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.

Dow Jones Surges Under Obama

The table below reveals that President Obama's first two years mark the biggest two-year increase in the Dow Jones Industrial Average since FDR. Obviously, the increase has much to do with the shit pile Bush handed to Obama, just as the huge increase under FDR had much to do with cleaning up after another reckless Republican. Some of the increase was inevitable and would have happened regardless of who was in the White House.

Yet even if people have different views on how much Obama should be credited for the surge, the least credible argument that conservatives can make is that he has been bad for business. Naturally, that is the one they try to make. If a Republican had presided over this stock market recovery, the conservative press would have insisted that everyone tattoo words to that effect on their arm. They would have repeated it on Fox News until it became an article of faith.

 

The problem, of course, is that the stock market is but one indicator of our economic health. The Dow Jones is not terribly relevant, its rise not very helpful, to those unable to invest. Yet the conservative investor class was very happy when stocks went up under Bush the Lesser. They were quick to suggest it was because markets trusted Republicans. Many financial elites, the same ones who bitched endlessly that Obama would ruin us all, have benefited enormously under two years of Obama, having got back most or all of what they lost after their toxic shit hit the middle class fan during Bush's last year.

Yeah, I know; there was a bunch of neo-liberals like Rahm Emanuel, Peter Orszag, Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, and others who were in on it as well. Democrats mostly, they worked in the Clinton Administration, the Obama Administration; some in both. They have mostly moved on to enormously enrich themselves on Wall Street. They promoted Wall Street's perverse dominance with the worst of the Republicans.

Good riddance to all.

Republicans Push for More Corporate Dominance

The march towards oligarchy continues. Republicans, in the guise of spending cuts, have announced they want to abolish campaign matching funds. As David Espo at MSNBC writes:

WASHINGTON — The House will vote next week on legislation to end the system of financing presidential candidates and national party conventions with federal matching funds, Majority Leader Eric Cantor announced Thursday. He put the estimated savings at $520 million over a decade if the legislation passes Congress and is signed into law.

Cantor, R-Va., said the vote would be a response to a pre-election project in which Republicans invited the public to vote on proposals for reductions in federal spending.

"While some have argued that providing even more taxpayer funding for this program might entice more candidates to participate, eliminating the program altogether would save taxpayers $520 million over 10 years and would require candidates and political parties to rely on private donations rather than tax dollars," read a description on Cantor's website.

That last sentence is the kicker: Cantor and his fellow Republicans, rolling in cash ever since the Supremes, at least five of them, handed them Citizens United a year ago, now want to more thoroughly privatize elections than ever before by outlawing even the modest role played by legislation passed in response to multiple election-related abuses by the Nixon Administration.

That legislation was specifically designed to prevent undue reliance on special interest groups, or more specifically the richest and best-connected interest groups. If it is repealed, a big if at this point, there will be even less separating corporate America from dominance, legal dominance, mind you, of the electoral process and government itself.

All this to "save" $520 million over 10 years. We spend that much on Afghanistan in a matter of days.

Citizens United

A couple of videos to recognize the one year anniversary of the asinine Citizens United decision. Note to conservatives: these videos contain parody. And a happy MLK Day to all.




She's learning fast, but thanks to a perverse combination of Wall Street money and teabagger ignorance, her generation will grow up thinking that corporate dominance is the norm.



Not too sure about that time and a half thing. That's subversive pro-human talk. No red-blooded American corporation favors it.

BTW: How can you tell she is a pre-teen?   She's ordering Zinfandel.

Corporate Communism

Dylan Ratigan has a good rant in the video below. Free market pain and adjustment for most of us; socialism, subsidies, and protection for those at the top. 

It should be so blatantly obvious that financial interests have captured our economy and government. I hold special contempt for teabaggers who had ample opportunity to see who the real perpetrators have been. Just to be clear on this; the evidence is pretty freakin obvious that the Republican establishment created the teabagger movement. The money, and there was lots of it, came from various sources, but mostly from Wall Street. And the teabaggers themselves have been too stupid, too misinformed, and so ideologically blind that they not only offer completely incoherent, contradictory, and intellectually infantile demands, they have also completely missed the overwhelming role that Wall Street, conservative economic doctrine, and Republican politicians have played.

Yet teabaggers and other shallow voters have become angry with America's difficulties only since Obama took office. Tip to the clueless; it ain't the unions, the public sector, teachers, Muslims, or Obama's black friends that have put the US and the middle class in the current bind.  Do your brain a favor and read some economic history.

Take a look at the chart below the video. If I had to choose one data set to show what has happened to the US in recent decades, this would be it.




This chart indirectly reveals how nearly all growth since about 1980 has gone to corporations. The data directly show that for a generation, corporate America has had the ability to pay much higher wages, but instead has pocketed nearly all productivity gains. Corporate profits are at record levels, but the American middle class is hurting not because taxes are too high, but because our wages are too low.

Jobs Up, Boehner Complains

The US Labor Department has just released its December employment data. As the Labor Dept.'s website says, "The number of unemployed persons decreased by 556,000 to 14.5 million in December, and the unemployment rate dropped to 9.4 percent. Over the year, these measures were down from 15.2 million and 9.9 percent, respectively."

Not bad. Many remain jobless, but the drop in the unemployment rate was substantial, the biggest one-month drop since 1998 (also under a Democrat). The still-high figure of 9.4% is the lowest since July 2009.  According to Nancy Pelosi, now the House Minority Leader, President Obama and the Democratic Congress created more jobs in 2010 than George Bush did in all of his eight years. The new Speaker of the House, John Boehner, from whom I have yet to hear a single statement or sound bite that is both substantive and coherent, replied that the data shows the need to cut spending in order to grow the economy.

Boehner pulled that positively Hooveresque conclusion from his ass.  He, Cantor, and the rest of his crowd just cannot accept that federal spending has a stimulative effect. To be more precise, they happily spend when they are in power and when the money goes to their districts. Spending, and the deficit, become problems only when Democrats are in control.

Did you notice how Republicans, primarily Boehner, railed against the federal deficit ever since Obama took office, but changed their tune late last year when it looked like they were going to score a victory for their richest benefactors by getting Democrats to agree to Bush-era tax cuts for all (by holding the unemployed hostage, no less). Then, for several weeks Republicans laid off the deficit rhetoric and instead insisted that we should never raise taxes in a week economy, as if the richest 2% of America would suffer. Now that they secured the tax cuts for the rich, Republicans are back to inveighing against the deficit.  

As for those jobs, Boehner should get an eyeful of the chart below. It's from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Obama has done remarkably well given the catastrophe handed to him by Bush and Wall Street.

ThinkProgress has a nice summary of Bush's record of job creation:

As the Wall Street Journal noted in the last month of Bush’s term, the former president had the “worst track record for job creation since the government began keeping records.” And job creation under Bush was anemic long before the recession began. Bush’s supply-side economics “fostered the weakest jobs and income growth in more than six decades,” along with “sluggish business investment and weak gross domestic product growth,” the Center for American Progress’ Joshua Picker explained. “On every major measurement” of income and employment, “the country lost ground during Bush’s two terms,” the National Journal’s Ron Brownstein observed, parsing Census data.

Whitewater, Part II

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks is spot-on in this clip. He makes almost all the points I myself try to make about the recent Republican accusations of corruption in the White House (no wonder I like him!). Note especially the almost comical position of Congressman Issa, who acknowledges that Bush signed TARP into law, but all that money must surely be corrupting the Obama Administration, so naturally one starts off with well-publicized accusations. The lack of evidence is apparently beside the point. Cenk also speaks of the $ billions that went unaccounted for in Iraq; a fact, not an accusation, of which Issa has nothing to say. 

Readers should note the real reason for Issa's aggressiveness. Republicans are going to do the same thing to Obama that they did to Clinton; endless investigations along with the accusations, the circus atmosphere, and the ample opportunities to implant in the minds of voters that Obama must be stopped. Republicans were able to drag out Whitewater for almost the entire eight years and never found anything. Their objective was to destroy Clinton. Failing that, to embarrass him, undermine his administration, and suggest to voters that the man was tainted, as if mere accusations meant scandals. 

Far more officials in the administrations of Bush the Elder and Reagan went to prison than those under Clinton, a fact almost completely forgotten by voters and our feckless media. But a generation of Americans will forever link Clinton to Whitewater. That, of course, was an objective. To be sure, Clinton created his own mess with Monica Lewinsky, but that was after almost everything else had run its course.

Republicans have shown a determination to set the narrative on Obama through every means possible, and that now includes subpoena and investigatory power. They spent years trying to destroy Bill Clinton, with limited success. They are set to do it again with Obama. They sense weakness, and the political and social climate has become dysfunctional, so the outcome may be different this time.  As Cenk says, "they're coming after you."

Rich Narcissists Still Whining

I wrote an earlier post about hypocrites on Wall Street on August 31. The key take-away for me, other than the enormity of their plunder, was the extent to which Wall Streeters, especially the banks, felt put upon because President Obama has dared to scold them for ruining the economy with the most reckless and breathtaking display of greed and irresponsibility in the history of capitalism. And yet they are still walking around, rich and unindicted, while Obama bailed out their collective and undeserving ass, poured billions into the economy, oversaw a stock market recovery, which disproportionately benefited these same bankers and other wealthy elites, passed a luke warm financial reform bill that won't reform much of anything, and thus does little to slow down Wall Street's dominance, and then agreed to extend tax breaks to America's richest.

And still they whine. Many bankers got behind Republicans in '10, as is customary, after supporting Obama in '08, an especially ironic choice given that Wall Street has done very well under Democratic administrations. They just can't shake that unsupported belief that Republicans are somehow better for business than Democrats. As with so much in our modern political economy, and ever more so in what is becoming a post-factual society, identity trumps evidence.

The President met with a small group of CEOs recently, and none of the banking honchos was invited. So now they are having a snit about it. Ben White at Politico has a good take on a level of animosity towards Obama that, in view of banking's profits and privileges, is irrational and bizzarre.

John Amato, referencing Ben White's article, has his take on it as well.  As Amato says, "You can see how deluded these fat cat CEO's are. I mean a few words will make them cry. As I said, even though the President gave these Masters of Destruction virtually a free pass they will now go back to pumping their millions in the GOP."

Finally, watch the video of Sam Seder's interview with Matt Taibbi.




As Taibbi says, the attitudes of the bank CEOs are "unbelievably obnoxious."

Rick Scott Set to Descend on Florida

I had forgotten the extent to which Rick Scott had masterminded the teabaggers' Town Hall riots back in the summer of 2009. OK, I knew he threw a lot of his own money into the health care debate, such as it was, and I certainly knew he wanted to stop any reform that would undermine the healthcare industry's profits. But Scott has been a one-man wrecking crew.

You remember Rick Scott, yes? In a post on September 20, I wondered, as did others, what Scott's appeal was, given his extremely dubious past as a CEO of a demonstrably fraudulent health care insurer. It was all very public information, and yet he had the inside track as Florida's next governor.

He, of course, won the election and so he will be that state's next CEO come January 4th (what is it about people who think CEOs make good politicians? The jobs are so similar, don't you know?)

Madfloridan has an excellent post excoriating the press for recently raising a few good questions about Slick Rick, now that the election is over. He cites three sources.

One is The St. Petersburg Times, which writes, "Incoming Gov. Rick Scott's disdain for government regulation appears to be absolute — and absolutely irresponsible. The Times quotes Scott who declares, "What's the benefit of a regulation, other than delay?"

Yikes, and this after deregulation ran amuck on Wall Street. And the St Petes Times concern about this? As Madfloridian says, "So now they worry." At least the Times bothered to explain the value of regulation.

Meanwhile, Time magazine asks, "Is Florida ready for Governor Rick Scott?" As Time writes:

Florida has some of the broadest open-government laws in the country. So when Governor-elect Rick Scott held a number of behind-closed-doors meetings with business leaders earlier this month during a five-day jobs tour, many political observers fretted that he might not fully appreciate the Sunshine State's sunshine rules. "It would have been a nice gesture on his part to hold those meetings more in the open," says Ben Wilcox, Florida director of the government watchdog group Common Cause. "But Florida's sunshine laws are going to take some getting used to on his part, since just about all he's known is the corporate world."

The Miami Herald quotes a Scott advisor who doubts that Florida needs public hospitals. That's pretty rich. Scott says it's all about improving efficiency, which sounds reasonable. But he is part and parcel of the conservative obsession with privatizing everything in sight, an idea wrapped with the wholly-unsupported insistence that the private sector is inherently and always more effective than the public sector. What that ideology really means is that by privatizing, profit becomes the central focus. And that is precisely why health care in the US is so inadequate. For other industrialized countries, universal health care is first and foremost a public health care issue. For the US, health care is a profit center. The primary fiduciary duty of US corporations, including those in health, is to their shareholders, not their customers. The insurance industry's big pushback on President Obama's health care plan was not because it would not work. It was because they knew a public option would end their ability to continue gouging the American people. 

So I feel for Madfloridian, who says, "I fear for our state the next few years. This guy makes Jeb look saintly." That, of course, is Jeb, as in Jeb Bush.

Orszag Cashes In

Obama said he was going to change the way Washington works. Like more bipartisanship. OK, so he has tried to get along with Republicans who publicly admit they intend to obstruct everything they can. It's like trying to pet a rabid dog and constantly having your hand bit. Republicans have gnawed Obama's hand down to the wrist, but he keeps sticking it out there.

But other things in the current White House are far too familiar. The President loaded up his administration with neoliberals--the heart of the financial establishment--people whose interests, efforts, and expertise are devoted to Wall Street. These guys have Obama's ear just like they had Bush's and Clinton's. And those that moved on after serving in government almost always went to, or back to, Wall Street, where they invariably enriched themselves.

So it not really a surprise that White Houe Budget Director Peter Orszag has departed and is now at Citigroup as Vice Chairman of Global Banking. He had brief stints as a Distinguished Fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and as a contributing columnist for the New York Times. Those positions were just a prelude, a decent interval, to the position at Citigroup, one for which he had been auditioning since day one at OMB.

Hey, he earned it. He may have headed OMB, but on occasion looked more like a Citigroup lobbyist, working to ensure that Citigroup received taxpayers largesse. In return, Orszag now has a plum job reportedly worth several million per year. Not bad for a few months of government work.

James Fallows wants to know why there is so little backlash on this. Conflict of interest anyone? Featherbedding? He knows, of course, and so do the rest of us. Society now accepts this kind of corrupt "descent from heaven," as the Japanese call it. American scolds will still shake their head and wag their fingers when they see it in China, or with some tin-pot dictator in Africa, but shrug their shoulders when it happens at home.

America has become irretrievably corrupt.

The Road to Oligarchy

When you spend a lot of time studying a subject, or follow events closely, you may assume that the issue at hand has become common knowledge, or at least has the attention of most sentient beings. I learned long ago, and still have to remind myself, that this is usually not the case. Recently I was again surprised by a poll that showed that 94% of Americans do not know who John Boehner is. This is a man who is constantly in the news, and in front of a camera. People will learn more than they wanted to know when he becomes Speaker of the House in January.

For the same reason, I have to assume not many have kept up with this country's slide into oligarchy. The evidence is there, and so is the reportage. It is not comforting.

For a small sampling, see Robert Freeman's article, It's Official: Rich Declare War on the Middle Class. As Freeman relates, "... all of the income and wealth gains for middle Americans from the “golden years” between 1945 and 1975 have now been wiped out.  Or more accurately, have now been transferred to the very rich."

Andy Kroll's How the Oligarchs Took America notes how thoroughly conservative elites have captured institutions, including the court system, the media, and the minds of many Americans since Ronald Reagan (greed is good). He also refers to an excellent new book that happens to be on my ever-growing reading list, Winner-Take All Politics, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. As Kroll relates,

Unlike so many pundits, politicians, and academics, Hacker and Pierson resist blaming the usual suspects: globalization, the rise of an information-based economy, and the demise of manufacturing. The culprit in their crime drama is American politics itself over the last three decades. The clues to understanding the rise of an American oligarchy, they believe, won’t be found in New York or New Delhi, but on Capitol Hill, along Pennsylvania Avenue, and around K Street, that haven in a heartless world for Washington’s lobbyists.

And for an analysis on how our warrior class has assisted the transfer of wealth, see Gilbert Mercier's cheerily entitled The American Empire is Collapsing and Americans Will be the Last to Know. My only quibble is that many Americans do know (there I go again), but we are at a loss as to what we can do.

More on Wage Theft

On November 15, I wrote about the growing problem of wage theft. Others are also trying to raise media awareness on a practice that is illegal, immoral, and pervasive. You won't hear much about wage theft if you expect our corporate-owned media to tell the story.

David Love is hitting this story. In a blog post called Wage Theft: Thou Shall Not Steal From Your Workers, he references Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ), a non-profit I noted in November was taking the lead on fighting wage theft. Among the depressing facts IWJ has uncovered, the average worker loses $2600 in unpaid wages every year. About 75% of low-wage workers who work 40+ hours per week are not receiving overtime pay, as federal law requires. And a great many people are incorrectly classified as independent contractors instead of employees because their employers avoid FICA, or payroll taxes, as well as minimum wage and overtime requirements. Avoiding FICA means the employer stiffs social security.
 
Kudos to Interfaith Worker Justice for caring enough to actually do something, and to David Love for raising awareness. Why does IWJ even have to fight this? It should be enough that IWJ points out a few infractions. Where are the government officials swooping in to stop this practice?

Where is our media? Isn't cheating workers out of their wages a sufficiently scandalous story? 

European Dismay

In my last post I referred to Tom Friedman's article on how badly the US is polarized and how deeply it has affected our ability to function on even a basic level. Thanks in no small measure to Republican obfuscation, we have become a bizarre parody of ourselves. It is almost like a skit on Saturday Night Live, to which Republicans would whine about how they are being unfairly stereotyped as being in the pockets of the rich. "We will not try to balance the budget on the backs of the poor," I can hear them say.  Except that they are. Slash social security and threaten to shut down the government if Dems don't give tax breaks to the rich? They want that too. How painfully obvious does it have to get before we realize today's Republicans are no longer the party of Eisenhower?

Unfortunately, there are too many Democratics who seem either resigned to events, and are not fighting back, or are actively assisting our transition to oligarchy.

Americans don't take foreign opinion into proper account account very well. As a result, too many Americans have increasingly indefensible views on our international role and rank. And thanks to our deeply compromised media, few Americans are hearing what others think about us and our government, and why it should matter.  

Our recent elections, a giveaway to corporate America disguised as economic populism, has dismayed many in Europe just as it did many progressives here.  How can it be, they ask, that Americans can be so narrow and forgetful as to vote back into power the same corrupt party that helped put the economy in the ditch just before Obama's term began in January 2009?

Europeans, the same people who have national health care of one sort or another, and pay less for it, have no desire to adopt America's for-profit, pay-through-the-nose model designed to enrich the insurance industry. Europeans get more for less, and they know it. They see our recent protracted effort to adopt universal health coverage as symptomatic of American ineptitude. They could see, just we could, at least those of us who didn't watch Fox News, that very high majorities of us wanted a public option.

Yet we couldn't get it done, despite public opinion and Democratic control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. Support declined only when it became clear that we would end up with an unworkable compromise that enabled insurance companies to continue dominating the process.

Steven Hill has written more on the European reaction. In a recent post at Alternet, Hill relates his own experience:

"While participating in a conference in Budapest in September, where prominent conservative leaders and thinkers were in attendance, including the president of the European Parliament and two prime ministers, some of the most eye-opening comments had to do with new perceptions about America. One speaker, Christian Stoffaes, who is chairman of the Center for International Prospective Studies based in Paris, stated the “United States is in disarray, extremely polarized. It is practically a civil war there, and you can’t count on it.” This theme was echoed by others speakers, who went even further. One said “We need to shift our emphasis eastward (towards Asia) and not wait for the Obama administration.” I found these statements to be surprising, and even vaguely alarming, given the importance of the transatlantic relationship in the post-World War II era. But there was a widespread view that the US is being consumed by the severity of the Great Recession, brought on by a broken Wall Street capitalism, as well as by the quagmires of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, and an inability to change course."

 Regarding the failed Copenhagen Summit on climate change, Europeans saw that the US was not serious about climate change. Calling it a real wakeup call for the Europeans, Hill notes a sudden European epiphany:

...it wasn’t George W. Bush who was the problem, but something more profound about America’s broken political system that prevents any leader, even one as talented as Obama, from delivering.  That political system is marinated in money, is paralyzed by a “filibuster-gone-wild” Senate that has allowed a minority of Senators to obstruct all legislation, and is hamstrung by a sclerotic, winner-take-all, two-party electoral system that has left voters poorly represented and deeply frustrated." 

Ain't it just swell? Hill captures one more quotation that I must share here because it is a sentiment that many progressives share, including myself. German Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schauble, says "...The USA lived off credit for too long, inflated its financial sector massively and neglected its industrial base."

Exactly.

Bear in mind this is the same Germany that has higher taxes and more regulations, higher wages and higher unionization, and health care for everyone. It has paid vacations for all, generous maternity leave, more generous pensions, and much greater job security. And wealth is much more evenly distributed because of taxes. All socialist programs.

Just what Republicans insist would destroy the US. Yet Germany has generally better demographics, such as lower homelessness, lower crime, higher literacy, and longer life expectancy.  

Germany also has a massive trade surplus. And It does not owe $ trillions to China.

Republicans have their arguments completely backwards. But at least we have more billionnaires.

Our Government is Paralyzed and Polarized

I don't always agree with Tom Friedman. He has, for example, been far too enthusiastic about the benefits of globalization. But I think he is spot-on in his recent rant in the New York Times. Taking a page from the recent Wikileaks dustup, Friedman imagines he is sharing with us a cable, intercepted if you will, between Beijing and the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. (You can read the whole article here).

The tone is one of satisfaction, even relief, because America is demonstrating a contemptible inability to face up to its challenges, especially those posed by China.  Here are some excerpts.

"Things are going well here for China. America remains a deeply politically polarized country, which is certainly helpful for our goal of overtaking the U.S. as the world’s most powerful economy and nation." 

"...There is a willful self-destructiveness in the air here as if America has all the time and money in the world for petty politics. They fight over things like — we are not making this up — how and where an airport security officer can touch them. They are fighting — we are happy to report — over the latest nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. It seems as if the Republicans are so interested in weakening President Obama that they are going to scuttle a treaty that would have fostered closer U.S.-Russian cooperation on issues like Iran. And since anything that brings Russia and America closer could end up isolating us, we are grateful to Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona for putting our interests ahead of America’s and blocking Senate ratification of the treaty...."

"...Americans just had what they call an 'election.' Best we could tell it involved one congressman trying to raise more money than the other (all from businesses they are supposed to be regulating) so he could tell bigger lies on TV more often about the other guy before the other guy could do it to him. This leaves us relieved. It means America will do nothing serious to fix its structural problems: a ballooning deficit, declining educational performance, crumbling infrastructure and diminished immigration of new talent."

"But the Americans are oblivious. They travel abroad so rarely that they don’t see how far they are falling behind... In foreign policy, we see no chance of Obama extricating U.S. forces from Afghanistan. He knows the Republicans will call him a wimp if he does, so America will keep hemorrhaging $190 million a day there."

"Most of the Republicans just elected to Congress do not believe what their scientists tell them about man-made climate change. America’s politicians are mostly lawyers — not engineers or scientists like ours — so they’ll just say crazy things about science and nobody calls them on it. It’s good. It means they will not support any bill to spur clean energy innovation, which is central to our next five-year plan. And this ensures that our efforts to dominate the wind, solar, nuclear and electric car industries will not be challenged by America."

...Thank goodness the Americans can’t read our diplomatic cables."

And that does not address what the Europeans think about us, our broken government, and our downward spiral to oligarchy. That will be another post.

Policy Preferences and Democratic Weakness

On Wednesday I shared a small taste of Bill Maher's skeptical attitude about American voters' understanding of issues and policies. He, of course, is not the only one who notes a wide and long-standing anti-scientific, anti-intellectual streak in this country.

Is it getting worse? It would seem so, in part because of a new level of right-wing aggressiveness, much of it associated with Sarah Palin and teabaggers. Palin sneers at those pointy-headed intellectuals, and the teabaggers eat it up. In her crowd, anti-science has become fashionable and, perversely, is viewed as virtuous.

And yet...  

RJ Eskow, a Senior Fellow with The Campaign for America's Future, cites many reasons to feel good about the wisdom of Americans, at least a majority of us. He has collected some impressive polling data, complete with compelling pie charts that show clear majorities of Americans prefer progressive legislation and policy choices. To wit:

     1.  A large majority opposes cuts to social security;

     2.  Seven in ten oppose raising the retirement age;

     3.  A plurality says to raise taxes on the wealthy;

     4.  Nearly 4 in 5 are against cuts in Medicare;

     5.  Nearly 2 in 3 oppose cuts in lending for college tuition;

     6.  About 6 in 10 say to do more to assist unemployed workers

     7.  4 in 5 say to do more to reduce poverty
     8.  Seven in 10 favor more regulation on Wall Street

Such clear preferences do not demonstrate that people actually understand the details or implications of their choices (3 in 10 don't favor Wall Street regulation?); but they do show that most people want government to help them, not get out of the way, as Republicans since Reagan have claimed. 

As I have posted before, it is essential that we understand the role of political identity. The polls Eskow cites suggest most American prefer, wait for it -- socialism -- a strong dollop of the European model, complete with much more equitable income distribution (say it ain't so Ayn Rand). Many gravitate towards Republicans because it suits their personalities. They want to see politicians project strength, conviction, and detemination. Republicans may have an unusual obsession with swagger, symbolism, and simplistic interpretations of complex issues, but nobody likes to see weakness in their elected officials. And that is what we have mostly seen in the last two years with Dems in the White House and Senate.

People want the Democrats to win, but they have no patience with any party that says it stands for the middle class and then repeatedly squanders its opportunities. Many Americans may be uninformed, many have short memories, and many are impatient, not realizing how long it takes to turn our economy around. Those are faults of the electorate that complicate governing in the US. But nobody is making Democratic politicians look weak except themselves.

Republicans write the script only because Dems let them.

Dogs And Teabaggers Sense Fear

Here is a video I meant to put up earlier. Bill Maher and Michael Moore capture much of the essence of teabagger mentality, and for that matter, much of what studies on authoritarian personalities have demonstrated long before anyone heard of teabaggers, Palin, or Glenn Beck.

Maher makes the point that many Americans are like dogs. That will get the right wing's assortment of serial resenters frothing, but he makes a cringe-worthy and accurate assertion that so many Americans are like dogs because they don't really understand what is being said; they look for voice inflection, style, symbolism, and attitude.

Ok, so dogs don't get symbolism, but Maher is right to emphasize fear as a motivator for dogs and teabaggers alike. Millions let their gut feelings be their guide, which is why, as Maher notes, so many seem impervious to rational discourse. On numerous issues wonkish progressives hold dear, teabaggers do not simply disagree with progressives, and offer a reasoned counter argument; they do not understand the issue in the first place. 

But listen carefully to Moore. He stresses a point you have heard me say before: Dems lost seats in November because the 18-24 crowd didn't bother to vote, while their parent and grandparents did. Moore says 70% of the 18-24 demographic voted for Obama, which sounds about right. However, while 23 million of them voted in '08, only 9 million did so in 2010. Yet Republicans only garnered 5 million more votes in 2010.

Do the math: it's all about voter turnout.

 ________

Lies, Liars, and Tax Policy

There is an excellent post at ourfuture.org, called Taxes: Myths and Realities. There is a lot in it, so I will just hightlight and paraphrase portions. Be sure to read the whole article. Lots of links too.

1. "President Obama's tax cuts benefitted more than 95 percent of Americans."

Teabaggers have mindlessly brayed that President Obama has raised their taxes, and don't Dems realize you can never raise taxes in a weak economy? In reality, 95% of Americans received a refund of nearly $3000, a 10% increase from the previous year. Moreover, the Obama tax cuts concentrated on working poor and the middle class. Families in the bottom quintile received an average cut of $604 from the 2009 tax cut legislation. The same group received an average of $22 from the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2006, despite Bush's repeated insistance that they were a boon for all Americans.

Is it necessary to point out that the bulk of Obama's tax cut went to the middle class, which will mostly spend it, and Bush's cuts, which went overwhelmingly to the rich, who mostly save it?

2. "Conservative tax policies helped the rich the most, and left everyone else poorer."

This has become indisputable. When conservative economic policies are in place, wealth is distributed upwards. See their links and then read The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett to understand why inequality is so pronounced in the US, and why it is hurting us.

3. "It's the wealthy and corporations, not working Americans, who avoid taxes."

Right again; I really need to develop this single issue, that the wealthy, especially the super-wealthy, have untold numbers of ways to avoid taxes not available to others, because it is one that most Americans don't really understand, and for an entire generation we have listened to Republicans howl about high taxes, welfare queens, and how lazy, indolent, slackers are sucking big bucks from the wealthy, who, of course, earned it all fair and square through pluck and diligence. 
 
This is some serious bullshit, but it points to the ability of Republicans to creat a politically advantageous framework; that real Americans, the ones from the heartland, are hardworking, sensible, and vote Republican. The poor and disadvantaged are actually lazy and dishonest, don't you see? They are just gaming the system, and wouldn't you know it, they usually vote Democrat. 

Nice framing, except that it is nonsense. As the site says, with data from the Government Accountability Office, "A whopping two-thirds of American corporations and foreign corporations doing business in the United States pay absolutely no federal income taxes—despite taking in $2.5 trillion in sales."

Meanwhile, here is David Stockman, Reagan's budget director. He is effectively acknowledging the unsustainability of Reaganomics, especially the obsession over tax cuts, an idea which has infected Republicans ever since.

They Will Never Be Satisfied

President Obama continues to get very little credit for what his administration has accomplished. He has lost some support with progressives because he has yet to make good on issues that matter to them, including DADT, overturning heavy-handed Bush-era policies such as indefinite detentions, Guantanomo, domestic wire-tapping, and that little thing called the (two) wars. Jobs continue to concern us all. And Wall Street reform, so proudly hailed by the White House, will do little to curtail the dysfunctional personalities that flock to finance, where greed, aggressiveness, and a sociopathic disregard for the welfare of others are so obscenely rewarded.

And yes, Obama, and numerous other Dems crapped out on health care reform. Although Fox News won't mention it, public support for a public option was very high during the negotiations. Support dropped only when it became clear that we were geting the shitty version, the one that allowed the insurance companies to continue to rip us off.  More than a few progressives now believe the White House never was committed to a public option. So there are reasons why many progressives, myself included, are ambivalent about his tenure so far.

Conservatives have no excuses for their animosity, other than to admit their addiction to partisan politics leaves them no choice but to continually confirm they are intellectual prostitutes.  And confirm they do: They look especially ridiculous as they howl that Obama has shackeled business, that the mini-reforms on Wall Street will destroy wealth, or that our deficits keep spiraling out of control.

The President deserves some perspective in light of the steaming pile that Bush handed him in January of 2009, coupled with the abject refusal of Republicans to offer anything other than exactly the policies that got us here.  Deregulate Wall Street? Tax cuts for millionaires? Attack the deficit by hobbling social security? That's why they are intellectual prostitutes.

Have a look at the chart below. It shows some data you will never hear from Mitch McConnell.

Right, five straight quarters of growth. The White House had the economy expanding after only six months. Don't think Obama was the reason? You can sure as hell bet the Bush or McCain White House would have stepped up to take credit. As it is, many in the media act as if the recession began when Obama took office and that eight years of Bush mismanagement never happened.

Now watch the video of Chris Hays sitting in for Rachel Maddow. Record profits for corporate America, rising stock prices, out-sized bonuses. They even got their auto industry back. It's all there.




This is a big fat Happy Thanksgiving for corporate America. Instead they whine. 

Updates on GM

GM has gone public again, and with significant investor interest. Many in the media seem to have forgotten how close to disaster GM came, and how dramatic the fallout would have been, at GM as well as its massive supply chain. 

There is a excellent write-up by "thebigotbasher" on GM's coming out party at The Conservative Lie. Give it a read. I'll just amplify here that Republicans are pretty miserable shits for trying to talk down GM's prospects. It seems clear they do not want to see GM succeed, at least for the next two years, because that success story will be forever linked to President Obama. They have been howling about Obama's heavy socialist hand on GM for months. They, of course, are suggesting that government do nothing, and let the magical free market pass its verdict on GM, and Chrysler as well. They do this because GM's failure will be forever linked to Obama. Dick Cheney, who is so often wrong, was not wrong in 2008 when he urged Republicans to get behind a bailout. He knew, and publicly stated, that if GM went under with Bush in the White House, the Republican Party would be seen as the party of Hoover.

Speaking of (mostly)Republican disparagements on GM, Jay Bookman suggests conservatives might want to issue a recall of their past public statements. He has an excellent compendium of quotes from critics who were convinced that govenment aid to GM was complete heresy. Here are just a few:

       

    “Every dollar spent with GM is a dollar spent against free enterprise.” -talk-show host Hugh Hewitt

    “Now the government has forced taxpayers to buy these failing companies without any plausible plan for profitability. Does anyone think the same government that plans to double the national debt in five years will turn GM around in the same time?”– U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C

    “I see no hope whatsoever for the situation. I think the $50 billion might as well be kissed goodbye. I would expect that this is just the beginning.”– conservative policy consultant Wendell Cox

You might think Republicans would have a bit more confidence. When Chrysler needed government support in the 1980s, far-left socialist Ronald Reagan was there. Chrysler recovered, paid back its loans, and was viable for a generation.

There is so much more on this, including the caveat that it remains to be seen how GM will ultimately turn out, but I got to get out of here for now. 

Gotta get a bird.

Health Care May Get Worse Before It Gets Better

I see where our beloved health care industry, the world's best most profitable, gave $86 million to the US Chamber of Commerce trying to defeat last year's health care legislation. I guess they have to protect that gravy train.

Meanwhile, yet another study has been released which lays bare our deficient health care. Reuters reports that a study by the Commonwealth Fund shows ..."that while Americans pay far more per capita for healthcare, they are unhappier with the results and less healthy than people in other rich countries."

The Fund's data also revealed that 20% of adults in America had significant problems paying medical bills. Only 2% in Britain and 9% in France reported similar problems.

The single biggest difference, it strikes me, between health care in the US and elsewhere in the OECD is that in the United States, health care is compelled by conservative economic doctrine to be a profit center. And if doctrine is not enough, what with all those pesky socialists, powerful interests, with their lobbyists and paid-for politicians, will work to make it happen, on their terms. Elsewhere in the OECD, the focus is on low cost health care for all, not profits. Yes, I know; it drives conservatives wild--it can't work if someone isn't making money off of it.

Thus, the primary purpose of the health insurance industry is to turn a profit, not to care for the sick. Only this would explain why a nation can so ineffectively care for millions, especially the poor and others who cannot get insurance.  What we have had are highly profitable insurance companies that were able to cherry pick their customers, and ignore or abandon those who threaten profits.

Health care reform was supposed to address at least some of the most egregious aspects, all of which the health care industry fought like crazy to protect. Current legislation is deeply flawed, but hey, it was a start. The egregious, and some might say inevitable flaw, is that taxpayers will now pay for those previously rejected, which is ok, but without cost controls on the insurers, which is not. Lots of new customers and no one saying you can't raise your premiums. That single condition explains why the health care bill ultimately passed.

And with Republicans, fortified with a gaggle of ignorant and strident teabaggers, about to take back control of the House, I am not expecting any progress.