Teamsters Local Union #174 -- Views and Opinion

The Grover Norquist "Impeach Obama" Fantasy
Posted: January 31, 2012
Source: Esquire
One of the more piquant passages in the interview that Mark Warren and I did with former President Bill Clinton, which appears in this month's production of Esquire: The Magazine is this part right at the top where Clinton talks about a change of heart experienced by a former GOP congresscritter named Bob Inglis, who lost in a primary in 2010 because he said disrespectful things about Glenn Beck but who, in the giddy years of the late 1990's, wielded his pitchfork most enthusiastically in the cause of impeaching Clinton, an effort for which he recently apologized, according to the former president, who nonetheless told us:

I had a fascinating meeting with Bob Inglis the other day. Bob Inglis was an extremely conservative Republican congressman from South Carolina. He was a three-term-pledge guy in the nineties.... So he came to me and he said, "I just want you to know, when you got elected, I hated you. And I asked to be on the Judiciary Committee in 1993, because a bunch of us had already made up our minds that no matter what you did or didn't do, we were going to find some way to impeach you. We hated you. You had no right to be president."

[...] Which makes me a little less sanguine than most people when I hear that Grover Norquist is going on about the subject again:

Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach. The last year, he’s gone into this huddle where he does everything by executive order. He’s made no effort to work with Congress.

Yes, and I have made "no effort" to convince Holy Mother Church to close St. Patrick's and open up a fried-dough stand in its place.

Don't Stop the Debates
Posted: January 30, 2012
Source: The New York Times, editorial
Senator John McCain spoke for many nervous Republicans on Sunday when he said it's time to "stop the debates." They've turned into mud-wrestling contests, he said on "Meet the Press" on NBC, and are driving up negative impressions of the party's presidential candidates.

Mr. McCain, who knows something about unfavorable ratings, is right that the 19 debates so far have left an increasingly sour taste in voters’ mouths. Since the debates began, the popularity gap has grown between the leading Republican candidates and President Obama.

But that’s not simply because the candidates have increased the intensity of their attacks on each other, nor is it curable by cutting back the mud-fighting, as Mr. McCain suggests. It’s also because voters have been exposed to the broken windows of the Republican idea factory. The value of debates is to put the candidates on stage to air their ideas. If voters find them dishonest and divisive, the Republicans are getting the wrong message if they think all they have to do to fix that is to stop talking so much.

Consider some of the “bold ideas” the country learned about in just the last two debates in Florida, leading up to Tuesday’s primary there.

Newt Gingrich wants to build a lunar colony on the moon in just eight years, and he seems to believe that the private sector can be induced to pay for it. He wants to convene a “gold commission” to get the country back to hard money, which would shackle the economy to a single commodity. He wants to end multilingual ballots (disenfranchising millions), promote an uprising in Cuba and end the capital gains tax, which would allow millionaires to pay less of their income to the government than the minimum they pay now.

Mitt Romney promised to get millions of illegal immigrants to “self-deport,” apparently by making their lives miserable. He would veto the Dream Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for immigrant college students and military service members. He would refuse to extend any government help to struggling homeowners, while repealing the Dodd-Frank law that finally regulated the banking practices that led to the housing crisis.

The debates that Mr. McCain so deplores also gave voters a taste of the incompetent candidacies of Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, helping to put an end to them. They have properly marginalized Ron Paul and his cranky libertarianism.
Read the complete source story here.

Pensions Aren't the Problem for State Budgets
Posted: January 29, 2012
Source: AFL-CIO Now Blog
Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, the Pravda of the 1 percent, is at it again, continuing its push to gut the retirement security of millions of middle class workers across the country while enriching the Wall Street moneymen who just three years ago took our economy over the cliff.

Virtually everyone agrees that our nation faces a retirement security crisis, but the Journal last week published a shameful op-ed calling for the elimination of pensions for nurses, firefighters, corrections officers and others who still have them. Having punched private-sector workers retirement in the gut, these folks won’t be happy until the whole concept of a secure retirement for working Americans is a thing of the past.

The typical AFSCME member — men and women who plow our streets, care for the sick, protect our children, clean our buildings and keep our communities safe — receives a pension of approximately $19,000 a year after a career of public service. The employees have earned and paid for these pensions. Employee contribution rates commonly amount to 3 percent to 10 percent of their paychecks. These contributions, combined with investment earnings, usually account for 75 percent or more of all pension benefit funding.

The economy’s collapse in 2008-2009 took its toll on everyone’s retirement savings. But our nation’s public pension systems, which were fully funded before the crash, continue their robust recovery earning their highest returns in decades in fiscal year 2011. Pensions continue to provide irreplaceable retirement security to millions of Americans who provide public services. Yet, the corporate-backed
opponents of pensions are creating a myth that the system is falling apart and that state and local governments are going bankrupt because of the $19,000 pensions sanitation workers are earning.

That is simply not true. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the size of the projected state and local government pension funding shortfalls is manageable. In most states, the total shortfall for the pension funds is less than 0.2 percent of projected gross state product during the next 30 years. Even in states with the largest shortfalls, the gap is less than 0.5 percent of projected state product during that period. And, because pension payments are made over generations of workers,
funding can remain stable over long periods, and funding challenges managed over decade long periods, despite short-term economic setbacks. These are facts that the opponents of public pensions simply ignore, as they seek to punish workers for Wall Street’s psychopathic behavior.

Mr. Gingrich's Deceptions
Posted: January 26, 2012
Source: The New York Times, editorial
Newt Gingrich’s victory in South Carolina turned on an almost comically broad deception, an inversion of the truth in which the insider whose personal wealth and political experience are entirely creations of Washington becomes the anti-establishment candidate. That it worked speaks poorly of voters who let themselves be manipulated by the lowest form of campaigning, appealing to their anger and prejudices.

Speaking on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Mr. Gingrich said he was the only one in the race who understands the level of anger at the “national establishment.” He feels no need to actually define this establishment; it’s simply a blob of elitist others who are trying to tell real Americans “what they’re allowed to think, what they’re allowed to say.” It is clear, though, that both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are in it, as are Wall Street, all bureaucrats and most emphatically the national media.

Mr. Gingrich is clearly hoping that if he keeps the volume up high on his sputtering and raving at this nebulous group, it will drown out his lifetime membership in it. For years, he was a lobbyist for Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage company, making more than $1.6 million over eight years. He also cashed in on his influence by selling access to health-care companies and insurers, bringing in $37 million over eight years.

Since the late nineteenth century, the model has been the Horatio Alger stories. In pamphlets with wonderfully alliterative titles, the hero (Determined Dick, Terrific Tom, etc.) starts out poor, and through smarts, Puritan work ethic, and improbable good luck, winds up in the ranks of the wealthy.

While this really did happen to a few famous individuals like Andrew Carnegie, the scenario was actually unlikely. A number of historical studies have shown that the ranks of the upper middle class to rich -- those who benefitted from the booming economy of the Gilded Age -- were drawn from members of their own class, and their own ethnic group. The odds on a worker or farmer or an immigrant breaking in were slim indeed.

There are several other problems, however, with using Alger's characters as the archetypes. While rags-to-riches was rare, another kind of social mobility did occur. Millions of Americans made it from the working class to the middle stratum, even if it was to the lower reaches. That is the true American success story, the result of free public education, equitable tax rates to fund public efforts, unions, and reform laws such as those that protected workers' health and prevented an injured bread winner from plummeting the family back into poverty.

Let us not be naive about history. If this shift happened, it came at exceptionally high cost. The casualty rate along the way, of laborers dead and maimed in the mills, was higher than that of any external war this country has fought. It required enormous sacrifice, and gut wrenching hunger, often of parents who went without so offspring could rise a wrung on the ladder. As that implies, mobility often took more than one generation. Note that there was also plenty of downward mobility -- something never touched on in all the accounts of our miracle -- as large numbers fell farther and farther behind thanks to layoffs, injuries, and other setbacks that were devastating, yet rarely the fault of the worker.
Read the complete source story.

‘Licking Their Chops’ on K Street and Capitol Hill
Posted: January 24, 2012
Source: Bill Moyers.com
The public’s disgust with Congress has been confirmed in poll after poll; Americans are fed up with the combination of partisan squabbling and inertia that since last year has led to little or nothing accomplished. Missouri Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, told CNN on Tuesday, “I think that the 11 percent of Americans who think we’re doing a good job need therapy.”

Several reports in the last day or two may finally convince that remaining 11 percent to head to the analyst’s couch. A headline in the congressional newspaper The Hill announces, “K Street Headhunters Enamored with Upcoming Class of Retiring Lawmakers.” Lobby shops and law firms in DC are scouting the talent and formulating their “mock draft” as at least 25 representatives and senators have announced their plans to leave office at the end of their current terms.

The paper’s Kevin Bogardus writes, “The retiring class includes lawmakers who are known for their bipartisan ties, and others who have spent decades on Capitol Hill accruing seniority on powerful committees. That mix of attributes has many on K Street licking their chops…

“Former senators could expect to earn somewhere between $800,000 and $1.5 million in annual salary next year at lobby firms, while ex-House members could earn between $300,000 and $600,000, headhunters estimated.”

Increasingly, however, the council’s recommendations have resembled not so much expert advice as a corporate wish list. In a report last October, the council’s sound proposals for job-creating public works projects were overshadowed by its unfounded claim that antifraud provisions put in place in 2002 in response to Enron are an impediment to growth and hiring, and should be ended.

Its latest report, issued last week, went so far in the direction of the Republican political agenda that it was endorsed by House Speaker John Boehner for its emphasis on lower tax rates and less regulation. The report drew the ire of the panel’s two union members, Richard Trumka, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and Joseph Hansen, chairman of the Change to Win coalition. After the false premises and false fixes that have dominated the job creation debate, the dispute is healthy.

The GOP: Unmasked and Undone
Posted: January 17, 2012
Source: Huffington Post
The Republicans have tipped their hand -- spilled it all over the floor, actually -- and demonstrated beyond doubt that they are solely dedicated to crippling any idea that Americans should have hope, that Americans should be nothing less than afraid and that history and facts are merely vague, noisy complexities, not of any real use to anyone and ultimately up for grabs.

And it is now clear that anything that comes from the Right Wing purporting to be factual analyses of social and political issues is invariably propaganda, much of it a cunning mixture of outright lies with some factual details and factoids woven into the mix to give it an air of credibility. Witness Mitt's incessant lie-stream and Fox's round-the-clock trumpeting of divisive memes, pouring into the media culture like so much bilge water.

But make no mistake: the years that comprise the Obama administration will be described as The War Years, not only for the inherited wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but as much for the war being waged on our own turf, emanating from within the think tanks and daily memos distributed by the far-reaching Right Wing machine.

The war on government being waged is fundamentally a war on Democracy. It's a war that is being waged strategically and continually and is now being fought in the open, as the GOP contenders having hogged the airwaves and congressional halls for so long that there is no way for the Right Wing to utilize its prime strategy of causing knee-jerk responses to hot-button issues -- everyone and everything's been given far too much airtime.

And even the dedicated ditto-heads and loyal Rep-bots who follow their orders without question are starting to see the holes in the repeated arguments, smell the proverbial rat; the geniuses and demagogues who profess to wage this war on behalf of their patriotic and steadfast audience are being spotted for the turncoat corporate shills they actually are, and are even seeing their reviled Obama as anything but the Socialist oppressor pig the brazen propagandists have painted him as being since he was duly elected.

But hell, this is Capitalist America and they are just doing the job for which they are well paid. They have mastered the selling of America, managing to buy up all the old fashioned version, hollow it out and resell it to a now hungry and desperate demographic.

And maybe more than a "teachable moment", this is actually an "evolution moment", where the two primordial elements that determine the course taken by a civilized society clash, naked, in a battle for dominance, all subtlety stripped away. No wonder the Right Wing has made a fetish of decrying Evolution and would put all its stock in myth rather than reality.
Read the complete source story here.

America Isn't a Corporation
Posted: January 13, 2012
Source: Paul Krugman, in The New York Times
[T]here’s a deeper problem in the whole notion that what this nation needs is a successful businessman as president: America is not, in fact, a corporation. Making good economic policy isn’t at all like maximizing corporate profits. And businessmen — even great businessmen — do not, in general, have any special insights into what it takes to achieve economic recovery.

Why isn’t a national economy like a corporation? For one thing, there’s no simple bottom line. For another, the economy is vastly more complex than even the largest private company.

Most relevant for our current situation, however, is the point that even giant corporations sell the great bulk of what they produce to other people, not to their own employees — whereas even small countries sell most of what they produce to themselves, and big countries like America are overwhelmingly their own main customers.

Yes, there’s a global economy. But six out of seven American workers are employed in service industries, which are largely insulated from international competition, and even our manufacturers sell much of their production to the domestic market.

And the fact that we mostly sell to ourselves makes an enormous difference when you think about policy.

Consider what happens when a business engages in ruthless cost-cutting. From the point of view of the firm’s owners (though not its workers), the more costs that are cut, the better. Any dollars taken off the cost side of the balance sheet are added to the bottom line.

But the story is very different when a government slashes spending in the face of a depressed economy. Look at Greece, Spain, and Ireland, all of which have adopted harsh austerity policies. In each case, unemployment soared, because cuts in government spending mainly hit domestic producers. And, in each case, the reduction in budget deficits was much less than expected, because tax receipts fell as output and employment collapsed.

Now, to be fair, being a career politician isn’t necessarily a better preparation for managing economic policy than being a businessman. But Mr. Romney is the one claiming that his career makes him especially suited for the presidency. Did I mention that the last businessman to live in the White House was a guy named Herbert Hoover? (Unless you count former President George W. Bush.)

And there’s also the question of whether Mr. Romney understands the difference between running a business and managing an economy.

Like many observers, I was somewhat startled by his latest defense of his record at Bain — namely, that he did the same thing the Obama administration did when it bailed out the auto industry, laying off workers in the process. One might think that Mr. Romney would rather not talk about a highly successful policy that just about everyone in the Republican Party, including him, denounced at the time.

But what really struck me was how Mr. Romney characterized President Obama’s actions: “He did it to try to save the business.” No, he didn’t; he did it to save the industry, and thereby to save jobs that would otherwise have been lost, deepening America’s slump. Does Mr. Romney understand the distinction?
Read the complete source story here.

The Supreme Court’s misguided Citizens United decision did damage enough to fair elections by freeing corporations to make unlimited donations to supposedly independent campaign expenditure groups. But the court said nothing about the basic 1907 reform law — enacted after the robber baron scandals — that bans corporate donors from wooing candidates directly with largess.

The R.N.C., in a brief filed in federal court in Virginia, would effectively spike that law by freeing candidates to solicit what could amount to a million-dollar-plus donation from any corporation seeking clout. The result would dash the anticorruption restrictions on candidates’ money seeking under the McCain-Feingold law, inviting a blizzard of money and favors directly between donors and politicians.

Republicans argue that the logic of Citizens United points toward scrapping the ban on direct corporate giving. This was the muddled reasoning of a federal district judge who overreached last year from the Supreme Court decision. The R.N.C. aimed to keep that possibility alive in the current appeal by filing a brief in opposition to the Justice Department’s defense of corporate restrictions.

Crucial to the R.N.C. position is having its own coffers keep pace with the new boom in corporate donations to “independent” so-called super PACs unleashed by Citizens United that do the candidates’ dirty work. “Traditional political parties and candidate committees are in danger of having their voices drowned out,” the R.N.C. wailed.
Read complete source story here

Only about one in 10 Hoosier workers is a union member, half the percentage of two decades ago. Far fewer than that find themselves in workplaces where everyone is required (by employer agreement, remember) to pay the cost of representation.

Public employees are by and large the lucky ones when it comes to the benefits and security collective bargaining brings; but they've taken their shots from the state in recent years. This governor started his first term in 2005 by rescinding the negotiating rights granted by his Democratic predecessors; and in just the most recent Indiana General Assembly session, GOP-driven school "reform" took some teacher union protections as a casualty.

Now we have "right to work" (love its Orwellian nomenclature) as top priority of Gov. Mitch Daniels and his allied legislature, despite the high ratio of antagonism to material value.

No one who's been around the block a couple of times believes Daniels' televised claims that "two-thirds of the time we're winning" when Indiana bids for jobs and the rest of the time we're not allowed to compete because a relative handful of Indiana employees have to pay union dues. If you buy that, you'll just as soon guess that the anonymous sponsors of his ads are people punching clocks and riding the bus.

As do their counterparts in Wisconsin, in Ohio and elsewhere on the battle map drawn by the Koch brothers, the American Legislative Exchange Council and the rest of the army of oligarchy, they are picking a fight with unions in order to rally the troops for a larger campaign.

There are three objectives: freedom from regulation for business, diminishment of the organized work force, and a shifting of resources and political support away from the public sector. It goes without saying that the Democratic Party, even the Indiana party of Evan Bayh and John Gregg, loses whenever a skirmish on one of these fronts goes the GOP way.

There is evidence -- witness Wisconsin and Ohio again -- that the tide is shifting; and while Indiana may be among the easiest of pickings, it's not been without its formidable resistance. A time of crisis has thrown construction workers together with teachers and hotel maids and clergy and college students and senior citizens and -- good Lord -- pro football players in a show of awareness that seems to have eluded the opinion-making elite. They know right to work is not about the rights of workers, and they know good jobs won't be "created" because people beg for them rather than demanding them.
Read the complete source story here.

Businessmen and Economics
Posted: January 11, 2012
source: Paul Krugman, in The New York Times
A brief thought on something I’ll try to expand on later. Leaving aside all the questions about what Mitt Romney did or didn’t do at Bain — and about his self-aggrandizing double standard — there’s an even broader question: why does anyone believe that success in business qualified someone to make economic policy?

For the fact is that running a business is nothing at all like making macro policy. The key point about macroeconomics is the pervasiveness of feedback loops due to the fact that workers are also consumers. No business sells a large fraction of its output to its own workers; even very small countries sell around two-thirds of their output to themselves, because that much is non-tradable services.

This makes a huge difference. A businessman can slash his workforce in half, produce about the same as before, and be considered a big success; an economy that does the same plunges into depression, and ends up not being able to sell its goods. Nothing in business experience prepares one for the paradox of thrift, or even the inflationary impact of increases in the money supply (which is real when the economy isn’t in a liquidity trap.)

And I haven’t even mentioned the fact that presidents need to work with Congress, and face far more limits on their authority than CEOs.

The idea that what America needs now is an executive type is just foolish.
Read the complete source story here.

The Republican Contest
Posted: January 10, 2012
Source: The New York Times, editorial
Where the Iowa caucuses illuminated the dark essence of social conservatism, the New Hampshire primary was a journey into the dingy, cramped quarters of the right wing's economic policies.

The Republicans ritually denounced President Obama as hostile to capitalism, disdainful of individual enterprise and lacking in ideas for reviving the economy. All they had to offer were economic ideas that not only are inadequate for that purpose but were instrumental in creating the nation's current economic problems.

In a flailing effort to address the pain of the middle class, the Republicans repeated familiar charges that Mr. Obama advocates a redistribution of wealth. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas outright called him a socialist. Newt Gingrich tried to focus national anger about income inequality with a faux populist assault on Mitt Romney's participation in the frenzied world of leveraged buyouts.

It was all exactly backward. Americans are angry about income redistribution — from the middle class to the tiny sliver at the top, not from the top down. Leveraged buyouts were only one factor in the growth of the income gap. Also to blame was a host of benighted economic policies advocated by Republicans for the last 30 years.
Read the complete source story here.

In its complaint -- which was front-page news at the time - -- the Justice Department alleged that these firms had created “an integrated, overall conspiracy and combination” starting in 1915 “and in continuous operation thereafter, by which” they developed a system “to eliminate competition and monopolize ‘the cream of the business’ of investment banking.”

The U.S. argued that the top Wall Street investment banks - - including Morgan Stanley (MS) (the lead defendant) and Goldman Sachs -- had created a cartel by which, among other things, it set the prices charged for underwriting securities and for providing mergers-and-acquisitions advice, while boxing out weaker competitors from breaking into the top tier of the business and getting their fair share of the fees.

The government argued that the big firms placed their partners on their clients’ boards of directors, putting them in the best possible position to know when a piece of business was coming down the pike and to make sure that any competitors were given a very hard time should they dare to try to win it.

The government was spot on: The investment-banking business was then a cartel where the biggest and most powerful firms controlled the market and then set the prices for their services, leaving customers with few viable choices for much needed capital, advice or trading counterparties.

Indeed, following the destruction of Bear Stearns Cos., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Merrill Lynch and countless smaller and foreign competitors during the financial crisis that began in 2007, the investment-banking business is an even more powerful and threatening cartel than it was in 1947.
Read the complete source story here.

A Shameful Attack on Working Families in Indiana
Posted January 7, 2012
Source: Jim Hoffa, writing in Huffington Post
The central battleground in the war against workers today is the Indiana Statehouse. Anti-worker lawmakers are frantic to pass a bill that would weaken unions and shrink Indiana's middle class. The legislative fight over the measure could make the Super Bowl look like a stroll in the park.

Indiana's Republican leadership is desperate to pass a so-called "right to work" bill before Feb. 5, when Super Bowl XLVI kicks off at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. They want to avoid any negative attention around the game. In the meantime, supporters of this awful bill will say and do anything to get it passed.

Bain, Barack and Jobs
Posted: January 5, 2012
Source: Paul Krugman, in The New York Times
America's recovery from recession has been so slow that it mostly doesn't seem like a recovery at all, especially on the jobs front. So, in a better world, President Obama would face a challenger offering a serious critique of his job-creation policies, and proposing a serious alternative.

Mr. Romney claims that Mr. Obama has been a job destroyer, while he was a job-creating businessman. For example, he told Fox News: “This is a president who lost more jobs during his tenure than any president since Hoover. This is two million jobs that he lost as president.” He went on to declare, of his time at the private equity firm Bain Capital, “I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs.”

But his claims about the Obama record border on dishonesty, and his claims about his own record are well across that border.

Start with the Obama record. It’s true that 1.9 million fewer Americans have jobs now than when Mr. Obama took office. But the president inherited an economy in free fall, and can’t be held responsible for job losses during his first few months, before any of his own policies had time to take effect. So how much of that Obama job loss took place in, say, the first half of 2009?

The answer is: more than all of it. The economy lost 3.1 million jobs between January 2009 and June 2009 and has since gained 1.2 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s nothing like Mr. Romney’s portrait of job destruction.

Incidentally, the previous administration’s claims of job growth always started not from Inauguration Day but from August 2003, when Bush-era employment hit its low point. By that standard, Mr. Obama could say that he has created 2.5 million jobs since February 2010.

So Much Fun. So Irrelevant.
Posted: January 4, 2012
Source: Thomas L. Friedman, in The New York Times
Two things have struck me about the Republican presidential candidate debates leading up to the Iowa caucuses. One is how entertaining they were. The other is how disconnected they were from the biggest trends shaping the job market of the 21st century. What if the 2012 campaign were actually about the world in which we're living and how we adapt to it? What would the candidates be talking about?

Surely at or near the top of that list would be the tightening merger between globalization and the latest information technology revolution. The I.T. revolution is giving individuals more and more cheap tools of innovation, collaboration and creativity — thanks to hand-held computers, social networks and "the cloud," which stores powerful applications that anyone can download. And the globalization side of this revolution is integrating more and more of these empowered people into ecosystems, where they can innovate and manufacture more products and services that make people's lives more healthy, educated, entertained, productive and comfortable.
Read the complete source story here

Where the Real Jobs Are
Posted: January 2, 2012
Source: Editorial, The New York Times
The Republicans believe they have President Obama in a box: either he approves a controversial Canadian oil pipeline or they accuse him of depriving the nation of jobs. Mr. Obama can and should push back hard.

This is precisely the moment for him to argue the case for alternative fuel sources and clean energy jobs — and to lambaste the Republicans for doubling down on conventional fuels while ceding a $5 trillion global clean technology market (and the jobs that go with it) to more aggressive competitors like China and Germany.

The payroll tax cut bill, which Mr. Obama signed last month, gave him 60 days to decide on the Keystone XL pipeline. That is not enough time to complete the required environmental review of a project that, in its present design, crosses ecologically sensitive territory and risks polluting an aquifer critical to Midwestern water supplies.

The Republicans’ claim that the pipeline will create tens of thousands of new jobs — 20,000 according to House Speaker John Boehner and 100,000 according to Jon Huntsman — are wildly inflated. A more accurate forecast from the federal government, one with which TransCanada, the pipeline company, agrees, says the project would create 6,000 to 6,500 temporary construction jobs at best, for two years.

The country obviously needs more jobs. Mr. Obama needs to lay out the case that industry, with government help, can create hundreds of thousands of clean energy jobs without incurring environmental risks — by upgrading old power plants to comply with environmental laws, retrofitting commercial and residential buildings that soak up nearly 40 percent of the country’s energy (and produce nearly 40 percent of its carbon emissions) and promoting growth in new industries like wind and solar power and advanced vehicles.

By even the most conservative estimates, the power plant upgrades required by the new rule governing mercury emissions are expected to create about 45,000 temporary construction jobs over the next five years, and as many as 8,000 permanent jobs as utilities install pollution control equipment. And while the projects are new and the numbers tentative, the Energy Department predicts that its loan guarantee programs could create more than 60,000 direct jobs in the solar and wind industries and in companies developing advanced batteries and other components for more fuel-efficient cars.
Read the complete source story here.

Carelessly Mistaking Theater For Policy
Posted: December 30, 2011
Source: Paul Krugman, in Truth Out
One crucial thing you need to understand about political journalists in the United States is that, with some honorable exceptions, they don’t know or care about actual policy.

In a way, that makes sense — the skills needed to cultivate contacts, to get the inside scoop on what’s going on in Congressional scheming or campaign war rooms, are very different from the skills needed to interpret spreadsheets from the Congressional Budget Office.

The problem, however, is that all too often political journalists mistake the theater of policy for reality (or don’t care about the difference).

Hence, the awful decision of Politico to give Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, an award as the health care policy maker of the year.

Even if you like the thrust of Mr. Ryan’s ideas, even if you think privatizing Medicare and turning it into a voucher scheme is fine, what became painfully, embarrassingly clear during the debate over the Ryan plan was that Mr. Ryan is, well, incompetent. The plan was a mess, from its invocation of ludicrous Heritage Foundation projections to its crazy assertions about what would happen to discretionary spending. It’s true that the plan “got everyone talking,” as Politico says — but mostly it got people talking about what a mess Mr. Ryan’s effort was.

Oh, and it was pretty clear that Mr. Ryan wasn’t being honest about his own numbers.
Read the complete source story here

The fact that members of Congress are getting richer (and 57 members come from the top 1 percent, according to USA Today) confirms what Americans suspect about the people who are running this country: that they don’t empathize with normal people.

The fact that rich people are in Congress isn’t usually that big a deal. But when Congress struggles mightily to take care of the economic business of the country — from the recent payroll tax extension fight to the debt limit fight — it starts to seem pretty evident to the average, everyday voter that members really don’t understand the economic problems their constituents face.