;)
Sunday
Mar082015
The Commentariat -- March 9, 2015
Internal links removed.
Washington Post: "Thousands of marchers, government officials and other public figures gathered Sunday for a second straight day to commemorate the 50th anniversary of a brutal police assault on civil rights demonstrators that spurred the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Starting from early morning, groups of people -- some with locked arms, some in song, some taking to their knees to pray -- began to march across Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of Selma's 'Bloody Sunday' march on March 7, 1965. By midafternoon, police said at least 15,000 to 20,000 people had joined the crush on and around the bridge...."
Richard Fausset of the New York Times: "Echoing a speech given by President Obama a day earlier, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Sunday that access to the polls was 'under siege' by a flurry of recent state laws, and by a 2013 United States Supreme Court decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act, the landmark legislation that was the great prize for the civil rights activists who marched here a half-century ago. Mr. Holder spoke at ceremonies before veterans of the civil rights era and ordinary citizens who gathered [in Selma, Alabama,] for a commemorative march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to mark the 50th anniversary of a violent confrontation between the police and protesters that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act." ...
... E. J. Dionne: "At a minimum, Congress should honor Selma by restoring an effective Voting Rights Act, once a bipartisan cause.... But let's be more adventurous and make voting in federal elections an obligation of citizenship." ...
... CW: Dionne doesn't go far enough. As much as possible, local elections should be tied to federal elections. One of the problems in Ferguson, & in many other communities, is that local elections are held in off-months &/or off-years, severely limiting turnout. Thousands of elected officials are serving at the whims of tiny minorities of eligible voters, giving the officials little incentive to answer to the broader public. That's precisely what happens in Ferguson. As the Washington Post reported last August, "Ferguson holds municipal elections in April of odd-numbered years. In doing so, the town is hardly unique. Approximately three-fourths of American municipalities hold their elections in odd years, a Progressive-era reform intended to shield municipal elections from the partisan politics of national contests, but one that has been shown to have a dramatic effect on reducing turnout." ...
... Greg Sargent explains why -- and of course it's obvious -- Republicans are not going to allow restoration or expansion of the Voting Rights Act. ...
... Ed Kilgore: "The president's speech at Selma on Saturday will definitely make the history books as one of his finest flights of oratory. But it was notable not just for its heights but for its gritty practical impact. It was not one of those 'civil rights speeches' absolutely anyone could nod along with, safely distant from the revered events of a past rapidly receding into history. Indeed, its central thrust was to insist the dynamics of Bloody Sunday are still being played out on the streets and in the courts and Congress." ...
... Jelani Cobb of the New Yorker: "If we have learned anything new from the D.O.J. report [on Ferguson, Mo.], it is about the ways in which racism facilitated corruption, and the way that stereotypical views of black criminality camouflaged a practice of targeting -- and all but extorting revenue from -- African-American residents.... Ferguson ... is an object lesson in the national policing practices that have created the largest incarcerated population in the Western world, as well as a veil of permanent racial suspicion...." ...
... CW BTW: If you want to know how John Roberts, et al., get away with claiming that racism is so over, you need only read the headline of the National Review article by Ian Tuttle, which Cobb cites: "The Injustice the DOJ Uncovered in Ferguson Wasn't Racism." The denizens of Right Wing World live in an absurd, fraudulent bubble which they invoke at every turn to justify their elitist, racist, sexist, anti-science policies. This bubble allows Mitt Romney to disown the 47 percent, Haley Barbour to claim that the white supremacist Citzens Councils were really gentlemanly businessmen who outlawed the KKK, Todd Akin to claim that nice girls can't be impregnated by rapists, and Rick Scott to render climate change unspeakable (see links under "Beyond the Beltway" below). ...
... That's Not de Mississippi. It's de Nile. Ferguson Mayor James Knowles, who had not read the DOJ entire report at the time of his interview, did not find the report convincing. Carimah Townes of Think Progress: "He also maintains that there is 'no proof' of gross civil rights violations." Thanks to Jeanne B. for the link. ...
... By Sunday, Knowles seemed a little more willing to accept some of the report's findings, but complained the town had undergone a level of scrutiny to which other communities had not been subjected & suggested that he & the city council members didn't bear much responsibility because they were part-timers wh outsourced day-to-day operations to "professional staff."
Somani Sengupta of the New York Times: "Despite the many gains women have made in education, health and even political power in the course of a generation, violence against women and girls worldwide 'persists at alarmingly high levels,' according to a United Nations analysis that the Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is scheduled to present to the General Assembly on Monday. About 35 percent of women worldwide -- more than one in three -- said they had experienced violence in their lifetime, whether physical, sexual, or both, the report finds. One in 10 girls under the age of 18 was forced to have sex, it says." ...
... CW: I think the percentage is higher than that. I suspect women underreport violence against them, because they are ashamed, because they fear further violence, or because they're so abused, they think they "deserve" it & don't consider it abuse. I write from personal experience.
Jesse Byrnes of the Hill: "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Sunday warned President Obama not to agree to an unsatisfactory deal over Iran's nuclear program, suggesting the president's unilateral moves on Iran had their limit. 'Obviously, the president doesn't want us involved in this. But he's going to need us if he's going to lift any of the existing sanctions. And so I think he cannot work around Congress forever,' McConnell said in an interview aired on CBS's 'Face the Nation.'"
We really don't have 218 votes to determine a bathroom break over here on our side. So how are we going to get 218 votes on transportation, or trade, or whatever the issue? -- Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.)
... Ashley Parker of the New York Times: "In their first major test of governing this year, Republicans stumbled, faltered -- and nearly shut down the Department of Homeland Security. And that vote may have been the easy one. In April, physicians who treat Medicare patients face a drastic cut in pay. In May, the Highway Trust Fund runs dry. In June, the charter for the federal Export-Import Bank ceases to exist. Then in October, across-the-board spending cuts return, the government runs out of money -- and the Treasury bumps up against its borrowing limit.... While many of these measures used to be pushed through in an almost unthinking bipartisan ritual, there is no such thing as simple in Congress anymore.... The Republican turmoil has, in turn, empowered congressional Democrats, who found that by standing unified, they can wield significant power from the minority...." ...
There's never been a time when we've taken progressive action and regretted it. -- Dan Pfeiffer
... ** Jonathan Chait spoke to outgoing presidential advisor Dan Pfeiffer about how the White House gave up on Republicans. "If you had to pinpoint the moment this worldview began to crystallize, it would probably be around the first debt-ceiling showdown, in 2011, when Obama tried repeatedly and desperately to cut a budget deal with House Speaker John Boehner only to realize, eventually, that Boehner did not have the power to negotiate. The administration has now decided that in many cases, even adversarial bargaining fails because the Republican leadership is not capable of planning tactically."
Paul Krugman hopes the Fed is smarter than Paul Ryan & won't raise interest rates over a fear -- real or imagined -- that the rate of inflation could top 2 percent because a hike in the interest rate could cost millions of jobs & perhaps also cause the U.S. economy to slide "into a Japanese-style deflationary trap, which has already happened in Sweden and possibly in the eurozone."
Supreme Tenthers May Save ObamaCare. Robert Pear of the New York Times: "In 2012, the Supreme Court declared that Congress had put 'a gun to the head' of states by pressuring them to expand Medicaid, and it said that such 'economic dragooning' of the states violated federalism principles embedded in the Constitution. Now, in a separate case, comments by several justices indicate that they could uphold a pillar of the Affordable Care Act -- insurance subsidies for millions of lower-income people -- by invoking those same principles."
Carvin v. Carvin. Ian Millhiser of Think Progress: In his argument before the Supremes in 2012, the lawyer for the anti-ObamaCare side directly contradicted his statements to the Court during his 2015 argument in King. Millhiser has the goods on Michael Carvin & on Scalia & Alito., who also contradicted their 2012 statements: "Carvin, as Roberts alluded to, is an advocate who is paid to advance the views of his client. Scalia and Alito do not have the same excuse."
Ian Austen of the New York Times: "For years, cycling's top officials turned a blind eye to doping, operating in deference primarily to one rider -- Lance Armstrong -- according to a reform commission that spent the past year excavating the sport's doping problems. The three-member commission issued a scathing indictment of the sport's officials Sunday, laying much of the blame on a governing body that, it said, had interests that ran counter to any genuine efforts to expose doping. The 227-page report detailed how Mr. Armstrong's extraordinary influence had not only compelled officials to ignore drug use but had also enabled his lawyer to secretly write and edit the report of an earlier investigation into Mr. Armstrong's doping practices."
Presidential Race
Coronation Interruptus
Obviously, Hillary isn't actually texting in the photo. She's just looking at photos of sunny beaches.Adam Sneed of Politico: "The top House Republican Benghazi investigator says the emails Hillary Clinton has handed over for review have 'huge gaps' that challenge her credibility over what happened in the 2012 attacks in Libya. 'There are gaps of months and months and months,' Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said on Sunday on CBS's 'Face the Nation.' In the batch of emails handed over to the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Gowdy said there’s no record of any communication on the day that Clinton was famously photographed wearing sunglasses and typing on her Blackberry." ...
... Allen Rappeport of the New York Times: "Mr. Gowdy said that he was interested only in communications relating to Benghazi, but that Mrs. Clinton’s evasiveness on the matter was wrong. 'It's not up to Secretary Clinton to decide what's public record and what's not,' he said. Other leading Republicans sought to further press the issue of Mrs. Clinton's emails." ...
... Ben Brody of Bloomberg Business: "Members of a House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack tussled Sunday over whether they should release the committee's cache of messages from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private e-mail account." CW: Darrell Issa seems to suggest that the purpose of the subpoenas is to render illegal Clinton's private e-mails. ...
... Jim Puzzanghera of the Los Angeles Times: "... Sen. Dianne Feinstein [D-Calif.] ... said [Hillary] Clinton should speak publicly about her emails or risk damaging her potential 2016 presidential campaign. 'She is the leading candidate, whether it be Republican or Democrat, to be the next president, and I think she needs to step up and come out and state exactly what the situation is,' Feinstein said on NBC's 'Meet the Press.' 'I think from this point on the ... silence is going to hurt her.'" ...
... Real Men Don't Type. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-19th-Century) has never sent an e-mail. ...
... CW: The beau of the cotillion does have a Twitter account. The nature of the content suggests staff members are the "real tweeters." ...
... Former Secretary of State Colin Powell lost his e-mails: "I don't have any to turn over. I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files. A lot of the emails that came out of my personal account went into the State Department system. They were addressed to State Department employees and state.gov domain, but I don't know if the servers in the State Department captured those or not." ...
... CW: Could we now hear from the right-wing outrage machine on the horror & duplicity of Colin Powell's lost e-mails? What about that one where he wrote, in part, "I bet my phony dog-and-pony show convinced a lot of those yokels that Saddam really does have WMDs. I should get an Oscar. LOL." Or the one where he wrote, "My boss is the Dumbest Oaf in America." Oops, deleted. Laptop tossed.
... Amy Chozick of the New York Times: "... as Mrs. Clinton commemorates her 1995 women's rights speech in Beijing in back-to-back events in New York, she finds herself under attack for her family foundation's acceptance of millions of dollars in donations from Middle Eastern countries known for violence against women and for denying them many basic freedoms. This was not how she intended to reintroduce herself to American voters."
Screwing Wisconsin's workers and proud of it. Journal Sentinel photo.Meg Kissinger & Jason Stein of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "Overhauling more than a half century of labor law in Wisconsin, Gov. [Scott] Walker Monday signed so-called right-to-work legislation banning labor contracts that require private sector workers to pay labor fees.... The passage marks a shift in the GOP governor's position that comes as he pursues an all but certain presidential run. Walker said repeatedly during the intense battle over Act 10 -- his 2011 law that repealed most collective bargaining for public workers -- that he would not let legislation affecting private-sector unions reach his desk." ...
... Charles Pierce: "At this point, if Scott Walker's positions on most major issues get any more fluid, he's going to have to campaign in a wine skin."
Rand Paul for President! And Senator! Sam Youngman of the Lexington Herald-Leader: At Rand Paul's urging, the Kentucky Republican executive committee voted unanimously to hold a caucus next March rather than a primary, as the party has in the past. This would allow Paul to run for both president & Senate. Kentucky law disallows a person to appear on two ballots simultaneously. "While winning approval for a caucus from the executive committee was key to Paul's efforts, the state central committee, which comprises more than 350 members, will still have to vote on a formal proposal, with caucus rules and details, when it meets Aug. 22."
Senate Race
Arelis Hernández of the Washington Post: "U.S. Rep. Donna F. Edwards (D-Md.) plans to announce on Tuesday that she will run for the Senate seat being vacated by Barbara A. Mikulski (D), according to two Democrats familiar with her plans, setting up a potentially bruising primary fight with Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.)."
Beyond the Beltway
Ben Brumfield of CNN: "A fraternity fraught with scandal quickly shut down a chapter in Oklahoma when a video surfaced that showed members singing a racist chant that used the n-word. The video shows a group of young white students chanting the n-word loudly and boisterously while riding on a bus. Sigma Alpha Epsilon's national chapter shut down the chapter Sunday night, suspended all of the chapter's members and threatened to remove those responsible from the fraternity for life." ...
... Mecca Rayne of KOCO Okalahoma City: OU "President David Boren said the members of the fraternity have until midnight to get off campus." ...
... CW: By Right Wing News standards, this "wasn't racism," but "a failure of university discipline" or something. (See Jilani Cobb post, linked above.)
We were told that we were not allowed to discuss anything that was not a true fact. -- Kristina Trotta, former Florida Department of Environmental Protection employee. ...
... Officially Ignorant. Tom McCarthy of the Guardian: "Officials with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP, the agency in charge of setting conservation policy and enforcing environmental laws in the state, issued directives in 2011 barring thousands of employees from using the phrases 'climate change' and 'global warming', according to a bombshell report by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting (FCIR). The report ties the alleged policy, which is described as 'unwritten', to the election of Republican governor Rick Scott and his appointment of a new department director that year. Scott, who was re-elected last November, has declined to say whether he believes in climate change caused by human activity. 'I'm not a scientist,' he said in one appearance last May.... The 2014 national climate assessment for the US found an 'imminent threat of increased inland flooding' in Florida due to climate change and called the state 'uniquely vulnerable to sea level rise'." ...
... Digby: "You have to love the idea that someone told scientists that they are not allowed to discuss anything that isn't a 'true fact.' Presumably they would not likewise be barred from talking about God ... It's true that this small band of elites have unfettered power but they are more reminiscent of the Inquisition than anything in the 1920s. (If you click that link you can see the original Vatican document declaring the Copernican system 'foolish and absurd.')"
Phil Willon & Melanie Mason of the Los Angeles Times: "A U.S. Supreme Court case that could force California to redraw its congressional districts has stirred up fears of a return to partisan gerrymandering, a divisive process that has been criticized for both cementing and crushing political careers. While the potential impact remains uncertain, both Democratic and Republican leaders agree that the ruling could solidify the Democrats' tight grip on California's 53-member House delegation, the largest of any state."
Ugly Americans. Rosie Scammell of the Guardian: "Tourists are once again getting into trouble in Italy, with two American women caught carving their names into Rome's Colosseum. The Californians, aged 21 and 25, snuck away from their tour group on Saturday and began scratching their initials into the amphitheatre with a coin." CW: One of the two letters they carved was a "J." There is no "J" in Italian (or Latin).
Anne Barnard of the New York Times: "In those areas of Iraq and Syria controlled by the Islamic State, residents are furtively recording on their cellphones damage done to antiquities by the extremist group. In northern Syria, museum curators have covered precious mosaics with sealant and sandbags. And at Baghdad's recently reopened National Museum of Iraq, new iron bars protect galleries of ancient artifacts from the worst-case scenario. These are just a few of the continuing efforts to guard the treasures of Iraq and Syria, two countries rich with traces of the world's earliest civilizations." ...
... CW: ISIS reminds me of medieval & later Christian fundamentalists: "In the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods, locals destroyed many of the standing stones around the [Avebury, England,] henge, both for religious and practical reasons.... At some point in the early 14th century, villagers began to demolish the monument by pulling down the large standing stones and burying them in ready-dug pits at the side, presumably because they were seen as having been erected by the Devil and thereby being in opposition to the village's Christian beliefs.... In the latter part of the 17th and then the 18th centuries, destruction at Avebury reached its peak, possibly influenced by the rise of Puritanism in the village, a fundamentalist form of Protestant Christianity that vehemently denounced things considered to be 'pagan'...."
News Ledes
Washington Post: "Sam Simon, the often-overlooked but instrumental co-creator of 'The Simpsons,' which popularized the hapless patriarch Homer ('D'oh!') and his puckish son, Bart ('Eat my shorts!'), and became a phenomenon in the new genre of irreverent animated sitcoms, died March 8 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 59."
Washington Post: "The estimated cost of President Obama's signature health care law is continuing to fall. The Congressional Budget Office announced on Monday that the Affordable Care Act will cost $142 billion, or 11 percent less, over the next 10 years, compared to what the agency had projected in January."
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Reader Comments (9)
CW: I'm bringing forward this comment by safari, as it relates to a story I first linked today:
Rick Scott, for political expediency and lust for wingnuttery, allegedly demanded that workers at Florida's Department of Environmental Protection remove the words 'global warming,' 'climate change,' and even the sacrilegious 'sustainable' from their lexicon.
If we shut our eyes and believe hard enough, anything can become true in Right Wing World.
Nothing shocking here obviously, but I find it particularly egregious to eliminate the entire idea of sustainability. Holy shit! We're talking about the people in charge of securing the future of an entire state and all the citizens and cities within that state, completely neglecting a central concept to that secure future.
They could easily speak out of their asses while mounting some baseless argument combining endless fossil fuel use leading to future sustainability if they wanted to. But to entirely eliminate the concept of sustainability while managing a state in the crosshairs of future climate change is as radical and irresponsible as humanely possible.
The strategy is obviously to push off Florida's investment (especially real estate) Armageddon as investors pull their money out of the disappearing coasts and Miami requires rain boots to take a walk downtown. That the MLS is considering building a new stadium downtown Miami is proof that these financial elites and economic brainiacs can't see longer than their current bank accounts and the future be damned.
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-03-08/florida-officials-say-they-were-banned-from-saying-climate-change-and-global-warming-
Hard to understand people with their head in the sand or between their ears like Rick Scott and others who ignore sea level rise because global warming doesn't exist!!!! (If you live near a coast, prowling around the above link can pinpoint your own vulnerability.)
As CW points out: "... financial elites and economic brainiacs can't see longer than their current bank accounts and the future be damned." The last four words are most telling.
I believe most homes in Florida are built on slab and without basements. Heavier rainfalls, rising sea levels, and increased flooding are bound to increase and create huge problems for homeowners sooner rather than later. Stilts, anyone?
In fact, the highest land areas that I have observed in Florida were the mountain-like landfills! Does everyone there drink Evian or Poland Springs—or is no one concerned about leachate runoff in the groundwater?
@MAG: That was safari, not I, who pointed to the brainiacs, but I agree wholeheartedly.
Much of South Florida is already underwater for months of the year. I have an old house with a brick basement -- and two sump pumps. Once the rains saturate the ground, as they do every summer, the basement leaks like a sieve. I own another nearby house built on a slab foundation, & I've had to have the foundation repaired twice because of leaking.
New houses along the coasts have been built on stilts for decades -- by law. These "stilts" are a storey tall, so that the main floor of the house is really the second storey. The walls of the "basement," which is at ground level & usually serves as a garage, are breakaway to permit floodwaters passage during & after hurricanes. Too bad for the stuff stored there.
These are "true facts," Rick Scott.
Marie
So if you are not allowed to discuss anything that isn't a 'true' fact I suppose you can discuss something that is a 'false' fact. So how can you have a 'false' fact. Well there are three possibilities. You are so dumb that you don't know what a fact actually is. Or you are a Republican politician or both. And lastly you listen to FOX news.
“We were told not to use the terms ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or ‘sustainability,’ ”
This bit of intellectual chicanery is directed at employees of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
Why even bother having such a department if they can't talk about what it is they're there for? It's like ordering an oncologist to stop using words like "cancer" and "malignant". So what do they do? Play Charades? "Two words, first word....ah...round, circle, big round circle? Globe, globe....! Global?"
In North Carolina it's against the law (it really is!) to use science when making decisions about the dangerous rise in sea level. You can bet your ass insurance companies writing policies will pay attention to science based (as opposed to wingnut based) predictions when working out their premiums and considering possible damage from sea water over the next 25 to 30 years. A few inches here, a few inches there, pretty soon, your house is floating out to sea. Will the wingnuts be there to tell you it's all an illusion, that there's another side to it?
And that's a "small" problem I have with the way the Bloomberg article, linked by Safari, is written.
The writer, David Knowles, although doing us a service by pointing out a serious attack on rationality and the real world by Florida Republicans, defaults at one point to "both sides" thinking when he mentions that "...the semantic aspects of the debate over global warming often serve to underscore the level of mistrust between the opposing sides of the issue."
No, David.....no, no, no, fucking no!
Mistrust between opposing sides? There are no "sides". At least not two sides with legitimate points of view worth considering, a standard trope for far too many journalists. There is only facts and ignorance.
An article in the current National Geographic on the War on Science, frames this "debate" thusly:
"...evolution actually happened. Biology is incomprehensible without it. There aren’t really two sides to all these issues. Climate change is happening. Vaccines really do save lives. Being right does matter—and the science tribe has a long track record of getting things right in the end. Modern society is built on things it got right."
Aye...and there's the rub: if society, up til now, has been built (largely) on things that science has gotten right, where will be when we have a small minority working day and night to make sure that decisions are based on things that are demonstrably wrong?
It used to be that the Party of No was simply a frustrating, begrudging naysayer. Let's try this....no. Let's try that....no. Let's try something....no, unless it's more tax breaks for the wealthy.
They had (and still don't) no ideas of their own but were unwilling to do anything to make things better. Now, however, we see them actively working to make things worse. The senate majority leader screams at governors to ignore the president's rules for reducing carbon emissions. Republicans and their Supreme Court (it sure as shit isn't mine) actively attack the fabric of society. Break down what has been built up and leave nothing behind. They diminish democracy while other Republicans pass laws making it a crime to use facts.
As George W. Bush once so brilliantly indicated, who cares about the future? We'll all be dead.
But in the meantime, let's inflict as much pain and suffering and stupidity as possible.
Colonial Teabaggers:
http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/legacy/assets/images/si/cartoon-contest-2012/westrich-web.jpg
Why should facts matter to the Grand Old Plutocracy? As "psychic" Uri Geller said of his scientist critics: "What do I care about those schmucks? I'm a millionaire."
Re: "just the facts, madam, just the facts" Joe Friday here, just another dick digging for the truth....
"Your puddle was eaten by a tiger shark? That's what you called in to 911, correct?"
"Name of said poodle? Frenchie? Where was Frenchie when he was eaten by the tiger shark? Swimming in the front yard? Oh, what was the front yard a few years ago. Now called the front tidal plain.
"Did you get the name of the tiger shark? Toofie? Toofie the tiger shark? Madam, you are telling me your French poodle by the name of Frenchie was eaten in the front yard by a tiger shark by the name of Toofie the tiger shark?"
" I've been a dick for thirty years now and that's the most ridiculous story I've ever heard. Facts, madam, I need facts. Next thing you will be telling me is that global climate change is a fact. I'm getting into my dingy and rowing out of here unless you want to change your story."
"You have rescued and adopted Toofie the tiger shark? Better home protection than a poodle? You don't want to press charges against him for eating your poodle? Why am I here? You want to buy a license of your pet shark?" I deal in facts, madam, facts, if you want a license to ignore the facts you need to speak to governor Scott." And tell Toofie he needs a collar."
I posted this yesterday, but it disappeared into a black hole. If it doesn't stick this time, fuck it.
From the Guardian. It’s Armando Iannucci writing about the UK, but it could quite easily be the US:
“There’s no phrase more guaranteed to get a politician jumpy and defensive than: “This is bad for business.” If someone from a boardroom says it, Whitehall snaps into action to do something about it, Oppositions scurry to explain what they mean. Policies are swiftly adopted or modified, depending on exactly how “Bad For Business” the accusation implies.
“It doesn’t happen when bishops say: “This is bad for poor people,” or health experts say: “This is bad for the mentally ill,” or tenants say: “This is bad for me and my family.” But somehow to be Bad for Business is an unquestionable wrong that must be righted before anyone has time to work out whether by Bad for Business they just mean Bad for their own Business, or even just Bad for their Shareholders.”