Political Irony

Far more Americans believe that climate change is real and is happening as a result of human activity, and say that the government should act to control the problem, than deny climate change. In fact, a recent survey shows that only 12% still deny climate change. The number of people who think we need to do something about climate change is increasing.

And yet, yesterday’s election just made Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe the chair of the Senate Environment committee. In 2012, Inhofe published a book titled “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future”. The same year, he refuted climate change science by citing the Bible:

The Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that “as long as the earth remains there will be seed time and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.” My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.

He has also claimed that even if it did exist, climate change would not be a bad thing – “it appears that just the opposite is true: that increases in global temperature may have a beneficial effect on how we live our lives.”

Yup, we just made a wing-nut climate denier the most powerful man in Congress on the environment. And that’s not the only bad news – the new chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation committee is likely to be Ted Cruz, another climate skeptic. He was also the public face of last year’s government shutdown.

© John Jonik

UPDATE: More about this from Stephen Colbert:

If you’ve been paying attention, you’d know that the Supreme Court decision making political bribery campaign contributions protected as free speech was a very bad idea.

But an article in BuzzFeed points out that there is one way where money is the same as free speech, a way that has been used since the Roman empire!

Here are two examples, but go see the original article for more.

Remember when Republicans were screaming that Obama violated the constitution and they were going to impeach him?

Eventually, they shut up about that, but then they tried a new tactic. According to Politico:

House Speaker John Boehner came out swinging hard last June when he announced that his chamber would take President Barack Obama to court. The suit, charging that the president grossly exceeded his constitutional authority by failing to implement portions of the Obamacare law, was billed as an election-season rallying point for aggrieved Republicans.

Their lawyers expected the suit to be filed in September. Well, it is now two months later and just a few days before the election, and the GOP has also shut up about their lawsuit.

As a former House Counsel put it “I thought this was a constitutional crisis and the republic was in jeopardy because Obama overstepped his bounds. Now, they can’t even get around to filing it?”

Of course, the reason the GOP never filed the lawsuit was pure politics. Boehner’s announcement spurred fundraising by the Democrats and alienated moderates. So I guess partisan politics once again trumps constitutional issues.

Even more interesting, it is looking likely that Republicans will take over the Senate in this week’s election. With control of both houses of Congress, will they bring up the lawsuit again in order to pander to the Tea Party?

I guess in order to be a Republican, you have to have a very short attention span.

UPDATE: There may be another explanation for the delay. According to Politico, the Republicans have hired two different law firms to sue the president, but both of them have quit.

I hoped that there would be a huge public outcry about what happened to Carmen Segarra, but so far it has been all but ignored by the mainstream media. Have you ever wondered how all our banks and financial institutions started failing, forcing us to bail them out, and nobody saw it coming? If yes, then read on.

In the aftermath of the “great recession” people wanted to know why the Federal Reserve, which was originally put in place to prevent meltdowns, had failed miserably. The problem was that the culture at the Fed was completely deferential to the banks. To solve this problem, the Fed hired a bunch of expert bank examiners who weren’t afraid to force banks to follow the law. One of them was Carmen Segarra. She was highly qualified for the job, and set out to do exactly what was asked of her to prevent another economic meltdown. Her task was to help regulate Goldman Sachs.

But after only seven months, she was fired. The Fed claimed it was for “performance problems“, but what they didn’t know is that Segarra had run smack into the deferential culture she was hired to change. Knowing this, she had purchased a small audio recorder and had recorded 46 hours of meetings.

Excerpts of those recordings were broadcast on National Public Radio.

The recordings document just how deferential the people whose job it is to regulate the banks can be to those banks. For example, in one meeting a Goldman employee says “once clients are wealthy enough certain consumer laws don’t apply to them.” In other words, laws don’t apply to the rich. After the meeting, Segarra says to a fellow Fed regulator how surprised she was by that statement, and the regulator replies “You didn’t hear that.”

In other tapes, Segarra’s managers try to get her to water down her reports on Goldman, and even try to get her to be more deferential to Goldman, the very thing she was hired to get rid of.

As an article in Bloomberg puts it:

1. You sort of knew that the regulators were more or less controlled by the banks. Now you know.

2. The only reason you know is that one woman, Carmen Segarra, has been brave enough to fight the system. She has paid a great price to inform us all of the obvious. She has lost her job, undermined her career, and will no doubt also endure a lifetime of lawsuits and slander.

So what are you going to do about it? At this moment the Fed is probably telling itself that, like the financial crisis, this, too, will blow over.

In the aftermath of the broadcast of these tapes, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown both called for full congressional hearings.

With so many politicians in the pocket of the big banks, do you think we will get these hearings?

Only if we insist.

Republicans oppose raising the minimum wage because they claim that it will cost jobs. Despite the fact that there is plenty of evidence of the opposite. After all, if working-class people earn more money, they spend it. If rich people make more money, they send it to offshore tax havens!

But here’s something interesting. An article in The Atlantic points out that companies that pay higher wages actually survived the last recession far better than those that pay minimum wage. It sounds counter-intuitive, but if you think about it, it isn’t really.

For example, consider QuikTrip, a chain of combination convenience stores and gas stations. That’s a job that practically screams minimum wage. But while the average cashier in the US makes just over $20,000 a year, QuickTrip pays their entry-level employees $40,000 a year plus benefits! How did that work out? During the recession, while most low-cost retailers were shutting down stores and laying off employees, QuikTrip was was expanding to new locations and hiring more workers.

Or consider Trader Joes and Costco Wholesale, which are both companies known for their low low prices. But both of them pay wages far above average. Why? Because when a company pays workers a decent wage, they are rewarded with lower turnover. That in turn lowers training costs, increases efficiency, and increases sales. At QuikTrip, sales per square foot are 50% higher than the average convenience store chain. And when your employees are happier they do their jobs better, and that naturally translates into happier, more loyal customers.

When financial times are tough, too many companies make the mistake of trying to save money by cutting back on employees. That’s what happened to Borders and Circuit City. Both companies responded to the recession by cutting staff — and both ultimately went bankrupt.

What’s really ironic about this is that many of these same companies that are trying to save money by cutting workers salaries and benefits are simultaneously raising how much they pay their top executives. They think that they have to pay top dollar for a CEO in order to do better as a company.

The evidence shows that they have it completely backward.