Author: Tom Sullivan

The Goldilocks question
by Tom Sullivan

The phrase “big government” scrolled across the screen again the other day and got me thinking about how effectively the right has been in programming Americans to believe that any government at all is the ever-execrable big government of the GOP’s daily rantings. A little over a year ago, Gallup reported that 72 percent of Americans believe big government is a greater threat than big business or big labor.

Yet, writing at the Daily Beast, Matt Lewis warned fellow conservatives that big businesses that put profit margins ahead of principle are at best strange bedfellows for the right. He warns, it’s best not to trust anyone who’s trying to sell you something:

I think it’s time that social conservatives also realize that big business isn’t their friend, either. My theory is that there are essentially two groups of people you have to be wary of: big government and big business. Conservatives have typically obsessed over the former, while attempting to co-opt the latter.

When Ronald Reagan declared that government is the problem he might as well have delivered the message on stone tablets from Mount Sinai. Those who beatified Saint Ronnie use the phrase big government as if there is no other kind. Thus, when conservatives control the reins of power, they begin obsessively dismantling the America built by those who came before them. So obsessively, in fact, that it is fair to ask how they will know when they are done. When is it time to put down the sledge hammers?

I like to pose the Goldilocks question:

How much government is too big, how much government is too small, and how much government is just right?

For the Scott Walkers and the Sam Brownbacks and the Pat McCrorys and the John Kasichs and the Ricks Snyder and Scott, this is not a trivial question. Since a “right-sized” government does not seem to exist in their universe, these are questions the right seems completely unprepared to address. Asking the question generally leaves them with their mouths hanging open.

Originalists among the T-Party typically fall back on Article 1, Section 8 enumerated powers in the Constitution. Of course, there is no Air Force in there — it’s neither an Army nor a Navy. Therefore, no satellites, no telecommunications, no GPS. (Sorry, fishermen.) No system of lake, river, coastal, and aeronautical aids to navigation. They’re not exactly military, nor law enforcement, nor commerce — and there’s not really a market for trade in buoys, range markers, lighthouses, radio beacons, and air traffic control. No interstate highway system in Article 1, Section 8 either.

We ought to demand that our friends on the right define what their anti-big-government utopia looks like. Paint us a picture. Compare and contrast the life we live today with the one you promise your policies will provide. How about you start, Sam Brownback?

If you believe the lives we live right now are manacled by big, bad government, what would you demolish? What should go away? How much smaller should the military be? Is half a million installations worldwide too big? Is nearly 900 overseas bases too big? Would the Founders have considered that big government? Is Social Security big government? What’s your plan for demolishing it? Do you propose privatizing the interstate highways? Should there be tolls on all of them?

And no, no more abstract blather about more freedom and more choices and fewer taxes. Paint us a picture. Describe for us, in detail, what your small-government utopia will look like in day-to-day, physical terms. Lowly fiction writers can do that.

How much government is too big, how much government is too small, and how much government is just right?

That voodoo that you do so well
by Tom Sullivan

It was voodoo economics then. It’s voodoo economics now. Conservative governors are finding out that George H.W. Bush was right about trickle-down economics as early as the 1980 Republican primaries. That hasn’t stopped generations of Republican lawmakers from pursuing the policy over and over, trying to make it work. (There’s an old saw about that, as I recall.) Plus, there’s got to be a pony in there somewhere.

The Century Foundation’s Amy Dean, writing for Aljazeera, describes the hangover Republican governors have from drinking all that tea. Those tax cuts for the wealthy haven’t performed as advertised:

In Kansas, Brownback lowered tax rates for top earners by 26 percent. Now the state faces a $334 million budget deficit. Kansas’ public services are so emaciated that the State Supreme Court ruled the funding of the school system unconstitutional. Economic growth has stalled and the state’s employment growth currently ranks 34th in the nation.

[snip]

Wisconsin is experiencing similar woes from supply-side tax cuts and union busting. In 2013 the Federal Reserve ranked Wisconsin 49th in economic outlook and 44th in private-sector job growth. Wages fell 2.2 percent that year. Wisconsin is now raiding public employees’ retirement funds to make up for a budgetary shortfall of nearly $280 million. By contrast, neighboring Minnesota raised taxes on top earners in 2013 and now has one of the fastest growing economies in the nation. The state raised its minimum wage and balanced its budget without resorting to financial accounting games.

What Republican governors have resorted to is raising taxes on the middle class through consumption taxes and raiding state pension funds. Will voters remember come election time?

Not likely, writes Paul Krugman in his Monday New York Times column. Voters have notoriously short memories, and tend to judge a government’s economic policies not over the long haul, but perhaps only over the two quarters leading up to the election:

This is, if you think about it, a distressing result, because it says that there is little or no political reward for good policy. A nation’s leaders may do an excellent job of economic stewardship for four or five years yet get booted out because of weakness in the last two quarters before the election. In fact, the evidence suggests that the politically smart thing might well be to impose a pointless depression on your country for much of your time in office, solely to leave room for a roaring recovery just before voters go to the polls.

Please, don’t give these guys any more clever ideas.

Mislearning the Civil Rights era

Racially fraught incidents at colleges around the country highlight what PBS describes as “a failed lesson in colorblindness.” Good intentions gone awry.

This week, a white female at the University of South Carolina was suspended over a photo showing her writing a racial slur on a whiteboard. The comment blamed blacks for the poor wifi reception on campus. The incident followed the expulsion of three students at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania over racial comments broadcast on college radio:

…one of the students used the N-word, a second said “black people should be dead” and the third said “lynch ’em.”

A student at Duke University is under investigation after hanging a noose from a tree on campus. A former University of Mississippi student faces federal civil rights charges for placing a noose on the statue of James Meredith, the first student to integrate the Ole Miss campus in 1962. Then there was the infamous video of University of Oklahoma fraternity members’ racist chant. And others.

The Christian Science Monitor quotes a PBS op-ed by Mychal Denzel Smith:

“As children of the multi-cultural 1980s and 90s, Millennials are fluent in colorblindness and diversity, while remaining illiterate in the language of anti-racism,” Mychal Denzel Smith, a journalist and social commentator, wrote in an op-ed for PBS.

Smith writes:

To be fair, that’s not entirely their fault. They were taught by their elders, Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers, about how to think about race and racism. The lessons Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers gleaned from the Civil Rights era is that racism is matter of personal bigotry — racists hate people because of the color of their skin, or because they believe stereotypes about groups of people they’ve never met — not one of institutional discrimination and exploitation. The history Millennials have been taught is through that lens, with a specific focus on misunderstanding the message of Martin Luther King, Jr. Certainly, a world where we all loved one another would be ideal, where each person is seen as equal, where “the dream” of children of all different racial backgrounds holding hands with one another without prejudice is a reality. But Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers generally decided to ignore King’s diagnosis of the problem — white supremacy — and opted to make him a poster-child for a colorblind society, in which we simply ignore construct of race altogether and pray that it will disappear on its own.

Hence the insistence after the election of Barack Obama that we now live in a post-racial society, recent evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Three-quarters of a century after the Silents before them, Smith’s analysis suggests, race is again a taboo subject decent people don’t talk about in polite society. Only 20 percent of millennials say they’re comfortable having a conversation about it.

Smith elaborates on how the pursuit of colorblindness as an ideal misses the mark:

For Millennials, racism is a relic of the past, but what vestiges may still exist are only obstacles if the people affected decide they are. Everyone is equal, they’ve been taught, and therefore everyone has equal opportunity for success. This is the deficiency found in the language of diversity. We have spent the post-Civil Rights era concerned with whether or not there is adequate representation for racial minority groups within our existing institutions, not questioning whether these institutions are fundamentally racist and rely on white supremacy for their very existence. Armed with this impotent analysis, Millennials perpetuate false equivalencies, such as affirmative action as a form of discrimination on par with with Jim Crow segregation. And they can do so while not believing themselves racist or supportive of racism.

Writing for Aljazeera in January, Demos’ Sean McElwee finds that “while young white Americans are clearly aware of interpersonal racism, they seem unwilling to address structural or implicit biases. It may be that racial progress will occur simply because there are fewer young whites relative to people of color.” That is, demographic factors are also work.

Responding to the Duke noose incident, Ed Dorn, who teaches civil rights history at the University of Texas in Austin told the Monitor:

“A lot of people, even of the Millennial generation, grew up believing that this country would always look a certain way, and that the people who were in charge of major institutions would always be of a certain color … But the color line is shifting, and in a few decades this will no longer be a white man’s country. That makes them uncomfortable, angry, and anxious.”

[snip]

“We’re seeing a major pushback against the progress that’s been made since the 1960s, and one manifestation of that is a racist song by a bunch of drunken fraternity members and incidents like [the noose at] Duke,” says Professor Dorn. “It’s also important to note that free expression on campus has traditionally not been sanctioned strongly, which means that a few 20-somethings on a college campus, fueled by a few beers, feel that they can get away with a few things. There’s a reason we use the word ‘sophomoric.’ “

Regarding our own college years, most of us might not want to look too closely in the mirror.

Curiouser and curiouser
by Tom Sullivan

Sen. Ted Cruz is enough to grok before the second cup of coffee, but this may take some espresso:

A Philadelphia woman was arrested Friday on charges she tried to join the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group, a day after two women in New York City were charged with plotting to build a bomb and use it for a Boston Marathon-type attack.

Keonna Thomas, 30, was preparing to travel overseas to fight with the armed group and hoped to make it to Syria, authorities said. Instead, she was arrested at her home, which has three small U.S. flags adorning the porch. If convicted, she could face 15 years in prison.

This woman’s arrest comes on the heels of the two New York women arrested Thursday:

“The defendants allegedly plotted to wreak terror by creating explosive devices and even researching the pressure cooker bombs used during the Boston Marathon bombing,” said Assistant Director in Charge Diego Rodriguez, of the FBI’s New York Field Office.

The justice department said the two women have plotted to build an explosive device since at least August of last year and studied chemistry and electricity.

They did not have a specific target but at one point considered Herald Square in Manhattan, according to the court documents.

Ms Velentzas apparently criticised a US Air Force veteran who was recently arrested for attempting to travel to Syria engage in violent jihad.

She questioned why people would try to travel overseas when there were targets in the US that provided opportunities for “pleasing Allah”, the justice department said.

A grain of salt, of course. American authorities are not above entrapping people on terrorism charges. Yet these three join Jihad Jane and young women from England, France, and Austria (among others) willing to turn on, tune in, and check out. They are about “10% of those leaving Europe, North America and Australia to link up with jihadi groups,” according to the Guardian.

George Packer wrote in the New Yorker in February:

There’s an undeniable attraction in this horror for a number of young people around the Middle East, North Africa, and even Europe and America, who want to leave behind the comfort and safety of normal life for the exaltation of the caliphate. The level of its violence hasn’t discouraged new recruits—the numbers keep growing, because extreme violence is part of what makes ISIS so compelling. Last year, Vice News shot a documentary in the Islamic State’s de facto capital of Raqqa, Syria, and what was striking in the footage was the happiness on the faces of ISIS followers. They revelled in the solidarity of a common cause undertaken at great personal risk. They are idealists—that’s what makes them so dangerous.

Packer told PRI’s “The World”:

“People who leave their comfortable lives to join ISIS might actually find the ultra-violence of ISIS exciting and somehow fulfilling, and it might almost prove to them that ISIS is serious,” Packer says. “It satisfies the more apocalyptic longings that ISIS and its members have to purify the world of non-believers and apostates, and to galvanize and lift the hearts of the believers.”

Packer says calls for “purification” are key for any extremist group when they call for ridding “the world of these contaminants — whether it’s the Jews, whether it’s the Christians, whether it’s the Slavs, whether it’s the seculars, whether it’s the intellecutal [sic] Cambodians.”

Still, it’s tough to see what in ISIL propaganda is attractive for young women. Their reasons for joining are complex, no doubt, but as with most propaganda, the reality is a tad less glossy, as the manifesto released in January, “Women of the Islamic State,” reveals.

But the motivations for joining terrorist groups tend “not to be different between men and women,” according to researcher Mia Bloom, Professor of Security Studies at the University of Massachusetts. The social media recruiting savvy of these groups is far superior to al Qaeda or the Tamil Tigers. She discussed the manifesto with Euronews in February:

Bloom: “I think the reason this document was not intended for an English-speaking audience is that it contravenes almost completely this Disney, idealised version that ISIS has portrayed for women, when they’re addressing women in the UK, Canada or Australia by saying, ‘It’s a wonderful life and you’re going to come here and have everything taken care of for you, and you’re going to have excitement and you’re going to be able to make this contribution,’ whereas the Arabic document makes clear that you’re going to be married off and there’s a good possibility you’re not going to be able to leave the house, but you’ll still be able to do more in the caliphate than you will in your home societies.”

euronews: “How can Western countries try to counteract this type of propaganda?”

Bloom: “For example, I’ve seen on Twitter a British jihadi who said, ‘I came here to be a hero and a martyr, and they have me cleaning toilets.’ It’s one of the things that I have to think about when we are very concerned about returning foreign fighters, that perhaps if we could have these individuals who are disillusioned address the public and talk to people who are on the fence and at least plant the seeds of doubt.”

The recruiting strikes me as the little different from that of other apocalyptic death cults around the world. The Kool-Aid comes in different colors, but it all tastes the same.

Everybody’s wise to Eddie except Eddie
by Tom Sullivan

For those growing up in the 1960s, Eddie Haskell from the sitcom “Leave It to Beaver” was our archetype for the conniving, two-faced schemer. Superficially polite — over-polite — when parents were present, he dropped the facade and became his true, devious self whenever the adults left the room. IIRC, at the end of one episode, Eddie gets his comeuppance. As he is led away, he is still working his Mr. Innocent routine, mystified that it seems not to be sparing him punishment. Wally Cleaver turns to his little brother and observes, “Everybody’s wise to Eddie except Eddie.”

It’s not a new observation that conservative politics often exhibits the same public/private, two-faced quality. This week’s sideshow in Indiana over its Religious Freedom Restoration Act bought Eddie to mind again. Protestations that the bill meant to protect religious practice rather than license discrimination were just as transparent.

In the sitcom, Ward and June Cleaver always play along with Eddie’s innocent act, never confronting him about being a fraud, and tacitly encouraging him to keep lying. In real life, don’t our Wards and Junes of the press do the same?

A radio newscast last night reported that RFRA supporters in Indiana complained that the changes made to the law yesterday under national pressure had stripped the law of its religious protections. That is, the right of business owners to use their religious belief to discriminate against customers.

Gov. Mike Pence’s public efforts over the weekend to deny it were damned near comedic, even as more privately, RFRA supporters revealed their true intentions:

But even this week, as Pence called for a fix to clarify that “this law does not give businesses a right to deny services to anyone,” conservative groups stuck to the message of same-sex marriage opposition to rally supporters.

A website post Monday by Advance America, led by Eric Miller, sought to set the record straight on “misinformation” about the law by listing purported examples of how Indiana’s RFRA could be used.

“Christian bakers, florists and photographers should not be forced by the government to participate in a homosexual wedding,” the post said. “Pastors should not be forced by the government to conduct a homosexual wedding at the church.”

And Wednesday, as lawmakers hashed out language to expressly prohibit using RFRA to discriminate, Micah Clark sent out a message to supporters to urge lawmakers to reject any changes.

Ed Kilgore reminds us that faced with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, conservatives across the country — “not all of them southerners” and certainly many of them Democrats — “executed a strategic retreat, accepting the demolition of de jure segregation but defending de facto segregation via private action.” That is, defending the notion that private business owners should be free in public accommodations to select whom they wish to serve. Kilgore quotes Barry Goldwater at length on the matter, concluding:

Like southern “Christian” segregationists in the recent past, today’s politicized conservative Christians are executing a strategic retreat into an allegedly private sphere where they are on stronger ground in resisting anti-discrimination policies. They intensely dislike the parallels on the grounds that hostility to gay rights and/or same-sex marriage in deeply entrenched in their faith, or in the case of conservative evangelicals, in the Bible.

That is exactly what the segregationists said as well, of course. It is not hard to foresee a day when the tortured efforts of religious leaders to stitch together a few culture-bound passages into an eternal condemnation of homosexuality (or for that matter, abortion, which is virtually invisible in Scripture) will look just as absurd and embarrassing as yesterday’s thundering sermons on black people being consigned to submission by the Curse of Ham. And then maybe the strategic retreat into efforts to hang onto discrimination via protestations of “religious liberty” will look less sympathetic as well.

But it is that Haskellish relflex on the right to deny the truth of what everyone can else see that’s more infuriating, as well as being more broadly applied than on just religious matters. It is as if they believe that by smiling broadly and speaking earnestly enough, observers will be duped as to their real intentions.

I’m talking about photo ID laws peddled as “election integrity” measures. Or the changes being made in the GOP-controlled North Carolina legislature to how cities and counties elect local leaders, rigging the game in their favor. Expanding some panels and shrinking others by legislative fiat, always claiming the effort is meant to improve representation and, wouldn’t you know, always tilting the playing field towards Republicans. As if no one is wise to what they’re really up to.

UPDATE: Thomas Mills at PoliticsNC blog this morning reinforces my point. Watch your backs, people:

Now, the flood gates have opened. Republicans all over the state want to assert their authority over the peons who hold local offices. As the state grows and becomes more urban and liberal, the GOP wants to ensure minority rule by rigging the system.

The 6-percenters
by Tom Sullivan

Hearing yesterday morning that the snowpack in the Sierras is six percent of average nearly drew a gasp. Records have been shattered:

The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which typically supplies nearly a third of California’s water, is showing the lowest water content on record: 6 percent of the long-term average for April 1. That doesn’t just set a new record, it shatters the old low-water mark of 25 percent, which happens to have been last year’s reading (tied with 1977).

Things are so bad that Governor Jerry Brown decided to slog into the field for the manual snow survey on Wednesday morning. He didn’t need snowshoes but he did bring along a first-ever executive order mandating statewide water reductions.

“We’re in a historic drought and that demands unprecedented action,” he told reporters who made it to the Sierra survey site off of Highway 50.

In the Central Valley, farmers would drill wells if they could stand the two-year wait, the half-million dollar cost, and if there was any point. California celebrates its gold rush history in the appellation, the 49ers. I’m wondering if the 6-Percenters might have a future in California lore.

We don’t have experience with drought at this scale in the east, but it’s not unheard of. In 2007, things got so bad in the Southeast that one small town, Orme, Tennessee, restricted residents to water use a few hours a day. Each night, the mayor himself opened the valve that fed water to the small community.

Water-hungry Atlanta’s thirst drove Georgia lawmakers to uncover what they call a 200 year-old surveying discrepancy that if “corrected” would move a piece of the border a few hundred yards north, giving Georgia (and particularly Atlanta) access to the waters of the Tennessee River.

Atlanta keeps growing like a weed, apparently heedless of nature’s limits.

In 1998, I put in a wastewater neutralization system for a client in an office park in Alfaretta, north of Atlanta. I asked what the small, metal out-building was at the edge of the parking lot. The Culligan Water rep told me it was a well house (in an upscale office park).

He knew clients (including hospitals) drilling wells all over Atlanta because the Metropolitan Sewer District wouldn’t let people use all the water they wanted (both because of the MSD infrastructure capacity and water source limits, I think). So they were drilling their own wells to get unmetered water, as if the supply was limitless.

The Flint River Aquifer has been under strain for decades as Atlanta keeps growing, the developers keep developing, and the water table keeps dropping.

For far too long, we have treated water as a birthright. The American West has fought over water for years, but the complex infrastructure relies on having supplies to manage. Now that water is becoming more scarce, the vultures circling overhead are wearing business suits. Scarcity means profit potential. Whether it is Nestle or the fracking industry, water has become the new gold rush for whomever succeeds in controling it. At least until it runs out.

One from the heart
by Tom Sullivan

This plainspoken message from the Labour Party doesn’t feel as if it’s been massaged to death by consultants, even if it was. I’m not sure the DNC has the guts to deliver a message as unapologetically progressive as this, or if it has the residual credibility to have it believed if it did. But this one works for me.

Can we get Martin Freeman do one for Democrats in 2016?

The Matrix refinanced: Changing a human being into revenue
by Tom Sullivan

Jeff Bryant’s alarming post at Salon details some of the financial services sector’s inventive, new schemes for funding education. Wall Street already saw K-12 schools as “the last honeypot,” a steady, recession-proof, government-guaranteed stream of public tax dollars just waiting to be tapped by charter schools. It first had to convince states to increase competition – meaning eliminating teachers and other public employees standing between investors and their money.

One could argue that the right’s small government, low taxes mantra always had as its goal eliminating the “creeping socialism” of government providing education and other public services on a not-for-profit basis. (What, no middle-man markup?) “Starving the beast” was never about the size of government, but about eliminating public-sector competitors and making sure the right people take a percentage of vital services funded at taxpayer expense.

Since the collapse of the housing market, the giant pool of money is looking for other places to invest. So it’s out with the NINA loans and the CDOs and in with the SLABS, CABS, PPPs, and ISAs. Jeff Bryant writes:

It’s not hard to see the allure of SLABS [student loan asset-backed securities]. Student loans seem to be an endless stream of revenue as colleges and universities continue to increase tuition, economic conditions and employment transience feed the unemployed back into continuing education, and political leaders urge everyone to attend college. The income stream is nearly guaranteed to pay off because the loans are next to impossible to discharge in bankruptcy.

A Huffington Post article by Chris Kirkham states, SLABS offer “seemingly unlimited growth potential at virtually zero risk. The burden of college loan repayment falls entirely on students’ backs, shielding corporations from the consequences of default.”

Remember when mortgage-backed securities were a guaranteed, sure thing? There’s much more here: ‘capital appreciation bonds’ (CABs) for financing public schools, “public-private partnerships (P3s) where developers provide capital to build schools they then lease to universities (as happens with K-12 charters). Don’t get me started on P3s.

The ultimate solution in the private edu-debt sphere emerged recently when conservative ex-governor of Indiana, now president of Purdue University, Mitch Daniels proposed to the U.S. Congress that, “Instead of taking out a traditional college loan, students would have the option of finding an investor – possibly a Purdue alum – to finance their degree in exchange for a share of their future income.”

If you read that and said out loud, “indentured servitude,” so did I. Daniels’ (and others’) first swing at these Income Share Arrangements (ISAs) whiffed, Bryant explains. But?

But like what so often happens, quirky proposals from conservatives that appear like blips on the outer edge of the crazy radar, actually have a huge think tank machinery behind them. As a report from an Indiana news outlet explains, the financial vehicles Daniels alluded to are what’s known in the biz as Income Share Arrangements (ISAs). The reporter sourced the concept of ISAs to 1955 and University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, the god of right-wing privatization advocates.

Beth Akers, a fellow with centrist think tank Brookings, has argued ISAs should “play a role” in financing student loan debt. She posits that the central problem with higher education is there is “almost no incentive” for students to choose schools and courses of study that pay off down the road in terms of lucrative salaries. A broad market for ISAs could change that by enabling students to “collateralize their financing with future earnings, just as home buyers collateralize their mortgage with the house itself.”

Except here, humans themselves are the collateral. This financial Matrix bypasses all the intermediate messiness of productive capitalism. Why should “job creators” bother with the inefficiency of trading in actual products and services when, by plugging them into a matrix of derivatives, you can change a human being into revenue?

Cue Laurence Fishburne. I didn’t give the Wachowskis enough credit.

Treachery with a smile on its face
by Tom Sullivan

The Bush administration’s infamous torture memos were not the first legal documents to use the color of law to whitewash moral obscenities. Jim Crow had etched that tradition deep into the national culture over a century earlier.

Jim Crow may be gone, but the tradition persists in the branding of legal initiatives that purport to do one thing but in fact do the opposite. And in laws advertised as defending one American principle while violating others. And in using the color of law, as Bush and Cheney did, to justify the illegal and the immoral. Whether it is “election integrity” measures meant to limit ballot access or “religious freedom” as justification for discrimination, treachery with a smile on its face has become standard operating procedure where many of this country’s laws are made.

Like a wicked, little boy who stomps a cat’s tail then smiles sweetly — Who, me? — lawmakers figure you can fool some of the people some of the time with such legislation. Then they dare us to stop them.

Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act isn’t the first of the new, flag-draped attempts at putting “those people,” however defined, back in their places. But it is egregious enough that prominent people are calling bullshit.

“There’s something very dangerous happening in states across the country,” writes Apple CEO Tim Cook in today’s Washington Post. Cook condemns “a wave of legislation” designed to sanction discrimination under color of law:

These bills rationalize injustice by pretending to defend something many of us hold dear. They go against the very principles our nation was founded on, and they have the potential to undo decades of progress toward greater equality.

America’s business community recognized a long time ago that discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business. At Apple, we are in business to empower and enrich our customers’ lives. We strive to do business in a way that is just and fair. That’s why, on behalf of Apple, I’m standing up to oppose this new wave of legislation — wherever it emerges. I’m writing in the hopes that many more will join this movement. From North Carolina to Nevada, these bills under consideration truly will hurt jobs, growth and the economic vibrancy of parts of the country where a 21st-century economy was once welcomed with open arms.

Cook concludes, “This isn’t a political issue. It isn’t a religious issue.” That’s putting it mildly. And far too politely. It is a moral issue.

My only real complaint with Cook’s op-ed is that he argues discrimination is bad for business. That may be. But completely beside the point. These efforts to resurrect and slap a smiley face on Jim Crow are evil.

Who’s afraid of Elizabeth Warren?
by Tom Sullivan

“It will not work,” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said bluntly after reports last week that some Wall Street banks may withhold campaign donations from congressional Democrats over tensions with her:

“They want a showy way to tell Democrats across the country to be scared of speaking out, to be timid about standing up, and to stay away from fighting for what’s right,” Warren wrote. “… I’m not going to stop talking about the unprecedented grasp that Citigroup has on our government’s economic policymaking apparatus … And I’m not going to pretend the work of financial reform is done, when the so-called ‘too big to fail’ banks are even bigger now than they were in 2008.”

It’s that intensity, the appearance that Warren cannot be bought and is in the Senate more to represent the little guys than herself that has the effort to draft Warren for president hard at work in Des Moines, Iowa (funded by Moveon.org and and Democracy for America):

Toria Pinter, a law student who is on medical leave, said that she was drawn to Warren because of the senator’s vocal call to lower the interest rates on student loans. Pinter said people should not misconstrue this campaign as anti-Clinton effort, but rather a pro-Warren movement.

“The campaign is not about Clinton,” she said. “That’s not what we are here to talk about. We are here to talk about Warren and how important she is to us. Because she embodies the ideals and issues that are important to us at the end of the day.”

[Blair Lawton, Iowa Field Director for the Run Warren Run campaign] said even if Warren decides not to run, he believes there are some long-term benefits from this campaign including “putting a big investment into the progressive community.

Meanwhile back in Washington, D.C. (cue theme from The Empire Strikes Back), Republicans are pushing back on Warren, reports Politico:

Republicans are deploying a new taunt to needle Democrats they say refuse to consider even modest changes to financial oversight laws: Why are you so afraid of Elizabeth Warren?

It’s part of an effort by the GOP to portray Democrats as being completely inflexible when it comes to changes to the 2010 Dodd-Frank law because they are running scared from the populist wing of the party that views Warren, the most outspoken Wall Street critic in Congress, as their champion.

In an appearance at the American Bankers Association conference, House Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) joked that they might need extra help when lobbying Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Warren: “May the force be with you.”

Reading through the rest of the article about what changes Big Bidness wants to to see in Dodd-Frank, one comes away asking whether Congress would show the same level of effort and concern over the needs and wants of less well-heeled and less well-connected constituents. Which explains why volunteers are busting their tails for Warren in Des Moines.

Who knows what words Republican old boys are actually using in D.C. to cast Democrats as inflexible or “running scared” or weak-kneed by asking “Why are you so afraid of Elizabeth Warren?” But that strikes my ear as, “What are you afraid of, a girl?”

With any luck, someone will catch one on tape saying explicitly what they really think.