What’s
Wrong Today:

Now that
the Senate’s passed an immigration bill, everyone wants to know what the House
is going to do, and there are a few theories about what happens next. Speaker
John Boehner, at a briefing last Thursday, said the House
would not take up the Senate bill and would pass its own bill, but only if a
majority of Republicans backed it. Although he didn’t say it, that is known as
the “Hastert Rule”. From the Wrongologist  in March:

Although Republicans
hold 234 seats in congress and just 218 votes are required to pass legislation,
the question is, are there are more than 17 Republicans who will refuse to
support any Immigration Bill? The answer is certainly yes.

The question is: Can Mr. Boehner lead his caucus?

There are doubters. Roll
Call reports that the Club for Growth and Heritage Action for America are
out to depose Mr. Boehner:

Mr.
Boehner has had continuing problems leading his caucus. Recently, the
Senate-passed Farm Bill failed
to pass the House. The vote wasn’t even particularly close: 234-195 against passage, as 62 Republicans voted against the bill.

Remember
Boehner’s Plan B? It was Mr. Boehner’s fiscal cliff tax proposal that in
December 2012 would have extended the Bush tax cuts on income for those who
earn $1 million or less. Even on the day of the expected vote, he said it would
pass, but it failed to win even enough support in the Republican Conference and
the vote was canceled. 

Of the 234 House Republicans,
48 are members
of the Tea Party Caucus and 4 representatives are former members of the
Tea Party caucus. 201 members are Democrats. So, a majority of the House – 253 of 435
members – are either Tea Party Republicans or Democrats, leaving only 180 members who are more or less mainstream Republicans to form
the basis of a functioning center-right coalition.

At some
point, the House will probably pass something related to immigration reform. It
might not resemble the Senate version. It might be 100% about border security,
but some bill will serve as a vehicle to go to a Conference Committee with the
Senate.

Then the
House will vote on assigning members to serve on the Conference Committee. That
requires a majority vote. The Senate has a similar process, although approval
of their conferees is not in doubt. Speaker Boehner will not have an easy time
convincing the majority of his caucus to assign conferees because he cannot
assure them that the Conference Committee will produce a bill that they can
support.

Instead, he
has assured them that he won’t allow a vote on the Conference Report if the
majority doesn’t support it.

In order
for a bill to become a law, both Houses have to pass an identical version of
the bill. That is what the Conference
Report is. Apparently, many House Republicans suspect that the
Conference Report will be a bill that they can’t support.

It’s hard
to see how the Conference Committee can create a report than the Democrats can
support and that the president is willing to sign, but is also acceptable to
the majority of the House. The way it looks right now is that the
Committee will produce a report that the House will reject.

So Mr.
Boehner is caught in a vise: Many traditional Republican supporters favor the
Senate bill. They include: Grover Nordquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, the US
Chamber of Commerce, the Small Business Majority, the National Association of
Manufacturers and the Financial Services Forum.  

He faces
attacks from his right by the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth, and a
revolt from the Tea Party caucus, while most of his traditional sources of
support want him to bring forward something close to the Senate’s bill.

Can Mr.
Boehner find a way to lead on Immigration? If he can, perhaps it will be by
making a deal with most of the 201 House Democrats and 40 or so Republicans.

That would
likely be the end of his ride as Speaker, so don’t bet on Boehner’s leadership
stepping in front of his partisanship in 2013.

The worst
possible outcome for the GOP would be for something like the Senate bill to
become law over the explicit objections of the House leadership. It would give
Democrats a huge policy victory and leave Republicans without the political
dividends they’d pocket if they were equal partners in the reform effort.

It would really
exacerbate their problems with Hispanic voters. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said:

But the
longer the House takes on immigration, the more the 2016 presidential election
will emerge as a factor in the Republicans’ thinking about how to pass a bill.

The trick
Republicans are trying to play is to win additional seats in the Senate by claiming
they supported the immigration bill, while retaining their majority in the
House by claiming they did not vote to pass the Senate version of the bill.

Hard to
see how this is a winning strategy for their party. Certainly it is not a
winning strategy for the country.

Harry Truman never minced words:

Wrong Quote of the Week:

John McCain brags about
the Senate immigration bill, that it creates the “most militarized border since
the fall of the Berlin Wall.”  Kinda makes you proud, don’t
it?

Chief Justice Roberts: The 1965 Voting Rights Act is “antiquated”

Liberty, meet Justice:

‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy:

Remain silent at the Ballot Box:

NSA = Not Sayin’ Anything:

Meet your new buddy:

What’s
Wrong Today:

“If we desire respect
for the law, we must first make the law respectable” – Justice Louis D. Brandeis

When
Edward Snowden leaked classified information about US intelligence programs
this month, he became either a criminal, a conscientious citizen, or maybe both,
depending on your viewpoint and to some degree, your politics.

He is also
the gift that keeps on giving: The NYT
today reports on a new disclosure by Snowden:

The
Times says that the report is the latest document given to the Guardian by Snowden. It
may clear up a long-running mystery over which program White House officials
wanted Mr. Ashcroft and other Justice Department officials to sign off on when
they went to his Washington hospital room.

Snowden’s saga is
very useful for one reason: It’s forced us to think about how (or if) we strike
a balance between privacy and security. It’s a conversation long overdue; as
our lives become ever more digital and electronic, there’s an inevitable and
corresponding loss of privacy. We’ve mutely acquiesced to turning ever greater
quantities of our personal information over to entities who do with it…well,
who knows what?

That the National
Security Agency (NSA) is sitting on a treasure trove of cell phone metadata is
hardly surprising. The question is what they’ll use it for, and if this
represents the beginning of a descent down a slippery slope: today, cell phone
metadata; tomorrow, listening to our phone calls?

From Bloomberg:

Snowden’s
location and motives are interesting to speculate about, but they shouldn’t
distract attention from what really matters in all this:

• Twelve
  years after the Sept. 11 attacks (and two years after the killing of Osama bin
  Laden) the security apparatus created in response is growing, not shrinking.

• The
  US government is monitoring its citizens’ communications on a scale that was previously unknown and is
  without precedent.

• The
  Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) has declined just 11 of the government’s
  more than 33,900 surveillance requests.

• The
  legal interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which is used by that
  court to rule on government requests for information, is classified. So the laws that enable this
  surveillance are themselves, in effect, secret.

• The
  group meant to guarantee appropriate privacy safeguards, the Privacy and Civil
  Liberties Oversight Board, was authorized by Congress in 2007, but didn’t get a
  full-time chairman until last month, and has met with President Barack Obama
  exactly once.

Bloomberg
continues:

We can understand
that we can’t have people disclosing secrets left and right, but what happens
when/if our government oversteps? It’s easy to demonize a whistleblower, but
how else would we know if our government is engaged in activities that run
counter to preserving and protecting democracy?

The
reaction of our mainstream media to the NSA leaks, by disparaging leaker Edward
Snowden, has exposed cable news and other mainstream media outlets as government
mouthpieces that have allowed very few points of view to be aired.

Consider
Andrew Ross Sorkin, a writer the Wrongologist follows: After Snowden made it
out of Hong Kong to Russia, Sorkin expressed his frustration:

“We’ve
screwed this up, to even let him get to Russia.”  By “we,” he meant the US
government. Last time we checked, Sorkin worked for the New York Times, not the government.  

Sorkin declared on CNBC that maybe Glen Greenwald should be arrested:

If these
were independent journalists, they would be dissecting the impacts of NSA
surveillance on privacy rights, trying to separate fact from fiction. But, the US
news media are obsessed with questions like: How much damage has Snowden caused? How can he be brought to justice? Is Putin the winner vs. Obama?

Many pundits, after a
few days of vague discussion, think they have heard enough to strike the
balance between liberty and security. Many seem confident that the government
is doing nothing more than relieving Verizon, AT&T and Facebook of their data storage problems.  So what if government agents can, on
occasion, sift through years of phone and Internet records if they need to find
a contact with a suspicious foreigner?

Americans want to accept
assurances that specific conversations are only rarely exhumed and only when
allowed by the FISA court. Such sifting and warrants — in unexplained
combination with more conventional intelligence efforts — are now said by
President Obama and his team, to have prevented several dozen potential
terrorist attacks, with elliptical references to threats against New York
City’s subways and Stock Exchange.

From Max Frankel in
the NYT: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Until Snowden, the
very existence of the enterprise was “top secret” and publicly denied, even in
Congressional hearings. Even now, the project remains secret in every important
respect.

Frankel, who was at
the Times for the Pentagon Papers: (emphasis
by the Wrongologist):

How do you balance
security and privacy? When does the collection of data violate the 4th
Amendment? If we don’t have this
conversation now, we’ll soon live in a country we no longer recognize.
If we continue to mutely acquiesce to the idea that government knows best and
should be allowed to do what it thinks needs to be done to keep us safe, we’ll
become proof of Benjamin Franklin’s belief that those who would sacrifice
liberty for security deserve neither.

Franklin was ahead of
his time, because modern-day America is proving his thesis to be spot-on.

Can we trust our
government? Should we trust our government? The answer to those questions have
never been more important.

Errol
Flynn (playing Robin Hood) in The Adventures of Robin Hood when asked if he
blamed Prince John for England’s problems, said:

It’s
sad that Americans have to depend on outlaws like Snowden and other
whistleblowers for the truth.

 

What’s
Wrong Today:

As the
Wrongologist pointed out yesterday, Justice
Ginsburg’s dissent in Shelby County vs.
Holder
outlines the Congress’s findings from the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting
Rights Act:

Congress
discovered roughly 1,800 instances between 1982 and 2006 in which areas covered
by Section 4 of the Act were prevented from enacting voting laws that were
discriminatory in nature. That averages out to 67 attempts to discriminate per
year, every year, for 24 straight years.

There are
three sections of the Voting Rights Act that are directly relevant to the
Supreme Court’s ruling:

Section 2
of the Act allows anyone from any jurisdiction to challenge a governmental
entity that attempts to discriminate in the electoral process. This is almost
always done after the fact: Someone was denied the right to vote, or a class of
people had their vote suppressed, or districts were drawn that were
discriminatory in nature and the Feds look into it.

Section 4
defines those areas of the country that have a history and record of racial
discrimination and that must get advanced clearance (the preclearance requirement) under Section 5 in order to
make any changes in their election laws.

The
Supreme Court invalidated the formula that Congress used to craft Section 4,
which means that no jurisdictions are currently subject to Section 5.

If the law
had been the way it is now between 1982 and 2006, all 1,800 violations referenced
above would have had to have been addressed under Section 2, and addressing them would have occurred after
the elections.

So, will we be looking
at intended consequences or unintended consequences? How rapidly will southern
Republicans move to take advantage of SCOTUS’ decision striking down Section 4
of the Voting Rights Act to restrict who can vote?  You’d think after years of claiming that
Section 4 and Section 5 were unnecessary, southern Republicans would pause a decent interval before proving
the point of voting rights advocates that prior review of voting
changes in the Deep South remain a necessity.

However, Talking
Points Memo reports the following:

Within
hours of Tuesday’s decision, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott declared on Twitter:
“Eric Holder can no longer deny VoterID in Texas.” The Texas Department of
Public Safety announced later in the day that on Thursday it would begin
distributing photo IDs under a 2011 law that Holder’s lawyers had blocked under
Section 5.

In
Mississippi, the Secretary of State said her office would begin enforcing a
pending voter ID law for primaries in June 2014.

North
Carolina Republicans said they plan swift action on a pending voter ID bill.

So the remaining
question is just how blatant the disenfranchisement of blacks, Hispanics, and
college students will become.

Perhaps creating
even the most restrictive voter ID laws will not be enough. The next logical
step (along with discriminatory redistricting) will be to make voting so
physically taxing that minority voters are unable to cast votes, more like what
we saw in 2012.

The Election
of 2010 enabled Republican-controlled statehouses to begin a coordinated
strategy to suppress the votes of blacks, Hispanics, the poor and the young –
seen as predominantly Democratic voters – by requiring photo IDs, tightening
eligibility and reducing voting hours.

That plan,
however, ran afoul of the Voting Rights Act, especially in Old Confederacy
states like Texas which were covered by the preclearance requirement of the
law. Using the Act, the Justice Department was able to beat back most of the
attempts to infringe on suffrage – and minorities provided key votes to reelect
President Obama in 2012.

Kerry Kennedy, (RFK’s daughter)
in the NYT
today:

She
went on to say that the Voting Rights Act remains:

The Right’s
current message remains wrapped up in the word “liberty”. But that message includes the “liberty” of white Americans to reign over — and rein in —
non-white Americans.

That
sentiment was at the heart of the Jim Crow laws: Denying citizenship rights to
blacks despite the 14th and 15th amendments; it can be
seen today in the Right’s longstanding refusal to grant congressional voting
rights to District of Columbia residents, most of whom are black and who face
“taxation without representation”; it is reflected in the Right’s obsession
with the conspiracy theory about Obama being born in Kenya; and it fires up
Republican opposition to immigration reform since it would permit some 11
million undocumented immigrants — mostly Hispanic — to eventually gain
citizenship and the right to vote.

Conservatives
and bigots created the original Jim Crow laws, and we’ve already heard cheers from
some Republicans eager to return to a time when the feds didn’t interfere with the
sovereign ability of white southerners to decide who was worthy to vote.

It’s like watching a tape of that
1965 march across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma played in reverse. To that end,
expect to see Republican-controlled state legislatures renew their efforts
to create voter eligibility roadblocks in the form of “Jim Crow 2.0”
laws.

It
is going to be a heavy lift, but things can change, if and ONLY if, Democrats
get off their butts and work very hard in 2014 to win 25+ congressional
districts not currently held by Democratic incumbents.

They
need to work like there is no tomorrow, because otherwise, there may not be one.

Boomers: Nobody is currently writing
a book called “The Greatest Generation” about you. Any idea why?

Their only political transparency is that they will do
anything for cash:

But
the GOP has principles:

They can manage your info, but not their people:

Is Obama just Cheney with a Nobel Peace Prize?

Another Slippery Slope traps
America:

Good Guy Roulette:

What’s
Wrong Today:

We became aware of
the breadth of the National Security Agency’s surveillance efforts with Edward
Snowden’s whistle-blowing. But the real story is that our government has increasingly
privatized national security.

Outside contractors
perform much of the work. The news that companies like Booz Allen Hamilton hire
high school dropouts who have secret clearances was stunning to most Americans.

Mother
Jones reports that over the past decade, firms like Booz Allen Hamilton, have
increasingly become major players in outsourced national security work. They
now account for nearly 60% of every dollar the government spends on intelligence.
A majority of top-secret security clearances now go to private contractors who
provide services to the government at stepped up rates.

Here is a look at the
mushrooming intelligence contracting sector:

The New
York Times reported that at
a Senate hearing on intelligence contractors in
September 2011, a witness from the Project on Government Oversight, (POGO) a watchdog group, cited
research from 2008 showing that the government paid private contractors 1.6
times what it would have cost to have had government employees perform the
work. Here is MoJo’s chart on salaries:  

A Government Accountability
Office (GAO) report
documents the potential for hundreds of millions of dollars in savings if the
contractor compensation cap is reduced from its current level of $763,029.

Since the
1990s, federal law has placed a limitation, or cap, on the amount of employee
compensation that contractors can charge to federal contracts. The cap has increased
by 63% in real terms since it was first used in 1998. The cap was set at
$693,951 in 2010 and $763,029 for 2011 and 2012. If the cap were reduced to
either the President’s salary cap ($400,000) or the Vice President’s salary cap,
($230,700), there would have been a
savings of more than $180 million per year from compensation costs that would
exceed a cap set at the President’s salary, and at least $440 million per year
if set at the Vice President’s salary. This means that the outsourcers are
charging more for their skilled staff than for their top management.

A by the numbers look at our private intelligence
industry:

12,000: Number
of Booz Allen Hamilton employees with top-secret clearances

483,263: Number of contractors with
top-secret clearances

1.4
million: Number
of public and private employees, total, with top-secret security clearances, as
of FY 2012

7th: Where employees with top-secret
clearances would rank, by population, if they were a single American city

1: Number
of occupations, out of 35 analyzed by POGO, in which privatization yielded
statistically significant savings: Groundskeepers

4.4
million: Number of
private contractors serving the federal government in 1999

7.6
million: Number
of private contractors serving the federal government 2005

1.8
million: Number
of federal civil servants in 1999

1.8
million: Number of
federal civil servants in 2005

70: Percentage of classified
intelligence budget that goes to private contracts (as of 2007)

90: Percentage of intelligence
contracts that are classified

1,931:
Number of private firms working on counterterrorism, intelligence, or homeland
security, according to the Washington Post

$1.3 billion: Booz Allen
Hamilton’s revenue from intelligence work during its most recent fiscal year,
according to the New York Times

23: Percentage of the firm’s overall
revenue

98: Percentage of the firm’s work that
focuses on government contracts

The Wrongologist managed
outsourced federal contracts prior to leaving the F500. In his experience,
outsourcing a contract is almost always a losing proposition for the
government, involving increased costs (despite claims that contracting saves
the government money) and often, poorer service quality.

Outsourcing any
function brings the potential to obtain inferior work for dollars expended, unless managed very carefully by the government.

Outsourcing can work well
in the private sector, particularly for companies where work ebbs and flows in
response to client requirements. There is limited use for it in government
services, particularly in gathering and analyzing sensitive information!

It would be interesting
to learn how many of these security contracts are sole-sourced, meaning that they are
awarded without competitive bidding.

After years
of Republicans demonizing government service, we see that outsourcing
government services (as opposed to goods manufacturing) generally costs taxpayers more,
offers less accountability and in some cases, limited success.

Most
privatization directly awards contracts to businesses in a politician’s district.
The winning firm contributes to said politician’s election campaigns. The irony
is that politicians, who make a living off of the government stay in their jobs
by demeaning government services and government employees, while simultaneously
directing jobs and money to private business. The outsourcers then give the
government and the tax payers lower value on the way to contributing to the politician’s
campaign. Clearly, this is not a virtuous cycle!

What
incentive do contractors really have to properly serve their government employers?
The contractors aren’t working for us; they are serving their managers and
seeking advancement in their firms, not within the government.

And who do
we have to thank for this self-created mess? 
Congress, so intent on downsizing government that it’s downsized the
quality of the work performed as well.

The basic
justification for outsourcing government work is to get a job done better and
cheaper. But it is highly doubtful that American taxpayers are getting their
money’s worth.

What’s
Wrong Today:

From the News Hour:

After 12
years of war, senior US officials now say direct talks with the Taliban are
scheduled to begin within the next few days. The news came as President Obama
wound up a meeting with French President Hollande at the G-8 summit in Northern
Ireland.  The possibility exists that
direct talks with the Taliban may begin in the next few days.

A first
attempt of negotiations between the United States and the Taliban failed in
2012 ― the US did not fulfill an agreed upon prisoner release.

The US
military handed over “full responsibility” to the Afghan security
forces in Kabul on the same day as the Taliban announced the opening of an office in Doha, Qatar:

The Islamic Emirate
was the name the Taliban called Afghanistan when they were last running the
country in 2001. The Taliban were also allowed to raise their white flag (video) over Doha. The statement from the Qatari
officials was telling: The Assistant Foreign Minister for Foreign
Affairs Ali bin Fahad al-Hajri, who was the chief guest at the opening of the
Political Office of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan yesterday:

Neither the
Taliban nor Qatar made any mention of talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government. Afghan president Karzai said
initially that he would send members of his Peace Council to Doha. But he also demanded an immediate move of the talks to
Afghanistan. The News
Hour quoted President Hamid Karzai:

But moving the talks to Afghanistan does not to fit in the US or the Taliban’s
plan, and the Taliban doesn’t want to engage with the Karzai government. So Karzai has tried to torpedo them, leaving the talks in
danger. From The
Guardian:

Karzai, angry at the
US going behind his back, also stopped
discussions with the US about a the status of forces agreement (SOFA) that the
US requires if it is to keep troops in the country after 2014. Afghan Spokesman
Aimal Faizi:

Repeated
phone calls by John Kerry, the US secretary of state, appeared not to have
mollified Karzai, who accused the Obama administration of duplicity. Karzai was
apparently irritated by a press conference in Qatar at which the Taliban
effectively portrayed itself as a government in exile.

You mean
nobody bothered to inform Hamid Karzai that we would be meeting with the Taliban?
Is our foreign policy now being run by the Keystone Kops?  Or is our new Secretary of State, Mr. Skull
and Bones, simply not up to the job?

Poor Secretary
Skull and Bones: Putin keeps him waiting in Moscow for three hours and then gives
him five minutes and a stern lecture, and now Karzai won’t return Kerry’s
“repeated” phone calls and accuses the Obama administration of
duplicity.

Killer comment from Kate Clark:

Commentary:

Does this strike anyone else as a reprise
of our negotiations to end the war in Vietnam? Basically, the Afghanistan
talks will end up being three separate discussions about how to make peace between
the Afghan government and the Taliban, while allowing the US to make a graceful
exit. In 1968, Nixon called this Vietnamization.

With the Vietnam
negotiations which began in 1970, Henry Kissinger had to appease the South
Vietnamese government while negotiating with the North. It couldn’t be done. We
had a cease-fire in 1973. In 1975, we simply pulled out.

The North had won; they reunified
their country a year later. Game over.

So
after 12 years of fighting in Afghanistan to protect women and children from the brutal Taliban (which we
were led to believe was part of the task), the most powerful
military country on Earth has finally decided it’s better to talk to their
enemy than keep fighting them.

What
happened to: “We don’t negotiate with terrorists”?

What has
changed on the ground since 2008, when Obama could have negotiated an endgame similar to the
way the 2013 negotiation will play out?

1. Afghanistan was
further devastated.

2. There were 564
US military deaths in Afghanistan at the end of 2008; There are 2145
through June 2013, an additional 1581 of our best young people died, and what did
we gain?

3. The US is
unilaterally negotiating with the Taliban without pretense of multilateralism
or concern for Afghan sovereignty.

4. We will leave
behind a civil war.

All of the above brought to you by
the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.

If this is the end
game, then what did we spend 12 years fighting for? We did get Osama bin Laden,
in Pakistan. It’s possible we
taught the Taliban a lesson. It’s possible that we’ve exhausted both their resources
and their spirit.

It is also possible
that the Taliban has won.Their Doha office has the look of a government in exile.

Most US troops will soon
leave Afghanistan. After a discrete period of time, Congress will likely cut
off most of the money to the Afghan government. At that point, Afghanistan, like Vietnam, will have to
find a new internal equilibrium on its own.

What’s
Wrong Today:

The Wrongologist
has a few bones to pick with United Airlines.

He and Ms. Oh So Right were
scheduled to fly at 6:00am on Monday from Sacramento, CA to Chicago, and on to
Newark, NJ. The plane was rejected by the Captain because a flap couldn’t move.
Makes you wonder how the plane landed the night before, and how the crew that
flew it in didn’t know about the problem. Anyway, fight was cancelled.

We were
told by customer service that there was no other possible way to get from Sacramento
to the East coast until the following day. Except that the Wrongologist was
able to get the United call center to change his reservation to San Francisco to Newark direct, leaving
3 hours later. San Francisco is a $300, hour and a half ride away, so, we grab a cab, and we make
the flight, to find that we do not have the extended seat room that we paid $68.00
for.

That will
be the subject of a rant with their call center today.

Also, United
has “upgraded” its in-flight entertainment to DirecTV™! Sounds great, 250
channels of sleep-inducing goodness, but it is pay-per-view and United no
longer offers any free in-flight entertainment. And the DirecTV™ costs $7.95
for the flight. Another marketing triumph by United Airlines! Almost no one
sitting near the Wrongologist purchased the entertainment. This looks like it
will have a similar usage arc to the phone calls from your seat upgrade that
United struck out with in a decade ago.

Finally,
we land in Newark, 16 minutes early. Nice! Except that we wait on the ground
for ONE HOUR, ostensibly for a gate.

Back to
the leg room issue: American Airlines, which is merging with US Airways, has announced plans to add more seats to its Boeing 737s and
McDonnell Douglas MD-80s.

Mark
Gerchick, formerly of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and who now
writes about air travel, told NPR  that 20 years ago flyers could expect about
34 inches of legroom in economy; the standard is now around 31 inches, with
some airlines going as low as 28 inches. Mr. Gerchick:

Surprisingly,
American claims passengers will
benefit from less leg room since FAA rules require that it add another
flight attendant to its 737 crews once the number of seats on the planes goes
over the current 150. (The FAA requires at least one flight attendant per 50 seats.)

Really? Another
“Flight Attendant” per flight? Actually, it’s one more “Sales
Associate” per flight. Sure, in a real emergency, an additional attendant may
be a good thing, but since airplanes are our safest form of travel, those
emergencies are thankfully very few and very far-between.


And since free food and drinks have/are disappearing, at least in coach, there
is no doubt that the additional person will be there to sell, sell, sell. Not
that there’s anything wrong with that.

The Dallas Morning News has
a detailed graphic showing how the number of seats on
American’s 737s and MD-80s have changed over time. But that isn’t the whole
story, since the size and placement of the seats themselves have changed. Most
modern economy cabins include economy-plus seats with extra legroom, which reduce
the space available to other passengers. American claims that some of the 2.5
inches lost per passenger will be made
up by thinner seats.

Yep, less padding in the seats. Foam padding: Another up sell opportunity! 

So the
Wrongologist, on his United flight was a victim of two trends that all airlines
are driving, and they pull in opposite directions:

On the one
hand, even full-service airlines like United and American are trying to cram as
many passengers into the back of the plane as possible.

On the
other, you have the airlines’ desire to up-sell to customers who are unwilling
to pay for business or first class. Airlines are happy to offer better entertainment
services to passengers in coach—but only in return for a fee.

In
the old days of US aviation, when the government regulated air travel routes so
there was limited competition, airlines charged enough to be at least marginally profitable flying at 50% of
capacity with lots more legroom in coach.  The crunch began in the 1990’s, with low-cost
carriers like Southwest cutting into United’s market share.

United
filed for bankruptcy on December 9, 2002, the largest airline to do so, along
with Pan-Am, Eastern, Delta, and US Airways (twice).

Back
then travelers and their employers paid the going rate. Most of the casual and
leisure travelers didn’t fly–it was too expensive. Things changed drastically
post-deregulation. Now to remain profitable, airlines have to pack as many
people in as they can and must fly at
~90% of capacity to stay reasonably profitable.

Being
uncomfortably cramped is the price we pay for being able to fly at today’s
prices (particularly for leisure travel) which are far lower in inflation-adjusted
terms than what was the standard price prior to deregulation.

And
the era of one-size-fits-all coach cabins is gone. The sad thing is if we did
return to less crowded, more comfortable flying we would also have to return to
paying far higher fares than what we pay now.

Happy Father’s Day to the fathers among us! Enjoy the cartoons along with your new
tie…

Wall Street’s Mantra:

Working in the Data Mine goin’ down, down:

 Crossfire with Ben and Barack:

The 5 Stages of Surveillance Grief:

What’s
Wrong Today:

The BLS’
April Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey
(or JOLTS) report shows
there are 3.1 official unemployed per job opening, the same as for the past two
months. The JOLTS report includes part-time
jobs and does not make a distinction between part-time, full-time openings.
The JOLTS report lags by a month the published unemployment rate.

To create
the JOLTS report, the BLS takes a random sampling of 16,000 businesses and
derives their numbers from that.  The survey also uses the CES, or current
employment statistics, not the household survey as their base benchmark,
although ratios are coming from the household survey, which provides the tally
of unemployed.

The April
2013 unemployment rate was 7.5%. It went up to
7.6% in May.

From
Wonkblog comes this chart from the Economic
Policy Institute’s Heidi Sheirholz. It is a reminder that the US labor market
is still in rough shape — despite the considerable improvement in recent years.
There were 1.8 official unemployed persons per job opening at the start of the
recession, December 2007.  Below is the graph of the official unemployed
per job opening.  The official unemployed was 11,659 million souls in
April 2013:

The ratio
of jobs to jobless has improved an enormous amount since 2009. But to put
things in perspective, it’s still
worse than it was at any point during the last downturn, which started in 2001.

We see the
same story each month, a mostly static pool of jobs available with employers clearly
not hiring.  Job openings declined 3.0% from last month to a total of
3,757,000.  People hired increased by 4.7% to 4,425 million.  Yet, real hiring has only increased 22% since June 2009.  Although job openings
have increased 72% from July 2009, they are still below pre-recession levels of
4.7 million available jobs. 

The story
is not just that there is not enough hiring, but there are not enough job
openings either.

Sheirholz also notes that the number of
unemployed job-seekers appears to outstrip the number of openings in just about
every industry, from construction to retail to education to hospitality. (The
gap is smallest in mining, but there are relatively few jobs there, compared
with the other sectors.)

Looking
at the broader definition of
unemployment, or U-6, the ratio adds up to 5.8
unemployed people per each job opening. U-6 is
defined as those who are unemployed plus those in part-time positions who would
prefer to be in full-time jobs. This is down from nearly 12 people in July of
2009. The April U-6 unemployment rate was 13.9%.  Below is the graph of
number of unemployed, using the broader U-6 unemployment definition, per job
opening.

Another
big problem is that average hourly compensation has not changed much in the
past year. The chart below shows that only 5 industries have increased wages by
more than the rate of annual inflation. That demonstrates the weakness in the
job market at least as well as does the unemployment rate.

As long as incomes do not
keep up with the underlying rate of inflation, the economy will not manage
enough growth to assist job creation. Average hourly earnings were unchanged in
May, and only 2% higher than year ago levels. In other words, consumers are
simply running in place.

Even more concerning is that many of these positions are being
filled by older, formerly retired persons who are taking away employment
opportunities for young people. The unemployment rate for teenagers (16 to 19 years)
increased to 24.5% in May from 24.1% in April.

This is
not a social judgment; it’s economics: Those in the middle income strata, the primary driver
of the US economy, have fallen to the low income strata and the lowest income stratum
has moved toward poverty.

Businesses
say there are unfilled job openings, but if they hire an H1-b foreign worker rather than an American, what have we gained? 

There are plenty of companies that
keep job ads open even when they’re not actively hiring. They just tighten
their selection criteria to select only superstar candidates who are worth
creating a position for simply to get them on board.

Job demand is not that strong; so the
self-sustaining aspect of labor recovery is absent. When you take into account how much of that
“gain” in a lower unemployment rates that we’ve seen have been people
dropping out of the labor force rather than finding jobs, it’s just an overall
tragedy.

No one in Washington even bothers to
talk about unemployment anymore, but it’s still a big problem.

Congress can and should be doing a
lot more to fix this.