Wal-Mart, SEIU and the grand bargain

Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post takes a more forgiving view than mine of Fed chief Ben Bernanke's speech about rising inequality. Pearlstein calls Bernanke a desperately needed "trustworthy moderator for this national debate," and he says Bernanke

gently, but deftly, dismissed the favorite conservative arguments that the story is not one of greater inequality so much as one of greater mobility. At the same time, Bernanke exposed as myth all those overblown fears about the broad decline in standard of living and the death of the American middle class.

Pearlstein says there's little to be gained by debating the relative importance of various factors contributing to rising inequality -- technological change, globalization, superstar compensation for a tiny minority in every field, the decline of unions, deregulation. "Having followed this debate for nearly 20 years, I've come to the conclusion it has become a meaningless exercise," Pearlstein writes.

Instead of arguing about causes, Pearlstein says, we should discuss how "to preserve the political consensus for open and flexible markets by offering Americans a stronger economic safety net -- one that might include more portable and affordable health insurance and pensions, some expansion of income support in the event of a job loss and a big new investment in education and training, from early childhood through adulthood."

Pearlstein says this sounds like the idea of an economic grand bargain that's been bandied about since the election. Rep. Barney Frank has been a proponent of this grand bargain, where businesses get fewer restrictions on trade, and less regulation, in exchange for -- well, I'm not sure what the middle and working classes get out of it.

Maybe this is where the grand bargain is taking shape. The CEO of Wal-Mart and the president of the Service Employees International Union have agreed to lobby for universal health coverage.

As Katie Porter mentions in Credit Slips, the problem isn't merely one of income inequality, but also of income volatility.

The success of excess

The headline:
Boston scare suspect videotaped bomb squad

One of the men criminally charged after placing blinking cartoon advertisements around the city and causing a terrorism scare videotaped a police bomb squad removing one of the devices, but did not tell the officers the object was harmless.
Surveillance cameras caught 27-year-old Peter Berdovsky videotaping officers removing what they thought was a possible bomb last week.
"Mr. Berdovsky didn't do anything inappropriate," his lawyer, Walter Prince, said Tuesday.

Let's try an alternate history, with this headline:
Two dead terrorists, many unanswered questions

Police fatally shot two men who interfered with a bomb squad that had been removing one of many mysterious electronic devices planted in vulnerable places.
Authorities said the two men had been videotaping the removal of the device. Police said they believe that the men were planning to provide al Qaeda with the video so the terrorist organization could have a better understanding of U.S. police methods and procedures.
The suspected terrorists, Peter Berdovsky, 27, and Sean Stevens, 28, approached a police officer standing by yellow tape that had been placed around the Sullivan Square transit station. As they tried to gain the officer's attention, he warned them back. The American-born terrorists slipped past the yellow tape to confront a group of police officers standing next to a cruiser nearby.
"The subjects were ordered to stop," Police Commissioner Ed Davis said. "They persisted in attempting to engage the police officers in conversation. When they turned to leave, one of the terrorists stated that he had placed the device at Sullivan Square and had placed other devices in other locations. Upon hearing this, the officers discerned that one of the terrorists was holding a weapon. Both men were killed in the ensuing gunfire."
The "weapon" turned out to be a video camera. Police were examining the camera last night to determine if it was booby trapped.

Ben Bernanke's disappearing act

Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, gave a speech today about economic inequality, then sidestepped some of the most important drivers of inequality. He performed a magic act: Poof! The federal government disappeared. Wealthy special interest groups vanished.

Bernanke introduced his topic this way:

Although we Americans strive to provide equality of economic opportunity, we do not guarantee equality of economic outcomes, nor should we. Indeed, without the possibility of unequal outcomes tied to differences in effort and skill, the economic incentive for productive behavior would be eliminated, and our market-based economy--which encourages productive activity primarily through the promise of financial reward--would function far less effectively.

This type of economic propaganda has been spouted so tirelessly for so long that no one notices that it's propaganda. "We do not guarantee equality of economic outcomes, nor should we." Both clauses of that sentence are untrue. We do guarantee equality of economic outcomes for some people. And we should -- but for a different group of people.

We guarantee high incomes for doctors, especially. Also for drug companies, movie studios, and corporate lawyers. We do this by limiting the number of doctors, lawyers and other highly paid professionals who are allowed to practice. The medical and law professions ensure that medical schools and law schools admit a limited number of students each year. More important, they make sure that the federal government keeps a lid on the number of immigrants who practice highly paid professions.

Movie studios, record companies and drug manufacturers are protected by strict copyright and patent laws.

Dean Baker has been beating this drum for years.

In today's speech, Bernanke sought to explain why the rich have gotten so much richer in the last few decades, leaving the poor and especially the middle class behind. (The people in the middle quintile of the income scale have advanced the least, in relative terms.)

Bernanke trots out the role of global trade and technological change, and then he comes up with this:

Finally, changes in the institutions that have shaped the labor market over the past few decades may also have been associated with some increase in wage inequality. For example, unions tend to compress the dispersion of pay for jobs in the middle of the skill distribution. Thus, the decline in private-sector union membership over the post-World War II period -- particularly the sharp drop in the 1980s -- has been associated with an increased dispersion of pay among workers with intermediate levels of skill. The sources of the decline in union membership are much debated, and certainly long-run structural changes in the economy, such as the decline in manufacturing employment, have played a role.

No mention of Ronald Reagan. No mention of PATCO. No mention of a decades-long effort to throttle unions until they constitute just 7.4 percent of employees of private companies.

Unions do guarantee equality of outcomes for some people -- those who hold similar jobs. The decline of unions over the past 30 years has happened at the same time that income has been redistributed upward. That's not a coincidence. It's the deliberate result of policy, adopted mostly by Republicans.

God is not on our side

Just checking in on what Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell said on Sept. 13, 2001, when they accused the ACLU, liberals, feminists, abortion rights supporters, gays and lesbians, and People for the American Way of seizing control of jetliners and crashing them into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

JERRY FALWELL: Well, as the world knows, the tragedy hit on Tuesday morning, and at 2:00 in the afternoon, we gathered 7,000 Liberty University students, faculty, local people together, and we used the verse that I heard you use a moment ago, Chronicles II, 7:14, that God wanted us to humble ourselves and seek his face. And there's not much we can do in the Church but what we're supposed to do, and that is pray. Pray for the President that God will give him wisdom, keep bad advisors from him, bring good ones to him, praying for the families of the victims, praying for America.

… I sensed a brokenness, tears. People were sobbing at the altar. And, they have no shame about it. It was the kind of brokenness that no one could conjure, only God could bring upon us. And, that is to me the most optimistic thing that I see today as I look across America. And every city, I called a friend in Springfield yesterday. He said at least a hundred churches, Springfield, MO, at least a hundred churches have special prayer meetings for America today and tonight. And, that's happening by the thousands all over America. This could be, if we will fast and pray, this could be God's call to revival.

PAT ROBERTSON: Well, I believe it. And I think the people, the Bible says render your hearts and not your garments, and people begin to render their hearts and they weep before the Lord, and they really get serious with God, God will hear and answer. We'll see revival. I am thrilled to hear that about your church because it's happening all over.

Falwell and Robertson were thrilled with the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. They said that if the deaths of thousands of civilians is what it takes to put asses in pews, then they're all for it. Just two days after Sept. 11, 2001, Falwell and Robertson announced that they were on the same side as the terrorists who had killed more than 3,000 people. Like Osama bin Laden, they don't like liberals and they don't like their fellow Americans and they want Americans to turn to the One True Religion.

There's some disagreement as to what that One True Religion is, but Falwell and Robertson didn't want to make such distinctions while they were metaphorically clasping fists with bin Laden. Dinesh D'Souza is making the same argument as Falwell and Robertson did, at book length.

But our mission today isn't to marvel at the hatred of America that Falwell and Robertson share with bin Laden. It's to ask a simple question: Why didn't God answer all those prayers that Falwell and Robertson talked about?

Why didn't God give President Bush wisdom? Why didn't God keep bad advisers from him? Why didn't God bring good advisers to him? Why didn't God comfort the families of all the victims? Why didn't God prevent America from division?

Falwell and Robertson were chirpily confident that a religious revial would result from the deaths of thousands of Americans. Where's the revival? Do Falwell and Robertson now believe that the terrorist attacks were in vain? Are they disappointed?

Learn this word: Chang'e

In China, 13 designers are competing to draw up plans for a lunar rover. China's Chang'e project will launch a satellite into earth orbit. That satellite will launch another satellite that will go into moon orbit and provide 3-D maps and analyze the moon's chemical composition to figure out how it could be useful to pioneers living there.

Later, China will send an unmanned rover to the moon that will drill core samples and send them back to earth. The goal is to do this by 2017. Then China will decide whether to send people to the moon.

What's the over-under date for when the conventional wisdom holds that there is no longer one superpower, but two?

Damn Colties

Someone had to say it, and Joe Queenan says it best: Today's Super Bowl offers fans a chance to root for absolute good over unadulterated evil.

You have the Bears. The descendants of George Halas. Working class. Have stayed with the same stadium since 1971, continuing to love it as it aged and sagged and had a facelift. Play in the rain and snow, like real football players. NFC.

You have the Colts. Owned by the satanic Irsays. White collar. Skedaddled out of Baltimore at night like little 'fraidy cats, then lacked the class to adopt another name and logo. Play indoors, like little girls in the play area at a mall. AFC (derisive snort).

Marvin Harrison might be the greatest wide receiver ever, even better than Jerry Rice. Did you see the catch he made on the 2-point conversion in the AFC title game? But tell me: Who would you rather have a beer with -- Harrison or Muhsin Muhammad? (If you say, "Muhsin who?," that's your loss.)

A lot of people root for Peyton to win a Super Bowl. The last time I felt that way was when I was rooting, inexplicably, for John Elway of the damned AFC's Broncos. Later, I wondered, "Why care about Elway? There were about 106 guys on the combined rosters."

This game isn't about Manning. It's about what Queenan calls "the serious moral issues underlying the set-to."

Go Bears!

Update: Lance Mannion, who is rooting for the Colts, makes the case against rooting for a team solely because of the athletes' political beliefs.

CNN gives a sloppy wet one to the prez

Digby has a post about what she calls "the giddy reception that President Bush received on the floor of the NY stock exchange last week," with a partial transcript of the CNN coverage.

As CNN correspondent Susan Lisovicz noted in her stand-up, Bush is the second president to visit the exchange during trading hours. The first was Herbert Hoover. Just kidding. The first was Hoover's ideological heir, Ronald Reagan.

Lisovicz's report from the trading floor had this bit:

President George W. Bush, we believe, has just entered the building, and he may pass right behind me. Of course, the president of the United States using Wall Street as his stage to talk about his economic policy, and there's a lot to talk about that is quite favorable to the Bush administration.

We've had 7.2 million jobs created since 2003. The jobless rate historically low, 4.5 percent. We just got the first look at the fourth quarter GDP coming in better than expected at 3.5 percent.

It takes a little work to get employment data, but it's not that hard. You can find it at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The disappointing thing is that you can't create a chart on the BLS site and then link to it. It's all dynamically generated and unlinkable.

Anyway, let's look at nonfarm payrolls. In January 1993, when President Clinton took office, people had 109,725,000 nonfarm jobs in this country. In January 1999, there were 127,477,000 nonfarm jobs. The economy created a net 17,752,000 jobs in Clinton's first six years.

In January 2001, when President Bush took office, people had 132,471,000 nonfarm jobs. Last month, people had 137,258,000 nonfarm jobs. The economy created a net 4,787,000 jobs in Bush's first six years.

• Clinton: 17.8 million net new jobs in six years.
• Bush: 4.8 million net new jobs in six years.

Lisovicz is engaging in propaganda. Is she factually correct about 7.2 million jobs created since 2003? In August 2003, after the recession, employment bottomed out at 129,818,000. Payrolls have grown by 7.4 million since. In the equivalent period during Clinton's presidency, nonfarm payrolls increased by 9.9 million.

This stuff is easy to look up. I don't expect Lisovicz to go to the BLS web site while she's standing on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, shivering in ecstasy when the president is standing just five feet away. But a real journalist doesn't merely parrot an administration's talking points. A true journalist puts those talking points in perspective.