Month: May 2013

Robert Reich gets the need for international action

by David Atkins

I’ve mentioned before with some controversy the need for a stronger set of international rules to prevent predation by various malevolent actors, including and especially multinational corporations. Robert Reich agrees:

As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom — eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s “competitiveness” — while sheltering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions they can find. Major advanced countries — and their citizens — need a comprehensive tax agreement that won’t allow global corporations to get away with this.

Google, Amazon, Starbucks, every other major corporation, and every big Wall Street bank, are sheltering as much of their U.S. profits abroad as they can, while telling Washington that lower corporate taxes are necessary in order to keep the U.S. “competitive.”

Baloney. The fact is, global corporations have no allegiance to any country; their only objective is to make as much money as possible — and play off one country against another to keep their taxes down and subsidies up, thereby shifting more of the tax burden to ordinary people whose wages are already shrinking because companies are playing workers off against each other.

Of course, just like disjointed tribes more interested in fighting one another than in resisting the invader, the nation-states of the world are reacting to the multinational corporate threat by descending into the very nationalism that will doom them:

Meanwhile, At a time when you’d expect nations to band together to gain bargaining power against global capital, the opposite is occurring: Xenophobia is breaking out all over.

Right-wing nationalist parties are gaining ground elsewhere in Europe as well. In the U.S., not only are Republicans sounding more nationalistic of late (anti-immigrant, anti-trade), but they continue to push “states rights” — as states increasingly battle against one another to give global companies ever larger tax breaks and subsidies.

Nothing could strengthen the hand of global capital more than such breakups.

Reich clearly gets what I’ve also been stating for a while now: that protectionist nationalism abroad is no different from “states’ rights” at home. Both serve to empower corporations over governments.

Reich’s progressive credentials are frankly unimpeachable. He’s not an imperialist or corporatist any more than I am. Reich gets it. The status quo is a playground for multinational corporations. They get to play nation-states off one another and watch their people fight one another for scraps rather than take on the global capital threat. It’s going to take international coalitions with teeth to counter the power of international corporate capital.

Coalitions: what works at a local and state level to counteract corporate power, can work at an international level as well. It’s really the only thing that can.

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RIP Ray Manzarek

by digby

The legend has it that this is the song Jim Morrison sang for Ray Manzarek out on Venice Beach all those years ago — which persuaded him to join forces and start The Doors:

And here’s Riders on the Storm, featuring arguably Manzarek’s most memorable playing:

If there’s a Rock and Roll heaven and all that jazz …

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The elderly poor — there are a whole lot of them

by digby

This report by the Kaiser Family Foundation about elder poverty is shocking. I don’t think people realize just how many millions of people are barely subsisting in their old age, but it’s many more than the government likes to admit to. Just as with the Chained-CPI, we’re dealing with how they are accounted for rather than the actual numbers these people are forced to live on.

Dylan Matthews explains why elder poverty is so much worse than we realize:

While the SPM takes transfer payments into account, it does the same with out-of-pocket medical costs. If you’re an unmarried senior with no dependents, make $15,000 a year, and spend $10,000 of it on medical care, under the official poverty measure you’d most likely not count as poor, as $15,000 is above the 2012 poverty threshold for a single senior ($11,011). 

But under the SPM, you’d count as poor as $15,000 – $10,000 = $5,000, which is below the relevant SPM threshold. And despite having Medicare, many seniors struggle with out-of-pocket medical bills. As my colleague Michelle Singletary pointed out over the weekend, the Employee Benefit Research Institute has found Medicare only pays for about 60 percent of seniors’ total health costs. Sarah has written about how out-of-pocket costs tend to pile up particularly at the end of seniors’ lives.

Can you believe that we’re actually talking about whether or not $15,000 counts as poverty in America in the first place? And then it turns out they aren’t counting what these old people have to lay in medicare costs! That’s just mind-boggling.

In any case, the article is very interesting and shows that some of the places with the highest elderly poverty are in places like California where 20% of SS recipients are in poverty.

And yet, the president and members of both parties have been talking about cutting benefits. Unbelievable.

As always when I read about the necessity of a guaranteed old age pension that keeps people living in dignified circumstances after they are too old to work, I’m reminded of this great article by Arthur Delaney and Ryan Grim from a few years ago:

An employee of Associated Charities, a private organization dedicated to alleviating poverty in the District of Columbia, met an old black woman carrying a basket of cinders near the dump in Southeast D.C. on a bitterly cold day in December 1896.

The woman “could not give street and number, but could ‘fotch’ the agent to her place,” according to a case study labeled “Aunt Winnie” in one of the organization’s annual reports from near the turn of the century. “Old age, with a heavy load on top and a strong wind blowing, made the walk a trying one. At last the 8×10 cabin was reached. In it was a stove in many pieces held together with wire, a bedstead with rags for mattress and rags for covering. From the leaky roof the floor was wet through and through.”

Aunt Winnie, the report said, had no income save the 50 cents she made every two weeks for taking in wash. In summertime she raised herbs and greens, but in winter she “suffered for food and fuel.” Her children had all been sold away to slavery, and a nearby niece was too poor to offer any support. Her neighbors helped, providing money for the stove and cot, and a “colored friendly visitor was found to carry broth and other comforts to her.” The neighborly charity wasn’t enough to persuade the agent, who was essentially a private sector version of a social worker, that the old woman should be on her own.

“In the fall of ’98 agent asked her to go into the almshouse, but she would not consent. During the storm in February ’99, she was kept from perishing with a great effort. Every visit, and they were many, had to be made through snow up to the waist. It was during these visits that the promise was made that before another winter she would take refuge in an almshouse.”

When the weather warmed, Aunt Winnie backed off her promise to go to the almshouse. The social worker started to play hardball.

“It would be hard to say which, the agent or the applicant, suffered the more, because through all this distress had sprung up a loving confidence and perfect trust that seemed cruel to deceive. Attention and assistance were withdrawn gradually.”

It worked: In July, Aunt Winnie relented and said she’d go to the almshouse as soon she could sell her cabin. Nobody would buy it, so the social worker told her to tear it down and sell it for kindling. At 2 p.m. on Aug. 23, 1899, the social worker showed up in a wagon.

“[S]he was sitting on her trunk, without a stick of the cabin to be seen. Without a murmur she dropped a courtsey to the bare spot where once stood the cabin and turned away. After an affectionate separation in the almshouse the agent came away feeling that for such a balmy day in August it was a trying task to perform, but for winter’s blizzards, a blessed relief. In case of her death a promise has been made to her that the general secretary of the Associated Charities will keep her body from potter’s field.”

Aunt Winnie, whose story is preserved in the archives of the Historical Society of Washington, had been sent to an American institution that was by then some 300 years old and went by a variety of names: the county farm, the poor farm, the almshouse or, most often, simply the poorhouse. She would probably have been surprised to learn that more than a hundred years later, after the virtual eradication of elderly poverty, a powerful political movement would materialize with the mission of returning to the hands-off social policies that made the poorhouse the nation’s only refuge for the jobless, the aged, the infirm and the disabled.

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The scariest weather event I’ve ever seen

by digby

Apparently, it was a mile wide:

Action News 5 – Memphis, Tennessee

I just don’t know what to say about that other than — Oh My God. That is a monster tornado.

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Stimulus working in Japan. Austerity failing in Europe. Will economists learn?

by David Atkins

I noted a few days ago how the inflation rate has dashed the expectations of conservative economists by remaining stubbornly low, then pointed out (as Paul Krugman has been gleefully doing for months) that conservative economists have been proven wrong about nearly everything:

The world is in deflationary spiral, not an inflationary one. Just as Keynesian economists predicted, and as conservative economists insisted could never happen.

Throw this in there with the disproven claims that bond vigilantes would punish the dollar for the S&P downgrade, that tax cuts would lead to economic growth, that deregulation would lead to endless prosperity and self-policing markets, that lower taxes would lead to increased revenues, and that austerity would lead to increased investor confidence and lower unemployment. All wrong. Dead wrong.

Add to that the success of stimulus and failure of austerity, Japan versus Europe edition:

Even as Europe fell deeper into what just became its longest recession since World War II, Japan posted an unexpectedly robust growth rate of 3.5 percent under the bold new stimulus measures championed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — precisely the medicine many have urged European leaders to take.

“The elites in Europe don’t learn,” said Stephan Schulmeister, an economist with the Austrian Institute of Economic Research. “Instead of saying, ‘Something goes wrong, we have to reconsider or find a different navigation map, change course,’ instead what happens is more of the same.”

He added, “Angela Merkel is not willing to learn from the Japanese experience,” referring to the German chancellor.

Since taking office in December, Mr. Abe has pushed a three-pronged program — called the three-arrowed approach in Japan — to end two decades of stagnation in the Japanese economy. It involves a strongly expansionary monetary policy, increased fiscal spending and structural changes to improve competitiveness; the first-quarter growth spurt suggests that his approach is already paying off.

Not only have exports improved, the logical outgrowth of a weaker currency, but consumer sentiment and household consumption also have risen. “The real economy is responding,” said Adam S. Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “The last five months, six months, there’s been a mini consumer boom. All the things that people said could never happen in Japan have turned around.”

He added: “Japan’s central bank is supporting recovery, and it’s working. The European Central Bank is supporting stagnation, and it’s working.”

If there were justice in the world and economics were an actual science like it pretends to me, every conservative and neoliberal economist who has made wildly wrong predictions at the expense of traditional Keynesians would find their careers and livelihoods in jeopardy. But that’s not how the system works. Economists who tout the corporate line serve on boards where they are extremely well-compensated for continuing to infect the academic bloodstream with wildly fallacious theories that have no bearing on reality. Remember this particularly compelling segment of the outstanding docmentary Inside Job:

The time is long past for policy makers to do what works and leave aside what doesn’t. There is a temptation (as Digby has noted) to see economics as a morality play in which the poor and middle class must suffer for the sins of the rich. But that does not good policy or economics make.

If the profession of economics refuses to act like a real science and make predictions based on available data rather than on conservative political morality, then it should should have the same impact on public discourse and policy that astrology and young earth creationism do.

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Begging to be subjects, Part XXXIV

by digby

Apparently it’s necessary to point out that just because something has been legalized, it does not mean that anyone has an obligation to do it. I’m speaking, of course, about this unfolding leak scandal. Yes, the administration appears to have adhered to a strict interpretation of the law (although it seems to me that if the FBI misled the court about possible indictments of reporters in order to get warrants then perhaps that’s not actually the case.)

But who cares that it’s legal? There is a constitutional principle at stake and we have a right to expect the Department of Justice to be exceptionally cautious about using the sledgehammer of the federal government to shut down the press. Yes, we know the government has reasons to keep secrets and we know the press has reason to want to reveal them. It is a tension that exists at the heart of our system. But that is why we expect that the government, our representatives after all, to give the press notice and allow the process to be litigated through proper channels. These backdoor subpoenas, surveillance of reporters, sweeping dragnets for information is contrary to the principle that the press is a uniquely important institution in a free society.

Perhaps it is just a standard “policy dispute” as the jaded punditocracy drolly asserts today, certainly nothing we could call a “scandal.” Everyone knows that reporters are going to be secretly tracked by the government in the course of their jobs. Why what could be more All-American than that?(Oh, and don’t worry reporters — if the government finds something in the course of their surveillance that doesn’t pertain to their investigation they pinky swear to forget they ever saw it, so no need to worry that federal agents are prying into your personal life.)

Still, I think it’s worth just a teensy bit of concern by those who foolishly believe that the more secrecy a government insists upon having, the more suspicious one should be about why it’s keeping all those secrets. That just seems like common sense to me.

Update: It occurs to me that even people inside DC don’t know just how massive this secret, domestic intelligence apparatus is, far beyond what’s going on with these particular press leaks. There is a hugely expensive, unaccountable, secret part of our government.  I’ve mentioned this Frontline documentary before but it’s never been more timely than now.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth taking the time.  Certainly journalists and opinion writers should. How anyone could be blase after seeing it is beyond me.

For instance, do you know about the “fusion centers?” Probably not.  But you’re paying for them:

Today, a bipartisan Senate committee published the searing results of a two-year investigation (PDF) into “fusion centers,” which were created in the aftermath of 9/11 as places for state, local and federal officials to share and analyze information, in the hopes of detecting and thwarting terrorist threats.

The country’s 70-plus state and local fusion centers have “not produced useful intelligence to support federal counterterrorism efforts” and have “too often wasted money and stepped on Americans’ civil liberties,” according to the report, which goes on to criticize the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for insufficient oversight.

According to the congressional report, DHS estimates that it has spent between $289 million and $1.4 billion to support fusion centers since 2003. Why is there such a broad range and so little certainty of just how much money has been spent?

DHS has given an unusual amount of autonomy to each state to figure out what to do with fusion center money, which also means they don’t have good accounting of what each state spends their money on and how effective it’s been. It’s a broad problem for DHS. They were trying to give states autonomy, but it lacks the accountability that such a broad and expensive program needs.

Committee chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) noted that while fusion centers have not provided useful intelligence, they “may provide valuable services in fields other than terrorism,” like criminal investigations, public safety or disaster response. What’s the likelihood that the centers remain in place, but take on other activities? What’s the likelihood that they are eliminated altogether?

Is this ok? Are we just accepting that the government has built 70 surveillance centers that are not doing anything to thwart terrorism, but need to be funded because they might become valuable in “other things” like criminal investigations and “public safety?” Feel safer with more and more yahoos with surveillance power using this federally funded technology to track …well, anything they want to?
That’s just one example. Perhaps it’s true that nobody gives a damn about all this, but the one group I would expect to care would be the press. To see some of these pundits and reporters pooh-pooh it  is just depressing.

We’ve known about much of this for some time, what with the disdainful treatment of Wikileaks and stories of other reporters being hounded and personally investigated. But it’s still very unnerving to know that the so-called liberal media won’t even uniformly fight for itself when it finds the press in the cross-hairs. What the hell are average citizens supposed to do?

Update: This Greg Sargent interview with Mark Mazzetti, who covers national security for the New York Times, is well worth reading. Unlike the jaded commentariat (not Greg, obviously) people who work in the field really are disturbed.

Of course, if you don’t care to know what your government is doing well then, this is just a tempest in a teapot.
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VSP macho complex

by digby

Paul Krugman posted this interesting take on the psychology of the Very Serious People today:

It was obvious during the runup to the Iraq war that what was going on in the minds of many hawks — and not just the neocons — was not so much a deep desire to drop lots of bombs and kill lots of people (although they were OK with that) as a deep desire to be seen as people who were willing to Do What Has to be Done. Men who have never risked, well, anything relished the chance to look in the mirror and see Winston Churchill looking back.

Actually, I suspect that even the torture thing had less to do with sadism than with the desire to look tough.

And the austerian impulse is pretty much the same thing, except that in this case the mild-mannered pundits want to look in the mirror and see Paul Volcker.

Much of the problem in trying to stop the march to war was precisely the fear of many pundits that they would be seen as weak and, above all, not Serious if they objected. Austerity has been very much the same thing — and again, it’s not just the right-wingers who are afflicted.

I wrote something similar about the right’s Benghazi obsession yesterday. But Krugman is correct that it isn’t just a right wing thing. It’s a Very Serious People thing as well, both in foreign policy terms as well as, we now know, economic ones. The world is run by a bunch of macho wannabes who have some deep need to show their masculine bonafides by either pounding their chests for war or demanding human sacrifice to “toughen us up.”

Maybe people like this should be in charge instead.

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Prosecuting the press: “This has not fared well in American history.”

by digby

Wow. It would appear that the Obama administration’s Department of Justice is now officially out of control. This report about a leak investigation involving Fox DC bureau chief James Rosen:

FBI investigators used the security-badge data, phone records and e-mail exchanges to build a case that Kim shared the report with Rosen soon after receiving it, court records show.

In the documents, FBI agent Reginald Reyes described in detail how Kim and Rosen moved in and out of the State Department headquarters at 2201 C St. NW a few hours before the story was published on June 11, 2009.

“Mr. Kim departed DoS at or around 12:02 p.m. followed shortly thereafter by the reporter at or around 12:03 p.m.,” Reyes wrote. Next, the agent said, “Mr. Kim returned to DoS at or around 12:26 p.m. followed shortly thereafter by the reporter at or around 12:30 p.m.”

The activity, Reyes wrote in an affidavit, suggested a “face-to-face” meeting between the two men. “Within a few hours after those nearly simultaneous exits and entries at DoS, the June 2009 article was published on the Internet,” he wrote.

The court documents don’t name Rosen, but his identity was confirmed by several officials, and he is the author of the article at the center of the investigation. Rosen and a spokeswoman for Fox News did not return phone and e-mail messages seeking comment.

Reyes wrote that there was evidence Rosen had broken the law, “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.” That fact distinguishes his case from the probe of the AP, in which the news organization is not the likely target.

And to think we all assumed that sort of thing went out with the departure of Bush’s consiglieri Alberto Gonzales. (Not that we haven’t known for some time that they’ve been “going the extra mile” investigating reporters, including looking at their bank records and credit files.) But it seems that isn’t the limit of what they’ve done. I wonder what is?

Meanwhile, recall that just last week:

Under questioning by Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), Holder dismissed the notion of prosecuting reporters as, basically, nuts.

“You’ve got a long way to go to try to prosecute people—the press for the publication of that material,” Holder declared. “This has…not fared well in American history.”

“With regard to the potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material, that is not something that I’ve ever been involved in, heard of or would think would be a wise policy,” Holder added later. “The focus should be on those people who break their oath and put the American people at risk, not reporters who gather this information. That should not be the focus…of these investigations.”

Apparently, they just used the threat of prosecution to persuade a court to issue a warrant. Which, considering Holder’s testimony, means they misled the court  — or he misled the committee. But hey it appears that anything goes with these cases so maybe nobody cares.

I’m going to guess that the explanation for all this will be that these investigations are at the individual prosecutor’s discretion and they’re only following departmental policies, doing their jobs etc, etc. And maybe these prosecutors really are personally offended by national security leaks, in this case from the State Department regarding North Korea. But even if this goes all the way to Holder, how likely is it that the DOJ has taken it upon itself to worry about protecting a North Korean source, which is the issue at stake in the Rosen case? Who’s ordering these investigations?

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Dispatch from Gilead: criminalizing miscarriage

by digby

Like a lot of reproductive rights advocates, I’ve often been accused of being hysterical about the anti-abortion right’s agenda. I’m often told that there is no desire to deny women their agency and that we really should lighten up. When we point out that the logical end point of the anti-abortion zealots’ arguments for conferring “personhood” from the moment of conception is to criminalize miscarriage, we’re told that we are being ridiculous and that we need to calm down.

Not so ridiculous:

If a woman in Virginia has a miscarriage, they must report it within 24 hours to the police or risk going to jail for a full year. At least, that’s what would have happened if a bill introduced by Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain (R) had become law.
And yet, the Virginia Republican Party wants to make Obenshain into the state’s top prosecutor. This weekend, Virginia Republicans selected Obenshain as their nominee to replace tea party stalwart Ken Cuccinelli (R) as the state’s attorney general.

Under Obenshain’s bill, which was introduced in 2009,

When a fetal death occurs without medical attendance upon the mother at or after the delivery or abortion, the mother or someone acting on her behalf shall, within 24 hours, report the fetal death, location of the remains, and identity of the mother to the local or state police or sheriff’s department of the city or county where the fetal death occurred. No one shall remove, destroy, or otherwise dispose of any remains without the express authorization of law-enforcement officials or the medical examiner. Any person violating the provisions of this subsection shall be guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor.

That means they could face up to one year in prison. But don’t worry your pretty little heads about it girls, they probably won’t use it except on the really “bad” girls who deserve it.

Meanwhile, did you know that this is already on the books in Virginia?

Even without Obenshain’s bill, Virginia law already treats many miscarriages as potential crimes. Under existing Virginia law, “[w]hen a fetal death occurs without medical attendance upon the mother at or after the delivery or abortion or when inquiry or investigation by a medical examiner is required, the medical examiner shall investigate the cause of fetal death and shall complete and sign the medical certification portion of the fetal death report within twenty-four hours after being notified of a fetal death.”

That’s almost as chilling as far as I’m concerned. Criminalizing a failure to report miscarriage takes it to a more sinister level, but I don’t know why it’s any of the state’s business at all. It’s an extremely common, natural occurrence after all. Half the time we don’t even know it’s happened. They might as well require reporting of nocturnal emissions or menstrual periods. It’s an extremely inappropriate intrusion on the internal bodily functions of women.

At least as it stands, the only time the state is involved is if they are informed of an “unattended” fetal death, but just having that on the books means that the state can treat miscarriage (and now possibly the practice of medical abortion with oral mifepristone) as something requiring an official investigation. Sure, it probably doesn’t happen very often and is used mostly to gather statistics. But then you inevitably have some patriarchal throwback like Mark Obenshain come along to try to take it to the next level. After all, he was just proposing to give the existing law a little bit more teeth wasn’t he?

And he’s running for Attorney General to replace this guy, so it’s not as if these nuts can’t get elected. Indeed, that neanderthal is so successful he’s now running for Governor.

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Drowning it in the bathtub very slowly

by digby

I’m all for “reform” and “streamlining” but in my personal experience in the corporate world that inevitably just meant making one person do the job of three. Or four. For the same money. They call this “enhanced productivity” and on paper it looks really great. But for anyone who’s on the job, most often it’s clear that morale tanks and the work suffers.

Naturally the spending jihad during these decades of conservative political dominance meant that government would go the same way:

The controversy that erupted in the past week, leading to the ousting of the acting Internal Revenue Service commissioner, an investigation by the FBI, and congressional hearings that kicked off Friday, comes against a backdrop of dysfunction brewing for years.

Moves launched in the 1990s were designed to streamline the tax agency and make it more efficient. But they had unintended consequences for the IRS’s Exempt Organizations division.

Checks and balances once in place were taken away. Guidance frequently published by the IRS and closely read by tax lawyers and nonprofits disappeared. Even as political activity by social welfare nonprofits exploded in recent election cycles, repeated requests for the IRS to clarify exactly what was permitted for the secretly funded groups were met, at least publicly, with silence.

All this combined to create an isolated office in Cincinnati, plagued by what an inspector general this week described as “insufficient oversight,” of fewer than 200 low-level employees responsible for reviewing more than 60,000 nonprofit applications a year.

This was all the rage among the New Democrat types during the 90s. They told us that even though “the era of Big Government” was over, there was no reason services would suffer. How’d that work out for us?

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