johnson, 58 years old, had been slated to be CEO of the combined company since January 2011, when Duke and Progress announced their $26 billion merger. In fact, it was written into the merger agreement that he would take the top job.

“This was a critical element in the merger deliberations of our Board,” John Mullin, former lead director of Progress, said in the letter. “I do not believe that a single director of Progress would have voted for this transaction as structured with the knowledge that the CEO of Duke, Jim Rogers, would remain as the CEO of the combined company.”

Duke has said Mr. Johnson left by mutual agreement with the board.

In an interview Friday, Mr. Mullin accused former Duke directors who dominate the newly merged board of reneging on their commitment to make Mr. Johnson CEO of the combined enterprise.

“Being the CEO for a very short period of time and then being asked to resign so the former CEO could become CEO, that was not our understanding of what it meant for Bill to be CEO of the combined company,” he said.

As reported in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Johnson signed his employment contract on June 27, and it went into effect on July 2 when the deal closed. That afternoon, the new board, about two-thirds of which was made up by former Duke directors, met and decided Mr. Johnson needed to be removed from the top job, people familiar with the matter said…

Here’s the kicker:

Despite his short-lived tenure, Mr. Johnson will receive exit payments worth as much as $44.4 million, according to Duke. That includes $7.4 million in severance, a nearly $1.4 million cash bonus, a special lump-sum payment worth up to $1.5 million and accelerated vesting of his stock awards, according to a Duke regulatory filing Tuesday night. Mr. Johnson gets the lump-sum payment as long as he cooperates with Duke and doesn’t disparage his former employer, the filing said.

Under his exit package, Mr. Johnson also will receive approximately $30,000 to reimburse him for relocation expenses.

Was this the deal all along? Does it matter?

My feeling is that this impulse to game the system has completely taken over the American ethos to such an extent that we now believe on some level that only a chump, a fool, wouldn’t do it. In fact, it would be wrong not to. Or at least not obviously right.

This reminds me once again of a talk I had with a lawyer friend after the Bush vs Gore decision, in which I was bemoaning the destruction of the court and the very idea of our democracy. He replied to me quite sanguinely that “Americans love winners and they admire those who figure out a way to win. It doesn’t matter how they did it, only that they did.”

I was appalled. Still clinging to some semblance of idealism, I simply thought this was over-the-top. I don’t think so anymore.. The old Vince Lombardi quote, “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” is a very American sentiment. Taken to its natural conclusion, we have these vastly wealthy players recklessly spending vast sums of money not their own as if they’re just. (Sound familiar?) And the man at the center of all this — whether a player himself or a pawn — wins big too. (He signed a self-serving contract and that makes him savvy — and thus, deserving.)

And yet there remains this requirement for a puritanical work ethic for the poor. Indeed, many people seem to believe it is they who are the culprits in this breakdown of decency and conscience.(Nothing new there, of course.)But it’s funny how it works. Poor people are losers if they even accept a government subsidy, while rich people are winners if they openly defy every norm of decent behavior and rig the system for themselves. Must be the money.

.

Shades of grey (austerity): remember what they did to you

by digby

In case you are wondering just why there have been such dismal job numbers and the government is doing everything it can to make it worse, here’s a handy little primer on who’s really responsible:

1. Filibustering the American Jobs Act. Last October, Senate Republicans killed a jobs bill proposed by President Obama that would have pumped $447 billion into the economy. Multiple economic analysts predicted the bill would add around two million jobs and hailed it as defense against a double-dip recession. The Congressional Budget Office also scored it as a net deficit reducer over ten years, and the American public supported the bill.

2. Stonewalling monetary stimulus. The Federal Reserve can do enormous good for a depressed economy through more aggressive monetary stimulus, and by tolerating a temporarily higher level of inflation. But with everything from Ron Paul’s anti-inflationary crusade to Rick Perry threatening to lynch Chairman Ben Bernanke, Republicans have browbeaten the Fed into not going down this path. Most damagingly, the GOP repeatedly held up President Obama’s nominations to the Federal Reserve Board during the critical months of the recession, leaving the board without the institutional clout it needed to help the economy.

3. Threatening a debt default. Even though the country didn’t actually hit its debt ceiling last summer, the Republican threat to default on the United States’ outstanding obligations was sufficient to spook financial markets and do real damage to the economy.

4. Cutting discretionary spending in the debt ceiling deal. The deal the GOP extracted as the price for avoiding default imposed around $900 billion in cuts over ten years. It included $30.5 billion in discretionary cuts in 2012 alone, costing the country 0.3 percent in economic growth and 323,000 jobs, according to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute. Starting in 2013, the deal will trigger another $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years.

5. Cutting discretionary spending in the budget deal. While not as cataclysmic as the debt ceiling brinksmanship, Republicans also threatened a shutdown of the government in early 2011 if cuts were not made to that year’s budget. The deal they struck with the White House cut $38 billion from food stamps, health, education, law enforcement, and low-income programs among others, while sparing defense almost entirely.

There have also been a few near-misses, in which the GOP almost prevented help from coming to the economy. The Republicans in the House delayed a transportation bill that saved as many as 1.9 million jobs. House Committees run by the GOP have passed proposals aimed at cutting billions from food stamps, and the party has repeatedly threatened to kill extensions of unemployment insurance and cuts to the payroll tax.

I’m not going to blame President Obama for this. He clearly wanted something more. But I will second this from Noam Scheiber, who notes that the private sector isn’t actually fine and something more must be done:

The upshot is that we’re no longer in a world where sending states a few tens of billions of dollars to shore up their finances is going to get the recovery on track. The economy, by which I mean the private sector, is disconcertingly weak, and strengthening it is going to take something on the order of several-hundred-billion dollars.

The good news is that Obama actually has a plan of roughly that magnitude—the $450 billion American Jobs Act he proposed last September, replete with new payroll tax cuts and additional aid for the unemployed. The bad news is that, in the vein of his “private sector is doing fine” comment, we’ve heard remarkably little about this package in recent months. I’m not sure if that’s because Team Obama believes focusing on it would draw attention to how fragile the economy is at an inconvenient time in the political cycle. Or because, after three plus years of intransigence, Obama has calculated that Republicans aren’t going to abruptly drop their deal-breaking opposition. But, regardless, I think it’s the wrong strategy.

One theme that runs through numerous White House missteps these last few years is the impulse to game out what the political constraints will allow, then proceed within them, rather than start with the optimal policy and fight for as much as they can get. (The major exception was the Jobs Act … before it was shelved.) But with the unemployment rate stuck above eight percent only four months before Election Day, maybe the latter is worth a shot. Sometimes good policy really is the best politics.

To those who believe the bully pulpit is a joke and that elections are entirely decided based upon how much cash individual voters have in their pocket when they step into the voting booth, this might not be persuasive. But if you think that people do tune in to what candidates are saying at some point in the cycle and are able to reason at all, it might help at the margins if the Obama campaign went back into “it’s a do-nothing-congress, pass my jobs bill” mode. I’m fairly sure it couldn’t hurt.

And who knows? Maybe educating the public a little bit about economics in the process might just help the country stave off know-nothing austerity in the future. Again, fairly sure it won’t hurt.

Good Ideas. Clunky Read.

by tristero

From an op-ed by William E. Forbath in The New York Times:

you can’t have a republican government, and certainly not a constitutional democracy, amid gross material inequality.

Of course. But what’s with the tone-deaf writing style, which hides certainty in a dependent clause? And how about that flaccid-sounding “amid,”thoroughly crushed by all the Big Idea phrases on either side?

Professor Forbath urges a clearly articulated, history-based liberal alternative to the rightwing “laissez-faire” mis-readings of the Constitution. A great idea. And sure, “crackpot originalism” efficiently mincemeats Scalia, but alas, the essay is not very well organized. Who, for example, are the “revivalists” at the top of graf 8? I don’t see…oh, yes, now I get it, there they are, mentioned in the middle of a long, tortuous sentence that ends with an awkwardly-used colon: seven paragraphs and several long digressions earlier.

Our problem is not ideas – we got ’em. Our problem is not moral justice, either, or the facts – they’re on our side. Our problem is, as always, rhetoric. We are still very bad at writing crisp, compelling explanations of our ideas.

Let’s take that quote above, and do a 2 minute rewrite:

In the face of gross material inequality, a democratic republic simply can’t exist.

Not great, I agree, but I think it reads a little better. Overall, the sentence is filled with sibilants, “t’s” and plosives – tough sounds. “In the face of” posits a confrontation and focuses the homonyn potential of “gross”so that it better implies personal revulsion (the sight of a “gross face”) at the enormous (“gross”) size of the inequality. A”democratic republic” conflates the distinction between a “republican government” and a “constitutional democracy” – important, but not terribly useful in this context. The strongly trochaic “simply”not only reinforces the proposition in the verb clause that follows but adds a second, vital, hidden assertion to it: the harm gross inequality causes is very easy to grasp. Finally,”can’t exist”explicitly warns that gross material inequality is an existential threat to America.

I’m sure that you folks – many of you far more talented writers than I am –  can do much, much better. William Forbath does have a great idea. Rather than wasting our time criticizing crackpot originalism – which confers upon it a status it doesn’t deserve – liberals need to better articulate independent alternatives. However, the way he expressed himself was not terribly articulate. It really is the rhetoric, people.

This is the kind of thing that makes people proud to be Democrats I’m sure:

The 17 House Democrats who voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in criminal contempt last week have received more than $1.3 million in financial aid from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee since the start of 2009, a review of campaign finance records shows. That total constitutes roughly one out of every nine dollars that the committee either spent or earmarked for candidates during that time period.

The aid isn’t atypical for the campaign committee, whose priority is numerical majorities rather than ideological purity.

“The DCCC is a member participation organization that supports Democrats for Congress with the goal of electing a Democratic majority,” said Jesse Ferguson, a spokesperson for the DCCC.

But with anger mounting among the Democrats over the GOP’s treatment of Holder, the money breakdown threatens to re-ignite a long-simmering debate over what type of lawmakers are best suited to fill the party’s ranks. The 17 Democrats who voted to hold Holder in contempt for the invoking of executive privilege in the Operation Fast and Furious investigation did so under pressure from the National Rifle Association. Their votes demonstrate the gun lobby’s continued power within the halls of Congress, while raising the question of why the DCCC lacks that same institutional clout.

In addition, seven of those 17 Democrats have said they either are skipping the party’s convention this summer or remain unsure of their intentions. One member has declined to endorse President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign.

Isn’t that just terrific?

Here’s Howie:

“[DCCC Chairman Steve Israel] is spending gargantuan amounts of money and energy on hopeless Blue Dogs … [rather] than working on winnable campaigns for independent-minded, progressive Democrats,” said Howie Klein, the co-founder of Blue America PAC, an organization devoted to promoting progressive candidates.

“Those 17 Democrats didn’t just suddenly join [Rep. Darrell] Issa’s witch hunt and stray from the Democratic fold. All 17 — no exceptions — are among the Democrats who vote with [Speaker John] Boehner and [House Majority Leader Eric] Cantor most frequently for the far right’s anti-family agenda.”

This is the truth. There are winnable campaigns out there that could really use some help. But these people are throwing good money after bad to elect people who won’t even commit to voting for the Speaker. This is a huge problem that relates to my earlier post suggesting that professional Republicans and Democrats alike believe that the most conservative candidate is always the best.

.

A political party descends rapidly into moral insanity

by David Atkins

The New York Times covers a Pew poll with some data about polarization:

[T]rends suggest that Americans are not vastly more polarized than they were in the late 1980s but that they have increasingly sorted themselves into two ideologically cohesive political parties.

During this time, Republicans have moved farther to the right — on economic issues, at least — than Democrats have moved to the left. Asked whether the government should take care of people who cannot take care of themselves, 75 percent of Democrats now say yes, down only slightly from 79 percent in 1987. But just 40 percent of Republicans say so, down from 62 percent in 1987.

Republicans’ support for stricter laws to protect the environment has fallen even more sharply.

But the views of Democrats have shifted on some economic issues as well, with Democrats becoming more strongly in favor of government steps to ensure equal opportunity. On social issues, like gay rights, Democrats have moved more than Republicans.

The poll, released Monday, suggested that Democrats have opinions closer to those of the country as a whole on gay rights and Wall Street. Republicans are closer to the national mood on affirmative action and whether the government should go deeper into debt to help the poor.

Bottom line? Since 1980 Republicans have moved much, much farther to the right. Democrats have also moved to the right on economic issues, but have moved somewhat to the left on social issues. Meanwhile, Democrats are much more in line with the public on core issues, while Republicans play very well on the public’s racism. Of course, there’s a problem with this: Pew creates a caricature of the liberal argument, postulating that Democrats want to go into more debt to help “the poor.” On the contrary. The People’s Budget balances the budget, while austerity measures are doomed to make the economy worse, decreasing tax revenue and increasing the deficit. Progressive Democrats want to close the deficit by clawing back some of the wealth essentially stolen by the richest 1%, and using it to help both the poor and the middle class, thus reinvigorating the economy while reducing unemployment and closing the deficit.

That aside, though, here’s the shocking bit, straight from the Pew Poll’s analysis itself:

Just 40% of Republicans agree that “It is the responsibility of the government to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves,” down 18 points since 2007. In three surveys during the George W. Bush administration, no fewer than half of Republicans said the government had a responsibility to care for those unable to care for themselves. In 1987, during the Ronald Reagan’s second term, 62% expressed this view.

In just five years, the percentage of Republicans who say the government should take care of people who can’t take care of themselves has dwindled by 18 percentage points. That’s no minor shift. That is a political party in the throes of a descent into moral madness.

.

QOTD: Chris Hayes

by digby

The central question for liberalism? Here’s Chris Hayes talking about inequality.

The argument that I make in the book is that inequality is bad because of what it does to the people at the top of the social pyramid. That it actually makes the people at the top of the social pyramid worse… It just is impossible, in practical terms, to separate equality of opportunity from equality of outcome. The latter subverts the former almost as what I call in the book a kind of iron law.

To me this is the most startling observation of the book. (Not the only one, mind you, just the most startling.)If he’s right, that income inequality always ends up rigging the game on behalf of the elites, then the whole liberal project of “equality of opportunity” is called into question, right? Opportunity alone is never going to cut it.

And frankly, the fact is that not everyone is going to become one of the elites, for a variety of reasons, no matter how equal the opportunity playing field really is. So, it’s really a lottery system — some people born American, with successful parents, more talent, more energy, more luck — are able to take advantage of the “equal opportunity” to climb to the top. Terrific as far as it goes.

What happens to everyone else?

.

Preparing the Romney purge already?

by digby

Alex Parene at Salon notes that prominent Republicans are signaling that Romneybot is underperforming specs:

Are prominent conservatives panicking about Mitt Romney’s campaign? It sorta looks that way, today. The Wall Street Journal editorial board — the men who ensure that even educated, newspaper-reading rich conservatives are successfully misinformed on all the major issues of the day — has a big “Mitt Romney is blowing it” editorial today (published online late Wednesday) that seems designed to stir up as much trouble as possible for the candidate.

The first line is hilarious and patently untrue: “If Mitt Romney loses his run for the White House, a turning point will have been his decision Monday to absolve President Obama of raising taxes on the middle class.”

Oh, indeed it will. After all, conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed.

We really needed for them to nominate a true believer this time — I’m afraid the fact that a loss for Romney the Massachusetts corporation in a suit will do little to calm the far right flame. In their minds he will prove, once again, that the country really wanted a far right extremist. If they had nominated one of their stars

The most interesting thing about this is the fact that Democrats have bought into the same mythology. Even if they don’t have to, the Party supports the most conservative Democratic candidate available, obviously laboring under the similar belief that the nation is begging for more right wing politics.

And people wonder why politics are so conservative these days.

.

Almost 10% of Pennsylvania voters could be disenfranchised by new voter ID law

by David Atkins

I don’t see how this can possibly be constitutional:

The impact of Pennsylvania’s new Voter-ID law could be much wider-reaching than the state’s Republican officials claimed when passing the bill, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

In fact, over 758,000 registered voters in Pennsylvania — representing 9.2 percent of the state’s 8.2 million registered voters — do not have photo identification cards from the state Transportation Department, based on a comparison between voter registration rolls and the Transportation Department database.

The problem is most acutely shown in Philadelphia, with 186,830 registered voters who do not have ID cards in the Transportation database, 18 percent of the city’s total registration.

Pennsylvania has tended to vote Democratic in presidential elections, having only voted Republican in landslide elections since the 1950’s. However, the results can sometimes be quite close, and the GOP has sought to win the state in cycle after cycle. It voted for Barack Obama by an 11-point margin in 2008 — a raw vote spread of about 620,000 votes, less than the new figure of potentially disenfranchised voters. Before that, it went for John Kerry by only 2.5 points in 2004, a spread of about 145,000 votes.

Recently, the state’s GOP House Majority Leader Mike Turzai boasted of the Voter-ID law as a Republican accomplishment that would have an effect in November, telling a party meeting: “Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”

The Supreme Court ruled that Indiana’s voter ID law was constitutional, but similar attempts in Wisconsin and Texas have been blocked at least for now, with Texas challenging the Voting Rights Act itself.

But it’s impossible to see how preventing almost 10% of the population from voting can be viewed as anything other than gross disenfranchisement.

.

Well that’s mighty white (male) of him:

by digby

Oooh, here’s a scoop:

Mitt Romney’s wife has disclosed a tantalizing detail about her husband’s intensely secret vice presidential search: He’s considering choosing a woman.

“We’ve been looking at that, and I love that option as well,” Ann Romney told CBS News in a joint interview with her husband that was broadcast Thursday.

That’s half the fucking population they’re so generously “considering”. In fact it’s a little more. Can people see just how offensive that is … how it reeks of privilege?

I guess not everyone sees what a sad comment that is. It’s 2012 and a woman is still a novelty option. Cute almost! I guess I’m just shocked that I’m on verge of old age and this is still happening.

.

Another story from the taser war on the mentally ill

by digby

Seattle:

The mother of a 25-year-old man who died after Tukwila police allegedly tased him said she told officers that her son was mentally ill and she “begged them not to use a Taser on him,” it was reported Tuesday.

Victor Duffy’s mother, Deanne Mills, told the Seattle Times she returned to her Tukwila home on Saturday just as the police were arriving. She said her son had called 911 during a fight with his younger sister despite his “deathly” fear of police.

The Seattle Times said that, according to Mills, her son had been diagnosed as being bipolar and having PTSD after a confrontation with police in which he was tased six years ago. She told the newspaper that her son was mentally ill and had not been taking his medications.

“I begged them not to use a Taser on him,” Mills was quoted as saying by the Times. “I told them he was afraid and I asked them to take care of him.”

Naturally, they used a taser on him:

Duffy’s relatives told the newspaper they were herded outside the home and they could hear a Taser being used and Duffy screaming inside the home while they were outside. One of his cousins said Duffy then jumped out of a second-story window to get away from them and apparently broke his ankle.

In a news release issued Monday by the Tukwila Police Department, the police said that officers responded to a 911 call late Saturday morning from residents of a house in the 5600 block of South 152nd Place.

“A 26-year-old male with a history of mental illness was being combative with his family and making strange statements to the 911 operator,” the statement said. “Officers arrived to find the male holding a golf club and threatening his family.

“The male broke his ankle while trying to escape from the officers as they were taking him into custody for involuntary mental health commitment … while in the ambulance, the male began to have breathing difficulties. He was taken to Harborview Hospital for emergency care, where he later died.”

So the relatives were not in the home and none of them were in danger. Apparently the cops couldn’t be bothered to listen to the mother about his mortal fear of tasers so they zapped him and he dove out a window to escape.

Mentally ill people are being tortured and killed by police. This has been the case throughout history, but you’d think we’d be a little bit more civilized by now. Whenever I see people laughing uproariously at some poor person being tasered and screaming in agony, I’m reminded of this:

In 1675 Bedlam moved to new buildings in Moorfields designed by Robert Hooke, outside the City boundary. In the 18th century people used to go there to see the lunatics. For a penny one could peer into their cells, view the freaks of the “show of Bethlehem” and laugh at their antics, generally of a sexual nature or violent fights. Entry was free on the first Tuesday of the month. Visitors were permitted to bring long sticks with which to poke and enrage the inmates. In 1814, there were 96,000 such visits.

We haven’t come that far I’m afraid.

.