Month: September 2012

No, American teachers don’t get paid too much

by David Atkins

As the Chicago Teachers Union strike heats up (and Paul Ryan finds common cause with Rahm Emanuel), it’s worth remembering that American teachers get paid much less than in most other industrialized countries, when accounting for the salaries of college educated workers. Catherine Rampel at the Times’ Economix blog has the details:

The United States spends a lot of money on education; including both public and private spending, America spends 7.3 percent of its gross domestic product on all levels of education combined. That’s above the average for the O.E.C.D., where the share is 6.2 percent.

The annual spending per student by educational institutions of all levels is also higher in the United States than it is in any other developed country.

Despite the considerable amount of money channeled into education here, teaching jobs in the United States are not as well paid as they are abroad, at least when you consider the other opportunities available to teachers in each country.

In most rich countries, teachers earn less, on average, than other workers who have college degrees. But the gap is much wider in the United States than in most of the rest of the developed world.

We do have a problem in the U.S. with education: it’s income inequality. American schools in affluent areas are on par with other countries. Schools in middle-class and poorer areas are not. Whatever the shortfalls in our education system, they’re not the fault of teachers or teachers’ unions. Teachers’ unions are the only thing keeping the pay of American teachers from hitting rock bottom compared to other countries, thus worsening the situation both from an educational point of view and from an economic one.

We don’t have an education crisis in this country. We have an income inequality problem.

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Inside when the planes hit

by digby

I remember reading this when it first came out and I’ve searched for it ever since. I’m not sure if Esquire didn’t have it online when I was searching or whether I just failed to find the right keywords (I didn’t recall which magazine I’d read it in.) In any case this account of being the World trade Center on September 11th is one of the most searing, horrifying first person accounts I’ve ever read. I’ve never gotten it out of my head.

Up to that day, I’d had a Brady Bunch, cookie-cutter, beautiful life. I now know what it’s like to have a 110-story building that’s been hit by a 767 come down on my head. For better or for worse, it’s part of my life. There are things I never thought I’d know that I now know.

It was as mundane a morning as you can imagine. Tuesdays are usually the days I go out to see clients and make sales calls. I get to my office at a quarter to eight, eat a bran muffin, drink a cup of coffee, and get my head straight for the day.

I was actually in a good mood. A couple of us were yukking it up in the men’s room. We’d just started sharing the eighty-first floor of 1 World Trade Center with Bank of America, and they’d put up a sign telling everyone to keep the bathroom clean. “Look at this,” one of us said. “They move in and now they’re giving us shit.” It was about quarter to nine.

All of a sudden, there was the shift of an earthquake. People ask, “Did you hear a boom?” No. The way I can best describe it is that every joint in the building jolted. You ever been in a big old house when a gust of wind comes through and you hear all the posts creak? Picture that creaking being not a matter of inches but of feet. We all got knocked off balance. One guy burst out of a stall buttoning up his pants, saying, “What the fuck?” The flex caused the marble walls in the bathroom to crack.

You’re thinking, Gas main. It was so percussive, so close. I opened the bathroom door, looked outside, and saw fire.

There was screaming. One of my coworkers, Alicia, was trapped in the women’s room next door. The doorjamb had folded in on itself and sealed the door shut. This guy Art and another guy started kicking the shit out of the door, and they finally got her out.

There was a huge crack in the floor of the hallway that was about half a football field long, and the elevator bank by my office was completely blown out. If I’d walked over, I could’ve looked all the way down. Chunks of material that had been part of the wall were in flames all over the floor. Smoke was everywhere.

I knew where the stairs were because a couple of guys from my office used to smoke butts there. I started screaming, “Out! Out! Out!” The managers were trying to keep people calm and orderly, and here I was screaming, “The stairs! The stairs!”

We got to the stairwell, and people were in various states. Some were in shock; some were crying. We started filing down in two rows, fire-drill style. I’d left my cell phone at my desk, but my coworkers had theirs. I tried my wife twenty times but couldn’t get through. Jenny had gone up to Boston with her mother and grandmother and was staying with my family. Our son was with her. Ben’s six months old. It was impossible to reach them…

I suppose we all wonder what we’d do in a catastrophe like that. This fellow found out.

It’s an amazing story, highly recommended. Just brace yourself.

h/t to Peter Daou who tweeted this link.
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In case you were wondering if all this 99% stuff is really true, EPI has gathered all the numbers. And it is:

Daily stock indices, monthly employment reports, and even quarterly data on the gross domestic product are insufficient indicators for answering this vital question: How well is the American economy providing acceptable growth in living standards for most households? EPI’s The State of Working America, 12th Edition looks broadly at available data and concludes that the answer is simply “not well at all.”

This is not because the economy has failed to grow, on average. National income has grown enough to substantially improve the fortunes for all. As the data reveal, however, it is the top 5, the top 1, and fractions of the top 1 percent that have received almost all the benefits of the economy’s growth.

Here are some numbers for you:

A generation of rising inequality

156% — From 1979–2007, wages for the top 1 percent of wage earners grew 156 percent, compared to 17 percent for the bottom 90 percent.

60% — From 1979–2007, the top 1 percent of tax units claimed 60 percent of the cash, market-based income growth, compared to 9 percent for the bottom 90 percent.
38.3% — From 1983–2010, 38.3 percent of the wealth growth went to the top 1 percent and 74.2 percent to the top 5 percent. The bottom 60 percent, meanwhile, suffered a decline in wealth.

Rising inequality prevented wage growth for low- and middle-income workers

0.6% — From 1979–2007, incomes for the middle fifth of households grew, but the annualized rate of growth (0.6 percent) reflects a deep economic failure. This middle-fifth growth lagged far behind average growth over the same period, and pales in comparison to growth during earlier periods of history; between 1947 and 1979, for example, cash incomes (not even including expanded employer-provided and government in-kind benefits like health care) for the middle fifth of American families grew at an average annual rate of 2.4 percent—or four times as fast as what was achieved by the middle fifth of households between 1979 and 2007. If the middle fifth of the income distribution had grown at the average rate of income growth overall, these households would have had income $18,897 higher in 2007.

7% — The typical worker has not gained from improvements in the ability to produce more goods and services per hour worked (productivity growth). Between 1979 and 2011, productivity grew 69 percent, but median hourly compensation (wages and benefits) grew just 7 percent.

Policy choices generated inequality

Policy decisions made over the last several decades have caused this explosive rise in inequality. These decisions include: lowering individual and corporate tax rates; deregulating industries; failing to maintain the value of the minimum wage; failing to protect the right of workers to obtain collective bargaining; and failing to prevent asset bubbles.

So let’s have some more of that good stuff!

Who’s shaping public beliefs about health care?

by digby

Greg Sargent talks about a new national Journal poll that find a vast majority of Americans want to keep Medicare just as it is. But that’s not all:

And yet the poll also finds that far more respondents think that Obamacare helps the poor than think it helps people like them. Sixty percent say the health law will make things better for people without insurance and for the poor. But only 45 percent say it will make things beter for the middle class, and only 43 percent say it will make things better for “people like you and your family.”

And there you have it. The Romney/Ryan game plan all along has been about painting Obama as the true threat to Medicare and themselves as its true defenders, in order to obscure the true nature of their ideological differences with Obama over the program’s future. After all, what they have actually proposed is deeply unpopular. And they have employed the suggestion that Obama is taking hard earned benefits away from seniors to expand health care to other people, because majorities do believe the law is all about helping the poor, and not helping them.

I think there’s truth in Greg’s analysis. Certainly the Republicans have made a fetish out of claiming Obamacare robs Medicare to pay for the you-know-whos. But there’s another reason people believe this, which President Obama has stated over and over again:

If you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, or Medicare, or Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have.

The president repeatedly made it clear that if you were currently insured by your employer or one of those programs, nothing would change for you. I’d guess that many people heard that and believed him. Therefore, this huge new program must be for someone else.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about that tack. It’s understandable since most people have pretty good insurance that you wouldn’t want to scare them by saying hat everything’s going to change. On the other hand, this idea that the hard working real Americans are subsidizing the parasites has a very long pedigree in American culture and it was dangerous to frame it that way.

In any case, it probably ended up accomplishing both things. People aren’t scared they’re going to lose what they have, but at the same time many also believe there’s a big new “entitlement” for the uninsured and the poor. The Democrats should be thinking about this.

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Learning the lessons of the neocon wetdream all over again

by digby

So Kurt Eichenwald has a new book coming out called 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars.He wrote a piece for the NY Times in which he revealed some new information about the months before the attacks:

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

In response, the C.I.A. prepared an analysis that all but pleaded with the White House to accept that the danger from Bin Laden was real.

“The U.S. is not the target of a disinformation campaign by Usama Bin Laden,” the daily brief of June 29 read, using the government’s transliteration of Bin Laden’s first name. Going on for more than a page, the document recited much of the evidence, including an interview that month with a Middle Eastern journalist in which Bin Laden aides warned of a coming attack, as well as competitive pressures that the terrorist leader was feeling, given the number of Islamists being recruited for the separatist Russian region of Chechnya.

And the C.I.A. repeated the warnings in the briefs that followed. Operatives connected to Bin Laden, one reported on June 29, expected the planned near-term attacks to have “dramatic consequences,” including major casualties. On July 1, the brief stated that the operation had been delayed, but “will occur soon.” Some of the briefs again reminded Mr. Bush that the attack timing was flexible, and that, despite any perceived delay, the planned assault was on track.

Yet, the White House failed to take significant action.

This seems to be a shocking revelation to many people this morning. I’m not sure why. It was obvious after Richard Clarke’s testimony about people running around with their “hair on fire” that summer that the administration had been negligent. I suppose that Eichenwald turning up documents and interviews that back up that testimony is important for the historical record, but even before Clarke’s testimony, the confluence of events alone showed what happened quite clearly.

I wrote this before the invasion in early 2003 (and been writing similar elsewhere since early 2002):

Invading Iraq on a thin pretext (which is what is going to happen because this war is already timed for American convenience and nothing else) is possibly going to set off a chain of events that could have been avoided if we handled the situation with a little more sophistication and finesse instead of fulfilling some long held neocon wet dream. And that is the real problem.

The Wolfowitz/Perle school never took terrorism seriously when it was becoming a threat on the world stage and they don’t take it seriously now. The influential CSP issued only 2 reports since the 1998 embassy bombing about the threat of terrorism until 9/11. The PNAC has been wringing their hands about Iraq and pushing for missile defense for years, but terrorism was hardly even on the radar screen. They are about China, Iraq, North Korea, Russia, Israel, US “benevolent” hegemony and missile defense. Period. Anything else will be subsumed under what they believe is the real agenda…

This is very dangerous. Bush, with his stupid bellicose posturing has created a needless crisis in Asia by challenging a cornered and neurotically proud despot in North Korea into a nuclear standoff. He has escalated the problem with Iraq to one of immediate danger, when it was a medium term threat at worst, and by conflating it with Al Qaeda and Muslim fundamentalism, for no good reason other than political expediency, he has made it a cause for a whole lot of disaffected people in the Mideast and Indian subcontinent to rally around.

The PNAC documents were clear about their priorities. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and the rest of that PNAC cabal had an agenda. Terrorism wasn’t part of it.

On the other hand, when the threat they didn’t take seriously materialized, they were prepared to take advantage of it. As their seminal document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” said:

[T]he process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor”

And indeed, they started talking about invading Iraq immediately. Recall this:

On the day of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, Wolfowitz told senior officials at the Pentagon that he believed Iraq might have been responsible. “I was scratching my head because everyone else thought of al Qaeda,” said a former senior defense official who was in one such meeting. Over the following year, “we got taskers to review the link between al Qaeda and Iraq. There was a very aggressive search.”

In the winter of 2001-02, officials who worked with Wolfowitz sent the Defense Intelligence Agency a message: Get hold of Laurie Mylroie’s book, which claimed Hussein was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and see if you can prove it, one former defense official said.

The DIA’s Middle East analysts were familiar with the book, “Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein’s War Against America.” But they and others in the U.S. intelligence community were convinced that radical Islamic fundamentalists, not Iraq, were involved. “The message was, why can’t we prove this is right?” said the official.

Richard Clarke quoted Wolfowitz in his book making all this crystal clear:

“You give Bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don’t exist.”

They were very, very wedded to their larger agenda — so much so that they ignored the threat assessments in the summer of 2001. So wedded, in fact, that they took advantage of the terrorist attacks on September 11th to pursue it.

I thought we already knew this. But judging by what I’m reading this morning on twitter and elsewhere, we didn’t. As Elizabeth Warren would say, “holy moley.”

Update: To be clear, I’m not saying that Bush and his people planned 9/11 or even wished for it. I’m saying they didn’t believe it could happen. But when it did, they used it to advance the agenda they already had on tap.

Are these people even trying?

by David Atkins

Rachel Maddow has a great segment on the recent rank incompetence of the Romney campaign.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
There are some bizarre theories out there that Republicans are trying to throw the election because they’re happy with Obama. I think that’s preposterous for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that Karl Rove’s big donors aren’t spending over a billion dollars to defeat the President on a lark. Nor is Mitt Romney in the race as a sacrificial lamb. He certainly doesn’t need the money.

But if the Romney campaign doesn’t achieve some level of competence soon, the voices throwing those sorts of theories around will only get louder.

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Because you need it

by digby

Now this is what I call a Honey Boo Boo:

After carrying out their third examination, vets at San Diego zoo in California confirm their new baby panda is a boy. The panda, which won’t be named until he is 100 days old is the sixth giant panda to be born at the zoo. The 21-year-old mother, Bai Yun, who gave birth on Sunday, was the first giant panda born in captivity in China and is on long-term loan in San Diego

This too:

Sea otters might be on the frontlines of the fight against global warming, according to a new study showing the fur-coated swimmers keep sea urchin populations in check, which in turn allows carbon dioxide-sucking kelp forests to prosper.

Researchers from the University of California, Santa Cruz, looked at 40 years of data on otters and kelp blooms from Vancouver Island to the western edge of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. They said they found that sea otters have a positive indirect effect on kelp biomass by preying on sea urchins…

The authors acknowledge that otters probably aren’t the answer to rising CO2 levels, a major contributing factor to global warming, but the researchers say their study illustrates the impact animals can have on the atmosphere.

“Right now, all the climate change models and proposed methods of sequestering carbon ignore animals. But animals the world over, working in different ways to influence the carbon cycle, might actually have a large impact,” UC Santa Cruz professor Chris Wilmers, a co-author of the study, said in a statement. “If ecologists can get a better handle on what these impacts are, there might be opportunities for win-win conservation scenarios, whereby animal species are protected or enhanced, and carbon gets sequestered.”

Ok, you know you want it:

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Regrets for embarrassing the unembarrassable

by digby

One of the main events of the Obama first term that thrilled progressives and showed a very tough Obama persona turns out to have been an error:

President Obama told author Bob Woodward that he didn’t know Rep. Paul Ryan was going to attend at a major speech he delivered last year on spending and debt, and says in retrospect that it was “a mistake” to dress down Ryan and his budget plans to his face in that setting.

In the interview conducted July 11 — about a month before Ryan was tapped as Mitt Romney’s running mate – the president also misstated the first name of the man who is now on the opposing presidential ticket.

“I’ll go ahead and say it – I think that I was not aware when I gave that speech that Jack Ryan was going to be sitting right there,” the president told Woodward according to audio transcripts of their conversations, provided to ABC News.

“And so I did feel, in retrospect, had I known – we literally didn’t know he was going to be there until – or I didn’t know, until I arrived. I might have modified some of it so that we would leave more negotiations open, because I do think that they felt like we were trying to embarrass him,” Obama continued. “We made a mistake.”

Yes, that would have made all the difference.

Oh well, tomorrow is another day.

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QOTD: Mary Matalin

by digby

Can you see what’s wrong with this picture?

“Janna is a seasoned political partner who lives a real middle-class mother life with real Americans in the middle of the country,” said veteran GOP strategist Mary Matalin. “Hard to imagine a greater asset to the campaign than such an authentic presence.”

This is a perfect Villager comment. “A seasoned political partner” who is also an “authentic” middle class mother just like “real Americans” in the middle of the country.

Uhm no. “Seasoned political partners” aren’t average people and Janna Ryan is not just like real American moms in the middle of the country living a real middle-class mother life. She’s married to one of the most powerful men in the US Government, a man who routinely hob-nobs with the wealthiest people in world. He’s also running for Vice President of the most powerful nation on earth. I’m sure millionaire celebrities consider all these things to be signs of normal middle class life since they think they are all salt ‘o the earth reglar folk themselves, but it just ain’t true.

Oh, did I mention this?

An Oklahoma native, her cousin is retiring Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.), and her uncle David Boren is a former governor and senator.

And hilariously, the very next paragraph after Matalin’s absurd spin says this:

“She has good and sharp political instincts. She knows Capitol Hill well, having worked as both a staffer and a lobbyist,” Cole said. “She was a tax lobbyist, so she knows the fiscal issues as well as anybody and probably more than any of the spouses that, with all due respect, didn’t come from that background, whether it’s Michelle [Obama] or Ann [Romney] or Jill [Biden]. She did.”

Sure, most all-American soccer moms are lobbyists. What could be more common?

That’s the very essence of the Village, right there. They honestly believe they are average people. They’re all just regular folks like you and me — well except for all the money, the power and the celebrity. But what difference could that possibly make?

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The power of emotion is humiliating the quants

by David Atkins

If President Obama manages to hold onto his lead and win in November, one of the most pleasant side effects will be the humiliation of elections models (such as this much ballyhooed one from Colorado University) based on economic determinism. It will be a pleasant reminder to all the Ivy-educated poli sci quants that context, emotion and qualitative factors are what carry the day in politics. That in turn should take some of shine out of the advocates of bloodless technocracy as good political policy. Jamelle Bouie steps in for Greg Sargent today and points out the obvious:

As Greg has been pointing out, it’s clear that the Romney campaign is governed by a crude economic determinism — “as long as the economy is bad, all we have to do is show up, and voters will reward us with the presidency.” Hence Romney pollster Neil Newhouse’s declaration that “the basic structure of the race hasn’t changed.” This is true, but not in a way that helps Romney. Simply put, the “basic structure of the race” still favors President Obama. The economy is poor and job creation is sluggish, but growth is on an upward trajectory, and according to most election models, this makes Obama a slight favorite for reelection. That the Romney campaign fails to see this explains everything from Romney’s refusal to provide policy detail to his team’s inexplicable decision to cede summer advertising to the Obama campaign.

The simple fact is that voters aren’t making a crude economic calculus based on objective conditions — they’re weighing context and evaluating both candidates’ plans for the future. And when it comes down to it, they’re not necessarily convinced that Obama has completely failed to fix things. If Romney can’t overcome and account for that, he’ll lose.

They’re doing even more than that. They’re actually weighing a deeply personal, almost romantic soap opera triangle between themselves and the two candidates.

Which is perfect. Mitt Romney is the ultimate bloodless quant. As Biden said, he looks at the world as a series of spreadsheets, with the goal of tilting the balance sheet toward the wealthy. The President, meanwhile, has a natural gift of emotive power in his campaigning, but governs like a technocratic quant who often underestimates the power of symbolism and values-driven policy.

Hopefully if the President defeats Romney handily, it will help sully the reputation of the quants and validate those who know that elections, like life, are much more fluid and emotional than deterministic models would suggest.

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