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Category: General

Outsourcing Bobo

[ 34 ] January 18, 2014 | Scott Lemieux

David Brooks presents us with an instant classic of the “let us have the comity and civility to all come together and concede that conservatives are right about everything” genre. The subject is inequality, and it actually induces this sentence:

There is a growing consensus that government should be doing more to help increase social mobility for the less affluent. Even conservative Republicans are signing on to this.

Hahahahahahaha, oh, you’re killing me. Conveniently, Brooks’s column makes abundantly clear that such as a consensus doesn’t remotely exist, and while some Republicans are willing to say that the same anti-mobility policies they’ve always favored will somehow help the poor, what they actually want to do to advance mobility is “nothing.”

Anyway, at least this has produced some inspired commentary. All of these are worth reading in full, but some teasers. Baker:

It’s not clear what social fabric Brooks thinks is fraying. The percentage of children in single-parent families has actually largely stabilized in the last three decades. The percentage of teen mothers is way down as is the crime rate. The high school graduation rate is way up. These changes have not been reflected in improved conditions for those at the bottom as minimum wage workers are more educated and experienced than ever.

As much we might want to take David Brooks’ plea for considering complex cultural, social, and behavioral problems, de-industrialiation looks pretty much like a good old-fashioned economic problem. An over-valued dollar makes our goods uncompetitive internationally. If the currency is over-valued by 20 percent it is roughly equivalent to having a 20 percent tariff on all U.S. exports and a 20 percent subsidy on imports. In addition, if we have trade agreements that expose manufacturing workers to competition with low-paid workers in the developing world, while largely protecting highly paid professionals like doctors and lawyers, then we will have a serious problem of deindustrialization. That’s pretty much economics 101, it’s hard to see why any bigger explanation is needed on this one.

Bruenig:

The David Brooks Problem is that he writes opinion columns for the New York Times, but has no idea what he is talking about. The proximate causes are that 1) he doesn’t know how to do research, 2) he has no motivation to try because he lives an extravagant and distracted life in his $4 million home. In some ways, responding to him is a largely futile affair that misses the point, but sometimes I am called to do so, and so I will.


Scocca:

Since Brooks has taken a passing interest in the question of smarm, let’s note that arguing that reasonable bipartisan legislation should start with one party’s agenda topmost is definitive political smarm.

Undue Burden

[ 26 ] January 18, 2014 | Scott Lemieux

Pennsylvania’s vote suppression law has been ruled unconstitutional by a state court:

A Pennsylvania judge on Friday struck down the state’s voter ID law, which was signed in early 2012 and is one of the strictest in the nation, ruling that the statute “unreasonably burdens the right to vote.”

“Voting laws are designed to assure a free and fair election; the Voter ID Law does not further this goal,” Commonwealth Court Judge Bernard McGinley wrote.

Whether this will be upheld by Pennsylvania’s higher appeals court is unclear, but it’s at least tentative good news.

American Hustle

[ 132 ] January 17, 2014 | bspencer

“American Hustle” is a film that lingers on your palate like that last sip of that flowery, chocolatey Beoujolais you had that one time. It’s sweet and it’s sophisticated It may make you feel a little tipsy, even a little sexy. But whatever it makes you feel, it lingers. Oh, how it lingers.

It lingers because when you’re done watching it you’ll wonder how a film so funny can also be so sexy and sad. And sexily sad. It lingers because  you’ll never be able to decide who in its stellar gave the best performance (I hesitantly choose Amy Adams, who is a Keane-eyed goddess in this).  It lingers because it never raises its voice. Its awesomeness never announces itself loudly, it quietly shows up and surprises you: that laugh you weren’t expecting, that jolt of electricity you feel when Amy Adams and Bradley Cooper share a scene. The way the amazing Christian Bale effortlessly almost* makes you forget he is an incredibly handsome Englishman and not a shlumpy balding New Yorker.

I won’t get into to plot. The plot doesn’t matter. “American Hustle” isn’t about plot. It’s about the hustle. It’s about how we hustle ourselves, how we hustle people we love, how we love people who hurt us and hurt people who love us. It’s about how we’re all hustling ourselves into a new career, a new romance, a new life. Or trying to.

It’s not many films that make me want break out language this florid and melodramatic. Please know you’ll probably  never read another movie review like this from me. (My next movie review will probably use words like “barf” and “unicorn” and it will be silly.)

Go see “American Hustle.” It’s lovely.

 

*I say almost because, bad wigs aside, the bones of Bale’s attractiveness are still there. They just are.

Just How Dumb is the “ACA Was A Health Insurance Industry Bailout” Argument?

[ 143 ] January 17, 2014 | Scott Lemieux

It’s so dumb that wingnuts have embraced it.

Now, I’ll grant that the left version of this argument is just as silly and made by people who should know better. The health insurance industry didn’t need a “bailout” under the status quo ante — the fact that individual insurance market was basically a con and the ability to refuse coverage to the least profitable classes of customers worked just fine to ensure ongoing profitability, thanks. The risk corridors in the ACA that might provide subsidies to insurers with unfavorable risk pools are necessary because of the crucial consumer rights — guaranteed issue and the ban on rescission — provided for by the ACA. To call risk corridors a “bailout” comparable to giving cash to corporations so they don’t face the consequences of their own mistakes is still deeply asinine.

Cruel and Unusual

[ 189 ] January 17, 2014 | Scott Lemieux

Another day with the machinery of death.

If only there was another way of punishing terrible crimes — perhaps a long or even permanent period of imprisonment. Until we come up with something, I’m not sure what the alternative to arbitrarily selecting a small subset of people who may or may not be guilty of heinous crimes and killing them with methods that may or may not be humane is.

Biomass is a Terrible Idea as a Major Energy Source

[ 185 ] January 17, 2014 | Erik Loomis

You might think corn-based ethanol is the worst possible “green energy” alternative. And I’d like to think you are right. After all, turning the entire Midwest into a giant corn monoculture and destroying the remnants of a once fertile ecosystem in order to force an inefficient and dirty way to create ethanol on a nation all because of an already powerful industry with a huge lobbying arm is a pretty bloody awful idea.

But then there’s biomass. And sure, efficient use of plant resources makes sense. After all, the timber industry realized by the 1940s that rather than wasting all that sawdust and stumpage, turning it into wood alcohol or other products was a smart economic strategy that ultimately meant needing to cut less trees for the same amount of product. But biomass as a core alternative energy source? Only if you like massive deforestation.

In 2007, the European Union set an ambitious goal to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to 20 percent below their 1990 levels by 2020. That, in effect, required power plants across the continent to quickly find new ways to make energy. Some turned to wind and solar. But for coal-fired power plants it was much cheaper to convert their facilities to burn wood. The conundrum for those companies is that much of western Europe doesn’t have sufficiently large forests left to meet the demand, and the remaining woodland is heavily regulated. So corporations turned to the Southeastern U.S., where wood is plentiful, and regulations about what can be done on private land are lax.

Wood pellet manufacturing in the U.S. is now booming.

Drax, Britain’s largest coal plant, is in the process of converting most of its operations to biomass fuel, and other power plants across the continent are following suit.

In 2008 Europe imported about 2.5 million tons of wood pellets. By 2012 it imported 9 million. And by 2020 it’s projected to import upwards of 20 million tons, largely from the United States and Canada, according to John Bingham of Hawkins Wright, a British forest products consultancy.

….

Quaranda said his group has documented several cases of forests clear-cut for biomass fuel. A Wall Street Journal report also found clear-cutting in North Carolina.

Seth Ginther, a lawyer with the U.S. Industrial Pellet Association, insists the pellet industry is not responsible for environmental damage. But he acknowledged that private landowners are free to do what they wish, including cut down whole trees on their land.

And in the South, where nearly 90 percent of land is privately owned, there is no law on the books requiring landowners to grow those trees back.

Dozens of biomass facilities have been built in the South. There are currently two in Louisiana, with eight more planned, according to Quaranda.

With a permit to build roads for logging in a protected area of the Atchafalaya pending approval from the Army Corps of Engineers, Dean Wilson worries he’s just seen the beginning of a decades-long battle to protect the woods he’s been looking after since the 1980s.

Now Wilson is trying to employ the same tactic he used when he found out retailers were selling cypress mulch taken from the Atchafalaya.

Biomass as a major industry basically means the elimination of the United States’ private forests. It would provide a lot of short term profit for companies and land-owners and unbelievably enormous long-term problems, including the destruction of ecosystems, huge losses of carbon-using greenery, erosion, degraded water quality, and widespread deforestation. And if anyone believes the idea that trees are a crop and thus will be replanted for future use, especially on private land, please contact me about the oceanfront property I have to offer you in western Nebraska. The regulatory regime on reforestation, especially in the South is basically zero.

Industrialized biomass is a terrible idea and while we need a multifaceted energy production future and while all energy production has a cost, this cost is completely unacceptable.

Climate Coverage

[ 98 ] January 17, 2014 | Erik Loomis

It’s no wonder that we are doing nothing on climate change given that it gets almost no coverage in the national media. And it’s not like climate change is the most important problem faced by humans or anything.

Climate change got more coverage on broadcast news in 2013 than in the previous few years, but the issue still didn’t get nearly as much attention as it did in 2009, Media Matters found in a new analysis.

ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox together featured more coverage in 2013 than they did in 2012. The amount of airtime granted to climate change on both the Sunday shows and the nightly news was up, too — to a total of 27 minutes, and an hour and 42 minutes, respectively, for the entire year. The progressive media watchdog group Media Matters totaled the time broadcasters devoted to climate change for a new report released Thursday.

Up to 27 minutes on the Sunday shows! Well then! Surely John McCain must have something to say about this. And interviewing 2 climate scientists on the major networks over the last 5 years seems like 2 too many. James Inhofe really should have enough to say without them, plus his beliefs support America.

America’s Distribution of Wealth

[ 178 ] January 16, 2014 | Erik Loomis

If you are like me, you think Lawyers, Guns, and Money has really gone downhill since Erik Loomis began posting here, what with the unionism and socialism and all the other isms that have sought to bring down America. Not to mention thinking climate change is real and questioning our technological utopian fetishism. As a counter to these pernicious foreign ideologies, it’s time to turn to Dr. Clifton Ganus of the National Education Program. He will set us straight on the moral uprightness and godly ways of the American capitalist system. The sheer number of noncontextualized statistics will show the truth of his points. And if they don’t, the English socialist and Russian communist who are totally not Americans doing incredibly lame imitations of the English and Russians will make the glories of American free market crystal clear. Good evening and God bless this great land.

Incredibly, the good Dr. Ganus is either still alive or lived long enough to have his own twitter account, while he chancellor of the right-wing evangelical Harding University in Arkansas, which I think is the descendant of the school he is actually teaching at in this video.

On Buffer Zones and the First Amendment

[ 262 ] January 16, 2014 | Scott Lemieux

Not that I could hope to match the wisdom of Charles C. Cooke, but I have a piece on the oral arguments in the buffer zone case up.

I didn’t see it until after the piece went live, but I was somewhat puzzled by Emily Bazelon’s framing of the argument:

Most of the time, abortion providers and supporters argue for treating abortion as a regular part of medicine and women’s health. In reaction to the rash of new abortion restrictions in Republican-controlled statehouses, the Center for Reproductive Rights wrote, “No medical procedures other than abortion are targeted for restrictions aimed at reducing their effectiveness and increasing their expense and inconvenience.”

And yet there is one area in which clinics do want special treatment from the government: They want to keep opponents of abortion away from the clinic entrances patients, staff, and providers must walk through. In Massachusetts, abortion critics who are trying to talk women out of going through with the procedure—you can call them “protesters” or “counselors,” depending on your point of view—have to stand 35 feet from a clinic entrance or driveway.

The obvious problem with this attempted gotcha is that the distinction drawn by the reproductive health clinics makes perfect sense while the reverse doesn’t. One the one hand, there are no actual health risks posed by abortion that justify singling out abortion clinics for special regulations (as opposed to applying neutral requirements that apply to all medical professionals) — abortion is safer than childbirth. And the real agenda of these regulations — to shut down clinics that perform abortions — isn’t even hidden by their advocates. On the other hand, there are good reasons to treat reproductive health clinics differently in terms of access and safety — there are no systematic campaigns of terrorism and harassment against dental clinics or walk-in medical clinics. Maybe there’s a good argument for why the state can create buffer zones around public officials, funerals, and the Supreme Court of the United States but not reproductive health clinics, but this sure isn’t it.

I also think this example from Liptak’s piece about the case is instructive:

But as three young women made a path for the door, a second protester, Mary O’Donnell, called out from the far side of the yellow line. Her tone was conversational, and her words were partly muffled by passing traffic.

“Please allow us to help you,” Ms. O’Donnell said. “It’s not too late to change your mind.”

The women kept walking.

Ms. O’Donnell, 81, said she found the line baffling. “This is wrong,” she said. “It’s bizarre.”

Opponents of reproductive rights certainly have a First Amendment right to make their views known, including to women who might be about to obtain or arrange an abortion. But the Massachusetts law does not prevent this. It does prevent some protestors from continuing to make arguments on precisely their terms to a private individual who has already demonstrated herself an unwilling audience. In the context of the genuine safety threats to reproductive health clinics, it’s far from obvious to me that this particular type of conduct is protected by the First Amendment.

Wisconsin Taking Another Step to the New Gilded Age

[ 66 ] January 16, 2014 | Erik Loomis

Conservatives’ vision of the future of American work

Scott Walker’s Wisconsin really is vanguard of the New Gilded Age. Republicans have introduced a new bill, almost certain to become law, that will get rid of a state law requiring employers to give workers 24 hours in a row off at least once every 7 days. I know, quite the imposition upon the freedom of workers to work whenever they are compelled upon risk of termination want! But hey, workers have the option to opt out, by which conservatives mean the same as Gilded Age conservatives did in 1895 that workers had real options–do what we say or find another job. But no one is compelling them!

Conservatives say that workers will only have to forego their rest days if they volunteer, but the law’s opponents argue that businesses could create environments that are hostile to workers who insist on their rights. Workers who take their mandated rest days could be skipped over for promotion, denied privileges allowed to workers who work a 7-day week or could see sharp reductions in their schedules until they no longer have enough hours to make ends meet, financially.

Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce said that it conceived of the law when it noted that the federal government does not have a rule mandating that workers receive a certain number of hours off per work cycle.

Lawmakers Grothman and Born told reporters from the Journal that they had heard from a diverse array of businesses that support the 7-day work week, but when asked to provide examples, they were only able to provide the names of groups belonging to the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce network.

“Here’s an opportunity for folks to work together to get things done in a positive way for the employer and the employee,” Born said. “It just seems like a win all the way around.”

All the way around. Indeed. All the way around to the conditions of 1895.

Thursday Links in Descending Order of Importance

[ 111 ] January 16, 2014 | bspencer
  • Charles CCH Pounder Cooke talks about abortion care center buffer zones. I only skimmed because it’s morning and it’s Charles Cooke. Sometimes I think Cooke is around to remind us that having a British accent doesn’t make you smart, because Stuart Varney can’t be everywhere at once.
  • Read about the Redditor who set up an online dating account as a woman and promptly got deluged with what I like to call “The Favre Treatment.” Yes, that’s right–this poor guy got sent pretty explicit unsolicited pictures of Crocs. No, I’m kidding. He was deluged with dick pics. I think Katherine, in the comments, nails my feelings on the matter. Why don’t more men simply take our word for it when we wimmin say something sucks? It’s like going “I didn’t really think periods were uncomfortable ’til I stabbed myself in the vagina.” Dudes, quit stabbing yourself in the vagina–just take our word for stuff.
  • Look at this incredibly cool photo of a Blue Morpho butterfly.
  • Origami Isopod wants you feel sorry for these poorly-rated gummy bears, but they’re flavored with something called “Lycasin,” which I’m pretty sure is the drug those scientists used to subdue Wolverine when they were replacing his skeleton with Adamantium.
  • These squirrels look like Radiohead. We can now shut down the Internet.

Wal-Mart Doesn’t Have Much Respect for the Intelligence of Its Employees

[ 16 ] January 16, 2014 | Erik Loomis

This purloined presentation of Wal-Mart anti-union propaganda is pretty unprofessional. You’d at least think the world’s largest retailer would argue something a bit more complicated than a labor organization would cost employees a whole $5 a month. The second presentation, for managers, is more standard anti-union hack work. But at least it looks like they spent more than 5 minutes putting it together.

Meanwhile, the NLRB is filing a complaint against Wal-Mart for violation labor law in 14 states while cracking down on striking workers.

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