Bizarro Legislature

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If you're a member of the NC House and make a mistake with your vote, and want to change it, you can do so only if changing your vote doesn't change the result. That sounds like something out of a Seinfeld episode.

The 10-year veteran lawmaker hit the wrong button on her desk. Carney punched the thumbnail-sized green button that says “AYE” just above the red one that says “NO.”

“Oh, my God,” she said on the floor. “It won’t let me change my vote.”

For all the maneuvering, arm-twisting and political horse-trading Republicans employed to get a handful of Democrats to void their party leader’s veto just before 11:30 p.m. Monday, it came down to a mistake.

“You ever see my golf game?” said state Sen. Bob Rucho, a bill sponsor, after the vote. “It’s based on luck, not on skill.”…

The vote took her by surprise. Republicans limited debate on the fracking legislation – Senate bill 820 – and called the vote. Green button to override. Red button to sustain.

Carney hit the button and looked to the board above the chamber that shows the results: 72 to 46. The color next to Carney’s name matched the Republicans.

She panicked. She hit a different button to turn on her microphone and called to the House speaker on the dais. He didn’t recognize her. So she rushed to the front, 20 steps from her seat in the eighth row down the red-carpeted middle aisle.

Carney asked the clerk to check her vote. Green. Override.

She then asked Tillis if she could change her vote. Tillis said House rules prevented it.

Lawmakers mistakenly vote all the time but they are not permitted to change a vote if it affects the outcome.

Is this really how we want our town/county/state/federal government to run? Wouldn't a time limit on changing your vote be adequate, whether or not it affects the outcome? Even Microsoft products ask you if you're sure you want to undelete something, so you have to ask yourself if we want to be governed by a system that's actually buggier than Word. Sometimes I think I've fallen asleep and been awakened in Bizarro World.

No Email Will Replace a Kiss

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During his keynote address at the National Apartment Association education conference last week Tom Brokaw emphasized the increasing importance of in-person communication as people, especially young people, have come to rely more and more on digital forms of communication. He truly hammered his point home when he said, "No email will replace a kiss. No Tweet will replace the whisper of 'I love you' in your ear."

If We Only Knew

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Four years after the economy melted down there's still a serious lack of understanding among the general populace as to the root causes of the collapse. It's not that the causes aren't well documented, they're just complex and opaque, and that's probably just as well as far as those driving the economic train are concerned. 

The latest example of this disconnect between economic cause and effect is the movement to blame seemingly every municipal deficit on public employees, their benefits and their unions. Obviously exploding pension obligations play a role in putting stress on the cities' or states' coffers, but those obligations were far from the only reason the municipalities started to bleed red ink. Thomas Ferguson explains in his article on AlterNet (h/t to Fec for the pointer):

What has driven cities and towns to the brink is not demands from their workforce but the collapse of national income and the ensuing fall in tax collections. Or, in other words, the Great Recession itself, for which Wall Street and the financial sector are principally to blame. But many powerful interests have jumped at the opportunity to use the crisis to eviscerate what’s left of the welfare state, roll back unionization to pre-New Deal levels, and keep cutting taxes on the wealthy. The litany of horror stories that now fills the media is ideal for their purposes…

At a time when cities and states are taking hatchets to services and manically raising fees and fares, the group’s analysis merits a closer look and a much, much wider audience.

Its starting point will be familiar to anyone who recalls the debate over financial “reform” of the last few years. In the bad old days of pre-2008 deregulated finance, bankers started pedaling hot new “structured finance” products that they claimed were perfect for the needs of clients who had thrived for decades using cheaper, plain vanilla bonds and loans. The new marvels – swaps and other forms of so-called “derivatives” whose values changed as other securities they referenced fluctuated in value – were often complex and frequently not priced in any actual market. Their buyers thus had difficulty understanding how they really worked or how they might be hurt by purchasing them...

The result, for years now, has been literally billions of dollars of losses for cities, states, and other local authorities, including school boards and state college loan agencies. Locked in by the termination fees, they can stay in the swaps and pay and pay as the banks’ payments to them dwindle. Or they can buy their way out of the swaps at preposterous prices – Morgenson indicated that New York State recently paid $243 million dollars to get out of some swaps, of which $191 million had to be borrowed.

One of the common themes found in almost every accounting of the financial meltdown has been the complexity of the financial products that Wall Street used, without oversight, to reap billions, if not trillions, of dollars in profits while setting the economy up for a massive fall. Who really knew what mortgage backed securities and credit default swaps were before the crisis? Very few people knew what they were, and even fewer understood how they worked, and that's why when it came time to start assessing blame it became a whole lot easier to point the finger at moderate-to-low income homeowners who took a too-good-to-be-true deal on their mortgages and then failed to make good. It was easy to blame them, the first dominoes, because the average person could understand what they did wrong. On the other hand the financial Masters of the Universe were happy to let the little guys take the fall while they hid behind the opaque curtain of financial shenanigans they'd hung around the rest of us.

And the banks' shenanigans were quite possibly intentional and coordinated. From Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone (again h/t to Fec):

The defendants in the case – Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm – worked for GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric. Along with virtually every major bank and finance company on Wall Street – not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more – these three Wall Street wiseguys spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and small towns across America. The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. By conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes – from "virtually every state, district and territory in the United States," according to one settlement. And they did it so cleverly that the victims never even knew they were being ­cheated. No thumbs were broken, and nobody ended up in a landfill in New Jersey, but money disappeared, lots and lots of it, and its manner of disappearance had a familiar name: organized crime…

USA v. Carollo involved classic cartel activity: not just one corrupt bank, but many, all acting in careful concert against the public interest. In the years since the economic crash of 2008, we've seen numerous hints that such orchestrated corruption exists. The collapses of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, for instance, both pointed to coordi­nated attacks by powerful banks and hedge funds determined to speed the demise of those firms. In the bankruptcy of Jefferson County, Alabama, we learned that Goldman Sachs accepted a $3 million bribe from J.P. Morgan Chase to permit Chase to serve as the sole provider of toxic swap deals to the rubes running metropolitan Birmingham – "an open-and-shut case of anti-competitive behavior," as one former regulator described it.

Now let's be clear – if the banks' actions and the extent of their screwing of us were more easily understood we would probably have such a huge popular outcry against them that even our Wall Street-coddling Congress and Obama administration would be forced to go after their friends. As it is the average Joe is too busy trying to keep food on the table to pay much attention to this stuff, and quite frankly it's just easier to blame the deadbeat down the street than to try and figure out how guys in the pink ties and cuff links took him and the rest of us to the cleaners. Sadly the denizens of Wall Street continue to reap the rewards of their corrupt system while the rest of us get to eat cake.

If we only knew.

Triad Newspapers Losing the Battle with TV Competitors Online

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The lede for this months-old article on NetNewsCheck says it all:

Greensboro is one of those rare places where the local newspaper site doesn’t lead; in fact, the News & Record’s news-record.com trails all three TV news sites in this media market of 1.8 million, according to comScore.

This won't come as a surprise to anyone paying attention, and if you want to know how long the News & Records digital presence has been an issue all you have to do is check out Ed Cone's or Roch's sites and search "news & record."

In fact Ed's quoted in the story:

To Ed Cone, a local journalist and the blogger behindedcone.com, the paper is getting its just desserts. “They gutted their website,” he said, criticizing news-record.com’s new content strategy. “Why would anybody go to their website?”

Really the N&R's site is a story of lost opportunity and it's a shame, because newspapers really had a natural early advantage in the online news market when it was still largely text based. Unfortunately they missed that opportunity and as the action moves to multimedia and mobile apps they'll be playing a very tough game of catchup with the digital properties that have TV DNA and are accustomed to telling stories in short, multimedia bursts.

The article really is a good read, not so much because of the disection of the N&R's ill-fated digital strategy, but because it takes a look at the explosion of mobile users and the trend towards video/multimedia delivery of the news. 

Last note – the article doesn't mention the Winston-Salem Journal or High Point Enterprise, but I suspect the news is even worse for them.  A quick search of the Alexa rankings of the Journal, the Enterprise and the News & Record shows that the N&R's ranking is higher than the Journal's and the Enterprise barely makes a blip (i.e. its ranking is terrible). Really none of the papers' online efforts appear to be holding up well in their competition with the TV sites, and unless something changes soon that situation is likely going to get worse.

Is 140 Enough?

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Twitter, the source of much derision for anyone who doesn't use it, was built at a time when SMS texting was the primary form of non-verbal communication on "mobile devices" so it was designed to work within the 160-character confines of the system. Since then Twitter has grown like kudzu and most people use it with anything but SMS – the Twitter website, web-based tools like Tweetdeck or mobile apps of various persuasions. That development has led to people suggesting that Twitter increase the character limit which has led, in turn, to others defending the 140 character limit. Here's a simple argument in favor of keeping the limit:

And, that's how we have learned to use the service. Or, as GigaOm's Mathew Ingram put it the first time Manjoo made this argument: "The point the Slate writer misses (or hints at, and then discards) is that if it did this, it wouldn’t be Twitter any more."

What truly makes the character limit so crucial to Twitter being Twitter is the brevity it forces on its users. Ask any writer and they'll tell you that brevity is hard – any fool can take two pages to tell you how to install a light bulb, but it takes some work to tell you in one sentence. Is 140 characters really "writing"? Not in the traditional sense, but if you haven't used Twitter you have no way of knowing how creative and witty people can be in so little space and it's truly a wonder to behold when it's done well. (See the Washington Post's Gene Weingarten for a good example, although the fact that he uses a turd as his icon might be a little off-putting to some of you).

The character limit also promotes sharing, because the less space someone has to write the more likely he is to simply provide a link with a quick (hopefully witty) intro. So rather than reading an unnecessarily long missive about a subject you get to read a quick intro and then view the source piece itself. Here's an example from Weingarten:

"Women may not be any smarter than men, but they are definitely less stupid." My new column:http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/maga …

Sure, some folks use Twitter poorly, but some people who own Porsches drive like granny going to church and that's not the car's fault. Hopefully Twitter will stick to its guns and keep the 140 character limit. As the article linked to above points out, Twitter can expand and improve its service (i.e. photo sharing, links to expanded posts, etc.) without altering its fundamental 140-character DNA, and if they're smart that's exactly what they'll do.

FWIW, here's a link to probably the worst Twitter account in existence.

Taxing the Middle Class

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It doesn't matter which party sponsors it or which party fights it tooth and nail – any tax package that causes taxes to rise significantly on the middle class should prompt a "throw the bums out" campaign that will jolt Congress indiscriminately. It should, but given America's private history it probably won't even if some of the numbers in this Washington Post story end up becoming reality.

So although households earning $100,000 to $200,000 a year would save about $7,000 from the lower tax rates in the GOP plan, those savings would be swamped by eliminating major deductions, according to the report by the Democratically controlled congressional Joint Economic Committee.

The net result: Married couples in that income range would pay an additional $2,700 annually to the Internal Revenue Service, on top of the tax increases that are scheduled to hit every American household when the George W. Bush-era cuts expire at the end of the year.

Households earning more than $1 million a year, meanwhile, could see a net tax cut of about $300,000 annually.

“According to this report, while millionaires will receive a huge tax break, earners making under $200,000 will see their taxes rise significantly,” said Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.), who chairs the Joint Economic Committee.

If you read the whole article you'll see that the analysis is based on some assumptions about likely tax breaks for the wealthy and the elimination, or reduction, of certain tax breaks for the middle class. That's why there's a healthy dose of the unknown tied to the story, but given the past history of the parties involved some of those assumptions are likely accurate, and given the proclivity of the powers-that-be to rob from the middle to pay the very-rich it's a safe bet that those making less than $200k a year are looking down the barrel at a healthy screwing.

Here's a nice table to drive that point home:

Middleclassscrew

Lewisville and North Wilkesboro Acting Like Two NBA Teams

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What if the rest of the world functioned like pro sports? Think you have a talent gap in marketing and have too much talent in accounting, then why not trade your accountant for a marketing whiz from the company down the street? 

That question is prompted by the news that recently-retired Lewisville town manager Cecil Wood has agreed to become the interim town manager in North Wilkesboro. You see North Wilkesboro recently lost their town manager, Hank Perkins, when he resigned to become town manager of…Lewisville. 

In truth this isn't that surprising. Cecil Wood used to be the Wilkes county manager and has some pretty deep roots there, but it's still kind of interesting to think of towns (or companies) trading talent the way pro teams do.

People vs. People

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Fec points to a piece at Naked Capitalism that takes the unions and President Obama to task for creating the environment that led to voters in two California cities, San Jose and San Diego, voting overwhelmingly to cut city employees' pensions:

This is not a Republican initiative – the San Diego Mayor is a Democrat.  And pension cuts like this are happening nationally, mostly with full support from voters in the Republican Party and a good chunk of the Democratic Party as well.  The union representing city workers, of course, went to the courts rather than pursuing a strategy of engagement with the public.  These unions will probably end up losing the fight, because they have no ability to persuade voters that they represent anything but a self-interested group of insiders.

The states and localities suffering from budget crises are having problems because Wall Street blew up the economy, and in many cases, ensnared these municipalities in extremely bad deals.  The wealth of taxpayers was and is being transferred to banks.  In 2008, the choice before Bush, and then Obama, was clear.  They could hand taxpayer resources to Wall Street and oversee a series of budget crises in states and localities, with the opportunity for later privatization of public assets and the breaking of public sector unions.  Or Bush, and then Obama, could crack down on Wall Street, and make sure that bailout monies went to states and localities, and, with record low interest rates, spur tremendous investment in new energy, infrastructure, and education initiatives.  It was a choice.  Bush picked Wall Street.  Obama also picked Wall Street, with public sector unions supporting Obama like turkeys cheering on Thanksgiving.

Now voters are making their own choice.  Once again, this is a direct consequence of how Barack Obama has led the Democratic Party and redefined liberalism, into a party and an ideology that is defined by wage cuts, foreclosures, debt, and acceptance of dramatic political and economic inequality.  Voters don’t want to pay for a government and for government workers who they perceive as out of step with their interests.

Maybe. Another consideration is that people tend to not like seeing people that they perceive to be peers, or even worse, people lower in class benefiting at their own expense:

Instead of opposing redistribution because people expect to make it to the top of the economic ladder, the authors of the new paper argue that people don’t like to be at the bottom. One paradoxical consequence of this “last-place aversion” is that some poor people may be vociferously opposed to the kinds of policies that would actually raise their own income a bit but that might also push those who are poorer than them into comparable or higher positions. The authors ran a series of experiments where students were randomly allotted sums of money, separated by $1, and informed about the “income distribution” that resulted. They were then given another $2, which they could give either to the person directly above or below them in the distribution.

In keeping with the notion of “last-place aversion”, the people who were a spot away from the bottom were the most likely to give the money to the person above them: rewarding the “rich” but ensuring that someone remained poorer than themselves. Those not at risk of becoming the poorest did not seem to mind falling a notch in the distribution of income nearly as much. This idea is backed up by survey data from America collected by Pew, a polling company: those who earned just a bit more than the minimum wage were the most resistant to increasing it.

It's awfully hard for the average person not to be resentful of a public employee, someone who is ostensibly your employee, pulling in a livable wage and "Cadillac" benefits while everybody else has watched their IRA evaporate in the heat of the Great Recession. It's even harder to accept that their taxes might have to go up to cover deficits that are caused in part by those benefits, so it's not surprising at all that people would vote to cut those same benefits.

Sure, the "macro" politics described in the Naked Capitalism piece played a role in creating the environment that led to the recent votes curtailing public pensions, but it would a mistake to ignore the role of "micro" politics in these results. Let's face it – people don't like seeing their neighbors doing better than they are.