The Commentariat -- June 4, 2012
My column in today's New York Times eXaminer is on a news report about Willard that neglected mentioning a few facts.
Paul Krugman: "... the best argument against Republicans’ claims that they can fix the economy [is] the fact ... that we have already seen the Republican economic future — and it doesn’t work." ...
... Decca Aitkenhead of the Guardian interviews Krugman who lets on that his audiences are smarter than the Very Serious People.
Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times: "Days before Bank of America shareholders approved the bank's $50 billion purchase of Merrill Lynch in December 2008, top bank executives were advised that losses at the investment firm would most likely hammer the combined companies' earnings.... But shareholders were not told about the looming losses..., leaving them instead to rely on rosier projections.... What Bank of America's top executives ... knew about Merrill's vast mortgage losses and when they knew it emerged in court documents filed Sunday evening in a shareholder lawsuit.... The disclosure ... is likely to reignite concerns that federal regulators and prosecutors have not worked hard enough to hold key executives accountable for their actions during the financial crisis." CW: who could have guessed? ...
... Nelson Schwartz & Jessica Silver-Greenberg of the New York Times: "A small group of shareholder advocates delivered an urgent message to top executives at JPMorgan Chase more than a year ago: the bank's risk controls needed to be improved. JPMorgan officials dismissed the warning from the CtW Investment Group, the advocates, who also cautioned bank officials that the company had fallen behind the risk-management practices of its peers."
New York Times Editors: the I.R.S. should end the farce of groups like Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS being allowed to claim itself a "social welfare organization" with tax-exempt status. ...
... Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D-Montana) in a New York Times op-ed: "In Montana's frontier days, we learned a hard lesson about money in politics, one that's shaped our campaign-finance laws for a century and made our political system one of the country's most transparent. Those laws, and our political way of life, are now being threatened by the Supreme Court -- which is why I recently signed a petition for a federal constitutional amendment to ban corporate money from all elections."
Stephen Colbert explains an aspect of Obama's foreign policy:
Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post: "The government of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is rewriting the nation's environmental laws to speed the extraction and export of oil, minerals and other materials to a global market clamoring for Canada's natural resources.... Economic and political factors account for the controversial gambit. High prices for oil and minerals, along with demand from Asia, have given Canada new incentive to tap into its resources, and new technology has made extraction easier.... The strategy has won plaudits from energy industry officials and some economists, while sparking an outcry from environmentalists and their allies in Parliament."
The Washington Post is running a series on cyberwar, which you can link here. I'm sure it's interesting and really important; I'm just not smart enough to grasp it all, but I'm sure most of you are.
Gabriel Sherman of New York magazine has a long piece on NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose next act, Sherman writes, is "mayor of the world."
Here's a portion of Elizabeth Warren's speech at the Massachusetts Democratic convention Saturday. She won the nomination with about 96 percent of the vote:
... From Warren's Website, here's the transcript.
Presidential Race
Alex Koppelman of the New Yorker analyzes ten campaign ads. And the latest salvo from the Obama camp, an ad that will run in nine swing states:
That stimulus [President Obama] put in place -- it didn't help private sector jobs, it helped preserve government jobs. And the one place we should have shut back -- or cut back -- was on government jobs. We have 145,000 more government workers under this president. Let's send them home and put you back to work. -- Mitt Romney, May 29
Private sector jobs have increased under Obama and government jobs have fallen, making Romney's assertion incorrect.... If one assumes Romney was referring to federal workers, then his statistic is accurate but his comment makes little sense. He says he wants to cut back government jobs, even though Obama added jobs in areas that Romney identifies as critical -- and even though such cuts in government employment would further reduce overall employment. We had given him Two Pinocchios for the previous way he had used this 145,000 figure but given the context of this statement, we have no choice but to increase the number. -- Glenn Kessler, Washington Post fact-checker
Right Wing World
George Packer & Amy Davidson of the New Yorker discussed the extremism of the Republican party late last week:
"Evolution is hooey." Gail Collins in the New York Review of Books: "Texas certainly didn't single-handedly mess up American textbooks, but its size, its purchasing heft, and the pickiness of the school board's endless demands -- not to mention the board's overall craziness -- certainly made it the trend leader. Texas has never managed to get evolution out of American science textbooks. It's been far more successful in helping to make evolution -- and history, and everything else -- seem boring." CW: Toldja Collins could write serious stuff.
Local News
Reuters: "Two public opinion polls released on Sunday show Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walkerwith a lead of three and six percentage points two days before the election to recall.... Both findings were within the margin of error so the results could be even tighter." ...
... This Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel overview seems kinda pro-Walker to me, but there appears to have been a real effort to be objective, & the video is a good overview of the recall. (The Journal-Sentinel endorsed Walker in the recall election.) --
News Ledes
FP: "Chinese authorities have rounded up hundreds of activists in the capital Beijing, rights campaigners and petitioners said Monday, as they marked the 23rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. The detentions came as Washington angered Beijing by calling for all those still jailed over the demonstrations on June 4, 1989 -- when hundreds, if not thousands, of protesters were shot and killed by soldiers -- to be freed."
AFP: "The three Swedish nationals and one Tunisian living in Sweden had pleaded not guilty to the terrorism charges, but a district court found all four 'guilty of terrorism', chief judge Katrine Eriksen said in the unanimous verdict, which was broadcast live. However Sahbi Ben Mohamed Zalouti, Munir Awad and Omar Abdalla Aboelazm -- all Swedish citizens of Tunisian, Lebanese and Moroccan origin, respectively -- and Tunisian national Mounir Ben Mohamed Dhahri were found not guilty of a secondary charge of weapons possession due to a technicality, she said. Prosecutors had charged that the four planned to 'kill a large number of people' at the Jyllands-Posten's offices in Copenhagen when they were arrested on December 29, 2010."
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Reader Comments (7)
The more I hear from Gov. Schweitzer the more impressed I am. I heard him interviewed a while back and remember thinking his position's where what I wanted to hear from the Democrats in D.C.
The Wisconsin video I thought presented both sides fairly and as balanced as possible. It saddens me that this state, the one I was born and bred in, has become so polarized. I left it decades ago, but it will always be my home. The results tomorrow will not only be a Wisconsin win or lose, but will have serious ramifications for the whole country.
Apropos of the amount of concern on the part of Bank of America for their shareholders in the midst of acquiring the dead weight of Merrill Lynch (none), I was reminded of the recent four part Frontline look at the financial industry and its role in the recent meltdown in which numerous former employees all told pretty much the same story. The rule of greed trumps all. In fact, brokers who go out of their way to screw their clients gain a reputation as savvy money makers instead of the one they should have: lying, cheating, criminally liable, immoral rat bastards.
So, as Marie asks, who could have guessed these guys would act so outrageously negligent toward their own shareholders? But never fear, Republicans feel the same way about voters. That’s why they will fight with every last fetid breath against regulating such goons.
And speaking of the economy, I read an article last week by David Wessel of the WSJ which brought to light a significant problem for the millions out of work and unable to find jobs.
There are basically two ways to look at the problem of unemployment when considering a good fix. First, if businesses are unsure of the economic climate, they are unwilling to increase their output (and hire additional workers) if they feel demand is not there. This is a rationale for some kind of monetary solution. Increased government spending and investment can help restore some balance. We know how Republicans feel about this.
The second possibility is that there are plenty of workers and plenty of jobs but never the twain seem able to meet. Why? Well, Our Mister Brooks, from his Ivory Tower of Smug Arrogance, finger-wagged a while back that lazy unemployed Americans need to get busy and retrain themselves for the jobs that are out there. After all, thrifty, hard-working Americans (conservatives) had always been able to do this so why can’t those shiftless minorities and lazy liberals do the same?
It’s always in the best interests of Republicans to blame individuals for their own plight. Out of work? Don’t look at us. It’s your fault. Your company downsized and fired you because of the economy that we wrecked? Tough luck. Go back to school and retrain and maybe our industry cronies will hire you for a quarter of your former salary with no benefits. Because that’s how we roll.
The best answer may be somewhere in between. Difficult problems often do not have the kind of simplistic fairy-tale solutions beloved by the Right.
But I digress. Wessel makes several cogent points:
One problem is that employers are too picky. They want to hire what he calls “unicorns”. The perfect fantasy employee who comes pre-trained for the exact job with plenty of experience. This excludes anyone who could do the job but needs training.
That brings us to the second problem. Employers too often don’t want to invest in largely qualified candidates who might need some additional training. They want the government to do that. But government can’t provide the kind of specific training that Company A might require. So that’s a non-starter all around.
Thirdly, employers simply don’t want to pay employees what they’re worth. This calls down all manner of draconian fallout. First, unemployed but experienced and highly qualified candidates are willing to work but not for slave wages. The company, despite their preference for the perfect candidate, then hires unqualified candidates, pays them slave wages and runs into delays, inferior products, sluggish productivity, and with it, their ability to serve as a cog in the economic engine.
But Wessel’s most interesting finding is that companies rely too heavily on screening software which immediately discounts scads of qualified applicants. In one instance, an HR director applied to his own company using their screening software and was turned away. On a personal note, just as a lark, a short while ago, I went to a local company that hires people to work as help desk personnel for simple IT problems. Not that long ago I worked at a very large company where part of my duties was to serve as a systems administrator for my department. I applied for this very basic job, sat down at the computer and took their test. I was informed the next day that I was not qualified despite the fact that I could take their whole company apart and put it back together in the dark of night.
So there are likely tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of unemployed, fully qualified applicants who are turned down by a software application without ever getting to speak to a human being.
Adjusting the software would be a great first step, but getting the rest of it right will mean cooperation between public and private entities and a much more real world, approach to difficult problems. The last two, cooperation and an appreciation of complexity, and the necessary ability to find one’s way through to a solution are clearly not in the interest of right-wing ideology and so, may likely stay problems for the foreseeable future.
If you’re out of work, good luck to you. That’s the best I can say. Hey, at least I won’t tell you you’re lazy and shiftless like David Brooks did.
PD,
The vote in Wisconsin tomorrow may show us in the starkest of terms, the baleful effects of little Johnny Roberts' dream decision, Citizens United.
The fact that in a state that rushed to recall a governor clearly in the pockets of special interests and big money, this person is ahead by this much in the polls and may win walking away is no kind of bellwether for the national mood. Rather, it will demonstrate yet again the deleterious and un-democratic influence of the obscene amounts of cash poured into this race by Republicans and their corporate masters.
Roberts and the other Five Little Dwarfs who handed us this ruling will be sitting in front of their TVs tomorrow, with a big bowl of popcorn, gleefully watching the returns on Fox and snickering about any cries of foul from true lovers of democracy.
Sorry, this comment by Kate Madison got buried yesterday -- accidentally -- in my odious Approval Purgatory & I just discovered it late this morning. Here it is again:
Natterly, natterly. How MoDo carries on. She truly has missed the point. Yeah, Barry is a wuss and somewhat OCD. He is also decent, respectful, bright and able to learn. AND--he will appoint perhaps 3 Supremes in his next term.
Think about who Mitt RawMoney would put on the Court--a coupla more Scalias, Alitos, Roberts and Thomases. Gag me with a spoon! And if that is not enough, he would repeal the Affordable Health Care Act and give more power back to the greedy Insurance fellas. Please don't arc a bean, but he has said he would appoint JOHN BOLTON (probly) as Secretary of State. Gimme a break. There really is no choice here. Obama is flawed and still somewhat immature, I agree. But he will make excellent appointments to the Supremes--albeit not as progressive as many of us would wish. And he will not take orders from Israel to invade Iran. With Romney--it is a done deal.
If you are not yet scared of Romney, here is reason to be:
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/05/is-the-constitution-mormon.html
Yes, Akilleus, thou dost speak the truth. A man who once ran for president but was screwed by the Wille Horton ad speaks up also:
The big question: "What’s the impact of the Citizens United decision?" asked
Morrison.
"Terrible. It has to be one of the five worst decisions by the Supreme
Court. [They] call themselves strict constructionists, right? Tell me where
it says in the Constitution that money is speech. Tell me where it says
Congress cannot reasonably regulate campaign contributions. It’s been doing
so for 120 years. All of a sudden these guys decide, not only is money
speech but corporate money is speech. Outrageous, in my opinion. It’s
polluting the political process.
"And there is no constitutional issue about this health-care bill. Scalia a
few years ago wrote an opinion saying the federal government could regulate
somebody’s backyard marijuana patch under the commerce clause, because that
patch had an indirect effect on interstate commerce. You’re talking about 20
percent of the GNP with health care, and the federal government can’t
regulate it? Don’t employers have to pay a minimum wage under the commerce
clause? If they turn this down, those guys ought to be impeached, honest to
God. There’s no constitutional issue here."
So, unfortunately, it’s only a retired politician who has the guts to say
that conservatives are writing a new Constitution in the courts. They
sanctify the old and then set it on fire.
From an interview with Dukakas
Aah, PD, you forget. In today's dialectic, the past is not prolog, it's epilog.