The New Republic: David Fontana: U.S. Justice Sonia Sotomayor Schuette Dissent: A National Treasure

Posted on May 6, 2014 by Rik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

U.S. Justice Sonia Sotomayor Dissent on the Shuelette Michigan Affirmative Action Case
“Consider this language from Sotomayor’s dissent, which is so unusually compelling in its simplicity in describing the daily experiences of millions of Americans:

Race matters to a young man’s view of society when he spends his teenage years watching others tense up as he passes, no matter the neighborhood where he grows up. Race matters to a young woman’s sense of self when she states her hometown, and then is pressed, “No, where are you really from,” regardless of how many generations her family has been in the country. Race matters to a young person addressed by a stranger in a foreign language, which he does not understand because only English was spoken at home. Race matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: “I do not belong here.”
“To see why this language matters, let’s put aside the merits of the case, which Jeffrey Rosen ably discussed, and focus on the audiences that this Sotomayor Style enables her to reach. ”
U.S. Justice Sonia Sotomayor
“In my colleagues’ view, examining the racial impact of legislation only perpetuates racial discrimination. This refusal to accept the stark reality that race matters is regrettable. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination. As members of the judiciary tasked with intervening to carry out the guarantee of equal protection, we ought not sit back and wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society. It is this view that works harm, by perpetuating the facile notion that what makes race matter is acknowledging the simple truth that race does matter.”The New DemocratAt some point, supporters of affirmative action are going to have figure out what is it for and why they support it. Is it to make up for the injustices to ethnic and racial minorities and Caucasian women in the past? Is it to make up for the fact that African-Americans and Latin Americans are behind Caucasian-Americans in economic and educational status?

This might be just the third time that I’ve agreed with and quoted Chief Justice John Roberts on anything. His decisions on the Affordable Care Act and the Defense of Marriage Act in 2012 and 2013  might be the only other times.  He got it perfectly right here when he said “If we are going to have a society where race does not matter, than race cannot matter.”  He wasn’t singling out any race or ethnicity.  He said “Race,” period.

That means that the United States Government cannot condone racial discrimination, even for good intentions to help communities that have been left behind. If the public or private sector discriminates against or for people because of their race, ethnicity or gender there will be distortions in the space of public transactions. Certain people would benefit from your discrimination, others would not.  In a society where race doesn’t matter, not just officially but in actuality, you can’t have laws that condone racial, ethnic, or gender discrimination as affirmative action does.

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Brookings Institution: Sr. Semone Campbell: Faith Has Political Consequences

Posted on May 6, 2014 by Erik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

The American Left, especially the Far-Left, gets stereotyped as being Atheist.  This is reinforced by MSNBC at any point when they are talking about religion.  Ditto,  Salon, The Nation, the AlterNet or  Bill Maher.  But, there’s also a strong Religious Left in America and Sr. Simone Campbell is a perfect example of it.

The people of the Religious Left have very strong progressive and social democratic political tendencies.  They believe that their religion tells them to look after people and their communities and that government has a strong role to play in this. They believe in social justice and that all Americans should have equal access to freedom and true equality.

You could make a good case that the Religious Left came of age in the 1950s and 1960s with the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  It was pushing for civil rights and equality for African-Americans but, by the late 1960s, they had  won those battles and moved on to talking about and and pushing for social justice and giving the Federal Government a bigger role to see that more Americans have what they need to live well.

Not everyone on the Left is an atheist, as much as we get stereotyped that way. I come from an atheist family but I’m a liberal and an agnostic.  There are liberal catholics and progressive protestants and  even socialist christians. The problem with stereotypes is that even though they are all based on some truth, it’s never the whole truth.  It’s a biased characterization of a group that others want the public to see.  The popular religious characterization  of the left is a perfect example of that.

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Andrew Sullivan: Why Rand Paul Matters

Posted on May 6, 2014 by kireschneider

Source:The New Democrat 

For me, though, these clips make Paul’s candidacy more appealing, not less. What the GOP needs is an honest, stringent account of how it has ended up where it is – a party that has piled on more debt than was once thought imaginable and until recently, has done nothing much to curtail federal spending. Reagan was a great president in many ways, as Paul says explicitly in these clips.

But Reagan introduced something truly poisonous into American conservatism.

It was the notion that you can eat your cake and have it too, that tax cuts pay for themselves and that deficits don’t matter. This isn’t and wasn’t conservatism; it was a loopy utopian denial of math. And the damage it has done to this country’s fiscal standing has been deep and permanent. It is one of modern conservatism’s cardinal sins. And Paul is addressing it forthrightly – just as he is addressing the terrible, devastating consequences of neo-conservatism for America and the world in the 21st Century.

What we desperately need from the right is this kind of accounting. It’s what reformers on the left did in the 1990s – confronting the failures of their past in charting a new future. Taking on Reagan on fiscal matters may be short-term political death, as Corn suspects and maybe hopes, but it is vital if the GOP is to regain some long-term credibility on the core question of government solvency. Compared with the ideological bromides and slogans of so many others, Rand Paul is a tonic. And a courageous one at that.
The New Democrat
I really respect Senator Rand Paul and love Andrew Sullivan (you know platonically) because of their damned straight honesty and forthrightness.  Andrew, on his blog, The Dish, today compared the supply side economics of the Reagan and G.W. Bush administrations with the overreach of the Democratic Party at the time of the emergence of the New Left in America. The base of that party became so radical in the late 1960s and 1970s that it gave liberalism and Liberals a bad name.  It took Bill Clinton ,in the early 1990s, to bring the Democratic Party back to Earth, so to speak, and make it a center-left party again.
Senator Rand Paul was speaking the plain truth when he said that President Jimmy Carter had a better, more responsible and conservative fiscal record than President Ronald Reagan.  President Carter had a balanced budget as one of his goals and he pushed that throughout his presidency. He had a very rough economy and never got there but it wasn’t because of the overspending of his administration or the Congress.  It was because of the bad economy of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
President Reagan abandoned the goal of a balanced Federal budget by 1984 in late 1981 or early 1982 when his Economic Recovery Act became law.  He was getting intelligence reports about the U.S.S.R. and the mess its economy was in.  Perhaps he got the idea that this would be the time to end the Cold War and put the Soviet Union out of business.  That meant building up the Defense Department in an attempt to bring the Russians to their knees so that they had to negotiate with the U.S. in order to survive economically.
The fact is that our last fiscally conservative president was George H.W. Bush who was no radical,  right or left.  He had a pretty conservative fiscal policy and a tight monetary policy.  Without the 1990 Deficit Reduction Act that he negotiated with a Democratic Congress we wouldn’t have reached the balanced budget in 1998 that we did. President Gerald Ford is probably the most fiscally conservative president we’ve ever had as far limiting what the Federal Government would do and spend.  It is not Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush.  They were both supply side borrowers and spenders.

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Real News: Anton Woronczuk Interviewing Bruce Dixon: Affirmative Action Ruling Will Further Racial Inequality

Posted on May 5, 2014 by Derik Schneider

The New Democrat

This is the third post from The New Democrat on affirmative action this week.  It is a very important subject because it effects the whole country even though it doesn’t benefit the whole country.  With all of the falsehoods being put out on the U.S. Supreme Court affirmative action decision this week, I believe that it’s important to set the record straight and explain the narrow decision delivered and the judicial restraint demonstrated by the Roberts Court on this key issue.

SCOTUS ruled in a 6-2 decision that public institutions, by themselves, can’t have their own affirmative action policies that consider race, ethnicity or gender, even as just one consideration, when granting access to public benefits.

I’m not a lawyer but what SCOTUS said was that for state institutions to have affirmative action policies, they must be developed through democratic processes. That since affirmative action effects the whole state, these policies need to be developed democratically by legislatures or voters and not by executive branch entities.

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Mises Daily: Julian Adorney: ‘Killing the Maximum Wage Myth’

Posted on May 5, 2014 by Ederik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

People on the far left get labeled as Socialists because they have a tendency to advocate socialist policies that are more common in Europe than in America.  The notion of  “maximum wage” that talk show host Bill Maher began advocating back in February is a perfect example of this.

It’s is almost impossible to ignore the hypocrisy of Bill Maher on this issue, especially since he’s part of the financial one percent  that he likes to bash and call greedy.  If he thinks that these people make too much money,  he could initiate the correction by living on three-hundred-thousand dollars a year, his suggestion for the Federal maximum wage.  He could donate the rest of his income to Uncle Sam or his favorite charity, if he has one.  He could begin by setting the example of unselfishness and compassion that he wants to impose on the rest of the country by law.

The idea of a maximum wage is a bad idea. Americans, as much as anyone, are guilty of human nature. We need to be incentivized in order to be as productive. “If you do this, we’ll give that and the better you are at doing what we want you to do, the more we’ll pay you for it”. Capitalism and private enterprise are built on incentive, supply and demand. The better you are at something, the more money you’ll tend to make by providing that service to the market.

Do we have overpaid CEO’s and do companies and employers tend to set wage rates instead of the market as a whole?  Of course, but that doesn’t get fixed by telling people “once you make a certain amount of money Uncle Sam is going to take most of everything above that amount from you.” Instead, we should focus on the lower middle and bottom end of the economy and empower and incentivize those people to be as successful as possible.  

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Prison Reform Movement’s Weblog: Yuram Abdullah Welier: Profit From Prisoners: How UNICOR Capitalizes on Inmate Labor

Posted on May 5, 2014 by Rik Schneider

“An inmate sews pieces of a Maryland flag together for the Maryland Correctional Enterprises in Jessup, Md.
Operating under the trade name of UNICOR with over 100 factories at 75 locations across the continental United States, Federal Prison Industries (FPI) produces a wide range of market-priced goods and services to the US Federal government and the private sector.

From manufacturing office furniture to recycling electronics, FPI operations even include a one-stop shopping call center staffed by inmates to speed processing of orders. Boasting ISO 9001:2000 certification and Lean Six Sigma processes in its factories, the FPI even makes helmets for the US military, using convict labor earning from $0.23 per hour up to a maximum of $1.15 per hour.

With a diversity of products and services from ADP (automatic data processing) and telecommunications services to XML (extensible markup language) tagging, the FPI is a huge government-run corporate entity, which not only sells to civilian federal agencies, but also to the US military.

Originally created in 1935 during the Great Depression under US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the FPI was the brainchild of Bureau of Prisons Director Sanford Bates, who conceived of the idea as a way to abate growing prison unrest, which he attributed to inmate idleness. Products manufactured, which included cotton duck cloth, shoes, brooms and brushes, were exclusively sold to the US government.

The FPI flourished and by 1937, in spite of the depression, the federally-owned enterprise boasted profits of $570,000.00, which is approximately $9.5 million in 2014 dollars. By the time of the Second World War, the FPI was operating 25 factories and producing over 70 products. By 1941, FPI factories, with a workforce totaling 18 percent of the prison population, were turning out war material from bomb fins and casings to parachutes and TNT on a 3-shift, around-the-clock basis. Many ex-convicts, who had become skilled in welding, aircraft sheet metal work, shipbuilding and aviation mechanics, were able to find jobs in war industries immediately upon release.

Following WWII, the Korean War generated more sales for the FPI, whose profits reached $29 million (about $260 million in 2014 dollars). Business was so good that the FPI initiated a $5-million expansion program, which resulted in improved production capacity just in time for the US war on Vietnam. By 1974, the FPI had grown so much that it was reorganized into seven industry specific business units: Automated Data Processing; Electronics; Graphics; Metals; Shoe and Brush; Textiles; and Woods and Plastics. The FPI’s focus shifted to marketing and in 1977, the government-owned entity inaugurated the UNICOR trade name and introduced new product lines in stainless steel, thermoplastics, printed circuits, modular furniture, Kevlar-reinforced items such as military helmets, and optics. By 2001, UNICOR sales of goods and services to the US Department of Defense (DOD) had climbed to $388 million.”

Source:Prison Reform Movement’s Weblog

The United States has a high convict recidivism rate, i.e., a large percentage of our prison inmates come back to prison after they finish their sentences.   70 % of ex-convicts return to prison. We also have a relatively large prison population.  About 1 of every 100 Americans is either in prison, on parole, or under some other type of supervised probation.

Because of these factors, we have high prison costs.  Prisons, as they are currently structured do not pay for themselves. There are a few exceptions to that among state prisons that are like family farms.  There are a few prisons in Louisiana where inmates work full-time producing food and other products for the institution but also to sell on the market and to other government agencies.

This post is about how to reduce the recidivism rate, the prison population and the associated  high costs.  The first step is educating the inmates who’ve decided that they want to improve themselves and end their criminal careers.  Once they have marketable skills, they can  work in prison factories and other prison business’s and make a living for themselves and their families.

We should make prison industries real enterprises producing products for the prisons but also for other government agencies and the open market as well.  Local business could manage these industries  using the inmate population as their staff.  Instead of paying the inmates 20 cents or a dollar an hour, as is done now, they could pay them the local going rate for the work that they do.  

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The Economist: Richard Davies & Zanny Minton-Beddoes: Time to Rethink Retirement

Posted on May 4, 2014 by Erik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

This emphasizes the great need for improving the skills of workers, especially in America which ranks  39th in the world in education.  That 1 in 5 Americans lives in poverty is already  unacceptable.

Our aging population means current and future workers are going to have to work longer and be more productive.  They need to put more money away for their own retirements and be less dependent on the public safety net to provide them needed income when they retire.

Private retirement accounts are an attractive policy option that encourages people to put money,  matched by their employers, away for savings and retirement.  This allows people to finance their own retirements bringing down government costs. 

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Bloomberg News: Rip up the Script: Why Canada’s Middle Class Beats America’s

Posted on May 4, 2014 by kireschneider

Source:The New Democrat 

Strange title for an over two-minute video, two-minutes and seventeen seconds to be precise, that spends only twenty seconds talking about the Canadian middle class. Most of this video was about the decline of the American middle class, which should’ve been reflected in the title.  The last twenty seconds discusses why Canada wasn’t hurt as much by the Great Recession as the U.S. 

Why Canada wasn’t hurt as much by the Great Recession as America and Europe?  Canada is larger than America geographically but has one-ninth the population. They have thirty-five million people v.s. three-hundred and ten million. Canada is also energy independent, sending energy to the U.S. via the Keystone Pipeline. They don’t have the debt and deficit issues that the U.S. or a lot of Europe has and they tax business at a much lower rate.  Canada has a lot of economic resources with a fairly small population and a lot of land.  Physically, it is  the second largest country in the world, trailing only the Russian Federation.

Germany’s economic system is similar to both Canada’s and America’s.  It has a robust private sector and a strong safety net.  It has modern infrastructure and taxes business’s lower than the U.S. They have managed to keep their debt to GDP ratio down throughout the Great Recession.

The U.S. is trying to figure out how to become energy independent, how to finance and rebuild a crumbling infrastructure, educate more Americans and improve our 39th in the world ranking in education.  We have to move millions of Americans out of poverty.  Our poverty levels are roughly twice that of the rest of the developed world.  This requires improvements in education and job training. We need  to get our national debt stabilized and under control.

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David Pakman: Study- ‘U.S. Is An Oligrachy, Not A Democracy’

Posted on May 4, 2014 by Derik Schneider
Study_ US an Oligarchy, Not a Democracy

Source:David Pakman Show– A joint session of the U.S. Congress 

Source:The New Democrat

“–Study: The U.S. is an oligarchy, not a democracy

https://www.commondreams.org/view/201…
http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gil…

–On the Bonus Show: Books bound in human flesh, Japan’s penis festival, A man uses

his girlfriend’s passport to travel, more.. ”

Source:David Pakman: Study- ‘U.S. Is An Oligarchy, Not a Democracy’

America is a democracy in the form of a Federal Republic.  We have a Federal system with fifty-states and three levels of government. Federal, state and local.  In contrast, the United Kingdom  has a unitary system where most of the power resides in London, with the national government. We are not a democracy in the pure majoritarian sense where the majority can always rule over the minority.  This is a damn good thing that I’ll get into later.

Majority will can not violate the First Amendment or any of the other amendments in the Bill of Rights. Overturning these provisions requires agreement by two-thirds of the fifty states and two-thirds of the members of Congress.  As the Far-Right is learning in the Federal court system, government can’t treat gays as second-class citizens simply because of their sexuality even if the the popular will is in favor of that.

The Far-Left and Far-Right statists are learning that just because they have the so-called popular will on their side and their ideas seem good to them,  they may not hold up as law if they are unconstitutional. The nanny statists in New York learned this in 2012 with their efforts to prohibit the sale of jumbo soft drinks. 

I view America as a liberal democracy in the form of a federal republic. That is we elect our own leaders but also have freedom in own lives.  Our democracy needs to be guarded better to see that people with a lot of money don’t have undo influence at everyone’s else’s expense.  The recent campaign finance rulings of U.S. Supreme Court are making this very difficult.  

 

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Thom Hartmann: ‘Our Tax System is Up-Side-Down!’

Posted on May 3, 2014 by Derik Schneider

Source:The New Democrat 

Thom Hartmann says that he makes his living by producing services for the general public through his talk shows and writings, whereas investors like Mitt Romney make their money by investing in other companies.  When those companies do well, so does Mitt.  When they lose, so does Mitt, the differences between producing and investing.

I wouldn’t go as far as Mr. Hartmann here and tax all rich people at ninety-percent. If you want people, to be doctors, lawyers, accountants, mechanics, business people etc., to be productive and successful then you shouldn’t discourage them from being successful.  You shouldn’t tax the hell out of them simply because they are successful.  I prefer taxation by the income you spend rather than the income you earn.

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