Poor In Jail for Being Poor

For-Profit Companies Are Helping to Put People In Jail for Being Poor. I Should Know, I Was One of Them.

By Kevin Thompson

In December, I was jailed for five days simply because I couldn't afford to pay $838 in traffic fines and fees to DeKalb County and a private probation company called Judicial Correction Services, Inc.

It sounds unbelievable, but that's exactly what happened.

Last summer, I got a traffic ticket just after I pulled my car out of the driveway of my home in Decatur, Georgia. I had no idea that this ticket would eventually land me in the DeKalb County Jail for being poor.

That day, I also didn't know that my driver's license had been suspended. I later learned that it had been suspended because I forgot to submit a form to the Georgia Department of Driver Services after resolving charges related to a minor traffic violation (I missed a "no left turn" sign and appeared late to my court hearing). [By his own admission he did violate the law and didn't plan properly for court]

In October, the DeKalb County Recorders Court ordered me to pay $810 in fines related to the ticket. When I told the judge that I could not afford to pay $810 that day, she put me on "probation" with Judicial Correction Services (JCS) and told me that I had 30 days to pay. Like other people who couldn't afford to pay fines on sentencing day, I was on "pay-only" probation. My driver's license was also suspended for another six months.

I did everything I could to pay my court fines and the fees JCS charged me for "probation." Because my license was suspended, I could no longer earn money through paid tow truck driving training, which I had done before. I did odd jobs for an auto shop while looking for work and borrowed money from my mom, sister, and grandmother to pay what I could.

But it wasn't enough.

When my 30 days were almost up, I went to see my JCS officer. She charged me with violating probation for failure to pay court fines and JCS fees. She also failed to tell me that I had a right to request a court-appointed lawyer at my probation revocation hearing. Instead, she said I would have to pay $150 for a public defender, even though the fee is $50 and can be waived for poor people. I didn't have the money to pay, so I didn't request a lawyer.

I dressed in slacks and a dress shirt that I borrowed from my dad, since I didn't have my own, and I went to court with my mother for my probation revocation hearing. I hoped the judge might give me an extension of time to pay or community service because I was trying my best to pay. Instead, the judge immediately asked to hear from the JCS officer next to her, who recommended sentencing me to 10 days in jail if I couldn't pay my balance that day. I begged the judge to help me get a permit so that I could drive for work and to give me some more time to pay. Instead she sentenced me to nine days in jail.

I was stunned. I couldn't believe what happened.

All of a sudden, I realized that my mom was going to see me put in handcuffs and taken to jail. I could feel tears welling up in my eyes. I asked the judge if I could hug my mom. The judge said no. As I was handcuffed and taken to a cage behind the courtroom, I began to cry.

I spent five days in the DeKalb County Jail where it was cold and dirty, and I didn't get enough food. I felt ashamed, scared, and sad during those five days. It hurt to be separated from my family. And even after I was released, I felt scared that police might arrest me and jail me again for no good reason. After all DeKalb County and JCS essentially jailed me for being poor.

What happened to me – and others like me who try their best to pay fines and fees but fall short – is unfair and wrong, but I am standing up for my rights. The Constitution prohibits local governments and for-profit companies from doing what they did to me. I hope this lawsuit will help prevent other people from being jailed just because they are poor.

Bottom-up economics

Obama's middle-out economics is good. Bottom-up economics is better.

By Jeff Spross

Lately, the Democrats have been trying to rebrand their political vision as "middle-out economics."

It’s certainly preferable to "upper-class economics" or "crazy-rich-fatcat" economics. And the basic argument for bulking up the middle class’ purchasing power over the long haul is sound.

But it also raises an uncomfortable, if obvious question: What about the lower class?

Poverty, when properly measured, has fallen over the last 50 years — thanks overwhelmingly to safety net spending — but still remains at around 16 percent. That includes 13 million children, and the U.S. has a shockingly high number of kids living below 50 percent of median income compared to other advanced countries. Meanwhile, the number of job seekers still outstrips the number of job openings in nearly every sector of the economy, and unemployment among the less educated remains much higher than for the country as a whole.

Yet the Democrats’ new proposals to boost the middle class feature a number of design aspects that render them almost useless to the lower class. More broadly, the Democrats have spent the last few decades turning away from a commitment to a broad and generous social safety net, and towards shrinking government and mandating work requirements. (Though ObamaCare was a welcome exception to this trend.)

The GOP is even worse on this score, eagerly pursuing even more cuts to the safety net and even more work requirements. It has also perpetuated our country’s strange habit of funneling aid through the tax code — and thus disproportionately benefiting the already well-off.

A report by The New York Times earlier this week laid out the problem starkly. From 1967 to 2000, the middle class — which the article defined as households making $35,000 to $100,000 in today's dollars — shrank by 8 percentage points, while the number of households making less shrank by 9 percentage points. But those households making more increased by 18 percentage points.

Conservative commentators took this as a good sign (more people making high incomes!), but it also suggests that moving from the middle to the upper class has been a lot easier than moving from the lower to the middle. Even more disturbing, the shrinkage of the lower class and the growth of the upper class both dramatically reversed after 2000 — each by 3 percentage points — while the middle continued to fall. The report also found that an increasing share of the middle is made up of older Americans — suggesting things would be even worse without Medicare and Social Security — while the poorly educated and single-parent homes are a rising share of the lower slice.

Then layer on the fact that the children of poor families are overwhelmingly likely to remain poor, and rich children to remain rich — even in those rare circumstances when the rich child did not get a college education and the poor child did. Class is pretty entrenched across generations in America.

We can add other data points to this. The share of consumption in the economy provided by the top 20 percent of earners has increased from 53.4 percent in 1992, to 61 percent in 2012. That same slice of the population has provided 90 percent of the increase in consumption since 2009. High-end goods and services are on the upswing, while retailers aimed at the middle class — like Sears and J.C. Penny — are retrenching.

As Michaels noted, modern corporations, with their fixation on shareholder value, don’t bother pushing back at this trend — they just adjust their business models accordingly. And political science suggests its the preferences and concerns of the upper class that utterly dominate politicians’ thinking. As long as the well-off are doing alright, neither our economic system nor our political system is inclined to worry about anyone else.

So the upper class isn’t just growing — it’s sucking up the entire economy with it, and leaving everyone else behind.

The argument for middle-out economics is that job growth is a feedback loop between consumers on one end and investors and businesses on the other. So increasing the middle’s purchasing power increases the inherent potential for job growth. But this applies in spades to the poor and the lower class. They’re even more cash-constrained than the middle class, and thus even more likely to go out and immediately spend any extra dollar in market income or government aid given to them.

When conservatives look at areas of endemic poverty, like Appalachia, they think they see a collapse in the social fabric and bourgeois values, with an attendant rise in dependence on government aid. But what they’re actually seeing is a catastrophic collapse in the economic feedback loop; one that government is too limited and unimaginative to counteract.

Access to jobs and market incomes in these communities becomes increasingly scarce, as the lower class is essentially squeezed out of the economic ecology entirely.

So what we really need is bottom-up economics: a sustained effort to move purchasing power to both the middle and the lower class, and to ensure a baseline supply of good jobs even at the lowest end of the income ladder.

This will be expensive. And our political system appears terrified of even slight tax hikes on the upper class. But the threat of the long-term debt has been wildly over-hyped, and if ever there was a national priority that justified some serious borrowing in the short-to-medium term this is it.

And in the long term, if we successfully rebuild the lower class, the upper class may well become more tolerant of the tax revenues needed to sustain the system. If you lift up the bottom, people will be less afraid of falling from the top.

Senate Approves Keystone, Veto coming...

Senate Approves Keystone XL Pipeline Bill, Testing Obama

By CORAL DAVENPORT

The Senate passed a bill on Thursday to force approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which President Obama is certain to veto in his first official clash with the new Republican-majority Congress.

The five-year fight over the Keystone pipeline has become a proxy for far broader fights over climate change, energy and the economy, and for the conflict between Mr. Obama and congressional Republicans.

When Republicans won control of the Senate late last year, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, chose the Keystone bill as the first measure Republicans would send to Mr. Obama.

The White House promptly said that Mr. Obama would veto the measure, which would force the approval of a proposed 1,179-mile oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. It would be just the third veto of Mr. Obama’s presidency, but the opening shot in a fight over Republican-sponsored measures.

The Senate voted 62 to 36 in favor of building the pipeline. Nine Democrats joined 53 Republicans in passing the bill. The passage sends the measure back to the House, which passed a largely similar bill this month. House leaders are deciding whether to pass the Senate bill as is or to hold a conference merging the House and Senate versions into a new bill to be voted on by each chamber.

Either way, the bill is expected to reach the president’s desk as soon as next week. It is unlikely, however, that either the Senate or House can muster the two-thirds majority of votes necessary to override a veto.

Mr. Obama, who currently retains authority to approve or deny the permitting of the pipeline because it crosses an international border, is expected to veto the bill because it would remove his executive authority to make the final decision. Senate Republicans said that if he vetoed the Keystone bill, they would add it on to another measure this year, like must-pass spending legislation or a broader energy bill.

But pressure is mounting on the president from both sides to make a final decision on Keystone construction, which has been pending since he took office.

Mr. Obama has repeatedly said that he is waiting for all reviews and processes to be completed before he makes a final decision. In 2013, he said that his verdict on the pipeline would be based on whether its construction would worsen climate change. But an 11-volume State Department environmental review of the proposed pipeline, released last year, concluded that its construction would not significantly increase the rate of planet-warming pollution into the atmosphere.

After that review was released, Mr. Obama said that he would not issue a decision until a court case in Nebraska over the pipeline’s route was settled. Earlier this month, the Nebraska court cleared the way for the pipeline’s construction through that state.

Mr. Obama has also said that he wants to wait until a series of reviews by additional cabinet agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the departments of Defense, Interior, Homeland Security and Commerce, are complete.

The deadline for those reviews, aimed at determining whether the project is in the national interest, is on Monday.

People on both sides of the debate are urging Mr. Obama to make a decision soon, and some people say that after the years of deliberation and delay, he could weigh in as soon as February.

Senator John Hoeven, a North Dakota Republican who is a chief sponsor of the bill, said: “You’ve got Congress approving it on a bipartisan basis. All six states on the route have approved it. The Nebraska court decision is done. The American people overwhelmingly support it. The president has to consider all that when he makes his decision.”

On that point, environmentalist opponents of the pipeline agreed. “This issue is ready for a decision,” said Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, one of the groups that has held hundreds of rallies outside the White House and around the country, urging Mr. Obama to reject the project. “After the agencies have weighed in, this issue has been examined enough, and the president has everything he needs to make this decision.”

After all this time and deliberation, Mr. Brune expressed confidence that Mr. Obama would reject the pipeline.

“I bet your lunch he’ll reject it,” he said.

Mr. Brune said his confidence stemmed from recent public statements Mr. Obama had made that disparaged the pipeline project. In a December interview on “The Colbert Report,” Mr. Obama said he would weigh the project’s effect on climate change against its potential for the creation of jobs.

“We have to examine that, and we have to weigh that against the amount of jobs that it’s actually going to create, which aren’t a lot,” he said.

Despite the debate over the pipeline, and its potency as a symbol of energy and environmental policy, experts have pointed out repeatedly that the symbolism vastly outweighs its substance.

Still, the two-week Senate floor fight over the Keystone bill set the stage for debates on more substantial energy and climate change policy issues over the next year, and for the presidential election. Most notably, it forced Republicans into an on-the-record vote on their views on climate change: 15 Republicans voted in favor of a resolution declaring that humans contribute to climate change, and five Republicans voted in favor of a resolution declaring that humans contribute significantly to such change.

The Senate also voted in favor of an energy-efficiency amendment from Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, and Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire. The amendment, which aims to reduce energy use in commercial buildings, would go down in Mr. Obama’s veto, but the senators are expected to reintroduce it as a separate measure this year, which has a good chance of congressional and presidential approval.

Keeps on rocking...

Oklahoma worries over swarm of earthquakes and connection to oil industry

By Lori Montgomery

The earthquakes come nearly every day now, cracking drywall, popping floor tiles and rattling kitchen cabinets. On Monday, three quakes hit this historic land-rush town in 24 hours, booming and rumbling like the end of the world.

“After a while, you can’t even tell what’s a pre-shock or an after-shock. The ground just keeps moving,” said Jason Murphey, 37, a Web developer who represents Guthrie in the state legislature. “People are so frustrated and scared. They want to know the state is doing something.”

What to do about the plague of earthquakes is, however, very much an open question in Oklahoma. Last year, 567 quakes of at least 3.0 magnitude rocked a swath of counties from the state capital to the Kansas line, alarming a populace long accustomed to fewer than two quakes a year.

Scientists implicated the oil and gas industry — in particular, the deep wastewater disposal wells that have been linked to a dramatic increase in seismic activity across the central United States. But in a state founded on oil wealth, officials have been reluctant to crack down on an industry that accounts for a third of the economy and one in five jobs.

With seismologists warning that the spreading earthquake swarms could trigger something far bigger and potentially deadly, pressure is building to follow the lead of other oil and gas-producing states and take more aggressive action.

Map: Earthquakes and drilling in Oklahoma

“The question is: Is it all about profits, or do the people have any rights at all?” said Robert Freeman, 69, a retired Air Force contracting officer who is trying to rally his neighbors in Guthrie to demand a moratorium on new disposal wells.

“I understand the oil and gas industry is the economic lifeblood of the state. I get some of my paycheck from the oil and gas industry,” added Lisa Griggs, 56, a Guthrie environmental consultant. “But they don’t get to destroy my house.”

State officials insist they are doing all they can to develop new regulations. In September, Gov. Mary Fallin (R) named a coordinating council to study seismic activity. And the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, an elected three-member panel that regulates oil and gas producers, has imposed new restrictions on wells in seismically active areas.

“We’ve taken a proactive approach,” said commissioner Dana Murphy (R).

But in Oklahoma — where the state monument is a Golden Driller that stands half as high as the Statue of Liberty; where an active oil rig still pumps on the grounds of the state capitol — politicians can move only so fast. Murphey, the lawmaker, called Murphy, the commissioner, “courageous” for abstaining from a vote to approve a disposal well north of Guthrie, even though the commission ultimately okayed the well.

“The oil and gas industry funds so much of those [commission] races,” said Murphey (R) with a sigh. “And she hasn’t been a tool of the industry.”

Meanwhile, the state seismologist, Austin Holland, readily acknowledged that the industry has tried to influence his work — even as he and his colleague, Amberlee Darold, are pelted with “hate e-mail” from quake victims.

“I can’t really talk about it,” Holland said, taking a cigarette break from the dirty work of burying instruments near a cow pasture southwest of Oklahoma City. “I try not to let it affect the research and the science. We’re going to do the right thing.”

For the most part, Oklahoma oil companies and their representatives have declined to engage in the public debate. When industry representatives have ventured forth, they have denied responsibility for the quakes. At a luncheon hosted by the Oklahoma City Geological Society last summer, Glen Brown, a Continental Resources geologist, blamed a worldwide surge in seismic activity that has nothing to do with wastewater disposal.

“There’s a hysteria that needs to be brought back to reality that these [quakes] are light and will not cause any harm,” Brown said, according to local news reports.

In an interview, A.J. Ferate, vice president of regulatory affairs for the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association, said, “It’s hard to deny that in certain geographic locations with certain geologic circumstances, we’ve had some problems with some wastewater wells.” But “to make a blanket assertion that wastewater wells are always the cause, I don’t know that I can agree with that.”

Though mild for the most part, the Oklahoma quakes have already caused harm, and not just to people’s foundations and swimming pools. Around 11 p.m. on Nov. 5, 2011, a magnitude 5.6 quake — the biggest in state history — hit the small town of Prague, east of Oklahoma City. Sandra Ladra, a business manager for a state job training center, was sitting in a recliner watching television when the quake toppled her two-story stone fireplace. Big rocks rained down on her legs, gashing her knees.

“I nearly went into shock,” said Ladra, 63. “You just really don’t think you’re going to live through it.”

In August, Ladra filed suit, the first case in Oklahoma to try to pin liability for the quakes to the oil companies — in this case, New Dominion LLC and other producers with disposal wells near Prague. In October, a trial judge dismissed the case, agreeing with New Dominion that Ladra must first go before the Corporation Commission and prove “a scientific basis” for her claim.

Last month, in an unusual decision, the Oklahoma Supreme Court agreed to review that ruling. If the case goes to trial, Ladra’s attorney, Scott Poynter, said he intends to convince a jury that the oil companies are at fault — a potential gamechanger, both legally and politically.

“The science has been there since the 1960s to link injection wells to earthquakes,” said Poynter, who has also represented victims of “induced” or manmade quakes in Arkansas.

There, Poynter is on solid ground. Both the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the Oklahoma Geological Survey have confirmed a connection between the recent oil and gas boom and a sharp uptick in seismic activity in Texas, Colorado, Arkansas and Ohio, as well as Oklahoma. New extraction techniques, such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, generate massive amounts of wastewater, which are then injected deep underground to avoid contaminating clean water near the surface.

Under the right geological conditions, those injections can trigger quakes.

“An earthquake that was sitting there waiting goes kaboing. Then things shake,” said John Armbruster, a geologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, who studied manmade quakes in Youngstown, Ohio.

There, a single well was linked to a well-defined area of seismicity, Armbruster said, and the response was easy: Shut it down. Similarly, Arkansas declared a moratorium on new disposal wells in northern Faulkner County after earthquakes led to the discovery of a previously unknown fault.

But Oklahoma has about 3,300 active disposal wells, pumping more than 2 billion barrels of toxic brine a year into a vast network of faults buried under the red-dirt prairie. So far, state regulators have been unable to establish a clear connection between the quakes and any particular well.

“Broadly, we can say it looks like there are some strong correlations” between the wells and seismicity, said Holland, the state seismologist. “But when you zoom in, the quakes aren’t happening next to the wells, where you’d expect to find them.”

With few answers forthcoming from state bureaucrats, Jason Murphey teamed up last fall with Rep. Cory Williams, a Democrat from Stillwater, to hold the first legislative hearings on the quakes.

Oklahoma State University professor Todd Halihan, a member of Fallin’s coordinating council, testified that the Corporation Commission “is not following injection protocols designed to prevent induced seismicity.” He concluded that the state could either do nothing and risk a major calamity. Or officials could reduce volumes at several “monster” wells, with names such as “Deep Throat” and “Flower Power,” that scientists say may be responsible for a huge share of quakes across the Midwest.

“Rather than just one well, one earthquake, it may be that the broader region is affected by multiple wells,” said Robert Williams, a geophysicist with the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program in Golden, Colo., citing forthcoming research by Stanford geophysicist Mark Zoback.

Murphy said the commission is watching Zoback’s work. “We have to see what the results are to see if that causes us to take another step,” she said.

In the meantime, skepticism runs deep. Jerry Ellis, a former Democratic state senator, said he met with Murphy and other commission officials before he retired last year.

“This was in August. In July, we had 33 earthquakes in Payne County, where Oklahoma State University is located. The last thing I said was: Those high-rise dorms at the campus, if one or more were toppled and several students were killed, would you be able to look back and say you did everything you could to prevent it?

“They did not answer,” Ellis said. “They just kind of hung their heads.”

What If No One Wins

What If No One Wins the GOP Presidential Nomination?

By Sean Trende

Normally, I dread commenting on presidential nomination contests. But as much as I might like to return to the days of short presidential nomination processes (Franklin Roosevelt didn’t declare his intention to seek a third term until the summer of 1940), the reality is that the year-long nomination process is here to stay, and it is time to start writing on it.

But in truth, I’m actually hopeful about this year’s campaign, because I think it could be unlike anything we’ve seen in a very long time. I think the Republican Party really could wind up with a brokered convention – that is, a race where no candidate receives a majority of the delegates by the end of voting. In fact, it might well be the most likely outcome, if only because no particular outcome is particularly probable.

This race is intriguing not just because of one possible outcome. It is interesting because it is difficult even to formulate a workable theory of the race. Charlie Cook uses a brackets metaphor, while Jim Geraghty and Larry Sabato think of the race in terms of tiers, but all of these have problems. Instead, I see a race that is largely chaotic. It is one where an unusually large number of candidates have perfectly plausible paths, if not to the nomination, then at least to lengthy runs deep into the balloting process.

This is because 2016 really is the deepest GOP field in a very, very long time. In fact, it isn’t even close. To be clear, that doesn’t mean that eventual candidate is (or will be) the strongest Republican nominee ever. I think that’s unlikely, and in fact, that is crucial to my analysis. It just means that number eight is unusually strong. In 1996, eighth place in Iowa was businessman Morry Taylor. In 2008, it was Alan Keyes (who placed fourth in 2000). This year, eighth place will probably be a candidate we now see as a legitimate contender for the nomination.

Let’s look at Jonathan Bernstein’s list of potential candidates here, and assume the following candidates get in: Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, John Bolton and Peter King. Some on that list won’t run, but some others probably will (Mike Pence or Rick Snyder being the most obvious contenders).

Let’s rate this field using a points system as follows: 5 points for a sitting veep, 4 for a sitting senator or governor, 3 for a representative, 2 for Cabinet officials, and 1 for “other.” We’ll (somewhat arbitrarily) add a point for “star power,” and deduct one for candidates who haven’t won a race in the past six years. We’ll do this for all the initial fields going back to 1980 (minor note: Harold Stassen receives a 1 even though he was a former governor. An election in 1938 doesn’t have much bearing in 1988).

The total for the prospective 2016 field is 56 points, by far the highest of any field. The next-closest field, from 2008, totals just 39 points. Moreover, the average candidate quality in 2016 is the highest of the bunch: 3.5 points, compared with 3.1 points for 2012 or 3.3 for 2008. Even this doesn’t tell the whole story though, as the 2008 slate is filled with candidates who were much weaker than their ratings suggested (Jim Gilmore, Sam Brownback, Tommy Thompson). Almost all of the candidates on the 2016 list would have been top-flight contenders against the 2012 field, yet many of them will struggle to finish in the top five in a single primary or caucus.

Now to be clear, it is likely that some of these candidates will drop out as we approach actual voting for the usual reasons: they fail to gain traction in the polls, fail to raise money, or are excluded from debates. At the same time, I think that this “early winnowing” effect will be more muted than is usually the case. Most of the candidates on my list tend to draw support from different wings of the party, have different bases of fundraising, and will register at least some support in Iowa. Someone might catch fire, but I think the lack of an overwhelmingly strong candidate means that it is just as likely that the polling remains very tight, with candidates struggling to make it out of the low teens. This keeps even marginal candidates in striking distance and will decrease the incentive to drop out. Our hypothetical field of 16 might be 10 by caucus day, but it will be a very serious group of 10.

The traditional way to analyze the Republican primary is to walk through the early states, gaming out various paths to the nomination. So, we would start with Iowa, which traditionally likes religious conservatives and fellow Midwesterners. This might argue for Scott Walker, who performed well in the state over the weekend, Ted Cruz, who could combine religious conservatives with Tea Partiers, or perhaps for a repeat victory for Huckabee or Santorum.

Next is New Hampshire, where we could see a Chris Christie, Mitt Romney, or Jeb Bush do well. South Carolina traditionally follows (although for now, New York and Utah precede it) and it has long been the establishment firewall. But lately it has been more populist: Huckabee very nearly defeated McCain (in a race whose map eerily paralleled a 1940 anti-prohibition referendum) on the basis of a strong showing in the upcountry, while in 2012 Newt Gingrich beat Mitt Romney in the state by a 12-point margin. So we might label this fertile territory for an insurgent populist, perhaps Ted Cruz or Rick Perry.

That leaves a flurry of caucus states – Nevada, Colorado and Minnesota – to consider before we get into the run up to Super Tuesday. Santorum made a splash by winning some of these in 2012 (though Romney did manage to win Nevada). But look at the second-place finisher in Minnesota and Maine (which held early caucuses in 2012): Ron Paul. Caucuses tend to reward candidates with devoted followings. If Rand Paul inherits his father’s following and builds upon it somewhat as a more reasonable, electable option, one can see him performing well here.

So here you have a perfectly plausible scenario where we exit the early primary phase of the contest with four winners, each of whom is a legitimate presidential contender. What’s more, it’s not entirely clear how they knock each other out. Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul all represent different wings of the party, would draw from different fundraising bases, and would have different demographic appeals. Just as important: None is an obvious choice, but at the same time, unlike 2012, all will have a group of supporters that really likes them; it won’t just be an “anti-Bush” vote trying to coalesce. You can mix up the various winners (Rubio, Christie, Perry, Paul), but the same analysis holds.

Plus, we have states like New York, Utah and North Carolina that have moved up their primaries. We don’t have a good feel for these states, but you could take any one of the above scenarios, add Chris Christie in New York, Mitt Romney in Utah and any number of candidates in North Carolina.

Moreover, a strong second-place finisher could decide that he is the next Bill Clinton (who famously won only one of the first 11 primaries in 1992), and try to keep going.

At that point, it really is anybody’s game. No one really has an incentive to drop out, as the RNC’s compressed schedule means the finish line is in sight by the time Super Tuesday rolls around, and all of these candidates can probably win a race here and there to keep the old ball rolling. Money might get tight, but the threshold for winning these contests remains low. It also becomes very difficult for any one candidate to amass a majority of the delegates very, very quickly.

Complicating matters even further, our analyses haven’t fully accounted for the rise of SuperPACs. I suspect 2012 was but a preview of their potential impact. Rick Santorum nearly threw the entire race into chaos in 2012 with a camper and the backing of Foster Friess. Sheldon Adelson helped Newt Gingrich stay in the race through May. Without SuperPACs, they likely would have been out in March, at the latest. What happens if Friess, Adelson, Karl Rove and the Kochs all back different candidates, while a candidate like Paul survives off of grassroots support? That race could go on for a very long time.

But, in fact, the race is even less predictable than the above analysis suggests. To see what I mean, let’s revisit our list of candidates above, putting in a sort of bare minimum for each candidate in Iowa, without any regard for the total vote share. I did this, and I was not generous. Top-flight candidates rarely drop much below 10 percent here, and candidates we today regard as also-also-rans routinely put up strong showings. So when I give two-term governors who have routinely been mentioned as nominee material like Bobby Jindal or Chris Christie 5 percent, or give 11 percent to a candidate like Mike Huckabee, who won 40 percent of the vote the last go-round, I’m being pretty stingy.

The total I came up with was 125 percent. There are two implications to this. First, a lot of objectively strong candidates are going to have to do quite a bit worse than we currently think is possible next January, but we have no real way of knowing just who those candidates are. To be sure, the field will narrow some by Election Day, but I’m already giving the most likely dropouts very small vote shares.

Second, and most importantly, with a deep field such as this that splits the Republican coalition in so many different ways, you really might be able to win Iowa with 12 percent of the vote or so. Alan Keyes surpassed that vote share in 2000, Gary Bauer came within striking distance of it that same year, and Pat Robertson doubled it in 1988.

Given this, almost anyone really can win Iowa this time. Moreover, if we really do have a low-teen threshold for victory in these early races, the types of unpredictable “quantum effects” that political scientists routinely dismiss as irrelevant, like newspaper and gubernatorial endorsements, suddenly become important. Could Chris Christie have a solid debate and shoot from 5 percent to 15 percent in the polls right before the election? I’m basically asking if he can win over two-thirds of Romney voters, so the answer to me is obviously “yes.” Might Terry Brandstad decide it is Kasich's time, and rocket the governor into a surprise third-place finish? If it only takes 10 percent of the vote to do so, why not?

So what happens if, instead of Walker, Bush, Cruz, and Paul, our early winners are, say, Ben Carson, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Paul, with Walker, Bush and Cruz coming in a close second in these states? The result would be seven solid candidates receiving substantial numbers of delegates early on, without an obvious pick for the party. It would quickly become self-perpetuating: The longer candidates continue to rack up delegates, and the longer that the size of the field prevents someone from racking up a huge numbers of delegates, and the longer the field will stay large.

The most credible response to all of this is, in my view, “Haven’t we predicted this before?” This was basically Steve Kornacki’s rejoinder to me in 2012, when I was discussing such a scenario for that year. Our back-and-forth is worth revisiting if you agree with me so far, as Kornacki’s recitation of history is impeccable (as is his wont).

But my rejoinder is basically the same as last time: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. This is especially true since some things really have changed: SuperPAC funding, Internet fundraising (weakening parties), and the size and strength of this field.

Most importantly, we should bear in mind just how close Republicans actually came to a brokered convention in 2012. Had 5,300 Ohio voters changed their mind, and/or 16,200 Michigan voters cast their ballots differently, Romney would have been severely damaged, and that race probably would have gone to the convention. Party elites might even have demanded it.

For that matter, consider 2008 on the Democratic side. John Edwards was a very serious candidate, coming off of a credible run as vice president in 2004. What if he had decided to gut it out for one more week, through Super Tuesday? Let’s say he won only 90 delegates – just 5 percent of the 1,700 delegates awarded that day. If he pulled evenly from Obama and Clinton, this would have been enough eventually to deny Obama an outright majority of the pledged delegates.

Of course, the super delegates would probably have still saved Obama (Edwards would have had to have won about 250 delegates on Super Tuesday to prevent that), but super delegates don’t fit into the Republican calculus to any great degree. More to the point, it only took two equally matched candidates and a tepid effort from a third candidate for the 2008 Democratic race to come dangerously close to a convention. If just four or five evenly matched Republicans making it to Super Tuesday, it’s hard to see how a similar result would be avoided.

This isn’t to say that things necessarily play out this way. A candidate could catch fire and suddenly bring stability to the races, as happened with the Democrats in 2004. A large number of candidates could decide not to run.

Rather, the point is that it really is unknowable at this point what will happen. For now, the race is chaotic and utterly unpredictable. Which makes it fun.

And you wonder why cops are scene as racist....

Video shows Seattle cop arresting elderly black man using golf club as cane

By Elahe Izadi

William Wingate had been standing on a busy Seattle street corner in July, leaning on a golf club he uses as a cane, when a police cruiser pulled up and the officer inside yelled at Wingate to “put that down.”

The resulting exchange — in which the officer claims that Wingate swung the club at her after she asked him to “shut it down” before she arrested him – was captured on the cruiser’s dashboard camera, the footage of which Seattle Police released this week as it apologized for the 2014 incident.

The response to that video prompted Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole to announce Wednesday that she was ordering a comprehensive review of the officer’s performance during Wingate’s arrest and another incident. She did not name the officer, but multiple local outlets have reported her name as Cynthia Whitlatch.

By Thursday, O’Toole said she had put Whitlatch on desk duty following the discovery of Facebook posts attributed to her. The Stranger reported those comments included her decrying “chronic black racism that far exceeds any white racism in this country. I am tired of black peoples paranoia that white people are out to get them.”

Whitlatch is white; Wingate is black.

“Until yesterday I was unaware of Officer Whitlatch’s Facebook posts. I was shocked and disappointed to read her comments,” O’Toole said in a statement posted on the department’s Web site. “We are working to reform the Seattle Police Department, and behavior of this nature seriously undermines our efforts.”

The department did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.

In the video of the July incident, Wingate, who was 69 at the time, says he can’t hear the officer and then is confused by her demand. “What’s going on?” he asks.

“Aren’t you holding a golf club?” the officer asks.

“This is my golf club,” Wingate says.

“I’m not going to take it from you, but it’s a weapon,” the officer says. “Shut it down, please.”

“Why don’t you call somebody, because I’ve been walking with this golf club for 20 years,” he says.
The officer tells Wingate that he’s being recorded, and she goes on to say: “You just swung that golf club at me.”

“I did not,” responds Wingate, who is seen holding a plastic bag in one hand, with the golf club still pointed to the ground.

He turns to passersby, and the officer tells him he’s not free to leave. Eventually, another officer arrives, and Wingate is arrested. He was charged with obstruction and harassment, according to police.

In the police report, as described on the Seattle Department’s crime blotter, an officer “stated she had witnessed the man swing a golf club toward her, striking a stop sign as she drove past him” and that she “ordered him to surrender his golf club,” which he refused to do.

Wingate spent a night in jail. “He’s never been arrested his whole life,” said his lawyer, Susan Mindenbergs. The 70-year-old veteran once served as an Air Force Police Officer and spent 35 years as a bus driver in Washington’s King County, his attorney told The Post. “His relationships with the police have always been cooperative,” Mindenbergs said. “That’s been his experience, so this was dramatically different.”

A public defender recommended Wingate sign an order of continuance in order to leave jail, according to Mindenbergs.

The city attorney’s office filed a charge of unlawful use of a weapon based on the police report, spokeswoman Kimberly Mills told the Stranger, and that if he signed an agreement, “the case would be dismissed after two years if he complied with all conditions ordered by the Seattle Municipal Court judge.”

After the footage went public and the department apologized, Wingate told KIRO that while he doesn’t know whether he was racially profiled, “I know one thing. I’m a black man walking down the street doing nothing, and I got stopped and went to jail by a white police officer.”

“I was scared,” he said. “I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. I knew one thing—I was being framed.”

Wingate has filed an administrative claim against the city for $750,000, and Mindenbergs said she is in the process of gathering public documents to prepare for a lawsuit within the next couple of weeks. According to the claim, Wingate has been seeking medical attention for post-traumatic stress.

The incident came to light after local activist and former state lawmaker Dawn Mason found out about the case from a neighbor.

The incident gained some attention in Seattle before police released the video this week. In August, following the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Wingate spoke about his experience at a local NAACP rally. “I had never seen her before in my life,” Wingate said of the officer, the Seattle Times reported.

In light of the incident, the Seattle King County NAACP chapter called for more action from city leaders regarding police abuse. “This goes deeper than any one officer,” a statement read. “At every step along the way, our justice system failed Mr. Wingate. That is what institutional racism looks like.”

Following a 2011 investigation, the Justice Department said it found that the Seattle Police Department “engaged in a pattern or practice of excessive force” and some policies and practices, especially “related to pedestrian encounters, could result in discriminatory policing.” The city settled with Justice, and a federal monitor has been charged with overseeing changes in the department.

O’Toole, who took over as chief in June 2014, said in a statement Thursday: “I was hired because of my track record for reform and my commitment to bias-free policing. I knew this would be a difficult job, but days like this make me even more determined.”

Isn't Sorry

Scott Walker Isn't Sorry

The Wisconsin governor concedes nothing to his critics, and Republican voters are embracing his message.

By Peter Beinart

Few national commentators predicted it, but we’re in the middle of a Scott Walker boomlet. It began earlier this month when Walker shrewdly used Chris Christie’s owner’s box bromance with Jerry Jones to highlight his own, comparatively blue-collar, devotion to the Green Bay Packers. And it exploded at last Saturday’s Iowa Freedom Summit, where according to Slate’s John Dickerson, it was clear that Walker “outshines the competition.” After taking Iowa “by storm,” reported The Hill, “Scott Walker’s stock is soaring.”

Walker’s rise illustrates the pitfalls of media coverage of the GOP race. Not many national reporters live within the conservative media ecosystem. They therefore largely assume that in order to win over the non-white, female, millennial and working class voters who rejected John McCain and Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidates must break from conservative orthodoxy, if not substantively, then at least rhetorically. Journalists are also drawn to storylines about change. Thus, when potential GOP candidates show signs of ideological deviation, the press perks up. After 2012, Marco Rubio garnered enormous media attention for his efforts at immigration reform. Rand Paul’s transgressions—whether on foreign policy, civil liberties or race—make headlines almost every week. In covering the launch of his new Super PAC, journalists made much of Jeb Bush’s discussion of income inequality and his fluent Spanish. Most recently, reporters have lavished attention on Mitt Romney’s new focus on the poor.

Walker’s rise is a reminder that among Republican primary voters, and especially Iowa-caucus goers, the market for ideological or even stylistic innovation, may be smaller than the media assumes. Because the most striking thing about Scott Walker’s speech at the Freedom Summit, and his emerging campaign message more generally, is how retro it is. Walker concedes nothing to the conventional wisdom about what the GOP must do to compete in a more culturally tolerant, ethnically diverse and economically insecure America. And the GOP faithful love it.

It starts with ethnicity and race. Since 2012, many prominent Republicans have made overtures to African Americans and Latinos. Paul Ryan has been hanging around with African American ministers. Rand Paul has spoken at Howard University and met with activists in Ferguson. Jeb Bush’s SuperPAC vows that “We will not cede an inch of territory—no issues, no demographic groups, no voters.” Even Representative Curt Clawson, who delivered the Tea Party response to President Obama’s State of the Union Address, managed a few lines of Spanish.

Not Walker. His speech in Iowa not only slammed President Obama’s executive action legalizing some undocumented immigrants. It didn’t even include the love-letter to legal immigrants that Republicans typically use to shield themselves from charges of being anti-Hispanic. In addition, Walker said nothing about reaching out to African Americans and boasted about Wisconsin’s voter-ID law, which many African Americans and Latinos see as means of reducing their turnout. Even the imagery on Walker’s website stands out. People of color make up roughly half the faces in the photo-montage used by Jeb Bush’s Right to Rise PAC (not including Jeb’s himself). In the video for Walker’s new PAC, by contrast, the opening faces are relentlessly white. You don’t encounter an African-American until roughly halfway through. And unlike Jeb’s website, Walker’s isn’t translated into Spanish.

As Alec MacGillis explained in an excellent New Republic profile last summer, greater Milwaukee exists in a kind of political time warp. Because its African-American population arrived later than in other northern cities and because its white population fled to the suburbs later, the racially-tinged, suburban-versus-urban politics that have faded in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia remain strong in Wisconsin. When running for governor, Walker even said, “We don’t want Wisconsin to become like Milwaukee.”

While every Republican presidential hopeful wants to be seen as Reaganesque, other leading contenders clearly hope to improve on the Gipper’s relationship with people of color. Walker, by contrast, isn’t updating the 1980s script at all.

He’s not updating it on economics either. In recent months, many of Walker’s likely GOP opponents have moved beyond a purely anti-government message to suggest conservative-sounding ways government can give Americans an economic boost. Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio have proposed new anti-poverty tax credits. Mitt Romney has backed a higher minimum wage.

Walker’s having none of it. His message is simple and old-fashioned: “Take control from the federal government and big-government special interests and give it back to hard-working taxpayers.”

In fact, Walker won’t even concede that declining upward mobility is a problem. Jeb frankly admits that, “while the last eight years have been pretty good ones for top earners, they’ve been a lost decade for the rest of America … the income gap is real.” Ryan declared last year that, “we’re losing not only mobility, we understand that, but whole generations of Americans don’t know what this is.” But for Walker, it’s still Morning in America. At the Freedom Summit, he actually asserted that the United States is “one of the few places left in the world where it doesn’t matter what class you were born into, it doesn’t matter what your parents did for a living. In America, the opportunity is equal for each and every one of us.” As even National Review has noted, that just ain’t so.

After the 2012 election, many pundits deemed it inevitable that Congressional Republicans would respond to Romney’s defeat by passing immigration reform. They didn’t. Now pundits are lavishing attention on those GOP presidential candidates who are trying to update their party’s image and message. But Scott Walker is betting that conservative activists aren’t interesting in adapting to Obama’s America. And if last weekend’s Freedom Summit is any guide, he may be right.   

No Romney for you!!!!

Former GOP nominee Romney will not run for president in '16

By STEVE PEOPLES

After a three-week flirtation with another run for president, Mitt Romney said definitively on Friday that he will not seek the White House in 2016.

The Republican Party's 2012 nominee plans to tell supporters about his plans to pass on another national campaign during a conference call. He first let his staff know in a separate call that he was out of the race.

"After putting considerable thought into making another run for president, I've decided it is best to give other leaders in the party the opportunity to become our next nominee," Romney said in a statement, which he planned to read to supporters on the call.

The former governor of Massachusetts had jumped back into the presidential discussion on Jan. 10, when he surprised a small group of former donors at a meeting in New York by telling them he was eyeing a third run for the White House.

It was a monumental change for Romney, who since losing the 2012 election to President Barack Obama had repeatedly told all who asked that his career in politics was over and that he would not again run for president.

In the days since that meeting in New York, which caught several in attendance off-guard, Romney made calls to former fundraisers, staff and supporters, and gave three public speeches in which he outlined his potential vision for another campaign.

"I'm thinking about how I can help the country," he told hundreds of students Wednesday night at Mississippi State University.

In that speech, and what amounted to a campaign stop a few hours before at a barbeque restaurant with Mississippi State's football coach Dan Mullen in tow, Romney sounded every bit like a politician preparing to run for president.

"We need to restore opportunity, particularly for the middle class," Romney said. "You deserve a job that can repay all you've spent and borrowed to go to college."

But as Romney sounded out his former team about putting together a new national campaign, he discovered that several of his past fundraisers had already made plans for 2016 and were committed to supporting former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

Several key former Romney donors told The Associated Press this week that in Bush they see someone who can successfully serve as president, as they believe Romney could. But they also think Bush has the personality and senior staff needed to win the White House, something the former Massachusetts governor could not bring together in his two previous presidential campaigns.

"I've got great respect for Gov. Romney, and I busted my buns for him," said Chicago investor Craig Duchossois, whose wife contributed $250,000 to a pro-Romney super PAC while he collected tens of thousands more for Romney's last campaign. "But I have turned the page."

Romney also lost one of his most trusted political advisers on Thursday when David Kochel joined Bush's team. Kochel, who led Romney's campaign in Iowa in 2008 and 2012, is in now line to play a senior role in Bush's campaign should he run.

Romney's inner circle was surprised to lose Kochel, whom a Bush spokesman called one of "the most respected strategists" in the country.

The exit of Romney from the campaign most immediately benefits the other favorites of the party's establishment wing, including Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

The more conservative side of the field is largely unchanged, with a group of candidates that will likely include Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, former neurosurgeon Ben Carson and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Safe and Affordable

Ensure Access to Safe and Affordable Rental Housing

by Sarah Edelman and Julia Gordon

This influx of renters has put significant upward pressure on rents. According to the Consumer Price Index, as most other expenses have held steady in recent months, rent expenses continue a steep upward climb. Half of all renters spend more than 30 percent of their gross income on housing, while 27 percent spend more than 50 percent — both sharp increases over the last decade. When the rental market tightens, the lowest-income renters feel the pressure first. Today, that pressure extends even into the middle of the income spectrum.
 

Since the foreclosure crisis in 2008, the nation has gained more than four million renting households, and demographers expect an additional four million households to become renters over the next decade. At the same time, the homeownership rate has declined from nearly 70 percent to 64 percent.

Consequently, in addition to supporting the development and preservation of affordable rental housing, local policymakers should focus significant effort on improving renter protections. In a few jurisdictions, such as New York City, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, CA, many tenants are protected by local laws that ensure that if they pay their rent and follow the other terms of their lease, they can make family plans without constant worry about needing to move or to afford steep rent increases. But in most of the country, particularly in Sunbelt states like Georgia, Arizona, Texas and Florida, landlords can raise the rent significantly with little notice or evict a tenant even if the rent check is just a few days late.

Additionally, federal, state and local sources should provide sufficient funding for civil legal aid, which is often the only affordable source of assistance for families experiencing problems with a landlord or rental property, such as an illegal eviction, inadequate heat or other utilities, or dangerous conditions in the home.

Finally, Congress should immediately renew the recently expired “Protecting Tenants in Foreclosure Act,” which since 2009 has given tenants whose landlords are losing their properties to foreclosure an opportunity to finish out their lease and make appropriate plans for the future.

To help ensure access to safe and affordable rental housing, ask your state and local representatives to support legal protections for renters, and ask your Congressional representatives to support federal funding for civil legal aid and to renew the Protecting Tenants in Foreclosure Act.

Hell With Protecting the Public

Republicans and Wall Street Say to Hell With Protecting the Public!

by Bill Moyers

Since December, Congress has twice passed measures to weaken regulations in the Dodd-Frank financial law that are intended to reduce the risk of another financial meltdown.

In the last election cycle, Wall Street banks and financial interests spent over $1.2 billion on lobbying and campaign contributions, according to Americans for Financial Reform. Their spending strategy appears to be working. Just this week, the House passed further legislation that would delay by two years some key provisions of Dodd-Frank. “[Banks] want to be able to do things their way, and that’s very dangerous.” MIT economist Simon Johnson tells Bill.

“‘Here we go again’ — I think that’s exactly the motto, or the bumper sticker for this Congress. It’s crazy, it’s unconscionable, but that is the reality.”

Lawmakers are pinning these provisions to Dodd-Frank onto bigger must-past bills like spending measures that the president doesn’t dare veto.

Bill Moyers: The safeguards that Congress is tearing down, even as we speak, were put in place after the financial disaster of 2008 to prevent another one like it from happening. Why do you think the Republicans are trying to sabotage them?

Simon Johnson: It’s mostly the lobby, specifically a few very large banks that don’t like those restrictions on their activities. They want to be able to take more risk. They’re not worried of course about how that could negatively impact the rest of us, and they’ve persuaded the Republicans to help them in that quest.

Moyers: Are they putting depositors and taxpayers at risk?

Johnson: Yes, absolutely. That’s the core of the reforms: Try and make sure — and it’s hard — that part of the financial system is safe; that depositors are safe; that the taxpayers, as the ultimate backstop for deposits, are safe; and of course, try and make sure that you don’t have a huge crisis that affects the broader economy with millions of people being thrown out of work. That’s the goal. And JPMorgan, Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo don’t like that. They want to be able to do things their way, and that’s very dangerous.

Moyers: Aren’t these the same banks that nearly broke the economy in 2008 and helped to destroy millions of jobs and households?

Johnson: They were at the center of what happened. Citigroup, for example, went spectacularly wrong. Parts of Bank of America were in big trouble. In 2008 and 2009, JPMorgan Chase was relatively okay, but they’ve gotten themselves into lots of trouble subsequently, with big trading losses, the so-called London Whale problem, and by fixing interest rates, and accusations of fixing exchange rates and other kinds of market manipulation. So all of these very big financial institutions are potential trouble.

Moyers: But we put these rules in place to reduce the risk of their reckless gambling with our money and here we go again, it seems.

Johnson: Here we go again — I think that’s exactly the motto, or the bumper sticker for this Congress. It’s crazy, it’s unconscionable, but that is the reality.

Moyers: What do you make of the fact that the tea party opposed those bank bailouts back in 2008 when George W. Bush was pushing for them, and the tea party helped Republicans win control of Congress last fall, and here the tea party is silent as their party turns into Wall Street’s puppet?

Johnson: I’ve always been puzzled and frustrated by this. When I talk to people on the right, more libertarian people, people who don’t like government, intellectuals, they get this. They would be able to participate in this conversation with you and me and we’d be getting on just fine. The problem is when you get to the political right, they don’t want to get involved. They don’t want to touch this.

They don’t even want to talk about it. It has exactly the irony that you just put your finger on, which is that people on the right who rose up against government bailouts –and with some justification — are now supporting the repeal of some of the safeguards that were put in place to prevent any such bailouts in the future. It doesn’t make sense, but that’s the political reality.

Moyers: In my research, I couldn’t find any evidence that Republican candidates, or Democrats for that matter, asked voters last November if they wanted to let the wolves of Wall Street loose again. Do you remember any indication that there was a mandate in the election to turn the country over to the big banks again?

Johnson: I’m assuming that certainly no one made that proposal. What’s interesting is how few candidates, including on the left, mention the threat of Wall Street or mention these dangers. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who wasn’t up for election in November, but did a lot of campaigning for other people, is one of the very few leading national-level politicians who talks about this. She says, “It’s the Wall Street problems that gave us the massive crisis, the deep recession, the budget problems and the austerity. So first and foremost, make sure that Wall Street can’t do it again.” But it’s really interesting how few politicians are willing to explain that the deregulation of Wall Street led to the 2008 financial crisis, which caused the budget to worsen and austerity to take center stage.

Moyers: Why?

Johnson: I don’t know. I think it’s the lobby and the political contributions. A lot of money flows from the big banks into the House Financial Services Committee, for example, and more broadly. But when I talk to community bankers — and I want to emphasize this — they are absolutely on the same side.

Moyers: And by community bankers, you mean?


Johnson: The Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA).

Moyers: But these are not the big banks, right?

Johnson: No, they’re small town banks. They lend to the real economy. The ICBA represents 6,500 community banks. They don’t do derivatives trading and other kinds of crazy stuff. But they got hammered in the financial crisis and they’ve struggled in the recession and in the low-interest rate environment. They really fear and are very articulate against the “too big to fail” crowd.

Moyers: The first target right now in Congress is the Volcker rule and the Republicans, and some Democrats who are joining in, or at least are compliant, they say they’re only making technical corrections to the Volcker rule. Do you believe them?

Johnson: Absolutely not, that’s just a smokescreen. We should remind everyone that the first thing they wanted they already got, the repeal of Section 716, which pushed derivatives away from the insured bank part of their financial empires. They got that in December.

Moyers: They tacked it onto the omnibus spending bill and Obama and Jamie Dimon lobbied for Congress to vote for it.

Johnson: Yes, but only one of those gentlemen, President Obama, had to sign the legislation that made it go through. Previously, the White House had pushed back and said, “No, we’re not doing Dodd-Frank repeal through this sneaky spending bill business.” But in December, they dropped that. So now the lobbyists are exploring all possible ways they can take this forward, including “technical fixes” to Dodd-Frank that are not technical fixes. They are undermining the substance, reducing the effectiveness and putting more pressure on the regulators not to do their jobs. It’s back to business as usual, pre-2008.

Moyers: As you indicate, their strategy is to pin these provisions on bigger bills that the president doesn’t dare veto. So they get an unpopular result in an undemocratic way. What does that tell you?

Johnson: I think it tells you that democracy is basically broken. But on a slightly more optimistic note, I would say that when and if the White House fights it can win. For example, the White House has steadfastly refused to allow amendments to the Affordable Care Act to be snuck through on spending bills, and they will hold the line on that, and the Republicans know that the White House will fight them publicly every inch of the way. Ultimately they’ll win that debate because they’ll say, “Look, you want to shut down the government to make these crazy changes to a program that’s working, the Affordable Care Act?” Republicans are not going to win that. But Dodd-Frank is different because on Dodd-Frank, the administration signaled in December that the store is open and they’re willing to give things away, or sell them relatively cheaply. They’ve created a very target-rich environment for the Republicans and for the lobby.

Moyers: I know you’re not an insider in the White House, but you’re read widely in Washington. What’s your understanding of why the president in effect said the shop is open?

Johnson: I think that he’s been poorly advised on this for a long time. I think that the people around him have a very generous view of these big Wall Street players and think somehow that the country — and the economy — needs the “too big to fail” crowd, with their fundamentally anti-social behavior. I think they’re wrong. There’s a Wall Street view of the world — and I’m paraphrasing Elizabeth Warren here — which has taken over and dominated the Treasury for a long time. That remains a problem and that remains a real weakness of this administration.

Moyers: What’s the Main Street view of the world that collides with this?

Johnson: The Main Street view is exactly the community banking view of the world, which is we have families and businesses. They need credit, they need financing, and we serve as an intermediate between savings and responsible borrowers. It has some risks, but they’re manageable, and we’ve had a system for a long time that generated growth and created opportunities for most Americans without blowing up in our faces. But we gave that up in the 1990s and we’re still living with the consequences. Why anyone would want to go back to the crazy casino dominating the real economy is beyond me and it’s beyond my community banker friends.

Moyers: We should remind our younger readers that in the 1990s, Democrats were wholly complicit in what you just described as changing the rules, regulations and the laws to benefit Wall Street. So you’ve got both parties against Main Street in effect, don’t you?

Johnson: Since the 1990s there’s been a bipartisan consensus. The Clinton Treasury, Alan Greenspan, a Republican at the Federal Reserve, and both Republicans and Democrats in the Congress agreed that deregulation of finance as fine and allowing big finance to become even bigger was a good idea. So the question now is: Who has backed away from that and who is willing to acknowledge that was a mistake? The answer is some Democrats — not enough — and very, very few Republicans. But still, some Republicans do and I think they should get credit for that.

Moyers: I’ve read that depositors and taxpayers could be liable for trillions of dollars in oil derivative losses as a result of falling oil prices and the repeal of 716 of the Dodd-Frank provision that passed in December. Could we be liable?


Johnson: I don’t want to sound like a doom-monger, but I think the basic answer is we have no clue. These very large banks — they’re big trading houses really, taking speculative positions on a daily and hourly basis and betting the whole shop sometimes — we don’t know what their exposure is to movements in oil prices. They’re very opaque; they do not have good disclosure. I think even the regulators don’t fully understand the exposure of these banks to complex derivatives. That’s something we saw with what happened with housing prices and the derivatives based on that in 2008.

I suspect something like that could happen with oil and with other commodity prices. There is a big exposure and any financial disaster can have a massive effect on the real economy. That’s where you get the trillion-dollar losses in GDP and incomes and millions of jobs lost. I’m worried about that. I’m worried about lots of things around finance…

Moyers: What else worries you?

Johnson: Europe. I don’t think it’s good to sound panic-stricken at every turn of events, but we have not done a good job of insulating ourselves from the risks that are going to be generated by the European banking system as we move forward, and we have to see the world much more in those defensive terms than we did in previous decades.

Moyers: Who’s standing up for the public?

Johnson: A few people and I think they’re the heroes. Sen. Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts, is the most prominent, but there’s also Sherrod Brown from Ohio, Jeff Merkley from Oregon and David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana. The Independent Community Bankers of America, they deserve a lot more by way of kudos from the public. Perhaps they’re not as high-profile as some lobby groups but they’re absolutely speaking truth to authority on these issues. There’s a list and it’s a list of sensible people. It’s a longer list than it was in the 1990s when very few people stood against the consensus for deregulation. But it’s a group that’s not yet powerful enough and we’ll see — I think the big issue, really, is the presidential election — which way do the Democrats decide to go on this issue and which way do the Republicans go, although I think that’s a bit more predictable. And then who wins in the big competition for narratives and ideas in 2016.

Moyers: But if that’s the case, it leaves the public vulnerable because Bill Clinton was president in the 1990s when Glass-Steagall was repealed and George W. Bush was president in aughts of this century when the economy collapsed. Democrats passed Dodd-Frank, but it’s now being weakened. The election doesn’t seem to decide how Wall Street is treated in Washington. Wall Street always seems to have the upper hand.

Johnson: That is true and has been true in the past. President Obama campaigned on the promise of changing things and not so much has changed on this dimension. I think though that it depends on who’s running, what that person believes and what they are really going to do when they get in. So whether Elizabeth Warren runs is one question. If Hillary Clinton is the lead candidate and wins the nomination, who are her advisers? Who does she listen to? Does she go back with Robert Rubin, who was treasury secretary in the 1990s, who is still, as far as we know, largely persuaded that big is beautiful in finance? Or does she go with some different advisers and perhaps a perspective that’s closer to that of Elizabeth Warren? I think the Democratic primary is right now, the real primary.

Moyers: How so?

Johnson: I think this is when the battle for ideas is being fought. I think the arguments about the substance on the Democratic side are absolutely now and by the time you reach the formal nominating process, it’s going to be a bit late. So ask me again in three months or in six months and I think we’ll have a clearer answer for whether 2016 could be decisive or whether it will be, as you just suggested, potentially business as usual irrespective of who wins.

Moyers: Does Elizabeth Warren have an obligation to run in order to get her argument into the warp and woof of the Democratic race, just as the tea party folks ran and got their arguments embraced by the Republican Party? Doesn’t she have an obligation to get into the debate, into the campaign and try to champion, give people an option to the establishment candidates?

Johnson: I think she is in that conversation, she does have an ability to mobilize people and an ability to bring pressure and I think — although it’s not for me to say whether or not she has an obligation — but I think she believes and is passionate about wanting to really move the needle and change the world on these important dimensions. It’s up to her to decide how best to do that and I for one am not going to second guess her on that. I’m going to be supportive every inch of the way, because honestly, we have nobody else. We have a few other people who are great, but Elizabeth Warren is by far our best hope for meaningful change on any of these dimensions.

Moyers: In the meantime, what can people who are concerned — Main Street people, people who do see what you see, what we see — what can people do to be more effective against the big bankers who are controlling our Congress today?

Johnson: Express your views. Write your congressman, email them and make phone calls. There’s a Progressive Change Coalition project called The Big Ideas Project. You can find ways through that organization to tell them and others what your views are in terms of the priorities for the country. You’ve got to speak out and you’ve got to find ways to be polite, be articulate, be forceful and be persuasive.

Can’t Be Saved?

The Middle Class Can’t Be Saved Until Wall Street Is Tamed

by Robert Reich

Presidential aspirants in both parties are talking about saving the middle class. But the middle class can’t be saved unless Wall Street is tamed.

The Street’s excesses pose a continuing danger to average Americans. And its ongoing use of confidential corporate information is defrauding millions of middle-class investors.

Yet most presidential aspirants don’t want to talk about taming the Street because Wall Street is one of their largest sources of campaign money.

Do we really need reminding about what happened six years ago? The financial collapse crippled the middle class and poor — consuming the savings of millions of average Americans, and causing 23 million to lose their jobs, 9.3 million to lose their health insurance and some 1 million to lose their homes.

A repeat performance is not unlikely. Wall Street’s biggest banks are much larger now than they were then. Five of them hold about 45 percent of America’s banking assets. In 2000, they held 25 percent.

And money is cheaper than ever. The Fed continues to hold the prime interest rate near zero.

This has fueled the Street’s eagerness to borrow money at rock-bottom rates and use it to make risky bets that will pay off big if they succeed, but will cause big problems if they go bad.

We learned last week that Goldman Sachs has been on a shopping binge, buying cheap real estate stretching from Utah to Spain, and a variety of companies.

If not technically a violation of the new Dodd-Frank banking law, Goldman’s binge surely violates its spirit. Meanwhile, the Street’s lobbyists have gotten Congress to repeal a provision of Dodd-Frank curbing excessive speculation by the big banks.

The language was drafted by Citigroup and personally pushed by Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase. Not incidentally, Dimon recently complained of being “under assault” by bank regulators.

Last year JPMorgan’s board voted to boost Dimon’s pay to $20 million, despite the bank paying out more than $20 billion to settle various legal problems going back to financial crisis.

The American middle class needs stronger bank regulations, not weaker ones. Last summer, bank regulators told the big banks their plans for orderly bankruptcies were “unrealistic.” In other words, if the banks collapsed, they’d bring the economy down with them.

Dodd-Frank doesn’t even cover bank bets on foreign exchanges. Yet recent turbulence in the foreign exchange market has caused huge losses at hedge funds and brokerages.

This comes on top of revelations of widespread manipulation by the big banks of the foreign-exchange market. Wall Street is also awash in inside information unavailable to average investors.

Just weeks ago a three-judge panel of the US court of appeals that oversees Wall Street reversed an insider-trading conviction, saying guilt requires proof a trader knows the tip was leaked in exchange for some “personal benefit” that’s “of some consequence.”

Meaning that if a CEO tells his Wall Street golfing buddy about a pending merger, the buddy and his friends can make a bundle — to the detriment of small, typically middle-class, investors.

That three-judge panel was composed entirely of appointees of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
But both parties have been drinking at the Wall Street trough.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, the financial sector ranked fourth among all industry groups giving to then candidate Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee. In fact, Obama reaped far more in contributions from the Street than did his Republican opponent.

Wall Street also supplies both administrations with key economic officials. The treasury secretaries under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush – Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson, respectively, had both chaired Goldman Sachs before coming to Washington.

And before becoming Obama’s treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner had been handpicked by Rubin to become president of Federal Reserve Bank of New York. (Geithner is now back on the Street as president of the private-equity firm Warburg Pincus.)

It’s nice that presidential aspirants are talking about rebuilding America’s middle class. But to be credible, he (or she) has to take clear aim at the Street.

That means proposing to limit the size of the biggest Wall Street banks; resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act (which used to separate investment from commercial banking); define insider trading the way most other countries do – using information any reasonable person would know is unavailable to most investors; and close the revolving door between the Street and the US Treasury.

It also means not depending on the Street to finance their campaigns.

Powerful Immigration Foe

Step Aside, Steve King: Meet the Right's Most Powerful Immigration Foe

Sen. Jeff Sessions, incoming chair of the Senate immigration subcommittee, is ready to go to war with Obama.

By Pema Levy

It wasn't long ago that Sen. Jeff Sessions was waging a lonely battle against comprehensive immigration reform. ABC News called the Alabama Republican a "lone wolf" in his dogged quest to kill the Senate's immigration reform bill, which passed the upper chamber in June 2013 on a 68-32 bipartisan vote. At one point, Sessions introduced an amendment to slash the number of immigrants allowed to enter the country legally—not even Texas firebrand Ted Cruz voted for it.

But Sessions' days of fighting immigration reform from the sidelines are over. Last week, he became chair of the Senate judiciary subcommittee on immigration. The new face of Republican immigration policy has yet to make headlines like his anti-reform ally in the House, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), whose inflammatory rhetoric about undocumented immigrants ("deportables") has made him a household name within the Latino community. But Sessions is just as hardline as King. And now his party has place him in a high profile position in the nation's ongoing and contentious immigration debate.

"By choosing Sessions, Senate Republicans are handing over the agenda and a megaphone to their leading anti-immigrant voice," America's Voice, a pro-immigration-reform group, said in a seven-page memo circulated to reporters that enumerated Sessions' anti-immigration track record.

Sessions' new prominence could prove a public relations problem for the GOP heading into the next presidential campaign. Less than two years ago, in the wake of a presidential election in which the Latino vote helped doomed Republican Mitt Romney's White House ambitions, the party called for bipartisan immigration reform. Now, Senate Republicans have elevated reform's biggest foe.

Groups on the far right have celebrated Sessions' ascendance. "The appointment of Sessions as the chairman of the subcommittee is a very positive step," says Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group with extremist ties that seeks to stem immigration into the United States.

The first test of Sessions' influence came this week in the debate over a border security measure sponsored by Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the chairman of the House homeland security committee. This bill was supposed to be the kind of immigration legislation Republicans can get behind.

Not Sessions. The senator has opposed the measure, arguing that ramping up border protection is pointless without stricter interior enforcement, which he believes would deter people from entering the country illegally as well as roll back President Barack Obama's executive actions to decrease deportations of undocumented residents. Moreover, conservative Republicans fear that GOP leaders in the House and Senate want to pass McCaul's bill so that they can move on to other immigration issues opposed by the right, such as increasing the number of visas for high-skilled immigrant workers. And the conservative GOPers suspect that House Speaker John Boehner and his lieutenants are using McCaul's measure as an excuse to skirt an all-out fight over Obama's executive actions on immigration.

The House was scheduled to vote on McCaul's bill on Wednesday, but Monday evening, the Republican leadership pulled the legislation due to the impending snow storm. The convenient delay gives Boehner and his lieutenants time to shore up support from their caucus' most conservative members—or, if they can't, scuttle the bill.

In opposing the McCaul border bill, conservative House members have cited Sessions position against it, and the senator can take credit for causing Boehner and GOPers who want to make progress on immigration a real headache. Score one point for Team Sessions.

For Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, 68, fighting both parties on immigration has been a nearly decade-long crusade. But prior to that he was known mostly because of another issue: race.
In 1985, when Sessions was a federal prosecutor in his home state, President Ronald Reagan nominated him for a federal judgeship. But Sessions' nomination ran into trouble in Washington—largely over questions about his views on race.

Not long before his nomination, Sessions had prosecuted three civil rights activists, a group known as the Marion Three that included a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr., for voter fraud. "The three had been working in the 'Black Belt' counties of Alabama, which, after years of voting white, had begun to swing toward black candidates as voter registration drives brought in more black voters," a 2002 New Republic story on Sessions recounted. "Sessions's focus on these counties to the exclusion of others caused an uproar among civil rights leaders, especially after hours of interrogating black absentee voters produced only 14 allegedly tampered ballots out of more than 1.7 million cast in the state in the 1984 election." The Marion Three were acquitted after only a few hours of jury deliberations, and civil rights advocates used the case in their opposition to his nomination.

During Sessions' judicial confirmation hearings, several witnesses provided damaging testimony about him. A Justice Department official said that Sessions had called the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union "un-American" groups that "forced civil rights down the throats of people." A black attorney named Thomas Figures, who had worked in Sessions' Alabama office, claimed that the nominee had referred to him as "boy." Figures testified that after he had criticized a white secretary, Sessions had told him, "Be careful what you say to white folks." Figures also maintained that Sessions had been reluctant to prosecute civil rights cases and had once commented that he was okay with Ku Klux Klan members "until I learned they smoked pot."

"Mr. Sessions is a throwback to a shameful era which I know both black and white Americans thought was in our past," the late-Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) said on the first day of Sessions' confirmation hearings. "It is inconceivable to me that a person of this attitude is qualified to be a US attorney, let alone a US federal judge. He is, I believe, a disgrace to the Justice Department and he should withdraw his nomination and resign his position.''

In what was a rare event, the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee, which was led at the time by the late Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina (who was once known as a crusader against civil rights), voted down Sessions' nomination.

Sessions has always contended that the attacks against him were unfair. The comment about the NAACP and other civil rights groups being "un-American," he said, was actually a reference to the organizations' foreign policy positions. The comment about the KKK, he said, had been a joke. A few years ago, Sessions said Kennedy's statement about him had been "exceedingly painful to hear" and "hurtful because it wasn't true."

The specter of those Senate hearings has haunted Sessions for years. And his foes in the current immigration debate have claimed his opposition to immigration reform is linked to his supposed racial insensitivity.

Sessions, though, explains his opposition to efforts to legalize undocumented immigrants and increase legal immigration as a populist defense of American workers whose jobs and wages he believes are being decimated by immigrant labor. He has urged his fellow Republicans to take up this mantra: opposing immigration to help working and middle-class citizens.

"What sense does it make to continue legally importing millions of low-wage workers to fill jobs while sustaining millions of current residents on welfare?" Sessions wrote in a 25-page handbook on the immigration issue that he distributed to every Republican in Congress this month. The policy brief claims that comprehensive immigration reform is nothing but a sop to elite CEOs who want to import cheap labor. Sessions proposes that Republicans focus on winning back lower-wage workers—those who broke for Obama over Romney in 2012—rather than placate corporate donors. It's a message that jibes with Republicans' overall attempt to shed their image as the party of the rich.

Immediately after taking over the subcommittee, Sessions announced that he would change its name to the "Immigration and the National Interest" subcommittee, "as a declaration to the American people that this subcommittee belongs to them," not to the "financial and political elite." He plans to hold hearings featuring the voices of down-and-out Americans who consider an influx of immigration at least partly responsible for dropping wages, lost jobs, and strains on community resources, such as hospitals and schools.

And Sessions is prepping for an all-out war on Obama's immigration executive actions, when Congress considers funding for the Department of Homeland Security in late February. Not all Republicans are looking forward to a battle royal over fully funding the government agency in charge of border security and various anti-terrorism efforts. But if Sessions is able to exploit this fight and yank the immigration debate to the right—against the wishes of many within the GOP establishment—Republicans will have no one to blame but themselves.