The national Chamber of Commerce (unlike the smaller, local groups who share that name) is the embodiment of everything wrong with a special interest group. It advocates policies that benefit only a small handful of people while hurting most Americans, and pours millions into fighting legislation to help American families, workers, and small businesses.
This is a particularly Orwellian bit of political theater, given that it is the private businesses the Chamber purports to represent that eliminated 8 million jobs in 2008 and 2009 and have managed to add a scant 600,000 since then. If Chamber President Tom Donohue wants to round up those responsible for the lack of job growth in this country, all he has to do is call a meeting of his board of directors.
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| Although the jobs haven’t returned, corporate profits surely have and, at $1.2 trillion annually, are now higher than they were at the height of the bubble. It turns out that companies have found ways to produce as much as they ever did, but with fewer workers. |
| The only surprise is that anyone is surprised by the lack of private-sector hiring. It is only in the world of Chamber of Commerce propaganda that businesses exist to create jobs. In the real world, businesses exist to create profits for shareholders, not jobs for workers. |
By the same token, however, it is more than a bit hypocritical for business leaders to pin the blame on the Obama administration for their own failure to create private-sector jobs, as they have been doing lately.
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There was a time, not long ago, when real business leaders encouraged these kind of public-private partnerships. If the Chamber of Commerce were as interested in creating jobs as it is in promoting its free-market ideology, it would hang a new message on its columned facade for the president to see:
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There’s been quite a few posts like this springing up around the Web the last few days, but as usual it’s Greg Sargent who pieces them together into a narrative. Ever since John Boehner accused Dems last week of “snuffing out the America that I grew up in,” people around the Web have taking stabs at defining the America of Boehner’s youth. |
* The Republican Party platform of 1956 called for “broadened coverage in unemployment insurance” and “better health protection for all our people.” It vowed to “continue vigorously to support the United Nations.” |
It pledged support for “progressive programs” to expand workers’ rights. It vowed an immigration policy that ensured that America would remain a “haven for oppresssed peoples.” |
* The Republican Party platform of 1960 hailed the GOP’s success in extending unemployment insurance. The GOP counted as an achievement its efforts to raise the Federal minimum wage. |
The platform hailed expanded Social Security coverage and pledged an aggressive Federal effort to help those struggling with health care costs (in those pre-Medicare days, the primary focus was on the elderly). It pledged to continue robust Federal intervention to preserve the environment. |
But as Mike Tomasky notes, the Republican Party of Boehner’s youth was fairly moderate and embraced Big Government spending — a far cry from today’s GOP. Contemporary conservatism was merely a gleam in Bill Buckley’s eye. If this is what Boehner is nostalgic for, that would be news indeed…
Read more at voices.washingtonpost.com |
First: what year is this, Bill Keller - 1995? I know the NYT longs for the days of endless stories about Bill Clinton & the First Penis, but this is ridiculous. Second: As Serwer smartly notes, Keller’s refusal to engage on the substance regarding the NYT’s embargo on the term “torture” leads to him accusing critics of doing - well, exactly what the NYT has been doing. It’s a good rule of thumb that anyone responding to a criticism by accusing someone else of enforcing “political correctness” is factually incorrect. That’s because if the actual facts of the criticism were in dispute, they’d dispute them. |
| Employing a misleading euphemism in order to avoid offending a side in a political dispute is the definition of “tendentious political correctness.”Read more at www.prospect.org |
It’s nice to see Krugman out making this case in such a straightforward manner. As I’ve repeatedly asked others - without getting a response - what jobs are the unemployed supposed to take right now?
But that was then. Today, American workers face the worst job market since the Great Depression, with five job seekers for every job opening, with the average spell of unemployment now at 35 weeks. Yet the Senate went home for the holiday weekend without extending benefits. How was that possible? |
The answer is that we’re facing a coalition of the heartless, the clueless and the confused. Nothing can be done about the first group, and probably not much about the second. But maybe it’s possible to clear up some of the confusion. |
But it’s an effect that is completely irrelevant to our current situation. When the economy is booming, and lack of sufficient willing workers is limiting growth, generous unemployment benefits may keep employment lower than it would have been otherwise. But as you may have noticed, right now the economy isn’t booming — again, there are five unemployed workers for every job opening. Cutting off benefits to the unemployed will make them even more desperate for work — but they can’t take jobs that aren’t there. |
Wait: there’s more. One main reason there aren’t enough jobs right now is weak consumer demand. Helping the unemployed, by putting money in the pockets of people who badly need it, helps support consumer spending. That’s why the Congressional Budget Office rates aid to the unemployed as a highly cost-effective form of economic stimulus. And unlike, say, large infrastructure projects, aid to the unemployed creates jobs quickly — while allowing that aid to lapse, which is what is happening right now, is a recipe for even weaker job growth, not in the distant future but over the next few months. Read more at www.nytimes.com |
Several people already flagged this piece, but it bears repeating - and Leonhardt sums it up brilliantly.
Mr. Bernanke also believes that the economy is growing “not fast enough,” as he recently put it. He has predicted that unemployment will remain high for years and that “a lot of people are going to be under financial stress.” |
Yet he has been unwilling to use his power to lift growth and reduce joblessness from near a 27-year high. Instead, Fed officials are expected to announce on Wednesday that they have left their policy unchanged, even if they acknowledge that the economy has recently weakened. |
In effect, Mr. Bernanke and his colleagues have decided to accept an all-but-certain downside — high unemployment, for years to come — rather than risk an even worse situation — a market panic, a spike in long-term interest rates and yet higher unemployment. As the last few years have shown, market sentiment can change unexpectedly and sharply. |
The main historical lesson of financial crises is that governments are usually too passive. They respond in dribs and drabs, as Japan did in the 1990s and Europe did in 2008. Or they remove support too quickly, as Franklin Roosevelt did in 1937, and then the economy struggles to escape its funk. |
Very smart stuff in here. From a policy perspective, it’s widespread and long-term unemployment that needs to be addressed first and foremost. From a politics perspective, it’s all about jobs - fix the high unemployment rate and the votes will follow. I don’t understand why Congress seems to be terrified of engaging the one course of action that makes sense from a policy and political perspective.
I know the president has a lot on his mind, but the No. 1 problem facing the U.S. continues to fester, and that problem is unemployment. |
Unemployment is crushing families and stifling the prospects of young people. Given that reality, President Obama’s take on the May numbers seemed oddly out of touch. “This report,” he said, “is a sign that our economy is getting stronger by the day.” |
The economy is sick, and all efforts to revive it that do not directly confront the staggering levels of joblessness are doomed. Even the meager job growth in the private sector last month was composed mostly of temporary work. Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, had the right take when he said, “These new data do not present a picture of a healthy private sector and offer nothing even closely resembling the job growth we need to dig us out of a very deep hole.” |
More than 15 million Americans are out of work, and nearly half have been jobless for six months or longer. New college graduates are having a terrible time finding work, and many are taking jobs that require only a high school education. Teachers are facing the worst employment market since the Depression. |
It’s impossible to overstate the threat that this crisis of unemployment poses to the well-being of the United States. With so many people out of work and so much of the rest of the population deeply in debt, where is the spending going to come from to power a true economic recovery? The deficit hawks are forecasting Armageddon, but how is anyone going to get a handle on the federal deficits if we don’t get millions of people back to work and paying taxes? |
There is no plan that I can see to get us out of this fix. Drastic cuts in government spending would only compound the crisis. State and local governments, for example, are shedding workers as we speak. Read more at www.nytimes.com |
So many lies, straw men, and distortions in one piece, and they all serve for Mitch Daniels’ self-aggrandizement. He never mentions the cost to Hoosiers of this lawsuit. He elides his administrations’ decisions to gamble state pensions on risky investments. And most importantly, there’s no mention of what would have happened if the lawsuit had succeeded - the money to repay Hoosiers would not have mysteriously appeared. We would have gotten even less back. June 10 will be a silent anniversary, but one worth noting by those alarmed at the past year’s assault on free institutions. It was last June 10 when the federal government tossed aside the option of proven, workable bankruptcy procedures in order to nationalize Chrysler on behalf of its union allies. |
The one effort to stop the Chrysler cramdown was launched by three Indiana pension funds. Believing they were making both a wise investment and a gesture supportive of a longtime state employer, Hoosier retired teachers and state policemen had purchased some $19 million in Chrysler’s secured debt. The market consensus at the time was that, at 43 cents to par, the bonds were well below their value if bankruptcy ultimately came. |
Bankruptcy came, all right, but in a new, extra-legal form run by the federal government. The United Auto Workers, who owned no interest in the company, were simply handed a 55% interest, a gift valued then at $4.5 billion. When no one else wanted to buy the firm, Fiat was given a 20% stake for free to take it over. After this looting, the legitimate creditors were told to be happy with the remnants. For Indiana’s retired teachers and state policemen, this amounted to 29 cents on the dollar, a loss of $6 million versus the purchase price and millions more below the expected value in a standard Chapter 11 proceeding. |
Aided by incensed counsel donating much of their time pro bono, Indiana returned to the Supreme Court with a slim hope of recovering its pensioners’ assets, reinstating traditional American property rights and making secured credit secure once more. It seemed to some an exercise in futility: The judge in the Coyotes case commented from the bench that the “poor pension manager from Indiana . . . was kind of like the gentlemen in Tiananmen Square when the tanks came rolling.” |
The nation is not safe from crony capitalism. In the past year we’ve experienced the nationalization of the student loan industry and the passage of national health-care and financial-services regulation, each of which is rife with new opportunities for government favoritism and preferential handouts to favored corporations like Chrysler. |
But thanks to a quiet correction by the Supreme Court—and a little Hoosier stubbornness—the rule of law has been re-established. The greatest benefits will accrue not to lenders and borrowers but to all those whose jobs are created because investors once again can trust that the money they’ve risked is safe from seizure by the state. Read more at www.wallstreetjournal.com |
Much ado about no new spending. | Megan McArdle has a post up saying that health-care reform is “already at least a hundred billion dollars in the hole.” That’s really not right, though it’s certainly true that the CBO’s estimate suggesting $115 billion in discretionary costs confused a lot of people. |
So that knocks out more than $86 billion of the $115 billion. What’s leftover is about $15 billion for administration and $10 billion in possible new discretionary spending. That spending may or may not happen, and if it does, it will need another vote in Congress, and it will have to be offset elsewhere in the budget. |
As Elmendorf writes at the bottom of his post, this is why the CBO doesn’t include discretionary spending numbers in their normal estimates. Discretionary spending is not “new spending that the bill has passed into law.” Most of it’s old spending that may or may not continue, and a bit of it is new spending that may or may not happen, but would need another vote and an offset.
Read more at voices.washingtonpost.com |
I honestly don’t know enough about Elena Kagan to form a real opinion about her nomination. Of the probable nominees, I don’t think he could have done better than Diane Wood. Greenwald has been a vocal critic of Elena Kagan, and while I can’t necessarily agree with him on that, I definitely agree on his analysis of Democratic cowardice on SCOTUS picks (dating back to Clinton). | The Right appoints people like John Roberts and Sam Alito, with long and clear records of what they believe because they’re eager to publicly defend their judicial philosophy and have the Court reflect their values. Beltway Democrats do the opposite: the last thing they want is to defend what progressives have always claimed is their worldview, either because they fear the debate or because they don’t really believe those things, so the path that enables them to avoid confrontation of ideas is always the most attractive, even if it risks moving the Court to the Right. |
| Why would the American public possibly embrace a set of beliefs when even its leading advocates are unwilling to publicly defend them and instead seek to avoid that debate at every turn?Read more at www.salon.com |
Lots of people have flagged Mark Lilla’s piece in the New York Review of Books, and with good reason. Lilla does an excellent job of looking at the big picture and long term trends, putting together pieces and a coherent narrative of American political history. But I find it astonishing that Lilla omits any mention of Nixon and Watergate in his piece. (Lilla also elides any mention of the assassinations of JFK, RFK, Dr. King, etc.)
Lilla writes that the decline of trust in government “is not a peculiarity of the United States and no one party or scandal is to blame.” But at multiple points in the piece, he dates the trends to the 1970s. It seems that if you’re going to write about all these trends of declining trust in institutions, you might want to write about some of the key betrayals of public trust by those institutions.
Despite the problems with his analysis, Lilla does do a good job of describing why this current “populism”, especially in the Tea Party incarnation, doesn’t fit with the populism we’ve seen in America in the past. | Just as obviously, though, the angry demonstrations and organizing campaigns have nothing to do with the archaic right–left battles that dragged on from the Sixties to the Nineties. The populist insurgency is being choreographed as an upsurge from below against just about anyone thought to be above, Democrats and Republicans alike. It was galvanized by three things: a financial collapse that robbed millions of their homes, jobs, and savings; the Obama administration’s decision to pursue health care reform despite the crisis; and personal animosity toward the President himself (racially tinged in some regions) stoked by the right-wing media.1 But the populist mood has been brewing for decades for reasons unrelated to all this.
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A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.
Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob.
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| The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.Read more at www.nybooks.com |
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