“It’s Always Black Friday For Clerks”: The Result Of Decisions And Policies That Have Had A Hideous Impact
Contrary to what you may assume about me, I actually enjoy the occasional trip to the mall. It’s a kind of a sociological expedition of the sort I find instructive and entertaining—I love watching the gangly teens, for example, as I recall going to the mall myself when I was 16, combing my hair and hoping to run into the girl of the moment. I find the big-box stores similarly interesting. The biggest downside these days is the parking, an already Hobbesian horror that has been exacerbated in the smart phone era by this new thing whereby now when you see a person get in his or her car, you can’t assume they’re leaving immediately because they’re probably going to sit there and check their phone for at least two minutes, and thus your search continues.
So I don’t want to be a killjoy here. I’m good with commerce, I’m fine with Christmas, and I will even defend Christmas music up to a point, a topic to which I may devote a column sometime between now and the fateful day.
But just take a few minutes with me to ponder the side of all this that most people don’t bother to think about. On Thanksgiving morning, I awoke to a batch of emails like the Nordstrom “Black Friday Is Here Early” one; when I brought in my Washington Post, I flipped through the circulars and really was gobsmacked the number of stores from Macy’s to Sears to H.H. Gregg and loads of others opening Thanksgiving night at 5 or 6 or 7 pm. Yes, I was aware that this is a thing, but I guess I’d thought it was an unpopular thing and had peaked a couple of years ago. Evidently not.
Who’s working at Sears or wherever on Thanksgiving evening? Maybe she doesn’t mind. Maybe it’s the most ironclad excuse going to escape the family. But…is she getting overtime? Does she make decent money to begin with?
On the overtime question, chances are she is not, and this is a huge and hugely overlooked issue that has had a dramatic effect on stagnating middle-class incomes over the last three decades and has surely contributed, in turn, to our growing inequality. Nick Hanauer, the Seattle venture capitalist and admirable class traitor (and friend of mine, I guess I should say), laid it out last week in a terrific column he wrote for Politico.
“In 1975,” Hanauer wrote, “more than 65 percent of salaried American workers earned time-and-a-half pay for every hour worked over 40 hours a week. Not because capitalists back then were more generous, but because it was the law. It still is the law, except that the value of the threshold for overtime pay—the salary level at which employers are required to pay overtime—has been allowed to erode to less than the poverty line for a family of four today. Only workers earning an annual income of under $23,660 qualify for mandatory overtime.” He then cited a study from the Economic Policy Institute calculating that just 11 percent of American workers, well down from that old 65 percent, qualify for overtime pay today.
In an issue paper it released in June, the Center for American Progress suggested that the overtime threshold be increased from the current poverty-level maximum to $960 a week, which would match the 1975 levels after adjusting for inflation. This would restore overtime rights to workers earning up to around $50,000 a year, which is roughly the current median. Remember—American workers work longer hours and are more productive today than they were in 1975. But they are paid less, and the vanishing overtime pay is a big part of why. The CAP paper estimates that if current trends continue unabated, overtime pay will disappear entirely by 2026.
If it were raised, who would be covered? Well, a hell of a lot of people. There’s this web site glassdoor.com that lists typical salaries. Wow, are these salaries terrible in some cases! A Best Buy sales associate makes, according to glassdoor’s information, $10.36 an hour, which (assuming a 35-hour week and 50 paid weeks a year) comes out to $18,130. So that person would qualify for some overtime now. But that’s a poverty wage. Try to keep that in mind the next time you start fuming when you can’t get the young man’s attention.
Over at Sears, a sales associate makes just $8.44 an hour, $14,770. Managers of course do better—an assistant manager pulls down $46,629, so she or he would still qualify for overtime if it were brought up to 1975 levels. A sales manager at Macy’s gets $47,324. Even at the higher-end Nordstrom, a department manager hauls in a mere $41,828. All of these people, and millions more like them, deserve a little overtime.
I know the counter-arguments. Yes, it would cost businesses more. Tough. Businesses have been cheating American workers for three decades. Would businesses merely lay off workers? Some would, some would not. Every capitalist isn’t Ebenezer Scrooge. Communities and society as a whole would reap huge benefits if we had a larger and more prosperous middle class that had more money to spend, as capitalists like Hanauer know well and preach regularly.
So just remember this season that if you’re purchasing anything that costs north of $300 or so, the person who’s selling it to you probably can’t afford to buy it herself. And that this state of affairs is not just the way things are. It’s the result of decisions and policies that have had a hideous impact. They can be reversed, too, someday.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 28, 2014
“A Tired, Old And Wrong Cliche”: President Obama Is No ‘Bystander’
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) delivered a widely noticed speech in September 2011, condemning President Obama, not just on policy grounds, but specifically on the issue of leadership. “We continue to wait and hope that our president will finally stop being a bystander in the Oval Office,” the governor said. “We hope that he will shake off the paralysis that has made it impossible for him to take on the really big things.”
Much of the political media agreed and echoed the assessment. Pundits crying, “Why won’t Obama lead?” became so common, a tired cliche was born. The president may have run as a young, ambitious leader, eager to change the world, but the Beltway was increasingly convinced: Obama is an overly cautious, overly cerebral president who would rather talk than act.
Two weeks ago, Dana Milbank went so far as to endorse Charles Krauthammer’s thesis of Obama as a “passive bystander.”
The real problem with Obama is not overreach but his tendency to be hands-off.
Since the second year of Obama’s presidency, I have been lamenting the lack of strong leadership coming from the White House, describing Obama in June, 2010, as a “hapless bystander … as the crises cancel his agenda and weaken his presidency.” I’ve since described him over the years as “oddly like a spectator” and as “President Passerby.”
Let’s put aside, for now, the fact that the bystander thesis completely contradicts the other common anti-Obama condemnation: he’s a tyrannical dictator whose radical agenda is destroying the very fabric of America.
Instead, let’s focus on why the bystander thesis appears to be outrageously wrong – especially today.
Faced with an intensifying climate crisis, a hapless bystander, content to watch challenges pass him by, might have decided to do nothing. Maybe he’d call for action in a State of the Union address or issue a white paper, but President Spectator would struggle to shake off the paralysis that makes it impossible to take on the really big things.
Except Obama’s done the opposite, unveiling an ambitious domestic agenda, striking a deal with China that few thought possible, and challenging the rest of the world to follow his lead. It’s an effort wrought with political and policy pitfalls, but Obama’s doing it anyway because he sees this as an effort worth making.
As we discussed back in February, there’s a group of pundits who’ve invested almost comical amounts of time urging Obama to “lead more.” It’s never been entirely clear what, specifically, these pundits expect the president to do, especially in the face of unyielding and reflexive opposition from Congress, but the complaints have been constant for years.
As the argument goes, if only the president were willing to lead – louder, harder, and bigger – he could somehow advance his agenda through sheer force of will, institutional constraints be damned. And if Congress resists, it’s necessarily evidence that Obama is leading poorly – after all, if only he were a more leading leader, Congress would … follow his lead. The line of criticism became so tiresome and so common that Greg Sargent began mocking it with a convenient label: the Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Power.
What seems obvious now, however, is the need for these pundits to reconsider the thesis.
Obama saw a worsening climate crisis, so he decided to take the lead. Obama is tired of waiting for a hapless Congress to act on immigration, so he’s leading here, too. Obama saw an Ebola threat, and he’s leading a global effort to save lives. Obama sees an ISIS threat, so he’s leading an international campaign to confront the militants.
The president showed leadership when disarming Syria of its chemical weapons. He’s showing leadership in trying to strike a nuclear deal with Iran. He showed leadership on the minimum wage, raising it for federal contractors while Congress sat on its hands. He’s showed leadership on health care, rescuing the auto industry, and advancing the cause of civil rights. [Update: several readers reminded me he’s leading on net neutrality, too.]
The policymaking process is filled with choke points, but when the president has his eyes on a priority, he doesn’t just throw up his arms in despair when one door closes; he looks for a new route to his destination.
Now, if Obama’s critics want to question whether he’s leading the country in the right direction, that’s obviously grounds for a spirited debate – each of the president’s decisions can and should be evaluated closely on the merits. “Leadership” is not an a priori good. Obama can take the lead on a given issue, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s right.
But if Obama’s detractors would have Americans believe he’s not leading at all, I haven’t the foggiest idea what they’re talking about.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 14, 2014
“Republicans Cloaking Their Extremism”: The Values Election We Didn’t Have — And Must Have
Tuesday’s elections have left us with a dismal political landscape in Washington, D.C. and exposed the deep dissatisfaction many Americans feel with the economy and the functioning of government.
The results also, let’s be frank, pay sad tribute to the dishonest genius of Republican Party strategists, who coached candidates to hide clear records of extremism, and who spent six years laser-focused on making Congress dysfunctional while managing to convince voters it was the fault of President Obama and the Democrats.
By cloaking their extremism, and by evading responsibility for anti-government and anti-governing obstructionism, Republican leaders kept voters from having a clear sense of the real contest this year’s elections represented. In 2008 and 2012, there was no denying that the elections were between two very different systems of values and ideas about the role of government in promoting and protecting the well-being of its people. This year’s election was largely a failure to the extent that it was not about values and policies but the personal unpopularity of President Obama, any and all government failings, and the dysfunction in Washington.
In fact, there’s a troubling paradox in the election results: some of the best news for progressives is also some of the most depressing, because it points to the depth and cost of our political failures.
Here’s what I mean. Voters in red states and blue cities alike voted to raise the minimum wage, which polls show has majority support across the political spectrum. But those same voters elected Republican candidates who have opposed efforts to raise workers’ wages. Colorado and North Dakota both rejected anti-choice “personhood” amendments, but voters elected officials in favor of “personhood” laws and hell-bent on closing down health clinics. Polls show support for equal rights for LGBT people way up, but many voters still supported candidates who are committed to resisting any gains toward legal equality.
Voters are rightly dissatisfied with an economy that leaves so many workers and families with stagnant or sinking wages and opportunities. Yet they voted for candidates most likely to make those problems worse. Americans who are hurting are not the ones who will benefit from further tax cuts for the rich, policies that give wealthy corporations and shadowy political groups more influence over elections than voters and ordinary people, and the gutting of regulations that protect consumers and communities from wrongdoing by unaccountable corporations. They’re concerned about climate change yet their votes yesterday hand the gavel of the Senate committee responsible for dealing with it to a climate change denier.
The deck was clearly stacked against progressives this year. Democrats faced contested races in a number of conservative states. There was seemingly no end to the bad news overseas, some of which found its way home. And President Obama’s popularity dwindled even as the economic picture brightened, because so many people were not feeling any of the benefits in their own pockets.
But that’s no excuse for the wave of defeats. Too many Democrats did not make a clear and convincing case about the consequences of policies pushed by far-right activists and promoted by Republican elected officials. And that allowed the debate to become a referendum on voters’ feelings about Barack Obama — and on an insider’s squabble about where the buck stopped on the lack of effective action in Congress.
We must not let Republicans continue to get away with the sleight-of-hand they used to distract voters from their extremism this year. Progressive leaders must make clear what values are at stake in the upcoming policy debates — and whose policies are aligned with the American values and the interests of American families. We must push Democrats to draw clear distinctions between the values of the far-right lawmakers who will make this the most ideologically extreme Congress in memory and the voters who believe our nation’s future depends on prosperity that is broadly shared, not funneled only to those at the very top. This also requires Democrats to have a clear agenda that excites the people who sat out this week’s elections.
Moving forward, the most important mission for President Obama and Democratic congressional leaders is not to show how well they can work with Republican congressional leaders, but to show voters that they can and will take principled stands when core values are at stake, and to help Americans understand how the policy agenda of far-right Republicans undermines the kind of communities and country they want to live in.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People For the American Way; The Huffington Post Blog, November 5, 2014
“Last Night’s Consolation Prize”: Seeing Karl Rove Earn His Nickname ‘Turd Blossom’
How bad was last night? It was so bad that, for me, the only emotional consolation prize was the small and admittedly puerile pleasure of seeing Karl Rove squirm, again on an election night. It had nothing to do with who won or who lost, but it was the only media moment that made me smile, a piece of spinach caught in the teeth of wall-to-wall Republican gloating.
I say this even as I acknowledge that Rove’s discomfiture paled next to that of 2012, when he infamously insisted on Fox News that Romney had won Ohio, despite the network’s calling it for Obama. Rove’s intransigence forced Megyn Kelly to walk with camera in tow to Fox’s “brain room” for confirmation, where she shot the ham-headed GOP op down on national TV.
Kelly was there again last night when Rove, who should have been doing a victory dance, instead invited the viewer to imagine him bending over for a rectal exam.
As the scale of the GOP victory started to register, Chris Wallace asked Rove what it felt like to lose a midterm election badly, because Rove had experienced George W. Bush’s midterm massacre in 2006, when the Republicans lost thirty House seats, six Senate seats, and both chambers of Congress. How did Bush’s Brain think Obama felt after being hit by this wave?
Every president is “idiosyncratic,” Rove started off and then, looking pained, he added, “It’s like going to a proctologist without an anesthesiologist.”
“Thanks for the metaphor,” Wallace said, wincing, as Megyn said something like “Eeeew!”
Actually, it was the second time Rove, whom W. had long ago dubbed “Turd Blossom,” has publicly likened presidential politics to proctology. In a 2012 Wall Street Journal column, he called getting vetted for the vice-presidential slot on Romney’s ticket (in the wake of John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin four years earlier) “a political proctology exam.”
Yes, I’m not proud of it, but seeing “the Architect” being embarrassed on TV was my desperate little crumb of solace.
There are of course more substantial, electoral forms of solace—Arkansas, Alaska, Nebraska and South Dakota voted to raise the minimum wage; Scott Brown lost, Tom Wolf won. And The Nation’s Zoe Carpenter details them here.
But for the moment, I see the glass 90 percent empty. Nunn and Orman didn’t come close, the “hairless serpentine” in Florida topped Charlie Crist. Scott Walker and even Sam Brownback survived. The Dems’ would-be Southern firewall, Kay Hagan, went under after a solid year of street demonstrations against her opponent. Voter suppression, which a couple of late court decisions limited for this election, will only get worse next time, when the delayed laws take effect, and the media will largely ignore the issue, again. How much of the vote yesterday was lost to voter ID, missing voter registrations and malfunctioning machines we’ll probably never know.
But at least Megyn Kelly thinks Karl Rove is kinda gross. That’s something. Isn’t it?
By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, November 5, 2014
“The Media Just Hasn’t Reported On It”: Why Republicans Have Gotten Away With Craziness This Year
We don’t know if Joni Ernst is going to be the next Senator from Iowa, but one thing we can say is that Democrats failed to paint her as a radical Tea Partier with dangerous ideas. (Actually, there’s another thing we can say: her replacing liberal lion Tom Harkin would have to be the widest ideological swing in a Senate seat from one Congress to the next in a long time.) The question is, why? And more broadly, why have they failed to do that with any of the GOP Senate candidates running this year? It’s not like this is a bunch of moderates. One explanation is that the establishment triumphed by weeding out the nutcases:
National Republicans managed this year to snuff out every bomb-throwing insurgent who tried to wrest a Senate nod away from one of their favored candidates. They spent millions against baggage-laden activists such as Matt Bevin, the Louisville investor who mounted a ham-fisted challenge to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel, the conservative upstart who imperiled a safe seat by nearly ousting longtime Sen. Thad Cochran.
The confrontational approach—by both party committees and outside super PACs—represented a sharp departure from the GOP’s cautious strategy in the 2010 and 2012 cycles, when cartoonishly inept nominees aligned with the tea party lost the party as many as five Senate seats.
All that’s true, but it’s not just that they kept crazy people from winning primaries, they also kept primary winners’ craziness from undoing their campaigns. Ernst has managed to skate away from accountability for her more disturbing ideas, like her embrace of the “Agenda 21” conspiracy theory or her statement that she might have to start shooting government officials if they trample her rights. That’s not to mention her beliefs that there should be no federal minimum wage and that weapons of mass destruction were actually found in Iraq.
And it isn’t like Democrats haven’t tried to convince voters that Ernst is a radical. So why hasn’t she, like Todd Akin and Sharron Angle before her, gotten all kinds of negative attention for her comments that ultimately drove her to defeat?
There are many factors, like the fact that the Republican party has stuck by her, that had an impact. But I think the biggest reason is that the media just haven’t reported on it very much. Ernst’s Agenda 21 conspiricizing may have gotten attention from liberal bloggers, but it didn’t get much notice in the Iowa media, or from national political reporters. In contrast, when Bruce Braley told attendees at a fundraiser that if Republicans took the Senate, the Judiciary Committee would be chaired by “a farmer from Iowa without a law degree,” meaning the state’s senior senator, Chuck Grassley, it was huge news. The Des Moines Register, the state’s largest paper (and one that Ernst complains is biased against her) did editorialize once against Ernst’s radical and constitutionally demented views on “nullification,” but that’s the only substantive article about the topic that comes up when you search the paper’s web site (though there are a few letters to the editor that mention it). On the other hand, when I searched for Braley’s statement about Grassley being a farmer in the DMR, I got 79 hits.
While I haven’t done a systematic analysis of the rest of Iowa or national media, that doesn’t seem unrepresentative—I’ve seen the Grassley farmer thing mentioned many, many times in mainstream sources, but not Ernst’s crazier beliefs. Perhaps it’s because reporters are just tired of writing the “Republican candidate says extreme things” story. But I think it’s also that the Braley “gaffes,” whether it’s implying that farmers are not necessarily the font of wisdom in all things, or being upset when his neighbor’s chickens crap on his lawn, are personal in a way Ernst’s statements aren’t. They supposedly imply that Braley might be a bit of a jerk, whereas you can be friendly and nice and also believe the UN is coming to kick you off your land.
The trouble is that when we’re talking about electing people to the nation’s legislature, this is completely backward. The personal stuff is of only the tiniest importance, if any at all, while beliefs about the world are very relevant. Joni Ernst’s ideas about the UN, about guns, and about the legal status of zygotes will actually make a difference in how she does her job, should she win. In contrast, unless Harry Reid has his chickens crap in Bruce Braley’s Capitol Hill office just before a critical budget vote, I don’t think that’s going to really be an issue. But that’s what the campaign coverage has focused on.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 3, 2014
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