Cogitamus

More Gun Madness and Open Thread

Sorry to be AWOL all day.  I am actually down in the Mayan Riviera in Mexico -- no hurricane here, but a pretty considerable amount of rain -- on a quick six-day vacation, so was not fully aware of the massacre at the DC Navy Yard.

It is disheartening to realize that a certain segment of the American population is simply going to prevent the enactment of any kind of meaningful control over guns and gun violence.  These people have made some sort of mad calculation that these mass casualty events are somehow acceptable.  Or at least, acceptable enough that no meaningful attempt can be made to limit access to guns.  Witness the recent recall elections in Colorado, which will no doubt further inhibit such efforts.

I am not sure where this leaves us.  I think we have to keep fighting the fight, but I have no sense of optimism about anything meaningful getting done.

Our condolences to those who lost family and friends and our best to those who were wounded. 

 

 

Monday Open Thread

- The view from my window -- well, it was last weekend while staying in NYC as part of the long way around trip to take the kid back to New Jersey for college.  I paid for the upgrade in rooms and in this instance it was well worth it.   As was going over to the U.S. Open and getting a chance to see Rafael Nadal -- newly crowned as the champion after a Monday evening final -- play in person.  What an amazing talent and competitor.  Got to see the Williams sisters play doubles as well, which was a treat.  Anyone who likes the game of tennis should try to do an early weekend pilgrimage to the Open, when there are multiple matches going on throughout the huge facility and you can leave the cavernous Ashe Stadium and find some of the world's best operating on side courts with just a few hundred people watching. 

- Syria intervention watch: So it is a little difficult for me to get a handle on the Obama Administration's strategy here.  It seems to me if the President was truly committed to a military strike he probably should have proceeded immediately without consulting Congress -- as they say, it is easier to apologize then ask permission.  But having committed -- seemingly -- to a congressional vote, what does the President do if he cannot prevail or if he loses in the House?  How does one really justify seeking congressional approval and then ignoring it?  I do not think historical precedent suggests that Obama needed congressional autorization for taking action, but a big part of me feels like it would be a positive development for the President to lose such a vote, even if the Republicans who will oppose him are acting from their own bad faith motives.   Especially when I read this kind of bullshit argument in favor of intervention.  (These WWII analogies to the Syria situation really should be against the law -- and Bill Keller is just a dim bulb.)   I think that the DC elite simply view these issues in a fashion completely differently from a war weary and skeptical (suitably) public.  Who knows, maybe Putin will save the Administration from embarrassment with his most recent diplomatic gambit. 

- This article in the Sunday Times Magazine on Rwandan ruler Paul Kagame, a man at once deeply troubling and in ways admirable, is a fascinating read. 

- And Erik Loomis has an interesting post on the 1919 Boston Police strike and the breaking of the police union by then-Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge.

What's going on with all of you? 

A Few Day-After-Labor-Day Thoughts (and Open Thread)

A few Labor Day thoughts, a day late and a dollar short:

1) It would be nice to have a party that consistently paid attention to and fought for the interests of working people, and didn't lose sight of those interests in the crush of other business.

Didn't Obama say something in his inaugural speech about increasing the minimum wage? I'm not seeing any legislation. I'm not seeing any attempt at a push for it. Instead, we're putzing around with Syria. Excuse me, but what's more important to the American people, Syria or a minimum wage increase? It needs to go up to $12 in a series of steps between now and the end of 2016.

2) It's time to widen the issues around work. While I'm not comfortable with the idea of a guarantee of full employment, I think there should be a fairly low limit on how bad it can get without an automatic response kicking in.

The Federal government should have a list of infrastructure projects, rank them by urgency and usefulness and identify them by region, and when unemployment gets as high as 7%, it should automatically borrow enough money to spend sufficiently on infrastructure projects, particularly in the high-unemployment areas of the country, until we got unemployment back down below 6%.

3) With defined-benefit pension funds getting raided everywhere you can see, and 401k's having proved largely useless, it's time to expand Social Security, not trim it. And the Social Security retirement age should be brought back down to 65; it should never have gone up.

4) Simplify and expand the 40-hour week: Everyone below 2x the median male full-time, year-round income, rounded up to the next thousand, gets time and a half for overtime. Doesn't matter if they're supervisors, professionals, or what have you. And if you make above 2x the median, and below 4x the median, you get paid for overtime at the 2x rate.

Right now, that median is $48,202, so you'd get time and a half for overtime if you made less than $97,000, and you'd get paid for overtime as if you were making $97K a year if your base salary was between $97K and $194K.

5) And make that double time after 60 hours. The more scarce your time off is, the more valuable it is to you, and the more your employer should have to pay to take it away.

6) Paid vacation and sick time: a worker should earn one day of vacation and a half-day of sick leave for every 4 weeks on the job. And just to keep it immune from full-time/part-time games, it should be calculated in terms of hours: every 40 hours worked gets you 2 hours of vacation and 1 hour of sick leave.

7) Regular schedules: this game of jerking low-wage employees' schedules around so that their hours may vary all over the place from one day to the next, and not knowing what their schedule is from one week to the next, has got to go. If the average number of hours a day an employee works is N hours, then his or her hours must fit in the same (N+2)-hour window every day, and s/he must get time and a half for any hours outside that window.

For instance, if an employee works six days a week and averages five hours a day, then the hours must fit inside the same 7-hour time period every day, e.g. from 8am to 3pm. That gives the employee some predictability, to be able to arrange for child care or take on a second job.

It upsets me that such thing don't seem to be even remotely on the Democratic Party's radar, let alone something it'll keep coming back to and fighting for until it wins them. I don't know what to do about that, but we've certainly got to do something.

Open thread.

The U.S.A. Is Our Name, Overseas Kaboom Is Our Game

Forget Syria on its own dubious merits for a moment.  The really disturbing part of our what is soon to be our latest military adventure is that we just never stop doing this.  We seem to look at the world with the attitude that we can militarily intervene anywhere and anywhen we damned well feel like it.

A short history:

During the Reagan Administration, we stationed troops in Lebanon, invaded Grenada, mined the harbors of Nicaragua, supported 'freedom fighters' such as the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and Jonas Savimbi in Angola, and launched air strikes on Libya.

Bush the Elder invaded Panama and deposed Noriega, attacked Iraq to kick them out of Kuwait, and sent our troops to Somalia.

Clinton launched air strikes on Iraq in 1993, 1996, and 1998, continued Bush's Somalia mission, deployed peacekeepers to Haiti, intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo, and launched air strikes against targets in Afghanistan and Sudan.

Bush the Lesser invaded Iraq, where we spent a half-dozen years, and Afghanistan, where we are to this day.

Obama continued and expanded Bush's Afghanistan intervention, intervened in Libya, killed bin Laden in Pakistan, and launched drone strikes on numerous targets in Pakistan and Yemen.  And is now poised to launch air strikes on Syria.

There were good arguments for many of these interventions, and pretty lousy arguments for many of them.  We had the support of various international bodies (UN Security Council, NATO, OAS) for some of them, and for others we just went ahead without.  For some, the President got Congress' okay; for others, he didn't.

But there sure are a shitload of them, aren't there?  It's past time we started thinking about how to use troops and bombs in other countries more rarely and more wisely.  Now would be an excellent time to start.

Open thread.