Month: July 2013

White on white

by digby

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In his most recent Gawker piece, Cord Jefferson responded to the deluge of right-wing attacks on African-American communities with satire: “White-on-white violence is a menace to white communities across the country, and yet you never hear white leaders like Pastor Joel Osteen, Bill O’Reilly, or Hillary Clinton take a firm stance against the scourge.”

Jefferson continued the joke on an All In conversation Tuesday night:

“I used to live in New York City and would occasionally go to Hoboken, New Jersey, St. Patrick’s Day Parade. And there were so many young white men there vomiting in the streets, urinating in the streets, getting in fist fights in the streets. It was a sight to be seen,” said Jefferson of what he has declared the “white-on-white crime scourge.”

Jefferson, Gawker’s West Coast editor, said he wasn’t playing the race card.

“Anytime you tell the truth, there’s going to be those people that come out and think that you’re doing it for some insidious reason and say that you’re a racist,” declared Jefferson. ”My best friend is white, my mother is actually white, my prom date in high school was actually a white woman. She was very white actually, she used to ride horses and do that whole thing.”

He’s right. We white people need to speak out. Why right in my own backyard, this happened just the other night:

Huntington Beach is cleaning up Monday morning after a fight broke out following the U.S. Open of Surfing, leading to a two-hour confrontation between police and unruly beachgoers.

Eight people were arrested and several officers were injured Sunday night. 

Police in riot gear used tear gas and nonlethal rounds to disperse the crowd, which tipped over portable toilets and smashed storefront windows.

Video of the rioting shows people in the crowd rocking city vehicles while others jump-kicking or shoving portable toilets onto their sides. 

Kyle Calder told KTLA the melee started when someone was hit with a ketchup bottle from a second-story restaurant. The person threw the bottle into the crowd, triggering a fight that expanded into a small-scale riot.

“That’s when the cops came and everything went mayhem from there,” Calder said.

Just look at all those white people hurting each other and destroying their own neighborhood.  Those young white males just have no respect for authority. It’s a culture thing.

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A quick, visual look at what’s wrong with America’s economy

by David Atkins

Henry Blodget at Business Insider has a fantastic short piece with four graphs that demonstrate the sickness at the heart of the American economy. Here are the first two:

CHART ONE: Corporate profits and profit margins are at an all-time high. American companies are making more money and more per dollar of sales than they ever have before. Full stop.

And here’s chart #2:

CHART TWO: Wages as a percent of the economy are at all-time low. Why are corporate profits so high? One reason is that companies are paying employees less than they ever have as a share of GDP. And that, in turn, is one reason the economy is so weak: Those “wages” represent spending power for American consumers. And American consumer spending is “revenue” for other companies. So our profit maximization obsession is actually starving the rest of the economy of revenue growth.

Head to the article to see the other two, dealing with employment rates and labor share of national income. It’s pretty obvious what’s wrong. The solutions aren’t complicated or scary. The only obstacle is obscenely rich people who don’t want to give up any of their stolen loot.

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Dday and the Real Housewives of New Jersey

by digby

Here’s a must-read by dday in the New Republic about the Real Housewives of New Jersey. No really. It’s about the government’s zealous pursuit of one of the reality show stars and her husband for lying on their loan applications. Never let it be said that the Obama administration isn’t pursuing mortgage fraud.

Yes, what they did was wrong. But when you read the article you’ll see that they were doing was just part of the system the Big Banks had in place. You remember the banks, don’t you? The institutions and their corporate leaders which the Attorney General publicly said couldn’t be punished because the system would be wrecked? Yeah, they can’t be touched.  But Teresa and Joe going to jail for 20 years will certainly teach everybody a lesson: only the little guys or the easy pickings ever have to pay a price. It’s the new American credo.

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QOTD: David Roberts

by digby

The first step in WLDPS [White Liberal Dude Privilege Syndrome] therapy is for the sufferer to acknowledge that it does not matter what was or was not in his head, or what he “really” meant. Part of privilege is the deep conviction that one is the absolute authority on one’s own mental states and thus the dictator of one’s own meanings — no one can tell you what they are, what you think, who you are, man. You don’t know me! We privileged dudes have trouble accepting that language is a social phenomenon, a social act, and meaning is created collectively, in the spaces between and among people. When you use language that is freighted with social meaning, you are responsible for that meaning, even if you did not “intend” it.

Read the whole thing. You won’t regret it.

And, by the way, the same rule applies to white liberal women privilege too. I’ve been there more than once over the years with people of color, LGBT, those with physical and mental disabilities and even other women. All you can do is admit that you were wrong and learn from the error. It is an ongoing process.

Good for Roberts for writing it out. I have apologized privately to those I insulted, but rarely in public. I should have done that more often.

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Hillary’s making them crazy already

by digby

As Atrios says, good luck explaining all this to the kids:

None of the 90s scandals made any sense at all even at the time, unless there was something nefarious about losing money on a land deal or you were pretty sure Hillary Clinton had her friend murdered. 

Still it wouldn’t surprise me if the NYT brings the Whitewater band back together. What’s Jeff Gerth up to these days?

Fox is already going all in on the Hillary bashing in the crudest manner possible. Here’s John Amato:

Fox News sinks to another low for this segment from Tuesday’s America Live which discusses media bias over some Hillary Clinton mini-series and documentary being made. WMAL Radio host Chris Plante lowered himself into the Louis Gohmert chamber of shame with this.

Plante: Look, we know what their biases are and we know what the outcome is going to be as Howard said. Casting Diane Lane, the lovely Diane Lane as Hillary Clinton is enough of a tip off as to where this is going to go. 

You know personally I would cast Phillip Seymour Hoffman to play Hillary Clinton.

Plante is the type of vile conservative Fox obviously loves because of the bilge that pours out of his mouth when he discusses anyone left of center. Any liberal pundit who displayed this type of behavior on air would never get on TV again. By the way, he was so proud of this that it’s on their website.

Fox News is freaking out over the proposed plans that NBC and CNN are developing films around Hillary Clinton. 

Funny how they never cried like this for the Hillary propaganda movie that was made by Citizens United. In fact, they were promoting it endlessly. And we know how the Supreme Court ruled on that movie. It’s destroyed our campaign finance laws.
[…]

Kurtz: Everybody knows Hollywood, quote, ‘Hollywood loves Hillary Rodham Clinton,’ but I don’t three years before a presidential election anything in the works on Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or any of the other names that you mentioned, so there is this view that feeds the narrative that a lot of people already have, Hillary has this special status both in the culture and the media culture and if there is no film on any of the prospective Republican presidential candidates, then I think that does tilt the scale. 

Megyn Cut Out: …but we know it’s going to start after that point (1998) Do you think they get into Benghazi, I mean it’s been such a..I mean a US Ambassador died on her watch as SOS. Is it going to be addressed? Is there a way to address it that in some way portrays her in a positive light, that she did what she could?

Plante: Well of course, that’s the value of propaganda. Of course she’s going to be the innocent victim, the heroic figure. She’s already been declared one of our greatest SOS ever with no accomplishments to her name, quite literally as SOS, other than the Benghazi cover-up so of course it’s going to make it, paint her the person who tried to save them and worked late into the night. That 3am phone call.

This is a whitewash before you begin and the CNN piece, Charles Ferguson is famous for two films. One is a hatchet job on the Bush administration and the Iraq war and the other is a hatchet job on Wall Street and capitalism that he did with Matt Damon. Those are his credentials…

This fool obviously knows nothing about Ferguson, who is a multimillionaire software entrepreneur who won an Academy Award for Inside Job about the financial collapse. And he was an early Iraq war supporter, but was so disillusioned by it that he helped fund research and the movie called No End In Sight, about how disastrous George W. Bush handled the initial occupation of Iraq, which then broke out into an uncontrollable civil war.

Read Amato’s entire piece for the full rundown. It’s going to be a very ugly campaign if Clinton decides to run. They just can’t help themselves.

And Howie Kurtz is fitting in just perfectly, isn’t he?
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When a superpower loses it

by digby

In this must-read from James Fallows he picks up on a column over the week-end by academic John Naughton which lays out one of the major ramifications of our surveillance overkill: the fact that the rest of the world is no longer going to trust American internet companies to guard their data. I don’t think we understand quite yet how that’s going to play out but it isn’t good. The concept of the free internet is at stake and our government pretty much ran around like a bunch of cowboys without considering the fallout of their own parochial, paranoid needs of the moment.

He concludes:

The real threat from terrorism has never been the damage it does directly, even through attacks as horrific as those on 9/11. The more serious threat comes from the over-reaction, the collective insanity or the simple loss of perspective, that an attack evokes. Our government’s ambition to do everything possible to keep us “safe” has put us at jeopardy in other ways.

One more note: it is also worth emphasizing that this damage was not done by Edward Snowden, except in an incidental and instrumental sense. The damage comes from the policies themselves, just as the lasting damage from Abu Ghraib came not from the leaked photos but from the abuse they portrayed. [My emphasis. And thank you James Fallows, for saying it.]

What governments do eventually becomes known. Eventual disclosure is likely when a program involves even a handful of people. (Latest case in point: Seal Team Six.) It is certain when an effort stretches over many years, entails contracts worth billions of dollars, and requires the efforts of tens of thousands of people — any one of whom, as we’ve seen from Snowden, may at any point decide to tell what he knows.

In launching such an effort, a government must assume as a given that what it is doing will become known, and then calculate whether it will still seem “worthwhile” when it does. Based on what we’ve seen so far, Prism would have failed that test.

So much of our government’s reaction to 9/11 can be summed up with one image of our president at the time, standing on the rubble of the World Trade Center with a bullhorn, promising retribution. I realize that was very satisfying to many people. It’s human. And maybe the nation needed to hear it.

But the irrational decision to invade Iraq dispelled any notion I had that this was merely a performance and that a more thoughtful, considered analysis of how to respond was taking place in the corridors of power. All the literature on the decision process since then has born that out. Some, like Cheney and Wolfowitz, were always crazy and saw their opportunity to advance their crazy cause. Others were just afraid either of the terrorists or being blamed if another terrorist attack took place. The result was that our government lost its collective mind. And it took on an ethos within its national security apparatus that institutionalized that insanity.

So here we are, 12 years later with what looks to me like a runaway surveillance operation run by a power mongering General (not to mention the various CIA operations and Dirty Wars) — and all of it blessed by a Democratic president. We’re not getting any saner. And the blowback hasn’t even really begun yet.

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Your Big Mac would cost shockingly little extra if McDonalds workers were paid $15/hour

by David Atkins

Update: it appears that the information in the original source may have been erroneous. Apologies for taking the numbers at face value, as the story had appeared in HuffPo, Business Insider and other places.

A business student crunches the numbers on what a Big Mac would cost if McDonalds workers were actually paid a living wage of $15 an hour. The answer? Not that much more:

Arnobio Morelix, a student at the University of Kansas School of Business, found himself asking the same question, so he did some financial modeling based on McDonald’s annual reports and data sets submitted to investors.

Morelix’s take: If McDonald’s workers were paid the $15 they’re demanding, the cost of a Big Mac would go up 68 cents, from its current price of $3.99 to $4.67.

A Big Mac meal would cost $6.66 rather than $5.69, and the chain’s famous Dollar Menu would go for $1.17.

“Some folks online are complaining they will not pay $2 for their Dollar Menu, but the truth is that even if McDonald’s doubled salaries the price hike would not be 100%,” Morelix said. “I will be happy to pay 17 cents more for my Dollar Menu so that fast food workers can have a living wage, and I believe people deserve to know that price hikes would not be as high as it is often portrayed.”

It’s not just a moral question. The economic drag and potential inflation of slightly raising the cost of unhealthy fast food would be dramatically overshadowed by the stimulative economic effect of doubling the salaries of every fast food worker in America. It would also have the salutory effect of putting healthy foods on a somewhat more level playing field, which would increase public health and reduce costs in myriad ways.

But that’s not all. Morelix’ numbers assume that McDonalds takes the same profit as it did before, and assumes wage increases for every worker all the way up to and including the CEO:

Morelix said that his number crunching assumes profits and other expenses are kept at the same absolute number. His calculations are based on increases in salaries and benefits for every McDonald’s worker, from minimum wage line cooks paid $7.25 an hour to CEO Donald Thompson, who made $8.75 million in 2012.

The assumption that profits must be kept at the same level is a critical one that underpins most Republican arguments about economic regulation. They inherently assume that profits must and will be kept at prior levels, such that any added costs due to regulation or wage increases are passed along to the consumer. That simply isn’t a valid argument. There is a price point consumers will refuse to pay for substandard sandwiches–and it’s probably below $4.67. Even with all workers paid at least $15/hour, it would probably be a competitive advantage for Burger King to offer a Whopper at under $4.50, which in turn would force McDonald’s to keep pace. The huge corporations that make up the fast food industry would likely be forced to take slightly less obscene profits, the only drawback to which would be less money in the hands of the very few shareholders who own over 80% of the stocks. Whatever economic drag that might have at the top of the economic ladder would be offset a hundredfold by the increase in consumer demand capacity from the workers at the bottom of the ladder.

Meanwhile, those who would be significantly impacted in their wallets by a 50-70 cent increase in the cost of a hamburger today would be far less impacted by it tomorrow, if the national minimum wage were set to $15.

In short, it would be a win-win for just about everyone–everyone, that is, except for the fat cats at the very top of the chain.

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QOTD: Yellen edition

by digby

James Hamilton explains why Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen is “an outstanding choice to head the Federal Reserve.”

“If someone disagrees with her, her first instinct is not to try to bully them, but instead to try to understand why they have reached a different conclusion than she has. Because of this attribute, Yellen is one of the people I would trust most to be able to sort out what the key problems are and what needs to be done in any new situation.”

In fact,  that assessment has nothing to do with gender.  There  are plenty of men who have that attribute. Larry Summers isn’t one them.

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I’m so glad these dangerous criminals are off our streets

by David Atkins

Louisana’s finest are protecting their communities from all those scary gay people–even though what they’re doing isn’t actually illegal. Here’s the sting:

An East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office task force arrested at least 12 men since 2011 under a sodomy law invalidated a decade ago the U.S. Supreme Court, a newspaper reported Sunday.

The most recent arrest was July 18 when a man discussed or agreed to have sex with a male undercover agent, The Advocate (http://bit.ly/13mSpdc) reported. The task force was trying to deter sexual activities at the parish’s public parks.

Although sex in public and sex solicitation for money are illegal in Louisiana, neither was part of these 12 cases, and most of the men were arrested after agreeing to have sex away from the park at a private residence, District Attorney Hillar Moore III told the newspaper.

“The sheriff’s office’s intentions are all good,” Moore said. “But from what I’ve seen of these cases, legally, we found no criminal violation.”

The Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that a Texas law against oral or anal sex was invalid. Louisiana was among nine states with such laws. Richard Leyoub, then attorney general, said the high court’s ruling made Louisiana’s law unenforceable.

The sheriff’s office sent a statement Sunday to the newspaper saying it “should have taken a different approach” to worries about park safety, the newspaper reported.

Priorities. Some places have the right ones. Some places don’t.

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Geek Out Live with Rush Holt

by digby

It does not have to be inevitable that the Wall Street friendly, establishment centrist Corey Booker is the next Democratic senator from New Jersey. There are real progressive alternatives, one of whom is a great congressman, teacher, civil libertarian and scientist — Rush Holt.  Tonight his campaign is holding a major online townhall at 7:30 ET, 4:30 PT featuring a number of big names from the world of science and politics to talk about our future. (They’re calling it a GEEK Out, so I know all of my readers will naturally be compelled to tune in.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1PUrjf_KiA

You can GEEK Out Live with Rush, here. I urge you to tune in.  It’s an innovative concept — an intelligent conversation with the American people. Imagine that.

Congressman Holt wrote this guest post for Blue America a couple of weeks ago:

I’m not the most famous candidate running for Senate in New Jersey. If you know me at all, you probably know me as the congressman who beat IBM’s computer, Watson in Jeopardy– the one whose bumper stickers say “My Congressman IS a Rocket Scientist!”

But as a true progressive, you care about more than celebrity and slogans. You care about electing the senator who will fight the hardest for our shared values.

So let me tell you why, with your support, I will be that person: the truly progressive, evidence-driven voice we urgently need in the U.S. Senate.

As a teacher and a scientist, I used to help run the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and led the nuclear nonproliferation program at the U.S. State Department. This experience gives me a very different perspective from anyone now in the Senate –and gives me the conviction to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

You see, right now, the Senate has zero scientists. And as a result, the evidence in support of our progressive priorities is being ignored:

• The earth’s climate is changing, and human beings are responsible. Every single month for the last 28 years has been warmer than the historic average. If America fails to act, millions of people will die.

• America’s health care system is not the best in the world– not even close. We’re paying 40 percent more than any other country as a share of our economy, and we’re still leaving almost 50 million people uninsured.

• America is betraying our young college students– burdening them with an average of $27,000 in student loan debt, then abandoning them to face 13 percent unemployment in the workplace.

If we’re honest about the evidence, the way forward is clear.

We need to tax carbon so that polluters pay for the greenhouse gases they’re dumping into our atmosphere.

We need to move to a single-payer health care system, the kind that has held down costs and improved quality in nations around the world.

We need to make college more affordable by charging students the same low interest rate, 0.75%, that Wall Street banks pay to borrow money from the government.

And we desperately need a senator for the 21st century: someone who has a real understanding of the science and technology that are changing our world.

Because despite what some senators have claimed, the Internet is not a series of tubes, abortions do not cause breast cancer, and breast implants do not make women healthier. And although changing technology does present new challenges to law enforcement, it does not mean the NSA has the need or the right to monitor the phone calls, letters, and e-mails of innocent people– treating Americans as suspects first and citizens second.

It’s long past time for the Senate to have at least one scientist, at least one voice who follows the evidence wherever it leads, no matter the political or personal risk.

When you think about it, it’s kind of shocking that we don’t. The closest we have are a bunch of right wing, anti-choice MDs who deny climate change and want to repeal Obamacare.

Please take the time to tune in to Holt’s GEEKOut tonight. We really don’t need another Big Money centrist in the Senate. That particular constituency is already very well represented. What we need is a progressive, civil libertarian, scientist to challenge the likes of throwbacks like Paul, Coburn and Barraso when they pretend to have scientific knowledge that backs up their antideluvian worldview.

If you’d like to donate to Congressman Holt’s senate campaign you can do so here.

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