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Kunstler: Stop calling Americans “consumers”

By Joe Romm on Jun 29, 2009 at 8:40 pm

I was at a small meeting on peak oil Friday — Executive Summary:  We’re peaking now!

James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, was there.  He is in the Mad Max/Lovelock/Wall-E school of dystopia, and so I have a number of disagreements with him (see “Why I don’t agree with James Kunstler about peak oil and the “end of suburbia“).

He did, however, say one thing that really strike a chord.  He said we should stop calling Americans “consumers.”  It pigeonholes all Americans and also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That seems to me a reasonable point, and I will endeavor to make a change.  Indeed, I had previously blogged that the U.S. savings rate was on the rise, it looks like U.S. carbon dioxide emissions peaked in 2007, President Obama was making a big ush toward making America a nation of creators as opposed to consumers, and I asked “Is the U.S. consumption binge over?”

The figure above is from the NYT business blog, Economix, which has a longer-term, glass-is-half-empty perspective in a post titled, “Savings Rates Rising Toward Mediocrity“:

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Politics

Wilkerson says DADT ‘should be repealed’ immediately.

By Ben Armbruster on Jun 29, 2009 at 8:00 pm

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.), former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, appeared on the XM/Sirius radio show “Stand Up! With Pete Dominick” today and stated forcefully that the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy barring gay men and women from serving openly in the military “should be repealed”:

DOMINICK: You’re a 31 year veteran of the military, Army, like I’ve said, you served in Vietnam. What’s your opinion of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy currently in place? Should it be repealed or should it remain in place?

WILKERSON: Let me say just right off the bat, it should be repealed. Gays should be able to serve – gays and lesbians should be able to serve openly in the American armed forces just like anyone else does. [...]

DOMINICK: It should be repealed immediately.

WILKERSON: Yep.

Listen here:

At a meeting commemorating the 40th anniversary of the gay rights movement at the White House today with more than 250 leaders of the gay community, President Obama defended his administration’s lack of action thus far in his presidency in repealing the policy. But according to the Boston Globe, Obama added the delay “does not diminish his pledge to eventually overturn it.” Read the Center for American Progress’s report on how Obama can repeal the ban here.

Transcript: Read more

Justice

Conservatives Attack Sotomayor For Not Having A Crystal Ball

By Ian Millhiser on Jun 29, 2009 at 8:00 pm

SotomayorWithin minutes of today’s decision in Ricci the right-wing opened a new assault on President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, claiming that all nine justices disagreed with Judge Sotomayor. The claim featured prominently in a Federalist Society press call held just over an hour after the decision was handed down; right-wing law professor Jonathan Adler made the claim on his blog; and the same claim is all over the National Review’s website. By lunch, even Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) had picked up the spin.

The basis of this claim is the fact that both Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion and Justice Ginsburg’s dissent created new legal standards which are different than the twenty-five year old rule Sotomayor was required to follow in Ricci.  Under the Second Circuit’s 1984 decision in Bushey v. New York State Civil Service Commission employers have almost carte blanche authority to reconsider a hiring or promotion test if minorities underperform white applicants who take that test.  The newly-announced rule created by today’s majority opinion says that employers must have a “strong basis in evidence” showing that the test was in fact illegal before they can throw out a promotion test.  Justice Ginsburg’s dissent would have carved a middle ground, allowing employers to reconsider a test when they have “good cause to believe” that the test was illegal.

So Cornyn and his co-ideologues are right that Sotomayor failed to predict that both Kennedy and Ginsburg would create never-before-imagined legal standards in their dueling opinions in Ricci, but this is hardly a legitimate attack on Sotomayor.  As legendary Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse explains, Sotomayor’s crime was that she simply followed the rules that were in place when Ricci was before her court:

This is a substantial weakening of the disparate-impact prong of Title VII. [T]he 2nd Circuit (and the 6th Circuit, which had handled a similar case in a nearly identical way) was playing by the old rules, and the Supreme Court changed those rules. Don’t we want our appellate judges to play by the rules they are given and to refrain from the activism that would be involved in crafting new ones? Does it seem to you, as it does to me, that Judge Sotomayor’s critics are now kind of stuck?

The lovely thing about being the nation’s highest court is that you aren’t bound by lower-court decisions, and can create new rules on the fly.  Judge Sotomayor did not have this luxury, and she shouldn’t be attacked for doing nothing more than following a binding precedent.

Health

Mark Krikorian And CIS Conflate ‘Uninsured Crisis’ With ‘Immigration Crisis’

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Jun 29, 2009 at 7:00 pm

Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), recently told Michigan’s WXMI-GR news that the biggest growth in the uninsured has come from an increase in immigration — both legal and illegal. According to Krikorian, “From 1989 on, more than 70% of the increase in the total number of uninsured people is immigrants or their young kids.” Watch it:

CIS’ “findings” were also featured in Jerome Corsi’s Red Alert newsletter. Corsi is already well known for authoring two error-ridden anti-Obama books. His “controversial and often bizarre views,” include xenophobic government conspiracy theories as expressed in his book, “The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger With Mexico and Canada.” Stephen Camarota, Director of CIS Research, told Corsi, “It is not too much to say that the nation’s problem with those lacking health care insurance is being driven by the nation’s immigration policy.” Krikorian is also quoted as saying, “We don’t have an uninsured crisis…We have an immigration crisis.”

What Corsi, Krikorian, and Camarota all conveniently fail to mention is that there were years during the post-1989 period during which the number of uninsured native-born citizens dropped dramatically. By leaving out this significant piece of information, anti-immigrant zealots are able to make it look as if immigrants were a larger share of the total increase in the uninsured than is really the case.

In a personal email correspondence, Dr. Walter Ewing, Senior Researcher at the Immigration Policy Center (IPC) further criticizes CIS for muddying the national health care debate with their anti-immigrant agenda. “Given that nearly 80 percent of the uninsured adults and children in this country are U.S. citizens, it is difficult to fathom how Mark Krikorian can treat this as an immigration issue,” says Ewing.

Ezra Klein has pointed out that excluding immigrants from a national health care system, as groups like CIS advocate, could do more harm than good as unskilled or semi-skilled insured native workers are left to compete with cheaper uninsured undocumented immigrants. As CIS and their anti-immigrant allies exploit the health care issue to make the case against immigration, some have gone as far to argue that immigration reform which includes a legalization program for undocumented immigrants could actually solve labor cost disparities and pave the way for health care reform:

“Most immigrants—legal and illegal—to this country are hard-working, young, and in relatively good physical shape (especially compared to native-born Americans). They make far fewer demands on the public purse than, for example, the average retiring baby boomer. If placed on a pathway to citizenship, they comprise a potentially huge new block of taxpayers—taxpayers that could be critical to balancing the long-term ledger for health care, social security, and other entitlements.”

Security

Diehl: Obama’s Israel-Palestine Policy Too Effective

By Matt Duss on Jun 29, 2009 at 6:15 pm

harhomaIt’s unfortunate for Jackson Diehl that this column, in which he argues for Obama to ease up already on Israel over its past commitments to a settlement freeze, should come out the same day as this story in the New York Times, which reports that “Israel would be open to a complete freeze of settlement building in the West Bank for three to six months as part of a broad Middle East peace endeavor that included a Palestinian agreement to negotiate an end to the conflict and confidence-building steps by major Arab nations, senior Israeli officials said Sunday.”

A settlement “pause” is, of course, far short of what Israel committed to under the roadmap, as Peter Juul pointed out in an earlier post. While the Obama administration should continue to pressure Israel on its obligations, I think we should recognize this proposal, as with Netanyahu’s qualified endorsement of a Palestinian state, as positive (if certainly insufficient) progress.

While a settlement freeze is by no means impossible, there’s no doubt that it will be extremely difficult for Netanyahu with regard to his right-wing, settlements-supporting political coalition. Knowing this, it seems to me that the Obama team has created an excellent incentive for the Israelis to engage in final status talks, determine the final borders of Israel and Palestine, after which time Israel can build all it wants — inside Israel.

Diehl, on the other hand, frets that “the extraction of a freeze from Netanyahu is, as a practical matter, unnecessary.”

While further settlement expansion needs to be curbed, both the Palestinian Authority and Arab governments have gone along with previous U.S.-Israeli deals by which construction was to be limited to inside the periphery of settlements near Israel – since everyone knows those areas will be annexed to Israel in a final settlement.

To call this argument — because the Palestinians have begrudgingly gone along with past agreements under which the U.S. acquiesced to continued Israeli building on Palestinian land, it’s no big deal if Israel just keeps building on Palestinian land — specious really does injustice to the word.

It’s also strange that Diehl would accuse the administration of “raising the stakes” by holding Israel to commitments on settlements — commitments that he does not deny that Israel has made. This bespeaks a pretty cynical view of agreements between the U.S. and its partners. I should think Diehl would be more concerned with the loss of American credibility in the region that has resulted from years of a U.S. “wink, wink” policy toward Israeli settlement building — credibility that Obama is now trying to restore as a necessary first step toward resolving the conflict.

Yglesias

Endgame

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 29, 2009 at 6:13 pm

Thanks to John Roberts, the white man can finally get a break in this country:

— Why models overestimate the cost of environmental legislation.

— It would actually be a third stimulus rather than a second (we had a small one under Bush) but John Judis is right that we need one.

— Coal-loving congressfolk from Dixie might want to check out what climate change is going to do to their farms.

— TPM Media is getting a lot bigger.

— Applying economic cost-benefit analysis to a global problem that disproportionately affects the poor leads to insane conclusions.

Apparently in Australia you can advertise hard liquor on television, with brotastic results; a US ban on TV beer ads would probably improve public health and also serve as an important stimulus to print media.

Politics

Iraqis jubilantly celebrate U.S. troop withdrawal.

By ThinkProgress on Jun 29, 2009 at 6:05 pm

U.S. forces handed over formal control of Iraq’s major cities today (it is already Tuesday in Iraq), “a defining step toward ending the U.S. combat role in the country.” In celebration, Iraqis launched fireworks and “thousands attended a party in a park [in Baghdad] where singers performed patriotic songs. … Loudspeakers at police stations and military checkpoints played recordings of similar tunes throughout the day, as Iraqi military vehicles decorated with flowers and national flags patrolled the capital.” Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who had called the withdrawal a “great victory,” declared June 30 a public holiday. Some scenes of celebration around the country:

iraqcelebrations

Politics

Could Census fear-mongering cost Bachmann her seat?

By Nate Carlile on Jun 29, 2009 at 5:35 pm

bachmannWhile noting that “conspiracy theories have been a constant in Rep. Michele Bachmann’s political career since she first ran for the Stillwater school board in the late 1990s,” the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune’s editorial page called into question the collateral damage that could stem from Bachmann’s irrational 2010 Census fear-mongering. The Star-Tribune points out that not only is Bachmann “a politician interested more in being the face of the fringe element than solving the real-life problems of her north-suburban district,” but that “she may be setting in motion events that could substantially hurt her home state and potentially cost her the office she occupies.” The Star-Tribune writes:

The 2010 census will likely determine whether Minnesota loses one of its eight U.S. House seats; population determines seat allocation. Political experts agree that a few thousand people not filling out census forms may be all it takes for the state to lose a congressional advocate in the nation’s capital. If Minnesota were to lose a congressional seat, Bachmann’s district appears to be candidate for absorption. Bachmann has been careful to say that she’s willing to tell the census how many people live in her household, the basic information that will determine whether Minnesota keeps a congressional seat. But that’s a message that’s easily lost in her fear-mongering; Beck didn’t help when he pantomimed flushing census documents down the toilet.

Economy

Supreme Court: States Have The Right To Investigate National Banks For Lending Discrimination

By Pat Garofalo on Jun 29, 2009 at 5:30 pm

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo

Though the Supreme Court case garnering the most headlines today will be the Ricci v. DeStefano employment discrimination case, a second decision came down with important implications for the future of financial regulation. In a 5-4 decision in Cuomo v. The Clearing House Association, the Court decided that states are allowed to investigate national banks for discrimination and violating state fair-lending laws, which reverses (in part) a 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling from 2007.

The Clearing House argument was that only the federal government (in this case, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) has the ability to investigate national banks. Justice Antonin Scalia joined the four liberal justices in disagreeing with this argument:

The foregoing cases all involve enforcement of state law. But if the Comptroller’s exclusive exercise of visitorial powers precluded law enforcement by the States, it would also preclude law enforcement by federal agencies. Of course it does not…In sum, the unmistakable and utterly consistent teaching of our jurisprudence, both before and after enactment of the National Bank Act, is that a sovereign’s “visitorial powers” and its power to enforce the law are two different things. There is not a credible argument to the contrary.

This case began when Eliot Spitzer, then New York’s attorney general, wanted to discover “whether minorities were being charged higher interest rates on home mortgage loans.” But at the time, the courts ruled that Spitzer was barred from investigating whether national banks were engaging in such practices, leaving the job to ineffectual federal regulators. Current New York AG Andrew Cuomo called the Supreme Court’s reversal of this decision “a huge win for consumers across the nation.”

As Adam Levitan added at Credit Slips, “hopefully this opinion, combined with the emphasis in the Obama financial restructuring plan on ending federal preemption of state consumer protection laws (federal law will be a floor, not a ceiling), marks a turning point in the long march of federal preemption of state consumer protection laws in financial services.” Indeed, Obama has taken positive steps to ensure that states can enforce consumer protections within their own borders, despite pressure from the mortgage and insurance industries.

In the grander scheme of things, this was an attempt by the banking and mortgage industries to grab a piece of the immunity from state law already enjoyed by the health insurance and medical device industries (as outlined by Ian Milhiser here). Hopefully this case will blunt the charge by others, including the restaurant industry, to avoid state law.

Yglesias

Sowell: Obama Will Lead to Sharia

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 29, 2009 at 5:25 pm

Via Tyler Cowen, Thomas Sowell argues that “Perhaps people who are busy gushing over the Obama cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under sharia law.”

And, yes, that was in National Review the flagship publication of the American right.

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