Denying Southern Reality and Other Acts of a Politically Motivated SCOTUS

Posted: June 25, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , | 12 Comments

220px-1900sc_SM_DixieI think y’all know by now that I was raised culturally southern.  I was born in the South.  I live in the deep South and have for nearly two decades.   We’ve been regaled recently with the news that Southern Cuisine maven Paula Dean still longs for the good ol’ days of smiling black servants or slaves.  We ‘ve heard Haley Barbor talk up the old Southern institutions that were the institutional face of the KKK as being positive community builders. I still can’t believe that Mississippi doesn’t celebrate Memorial Day because it is a “Yankee Holiday” and enshrines the Confederate version by declaring April “Confederate Heritage Month”.  But, you do not need these folksy stories of the obvious racism in the South to understand why today’s SCOTUS decision is a complete sham.   Scalia has said that the Voting Rights Act is a “racial entitlement” in the past.  It is not.  It protects disenfranchised voter’s most basic right in a democracy.  This is another example of the hypocrisy of the ‘conservative’ wing of the court.  This is pure judicial activism.

Here is a list of things from Bader Ginsberg’s scathing dissent that lets you know exactly why the VRA is still necessary and is about protecting rights not creating entitlements.

Ginsburg’s dissent also rattled off these eight examples of race-based voter discrimination in recent history:

    • “In 1995, Mississippi sought to reenact a dual voter registration system, ‘which was initially enacted in 1892 to disenfranchise Black voters,’ and for that reason was struck down by a federal court in 1987.”
    • “Following the 2000 Census, the City of Albany, Georgia, proposed a redistricting plan that DOJ found to be ‘designed with the purpose to limit and retrogress the increased black voting strength…in the city as a whole.'”
    • “In 2001, the mayor and all-white five-member Board of Aldermen of Kilmichael, Mississippi, abruptly canceled the town’s election after ‘an unprecedented number’ of AfricanAmerican candidates announced they were running for office. DOJ required an election, and the town elected its first black mayor and three black aldermen.”
    • “In 2006, the court found that Texas’ attempt to redraw a congressional district to reduce the strength of Latino voters bore ‘the mark of intentional discrimination that could give rise to an equal protection violation,’ and ordered the district redrawn in compliance with the VRA…In response, Texas sought to undermine this Court’s order by curtailing early voting in the district, but was blocked by an action to enforce the §5 pre-clearance requirement.”
    • “In 2003, after African-Americans won a majority of the seats on the school board for the first time in history, Charleston County, South Carolina, proposed an at-large voting mechanism for the board. The proposal, made without consulting any of the African-American members of the school board, was found to be an ‘exact replica’ of an earlier voting scheme that, a federal court had determined, violated the VRA…DOJ invoked §5 to block the proposal.”
    • “In 1993, the City of Millen, Georgia, proposed to delay the election in a majority-black district by two years, leaving that district without representation on the city council while the neighboring majority white district would have three representatives…DOJ blocked the proposal. The county then sought to move a polling place from a predominantly black neighborhood in the city to an inaccessible location in a predominantly white neighborhood outside city limits.”
  • “In 2004, Waller County, Texas, threatened to prosecute two black students after they announced their intention to run for office. The county then attempted to reduce the avail ability of early voting in that election at polling places near a historically black university.”
  • In 1990, Dallas County, Alabama, whose county seat is the City of Selma, sought to purge its voter rolls of many black voters. DOJ rejected the purge as discriminatory, noting that it would have disqualified many citizens from voting ‘simply because they failed to pick up or return a voter update form, when there was no valid requirement that they do so.'”

SCOTUS Blog has some interesting analysis of the decision which is shocking in its naked political approach.

To those who will be distraught, outraged, or fearful, the essential question at stake in the Court’s decision – and in the continuing vitality of Section 4 — is whether we believe racial discrimination in voting still exists in the South.  The question being framed this way, the Court’s decision today will appear to be, at best, a denial of reality and a reflection of a naïve “post-racial” view that in the Obama era, racial discrimination in voting has ended.   Justice Sotomayor, at oral argument, perfectly reflected this perspective on what the decision represents when she posed this pointed question to the VRA’s challengers:   “Do you think that racial discrimination in voting has ended, that there is none anywhere?”  The answer to that question must be no.  From this vantage point, then, as long as racial discrimination in voting still does take place at all in the South, Section 4 of the VRA – the part the Court invalidated – remains not just justifiable, but essential.

In addition, to many people, the VRA symbolizes protection of the crown jewel of rights, the right of access to the ballot box.   For those who know the history, this right was born from the blood and the bodies of all those who had been given the last full measure of their devotion to secure full access for all to the ballot box – those beaten on the bridge from Selma, Alabama in 1965, the three civil rights workers lynched in the Mississippi summer of 1964, and many others.  How can the Court find unconstitutional an Act that plays any role at all in ensuring political equality regarding this most sacred right?  And why should the Court second-guess Congress on these issues?

Yet to others, including the Court’s pivotal actor, Justice Kennedy, the essential question at stake is whether our political system is frozen in place on issues concerning race.  Do our political institutions and culture have the capacity to recognize that dramatic changes at the intersection of race and voting have taken place over recent decades?  Section 4 was created in 1965 as a short-term measure for five years; in initially upholding that system, the Court called it “an uncommon exercise of congressional power” justified by the “exceptional circumstances” of the massive disfranchisement of black voters (and many poor whites) that existed when the VRA was enacted.  In 1970, Congress extended this system for another five years; in 1975, for another eight; and in 1982, for twenty-five more years.   Then, in 2006, in the provision the Court struck down, Congress re-authorized this system for another twenty-five years, until 2031.  Thus we moved from a five-year regime in 1965 for exceptional circumstances to a sixty-six-year regime that continues to single out nine states (and fifty-three other counties) for unique federal control.

But of even more symbolic significance, from this perspective:  these areas all became covered because of their voting practices in 1964 or, at the latest, 1975 – nearly forty years ago.  And these are the same areas, and nearly the only areas, that have remained covered ever since.  Though the Act formally creates a mechanism to permit these areas to prove their current entitlement to be relieved of coverage, this part has never been a meaningful way for the Act to unwind itself from within:  fewer than one percent of all the counties originally covered that have significant minority populations have ever emerged from the Act.  From this vantage point, the question the case was “about,” then, is this:  how can Congress act as if nothing significant enough has changed in the last forty years to justify any meaningful change at all in Section 4?  Even if areas of discriminatory voting practices remain, surely they cannot mirror so exactly the areas of which this was true forty or fifty years ago.

From this starting place, Section 4 symbolizes that the issue of race remains so charged that our political system lacks the capacity to move forward to any extent at all.  As Justice Kennedy put it at the argument:  Congress “should use criteria that are relevant to the existing [conditions] – and Congress just didn’t have the time or the energy to do this; it just re-enacted it.” And despite the popular image that Section 4 is about protecting access to the ballot box, Section 4 long ago in practice became more about racial redistricting than access to the ballot box.  While the Justice Department in recent decades blocked access changes on average fewer than twice a year, it blocked redistrictings nearly fourteen times as often.  Indeed, in the 2006 Act itself, Congress itself did not rely primarily on ballot-box access problems to justify renewing Section 4, but on issues like redistricting.  If Section 4 is “about” access to the ballot box in the public imagination, to the Court majority, I suspect, Section 4 is about racial redistricting.

 Can this decision bring about any good?  Well, it is possible because it should be clear now there is a total Republican assault on modernity and a world where white men don’t get to tell every one else what to do.  The last election showed that the nation’s minorities and women were not about to let that happen again.

On its face, this looks like a big victory for Republicans. But is it really? I suspect it will turn out to be a poisoned chalice. Many of the GOP’s current problems stem from the fact that it is overly beholden to its white, Southern base, at a time when the country is rapidly becoming more racially diverse. In order to expand its base of power beyond the House of Representatives, the GOP needs to expand its appeal to minority voters. As the ongoing battle over immigration reform demonstrates, that process is going poorly and looks like it will be very difficult.

The Supreme Court’s decision to strike down a central provision of the Voting Rights Act will make it easier for Republicans to hold and expand their power in those mainly Southern states. That will, in turn, make it easier for them to hold the House. But it will also intensify the Southern captivity of the GOP, thereby making it harder for Republicans to broaden their appeal and win back the White House.

There is only so long that these neoconfederates can continue to push their backwards agendas through the federal government.  They need to be thrown out of statehouses too.  This seems to me an odd continuation of the Civil War.  Nixon’s Southern Strategy will divide this country for decades to come. The hypocrisy of judicial overreach in this decision and most others that are penned by Scalia, Alito, Thomas, or Kennedy just oozes political scamming and it makes us all look bad.  This is just another embarrassing attempt to stop the future. Future Courts will make hay of it.

Monday Threads: An Open Mind is a Terrible Thing to Lose

Posted: June 24, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , | 102 Comments

hillary clinton alien babyGood Morning!

I’ve often wondered what it is about some people that makes them wind up so damned narrow-minded.  They seem eager to embrace anything that validates their belief system no matter how whacky and far-fetched or disproven. They are not tolerant of people or ideas that don’t fit their idea of correctness.  Indeed, they seem to go out of their way to avoid data, evidence, and frankly, reality.  This is all in the hopes of pushing away modernity or just plain change.  I suppose this is a subject more aptly discussed by Doctor BostonBoomer the Psychologist than Doctor Dakinikat the Economist.  However, these headlines just got me in the mood to ask one big question:  What makes people feel so smug about their beliefs and beliefs systems even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are just plan wrong minded and bigoted?

First, here is a story from Raw Story that involves psychology and studies that look at the question directly.   The story is based on a morality study that finds conservatives show a ‘general insensitivity to consequences’.

Research published June in Social Psychological and Personality Science suggests that religious individuals and political conservatives think about moral issues in a fundamentally different way than liberals.

The study by Jared Piazza of the University of Pennsylvania and Paulo Sousa of Queen’s University Belfast, which included a total of 688 participants, found religious individuals and political conservatives consistently invoked deontological ethics. In other words, they judged the morality of actions based on a universal rule such as, “You should not kill.” Political liberals, on the other hand, consistently invoked consequentialist ethics, meaning they judged the morality of actions based on their positive or negative outcomes.

“Does being religious or being conservative promote a rule-based ethic or does having a rule-based ethic promote religiosity and/or conservatism?” Piazza told PsyPost. “This question is difficult to answer definitively without running a longitudinal study, since you cannot really manipulate religious orientation, or being in possession of a deontological orientation, and then look at the consequences.”

The study’s cross-sectional methodology makes it impossible to say anything more than religion and conservativism are associated with deontological ethics. However, Piazza said prior research suggested that being religious underlies the adherence to deontological ethics

“I think it is more likely that being religious — and being religious in a particular way — is what promotes deontological commitments, and not the other way around,” he told PsyPost. “In a recent unpublished study I conducted with my colleague Justin Landy at Penn, we found that it is a particular sub-class of religious individuals that are strongly opposed to consequentialist thinking. Specifically, it was religious individuals who believe that morality is founded upon divine authority or divine commands, and that moral truths are not obtained via human intuition or reason, who were strong deontologists (i.e., they refused to find various rule violations as permissible even when the consequences were better as a result).”

“This suggests that not all religious individuals are non-consequentialists; that is, religion does not necessarily promote a deontological ethic, though many religious institutions do promote such an orientation,” Piazza added. “Instead, it may be that people who are skeptical about the capacity for human beings to know right from wrong in the absence of divine revelation that tend towards a rule-based morality. Though this begs the question of why some religious individuals tend to see morality in terms of honoring divine commands, while others accept that human intuition or reason may be an equally, if not more reliable, foundation. This is an interesting and complex psychological question which we don’t currently have an answer to.”

Is this what makes the right wing so impervious to reality and evidence? And is that why the left wing seems enamored of a guy that just handed over state secrets to the Russians and the Chinese?

One of the great right wing myths explored here anecdotely is that that atheists, for example, cannot be compassionate or charitable because those are ethics that only spring from the fear of some kind of magical supreme being and threat of his afterlife hell realm.  Yet, studies show that people with little to know religion do good deeds in abundance.  In fact, big media is responsible for promoting this nonsense.  Remember when Wolf Blitzer asked an atheist if her ‘faith’ in a god got her through the experience of a horrible tornado?  Now, Time Magazines thinks atheists ignore human disaster too.

As part of his reporting, Klein joined one of the disaster relief groups and worked at a site damaged by the Oklahoma tornadoes… and that’s when he wrote this:

… there was an occupying army of relief workers, led by local first responders, exhausted but still humping it a week after the storm, church groups from all over the country — funny how you don’t see organized groups of secular humanists giving out hot meals — and there in the middle of it all, with a purposeful military swagger, were the volunteers from Team Rubicon.

Wow. My jaw dropped while reading that because it’s absolutely not true.

Klein took a cheap shot at atheists for not doing the relief work that churches — with all the personnel and financial advantages they have at their disposal — were doing even though we were often working right alongside them! He made the same mistake that Minister David Brassfield did (though at least Brassfield eventually offered a semi-apology).

Klein is simply lying out of his ass. A simple Google search would’ve turned up a number of ways atheists helped in the wake of the Oklahoma tornadoes. But since Klein was too lazy to do it, I’ll do it for him:

Is that enough proof that atheists, too, were (and still are) helping out in the aftermath of the tornadoes?

Maybe Klein didn’t know any of this was going on because, as Tancredi points out, “these [Humanist] groups have no tax exempt status and therefore can’t exactly afford to have the t-shirts for everyone to wear so that you know when they are out in force during a volunteer effort.”

Another deeply engrained myth in the minds of law and order conservatives is that all law and enforcement is benign despite overwhelming evidence in many cases to the contrary.  Democracy Now! investigates the License to Kill given to the FBI in this country and there are some astounding statistics.  Agents involved in fatal shootings have not cleared every single time since 1993.  Are all those shootings really justifiable?

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZALEZ: As President Obama prepares to nominate James Comey today to head the FBI, the agency is facing new questions over how it handles shootings involving FBI agents. A new look at the FBI’s internal destinations has found the bureau has cleared its agents in every single shooting incident dating back two decades. According to the  New York Times, from 1993 until today, the FBI shootings were deemed justified in the fatal shootings of 70 people and the wounding of 80 others.

Out of 289 shootings that are found to be deliberate, no agent was disciplined except for letters of censure in five cases. Even in a case where the bureau paid a shooting victim over $1 million to settle a lawsuit, the internal review did not find the agent who shot the man culpable.

AMY GOODMAN: The issue of FBI accountability has recently re-emerged following last month’s fatal shooting of Ibragim Todashev during questioning by agents in Orlando, Florida. A Chechen native, Todashev who was interrogated over his ties to one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing.  The Washington Post and several TV news organizations reported he was unarmed, citing unnamed law enforcement officials.

On Thursday, I spoke to Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage, the Washington correspondent for  The New York Timeswho co-wrote the recent article called, “The FBI Deemed Agents Faultless in 150 Shootings.” I began by asking Charlie Savage to lay out what he found.

Then, there are of course, all the lies pushed by the fetus fetishists to support all kinds of wierdly NAZI like invasions into women’s bodies. How do small government touting conservatives reconcile this kind of government intrusion? Corporations are people my friend, but women are not?

HR 1797 is titled the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, even though scientific studies, and meta-analysis of said studies, have found no evidence of fetal pain until the third trimester. Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) proposed the legislation, despite the fact that a 20-week abortion ban passed in his state was recently ruled unconstitutional. Grounding the bill in faux science is no surprise, given Franks’ role in founding the Arizona Family Research Institute, a group linked to the notorious Focus on the Family, a devoutly anti-choice (and anti-LGBTQ rights) organization that promotes an anti-science fringe agenda such as teaching “Creationism” and abstinence-only education. As a young politician, Franks reportedly donned a tie tack in the shape of fetal feet.

As the bill was furiously debated in the House Tuesday, hardly a minute went by without a mention of Gosnell. Gosnell, of course, is the infamous Philadelphia doctor recently convicted of the first-degree murder of three babies, voluntary manslaughter of a Bhutanese immigrant named Karnamaya Mongar, and 21 counts of abortion past the legal gestational date (24 weeks in Pennsylvania), among other charges.

“The trial of Kermit Gosnell exposed late abortions for what they really are: relocated infanticide,” Franks in a statement about the bill.

His statement echoes anti-choice rhetoric surrounding the Gosnell case; if Gosnell’s victims had been in a womb, they say, his actions would have been legal—or, as Kirstin Powers put it, it’s “merely a matter of geography.”

But it’s not accurate.

Gosnell was convicted of involuntary manslaughter of Mongar and of first-degree murder of three babies, referred to as Babies A, C, and D in the grand jury report and throughout the trial. From the grand jury report, describing Baby A: “His 17-year old mother was almost 30 weeks pregnant.” Baby C, according to the grand jury report, was “at least 28 weeks of gestational age.” The grand jury did not know the exact gestational age of Baby D, though experts used a review of neonatology charts to conclude that the age was “consistent with viability.” In other words, each of these were third trimester pregnancies.

Gosnell’s “procedures” were illegal under current law. A 20-week post-fertilization ban would not make them any more illegal. If passed into law, HR 1797, or any other 20-week ban, would not prevent another Gosnell.

Meanwhile, abortions performed in weeks 20 through 24 are statistically rare. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest abortion surveillance report, based on data from 2009, 91.7 percent of abortions were performed at or before 13 weeks gestation. Only 1.3 percent of abortions occurred at or after 21 weeks’ gestation.

They even invented a non existent procedure–“partial birth abortion”–to try to chip away at a woman’s autonomy and right to make health FYnGWg6NZOpNk5mDZKcuxB2_ayodecisions impacting her health and well-being.  It just always amazes me that none of these folks ever see through their lies.

I am going to end with the offering of an economist Miles Kimble of a quote by John Stuart Mills.  It’s a quote from an essay entitled:  A Remedy for the One-Sidedness of the Human Mind.

People are drawn to simplifications. And therein lies danger. John Stuart Mill writes about how that danger can be reduced by including in the intellectual ecosystem even those who are off-base in their judgments. The following is from On Liberty, Chapter II: “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion,” paragraphs 34 and 35:

It still remains to speak of one of the principal causes which make diversity of opinion advantageous, and will continue to do so until mankind shall have entered a stage of intellectual advancement which at present seems at an incalculable distance. We have hitherto considered only two possibilities: that the received opinion may be false, and some other opinion, consequently, true; or that, the received opinion being true, a conflict with the opposite error is essential to a clear apprehension and deep feeling of its truth. But there is a commoner case than either of these; when the conflicting doctrines, instead of being one true and the other false, share the truth between them; and the nonconforming opinion is needed to supply the remainder of the truth, of which the received doctrine embodies only a part. Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth. They are a part of the truth; sometimes a greater, sometimes a smaller part, but exaggerated, distorted, and disjoined from the truths by which they ought to be accompanied and limited. Heretical opinions, on the other hand, are generally some of these suppressed and neglected truths, bursting the bonds which kept them down, and either seeking reconciliation with the truth contained in the common opinion, or fronting it as enemies, and setting themselves up, with similar exclusiveness, as the whole truth. The latter case is hitherto the most frequent, as, in the human mind, one-sidedness has always been the rule, and many-sidedness the exception. Hence, even in revolutions of opinion, one part of the truth usually sets while another rises. Even progress, which ought to superadd, for the most part only substitutes, one partial and incomplete truth for another; improvement consisting chiefly in this, that the new fragment of truth is more wanted, more adapted to the needs of the time, than that which it displaces. Such being the partial character of prevailing opinions, even when resting on a true foundation, every opinion which embodies somewhat of the portion of truth which the common opinion omits, ought to be considered precious, with whatever amount of error and confusion that truth may be blended. No sober judge of human affairs will feel bound to be indignant because those who force on our notice truths which we should otherwise have overlooked, overlook some of those which we see. Rather, he will think that so long as popular truth is one-sided, it is more desirable than otherwise that unpopular truth should have one-sided asserters too; such being usually the most energetic, and the most likely to compel reluctant attention to the fragment of wisdom which they proclaim as if it were the whole.

Thus, in the eighteenth century, when nearly all the instructed, and all those of the uninstructed who were led by them, were lost in admiration of what is called civilization, and of the marvels of modern science, literature, and philosophy, and while greatly overrating the amount of unlikeness between the men of modern and those of ancient times, indulged the belief that the whole of the difference was in their own favour; with what a salutary shock did the paradoxes of Rousseau explode like bombshells in the midst, dislocating the compact mass of one-sided opinion, and forcing its elements to recombine in a better form and with additional ingredients. Not that the current opinions were on the whole farther from the truth than Rousseau’s were; on the contrary, they were nearer to it; they contained more of positive truth, and very much less of error. Nevertheless there lay in Rousseau’s doctrine, and has floated down the stream of opinion along with it, a considerable amount of exactly those truths which the popular opinion wanted; and these are the deposit which was left behind when the flood subsided. The superior worth of simplicity of life, the enervating and demoralizing effect of the trammels and hypocrisies of artificial society, are ideas which have never been entirely absent from cultivated minds since Rousseau wrote; and they will in time produce their due effect, though at present needing to be asserted as much as ever, and to be asserted by deeds, for words, on this subject, have nearly exhausted their power.

Be wary of Occam’s Razor when it comes to moral issues. Be open to new evidence.  Be aware that things are not always as they seem or you want them to be and above all, realize that we are all the same while being uniquely us.  I am still awaiting the decision that says the United States recognizes the full humanity and rights of its GLBT citizens.  I am praying that Trayvon Martin’s family will see justice.  I would like to see the FBI truly investigate the shooting deaths that resulted from their hunting the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon Bombings and think about what it does to justice in the name of security..  We should be a country of laws that create an open path to justice and not one of closed minds that suppress evidence and diversity.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

What Does it Mean to Have a Speaker that Knows Nothing about Economics?

Posted: June 22, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: John Birch Society in Charge | Tags: , , | 65 Comments

boehner_gavel_apSpeaker John Boehner is bad at a lot of things.  His speakership has been marred by so many mishaps and embarrassing moments that it’s easy just to try to laugh at him and the entire House of Representatives.  They seem to do nothing but try to repeal the impossible and stand for the unfathomable.  However,  the country is struggling to come out of an extremely horrible financial crisis with deep, lasting and dangerous unemployment.   The Fed chair–a republican and republican appointee–points out exactly how bad this has been for our economy. What does it mean when the third in line to the presidency is clueless about one of the most important functions of modern government and appears to get all of his knowledge from a bad Ayn Rand novel?

Bernanke spoke to the press after the release of the Federal Open Market Committee minutes.

If the recovery continues, the Fed plans to taper off mortgage-backed securities purchases once the unemployment rate hits 7%, the Fed Chair suggested.  And while reporters grilled Bernanke about inflationary risks and the impact of MBS purchases, he remained cautiously optimistic.

The Fed Chair’s more optimistic tone stemmed from improving market fundamentals, with Bernake highlighting increases in household wealth and fewer large scale layoffs. State and local governments also are improving somewhat financially, he said.

The only major drag is federal fiscal policy.

It is difficult to understand why the portion of US government designed to be the most accountable to the masses seems least concerned with jobs and economic growth.  It is undoubtedly due to the significant misunderstanding and willful ignorance of economics recently demonstrated by the speaker and many–if not most– in his party. Paul Krugman speaks sincerely to this problem.

John Boehner’s remarks on recent financial events have attracted a lot of unfavorable comment, and they should. Actually, I think even the stuff most commentators have shied away from — he talks about the Fed “deflating” when I think he means either inflating or debasing, or possibly is doing a Sarah Palin and merging the two — is significant. I mean, he’s the Speaker of the House at a time when economic issues are paramount; shouldn’t he have basic familiarity with simple economic terms?

But the main thing is that he’s clinging to a story about monetary policy that has been refuted by experience about as thoroughly as any economic doctrine of the past century. Ever since the Fed began trying to respond to the financial crisis, we’ve had dire warnings about looming inflationary disaster. When the GOP took the House, it promptly called Bernanke in to lecture him about debasing the dollar. Yet inflation has stayed low, and the dollar has remained strong — just as Keynesians said would happen.

Yet there hasn’t been a hint of rethinking from leading Republicans; as far as anyone can tell, they still get their monetary ideas from Atlas Shrugged.

Oh, and this is another reminder to the “market monetarists”, who think that they can be good conservatives while advocating aggressive monetary expansion to fight a depressed economy: sorry, but you have no political home. In fact, not only aren’t you making any headway with the politicians, even mainstream conservative economists like Taylor and Feldstein are finding ways to advocate tighter money despite low inflation and high unemployment. And if reality hasn’t dented this dingbat orthodoxy yet, it never will.

It is rather obvious and rather sad that nearly all the economic ideas of the Speaker and his party come from a bad piece of fiction and ignore every lesson of economics learned from even libertarian-leaning economists like the late Milton Friedman. The result has been damaging to many Americans and the underlying economy.

SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER: Well,it certainly could because you know, people open their 401(k) statements you know, at the end of every quarter and for most people it’s an indication of their wealth. And the value of their home would be another indication,how well homes are selling in their neighborhoods.

But sell off is in large part due to the policies that we’ve had coming’ out of the Federal Reserve. You know, you can’t continue to deflate our money and deflate it and deflate it– have equity markets go– without some change, yeah. Bernanke has made it clear he’s doing these policies in the absence of the government doing its part to help improve our economy.

That’s why Democrats and Republicans here on Capitol Hill and the president need to deal with– fix our tax code that would help us promote more economic growth and deal with our long term spending problem. We’ve spent more money than what we’ve brought in for 55 of the last 60 years. That ought to scare the hell out of every American.

We need to deal with this problem openly and honestly. Because if we do, investors around the country, business owners are going to look up and go, “Gee, they’re actually dealing with the issues that I’m most concerned about.” Then they’ll begin to invest.

MARIA BARTIROMO: But how likely is that over the next year? I mean, Bernanke made it clear yesterday that if the data continues as it is then they could be out of the bonds buying business by next year this time. So that’s one year. Will we see fiscal policy in terms of tax reform, in terms of regulatory clarity? Will we see that in the next 12 months?

SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER: Listen,hope springs eternal in my heart. And while we have big differences over what tax reform might look like, what entitlement reform might look like we have to — we have to come together and deal with these things. Because if we want our economy to grow, we want to create jobs– we’ve got to deal with the issues that are affecting it.

You know, Republicans– we’ve got our jobs plan. We’ve had it now for literally the last three or four years. We’ve updated this effort and it’s our number one focus here. And while, you know, we’ve got other obligations under the constitution that provides oversight of the Executive Branch we’re trying to stay focused on those things that would improve our economy– help the American people’s wages increase and have more jobs available.

Fixing the tax code is not fiscal policy.  It’s not anything that will create any kind of job growth or economic well being.   What is this man thinking?

To quote Matthew O’Brien at The Atlantic,  Boehner is “dangerously clueless” about economics and economic policy required of the Federal Government in challenging times.  It is rather pathetic and deluded.  O’Brien points out the facts about that quote from Boehner above.

Bookmark this, print it out, and put it in a time capsule, because this is about as wrong as anybody could possibly be about economics (excluding Don Luskin, of course). Now, Boehner doesn’t put it very clearly, but when he says markets are going down because Bernanke is “deflating the dollar”, he means markets are in the red because the Fed is weakening the dollar. The opposite is true. Markets sold off not because the Fed is doing too much, but because markets worry it won’t do enough. As you can see below from Bloomberg, the dollar went up during the recent sell-off on Wednesday and Thursday after Bernanke explained how and when the Fed expects to wind down QE3. That’s what happens when the Fed tightens policy.

DollarIndex1.png

For all the talk of “currency debasement” from conservatives who fancy themselves monetary experts, the dollar is actually stronger today than it was when the Great Recession began. Core PCE inflation, the Fed’s preferred measure, just hit a 50-year low at 1.05 percent. And no, stripping out food and energy prices isn’t hiding the inflation monster: headline PCE inflation was a meager 0.74 percent in April. Weimar we are not.

Boehner was no more coherent on fiscal policy. Now, it’s true that Bernanke would like to see some kind of budget deal that reins in long-term deficits, but he wishes we were doing less to try to rein in short-term deficits. In other words, he wants less austerity now, and more austerity later. Here’s what Bernanke said about about our cutting-spending problem in his press conference on Wednesday:
The main drag or the main headwind to growth this year is, as you know, is the federal fiscal policy, which the CBO estimates is something on the order of 1.5 percentage points of growth.
That’s not exactly the clarion call for future spending cuts that Boehner imagines. It’s a plea, in the understated lexicon of central bankers, to stop maiming the recovery with pointless and premature austerity. But Boehner either isn’t listening or doesn’t understand. He somehow thinks it’s scary that the government has run deficits for 55 of the last 60 years (though not so scary that he didn’t vote for many of those budgets). This is nonsense. As Josh Barro points out, there’s no better proof that we shouldn’t be scared of deficits than the fact that we have run them for 55 of the past 60 years without any problem. As long as the economy grows faster than the debt, there’s no reason we can’t run deficits forever.

We tried Hoovernomics. It failed. So we’re … trying it again?

Yes.  Republicans are completely in love with failed policies of the past and they’re not about to change anything now.  It’s unbelievable that we could have a Speaker of the House that can be so completely ignorant about economic policy this day and age.  It’s pathetic and it’s sad.  It is also dangerous.

Friday Reads

Posted: June 21, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , | 13 Comments

Farmer-Seed-Co-1906Good Morning!

I want to talk about the Farm bill that didn’t get through the House yesterday mostly because it is such a good example of the clusterfuck that happens whenever the Republican party tries to do anything these days.  The Granola party is full of fruits, nuts and flakes and it all came into play on the votes in this bill.  Most farm states are Republican and most rural areas vote Republican.  I wonder how this will play in the farm belt states.

The surprise defeat of the farm bill in the House on Thursday underscored the ideological divide between the more conservative, antispending Republican lawmakers and their leadership, who failed to garner sufficient votes from their caucus as well as from Democrats.

The vote against the bill, 234 to 195, comes a year after House leaders pulled the measure off the calendar because conservative lawmakers demanded deeper cuts in the food stamp program and Democrats objected. This year’s measure called for more significant cuts than the Senate bill, but it still did not go far enough to get a majority in the House to support an overhaul of the nation’s food and farm programs. Sixty-two Republicans, or more than a quarter of the caucus, voted with Democrats to defeat the bill.

The failure was a stinging defeat for Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, who continues to have trouble marshaling the Republican support he needs to pass major legislation. Without the solid backing of his party, Mr. Boehner has to rely on some Democratic support, which deserted him Thursday.

Mr. Boehner was unable to secure the votes of a number of recently elected and strongly conservative lawmakers who were averse to cutting deals on legislation like the farm bill. Traditionally, the farm bill has passed easily with support from urban lawmakers concerned with nutrition spending and rural members focused on farm programs. But conservatives said they were more driven by a desire to shrink the size of government through spending cuts, not expand it though crop insurance subsides to rich farmers.

Republican wingnuttia was on full display.

Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) on Thursday denied it was “evil” for Republicans to want to cut food stamps because poor people used the program to purchase extravagant foods.

The Texas congressman complained that Democrats had portrayed Republicans as evil because they supported a measure to cut nearly 2 million low-income people off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which would mainly impact working families with children.

On the other hand, Gohmert said, poor people were using food stamps to buy food that other Americans could not afford. He claimed his “broken-hearted” constituents had repeatedly told him they had seen people use food stamps to buy king crab legs.

“Because he does pay income tax, he doesn’t get more back than he pays in, he is actually helping pay for king crab legs when he can’t pay for them for himself,” Gohmert explained.

“How can you begrudge somebody who feels that way,” he added. “How can you begrudge anyone who steps up on behalf of constituents who feel that way. We don’t want anyone to go hungry, and from the amount of obesity in this country by people who we’re told do not have enough to eat, it does seem like we could have a debate about this issue without allegations about wanting to slap down or starve children.”

The average monthly SNAP benefit for one person is $133.44.

This is kind’ve a weird situation because this farm bill replaced a strange 1944 farm bill that would go back into law.  Here’s another tale of vintage_children_waving_to_local_farmer_on_tractor_poster-re4dbd0d6dc8a42e9ba47fa76364fd4fa_az0bt_8byvr_512Republican crazy.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a conservative charged with whipping GOP votes for the bill, was surprised by the number of GOP defections.

“I was surprised by about half of them,” he said. “I thought they would have taken more of a 10,000 foot view. We are ending direct payments in this bill, we are starting to reveres the obscene growth of the food stamp program.”

King blamed key vote alerts from Heritage Action and Club for Growth for hurting the bill and also acknowledged that the Boehner-backed dairy amendment and Southerland food stamp work requirement cost key Democratic support.

King said that the path forward is unclear.

“There is going to be a staring contest now because unless Congress acts the 1949 farm bill goes back into effect,” he said.

The 1949 law contains archaic farm subsidy supports seen as unworkable in today’s world. Currently, rural America is using the 2008 farm bill which was retroactively extended in the New Year’s fiscal cliff deal. It expires Sept. 30.

Democrats have blasted the $20.5 billion in food stamp cuts all week as cruel, while Republicans said more cuts are needed to eliminate fraud and ensure people aren’t becoming dependent on the program.

“[W]hen we see the expansion of the dependency class in America, and you add this to the 79 other means-tested welfare programs that we have in the United States … each time you add another brick to that wall, it’s a barrier to people that might go out and succeed,” King said during Wednesday’s debate.

Rep. James McGovern (D-Mass.) offered an amendment to restore the cuts, which was rejected in a 188-234 vote.

“It always is a wonderment to me, that in this, the greatest country that ever existed in the history of the world, that one in four or one in five children goes to sleep hungry at night,” Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said just before that vote, in an effort to encourage the additional funding.

Yes, because letting children starve is just so pro-life!!!

WHO has released a report showing that violence against women is a global “crisis of epidemic proportion”.

According to  statistics released Thursday by the World Health Organization (WHO), more than one in three women around the world have been raped or physically abused; 80 percent of this abuse happens in the home at the hands of an intimate partner or spouse.

The report represents the first “systematic study of global data on the prevalence of violence against women,” according to a release from the organization.

In addition to statistics revealing epidemic levels of violence affecting women and girls in countries across the globe, the report also details the impact of violence on their physical and mental health, ranging from death and serious injury to depression, substance abuse, increased vulnerability to sexually transmitted infections and other negative health outcomes.

“This new data shows that violence against women is extremely common. We urgently need to invest in prevention to address the underlying causes of this global women’s health problem.” Professor Charlotte Watts, from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said in a statement.

womens land armyHere is an interesting article in The Nation by Jessica Valenti on “The Peeping Press” and how women fare under the gaze of a male media.

There comes a point in most women’s lives when you realize that you’re perceived as public property. Maybe it’s the first time you’re catcalled, or maybe it’s when a teacher tells you to cover up. The experience can come in an infinite number of iterations; the only sure thing is that the first time is never the last time. Walking around in a female body means you are constantly reminded that your value exists in the way that other people—men, especially—look at you.

Stranger still, this being noticed or touched or commented upon is framed as a compliment—it’s not enough that women are meant to endure the neverending objectification, we’re actually supposed to enjoy it. Women are taught to be eager to please not just in our demeanor but in our appearance, and everyday harassment is presented as friendly conversation: “Why don’t you smile?!”

Recently it occured to me that the expectation that women enjoy male attention in all forms may be behind the many unfortunate media profiles of influential women. Whether a rocket scientist’s beef stroganoff or a White House counsel’s high heels—when it comes to covering successful women, the media prefers palatable over powerful. Articles like these are not always written by men, but they always seem to be written for them.

The most recent—and perhaps one of the most egregious—example comes from the Daily Beast, where the site’s first piece on President Obama’s pick for CIA deputy director Avril Danica Haines is headlined: “New CIA #2 Pick Used to Read Anne Rice Aloud at Her Bookstore’s Erotica Night.”

The article’s premise alone is sexist—would the racy reading habits of a male appointee ever be fodder?—but the content is even worse. A neighbor is interviewed about Haines, “reminiscing about when when she would rehab her apartment in ‘jeans or a pair of shorts’” and reporters Ben Jacobs and Avi Zenilman inexplicably include an explicit Anne Rice excerpt that Haines may have read. They paint a picture that rivals Penthouse Forum …

So, I found this vintage poster about the Women’s Land Army looking for vintage prints of women farmers.  I had never heard of it before until now.

The Women’s Land Army played a fundamental role in Britain during World War Two. The Women’s Land Army helped to provide Britain with food at a time when U-boats were destroying many merchant ships bringing supplies to Britain from America.

The Women’s Land Army was first created during World War One. This was an era when a great deal of farm work was done by men. With so many young men called up for the armed services, there was a real gap in farm workers. Hence, the government called on women to fill this gap. The same situation arose in World War Two – home grown food was needed and the men were not there to harvest it. Hence why the government resurrected the WLA.

The women in the WLA did all the jobs that were required to make a farm function normally – threshing, ploughing, tractor driving, reclaiming land, drainage etc. Their wages were set by the Agricultural Wages Board. The wage for someone in the WLA over the age of 18 was £1 12 pence a week after deductions had been made for lodgings and food. There was an agreed maximum working week – 50 hours in the summer and 48 hours in the winter. A normal week would consist of five and a half days working with Saturday afternoon and Sunday off. Along with their weekly pay, all members of the WLA who was posted more than 20 miles from their home would receive a free rail warrant for a visit home every six months. However, their pay came from the farmers themselves and there is evidence that WLA members were paid less than the accepted rate by some farmers who tended to overcharge for accommodation and food. Also during harvest time, many WLA members worked from dawn to dusk and easily eclipsed their 50 hour week.

There’s a documentary about these ladies at the BBC if you’re interested in learning more about them.

I volunteered for the women’s Land Army aged nineteen. I had read in the newspaper ten thousand women were urgently needed to work on the land. I wrote off. I was suprised to find I had to go to Oxford street for my interview. I sat in front of this lady, with what I called five pound note voice. She wore a beautiful silk dress, a silk scarf and she twirled a gold pencil continuosly in her long fingers, as she fired a barrage of questions at me. She wanted to know if I thought it was all feeding chickens with lovely weather. I responded, ‘I have been hop picking you know, since the age of three’. She jumped back as if I had fleas. That did not impress her at all. I left the interview thinking, ‘Thats that’. I felt elated when i recieved a letter to say I has been accepted and I had to go from Liverpool Street Station to Clacton-on-Sea, Essex.

Now the next worrying hurdle was to tell mum and dad this news. dad hit the ceiling in anger, asked what i was thinking of doing leaving the family? In those days nobody left home. Families looked after each other. I said ‘But there’s a war on Dad, I want to go’. I explained, for a 48 hour week I would get one shilling (5p) per hour. Money was always important to my dad, because money was very thin on the ground, always. I continued, out of that I would pay twenty five shillings for my billet. Another explosion from Dad. Mum looked very unhappy.

So, with misery on the one hand and a feeling of quiet excitement on the other I looked forward to going to Clacton-on-Sea, my first visit ever. A big change, having spent most of my life living in one room with my mum, dad and brothers.

The start for me in october 1941 was the beginning of a chapter recalled as the happiest days of my life because there was a purpose served, growing food for Great Britain, where food was rationed, to two onces of cheese per week.

I guess the common thread here is that it is we have extremely odd priorities these days.  Women are still objects.  Live children can starve but brain dead fetuses are sacred. So, subsidizing farmers to not grow anything or grow stuff we don’t need is okay.  Feeding children and old people is a waste.  I continue to be confused.  I guess that crazy men still run the world.  I guess we’ll see all that crap stirred up all over the place again if and when Hillary runs again.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Monday Reads: Some Populist Pokes at the Eyes of the Privileged

Posted: June 17, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , | 51 Comments

Good Morning!21-026 Life Cover

I thought I’d take a few looks at what should be done differently in this country if we indeed we’re interested in progressing as an entire nation.  It seems these days the only folks that progress are the politicians and their owners.  So, hold on here, we go.

Why is no one calling for an investigation of Booze Allen Hamilton? 

Booz Allen reacted with anger in a press statement released hours later:

“News reports that this individual has claimed to have leaked classified information are shocking, and if accurate, this action represents a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm.”

Core values? Let’s examine Booz Allen Hamilton’s track record.

In February 2012, the US air force  suspended Booz Allen from seeking government contracts after it discovered that Joselito Meneses, a former deputy chief of information technology for the air force, had given Booz Allen a hard drive with confidential information about a competitor’s contracting on the first day that he went to work for the company in San Antonio, Texas. US air force legal counsel concluded (pdf):

“Booz Allen did not uncover indications and signals of broader systemic ethical issues within the firm. These events caused the air force to have serious concerns regarding the responsibility of Booz Allen, specifically, its San Antonio office, including its business integrity and honesty, compliance with government contracting requirements, and the adequacy of its ethics program.”

It should be noted that Booz Allen reacted swiftly to the government investigation of the conflict of interest. In April that year, the air force lifted the suspension – but only after Booz Allen had accepted responsibility for the incident and fired Meneses, as well as agreeing to pay the air force $65,000 and reinforce the firm’s ethics policy.

Not everybody was convinced about the new regime. “Unethical behavior brought on by the revolving door created problems for Booz Allen, but now the revolving door may have come to the rescue,”  wrote Scott Amey of the Project on Government Oversight, noting that Meneses was not the only former air force officer who had subsequently become an executive in Booz Allen’s San Antonio office.

So, corruption is rampant in these organizations that only exist to expand government destruction of civil liberties.  But, let’s not forget that a lot of these organizations also are responsible for our economic bad health.   Rampant corruption is part and parcel of the financial industry. As our ability and desire to produce real stuff has fallen, so our national experience shows we have gambling houses for financial institutions eager for extraordinary returns.  And, it’s all for profits of a few.

This reminds us of something I fear is often forgotten – that our economic troubles did not begin with the financial crisis of 2007-08 but rather pre-dated them. Capexp

My chart shows this. It shows that firms were loath to invest long before the crisis. Capital spending fell relative to retained profits in the early 00s and stayed very low by historical standards. This reflects the “dearth of domestic investment opportunities” in western economies of which Ben Bernanke spoke in 2005. This is, of course, a cause of the weak income growth of which the IFS speaks; firms’ reluctance to spend held down wage and employment growth. The “Great Moderation” might have led to irrational exuberance in financial markets, but it certainly did not unleash a boom in corporate animal spirits and real investment.

In fact, one could argue – as Ravi Jagannathan has (pdf) – that the financial crisis is not the cause of our woes but rather a symptom of this underlying problem. The story goes something like this.

After 1997, Asian economies wanted to run big current account surpluses, either as a policy of export-led growth or in order to rebuild reserves depleted by the 97 crisis. By definition, this meant they were net savers, which put incipient downward pressure upon global interest rates. In a parallel universe, these high savings might have financed a boom in real capital spending in the west. But because firms couldn’t see good investment opportunities, this didn’t happen.Instead, the lower interest rates fuelled a housing boom and the hunt for yield led to strong demand for mortgage derivatives. These bubbles in housing and derivatives then burst, giving us the crisis.

In this way, we’ve seen what Marx saw in the 19th century – that a lack of profitable opportunities in the real economy pushes people down “the adventurous road of speculation, credit frauds, stock swindles, and crises.”

Our state is a pretty good example of what happens to people and the natural environment if the only driving force in a decision is profit of the owners.  Here’s some information on the chemical plant explosions we recently experienced near the place I taught for a few years during grad school.

Back-to-back explosions at chemical plants only miles apart along the Mississippi River have given pause to those who live in the shadows of America’s dirtiest industries.

On Thursday, an explosion at a chemical plant in Geismar, La., owned by Williams Cos. Inc. led to two deaths and injuries – some serious – to dozens of others. Then late Friday, another explosion at a chemical plant just a few miles away in Donaldsonville claimed one life and injured eight people after a nitrogen tank exploded during an offload.

“The incident involved the rupture of an inert nitrogen vessel during the off-loading of nitrogen,” a news release from the company, CF Industries, said. “There was no fire or chemical release nor is there any threat or hazard posed to the community.”

Hundreds of industrial plants, many that either produce or consume poisonous and explosive chemicals, line rivers and bayous throughout the South, but in few places as heavily as around New Orleans and the Mississippi River.

Some 311 chemical manufacturers employing 15,727 people currently exist in the parishes that line the Mississippi from Baton Rouge to its mouth. That number excludes the large numbers of oil refineries and plastics manufacturers in the area.

To be sure, locals welcome jobs that pay an average of more than $40,000 a year. But explosions like the ones that roiled the river this week remind many of the dangers, both to human life and the environment, such jobs bring.

I’d like you to read a story about the Tulane Environmental Law Center and how the first Republican Governor since Reconstruction–a mentor of Bobby Jindal–tried to destroy it in an effort to let a Japanese chemical company locate here. It gives you an idea of what we’re up against when trying to protect the people, the wild life, and the natural beauty of the nation’s Mississippi delta and Gulf area.

In late 1996, the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic (the Clinic) took on representation of a community group called St. James Citizens for Jobs and the Environment in a controversial challenge to Shintech Inc.’s proposed construction of a polyvinyl chloride plant in Convent, Louisiana. After the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) granted a petition to veto the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality’s issuance of an air permit to Shintech,1 Shintech changed its plans and located a downsized facility elsewhere in Louisiana.2

The Shintech dispute sparked a national controversy, featured on national television news shows and, ultimately, in a cable-television movie called “Taking Back Our Town.”3 A common postscript to retellings of the Shintech story is a statement that the Clinic essentially paid for its contribution to St. James Citizens’ success with its life—suffering retaliatory restrictions that supposedly would prevent it from ever representing a group like St. James Citizens again.4 In fact, the Clinic has continued to represent St. James Citizens and similar clients and continues to enjoy its fair share of successes and to weather its share of defeats.5

We continue to have efforts to suppress protection of people, animals and environments from the abuse of the petro-chemical industry. They create huge costs to taxpayers, people and the environment, yet many governments refuse to ensure these costs are recoverable and the loss of life and natural gifts prevented.

No where has the suppression of so many by so few been felt than in the area of women’s health.  No less than 300 bills have been introduced this year that restrict women’s access to birth control, abortion, and basic family planning and health care.

State legislatures across the country have enacted an avalanche of restrictions that deny women of their reproductive rights. Just this year alone, more than 300 anti-abortion measures have been introduced in the states — in direct violation of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade.

The anti-abortion legislation is an unprecedented assault on a woman’s right to make decisions about her body and health. At least 185 anti-abortion laws have been enacted since 2011, and the likelihood that more will be passed this year are very real.

“Half of pregnancies are unintended,” Elizabeth Nash told Lawyers.com. She is the state issues manager for the Guttmacher Institute. “Instead of trying to figure out why and preventing women from being put in the situation to need an abortion, we’re doing nothing but putting all these restrictions in place to make it harder to access services when they are needed.”

The laws are the result of the 2010 elections, when droves of conservative and tea party candidates were voted into the state legislatures. The result has been a surge of radical and unconstitutional laws that choke off reproductive rights.

For example:

  • Eleven states have passed abortion bans, making it illegal to get an abortion at 20 weeks after fertilization, or as early as 12 weeks in Arkansas and six weeks in North Dakota. Women are often unaware they are pregnant within this time. Roe v. Wade provides a right to abortion up to 24-26 weeks, when the fetus is viable.
  • Eight states have passed “personhood” laws, giving the zygote legal rights. These laws could make an abortion a crime — regardless of rape, incest or the life of the mother.
  • Eight states require the doctor to give the woman false information, such as requiring doctors to tell women that having an abortion increases their risk of suicide. Scientific research refutes this claim.
  • In 26 states, women are required to receive anti-abortion “counseling” followed by a waiting period before they’re allowed to undergo an abortion.

There is a pattern of increased control of individual rights and of usurping national assets in the name of corporate profits. It’s been systemically enshrined in law at all levels of government.  It is hard to be complacent in the face of these assaults.  We await this week the decision of the Supreme court on issues central to GLBT rights in this country.  It seems there are few government institutions that aren’t corrupted by religious nuts, anti-science nuts, and profit-addicted corporations.  Whatever happened to our rights?

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

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