The Progressive Bloc

Chris Bowers at Openleft describes an interesting emerging strategy among progressive Dems in the House and Senate:

Bowers suggests that, instead of 60 votes in the Senate or 218 in the House, what progressives really need are 12-13 Senators and 45 Reps who are prepared to walk away from legislation unless their demands are met- thus forcing the administration and the Congressional leadership to whip the others hard in order to bring them in line with the progressives.

This works best when there's an easily articulated demand- like the public option in healthcare reform- that the progressive bloc can get behind.

Bowers notes that the inspiration comes from the Senate "blue dogs" and Evan Bayh's conservative dems, who often threaten to side with the GOP and walk away from bills unless their demands for watering them down aren't met.

An additional benefit, that Bowers doesn't really get into, is that this opens up the possibility of tapping the energy many of the most progressive constituents in steeling the spines of their Reps and Senators. For instance, in Manhattan, where I live, most people are represented by Jerry Nadler, Charlie Rangel and Carolyn Maloney, as well as Schumer and Gillibrand- all solid, liberal Dems. I periodically get emails from Moveon and other progressive organizations generally asking me to call my member of congress to support this or that, but it's pointless to do so, because my folks are already on board, and it's equally useless to write/call elected officials who don't represent me.

If, however, the progressive bloc strategy got moving, people like me (and active constituents in deep blue districts and states all over the country, who are likely to be the most progressive) can contact our reps and demand that they walk away from mediocre bills if progressive improvements aren't included. That's a pretty serious font of untapped elected-badgering energy that could be put into play in an organized manner to make sure that Bayh and Baucus aren't running the show in DC.

Brooks admires Obama's "self-mastery"?

Huh? I'm all for sociologically interesting reporting, but today's David Brooks is sort of a whiff:

[...] three stories have dominated public conversation, and each one exemplifies another branch of indignity.

First, there was Mark Sanford’s press conference. Here was a guy utterly lacking in any sense of reticence, who was given to rambling self-exposure even in his moment of disgrace. Then there was the death of Michael Jackson and the discussion of his life. Here was a guy who was apparently untouched by any pressure to live according to the rules and restraints of adulthood. Then there was Sarah Palin’s press conference. Here was a woman who aspires to a high public role but is unfamiliar with the traits of equipoise and constancy, which are the sources of authority and trust.

But it’s not right to end on a note of cultural pessimism because there is the fact of President Obama. Whatever policy differences people may have with him, we can all agree that he exemplifies reticence, dispassion and the other traits associated with dignity. The cultural effects of his presidency are not yet clear, but they may surpass his policy impact. He may revitalize the concept of dignity for a new generation and embody a new set of rules for self-mastery.

What do all these people have in common: Barack Obama, Saarah Palin, Michael Jackson, and Mark Sanford? They're all famous, they're all on TV, they all do things to get on TV, etc.

Could it possibly be that people who have whatever traits were described there in the article as the "dignity code" choose not to live in a way that puts them on television?

What people we admire who don't necessarily aspire to "dignity" in Brooks's meaning? Let me just try to put a few out there. I realize not everyone will agree on these suggestions, but I'm just wondering what allows them to attempt to be subjectively good moral influences without working off the "dignity code?" Rick Warren, Dan Savage, Bono.

There's something missing from today's David Brooks, and I intend to write more later to try to find out what it is.

Palin's problems run deeper than class or gender

I don't really have anything to say about Palin's bizarre departure from the Alaska governorship other than that it confirms my general opinion of her as a loon who's not fit to govern anything.

I do, however, take issue with new Times columnist Ross Douthat's portrayal of Palin as a small-d democratic foil to the "elite" Obama-

Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. (And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education, slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools.)

Male commentators will attack you for parading your children. Female commentators will attack you for not staying home with them. You’ll be sneered at for how you talk and how many colleges you attended. You’ll endure gibes about your “slutty” looks and your “white trash concupiscence,” while a prominent female academic declares that your “greatest hypocrisy” is the “pretense” that you’re a woman. And eight months after the election, the professionals who pressed you into the service of a gimmicky, dreary, idea-free campaign will still be blaming you for their defeat.

All of this had something to do with ordinary partisan politics. But it had everything to do with Palin’s gender and her social class.

I'll first note that plenty of female candidates (Hillary, Liddy Dole, Gerry Ferraro) have made it through presidential campaigns without having their children paraded through the tabloids- largely because they had selling points beyond "I didn't abort the special needs child." I'll also note that basically whenever the kids of high-profile politicians do stupid things, they end up in the tabloids.

As far as class goes, Matt Yglesias makes the point that one could reasonably compare Palin with Joe Biden. Like Palin, Biden was a graduate of less-than-first-tier schools (U. Delaware and Syracuse Law). Unlike Palin, neither of Biden's parents went to college. Biden never became rich, eschewed the fancy trappings of the Senate and continued to live in Delaware (and if the Northeast has an Alaska, it's Delaware).

Biden managed to avoid being labeled as stupid and trashy not by dint of his superior social class, but by being generally well informed and appearing to be a legitimate vice presidential candidate. You could say the same about Lyndon Johnson (graduate of Southwest Texas State Teachers' College) or Harry Truman (no college)- regular guys without elite east-coast credentials who succeeded by being smart and tough.

Douthat's article does a disservice to women and to the non-elite-school class (which I imagine Douthat knows a lot about from his time at Hamden Hall, a private Connecticut high school, or maybe from reporting that he did on them while writing for the Harvard Crimson). Palin's problems with the press came from her being an unprepared joke of a candidate- not because she was a woman or because she didn't graduate from Yale.

The worst reporter in America

Cokie Roberts, ladies and gentlemen. Cokie Roberts.

This morning, I was treated to yet another of Ms. Roberts so-bad-its-barely-even-wrong little postcards from pre-1992 Democratic lobbyist land. She was criticizing the MoveOn for 'pushing' Democratic Senators on health care and energy issues 'without realizing that these Senators would be up for reelection, and there's only so far they can go without getting in trouble back home.' (Not an exact quote. Maybe later I'll find the real quote and compare it to my recollection.)

There are several conventions required in order for that bit of garbage to make sense:

1. People from states other than NY, CA, and MD are not smart enough to want things like affordable healthcare and clean energy
2. People from states such as NY, CA, and MD who join groups such as MoveOn are too stupid to act in their own best interests
3. People from Washington DC are the only ones smart enough to scurry around in oh-so-intriguing back rooms and put together the deals that keep this Republic chugging along down the track
3.a. Sometimes, reporters with really good access to sources (as opposed to reporters who really read things, call people, and write down the product of reading and calling) can shed a little light on how that happens

Here's a piece by Jack Shafer criticizing her, too: http://www.slate.com/id/2216890/

My friends, harking back to a quote I hear placed in the mouth of Thomas Jefferson, I would almost rather have a government without newspapers, than newspapers with reporters like Cokie Roberts.

MJ

I've have mixed feelings about the death of Michael Jackson. I never really listened to any of his music until college, where I developed a serious appreciation for '80s hits that I'd bypassed while spending the first 10 years of my life (I was born in '79) listening to Crystal Gale and the Eagles.

As a child during MJ's peak, I remember him largely as a figure of unvarnished terror. I must've been maybe 3 or 4 when I first saw the Thriller video playing on a display TV during Halloween season while shopping for a costume at Jamesway, and I remember having nightmares about it for weeks.

Around the same time, my parents (who were unaware of my fear of werewolf-Michael), as part of their sporadic attempt to keep my musical tastes from totally alienating me from my peers (see their 1991 purchase of New Kids concert tickets), installed in my bedroom a seriously creepy poster of MJ and ET., which engendered a new round of nightmares until being taken down.

For the following 15 years, I had a hazy idea of Michael Jackson as a weirdo celebrity, with any reference to his actual body of work made hazy by my better familiarity with Weird Al's "Eat it" and "Fat". In college I drunkenly sang along to MJ's hits from my spot at the beirut table, although usually slipping "Ham on, ham on, ham on whole wheat... all right" into Beat it.

I watched Michael's descent into MacCauley Culkin-befriending, baby-dangling weirditude with the eye of the prescient- hadn't I known from the age of 3 that this guy was scary? - but with a sense of regret at the wasted talent.

This morning, after hearing yesterday's news, I felt a weird urge to memorialize MJ by facing down my childhood fears, and I became the 136,457,280th person to watch Thriller on Youtube.

Waiting Room

One of the things I'm getting really sick of hearing from anti-reform folks during the health care debate is that, under any kind of reform, health care in the US would go from being immediately available to a six month wait:

Thus, the public option will crowd out other insurers and achieve monopoly pricing power. Once monopoly pricing power is achieved, then you will see a decline in both quality and supply of health services. The key is the lack of supply. At the monopoly price, the number of people willing to provide heath services will be suboptimal. This is why you have to wait six months for a CAT scan in England. Effectively, supply is rationed.

I'm not sure what kind of healthcare utopia conservatives have been living in. As a big-firm lawyer in NYC, I have (comparatively) pretty fantastic health insurance. However, I can't go see my dentist because I inadvertantly signed up for the DPO instead of the PPO plan- and can't switch until the enrollment period in November; it's a month wait to see my gastroenterologist, and about the same to see my dermatologist. My wife, who (like I did while in law school) is using the low-ranked Beech Street insurance, has had to wait months to see doctors, and several times has had to not go to a recommended doctor because of the wait. We're in New York City, which has one of the highest concentrations of doctors (and specialists) in the US- and our situation doesn't appear to be abnormal.

Forgive me for not getting too worked up when the GOP threatens that healthcare reform will result in long waits to see my doctor.

Adultery still a crime in SC

One interesting fact gleaned from blogs reporting on the Sanford story- both extramarital and non-marital/premarital sex are still violations of the South Carolina penal code- with penalties of 6-12 months in prison or a $500 fine:

SECTION 16-15-60. Adultery or fornication.
Any man or woman who shall be guilty of the crime of adultery or fornication shall be liable to indictment and, on conviction, shall be severally punished by a fine of not less than one hundred dollars nor more than five hundred dollars or imprisonment for not less than six months nor more than one year or by both fine and imprisonment, at the discretion of the court.

SECTION 16-15-70. "Adultery" defined.
"Adultery" is the living together and carnal intercourse with each other or habitual carnal intercourse with each other without living together of a man and woman when either is lawfully married to some other person.

SECTION 16-15-80. "Fornication" defined.
"Fornication" is the living together and carnal intercourse with each other or habitual carnal intercourse with each other without living together of a man and woman, both being unmarried.

Sanford's conduct would get him fired from any other job

CNN is reporting that Governor Sanford has admitted being unfaithful to his wife during his southern hemisphere sojourn. I don't really care what he was up to in Argentina- the point that the GOP is awfully hypocritical about the "sanctity of marriage" is a well-beaten deceased horse at this point- but I will say this: Almost any American who took a week-long, unscheduled, non-emergency vacation without telling his employer and without arranging for somebody to cover his responsibilities in his absence would be fired.

I shall not be surprised if we find out that Sanford thinks himself more indispensible than the average American.






Back after a long break wherein I got married. Thanks to all who are still checking in.

Pop quiz: who is most likely to shill for banks?

I'm frustrated by the apparent failure of bankruptcy reform efforts in congress. The New York Times just published an interesting article on where this ship ran aground. A couple of excerpts, briefly:

[...] the banks defeated the bankruptcy change — the industry picturesquely calls it the “cramdown” provision — by claiming that it would push up interest rates and slow the housing market’s recovery, even though academic studies have countered such claims.

The industry also steadfastly refused offers to negotiate over a weaker version. And it poured millions of dollars into lobbying: four of the industry’s top trade groups spent nearly as much on lobbying in the first three months of this year as they did in all of 2001.

[...] an industry strategy of dividing the Democrats had the most success. One target was Senator Mary Landrieu, the moderate Democrat from Louisiana.

I'm really disappointed in that one, because I gave up a month of my own time to go to Louisiana to volunteer in Sen. Landrieu's Dec. '02 runoff. (My supervisor was Mitch Stewart, who was the Iowa caucus director of Obama, and now sends most of you weekly emails as the national head of Organizing for America). Back to article:

Throughout it all, the banks took advantage of the Obama administration’s seeming ambivalence. Despite its occasional populist rhetoric, the White House was conspicuously absent from weeks of pivotal negotiations this spring. “This would have been a much different deal if Obama had pressed it,” said Camden R. Fine, head of the Independent Community Bankers of America and one of the chief lobbyists opposing the bankruptcy change. “The fact that Obama effectively sat it out helped us a great deal.”

That one I'm more OK with - it's not like the White House was off twiddling it's thumbs. The article goes on:

The industry’s worst fears began to come true in early January when Senator Charles E. Schumer announced that he had persuaded Citigroup to endorse the idea. Mr. Schumer had held discussions with Vikram S. Pandit, Citigroup’s chief executive, and Lewis B. Kaden, a vice chairman. Mr. Schumer then spoke to other top executives, including Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, hoping to peel more big banks away from the opposition.

The article goes on to explain that the reform bill's strongest proponents were Dick Durbin of Illinois and Chuck Schumer of New York, while Tom Carper of Delaware and Tim Johnson of South Dakota opposed the bill.

I can go on at length some other time about the economic and legal reasons why the consumer bankruptcy laws need changing, but let me just ask you a question from the political perspective: what does it mean when the senators from New York and Illinois want to get rid of special interest bank legislation, but the senators from those financial hubs of South Dakota, Delaware, and Louisiana work to keep it?

Another reason not to prosecute torture - litigation blows

Jeff and that guy who write the thing have captured some of the most important reasons not to prosecute, but may I add another? The Old 97s once sang, "telephones make strangers out of lovers," and that dynamic would also go to work here.

As far as I can tell, we made real advances on torture when John McCain and that excitable sidekick of his Lindsay Graham took up the fight. So now that Congress is investigating the lawyers, not contractors, CIA agents or soldiers, but just the lawyers, who is trying to make hay by fighting the anti-torture side? Lindsay Graham.

My favorite presentation of this debate would be the Democratic congressional leaders to play possum on this and let the Republicans like Graham and Hagel go on TV to argue with Dick Cheney. I understand why the dynamics of Congress don't really allow this to happen, but where we might have developed a national consensus that would keep this kind of thing from happening again because the collective conscience of the country understands that it's either ineffective and thus immoral (my position) or immoral a priori.

Instead, now all we have is an argument.

Global warming forces Island to evacuate

From Matt Yglesias:

The Carteret Islands, a somewhat outlying atoll off the coast of Papua New Guinea, don’t normally attract much attention. But it’s a shame more people weren’t paying attention in late April when a lone blogger, Dan Box, was on hand to witness the beginning of the islands’ evacuation. It’s a small atoll, you see, and relatively low-lying. Sea levels are rising. Flooding is increasing. And even though the island is still there, it’s no longer habitable: “King tides have washed away their crops and rising sea levels poisoned those that remain with salt,”wrote Box. These days, in other words, sometimes the high tide gets so high it buries the farmland, and even when it doesn’t, the salt permeates the soil. So 2,600 people need to move.

Still, it’s hard to miss the fact that the elite conversation in Washington, D.C., has a distinct air of frivolity about it that attention to events abroad might dispel. If it were announced that the United States of America was planning on dumping a load of poison on the Carteret Islands rendering them uninhabitable, I think even Sen. James Inhof of Oklahoma would be spurred to action. Certainly I doubt that you’d see a Blue Dog member of the House whining that since the poison factory is located in his district, he doesn’t see how we can possibly afford to stop producing the poison. Libertarians wouldn’t be arguing that the pristine logic of the free market grants companies the right to poison other people’s islands.

Clear-eyed on the costs of prosecuting the torturers

A reader writes into Andrew Sullivan with a theory on Obama's real position on prosecuting torture:

I’m sorry, but President Obama is going to break your heart on this one. He is not playing some long game, rope-a-dope, clever strategy which will allow him to ultimately expose Bush’s war crimes and prosecute them. In fact, he is going to do everything he can to squash all of this.

Imagine what such prosecutions would entail: years of courtroom drama, depositions, lawsuits and counter-suits; the long parade of powerful and high ranking ex- and current members of government, including a goodly number of Democrats, being called on the carpet and having to testify against one another; the enormous rancor and bitterness. This would be Watergate on steroids. And imagine the shot in the arm this would give the zombified Limbaugh Right.

The prosecutions you are asking for would simply swallow the Obama presidency whole. It is the kind of energy draining, oxygen consuming drama that is the nightmare of every president. It would come to define his presidency in the same way the Hostage Crisis defined Carter’s and there is zero chance he will opt for this.

President Obama is making a realistic, cold, clear-eyed cost-benefit analysis. This is the choice: Does he fix the economy, fix healthcare, get a handle on the two wars he’s dealing with, or does he prosecute Bush era war crimes? He has chosen his agenda and is asking us to choose that to.

I pretty much agree with this. Politics comes down to choosing- allocating resources. The main resource a President has is time and public attention. Obama can spend it on his agenda, or on prosecuting the torturers. I'd like to see these guys get their comeuppance too, but not at the cost of flushing Obama's agenda. It's easy and noble-sounding to pipe up about the paramount importance of the rule of law- and for the most part I agree with that. However, right now- nobody's torturing- because the good guys won the last election, and last I checked the dead-enders in the GOP who are supporting torture are polling at about 20%. They may be loud, but their strategy is being discredited as we speak.

The surest way to bring torture policies back to the US? An epic fail of Obama's programs that brings Sarah Palin to power in 2012.

Traffic Rules

Megan McArdle clarifies a point I've been thinking about a lot lately when dealing with the Administration's push to cram down the bondholders in the Chrysler bankruptcy:

The seniority rules have no particular moral priority; like traffic rules, they matter because they are the rules. People make decisions based on what the rules are, and if you change the rules without warning, you get nasty accidents.

Right now, senior debt is cheaper than junior debt; secured debt cheaper than unsecured. If you declare that there are no priority rules, because the government will step in and arrange things so its friends get to cut in line, then everyone will have to pay something close to what the most junior unsecured creditors get now. Not only will interest rates go up, but terms will shorten--no one wants to lend into a period when default risk can't be calculated. And companies that are particularly likely to have administration "friends"--union shops, when Democrats are in office; maybe oil companies or defense contractors for Republicans--are going to find it harder to do debt financing at all.

Most people underestimate just how economically valuable the rule of law is. A roughly stable investment environment that doesn't maximize social justice is undoubtedly better than an unpredictible one that tries to--just as the billions of poor people who live in states that have tried to exchange the former for the latter. The winners were not the dispossessed.

Well, I think it's about trade...

This graph, representing the responses to the question "What is Cap and Trade," leads me to believe that perhaps Obama should do a better job selling the program...

Mis-reporting on the Chrysler Bankruptcy?

Quite out of the ordinary that the administration has gotten so involved in the Chrysler bankruptcy, and that deserves to be a story line in the news reports, but I think articles such as this one, U.S. Played Rough with Chrylser Creditors, WSJ 5/11/09, kind of confuse the issues in the minds of most readers. Based on reading the excerpts below, what do you think the Creditors with whom rough was played by the U.S. ended up getting?

The results of these hardball tactics were on display Friday, as the last resisters of a deal to slash the value of Chrysler debt abandoned their effort to fight it in bankruptcy court. That raised the chances for a relatively swift transit through Chapter 11, producing a new Chrysler 55%-owned by a trust for union retirees, 35% by Fiat SpA -- which hasn't even been a Chrysler creditor -- and not at all by the senior secured lenders.

That conclusion would upend a longstanding tradition concerning rights in a bankruptcy: Senior secured lenders get paid in full before lower-priority creditors get anything. Not this time.

[...]

When the issue of the $6.9 billion in debt came up, Mr. Rattner looked at the lending group and said, "We have in mind for you a much lower number." He silenced the room by proposing they get just $1 billion.

While that wasn't the administration's bottom line, the task force had determined what was: the amount lenders would get in a liquidation of Chrysler assets. A Chrysler analysis in January estimated that at $2 billion. The UAW and Fiat knew about this figure, and also knew that the task force was first going to offer lenders just $1 billion. But the lenders, having waited so long to engage with the Treasury, were in the dark.

[...]

After receiving one more bank counteroffer, the Treasury on April 28 offered what it had planned all along, to buy out the lenders for $2 billion. The only sweetener was that it would be in cash, meaning the lenders didn't have to wait for a reorganized Chrysler-Fiat to pay it.

Mr. Rattner called Mr. Lee: "It's $2 billion, take it or leave it."

The big banks quickly agreed to the deal -- equal to 29 cents on the dollar. Though that offered a profit to a few firms that bought debt as low as 15 cents on the dollar, most of the lenders had paid 50 cents to 70 cents, and the banks 100 cents. News that the big banks were accepting the offer leaked before they had told the smaller lenders. "To say the least, we were floored," says one.

So what's the significance of 29 cents on the dollar, and how did that play in to the negotiations? That's the amount that the government estimated the secured lenders could get if the lenders liquidated the Chrysler assets. Maybe that number is a little low, but work with me here: if you lent 100 million dollars to build a Chrylser factory last year, Chrysler owes you 100 Mil, but what's the value of that factory now if you had to foreclose on it and sell it? There might not be a Chrysler company who plans to keep using it, all the competitors have their own plants, no one else is going to needs a plant in order to like... start a car company right now, and even if they did, what are the odds they want one in Michigan? 29 cents on the dollar sounds pretty reasonable, huh?

The rule in Chapter 11 cases is that to reorganize a company, you can force a creditor to take something other than full payment for his claim as long as he gets at least what he would in a liquidation. OK, now we've met that part of the test.

The fight then, was that some, but not all, of the lenders thought they could get more. What else did they want? The venture funds were looking for stock in a reorganized Chrysler. That new Chrysler stock has a lot of really cool built in features. First of all, the owners of the new stock wipe out the owners of the old stock, so they're already ahead of lots of people. Second, the new company benefits from cabining off a lot of the previously open-ended liability of the old company, which could be a really big deal with liabilities for things like retiree health care. Third, a lot of the other liabilities of the company get paid off out of a really good type of loan available in bankruptcy (debtor in possession financing) that really isn't available to businesses outside of bankruptcy. Fourth, the new company can emerge lean and mean by shedding a lot of unprofitable business units or product lines that would have been tough to drop outside of bankruptcy. All in all, this means that the new stock is a product of the bankruptcy process, it can be really valuable, and a lot of the lenders were planning on getting some.

So what did the lenders lose? Their entire investments? Not even close. They got paid that same 29 cents on the dollar they would see in liquidation, but they got none of the upside of participating in a reorganization. This is pretty unusual, because in all but very large cases, the lenders are the only ones with the money or legal position to keep fighting. It's unusual, but it's not illegal, it's not the result of bullying and intimidation, it's not the result of Putin/Chavez-style crony-capitalism, it's just unusual.

My point here isn't that the Obama effort on Chrysler was divinely conceived and should be beyond scrutiny; my point is that just focusing on the Obama administration role and ignoring the underlying legal and business dynamics only gives you a slightly misleading part of the picture. It's not that the lenders were denied something they had a right to, it's more like they were denied instead something they had a chance at. Some would be-Madame DeFarge figure is certainly weaving the Chrysler episode in to the long memory of the right wing, and I don't expect this explanation to influence any of those, but here's hoping that maybe the other 88% of the country can get a better handle on these issues by seeing the shape of the whole Chrysler bankruptcy forest and not just silhouette of the Obama tree.