“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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New York Times Editorial Board: When States Fight to Overturn Good Local Labor Laws
Local government is theoretically a cornerstone of democracy. But as a practical matter, conservative state legislatures have often blocked progressive local laws. Many states, for example, have laws on their books to pre-empt local restrictions on guns and pesticides.
The latest backlash involves state efforts to pre-empt an increasing number of pro-labor laws passed by cities and counties. State lawmakers in Alabama, Idaho, Illinois, Minnesota, Montana, Pennsylvania and Washington have introduced legislation this year to curb or outlaw local minimum-wage increases. In Indiana, Kansas and New Mexico, state legislators have taken aim at local fair-scheduling laws, which require employers to give reasonable notice of workers’ hours. Bills in Pennsylvania and Washington target local laws requiring paid leave for employees. In other states, bills would pre-empt municipal-contracting rules that require private-sector contractors to adhere to local laws on compensation and other labor issues. [..]
The real needs of real people are driving pro-labor legislation on the local level. The question in some states is whether those needs and those people will prevail over the interests of low-wage employers and the lawmakers who do their bidding.
Bennet L. Bershman: Justice Scalia’s Faux Originalism
The adulation by admirers of Justice Antonin Scalia over his alleged role as a conservative constitutional steward who applied neutral, nonpartisan principles, is pure myth. While promoted by conservative ideologues who fawn over Justice Scalia’s flamboyant jurisprudence, holding him up as an icon for conservative principles, is simply hard to take.
Justice Scalia was, in fact, one of the most unabashedly partisan judges ever to sit on the Supreme Court. His manipulation of the constitution was brilliant, and maddening, mostly because he and his followers pretend otherwise.
Sometimes Scalia claimed to be a textualist, sometimes not. Sometimes he claimed to be an originalist, sometimes not. Sometimes he glorified judicial restraint and vilified his colleagues for their “Czarist arrogance” in expanding constitutional rights. Sometimes he was a clear example of judicial activism.
He made his position known often with sarcastic and demeaning rhetoric . Not surprisingly, his constitutional maneuvering almost always brought him, and his boosters, to the outcome they sought, whether to stop abortions and limit homosexual rights, make guns freely accessible, limit minorities right to vote, give corporations the right to spend unlimited cash in elections and their right to pray, and, of course, to ensure the election of our 36th President.
David Cay Johnston: Every man a capitalist
Law professor Robert Ashford offers a solution to our core economic problem of eroding wages combined with increasing concentration of wealth and income at the top. His ideas, which Congress long ago embraced — sort of — could benefit us in myriad ways if only people knew about the opportunity that surrounds us, but remains as invisible as the air.
The idea is how to make every one who labors not just a worker, but also a capitalist.
What makes Ashford’s approach fascinating is that it does not require taxes to redistribute wealth, it encourages capital investment, it promotes business profits and it aligns neatly with what America’s founding fathers wrote about the requirements for a successful democracy.
Ashford, a colleague of mine at Syracuse University College of Law, teaches his students that what we call productivity is often a shift in labor performed by people to labor performed by capital.
Consider a poor man who hauls sacks of grain for a living. If he can save up and buy a donkey he can carry much more grain. That donkey is his capital. With the increased earnings from this capital the man can acquire a cart, then a truck and eventually build a short-haul railroad, all the while prospering as capital performs more and more labor.
The more the man has, the more he can consume, his mud hut being replaced by a house and other signs of prosperity all made possible by acquiring more and more capital with the earnings of his capital.
The trick, of course, is to acquire your first capital and then use it to acquire more and more capital. That’s where Ashford’s plan comes in.
Arun Gupta: A ‘mini-Chernobyl’ in California
Los Angeles’ massive methane leak from a natural gas well was labeled a “mini-Chernobyl” by city officials and described as “the worst environmental disaster since the 2010 BP oil spill” by consumer advocate Erin Brockovich. A single hole in the ground spewed more than 200 million pounds of methane out of the Alison Canyon storage field in L.A. County in 16 weeks. Because methane is 84 times as powerful at trapping the sun’s heat as carbon dioxide over 20 years, the torrent of gas, likened to a volcanic eruption, was equivalent at its worst to adding the exhaust of 7 million cars a day. The accident set back California’s plan to reduce greenhouse gases by a year or more.
More disturbing, the leak, caused by a crack in an underground pipe, wasn’t an anomaly; it was business as usual. The accident exposed the collusion between government and the oil and gas industry that led to the mishap, accounting gimmicks used to show progress on climate change and the reality that methane is a dirty energy source rather than a much-hyped bridge fuel to a zero-carbon future.
Now that the well has been plugged, California lawmakers vow there will be stronger regulation and oversight. But that won’t happen as long as fossil-fuel companies have the money to game the system. Since 2014, the oil industry has spent a stunning $42 million in the Golden State to defeat bills that would have reduced pollution and oil consumption. Many scientists say we must eliminate the use of hydrocarbons for energy this century to stave off global cataclysm. That requires the abolition of oil, natural gas and coal corporations. On Feb. 15, two activists dropped a banner above the headquarters of the California Public Utilities Commission, calling on it to shut down all natural-gas storage facilities in the state.
Amy B. Dean: Grass-roots Democrats revolt against party leaders
Grass-roots Democrats are getting mad at their party’s leaders, and their dissatisfaction might soon find an outlet. In Florida, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz is facing a high-voltage primary challenge for her House seat, in what is effectively a referendum against the direction taken by the party leadership in recent years.
Much of the anger at Shultz stems from what critics see as her mishandling of the Democratic primary debates. Supporters of candidate Bernie Sanders accuse Wasserman Schultz of scheduling as few debates as possible and contend that the ones she scheduled often took place at odd times that seemed designed to minimize viewership — during college football games or on holiday weekends.
This can be read as an effort to help Hillary Clinton, whose 2008 campaign Wasserman Schultz managed. Former candidate Martin O’Malley went so far as to accuse the chairwoman of “rigging the process and stacking the deck.” And even if that’s not true, the lack of Democratic debates ceded the public spotlight to the Republicans, allowing them to propagate their conservative ideas while Democrats took a backseat. According to Nielsen ratings, the combined viewership of the debates before the Iowa primaries were 42.5 million for the Democrats and 116 million for the Republicans.
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