Lehman vs UAW

In a diary at Daily Kos, 4workers makes a great point on the differences between how union and white collar financial jobs are being talked about during the economic crisis:

When Lehman Brothers failed, I didn’t hear talk about how the employees (not the execs, but the employees)there made too much, needed to accept less, didn’t need these “legacy benefits” like health care. And I’ll bet a lot of them made more than the average auto worker.

But now that it’s blue collar auto workers in trouble, all we hear is that they need lower expectations, to be more competitive with foreign workers—-and that unions, especially, are in the way of that competitiveness. This despite the concessions the UAW made and is continuing to make in the spirit of “we’re all in this together-ness.”

This is a great point. There is clearly a double standard in terms of how most politicians and the press are willing to talk about affected workers in various industries. It’s frustrating and sickening — and this sort of commentary ensures that the financial industry will get bailout after bailout, while a sector that connects to millions of jobs in America gets run through the ringer for a comparatively tiny sum.

Vittering Spitzer?

Steve Benen brings up an interesting possibility as far as a replacement for Hillary Clinton in the Senate: Eliot Spitzer.

Ben Smith, who recently suggested Spitzer might be a strong candidate to succeed Hillary Clinton in the Senate, argued yesterday that a purely intellectual approach may not be sufficient to restore Spitzer’s name. Ben said the former governor may need a few “soft-focus interviews about his personal transgressions” to help the rehabilitation along.

Perhaps, but wouldn’t it better if Spitzer’s obvious expertise were considered by the political world on the merits? I can appreciate how sleazy his sex scandal was, but it was hardly more offensive than David Vitter’s, Newt Gingrich’s, or Rudy Giuliani’s, and they’re all prominent political figures and Republicans in good standing.

Spitzer made a humiliating personal mistake, and he’s paid a high price. Maybe, as a sign of cultural maturity, we can get past this and start taking Spitzer seriously again.

The way I see, Eliot Spitzer, by commiting adultery and hiring a prostitute, did something which New Yorkers (and most of the political world) felt precluded him from continuing to be Governor of the Empire State. But that problem clearly does not exist in the US Senate. David Vitter also was revealed to have frequented prostitutes (his diaper fetish was also revealed). Neither of these things lead to his expulsion from the Senate, nor even reprimand from the Senate Ethics Committee. If what Spitzer did was unforgiveable in New York, it is eminently forgiveable in the US Senate. While I don’t have any great preference for Spitzer over any other scandal-free candidate to replace Clinton, it’s clear that his personal problems should not prevent him from being considered.

Healthcare Stimulus

I like where Jonathan Gruber is going with this, but don’t think he’s going far enough.

Given the present need to address the economic crisis, many people say the government cannot afford a big investment in health care, that these plans are going nowhere fast. But this represents a false choice, because health care reform is good for our economy.

As the country slips into what is possibly the worst downturn since the Depression, nearly all experts agree that Washington should stimulate demand with new spending. And one of the most effective ways to spend would be to give states money to enroll more people in Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Plan. This would free up state money for rebuilding roads and bridges and other public works projects — spending that could create jobs.

Health care reform can be an engine of job growth in other ways, too. Most proposals call for investments in health information technology, including the computerization of patient medical records. During the campaign, for example, Mr. Obama proposed spending $50 billion on such technology. The hope is that computerized recordkeeping, and the improved sharing of information among doctors that it would enable, would improve the quality of patient care and perhaps also lower medical costs. More immediately, it would create jobs in the technology sector. After all, somebody would need to develop the computer systems and operate them for thousands of American health care providers.

Gruber’s thinking about this in terms of how to direct a part of a stimulus package that will likely run around $500 billion. I agree that health care should be a part of that, but when its relegated to the realm of pie-yet-to-be-divvied-up, it’s hard to envision enough being done to make both the necessary economic difference and substantively make peoples’ lives better. What I want to see is unabashed argumentation that goes along the lines of this: Companies like GM, Citigroup, and AIG exist with the presumption that they must continue to exist, regardless of how poorly they have been run. The response to the economic crisis has run over $7 trillion. There is no reason that these large, poorly managed corporations are more entitled to health and prosperity than the citizens of the United States. Don’t just ask for expanding state children’s health care programs — go whole hog. Now is the time for health care for all, paid for by the US government. Gruber lays out the economic benefits of health care spendingas a response to economic troubles. But just as the bailouts are stop-gap, single-payer health care is long-term. Businesses can’t plan on the next government bailout (well, maybe Citigroup was), but they can plan on the reduction of their costs by 15-20% permanently by not having to pay for their employees and retirees health care.

The Wall Street crowd in New York and the shock doctrine crowd in DC get the fact that now is the time to go big. It’s time for those of us who are working for all Americans to do the same.

Stanley Follow-Up

After getting great linkage from Atrios, Steve Benen, and The Daily Howler for my post on Alessandra Stanley’s wank-tastic analysis of imaginary political themes in the Obama national security team press conference, I thought I’d follow up with another on Stanley’s history of bad political commentary. A couple of my commenters tried to dismiss her bad column to varying degrees from Stanley because  she writes for the Times Arts & Leisure section and isn’t a political reporter. But yesterday wasn’t the first time that Stanley had problems writing accurately about political events.

Stanley has been awarded the Wanker of the Day by Atrios two times since 2006.  The previous citation was naturally for her endeavors into political writing, something we’ve already seen she has little acumen for. Now I’m not going to be charitable and count her god-awful review of ABC’s fictional Path to 9/11 movie as excusable because it was of an actual movie on broadcast television. Her review came at the end of a major political fight between liberal bloggers and executives at ABC and Disney. Roger Ailes demolished her review, earning Stanley a WOTD link in the process:

Consider this passage from Stanley’s review of ABC’s “Pathological Lies About 9/11”:

“‘The Path to 9/11’ is not a documentary, or even a docu-drama; it is a fictionalized account of what took place.

But if it’s a fictionalized account, it’s not about “what took place.” It’s an account of what didn’t take place.

Stanley seeks confused about the difference between reality and fantasy:

“The outside pressure was intense enough to persuade ABC to re-edit one of the more contested made-up scenes in the film. In the version sent to critics, it depicted C.I.A. operatives and their Afghan allies armed with guns and night-vision goggles creeping in the dark to snatch Mr. bin Laden from his compound in 1998. The men are told to stand by, in harm’s way, as the C.I.A. director, George J. Tenet and the national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, cavil by videoconference. Rather than take a firm decision, Mr. Berger flips off his videophone, and Mr. Tenet aborts the mission. (Among other things, ABC agreed to excise Mr. Berger’s hissy fit.)

“In reality the C.I.A. got close, but never that close….”

So if the program’s version is indisputably fiction, there’s no “contest.” The show is indisputably a lie. And since there was no conversation, there was no Berger “hissy fit.” Yet Stanley treats it as fact (“Mr. Berger’s hissy fit”) while acknowledging it’s a fraud.

Tristero piled on as well:

[Stanley]’s saying don’t worry, be happy, every little thing will balance out in the end, that if the 9/11 series is harsh and unfair towards Clinton, Bush will get his just as harshly and unfairly. That’s because the Disney propaganda will be counterbalanced by a future, hypothetical mini-series on the Bush administration’s marketing of the New Product in 2002 – the Iraq war – which will be equally inaccurate.

The similarity between Stanley’s review of the fictional 9/11 movie and the press conference that she (but no one else in America) viewed on Monday is that in both cases Stanley demonstrates a remarkable inability to distinguish between what is real and what is not real. Stanley’s Path to 9/11 review went beyond the common “Democrats say x, Republicans say y” brand of stenography and actually reported fictional accounts of an historic event as fact, then suggested the factual challenges to the movie were equivalent to the fictional assertions contained therein. It’s hard to find a reporter who has strayed further from the principles of reporting than Stanley in her 9/11 review, but the concoction we saw this week surely pushes the envelope even more.

Yesterday I wrote:

Alessandra Stanley and her editors need to stop projecting their desired story lines onto the Obama administration (viz. making things up) and start reporting the news like professionals.

But in going back to her Path to 9/11 review, I’m finding it impossible to be hopeful about the chances of Stanley’s reporting taking a turn for the better. In that review Stanley was careless with how she handled facts and took fictional events in the final as meritorious of treatment as fact. In the review of the Clinton press conference, she simply created her own set of events and wrote about them. Clearly the latter is worse.

There is one place where we regularly see facts created out of whole-cloth in the pages of the New York Times: Maureen Dowd’s twice-weekly columns. The difference worth noting is that Dowd is an opinion columnist, free to set whatever analytical framework she chooses. Yes, she should stay to the facts, but she isn’t reviewing pieces of news qua news, while Stanley is.

At this point I think the best remedy to Stanley’s reviews of fictional events is to contact the Times’ Public Editor Clark Hoyt. His email address is public@nytimes.com; in my experience the Times Public Editor or someone from his staff will respond to reader emails. Enough of an outpouring of anger will force Hoyt to address Stanley’s drivel in the paper itself. Maybe then her editors will endeavor to keep her reviews and analysis to things that actually happened and not fantasies of her own creation.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

One of the things that was most frustrating working for and with Chris Dodd during the course of the FISA fight is that while the blogosphere and a few rare liberal pundits (Keith Olbermann comes to mind) gave Dodd credit for standing up to the Bush administration and defending the rule of law, the mainstream press basically ignored his role in delaying retroactive immunity for telecom companies that illegally spied on Americans. Most big outlets focused their coverage of the Democratic Senate’s actions on FISA focused on Harry Reid, Patrick Leahy (as Judiciary chair), Jay Rockefeller, and Intelligence and Judiciary committee members like Ron Wyden, Russ Feingold, and Sheldon Whitehouse. While these were all key players in the legislative process, none of them did what Dodd did (while some actively fought against Dodd’s principled and lawful stand). I attribute the refusal of organizations like the New York Times and Washington Post to give Dodd his due were based on the fact that he wasn’t on either of the relevant committees and was running a presidential campaign. They just didn’t want to give him coverage, so instead of practicing good journalism, they largely ignored Chris Dodd’s role in trying to single-handedly stop bad FISA legislation.

I write all of this as preface to a piece by Ryan Singel of Wired’s Threat Level blog that came out yesterday. In writing about the current legal fight going on over the validity of the legislation passed last summer over Dodd’s objections, Singel ends up giving Dodd the greatest degree of credit for his work I have seen coming from any mainstream media outlet. Here is the first portion of Singel’s post:

The constitutionality of retroactive immunity for telecoms that helped Bush spy on Americans got its day in court Tuesday, a little less than a year after senator Christopher Dodd all but shuttered Congress with an ultimately futile one-man stand against the idea.

Tuesday’s courtroom showdown in San Francisco lacked the fireworks of Dodd’s fiery oration, but the judge handling the case gave some indication that he may take over as the one-man anti-immunity crusader.

“In essence that gives the attorney general carte blanche to immunize anyone.” Walker said, wondering what odd creature Congress had fashioned. “What other statute is like this statute?”

Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Walker that Congress had no right to give the attorney general a magic wand to make cases against the telecoms go away just by telling the judge a little bit about what happened. The group is suing AT&T for helping the government spy on Americans’ internet and phone usage.

“We have a right to an injunction against the telecoms,” EFF’s legal director Cindy Cohn said. “They are the gatekeepers … They have an independent duty to protect Americans’ privacy.”

A Democratically-controlled Congress bowed to election-year political pressures in the summer, legalizing much of the formerly lawless spying and creating a get-out-jail-card for the telecoms being sued for helping with the spying. [Emphasis added]

Dodd never got the credit he deserved outside the liberal blogosphere. It’s great to see that some journalists haven’t forgotten Chris Dodd’s role in the FISA fight. I’m glad Ryan Singel took the time to write Dodd into this post; he didn’t have to, but it was the right thing to do. Credit where credit is due to both Dodd and Singel.

Stop Projecting

Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times does some serious drama-projection in this piece on the nomination of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Here’s a snippet of the wankery:

Presentations of presidential appointees can be important, but they are rarely interesting. Usually, the men and women chosen for top cabinet roles are not well known to the public; if there is drama behind the scenes, most in the audience are blind to it.

That was hardly the case on Monday when President-elect Barack Obama introduced his national security team. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s speech was no ordinary public-service pledge; for plenty of viewers, it was the moment when Mrs. Clinton finally conceded the election for real.

The occasion was solemn, but like a wedding where the parents are divorced, the ceremony was carefully choreographed to avert awkward moments and camouflage past unpleasantness.

When Mr. Obama unveiled his economic team last week, he alone made a speech. In this more delicate selection, it was decided that Mrs. Clinton, his pick for secretary of state, should also speak. But that might look suspect — or too political — unless the five other appointees also said a word, and that, in turn, required a few words from Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., who had yet to make public statements of any consequence since the election. (He spoke last, spiritedly, and at some length.)

Not all the staging was designed to address Mrs. Clinton’s sensibilities. She and the five other appointees walked out on stage and stood in line, almost as if at attention, waiting for the president-elect to walk in. He did so briskly, with Mr. Biden at his heels. [Emphasis added]

Look, it’s clear that the press wants there to be Obama-Clinton drama. They love the old storylines and they love creating a storyline that wedges Democrats apart. This is exactly that sort of story: Clinton v. Obama, Can He Trust Her? Will She Go Rogue???

But it’s 100% B.S. Nowhere in the press conference is it apparent that any of it was “designed to address Mrs. Clinton’s sensibilities.” Stanley is projecting, plain and simple. Moreover, at no point in the time since June 7, 2008, has Hillary Clinton ever suggested that her concession of the Democratic nomination for the presidency was not “for real.” Again, Stanley is making things up.

I have no doubt that the good people of the Obama Transition Team carefully choreographed yesterday’s press conference. It was likely on par with the roll-out of the Obama administration’s economic team for importance. So yes, there was surely a schedule of who spoke when and who stood next to whom. It’s even conceivable that the speeches of all of President-Elect Obama’s appointments were written and/or vetted by members of the transition team. This is not news. The professionalism and orderliness seen in the Obama press conference yesterday was not done out of a desire “to avert awkward moments and camouflage past unpleasantness.” It was “carefully choreographed” to be presidential.

Alessandra Stanley and her editors need to stop projecting their desired story lines onto the Obama administration (viz. making things up) and start reporting the news like professionals. Unfortunately, my guess is that as long as Hillary Clinton (let alone Bill) is in the picture, this will not happen. This is no fault of Senator and soon-to-be Secretary of State Clinton; the blame lies with petty and trite fiction writers like Alessandra Stanley.

Rebuilding the Party Fail

I know Sarah Palin is many Republicans idea of the future — what sort of future I dare not hazard (though the answer lies later in this paragraph) — but I’m not so sure that hawking year-old biographies of Sarah Palin is the path to victory the Rebuild the Party crowd had in mind. But the ultimate failure in this bizarro Human Events email: the Palin book is hawked with a crappy science fiction book about the end of civilization. What remains unclear is if the book, Terror Occulta, predicates the end of the world on the rise of Sarah Palin. Only one way to find out…buy two shitty books!