Weekly Audit: Standoff Continues in Wisconsin

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger

The 14 Democratic state senators who fled Wisconsin to thwart the passage of a draconian anti-union have no plans to return.

On Sunday night, a Wall Street Journal blog reported that the senators planned to return soon. Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly found it odd that the piece didn't contain any direct quotes from the exiled Democrats. The claim that the Democrats were planning to return rested on a paraphrase of State Sen. Mike Miller said about the Democrats coming back. Miller says the Journal misconstrued his remarks and that the Dems are only coming back "when collective bargaining is off the table."

It would be an odd time for Democrats to return. Republican governor Scott Walker has offered them zero concessions. Furthermore, as Benen observes, Walker's popularity is plummeting. The latest poll by the Wisconsin Research Institute puts the governor's approval rating at 43%, with 53% disapproving. A majority of respondents had favorable opinions of state Senate Democrats, public employee unions, and teachers' unions.

Benen writes:

The significance of these polls can't be overstated -- they stiffen Democratic spines, while making Republicans increasingly nervous about standing behind an unpopular governor with an unpopular plan.

In YES! Magazine, Amy B. Dean explains why every American should care about the situation in Wisconsin. The collective bargaining rights of public employees are the central issue in this standoff. Walker is testing a radical new approach to unions and several other Republican governors are poised to follow his model if he succeeds. It is naive to assume that the war on unions will end with the public sector.

Jobs gap

Writing at The Nation, Chris Hayes explains why Washington doesn't care about jobs. Hayes argues that Washington elites are insulated from the toll of unemployment by class and geography. The jobless rate for workers with college degrees is only 4.2%, which is less than half of the official unemployment rate of 9% and a quarter of the 16.1% underemployment rate. (The underemployment rate counts both the jobless who are still looking for work and those who have given up and left the labor force.) Furthermore, Hayes notes, the unemployment rate in greater Washington, D.C. is only 5.7%, which is lower than that of any other major city in America. He writes:

What these two numbers add up to is a governing elite that is profoundly alienated from the lived experiences of the millions of Americans who are barely surviving the ravages of the Great Recession. As much as the pernicious influence of big money and the plutocrats' pseudo-obsession with budget deficits, it is this social distance between decision-makers and citizens that explains the almost surreal detachment of the current Washington political conversation from the economic realities working-class, middle-class and poor people face.

Even as the overall unemployment rate falls, economic recovery proves elusive for many workers of color, Shani O. Hilton reports at Colorlines.com. The February jobs report shows that the economy added 192,000 jobs, with overall unemployment falling by a tenth of a percentage point, bringing joblessness to its lowest rate since 2009. However, the unemployment rates for black and Hispanic workers remained fixed in February, at 15.3% and 11.6%, respectively.

Hilton notes that even if the economy were to add 200,000 jobs a month, it would take three years to bring general employment up to pre-recession levels.

Public innovation

The stereotype is that the private sector drives innovation. However, as Monica Potts reports in The American Prospect, industry's well-deserved reputation for innovation is built on a foundation of publicly funded basic research. Conservatives often argue that the private sector would pick up the slack if public funding for basic research were reduced. Potts argues that public funding for basic research is essential because companies will naturally gravitate towards research that has an immediate payoff, instead of investing in cultivating deeper scientific understanding through basic research.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

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All the buzz yesterday on the talk shows (besides Michele Bachmann repeating her talking point dozens of times on Meet the Press rather than actually answering questions) was tapping the Strategic Oil Reserve to somehow lower gasoline prices.  To even suggest such a move is not only a bad idea and bad policy, it won't help.

First, a little history.  The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, or SPR, made up primarily of salt dome storage along the Texas and Louisiana coasts, was created after the oil shock of 1973 - 1974, when OPEC flexed its muscles by embargoing oil exports to the US to punish us for our Israeli policies at the time.  The emargo had the desired effects; first it drove oil prices to historic levels and second, it scared the bejesus out of everyone, including our elected leaders.   Injections of crude oil began in 1977, and was not actually filled to it's working capacity of around 727 million barrels until the end of 2009.  The reserve was established to be used in emergencies such as wars and embargos, and it has been used for that a couple of times, notably Gulf War 1 and during the Gulf of Mexico production shut down during and after Hurricane Katrina.  About 30 million barrels were drawn down during each event.  It was used for political purposes in late 2000, when President Clinton arranged a "swap" of about 30 million barrels with private industry to help fuel prices during that year's Middle East tensions.  The swap moved government oil into the private sector, to be returned the following year.  After several re-negotiations of the deal, all the oil was finally returned to the SPR by 2004.  This use of the SPR certainly didn't meet the emergency or war standard, and some believe it was used to manipulate fuel oil prices downward during the price spikes in those years.

Which brings us to today.  White House Chief of Staff William Daley yesterday, coincidently, also on Meet the Press, suggested that the administration is considering tapping the reserve in response to rising crude prices due to the latest unrest in the MIddle East.  That idea is not only stupid, it just won't work.  Currently, the US is importing about 11 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products per day of which about 8.6 million barrels comes in as crude.  We currently consume about 19 to 20 million barrels per day of liquid petroleum products, making our import percentage about 60% of daily use.  With a 727 million barrel inventory in the SPR, that would give us about two months supply if all imports were cut off.  If only half was cut off, that still only give us 4 months, and we would be completely vulnerable to energy supply disruptions and unrest in the Middle East.

Which brings us to the real issue...the only way to reduce gasoline prices is to use less.  That is the only way.  Our elected leaders have been kicking the can down the road for over 40 years since the first oil shock, and continue to do that today, only fiddling around the edges of comprehensive energy policy. We must deal with this problem now, expanding our use of renewables, natural gas, and have an adult conversation about mass transit and nuclear power.

Until we do, we'll continue to be at risk for our own future, and will continue tossing around stupid ideas like drawing from the SPR before we really need it.
 

Bob Cavnar, a 30-year veteran of the oil and gas industry, is the author of Disaster on the Horizon: High Stakes, High Risks, and the Story Behind the Deepwater Well Blowout. He is CEO of Luca Technologies.

 

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I used to be angry, now I am apoplectic. I also used to be fraulein and now I am a frau. I used to be a mademoiselle and now I am a madam, a senorita and now a senora. In other words, I am a mature woman, whose human rights are vanishing before her very eyes. For a long time, I have confused myself with a man and a human and become habituated to freedom. I don't like it when Congress treats me like a girl by hacking away at abortion rights and thinking about ELIMINATING funds for family planning.

From deep within my apoplexy, I ask: What in the name of God and goodness is Congress thinking? My reluctant and puzzled conclusion: Congress IS moralizing about sex and how some people are not supposed to have it while one member (and I do mean "member") after another is discovered in a bathroom with his pants pathetically down or on a screen showing off his biceps. Larry Craig, Eliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford, John Kennedy, Gary Hart -- all sides of the aisle -- remind me of nothing so much as my 16-year-old son, who forgot to remove a used condom from his jeans' pocket, for me to find when I laundered the pants. I don't remember moralizing. I do remember conversation. We decided, sex ed for him was "everybody agrees, no one gets hurt, no one gets pregnant." He posted these notes on his bedroom wall. Moralizing is not conversation. Congress wants to be punishmentalist and moralizing about female sexuality, as though it was theirs and not mine.

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Just a few years ago, before the economic meltdown of 2008, there seemed to be a barrier between wine as a part of our eating culture, and wine as a central prop for having the right "label" to show off. Today, there is more pride than ever in finding the great undiscovered wines that represent real values in the marketplace. I am sure this is in response to our economic condition, but at the same time, I think it gives us a little more opportunity to develop a more mature and pragmatic approach to buying , consuming, and enjoying wine.

I find it encouraging to see consumers picking up wine packaged in tetra-pack containers, wine bars pouring from a keg, and more and more creativity to find real value for the consumer. There is a real shift from an industry that was built on winery branding to the brand loyalty of those who can provide the best selection of wines at the fairest price. The messenger; whether it is the internet, your local retailer, a sommelier, or another news source; have become the brand for sources of wine information; a far more healthy marketplace than an industry that was predominantly getting their information from Robert Parker and the Wine Spectator only a few years ago. This growth pattern of sources takes away some of the semi-monopoly of wine evaluation, and opens it up to a far greater amount of sources that have a far wider range of interests and opinions. The good news is there wouldn't be room for these sources, if there wasn't a growing market with an interest.

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