Fracking Public Servants

This is going to be all about how much executives at the municipal, county & state level can frack public workers. It’s not limited to Republicans – Democratic executives are leading the charge too (see: upcoming state union negotiations in New York and Oregon). Note that in this instance, Prichard, Alabama is going to be used as a model for voiding contractual commitments made to retired public workers. Once again, contracts for working Americans are worth less than nothing, unlike contracts for Wall Street executives who broke the economy, which can never be broken for fear of “talent” moving elsewhere.

Breaking & Entering, Burglary

Apparently these things aren’t illegal for everyone.

Yves Smith writes:

The traditional procedures around the transfer of title made the old system virtually fail-safe. Any number above zero is unacceptably high. And “a tiny percentage” across the huge numbers of foreclosures happening across the US adds up to meaningful numbers in real terms.

While it’s true that the plural of anecdote is not data, it’s critically important, as Yves notes, that “any number above zero is unacceptably high.” More importantly, as these stories of bank break-ins come in from all over the country, it is clear that they are a symptom of national problems with mortgage servicing and foreclosure mechanisms.

Not Far-sighted

On Sunday night, 60 Minutes ran a piece attack public workers and repeating claims by reactionary NJ Governor Chris Christie that public workers are to blame for the large holes in state budgets. Dean Baker absolutely demolishes the CBS piece and Christie’s logic. As is often the case when it comes to the current round of deficit hysteria and public servant bashing, the people who are most committed to this narrative are congenitally disinclined from including the Wall Street created financial crisis from their analysis of what brought us to the situation we are in today (as they perceive it).

Way back in the last decade the United States had a huge housing bubble. The Wall Street banks made money hand over fist making and selling the loans that fueled this bubble. The economic policymakers and regulators who were supposed to prevent the growth of such dangerous bubbles, people with names like Greenspan, Bernanke, Paulson, and Geithner, assured the public that everything was just fine. When they were proved horribly wrong, they then congratulated themselves for avoiding a second Great Depression.

This background is important to any story on the financial problems facing state and local governments, since it is 90 percent of the picture. It also would be good if the public remembered this history, since many of the people who either profited from the bubble or failed to take measures to counter its growth are now at the forefront in demanding that state and local governments sharply reduce their budgets and that public sector employees take big cuts in pay and benefits.

This cuts to the core of what the attacks on relatively low-wage public servants ignore. It’s not the guy at the DMV’s fault that Wall Street recklessness blew a whole in his pension fund. Making workers pay off Wall Street’s bad bets is not a bizarre theory for the Banksters to put forward, but it is strange to hear CBS posit it is a logical and necessary response to Wall Street blowing up the American economy.

Things get even better when Baker sets his sights directly on Christie.

Interestingly, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is presented as a heroic visionary in this story because of his willingness to make cuts in areas like public and education and to force workers to take pay cuts. In one instance he is shown telling teachers complaining about cuts in their benefits that they should get another job if they are unhappy with their pay.

While such an approach may be an effective short-term strategy it is absolutely disastrous in the long-term. At any point in time it will be difficult for long-time workers to leave their jobs with the state and find comparable employment elsewhere, especially in the midst of the worst downturn in 70 years. However, as new workers come into the labor force, lower pay and worse benefits in the public sector will make these jobs less attractive. This means that New Jersey’s schools and other public agencies will have less choice in selecting their workforce, which is likely to lead to a deterioration in the quality of education and other public services. This is not obviously far-sighted thinking.

Obviously.

Austerity Soon?

There’s clearly a drumbeat for the solution to all of what ails the American economy to be increasing pain and suffering felt by the lower and working class. It’s not surprising that right wing governors like Chris Christie are trying to convince people that government deficits are caused by public workers making $30,000. Christie is an asshole and this is what assholes do. But what is so unfortunate – and dangerous – is the willingness of mainstream media outlets like 60 Minutes are buying into it, then failing to even include a cursory counterweight to the right’s attacks on workers. Lies and misinformation of this sort evolve into Conventional Wisdom quite quickly when presented unilaterally as fact by major media outlets.

This isn’t just about Conventional Wisdom, though. It’s actually about the march towards cruel austerity measures being enacted here in America, punishing people who did nothing to contribute to the collapse of the economy so those who wrecked it can be fully restored and kept in the style to which they’ve grown accustomed. The Republican Party, as well as conservatives in the Democratic Party, seem fully down to enact austerity measures, strip public programs and destroy the social safety net. At some point soon, politicians on the left will have to stand up to fight back against austerity from coming to America. But other than Bernie Sanders, I don’t know who will be willing to take the fight to the super-rich and the banks. I have to believe there are still politicians who will fight for working Americans. Now is the time for them to show themselves.

Taibbi on Young Journalists

Not that this is an area I ever write about, but Matt Taibbi has a great passage in a piece beating up Matt Bai in which he assails the culture many young, ostensibly liberal, journalists adhere to in a well-charted path to Beltway acceptance and success.

Bai is one of those guys — there are hundreds of them in this business — who poses as a wonky, Democrat-leaning “centrist” pundit and then makes a career out of drubbing “unrealistic” liberals and progressives with cartoonish Jane Fonda and Hugo Chavez caricatures. This career path is so well-worn in our business, it’s like a Great Silk Road of pseudoleft punditry. First step: graduate Harvard or Columbia, buy some clothes at Urban Outfitters, shore up your socially liberal cred by marching in a gay rights rally or something, then get a job at some place like the American Prospect. Then once you’re in, spend a few years writing wonky editorials gently chiding Jane Fonda liberals for failing to grasp the obvious wisdom of the WTC or whatever Bob Rubin/Pete Peterson Foundation deficit-reduction horseshit the Democratic Party chiefs happen to be pimping at the time. Once you’ve got that down, you just sit tight and wait for the New York Times or the Washington Post to call. It won’t be long.

I would just advise any young journalist who is coming up through a liberal magazine or news website to ask themselves if this looks like you. If it does, is it really what you want to be doing? How you want to be seen?  It’s not too late to change.

More importantly, people who read up-and-coming young liberal journalists should read this passage and wonder if it looks like your favorite wonk or pundit. Have they recently defended a top administration official for leaving public service to take a luxuriously compensated job at a big Wall Street bank because, after all, the journalist has never personally seen the former public servant drown a bag of puppies, so they can’t possibly be a bad, greedy person? If so, it’s probably time to stop reading this person, as they will soon be beating up on unreasonable liberals (at least, more than they already do).

What Terrifies Conservatives?

Rick Perlstein has a piece in the latest issue of Democracy Journal that takes a historical look at how right wing propaganda has been developed over the last century to the point where it is a smoothly running machine today. One key point Perlstein makes is, “Historically, nothing has terrified conservatives so much as efficient, effective, activist government.” This bears out in an important way today in right wing attacks on public sector workers around the country, at state, federal, and municipal levels.

Governing well in the interests of the broad majority brings compounding political benefits for the party of government. Consider the famous December 2, 1993 memo by William Kristol entitled “Defeating President Clinton’s Health Care Proposal.” The notion of government-guaranteed health care had to be defeated, he said, rather than compromised with, or else: “It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.” Kristol wrote on behalf of an organization called the Project for a Republican Future. The mortal fear is that if government delivers the goods, the Republicans have no future.

The fear easily escalates unto hysteria: Activist government is a fraud in its very essence, an awesomely infernal political perpetual motion machine. “THE LIBS PLAN TO DESTROY US,” runs a recent email circulating widely on the right. The text is mostly made up of a list of government departments, agencies, and programs, “many with mutable locations through the nation.” It goes on to explain, “The people employed in these offices generally earn 31% more than their civilian counterparts.” (In fact, controlling for education and experience, state and local public employees make less than their private-sector counterparts, according to a September 2010 report from the Economic Policy Institute.) “All are supported 100% by the American taxpayer employed in the private profit producing sector.” The hysteria cannot allow, for example, that more private profit has been created out of thin air by a government invention like the Internet than any in the history of man: “they are all parasites.” This essay now arriving in thousands of ordinary, everyday email inboxes concludes: “Before the 50’s the Democratic party was very much the party of the average working man. . . . [Then] the socialists in the party realized that one way for them to gain power and influence was by creating jobs . . . GOVERNMENT JOBS.”

The baseline fear of government actually working is an important guiding post in understanding the right’s prolific attacks on public workers. Perlstein does great work explaining this phenomena, both in historical and contemporary contexts.

Honest Men in Washington

Matt Taibbi’s post yesterday praising the honest and conviction of Senator Bernie Sanders is a great reminder that these are characteristics politicians are capable of possessing in genuine ways. Taibbi writes:

I can live with the president fighting for something and failing; what I can’t stand is a politician who changes his mind for the sake of expediency and then pretends that was what he believed all along. You just can’t imagine someone like Sanders doing something like that; his MO instead would be to take his best shot for what he actually believes and let the chips fall where they may, budging a little maybe to get a worthwhile deal done but never turning his entire face inside out just to get through the day. This idea that you can’t be an honest man and a Washington politician is a myth, a crock made up by sellouts and careerist hacks who don’t stand for anything and are impatient with people who do. It’s possible to do this job with honor and dignity. It’s just that most of our politicians – our president included, apparently – would rather not bother. [Emphasis added]

Bingo. I would say that as a political operative and someone who has spent most of my life drawn to politics and towards the idea of the nobility of public service, the highlighted passage has been a benchmark assumption. Over time, I’ve come to understand that the number of actually honest politicians is a perilously low number. The depressing side of political work comes not from failing to see any people do this work with dignity – there are those that do and are inspiring as a result – but how many people you thought were in that category are actually disinclined from working honestly, with dignity, for the public good. Some walk away from it because it is hard. Others walk away because they never believed in honest service to begin with. In both cases, the challenge is that the system is run by people who don’t bother to do their work “with honor and dignity.” This speaks to the value of Bernie Sanders 8+ hour long speech against the proposed tax cuts. He stood up as a hero for those who opposed the cuts and did so without apology. We need more actions like Sanders’ in both chambers of Congress, as these inspire people who watch them and remind us that it is possible for people of principle to work with dignity in the halls of power.

Blocking the Judiciary

It seems pretty obvious to me that if you are upset or outraged with the ruling this week that the individual mandate in the healthcare bill is unconstitutional – a ruling made by a 20 year GOP activist now sitting for life on the federal bench – then you should care a hell of a lot about the fact that President Obama has about 40 judicial nominees who are awaiting confirmation votes by the Senate. These are not controversial figures. Every single one was voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, most unanimously or with only token dissent.

What incentive does Minority Leader McConnell have to let these nominations proceed? Well, none, other than the federal bench is rife with vacancies that are now slowing the wheels of justice around the country. Of course, this will quickly be solved once a Republican again sits in the Oval Office.

Here’s my prediction: while some of these nominees will end up getting a vote, many will not. And the ones that do will tend to be gray-haired judges who don’t have much chance of ever getting a Supreme Court nomination. The Senate Republicans are functionally (and strategically) cutting off the ability of Democrats to grow a liberal bench of judges who can be considered for future Supreme Court vacancies. While I don’t think it’s crucial that nominees to the Supreme Court be members of the federal bench, recent precedent has been dominated by judges. And while there were objections to Harriet Miers for many reasons, I’d expect the hue and cry from the right if a Democrat nominated someone who was not currently a judge to be deafening.

Democrats can’t let Republicans to continue to own a full branch of government. The GOP has spent decades cultivating activist judges, training them, employing them, nominating them, and confirming them. Roberts and Alito are prime examples of how the fruits of their labor have paid off: two corporatist, political, activist justices who will sit on the Supreme Court for another thirty to forty years. It’s time for Democrats to do the same thing: cultivate young attorneys, provide them training and academic opportunity, get them onto the federal bench at a young age and let them grow into future Supreme Court justices. Failure to do so means that we can expect every law of progressive bent signed by President Obama to one day be overturned by the Roberts court.  That’s the game the Republicans are playing and if we don’t start playing it too, America will wind up back in the 1800s.