Alternate Causality Gone Wrong

I can't prove that these lawyers competed in policy debate in high school, but their work product provides powerful circumstantial evidence.  Josh Green informs us,

The law firm of Crowell & Moring, which represents the National Mining Association, was none too pleased with a new West Virginia University study showing that mountaintop removal mining may cause birth defects in people who live nearby. So four of the firm's lawyers prepared a memo to undermine the study--a memo that claimed the university's researchers had ignored a significant cause of West Virginia's birth defects: inbreeding.

The study failed to account for consanquinity [sic], one of the most prominent sources of birth defects.

The lawyerly term for inbreeding is "consanguinity." And that's not a charge taken lightly in West Virginia! Crowell & Moring hastily removed the offending memo from its website. But not before quick-thinking Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward Jr. preserved a copy. You can read his story here and download the memo her.

I'd like to go on a long riff about how the lawyers' taking down down the memo is similar to policy debaters shrinking down the text that they don't read or may hurt their cause because it implies the evidence they're reading doesn't say what they claim it does.  I could have added that they need to explain that continued mining will prevent nuclear war because every policy debate team has nuke war impacts that won't quit.

What these lawyers have done, however, is more serious than use a high school policy debate tactic poorly.  They blamed the victims, a tactic that shows that corporate America has lost none of the hubris that caused the economic downturn that still plagues ordinary Americans.  If fact, it plagues everyone except corporate CEOs who give themselves exorbitant bonuses.

Plains Pops: Money And Religion Edition

The Week calls executive salaries "enraging" and reveals the biggest disconnects between the rich and the rest of us.

$10.8 million
Median pay in 2010 for top executives at 200 large companies, according to an Equilar report commissioned by The New York Times. "Total C.E.O. pay hasn't quite returned to its heady, pre-recession levels — but it certainly seems headed there," says Prandyna Joshi in The New York Times.

$752
Average weekly income of the average American worker in late 2010, just a 0.5 percent raise over the previous year. "It's not as if most workers are getting fat raises," says Joshi. After inflation, they're actually making less.

29.2
Percentage increase in profits for American businesses in the fourth quarter of 2010, "the fastest growth in more than 60 years"

2
Percentage increase, since the recovery began, in the amount businesses are spending on employees, according to the Commerce Report

26
Percentage increase in the amount they're spending on equipment and software. "The economy is producing as much as it was before the downturn, but with seven million fewer jobs," says Catherine Rampell in The New York Times.

Writing an opinion piece for CNN, Kenneth Davis, author of Don't Know Much About History, opines that original intent properly understood implies that United States was not founded as a Christian nation.  Several take away paragraphs.  First, the founders were probably not evangelicals.

No one can argue, as "Christian Nation" proponents correctly state, that the Founding Fathers were not Christian, although some notably doubted Christ's divinity.

More precisely, the founders were, with very few exceptions, mainstream Protestants. Many of them were Episcopalians, the American offshoot of the official Church of England. The status of America's Catholics, both legally and socially, in the colonies and early Republic, was clearly second-class. Other Christian sects, including Baptists, Quakers and Mormons, faced official resistance, discrimination and worse for decades.

Davis then goes on to give the following facts to bolster his claims that the United States founders saw the nation as a secular state.

Beyond that, the first House of Representatives, while debating the First Amendment, specifically rejected a Senate proposal calling for the establishment of Christianity as an official religion. As Lambert concludes, "There would be no Church of the United States. Nor would America represent itself as a Christian Republic."

The actions of the first presidents, founders of the first rank, confirmed this "original intent:"

-- In 1790, President George Washington wrote to America's first synagogue, in Rhode Island, that "all possess alike liberty of conscience" and that "toleration" was an "inherent national gift," not the government's to dole out or take away

-- In 1797, with President John Adams in office, the Senate unanimously approved one of America's earliest foreign treaties, which emphatically stated (Article 11): "As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, -- as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen (Muslims) ..."


-- In 1802, Jefferson added his famous "wall of separation," implicit in the Constitution until he so described it (and cited in several Supreme Court decisions since).

Because these first two pops seem a bit disjointed, I'll try to tie money and religion together.  The Pope tweets, and Bloomberg reports that Twitter is worth $7 billion which is about $2 billion less than the National Football League which arguably functions as America's secular church.

I Thought It Was an Invisible Hand Not an Invisible Backhand

In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith famously says

“By directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."

Smith precedes his metaphor with a more direct example.  “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”

The latest jobs report shows that "[t]he average hourly wage of all employees remained $22.87, unchanged from February and up only 1.7 percent over the last year."  That 1.7 percent is less than the "2.1% [that compensation grew] in the 12 months ended December 2010. 

According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report, "[t]he average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls was unchanged at 34.3 hours in March."  Assuming a two-week paid vacation, the average worker can expect to earn $40,793.92 this year.

While trying to earn that $40,000 value, The average butcher, brewer and baker has produced a rather interesting end.  According to a USA Today report, "median CEO pay jumped 27% in 2010 as the executives’ compensation started working its way back to prerecession levels. . . ."

Of course not every CEO got the 27% increase; some got a little more. "The highest paid of the CEOs analyzed by USA TODAY was Philippe Dauman, CEO of Viacom. Dauman was paid $84.5 million, which was not only a 149% increase from 2009, but 11% greater than the No. 2 on the list, Ray Irani of Occidental Petroleum."

Sticking with the averages, the difference between 27% and 2.1% is stark enough.  The unintended consequences are brought into sharper relief when the article reports

The median amount that CEOs actually took home — which includes salary and cash bonuses, as well as stock and options awarded in previous years that vested or were cashed in — was $8.6 million. That’s the most CEOs have pulled down since the median of $9.2 million in 2007, according to GovernanceMetrics’ analysis of S&P 500 companies.

The averages mean that one CEO is paid as much as 210 "average hourly" workers.  That same CEO is paid as much as 665 minimum wage employees.  Even worse than these salary and growth disparities is "the disconnect between pay and companies’ true underlying performance."  USA Today cites University of Massachusetts professor William Lazonick who points out "companies in the S&P 500 boosted profit 47% last year, much of that was due to cost-cutting and layoffs, not from the creation of businesses and growth."  In short, execs got big bonuses by firing workers.

Adam Smith contends that people who look out for their own interests benefit others even if they don't mean to.  It's difficult to see how workers benefit from the CEOs who are looking out for themselves.