Chris Christie's Traffic Jam Scam: "I Has a Sad Now" Update: Bruce Springsteen joins Jimmy Fallon Parody Born to Run Mocking Chris Christie.

by Sunnyjane

I'm so sad that I haven't even had the desire to yell at a teacher lately.

Screeeeecccchhhh!  No, that's not the sound of a vehicle coming to a sudden halt on the George Washington Bridge.  That's the sound of a political career trying its damnedest to keep from going off the bridge.

Tip O'Neill, former Democratic Speaker of the House, coined the phrase All Politics is Local, and that's usually true.  But when a scandal's transgressor is a well known governor who aspires to the lofty position of President of the United States, said scandal becomes national news and garners the media coverage it deserves.  After all,  Americans love a political scandal.

Hail Mary, Full of Grace, Let Me Win This Freaking Race

The first motive for the grand plan to shut down two access lanes from Fort Lee to the George Washington Bridge came shortly after copies of emails were made available on Wednesday, January 8. 

Motive #1:  The lane closings were retribution against the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, Mark Sokolich, for refusing to endorse Gov. Christie's candidacy for a second term.  However, that falls short as good reasoning because Christie says he never asked the mayor for his support, as he had done with many other Democratic mayors in New Jersey.  Mayor Sokolich has pretty much confirmed that he was never approached by anyone in the Christie campaign for his endorsement, telling Chris Hayes:  I’ve never viewed myself as being that important. The governor himself said that I’m not on his radar.  But the mayor did add, David Wildstein deserves an ass-kicking. Sorry, there, I said it. 

Motive #2:  Rachel Maddow put forth another theory, that the closings were payback for what he knew would be the state Senate's refusal to confirm his reappointment of a Republican judge to the New Jersey Supreme Court.  In one of his epic rants on the evening of August 12, Christie raged in public that the members of the Senate -- led by Democratic Senator Loretta Weinberg, who happens to live in Fort Lee -- were all animals and suggested that reporters should take a bat to the seventy-eight year old grandmother.  It was the very next morning, at 7:34, that Bridget Kelly sent the infamous eight-word email to David Wildstein: Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.  And Wildstein replied: Got it.

Motive #3:  The latest conjecture comes from MSNBC's Steve Kornacki, who speculates that the Christie administration may have been trying to derail a billion dollar development project of Mayor Sokolich's.  Of course, such traffic jams -- if allowed to continue -- would have meant the end of that project.

Motive #4:  An admittedly small thinker -- and I hesitate to try to out-speculate some of the most respected minds in the media -- I believe the motive for this jam-scam is much simpler.  The lane shutdowns began less than two months before the gubernatorial election in November.  Christie knew he was going to win reelection, and yet he admitted in his press conference on Thursday, January 9, that he was trying to run up the score.  He wanted his opponent's voters.  And who was his opponent?  Barbara Buono of Bergen County, in which Fort Lee was the targeted town.

In an email exchange with David Wildstein, a name-redacted individual wrote: I feel badly [sic] for the kids.  I guess. 

To which Wildstein replied, They are the children of Buono voters.

Gov. Christie won Fort Lee with 55%, Bergen County with 60.2%, and the entire state with 60.4%.  So, his strategy may well have worked.

The truth may be one, some, all, or none of the above.  But with several investigations taking shape, I'm sure we'll find out.

The Governor Doth Protest Too Much, Me Thinks

   

So after trying to block the investigation, I took swift action four months later!

One thing that Chris Christie hasn't learned yet is that most times, saying less is much better than spewing a whole lot of shit on national television for almost two hours.  He used every self-castigating adjective he could think of to display how awful he felt.  The only thing he didn't say was something along the lines of I'm upset because I always assume that the suck-up idiots who work for me are trustworthy.

For the Governor to say he knew nothing about the issue until the morning of Tuesday, January 7, is an outright lie; the cover-up started much earlier.  In the middle of the closures, Pat Foye, Bill Baroni's counterpart on the New York side of the Port Authority, asked in an email to Baroni how he was supposed to explain the lane closings to the public.  Baroni replied, I am on my way to office to discuss. There can be no public discourse.  To which Foye responded, Bill that’s precisely the problem: there has been no public discourse on this.  

In early December 2013, he personally phoned New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to ask him to stop Pat Foye from pressing so hard on the investigation into Bill Baroni's part in the September shutdown.  Obviously, Cuomo refused.  

Me thinks that NO ONE is going to come out of this smelling like a rose.

Conservative Reactions and Reactionaries

Brit Hume, Fox News: It's this feminized atmosphere that makes Chris Christie a bully.* 

On the day of the released emails, both CNN and MSNBC ran with the story on a full-time basis, while Fox News gave it about fifteen minutes.  After all, it was Roger Ailes who tried to convince Chris Christie to run for president in 2012, and would surely expect him to run in 2016.  And the Governor claims Ailes a confidential adviser and any interactions between the two will be protected under the New Jersey's executive privilege rules.

Known to be sound-bite grabbers searching for a camera if a scandal appears to be taking shape around President Obama, GOP members of congress have been notably silent on the Chris Christie Bridgegate brouhaha.  When asked if Christie was still a viable candidate for 2016, John Boehner said, I think so.  Rand Paul, a wannabe primary challenger of the Governor's was rather frosty when asked, saying that it was a local problem.  However, he could not resist adding, I have been in traffic before, though, and I know how angry I am when I’m in traffic, and I’m always wondering, ‘who did this to me?’  (Did you feel that filet knife that was just plunged into your kidneys, Governor?)

Rudy Giuliani called the closures a stupid political prank that got out of hand.   A prank? 

*If you thought you'd seen Fox News reach its nadir, you might be in for a surprise.  On Sunday, the station's Media Buzz program produced this little gem from Brit Hume, who referred to Chris Christie as masculine and muscular.   Expounding, Hume said, I have to say that in this sort of feminized atmosphere in which we exist today, guys who are masculine and muscular like that in their private conduct and are kind of old-fashioned tough guys run some risks.  (Hume may have to walk that back a bit; see the End Note.

For more of what the GOP pundits and other talking heads had to say yesterday, read on.

End Note

Say I'm a bully one more time and I'll punch your nose in!

Actual quote:


Using direct and blunt language is something that I've done my whole life. It was the way my mother raised me. I am who I am. And I'm not going to change. 

Thanks for the warning.  The American voters appreciate your clarifying that, and we'll be sure to remember it in 2016.  Please proceed, Governor.

UPDATE by Kathleen. 

I'd like to add this parody of Bruce Springsteen's "Born To Run" mocking Governor Chris Christie performed by Jimmy Fallon and Bruce Springsteen to Sunnyjane's excellent post. 

The Minimum Wage and the Living Wage

by Blueberry T

For months, I’ve had it in mind to write a post about the right to work, as opposed to Right-to-Work laws, and the living wage. The trouble is that I got lost/buried in the topic and couldn’t get anywhere with it. Then, the other day, I saw that Governor Chris Christie – who portrays himself as a pragmatic centrist who represents the interests of his constituents – vetoed a bill that would have raised the minimum wage in New Jersey from $7.25 to $8.50 an hour now, and indexed the minimum wage to inflation thereafter. Wow - he cured my writer’s block!

Christie vetoed the bill despite the fact that 82% of New Jersey residents surveyed by Quinnipiac University, including 67% of Republicans, support increasing the minimum wage to $8.50/hr.  

In the interest of full disclosure, Christie sent the bill back to the legislature, saying he would accept a modified bill with an increase of a whopping 25 cents/hr in the minimum wage this year, and increases over the next three years to bring it up to $8.25/hr., but without inflation indexing. He used the excuse that increasing the minimum wage would threaten economic recovery. This is a common argument used to thwart efforts to raise the minimum wage, along with arguments that raising the minimum wage causes job losses.  Here is the conservative Heritage Foundation’s argument along those lines.  Here are articles from Bloomberg, Think Progress and LearnVest refuting these arguments and laying out the strong case for a raise in the minimum wage.

Now, let’s look at this.  Of course, this is an issue not just in New Jersey, but throughout America. For background, here is current information from the Department of Labor on the federal minimum wage law and how it is implemented. States can now enact their own minimum wage; currently the state of Washington has the highest minimum wage at $9.19/hr. Here is a clickable map showing the minimum wage in each state (you can scroll down to compare the data for each state) and a Q&A that covers exemptions and other issues. 

Today, the national minimum wage is $7.25/hour, which equates to $15,080/year for a full-time worker.  Adding insult to injury, minimum wage workers generally do not get health insurance or much else in the way of benefits.  The national minimum wage has fallen so far behind the pace of inflation that it now only provides 68% of the buying power that it had in 1968. According to Wikipedia, “The minimum wage had its highest purchasing value ever in 1968, when it was $1.60 per hour ($10.64 in 2012 dollars). From January 1981 to April 1990, the minimum wage was frozen at $3.35 per hour, then a record-setting wage freeze. From September 1, 1997 through July 23, 2007, the federal minimum wage remained constant at $5.15 per hour, breaking the old record.” In other words, since 1981 there have been two periods of almost a decade each during which the minimum wage did not increase at all. Even the highest minimum wage in the country currently, $9.19/hr, does not keep pace with inflation when compared to the 1968 wage.

Note this map is now out-of-date; I include it for the data on who earns minimum wage; also note the minimum wage did NOT rise to $8.25/hour in 2010 as estimated here.

The fact that the minimum wage is not indexed to inflation is a huge problem, because raising the minimum wage is always a political football and generally falls prey to legislative gridlock or conservative ideological purity tests. This is the case even though several studies indicate that people earning the minimum wage are likely to spend every dollar they earn, thus increasing consumer spending and stimulating the economy. Ironically, in the recent fiscal cliff compromise, the estate tax exemption was indexed to inflation. Got that? If you earn the minimum wage, you don’t get any adjustment each year, but if you are going to inherit more than $5 million, you are in luck not only because of your obvious wealth, but also because the amount not subject to the estate tax will now be increased each year - because it would have been some kind of unfair hardship otherwise, right? Talk about a tax code and economic system that favor the wealthy! If there is one single economic reform that is urgently needed, it is to index (minimum) wages to inflation.

But that is only part of the story.  Most importantly, the minimum wage is not enough to live on, almost anywhere in the country – and certainly a single value does not reflect variations in the cost of living throughout the country, in any case. In most areas, the minimum wage is closer to a poverty wage than a living wage. To help illustrate this, MIT has developed a living wage calculator that shows the wage needed to meet the actual cost of housing and other basic necessities in every city or town in the country.  It’s a tremendously helpful tool that also shows how much money is needed not only for a single adult, but for a 1-2 adults with 1-3 children.  It also shows the estimate for each expense category. 

What becomes immediately apparent, in looking at the MIT living wage calculator, is that not even a single person earning minimum wage can possibly come close to the living wage costs, anywhere in New Jersey (and most other places in America). Living wage is around $10/hr or more everywhere in the state. (Okay, I didn’t check every town, but the lowest living wage I found was close to $10/hr and most were much higher.) Even a couple with no children, both earning minimum wage, would fall short of the living wage. With children, forget it. Impossible. You’d have to work more than two full-time jobs.

In fact, the minimum wage is, in effect, a poverty wage for anyone with one child, and even lower than poverty level for someone with more than one child, as is the case for many single mothers, for example. The result is that there is little hope of ever getting out of poverty for many people consigned to the minimum wage scrapheap of the American economy. This is a far more important economic truth, and far more damaging to the economy and society as a whole, that the weak arguments about raising the minimum wage being detrimental to business. Governor Christie should have to confront these facts and address this issue, rather than basing such an important decision, which affects his constituents' lives so directly, on speculation and the wishes of self-interested businesses.

In this article by Robert Reich in Salon, he reports, among other things, that "almost a quarter of all jobs in America now pay wages below the poverty line for a family of four."  He notes that many of the jobs stemming from economic growth in the coming decade will be low wage. Not surprisingly, there is a strong correlation with the weakening of labor unions. 

Here is more information on the living wage from the Labor Center at UC Berkeley and the Living Wage Action Coalition. 

The irony is that if people made enough to meet their needs, so many of society’s problems would be lessened or resolved.  This lack of a living wage is a far bigger problem than the deficit, but gets far less attention than it deserves.  

UPDATE: Our friend and reader Nomad (Nomadic Joe) reminded us of the role that ACORN played in campaigning for a living wage; here is his post on the subject.  EbbtideMB pointed out the work that labor unions are doing to promote living wages; here is a resolution referring to living wage ordinances passed in  Michigan and elsewhere. The importance of labor unions in promoting the living wage is key, and the weakening of organized labor is such an important factor in wage stagnation.