Domestic Policy – Page 15 – The Wrongologist

Which States Are The Best for Working Moms?

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Columbia Hills, WA – May 2022 photo by Mitch Schreiber Photography

Each year, WalletHub ranks the best and worst states for working mothers. Below is an overview of their methodology and findings: Women make up nearly half of the US workforce, and nearly 68% of moms with children under age 18 were working in 2021. That share of the workforce declined during Covid, dropping around 1.3% between Q3 2019 and Q3 2021 (compared to 1.1% for men).

We know that women face an uphill battle in the workplace, with their average hourly wage being just 84% of what men make. They face other non-financial problems as well. Parental leave policies and other childcare support systems vary by state, but the quality of infrastructure — from cost-effective day care to public schools, is far from uniform.

WalletHub compares state performance across 17 metrics to rank the best & worst states. They compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across three key dimensions: 1) Childcare, 2) Professional Opportunities and 3) Work-Life Balance:

“We evaluated those dimensions using 17 relevant metrics…with their corresponding weights. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the most favorable conditions for working moms. We then determined each state and the District’s weighted average across all metrics to calculate its overall score and used the resulting scores to rank-order our sample.”

WalletHub’s weighted average for the three categories was as follows: Childcare = 40 possible points, Professional Opportunities = 30 possible points, and Work-Life Balance = 30 possible points, totaling 100 points available per state. That translates into the overall total score below. Here are the top 10 US states for working mothers with individual state rankings by category:

It’s very telling that America’s best score was 62.99 out of 100, meaning that all states have a long way to go to make us a nation that supports women and mothers. Wrongo is happy to note that Connecticut is #1 in job opportunities for women. Here are the bottom 10 states:

Note that only California of the bottom 10 states is an urban (and blue) state. It gets killed in the rankings because of its terrible performance on childcare. If you are interested in how your state ranked, you can see an interactive map of all the states here. WalletHub also compared the top and bottom five states across a few of their metrics. Here’s what those rankings show:

According to a recent report, more than 2.3 million American women have dropped out of the labor force since the start of the pandemic. Solving the problems that keep these women out of the workforce should be a focus for all of the states.

This is particularly true for service and front-line workers whose work scheduling can be unpredictable and for many jobs, there is limited flexibility. Companies should do more. They can create more flexible work environments, allowing parents to take short-term time off. They can strive to eliminate schedule unpredictability for hourly workers. Companies can also work to change their culture to better recognize work-life balance.

The biggest hypocrisy of the anti-abortion movement and the Supreme Court’s apparent decision on abortion is that the Justices and the Republicans are willing to go to the mat to protect the unborn, but that commitment mysteriously vanishes once a child exits the womb.

In many cases, these same zealots are actively hostile to programs that would benefit children.

Parenthood is humankind’s most important job; but there’s no internship, no training program, no handbook. You dive into it and are expected to figure things out on your own. It’s true that parents should bear the responsibility and costs of raising a child, but, government intervention should be available, depending on local conditions and income levels. Some parents simply need help.

At a time when Republicans and the Supreme Court seem to be willing to discount the value of women in our society, it’s important that we battle their views on the economic front as well as on the political front.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – May 8, 2022

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell thinks the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe is a “toxic spectacle”. Chief Justice John Roberts calls it a “betrayal.” And Justice Thomas of Ginni said:

“We can’t be an institution that can be bullied into giving you just the outcomes you want…We are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t like…”

So suck it up American women! They’re sure that the leak is worse for America than their outrageous decision, and nothing you say will change any Republican minds. It is likely to be a long time before this (anticipated) decision is reversed. We will be a nation divided between states where reproductive freedom is guaranteed and states without it.

Major judicial errors in American history have been reversed before. The Constitutional amendment prohibiting alcohol was repealed in 14 years. The Supreme Court opinion upholding laws that criminalized gay sex was overturned after 17 years.

Women have many reasons for choosing abortion that have nothing to do with not wanting to be a parent. They may have medical needs; a fetus may carry genetic defects; the woman may be an underage child or a survivor of rape or incest. Adoption does not erase either the medical effects or the psychic scars that forcing a mother to term might inflict, and that may persist long after pregnancy is over.

And on this Mother’s Day, it is particularly ironic that they call themselves pro-life. Except, of course, for mothers. On to cartoons.

Who should be feeling violated?

Alito changes the rules:

Barrett shows she’s one of the boys:

More of the hypocrisy:

Oh, the places you will go:

Anybody else think Republicans are too controlling?

Mother’s Day 2022:

Thoughts on Alito’s Draft Opinion

Daily Escape:

Chama River, near Abiquiu, NM – 2022 photo by James C. Wilson

Wrongo’s last column spoke about how the Republican Party had become the Party of White Christian Nationalists. And that was before the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked to the world. It seems that this likely decision is a key example of how radical Christians are assuming a political role in America that isn’t dissimilar to the Taliban’s in Afghanistan.

Justice Alito’s draft opinion reinforces the view that there’s a very dangerous Christian movement afoot in our nation. It’s not enough for them to live in a country where they are completely free to practice their own religious beliefs. They require the rest of us to live by their religious code, too.

Two thoughts: First about the Court’s legitimacy in the eyes of the public when they overturn a 50-year-old precedent. The Editorial Board of the WaPo summarized the damage to the legitimacy of the Court that Justice Alito is likely to inflict:

“The Court’s legitimacy rests on the notion that it follows the law, not the personal or ideological preferences of the justices who happen to serve on it at any given time….What brought the Court to its current precipice was not a fundamental shift in American values regarding abortion. It was the [result of] shameless legislative maneuvering of Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, who jammed two Trump-nominated justices onto the Court.”

For some time, you’ve been able to predict the votes of Supreme Court Justices by knowing the Party of the president that appointed them. That is particularly true if the issue is either overtly political or a Culture War proxy for Republican Party doctrine.

The American people want to believe the law is fair and impartial, because everyone wants to live in a just and predictable society. But this isn’t what Conservatives want. Their so-called love of religion and love of authority move them to reduce or eliminate voting rights, and now, to eliminate women’s rights.

Second, Wrongo thinks that the Conservative Court has gone a political bridge too far. Most polls show that the rights granted in the Roe v. Wade decision are broadly popular, even among Republicans. And Americans have lived with those rights for almost 50 years, assuming it was an inviolable Constitutional right, you know, like owning a gun.

Heather Cox Richardson says that the Supreme Court has never before taken away a Constitutional right. That means there will certainly be a political backlash against those who have supported this attack against women specifically, and against privacy rights in general.

Pew reports that women are more likely than men to express support for legal abortion (62% vs. 56%). And among adults under age 30, 67% say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do 61% of adults in their 30s and 40s.

This describes the foundation of a political movement: Young women as the vanguard of an anti-Republican crusade (pardon the Christian pun). We also know that young people historically have had the lowest voter turnout, dating back to the 1960s. Here’s a graph showing what percentage of women have voted by age group:

Source: Stastia

It was only in 2020 that very young women reached the 50% turnout level for the first time in 50 years. They still lag all other age groups in voting. This means that a wealth of untapped political power lies waiting to be flexed this fall, and overturning Roe is the spark that can light the fire.

Add to that Black and Hispanic women who according to a Guttmacher Institute report are, respectively, three and two times more likely to have an unintended pregnancy than white women. Nationally, Black women had 37% of abortions, white women had 34%, and Hispanic women had 22%. Black women are also more than three times more likely to suffer a pregnancy-related death compared to white women.

Pew also reported that two-thirds of Asian (68%), and Black adults (67%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do 58% of Hispanic adults.

All of this creates the basis for a national political movement to defeat anti-abortion candidates at local, state, and national levels. Think about how a young woman like Mallory McMorrow who spoke so effectively against the Republican Culture War, could be a leader in the fight.

Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball lists seven states that offer the biggest potential for a Democratic backlash driven by abortion rights: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Each of these states has a highly competitive gubernatorial or Senate race on tap for this fall, and several of them have two.

Before you say it’s impossible, remember that in Ireland in 2012, the death of a young woman who had been denied a medically necessary abortion became a rallying cry for the abortion rights movement. In 2018, this Catholic country held a referendum to change their Constitution to legalize abortion, which passed with over 66% support.

The non-Christian-radical path forward is via the ballot box, where women should be poised to lead us to a rebuilt society. Even as the Roberts Court and Republicans turn their backs on the Constitution, we must still embrace it.

The Roberts Court’s radical Christian majority is, intentionally or not, administering a fatal blow to the Court’s legitimacy.

China’s Torpedoing the Supply Chain

The Daily Escape:

Spring snow, Mt. Princeton, CO – April 2022 photo by Haji Mahmood

For the past two years, Covid has thrown the global supply chain into a tailspin. Even though the cargo industry’s ships, trains, trucks, and planes worked full-time, we still have shortages. Now, China’s zero Covid policy is increasing both the uncertainty and costs of efficiently operating the still-choked global supply chain.

From Bloomberg:

“We expect a bigger mess than last year,” said Jacques Vandermeiren, the chief executive officer of the Port of Antwerp, Europe’s second-busiest for container volume, in an interview. “It will have a negative impact, and a big negative impact, for the whole of 2022.”

Bloomberg says that China accounts for about 12% of global trade. It’s recent Covid lockdowns have idled factories and warehouses, slowed truck deliveries and exacerbated container logjams. And since US and European ports are already swamped, this new outage will leave them vulnerable to additional shocks.

China is home to six of the world’s 10 largest container ports. It’s the global economy’s most important manufacturing hub. While most countries have decided to learn to live with the Covid, Beijing has maintained its Zero Covid policy, where even small outbreaks can shut down large population centers and slow economic activity.

It’s taking an average of 111 days for goods to reach a warehouse in the US from the moment they’re ready to leave an Asian factory. That’s similar to the record of 113 set in January 2022 and more than double the time that the same trip took in 2019, according to Flexport Inc., a freight forwarder.

Julie Gerdeman, CEO of supply-chain risk analytics firm Everstream Analytics says:

“Once product export activities resume and a large volume of vessels make their way to the US West Coast ports, we expect waiting times to increase significantly…”

You’d think that after more than two years into this pandemic, America would have realized that single-sourcing much of our industrial production to a dictatorship is a bad idea. One with enormous consequences when something goes wrong.

But we haven’t. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has advocated for what she calls “friend-shoring” meaning reducing our dependence on China and Russia. Brian Ehrig, a partner at the consulting firm Kearney is co-author of a report that found 78% of CEOs are either considering reshoring or have done it already. He says that relocating supply chains:

“…might cost more, but if you can make smaller quantities that you can then sell at closer to full price, you can actually completely change the game…”

Le Monde reminds us that capitalism has created hidden dependencies in Ukraine. It is the main producer of the wiring harnesses that hold together the many electrical cables in a car. They quote Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank (ECB) in a speech in Washington, DC: (brackets by Wrongo)

“Ukraine produces one fifth of Europe’s [harness] output,”

These parts are low value added, but essential in the construction of cars, a perfect outsourcing target for capitalism. Globalization isn’t going to die; but maybe it can evolve. Much of that possible shift hinges on convincing consumers to accept higher prices for the certainty of supply.

For example, once the CDC finally gave us unambiguous advice about wearing masks, there was a huge rush to open mask production facilities in the US. But now they’ve all closed, because it’s cheaper to make masks in China.

Dictatorships can ensure that labor remains cheap. That’s great for capitalists, not so good for people who needed masks in 2020 when China decided to keep most of them for their population. Or, now, when China is still willing to shut down its economy to stop a Covid outbreak.

And, despite all the good will in the world, nobody will make masks in the US if it means their five-dollar boxes of masks go unsold because everyone is buying the one-dollar boxes. Instead, they will complain about how the company asking five dollars is a bloodsucker.

We’re told that capitalism works. That it just does. That just-in-time supply cuts costs for consumers. But does it?

Art installation by Steve Lambert – 2013, Times Square, NYC

It’s proven not to work during an emergency. But what are the chances of re-shoring ever happening? Business school really only teaches one thing: Short-term profits rule and everything else is irrelevant.

After all, America is a business, not a country.

What should be readily apparent is that despite the CEO poll above, our corporate masters are certainly not thinking about systemic change to supply chains. Nor will they, as long as the focus is reducing costs as low as possible for maximum shareholder gain.

The point is that unless business is incentivized otherwise, don’t expect the supply chain to get any better. That incentive must come from the government in the form of tax policy or subsidy.

Musk Buys Twitter

The Daily Escape:

High tide, Bandon, OR – April 2022 photo by Bobbie Shots Photography

The Boston Globe is reporting that Musk is purchasing Twitter.

Musk is one of the great entrepreneurs of the 21st Century. He’s redefining space travel with SpaceX. He’s revolutionized internet communication with his Starlink low-earth orbit satellites, having more than 2,000 satellites in orbit. And he’s made Tesla the global leader in Electric Vehicles. And that has made him very rich.

Now he’s using some of his Tesla money along with a lot of Other People’s Money (Morgan Stanley, Barclays, and Bank of America) to buy Twitter and take it private. Bloomberg says Musk’s pledging $21 billion of his own money. The Banks are going to lend him $12.5 billion, secured by an additional $62.5 billion of his Tesla shares.

The rest of the purchase price will be funded by $13 billion in debt that Twitter will take on. After the deal closes, Twitter will have about $1 billion in interest payments due on the new debt annually. Twitter’s cash flow is projected to be about $1.43 billion this year and $1.85 billion in 2023. So debt payments will now be a huge chunk of Twitter’s future cash.

Since this is America, it’s unlikely that any government agency will stand in the way of the sale, but there are two things wrong with it.

First is how Musk became so fabulously wealthy. As Ranjan Roy points out at Margins, his rapid ascent to wealth is due to his unusual compensation package at Tesla. The package set what appeared to be unrealistic goals for sales and profits.

In early 2018, when the comp package was agreed, there was plenty of doubt whether Tesla could scale its manufacturing capacity. Musk had repeatedly said Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy, yet over the next few years, Tesla both stabilized and grew. It went from producing around 90k cars/quarter in 2018, to nearly 300k in the last quarter of 2021. Revenue grew from $12 billion to $54 billion. Tesla produced nearly 1 million cars in 2021.

At the same time, Tesla’s stock price went to the moon, making Musk the world’s richest human. Not incidentally, much of that was helped by Musk’s tweeting. Ranjan Roy says:

“…since the Spring of 2013, it was clear Tesla’s business results and Musk’s tweeting could have a self-reinforcing impact, and that…cycle…became more clear in recent years. Shortly after Musk signed his giant package, the really high-volume tweeting began, and the rest is wealth accumulation history.”

Musk realizes that he’s dependent on his Twitter marketing strategy. He has 80+ million Twitter followers, and unfettered access to his account is vital to his current and future business interests. Why? His current Tesla 10-year pay package has nearly hit its maximum targets in just four years.

Musk needs to think about where he gets his next giant gain in wealth.

This is the challenge of today’s capitalism: Boards with little real vision give stupendous compensation packages that turn out to be easily achievable. And the SEC allows entrepreneurs with media savvy to pump up their own stock at little personal risk.

Yes, Musk and Tesla have both paid fines to the SEC for stock manipulation. In a September 2018 settlement, Musk and the SEC agreed that he would step down as Tesla Chair and pay a $20 million penalty. Tesla also had to pay a $20 million fine.

But these were just minor costs of doing business compared to the personal wealth he’s created.

The second problem is that Musk, (and maybe a few on Twitter’s board) think that individual users should decide who and what gets seen and heard online. Musk says he wants Twitter to be an open playing field for competitive speech.

That may be peachy in the abstract. But we all know that every unmoderated platform goes to shit because it only takes a few bad-faith users to make it miserable for everyone.

For now, Twitter has decided that Trump can’t post on its platform. It decides whether to delete a post about vaccines if it deems the post to be misinformation. Most people don’t have the time to learn what’s real and reliable, and history shows how susceptible most are to harmful misinformation campaigns. Expect this to change after Musk buys Twitter.

Scott Galloway says:

“In an unmoderated online forum, all speakers do not play by the same rules or have the same tools. University of Maryland professor David Kirsch has found that automated pro-Tesla Twitter accounts are responsible for 20% of the tweets about Tesla, and that the launching of these bots correlates with increases in the company’s stock price.”

Rupert Murdoch transformed media in order to exercise greater influence over society. Does America need Musk to become another Murdoch? There’s a good chance one of his first acts as the Tweeter-in-Chief will be to re-instate Trump’s account, something that will have very serious political consequences.

Wrongo is a capitalist, but we’ve always needed rules to reign in the worst of the market’s players. And rules require umpires. Without umpires, anticompetitive and illegal acts go unpunished. Worse, today people insist, in the name of freedom, on their right to shout down all dissenting voices.

In America, underregulated economic winners have funded think tanks. Some have bought politicians. Some, newspapers and cable news stations. Musk is buying Twitter. They’re trying to convince us that the umpire is the enemy.

Musk wants you to live in a Wild West of speech and power. Are you ready for that?

Saturday Soother – April 23, 2022

The Daily Escape:

North Landing River, near Virginia Beach, VA – April 2022 photo by Erik Moore

Our media ecosystem is overwhelming us. Some of the information is accurate, some is bogus, and much is intentionally misleading. And that’s a deliberate strategy. While it didn’t originate with Steve Bannon, he perfected it with his thought that:

“…the Democrats don’t matter….The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

This is why the ongoing cultural war works so well for Republicans. There’s always some petty war going on between the Parties that’s stoked by the media. And it’s almost always about cultural issues since Republicans really don’t have a policy platform, and don’t want to go against large corporate America. When you go against corporations, you lose the money needed to get elected.

But we should see the big corporations as our common enemy. Time Magazine has an article about how overtime pay has disappeared:

“If it feels like you’re working longer hours for less money than your parents or grandparents did, it’s because you probably are. Adjusted for inflation, average hourly wages have actually fallen since the early 1970s, while average hours worked have steadily climbed. American workers are increasingly underpaid, overworked, and overwhelmed.”

One reason is the loss of overtime pay:

“If you’re under the age of 45, you may have no idea that overtime pay is even a thing. But…middle-class workers used to get a lot of it….That means that [for] every hour you work over 40 hours a week you work for free, contributing…a giant pool of free labor that modern employers have come to expect and exploit. Profits are up, real wages are down, and income inequality has soared to its highest level since the Gilded Age.”

Overtime pay was one of the great New Deal reforms. It was a core provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The FLSA set the minimum wage at one-half the median wage and the overtime threshold at three times the minimum—an amount equal to 1.5 times the median wage.

But both the minimum wage and the overtime rules began to change in 1975, and rising income inequality since 1975 is responsible for a $50 trillion upward redistribution of wealth and income from the bottom 90% households to those in the top 1%. Here’s a chart showing the impact of losing overtime. Productivity goes up, but is completely decoupled from income:

Source: chartr

The Economic Policy Institute has a tool called “Company Wage Tracker” that allows you to select any big corporation and see what percentage of their employees make below a certain wage. For example, it shows that 51% of Walmart employees earn below $15/hr.

The NYT wrote about Mary Gundel, a manager at a Dollar General store in Tampa, FL who was fired for speaking out about the chain’s policies regarding overtime and short-staffing:

“The store used to have about 198 hours a week to allocate to a staff of about seven people….But by the end of last month, she had only about 130 hours to allocate….With not as many hours to give to her staff, Ms. Gundel often had to operate the store on her own for long stretches, typically working six days and up to 60 hours a week with no overtime pay.”

Ms. Gundel was working 60 hours a week and making $51,000 a year. That means she’s making only a little more than the minimum wage. Dollar General is one of the most profitable retail chains in the country.

Prices are going up everywhere across America, and corporations are making proportionately more income. This is what the Democrats should be focusing on, standing up for workers, doing what is right as opposed to groping for answers to the Republican’s culture war issues.

There’s plenty that’s wrong in America. But what’s wrong doesn’t see the light of day alongside all of the pissing contests about Critical Race Theory, or predator grooming or LGBTQ issues. These are ginned-up to make sure you won’t pay attention to what’s really going on.

Something seems to be brewing. We’re seeing halting attempts at unionization at Starbucks and Amazon. Those employees want a better life; they want to have a seat at the table about the future of the company.

We need to remember that without the “essential workers” the country grinds to a halt. We need to support those who try to organize. We need to wrest some economic power away from politicians and big businesses. And finally, some faceless people who are sick of being wronged are trying to do just that.

Enough for another week. It’s time to let go of the news. It’s time for our Saturday Soother. On the Fields of Wrong we’re preparing our vegetable garden, although it will be a few weeks before it’s warm enough for the plants to survive. We had an overnight temperature of 32° earlier this week.

Now, grab a seat by a large window and listen to violin soloist Soojin Han play Chopin’s “Nocturne No.20 in C# minor” in August 2019. She’s playing on a 1666 Stradivarius:

It sounds beautiful.

Chopin composed the piece in 1830, but it was published in 1875, 26 years after his death. It was featured in the movie “The Pianist” in 2002.

DeSantis vs. Disney

The Daily Escape:

Sea glass, Provincetown, MA – April 2022 photo by Nancy Kaplan

Today we continue discussing the growing Republican culture wars, this time in Florida against Disney. NBC News reported:

“The Florida Senate passed a bill Wednesday that would dissolve the special taxing district that allows the Walt Disney Co. to self-govern in its theme park area.”

Walt Disney World has effectively operated as its own municipal government in central Florida since a 1967 state law established what’s called the Reedy Creek Improvement District, an area encompassing 25,000 acres near Orlando. The law grants Disney a wide range of authority, including the power to issue bonds and provide its own utilities and emergency services, such as fire protection.

That law is in large part what convinced Disney originally to come to Florida. It has since become the state’s largest private employer with 80,000 jobs.

On Wednesday, the Florida senate passed a bill that would dissolve all independent special districts established before 1968, including Reedy Creek. Lawmakers voted 23 to 16 in favor of the bill during a special session of the state Legislature.

This is part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) and the Republican-controlled legislature‘s escalating culture war with Disney over the company’s opposition to recently passed legislation in Florida that Disney considers to be anti-gay. Disney’s leadership has criticized the legislation that prevents classroom discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in kindergarten through the third grade.

Disney later said it would pause making campaign donations in Florida and also said it hoped that the law would either be repealed or struck down by the courts.

Wrongo is old enough to remember when the GOP believed that corporations had free speech and should be pretty much immune from regulation. But it now seems that corporations can be harassed or investigated unless they fall in line with the goals of the Republican culture war.

Targeting Disney only became a thing after the company spoke out about the “don’t say gay” law. Charles Cooke in the National Review notes that:

“Until about a month ago, Walt Disney World’s legal status was not even a blip on the GOP’s radar. No Republicans were calling for it to be revisited….”

Cooke says that Florida’s legislature has had five opportunities over the past 50 years to remove Disney’s sweetheart deal and didn’t. But context is everything. After the DeSantis effort to punish Disney, the legislature piled on, pretending that it’s doing so out of a concern for “good government”.

The fun part is that Disney’s status is not unique. Florida has 1,844 special districts, of which 1,288, like Walt Disney World, are “independent.” Charlie Sykes at the Bulwark offers up examples of a few more of these districts:

The Villages (where Governor DeSantis announced his review of Disney’s status)
Orlando International Airport
The Daytona International Speedway

Wrongo isn’t defending Disney’s right to special treatment, despite he and Ms. Right having a granddaughter who works for Disney in CA.

Wrongo would be fine if Florida took away all special breaks from these large corporations.

The Disney special district is really a form of corporate welfare. And no Republican with serious national ambitions wants to be against corporate welfare. So instead, DeSantis tries punishing Disney as part of his red-hot culture war. If this move was really about good public policy, then Republicans would have done it through their regular legislative process. But that clearly wasn’t their intent.

Overlooked in the anti-Disney hype, was that this bill was attached to other legislation approved by the Florida senate, a Congressional redistricting map that eliminates two predominantly Black Congressional districts and tilts the balance of the Florida delegation even more to the Republicans. Democrats were especially critical of an amendment added Tuesday that requires all lawsuits challenging the redistricting map to be filed in Leon Circuit Court. This is an attempt to sidestep the federal court in Tallahassee where in the past, most election law cases have been challenged and found to be unconstitutional.

The new map is expected to boost Republicans’ current 16-11 Congressional advantage to 20–8. Republicans would likely own roughly 71% of the state’s Congressional seats in a state where Trump won with 51.2% of the vote in 2020. Florida also gained a seat during the most recent census.

The Party claiming to be against “Big Government” is using the government to punish a private company for permissible business decisions. As Heather Cox Richardson says:

“The Walt Disney Company delivers to the state more than $409 million in sales taxes for tickets alone, employs more than 80,000 Florida residents, and supports more than 400,000 more jobs. Today, the Miami Herald reported that repealing the company’s governing authority would raise taxes on families in the area by $2,200 each.”

Anyone else getting really tired of Republicans telling us we can’t say certain words, we can’t read certain books, we can’t teach certain things, or that we can’t talk about certain history? And why are they taking away our freedom to vote?

What’s Conservative about any of that?

Texas Wingnuttery

The Daily Escape:

Easter morning at Lake Tapps, with Mt. Rainer in background, Pierce County, WA – April 2022 photo by Motojw Photography. This picture was cropped by Wrongo to fit the blog’s page. View the original photo here.

Two examples of Texas wingnuttery, and it’s only Tuesday. First, the WaPo has an article showing how Conservative groups are teaming up with politicians to remove books and to change membership of local library boards:

“In early November, an email dropped into the inbox of Judge Ron Cunningham, the silver-haired head chair of the governing body of Llano County in Texas’s picturesque Hill Country. The subject line read ‘Pornographic Filth at the Llano Public Libraries.’”

The author was Bonnie Wallace, a local church volunteer who had attached an Excel spreadsheet with 60 books she found objectionable, including those about transgender teens, sex education and race, including “Between the World and Me,” by author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Not long after, the county’s chief librarian sent the list to Suzette Baker, head of one of the library’s three branches:

“She told me to look at pulling the books off the shelf and possibly putting them behind the counter. I told them that was censorship,”

In January, commissioners voted to dissolve the existing library board and created a reconstituted board of mostly political appointees, including many of the citizens who had complained about books. They named Ms. Wallace the vice chair of a new library board stacked with conservative appointees some of whom didn’t even have library cards.

Later, Baker was fired, and Llano joined a growing number of communities across America where conservatives have mounted challenges to books and other content they deem to be inappropriate.

A movement that started by influencing school boards has now expanded to public libraries. They accounted for 37% of book challenges last year, according to the American Library Association. Conservative activists in several states, including Texas, Montana and Louisiana have joined forces with like-minded officials to dissolve libraries’ governing bodies, rewrite or delete censorship protections, and remove books outside of official challenge procedures.

No one is forced to go to a public library. If someone goes to a public library, nobody is forcing that person to read a book while there, or to take a book out of the public library. It’s called a “public” library for a reason. The library serves all of the public, not just a small interest group (or individual) who feels they have the right to decide what all citizens should or shouldn’t read.

The issue is denial of public access.

Second, the NYT reports that a Texas state legislator warned Citigroup that he would introduce a bill to prevent the bank from underwriting municipal bonds in the state unless it rescinded its policy covering travel expenses for employees who go outside their state to seek an abortion. This Texas politician is attempting to dictate a national anti-abortion policy:

“Citigroup stated in a filing on Tuesday that it would provide travel benefits to employees seeking abortions outside their state, “in response to changes in reproductive health care laws in certain states.” Last year, Texas enacted a law that bans abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy. The law took effect in September.”

It’s important to remember Enron, a now-defunct Texas corporation known for its massive accounting fraud, used to threaten banks with withdrawing all of their business if the bank’s analysts gave accurate opinions about Enron’s stock. It appears that remains a model for Republican governance.

Lots of high tech companies have diversity programs and progressive employee policies. Many have extensive operations in Texas. It’s going to take some time but Texas will suffer disinvestment as companies move elsewhere.

Because Texas is becoming Taliban country.

Here’s a long quote from Oliver Cromwell, speaking to the Rump Parliament on April 20, 1653, the day he dissolved it. He could easily be speaking to today’s Republican Party:

“It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter’d your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil’d this sacred place, and turn’d the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!”

Monday Wake Up Call – April 3, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Makapu’u Lookout, Oahu, HI – January 2022 photo by TwoBongs on Tour

Let’s talk about the “Wealth Effect”. It’s the notion that when households become richer as a result of a rise in asset values, such as stock prices or home values, they spend more and stimulate the broader economy. The idea is that consumers feel more financially secure and confident about their wealth, even if their income and costs are the same as before.

This concept has been endorsed by two recent former Fed Chairs, Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke. It’s simply another term for trickle-down economics.

In 2019, after nearly 11 years of the Fed’s policy of adding money to the economy, by “Quantitative Easing” (QE), the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) did a study on the Wealth Effect, to quantify how much richer the rich would have had to become to have x% impact on the overall economy, and how long this boost lasts before it fades.

They found that QE makes 10% of the population a lot richer, producing immense concentration of wealth at the top 1%, and mind-boggling concentrations of wealth at the billionaire level. After which, there were some very muted trickle-down effects on the economy.

Wolf Richter used the Fed’s wealth distribution data to create a chart he calls the Wealth Effect Monitor. The Fed divides the US population into four groups by wealth: The “Top 1%,” the “2% to 9%,” the “next 40%,” and the “bottom 50%” to report on wealth.

Richter divides this data by the number of households in each category, to obtain the average wealth per household in each category. Here’s his chart for the past 21 years:

Note the immense increase in the wealth for the 1% households after the Fed’s latest QE effort that began in March 2020. They have been the primary beneficiaries of the Fed’s policies since 2020.

True to the Wealth Effect’s concepts, the Fed’s policies helped to inflate asset prices, and thus only asset owners benefited: The more assets held, the stronger the benefit. Here’s Richter’s analysis of average wealth (assets minus debts) per household, by category in the 4^th quarter, 2021:

“Top “1%” household (red): $36.2 million
The “2% to 9%” household (yellow): $4.68 million
The “next 40%” household (purple): $775,000
The “bottom 50%” household (green): $59,000

The Fed doesn’t provide separate data on the 0.01% and the Billionaire class, but they were the biggest beneficiaries of the Fed’s monetary policies. The top 30 US billionaires have a total wealth of $2.12 trillion, sliced into 30 slices for a wealth of $70.8 billion per billionaire, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Compare that to the bottom half of the US population (the “bottom 50%”) who have a combined wealth of just $3.7 trillion, divided into 165 million slices for each individual. The way percentages work, you would think that households in the bottom 50% would have the largest percentage gains since they start from a lower base. But because they own fewer assets, when adjusted by population, they stay mired in last place. From Richter:

“When the wealth of the bottom 50% increases by 5%, they gain about $3,000. And when the average wealth of the top 30 billionaires increases by 5%, they on average gain $3,500,000,000.”

Saturday Soother – March 26, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Crocus in bloom, Holliston, MA – March 2022 photo by Karen Randall

Let’s take a look at three stories that didn’t get their due this week. First, from the LA Times, about gang infiltration of the LA County Sherriff’s department:

“The top watchdog for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has identified more than 40 alleged members of gang-like groups of deputies that operate out of two sheriff’s stations…..Inspector General Max Huntsman said his office has compiled a partial list that includes 11 deputies who allegedly belong to the Banditos, which operate out of the East L.A. sheriff’s station, and 30 alleged Executioners from the Compton sheriff’s station.”

Huntsman told the LA Times that about a third of the 41 deputies on his list had admitted that they had gang tattoos or belonged to the groups. Allegations aren’t proof but apparently, there is a long history of allegations like this one surrounding the LA Sherriff’s department.

Also consider this article in the WaPo about police wrongdoing:

“The Post documented nearly 40,000 payments involving allegations of police misconduct in 25 departments, totaling over $3 billion. Departments usually deny wrongdoing when resolving claims.”

They found that more than 1,200 officers in the departments surveyed had caused problems resulting in at least five payments each by their municipalities. More than 200 had 10 or more payments for actions that resulted in lawsuits. New York City leads the way with more than 5,000 officers named in two or more claims, accounting for 45% of the money the city spent on misconduct cases. There are 36,000 officers in the NYPD. That’s 13.8%.

Settlements rarely involve an admission of guilt or a finding of wrongdoing. City officials and attorneys representing police departments say settling claims is often more cost-efficient than fighting them in court. Since there’s no formal list of bad actors, there’s little reason to hold these officers accountable.

Law enforcement throughout America gives itself a black eye whenever stories like these are written.

Second, the NYT reported that several of the Republican Senators who suggested that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson had given uncommonly lenient sentences to felons convicted of child sex abuse crimes had all previously voted to confirm judges who had given out similar prison terms below prosecutor recommendations, the very problem they had with Judge Jackson:

“But Mr. Hawley, Mr. Graham, Mr. Cotton and Mr. Cruz all voted to confirm judges nominated by President Donald J. Trump to appeals courts even though those nominees had given out sentences lighter than prosecutor recommendations in cases involving images of child sex abuse.”

You can read the article for the examples.

Hypocrisy is fuel for politicians, so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. We know that Sen. Graham had voted only a year ago to confirm Judge Jackson, despite the sentencing decisions she had made as a district judge, the same ones that he now objects to.

Third, Bloomberg reported that private equity money is again pouring into residential real estate markets. They cite Phoenix, AZ as a prime example: (brackets by Wrongo)

“The median home [in Phoenix] was worth about $285,000 at the beginning of the pandemic; it was valued at $435,000 two years later.”

That’s a 53% increase. This is also true in NJ, where Wrongo’s son just got an all-cash offer from an investment group for his home, sight unseen, at 11% higher than the closest offer from a retail home buyer who needed a mortgage.

This is turning first-time home buyers into long-term renters, with real-world consequences.

Home equity represents a huge portion of individual wealth in the US, especially for moderate-income families that have few other opportunities to use borrowed money to purchase assets that can increase in value over time. Price appreciation lets owners accrue wealth which can be tapped later on when they have a large or unexpected expense.

Wall Street’s spin is that there just aren’t enough rentals for families who want to live in good neighborhoods but can’t afford a down payment. So they’re providing a necessary economic service. You be the judge.

Enough of this drama! It’s time to find a way to let go of the tragedy in Ukraine and the clown show surrounding Judge Jackson for a bit. It’s time for our Saturday Soother.

Here on the fields of Wrong, it’s time to take down the deer fencing and put up the bluebird nest boxes. We also need to watch what we can of college basketball’s March Madness.

To help you get ready for the weekend, grab a chair by a large window and listen to Mozart’s “Turkish March” played here on bamboo instruments. It was performed in 2015 by Dong Quang Vinh on a bamboo flute along with the Bamboo Ensemble Suc Song Moi, in Haiphong, Vietnam:

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Domestic Policy

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