Wall Street Executive: Banker Pay Is ‘Way Too High’

By Pat Garofalo on Oct 5, 2012 at 5:45 pm

Over the last four quarters, big Wall Street banks have been more profitable than at any time since before the Great Recession, with the six largest banks making $63 billion. While some high-profile Wall Street firms say they’ll reduce their bonus pool, some bankers will still be pulling in seven-figure bonuses, and starting bonuses easily clear six-figures.

But one Wall Street executive is taking issue with sky-high pay. James Gorman, chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley, told the Financial Times that compensation on Wall Street is “way too high,” chiding banks for increasing pay in good times and bad:

“There’s way too much capacity and compensation is way too high,” Mr Gorman said in an interview with the Financial Times. “As a shareholder I’m sort of sympathetic to the shareholder view that the industry is still overpaid.” [...]

“Comp [compensation] comes down because the amount of people in the business comes down,” said Mr Gorman. “What the Street has historically done is when revenues went up, they kept the comp-to-revenue ratio flat. They rank comp by ratio. When revenues went down, they increased the comp-to-revenue ratio because they said, ‘We might lose all our people. We have to increase it’. ”

He added: “That’s a classic Wall Street case of ‘Heads I win; tails, you lose’. The current Wall Street management is a little tougher-minded about that and shareholders are certainly tougher-minded.”

Over the last 30 years, skyrocketing Wall Street pay has contributed to the country’s increasing income inequality. And as one former Wall Street trader put it, “there’s no other industry where you could get paid so much for doing so little.” Pay for Wall Street CEOs jumped by double-digits last year according to multiple analyses.

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Health

San Francisco Judge Rules That Crisis Pregnancy Centers Cannot Mislead Women

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Oct 5, 2012 at 5:30 pm

Crisis Pregnancy Center advertisement

Although so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs) often present themselves as valid alternatives to women’s health clinics, they actually serve as a tool for anti-abortion advocates to talk women out of getting abortions, often using misleading information and conservative propaganda to shame women into making a different choice for their bodies. In San Francisco, however, a judge has confirmed that crisis pregnancy centers will no longer be able to use deceptive advertising to take advantage of vulnerable pregnant women.

After San Francisco city officials proposed an ordinance to crack down on CPCs’ false advertising — for example, signs telling women who are seeking abortions that they can receive counseling, medical care, and emotional support at a crisis pregnancy center — a local CPC sued. The anti-abortion organization First Resort alleged their civil rights were in danger of being violated by the overly vague law, which they claimed might be applied more broadly to restrict more than just their advertisements. Jezebel reports that this week, Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong dismissed the legal challenge to the city’s ordinance, ruling that First Resort should understand exactly what the law is intending to do:

First Resort claimed that statements regulated by the ordinance are not expressly limited to advertising and therefore the ordinance could apply “to virtually any speech made by First Resort, including statements made to its financial supporters for fundraising purposes.”

Armstrong noted that First Resort “ignored” provisions that state the purpose of the ordinance is to prevent false and misleading advertising regarding services and counseling provided or not provided and that any center cited under the ordinance would get a chance to cure the “false, misleading or deceptive advertising.”

The judge ruled that a “person of common intelligence could discern that the conduct proscribed by the ordinance is false and misleading advertising, and not simply any statement made by the limited services pregnancy center.”

San Francisco is not the first city to attempt to prevent CPCs from spreading misinformation, but it is the first to succeed. Laws attempting to regulate CPCs have been struck down in other cities like Baltimore and New York City. And in many parts of the country, crisis pregnancy centers have powerful allies in elected officials. Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) has said he hopes to defund Planned Parenthood clinics in his state and replace them with crisis pregnancy centers that don’t provide the same health services.

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NEWS FLASH

Two Prominent Republicans Endorse Marijuana Legalization | Washington Republican U.S. Senate candidate Michael Baumgartner and former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) both endorsed ballot initiatives in their respective states to legalize marijuana. Support for legalization reached an historic high nationwide last year, when for the first time a Gallup poll showed that 50 percent of Americans now support marijuana legalization, as compared to only 46 percent who oppose it.

Alyssa

How Diverse Is Television This Fall?

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Oct 5, 2012 at 5:06 pm

GLAAD does an incredible job of combing through new and returning every fall to figure out who—and not only on the basis of sexual orientation—the networks want to tell stories about. The numbers on series regulars are important because they represent a more significant commitment: it’s not particularly hard for a show to slot in a supporting characters whose main characteristic is his or her gayness, or to cast an actor of color to play a wholly generic supporting character whose role is so slight doesn’t require anyone to think about any potential racial inflection of the part. So as the season gets off to a start this year, here’s what television looks like:

-4.4 percent of series regular characters are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender

-61 percent of gay characters on broadcast television are men

-20 percent of gay characters on broadcast television are lesbians

-78 percent of series regulars are white

-12 percent of series regulars are African-American

-4 percent of series regulars are Latino

-5 percent of series regulars are Asian-Pacific Islanders

-1 percent of series regulars are multi-racial

-45 percent of series regulars are women

-0.6 percent of series regulars on the broadcast networks are people with disabilities

On race, the really egregious representation is for are Latino series regulars—16 percent of the American population is Latino, and this number of series regulars is actually down 2 percent from the previous television seasons. I’m not entirely sure why writing Latino characters appears to be such a challenge for television networks. Maybe it’s that archetypes of Latino characters aren’t as well-established as those for African-American characters, though I think the works of folks like Michael Peña is starting to establish roles like Latino cops that will prove as durable and as easily slotted into shows as African-American police officers and detectives. It may also be that some of the archetypes that do exist, like the volatile bombshell, only work and aren’t awful, stereotypical throwbacks under certain narrow circumstances, and when executed by certain performer like Sofia Vergara, and then not with consistent success. But either way, it’s an embarrassing statistic.

People with disabilities are also dramatically underrepresented on television: the reality’s around 12 percent, and representation’s clocking in at 0.6 percent. Some of this may be a settings issue: 21.1 of people with disabilities were employed in September 2012 as compared to 69.3 percent of people without disabilities, which means that a lot of American television is set in environment where people with disabilities are underrepresented compared to their actual presence in the population. But it’s also a matter of reminding network suits that, in fact, people with disabilities live and laugh and love and have adventures and solve crimes and practice medicine and run parts of government and try cases in court, and that audiences at home can see something other than their disabilities.

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Economy

How Today’s Jobs Report Deprives Romney Of Key Talking Points

By Guest Blogger on Oct 5, 2012 at 4:40 pm

Our guest blogger is Gadi Dechter, managing director of economic policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Today’s positive jobs report offers further proof that the unremittingly bleak picture of the economy that Mitt Romney has been painting — and which he emphasized in Wednesday’s presidential debate — is incomplete and inaccurate.

Employers added 114,000 jobs in September, and the unemployment rate dropped to 7.8 percent, going below 8 percent for the first time in almost four years. The economy has added private sector jobs for the past 31 months, totaling 5.2 million jobs over that period.

But you wouldn’t know that by listening to Romney, who in his initial reaction to the jobs report ignored the headline gains and dismissed good news for American workers as “not what a real recovery looks like.” Unfortunately for the GOP candidate, very real economic improvements continue to rob him of his best attack lines.

During last week’s debate, Romney declared, “We’ve had 43 straight months with unemployment above 8 percent.” Romney won’t be able to repeat that zinger when he and Obama face off again in two weeks.

Nor can Romney disparage the president for presiding over a term of net employment loss. Romney lost that line late last month when the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed that Obama is net positive for job creation, even after accounting for the president’s first few months in office, when the economy was still hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of jobs a month because of the Bush-era recession.

Even without accounting for those revisions, today’s job report bolsters net job creation under Obama, to 663,000.

To be sure, unemployment is too high and economic growth too slow to quickly knock the unemployment rate down to the traditional “full employment” rate of about 5 percent. But any balanced look at today’s report and at economic improvements in recent years suggest that the 2009 stimulus, the successful auto industry rescue, and landmark financial regulatory reform, have put the economy on a firm path to full recovery.

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Justice

Federal Appeals Court Upholds Decision Restoring Early Voting In Ohio

By Ian Millhiser on Oct 5, 2012 at 4:14 pm

A unanimous panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed a lower court’s decision striking down Ohio’s recent law limiting early voting. Although the panel divided on its reasoning, all three judges concluded that the law has serious constitutional deficiencies. The majority opinion was written by Judge Eric Clay, a Clinton appointee, and joined by Judge Joseph Hood, a George H.W. Bush appointee.

As the facts of this case demonstrated, cutting off early voting will endanger many voters’ ability to cast a vote:

Plaintiffs introduced extensive evidence that a significant number of Ohio voters will in fact be precluded from voting without the additional three days of in-person early voting. The district court credited statistical studies that estimated approximately 100,000 Ohio voters would choose to vote during the three-day period before Election Day, and that these voters are disproportionately “women, older, and of lower income and education attainment.” The district court concluded that the burden on Plaintiffs was “particularly high” because their members, supporters, and constituents represent a large percentage of those who participated in early voting in past elections. The State did not dispute the evidence presented by Plaintiffs, nor did it offer any evidence to contradict the district court’s findings of fact. Plaintiffs did not need to show that they were legally prohibited from voting, but only that “burdened voters have few alternate means of access to the ballot.”

The State argues that the burden on non-military voters is slight because they have “ample” other means to cast their ballots, including by requesting and mailing an absentee ballot, voting in person prior to the final weekend before Election Day, or on Election Day itself. However, the district court concluded that because early voters have disproportionately lower incomes and less education than election day voters, and because all evening and weekend voting hours prior to the final weekend were eliminated by Directive 2012-35, “thousands of voters who would have voted during those three days will not be able to exercise their right to cast a vote in person.”

If the state chooses to appeal this decision, it may appeal either to the full Sixth Circuit or to the Supreme Court. Currently, Republican appointed active judges outnumber Democratic appointees 10-6 on this court (although one of the Bush appointees is the product of a deal with Democratic senators), and the Sixth Circuit does have a record of handing down ideologically divided decisions in cases that could impact presidential elections. Judge Hood, the Bush appointee who joined today’s opinion, is a district court judge on temporary designation to the appeals court and would not join the full panel of judges should it be convened.

Nevertheless, there is one reason why the Sixth Circuit’s judges may stay their hand if the state asks for the case to be heard by a larger panel. In 2008, the court divided almost entirely on partisan lines to side with an Ohio Republican Party effort that could have prevented as many as 200,000 registered voters from having their votes counted. That decision was smacked down by the Supreme Court just three days later.

Disclosure: The author of this post clerked for Judge Clay in 2007–08

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Election

Tea Party Voter Suppression Group Under Investigation For Possible ‘Criminal Conspiracy’

By Aviva Shen on Oct 5, 2012 at 4:10 pm

The Tea Party organization launching a multi-pronged voter suppression effort this election is under investigation by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) for a possible “criminal conspiracy to deny legitimate voters their constitutional rights.”

Cummings sent a letter to True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht warning her that the Ohio branch of the group, in suing to throw thousands of students, trailer park residents, homeless people and African Americans off the voting rolls, may be violating the law:

At some point, an effort to challenge voter registrations by the thousands without any legitimate basis may be evidence of illegal voter suppression. If these efforts are intentional, politically motivated and widespread across multiple states, they could amount to a criminal conspiracy to deny legitimate voters their constitutional rights.

True the Vote released a statement affirming their support for the Ohio voter purge advocates on Monday:

True the Vote stands by the well-intentioned efforts of these citizens and is disgusted by the attempts of some within government and media to warp what should have been a simple, legal process into a calculated partisan charade.

The most radical voter suppression efforts — including voter ID laws, voter purges, gerrymandered districts and restrictions on voter registration — have been killed in the courts or delayed til after the election. In many cases, judges concluded that minorities would be disproportionately affected by these efforts. Indeed, an analysis of the failed voter purge in Texas, True the Vote’s home state, found that African American and Latino names were much more likely to be flagged for removal, and African American districts received more letters questioning their eligibility to vote than any other districts.

Rather than rely soley on these initiatives, True the Vote is also mobilizing a national network of volunteer poll watchers to challenge and intimidate voters on Election Day. In light of the misinformation and questionable tactics disseminated in these volunteer trainings, Rep. Cummings is seeking “the data you have been using to challenge voter registrations, the training you have been providing volunteers to conduct these activities, and the manner in which you have been determining where to deploy your resources in select jurisdictions.”

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Alyssa

National Hockey League Cancels Season’s First Two Weeks As Lockout Of Players Continues

By Travis Waldron on Oct 5, 2012 at 3:36 pm

The National Hockey League, eight years removed from a lockout that devastated its revenues, was finally healthy again. But after another dispute over how to split revenues and the owners’ lockout of players ensued, the league has canceled the first two weeks of its season, including all four of Tuesday’s opening night games and 78 others.

More cancellations could be ahead, as both players and owners indicated in statements that a deal over how to split the league’s $3 billion in revenues probably isn’t close. According to Players Association head Donald Fehr’s statement, the players were willing to take the ice while a new collective bargaining agreement was being negotiated, but ownership decided to lock them out anyway:

“The decision to cancel the first two weeks of the NHL season is the unilateral choice of the NHL owners. If the owners truly cared about the game and the fans, they would lift the lockout and allow the season to begin on time while negotiations continue. A lockout should be the last resort in bargaining, not the strategy of first resort.

For nearly 20 years, the owners have elected to lock-out the players in an effort to secure massive concessions. Nevertheless, the players remain committed to playing hockey while the parties work to reach a deal that is fair for both sides. We hope we will soon have a willing negotiating partner.”

The primary issue in the lockout is almost identical to the one in last year’s NBA lockout. Under the last collective bargaining agreement, NHL players received 57 percent of the league’s $3 billion in revenue; NHL owners want to lower that to less than 50 percent (their preferred number is 47 percent). Under their previous CBA, NBA players also received 57 percent of their league’s $3 billion in revenues. NBA owners wanted to lower that share to 47 percent before the two sides settled on a 50-50 split.

The NHL’s owners don’t need this lockout. The league is as healthy as it has been since the 1990s, its championship series back on national television, its revenues are rising, and its big markets are competitive, strong, and making money. Another labor dispute only risks putting the league back to where it was in 2004, and for little reason.

But here’s the thing: successful lockouts breed more lockouts. NBA owners were in a similar situation (just 12 years removed from a devastating lockout), and they won. The league suffered little backlash from the media or fans for the second lockout go-round. NFL owners locked out their players last year and won. By the time the season started, fans were just happy to have the games back. The NFL tried again this year with its officials, and again they won. Now, it’s the NHL’s turn. And when corporations lock out workers and win, other corporations use the same tactics to make their own situations better. It’s why the number of lockouts is rising so quickly.

These are not isolated incidents, and that’s what makes the disputes so important not just for the players involved, but for all workers who could one day be subject to a corporation or business that has a lockout in its arsenal.

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Justice

No, Justice Scalia, Overruling Roe, Criminalizing Sex and Killing Inmates Are Not ‘Absolutely Easy’ Cases

By Ian Millhiser on Oct 5, 2012 at 3:30 pm

Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia routinely pretends that his approach to the law is merely to follow the clear language of the Constitution, and anyone who does not reach the same conclusions he does must be doing it wrong. In truth, however, Scalia’s rhetoric far more often just exposes how simplistic his vision of the Constitution truly is. Consider a speech he gave earlier this week at a conservative think tank:

Scalia calls himself a ‘‘textualist’’ and, as he related to a few hundred people who came to buy his new book and hear him speak in Washington the other day, that means he applies the words in the Constitution as they were understood by the people who wrote and adopted them.

So Scalia parts company with former colleagues who have come to believe capital punishment is unconstitutional. The framers of the Constitution didn’t think so and neither does he.

‘‘The death penalty? Give me a break. It’s easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the Constitution prevented restrictions on abortion. Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state,’’ Scalia said at the American Enterprise Institute.

This is the opposite of true, at least for someone who claims to take the text of the Constitution seriously. Take, for example, the death penalty. The Constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments,” but it provides no other guidance on just how vicious a punishment must be to become “cruel” or how uncommon it must be to become “unusual.” Does the fact that the death penalty is increasingly rare in the United States meet the threshold of unconstitutionality? The Constitution doesn’t say.

Similarly, both abortion bans and bans on particular sex acts were held unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment, the relevant part of which provides that “[n]o State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” What are the “privileges and immunities of citizens?” How much “process” are people “due”? Why is it a denial of the “equal protection of the laws” for the government to refuse to hire someone because of their race or gender, but not because they performed poorly in college or have an unimpressive resume? The text of the Constitution does not answer these questions.

Scalia’s answer is that rights protected in the Constitution must be understood exactly as they were understood at the time they were ratified, but there’s also nothing in the document itself which suggests that “unusual” punishments are those that were unusual 200 years ago and not those that are unusual now, or that the amount of “process” that people are “due” is the amount that they were given in the 1860s. Indeed, if anything, the Constitution’s text suggests the opposite. The framers were perfectly capable of being very precise about which rights they wanted to protect when they wanted to be — just read the Third Amendment for an example. When they chose, for example, to use words whose scope would naturally change over time — something that is common today may be unusual 50 years from today — that suggests that they wanted the scope of those rights to match that natural process.

Of course, the Constitution doesn’t always use flowing or ambiguous language and when it speaks precisely judges are wrong to read their own preferences into language that does not support their views. Unfortunately, Scalia is hardly a model of textual loyalty in such instances. Nor is he particularly loyal to his notion that the words of the Constitution should keep the meaning the founding generation would have understood them to have. The Constitution gives Congress power to “regulate commerce … among the several states.” And one of the ratifiers of the Constitution explained in the very first decision to interpret these words that there is “no sort of trade” that the words “regulate Commerce” do not apply to and that the power to “regulate” something “implies in its nature full power over the thing to be regulated.” Yet Scalia voted to strike down the Affordable Care Act, a law that regulates trade in health care.

No one who takes the text of the Constitution seriously can reach the decision he reached in that case.

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LGBT

Matt Birk Against Equality: Gays Are Selfish And Don’t Need Benefits

By Zack Ford on Oct 5, 2012 at 3:15 pm

Despite previously decrying efforts to “celebritize” the issue, Maryland’s opponents of marriage equality have launched a new ad featuring Baltimore Ravens center Matt Birk. Birk spoke out recently against the freedom to marry, rivaling the position of his teammate, Brendon Ayanbadejo. In the new 30-second ad, he accuses gay couples of being selfish for wanting the right to marry, insinuating that they will somehow harm the children they are already raising. He also suggests that the few benefits granted by domestic partnerships are more than enough:

BIRK: Marriage is more than what adults want for themselves. It is also about the next generation. Marriage is and should remain between a man and a woman. Gay and lesbian couples already receive benefits in Maryland, like hospital visitation, state health benefits, and tax breaks. We don’t need to redefine marriage.

Watch it:

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