Month: May 2014

Yes you can argue with a libertarian


by digby 

The Sabbath Gasbag shows are even more inane than usual this morning. (They’re obviously serving stronger-than-usual Mimosas in the Green Room at ABC…) Instead of watching that, listen to this interesting exchange between Sam Seder and libertarian professor William Block.

I’d love to see that on a Sunday show but there’s no time for it what with all the need to speculate about Clinton’s brain damage and all (while tut-tutting the horror of Karl Rove bringing it up, of course.)

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Huzzah for greater inequality

by David Atkins

Just in case you were under the illusion that rampant inequality was a distinctly American phenomenon, here’s a new report from Britain:

The 1,000 richest people in Britain saw their wealth rise 15% last year to £519bn, latest figures have revealed.

Despite many people’s wages falling in real terms, The Sunday Times’ annual Rich List suggests the most well-off Britons now own the equivalent of a third of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

As well as the familiar names of Sir Richard Branson, Roman Abramovich and Sir Philip Green, the 2014 list features a number of new entrants.

They include Riccardo Zacconi, chief executive of King Digital Entertainment, and three other staff at the company behind the hugely popular Candy Crush Saga game.

Former Tesco boss Sir Terry Leahy and the man who masterminded the Grand Theft Auto franchise, Dan Houser, also join the top 1,000.

Philip Beresford, who has compiled the Rich List since 1989, said: “I’ve never seen such a phenomenal rise in personal wealth as the growth in the fortunes of Britain’s 1,000 richest people over the past year.

“The richest people in Britain have had an astonishing year.”

Too bad it hasn’t been so great for everyone else.

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Must read ‘o the day: Koch history

by digby

The story of the libertarian billionaire brother is more interesting than I knew. This piece about David Koch’s first (and only) campaign for elective office is very instructive:

The Kochs had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in the burgeoning libertarian movement. In the waning days of the 1970s, in the wake of Watergate, Vietnam and a counterculture challenging traditional social mores, they set out to test just how many Americans would embrace what was then a radical brand of politics.

It was the first and only bid for high office by a Koch family member. But much of what occurred in that quixotic campaign shaped what the Kochs have become today — a formidable political and ideological force determined to remake American politics, driven by opposition to government power and hostility to restrictions on money in campaigns.

That election also handed the Kochs their first political setback, driving them to rethink their approach to libertarian ideas. Since then, they have built a powerful network of political nonprofit groups that is exempt from most campaign reporting requirements and contribution limits but will spend tens of millions of dollars to influence the 2014 election. They have exerted enormous influence on American politics, battling government regulation and casting doubt on the urgency of climate change. Instead of replacing the Republican Party, they have helped to profoundly reshape it.

“The 1980 campaign was instructive in helping them learn what ideas resonated,” said Robert A. Tappan, a Koch Industries spokesman, “and at the same time, giving them an understanding of the implications of the electoral political process.”

The Kochs, heirs to a family oil refining and marketing business, were unlikely entrants in a presidential campaign.

Politics was a dangerous game for those in business, Charles Koch argued in a 1974 speech to libertarian thinkers and business leaders in Dallas. Subsidies and special treatment demanded by corporations had helped turn Americans against free enterprise. Business had colluded with the Nixon administration to design price controls and other “socialistic measures.”

The most effective response was not political action, Mr. Koch argued, but investment in pro-capitalist research and educational programs.

“The development of a well-financed cadre of sound proponents of the free enterprise philosophy is the most critical need facing us today,” he said, according to a copy of his speech in a Libertarian Party archive at the University of Virginia, one of thousands of documents reviewed by The New York Times for this article.

And just in case you are even slightly attracted to them for their equal loathing of both parties, keep in mind that they hate them both for being too unfriendly to big business and wealthy interests:

… Charles Koch, then in his first decade as president of Koch Industries, had aggressively expanded the firm’s holdings in oil refineries, petroleum products and commodities, while David Koch worked as an executive at the company’s engineering subsidiary.

As the brothers became more politically active, Koch Industries repeatedly butted against the federal government’s new energy regulations. One month before Charles Koch’s speech in Dallas, a federal audit found that Koch and two other companies had broken federal oil price controls. In 1975, a Koch subsidiary was cited for $10 million in overcharges on propane gas.

The family’s frustrations were captured in a fund-raising letter that Charles Koch wrote on behalf of the 1976 Libertarian presidential candidate, Roger MacBride, a co-creator of the “Little House on the Prairie” television series. Mr. Koch excoriated Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford for backing price controls, and attacked legislation to impose fuel economy standards as “one of the many demonstrations of the bankruptcy of the Republican alternative to Democratic interventionism.”

They want you to have the “liberty” to choose to live under bridges and beg for food — and gasp for air as well. And hey, as long as the government isn’t taxing your stale bread, you’ve got to feel pretty darned free, amirite? And if you are unhappy with any of that you can always become an oil billionaire. God bless America.

Oh and this was amusing:

David Koch ultimately contributed about $2.1 million, more than half the campaign budget. But the costs began to wear on his siblings, Mr. Koch recounted in an interview with New York magazine. In September 1980, at a rally in Los Angeles, Mr. Crane and Charles Koch shared an elevator with Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, a libertarian activist, who overheard Charles Koch grumbling that his brother was dipping into his investments to pay for the effort.

“Charles was horrified that David had actually had to spend capital instead of just some of the interest on some of his money,” said Ms. Pillsbury-Foster, who became a critic of the brothers’ involvement in the libertarian movement.

Yeah, Now that they’re worth 100 billion I’m going to guess this is no longer an issue. They can buy the entire political system with their interest.

They’ve come a long way baby. I think we have to admit that their life’s work has certainly been fruitful for them — and people like them.

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Dark money for Big Dems

by digby

They never, ever give up. You get rid of the Blue Dogs and make the DLC a dirty word and they just rebrand and come back richer than ever. Lee Fang has the goods:

Looking for the fight over the heart and soul of the Democratic Party in the waning days of the Obama administration? Next Tuesday morning, take the elevator to the eighth floor of a downtown Washington, DC, building and step into the offices of America’s Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA), the premier lobbying group for some of the largest fracking companies in the world.

While much of the talk about a progressive revival revolves around populist figures like New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Senator Elizabeth Warren, there are other, better funded efforts afoot. Corporate titans from finance to natural gas to big retail to telecom are attempting to steer the party, and as the midterms shape up, these interests are pushing to ensure they continue to have wide sway over America’s only viable outlet for center-left expression at the polls. Which brings us to the latest venture in corporate-centered party-building and the group hosting a chat in ANGA’s headquarters: The NewDEAL.

Created by Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley and Senator Mark Begich of Alaska, the NewDEAL is one of several cash-rich efforts to resurrect the Democratic Party’s flailing bench of electable candidates.

This NewDEAL has little in common with President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal platform, which pledged to save capitalism from itself by cracking down on predatory banking institutions and restoring workplace rights for Americans. No, this NewDEAL is a 501(c)(4) issue-advocacy nonprofit, a tax vehicle which allows campaign activity without disclosure of donors, and its name is an acronym for “Developing Exceptional American Leaders.”

The group, touted as a platform to “highlight rising pro-business progressives,” is led by Democrats who have made a name for themselves by bucking the populist trend. They include NewDeal co-chair Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, whose zeal for the charterization of public schools and love of Wall Street makes him indistinguishable from many across the aisle. The other co-chair, Governor John Hickenlooper of Colorado, has staked a position in his state’s energy wars as a staunch defender of drillers.

VICE has obtained a “supporter list” showing donors of the NewDEAL, which reads like a who’s who of corporations seeking government access: Comcast, Fluor, Merck, Microsoft, New York Life, Pfizer, Qualcomm, Verizon, Wal-Mart, the Private Equity Growth Capital Council, among others, including, of course, the host of Tuesday’s event, ANGA.

You have to love the cynicism with which they take the name New Deal and use it for this purpose. I wonder which marketing wunderkind came up with it?

I can see why Begich would do this. He’s from a Big Energy state and has a big reason to do their bidding. But what to make of Booker and O’Malley? One must assume they are simply whores for money:

The organization is staffed by many of the lobbying world’s top Democratic allies, including those who have worked to channel the party’s election efforts into backchannel corporate influence. The fundraiser for the NewDEAL, Helen Milby, previously served as the “chief fundraiser” to the New Democrats, a caucus of business-friendly lawmakers whose last period of influence, in 2009 through 2010 when their party controlled Congress, featured a massive campaign to water down health care and financial reform in exchange for corporate donations, as chronicled by an investigation in ProPublica. After many were wiped out by the Republican tidal wave in Obama’s first midterm—the president identified himself as a member of this coalition right after he was first elected—most of the New Democrats became lobbyists themselves.

Another NewDEAL leader, a consultant named John Michael Gonzalez, represents the firm Peck Madigan Jones. Peck Madigan Jones probably isn’t familiar to the average political observer. But it’s the lobbying firm that’s been in charge of fundraising for the think tank best known for fighting for corporate control of the Democrats, Third Way, a group that has been waging war on the burgeoning left-wing element of the party. “Economic Populism Is a Dead End for Democrats” wrote Third Way’s leaders in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece earlier this year that scorched the tax-the-rich politics of Warren and de Blasio.

A critic might argue that winning is winning. Democrats need cash too, especially in the era of Citizens United, so why not bring corporate lobbyists aboard when the de Blasio approach might fall on deaf ears outside of New York City? That argument loses some weight, though, if you follow the money trail. NewDEAL board member Gonzalez serves as a lobbyist to the US Chamber of Commerce, which is currently airing harshly negative campaign ads against NewDEAL co-chair Senator Begich, who may lose his seat this year. Business first, I suppose.

See what I mean? Everything old is new again … And there’s just too much money in the hands of these people for them not to spread it around. After all, it’s the cheapest an most lucrative investment they can make.

Read the whole story. Unless you don’t want to get depressed or angry in which case go watch that hero cat video again. I’m going to.

The aren’t parasites — they just have bad timing

by digby

Krugman:

Matt O’Brien has an interesting if depressing piece on long-term unemployment, making the point that long-term unemployment is basically bad luck: if you got laid off in a bad economy, you have a hard time finding a new job, and the longer you stay unemployed the harder it becomes to find work.

Obviously I agree with this analysis – and I’d add that O’Brien’s results more or less decisively refute the alternative story, which is that the long-term unemployed are workers with a problem.

He goes on to discuss the pervasive notion that the long-term unemployed are a special breed of lazy or inept workers. Obviously. Other people find work, why can’t they?

But here’s the thing: the association between worker quality and unemployment should be much stronger in a good economy than in a bad economy. In 2000, with labor scarce, there probably was something wrong with many people who got laid off; in 2009, it was just a matter of being in the wrong place. So if unemployment was about personal characteristics, being unemployed should have mattered less for job search after the Great Recession than before. What we actually see, of course, is the opposite.

It’s really a matter of bad timing. If you got laid off in a bad economy and were unable to find work right away, you become less and less employable, for a lot of reasons, none of which are your fault. But it provides a nice morality tale for the economic sadists so they persist in using this bad luck, bad timing story to tell a Randian tale of parasites and moochers.

Also too: as Krugman points out, this is where the government is truly indispensible:

And as O’Brien said, it’s one more reason failure to provide more stimulus is a crime against American workers.

There were a lot of reasons for that — almost all of them the result of political intransigence and ineptitude. What a bad time to have a crisis of such epic proportions,

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What’s the matter with Kansas?

by digby

Ideological terrorism, that’s what:

In a time of slack economic growth and high unemployment around the country, Kansas lawmakers thought they had the solution: massive tax cuts for the wealthy would lure economic activity and jump-start the state’s economy. But after Gov. Sam Brownback (R) signed $1.1 billion worth of tax cuts into law over the past two years, the state is behind the national average for economic growth.

A new forecast from Kansas’s budget officials projects that “personal income in Kansas will grow more slowly than U.S. personal income in 2014 and 2015,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) writes. The projections come from Brownback’s own Division of the Budget, which expects personal income growth of 3.8 percent this year and 4.2 percent next year. The state’s overall economic growth is now projected to fall behind the nation’s after two decades of keeping pace, the think tank adds.

At the same time that Brownback’s promised economic growth is failing to materialize, his critics‘ predictions about the tax cuts are largely coming true. The tax package is starving the state of revenue. With less money coming in, Kansas is cutting public services. The state Supreme Court has ordered lawmakers to restore funding to poor school districts, saying that the spending levels they enacted were so low as to be unconstitutional. But given the state’s revenue problems, the way that the legislature is going about correcting the underfunding problem simplytakes money away from other schools that need it.

It’s certainly soothing to think that this, finally, will prove to the zealots that they are completely wrong but I’m afraid that’s not going to happen. Since things will likely improve a bit — or at least not get a whole lot worse — all the unnecessary suffering will be swept under the rug and they will declare a victory. You know, the inevitable rationalization: “it will all work out in the long run.” To which Keyenes famously responded, “in the long run we’ll all be dead.”

You’d think the big pro-life types would be concerned about ruining the lives and the futures of the people but they’ve never cared much about the post-born have they?

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Climate skepticism for dummies

by digby

Joshua Holland generously gathered all the information necessary to refute 8 of the top alleged reasons the neanderthals cite as evidence climate change isn’t real:

Most people who deny that human activity is warming the planet just dismiss a massive body of scientific evidence as a big hoax.

But there’s a more sophisticated set of climate “skeptics” who make arguments that, at least to the lay ear, sound like they’re grounded in scientific evidence. And because most of us lack the background to evaluate their claims, they can muddy the waters around an issue that’s been settled in the scientific community.

So, as a public service, we gathered eight of the most common of these pseudoscientific arguments and asked some serious climate scientists — all working climatologists who have been widely published — to help us understand what makes these claims so misleading.

1. No, the Earth Hasn’t Stopped Warming Since 1998 (or 1996 or 1997)

2. No, the IPCC Makes Projections, Not Predictions

3. Yes, the Temperature Readings Are Reliable

4. Yes, There Is a Scientific Consensus

5. It’s Not the Sun’s Fault

6. Doubling Down With “Global Cooling”

7. Yes, It’s Been Warm Before

8. No, Antarctic Ice Isn’t Increasing

Read on for the details. The evidence is overwhelming.

No, businesses aren’t going to “get off the sidelines” to fix income inequality

by David Atkins

This is depressing:

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged business leaders to “come off the sidelines” and do more to help combat income inequality in an economic address Friday.

The potential 2016 Democratic presidential contender said she is working to “encourage more companies to come off the sidelines and frankly, for some to use some of that cash that is sitting there waiting to be deployed,” in a speech at the New America Foundation 2014 Conference.

She said the Clinton Global Initiative is “assembling a network of businesses” that will be unveiled next month at their conference in Denver. And she praised businesses like Corning and Gap, Inc., for investing in programs that spur economic growth and raise wages.
“We can’t wait for government, which seems so paralyzed and unfortunately at a time when we could be racing ahead,” she said.

In her address, Clinton stuck to economic issues, arguing that businesses and community groups needed to work together to help bolster the middle class. The speech comes as Clinton gears up for the release of her new memoir and weighs a possible run for president.

“Our economy grows fastest when people in the middle are working and thriving, and when people at the bottom believe that they can make their way into that broad based middle,” she added.

Clinton said upward mobility in America exists “where the fabric of community is strong,” in places with a “vibrant middle class, two-parent families and good schools.”

“It’s not about average income … it’s not about race,” she said. “It’s about all of these other factors that add up to healthy families and inclusive communities.”

I understand what she’s saying here, and perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps encouraging business to do more is a good thing as long as Republicans are so intransigent.

But the notion that income inequality fixes will come voluntary from big business is ludicrous, and the fact that this is Ms. Clinton’s first big move on the subject shows all the wrong, neoliberal instincts.

If the GOP is refusing to allow income inequality fixes to move forward at the federal level, the right answer is to punish the hell out of them at the ballot box over it while rapidly advancing with fixes at the state and local levels. The answer isn’t to beg corporate interests to do the right thing over a “business roundtable.”

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Cat Island

by digby

My next vacation:

A 40-minute ferry ride from Ishinomaki, near Sendai, will get you to a small island named Tashirojima. There you will find a population of 100 people and several hundred cats.

The feline domination of Tashirojima dates back to Japan’s late Edo Period—from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century. At that time, residents of the island raised silkworms for their textiles. Cats were valued because they chased away the mice that preyed on silkworms.

Tashirojima was, and is, an island sustained by the fishing industry. The beloved silk-saving cats began to approach fishermen for food, and the workers’ obliging response drew swarms of kitties to the shores. A mythology arose around the Tashirojima cats: The fishermen came to regard them as good luck and built a cat shrine in the middle of the island.

Though it was perilously close to the epicenter of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake—and therefore in the path of the ensuing tsunami—Tashirojima, its people, and its four-legged inhabitants survived the disaster. Buildings at the shore were damaged, but most houses, built on hillsides, remained intact.

An unnerving video on YouTube purports to show some of the island’s cats behaving strangely right before the tsunami hit:

I’ve been through several good sized earthquakes and my cats have never given a hint of what was coming. But they weren’t Zen Buddhist cats so …

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