But as he turned to characterize the Great Recession, Obama’s speech pattern changed: He shifted to a sentence structure that excludes human actors from the subject position. “The deck is stacked” against the working class, Obama said. Why? Because “taxes were slashed,” he said, and “growth has flowed to a fortunate few.” His language gave no indication of who brought about these disparities.
Instead, his words suggested abstract ideas were capable of independent action. “Because of upward mobility,” Obama said, “the guy on the factory floor could picture his kid running the company.” And, he went on, “jobs automated or headed offshore.” In a nearly hourlong speech, only rarely did we get any glimpse of who-did-what-to-whom: “Businesses lobbied Washington to weaken unions and the value of the minimum wage.”
It’s no surprise that Obama’s not naming names—throughout the economic collapse and its aftermath, that kind of avoidance has been commonplace among politicians. What makes this speech stand out is that even as it attempts to put forth deliberate remedies to inequality, its language undermines the notion that we are confronting a problem humans made, not a hurricane or nasty flu, and suggests that the problem is out of human hands. It’s a perfect example of why English teachers admonish us to avoid passive constructions.
Research has shown that the grammar we use to describe events influences how audiences perceive them: In particular, the choice of an active or passive voice can make people change their assessments of blame. Using the infamous “wardrobe malfunction” from the Super Bowl Halftime Show in 2004, social psychologists Caitlin Fausey and Lera Boroditsky found that respondents who read that Justin Timberlake “tore” Janet Jackson’s clothing attributed blame and sought to levy 53 percent more in fines than those who read that “the bodice tore.” This was true even though all the participants first watched a video of what happened.
Continue reading “And then inequality happened”
Category: Politics As Usual
The goombah
Everyone who lives around here already knows what a vindictive asshole Christie is:
So the unfolding story of the lane closings has become something of a cause célèbre, resulting in a hearing before the New Jersey Legislature on Monday, as well as a window into the proudly aggressive and often secretive dealings of Mr. Christie’s team.
The mayor of Fort Lee, a Democrat, complained in a letter in September that the lane closings were “punitive” — Mr. Christie, a Republican, was leaning heavily on Democratic mayors to endorse him for re-election so he could present himself as a presidential candidate with bipartisan appeal, but the mayor was not going along.
Mr. Christie laughed off the idea that he had been involved in a matter as small as closing bridge lanes, and his chief appointee at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversees the bridge, insisted that the lane closings were simply part of a traffic study.
But on Friday, the man who ordered the closings — a high school friend of the governor’s who was a small-town mayor and the founder of an anonymous political blog before Mr. Christie’s appointee created a job for him at the Port Authority — resigned, saying the issue had become “a distraction.”
And testifying under subpoena in Trenton on Monday, bridge workers described Mr. Christie’s associates’ ordering the closings, and called the different maneuvers “unprecedented,” “odd” and “wrong.” There was, they said, no study.
Mr. Christie’s associates at the Port Authority, they said, ordered bridge workers to shut down the lanes with three days’ notice despite warnings that it would cause havoc, and that changes of this magnitude typically took years of planning. They were instructed not to tell anyone — not the news media, not Fort Lee, not even the Port Authority’s executive director, who is an appointee of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, they said. They protested, but went along, they said, because they feared retribution.
At perhaps the strangest turn in the legislative hearing, the chairman of the Transportation Committee, Assemblyman John Wisniewski, a Democrat, pressed the Port Authority’s executive director, Patrick J. Foye, to say whether it was possible that the police officer who had overseen the moving of the cones that closed the lanes — a man named Captain Licorice, though no one who testified could verify the spelling of his name — had been given a promotion as a reward for staying silent about the whole operation.
“You have to forgive our suspicion here,” Mr. Wisniewski told Mr. Foye, who was forced, as other Port Authority officials were, to attend the hearing by subpoena. “There’s a lot here that’s happened that is not normal, that is unprecedented.”
“It is troubling to me, too,” Mr. Foye replied. (He did say, however, that the promotion was not an exchange for silence.)
Budget deal = last-minute booty calls
I wish they were on CNN, because they get a lot closer to the truth than our corporate media. Jon Stewart and John Oliver:
The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook
Federal pension grab in new budget
Leave it to David Dayen to dig out the nasty details of the Ryan-Murray budget deal and how federal workers will be sacrificed to the deficit gods:
2013 has not been a pleasant year if you work for the federal government. You’ve been subject to pay freezes, furloughs and shutdowns. One of you got yelled at by a Tea Party Republican at the World War II memorial. And if Congress passes the budget deal announced Tuesday night by Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Patty Murray – a big if – you will get a final Christmas present: You’ll have to pay more into your pension, an effective wage cut that just adds to the $114 billion, with a “B,” federal employees have already given back to the government in the name of deficit reduction.
The deal between House and Senate negotiators Ryan and Murray would reverse part of sequestration for 2014 and 2015, itself a major source of pain for federal workers. But negotiators want to pay for that relief in future years, with the overall package cutting the deficit by an additional $23 billion. And one of the major “pay-fors” is an increase in federal employee pension contributions. President Obama’s 2014 budget included such a proposal, which would have raised the employee contribution in three stages, from 0.8 percent of salary to 2 percent. Congress had already made this shift for new hires; the Obama proposal would affect all workers hired before 2012.
That proposed increased contribution translated to a 1.2 percent pay cut, and a total of around $20 billion in givebacks over 10 years. Negotiators were pressured by the powerful Maryland Democratic delegation, including Minority Leader Steny Hoyer, House Budget Committee ranking member Chris Van Hollen and Senate Appropriations Committee chairwoman Barbara Mikulski, into softening the blow on federal employees, many of whom live in their districts. According to Sen. Murray, the increase in contributions now equals about $6 billion over 10 years. But negotiators traded some of the cuts to federal employee pensions with different cuts to military pensions, also totaling $6 billion. So whatever the occupation, people who work for the government will bear the brunt of the pain.
Read it and weep. Once again, the deficit madness gets pushed to a different segment of the population so the rich may rest in luxury.
Undermining the peace deal with Iran
You’re shocked, right? I’m not:
In the normal course of affairs, Democrats would be ecstatic about what Secretary of State John Kerry brought home from Geneva..
[M]ost Democrats are too worried about offending donors to even discuss Iran, let alone take credit for the agreement. The ones who are talking about it are condemning it in terms that sound Ted Cruzesque. (See top Democrats Chuck Schumer and Bob Menendez for two, of many, examples). And it’s not just Democrats from the northeast who are hammering on Obama. Congressional campaigns now fundraise nationally, meaning that senators from South Dakota and Oregon respond to events in the Middle East as if they represented the New York metropolitan area. Pretty much all Congressional Democrats are running scared…of a Democratic president’s historic success.
Writing in The Forward, former George W. Bush administration official and life-long neocon, Noam Neusner… [writes] They can’t support Obama’s Iran achievement because these Democrats are “the men and the women, after all, who are on a first-name basis with most of the board of AIPAC” and “they want to be in Washington long after Obama leaves the White House.”
Anyone who has any doubt about what Neusner is talking about should note his reference to the Democrats’ “first name” relationship with the AIPAC board. He doesn’t just refer to the lobby or to AIPAC in general. He certainly does not refer to Jewish American voters who tend to be part of the Democratic party’s progressive wing and are no fans of Netanyahu’s or his paranoid visions. No, he refers to the AIPAC board which is composed of AIPAC’s wealthiest members, the ones who decide who the lobby will support (or try to defeat) in November 2014.
This applies to the 2016 election as well. Secretary of State John Kerry’s predecessor, Hillary Clinton, has also been conspicuously silent. Because she is the lobby’s favorite for president, she no doubt also feels the need to tread softly. (Fearing donor backlash, Clinton has, to put it mildly, never been a profile in courage when it comes to any Israel-related issue).
No doubt, she will ultimately endorse the deal but envelop her endorsement with enough saber rattling at Iran to please her lobby-affiliated donors. As for progressives like Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH), they have not yet demonstrated if they will put America’s interests – number one of which is preventing U.S. involvement in another neocon generated Middle Eastern war – above filling their campaign coffers.
The fact is that there is no reason other than the desire to placate donors that would lead any Democratic Member of Congress to oppose the agreement. (Republicans sincerely despise the idea of negotiations so they don’t have to be bought)….
There really is no choice but to support the agreement, unless you believe, despite all evidence, that another Middle East war would be the cake walk the neocons promised that invading Iraq would be. Why would anyone believe anything that crowd tells us? Even for campaign dough.
What happened to the Hurricane Sandy money?
I think this will turn out to be quite a story.
TRENTON — In advance of an expected 2016 presidential campaign, Chris Christie’s administration is stepping up efforts to control the Republican governor’s image at all costs — even skirting sunshine laws that permit public access to government records.
Getting the Christie administration to release its grip of records tracking use of federal Sandy recovery money has been particularly difficult for watchdog groups and media outlets, including the Asbury Park Press.
The Fair Share Housing Center recently received the first detailed information about housing recovery programs supported by federal grants — only after suing the administration for not complying with a public records request.
The Press has yet to receive Sandy recovery information the newspaper first sought four months ago. The Press asked for internal administration records from the contract bidding that resulted in Christie and his family starring in TV commercials for the $25 million “Stronger Than the Storm” tourism campaign.
In September, state officials told the Press a search had “identified hundreds of potentially responsive documents’’ and promised to begin sharing the information “on a rolling basis” starting in the second week of October.
For two months after the deadline, nothing was forthcoming — until some of the documents were released Friday, just hours after this story first appeared on the newspaper’s APP.com website. State officials said more information would be available later this month.
Not only are they blocking info on the federal funding, IIRC, we still don’t have an accounting of the private donations raised by the Springsteen-BonJovi-Billy Joel concert — which is being handled by Mary Pat Christie, former Wall St. banker and the governor’s wife.
Christie and the bridge
You’ll remember I wrote about this last week, after a Christie political appointee closed a lane on the George Washington Bridge (if you’ve ever driven across the GW, you know why) to punish a NJ mayor who wouldn’t back Christie’s reelection.
Now it’s turning into a big deal, and a big problem for Christie. What a schmuck
Of course there’s a wall between editorial and the publisher!
Oh, I’m so happy that South Jersey Democratic boss George Norcross now has total control of my local news organization!
The White House vs. Eric Holder
This doesn’t exactly bode well for protecting us from the excesses of the surveillance state:
In September, President Obama nominated John Carlin, a career federal prosecutor, to run the Justice Department’s National Security Division, a senior post whose occupant plays a key role in authorizing secret surveillance operations and managing national security investigations. It was a controversial pick. Not only did some of Carlin’s peers think he wasn’t the most qualified candidate. Attorney General Eric Holder — the man who was supposed to be Carlin’s boss — hadn’t supported him. Several former officials told Foreign Policy that the attorney general “strenuously” objected to nominating Carlin.
But Carlin had the backing of two senior officials in the White House, who had made it known that he was their preferred choice. In the end, their candidate won out, prompting several former law enforcement and national security officials to decry the nomination as an act of undue political influence over law enforcement decisions.
“I think it is extraordinary and unusual to have someone forced upon an attorney general over his objections,” said one former law enforcement official. “The independence of the Justice Department from the White House is institutionally important.” Decisions on which cases to prosecute and how to manage criminal investigations are supposed to be made free of political considerations.
Holder had his own list of candidates, which included another career prosecutor who had been his adviser on national security issues and had years more experience than Carlin working on terrorism and espionage cases, officials said. Holder didn’t know Carlin well and hadn’t worked closely with him.
Ultimately, the decision on whom to nominate for the position is the president’s alone. And Holder has since embraced Carlin — at least in public. But the rocky path to Carlin’s nomination, described in interviews with a dozen current and former Justice Department and administration officials, reveals a tense personal and political struggle over one of the most important national security positions in the government.
Carlin’s biggest advocates in the White House were Kathryn Ruemmler, the White House counsel, and Lisa Monaco, the president’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, according to current and former officials. Ruemmler and Monaco had worked with Carlin at the Justice Department and in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, where all three served at the same time as prosecutors.
Former officials said they are concerned that Carlin, who has been acting in the position since March, doesn’t speak as an independent voice for the department, but rather is aligning his positions first with the White House, and particularly with Monaco, thus undermining Holder’s authority. Two individuals drew comparisons to John Yoo, the controversial Justice Department attorney in the George W. Bush administration, who was known to have his own relationships with White House officials and was seen as operating outside channels meant to guard against political influence.
“It shouldn’t be that way,” said a former government official who doesn’t support Carlin’s nomination. “There should be some walls between the Justice Department and the White House. The White House should not have a direct feed.”
Premiums low, deductibles high
The New York Times goes into depth about the economic demands of Obamacare insurance policies. Okay, we tried it your shitty, expensive, corporate friendly way — can we have single payer now?
WASHINGTON — For months, the Obama administration has heralded the low premiums of medical insurance policies on sale in the insurance exchanges created by the new health law. But as consumers dig into the details, they are finding that the deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs are often much higher than what is typical in employer-sponsored health plans.
Until now, it was almost impossible for people using the federal health care website to see the deductible amounts, which consumers pay before coverage kicks in. But federal officials finally relented last week and added a “window shopping” feature that displays data on deductibles.
For policies offered in the federal exchange, as in many states, the annual deductible often tops $5,000 for an individual and $10,000 for a couple.
Insurers devised the new policies on the assumption that consumers would pick a plan based mainly on price, as reflected in the premium. But insurance plans with lower premiums generally have higher deductibles.
In El Paso, Tex., for example, for a husband and wife both age 35, one of the cheapest plans on the federal exchange, offered by Blue Cross and Blue Shield, has a premium less than $300 a month, but the annual deductible is more than $12,000. For a 45-year-old couple seeking insurance on the federal exchange in Saginaw, Mich., a policy with a premium of $515 a month has a deductible of $10,000.
In Santa Cruz, Calif., where the exchange is run by the state, Robert Aaron, a self-employed 56-year-old engineer, said he was looking for a low-cost plan. The best one he could find had a premium of $488 a month. But the annual deductible was $5,000, and that, he said, “sounds really high.”
By contrast, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average deductible in employer-sponsored health plans is $1,135.
“Deductibles for many plans in the insurance exchanges are pretty high,” said Stan Dorn, a health policy expert at the Urban Institute. “These plans are more generous than what’s prevalent in the current individual insurance market, but significantly less generous than most employer-sponsored insurance.”
Caroline F. Pearson, a vice president of Avalere Health, a consulting company that has analyzed hundreds of plans, said: “The premiums are lower than expected, but consumers on the exchange will often face high deductibles and high co-payments for medical services and prescription drugs before they reach the cap on out-of-pocket costs,” $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family.
Continue reading “Premiums low, deductibles high”