The Carter Gilson Report

Republican Tom Price of Georgia posted this silly little YouTube clip today:

So, wait a minute, you think that the President only stands with some people and not others because he blasted the people who caused and exacerbated the global economic crisis we’re now facing? Because that’s what you’re saying here.

Just a tiny little suggestion, if you’re trying to win back the middle class, don’t make it quite so obvious that you’re standing with the investment firms and hedge funds whose greed necessitated the biggest government bailout of financial institutions in US history.

The best news to come out in a while. It seems that Toyota and GM are still pushing ahead with their plug-in hybrid models, and the competition is still pretty fierce.

Toyota plans to introduce its plug-in hybrid electric vehicle late this year, a year earlier than originally planned, and a year ahead of the Chevrolet Volt, a senior Toyota executive said Sunday.

James Lentz, the president of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., said in an interview that Toyota planned to initially make about 500 plug-in hybrids, which will be made available first to commercial customers. About 150 plug-ins will be slated for customers in the United States, Mr. Lentz said.

GM is hoping that the Volt will save it from the brink.  With Toyota pushing up their plug-in, it seems that there would be even more incentive for GM to speed up its development.

And given the economy right now, perhaps there could be some incentive to make them affordable?  Maybe?

Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader, and first rate wanker, is looking to prolong the economic downturn as long as it means providing money to actual Americans through jobs:

“As of right now, Americans are left with more questions than answers about this unprecedented government spending, and I believe the taxpayers deserve to know a lot more about where it will be spent before we consider passing it.”

Nice of you to think of that now, Mitch.  You didn’t seem to think that was all that important when bailing out the banks, who are getting billions in public money with no oversight, but now you want to stick it to the citizens who are unemployed or underemployed and would be helped directly by an infrastructure-based stimulus plan.

It’s brazen, I’ll give him that.  It’s also stupid.  You have an incoming president-elect with approval numbers in the upper ionosphere, promoting a popular idea that would put people back to work, and you decide that this is your Little Bighorn. There is no political way to win this from that position. If it doesn’t pass, you’ll have won the battle but lost the war, as the Republican Obstructionist brand takes hold. If it does pass, you’ll have lost anyway and will be seen as utterly ineffective. Just from a political standpoint it seems like McConnell should be supporting anything Obama says on the economy right now.

And, on the other hand, if this is a position based on deeply held convictions, we will finally have the man’s soul laid bare, alas a few months late to vote him out of office.

(h/t Political Wire)

Unionized workers are having to resort to actions not taken since the Great Depression. Chicago’s Republic Windows and Doors closed down this Friday. The union, under the United Electrical Workers, has decided to use peaceful, yet forceful, means to highlight their situation.

Workers laid off from their jobs at a factory have occupied the building and are demanding assurances they’ll get severance and vacation pay that they say they are owed.

About 200 employees of Republic Windows and Doors began their sit-in Friday, the last scheduled day of the plant’s operation.

Leah Fried, an organizer with the United Electrical Workers, said the Chicago-based vinyl window manufacturer failed to give 60 days’ notice required by law before shutting down.

Workers also were angered when company officials didn’t show up for a meeting Friday that had been arranged by U.S. Rep Luis Gutierrez, a Chicago Democrat, she said.

So, workers are staging an action over severance, back vacation pay, and most of all, the WARN Act. The WARN Act provides that in a situation like this, where a mass lay-off will be happening, the workforce will be given 60 days warning. Long enough for many to find new jobs, get training to change careers, and then the company must provide a severance of some kind.

When I was working at RCN and they closed my call center, that is exactly how it happened. 60 days before they gathered us and gave us the news. At the time, it seemed unbelievable, but it also seemed like a long time, time enough to find something new. Some did, many did not. I was unemployed for six months from September 2003 to March 2004.

The workers at the Republic plant did not get this time before the doors were to close. So they are keeping the doors open.

During the peaceful takeover, workers have been shoveling snow and cleaning the building, Fried said.

“We’re doing something we haven’t since the 1930s, so we’re trying to make it work,” Fried said.
…
Police spokeswoman Laura Kubiak said authorities were aware of the situation and officers were patrolling the area.

In other words, they’re hardly engaging in malicious acts. This is a modern sit-in, they won’t be cowed, and I kind of want to bake brownies for them. Alas, delivering them would be tough.

There’s a meme that’s been going around the government and the media for the last few months.  Some companies, they say, are too big to fail.  If these companies were to go under, declare bankruptcy, and fall off the face of the earth, the vacuum left in their absence would be too much for our economy to survive.

On the one hand, they’re right.  Companies like GM and Citigroup employ, directly and indirectly, millions of people across the world.  Losing them would drive this already sick economy into a death spiral.

But there’s something to think about in calling anything too big to fail.  Beyond abandoning the free market, which is supposedly God to many economic policy makers, it also points to the failure of deregulation.  These companies got so big because the anti-monopoly, regulatory, post-robber-baron financial world that was in control for most of the 20th Century got chucked out in the Reagan Revolution, and the trend continued through Clinton until Bush 2 got into power and totally screwed the pooch.

Yes, we should be bailing out the big companies right now.  But there have got to be strings included.  And one of those strings should be that no company be allowed to get where it is too big to fail.  Companies fail all the time, and new companies come along.  It’s financial natural selection.  That’s what commercial bankruptcy is for.  We shouldn’t get to a point where any company is too big to declare bankruptcy if that’s what is needed.

Just a couple weeks ago, GM was talking about buying Chrysler as a way to get both companies out of trouble.  That’s the opposite of what should happen.

Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman has what may be among the most important columns about the negatively-aged Obama administration to date:

Barack Obama should learn from F.D.R.’s failures as well as from his achievements: the truth is that the New Deal wasn’t as successful in the short run as it was in the long run. And the reason for F.D.R.’s limited short-run success, which almost undid his whole program, was the fact that his economic policies were too cautious.
…
This history offers important lessons for the incoming administration.

The political lesson is that economic missteps can quickly undermine an electoral mandate. Democrats won big last week — but they won even bigger in 1936, only to see their gains evaporate after the recession of 1937-38. Americans don’t expect instant economic results from the incoming administration, but they do expect results, and Democrats’ euphoria will be short-lived if they don’t deliver an economic recovery.

The economic lesson is the importance of doing enough. F.D.R. thought he was being prudent by reining in his spending plans; in reality, he was taking big risks with the economy and with his legacy. My advice to the Obama people is to figure out how much help they think the economy needs, then add 50 percent. It’s much better, in a depressed economy, to err on the side of too much stimulus than on the side of too little.

In short, Mr. Obama’s chances of leading a new New Deal depend largely on whether his short-run economic plans are sufficiently bold. Progressives can only hope that he has the necessary audacity.

FDR nearly failed because he didn’t go far enough.  That’s almost blasphemy, but it’s true.  Obama needs to do more, and do it fearlessly.

A new WPA based on a new power infrastructure is a first and necessary step.  Our current power grid is not just prone to failure but vulnerable to an attack.  It was just a few years ago that most of the eastern seaboard was shut down by a single outage, and we haven’t fixed it enough since then to avoid the same thing happening again.

Also, a new power grid could more efficiently transfer electricity generated from new sources.

This would need to be coupled with a reinvestment in physical infrastructure, the roads, bridges, railroads, waterways and other ways that we get our selves and our stuff from place to place.  It’s been 50 years since the last major project, the Eisenhower highways, and Obama has indicated that this is something to invest in.

These two projects alone would generate many jobs and a lot of revenue which would then fund more structure reinvestment.  America has been in a terrible accident, but we can rebuild her.  We have the technology.