Hating on the Duck people
by digby
More evidence that the liberal media is out to get the Duck Dynasty family:
“At the end of day, we sit down and thank God for our blessings ,and we’re gonna continue to do that and hopefully we can spread that message. And I think, as a country, if we can come back to that a little bit, we’ll have a great 2014.”
In fact, the liberal media have been out to get them from day 1.
ICYWW: US Magazine is owned by Jann Wenner, who also owns Rolling Stone.
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Is childbirth a form of child abuse?
by digby
Another day another anti-abortion lie:
A Kentucky state politician is claiming that abortions are a form of domestic violence because they cause pain to the fetus.
“The most brutal form of domestic violence is the violence against unborn children,” Republican state Rep. Joe Fischer.
I suppose he might be right about that. But it’s not the 20 week old fetus that hasn’t neurologically developed to the point of being able to feel pain. It’s the fully formed baby being physically forced to pass through a hole the size of a bagel.
Here’s just one complication of childbirth that most definitely causes pain to the baby:
Fractured clavicle in the newborn
A fractured clavicle in the newborn is a broken collar bone in a baby that was just delivered.
Causes
A fracture of a newborn’s collar bone (clavicle) can occur during a difficult vaginal delivery. It is fairly common during difficult births.
Symptoms
The baby will not move the painful, injured arm. Instead, the baby will hold it still against the side of the body. Lifting the baby under the arms causes the child pain. Sometimes the fracture can be felt with the fingers, but usually the problem cannot be seen or felt.
Within a few weeks, a hard lump may develop where the bone is healing. This lump may be the only sign that the newborn had a broken collar bone.
Exams and Tests
A chest x-ray will show whether or not there is a broken bone.
An infant’s refusal to move an arm may also be due to partial dislocation of the elbow (nursemaid’s elbow), nerve damage (Erb palsy), broken humerus (upper arm bone), or other causes.
That’s not the only thing. Anyone who’s ever been in a hospital nursery or an NICU can see that newborns are often bruised. Their heads are commonly misshapen, and although they don’t know whether or not the naturally soft skull adjusting to the birth canal is painful to the baby, it certainly could be. The physical trauma for both mother and child in normal childbirth is harrowing. The old common wisdom was that even newborns couldn’t feel pain so no harm no foul. But we know better now. Newborns do feel pain and, like their mothers, they certainly feel it during childbirth.
Nobody’s suggesting (yet) that we must require all women to have ceasarean sections in order to avoid abusing the fetus, but the way they’re going, it’s only a matter of time before some zealot decides that women are child abusers if they opt for a natural delivery. (Or, at the very least, they’ll have the decision made for them by a tribunal of priests, legislators and judges. Silly women can’t be trusted to make such important decisions on their own.)
To distort science to assert that fetuses feel pain long before their neurological systems have developed is simply daft:
“The way that a fetus grows and develops hasn’t changed and never will,” Dr. Anne Davis, a second-trimester abortion provider, associate professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University Medical Center, and consulting medical director at Physicians for Reproductive Health, told Salon. “And what we know in terms of the brain and the nervous system in a fetus is that the part of the brain that perceives pain is not connected to the part of the body that receives pain signals until about 26 weeks from the last menstrual period, which is about 24 weeks from conception.”
So, these anti-abortion zealots are lying as usual.
And their unctuous concern for the non-existent pain of a 20 week old fetus is especially rich considering how little they care about whether it has any food in its belly or a roof over its head once it’s born.
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Using international law to strengthen the progressive labor movement abroad
by David Atkins
My first post up at the UN Global Dispatch blog went up today, about the need for stronger international treaties and regulations to advance the goal of worker protections abroad. I used the example of Bangladesh as a case in point, due to the devastating factory collapse and subsequent reactions by international state and non-state actors.
In the wake of the collapse, two different agreements took shape: one of them was a more toothless American-style approach crafted by the “Bipartisan Policy Center” (why is it that “bipartisanship” must so often align with corporate interests?) in which corporations made voluntary commitments to worker safety without independent investigators or consequences. There was also another agreement, created by international labor organizations and signed on to by more Eurozone companies, that did feature independent investigations of factory safety as well as real consequences for failure to provide better working conditions.
However, as I noted in my post, not even the stronger approach will be adequate to the task:
However, it’s clear that even the more labor-friendly response has serious problems. First, it only applies to Bangladesh, even though many other developing countries where multinational corporations have factories have frightening labor and safety conditions as well. Second, it’s essentially reactive: the commitments were only made after the deaths of over a thousand people had shocked the conscience of the world, potentially causing PR headaches for the manufacturers in question. Third, it puts Bangladesh itself in a precarious position: the country must walk the line between delivering too little in the way of protections and wages for its workers, and delivering enough that production costs lead manufacturers to look elsewhere for expendable labor—including in nations whose conditions may or may not be worse than those in Bangladesh.
The lesson should be obvious: the more international and legally binding the agreement, the more helpful it will be to workers in developing nations. The more expansive and multi-party the treaties are, the less competitive labor arbitrage risk will entail for any nation that improves factory conditions. Voluntary commitments from multinational corporations will do little to prevent the next tragedy.
Labor and worker protection agreements are in their infancy at the highest international levels. But with multinational corporations increasingly able to use labor arbitrage to manufacture products in nations with the weakest worker protections, the international community must take a stand in creating legally binding, global treaties that are proactive in nature, and carry negative trade consequences for those nations that choose to flout or ignore them.
Neither an increase in protectionism by developed nations nor a piecemeal patchwork of voluntary corporate deals will be adequate to protect workers in either the developed or the developing worlds. There is no way to put the multinational corporate genie back into the national bottle.
The only way to control their behavior is to embrace stronger and more effective international organizations with the power to enforce supranational treaties and obligations that protect workers and minimize the damage of global labor arbitrage.
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Is the president going to tap his power?
by digby
Greg Sargent reports on the White House’s new strategy for the second term — use executive power:
The recalibrated strategy is partly a reflection of a realization that there’s probably no chance of winning GOP cooperation on most of Obama’s agenda. But the White House is not simply resorting to new tactics to move Obama’s agenda forward, though that’s important. Rather, it looks to me like Obama and his advisers are also embarking on an ambitious effort to re-engage the president with the public on a new set of terms.
Scott Wilson has a must read on what’s really driving the new thinking. Short version: Obama advisers have concluded that he’s coming across as too much of a prisoner of the Congressional stalemate that has resulted from GOP obstructionism. Resorting to executive authority is also about resetting the prism through which the American people evaluate the president’s performance and his engagement with them — by conveying a sense that he has a plan to move the country forward, and he’s acting on it.
Wait. The last I heard from all the analysts was that the presidency was little more than a ceremonial position, sort of like the Queen of England, and there’s no point in expecting anything at all from it. Indeed, I had been given to understand that it’s foolhardy to even think about what a president could accomplish with his one branch of government that oversees all federal agencies, the military and the entire regulatory state as long as a rump faction of the GOP held sway in the House of Representatives. Who knew he could actually do things and say things that might make a difference?
I can certainly see why the administration was getting a teensy bit uncomfortable with all that talk of presidential impotence. It’s not exactly an inspiring image. Still, you can’t help but wonder just what the hell took them so long to realize that all their supporters relentlessly flogging the idea that the poor president is little more than a figurehead might just not reflect well on legacy of the man the nation elected to be its national leader.
The fact is that he does have power. Let’s hope he uses it well.
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Plutocrat Whine ‘o the Day
by digby
They’re having a good old fashioned pity party over there in Davos:
“Life is hard enough,” according to Swiss banking executive Sergio Ermotti, “without people “constantly bashing banks.” The UBS chief executive made those remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “I think this constant lecturing on ethics and integrity by many stakeholders is probably the most frustrating part of the equation,” he said, “because I don’t think there are many people who are perfect.”
Yeah, “life is hard” for the “imperfect” super wealthy.
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“Inequality doesn’t just happen. The 1% make it happen”
by digby
Responding to the depressing news that the administration has succumbed to elite pressure to “tone down” the rhetoric about wealth inequality, Damon Silvers, special counsel for the AFL-CIO, points out the uncomfortable truth:
[T]he president faces a choice of rhetoric on Tuesday night—but that choice is not just about political gamesmanship. It will have serious policy implications. But there is also an issue of simple credibility. The American people are watching, and they are furious about inequality. Large majorities in poll after poll want a more progressive tax system, accountability for bankers, less power in public life for corporations and the rich and, most of all, higher wages.
The public’s anger shouldn’t be a surprise—anyone whose eyes are open who lives in today’s America knows that inequality doesn’t just happen. The 1% make it happen.
Just look around.
This week, as the president drafted his speech, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase got a 74% raise, taking his salary from $11 million to $20 million. Since much of his compensation is in the form of stock and stock options, he will pay 20% taxes on those gains, less than the marginal tax rate for many middle-income Americans.
Jamie Dimon runs a bank that just paid the largest civil penalty in American history for a single company, for misconduct in the mortgage markets. Nonetheless, Dimon and his colleagues at JPMorgan Chase appear as of now to have avoided all criminal penalties and all personal responsibility for their actions.
And meanwhile since 2008, 10 million families have been thrown out of their homes and more than 3 million Americans have been incarcerated, the majority for non-violent offenses involving sums and social consequences a bit smaller than what went on at Chase.
Then there is Walmart. Walmart is the largest employer in the country—1.4 million people work for Walmart. Last summer, Walmart associates went on strike, demanding that Walmart pay a minimum of $25,000 a year. Walmart is majority owned by the Walton family, the richest family in the world. Walmart has responded to its employees’ exercising their legal right to ask for a wage barely enough to keep a family of four out of poverty by firing people brave enough to stand up to them. The National Labor Relations Board has issued formal complaints against Walmart, but our labor laws are so weak the Walton family is much less worried than Dimon that making money by breaking the law might actually come back to haunt them.
Finally, there is the actual policy agenda of America’s elites—measures that will put more downward pressure on wages. Every trade agreement we have done since The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has been based on the same template, and the cumulative effect has been a huge trade deficit that saps our economy, loses millions of jobs and continues the relentless downward pressure on wages. Yet the Obama administration is using that same template again in drafting the Trans Pacific Partnership, the biggest trade deal the United States has ever done, and the implementing the same process, Fast Track, that gave us NAFTA with no questions asked.
Yes, well we don’t need to hear about any of that unpleasantness. What good Americans are supposed to care about is that income mobility hasn’t gone down substantially, which means we’re doing great! (Well, some are doing better than others, but that’s just the breaks …) Clearly, if you aren’t able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, the blame lies with you. And in the meantime, let’s do everything we can to make it even harder to ascend the wealth ladder in America. Because only then can the big winners truly know that they deserve it.
As Silver adroitly points out:
Grotesque inequality kills the American Dream because the American Dream is not the fantasy that we can all be rich, or the fact that a few of us will be rich. It’s about what happens for the vast majority of people who work hard, who contribute to the life of our country, who will never get rich but who deserve lives of economic security and dignity, who should get their share of the vast wealth they produce. Our economy used to do just that, and now it doesn’t, but it can again if we choose to make it so.
Elites believe that all that matters is that the possibility exists for someone to get rich. After all, that’s their highest value, so it must be that for everyone. But acquiring great wealth isn’t the holy grail for most people — the vast majority just want to live a decent, fulfilling life and provide well for their children. That was the American Dream as I understood it many years ago, anyway. Sure, some people have the drive and ambition to make a lot of money. But that’s not the be all and end all of human experience and if you build a Darwinian system based solely on those values I think it’s fairly obvious what kind of society you end up with. It isn’t pretty.
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Even John McCain has to learn that if you give them an inch they’ll take a mile
by digby
Regardless of how much you prostitute yourself for these people it’s never going to be enough to allow even the smallest deviation from the program:
The Arizona Republican Party formally censured Sen. John McCain on Saturday, citing a voting record they say is insufficiently conservative.
The resolution to censure McCain was approved by a voice-vote during a meeting of state committee members in Tempe, state party spokesman Tim Sifert said. It needed signatures from at least 20 percent of state committee members to reach the floor for debate.
Sifert said no further action was expected.
They must be a lovely bunch.
McCain is extremely conservative by normal standards. And he has become far more conservative the longer he’s been in office. But the party folk in Arizona are far-right reactionaries and they want one of their own. McCain’s too old school for them.
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A cluephone for Davos
by David Atkins
The jet set crowd in Davos is feeling very sorry for itself that no one seems to like them. Other billionaires are worried that Nazi storm troopers are coming for the rich any day now.
It seems almost superfluous to point out the obvious, but there are some very good reasons that animosity toward the top tenth of one percent of incomes is so high. They’re simple enough that they can easily be expressed without comment in chart form.
Reasons like this one:
Or this one:
Or this:
Or, of course, this:
If the Davos crowd wants not to be reviled, they could start by doing something about all of that.
Because if they won’t, people will end up doing something about it for them in a way that won’t be good for anyone involved. If that makes them feel persecuted, then too bad. Our current economic system is neither natural nor value neutral. It wildly overcompensates the financialized “labor” of those at the top of the chain–much of which has little value to society–while dramatically undercompensating the real, necessary work of the people who build, teach, manage, maintain, clean, and service things and other people. If derivatives trading were banned tomorrow, most people would barely notice the difference. Meanwhile, the lives of real people might well be vastly improved by transaction taxes, tighter controls on vulture capital, and other efforts to undo the financialization of the economy and incentivize the world’s best and brightest to enter fields less dedicated to the distasteful and counterproductive task of helping ludicrously overpaid rent seekers extract even greater rates of return on investment.
The world of mercantilism, slavery and hereditary kingship wasn’t set in stone forever as the end of history. Our modern system of industrial capitalism on a Westphalian political substrate isn’t the end of history, either.
If the Davos crowd wants to keep the current order that has made them so wealthy, they need to work on making it fairer for everyone. That means not just making it easier for a few lucky poor people to become rich, but also vastly improving the lives of all those in the poor and middle class who don’t hit the lucky jackpot. Otherwise, sooner or later the current order will be replaced–peacefully or otherwise–with something better that actually provides results.
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Hey, hey let us hear it! S-P-I-R-I-T, spirit!
by digby
Now this is what I call cheerleading:
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QOTD: Rick Perlstein
by digby
Have you ever noticed how conservatives who say the most controversial things imaginable think no one actually disagrees with them?
They will admit that, yes, people might claim to disagree. But they will explain, if pressed, that those who do so are lying, or nuts, or utter the non-truths they utter out of a totalitarian will to power, or are poor benighted folks cowed or confused by those aforementioned totalitarians. (Which, of course, makes the person “finally” telling “the truth” a hero of bottomless courage.) Or the people who disagree are simply stupid as a tree stump. This is why “agree to disagree” is not a acceptable trope in the conservative lexicon. A genuine right-winger will be so lacking in intellectual imagination—in cognitive empathy—that imagining how anyone could sincerely reason differently from them is virtually impossible.
Read the whole article, especially if you spend any time on twitter …
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