This is the progress-making sector of the American economy:
Health insurance premiums, by contrast, are a lot higher than they were five years ago and it doesn’t seem like we’re getting more useful services in exchange.
The price of oil closed yesterday at $101.19 per barrel, and analysts have been predicting that rising gas prices may stunt America’s slow economic recovery and cause the loss of as many as 600,000 jobs. Unrest in the Middle East is just one of many factors behind the recent rapid rise in oil prices.
But as ThinkProgress’ George Zornick pointed out last week, “one question remains unanswered — to what extent are commodity traders influencing these high gas prices?” Many experts point to speculative trading, not simple supply and demand, as one of the causes of the 2008 spike in oil prices. And today, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — which is responsible for policing energy markets — said that energy speculation is at an all-time high:
Hedge funds and other speculators have increased their positions in energy markets by 64 percent since June 2008 to the highest level on record, according to data released by U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commissioner Bart Chilton. Speculative positions accounted for more than one million energy futures equivalent contracts as of January, according to the data.
CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said in a speech today that high speculation is skewing prices. “We could have helpful limits in place that could guard against markets being adversely impacted by excessive speculation. We could do that now if we wanted. And, as you can tell, I want,” Chilton said.
The CFTC was given the power to restrict speculation in the oil market by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. But the agency has yet to implement the regulations, with its two Republican commissioners and one Democrat, Michael Dunn, expressing reservations. The CFTC actually missed the January 13 deadline to put speculation limits into place. As Zornick reported, Dunn’s term is ending this summer, giving the Obama administration an opportunity to appoint someone ready to fully implement the speculation restrictions included in Dodd-Frank.
However, even assuming the CFTC follows through with implementing the law, it will be hard pressed to enforce any limits if the budgets cuts envisioned by House Republicans are actually enacted. H.R. 1, the House Republican approved spending plan for the remainder of 2011, includes a nearly one-third cut in the CFTC’s budget. Such a draconian cut would require the CFTC to lay off more than 30 percent of its staff. “We’d have to have significant curtailment of our staff and resources,” CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler said. “We would not be able to police…or ensure transparent markets in futures or swaps.”
Last October, ThinkProgress’ Tanya Somanader pointed out that despite a growing number of LGBT suicides, conservatives are claiming “that anti-bullying measures are nothing more than insidious tools of the ‘homosexual agenda.’” Several anti-gay Republican candidates in the election last year even made opposition to anti-bullying measures key components of their campaign.
But the fight against anti-bullying laws simply exposes the true vitriol of the organized anti-gay lobby in America. At the Tea Party Policy Summit in Arizona last month, we spoke to American Principles Project executive director Andy Blom. Blom, a veteran organizer for conservative causes, has mobilized Tea Party activists to rally against gay marriage. Recently, he has taken up the charge of stopping bullying laws on both the state and national level. According to Blom, children are rarely bullied on gender issues, and anti-bullying laws are really a Trojan horse to “force homosexual teaching into the schools”:
BLOM: The core of the anti-bullying agenda is all gender-based and this is a really serious mistake for a lot of reasons. Bullying is not good, okay. The reasons people are bullied are size, clothing, economic circumstance, race, it’s like anything having to do with gender falls down on number five or number six. But all the curriculum on bullying is about LGBT [...] All of it is being used as an opportunity to force homosexual teaching into the schools. And we, the curriculum, we start to peel this and look at the curriculum, it’s frightening what people want to teach under the rubric of bullying. And because being in favor of bulling is like hating apple pie, it’s being very effective at skidding a lot of very unseemly things into curriculum. And there’s legislation in the Hill to force private and parochial schools to adopt the same anti-bullying thing. So this means Catholic Schools are teaching about the pleasures of homosexual sex or teaching about you know Johnny has two daddies if they’re able to push this through. [...] In truth, the whole homosexual agenda gets filtered into the schools through anti-bullying.
Watch it:
Blom gained notoriety earlier this year for leading an effort to boycott the conservative CPAC convention because of its inclusion of GOPAC, a nominally pro-gay organization. During our interview, Blom also suggested that he would have a problem with Republicans including GOPAC or any pro-gay group in the 2012 Republican convention. Even Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) troubled Blom because Christie signed a landmark anti-bullying bill into law in January.
In the coming days, ThinkProgress will investigate the key organizers, institutions, and donors to groups mobilizing against efforts to stop bullying in schools.
Born in November of 1914, John T Connor was a young New York attorney in 1942 when he somehow found himself attached to one of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development medical branches working on pharmaceuticals. Specifically, he was involved in the logistics of coordinating penicillin production. After the war he worked for Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal in which capacity he “disassembled the military penicillin program and incorporated it into the private sector”. Having done that for two years, Connor became a pioneer in the field of cashing in by signing up with Merck as General Counsel. In 1964, he co-chaired the National Independent Committee for Johnson-Humphrey, which I guess was a kind of front organization designed to showcase support for the ticket from eastern moderate Republicans.
With the election won, Johnson moved to replace JFK holdover cabinet members with his own guys, and thus did Connor become Commerce Secretary, inaugurating the concept of making this department a place to stash an important fundraiser from the business world. Typically for a Commerce Secretary, he didn’t play a significant role in the formation of Johnson administration economic policy. These were, however, the years in which the Bretton-Woods system started running into trouble so one important Connor initiative was an effort to corral/cajole American businessmen into taking voluntary action to stem the flow of dollars out of the country.
An early opponent of the war in Vietnam, Connor ended up resigning in 1967 after proving unable to persuade the administration that the war was damaging the country’s economy. Upon stepping down, Connor swiftly became CEO of Allied Chemical and then once Richard Nixon was in office he founded an organization called Business Executives Against the Vietnam War.
Those of you who have been following this blog for a while know that I frequently write roundtables for The Atlantic. Recently, one of my collaborators and I, Lux Alptraum, who runs Fleshbot (NSFW, obviously, but well worth checking out!) decided that we liked writing letters about pop culture to each other so much that we were going to do it on the regular basis. From here on out, we’ll be blogging together at Pop Culture Pen Pals. Please come by! We’re having a lot of fun, and I think you will, too. Up this week: bisexuality in popular culture.
It is nothing new for conservatives to dress their political ideology in religious language. Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) justified his opposition to controlling greenhouse gases because “you can’t regulate God.” Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) accused Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) of “disrespecting” Christians by considering keeping Congress in session in order to overcome GOP obstructionism. Rep. Steve King (R-IA) even went so far as to compare Democrats to Pontius Pilate, the ancient Roman official who sentenced Jesus to be crucified.
Last week, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) added his voice to the chorus while being interviewed on the Family Research Council’s weekly radio show. DeMint told host Tony Perkins that the size of government and the size of God exist in an inverse relationship – “the bigger government gets, the smaller God gets”:
DeMINT: Some are trying to separate the social, cultural issues from fiscal issues, but you really can’t do that. America works, freedom works, when people have that internal gyroscope that comes from a belief in God and Biblical faith. Once we push that out, you no longer have the capacity to live as a free person without the external controls of an authoritarian government. I’ve said it often and I believe it – the bigger government gets, the smaller God gets. As people become more dependent on government, less dependent on God.
Listen here:
For someone supposedly espousing Christian ideals, DeMint’s notion that God’s power can be limited by the federal government is a surprising argument. Indeed, one of the main tenets of Christian belief is that God is all-powerful – Matthew 19:26 is just one Biblical reference to God’s omnipotence. DeMint is vastly exaggerating the nominal increase in the size of government over the past two years.
DeMint then went on in the interview to make another outlandish statement: “We’ve found we can’t set up free societies around the world because they don’t have the moral underpinnings that come from Biblical faith”:
DeMINT: You cannot have a free society that way. We’ve found we can’t set up free societies around the world because they don’t have the moral underpinnings that come from Biblical faith. I don’t think Christians should cower from this debate, should be told that their views and their values should be separate from government policies, because America doesn’t work without the faith that created it.
In fact, the world’s largest democracy is India. The third most-populous democracy is Indonesia. Japan and Turkey are also high on the list. Despite not having the “moral underpinnings that come from Biblical faith” – Christians make up less than three percent of citizens in all these countries – these countries are clearly capable of maintaining free societies.
It sounds a bit odd to say that Bill Gates is going to need a check from the government to keep him comfortable when he retires, so some form of “means-testing” is often proposed as a Social Security cure-all. There’s something to this idea, but as Kathy Ruffing points out benefits for rich people amounts for a very small slice of overall Social Security spending:
This reflects the fact that not that many people are rich, and Social Security contributions are capped at around the $100k income level. If I had my druthers, I really wouldn’t cut Social Security at all. If you’re going reduce future tax increases by means-testing something, the thing to do is to impose Jason Furman-style cost sharing on Medicare so that it has a deductible that’s defined as a share of income. But still under that plan you’d be meaningfully reducing benefits for middle class people in order to save any meaningful amount of money.
Senate Republicans yesterday vowed to block any potential nominees for Commerce Secretary or other trade posts until the White House moves ahead with free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. But Republicans need look back only to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of the ’90s to see the potential downsides to these types of deals.
One of NAFTA’s biggest promoters, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, appeared on the Howie Carr radio show yesterday evening and was asked about the watershed trade pact between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada he helped create. Responding to a caller who asserted that NAFTA killed American jobs, Gingrich didn’t disagree, but retorted by touting the fact that NAFTA had created jobs “close to the United States” in Mexico:
CALLER: Back in the ’90s I remember Ross Perot saying that there was going to be the giant sucking sound of jobs if NAFTA passed. I think it ended up being true, right? And I know you were a big free trader.
GINGRICH: Yeah, well, I don’t think it was true in Mexico. I think the fact is that NAFTA allowed us to build jobs in Canada, the United States, and Mexico, in competition with China. I mean, our big competitor is not Mexico. Our big competitor is China and India. And I’d rather have jobs close to the United States than have jobs overseas in places like China and India. That’s why I was in favor of it. … So in a sense, I’d like our neighborhood to be fairly well off and fairly prosperous.
Listen here:
Of course, critics of NAFTA worried about precisely what Gingrich points to as a success — jobs being created in Mexico and Canada instead of the U.S. While there were many benefits to the American economy from enacting the pact, there is no question that NAFTA pushed low-skilled American jobs out of the U.S. to Mexico. “All 50 states and the District of Columbia have experienced a net loss of jobs under NAFTA,” especially in the manufacturing and agriculture sectors, according to a study from the Economic Policy institute. “[O]ver a million jobs that would otherwise have been created were lost, and wages were pressured downward for a large number of workers with less than a college education.”
And Gingrich himself promised NAFTA would help create American jobs, telling Congress after being re-elected Speaker that the treaty would help the U.S. “focus on increasing American jobs through world sales.” It’s not like Gingrich wasn’t warned about what NAFTA would do to American manufacturing. Robert Reischauer, then the director of the Congressional Budget Office, warned in 1993 that while the deal would create jobs for educated Americans, the gains “will all largely be invisible.” “But when the glass factory in Toledo closes or the textile plant in South Carolina or the furniture manufacturer in North Carolina because those low-wage jobs move to Mexico, it will be highly visible, and it will be attributable to Nafta,” he said.
A new Public Policy Polling poll shows Gingrich has a decent chance of winning the Republican presidential nomination, trailing only four points behind leader Mike Huckabee.
There’s something weirdly deliberate about the ugliness in the trailer for Hesher, and it’s not just that Natalie Portman is wearing too-big hipster glasses and a convenience-store vest:
Of course it’s wildly inappropriate that Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character would hang around with a grade-school kid in his underwear, particularly one to whose bullying he is an oddly, and again age-appropriately, passive witness. Blowing things up or burning them down seems like fairly cliche attempts to get someone to act out and achieve catharsis in the wake of a devastating event like a spouse’s death.
But I wonder if some of the ugliness of this is that it doesn’t seem like any of the characters make much emotional progress, unless you count Rainn Wilson shaving off his beard. In trailers for family-tragedy movies like this, I think I look for the emotional queue that everything is probably going to be all right, no matter how much that spoiler tends to annoy me. It doesn’t necessarily look like things were ever that terrific for the people in this movie, and maybe there isn’t a lot of better that they can get. Maybe everything just plods along. In a movie with beautifically-lit redemption and emotional progress, maybe a dirty guy with long hair who can’t put on his damn pants would come to look like a saint. Instead, he’s just a grubby, badly tattooed dude who is hanging out with a grieving grade school kid, weird in a slightly more baroque way than the ways in which life is usually weird.
John Boehner, talking to Larry Kudlow last night, said the need for “energy independence” is a good reason to build nuclear reactors:
JOHN BOEHNER: –listen, I think we need– we need to take a step back– understand what happened, understand what changes have been made, and really understand what– what– what are the risk here. As we all know– Japan– sits– in– volcanic area– prone to earthquakes. You know, they have some 1,500 earthquakes a year. We’ve got parts of the United States– that have some inclination toward earthquakes. But, we have other parts of the country where there are– there’s no threat. But, we need to learn those lessons. But, I don’t think it should deter us– from trying to do everything we can– to move America toward energy independence.
Like almost all invocations of energy independence, this makes no dense. There are two things you’d like to see from energy. On the one hand, you’d like it to be plentiful and cheap. On the other hand, you’d like it be to clean and safe. Independence has nothing to do with it. If anything, various energy-related disasters—oil spills, reactor meltdowns, mine collapses—should emphasize the fact that producing energy isn’t really a great line of work to be in. The good thing about a nuclear reactor is that it gets you electricity. The bad thing about a nuclear reactor is that there’s a potential for disaster. Under the circumstances, there’s nothing wrong with obtaining dirty, dangerous energy from a foreign country. In Denmark, their grid is networked with the Norwegian and Swedish power grids which allows them to draw on Swedish nuclear power and Norwegian hydro without there actually being nuclear plants or giant dams in Denmark. The foreignness of those energy sources is a benefit, not a cost.
Meanwhile, unless I’m mistaken our nuclear plants use plenty of imported uranium so the whole idea of obtaining nuclear autarky is off base anyway.
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