Wisconsin Isn't Working

Instead, it's a fish that rotting from the head down.  There are many reasons for Badger State voters to get rid of the POS known as Scott Walker, but the state's job shrinkage after he declared the state "open for business" surely has to be one of them.

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Happy Easter and Passover, everyone!   See you in April.

Why We Have Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself

Because, when we allow ourselves to be gripped with fear at the expense of easy-to-verify facts, we give conservatives their only opportunity to beat us.  Take a look at the hubbub over the non-existent "Monsanto Protection Act."

Can You Lose A Job Because You Need A Job?

In Mississippi, the answer is apparently yes.

Sadly, this simply illustrates the hoax of the un-welfare state:  we can neither receive help from others, nor have the means to help ourselves.

I've said it before today, and I'll say it more loudly now:

WAKE UP!

The Curse Of The Billable Hour

My wife and I used to work for the worldwide legal behemoth DLA Piper, back in the 1980s when it was merely Piper & Marbury, the second largest law firm in Maryland.  We were both legal assistants, and proud to be so; Piper in those days, despite being a blue-chip corporate firm, valued its integrity as much as its revenues, and treated both its employees and clients with respect.

Sadly, that no longer seems to be the case.  But the principal problem here is not the law firm in question, but, rather, the institution of the billable hour, by which lawyer productivity and achievement is measured principally by the amount of time one or more attorneys spend on a matter.  One doesn't have to be a lawyer to see how such a system can be manipulated for the benefit of the lawyer and not the client.  I have heard of lawyers billing clients for time spent (sometimes in the shower) thinking about their client's case.

This is why my wife and I, whenever possible, try to negotiate a flat fee and a payment schedule for our clients.  It ensures honest work and reliable payments.  Of course, in the litigation context, flat fees are not always possible, because litigation is inherently unpredictable.  Let's hope that the DLA Piper scandal ensures more communications between lawyers and clients about costs--and more self-policing by lawyers of their billing practices.

And, Speaking Of Waking Up ...

Attention, residents of Plains states (and yes, Nebraska, I'm particularly talking about you):  this could be your nightmare if Keystone XL is ever built.

But don't worry.  I'm sure it'll be absolutely safe if it is.

Just like this one probably "was."

59 Dollars Over Four Decades

If you're in the bottom 90 percent in this country, that's how much your income has increased.

For the love of God, people:  WAKE UP!

The Arc Of History Is Long ...

... but, as MLK said, it bends towards justice.  New York has taken a small step in that direction, advancing the concept of guarantee paid sick leave for employees.  Let's hope that, one day, this will not be limited to New York.

What Solar Power REALLY Needs To Take Off

I've written before about the remarkable achievements in Germany in expanding its use of solar power, even to the extent that has allowed them to close nuclear plants, despite not being a country notorious for sunny days.  This article goes into some fascinating detail about how the Germans accomplished this.  In the process of doing so, it makes two points worth repeating, one for each side of the political fence.

Government intervention:  Solar power would not have taken off in Germany without public policy and subsidies to make that happen.  The fact that it is enabling the country to wean itself off of nuclear power, the most toxic and dangerous form of energy there is, makes that an investment well worth making.  Score one against the anti-government crowd.  However, there is another problem.

The need for more technological innovation:  For the most part, solar power's advocates have failed to acknowledge that solar, like its cousin wind power, is essentially intermittent, which forces us to continue, at least in the short term, our reliance on dirtier but steadier sources of power.  As the article acknowledges, this won't change until more effective ways of storing solar power on a massive scale are developed.  Developing these ways, and ensuring their safety, are what solar power advocates really need to focus on promoting.  Otherwise, we'll never free ourselves from the grip of extraction-industry politics.

And What Is He REALLY Proud Of?

According to this, Senator James Inhofe of  Oklahoma is "proud" to be a climate-change denier.

What he really should be proud of is how well he illustrates the correlation between opposing green policies and sitting hip-deep in the pockets of the oil companies.

If you take a look at the slide show accompanying the article, you will (hopefully) be unsurprised by the correlation between low scores from the League of Conservation Voters, and representation of extraction-industry states.  Yes, it includes Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, but he's a Tea Party idiot destined for the scrap-heap of one-term senators.

As Upton Sinclair once said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."  Sadly, the only way to get rid of these bastards is for everyone to find more and more ways to depend less and less on coal and oil--and thereby destroy the power of politicians who careers depend so much on pollutants.

Whose Rights ARE They, Anyway?

Answer:  They should be everyone's.

Take the right to counsel, for example, guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment.  It's been in the news recently, in the context of whether it should apply to immigration detainees as well as to U.S. citizens (for example, in the New York Times).  My take on that, as an immigration lawyer?  It should apply to detainees, because it is a human right, not a civil right.  That's why it's in the Constitution in the first place.  The only reason this right and others appear to have "expanded" is simply because our understanding of the word "human" has expanded since the times of the Framers.  The right to counsel is one that, in fact, should be religiously supported by conservatives, because it is in essence the right to be protected from arbitrary state action.

Ah, if only THAT was the thing conservatives really wanted.

What they really want, of course, is a world in which they get the goldmine and everybody else gets the shaft.  This is why they love to play divide-and-conquer politics with their opponents, getting them to envy each other so that they won't focus on their common enemy.  The Times article I cited just now has an example of how this works in the context of the right to counsel:

Jon Freere, a legal policy analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, a research organization based in Washington that advocates for reduced immigration, pointed out that American citizens routinely deal with important civil matters like child custody, foreclosures or evictions without the benefit of guaranteed legal representation.

“Why should illegal aliens be guaranteed greater protections than citizens?” he asked. 

Throwing more immigration lawyers into the mix, he said, would probably slow the process only further, especially considering that immigration lawyers are always looking to expand the scope of asylum. 

Don't you just love it?  Can't have those pesky lawyers expanding human rights to make sure that more humans benefit from having them.  As for Americans "routinely" dealing with "important civil matters" on there own, this is hardly a great thing.  Pro se parties burden the legal system with their lack of legal knowledge, straining already crowded court schedules and often shafting themselves with regard to the results.  They only go to court without a lawyer because they either lack money to hire legal counsel or have too much money for legal-aid services.

But Mr. Freere, and his fellow north-bound ends of south-bound Brontosauruses (thank you, Bill James), employ the strategy outlined in that quote across the board.  Just think about there arguments about unions:  "Why should they get great salaries and benefits that most people can't get?"  Sound familiar?  Of course, most people don't get those great salaries and benefits because they were foolish enough to buy the bill of economic goods that free-marketers sold to them.

Every human being has the right to every human right, be it the right to counsel, to a decent living, or to anything else that makes a human being human.  And no one should let the Jon Freeres of the world convince them otherwise.

Unionize The Self-Employed?

This may seem like economic heresy but, in a fend-for-yourself world in which no one has a womb-to-tomb life with one employer, it may become part of a long-term solution to our economic woes.  Take a look.

Sorry, David, But Socialism Won A Long Time Ago

Up until today, I had become an admirer of David Stockman, Reagan's former budget director, because he has so forcefully denounced the brand of supply-side economics he used to advocate.  Then I read this.

It's chock-full of bipartisan blame (going all the way back to FDR) for our current economic woes.  But undergirding all of that fair-minded prose is a fantasy that, apparently remains with Stockman from his early days in politics:  the idea that an economy with little or no government interference is both desirable, and possible.

To paraphrase "2001: A Space Odyssey":  I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid we can't have that.  Because nobody wants it.  In fact, nobody has ever wanted it.

Go all the way back to Adam Smith, the first advocate of capitalistic economics.  In "The Wealth of Nations," he advocates progressive taxation and government support for the poor, including public works projects, and denounces the role of corporations in economic life.

Fast-forward to the Industrial Revolution, when laws were written to ensure that the corporate masters of the writers could enslave the rest of us--until workers put there livelihoods and their lives on the line to ensure that there could be some equality of power between themselves and their employers.

Now move on to the Great Depression.  Oh yes, there were advocates of unfettered markets even after the crash, who said that any effort by the government to step in would only make things worse.  Well, things did get worse, when voters listened to them and voted Republicans into Congress to handcuff Roosevelt (who, BTW, gave us that great Glass-Steagall Act you so effectively champion, and your party destroyed with the help of another of your heroes, Bill Clinton).  Fortunately, he was not handcuffed forever, and the modern progressive state he helped to build gave the United States, in the middle of the last century, the greatest period of widespread and shared prosperity it has ever (and may ever) know.

Finally, consider the economic schizophrenia of the Reagan Era.  Almost thirty uninterrupted years of tax cuts, budget cuts and deregulation.  You many even recall a Newsweek cover with your face on it, next to the title "Cut, Slash, Chop."  I think it looked something like this:

Yes, that's about right.

And how did that era end?  When the financial house of cards collapsed in 2008, the investing class decided that socialism looked pretty good, and that they wanted as much of it as they could possibly get.  Amazingly, they got it, with the help of both parties.

I don't get the sense that you would disagree with much of this.  But your proposed solution is for a world that cannot exist.  Even if government was limited to purely police and military powers, it would still be a major purchaser, manufacturer and employer--in short, it would still have a massive involvement in our economy that would distort supply and demand for other goods and services.  And even YOU seem to be willing to add a "social safety net" to that involvement.

Socialism, David, has won.  It won a long time ago,  The best thing that we can do is to move back to an era, if that's even possible, like the mid-20th century, when government balanced its efforts between helping the working class and the investing class.  Above all, we need to curtail the current policy of socialism for the rich.

If we can do that, we won't have to worry about your proposed solution:  stuffing mattresses with cash.  After all, even cash is no good without a government to back it. 

Power To The People!

Quite literally, in fact.

Municipalities taking over public utilities could have financial advantages for cities as well as environmental ones.  Let's hope that this is a trend that takes off.

All Debt Isn't Federal

In the debate over the national debt and the federal budget deficit, much of the discuss seems to assume that the Federal Government, as a spendthrift, is some kind of horrible exception to the American way of life.  In fact, nothing could be further than the truth.

Note, in particular, how much of our debt is business debt, and how much of that debt was build by the spate of leveraged buy-outs that began during the Reagan years.  This merely serves to underscore an unpleasant and unpopular truth:  spendthriftiness was the basis and the essence of the so-called Reagan "revolution."

Why is our government a spendthrift?  Simple.  We are a nation of spendthrifts.  We hate everyone's excessive, unfunded spending, except when it benefits us.  This is why people are much bigger on cutting spending in the abstract than they are in the particular.  And, especially when it comes to the sequester, even the GOP is not immune to this type of "thinking."

And, until that changes, We the People will remain on the slippery slope to bankruptcy.

The Future Really IS Here, After All

Lately, I've found myself looking around and reflecting on how much of the "future" that was predicted when I was a child has in fact become reality.  Here's one more recent example:  robotic exoskeletons that allow paraplegics to walk--and, perhaps, do much more.

It's really a shame that Christopher Reeve didn't live long enough to see this.  He always believe in the potential for this to happen, and he would have benefited so much from it.  But the fact that he devoted so much of his life after he lost the ability to walk to promoting research into breakthroughs like this one proves he deserved to play Superman.

Sometimes, we don't have to believe a man can fly.  It's a big enough miracle if a man can walk.