We’re friends with a few of the country’s name-brand bloggers. There’s no magic to it. We just keep seeing them at conventions. We know lots of local and state-level politicians too. There’s really no magic to it, either. It isn’t just about donations or family connections. It’s about showing up.
The first time you show up to volunteer nobody knows you. Maybe they catch your name. The second time you show up maybe they remember seeing you before. (What was your name again?) The third or fourth time, now you’re somebody they think they might need to take seriously.
I got into this business working on Patsy Keever’s 2004 congressional race. I didn’t know Patsy from Adam, but I was angry and frustrated and that was where the fight was. I walked in off the street to stuff envelopes or something — I didn’t know anything about electioneering. (I was out of work.) A couple of weeks later I had my own computer and a desk. I entered data, cut call lists. By the time it was over, I had done about everything except fundraising, including location scouting for commercials and playing craft services for the film crew.
It amazed me to watch activists walk in off the street, offer to write “white papers” and expect to be dubbed the campaign’s chief advisor on [your pet issue here]. Can you make some phone calls? No?
Chris Dixon, candidate for State Senate District 48, highlights this good economicnews:
“The Asheville Tribune” Touts Benefits of Federal, State, and Local Economic Stimulus
As the Democratic candidate for State Senate District 48 (Buncombe, Henderson, and Polk counties), I have made local job creation my #1 campaign issue. It was the loss of the Volvo plant in Arden in December of 2009 that spurred me to run. So, I was heartened to see the following headline in The Asheville Tribune (Aug. 26-Sept. 1, 2010): “Fletcher company to offer 100 new jobs in expansion plan.”
This is surely good news for a town in the heart of my district, and the page 3 article gives plenty of encouraging details. All told, brake manufacturer Continental Teves will add 388 jobs in “three to four years,” doubling the plant’s workforce to 625 workers. This will more than replace the 250 jobs shed by Volvo—mostly to unionized plants in Pennsylvania.
However, the most interesting commentary in the article follows:
(Kathryn) Blackwell (corporate spokesperson in Auburn Hills, MI) said brake-making has perked up since deciding a year ago to expand the Fletcher facility. “Then we had two major customers (G.M., Chrysler) coming out of bankruptcy, with no sign of light at the end of the tunnel. But at this point, we’re seeing volumes picking up considerably—beyond most experts’ analysis.”
North American auto production is 25 percent above industry projections this year, Blackwell said, with Detroit’s Big Three needing brakes and other parts. “This is the first good news we’ve had in over two years.”
The article goes on to mention that the Fletcher expansion beat out plants in Europe and Mexico thanks to what Blackwell describes as “Fletcher and Henderson County tax incentives and a state grant of up to $2.2 million.”
Hmmm. Let’s see. GM and Chrysler are still in business thanks to a federal intervention. The Wall Street Journal’s Detroit bureau chief declared, “…President Obama’s auto industry initiatives are working and the president is entitled to take a bow, no matter how much that might pain conservatives.” Henderson County’s all-Republican board of county commissioners conspired with the Fletcher town council and the Democratic administration of Gov. Bev Perdue to bestow various economic incentives upon Continental Teves.
How long before we see a Tea Party protest at the plant gate? Surely, they won’t sit idley by as socialism and economic bipartisanship (the horror!) gain a foothold in Fletcher.
Shuler’s votes on energy, environment, education, and labor look great. Shuler’s votes on health care and civil rights don’t. GOP’s lame attempts to again tie him to a demonized Pelosi look silly.
Heath Shuler is monied, and Jeff Miller is not. The Asheville Tea Party decided not to endorse Miller, so the WNCGOP formed their own Tea Party to make sure he got a Tea Party endorsement of some sort. The Buncombe GOP is putatively leaderless. The Buncombe Dems have a lot of energy, but will they have vols? Can Susan Fisher, Patsy Keever, and Jane Whilden coattails translate into votes for Heath?
I can’t wait to hear everyone’s take on the race. Fire away in the comments. You can bet that both campaigns will be reading.
Disclaimer – I am definitely voting for Rep. Heath Shuler.
Neal Gabler of the Woodrow Wilson Center laments that Wall Street reforms will never outfox human nature — specifically, greed:
If we’ve learned nothing else about investment banking over the last two years, we’ve learned that it operates like a virus. You can devise all sorts of economic antibiotics — from stricter regulation and more oversight to limiting certain institutional arrangements, as Glass-Steagall did — but sooner or later they are all bound to fail because financial instruments keep mutating to escape destruction. Investment bankers reconstitute highly risky, highly profitable schemes such as credit default swaps or unit contingent options or other exotic inventions. That’s why reform never works. It will always be outsmarted.
At least, as long as there is financial reward in outsmarting the system. Gabler notes (anecdotally, at least),
that During the long postwar economic boom, the top marginal rates hovered at 91%, removing a lot of the incentive to game the financial system. There was no point in scheming if you couldn’t profit from it. Still, the country prospered. So did Wall Street.
What changed starting in 1981, according to Gabler, is that the government started rewarding greed. “The Reagan tax cuts were hailed by conservatives as a way to unleash American initiative,” Gabler writes (by dropping the punishing, punishing, punishing, punishing, punishing top marginal tax rates — these people are really sensitive about being punished). We succeeded in unleashing “American avarice” along with it. Gordon Gekko made his Wall Street debut in 1987.
Reward a behavior and you’ll get more of it is an article of faith in certain circles. It reminds me that one of the core beliefs behind our criminal justice system — and a style of parenting popular in certain circle — is that punishment is supposed to deter misbehavior. Crimes of passion excluded, of course, and it would be hard to argue that the creation of derivatives and credit default swaps were crimes of passion, merely of greed.
Incentives, as we have seen, don’t always work the way common sense says they should. But if Gabler’s analysis has any merit (you don’t treat viruses with antibiotics, for example), disincentivizing one of the seven deadly sins again might have a more salutary effect than trying to inoculate against it.
That would be terribly unfair, of course. The full list of deadly sins applies only to people in the lowest tax brackets.
After last year’s summer of discontent, I looked back on America’s response to September 11:
A flood of post-September 11 articles asked how the attacks happened, what we would do next, and why terrorists hate us. One savvy pundit asked, Would America keep its head?
We invaded Iraq on trumped-up intelligence. We conducted illegal surveillance on our own citizens. We imprisoned people without charge, here and abroad. We rendered prisoners for torture and tortured others ourselves in violation of international law. All the while, millions of staunch, law-and-order conservatives supported and defended it, and still do. Vigorously.
Did America keep its head? Uh, no.
After an earlier national tragedy, the 1986 Challenger disaster, the broadcast networks filled air time by bringing on psychologists. How absurd it seemed to have TV psychologists telling us how we should feel about it and explain it to the kids. Today, of course, absurd is the new normal. Today we have the conservative Mighty Wurlitzer going all E. Power Biggs on America, telling us 24/7 not how we should feel but whom we should fear. And week by week it is becoming increasingly hard to keep up with whom the home of the brave is supposed to fear.
I have something coming up on the mosque madness, but Olbermann did a pretty good job of nailing it in this commentary:
“Silly season” seems too mild for this tilt towards mass insanity. I don’t know what’s the more appropriate response to this kind of bald-faced stupidity: condemnation or ridicule. Thankfully, there’s The Daily Show for the latter.
Business Insider calls this video “weirdly awesome.” The EconomicPolicyJournal dot com reports the WSJ calling it “too bizarre to believe.” (Who could have seen that coming?) EPJ wrings its hands over what “heavy duty players” must be behind it — unions. (Who could have seen that coming?)
Suppose the U.S. government had posted a budget surplus in 12 of the past 13 years. Suppose not a single major American financial institution had failed or needed a government bailout. Suppose the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 6.1 percent in the first quarter of this year, rather than at 2.7 percent.
Canada did, Harrop instructs, explaining that “What Canada had was a civic culture that wanted government to regulate financial activity.”
It’s not exactly apples and apples. Harrop runs down a few of the differences. Canada’s vast mineral wealth. America thinks it’s our job to provide military security for the rest of the world, “a job that other countries are all-too-pleased to give us,” she notes. Kinda runs up our costs (and tax burden). But Canada’s regulatory structures help keep the foxes out of the hen house.
How much are Canada’s businesses suffering? Harrop reports that Toronto’s large cap index has outperformed the S&P 500 so far this year by 27 percent. Anytime new regulations are proposed here, American foxes yelp in Pavlovian fashion about how regulation will make them an endangered species.
No, that’s the American Middle Class.
Harrop observes:
What we have is an elite willing to risk everyone else’s economic security to enable a few hotshots to win big at the casino of recklessness and fraud — while maintaining a variety of taxpayer backstops to reduce their risks. The joint never gets closed, also thanks to the large numbers of ordinary citizens trained to holler “socialism” every time the government tries to set a ground rule.
Yet even the conservative Washington Times will report that Canada’s banking system is “the healthiest banking system in the world.” The World Economic Forum agrees.
The AP reported in June that Canada had already reclaimed three-quarters of the jobs lost during the recession, although some recent gains have been in part-time work not expected to last.
Two very thoughtful opinion pieces in the AC-T today. The first is from Jim Buchanan and features this quote from Glenn Greenwald,
“Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and streetlights — or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State — that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability?”
This second piece is from the editorial board, and it recognizes the stark reality of our local economic situation. Click here to read the whole thing. Here’s a trenchant quote:
More affordable housing would be a boon to the regular folk who teach in our schools, fight crime in our neighborhoods, fight fires in the community, care for our sick and elderly in hospitals and nursing homes.
Neal Gabler of the Woodrow Wilson Center 
