Tag: Punting the Pundits

We are seeing the usual hysteria over the sharp drop in the markets in Asia, Europe, and perhaps the US. (Wall Street seems to be rallying as I write.) There are a few items worth noting as we enjoy the panic.

First and most importantly, the stock market is not the economy. The stock market has fluctuations all the time that have nothing to do with the real economy. The most famous was the 1987 crash, which did not correspond to any real-world bad event that anyone could identify.

Even over longer periods, there is no direct correlation between the stock market and GDP. In the decade of the 1970s, the stock market lost more than 40 percent of its value in real terms; in the decade of the 1980s it more than doubled. GDP growth averaged 3.3 percent from 1980 to 1990, compared to 3.2 percent from 1970 to 1980.

Amanda Marcotte: Why Fox News’ Defense Of Megyn Kelly Is Going To Backfire

Donald Trump has reignited his sexist harassment campaign against Megyn Kelly, and the folks at Fox News are, in seemingly coordinated fashion, striking back. Fellow Fox News hosts and pundits are asking Trump to cool it, and even Roger Ailes has released a statement calling Trump’s abuse “unacceptable” and “disturbing.” It’s almost touching, watching all these conservative media people who usually profit at peddling sexism choose, this time at least, to join together in an effort to stop this one particular instance of it.

It’s also going to backfire.

Conservative media and Fox News in particular have spent years – decades, if you count talk radio – training their audiences to believe that exhortations against sexism and racism are nothing but the “political correctness” police trying to kill your good time. Indeed, one reason that Trump was able to get so much attention for his presidential run in the first place is that Fox has spent years building him up, knowing that their audience enjoys vicariously needling imagined liberals and feminists with his loud-mouthed insult comic act.

Seamus Milne: China can ride out this crisis. But we’re on course for another crash

It may not yet be the moment to get in supplies of tinned food. That was what Gordon Brown’s former adviser during the 2008 crash, Damian McBride, suggested on Monday as stock markets crashed from Shanghai to New York and $1tn was wiped off the value of shares in one day. But seven years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers brought down the global financial system and plunged half the world into a slump, it’s scarcely alarmist to see the financial panic as the harbinger of a new crisis in a still crippled world economy.

The market gyrations that followed “Black Monday” this week and the 40% drop in the value of Chinese stocks since June have only underlined the fragility of what is supposed to be an international recovery. For all the finger-wagging hubris of western commentators over the fact that the latest mayhem has erupted in China, this is a global firestorm. And after three decades of deregulation punctuated by financial crises and a systemic meltdown, there is every reason to fear more fallout from casino capitalism.

Scott Lemieux: Gun control is political. So is refusing to address the politics of gun violence

After the 24-year-old television reporter Alison Parker and her 27-year-old cameraman Adam Ward were killed while on camera from a lake outside of Roanoke, Virginia on Wednesday morning, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, somewhat predictably tweeted that “[w]e must act to stop gun violence, and we cannot wait any longer” and Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe called for new gun control measures in the form of background checks .

The conservative response to Democrats’ anodyne reactions is even more predictable:  it’s wrong, they say, to “politicize” individual acts of firearm violence. But gun violence in the United States has everything to do with politics – and we should be talking more, not less, about the impact of America’s failed gun policies on victims and their families and communities.

Even supporters should realize that corruption is tarnishing charter schools’ reputations and wasting public money

Charter schools enroll more than 2.5 million students in the U.S. But as these publicly funded, privately run schools have spread across the country, so have reports of corruption and waste bred by a lack of accountability.

A recent study published by the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and the Center for Popular Democracy, entitled “The Tip of the Iceberg,” found $203 million lost to fraud, corruption and mismanagement in charter schools, with a projected $1.4 billion in losses in 2015 alone. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is concerned as well: It has investigated schools in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Connecticut, Arizona, Ohio, Massachusetts, Indiana and Illinois. [..]

Whether or not one thinks that charter schools are a good thing, we should be able to agree that greater accountability strengthens our school system. However, many charter advocates have stood in the way of reform.

Lauren Pagel: Forget fracking. We need clean energy now

New EPA rule on methane takes step in right direction, but we must expedite the transition to renewable energy

One year ago, Earthworks, the environmental advocacy organization I work for, launched the Citizens Empowerment Project to document the effects of fracking on air quality in across the country. With the help of a special thermal camera that detects and visualizes the presence of harmful gases, people near fracking sites across the country can now confirm what they have known for years to be true: Oil and gas development is polluting their air.

This pollution includes Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) such as benzene, a known carcinogen. These pollutants contribute to smog, which can trigger a variety of health problems such as asthma. Air pollution is a problem at almost every point along the development chain, from the well pad to the pipeline and beyond. But until now,  state rules to protect families living near such sites have been spotty and largely unenforced. And there are few national protections that safeguard our air from fracking and related development.

Jeb “I’m my own man” Bush sounds more and more like his know-nothing ex-president brother every day. This time, in between defending the Iraq War and saying he might bring back torture if elected president, he’s demanding that tech companies stop letting billions of the world’s citizens use encryption online to protect their information because of “evildoers.”

Bush’s comments echo the dangerous sentiments of FBI director Jim Comey, who has publicly campaigned against Apple and Google for attempting to make our cell phones and communications safer by incorporating strong encryption in iPhones and Android devices. [..]Unfortunately, Bush’s comments seem to be part of a pattern with the 2016 presidential candidates, none of whom seem to understand the basic precepts of technology, and the critical role encryption plays in all of our cybersecurity.

Robert Kuttner: 2016: The Coming Train Wreck

Six months ago, the 2016 election looked to be predictable and boring: Clinton II vs. Bush III. Advantage: Clinton.

Well, forget about that.

The Republican demolition derby has been getting most of the publicity lately, but one should worry more about the Democrats. Consider:

Hillary Clinton is sinking like a stone. She’s falling in the polls. Conversations with her longtime friends and admirers indicate grave worry. She is not generating the excitement that the first prospective woman president should; the email mess is not going away; even the money advantage is not what was anticipated. [..]

To sum up: The 2016 Republican field is more of a Mutually-Assured-Destruction mess than any in my long lifetime. It’s not only much too big, but far to the right of American public opinion. The exceptions are a surprisingly strong John Kasich, who is probably too moderate to be nominated, and Jeb Bush who may well be too clumsy. And then there is Trump.

In general, that’s all good news for the Dems. But never, never, discount the Democrats’ talent for doing themselves in. If this were an HBO series, it would be one hell of a show, albeit a little far-fetched. Unfortunately, it’s our life.

Char Millier: When firefighters speak out on climate change, we ought to listen up

Climate change is worsening the fires that ravage many parts of America each year. Grime-streaked firefighters battling one of the 167 active wildfires currently scorching portions of the US west will tell you as much. What they have encountered on the firelines in the past few years is evidence that everything has changed as a result of global warming.

In mid-August, the day after a quick-moving fire first exploded southwest of Boise, Idaho, the blaze more than doubled in size to nearly 79,000 acres in one four hour stretch. Along the way, it sparked a “firenado” that rained hot ash and dirt on firefighters.

Or consider the disturbing talk surrounding the still-smoldering fire named Rocky that this month scorched 70,000 acres near Napa, California: “This fire wants to do whatever it wants,” Jason Shanley, a Cal Fire spokesman, observed, adding “It’s defying all odds. 30 year, 40 year veterans have never seen this before.”

Robert Creamer: Out of Touch Punditry Should Get a Grip — Hillary’s Email Is Non-Story

A message to the out-of-touch Washington pundit class: get a grip. What was or was not on Hillary Clinton’s email server when she was Secretary of State is not a game-changing news story.

In fact, no one outside the chattering class — and right-wing true believers — could give a rat’s rear about this story — and there is a good reason: there is no “there” there. If someone really thinks the great “email” story — or the Benghazi investigation — are going to sink her candidacy, I’ve got a bridge to sell them.

Of course, this is not the first time that the media — with an assist from right-wing political operatives — have laid into Hillary Clinton in an attempt to create a “scandal” where there was none.

We need more primary and general election debates, featuring more candidates, more issues and bolder moderators.

The humorist Will Rogers ran a mock campaign for the presidency in 1928 that got so much attention, and was so favorably received, that some Democrats proposed him as a serious contender in 1932. Rogers politely pulled himself out of the running-with an observation that “Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with.”

On a more personal and professional note, Rogers warned that “A comedian can only last till he either takes himself serious or his audience takes him serious.”

That is the only argument I can think of for not asking Jon Stewart to moderate at least one of the 2016 presidential debates. And this argument fails because both comedy and politics have changed sufficiently over the past 80-plus years to justify the risk to the reputation of the recently-retired “Daily Show” host.

George Zornilk: Congress Is Sick of the Secrecy Around the TPP

And Senator Sherrod Brown is blocking a key Obama nominee to show it.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is in its final stages, though nobody seems certain when talks over the massive trade deal will actually conclude. The document is undergoing critical late-stage revisions as member nations haggle over the automobile trade with Japan, dairy prices in New Zealand, and monopoly periods for non-generic pharmaceuticals.

When the deal is completed, members of Congress will be able to see the entire text without restriction before they vote on passage. But until then, legislators are operating under hyper-strict rules when they want to review the text, which is locked in a basement room of the US Capitol. Only certain congressional aides with security clearances can see the TPP draft, and only when the member of Congress is also present. Notes taken during these sessions can’t be taken out of the room. [..]

Senator Sherrod Brown recently gave the administration a deadline to ease some of these restrictions. He wants his policy advisors to be able to evaluate the evolving text without having him present. But that access was never given, and his self-imposed deadline passed last Friday.

Brown has consequently announced he will place a hold on Obama’s nominee to be Deputy US Trade Representative.

Stephen W. Thrasher: Republicans’ deep hatred for teachers can’t be denied and they’re not trying

It’s August, the heat is miserable, kids are going back to school and that means one thing for America’s conservatives: it’s the perfect time to take a cheap shot at the nation’s teachers.

John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio – who is generally considered less extreme than Texas Senator Ted Cruz, less dynastic than former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and less crazy than professional troll Donald Trump – recently said: “If I were, not president, if I were king in America, I would abolish all teachers’ lounges where they sit together and worry about ‘woe is us’.”  [..]

Republicans love to hate teachers and imply that all the ills of US society are the result of their laziness. If only schools could be turned over to market forces and not held back by greedy teacher unions, conservative logic goes, everything would be fine – even though charter schools perform no better than traditional schools. Trying to bust unions in general (and those of teachers in particular) turns conservatives on as much as trying to deny climate change, defend the NRA, defund Planned Parenthood or battle for a check from the Koch brothers.

Zoë Carpenter:  The Racist Roots of the GOP’s Favorite New Immigration Plan

Birthright citizenship is enshrined in the 14th Amendment, but Donald Trump and other candidates are keeping alive the idea that some Americans should not have equal rights at birth.

The year 1866 was an alarming one for xenophobes: Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, declaring “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power…to be citizens of the United States.” Though explicitly intended to grant citizenship to African-Americans, who’d been denied it by the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1857 Dred Scott case, wouldn’t the law also “have the effect of naturalizing the children of Chinese and Gypsies born in this country?” wondered Pennsylvania Senator Edgar Cowan. “Undoubtedly,” responded Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois. When President Andrew Johnson vetoed the act, he too raised the specter of the Chinese and “the people called Gypsies.”

Congress overrode the veto, and went on to enshrine the principle of birthright citizenship in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Needless to say, fears about the children of the gypsies proved unfounded. Yet the idea that people with certain types of parents should be denied citizenship-and the associated rights-persisted. Late in the nineteenth century the government tried to withhold citizenship from the children of Chinese immigrants, but was rebuffed by the Supreme Court. Native Americans weren’t considered citizens until 1924. These days the target is Latino immigrants and their children. And thanks to Donald Trump, the nativist argument against birthright citizenship has moved from a sideline item to a centerpiece in the Republican primary.

If you are running for office as a Republican today, you have to mention your reverence for the Constitution at least as much as you mention your love for Ronald Reagan.

The Second Amendment — every word should be taken literally because it was literally ordained by God! The First Amendment protects my right to discriminate against gay people! Neither the Constitution nor the Bible contains the word “Obamacare”!

But Republican politicians have a few glaring blind spots when it comes to the Constitution. One of those is the 14th Amendment, a pillar of our inclusive democracy, a key component of which Republican presidential candidates are now asking us to ignore or change.

E. J. Dionne: All Votes Matter: When Will Discrimination End at the Ballot Box?

Many find politics frustrating because problems that seemed to be solved in one generation crop up again years or decades later.  The good thing about democracy is that there are no permanent defeats. The hard part is that some victories have to be won over and over.

And so it is with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a monument to what can be achieved when grass-roots activism is harnessed to presidential and legislative leadership. Ending discrimination at the ballot box was a way of underwriting the achievements of the Civil Rights Act passed a year earlier by granting African-Americans new and real power to which they had always been constitutionally entitled.

Thomas Frank: It’s not just Fox News: How liberal apologists torpedoed change, helped make the Democrats safe for Wall Street

Center-left pundits have carried water for the president for six years. Their predictable excuses all ring hollow

As the Obama administration enters its seventh year, let us examine one of the era’s greatest peculiarities: That one of the most cherished rallying points of the president’s supporters is the idea of the president’s powerlessness.

Today, of course, the Democrats have completely lost control of Congress and it’s easy to make the case for the weakness of the White House. For example, when Frank Bruni sighed last Wednesday that presidents are merely “buoys on the tides of history,” not “mighty frigates parting the waters,” he scarcely made a ripple. [..]

It is, in other words, a classic apologetic. The pundit, a clear-thinking, reality-based fellow (and yes, they are almost always fellows), knows that if you paid attention back in 2008 you understood that Obama wasn’t promising anything great. Plus, the president has delivered all kinds of subtle but awesome stuff that his soft-headed fans overlook. Besides, there are those awful racist Republicans. Good Christ! Would we rather have one of them in the Oval Office?

This theme has been so elaborately developed over the last few years that it would be possible to write a decent history of the Obama administration entirely in terms of the various apologetics deployed on its behalf, savoring all the different grades of literary style, noting all the catch phrases and in-jokes the pundits share with one another, enumerating all the clever put-downs they use to deride the unrealistic liberal masses.

As a preface to any such future history, let me outline here the main points of the genre.

David Dayen: Presidential libraries, an all-American scam: Why these overpriced vanity projects are bad for politics, the economy & history

Barack Obama is in the early stages of raising $1B for his planned library in Chicago. What a waste!

We spend a lot of time fretting about the power of money in elections. But what about the power of money after all the elections end? The lure of cashing in once leaving politics can have as much of an impact on policy as the continual lobbying and campaign contributions while a politician is in office. Yesterday the New York Times depicted this in rather unseemly fashion, showing how President Obama has vigorously plotted his post-presidency since a week after getting elected to a second and final term.

By “plotted” I mean “flattered potential donors at late-night White House dinners.” The scene-setter for the article featured Obama and his wife in a private upstairs dining room this February, hobnobbing until 2 a.m. with venture capitalists, billionaire CEOs, actresses and hedge fund manager Marc Lasry, last seen getting $450 million in public money from Wisconsin to build a sports arena for the Milwaukee Bucks, which he co-owns. The dinner was part of a series of all-night bull sessions with “extraordinarily rich groups of people.” [..]

Which all begs the question: If a private citizen seeks private donors for a building with his name on it, and an endowment for a foundation that could potentially do good work, why should we care?

Giving prisoners access to financial aid for college tuition is the first step towards “de-carceration.”

Prison isn’t the most intellectually stimulating environment, but the dimmest corners of the criminal justice system may actually be a perfect place to liberate an otherwise wasted mind. A new initiative by the White House to issue Pell Grants to incarcerated students is about to test just how truly corrective our so-called corrections system can be.

The plan to extend Pell Grant access in prisons is described as a “limited pilot program” authorized through a federal financial aid waiver program under the Higher Education Act. Incarcerated adults could apply for grants of up to $5,775 for tuition and related expenses, at college-level programs offered in prison facilities nationwide. Designed to allow for studying long-term effects of education on recidivism, the program moves toward restoring access to Pell Grants for incarcerated people, which Congress removed in the mid-1990s.

College behind bars remains a tough sell to some law-and-order conservatives-hence the charmingly titled counter-legislation, the “Kids Before Cons” Act. Generally, however, the idea of de-carcerating the prison population appeals to an ascendant libertarian streak among Republicans because, in fiscal terms, textbooks and professors yield better returns on investment than weight rooms and laundry duty.

Joan Walsh: That big Fox News debate meant nothing: Trump continues to dominate his cowardly rivals

The non-Trump contenders continue to hope for a miracle: the frontrunner departs, and they inherit his support

I enjoyed the Aug. 6 Fox debate as much as any Democrat, but the results are in: As is typical with debates, the GOP wrangle watched by 24 million Americans changed pretty much nothing. [..]

All the Fox debate really did was prove that Trump can make Roger Ailes say uncle, after savaging Megyn Kelly and siccing his misogynist supporters on the popular anchor. It also gave Democrats great footage for fall campaign ads, where we can expect to see Walker looking like a sociopath as he explains why he doesn’t care about saving mothers’ lives, and Rubio shrugging off the troubles of rape and incest victims who become pregnant.

As I wrote earlier, they’re all Todd Akin now – and they probably have about as much chance of becoming president as Akin did.

Heather Digby Parton: The GOP plot to destroy “birthright citizenship”: Everything you need to know about Trump & Walker’s hideous plans

Anti-immigrant hysteria reaches a fever pitch in the Republican Party, which now takes aim at the 14th amendment

Back when he was considered by all the smart people to be the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, Governor Scott Walker made a huge gaffe when he told Glenn Beck that he was not only repudiating his previous tepid support for a path to citizenship for undocumented workers, but that he now believed even legal immigration should be curbed. [..]

When Walker made his comments, many in the GOP were shocked and objected strenuously. Sen. Orrin Hatch called it “poppycock” and Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio said “we want legal immigration…it’s enriched our country immeasurably. It’s who we are. It’s the fabric of our success.”

That was in April of this year and what a difference four months makes. The new GOP frontrunner, Donald Trump, has made immigration the centerpiece of his campaign, and curbing legal immigration, a policy he endorses, is only one of several highly controversial policies he’s proposed in his recently released “immigration plan.” He is also for deportation of all undocumented workers and plans to repeal “birthright” citizenship, which would require a constitutional amendment.

Confronted with a dire situation, a world power last week took strong action to secure its domestic jobs and manufacturing.

That was China. Not the United States.

China diminished the value of its currency.  This gave its exporting industries a boost while simultaneously blocking imports. The move protected the Asian giant’s manufacturers and its workers’ jobs.

Currency manipulation violates free market principles, but for China, doing it makes sense. The nation’s economy is cooling. Its stock market just crashed, and its economic powerhouse – exports – declined a substantial 8.3 percent in July ­- down to $195 billion from $213 billion the previous July. This potent action by a major economic competitor raises the question of when the United States government is going to stop pretending currency manipulation doesn’t exist. When will the United States take the necessary action to protect its industry, including manufacturing essential to national defense, as well as the good, family-supporting jobs of millions of manufacturing workers?

Norman Solomon: Subverting Illusions: Julian Assange and the Value of WikiLeaks

Three years after Ecuador’s government granted political asylum to Julian Assange in its small ground-floor London embassy, the founder of WikiLeaks is still there — beyond the reach of the government whose vice president, Joe Biden, has labeled him “a digital terrorist.” The Obama administration wants Assange in a U.S. prison, so that the only mouse he might ever see would be scurrying across the floor of a solitary-confinement cell.

Above and beyond Assange’s personal freedom, what’s at stake includes the impunity of the United States and its allies to relegate transparency to a mythical concept, with democracy more rhetoric than reality. From the Vietnam War era to today — from aerial bombing and torture to ecological disasters and financial scams moving billions of dollars into private pockets — the high-up secrecy hiding key realities from the public has done vast damage. No wonder economic and political elites despise WikiLeaks for its disclosures.

David Zirin: The Absurd, Cowardly, and Morally Bankrupt NLRB Decision Against the Northwestern Football Union

The decision by the National Labor Relations Board to overturn a previous decision from March 2014 and deny Northwestern football players the right to unionize was as cockamamie as it was craven.

It was cockamamie because the NLRB’s reasoning was that their decision “is primarily premised on a finding that because of the nature of sports leagues…[granting the Northwestern football team union rights] would not promote stability in labor relations to assert jurisdiction in this case,”  What the hell does that mean? I will try to explain: The NLRB states that since it only has jurisdiction over the seventeen private schools among the 125 Division I football schools, most of which are public institutions, it would be irresponsible to convey a different status onto Northwestern. (State labor boards, not the NLRB, oversee the public universities.) Their argument is that since they would be imposing a different set of rules for the seventeen private institutions, it would send the entire system out of whack, promoting “instability” into a climate that is currently stable.

This is absolute hogwash. Northwestern is its own entity where football players generate huge amounts of revenue and have their own grievances with coaches and administrators (what some might refer to as “management.”) As people who generate income, and as was ruled earlier by the NLRB are “paid” with a scholarship, room, and board, they should have every right to organize themselves to achieve whatever else they feel they are denied, like decent medical care or better concussion protocols. As for state universities, they have the freedom to do exactly what the Northwestern players did and organize themselves in an effort to then approach their own state boards and ask for union recognition. That is how national campaigns work. Different states have different laws, different union freedoms, and unions still make efforts to organize across state lines. The fact that different labor boards would need to be approached is more an argument against the cringe-inducing bureaucracy that engulfs labor law in this country than the efforts by Northwestern players to be recognized as the labor they so clearly are.

Paul Hockenos: US climate policymakers can learn from Germany

President Barack Obama and some of the candidates in the 2016 presidential race have in recent weeks rolled out climate change plans. As policymakers continue to weigh their environmental strategies, it is useful to take a stock of what has worked and what hasn’t in other countries, particularly in Germany. The success of Germany’s Energiewende, which aims to fully transition the country into renewable energy, provides seven important lessons for the United States on how to switch from fossil fuels to renewables.

First, the transition to renewable energy can happen quickly. Germany has moved faster than any other industrialized country in shifting its electricity consumption toward renewable energy. In the past 15 years, it has gone from having only about 5 percent renewables in its power mix (mostly small hydroelectric plants) to generating a third of its electricity from renewables, including on- and offshore wind, bioenergy, hydro, thermal and photovoltaic solar. On July 25, Germany set another new record: Renewables accounted for 78 percent of its electricity. [..]

Second, renewable energy expansion boosts jobs and economic growth. Germany made massive investments in renewables, and its economy was one of the first to crawl out of the recent global recession and has grown steadily from 2004 to 2015. Moreover, the transition has not slowed Germany’s global competitiveness. It exported more in 2014 than ever before and increased its already lopsided trade surplus to $234 billion that year, despite sanctions against Russia and sluggish global growth. In 2013 the renewable sector accounted for about 372,000 jobs in Germany, and other aspects of its environmental policy – such as energy efficiency, alternative mobility, educational and training programs, research and development, the decommissioning of nuclear reactors and grid expansion – have added at least 1.5 million jobs. The most obvious winners from Energiewende are farmers, small and medium-size businesses and citizen groups that invested heavily in renewable energy.

Recruiting workers to a field is easy if you’re willing to offer the market wage

Last week the New York Times ran a long piece calling attention to school districts across the country that are having a difficult time attracting new teachers. The piece reported that many school districts are relaxing standards in order to get teachers, in some cases hiring teachers who have not yet completed their training. Others have increased the intensity of recruiting, making more effort to court good applicants. It also reported on some districts going to Puerto Rico or even Spain in search of teachers.

The one tactic that is not mentioned is higher pay. While the piece notes that many recent college grads are opting for higher-paying alternatives to teaching, it does not discuss why school districts are not raising wages as a way to pull some of these people back into teaching.

This is not the first time that we have seen assertions about labor shortages even though wages don’t appear to be growing. It is a regular theme in reporting on the economy. Times columnist Thomas Friedman has repeatedly complained that employers can’t get qualified workers due to inadequate training. Last year Slate told its readers there is a shortage of truck drivers. And The Wall Street Journal ran a long piece on the shortage of skilled workers in manufacturing.

The traditional way to attract qualified workers is to offer higher wages. This is the basic logic of supply and demand. If the price rises, or in this case the wage, then it will also increase the supply.

RobertReich: The Fraud of the New “Family-Friendly” Work

Netflix just announced it’s offering paid leave for new mothers and fathers for the first year after the birth of adoption of a child. Other high-tech firms are close behind.

Some big law firms are also getting into the act. Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe is offering 22 paid weeks off for both male and female attorneys.

Even Wall Street is taking baby steps in the direction of family-friendly work. Goldman Sachs just doubled paid parental leave to four weeks.

All this should be welcome news. Millennials now constitute the largest segment of the American work force. Many are just forming families, so the new family-friendly policies seem ideally timed.

But before we celebrate the dawn of a new era, keep two basic truths in mind.

James P. Hoffa: China’s Currency Manipulation Should Serve as a Warning About TPP

Currency manipulation has long been a drag on the U.S. economy and our jobs. But China’s decision last week to devalue the Yuan shows the kind of damage such tinkering can bring to America. And it’s why Congress cannot approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) until something is done about it.

The Teamsters for years have talked about how the issue is a cancer for trade deals like the 12-nation Pacific Rim pact. It makes imports cheaper to buy in the U.S. but drives up the cost of goods workers make here and export to the world. That, in turn, increases our trade deficits and forces U.S. manufacturers to either move overseas or close up shop.

The practice creates an unfair trade advantage that has already cost millions of jobs in this country and shuttered thousands of U.S. factories. And it will only get worse if America proceeds with the TPP. Japan, Singapore and Malaysia, for example, are part of the trade agreement and have a long history of engaging in currency manipulation. China’s decision to lower the value of the Yuan after four years of relative stability will likely cause others nations to do so as well.