“How Many More Times?”: Probably Many, Many More In The Imaginary America Of Gun Nuts
As our understanding (if that word doesn’t overstate what we can ever comprehend of such events) of yesterday’s shootings at the Washington Navy Yard improves, we’re seeing a depressingly familiar picture: disturbed man with “anger issues” and “gun issues” gets hold of an assault rifle and kills a lot of innocent people.
At this point, it seems Aaron Alexis came onto the military facility with a shotgun and acquired the assault rifle by stealing it, perhaps after killing its licensed user. If we even begin to have a public discussion of the killings as another data point in favor of stronger gun regulation, the gun lobby will make that a big argument, along with D.C.’s almost uniquely strong gun laws and the availability of other culprits in the affair (e.g., lax security for, and excessive dependence on, defense contractors).
Since we’re talking about a military base, the gun lobby will not, at least, be able to use its favorite argument, that a more secure environment in which more people were heavily armed could have prevented the killings.
But before we even head down the trail of talking about gun laws, let’s just acknowledge that this isn’t a matter of convincing Americans we need tighter background checks for gun purchases. According to every imaginable poll, they’re already convinced. It just doesn’t translate into action, in part because the gun lobby and the Second Amendment absolutists have an iron grip on one our two major political parties, and in part because because their power is especially strong in rural areas where strategically situated Democratic representatives haven’t yet been hunted to extinction.
As WaPo editorialized yesterday:
Life does go on, through Columbine in 1999, through Virginia Tech in 2007, through Sandy Hook in 2012. Each atrocity provides a jolt to the nation and then recedes with little effect, until the next unimaginable event occurs, except each time a little more imaginable. Everything was supposed to change after a man with a semiautomatic weapon mowed down 20 elementary school children in their classrooms last December. But for the politicians, nothing changed. Now, another massacre, another roster of funerals. Again, again, again.
So long as a powerful minority of Americans think the individual right to bear arms–any arms–trumps every consideration of public policy, and is the Crown Jewel of the Bill of Rights, and is our bulwark against tyranny–it won’t much matter. Hundreds dead, thousands dead, tens of thousands dead–it’s all irrelevant to what is in effect a religious commitment to the almighty Second Amendment, a golden calf worshipped as the ultimate expression of an illusory personal independence and an imaginary America.
No, rational arguments and conventional politics may never prevail against people who will look you right in the eye and tell you they need to be heavily armed in case it becomes necessary in their view to overthrow the government and impose their will on you. The whole idea here is that their rights trump your arguments, your priorities, your votes, your democratic elections, your duly authorized representatives or law officers. That’s their understanding of a “constitutional” system, and of what makes America “exceptional.” Their guns are an ever-present reminder to the rest of us that we just don’t know what level of taxation or regulation, or which offense to “traditional” culture, will be the trigger for a “patriotic” resurrection. That, perhaps, will keep us in line.
So while it’s important to keep up the fight for sensible firearms laws, no one should be under the illusion that this or the next mass killing is going to make a difference.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 17, 2013
“We Just Keep Short-Changing Women”: Same Job, Same Size Budget Equals Less Pay For Women
Hey, married men – wake up! Your working wives are getting shorted on pay and that means your family has less money than it should.
A new report on pay, made public today by Guidestar USA proves discrimination against women is pervasive.
The new report compares men and women with the same positions at similarly sized nonprofit enterprises, so the fact that women often work in lower-paid occupations such as waitressing, retail and clerical work is irrelevant in this study.
While women who become waitresses or retail clerks should expect to make less than lawyers and executives, there is no reason that women executives and lawyers should make less than men doing the same jobs — but they do.
Men holding the top spot at nonprofits averaged between 10 percent and a third more than women in the same jobs, Guidestar found.
In general, the bigger the organization and the bigger the job responsibilities, the greater the gap between what women and men are paid — and the greater the share of top jobs held by men.
Guidestar is a nonprofit organization that compiles data reported to the IRS, and the public, by all nonprofits. The 2010 data cover not just charities that solicit donations, but trade organizations, small mutual insurance operations and social welfare organizations among the 29 types of nonprofits authorized by Congress.
This is Guidestar’s 12th annual Nonprofit Compensation Report and it draws on disclosures by more than 77,000 nonprofits.
The report used names to determine sex. Androgynous names like Pat or Chris were excluded from the analysis, Charles McLean, Guidestar’s research director, told me.
At small nonprofits, those with an annual budget of less than $250,000, men in the top job averaged $53,389. That is 10 percent more than the $45,038 paid to women.
More than half of these small nonprofits, 57 percent, were led by women.
At the top, these gaps grew to chasms.
Among organizations with budgets of $50 million or more, men in the top job averaged $644,375. That is almost a third more than the $488,249 average for women CEOs.
Even more telling, women held just 1 in 6 of the CEO jobs at the biggest nonprofits.
The only CEOs who made more than $1 million a year on average were men at $50 million-plus nonprofits who, at the 90th percentile, averaged almost $1.2 million, compared to less than $924,000 for women at the same percentile of pay.
The pattern is pretty much the same for the top legal and finance jobs at nonprofits. However, pay disparities are smaller for public relations.
The same pattern of men dominating in the highest-paid jobs is found in the latest ORS data on wages reported on income tax returns.
Among people with wages of $10 million or more, just one in 29 was a woman. These 60 highly paid women workers averaged $18.8 million in wages in 2010, IRS data shows.
Men accounted for more than 96 percent of all top wage earners. The 1,664 men were paid on average $20.1 million or almost 7 percent more than the highest-paid women workers, the IRS data shows.
The IRS data also shows that as workers get older, the pay disparities between men and women increase. Among workers under age 26, the average pay of men was $16,000 in 2010, just 22 percent more than women of the same age.
But for workers ages 45 to 60, men averaged about $67,000, which was 70 percent more than women, who averaged slightly less than $40,000.
This may reflect occupational choices, but it may also indicate that as time passes, the gap between what men and women make will narrow.
Guidestar gets its figures from the Form 990 tax returns that all nonprofits must file with the IRS. It then analyzes them in many ways, including pay by gender and size of organization budget.
The data is exceptionally robust because Congress micromanages nonprofit pay, a cause championed by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a Republican who is the only pig farmer in the Senate and a longtime antagonist of charities and other nonprofits.
One benefit of Grassley’s instinctive suspicion of nonprofits is that he persuaded Congress to require much more complete disclosures on what nonprofits pay than corporations. Profit-making enterprises only have to disclose what their top five executives were paid, and then only if they have publicly traded stock or bonds.
Even more significant, Congress requires rigorous and costly review of pay comparability for nonprofit leaders.
The zone of discretion for paying nonprofit executives under the laws Grassley sponsored and rules the IRS issued is exceedingly narrow, unlike the wide-open rules for profit-making corporations. For nonprofits with budgets of $5 million to $10 million, the zone of discretion is perhaps $10,000 above or below what the Guidestar and other pay studies show, compensation consultants have advised me when I sought their advice because nonprofit boards on which I volunteered assigned me to recommend the top executive’s pay.
Discrimination against women is pervasive and significant. It is also only slightly less severe than it was in Guidestar’s first pay study in 2001.
McLean, the Guidestar research director, said, “There is progress being made, but it is very slow.”
Two ways to speed up that process:
—Women who are married should make sure their spouses know how much money the family loses because of gender discrimination.
—Men should be in the forefront of demanding for equal pay for women, especially the majority of married men with a working wife.
Or we could do nothing, and just keep shortchanging women.
By: David Cay Johnson, The National Memo, September 16, 2013
“Very Troubling”: Gun Violence Is The Tragic New Normal
The horrific tragedy at the Navy Yard Monday ought to reignite a national discussion over gun violence in the country, with tragedies now known simply and universally by their venues: Virginia Tech. Tucson. Colorado. Sandy Hook. And now Navy Yard.
But in all likelihood, the rampage will have the same public policy result as earlier mass murders did: a lot of people will get on TV and offer their thoughts and prayers to the victims’ families. Some lawmakers and activists will call, yet again, for tighter restrictions on guns. And the effort toward any kind of gun control – even background checks for gun buyers – will be shunted aside or defeated on the floors of the House and Senate, where gun lobbyists have strong allies.
If the most recent shootings show anything, it’s how accustomed we have become to guns and the death and damage they cause. The suspect, now dead, had been arrested in two prior shootings, one in Seattle and one in Fort Worth, Texas. In Washington state, the accused killer, Aaron Alexis, had apparently shot out the tires of a construction worker Alexis believed had mocked him the previous day. No charges were filed against him. And in firearms-loving Texas, Alexis was arrested when he fired his gun in his apartment (he said he had been cleaning the gun at the time). The bullet went through his ceiling and the floor of the upstairs apartment, missing his neighbor by a few feet. Alexis was not punished for that act, which, at the very least, was one of gross recklessness.
Washington, D.C. used to be a place where you didn’t have to worry so much about security. You could go into almost any public building without even so much as a metal detector screening you first. The district also banned handguns, which, it’s true, did not stop gun violence. Since D.C. is bordered by two states, including one (Virginia) where gun laws are quite lax, it wasn’t too difficult to acquire a firearm and bring it over the city line. But since the Supreme Court decided the sweeping gun ban was unconstitutional, there’s more of a free-for-all attitude with guns. What galls Washingtonians more is that it wasn’t locals who wanted the gun ban lifted. It was people who don’t even live here.
The acceptance of guns – or the presumption of the presence of guns – leads to other unintended consequences, as well. In New York City this week, a deranged man in Times Square pretended to point a gun (using only his hand) at police. They shot, wounding two bystanders. It’s a terrible mistake, and one wonders whether it would have occurred if we were not all so ready to assume everyone has a gun.
Pro-gun activists say the answer is to arm more people – the teachers in schools, regular citizens on the street, security people in commercial places. Does adding more guns work? Not really. A Mother Jones investigation last year showed that in the 62 mass shootings of the previous 30 years, not one had been stopped by an armed civilian. More guns just means more opportunity for another tragedy, even another accident. And what’s more troubling still is that we have come to accept it as normal.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, September 17, 2013
“Under The Dome Of The NRA”: Navy Yard Shooting, A Jarring Reminder Of America’s Gun Problem
At least thirteen people were killed at the Washington Navy Yard on Monday, including a suspected gunman, in the latest iteration of a now-familiar US news event: a mass shooting that claims victims apparently at random.
As the streets of DC came to life Monday morning, reports emerged around 8:20 am that shots were fired at the naval facility on the city’s southeast waterfront, less than two miles from the US Capitol. It quickly became clear that multiple people had been shot during a rampage, and at a 2 pm news conference on the perimeter of the crime scene, police confirmed that twelve people lay dead inside. The number was later updated to thirteen.
During a press briefing at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center not long after the shootings, a spokeswoman speculated that “it had to be a semi-automatic [weapon],” based on witness descriptions of gunshots heard in “rapid succession.” Authorities later confirmed that indeed the suspected gunman had an assault rifle as well as a pistol.
Police identified the deceased suspected shooter as Aaron Alexis, a 34-year-old man from Fort Worth, Texas, who reportedly worked at some point as a contractor for the Navy.
In the context of increasingly frequent mass shootings and a highly visible congressional debate on gun control, any further mass gun violence is sure to become a political issue—all the more so when it happens in Washington itself.
Had the scene outside the Navy Yard been in a movie about a fictional gun control debate, it probably would have been rejected as too didactic.
The Capitol dome was part of the nearby skyline as reporters, television cameras, scattered passerby and law enforcement officers converged on M Street Southeast at the western edge of the perimeter set up by police. To the east, all one could see was a small army of emergency responders in the street; the sidewalk-to-sidewalk flashing lights made individual vehicles almost indistinguishable. A US Park Police helicopter flew in tight circles extremely low overhead.
In isolation it was not that unusual of a sight in DC: it looked like perhaps one of the many motorcades that criss-cross the city from time to time. But people on the street were unusually quiet and unsettled, because of course there was no dark limousine nor group of dignitaries in the middle of the chaos but rather the scene of a grisly multiple murder.
Many of the reporters at the scene wore congressional press credentials and might have otherwise been covering a comparatively dry budget debate, but instead scoured around for witnesses to the shooting. Blocks away, Senate office buildings were placed on a two-hour lockdown, with staffers unable to exit or enter, and intimidating military-style vehicles surrounded the Capitol complex.
In that fictional movie, this is where a dysfunctional Congress finally springs into action and helps solve the problem. The very same staffers who worked behind the scenes to scuttle this year’s big gun control legislation, now trapped in their offices because a mass shooter might be on the loose, suddenly see the light and pull the Manchin-Toomey legislation out of their desk drawers.
But will that happen here? While it’s clearly very early on, and the gun control debate has taken some surprising turns in the past year, this scenario seems unlikely. Senator Manchin already told reporters Monday afternoon he still didn’t have the votes to get his gun control legislation passed; no previously opposed members suddenly announced a new position. Only hours before the shootings, members of Congress and gun control advocates were bemoaning a recent loss of momentum in Congress thanks to recall elections in Colorado that cost two longtime legislators their jobs because they supported tighter gun rules earlier this year.
Continued inaction seems likely because the gun control debate has never suffered for an absence of bloodshed. Manchin-Toomey didn’t fail because the slayings at Sandy Hook Elementary School weren’t quite tragic enough. More indiscriminate killings—even right in the backyard of Congress—probably won’t change the fundamental calculus made by Senators to sidestep the wrath of the National Rifle Association (on display in Colorado just last week) and extremely pro-gun conservative voters, who value “gun rights” to the exclusion of almost any other issue.
That said, the gun control package was only a couple of votes short in the Senate this year. Maybe more shootings will finally convince someone to change his or her vote. But more likely, until the fundamentals of the debate change, this mass bloodshed will only serve as gruesome illustrations of a problem nobody in Washington can seem to solve—nor even meangingfully address.
By: George Zornick, The Nation, September 16, 2013
“Give Jobs A Chance”: To Err Is Human, But To Err On The Side Of Growth Is Wise
This week the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee — the group of men and women who set U.S. monetary policy — will be holding its sixth meeting of 2013. At the meeting’s end, the committee is widely expected to announce the so-called “taper” — a slowing of the pace at which it buys long-term assets.
Memo to the Fed: Please don’t do it. True, the arguments for a taper are neither crazy nor stupid, which makes them unusual for current U.S. policy debate. But if you think about the balance of risks, this is a bad time to be doing anything that looks like a tightening of monetary policy.
O.K., what are we talking about here? In normal times, the Fed tries to guide the economy by buying and selling short-term U.S. debt, which effectively lets it control short-term interest rates. Since 2008, however, short-term rates have been near zero, which means that they can’t go lower (since people would just hoard cash instead). Yet the economy has remained weak, so the Fed has tried to gain traction through unconventional measures — mainly by buying longer-term bonds, both U.S. government debt and bonds issued by federally sponsored home-lending agencies.
Now the Fed is talking about slowing the pace of these purchases, bringing them to a complete halt by sometime next year. Why?
One answer is the belief that these purchases — especially purchases of government debt — are, in the end, not very effective. There’s a fair bit of evidence in support of that belief, and for the view that the most effective thing the Fed can do is signal that it plans to keep short-term rates, which it really does control, low for a very long time.
Unfortunately, financial markets have clearly decided that the taper signals a general turn away from boosting the economy: expectations of future short-term rates have risen sharply since taper talk began, and so have crucial long-term rates, notably mortgage rates. In effect, by talking about tapering, the Fed has already tightened monetary policy quite a lot.
But is that such a bad thing? That’s where the second argument comes in: the suggestions that there really isn’t that much slack in the U.S. economy, that we aren’t that far from full employment. After all, the unemployment rate, which peaked at 10 percent in late 2009, is now down to 7.3 percent, and there are economists who believe that the U.S. economy might begin to “overheat,” to show signs of accelerating inflation, at an unemployment rate as high as 6.5 percent. Time for the Fed to take its foot off the gas pedal?
I’d say no, for a couple of reasons.
First, there’s less to that decline in unemployment than meets the eye. Unemployment hasn’t come down because a higher percentage of adults is employed; it’s come down almost entirely because a declining percentage of adults is participating in the labor force, either by working or by actively seeking work. And at least some of the Americans who dropped out of the labor force after 2007 will come back in as the economy improves, which means that we have more ground to make up than that unemployment number suggests.
How misleading is the unemployment number? That’s a hard one, on which reasonable people disagree. The question the Fed should be asking is, what is the balance of risks?
Suppose, on one side, that the Fed were to hold off on tightening, then learn that the economy was closer to full employment than it thought. What would happen? Well, inflation would rise, although probably only modestly. Would that be such a bad thing? Right now inflation is running below the Fed’s target of 2 percent, and many serious economists — including, for example, the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund — have argued for a higher target, say 4 percent. So the cost of tightening too late doesn’t look very high.
Suppose, on the other side, that the Fed were to tighten early, then learn that it had moved too soon. This could damage an already weak recovery, causing hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars in economic damage, leaving hundreds of thousands if not millions of additional workers without jobs and inflicting long-term damage as more and more of the unemployed are perceived as unemployable.
The point is that while there is legitimate uncertainty about what the Fed should be doing, the costs of being too harsh vastly exceed the costs of being too lenient. To err is human; to err on the side of growth is wise.
I’d add that one of the prevailing economic policy sins of our time has been allowing hypothetical risks, like the fiscal crisis that never came, to trump concerns over economic damage happening in the here and now. I’d hate to see the Fed fall into that trap.
So my message is, don’t do it. Don’t taper, don’t tighten, until you can see the whites of inflation’s eyes. Give jobs a chance.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 15, 2013
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