Happy New Year

Hope the new year brings more peace and happiness. Will be off on New Years Day, see you all on Thursday.

Be safe.

NASA's Hubble Sees Cloudy Super-Worlds with Chance for More Clouds

Scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have characterized the atmospheres of two of the most common type of planets in the Milky Way galaxy and found both may be blanketed with clouds.

The planets are GJ 436b, located 36 light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo, and GJ 1214b, 40 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. Despite numerous efforts, the nature of the atmospheres surrounding these planets had eluded definitive characterization until now. The researchers described their work as an important milestone on the road to characterizing potentially habitable, Earth-like worlds beyond the solar system. Their findings appear in separate papers in the Jan. 2 issue of the journal Nature.

The two planets fall in the middle range in mass, between smaller, rockier planets such as Earth and larger gas giants such as Jupiter. GJ 436b is categorized as a "warm Neptune" because it is much closer to its star than frigid Neptune is to the sun. GJ 1214b is known as a "super-Earth" because of its size. Both GJ 436b and GJ 1214b can be observed transiting, or passing in front of, their parent stars. This provides an opportunity to study these planets in more detail as starlight filters through their atmospheres.

One of the papers presents an atmospheric study of GJ 436b based on such transit observations with Hubble, led by Heather Knutson of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. The Hubble spectra were featureless and revealed no chemical fingerprints whatsoever in GJ 436b's atmosphere.

"Either this planet has a high cloud layer obscuring the view, or it has a cloud-free atmosphere that is deficient in hydrogen, which would make it very unlike Neptune," said Knutson. "Instead of hydrogen, it could have relatively large amounts of heavier molecules such as water vapor, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide, which would compress the atmosphere and make it hard for us to detect any chemical signatures."

Observations similar to those obtained for GJ 436b had been obtained previously for GJ 1214b. The first spectra of this planet also were featureless, but indicated GJ 1214b's atmosphere was dominated by water vapor or hydrogen, with high-altitude clouds.

Using Hubble, astronomers led by Laura Kreidberg and Jacob Bean of the University of Chicago took a closer look at GJ 1214b. They found what they consider definitive evidence of high clouds blanketing the planet and hiding information about the composition and behavior of the lower atmosphere and surface. The new Hubble spectra also revealed no chemical fingerprints in GJ 1214b's atmosphere, but the data were so precise they could rule out cloud-free compositions of water vapor, methane, nitrogen, carbon monoxide, or carbon dioxide for the first time.

"Both planets are telling us something about the diversity of planet types that occur outside of our own solar system; in this case we are discovering we may not know them as well as we thought," said Knutson. "We'd really like to determine the size at which these planets transition from looking like mini-gas giants to something more like a water world or a rocky, scaled-up version of the Earth. Both of these observations are fundamentally trying to answer that question."

60 Minutes

When ‘60 Minutes’ Checks Its Journalistic Skepticism at the Door

By DAVID CARR

Last week, a study commissioned by the president concluded that the National Security Agency had reached too far into the private lives of Americans. The study, which came after a series of journalistic revelations exposing the agency’s surveillance practices, recommended numerous reforms that would curb the N.S.A.’s prerogatives. President Obama said he was “open to many” of the suggestions.

It was exactly the kind of news-making moment that “60 Minutes” — America’s leading purveyor of serious television news — has often been responsible for creating. For more than four decades, the program has exposed C.I.A. abuses, rogue military contractors and hundreds of corporate villains.

But where was “60 Minutes” on the N.S.A. story? The Sunday before the damning study, the program produced a segment that scanned as a friendly infomercial for the agency. Reported by John Miller, a CBS News reporter, the piece included extensive interviews with Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the N.S.A.

      

In a scene that served as something of a metaphor for the whole segment, the producers negotiated access to the Black Chamber, a supersecret area where the nation’s top code breakers work. The door is briefly opened, we see a deserted office hall that looks like any other and then the door is closed. We get a look in, but we learn nothing.

      

Coming as it does on the heels of the now-discredited Benghazi report — in which “60 Minutes” said it was fooled by an eyewitness who was apparently nothing of the kind — the N.S.A. segment raises the question of whether the program has not just temporarily lost its mojo, but its skepticism as well. It didn’t help that the day after the piece aired, a federal judge ruled that the agency’s program of collecting phone records was most likely unconstitutional.

      

In between its coverage of Benghazi and the N.S.A., “60 Minutes” drew criticism for letting Amazon promote a drone delivery program that is years from actually happening, if it happens at all. It was a fanciful look at the commercial future, though Charlie Rose, the reporter, also asked Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, some tough questions: whether providing cloud services to the C.I.A. was a conflict, and whether its “ruthless” pursuit of market share was fair.

      

Let’s stipulate that “60 Minutes” has been and continues to be a journalistic treasure, which just this year has done hard-hitting pieces on the damaging practices of credit report agencies, the high rate of suicide among returning veterans, and how tainted pain medication that caused fungal meningitis killed dozens and sickened hundreds. Mr. Rose also landed an interview with the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, about chemical weapons. At a time when both the definition and execution of news has dimmed, “60 Minutes” stands out.

      

Historically, the news that “60 Minutes” was in the lobby or on the phone has struck fear in the hearts of both the stalwart and the venal. The show made its targets quake and audiences thrill as it did the hard, often amazing work of creating consequence and accountability.

      

But in the last few months, there have been significant lapses into credulousness, when reporters have been more “gee whiz” than “what gives?” The news that “60 Minutes” is calling could be viewed as less ominous and more of an opportunity. More than once this year, the show has traded skepticism for access.

      

When it comes to the access game, everyone, even “60 Minutes,” plays ball on occasion. When it seeks to lighten things up, as it did with Taylor Swift, or Maggie Smith of “Downton Abbey,” no one expects hidden cameras or brutal interrogations. Everyone, including the audience, knows the score.

But viewers expect the show to bring its A game, and deserve it, when it takes on a huge issue like the N.S.A., to serve as a stand-in for the American people and ask the uncomfortable questions.

      

Mr. Miller is a former high-ranking official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and a former spokesman of the F.B.I. whose worldview is built on going after bad guys and keeping the rest of us safe. In his report, Mr. Alexander was allowed to parse his responses, suggesting that the collection and retention of telephone metadata from Americans is not a big deal — it is — and that the agency is “not collecting everybody’s email, we’re not collecting everybody’s phone things.” The report delivered to the president last week said that the agency was doing a great deal of both and that it should stop.

      

After taking over “60 Minutes” from Don Hewitt less than 10 years ago, Jeffrey Fager has managed to maintain the journalistic momentum of the news division’s crown jewel. In 2011, he was named chairman of CBS News, and since then has earned high marks for helping restore hard news at the evening news program and developing a distinct identity for “CBS This Morning” by emphasizing topical coverage.

      

But people inside and outside the news division have questioned whether those dual roles are stretching him too thin. An internal CBS investigation into the Benghazi fiasco cited fundamental lapses in execution, including missed opportunities to check the story of Dylan Davies, a contractor who had told conflicting accounts about his whereabouts on the night of the attacks on the American diplomatic mission.

      

Of course, any news organization can be fooled — The New York Times famously fell short with its reports of supposed weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq war — but it was hard to watch the N.S.A. segment and not wonder who was minding the store.

      

On what planet is it fine for someone like Mr. Miller, a former federal law enforcement official, to be the one to do a big segment on a major government security agency? Mr. Miller got the story because the N.S.A. said yes to his pitch — why would it not? — but other journalists at “60 Minutes” without his potential conflicts were interested as well. No matter how the deal was brokered, the optics were terrible and the N.S.A. got its hands on a megaphone with nary a critic in sight.

      

Mr. Fager would not speak on the record, perhaps in part because he was pummeled after initially defending the Benghazi broadcast; when it fell apart, he was forced to put Lara Logan, the reporter, and the producer on leave. But while declining to comment, he made it clear that he very much had his eye on the ball at “60 Minutes” and pushed back against any notion of institutional malaise.

      

Mr. Miller was more than happy to explain his N.S.A. segment, which he said he would not change if he had the chance. As a reporter, he has a blend of insider knowledge and careful inquiry that has been lauded by many, including me, especially during the school shootings in Newtown, Conn. He is nothing if not confident, dismissing his critics as ankle-biting, agenda-ridden bloggers who could not be compelled to get out of their pajamas and do actual reporting.

      

“I fully reject the criticism from you and others,” he told me. “The N.S.A. story has been a fairly one-way dialogue. There has been no conversation and when you do hear from the N.S.A., it is in a terse, highly vetted statement.”

      

“We went there, we asked every question we wanted to, listened to the answers, followed up as we wished, and our audience can decide what and who they believe. As we constructed it, the N.S.A. was a story about a debate, not a villain, and we added to that debate with important information. I fail to understand how a shrill argument for the sake of creating televised drama would have accomplished anything.”

      

Mr. Miller is a highly respected reporter, and stand-up enough to come on the phone and defend his work. (He is reportedly heading back into government to work for his former boss, William Bratton, in the New York City Police Department.) But I’m pretty sure that the credentials that make him valuable on a mass shooting are the same ones that create a conflict on the N.S.A. segment. And Ms. Logan, who raced past conflicting information to a predetermined conclusion and pulled the program into a ditch in the process, should get more than Christmas off for her lapses.

      

The DNA of “60 Minutes” is adversarial, investigative and most of all accurate. It would be a cheap and easy trick to roll Mike Wallace back from the grave for the sake of contrast, but of course the N.S.A. would not have let him near the place. Maybe that is the point. “60 Minutes” is a calling, not an assignment, and the program should not be the kind of outfit that leaves its skepticism at the door to get inside.

Rattle GOP

The Francis factor: Pope’s economic ideas rattle GOP

By KATIE GLUECK

He draws crowds like a rock star, was named “Person of the Year” by Time as well as a gay rights magazine, and drew the ire of Rush Limbaugh for his criticism of “trickle-down” economics. Pope Francis has dramatically shifted the message and tone of the Vatican in the last nine months, and he’s forcing Republicans in Washington to reassess their relationship with the Catholic church.

For years, Catholic leaders’ staunch and very public opposition to abortion, gay marriage and the contraception-related provisions of Obamacare made them natural allies for the GOP. But Francis has scrambled the equation by de-emphasizing hot-button social issues, warning against unchecked capitalism and pushing a populist message at odds with the core of the anti-spending, anti-big government Republican Party.

It’s unclear whether Francis’s proclamations will fray the ties between the right and the Vatican, but already some conservatives have sharply criticized his economic ideas. At the same time, some on the right have expressed admiration for the 77-year-old pope’s more inclusive approach, including on subjects such as homosexuality. Their praise comes as the GOP itself grapples with growing disenchantment among young people and other demographics for its strident tone on social issues.

“His economic perspective I’m not particularly enamored with, but his advocacy for the poor, his lifestyle example, his more modern outlook on social issues — I’ve been very impressed,” said Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican.

Last month, Francis blasted “trickle-down” economics as an “opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, [that] expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power.” He also criticized the “idolatry of money” and unbridled capitalism as “a new tyranny.”
Conservative radio host Limbaugh slammed the comments as “pure Marxism” and other commentators on the right also vehemently disagreed with the pope’s message. One derided Francis as the “Catholic Church’s Obama.” Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a tea party darling, said Francis had made “some statements that to me sound kind of liberal,” though she later walked back that assessment.

In an interview with an Italian outlet, Francis replied to his critics: “The Marxist ideology is wrong,” he said. “But I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people, so I don’t feel offended.”
Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), who grew up attending Catholic school and graduated from the University of Notre Dame’s law school, told POLITICO that he disagreed with the pope’s economic message. He considers the phrase “trickle-down” to be a “pejorative” term, “like some liberal speechwriter stuck it in.” But he also argued that the pope’s message should be considered in a broader context.

“I genuinely believe…supply-side economics does more to help people come out of poverty, move up in the world … but on the other hand, we shouldn’t be dwelling on wealth,” King said. “The guidance I’d take from this is, when I support conservative economics, I should do it in a way that helps the most people.”

King also praised Francis for signaling a more accepting outlook on gay people.

When asked about gay priests last summer, the pope responded, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” That quote was highlighted in the influential gay rights magazine The Advocate. It named Francis its “Person of the Year,” noting that as the leader of 1.2 billion Roman Catholics around the world, “what he says makes a difference.”

Observers said Francis’s understated approach to polarizing social issues represents a sharp break with his predecessors, including Pope Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II, though the newest pontiff hasn’t altered church doctrine on those issues.

His inclusive outlook may have played a role in his decision to remove Cardinal Raymond Burke from the Congregation for Bishops, an influential Vatican organization. Burke, an outspoken conservative, in 2004 signaled he would deny communion to John Kerry, a Catholic running for president at the time, because of his support for abortion rights.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), who is Catholic, downplayed the furor in some conservative circles over Francis, who was elected pope in March.

Progressive Movement

15 Wins for the Progressive Movement in 2013

 

by Joshua Holland

In politics, as in sports, you can’t win ‘em all. With a divided government and a House of Representatives firmly in the control of tea partiers, it was a tough year for progressives in Washington – one marked by the painful cuts of sequestration and austerity’s continued drag on an already anemic recovery.

But there were also some victories for progressives in 2013, especially in state and local politics. While Washington was stuck in the grip of the politics of obstruction, grass-roots activists did their part, scoring some major wins for economic justice, civil liberties and democracy.

As we near the end of the year, here are some of the biggest progressive wins we saw. They’re in no particular order, but you can rank them in the comments.

1. Wounding ALEC …
They say sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that proved true this year as activists continued to expose the previously shadowy workings of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
The group took a big hit in 2012 when controversy over Florida’s Shoot First law, also known as “stand your ground,” peaked after the killing of Trayvon Martin and ALEC’s fingerprints on the legislation came to light. ALEC’s hand in pushing voter disenfranchisement laws was also revealed before the 2012 election. And earlier this year, ALEC got more bad press for pushing model legislation that would require science teachers to include pseudoscientific rebuttals to the data on climate change in their curricula.

While ALEC’s corporate sponsors were happy to back the group’s efforts to secure lower taxes and less regulation, they didn’t want to share the heat associated with these other issues. State lawmakers who had enjoyed ALEC’s luxurious junkets also came under pressure to cut ties with the organization. As a result, The Guardian reported that, “by Alec’s own reckoning the network has lost almost 400 state legislators from its membership over the past two years, as well as more than 60 corporations that form the core of its funding. In the first six months of this year it suffered a hole in its budget of more than a third of its projected income.”

2. Love wins …
Last New Year’s Eve, gay Americans could legally marry in 10 states. When the ball drops this year, they’ll have that right in 18 states.

2013 also saw the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) overturned by the Supreme Court, a victory that was years in the making.

3. Progressive cities …
In New York City and Los Angeles – two of the most influential cities in the world – unapologetically populist candidates backed by grass-roots community groups organized labor and scored decisive wins over more centrist rivals.

These weren’t partisan battles – in LA, two Democrats, Eric Garcetti and Wendy Greuel, made it through the runoff to face each other in the final election, and in New York, the real battle was in the Democratic primary as polls showed that any of the three leading Dems would have beaten Republican Joe Lhota in the general election.

They were contests of ideas. Garcetti ran a campaign focused on restoring public services that had been cut and attacking Greuel for relying on heavy spending by outside groups. Greuel, who had earned plaudits from the Chamber of Commerce for slashing corporate taxes in LA as councilwoman, lost to Garcetti by eight points.

In New York, Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio rose from the bottom of the pack to win the nomination – and then trounce Lhota – by relentlessly campaigning against the city’s sky-high levels of inequality. He also condemned the NYPD’s controversial ‘stop-and-frisk’ policies and promised reform.

Democratic City Council President Christine Quinn, outgoing Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s preferred successor and the front-runner going into the race, had wounded her reputation by blocking paid sick leave legislation – while raking in contributions from business groups opposed to the measure – and came in third in the primary. Peter Dreier and John Atlas wrote in The Nation that de Blasio’s victory wouldn’t have been possible without years of progressive grass-roots organizing in the City that Never Sleeps.

4. Stop-and-Frisk checked …
Even before the mayoral race, community groups and civil libertarians had made real progress reining in what they viewed as the NYPD’s rampant racial profiling. Not only did they shine a light on the practice, with the help of excellent reporting from NYC’s NPR affiliate, but they also helped win passage of the Community Safety Act, which established a civil liberties watchdog for the NYPD and made it easier to sue the department for incidents of racial profiling. In August, the City Council overrode Michael Bloomberg’s veto of the law.

5. Predatory lending checked …
In November, regulators enacted tough restrictions on predatory lending by banks insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Sally Kohn reported that the rules were largely the fruit of a two-year campaign by National People’s Action, “a national network of grass-roots organizations with more than 200 organizers in cities and states across the country.”

6. People got raises … and sick days
On January 1, 2014, working people in 13 states will see their minimum wages increase, according to the National Employment Law Project.

New Jersey not only raised its minimum wage by a dollar, but its citizens also approved a constitutional amendment that ties future hikes to the rate of inflation. Connecticut is raising its minimum to $9 per hour by 2015. A regional block consisting of Washington, DC, and two of its suburban counties in suburban Maryland are on the cusp of enacting an $11.50 living wage that will cover 2.5 million residents. In Massachusetts, the state Senate approved a measure that will enact a living wage of $11 per hour over the next two years – and double the minimum for tipped workers. The Assembly is expected to take up the bill next year. And in Sea-Tac, Wash., voters narrowly approved a $15 wage that is expected to be matched by Seattle next year.

Also this year, NYC and Portland, Ore., became the fifth and sixth major cities to require employers to offer workers paid sick days. Washington, DC, will soon become the seventh. And the fight continues: According to the National Partnership for Women and Families, “legislators and advocates continue to advance proposals in Congress and about 20 other states and cities.”

7. Larry Summers derailed …
Progressive Democrats in the Senate, led by Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Jeff Merkeley (Ore.) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio) — and pressure from reform-minded activists — forced Larry Summers to withdraw his nomination for Federal Reserve chairman in favor of Janet Yellen, who was generally expected to be much tougher in terms of regulating Wall Street.

Summers, who served as Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary before a controversial tenure as president of Harvard University, was widely respected for his knowledge and backed by President Obama. But he was also associated with financial deregulation in the 1990s, had pushed a tepid response to the 2008 crisis and helped keep millions of homeowners underwater by refusing to endorse allowing bankruptcy judges to reduce what struggling homeowners owed to their lenders.

8. Fili-busted …
After facing unprecedented obstruction that ground the institution to a halt, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) finally killed the filibuster for most executive branch nominations. As CNN noted, a handful of progressive bloggers, led by Daily Kos writer David Waldman, deserve a huge amount of credit for the change, having spent eight years writing about and organizing around the issue.

9. Gun safety …
Bizarrely, some states and localities responded to the nightmarish shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School by loosening restrictions on firearms. But that doesn’t negate the fact that, as Mother Jones reported, “41 new laws in 22 states made it harder for people to own guns, hard for people to carry them in public and enhanced the government’s ability to track guns.” Seven states passed legislation requiring universal background checks for gun purchases.

10. A march to war was stopped …
Progressives can’t take all of the credit for blocking the Obama administration’s path to entering Syria’s bloody civil war, but they deserve a good amount of it. Highly energetic opposition from the American left let Democrats in Congress know that they would pay a price if they uncritically supported the president’s planned attack.

11. Domestic workers got some dignity …
This year, Hawaii and California became the second and third states to enact a bill of rights law for domestic workers (New York led the way in 2010). The laws guarantee workers overtime pay and some days off and offer protections against sexual abuse and other workplace violations.

12. A global fight in a Washington county…
Whatcom County elections aren’t usually a subject of national attention. But this year, a slate of four progressive candidates for the county council, backed by grass-roots activists and environmental groups, beat back a group of business-backed rivals. As Joel Connelly reported for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the results of the race will likely kill the development of the massive, $600 million Gateway Pacific Terminal, which would export as much as 48 million tons of climate-changing coal to China every year.

13. California expands access to reproductive health care …
While many red states were passing overly burdensome regulations on abortion providers – which pro-choice activists say amount to “back door” bans on the procedure – California went the other way. A law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in October permits more health care providers — trained nurse practitioners, physician assistants and nurse midwives – to perform abortions in the first trimester. According to Washington Post health reporter Sarah Kliff, it was the first time a state had expanded abortion access since 2006.

14. Homeowners got some protection against foreclosures …
Homeowners’ bill of rights legislation passed in Minnesota and Nevada and went into effect in California this year. Among other protections, these laws banned so-called “dual-tracking,” when lenders foreclose on a homeowner who has an application pending for a loan modification. During the first month the law was in effect in Nevada, foreclosure-related filings fell by almost 40 percent.

15. Immigrant rights activists win a couple in Connecticut …
If immigration reform isn’t dead in the nation’s capitol, it’s gravely ill and on life support. But in Connecticut and California, lawmakers decided that public safety was more important than anti-immigrant sentiment. Those states joined a growing number that allow unauthorized immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses after passing a background check and the necessary written tests and driving exams.

Connecticut also passed the TRUST Act, which gives law enforcement officers discretion regarding whether or not to hold individuals for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The intent of the law is to encourage the undocumented to report crimes and cooperate with police without fear of deportation.

The Charitable-Giving Divide

By JUDITH WARNER

Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and 38 others announced that they formed a pact to give at least half their wealth to charity. After all, what better illustration could there be of the great social good that wealthy people can do when the government lets them keep their hard-earned dollars to spend as they please? 

The problem is that the exceptional philanthropy of the superwealthy few doesn’t apply to the many more people defined as rich in the current debate over the Bush tax cuts — individuals earning over $200,000 and couples with revenues over $250,000. For decades, surveys have shown that upper-income Americans don’t give away as much of their money as they might and are particularly undistinguished as givers when compared with the poor, who are strikingly generous. A number of other studies have shown that lower-income Americans give proportionally more of their incomes to charity than do upper-income Americans. In 2001, Independent Sector, a nonprofit organization focused on charitable giving, found that households earning less than $25,000 a year gave away an average of 4.2 percent of their incomes; those with earnings of more than $75,000 gave away 2.7 percent.

This situation is perplexing if you think of it in terms of dollars and cents: the poor, you would assume, don’t have resources to spare, and the personal sacrifice of giving is disproportionately large. The rich do have money to spend. Those who itemize receive a hefty tax break to make charitable donations, a deduction that grows more valuable the higher they are on the income scale. And the well-off are presumed to have at least a certain sense of noblesse oblige. Americans pride themselves on their philanthropic tradition, and on the role of private charity, which is much more developed here than it is in Europe, where the expectation is that the government will care for the poor.

But in the larger context of “the psychological culture of wealth versus poverty,” says Paul K. Piff, a Ph.D. candidate in social psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, the paradox makes sense. Piff has made a specialty of studying those cultures in his lab at the Institute of Personality and Social Research, most recently in a series of experiments that tested “lower class” and “upper class” subjects (with earnings ranging from around $15,000 to more than $150,000 a year) to see what kind of psychological factors motivated the well-known differences in their giving behaviors. His study, written with Michael W. Kraus and published online last month by The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that lower-income people were more generous, charitable, trusting and helpful to others than were those with more wealth. They were more attuned to the needs of others and more committed generally to the values of egalitarianism.

“Upper class” people, on the other hand, clung to values that “prioritized their own need.” And, he told me this week, “wealth seems to buffer people from attending to the needs of others.” Empathy and compassion appeared to be the key ingredients in the greater generosity of those with lower incomes. And these two traits proved to be in increasingly short supply as people moved up the income spectrum.

This compassion deficit — the inability to empathetically relate to others’ needs — is perhaps not so surprising in a society that for decades has seen the experiential gap between the well-off and the poor (and even the middle class) significantly widen. The economist Frank Levy diagnosed such a split in his book “The New Dollars and Dreams: American Incomes and Economic Change,” published in the midst of the late-1990s tech boom. “The welfare state,” Levy wrote, “rests on enlightened self-interest in which people can look at beneficiaries and reasonably say, ‘There but for the grace of God. . . .’ As income differences widen, this statement rings less true.” A lack of identification with those in need may explain in part why a 2007 report from the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University found that only a small percentage of charitable giving by the wealthy was actually going to the needs of the poor; instead it was mostly directed to other causes — cultural institutions, for example, or their alma maters — which often came with the not-inconsequential payoff of enhancing the donor’s status among his or her peers.

Given all this, it’s tempting to believe that there’s something intrinsic to the rich or the poor that explains their greater or lesser generosity and empathetic connection to others (i.e., rich people get rich because they like money more and are less distracted from their goals by the relational side of life), but Piff’s research points in a different direction. Piff found that if higher-income people were instructed to imagine themselves as lower class, they became more charitable. If they were primed by, say, watching a sympathy-eliciting video, they became more helpful to others — so much so, in fact, that the difference between their behavior and that of the low-income subjects disappeared. And fascinatingly, the inverse was true as well: when lower-income people were led to think of themselves as upper class, they actually became less altruistic.

“These patterns can be changed,” Piff says. What this means is that whatever morality tale can be spun by the giving patterns for rich people and poor people, it shouldn’t turn on the presumed nobility of the needy or essential cupidity of the fortunate. Instead, we should look at what has pushed rich and poor (or, more accurately, the rich and everyone else) to such opposite extremes of existence. A generation of political decisions — regarding big business and labor, the deregulation of the financial industry and, yes, tax cuts for the wealthy — have brought our society to this sharply divided, socially and economically polarized place we now find ourselves, says the political scientist Jacob Hacker, co-author, with Paul Pierson, of the coming book “Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.” And, just as with the behavior of Piff’s subjects in the lab, political decisions can be changed. “Runaway inequality,” he says, has led to “a pulling away of the very wealthy from the rest of American society. Do we believe the rich should be trusted to tithe, or should we have a society with a basic taxing-and-spending structure that ensures a modicum of economic security for all people?”

In a more equitable society, the very well off might indeed have less cash to give. But if a rising tide lifts all boats, that may not matter so much.

Malfeasance

Wall Street Malfeasance: A Small Sampling from 2013

Another year, another long litany of bank crimes! While individuals making mistakes often leads to lifetime imprisonment, if you are a white-collar criminal institution, apparently you can still buy your way out of prison.

 

Here is just *one* crime or dirty dealing from each month of this year:

• January: Bank of America settles for $10.3 billion over questionable home loans it sold to Fannie Mae
• February: The OCC signs the Settlement for the Independent Foreclosure Review. This review was meant to reveal what went wrong during the foreclosure crisis. The review was exceedingly flawed, but instead of fixing the problems, the OCC just gave up and announced a settlement.
• March: The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations releases a DAMNING report on JPMorgan’s outright lies to regulators during the London Whale fiasco
• April: The details of the Independent Foreclosure Review Settlement payments are unveiled. Wronged homeowners who never missed a payment were paid $5,000 (but didn’t get their home back). Those who had a loan modification approved, but the bank foreclosed anyway, got a paltry $300.
  I devoted a whole tumblr to “What You Can Buy for Having Your House Stolen.”    

• JPMorgan is banned from the electricity markets for six months by energy regulator FERC because of the "egregious nature of JP Morgan’s repeated submission of false and misleading statements" during an investigation over market manipulation.
• May: Citigroup, the bank that received the MOST government aid ($476 billion), has the audacity to write and lobby for a bill that would keep their costs artificially low, because of implicit government guarantees. Most of Congress is all “SURE WHY NOT, CO-SIGN”
• June: Former Bank of America employees alleged in sworn statements that the Bank had rewarded employees who pushed the most people into foreclosure.
• July: The FERC investigation revealed that JPMorgan was indeed manipulating electricity markets, and was ordered to pay $410 million in fines. AND!The Senate held a hearing about how Wall Street Commodities sepculation drives up prices for consumers on things like soda and beer.
• August: Two former JPMorgan traders are indicted for hiding the losses from federal regulators and falsifying records. Dennis Kelleher from Better Markets calls the charges “chasing minnows while letting the whales of Wall Street go free.”
• September: JPMorgan was Ordered To Pay $309 Million For Illegal Credit Card Practices
• October: Bank of America was found liable for mortgage fraud
• November: Merrill Lynch (now owned by Bank of America) settles for $160 million over charges by 700 black brokers that they were discriminated against by the firm because of their race.
• December: It was unveiled that JPMorgan knew Bernie Madoff was a scam artist, took their own money out, but didn’t tell any U.S. regulators about the problem. And they sold Madoff products to their clients despite suspecting something was very wrong with Madoff’s perfect record

http://becausefinanceisboring.com/post/71064014524/wall-street-malfeasance-a-small-sampling-from-2013

No Shame: $91 Billion in Bonuses, $83 Billion in Government Subsidies/year.

Are Taxpayers Paying for Wall Street Execs’ Bloated Bonuses?

For the past 40 years, corporate America has spent untold millions convincing lawmakers and the wider public that government intervention in the private sector results in painful unintended consequences that harm us all. At the same time, corporate-backed think tanks and media outlets have advanced the narrative that public benefits create a culture of dependency, and by doing so ultimately do their recipients more harm than good.

The hypocrisy of these claims is becoming increasingly evident as low-wage employers — notably retailers and the fast-food industry — enjoy profits subsidized by their workers’ reliance on public benefits. These firms are the real “welfare queens” in today’s economy.

And that also appears to be the case higher up on the economic ladder — much higher up. This week, Alexis Goldstein noticed a similarity between two headline-grabbing numbers. She writes:

Earlier this year, Bloomberg calculated that the top 10 US banks receive $83 billion a year in subsidies from the government, due to their cheap cost of funding and the preferential treatment creditors give them because they assume the government sees them as TBTF. 

In November, a NYT analysis of a Johnson Associates survey found that the top eight US banks set aside $91.44 billion for bonuses in 2013.

This absurd amount in bonuses, given the subsidy banks get, is even MORE absurd when you think through all the OTHER ways they profited this year do to criminal activities. (See my roundup of SOME of the 2013 bank crimes, and my top three worst offenses). And the fact that 10 million people were displaced from their homes during the foreclosure crisis—as many as live in the entire state of Michigan!

But what could banks do with that money instead?

They could give those bonuses back to the people they made homeless.

Another idea, from Charles Cuff, is to divide that money up among the 46.5 million people living in poverty (as reported in the 2012 Census). $91.44 billion dollars would give each of them nearly $2,000.
Now, some may ask, “Don’t banks give money to charity?” They sure want you to think so.Goldman made a big show in the NYT about its charitable donations ($241.3 million)—which employees COMPLAINED about. But Goldman set aside $10.4 billion for bonuses in the first 9 months. So their charitable giving is 2.3% of the amount they will pay out in bonuses…to employees who make BASE salaries in the $150-$250K range.

Life of kids.....

Just Kids (in Prison for Life)

By Matt Stroud

When Stacey Torrance was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in a Philadelphia courtroom in 1988, the sentence seemed somewhat unusual. First of all, life in prison is typically reserved for perpetrators of violent crime. And while someone had been killed during the chain of events that landed Torrance in front of a judge, Torrance hadn’t planned or participated in the killing. Torrance had agreed to lure Alexander Porter, the brother of a friend, to an older acquaintance who planned to steal Porter’s keys and then burgle the home of Porter’s father. But instead of simply stealing Porter’s keys, the older acquaintance, along with an accomplice Torrance had never met, tied him up and threw him into the trunk of their car. Torrance, too, was tied up — something he had not agreed to. Torrance was then taken to his mother’s home and released. Porter was driven away and eventually killed by Torrance’s older acquaintances, who were later tried for first-degree murder and eventually sentenced to a lifetime in prison.

Secondly, Torrance had never been in trouble with the law before. And a life sentence for a non-violent first offense tends to raise eyebrows — particularly when the offender didn’t pull a trigger.
But most importantly, Torrance was only 14 years old in 1988. If he had been convicted in another state, he might have been released when he turned 21, back in 1995. But Torrance was convicted of second-degree murder and, under Pennsylvania’s mandatory sentencing laws, the judge had no choice but to hand down a life sentence. So Torrance spent the year of his 21st birthday in a prison cell within Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections. He remains incarcerated to this day.

But if an appeal to the US Supreme Court gains traction, there’s a chance he might eventually become a free man.

Pennsylvania has sentenced more juveniles to life in prison than any other state in the country. Out of the 2,500 or so prisoners sentenced to life without parole before turning 18 in the United States, about 500 are in Pennsylvania. Michigan and Louisiana are competing for second place with about 350 and Florida and California follow with about 250 each. Missouri and Illinois both have about 100. The rest are scattered around the country in states that tend to avoid sentences of juvenile life without parole — or JLWOP — in all but the most heinous crimes. A handful of states have no JLWOP prisoners.

For years, none of that mattered to Stacey Torrance, or any of the other juvenile lifers in his situation. They were behind bars until death. But last year, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in Miller v. Alabama that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles were unconstitutional. Justice Elena Kagan, in her majority opinion, explained the obvious: Kids are affected by “immaturity, impetuosity and failure to appreciate risks and consequences,” which makes it unfair, cruel and unusual to send them to prison for life.

State legislators went to work; laws changed. In Louisiana, for example, juvenile lifers are now required to serve a minimum of 35 years behind bars before their first parole hearing. JLWOP is still an option in Louisiana — just not a mandatory one. In California, JLWOP is no longer an option at all; a parole review is required after juvenile lifers have served 15, 20 and 25 years behind bars. In Pennsylvania, those convicted of second-degree murder before the age of 15 — such as Stacey Torrance — must serve 20 years before their first parole hearing; those charged between ages of 15 and 17 must serve 30 years.

After Miller, juvenile lifers had hope. In a paper flood, they filed new direct appeals to state and federal courts and filed for resentencing under laws such as Pennsylvania’s Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA), which allows for an additional inquiry after Pennsylvania’s Superior Court has denied a prisoner’s direct appeal.

For Torrance, Pennsylvania’s response to Miller seemed like the blessing he had prayed for since the day he was locked up. More than 20 years have passed since he was charged with murder. Under the new rules, he should be up for parole, right?

Wrong.

When the Supreme Court ruled in Miller v. Alabama, it failed to address one major question: What should be done about the 2,500 JLWOP sentences already being served? That was left to the states to determine on their own.

On October 30, 2013, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court made a decision in the case of Ian Cunningham, a 31-year-old prisoner serving life in prison for a murder he committed at 17. The court determined that his appeal “must be decided under the law as it stood at the time his conviction became final in 2005.” That meant the Miller decision would effectively be ignored in his case. He would remain a prisoner serving life without parole. In other words, Pennsylvania’s highest court decided Miller would only apply to cases going forward, not cases that had already been resolved.
This decision didn’t affect just Cunningham. All but about 15 or so JLWOP sentences in Pennsylvania would remain as they were — sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

For people such as Bobbi Jamriska, Pennsylvania’s director of the National Organization of Victims of Juvenile Lifers, Pennsylvania’s JLWOP decision was a win. In 1993, Jamriska’s pregnant sister was killed by a 16-year-old who is serving a life-without parole sentence.

“You cannot go back and change the past,” she says. “The folks that were sentenced prior to Miller were sentenced under the law at the time. To go back and try to take that away has been very traumatic to the victims.”

On the other side of the argument are people such as Jeffrey Shook, an associate professor of social work at the University of Pittsburgh who studies the transfer of juveniles to the adult criminal justice system. “The spirit of Miller was that kids are different and they shouldn’t be held to these mandatory sentences,” he says. Pennsylvania’s decision, he says, “creates two arbitrary classes of offenders based simply upon when a decision was handed down by a judge. That’s not a solid basis for justice.”

Pennsylvania wasn’t the only state to rule out retroactivity. Arkansas, Minnesota, Texas, Wyoming and Florida also decided to leave old JLWOP cases alone. But it’s by no means a nationwide consensus. Courts in Illinois, Iowa, California, Delaware and North Carolina have made the opposite decision — that Miller should be fully retroactive, that old sentences should be reconsidered.

For Stacey Torrance — and the more than 2,000 juvenile lifers nationwide — the lack of consistency in how Miller was interpreted could eventually be a good thing. Bradley Bridge, an attorney with the Defender Association of Philadelphia, told In These Times that he plans to work with the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia to appeal the Cunningham decision to the US Supreme Court by the end of January 2014. Bridge believes that the lack of national consensus on the retroactivity issue will compel the nation’s highest court to step in again.

“This is an important issue that [the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court] do care about,” he says, noting that the Supreme Court has made rulings in three separate cases over the last eight years dealing with how juveniles should be sentenced in court. “So they’re very interested in the topic and the topic has a wide variety of resolutions all over the country … which is why I think there’s a reasonable chance that they will hear the case.”

Shook puts it a little more simply. “This is not over,” he says. “This is by no means the end of the story.”

Student Debt

Report: 2012 Grads Have Highest-Ever Student Debt

 

by Allison Kilkenny

The Institute for College Access & Success, an independent nonprofit organization based in Oakland, California recently released its eighth annual report on average student loan debt in the US, and its findings are dire. College graduates who borrowed for bachelor’s degrees granted in 2012 have an average student loan debt of $29,400, the highest average student loan debt ever on record.
Overall, 70 percent of college seniors graduated in 2012 with debt.

“The graduates of 2012 left school and entered repayment at a time of high unemployment,” said Debbie Cochrane, research director at the institute. “In many ways, these graduates were hit from both sides.”

“They went to college during a recession when their family’s ability to pay for college was likely reduced. Now they are graduating from college and may be experiencing substantial challenges getting a job to repay the loans.”

Lynn O’Shaughnessy, an expert on college issues who lives in La Mesa, says the trend isn’t likely to reverse itself anytime soon because the price of higher education continues to rise while incomes remain flat.

“College costs have always gone up higher than inflation, but the problem we face now is that family incomes are stagnant and they can’t afford it anymore, if they ever did,” said O’Shaughnessy, author of the book The College Solution and a blog of the same name. “It used to be much more affordable.”
Students in certain states are hit particularly hard. For example, average debt is higher for graduates from Pennsylvania ($31,675). Seventy percent of graduates from Pennsylvania public and nonprofit colleges have student loan debt, compared to 41 percent of students graduating from Nevada colleges. The average student debt in New Mexico is just under $18,000.

Mike Morrill executive director for Keystone Progress, an activist network, explains the long-term effects: “Even if you are able to get a good job it means that if you’re graduating with $30,000 or more in debt, that means it’s going to be a long time before you get rid of that debt. It makes it harder for you to buy a house harder to start a business.”

The Times Herald reports that college expenses in Pennsylvania have become outrageously high over the past decade, fueled in part by the “easy money” of student loans and government financial aid. Schools maintain extremely high principals (the cost of tuition) and offset the costs to students, who are expected to take out loans that could potentially permanently bury them in debt.

And student debt, like subprime loans, is a huge moneymaking scheme from which the government is making a pretty penny. Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi reports the federal government is poised to make $185 billion over the next 10 years on student loans.

Before Christmas, senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Jack Reed (D-RI) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) released a slate of proposed reforms aimed at lowering student debt, including a student borrower’s bill of rights that would put more emphasis on getting servicers to offer students affordable repayment plans, and a provision that would require schools with lots of struggling borrowers to compensate the government for loan repayment losses.

Businessweek reports the penalty proposed in the Protect Student Borrowers Act of 2013 would affect schools at which at least a quarter of students take out loans, a threshold that would include most institutions. Community colleges would be exempt, along with historically black institutions, according to Inside Higher Ed.

Horsehead Nebula

The Horsehead Nebula is one of the most famous nebulae on the sky. It is visible as the dark indentation to the red emission nebula in the center of the above photograph. The horse-head feature is dark because it is really an opaque dust cloud that lies in front of the bright red emission nebula. Like clouds in Earth's atmosphere, this cosmic cloud has assumed a recognizable shape by chance. After many thousands of years, the internal motions of the cloud will alter its appearance. The emission nebula's red color is caused by electrons recombining with protons to form hydrogen atoms. Also visible at the bottom left of the picture is a greenish reflection nebulae that preferentially reflects the blue light from nearby stars.

Holiday

Lights in the trees

The holidays are coming to an end.... Well this year I found myself eating a lot of crab and running in the cold...

I ended up taking a few days off work, I actually didn't plan on doing that.

So I found the extra time relaxing but I had no plans. I was going to go to friends homes for dinners and such, and one evening I was able to enjoy fresh crab (which is our tradition) and razor clams. I was also going to go ski but like so many other places this winter the snow was not good and I just didn't want to spend the money trying to ski on rocks and pour quality snow.


Clams

So I ended up spending a few days in the Hood River area and stopping at a winery or two too pass the time.

While back in town, I did a few runs, but I really should have done more. Thought it was cold, I went out and did it when I could but with shopping and other commitments I didn't do enough running. And now or course my waist is letting me know...



Fresh Crab

Hood River area

 While in Hood River, I went out to dinner at a new restaurant. The place was an old French spot but had changed hands and was converted into a 'American Food' type place. It was one of the only places open and we decided to give it a try. Unfortunately the food was not very good and over priced. Didn't eat it really, but was kind of shocked that the server didn't even offer to take the main dish off the bill. Ended up talking to the owner, he did remove it but it was not a good experience. So much for the new place...

Winery view

Marchesi Vineyards in Hood River is a great place to go and sip wine. they were named the best winery four years in a row for Hood River. Great selection and a nice place, very relaxing and friendly. Even in winter months it is inviting, with an in door area and heaters out side, it is nice to try their selections. Also it is more than the average Pinot Noir..

http://www.marchesivineyards.com/

At the Gorge Hotel

Major stories not told this year....

A Dramatic Wake up Call on Climate Change Monika Bauerlein

This year may turn out to have been a watershed in the biggest story of our age — the enormous shift in global climate. It was a year of record weather events, from freak storms across the US to record floods in Europe and lethal typhoons in Asia. It was also the year when the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a dramatic wake-up call, reporting that CO2 in the atmosphere is higher than it’s been in a million years and that within our children’s lifetimes, the oceans may rise a full three feet.

Supreme Court Overturns Key Provision in Voting Rights Act Ari Berman

The most underreported story of 2013 was the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a key section of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. It was the most wrongheaded voting rights decision in a century, since the Court upheld poll taxes and literacy tests in Giles v. Harris in 1903. John Roberts’s ruling invalidating Section 4 of the VRA means that the states with the worst history of voter discrimination in the United States no longer have to approve their voting changes with the federal government. As a result, onerous laws that were previously blocked by the federal courts, such as Texas’s voter ID law, immediately went into effect while new states like North Carolina rushed to enact even more flagrantly discriminatory measures. Yet far too many in the mainstream media have ignored the ramifications of the decision and have not paid attention to the disturbing spread of Jim Crow 2.0.

Obama’s Relative Silence After Texas Plant Explosion Mike Elk

The failure of the Obama administration to use the explosion at a fertilizer company in West, Texas, which killed 15, to launch a major public campaign to reform deeply flawed workplace safety laws has been seriously underreported. Following the Upper Big Branch mine explosion that killed 29 miners, Obama used his remarks at the workers’ memorial to call for increased workplace safety measures, which ultimately failed in the House. But three years later, Obama did not even mention the plant’s long history of breaking workplace safety laws at the memorial commemorating the workers and firefighters who were killed in the West, Texas explosion. It was just another mass killing of Americans with no serious political will behind it to create changes.

US Military’s “Pivot to Africa” Tom Engelhardt

The US military is moving into Africa was barely reported this year. In 2013, there was endless media coverage of the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia,” because the administration assured one and all that it was so crucially important (though the actual pivot consisted of little indeed). In the meantime, no one talked about the importance of the US military’s “pivot to Africa.” In Africom’s Gigantic Small Footprint could help define our global military future in a big way.

US Negotiates Major Trade Agreement Simon Johnson

The US is on the verge of signing a major trade agreement, with big implications for business, finance and jobs. This is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), about which there has been relatively little media coverage – although this Washington Post article does a nice job of explaining what is at stake. Approving or amending this trade deal will be a major issue for Congress in early 2014. You should become better informed and put pressure on your congressional representative. Left to their own devices, they will likely just wave this through.

Tax Writers Promise 50 Years of Secrecy for Senators’ Suggestions Mattea Kramer

The wealthiest Americans and corporations enjoy deep tax savings because our tax code is riddled with loopholes that cost the federal government trillions of dollars annually. But this summer Senate finance leaders promised senators 50 years of secrecy for stating which loopholes they want kept in the tax code. That gave them license to stand up for special interests instead of their constituents – and that’s outrageous. We must not allow taxes to be cloaked in secrecy or treated as the third rail of our democracy. Getting rid of loopholes is a crucial move toward a federal government that has the money to invest in job creation, education and scientific research, among many other priorities.

America’s War on Youth Maya Schenwar

While a variety of media have touched on the corporatization of school systems and the shutting down of impoverished schools, there’s been a marked dearth of coverage of the interconnections between the various forms of violence hitting youth from all sides. Rania Khalek tracked the connections between rising prison budgets and atrophying education funding, Victoria Law has chronicled the criminalization of poor youth of color fed into the juvenile “justice” system, I have pointed to the devaluation of the lives of prisoners’ children through the severing of mother-baby bonds at birth and Michael Corcoran has analyzed corporate media’s complicity in demonizing youth for their poverty and unemployment. All the while, Henry Giroux has demonstrated how the interwoven forces of market-driven politics, surveillance, criminalization and overarching authoritarianism have produced a culture that increasingly renders young people “disposable.”

Strategy

Democrats Turn to Minimum Wage as 2014 Strategy

By By JONATHAN MARTIN and MICHAEL D. SHEAR

Democratic Party leaders, bruised by months of attacks on the new health care program, have found an issue they believe can lift their fortunes both locally and nationally in 2014: an increase in the minimum wage.

The effort to take advantage of growing populism among voters in both parties is being coordinated by officials from the White House, labor unions and liberal advocacy groups.
      

In a series of strategy meetings and conference calls among them in recent weeks, they have focused on two levels: an effort to raise the federal minimum wage, which will be pushed by President Obama and congressional leaders, and a campaign to place state-level minimum wage proposals on the ballot in states with hotly contested congressional races.

      

With polls showing widespread support for an increase in the $7.25-per-hour federal minimum wage among both Republican and Democratic voters, top Democrats see not only a wedge issue that they hope will place Republican candidates in a difficult position, but also a tool with which to enlarge the electorate in a nonpresidential election, when turnout among minorities and youths typically drops off.

      

“It puts Republicans on the wrong side of an important value issue when it comes to fairness,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the president’s senior adviser. “You can make a very strong case that this will be a helpful issue for Democrats in 2014. But the goal here is to actually get it done. That’s why the president put it on the agenda.”

      

Top Republicans assert that a wage increase would dampen the economic recovery and indicated after Mr. Obama mentioned the issue in his State of the Union speech this year that they had no intention of bringing a minimum-wage increase to a vote in the House, which they control.

“Why would we want to make it harder for small employers to hire people?” Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio said.

      

In the capital, Mr. Obama and congressional Democrats are supporting legislation that would raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 2015. Mr. Obama is planning a series of speeches across the country focused on improving wages for workers, aides said, many of them timed to coincide with key minimum-wage votes in Congress. Income inequality is also likely to play a prominent role in his State of the Union address next month.

      

At the same time, Democratic campaign officials and liberal activists — conceding that Democrats face tough prospects in some Senate races — are working to put minimum-wage increases on the ballot next year in places like Arkansas, Alaska and South Dakota. The hope is to stoke Democratic turnout in conservative-leaning states where the party’s Senate candidates have been put on the defensive by the mishandled rollout of the Affordable Care Act.

      

But in a sign that some moderate Democrats are uneasy about inflaming their local business communities, the imperiled Democratic Senate incumbents in Alaska and Arkansas, Mark Begich and Mark Pryor, have yet to embrace the ballot measures.

      

States with contested House races, including New Mexico, will also see campaigns to bring minimum-wage increases to a referendum next year.

      

After being battered for nearly two months on the problems with Mr. Obama’s signature health law, Democrats see the minimum-wage increase as a way to shift the political conversation back to their preferred terms.

      

“The more Republicans obsess on repealing the Affordable Care Act and the more we focus on rebuilding the middle class with a minimum-wage increase, the more voters will support our candidates,” said Representative Steve Israel of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

      

Democratic planning on the issue has picked up in recent weeks, as the 2014 elections approach and the need to counter attacks on the health law has grown more urgent.

      

This month, top aides to Mr. Obama including the economic advisers Jason Furman and Gene B. Sperling, Labor Secretary Thomas E. Perez and the legislative affairs office convened a meeting at the White House complex with an array of liberal groups to discuss the minimum wage. The gathering included representatives from Mr. Obama’s political arm, Organizing for America, unions and progressive groups like Americans United for Change and the National Employment Law Project.

      

An official from the National Employment Law Project presented a spreadsheet showing which cities and states were pursuing campaigns to increase minimum wages next year, according to a person who attended. The attendees also discussed the potential timing of a minimum-wage vote in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

      

A representative from the A.F.L.-C.I.O. urged the White House officials to coordinate with Senate Democrats on when to bring the issue to the floor so that the unions could “have time to mount a grass-roots” campaign stirring up support for the measure, an attendee recalled.

      

“The combination of the state ballot initiatives and at some point a big nasty fight in D.C. that will amplify some of the stuff in the states is going to create a feedback loop that will be really helpful,” said one Democratic official involved in the discussions.

      

Democrats prize the issue of a minimum-wage increase because it would help address income inequality, which is galvanizing liberals at the moment and is popular with swing voters they will need in next year’s elections.

      

Sixty-four percent of independents and even 57 percent of Republicans said they supported increasing the minimum wage, according to a CBS News poll last month. Some 70 percent of self-described “moderates” said they supported an increase.

      

“We’ve got a lot of folks who are registered Republicans for whatever reason here, but when you start talking about earning a dollar more an hour it means something to them, regardless of their party,” said Rick Weiland, the Democrat running for the Senate in South Dakota next year, who has embraced the ballot measure there.

      

Mr. Weiland said 62,000 people in his sparsely populated state would receive a raise if a ballot question that calls for raising the minimum wage to $8.50 an hour from $7.25 wins the approval of voters in November.

      

Liberal strategists would like other Democratic Senate candidates to follow suit, noting that Democrats were elected senators in two conservative-leaning states, Missouri and Montana, in 2006 when proposals to increase the minimum wage were overwhelmingly approved.

      

Of course, for the overall strategy to work for the Democrats they need Republicans to oppose an increase, and history suggests that is not a given.

      

At the meeting this month, Mr. Sperling, who was an adviser to President Bill Clinton, recalled that in 1996 Republican leaders decided that fighting an wage increase was not worth the political trouble and let a bill raising the rate pass after inserting provisions helping small businesses.

Political polarization

Red, blue states move in opposite directions in a new era of single-party control

By Dan Balz

Political polarization has ushered in a new era in state government, where single-party control of the levers of power has produced competing Americas. One is grounded in principles of lean and limited government and on traditional values; the other is built on a belief in the essential role of government and on tenets of cultural liberalism.

These opposing visions have been a staple of national elections, and in a divided Washington, this polarization has resulted in gridlock and dysfunction. But today, three-quarters of the states — more than at any time in recent memory — are controlled by either Republicans or Democrats. Elected officials in these states are moving unencumbered to enact their party’s agenda.

Republican states have pursued economic and fiscal strategies built around lower taxes, deeper spending cuts and less regulation. They have declined to set up state health-insurance exchanges to implement President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. They have clashed with labor unions. On social issues, they have moved to restrict abortion rights or to enact voter-identification laws, in the name of ballot integrity, that critics say hamper access to voting for the poor and minorities.

Blue states have also been forced to cut spending, given the budgetary pressures caused by the recession. But rather than cutting more deeply, a number of them also have raised taxes to pay for education or infrastructure. They have backed the president on the main elements of his health-care law. The social-issue agenda in blue states includes legalizing same-sex marriages, providing easier access to voting and, in a handful of cases, imposing more restrictions on guns.

The values that underpin these governing strategies reflect contrasting political visions, and the differences can be seen in stark terms in the states. In a red state such as Texas, government exists mostly to get out of the way of the private sector while holding to traditional social values. In blue states such as California and Maryland, government takes more from taxpayers, particularly the wealthy, to spend on domestic priorities while advancing a cultural agenda that reflects the country’s growing diversity.

The alternative models on display in the states have triggered a competition for bragging rights about which would be better for the nation as a whole — a debate that is likely to intensify nationally in forthcoming elections.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), coming off a year as chairman of the Republican Governors Association, has been a tireless proselytizer for his party’s conservative approach. Red states, he said, are “doing better economically, they’re doing better with credit ratings, they’re doing better with people moving into their states. . . . I’ll sit here all day and talk to you about how Republican policies and Republican-led states are doing better.”

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn (D), who has moved Illinois in a progressive direction, countered that the Republican model threatens to leave too many people behind. “We’re not Pottersville, and we don’t intend to be Pottersville,” he said in a reference to the mean-spirited and miserly villain in the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” “There is a choice between a Bedford Falls that cares about your neighbor and the scorched-earth, don’t-care-about-your-neighbor policy of Mr. Potter.”
Single-party control

Today, 37 of the 50 states are under unified party control. Republicans hold the governorship and majorities in both chambers of the legislature in 23 states; Democrats have full control in 14 states. In 12 states, power is divided between Republicans and Democrats. (The other state, Nebraska, has a nonpartisan, unicameral legislature, although the governor is a Republican and the legislature is conservative.)

Justin Phillips, a political scientist at Columbia University who has written extensively about state government, said the degree of unified party control in the states is greater than at any time in more than half a century.

“This allows governors to behave very differently than they do under divided control,” Phillips said. Acknowledging that the parties long have had different philosophies about how to govern, he added: “The difference between what Democrats want and what Republicans want is growing. With unified party control, they don’t have to compromise.”

The National Governors Association once was an arena where governors of both parties came together to find consensus. But Ray Scheppach, who spent three decades as the organization’s executive director, said the governors’ partisan organizations — the Republican Governors Association and the Democratic Governors Association — now dominate, producing a sea change in the way states are being governed.

“They used to be governors first and Democrats or Republicans second,” Scheppach said. “Now they’re Democrats and Republicans first and governors second. In my mind, that’s a huge change.”
Widespread unified control in the states represents a significant shift over a period of three decades. After the 1980 elections, 24 states were under unified control. A decade later it was 20, and after the 2000 election it was only 21. Since then the states have been moving toward more unified control, with the biggest changes taking place in the past half-dozen years as partisan lines have hardened and split-ticket voting has declined across the country.

Control in the states today is more closely aligned with voting patterns in presidential elections than in the days when conservative Democrats dominated state and local elections in the South and moderate Republicans held greater sway in the North.

Karl Kurtz, a political scientist at the National Conference of State Legislatures, noted in an article published this year that Republicans control both houses of the legislatures in 22 of the 24 states carried by Mitt Romney in 2012 and that Democrats hold majorities in 18 of the 26 states won by Obama.

The eight Obama states that have full or partial Republican control are or recently have been presidential battlegrounds. These are Florida, Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Two decades ago, when politics were not as polarized, governors were more inclined to work cooperatively with legislators of the other party, in part as an acknowledgment of the disparate views of the entire citizenry of their states.

“This picture of Republican-controlled states doing exactly the opposite of what Democratic-controlled states do on these issues is relatively recent,” Kurtz said. “Even in past generations, even when they had the hammer, when they had unified government, when they might have had a supermajority or veto-proof majority control, I think there was more of a tendency to negotiate with the minority than there is today.”

The risk is that with unified control, governors and their like-minded legislators push beyond the views of their citizenry, particularly in states where public opinion is more evenly divided.

Phillips and Columbia colleague Jeffrey R. Lax argued in a paper published in the American Journal of Political Science that elected officials in states with unified control can overshoot public opinion. “The net result is that state policy is far more polarized than public preferences,” they wrote.

The most obvious example of this is Wisconsin, a state Democrats have carried in every presidential election since 1988 (although several of those outcomes were among the closest in the nation). After his election as governor in 2010, Republican Scott Walker, with the backing of a GOP-controlled legislature, moved swiftly to implement a conservative agenda that included significant restrictions on collective-bargaining rights for most state workers.

The policies sparked widespread protests and ultimately a recall election in 2012 that Walker survived. The state remains deeply polarized, and Walker, a prospective 2016 presidential candidate, remains firm in his convictions, with a new book titled “Unintimidated.”

In Ohio, which Obama carried in 2008 and 2012, Republican Gov. John Kasich and his legislature triggered a similar backlash over changes in public employees’ collective bargaining and over voting laws. Ohio voters repealed restrictions on collective bargaining for public employee unions a year after Kasich’s election. Later, faced with another threat of a citizen veto, the legislature rolled back some voting-law restrictions.
Going separate ways

In many more states, however, citizens are being governed by a philosophy and a set of policies that conform more closely to public opinion within their borders. That has accelerated the trend toward more-partisan governing, and as Ronald Brownstein and Stephanie Czekalinski wrote this year in National Journal, it is sometimes “straining the boundaries of federalism.”

Over the past three years, Obama’s Affordable Care Act has been the most ideologically divisive issue across the country. The law envisioned that the states would establish marketplaces, or exchanges, to facilitate the purchase of health insurance.

But 27 states opted not to do so in any way, throwing responsibility on the federal government. All have Republican governors, Republican legislatures or both. Of the states that took full responsibility for an exchange, two-thirds are under unified Democratic control and almost all the rest have divided government. (There are seven states in partnership with the federal government.)

The law also expanded access to Medicaid, with the federal government providing the states with more than 90 percent of the funding over the first nine years. Democratic-led states leaped at the opportunity, but 23 states have declined — three-quarters of them under unified Republican control when the decisions were made.

Some Republican governors have bucked that trend. Eight states with Republican governors or unified Republican control have decided to enter into the expanded Medicaid program.

The latest to join was Iowa, where Republican Gov. Terry Bran­stad worked with leaders in both parties in a divided legislature. Earlier, in Ohio, Kasich had to overcome resistance from Republican legislators. He found a route around the legislature that put his state in the program, arguing that it was good for the state and its low-income residents.

Governors of both parties often cite the same priorities when they talk about their agendas: job creation, education, transportation and health care. But policies have differed, particularly as they have addressed budgetary pressures during the slow recovery after the 2008 recession.

Tax policy is one area that often has divided Republicans and Democrats. The American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group that has offered legislative models for lawmakers, cites 18 states as having cut taxes this year. All but two have Republican governors, and those two — Arkansas and Montana — have Republican legislatures.

Democratic governors have gone in the other direction. Maryland, under Gov. Martin O’Malley, raised taxes on the wealthy. California Gov. Jerry Brown won voter approval last year for a major tax increase on the rich.

On education, Republican-led states have pushed for charter schools and more choice for parents in lieu of ever-greater spending. They say their blue-state colleagues are too constrained by the power of teachers unions to be as bold in their efforts. Democrats say Republicans have been too willing to squeeze funding for schools.

The minimum wage is another point of divergence. California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island have increases pending. In New Jersey, where Democrats control the legislature, voters in November approved a constitutional amendment increasing the state minimum wage. Republican Gov. Chris Christie opposed the amendment.

Red and blue states also have gone in different directions with labor relations, with red-state governors and legislatures moving to restrict collective-bargaining rights for public employee unions and others approving right-to-work legislation.

Michigan is a state synonymous with union power and one that has consistently voted for Democratic presidential nominees since 1988. But the GOP-controlled legislature last year approved a right-to-work law. When Republican Gov. Rick Snyder signed it, he said: “I don’t view this as anti-union at all. I believe this is pro-worker.”

Pensions have strained the budgets of most governors. Red-state governors have trumpeted their efforts to revamp public employee pension and benefit packages, but blue-state governors have been forced to act as well, despite ties to organized labor.

According to analysts at both Morningstar and Moody’s, there is no clear red-blue pattern to the problems states face on the pension front or to actions taken to solve those problems.

Illinois had perhaps the most severe pension problem in the country and seemed politically incapable of dealing with it. But Quinn and the legislature reached agreement recently on what Moody’s called “the largest reform package” in the country. If fully implemented, the analysis said, the deal would substantially reduce a problem that had resulted in five credit downgrades for the state.

Culture wars continue

Social issues have produced an even starker dividing line between red and blue states.

Abortion wars in Texas drew national attention this summer when state Sen. Wendy Davis (D) filibustered against a bill to restrict abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The filibuster helped launch Davis to a candidacy for governor in 2014. But in conservative Texas, she and her allies ultimately failed to block enactment of the bill, which was championed by Gov. Rick Perry (R) and the GOP-controlled legislature.

Texas was hardly alone among red states in moving to restrict abortion rights. Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortion issues across the country, said that in 2013 there were 64 restrictions approved in the states. Of those, 53 were in states where Republicans control both the legislature and the governor’s office. Ten came in states where the Republicans have partial control of the government.

“In general, if there is Republican control, then abortion restrictions are on the table and able to be enacted,” she wrote in an e-mail. “When Democrats are in charge then abortion restrictions are not very likely.” Nash noted that California was the only state to approve expanded access to abortion services.

The Supreme Court gave same-sex marriage a boost this summer in a pair of rulings but stopped short of legalizing such unions across the country. That has left the issue to the states, where action follows a distinct red-blue pattern.

Same-sex marriage is now legal in 17 states and the District of Columbia. Where it has become legal by popular vote or action by a state legislature, Democrats control the levers of government.

In some other states, the courts have moved to sanction such unions. In recent weeks, same-sex marriages became legal in two more states — New Mexico, where control of government is divided, and Utah, long a Republican stronghold. In both cases, the change came from court rulings.

There have been political repercussions in two other states with divided control of government after courts stepped in to legalize such unions.

After the Iowa Supreme Court acted in 2009, its ruling triggered a major political reaction. Voters subsequently removed three judges who had supported the ruling. A fourth survived his election in 2012.

In New Jersey, the issue produced a different reaction. Same-sex marriages became legal there in October by court action. Christie opposed the change, but with Election Day only a few weeks off, he chose not to buck public opinion and withdrew the state’s appeal to the court action.

Public opinion has shifted dramatically on this issue, but some red states are still moving to put prohibitions in their constitutions. North Carolina, which has been a presidential battleground in the past two elections but where a Republican governor and legislature have moved decidedly to the right, approved such an amendment in the spring.

Many other states have such prohibitions written into their constitutions, and they are likely to become the next front in the culture war over same-sex marriage.

The mass shooting last December at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., sparked calls for new gun-

control legislation, nationally and in the states. Obama’s gun initiative died in the Senate early this year, but new restrictions were enacted in eight states, seven where Democrats have unified control.

“I’ve been involved with state legislation for 18 years now,” said Brian Malte, senior national policy director at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “2013 was by far the most successful year in terms of us passing proactive gun legislation.”

Andrew Arulanandam, director of public affairs at the National Rifle Association, said the pattern is fairly clear on gun legislation. Where control is divided or where Republicans hold power, “we were able to advance our agenda,” he said. Even in some blue states, the NRA was successful in defeating proposed restrictions.

Colorado passed new gun restrictions after the Sandy Hook killings and an earlier mass shooting in a suburban Denver movie theater. But the legislature’s action produced a backlash from pro-gun groups and citizens, resulting in the recall of two Democratic state senators, including state Senate President John Morse. A third who faced a possible recall resigned.

Voting laws have become another red-blue battleground. There are two trends visible in the states. Red states have moved to enact a series of restrictive laws, including those requiring ID cards to vote as well as laws that cut back on early voting.

“That trend has been almost exclusively in states that are red, where the legislature and the governorship are Republican,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

A countertrend has developed in blue and some red states, with legislators moving to make access to voting easier, through things such as online registration.

The red-blue hard sell

The debate over which approach works better is being fought with claims and counter claims, all buttressed with batteries of statistics: the number of jobs created, the rate of job creation, changes in median income, poverty rates or the percentage of the population without health insurance.

Some analysts who have studied the contrasting performances of states say government policy is only one factor and perhaps not as significant as a state’s history and culture. Michigan’s long economic decline came during periods of both Democratic and Republican governorships, for example.
California rose under Democrats and Republicans before it hit budgetary and economic turbulence.

“It has almost nothing to do with any individual administration,” said Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University. “I think of history as the number one factor. State government is significant but secondary.”

Still, Republicans have been more vocal about what they see as the superiority of their philosophy.
Louisiana’s Jindal says that, on average, unemployment is about a point lower in Republican-led states than in Democratic-led states. Of the 10 states with the lowest unemployment rates in November, five have unified Republican control, three are controlled by Democrats, one is divided and one, Nebraska, has a unicameral legislature. Of the 10 states with the highest unemployment rates, four are in unified Republican hands, two are under the control of Democrats and four are divided.

Among the 17 states that the Bureau of Labor Statistics says had statistically significant declines in unemployment over the past year, eight are controlled by Republicans, seven are controlled by Democrats and two have divided government. Two of the top three performers — North Carolina and Florida — are under GOP control while the other — New Jersey — has a Republican governor. In these 17 improving states, California’s unemployment rate, at 8.5 percent,was the highest.

Presented with some of those realities, Jindal said there are fairer measures of success than the unemployment rates. He cited overall job growth and, crucially, how businesses rank the states. He and other Republican governors point to Texas as the nation’s leader in job creation since the 2008 recession, and they credit low-tax, low-regulatory policies for the successes.

Jerry Nickelsburg, a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, said Texas’s success is clear. But he questioned whether the same model is successful in other states. “Texas does really well with GDP growth,” he said. “But then go to other low-tax, low-wage, weak-union states and you really don’t find them doing quite so well.”

Maryland’s O’Malley drew a different contrast between how Democrats and Republicans are governing, arguing that his state’s record holds up well when measured against red states. “The fundamental difference between most Democratic governors and most Republican governors has to do with ideology versus a more entrepreneurial approach,” he said. “Democratic governors exist in a reality-based world. We are not chained to ideology.”

Wisconsin’s Walker said the GOP’s small-government model is the surest way to economic dynamism. “You create a government that’s . . . mainly about helping government get out of the way,” he said. But he added a caveat. “I think government’s too big, too expensive, too involved in your lives,” he said. “But for the government that’s necessary, it should work. . . . That’s the challenge for Republicans.”

Perry, who is exploring a second presidential candidacy, has taken this fight into his opponents’ back yards. He has sponsored radio ads in or made forays to some Democratic-led states to encourage businesses to consider moving or expanding operations to Texas. asserting that the limited-government approach of Republicans has clear advantages over the Democrats’ model.

Illinois’s Quinn dismissed Perry as a “big talker.”

“I have read the entire book of Amos in the Old Testament,” Quinn said. “Amos was a working guy who took care of sycamore trees. One of his famous pieces of advice is, don’t afflict the poor. I think some of the policies of the governors on the other side are afflicting the poor.”

The coming national debate

California’s Brown ultimately finds all the gamesmanship tiring. “I think it’s hard to make these generalizations,” he said. “A lot of it is just boosterism when governors go around. They’re more like promoting their state to puff up their images. We [in California] have problems, and we’re solving them.”

One analyst who works closely with governors and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to take sides in the debate, said, “I don’t know that anyone has a definitive measure to show your economic policy is better than mine.”

Perry argued that the red-blue contrasts are just what the Founding Fathers envisioned by giving states constitutional authority to chart their own destinies with economic and social policies that are tailored to their populations. “People in this very mobile society can go live where they’re most comfortable,” he said.

The next presidential campaign probably will revive the national debate about whether the country should move decisively in one direction or the other, particularly if a Republican governor becomes the party’s nominee.

But Thad Kousser, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, offered this caution to would-be contenders. “When a governor is running for president,” he said, “they push an ideological agenda that is tailored much more to the national primary voters in their party than it is to the average voter in the state. And they often crash and burn for that reason.”

Columbia’s Phillips said it is questionable whether there is an ideal model for the nation. “If the country had to live under one [red or blue] model, I think national politics would be as hostile, or worse, than it is today,” he said. Having divergent approaches in the states, he said, “defuses” some of the conflict at the national level. “It is what the framers of the Constitution envisioned.”

But Brown focused on one value of single-party dominance in an era of partisan divisions. “The main thing is to get stuff done,” he said. “You need a governing consensus. . . . You can’t govern as a constant bickering, debating society. Somebody must prevail over time to sustain any kind of momentum.”

That question could be at the heart of the debate in 2016. After years of gridlock, will people be prepared to move as decisively in one direction or the other in Washington as they have been in the states?