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It's Time to Stop Sulking and Start Fighting Back on Obamacare

—By

| Thu Jun. 6, 2013 9:45 AM PDT

First Read, after noting that Obamacare is getting steadily more unpopular, explains why:

The Obama White House has a massive PR problem with health care. The biggest reason: Opponents of this law have been very vocal, while supporters have done very little to drum up support. The president doesn’t sell it that often, and many arms of the Democratic Party essentially avoid it. Politics abhors a vacuum, and opponents — not supporters — have filled the health-care vacuum.

Yep. Three years after passage, conservatives remain revved up and on the warpath about Obamacare. They vastly outspend supporters on the airwaves; conservative talkers attack it relentlessly; think tanks write reports predicting doom over every conceiveable piece of bad news; Republican House members schedule endless repeal votes; and Republicans in both chambers do everything they can to sabotage its rollout.

In the meantime, many liberals remain....lukewarm. Why? I find it hard to fathom. It's true that we didn't get everything we wanted. We didn't get a public option. We gave away lots of goodies to corporate interest groups. We fought those wars and lost, and as a result, the very people who ought to be defending Obamacare most vigorously are, instead, still sulking in their tents. The left is, basically, fighting with one hand tied behind its back.

Even granting that I'm temperamentally more tolerant of compromise than many people, I still find this inexplicable. You fight your fights, and sometimes you lose. That's the way politics is and always has worked. But Obamacare is an historic piece of legislation regardless. Despite all the Republican tantrums, it's going to provide decent healthcare to tens of millions of Americans who didn't have it before. And like other social welfare programs before it, it will eventually expand and cover even more people. It's something to be proud of, and something to defend robustly, not something to slink away from.

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Report: When It Comes To the Deficit, Washington is Still Acting Like It's 2010

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| Thu Jun. 6, 2013 9:41 AM PDT
deficit cutting

Washington's obsession with the nation's budget deficit is a mistake, according to a new report released Wednesday by the liberal Center for American Progress (CAP). Congress and President Barack Obama are locked in a budget-cutting state of mind, still hoping to reach some sort of a grand bargain deficit reduction deal later this year that would replace the sweeping spending cuts that went into effect in March.

But as the report notes, the state of the economy has changed since 2010, the year that talks over how to reduce the deficit began:

  • The deficit has fallen by $2.5 trillion, due to tax increases and big spending cuts already enacted.
  • Growth in health care costs has slowed.
  • Inflation and interest rates are still low, despite concern that running a big deficit would increase them.
  • The key academic argument that high debt causes slower economic growth has fallen apart.
  • Austerity policies in Europe have not worked out so well.
  • The US economy has not come back to life as quickly as was projected when all the budget cutting began.

"Much has changed," Michael Linden, the author of the CAP report, writes, "and the debate should change with it."

Although the initial push for austerity came from the right, Obama and congressional Democrats soon fell in line. As Ezra Klein noted at Wonkblog Thursday, lower deficit forecasts didn't change Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-Wisc.) budget-cutting mania. "With some of the urgency gone, did Ryan ease up on the cuts to programs like Medicaid and food stamps?" Klein writes. "Of course not....The facts changed. The policies in the Republican budget didn't." As for Democrats, Klein says, "they’ve kept pursuing the exact kind of budget deals that led to sequestration in the first place." Obama put forward a budget in April that, as Linden says, "goes well beyond halfway to meet the demands of conservatives in Congress."

"It is time to reset the entire budget debate," Linden says. "No more pretending that the sky is falling."

New Report Shows How Walmart Forces Its Employees to Live on the Dole

—By

| Thu Jun. 6, 2013 9:10 AM PDT
walmart

Walmart's wages and benefits are so low that many of its employees are forced to turn to the government for aid, costing taxpayers between $900,000 and $1.75 million per store, according to a report released last week by congressional Democrats.

Walmart's history of suppressing local wages and busting fledgling union efforts is common knowledge. But the Democrats' new report used data from Wisconsin's Medicaid program to quantify Walmart's cost to taxpayers. The report cites a confluence of trends that have forced more workers to rely on safety-net programs: the depressed bargaining power of labor in a still struggling economy; a 97 year low in union enrollment; and the fact that the middle-wage jobs lost during the recession have been replaced by low-wage jobs. The problem of minimum-wage work isn't confined to Walmart. But as the country's largest low-wage employer, with about 1.4 million employees in the US—roughly 10 percent of the American retail workforce—Walmart's policies are a driving force in keeping wages low. The company also happens to elegantly epitomize the divide between the top and bottom in America: the collective wealth of the six Waltons equals the combined wealth of 48.8 million families on the other end of the economic spectrum. The average Walmart worker making $8.81 per hour would have to work for 7 million years to acquire the Walton family's current wealth.

Using data from Wisconsin, which has the most complete and recent state-level Medicaid data available, the Democrats' report finds that 3,216 of Wisconsin’s 29,457 Walmart workers are enrolled in the state's Medicaid program. That figure that balloons to 9,207 when Walmart employees' children and adult dependents are taken into account. The study also looked at the costs of other taxpayer-funded programs that Walmart employees on state Medicaid could also use. Here's the tab: 

  • At least $251,706 for state Medicaid
  • Between $25,461 and $58,228 for reduced-price school lunches
  • Between $12,938 and $29,588 for reduced-price school breakfasts
  • Between $155,406 and $355,350 for subsidized Section 8 housing
  • Between $72,160 and $165,000 for the Earned Income Tax Credit, which gives money to low-income workers
  • Between $11,414 and $26,100 for assistance under the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps poor families pay for heating costs
  • Between $96,007 and $219,528 for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits (food stamps)
  • Between $279,450 an $639,090 for Wisconsin Shares Child Care Subsidy Program benefits, which helps low-income workers pay for child care

At a minimum, Walmart workers in Wisconsin known to be enrolled in Medicaid rely on at least $9.5 million a year in taxpayer funds. If the study's low-end estimate of $900,000 per store in taxpayer-funded benefits is right, Walmart's 300 Wisconsin stores could be forcing the state to provide as much as $67.5 million per year in benefits that employees of Walmart's higher-wage competitors, such as Costco, don't need.

House Democrats are pushing two pieces of legislation that would address the drag Walmart's low wages place on the economy. One would raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10; another would allow employees to share salary information, bolstering their bargaining power. A study published last year found that raising average retail wage salaries from $21,000 to $25,000 a year would create 100,000 new jobs and give a $13.5 billion annual boost to the overall economy.

Walmart has pushed back against the Dems' report. "Unfortunately there are some people who base their opinions on misconceptions rather than facts, and that is why we recently launched a campaign to show people the unlimited opportunities that exist at Walmart," Brooke Buchanan, a spokeswoman for the company, told the Huffington Post. "We provide a range of jobs—from people starting out stocking shelves to Ph.D.'s in engineering and finance. We provide education assistance and skill training and, most of all, a chance to move up the ranks."

Research suggests that Walmart could increase wages significantly and still turn a profit. But the company has worked for years to avoid doing that. An internal memo obtained by the Huffington Post in November, "Field Non-Exempt Associate Pay Plan Fiscal Year 2013," outlined how Walmart capped raises for hourly workers, lowing costs and bolstering their bottom line profits. In 2012, the company's net sales were higher than Norway's entire economic output.

The ranks of near-poor households enrolled in Medicaid have been swelling in Wisconsin since the late 1990s. Although Walmart isn't the only force driving this trend, it certainly isn't helping.

Charts of the Day: Time to Hit the Fiscal Reset

—By

| Thu Jun. 6, 2013 8:28 AM PDT

You've seen versions of these charts before, but Michael Linden of CAP has now updated them. They send a pretty clear message: Over the past two years, the federal deficit has been slashed by about $2.5 trillion, mostly via spending cuts. As a result, our medium-term deficit picture has brightened considerably.

And now? It's time to stop. The economy is still fragile, austerity has failed utterly in Europe, and we don't need any more of it here. For now, at least, a deficit of around 3 percent of GDP is, if anything, too low. It's time to hit the reset button. The full report is here.

Grazing Reindeer Take a Bite Out of Global Warming

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| Thu Jun. 6, 2013 3:05 AM PDT
ReindeerReindeer: Ben Bawden at Flickr

Turns out where we let reindeer dine when has a big impact on the energy balance of the planet. That's because reindeer (aka caribou) prune dark-colored Arctic vegetation, minimizing solar heat absorption.

The study was done by Finnish researchers using satellite data to compare tundra in Norway, where reindeer aren't allowed to graze in summer, with similar tundra in Finland, where they are. As you might expect, vegetation is shorter and sparser on the Finnish side. In contrast, the taller trees and shrubs of the ungrazed Norwegian side absorb more sunlight—which promotes an earlier snowmelt, increases solar absorption, and accelerates warming.

The heat difference is significant, according to the team's calculations: on the Norwegian side, solar energy absorption of up to 6 W/m2 in the snowmelt season, or up to 0.5 W/m2 to the yearly energy balance. Put another way, compared to the Finnish tundra, Norwegian energy absorption during the months of March, April, and May is enough to melt a cubic kilometer of ice. "No small matter,” Lauri Oksanen, a co-author of the paper in Remote Sensing of Environment, tells Eye on the Arctic.

Reindeer lichen
Reindeer lichen: Travis at Flickr

The net result is that reindeer can delay seasonal warming and help de-couple one of the more potent positive feedback loops affecting climate in the far north. Although, Oksanen notes, that if the reindeer are allowed to overgraze their favorite food—the whitish-colored reindeer lichen—they can also remove one of the tundra's most reflective summer surfaces.

Photo credit: dration at Flickr

So, carefully managed, reindeer could be used to do what they do best: geoengineer the landscape. Selective summer grazing could be used to delay snowmelt, increase the surface albedo, and reduce ground heating. 

"If wetlands and poorly growing forests could be brought back so that the forests were left sparse and the wetlands returned to a natural state, it would significantly cool the atmosphere," says Oksanen.

Conspiracy Theorists Are More Likely to Doubt Climate Science

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| Thu Jun. 6, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Suzanne Tucker/Shutterstock

In recent years, a persuasive theory of how and why people deny science and reality has emerged. It's called "motivated reasoning"—and was described at length in Mother Jones (by me) back in 2011. Here's the gist: People's emotional investments in their ideas, identities, and worldviews bias their initial reading of evidence, and do so on a level prior to conscious thought. Then, the mind organizes arguments in favor of one's beliefs—or, against attacks on one's beliefs—based on the same emotional connections. And so you proceed to argue your case—but really you're rationalizing, not reasoning objectively.

At the same time, though, other phenomena are also often invoked to explain the rejection of science on issues like climate change, evolution, and vaccinations—phenomena that may (or may not) be fully separable from motivated reasoning. One of the most prominent of these: conspiracy theorizing.

Psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky, who studies conspiracy theorists

So what's the relationship between the two? In my recent Point of Inquiry podcast interview (excerpted below) with University of Bristol psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky, it became clear that motivated reasoning and conspiracy mongering are at least in part separable, and worth keeping apart in your mind. To show as much, let's use the issue global warming as an example.

In a recent study of climate blog readers, Lewandowksy and his colleagues found that the strongest predictor of being a climate change denier is having a libertarian, free-market world view. Or as Lewandowsky put it in our interview, "The overwhelming factor that determined whether or not people rejected climate science is their worldview or their ideology." This naturally lends support to the "motivated reasoning" theory—a conservative view about the efficiency of markets impels rejection of climate science because if climate science were true, markets would very clearly have failed in an very important instance.

But separately, the same study also found a second factor that was a weaker, but still real, predictor of climate change denial—and also of the denial of other scientific findings such as the proven link between HIV and AIDS. And that factor was conspiracy theorizing. Thus, people who think, say, that the Moon landings were staged by Hollywood, or that Lee Harvey Oswald had help, are also more likely to be climate deniers and HIV-AIDS deniers.

"Clearly, for a number of people…conspiratorial thinking determines their rejection of science," explained Lewandowsky in our interview.

Indeed, there are distinct personality or dispositional factors that have been associated with a tendency towards conspiratorial thinking—including paranoia and a sense of disgruntlement, or being unhappy with how society is treating you. Furthermore, conspiratorial beliefs tend cluster together. "If a person believes in one conspiracy theory, they're likely to believe in others as well," explained Lewandowsky on the podcast. "There's a statistical association. So people who think that MI5 killed Princess Diana, they probably also think that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act by himself when he killed JFK."

This makes conspiracy theorizing a kind of "cognitive style," one clearly associated with science denial—but not as clearly moored to ideology.

For an excerpt of the relevant part of our interview, listen below (for the full show click here):

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Report Says IRS Approved Tax-Exempt Status For Twice as Many Conservative Groups as Liberal Groups

—By

| Wed Jun. 5, 2013 9:53 PM PDT

Here's an interesting tidbit from the newsletter Tax Notes. As we all know by now, the IRS applies extra scrutiny to a group applying for tax-exempt status if it suspects the group is political in nature. In 2010, they decided that having "tea party" in a group's name was sufficient to raise a red flag.

The Inspector General's report about this included an audit of 298 groups that had been given special scrutiny. Of these, 96 had "tea party," "patriots," or "9-12 project" in their names. But that's all we know. We have no idea how many of the 298 groups were liberal and how many were conservative, because the IRS doesn't release the name of groups that have applied for tax-exempt status.

However, the IRS does publish the names of groups that have received special scrutiny and been approved for tax-exempt status. They recently released a list of 176 organizations that have been approved since 2010, so Martin Sullivan checked each one to figure out if it was liberal or conservative. Here's what he found:

  • 122 conservative
  • 48 liberal/nonconservative
  • 6 unknown

This doesn't tell us anything definitive about the entire set of groups that got special scrutiny. If the whole set is similar to the approved set, then about two-thirds were conservative and one-third liberal—most likely because of the boom in new tea party groups in 2010. But that's just a guess.

One thing isn't a guess, however: Two-thirds of the groups who were approved for tax-exempt status were conservative. If the IRS was on a partisan witch hunt against conservative groups, that's sure an odd way of showing it, isn't it?

The NSA Is Still Data Mining Your Telephone Calls

—By

| Wed Jun. 5, 2013 6:33 PM PDT

I confess that I'm a little puzzled by this Glenn Greenwald story in the Guardian:

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April....Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

The NSA, as part of a program secretly authorized by President Bush on 4 October 2001, implemented a bulk collection program of domestic telephone, internet and email records....Until now, there has been no indication that the Obama administration implemented a similar program.

Obviously I'm missing something. After Democrats caved on the surveillance bill in 2008, I simply assumed that this kind of massive data mining of telephone metadata was going to continue forever and everyone knew it. But Glenn suggests that, in fact, this is something surprising. So I guess I assumed wrong.

I'm going to mull this over for a while to figure out where I went wrong. In the meantime, go read the full story.

Flashback: Bush Aides Used Alternate Email Addresses, Too

—By

| Wed Jun. 5, 2013 2:46 PM PDT
secret emails

Multiple top Obama administration officials have been using secret alternate email addresses to conduct government business, the Associated Press reported Tuesday. Conservatives were already outraged by former Environmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson's previously revealed use of an alias, Richard Windsor, to send emails, so this latest news has the potential to create a firestorm on the right.

The Obama administration claims there's nothing to see here, and that officials were using the alternate addresses so they could do their jobs  without having to wade through a deluge of spam. The alternate email addresses uncovered by the AP have all been governmental—the alternate email for Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of Health and Human Services, was KGS2@hhs.gov, not sebelius@gmail.com, to cite one example. Several government agencies told the AP that the alternate email addresses "are always searched in response to official requests and the records are provided as necessary." Although the addresses themselves may be secret, the emails that are sent to and from those addresses are subject to normal government recordkeeping and public disclosure rules—at least according to the Obama administration.

The AP, however, notes that it "could not independently verify" that the Obama administration did in fact search officials' unlisted email accounts in response to public records requests. In fact, the news agency found only one example of an email from an official's unlisted account being disclosed in response to such a request.

Figuring out whether or not these emails are being properly archived and searched is crucial. During the presidency of George W. Bush, a scandal erupted over Bush aides' use of private, non-governmental email accounts to conduct government business. All emails from federal employees conducting government business are usually subject to public records laws, regardless of what addresses are used to send them. But the Bush-era accounts were, unlike the Obama administration accounts, non-governmental—some, for example, were operated by the Republican National Committee. That means those emails were less likely to be archived and maintained for posterity than emails sent or received by governmental addresses.

If Obama administration officials' secret-address emails are being archived under federal records laws and being properly searched in response to public records requests, they're likely above board. (The administration claims that using alternate email addresses was common under past presidents, too.) If that's the case, the secret email addresses are no more than a modern day equivalent of an unlisted phone number. But if these private emails aren't being properly archived and searched, it may—and should—be a real scandal.

Will Connecticut lead the way on GMO labeling?

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| Wed Jun. 5, 2013 2:13 PM PDT
Not ashamed to admit it.

On June 3, the Connecticut legislature passed a bipartisan GMO labeling bill, making it the first state to require food manufacturers to reveal whether their products include genetically engineered ingredients. The bill passed both chambers by a landslide, and right-to-know activists have declared it a major victory. But the bill comes with a catch. Before it goes into effect, similar legislation must be adopted in at least four other states, including one that borders Connecticut, and those states must have an aggregate population of at least 20 million residents.

In other words, the Nutmeg State will continue to do nothing on GMOs until New York, Massachusetts or Rhode Island and some combination of other states also decide to take on Big Ag and Big Biotech. This trigger clause was meant to protect Connecticut businesses from being put at a competitive disadvantage and to keep the state from "going it alone," says Paul Towers of Pesticide Action Network. Towers called it "a cautious but important step."

With a population of 3.5 million, Connecticut doesn't hold the same sway as a large population state like New York or California that, just by acting alone, could force GMO labeling nationwide. (Since so much of their product is sold in those states, if one of them passed a labeling bill, food manufacturers would most likely just label all of the products they sell in the US, for the sake of efficiency.) That's why the biotech and food industries dropped $46 million last year against California's Prop. 37, out-spending right-to-know supporters 5 to 1 and ultimately defeating the measure.

Even with Connecticut's trigger clause, advocates are optimistic. Tara Cook-Littman, the head of GMO Free CT, said her group fought against the clause throughout the legislative session. But ultimately, she said, the group felt that the integrity of the bill wasn't compromised by its inclusion. "The truth is we really think we have nothing to fear from the trigger clause," Cook-Littman told Mother Jones. "We're hoping that the clause will end up being a catalyst to encourage other states to join us."

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