Oops! We forgot the workers! Jonathan Alter more or less admits that Obama has failed on what must be his deepest long-term priority — namely, reversing (or beginning to reverse)  the ” financial and emotional body blows inflicted on organized labor and middle-class Americans in recent decades.” According to Alter, Obama needs to “deliver something big for working people who don’t see much for themselves in trade deals,” not to mention his permissive immigration plans.

Alter’s answer? An infrastructure program! “Obama should devote the rest of 2015 on the domestic side to finding the money for infrastructure.” It’s not stimulus, says Alter –it’s a “jobs program.” Maybe Obama could unlock “$1 trillion … over 10  years for rebuilding the roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, rails and sewage system.”

So who gets the jobs? Well,  construction workers — specifically, the program could “propel a whole generation of older displaced construction workers to retirement with some dignity.” OK. But what about the rest of us — all the other non-rich strugglers who also aren’t “symbolic analysts” (in Robert Reich’s phrase), who often have to compete with all the physical laborers on the planet?  And even a trillion dollars over 10 years isn’t all that much ($100 billion a year).

Is “infrastructure investment” becoming the Democrats’ version of tax cuts — a completely inadequate, go-to answer that mostly demonstrates the numbing poverty of the party’s policy agenda? You make the call!

P.S.: In the infrastructure/tax cut comparison, construction workers perform the same role as Mitt Romney’s small business owner “job creators.” Sure, we want to help them. But most people aren’t business owners. They aren’t construction workers either. …

Off-point, but …: Alter also seems to think that, if the trade deal removes “Vietnam’s 80 percent tariff on U.S. autos,” Detroit will somehow start selling U-S made cars in that Asian country (“jobs for Detroit autoworkers”). This is insane — a sign of a journalist tossing in White House talking points without thinking.  Without tariffs, Vietnam’s market will undoubtedly be served, not by U.S.-made cars but by inexpensive vehicles built in low-wage countries like India, China and Vietnam itself. The Vietnamese aren’t going to start buying Cadillacs. (Nobody seems to be buying Cadillacs, but that’s a separate issue.)

Punditry Dept., Legacy Hydraulics Division: Obamacare’s victory (in King v. Burwell) takes some of the legacy pressure off the Iran deal, no? …

… is that you don’t have to follow the rules. NPR shows how it’s done! When discussing allegations that Australia paid the crew of a migrant smuggling boat to turn around and go back a) talk only to asylum activist b) don’t check his facts c) don’t try to get the government’s side of the story (which is presumably related to this). … Hey, that’s the sort of thing I might do! But I don’t call it news. … P.S.: Why is it so horrible to pay the crew of a smuggling boat to turn around? … P.P.S.: Here’s a better account, from the Australian press. If only NPR had access to Google. I blame Republican budget cuts. …

Sen. Ted Cruz flipped and voted against fast-track trade authority at the last minute, citing (in part) the Wikileaks revelation confirming the existence of immigration provisions in one of the deals (the Trade in Services Act, or TiSA). Cruz wrote:

Despite the administration’s public assurances that it was not negotiating on immigration, several chapters of the TiSA draft posted online explicitly contained potential changes in federal immigration law. TPA would cover TiSA, and therefore these changes would presumably be subject to fast-track.

Good for Cruz. New Yorker editorialists will sneer, but even Obama’s ex-adviser Lawrence Summers has said “[c]oncerns that trade agreements may be a means to circumvent traditional procedures for taking up issues ranging from immigration to financial regulation must be taken seriously.”  Cruz might also be forgiven for delaying his epiphany until the Wikileaks revelation further destroyed trust in pro-trade leaders like Paul Ryan (who had assured Congress that the secret immigration provisions were just an “urban legend.“)

But you have to wonder if Cruz’s change of direction was also aided, not-so-subconsciously, by the realization that has been blowing his previous advantage over GOP primary rivals on the issue of immigration control (in part because of his support for increased legal immigration).  Cruz now has to worry about both Scott Walker and Donald Trump stealing the issue from him. His fast-track flip helps reestablish some immigration control cred.

If Cruz’s switch is actually a cynical, calculated attempt to curry favor with voters … well, that’s a good thing too. Maybe even better than if it was 100% sincere. It means the primary landscape rewards border controllers. …

Backfill: Roll Call blames Trump …

Update: Byron York a) reminds that Cruz actually wrote an op-ed with Ryan in April promoting the fast-track bill he has now voted against (!); b) notes Cruz, like other Republicans, was feeling a “lot of … heat” from the GOP base, and his colleagues think his flip was “obviously motivated by his political concerns;” and c) speculates that “Cruz’s GOP opponents are going to give him hell about his yes-then-no votes on trade,” especially in debates. … If they do give him hell, I’m not so sure it will hurt him. It just gives him a chance to elaborate on his concerns in a way that might help him re-connect with the GOP base. Also, voters often don’t mind flip-floppers, at least if they flop in the voters’ direction. Demonstrates that they know who’s in charge. …

It looks as if the historically low rate of intermarriage for black Americans may finally be changing. According to Pew, the percentage of newlyweds who married outside their race rose to 19 in 2013 — that’s up from less than 16% as recently as 2008 (see P. 10). For black women –historically less likely to intermarry than black men — the percentage rose by a third, from 9% to 12%, in just the three years from 2010 to 2013, if I read Pew’s maddeningly-presented data correctly. Given the normal glacial pace of big demographic trends, that seems like a significant, and not-so-slow, rise, … Punditry! An Obama Effect? Personally, I would like to blame welfare reform — i.e., women who used to go on welfare now go to work and come into contact with a broader array of potential partners. And “no scrubs“! But I don’t know if the intermarriage boomlet is occuring among potential welfare recipients (as opposed to the black middle and upper class).  Over to you, Kay Hymowitz …

Why is John Kasich so annoying? Byron York notes that John Kasich’s frankly religious appeal to conservative evangelicals in the Faith & Freedom Caucus somehow turned them off. … Kasich loves to lecture. Usually, the not-so-subtle subtext — as with his citation of Matthew 25 to justify his Medicaid expansion — seems to be how moral Kasich is (in contrast with, say, his audience). There’s probably no less convincing way to justify Medicaid expansion to conservatives. …P.S.: In 1996, Kasich was chosen to give the closing argument in the House for welfare reform.  I think if he’d talked for 10 more minutes, welfare reform would have lost. …

Hillary’s re-launch speech:  It’s here.  (I didn’t see it, I read it later.)

1)  It’s a pretty good speech if you ignore the middle 40%, which is the Power Point of a SOTU address she may never get to give. That was sort of like the drum solo in the middle of an Iron Butterfly concert. At least the typical SOTU address has an impressively pointillist level of detail (“We will negotiate the third round of the Law of the Sea…”). This didn’t even have that.

2) The opening passages, about how Hillary is going to “make our economy work for you and for every American,” hit the key point. But a) didn’t her husband promise that if we re-elected Obama, we would “feel it” — it being the recovery? I think he did! Guess that didn’t happen. Why? b) Hillary offers astonishingly little in the way of policies that might reverse the “powerful currents” moving in the direction of greater money inequality. At least Obama had a concrete vision — labor unions, empowered by “card check” legislation, were going to win for workers a greater share of productivity gains. That was deeply misguided, but it was something to latch onto. Hillary has nothing similar. She’s going to fight so you can “receive your work schedule with enough notice to arrange child care.” That’s not reversing the inequality tide! That’s trying to help a few people stay afloat in the inequality tide. Maybe its enough.

3) Come to think of it, there was zero mention of the role unionism would play in Hillary’s economic plan. Maybe that is because they have no role? The word “union” only gets mentioned twice, in boilerplate lists of American institutions (“in our families, in our businesses, unions, houses of worship, schools”). The omission’s especially striking in a speech that’s supposed to fire up the Democratic base — rivalling Hillary’s failure to mention Social Security and Medicare.

4) David Frum offers a provocative interpretation of the speech as a rejection of Obama’s lofty 2008 pitch for unity and leadership — in favor of a non-naive, fight-back vision of Dem groups taking from GOP groups:

Hillary Clinton’s speech had to be long because the coalition she seeks to assemble is made up of so many different sub-units, each of which needed to be assured that its claim would be included in the total: unauthorized immigrants, indebted college students, working mothers … schoolteachers …Obamacare enrollees …: a coalition of interest groups who may not always recognize each other as allies and who cannot automatically be relied upon to show up on voting day.

The Coalition of the Dependent!  That’s a slightly nightmarish, if not inaccurate, vision of politics of a modern campaign. But it’s not the speech that I’m reading here on the Web. Hillary’s actual text has plenty of appeals to “unity” and descriptions of how her leadership will bring both sides of the class divide together. She trumpets hidden “allies for change” in business and finance. She denounces “extreme partisanship,” while posing as the problem-solving middlewoman. (A few hours after the speech she triangulated on trade.) She’ll fight back — not against rich, white married GOPs, but “against those who would drive us apart.”  Hard to believe youthful Daily Kossacks will be satisfied with this version of 2004’s Fight Club progressivism. But then they are older now.

5) Nor did I see much of Brian Beutler’s anti-triangluation — the taking of aggressive “progressive issue positions” that expose half-hearted Republican moves to the center. Hillary hardly mentions the biggest of those aggressive positions (on immigration) and certainly doesn’t announce any new ones, whether on social insurance or general income redistribution. Not even an attack on the carried interest loophole. As predicted, Beutler’s lucky he wrote his piece before Hillary proved him wrong.

6) Worst sign of speeches to come: “Using additional fees and royalties from fossil fuel extraction to … ease the transition for distressed communities to a more diverse and sustainable economic future …” That was during the drum solo.

It’s not “dysfunction” just because your side loses: Substitute “comprehensive immigration reform” for “TPP” in the following paragraph from Paul Krugman and it’s equally right:

A brief aside: I don’t think it’s right to call this a case of Washington “dysfunction”. Dysfunction is when we get outcomes nobody wants, or fail to do things everyone wants done, because there doesn’t seem to be any way to package the politics. In this case, however, people who oppose TPP voted down key enabling measures — that is, they got what they wanted. Calling this “dysfunction” presumes that this deal is a good idea — and that kind of presumption is precisely what got successfully challenged yesterday. [E.A.]

Undernews Alert: Daily Caller‘s Patrick Howley asks former Hillary Clinton law partner Webb Hubbell if “he is actually Chelsea Clinton’s biological father” — and Hubbell says, “I’m not going to answer questions about that.” Huh? Why not just say, “No”? ….

I love how William Finnegan buys credibility with his New Yorker readers by sneering at  “conservative opponents of immigration reform” who worry that fast-tracked trade deals might undermine the nation’s ability to set immigration limits — even though that’s the same fear voiced by the respectable, liberal Economic Policy Institute. …

The Future Is Now: With Jake Tapper taking over CNN’s “State of the Union,” all the big Sunday chat shows now have solid hosts — Todd, Dickerson, Stephanopoulos, Tapper. It’s too good to last. Where is the corporate idiocy? Something very bad will happen soon. … P.S.: My viewer’s plea: Don’t try to “make news.”  If news happens, it happens. But there’s nothing more tedious than watching a host trying to get a Senator to say something he doesn’t want to say.  …

Paul Krugman did correctly sound the alarm about the 2008 housing crisis — and he’s been right about inflation (so far!).  But his review of his last decade’s hits and misses is something less than a ruthless self-inventory. Off the top of my head: He omits his argument that Timothy Geithners “stress tests” would not be enough to stabilize the financial system (an error he has admitted elsewhere) and his column declaring the V.A. health care system a “huge policy success.” …

“Today’s Democrat doesn’t need to worry about proving that she is tough on crime … “ [WaPo‘s Ruth Marcus]. Are we sure about that? Maybe check back after a few more months of De Blasioism and “blue flu” (a frequent after-effect of Ferguson-style protests) …

Corridors of Power, Now Moving at Warp Speed! From Tuesday’s Washington Post Ben Terris profile of Benny Johnson, who was once fired from Buzzfeed for plagiarism:

“D.C. has always been the city of second chances; now it just moves at meme speed. And no one can ride a meme like Benny Johnson.”

Helen Rogan, my magazine colleague a few decades ago, called this particular style of bad writing “The Hearty Hack.” The Post Style section once had a lot of it. I thought it had almost vanished. Good to see someone carrying on the tradition. … P.S.:  1) Has D.C. really been “the city of second chances”?  Janet Cooke, Stephen Glass, Gary Hart, Jack Abramoff, call your offices!  … 2) Terris says “Benny rebounded unusually quickly, fielding offers within weeks of his dismissal.” Weeks! In today’s wired world, moving at meme speed, don’t talented, newly unemployed people usually get offers within … I don’t know, nanoseconds? …  Backfill: Terris’ smarmy piece already provoked some controversy, summarized here. At kausfiles, you don’t ride meme. Meme ride you.  …

Stick to your guns, man! Those close to Jeb Bush

“would like to see him win at least one state in the opening primaries.” (WaPo 6/9/15)

So he is already waffling on his innovative “lose the primary” strategy….

New Republic‘s Brian Beutler praises Hillary Clinton for taking clear, aggressive, “progressive issue positions” that make voters wonder why Republicans take only  halfway positions. On immigration — one of his two examples — Hillary has embraced both forms of amnesty, legislative and executive. Republicans, meanwhile, muddle it up.  Beutler’s description:

Generally speaking, it’s not the liberalization of immigration law they oppose, but the unilateral nature of Obama’s actions. They oppose amnesty, but keep the door to a nebulous “legal status” ajar.

Aha! And why do they stop at nebulous “legal status”?

“When [Republicans] talk about legal status,” [Hillary] said, ‘that is code for second-class status.”

A forceful shot. But note that it only works against Republicans who take mealy-mouthed halfway positions (whether in an attempt to please donors or voters). It doesn’t really work against Republicans who say that in order to protect American workers they don’t want any legal status at all right now.

P.S.: I’m not sure it even works against Jeb Bush, Bush has comically prevaricated on the citizenship/”legal status” issue. But the semi-erotic fever of his passion for amnesty makes it obvious he’ll go for full citizenship as soon as he has the chance.

P.P.S.: Beutler contrasts Hillary’s new approach with traditional Clintonian triangulation, which in its classic form meant taking a middle stance and pushing off against both extremes. Hillary’s anti-triangulation is, instead, a way for the extremes to mow down whoever has wandered into the middle. But surely it also matters, once the No Man’s Land is denuded of life, whether Hillary’s polar position is more popular than the opposite polar position. On immigration, I doubt it  …

P.P.P.S: And how will Hillary extend her new approach to  “social insurance reforms,” as Beutler hopefully predicts? She will say she wants to make Social Security more generous. Republicans will say they don’t want it to go broke. Is that standoff such an obvious loser for the GOPs? Hillary may well have traction against Ryan-like voucherization plans — but that’s against the polar GOP postion, not the middle position. Good for Beutler that he wrote this piece now. …

Maybe immigration isn’t as big a factor as I’d thought. It’s a bigger factor!  “Tyler Durden” of ZeroHedge thinks he has made a discovery in the official job statistics — a discovery that explains

why America’s seemingly “booming” jobs recovery, which is “firing on all fours” according to the BLS, is not manifesting itself in either inflationary pressures [i.e. due to wage growth], or broad economic productivity.

The discovery is that the vast bulk of recent job growth has gone to immigrants, including illegal immigrants who have little power to ask for raises. Specifically, since the start of the 2007 Great Recession “the US has added 2.3 million “foreign-born” workers”, but only 727,000 “native born.” (This is according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own survey.)

This means that the “recovery” has almost entirely benefited foreign-born workers, to the tune fo 3 to 1 relative to native-born Americans! [Boldface not added!]

It would also explain why the politics of the “jobs recovery” is so problematic for Democrats. Disproportionately, voters ain’t ‘feeling it.’ (Plenty of foreign born workers are also voters, but the percentage who are has to be lower than that for native-born workers.)

Durden says he’s not taking sides in the immigration debate, just trying to “fill a gaping hole in economist models.”  …

P.S.: At first I thought Durden’s theory required there to have been a huge surge of new immigration (which, maybe, there has been). But it merely requires that foreign born workers, who may already have been in the U.S., get the lion’s share of new jobs. … Nor am I completely clear on why foreign-born labor would produce low labor productivity, unless the argument is that with so much cheap labor employers don’t have to make productivity-enhancing improvements. …

P.P.S.: We will now attempt to insert a dramatiic graph from Durden’s post:

At this point several readers made Whole Foods jokes … :The percentage of Americans “struggling to afford food” has hit a 7-year low — 15.8% — according to Gallup. That’s relatively good news. On the other hand, the same survey reports that almost 4% of Americans with incomes over $90,000 “struggled to afford food” in the past year, suggesting … I dunno … that there are things about this survey that aren’t as clear as they seem (and probably that the survey overstates the hunger problem). …

“#BlackLivesMatter”?: Only about 5% of black teen male dropouts from poor families are employed, according to this 2013 interview with economist Andrew Sum. That doesn’t mean a 95% unemployment rate — many aren’t in the labor market all. Still. Sean McElwee of Demos calls it “one of the most viscerally jarring statistics I’ve ever read.”

Teenage employment used to be higher, Sum notes. Why did it collapse?  One reason, he says, is that after the 2001 recession, the jobs that teenagers had once gotten instead went to “older workers & immgrants.” Less skilled, younger, and black workers are typically the people most adversely affected by the arrival of lower-skilled immigrants — this is just a pointed example of that general rule of thumb. It’s simply astounding that a president of Obama’s declared sympathies would, when faced with this situation, want more immigration to fill the jobs that poor black teenagers used to get. What’s he going to tell them? ‘Go back to school’?** School hasn’t helped them, and the payoffs from school are far off in the future. A job would have an immediate payoff. And work itself is socializing. It can succeed where public schools fail. In a tight labor market, employers would have to compete to figure out how to bring marginal workers into the mainstream economy.

I would bet on market ingenuity over public schools. But first, the easy path — importing desperate hard-working Third Worlders to fill employer demand — has to be closed off, at least temporarily. …

__________

** — That’s basically what he tells workers who lose their jobs due to trade (who also tend to be less skilled).  “[W]e’ve got to provide help to transition, and to re-tool and adapt …” It’s easier to say that to people who’ve been in the work force. It’s less likely to be effective advice for teenage dropouts who’ve never been part of the mainstream economy. How do you “re-tool” when you haven’t tooled in the first place? Wouldn’t it be good to have a decent supply of jobs that don’t require “tooling” at all?

Pay to Play? National Journal has just announced an event, “Pathways to Reform: A Discussion on High-Skilled Immigration Policy.” Underwritten by Qualcomm, which of course has a corporate interest in increasing the supply of high-skilled immigrant labor. That’s a not uncontroversial position, given the unemployment rate among skilled current residents of the U.S.. Yet of the seven “key stakeholders and experts” on the panel, I count seven supporters of more high-skilled immigration, and zero skeptics. Should be a “robust discussion.”

I have several friends who work for the National Journal and Atlantic.  They’re usually sticklers for ethics. So I ‘d ask them: Isn’t it corrupt of National Journal to seemingly rent out to Qualcomm not only the prestige of its name, but its credibility — as if this panel represented the real diversity of national opinion on the issue, in National Journal’s estimation. (If that really is their estimation, Lord help them.)  It’s also amazingly unsavvy of Qualcomm’s D.C. office not to take the risk of including even a token dissenter on the panel. Is their argument that weak?

I always thought the Atlantic/National Journal model was to have a reasonable panel, plus a bonus corporate lobbyist panelist who happens to have contributed to the bottom line. This seems different — an entirely artificial, hermetically curated event, a fake debate. …

Once dunned twice shy, baby: Here’s the New York Times quotation of the day, from Hillary advisor Harold Ickes, who is apparently having trouble finding “Democratic donors who can give $5 million or even $10 million each” to a pro-Hillary SuperPac (which would be formally independent of the official Hillary campaign):

“Our side isn’t used to being asked for that kind of money. If you asked them to put up $100 million for a hospital wing, they’d be the first in line.”

Hmm. Why might Ickes find it hard to recruit rich Democrats for a SuperPac to elect Hillary in 2016? Maybe because rich Dems were pushed into giving millions to Ickes’ unofficial PAC (the Media Fund) to elect a Democrat in 2004 –– remember the “mandatory” meeting of Hollywood libs? — and felt the money was largely wasted. It certainly didn’t elect John Kerry. Early on, Ickes even got in a sniping match with Kerry’s official campaign — the sort of SuperPAC  vs. candidate discord that may be our best hope in a Citizens United world, but that the donors might fail to appreciate. A hospital wing probably seems a better bet. …

Peggy Noonan suggests a question for Hillary:

“Broad amnesty would worsen chronic unemployment and is in that sense a way of giving up, and on our own people, many of whom were blasted out of manufacturing jobs by globalist hacks in Washington—but it will keep wages down, give you a feeling of creamy moral goodness and nail down the Hispanic vote, so all good, right?”

Right. I detect incipient Moe Tuckerism! Can’t business be pleasantly surprised that Americans stood for globalized trade, and not try to also import the world to bid down pay in the few unskilled jobs that still have to be performed here? …

Mick Jagger talks about how he, Mick Jagger, came up with “Moonlight Mile” on his guitar, and worries that Keith Richards’ new guitar additions may make the live version “too cluttered.” It’s lucky there’s no rivalry between those two, because if there was this might cause tension. …

Byron York notes that the Presidential Records Act bans a president from using an un-official e-mail system unless the messages are then properly archived. He suspects President Hillary couldn’t be made to obey this law. Maybe. Certainly she shouldn’t be above the law. But it should also be noted that this particular law is insane. Decisionmakers — from presidents to parents — need a private zone of honesty where they can say what they really think. That used to be done in person, and over the telephone. Now it’s done through e-mails. Making all e-mails subject to disclosure, even decades down the road, just forces people to search for other, inevitably more cumbersome, ways to have the real conversatons that matter (as opposed to BS for-public-consumption discussions). When a Benghazi hits, do you want the Secretary of State focused on protecting American interests (actions for which she will be judged by voters) or protecting her own reputation in the archives? … It’s the Sunshine Fallacy, the idea that all human activities can be completely and accurately recorded for the public without humans reacting (in counterproductive ways) to all that public data collection. Obvious analogy: Heisenberg Principle. Cultural reductio ad absurdum: “We Live in Public.” …

Another way of putting it: The Records Act is the equivalent requiring a White House taping system, for the benefit of historians. Wasn’t the discovery of Nixon and Johnson’s taping system a huge scandal? When did historians become the most important people in the world?….

Jordan Fabian’s story in The Hill on the 5th Circuit’s immigration decision quotes four “advocates” of Obama’s amnesty (Fitz, Hincapie, Leopold, Smith) and zero people who oppose it — i.e. the side that won. This is standard procedure in MSM immigration reporting. The conventional rules (“talk to both sides”)  don’t apply. I’m not quite sure why it happens. Is it because a) Everyone knows there is only one credible side on the amnesty issue and anyone who opposes it is really too much of a nativist yahoo to quote (unless you’re quoting Steve King to mock him); b) The advocates’ phone numbers are the only ones journalists have — that’s who immigration beat reporters hang out with; or c) the advocates are the ones initiating the stories, and they might stop feeding them to you if you call the other side? …  All of the above, obviously. But I think (c) is often overlooked. …