Tag: Punting the Pundits

Bad news on the economy. It added only 88,000 jobs in March — the slowest pace of job growth in nine months.

While the jobless rate fell to 7.6 percent, much of the drop was due to the labor force shrinking by almost a half million people. If you’re not looking for work, you’re not counted as unemployed.

That means the percentage of working-age Americans either with a job or looking for one dropped to 63.3 percent — its lowest level since 1979.

The direction isn’t encouraging. The pace of job growth this year is slower than its pace last year.

What’s going on? The simple fact is companies won’t hire if consumers aren’t buying enough to justify the new hires. And consumers don’t have enough money, or credit, or confidence to buy enough.

David Sirota: A Victory Against the Language of Bigotry

As one of the world’s largest news outlets, The Associated Press’ linguistic mandates significantly shape the broader vernacular. So when the organization this week decided to stop using the term “illegal immigrant,” it was a big victory for objectivity and against the propagandistic language of bigotry. [..]

“Illegal,” of course, has been used as more than a mere label-it has for years been used as an outright epithet by xenophobes. They abhor the notion of America becoming more diverse-and specifically, more non-white-and so they have tried to convert “illegal” into a word that specifically dehumanizes Latinos. Thus, as any honest person can admit, when Republican politicians and media blowhards decry “illegals,” they are pretending to be for a race-blind enforcement of immigration laws, but they are really signaling their hatred of Latino culture.

How much sicker does the patient have to get before the doctors stop prescribing poison? [..]

Paul Krugman’s right: This isn’t a recession. It’s Europe’s Second Depression, and it’s on track to last even longer than the first one. Austerity economics has been imposed across most of the Eurozone, to a greater or lesser degree, with devastating economic results:  This is Europe’s sixth consecutive quarter of economic contraction.

Europe’s Austerity Recession (or Depression) has now lasted longer than the one brought on by the financial crisis of 2008.

Dean Baker: Nevermind: Headline of Correction for NYT Piece on Projected Cost of Dementia

The New York Times ran a front page piece warning readers that the cost of treating dementia is “soaring.” The piece tells readers of the findings of a new study by the Rand Corporation that shows the cost of dementia doubling by 2040 from its 2010 level.

Are you scared? Are you shaking in your boots? Thinking about pulling the plug on these costly old-timers?

Well our friend, Mr. Arithmetic, reminds us that the Congressional Budget Office projects (pdf) that the size of the economy is projected to roughly double over this period. This means that the Rand study’s finding implies that dementia will impose pretty much the same burden on the economy in 2040 as it does today.

Dave Maass and Trevor Timm: Are You a Teenager Who Reads News Online? According to the Justice Department, You May Be a Criminal

During his first term, President Barack Obama declared October 2009 to be “National Information Literacy Awareness Month,” emphasizing that, for students, learning to navigate the online world is as important a skill as reading, writing and arithmetic. It was a move that echoed his predecessor’s strong support of global literacy — such as reading newspapers — most notably through First Lady Laura Bush’s advocacy.

Yet, disturbingly, the Departments of Justice (DOJ) of both the Bush and Obama Administrations have embraced an expansive interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) that would literally make it a crime for many kids to read the news online. And it’s the main reason why the law must be reformed.

Obama’s new budget will reportedly include GOP’s beloved entitlement cuts. Why he’s overlooking the real solution

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the budget will likely include the chained CPI for Social Security. “We and all of the groups engaged on this are starting to feel it may well be in the budget,” AARP vice president Nancy LeaMond told the WSJ. The same day the New York Times revealed that Obama and House Republicans are getting close to agreement on a package of Medicare cuts that would restructure Medicare parts A and B – one covers hospitalization, the other doctors’ visits – to raise deductibles for the 80 percent of seniors who see doctors but don’t require hospitalization in any given year. The Times reports that some version of the proposal might also find its way into the 2014 budget.

Including entitlement curbs would be notable, the WSJ’s Damien Parella notes, “as Republicans often have criticized the White House for offering such steps in private negotiations but never fully embracing them as part of an official budget plan.”

But if he’s now embracing them publicly, doesn’t that remove them as something to bargain over?

Allison Kilkenny: Thousands Protest the UK Government’s Brutal Austerity

Britain’s government has introduced sweeping changes to the country’s welfare, justice, health and tax systems, including a “bedroom tax” that will reduce housing subsidies that primarily benefit poor people. The levy ostensibly aims to “tackle overcrowding and encourage a more efficient use of social housing,” resulting in an estimated million “social housing” households losing 14-25 percent of their housing benefits.

The Guardian:

   Critics say it is an inefficient policy as in the north of England, families with a spare rooms outnumber overcrowded families by three to one, so thousands will be hit with the tax when there is no local need for them to move. Two-thirds of the people hit by the bedroom tax are disabled

.

Thousands of trade unions, advocates for the disabled, leading churches, and anti-poverty protesters held marches against the changes over the weekend, calling the cuts “unjust.” In a joint report released over the weekend, the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Methodist Church, the United Reformed Church and the Church of Scotland criticized the government of perpetuating myths about poverty in an attempt to justify the cuts.

Tory Field and Beverly Bell: From Growing Profit to Growing Food: Challenging Corporate Rule

Just outside of the small town of Maumelle, Arkansas sits your run-of-the-mill American strip mall. And as in so many other box store hubs, a Walmart dominates the landscape. [..]

We are bombarded and manipulated by corporate name brands every day. A Coca-Cola annual report some years back stated, “All of us in the Coca-Cola family wake up each morning knowing that every single one of the world’s 5.6 billion people will get thirsty that day… If we make it impossible for these 5.6 billion people to escape Coca-Cola…, then we assure our future success for many years to come. Doing anything else is not an option.”

“Impossible” to “escape” sounds daunting, downright creepy. Yet people are escaping, in droves, a food system that is more obsessed with money than with sustenance.

Abby Rapoport: The People’s Bank: Deep-Red North Dakota’s Populist Bright Spot

When the financial crisis struck in 2008, nearly every state legislature was left contending with massive revenue shortfalls. Every state legislature, that is, except North Dakota’s. In 2009, while other states were slashing budgets, North Dakota enjoyed its largest surplus. All through the Great Recession, as credit dried up and middle-class Americans lost their homes, the conservative, rural state chugged along with a low foreclosure rate and abundant credit for entrepreneurs looking for loans.

Normally one of the overlooked states in flyover country, North Dakota now had the country’s attention. So did an unlikely institution partly responsible for its fiscal health: the Bank of North Dakota. Founded in 1919 by populist farmers who’d gotten tired of big banks and grain companies shortchanging them, the only state-owned bank in America has long supported community banks and helped keep credit flowing. The bank’s $5 billion deposit base comes mostly from state taxes and funds. The money is leveraged so the bank can offer loans for local small businesses and infrastructure projects; the interest, rather than going to Wall Street banks, stays in the state. The Bank of North Dakota rarely makes direct loans; instead, when a community bank wants to give a sizable loan but lacks the capital, the state bank will partner on the loan and provide a backstop. Such partnerships help ensure that small-business owners, farmers, and ranchers can access lines of credit-and they strengthen community banks, which is why North Dakota has more local banks per capita than any other state.

It is time to acknowledge that the fashionable theory of school reform-requiring that pay and job security for teachers, principals and administrators depend on their students’ standardized test scores-is at best a well-intentioned mistake, and at worst nothing but a racket. [..]

Our schools desperately need to be fixed. But creating a situation in which teachers are more likely to cheat than students cannot be the right path.

Standardized achievement tests are a vital tool, but treating test scores the way a corporation might treat sales targets is wrong. Students are not widgets. I totally reject the idea that students from underprivileged neighborhoods cannot learn. Of course they can. But how does it help these students to have their performance on a one-size-fits-all standardized test determine their teachers’ compensation and job security? The clear incentive is for the teacher to focus on test scores rather than actual teaching.

Wendell Potter: Is a High-Deductible Health Plan a Silver Bullet — or Snake Oil?

Those accustomed to obtaining health insurance through the workplace and choosing among different types of policies may be in for a rude surprise.

Increasingly, employers of all sizes are eliminating choice and offering only high-deductible plans — euphemistically referred to in the insurance world as consumer-directed health plans or HDHPs.

The looming shift has nothing to do with Obamacare or even the widely held belief that certain types of health plans will encourage people to give up costly bad habits like smoking. It is about profit.

Bil McKibben: The Methane Beneath Our Feet

Insouciant New Yorkers-here is another pending disaster to shrug off with characteristic brio! There is a huge, ongoing gas leak beneath your very feet. A team of natural gas experts recently commissioned to survey the New York system has found vastly elevated levels of methane in locations all over Manhattan, a clear indication that Con Ed’s 4,320-mile network of pipes, dating back to the 1800s, is corroded, full of holes, and spewing methane into the atmosphere. The main danger here is to planetary, not personal, safety: though it has received relatively little attention, methane, the primary component of natural gas, is second only to carbon dioxide on the list of greenhouse gases that are inducing climate change. [..]

Because of the grave threat methane poses to the climate, the dangers of natural gas leakages go well beyond the immediate risk of exploding manhole covers (though recent measurements in Washington, DC indicate that there is enough leaking gas to cause any cautious pedestrian a certain amount of worry). And given the vastness of the problem, the leaks challenge some of the basic assumptions of current US energy policy, which has aggressively endorsed natural gas as a “clean” and climate-friendly alternative to oil and coal.

James Hansen: Doubling Down on Our Faustian Bargain

Humanity’s Faustian climate bargain is well known. Humans have been pumping both greenhouse gases (mainly CO2) and aerosols (fine particles) into the atmosphere for more than a century. The CO2 accumulates steadily, staying in the climate system for millennia, with a continuously increasing warming effect. Aerosols have a cooling effect (by reducing solar heating of the ground) that depends on the rate that we pump aerosols into the air, because they fall out after about five days. [..]

The tragedy of this science story is that the great uncertainty in interpretations of the climate

forcings did not have to be. Global aerosol properties should be monitored to high precision, similar to the way CO2 is monitored. The capability of measuring detailed aerosol properties has long existed, as demonstrated by observations of Venus. The requirement is measurement of the polarization of reflected sunlight to an accuracy of 0.1 percent, with measurements covering the spectral range from near ultraviolet to the near-infrared at a range of scattering angles, as is possible from an orbiting satellite. Unfortunately, the satellite mission designed for that purpose failed to achieve orbit, suffering precisely the same launch failure as the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO). Although a replacement OCO mission is in preparation, no replacement aerosol mission is scheduled.

The revised GDP data for the fourth quarter released yesterday showed the profit share of corporate income hitting 25.6 percent. This is the highest since it stood at 25.8 percent in 1951. However if we look at the after-tax share of 19.2 percent, we would have to go back to 20.8 percent share in 1930 to find a higher number, excepting of course the 19.3 percent number hit last year.

To put this in context, the after-tax profit share was just 14.5 percent in Reagan’s Morning in America days. The difference would have come to roughly $330 billion last year. To put this in the 10-year budgetary window that is the standard framework in Washington these days, the rise in after-tax corporate profits since the Reagan era can be seen as equivalent to a $5.0 trillion tax on the nation’s workers.

This surge in profits in a weak economy (profits tend to move with the cycle) is striking but readers of the Washington Post version of AP piece on the data wouldn’t know anything about it. This piece includes no mention of the jump in corporate profits in 2012.

Robert Kuttner: Looking Backwards

Jubilant Republicans took back the Senate in yesterday’s mid-term election, and appeared to have increased their majority in the House by about ten seats.

“Barack Obama is now the lamest of lame ducks,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, now the Majority Leader, who held on to his own Kentucky seat by about three percentage points, the Senate Republicans only close call of the evening.

“The Senate numbers this year were against the Democrats,” said pollster Stan Greenberg, “but what really killed us with the voters was the economy.” [..]

“This fiasco, once again, is why I don’t call myself a Democrat,” said Vermont independent Senator Bernie Sanders. “Don’t progressives get even one party?”

Recently I was at a symposium and it was a White man from North Carolina who reminded me of our awkward roots. He pointed out that we are still on the plantation and that most poor Whites are like the plantation overseer: barely a cut above a slave, but faithful caretakers of the Massa’s criminal wealth (his dark human “chattel”). Funny, when he said that, I had a different image of the overseer. Often the cruelest of overseers was the benighted, psychologically engineered Black slave who had been thrown a few extra scraps.

That brings me to Dr. Ben Carson. Dr. Ben Carson loves America, too. He is a celebrated Black neurosurgeon, who made his people proud when he separated those Siamese twins; he did what even the great White hopefuls couldn’t. His brilliance garnered him international fame that spread from the corridors of Johns Hopkins University, a college right in my neighborhood. And wasn’t I proud. Dr. Ben was actually right up the street from me, striking a blow for the dignity of Black people, weary from the stigma of criminal thuggery, suffering from the violence of billy club justice. Dr. Ben…wow, I might even meet him one day, I thought. That was until I realized that Dr. Carson was just another benighted, grasping overseer who, rather than standing respectfully on the shoulders of those who had bravely paved his way, was trampling their memories on his carousel ride to snatch the brass ring.

Robert Reich: Why Politicians Are Sensitive to Public Opinion on Same-Sex Marriage, Immigration and Guns, But Not on the Economy

Who says American politics is gridlocked? A tidal wave of politicians from both sides of the aisle who just a few years ago opposed same-sex marriage are now coming around to support it. Even if the Supreme Court were decide to do nothing about California’s Proposition 8 or DOMA, it would seem only matter of time before both were repealed.

A significant number of elected officials who had been against allowing undocumented immigrants to become American citizens is now talking about “charting a path” for them; a bipartisan group of senators is expected to present a draft bill April 8. [..]

But American democracy has shown itself far less responsive — and our politicians remarkably impervious — to public opinion concerning economic issues that might affect the fates of large fortunes. This is a distressing feature of our democracy, necessitating change.

Frances Beinecke: After Shell Fiasco, It’s Clear: No One Should Drill in the Arctic

Shell Oil announced it will suspend its Arctic Ocean drilling program until at least 2014. But it turns out that after you ground a drilling rig, leak oil into the water, and crush your emergency response equipment, you don’t get to decide when you return.

Then-Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar recently said, “Shell will not be allowed to move forward into the Arctic to do any kind of exploration unless they have this integrated plan in place that’s satisfactory to the Department of the Interior.”

The reasoning behind this firm stance is clear: “Shell screwed up in 2012,” the secretary said.

Indeed, Shell did have an astonishing string of failures and fiascos last year. But the truth is no company will prove a match for the forbidding Arctic environment. Other oil giants have been watching Shell’s misadventures and are starting to second guess their own future in the region.

Eugene Robinson: Maximum Mayhem on His Mind

The gunman in the Newtown massacre fired 154 bullets from his Bushmaster military-style rifle in less than five minutes, killing 20 first-graders and six adults. He brought with him 10 large-capacity magazines, each holding up to 30 rounds, which allowed him to reload quickly. He also carried two semiautomatic handguns, one of which he used to take his own life.

Is this supposed to be the price of the Second Amendment? Is this the kind of America we want?

We all know the banking system is broken. It’s easy to become pessimistic in the face of corporate and political corruption, but the system can be changed. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again.

One pathway to genuine reform is “public banking”: the establishment of banks which are owned at operated by the government, and which serve people and small businesses directly. Here’s why public banking should be included in the agenda for deep and genuine financial reform.

There’s a working model for state banking.

Bryce Covert: This Is What Happens When You Rip a Hole in the Safety Net

America’s social safety net, such as it is, has recently come under some scrutiny. Chana Joffe-Walt’s in-depth exploration of the increase in people getting Social Security Disability benefits at NPR got many listeners buzzing. Then in The Wall Street Journal, Damian Paletta and Caroline Porter looked at the increase in the use of food stamps, called SNAP. All three journalists look at the increasing dependence on these programs and come away puzzled: Why are so many people now getting disability and food stamp payments?

The answer is twofold. Recent trends give us the first part of the explanation. Yes, as Paletta and Porter note, the economy is recovering and the unemployment rate is falling. But, as they recognize, the poverty rate is also rising. And therein lies the rub: people are getting jobs but staying poor. The available jobs are increasingly low-wage and don’t pay enough to live off of. And the big profits in the private sector haven’t led to an increase in wages.

Richard Reeves: A New American Rebellion

As the Supreme Court debated this week over the federal Defense of Marriage Act, the 17-year-old law barring same-sex marriage, Justice Antonin Scalia noted the number of states that are permitting gays and lesbians to marry. “There has been a sea change,” he said, “between now and 1996.”

He was right about that, but it’s not just gay marriage. A range of change is taking place socially, culturally, legally in the United States. Thomas Jefferson, in a 1787 letter, advocated “rebellion” every 20 years for the nation to keep up with itself. That may be too strong a word. Matt Miller, a Washington Post columnist, probably comes closer with the phrase “accelerated evolution.” Whatever word one chooses, the times they are a-changin’.

Ana Marie Cox: The Supreme Court’s Problem: How to Back America Out of Anti-Gay Bigotry

Opponents of same-sex marriage don’t like civil rights analogies. Tough luck: Doma is unconstitutional because it’s unjust

US Supreme Court observers groaned when the well-regarded and Peabody Award-winning SCOTUSblog.com put the chances of the supreme court striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (Doma) at 80%. As far as predictability goes, supreme court decisions are somewhere between next week’s weather and Tilda Swinton’s career choices. Maybe, SCOTUSblog was itself playing at a little performance art, a commentary on the search for specificity and certainty in a series of cases that deal primarily with the ineffable realm of human emotions. Love, to be sure, but also the fear and unease, if not outright bigotry, that love flies in the face of. [..]

Civil rights is not a polite endeavor. The allusions and discursiveness of the arguments before the supreme court this week are just the most polished version of the truth. The way that we’ve gotten to where we are isn’t by convincing people through reasoned discussion; it is because people are afraid to be thought of as bigots. Until the laws themselves change, I’m fine with that.

“Monsanto is an agricultural company. We apply innovation and technology to help farmers around the world produce more while conserving more.”

“Producing more, Conserving more, Improving farmers lives.”

These are the promises Monsanto India’s website makes, alongside pictures of smiling, prosperous farmers from the state of Maharashtra. This is a desperate attempt by Monsanto and its PR machinery to delink the epidemic of farmers’ suicides in India from the company’s growing control over cotton seed supply – 95 per cent of India’s cotton seed is now controlled by Monsanto.

Control over seed is the first link in the food chain because seed is the source of life. When a corporation controls seed, it controls life, especially the life of farmers.

Jim Hightower: Corporate Kangaroo Courts Supplant Our Seventh Amendment Rights

Being wronged by a corporation is painful enough, but just try getting your day in court. Most Americans don’t realize it, but our Seventh Amendment right to a fair jury trial against corporate wrongdoers has quietly been stripped from us. Instead, we are now shunted into a stacked-deck game called “Binding Mandatory Arbitration.” Proponents of the process hail it as superior to the courts – “faster, cheaper and more efficient!” they exclaim.

But does it deliver justice? It could, for the original concept of voluntary, face-to-face resolution of conflict by a neutral third party makes sense in many cases. But remember what Mae West said of her own virtue: “I used to be Snow White, then I drifted.” Today’s practice of arbitration has drifted far away from the purity of the concept.

David A. Kessler: Antibiotics and the Meat We Eat

SCIENTISTS at the Food and Drug Administration systematically monitor the meat and poultry sold in supermarkets around the country for the presence of disease-causing bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. These food products are bellwethers that tell us how bad the crisis of antibiotic resistance is getting. And they’re telling us it’s getting worse.

But this is only part of the story. While the F.D.A. can see what kinds of antibiotic-resistant bacteria are coming out of livestock facilities, the agency doesn’t know enough about the antibiotics that are being fed to these animals. This is a major public health problem, because giving healthy livestock these drugs breeds superbugs that can infect people. We need to know more about the use of antibiotics in the production of our meat and poultry. The results could be a matter of life and death.

Micah Uetricht: Chicago Is Ground Zero for Disastrous “Free Market” Reforms of Education

Chicago has turned public schools into privately run charters. The results aren’t stellar and other cities should beware

If you want a glimpse of what slash-and-burn free market education reform does in cities throughout the US, look no further than Chicago. Last week, Chicago Public Schools announced its plan to close 54 public elementary schools in the city by next year – about 8% of all public schools in the city. Almost all are located on the city’s south and west sides in predominantly black neighborhoods.

In a city where the majority of black children live in poverty, in communities long plagued by hyper-segregation, unemployment, youth violence, and disinvestment, these neighborhoods will likely be thrown into further chaos, as students (91% of whom are students of color) are forced to cross into rival gang territories. Public schools, which served as one of the few remaining community anchors, will be shuttered.

Feminists breathed a sigh of relief on Sunday when two young men in Steubenville, Ohio, Ma’lik Richmond and Trent Mays, were found guilty of raping an unconscious 16-year-old girl. In a case where social media, texts and video painted a clear-as-day picture of the horrors that happened that night, anything other than a guilty verdict was unthinkable.

But the trial outcome doesn’t change the fact that these two men, along with a party of onlookers, didn’t think anything was wrong-or even out of the ordinary-about sexually violating someone. And as the media and public response to the trial demonstrated, it’s not just the rapists who believe penetrating an unconscious girl is little more than teenage party hijinks. The truth is that for all of our cultural bluster surrounding rape-how awful it is, how it must be stopped-we’re still a country that treats sexual assault as a joke.

Amanda Marcotte: What North Dakota and Mississippi Reveal About Anti-Choice NIMBYism and Hypocrisy

With the legal struggle in Mississippi working through what may be its last phases and North Dakota on the brink of closing down its last clinic through a TRAP law requiring unnecessarily that abortion providers have admitting privileges at local hospitals, it seems that the NIMBYism strategy of anti-choicers may finally have reached the end goal of completely eliminating access to legal abortion in some states. Beyond just the gross misogyny on display in these efforts, what we’re seeing here is the triumph of symbolic politics over real world issues such as realistic policy goal-setting and the health of the population. Not that this should be any surprise. Like fundamentalist hypocrites from the beginning of time, anti-choicers have always been more interested in putting up appearances than dealing with people’s lived realities.

Kristina Lapinski: Op-ed: The 6 Most Absurd Prop. 8 Briefs

The Supreme Court has managed to attract some of the most outlandish of arguments from some familiar antigay figures.

Nine U.S. Supreme Court justices hear arguments today in the Proposition 8 case and in the Defense of Marriage Act case on Wednesday. For the past few weeks briefs have flowed into the Supreme Court in an attempt to persuade the justices, from both sides of the issue. Gay U.S.A. The Movie has compiled a list of the most absurd amici briefs submitted by the anti-equality proponents: [..]

Under the Supreme Court’s rules, a brief from an amicus curiae, “friend of the Court,” is supposed to bring to the Court’s attention  “relevant matter not already brought to its attention by the parties.”  If a brief does not conform, then the rule adds, the document “burdens the Court, and its filing is not favored.”   While to some extent these absurd arguments may be unique, one can only wonder to what extent such garbage could impact the nine.

Joan Walsh: How not to seem like a racist

A tip for right-wingers angry about charges of racial bias: Try treating the Obama daughters with decency

Writing my piece on Andrew Breitbart and Tucker Carlson, I missed a huge example of overlap between their two sham-empires: the reporter who broke the Caller’s now-disgraced “scoop” about Sen. Robert Menendez patronizing prostitutes, Matthew Boyle, now works for Breitbart.com. And on Monday he penned the ridiculous story revealing the location of Malia and Sasha’s spring break vacation (which is now at the top of the Drudge Report).

On Twitter Monday and Tuesday, Breitbart fans attacked my focus on their hero’s bizarre racially driven crusades. They continue to insist that they’re being unfairly tarred with the charge of racism, when they’re the real “post-racialists” who just don’t like Barack Obama because he’s a liberal. I have some advice for right-wingers who don’t want it to seem like their anti-Obama animus is racial: Try treating his daughters with respect.