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American households got poorer in the first decade of the 21st century, largely because of the housing bust.
by Jacob Goldstein, NPR Planet Money
American families got poorer in the first decade of the 21st century.
The wealth of the median U.S. household — the family at the middle of the middle class — fell from $106,000 in 2001 to $77,000 in 2010.
The fall was driven, not surprisingly, by the housing bust. Homes are the single largest asset for many families, and they represent a particularly large share of wealth for the middle class. [MORE]
How to make it in American politics: 1. Have money 2.
Even if Gov. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) administration prevails in its new lawsuit against the Obama administration, his efforts to purge voters before November’s election still faces a major obstacle — the county elections supervisors, including 30 Republicans, who have the ultimate authority over the voting rolls.
Republican Ann McFall, county supervisor of elections for Volusia County, told ThinkProgress that the lawsuit does not have her support and she will not resume purging voters before the elections, regardless of the suit’s outcome:
"No I do not support the lawsuit. It is [about] helping the Governor and Secretary of State improve their image. I am not doing any further voter purge until after Nov 2012."
After every one of Flordia’s 67 Democratic, Republican, and Independent county elections supervisors joined together last week to stop Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) error-riddled and likely illegalattempt to remove what his administration said were non-citizen voters from the voter rolls, Scott is pursuing a new tactic in his voter suppression campaign. Yesterday, he announced he will sue the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in an attempt to get more accurate immigration data than the wildly-inaccurate earlier list his administration had originally claimed contained “sure-fire” non-citizens. A DHS representative told the Orlando Sentinel last week that even their list would not provide Florida with an accurate picture of who is and is not a U.S. citizen.
McFall’s fellow Republican Jerry Holland, supervisor of elections for Duval County, told ThinkProgress that he does support the Scott administration’s lawsuit. But even he did not commit to resuming the purge, saying he would do “what ever the law requires and permits.” [MORE]
Language in appropriations bill would block funding for an FCC rule to put political ad data online.
SPEAKING of AMERICA Monday June 11, 2012 11 pm ET (8 pm PT)
Call: (646) 929-2495
I'll be co-hosting Don's show tomorrow night, Monday from 11 pm ET to 1 am ET with Coffee Party President - Eric Byler. Hope to talk to you then!
Speaking of America 6/11/12: Jessica English and Eric Byler are co-hosting Don Manning's Speaking of America tonight at 11 pm ET. Two hours of late-night talk will kick off with Eric educating Jessica on the history of WWF professional wrestling, and its evolution into two popular strains: (1) Fox "News" (less violence, more theater) (2) ultimate fighting (more violence, less theater).
We'll then talk to Andrew Forrest of the new start-up social media company UpWorthy. We'll talk about how social media can empower the People, and how UpWorthy and Coffee Party can work together.
Read Eric Byler's recent blog on Social Media as the "good news" in the face of the most aggresive ruling class we've seen in America since the Guilded Age.
LISTEN to the show.
Via Jessica English
by Michael Stafford,
I’m a life-long Republican. My political affiliation has been woven intrinsically into the very fabric of my being.
...
Today, however, I am a registered Republican no longer.
I came to the decision to leave the GOP not with a heavy heart, but with a broken one.
[Read More.]
Michael Stafford is a former Republican Party officer and the author of “An Upward Calling.” Michael can be reached at anupwardcalling@yahoo.com
New York Times Editorial
If you wanted to reproduce the conditions that led to the Great Recession in 2007, the easiest way would be the plan unveiled last week by House Republicans: gut the regulators who are supposed to keep the worst business practices in check.
At a time when the economy is still reeling from the downturn, House Republicans released a spending bill that would severely cut the budget of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which would keep it from regulating potentially toxic swaps and other derivatives. It refused to give the Securities and Exchange Commission the extra money it needs to carry out the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill.
And the bill would cripple the Internal Revenue Service, limiting its ability to detect tax avoidance, particularly by businesses and the wealthy. (The I.R.S. cut, designed to impede the agency’s role in health care reform, will inevitably increase the deficit.)
The proposed cuts are the latest in a long series of efforts by Republicans to keep the government from tempering even the most economically dangerous desires of business. Having failed to prevent the enactment of Dodd-Frank and the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, they are imposing their will with what may be their most effective weapon — choking off the air supply of regulators by limiting the money they can spend. These agencies had already been hesitant to impose a real crackdown; the cuts will make the situation worse. ...
A few weeks ago, JPMorgan Chase, a too-big-to-fail bank, lost at least $3 billion trading in derivatives. Regulators might have halted that if Dodd-Frank were fully in place. The Republican response is to hobble the regulators even further — an invitation to another financial disaster.
[Read more.]
Posted by Suzy Khimm, The Washington Post Wonkroom
CEOs with a taste for luxury goods— expensive cars, boats, and houses—aren’t more likely to commit fraud, researchers found.But fraud is more likely to happen in the companies that they run, according to a new working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research...
Big-spender CEOs also tend to run companies that take bigger risks, but have poorer performance and are more likely to go bankrupt:
Companies run by unfrugal CEOs are significantly more likely to engage in large acquisitions, to invest less in long-term organic growth, to operate assets in place less efficiently, to generate inferior subsequent accounting and 34 stock return per dollar of corporate investment, and to go bankrupt, suggesting a pattern of low frugality with regard to the stewardship of corporate resources.
[MORE]
by CHARLES ELMORE, The Palm Beach Post One of Palm Beach County's largest nonprofit corporations blames "a challenging economy" for its decision to let nearly 5 percent of its workers go. But financial records analyzed by The Palm Beach Post don't show falling revenues or belt-tightening by executives trimming their own pay in tough times at Hospice of Palm Beach County. On the contrary: The average compensation of the top 12 executives has grown past $306,000, up from $290,000 the previous year. [MORE]
By Elise Foley, The Huffington Post
WASHINGTON -- Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) criticized public-sector unions on Sunday, saying they should be eliminated entirely.
"There's, I think, a fundamental problem with government becoming its own special interest group," he told Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday." "Ultimately, there is not really bargaining in those situations because government sits on both sides of the table."
Wallace then asked whether Daniels would like to see public-sector unions disappear entirely.
"I think government works better without them, I really do," Daniels replied. [MORE]
Dawn Loggins, 18, was homeless last year. Yet she worked hard -- both as a student and as a janitor. She's now going off to the Ivy League.
Read her amazing story.
Excerpt from article by LESLIE A. GORDON, ABA Journal
‘A NEW CREATURE EMERGED’
The Montana opinion “exposed the falsity of Citizens United’s construct,” says Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine and a campaign finance expert. The court misguidedly dressed up a value judgment—that independent corporate political spending does not corrupt—into a fact, thereby obscuring the issue, Hasen says.
In contrast, the Montana court showed as a matter of evidence that independent corporate spending can corrupt. Hasen adds that “what the Supreme Court in Citizens United should have said is: ‘We don’t care if it corrupts or not; the First Amendment is worth the risk of corruption.’ ”
The case, Western Tradition Partnership v. Attorney General, decided in December, held that the limits on corporate political spending established by the Corrupt Practices Act, enacted in 1912 by a citizens’ initiative, survived Citizens United’s strict scrutiny test because the state produced evidence of actual political corruption by groups akin to those seeking to overturn the ban.
Even in dissenting, Justice James C. Nelson argued that Citizens United, which he said he was bound to follow, was misguided, stating that “the notion that corporations are disadvantaged in the political realm is unbelievable.”
Trevor Potter, co-chair of the advisory committee to the ABA’s Standing Committee on Election Law and head of the political law practice at Washington, D.C.’s Caplin & Drysdale, believes that even the Citizens United majority “must be surprised at how badly this has gone, not only in the president openly criticizing the court but also in the public furor. The decision was based on a misunderstanding of the consequences and of the law, and we’re seeing the results.”
According to Potter, the constitutional premise behind Citizens United is that the government may regulate money that is corrupting and potentially corrupting, but it may not regulate wholly independent speech because, by definition, it cannot corrupt.
“But a new creature emerged: super PACs, which are run by candidates’ former campaign managers and are funded by candidates’ relatives,” Potter says. “The candidates know who the super PAC donors are and thank them. Therefore, we don’t have the independent spending on which the Citizens United court hung its hat.” [Read Full Article]
Via Coffee Party USA
by Charles P. Pierce, Esquire
As it happens, there's a big moment coming next week for those of us who have become intrigued by how thoroughly the Citizens United decision has turned American politics into a high-priced seraglio for plutocrats. The Supreme Court of the United States will find on its docket a case whereby it will decide whether to hear — or simply to overturn without comment — the ruling by the Montana Supremes that upheld that state's Corrupt Practices Act, a law dating back to 1912, when the country was just beginning to stagger out of its previous Gilded Age, that forbade corporate contributions to election campaigns. This law was passed partly as a consequence of the activities of one William Clark, The Copper King, who spent tens of thousands of dollars to buy himself a Senate seat, back in the days in which this required the wholesale purchase of state legislators, and did so in such an egregious and clumsy fashion that the U.S. Senate tossed him out on his ear, Montana passed its law and, eventually, the country ratified the 17th Amendment, providing for the direct election of Senators which, as we have seen, has now led to the wholesale purchase of U.S. Senate seats by corporate proxies, thanks to the nine wise souls in Washington. [MORE]
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With four justices nearing 80, the next president could influence policies on abortion, property, guns and gays for decades.
By Tony Mauro, USA Today
The late Supreme Court justice William Brennan used to say that five was the most important number — the number of justices needed to win a majority on a nine-member court. This presidential election year, the most important numbers at the court could be 79, 76, 75 and 73. Those are the ages, respectively, of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer.
While all four justices appear healthy — most remarkably Justice Ginsburg, who has beaten cancer twice— the fact remains that during the next presidential term of office, a stalwart liberal (Ginsburg), a combative conservative (Scalia) and a usually conservative swing voter (Kennedy) will reach the age of 80. And Breyer, also a steady liberal, will be approaching octogenarian status. That means that whoever is elected president might have a very rare opportunity to alter the direction of a closely divided court for decades to come. [MORE]
The personal information you gave Microsoft or Yahoo may be used to target you with online ads.
by Lois Beckett, ProPublica
Microsoft and Yahoo are selling political campaigns the ability to target voters online with tailored ads using names, Zip codes and other registration information that users provide when they sign up for free email and other services.
The Web giants provide users no notification that their information is being used for political targeting.
[Read more.]
By GARY FINEOUT, AP
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida Gov. Rick Scott says the state is suing the federal government because it will not allow the state to check the citizenship status of registered voters against databases. Scott announced the lawsuit Monday.
The federal agency on Monday announced its intention to sue the state. It comes the same day that Florida announced it was suing a different federal agency over the purge. [MORE]
by US Uncut Minnesota
Super PACs have arrived this election season and whatever your political point of view you will be targeted. Hundreds of millions of dollars, mostly to be spent via negative advertising, will be parlayed by Super PACs. These new entities, as a result of the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision, legally raise and spend unlimited sums of money to advocate for or against candidates. The 2010 Citizens United ruling gave corporations and unions the right, under the doctrine that money is speech protected by the First Amendment, to make unlimited independent expenditures in campaigns for elected office. Super PACS are pushing expenditures into the unaccountable mega-millions. The consequences have begun to roll out in 2012. The US Supreme Court's historic decision not only struck down a federal statute, 2 U.S.C. § 441b, and decades of ‘settled’ campaign finance law – overturning two of its own key campaign-finance decisions -- it has also jeopardized 26 states' laws prohibiting or limiting independent corporate expenditures. This decision establishes protection for a debilitating entrenchment of corruption at all levels of politics. Citizens United prevents effective campaign finance reform and hence fair and open elections. It ensures the influence of money-in-politics, the escalating power of lobbyists, and and a profound shift in governance against the public's interests. According to many observers, whether conservative, liberal or independent, the consequences of this Supreme Court decision and other similar decisions, undermines the First Amendment and our system of constitutional protections. Instead of “more free speech”, the ruling gives corporations/corporate entities and moneyed interests unprecedented power over political speech.
One has only to look at the 2012 primary season within the Republican Party to witness the power of money to influence votes, mount negative attack ad campaigns, buy media time and resultant “eyeballs” and “mind share” (in advertising-speak) and generally monopolize election outcomes. In the upcoming 2012 general elections Democrats and Republicans alike will display an unprecedented level of negative electioneering, hundreds of millions of dollars spent on orchestrated assaults by a handful of individuals, taking attack ads to a new unprecedented high and public trust in politics to a new low. [MORE]
by ANTHONY CODY, via VALERIE STRAUSS, The Washington Post A disturbing thought came to mind as I was looking at the latest report from the National Council on Teacher Quality, which criticizes schools of education for failing to jump on the “obsessed with data” bandwagon. You can just feel the irritation in the words of NCTQ president Kate Walsh when she says: A lot of schools of education continue to become quite oppositional to the notion of standardized tests, even though they have very much become a reality in K-12 schools. The ideological resistance is critical.
This reminds me of a phenomenon called “Groupthink.” What we are experiencing in education is actually a virulent and coercive strain of Groupthink, and it is harming our students. [MORE]
Why Electoral Politics Sold Out the Popular Uprising in the Badger State -- and Why It’s Not All Over
by Andy Kroll, TomDispatch.com
The energy of the Wisconsin uprising was never electoral. The movement’s mistake: letting itself be channeled solely into traditional politics, into the usual box of uninspired candidates and the usual line-up of debates, primaries, and general elections. The uprising was too broad and diverse to fit electoral politics comfortably. You can't play a symphony with a single instrument. Nor can you funnel the energy and outrage of a popular movement into a single race, behind a single well-worn candidate, at a time when all the money in the world from corporate “individuals” and right-wing billionaires is pouring into races like the Walker recall. .....
The takeaway from Walker's decisive win on Tuesday is not that Wisconsin's new populist movement is dead. It's that such a movement does not fit comfortably into the present political/electoral system, stuffed as it is with corporate money, overflowing with bizarre ads and media horse-race-manship. Its members' beliefs are too diverse to be confined comfortably in what American electoral politics has become. It simply couldn’t be squeezed into a system that stifles and, in some cases, silences the kinds of voices and energies it possessed. ....
Ultimately, however, the decision on what comes next rests in the hands of those who inspired and powered the Wisconsin uprising. And with an emboldened Governor Walker, there should be no shortage of reasons to fight back in the next two years. But success, as Tuesday's election made clear, isn’t likely to come the traditional way. It will, of course, involve unions; it might draw on state and local political parties. But in the end, it's in the hands of the people again, as it was in February 2011.
The future they want is theirs to decide.
[Read More.]
His embrace of the deficit reduction deal puts him at odds with almost all of the Republican primary candidates.
by CONOR FRIEDERSDORF, The Atlantic
Last summer, when the Republican primary candidates, every one a supposed deficit hawk, declared on an Iowa debate stage that they'd all reject a deficit reduction plan even if its spending cuts were ten times bigger than its tax hikes, National Review's Kevin Williamson incredulously avowed that "if Congress wanted to get rid of tax exemptions and exclusions amounting to $100 billion in new taxes in exchange for $1 trillion in cuts, and Republicans turned the deal down, I would personally drive down to Washington and pelt them with rotten vegetables, and possibly with rocks. $100 billion in new taxes plus $1 trillion in cuts balances the budget in 2012."
The moment stands out as the strongest evidence available for commentators like me who think that, like Howard Jarvis and Grover Norquist, the GOP remains a party that cares more about tax cuts than deficits, and that a Republican majority is unlikely to balance the federal budget. Only Jon Huntsman, widely dismissed by the GOP base, has since said his answer was a mistake. But there is one prominent Republican speaking up in favor of the hypothetical deal.
Meet former Florida governor Jeb Bush, whose political prospects are uncertain due to a sibling who sullied his family's name. [MORE]
by Jeff Spross and Ian Millhiser, Think Progress
The legal case against the Affordable Care Act is constitutional gobbledygook. It relies on a misreading of the Constitution the Supreme Court foreclosed nearly 200 years ago, and it is completely at odds with what many of the most Court’s most conservative justices wrote in past opinions. Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Kennedy and even Justice Scalia all wrote or joined opinions that clearly establish Obamacare’s constitutionality.
There is, however, a partisan argument against the Affordable Care Act. When Congress voted on health reform, every single Republican voted to maintain the status quo. When the justices announce their decision in the health care case this month, these same lawmakers hope that every single Republican justice will join them in voting against reform. Things weren’t always this way, however. In the words of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Republicans used to oppose “those who can’t get their policy views enacted through the legislature” who then “turn to the courts.”
Indeed, quotes from Republican senators arguing against exactly the same kind of judicial activism Republican senators now insist the Supreme Court must engage in is so common, we found dozens of examples. [MORE]
By CHARLES MAHTESIAN | 6/10/12 7:08 AM EDT
Last year, the liberal Netroots unleashed their ire on President Barack Obama for short-shrifting the progressive causes they thought he’d champion in the White House. This year, they had a more pressing matter on their minds: a fear that Republicans, backed by the boatloads of cash that helped Scott Walker win in Wisconsin, could make even more gains up and down the ticket — and perhaps even beat Obama in November.
There wasn’t any time or appetite for airing the left’s frustrations with the president. Instead, the conversation at the three-day Netroots Nation conference centered around the recent Wisconsin recall election — and what it means for November.
Both in panel discussions and in conversations in the halls of the Rhode Island Convention Center, GOP Gov. Walker’s victory provided the backdrop for a gathering of progressives shocked into attention, not just by the outcome of the nationally watched Wisconsin race but also by the role that outside money played in it. [READ MORE]
Excerpt from editorial in The Economist, reacting to the GOP filibuster of Equal Pay for Women, and Sen. Rand Paul's claim that equal pay would be "communist."
But should it be illegal to offer different pay for the same work based on an employee's sex? Maybe not. Mr Paul's argument here implies he thinks it should be okay. So, let's try a thought experiment. How would you react to seeing a job advertisement that read: "Associate lawyer in patent firm, 3 years' experience required, salary $100k for man, $77k for woman"? Is that okay? If not, why not? How about this: "Associate lawyer in patent firm, 3 years' experience required, salary $100k for Christian, $70k for Jew"? How about "Salary $100k for white, $65k for negro"?
The Paycheck Fairness Act, like the Lily Ledbetter Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, is not an instance of government price setting. It is an instance of government prohibition of certain forms of exploitative price discrimination. [MORE]
TV stations are fighting efforts to put their public data on political advertisements online. So we’re doing it for them.
by Daniel Victor, Pro Publica
Every local broadcast station has a repository of documents about political advertising that you have a legal right to see but can do so only by going to the station and asking to see “the public file.”
These paper files contain detailed data on all political ads that run on the channel, such as when they aired, who bought the time and how much they paid. It’s a transparency gold mine, allowing the public to see how campaigns and outside groups are influencing elections.
But TV executives have been fighting a Federal Communications Commission proposal to make the data accessible online...
We intend to enlist more readers in checking their local stations as the election campaigns slog on. The general election is likely to usher in even greater spending, and such spot checks could keep an eye on how big spenders are influencing the election. If you’d like to join in, please fill out this form.
[Read more.]
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