Month: February 2014

Back to Ohio

by digby

So the wingnuts are in a tizzy because the Ohio National Guard planned an exercise they find offensive:

The make-believe scenario is timely. Two school employees who are disgruntled over the government’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, plot to use chemical, biological and radiological agents against members of the local community.

ONG’s January 2013 training exercise is one of many instances where government officials have identified those with limited-government or pro-Second Amendment opinions as potential terror threats. In 2009, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned law enforcement agencies that a predicted rise in”right-wing extremism” would be fueled by “proposed imposition of firearms restrictions and weapons bans” and “the election of the first African American president.” Throughout modern history, groups and individuals associated with left-wing causes have proven far more likely to commit acts of domestic terror.

As Charlie Pierce points out there, that last just ain’t true. He provides a list of right wing terrorist acts in the US. It’s a long one. Starting with this:

Pierce also points out that the Ohio national Guard has a bit of a, shall we say, history with this sort of thing that might make it just a tad unlikely to create scenarios featuring left wing “threats.”

One can certainly understand why the ONG might be a little bit reluctant to play out anti-left scenarios in maneuvers.

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The story of our times

by digby

Shameful:

“What’s happened in New York is pretty similar to what’s happened in the rest of the country. Like everything else here, it’s exaggerated and bigger, but the trends tend to be the same,” said Joel Berg, New York City Coalition Against Hunger (NYCCAH) executive director and former advisor to President Bill Clinton. The modern hunger crisis “can be directly traced to the Reagan era and the replacement of living wage jobs with poverty jobs or no jobs at all,” Berg told msnbc.

Federal nutrition programs had expanded dramatically in the decade before President Reagan took office, but his administration put a decisive end to the forward momentum. In a 1983 Christian Science Monitor op-ed called “The return of hunger to America,” Democratic presidential candidate and South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings noted that Reagan had successfully slashed at least $5.9 billion (or nearly $13.6 billion, in 2014 dollars) out of food stamps.

In the late 70s, hunger in the United States appeared to be nearing extinction. In New York, says Berg, there was so little need for emergency food services that in 1978 the city had only 28 operating feeding agencies. By 2014, that number had ballooned to about 1,000 agencies.

Granted, there was a slight dip in nationwide food insecurity figures during the boom times of the late 90s and early aughts, according to USDA figures. Yet the brief dip didn’t last long, thanks in part to President Clinton’s 1996 welfare cuts and the lack of any concerted federal anti-hunger effort.

The 2008 financial collapse vastly hiked the number of hungry people in New York and across the U.S. Between 2006 and 2012, according to NYCCAH estimates, roughly 200,000 New Yorkers became food insecure. To make matters worse, the same economic forces that added those 200,000 to the ranks of the needy also decimated the non-profit safety net which was supposed to catch them. Between 2007 and 2012, New York lost 25% of its food pantries and soup kitchens.

The 2009 federal stimulus bill helped to limit the damage by adding back $45.2 billion to the food stamp program and raised the cap on maximum benefits. Yet food insecurity never returned to pre-recession levels, and November’s $5 billion cut wound up making things worse.

In fact, the Food Bank For New York City reports that its member pantries and soup kitchens saw a greater increase in demand as an immediate result of the food stamp cuts than they did in the weeks after Hurricane Sandy slammed the city in 2012.

In the late 70s, hunger in the United States appeared to be nearing extinction…

And then along came Reagan, the original “transformational” president, once described this way:

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”

It’s probably unfair of me to bring that up but when he said it, the first thing I thought of was the food stamp cuts. Getting rid of those “excesses” is what he ran on and that’s the “accountability” he was talking about. It was the beginning of this whole austerity crusade and we haven’t managed to get out of it yet.

That excerpt is from a great piece by Ned Resnikoff. Be sure to read the whole thing. Just heartbreaking.

Oh, and just for fun consider these entrepreneurial, job creators after you check in with RichKidsofInstagram.

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Yes Virginia, progressive, populist policies are possible. Even now.

by digby

On Virtually Speaking the other night Dave Dayen gave a very interesting rundown of this idea of allowing the post office to offer banking services, especially in “bank deserts” where people are forced to spend upwards of 25% of their annual incomes just to do rudimentary transactions that the rest of us take for granted. It’s a fascinating discussion about a particular policy idea that could easily be implemented by the post office — if it had a postmaster who wasn’t a conservative ideologue committed to privatizing the post office and, in the process, destroying the middle class security of its workforce. You can listen here.

You can also read about it in this article at The New Republic where Dayen spells out what the real hangup on this lies. Naturally, the banks don’t want it. They are investors in the notorious payday lendering industry which deploys usurious practices to rob the poor, so naturally they lobby against it. But it’s also due to yet another example of the White House failing to fill vacancies, even ones that would be uncontroversial:

There are five vacancies on the nine-member board. He has not successfully placed a single appointee on it during his entire tenure in office. The four existing members were all appointed by George W. Bush.

Currently, the board consists of chairman Mickey Barnett, a former Republican state senator from New Mexico and onetime aide to Senator Pete Domenici; vice chair James Bilbray, an-ex Democratic congressman from Nevada; Louis Giuliano, former CEO of ITT Corporation and a senior advisor to the Carlyle Group; and Ellen Williams, a lobbyist and former chairwoman of the Republican Party of Kentucky. So the decision-making entity for the Postal Service remains in partisan Republican hands, five years into the Obama presidency. It’s not surprising, then, that they’ve used a relatively artificial retirement funding crisis to shrink the agency and privatize services.

Obama could fill the vacancies and restore a Democratic majority (by law, no more than five members of the board must come from one party, but with five vacancies to work with, he can certainly establish a majority).2 In addition, Barnett’s term has already expired, and Giuliano and Williams’s terms expire in December. So Obama could remake this board with members more favorable to a truly innovative agenda for the Postal Service that includes non-bank financial services. And since board members serve seven-year terms, they would be insulated from political shifts through the next presidential term.

And that’s not all. The Postal Regulatory Commission, which also has some jurisdiction here has vacancies as well. Aside from the inability to creatively use an existing government agency to fix a serious problem, why is this a problem? Dayen explains:

The Obama Administration has often been criticized for failing to fill executive branch agencies with key appointments in a timely manner. It was understandable for the White House to slow-walk what may have been considered low-priority appointments when Senate Republicans routinely blocked every nominee. But since Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid triggered the nuclear option, nominees only need 50 votes for confirmation, lessening the possibility for obstruction and making the administration’s sluggishness far more frustrating.

In effect, you have a Republican majority controlling an executive agency under a Democratic president, which happens to be the country’s second-largest civilian employer, behind Walmart. The loss of over 125,000 postal jobs has had a detrimental effect on employment, and the resistance to ideas like postal banking prevents low-wage communities from an alternative to payday lenders, check-cashing stores and other unscrupulous operators. Yet the White House has shown no urgency in reversing the conservative governing ideology at the Postal Service. If nothing else, there’s an economic imperative for the White House to act. They claim to want to reduce inequality through executive action. Postal banking is a major opportunity to do so.

It is a really good idea. I wonder if they’ll try?

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The best Blue America contest ever featuring Joni Mitchell, Lee Rogers and a poet philosopher named Alan Grayson

Guest post by Howie Klein

This week, we’re pushing against the Fox and Koch smear campaign directed at Orlando progressive Congressman Alan Grayson. What we’re doing this week, is giving away 4 Joni Mitchell 18″ x 24″ art prints– images she painted for her albums– one print each to four people who contribute to Alan Grayson and Lee Rogers. Alan asked that we help Lee’s campaign as well. The basic rules are the same as always: just contribute any amount to Alan and Lee on this special Joni Mitchell page— or, if you’re strapped for cash and want a chance to win, send us a post card telling us so at P.O. Box 27201, Los Angeles, CA 90027. Everyone has a lot better chance to win one of the rare, collectible Joni prints– four times better– that have never been offered for sale for any amount of money.

Since you’re already on this mailing list, you probably already know why we think Alan Grayson is the most essential– the best– Member of Congress. But what you probably do not know is why Alan Grayson counts himself among the world’s most devoted admirers of Joni Mitchell’s work. He picked the prize and this little essay he wrote will help you understand why:

170 Beautiful Words
by Alan Grayson

Howie Klein asked me to explain to his Blue America audience my fondness for Joni Mitchell songs. I decided to explain by example. Here are the lyrics– just 170 words– for one of Joni’s less famous songs, “For Free,” from her album Ladies of the Canyon (1970):

I slept last night in a good hotel.
I went shopping today for jewels.
The wind rushed around in the dirty town,
And the children let out from the schools.
I was standing on a noisy corner, waiting for the walking green.
Across the street he stood, and he played real good,
On his clarinet, for free.

Now me, I play for fortune, and those velvet curtain calls.
I’ve got a black limousine and two gentlemen, escorting me to the halls.
And I play if you have the money, or if you’re a friend to me.
But the one man band, by the quick lunch stand,
He was playing real good. For free.

Nobody stopped to hear him, though he played so sweet and high.
They knew he had never been on their TV’s, so they passed his music by.
I meant to go over and ask for a song, maybe put on a harmony.
I heard his refrain, as the signal changed.
He was playing real good. For free.

Here are some reasons why I love this song, all 170 words of it:

(1) I can see it. I can picture Joni Mitchell standing on that noisy corner, waiting for the walking green.

(2) With just a few images– “hotel,” “jewels,” “limousine,” “escorts”– Joni paints the enormous perks of success, matter-of-factly, without bragging.

(3) With one single sentence, Joni succinctly draws the Venn diagram of everyday life for the today’s successful people– “I’ll play if you have the money, or if you’re a friend to me.”

(4) Joni concedes that success, including her success, is not always deserved, nor is anonymity. “They knew he had never been on their TV’s, so they passed his music by.” Fame begets fame, with or without talent. (If you don’t believe Joni on this, then ask Kim Kardashian.)

(5) A random meeting, a chance encounter. You notice something beautiful that other people seem to be overlooking. A man playing the clarinet. A pretty cloud in the sky. A clever bumper sticker on a car. The lines in your own palm. Are you open to that, or are you just too busy?

(6) I wonder what happened at the end. Did Joni ask him for a song? Did they put on a harmony? I’m not sure, but I don’t think so, because those would have been forms of payment, and he was playing real good– for free. But as I said, I’m not sure what happened at the end– and I really would love to know.

Well, my exegesis on the song is now considerably longer than the song itself, so I’ll stop. But here’s the thing– all of Joni Mitchell’s songs are like this. Dense. Poetic. Brimming with deep and yet casual insights into the way people are. And that’s putting aside the gorgeous musical compositions, and Joni’s surreal voice.

What is the meaning of life? I’m not sure, but I sense that it’s somewhere in there, suffusing the songs of Joni Mitchell.

Again, here’s where you can support Alan Grayson and Lee Rogers and enter to win one of the 4 Joni Mitchell prints.

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Serfdom either way

by David Atkins

This is deeply wrong:

The earnings gap between young adults with and without bachelor’s degrees has stretched to its widest level in nearly half a century. It’s a sign of the growing value of a college education despite rising tuition costs, according to an analysis of census data released Tuesday.

Young adults with just a high-school diploma earned 62 percent of the typical salary of college graduates. That’s down from 81 percent in 1965, the earliest year for which comparable data are available.

The analysis by the Pew Research Center shows the increasing economic difficulties for young adults who lack a bachelor’s degree in today’s economy that’s polarized between high- and low-wage work. As a whole, high-school graduates were more likely to live in poverty and be dissatisfied with their jobs, if not unemployed.

In contrast, roughly nine in 10 college graduates ages 25 to 32 said that their bachelor’s degree had paid off or will pay off in the future, according to Pew’s separate polling conducted last year. Even among the two-thirds of young adults who borrowed money for college, about 86 percent said their degrees have been, or will be, worth it.

“In today’s knowledge-based economy, the only thing more expensive than getting a college education is not getting one,” said Paul Taylor, Pew’s executive vice president and co-author of the report. “Young adults see significant economic gains from getting a college degree regardless of the level of student debt they have taken on.”

The latest findings come amid rising college tuition costs, which have saddled young adults in the so-called Millennial generation with heavy debt amid high unemployment. Noting the increasing importance of a college education, President Barack Obama and Republicans such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida have pushed proposals to make higher education more affordable as a way to promote upward mobility and bolster America’s shrinking middle class.

Do I really need to comment here? The insanity speaks for itself.

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Another win for common sense, justice and decency! Thank you Governor Inslee

by digby

Best news this week:

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) on Tuesday said he is suspending the use of the death penalty over concerns that the punishment is being unfairly applied.

At a press conference Tuesday, Inslee said he will not commute the sentences of those on death row, nor will he issue pardons. Instead, he will issue reprieves, which stay executions until further notice.

“Equal justice under the law is the state’s primary responsibility,” Inslee said in a statement first obtained by the Associated Press. “And in death penalty cases, I’m not convinced equal justice is being served. The use of the death penalty in this state is unequally applied, sometimes dependent on the budget of the county where the crime occurred.”

Thank you!

This seems so obvious to me that I have a hard time making the argument anymore. The concept of justice in our system is so weighted against the death penalty that there’s really no good argument for it at this point in my opinion.

Good for Governor Inslee.

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Huzzah for the end of debt ceiling hostage taking. Technically anyway.

by digby

Hey the Democrats win one. Speaker Boehner allowed the clean debt limit to come to the floor and it passed. Huzzah:

In the weeks leading up to the vote, House Republican leaders floated a number of conditions to link to the debt vote, but nothing could garner enough support to pass with GOP votes alone.

“When you don’t have 218 votes, you have nothing,” Boehner told reporters on Tuesday. The final proposal GOP leaders floated would have tied the debt increase to a repeal of a minor cut to cost-of-living adjustments to the pensions of current working-age military retirees.

No more holding the debt ceiling hostage. Technically, anyway:

The House still approved the pension cut repeal in a separate vote, 326-90, on Tuesday

No word on when they’re going to repeal the pension cuts for federal workers. Pretty sure never.

So the Republican leadership gets credit among the Villagers and the donor class for being grown-ups and marginalizing the Tea Party while still allowing their neanderthals to vote against it and delivering the goodies for their military constituency at the same time.

This guy’s pretty happy with this, I’m sure:

According to participants, several House Republicans who are leaving to run for Senate seats were particularly upset with the option that Boehner’s leadership team had presented them with, particularly Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a Bronze Star Medal winner for his service in the Army infantry in Afghanistan. Cotton, who is in a neck-and-neck race with Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), is a staunch fiscal conservative who opposes raises the debt ceiling but did not want to cast a vote that would be deemed anti-military if he opposed the Boehner plan linking the military pension issue to the debt ceiling hike.

This worked out nicely for him.

So, it’s all good. And sadly,in our dysfunctional system, it’s probably the best we can hope for. They managed to raise the debt ceiling with time to spare, something the Democrats are happy to take credit for making happen and Republicans are happy to have voted against. And both Dems and Republicans wanted to restore the military pensions so that’s a win, although it would be nice if the wholly Democratic constituency that was sacrificed in the latest budget deal was similarly spared. I knew that wouldn’t happen. That will take a Democratic House majority which we are probably not going to see unless we have a landslide victory sometime before we hit 2020.

Still, it’s getting a little bit less intense there on Capitol Hill around these must-pass pieces of legislation and that’s a good development. The bar is so low now that we consider it a big accomplishment to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling, things that up until recently were completely uncontroversial pro-forma votes. The lunatics seem to have calmed down enough to allow themselves to win without committing political suicide. It’s a big step for them.

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Housing prices in a well-run economy are LOW

by David Atkins

I know it’s anathema to asset-crazed American policymakers, but the Germans have it figured out. Keep housing costs low, and your economy will do well.

Keep in mind that the following article is from Forbes, not Jacobin or Mother Jones:

In World’s Best-Run Economy, House Prices Keep Falling — Because That’s What House Prices Are Supposed To Do

When Americans travel abroad, the culture shocks tend to be unpleasant. Robert Locke’s experience was different. In buying a charming if rundown house in the picturesque German town of Goerlitz, he was surprised – very pleasantly – to find city officials second-guessing the deal. The price he had agreed was too high, they said, and in short order they forced the seller to reduce it by nearly one-third. The officials had the seller’s number because he had previously promised to renovate the property and had failed to follow through.

As Locke, a retired historian, points out, the Goerlitz authorities’ attitude is a striking illustration of how differently the German economy works. Rather than keep their noses out of the economy, German officials glory in influencing market outcomes. While the Goerlitz authorities are probably exceptional in the degree to which they micromanage house prices, a fundamental principle of German economics is to keep housing costs stable and affordable.

It is hard to quarrel with the results. On figures cited in 2012 by the British housing consultant Colin Wiles, one-bedroom apartments in Berlin were then selling for as little as $55,000, and four-bedroom detached houses in the Rhineland for just $80,000. Broadly equivalent properties in New York City and Silicon Valley were selling for as much as ten times higher.

Although conventional wisdom in the English-speaking world holds that bureaucratic intervention in prices makes for subpar outcomes, the fact is that the German economy is by any standards one of the world’s most successful. Just how successful is apparent in, for instance, international trade. At $238 billion in 2012, Germany’s current account surplus was the world’s largest. On a per-capita basis it was nearly 15 times China’s and was achieved while German workers were paid some of the world’s highest wages. Meanwhile German GDP growth has been among the highest of major economies in the last ten years and unemployment has been among the lowest.

On Wiles’s figures, German house prices in 2012 represented a 10 percent decrease in real terms compared to thirty years ago. That is a particularly astounding performance compared to the UK, where real prices rose by more than 230 percent in the same period. (Wiles’s commentaries can be read here and here.)

A key to the story is that German municipal authorities consistently increase housing supply by releasing land for development on a regular basis. The ultimate driver is a central government policy of providing financial support to municipalities based on an up-to-date and accurate count of the number of residents in each area.

The German system moreover is deliberately structured to encourage renting rather than owning. Tenants enjoy strong rights and, provided they pay their rent, are virtually immune from eviction and even from significant rent increases.

Meanwhile demand for owner occupation is curbed by German regulation. German banks, for instance, are rarely permitted to lend more than 80 percent of the value of a property, thus a would-be home buyer first needs to accumulate a deposit of at least 20 percent. To cap it all, ownership of a home is subject to a serious consumption tax, while landlords are encouraged by favorable tax treatment to maximize the availability of rental properties.

I wish I could paste the whole article, but since I can’t I encourage you to read the whole thing. The end result of all this regulation is that the economy remains stable and largely bubble-free, the middle-class stays out of crippling mortgage debt, housing remains plentiful and affordable, and speculative financiers have less power.

Of all the mistakes American policy makers have made over the last half-century, making housing an investment to be inflated rather than a basic cost to be kept low may well be the biggest.

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Today we fight back

by digby

Guys, if you haven’t called your legislator yet, it’s not too late. Just click here. Nobody will care about government surveillance unless you register your complaint. This stuff does work.

Please take the time to do this one thing.

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“The so-called free speech advocates who have no appreciation for freedom”

by digby

“…. were allowed to assault and humiliate the symbols of law and order, the policemen on the campus”

I have often wondered whether “kids today™” really understand what our parents were like in the 1960s. I keep hearing from millenials who think the Greatest Generation were far more admirable than their miscreant baby boomer children turned out to be. And there’s some truth in it — the Greatest Generation fought a major war and grew up in the Great Depression so they had some very meaningful life experience in them at a very young age. Lord knows the baby boomers are pieces of work in a million different ways.

But this is a good example of how they were when it came to the cultural changes all around them:

That’s right. Ronald Reagan was actually the Church Lady.

Thanks to Rick Perlstein for sending that clip my way …