Sidebar: Tough-Talking the Obvious, 8/28/11

From USA Today... Adam Levine, of Maroon 5, has had just enough of this shit and isn't going to idly remain quiet:

ADAM LEVINE: MTV 'PRETENDS TO STILL CARE ABOUT MUSIC'

Mr. Levine got all up in MTV's twitter grill and called out what everyone in the universe has been joking about since the second or third season of Real World.  He twitted:

the VMA's. one day a year when MTV pretends to still care about music. I'm drawing a line in the sand. f--- you VMA's.

Later on, he upped the badboy ante by twitting:

i may be a pop singer. but every once in a while the angsty teenager in me just blurts out some raw honesty. it's a reflex.

Takes steel junk to stand up to profess an established, safe, opinion that the collective groupthink arrived at a generation ago.  Takes even more steel junk to double-down on that safe opinion with the "you don't like what I say? tough shit establishment (which I am not acknowledging totally agrees with me) , because I'm just getting the truth out there" tough-talk follow up.

Half-Assed Fridays: August 26, 2011

From GOP front-runner, Rick Perry:

If you polled the military, the active duty and veterans, and said ‘would you rather have a president of the United States that never served a day in the military or someone who is a veteran?’ They’ve going to say, I would venture, that they would like to have a veteran.

His assertion is that troops would rather take orders from someone who knows what it's like to serve in the military.  While I don't think it's necessarily true, I don't have any qualms with Governor Perry's thoughts on the matter.  He served as a C-130 pilot for the air force and left having achieved the rank of captain.  Honestly, a distinguished career serving our armed forces.

But maybe he should ask the follow-up question... would the military want to follow a male cheerleader?  Would they want to follow a male cheerleader for the second time in the last three presidencies?  Why does the GOP keep insisting on pushing former male cheerleaders to the front of their party?  Why does Texas now seem to require their GOP governors to be former male cheerleaders that graduated with GPA's less than 2.4?

We gave the male cheerleader commander-in-chief thing a shot with George W. Bush and from my perspective, it went horribly.  Faced with the most tragic terrorist attack, Bush et al. macho'ed logic aside like a rival school's football mascot during sideline time-out antics and invaded the wrong country.  How do we protect ourselves from future train-wreck male cheerleader rule?  Does the answer lie in changing the constitution?

I honestly don't know.

America Likes To Punch Itself in the Face

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its unemployment projections yesterday, and here's what they had to say:

CBO Forecasts High Unemployment For Years

Specifically, they expect unemployment to remain above eight percent until 2014, six long years after the economy crashed.  Here's the actual graph:

A couple of things jumped out at me when looking over the data that shouldn't really be that surprising to  a lot of people.  First, these cycles really are pretty cyclical  You hear them described that way all the time, but's calming to see those waves coming in.  

Second, the article failed to mention what they were predicting for after 2014, which was a precipitous drop back to more normal a-hair-under-6% levels.  Hopefully there's some truth to those predictions and most of America can get back to their normal lives relatively soon, and by that I guess I mean three plus years from now.  Also interesting to me is that the unemployment rate under Reagan hit even higher rates back in the early eighties.  

To dig up a NY Times Classic, the 1983 to 2011 comparison was made in the article

From 1983, Hopes For Jobs In 2011

Reagan, after inheriting a down economy and failing to fix it in his first few years, watched the Congressional incumbents receive a wake-up call in the the form of a mid-term election beat-down.  The unemployment rate fell dramatically from 10.8 to 10.4 percent, but mostly because people simply gave up looking for work, technically taking them out of the work force.  Same basic thing happened at the beginning of 2011 (9.8 to 9.4%).  Reagan and Obama both chose to overlook those volatile numbers and concentrate on positives such as... the stock market was strong in 1983, it was strong at the beginning of 2011.  

One other similarity.  The country was perilously close to its debt ceiling limit in 1983, and it was again in the beginning of 2011.  So President Reagan wrote a letter to Senator Howard Baker (R. TN) and asked that the debt ceiling be raised, saying:

This country now possesses the strongest credit in the world.  The full consequences of a default -- or even the serious prospect of default -- by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate.  Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and on the value of the dollar in exchange markets.  The Nation can ill afford to allow such a result.  The risks, the costs, the disruptions, and the incalculable damage lead me to but one conclusions: the Senate must pass this legislation before the Congress adjourns.  November 16th, 1983.

So Senator Baker, known to many as the Great Conciliator, got everyone together and got it done, a trademark throughout his career.  Going even further back in the NY Times backlog:

THE WHITE HOUSE CRISIS: MAN IN THE NEWS; The Great Conciliator: Howard Henry Baker Jr.

Some quotes to describe Senator Baker and the leadership he brought to Congress during that time.

''He's a genius at finding the compromise point and pushing it through,'' said Senator Jim Sasser, Mr. Baker's Democratic colleague from Tennessee.

And this one:

''I'm frank to say that I don't think we could have had the successes that we've had up there without his leadership,'' the President (Reagan) once told a reporter. 

Let's compare that with what we got.

"Get your ass in line." - John Boehner to House republicans.

"The American people will not accept an increase in the debt limit without significant spending cuts and reforms." - John Boehner, speaking to the American people who definitely would have accepted it as they had dozens of times before.

"The sad truth is the President wanted a blank check six months ago, and he wants a blank check today.  That is just not going to happen." - John Boehner, still speaking to the American people, apparently forgetting that he's talking about the Congressional budget already passed.

"You see, there is no stalemate in Congress.  The House has passed a bill to raise the debt limit with bipartisan support.  And this week, while the Senate is struggling to pass a bill filled with phony accounting and Washington gimmicks, we will pass another bill." - John Boehner, again, still speaking to the American people, playing fast and loose with the meaning of bipartisan and completely blowing the meaning of stalemate.

"Conciliation... sounds like French for 'make me your bitch.'  Compromise... sounds like Nazi for France." - libelous quote I just made up.

Ok, so needless to say, we didn't get the Congressional leadership in 2011 that we got in 1983.  But we did get a rating downgrade, a new crash in the stock market, and the chance at a genuine double-dip recession. I guess despite that, the CBO still sees unemployment dropping in a few years, so that's a positive.  Cycles will be cycles to some degree.

But that graph reminded me a little of another graph I sometimes see floating around my liberal circles:

That's a graph showing CO2 levels in the atmosphere over the last 450,000 years.  This one also has those relaxing waves rolling into shore, but it also has that "HOLY SHIT!!" spike to the last one.  More importantly, both spikes have self-infliction and denial in common.

When trying to piece together what happened with the 2008 crash, a lot of higher-ups in banking stated there was no way to predict that the crash would occur.  That's despite the fact that they pushed out crap loans in order to bundle them together into giant piles of crap to sell off shares so other people could invest in crap all while banks and insurance companies issued credit default swaps to protect those investment in pure financial crap.  

We did it, bankers definitely did it, government facilitated it.  But in the end, we all really enjoyed splashing around in a giant pool of our own feces for some reason.  Then when people showed us the pictures of us splashing in our own feces that they took on their phones, we tried to deny responsibility.  Just like when some people drive gas-fueled cars and use electricity from coal-burning plants and let industrial cow farms pump out massive amounts of cow-ass methane, then just shrug and say stupid things like "the jury is still out" or "climate change is cyclical" when looking at that CO2 spike.

We do these things to ourselves.  We take the course of nature, or economics, and we apply Britney Spears shaving her head to those cycles and make them so much worse.

Dammit, now I definitely have to close with a shot of Marcus Bachmann eating a corn dog just to get out of this funk.

Seriously, who makes that face when something quasi-phallic approaches your mouth?  

"It's Worse Than You Know..."

Over the weekend, Bloomberg.com dropped this article concerning the reality behind just how in bed the largest banks were with the federal reserve:

Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion In Secret Fed Loans

The article demonstrates how the Fed went above and beyond the admitted 2008 public bailout of banks when the economy first started to crash.  The public bailouts amounted to $160 billion to the top 10 largest banks, which seems like a lot of tax dollars taken from us to go to the banks that DWI'ed everyone into this problem in the first place.

Turns out, some of the nation's largest banks also went to the federal reserve for additional loans, initially amounting to just under $670 billion, to help stabilize the banks and to try and keep the lending markets moving.  Let's name some names...

The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley (MS), got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion, according to a Bloomberg News compilation of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress.

Turns out that it wasn't just our banks that got federal help, a chunk of the loans went overseas.

Almost half of the Fed’s top 30 borrowers, measured by peak balances, were European firms. They included Edinburgh-based Royal Bank of Scotland Plc, which took $84.5 billion, the most of any non-U.S. lender, and Zurich-based UBS AG (UBSN), which got $77.2 billion. Germany’s Hypo Real Estate Holding AG borrowed $28.7 billion, an average of $21 million for each of its 1,366 employees.

But one of the worst potential offenders was Goldman Sachs, who may have taken a Fed loan in order to turn around and re-lend that money to financial institutions that didn't qualify for those Fed loans in the first place.  This was so profitable because the Fed offered loans at one third the rate banks were loaning to each other (1.1% vs. 3.8%).

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), which in 2007 was the most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history, borrowed $69 billion from the Fed on Dec. 31, 2008. Among the programs New York-based Goldman Sachs tapped after the Lehman bankruptcy was the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, or PDCF, designed to lend money to brokerage firms ineligible for the Fed’s bank-lending programs.

They weren't alone in taking loans they may not have needed.

Even banks that survived the crisis without government capital injections tapped the Fed through programs that promised confidentiality. London-based Barclays Plc (BARC) borrowed $64.9 billion and Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) got $66 billion...

...Herring, the University of Pennsylvania professor, said some banks may have used the program to maximize profits by borrowing “from the cheapest source, because this was supposed to be secret and never revealed.”

Other banks milked the system by taking out one loan and having a subsidiary get a separate one.

In March 2009, Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America drew $78 billion from one facility through two banking units and $11.8 billion more from two other programs through its broker-dealer, Bank of America Securities LLC.

Like most loans, banks had to offer collateral, but as the crisis worsened, the Fed relaxed those requirements in order to get more cash into the hands of banks.

Morgan Stanley borrowed $61.3 billion from one Fed program in September 2008, pledging a total of $66.5 billion of collateral, according to Fed documents. Securities pledged included $21.5 billion of stocks, $6.68 billion of bonds with a junk credit rating and $19.5 billion of assets with an “unknown rating,” according to the documents.

Meanwhile, the banks went to the public and reassured them that they were the pictures of stability.  Morgan Stanley's $107 billion already mentioned was basically all the cash they had available and it totaled almost three times the amount of profits they made in the past decade.  Meanwhile they were telling people they had "strong capital and liquidity positions."  JP Morgan Chase, which took about $48 billion in loans, told people they had a "fortress balance sheet."

The federal reserve refused to disclose any of these activities until an act of Congress, specifically the Dodd-Frank Act, forced their hand.  In March 2011, the Fed finally released numerous databases detailing all of the confidential loans they offered back at the height of the crisis.

The argument can easily be made that since lending markets completely froze, someone had to step up in some capacity to get those moving again.  The Fed couldn't practically act as a general lender, so it makes some sense to get lending cash to those who normally fulfill that role.  It's the secrecy and the abuse of that system that make it sound so outrageous, especially given that these banks were already given our tax dollars to stay in business.

The article throws out one statistic just to put things in perspective.  The total amount of these loans, $1.2 trillion, is "about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages."  When offered the choice of who to help, the largest banks took precedence over average citizens.  Some of those largest banks seized the opportunity to build even further on their profits, all while some people lost their homes.

Between these secret loans and TARP, it's not that the federal government couldn't directly help the average people devastated by this recession.  It's that they specifically chose not to.  Any time someone utters the phrase "class warfare," they should get pelted with statistics and facts until they can't stand up under the weight of how stupid they sound.

Half-Assed Fridays

Since it's Friday in the summer, I'm going to phone it in a bit today.  Flipping around the headlines, I'm reading about how stocks are tanking again, a gentleman from PIMCO says another recession is inevitable, and so on.

In honor of that, I present to you a small collage of stock brokers looking sad in that typical bear market stock photo sort of way.  Enjoy...

And Why I Love New Hampshire

Growing up as a kid, my family took a few vacations to New Hampshire and they remain some of my favorite childhood memories.  So I've always had a soft spot for that state, and it warms my heart to pass on this article.

Perry Heckled As Campaign Shifts Into New Phase

It's time to realize that Texas or the Iowa straw poll might not actually reflect the typical American voter.  He was met by protestors during campaign stops with the following messages:

"Hands off our Medicare," about 35 protesters chanted as the Republican presidential candidate shook hands outside Popovers on the Square a popular local eatery.

And:

"Stop attacking middle class families Rick Perry," a man shouted at the Texas governor as he ordered a popover pastry.

But the best of all, from the mouths of babes...

One woman who did not appear to be affiliated with the protesters ushered her son up to the governor and prompted him with questions for Perry like "do you believe in evolution?"

"It's a theory that's out there," Perry told the child. "It's got some gaps in it. In Texas we teach both Creationism and evolution."

The mother then told her young son: "Ask him why he doesn't believe in science," as Perry continued into the cafe.

Okay, not quite from the mouths of babes but I still got a kick out of it.

 

 

 

Maybe Mitt Romney Should Read My Blog...

... or at least the NY Times article I linked to yesterday about the rapidly declining opinion people hold of the Tea Party.  From Reuters:

Romney Says He's In Sync With Tea Party

During a campaign stop in New Hampshire, steel workers asked Mitt Romney why he felt cutting government would stimulate the economy, what he intended to do to protect social security, and if he was a member of the tea party.  His response:

"I don't know that you sign a membership," he said. "What I consider myself is someone who is in sync with the Tea Party."

Mitt Romney is pretty well know for trying to read the political temperature of the room he stands in at that exact moment and shifting all his views to line up with the people around him.  This leads to a lot of comments that seem to backpedal over previous statements, or at least stances that feel completely flaccid.

In this particular case, I don't think the steel workers were hoping for a resounding "Hell yes, I'm a Tea Party member!"  Quite the opposite, in fact, based on their questions.  But Romney, who just got hammered in the Iowa straw poll, understands that despite the fact a lot of people disapprove of the Tea Party, they are enough of a unified contingent to have a king-making role.

So you have two emerging strategies for the top three GOP candidates.  Bachmann and Perry have jumped in hip-deep with the Tea Party king-making block.  Sure they aren't the majority, but their pack-like behavior guarantees someone a possible 20% or so right off the bat.  Then that someone just needs to figure out how to persuade the moderate republicans that either he or she isn't actually batshit crazy, or that he or she is capable of actually beating Obama.  Because no one likes to vote for a loser, even if it means the country as a whole loses.

Romney, on the other hand, seems to be going after the moderate GOP demographic, and maybe hoping that the country, unhappy with the current state of the union, will want to swap one brand of moderate for another.  So there's the vote for a winner appeal.  But this Iowa straw poll business probably has him a little nervous, a nervousness that we saw in the 2008 election with John McCain.

A lot of McCain fans could barely recognize the man that ran for president in 2008.  He caught the jitters so badly that he voted against banning water-boarding despite having been tortured as a POW during Vietnam.  He caught the jitters so badly that he chose Sarah Palin as a running mate, a mistake that still plagues our country to this day much to the joy of satirists and comedians and fans of bus tours everywhere.  Lexington, Concord, and Paul Revere... less amused.

So now we get to watch Romney potentially self-destruct with the same cake-and-eat-it-too game plan, which has given us some of the following gems:

Many Tea Party members don't see themselves as "in sync" with Romney, however. In Massachusetts he helped author the statewide healthcare mandate that was an inspiration for President Barack Obama's 2010 national health reforms

Obamacare and Romneycare, as they are derisively referred too, are disliked by the Tea Party as an example of government overreach. Romney has defended the state law while promising to repeal the federal version, should he be elected.

So first we get Romney standing by his decision but wanting to cave on the national-level, watered-down version of his idea.  Next up, smaller government:

Romney reiterated his view that military spending should be exempt from any attempt to balance the federal budget. Defense spending accounts for about half of discretionary U.S. federal spending.

"I am not in favor of cutting defense," he said. "Some people would like to cut that down dramatically, not me."

You can't exempt one of the most expensive things in our budget and then balance the left overs.  It's like deciding to go vegan but exempting the Craz-E Burger, a bacon-cheeseburger with a Krispy Kreme donut cut in half and slathered with butter for a bun.

Finally, he might as well just copy and paste Perry's speeches:

"Our regulation, our bureaucracy, our tax rates are so much higher than other countries," Romney said. "The right answer for America is to get government smaller."

In the end, I think I actually want Romney to win the GOP ticket because he's the only leading candidate that doesn't make me nervous about Obama losing, which could happen given the shape the country's in at the moment.  But no one likes a sycophant, and no one wants a leader who goes soft every time tough decisions come up.

It's something that holds true for both Romney, and maybe for President Obama as well.  It's okay to actually believe in something... unless you believe in science, climate change, letting boys marry each other, helping out your fellow citizens when they get sick without bankrupting them, or in saving the middle class.

We have no room for those beliefs here.

 

 

 

Under the Tea Party Hood

An interesting look at the Tea Party and its demographic origins in the NY Times:

Crashing the Tea Party

First, the article looks at where the Tea Party stands now.  Turns out, more and more people are lining up against the Tea Party.

Polls show that disapproval of the Tea Party is climbing. In April 2010, a New York Times/CBS News survey found that 18 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of it, 21 percent had a favorable opinion and 46 percent had not heard enough. Now, 14 months later, Tea Party supporters have slipped to 20 percent, while their opponents have more than doubled, to 40 percent.

Of course, no real mention of where the remaining 40% stand.  I can't possibly believe those 40% fall into the "had not heard enough category" after all the press the Tea Party received during the debt ceiling debate.  It's also hard to believe they would still be in some kind of "indifferent" category.  Either way, seems like a bit of an omission.

What's striking, though, is just how much some people disapprove of the Tea Party.

Of course, politicians of all stripes are not faring well among the public these days. But in data we have recently collected, the Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about — lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like “atheists” and “Muslims.” Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.

That's right... more than Muslims, or (shudder) Atheists.  Despite the fact that our country was founded by a number of non-believers, atheism might as well be a four letter word to most Americans (and it may literally be to other Americans given the sad state of our educational system), and yet the Tea Party ranks even lower.  I have to confess that when I read how the Christian Right also dwelled in the basement, I had to smile a bit.  Sometimes I feel like the Christian Right distorts their faith so much that it becomes a bit unrecognizable.

The NY Times article goes on to explain that the Tea Party and the Christian Right might have more in common than sharing the toilet of American approval ratings.

Professors David Campbell (Notre Dame) and Robert Putnam (Harvard), the authors of the article, interviewed three thousand people back in a 2006 study to explore national political attitudes.  Then they reinterviewed the same three thousand people again this summer.  They found a number of interesting things.

First, they discovered that many Americans were indeed swinging toward the more fiscally conservative side of the spectrum, something that ought to help Tea Party popularity, not hurt it.  They also found that despite many Tea Party claims, their origin story doesn't involve a mishmash of different political ideologies all uniting behind the idea of smaller government.

... The Tea Party’s supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born, and were more likely than others to have contacted government officials. In fact, past Republican affiliation is the single strongest predictor of Tea Party support today.

So no shock there, but I guess it's nice to have some confirmation to what many of us already believed.  But the article goes on to uncover some more disturbing trends.

They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.

And a little more for good measure.

More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek “deeply religious” elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.

Now people like Michele Bachman and Gov. Perry start to make a little more sense.  Perry recently held a giant prayer meeting in Houston to ask God to help solve our country's problems.  Michele Bachmann has talked at length about her Godly submission to her husband, who told her to go be a tax attorney and run for office (and as Bill Maher pointed out, when most husbands get that level of submission from their wives, they ask for a three-way... Mr. Bachmann chose tax attorney).  She's talked at length about her love for gay people:

“If you’re involved in the gay and lesbian lifestyle, it’s bondage. It is personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement.” — Senator (sic) Michele Bachmann, speaking at EdWatch National Education Conference, November 6, 2004.

Or another quote from that same banner day:

“Don’t misunderstand. I am not here bashing people who are homosexuals, who are lesbians, who are bisexual, who are transgender. We need to have profound compassion for people who are dealing with the very real issue of sexual dysfunction in their life and sexual identity disorders.” — Senator (sic) Michele Bachmann, on homosexuality as a mental disorder, speaking at EdWatch National Education Conference, November 6, 2004.

It's not that she hates them, she just feels sorry for them and their dysfunctional, depressing, S&M-esque, sickness... which doesn't really make homosexuality out to be the choice that the current Defense of Marriage Act legislation sort of hinges on to keep it from being discriminatory, but that's neither here nor there.

In the end, the study found that most people strongly disapprove of bringing more religion into politics, and that is one of the biggest reasons for the drop in Tea Party popularity despite their having their fingers a bit on the pulse of the fiscal conservatism sweeping the country.

And yes, there are phallic shots of Michele Bachmann eating the same corn dogs as Rick Perry for those who want to find them.

         

As Wisconsin Goes, So Goes the Nation

From the Christian Science Monitor:

In Final Wisconsin Recall, Signs of a National Tea Party Backlash?

Wisconsin is set to have their final recall elections, ending the political E! reality show that has been their state government.  It all started with the mid-term elections back in 2010.  Our economy went down the toilet, the country was in a pretty bad place, and the democratically controlled U.S. government proved to be pretty limp.

Voters went out during those mid-term elections looking to blame someone.  They blamed, rightfully so, those in office and voted them out.  In Wisconsin, that meant electing republican Scott Walker for governor, and giving both houses of the state legislature to the republicans.  Once in office, they set about achieving Gov. Walker's promise to bring 250,000 jobs to Wisconsin by cutting a number of different taxes.  They also brought up legislation to allow concealed firearms, to redraw voting districts, and to establish tougher ID requirements at the voting booth.  Nothing too surprising for a republican administration.

What drew national attention to Wisconsin was Walker's concern that the state budget was too bloated.  He proposed a Budget Repair Bill back in February of 2011 that proposed a number of sweeping changes, summarized in the following article:

Read Summary of Gov. Walker's Budget Repair Bill

One upsetting change was that all state and local employees would need to contribute more to their benefits package, a move that would have equaled roughly an 8% decrease in pay.  But the main uproar came from the language stripping public employees of most of their collective bargaining rights.  Pay increases beyond inflation would have to be passed by specific public referendum.  Unions could no longer have dues automatically withdrawn, and the unions' members would have to vote annually to decide if they wanted the unions to continue representing them.

The unions understood the economic shortfalls faced by the state government and were willing to accept the increased employee contributions, but they didn't see the need to attack their very existence as part of a financial bill.

In the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, Wisconsin residents refused to accept this quietly and took to the streets to protest.  Ironically, Gov. Walker's stance during the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression pretty much lined up with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's view on the subject.

"All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters." - FDR

The gist of the economic argument is that state employees don't have the same relationship to their employer because the state employer doesn't operate the way a normal employer operates.  The state doesn't suffer the same kinds of restrictions a business owner would and therefore, lacks the same ability to push back during a collective bargaining process.

As part of the public outcry, fourteen democratic state legislators fled to Illinois to prevent the Budget Repair Bill from being voted on and passed by the republican-controlled government.  Protests continued  at the state capital and the entire story caught the national attention.  People on both sides of the political spectrum latched onto this debate as a rallying cry for all that was wrong with the country.  Democrats cried out about the assault on teachers.  Republicans cried out about the stranglehold unions and exorbitantly paid teachers had on our government (suck it everyone who makes less than forty grand a year, high rolling educators are taking over and the unions are gonna make sure they keep blowing it up at forty grand a year).

Truth be told, I don't think the democrats entirely defended teacher unions like a maiden's chastity in a harlequin novel because it was the right thing to do.  Democrats can't match republican fund raising efforts most of the time as it is, and that's with significant help from unions.  Without unions, democrats would lose a real chunk of backing.  And I don't think teacher unions actually set fire to republican puppies, despite the daytime-emmy-worthy outrage some of them demonstrated.  They understand what union busting can do to their opponents' financing, so it makes sense on a tactical level.

But none of that has anything to do with the fact that Wisconsin state government is required to balance its budget and is about to face billions in shortfalls.  The teachers chipping in more toward their benefits package does.  The massive, typical republican tax cuts that Walker et al gave to corporations and the rich does as well.

The Wisconsin outrage led to a series of recall efforts.  A total of eight senators, six republicans and two democrats, got challenged for their jobs.  The republicans faced their recall a short time ago and you would think, given all the protesting in the streets, that it would have been a landslide.  As it stands, only two of the six republicans were recalled, replaced with their democratic challengers.  Today, the two democrats face their challengers, incensed that when a critical vote came before the state government, they fled and essentially shut down the process.  Chances are, both democrats will retain their seats, and all that sound and fury last winter won't signify much.

Which leads back to the curious headline above from the Christian Science Monitor.  These recall elections don't wreak of backlash against the Tea Party.  It seems like the status quo proved to be pretty  intransigent.  What's interesting is that Wisconsin's political divide tends to fall almost exactly the same as the entire nation, so many political thinkers look to Wisconsin's microcosm as a potential indicator for 2012.  Based on what's happened so far, if Wisconsin can be used as a predictor, we can probably expect far less shake up than some of us want.

But that feels like such a dry note to end on, so here's a picture of Gov. Perry eating something phallic:

It's Time to Mess With Texas

You have probably already heard quite a bit from Governor Rick Perry of Texas.  If not, you're most certainly about to.  He came in second only to Michele Bachmann...

Sorry, needed a moment since I literally shat myself while doing a spit take at the same time.  I think we can officially call the "Why Don't Some People Take Republican Politics Seriously?" mystery solved.

But back to my point... Gov. Rick Perry seems poised to be one of the top contenders vying for the Republican 2012 nomination.  Honestly, I feel like Bachmann will fade in time, as many past straw poll winners do, because I just don't think she can hold her own on the national stage.  Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, who some considered one of the more tolerable, moderate GOP possibilities, dropped out.  That leaves Mitt Romney.  So I wouldn't be shocked if we have a Perry/Romney off for the GOP ticket.

Unless, and stay with me on this one, Sarah Palin swoops in off her bus and announces her candidacy for President in a total game-changing way like when a bird crashes into a window that it can't see.

Either way, one thing you're going to hear a lot about is the Texas Miracle, essentially Gov. Perry's claim that Texas has managed to create jobs despite our tanking economy.  Since Gov. Perry was physically located in the same geographical area as this claimed job creation, he must be responsible for it and therefore can bring that magic healing power to the greater nation if planted into the right geographical space, like Washington D.C.

Paul Krugman, famous communist and America-hater who also happens to have a PhD in economics, a nobel prize for his work, and teaching stints at Princeton and the London School of Economics, explored the Texas Miracle today in the New York Times.  I've bolded the words in the previous sentence that can be triggers for the hard right to discredit someone's input.

First, a little background about the Texas Miracle, courtesy of CBS:

How Rick Perry Created the Texas Miracle

Some points to consider.  Gov. Perry stated that Texas leads the nation in job creation, and it does, having created hundreds of thousands of more jobs than any other state.  Obviously, given our economic climate, there isn't another issue more important to many voters out there.  One seemingly positive quote from the CBS article:

"We're hiring, we can't hire people fast enough," said Jeff Brown of California-based EA video games. He said the company is adding 300 jobs in Austin, Texas, partly because of low costs, but also because of Perry's three trips to persuade EA to move.

Phrases like "we can't hire people fast enough" probably jump off the page so brightly in these dim economic times that you could be forgiven for ignoring the "persuade EA to move."  So first, Texas may not necessarily be creating jobs, they poach them.  When Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin promised to create 250,000 jobs, a promise that may have gotten him elected, he went the same route to help meet that goal.  He approached companies outside of Wisconsin and offered incentives to relocate.  In the specific case quote above, EA Games ditched their California location, pulled those jobs out of that state, and gave them to Texas.  Not quite job creation, but still good for the people of Texas.

But in comes Dr. Krugman to explore the hundreds of thousands of new jobs through an economic lens, specifically in relation to population growth.  Turns out that Texas unemployment numbers aren't all that great.

Texas has an increasing population for a few reasons.  First, it's pretty cheap to live there.  Second, it gets a lot of immigrants from Mexico.  Third, it gets retirees because of the warm weather.  Fourth, it has a pretty high birth rate compared to other states.  Krugman's article -

The Texas Unmiracle

- examines what this means in the real world.

But what does population growth have to do with job growth? Well, the high rate of population growth translates into above-average job growth through a couple of channels. Many of the people moving to Texas — retirees in search of warm winters, middle-class Mexicans in search of a safer life — bring purchasing power that leads to greater local employment. At the same time, the rapid growth in the Texas work force keeps wages low — almost 10 percent of Texan workers earn the minimum wage or less, well above the national average — and these low wages give corporations an incentive to move production to the Lone Star State.

So Texas tends, in good years and bad, to have higher job growth than the rest of America. But it needs lots of new jobs just to keep up with its rising population — and as those unemployment comparisons show, recent employment growth has fallen well short of what’s needed.

How short?  He breaks it down in a graph on his NY Times blog:

Turns out Texas unemployment numbers fall in line with a lot of other states (in this case specifically New York and Massachusetts).  So while jobs are created, they tend to be of the crappy minimum wage variety which you can't really support a family on, and there still aren't enough of them to keep the economic picture from looking like any other state in the country.  Still job creation is job creation, and we need that magic on a national level, to which Krugman says:

Still, does Texas job growth point the way to faster job growth in the nation as a whole? No.

What Texas shows is that a state offering cheap labor and, less important, weak regulation can attract jobs from other states. I believe that the appropriate response to this insight is “Well, duh.” The point is that arguing from this experience that depressing wages and dismantling regulation in America as a whole would create more jobs — which is, whatever Mr. Perry may say, what Perrynomics amounts to in practice — involves a fallacy of composition: every state can’t lure jobs away from every other state.

Gov. Perry has a specific system in place for his job growth.  First, unprotected sex and babies plus hot weather for the old folks.  Add to that massively government subsidies for the oil industry to shore up a large chunk of the jobs and their spillover.  Finally add jobs taken from other states through the promise of lower wages and less regulation, and presto, you get the same net effect as most other states except with lower wages and fewer safety nets.

The truth of the matter is that many economists don't believe politicians can create jobs, they can only really create an atmosphere conducive to job creation.  NPR's Planet Money covered this topic in their podcast:

How Do You Create a Job?

The podcast interviews Princeton economist Orley Ashenfelter... and it looks like I have to bold some words again for right-wing discrediting.  He states that the basics of job creation is operating in a situation where the cost for hiring a person is less than the amount of profit to be made from that person's efforts.   The government can offer perks that help make that profit, often in the form of lower corporate tax rates or deregulating.  But raising taxes, according to Ashenfelter, can also help in other ways, by tackling crime rates (especially in urban areas), or creating an educational system that produces exceptional employees.  

In the end, Ashenfelter states that both more and less government can help with job growth, with the goal being to have a government that runs well, not bigger or smaller.  So there you have it, we're screwed.

Here Come the Whores

Continuing in the "Sure, we're going to be fine" line of thinking.  From Business Week:

Lobbyists Take Aim at the Supercommittee

Lobbyists are set to focus all their attention this autumn on the Congressional Supercommittee tasked with slashing $1.5 trillion from the budget.  Usually lobbyists put their effort and their cash into influencing policy decisions to break their way, now their target will be maintaining the status quo and insuring their clients avoid budget cuts that are theoretically unavoidable.  So if you thought lobbying was a waste of obscene amounts of money before, just imagine all that cash going toward making nothing happen.

In better times, lobbyists measured their success by how much cash they could wring out of the federal government. Now they’ll consider it a victory just to hang on to what they’ve got. “To try and preserve the status quo, that requires a lot of work,” says Feehery, whose lobbying clients include News Corp. (NWS), Sony (SNE), and Deutsche Börse Group.

On the "Lobbyists Are People, Too" front...

It has been a tough year for lobbyists (schadenfreude duly noted). They made out during the epic Washington battles over health care and financial reform, but then business went soft as the economy dragged and the debt fight paralyzed Congress. Lobbying revenue dipped to $1.65 billion in the first half of 2011, down 8.5 percent from the first half of 2010, according to the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington.

Wonder how many teacher positions $1.65 billion would have saved?  But don't worry, given the raised stakes of the supercommittee, they should be able to make that up as corporations go all in to try and protect their interests.

What makes this potentially interesting is the fact that if the supercommittee fails to cut $1.5 trillion, then automatic, across-the-board cuts kick in.  So lobbyists are faced with a sort-of prisoner's dilemma.  Do you let your lobbyists relax a little bit, take a small hit, but allow the supercommittee to hit their savings goal?  Or do you play hardball knowing that your interest may not be scheduled to take much of a hit with the across-the-board cuts that kick in if the committee fails?  There could always be a next time of automatic cuts due to supercommittee failure (in fact it could happen in 2013 since I don't expect Congress to suddenly become competent).  And some of the industries you screwed over by playing hardball may decide to have long memories.

Who knows?  Only thing for certain, some noble government employees will try to spin how the increased lobbying created jobs, and good for them as they get overrun by an angry mob.

 

Conspiracy Theories, Part III

There's a construction site a block or two away from my office, and like most sites in New York City, the plywood walls blocking off the site from the street are plastered in posters.  Sure they all have the stenciled words painted on the walls telling people not to post, but people do it anyway.

Usually they consist of ads for a club or a new record about to be released, or an upcoming film, or in one case, the inspired and romantic marriage proposal that a friend I used to work with received (she said yes, and when she described how her now-husband popped the question, we all had to admit the construction wall posters were pretty cool).

But here's one I saw the other day:

Moving in a little closer:

Since I had never heard of Jeff Boss or why the NSA was trying to kill him, I thought I would check out what was going on.  Doing a little research reveals that he's apparently a candidate for the 2012 democratic presidential nomination and the 2012 Senate race.  He also ran for Congress in 2010 (unsuccessfully) and for both president and US Senate in 2008 (unsuccessfully).  His platform is a simple one, and I'll let him spell it out in his own words.

I  Witnessed a family member my sister in law, high up in the NSA (National Security Agency) planning the 911 attack. She was talking about helping Ramsi Yousef (responsible for the 93 bombing at the World Trade Center) call his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed(considered the mastermind of the 911 attack) from the NSA secret prison in Alexandria, VA and she was talking about flying planes into buildings. I never heard the dates or the names of the buildings and I never thought anything would ever happen. But  on September 10, 2001 I was told to go the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. My first day in a new office, and I was yelled out by 4 supervisors not to be late. I was late. Thank G-d. The NSA wanted the oil in Iraq, which has the second largest oil reserve in the world.  Certain powerful people in the NSA told me that the electronic voting machines can be hacked into and the vote changed within seconds. If we do not have our vote, then we are not a democracy. By creating a culture of  Fear, the NSA has helped to pass the Patriot Act, which trashes our constitution. Now the government is bailing out the automakers, banks, insurance co. etc, and when they bail out these companies, they own and control them. When the government controls the big companies this is Russian style communism. Our Civil liberties, Constitution, and Democracy are rapidly disappearing. I will not let them hijack my country.

While I share his concern about the lack of transparency surrounding electronic voting machines, we differ on a number of other points, so needless to say, he probably won't get my vote next time around.

He goes on to claim that the NSA is now trying to kill him to block his message, and that they take active measures to shut down his attempts to get the message out.  He hands out literature, the NSA swoops in behind to collect it and destroy it.  He posts videos on Youtube, the NSA edits them or takes them down (at least according to his videos that I watched on Youtube).  He tries to buy ad space in local papers or on local radio, the NSA forces the media to turn down his requests.

When I was on WPAT, the radio station broadcast the Emergency broadcast system for 10 minutes over my interview. My phone, email, and website are controlled by the NSA. I have filed 9 complaints at the US Attorney’s Office in Newark. The only response I got back was a forged letter with a forged signature of the director on it. I have a tape of this person Tom Mallony admitting he signed Ralph Marra’s name illegally. I have also filed 15 complaints with the FBI, but every time I show up at one of these federal buildings, the people on the payroll of the NSA show up and block my complaints from being heard. I have been stopped from getting help from FBI employees named: Esposito, Marrero, Zambleta, Mercarto, and Barnes and numerous others, some with fake names.

There's even this line in extremely small print on his website:

NSA IS TRYING TO KILL THE CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES   2012 DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY/CONGRESS 2010 DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY!

He's written to President Obama himself outlining his claims and specifically mentioning that the NSA has bugged his car and home, and also set up microwave devices to send waves through the walls to kill him.  Obama never responded, which begs the question... did the NSA get to Obama or was he in on it the entire time?

Mr. Boss also claims he has over 200 NSA agents admit to what they are doing on DVD.  Here's some of that footage:

You can get the idea pretty quickly without sitting through the entire 10 minute clip.  If that's what the NSA let through, I'd hate to see the damning stuff they cut out before they let Boss post it up.  Obviously it's pretty easy to guess that when newspapers see what he wants to print, they shut it down.  When radio stations hear what he says, maybe they run emergency broadcast signals over his words.  When he asks people that are barely paying attention to him or barely speak English about his theories, they sort of nod.  It's not hard to understand why Mr. Boss experiences what he does.

While Jeff Boss may come across as an easy target, he's not alone in the 9/11 conspiracy camp.  There's a number of feature-length (or near-feature-length) "documentaries" up on youtube that supposedly go into how the WTC attacks were an inside job.  One favorite target is Bill Maher:

There's a lot of energy that goes into these particular efforts by a particular group of people, and sometimes I wonder if efforts such as my own here aren't terribly different?  Maybe I'm just as crazy for believing a lot of what's working against our country is an inside job.  Are 9/11 Truthers all that different from misinformed people trying to actively participate in the national debate?

In the end, I can't fault the passion of many of these people that get categorized as the lunatic fringe while so many people seem to sit on their hands, but I obviously wish that passion got directed at something 1) actually real and 2) actually able to make this a better place.  I am genuinely curious what sparks their passion and sends it spinning off into these misguided directions.

A few days later, the Jeff Boss posters were all torn down... not unexpected in New York City itself.  Not when you can turn around from the spot where the posters hung and see the Freedom Tower already surpassing every downtown structure around it.

Part of the travesty might be that our political debate on both sides is taking too much from the 9/11 Truther movements.  Angry and out of touch with reality.

Sometimes Free Market Forces Hate Competition and Kids

From the Christian Science Monitor:

'Kids For Cash' Judge Sentenced to 28 Years For Racketeering Scheme

The short of it... two Pennsylvania judges, Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan, were charged with racketeering for accepting kickbacks from two local private juvenile detention centers.  From the article:

The federal indictment says the two judges accepted $2.8 million in kickbacks from the owner and builder of two privately-run juvenile detention facilities. In exchange, the judges agreed to close down the county’s own juvenile detention center, which would have competed with the new, privately-run facilities. In addition they guaranteed that juvenile offenders from their court would be directed to the privately-run facilities.

Mr. Ciavarella was just sentenced to 28 years in prison while Mr. Conahan still awaits sentencing.

The whole scheme was labeled Cash For Kids since the private prisons the two judges favored profited off of each kid they housed.  While Mr. Ciavarella believes the Cash For Kids line to be cheap character assassination, some statistics support that the label might not be entirely off the mark.

An investigation revealed that half of the children who appeared in his courtroom were not represented by a lawyer and were never advised of their right to counsel. Of those unrepresented children, up to 60 percent were ordered by Ciavarella to serve time at a detention facility.

Here's one story in particular:

One of those cases involved 16-year-old A.A., who was arrested for gesturing with her middle finger at a police officer who had been called during a custody dispute involving her parents and her sister.

According to a 2010 report of the Interbranch Pennsylvania Commission on Juvenile Justice, A.A. was an honor roll student, a Girl Scout, and YMCA member, who attended bible school. She had no prior arrest record and had never even been in detention in school. 

She was sent to Ciavarella’s court, and was told she wouldn’t need a lawyer since it was a minor issue. 

After examining the paperwork, Ciavarella informed A.A. that she had no respect for authority. She later told the investigating commission that Ciavarella never gave her an opportunity to speak at the hearing. She was led out of the courtroom in shackles and held in juvenile detention for six months. 

It might not be entirely fair to selectively choose what could be one of the more egregious offenses, but when compared to how he was potentially and irrevocably ruining the lives of kids, being unfair seems minor.

The Cash For Kids case demonstrates an obvious and glaring weakness of laissez-faire economics in real-world situations.  The privatized prisons used their profits to achieve a type of efficiency many people would find disgusting.  Their purchasing power went to influencing judges so that they would consider an irrelevant data point (a paycheck) when making their legal determinations.  In effect, the prisons bent the market into an unnatural shape that favored them.

I feel that unnatural shape trips up the free-market forces that many conservatives praise when talking about deregulated markets.  Imagine what unnatural shapes multinational corporations, with their financial forces that dwarf many countries, could create. There's also the obvious question asking why financial efficiency should take ultimate priority above even people.

In the end, even free-market forces need something to compete against.

We Are Mad As Hell And Something Something...

Courtesy of the Washington Post:

No surprise that the American people's dissatisfaction with government has risen, especially given their Tonya Harding-esque handling of the debt ceiling debate.  The question remains, as always, what will the voters do about it come the next election?  If we have typically low voter turnout and an incumbent re-election rate of around the usual ninety percent ballpark, then we deserve everything we get.

Asking Tough Questions, August 10th

No poll this time...

Super Committee Takes Shape But Will Partisan BS Be Its Kryptonite?

If you go on to the full story, it turns out even the choices illicit partisan bullshit.

Super Debt Committee Takes Shape as Republicans Appoint Their Six

From Russ Feingold, former Wisconsin democratic senator:

"There is no doubt Mitch McConnell and John Boehner will appoint members who will draw the line on no new revenues, and instead zero their aim on big cuts to Medicare and Social Security, using the deficit to change our fundamental values," read a petition circulated by Progressives United, a group led by former Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold. "Democratic appointees must oppose all cuts to Social Security and Medicare and demand that corporations and the wealthy finally sacrifice like everyone else. No ifs, ands, or buts."

And from the right:

Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, called on Reid to withdraw the appointment of Murray, co-chair of the committee, because she is head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the fundraising group tasked with getting Senate Democrats elected. 

Murray's selection is "absolute proof that Democrats are not serious about deficit reduction," Priebus. "The select committee is no place for someone whose top priority is fundraising and politics."

So yeah, we're going to be fine.  Things are going to be different this time around, we promise.

Long Past Due

Now that New York State allows gay marriage, I think it's finally time these crazy kids made it official.

Group Pushes to 'Let Bert and Ernie Get Married' on Sesame Street

Many people in America have grown up watching these two share their lives together.  Who says love can't overcome the most unibrowed forehead in the universe?

Two Americas, Jersey Style

Had to work late a few nights last week, and on one particular night, the car taking me home took a wrong turn and got off the highway in Newark.  To get back on the highway, we had to take a number of twists and turns in a protracted urban u-turn involving run-down one-way streets.  Eventually we got back on the highway and made it to the town I live in, Maplewood.

During those ten minutes in Newark, I saw a number of typical scenes of urban decay, some I had seen in various forms before having gotten lost in Newark in the past.  Images a lot of people have probably grown numb to.  I'd like to believe I haven't fallen into that category, but the truth is, it's something I don't encounter in my day-to-day.

I feel fortunate to live in Maplewood.  It's the kind of place I imagined raising my kids in.  It's progressive, it has an urban sense to it given all the Brooklyn ex-pats that move there, it's quaint without feeling too small.  But here's something I don't usually think of when I think of Maplewood.

There's Maplewood on the left, Irvington (which feels a lot like Newark) sits in the middle, and Newark comes next on the right.  Maplewood and Newark practically neighbor each other and the two places couldn't be more different.

Now I don't want to make it sound like Newark is hell on earth, the downtown Ironbound district is pretty nice.  Around Newark Penn Station (not sure why they chose the same name as New York Penn Station), there's the Prudential Center where the New Jersey Devils and Nets both play... at least until Jay-Z moves the Nets to Brooklyn.  There's also a number of really great Portuguese and Spanish restaurants as well.  A lot of this Ironbound success came from an effort to revitalize downtown around a sports arena, a plan borrowed from Baltimore (more Baltimore later).  Also, the PATH system connected the Ironbound district directly to Manhattan, so now it was possible to easily live in Newark and work in Manhattan.

Get a few blocks away from the Ironbound district, however, and the scene changes rapidly.  Here are some pictures from around the interwebs that highlight some of the views.  I've personally seen one of the buildings (the first), but the others are representative of some of the harder hit areas.

On my drive through last week, I saw some abandoned buildings and a few abandoned construction projects, all in about ten minutes.

Now here's the tree-lined park around the corner from my house that I take my kids to play in.

Beyond this park is the town's country club that allows my kids' pre-school use of their private pool.  Sure, that's the only time my family will be allowed inside the club since I'll never be able to afford a membership, but just living in a town like Maplewood (or any town like it anywhere in the country) has spill-over effects.

Cherry-picking Newark detritus aside, that's not even the worst New Jersey has to offer.  Camden, NJ may be the hardest hit area in the state.  A few years ago, it had the highest violent crime rate in the country, almost six times higher than the national average.  Almost half the people in Camden live below the poverty line.  Three recent mayors went to jail on corruption charges.  The police department and school system had to be taken over by the state to keep them operational.

Let me introduce you to some of the sights of Camden, NJ.

Now let me throw up another Google Map excerpt:

There's Camden on the left next to the A marker.  Over on the lower right, just above a I295 graphic, is the town of Cherry Hill, median income north of $87,000 a year.  One of the wealthier towns in the state.  A little further away than Maplewood is to Newark, but not drastically so.

I don't want to imply that poverty only strikes urban areas.  Rural poverty is also an epidemic, I just happened to focus on areas in my general backyard.  My point with all of this was only to highlight that there are parts of this country broken almost beyond repair.  Not esoteric debt-ceiling, TARP, credit default swap, federal reserve areas.  Areas that people have to come home to and raise their children in.  Imagine raising your kid in the violent crime capital of the country.  Imagine reading about oil company subsidies and the Bush tax cuts while you try to raise your kid in the violent crime capital of the country.

I was a John Edwards supporter during the 2008 democratic primary because he seemed to be the only candidate specifically addressing poverty in his campaign.  Who knows what would have happened if he actually won or hadn't made those interesting acting choices?  But at that moment, he brought poverty to the forefront every time he got up to speak.

Poverty feels like an issue politicians bring out to hint at some humanity and then put away to deal with more politically pressing issues.  I believe that those shouting for hardcore, free-market economies ignore or forget how ruthless free markets can be.  They are part of the reason we have places like Newark and Camden and they will never help save them.  What free market force would ever inspire a company to move in to Camden with its crime rate, unless that company was given tax breaks and imminent domain to displace everyone, tear down the city, and build it up into some industrial complex from scratch?  I bet there's a free-market supporter responding to that last idea with a "well if that's what the market wants..."

On some level, it was even hard to take Edwards seriously on the subject.  Sure he was the son of average parents, but the fact remained he had grown quite wealthy.  He clearly had advantages that most Americans don't have (e.g. dreamboat hair).

For me personally, my most impressionable and intimate exposure to urban poverty came in the safe package that is a television show.  The Wire, a fictional show created by David Simon (a former Baltimore Sun reporter) and shown on HBO, appears to be a typical cop show at first.  Set in Baltimore, it follows a wiretap team eavesdropping on a key player in the Baltimore drug scene.  But it soon blossoms to intimately humanize heartache and corruption at every level of the city.  The cops, the drug dealers, the docks, the schools, real estate, city hall, and finally the newspapers themselves.  Sure The Wire has its faults and its biases, but in a time when the politicians whose job it is to help fix poverty ignore the issue, at least someone had the courage to attempt an honest depiction of the hardships so many people face.  The Wire is easily the best thing I have ever seen as a whole, the modern-day equivalent of a Charles Dickens novel, and in my mind, required viewing for anyone interested is learning about another side of our country.  The following is definitely not safe for work.

When I see trump speeches on the congressional floor, or read about our leadership callously favoring the richest sliver time and time again, I can't help but feel like those government officials are helplessly out of touch with the realities of the country they were asked to govern.  On another level, I can't entirely blame them because we've created a system that makes it too easy to ignore poverty.