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April 14, 2006

Who's Popular Now?

We don't usually do polls or horse-race stuff around these parts, but hell, there are midterms coming up this fall, and Steve Benen of the Carpetbagger Report has some polling data spelling moderately good news for Democrats. For the past year or so, polls have shown that voters were dissatisfied with Republican rule—not to mention soured the Bush administration in general—but weren't all that high on the minority party either. Now that all seems to be changing, and by very large margins voters are picking Democrats in "generic" congressional ballots and telling surveys that they'd prefer to see the Democratic Party control the House and Senate this fall.

Whether that translates into an actual change in who controls Congress remains to be seen. This country does, after all, have a highly gerrymandered House set-up, which makes it very hard for the balance of power to change, even when the national mood favors the minority party so heavily. Seats are won district by district, and the Washington Post reported recently that the Democrats may not have enough competitive candidates to win the 15 seats they need to retake the House, barring a truly massive anti-incumbency atmosphere come 2006. I guess the proper thing to do at this point would be to add, "But who knows?," so make of this all what you will.

Do Voters Flee from Black Candidates?

Here's a sign of how little progress this country has made:

[W]hite Republicans nationally are 25 percentage points more likely on average to vote for the Democratic senatorial candidate when the GOP hopeful is black, says economist Ebonya Washington of Yale University in a forthcoming article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. White independents are similarly inclined to vote for the white Democrat when there's a black Republican running, according to her study of congressional and gubernatorial voting patterns between 1982 and 2000, including five Senate races in which the Republican nominee was black...

But racially motivated crossover voting is not just a Republican phenomenon. Democrats also desert their party when its candidate is black, Washington found. In House races, white Democrats are 38 percentage points less likely to vote Democratic if their candidate is black.

I'd only note that two of those five Senate races, I believe, involved Alan Keyes running on the Republican ticket—and it's possible that it was his actual lunacy, rather than his skin color, that drove voters away. That could skew the results a bit, although the actual study isn't available. Still, it's a depressing finding. And this next tidbit, from a different study, is also disheartening, albeit to a much lesser extent:

[A research team headed by demographer Jonathan Kelley, of Brown University and the University of Melbourne] found that not all books are created equal. "Having Shakespeare or similar highbrow books about bodes well for children's achievement," they wrote. "Having poetry books around is actively harmful by about the same amount," perhaps because it signals a "Bohemian" lifestyle that may encourage kids to become guitar-strumming, poetry-reading dreamers.

Well, then.

April 13, 2006

How to Avoid Cleanup Costs

Over at the Sierra Club site, Marilyn Berlin Snell has a story about how corporations use bankruptcy to discharge their environmental obligations. In particular, she follows the story of Asarco, a massive copper conglomerate whose smelters were poisoning towns. After being found guilty in court and racking up $500 million to $1 billion in environmental liabilities, the company declared bankruptcy in 2005—and the public was stuck with the bill for cleaning up the mess. It's not an uncommon tactic:

Reorganization under the Bankruptcy Code's Chapter 11 helps companies wipe the slate clean of environmental liabilities, giving them a fresh start. In the United States--a country that has based its keystone environmental laws on the principle that polluters, not taxpayers, should pay to clean up the poisons they spew--Asarco is just one example of how corporations use Chapter 11 to slough off massive environmental liabilities, reorganize, and then emerge leaner and meaner to operate another day.

Asarco's parent company, Grupo México, is benefiting too. A few months after Asarco filed for bankruptcy, Grupo México announced that net profits had doubled--largely because Asarco's environmental liabilities had been removed from its books. Of course, the liabilities remain, but now they are borne by U.S. taxpayers.

Last year, Congress cracked down on personal bankruptcy, making it harder for consumers to erase their debts. But legislators have done nothing to get tougher with the approximately 38,500 businesses that declare bankruptcy each year. A 2005 report to Congress spelled out steps the EPA could take to ensure such companies fulfill their environmental obligations. But as that study sits on a shelf, Asarco and an untold number of other polluting enterprises are getting a free pass.

No one really knows how many companies do this. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) asked the GAO to look into it, and the agency found the following: " While more than 231,000 businesses operating in the United States filed for bankruptcy in fiscal years 1998 through 2003, the extent to which these businesses had environmental liabilities is not known because neither the federal government nor other sources collect this information." Companies with environmental liabilities don't always notify the EPA -- ostensibly a creditor -- when they file for bankruptcy. Snell, for her part, makes some guesses as to which companies are doing just this, however; it's worth reading her whole story.

Armitage Says Talk With Iran

Well here's at least one semi-sane Republican voice speaking up (not that anyone needs to be a fan of Richard Armitage):

Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state during President George W. Bush's first term, has urged the Bush administration to hold talks with Iran over its nuclear programme.

Mr Armitage said Washington would benefit from talking to Tehran on a range of issues, including Iran's nuclear aspirations. The Bush administration has so far resisted calls from its European allies to engage Iran directly over its alleged nuclear weapons programme.

"It merits talking to the Iranians about the full range of our relationship... everything from energy to terrorism to weapons to Iraq," Mr Armitage told the Financial Times in an interview. "We can be diplomatically astute enough to do it without giving anything away."

Yes, exactly. Why not try? At worst, talks with Iran fail, and the U.S. is right back where it is now, at an impasse. So why not? The Bush administration reportedly doesn't want to negotiate with Iran because that would amount to appeasement of an evil regime. But we already appease evil regimes. We send (innocent) terrorist suspects to Syria to be beaten with electrical cables. We give $1 billion a year to Egypt, home of "widespread and systematic" torture. Our dear friends in Saudi Arabia have 126 children on death row, among other atrocities. And let's not get started on Dubai. You can disagree with the decision to support these countries so strongly—I certainly do—but either way, it's not like appeasement is unprecedented for this administration. And there's a better case for making nice when it comes to Iran, because it could be the only way to avoid a very catastrophic war. So again: why not try?

Hawks Declare War on Iran

Matthew Yglesias points out that the Weekly Standard is gearing up for war with Iran. As he notes, the two articles he cites are a combination of fantasy (would air strikes actually destroy Iran's nuclear program? No one knows. Oh well…) and insanity (thousands and thousands of people could die? Oh well…) But for sheer nuttery, it's hard to top William Kristol's editorial on the subject:

Given Iranian president Ahmadinejad's recent statements and actions, it should be obvious that it is not "a sign of humanity's moral progress"--to use Blum's phrase--to appease the mullahs. It is not "moral progress" to put off serious planning for military action to a later date, probably in less favorable circumstances, when the Iranian regime has been further emboldened, our friends in the region more disheartened, and allies more confused by years of fruitless diplomacy than they would be by greater clarity and resolution now.

Virtually no one, of course, thinks it's unequivocally moral or non-problematic to "appease the mullahs," as Kristol terms it. The people making the case for engagement just think it's the rational thing to do—the thing that will get fewer people killed and cause fewer catastrophes. (Plus, engagement is far more likely to help Iran eventually liberalize than bombs and sanctions will—we've seen how well that worked for Cuba.) Sometimes foreign policy just doesn't have a "pretty" choice that will make everyone feel warm and fuzzy inside. But notice also that Kristol says we need to act right this very instant. Bombs can't wait. Yet right before that, he says this:

That action would be easier if the situation in Iraq improved--which implies an urgent push to make progress there, with the deployment of more troops if necessary. Planning for action in Iran would be somewhat easier if the president finally insisted on a far-too-long-delayed increase in the size of the military. It would be easier, too, under the leadership of a new, not-discredited defense secretary in whom the president would have confidence, since he has surely (if privately) lost faith in the current one.

That's a nice fantasy. Set aside the fact that there aren't "more troops" we can magically send to Iraq, and even if they were, they likely wouldn't do much good—the ongoing civil war almost certainly isn't something that "more troops" can quell. But how on earth would an "increase in the size of the military" help with Iran? Training troops and expanding the active service takes years and years. If we need to act immediately, as Kristol demands, then any expansion of the military is completely irrelevant. Iraq isn't going to get better immediately. A newfound invasion force isn't going to materialize immediately. I can't tell if Kristol's truly insane or just badly confused, but either way, it's disturbing that this sort of stuff gets taken seriously.

Generals Speaking Out

Fred Kaplan has a good column about the recent spate of retired generals calling for Donald Rumsfeld's head. On the one hand, no one wants to see a repeat of the 1960s, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff, against their better judgment, failed to speak up and dissuade Johnson and McNamara from hurtling the country into Vietnam. If military leaders think something has gone badly awry in the Pentagon, the public should probably know.

On the other hand, it's perfect reasonable to get a bit leery when generals suddenly start speaking out against civilian government. During the 1990s the military became quite politicized—a development that Bill Clinton, ironically, helped start when he took the unprecedented step of getting endorsements from 20 retired generals in his 1992 campaign, to counteract his image as a pot-smoking draft-dodger. Just like they do now, Democrats made a fetish of men in uniforms. The flipside was that once in office, Clinton was loathe to challenge his generals—they had more credibility on security issues, after all.

The upshot was that the military enjoyed inordinate influence over a not-insignificant part of foreign policy during the '90s. Partly that was because the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 made the made the military more powerful by making the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff "principal military advisor to the president, the NSC, and the secretary of Defense." Partly that was because, by all accounts, Les Aspin and William Perry were relatively aloof and inattentive Defense Secretaries.

Whatever the cause, the military seemed to have more sway than usual. Colin Powell felt free to write a Foreign Affairs article describing "his" foreign policy in 1993 and the military went into open revolt over lettings gays in the military. Later on, the Joint Chiefs opposed the land-mine treaty because it would hurt our readiness in North Korea; they opposed the International Criminal Court for fear that U.S. soldiers could be prosecuted—an unlikely event, but whatever; they opposed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and pushed for missile defense systems over the objections of the rest of the world; they opposed the ban on child soldiers. And the president caved on all of these issues.

Meanwhile, as Dana Priest reported in her excellent book, The Mission, regional Commanders-in-Chief were essentially handling diplomacy in their little parts of the world, as State Department funding dwindled and no one attempted to rein them in. And, as Andrew Bacevich has noted, during the 1990s there was the odd spectacle of more and more retired generals appearing on television to criticize the president, and the politicization of the officer corps.

Now it's a very large leap from a couple of retired generals speaking out against a disastrous Secretary of Defense after a long reticence to the creation of a full-blown military state. I don't think there will be a coup tomorrow. Certainly many active generals take civilian control of the military very seriously—Kaplan notes that many of them remember what happened when Gen. Douglas MacArthur tried to force a public showdown with Harry Truman. And if a bit of grumbling gets Rumsfeld fire, that would be a good thing—although presumably Bush would just replace him with someone equally disastrous. Still, there's decent reason to worry about the scenario Kaplan sketches here:

Rumsfeld's arrogance, his "casualness and swagger" as Gen. Newbold put it—which have caused so many strategic blunders, so much death and disaster—have started to tip some officers over the edge. They may prove a good influence in the short run. But if Rumsfeld resists their encroachments and fights back, the whole hierarchy of command could implode as officers feel compelled not merely to stay silent but to choose one side or the other. And if the rebel officers win, they might find they like the taste of bureaucratic victory—and feel less constrained to renew the internecine combat when other, less momentous disputes arise in the future.

Maybe he's just worrying too much. It seems like it would be better not to find out.

April 12, 2006

A Happy Ending for Iran?

Down at the bottom of Knight Ridder's coverage of Iran's announcement that it has enriched uranium is this optimistic take:

Saeed Laylaz, a political analyst in Tehran, said he expects Tuesday's political fanfare will soon be followed by another announcement suspending all enrichment activities, as requested by the IAEA. Such a move, Laylaz said, would be a savvy way for all sides to save face and avoid escalating the crisis.

"They wanted this big ceremony to show that nuclear technology is not a goal - it's an achievement. This is enough, and now we can go back to negotiations," he said.

Predicting anything when it comes to Iran is a mug's game, but that's a hopeful possibility. The UN Security Council has already given Iran 30 days, starting March 29, to suspend its uranium-enrichment program. Perhaps, as Laylaz says, the Iranian government just wanted to make an announcement, get people at home excited, and then comply with the UN to show that it had peaceful intentions all along. Who knows? It's just as likely, of course, that the situation will only continue to get worse, especially since, according to the Financial Times the Bush administration now seems to be rejecting overtures by Iran to negotiate. (Those reports, naturally, could well be false or mistaken.)

UPDATE: Okay, guess not.

Powell Comes Clean on WMDs

Robert Scheer recounts a recent conversation with Colin Powell, during which Powell admitted that neither he, nor top government officials, ever perceived Iraq as a nuclear threat. When asked why the President disregarded the State Department’s conclusion to this effect, Powell responded that "the CIA was pushing the aluminum tube argument heavily and Cheney went with that instead of what our guys wrote."

According to Scheer, Powell affirmed that the President’s State of the Union reference to Iraq's quest for uranium from Niger “was a big mistake.” Adding, "it should never have been in the speech. I didn’t need Wilson to tell me that there wasn’t a Niger connection. He didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. I never believed it." Powell continued that it wasn’t the President that wanted to premise the war on nuclear threat, but "all Cheney."

As Scheer points out, it’s convenient for Powell to place the burden to Cheney and remain a Bush loyalist. "But it begs the question," he writes, "of how the president came to be a captive of his vice president’s fantasies."

New at Mother Jones

One Dollar, One Vote
The evidence is clear: Massive income disparities are undermining democracy in America.
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Iraqi School Kids: "They don’t see why they should prepare themselves."
Students struggle to keep up amidst daily bombings and sectarian warfare.
By David Enders

The Poor Man's Air Force
A history of the car bomb (Part 1)
By Mike Davis

Out of the Shadows
Two million people marched for immigrant rights on Monday -- and taught us something about standing up for justice.
By Paul Rogat Loeb

Explaining Away Stagnant Wages

Every now and again, the Bush administration or some other booster of the current economy will argue that wages aren't really stagnating, as they appear to be to anyone who looks at the numbers. Rather, workers are just receiving more and more of their compensation in health care benefits.

Trouble is, that's not true, at least not for workers at the very bottom of the ladder. According to the Economic Policy Institute, between 2004 and 2005 the bottom 20 percent saw their wages decline 1.9 percent. Yet only 24 percent of those workers get health insurance through their employer. Basically, health care costs would have had to increase 39 percent during that year for this to be the primary explanation; in fact, it rose 9.2 percent. In reality, there's something badly wrong with an economic "recovery" that has a large number of workers seeing their paychecks shrink rather than grow.

Would the U.S. Nuke Iran?

Over the past week, both Seymour Hersh and the Washington Post have published reports that the Bush administration is considering various plans to attack Iran—plans that may or may not include using "bunker-buster" tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Iran's underground nuclear sites. It's a bit alarming, to say the least, and there's been shockingly little follow-up in the media. Unfortunately, both pieces are frustratingly vague, so here are two follow-ups worth reading.

Jeffrey Lewis of Arms Control Wonk looks at Iran's main centrifuge plant in Natanz and says that, setting aside the rather obvious insanity of dropping a bunker-buster on Iran, there's no technical reason to use nukes to destroy Iran's nuclear program. The facility just isn't deep enough underground—conventional weapons will do. (Indeed, you could make an argument that "bunker buster" tactical nukes are never needed to destroy underground facilities, and that the entire program should be discontinued.)

Meanwhile, a while back William Arkin took a peek at Pentagon war games from the early 1990s, when the military tried to figure out what would happen if Iran went nuclear, allied itself with a breakaway Shiite republic in Iraq, and tried—for reasons unknown—to conquer the Middle East. Basically, the United States would have no trouble stopping it, so long as it had troops permanently based in the region (hint, hint), and didn't need to use nuclear weapons to do it. In fact, military leaders found that it was nearly impossible to incorporate the nuclear arsenal into their war plans.

Perhaps it's naïve to be (very slightly) comforted by these sorts of things, but both analyses sure make it seem like dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran is unlikely, whatever the chances of a conventional attack might be. (A conventional bombing raid against Iran would be a horrible idea, of course, but a nuclear attack would be catastrophic.) On the other hand, Billmon wonders what would happen if we did use nukes against Iran. The Bush administration is insane enough to do so, the corporate media is brainless enough to go along happily (mushroom clouds make for good ratings), and the country might be so jaded and used to watching unimaginable violence over TV that really, it's entirely possible we could turn parts of Iran into glass and no one would care.

April 11, 2006

IRS to Sell Tax Information

The IRS is planning to share tax return information with accountants and tax preparers. Under the new proposal, once you sign an authorization form, the third party preparer is free to sell the data contained in the filings to corporate marketers. That data includes everything from income figures to bank accounts, Social Security numbers, and other private information.

Nothing good can come out of this plan. Without regulations for how the data is used, identity theft will likely skyrocket. There is also nothing that would restrict tax preparers from offering people incentives to authorize the release of their personal data. With the mountains of paperwork being filled out at tax time, it would be easy enough for tax preparers to toss another form in there and get taxpayers to sign.

Interestingly, one of the companies that has opposed this change, H&R Block, has its own legal woes, facing a lawsuit charging that the firm violated fifteen separate state and federal laws when it marketed and sold Refund Anticipation Loans. But, Murray Walton, vice president and compliance officer at H&R Block, told the officials, "we find the idea of selling tax return information repugnant." It seems H&R Block is trying to rehabilitate its image.

Barack Obama (D-IL) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) are working to keep tax payers’ information private and have introduced the Protecting Taxpayer Privacy Act which would prohibit tax preparers from disclosing taxpayer information to third parties. Republicans and Democrats alike are backing the Privacy Act. Hopefully this rare act of bipartisan support will help prevent the IRS from pushing its new policy.

California Considers Minimum Wage Hike

In the Los Angeles Times today, Tom McClintock, a Republican state Senator, says that California shouldn't raise the minimum wage. It will destroy jobs! People will be unemployed! Misery and poverty to follow! Anyone who thinks otherwise has fallen victim to the "smarmy rhetoric of leftist populism," you see:

The truth is that if your labor is worth $6.75 an hour and the minimum wage is raised to $7.75, you simply become unemployable. The first rung of the ladder is gone, and there's no place to start.

That sounds very clever, but here's some more "smarmy rhetoric" to consider. Very rarely, if ever, have modest minimum wage hikes had any sort of effect on employment in the real world. The Economic Policy Institute has written up the state level data for all to see. Employment in Florida actually rose after a dollar hike in the minimum wage last year. Call it magic. Congress boosted the federal minimum in 1990-91 and 1995-96 and no one can recall hordes of "unemployable" people wandering the street with their life possessions in shopping carts (the 1995 hike, in fact, preceded one of the tightest labor markets in recent memory). Britain and Australia have had similar experiences. Maybe if we squint really hard the real truth will become apparent, but that's the basic story.

No matter. McClintock's leaps on yet another canard—that the minimum wage only helps middle-class teenagers working cushy jobs at the mall:

One newspaper gushed that the proposed state increase will boost the pay of California's "working poor" by $2 billion. But the vast majority of minimum-wage earners are part of middle-class families. Most are teenagers chasing their first job or spouses of breadwinners trying to find a niche for themselves in the job market.

I'm not sure what the precise statistics are for California, but this sounds dubious. Heather Boushey of CEPR has estimated that, nation-wide, the average minimum-wage worker earns 68 percent of his or her family's income—precisely the sort of person who badly needs help. And that gushing newspaper likely has things right: After the 1995-96 federal increase, 35 percent of the gains went to the poorest 20 percent of the population. Very few policies are half as progressive, and if a few middle-class teenagers get richer as a result, well, what of it? (And given how fast California's tuition fees are rising, most of those teenagers probably need those extra dollars to pay for college.)

April 10, 2006

"E-Waste" Polluting Poor Communities

Technology is improving faster than we can get our hands on it, and little thought is being given to the mountains of discarded electronics that are accumulating. Salon is currently tackling the question of electronic waste, and reports that the majority of old electronics are shipped off to poor countries across the globe, for cheap recycling.

Despite the fact that the recycling of highly toxic materials has been banned in China since 2000, the practice of environmentally-unsound recycling continues. And the reality of these dangerous procedures isn't pretty:

In Taizhou's [China] outdoor workshops, people bang apart the computers and toss bits of metal into brick furnaces that look like chimneys. Split open, the electronics release a stew of toxic materials -- among them beryllium, cadmium, lead, mercury and flame retardants -- that can accumulate in human blood and disrupt the body's hormonal balance. Exposed to heat or allowed to degrade, electronics' plastics can break down into organic pollutants that cause a host of health problems, including cancer. Wearing no protective clothing, workers roast circuit boards in big, uncovered wok like pans to melt plastics and collect valuable metals. Other workers sluice open basins of acid over semiconductors to remove their gold, tossing the waste into nearby streams. Typical wages for this work are about $2 to $4 a day.

According to the EPA, only about ten percent of electronics are properly recycled, accounting for approximately 2 million tons of e-waste dumped in U.S. landfills each year. And despite claims by companies that they recycle old parts, it’s difficult to determine where the materials actually end up, leading to a growing U.S. problem—which isn’t helped by the absence of a national system for handling the waste. However, for now, you can find a list of responsible e-cyclers here.

How to Pay Your CEO

Can we call it corruption?

In other words, the very firm that helps Verizon's directors decide what to pay its executives has a long and lucrative relationship with the company, maintained at the behest of the executives whose pay it recommends.

No, we'll call it corporate capitalism. The New York Times has a fantastic story today looking into the process by which corporations pay their CEOs. Arrangements like the above are hardly uncommon. And executive compensation often bears no relation to the actual performance of the company. Among other things, the story cites one study identifying 11 major companies "whose shareholder returns had been negative for five years, but whose chief executives' pay had exceeded $15 million during the last two years combined." Lucky them.

MORE: See this story for more. "The average pay for a chief executive increased 27 percent last year, to $11.3 million." This at a time when median wages have stagnated.

Tolerance Policies and... Intolerance

Tolerance policies on university campuses are now becoming the subject of scrutiny, as radical Christians increasingly consider them an infringement on their freedom of speech. Ruth Malhotra, a 22-year-old senior at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is demanding that her university revoke their tolerance policy because it prohibits her from condemning homosexuality, a belief she claims her Christianity compels her to share. The Christian Legal Society has already formed a national group to challenge tolerance policies in federal court. Well-funded ministries, like Focus on the Family and Campus Crusade for Christ are financing several non-profit law firms to begin taking cases such as Malhotra’s for free.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

The legal argument is straightforward: Policies intended to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination end up discriminating against conservative Christians. Evangelicals have been suspended for wearing anti-gay T-shirts to high school, fired for denouncing Gay Pride Month at work, reprimanded for refusing to attend diversity training. When they protest tolerance codes, they're labeled intolerant.
A recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League found that 64% of American adults — including 80% of evangelical Christians — agreed with the statement "Religion is under attack in this country."

Jon Davidson, legal director of the gay rights group Lambda Legal, asks, "What if a person felt their religious view was that African Americans shouldn't mingle with Caucasians, or that women shouldn't work?" Evangelicals dismiss this argument, drawing a distinction between race/gender and sexual preference, arguing that homosexuality is a choice, that does not conform to God’s “natural order,” while race and gender are inborn traits.

Leading evangelical, Rev. Rick Scarborough, sees this persecution of Christians as the civil rights struggle of the 21st century. "Christians," he said, "are going to have to take a stand for the right to be Christian."

April 14, 2006

Who's Popular Now?

Do Voters Flee from Black Candidates?

April 13, 2006

How to Avoid Cleanup Costs

Armitage Says Talk With Iran

Hawks Declare War on Iran

Generals Speaking Out

April 12, 2006

A Happy Ending for Iran?

Powell Comes Clean on WMDs

New at Mother Jones

Explaining Away Stagnant Wages

Would the U.S. Nuke Iran?

April 11, 2006

IRS to Sell Tax Information

California Considers Minimum Wage Hike

April 10, 2006

"E-Waste" Polluting Poor Communities

How to Pay Your CEO

Tolerance Policies and... Intolerance

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