Monday Open Thread [11.9.2015]

M.J. Lee says a “[s]trong economy could help Hillary Clinton, Democrats” in 2016:

“The Labor Department announced Friday that the U.S. economy added 271,000 jobs in October, pushing the unemployment rate down to 5%. To put that figure in perspective, the last time the jobless rate was 5% was in April 2008…The most striking bright spot in Friday’s report was wage growth. After remaining stubbornly stagnant, average hourly earnings rose 2.5% — the best gain since 2009″…”This is a very good report. And it’s not just the headline number but the fact that average hourly earnings are up,” said Gus Faucher, a PNC senior economist. “If I were a Democrat I would be making a lot of hay out of it.”

That picture is of Ben Carson and a black Jesus. It is a painting from the home of the good lying Doctor. Indeed, as the Guardian finely illustrates, the home of the lying Doctor Carson is a narcissistic celebration of all things Ben Carson. Take a look, including at a stone engraving of a Bible version that misspells “Proverbs.”

Ben Carson is crying about media scrutiny, saying it is unfair and that is because secular progressives fear him. LOL. Dr. Carson, as a secular progressive, let me tell you that I do not fear you. I pity you. You are a pathological liar with a clear psychological problem and a mental illness. I find you laughable as well. If you were to be your party’s nominee, Hillary Clinton would win nearly 50 states and all Republicans everywhere would be swept out of office. So I am actually rooting for you.

Zoë Carpenter at The Nation writes about President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline at long last:

We’re sure to hear more of the usual griping that KXL was a merely symbolic fight, in the sense that the rejection alone will not save us from a climate catastrophe. But the pipeline gave the environmental movement something tangible to build around, a way to shift the power from Big Oil, which is used to getting everything it asks for. Now it’s proved that even in an era in which corporations are people and money is speech, big moneyed interests can still be beaten by good old-fashioned organizing. Critically, KXL also acted as a vehicle for communicating the argument that major new fossil-fuel development projects in general aren’t compatible with efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

Though Obama downplayed the impact of KXL on emissions during his announcement—“This pipeline would neither be a silver bullet for the economy as promised by some, nor the express lane to climate disaster proclaimed by others,” he argued—the president did validate that broader principle. “Ultimately,” he said, “if we’re going to prevent large parts of this earth from becoming not only inhospitable but also uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we’re gonna have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them.”

Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect talks about why the mortality rate for the white working class has risen since 1999:

A study released Monday by Princeton economists Angus Deaton (the 2015 Nobel laureate in economics) and Anne Case documented that the number of deaths by suicide, alcohol use, and drug use among working-class whites ages 45 to 54 has risen precipitously since 1999—so precipitously that the overall death rate for this group increased by 22 percent. Death rate increases in the modern world are so rare that economists and public-health scholars have been groping for equivalent instances. “Only HIV/AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” Deaton told The New York Times. […]

In recent decades, however, the stories of the white working class have grown relentlessly grimmer. The offshoring of U.S. manufacturing and the increasing substitution of machines for humans in the production process took a huge toll. As Andrew J. Cherlin points out in Labor’s Love Lost, his study of the disintegration of the working-class white family, the share of blue-collar jobs in the U.S. economy declined from 28 percent in 1970 to 17 percent in 2010. Work in the service or retail sectors was no bargain, either: As research by Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute demonstrates, the real median hourly wage for white men with no more than a high school diploma declined from $19.76 in 1979 to $17.50 in 201

The white working class’s loss of jobs and incomes was spurred by its loss of power: The nearly complete deunionization of the private sector left those workers with no way to bargain for better pensions or pay. The doctrine of maximizing shareholder value, which corporations began to adopt in the ’80s, most commonly meant minimizing worker pay and benefits, hiring from temp agencies and eliminating programs to increase employee skills.

Brian Beutler says Ben Carson being exposed as the liar he is is also an indictment of Conservative politics:

Carson has been famous for years, and a political celebrity since February 2013, when he issued a meandering indictment of President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast while Obama sat next to him, silent and captive. The whole time, Carson has boasted of rejecting a “full scholarship” to West Point, an academy that actually pays people for their attendance. He thrust his deception into the public eye over and over and over again, and nobody questioned it until he became a poll leader in the Republican presidential primary.

This is not a great reflection on the media, I suppose—but it’s a worse reflection on the people who vaulted Carson to the summa of the conservative movement without bothering to investigate him. The price of entry into this realm of politics is so low that many, many successful people (Carson, but also Herman Cain and others) believe that the way they are perceived will protect them from their skeletons.

In this way, Carson’s rise is reminiscent of the McCain campaign’s decision to elevate Sarah Palin to vice presidential nominee after the most cursory vetting. Carson and Palin both paired reactionary politics with identities more closely associated with liberalism. Palin’s value was in her potential to undermine the historic nature of Obama’s candidacy. Carson’s is in his willingness to validate and absolve conservative racial politics.