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Monthly Archives: June 2021

Burrito economics: Republican claims about price rises are so much hot air


Robert Reich

Sun 13 Jun 2021 01.00 EDT

House Republicans are blaming Democrats for the rise in Chipotle burrito prices.

You heard me right. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) issued a statement on Wednesday claiming that Chipotle’s recent decision to raise prices on their burritos and other menu products by about 4% was caused by Democrats.

“Democrats’ socialist stimulus bill caused a labor shortage and now burrito lovers everywhere are footing the bill,” said an NRCC spokesman, Mike Berg.

It seems Republicans have finally found an issue to run on in the 2022 midterm elections. Apparently Dr Seuss and Mr Potato Head weren’t gaining enough traction.

The GOP’s tortured logic is that the unemployment benefits in the American Rescue Plan have caused workers to stay home rather than seek employment, resulting in labor shortages that have forced employers like Chipotle to increase wages, which has required them to raise their prices.

Hence, Chipotle’s more expensive burrito.

This isn’t just loony economics. It’s dangerously loony economics because it might be believed, leading to all sorts of stupid public policies.

Start with the notion that $300 per week in federal unemployment benefits is keeping Americans from working.

Since fewer than 30% of jobless workers qualify for state unemployment benefits, the claim is that legions of workers have chosen to become couch potatoes and collect $15,000 a year rather than get a job.

Republicans have found an issue to run on. Apparently Dr Seuss and Mr Potato Head weren’t gaining enough traction

I challenge one Republican lawmaker to live on $15,000 a year.

In fact, evidence suggests that workers who are holding back from re-entering the job market don’t have childcare or are still concerned about their health during the pandemic.

Besides, if employers want additional workers, they can do what they necessarily do for anything they want more of but can’t obtain at its current price – pay more.

It’s  called capitalism. Republicans should bone up on it.

When Chipotle wanted to attract more workers, it raised its average wage to $15 an hour. That comes to around $30,000 a year per worker – still too little to live on but double the federal unemployment benefit.

Oh, and there’s no reason to suppose this wage hike forced Chipotle to raise the prices of its burrito. The company had other options.

Chipotle’s executives are among the best paid in America. Its chief executive, Brian Niccol, raked in $38m last year – which happens to be 2,898 times more than the typical Chipotle employee. All Chipotle’s top executives got whopping pay increases.

So, it would have been possible for Chipotle to avoid raising its burrito prices by – dare I say? – paying its executives less. But Chipotle decided otherwise.

I’m not going to second-guess Chipotle’s business decision – nor should the NRCC.

By the way, I keep hearing Republican lawmakers say the GOP is the “party of the working class”. If that’s so, it ought to celebrate when hourly workers get a raise instead of howling about it.

Everyone ought to celebrate when those at the bottom get higher wages.

The typical American worker hasn’t had a real raise in four decades. Income inequality is out of control. Wealth inequality is into the stratosphere (where Jeff Bezos is heading, apparently).

If wages at the bottom rise because employers need to pay more to get the workers they need, that’s not a problem. It’s a victory.

Instead of complaining about a so-called “labor shortage”, Republicans ought to be complaining about the shortage of jobs paying a living wage.

Don’t hold your breath, or your burrito.

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The Most Anti American Member of The Congress


McConnell: “Highly unlikely” he would allow Biden to fill Supreme Court vacancy in 2024

Orion RummlerMon, June 14, 2021, 10:58 AM

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday that it is “highly unlikely” a Supreme Court nominee picked by Biden would be confirmed in 2024 if Republicans take control of the Senate.

Why it matters: A record number of judges, plus three Supreme Court justices, were confirmed under Trump. Democrats have pledged to “restore the balance” of the courts.

What they’re saying: Hewitt asked if McConnell would block Biden from filling a 2024 Supreme Court vacancy as he blocked Obama from replacing the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

  • “Well, I think in the middle of a presidential election, if you have a Senate of the opposite party of the president, you have to go back to the 1880s to find the last time a vacancy was filled,” McConnell said.
  • “So I think it’s highly unlikely. In fact, no, I don’t think either party if it controlled, if it were different from the president, would confirm a Supreme Court nominee in the middle of an election. What was different in 2020 was we were of the same party as the president.”
Rob Rogers Comic Strip for June 15, 2021
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George Washington Predicted Donald Trump: why doesn’t everyone know this?



Matthew Rozsa  1 day ago

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As my colleague Amanda Marcotte frequently points out, conservative ideology these days seems to boil down to little more than “owning the libs.” If you manage to achieve “triggering a lib,” maybe you get imaginary bonus points — perhaps the Star Theme from Super Mario Bros. plays in your head.

Well, I think it’s time for liberals to return the favor. We should repeatedly bring up the fact that America’s most important founding father, George Washington, warned us about the rise of Donald Trump.

No, he didn’t know the man’s name, of course — he wasn’t a time traveler or a clairvoyant — but he described Trump’s personality and actions in detail. Washington was president as the United States prepared to hold its first contested presidential election — he was elected twice without opposition — and wanted to make sure it would run smoothly. More than that, he wanted to make sure all future elections ran smoothly. So in his famous Farewell Address, he outlined what an enemy of this democratic process might look like. The speech was published during the 1796 election between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the two great rivals of early American politics.

The most relevant section of the document (most of which reads as fairly antiquated today) is pretty much a giant spoiler alert for everything Trump did to undermine the results of the 2020 election, an effort that began long before a single ballot had been cast. When you get right down to it, one of the likeliest ways for American democracy to reach its breaking point would be if a presidential candidate refused to accept the will of the people. More than two centuries before that happened, Washington foresaw exactly how it would go down.

Although the ideas were entirely Washington’s the address was largely written by Alexander Hamilton. At one point, the man on the one dollar bill warns that partisanship could lead to the rise of a dictator. Decrying the “baneful effects of the spirit of party generally,” he argued that if partisanship reaches a fever pitch, it could “gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual.”

Washington also warned that hyper-partisanship “opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.” He was worried that these factors could facilitate the rise of “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” who would manipulate partisan anger to “subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

Does any of that sound familiar? Trump has close and somewhat mysterious ties to Vladimir Putin’s government, and former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report demonstrated that his campaign worked with individuals connected to Russia during the 2016 presidential election. When Trump abused his power in an effort to pressure Ukraine into opening an investigation into Joe Biden, Senate Republicans — intimidated by a voter base that, intoxicated by “the baneful effects of the spirit of party,” had come to value defeating Democrats over everything else — rigged his impeachment trial so that partisanship would prevail over justice.

Then Republicans did it again when, after years of conditioning his supporters to believe that any election he loses has been stolen, he became the first defeated president to refuse to accept his loss — and led an insurrection attempt as a result. (After John Tyler, who sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War, Trump became the second president to indisputably betray the Constitution.) Now Republicans have allowed Trump to transform the party in his image, not caring that he put many of their own lives in danger. They are using a Big Lie to erode democracy.

And what did Washington think the climax of all of this hyper-partisanship — as manifested in the above “hypothetical” examples — would be?

The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

Trump is, to a T, what the Father of His Country predicted. Opponents of Trump, Trumpers and Trumpism need to bring this up waaaaaaay more often.

For what it’s worth, I was tempted to bring up two other relevant sections of Washington’s Farewell Address. One, which pertains to foreign policy, prophesied the rise of American imperialism and is interesting for that reason, but isn’t directly relevant here. The other, which denounces “all obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities,” I simply don’t support. True, that suggests Washington would clearly have disapproved of the Jan. 6 rioters and their defenders, but not necessarily for the right reason. The problem with the Capitol attack, at its core, is that it was a battle for a baseless and unjust cause. If the rioters had been fighting for human rights rather than fascism — like the civil rights protests of the 1960s, or at least a cause better than shared omnipotence with a malignant narcissist — their actions might have been theoretically defensible.

In any case, those who fight for democracy today should embrace Washington’s Farewell Address. We don’t need to pretend that Washington was an impeccable and virtuous hero, or look past his numerous flaws. But he wasn’t wrong about democracy. His greatest achievement was not defeating the British in the Revolutionary War. It was leaving office in 1797 and handing the reins to Adams, his elected successor — establishing a precedent that Adams knew he had to follow four years later, when he lost his rematch with Jefferson in the bitterly contested election of 1800. It was the precedent that every president followed until Trump lost to Biden in 2020. Washington showed that democratic government could function, for the first time in modern history, because the nation’s leaders would respect the will of the people. 

I once attended a reenactment of Adams’ inauguration as part of my journey covering Barack Obama’s second inauguration for Mic (then PolicyMic) in 2013. When the tour guide read from a contemporary account describing the tension in the room as people wondered whether Washington’s troops would arrest Adams so the first president could stay in power, it felt like a bizarre account from ancient history. Only eight years later, the very people who would claim to venerate Washington’s footsteps have made that 1797 report seem like this week’s headlines.

Washington stepping down from power was the first thing that made America great. If Republicans really want to Make America Great Again, they need to heed Washington’s message — and dump the “cunning, ambitious and unprincipled man” on whose behalf they seem willing to destroy democracy.

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Kevin Hart speaks out on cancel culture: ‘When did we get to a point where life was supposed to be perfect?’



Go Kevin

Erin Donnelly

Sun, June 13, 2021, 1:06 PM

According to Kevin Hart, he “personally [doesn’t] give a s***” about so-called cancel culture — but he certainly has a lot to say on the matter.

The comedian and star of the upcoming Netflix film Fatherhood, who weathered his own backlash after old homophobic jokes resurfaced and resulted in him stepping down from his Oscars hosting gig in 2019, spoke out about internet outrage in a raw new interview with the Sunday Times.

“If somebody has done something truly damaging then, absolutely, a consequence should be attached,” Hart told the U.K. newspaper. “But when you just talk about… nonsense? When you’re talking, ‘Someone said! They need to be taken [down]!’ Shut the f*** up! What are you talking about?

“When did we get to a point where life was supposed to be perfect?” the Get Hard star continued. “Where people were supposed to operate perfectly all the time? I don’t understand. I don’t expect perfection from my kids. I don’t expect it from my wife, friends, employees. Because, last I checked, the only way you grow up is from f***ing up. I don’t know a kid who hasn’t f***ed up or done some dumb shit.”

–

The 41-year-old touched on his own controversies, saying he didn’t let the backlash affect him. He went on to argue that those who do make mistakes be given the opportunity to learn, grow and move on. 

“I’ve been canceled, what, three or four times? Never bothered,” he said. “If you allow it to have an effect on you, it will. Personally? That’s not how I operate. 

“I understand people are human,” he added. “Everyone can change. It’s like jail. People get locked up so they can be taught a lesson. When they get out, they are supposed to be better. But if they come out and people go, ‘I’m not giving you a job because you were in jail’ — then what the f*** did I go to jail for? That was my punishment — how do you not give those people a shot? They’re saying that all life should be over because of a mistake? Your life should end and there should be no opportunity to change? What are you talking about? And who are you to make that decision?”

According to Hart, comedians like himself are holding themselves back for fear of running afoul of a sensitive climate. 

“You’re thinking that things you say will come back and bite you on the ass,” he said of censoring his material. “I can’t be the comic today that I was when I got into this.”

He later clarified that ruffling feathers with an off-color joke is “not necessarily about cancel culture, it’s backlash. 

“It’s about the intent behind what you say — there’s an assumption it’s always bad and, somehow, we forgot comedians are going for the laugh. You’re not saying something to make people angry. That’s not why I’m on stage. I’m trying to make you laugh and if I did not make you laugh I failed. That’s my consequence.”

Ultimately, Hart feels that society should be able to have disagreement without division or backlash. 

“If there’s a message to take from anything I’ve said, it’s that in this world of opinion, it’s OK to just disagree,” he told the paper. “It’s OK to not like what someone did and to say that person wasn’t for me. We are so caught up in everybody feeling like they have to be right and their way is the only way. Politics is f***ed up because, if you don’t choose our side, you’re dumb.

“It’s a divide. It’s f***ed up. But I’m not about to divide. I don’t support the divide! I put everybody in the f***ing building. We all come into this building Kevin Hart is in and we all laugh. I bring people together — like it or not.”

The father of four also addressed the controversy surrounding his Oscars announcement and his past jokes about the LGBTQ community. 

“If people want to pull up stuff, go back to the same tweets of old, go ahead,” he said. “There is nothing I can do. You’re looking at a younger version of myself. A comedian trying to be funny and, at that attempt, failing. Apologies were made. I understand now how it comes off. I look back and cringe. So it’s growth. It’s about growth.”

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American democracy is at risk from Trump and the Republicans. What can be done?


Sun 6 Jun 2021 11.56 EDT

  •  
  • Pippa Norris 
  • The Capitol attack was a warning: US democracy is at risk. To fix the system before the 2022 midterms, two steps have to be enacted
  •  

Academics rarely agree about the big issues, and generally hesitate to enter the political fray by signing collective public statements. Yet a few days ago, more than 100 leading scholars of democracy endorsed a remarkable Statement of Concern, which I also signed, warning about grave threats to American democracy and the deterioration of US elections.

“We urge members of Congress to do whatever is necessary – including suspending the filibuster – in order to pass national voting and election administration standards that both guarantee the vote to all Americans equally, and prevent state legislatures from manipulating the rules in order to manufacture the result they want. Our democracy is fundamentally at stake. History will judge what we do at this moment.”

Why the alarm? Is this warranted?

On 14 December 2020, after courts litigated challenges and all 50 states certified the count, the electoral college formally declared the defeat of Donald Trump. Most assumed that the peaceful and orderly transition in power would follow, following historical traditions for over 200 years. Instead, the world was shocked to witness the violent Capitol insurrection on 6 January, triggering five deaths, 140 people injured and more than 400 arrests.

But even this unprecedented attack on Congress was not the end of the assault on the unwritten norms and practices of American democracy and the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s win.

For months, the big lie claiming a “stolen election” has continued to be spread relentlessly by the former president, his close advisers, Republican lawmakers and rightwing sympathizers on cable news and social media. According to many polls, two-thirds of Republicans continue to believe that Biden’s victory was fraudulent. In Arizona, the Republican party hired a private firm to conduct an audit of the certified vote count.

It is reported that Trump is obsessed about the use of audits to overturn results in other close states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, believing that he will be returned to office in August. In state houses, Republicans have long expressed concern about the risks of electoral fraud and the need to tighten registration procedures and balloting facilities. The Brennan Center reports that since January this year, 22 new laws restricting voting rights have been enacted in 14 states. For the 2021 legislative session, almost 400 bills restricting voting rights have been tabled in 48 states.

Challenges to democracy are increasing worldwide. The long spread of “third-wave” democracies across the globe from the mid-1970s stalled around 2005 – since when scholars have noted accumulating indicators of democratic backsliding and rising authoritarianism in many countries.

Contrary to popular commentary, signs of democratic deterioration in America were on the wall well before Trump became president – such as persistent gridlock in US Congress, deepening cultural polarization and the corrupting role of dark money in politics. The backsliding has accelerated during the last four years, with attacks on the news media, risks to the impartiality of the courts, and the weakening role of Congress as an effective check and balance on executive power.

The US electoral system has also long been problematic, notably extreme partisan gerrymandering, the composition of the electoral college, rural over-representation in the Senate, lack of electoral standards as the supreme court rolled back federal oversight of state elections established by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, low turnout and the expansion of misinformation in the media. Since Bush v Gore in 2000, serious challenges to electoral legitimacy, and growing party polarization over the rules of the game, have gradually deepened. The Electoral Integrity Project has used expert surveys to evaluate the quality of national elections around the world since 2012 and found that US elections have persistently been graded poorly by EIP experts, scoring next to last among the world’s liberal democracies, and ranking about 45th out of 166 nations worldwide.

Unfortunately, Republican federal and state lawmakers have no rational incentives to abandon Trump and the big lie about electoral fraud, even if they recognize the falsehood. Most incumbents are nominated through party primaries and hold safe districts due to partisan gerrymandering, so Republican chances of re-election depend on throwing red meat to the Maga base, not building a broader coalition among moderate independents.

What is to be done?

To fix the system, two steps are essential. Both need to be enacted before the November 2022 midterm elections, when the Democrats are likely to lose control of the Senate, if history is any guide.

First, the Senate filibuster has to go as a relic of a bygone era. Worldwide, about 41 national legislatures have some supermajority rules but in nearly all cases these are only used, quite sensibly, for constitutional amendments, not for routine legislation (like establishing the 6 January commission). The rule benefits the opposition party seeking gridlock in DC and stymies effective electoral reform.

The Senate rules are not fixed in stone and they can be amended by their own members through various procedural initiatives. The benefits of the filibuster rule for non-constitutional amendments are doubtful and the harm for gridlock has never been more serious. The Senate needs to act urgently to change its procedural rules to protect American democracy.

Second, the US Senate needs to pass the HR1 For the People Act. This offers a comprehensive package of moderate reforms designed to protect voting rights in US elections, reduce partisan gerrymandering, make campaign spending more transparent and tighten ethics in public life. Getting rid of extreme partisan gerrymandering and ultra-safe districts is vital to incentivize House candidates to appeal broadly to all citizens well beyond their base. The Senate also needs to pass HR4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, restoring provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act requiring certain states to pre-clear changes to their voting laws with the federal government, which had been struck down earlier by the US supreme court in Shelby County v Holder.

A series of other reforms are highly desirable in the long term but impractical right now.

One is adopting non-partisan blanket primaries, as in Washington and California, where the two candidates with the highest vote share get to run in the general election, irrespective of their party affiliation. This increases the incentive for all candidates to reach out to a broader constituency than the party base, so it is likely to encourage the election of more moderate lawmakers in Congress.

Another is designed to break the stranglehold on two-party winner-take-all competition, ideally by implementing a mixed-member proportional electoral system for the US House, like Germany and New Zealand, with an enlarged number of members, or ranked-choice voting in multimember districts.

Yet another reform is adopting a compulsory retirement age for members of Congress, like the minimum age requirement, to increase incumbency turnover, limit gerontocracy and expand representation for the younger generation of leaders, women and minorities.

These are all worthy matters for future debate about long-term constitutional and legal reforms to American elections, a generational project. But, in the short term, the most urgent and practical priorities right now facing the Senate majority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer, means wrangling the US Senate to abolish the filibuster rule and then to pass some version of HR 1 and HR 4. The laws would still face major challenges through the courts. But if they don’t get enacted, American democracy is at risk.

The sixth of January was the warning bell. The stress test of the 2022 midterm elections is fast approaching. Other countries have seen democratic breakdown. This is not alarmism. Alas, it’s real.

  • Professor Pippa Norris is a comparative political scientist at Harvard University and founding director of the www.ElectoralIntegrityProject.com
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How the For the People Act Would Strengthen Campaign Finance Rules


Changes in the bill would help the FEC fulfill its mission of restraining the role of money in America’s political system.

June 1, 2021

This piece was originally published in The Hill.

At a Senate hearing in May on the For the People Act, the landmark democracy reform bill that passed the House in March and is now pending in the Senate, opponents of the bill repeatedly attacked provisions that would overhaul the Federal Election Commission, our nation’s troubled campaign finance regulator. The FEC reform provisions drew more ire than any of the bill’s other campaign finance reforms, with Senators predicting that the agency would become a “partisan weapon,” to quote Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) that Democrats would use to persecute Republicans.

In reality, the bill’s changes are fairly modest, and unlikely to result in the commission being weaponized against either party. But they will make it a more functional body capable of enforcing the law as written. For defenders of the status quo like Cruz and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (who has been attacking these provisions of the bill for years), any effort to have the FEC actually fulfill its statutory mission to restrain the role of money in our political system is unacceptable. 

Their views might have salience “under the Dome” of the Capitol, but they are out of step with the American people.

By any ordinary measure, the evenly-divided FEC — where I worked as a senior staffer to one of the Democratic commissioners — is not doing its job. 

On enforcement, a commission vote is required to even investigate serious legal violations. Usually those votes deadlock along party lines, often after the commission has sat on a matter for years. That happened most recently in connection to hush money payments made to the adult film star Stormy Daniels on behalf of former President Trump shortly before the 2016 election. The commission’s professional nonpartisan staff recommended investigating whether Trump and the Trump Organization intentionally broke the law (former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was prosecuted by the Department of Justice and went to prison on the same facts), but commissioners split on whether to follow the staff recommendation and the matter died.

The FEC also struggles to update its rules, which have not kept pace with changing laws or technology. Most recently, a modest proposal to improve transparency for certain online campaign ads like those the Kremlin and other malign foreign actors have used to manipulate the U.S. electorate has languished for years. 

The For the People Act would tackle these problems by reducing the number of commissioners from six to five, to make it easier for decisions to be made by a majority vote. It would also allow the president to designate a chairperson to oversee the agency’s day-to-day operations. And it would give the agency’s nonpartisan staff more authority to investigate wrongdoing on their own initiative.

These are not radical reforms (similar proposals have garnered bipartisan support in the last three Congresses). They would simply make the FEC more like other long-established federal regulators, such as the Federal Communications Commission and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. 

And unlike these other bodies, the FEC still would not be controlled by the president’s party. The For the People Act reserves one of the commission’s five seats for a political independent, who cannot have been affiliated in any way with either of the two major parties for the preceding five years. It also sets up a bipartisan blue-ribbon panel to vet potential nominees, which typically does not exist for other agencies. These are much stronger safeguards than exist under current law.

Unlike other federal regulators, the FEC does not even have power to directly levy penalties for lawbreaking in most instances. Instead it has to seek them in court, adding an extra layer of protection. The For the People Act would not significantly change this process.

So what’s behind all the sound and fury? 

While the bill would not turn the FEC into an all-powerful election overseer, it would allow the agency to fulfill its core mission of interpreting and diligently enforcing the law. For the most zealous opponents of campaign finance regulation (including powerful U.S. senators), that is simply a bridge too far. 

They simply do not view most restrictions on campaign money as legitimate. McConnell and his allies have waged a decades-long court battle to get these rules invalidated. Those efforts have met with only partial success. Even the notorious Citizens United decision resoundingly upheld transparency requirements for political spending and left in place limits on direct contributions to candidates. But with the main agency charged with enforcing such rules largely missing in action, the protection they offer our political system is mostly hollow.

This is not what Americans want. Poll after poll shows lopsided majorities in favor of stronger campaign finance rules. When asked, Americans also make clear they want those rules enforced.

That simply will not happen until we fix the FEC.

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