Impressive

You've got to hand it to Republican Party operatives. After more than 30 years of constant effort, conservatives within the party, media, the judiciary, and in the corporate world, have managed to turn upside down much of what the public thought it knew about government, unions, taxes, and even teachers.

I make a distinction between Republicans and conservatives that some may see as unnecessary; are not Republicans and conservatives synonymous? Pretty much, at least in 2012, but it would be difficult to overstate just how far to the right the Republican Party has lurched; a process that began, to the dismay of millions of moderate and liberal Republicans, with the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964. The cleansing process picked up rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s, with numerous watershed moments, such as the arrival of Newt Gingrich and the politics of destruction. As testimony to Republicans' new approach to governing, many will recall that the Party was able to keep Whitewater in public view, with the help of a stupidly compliant press, for literally years on end, only to have the process finally wind down having demonstrated no presidential malfeasance.

From the judicial standpoint, it was a waste of time and taxpayers' money. But upholding the law had nothing to do with it. The objective was to vilify a Democratic President, obstruct his agenda and ability to govern, and convince the public that conservatives stood on principles. The never-ending rush to spin the story helped feed the narrative that liberals are not to be trusted. Even today people will refer to Whitewater as a scandal, forgetting that there was no wrongdoing, despite years of investigation. It was only a scandal because the Republican hierarchy kept claiming it was. And many will be surprised when reminded that the 12 years of Reagan and Bush saw a dramatically greater number of actual convictions, not accusations, than in the eight years of Clinton. If the reality goes against what you had heard and "just assumed," it is because Republicans worked hard to make it so, for they have shown a superior ability to get their ideas into the media and into people's heads. They dominate most narratives because they understand how to make their messages simple and emotional. What sounds implausible or even ridiculous at first becomes accepted as truth if repeated enough. All propagandists understand this. This why Republicans have said for decades they, against all evidence, are the party of personal responsibility, fiscal prudence, and limited government. Voters who don't study the facts have come to accept this narrative.

And now we see Republican spin taken to new heights, creating a parallel world of logic and reason. They have managed what should have been impossible in a sane world of evidence, facts, and reason; divert enough of the electorate's, and the media's, attention away from the Wall Street banks and turn the middle class against itself. Significant numbers of Americans now think that public workers earn too much, are lazy and irresponsible, and are a drain on our fragile economy.Too many show an infantile understanding of economics by buying into Republican rhetoric that teachers' salaries are too high, so we must rein in those destructive teachers' unions. "Never mind that stuff you hear about Wall Street. Those guys deserve every penny they got, and besides, look at all the jobs they create."

The truly reprehensible thing about Mitt Romney is that he personally promotes these ideas and never once has acknowledged that the Bush tax cuts, which he wants to deepen, have been a prime contributor to the federal deficit. Everything the man says indicates he will be for the one percent and will penalize the working class, and yet he is running as a viable candidate.

And as we just saw in Wisconsin, there are plenty of voters who are fine with Scott Walker's effort to strip away the hard-fought gains by teachers and other public workers. Many now instinctively believe that there is such a thing in America as "big labor," and that cutting back salaries and benefits of teachers, librarians, firefighters, cops, and others, will somehow drive the economy forward, that and more tax cuts for the wealthy. Republicans have apparently convinced more than a few that teachers are now fat cats. The Wall Street bankers that drove the economy into recession have almost entirely avoided legal scrutiny. Forgotten is their unforgivable act of paying mammoth executive compensation with the very tax dollars meant to stabilize the catastrophic mess they created. No accountability, no significant judicial proceedings, and the few penalties levied have been easily paid and treated as nothing more than the cost of doing business.

The banks got away with it while attention has been diverted to where Republicans want it. They, including Mitt Romney himself, have convinced many that pushing back against the oligarchy is class warfare, but endless bitching about teachers and other members of the middle class, with an eye to stripping their rights and reducing their pay, is productive policy. And they have roughly half of that middle class believing it.

That is quite an accomplishment.

Labor Just Needs to be Flexible

US corporations pay some of the highest dividends in the capitalist world. That sounds pretty good; corporations sharing their profits, giving back to their communities, right? I mean, all those orphans and grandmothers cashing in those fat dividend checks.

There are two problems with this. The first is that dividends mostly don't go back to the communities where the profits were made, they tend to consolidate wealth for the one percent. The vast majority of dividends actually paid go to America's wealthiest. Those individuals mostly live somewhere else, i.e., profits are made in middle class communities--think Walmart, Starbucks, or your local utility--and then end up as dividends for the investor class concentrated in  relatively few neighborhoods; the Hamptons, Beverly Hills, Zurich.

And then they pay 15% tax on it, tops. This, of course, is what Warren Buffet means when he says his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does.The result is that corporate dividends are yet another way to ensure a steady stream of cash away from the middle class and to the investor class. That's true in a demographic sense, but also geographically; money, and the control of that money, shifts away from communities that need it the most. When some of it does come back, it is on the investor class's terms.

The middle class, in turn, is subjected to endless scolding. How many times have we heard that labor needs to be flexible? What with all the foreign competition, working families cannot expect wage increases; "times are tough," and we all must "tighten our belts" and other nonsense. These assertions are made in the face of record profits, record executive compensation, and continuing tax breaks for both the companies and those that run them.

It's always about how labor must be flexible. Don't be a sap, be flexible and go where the jobs are. And retrain yourself along the way. See? It's easy. Now run along and show me that work ethic that compels you to tolerate the crap I heap on you.

The reality is that an increasing number of Americans are expected to become nomadic laborers. Don't settle down and establish roots. Corporate America paid politicians good money for the right to close down factories with minimal cost to them even if it means massive layoffs for employees. But you can just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get another job, one in the next county, 50 miles away, and lower pay. Night shift only. And you'll be on probationary status as a newbie. Too bad about that commute; the extra gas money comes out of your pocket. Your seniority at the old job? Get real, you're starting all over again. At the bottom, with few benefits. And your lunch hour is now half an hour. Don't like it? There are 200 other applicants behind you. We hire those who don't complain.

Perhaps you have to move across country. That's where the work is, so pack up. And pull your kids out of the only school they have known. It was a pretty good school, too. Kind of ironic, because that's the reason you moved into the neighborhood in the first place. And settled down, so you, your spouse, and the kids could contribute and be part of the community. The company health plan was pretty decent. You put up with a lot because you didn't want to forfeit it.

No matter now; say goodbye to it, and to the neighbors you won't see again. Your spouse will also have to abandon that part-time job. That's gotta hurt; (s)he won't likely find a better job where you're headed.  But if (s)he does, it's almost guaranteed to be at low pay and no benefits, just like nearly all part-time jobs in the US.

You'll just have to tighten your belts some more. Too bad about jerking your kids out in the middle of the school year. Just tell them that labor flexibility is the new American Dream.

Hanauer Ruffles Some Feathers

Here is an interesting video of Nick Hanauer at TED. Hanauer is a wealthy venture capitalist who dares to say what some of his class do not want to hear; the wealthy are not the prime job creators and that nothing matters without a healthy middle class. This apparently offended the operatives at TED so much that they refused to post, as is customary, the video at their website.

Alex Pareene provides some perspective, noting first that TED is a self-indulgent, over-hyped organization funded by and for wealthy Silicon Valley types who love to congratulate themselves on what they fancy is their proper position in the pantheon of money and privilege. As Pareene puts it:

In case you’re unfamiliar with TED, it is a series of short lectures on a variety of subjects that stream on the Internet, for free. That’s it, really, or at least that is all that TED is to most of the people who have even heard of it. For an elite few, though, TED is something more: a lifestyle, an ethos, a bunch of overpriced networking events featuring live entertainment from smart and occasionally famous people...Strip away the hype and you’re left with a reasonably good video podcast with delusions of grandeur. For most of the millions of people who watch TED videos at the office, it’s a middlebrow diversion and a source of factoids to use on your friends. Except TED thinks it’s changing the world, like if “This American Life” suddenly mistook itself for Doctors Without Borders.

TED has a lot riding on its continued success and it doesn't want anyone, including a fellow rich guy, screwing things up by speaking too plainly. Attendees shell out big time to have their egos stroked, not to hear a presentation that was inappropriately "political". That, at least, is how TED was spinning it. My own view is that many in the crowd are not indifferent to Hanauer's argument. Many even share it, including his point that growing inequality will hurt us all, and the wealthy need to pay more taxes.

Republicans say Republicans are the Problem

Perhaps you heard recently that two prominent Republican strategists have acknowledged that Republicans are the problem with government. Surely you have read by now the whirlwind tour that Messrs. Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have been on, where they have been able to discuss in detail their damning indictment against what the Republican Party has become. All the major media outlets have hosted the pair where they have been able to honestly discuss the issues. Shawn Hannity says he has had an epiphany, a veritable mea culpa. Even Rush Limbaugh admits to rethinking his positions.

All right, so that will never happen. Not when their salaries depend upon them not understanding it, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair. But Mann and Ornstein, writing in none other than the Washington Post, did indeed acknowledge how toxic their party has become:

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

It is grimly gratifying to hear them admit that

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

The Republican party was not always like this. Geoffrey Kabaservice's history of the party, Rule and Ruin, reminds us Republicans had long stretches of moderation and sensibility. Mann and Ornstein plead this point as well. They acknowledge what progressives have been saying for years; "...the center of gravity of the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right."

And you thought all that talk about obstructionist Republicans was just whiny liberals:

Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.

I remind readers that Mann and Ornstein are fixtures in Washington and in Republican circles, often called upon to do the intellectual heavy lifting on conservative issues. So what makes the media response even more interesting, in an Alice-in-Wonderland sort of way, is the systemic refusal of Washington elites, beyond the Wapo, to acknowledge or even bother to dispute, the veracity of Mann and Ornstein's contentions. They are simply being ignored. Bear in mind that these two authors are among the most quoted in politics; they are frequent guests on the media talk shows.

Not this time. Republicans and their media masters can blow off such talk when it comes from Democrats; it is harder to do when your own policy wonks say the same thing. So you do the next best thing. Ignore them and be thankful the news cycle is as short as the American attention span.

Good For Business

I see where America's biggest corporations, the Fortune 500, have just reported record profits of $824 billion for 2011. This wasn't supposed to happen, not if you listened to the rhetoric from the chieftains of these firms, along with the paid shills of the Republican Party. After all, wasn't President Obama supposed to be a closet Marxist? And isn't he set on destroying free enterprise and turning us all into wards of the Democratic Party? Or was it a Muslim caliphate?

How did that argument go again? They said business needs tax cuts in order to hire more workers, and that America's seemingly high corporate tax rate was stifling business. They said that Wall Street had no confidence in Obama and that business would languish as a result. All those regulations and taxes had to be cut if we were ever to recover. If only Obama wasn't so extremist or anti-business. This is after Wall Street trashed the economy under Bush's indifferent watch, and before, during, and after the dramatic recovery of corporate profits and stock prices after Obama took office.

Couldn't have happened to a more deserving bunch, the same Wall Street crowd that was, and under Obama, continues to be, the wealthiest and most privileged people this side of the House of Windsor.

Republican talking points have become a fantastical bundle of contradictions, increasingly disconnected to empirical reality. Here is ThinkProgress with more on how well big business has done under Obama and more background on increased productivity (with no commensurate wage increases), increasing CEO pay, and the 40-year low in the tax rates corporations actually pay.

Undermine What Works

Hope you are keeping up with the drama with our postal service, the one many claim is poorly run and should be rescued by privatizing it. Here is a quick summary, as provided by Stephanie Whiteside at Current.com.

The Senate has scrambled to prevent the closing of hundreds of local post offices and give communities a right to appeal closures after the U.S. Postal Service proposed the closings in response to a budget gap.

Officials claim the gap is due to a move towards other services  — people paying bills and conducting business online rather than relying on the postal service. But is email the main reason for the gap?

While the postal service may be facing challenges due to the Internet, it's not the only reason the agency is feeling squeezed. In 2006 Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which requires that the Postal Service pre-fund 100 percent of its health benefits for 75 years. Not just that, but the USPS was given only 10 years to accomplish the task. That's something no other organization(public or private) is required to do. Prior to the 2006 act, USPS generated a profit; now, with the additional $5.5 billion a year it must pre-fund, it's facing a budget shortfall. 

Is it really any surprise, as Whiteside points out, that industry lobbyists, meaning competitors to the USPS, were in favor of the legislation? Said legislation, passed when Republicans held Congress and the White House, also made it more difficult for the USPS to innovate and experiment with new avenues of growth.

The problem now is that the postal service is being compelled to close numerous small rural PO's to cut costs, an extraordinarily inefficient tactic that will save a pittance but ensure that many communities will have greater costs and hobbled mail delivery. And of course, thousands will lose their jobs.  Here is a similar take on the impact of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, including a video on how rural America will be hurt.

I can only hope that these rural folks will gain a sense of irony. We're talking mostly red state America, the ones that want government out of their lives, the ones who think private firms will always provide better service. As the PO closings continue, it is they who will pay more and get less. Just don't tell me our government is doing this. That "Accountability Act" of 2006 wasn't passed by Congress, it was passed by Republicans in Congress. And those same Republicans know how their low-info voting base works: Fox and others will try to pin this on Obama. They will use it as more evidence of government ineptitude. They won't tell you it was their own legislation, signed into law by George Bush, and that it was meant to bring down the USPS. 

Low Wages are Crippling Us

Since posting on the problem of suppressed wages on April 25, I've noticed others have posted on the subject and the problems the US* has created for itself by squeezing the incomes of the middle and working class. Nice to know they got my memo. The paste-up below is from Morgan Housel at Motley Fool. Nice write up, Morgan.

Nearly every recent survey asking Americans about their most pressing concern points to the same answer: a job. People are upset about taxes, politics, deficits, and wars, but until you can clock in five days a week and get a paycheck every other Friday, almost nothing else matters.

The good news: Jobs are starting to come back. About 3.3 million more Americans are working today than were just two years ago. That's great from a social perspective. People are going back to work and regaining dignity. Let's hope it lasts. 

But even if it does, it might not be enough to fuel a strong recovery. What drives the economy isn't necessarily jobs -- it's people's ability to save and spend money. And even though jobs are coming back, average weekly hours and wages, by and large, are not. More people have jobs than did a year or two ago, but we're working fewer hours, for barely more money, than before the recession began.

The average private-sector employee worked 34.3 hours per week this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Five years ago, the average workweek was 34.7 hours long. That might sound like a small difference, but it adds up fast. Working more hours means bigger paychecks, which means more saving and spending, which drives economic growth -- just like adding new jobs would. According to UBS economist Sam Coffin, every one-tenth of an hour increase in an average private-sector workweek is the equivalent of adding 320,000 jobs. So if employees were working the same number of hours today as they were five years ago, the increase in spending would be like having an additional 1.3 million people employed -- enough to push the unemployment rate well under 8%. 

Then there are wages. From the end of World War II through the late 1990s, average real (after inflation) hourly earnings increased 1.8% a year, and growth coming out of recessions was usually stronger than that. Not this time. Average real hourly earnings have been essentially flat over the last several years. If wage growth followed its historic growth rate from 2009 through today, the average worker would be earning almost $1 an hour more than they are now. The additional spending that would generate is the equivalent of some 2 million new jobs in today's economy. 

All of this underlines something important about today's jobs market: A disproportionate number of jobs being created are for low-wage, part-time work. According to a recent Bloomberg Briefing, 41% of jobs created since 2010 are from "low-wage" sectors like retail and hospitality, even though such sectors only make up 29% of the total labor force. When government job losses are factored in, 70% of all job gains in the last six months came from low-wage sectors. In March, the notoriously low-wage restaurant and food-service industry added 37,000 of the 120,000 total jobs created for the month. "Administrative and waste services" made up another 15,000 of the total (though month-to-month figures can be murky). 

Measured by the number of jobs alone, our employment recovery has been extraordinarily weak. But, when you factor in the quality and pay of the jobs that are bouncing back, it's been downright abysmal. When it comes to spending and stimulating the economy, creating 3.3 million new jobs today might be the equivalent of several hundred thousand jobs in years past. That's a dark thought when thinking about our future.....

*Actually, it can be problematic to use "country" or "nation" as the unit of analysis; the United States is an abstract concept.The decision to promote policies that benefit the rich is not done by a country, or even a government, but by certain specific individuals within the government and others who support them. Using expressions such as "the US believes" or "the American people demand" are clumsy but often effective simplifications. People who conflate the two parties and claim that "politicians" got us in this mess have a perverse devotion to symmetry and are intellectually lazy.   

Our Low-Wage Recovery

There has been lots of talk in the air about what this country needs. Republican presidential candidates have been almost unanimous about the value of cutting taxes, by which they mean the top tax rate, the one that affects the wealthy. And we must get the corporate tax rate down as well; it tops out at 35% and that must surely be why American corporations are having trouble competing, except that they aren't. The premise for lowering the top corporate tax rate is that corporations actually pay the current rate. They don't. What they do pay are the most obscene compensation packages in the world.

And let's not forget to cut spending, lots of it. Please tell me you find it odd --in a simple math that doesn't add up kind of odd-- that proponents of spending cuts, meaning nearly every conservative member of congress, simultaneously insist on budget-destroying tax cuts for the wealthy, those who have already enjoyed a generation of such largess, even as they yelp about the deficits those tax cuts created. The national debt is so horrible that we must gut spending on society's most vulnerable to save the republic, but apparently not so horrible that we can't give more tax breaks for our most privileged.

So why has our recession lasted so long? It isn't because taxes are too high, or because we have a large budget deficit.

The reason is that we are turning into a low-wage country. Look at chart below. It shows the share of employees in low-wage work. Hey, we are number one. Yes, I know, having a crappy job is better than no job at all. But this is a long ways from the can-do spirit that this country once had, back when it was an unambiguous economic superpower, back when its tax rates were much higher and wages grew along with productivity. I've discussed the wage-productivity divergence here and here.  



As Tavis Smiley and Cornel West have shown, many of the newly created jobs are "...in the restaurant, retail, temporary service, social assistance and hospitality sectors. In other words, low-wage jobs, most without health benefits or paid sick leave."  Additional analysis of the significance of the chart above, including America's growing wage polarization, is at "Economist's View."

In other words, low wages means marginalized families with low consumption. Not only can they not save, provide for their children's education, and pay for health care simultaneously, they simply cannot buy much of the products that both corporations and merchants need them to buy. The inability to consume more, regardless of how one feels about materialism, prolongs the weak recovery because everything is predicated on sales, not low taxes. Businesses, especially the smaller ones on Main Street America that do not have foreign sales, do not want lower taxes or cheaper workers. They want more customers.

“It is to the real advantage of every producer, every manufacturer and every merchant to cooperate in the improvement of working conditions, because the best customer of American industry is the well-paid worker.” FDR

Single Payer

This is a short story of a psychiatrist named Carol Paris, who is leaving her practice in the US and is relocating to New Zealand. She is fed up with a market-based system that jerks around both physicians and their patients in an effort to extract profits. As I have written before, US health care is compelled to offer a hybrid system of care for those who cannot afford the ghastly fees, especially insurance premiums, combined with those same insurance companies out to maximize profits. It may make sense to a free-market ideologue, but in practice, it is clearly a mess. It creates profits for shareholders by refusing coverage for those who cannot afford the premiums. The federal government pays for those not profitable to the private sector. Health care in America is, after all, a profit center. The Affordable Care Act has changed only some of the most egregious practices. Below is a partial transcript originally from Common Dreams.

Dr. Carol Paris is a psychiatrist. She’s practiced for 13 years in southern Maryland. And she’s fought hard for a single payer system. She’s even been arrested in Congress for speaking out for single payer. But now, she’s had enough. She’s closing her practice. And moving it to New Zealand. 

“I’m so tired and weary of trying to practice sane, passionate, good medicine in this insane health care system in the United States,” Paris said last month in an interview at Union Station before walking over to protest in front of the Supreme Court against the Obama health care law and for single payer. “It impairs my ability to practice in a way that is ethical and passionate. I have a few years left in me to practice. And I’ve decided see what it is like in another country. I have a couple of friends who are psychiatrists who have done a sabbatical in New Zealand. And they said they are so sad to be back in the United States practicing because it was so much more sane and caring in New Zealand. I’m going to see what it is like for my own mental health.” 

“The insanity here is that we have a system of financing health care in this country that is all about profit for corporate America and not about the health care of the people,” Dr. Paris said. “It is opposed to the health care of the people of America. You can’t be about profit and be about a social service.” 

“Every day, I spend more time helping my patients figure out how to game the system, how to maneuver the system of health care insurance,” Dr. Paris said. “Maybe they can afford to see me and maybe afford medicine, but they can’t afford therapy. So, I’m robbing Peter to pay Paul.” 

“Any recommendations I make for my new patients is based on the assumption that they will have no health insurance tomorrow...."

For visual learners I have included the video below.

Good luck, Doc. Can't say that I blame you.

The Romney Standard

On March 23 I posted a story on the abject willingness of many, including Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, to misrepresent the actions and policies of President Obama. One takeaway from this is that a willingness to lie, with the belief that one will not be held accountable, has escalated in recent years. And yes, it has coincided strongly with the Republican party's jaw-dropping turn to the right. Lying, in other words, has become a calculated risk, part and parcel of campaign strategies, embedded in speech, spin, and soundbites.

Lying and the overall bullshit factor are on the increase in part because the media lets it happen. More fundamentally, we see a political party that is desperately trying to discredit a remarkably scandal-free sitting president, and has resorted to demeaning and hateful rhetoric known to work with a voter base that scores low on information but generally high on authoritarian personality scales.

And of course, Republicans know they are facing unfavorable demographic trends. A rational person would think the party would want to embrace a wider swath of voters and give them compelling reasons to vote Republican. Instead, that party's politicians and operatives resort to strident and inflammatory rhetoric. They do not know what else to do because they are scared of the future, and they have embraced an inflexible and unsustainable ideology that has boxed them in. They cannot offer up real solutions without violating party dogma. In such an environment, it is no surprise that the candidates feel they are justified in lying, slandering, and misrepresenting opponents. If you want to win, you can't be squeamish.

Take Mitt Romney, who, despite everything, is still likely to be the Republican nominee. It would be an understatement to say I have a problem with this class warrior, the choice of oligarchs everywhere. It isn't the Mormon thing, per se, even if that makes some Republicans squirm. After all, Romney's acceptance of magic underwear or Joseph Smith's inane story of the golden plates is not any less credible than Santorum's belief in transubstantiation or papal infallibility.

It is mostly because Romney has the interests of the one percent at heart; a Wall Street First kind of guy who thinks gutting social programs and further shifting wealth to the very top is viable policy.    

But on a more personal level I am offended by a man who now feels the lying is an acceptable campaign tactic. Adultery and divorce no longer carry the social stigma they once did, much to Newt's relief, so why should bald-faced lying? 

The video below shows Rachel Maddow discussing Romney's honesty issue. As she says, "there is something different" about Romney and his campaign, well beyond the usual twisting and distorting we find with most candidates, the kind we long accepted as the nature of hard-ball politics. Maddow gives specific, undeniable, calculated lies, and then notes the indifference the Romney camp shows when it is caught.

These examples are not mistakes or gaffs; everyone makes those and everyone deserves to be cut at least a little slack when they make them, especially during an exhausting primary race. Maddow's very reasonable question is to ask whether Romney's chronic, almost pathological willingness to lie, even when he knows fact-checkers can easily call him out, is now a leading indicator of where American politics is headed, a new standard of cynicism and calculated manipulation.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Lying About Oil Production

Republicans keep harping on gas prices. They want very much to blame Obama, and they do so through some astonishing rhetoric. Romney in particular insists that Obama has a weak and ineffective energy policy, and that it is the reason why gas prices continue to climb.

Three points are worth noting; one is Romney's breathtaking willingness to lie, a subject I'll address in greater detail separately; second is that his own economic advisers have distanced themselves from his claims.

And then there is point number three: Romney's charges about oil production are wrong. In fact they are laughably, face-palm in disbelief kind of wrong. I have already touched on this point before. I referenced an article in the Houston Chronicle that discussed the transformation in oil production that is taking place since Obama took office. And here is how the New York Times reports it (emphasis mine):

The desolate stretch of West Texas desert known as the Permian Basin is still the lonely domain of scurrying roadrunners by day and howling coyotes by night. But the roar of scores of new oil rigs and the distinctive acrid fumes of drilling equipment are unmistakable signs that crude is gushing again.

And not just here. Across the country, the oil and gas industry is vastly increasing production, reversing two decades of decline. Using new technology and spurred by rising oil prices since the mid-2000s, the industry is extracting millions of barrels more a week, from the deepest waters of the Gulf of Mexico to the prairies of North Dakota... 

Taken together, the increasing production and declining consumption have unexpectedly brought the United States markedly closer to a goal that has tantalized presidents since Richard Nixon: independence from foreign energy sources, a milestone that could reconfigure American foreign policy, the economy and more. In 2011, the country imported just 45 percent of the liquid fuels it used, down from a record high of 60 percent in 2005. 

Pretty good, though obviously that is not what Romney is claiming. The real problem here is the White House does not tout its accomplishments very well. President Obama has allowed Republicans on all levels, including their allies at Fox, to establish the narrative. That is a mistake Democrats are prone to making. I expect the talking heads at Fox to lie, including the buffoons at Fox and Friends, but Mitt Romney is repeatedly and deliberately misrepresenting the facts.

I leave you with one other factoid, the picture below, that Mitt Romney is shamelessly lying about. Note the sharp increase in the blue line. Note the date. Who became president just before the blue line started to go up?

Go ahead and say it, Mitt. No lying this time.

Lying: An Unregulated Industry

We keep hearing the same theme on the Republican campaign trail, the same tired bromide about how government weighs heavily on the private sector, the onerous regulations that sap our energy, and the ruinous taxes that undermine private initiative. And of course, all of this is what President Obama wants, because liberals, especially the foreign-born dark ones, want bureaucrats to take over the economy. That's why there are fewer civil servants now than when Obama assumed office. He wanted to destroy the big banks, which is why he rescued them. And his anti-corporate mentality explains not only that GM is turning profits and cutting paychecks, but that corporate profits are way up, as is the stock market. Private sector job creation has steadily climbed, despite Obama's confiscatory socialism. And he wants to drive up oil prices, which is why domestic oil production-and domestic drilling permits-- have increased every year since Bush left office, the same year Wall Street triggered the recession.

For some people, in other words, facts don't matter. Not even to presidential candidates. We have been subjected to a barrage of rhetoric that says essentially two things: 1) taxes are too high, and that is half the reason why the economy is sluggish, and 2) regulations are too numerous and burdensome, which is the other half. The solution? It's simple. In the Manichean mind of Republicanism, all policy prescriptions are simple; cut taxes and regulations. 

Never mind that we already have the lowest taxes in the OECD; no where else are the very wealthy able to protect so much of their money. And that nonsense about corporate taxes at a ruinous 35%? I addressed that here. Union death-grip on the economy? The United States has the lowest union membership in the entire OECD. And it has been steadily declining, exactly what conservatives have always wanted. And we have the cheapest gasoline in the OECD as well.

But that campaign theme, the one about unleashing the private sector by gutting taxes and government? None of the four Republicans left standing (OK, Paul and Gingrich are on their knees) ever misses a chance to tell voters that fewer corporate regulations means freedom for us all. We are left with a truism that Republicans have understood better than Democrats: you can get enough people, not all, but enough of them, to believe outrageous and nonsensical tripe if you just repeat it enough, preferably with confidence and conviction, if not outright rage.

Now for some reality. According to Ifo Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, in a study that compiled World Bank data, and entitled Business Regulation in International Comparison (available here), the United States is a mighty fine place to do business. The US is suffering, and fares poorly when broad demographic data are compared to similar OECD members, but when it comes to business getting what it wants, the US scored higher than any other large country. It was third overall (among a total of 30 OECD and non-OECD countries), bested marginally by smallish New Zealand and Singapore.

The US scored highest in category 5 -protecting investors- confirming the charge that government prioritizes the interests of the investor class. And we were fourth-best, right up there with the two authoritarian states, Hong Kong and Singapore, when it came to the relative ease of starting a business. The real kicker is that the US was also ranked fourth-best when it came to hiring and firing workers, where nations scored high if business was able to fire workers easily and avoid costly penalties and benefits.

Republicans like Romney and Santorum have been telling us that they will unleash the private sector from that horrid Obama, and they will do it by ever more tax cuts, ever fewer regulations.

They are full of shit. The reality is almost the complete opposite of their fact-free narrative. If suppressing working-class wages and unions, enabling and subsidizing the welfare queens on Wall Street, cutting taxes for the investor class, and letting management compensation run wild were the appropriate policy tools, Wall Street would not have crashed and we would not have had the recession in the first place.

If you know anything about economic history, you know that we have been on this path for decades. And all the Republican candidates can do is call for more of it.

Getting Simpletons to Blame Obama

This crap about trying to blame President Obama for rising gas prices needs to be seen for what it is: a cynical attempt by Republicans and their official partner, Fox News, to derail the President's reelection prospects. They, Republicans, do it in part to divert attention away from the inane clown car called the Republican presidential primaries. But they also do it it part because they know that many low-information voters will fall for it, like the guy below.

For those interested in the real reasons why gas prices fluctuate, and why they should be rising at this particular time, I invite you to read Why are Gas Prices Skyrocketing?  It is worth noting the evidence he provides showing that Asia and Europe are buying up oil because of the fear that, once again, the US will precipitate a war in the Middle East and jeopardize supplies from Iran.

But the real reason gas prices are rising is because Wall Street speculators are driving up prices. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission knew it was true in 2008, when gas prices shot up under Bush, and it knows it is true under Obama. CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton explains in the video below how it works and who pays. It is part and parcel of conservative economic policies that ensure the transfer of capital from Main Street to Wall Street. 



The video below is from 2008, when Bush the Lesser was still President, and is why I say Fox News panders to low information voters; especially those with short memories. Speculators drove up prices near the end of Bush's tenure. Most at Fox don't want to shine the light on Wall Street traders, but at least Bill O'Reilly knew enough--in 2008--to recognize the role of speculators and that an American President doesn't wield power to dictate gas prices, or to curb speculation.

Except, apparently, when the President is a Democrat.


The mendacious inconsistency of the arguments thrown out in the unceasing effort to undermine the Obama administration would be downright hilarious were it not for the stakes involved.

Obama's Burden

A recent cover story of The Week magazine relates the difficult choices President Obama faces in Afghanistan. These choices are part of the larger set of problems he has faced since his first day in office. The two endless (and thankless) wars in the Middle East were only his biggest foreign challenge for a president who also had to overcome the biggest economic recession since the 1930's, the spectacular fallout from Wall Street's recklessly irresponsible activity; activity, it should be added, that was condoned and even applauded by free market ideologues, including Alan Greenspan.

All of this in addition to a massive trade deficit, one caused by policies that have allowed widespread offshoring of jobs and a corporate culture that does not take manufacturing seriously--these are the prime reason industries have been hollowed out.  This bears repeating: It is our own incoherent industrial policies that have contributed the most to our weakened industrial base and the mammoth trade deficit that it engendered, not China, not Japan, not foreign oil.

Obama faced two hugely expensive wars, neither of which was going well. He was forced to choose from several poor choices. The wars have added enormously to the national debt, an issue that did not seem to bother Republicans while Bush was in office.

The US has generally paid for its wars by raising taxes. We certainly did so in WWII, the Korean War, and Viet Nam. Many voters have forgotten how unusual and as we now know, reckless it was for George W. Bush, who inherited a huge budget surplus, to first squander the surplus by passing costly tax cuts for those already wealthy.  He too was faced with a large national debt as well as a seriously eroding infrastructure. He opted for tax cuts, the budget deficits returned, and then he went to war. Bush and the Republican-controlled congress refused to pay for it and the federal government has been growing its deficit ever since.

Obama tried to do what many economists said he must do; stimulate the economy, and keep the budget deficit from becoming too large, not an easy task, but then he did not create the conditions and policies in place when he took office. Others created them; Obama is getting blamed for them.

The irony is that Obama's fiscal stimulus was conventional, mainstream, and conservative. Keynes himself made it clear that government stimulus spending was very much a conservative alternative to the much greater pain of allowing massive unemployment and the resultant upheaval and unrest.

Obama gets blamed for continuing unemployment too, of course. The realty is that we have a much smaller industrial base that will call back workers when conditions improve. This is a big reason the recession lasted as long as it did, and why the recovery is so slow: there are far fewer good-paying jobs. Instead, millions of people have been forced to settle for poorer paying jobs than the ones they once held, and often with fewer benefits. Lower wages exacerbates economic recovery.

The final kicker is one left out of most analyses that focus on the mortgage crisis. The middle class carried the economy all the way until near the end of Bush the Lesser's second term. They did so by running up massive personal debts on their credit cards. That was unsustainable, of course, so once the Wall Street bankers crashed the economy, and unemployment started to rise, middle class consumers cut back on expenses. The cutbacks were prudent for the individual, but they hurt spending, tax receipts, and other peoples' jobs that depended on spending.

This is the mess the President faced on inauguration date. None of it started with him. And the process, the wars, the deindustrialization, the irresponsible tax cuts, the eroding infrastructure, the mortgage bubble, the suppression of wages, the dominance of unaccountable banks, all of it, was well under way long before most of us had even heard of Barack Obama.

Now bear in mind that most of the same people who got us in this mess, including essentially every Republican in congress, are completely opposed to Obama's every effort to extricate us, as if we can actually dig ourselves out of the hole, the one the middle class did not dig, without some pain and sacrifice. So if Obama tries to raise taxes to where they were in the Clinton boom years, he is a big government socialist. Never mind that taxes were higher under Reagan. If he tries to cut subsidies to Big Oil, as if they they needed it, he is undermining business. If he tries to rein in our out of control defense spending, he is endangering America's security. Never mind that the level of spending he proposes would still be higher than it was in Bush's first term. And every effort to get Wall Street under greater control, before it ruins it again for the rest of us, is opposed. Republicans insisted in 2010 that the Bush tax cuts be extended, and they were willing to shut down Washington to get them.  And now, of course, Obama gets blamed for the inevitably larger budget deficit.

Republicans have left the President with few options: Republicans will continue to support looser regulations and lower taxes (for the rich). Never mind that these are what created the financial mess in the first place. Only now are Republicans insisting on lower spending, not coincidentally on the programs that help the bottom half of society. Any honest appraisal of the federal budget will show that even significantly lower spending will do little to close the budget gap, not when tax revenues-from individuals and corporations alike-are the lowest they have been in decades.

Here is a short video that covers much of the above. It offers up in graphic form the impact on the federal deficit and debt of the wars, the bank bailouts, the recession, and most of all the Bush tax cuts.



One more thing; Obama even got Osama bin Ladin, after the trail had gone cold, so no, Bush, you don't get credit. 

Facts Keep Getting in the Way

Man I love it when Rachel Maddow sets bloviating liars like Karl Rove straight. He, along with the presidential candidates still standing keep trying to find something new to pin on Obama. Now he's getting blamed for high gas prices. It is an old tactic used to score points with low-information voters because apparently many of them really do support candidates who promise the holy grail of American consumerism; cheap gas and lots of it. 

In the video below we have Rove, on Fox News, of course, claiming the President is anti-oil, laughably mischaracterizing the role of the US Export-Import Bank, and essentially trying to plant the seed in the viewer's head that Obama is so nefarious that for reasons that elude thinking people, he, the President, would want energy prices to go up in a recovering economy and an election year. Newt Gingrich is shown making similar charges. Gee, I had no idea that Obama is so ingeniously treacherous.

Rachel Maddow brilliantly points out the idiocy of these charges through the ample use of her favorite weapon, facts. Watch as she shows how domestic oil production has been going up every year since Obama took office. She is referencing an article from that socialist rag, the Houston Chronicle, that says in part:

The United States' rapidly declining crude oil supply has made a stunning about-face, shredding federal oil projections and putting energy independence in sight of some analyst forecasts.

After declining to levels not seen since the 1940s, U.S. crude production began rising again in 2009. Drilling rigs have rushed into the nation's oil fields, suggesting a surge in domestic crude is on the horizon.

The number of rigs in U.S. oil fields has more than quad­rupled in the past three years to 1,272, according to the Baker Hughes rig count. Including those in natural gas fields, the United States now has more rigs at work than the entire rest of the world.

"It's staggering," said Marshall Adkins, who directs energy research for the financial services firm Raymond James. "If we continue growing anywhere near that pace and keep squeezing demand out of the system, that puts you in a world where we are not importing oil in 10 years."

Rove does have one redeeming quality; his first name is pretty cool. He even manages to spell it right.

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Romney Loved His Bailout

Mitt Romney wants to tell us he is just loaded with business experience, just the kind needed to run the country, 'cause don't you know, representing the diverse interests of the American people is incredibly similar to being chief vulture at Bain Capital. Only his huge ideological blind spot has kept him from realizing that the plunder and pillage known as private equity is not exactly endearing him to voters.

And about that one term as governor of Massachusetts? He has been running from that too. He wouldn't be if he were going after moderates or independents, but these are Republican primaries, so he wants the Republican base, the right wing of the right wing party, to forget what he said and did as governor, such as signing the Massachusetts health care insurance reform law, which provided near universal health care for citizens of that state.
 
Now there is one more item, one that I expected to come up sooner; his role as chief executive of the 2002 Winter Olympics Organizing Committee. Frankly I expected Romney to toot his horn a bit more on this. Isn't it a feather in his cap? More evidence of his organizational and leadership skills?

Maybe not, though I am not sure Romney is sufficiently self-aware to realize the ideological impasse any Republican would face once it was realized just how Romney financed the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

As the video below reveals, the 2002 Winter Olympics were not only frightfully expensive, much of the money came from taxpayers. And for me, the issue is not, in and of itself, that tax dollars were spent, though the amount, and what it bought certainly matter. The essential hypocrisy of Mitt Romney is his claim that the private sector does most everything better, that he has the requisite private sector chops--and rugged free market individualism to go with it-- and his increasing strident rant against the legitimacy of government. We must get government out of the way, he says, for this will unleash the private sector. 

Recall the 1984 games in Los Angeles, where the private sector played a major role, and the credit that was given to Peter Ueberroth for his ability to raise money from private donors. Instead, Romney lobbied the federal government, one then largely controlled by Republicans, for huge amounts of cash--from taxpayers-- to foot what proved to be a record-breaking tab. He gleefully boasts of it in the video, even while he chides others when they rely on government.

There is only thing Romney perhaps can boast, as he does in the video, and that is his lobbying skills at getting the federal government to give him huge amounts of money. He showed you can get a lot of things done if you can talk friends in Washington to pay for it. The Salt Lake City games were a success, but Romney is now reluctant to acknowledge that it was because the federal government bailed him out to the tune of $1.3 billion.

"Have You Got a Better One?"

Mitt Romney has a habit of stepping in it, what with his lines about banks being people, how he likes to fire people, and how he too is unemployed.  He was even caught pointing to his blue jeans trying to prove he is a regular guy. I mean, shit, he actually pointed at them as if he should somehow get points or something, as if it made a damn bit of difference. And he does this with a remarkable lack of self awareness, not realizing how phony he looks. This is the guy who is insisting that he was a "severely conservative governor." This is a laughable contention that conservatives can see right through (like the rest of us).

But there is one revealing moment that has been largely overlooked. He was on the deeply conservative Laura Ingraham radio show recently where he continued to make the claim that Obama made the recession worse. He has repeated some variation of this shtick at numerous venues; Obama may not have caused the recession, but he made it worse.

Ingraham asked how effective is it to keep ragging about Obama's handling of the economy when most indicators show the economy improving.

Romney's response? You need to hear it for yourself. In the video below Rachel Maddow has two face-palm moments. The first, at about the 3:40 mark, shows Romney insisting that things are worse, and then claiming he didn't say it. It is reminiscent of John McCain's campaign statement that he never claimed he was a maverick. Say what?

And then at about the 8:35 mark, Maddow plays the audio from the Ingraham show. After some blunt questioning from Ingraham about the economy, Romney first says, "Of course it's getting better." Not only is this a contradiction of his earlier claims about making things worse, it is an indirect admission that once again, Republican policies blew up the economy and once a Democratic President was charged with cleaning up the mess.

Ingraham then points out the obvious when she says Obama inherited a major recession, enacted various policies, and we are now seeing job growth, but wonders why Romney says to vote against Obama anyway. "Isn't that a hard argument to make?," she says,

Romney's response: "Have you got a better one, Laura?"

Damn, Mitt, that's some pretty weak sauce. But thanks for making the case for the President. Obama has said the economy is turning around. Glad to see you agree.

Little Sally's Epiphany

On Dec. 22 I posted an article about the doctrine of maximizing shareholder value, what former GE CEO Jack Welch called "the dumbest idea in the world." I shared the views of Steve Denning at Forbes who discussed the contradictions, to use a Marxist term, of management's blind allegiance to improving the net worth of shareholders. Denning, in turn, featured a new book by Roger Martin.

Martin has another article on this called "Little Sally Learns About the Toxicity of Shareholder Value Maximization." In it, Martin makes the case that corporations committed to maximizing shareholder value have perverse expectations of employees. Why would management expect, Martin says, employees to be motivated by a corporate culture that cares most about making mostly rich people richer, people the employees do not even know?

Martin's recognition of the basic psychology of employee motivation should sound familiar to the longstanding view, often held by progressives, that American corporate culture is short-sighted and less committed to improving its products than their bottom line. Recall that General Motors' management of yesteryear boasted that GM was not in the business of making cars, but of making money. GM's subtle indifference to product quality and innovation weighed heavily on it for a generation and nearly destroyed it. Its future remains uncertain.

There are, in fact, two separate arguments at play here; One is the Denning-Roger idea that management is inappropriately concentrating on short-term profits and boosting share price, practices which are systematically distorting management decisions. The other is that focusing on the interests of the investor class, the one percent, creates a bias against workers, community, and ultimately the corporation itself. It is a model best suited to maximizing wealth for a few; it does that very well.

The result is that US corporate culture has the deeply held tendency to treat employees as a mere input, an irritating expense that must be reduced, the abstract L for Labor in the cold computations of economists. It is this second argument which explains why, in the US more than, say, Germany or Sweden, the middle class is squeezed, why jobs are scare, but the investor class is richer than ever. It is the triumph of corporate profits as the centerpiece of American political economy, economics as if people didn't matter.

These are two different lines of argument, from different sources, politics, and traditions, that have dovetailed into a single unavoidable conclusion. I can only hope that we finally see a few inchoate signs that free market economists, free traders, and other purveyors of casino capitalism are beginning to realize the intellectual poverty of their ideology and the aching unsustainability of the American corporate model they have created and upon which they feed.

I leave you with an illustrative dialogue Roger Martin shared about Little Sally.

Sally: Daddy, my teacher asks me to listen carefully in class and do my homework every night. What does your boss ask you to do?

Daddy: He wants me to help him maximize shareholder value?

Sally: Huh? What does that mean?

Daddy: It means increasing our stock price to the highest we can make it go.

Sally: Why?

Daddy: Because that will make the shareholders happy.

Sally: Well who are these shareholders anyway?

Daddy: They are people who buy shares in our company.

Sally: What are they like? Do you know them?

Daddy: Actually we don't really know who they are. Every three months, we get a list of them but they buy and sell so often, the list changes routinely. And even the list we get is for organizations like mutual fund companies and pension funds that invest money on behalf of shareholders and aren't the actual shareholders.

Sally: This is getting a bit confusing. Are they at least nice people; these mutual funds and pension funds?

Daddy: It would be hard to describe them as terribly nice. They are really demanding and if we don't increase the stock price for them, they get pretty upset and sell our stock.

Sally: That isn't very nice. When they do that, do they sell to nicer people?

Daddy: No, typically they sell to people about like them - pretty impatient.

Sally: This sounds pretty weird. If you do get the share price to rise and the shareholders are happy rather than upset, do they do nice things for the company?

Daddy: Not really, Sally. What happens is that they then insist on us getting the share price to rise some more still. Or sometimes they sell their shares because the price has risen enough for them.

Sally: Whew. I must have this wrong but let me check. You go to work every day trying to increase your company's share price for people that you don't know, who don't act nicely at all, and if they are unhappy just sell their shares to some other people who you don't know either and are also not very nice. And if you succeed, they don't do anything for you other than put more pressure on you or sell because they are happy. They seem to sell whether they are happy or upset. That can't be much fun. Why do you do it Daddy? Why don't you try to do something a bit more fun?

Daddy: Well Sally, I know that it sounds kind of weird, but that is our capitalist system. It is our duty to maximize shareholder value, even if it is pretty unfulfilling and unpleasant. And I try to do the best job I can to help our CEO do that. And Sally, if I do a really good job helping my CEO, when he retires, he might appoint me CEO.

Sally: I love you Daddy and because of that I kind of hope that he doesn't make you CEO!

Super Bowl Socialism

On this day, Super Bowl Sunday, we will once again witness the gawdy mixture of sports, excess, patriotism, and military pride. The US military and the National Football League are two institutions in America that are deeply socialist in their structure: They are successful for that reason.

Take the US military: Everyone from a fresh recruit to the Joint Chiefs of Staff is on the public payroll; housing, food, travel benefits, a retirement plan. And they all have a government-provided and regulated health care I suspect few are willing to abandon for the capriciousness of the profits-first private sector. Moreover, the military is chock-a -block with regulations, rules, requirements, and a thick code of behavior.

It is worth noting that the US military is a dominating force in the world because the US government wanted it to be, not because the markets made it happen. Military preeminence is this nation's industrial policy and power, complete with the world's most sophisticated weapons. Our defense industry is number one because our government put resources into it and fostered private sector support. 

At the same time, most observers will happily tell you the US military is full of courageous, dedicated, devoted, proud, and hypercompetitive men and women. All this and modest pay as well.

This is a combination that free market advocates say cannot exist. Any institution so encumbered will surely stifle innovation, resourcefulness, and personal responsibility.

We see a similar result with professional sports. The NFL, for example, exemplifies bounded competition: a highly circumscribed set of rules and regulations which define and control every aspect of the game. That set of rules and regs is exactly why the game works; they are designed to enhance competition because they do not allow a richer or better situated team to dominate the game. And they minimize cheating, which bothers Americans more in sports than it does in Wall Street and government. Players, union members all, compete fiercely within the confines of the rules, and abide by a thick rulebook that regulates every aspect of play.

Again this contradicts the free market doctrine that insists regulations are inherently burdensome and constrict creativity, competition, and glorious individualism. With no sense of irony, sports fans glibly cheer on their favorite franchises that make clear they win through team effort and pound out selfishness, arrogance, and self-centered individualists more concerned about their stats and their image. There is no I in team, as they say. And no, it is not because of high pay; the pattern fits all sports, including high school, college, and amateur players with no real prospects for riches.
    
I see that Bill Maher got my memo. In the video below Maher also notes the socialist structure of the NFL, what he calls the irritable bowl syndrome  He does stress different points, however. Watch it and note how the socialized structure of the NFL provides such different results than does major league baseball.

Newt's Hilarious Hypocrisy

It's a little early to say how the Republican primaries are going to play out, but it is evident that the two frontrunners, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, are seriously damaged goods. Gingrich has been a known factor for many years. That helps explain why he is reviled by many in his own party. Romney has scored a major victory in Florida and has retained his front-runner status. His biggest advantage is that candidates like Gingrich, Santorum, and Paul are the only alternatives. And they are more than all but the most disaffected Republicans can stomach.

Still, Gingrich speaks in ways that have visceral appeal to many conservatives. He is reactionary rage personified, at least compared to the clueless Romney. And Gingrich knows how to tap that rage. Below is Mark Karlin's take on how Gingrich is operating; what's inside his head as well as the heads of people who actually think he should be president.

The brazen hypocrisy of the GOP on sexual, religious and family matters has been a consistent source of bewilderment for BuzzFlash since the site was founded in May of 2000. In fact, BuzzFlash (now a part of Truthout) began largely in reaction to the dissemination of a disingenuous, Republican, demagogic, political hypocrisy that is inexplicable on any rational level - and we've covered about every psychological theory that tries to explain how people who hold themselves out to be godly can be full of such hate, bitterness, greed and gross double standards. 

In fact, during the last South Carolina debate, Newt Gingrich - who has made the alleged collapse of America's "moral values" one of his trademark "red meat" appeals - deflected questions about his Lothario, adulterer, callous "family values" behavior by attacking the press. Gingrich knows that lacerating the supposed "liberal media" rouses the Tea Party faction of the GOP like splashing a bowl of blood on a vampire. 

Gingrich claimed to be "appalled" by the "destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media." He called a panelist question about charges that he wanted an "open marriage" with his second wife (who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the time), while he was having a multiyear affair with his eventual third wife, as "close to despicable as anything I [Gingrich] can imagine." 

Jon Stewart is feeling BuzzFlash's pain now - one that is particularly acute when watching the GOP presidential debates. In fact, after playing a segment on the "Daily Show" about Gingrich's "indignation" over questions about his egregious, immoral family values, Stewart's brain appeared ready to explode as he listed just some of the audacious hypocrisies in which the former House speaker has engaged. 

Recently, I recall seeing a clip of Newt in high dudgeon denouncing the alleged secular godlessness and lack of morality in Europe - and he vowed that he would not let the US sink into such degeneracy. Gingrich is the ultimate con man, saying whatever needs to be said to arouse the ember of the dark side of fundamentalist faith. He creates a fantasy world of demons who are supposedly set out to destroy "divinely" bestowed "American exceptionalism," when he himself has spent more time playing "Sympathy for the Devil" in his life than following the Ten Commandments. 

And, most significantly, as Jon Stewart has come to learn, Gingrich is filled with such confident cunning - such calculated lying - that he can make those who engage in reason want to jump out the nearest window in dismay. 

He is a master magician of the dark arts. That much you can say for him.

The video to which Karlin refers is below. What Karlin says in words, Jon Stewart brilliantly captures in just a few minutes on The Daily Show.

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