David Brooks made an odd argument the other day about the impossibility of serious class-based political divisions in a world where high-income people work longer hours than low-income people that prompted a righteous smackdown from Matt Taibbi. For a more analytical take, I would recommend Monica Potts:

I suspect that low-wage earners just aren’t allowed to work as much as they might want to. They’re probably the employed — not the employers — and their bosses aren’t going to let them work overtime just because they need more money. If they do work overtime, they’re probably asked to work off the clock, or just aren’t paid properly. The people I know who work at or near the minimum wage have hours that are intensely managed by their superiors just so they don’t get more money or qualify for benefits. Unless the workers are unionized, there’s little recourse. And none of that counts those who want to work but simply can’t get hired full time. I suspect that, if you dug behind those numbers a bit, there isn’t a lot of choice involved in working hours at the lowest income levels.

Particular in the current weak economic climate we have a situation whereby approximately nine million people say they’re “part-time for economic reasons”—looking for full-time work, in other words, but there aren’t full-time jobs for them.

Even in a weak economic climate, high-level professional work can’t really be done on a part-time basis. A company can go out of business, but as long as it’s in business the executives need to be working pretty long hours. The flipside of that is that the business can’t reduce its labor costs by cutting hours (and therefore salary) for its executives. But when business slows down, a firm can reduce the hours of its cashiers (or what have you) and therefore reduce expenses and also the cashiers’ income. To then look at the situation and say “well, the cashiers would have more money if they worked harder” is basically backwards—if the labor market were in better shape, people would work longer hours and get paid more on a per hour basis.

But having put a floor underneath the decline in the stock market and brought us to a situation where the unemployment rate isn’t going up anymore many elites are ready to declare victory and then, I guess, when low-skill people can’t find work they’ll get slammed as lazy.

Ever since House Minority Leader John Boehner urged bank executives to stand with him and fight off efforts by “little punk staffers” to bring the financial sector under control, I’ve been waiting to hear from the little punks on Boehner’s side of the aisle. Erika Lovely delivers:

A House Republican staffer, who didn’t want to be identified taking issue with the words of the Republican leader, told POLITICO: “Most staffers on the Hill are younger than you think they would be, making them an easy target for such remarks, but in reality they are also smarter than you think they would be. As one who had to fight for my job here, I can say that getting a job as a ‘little punk staffer’ is a competitive process where only the very qualified succeed.” [...]

Most Republican staffers interviewed by POLITICO said they’ve also been bothered by the name-calling, but they stopped short of calling out the Republican leaders behind it.

I would just say that there’s a larger issue here. I know a lot of people with a right-of-center perspective on political issues, especially folks with a right-of-center perspective on topics about the size and scope of government. And a lot of people concerned about these issues are here in Washington very diligently working to try to improve public policy as best they see it. But a huge swathe of the leadership of the conservative movement has decided that the best way to advance right-wing ideology is by casting aspersions not on high taxes and stringent regulations, but on the entire concept of working professionally in the public sector. Realistically, though, no government is ever going to be so small that it works without decent people working in it. If you look at a place like Singapore, often touted as a model of small government principles in action, you’ll see that it’s got a vigorous and effective government—something you don’t get by randomly disparaging “bureaucrats” and “punk staffers.”

This week, we’re dealing with a rerun of the “handful of senators hold up extension of unemployment benefits” show. Except this time it’s also preventing renewal of the National Flood Insurance Program, which is delaying 1,400 home closures per day according to the National Association of Realtors.

The question of whether Henry Kissinger was involved in the “Operation Condor” assassination campaign that led to the Chilean government killing a former ambassador on the streets of Washington, DC has long been the subject of controversy. Now thanks to the work of the National Security Archive we know the answer:

As secretary of state, Henry Kissinger canceled a U.S. warning against carrying out international political assassinations that was to have gone to Chile and two neighboring nations just days before a former ambassador was killed by Chilean agents on Washington’s Embassy Row in 1976, a newly released State Department cable shows. [...]

Discovered in recent weeks by the National Security Archive, a non-profit research organization, the Sept. 16, 1976 cable is among tens of thousands of declassified State Department documents recently made available to the public. [...]

In the Sept. 16, 1976 cable, the topic of one paragraph is listed as “Operation Condor,” preceded by the words “(KISSINGER, HENRY A.) SUBJECT: ACTIONS TAKEN.” The cable states that “secretary declined to approve message to Montevideo” Uruguay “and has instructed that no further action be taken on this matter.”

The fact that this stayed classified for so long is yet another data point for the principle that we have far too much formal government secrecy in the United States. Recently there’s been a lot of emphasis on “transparency” in things like fundraising, earmarks, etc. And that’s all to the good. But the most important powers of the government are the life-and-death powers wielded by the national security establishment and they remain largely shrouded in secrecy. What operational danger would revealing the truth about this cable have created for the United States? It was just a decades-long effort to help Kissinger and the Ford administration evade democratic accountability for their policies.