Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Wed. Nov. 18



 
The Blast may be on hiatus tomorrow.  If so, it should return Friday.
 
 
 
 
AROUND NEW HAMPSHIRE
 
 
 
 
1.  Upcoming Event
 
Laconia Democrats Meeting
 
Thursday, November 18
6:00 pm
Unitarian Universalist Church, 172 Pleasant St
 
We will be discussing plans to support candidates for Laconia state representative races. 
 
 
 
 
2.  In Concord Today
 
 
Special session today to address drug abuse in NH
 
by Garry Rayno,   unionleader.com,   November 18, 2015
 
CONCORD — Lawmakers today are expected to approve a 26-member task force to review legislation to address the state opioid epidemic during a special session.

The task force of 15 Republicans and 11 Democrats would work from next week to the first week of January to refine legislation House and Senate leaders hope to have on Gov. Maggie Hassan’s desk by the middle to the end of January.

Republican leaders concede those bills are likely to have unanimous consent such as making the penalties for distributing fentanyl — currently causing more overdose deaths than heroin — the same as heroin, standardizing insurance authorization for substance abuse treatment, and enhancing the state’s drug monitoring program.

Money bills will take a little longer said Senate Majority Leader Jeb Bradley, R-Wolfeboro, until lawmakers have a better idea of the state’s financial picture. “Those bills will have the normal cleansing by the Senate and House,” Bradley said, meaning they are likely to be heard by two committees in each body.

Those bills include money for additional drug courts beyond the current five, adding a position in the Attorney General’s office to focus on drug crimes and additional money for the Governor’s Commission on Drug and Alcohol Abuse Prevention, Treatment and Recovery.

Bradley said while there is largely agreement on those plans, they will take a little more time to go through the process.

What is expected to take more time to reach agreement is revamping the prescription writing rules. Bradley said prescribers need to be at the table as lawmakers review the potential changes.

Hassan went to the Executive Council to approve the special session after Senate President Chuck Morse, R-Salem, and House Speaker Shawn Jasper, R-Hudson, declined to agree to a special session.

Hassan proposed legislation last week to deal with the crisis and the next day the Republican leadership in the House and Senate said they would not take up her bill but would instead ask lawmakers to appoint a task force to vet proposed legislation and report back the first week of January.

Hassan released a comprehensive package ranging from making penalties for fentanyl distribution the same as heroin to increasing funding for the Governor’s Commission on Drug and Alcohol Abuse Prevention, Treatment and Recovery, the resolution focused on six areas, all of which are less included in the governor’s proposed legislation.

House Speaker Shawn Jasper, R-Hudson, said the resolution was drafted with the understanding that all issues related to the heroin and opioid epidemic would be discussed, not just the six listed.

Bradley said much the same, that the resolution was broad enough to discuss many proposals to deal with the drug crisis.

If the legislation passes, the task force will meet next week.

“We’ve made it very clear we will set up our committees next week and start meeting right away,” Morse said Tuesday. “The speaker and I will agree on the bills we will fast track through the hearing and voting process.”

Democrats are expected to try to add several other areas of study to the resolution, particularly in the Senate.

Wednesday’s session will being at noon in the House, a time change from the original 10 a.m. start time, where the resolution will be introduced. If it passes, it will move to the Senate — which meets at 1 p.m.
 
 
[Update:
Substance abuse task force passed 290-46 by House
Senate unanimously approves substance abuse task force, preliminary report will be due Dec. 21   ]
 
 
 
 
3.  Republican Games on the Executive Council
 
 
N.H. Executive Council’s Legal Blinders
 
Editorial,   vnews.com,   November 17, 2015
 
Ignorance of the law may be no excuse, but it does exist even at the highest levels of government, as the New Hampshire Executive Council convincingly demonstrated earlier this month in rejecting the nomination of Dorothy Graham to be a Superior Court judge.
Graham, nominated to the bench by Gov. Maggie Hassan, has represented indigent clients as a public defender for 20 years, earning high marks from, among others, Manchester Police Chief Enoch F. Willard. In a letter of recommendation to the Executive Council, Willard wrote that she “possesses the qualities I feel are essential in a judge: patience, wisdom, courage, alertness, incorruptibility and the gifts of sympathy and insight.” If that weren’t enough, he added that “she is of unquestioned integrity, honesty and her commitment to fairness is absolute.” This, mind you, from someone whose officers interact with Graham primarily as witnesses for the prosecution.
This was not enough to impress the Executive Council, which rejected the nomination on a 3-2 vote along party lines. The three Republican members of the council, Chris Sununu, David Wheeler and Joe Kenney, whose district includes the Upper Valley, all voted against Graham.
For his part, Sununu claimed that his vote was predicated on his belief that judges ought to come from the ranks of prosecutors. “I do have concerns about the fact that she’s only been a public defender for the vast majority, if not her entire career,” Sununu said. “I do usually like to see someone with more prosecutorial background.” This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the legal system, of what lawyers do and how they think. Lawyers represent clients to the best of their ability, no matter which side of a case they are on. What’s relevant to choosing judges is not which side they’ve represented during their career, but the qualities of intellect and temperament they have displayed and the depth of their commitment to fairness.
Public defenders are typically underpaid, overworked and highly stressed. Most could be making a lot more money in private practice. That they instead choose public service is a high recommendation for the bench.
If anything, the ignorance evinced by Wheeler and Kenney made Sununu look by comparison like the second coming of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. They said they voted against Graham because she had represented sex offenders on appeal, apparently on the basis of an article on a conservative website that claimed Graham “had a history of trying to get child rapists off on technicalities.”
News flash for Wheeler and Kenney: Public defenders don’t choose their clients; they are assigned to them. And as lawyers, they are ethically bound to represent those clients with all the skill and devotion at their command. Because the legal system is adversarial, it depends on effective and zealous advocacy on behalf of both the state and those accused of committing crimes against it. Moreover, there are no such things as “technicalities” when a defendant’s liberty is at issue. The Constitution guarantees due process to all, and any failing in that regard is fundamental, not technical.
There is, of course, another explanation for the votes of Sununu, Wheeler and Kenney, and it’s even worse: that they voted against an apparently well-qualified judicial nominee in a clumsy attempt to embarrass Hassan, a Democrat who is challenging Republican incumbent Kelly Ayotte for her U.S. Senate seat next fall. We’d prefer to stick with the ignorance explanation, even if it’s no excuse.
 
 
 
4.  New Keno Bill
 
 
KENO COMEBACK IN 2016?
 
by staff,   lfda.org,   November 18, 2015
 
The House Ways and Means Committee is recommending a bill to establish keno in New Hampshire in  2016. 
 
Keno is a lottery game offered in bars and some other establishments that serve alcohol. A player selects numbers on a slip, and a computer generates random numbers every four minutes. The player gets a payout for matching numbers from the computer and the slip.
 
Under the 2016 keno bill, a town or city must vote in favor of allowing keno before any establishment applies for a $500 keno license from the state.
 
Roughly 90% of keno profits would then go to school funding.
 
The Lottery Commission can't know for sure how many towns would approve keno or how many establishments would apply for keno licenses. However, the Commission estimates that keno would generate roughly $8.4 million annually for school funding. 
 
Keno supporters note that Massachusetts already offers keno at restaurants and bars. They argue New Hampshire is losing out on revenue when Granite Staters cross the border to play.
 
Keno opponents argue that the game is too similar to the instant gratification of slot machines.
 
 
 
 
5.  Changes to the State's Forfeiture Law?
 
 
NH's forfeiture laws getting a hard look
 
by Dave Solomon,   unionleader.com,   November 7, 2015
 
There are probably no two people more different than retired Rockingham County Attorney Jim Reams and convicted murderer Dickens Etienne of Manchester.

But they have one thing in common. Both are being used as examples of why New Hampshire needs to change its laws on civil forfeiture — the process by which criminals, or alleged criminals, are denied the fruits of their illegal activities.

Etienne, serving a life sentence for shooting 25-year-old rival Larry Lemieux in the back of the head in 2004, has been trying for more than a decade to recover $9,800 taken from his apartment by Manchester police on the day of his arrest. The case eventually reached the state Supreme Court, which in August ruled against Etienne, even though there was never any allegation that the money and the murder were connected.

The Supreme Court agreed with the lower court that the money must have been obtained illegally because Etienne, who claimed the cash as gambling receipts, was essentially a professional criminal who had no legal way to earn the money.

Reams was under investigation by the attorney general's office for misconduct in office. According to Attorney General Joseph Foster's 2014 “complaint for removal,” Reams created a forfeiture account that he alone controlled, spending nearly $250,000 over 10 years that Foster said was not allowed by law. Facing removal proceedings, Reams retired in June of last year.

Both cases have been cited by proponents of House Bill 636, the second attempt in the past five years to reform civil forfeiture in New Hampshire, which is one of several states that do not require a criminal conviction before proceeding with a civil forfeiture process.

Follow the money

Proponents of the change want to make conviction mandatory before assets can be taken by law enforcement, and they want any assets that are legally forfeited to go into the state's general fund, rather than into the hands of local law enforcement agencies to spend at their discretion.

Law enforcement, from the attorney general on down to local police departments, is vehemently opposed and succeeded in having a similar effort defeated in 2011. The legislation was brought back earlier this year, and referred to committee for further study.

That can be death for any bill, but the sponsors of HB 636 persisted through a committee review. They came back in the fall with a slightly revised version of the measure that the House Judiciary Committee supports. The committee voted 14-5 two weeks ago to send the bill to the full House, where it is likely to be approved and sent to the Senate.

“In the study process, we distilled our recommendations to four easily understood principles that people can agree or disagree with, and the legislation will rise or fall on that basis,” said state Rep. Paul Berch, D-Westmoreland, an architect of the revised bill.

Four principles

The first principle is that a criminal conviction is required as a prerequisite to a civil forfeiture. Second, the standard of proof in a forfeiture case has been elevated to “clear and convincing evidence” that the assets are the result of a crime or were used in a crime, as opposed to the existing standard of “more likely than not.”

The third principle protects the rights of innocent property owners caught in the crossfire of illegal activity, such as the owner of an automobile stolen to commit a crime.

The fourth, and most contentious aspect of the reform, is to put the forfeited property or cash into the state's general fund.

There appears to be consensus among all stakeholders on the first three points, but No. 4 could bring the bill down.

“There is an important principle that this bill supports,” said Berch, “and that is that it is the job of the police to solve crimes and arrest suspects, and for prosecutors to prosecute when appropriate. It is the job of the Legislature to appropriate funds.”

AG's objection

Senior Assistant Attorney General James Vera testified against the bill in its original version, and plans to oppose the revised version as well, largely on the basis of who gets the money.

“We're in a drug crisis in this state as you certainly know,” he said, citing the oft-heard concern that the money police confiscate in arresting drug dealers in particular is desperately needed as a weapon in combating the opioid crisis, particularly because it is often used by undercover officers to make drug buys.

Vera handles the criminal forfeiture cases at the Justice Department, and provided details on five randomly selected forfeiture cases in the last two years, all of which ultimately resulted in criminal convictions. No one on either side of the debate could point to a situation in New Hampshire where someone had property seized and was later exonerated.

“We don't object to the need for a criminal conviction before forfeiture could take place,” Vera said. “The issue frankly is where the money is going.”

The amount of money at stake is relatively small, which has supporters of the change scratching their heads about the intensity of the opposition.

Amount at issue

Last year, 31 separate state forfeiture cases yielded about $58,000, which according to current law was split 45 percent to the local or county law enforcement agency, 45 percent to the state Department of Justice, and 10 percent to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Although $1 million or more can be seized in any given year, most of that is seized by federal agencies like DEA, and subject to the federal forfeiture laws. New Hampshire has been netting about $50,000 to $60,000 a year.

“I don't know why they (law enforcement) are so strongly opposed,” said state Rep. Michael Sylvia, R-Belmont, who chaired the subcommittee responsible for the most recent rewrite. “They are spending as much on lobbying as the amount of money at issue. It's kind of ridiculous. It suggests to me that there is something more going on here.”

Tilton Police Chief Robert Cormier, president of the N.H. Association of Chiefs of Police, said there is no mystery about the value of the money in fighting a drug epidemic.

“It goes back into the drug cases themselves. It doesn't go to the agencies,” he said. “To do an undercover investigation and get a prosecution, you usually have to make at least three buys. You take the money from a forfeiture case and reinvest it into the next case.”

Turning the money over to the state and hoping for an appropriation to an undercover drug purchase fund is an uncertain proposition, at best, he said.

“Would the small towns still get money?” he asked, “and what would the mechanism be to get the money. If we get a tip, we need quick turnaround. Some times you only have one chance in two hours to make a buy. Right now with the heroin epidemic and the drug crisis, to lose the ability to put these buys together would cripple us.”
 
 
 
 
6.  From Under Another TinFoil Hat
 
 
Pitfalls of a 400 Member Legislature, Part Two
 
by Susan Bruce,   susanthebruce.blogspot.com,   November 17, 2015
 
 
Max Abramson is a member of the Free State Project, the group of armed libertarian miscreants that intend to take over and dismantle the NH state government, then threaten to secede from the US. He's also an elected state representative from the town of Seabrook. This is a screenshot of a comment he left at a story at the Union Leader newspaper. The UL is one of the propaganda arms (along with WMUR) of the NH GOP. 

The 10,000 refugees he mentions are the sum total of ALL Syrian refugees slated to come to the US in the next 12 months. 10,000 for the entire country. Not the state of NH. 

Also, only US citizens can vote in US elections. 

Felonious Max is deliberately spreading dishonesty and deliberately fearmongering, just like his GOP colleague Dick Marple. We should expect better from our elected officials. 


This is another instance of what you get when you have a 400 member volunteer legislature.  
 
 
 
 
 
AND NATIONALLY
 
 
 
 
 
7.  Denier Myths and Roots
 
 
Five Republican Delusions About the Environment
 
by Rebecca Leber,   newrepublic.com,   October 26, 2015
 
When climate change and energy policy come up in Wednesday's Republican presidential debate, you can expect the candidates to describe a world that doesn't much resemble the one we live in. While the climate crisis received prominent billing in the first Democratic debate and inspired an unusually healthy discussion of real-life solutions, Republicans have charged ahead with energy plans that hardly recognize current reality.
The GOP’s attitude toward energy and environment might best be summed up by a recent comment Donald Trump made to Fox News’s Chris Wallace. Trump said he would cut virtually all of the funds going to the Environmental Protection Agency, an action he insisted would have no repercussions. “We’ll be fine with the environment,” he said.
The rest of the candidates apply the same “we’ll be fine” attitude as they also call for gutting much of America’s regulatory apparatus—and as they ignore, more broadly, what's happening to the planet. In the last few weeks, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and John Kasich have released their energy platforms; Ted Cruz and Bobby Jindal offered their plans way back in 2014. Their policy prescriptions could have just as easily come from last century—even as the rest of the world is finally getting serious about climate change and clean energy. 
These candidates need a reality check—five of them, in fact:  

1. Actually, climate change is a problem.

We're long past due for a Republican to offer some kind of plan for addressing out-of-control greenhouse gas pollution. The presidential candidates will talk all day about how they will reverse President Obama's landmark restrictions on carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants, called the Clean Power Plan, and pull the U.S. out of a pending global climate deal. But even the small minority who, like Jeb Bush, will admit out loud that climate change is a threat refuse to propose any action that could help address it. That might be what the conservative base in Iowa demands, but the candidates are out of step even with their own party: One poll conducted by prominent conservative pollsters found that 54 percent of GOP voters support a revenue-neutral carbon tax and renewable energy tax credits. 

2. We cannot drill our way to energy independence. 

For decades now, ever since President Richard Nixon pledged to make it happen, just about every Republican—joined by many Democrats—has promised energy independence. Republicans say that by opening all of the public lands and the entire ocean for fossil fuel development, America would no longer have to rely on oil from the Middle East. It’s a false promise, because the U.S. will still be just as susceptible to global oil price shocks, and will likely remain a net importer, even if more of our oil is being produced in North America. Meanwhile, Republicans ignore the other half of the equation to achieving something near energy independence—efficiency measures like raised mileage standards for cars that cut Americans’ demand for oil in the first place.

3. The clean energy industry isn't some fantasy Al Gore dreamed up.

Republicans'  are casting their "drill, drill, drill" vision of achieving energy independence by boosting fossil-fuel development—both onshore and offshire—as bold and visionary. Democrats’ enthusiasm for solar and wind energy, by contrast, is seen as failed and outdated; as Marco Rubio’s plansays, “Hillary Clinton’s energy vision is stuck in the past.” Numbers tell a different story: At 174,000 employees, the solar industry may make up just one-tenth of 1 percent of U.S. jobs, but the industry is growing at a rapid clip. It accounts for one in every 78 new jobs in America, according to the industry trade group Solar Foundation. The wind industry counts nearly 80,000 employees (for a point of comparison, the Keystone XL pipeline would employ a couple thousand employees for a temporary project, and fewer than 50 permanent employees). And how do Republicans respond to these numbers? They ignore the fact that the clean energy industry exists, unless they're pooh-poohing it. 
But clean energy is saving consumers and businesses more and more money, as prices come down. “Onshore wind is today competitive in many places in the U.S. and around the world with coal and gas fired generation technology,” an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance recently told the Washington Post. “Solar generally remains pricier, but prices are also dropping fast." But when Republican candidates do talk renewables, it's only to bemoan these credits as a waste of taxpayer dollars on a failed technology. 

4. Coal country won’t be saved by repealing Obama’s initiatives.

Republicans love to talk about out-of-work coal miners—you know, the guys who've lost their jobs entirely because of Obama's Environmental Protection Agency—but their plans are light on ways to help them. How about a jobs program to retrain them for new fields, for instance? No, the answer is promising to repeal as many EPA regulations as possible, particularly Obama's Clean Power Plan. Bush wants an outright repeal of the plan; Rubio suggests regulatory reforms that would effectively stanch most major EPA initiatives; and Cruz would exclude greenhouse gasses from EPA regulation altogether. The senator from Texas summed up this reasoning in a June speech: “The Obama administration’s EPA has been unbelievably abusive and it is killing jobs across this country."
But repealing or scaling back EPA initiatives won't bring back lost coal jobs. A major reason coal has suffered under Obama can be chalked up to the free market Republicans like to celebrate. Natural gas and the clean-energy boom have applied pressure to the coal industry by driving down prices, and it's cost the industry the most in states where it's more expensive to mine for coal. That means central Appalachia has suffered greatly, losing two-thirds of its coal jobs as mining has shifted to cheaper production in the Midwest. (Obama's record on coal is hardly as harsh as conservative critics suggest; he too has come under criticism for subsidizing Midwest coal production by cheaply leasing public lands to coal companies.) 

5. Energy prices are not about to skyrocket.

Republicans foretell a coming doomsday for the American economy if regulations aren’t kept in check. “The Obama Administration would like Americans to believe in the inevitability of energy scarcity and ever-rising energy prices—the same failed mindset of the Jimmy Carter Administration," Jindal says in his plan. "Energy scarcity and skyrocketing energy prices result from failed public policy, not our unparalleled energy abundance.” Bush predicts that “Obama’s Carbon Rule will increase electricity prices for everyone and threaten the system’s reliability.” 
The fossil fuel industry has been warning of the same thing for decades. It has never once been correct. Even if you discount the health and economic benefits from less air pollution, the estimated costs of regulations usually turn out to be overstated. For example, after the coal industry warned of huge rate hikes following the federal acid rain program in the 1990s, electricity prices in many states actually declined.
 
B.  http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/33426-climate-denialism-a-brief-history-by-naomi-oreskes-and-erik-conway 
 
Climate Denialism: A Brief History
 
by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway,   truth-out.org,   October 31, 2015
 
In the late 1970s, scientists first came to a consensus that global warming was likely to result from increasing greenhouse gases released by the burning of fossil fuels. This idea had been around since the turn of the century, but the development of computer models made it possible to make quantitative predictions. Almost immediately, a small group of politically connected and conservative scientists began to question this consensus. As empirical scientific data mounted up, their attacks became more unprincipled. These conservative scientists used data selectively and often misrepresented the conclusions of many studies undertaken by the scientific community.
In 1992, world leaders gathered in Rio de Janeiro to sign the United Nations Framework on Climate Change. President George W Bush promised to translate the written document into "concrete action". Three years later, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared that the human impact on the earth's climate was no longer a prediction but an observable fact.
In the early 1990s, a group of skeptics claimed that Roger Revelle, one of the first climate scientists, had changed his mind about global warming and no longer believed it was a serious problem. The claim was repeated through several news outlets, including the Washington Post. When a graduate student named Justin Lancaster - who had worked closely with Revelle before his death in 1991 - tried to insist that Revelle had not changed his view, he was sued for libel. Lancaster was obliged to settle out of court. The claim was repeated again and again, and even today, exists on the Internet.
In 1996, when the IPCC released its second assessment report, stating that the human impact on climate was "discernible", a fossil-fuel-industry-funded group called the Global Climate Coalition accused the IPCC author Benjamin Santer of making unauthorized changes to the document, with the intent of creating a sense that global warming was more certain than it was. The following year, Frederick Seitz, chairman of the George C Marshall Institute, repeated the charges in the Wall Street Journal in an op-ed piece headlined "A Major Deception on Global Warming".
Massive Attack
Had Santer made unauthorized changes to the IPCC report? No: his changes were made in response to peer review. He was doing what every scientist is expected to do - and what IPCC rules required him to do - accepting criticism and using it so that the conclusions of the study were rigorous and clear. Frederick Seitz was a former president of the National Academy of Sciences, so it was not plausible that he did not know about the peer-review process.
In 2007, the claims were repeated in Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, a book whose premise is that "human-emitted CO2 has played only a minor role" in contributing to global warming. The authors are Dennis Avery and Fred Singer. Singer is a physicist with a track record of challenging scientific evidence. He had taken part in the previous attack on Santer.
Both the IPCC and Santer's co-authors took considerable pains to set the record straight, denying that Santer had done anything wrong. Yet, in their book, Avery and Singer reassert that "scientific reviewers discovered that major changes had been made 'in the back room' after they had signed off on the science chapter's contents" and that "Santer single-handedly reversed the 'climate science' of the whole IPCC report". The idea that any one individual could reverse the entire IPCC process is absurd, and yet, like the "Revelle changed his mind" claim, it remains on the Internet today.
Climate scientists have been subjected to repeated attacks of this kind. In 2005, Congressman Joe Barton of Texas demanded that Professor Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Centre at Pennsylvania State University, produce a huge volume of paperwork relating to his research. In February, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma accused a dozen climate scientists of criminal violations of Federal Law, based on alleged evidence contained in the UEA emails. Recently, Virginia's attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, went after Mann again, asking that the University of Virginia produce thousands of pages of documents relating to Mann's research.
We, too, have been objects of attack. When one of us (Naomi Oreskes) published a review on the book The Republican War on Science in the journal Science, in which we noted some connections not pursued in that book, Science was threatened with a lawsuit unless it published a rebuttal. (We supplied documents, Science held firm, and the threat went away.)
Blaming scientists for speaking truth to power is an old story. Scientists have long recognized that both the government and public can be reluctant to accept scientific evidence that results in discomfiting conclusions. In 1949, when the USSR detonated its first atomic bomb, the US had to face the reality that it had lost its monopoly on nuclear weapons. Scientists had been warning of this since 1945, but the success of their predictions did not increase their standing. When they then said that any attempt to stay ahead of the Soviets by building the H-bomb would only speed up the arms race, they were accused of being disloyal. As Harold Urey, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934, wrote: "Because we [scientists] told disagreeable truths, we have even been accused of wishing to give up our progress because we are impractical dreamers or plain traitors."
What is most disagreeable to many "resistors" of global warming is the fear of climate change being used as a warrant for heavy-handed government intervention. There is a parallel with 1949: fear of the Soviet Union then was not fear of a potential invasion, but that the Soviets would export communism to Europe, from where it might spread to the US.
Today, US conservatives and right-wing commentators are red-baiting once again. The columnist Charles Krauthammer alleges that "with socialism dead . . . the left was adrift until it struck upon a brilliant gambit: metamorphosis from red to green". Patrick J Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, labeled plans for a cap-and-trade system to control greenhouse gases as "Obamunism". The irony is that in 1990, Bush installed a cap-and-trade regime to reduce acid rain because it was an acceptable market-based mechanism. Yet, when Congress finally took the model seriously, conservatives called it communism by other means.
Market Failure
Attacks on climate science, including the 2009 "Climategate" campaign, had nothing to do with the science itself and neither did the entire earlier history of global-warming denial we have studied. Scientists are an easy target. The real issue is the politics of defending the free market.
Since the mid-1990s, the fossil-fuel industry has made common cause with old cold warriors, maverick scientists and conservative think tanks to undermine climate science. The obvious reason is that climate change is what Nicholas Stern calls "the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen." If the free market has failed, then governments will need to act. And that is precisely what various constituencies, from Inhofe to Cuccinelli and a host of think tanks, do not want. It was also what Seitz and his colleagues didn't want. These scientists were passionately anti-communist and viewed any form of government regulation as a step towards socialism.
No wonder we see the rise of McCarthyite tactics today: the stakes, at least in some people's eyes, are the same. But what these people seem to have forgotten from the 1950s is that McCarthyism didn't just destroy the careers of many innocent people: in the end, it destroyed Joe McCarthy.
 
 
8.  Republicans and Their Obamacare Neurosis
 
 
Free Mitt Romney!
 
by Paul Krugman,   nytimes.com,   October 26, 2015
 
Sometimes I find myself feeling sorry for Mitt Romney. No, seriously. In another time and place, he might have been respected as an effective technocrat — a smart guy valued (although probably not loved) for his ability to get things done. In fact, that’s kind of how it worked when he was governor of Massachusetts, a decade ago.
But now it’s 2015 in America, and Mr. Romney’s party doesn’t want people who get things done. On the contrary, it actively hates government programs that improve American lives, especially if they help Those People. And this means that Mr. Romney can’t celebrate his signature achievement in public life, the Massachusetts health reform that served as a template for Obamacare.
This has to hurt. Indeed, a few days ago Mr. Romney couldn’t help himself: he boasted to the Boston Globe that “Without Romneycare, we wouldn’t have had Obamacare” and that as a result “a lot of people wouldn’t have health insurance.” And it’s true!
But such truths aren’t welcome in the G.O.P. Ben Carson, who is leading the latest polls of Iowa Republicans, has declared that Obamacare is the worst thing to happen to America since slavery; 81 percent of likely Republican caucus-goers say that this statement makes him more attractive  as a candidate.
Not surprisingly, then, Mr. Romney quickly tried to walk his comments back, claiming that Obamacare is very different from Romneycare, which it isn’t, and that it has failed.
But you know, it hasn’t. On the contrary, the Affordable Care Act has been a remarkable success, especially considering the scorched-earth opposition it has faced.
First of all, a lot of people — around 16 million, the administration estimates, a picture confirmed by independent sources — do indeed have health insurance who otherwise wouldn’t. Millions more would be insured if Republican-controlled states weren’t refusing to expand Medicaid (even though the federal government would pay the costs) and generally trying to obstruct the program.
How good is the insurance thus obtained? Not perfect: despite subsidies, policies are still hard for some to afford, and deductibles and co-pays can be onerous. But most people enrolled under Obamacare report high satisfaction with their coverage, which is hugely better than simply not being uninsured. And may I inject a personal note? If truth be told, I live in a pretty rarefied, upper-middle-class-and-above milieu — yet even so I know several people for whom the Affordable Care Act has been more or less literally a lifesaver. This is, as Joe Biden didn’t quite say, a really big deal.
Oh, and have you noticed how those ads featuring people supposedly hurt by Obamacare have disappeared? That’s because none of their stories held  up.
What’s more, the big Biden deal has come in below budget. Insurancepremiums in Obamacare’s first two years were well below predictions. It looks as if there will be a partial rebound in 2016, but it’s still cheaper than expected. And over all, health care spending has slowed dramatically.
Meanwhile, none of the bad things that were supposed to happen have.Employment growth since the “job-killing” law went into effect has been faster than at any time since the 1990s. Employers have not, in fact, eliminated full-time jobs to avoid the act’s provisions. And the budget deficit keeps falling.
In short, President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, who pushed the Affordable Care Act through despite total opposition from the G.O.P., have a lot to be proud of. And so does Mr. Romney, who helped lay the foundation. Instead, however, he’s trashing the best thing he’s ever done.
You have to wonder: Does Mr. Romney really think that his party would look more favorably on Obamacare if it worked even better than it has, if it cost no money at all? If so, he’s delusional. After all, the great majority of Republican-controlled states have turned down free money, refusing to let the federal government expand Medicaid (and in so doing pump money into their economies).
The point is that from the point of view of the Republican base, covering the uninsured, or helping the unlucky in general, isn’t a feature, it’s a bug. It’s not about how much it costs in taxpayer funds or economic impact: the base is actually willing to lose money in order to perpetuate suffering.
And a movement with those values has no use for technocrats. Ask Ben Bernanke, who has given up on a party in thrall to the “know-nothingism of the far right.”
Maybe Mr. Romney still imagines that a desperate party will call on him to save it from Donald Trump. Or maybe he just can’t bring himself to admit that he picked the wrong group of people to hang out with. Either way, one hopes for his sake that he eventually gives up his illusions. Trust me, Mitt: it will be a liberating experience. 
 
 
 
9.  Debunking Myths About Public Employee Unions
 
 
Laws enabling public-sector collective bargaining have not led to excessive public-sector pay
 
by Jeffrey Keefe,  epi.org,   October 14, 2015
 
Executive Summary
Unlike many other countries, when the United States enacted its private-sector labor law, the National Labor Relations Act, in 1935, it did not include public employees within the same or similar framework for collective bargaining. Not until the late 1950s and 1960s did state and local governments grapple with a labor law to govern their rapidly growing public-sector labor forces. No state or local government chose to transplant the private-sector model of collective bargaining; instead they adopted some parts of it, chose to create no bargaining framework at all, or prohibited collective bargaining. This paper describes the rapid growth of labor laws that have enabled public-sector collective bargaining, and examines the effects of various labor law frameworks on public employee wages.
  • Only 2 percent of the state and local public-sector workforce in 1960 had the right to bargain collectively. By 2010, that share had grown to 63 percent.
  • While early on, many policymakers were concerned about the right to strike, a number of states did eventually extend the right to strike to more than 20 percent of public employees; however, all of these employees are in non–public safety positions. Thus the right to strike has not had catastrophic results in terms of threats to public safety or welfare.
  • The right to strike has also not led to massive wage increases: Employees covered by the right to strike earn about 2 percent to 5 percent more than those without it.
  • Public safety employees are effectively covered by binding interest arbitration, which has prevented strikes and has resulted in cost-effective and widely accepted settlements by the participants.
  • This research finds no wage effect for public employees covered by collective bargaining attributable to binding interest arbitration when compared with mediation.
  • Fact-finding, the most widely employed final dispute-resolution procedure, tends to favor the public employer, resulting in significantly lower wages for public employees, in the range of 2 percent to 5 percent less than other dispute resolution procedures.
Union security provisions, which require employees to contribute to the financial support of the union that has the exclusive right to represent them with respect to terms and conditions of employment, vary by state, locality, and various occupations.
  • Dues checkoff, which is widespread in the public sector, has a small positive effect on wages, ranging from 0 percent to 3 percent; however, we suspect it has a major effect on union membership.
  • Open-shop laws, which prohibit union security agreements, are associated with significantly lower public-employee wages, with estimates ranging from -4 percent to -11 percent, compared with no policy on union security.
  • Agency-shop provisions, which require the payment only of a fee narrowly tailored to support a union’s collective bargaining activities, its contract enforcement, and employee grievance processing, are associated with significantly higher wages, ranging from 2 percent to 7 percent for public employees.
In summary, it is difficult to conclude that the relatively small wage effects of collective bargaining have led to serious distortions in the democratic process. Collective bargaining has resulted in higher public-employee wages in the range of 5 percent to 8 percent. There is some indication that collective bargaining has offset employer monopsony power in the public sector (Keefe 2015; Lewin, Kochan, and Keefe 2012), thus not producing excessive or distorted public-employee compensation, and has promoted internal equity (Keefe 2015, forthcoming).
 
[ To read the full report, click on the following link:
 
 
FINALLY
 
 

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