Month: May 2015

Quote of the Day

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It comes from my choice for Democratic nominee for President, Bernie Sanders:

In the interview, Sanders also indicates that he’d like to see a 90 percent tax rate in the country. After he sarcastically referred to that rate existing under “radical socialist Dwight D. Eisenhower,” Harwood asked him if he thought it was too high. “No. That’s not 90 percent of your income, you know?” explained Sanders, “That’s the marginal. I’m sure you have some really right-wing nut types, but I’m not sure that every very wealthy person feels that it’s the worst thing in the world for them to pay more in taxes, to be honest with you. I think you’ve got a lot of millionaires saying, “You know what? I’ve made a whole lot of money. I don’t want to see kids go hungry in America. Yeah, I’ll pay my fair share.”

I love the bit about, “Radical socialist Dwight D. Eisenhower.”

The whole discussion (it’s informal enough that it’s more of a chat than an interview) with John Harwood, NBC’s Chief Washington correspondent, is well worth a watch.

Memorial Day Thought: Thanking Soldiers for Their Service Is Quite Literally the Least You Can Do………

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I do not say this to diminish or demean the actions taken by members of the military, but rather because the boiler plate, “Thank you for your service,” is patronizing and demeaning.

What you are really saying, and the soldiers understand this, is “I am so glad that it’s you, and not me, or my children, who are doing this.”

Rather unsurprisingly, the folks who have served have a similar view of that cliche:

………

 As the size of the military shrinks, the connections between military personnel and the broad civilian population appear to be growing more distant, the Pew Research Center concluded after a broad 2012 study of both service members and civilians.

 Most of the country has experienced little, if any, personal impact from the longest era of war in U.S. history. But those in uniform have seen their lives upended by repeated deployments to war zones, felt the pain of seeing family members and comrades killed and maimed, and endured psychological trauma that many will carry forever, often invisible to their civilian neighbors.

 ………

 “I am well-aware that many Americans, especially our elite classes, consider the military a bit like a guard dog,” said Lt. Col. Remi M. Hajjar, a professor of behavioral sciences and leadership at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

 “They are very thankful for our protection, but they probably wouldn’t want to have it as a neighbor,” he said. “And they certainly are not going to influence or inspire their own kids to join that pack of Rottweilers to protect America.”

 ………

 George Baroff, enjoying an outdoor lunch at an organic food co-op in Carrboro one recent afternoon, said he understood the military quite well: He served three years as a draftee during World War II before eventually becoming a psychology professor in nearby Chapel Hill.

 Baroff, 90, finds himself startled when people learn of his war record and say, as Americans often do to soldiers these days, “Thank you for your service.”

 “You never, ever heard that in World War II. And the reason is, everybody served,” he said.

 In Baroff’s view, today’s all-volunteer military has been robbed of the sense of shared sacrifice and national purpose that his generation enjoyed six decades ago. Today’s soldiers carry a heavier burden, he said, because the public has been disconnected from the universal responsibility and personal commitment required to fight and win wars.

 “For us, the war was over in a few years. The enemy surrendered and were no longer a threat,” he said. “For soldiers today, the war is never over; the enemy is never defeated.” The result, he added, is “a state of perpetual anxiety that the rest of the country doesn’t experience.”

 ………

 What most don’t realize is how frequently such gestures ring hollow.

 “So many people give you lip service and offer fake sympathy. Their sons and daughters aren’t in the military, so it’s not their war. It’s something that happens to other people,” said Phillip Ruiz, 46, a former Army staff sergeant in Tennessee who was wounded twice during three tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 Douglas Pearce, a former Army lieutenant who fought in Afghanistan and is now a marriage and family counselor in Nashville, said civilians seem to think they “can assuage their guilt with five seconds in the airport.”

 “What they’re saying is, ‘I’m glad you served so that I didn’t have to, and my kids won’t have to.‘”

(Emphasis mine)

Seriously, find something a bit more meaningful to say.

H/T Ed Kilgore at Washington Monthly.

Quote of the Day

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There’s a breed of pedigreed dolt endemic to Washington, D.C. They determine their opinions socially, not empirically; what “everybody knows” trumps facts any old day. Their notion of tough, hard-nosed realism invariably entails that other people should suffer, from the blithe imperialism that cheers on unnecessary wars to the ‘sensible centrism’ that insists that unnecessary cuts to the social safety net are absolutely imperative. (The occasional safely contrarian view offers some novelty and the gloss of independence without truly challenging the establishment framework.) They remain cheerfully cloistered from the effects of their pronouncements about what the less privileged should be doing (and should be having done to them).

—Batocchio at Hullabaloo

The is commenting specifically about the rush to war in Iraq, but it applies generally.

Read the rest.

Smart Political Move

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During the (quite disastrous for Labour) UK elections, Ed Millibrand was insistent on two big issues: He would not go into a coalition with the Scottish National Party (SNP), and he would oppose a referendum on Britain’s EU membership.

Both positions were big political losers, with Labour being basically turfed out in Scotland, and losing votes from a significant Euroskeptic constituency.

Ed is gone, and the acting Labour leader, Harriet Harman, has announced that the party will support the referendum, but campaign for a “No” vote:

Acting leader Harriet Harman has said Labour will now support plans for an EU referendum by the end of 2017.

 Ms Harman told the Sunday Times the change in position came after they “reflected on the conversations we had on doorsteps” during the election.

 The PM has pledged to renegotiate a “better deal” for the UK and hold an “in/out” referendum by the end of 2017.

 Ms Harman told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show the party would still campaign for the UK to stay in the EU.

 She said: “Whether we are in the European Union or not is a huge, important, constitutional, political, economic decision.”

 The Conservatives were bringing forward a bill to allow the referendum to happen, said Ms Harman, and Labour “wouldn’t succeed” in stopping it.

While she coaches this decision in terms of a lack of agency, this is actually a very politically savvy move.

The mainstream Tories (Conservatives) want to stay in the EU, because big business, particularly The City (London’s equivalent of Wall Street), because it makes doing business (and hiding income from Inland Revenue HM Revenue and Customs) much easier, and, particularly for the British FIRE sector.

As such I am sure that the reelected Prime Minister, David Cameron, is really not particularly eager to put Britain’s continued membership in the European Union up to a vote.

However, political realities forced Cameron to promise a referendum, because the loony right of his party was pressuring him, and because the even more right wing UKIP has been taking an increasing portion of what would have been Tory votes, which in the UK’s first past the post system, could prove problematic.

With Labour saying that they will not oppose a referendum, it removes one of the few excuses for Cameron to delay a vote on status, and regardless of what happens, this will not be good for him politically, because, even while he has promised a referendum, which necessarily will upset UK big business, he must also campaign against it, which would serve to strengthen UKIP.

I am not sure if Ms. Harmon intended for there to put the Conservative mainstream in this position, but they appear to be thoroughly skewered on the tines of Morton’s fork.

And Yes, the TTIP, in All Its Bee Killing Glory, Sucks Too

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The US, acting on behalf of Monsanto and its ilk, pressured the EU into revoking its common sense pesticide regulations using the TTIP to coerce regulatory forbearance:

EU moves to regulate hormone-damaging chemicals linked to cancer and male infertility were shelved following pressure from US trade officials over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) free trade deal, newly released documents show.

Draft EU criteria could have banned 31 pesticides containing endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs). But these were dumped amid fears of a trade backlash stoked by an aggressive US lobby push, access to information documents obtained by Pesticides Action Network (PAN) Europe show.

On 26 June 2013, a high-level delegation from the American Chambers of Commerce (AmCham) visited EU trade officials to insist that the bloc drop its planned criteria for identifying EDCs in favour of a new impact study.

Minutes of the meeting show commission officials pleading that “although they want the TTIP to be successful, they would not like to be seen as lowering the EU standards”.

The TTIP is a trade deal being agreed by the EU and US to remove barriers to commerce and promote free trade.

Responding to the EU officials, AmCham representatives “complained about the uselessness of creating categories and thus, lists” of prohibited substances, the minutes show.

The US trade representatives insisted that a risk-based approach be taken to regulation, and “emphasised the need for an impact assessment” instead.

On 2 July 2013, officials from the US Mission to Europe visited the EU to reinforce the message. Later that day, the secretary-general of the commission, Catherine Day, sent a letter to the environment department’s director Karl Falkenberg, telling him to stand down the draft criteria.

“We suggest that as other DGs [directorate-generals] have done, you consider making a joint single impact assessment to cover all the proposals,” Day wrote. “We do not think it is necessary to prepare a commission recommendation on the criteria to identify endocrine disrupting substances.”

The result was that legislation planned for 2014 was kicked back until at least 2016, despite estimated health costs of €150bn per year in Europe from endocrine-related illnesses such as IQ loss, obesity and cryptorchidism – a condition affecting the genitals of baby boys.

A month before the meeting, AmCham had warned the EU of “wide-reaching implications” if the draft criteria were approved. The trade body wanted an EU impact study to set looser thresholds for acceptable exposure to endocrines, based on a substance’s potency.

“We are worried to see that this decision, which is the source of many scientific debates, might be taken on political grounds, without first assessing what its impacts will be on the European market,” the chair of AmCham’s environment committee wrote in a letter to the commission.

These could be “dramatic” the letter said.

In a high-level internal note sent to the health commissioner, Tonio Borg, shortly afterwards, his departmental director-general warned that the EU’s endocrines policy “will have substantial impacts for the economy, agriculture and trade”.

The heavily redacted letter, sent a week before the EU’s plans were scrapped continued: “The US, Canada, and Brazil [have] already voiced concerns on the criteria which might lead to important repercussions on trade.”

The series of events was described as “incredible” by the the Green MEP Bas Eickhout. “These documents offer convincing evidence that TTIP not only presents a danger for the future lowering of European standards, but that this is happening as we speak,” he told the Guardian.

Even without a signed deal, it appears that the two big “Free Trade” deals being negotiated have already been used to subvert consumer and environmental safeguards.

Of course, this is precisely what Obama said wouldn’t happen, but I guess that he’s looking forward, not back.

Bob Menendez Shafts Barack Obama on TPP

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He managed to get an amendment in the Senate’s TPP bill, which has the effect of toughening human trafficking requirements of member countries, which means that Malaysia’s horrific human trafficking record would make the treaty ineligible for fast track:

Remember, passing Fast Track in the Senate was supposed to be the easy part. Not only did Fast Track get rejected on its first try — “Welcome aboard the S.S. Lame Duck, Mr. President!” — now we get this. Ryan Grim explains:

The Senate approved a bill to “fast-track” trade agreements negotiated by the president. The agreement will prevent Congress from amending or filibustering Obama’s controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. The TPP deal would have a hard time surviving without fast-track authority.
But a key crackdown on human trafficking survived the legislative jujitsu. The White House considers the provision a deal-breaker, as it would force one of the nations involved in the TPP talks — Malaysia — out of the agreement.

From the US State Department:

Malaysia (Tier 3 [the worst]) is a destination and, to a lesser extent, a source and transit country for men, women, and children subjected to forced labor and women and children subjected to sex trafficking. The overwhelming majority of trafficking victims are among the estimated two million documented and two million or more undocumented foreign workers in Malaysia.
Foreign workers typically migrate willingly to Malaysia from other countries in Asia—primarily Indonesia, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Nepal, Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam, India, Thailand, and Laos—in search of greater economic opportunities.

Here I pause to note that somebody decided that it would be a good idea for the US to take in the Rohingya, the Muslim boat people who have turned to traffickers to escape a slow motion Burmese genocide, after which the Malaysians offered temporary, one-year status to such Rohingya as actually reach their shores.

………

 Complicating any efforts to “fix” the bill, however, is the possibility of an alliance between feminist factions in the Democratic party, and Christianist factions among the Republicans, both of whom take strongly principled positions on human trafficking.

 Complicating the picture even more, when you think about it, is the potential for agita in 2016. Suppose Obama, very ironically, gets the anti-slavery provisions “fixed,” i.e. removed, and the bill passes in time. The campaign ads practically write themselves. “A vote for TPP is a vote for human trafficking.” “Why does Senator X support slavery?” Cue the ominous music. Cue pictures of skeletal women and children. Cue the die-ins on the trail. I’m sure campaign shops on both sides are practically drooling with joy, because the only way TPP will pass is with bipartisan support. Getting that amendment in there was GENIUS, and we’ll get to how that happened in a moment.

So what we are seeing here is a pissing contest between Menendez and Obama.

The time line is:

  • Menendez does his level best to submarine any potential nuclear deal with Iran, including politically attaching himself to Benyamin Netanyahu.
  • Menendez is indicted for corruption. (BTW, good luck getting a conviction under recent Supreme Court rulings)
  • Menendez inserts an amendment to Fast Track which basically excludes Malaysia from the treaty.

Note also the consequences of excluding Malaysia, the most populous Muslim majority state in the world the only sizable majority Muslim state in the TPP, so its exclusion would leave the rump state of Brunei (population 415,717) as the only majority Muslim nation in the agreement.

I cannot believe that I am actually on Menendez’ side on all of this, but the TPP is clearly bad news, as the TTIP with Europe, (more on that later) so to the degree that these treaties can be stopped, the better it is for everyone but the multinational business for whom this is a big government subsidy.

Fabulous!

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If there is a Western European country that I would not have expected to vote for same sex marriage, it is Ireland.

Once again, I am pleased to be proved wrong, as Ireland became the first nation to approve same sex marriage by referendum:

Ireland became the first nation to approve same-sex marriage by a popular vote, sweeping aside the opposition of the Roman Catholic Church in a resounding victory Saturday for the gay rights movement and placing the country at the vanguard of social change.

With the final ballots counted, the vote was 62 percent in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage, and 38 percent opposed.

The turnout was large — more than 60 percent of the 3.2 million eligible voters cast ballots, and only one district out of 43 voted the measure down. Cheers broke out among the crowd of supporters who had gathered in the courtyard of Dublin Castle when Returning Officer Riona Ni Fhlanghaile announced around 7 p.m. that the ballot had passed, 1,201,607 votes to 734,300.

Not long ago, the vote would have been unthinkable. Ireland decriminalized homosexuality only in 1993, the church dominates the education system, and abortion remains illegal except when a mother’s life is at risk. But the influence of the church has waned amid scandals in recent years, while attitudes, particularly among the young, have shifted.

This wasn’t just a victory, this was a blowout.

The Catholic Church needs to get with the program. If they get blown out in Ireland, in a plebiscite no less, they need to know that they have lost the war.

Rather ironically, at nearly the same time, Northern Ireland just killed same sex marriage:

Politicians in Northern Ireland will face intense pressure from LGBT rights campaigners to “catch up” with the rest of western Europe after the Irish Republic overwhelmingly backed same-sex marriage in a referendum.

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions will join Amnesty International and gay rights group the Rainbow Project to hold a mass rally in support of equal marriage rights on 13 June, while a legal test case has also been lodged with Belfast’s courts.

After Friday’s historic referendum, in which the Republic’s voters endorsed same-sex marriage by 2-1, Northern Ireland remains the last country in western Europe where LGBT couples are barred from getting married.

Attempts to legislate to allow gay marriage have been vetoed by the Democratic Unionist party and a majority of Ulster Unionists in the devolved Northern Ireland assembly at Stormont.

An ICTU spokesman said the region needed to catch up with the rest of democratic Europe – and in particular every other part of the UK. “In 1998 Northern Ireland became one of the most advanced places on earth for human rights. Section 75 of the Good Friday agreement dealt with human rights and enshrined the rights of every citizen to be treated equally in Northern Ireland,” he said.

“Since then Northern Ireland has slipped back in terms of the human rights agenda and is now isolated in the UK as the only place where a gay couple cannot get married. The rally will be held in solidarity with the gay community.”

Section 75 of the Good Friday agreement guarantees the right of every citizen to avail themselves of state services in the region. LGBT rights campaigners believe that these services include marriages in civil spaces such as council chambers.

Amnesty’s campaign director in Northern Ireland, Patrick Corrigan, has called for a mass turnout at the rally, which will start from Belfast’s Writers Square at 2.30pm. Corrigan said people in Northern Ireland should show they are “sick of living in a discriminatory backwater for gay people”.

Last month, a Sinn Féin motion on marriage equality fell after 47 Stormont assembly members voted in support while 49 unionists voted against. Even if there had been a small majority in favour, the DUP would have exercised a special veto drawn up under devolution.

So, we have the political wing of the IRA agreeing with Ian Paisley’s DUP.

I gotta think that this is more political posturing than anything else.

Basically, no one wants to be a first mover.

And so I Must Add Another to the List of They Who Must Not Be Named………

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The Stupid, it Burns Us!

I must add (thankfully former) Twitter “Hashtag activist” Suey Park, who face planted with her #CancelColbert tag about a year ago.

It started with ……… Hell, just watch the attached video.

Short version:

  • Football team owner and contemptible scumbag Dan Snyder, facing criticism for his team’s name, founds the “Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation” in a ploy that not even his own mother would believe.
  • Colbert makes joke about this.
  • Comedy Central tweets punchline bereft of context.
  • Ms. Park has a Twitter fit, despite never having seen the original joke, which goes viral.
  • Colbert answers back (He is actually very gentle to her and savage on the cable news coverage) in the attached video.
  • Ms. Park becomes a laughing stock.
  • Dirtbag misogynists sent threats of murder and rape to Ms. Park, and she gets doxxed.

We can all agree that nothing that Ms. Park did merited the threats against her person.

What is also clear that, even by the incredibly lame standards of “Twitter Hashtag Activists,” Suey Park squandered whatever credibility she once had: She has become a punchline to a very bad joke.

She has made some attempt to rehabilitate her reputation (see link), but, I don’t care about her reputation, or how she feels about herself, or how she might have learned from the experience.

Until she does something that affirmatively proves that her opinions have some insight beyond what could be generated with an ELIZA program, she goes on my list of They Who Must Not Be Named.

That is all.

Advertisement Octagon. Only One Shall Emerge Victorious!

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Coneheads


Brady Bunch

I really like these two ads that invoke classic TV, the Bradu Bunch and the the Coneheads from Saturday Night Live.

They are both brilliant.

Casting Danny Trejo as Marsha and Steve Buscemi as Jan Brady is genius, and their seamless integration into an existing scene is magnificent.

Conversely, the Coneheads commercial splices seamlessly into the already well known “Jake, from State Farm” ad.

I cannot decide which is the better exemplar of the classic TV based advertisement form.

As Nebraska Goes………

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The Nebraska legislature has overwhelmingly voted to abolish the death penalty:

The Nebraska Legislature on Wednesday voted, 32 to 15, to abolish the death penalty, setting up a final showdown between a bipartisan coalition that supported the bill and the Republican governor, who has promised to veto it. No conservative state has banned the death penalty since North Dakota did so in 1973.

If the bill is vetoed by Nebraska’s Republican governor, Pete Ricketts, a vote to override his veto could come as soon as Tuesday. Thirty votes are required to override.

The bill, which would replace lethal injection with life imprisonment, passed the unicameral Legislature on Wednesday after months of debate and lobbying on both sides, with conservative Republicans lining up in opposition to a group of Democrats and moderate Republicans who said they have come to oppose the death penalty for reasons that are moral, fiscal or religious.

Nebraska has not executed an inmate since 1997, leading some lawmakers to argue that the state has ended the death penalty in practice.

This is significant, because, well, it’s Nebraska.

Hopefully, this is a part of a trend.

The Most Incompetent Member of the Bush Administration

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I think that we have a winner, and despite a spirited competition, Richard Bruce Cheney has won the “most incompetent” crown:

Dick Cheney would like you to believe that he knows more about protecting the nation from terrorism than anyone else. But he actually knows less.

When presented with an actual terror threat — the one that turned into the 9/11 attacks — Cheney thought al Qaeda was bluffing.

No kidding. This is from The Great War Of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism, a new book by former acting CIA director Mike Morell:

The threat reporting continued [in the spring and summer of 2001] — other pieces were titled “Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent” and “Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks” — but I sensed some skepticism about it. The vice president one morning asked me whether all this threat reporting might not be deception on the part of al Qa‘ida — purposely designed to get our attention and to get us to needlessly expend resources in response.

UBL Threats Are Real. Take a minute and think about that. Think about what would have happened on the afternoon of September 11, 2001 if Americans had known that had been Cheney’s attitude just a few months before. Think about how, if he’d been a Democrat, that would have defined liberals as weak, cowardly children for the next 50 years.

So it’s not just that Cheney is cartoonishly evil, it’s that he’s monstrously incompetent; in fact, his monstrous incompetence is a large part of why he’s so cartoonishly evil. He was overwhelmingly powerful, but with no understanding of reality, and so blundered around the world strewing destruction wherever he went.

Dick Cheney initiated the privatization of key military functions as SecDef under Bush 1.

He ignored the threat of  al Qaeda.

His response to the attacks of September 11 was to gin up a war with Iraq, who was secular Arab enemy of Jihadists.

As White House Chief of Staff, he convinced Gerald Ford to dump Nelson Rockefeller as VP for his reelection bid, killing any chance at grabbing a portion of Black vote.  (In 1976, Jimmy Carter was viewed with some suspicion by elements of the Black community)

This is a guy who has failed upward throughout his career.

No wonder that  Harry Whittington who was shot in the face by Cheney, ended up apologizing to Cheney for his being shot in the face. 

It appears to be some sort of twisted Republican imperative.

Seriously, Is Anyone Surprised by This?

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In nature, parasites are associated with decreased success of the host, so it should come as no surprise that an IMF study shows that economic parasite, such as a bloated finance industry, also hinders economic success:

As the world has floundered in low growth post-crisis, with advanced economies still suffering with credit overhangs and hypertrophied, largely unreformed financial services sectors, it has become acceptable, even among Serious Economists, to question the logic that a bigger financial sector is necessarily better. Of course, the logic of “more finance, please” was never stated in those terms; it was presented in the voodoo of “financial deepening,” meaning, in layperson’s terms, that more access to more types of financial products and services would be a boon. For instance, one argument often made in favor of more robust financial services is that they allow for consumers to engage in “lifetime smoothing” of spending. That basically means if times are bad or an individual has a big investment they to make, he can borrow against future earnings. But we have seen how well that works in practice. Most people have an optimistic bias, so they will tend to underestimate how long it will take them to get back to their old level of income, assuming that even happens, which makes it too easy for them to rationalize borrowing rather than going into radical belt tightening ASAP. And we’ve seen, dramatically, on how college debt pushers get students to take on debt to “invest” in their education, when for many, the payoff never comes.

 Moreover, despite an enormous increase activity and widespread use of technology, costs of financial intermediation have increased, as Walter Turbewille shows, citing a study by Thomas Philippon:

But the recent IMF paper, Rethinking Financial Deepening: Stability and Growth in Emerging Markets, is particularly deadly. Even though it focused on the impact of financial development on growth in emerging markets, its authors clearly viewed the findings as germane to advanced economies. Their conclusion was that the growth benefits of financial deepening were positive only up to a certain point, and after that point, increased depth became a drag. But what is most surprising about the IMF paper is that the growth benefit of more complex and extensive banking systems topped out at a comparatively low level of size and sophistication. We’ve embedded the paper at the end of this post and strongly urge you to read it in full. (at link)

 The contribution of the IMF paper is that the authors developed a new index to do a comprehensive job of capturing financial activity. Previous work had tended to look either at the size and sophistication of financial institutions, or the depth and complexity of financial markets. The new index incorporates both aspects of financial activity, as well as incorporating access. The writers concede that their measure is still imperfect, but is an improvement over other approaches. They also stress that they are well aware of the issue of establishing that the relationship between the size and complexity of the financial sector is causal, and not a mere correlation:

Empirically, establishing causality from finance to economic growth has been a key challenge. King and Levine (1993) were the first to address this issue in a cross-country regression context. Their paper found that initial levels of financial depth—approximated by the size of the banking system relative to GDP—could predict subsequent growth rates over extended periods, even when controlling for other explanatory variables. Stock market depth was also incorporated later by Levine and Zervos (1998), with the finding that causality went from finance to growth. These results held up with further refinements of the approach, by using instrumental variables (Levine, Loayza, and Beck 2000). In the 2000s, the empirical work continued to evolve with the application of dynamic panel data techniques, using lagged values of the financial variables as instruments and controlling for other determinants of growth (Beck and Levine 2004). The present paper follows this last approach, using similar control variables and econometric techniques to ensure that the relationship is not one of simple correlations but of causality that goes from finance to growth.

This is the money chart:

I have always maintained that the financial industry should be restricted to the minimum size possible, because anything above the level required to bring the generate capital for the “real” economy is inherently parasitic.

It appears that the IMF agrees with me.

I Finally Have Something Nice to Say about Los Angeles

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Kudos to the “City of Angels” which has raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour, including tipped workers:

The nation’s second-largest city voted Tuesday to increase its minimum wage from $9 an hour to $15 an hour by 2020, in what is perhaps the most significant victory so far for labor groups and their allies who are engaged in a national push to raise the minimum wage.

The increase, which the City Council passed in a 14-to-1 vote, comes as workers across the country are rallying for higher wages and several large companies, including Facebook and Walmart, have moved to raise their lowest wages. Several other cities, including San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and Oakland, Calif., have already approved increases, and dozens more are considering doing the same. In 2014, a number of Republican-leaning states like Alaska and South Dakota also raised their state-level minimum wages by ballot initiative.

The effect is likely to be particularly strong in Los Angeles, where, according to some estimates, almost 50 percent of the city’s work force earns less than $15 an hour. Under the plan approved Tuesday, the minimum wage will rise over five years.

………

Even economists who support increasing the minimum wage say there is not enough historical data to predict the effect of a $15 minimum wage, an unprecedented increase. A wage increase to $12 an hour over the next few years would achieve about the same purchasing power as the minimum wage in the late 1960s, the most recent peak.

Many restaurant owners here aggressively fought the increase, saying they would be forced to cut as much as half of their staff. Unlike other states, California state law prohibits tipped employees from receiving lower than the minimum wage. The Council promised to study the potential effect of allowing restaurants to add a service charge to bills to meet the increased costs.

The restaurant owners can, to quote Bender Rodriguez, “bite my shiny metal ass.”

There is no justification to pay slave wages to your employees, and there is no reason for a wait person to have to tolerate bad behavior from a customer because they depend on tips for their livelihood.

If your business cannot make it if you have to pay your employees a fair wage, then your business should not make it, no saving throw.

If You Are a Guy and You Refuse to Go on Your Rescuing-Supermodels Adventure Because Charlize Theron Is Coming with You, You Really Need to Reconsider Your Commitment to Heterosexuality.

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Virginia Hey, “Warrior Woman”, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)


Charlize Theron, Furiosa, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

You may be aware that Australian director George Miller has done a reboot of his seminal 1979 film Mad Max.

What you may not be aware of is the fact that various members of the really small penis brigade, aka “Men’s Rights Advocates”, have called for a boycott of the film.

Over at Unfogged, a guest poster notes:

The new Mad Max movie may be the most guy movie ever made. The plot is literally Tom Hardy (Mad Max) and Charlize Theron (Furiosa) rescue scantily-clad supermodels. If you asked me when I was 15 to list movie ideas, the list would have gone something like: scantily-clad supermodels, 18 wheelers, guys getting shot, guys getting blown up, fist-fights on top of an 18 wheeler, guys with chainsaws, guys getting run over by 18 wheelers, guys with guitars that shoot fire, and cars crashing into 18 wheelers and blowing up. This list is basically the script for Mad Max: Fury Road. The only thing missing is a helicoper piloted by velociraptors crashing into an 18 wheeler. But there’s always the chance of a sequel.

He further notes that the this shows just how toxic the “Mens Rights” Movement is. Not only are they demandin “guy films”, they are demanding the exclusion of any strong women from the movie, even though the director, George Miller, has a long history of woman warriors in his films.

His closing statement says it all, “If you are a guy and you refuse to go on your rescuing-supermodels adventure because Charlize Theron is coming with you, you really need to reconsider your commitment to heterosexuality.”

That’s gonna leave a mark.

H/t Brad DeLong

This is a Good Rebuttal of Obama’s Pro TPP Arguments

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Michael Wessel, who has been deeply involved with trade deals, and who has had access to the classified draft text of the TPP, has basically called Barack Obama over his claims about the trade deal:

You need to tell me what’s wrong with this trade agreement, not one that was passed 25 years ago,” a frustrated President Barack Obama recently complained about criticisms of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). He’s right. The public criticisms of the TPP have been vague. That’s by design—anyone who has read the text of the agreement could be jailed for disclosing its contents. I’ve actually read the TPP text provided to the government’s own advisors, and I’ve given the president an earful about how this trade deal will damage this nation. But I can’t share my criticisms with you.

I can tell you that Elizabeth Warren is right about her criticism of the trade deal. We should be very concerned about what’s hidden in this trade deal—and particularly how the Obama administration is keeping information secret even from those of us who are supposed to provide advice.

So-called “cleared advisors” like me are prohibited from sharing publicly the criticisms we’ve lodged about specific proposals and approaches. The government has created a perfect Catch 22: The law prohibits us from talking about the specifics of what we’ve seen, allowing the president to criticize us for not being specific. Instead of simply admitting that he disagrees with me—and with many other cleared advisors—about the merits of the TPP, the president instead pretends that our specific, pointed criticisms don’t exist.

What I can tell you is that the administration is being unfair to those who are raising proper questions about the harms the TPP would do. To the administration, everyone who questions their approach is branded as a protectionist—or worse—dishonest. They broadly criticize organized labor, despite the fact that unions have been the primary force in America pushing for strong rules to promote opportunity and jobs. And they dismiss individuals like me who believe that, first and foremost, a trade agreement should promote the interests of domestic producers and their employees.

I’ve been deeply involved in trade policy for almost four decades. For 21 years, I worked for former Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt and handled all trade policy issues including “fast track,” the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization’s Uruguay Round, which is the largest trade agreement in history. I am also a consultant to various domestic producers and the United Steelworkers union, for whom I serve as a cleared advisor on two trade advisory committees. To top it off, I was a publicly acknowledged advisor to the Obama campaign in 2008.

………

The text of the TPP, like all trade deals, is a closely guarded secret. That fact makes a genuine public debate impossible and should make robust debate behind closed doors all the more essential. But the ability of TPP critics like me to point out the deal’s many failings is limited by the government’s surprising and unprecedented refusal to make revisions to the language in the TPP fully available to cleared advisors.

Bill Clinton didn’t operate like this. During the debate on NAFTA, as a cleared advisor for the Democratic leadership, I had a copy of the entire text in a safe next to my desk and regularly was briefed on the specifics of the negotiations, including counterproposals made by Mexico and Canada. During the TPP negotiations, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has never shared proposals being advanced by other TPP partners. Today’s consultations are, in many ways, much more restrictive than those under past administrations.

………

Only portions of the text have been provided, to be read under the watchful eye of a USTR official. Access, up until recently, was provided on secure web sites. But the government-run website does not contain the most-up-to-date information for cleared advisors. To get that information, we have to travel to certain government facilities and sign in to read the materials. Even then, the administration determines what we can and cannot review and, often, they provide carefully edited summaries rather than the actual underlying text, which is critical to really understanding the consequences of the agreement.

………

In an effort to diminish criticism, USTR is now letting cleared advisors review summaries of what the negotiators have done. In response to a question about when the full updated text will be made available, we’ve been told, “We are working on making them available as soon as possible.” That’s not the case overseas: Our trading partners have this text, but the government’s own cleared advisors, serving on statutorily-created advisory committees, are kept in the dark.

………

Senator Warren should be commended for her courage in standing up to the President, and Secretary Clinton for raising a note of caution, and I encourage all elected officials to raise these important questions. Working Americans can’t afford more failed trade agreements and trade policies.

Congress should refuse to pass fast track trade negotiating authority until the partnership between the branches, and the trust of the American people is restored. That will require a lot of fence mending and disclosure of exactly what the TPP will do. That begins by sharing the final text of the TPP with those of us who won’t simply rubber-stamp it.

(emphasis mine)

What might be useful here is an amendment to any fast track legislation that says that the full and final text of any agreement, along with all side agreements, must be made available to the public in full for some period of time (I would suggest 6 months, which is enough time for lawyers who make their money on gaming this sort of crap to develop loose lips) before it can be taken up by the Congress.

The British Have Their Own Version of the Cadillac Driving Welfare Queen

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One of the oft repeated claims in UK politics, are that there are families for whom three generations that have never worked. The quotes have been made by any number of politicians, most commonly Tories, but also Tony “Bush’s Poodle” Blaire.

It turns out that no one can find any evidence that even one such family ever existed:

This month I ran a workshop with a group of first year undergraduate sociology students at Teesside University (in the North East of England). Our students tend to be from working-class or lower-middle class backgrounds and often the first in their families to go to university. I’d been invited to give an insight into a ‘real life’ research project, and I began by asking for responses and thoughts about some quotations:

‘Behind the statistics lie households where three generations have never had a job’ (ex-British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, 1997).

 ‘…on some deprived estates…often three generations of the same family have never worked’ (Iain Duncan Smith, 2009; now British government Minister for Work and Pensions).

 ‘To reintroduce the culture of work in households where it may have been absent for generations’ (Universal Credit, Department of Work and Pensions, 2010; this is a document that introduces a very major overhaul of UK welfare payments).

 ‘…there are four generations of families where no-one has ever had a job’ (Chris Grayling, ex-Minister for Work and Pensions, 2011).


 The idea that there are families in the UK with three (or four, or five and even six have been claimed) generations where no one has ever had a job is a particularly powerful orthodoxy. It is often repeated, rarely questioned, becoming part of a taken for granted vernacular. I was struck by the students’ comments. One said, ‘well, it must be true if all these [people] are saying it’. Another felt the same because ‘they wouldn’t say it unless there was loads of data to back it up’. Simple ideas boldly spoken (and repeated) by people in authority can carry real weight.

 ………

But my colleagues and I are social scientists, so instead of relying on ‘personal observations’, Tracy Shildrick, Andy Furlong, Johann Roden, Rob Crow, and I began rigorous research to see if there really were families like this. We have continued thinking, analysing, writing about, and presenting the complexities of the research material that we gathered since then. The research generated other questions, but, unusually for a sociological study, we found a clear and unequivocal answer to this first question: the existence of families where ‘no one had worked for three generations’ is highly unlikely.

 We searched very hard to find such families. We chose two extremely deprived working-class neighbourhoods – in Glasgow and Middlesbrough, because we assumed that they were the sorts of places most likely to reveal this phenomenon. Despite deploying all the strategies and tactics we could think of (including financial inducements), we were unable to find any. This does not mean that they do not exist. Some people believe in fairies or Yetis, and one cannot prove they do not exist. We can say, however, that it is highly improbable that they do. Or, if they do, their numbers are infinitesimally small. Other research drew upon the best available secondary statistics and concluded that less than half of one per cent of all workless households in the UK might have two generations where no one had ever had a job. Households with three generations that have never worked are, logically, going to be far, far fewer in number than even this tiny fraction.

 This was, actually, a quite predictable conclusion. A little socio-economic history helps. How long is ‘three generations’? Maybe sixty years, so back to the 1950s, or earlier. The proposition is that there are families where no one has had a job since the 1950s. The UK welfare state has become tougher and tougher over this period, particularly in the last few years. We have very tight ‘conditionality rules’ and ‘activation tests’; recipients of unemployment benefits must provide evidence of their worthiness for these on a weekly basis. It is difficult to imagine a person being able to defraud the state for the whole of his/ her working life – and then his/ her son or daughter doing the same and then his/ her son or daughter after them, for sixty years.

So this family appears to never have existed, but that didn’t stop various people, including the Smiler (Blair) from using it on the stump.

To be fair to Ronald Reagan, (I f%$#ing cannot f%$#ing believe that I f%$#ing just said that) in his case, he was referring to one individual, Linda Taylor ((AKA Connie Walker, AKA Linda Bennett, AKA Linda Jones, AKA Connie Jarvis, AKA Martha Louise Miller, AKA Martha Louise White), who did use a number of aliases to defraud social welfare programs, though it appears this was only one of many criminal endeavors.

Ms. Taylor appeared to be a veritable criminality, with allegations of a lot of other crimes, including kidnapping, baby trafficking, and murder.