Monday, December 5, 2011

The rich aren't so different from you and me, politically

When the party leanings of independents are taken into account, 57% of the nation's wealthiest adults associate themselves with the Republican Party, compared with 44% of the "99%." At the same time, Gallup polling finds little difference in the two groups' ideological views. Among the very wealthy, 39% say their political views are conservative, 41% call themselves moderate, and 20% liberal, similar to the percentages seen among all others.

But even if their self-identifications are similar, that doesn't mean their priorities—and their ability to press for those priorities—is the same. Lots of people call themselves "fiscal conservative/social liberal" for example, but that means a lot of different things depending on who is doing the talking.

The problem with third parties

Philadelphia Daily News columnist John Baer gets Third Party Fever:
WANT AN alternative to a 43-precent-job-approval president and whoever the Republican "Gong Show" offers? Fed up with Obama but afraid of the right?
Well, there's a move afoot, kicked off by a billionaire biz guy, to nominate a centrist, bipartisan ticket through a national online convention.

It's scheduled for next June, run by something called Americans Elect and open to all registered voters.

Its pitch: Pick a president, not a party. It plays to national disgust with Washington gridlock, Democratic disappointment in Obama and GOP angst over the Republican field. And it isn't a bad idea.
It's not a great idea. It would be nice to break through the Washington gridlock on occasion, yes, but electing a third party president won't do much to end that. If you're really wanting to shake things up, you've got to start electing Americans Elect candidates to Congress.

That's arguably harder to do than fielding a candidate for presidency. To run for Congress, you've actually got to develop a local constituency, and to do that you probably need to have an agenda somewhat more detailed than "those guys suck"—voters need to know, generally, what you stand for and what you'll try to get accomplished in office. And if you actually get to Congress, there's no guarantee that your presence there won't further calcify the divisions.

But Congress, not the presidency, is where the gridlock is. Third party efforts suck because they focus on the unattainable goal of hitting a home run and capturing the presidency; it skips the hard work that would really be needed to field a consistently credible alternative party.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Federalist 54, slavery, and 'The 1 Percent'

Like a lot of liberals, when I think about the Constitution's original provision that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of apportioning representation in Congress, I often think about it in racial terms: They were literally saying that black people were less than fully human! Sometimes I think about it in political terms: Southern politicians were accruing power—and thus preserving slavery—by giving slaves any human weight at all. But I don't often think about it in economic terms.

Federalist 54 changes that for me. This is the paper in which James Madison must justify the three-fifths apportionment to the people of New York. And his primary justification is this: Slaves are a form of wealth. And wealth deserves a little extra representation in the halls of government.

No really. This is what Madison writes:
"After all, may not another ground be taken on which this article of the Constitution will admit of a still more ready defense? We have hitherto proceeded on the idea that representation related to persons only, and not at all to property. But is it a just idea? Government is instituted no less for protection of the property, than of the persons, of individuals. The one as well as the other, therefore, may be considered as represented by those who are charged with the government. Upon this principle it is, that in several of the States, and particularly in the State of New York, one branch of the government is intended more especially to be the guardian of property, and is accordingly elected by that part of the society which is most interested in this object of government. In the federal Constitution, this policy does not prevail. The rights of property are committed into the same hands with the personal rights. Some attention ought, therefore, to be paid to property in the choice of those hands.

"For another reason, the votes allowed in the federal legislature to the people of each State, ought to bear some proportion to the comparative wealth of the States. States have not, like individuals, an influence over each other, arising from superior advantages of fortune. If the law allows an opulent citizen but a single vote in the choice of his representative, the respect and consequence which he derives from his fortunate situation very frequently guide the votes of others to the objects of his choice; and through this imperceptible channel the rights of property are conveyed into the public representation. A State possesses no such influence over other States. It is not probable that the richest State in the Confederacy will ever influence the choice of a single representative in any other State. Nor will the representatives of the larger and richer States possess any other advantage in the federal legislature, over the representatives of other States, than what may result from their superior number alone. As far, therefore, as their superior wealth and weight may justly entitle them to any advantage, it ought to be secured to them by a superior share of representation."
Basically: Rich men have disproportionate influence on selecting representatives in government—more because of their awesomeness than because they purchase it seems—and so should rich states. That's why it's fair to (mostly) count slaves when determining a state's representation in the House of Representatives.

The logic, as Madison admits, is "a little strained." If wealth determines representation, then why not make a tally of all the assets within a state and determine representation accordingly? The answer, it appears, is that slaves can be punished for committing crimes—that separates them from mere livestock, and, well, it all gets very depressing to read and think about.

But Federalist 54 is interesting in light of the recent "Occupy Wall Street" protests. At the heart of the demonstrations, I believe, is a belief that every citizen should have roughly equal representation in the federal government—the anger against "The 1 Percent" is anger not just that rich people are getting richer much faster than the rest of us, but that they have disproportionate influence with our government to bend policies to their will. To the protesters, that seems undemocratic—a betrayal of the American promise.

If we're to take Madison at his word, though, the problem is actually pretty foundational: The idea that wealth deserves more say in the halls of our democratic government seems at odds with the "one person, one vote" ideals we're usually taught, but it's baked into our government's DNA, part of the founding documents. 

Karen Heller's oversight on Herman Cain

At the Philadelphia Inquirer today, Karen Heller pooh-poohs the idea a candidate—say, like Herman Cain—should have to give up pursuing the presidency just because of adultery allegations. "Adoring your spouse is an admirable quality, particularly in one's own partner. But fidelity shouldn't be the determining factor on which candidate gets your vote. Richard Nixon was faithful to Pat, just not to the Constitution," she writes.

I don't entirely disagree: I wrote something similar back when Anthony Weiner was in hot water. But that said: It's absolutely a good thing that Cain was driven from the race.

Why? Not because of the adultery allegations, at least not on their own. The problem is that the adultery allegations came after stories that Cain had sexually harassed subordinates back when he was running the restaurant lobbying association. Essentially: He used and abused his power to try to get women to go to bed with him. Those allegations didn't merely suggest Cain was a bad boy in his private life; they suggested that Cain handled the perks of leadership in selfish, abusive, distorted fashion. That should be the concern of voters—and to my mind, should've been enough to drive him from the race on their own. The adultery allegations were the straw that broke the camel's back.

So I agree with Heller: Adultery, on its own, shouldn't be a disqualifier from high office. When it's combined with power abuses, though, there's a real problem. It would've been nice if she'd at least acknowledged that part of the story, instead of stripping it down to a mere tale of adultery.

Friday, December 2, 2011

I wonder what Newt thinks of this?

Children as young as 12 toil on farms as long as 12 hours a day, six to seven days a week, often in sweltering conditions, a recent report by Human Rights Watch found. Because of biological characteristics (such as a greater surface-area-to-body-mass ratio and a lower sweat capacity) and a reduced tendency to know when to take a break in response to heat symptoms, young farm workers are particularly at risk of excessive heat exposure, Public Citizen said in its comments.

Reserving its objections to the practice of child labor, to which it is opposed, Public Citizen called on the DOL to establish a heat-stress threshold that requires employers to take immediate action to prevent the onset of heat injury, among other protective measures.

Do we deserve a Great Depression because the Greeks were irresponsible?

Rod Dreher seems to think so. Here he is, commenting on David Brooks' column sticking up for Germans who don't want to bail out their Eurozone counterparts:
I wonder what would be worse: a Depression that serves as nemesis for the hubris of the Eurozone tower of Babel, or saving the Eurozone by throwing overboard the “precious social construct” of moral hazard and an economic system that rewards virtue and punishes vice.
Those are two bad choices, but you know what? The Depression is worse. In the latter scenario, people who don't deserve to live comfortable lives get to do so—but so do the people who do deserve to. In the former scenario, people who made bad choices pay for them—but so do a lot of other people who don't. I'm not a fan of tripping lightly over moral hazard, but I'm even less a fan of the misery that accompanies a Depression.  And there's no telling where those ramifications would end. The last Depression ended with a genocidal world war, after all.

Is Islamic terrorism worse than other terrorism?

I'm perusing a Congressional Research Service report on "homegrown jihadism" in the United States—it'll take a bit to digest—but I couldn't help but notice the kicker to this paragraph:
How serious is the threat of homegrown, violent jihadists in the United States? Experts differ in their opinions. In May 2010 congressional testimony, terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman emphasized that it is, “difficult to be complacent when an average of one plot is now being uncovered per month over the past year or more—and perhaps even more are being hatched that we don’t know about.”By contrast, a recent academic study of domestic Muslim radicalization supported by the National Institute of Justice reveals that “the record over the past eight years contains relatively few examples of Muslim-Americans that have radicalized and turned toward violent extremism” and concludes that “homegrown terrorism is a serious but limited problem.” Another study has suggested that the homegrown terrorist threat has been exaggerated by federal cases that “rely on the abusive use of informants.” Moreover, the radicalization of violent jihadists may not be an especially new phenomenon for the United States. Estimates suggest that between 1,000 and 2,000 American Muslims engaged in violent jihad during the 1990s in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya. More broadly, terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins notes that during the 1970s domestic terrorists “committed 60-70 terrorist incidents, most of them bombings, on U.S. soil every year—a level of activity 15-20 times that seen in most years since 9/11.”  Few of the attacks during the 1970s appear to have involved individuals motivated by jihadist ideas.
So, no big deal then, right?

Now, it's true that jihadists scored one really spectacular attack with 9/11—and that attack, not all the small-bore and (mostly) ineffective operations since then is what we've decided to address with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the reorientation of our national security infrastructure over the last decade. It's understandable, if not always laudable.

But the truth is that 1970s radicals were, on an ongoing basis, more deadly than American-grown jihadists. And it's also true that a government agency that points out that fact feels compelled to add something along the lines of: "Sure, the radical hippies committed a lot more bombings. But they weren't Muslim or anything."

Don't celebrate those new job numbers too much.

However, at this pace of job growth, it will be more than two decades before we get back down to the pre-recession unemployment rate. Moreover, a shrinking labor force is not the way we want to see unemployment drop.  At this rate of growth we are looking at a long, long schlep before our sick labor market recovers.

Something is really, really wrong with the economy

The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that in the third quarter, wages as a share of gross domestic product were the lowest they’ve been since 1929, and compensation (that includes health insurance) as a share of GDP was at its lowest point since 1955. Corporate profits as a share of GDP, by contrast, are the highest they’ve been since 1929.

It's not a depression. But it's depressing.

According to the study, to be released Friday by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, just 7 percent of those who lost jobs after the financial crisis have returned to or exceeded their previous financial position and maintained their lifestyles.

The vast majority say they have diminished lifestyles, and about 15 percent say the reduction in their incomes has been drastic and will probably be permanent.

About those defense budget cuts

Here's a graph from the Congressional Research Service showing what proposed "cuts" to the defense budget mean: We still spend more ... just not quite as fast as we expected to.

Paul Pillar on the Nazi analogy approach to foreign policy

There also is other, broader and longer term damage from the loose, profligate playing of the Nazi card. Repeatedly playing the card represents a failure to discriminate among different levels of threat. That undermines the tailoring of policy responses to make them appropriate for each threat. More specifically, it diminishes appreciation for the enormous magnitude of what the real Nazis did. If even problems that do not come anywhere close to what they did are rhetorically equated with Nazism, then the currency of discourse about human evil is debased. The rhetorical equation undermines understanding of the gigantic scale of the evil that the Nazis perpetrated, including the Holocaust.

Winning wars is OK. Waging wars is better.

At The National Interest, John Mueller suggests that Obama won't get much electoral lift from winning the Libya war—we're still talking about that?—because presidents rarely do:
Nobody gave much credit to Bush for his earlier successful intervention in Panama, to Dwight Eisenhower for a successful venture into Lebanon in 1958, to Lyndon Johnson for success in the Dominican Republic in 1965, to Jimmy Carter for husbanding an important Middle East treaty in 1979, to Ronald Reagan for a successful invasion of Grenada in 1983, or to Bill Clinton for sending troops to help resolve the Bosnia problem in 1995. Although it is often held that the successful Falklands War of 1982 helped British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in the elections of 1983, any favorable effect is confounded by the fact that the economy was improving impressively at the same time.
Right: Americans expect to win wars, so you don't really get special consideration as president for getting the job done. There's really only two war-related situations that seem to make much of a difference to a president's standing:

• Losing wars is bad. Think LBJ, of course, but even the relative success of the surge in Iraq wasn't enough to overcome Americans' (entirely correct) belief that George W. Bush had mostly prosecuted the war very badly. That led to Democrats' electoral success in 2006 and 2008.

• Going to war, on the other hand, is tremendously good in the short-term. George HW Bush saw his tepid popularity skyrocket when he led the U.N. coalition against Saddam in 1991; his son saw a similar boost after 9/11. A lot of that depends on the perceived justness of the cause; Obama didn't get a boost, most likely, because A) Americans barely cared about the war there, B) American military involvement was mostly kept out-of-sight, and C) his administration didn't do much in terms of rallying around the flag.

And a president has to show himself to be willing to go to war. Every president is scared of looking weak, and certainly political opponents are always willing to scream "appeasement" if a rival country gains an inch anywhere else in the world.

The lesson? Be willing to go to war. Make sure you win it. Losing is really the only part of the equation that is for ... losers.

It's a good thing we're fighting for women's rights in Afghanistan

One of the justifications for the continued war in Afghanistan is that women are likely to lose whatever freedom they've obtained now that the Taliban is not in charge. Remember this Time Magazine cover? Although I don't think it's a good enough reason to keep the war going—we'd have to fight forever in every woman-oppressing country on the planet, ultimately—it is enough to give one pause.

But ... this is the regime that we're actually fighting to preserve:
KABUL, Afghanistan — When the Afghan government announced Thursday that it would pardon a woman who had been imprisoned for adultery after she reported that she had been raped, the decision seemed a clear victory for the many women here whose lives have been ground down by the Afghan justice system. 
But when the announcement also made it clear that there was an expectation that the woman, Gulnaz, would agree to marry the man who raped her, the moment instead revealed the ways in which even efforts guided by the best intentions to redress violence against women here run up against the limits of change in a society where cultural practices are so powerful that few can resist them, not even the president. 
The solution holds grave risks for Gulnaz, who uses one name, since the man could be so humiliated that he might kill his accuser, despite the risk of prosecution, or abuse her again. 
The decision from the government of President Hamid Karzai is all the more poignant coming as Western forces prepare to leave Afghanistan, underscoring the unfinished business of advancing women’s rights here, and raising questions of what will happen in the future to other women like Gulnaz.
Read further into the story, and you'll discover that European Union officials have silenced a documentary about the plight of Gulnaz and women like her—supposedly for their protection, but also for cravenly political purposes. It's all very depressing. And it leaves me with a question I don't actually know how to answer: How do we actually help these women? Fighting an un-ending war doesn't seem to be the answer, but an alternative solution seems really necessary.

Advice to landowners about to sign a lease with an energy company

Get a lawyer first. The New York Times story about big companies taking advantage of small property owners isn't all that surprising, but the seeming willingness of landowners to sign a lease without understanding the details ... well, no, that's not surprising either, but it should be.
“If you’ve never seen a good lease, or any lease, how are you supposed to know what terms to try to get in yours?” said Ron Stamets, a drilling proponent and a Web site developer in Lakewood, Pa., who started a consumer protection Web site, PAGasLeases.com, in 2008 so that he could swap advice with his neighbors as he prepared to sign a gas lease. Others have also taken steps to better inform landowners about the details in leases. In the past several years, the attorneys general in New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania have published advisories about the pitfalls of leasing land for drilling.
And thank heavens for Stamets's website. But property owners stand to make a pretty decent chunk of change out of leasing their land to drillers: It should be a no-brainer that they hire a lawyer to examine the terms of the lease—never just accept the standard form!—and to get advice about what protections they want or need. The energy companies are looking out for their own interests, not yours. If you don't know enough to protect your interests, hire somebody who does.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Forgiveness for Newt

I remember in the late 1990s when a conservative friend of mine made a strenuously felt case that Bill Clinton didn't deserve to be president because of Clinton's well-known philandering. "How can I trust him to keep his oath to the country when he can't even keep his vow to his wife?" my friend said, and indeed that seemed to be the rationale for a lot of evangelical Christians who weren't content to simply oppose the president, but expressed a great deal of contempt for him.

I was reminded of my friend tonight by Dave Weigel's Slate story about how Iowa evangelicals are trying, very delicately but unmistakably, to give their flock permission to vote for thrice-married (and multiple philanderer) Newt Gingrich. To be fair, those leaders acknowledge the problem. Says one pastor: “Do you vote for a Mormon who's had one wife, a Catholic who's had three wives, or an Evangelical who may have had an entire harem?”

There's a lot of talk about "forgiveness" in Weigel's piece—talk that, to my memory, was pretty well absent when it came to Clinton's transgressions a decade ago. What to make of this? A couple of options:

• That evangelicals were sincere in the late 1990s about their contempt for Clinton, but have been so beaten down by GOP sex scandals since then that they're bending and bowing to the larger culture's sexual mores—or at least, deciding those strict rules don't matter so much in the political realm anymore. I'd actually kind of hate to see that, bizarrely enough: I don't really share evangelicals' sexual morality, but I'd hate for holders of that morality to shrug and give into the culture out of weariness rather than conversion.

• Or maybe it's straight hypocrisy.

The truth, I suspect, is a little bit of both: A mixture of defeat and cynicism when it comes to our sexed-up culture. In any case, I'd love to hear some of these guys talk more about forgiving Clinton. They kind of have to, right?

Even holiday work has disappeared

Underemployment, a measure that combines the percentage of workers who are unemployed with the percentage working part time but wanting full-time work, is 18.1% in November, as measured by Gallup without seasonal adjustment. That is up from 17.8% a month ago and 17.2% a year ago. Many employers appear to have chosen to hire part-time rather than full-time employees for this holiday season.

Once I was the King of Spain...

...now I eat humble pie: Tobias's current favorite song:

Should Congress extend the payroll tax break?

Maybe not. It might feel good now, but have long-term consequences. Or, at least, that's what I say in this week's Scripps column:
Whether he means to or not, President Obama is threatening the future of Social Security and the cause of good governance with his campaign to extend the payroll tax cut.

Sure, the tax break is meant to be temporary. But lots of tax breaks have a sunset clause. Yet somehow we're still stuck (for example) with the tax cuts that were passed under George W. Bush, which helped create our current deficit mess. Why? Because Obama didn't have the political will to let those tax cuts expire and let America's wealthiest citizens start contributing to deficit reduction.

Now the president is traveling around the country, saying the end of the payroll tax break is an attack on the middle class, one that will further undermine an ailing economy, and proves that Republicans only care about keeping taxes low for the rich.

On that last part, he's right: GOP tax-cutting zeal has been mysteriously absent on this issue.

But if the end of the temporary tax break amounts to an unconscionable tax hike on the middle class, it will probably be an unconscionable tax hike on the middle class next year and the year after that, and so forth, for as many times as is needed to renew the "temporary" exemption. If the economy suddenly, finally starts to grow, there will surely be politicians who suggest that letting the break expire at that point will bring the pain back.

Americans will want to keep their tax break. (It amounts to about $1,000 a year for many families.) But they'll also eventually want their Social Security check. It may not be possible to keep both. In the end, we really do have to pay for the government we get, or we'll stop getting that government. We'll end up paying, one way or another.
Ben manages to be down on both the payroll tax cut extension and Social Security. You'll have to click the link to read his take.

The economy must be fixed, then!

Banks show highest profits since ’07 | NAFCU: " Federally insured banks reported third-quarter profits of $35.3 billion, which is up $6.5 billion from the previous quarter and the highest level since 2007, according to the FDIC’s latest Quarterly Banking Profile.

The FDIC report, released last week, noted improved earnings for 63 percent of insured banks from with the same time last year. This is the ninth quarter that earnings improved, the FDIC said."

'via Blog this'