Month: September 2012

Ezra Klein’s Honesty

In an interesting piece about how Paul Ryan convinced people in Washington that he is a Serious and Deep Thinker, Alec MacGillis of The New Republic reports an incredible development in the self-identity of young Beltway pundit and reporter Ezra Klein. Klein has moved from ostensibly progressive blogger to a gig at The American Prospect to a column and blog at The Washington Post. He also is a regular guest on MSNBC and even occasionally fills in for progressive MSNBC hosts.

While Klein is considered an expert on healthcare policy and has proven himself a reliable mouthpiece for the Obama administration, there have been plenty of people (myself included) who have questioned whether he was actually liberal or someone seeking to climb the ladder of the Beltway centrist press elite. MacGillis finds and answer to that:

I talked to Klein shortly after the convention and asked whether he thought Ryan had used wonkery to cloak a rigid ideological agenda, partly by engaging with fellow policy geeks like himself. Klein demurred, saying that it should have been clear to everyone for some time now that Ryan is a “very, very ambitious politician who is also a very fluent policy wonk.” He disputed the premise that he had given Ryan bipartisan cover at a crucial point in the congressman’s career: “I don’t think of the blog as making an argument for liberalism. At this point in my life, I don’t really think of myself as a liberal. That’s not the project I’m part of, which is to let the facts take me where they do. That’s why I gave him better coverage when the numbers added up and less so when they didn’t.”

First, anyone who’s followed Paul Ryan’s career from the left has been pretty clear throughout: the numbers he uses don’t add up to the positions he takes. Paul Krugman and Dean Baker are two easy examples.

But more importantly, Klein is saying he’s not a liberal. Without making any normative judgment about what it means for someone who emerged from the progressive blogosphere to declare themselves no longer a liberal, I would hope that this means that liberal groups and liberal media outlets take Klein at his word and stop treating him like a liberal reporter. If MSNBC needs a substitute for one of their liberal news show hosts, they should turn to a self-identified liberal, not Klein. If a progressive advocacy group wants positive coverage from a sympathetic reporter, they should not count on Klein as a good liberal reporter. There are plenty of good, liberal reporters and opinion journalists out there – they should be supported by being given stories by liberal groups.

Hopefully Klein’s honesty leads to changes in how groups relate to him and how MSNBC views him on their roster of commentators.

Michael Lewis on Obama on Wall Street

From Politico’s Ben White:

Michael Lewis at a PEN@Bloomberg event: “It’s a very odd Presidency. It’s odd that the stock market has doubled and [Obama is] regarded as a socialist. It’s odd that given what [Obama] could have done to big Wall Street interests, and what he actually did, that he’s as reviled on Wall Street. … Obama has been in some ways their best friend – he could have really thrown the institutions to the wolves and he didn’t do it. And it cost him a lot of good will to the left.’

‘I was surprised how calm and moderate President Obama was [about the financial crisis]. And it was one of the first things we talked about … It didn’t end up in the piece, but [President Obama] basically said, as much as one would like some Old Testament vengeance, it’s not very useful in public policy. He wasn’t angry. He didn’t have an anger about the whole thing. He was just trying to figure out the best solution to how to handle this whole mess.’

I had assumed that after the Obama administration shepherded a 49 state robosigning settlement that cost the banks as close to nothing as realistically imaginable, the Wall Street cash would have gone rushing into his campaign coffers. The crimes and misdeeds connected to fraudulent mortgage origination, fraudulent securities sales, fraudulent foreclosure, forgery, perjury, and everything associated with robosigning could have, in a just world, put every one of these banks out of business. But Obama saved them from facing real consequences for their action, just as he pivoted Congressionally funded homeowner aid programs to function to “foam the runway” for banks to prevent them from going bust.

Given that Wall Street’s gambling and excesses and illegality could have (and likely should have) derailed his presidency before it even started, it’s shocking that President Obama was incapable of being angry about it. Anger may not be the best vehicle for crafting and maintaining public policy, but anger is what should compel public policy responses in situations like these. No, I can’t help but conclude that the President wasn’t angry because (as he’s said in the past) he doesn’t believe Wall Street did anything wrong. Thus he has been their friend and protector at a time when we needed a President to rail against their gambling and hold them to account for the damage they inflicted on our country.

Teachers are underpaid in Chicago, the US

A lot of the contrived outrage around the Chicago Teachers Union strike is around the critics’ false belief that the teachers are overpaid and greedy. You’ve probably heard that CTU teachers are paid an average of $70,000 and the union rejected a 16% pay raise.

Zaid Jilani has reported that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average pay for a Chicago teacher is only $56,720. And about rejecting that big raise, in fact “The district offered a cost-of-living raise of 2 percent a year for four years, which the union said was unacceptable — especially after Mayor Rahm Emanuel last year canceled a previously negotiated 4 percent raise.”

Jilani also reports that the teachers are fighting against generally bad conditions, including huge class size, crumbling schools with no libraries, no air conditioning, and limited access to the arts and music for students.

So in the midst of a lot of conservative misinformation about Chicago’s overpaid teachers, it’s worth noting, as Dean Baker does, that until very recently, we’d been lead to believe that salaries of $250,000 or even up to a million dollars a year were considered working class.

Since the Chicago school teachers went out on strike Monday, many political figures have tried to convince the public that their $70,000 average annual pay [sic] is excessive. This is peculiar, since many of the same people had been arguing that the families earning over $250,000, who would be subject to higher tax rates under President Obama’s tax proposal, are actually part of the struggling middle class. They now want to convince us that a household with two Chicago public school teachers, who together earn less than 60 percent of President Obama’s cutoff, have more money than they should.

Baker also gets specific, noting that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel made over $274,000 at an apparent no show job at Freddie Mac after he left the White House, while noted austerian Erskine Bowles made $335,000 at Morgan Stanley the year his investment bank had to be bailed out to prevent its failure.

While Chicago’s teachers are obviously underpaid in comparison to Freddie Mac’s Emanuel and Morgan Stanley’s Bowles, a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows American teachers are also very underpaid compared to their peers in the developed world.

The average primary-school teacher in the United States earns about 67 percent of the salary of a average college-educated worker in the United States. The comparable figure is 82 percent across the overall O.E.C.D. For teachers in lower secondary school (roughly the years Americans would call middle school), the ratio in the United States is 69 percent, compared to 85 percent across the O.E.C.D. The average upper secondary teacher earns 72 percent of the salary for the average college-educated worker in the United States, compared to 90 percent for the overall O.E.C.D.

American teachers, by the way, spend a lot more time teaching than do their counterparts in most other developed countries

One would think that if we wanted the US to be competitive with other countries in the developed world, we would want to have the best teachers, paid competitively with other countries’ teachers.

The experience for Chicago’s school children is not a good one, given the poor conditions they are asked to attempt to learn in. The Chicago Teachers Union is on strike to try to get guarantees from the school system to address these concerns and to make sure teachers have pay worthy of the important job of securing the future generations of American leaders.

Compared to the destructive economic actions of highly paid individuals like Rahm Emanuel and Erskine Bowles, it hardly seems controversial for Chicago’s teachers to be paid a fair wage, under a fair contract.