May links 2

Conservative Supreme Court prunes worker rights. I appreciate both sides of this argument in general, but I think this isn't a good ruling. If we want a strong middle class in this country, we need support for workers. That's how we got the middle class.

Shootings. An account of what the school shooter from Santa Fe, TX said and did while killing his victim. Not a vantage point we usually get. Some details of police actions. Young Texans will probably not being leading marches for changes in gun laws. Accounts from first responders to the Las Vegas shooting. There were a lot of first responders, and it was more like a military battle because the shooter was so well armed and prepared.

More on Russia. For reference. The fake ads that Russians put out. So many that they are condensed in zip files. I don't really want to look, but I know I should. Mueller apparently used a Russian oligarch for a sensitive mercy mission. Not scandalous. Background on an undercover FBI informant who tried to find out what was happening in the Trump campaign. Trey Gowdy, in his sometimes-straight-sometimes-hack way, says that the FBI use of an informant in the investigation was appropriate. Great background and historical perspective on Russia.

Memorial Day reflection. When war becomes mundane and most Americans become detached, wars can linger and not be resolved.

Sessions changed immigration enforcement. Revealing and fascinating article about how Jeff Sessions (the Attorney General) is changing immigration enforcement. Chilling, surprising.

Background on fentanyl. I have some knowledge of fentanyl, but this was instructive even to me.

Timeline on scandal. Trump friends Michael Cohen and Elliott Broidy were gathering a lot of money. At this point in the investigation, it may be a partial timeline, but it's already long.

Revealing more sexual harassment. University of Southern California is being sued over the behavior of one of its gynecologists. Surprise - complaints were ignored.

More on the gold standard. One of my pet peeves is people who dogmatically think that the gold standard is workable. Another revealing story about FDR and his odd relationship with the gold standard.

Well, then don't act like one. Lawyer claims he's not a racist after his non-racist rant went viral. And that kind of rant isn't popular in New York City, the home of large number of immigrants.

Image: thefirearmblog.com

An unsettled argument about the Great Depression

What if the US owed its former marvelously robust middle class to anti-competitive regulations from Franklin Roosevelt? Would that make the heads of conservatives and libertarians explode? Well, folks, especially those from the aforementioned groups, that is a very strong possibility.

Lots of politically-minded people have reasons to try to tear down FDR's legacy. (I suppose a similar number have political reasons to bolster it. I'm not neutral, but, as always, I tend to bow to evidence.) A gem fell in the laps of anti-FDR folks in the form of a study from two UCLA economists claiming that some FDR policies slowed recovery from the Great Depression by seven years. Specifically:

"So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies."

Suppose you don't focus on the second half of that paragraph (the stalling of a 'beautiful recovery'), but instead focus on the policies that allowed businesses to collude as long as they paid their workers more.

Wow! This sounds like paying factory workers well. They can then afford to buy homes, let their children stay in school, enjoy occasional vacations, and generally live a decent life due to their decent wages. This also sounds like the American dream.

So there are all sorts of conservatives and libertarians beating up on FDR, but perhaps he was responsible for the well-paid, productive US factory workers who were the backbone of the halycon 1950's. When conservatives and libertarians say that we can have a much better, more productive economy, aren't they subliminally asking us to imagine the 50's? I think so. I don't think they're asking us to envision the periods when steel companies crushed strikes or when meatpacking companies cared little about the deaths of their workers.

What if the greatest period in US history is the product of the paternalist and socialist tendencies of FDR, and not the due to the vitality of American industries and the work ethic of their employees?

Well, if we're honest, no one thinks we can go back to the 1950's. We were the only industrialized country that hadn't been devastated by war, so we didn't have the international competition that we have today. We also have tapped out some of the resources we had back then, which is another reason we can't go back.

We can't go back to times that conservatives and libertarians consider 'better.' However, we can't use the same policies that FDR used either. Would we accept public works jobs that paid the present-day equivalent of $1 a day (as the WPA paid) and housed workers in dormitories? I can't imagine that we would. No, solutions to today's economic and employment problems aren't going to be found among New Dealers, or Austrian/libertarians, or nostalgic tea partyers, or staunch supply-siders.

. . . but maybe we'll try them all before we realize that.

WPA sewing project

Image: livingnewdeal.org

Extra. More revisionist history about the Depression that isn't quite accurate. A fascinating discussion of the monetary policy before and after the crash of 1929.

Update 2/20/17. Possibly some more evidence of this. From a fascinating article about how modern capitalism is about to face a huge pushback, here are two graphs showing how workers are losing their share of the economic pie while the rich are taking it:

Image: macrobusiness.com.au

This isn't supposed to be a zero-sum situation. Supposedly, we can all get richer together, so it doesn't matter if the ultra rich become ultra richer. But maybe we're experiencing that it does matter.

Update 10/25/17. Some extra information. A graph showing income gain (or loss) over 6 decades. Yes, increases in income used to be shared more evenly across the spectrum than it is now. This article credits the Wagner Act of 1935 concerning collective bargaining for the increase in workers' wages.

The political history of the Supreme Court

I'm not a great student of American history. The last American history course I took was, embarrassingly, in high school. There is one surprising advantage to not having studied a lot of American history--I haven't formed a lot of prejudices that are set in stone. I have a superficial knowledge, but I know it's only superficial, so I'm ready to question all those standard theories that float around.

So, what is the real history of the Supreme Court? I started wondering because of suggestions (among liberals) that the GOP might not confirm a Supreme Court nominee for the rest of Obama's term. Looking back at information about the Supreme Court (mostly from Wikipedia), I saw a number of interesting trends.

FDR through Nixon

Supreme court nominees used to be much closer to the president and much more political. For example, Hugo Black was a senator. Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) tapped him because he was young, from the south, and a strong legislative supporter. Luckily he was also a great fit for the job. He was extremely interested in constitutional questions and developed "textualism," a conservative school of thought on how to interpret the Constitution. This is almost all news to me, and quite fascinating.

Another interesting factoid is that president always tried to push the court toward their political side. FDR did it big time because his first New Deal programs were struck down by a conservative court. FDR made a lot of appointments to the court over his 13 years as president, and he was successful in his goal. The court was fairly liberal due to his selections. Eisenhower wanted to reverse this trend, but his choices weren't so effective. He aimed for conservative (but presumably not Jim Crow conservative), but ended up with Earl Warren.

So even after Eisenhower, the court was fairly liberal. Kennedy and Johnson together appointed four judges, but two resigned after a few years. The balance on the court didn't move much because of their presidencies. Nixon, like Eisenhower, wanted a more conservative court yet didn't get what he hoped from his appointees except for his last appointee, William Rehnquist.

Reagan

By the time Reagan was president, the conservatives in the country were quite fed up with the liberal slant of the court. Per my memory, the biggest complaints were over abortion legalization, the end of school prayer, and limitations on evidence collection and police tactics. However, Reagan didn't give the conservatives what they wanted immediately. For the first vacancy, Reagan nominated the first woman on the court, Sandra Day O'Connor. I wonder how angry his conservative supporters were over that.

His next appointee, Antonin Scalia, probably pleased the conservatives mightily. For the next vacancy, Reagan went with the ultra-conservative Robert Bork. In doing this, Reagan ignored all the buzz that this was going too far. This is just speculation, but I'm guessing that in 1987 (the year of the nomination), Reagan was no longer fully in control of his decision-making. The choice backfired. Democrats were successful in painting Bork as too conservative. The replacement nominee, John Paul Stevens  Anthony Kennedy, was considerably less conservative, to the chagrin of the conservatives.

Reagan's legacy on the Supreme Court were two swing justices and only one solid conservative. The anger and disappointment of conservatives must have been huge. George H.W. Bush had two appointees--another mixed bag of one swing vote and one solid conservative. Clinton, following the established pattern, appointed two liberal-leaning justices.

21st Century - Fully Political

With George Bush II, the conservatives finally got more than lip service. Bush II appointed two solid conservatives. Obama has appointed two solid liberals. At this point, there is barely a swing vote on the Court. Occasionally Anthony Kennedy sides with the liberals, but generally there are five conservative votes.

What I learned in all this:

• Presidents have always tried to nudge the Court into their corner. 
• Conservative presidents have often failed to get conservative judgments out of their appointees. I wish I understood why this happened so often. 
• The pressure to appoint clearly conservative or clearly liberal justices has grown. Both sides dearly want to own the majority on the Court. This may indicate that the Court has become ever more important in political outcomes in the country.
• Professional experience as a judge became more important after Johnson and Nixon--due to some embarrassing nominees and appointees. This allowed the presidents to pretend that they were nominating someone neutral. However, this veneer of neutrality is a sham--nominees fulfill political goals. They aren't neutral legal arbiters, as most judges are supposed to be. 
• The sham is still active and seems to be demanded of both politicians and nominees, so it will continue.

Image: cagle.com