Yes, but will Ron Johnson ask the Chamber to name ITS foreign contributors?

by folkbum

At tonight's debate--observed here at casa folkbum entirely through the twitterations of locals who didn't have better things to do--Ron Johnson said he would ask the groups running ads in his favor to disclose their contributors' names, contra the recent Citizens United case.

At least, that's what the twitterers said, all, um, atwitter.

This is a great idea, and if Johnson lives up to that promise good for him. But I think he can do more, so so much more. More than I can say clearly in words. So, a picture!



Blogger's limitations being what they are, the graphic may be hard to see--you can click the pic to go straight to ThinkProgress whence the flowchart originated. The short version of it, though, is that the Chamber of Commerce takes in a ton of money from interests outside the United States. Those funds flow directly into a pot of money from which the Chamber is buying ads all over the country, including in the Wisconsin Senate race here.

The Chamber has refused to name names but they won't deny that they're doing what they're doing.

So how about it, Johnson? Will you ring up your buddies at the Chamber and ask them to name not just names, but the foreign interests those names represent? I have a guess at the answer--it's the same one your friends in the Senate chamber have been saying for four years straight: no.

I could have written this

by folkbum

If you cut and paste from things I've written here and elsewhere in the last decade, I probably have written most of these sentiments. But Louanne Johnson puts them all in one place:

Most American teachers are good at their jobs -- when they are allowed to do their jobs. And that is the primary problem with our public schools. Teachers are not allowed to teach.

Or rather, they are told how to teach in such great detail and required to document what they are teaching in such great detail and expected to spend so much time teaching students to pass the tests that will prove the teachers have paid such great attention to detail that the teachers don’t have time to teach the information and skills their students need.

FriTunes: Laugh With Me edition

by folkbum

Or laugh at me, I don't really care. Here's the important thing: Comedy Sportz Milwaukee's fall Rec League season starts this Sunday afternoon. There will be three one-hour matches starting at 2 PM. My team, We Fly Coach, takes the stage at 4 PM. The shows are FREE and the laughs will be non-stop, so come on down and enjoy the show. Now, the tunes:

Your Explanation Will Be Illuminating

By Keith R. Schmitz

Someone sent this to me. Since this place is troll town, the reactions should be interesting.

TEA BAGGERS, Republican "Conservatives" and Other Angry People....

It is truly amazing to realize that:

You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.

You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate energy policy.

You didn't get mad when a covert CIA agent got outed by Cheney's office.

You didn't get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.

You didn't get mad when our government deceived us about "weapons of mass destruction" and spent billions to attack Iraq, a country that posed no threat to us, instead of finishing the job of getting rid of the real terrorists in Afghanistan

You didn't get mad when $500 billion a year was borrowed to pursue that war.

You didn't get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq.

You didn't get mad when you saw the Abu Grahib photos.

You didn't get mad when you found out we were torturing people.

You didn't get mad when the previous President inherited a budget surplus, then ran up the national debt up to $10.024 trillion.

You didn't get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans and the President lied about it.

You didn't get mad when we didn't catch Bin Laden in Tora Bora.

You didn't get mad when you saw the horrible treatment of combat veterans at Walter Reed.

You didn't get mad when FEMA failed in New Orleans.(Heck of a job Brownie).

You finally got mad when????

When the government decided that people in America deserved the right to health care if they are sick.

When some regulation of irresponsible financial institutions is enacted. When stimulus programs are enacted to help repair our aging infrastructure and create new technologies and jobs.

When we try to salvage something worthwhile from the previously botched war in Afghanistan.

How is it possible that Illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, tax cuts to make the rich richer while running up huge deficits are all ok with you, but helping lower and middle income Americans makes you mad?

Of course. All of the above will be rationalized.

Whistling Dixie Over China

By Keith R. Schmitz

Want something to really worry about?

China is starting to invest in its people. Meanwhile, this country is seeking ways to whittle at our education system and is engaged in contentious battles with its educators.

Case in point why we should be concerned. About five years ago in Beijing, stopped in at one of their popular Border's style bookstores on Wangfujing Street on the way to the Forbidden City.

On the first floor, where the Harry Potter and the latest right wing rant and rave books should be there were books on math and science, and even customer service books broken down by industry. They had a full free standing bookshelf on differential calculus.

Second floor was devoted to books and other media on how to speak and read English. By the time you reach the third floor there were the popular titles. Not a formula for retailing success here, but when you look at the big picture, not pretty.

This is not a lesson necessarily though on selling, but on selling us out.

Politi"Fact" continues its big, sloppy kisses to Republicans

by folkbum

I am not sure how much the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel paid to buy the PolitiFact brand, but if they were expecting their own brand to be buoyed by a true independent voice this election season, they got ripped off.

Take the last two Politi"Fact" Wisconsin stories. On Tuesday, they examined a claim in a TV spot from Republican candidate Ron Johnson about Democratic Senator Russ Feingold's vote on health care. Here's a bit, with my bold (italics in the original):

A closer look at the language [in the ad] shows Johnson frames the issue around a question the polls did not ask.

The pre-vote polls used straightforward references to the "health care reform plan" or "proposed changes to the health care system." That is in contrast to the Johnson ad, which says a majority of Wisconsinites opposed--and Feingold voted for--a "government takeover of health care." [. . .]

That two-word phrase--government takeover--became Republican shorthand in opposing the legislation, even though Democrats dropped the "public option" approach under which the feds would have run a plan to compete with private health insurance.

Our PolitiFact colleagues have repeatedly probed the truth of the government takeover charge, and found it ridiculously false--a Pants on Fire. In truth, the health care law creates a market-based system that relies on private health insurance companies.

So looking around the page there, you might be wondering: Where are the dancing flames? Where is the honest labeling of what Johnson has done, as determined by PoltFact's own standards?

Indeed, in missing the opportunity here to call Johnson's ad a pants-on-fire lie, Politi"Fact" keeps its streak of only awarding flames to Democratic candidates alive. (They awarded one pants-on-fire rating to a statement by a conservative yakker at a competing media conglomerate, true, but no Republican candidates even when they clearly deserve it.)

Then today's Politi"Fact" awards the first and to date only 100% "True" rating in the feature's near two-month-long history. And what claim was rated as true? That Scott Walker, Republican candidate for governor, gave back a large chunk of salary in his first six years on the job as Milwaukee County Executive. Here:

For years, folks in southeastern Wisconsin have heard about Scott Walker, the Milwaukee County executive, giving up thousands upon thousands of dollars of his salary. [. . .] The returned money was part of a 2002 campaign promise to cut the job’s salary by $60,000 per year. Walker, the Republican candidate for governor, made the pledge in the wake of a scandal over lavish county pensions.

His Democratic opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, has taken a jab at Walker, pointing out Walker has reduced his annual giveback from $60,000 to $10,000. The Barrett campaign points to a 2002 Walker flier, which includes the promise to reduce the county exec salary by $60,000 per year.

That promise, however, didn’t specify for how long Walker would reduce the salary by $60,000. And in April 2008, he was re-elected after telling voters he would reduce the giveback to $10,000. (Walker joked at the time, according to a news report, that his decision to give back nearly half of his $129,114 salary had been unpopular with his wife.)

It goes on from there to talk about just how precisely accurate the number touted by Walker is.

But do you notice anything missing? That's right--no one has challenged Walker's salary claim as untrue. Politi"Fact" is literally answering a question no one has asked. It's one thing to take a disputed item--like whether or not the Affordable Care Act of 2010 is a "government takeover of health care"--and arbitrating the truthity or falsity of that claim. It's another thing to take an item that no one has claimed to be false and declare it true.

And the part of this Walker claim that is disputable--whether or not he broke a promise--is glossed over with a glib "whatevs" when a nearly identical semantic distinction made by Russ Feingold was awarded pants-on-fire status. Can the bias be any clearer?

Profile in Jello

By Keith R. Schmitz

Lt. Gov. wannabe Rebecca Kleefisch refuses to debate opponent Tom Nelson.

A request of the media

by folkbum

If anyone can manage to pop the Ron Johnson protective bubble for a moment, can you ask where he stands on the minimum wage? I'm sure the middle class and working poor of Wisconsin would like to know.

Quote of the Day: This is why I have no hope for America anymore edition

by folkbum

Back in Washington, Graham warned Lieberman and Kerry that they needed to get as far as they could in negotiating the [energy/ climate change] bill “before Fox News got wind of the fact that this was a serious process,” one of the people involved in the negotiations said. “He would say, ‘The second they focus on us, it’s gonna be all cap-and-tax all the time, and it’s gonna become just a disaster for me on the airwaves. We have to move this along as quickly as possible.’ ” [via]

It's bad enough when a single senator can block legislation or appointments on a whim, or when a whole bill is rewritten to suit a single senator's needs (how often in the last year have we seen legislation altered to get Collins's or Snowe's vote, or Baucus's vote, or Scott Brown's?). But now apparently legislation can also die because a single senator is afraid someone will say mean things about him on Fox News.

I don't care where you were on the specific bill here, if you're glad it died or worried now over the fate of the planet. You ought to be just as disgusted by this new reality as I am.

Milwaukee Guitar Club

by folkbum

On a much more positive note: Here's my story from the Bay View Compass about the Milwaukee Guitar Club, which is where I've been hanging out most Tuesday nights lately. The winter location is upstairs at the Bay View Brew Haus. Grab your axe (acoustic; there's not really any outlets upstairs) and come on down if you wanna.

Margaret Jane Bullock Johaningsmeir, 2001-2010

update: thanks to everyone for your kind words and good thoughts about Maggie.

Republicans are all about the deficit

by folkbum

Increasing it, that is:



It's an old fetish. Like Reagan old.

Dear Politi"fact" Wisconsin

by folkbum

Sirs,

It has come to my attention that you have recently deemed two Democrats worthy of "pants on fire" status. This is amusing, no doubt, to those who find immolation to be a hoot-n-a-half. But beyond the offense that may be taken among the pre-immolated and the professional firefighting community, the awards--to Julie Lassa (via the DCCC) and Rep. Steve Kagen--betray a frightening amount of willful ignorance on the part of the, I think you call them, "fact checkers" at your employ when it comes to Social Security.

To wit, a small but not insignificant portion of this morning's laugh riot:

Here is what [Up Nort' candidate Reid] Ribble actually said, based on a longer video of the same statement posted on YouTube. We’ll highlight where the new words pick up.

"Somehow we have to establish a phase-out of the current Social Security system to a new system. And that will have to happen over time. It could happen in a single generation."

Ribble goes on to discuss how the life expectancy of Americans has grown since Social Security was established in the 1930s, and its effect on the system.

"It has to change," Ribble said of Social Security. "It will bankrupt this country if it doesn’t change."

It is remarkable to consider that your application of the "pants on fire" label was not awarded to this very statement itself. For you see, Mr. Ribble--are you sure he's not a Muppet?--is spinning quite the tale about bankruptcy.

The numbers, unlike Mr. Ribble, do not lie. If you believe, as the right-wing hand-wringers do, that the moment Social Security starts dipping into its trust fund, the sky will shatter and fall impaling us all with sharp daggers of fiscal doom, then 2015 is the big date. 2037 is the other big date. Over the course of those 22 years, the Social Security Trust Fund will pay out about $4.2 trillion in interest and principal on the treasury bonds it holds. Or an average of $191 billion a year.

This is a lot of money. It is more money than you or I put together can ever hope to make in a lifetime. It is, however, small potatoes comparatively. The Pentagon's annual budget is nearly four times that, for example. And the total federal budget today is 18 times that. To suggest that such a small number is enough to "bankrupt" us, particularly when no such claim is made about hugeanticon defense budgets or the ginormous hole favored tax cuts would leave in the budget, is a bald lie. Indeed, expiration of all the Bush tax cuts, on schedule for the end of the year (but possibly to be stopped in a lame duck session that may or may not still let them expire for the very wealthy dear jebus just shoot me in the head now the Democrats are blowing this one too) would cover the Social Security Trust Fund and then some.

After 2037, when the fund would be exhausted, there would still be a shortfall of about 22% of promised benefits between income (in the payroll tax) and outflow. This would amount to $5.4 trillion through 2084. Over those 47 years the annual cost to cover that shortfall is a mere $115 billon, even less than the non-bankrupting amount already discussed.

In short, sirs, the technicality by which you ascribe liarliar status to anyone who accuses Republicans of wanting to dismantle Social Security ("they'll replace it with something!" you cheerily wave into the ether), is a mere whiff of smoke compared to heaping mounds of burning Dockers Republicans have been shoving at Americans for decades. Social Security is not going broke. It is not going to bankrupt the country. It is not going to disappear before you or I or your grandkids retire unless Republicans destroy it.

Which they will. Mr. Ribble says he wants to replace Social Security with "something"--perhaps pixie dust and bottled genii. Rep. Paul Ryan wants to give people "guaranteed personal accounts," whatever that means, which is "a good starting point," according to Reality TV wunderkind Sean Duffy. Now, you want to talk about bankruptcy, Ryan's plan will do it. In spades.

Howso? Because Ryan is promising the same dollar to two people. You and I are paying into Social Security right now, and that money is going out to grammy in her monthly check. Ryan wants the money you and I pay to go into a "guaranteed personal account" and in grammy's monthly check, since he promises currently and nearly retired folk won't see their benefits change. Suddenly, the shortfall goes from almost nothing in 2011 to hundreds of billions, years earlier than expected. By the time currently and nearly retired folk finally keel over and stop soaking up the gummint largesse--say, 25 years from now, maybe--the cumulative new debt from the transition would be somewhere on the order of an additional $4 or $5 trillion!

And remember, Paul Ryan is the serious numbers guy!

So, sirs, in the future, please be certain that you aim your pantsafire judgments squarely at those telling the greater falsehoods. Mr. Ribble, Sean Duffy, Paul Ryan, and Republican Senate candidate Ron Johnson have all been spreading lies about Social Security and need to be called to account. And, as you have appointed yourselves arbiters of all that is true or false in the world, get to work on that, please.

FriTunes

by folkbum



Apparently, Ani DiFranco turned 40 this week. She's one of those performers who was like "my age" and making a living doing the singer-songwriter thing when I was in college. So now I feel old. :(

Dissing Social Security sure is Ponz-ular

or, No One Ever Went Broke Scaring You Into Thinking Social Security's Going Broke

by folkbum

Every six months, I send a big chunk of dough to American Family to insure my car. That money doesn't go into a safe with my name on it. Instead, that money goes into 1) a set of investments designed to increase AmFam's long-term financial stability and 2) the settlement payouts of other clients found to be at fault. Someday, I will (sadly, not too long ago, I did) need AmFam to pay for an accident myself. When that happens, the payout will come from the immediate cashflow of the company--the premiums their other customers are paying at that moment.

If you're Ron Johnson, or Rick Esenberg, or Nick Schweitzer, or any one of countless others on the right, that makes American Family insurance--hell, any insurance--a Ponzi scheme.

For after all, Social Security, which all of the above have happily (though RoJo's backing away? maybe?) called a Ponzi scheme, does exactly the same thing. We pay into it, the SSA invests some, and they use the rest to pay out benefits to other people.

Hell, the RoJos and Esenbergs and Schweitzers of the world would have beaten George Bailey to death in the bank, screaming at him about putting their money in Joe's house.

No, actually probably not. See, there's a political advantage to trashing Social Security that doesn't exist in trashing banks and insurance companies and every other operation that exists with a similar structure. We have been told for decades that Social Security is going bankrupt and will not be there for (me, you, your children, the creepy guy next door who peeks in your window, take your pick), and it has worked. Polls consistently show that people believe remarkable falsehoods about Social Security. And when you have people scared about Social Security, there's a campaign issue for you.

To be fair to the bloggers above, they try offering arguments. Probably because they, too, believe the falsehoods and have to twist and turn to make sense. Esenberg:

People like Jay who defend the system like to say that the government won't or can't default on those bonds. It certainly can. Congress could repudiate the bonds, although it likely won't. The problem - the one that Jay elides by saying that the trust fund "can pay" out benefits for a number of years - is what it would take to pay those benefits.

The trust fund can't just write a check. It must redeem those bonds, i.e., call in the government's IOU to itself. The government can't just write a check to honor the bonds because it doesn't have the money. It must either raise taxes or borrow more money. To the extent that this cannot be done, benefits must be reduced. Thus taxpayers who have paid "extra" as "we went" really have nothing to draw on. They must either forego benefits or impose even higher taxes on younger people.

Let's pretend for a second that the trust fund isn't really what is and instead is, like my mythical AmFam payments sitting in a safe. Every dollar spent from that trust fund would have been deficit spending (or higher taxes) over the last thirty years. If it was okay (or would have been) to deficit spend back then--on star wars, the war in Iraq, "ending welfare as we know it," whatever--why is it suddenly anathema to raise taxes or deficit spend to keep a promise we've made to our elders and poor? And it wouldn't take much: Social Security will continue to draw revenue that nearly meets the promised benefits for many years, bottoming out at between 75% and 80% of benefit levels. Small tweaks now--lifting the cap on taxable income, or redefining income to include more than just wages, or pushing the payroll tax up a smidge--would make future work to meet those promises much easier (either because you believe in the trust fund or because current deficits will be lower).

Schweitzer:

My question [. . .] is... where is the choice with Social Security? Yes, Social Security doesn't deceive anyone... everyone does in fact know how it works... or at least should. But Social Security has one advantage that no privately run Ponzi Scheme has... there is no choice in whether or not you participate. I belong to an entire generation of people who truly believe that we will not get anything from Social Security. [ed: see! I told you!] I am planning my retirement on the idea that Social Security will not pay me one red cent. I have to. I know exactly how Social Security operates, and I can also see demographics and how population is changing. There simply won't be enough people to pay me once I rise to the top of the pyramid.

For this, I defer to erstwhile Republican Charlie Crist, who makes a salient point: "There are other ways we can help fund it, by creating a pathway to citizenship. [. . . I]f we have those 11 to 14 million people productively participating in the American economy and paying the payroll taxes that would be attended to it, that would help Social Security." There is a labor force in this country willing and waiting to contribute to our financial health--and Nick's financial future--but the same forces scaring the pants off of you about the safety of Social Security are also busy scaring you about the Brown Menace because, you know, that too makes a good election issue. What's good for the country is bad for electoral fortunes.

And it's those fears that RoJo and his political allies are counting on, and apparently winning, in their quest to return to the freewheeling Bush years of no regulation and vast income growth for the already well-off. Esenberg and Schweitzer have become willing tools in that quest.

Well then, what does work?

by folkbum

I noted yesterday that a recent study of performance pay (where "performance" means "your kids get higher standardized test scores) showed that even big-money incentives for teachers had little effect on students. So what will?

As I have written here repeatedly, we have a good idea what we need to do to improve achievement among our worst students, and all of the solutions are ones that a time- and resource-intensive. Significantly. The LA Times ran an op-ed from David Kirp yesterday that made this plain: "Effective education can't be accomplished on the cheap," he says. But he's not talking about paying me or other teachers more.

Instead, things that do work include high-quality preschools, keeping schools open more days and longer hours, much smaller class sizes, and better-funded schools in general. Beyond what's in Kirp's op-ed, we know that other models held up as great successes--things like SEED schools or the Harlem Children's Zone--do what they do in large part because they are supported in significant ways by funds not available to schools that consistently underperform.

If you want to make closing the achievement gap and improving education in the worst areas, make real investments in children's lives and communities rather than throw carrots and sticks at the teachers.

I doubt that

by folkbum

The lede of a Washington Post story on teacher merit pay:

Offering teachers incentives of up to $15,000 to improve student test scores produced no discernible difference in academic performance, according to a study released Tuesday, a result likely to reshape the debate about merit pay programs sprouting in D.C. schools and many others nationwide.

I don't doubt the first part, that such incentives, especially when tied to things teachers see as unimportant, like test scores, are ineffective. That resonates as a billion percent true with me.

It's the second part, that this study will have an effect on the debate, that rings false. Of course it won't have an effect on the debate: Those pushing merit pay almost exclusively do so for ideological reasons (gotta make schools like "the market"!), and reality simply never enters into their consciousness. So good luck changing that debate one bit.

Ron Johnson: Too much crazy for one paragraph

by folkbum

But Steve Benen tries mightily:

Ron Johnson is one of the year's stranger Senate candidates (and in 2010, that's saying something). He's the far-right candidate who rails against government intervention in private industry, but has sought and received federal aid for his business enterprises. He thinks "sunspots" cause global warming, which doesn't make any sense. He's argued that China is better for businesses than the United States. He thinks Greenland has snow because of global cooling. At the height of the BP oil spill disaster, he said he'd sell his BP stock, just as soon as it was more profitable for him.

Much better at encompassing all the crazy is the Awl, which thoroughly skewers the man. If you read one thing today, make it this.

Chairman Johnson's Workers' Paradise

by folkbum

If only the US Business climate were more like China's, Ron Johnson wistfully dreams. Really?

In China, death from overwork is so common, there's a word for it: guolaosi. But despite the fact that guolaosi kills over 600,000 Chinese workers a year, working conditions in China are improving. And consumers in the West can help prevent guolaosi deaths by demanding fairly-produced goods from China.

Yan Li's family knows the meaning of guolaosi far too well. Li worked for a Foxconn factory in Southern China where he helped assemble components for iPads, Playstations, and mobile phones. He stood on the assembly line in one place, making the same tiny motion with his wrist all day. Sometimes, according to his family, his shifts would last for 24 hours. Sometimes up to 35 hours at a time. Li had no trade union, no group to represent his interests, and if he had tried to form one he'd probably have been imprisoned or killed. This went on until one day 27-year-old, otherwise healthy Li finished a particularly long shift and dropped dead.

Gualoisi is not uncommon in China. In fact, China Daily estimates that up to 600,000 workers a year die from overwork. That figure includes many workers like Li who are young and have no serious health problems before starting brutally strenuous jobs. It also includes workers who commit suicide to escape abusive work environments, which incidentally, happened to another worker at Li's factory the same night he died. These deaths occur at factories that make things all of us have in our home and use daily — cell phones, computers, car parts, etc. The factory where Li died might have made the computer I'm writing this story on, on the one you're using to read it. (via)

For our sakes, lets hope Chairman Ron doesn't get to set economic policy for the US anytime soon.

(Also worth wondering why then PACUR hasn't been shipped to China, like lots of Bemis's other suppliers.)

Crickets

by folkbum

The righty blogs were all kinds of giddy over weekend revelations that a minor union cog stood outside a bar puffing himself up to a stranger about how he was almost single-handedly going to bring down the Walker campaign for governor. John-david Morgan couldn't even get the names or job titles of his alleged conspirators right, yet his drunk-talk was taken as gospel evidence of illegal coordination and a complex, interconnected web of operatives planning unspeakable horrors in the weeks to come.

So I waited with great curiosity to see how those same righty blogs would react to documentary evidence of actual coordination between the state Republican Party, Americans for Prosperity, and local Tea Party groups to engage in voter caging. In addition to, this time, the operatives getting the names and titles right, you have the people involved initially lying to the press to cover up what they had done.

You might be surprised to learn that all of this has been met, by the righties, with dead silence. Well, no, you're probably not surprised. I know I'm not.

CAVEAT: Since the story broke, Charlie Sykes hasn't been on the air. It's entirely possible that he will jump on this story later this morning, condemning the people involved in no uncertain terms (perhaps while getting their job titles wrong, too!), and then the herd will dutifully follow with their own critiques of the state GOP, AFP, and the Tea Parties. And if you believe that, I have some great lakefront property to sell that you may be interested in ...