The New York Times recently editorialized about a little-understood obstacle to prisoner re-entry: the crushing debt burden that many ex-offenders face upon release, which interferes with restitution and child support payments and hinders parole and re-integration. The editorial was based on a new report from the Council of State Governments Justice Center, Repaying Debts, which contains data from studies in several states. Below the break are just a few of the fascinating findings.

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Four years and three months after waking up on a Sunday morning and learning that her career as a clandestine intelligence officer was over because of a stupid column by Robert Novak, Valerie Plame Wilson finally gets to meet the public and tell some of her story.

Sunday night she appears on 60 Minutes, and kicks off a book tour that will start Monday morning on the Today Show and include stops at Larry King Live and the Daily Show. Unfortunately, Val cannot be totally forthcoming. I am not talking about revealing sources or methods that would compromise intelligence operations. She is a solid professional and would never entertain such nonsense. But the CIA succeeded in getting a Federal judge to block Val from admitting that she started working with the CIA in September of 1985.

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The Price of Popularity

Paul Krugman warns about the mounting attention Democrats are getting from big ticket donors in yesterday's New York Times (echoed last week in Slate). His thesis is simple: as the Democrats solidify their popularity for this November and beyond, companies are likely to re-direct their lobbying efforts to the democratic side of the field. Krugman worries about the implications of this for the progressive agendas of the presidential candidates.

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As Josh pointed out, now Comcast is joined the Bell companies in helping to make the case for Net Neutrality. They didn’t do this of their own volition, of course, but that’s the effect of the latest incident in an ever-increasing list of actions that lead to the inevitable conclusion that broadband companies like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon can’t be trusted to keep the Internet free and open.

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First, thanks to Josh, Andrew and everyone at TPM for letting us sit at the Table for One all this week. It's been fun and rewarding to read your thoughts about the state of our voting system.

To recap, Monday we started by laying out the facts: despite high levels of voter registration, American voter participation ranks far behind most nations in the world. Tuesday we talked about our challenge to all presidential candidates to lay out their plans (on video) for changing that. Wednesday and Thursday I was joined by Why Tuesday? advisory board member John Bonifaz and we posted about problems with how we literally cast ballots, and about the concept of Clean Elections.

While we were debating here what should be done do to make voting more secure, reliable and accessible, there were several other interesting developments this week surrounding the way and day we vote.

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Dear book clubbers,

As an author, it’s rare to find a venue for such well-informed debate. TV and radio are all about sound-bites. Bookstore talks are like college seminars where no one’s done the reading: you stand up and talk to people about a book they haven’t read—and that, amazingly, is the point. By contrast, here, I’ve gotten to mix is up with people who have read the book, thought about it, and taken the time to write down their thoughts. So thanks Chris, Scott, Dana, and Mark and to the staff at TPMCafé for all their time and effort!

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Conservative economic policy is dead. It committed suicide.

Its allegiance to market solutions, tax cuts and spending cuts, supply-side nonsense, manipulative and corrosive ties to industry and the rich, have left it wholly unable to cope with the challenges we face. Its terribly limited toolbox simply cannot address the economic insecurities and opportunities generated by today's global, interconnected, polluted, insecure, dynamic, bubble-prone economy.

What’s more, progressives have developed an alternative policy set with the flexibility to combine market forces with the necessary regulation and redistribution to address these challenges. Whether that agenda will ever see the light of day is another question.

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The libertarian Tyler Cowen has a blog post up in which he mainly argues that the problem with my book, The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing, is that most of the ideas I explore actually aren’t conservative ones. Matt Yglesias and Sam Rosenfeld coined the helpful phrase “the incompetence dodge” to describe pro-Iraq war advocates who blame the abysmal prosecution of the war for the failures there while insisting that the idea to invade was still wise. Let’s call Cowen’s explanation for the endless succession of governance failures at the hands of conservative public officials “the ideological purity dodge.” That is, the right-wing Republicans running the government actually failed because they weren’t conservative enough.

Cowen’s critique rather efficiently amounts to roughly three sentences per chapter, so I’ll try to respond with comparable brevity. (His arguments are in the boxes below):

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Here is the only thing you need to know about Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s plan to divide Jerusalem: there is no such plan. There never was one and it is safe to say that there will never be one.

Nor is there a plan by any other Israeli leader to divide Jerusalem. Additionally, neither the Mahmoud Abbas nor the Palestinian Authority he heads favors the division of Jerusalem.

From Olmert to Ramon to Beilin to Abbas and Fayyad, there is not a single proposal to divide the city.

So what is all the yelling about?

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I think part of what's underlying some of Dana's objections as well as Scott's pointed critique is the sense that the in some deep sense The Trap is heaping a whole lot of attention on the injustices suffered by a group that is really doing quite well: the young, over-educated members of the elite who have dreams of saving the world, or writing a novel and still want the basics of bourgeois comfort. Do we really want a government that caters to their needs?

The answer is no, and I think Daniel would agree. But that's not what he book argues. What The Trap does is make an argument to this relatively well-off cohort that the rise of inequality and the winner-take-all society isn't just a problem for other people -- the urban poor, midwestern factory workers, non-unionized service workers -- but a problem for them as well. If the book were a magazine article in one of those service-y glossies you see at checkout counter the headline would be "What Social Democracy Can Do For You!"

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The House of Representatives today fell 13 votes short of expanding a popular children's health insurance program over Bush's veto.  Of all the places that Washington Republicans could have chosen to draw a line in the sand over deficits and excessive spending, this was, well, an interesting one.  Ganesh Sitaraman provided a good analysis of the politics behind SCHIP a couple weeks back.  This fight certainly bodes poorly for the GOP's short-term political fortunes, but more importantly it represents the opening salvos in an intense health care debate likely to take center stage in the years ahead.

In total, 229 of 231 voting Democrats supported the bill, while only 44 of 198 Republicans did (click here to see a roll call vote).

I don't blame the House leadership for lacking the votes to override vetoes. They have what they have, a slender and very tenuous majority.

But doesn't it seem as if they give in often and so easily on, in effect, everything? It's a basic tenet of negotiation theory that you have to draw lines.

The thesis of my book, in my mind, is this sentence from the introduction: “When it comes to the distribution of wealth, you’re freer when it’s flatter.”

Despite the claims of Dana and Scott that the glass is half-full, I don’t think anyone—including them—would say people don’t face more pressure in choosing a non-corporate career when the pay differentials have gone through the roof, healthcare is less attainable, tuitions have spiked, and rents in major cities have gone up (in 1984, housing costs in San Francisco were 63% higher than in the typical American city; now they’re 300% higher than the typical city). Do people still squeeze by? Yes. And I’m totally up-front about that. Many of these people are profiled in my book. But anyone who wants to argue people aren’t more squeezed today than a generation ago has their head in the sand, not in reality (and not in the data, for that matter).

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As you've probably heard, in a press conference yesterday, President Bush warned that letting Iran get the knowledge of how to build a nuclear weapon could unleash World War III. Given that he is not exactly a student of military history, GWB and his spokespersons are awfully free with their war analogies.

The conflict formerly known as the Global War on Terror (GWOT) has been compared to the Cold War (long hard slog, no end in sight). Iraq is either Korea (long hard slog, no full troop withdrawals in sight) or Vietnam (should have stayed in for a long hard slog, since pulling out caused the genocide in Cambodia). And now Iran getting the knowledge of how to build nuclear weapons -- not even the weapons themselves -- will spark World War III (a short, decisive slog, the literal war to end all wars). Thank goodness the days of fear-mongering and loose charges were brought to an end by the fiasco in Iraq! 

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At the risk of overstaying my welcome in The Book Club, I have to respond quickly to Daniel's latest. Yes, Daniel, I agree that--as I said in my first post--young idealists have to give up more now than they did in the past. I'll also add that they have to give up more than young idealists in other countries. What we disagree on is a host of your other claims and on whether it's that big a problem that young idealists have to give up more now than in the past or than they would in other countries.

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Let me just take a second to respond to Daniel's last post before getting into the moral argument behind The Trap. Daniel implies that I'm suggesting young idealists move to "poor neighborhoods" or "the worst neighborhoods" or "the ghetto". This is another instance where I think he simply can't shake his ideological perspective.

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I'm always looking for other ways to understand the change in financial stress on the middle class. Dave Collum, a Professor of Chemisty and Chemical Biology at Cornell University, sent a vivid example:

When I was fifteen (circa 1970), I would carry two golf bags for four hours and earn $10. I also just happen to remember buying an extra large pizza at that same age for $2. (It was a memorable pizza, but that's another story.) The beauty of the pizza measure of wealth is that pizzas haven't changed. They cannot be hedonically adjusted for changes in quality. Thus, I was paid 1.25 extra large pizzas per hour as a fifteen year old to carry golf bags. If the average pizza costs $12 today, I was paid the functional equivalent of $15/per hour. The only fifteen year olds earning that kind of money are in drugs or prostitution.

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The next election will most likely break all previous records in campaign spending, and the money barrier is as high as ever when it comes to running for federal office. At the same time, confidence in our elections remains shaky at best.

On a recent episode of our vlog at Why Tuesday?, we interviewed some movers and shakers pushing the Clean Elections public financing system. Clean Elections give candidates the option to qualify for full public financing of their campaigns if they meet criteria including collecting a certain number of small donations. This movement has already won key victories in seven states and two cities, where voluntary public financing is now in place for statewide, local and state legislative offices.

Some in Congress have proposed legislation create a national public financing system for our congressional elections, and there are signs that this effort is one of the strongest in years.

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THIRD PRINCIPLE: Minimal Altruism for Everyone Else

With the emergence of non-state actors in global affairs – Al Qaeda being only the best known of many – the question of how to treat people living in other political societies, not just other nation states, has become pressing.

Modern American liberals believe that members of other political societies deserve concern and respect, but Americans don’t have to pay for their health care.

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Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, head of the Joint Special Operations Command’s operations in Iraq, is the chief promoter of a victory declaration and believes that AQI has been all but eliminated, the military intelligence official said. But Adm. William J. Fallon, the chief ofU.S. Central Command, which oversees Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, is urging restraint, the official said. The military intelligence official, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity about Iraq assessments and strategy.

Senior U.S. commanders on the ground, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. forces in Iraq, have long complained that Central Command, along with theCIA, is too negative in its analyses. On this issue, however, Petraeus agrees with Fallon, the military intelligence official said.

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When I concluded my first book club post with, “let the clubbing begin,” I was wondering if the clubs wielded would be made of wood—or Nerf. So I guess the answer is both. So let me respond to the questions raised by Dana (Nerf) and Scott (wood).

Part of writing a book that’s intended as a wake-up call is that it has to be pointed, even angry. But to pull back and go into disinterested social scientist mode, my goal is to argue that trends are in the wrong direction. As I wrote in the introduction to the book, “Conservative economic policies have not merely stopped the social progress that was making American freedom real for those further down the socioeconomic ladder. They have begun rolling back freedom for everyone.” So if I’m showing that even relatively privileged people are now facing lives dominated by economic compulsion, it’s even more the case for those further down. We’re truly becoming a society in which only the independently wealthy control their own lives. And this is odd, considering the country has only gotten more prosperous in recent decades. So somehow we’ve flipped the natural relationship between freedom and development (to borrow Amartya Sen concept) and we need to flip it back. But ironically, it’s harder to flip it back when our most eloquent agents of change are pushed to sell out—like when the universal healthcare advocates go to work for Big Pharma.

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This week we've already talked about when we vote, so let's talk about how we vote.

Remember the moment some years ago when the CEOs of Big Tobacco were called before Congress to be sworn under oath and forced to testify about what they knew concerning the health effects of their product? Today, there is another industry that could meet the same fate: the voting systems industry. This time, the products in question affect the health of our democracy.

The August broadcast of the HDNet program Dan Rather Reports raised serious questions as to whether United States voting systems companies have engaged in commercial fraud by knowingly marketing defective products to jurisdictions throughout the country. The piece was called The Trouble with Touch Screens.

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Although uninvited, I can't resist jumping in to this discussion of The Trap. I read it a few months ago, and it's a very good book, deserving of a place next to Tamara Draut's rhymingly-titled, Strapped as an evocative discussion of the astonishing pressures on young people, which create burdens that extend well into the life cycle. The discussion here has focused mostly on the economic analysis, and it should be said that Brook has the extraordinary intellectual range, curiosity, ability to combine ideas from different fields, and prose of an extraordinary cultural critic.

But on the economics, and speaking from the land beyond group houses and Ramen-noodle dinners, from the far continent of mortgages and kids, I want to emphatically echo Dana Goldstein's reaction, which was essentially that Brook runs the the risk of letting his Ivy League subjects off the hook too easily. What they insist is “no choice” but to go to work at a law firm or become a lobbyist is almost always very much a choice.

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In case I sounded flippant in my previous post -- sure, anybody can afford to pass up the big bucks and serve their country on a dime! -- I wanted to clarify a few points. The Trap is based on a set of revealing interviews with high-achieving young adults in their twenties and thirties. By the time Brook comes upon his subjects, they've already graduated from elite schools and pursued the right unpaid internships, jobs, and extracurricular activities to make real the choice between high status, low-paid work and high status, wealth-creating work.

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First, thanks to the folks at TPMCafe for inviting me to participate in this Book Club, and congratulations to Daniel Brook for the publication of The Trap. As someone who wants to write a book someday and who comes face to face every morning with the fact of an unwritten dissertation, I admire anyone who successfully manages to develop an idea to the point where it merits others' paying money to read it.

That said, I have to say that I find myself fairly unsympathetic to The Trap's argument and skeptical of many of its empirical claims. Let me tackle Brook's empirical case in this post.

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Last year I, along with my fellow Why Tuesday? correspondents, asked many of the 2008 presidential candidates and their colleagues (on video) if they knew why we vote on Tuesday in the United States, a day smack in the middle of the workweek.

Well, we talked to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Chris Dodd and Duncan Hunter, and most didn't know the answer... yet all of them agreed that election reform is an issue worth discussing. But despite the fact that two-thirds of Americans are in favor of reforming our election processes, there is a deafening silence in the public sphere about this vitally important issue.

So that gave us an idea: the Why Tuesday? Candidate Challenge. We've asked all presidential candidates to, by October 31st, lay out their plan for fixing America's broken voting system in a video response to be posted on our website.

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I've been waiting for one of the discussants to really attack Daniel's fine book so I could leap to its defense. But in the absence of that, I want to make just one small, important point about the political effect of the Trap that Daniel describes. The book includes a number of excerpts from interviews with people working in "the system" who are closet progressives, like the "universal healthcare-advocate-turned-consultant for Big Pharma" he cites in his post.

In my travels through young adult-hood, I've run into dozens, even hundreds, of such characters myself. But I've also found that one of the most pernicious effects of this kind of "selling out" is that people's politics change from the outside in. If you are, say, a corporate lawyer who spends all days writing briefs defending a big corporation from burdensome regulations, you can't help but begin to think that the regulations actually are burdensome. You'd have to be a kind of sociopath not to.

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If the presidential primaries were decided based on candidates' positions on war and peace, the frontrunners would be quite different. Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, and Bill Richardson would score points for supporting immediate withdrawal from Iraq. John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson would merit consideration based on their pledges to work towards eliminating nuclear weapons.

Of course, this is not going to happen. Other factors will intercede, from positions on other issues to money for advertising. But there is a "peace primary" of another sort, designed to promote organizations that have a long-term commitment to fighting for peace and justice. Without these kinds of organizations, the candidate commitments mentioned above will not mean much.

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Daniel Brook’s The Trap was perfect reading last week as the news broke that income inequality has hit its post-World War II high. As Brook writes, inequality in places like Manhattan rivals that of developing nations. The super rich buy up bohemian brownstones while undocumented immigrants deliver their take-out and do their laundry. In the middle, most teachers, journalists, and government workers take on longer and longer commutes just to be able to afford their rent.

What I loved about The Trap was Brook’s ability to enrage members of the middle class, upper-middle class, and yes – even the rich – about the shame of inequality. Brook does so by pointing to a contraction of choice, a very real feeling among well-educated young professionals that their career plans are dictated more by financial need than by passion. Indeed, income growth in the public and non-profit sectors has failed to keep up with skyrocketing corporate pay packages. But I worry that Brook overstates his case when he writes that careers in public service and the arts “have been relegated to a mix of moral giants, mental midgets, and trust fund babies.” Had I read The Trap in college, when I was deciding whether to pursue journalism or a more highly-remunerated career path, I might have had a panic attack.

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Since Ezra Klein and I will be sharing a panel at a conference this Thursday to contine our debate on whether progressive domestic policy should be pursued at the state or federal level, I thought I'd elaborate on the issue in a few posts in coming days.

The core point is that despite the conventional wisdom, most domestic programs are funded and administered by state governments because federal instituations have historically been resistant to policy innovation, forcing states out of necessity to take the lead in creating the policies to solve the problems facing American working families.

Federal inaction and state innovation is not a historical oddity but part of the institutional DNA of our national constitutional system, symbolized by the Senate filibuster which kills policy after policy. For this reason, policymakers at both the state and federal level need to think about all policies in the light of creating a "collaborative federalism" that builds policy on that reality.

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Today, the New York Times reports on a New York University study that reveals the New York City manifestation of a phenomenon that housing and civil rights activists have been troubled by for years: even when median income levels were comparable, New York City home buyers in minority neighborhoods were more likely to get a loan from a subprime lender than non-Hispanic whites.

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Dear book clubbers,

I’m thrilled to be here to discuss my first book, The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America , which argues that the new inequality is a problem for just about everyone.

Too often when we consider the new inequality, we think, “Oh, that’s like a CEO now makes almost 500 times what the average factory worker makes and only a generation ago it was less than 100 times.” Well, yes, that is a manifestation of the new inequality. But most of us aren’t CEOs and we’re not factory workers. How does the new inequality affect, say, the typical college-educated reader of this blog? The way the new inequality affects you is that it has driven what used to be small pay differentials both within and between professions through the roof. Thus, the new inequality routes professional talent in ways that, as progressives, we should be very worried about.

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Welcome to TPMCafe's Book Club table. This week we're hosting a discussion of Daniel Brook's new book, The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America.

In his book, Brook measures the options available to recent graduates in America's workforce, and finds them wanting: a new worker in the economy can either be "a sellout or a saint"--someone who makes good money in the corporate world or someone who scrapes by in the creative or non-profit one.

Joining him in the discussion will be Rick Perlstein, Chris Hayes, Kevin Drum, Scott Winship, and Dana Goldstein.

Previous Book Club discussions have covered the work of Thomas Frank, Anthony Shadid, Larry Diamond, George Packer, Ivo Daalder/James Lindsay, Robert Dreyfuss, Chris Mooney, Gene Sperling, Gershom Gorenberg, Peter Beinart, Kevin Phillips, Sidney Blumenthal, Reed Hundt, Anne-Marie Slaughter, John Ikenberry, Jonathan Cohn, Daniel Gross, Steven Cook, Chris Hayes, Josh Kurlantzick, Glenn Greenwald, Todd Gitlin, Jonathan Chait, Greg Anrig, Jr., Matt Bai, Katha Pollitt, and Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus.

Welcome to Table for One, the guest-blogging section at TPMCafe.

This week we are joined by Jacob Soboroff, Executive Director of Why Tuesday?, who comes to blog for the week on election reform. Soboroff and Why Tuesday? begins their investigation of the voting process in America by wondering why we must vote on a day in the middle of the week, and continue to ponder what other reasons exist for the country's low levels of voter turnout.

See earlier Table for One guest-blogs:
Sam Quinones, Jeffrey Toobin, Ben Naimark-Rowse, Charlie Savage, Congressman Steve Kagen, Congressman Earl Blumenauer, Scott Winship, Robert Hormats, Bill McKibben, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Sen. John Edwards, the ACLU's Anthony Romero, Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Andrew Rasiej, Gov. Tom Vilsack,Gen. Wesley Clark, Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), and Sen. Russ Feingold.

Everyone at Why Tuesday? is excited about the opportunity to blog this week at TPMCafe. In fact, we consider this platform a true embodiment of what the overarching mission of Why Tuesday? is all about: sparking a national dialogue about the state of America’s voting system in order to increase voter participation.

Election reform. It is an issue we don’t hear nearly enough about. Indeed, much of our mainstream media doesn’t cover or educate Americans about the state of election systems at home or abroad, even though voting is the right upon which all other rights depend.

Americans want their vote to matter, and they want voting to be convenient. Yet American voter participation is so low that, over the last half-century, we rank in the bottom twenty percent of all nations in voter turnout. It’s forums like Why Tuesday? and TPMCafe that will help us change that.

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Two weeks ago a jury determined that Jammie Thomas, a single mother living in Minnesota, should pay $222,000 to the recording industry for allowing other people to download 24 songs off her computer on a file sharing system. That’s a pretty steep fine for passing along a few copies of Brittany Spear’s latest hits.

The recording industry was apparently able to track down this crime by hiring a high tech sleuth who has software that can monitor the files that people place on their computers. No doubt the recording industry’s sleuth has been visiting a computer near you.

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While I think that post-Fidel Cuba is going to look a lot like Fidel's Cuba unless the US opens the spigots to travel and trade, Jimmy Carter's perspective on US-Cuba relations is useful to read. He thinks that we have undermined any chance of organic democratic movements taking hold inside Cuba.

Perhaps -- but I think that the complete and utter failure of decades long American sanctions are harming our interests -- irregardless of how liberal or illiberal the Cuban government is.

Compare it to what Robert Hutchings has recently said on Cuba. Hutchings is former Chairman of the National Intelligence Council in this Bush administration and is now Diplomat-in-Residence at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School.

First, Carter's thoughts as shared with the Wall Street Journal:

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IG means Inspector General. Normally, the IG operates outside the boundaries of political influence and cronyism. This week we learned that CIA Director Michael Hayden has launched an investigation of the IG. This comes in the wake of the IG–a man named John Helgerson–investigating torture and other abuses by CIA officers. Sure looks like an effort to shut down Mr. Helgerson. So what the hell is going on?

Here’s the link for the New York Times story:

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, has ordered an unusual internal inquiry into the work of the agency’s inspector general, whose aggressive investigations of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation programs and other matters have created resentment among agency operatives.

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This Halloween Public Citizen and the Americans for Fairness in Lending are teaming up to sponsor screenings of the must-see Maxed-Out (featuring our very own Elizabeth Warren). If you sign up for a screening, they will send you an organizing kit and (if you are lucky) a free DVD of the movie!

For those of you who don't know about the multi-award documentary, it is an absolutely perfect indictment of the culture of debt that has permeated the middle class in America. Among other things, the movie talks about the predatory credit card companies, the perverse incentives for collection agencies, and the tragedies that can result from overwhelming and unending debt. My personal favorite moment of the film shows the families of soldiers in Iraq living in debt and being forced into bankruptcy while their husbands and sons serve abroad. I don't think I need explain why. This film is not to be missed.