David Cay Johnston has been writing a lot of great stuff over at Al Jazeera America. This last week he wrote, Flat Wages Show the US Doesn’t Have a Labor Market. That’s quite a thing for a conservative to say. But that’s one of the things that is so great about Johnston: he doesn’t follow the herd. He is, fundamentally, conservative. But he isn’t partisan. The person I most associate him with is Dean Baker. The fact is that even though they come at problems from different points of view, they both are interested in the common good. And they see that our system does not facilitate that.

In this article, Johnston focuses on the Supreme Court’s definition of a market. He wrote, “The high court has held that a market requires a buyer (employer) and seller (worker) acting without coercion and a reasonable command of the facts reaching an agreement on price (pay).” This is really critical. We have a tendency to be really loose when it comes to this kind of stuff. But not any system where goods and services are transferred is a market. No one would say that a mafia protection scheme is a market, even though a service (not getting beaten up or killed) is exchanged for money. Coercion really is key.

So let’s look at labor. Is it a market in this sense? Not at all. It is totally coercive. I’ve talked about this a lot. People don’t have a choice but to have a job. We are all born into the Monopoly game with all the properties already sold. So we can’t just farm a fallow field or hunt. Nor can we just cut down some trees and build a house. These are all options that civilization has taken away. But in the conservative mind (and even more, the libertarian mind), civilization owes nothing to the individual. Rights have been taken away and not replaced, but they think it is “natural.”

But we can see that there is no labor market just by the outcome. Macroeconomics is nothing but feedbacks. So wealth should be something that is constantly circling around the economy. But it largely isn’t. Other than the late 1990s, when has the the US economy reached full employment? You’d have to go back more than a generation. Full employment is the exception, not the rule. And this means that workers have basically no leverage in the economy: there are always more people than jobs. And the end result is that money piles up with people who already have large piles.

Johnston puts forth two ideas[1] on how we could go about creating a labor market in this country. The first is to raise the minimum wage. I’m for that. But it is also the case that it is a remedy that doesn’t fix the underlying problem. Clearly it should be done, however. Second, is that we should encourage the creation of labor unions. This is the core of the issue. And from my perspective, we should mandate labor unions. When I was a libertarian, I used to argue this. You couldn’t have management able to organize as a unit and not have labor do the same thing. Almost no libertarians believe this, because they don’t actually believe in “free markets and free minds”; they just hate workers. (Note how popular libertarianism is among upper middle class white college graduates.)

But the Republicans are not willing to touch this stuff. And to be honest, the Democrats are fairly squishy on it as well. But these are things that we should all agree on. In particular, the minimum wage is something that even majorities of Republicans believe in. Really, it all comes down to accountability. Johnston wrote, “Congress will act only when voters make the reelection of representatives depend on raising wages.” That’s true. The problem is that too many of the people affected are too busy working second and third jobs to show up at the polls.

[1] He talked about a third one, but it is fairly technical: labor inspectors. It’s important though.

You probably heard the sad news, Former President Jimmy Carter Reveals Cancer Diagnosis. While it is true that he’s 90 years old, I still had hoped that he would be around for many more years. But we can be grateful that it is his body and not his mind that is being attacked. I always thought Ronald Reagan’s last years were tragic — alive but dead in a public sense — and a personal sense.

The one thing I really didn’t like about Carter’s presidency was his return of the Cold War. In that way, both Nixon and Reagan were more liberal than he was. And there is an interesting irony today, where the Republican Party is much closer to Carter with regard to Russia and China, than they are to Reagan. But in their minds, Carter was some foreign policy wimp. But it shouldn’t come as much of a shock that they are a bunch of idiots who don’t know a thing about history.

What everyone will admit is that Carter is a man of integrity. Sadly, Republicans now think that being a total jerk and unethical to boot is a prerequisite for political power (and they wonder why Trump is doing so well). As a result, it is what makes Carter great that they see as disqualifying. But even they will admit that he isn’t a liar. But they hate some of the things that he says — precisely because they are true. Consider this, for example:

At this point, I don’t think that anyone — including Carter himself — knows what the prognosis is. But it doesn’t sound good. He had gone in to have a growth on his liver removed. Once inside, doctors found that he had cancer and that it had spread to multiple parts of his body. So I’m thinking he only has about a year.

It’s a good opportunity for the nation to reevaluate his presidency. Because just as Ronald Reagan’s is almost completely mythical in its laudatory content, Carter’s is equally mythical in its disparagement. Carter was actually a very good president during very difficult times. And Reagan is wrongly given credit for a great deal of the good that Carter did. He was the prototype of the modern Democratic president: competent and realistic without a great deal of ideology. That’s pretty much the opposite of the modern Republican president. Carter is a national treasure, and more people ought to realize that.

I hope that Carter somehow makes a recovery and that we have him around for many more years to come.

Afterword

Based upon the title of this article, I did a Google search and came up with a couple of articles you might want to check out:

Jimmy Carter Was a Lot Better President Than Almost Anyone Ever Admits
A President’s Day Reconsideration: Jimmy Carter

It seems that the FBI has found two top secret documents on Hillary Clinton’s email server. In the most fundamental sense, I don’t especially care. Our government does almost nothing but classify documents. At this point, I assume even top secret ones are nothing but embarrassing information. I’m sure that in a century historians will have a lot of fun going through them. They’re going to say, “This government really didn’t want it’s people to know what was going on!” Because that is what the vast majority of classification is all about: stopping the American people from knowing the things that their government is doing.

But the other side of this is that Clinton hasn’t exactly been a supporter of transparency. She is definitely behind the surveillance state. So it is hard to be too sympathetic to her. And there is the other issue of inequality in America. Clinton will almost certainly not be prosecuted for this. That isn’t because she’s Hillary Clinton. In fact, her being Hillary Clinton is probably the only thing that makes me hedge my bet slightly. She’s part of the power elite. She’s like David Petraeus, and we don’t go after people with actual power. There are always apologists around to explain how the law shouldn’t apply to them.

Glenn Greenwald wrote a typically excellent article about this divide, Hillary Clinton on the Sanctity of Protecting Classified Information. He mentioned a number of people who the administration moved heaven and earth to go after for the most minor of “crimes.” That includes people like Thomas Andrews Drake, who as is typical, had almost a dozen charges dumped on him, only to end up pleading to “one misdemeanor count for exceeding authorized use of a computer.”

The focus of Greenwald’s article is on Chelsea Manning. None of the documents she released were top secret. They were simply classified. And as Greenwald noted:

But Clinton wasn’t understanding of Manning’s actions. At the time she said, “I think that in an age where so much information is flying through cyberspace, we all have to be aware of the fact that some information which is sensitive, which does affect the security of individuals and relationships, deserves to be protected and we will continue to take necessary steps to do so.” But that’s the irony. When someone like Manning releases classified documents as an act of what she (and I) think is the public good, it is seen as the worst possible thing. But when someone like Clinton releases them out of incompetence or laziness, well, we all make mistakes.

Of course, the Republicans are going to have a field day with this. But that’s just partisanship. If Clinton were a Republican, Fox News would spend the day spinning it as No Big Deal. Instead, it will spend the day spinning it as the Worst Thing Ever. And maybe this scandal will hurt Clinton in the presidential election. I don’t actually think anyone but the partisans care. Most people are with me in believing that classified documents are mostly a crock. In the end, the economy will trump all.

As for me, all this shows about Clinton is that she’s something of a hypocrite, which is not news. It’s much more important in what it says about our political system. We are not, as John Adams claimed, “A government of laws, and not of men.” Who you are is far more important than what you do with regards to the judicial system.

Last Friday, Dean Baker wrote, Job Growth Remains Strong in July. He actually wrote that the jobs report is “moderately positive,” which, if you know anything about Baker, is high praise. But it isn’t anything especially great. It is just that the economy is continuing to grow as it has been. And wage growth is poor. If we look at the last three months, wages are less than 2% higher than they were during the same period a year ago. Accounting for inflation, that’s an increase of about 1%. So we are hardly seeing liftoff with pay. And this is with over a decade and a half since the middle class has seen much of any increase in wages.

Most people know that the standard unemployment rate — 5.3% right now — doesn’t mean much. It doesn’t include people who want jobs but have simply given up looking. And it doesn’t include people who are working part time but want to work full time. The best way to look at employment is with the Employment-to-Population Ratio, which is bizarrely abbreviated EPOP. And it paints a very disturbing picture of the economy. The standard one uses all employees. But this one shows only prime age men (25-54), in order to cut out demographic factors (aging workforce).

What most disturbs me about this is that our peaks seem to be going down over time. And if you look at numbers dating back to the 1950s, it is even worse. The number stayed pretty constant until the late 1960s, and then it has been all down hill from there. This is largely due to women entering the work force. But this only makes the case that much more strongly. It used to be that families could better support themselves with a single paycheck. That’s just not so anymore. Regardless, the EPOP for all workers peaked at 81.5% in 2000 and is down to 76.7% as of last year. And it looks like we are headed for a new (lower) normal.

What’s so aggravating about this is that despite the data, there is still a constant push to slow down the economy. The claim is that inflation is about to take off. Well, let’s consider that for a moment. The Federal Reserve is supposed to have a 2% inflation target. The idea is that sometimes it will be a little above that and sometimes a little below, but overall: 2%. Now I think that is too low. I think our target should be more like 3% or 4%. The 2% target is just something that Alan Greenspan pulled out of the air. But it is certainly the case that a 2% inflation target is better for the rich and a 4% target is better for workers. So you decide what is really going on.

But the Fed can’t even manage to meet its 2% inflation target. The inflation rate of the last year was only 0.8%. The inflation rate of the first six months of this year has has been slightly negative. Now, I understand: what the Fed does is hard. It is not always possible to get the inflation where it ought to be. But the question on my mind is why the Fed has been making noises about raising interest rates for the last year. I would think they would be freaking out about the low inflation, not looking for ways to slow the economy down. If ever there was a time to push for increased wages and some inflation, it is now.

It doesn’t matter, apparently. The Federal Reserve is not just supposed to keep inflation low, it is supposed to keep unemployment low too. But as Matt Yglesias asked several years ago when Ben Bernanke was the Fed chair with unemployment at 8.2% and inflation less than 2%, “If the unemployment and inflation rates were reversed, would the Fed do something about it?” It’s a rhetorical question, because we all know it would have been working night and day on the problem. But the fact that poor people who no one on the Fed knows aren’t able to find jobs is never a pressing issue.

Last week was the end of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. I don’t think that I’ve missed an episode in the last six years. It was a good show — very funny and reasonably well informed. And we will see if The Daily Show With Trevor Noah manages to maintain the level of quality. But I don’t suspect that it much matters. I feel the same way about Jon Stewart that my father’s generation felt about Johnny Carson. It isn’t that I thought he was that great, but I liked hanging out with him and seeing his perspective.

On the last show, Stewart spent one segment actually talking about politics. But it was actually what I most dislike about him, Three Different Kinds of Bulls**t. He starts out, “Bullshit is everywhere.” But that’s not really true. Or if it is, then it is a totally pointless observation. If you really think that everyone lies, then it isn’t worth mentioning. It’s like saying, “Food is everywhere.” But I take his point: people pile it on to make unappetizing things seem appetizing. And when we don’t call it out, we allow ourselves to be manipulated. People were indeed more likely to support the “Patriot Act” than the “Security State Liberty Killing Act.”

But somehow, he gets from that to claiming that Dodd-Frank is nonsense because it could have just been, “Banks shouldn’t be able to bet on red.” This is the easiest kind of commentary, which is found all over Fox News. How many times have we heard that Obamacare is bad because it is 33,000 pages? As though complexity is necessarily a bad thing. Why are laws complex? Certainly part of the reason is corruption. But the main reason is simply that laws need to be clear so that they can be applied equally.

Dodd-Frank is not the law that I wanted. But noting that it is 2,300 pages long is not only a specious argument against it, it is also completely without content. No one becomes more informed by being told that bills in Congress are long. What’s more, it seems to give ignorant viewers a pass, “You don’t need to know what is in this bill, because they made it too long.” And The Daily Show was at its worst when it used this kind of contentless carping and easy “centrism” with its implication that if we all just chose to get along all would be well.

Just the same, I would never complain that Dennis Miller’s political comedy lacked substance. All he has to offer are jokes based upon pointed ignorance of what’s really going on in the world — the intent to see everything in the most simple minded way possible. Jon Stewart, on the other hand, was usually far better. When he encountered “bullshit,” he usually dug into it and presented at least a fair amount of the truth that it obscured. And that’s why the media ecosystem will be a lot worse off with him gone. I expect that Trevor Noah is going to be a lot like Larry Wilmore: funny but not terribly interested in digging down into the “bullshit,” except to find a joke or two.

Luckily, we still have John Oliver.

Robert Reich made a really good video about the Federal Reserve. I don’t pay that much attention to Reich anymore, because I fully understand everything he has to say. But he really is a great communicator. And unlike a lot of people, he doesn’t lose site of what most people — even politically engaged people — know. I know that I often take stuff for granted when writing about politics and economics. It’s easy enough to do when you spend so much time reading other writers who know as much or more than you do. But a lot of these issues are really important and not widely understood.

The Federal Reserve is an especially important and obscure topic. It’s important because it really does determine if you are going to get a raise — or even have a job. And it is obscure because very few people know what it does. There was the time during the 2004 Democratic debate when Al Sharpton totally blew a question about what the Fed does. So let me clear that up: the Fed controls the flow of money in the economy. Yeah, it does other things. But that’s the most important. And it is in this regard, that it has the power to decide if you have a job or not.

The two things that the Fed looks at are employment and inflation. But given whose interests the Fed actually looks after, it is far more focused on the latter issue. Everyone in the power elite seems constantly concerned that we are going to go back to the mid and late 1970s when inflation got almost as high as 15%. But the Fed was able to fix this by increasing unemployment. So it isn’t necessary now to “head off” inflation by killing jobs ahead of time.

The other thing about the economy of the 1970s is that the inflation problems were mostly the result of oil price shocks. So how is that an issue right now? It isn’t. What’s really going on is that the power elite think that it is much safer to allow American workers to continue to see their wages stagnate and to lose jobs rather than for the rich to see the slightest threat to their wealth. And that is what this is really all about. Like so much else in the United States, workers have accepted the world view of the power elite, even though it is not in the interests of workers.

What Reich talks about in this video is that the Federal Reserve should not raise interest rates until we clearly see inflation. It does seem to be the case that the Fed desperately wants to raise rates. They are just looking for an excuse to do it. But they haven’t raised rates because there is literally no indication of inflation. Worker wages are not going up. But to me, it is as simple as this: our unemployment rate is 5.3%. This is almost certainly artificially low because of involuntary part-time workers and others who have just given up looking for a job because they can’t find one. But even if that wasn’t the case, in 2000, the unemployment rate got down to below 4%, yet we didn’t have inflation. It makes no sense that the Fed can remember back 40 years, but can’t remember back 15 years.

Check out the video, it is very informative — and entertaining.