Feckless

We heard a lot of criticism directed at President Obama when gasoline prices started to climb earlier this year. Republicans, knowing how easily many voters can be manipulated, thought they had a campaign issue: just remind everyone that gas prices are going up, ignore the complex set of factors that explain the rise, especially Wall Street speculators, and just blame the President.

They lined up at the mic to do just that:
      In February, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made the laughably inane claim that “This President will go to any length to drive up gas prices and pave the way for his ideological agenda.”
      In March,  Mitt Romney declared, “He gets full credit or blame for what’s happened in this economy, and what’s happened to gasoline prices under his watch..."
     In April, House Speaker John Boehner said, “The president holds the key to addressing the pain Ohioans are feeling at the gas pump and moving our nation away from its reliance on foreign energy. My question for the president is: what are you waiting for?”

As it turned out, Boehner didn't have long to wait. Now that gas prices are falling, he and other Republicans have grown silent. Romney said Obama deserved credit, as well as blame, for what has happened. That is simplistic nonsense, of course; the fact that Congressional Republicans have spent three years obstructing the President apparently is not a factor for Romney. Let's be clear on that point: you may agree with Republican tactics and say the Dems must be stopped, etc., but you cannot later ignore the Republicans' role in the Washington logjam and pretend it wasn't a factor.

In any event, Romney is a little slow about giving Obama "full credit" on gas prices. Now one might say that Obama doesn't deserve much credit or blame: The White House inherently has few short-term options on oil prices and cannot be expected to simply step in and ratchet down gas prices. American presidents do not have that kind of power.

But that doesn't mean Obama didn't have some options, or that he didn't use them.

What's that? You didn't hear all about it? And some people still think our corporate-owned media has a liberal bias. To make a bad situation worse, the White House has done a poor job of sharing Obama's message and accomplishments. It's as if he believes the media is an honest broker and is motivated to get the full story out. Peter Cohen, writing for Forbes, captures this frustrating imbalance:

When he was running for President in 2008, Barack Obama struck me as a gifted orator. But now that he’s running for re-election, it feels to me that the messaging power of his political opponents is like Hurricane Katrina blowing against a chipmunk’s squeal. So I am confident that a piece of excellent news for drivers resulting from a little-noticed policy from Mr. Obama will get no attention at all from the media.

In April, I predicted that President Obama’s $52 million plan to increase the margin requirements and otherwise tighten the screws on oil speculators — who borrow huge sums to bet on the direction of oil without taking delivery — would cut oil prices by 10 percent. He’s beaten that prediction, and the lowered price of gasoline has added $78.4 billion to its consumers’ spending power.

Cohen has much more to say on the specific steps Obama has outlined to combat high prices, including:

  --Increase by a factor of six Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) surveillance and enforcement staff “to better deter oil market manipulation,

  --Boost 10-fold, to $10 million, the civil and criminal penalties against “firms that engage in market manipulation,

  --Give the CFTC authority to increase the trader margins — the amount of their own capital that traders must set aside for each bet...

These and other factors, including increased domestic oil production, have driven down oil and gasoline prices. Cohen puts it in human terms:

So just how much has Mr. Obama stimulated the economy through his April crackdown on oil speculators? Well, if my experience is any indication, the answer is quite a bit. After all, I was paying about $4.05 a gallon for mid-grade back then and this week the price had fallen to $3.49.

That 56 cents a gallon decline would amount to me saving about $582 a year — assuming that I fill up my 20 gallon tank once a week. But if the AP is right, that same 56 cent a gallon drop would add $78.4 billion to U.S. GDP.

That’s not much for a $15 trillion economy, but it represents a 1,508 percent return on Mr. Obama’s $52 million investment, in two months.

In the final analysis, I notice a double standard. Republicans attack Obama for not doing something about high gas prices. He, in fact, did something, including increased drilling and permit approval. Not a sound of approval from his critics, and not much coverage in the media. In the spring, Obama also outlines his plan to rein in speculators. By the first day of summer oil prices were off 21% from their April highs.

Republicans blame Obama for not doing something about gas prices even as they insist government should stay out of free markets. He does something, brings down prices, and they call it government meddling. Weren't you the guys blaming him for not doing anything?

Feckless assholes

Voter Disenfranchisement

Readers know I despise any and all acts of voter suppression. Numerous states now have bills under consideration that will make it more difficult, in one small way or another, for certain people to vote. And I guess it is just a coincidence that these bills will dispropotionately affect the poor, blacks, Hispanics, and most coincidentally of all, Democratics. If anyone knows of an example where the prime sponsor of any bill in any state that makes it more difficult for anyone to vote, and that sponsor is not a Republican, I would love to hear it. As for those bills, I will revisit them as events develop.

A subset of voter suppression is voter disenfranchisement, primarily through loss of voting rights due to a felony conviction. Mind you, this is not for felons actually in prison (many states deny prisoners the right to vote while incarcerated), but for those who have done their time and paid the price. It includes even those who have completed parole. And in case you were wondering, voter disenfranchisement was part and parcel of Jim Crow.

While voter disenfranchisement was quite prevalent in the past, only two states now impose permanent disenfranchisement for felons, Kentucky and Virginia. In 2007, Florida restored the voting rights of ex-felons. Alright, I am seeing some improvement.  However, those who think this is now a minor problem are first reminded that thousands of ex-felons in Florida were denied the right to vote in the 2000 and 2004 Presidential election. 

Spencer Overton, in his book, Stealing Democracy: the New Politics of Voter Suppression (2006), captures the basic rationale for voter disenfranchisement: ex-felons are disproportionately black, brown, poor and undereducated. And roughly 70% vote Democrat. As Overton relates (p.58),

"As frank as I can be, said Alabama Republican Party Chairman Marty Conners in 2003, we're opposed [to restoring voting rights after completion of sentence] because felons don't tend to vote Republican."

Overton notes how Republican Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader, has opposed voting rights restoration in Kentucky. In 1984 he would have likely lost his Senate race without the help of disenfranchisement. In 1998, Kentucky's other Senator, Jim Bunning barely won reelection, winning by only 6,766 votes. At the time, there were 94,584 disenfranchised ex-felons in Kentucky.

Bunning's successor, hard-line ideologue Rand Paul won a very close race in 2010, narrowly defeating his Democratic opponent in one of America's reddest states. I do not have any conclusive figures relating to the possible effect of voter disenfranchisement on the outcome of that race. There is good reason to think it played a decisive role. Some data can be found here. A good starting point on the subject and how the law has changed in recent years can be found at the Prison Policy Initiative.

Privatizing Elections: A Republican Wet Dream

Last week I reported that House Republicans intended to end the Presidential Election Campaign Fund, the Watergate-era law that created a role for public financing of elections. This latest effort to give the wealthy ever more control over our democratic institutions passed an important hurdle on Wednesday by a 239-160 vote margin. As with virtually all substantive legislation, the vote fell sharply on party lines.

Republican leaders never fail to give reason for loathing. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor claimed the bill was a "no-brainer." Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, introduced the bill into the Senate, claiming, “In a time of exploding deficits and record debt, the last thing the American people want right now is to provide what amounts to welfare for politicians.”

These, of course, are the same people who continue to vote for various corporate subsidies, allow corporations to avoid taxes through sweetheart legislation, happily line their pockets with corporate donations, oversee the monstrous and lucrative defense contracts that put billions of taxpayers' dollars into corporate coffers, and voted to extend tax cuts to America's richest.

What the budget deficit does is allow Republicans to chip away at any number of programs, however valuable, in the guise of attacking the deficit. The actual budgetary impact of many of the programs they insist must end is quite modest; $20 million here, $50 million there. Seems like a lot until you realize the total amount doesn't pay for a single B-1 bomber.

Republican presidential candidates know they personally will have no trouble raising huge sums of cash for future elections because they do corporate America's bidding. Progressive politicians who try to rein in the march to oligarchy will have a much tougher time raising money. And that disproportionate impact is why Republicans would love to end public financing. Obama's great fund-raising success in 2008, which did not rely on public funds, will be tough to repeat, and thanks to Citizens United, will likely be overshadowed as corporations and the super-wealthy reassert and extend their traditional dominance.

The bill still has to pass the Senate, which seems unlikely, and then be signed into law by the President, which is even more unlikely. I would feel better about this were it not for the Democrats' proven ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. 

See BusinessWeek for more details.

More Evidence Tax Cuts at the Top Don't Work

Democrats, at least some of them, and many in the progressive blogosphere, have been making a set of arguments on tax cuts, and why they should not be extended to the very wealthy. It is very simple, though it clearly makes little difference to Republicans set on rewarding their benefactors. The evidence against tax cuts may be on our side; the power to implement stupid policy is clearly on theirs, especially if President Obama, in his obsessive quest for bipartisanship, wilts in the face of the constant right-wing haranging.

Yet more evidence of the ineffectiveness of marginal tax-rate reduction comes from Moody's Analytics, an outfit that has long served hand in glove with Wall Street. As reported in Bloomberg, Moody's Analytics recognizes that Bush's tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 largely resulted in increased savings for the very wealthy. As Chris Cornell, an economist who researched the issue for Moody's, states, “I would tend to wonder how much the tax cut actually influences spending behavior...Spending by the top 5 percent of households seems much more closely tied to business-cycle issues than it does to tax-cut issues.”

Of course, Chris; wealthy households have far more than they know what to productively do with already. Giving them a tax break just compounds the effect.

Despite this, Republican leaders, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell in particular, continue to make the case that we must plunge ourselves further into debt roughly $700 billion so that rich people will have even more.  And they do this while howling that we must cut the deficit. That's chutzpah.

I suppose they deserve some sort of credit. No matter how inane their arguments may be, no matter the evidence that contradicts them, and no matter how blatant their class-warfare rhetoric may sometimes be, they remain consistent on some level. They know how, as Matt Taibbi puts it, "to set big groups of voters off angrily chasing their own tails in response to media-manufactured nonsense, with the Tea Party being a classic example of the phenomenon."

And they know Wall Street, having thrown shitloads on money at Repubicans, expects a return on its investment. And they know how to deliver, don't they?