Meet That Ham Sandwich: Governor Rick Perry

  Lawyers will tell you that any good prosecutor could convince a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.

Well, meet that ham sandwich: Governor Rick Perry. He’s a real ham — only not as smart.

A Texas grand jury indicted Perry, charging the Republican with official abuse of power. Specifically, he’s accused of threatening to veto all state funding for a public integrity unit. Among other things, that office was investigating corrupt favoritism in one of the governor’s pet projects.

Perry was trying to muscle out of office the woman who is the duly elected head of that unit, presumably to halt its inquiry. Leave office, he publicly barked at her, or I’ll take away all your money. She didn’t, and he did.

Not smart, for that’s an illegal quid pro quo, much like linking a campaign donation to an official favor. This led to the selection of a judge, the appointment of a special prosecutor, the establishment of a grand jury and the indictment of the gubernatorial ham sandwich.

Perry and his Republican operatives quickly denounced and even threatened both the special prosecutor and the jurors as partisan hacks who, in the governor’s words, “will be held to account.”

Thuggish as that is, the national media have mostly swallowed Perry’s hokum that he’s the victim, indicted for nothing more than exercising his veto power. It’s crude politics, Rick howled, as he turned his courthouse mug shot moment into a raucous Republican political rally.

Perry has hornswoggled the pundits, but don’t let them fool you. This is serious.

Again, the issue isn’t Perry’s veto, but his linking of a veto threat to his effort to oust an elected public official. His hamming it up about being a poor victim of Democrats doesn’t withstand scrutiny. The judge who appointed the prosecutor is a Republican. And the prosecutor himself was nominated to federal office by President George H.W. Bush and endorsed by two Texas Republican senators.

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. OtherWords.org

Chris Powell: GE's exit from Conn. might be good for the state

MANCHESTER, Conn. Now that nearly a dozen other states are bidding for General Electric to move its headquarters out of Fairfield, Connecticut probably will lose the 800 jobs there. Merely to keep something it already has, Connecticut is far less able to pay and to justify paying GE's extortion than other states will be able to pay and justify paying GE to get something new.

Paying GE to stay would incur a financial loss for Connecticut. But a state that used cash grants and tax breaks to pay GE to relocate and promise to stick around for a while would gain jobs, personal-income and property-tax revenue from GE employees, and general commerce to offset the expense.

Connecticut might be able to justify paying GE to expand here. But GE isn't planning expansion. Rather, the corporation is upset about the "unitary tax" just enacted by the General Assembly and Gov. Dan Malloy, under which a corporation's worldwide income is subjected to state taxation. Many states have unitary taxation, but while it may be fair, Connecticut's avoidance of it had been an advantage in attracting and keeping businesses, just as the state's avoidance of an income tax was a draw until 1991.

Presumably Connecticut could mollify GE only by repealing unitary taxation or subsidizing GE in some way that in effect would reimburse the tax. But repealing the tax would require the governor and legislature to raise other taxes or cut spending, while reimbursing GE its new tax would invite all big corporations in the state to demand the same treatment even if they had to threaten to move out as GE has done.

If keeping GE induces Connecticut to repeal unitary taxation and start making policy changes to save money and start putting the public interest over the special interest, the corporation will have done the state a service. But the corporation also may do the state a service if it leaves, for then the state may start to realize that paying extortion to businesses is no substitute for ordinary good and efficient government in pursuit of the public interest.

With a little luck GE's departure from Connecticut would end state government's policy of pretending that mere political patronage is economic development.

xxx

New London's is the latest municipal government to "ban the box" -- that is, to remove from city job application forms the box asking if an applicant has a criminal record. State government already has done the same thing. It is said that the question discourages otherwise qualified applicants who are trying to rebuild their lives and that, if an applicant is considered seriously, a criminal records check will be done on him anyway.

This is politically correct but not persuasive. For the application forms with the "box" don't say that anyone with a criminal record will be disqualified automatically. Instead the forms with the "box" signify that a criminal record may be relevant to job qualifications, which is why applicants are supposedly to be subject to a criminal records check at some point before hiring.

That is, forms with the "box" tell the whole truth while forms without the "box" mislead.

Further, forms with the "box" deprive personnel departments of an excuse to forget to do criminal records checks. Forms with the "box" remind personnel departments to be conscientious.

That such reminders may be needed was demonstrated by the massacre in June at the church in Charleston, S.C. The perpetrator should have been disqualified from purchasing his guns because he recently had admitted a narcotics offense, but that admission was not properly recorded in federal, state, and local law-enforcement databases.

Since government databases can be mistaken and since personnel departments can be negligent, job applicants themselves should continue to be asked at the outset if they have criminal records. While it's politically incorrect, it's a lot safer.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Meanwhile, in the Annals of Citizenship

Meanwhile, in the Annals of Citizenship

US capitalism seems to be taking another turn.  The Old Normal (Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, This Time Is Different) was the expectation that, even after a serious banking crisis, growth would resume its long-term annual trend of 2.0 percent in five years or so. The New Normal says, “Forget the trend.”

Robert Gordon, of Northwestern University, and Lawrence Summers, of Harvard University, expect slow growth for decades, thanks to various “headwinds,” or constraints on potential output(Gordon); or insufficient demand, stemming from a savings glut (Summers).

A lively discussion of these bold new claims is taking place, so far mainly on blogs, here, here, and here, for example. Soon enough such considerations will impinge on official forecasts, Federal Reserve Board policy, and, naturally, on asset markets. That’s bad news, especially for the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution, where, according to Gordon, growth will be least of all.

It’s always possible the current path it will be altered somehow:  a major new invention, an unexpected war, a plague. But at the moment much of this seems already to be written in the cards of growth accounting.

The debate over GDP growth has put me in mind of a favorite book.  I don’t mean Diane Coyle’s GDP: A Brief but Affectionate Portrait (Princeton, 2014), though her essay certainly makes very good reading in the present circumstances. GDP is a narrative of activity deemed to be “economic success,” she writes, so it is no surprise that the measure’s primacy should be challenged by those who see it as a symbol “of what’s gone wrong with the capitalist market economy.”  She writes,

"For example, environmentalists believe it leads to an overemphasis on growth at the expense of the planet, “happiness” advocates think it needs to be replaced with indicators of genuine well-being, and activists… argue that a focus on GDP has disguised inequality and social disharmony.”

Instead, the book I mean is Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge, 1950) by Thomas Humphrey Marshall, a noted Cambridge University sociologist of his day (he died in 1981.) In 1950 Karl Marx loomed somewhat larger than he does today.  By “social class,” I think Marshall meant something like what we call “capitalism” in the present day – or, in shorthand, GDP.  Here's a key excerpt, courtesy of W.W. Norton and J. Bradford DeLong.

The concept of citizenship had been evolving in England since at least the late seventeenth century, Marshall wrote, which meant that the growth of citizenship coincided with the rise of capitalism in that nation. The concepts seemed in near-total opposition.   Capitalism was all about inequality, the creation of new classes. Citizenship bestowed equal status on all members of the community, rich and poor alike. Capitalism was about creating new classes. Citizenship was about class-abatement.

Were they related?  Certainly rights seemed to have grown hand-in-hand with GDP (starting long before there was such any such statistical index of capitalism). Sometimes citizenship advanced in alliance with economic growth, other times in opposition.

This political narrative is very well known – far better than the narrative of, say, the Industrial Revolution. Civil rights, those associated with personal liberty, were established mostly in the eighteenth century, by a series of democratic revolutions; political rights in the nineteenth; social rights in the twentieth. Marshall described them thus:

[Civil rights include] freedom of speech, thought and faith, the right to own property and to conclude valid contracts, and the right to justice. The last is of a different order from the others, because it is the right to defend and assert all one's rights on terms of equality with others and by due process of law. This shows us that the institutions most directly associated with civil rights are the courts of justice.

By the political element I mean the right to participate in the exercise of political power, as a member of a body invested with political authority or as an elector of the members of such a body. The corresponding institutions are parliament and councils of 1ocal government.

By the social element I mean the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the fuIl in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society. The institutions most closely connected with it are the educational system and the social services.

In 1950 Britain, social rights had to do with extending the welfare state. It seems to me that the second half of the century had to do with bringing economic rights within the meaning of the term, especially in nations formerly deemed to have been socialist. Thrashing out the balance between the right to participate in markets and to share in their fruits, against non-market rights to education, health care, lifetime employment and retirement income, seems to have been what much of the shouting of the last fifty years has been about – in slightly different ways, in the First, Second and Third Worlds (unless, of course, you think that the broadening of the meaning of citizenship was finally settled, once and for all, sometime in the mid-century.

On this (admittedly idiosyncratic) argument, it seems to me that citizenship in the twenty-first century is likely to have to do with the extension of environmental rights to an ever-increasing community of citizens – not just clean air and clear water, which is where the movement began, but the rights to a temperate and at most slowly changing climate; relatively stable borders; and a thoughtfully managed biota.

Now here’s the thing: for the last three hundred and fifty years or so, the battle for expanded rights has led the way. We make our wish list in the political sphere; growth follows in its train. At the moment the top item on the list probably has to do with curbing slowing, then managing climate change. This is not just a matter of“climate week,” the demonstrations in New York, or the US preparations there for next year’s conference in Paris.  Businesses all over the world for years have been incorporating reduced carbon emissions in their spending decisions.

Eventually we can be expected to change the definition of economic success – that is, change the calculation of growth in the GDP – to include the expense of the maintenance of the atmosphere. (Solid waste and water pollution can come later.) In a recent article in Science by Nicholas Muller, of Middlebury College, a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, showed how such adjustments would increase GDP growth, not diminish it, in periods when the air pollution intensity of output was decreasing — estimated gross external damages (GED) from greenhouse gases fell by half in the US, from 6.4 percent to 3.2 percent of GDP, between 1999 and 2008

In the meantime, it is hard to know how much slow GDP growth may eventually be interpreted as measurement error. Northwestern’s Gordon acknowledges as much. He writes,

… GDP has always been understated. Henry Ford reduced the price of his Model T from $900 in 1910 to $265 in 1923 while improving its quality. Yet autos were not included in the CPI until 1935. Think of what GDP misses: the value of the transition from gas lights, that produced dim light and pollution and were a fire hazard, to much righter electric lights turned on by the flick of a switch; the elevator that bypassed flights of stairs; the electric subway that could travel at 40mph compared to the 5mph of the horse-drawn streetcar; the replacement of the urban horse by the motor vehicle that emitted no manure; the end of disgusting jobs of human beings required to remove the manure; the networking of the home between 1870 and 1940 by five new types of connections (electricity, telephone, gas, water, and sewer); the invention of mass marketing through the department store and mail order catalogue; and the development of the American South made possible by the invention of air conditioning. Perhaps the most important omission from real GDP was the conquest of infant mortality, which by one estimate added more unmeasured value to GDP in the 20th century, particularly in its first half, than all measured consumption.

In other words, the New Normal is going to take some getting used-to.  Capitalism in the twenty-first century is obviously going to be different from capitalism in the twentieth century.  More fundamentally, so, too, the rights of humankind.

Chris Powell: One Democratic Party Enough for Connecticut?

Benighted as Connecticut's Republican Party may be in the eyes of some, it is
obligated to reject the advice given the other day by the state's former U.S.
senator and governor, Lowell P. Weicker Jr. Interviewed by Connecticut's Hearst
newspapers, Weicker said the party should let people vote in its nominating
primaries without regard to party membership, as the party did briefly in the
1980s when its Weicker faction led the party. 

Of course no party is going to win elections without appealing to a majority of
voters. But not everyone's politics is as adaptable as Weicker's was over a long
career, in which he went from being a Goldwater and Nixon supporter, advocate of
the Vietnam War, and red baiter to hobnobbing with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro
and becoming the darling of government-dependent liberals when, as governor, he
filled their troughs with the proceeds of the personal income tax he imposed on
Connecticut, earning not just the liberals' forgiveness but their amnesia. 

That is, some people want their political views and principles given expression
more than they want to win elections at the cost of having to give up their
views and principles. By letting people participate without regard to party
registration, open primaries prevent people of distinct views and principles
from even [ITALICS] having [END ITALICS] a party. 

Indeed, when Weicker, as senator in the 1980s, sought to survive in increasingly
Democratic Connecticut by moving from political right to left and began to
alienate Republicans and risk being denied their renomination, his objective in
advocating open primaries was precisely to prevent Republicans from controlling
their own party. What may have been the most apt political cartoon drawn in
Connecticut during his years in politics depicted Weicker telling Castro
confidentially, "All you have to do is register Republican long enough to vote
in the primary." 

Besides, Connecticut's Republican Party is not very conservative anyway, largely
indifferent to abortion, homosexuality, gun control, and the other social issues
on which the national party feeds and unwilling even to challenge the major
spending policies on which the state's Democratic Party feeds. That is,
Connecticut Republicans are often hard to distinguish from Democrats, and the
state won't gain political choice and change from more Weickerism, from
Republicans becoming still more like Democrats. 

* * * 

... Rising housing prices are not really good news ... 

For the most part news stories treat an increase in housing prices as an
indicator of prosperity, something to be welcomed, as happened the other day
when the Greater Hartford Association of Realtors reported that the median
housing sale price in the Hartford area had risen by almost 1 percent over the
past year. That's because for many people homeownership constitutes the bulk of
their assets and a decline in housing prices can wipe out the heavily mortgaged. 

But housing isn't only an investment; it is also a necessity of life, like food
and fuel. Only food and fuel producers would celebrate an increase in the price
of those necessities — and an increase in housing prices means more expense for
renters and more difficulty for them in becoming homeowners. 

Of course real estate long has been highly cyclical, a boom-and-bust market,
made more mercurial by the Federal Reserve's manipulation of interest rates for
political purposes. The Fed's recent suppression of rates in the name of
stimulating the economy has worsened the country's housing situation, driving up
prices while depriving small savers of interest income without increasing
employment, wages, and the [ITALICS] ability [END ITALICS] to buy housing. Real
unemployment -- counting people who have withdrawn from the labor market, been
demoted to menial or part-time jobs, or claimed disability pensions -- is
several times the official unemployment rate. 

Reducing the cost of living is pretty much the definition of rising living
standards and progress, so rising housing prices are as much a bad sign as a
good one. 

----- 

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn. 

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