Author: hankkalet

I’ll state up front that I haven’t seen Lincoln yet, but my instincts have been telling me that something is rotten in the absolute acclaim the film has been winning. Steven Spielberg is a nice director, but I have difficulty taking him seriously as an intellectual one.

I love Raiders of the Lost Ark. E.T. was fabulous. Ditto Close Encounters. But there was something too easy about his major intellectual and supposedly serious works, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, movies that do their best to add an odd bit of gloss to what should have been far grittier films and whitewash any emotional or moral gray areas. Those two films — which were overly long and sanctimonious — can be summed up way too easily: patriotism and brotherhood is good (Private Ryan) and Nazis are bad (Schindler’s List, when you think about it, was just a serious retake on Raiders and not nearly as riveting).

Now we have Spielberg telling the story of the 13th Amendment — with help from the usually

Am I just being contrary? Am I just out of touch? Or is Tom Frank right when he calls the film a middlebrow apology for the false prophet (or is it profit?) of bipartisanism, horse-trading and compromise that takes as its chief target principled reformers?

I tend to agree with Frank on most things, just as I tend to agree with Matt Rothschild of The Progressive (full disclosure: he is my editor when I have written for the magazine and its op-ed project), who also has offered a pretty tart takedown of the film.

But I want to be openminded. For those of you who have loved the film, tell me why. And while you’re at it, explain why bipartisan compromise — which has brought us such important achievements as the original Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell rule, welfare reform, No Child Left Behind, sequestration, the PATRIOT Act, and a health-care reform bill without a public option but plenty of money for the insurance and drug companies — is the cure for what ails us as a nation.

Robert Reich, as usual, makes it clear that the yammering nonsense we call the Washington conventional wisdom on economic matters is nothing more than, well, yammering nonsense. To offer a quick summary of what he offers today:

Social Security and Medicare are sustainable with some fixes and the only people calling for cuts are the people who don’t rely on the programs in the first place (i.e., the rich).

The nation’s tax structure, thanks to three decades of ill-conceived “reform” have helped push income and wealth upward. As he says,

The real median wage is only slightly higher now than it was 30 years ago, even though the economy is twice as large.

The only people whose means have soared are at the very top, because they’ve received almost all the gains from growth. Over the last three decades, the top 1 percent’s share of the nation’s income has doubled; the top one-tenth of 1 percent’s share, tripled. The richest one-tenth of 1 percent is now earning as much as the bottom 120 million Americans put together.

Wealth has become even more concentrated than income (income is a stream of money, wealth is the pool into which it flows).

The richest 1 percent now own more than 35 percent of all of the nation’s household wealth, and 38 percent of the nation’s financial assets – including stocks and pension funds.

Think about this: The richest 400 Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together. The 6 Walmart heirs have more wealth than bottom 33 million American families combined.

Of course, discussions about taxing this group are viewed as socialism run amok. Taxing wealth, the wealthy say, is tantamount to thievery. And yet, as Reich points out, we do tax wealth — at the state level. It is called the property tax.

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Rachel Maddow last night offered what may be the most important response to yesterday’s announcement of a bipartisan immigration reform plan. In her reporting on and discussion of the plan from a group of eight Senators — four from each party — she offered this kernel of wisdom:

This is — this is an incremental centrist consensus lift of long accepted moderate reforms, which in any reasonable political science, reasonable understanding of how Washington works, this should be totally viable, should be. But, of course, this isn`t political science. This is our real Washington. And that means it has to go through the House too, where mark my words, watch. The Jan Brewer clause will be the only part of this thing that they like.

So what is the “Jan Brewer clause”? It is what might be described as a poison pill, a provision in the bipartisan that would create an undefined panel of southwestern politicians — governors, local officials, etc. — who would have a say over how immigration reform would move forward. As Maddow points out, Democrats and Republicans differ on what role this panel would play and how much power it may be given. But the existence of such a proposal creates an impression that it is Southwesterners who know best both the impact of the immigration issue but also how best to address it.

The absurdity of this thinking was on full display yesterday during the press conference. Two Latinos were among the new gang of eight and neither hailed from the southwest — Democrat Robert Menendez is from New Jersey and Republican Marco Rubio is from Florida. The rest of the gang of eight were white, male and — aside from Michael Bennett of Colorado — in their 50s. This is not a representative group. And Menendez and Rubio are far from representative of the immigrant community — both are of Cuban dissent, while the bulk of Latino immigrants come from Mexico and South America.

This does not diminish the importance of the other proposals — all of which are relatively moderate and all of which should be adopted as quickly as possible.

I emailed several New Jersey immigration activists who responded that they though the proposals were a good start. Oscar Barbosa, an immigration attorney in Elizabeth, responded this way:

The most important point is that the 11 million undocumented will have a path to citizenship, and that new visas will be available for “non-skilled” workers.

  We’ll see. There is still a lot of work to be done in Trenton too, including in-state tuition, problems with secure communities and driver licenses for immigrants.

Maria Juega, executive director of the Latin American Legal Defense and Educaton Fund in Trenton, was a bit less optimistic. She thought it was “too soon” and that the proposal was “too vague to make any kind of judgment.” She wanted to wait to see how the president would react — scheduled for 2:55 p.m. today, though MSNBC is reporting that he will back the Senate plan to avoid muddying the waters on the issue. Juega added:

Personally, I don’t think a comprehensive bill is possible this year (if ever!) but some piecemeal legislation could be passed (a la DREAM Act and AgJobs).

Sadly, I think she’s right. The gang of eight means that movement in the Senate could happen, but that is only one hurdle. The other is a much more conservative and anti-immigrant House of Representatives. For it to get through the House, John Boehner would need to post it for a vote (unlikely) and then supporters would need to cobble together a coalition of supportive Democrats (likely to be most of them) and enough Republicans to cross the 50 percent-plus-1 threshold. And that assumes that there would not be the assorted procedural blocks that often arise.

The package as outlined — absent what Maddow has called the “Jan Brewer clause” — has the potential to make real change in the lives of the undocumented by regularizing their status and offering a pathway to legality, but those are not the only issues in play. Access to the courts to address issues of fair housing, employment violations and the like without the threat of deportation must be a chief component of anything that passes. And the federal government should put incentives in place to encourage states to grant access to instate tuition, health programs and drivers’ licenses to those who are now undocumented.

Perhaps most importantly, the demonization has to stop. Jan Brewer and her fellow extremists need to be stripped of their platforms and power and no longer rewarded for the racist rhetoric they use to keep the issue burning.

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The state Department of Labor and Workforce Development released its latest jobs figures and, in general, they do not look too bad. They’re not as great as the governor is saying, but they do show that there maybe some signs of life stirring in the New Jersey economy.

Private sector employers in the Garden State added 30,900 workers to their payrolls in December, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), marking the state’s largest single monthly employment gain since the current practice of calculating total nonfarm employment began in 1990. The federal agency’s preliminary data also shows 46,100 private sector jobs were added between December 2011 and December 2012, marking the largest over-the-year private sector job gain in New Jersey in more than a decade.

Private sector employers in New Jersey have added 103,200 jobs since February 2010, the low point of private sector employment during the recession, according to the preliminary federal data, which also shows that 2012 was the state’s third consecutive year of private sector employment growth.

“With December marking the single greatest job gain since 1990, we’re seeing the state begin to recover from the blow delivered by Sandy. While we still have work to do, the sustained job growth we saw over 2012 and December’s strong showing certainly makes it clear that New Jersey is moving into 2013 on a very positive note,” said Charles Steindel, Chief Economist for the New Jersey Department of Treasury.

But a closer look at the numbers reveals some disturbing elements:

• The bulk of the jobs created in December — 10,900 — were in retail, many of which likely are seasonal and most of which are not the kind of high-paying jobs the state’s economy has hemorrhaged in the last five years.
• Over the last 12 months, even though the economy produced a significant number of jobs, the labor force participation rate barely budged, growing from 66 percent to 66.2 percent (this is the percentage of people who want work who have work) and is partly why the state’s unemployment rate remains stubbornly high.
• Over the last 12 months the state has continued to lose the kind of higher-paying jobs that used to sustain its middle class, jobs in pharmaceuticals (down 5.07 percent year-over-year), manufacturing of durable goods (down 3.89 percent) and construction (down 3.21 percent). Each of these sectors had a good December, though it was not good enough to erase losses experienced throughout the year.

Overall, I think Christie is right. We are looking at some positive signs, but Democratic criticisms also hold some water. The state appears to be stabilizing, but by no means are we witnessing an economic rebound or miracle.

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This video is making the rounds on Facebook and Twitter and purports to be a four-minute solution to gun violence.

Simple, right? It’s the media’s fault: News organizations spend too much time covering these apparently unremarkable events and not spending enough time talking about the heroes with the guns who stop them — which implies that there have been a bevy of these armed superheroes keeping us safe and sound in obscurity.

Let’s be clear: The media — which has become an epithet these days, rather than a basic term of description — covers mass shootings because they are news. When 20 children are gunned down in their elementary school, along with six adults, it is something that the public wants to know about and needs to know about. We look into the background of the Adam Lanzas of the world because we are trying to help society understand who these shooters are, how they come into being and maybe offer some help in finding ways to prevent these things from happening in the future.

I have no doubt that some of the shooters are hoping for the publicity, for the notoriety, but there is no evidence of that being the prime motive or that relegating these shooters to obscurity will have any effect on the prevalence of gun violence in our society.

I have my own thoughts on what needs to be done — I’ve made them clear in previous posts. What I want to reiterate here is that the news media has a job to do, which is to keep the public informed and to arm citizens not with firearms but with knowledge. God knows, we do not always do our job well or nobly, but scapegoating us as the cause of mass shootings and gun violence makes having a debate about these issues impossible.

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