“A Large Pizza With A Side Of Hate”: The Next Time You Order An Extra-Large Pepperoni, Tell Them To Hold The Hate
The only purpose of the “religious freedom” laws in Indiana and other states is to assert that discrimination against gay people is acceptable. The only way to “fix” such measures is to repeal them.
As events this week have shown, the nation is becoming intolerant of intolerance. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) insisted that the absurdly titled “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” was not meant to enable discrimination. But no sooner had the ink dried on the new law than a local pizzeria announced it was just raring to discriminate.
“If a gay couple came in and wanted us to provide pizzas for their wedding, we would have to say no,” said Crystal O’Connor, whose family owns and operates Memories Pizza in Walkerton, Ind.
As a practical matter, I’m betting that few couples, gay or straight, would be devastated to go without pizza at their wedding reception. But that’s not the point. O’Connor correctly understood that the law was intended to let her discriminate against gay couples. Her family’s Christian beliefs, she said, lead her to disapprove of same-sex marriage.
It is her right to believe whatever she wants. Religious liberty is guaranteed by the Constitution. But in a pluralistic society, freedom of worship cannot mean a business that serves the general public can discriminate. When I was growing up in the South, there were business owners who believed the Lord didn’t intend for different races to mix, much less marry. Federal civil rights legislation barred these businesses from acting on that belief. The proprietors got over it.
At Pence’s urging, the Indiana legislature quickly came up with a proposal to amend the law to prohibit discrimination based on “race, color, religion, ancestry, age, national origin, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or United States military service.” Pence signed it into law on Thursday. In other words: Never mind the whole thing, and we’re sorry we bothered everyone.
Read that list and contemplate the supreme irony: Indiana has ended up with an anti-discrimination law protecting the LGBT community that is among the toughest in the nation. Apparently, there will be pizza for everyone.
Doubtless with an eye toward Pence’s travails, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) announced that he will not sign the religious-freedom law his legislature just handed him without significant changes, probably along the lines of those done in Indiana.
Pence was a big supporter of the original law, so why the rapid moonwalk in the opposite direction? Because the business community, both locally and nationally, announced its opposition and activists began talking about a boycott of the state. Because the NCAA, which is holding the Final Four tournament in Indianapolis this weekend, announced its urgent concern. Because Apple chief executive Tim Cook, who heads the most valuable company in the universe, wrote a Post op-ed denouncing the Indiana law as discriminatory.
In Arkansas, Hutchinson heard expressions of concern from Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer — which happens to be headquartered in Bentonville, Ark. When Wal-Mart calls, and you’re governor of Arkansas, you pick up the phone.
About 20 states already have these religious-freedom laws on the books, although most are not as far-reaching as Indiana’s. There is no indication that rampant discrimination is taking place — but that’s not the point. The clear target is same-sex marriage, and the intention is to reassure citizens that discrimination against same-sex couples is at least theoretically permissible.
The fact that we don’t hear of these laws actually being used proves a truth about same-sex marriage that should be blindingly obvious: Whether two men or two women decide to marry has not the slightest impact on anyone else.
Just a decade ago, most gay activists considered same-sex marriage a bridge too far. Today, it’s the law in 37 states and the District. The world has not come to an end. “Traditional” marriage has not been threatened. Opponents cannot cite one negative impact on society, unless you count the deprivation felt by citizens who need somebody, anybody, to discriminate against.
With a few exceptions, such as Hobby Lobby, the business community has decided that bigotry is bad for the bottom line. Politicians can fight the likes of Apple, Wal-Mart and the NCAA if they want. It’s just not a high-percentage move.
Which brings me to the wrenching struggle the Republican Party is having with itself over the issue. It’s time for the GOP to get on the right side of history. The next time you order an extra-large pepperoni, tell them to hold the hate.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 2, 2015
“Voice Of Reason”: Non-Insane Republicans Have To Stand Up And Denounce The Folks Who Kidnapped Their Party
“I would not have passed this to begin with,” Richard G. Lugar, a former longtime Republican senator from Indiana, said in an interview. He added that he and three former Indianapolis mayors as well as the current mayor, Greg Ballard, also a Republican, intended to convey their concerns to Mr. Pence. Asked whether repeal would be preferable to some revision, Mr. Lugar, who was also once the mayor of Indianapolis, noted the complications.
“That’d be the cleanest way of remedying a mistake,” Mr. Lugar said, “but my guess is that a good number of the people who voted for this do not believe it is a mistake. The problem is pacifying them.”
Lugar, of course, represented one of the last vestiges of non-insane conservatism in the GOP–and, for his alleged ideological sins, he was crucified by the Tea Party in 2012, losing a Senate primary to a Pence-style wingnut named Richard Mourdock, who of course went on to lose the general election to Democrat Joe Donnelly.
I have more respect for Lugar than I have for the allegedly rational Republicans who keep their mouths shut whenever prominent members of their party do something nutty. For example, where were the pro-carbon-tax Republican economists such as Irwin Stelzer and Henry Paulson when Senator Roy Blunt (R-MO) recently put forward a budget amendment scorning the idea? The St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial page went after Sen. Blunt the way Stelzer and Paulson should have:
Coal is very dirty fuel. Some of its pollutants can be scrubbed out, though the energy industry is fighting those regulations, too. The carbon dioxide in coal plant emissions can’t be scrubbed out. It goes into the atmosphere. The cost of that is socialized, passed on to society at large in the form of a hotter planet.
A carbon tax would require consumers to pay the social cost of fossil fuels — coal, gasoline, natural gas, methane, etc. When the social costs of private investments (say in a tank of gas) are included in the price, economists called it a “Pigovian” tax (after British economist Arthur Pigou).
Already the price of a tank of gas includes Pigovian taxes for wear and tear on federal and state highways. Your electric and gas bills have Pigovian fees built in for utility company infrastructure. A carbon tax would be a fee to cover the cost of damage you’re doing to the atmosphere…
Conservative economists like Gregory Mankiw of Harvard, who worked for President George W. Bush and for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, have proposed replacing payroll taxes with a carbon tax. Instead of taxing income, you’d tax the consumption of a damaging substance.
Other nations have adopted carbon taxes without disastrous results, offsetting them with tax deductions and rebates. This December, when the nations of the world meet in Paris to establish new goals for addressing climate change, it would be good if our exceptional nation wasn’t an exception. Right now all we bring to the carbon tax discussion is a firm belief in the concept of a free lunch.
If non-insane Republicans want their party back, they’re going to have to stand up and denounce the folks who kidnapped it in the first place. Lugar has done so. Stelzer and Paulson, among others, have not—and why not? Do they have laryngitis?
By: D.R. Tucker, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, April 4, 2015
“A Nuclear Deal With Iran Isn’t Just About Bombs”: An Opportunity For Iran To End Its Chapter In Extremism
To prove that Americans can be every bit as crazy as Iranians, I took my daughter along on my last trip to Iran, in 2012, for a road trip across the country.
Iranians were stunned to see a 14-year-old Yankee teeny-bopper in their midst. In Mashhad, a conservative Islamic city that might seem wary of Americans, three Iranian women in black chadors accosted my daughter — and then invited her to a cafe where they plied her with ice cream, marveling at her and kissing her on the cheek as she ate.
They weren’t political, but they yearned for Iran to be a normal country again.
As the Iranian nuclear talks creep on into double overtime, let’s remember that this isn’t just about centrifuges but also about creating some chance over time of realigning the Middle East and bringing Iran out of the cold. It’s a long shot, yes, but it’s one reason Saudi Arabia is alarmed, along with Iranian hard-liners themselves. Those hard-liners survive on a narrative of conflict with the West, and depriving them of that narrative undermines them.
It’s odd to be debating a deal that hasn’t been reached, but, frankly, critics are mostly right in their specific objections to a deal, and in their aspirations for it.
“A better deal would significantly roll back Iran’s nuclear infrastructure,” noted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. “A better deal would link the eventual lifting of the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program to a change in Iran’s behavior.”
All true. Of course, a better deal would also involve gifts of delicious Persian baklava for every American. And a pony.
Netanyahu also suggests that a deal would give “Iran’s murderous regime a clear path to the bomb.” That’s a fallacy.
Iran is already on a path to nuclear capability. Netanyahu should know, because he’s been pointing that out for more than two decades. Beginning in 1992, he asserted that Iran was three to five years from a nuclear capability. Over time, that dropped to “a year or two,” and then to “months.”
But even if Netanyahu’s warnings have been alarmist, he has a point: Iran is getting closer. The problem is that fulminations don’t constitute a policy.
The West essentially has three options:
■ We can try to obtain a deal to block all avenues to a bomb, uranium, plutonium and purchase of a weapon. This would allow Iran to remain on the nuclear path but would essentially freeze its progress — if it doesn’t cheat. To prevent cheating, we need the toughest inspections regime in history.
■ We can continue the sanctions, cyberwarfare and sabotage to slow Iran’s progress. This has worked better than expected, but it’s not clear that we have a new Stuxnet worm to release. And, partly because of congressional meddling, international support for sanctions may unravel.
■ We can launch military strikes on Natanz, Isfahan, Arak, Fordow and, possibly, Tehran. This would be a major operation lasting weeks. Strikes would take place in the daytime to maximize the number of nuclear scientists killed. All this would probably delay a weapon by one to three years — but it could send oil prices soaring, lead to retaliatory strikes and provoke a nationalistic backlash in support of the government.
Imagine if we had launched a military strike against Chinese nuclear sites in the 1960s. In that case, Beijing might still be ruled by Maoists.
On balance, with either the military option or the sanctions option, Iran probably ends up with a nuclear capability within a decade. With a nuclear deal, it’s just possible that we could prevent that from happening. Perhaps no deal is achievable; the Iranian side has been recalcitrant lately. In that case, we continue with sanctions and hope that the economic pressure further delegitimizes the government and eventually forces Iran back to the table.
But, again, this isn’t just about uranium but also about undermining an odious regime and creating the conditions for Iran to become a normal country. I’ve rarely been to a more pro-American country, at the grass-roots, and there’s a pent-up anger at corruption and hypocrisy. That doesn’t mean that there’s going to be a revolution anytime soon. But it means that there’s a chance for movement after the death of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is 75 and underwent prostate surgery last year.
In the office of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, whom Khamenei edged out to be supreme leader, I was once jokingly introduced as coming from the “Great Satan.” An aide, referring to Iran’s own regime, immediately quipped: “America is only Baby Satan. We have Big Satan right here at home.”
So, sure, a nuclear deal carries risks and will be ugly and imperfect, but, on balance, it probably reduces the risk that Iran gets the bomb in the next 10 years. It may also, after Ayatollah Khamenei is gone, create an opportunity for Iran to end its chapter in extremism, so that the country is defined less by rapacious ayatollahs and more by those doting matrons in Mashhad.
By: Nicholas Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 3, 2015
“Power And Paychecks”: There’s No Excuse For Wage Fatalism; We Can Give American Workers A Raise If We Want To
On Wednesday, McDonald’s — which has been facing demonstrations denouncing its low wages — announced that it would give workers a raise. The pay increase won’t, in itself, be a very big deal: the new wage floor is just $1 above the local minimum wage, and even that policy only applies to outlets McDonald’s owns directly, not the many outlets owned by people who bought franchises. But it’s at least possible that this latest announcement, like Walmart’s much bigger pay-raise announcement a couple of months ago, is a harbinger of an important change in U.S. labor relations.
Maybe it’s not that hard to give American workers a raise, after all.
Most people would surely agree that stagnant wages, and more broadly the shrinking number of jobs that can support middle-class status, are big problems for this country. But the general attitude to the decline in good jobs is fatalistic. Isn’t it just supply and demand? Haven’t labor-saving technology and global competition made it impossible to pay decent wages to workers unless they have a lot of education?
Strange to say, however, the more you know about labor economics the less likely you are to share this fatalism. For one thing, global competition is overrated as a factor in labor markets; yes, manufacturing faces a lot more competition than it did in the past, but the great majority of American workers are employed in service industries that aren’t exposed to international trade. And the evidence that technology is pushing down wages is a lot less clear than all the harrumphing about a “skills gap” might suggest.
Even more important is the fact that the market for labor isn’t like the markets for soybeans or pork bellies. Workers are people; relations between employers and employees are more complicated than simple supply and demand. And this complexity means that there’s a lot more wiggle room in wage determination than conventional wisdom would have you believe. We can, in fact, raise wages significantly if we want to.
How do we know that labor markets are different? Start with the effects of minimum wages. There’s a lot of evidence on those effects: Every time a state raises its minimum wage while neighboring states don’t, it, in effect, performs a controlled experiment. And the overwhelming conclusion from all that evidence is that the effect you might expect to see — higher minimum wages leading to fewer jobs — is weak to nonexistent. Raising the minimum wage makes jobs better; it doesn’t seem to make them scarcer.
How is that possible? At least part of the answer is that workers are not, in fact, commodities. A bushel of soybeans doesn’t care how much you paid for it; but decently paid workers tend to do a better job, not to mention being less likely to quit and require replacement, than workers paid the absolute minimum an employer can get away with. As a result, raising the minimum wage, while it makes labor more expensive, has offsetting benefits that tend to lower costs, limiting any adverse effect on jobs.
Similar factors explain another puzzle about labor markets: the way different firms in what looks like the same business can pay very different wages. The classic comparison is between Walmart (with its low wages, low morale, and very high turnover) and Costco (which offers higher wages and better benefits, and makes up the difference with better productivity and worker loyalty). True, the two retailers serve different markets; Costco’s merchandise is higher-end and its customers more affluent. But the comparison nonetheless suggests that paying higher wages costs employers a lot less than you might think.
And this, in turn, suggests that it shouldn’t be all that hard to raise wages across the board. Suppose that we were to give workers some bargaining power by raising minimum wages, making it easier for them to organize, and, crucially, aiming for full employment rather than finding reasons to choke off recovery despite low inflation. Given what we now know about labor markets, the results might be surprisingly big — because a moderate push might be all it takes to persuade much of American business to turn away from the low-wage strategy that has dominated our society for so many years.
There’s historical precedent for this kind of wage push. The middle-class society now dwindling in our rearview mirrors didn’t emerge spontaneously; it was largely created by the “great compression” of wages that took place during World War II, with effects that lasted for more than a generation.
So can we repeat this achievement? The pay raises at Walmart and McDonald’s — brought on by a tightening job market plus activist pressure — offer a small taste of what could happen on a vastly larger scale. There’s no excuse for wage fatalism. We can give American workers a raise if we want to.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 3, 2015
“The Framers Distrusted The Corporate Form”: Toxic Law; How Corporate Power And ‘Religious Freedom’ Threaten Democracy
Corporations from Apple and Angie’s List to Walmart and Wells Fargo exercised their power last week against laws that give aid and comfort to bigots. But don’t be too quick to praise their actions.
Commendable as these corporate gestures were, they also illustrate how America is morphing from a democratic republic into a state where corporations set the political agenda, thanks to a major mistake by Democrats in Congress. What they did has resulted in Supreme Court decisions that would infuriate the framers of our Constitution.
The framers distrusted the corporate form. And they made plain their concerns about concentrations of economic power and resulting inequality, worrying that this would doom our experiment with self-governance. Surely they would be appalled at the exercise of corporate influence last week. For the companies opposing “religious freedom” laws in Arkansas and Indiana were concerned with human rights only in the context of profit maximization, which is what economic theory says corporations are about.
Where are the corporate actions against police violence? Or unequal enforcement of the tax laws, under which workers get fully taxed and corporations literally profit off the tax laws? Or gender pay discrimination? And when have you heard of corporations objecting to secret settlements in cases adjudicated in the taxpayer-financed courts, especially when those settlements unknowingly put others at risk?
The so-called religious freedom restoration statutes in Arkansas, Indiana and 18 other states reflect a growing misunderstanding of the reasons that American law allows corporations to exist, a misunderstanding that infects a majority on our Supreme Court.
Corporations, which have ancient roots, serve valuable purposes that tend to make all of us better off. We benefit from corporations, but they must be servants, not masters.
Confining corporations to the purposes of limiting liability and creating wealth is central to protecting our liberties, as none other than Adam Smith warned 239 years ago in The Wealth of Nations, the first book to explain market economics and capitalism.
There is no fundamental right to create, own or operate any business entity that is a separate person from its owners and managers. Corporations exist only at the grace of legislators.
But in 21st-century America, corporations are increasingly acquiring the rights of people, which is the product of an unfortunate 1993 law championed by Democrats that now helps bigots assert a Constitutional right to discriminate in the public square.
Concern about corporations and concentrated power that diminishes individual liberties has become increasingly relevant since 2005, when John Glover Roberts Jr. was sworn in as chief justice of the United States.
Roberts and other justices who assert a strong philosophical allegiance to the framers’ views have been expanding corporate power in ways that would shock the consciences of the founders — especially James Madison, the primary author of our Constitution, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.
In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations could spend unlimited sums influencing elections in the Citizens United decision. Now, as a practical matter, no one can become a Democratic or Republican nominee for president without the support of corporate America.
And, central to the Arkansas and Indiana legislation, the Supreme Court last year imbued privately held corporations with religious rights in the Hobby Lobby case.
The Roberts court invented all of these rights. Principled conservatives should denounce such decisions as “judicial activism,” yet nary a word of such criticism appears in right-wing columns and opinion magazines.
Today’s corporations have their roots in ancient trusts created to protect widows and orphans who inherited property. Hammurabi’s Code provided for an early version of trusts. Later the Romans created proto-corporations to manage public property and the assets of those appointed to oversee the far realms of the empire.
Managers of these early corporations had very limited authority, what the law calls agency, over the assets entrusted to them. Today, corporate managers have vast powers to buy, sell and deploy the assets they manage. They can do anything that is legal and demonstrates reasonable judgment.
Spending money to elect politicians (or pass anti-consumer laws) is perfectly fine under current law if it advances the profit-making interests of the company. Last week, we saw companies denounce bigotry against LGBTQ people, but of course they did so in terms of protecting their profits.
Walmart, the nation’s largest employer, opposed signing the Arkansas bill into law: “Every day in our stores, we see firsthand the benefits diversity and inclusion have on our associates, customers and communities we serve.” Apple CEO Tim Cook said, “America’s business community recognized a long time ago that discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business.”
But creating efficient vehicles to create wealth by engaging in business does not require political powers, as none other than Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist noted in a dissent.
Where we have gone furthest astray under the Roberts court is in last year’s Hobby Lobby decision. It imbued privately held corporations with rights under the First Amendment, which says, in part, “Congress shall create no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Based on Hobby Lobby, both the Arkansas and Indiana laws were crafted to provide a defense for bigoted actions by businesses.
Yet laws requiring businesses to serve everyone, without regard to their identity, do not inhibit the free exercise of religion. A law that requires a florist or bakery to serve people in same-sex weddings as well as different-sex weddings may trouble the merchant, but it does not inhibit religious activity.
The corporate power on display in the so-called religious freedom restoration cases stems from a Supreme Court case that upheld the doctrine of laws of general applicability.
In 1990, the Supreme Court held that Oregon jobless benefits were properly denied to two Native Americans who worked at a drug rehab facility and who also, as part of their well-established religious practice, ingested peyote, a controlled substance.
Justice Antonin Scalia, who claims to follow the original intent of the Constitution’s drafters, wrote the opinion. He held that “the right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a ‘valid and neutral law of general applicability’” such as denying jobless benefits to drug users.
Scalia cited an 1879 Supreme Court ruling in a test case known as Reynolds in which a Brigham Young associate asserted that federal laws against polygamy interfered with the “free exercise” of the Mormon brand of Christianity.
In that case, as Scalia noted, the high court had rejected the claim that criminal laws against polygamy could not be constitutionally applied to those whose religion commanded the practice. “To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself,” the conservative justice wrote.
Two years later, Congress undid that sound decision with passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a sloppily crafted bill introduced by then-Rep. Chuck Schumer (D- NY), and championed in the Senate by another Democrat, the late Ted Kennedy (D-MA).
It was this law, undoing Scalia’s sound Supreme Court decision, which enabled corporations to exercise their power for a particular cause that is in their interest, namely ending bigotry. Such actions may be laudable, yet still dangerous.
Corporations are valuable and useful vehicles for creating wealth. But they are not and never should be political and religious actors. As artificial “persons,” they should not be imbued with political or religious rights.
We need to keep corporations in their place. Otherwise, next time, their profit maximization may work against your liberties.
By: David Cay Johnston, The National Memo, April 4, 2015
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