Month: July 2013

Why was Zimmerman allowed to have a concealed firearm?

by David Atkins

I share the feelings of most progressives that the Zimmerman case highlights above all the tawdry state of race relations in America. That said, I’m also pessimistic about the ability of anything in its aftermath to improve racial harmony. It’s a teachable moment, but I’m not sure any lessons will be learned by the people who need to learn them. Perhaps more importantly, there’s not a whole lot that legislators can do to change hearts and minds. An activist furious about the jury’s decision can march in the street, but it’s not clear what precisely they would be asking for.

It does seem clear, though, that regardless of the circumstances of the incident and Zimmerman’s motives, both men would likely be alive today but for the presence of the gun. It was Zimmerman’s gun, not his racism, that caused what would have been just a fistfight to turn into a murder.

And given Zimmerman’s history of violence and thuggery, there is no reason he should ever have had access to a concealed firearm. Amanda Marcotte has an excellent post in which she cites some of Zimmerman’s history that should have prevented him from gun ownership in a sane world:

In July 2005, he was arrested for“resisting officer with violence.” The neighborhood watch volunteer who wanted to be a cop got into a scuffle with cops who were questioning a friend for alleged underage drinking. The charges were reduced and then waived after he entered an alcohol education program. Then in August 2005, Zimmerman’s former fiance sought a restraining order against him because of domestic violence. Zimmerman sought a restraining order against her in return. Both were granted. Meanwhile, over the course of eight years, Zimmerman made at least 46 calls to the Sanford (Fla.) Police Department reporting suspicious activity involving black males.

Marcotte comments:

Under common sense gun regulation, Zimmerman would have permanently lost his right to concealed carry when he assaulted a cop. If not then, then when the state granted a restraining order. (His retaliatory restraining order is further evidence of his paranoid mind set that should be taken into consideration when evaluating this case.) If a case is serious enough that the state can force you into an alcohol education program, then it should be serious enough to take your gun away from you. If, as the gun lobby claims, they are only protecting the rights of responsible gun owners, people who have a colorful history of irresponsibility should absolutely not have the right to own guns.

What makes all this even more unsettling is that you look at this history, and you see a man who is being told, over and over again, that he gets to be a violent asshole and no one will do anything to stop him. They’ll even make sure that he’s free to strap a gun on again and pretend that he’s roaming around in a war zone. The odds that a man like this will retire from a career of violence quietly are pretty low.

Legislators can’t do much to enforce racial harmony. But racial harmony and understanding wasn’t a prerequisite for saving a life on that fateful night. It would have been nice not to have had a racist paranoiac stalking unarmed teenagers on the street, but that sort of thing is difficult to control for. The presence of the gun, on the other hand, is quite a different story. That is something legislators can control for. It’s something the community can demand. It’s something that can make a measurable impact to save lives.

It’s long past time to do something about it. You can’t stop the Zimmermans of the world from being the dangerous jerks they are. But you can take away the easiest, most convenient tool they have to turn from being dangerous jerks to deadly dangerous jerks. George Zimmermans usually don’t kill people–they’re too craven. George Zimmermans with guns kill people.

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What were those GOP Senators really afraid of?

by digby

According to Alec MacGillis, themelves:

It may seem puzzling at first why the Republicans would’ve given in on most of the nominees in exchange for naught but a face-saving swap of pro-labor faces on the NLRB. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid seems to have emerged from his strikingly persuasive brinksmanship with even the right to continue to press further for filibuster rules changes down the line. What gives? Why weren’t Republicans more willing to let him go nuclear? Doing so would’ve allowed them to glory in the moral high ground and, once they won back the Senate as seems quite possible in the next few years, seek righteous revenge by breaking the filibuster for purposes far more consequential than confirming nominees to a few second-tier departments.

Others have already noted one reason for Republicans to pull back from this outcome: they could already undo plenty of the Obama legacy with a mere 51 votes—via the budget reconciliation process, which could, for one thing, do grave damage to Obamacare. But I would suggest another theory: that Republicans pulled back, in part, precisely because of the likelihood of how things would play out in the full post-filibuster revenge scenario. Here is Sen. Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican now considered among his caucus’s more reasonable voices, laying out the threat for reporters yesterday:

What’s at stake here is not just a change of the rule, it’s the way the rule is being changed. What it means is that with 51 votes, any majority can do anything it wants on any day in the United States Senate. It can change abortion rights. It can change civil rights. It can change environmental laws. It can change labor laws. Today, the House can do that, and when it comes to the Senate, we stop and think and consider. But after this, whoever has the majority can do anything it wants, on any day. That is a dangerous trend.

Got that? The Republican threat of what the party would do if the filibuster were to crumble is a list of things that a veteran Republican senator himself frames as being way-out-there and part of a “dangerous trend.” If the filibuster falls away, Alexander is saying, my own party will undermine abortion rights (which are, at the most basic level, supported by a majority of Americans). It will “change environmental laws”—who knows which ones, maybe even Republican-signed, widely accepted ones like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act? It’ll even “change civil rights,” whatever that means—since the Voting Rights Act has already been severely weakened by the Supreme Court, what’s left to be “changed”? The Civil Rights Act itself, and the tyranny, lamented not long ago by the senator from the state bordering Alexander’s Tennessee, of forcing businesses to serve people of all colors?

I don’t mean to mock Alexander, but rather to praise him for his candor. Implicit in his argument is that this agenda would not be a very popular one.

No kidding.

Alexander may have just been using those examples to try to sound nice and bipartisan. But it’s a very odd way for him to do it. I’m with MacGillis. He inadvertantly spoke the truth. What these Senators understand is that without the threat of the filibuster, a GOP Senate would:

charge forward with [their suicidal agenda] anyway, unbounded by the threat of a filibuster, regardless of the lasting toll it would pay at the polls.

In other words it would be just like the House GOP. Except you can’t gerrymander Senate seats.

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Elizabeth takes ’em downtown

by digby

Lulz:

In other words:

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QOTD: Eugene Robinson

by digby

This is so right:

The assumption underlying [the original police and prosecution] ho-hum approach to the case was that Zimmerman had the right to self-defense but Martin — young, male, black — did not. The assumption was that Zimmerman would fear for his life in a hand-to-hand struggle but Martin — young, male, black — would not.

If anyone wonders why African Americans feel so passionately about this case, it’s because we know that our 17-year-old sons are boys, not men. It’s because we know their adolescent bravura is just that — an imitation of manhood, not the real thing.

We know how frightened our sons would be, walking home alone on a rainy night and realizing they were being followed. We know how torn they would be between a child’s fear and a child’s immature idea of manly behavior. We know how they would struggle to decide the right course of action, flight or fight.

And we know that a skinny boy armed only with candy, no matter how big and bad he tries to seem, does not pose a mortal threat to a healthy adult man who outweighs him by 50 pounds and has had martial arts training (even if the lessons were mostly a waste of money). We know that the boy may well have threatened the man’s pride but likely not his life. How many murders-by-sidewalk have you heard of recently? Or ever?

The conversation we need to have is about how black men, even black boys, are denied the right to be young, to be vulnerable, to make mistakes. We need to talk about why, for example, black men are no more likely than white men to smoke marijuana but nearly four times as likely to be arrested for it — and condemned to a dead-end cycle of incarceration and unemployment. I call this racism. What do you call it?

I’m old enough to remember John DiIullio “super-predator” meme of a couple of decades ago when the right wing ginned up a major freak-out over gang violence that painted young black males as monsters. This Weekly Standard article from 1995 is fairly typical:

While the trouble will be greatest in black inner-city neighborhoods, other places are also certain to have burgeoning youth-crime problems that will spill over into upscale central-city districts, inner-ring suburbs, and even the rural heartland. To under-score this point, Abraham recounted a recent townhall meeting in a white working-class section of the city that has fallen on hard times: “They’re becoming afraid of their own children. There were some big beefy guys there, too. And they’re asking me what am I going to do to control their children.” I interviewed Abraham, just as I have interviewed other justice-system officials and prison inmates, as a reality check on the incredibly frightening picture that emerges from recent academic research on youth crime and violence. All of the research indicates that Americans are sitting atop a demographic crime bomb. And all of those who are closest to the problem hear the bomb ticking.

To cite just a few examples, following my May 1995 address to the district attorneys
association, big-city prosecutors inundated me with war stories about the ever-growing
numbers of hardened, remorseless juveniles who were showing up in the system. “They kill or maim on impulse, without any intelligible motive,” said one. Likewise, a, eteran beat policeman confided: ” I never used to be scared. Now I say a quick Hail Mary every time I get a call at night involving juveniles. I pray I go home in one piece to my own kids.” On a recent visit to a New Jersey maximum-security prison, I spoke to a group of life-term inmates, many of them black males from inner-city Newark and Camden. In a typical remark, one prisoner fretted, “I was a bad-ass street gladiator, but these kids are stone-cold predators.”

There’s always some dark threat for these people, isn’t there?

That thesis was crap then and proved to be even more so as time went on. But never let the facts get in the way of white fear and loathing of black males — especially young ones. It seems to be imprinted in our American DNA.

The interesting little bit of progress is that wingnuts are now being forced to unctuously express a phony concern for “black on black” crime to make their point. Nothing could be more disingenuous, but it goes part in parcel with their obscene appropriation of Martin Luther King as someone who shares their own values. Check this abomination from Ted Nugent:

Martin Luther King Jr. is rolling over in his grave that he sacrificed his life for the cause of judging people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin, as so many of his own race carry [on] in self-destructive behavior while professional race mongers blame everything on racism. It is painful and heartbreaking to say and write this, but horrifically it is true. Blacks kill more blacks in a weekend in Chicago than the evil, vile Ku Klux Klan idiots did in 50 years. Truly earth shattering insane. And not a peep from Obama or Holder. Tragic.

Ted is the black man’s real friend, dontcha know? His heart is breaking.

I suppose that’s better than when they were shrieking about how nobody cares about the little old white ladies being raped killed in their beds by 12 year olds. But I’m going to guess that most of his audience understands that subtext. Because they certainly don’t care about dead black kids one way or the other.

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Friendly filibuster reminder

by digby

Courtesy of Greg Sargent,who’s been making this point for some time:

With the Senate inching towards nuclear Armageddon, and with Republicans screaming that Harry Reid is on the verge of killing the Senate forever, let’s pause to remember three important facts about this debate:

1) Democrats do not want to change the Senate rules, and only will do so if Republicans leave them no choice.

2) Democrats do not want to change the Senate rules, and only will do so if Republicans leave them no choice.

3) Democrats do not want to change the Senate rules, and only will do so if Republicans leave them no choice.

That Democrats would prefer not to change the rules with the nuclear option — eliminating the filibuster on executive nominations — should be painfully, overwhelmingly obvious to anyone who is paying even cursory attention. Democratic leaders had a chance to enact meaningful reform at the beginning of the year, but they punted because they did not have the votes to change the rules by simple majority, instead agreeing to a watered down version of reform that led inevitably to the current gridlock and impasse.

Today, it appears they may not have to:

I can add a glimmer of good news: John McCain is leading a group of GOP Senators in talks with Dems who appear poised to support all the nominations with none of the conditions that McConnell wants. A second Democratic aide tells me that this group of GOP Senators is “basically willing to give us everything we want, with no conditions on future action.” The aide adds that Dems this morning are still trying to determine whether that group’s stance is “legit.”

Remember, if Dems get enough Republican votes to break the GOP filibuster on these nominations, that’s a victory that could put off the need to go nuclear. And right or wrong, this is the outcome Democratic leaders prefer. In other words, it’s still possible for some GOP Senators to do the right thing and avert a nuclear showdown, and that looks like it may happen. Watch today’s votes for the final answer.

The fact that Dems won’t agree to remove the threat of nuclear action later will be widely denounced as proof they are refusing to make concessions to avoid Armageddon. But remember, what is at stake here is whether the Senate is going to function as a nominally democratic body going forward, and whether Republicans will be permitted to continue to render the Upper Chamber a 60-vote body for the explicit purpose of rendering agencies dysfunctional because they are ideological hostile to their missions and perhaps their very existence. As Jonathan Cohn puts it:

Under McConnell’s leadership, the filibuster has become a modern-day instrument of “nullification.” Republicans are using it to undermine laws — like those protecting consumers from banks, or guaranteeing workers the right to organize into unions — that they happen not to like. Thanks in part to a recent court ruling, rendering it effectively impossible for the president to appoint temporary agency heads unilaterally, the Republican effort is succeeding. And it has grave implications for the people who depend on these laws.

And those who think the Democrats are just being “political” are cracked:

The Republicans have nearly brought Senate business to a halt.

Reid and the rest of the leadership want to preserve the filibuster for their own use should they lose the Senate (which is entirely possible.) But they also must be able to function. This gridlock is a function of our extremely polarized political environment, but it’s also about power and a willingness to use it. The Republicans have shown repeatedly that they are willing to use their power to obstruct to make political points. Reid and the Democrats have enough power that if they want to fight back they can. But some Republicans are savvy enough to realize that they’re cutting off their own noses of the future for the satisfaction of thumbing them at Barack Obama today. It’s quite the cat and mouse game.

This should be interesting. But don’t get your hopes up that the filibuster for presidential appointees will be eliminated. Senators of both parties would really prefer not to do that.

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It’s not just government: How insane hedge fund Objectivist libertarianism is destroying Sears

by David Atkins

In case you thought the cult of hedge fund Objectivist free market libertarianism was just destroying government and the social fabric, never fear that it can destroy companies as well. Just look at what has happened to Sears after it hired insane free market hedge fund libertarian Eddie Lampert to run their company:

Every year the presidents of Sears Holdings’ (SHLD) many business units trudge across the company’s sprawling headquarters in Hoffman Estates, Ill., to a conference room in Building B, where they ask Eddie Lampert for money. The leaders have made these solitary treks since 2008, when Lampert, a reclusive hedge fund billionaire, splintered the company into more than 30 units. Each meeting starts quietly: When the executive arrives, Lampert’s top consiglieri are there, waiting around a U-shaped table, according to interviews with a half-dozen former employees who attended these sessions. An assistant walks in, turns on a screen on the opposite wall, and an image of Lampert flickers to life…

In January, eight years after Lampert masterminded Kmart’s $12 billion buyout of Sears in 2005, the board appointed him chief executive officer of the 120-year-old retailer. The company had gone through four CEOs since the merger, yet former executives say Lampert has long been running the show. Since the takeover, Sears Holdings’ sales have dropped from $49.1 billion to $39.9 billion, and its stock has sunk 64 percent. Its cash recently fell to a 10-year low. Although it has plenty of assets to unload before bankruptcy looms, the odds of a turnaround grow longer every quarter. “The way it’s being managed, it doesn’t work,” says Mary Ross Gilbert, a managing director at investment bank Imperial Capital. “They’re going to continue to deteriorate.”

Plagued by the realities threatening many retail stores, Sears also faces a unique problem: Lampert. Many of its troubles can be traced to an organizational model the chairman implemented five years ago, an idea he has said will save the company. Lampert runs Sears like a hedge fund portfolio, with dozens of autonomous businesses competing for his attention and money. An outspoken advocate of free-market economics and fan of the novelist Ayn Rand, he created the model because he expected the invisible hand of the market to drive better results. If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.

Instead, the divisions turned against each other—and Sears and Kmart, the overarching brands, suffered. Interviews with more than 40 former executives, many of whom sat at the highest levels of the company, paint a picture of a business that’s ravaged by infighting as its divisions battle over fewer resources. (Many declined to go on the record for a variety of reasons, including fear of angering Lampert.) Shaunak Dave, a former executive who left in 2012 and is now at sports marketing agency Revolution, says the model created a “warring tribes” culture. “If you were in a different business unit, we were in two competing companies,” he says. “Cooperation and collaboration aren’t there.”

Although Lampert is notoriously media-averse, he agreed to answer questions about Sears’s organizational model via e-mail. “Decentralized systems and structures work better than centralized ones because they produce better information over time,” Lampert writes. “The downside is that, to some, it appears messier than centralized systems.” Lampert adds that the structure enables him to evaluate the individual parts of Sears, so he can collect “significantly better information and drive decision-making and accountability at a more appropriate level.”

Yes, decentralize and let the company’s divisions battle one another. Who needs that mushy cooperation business, even within a company?

While he often clashed with retail veterans, Lampert got along better with businessmen from finance and technology. “[Lampert] valued the outsider view,” says Bill Kenney, a former vice president who now runs his own consultancy. “He tends to bring people into the company who don’t have a lot of retail experience.”..

The newly merged Sears Holdings thrived at first, boosted by aggressive cost-cutting. By 2007, though, profits had declined 45 percent….

Executives close to Lampert expressed concerns that the new model would create rival factions. The chairman responded by comparing Sears to Greenwich Avenue, the ritzy shopping district near his home in Connecticut. There, he argued, the individual stores are run separately, but shoppers view them collectively as a premier brand. Why wouldn’t the same logic apply to Sears?

When Mukherjee unveiled the plan in January 2008, many Sears executives were befuddled. From then on, they were told, the units would act like autonomous businesses. If product divisions like tools or toys wanted to enlist the services of the IT or human resources departments, they had to write up formal agreements—or use outside contractors. Each unit had to craft its own financial statement, presenting a strategy to Lampert and his committee of top executives. Frank DeSantis, a longtime Sears staffer who now works for a chamber of commerce, remembers feeling a sense of déjà vu. Back in the ’90s, he says, the company briefly tried to reorganize the business in a similar fashion. “The result was confusing to the customer,” he says. “It became disjointed—we started fighting with each other.”

When Sears publicly announced the move on Jan. 22, 2008, shares shot up 12 percent. Inside Hoffman Estates, the mood was chaotic. Six days later, Sears announced that CEO Aylwin Lewis, a former Yum! Brands (YUM) president, was stepping down. Lampert appointed an operations executive, Bruce Johnson, as interim chief. (He’s now CEO of Sears Hometown and Outlet Stores.) Meanwhile, there were more than 30 slots to fill at the head of each unit. Executives jostled for the roles, each eager to run his or her own multibillion-dollar business. Marketing directors interviewed with the newly appointed presidents, hoping to snag coveted chief marketing jobs. “I worried about the structure—that it would end up breaking apart into people only thinking about themselves,” recalls Bill Stewart, former chief marketing officer for Kmart, now vice president of marketing at solar company Sunrun. The new model was called SOAR, for Sears Holdings Organization, Actions, and Responsibilities. Sears employees would later give it a different name: SORE.

As the company rolled out the plan, Sears executives held dozens of meetings to decide how units would interact. By 2009 there were around 40 separate divisions, according to an internal company document. Lampert expected SOAR to help Sears attract a higher caliber of talent. But it also created a top-heavy cost structure, according to a former vice president for human resources. Because Sears had to hire and promote dozens of chief financial officers and chief marketing officers, personnel expenses shot up. Meanwhile, many business unit leaders underpaid middle managers to trim costs…

Under the new model, Lampert evaluated the different divisions—and calculated executives’ bonuses—using a metric called business operating profit, or BOP. As some employees had feared, individual business units started to focus solely on their own profitability and stopped caring about the welfare of the company as a whole. According to several former executives, the apparel division cut back on labor to save money, knowing that floor salesmen in other departments would inevitably pick up the slack. Turf wars sprang up over store displays. No one was willing to make sacrifices in pricing to boost store traffic.

The bloodiest battles took place in the marketing meetings, where different units sent their CMOs to fight for space in the weekly circular. These sessions would often degenerate into screaming matches. Marketing chiefs would argue to the point of exhaustion. The result, former executives say, was a “Frankenstein” circular with incoherent product combinations (think screwdrivers being advertised next to lingerie).

Eventually Lampert’s advisory committee instituted a bidding system, forcing the units to pay for space in the circular. This eliminated some of the infighting but created a new problem: The wealthier business units, such as appliances, could purchase more space. Two former business unit heads recall how, for the 2011 Mother’s Day circular, the sporting-goods unit purchased space on the cover for a product called a Doodle Bug minibike, popular with young boys.

Needless to say, things quickly turned disastrous.

In the weeks leading up to Black Friday in 2011, Sears discovered that some of its rivals planned to open on Thanksgiving at midnight. Sears executives knew they should open early, too, but couldn’t get all the business unit heads on board, according to former executives. (A Sears spokesman says the decision “was not contingent on the business unit structure.”) Instead, the stores opened early the following morning. One former vice president drove to the mall that night and watched families pack into rival stores. By the time Sears opened, he says, cars were leaving the parking lot.

A month later, Sears announced that its performance during the holidays was poor and it was closing more than 100 stores.

As Sears’s sales declined, its business units found themselves fighting over a shrinking pile of money. Last year less than 1 percent of Sears’s revenue went to capital expenditures, much less than most retailers; even thrifty Walmart invested 2.8 percent of its sales.

Need I mention that Lampert is a big fan of Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged? Read the whole article. It’s amazing.

I think a lot of progressives don’t understand that we’re not just dealing with a bunch of big money boys who want to destroy government and social safety nets to benefit business interests. We’re dealing with a full-fledged cult that is just as willing to destroy business as it is to destroy government.

It would actually be more comforting to believe that economic self-interest is driving all this foolishness. Self-interest can be negotiated with, intimidated or shamed. Destructive religious cults are much, much scarier. There is no pleading, bargaining or reasoning with them.

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One of those days

by digby

Here you go:

Misha the Snow Leopard, born on May 13, made her public debut this week at the Denver Zoo.

For the last two months, Misha and her mother Natasha have been bonding behind the scenes. The curious cub is learning to climb, jump and pounce under the watchful eye of her mother. As the only cub in her litter, Misha has been getting all the milk she wants, and has gained nearly four pounds since her birth, now tipping the scales at about five pounds. As a full grown adult she could weigh around 75 pounds.

Snow Leopards are native to mountainous areas above the tree line in central Asia and in the Himalayan regions of Pakistan, India and Afghanistan. Snow Leopards are classified as Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and their numbers are decreasing.

Stat ‘O the Day

by digby

New Yorkers have their priorities straight:

Financial impropriety is a worse offense for an elected official than sexual misconduct, New York City Democrats say 69 – 22 percent. Financial impropriety is worse, women say 66 – 25 percent and men say 73 – 18 percent, white voters say 76 – 15 percent, black voters say 65 – 28 percent and Hispanic voters say 60 – 31 percent.

For some reason Villagers and Republicans continue to believe the opposite is true. Of course, most of them don’t believe there is any such thing as financial impropriety.

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Look what survived sequestration: The jet that ate the pentagon

by digby

While we’re ruthlessly cutting programs for poor people and old people and kids, check out the 1.5 trillion albatross the defense department has “somehow” managed to spare. They each cost 200 million dollars ….

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

And why is it spared? Well … I think you know why. And it isn’t just because of the evil Republicans.

Sure defense department personnel are having to sacrifice parts of their paychecks and services at military bases are all being cut. But when it comes to really important stuff, every penny will continue to flow, no matter what. Priorities, folks.

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Just pull the trigger already

by David Atkins

Harry Reid is still looking for a compromise:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) didn’t reach a deal on averting the “nuclear option” to change Senate filibuster rules after a meeting on Monday afternoon.

But they are negotiating a possible compromise ahead of a meeting of all 100 senators in the old Senate chamber at 6 p.m. on Monday night. The situation is expected to reach a boil as early as Tuesday morning when Reid is expected to force a vote on seven stalled presidential nominees.

Any deal would involve enough Republicans agreeing to an up-or-down vote on most — if not all — the seven stalled nominees on the Senate floor.

Why compromise? What is there to protect?

The Senate is terribly afraid of eliminating the filibuster on executive nominees because it might lead to changes to the filibuster for judicial nominees, which might lead to changes on the filibuster for actual bills. This is apparently a huge problem in a Senate that came within a inch of forcing talking filibusters on actual legislation.

To stop this slippery slope, the Senate is looking to a compromise on some of these particular executive picks, leaving the option open for the GOP to block future executive picks. Why?

Pull the trigger already. All appointments and laws should be subject to a talking filibuster only. Most objective analysts know it. The Senate is broken. It’s time to fix it.

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