Bill Humphrey, Author at Arsenal For Democracy

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About Bill Humphrey

Bill Humphrey is the primary host of WVUD's Arsenal For Democracy talk radio show and a local elected official.

Aug 19, 2015 – Ep. 139: Interview with Amb. Nicholas Burns

By Bill Humphrey August 19, 2015 - 11:00 am August 19, 2015 Radio Show

Posted by Bill on behalf of the team.

Topics: Guest expert Ambassador Nicholas Burns on the Iran nuclear deal. And: Discussion of the Republican debate and Planned Parenthood. Hosts: Bill, Kelley, Nate. Produced: August 14th and 16th, 2015.

Discussion Points:

– The details and benefits of the Iran deal from Ambassador Nicholas Burns, former lead U.S. negotiator
– Nate, Kelley, and Bill discuss the first Republican debate and the Trump phenomenon
– Kelley explains the latest opposition to Planned Parenthood

Episode 139 (56 min):
AFD 139

Guest Bio: Nicholas Burns

Ambassador Burns is the Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of Diplomacy and International Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He is Director of the Future of Diplomacy Project and Faculty Chair for the Programs on the Middle East and on India and South Asia. The Diplomacy Project focuses Harvard’s students, fellows and faculty on the importance of diplomacy in the 21st century global environment. He is also a member of Secretary of State John Kerry’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, Director of the Aspen Strategy Group, and Senior Counselor at the Cohen Group.

As a career Foreign Service Officer, he was Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs from 2005 to 2008; the State Department’s third-ranking official when he led negotiations on the U.S.–India Civil Nuclear Agreement; and was the lead U.S. negotiator on Iran’s nuclear program. He has also served as the U.S. Ambassador to NATO and Greece and State Department Spokesman.

The origin story of minimum wage laws, part 1

By Bill Humphrey August 18, 2015 - 8:55 am April 15, 2016 Arsenal Essay, Arsenal Local, Arsenal Research

Part 1: New Zealand, Australia, Massachusetts, the New Deal, and China: How governments took an active role initially, and how they balance economic variability now. || This original research was produced for The Globalist Research Center and Arsenal For Democracy.

More than 150 countries have set minimum wages by law, whether nationwide or by sector. Other countries have no legal minimum, or governments play a different role in wage setting processes.

Where in the world did government-set minimum wages originate?

In 1894, over 120 years ago, New Zealand became home to the first national law creating a government role for setting a minimum wage floor – although this may not have been the initial intention.

The Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act established an arbitration court made up of both workers and employers. It was intended to resolve various industrial-labor relations disputes in a binding manner. The goal was to avoid all labor strikes.

The court was empowered to set wages for entire classifications of workers as part of these resolutions. It did not take long for this to evolve into a patchwork of rulings that effectively covered all workers.

Today, New Zealand’s hourly minimum wage is about equivalent in purchasing power parity (PPP-adjusted) terms to US$9.40.

Which country first adopted a living wage?

In the 1890s, neighboring Australia was still a loose collection of self-governing British colonies, rather than one country. One colony, Victoria, was inspired by New Zealand to adopt a similar board with wage-setting powers. This occurred shortly before the Australian colonies federated together in 1901 to become one country.

In 1907, Australia pioneered what is now known as a “living” wage when the country’s new national arbitration court issued a ruling in favor of a nationwide minimum wage.

That court specified that it had to be high enough to fund a worker’s “cost of living as a civilised being.” While the ruling soon ran into legal trouble from the federation’s Supreme Court, it remained a crucial precedent in future labor cases.

To this day, Australia has a generous minimum wage. The current rate is about equal to US$11.20 in PPP-adjusted terms. This represents about 55% of median pay. However, New Zealand’s minimum wage is actually proportionally higher, at 60% of median pay.

N.B. Purchasing-power currency conversions are from 2012 local currency to 2012 international dollars rounded from UN data.

Which U.S. state had the first minimum wage?

In the United States, a minimum wage mechanism was first introduced in 1912 at the state level — but specifically for female workers (and some child laborers) — in Massachusetts.

The state passed a law to create a “Minimum Wage Commission” empowered to research women’s labor conditions and pay rates, and then to set living wages by decree. For any occupation, the Commission could set up a “wage board” comprising representatives of female workers (or child workers), employers, and the public to recommend fair pay levels.

The Commission’s decreed wage had to “supply the necessary cost of living and to maintain the worker in health.”

1912, the year Massachusetts passed the law creating the commission, was part of a period of major reforms in the United States, which had become the world’s largest economy.

These changes gave government a more active legal role in economic policy. In 1913, the country adopted the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. constitution, which made possible a federal progressive income tax. Also in 1913, the Federal Reserve System was created.

More than a dozen U.S. states followed Massachusetts within less than a decade. However, they had to contend with frequent battles before the U.S. Supreme Court on the constitutionality of government-set minimums. Read more

“A parliamentary era”

By Bill Humphrey August 18, 2015 - 8:00 am August 18, 2015 Arsenal Bolt

Arsenal Bolt: Quick updates on the news stories we’re following.

“No Joe. Not That.” – DelawareLiberal.net:

An era of bipartisanship existed during the Cold War because of the Cold War and because the two parties were both ideologically divided. There were liberals and conservatives in both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. And a lot of them, not just one or two. So there was bipartisanship because either the liberal wing of both parties voted for something, or the conservative wing of both parties voted for something.

That era is over. It is not coming back. We are now in a Parliamentary Era where each party represents one ideology. We have been since 1994. Our punditry, and old fools like Carl Bernstein, need to finally finally wake up to it.

Washington cannot be united. And it shouldn’t be. What instead has to happen is that, if you want anything to get done in Congress, is to vote for one party completely or the other, so that you have Congress and the Presidency controlled by one party.

Previously from AFD on this topic:

– “Polarization” – It’s odd to talk about Congressional “polarization” now while ignoring how ideologically confused the parties used to be.
– SBBS: “Pelosi’s Parliament” – How Nancy Pelosi ran the U.S. House like a parliament.
– “The Susan Collins Dilemma” – If a Senator votes to left on key Democratic issues but guarantees a Republican majority, which matters more?

2015 U.S. House composition (with one vacancy). Credit: Nick.mon / Wikimedia

Fair wages are just another operational cost to meet

By Bill Humphrey August 17, 2015 - 2:03 pm September 8, 2015 Arsenal Pulse

There are op-ed columnists weeping about all the jobs a $15 wage floor would supposedly eliminate, as if companies couldn’t just cut executive pay and shareholder payouts. Some still insist that, to avoid spurring unemployment, it would be better to pay everyone less than they need to pay bills.

I hate to break it to them, but the first goal of paid work is to get workers enough money to survive, not to give everyone something to do. But at any rate, there’s just so much evidence that reasonable minimum wages don’t cause mass unemployment (despite what those folks seem to think).

Really, it’s all a matter of priorities. Wages are just part of the field conditions in which companies compete under a properly regulated capitalist market, along with taxes and supply costs and anything else you can imagine a company needing to pay for. We’ve decided not to properly regulate the labor market, so companies use money for other stuff (or profits), and not for wages.

As FDR argued, if your business literally can’t operate without underpaying workers, it doesn’t deserve to operate. If higher wages for low-level workers is the breaking point for your company and no internal changes can save it, your company is a disaster. A properly regulated market would adhere to the principle of corporate survival of the fittest, but “fittest” would include ability to pay fair wages without bankruptcy. Small businesses wouldn’t go bust automatically either, because all workers would be getting paid more and thus have more to spend locally.

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When The Party’s Over: The 1820s in US Politics

By Bill Humphrey August 16, 2015 - 5:10 am August 18, 2015 Arsenal Essay, Arsenal Research

A recent eye-catching Washington Post op-ed, reacting to the surges of Trump and Sanders, posed the historically-based question “Are we headed for a four-party moment?” This op-ed had potential — it’s true after all that the seemingly solid two-party system in the U.S. occasionally has fragmented for a few cycles while a major re-alignment occurs — but, for some reason, it only used the 1850s and 1948 as examples (and 1948 isn’t even very illustrative in my view).

A far more intriguing additional parallel would be the 1820s (and the 1830s aftershocks). In 1820, one-party rule under the Democratic-Republican Party was fully achieved on the executive side of government, and no one opposed President Monroe for either re-nomination or re-election. It was the party’s 6th consecutive presidential win. The Federalists remained alive only in Congress, where 32 representatives (just 17% of the House membership) remained. By 1823, there were only 24 Federalists in the House. By the fall of 1824, they had all picked a Democratic-Republican faction to support.

That year’s factionalism, however, was when things fell apart for single-party rule, alarmingly rapidly. The Democratic-Republican Party ran four (4!) different nominees and 3 running mates (Calhoun hopped on two tickets). Andrew Jackson won the popular vote and the most electoral votes, but no one won a majority of the electoral college. So, the U.S. House (voting in state-blocs under the Constitution) had to pick, and they chose Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, the second-place finisher.

1824 presidential election results map. Blue denotes states won by Jackson, Orange denotes those won by Adams, Green denotes those won by Crawford, Light Yellow denotes those won by Clay. Numbers indicate the number of electoral votes allotted to each state. (Map via Wikipedia)

In 1828, when Jackson set out to avenge his 1824 defeat-by-technicality, a huge number of new (but still White and male) voters were permitted to vote for the first time. Contrary to the popular mythology, not every new voter was a Jackson Democrat, though many were. To give a sense of scale for the phenomenon, both Jackson and Adams had gained hundreds of thousands of votes over the 1824 results in their 1828 rematch. At the time, that was so huge that the increases to each in 1828 were actually larger than the entire 1824 turnout had been.

In part as a result of all of this turmoil in the electorate, the party split permanently that year, creating the Democratic Party (which continues to present), under challenger Jackson, and the rival “Adams Men” trying to keep President Adams in office that year. The Democrats under Jackson won easily in 1828. A third party, the Anti-Masons, entered the U.S. House with 5 representatives.

The defeated Adams Men faction, having lost their titular leader, became the Anti-Jacksons — and were officially named National Republicans in 1830. That year, in the midterms, the Anti-Masons picked up more seats, to hold 17, while a 4th party (under Calhoun) of “Nullifiers” sent 4 representatives. But Jackson’s Democrats held a clear House majority.

The large influx of new voters also still needed to be managed, particularly by the opposition. The three big (or sort of big) parties in 1832 — Democrats, National Republicans, and Anti-Masons — held national conventions (all in Baltimore) as part of this democratization and party-organization push. Democrats, however, still clearly held an organizing advantage. Read more

NSA and AT&T cooperated closely since 1985

By Bill Humphrey August 15, 2015 - 5:42 pm August 15, 2015 Arsenal Pulse

From “AT&T Helped N.S.A. Spy on an Array of Internet Traffic” in The New York Times:

Fairview is one of its oldest programs. It began in 1985, the year after antitrust regulators broke up the Ma Bell telephone monopoly and its long-distance division became AT&T Communications. An analysis of the Fairview documents by The Times and ProPublica reveals a constellation of evidence that points to AT&T as that program’s partner. Several former intelligence officials confirmed that finding.
[…]
In September 2003, according to the previously undisclosed N.S.A. documents, AT&T was the first partner to turn on a new collection capability that the N.S.A. said amounted to a “ ‘live’ presence on the global net.” In one of its first months of operation, the Fairview program forwarded to the agency 400 billion Internet metadata records — which include who contacted whom and other details, but not what they said — and was “forwarding more than one million emails a day to the keyword selection system” at the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. Stormbrew [another program] was still gearing up to use the new technology, which appeared to process foreign-to-foreign traffic separate from the post-9/11 program.

In 2011, AT&T began handing over 1.1 billion domestic cellphone calling records a day to the N.S.A. after “a push to get this flow operational prior to the 10th anniversary of 9/11,” according to an internal agency newsletter. This revelation is striking because after Mr. Snowden disclosed the program of collecting the records of Americans’ phone calls, intelligence officials told reporters that, for technical reasons, it consisted mostly of landline phone records.

One of the other issues discussed is that the NSA has been scooping a lot of emails (or fragments of emails) of people unrelated to intended searches because the emails are transmitted in blocks of information pieces before being re-assembled at the destination, so the target emails are probably mixed with everyone else’s emails at the interception points.

There was also a lot of discussion in the article about how AT&T and Verizon were making infrastructural repairs for the NSA overseas.

Emergency restriction areas re-appear in Turkey

By Bill Humphrey August 14, 2015 - 3:00 pm August 14, 2015 Arsenal Bolt

Arsenal Bolt: Quick updates on the news stories we’re following.

Al-Monitor: “Is Turkey’s ’emergency rule’ back?”

As of this writing, 37 areas in Gaziantep, Sanliurfa, Tunceli, Kars, Agri, Hakkari, Siirt and Sirnak provinces had been declared provisional security zones. The law allows bans from 15 days to six months. Nobody can enter those zones without permission, and doing so could mean fines and imprisonment.

Idris Baluken, co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party Parliamentary Group, asked for a parliamentary inquiry about the decision. In a petition to the parliamentary speaker, Baluken said the decision is illegal.

“With this decision for forbidden zones, what is suspended is democracy,” Baluken said. “Rule of law is being violated. In addition to the political ramifications of the decision, there are also the legal aspects. Basic rights of residence, traveling and communications recognized by the constitution are violated. The ‘contract’ between the people and the public authority of law is violated by the authority.”

Although most of the forbidden zones are those where the PKK is known to be active, two areas on the Syrian border were also included on the off-limits list.