Our own Angry Black Lady is having a fall fundraiser. Now that Sarah is not running, many of you will have some extra scratch that otherwise would have gone to her campaign, so why not help ABL out instead?
Excellent Links
“Get Ready Not to Vote”
Righteous explanation by Charlie Pierce at Esquire‘s Politics Blog on why 2012 just got more interesting:
Back in 2000, when the Supreme Court stepped in and foozled a presidential election to achieve the outcome that some of its members desired — oh, don’t bother to deny it — the dismissal du jour was to tell grumpy liberals to “Get over it!” This was so successful that not a single Democratic senator was willing to stand up with John Lewis and contest the election, and if you won’t stand up with John Lewis on an issue of voting rights, then you’d have rolled dice for the robe on Golgotha.
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The problem, of course, was that a lot of the forces demanding that people “get over” 2000 were far from getting over it themselves. They set about trying to make sure that their side wouldn’t come that close to losing an election again, and they worked to turn “voter suppression” into a science. It used to be that Ed Rollins could suppress votes by buying off a few preachers. Now, though, it can be done through willing local satraps — Katherine Harris, say, or Ken Blackwell, or that woman in Waukesha, Wisconsin, who apparently keeps election results in her freezer. It can be done through willingly partisan judges who wink and nod — hi, there, Tony Scalia! — or through the wholesale corruption of the Department of Justice, which is what happened during the Bush Administration when U.S. Attorneys were fired because they declined to conduct political prosecutions at the request of political appointees up to and including the president’s political guru.
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On Monday, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU law school published an exhaustive study (short versions here and here) of the effect of these new laws and concluded that more than five million eligible voters will find it more difficult to vote in 2012. The political implications are so obvious as to beggar explanation. What’s more compelling is the hole in our soul…
The Moustache of Understanding — Robots!
Tom Junod, at Esquire‘s Politics Blog, picks on “Tom Friedman and the Fattening of the American Center“:
… So why is the idea of the center so seductive, when the actuality of the center is so negligible? Well, it’s simple: There is status in the center. There is the opportunity to look down at people of both political extremes, while having one’s own smarts — one’s own reasonability, which has become the calling card of the new center — affirmed. Friedman, in particular, makes use of class insecurities to make his sale; he is a skilled politician, in that he knows how to make people feel better about themselves, and he is at the same time a skilled motivational speaker, in that he knows how to make them feel worse… which is to say that he knows how to make them worry about China. […] __
But then, that’s one of the attractions of attending a Friedman lecture. It’s
not that he reads from his books, so that you don’t have to; it’s that he doesn’t read from his books, because his books aren’t meant to be read. I was going to say that the books are lectures, rather than books, but that’s not quite right; they’re PowerPoint presentations, rather than lectures. Their arguments are numbered and bullet-pointed, in the manner of the instructions and exhortations typically found in books about how to respond to one’s cheese being moved or how to avoid eating too much of it. Friedman’s book even sounds like a diet book; tinker with the pronoun, and That Used to Be Us becomes That Used to Be Me, and can be used to sell grapefruit, tomato juice, and colonic irrigation. It’s billed as an optimistic book about national renewal — and it’s supposed to be pretty good — but really it’s a diet book for the national soul, and, as in all such books, it’s underlying message is that we had better worry about getting fat.
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“When I got out of college, I was able to find a job,” Friedman said in his lecture. “Now I’d have to invent one.” That was his “optimistic” message: that what he calls the “flattening” of the world due to globalization means that nothing is safe, that everything is in play, and that no one can be comfortable with where they are or what they’ve got. We can’t just go to to work anymore; we have to be able to create our work. He repeated this bromide, pretty much word for word, in his column on Sunday: a promise of economic slavery, done up in the trappings of personal — or technological — freedom, to the point where he actually seems to be rooting for the robot. Now, this message should have sent audiences and readers rushing to join their nearest labor union; Friedman is guaranteeing roughly 80 percent unemployment, after all. But labor unions aren’t part of the American center that Friedman and his ilk are promoting; they’re part of the past, and they’re beholden to party as much as party is beholden to them. No, the American center that Friedman conjures likes to think that it is self-sufficient, intellectually and otherwise, and so the people who listen to his lectures and read his columns like to think that they’ll be the ones who will be able to invent their jobs. They don’t like to think of themselves as the working stiffs who will inevitably get left behind — as the fatties whom Friedman’s fad diet is really addressing.
In that column, Friedman quotes the owner of Freelancer.com: “Barrie says he describes this rising global army of freelancers the way he describes his own team: ‘They all have Ph.D.’s. They are poor, hungry and driven: P.H.D.’” And yet the prevalence of well-educated, debt-burdened people at Occupy Wall Street is treated as a marvel or an anomaly by the media courtiers…
The Moustache of Understanding — <em>Robots!</em>Post + Comments (69)
Malefactors of Great Wealth
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Hat tip to Southern Beale for the news that Bloomberg Markets magazine has uploaded a new expose on “The Secret Sins of the Koch Brothers“:
… A Bloomberg Markets investigation has found that Koch Industries — in addition to being involved in improper payments to win business in Africa, India and the Middle East — has sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism.
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Internal company documents show that the company made those sales through foreign subsidiaries, thwarting a U.S. trade ban. Koch Industries units have also rigged prices with competitors, lied to regulators and repeatedly run afoul of environmental regulations, resulting in five criminal convictions since 1999 in the U.S. and Canada.
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From 1999 through 2003, Koch Industries was assessed more than $400 million in fines, penalties and judgments. In December 1999, a civil jury found that Koch Industries had taken oil it didn’t pay for from federal land by mismeasuring the amount of crude it was extracting. Koch paid a $25 million settlement to the U.S.
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Phil Dubose, a Koch employee who testified against the company said he and his colleagues were shown by their managers how to steal and cheat — using techniques they called the Koch Method.
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In 1999, a Texas jury imposed a $296 million verdict on a Koch pipeline unit — the largest compensatory damages judgment in a wrongful death case against a corporation in U.S. history. The jury found that the company’s negligence had led to a butane pipeline rupture that fueled an explosion that killed two teenagers.
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Former Koch employees in the U.S. and Europe have testified or told investigators that they’ve witnessed wrongdoing by the company or have been asked by Koch managers to take what they saw as improper actions…
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“How much lawless behavior are we going to tolerate from any one company?” asks David Uhlmann, who oversaw the prosecution of the Koch refinery division when he was chief of the environmental crimes unit at the U.S. Department of Justice. “Corporate cultures reflect the priorities of the corporation and its senior officials.”…
It’s worth reading the whole thing, although if you’re easily agitated you may want to have your blood-pressure medication at hand. Charles and David Koch have been accused, and frequently convicted, of every possible crime this side of dog fighting & kiddy porn — and if they could find a safe-at-one-remove “corporate” method of profiting from those hobbies, it sure doesn’t sound like they’d hesitate due to issues of morality or the general public welfare. They’re living embodiments of the old J.P. Morgan quote: “Whatever isn’t nailed down, is mine. Whatever I can pry loose, wasn’t nailed down.”
Don’t Mourn, Organize!
(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)
If three stories on the same day indicate a trend, even the WaPo is getting tired of listening to the One-Percenters snivel. Barbara Ehrenreich snarks on Super-Rich People Problems:
The latest group to claim victim status is the rich. Actually the super-rich, whose wealth ordinarily exempts them from pity. While they are not yet subjected to airport profiling (except for early boarding and club access), they sense that the public is turning subtly against them — otherwise how could President Obama propose raising their taxes?
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Admirers of the rich, led by pundits and politicians on the right — from Laura Ingraham to Larry Kudlow — have long derided the victimization claims of African Americans, women, gays and the unemployed, but now they’re raising their voices to defend the rich against what they see as an ugly tide of “demonization.”
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At a time when poverty is soaring, unemployment hovers grimly above 9 percent and growing numbers of Americans suffer from “food insecurity” — the official euphemism for hunger — this concern may seem a tad esoteric. At a time when executive compensation is reaching dizzying new levels and the gap between the rich and everyone else is growing as fast as the federal deficit, it may even seem a little perverse…
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You would never guess from all the talk of demonization that the rich enjoy perhaps the strongest PR machine on the planet, far beyond their entourages of agents, publicists and assorted image-makers. The mainstream media, for example, are not owned by collectives of busboys and taxi drivers, and even the “liberal” outlets among them are not pitched toward the impecunious. They may snicker when the occasional hedge fund manager is brought to justice, but they’ve been equally snarky about populist actions against the rich, such as the ongoing occupation of Wall Street, which is newsworthy if only for the levels of brutality it’s elicited from the NYPD. Or did you know that the Transportation Security Administration just won union representation this summer? Probably not, because that’s “labor news,” which has been all but supplanted by “business news.”
Greg Sargent, at his Plum Line blog, highlights Warren Buffett:
QUESTIONER: Are you happy seeing your suggestion, this new Buffett Rule, becoming more of a basis of a political battle that really has turned into class warfare?
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BUFFETT: Actually, there’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won. We’re the ones that have gotten our tax rates reduced dramatically.
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If you look at the 400 highest taxpayers in the United States in 1992, the first year for figures, they averaged about $40 million of [income] per person. In the most recent year, they were $227 million per person — five for one. During that period, their taxes went down from 29 percent to 21 percent of income. So, if there’s class warfare, the rich class has won.
And in the ‘Most Popular: Business‘ category, we’re told that the “Mental toll of extended unemployment looms large“:
… A recently released, comprehensive study of the long-term unemployed by Rutgers University’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development found that 32 percent were experiencing a good deal of stress and another 47 percent said they had some stress associated with their joblessness. Moreover, at least 11 percent reported seeking professional help for depression in the past year.
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One in two of the respondents in the two-year national study said they have avoided friends and associates, largely out of a sense of shame and embarrassment — a self-imposed isolation that hurt their ability to network to find employment.
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Many of these unemployed Americans cannot afford to seek professional help because they lost their employer-provided health insurance with their jobs. At the same time, federal, state and local governments have cut back on spending for mental health clinics and outreach in response to budget crises spawned by the bad economy.
“The Other Jobs Bill”
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Via Greg Sargent, Harold Meyerson discusses “a win for the middle class“:
The news that our trade with China has been bad for the American middle class has finally reached the U.S. Senate. On Monday, the Senate will take up legislation that would impose tariffs on Chinese goods so long as China depresses the value of its currency. Despite the partisan polarization that grinds lawmaking to a halt these days, the bill’s support is thoroughly bipartisan, with sponsors ranging from such conservative Republicans as South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham to liberal Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown. The legislation is expected to clear the Senate’s 60-vote hurdle for a floor vote and move on to the House…
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… Between 2001 and 2010, the U.S. trade deficit with China cost Americans 2.8 million jobs, according to a report by economist Robert Scott, issued last week by the liberal Economic Policy Institute. Most of those jobs — 1.9 million — were in manufacturing, and of those, almost half were in computers and electronics.
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This wasn’t simply the consequence of China’s cheaper labor or more generous corporate subsidies. As China’s productivity soared during the past decade, the value of its currency should have risen correspondingly. Instead, China purchased dollars, which had the effect of depressing the yuan and making Chinese exports about 28 percent cheaper than they would be if the yuan had been allowed to appreciate, William Cline and John Williamson found in a study for the centrist Peterson Institute for International Economics.
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Data like these have been floating around for years, of course. Until now, however, the Senate has remained largely impervious to the evidence of Chinese cheating and American decay. But elite opinion, which the Senate does heed, is finally catching up with mass opinion on whether losing our manufacturing base is a bad thing. An influential July 2009 article in the Harvard Business Review by economists Gary Pisano and Willy Shih argued that losing manufacturing meant losing our edge in innovation, that the relationship between research and production was reciprocal. This would not have come as news to Thomas Edison, but few on Wall Street or in corporate boardrooms the past two decades believed that America’s prosperity and dynamism required the retention and renewal of manufacturing…
Read the whole thing. Taking action is going to anger some very powerful people in both countries, but the ‘Walmart War’ has been just as bad for China’s middle class as it has for ours.
Thursday Evening Open Thread
Quick quotes from two of my favorite daily reads. Charlie Pierce at Esquire‘s Politics Blog:
I’m not sure what the people now occupying Wall Street ultimately will accomplish, but I’m a little tired with the argument that, because we don’t know what they may or may not accomplish, the entire exercise is doomed and useless. There has to be something to be said for people who at least direct their anger at the people who deserve it…
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For example, there is nothing that proves the essential fraudulence of the trope that the Tea Party “Movement” is some sort of spontaneous uprising, and not simply the well-funded re-branding of right-wing Republicanism aimed at a new crop of rubes, than the fact that there is little or no Tea Party presence on Wall Street. That is where the people who created the financial crisis work. That’s the scene of the crime. The wreckage of so many lives emanates from there, not from Washington. But the Tea Party is far more concerned with making sure that the Kenyan usurper in the White House gets run out of town on a rail, and the Tea Party’s heroes are roaming the landscape, talking rot, while the real villains are still yapping about how hard things are all over the place. Thank Whoever that there’s at least a few people who will stand outside of the right buildings and yell.
And Jonathan Chait at NYMag‘s Daily Intel, on “Mitt Romney’s Involuntary Political Celibacy“:
Mitt Romney keeps emphasizing his relative lack of governing experience, and in each telling his political virginity gets a bit more pure than in the last…
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I believe Jonathan Last put it best: “Mitt Romney would have been a career politician too, if only voters would have let him.” The man lost a Senate race in 1994, eked out a win for governor in 2002, abandoned his office in 2006 when polls showed him trailing, and lost a presidential race in 2008, from which he’s been running continuously since.
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Romney doesn’t have a political career in the same sense that William Hung doesn’t have a music career. It’s not because he’s above it.