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March 26, 2011

Today at the Prospect

  • Pema Levy writes that Elizabeth Taylor was just too confident, sexual and talented for her generation. And things haven't changed much today.
  • The Prospect gathers reactions to Geraldine Ferraro's death from around the web.
 
March 25, 2011

The Little Picture: Bob Herbert to Leave the NYT

bob-herbert1.jpg

Bob Herbert a columnist for The New York Times for nearly 20 years, is leaving the paper.

 

Scott Walker Ruins Everything

Jess Zimmerman at Grist has the lowdown on how Gov. Scott Walker ruins things for wind energy, too.

Energy developer Invenergy has twigged to the fact that Walker is a scumbag in general and an anti-environment scumbag in particular, and has pulled out of its plan to build a new large-scale wind farm in Wisconsin. The farm would have had 100 turbines, 150 megawatts, and enough to power about 40,000 homes at peak output. But thanks to Walker's bill to kneecap wind energy by imposing tight restrictions on where turbine farms can be built, Invenergy now thinks Wisconsin has an "absence of legislative stability," which is corporate for "run by a dick." Another 725 megawatts of planned wind installations from other developers -- and $1.8 million in investments into the state economy -- is also at risk.

One of the biggest problems with developing alternative energy in the U.S. is regulatory uncertainty, and it's one of the things that the federal government could actually fix by setting nationwide standards and policies. States go it alone, and it means that potential efforts are too vulnerable to the vagaries of local politics.

 

Blue North Carolina

According to Public Policy Polling, North Carolina is definitely "in play" for Obama 2012:

North Carolinians narrowly approve of the job Barack Obama is doing as President and as a result it appears he should once again be very competitive in the state in 2012. 48% of voters like the job he's doing to 46% who disapprove. The key to his solid numbers this month is that he's on positive ground with independents at a 46/43 spread.

This doesn't come as a big surprise. Republicans made gains in last year's midterm elections, but those were in spite of the state's rapidly changing demographics. From 2000 to 2010, North Carolina's population increased by 18.5 percent, to just over 9.5 million people. The state's African American population increased by 17.9 percent to roughly 2 million people, and the state's Latino population increased by 111.1 percent, to roughly 800,000 people. In total, North Carolina is 40 percent non-white, a huge increase from 2000. Moreover, the growing white population is concentrated in the eight-county "research triangle," home to North Carolina State University, Duke University, and UNC-Chapel Hill. These whites are more liberal than those in more rural parts of the state and supported Barack Obama in large numbers.

In other words, it's very possible -- if not likely -- that 2008 was the beginning of the end for Republican dominance in the Tar Heel State.

 

Poisonous Development in Green Cities

On Thursday, a hearing was held in San Francisco Superior Court to challenge an environmental impact report that found it safe for mega developer Lennar Corp. to build commercial housing on a former naval shipyard. The hearing came the same week that damning e-mails emerged showing that some local and federal officials may have colluded with the developer to cover up health risks associated with the controversial and long-troubled $8 billion project, which many people in the Bayview-Hunter’s Point neighborhood fear will ultimately price out what’s left of the city’s black population. From John Upton at The Bay Citizen:

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors approved much of the sprawling redevelopment plan last year after receiving assurances from federal and local officials that it was safe, despite toxic compounds, radioactive contamination and naturally occurring asbestos in swaths of the shuttered shipyard’s soil. A 75-acre outlying chunk of the project area was transferred to Lennar in 2005, but the construction of homes has not yet begun.

Work shutdowns occur when airborne asbestos levels at the construction site are unsafe. Lennar was fined $515,000 by air regulators in 2008 for engaging in practices that allowed dust to blanket surrounding neighborhoods.

“I’m sure you will also want to change my wording on how I portray the problems, lack of monitors, etc.,” San Francisco Department of Public Health official Amy Brownell told Lennar employees in an Oct. 13, 2006 email while preparing for a safety-related presentation. “Go ahead and change any way you want. I may change some of it back but I’m willing to read your versions.”

See more of the e-mails here.

Interestingly, the neighborhood began attracting black residents during WWII to work in the shipyard, which is where key components of the atomic bomb were first loaded onto the USS Indianapolis en route to Japan. After the war it was home to the Naval Radiological Defense Lab, which was then the military’s largest facility for applied nuclear research. The area was finally declared a Superfund cite in 1989, but despite federal law, little has been done to clean it up. The developer in question, who's already been sued by three of its former employees for punishing whistle-blowers, was reportedly being asked to finally finish the job.

Questions of redevelopment aside for a moment, it’s important to note that contaminants from this shipyard have been quite literally killing black folks for years. The Bayview district, which is over 60 percent black, has the highest asthma and cancer rates in the city. The lack of accountability and, in this case, corruption speaks volumes. Particularly because it's happening in one of the most green-conscious cities in a state with some of the strongest environmental protections in the country.

 

Freedom of Choice (But Not if You're Poor)

Grand_Moff_Tarkin.jpg

As we've seen, it's standard operating procedure for Republican governors to balance state budgets on the backs of the poor and working class. Insofar that there's anything to distinguish one governor from another, it's in the details: Wisconsin's Scott Walker wants to break unions and cut benefits, Florida's Rick Scott wants to flash Medicaid, and Michigan's Rick Snyder wants to impose martial law. Rinku Sen reports:

Last week, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed the Local Government and School District Fiscal Accountability Act. Now he can declare any city or district in financial emergency, appoint an emergency manager (at county, city, district or township level) and give that person the power to control budgets, sell off assets, bypass city councils and boards of education, take over school systems, de-certify pubic unions, and even to dissolve the city itself as an entity. This is corporate martial law—it won’t be the military taking over, but business interests that constitute an authoritarian regime.

With this law, Snyder has effectively transformed himself into the Grand Moff of Michigan; as the editors of Central Michigan Life, note, "There is nothing stopping Snyder from declaring financial emergencies in municipalities whose officials he has a problem with, appointing his friends from corporate circles as the emergency managers who would then run the municipality in the way most profitable to themselves."

I can't help but notice the racial dimensions of this policy, especially in light of the GOP attempt to "Southernize" the economies of the Midwest and Rust Belt. As Sen points out, Snyder has targeted low-income and majority-black cities for "financial emergency" status, effectively stripping them of their right to self-governance. I'm not surprised that this power grab will most harm the least well-off, but it does sound uncomfortably similar to governance regimes in the Jim Crow South, where white officials blocked blacks and other minorities from positions of political power and used their near dictatorial powers to break unions, defund (black) public schools, and allow wealthy interests to run roughshod over the area.

Of course, given Snyder's Tea Party sympathies, this attack on democratic self-governance might actually just be a new kind of "freedom" that I don't understand.

 

Today at the Prospect

  • Adam Serwer says Gov. Tim Pawlenty's effort to expand Muslim homeownership could hurt him in the GOP primary.
  • Veronica Beebe interviews M. Gregg Bloche, an expert in health policy and author of The Hippocratic Myth, about our current health-care system and the future of patient care.

 

Child Labor vs. Tuna Fish

Today is the 100-year anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Filmmaker Harry Hanbury produced an amazing video for the National Consumers League that tells the story of the fire and how shockingly little progress we’ve made since then to protect workers in America.

Examples of our cockeyed priorities from the film:

A violation of the South Pacific Tuna Act … can be a $350,000 fine. If a dairy refuses to contribute to the fund that all dairies put into to promote milk and dairy products, the Agriculture Department can fine them $150,000. But if a worker dies, $7,000 is the maximum citation.

Lately, as I’ve been going around defending unions, I’ve heard from a number of critics that the United States no longer needs unions because we now have worker-safety protections, fewer workplace accidents, etc.

First of all, that argument is as ridiculous as saying that because, thanks to seat belts, we have fewer deaths in car crashes than 40 years ago, we don’t need seat belts or seat-belt laws anymore.

Second, the suggestion that the work of unions is done because worker safety is now so hallowed ignores the raw facts surrounding us in our economy today.

Writing for TAP, Nancy Goldstein cites the famous “revelation” by an executive at Harley Davidson that "because of high unemployment, management is using its leverage to get more hours out of workers."

Well at least there’s no more child labor, right? Uh, not exactly. Again, from the film:

There are between 400,000 and 500,000 children out there working in the fields. Under current U.S. law, children as young as 12 years old are allowed to work in agriculture with unlimited hours as long as it’s outside of school.

Some of the kids apparently use machetes and chainsaws. Here. In the United States. Think about that next time you take a bite of lettuce.

The film doesn’t say so, but it seems like if you put two and two together, then one workplace safety fine involving the death of one of these kids working in agriculture might literally amount to less than the fine for violating the Tuna Act.

On so many levels, a full 100 years after the birth of the modern worker-safety movement, we should be appalled.

 

The American Tax System, Brought to You By G.E.

If you haven't read The New York Times' lengthy investigation of how America's largest corporation, General Electric, avoids paying taxes, you ought to take a look, because it's a remarkable story. As the article says, "regulatory filings show that in the last five years, G.E. has accumulated $26 billion in American profits, and received a net tax benefit from the I.R.S. of $4.1 billion. How do they do it? In two ways: they have a large, skilled, and creative tax department whose job is to ferret out every loophole they can exploit; and they have a huge lobbying operation, which enables them to rewrite the tax laws to their benefit. Here's their lobbying data from the Center for Responsive Politics:

GE lobbying.jpg

That's a lot of money spent on lobbying (over $39 million in 2010 alone), but for a company like GE, lobbying is just about the most lucrative investment they can make:

By the time the measure — the American Jobs Creation Act — was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2004, it contained more than $13 billion a year in tax breaks for corporations, many very beneficial to G.E. One provision allowed companies to defer taxes on overseas profits from leasing planes to airlines. It was so generous — and so tailored to G.E. and a handful of other companies — that staff members on the House Ways and Means Committee publicly complained that G.E. would reap “an overwhelming percentage” of the estimated $100 million in annual tax savings.

According to its 2007 regulatory filing, the company saved more than $1 billion in American taxes because of that law in the three years after it was enacted.

By 2008, however, concern over the growing cost of overseas tax loopholes put G.E. and other corporations on the defensive. With Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, momentum was building to let the active financing exception expire. Mr. Rangel of the Ways and Means Committee indicated that he favored letting it end and directing the new revenue — an estimated $4 billion a year — to other priorities.

G.E. pushed back. In addition to the $18 million allocated to its in-house lobbying department, the company spent more than $3 million in 2008 on lobbying firms assigned to the task.

Mr. Rangel dropped his opposition to the tax break.

There's some hope that in a second Obama term, we might take on comprehensive tax reform, which could, among other things, lower the corporate tax rate while eliminating these kinds of loopholes. I'd like to be optimistic about the prospects, but the problem is that a lot of very powerful companies like GE like the tax system just the way it is: absurdly complex, impossible for almost everyone (even, or perhaps especially, lawmakers themselves) to understand, and riven with opportunities ruthless tax lawyers can exploit. They will work very hard to make sure tax reform doesn't happen. After all, they're the ones who helped make the system what it is, and it sure works for them.

 

New York Millionaires Heart Taxes

Wealthy New Yorkers are asking Gov. Andrew Cuomo to end a $5 billion tax break for the state's wealthiest residents and to stop cutting the budget, which includes a $9 billion cut to education and other social services programs.

One signatory told Julie Shapiro of DNAinfo:

"This is what is decent and sensible as part of the social contract," [Donald] Shaffer said in a phone interview Thursday. "We've done very well in our society, and we should be happy to see to it that others who require public services are not short-changed."

There are a host of reasons New York City is probably more progressive than the rest of the country. But the primary one, and one of the reasons I bet Shaffer is so willing to give more to the state, is that the well-off see the less fortunate all the time. Even if you have a driver ready to whisk you anywhere you want in your town car, it's impossible to escape the street-level jumble of humanity that is New York. You would have to work really hard to spend any time there and not meet someone whose background, race, gender orientation, or working conditions weren't radically different from your own.

Understanding the social contract becomes really easy, then. Well-off New Yorkers understand how deeply their fates are entwined with everyone else in the city. And they understand that a millionaire's tax that benefits everyone else benefits them, too.

 

How Concern Over Media "Bias" Warps Judgment

Conor Friedersdorf calls on the right to police their media outlets and call out slander and lies, but rightfully notes that critics fail to realize how fundamental a shift this would be for conservatives:

I’d love to see more folks in the conservative movement adopt Rubin’s attitude. But they won’t. One reason is that it’s difficult to condemn Beck in isolation. Acknowledging that his show is indefensible -- that’s the core of her critique -- means confronting the fact that Fox News under Roger Ailes knowingly broadcasts factually inaccurate and egregiously misleading nonsense every day. How many conservatives are willing to stipulate that?

It also means departing from the conservative movement’s standard approach to its entertainers: It’s verboten to criticize anyone on “your own side” in an ideological conflict many see as binary.

I'd put that last sentence differently. It's not so much that conservatives assiduously stick by Reagan's 11th Commandment, refusing to criticize each other. It's that conservative media -- going all the way back to National Review -- was conceived as an alternative to pervasive liberal bias in American institutions. But the thing about fixating on bias is that it's a woefully inadequate criticism. If you're a conservative and you read something in The New York Times you agree with, you're unlikely to think the story the product of liberal bias. But if you disagree, well you're not surprised, because, you know, bias skewed the story. In short, ideology comes first; facts come second.

And worse, you run the risk of becoming a hack. As Friedersdorf writes, whatever the editors of National Review's private concerns over Glenn Beck's behavior may be, they preside over a magazine that publishes Andrew McCarthy. I can understand, from the perspective of self-interest, not wanting to become a critic of Roger Ailes and his Republican propaganda network -- they're powerful. But a writer few outside of the movement have heard of who obsesses over fantastical worldwide jihad? I can only conclude they are persuaded by his theories.

So I'm less concerned about the "poisonous" nature of our political discourse than I am with the fact that one faction has taken over an entire political party and promoted cranks, bigots, liars and hucksters in an effort to acquire power. Genuine political disagreement has been replaced by a daily dose of what craziness is emanating from Michele Bachmann, and that's hardly a productive use of the left's time, to say nothing of the United States as a whole.

 

Community Broadband Moves Ahead, Despite Obstacles

community broadband.jpg

In a new report, the Institute for Self-Reliance tells us that community broadband, in which local municipalities run their own cable to deliver Internet service to their citizens, is spreading, as you can see in the map above (the interactive version is available here).

This is happening despite the concerted efforts of companies like TimeWarner, Comcast, and AT&T, which have moved aggressively to stop community Internet projects even in places they don't serve because there isn't enough money in it. In 18 states, the telecom companies have used their lobbying muscle to get laws passed making it difficult or outright illegal for municipalities to start their own broadband services, essentially outlawing competition. And since cable service is so monopolistic within geographic areas, that leaves lots of people with one choice -- the local cable company -- for high-speed service. The report tells one story, about Kutztown, the only city in Pennsylvania with a community broadband service:

Kutztown’s Hometown Utilicom is among the oldest FTTH [fiber to the home] networks in the US. In addition to cutting telecom expenses for the City, the network has saved residents more than $1.5 million due to both its lower rates and the lower prices charged by the incumbent cable company in response to competitive pressure. Shortly after the Governor gave Kutztown an award for their network, he signed a bill ensuring no other community would be able to duplicate it. While not an outright prohibition, the bill has made it all but impossible for communities to invest in citywide networks, decreasing broadband competition in the state.

That governor, by the way, was a Democrat, Ed Rendell. But it's Republican legislators who are most receptive to the telecom lobbyists' pitch. You'll be shocked to learn that newly powerful Republican majorities in state legislatures are trying to crush community broadband wherever they can. (h/t Ars Technica)

 
March 24, 2011

The Little Picture: Elizabeth Taylor

liztaylor.jpg

Elizabeth Taylor died yesterday at the age of 79. Here she is in 2000, after receiving the honour of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire from Britain's Queen Elizabeth II at a ceremony held at London's Buckingham Palace. Her death, unfortunately, hasn't saved her from sexism; obituaries are nearly as much about certain aspects of her personal life as her professional career.

(AP Photo/Sinead Lynch/The Times, London/WPA pool)

 

Why America Needs Better History Education

John Stossel has never been mistaken for an intelligent man, so it's no surprise that he would say something like this:

John Stossel on Fox: "Why is there a Bureau of Indian Affairs? ... No group in America has been more helped by the government than the American Indians."

Obviously, this is only true if you ignore the century-long genocidal war pursued against the various Native American tribes. Of course, as someone consumed by his narrow, right-wing ideology, it's no surprise that Stossel didn't think of that complication.

Relatedly, you can easily imagine this coming from various John Stossel-like figures throughout American history. For example, "Why is there a Bureau of Refugees, Freedman and Abandoned Lands? No group in America has been more helped by the government than the freed slaves." Try it for yourself! Simply imagine a historically wronged group, and -- on the basis of a flawed and short-sighted view of the country's history -- complain about their representation in the federal government.

 

Today at the Prospect

  • Nancy Goldstein writes that in this time of corporate-led anti-union and anti-regulation fervor, we need to hold firm when it comes to defending workers' rights.
  • Ben Adler says that after years of browbeating, conservatives have succeeded in convincing Americans that Social Security is in trouble. But that doesn't mean it is.
  • Gershom Gorenberg reports on an outbreak of violence in Jerusalem.

 

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