Tighty Whitie Righties

Since you're all probably suffering from a severe case of Hillary Clinton fatigue by now, I thought I'd give everybody a break and and discuss that equally dapper white centrist -- David Brooks of the New York Times.

With lesser-evil Democrats throwing out such tasty morsels as aspirational cap-and-trade (just in time for Doomsday), and bestowing student debt forgiveness upon a chosen few lucky duckies, the Republicans are desperately playing catch-up, in hopes of winning a seat (or fifty) on the pseudo-populist bandwagon. So they're doing what they always do -- they're plastering a shady new shade of lipstick on a pig. They've issued a manifesto called "Room to Grow," and the reliable Mr. Brooks has obligingly given it penthouse column space in which to luxuriously metastasize.

The fact that he labels the agenda "The New Right" is your first clue.The next clue is that when you click on the link he so thoughtfully provides, you discover that the propaganda e-book he's touting is a product of something called the YG Network. No, it isn't Why???? Gee!!!!  It stands for "Young Guns" -- now initialized, probably because they don't want readers to confuse them with those white supremacist mass murderers. Because, the Republicans are merely white supremacists who don't want to take the guns away from the mass murderers.

Brooks also forgets to mention that the manifesto is the production of one John Murray, former deputy chief of staff to original Young Gun Eric Cantor. Before heading to Congress, Murray had lobbied for both AHIP, the health insurance cartel, and Big Pharma. The manifesto that Brooks is shilling for is actually a front for a gigantic SuperPac that Murray started when he left government "service" to cash in. From Politico:

Murray, with the help of former Cantor aide Rob Collins, is launching the new PAC as a fundraising vehicle that will be able to accept unlimited contributions from corporations and individuals and spend money to elect “free-market, pro-business” candidates.

Alongside the super PAC, Murray is launching two nonprofits: a 501(c)(4) that will be able to run issue advertisements and a 501(c)(3) that will commission studies and run educational programs.

The common thread running through all three organizations: the Cantor-Ryan-McCarthy brand, which got so much attention in the 2010 elections and will try to capitalize on the new world of lightly regulated, unlimited corporate and individual money.

With the super PAC, Cantor’s former aides will be able to pour money into the election efforts of candidates who are in the Young Guns’ mold — conservative and ready to challenge the establishment.

So, I guess the "Room to Grow" (Pinocchio noses)  manifesto must fall into the category of tax-deductible educational program for ruling class fun and profit. Don't you just love it when studly young establishment types pretend to pack heat as they pretend to challenge the establishment and educate the masses?

But meanwhile, it is David Brooks's task to cover up such greed and dishonesty with his usual concern-trolling gobbledygook. He enthuses,

In the first essay of the book, Peter Wehner moves beyond the ruinous Republican view that the country is divided between hearty entrepreneurs and parasitic “takers.” Like most reform conservatives, he shifts attention sympathetically to the struggling working and middle classes. He grapples with the fact, uncomfortable for conservatives, that the odds of escaping poverty are about half as high in the United States as in more mobile countries like Denmark.

You may remember nouveau-compassionate conservative Wehner as the bloodthirsty Bush speechwriter/attack dog who beat the war drums for the Iraq invasion while spewing "Christian" values. You also may remember him (Brooks pretends not to) as an enthusiastic member of Mitt Romney's "makers vs. takers" campaign team!

Brooks, meanwhile, avoids giving a mention to the manifesto contributor writing about the unemployment crisis.

Since Congress recently condemned millions of long-term unemployed Americans to destitution by refusing to extend their jobless benefits, I was anxious to read the chapter on how the "New Right" plans to help them. Boy, was I ever in for a treat.

Michael Strain, of the American Enterprise Institute, thinks that kicking people when they're down is just the ticket.

For starters, he wants to give them a one-way ticket out of town.... to wherever those great mystery jobs are rumored to be there for the taking.

Then, Strain suggests that "the federal minimum wage requirement that forces employers to take a $7.25 risk on an unemployed worker" should be scrapped in favor of a sub-minimum wage for people out of work six months or longer.... until such unspecified time that they can prove themselves. Meanwhile they may qualify for a short-term loan, with interest, that they can pay back while they're raking in their pitiful wages. Feudalism, much?

Strain also thinks that work-related licensing requirements (enacted for the public's welfare) should be scaled back or scrapped altogether.

Of course, this blatant brutality makes the Dems' own measly $10.10 minimum wage proposal look like manna from heaven. Which, after all, is the whole point of the bait and switch political duopoly owned and operated by a de facto plutocracy. The proles are allowed to go to the polls and choose the best of all possible evils.

And as always -- follow the $$$, all the way to the pockets of the .01%

Zombie Resurrection

New York Times restaurant critic turned op-ed columnist Frank Bruni has reanimated the long-discredited generational theft blame game -- accusing  Boomers rather than Banksters of creating the dire straits a whole lost generation of young Americans finds itself thrashing in.

The cult of plutocratic austerians, who'd temporarily retreated to their crypts when Thomas Picketty and wealth inequality became all the rage, are back on another rampage, this time trying to disguise themselves as fun young hipsters.

From their money pit they arise, clawing their way into Bruni's Sunday column. He swiftly pivots from a righteous condemnation of the national failure to address the looming climate catastrophe to yet another baseless condemnation of old people who are supposedly gobbling up Social Security and Medicare at the expense of Millennials. For some reason, he thinks that the older generation spends all its epic free time making fun of the selfie craze and other fads, when it should be apologizing to the 20 and 30-somethings for gross malfeasance and neglect:

Among Americans age 40 and older, there’s a pastime more popular than football, Candy Crush or HBO.

It’s bashing millennials.

Oh, the hours of fun we have, marveling at their self-fascination and gaping at their sense of entitlement! It’s been an especially spirited romp lately, as a new batch of them graduate from college and gambol toward our cubicles, prompting us to wonder afresh about the havoc they’ll wreak on our world.

We have a hell of a lot of nerve, considering the havoc we’ve wrought on theirs.

For decades they’ll be saddled with our effluvium: a monstrous debt, an epidemic of obesity, Adam Sandler movies. In their lifetimes the Atlantic will possibly swallow Miami Beach (I foresee a “Golden Girls” sequel with dinghies and life preservers) and the footwear for Anchorage in February may be flip-flops. At least everyone will be saving on heating bills.

Now that he's created his straw man (the narcissistic middle-aged and elderly who have nothing better to do than to torment their own kids) Bruni seamlessly glides to the alleged crimes of the middle-aged and elderly. To wit: becoming poor enough to qualify for Medicaid, and getting old enough to qualify for Medicare and Social Security. This generational theft, in Bruni's world, is the prime cause of mountains of crushing student debt. He thinks our retirement program is just another part of the federal budget. (Because that's what the deficit hawks who want to privatize it would like us to think.) He quotes centrist multimillionaire and former senator Bob Kerrey to make his point. Bob Kerrey apparently has a young trust fund son who he is worried about, because somewhere out there, an octogenarian scapegoat is breathing, eating more than its share, and filling too many prescriptions. Bruni blunders on,

And there’s too little money for that even now. Talk to physicians and other scientists who have long depended on research grants from the National Institutes of Health to keep the United States at the forefront of invention and innovation and they’ll tell you how thoroughly that spigot has closed over the last 10 years. They’re defeated, despondent.

Oh, the humanity. Oh, the irony. So much medical care is being wasted on diseased people that the best and the brightest scientists who study disease have thrown up their hands, descended into the Slough of Despond. This has nothing, of course, to do with the rampage of bipartisan budget cuts and the recent bipartisan Sequester that hammered the NIH. It's all because of Grandma. (defined, of course, as a Special Interest Group. Right up there with the Exxon Mobil lobbyists.)

So, Bruni enthuses, younger voters are Fighting Back! These young people are not, however, to be confused with the rabble-rousers of Occupy Wall Street. Bruni's Millennials ("they deserve our compassion") are the well-heeled young professionals who gathered in Washington last week to celebrate something called Millennial Week. He doesn't bother telling his readers that this gathering was the brainchild of a marketing pro, or that it was funded by banks and corporations -- and a millennial astroturf group called "The Can Kicks Back." That group in turn, is funded by the discredited Fix the Debt campaign, headed up by deficit codgers Al Simpson and Erskine Bowles, in turn funded by Wall Street titan Pete Peterson, who, incidentally, also provided financial backing for Obama's anti-New Deal Cat Food Commission. These people are not only zombies -- they're incestuous zombies.

You can almost see the $$$ signs flashing behind every stale reanimated talking point in Bruni's essay. Economist Dean Baker has a similar reaction and ably eviscerates Bruni's social spending data as dictated to him by the Urban Institute think tank.

My published Times comment:

 The zombie lie of generational theft just keeps shuffling along. This column is nothing but warmed-over Bowles/Simpson cat food.

It's not the Boomers who are stealing from the Millennials, and ruining their future. It's the super-rich and the polluting corporate welfare queens who are robbing all of us, from the cradle to the grave.

Fact check: Social Security is not part of the budget-- it's a self-funded insurance program. And since the 900 richest Americans already reach the taxable maximum of $117,000 by Jan. 2, why not just scrap the cap altogether? Solvency problem disappears.

Plus, raising the benefit and lowering the eligibility age to 55 would both ease the burden on tired older workers and open up the shrinking job market to millennials.

But as polls show, the super-rich are strongly opposed to social spending. To avoid looking like callous misanthropes, therefore, they and their media/political enablers spread the lie that the older people are leeching off younger people.

Despite what austerian billionaire Pete Peterson (a proud sponsor of that "Millennial Week" marketing confab) says, the country is not broke.

The Federal Reserve Board now reports that total US net worth rose to a record $81.8 trillion, up $1.5 trillion in the first quarter of 2014 and up nearly $13 trillion from the previous peak, pre-2008 crash.

Of course, those gains are clenched tightly in the fists of the real culprits, who think the rest of us have not suffered enough.

The Sarcasm Dragnet

 

 

The folks of the Surveillance State are shocked, shocked that snark and symbolism and smoldering emotions are going on in the chat-o-sphere. They just can't keep up with the jokes, the irony, the pissed-offiness, the double-entendres, the parodies, the satire that are running rampant in cyberspace. It's jamming up their poor brains as they constantly troll, in real time, the communications of every man, woman, child, boojum, bandersnatch and jubjub with an internet connection.

Is that a terrorist sicko they're monitoring, or just a sicko with a terrific sense of humor? It's hard out there for the spooks. Their reading comprehension scores are falling far, far behind their reading speed scores. And thus, the Department of Homeland Security has just put out a work order for special software to help our minders detect sarcastic blog posts, hidden meanings, deleted or altered Tweets, and snarky online comments. They are procuring what they call a "Computer Based Annual Social Media Analytics Subscription."

For the Snark's a peculiar creature, that won't

   Be caught in a commonplace way.

Do all that you know, and try all that you don't:

   Not a chance must be wasted to-day!

Here, if you choose to accept it, is your Mission Implausible from Uncle Sam:

HSSS01-14-Q-0182

This is a combined synopsis/solicitation for commercial items prepared in accordance with the format prescribed in Subpart 12.6 of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), as supplemented with additional information included in this notice. A subsequent solicitation document will not be issued. Solicitation HSSS01-14-Q-0182 is issued as a Request for Proposal (RFP) though FAC 2005-72.  The NAICS is 511210. The United States Secret Service  intends to award a ( FFP) Firm Fixed Price competitive contract on the basis of Best Value to the Government

STATEMENT OF WORK

UNITED STATES SECRET SERVICE

SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS TOOL

1.0       INTRODUCTION

This requirement is for procurement of a social media analytics software  tool to be used by the United States Secret Service (USSS) Office of Government and Public Affairs (GPA).

2.0       MISSION

The Secret Service is a federal law enforcement agency with headquarters in Washington, D.C. and over 140 offices domestically and internationally.  Although, the USSS was established in 1865, solely to suppress the counterfeiting of United States currency, its mission has grown to include: safeguarding the nation's financial infrastructure and payment systems; preserving the integrity of the economy; and to protecting national leaders, visiting heads of state and government, designated sites, and National Special Security Events (NSSE).

3. 0      OBJECTIVES

Procure a social media software analytics tool with the ability to:

• Automate the social media monitoring process;
• Synthesize large sets of social media data;
• Identify statistical pattern analysis;
• Visually present complex data in a clear, concise manner; and
• Provide user friendly functionality to multiple staff members.

4.0       TASK ORDER/PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE

One (1)BPA (Blanket Purchasing Agreement) with a period of 5 years. 

5.0       SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS

The software tool must possess the following capabilities/functionality:

• Real-time stream analysis;
• Customizable, keyword search features;
• Sentiment analysis;
• Trend analysis;
• Audience segmentation;
• Geographic segmentation;
• Qualitative, data visualization representations (heat maps, charts, graphs, etc.);
• Multiple user access;
• Functionality to have read-only users;
• Access to historical twitter data;
• Influencer identification;
• Standard web browser access with login credentials;
• User level permissions;
• Compatibility with Internet Explorer 8;
• Section 508 compliant;
• Ability to detect sarcasm and false positives;
• Functionality to send notifications to users;
• Functionality to analyze data over a given period of time;
• Ability to quantify the agency's social media outreach/footprint;
• Vendor-provided training and technical/customer support;
• Ability to create custom reports without involving IT specialists; and
• Ability to search online content in multiple languages.

All proposals must be submitted via email to Contract Specialist via Email at ivy.meadows@associates. usss.dhs.gov and charles.keeney@usss.dhs.gov   NO LATER THAN 9 June  2014, at 5:00 PM EST

 Don't you feel safer already? Robbie the Robot (aka Big Brother) will be constantly scanning, never sleeping, with a preternatural ability to detect nuance and hidden meanings in every digitized word.  He/it will be able to create custom reports without the need for human eyes or human brains. Softy Ware be able to measure his own spooky footprints wherever he dares to tread! If he feels like it, he can even send notifications to the perpetrators of suspected irony! Like, "Duh, could you explain the punchline again? Does not compute...ute...ute. The Blue Screen of Death will come knocking if you don't knock off the snark!" 

Taking a tip from the snark-hunters of yore, they will use all the means at their disposal in their search for meaning:

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;

   They pursued it with forks and hope;

They threatened its life with a railway-share;

   They charmed it with smiles and soap.

So, what could possibly go wrong? What could possibly be the potential for abuse? 

As NextGov observes, those honchos of the Homeland have gotten into hot water for this kind of stuff before:

A couple of years ago, the Homeland Security Department, the agency's parent, got in trouble with lawmakers and civil liberties groups for a social media program that would work, in  part, by having employees create fake usernames and profiles to spy on other users.  

A House Homeland Security Committee panel called DHS officials into a hearing after reports the department tasked analysts with collecting data that reflected negatively on the government, such as content about the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to a Michigan jail. The Electronic Privacy Information Center has sued DHS for more information on the program.

The likely defense this time will be that the software made them do it. No actual communications will be intentionally collected on purpose willingly. Besides, the software isn't merely collecting your words. It's collecting your meaning, your emotions, even your subliminal thoughts. It's a whole new job description for the Secret Service.

Oh, and before I forget: we just marked the first anniversary of the Edward Snowden revelations. 

So, stick a fork in it, Spooks! You're done. (I mean that literally, Bro.)

  

Ukraine-o-Mania: Eye Candy Crush Edition

The only thing more absurd than Barack Obama cheaply bribing a multi-billionaire Ukrainian candy magnate with bushels of bulletproof vests and night goggles is the notion that a grainy "leaked" video of Obama exercising in a public Polish gym constitutes a security breach.

If Obama and his Secret Service detail didn't want amateur cell phone footage of himself pumping iron and grinding on an elliptical trainer in order to spread his everyman manliness throughout the world, we never would have been able to feast our starving eyes upon it. The president, so beleaguered at home from the latest pseudo-scandal (the release of a POW who turns out not to be a plastic GI Joe Patriot) and the quickly fading real scandal of VA hospital malfeasance, found himself in dire need of some distracting publicity. Something that shows him to be both adorably vulnerable and ripped. You see, when he is not candy-crushing the world with his sweet weaponized aid, Obama is eye candy. He is also a human being. (Just like you, only smarter and more physically fit).

Shadowy Action Figure I

(The above photo is not a playable video. If you're that desperate to watch Barack playing you, then you can find the real deal here at TMZ, the go-to celebrity gossip rag where celebrities go to plant candid side-boob shots of themselves.)

For more staid and sober coverage with an undertone of hot steamy sex appeal, I personally prefer the New York Daily News. Their story is unsparing in providing us with the sights and sounds that TMZ so snarkily avoided. You can almost smell the locker room testosterone:

Footage shows POTUS, in a black tracksuit with headphones in his ears, doing a series of weight lifting exercises — including lunges, side raises, step-ups and shoulder presses.

The 52-year-old didn’t let jet lag get in the way of his fitness, finishing up his workout on an elliptical machine.

The short clip of the presidential fitness session was first leaked to Fakt, a Polish tabloid, and then quickly made the rounds online.

Onlookers told the tabloid Obama didn't hold back during his 45 minute workout, as he "heavily sighed and groaned" doing the exercises that were listed on a piece of paper he carried around during his routine.

On the gym wall, behind the President, was a Nike ad, emblazoned with an American flag and the phrase “Give it all you’ve got” written in Polish.

That just about sums up Obama's whole foreign policy: lunges, sidesteps, and pressers, dependent upon talking points from a crib sheet, his earplugs well jammed in to avoid distractions and heavy sighs abounding. It is all unfailingly performed as an advertising brand draped in the American flag. Kind of like fascism.

And what's neoliberal diplomacy and touting hard human sacrifice without also plugging a fun violent fantasy role-playing video game? Gushed Obama to the prime minister of Poland:

I’ve said a lot today already about why we think Poland is so important, why the alliance between the United States and Poland is so important, but perhaps during my remarks here I can say a little bit about why the economic progress that we’ve seen in Poland is so important.  Economic growth wasn’t inevitable just because Poland achieved its political freedom.  It wasn’t easy.  Reforms here in Poland have been hard and have not been without sacrifice.  But as you drive through Warsaw, you see that Poland is a country on the move, one with one of the largest and fastest-growing economies in Europe, a manufacturing powerhouse, and a hub of high-tech innovation. 

In fact, the last time I was here, Donald (Prime Minister Tusk) gave me a gift -- the video game developed here in Poland that’s won fans the world over, “The Witcher.”  I confess, I’m not very good at video games, but I’ve been told that it is a great example of Poland’s place in the new global economy and it’s a tribute to the talents and the work ethic of the Polish people, as well as the wise stewardship of Polish leaders, like Prime Minister Tusk.

Shadowy Action Figure II

In fairness, Obama did not admit to actually playing the game. He's got enough virtual reality to keep himself (and other countries) occupied.

Also, there is no word whether Obama gifted Petro Poroshenko, the candy oligarch-turned-president, with an actual copy of the popular Candy Crush game to accompany the expensive high tech toys being used to crush the Eastern Ukraine "separatists" and further enrich the American military-industrial complex.

And thus, for our distracted pleasure, comes the prurient grainy Obama exercise video, deflecting the American corporate media and gossip-mongers from the atrocities being exercised upon Eastern Ukrainian civilians. It's cheaper to cover a cheap contrived workout session than it is to cover the latest episode of state-sponsored terror wrapped in the American humanitarian flag.  It helps Obama get away with calling the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of people by a right wing coup "bringing peace and order to the east."

And his proclamation that he is "deeply impressed with Poroshenko's vision as a businessman" is all too eerily reminiscent of his praise of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein as a "savvy businessman."

But, whatever. The un-American beard of Bowe Bergdahl's father is what is morally repellant to the media mavens who are keeping you pseudo-informed and pseudo-enraged. After all, most Americans can't even locate Ukraine on a map.

From the Front Lines of the Class War (conclusion)

"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men"

Guest Post by William Neil

Part Three: Why The Caged Birds Don’t Sing in Annapolis

And now let me take these musings, and my readings in the history of democracy and the political economy of the United States, and come back and visit the doings in that sleepy, isolated, old colonial town with the remarkably preserved architecture, but no rail connection, Annapolis.  What is the nature of the “cage” that prevents those vast Democratic majorities in the Assembly and the Senate, comparable to those that Democrats and FDR enjoyed after 1936 from doing more?   Well, we have already seen that the two Maryland Senators led the attack on the Wagner Act, foreshadowing the Southern Democrat-Republican alliance that would become a powerful national force after 1938…and especially after 1964.  But I don’t just want to hurl charges against the timid nature of the Democratic Party in Maryland, I want to try to understand the forces operating to construct that cage of ideas, of political economy limits that restrains them.  

So my first question is:  is Annapolis a unique world, reflective of the not so progressive traditions of Maryland’s’ half slave, half-free character before and during the Civil War?  Or is it also, like most of the United States, and the rest of the world, living under the “apparatuses” of “repression” and “justification” that Thomas Piketty hints have lain behind capitalism’s three century’s ability to maintain a rate of return on capital of 4-5%, enough to insure the great inequalities of wealth and income that have been the norm,  not the exception, both in Europe and the United States – and which now go under the banner of “neoliberalism,” or, if you would prefer, “free-market capitalism” – and the “managed” democracy that Wolin says now goes with it?   And Maryland, it seems to me, is not so unique in the divisions it obviously has between its rural northwest counties, and southeastern ones,  those lying outside the economically dominant metropolitan areas close to Washington and Baltimore.  You can find the same divisions and tensions in New Jersey, New York too, and as those who follow fracking have come to know, in Pennsylvania, the vast semi-rural areas that lie between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and have always lain outside all that was meant by the term “the Main Line.”   

From the Front Lines of the Class War (continued)

Guest Post by William Neil

Part Two: A Brief History of Democracy and Capitalism:  A Troubled Relationship

Before I conduct an examination of the Maryland Democratic claim that “this is the best we could do,” which involves an assessment of the legislature and its leaders in Annapolis, as well as the forces operating upon them, “constraining” them, I want to brief my readers on what I have been reading and listening to (at the Real News network) as deeper background for this writing.  I maintain that these sources form the intellectual basis for the quickening of the national left’s pulse and the talk of a new left “populism.”  Those sources have in turn built their views upon the cruel foundation of facts of today’s American political economy, the great and growing inequalities of wealth and income, and the related power to twist and deform our democratic institutions to produce these terrible outcomes for the bottom 50% of the population, the working class (who admittedly may not see themselves that way), and increasingly, the 40% who make up the “middle class.”  (That split follows the handling of data on wealth and income distribution by Thomas Piketty in “Capital in the 21^st Century, who looks at the top 1% of earners, the top 10%, the 40% in the middle class, and the bottom 50%.) 

I begin with Chris Hedges powerful and moving speech, which I first saw in written form in January of this year, but which launched in Santa Monica, California on October 13, 2013.  It is entitled The Myth of Human Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies. I won’t even try to offer you a condensed version, my words would fall short of the electricity and tensions contained within it, but I will say that Hedges has written elsewhere that American is now a “tinderbox” for revolution, or something close to it, which will most likely ignite from two of the most unhappy and disenfranchised sources: the indebted college graduates who can’t find any work, or who now make up a substantial portion of the 28 million I have written about, working in the service/retail sector and displacing those with less education, and the déclassé  intellectuals thrown out of journalism, publishing and teaching by the vast changes in corporate forms, technology and education itself.  Are they now obsolete? We shall see. I must note from my readings that these types were not hard to find rising to prominence in the early days of the French Revolution.  Now for Mr. Hedges, in his own words, taken from the very beginnings of his speech:

The most prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a species is found in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage.  He is our foremost oracle.  He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia…Yet we, like Ahab and his crew, rationalize our collective madness.  All calls for prudence, for halting the march toward economic, political and environmental catastrophe, for sane limits on carbon emissions, are ignored or ridiculed…The corporate assault on culture, journalism, education, the arts and critical thinking has left those who speak this truth marginalized and ignored, frantic Cassandras who are viewed as slightly unhinged and depressingly apocalyptic.  We are consumed by a mania for hope, which our corporate masters lavishly provide, at the expense of truth.

From the Front Lines of the Class War

 Guest Post by William Neil

"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men"

Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:

This essay was never going to be the usual  post legislative session follow-up “report”  to Part I, which appeared at the end of February, and which was entitled Making Millard Tydings Proud, Economic ‘Justice’ in Annapolis.  Even when I was an advocate for NJ Audubon’s legislative goals in New Jersey in the 1990’s, I had an inclination to avoid euphoria over what we had managed to achieve. That avoidance wasn’t difficult: it was usually grounded in fact, because most of the time what we really wanted, and what was desperately needed in New Jersey - a state land-use plan with regulatory teeth - was not politically attainable,  due to the power of the real estate industry and the Right’s success in achieving an anti-statist and anti-regulatory  iron curtain. 

However, something happened along the way to Part II: a quickening of the national political pulse – on the left, at least - an outpouring of speeches, essays, studies and one powerful book (among other good ones)  that seems to have swept the serious reading public off its feet.  These I will name shortly, to set the broader context in which I will examine “economic justice” in Annapolis, and thereby temper my praise for its “famous men.” First though, let’s focus in some detail on what happened there between the end of February and the last day of the legislative session, Monday, April 7^th, 2014.

I.            The Annapolis Balancing Act: Gestures Towards the Working Poor; Estate Tax Relief for the Job Creators

On that last day of the session Maryland’s new minimum wage bill passed the House of Delegates by a vote of 87-47, bringing the state’s new minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, but not until July 1, of 2018.  (Maryland thus becoming only the second state to achieve the federal goal of $10.10)  This was the second vote by the House, necessitated by the fact that the Senate had made changes from the original version which the House passed way back on March 7 by an 89-46 margin. (HB 0295; SB 0331).  The Senate did not pass their version until Saturday, April 5^th, by a vote of 34-13.  Of equal significance to me, as a reporter on the political economy, is the fact that on the same day the House first passed its minimum wage bill it also approved The Maryland Estate Tax - Unified Credit Bill – and pay attention to the comparative margin – by a whopping 119-14 tally. (HB 0739; SB 0602).  The Senate voted for this bill on March 20^th, the Vernal Equinox, 36-10. 

To help keep these voting numbers in proper political perspective, the Democratic Party in Maryland has a 98-43 majority in the House of Delegates, more than two-to-one, and in the state Senate it is almost three-to-one, 35-12.  Since Maryland Democrats and their presidentially hopeful Governor, Martin O’Malley like to portray themselves as “progressive,” these majorities indicate that they are a fair test of what the party stands for in the sense they have the numbers to pass what they want; they cannot plead “gridlock” as the Democrats can do in Washington, DC (where even there they could do better - by overthrowing the Senate filibuster rules.)  

There is more detail to add from this Annapolis session, however, plenty more.  Before the House passed its first version of the minimum wage bill, Delegate Heather Mizeur (D-20), a gubernatorial hopeful in the June 24^th Democratic primary this year, offered an amendment which would have created a 2% annual adjustment upwards for inflation – a reasonable and important linkage, since the federal lack of one was a major factor, aside from the missing productivity gain adjustments, that allowed the federal minimum to fall so far behind its 1968 gold standard of purchasing power.  Mizeur’s amendment was buried, 8-124.  She did, however, for her courage, gain a $5.00 campaign contribution from me, and I don’t have many to give out, since I am a poor man in a rich man’s county. 

This failed inflation adjustment for wages is not trivia, it has real practical and symbolic importance, since the adjustments made in Maryland’s estate tax bill will bring it into alignment with the federal tax law, which is linked to inflation, and will raise the current wealth exemption to $5.34 million dollars by 2019 - and those inflation adjustments kicking in in 2019 are projected to raise it to $5.9 million (according to a Forbes Magazine article from 3/20/2014).   Readers should, at this point, remind themselves by repeating with me: American is not a class based society, we just reward merit.  Wage earners have not accumulated enough merit to have their miserly earnings under the minimum wage law, even a rising one, linked to inflation; those who have accumulated enough wealth already to worry about estate tax thresholds have, and if we are not nice to them they will flee our state.  Or so goes the conventional wisdom.  And, according to some recent studies, Maryland now has the highest density of millionaires per 1,000 of population of any state in the nation.