Month: February 2014

by tristero

Now here’s a great idea, by my friend, Doug Smith, writing in the NY Times:

 PRESIDENT OBAMA’S planned directive to increase the minimum wage for employees of federal government contractors has prompted the usual tiresome reactions in Washington and the media echo chamber we euphemistically call “debate.”
But the national discourse continues to sleepwalk past this out-of-the-box question: How about setting a maximum wage for government officials and top-paid government contractors?
Here’s how it would work:
If the minimum wage for employees of federal contractors rose to $10.10 an hour from $7.25, the president’s $400,000 salary would move to 20 times that of the lowest-paid worker, from roughly 27 times.
We should then enact laws to ensure that top-paid federal executives — and, critically, top-paid executives of companies that do business with the federal government — are never paid in excess of 20-to-1 (or perhaps even 27-to-1) compared with their lowest-paid workers.

I’m in.

Always right, never respected

by David Atkins

Alex Seitz-Wald has a good piece in the National Journal about the national Democratic Party’s slow, grudging, tepid embrace of populist politics. It serves as a nice bookend to yesterday’s post by Digby about the failure of the “adult in the room” strategy. Here’s Seitz-Wald:

The party has shifted noticeably to the left on economic issues, said Neera Tanden, the president of the center-left Center for American Progress. “Economic populism is a uniting force in the Democratic Party and progressive movement, and will help draw a contrast with Republicans in 2014 and future cycles,” she said.

What’s changed? Part of it is that Obama finally realized Republicans were unlikely to be very fruitful negotiating partners, freeing him to speak his mind without fear of damaging bipartisan deal-making. Meanwhile, macro-economic trends toward greater inequality continue apace, as Democratic-leaning demographic groups expand in size and voting power.

And as the economy has improved, and deficits have fallen, voters care less about cutting spending. According to a Pew poll released last week, 63 percent of Americans see reducing the budget deficit as a top priority, down 9 points from a year ago. That places the issue below five other policy goals, from fighting terrorism to improving education. It’s the first time that number has slipped since Obama took office in 2009.

At a meeting with liberal writers last week, House Democratic leaders expressed unity on Obama’s State of the Union message, and said they felt confident their populist-infused message would resonate with voters. The focus of the rest of 2014, said Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, is simple: “To create opportunities for people.”

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said her party would focus on legislation this year aimed at closing what she called “the opportunity gap.” That acknowledged that few bills are likely to advance past the Republican “brick wall” in the House, but failures will still help highlight what each party stands for, she said.

Pelosi and other members pointed to priority legislation such as raising the minimum wage and extending unemployment benefits, as well as a wish list of ideas like universal prekindergarten, greater college affordability, paid sick leave for workers, a gender pay-equity law, and an updated voting rights act. It’s an agenda that fits neatly under the “opportunity” umbrella.

So the Party is willing to accept that maybe–just maybe–it needs to go a little more populist. But only to a point:

The message also takes some of the edge off of Warren’s more confrontational rhetoric, which conservatives often deride as “class warfare.” (“No other candidate in 2012 represents a greater threat to free enterprise than Professor Warren,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s political director said during the campaign.)

While Warren’s message is aimed at the failings of the super wealthy, the “opportunity” message turns the lens around and offers to give a “ladder of opportunity” for people to move into higher socioeconomic strata.

And that’s something that broad swaths of the party seem ready to embrace. From purple-state governors to red-state senators such as Arkansas’ Mark Pryor, many Democrats have lined up to support a hike in the minimum wage ahead of tough reelection battles. The logic isn’t too hard to see: Despite business group’s objections, it’s an idea 71 percent of Americans support, according to a December National Journal poll.

Progressives are right. We’ve always been right. We’ve been right for decades. But the party that purports to include progressives never gives them credit until years or even decades after the fact, and refuses to act on progressive values unless the polling is north of 70 percent.

Conservatives don’t have this problem. They’re willing to go the populist route even when it’s broadly unpopular. It’s hard to say that that has hurt them. It hasn’t. Their problem is that they’re running a conservative populism that appeals to a dying demographic. But it’s not their populist tactics that are the problem, just their target audience and ideology.

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All in an obstructionist’s days work

by digby

Gee, I wonder what will happen?

Several House members told The Washington Post on Monday that Republican leaders have narrowed their list of possible debt-limit strategies to two options: trading a one-year extension for approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, or trading a one-year extension for repeal of a provision of the Affordable Care Act.

Hilarious…

And even more shocking:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Tuesday said immigration reform poses an “irresolvable conflict” between the two chambers and predicted that it won’t be completed in 2014.

“I think we have a sort of irresolvable conflict here,” he told reporters at his weekly press conference. “The Senate insists on comprehensive [reform], the House says it won’t go to conference with the Senate on comprehensive, and wants to look at step-by-step [reform]. I don’t see how you get to an outcome this year with the two bodies in such different places.”

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“I felt my freedom start to go away in 2008 when a communist got elected.”

by digby

With so many of their leading lights discredited perhaps it’s time for the Republican party to turn to a new generation of conservative stars. Like this fine person. (But they’re going to have to work to get back …)

Former “Saturday Night Live” cast member Victoria Jackson has filed to run as an independent candidate for a seat on a county commission outside Nashville, Tenn.

Jackson, who calls herself a tea party conservative, moved to Thompson Station in Williamson County last year. She told The Tennessean she filed as an independent because she’s “very disappointed with the Republican Party.”

As long as Jackson meets the candidate qualifying requirements by the Feb. 20 deadline, her name will appear on the election ballot Aug. 7.

She would run against the Republican nominee, who will be chosen May 6.

She’s been planning her political career for some time. Recall her memorable debut with the Tea Party Express:

(Go to 5:40 to see Jackson’s brilliance.)

I think she could go all the way:

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If people who were just working to keep health insurance don’t have to work anymore, that’s a GOOD thing

by David Atkins

So the CBO released a report suggesting that the ACA would, among other impacts, likely cause over 2 million workers to leave the workforce. The simple reason for that is that there are millions of Americans, many nearing Medicare eligibility, who would prefer not to work but have to in order to keep their outrageously overpriced health insurance. Meanwhile, there are millions of Americans who are out of work and desperately need jobs.

In any sane world, allowing the people who don’t want to be working anymore just to pad the health insurance companies’ bottom lines to retire while opening up millions of jobs for new job seekers would be considered a good thing. In any sane world, giving workers more leverage over employers in a labor market definitively tilted toward management would be a good thing.

But not in Republican land or in a media world that spends so little time covering labor and basic economics that the CBO’s identification of a loss of 2 million “workers” was interpreted for several hours in many headlines as a loss of 2 million “jobs.”

There have been many excellent pushbacks on this front day, including from Greg Sargent, Karoli, Media Matters and others. Perhaps the best and most comprehensive response comes from Michael Hiltzik at the L.A. Times, only a small portion of which I excerpt here:

The Congressional Budget Office is out with its latest report on the Affordable Care Act, and here are a few bottom lines:
— The ACA is cheaper than it expected.
— It will “markedly increase” the number of Americans with health insurance.
— The risk-adjustment provisions, which Congressional Republicans want to overturn as a “bailout” of the insurance industry, will actually turn a profit to the U.S. Treasury.
Given all this, why are the first news headlines on the CBO report depicting it as calling Obamacare a job killer?
You can chalk up some of that to the crudity of headline-writing, and some to basic innumeracy in the press. But it’s important to examine what the CBO actually says about the ACA’s impact on the labor market. (You can find it at pages 117-127, excerpted here.)
RELATED: Yes, men should pay for pregnancy coverage, and here’s why
The CBO projects that the act will reduce the supply of labor, not the availability of jobs. There’s a big difference. In fact, it suggests that aggregate demand for labor (that is, the number of jobs) will increase, not decrease; but that many workers or would-be workers will be prompted by the ACA to leave the labor force, many of them voluntarily.
As economist Dean Baker points out, this is, in fact, a beneficial effect of the law, and a sign that it will achieve an important goal. It helps “older workers with serious health conditions who are working now because this is the only way to get health insurance. And (one for the family-values crowd) many young mothers who return to work earlier than they would like because they need health insurance. This is a huge plus.”
The ACA will reduce the total hours worked by about 1.5% to 2% in 2017 to 2024, the CBO forecasts, “almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor — given the new taxes and other incentives they will face and the financial benefits some will receive.” That translates into about 2.5 million full-time equivalents by 2024 — not the number of workers, because some will reduce their number of hours worked rather than leaving the workforce entirely.

Is it any wonder that the ACA continues to have negative approval ratings when its most successful and laudable accomplishments are attacked by the sociopaths in the GOP and misunderstood by much of the press?

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The magnificent failure of the grown-up in the room strategy

by digby

A strategy only a villager could love:

The budget deficit is the lowest it has been since President Barack Obama took office, according to a Congressional Budget Office report this week. But don’t expect that to matter to the American people.

In fact, the deficit has been falling steadily since 2009. Yet a new HuffPost/YouGov poll shows that Americans still think the deficit is going up and disapprove of Washington politicians accordingly.

It’s a painful irony for the jobless, whose livelihoods were sacrificed in the pursuit of deficit reduction over the past several years. Beginning in 2010, the White House shifted its focus from growing the economy to reducing the deficit, hoping to win over swing voters thought to be turned off by too much government spending. As public jobs were slashed and government spending slowed, the economy took the predicted hit. But as the survey shows, there was no political gain that came with the pain.

The administration has since pivoted away from talk of belt tightening and shifted back toward economic growth — which, economists have pointed out all along, is the fastest way to reduce the deficit.

According to the new poll, 54 percent of Americans think the budget deficit has increased since Obama took office in 2009, while only 19 percent know it has decreased. Fourteen percent think it has stayed the same since Obama became president.

Some of us pointed out many, many moons ago that there would be no political payoff for this. By demagoguing the deficit they plant the idea in people’s heads that it’s the most intractable problem the nation has ever faced and that the only thing we can do to fix it is slash government as far as the eye can see. The real numbers are irrelevant. Cutting the deficit is like the war on terror — it will never end. (And if it does, as happened briefly at the end of the Clinton administration, the Republicans will seize power with their stirring message: tax cuts! It’s yer muneee!)

The Democrats had a chance to break this cycle because we were in a depression and citizens were looking to the government for solutions. But all the hemming and hawing about “short-term-stimulus-long-term-deficit-just-like-your-family-budget” nonsense ended up confusing the public and they fell back into their old way of thinking. Of course, attacking “the deficit” was always the Democrats’ plan because only then could they “get it off the table” and move on to funding all the neat stuff the public really needs and wants.

How’s that working out for us?

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Your government “protecting” you

by digby

The following text is a transcription of the first amendment to the Constitution in its original form. The first ten amendments were ratified December 15, 1791, and form what is known as the “Bill of Rights.”

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

I don’t see any qualification to that saying that the press is free to publish except where it makes money as a consequence of publishing documents that the government has unilaterally declared to be secret. But maybe it’s in the fine print.

REP. ROGERS: You — there have been discussions about selling of access to this material to both newspaper outlets and other places. Mr. Comey, to the best of your knowledge, is fencing stolen material — is that a crime?

DIRECTOR JAMES COMEY: Yes, it is.

REP. ROGERS: And would be selling the access of classified material that is stolen from the United States government — would that be a crime?

DIR. COMEY: It would be. It’s an issue that can be complicated if it involves a news-gathering and news promulgation function, but in general, fencing or selling stolen property is a crime.

REP. ROGERS: So if I’m a newspaper reporter for — fill in the blank — and I sell stolen material, is that legal because I’m a newspaper reporter?

DIR. COMEY: Right, if you’re a newspaper report and you’re hocking stolen jewelry, it’s still a crime.

REP. ROGERS: And if I’m hocking stolen classified material that I’m not legally in possession of for personal gain and profit, is that not a crime?

DIR. COMEY: I think that’s a harder question because it involves a news-gathering functions — could have First Amendment implications. It’s something that probably would be better answered by the Department of Justice.

REP. ROGERS: So entering into a commercial enterprise to sell stolen material is acceptable to a legitimate news organization?

DIR. COMEY: I’m not sure I’m able to answer that question in the abstract.

REP. ROGERS: It’s something we ought to think about, is it not?

DIR. COMEY: Certainly.

REP. ROGERS: And so if there are accomplices in purveying stolen information, shouldn’t we be concerned about that?

DIR. COMEY: We should be concerned about all the facts surrounding the theft of classified information and its promulgation.

REP. ROGERS: Hmm. And interesting that over the — again, the Munich Conference, where we had individuals tell us that in fact there are individuals who are saying to be in possession of this information who are eager to sell this information to other news organizations, would that be a legitimate exercise on behalf of a reporter?

DIR. COMEY: That’s a question — now you’re getting from the general to the particular. I don’t want to talk about the case in particular because it’s an active investigation of ours.

REP. ROGERS: It’s an active investigation for accomplices brokering in stolen information?

DIR. COMEY: We are looking at the totality of the circumstances around the theft and promulgation.

It’s very interesting to hear the Director of the FBI fail to strongly defend the first amendment. Of course it wouldn’t exactly be unprecedented, now would it?

I sure hope that all newspapers and other media outlets are listening to this. This is their notice that the government may be seeking a “novel” way to inhibit freedom of the press. If Mike Rogers’ characterization is even slightly on target, something very, very troubling is happening.

It sure is a good thing we had such staunch defenders of the constitution running the government during the Bush years, or the likes of the AP which broke the Abu Ghraib story would have been in grave danger. Certainly, the Washington Post must be relieved that Dana Priest didn’t reveal the existence of the CIA black sites during these more repressive times. Presumably all newspapers must realize they need to be more careful in the future. At the very least they, like all media outlets, will have to become a non-profit businesses in which no money is allowed to change hands lest they be charged with “receiving stolen property” (which logically must include “intellectual property.”)

Let’s just be clear here: Authoritarians like Mike Rogers are the reason we have the Bill of Rights. And it would be nice if James Comey could find it in himself to make it clear in situations like this that the FBI has some vestige of respect for its existence.

Trust ’em? Feel safer?

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The natural fallout of standing for very little


by digby

So this Pew Poll has all the conservatives running around crowing about how much smarter they are than those dumb Democrats:

If you read the accompanying breakdown you will see that there are lots of reasons for this, mostly a matter of age demographics. Young people don’t know the politicians and older people are more misinformed about certain issues. But at first glance, I had to laugh. Why don’t Democrats know that the Republicans are more conservative? Well maybe it’s because the Democrats keep pushing conservative policies. Certainly from the rhetoric you’d think that being a conservative is something both parties aspire to. Nobody wants to be a liberal, God knows. And even those who call themselves progressives most often say it under their breath, as if it’s a slightly shameful designation.

And on some of those issues, I think Pew was wrong to say that one party or the other was clearly in favor. For instance, Democratic leaders have been crowing to anyone who’ll listen about their grand success at deficit reduction, a proxy for reducing the size of government.  You can’t blame Democrats for thinking that’s a big Democratic issue. There are plenty of Democrats who support things like drilling in ANWAR and restricting abortion rights.  It’s certainly true that Republicans are required to support those things while many Democrats take the other side. But it’s not all that clear cut that the party takes the liberal position.

As I said, the analysis of those numbers shows that these results can be accounted for by demographic differences.  But it’s not as if the Democratic leadership has been out there drawing sharp differences.  You can’t blame their voters for being confused about what the party stands for.

It will be interesting to see how the Republicans deal with the phenomenon on their side as their right wing rebels against the erroneous notion being pimped by a bunch of grifters and charlatans that the GOP is much too liberal. Should be fun.

He was frightened

by digby

A world made for bullies:

Jury selection begins today in the trial of Michael Dunn, the man who shot and killed teenager Jordan Davis outside a Florida convenience store in November of 2012. Davis was sitting in a parked SUV outside the Jacksonville store with friends when Dunn, who is white, began complaining about their music. An argument ensued, and then ended, when Dunn fired his 9mm handgun into the vehicle. As the SUV raced off, Dunn stepped out of his car and fired again. Then he and his girlfriend drove to a hotel, checked in, and ordered a pizza. He never called the police and was only arrested because a witness jotted down his license plate. Dunn, who is mounting a Stand Your Ground defense, claimed a passenger in the vehicle had threatened him with shotgun—or a stick. The police found no gun.

There was a reason the law evolved to require that people had an obligation to retreat when they felt frightened.  It’s a recipe for bullies to provoke an argument and then kill when the person fights back.

This is what they really mean when they say “an armed society is a polite society.” Only people with guns will call the shots. Literally.

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When does the business community get fed up with supply-side failure?

by David Atkins

By now you’ve probably seen the Nelson Schwartz piece in the New York Times on the decline of businesses that serve the middle-class, while businesses serving the very rich and very poor are thriving like never before. If you haven’t, go read the whole thing, but here’s a taste:

As politicians and pundits in Washington continue to spar over whether economic inequality is in fact deepening, in corporate America there really is no debate at all. The post-recession reality is that the customer base for businesses that appeal to the middle class is shrinking as the top tier pulls even further away.

If there is any doubt, the speed at which companies are adapting to the new consumer landscape serves as very convincing evidence. Within top consulting firms and among Wall Street analysts, the shift is being described with a frankness more often associated with left-wing academics than business experts.

“Those consumers who have capital like real estate and stocks and are in the top 20 percent are feeling pretty good,” said John G. Maxwell, head of the global retail and consumer practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

In response to the upward shift in spending, PricewaterhouseCoopers clients like big stores and restaurants are chasing richer customers with a wider offering of high-end goods and services, or focusing on rock-bottom prices to attract the expanding ranks of penny-pinching consumers.

“As a retailer or restaurant chain, if you’re not at the really high level or the low level, that’s a tough place to be,” Mr. Maxwell said. “You don’t want to be stuck in the middle.”

Although data on consumption is less readily available than figures that show a comparable split in income gains, new research by the economists Steven Fazzari, of Washington University in St. Louis, and Barry Cynamon, of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, backs up what is already apparent in the marketplace.

In 2012, the top 5 percent of earners were responsible for 38 percent of domestic consumption, up from 28 percent in 1995, the researchers found.

Even more striking, the current recovery has been driven almost entirely by the upper crust, according to Mr. Fazzari and Mr. Cynamon. Since 2009, the year the recession ended, inflation-adjusted spending by this top echelon has risen 17 percent, compared with just 1 percent among the bottom 95 percent.

Now, we already know that the plutocrats at the very, very top of the food chain are a stateless superclass that doesn’t care about the health of the American economy in general as long as their assets continue to grow. It doesn’t matter to them if middle-class business fails so long as world GDP grows so their multinational business does well. But those jet setters don’t define the broader business class in America, a huge portion of which doesn’t sell luxury goods and does most of its sales domestically.

There are a lot of businessmen out there without golden parachutes waiting for them, workaday guys in suits making a solid low six-figure income that are dependent on the American middle-class consumer for them to continue with the lifestyles to which they have become accustomed. At what point do all of these medium-sized and large domestic firms decide that this trend constitutes a real threat to their long-term bottom lines? At what point do they start deciding that it might be better to get rid of carried interest loopholes, boost minimum wages, increase the tax rate on every dollar earned over $250,000, and generally improve the health and stability of the American economy? Most of the folks making even $200,000 a year would barely notice the changes being advocated by mainstream Democrats, and wouldn’t even take much of a haircut under the Progressive Congressional Caucus budgets.

At what point does the top 5% of America realize that its own future is being undermined and conned from them by the top tenth of one percent?

The top tenth of one percent doesn’t care and isn’t going to. But the top 10% should at least be able to see the handwriting on the wall and try to reverse course, shouldn’t they?

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