So Christie won in the lowest gubernatorial turnout in NJ, 38 percent. Put it this way: Barbara Buono got 50,000 more votes than Corey Booker did in last month’s special election.
Oh, and it was her Obama consultants who pushed the losing strategy. Imagine that. It’s almost as if the Democratic establishment likes Christie too much to criticize him!
I saw a prominent young libertarian (he appears on MSNBC) bemoaning the nanny-statism of it all. And this is why I don’t take libertarians seriously. The FDA isn’t merely saying trans fats aren’t good for you, they’re saying they’re harmful. Big difference.
FDA moves to cut out trans fats: Headline video (via Los Angeles Times Video)
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday moved to potentially eliminate trans fat from all processed foods to help prevent heart attacks and heart disease. For more: http://lat.ms/1aubw8c SUBSCRIBE FOR MORE VIDEOS AND NEWS http://www.youtube.com…
Krugman, writing from the IMF research conference:
It’s pretty clear, however, that the blockbuster paper of the conference will be one that focuses on the truly ugly: the evidence that by tolerating high unemployment we have inflicted huge damage on our long-run prospects.
How so? According to the paper (with the unassuming title “Aggregate Supply in the United States: Recent Developments and Implications for the Conduct of Monetary Policy”), our seemingly endless slump has done long-term damage through multiple channels. The long-term unemployed eventually come to be seen as unemployable; business investment lags thanks to weak sales; new businesses don’t get started; and existing businesses skimp on research and development.
What’s more, the authors — one of whom is the Federal Reserve Board’s director of research and statistics, so we’re not talking about obscure academics — put a number to these effects, and it’s terrifying. They suggest that economic weakness has already reduced America’s economic potential by around 7 percent, which means that it makes us poorer to the tune of more than $1 trillion a year. And we’re not talking about just one year’s losses, we’re talking about long-term damage: $1 trillion a year for multiple years.
Continue reading “The mutilated economy”
15 Under-the-Radar Progressive Wins of Election 2013 (via Moyers & Company)
Progressives have plenty to celebrate after last night’s off-off-year elections. Some of those victories were national news – Bill de Blasio’s win in the New York mayoral race, Martin Walsh becoming the new pro-labor mayor of Boston and New…
About 400 people, maybe half of them professionally indifferent media types, crammed into Novita’s in Metuchen Tuesday night to bear witness to the conclusion of, in its way, the biggest political sellout since the end of Reconstruction gave us Jim Crow laws. Sorry, that’s not an exaggeration- by betraying Barbara Buono, New Jersey’s Democrats have unleashed on the nation a right wingnut who will campaign as an oxymoron, a Republican moderate. And could become president.
Chris Christie is a dangerous man.
But, gee whiz, guys and gals, wouldn’t it just be totally and awesomely cool to have a real Jersey guy become president? Think of all “hits” the dying, increasingly digitized newspapers in the state would receive writing about him? Might rival the Kardashians as a trender.
If Chris Christie, someone who couldn’t be re-elected freeholder, whose brother bought him the US Attorney’s office, who used the machinery of federal prosecutions to eliminate his rivals, who incited hatred against teachers and other public employees, who presided over unemployment and property tax increases, who made the poor poorer and the rich richer, who made publicly abusing women a new professional sport in New Jersey-becomes president of the United States, we have one group to blame:
The leadership of New Jersey’s Democrats.
And Christie’s bosom Sandy pal, Barack Obama.
Not since the Senate confirmed Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the US Supreme Court, has the stink of misogynistic betrayal wafted so strongly over the national political scene. Buono was humiliated, sold out, dissed, patronized, treated like a back-bencher by her own party. Think it had anything to do with her gender? Obama could come to New York City to campaign for Bill DeBlasio-but he couldn’t cross the river for Barbara Buono?
Did Obama want Christie to win?
“A lot of people have a lot of explaining to do,” said Rush Holt. “A lot of explaining.”
Continue reading “You wanted him, you got him”
This is an interesting article on the values of different parts of America, and how they got that way.
Don’t be silly. Of course he has!
By allowing the firm to plead guilty—rather than the man who created it, owns it outright, and runs it with an iron fist—today’s agreement also perpetuates the myth, visible in other recent Wall Street cases, that abstract corporate entities rather than flesh-and-blood humans are responsible for financial wrongdoing. Which, of course, defies the laws of physics. SAC Capital Advisors exists only on paper. It was the people who ran the firm that defined its culture and designed its peculiar internal structure, in which portfolio managers and analysts were encouraged to share their best investment ideas with Cohen directly. While Cohen wasn’t named as a defendant in any of the SAC insider-trading cases, court papers have alleged that, as the firm’s owner and chief executive, he “enabled and promoted” the wrongdoings.
If this is so, why isn’t he in the dock facing criminal charges?
One possibility is that he hasn’t done anything wrong, and didn’t know anything about the insider dealing that was “substantial, pervasive and on a scale without known precedent in the hedge fund industry.” In a statement issued in July, his spokesman said, “Steve Cohen acted appropriately at all times.” Another possibility is that the investigators and prosecutors in Preet Bharara’s office still don’t have enough evidence to tie Cohen directly to particular instances of insider trading. One of the SAC employees who is currently awaiting trial, Mathew Martoma, who reportedly spoke personally with Cohen about his investments, has so far refused to coöperate with the government, according to numerous reports.
The S.E.C., despite settling with SAC in March, subsequently brought a civil case against Cohen, charging him with failing to supervise his employees and prevent insider dealing. Today’s agreement leaves that case outstanding, and it doesn’t preclude the possibility that the Justice Department could bring criminal charges against Cohen. According to a report on the Times’ DealBook blog, investigators are currently examining SAC’s trading in Gymboree, the children’s clothing and music chain, with the aid of a witness.
The agreement does appear to rule out the possibility that the Justice Department will indict SAC and Cohen on racketeering charges, which can carry penalties of decades in prison. Back in the nineteen-eighties, when Rudy Giuliani held Bharara’s job, he threatened the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert with racketeering charges, and brought them against Princeton/Newport Limited Partners, a small investment firm. According to reports earlier this year, the U.S. Attorney’s office was considering exercising the racketeering laws, which are a kind of nuclear option, in this case, too.
Evidently, that idea was dropped. Far from being treated like a mobster, Cohen was hit solely in the pocketbook. He wasn’t even mentioned in the U.S. Attorney’s press release about today’s settlement, or in a letter and legal stipulation about the settlement that Bharara’s office filed in U.S. District Court. Rather than naming names, the documents contain repeated references to dozens of corporate entities and investment funds connected to SAC—the “SAC Entity Defendants.”
From Cohen’s perspective, that’s got to be encouraging. He’s not quite in the clear yet. But with about seven billion dollars in his back pocket even after he’s paid off all his fines, he’ll be feeling better about things. Maybe he’ll even go out and buy himself another Picasso to celebrate.
So what is to be done? Democrats who aren’t Obama should already be working on easy-to-grasp proposals to “reform” the ACA — to make it more public and less private. The immediate priority — and progressives running for office in 2014 and 2016 should practice saying this out loud — is fixing Obamacare. Not just the website, but the coverage gaps, the ways insurance companies will continue to exploit people and rip them off, and the potential for the cost burden on middle-class people to grow.
Liberal Democrats need to propose real, old-fashioned liberal solutions to the real problems of the ACA. Things like federalizing Medicaid, to take care of people in states where the expansion has been blocked, and lowering the Medicare eligibility age. And they need to reintroduce the public option. None of that is attainable now, but it could be in the near future. That whole package ought to be pushed for by unions and by activists in primary elections. The message needs to be nakedly populist — “make Obamacare work for you instead of the insurance companies” — and made without the fear of conservative backlash, because conservative ideas are unpopular. And Democrats in Congress ought to begin seriously agitating for Medicare-for-all, both because it is the correct policy, and because doing so will make everything else seem more “reasonable.”
h/t Nicole Naum.
* McAuliffe won VA, but not by much. If you live there, the chances of a SWAT team entering your bedroom to make sure you’re not doing anything illegal while you’re having sex just went down considerably.
* Leftist Bill DeBlasio absolutely crushed it. Won every single demographic by HUGE margins, which tells me Gov. Cuomo will have to help him with those tax raises.
* In Alabama’s 1st District special election, the corporate Republican beat the teabagging challenger.
* Christie won by 10 or more points (which will make him even more unbearable. Click here to read why), and the media types are creaming their jeans. Why the hell do people fall for these con men? Oh well, at least the increase in the state minimum wage won.
* Illinois is the newest state to pass same-sex marriage.
* Portland, Maine legalizes pot.
* Colorado taxes pot for school funding.
* SeaTac, WA minimum wage goes to $15. Great progressive victory!
* Controversial school “reformers” lost control of the school board in Bridgeport CT in a closely watched race.
Except for Buono’s race, it was mostly a good night for our side. Very happy about the minimum wage bills that passed!
