I’m headed off on vacation, but I’ll be around, though at a reduced rate, over the next week and a half. I promise not to do what I did over Thanksgiving and get too sick to do anything but read The Diana Chronicles and drink tea!
And for those of you celebrating the second night of Hanukkah, have nerdy Jews riffing on Taio Cruz:
Because if there are two things this blog loves, it’s colorblocking and deeply cheesy pop.
In January, San Francisco will officially be the first U.S. city to have a minimum wage of above $10, nearly $3 more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25. And that won’t be the only locale in which workers will see a little extra pay in 2012. In fact, eight states will be raising their minimum wage next year, which, according to the Economic Policy Institute, will benefit 1.4 million workers:
There are eight states that have legislated annual, inflation-linked increases in their minimum wage. This “indexing” of the minimum wage ensures that the real value of the lowest-paid workers’ wages does not shrink as normal costs of living go up. On Jan. 1, 2012, minimum-wage workers in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington will all see an increase in their paychecks.
The table below describes the workers affected by the increase. Across these eight states, an estimated 1,045,000 workers will be “directly affected.” These are workers whose current wages are between the existing state minimum wage and the new Jan. 1 minimum wage. In addition, another 394,000 workers will be “indirectly affected” by the increase. These indirectly-affected workers are those whose current wages are just above the new Jan. 1 minimum, and are likely to also see a wage increase as employers adjust their overall pay structures to reflect the new minimum (the “spillover” effect).
The extra money pumped into the economy by the increases should also create about 3,000 jobs. But even with these increases, the minimum wage has a long way to go: It would actually take a minimum wage of about $9.92 today to match the buying power of the minimum wage in 1968.
On Fox News this afternoon, GOP uber-strategist Karl Rove advised House Republicans to pass the Senate’s two-month payroll tax holiday extension because “they’ve already lost the optics on it.” Rove made it clear he was not happy with the Senate bill and urged Republicans to “lambaste Democrats” for not passing a full-year extension, but said at this juncture, Republicans have no other options. Watch it:
Meanwhile, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said a Wall Street Journal editorial slamming House Republicans on the payroll tax fight “was right on the mark.”
NEWS FLASH
Hate Group Highlights Republican Candidates’ Anti-Gay Positions | The Family Research Council, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group for its anti-LGBT positions, has published a 2012 “Values Voter Republican Presidential Voter Guide.” Three of FRC’s ten criteria specifically address candidates’ positions on LGBT issues, including support for reinstating Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, support for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, and opposition to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. The Center for American Progress has its own interactive that takes a closer look at where the candidates stand on LGBT issues. Click below to see a larger version of FRC’s new voter guide:
This year has seen a great many important climate stories. Obviously, the continued self-destructive failure of the nation and the world to reverse greenhouse gas emission trends always deserve to be the top story in some sense:
The emergence of a genuine grassroots movement following Obama’s fecklessness on the environment is a major U.S. story (see “A Climate Movement Is Born: Ozone Decision Spikes Total Arrests to 1,252 at White House Pipeline Protest“).
And the energy story with the biggest climate implication was clearly Fukushima:
But the climate story that affects the most people around the world today by far is well described in this post — Oxfam: Extreme Weather Has Helped Push Tens of Millions into “Hunger and Poverty” in “Grim Foretaste” of Warmed World.
Climate Progress had been covering those who have been warning the day would come when humanity’s unsustainable energy and agricultural policies would collide with global warming, who warned that the agricultural system we need to feed the world was built on a relatively stable climate that we are now destroying. Lester Brown has been our Paul Revere on food insecurity (see the 2009 post Scientific American asks “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?”).
We covered the emergence of this story last year:
But CP really dug in to this story starting in January, when food prices soared — see Extreme weather events help drive food prices to record highs — and I had lunch with Brown (see Washington Post, Lester Brown explain how extreme weather, climate change drive record food prices).
Brown’s work persuaded me that genuinely destabilizing food insecurity may occur as soon as this decade — assuming 1 billion undernourished people isn’t already a crisis. So I decided to add a new category, “food insecurity,” and began a series of posts on food insecurity and the threat of Dust-Bowlification, which ultimately led the journal Nature to ask me to make the case that this was the gravest threat to humanity posed by climate change. As my piece concluded:
“Feeding some 9 billion people by mid-century in the face of a rapidly worsening climate may well be the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced.”
Of course, it’s not just climate change that is driving food insecurity. We have an “unsustainable surge in demand and not just ‘peak oil’, but ‘peak everything’,” as uber-hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham, a self-described “die hard contrarian,” put it in a must-read analysis (see “Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever”).
Here’s the key chart:
In my column for The Loop 21, I revisited John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me 50 years after he published his account of going undercover as a black man in the South. I was particularly interested in the way contemporary critics treated the project, which has queasy elements of blackface read today, even if it produced interesting moral revelations:
That basic challenge for the project isn’t something that’s simply evident now. In 1964, Brendan Gill wrote a scathing review in the New Yorker of the movie based on Griffin’s novel, arguing:
He is…rather simple-minded, for though he intends to turn his findings into a series of sensational pieces in a national magazine, he considers his ‘passing’ less a journalistic stunt than a self-imposed spiritual ordeal, the harsh consequences of which, in middle age and with many years of reporting behind him, he surely had little reason to be astonished by…he makes considerable trouble for his new-found Negro friends in the course of a masquerade that necessarily takes greater advantage of them than it does of whites, and that, in the end, merely confirms what has been a fact accepted for generations, however little it may have been acted on: that life for the Negro in a small Southern town is made tolerable only by his extraordinary feats of accommodation, most of them continuously humiliating.
But Dan Wakefield, in a New York Times review of the book published on October 22, 1961, suggested that such understanding wasn’t nearly as widespread as the New Yorker would suggest four years later. He wrote:
The daily indignities of living as a Negro in America are not ‘news’ and are seldom written about. Dramatic outbreaks of racial conflict make the front-page stories, but in order to begin to understand them—and what lies behind them—it is necessary first to be aware of the routine torments of discrimination as they plague the everyday life of particular individuals.
If fifty years has convinced some people that putting on blackface is an innocuous act, it hasn’t lessened the desire to see what happens when white and black Americans switch roles. FX repeated Griffin’s experiment and fused it with reality television in 2006 in a six-part series, Black.White., that not only had a black and white family exchange races, but had them live together in a more sedate version of a Real World house.
It may be easier to be a tourist in someone else’s life today than it was during John Howard Griffin’s expedition, and there may still be uncomfortable truths to be gleaned from those experiences. But all these experiments assume that visiting another country—even if it’s your own—will actually teach you what it means to live there. Sometimes the greatest possible act of sympathy is to acknowledge that you can’t understand the entirety of someone else’s experiences.
There’s something interesting about the fact that we’ve gone from blackface as an act of sympathy with a despised class to blackface as act of cultural appropriation. But gaining cultural capital doesn’t mean you’ve beaten discrimination. And assigning cultural capital can be a form of treating people as a monolith rather than individuals.
With übertenther Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) emerging as the latest frontrunner in the Iowa GOP primary, Ta-Nehisi Coates chronicles many of the most offensive highlights from a series of racist newsletters Paul published in the late 1980s and early 1990s:
In a partial defense of Paul, David Weigel offers a perfectly plausible explanation of how these bigoted rants against science and reality came to appear under the name of a medical doctor who now argues that the War on Drugs should end because it is inherently racist. As Weigel explains in a piece he co-authored with Julian Sanchez, the likely author of Paul’s racist rants wasn’t Ron Paul, it was a repulsive libertarian activist named Lew Rockwell.
Rockwell, who now runs a far right think tank that publishes articles with titles like “How to Eliminate Social Security and Medicare,” believed in the 1980s and 1990s that libertarians had become a “party of the stoned” that needed to be “de-loused.” His solution, according to Weigel and Sanchez, was to try to expand the libertarian tent to include overt racists who could be attracted to libertarians’ opposition to “State-enforced integration.” It was likely Rockwell, and not the libertarian Congressman Ron Paul, who drafted the racist rants published in Paul’s name.
This explanation for Paul’s behavior hardly excuses it, however. The simplest conclusion that can be drawn when someone publishes a racist rant in their own name is that they truly believe that one race is superior to another. Weigel and Sanchez’ reporting, however, leads to only two possible explanations. Either Paul is so oblivious to what was being done in his name that this obliviousness alone disqualifies him for a job like the presidency — or he knew very well that horrific arguments were being published his name and he lent his name to a cynical racist strategy anyway.
NEWS FLASH
Bank of America Will Pay $335 Million To Settle Claim Its Subsidiary Discriminated Against Minorities | Bank of America will pay a $335 million settlement to address federal claims that its subsidiary, Countrywide Financial, “systematically discriminated against minority home-buyers at the peak of the U.S. housing boom.” The Department of Justice alleged that Countrywide charged higher interest rates and other fees to African-American and Latino home buyers compared to white home-buyers with similar financial backgrounds. The Los Angeles Times reports that Countrywide “frequently pushed minorities into risky subprime loans rather than into safer prime loans,” a practice that helped spark the economic collapse in 2008. Bank of America insisted that these practices occurred prior to Bank of America’s acquisition of Countrywide.
The individual health insurance mandate in the Affordable Care Act has been one of the law’s most unpopular provisions, but a Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that people’s opinions change about the mandate when they know more. Generally, 33 percent support and 65 percent say they oppose the individual mandate. That number jumps to 80 percent saying they oppose it when survey participants are told it “could mean that some people would be required to buy health insurance that they find too expensive or did not want.” But when participants hear that “without the mandate, people might wait until they are seriously ill to obtain coverage, driving up insurance costs for everyone,” 47 percent support the mandate and 45 percent oppose. Another pro-mandate argument tips the public even more in favor of the individual mandate: “Sixty-one percent of those surveyed support it when told most Americans would still get their coverage through their employers and thus wouldn’t be affected by the mandate,” according to the Kaiser poll.
(Photo Credit: Brian Clark, The Virginian-Pilot)
The repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has opened the door to various milestones as military traditions become inclusive of same-sex couples. Today, the Navy tradition of being the first couple to share a homecoming kiss went to a same-sex couple for the first time. Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta won the lottery aboard the Oak Hill to fulfill the tradition and was greeted by her girlfriend, Petty Officer 3rd Class Citalic Snell when she crossed the brow.
Watch an interview with the couple about their historic moment:
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