Pete Lit

Posted Without Comment

(Photo by John V. Moore.)

Pack up the house, honey...

...we're moving to Hungary.

A survey of about 12,500 people in 24 countries found that Europeans are the most casual when it comes to work clothes with only 27 percent wearing a business suit or smart clothes to work.

Hungary came bottom of the table with only 12 percent of workers saying they wore a suit or smart dress to work.

Among Hungarian workers, 46 percent said it was appropriate to wear shorts to work while 56 percent approved of thong sandals or flip-flops at work.

I wonder if the First National Bank of Budapest is hiring.

Today, for one day only, Joliet is the preteen hotspot of the entire world

Jonas Brothers likely to snarl traffic

As of 7 o'clock this morning - six hours before the gates open - there were already a hundred youngsters congregating in front of Silver Cross Field, traffic was being diverted and police patrols were prominent. There are very few days that I'm glad to work an hour away from home, and this is one of those days.

Metaphysical graffiti

I noticed these messages this morning, spray-painted on the sides of freight cars which idled on the siding adjacent to my commuter line.

FOR MY BROTHER, I MISS YOU! THE ONLY KING OF TOLEDO!

And, even better...

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!

I wonder how many moms have even noticed that second one.

"...a bang for his pains..."

I really enjoyed watching the Spain-Netherlands final of the World Cup, more for the spectacle (the camera shots of hundreds of thousands of fans watching the game on TV in public squares in Madrid and Amsterdam were awe-inspiring, especially since such a thing would never happen here in the U.S.) than for the rough, foul-plagued play itself.

And I also enjoyed the British commentators, with their appealingly unique turns of phrase. I remember one instance in which a player made an extra effort to control the ball, only to get tripped up by his opponent - if he hadn't made that effort, he never would have suffered the painful tripping. Here in the U.S., we would have said something like "for all his trouble, he got tripped up", but the British announcer instead said "he got a bang for his pains." Love that.

Throw the bums out

While listening to an NPR story this morning about the agency formally known as the Minerals Management Service - the regulatory agency which, to put it very kindly, simply looked the other way and let BP and other oil companies do whatever they wanted - this aspect (from a related AP article) in particular struck me:

While some critics have urged mass firings, Bromwich said he does not intend to clean house at the drilling agency, which has offices ranging from Washington to Louisiana, Texas, Colorado and Alaska. "The risk of saying 'off with their heads' across the board is you risk losing a tremendous amount of knowledge and expertise," he said.

Why not mass firings? I'm in banking, specifically in credit, where I serve as a sort of watchdog over our clients. If I was caught having a too-cozy relationship with the clients I was supposed to be overseeing - nothing as severe as the drug-and-sex parties the MMS was having with the oil companies, but more basic things like ignoring loan agreement violations or doctoring financial records - I would be fired on the spot. No questions asked.

My job is to oversee our loan clients, make sure they're performing satisfactorily and remain good credit risks, and if I fail to do so I deserve to be fired. The MMS' job, as regulator, is really no different - the MMS is supposed to keep an eye on the oil companies, make sure they're acting legally and responsibly. And the BP fiasco makes it clear that with the widespread incompetence and corruption of the MMS, the agency was absolutely, positively not doing its job. And for that, there should be mass firings. Clean house, from top to bottom, and start over. All that "knowledge and expertise" means nothing if the knowledgable and expert regulators are in bed with the companies they're supposed to be regulating.

Love this photo...

Two of my absolute heroes.

(Official White House photo by Pete Souza)

“You know, I’d like my life back.”

We know how you feel, Mr. Hayward, because we'd like our Gulf back. But I suspect you'll be getting your wish long before we get ours.

Drinking game

Here's a simple idea for a drinking game: while watching The Bachelor or The Bachelorette, do a shot at every mention of the words "amazing", "journey" or "here for the right reasons." But if you do so, make sure you don't have anything important to do the next morning, because the recovery time might be lengthy.

Change we can believe in

Hmmm...first healthcare reform, now financial market reform. Obama's getting the job done, just like he promised. All the naysayers should remember that change is a gradual process - there was absolutely no chance of America becoming a more progressive, fair and equal country instantly upon Obama taking office in January 2009. Our government is designed to be a ponderous, deliberate and cautious policy-making body, so while change may not be coming as quickly as some would have hoped, it is defintely happening.

Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich is having a fit, calling Obama a socialist and the most radical president in U.S. history. When Gingrich is that livid, it surely means that good things are happening.

Dan Savage, Neologist

In this week's Savage Love, Dan Savage reconsiders and dismisses a common anatomy-derived derogatory term and, like any good solutions person, suggests a more appropriate alternative. This being a (nominally) family-friendly blog, however, I'm redacting the actual terms involved. Follow the link to see them for yourself.

You are a huge -----, CTOAC—wait, scratch that. ------- are powerful; they can take pummeling and spit out a brand-new human being. What you are, CTOAC, is weak, vulnerable, easily manipulated, and far too sensitive for your own good.

What you are is a ---- ----.

Perfect.

Decider Deigns to Divulge

I'm sure the Nobel and Pulitzer committees are now bubbling with excitement over the news of this forthcoming tome of rational thought, probing intellect and relentless curiousity.



Geez, what's with that photo? Was he constipated at that moment? With that squint of his I assume he was going for some sort of John Wayne look, but mostly this projects the image of a guy at the dog park who just stepped in something soft.

Gawker has a few nice alternate takes on the cover, from the comic:



To the bitter:



Somehow I sense that this small handful of Gawker covers contains more insight than anything Bush is writing. Or, more accurately, "writing."

Reward without burden

I wish I could say this surprised me, but it really doesn't. A study compares the operating behavior of 940 banks who obtained TARP bailout funds with 7,400 banks who didn't:

• Lending fell. The amount of loans outstanding to businesses and individuals fell 9.1% for the 12 months ending Sept. 30, 2009, at banks that participated in TARP compared with a 6.2% drop at banks that didn't.

• Employee pay rose. Average pay at banks getting aid rose 9.4% in the program's first year. By contrast, non-TARP banks increased salaries 1.8%.

• Cost-cutting limited. Banks in TARP cut costs less than those outside the program. Government-aided banks increased branches by 2.7% while non-TARP banks cut branches by 1.2%.

This is exactly what to expect when you give banks a handout with no conditions attached - no mandate to funnel the money to borrowers, no restrictions on compensation, etc. Instead of acting like responsible and grateful corporate citizens, they cut credit even further, boost compensation and make expensive investments in new branches. Thanks so much, Mr. Paulson.

“...the steeds of life swirl their smoke to the skies..."

Over at Quid Plura?, Jeff Sypeck ponders the surprising dearth of volcanic references in medieval Icelandic literature (surprising, in that Iceland is essentially a big hunk of volcanic rock), as well as the provenance of everyone's favorite unpronounceable geographic feature of the moment, Eyjafjallajökull: eyja (island), fjalla (mountains), jökull (glacier). Though that name sounds prosaically dull in English translation, I quite like the original.

Par-TAY!

The Mother of All Beer Blasts has, alas, been thwarted.

Cases of beer left at landfill too hard to resist
By Associated Press, April 15, 2010

Two Columbia, Mo., sanitation workers who apparently couldn't stand by and let beer go down the drain allegedly took dozens of cases of expired brew from the city landfill.

Police and city supervisors are trying to determine if the salvage was a crime - theft of city property - or just a policy violation.

"If we determine it's a police matter, we will take some action," said Officer Jessie Haden, a Columbia police spokeswoman.

A Columbia distributor, Scheppers Distributing Co., sent 1,500 cases of expired beer to the landfill on April 1 in two shipments. The first shipment was destroyed immediately, but the second, containing about 700 cases of Budweiser and Michelob Ultra, was not.

Margrace Buckler, the city's human resource director, said two Solid Waste Division workers, who haven't been identified, brought a city pickup truck to the landfill and hauled off about 50 cases of the beer.

Given the circumstances, how utterly delightful it is that the human resource director shares a last name with a brand of non-alcoholic beer.

Scheppers President Joe Priesmeyer said the expired beer would not be a health concern, although it might have lost some of its taste.

No problem there. It was Bud and Michelob, which means it had no taste to begin with.

Further Adventures in Republican Hypocrisy

Senator Mitch McConnell, fresh off a powwow with Wall Street hedge fund managers, denounces the current Democratic proposal to strengthen government regulation of financial institutions.

“This bill not only allows for taxpayer-funded bailouts of Wall Street banks; it institutionalizes them...The way to solve this problem is to let the people who make the mistakes pay for them...We won’t solve this problem until the biggest banks are allowed to fail.”

Strong words indeed (I'm no fan of bank bailouts either) but McConnell's position would be a lot more convincing had he not voted for the first bank bailout in October 2008.

Maybe McConnell thinks billion dollar handouts to feckless Wall Street financiers are just fine as long as they come with no conditions attached, as was initially the case with TARP - a blank check with no restrictions that might prevent future irresponsible behavior by bankers. But bailouts are bad when there's regulation involved.

Or maybe bailouts are economy-saving godsends under a Republican adminstration in the White House, but socialism-inducing evils under a Democratic administration.

Blago, you're fired...and soon probably convicted, too.

At Chicago News Cooperative, James Warren has an interesting take on what Rod Blagojevich's recent Celebrity Apprentice flameout means for his upcoming corruption trial.

In the presence of B-list celebrities — including over-the-hill athletes, pro wrestlers, comics and a lingerie model — the man we twice elected to the state’s highest post improbably exuded insubstantiality. By comparison, the motormouth Cyndi Lauper and baseball’s melancholy Darryl Strawberry came off as Marie Curie and Thurgood Marshall.

I'm starting to think that all of our candidates for major public office should be required to appear on a reality TV show prior to the election. Forget the canned stump speeches and soundbite-heavy candidate debates of the standard political campaign - seeing how candidates tackle a project assignment and interact with their teammates would be infinitely more helpful in determining their leadership skills, intelligence and ability to get the job done. In short, if Blago had appeared on Celebrity Apprentice before he was first elected, and showed everyone what a narcissist idiot he is, there's no way Illinois voters would have elected him once - let alone twice.

Modern Family

Modern Family, which just premiered last fall, is already one of my favorite shows. The acting is great (Ed O'Neill is a revelation, completely overcoming his lowbrow Al Bundy persona) but what I really love is the fast-paced, witty dialogue, as in this exchange from last night's re-run between the Dunphy sisters Haley (beautiful, anti-intellectual cool kid) and Alex (brilliant, bookish introvert). Alex has just discovered that a cherished poster of hers has been defaced by Haley, who suspected Alex of reading her diary.

Alex: Did you draw on my poster?

Haley: Yeah, I did. Maybe you'll think about that the next time you read my journal.

Alex: I didn't read your stupid journal, and I waited in line to get this signed, Haley.

Haley: Oh, don't be such a baby. It's just some dude with weird hair.

Alex: That's Maya Angelou, you idiot.

Haley: Oh, sorry. I don't follow the WNBA.

Simply wonderful.

Hurrah!

Progress in public education, at last?

The Obama administration on Saturday called for a broad overhaul of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, proposing to reshape divisive provisions that encouraged instructors to teach to tests, narrowed the curriculum, and labeled one in three American schools as failing.

Though NCLB did institute much-needed standards for holding educators accountable for student performance, I've always been concerned about its emphasis on standardized testing and narrow curriculum. Seems like we've been moving dangerously close to our students becoming mere test-takers instead of true learners, which I'm hoping Obama's proposal will correct.

Moonbeam Returns

Jerry Brown's announcement this week that he is running for governor of California has prompted this fine NYT piece on where his "Governor Moonbeam" nickname first came from: Chicago's own Mike Royko. As a longtime Royko fan, I've always been aware of the nickname (in fact, I can't think of Brown without "Moonbeam" coming to mind) but didn't realize that Royko later distanced himself from it.

“I have to admit I gave him that unhappy label,” Mr. Royko wrote. “Because the more I see of Brown, the more I am convinced that he has been the only Democrat in this year’s politics who understands what this country will be up against.”

What the country would be up against was four years (and ultimately eight) of Ronald Reagan, a prospect which in retrospect we all should have been much more wary of.

Quote

"Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness."
- Desmond Tutu

Hurrah

This just in: the federal government will use its immense power to benefit society.

The Obama administration is planning to use the government’s enormous buying power to prod private companies to improve wages and benefits for millions of workers, according to White House officials and several interest groups briefed on the plan.

By altering how it awards $500 billion in contracts each year, the government would disqualify more companies with labor, environmental or other violations and give an edge to companies that offer better levels of pay, health coverage, pensions and other benefits, the officials said.

Because nearly one in four workers is employed by companies that have contracts with the federal government, administration officials see the plan as a way to shape social policy and lift more families into the middle class.

Naturally, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce hates the idea, which is always a strong indication that it's a great thing for the rest of us.

Photo of the Week

Canadian Olympic hockey team celebrates its gold medal victory by drinking beer and smoking cigars out on the ice, for over an hour after the final game. The women's team, that is. Think this would be at all a controversy if a men's hockey team did it? Probably not.

(Photo credit: Associated Press)

Stimulating Hypocrisy

Simply put, President Obama's economic stimulus plan - enacted one year ago yesterday - is working. Though the unemployment rate remains high, the consensus amongst top economists is that several million more people would be unemployed (thus exacerbating the recession through diminished consumer purchasing power) without the stimulus. Economic activity is up, with GDP growth at a very strong 5.7% for the fourth quarter of 2009 and expected to be even higher for the current quarter, which should boost employment once companies are confident that the economy has indeed rebounded. There are even signs that the housing markets - whose collapse fueled the recession - have stabilized.

Thing is, you wouldn't know it from listening to Republicans. They continue to rail against corporate bailouts (those most of the bailouts were done on Bush's watch) and say stimulus spending hasn't created a single job and has been a complete waste of money. Which is understandable, given their adherence to the timeworn government-is-bad philosophy that underpins most conservative thought. But what isn't understandable is that the same Republican lawmakers who decry stimulus spending as wasteful are so eager to belly up to the trough to claim every penny they can for their home districts, and brag about all the federal dollars they're showering on their constituents.

Think Progress has compiled a list of 111 Republican U.S. Congress members who have publicly opposed economic stimulus efforts (including voting against the Recovery Act) only to later solicit federal stimulus funds for their districts. The hypocrisy on display is nothing short of astounding.

If you're a political conservative who truly believes that government should have little or no presence in the lives of individual citizens, that's fine. I don't happen to agree with you on that point, but we're both entitled to our divergent opinions. But if the small-government concept really matters to you, please take a look at this list and ask yourself if any of the 111, who are so eager to drain the federal coffers for the sake of political expedience, truly represents your beliefs.

Happy Paczki Day!

I really wish I had realized before I was already on my morning train that today is Paczki Day, or otherwise I would have taken a few extra minutes to stop by Joliet Bakery and pick up a couple paczkis (pronounced, best as I can tell, as "poonch-kees") for the ride to work. Them's good eatin'.

Strangely enough, though I grew up in the Chicago area (which is heavily Polish - Chicago has the second most Poles of any city, after Warsaw) I didn't first hear of paczkis until my early twenties, while on a business trip to Detroit that happened to include Shrove Tuesday. And even then I didn't eat my first one until just a year or two ago, when Joliet Bakery (a combination Polish bakery/grocery/restaurant/bar, affectionately known locally as Drunken Donuts for its unusual nightcap potential) first opened.

A vote for David Hoffman

This morning I casted my vote in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate (Obama's old seat) for David Hoffman, the former Chicago inspector general (and constant thorn in the side of the imperious Mayor Daley) and assistant state's attorney. All policy positions aside, I voted for Hoffman because, by all reports, his personal integrity is beyond reproach, which is a major consideration given the political shenanigans that have plagued Illinois government for far too long.

Meanwhile, frontrunner Alexi Giannoulias has been tight-lipped about his personal role in all the bad loans which threaten to swamp Broadway Bank, which his family owns and which he formerly was a top loan officer. It's pretty appalling for Giannoulias to tout his management experience at Broadway while refraining from explaining his role in the bank's current troubles. My choice of Hoffman over Giannoulias, while based primarily on character issues, is also due to electability concerns. Given the unfolding Broadway situation, Giannoulias will hardly be able to take a populist stance and rail against the greed of Wall Street bankers (he's personally made millions from his ownership in the bank) or their dubious lending practices when his own judgment as a lender is so open to question. I also don't relish the prospect of the GOP attack dogs sinking their teeth into Giannoulias and Broadway during the general election campaign.

David Hoffman represents the best candidate to retain the U.S. Senate seat within the Democratic Party, and also to serve the citizens of Illinois with honor and decency. And that's why he deserves your vote.

Unhappy Hipsters

Sheer genius: Unhappy Hipsters presents interior design photos from Dwell magazine, captioned to imagine the lonely, desperate, empty lives of their pensive, brooding and oh-so-chic human subjects. The most laugh-out-loud site I've come across in ages. Personal favorite so far: "Eames, Aalto - her most significant relationships were with dead designers."

Howard Zinn

Historian and progressive icon Howard Zinn has passed away, at age 87. I'm a great admirer of his, and he will truly be missed. Fortunately, his groundbreaking writings will live on. In fact, when our homeschooled daughter is a little older, I want one of her American history texts to be A People's History of the United States. She should, of course, also read the conventional history text that is a standard part of the curriculum in American schools, but I want her to read Zinn to gain a different perspective. There are, after all, at least two sides to every story.

“From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.”

Rest well, sir.

State of the Union

Just one comment about last night's State of the Union address. When Obama announced that he wanted to redirect $30 billion of bailout money - which had been repaid by the big banks - toward small community banks to spur lending to small businesses, did anyone else notice the expressions on the faces of John Boehner and Eric Cantor (the top two House Republicans) when the camera immediately cut to them? Both had looks of disdain, bordering on revulsion. Their reaction was probably mostly just their reflex response to anything that Obama proposes, but I also couldn't help thinking it was emblematic how the Party of Wall Street feels about everyday schlubs like you and me on Main Street.

Separated at birth?

Blobfish:



Ziggy:

Tell us what you believe, Mr. President

Why all the mixed messages?

The economic philosophies emanating from the White House are all over the map. A year ago, Obama looked like a Keynesian, proposing a bold stimulus package that was designed to boost growth through increased federal government spending. But almost immediately he backtracked, catering to conservatives in Congress by adding to the stimulus plan a number of tax cuts whose potential impact on economic growth was at best questionable.

And now, when economic and especially employment growth has been slow - partly because the spending portion of the stimulus wasn't big enough - he's proposing more relief for the middle class. But at the same time, once again catering to deficit-fearing conservatives, he's proposing a three-year freeze on key areas of discretionary federal spending to slow growth of the deficit. Never mind that this spending has little impact on the deficit (even the administration admits the cuts are largely "symbolic"), and that entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security as well as military spending will not be touched.

Lastly, last week he again railed against Wall Street, decrying its rampant greed and calling for stricter regulation and the separation of banking and trading activities on the part of the big banks, while at the same time arguing for Ben Bernanke - Wall Street's champion enabler and deregulator - to be retained as Federal Reserve chairman.

So what does Obama really believe? Is he a Keynesian, who believes government spending can boost economic growth, or a deficit hawk who is wary of running up the national debt? Is he a populist who believes Main Street is more important than Wall Street, or is he eager to appease the financial titans? It seems like every time he proposes a progressive initiative, he immediately dilutes it with conservative provisions in some sort of compromise attempt to appease the Republicans in Congress, few of whom have any interest in working with him anyway.

He's forever tacking toward the center. And the center is a great big nowhere.

Unconscionable

Unless you enjoy corporations and lobbyists controlling our political process - in fact, if you think they should have even more power than they already enjoy - and eagerly anticipate an accelerated onslaught of attack ads during every election, the Supreme Court's appalling ruling yesterday should have you as pissed off as I am right now. Here's one place you can make your voice heard. Let's take back democracy before it's completely destroyed.

Crossing my fingers on Afghanistan

My support for Barack Obama is well-documented here, but after seeing last night's speech at West Point I'm still not sure where he's going with the war in Afghanistan. Obviously he faces a highly unenviable situation: he can't withdraw troops quickly and just walk away, as Afghanistan's weak, corrupt and questionably-legitimate central government would soon collapse, returning the Taliban to power and giving al Qaeda a comfortable place of refuge; and he can't order a large-scale invasion which would rightly be seen as heavy-handed colonialism by the Afghan people and the rest of the world, and might not eliminate the scourge of Islamist extremism anyway. For all the talk of this being a fight against al Qaeda, the U.S. troops mostly find themselves in the middle of a civil war in a historically unstable region, and if two warring sides are bent on killing each other there's really nothing a peacekeeping force like the U.S. and its NATO allies can do about it.

The thing that most concerns me is the reliance of Obama's plan on the self-sufficiency of Afghanistan's internal security forces. Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan doesn't have a tradition of a large standing army which can be recruited to fight the insurgency. From what I've heard, the Afghan forces are often just as corrupt as the Karzai government itself, meaning that we face to prospect of handing off security responsibility to a bunch of thugs and thieves. I'm also concerned how viable a strong centralized government there could possibly be. At least Iraq has the great advantage of vast oil resources which have the potential to finance security forces and social programs. Afghanistan doesn't have that. Instead its most lucrative product is opium, whose trafficking is controlled by regional warlords who thus hold great power in the country and can dictate their demands to the central government, and not vice versa.

On the other hand, I'm encouraged by claims that U.S. aid (both humanitarian and development) will increasingly not be funnelled through the central government (where it would likely be pilfered) but instead to regional and local authorities who have proven themselves willing and able to responsibly deliver that aid to everyday Afghan people. Raising the standard of living of Afghans is a critical factor in negating the allure of the extremists, and that aspect of Obama's plan is far more important than increasing our military presence.

Obama might have no choice but to insitute the troop surge that he's outlined. But if drawing down troops starting in 2011 is dependent on the Afghans (including Karzai or whomever might succeed him) taking primary responsibility for their own destiny, then I'm less than optimistic. I don't see anything in Afghanistan right now that encourages me to believe such stability and self-sufficiency is possible. Karzai has to be sternly told to get his house in order, weed out and punish official corruption, and quickly develop the military capability to suppress extremism, or else the U.S. will pull out in 2011 whether Afghanistan is ready to stand on its own or not. Our military presence cannot be an open-ended commitment, nor one that is contingent on Afghan self-sufficiency.

Obama has few if any good options. So while I'm trusting his judgment, I'm also crossing my fingers.

Remind me one more time...

...why did we bail out General Motors?

Under this "bailout" plan, GM is remaking itself as a corporate entity that employs fewer Americans, produces fewer cars in the U.S. and sustains fewer communities – effectively undermining the core arguments that were made in the first place for providing bailout funds to the company.

Instead of building itself back up as a great American manufacturer – with new approaches and better ideas for reconfiguring U.S. plants and retraining U.S. workers – GM has used the federal money to offshore its manufacturing operations and downsize its U.S. distribution network by pulling out of inner cities and small towns.

That, and also pay for commercials that tell everyone how Chevy is better than Honda or Ford. Because as we all know, it's not building better cars that's important, but making people believe you're building better cars - even if they're pieces of crap.

"In Flanders Fields"

Despite being a pacifist, I still find myself moved by this verse...

In Flanders Fields
by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD, Canadian Army

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Today is Veterans Day, so please give some remembrance to all of the soldiers who have fought for our country. But also recall that this day was originally called Armistice Day ("a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace"), which marked the peaceful end of World War I, and remember that striving for peace means more soldiers come home safely or never go to war in the first place.

Quote

"Why shouldn't the American people take half my money from me? I took it all from them."
- Edward Filene, as quoted in Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940, by William Leuchtenberg

I didn't know anything about Filene (other than his department store chain) before reading this quote, but he seems to have been an interesting individual. He was a highly successful merchant, of course, but also was instrumental in the creation of both credit unions and workers compensation insurance.

Yes We Can

U.S. GDP rises 3.5% as stimulus kicks in. Well done, Mr. President.

Progressivism Then (As Now)

Edmund Wilson, from "Meditations of a Progressive", circa 1930-31 (collected in The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump):

...Still, one who like to see them come out and say, "Capitalism has got to go. It's just a question of time, so we're trying to make the transition easy." If they're going in for scaring the manufacturers, they might as well scare them good and proper. I suppose they're afraid of scaring their constituents, too. But why do the American progressives have to be tongue-tied with inhibitions? - they're shy of the whole language of real political thought. The surest way to shake an American reformer and make him back down has always been to accuse him of socialism - that's what they did with Bryan, and we ought to be beyond the Bryan stage. I suppose that we still have a lingering feeling that God is going to strike us dead if we admit that our old-fashioned republic isn't the last word in political science. A few high words would do no one any harm.

Clearly things have changed little since Wilson's day. We're still not "beyond the Bryan stage" - any proposal for genuine political reform, for wresting power away from the plutocracy, is met with charges of socialism (as if socialism is really that bad - it's done quite well for the standard of living in many countries in Europe), from which progressive reformers nearly always shrink in fear, weakly retreating from their positions and leaving the status quo intact.

Joe Hill

Time to honor a great American (or great American immigrant), the organized labor hero Joe Hill, who was born 130 years ago today. Or more accurately, as Mobylives points out, Joel Emmanuel Hägglund, Hill's given name. I had no idea he was Swedish. And check out the Wikipedia section on the remarkable fate of his remains - Billy Bragg, you're a braver man than I.

Cold-blooded inhumanity is a pre-existing condition, too...

At least for the titans of the health insurance industry. Three more examples of the venality of health insurers...

+ Being the victim of domestic abuse is a pre-existing condition, and thus is used as the basis for denying medical coverage. (Most of the top health insurers)
+ "Having a child is a matter of choice," and thus elective, and thus maternity care is subject to denial of coverage. (Anthem Blue Cross)
+ Delivering a child by Caesarean section increases the likelihood that a Caesarean will be needed for future births, and thus the first Caesarean creates a pre-existing condition which is the basis for denying coverage of future Caesareans. (Golden Rule Insurance)

But remember, things would be so much worse if we had government bureaucrats deciding what health care you deserve instead of profit-motivated private companies. PASS MEANINGFUL HEALTH CARE REFORM LEGISLATION, NOW.

Rejecting the "cult of the market"

French President Nicholas Sarkozy is onto something (no, not "on something") here.

"A great revolution is waiting for us. For years, people said that finance was a formidable creator of wealth, only to discover one day that it accumulated so many risks that the world almost plunged into chaos," argues the French leader. "The crisis doesn't only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so."

Sarkozy's "revolution" would still use measures of economic growth and contraction in the analysis of a nation's success. But the definition would be expanded beyond traditional gross domestic product (GDP) models to include measures of well-being and what Sarkozy describes as "the politics of civilization." These include environmental sustainability, the quality of public services and the amount of time citizens of a country have to meet family responsibilities -- which the French leader values as "personal services provided within a family circle."

I've been thinking along these lines quite a bit during the past few months, and have been contemplating what I'm tentatively calling "social profit." The general idea is that the standard measure of a company's profitability - revenues minus expenses - is skewed almost entirely toward the interests of shareholders and executives, and ignores the impact of a company's actions on its workers, its suppliers and customers, its community and society as a whole.

Under standard accounting, if a corporation fires a thousand workers and realizes payroll and other cost savings which are greater than the lost revenue which those workers generated, then the corporation's accounting profit improves. Shareholders and executives benefit (from the resulting improvement in the corporation's stock price) while workers and their families suffer. If a corporation determines that belching mercury and other toxic matter from its smokestacks into the atmosphere can be done at a lower cost (from resulting legal actions and regulatory penalties) than responsibly installing state-of-the-art pollution control equipment, then its accounting profit improves, again benefiting shareholders and executives while harming everyone who lives nearby with the nasty enviromental fallout. If a corporation forces its suppliers into unreasonable cost concessions, it lowers its own input costs but only by lowering the revenue of the suppliers, which may result in the suppliers freezing or reducing wages to its workers, or even instituting layoffs. Again, the corporation's shareholders executives gain, while the suppliers and their workers lose. Or, as Sarkozy might note, if a corporation demands that its employees work such unreasonably long hours that their family lives are disrupted or even damaged, the corporation gains through greater output and efficiency while families are harmed.

Simply put, accounting profit is too narrowly focused. It evaluates a corporation as if it exists in a vacuum, as if its sole responsibility is to enrich its shareholders and executives while all other stakeholders - workers, suppliers, customers, the community - are of little or no consequence. Social profit, by contrast, would measure a corporation's actions on all of its stakeholders. If a company generates high accounting profits, that's perfectly fine, but only if it does so while not damaging the rest of society in the process. Though my concept of social profit applies specifically to corporations, it could easily be extended to national economies, where Sarkozy rightly suggests GDP is as unreasonably narrowly focused as an economic benchmark as accounting profit is for corporations.

I like where Sarkozy is going with this, and hope he finds a receptive audience at the G-20 summit.

No to "triggers"

The latest proposal in the healthcare reform debate is to defer the public option for now, with the caveat that it could be implemented, or "triggered", several years from now if private insurers do nothing to reduce health insurance costs. This makes no sense for several reasons. First, the insurance industry has done absolutely nothing up until now to control costs, so why should we believe that they'll suddenly wise up and do so, just because there's the possibility of a public option being instituted sometime in the future? (And make no mistake, it will no more than a possibility - no matter how concrete Congress makes the "trigger" legislation, it's inevitable that enough wiggle room will be built in to enable the public option to be deferred again several years from now, or even abandoned completely.) Instead, the industry will likely use the trigger as a grace period to squeeze several hundred billion dollars more out of the American public.

Second, if the public option will be legitimate government policy in three years, why isn't it legitimate policy right now? Why wait?

The insurance industry has had it too good for far too long - raising premiums to policyholders while continuing to delay or deny coverage - and a public option trigger will do nothing more than to extend the insurers' good times for several more years, and won't fix our broken healthcare system. We're paying more for healthcare than every other country in the world, and yet the quality of that healthcare lags most of the developed world, and the private insurance industry's position as profit-grabbing middleman is the primary cause. We can do better, and must do better.

I know the Obama Administration is under a lot of pressure to pass any sort of healthcare reform so it can claim political victory. But 65 million voters didn't put Obama into office so he could claim political victories. Instead they voted for change, for a better way of life for all Americans. Weak healthcare reform is the wrong kind of change, and might be even worse than maintaining the unsatisfactory status quo. Pass a strong public option right now.

Save the public option!

I'm dismayed that the Obama Administration is already backing down from including a public insurance option as part of healthcare reform. Without a public option, it will be reform in name only, and our broken healthcare system won't be fixed.

The “public option,” a new government insurance program akin to Medicare, has been a central component of Mr. Obama’s agenda for overhauling the health care system, but it has also emerged as a flashpoint for anger and opposition. Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, said the public option was “not the essential element” for reform and raised the idea of the co-op during an interview on CNN.

Mr. Obama himself sought to play down the significance of the public option at a town-hall-style meeting on Saturday in Grand Junction, Colo., when a university student challenged him on how private insurers could compete with the government.

After strongly defending the public plan, the president suggested that he, too, viewed it as only a small piece of a broader initiative intended to control costs, expand coverage, protect consumers and make the delivery of health care more efficient.

No no no. The public option is the essential element. The best way to "control costs, expand coverage, protect consumers and make the delivery of health care more efficient" is to have a public option which will force private insurers to be more competitive. This will benefit both those who are currently uninsured (who will gain coverage) and those (myself included) who already have employer-provided private insurance, who will gain from more comprehensive coverage and controlled growth of policy premiums.

And the argument that "a public plan would invariably drive private insurers out of business and prompt employers to drop private coverage" doesn't hold either. The insurance companies are already in such a position of strength that even a few million people migrating to the the public plan won't bankrupt them, but should instead spur them to be more efficient and negotiate more vigorously with pharmaceutical companies and hospitals instead of just passing along higher costs to employers and individuals. This will make their health plan offerings more affordable, and make them more palatable to employers, who will thus be more likely to continue providing coverage to workers.

What's wrong with a little competition, anyway? Isn't that what capitalism is all about? What are the private insurers afraid of, other than the days of their being able to print money coming to an end?

I would like every conservative politician who rails against the so-called "government takeover of healthcare" to immediately renounce Medicare and Medicaid and demand the immediate termination of those programs. Those politicians would be lucky to suffer no more than simply losing their next election - but instead, I think it's more likely they'd be greeted in their home districts by angry constituent seniors armed with torches and pitchforks, with tarring and feathering suddenly coming back into vogue.

Effin golden, indeed

Amazon customers are having a field day adding tags to Rod Blagojevich's upcoming (and self-serving, delusional, narcissistic, etc.) memoir The Governor. I'm guessing most if not all of the contributors were his former constituents, howling online in outrage as they wonder (as I've done) how the hell they ever voted this guy into office twice. Here are all the tags so far that were selected more than once.

moron (121); delusional (91); crook (79); fraud (58); historical fiction (46); insanity (41); impeachment (35); fantasy series (29); hairbrush (27); hair care (20); comedy (19); testicular virility (7); sociopath (4); corruption (3); effin golden (3); illinois political corruption (3); narcissistic personality disorder (3); pay to play (3); cuckoo (2); disgrace (2); dogs (2); embarrassment (2); fitzpatrick (2)

The full list is here. (My favorites, at one vote each, are "governor goofy" and "careful picking up the soap.") And please, literature lovers, do society a favor - don't buy the book (let the schmuck pay for his own legal defense) and leave your own tag instead.

(Via Gapers Block Book Club.)

The Baffler returns!

No, not some second-rate Batman villian, but the great journal edited by Thomas Frank.

"In my little imagination, I never really felt like The Baffler went away," he said. "I mean, I just got back from the hardware store. I went to buy grass seed. The name of the seed? 'Rebel'! It's like there's almost no point anymore to the word!"

I was big fan of The Baffler back in the day, and am glad to see it return, so much so that I will be a regular subscriber this time instead of sporadically picking it up from the newsstand. My only regret is that, having ceased publication in 2003, it missed the meatiest parts of the Bush administration. The journal's wisdom and common sense would have gone a long way towards comprehending the insanity of that thankfully bygone era.

Antitrust: good news, bad news

Good: the new antitrust regime in Washington is getting aggressive.

President Obama’s top antitrust official and some senior Democratic lawmakers are preparing to rein in a host of major industries, including airline and railroad giants, moving so aggressively that they are finding some resistance from officials within the administration.

Bad: Some Obama administration officials are resisting.

In some cases, though, the new approach is being opposed by administration officials. Some fear that the crackdown is coming at a bad time, as corporate America reels from the recession. Other officials embrace the Bush administration’s view that larger companies and industry alliances can provide consumer benefits by making their businesses more efficient.

I really don't understand the latter, especially since two of the administration's biggest problems right now - reining in the excesses of Wall Street and reforming the healthcare system - are the direct result of previous administrations abdicating their antitrust responsibility, stepping aside and allowing the financial and healthcare industries to consolidate. Power became highly concentrated within those industries, competition slackened, prices rose and consumer choices decreased, and now those major players are so politically and economically strong that they can easily block any attempt at reform.

Repeat after me, Mr. Obama: increased industry power does NOT benefit consumers or society as a whole - no matter what those industries tell you. Do everything in your power to regulate industry and restore the critical competition that your predecessors let slip away.

Walter Cronkite

(Photo by CBS)

I'm sure the tributes for this great man will keep rolling in, from people who knew him well or speak more eloquently than I can. For me, all you need to know about Cronkite was the comment that Lyndon Johnson made after the anchorman returned from Vietnam and expressed serious reservations about the war effort: "If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America." We will never have another journalist as influential, respected and trusted as Walter Cronkite. Rest well, sir.

No caption needed

(Photo by Tom McCauley, Associated Press)

Although this picture speaks for itself, I welcome your suggestions for an appropriate caption. Feel free to leave one as a comment.

Perry Mason

It warms my heart to hear that Sonia Sotomayor was such a fan of Perry Mason while growing up. (And indeed, it's very hard to imagine Calista Flockhart or James Spader inspiring a young person to go into law, as Raymond Burr did for Sotomayor.) I was a huge fan myself, especially during grad school, so much so that I was often late for my noon class in trying to catch the last minutes of episodes that started on WTBS at 11:05 a.m. There was just something about the tone and mood of the show - the relentless pursuit of justice for the wrongly accused, the unapologetic sanctimony, the dark suits and Thunderbirds and swanky cocktail lounges, the endless befuddlement of authority as embodied by District Attorney Hamilton Burger. Even the utter implausibility of the latter factor - Burger losing every case to Mason, who always extracted a courtroom confession from an unwitting witness - never dampened my ardor for the show. Glad to see I'm not alone.

Who said it?

"When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account."

Sonia Sotomayor? No, Samuel Alito. And yet the same Senate conservatives who had no problem with this position in 2006, when they confirmed Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court, now hypocritically insist that a Supreme Court Justice should never practice empathy when making their judicial decisions, thus making Sotomayor (who has professed similar empathy) somehow unfit for the Court. Oh, please.

(Via Think Progress.)