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How Far Will Putin Go?

The world is hardly at peace as this new century unfolds. Death and chaos in Syria, renewed sectarian bombings in Iraq, al Qaeda and the Taliban terrorizing in the name of religion and hatred of the West, rebel armies leaving uncounted dead in the hellholes of Africa. And now, just as the United States prepares to draw away from a Middle East written off as hopeless to deal with the rising territorial belligerence of China (and a psychotic North Korea), a new threat has arisen as Vladimir Putin decides that Russia must resurrect itself as a great power.

The patterns that will shape the 21st Century are being spread out before us, and their design is increasingly ugly. How things are turning out seems to mock us for celebrating an anticipated “peace dividend” in the ‘90s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Instead we left behind a 20th Century that resolved much less than we thought.

Speaking before European Union officials in Brussels, President Obama voiced a similar lament:

”Russia’s leadership is challenging truths that only a few weeks ago seemed self-evident, that in the 21st Century the borders of Europe cannot be re-drawn with force…That…would ignore the lessons that are written in the cemeteries of this continent. It would allow the old way of doing things to regain a foothold in this young century.”

We have ourselves to blame for much of Russia’s combativeness. When the Soviet Union came apart, the triumphalist attitude the U.S. adopted was disappointing and foolish. The United States, widely esteemed for its Marshall Plan, the enlightened policy that helped to rebuild a defeated Germany, this time put the screws to its former adversary, a policy analogous to the mistakes made after the First World War, when the Treaty of Versailles forced the reduction of Germany’s military, the destruction of its armaments, payment of reparations from bankrupt coffers, and dispersal of pieces of the country to others (Alsace-Lorraine, Sudetenland) — punitive measures that set the stage for a leader to come along who would rally its people to restore pride in their nation through conquest.

That is not unlike what we have helped to create with Mr. Putin. The U.S. and Europe took advantage of a weakened Russia after the disbanding of the Soviet Union to expand what had been the North Atlantic Treaty Organization well to the east. From the Russian viewpoint, the West has sought to surround Russia with NATO, which now comprises 28 countries, more than twice the original dozen, several having even defected from Russia’s counterpart, the Warsaw Pact, and a couple of them — Estonia and Latvia — right up against Russia’s northern borders, with a third, Lithuania, inches away. We then placed missile defenses in those eastern reaches, avowedly as a deterrent against Iran. Russia did not view them that way.

These senseless provocations by the Bushes and Clinton showed a remarkable ignorance of Russian paranoia, its historical fear of a cordon sanitaire, as a repeatedly invaded country (Napoleon, Hitler) that had by far the greatest loss of life in World War II. The western bully inspired in Putin an unyielding hatred for the United States that we heard in his speech that announced the annexation of Crimea to the country’s legislators and top officialdom:

“They cheated us again and again, made decisions behind our back, presenting us with completed facts…That’s the way it was with the expansion of NATO in the East, with the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders. They always told us the same thing: ‘Well, this doesn’t involve you.’”

Ukraine was the latest chapter. The U.S. and Europe meddling in Russia’s backyard, its “close abroad” sphere of influence, Kiev being the “the mother of Russian cities” where
Russia itself took root, was an outrage for Putin and his cohort — a further encirclement, this time a move up against Russia’s southwest. “They see it as an erosion of their buffer zone, a further Western incursion into their natural sphere of influence”, says Kathryn Stoner, a Russia expert at Stanford University. “It would be like Russia going to Mexico and saying to the Mexican president, we stand with you against the U.S.”. When we vied along with the European Union to woo Ukraine away from ties with Russia, that only confirmed that the West is what Vladimir Yakunin, an adviser to Putin and head of Russian Railways, called a “global financial oligarchy” that wants continued domination of the world economy at Russian expense. Another member of what might be called Russia’s neocons, Aleksandr Dugin,
said that “Anti-Americanism has become the main ideology, the main worldview among Russians. There will never be another ‘reset,’ ever.”

what’s next?

America’s concern is that Putin will not stop, that he will claim that ethnic Russians in other enclaves such as the Baltic states are threatened, that he will claw back pieces of the last century’s empire. Like a de Gaulle, he regards himself as the personification of Russia, destined to make history by restoring his country’s greatness. His decisive action in Crimea has caused his popularity to soar at home, stirring a nationalist pride that has eclipsed the shouts of “Putin is a thief” and “Russia Without Putin” by tens of thousands in December 2011 street protests after what was considered his rigged re-election.

For Crimea he cites the same arguments that NATO did to justify the independence of Kosovo to protect its population from Serbia’s infamous “ethnic cleansing”. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel called “shameful” Putin’s comparing the threat to Crimea’s Russians to NATO’s Kosovo intervention, which occurred only after years of actual atrocities. Such fabrications have shown that he can’t be trusted. There were no such threats. He then denied that the unmarked troops that invaded were Russian. The thousands of troops massed at the border of southeast Ukraine are there only for “exercises”, he and his generals claim, a curious choice of location in a nation of 6.6 million square miles. Most serious, he abrogated the Budapest Memorandum, signed by Russia, the United Kingdom and the U.S. in 1994 that guaranteed Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for its surrendering its nuclear weapons. Putin claimed that the ouster of the staggeringly corrupt Ukrainian president voided the pact, as if Yanukovych was Ukraine.

Who lost Crimea?

Like the drone of a Greek chorus telling the audience the back story of how the tragedy unfolded, politicians and pundits on the right want to make sure we know that it is Barack Obama’s weakness that led Vladimir Putin to expropriate Crimea and append it to Russia.

Never mind the sequence of events: Yanukovych committed his country to join Russia’s trade alliance, ditched the compact with the European Union that the public wanted, ignited months of rioting and burning in Maidan Square. The insurgents sent him fleeing, seized parliament, set up a new government absent representation of eastern Ukraine where ethnic Russians mostly live, then revoked a law that had allowed general use of the Russian language, and introduced a bill that would ban Russian from the media, with the neo-Nazi rightists wanting to
strip Russian speakers of Ukrainian citizenship.

For Putin this was an anti-Russian coup on its border. Events led him to make sure Crimea, long historically part of Russia, would return there and its 60% ethnic Russian population be repatriated. When Putin broke off pieces of Georgia, just as he didn’t give a thought to the aggressive George W. Bush (certified as non-weak by the war hawks even though he took no action), neither did he give a thought to Obama. Journal columnist Peggy Noonan got it right: “Mr. Putin didn’t go into Ukraine because of Mr. Obama. He just factored him in”.

Yet it became the settled consensus that Obama’s failure to launch cruise missiles against Syria’s al-Assad regime told Putin he could act with impunity. “When the leader of the world’s only superpower issues a military ultimatum and then blinks, others notice”, said The Wall Street Journal. (
Forgotten is that, unlike Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama lacked the support of the United Nations, usually reliable Britain, the American public, and a Congress that, after a long lapse, exerted its constitutional right to declare war and then refused Obama’s request. He would have been going into Syria entirely on his own. A vote for impeachment surely would have followed.)

manning up
The universal accusation that he is weak may now be causing Obama to take overly provocative actions, sending F-16s into Latvia and warships into the Black Sea as if to placate his critics. In the same speech quoted above Obama said,

“What we will do always is uphold our solemn obligation, our Article 5 duty to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our allies and in that promise we will never waver. NATO nations never stand alone.

No equivocation there.

The armchair warriors, leading from behind, are in full throat. William Kristol, publisher of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, has never
worn a uniform but tells us we must not allow our war-weariness to be an excuse for not “shouldering our responsibilities”.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page calls for a “renewed military deterrent”, which “does not mean a strike against Russia”; rather, just the sort of paranoia-inducing moves that could prod Russia to strike instead. We are exhorted to move “quickly to forward deploy”, “permanently stationing forces in Poland and Romania as well as the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania”, “troops in addition to planes and armor”, revive the “Bush-era missile defense installation in Eastern Europe” and “deploy ships from the Europe-based Sixth Fleet into the Black Sea”, thus directly confronting the Russian fleet at Sevastopol
in a closed-off body of water like scorpions in a bottle. How to start a war.

Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu now says Russia plans to use military bases in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua for its navy and to refuel strategic bombers. Tit for tat.

Patrick Buchanan, a conservative who once sought the Republican presidential nomination, regularly chastises America for its foreign entanglements at his website. He makes the point that, across the 45-year span of the Cold War, five U.S. presidents took no action against Russia for anything they did east of the Elbe River. They…

”ruled out force during the Berlin Blockade of 1948, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the smashing of Solidarity in Poland in 1981.”

But we are now well east of the Elbe. With NATO’s aggressive push eastward we have now guaranteed the security of the Baltic States smack on Russia’s border. Much like Crimea, they have substantial ethnic Russian populations and are just what Mr. Putin would like to re-possess in his drive to rebuild a Russian empire.

Having painted ourselves into that far corner, we need ask just how strong is NATO’s resolve, should that be Putin’s next step? We are watching European diffidence to even invoke economic sanctions, fearful of a Russian cut-off of natural gas on which Europe relies, and anxious about consequences to thousands of Euro-owned businesses set up in Russia over the last quarter century. And there’s this to consider: “In the United States, one man takes a decision on the basis of an executive order”, said Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski to journalists, “whereas in Europe…we need a consensus of 28 member states”. Well, not quite, but…

Given the awkwardness of a bloated NATO and its questionable military readiness, Putin may well be tempted to test Europe’s resolve in the Baltics. “The U.S. is from Mars and Europe is from Venus. Get used to it”, Sikorski added. Douglas Feith, a former under-secretary of defense, raised a discomfiting specter in a Journal op-ed. “The Russian leader could perceive a rare opportunity to wreck NATO”.

Mar 31 2014 | Posted in World | Read More »

Do Corporations Have Religious Rights?

A flock of companies — 84 says the Wall Street Journal — have sued the government arguing that for religious reasons they should not be required by the Affordable Care Act to provide insurance to their employees that includes coverage for contraceptives. The Supreme Court combined two such cases into one, jointly referred to as “Hobby Lobby”, and heard the arguments of both sides in late March with a ruling expected in June.

The owners of both family-held corporations in the combined case — Hobby Lobby, a chain of arts-and-crafts stores based in Oklahoma City, and Conestoga Wood Specialties, a Pennsylvania manufacturer of kitchen cabinet doors — are highly religious and offended that they should have to violate their religious principles by offering such insurance. Of the twenty government approved methods of contraception, they object to four that act, they say, as an abortifacient — a substance that induces abortion, such as the “morning after pill”, although that is taken with no knowledge of whether conception took place the night before.

Members of these families are of course free not to use the contraceptives themselves, and even free to proselytize their employees not to, but instead they believe they should have the right to impose their religious rules on their employees’ lives and deprive them of this benefit. “There’s no way we’re taking anybody’s rights away”, says David Green, CEO of Hobby Lobby. “It’s our rights that are being infringed upon”. A Wall Street Journal editorial calls this paternalism “the free exercise of religion”, as in the freedom of the few to impose their religious views on the many, evidently.

Most of the questioning by the conservative justices centered on 1993’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA, spoken of as “Rifra”). It was difficult to believe that the Court would go well off principle and lose itself in the misapplication of this particular law.

As background, the Court had decided in 1990 that Native Americans could be prosecuted for the use of peyote, a hallucinogen certain tribes use in the practice of their religion. The Court ruled that exceptions could not be made for religious practices when a law applied equally to everyone. An uproar over the government stepping on religious freedom led to passage of RFRA — 97 to 3 in the Senate, unanimous in the House, signed by President Clinton in 1993 — which set curbs on what the government could enforce. The law was to safeguard an individual’s right to free expression of religious beliefs. Congress certainly did not have corporations in mind.

corporate souls

First, if the Court — six of whom are Catholic — decides in favor of these litigants, they will be effectively expanding on their ruling in Citizens United that corporations are “persons” and should have many of the same rights as their human counterparts. The attorney for the plaintiffs, Paul Clement, has said just that: “The courts are very able to determine whether a corporation’s religious beliefs are sincere”. If the Court decides that corporations can have religious beliefs, it will have descended into idiocy.

Justice Sotomayor asked just how does a corporation practice religion? On the PBS NewsHour, Walter Dellinger, solicitor general under Clinton, expressed the fittingly sardonic view that a corporation is very unlikely to be able to establish that it has a conscience that is being violated or overridden or of “having a soul or being faced with damnation”. But there seems to be magical thinking in today’s Supreme Court.

the burden

FRFA says that a government action “shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless it is “the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling government interest”. The conservative justices’ sharp questioning of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, who argued for the government, showed a sympathetic tilt toward the corporations’ (i.e., the families’) “burden”. Little regard was paid to Verrilli’s emphasis on the burden on their employees, depriving them of benefits that other insurance buyers receive and affecting the over 28,000 employees of the two companies with the imposition of the families’ religious notions about conception. Why, asked Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, couldn’t the two corporations avoid the burden by paying an allowance to their employees with which to buy whatever insurance plan they might choose on the exchanges instead of impacting them with their beliefs?

the compelling interest

FRFA was intended to protect an individual’s practice of religion. Here the individual has become a corporation, and the conservative justices’ deference to the corporations’ religious sensitivities seemed to ignore the furthering of a “compelling government interest” — the prevention by contraceptives of unwanted pregnancies, 40% of which end in abortion.

That became evident when Justice Sotomayor asked, could not other employers object to other medical issues such as blood transfusions? Or, what about vaccinations, Justice Kagan added? Clement’s answer was that an employer who objected to coverage for vaccinations would likely be thwarted by RFRA’s “compelling government interest” in preventing the spread of disease. What about the government’s compelling interest in this case — the minimization of abortions? Clement’s answer and the conservative justices’ deference to the corporations’ religious sensitivities ignored it.

By having their corporations bring the suits, the families behind them seem unable or uninterested in seeing beyond their own self-preoccupation to the greater good. That their somehow religious connection to heading off pregnancy will lead to the true harm of abortion down the road somehow leaves them unperturbed.

Clement’s view is that a government claim to a compelling interest is void, given how many waivers the Obama administration has already granted to religiously affiliated organizations such as churches, Catholic hospitals and religious non-profits. As this was done by executive fiat, irrespective of what the Affordable Care Act law says, Clement is curiously accepting these extra-legal acts as justification for Hobby Lobby being granted the same privilege instead of the justifiable Republican outcry against Obama taking extravagant liberties with waivers. Here, as well, the Obama administration has disregarded the unequal treatment of these organizations’ multi-faith employees compared to those in other corporations.

The White House drew the line only at commercial businesses. Those in court got a hint at what might be to come in Chief Justice John Roberts’ musings that maybe exemptions from this healthcare law requirement could be granted only to closely-held businesses because, assuredly, public companies like Exxon wouldn’t profess religious convictions. That Justice Kagan had already predicted that such a ruling in Hobby Lobby’s favor would bring religious objectors “out of the woodwork” apparently did not register with Roberts.

Mar 30 2014 | Posted in Law | Read More »

Obamacare: Is It Here to Stay?

Big money conservatives are slated to spend record millions to effect a complete Republican takeover, first the Senate this year (the House is a given), then the presidency in 2016. For now, their primary weapon is an endless tirade against Obamacare, and it works — as just seen in the Florida special election for a vacant House seat that went to a Republican.

Debunking hard luck stories of people who tell of their Obamacare horror stories in television commmercials funded by organizations such as the Koch-brothers’ Americans for Prosperity have provided high sport for those journalists with the energy to track them down. Best known is Julie Boonstra of Michigan, a leukemia sufferer who says in a commercial that her treatment has become “unaffordable” and the Affordable Care Act has “jeopardized” her health. But The Washington Post followed up and found that Obamacare provided cheaper coverage for her continued treatment and with her same doctor. The Los Angeles Times
recounts a number of such stories and says “virtually every yarn promoted by Republicans or conservatives about people hurt by the Affordable Care Act has deflated like a pricked balloon on the merest examination”.

adhocable care act

President Obama has treated the Affordable Care Act as his personal license to do with as he pleases, issuing one after another decree to waive this or postpone that to make the healthcare law work, which has outraged Republicans. And we’ve yet to see a tally of what all this will cost.

Enrollment is falling well short of the target thanks largely to its disastrous launch in October at the hands of government techni-klutzes and less than hoped for enrollment by the millennial generation since. Five months after, 4.2 million had bought plans by the close of February compared to the goal of 7.1 million hoped for by the end-March sign-up deadline.

Conservatives’ biggest hope is that Obamacare will collapse of its own weight, that too few among the young will sign up causing dropout from soaring premiums for the rest, that Obama’s waivers will beggar the plan’s income stream. Marco Rubio wants to sabotage the law by blocking “risk corridor” payments whereby insurers are reimbursed by the government if their costs outrun revenue. That guarantee was a surprise item in a law that famously no one read.

But getting rid of Obamacare by other means is another matter. Its use in the election campaigns has no purpose other than to infuriate a public enough so that they check the boxes or pull the levers in the Republican column. To remind you of the obvious, even with total control of both houses of Congress, a vote to repeal would not surmount a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. And even if it could, it would — until January 2017, anyway — face Obama’s veto.

But even looking beyond, Obamacare is a done deal. Gradually, it could become well-liked. But even if not, even if it continues to score low in public opinion polls for years to come, a conservative move to scuttle the law would see a huge public uprising for the simple reason that they do not want to go through this upheaval all over again.

markets tell the story

What does the smart money have to say? An outfit called Motif Investing offers funds built around trends in the marketplace. It assembles baskets of up to 30 stocks per fund with each limited to a single concept: the future of caffeinated drinks is one fund, companies in 3D printing is another, Chinese solar a third, and so on.

Well, one of the funds is made up of stocks thought to do well if Obamacare succeeds. As reported by Bloomberg/BusinessWeek, it is made up of hospitals, generic drug makers, pharmacy-benefit managers, companies specializing in electronic medical records, etc. — all of which will see money flow from Obamacare.

Repeal Obamacare is another Motif fund. It is comprised of medical device makers who would see Obamacare’s 2.3% excise tax go away, assisted living businesses whose reduced payment schedule under Obamacare would rise again, and so forth.

How have the funds done so far? In the past 12 months Repeal Obamacare has posted a 13.8% return. The value of what we’ll call Success Obamacare has risen 46.9%.

But that’s less than half the story. What is startling is that 45 times more money has been placed in the Success fund than in the Repeal fund.

Faites vos jeux, mesdames et messieurs.

Mar 28 2014 | Posted in Healthcare | Read More »

New Republican Thinking Would Overhaul Safety Net

After gaining the majority in the House of Representatives in the 2010 election, Republican strategy has been to gridlock every Democratic initiative, enough to earn them the sobriquet of “The Party of No”.


But think tanks on the right and some of the more prominent figures in the Party have come to realize that simply accusing the left of “class warfare” every time the subject is raised will not quell the growing anger over income and wealth disparity and stranded mobility.

But their solution is certainly not to amplify current government programs. On its 50th anniversary, they point to Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” as a failure for treating the symptoms rather than the causes. It’s a point well taken. The conservative position is that the mix of welfare, food stamps, housing allowances, the minimum wage, Medicaid, etc. may help people but they do nothing to extricate them from the bottom stratum of society. All simply create a culture of dependency.

Outfits such as the American Enterprise Institute, and Party luminaries such as senators Mike Lee and Marco Rubio, and congressmen Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor, propose a fresh approach. House Republicans opened a campaign at the beginning of March for a total overhaul of social programs with a 204-page critique of federal anti-poverty efforts from House budget chief Ryan. He argues that scores of programs actually create a “poverty trap” that keeps people from getting ahead.

what works is work

The Republicans’ new ideas decidedly emphasize creating incentives for people to find work. Theirs is a widespread belief — despite an economy with far fewer jobs than people looking for them — that high unemployment is caused by people not trying hard enough to find jobs, a lethargy induced by too much money from government social programs. At the core of their proposal is the one social program they do like and want to expand, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). It fits their philosophy because only those who work are eligible for its benefits. Created in the 1970s, that program rewards low-income people by refunding taxes and paying them to stay in the workforce rather than dropping out. Democrats who chortle at Republican adoption of something that seems ripped from the socialist playbook need to be reminded that the EITC was begun under Republican President Ford, expanded twice by Reagan, and again by the first Bush. Reagan called it the “best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress”.

The EITC is heavily skewed toward persons or couples with children. The childless must have incomes about 60% less than those with children in order to qualify, and that for a much more meager benefit. In addition to increasing benefits, part of the Republican expansion plan would right this imbalance to make it more of a general poverty program than a child protection scheme.

So far the plan has only been advanced conceptually, as a challenge to Democratically favored policies. No one seems to be addressing the question of how much this would cost. And it would be costly, because for such a program to succeed, benefits would need to taper off very gradually as a recipient earns more. If too much of added earnings are offset by a drop-off in benefits, the work incentive at the core of the idea will collapse.

Entirely lacking in the conversation is any mention of what to do about those who are unable to find work when there is no work to be found no matter their effort.

As Republicans want all spending to be offset by savings elsewhere, presumably their plan would be funded by cutbacks of current social programs. No one is proposing that we eliminate the federal safety net, says the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol’s publication on the right, but “all believe it’s possible to dramatically shrink the number of Americans who rely on it”.

One casualty, if conservatives were to have their way, would doubtless be the minimum wage, to which they are adamantly hostile. Although over 30% lower than it was in the 1960s, there are those who argue for it to be reduced still further. With the subsidy of a broadened EITC, a person could accept a job at, say, $5 an hour or still less, thus entering the workforce and learning skills to equip them for higher paying jobs, goes the argument. The counter argument is that, in the absence of the minimum wage, employers would take advantage of a workforce that is paid a subsidy and drive wages still lower. The minimum wage applies a brakes to that downward spiral.

But in reaction to the Republican complaint that current safety net programs just pay the bills and do nothing to elevate people’s standing in life, Democrats would argue that just supplementing income so that people can accept penury wage jobs is stranding them in the very “poverty trap” that Paul Ryan says is the problem with liberal programs. Any Republican overhaul must go further.

21st century jobs

Job training is routinely included in the list of government tools for reducing unemployment, but when do we see reports of whether people are being trained for job categories that actually exist? A recent Wall Street Journal editorial said there is “widespread recognition that they do little good”, that four reports from the Government Accountability Office in the last few years concluded there are too many programs, too little accountability, no less than 47 programs in nine agencies, all overlapping with at least one other, and with employment outcomes that were either negligible or “tended to be small, inconclusive, or restricted to short-term impacts”. As for whether the government knows where the jobs are, retiring Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn has delved into job training in his state and found that culinary students wound up as funeral attendants, tour guides, baggage porters and telemarketers.

Instead of job training, Republicans would could press for the government to fund — through subsidy or tax credits — on-the-job apprenticeships, which by definition equip a candidate with a needed skill and work that graduates into a permanent job.

The same principal applies to the long-term unemployed. At the beginning of the year Republicans blocked continuance of 99-weeks of federal unemployment payments, but with nothing as replacement. A sensible law would be for businesses to earn a tax break for hiring those still jobless when the near-universal cutoff of 26 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits is reached. It would be law that stays on the books permanently to automatically take over when unemployment payments cease. Republican Sen. John Thune of South Dakota favors this idea and thinks the reward to businesses should be elimination of the employer portion of payroll taxes for a time — and we would add that the length of the tax waiver should be based on the length of time the person had been unemployed.

move and improve

It is often reported that jobs are available, but in locales where people are not. It is also equally often reported that there is no end of jobs, but Americans lack the skills to fill them.

As to the first, Thune thinks the employment problem would be eased if the government were to lend $10,000 to families to pay for them to move. David Brooks, a conservative columnist at the New York Times, says Americans have become steadily less mobile. In 1950, 20% moved in a given year. Now, just 12%. Between the 1980s and 2000s, mobility among young people dropped 41%. Holding many back is the money sunk in houses with mortgages that are underwater. Otherwise, says the job-search website monster.com, nearly three-quarters of job seekers say they would relocate for new work.

Brooks says “a big factor here is a loss in self-confidence. It takes faith to move”. So in addition to Thune’s loan, we would add a government data base that constantly reports not on job openings but on the general job market in the various industries everywhere in the country to help the unemployed discover where to go. Otherwise, people have no reliable way to judge.

That same monster.com data said that employers are not willing to hire people sight unseen, however. A segment on the PBS NewsHour offers a way how this could be remedied. The head of Fabric Images, a company in Elgin, Il, had found diplomas and grade point averages to be useless in evaluating job candidates. “What does an ‘A’ mean to an employer today? ‘I got an ‘A’ in math’. What does that mean? Nothing”. Instead he discovered WorkKeys, currently in use by over a thousand companies. It tests applicants with actual workplace scenarios to measure how well they can decipher charts, graphs and other visual information, convert ratios, measurements, make calculations across a variety of situations and understand memos and instructions. It identifies capable workers irrespective of whether or not they had good grades or even graduated high school. This method could be used remotely to spot someone in Charlotte as the perfect fit for a job in Boise, for example. Republican planners need to come up with specifics such as this to move beyond the conceptual.

As to the other problem — Americans lacking in skills — whichever party that intends to campaign on upward mobility should inform itself of the P-Tech high-school model, which is experimenting with making high school six years with a curriculum that places heavy emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) courses. Students emerge with an associate’s degree — and in pilot programs — a job. P-Tech — short for the clumsy “Pathways in Technology Early College High School” — is meant to confront a future in which Georgetown University estimates that two-thirds of job openings will require post-secondary education. IBM, for one, is setting up P-Tech schools rapidly and pledges to start every graduate in a $40,000 a year job — an immediate move into the middle class. But for the idea to scale beyond corporate sponsors, planners on the right or left need to think about funding those final two years.

the roadblock of block grants

Paul Ryan’s opus was released just as this is written. If it is only a critique of liberal programs and lacking in specifics such as we’ve outlined, we may still be left with generalities such as Sen. Rubio speaking of rolling all federal programs into one and the misplaced emphasis of him and others wanting the money to be given to the states as block grants for them to do with as they see fit.

This is the usual conservative mania for dismantling federal government involvement and returning everything to the states which will only serve to complicate what could be a sensible reform movement. Washington already has the mechanisms for national distribution of funds and programs. Whether Social Security payments, Medicare reimbursements, unemployment benefits — all flow smoothly and electronically into our bank accounts. Splintering the system into 50 states to satisfy conservative ideology, each with the wasteful costs of its own administrative bureaucracy, each designing data processing systems 50 times over, would be senselessly inefficient. And, as with Obamacare (have Rubio et al. forgotten already the difficulties states had with that?), each state system would have to reach into government data repositories anyway to determine income and eligibility. Moreover, atop the states there would still be the need for a federal oversight agency to audit all 50 states for fraud and proof that the money was spent on categories allowed by the block grant statutes, because, let’s remember, this is taxpayer money collected from all of us by the IRS and we will want an accounting.

progress

That Republicans are beginning to confront the problem of the hollowed out middle class and poverty level wages with sensible ideas is welcome. There’s always been the fond notion of conservatives that private charity, not government assistance, is how society should take care of the poor. Arthur Brooks, head of the most prominent conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, and another who wants the EITC expanded, points out that the $40 billion that Americans donate to human assistance organizations annually would give each person now receiving federal food aid a mere $847 a year. We might finally be rid of that.

Mar 20 2014 | Posted in Economy | Read More »

Minimum Wage Blocked, Obama Tries Overtime End Run

While arguments for and against an increase in the minimum wage rage back and forth — a debate “dumb as rocks”, Bloomberg/BusinessWeek calls it — President Obama’s offense turned to a different page in his playbook, directing the Labor Department to revise rules on overtime pay. The move would tighten who in the workforce can be called supervisory and therefore ineligible for overtime pay as well obstruct businesses who falsely classify workers to avoid paying them for added hours of work.

As for the minimum wage. the Republican rebuff of Obama’s call to “Give America a raise!”, by their refusing to consider an increase, hands Democrats a popular cause (73% percent of Americans, including 53% of registered Republicans, favored the wage hike in a January Pew Research poll) with which to counter the GOP’s assault on Obamacare in the coming congressional elections. The rude shock of the Florida special election in which a Republican former lobbyist edged past a well-known and well-financed ex-candidate for governor, largely due to a deluge of outside money running ads against the healthcare law, tells Democrats that accusing Republicans of their mean-spirited denial of a minimum wage increase may not be enough. Obama’s overtime reset adds to Democrats claim that they are looking out for the little guy. It is expected to benefit some 5 million workers.

the job loss kerfuffle
In February a report on the minimum wage by the Congressional Budget Office had already handed to Republicans a half-truth that sprung a full-court press in the media. They made straight for one statistic in the report and benched all others — the estimate by the CBO that the increase from $7.25 to $10.10 could result in a loss of 500,000 jobs.

“This report confirms what we’ve long known”, said House Speaker John Boehner. A chiding Wall Street Journal editorial said, “Now comes news that a higher minimum wage is splendid even if it throws half a million poor people out of work”.

One would never know from such trumpeting of that number by conservative politicians and commentators that the CBO also concluded that almost a million people would be lifted out of poverty, 16 million low wage workers would benefit from an increase, another 8 million currently paid above the minimum would probably see increases because of stepped wage structures in companies, and the aggregate of $31 billion added to paychecks — every dime of which would be spent by low-wage workers — would give a boost to the sluggish economy.

But there was more. The report went on to explain that CBO actually believed job losses would range from zero to 1 million, and the eventuality of any job losses at all was given only a 2/3rds chance of occurring. The CBO had simply settled on the midpoint of 500,000. A New York Times editorial called it “essentially the budget office’s way of saying it doesn’t really know what would happen”. The CBO hadn’t done its own research; they had compiled studies by others and had not given weight to the more recent research that has caused economists to come around to the view that job losses are minimal when wages are raised a reasonable amount.

The more recent studies expanded on the idea of two researchers at the Univ. of California Berkeley, David Card and Alan Krueger, to compare in their 1992 study employment data in adjacent counties in Pennsylvania and New Jersey before and after the latter state raised the minimum wage and the former did not. They found “no indication that the rise in the minimum wage reduced employment”. That study is heavily cited as a turning point in research on the subject. Since then, others who have replicated the approach around the country have reached the same conclusion.

A holdout is David Neumark of the University of California, Irvine. He says a higher minimum wage costs some low-skilled workers their jobs while helping those who keep them. Weighed against him, in a technique adopted from medicine, is the meta-study, where many small clinical trials are combined to produce consensus estimates. As “one of the most studied topics in all of economics”, the minimum wage’s impact on jobs is well suited to this form of analysis. The Center for Economic and Policy Research, which by our count crunched hundreds of studies, concluded “that the minimum wage has little or no discernible effect on the employment prospects of low-wage workers”. This chart — albeit from a site with an evident mission called raisetheminimumwage.com — shows a composite of 64 studies that coalesce around “zero impact on jobs”.

Accordingly, some 600 economists, a group including seven Nobel prize-winning economists and four former presidents of the American Economic Associations, signed a letter to the president and congressional leaders urging passage of the $10.10 floor, calling it “a much-needed boost to the earnings of low-wage workers”.

Worth mentioning is that America’s minimum wage is 27% of the U.S. average pay, a lower ratio than that of any other member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development except Mexico.

off the clock?

“Overtime’s a pretty simple idea”, said Obama in announcing his intentions. “If you have to work more, you should get paid more”. By changing the rules he means to inhibit what is thought to be the widespread practice by employers of avoiding paying for overtime by salaried workers using the ruse of classifying them as executive, administrative or professional personnel exempt from overtime pay as prescribed by law. As the president pointed out, for those low on the pay scale and depending on the degree of abuse, “this rule actually makes it possible for salaried workers to be paid less than the minimum wage” when their salary is divided by total hours .

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce (a pro-business advocacy group not connected to the government) and conservative politicians in Congress reacted angrily to the president again acting on his own, changing policy by executive order, although he has issued less executive orders than most as this table shows. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” said Daniel Mitchell, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, quoted by The New York Times, an odd choice of cliché inasmuch as that seems to be what businesses enjoy by not picking up the tab for extra time worked.

Obama is empowered to set overtime rules by the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, just as George W. Bush did when he revised the rules in 2004. Bush favored business by setting the bar low: any salaried employee making over $455 a week could not claim pay for overtime work. And Bush gave business owners extraordinary latitude to classify work. A supermarket employee who normally unpacked shipments but was made to spend 5% of hours on tallying inventory, say, could be classified entirely as “administrative” and denied overtime altogether.

President Obama is expected to set the cutoff much higher than $455 (which, had it been linked to inflation, would be $575 today), and will call for a much higher percentage of administrative work for an employee to be exempt from overtime pay.

missing the target?

An argument against the minimum wage’s existence is that it benefits people indiscriminately. Martin Feldstein, a Harvard professor and once economic adviser to Reagan, says it is “a crude policy that fails to distinguish between a young person who lives at home and a working mother who is the sole support of her family”. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former CBO chief who now heads his own conservative advocacy group, says 80% of minimum wage earners are not truly poor according to the Census Bureau. Many have better paid spouses; some 46% are teens or young adults; more than 1/3 of all minimum wage earners live with parents. So what is the minimum wage accomplishing? But researchers at Univ. of California Berkeley, their study funded by labor organizers, learned that only 23% of fast food workers are under the age of 19. But wait. Wasn’t there a study from summer 2012 that said 9 of 10 earning the minimum wage are over 20; more than a 3rd are married; 25% have children? It’s a subject that seems to prove the adage that statistics can be made to support whatever case one is making.

workers getting less

There may be strong political motivation in an election year to advance programs that appeal to lower income groups, but their plight is real. Workers got only 42.6% of gross domestic income in 2012, the lowest on record. Yet conservatives are against both of these programs to raise wages.

The view from the right is that, if there were no costly overtime pay rule, or if there were no minimum wage, if individuals could hire out at less than $7.25 an hour, more could find work, enter the labor force and learn new skills. That solution — essentially an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit &#0151 is covered in this article on this page.

subsidizing big business

Feldstein says the minimum wage is “in fact a hidden tax increase” on businesses that is passed on to consumers as higher prices. It is an oddly myopic view because it fails to see that below poverty-level wages result in the same. They force people onto the public assistance rolls with the result that taxpayers are subsidizing businesses that pay the minimum wage or close. A study conducted for the Center for American Progress found that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour would save taxpayers $4.6 billion in spending on food stamps. Researchers at Univ. of California at Berkeley calculated fast food workers alone drew upon nearly $7 billion of public assistance from taxpayers such as food stamps, public housing and Medicaid from 2007 to 2011. Given its size, McDonalds share alone is $1.2 billion a year. Taxpayers are effectively paying 20% of the company’s profits.

McDonalds came in for ridicule for a tutorial on its website titled “Practical Money Skills” that educates its employees how to budget and save money. First step, get a second job. The chain admitted that a family can’t live on its wages.

ah, but inflation!

As for the higher prices that Feldstein and most economists assume, hysteria can overtake reason as in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that asked, “Isn’t it obvious that, with a higher wage, McDonald’s $1 menu, for example, would cost $3, few would buy it, Mickey D would have less revenue”, etc. The writer believes a 40% wage increase to $10.10, and with payroll only part of fast food operating costs, would lead to prices 300% higher. (Doesn’t the Journal edit these op-ed pieces?)

Even in major retail chains with a significant labor component, wage increases can be absorbed without major price hikes just as in the past. Testimony to that is that the restaurant and retail chains have grown bigger than ever. This group of economists calculates that McDonalds would only need to raise the price of a Big Mac by five cents — a 1% increase — if the minimum wage were raised to $10.50 an hour. A study from Univ. of California Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education calculated that if Wal-Mart raised its average wage from $8.81 to $12.00 an hour, and passed on the cost to consumers, it would cost their average shopper an extra 46 cents per visit, amounting to $12.49 a year.

Opponents set up a straw man when they argue that neither the minimum wage nor overtime pay rules solve the problems of social mobility and income disparity. That’s not what proponents claim because neither are social programs. As with the original Fair Labor Standards Act, the intent is the protection of workers from exploitation, that an employer should not be allowed to usurp a worker’s time or benefit from a worker’s services while paying wages that keep an underclass in penury. If a business cannot survive other than by paying poverty-level wages, capitalism’s own precepts say that it should fail.

The night before Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, which required a 25¢ an hour minimum wage, he said in a radio fireside chat, “Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day…tell you…that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry”. Sounds kind of like today, doesn’t it?

Mar 15 2014 | Posted in Policy | Read More »

Russia Will Not Back Down, Say These Four Experts


Ukraine, the view south from Russia      Google Earth
Vladimir Putin has shown that nothing will stop him from annexing Crimea and the questions that remain are, how much further will he take this and how much further will we?

Not that he is a Russian expert, but David Brooks, who claims access to government insiders, said on the PBS “NewsHour” that he expects a serious escalation could happen and soon. (Brooks, the conservative columnist balancing the op-ed page at The New York Times also said Obama is doing a “superb” job in dealing with the crisis. That’s new and different.)

But a true and lifelong Russian scholar, Stephen Cohen of Princeton and New York University, had earlier taken that further. On Fareed Zakaria’s “GPS” show a week ago he said, “I think we’re two steps from a Cuban missile crisis and three steps from war with Russia for the first time”.

A week before that, we posted the following excerpts from Cohen and three other Russian experts — what might be called contrarian views in that they put forth the Russian position that saber-rattlers like John McCain and Lindsay Graham seem quite unaware of.

The foursome below have actual knowledge of Russia, the region and their history, and have tried to make Americans understand that, like any country, Russia has its own strategic and security interests. They are dismayed by Americans’ inability to see the world from any perspective other than their own. That’s worth listening to.

Jack Matlock is a former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union who served during the last four years before its break-up. He now publishes a blog where he has criticized “the hysterical language of some observers, bordering on the apocalyptic” that has arisen from the Ukraine imbroglio. “The view of most of the media, whether Russian or
Western, seems to be that one side or the other is going to ‘win’ or ‘lose’ Ukraine. I believe that is fundamentally mistaken” as how Ukraine should be viewed.

It is not Russian interference that has created Ukrainian disunity; the Ukrainian state was assembled by outsiders: some eastern portions of Poland and Czechoslovakia, were annexed by Stalin, and the largely Russian-speaking Crimea was transferred by Nikita Khrushchev. “Since all constituent parts of the USSR were ruled from Moscow, it seemed at the time a paper transfer of no practical significance” and Sevastopol, the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet, was already controlled by Moscow, not Kiev. Matlock makes the point that, “Up to then, the Crimea had been considered an integral part of Russia since Catherine ‘the Great’ conquered it in the 18th century”. He says the U.S. has followed policies anathema to Moscow, insensitive to the fact that…

”Russia, as any other country would be, is extremely sensitive about foreign military activity adjacent to its borders. It has signaled
repeatedly that it will stop at nothing to prevent NATO membership for Ukraine. (In fact, most Ukrainians do not want it.) Nevertheless, Ukrainian membership in NATO was an avowed objective of the Bush-Cheney administration and one that has not been categorically excluded by the Obama Administration.

Obama’s “warning” to Putin was ill-advised. Whatever slim hope that Moscow might avoid overt military intervention in Ukraine disappeared when Obama in effect threw down a gauntlet and challenged him. This was not just a mistake of political judgment — it was a failure to understand human psychology”.

Matlock calls out the U.S. for its hypocrisy concerning violations of sovereignty, reminding us that we invaded Panama to arrest Noriega, Grenada to protect American citizens even though they had not been disturbed, Iraq on spurious claims of weapons of mass destruction, and we now target people wherever we choose with drones. “For the U.S. to preach about respect for sovereignty and preservation of territorial integrity to a Russian president can seem a claim to special rights not allowed others”.

Jack Goldstone is a professor of public policy at George Mason University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has studied how rebellion and revolutions take shape. He faults the revolutionaries in Ukraine for not “assuring all Ukrainians, especially the Russian-speaking residents of the south and east, that the new government would vigorously protect the rights and standing of Ukrainian citizens everywhere”. Ditto for not assuring Russia that agreements covering military and naval bases in Crimea would continue to be honored. They could have said that…

”The new regime wished to negotiate economic and political agreements with BOTH the EU and Russia, to be a friend to both. That would have at least taken away any provocations and provided an entry to beginning three-party (Ukraine, Russia, EU) talks to protect Ukrainian sovereignty.

Instead the new government in Kiev — with a large number of extremist Ukrainian nationalists from the west given prominent ministerial portfolios — struck down the law protecting the use of the Russian language as a second official language in the country. They failed to take any actions to anticipate the inevitable actions of Russia to protect its crucial naval base at Sevastopol (Russia’s only warm-water naval outlet to the Mediterranean and Atlantic ocean).

He, too, chastises the European Union for evaluating events in Ukraine in terms of a “victory” or “loss” rather than focusing on averting conflict.

“Let us grant that Ukraine is crucial to Russia’s security interests, and that it would be valid and reasonable for a referendum to detach the Crimea and join it to Russia (claims of Crimea being an integral part of Ukraine are historically weak). Let us even grant that Putin’s actions to this point, if a bit overzealous, are a reasonable reflection of the strategic importance of Crimea to Russia and of the oversteps of the nationalist revolutionary regime in Kiev”.

Stephen Cohen, whom we’ve already introduced, had just before the Ukraine-Russia flare-up stirred up controversy with an article in The Nation that took the U.S. media to task for its grossly biased coverage of Sochi in the run-up to the winter games.

”The degradation of mainstream American press coverage of Russia, a country still vital to U.S. national security, has been under way for many years. If the recent tsunami of shamefully unprofessional and politically inflammatory articles in leading newspapers and magazines—particularly about the Sochi Olympics, Ukraine and, unfailingly, President Vladimir Putin—is an indication, this media malpractice is now pervasive and the new norm”.

Appearing on the PBS NewsHour shortly after, Cohen said, “What we’re watching today is the worst kind of history being made, the descent of a new Cold War divide between West and East in Europe, this time not in faraway Berlin, but right on Russia’s borders”.

The official version is that Putin is to blame; he did this. But it simply isn’t true. This began 20 years ago when Clinton began the movement of NATO toward Russia, a movement that’s continued. And even if we just go back to this November…when the protesters came into the streets in Ukraine, Putin said to Europe and Washington, why are you forcing Ukraine to choose between Russia and Europe? We’re prepared with Europe to do a kind of mini-Marshall Plan to bail Ukraine out. Let’s do it together. And that was refused by Washington and Brussels. And that refusal led to the situation today”.

America’s attitude, says Cohen, is that Russia has no claim to legitimate national interests abroad, not even a country that sits on its border. Would the U.S. say the same about its relations with Canada and Mexico? Like the others we quote, the central issue for Cohen is the provocative attempt by America and Europe to encircle Russia with NATO:

Three or four years ago, Putin made absolutely clear he had two red lines. One was in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. NATO and NATO influence couldn’t come there. The other was in Ukraine. We crossed both. You got a war in Georgia in 2008, and you have got today in Ukraine because we, the United States and Europe, crossed Putin’s red line”.

As for Russia’s ties to Ukraine? Tens of millions of Russians are married to Ukrainians. “You want to divide — put a new Iron Curtain or whatever you call it right through that biological reality? This is madness. It’s gone too far.

John Mearsheimer, a professor at the University of Chicago who works on strategic issues and is found at this website, also appeared on the NewsHour and opened with, “We don’t have really good options which is why we should have never gotten into this mess to begin with”. Again we have to cease our misguided obsession with NATO.

”Since the end of the Cold War, the United states and the West Europeans have been pushing NATO further and further eastward, and this just drives the Russians crazy. It’s what precipitated, in my opinion, the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia. And I think what’s going on here is that the Russians are basically saying…that there’s no way that they’re going to tolerate a situation where the United States installs a pro-western regime in Ukraine and then eventually brings Ukraine into NATO. Putin — and the Russians more generally — have been very clear on this.

Mearsheimer is amazed that America is so obtuse on the point, that while we did not engineer the coup in Ukraine, our encouragement to the rebel forces helped topple the government and our meddling is viewed as intolerable by Putin and Russia. Yet Americans are

“shocked by what’s happened. It’s quite clear that the White House and most experts in Washington have been shocked. Ukraine is a core strategic interest and the fact that most Americans don’t understand that is amazing to me.”

Mar 14 2014 | Posted in World | Read More »

Doubling Down on Citizens United?

Depending on how the Supreme Court soon rules in a case heard last October, the name “McCutcheon” may enter the political vocabulary to the same extent as we now speak of “Citizens United”. Shaun McCutcheon is CEO of an engineering firm in Birmingham, Alabama, that specializes in the mining industry, but he is more widely known in Republican circles as a generous campaign contributor.

McCutcheon wants to contribute still more, and the case he brought asks why an individual should not be allowed to give the current limit under federal law — $2,600 to a single candidate per year of the two-year federal election cycle — to any number of candidates. The law restricts an individual to giving $48,600 to all federal candidates and $74,600 in gifts to parties, non-profits and PACs (political action committees). If you ask how then could Sheldon Adelson have spent $98 million in the 2012 election, he presumably did so through his corporations, taking advantage of the Court’s Citizens United decision. That notorious Supreme Court ruling in 2010 said that corporations, unions and other organizations are “persons” under the law and, to help a candidate win an election, should therefore enjoy the free speech right — in the form of money — to donate however much they choose to PACs and other groupings as long as they have no direct connection to candidates.

McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission argues that, just as the limits were removed for corporations et al., shouldn’t a patriotic American — within the limit permitted to give to a single candidate — be free to donate to any number of office seekers? Shouldn’t that aggregate limit of $48,600 be eliminated? The argument was buttressed by a lower-court judge who agreed with the “possibility that Citizens United undermined the entire contribution limits scheme”. McCutcheon has said that he wants to give $1,776 each to so many Republican worthies that his total desired outlay would exceed the $48,600 limit. So he wants the Supreme Court to change the law.

A favorable decision at the Supreme Court would loosen the rules of 1976’s Buckley v. Valeo which put forth the controversial tenet that money equates to free speech and therefore spending from a candidate’s own bank account should not be limited. Contributions by others to a candidate should be limited, though, because the court’s majority said the government does have an interest in preventing the “appearance of corruption” where large contributions by an individual to a candidate suggest that a “quid quo pro” reward might be in the offing. That justified the government’s stepping in to curtail this newly discovered form of otherwise free speech in the instance of contributions given directly to a candidate.

A lower court calculated that without aggregate limits, a wealthy individual could contribute as much as $3,500,000 spread on every candidate, party, PAC, state committee and so on, all the while adhering to the $2,600 limit per candidate. This has inspired a fear that goes well beyond anxiety over more money pouring into elections from wealthy donors. The media is guessing that organizers could “leverage contributions from individuals into huge sums to support their campaigns”, which would seem to be what a candidate for office is free to do under today’s rules, or that removing the aggregate cap will lead to “a new system where candidates will solicit seven-figure contributions that are bundled through multiple campaign committees”. But what would be wrong with a seven-figure contribution made up of hundreds of donors contributing to a candidate within the individual $2,600 limit? Is the media speculating that this commingling of funds will lead to a candidate given more that the amount contributed in his or her name; if so wouldn’t the short-changed candidate howl? These imaginings earned the derision of Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito, the latter calling such scenarios “wild hypotheticals that are not obviously plausible.”

A greater worry is that the high court is in a process of chipping away all election spending controls and, just as Citizens United used a dispute over a corporate-funded movie to reach well beyond that complaint and to open the floodgates to unlimited spending in general by corporations and unions, might the Court have in mind in McCutcheon more than the Alabama businessman has asked? Why else would the Court have granted time in the October hearing to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s lawyer, whose brief asked the court to overturn Buckley v. Valeo altogether. That would mean allowing individuals to make unrestricted donations directly to candidates’ funds, unraveling the campaign finance system entirely.

Wealthy donors want that to happen. The PACs to which they can make unlimited contributions must pay higher rates for television advertising. Candidates enjoy the lowest rates on a television station’s rate card. If the big hitters were able to write checks straight to the candidates, their dollars would stretch further and pay for even more repetitions of the attack advertising the public so hates.

what corruption?

Justice Anthony Kennedy — the swing voter that puts the 5 in 5-to-4 decisions — wrote in his Citizens United opinion that “political speech cannot be limited based on a speaker’s wealth”, that the government’s interest in controlling such speech-by-checkbook is “limited to quid pro quo corruption” and thinks concerns for such corruption are overblown. He gave us a glimpse of just how remote from political reality a justice can become over long tenure when, in his opinion for Citizens United he wrote that because contributors “may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt”.

Kennedy should listen to Lawrence Lessig’s, a Harvard professor who described in a TED talk given a year ago the money raising process in Congress where they:

“spend between 30% and 70% of their time raising money to get back to Congress…and the question we need to ask is, what does it do to them, these humans, as they spend their time behind the telephone, calling people they’ve never met…As they do this, they develop a sixth sense, a constant awareness about how what they do might affect their ability to raise money…They constantly adjust their views…Leslie Byrne, a Democrat from Virginia, describes that when she went to Congress, she was told by a colleague, ‘Always lean to the green’”.

And the colleague wasn’t talking about the environment.

Nevertheless, perhaps inspired by these hints from Kennedy that corruption is not problematic, attorneys for the Institute for Justice, a non-profit that acknowledges “initial seed funding” and “generous” contributions from the Koch brothers and the Walton Family Foundation (Wal-Mart), filed an amicus brief in McCutcheon that seeks to do away with “appearance of corruption” as grounds for preventing unlimited “free speech” spending on candidates. And the brief goes further, citing many other laws where the government justifies its right to regulate by concern for an “appearance of corruption”, suggesting that there will be further attempts to undermine this criterion and eliminate the restraints of other laws. As example, should payments we classify as bribery be viewed simply as just plain business as usual?

If the Court deals with this question raised by McConnell’s lawyer’s amicus brief and decides that neither the actuality nor the appearance of corruption is a problem, then should not the justices also rule that there can therefore be no harm or stigma in releasing the names of contributors to non-profits and PACs since, with appearance of corruption gone, their money has nothing further in mind than to send good people to Washington.

We will soon discover whether the Court, tarred by the public’s reaction to their despised Citizens United verdict, will be contrite enough to reaffirm limits on spending directly to candidates in deference to the “appearance of corruption” principle, or whether the justices on the right end of the bench will use McCutcheon to bring about Citizens United times two in what some perceive — by the Court’s acceptance of the case — to be a concerted plan to unravel all campaign finance laws. If that happens this democracy will have been sold to those with deepest pockets.

Mar 7 2014 | Posted in Law | Read More »