From Progress Report:
The Clarence Thomas Scandal
Jun 22, 2011 | By Ian Millhiser
In 1969, Justice Abe Fortas resigned in disgrace after the nation learned that he had accepted tens of thousands of dollars worth of gifts from corporate executives and other wealthy benefactors. Forty years later, Justice Clarence Thomas is caught in a strikingly similar scandal. Similarly to Fortas, Thomas has a wealthy benefactor named Harlan Crow who has shown lavish generosity to Thomas and his Tea Partying wife Ginni. And where Fortas had an ad hoc group of corporate executives to subsidize his lifestyle, Thomas seems to have the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) — a corporate-aligned think tank that once gave him a $15,000 gift. We find it difficult to find daylight between Thomas’ actions and the gifting scandal that forced Abe Fortas off the bench.
LAVISH GIFTS: Like Fortas before him, Thomas received tens of thousands of dollars worth of gifts from wealthy benefactors — some of whom have an interest in cases before his court. Crow gave Thomas a $19,000 Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass. He provided Thomas’ wife with half a million dollars to start a Tea Party group, and he donated over $1 million dollars to fund a museum that will include exhibits honoring Justice Thomas. Crow has a long history of investing in conservative political causes — he’s donated nearly $5 million to Republican candidates and conservative organizations, including $100,000 to the anti-John Kerry Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — but he isn’t even the most troubling entity to rain gifts upon Clarence Thomas. That honor goes to AEI, which gifted Thomas with a $15,000 bust of Abraham Lincoln even though AEI frequently files briefs in Thomas’ Court. Thomas has not recused himself from cases in which AEI participated.
SCANDALS UPON SCANDALS: If Thomas’ addiction to high dollar favors were his only problem, that would be deeply disturbing. But this is just one of many scandals facing the justice. Justice Thomas attended a Koch-sponsored political fundraiser intended to fund the conservative infrastructure of front groups, political campaigns, think tanks, and media outlets, an act that would likely violate his ethical obligation not to engage in fundraising if the Supreme Court were not exempt from the Code of Conduct for U.S. judges. Thomas claimed that his wife Ginni — a lobbyist and high-earning member of the professional right — earned no non-investment income whatsoever while she was working at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, despite having a legal obligation to disclose her income on his annual disclosure form. After Thomas’ failure to disclose this income was widely reported by the press, Thomas amended his disclosure forms to include Ginni’s income. And the fact that his wife is now working as a Tea Party lobbyist could raise recusal issues for Justice Thomas. Ginni Thomas has a right to do whatever she wants for a living, but if the Thomas family earned one dime to lobby in favor of repealing health reform, it would be a serious conflict of interest for Thomas to sit on a case that could make that repeal a reality.
THEIR MAN ON THE COURT: The rich and the powerful have been good to Justice Thomas, but Thomas has been extremely good to them. Thomas didn’t just join the infamous Citizens United decision opening up the flood gates to corporate money in elections, he also would have struck down essential transparency laws that allow Americans to know who is buying their democracy. Thomas stood behind decisions eviscerating consumer rights and the rights of workers in the workplace, and he embraces a vision of the Constitution that is nothing shy of terrifying. In three separate opinions, conservative Thomas called for a return to a discredited theory of the Constitution that early 20th century justices used to declare federal child labor laws unconstitutional. So Thomas has little regard for the Constitution and even less for precedent — perhaps that explains why he has thumbed his nose at the Fortas precedent and entangled himself so tightly with his wealthy and influential benefactors.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
The Conservative U. S. Supreme Court is Turning the United States into A Giant Impoverished Ghetto
From The Huffington Post -- June 21, 2011:
Walmart Case: Supreme Court Aids The Powerful
By Peter S. Goodman
Thank the Supreme Court for one thing: In its appalling decision in the Walmart gender discrimination case handed down Monday, the justices supplied future historians with a brilliant symbol of how the United States has essentially become a giant gated community enjoyed by the powerful, with most of the citizenry living outside and struggling to nourish themselves.
Walmart is nothing if not a monument to the benefits of mass organization, an exemplar of all the good things that can be extracted by those who assemble themselves into a single large-scale entity. As the largest retailer on earth, the company is generally able to dictate the terms of trade with the thousands of merchants who keep the shelves of its stores stocked with cut-rate goods, tapping factories in China and middlemen traders in Latin America. Walmart has a habit of placing multiple orders with multiple factories for the same products, then forcing each to accept lower prices at the last minute or walk away with nothing.
By dint of its scale, it is able to capture the lowest prices for just about everything, from shipping to labor to contracting services. At its global procurement office in the southern China boomtown of Shenzhen, Walmart makes representatives from surrounding factories sit together in a bare-bones waiting room before they get a chance to negotiate with the retailer's agents. Should the reps balk at Walmart's price, they know that the buying agent can just step out into the waiting room and find someone else from another factory -- someone desperate enough to deliver for whatever the company is paying. This is the power of being not only huge but organized into one entity.
Strip away the myriad technicalities, and what the Supreme Court essentially decreed this week is that Walmart's employees -- or really any group of people who happen to work for a colossal corporation -- are not entitled to organize themselves similarly to enhance their power to pursue their own interests.
The court ruled that female workers may not be considered a class for the purposes of a lawsuit in which they accuse the company of years of gender discrimination, because they worked in many different stores in many different American communities, making their experiences effectively individual.
"Respondents wish to sue for millions of employment decisions at once," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the lead opinion for the court in the five votes to four decision supporting the giant retailer. "Without some glue holding together the alleged reasons for those decisions, it will be impossible to say that examination of all the class members' claims will produce a common answer to the crucial discrimination question."
As if to underscore the absurdity of this disparity, Scalia noted that Walmart has a written policy barring discrimination: The mere act of writing this down at headquarters somehow confers immunity against claims of a breach of that policy -- not that there's any glue providing coherence to the experience of workers as a class!
In other words, the fact that they happen to work for a single enormous employer whose decisions are so consequential that they alone can influence the prices of certain commodities does not amount to a common experience -- not in the minds of the most powerful arbiters in the land.
Rather, each Walmart is its own separate unit, for the purposes of the lawsuit. Walmart gets to be a behemoth when it is setting the prices for the patio furniture and volleyball sets that it purchases from factories in Mexico and China, but when its employees want to band together to address alleged abuses in the court system, suddenly the Walmart corporation might just as well be a collection of little mom-and-pop shops that happen to have the same name.
The court suggested that the Walmart workers could pursue relief to their claims by filing their own individual lawsuits, but that is no option for low-wage employees who typically earn so little that many rely upon food stamps, say labor experts. (Another wonderful American story: Taxpayers subsidizing giant, publicly traded corporations by keeping their low-wage employees alive. But I digress.)
For the workers, this legal "solution" amounts to the equivalent of asking Walmart to negotiate directly with every factory that produces its products on an individual basis, and not impose the price by wielding the power of its scale.
For the labor movement, this is a distressing development. Another crucial weapon in a diminishing arsenal -- the class action lawsuit -- has been effectively blunted, even as corporate employers gain new powers. Last year, the Supreme Court decreed that corporations can essentially funnel as much money into political campaigns as they choose, unlike individuals. The realities of increasingly global trade has added to the options that management can employ as it arbitrages labor costs across every community, putting workers in Detroit in direct competition with their counterparts in Shenzhen.
And for American society writ large, the decision is nothing short of a disaster, a formal affirmation from the Supreme Court that huge corporations enjoy special rights denied to the people who depend on their wages to pay their bills.
Not lost on anyone is the simple fact of widening inequality, with increasing shares of the spoils of American commerce accruing to a narrowing group of people. Chief executives of huge companies are seeing their pay soar, while rank-and-file employees watch another year go by with essentially no raise -- if they are fortunate enough to be employed at all.
We are indeed becoming more like a gated community for the wealthiest Americans, with manicured lawns for those on the inside, and dumpster diving for the working class - -yes, class, a designation that exists by dint of economic reality, no high court affirmation required. The Supreme Court just reinforced the front gate.
Walmart Case: Supreme Court Aids The Powerful
By Peter S. Goodman
Thank the Supreme Court for one thing: In its appalling decision in the Walmart gender discrimination case handed down Monday, the justices supplied future historians with a brilliant symbol of how the United States has essentially become a giant gated community enjoyed by the powerful, with most of the citizenry living outside and struggling to nourish themselves.
Walmart is nothing if not a monument to the benefits of mass organization, an exemplar of all the good things that can be extracted by those who assemble themselves into a single large-scale entity. As the largest retailer on earth, the company is generally able to dictate the terms of trade with the thousands of merchants who keep the shelves of its stores stocked with cut-rate goods, tapping factories in China and middlemen traders in Latin America. Walmart has a habit of placing multiple orders with multiple factories for the same products, then forcing each to accept lower prices at the last minute or walk away with nothing.
By dint of its scale, it is able to capture the lowest prices for just about everything, from shipping to labor to contracting services. At its global procurement office in the southern China boomtown of Shenzhen, Walmart makes representatives from surrounding factories sit together in a bare-bones waiting room before they get a chance to negotiate with the retailer's agents. Should the reps balk at Walmart's price, they know that the buying agent can just step out into the waiting room and find someone else from another factory -- someone desperate enough to deliver for whatever the company is paying. This is the power of being not only huge but organized into one entity.
Strip away the myriad technicalities, and what the Supreme Court essentially decreed this week is that Walmart's employees -- or really any group of people who happen to work for a colossal corporation -- are not entitled to organize themselves similarly to enhance their power to pursue their own interests.
The court ruled that female workers may not be considered a class for the purposes of a lawsuit in which they accuse the company of years of gender discrimination, because they worked in many different stores in many different American communities, making their experiences effectively individual.
"Respondents wish to sue for millions of employment decisions at once," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the lead opinion for the court in the five votes to four decision supporting the giant retailer. "Without some glue holding together the alleged reasons for those decisions, it will be impossible to say that examination of all the class members' claims will produce a common answer to the crucial discrimination question."
As if to underscore the absurdity of this disparity, Scalia noted that Walmart has a written policy barring discrimination: The mere act of writing this down at headquarters somehow confers immunity against claims of a breach of that policy -- not that there's any glue providing coherence to the experience of workers as a class!
In other words, the fact that they happen to work for a single enormous employer whose decisions are so consequential that they alone can influence the prices of certain commodities does not amount to a common experience -- not in the minds of the most powerful arbiters in the land.
Rather, each Walmart is its own separate unit, for the purposes of the lawsuit. Walmart gets to be a behemoth when it is setting the prices for the patio furniture and volleyball sets that it purchases from factories in Mexico and China, but when its employees want to band together to address alleged abuses in the court system, suddenly the Walmart corporation might just as well be a collection of little mom-and-pop shops that happen to have the same name.
The court suggested that the Walmart workers could pursue relief to their claims by filing their own individual lawsuits, but that is no option for low-wage employees who typically earn so little that many rely upon food stamps, say labor experts. (Another wonderful American story: Taxpayers subsidizing giant, publicly traded corporations by keeping their low-wage employees alive. But I digress.)
For the workers, this legal "solution" amounts to the equivalent of asking Walmart to negotiate directly with every factory that produces its products on an individual basis, and not impose the price by wielding the power of its scale.
For the labor movement, this is a distressing development. Another crucial weapon in a diminishing arsenal -- the class action lawsuit -- has been effectively blunted, even as corporate employers gain new powers. Last year, the Supreme Court decreed that corporations can essentially funnel as much money into political campaigns as they choose, unlike individuals. The realities of increasingly global trade has added to the options that management can employ as it arbitrages labor costs across every community, putting workers in Detroit in direct competition with their counterparts in Shenzhen.
And for American society writ large, the decision is nothing short of a disaster, a formal affirmation from the Supreme Court that huge corporations enjoy special rights denied to the people who depend on their wages to pay their bills.
Not lost on anyone is the simple fact of widening inequality, with increasing shares of the spoils of American commerce accruing to a narrowing group of people. Chief executives of huge companies are seeing their pay soar, while rank-and-file employees watch another year go by with essentially no raise -- if they are fortunate enough to be employed at all.
We are indeed becoming more like a gated community for the wealthiest Americans, with manicured lawns for those on the inside, and dumpster diving for the working class - -yes, class, a designation that exists by dint of economic reality, no high court affirmation required. The Supreme Court just reinforced the front gate.
The Republican Plans to Increase America's Poverty
From Common Dreams
Published on Tuesday, June 21, 2011 by OtherWords
Paving the Road to a Hungrier, Unhealthier, and Less-Educated Nation
Massive spending cuts will make the future bleaker for millions of Americans.
by Deborah Weinstein
The number of poor children had already grown by 2.1 million in 2009 over pre-recession levels, with continuing high joblessness among parents raising concerns that poverty will continue to worsen for some time. Since kids who spend more than half their childhood in poverty earn on average 39 percent less than median income as adults, we can expect lasting costs that will hurt the nation's future economic growth.
And yet, a majority of House lawmakers want to narrow the deficit by making things worse for today's kids.
If House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's proposal takes effect, or the even more extreme House Republican Study Committee's budget plan prevails, the nation's economic future will inevitably get bleaker. Those proposals would reduce the food assistance, medical care, and education available to poor children. When children don't get adequate nutrition, research shows that they are more likely to suffer illnesses and hospitalizations. Poor health can trigger developmental problems that take a toll on school performance.
The House passed Ryan's proposal in April along party lines. Not one Democrat supported it and all but four Republicans voted in favor of it. In the Senate, five Republicans joined every member of the chamber's Democratic majority in rejecting it.
The House budget, best known for Ryan's proposal to radically change and mostly privatize Medicare, would also reduce spending on food stamps by 20 percent over the next decade. If such a deep cut were implemented through caseload reductions, it would mean 8 million fewer people receiving food stamps, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. If instead the cuts took effect by reducing the amount of assistance each family receives, a family of four would lose $147 a month.
Since about half of food stamp recipients are children, such cuts would hurt the chances that those kids will graduate from high school or college, increasing the likelihood of lifelong poverty. The Republican Study Committee's cuts are far deeper. They would cut food stamps in half over 10 years.
These proposals would have similarly harsh impacts on medical care. The House budget cuts, if implemented solely by reducing eligibility, would deny Medicaid to nearly half the people who rely on it now, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. More likely, there would be some combination of denying people altogether and reducing the care or increasing the costs for those who remain eligible. Either way, the impact would be severe. Again, the Republican Study Committee proposal would inflict even deeper cuts. That proposal calls for halving Medicaid spending by 2021.
How would these plans handle education spending? They'd cut it. We know that the House budget would cut education by nearly one-fifth next year and by a quarter by the end of the decade, with 1.7 million fewer low-income college students qualifying for Pell Grant scholarships. U.S. military spending, which nearly totals the combined military expenditures of every other nation on earth, wouldn't be cut at all. The Republican Study Committee doesn't spell out most of its education cuts, but it would cut all appropriations except for military spending by about 70 percent by 2021. Education funding would be slashed from preschool through college.
The GOP deficit reduction plans rely solely on massive domestic spending cuts that would heap more trouble on the recession generation's already grim prospects. That's counterproductive. Slower economic growth will cut tax revenue and make it harder to nix the government's persistent budget deficit problem. Balanced-budget amendments and other proposals to place drastic limits on total federal spending would result in cuts at least as deep as the Ryan and Republican Study Committee budget plans.
There's a better way. We can take a more responsible and effective approach that would gradually narrow the deficit and spare the programs that low-income Americans rely on through a combination of fair revenue increases and spending cuts that don't exempt the military. Otherwise, we'll wind up denying opportunities for a middle-class life to millions of our children.
Published on Tuesday, June 21, 2011 by OtherWords
Paving the Road to a Hungrier, Unhealthier, and Less-Educated Nation
Massive spending cuts will make the future bleaker for millions of Americans.
by Deborah Weinstein
The number of poor children had already grown by 2.1 million in 2009 over pre-recession levels, with continuing high joblessness among parents raising concerns that poverty will continue to worsen for some time. Since kids who spend more than half their childhood in poverty earn on average 39 percent less than median income as adults, we can expect lasting costs that will hurt the nation's future economic growth.
And yet, a majority of House lawmakers want to narrow the deficit by making things worse for today's kids.
If House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's proposal takes effect, or the even more extreme House Republican Study Committee's budget plan prevails, the nation's economic future will inevitably get bleaker. Those proposals would reduce the food assistance, medical care, and education available to poor children. When children don't get adequate nutrition, research shows that they are more likely to suffer illnesses and hospitalizations. Poor health can trigger developmental problems that take a toll on school performance.
The House passed Ryan's proposal in April along party lines. Not one Democrat supported it and all but four Republicans voted in favor of it. In the Senate, five Republicans joined every member of the chamber's Democratic majority in rejecting it.
The House budget, best known for Ryan's proposal to radically change and mostly privatize Medicare, would also reduce spending on food stamps by 20 percent over the next decade. If such a deep cut were implemented through caseload reductions, it would mean 8 million fewer people receiving food stamps, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. If instead the cuts took effect by reducing the amount of assistance each family receives, a family of four would lose $147 a month.
Since about half of food stamp recipients are children, such cuts would hurt the chances that those kids will graduate from high school or college, increasing the likelihood of lifelong poverty. The Republican Study Committee's cuts are far deeper. They would cut food stamps in half over 10 years.
These proposals would have similarly harsh impacts on medical care. The House budget cuts, if implemented solely by reducing eligibility, would deny Medicaid to nearly half the people who rely on it now, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. More likely, there would be some combination of denying people altogether and reducing the care or increasing the costs for those who remain eligible. Either way, the impact would be severe. Again, the Republican Study Committee proposal would inflict even deeper cuts. That proposal calls for halving Medicaid spending by 2021.
How would these plans handle education spending? They'd cut it. We know that the House budget would cut education by nearly one-fifth next year and by a quarter by the end of the decade, with 1.7 million fewer low-income college students qualifying for Pell Grant scholarships. U.S. military spending, which nearly totals the combined military expenditures of every other nation on earth, wouldn't be cut at all. The Republican Study Committee doesn't spell out most of its education cuts, but it would cut all appropriations except for military spending by about 70 percent by 2021. Education funding would be slashed from preschool through college.
The GOP deficit reduction plans rely solely on massive domestic spending cuts that would heap more trouble on the recession generation's already grim prospects. That's counterproductive. Slower economic growth will cut tax revenue and make it harder to nix the government's persistent budget deficit problem. Balanced-budget amendments and other proposals to place drastic limits on total federal spending would result in cuts at least as deep as the Ryan and Republican Study Committee budget plans.
There's a better way. We can take a more responsible and effective approach that would gradually narrow the deficit and spare the programs that low-income Americans rely on through a combination of fair revenue increases and spending cuts that don't exempt the military. Otherwise, we'll wind up denying opportunities for a middle-class life to millions of our children.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Michelle Bachmann and the Current Crop of Republican Tea Party Disaster Candidates Make Dubya Bush Look Brilliant by Comparison
From The Washington Post -- June 15, 2011
E.J. Dionne Jr.
After GOP debate, feeling nostalgic for George W. Bush
Perhaps I should thank the current crop of Republican presidential candidates for providing me with an experience I never, ever expected: During this week’s debate in New Hampshire, I had a moment of nostalgia for George W. Bush.
Let me note that this was tempered by another response to Bush that I’ll get to. Yet compared with the New Hampshire Seven — and with today’s Republican majority in the House of Representatives — Bush was the reincarnation of Theodore Roosevelt.
The 2012 GOP presidential field on display Monday offered not one idea about how to solve the problems facing our country that didn’t boil down to cutting taxes, slashing regulation or eliminating large swaths of government.
The big winner of the debate was Rep. Michele Bachmann, partly because she went in with a strategy and executed it, partly because she had a stage presence honed by hundreds of television appearances and partly because she didn’t seem crazily extreme, as her many outrageous statements in the past would have led you to conclude.
But she looked almost conventional only because the rest of the Republican Party has veered so far right that it has caught up with her. In the current GOP, she is the mainstream — and that ought to petrify more reasonable Republicans. Even Bachmann’s astonishing call to get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency (created under the Republican administration of Richard M. Nixon) passed without a challenge from her rivals.
That’s why I felt nostalgia for Bush, especially the guy who was a candidate for president in 2000. Unlike this crowd of Republicans, Bush acknowledged that the federal government can ease injustices and get useful things done.
Say what you will about his No Child Left Behind education-reform program. It accepted, correctly, that the federal government has to play an important part in reforming our public schools and held them accountable to a set of standards.
To get it passed, Bush worked with two of the most progressive Democrats in Congress, the late Edward M. Kennedy and Rep. George Miller of California. The reform now needs to be reformed, of course, but it was a serious initiative.
And while there are many problems with the way Bush chose to provide prescription drugs under Medicare, he was quite right to believe it had to be done. Any health insurance plan worthy of being called comprehensive needs to provide prescription coverage. Bush didn’t pay for this benefit, and its structure is more complicated and more expensive than it has to be. But Bush did address a real need.
Oh, yes, and I really do miss some of Bush’s early rhetoric. I cannot imagine a Republican today giving Bush’s 1999 speech in Indianapolis titled — shades of Barack Obama? — “The Duty of Hope.”
Bush criticized the view “that if government would only get out of our way, all our problems would be solved” as a “destructive mind-set.” He scorned this as an approach having “no higher goal, no nobler purpose, than ‘Leave us alone.’ ”
On the contrary, Bush declared: “We have always found our better selves in sympathy and generosity, both in our lives and in our laws.” Amen. A Republican who expressed such sentiments today would be pummeled mercilessly by Fox News.
Now, there are limits to my Bush nostalgia. In brief: He sent troops to battle in two wars and cut taxes, largely on the wealthy, leaving us in deep fiscal and foreign policy holes.
The budget disaster he stuck us with requires little elaboration. But notice all the stories in the wake of the debate about Republicans moving back toward isolationism. The lesson here is that reckless interventionism inevitably produces a backlash into potentially reckless non-interventionism.
In particular, the war in Iraq was undertaken before we had settled the war in Afghanistan. Bush and his advisers did not think through the costs or the consequences of running two wars simultaneously. We are living with the terrible aftermath of these choices, and Americans of all political stripes are understandably exhausted.
That’s why Bush nostalgia takes you only so far. The 43rd president, who might have given life to a constructive sort of moderate conservatism, instead unleashed the Tea Party furies that now engulf the Republican Party and threaten to turn Michele Bachmann, of all people, into a political giant.
E.J. Dionne Jr.
After GOP debate, feeling nostalgic for George W. Bush
Perhaps I should thank the current crop of Republican presidential candidates for providing me with an experience I never, ever expected: During this week’s debate in New Hampshire, I had a moment of nostalgia for George W. Bush.
Let me note that this was tempered by another response to Bush that I’ll get to. Yet compared with the New Hampshire Seven — and with today’s Republican majority in the House of Representatives — Bush was the reincarnation of Theodore Roosevelt.
The 2012 GOP presidential field on display Monday offered not one idea about how to solve the problems facing our country that didn’t boil down to cutting taxes, slashing regulation or eliminating large swaths of government.
The big winner of the debate was Rep. Michele Bachmann, partly because she went in with a strategy and executed it, partly because she had a stage presence honed by hundreds of television appearances and partly because she didn’t seem crazily extreme, as her many outrageous statements in the past would have led you to conclude.
But she looked almost conventional only because the rest of the Republican Party has veered so far right that it has caught up with her. In the current GOP, she is the mainstream — and that ought to petrify more reasonable Republicans. Even Bachmann’s astonishing call to get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency (created under the Republican administration of Richard M. Nixon) passed without a challenge from her rivals.
That’s why I felt nostalgia for Bush, especially the guy who was a candidate for president in 2000. Unlike this crowd of Republicans, Bush acknowledged that the federal government can ease injustices and get useful things done.
Say what you will about his No Child Left Behind education-reform program. It accepted, correctly, that the federal government has to play an important part in reforming our public schools and held them accountable to a set of standards.
To get it passed, Bush worked with two of the most progressive Democrats in Congress, the late Edward M. Kennedy and Rep. George Miller of California. The reform now needs to be reformed, of course, but it was a serious initiative.
And while there are many problems with the way Bush chose to provide prescription drugs under Medicare, he was quite right to believe it had to be done. Any health insurance plan worthy of being called comprehensive needs to provide prescription coverage. Bush didn’t pay for this benefit, and its structure is more complicated and more expensive than it has to be. But Bush did address a real need.
Oh, yes, and I really do miss some of Bush’s early rhetoric. I cannot imagine a Republican today giving Bush’s 1999 speech in Indianapolis titled — shades of Barack Obama? — “The Duty of Hope.”
Bush criticized the view “that if government would only get out of our way, all our problems would be solved” as a “destructive mind-set.” He scorned this as an approach having “no higher goal, no nobler purpose, than ‘Leave us alone.’ ”
On the contrary, Bush declared: “We have always found our better selves in sympathy and generosity, both in our lives and in our laws.” Amen. A Republican who expressed such sentiments today would be pummeled mercilessly by Fox News.
Now, there are limits to my Bush nostalgia. In brief: He sent troops to battle in two wars and cut taxes, largely on the wealthy, leaving us in deep fiscal and foreign policy holes.
The budget disaster he stuck us with requires little elaboration. But notice all the stories in the wake of the debate about Republicans moving back toward isolationism. The lesson here is that reckless interventionism inevitably produces a backlash into potentially reckless non-interventionism.
In particular, the war in Iraq was undertaken before we had settled the war in Afghanistan. Bush and his advisers did not think through the costs or the consequences of running two wars simultaneously. We are living with the terrible aftermath of these choices, and Americans of all political stripes are understandably exhausted.
That’s why Bush nostalgia takes you only so far. The 43rd president, who might have given life to a constructive sort of moderate conservatism, instead unleashed the Tea Party furies that now engulf the Republican Party and threaten to turn Michele Bachmann, of all people, into a political giant.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Conservative Girlie-Girls are Creepier than Weiner --- They make him look like Saint Andrew
From The New York Times -- June 17, 2011
Fake Identities Were Used on Twitter in Effort to Get Information on Weiner
By JENNIFER PRESTON
At least three months before the revelation that former Representative Anthony D. Weiner was sending lewd messages and photos to women online, a small group of self-described conservatives was monitoring his exchanges with women on Twitter. Now there is evidence that one or more people created two false identities on Twitter in order to collect information to use against him.
A Twitter user employing a fake name posed as a 16-year-old California high school girl in May and tried to get Mr. Weiner to be her prom date, according to people with knowledge of the communications and a review of documents. The person behind another Twitter account created under a fake name claimed to be her classmate and offered to provide the group with incriminating evidence about Mr. Weiner.
Mr. Weiner, who resigned on Thursday after admitting he had sent explicit photos and messages to multiple women on social media sites, had already been the subject of intense focus on Twitter by the conservative group, which calls itself the #bornfreecrew.
One Twitter user the group observed seeking to interact with Mr. Weiner was called “Nikki Reid.” She started an online campaign to get Mr. Weiner to be her prom date at Hollywood High School in May, using the account @starchild111. Within days after Mr. Weiner started following her, a Twitter user, also using a fake name, Marianela Alicea, and pretending to be Nikki Reid’s classmate, contacted a member of the #bornfreecrew and said she had information about Mr. Weiner, but never provided any.
But there is no evidence that either girl exists. There is no Nikki Reid or Marianela Alicea enrolled at Hollywood High School. In response to requests from a reporter from the blog Mediaite, a woman claiming to be Nikki Reid’s mother provided documentation to substantiate her identity and her daughter’s identity. But records show the street address the woman provided does not list anyone named Reid as an occupant. State officials in California have confirmed that the driver’s license this woman provided to Mediaite was false, as well.
It remains unclear who is behind the fake Twitter accounts, why anyone was trying to pretend to be a 16-year-old high school girl looking for Mr. Weiner to be her prom date or why the user contacted members of the #bornfreecrew. As an increasing number of politicians and elected officials use social media tools to engage with constituents and deliver their message, the prospect of people not using their real identities presents potential pitfalls and opportunity for political opponents to play dirty tricks.
The @starchild111 Twitter account, which was deleted two weeks ago, was created in September. There were very few posts on the account until March, when the fictional Nikki Reid began posting comments about admiring Mr. Weiner, including:
“Tweeps my progressive idol @RepWeiner is following me. Today is the best day ever!”
“Today also marks day one of my campaign to get @RepWeiner to be my prom date.”
“Will you be my prom date @RepWeiner.”
“Everyone please please follow @RepWeiner and tell him to be my prom date.”
The Twitter user also sought to interact with at least three other women Mr. Weiner was communicating within the weeks and months before he sent a sexually suggestive photo to a Washington state college student. The women included Gennette Cordova, 21, the college student; Ginger Lee, 24, a former pornographic film actress from Tennessee who exchanged over 100 e-mails with the congressman; and a Delaware high school student, 17, whose family said she exchanged five private messages with Mr. Weiner that did not include indecent or explicit material.
In an interview, Ms. Cordova said she was contacted on Twitter by “Nikki Reid,” who said she admired one of her posts and then began exchanging private messages with her almost every day for three or four weeks starting May 5. “There was something weird about it,” Ms. Cordova said. At the beginning of their exchanges, Ms. Cordova said, there was no mention of Mr. Weiner. Then the user began to ask her for advice saying, “I’m a fan girl too,” and “How did you get him to follow you?”
When Ms. Cordova saw that Mr. Weiner was following “Nikki Reid,” she said, she expressed her suspicions about the girl’s identity to him in a private message and he stopped following the account.
Mike Stack, 39, of New Jersey, a member of the #bornfreecrew on Twitter, said that when he saw that “Nikki Reid” began her campaign to get Mr. Weiner to take her to the prom, he sent her a message that said he thought it was “creepy” that Mr. Weiner was following a minor. He said he had no reason to believe that the account was not genuine.
A few days later, Mr. Stack said, he was approached by the Twitter user who said that she was Nikki Reid’s friend and that she had “incriminating evidence” against Mr. Weiner regarding private messages with her friend. But Mr. Stack said that she never presented any evidence to him and that the user of the account stopped communicating with him and eventually vanished.
Then, in what seems to be an elaborate ruse, the Twitter user claiming to be Nikki Reid and then a woman claiming to be her mother contacted Tommy Christopher, a correspondent for Mediaite, the media blog. After first communicating online, Mr. Christopher said, the woman dismissed claims of incriminating evidence against Mr. Weiner and accused members of the #bornfreecrew of harassing her daughter and her daughter’s friend. The woman also made a statement, which offered a forceful defense of Mr. Weiner.
She repeated this by phone to Mr. Christopher, who insisted the woman provide documentation confirming her identity. The woman faxed over a copy of a California driver’s license with her name, Patricia Reid, at a Los Angeles address, as well as school identification for the girls. But it turns out that the driver’s license and the school identification were fake, according to California state officials and school district officials.
Ms. Cordova said that as she looked back on their exchanges, she saw other signs of a fraud. For example, “Nikki Reid” did not have a Facebook account, like most girls her age. And she made references to “The O.C.,” the television show (featuring the young Hollywood actress Nikki Reed) that was popular among teenagers but ended in 2007.
“There is no way this girl is in high school,” Ms. Cordova said. “No way.”
Fake Identities Were Used on Twitter in Effort to Get Information on Weiner
By JENNIFER PRESTON
At least three months before the revelation that former Representative Anthony D. Weiner was sending lewd messages and photos to women online, a small group of self-described conservatives was monitoring his exchanges with women on Twitter. Now there is evidence that one or more people created two false identities on Twitter in order to collect information to use against him.
A Twitter user employing a fake name posed as a 16-year-old California high school girl in May and tried to get Mr. Weiner to be her prom date, according to people with knowledge of the communications and a review of documents. The person behind another Twitter account created under a fake name claimed to be her classmate and offered to provide the group with incriminating evidence about Mr. Weiner.
Mr. Weiner, who resigned on Thursday after admitting he had sent explicit photos and messages to multiple women on social media sites, had already been the subject of intense focus on Twitter by the conservative group, which calls itself the #bornfreecrew.
One Twitter user the group observed seeking to interact with Mr. Weiner was called “Nikki Reid.” She started an online campaign to get Mr. Weiner to be her prom date at Hollywood High School in May, using the account @starchild111. Within days after Mr. Weiner started following her, a Twitter user, also using a fake name, Marianela Alicea, and pretending to be Nikki Reid’s classmate, contacted a member of the #bornfreecrew and said she had information about Mr. Weiner, but never provided any.
But there is no evidence that either girl exists. There is no Nikki Reid or Marianela Alicea enrolled at Hollywood High School. In response to requests from a reporter from the blog Mediaite, a woman claiming to be Nikki Reid’s mother provided documentation to substantiate her identity and her daughter’s identity. But records show the street address the woman provided does not list anyone named Reid as an occupant. State officials in California have confirmed that the driver’s license this woman provided to Mediaite was false, as well.
It remains unclear who is behind the fake Twitter accounts, why anyone was trying to pretend to be a 16-year-old high school girl looking for Mr. Weiner to be her prom date or why the user contacted members of the #bornfreecrew. As an increasing number of politicians and elected officials use social media tools to engage with constituents and deliver their message, the prospect of people not using their real identities presents potential pitfalls and opportunity for political opponents to play dirty tricks.
The @starchild111 Twitter account, which was deleted two weeks ago, was created in September. There were very few posts on the account until March, when the fictional Nikki Reid began posting comments about admiring Mr. Weiner, including:
“Tweeps my progressive idol @RepWeiner is following me. Today is the best day ever!”
“Today also marks day one of my campaign to get @RepWeiner to be my prom date.”
“Will you be my prom date @RepWeiner.”
“Everyone please please follow @RepWeiner and tell him to be my prom date.”
The Twitter user also sought to interact with at least three other women Mr. Weiner was communicating within the weeks and months before he sent a sexually suggestive photo to a Washington state college student. The women included Gennette Cordova, 21, the college student; Ginger Lee, 24, a former pornographic film actress from Tennessee who exchanged over 100 e-mails with the congressman; and a Delaware high school student, 17, whose family said she exchanged five private messages with Mr. Weiner that did not include indecent or explicit material.
In an interview, Ms. Cordova said she was contacted on Twitter by “Nikki Reid,” who said she admired one of her posts and then began exchanging private messages with her almost every day for three or four weeks starting May 5. “There was something weird about it,” Ms. Cordova said. At the beginning of their exchanges, Ms. Cordova said, there was no mention of Mr. Weiner. Then the user began to ask her for advice saying, “I’m a fan girl too,” and “How did you get him to follow you?”
When Ms. Cordova saw that Mr. Weiner was following “Nikki Reid,” she said, she expressed her suspicions about the girl’s identity to him in a private message and he stopped following the account.
Mike Stack, 39, of New Jersey, a member of the #bornfreecrew on Twitter, said that when he saw that “Nikki Reid” began her campaign to get Mr. Weiner to take her to the prom, he sent her a message that said he thought it was “creepy” that Mr. Weiner was following a minor. He said he had no reason to believe that the account was not genuine.
A few days later, Mr. Stack said, he was approached by the Twitter user who said that she was Nikki Reid’s friend and that she had “incriminating evidence” against Mr. Weiner regarding private messages with her friend. But Mr. Stack said that she never presented any evidence to him and that the user of the account stopped communicating with him and eventually vanished.
Then, in what seems to be an elaborate ruse, the Twitter user claiming to be Nikki Reid and then a woman claiming to be her mother contacted Tommy Christopher, a correspondent for Mediaite, the media blog. After first communicating online, Mr. Christopher said, the woman dismissed claims of incriminating evidence against Mr. Weiner and accused members of the #bornfreecrew of harassing her daughter and her daughter’s friend. The woman also made a statement, which offered a forceful defense of Mr. Weiner.
She repeated this by phone to Mr. Christopher, who insisted the woman provide documentation confirming her identity. The woman faxed over a copy of a California driver’s license with her name, Patricia Reid, at a Los Angeles address, as well as school identification for the girls. But it turns out that the driver’s license and the school identification were fake, according to California state officials and school district officials.
Ms. Cordova said that as she looked back on their exchanges, she saw other signs of a fraud. For example, “Nikki Reid” did not have a Facebook account, like most girls her age. And she made references to “The O.C.,” the television show (featuring the young Hollywood actress Nikki Reed) that was popular among teenagers but ended in 2007.
“There is no way this girl is in high school,” Ms. Cordova said. “No way.”
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Meet All Those Looney Extreme Far Right Republican Candidates
From The Daily Beast -- June 15, 2012:
Has the GOP Lost Its Mind?
by Michelle Goldberg
Romney said he’d blow up the world economy over the debt ceiling. Bachmann doesn’t believe in evolution or global warming. And those were the debate’s stars. Michelle Goldberg on the lunacy of the Republican field.
Here are things that Republicans suggested eliminating or privatizing in last night’s debate: FEMA, NASA, the EPA, the Federal Labor Relations Board, Medicaid and food stamps. Herman Cain promised not to appoint any Muslims who want to kill Americans to his cabinet. Michele Bachmann supports states rights on gay marriage, but also supports a constitutional amendment outlawing it. Newt Gingrich faults big government for the lamentable absence of manned stations on the moon.
Rick Santorum wants to “a system of discipline” to “punish” gay soldiers, which suggests that his problem with pornographic Google results is not likely to abate. Tim Pawlenty views Iraq as “one of the shiniest examples of success in the Middle East.”
In this crowd, Mitt Romney seemed almost statesmanlike, even though he says he’s willing to blow up the world economy by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. At least he admitted that Sharia law will not soon be coming to America, about as brave a concession to reality as we’re likely to see from this field.
At least Romney admitted that Sharia law will not soon be coming to America, about as brave a concession to reality as we’re likely to see from this field.
He and Bachmann were the winners last night. Romney came off as relatively serious and reasonable, and benefited from the fact that Tim Pawlenty wimped out when invited to take on his health care record. Bachmann, who announced her candidacy during the debate, probably gained more from the proceedings than anyone. She was charming, charismatic and far better spoken than Sarah Palin, to whom she’s often compared, has ever been. Of course, she doesn’t believe in evolution or global warming, thinks homosexuality can be cured and warns of a plot to merge the United States with Canada and Mexico, but in today’s Republican Party, none of that is particularly controversial.
It’s going to be a long seventeen months.
Has the GOP Lost Its Mind?
by Michelle Goldberg
Romney said he’d blow up the world economy over the debt ceiling. Bachmann doesn’t believe in evolution or global warming. And those were the debate’s stars. Michelle Goldberg on the lunacy of the Republican field.
Here are things that Republicans suggested eliminating or privatizing in last night’s debate: FEMA, NASA, the EPA, the Federal Labor Relations Board, Medicaid and food stamps. Herman Cain promised not to appoint any Muslims who want to kill Americans to his cabinet. Michele Bachmann supports states rights on gay marriage, but also supports a constitutional amendment outlawing it. Newt Gingrich faults big government for the lamentable absence of manned stations on the moon.
Rick Santorum wants to “a system of discipline” to “punish” gay soldiers, which suggests that his problem with pornographic Google results is not likely to abate. Tim Pawlenty views Iraq as “one of the shiniest examples of success in the Middle East.”
In this crowd, Mitt Romney seemed almost statesmanlike, even though he says he’s willing to blow up the world economy by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. At least he admitted that Sharia law will not soon be coming to America, about as brave a concession to reality as we’re likely to see from this field.
At least Romney admitted that Sharia law will not soon be coming to America, about as brave a concession to reality as we’re likely to see from this field.
He and Bachmann were the winners last night. Romney came off as relatively serious and reasonable, and benefited from the fact that Tim Pawlenty wimped out when invited to take on his health care record. Bachmann, who announced her candidacy during the debate, probably gained more from the proceedings than anyone. She was charming, charismatic and far better spoken than Sarah Palin, to whom she’s often compared, has ever been. Of course, she doesn’t believe in evolution or global warming, thinks homosexuality can be cured and warns of a plot to merge the United States with Canada and Mexico, but in today’s Republican Party, none of that is particularly controversial.
It’s going to be a long seventeen months.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
What the $2.5 Trillion in Bush Tax Cuts Has Cost America
From Common Dreams -- June 14, 2011:
The $2.5 Trillion Tragedy: What America Has Given Up For 10 Years Of Bush Tax Cuts
... and Counting
by Zaid Jilani
Today marks the 10th anniversary of former President George W. Bush signing into law his 2001 tax cuts (he passed a second round in 2003). While doing so, Bush promised prosperity and growth, but the nation got neither.
The cost of these budget-busting 2001 and 2003 tax cuts was, as estimated by Citizens for Tax Justice, roughly $2.5 trillion through 2010. But America didn’t have to go down this route of cutting taxes and hoping for growth to miraculously appear. There were other policy options available to policymakers.
ThinkProgress, using data on various social spending projects from the National Priorities Project — which does these calculations for the cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars — has estimated ten other possible policies we could’ve paid for at the same $2.5 trillion price of the Bush tax cuts. While not all of these policies are currently performed by the federal government, they do represent an accurate calculation of the monetary tradeoffs, and each one individually would cost the same as the Bush tax cuts. Here are ten alternatives we could’ve pursued instead:
- Give 122.7 Million Children Low-Income Health Care Every Year For Ten Years
- Give 49.2 Million People Access To Low-Income Healthcare Every Year For Ten Years
- Provide 43.1 Million Students With Pell Grants Worth $5,500 Every Year For Ten Years
- Provide 31.5 Million Head Start Slots For Children Every Year For Ten Years
- Provide VA Care For 30.7 Million Military Veterans Every Year For Ten Years
- Provide 30.4 Million Scholarships For University Students Every Year For Ten Years
- Hire 4.19 Million Firefighters Every Year For Ten Years
- Hire 3.67 Million Elementary School Teachers Every Year For Ten Years
- Hire 3.6 Million Police Officers Every Year For Ten Years
- Retrofit 144.6 Million Households For Wind Power Every Year For Ten Years
- Retrofit 54.2 Million Households For Solar Photovoltaic Energy Every Year For Ten Years
The tradeoffs paint a stark picture. For the same price as the Bush tax cuts, which did little to help the economy, we could’ve sent tens of millions of students to college, retrofitted every household in America with the capacity to generate alternative energy, hired millions of firefighters and police officers, effectively ended our national shame of having kids who lack health care coverage, or put millions of more teachers into classrooms. But instead, Congress passed budget-breaking tax cuts, and then went on to pass even more in 2003. In 2010, Congress then went on to renew the Bush tax cuts for an additional two years, and the political will for the sort of public investments listed above appears to have dried up.
The $2.5 Trillion Tragedy: What America Has Given Up For 10 Years Of Bush Tax Cuts
... and Counting
by Zaid Jilani
Today marks the 10th anniversary of former President George W. Bush signing into law his 2001 tax cuts (he passed a second round in 2003). While doing so, Bush promised prosperity and growth, but the nation got neither.
The cost of these budget-busting 2001 and 2003 tax cuts was, as estimated by Citizens for Tax Justice, roughly $2.5 trillion through 2010. But America didn’t have to go down this route of cutting taxes and hoping for growth to miraculously appear. There were other policy options available to policymakers.
ThinkProgress, using data on various social spending projects from the National Priorities Project — which does these calculations for the cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars — has estimated ten other possible policies we could’ve paid for at the same $2.5 trillion price of the Bush tax cuts. While not all of these policies are currently performed by the federal government, they do represent an accurate calculation of the monetary tradeoffs, and each one individually would cost the same as the Bush tax cuts. Here are ten alternatives we could’ve pursued instead:
- Give 122.7 Million Children Low-Income Health Care Every Year For Ten Years
- Give 49.2 Million People Access To Low-Income Healthcare Every Year For Ten Years
- Provide 43.1 Million Students With Pell Grants Worth $5,500 Every Year For Ten Years
- Provide 31.5 Million Head Start Slots For Children Every Year For Ten Years
- Provide VA Care For 30.7 Million Military Veterans Every Year For Ten Years
- Provide 30.4 Million Scholarships For University Students Every Year For Ten Years
- Hire 4.19 Million Firefighters Every Year For Ten Years
- Hire 3.67 Million Elementary School Teachers Every Year For Ten Years
- Hire 3.6 Million Police Officers Every Year For Ten Years
- Retrofit 144.6 Million Households For Wind Power Every Year For Ten Years
- Retrofit 54.2 Million Households For Solar Photovoltaic Energy Every Year For Ten Years
The tradeoffs paint a stark picture. For the same price as the Bush tax cuts, which did little to help the economy, we could’ve sent tens of millions of students to college, retrofitted every household in America with the capacity to generate alternative energy, hired millions of firefighters and police officers, effectively ended our national shame of having kids who lack health care coverage, or put millions of more teachers into classrooms. But instead, Congress passed budget-breaking tax cuts, and then went on to pass even more in 2003. In 2010, Congress then went on to renew the Bush tax cuts for an additional two years, and the political will for the sort of public investments listed above appears to have dried up.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Bush's Tax Cuts and Other Policies Caused Our Current Huge Deficits -- Obama's Stimulus Packages Have Prevented Total Economic Disaster
From Media Matters for America -- June 12, 2011:
Meet The Press: "Obama's Economic Record" Is Higher Unemployment, Debt, Gas Prices ...
David Gregory Suggested "Democratic Governance" To Blame For Increases In Unemployment, Debt, And Gas Prices.
On the June 12 edition of NBC's Meet The Press, David Gregory stated:
GREGORY: This is the president's standing in terms of handling the economy in the public's eye, and it's pretty negative right now -- 60 percent almost. Fifty-nine percent disapprove of the president's handling of the economy. And there are facts that back that up that are difficult for this administration and for the Democrats: Unemployment's up 25 percent since Inauguration Day for President Obama; the debt's up 35 percent, over $14 trillion; a gallon of gas up over 100 percent, with gas 3.75, higher than that in certain parts of the country.
Why should Americans trust Democratic governance right now on the economy, and, particularly, the president's?
But Obama's Economic Policy Raised Employment
Independent And Private Analysts: Stimulus Significantly Raised Employment. Analysts have confirmed that the stimulus significantly raised employment. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the stimulus increased the number of people employed, as of the second quarter of FY2010, by "between 1.4 million and 3.3 million." Moody's Economy.com estimated that the stimulus would create 1.9 million jobs by 2010.
Economists: "The Effects Of The Fiscal Stimulus" On Economy "Appear Very Substantial." Economists have also agreed that the stimulus was effective. A March 2010 study in The Wall Street Journal found that 70 percent of economists surveyed said the stimulus "boosted growth and mitigated job losses." ABC News reported on February 18, 2010, that most of the economists on its panel thought the economy "would be worse today without the big aid package." And a February 2010 survey of 203 members of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) found that "[e]ighty-three percent believe that GDP is currently higher than it would have been without the 2009 stimulus package (ARRA)."
Analyses Show Debt Is Largely Due To Bush-Era Policies, Economic Downturn
Wash. Post Graphic Points To Bush Tax Cuts, Iraq And Afghanistan Wars As Main Reasons For Deficit. From a June 4 post on The Washington Post blog PostPolitics:
In the debate over the nation's rising debt, rhetoric trumps reality. In January 2001, the U.S. budget was balanced for the first time in decades and the Congressional Budget Office was forecasting surpluses totaling $5.6 trillion by 2011. A decade later, the national debt is larger, as a percentage of the economy, than at any time in U.S. history except for the period shortly after World War II.
In fact, 75 percent of the members currently serving in Congress voted for at least one -- and in most cases more than one -- of three policies that contributed to fully one-third of the $12.7 trillion swing from projected surpluses to real debt: President George W. Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, funding for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and President Obama's 2009 stimulus bill.
The post included the following graphic to illustrate CBO's estimates on how much former President Bush's tax cuts, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the 2009 stimulus contributed to the current debt:
CBPP: "[V]irtually The Entire Deficit Over The Next Ten Years" Due To Bush Policies, Economic Downturn. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) published an analysis of federal deficits in December 2009, which was updated on May 10, 2011, titled, "Economic Downturn and Bush Policies Continue to Drive Large Projected Deficits." The report noted:
Some lawmakers, pundits, and others continue to say that President George W. Bush's policies did not drive the projected federal deficits of the coming decade -- that, instead, it was the policies of President Obama and Congress in 2009 and 2010. But, the fact remains: the economic downturn, President Bush's tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years.
Meet The Press: "Obama's Economic Record" Is Higher Unemployment, Debt, Gas Prices ...
David Gregory Suggested "Democratic Governance" To Blame For Increases In Unemployment, Debt, And Gas Prices.
On the June 12 edition of NBC's Meet The Press, David Gregory stated:
GREGORY: This is the president's standing in terms of handling the economy in the public's eye, and it's pretty negative right now -- 60 percent almost. Fifty-nine percent disapprove of the president's handling of the economy. And there are facts that back that up that are difficult for this administration and for the Democrats: Unemployment's up 25 percent since Inauguration Day for President Obama; the debt's up 35 percent, over $14 trillion; a gallon of gas up over 100 percent, with gas 3.75, higher than that in certain parts of the country.
Why should Americans trust Democratic governance right now on the economy, and, particularly, the president's?
But Obama's Economic Policy Raised Employment
Independent And Private Analysts: Stimulus Significantly Raised Employment. Analysts have confirmed that the stimulus significantly raised employment. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the stimulus increased the number of people employed, as of the second quarter of FY2010, by "between 1.4 million and 3.3 million." Moody's Economy.com estimated that the stimulus would create 1.9 million jobs by 2010.
Economists: "The Effects Of The Fiscal Stimulus" On Economy "Appear Very Substantial." Economists have also agreed that the stimulus was effective. A March 2010 study in The Wall Street Journal found that 70 percent of economists surveyed said the stimulus "boosted growth and mitigated job losses." ABC News reported on February 18, 2010, that most of the economists on its panel thought the economy "would be worse today without the big aid package." And a February 2010 survey of 203 members of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) found that "[e]ighty-three percent believe that GDP is currently higher than it would have been without the 2009 stimulus package (ARRA)."
Analyses Show Debt Is Largely Due To Bush-Era Policies, Economic Downturn
Wash. Post Graphic Points To Bush Tax Cuts, Iraq And Afghanistan Wars As Main Reasons For Deficit. From a June 4 post on The Washington Post blog PostPolitics:
In the debate over the nation's rising debt, rhetoric trumps reality. In January 2001, the U.S. budget was balanced for the first time in decades and the Congressional Budget Office was forecasting surpluses totaling $5.6 trillion by 2011. A decade later, the national debt is larger, as a percentage of the economy, than at any time in U.S. history except for the period shortly after World War II.
In fact, 75 percent of the members currently serving in Congress voted for at least one -- and in most cases more than one -- of three policies that contributed to fully one-third of the $12.7 trillion swing from projected surpluses to real debt: President George W. Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, funding for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and President Obama's 2009 stimulus bill.
The post included the following graphic to illustrate CBO's estimates on how much former President Bush's tax cuts, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the 2009 stimulus contributed to the current debt:
CBPP: "[V]irtually The Entire Deficit Over The Next Ten Years" Due To Bush Policies, Economic Downturn. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) published an analysis of federal deficits in December 2009, which was updated on May 10, 2011, titled, "Economic Downturn and Bush Policies Continue to Drive Large Projected Deficits." The report noted:
Some lawmakers, pundits, and others continue to say that President George W. Bush's policies did not drive the projected federal deficits of the coming decade -- that, instead, it was the policies of President Obama and Congress in 2009 and 2010. But, the fact remains: the economic downturn, President Bush's tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Our Irish President Barack O'Bama Visits His Ancestral Home in Ireland
From The Daily Beast -- June 11, 2011:
Obama's Moneygall Visit Reveals His Inner Irishman
by Tom Sykes
The president’s hearty Irish swig of Guinness, on a visit to his ancestral village of Moneygall, cemented his status as a native son—though it may have set the country’s image back 20 years. Tom Sykes reports from Ireland.
Despite howling gales that threatened to ground the presidential chopper and the return of the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud, President Obama made it to his ancestral hometown of Moneygall in Ireland on Monday.
And what did he do when he got there?
Why, like any good Irishman, he went to the pub for a Guinness, of course. And in the three minutes it took for his pint to “settle,” and the five further seconds it took for him to take a big hearty Irish swig of “porter” at 3 in the afternoon, the national image of Ireland underwent a 20-year regression, to an era before Google set up its European headquarters in Dublin, before we became the biggest online gaming hub in Europe, and the chief attraction of Ireland was “the drink.”
But it would be unfair to accuse Diageo, which produces Guinness, of hijacking the president’s trip, as the Irish people seem to have done everything in their power to hand it to this multinational money machine on a plate. God bless the queen, who had the decency to try to look interested as she was poured a pint of Guinness on her recent trip to Ireland but declined to drink it for the cameras, despite being obviously “expected” to. Maybe she figured that starring for free in an ad for a $50 billion business whose products kill and impoverish thousands of people every year wasn’t why she was here.
Obama, however, had no such qualms, diving into the boozer, chatting with the bar staff and even uttering the brand name Guinness in his quest to connect with his roots. If you listened carefully, you could hear the whoops of delight from the executives at Diageo blowing in the wind from London all the way to Moneygall, a very, very small village on the edge of a very, very large Irish bog that is the hometown of Obama’s great-great-great-great grandfather Joseph Kearney, an Irish wig maker who immigrated to Ohio in 1849.
That Obama was in Moneygall at all was something of an astonishment to the people of this small village, despite the presence of the Secret Service and frenzied power-washing that has been a feature of life here for the past three months. They accepted without demurral that one of their descendants was president of the United States, but struggled to get their heads around the notion that one of their sons could be black.
After a bit of bemused head-scratching when a parish priest made the genealogical breakthrough during Obama’s battle with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, the collective consciousness of Moneygall, population 299, has now digested and processed the news.
So when the subject of “O’Bama” came up in recent months at Ollie Hayes’ Stars and Stripes-festooned saloon, where the president went for his pint Monday, and a visitor started to say, “But how come…” they would cut him off right away and explain patiently that Obama’s mother’s side is Irish and his father’s side is Kenyan.
Still, the fact remains that Moneygall is very, very white. No black people live in the village, but Moneygall is not unusual in that respect; rural Ireland is very, very white.
The 2006 census showed that just 1.06 percent of Irish citizens are black, and outside major city centers, black people are still a rarity. Inadvertent racism pervades conversation and society both polite and impolite; mixed-race people, for example, are often referred to as “half-castes” or “half-and-halfs.” A university-educated, professional friend of mine who was going to London to stay with an Irish friend married to a black woman recently told me he was due to visit “Mandela Hall.” It’s not maliciousness, usually, just naivete and a lack of familiarity, awareness, and education—but still, you don’t quite know where to look.
Moneygall itself has been through an accelerated racial awareness program since the news of Obama’s heritage broke. More people use the words “mixed-race” than “half-caste” here. But the village was unusually well-prepared compared to most of rural Ireland for the extraordinary news that one of their descendants was black, for back in the 1930s, another black man lived in Moneygall.
His name was Joe Kelly, and he lived at the local big house, Ballintemple, directly opposite the Anglican Church of Ireland where Obama’s ancestors worshipped, married and christened their children, and where the records identifying Obama’s heritage were found.
Ballintemple was occupied by a family of farmers called Burris until around 1930, when it was sold to the grandparents of the current owner, Henry Hogg.
“We still call his old room ‘Joe Kelly’s room,’” said Hogg. “Children from orphanages were basically handed out to families, and Joe Kelly was taken in by Mrs. Burris. When the house was sold, the family ‘inherited’ Joe Kelly. He came with the house. It was where he had always lived, so he wouldn’t actually have had anywhere else to go. My uncle later told me that his mother was a prostitute in Dublin. He was a houseboy for Mrs. Burris and then he was a houseboy for my grandmother. He used to go into Cloghjordan [a nearby town[ at the weekends and go to the pub and so on.
“Then, one day in 1942, he went into town and never came back. He disappeared. My grandmother was very concerned about him and asked after him, to try and find out what had happened, and she was told he had been seen getting on the train to Dublin. We think he might have joined the army and been killed in the war.”
Were people shocked when they discovered that Obama had direct Irish heritage?
“Shocked would be the wrong word, but people were highly surprised, because of his skin color,” Hogg said. “People didn’t really relate to the idea of a black president having Irish roots. But when they looked at it, and saw that Obama’s mother is white, and his father is Kenyan, then they understood it. A marriage like that is quite normal in America, but it would be highly unusual here.”
After his quick drink in Moneygall, the Obamas choppered back to Dublin, where the president delivered a stirring address to a crowd of 60,000 people in the city center, introducing himself as “Barack Obama, of the Moneygall O’Bamas. I am here to find the apostrophe that we lost along the way.” News was just breaking that the interest rate demanded by investors for lending money to the IMF-assisted Irish state had closed at a record high, exceeding 10.5 percent. “America will stand by you,” Obama told the cheering crowd.
Let’s hope so. And failing that, will you buy us a drink?
Obama's Moneygall Visit Reveals His Inner Irishman
by Tom Sykes
The president’s hearty Irish swig of Guinness, on a visit to his ancestral village of Moneygall, cemented his status as a native son—though it may have set the country’s image back 20 years. Tom Sykes reports from Ireland.
Despite howling gales that threatened to ground the presidential chopper and the return of the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud, President Obama made it to his ancestral hometown of Moneygall in Ireland on Monday.
And what did he do when he got there?
Why, like any good Irishman, he went to the pub for a Guinness, of course. And in the three minutes it took for his pint to “settle,” and the five further seconds it took for him to take a big hearty Irish swig of “porter” at 3 in the afternoon, the national image of Ireland underwent a 20-year regression, to an era before Google set up its European headquarters in Dublin, before we became the biggest online gaming hub in Europe, and the chief attraction of Ireland was “the drink.”
But it would be unfair to accuse Diageo, which produces Guinness, of hijacking the president’s trip, as the Irish people seem to have done everything in their power to hand it to this multinational money machine on a plate. God bless the queen, who had the decency to try to look interested as she was poured a pint of Guinness on her recent trip to Ireland but declined to drink it for the cameras, despite being obviously “expected” to. Maybe she figured that starring for free in an ad for a $50 billion business whose products kill and impoverish thousands of people every year wasn’t why she was here.
Obama, however, had no such qualms, diving into the boozer, chatting with the bar staff and even uttering the brand name Guinness in his quest to connect with his roots. If you listened carefully, you could hear the whoops of delight from the executives at Diageo blowing in the wind from London all the way to Moneygall, a very, very small village on the edge of a very, very large Irish bog that is the hometown of Obama’s great-great-great-great grandfather Joseph Kearney, an Irish wig maker who immigrated to Ohio in 1849.
That Obama was in Moneygall at all was something of an astonishment to the people of this small village, despite the presence of the Secret Service and frenzied power-washing that has been a feature of life here for the past three months. They accepted without demurral that one of their descendants was president of the United States, but struggled to get their heads around the notion that one of their sons could be black.
After a bit of bemused head-scratching when a parish priest made the genealogical breakthrough during Obama’s battle with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, the collective consciousness of Moneygall, population 299, has now digested and processed the news.
So when the subject of “O’Bama” came up in recent months at Ollie Hayes’ Stars and Stripes-festooned saloon, where the president went for his pint Monday, and a visitor started to say, “But how come…” they would cut him off right away and explain patiently that Obama’s mother’s side is Irish and his father’s side is Kenyan.
Still, the fact remains that Moneygall is very, very white. No black people live in the village, but Moneygall is not unusual in that respect; rural Ireland is very, very white.
The 2006 census showed that just 1.06 percent of Irish citizens are black, and outside major city centers, black people are still a rarity. Inadvertent racism pervades conversation and society both polite and impolite; mixed-race people, for example, are often referred to as “half-castes” or “half-and-halfs.” A university-educated, professional friend of mine who was going to London to stay with an Irish friend married to a black woman recently told me he was due to visit “Mandela Hall.” It’s not maliciousness, usually, just naivete and a lack of familiarity, awareness, and education—but still, you don’t quite know where to look.
Moneygall itself has been through an accelerated racial awareness program since the news of Obama’s heritage broke. More people use the words “mixed-race” than “half-caste” here. But the village was unusually well-prepared compared to most of rural Ireland for the extraordinary news that one of their descendants was black, for back in the 1930s, another black man lived in Moneygall.
His name was Joe Kelly, and he lived at the local big house, Ballintemple, directly opposite the Anglican Church of Ireland where Obama’s ancestors worshipped, married and christened their children, and where the records identifying Obama’s heritage were found.
Ballintemple was occupied by a family of farmers called Burris until around 1930, when it was sold to the grandparents of the current owner, Henry Hogg.
“We still call his old room ‘Joe Kelly’s room,’” said Hogg. “Children from orphanages were basically handed out to families, and Joe Kelly was taken in by Mrs. Burris. When the house was sold, the family ‘inherited’ Joe Kelly. He came with the house. It was where he had always lived, so he wouldn’t actually have had anywhere else to go. My uncle later told me that his mother was a prostitute in Dublin. He was a houseboy for Mrs. Burris and then he was a houseboy for my grandmother. He used to go into Cloghjordan [a nearby town[ at the weekends and go to the pub and so on.
“Then, one day in 1942, he went into town and never came back. He disappeared. My grandmother was very concerned about him and asked after him, to try and find out what had happened, and she was told he had been seen getting on the train to Dublin. We think he might have joined the army and been killed in the war.”
Were people shocked when they discovered that Obama had direct Irish heritage?
“Shocked would be the wrong word, but people were highly surprised, because of his skin color,” Hogg said. “People didn’t really relate to the idea of a black president having Irish roots. But when they looked at it, and saw that Obama’s mother is white, and his father is Kenyan, then they understood it. A marriage like that is quite normal in America, but it would be highly unusual here.”
After his quick drink in Moneygall, the Obamas choppered back to Dublin, where the president delivered a stirring address to a crowd of 60,000 people in the city center, introducing himself as “Barack Obama, of the Moneygall O’Bamas. I am here to find the apostrophe that we lost along the way.” News was just breaking that the interest rate demanded by investors for lending money to the IMF-assisted Irish state had closed at a record high, exceeding 10.5 percent. “America will stand by you,” Obama told the cheering crowd.
Let’s hope so. And failing that, will you buy us a drink?
Friday, June 10, 2011
Conservatives Would Rather Spread Racial Prejudice Than Protect America Effectively
From Media Matters for America -- June 10, 2011:
Right-Wing Media Attack Sec. Napolitano For Advocating Effective Screening Methods Instead Of Profiling Muslims
Right-wing media have attacked Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano for recently saying that it is "not good logic" to target Muslim men younger than 35 for security screenings at airports. In her comments, Napolitano instead recommended screening based on travel plans, behavior, and existing intelligence -- a method recommended by experts who note that racial profiling is ineffective.
Napolitano Says That It's "Not Good Logic" To Choose Racial Profiling Over More Effective Methods
Napolitano: Profiling Muslims Younger Than 35 Is "Not Good Logic." In remarks made on June 7 at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, Napolitano responded to a question by Jacob Goodwin, editor of Government Security News, about profiling "men, typically under 30 or 35," who are Muslim. Napolitano responded that it is "not good logic" to profile based on those criteria and stated that it's better to screen based on "a technique, a tactic, a behavior" that would indicate the person "has moved into the category of a violent extremist." From the June 7 briefing:
GOODWIN: You said earlier in your remarks that there's no single portrait of a would-be terrorist, and that the administration has no interest in profiling, and that not only are those policies -- the profiling policies -- illegal, but they are also ineffective. Common sense tells me that in most of the cases since 9-11 that we've made arrests, it wouldn't be profiling to discover that most of the suspects or the convicted parties have been men, typically under 30 or under 35, often Muslim.
It's not -- so my question is, is it -- I guess my question is, how do you square what most people would say if they're just talking to you, that common sense would suggest those are appropriate parties to at least focus more attention on, given that those were the parties that most often are arrested? Not to say that all men under 35 who are Muslim are suspect -- not at all -- but I guess my question is, why wouldn't the department focus more of its attention on that category of individual who's turned up most often as the suspect?
NAPOLITANO: Well, because you're not using good logic there. You've got to use actual intelligence that you receive. And so you might, you know -- all you've given me is kind of status. You haven't given me a technique, a tactic, a behavior, something that would suggest that somebody is not -- not a Muslim, but is Islamist, and is actually -- has moved into the category of a violent extremist.
Now we have ways to make, you know, some of those cuts, and they involve the intel that comes in, the analysis that goes on.
For example, we -- oftentimes for travelers entering the United States, we won't do a -- what's called a secondary inspection just because they're a 35-year-old male who appears to be Muslim, whatever that means. But we know from intelligence that if they have a certain travel pattern over a certain period of time, that that should cause us to ask some more significant questions than if they don't. And that's what secondary is all about.
So we continue to focus ourselves and to focus those with whom we work and those we train not on status issues but on actual behaviors, tactics, and techniques that we can associate from intelligence that we know or things we have learned or other countries have learned that could translate into possible criminal or terrorist activity. [NYU's Brennan Center for Justice, 6/7/11 accessed via YouTube]
Right-Wing Media Attack Napolitano For Not Profiling Muslim Men
Hoft Calls Napolitano's Statement "Unbelievable." In a June 9 Gateway Pundit post titled, "Unbelievable... Napolitano: Concentrating Terrorist Screening Efforts on Muslim Men Under 35 is Not Good Logic," Jim Hoft wrote: "Could Napolitano really be this clueless? Even in Egypt they screen Muslims. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told reporters today that concentrating terrorist screening efforts on Muslim men under age 35 is 'not good logic.' Listen and weep for your country." Hoft concluded: "Napolitano must have missed this report in December of last year... In the last 24 months 126 people have been indicted on terrorist-related charges in the United States. All of them were Muslim." [Gateway Pundit, 6/9/11, emphasis in original]
The Blaze Calls Profiling Muslim Men Younger Than 35 "Common Sense." On June 9, Glenn Beck's website The Blaze posted video of Napolitano's remarks under the headline, "Janet Napolitano: Using Common Sense And Concentrating Terrorist Screening Efforts On Muslim Men Under 35 Is Not Good Logic." [The Blaze, 6/9/11]
Fox Nation: "Napolitano Muslim Statement Takes The Cake." On June 9, the Fox Nation posted the video of Napolitano under the headline, "Napolitano Muslim Statement Takes The Cake." [Fox Nation, 6/9/11]
But Security Experts Agree Profiling Is Ineffective And Potentially "Dangerous"
Former Bush Secretary Of Homeland Security Chertoff: Profiling For Terrorists Is "Misleading And, Arguably, Dangerous." On the January 3, 2010, edition of NBC's Meet the Press, Michael Chertoff, former secretary of Homeland Security during the Bush administration, stated that "relying on preconceptions or stereotypes is actually kind of misleading, and, arguably, dangerous":
DAVID GREGORY (host): But I want to press Secretary Chertoff on this point, because that's what the counterterror officials will say -- it's more than a contributing factor. We know who 90 percent of these terrorists are. There may be other examples of women being used and whatnot, but Islamic males between the age of 20 and 30 make up roughly 90 percent of that profile. Is that an inappropriate or appropriate way for law enforcement to be targeting individuals?
CHERTOFF: I think relying on preconceptions or stereotypes is actually kind of misleading and, arguably, dangerous.
Obviously, you --
GREGORY: So that's wrong, that profile is wrong?
CHERTOFF: Correct.
GREGORY: Okay.
CHERTOFF: And what I would say is you want to look at things like where has the person traveled to, where have they spent time, what has their behavior been? But recognize -- one of the things that al Qaeda has done is deliberately try to recruit people who don't fit the stereotype, who are Western in background or appearance. Look at the guy like Adam Gadahn, who grew up in California, who is one of the senior-level al Qaeda operatives but does not fit the normal prejudice about what an extremist looks like.
Similarly, on the December 29, 2009, edition of NPR's All Things Considered, Chertoff stated that "the danger and the foolishness of profiling" is that "people's conception of what a potential terrorist looks like often doesn't match reality":
ROBERT SIEGEL (host): How should the U.S. reconcile reasonable, ethical restraints on profiling with some obvious facts that this sort of thing has been done by Muslim men, typically, and also of a certain age. One could focus pretty heavily on Muslim men under 40 and come up with lots of the people who are posing threats.
CHERTOFF: Actually, Robert, I'm going to argue that this case illustrates the danger and the foolishness of profiling because people's conception of what a potential terrorist looks like often doesn't match reality. In this case we had a Nigerian, for example, not a person from the Middle East or from South Asia. If you look at the airline plot of 2006, two of the plotters were a married couple that were going to get on a plane with a young baby. The terrorists understand that the more they vary the kind of operative they use, the more likely they're going to be able to exploit prejudices if we allow those prejudices to guide the way we conduct our investigation.
SIEGEL: Your objection to profiling is not just as an ethical matter, it's a point of efficacy also. You're saying it doesn't work.
CHERTOFF: I think it's not only problematic from civil rights standpoint, but frankly, I think it winds up not being terribly effective. [NBC, Meet The Press, 1/3/10, accessed via Nexis; NPR, All Things Considered, 12/29/09]
International Security Service Exec Steve Koenig: "There's No Place For Racial Profiling In A Modern Society." A January 1, 2010, McClatchy News article reporting that "[a]s some politicians step up calls for increased racial or ethnic profiling to thwart terrorism, most experts say such profiling is inefficient and unfair" quoted Steve Koenig, chief executive of international security services firm SCG International, as saying: "There's no place for racial profiling in a modern society. ... We have Indonesian terrorists. We have Chechen terrorists. There are Irish terrorists. You cannot apply that sort of methodology to solving this problem." [McClatchy News, 1/1/10, accessed via Nexis]
Aviation Security Expert Sheldon Jacobson Reportedly "Said Racial Profiling Itself Is Ineffective." The same McClatchy News article also reported that aviation security modeling and risk management specialist and University of Illinois engineering professor Sheldon Jacobson "said racial profiling itself is ineffective," and quoted him saying: "The fact of the matter is, we're dealing with a moving target. If we keep chasing the risks that we've already seen, we will ultimately miss the risk that is going to be coming toward us." [McClatchy News, 1/1/10, accessed via Nexis]
Statistical Model For Examining Rare Events Finds Profiling Ineffective. According to a February 2, 2009, New York Times article, "Too great a dependence on profiling passengers by ethnicity or nationality is an ineffective way to conduct airport screening to catch terrorists, according to a statistical model for examining rare events." The article quoted the report's author, University of Texas computational biologist and computer scientist Dr. William H. Press, who said: "We have been told that strong profiling will somehow find and siphon off the worst offenders and we'll be safe. It's not true. The math does not support that."
Right-Wing Media Attack Sec. Napolitano For Advocating Effective Screening Methods Instead Of Profiling Muslims
Right-wing media have attacked Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano for recently saying that it is "not good logic" to target Muslim men younger than 35 for security screenings at airports. In her comments, Napolitano instead recommended screening based on travel plans, behavior, and existing intelligence -- a method recommended by experts who note that racial profiling is ineffective.
Napolitano Says That It's "Not Good Logic" To Choose Racial Profiling Over More Effective Methods
Napolitano: Profiling Muslims Younger Than 35 Is "Not Good Logic." In remarks made on June 7 at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, Napolitano responded to a question by Jacob Goodwin, editor of Government Security News, about profiling "men, typically under 30 or 35," who are Muslim. Napolitano responded that it is "not good logic" to profile based on those criteria and stated that it's better to screen based on "a technique, a tactic, a behavior" that would indicate the person "has moved into the category of a violent extremist." From the June 7 briefing:
GOODWIN: You said earlier in your remarks that there's no single portrait of a would-be terrorist, and that the administration has no interest in profiling, and that not only are those policies -- the profiling policies -- illegal, but they are also ineffective. Common sense tells me that in most of the cases since 9-11 that we've made arrests, it wouldn't be profiling to discover that most of the suspects or the convicted parties have been men, typically under 30 or under 35, often Muslim.
It's not -- so my question is, is it -- I guess my question is, how do you square what most people would say if they're just talking to you, that common sense would suggest those are appropriate parties to at least focus more attention on, given that those were the parties that most often are arrested? Not to say that all men under 35 who are Muslim are suspect -- not at all -- but I guess my question is, why wouldn't the department focus more of its attention on that category of individual who's turned up most often as the suspect?
NAPOLITANO: Well, because you're not using good logic there. You've got to use actual intelligence that you receive. And so you might, you know -- all you've given me is kind of status. You haven't given me a technique, a tactic, a behavior, something that would suggest that somebody is not -- not a Muslim, but is Islamist, and is actually -- has moved into the category of a violent extremist.
Now we have ways to make, you know, some of those cuts, and they involve the intel that comes in, the analysis that goes on.
For example, we -- oftentimes for travelers entering the United States, we won't do a -- what's called a secondary inspection just because they're a 35-year-old male who appears to be Muslim, whatever that means. But we know from intelligence that if they have a certain travel pattern over a certain period of time, that that should cause us to ask some more significant questions than if they don't. And that's what secondary is all about.
So we continue to focus ourselves and to focus those with whom we work and those we train not on status issues but on actual behaviors, tactics, and techniques that we can associate from intelligence that we know or things we have learned or other countries have learned that could translate into possible criminal or terrorist activity. [NYU's Brennan Center for Justice, 6/7/11 accessed via YouTube]
Right-Wing Media Attack Napolitano For Not Profiling Muslim Men
Hoft Calls Napolitano's Statement "Unbelievable." In a June 9 Gateway Pundit post titled, "Unbelievable... Napolitano: Concentrating Terrorist Screening Efforts on Muslim Men Under 35 is Not Good Logic," Jim Hoft wrote: "Could Napolitano really be this clueless? Even in Egypt they screen Muslims. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told reporters today that concentrating terrorist screening efforts on Muslim men under age 35 is 'not good logic.' Listen and weep for your country." Hoft concluded: "Napolitano must have missed this report in December of last year... In the last 24 months 126 people have been indicted on terrorist-related charges in the United States. All of them were Muslim." [Gateway Pundit, 6/9/11, emphasis in original]
The Blaze Calls Profiling Muslim Men Younger Than 35 "Common Sense." On June 9, Glenn Beck's website The Blaze posted video of Napolitano's remarks under the headline, "Janet Napolitano: Using Common Sense And Concentrating Terrorist Screening Efforts On Muslim Men Under 35 Is Not Good Logic." [The Blaze, 6/9/11]
Fox Nation: "Napolitano Muslim Statement Takes The Cake." On June 9, the Fox Nation posted the video of Napolitano under the headline, "Napolitano Muslim Statement Takes The Cake." [Fox Nation, 6/9/11]
But Security Experts Agree Profiling Is Ineffective And Potentially "Dangerous"
Former Bush Secretary Of Homeland Security Chertoff: Profiling For Terrorists Is "Misleading And, Arguably, Dangerous." On the January 3, 2010, edition of NBC's Meet the Press, Michael Chertoff, former secretary of Homeland Security during the Bush administration, stated that "relying on preconceptions or stereotypes is actually kind of misleading, and, arguably, dangerous":
DAVID GREGORY (host): But I want to press Secretary Chertoff on this point, because that's what the counterterror officials will say -- it's more than a contributing factor. We know who 90 percent of these terrorists are. There may be other examples of women being used and whatnot, but Islamic males between the age of 20 and 30 make up roughly 90 percent of that profile. Is that an inappropriate or appropriate way for law enforcement to be targeting individuals?
CHERTOFF: I think relying on preconceptions or stereotypes is actually kind of misleading and, arguably, dangerous.
Obviously, you --
GREGORY: So that's wrong, that profile is wrong?
CHERTOFF: Correct.
GREGORY: Okay.
CHERTOFF: And what I would say is you want to look at things like where has the person traveled to, where have they spent time, what has their behavior been? But recognize -- one of the things that al Qaeda has done is deliberately try to recruit people who don't fit the stereotype, who are Western in background or appearance. Look at the guy like Adam Gadahn, who grew up in California, who is one of the senior-level al Qaeda operatives but does not fit the normal prejudice about what an extremist looks like.
Similarly, on the December 29, 2009, edition of NPR's All Things Considered, Chertoff stated that "the danger and the foolishness of profiling" is that "people's conception of what a potential terrorist looks like often doesn't match reality":
ROBERT SIEGEL (host): How should the U.S. reconcile reasonable, ethical restraints on profiling with some obvious facts that this sort of thing has been done by Muslim men, typically, and also of a certain age. One could focus pretty heavily on Muslim men under 40 and come up with lots of the people who are posing threats.
CHERTOFF: Actually, Robert, I'm going to argue that this case illustrates the danger and the foolishness of profiling because people's conception of what a potential terrorist looks like often doesn't match reality. In this case we had a Nigerian, for example, not a person from the Middle East or from South Asia. If you look at the airline plot of 2006, two of the plotters were a married couple that were going to get on a plane with a young baby. The terrorists understand that the more they vary the kind of operative they use, the more likely they're going to be able to exploit prejudices if we allow those prejudices to guide the way we conduct our investigation.
SIEGEL: Your objection to profiling is not just as an ethical matter, it's a point of efficacy also. You're saying it doesn't work.
CHERTOFF: I think it's not only problematic from civil rights standpoint, but frankly, I think it winds up not being terribly effective. [NBC, Meet The Press, 1/3/10, accessed via Nexis; NPR, All Things Considered, 12/29/09]
International Security Service Exec Steve Koenig: "There's No Place For Racial Profiling In A Modern Society." A January 1, 2010, McClatchy News article reporting that "[a]s some politicians step up calls for increased racial or ethnic profiling to thwart terrorism, most experts say such profiling is inefficient and unfair" quoted Steve Koenig, chief executive of international security services firm SCG International, as saying: "There's no place for racial profiling in a modern society. ... We have Indonesian terrorists. We have Chechen terrorists. There are Irish terrorists. You cannot apply that sort of methodology to solving this problem." [McClatchy News, 1/1/10, accessed via Nexis]
Aviation Security Expert Sheldon Jacobson Reportedly "Said Racial Profiling Itself Is Ineffective." The same McClatchy News article also reported that aviation security modeling and risk management specialist and University of Illinois engineering professor Sheldon Jacobson "said racial profiling itself is ineffective," and quoted him saying: "The fact of the matter is, we're dealing with a moving target. If we keep chasing the risks that we've already seen, we will ultimately miss the risk that is going to be coming toward us." [McClatchy News, 1/1/10, accessed via Nexis]
Statistical Model For Examining Rare Events Finds Profiling Ineffective. According to a February 2, 2009, New York Times article, "Too great a dependence on profiling passengers by ethnicity or nationality is an ineffective way to conduct airport screening to catch terrorists, according to a statistical model for examining rare events." The article quoted the report's author, University of Texas computational biologist and computer scientist Dr. William H. Press, who said: "We have been told that strong profiling will somehow find and siphon off the worst offenders and we'll be safe. It's not true. The math does not support that."
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Obama vs. Romney on Detroit Auto Industry -- "Let Mitt Romney Go Bankrupt"
From Politico -- June 8, 2011:
Let Mitt Romney go bankrupt
Romney vehemently opposed helping the auto industry
By JENNIFER GRANHOLM (Former Governor of Michigan)
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is due in Detroit Wednesday and Thursday to fill his presidential campaign war chest. As at recent events, he’s likely to take partial credit for the extraordinary resurgence of the U.S. auto industry – a comeback that has created more than 12,000 jobs in Michigan alone over the past year.
Unfortunately for Romney, we aren’t likely to forget that, when our city most needed help, his response was simple: “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”
After the 2008 financial meltdown, America’s auto companies were in dire straits. To survive, they needed a loan to allow them to restructure. But no bank was lending.
Romney vehemently opposed helping the auto industry. But as he advocated a course that would have led to certain liquidation for Chrysler and General Motors, President Barack Obama made the bold decision to extend GM and Chrysler the support needed for the necessary restructuring.
Obama’s decision was not without risk. Prominent Republicans, including Romney, criticized the president’s course of action. But he went ahead anyway, because Obama believed that the cost of inaction to the U.S. auto industry, auto workers, and communities across America was simply too great.
The president’s smart and strategic intervention saved more than a million American jobs – and preserved our way of life in Michigan. Thanks to Obama, the U.S. auto industry remains the backbone of manufacturing in America — and the Big Three are hiring again and operating at a profit.
Last month, Chrysler repaid its outstanding Treasury loans – more than six years ahead of schedule and just two years after coming out of bankruptcy. In the first quarter of this year, all three big Detroit automakers were profitable for the first time since 1994.
Most important for U.S. workers, GM and Chrysler are bringing back workers who were laid off. They are hiring new employees, adding shifts and expanding their facilities.
None of this would have happened if Romney had been president in 2009. Under his leadership, 1.4 million jobs supported by the U.S. auto industry would have been lost.
So for him to claim now that he pointed the way toward the recovery of the auto industry is profoundly disturbing. When asked last week about Romney’s claim that Chrysler didn’t need federal loans, Chrysler chief executive officer Sergio Marchionne answered that he must be “smoking illegal material.”
That Romney is a native son of Michigan only makes his cold shoulder toward the auto industry in 2009, and his attempts to woo Detroit money today, even more shameful. His laissez-faire strategy toward our auto industry during its time of crisis was wrong from the start – and a clear indicator of the misguided leadership he would bring to the White House.
The U.S. is facing enormous economic and global challenges, so we need a leader who isn’t afraid to roll up his sleeves to do what it takes to guarantee U.S. jobs and American success. It’s obvious that Romney is not that leader.
When Romney comes here with his hand out Wednesday, his Michigan supporters should treat him in the same way he treated the auto industry.
Let Mitt Romney go bankrupt
Romney vehemently opposed helping the auto industry
By JENNIFER GRANHOLM (Former Governor of Michigan)
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is due in Detroit Wednesday and Thursday to fill his presidential campaign war chest. As at recent events, he’s likely to take partial credit for the extraordinary resurgence of the U.S. auto industry – a comeback that has created more than 12,000 jobs in Michigan alone over the past year.
Unfortunately for Romney, we aren’t likely to forget that, when our city most needed help, his response was simple: “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”
After the 2008 financial meltdown, America’s auto companies were in dire straits. To survive, they needed a loan to allow them to restructure. But no bank was lending.
Romney vehemently opposed helping the auto industry. But as he advocated a course that would have led to certain liquidation for Chrysler and General Motors, President Barack Obama made the bold decision to extend GM and Chrysler the support needed for the necessary restructuring.
Obama’s decision was not without risk. Prominent Republicans, including Romney, criticized the president’s course of action. But he went ahead anyway, because Obama believed that the cost of inaction to the U.S. auto industry, auto workers, and communities across America was simply too great.
The president’s smart and strategic intervention saved more than a million American jobs – and preserved our way of life in Michigan. Thanks to Obama, the U.S. auto industry remains the backbone of manufacturing in America — and the Big Three are hiring again and operating at a profit.
Last month, Chrysler repaid its outstanding Treasury loans – more than six years ahead of schedule and just two years after coming out of bankruptcy. In the first quarter of this year, all three big Detroit automakers were profitable for the first time since 1994.
Most important for U.S. workers, GM and Chrysler are bringing back workers who were laid off. They are hiring new employees, adding shifts and expanding their facilities.
None of this would have happened if Romney had been president in 2009. Under his leadership, 1.4 million jobs supported by the U.S. auto industry would have been lost.
So for him to claim now that he pointed the way toward the recovery of the auto industry is profoundly disturbing. When asked last week about Romney’s claim that Chrysler didn’t need federal loans, Chrysler chief executive officer Sergio Marchionne answered that he must be “smoking illegal material.”
That Romney is a native son of Michigan only makes his cold shoulder toward the auto industry in 2009, and his attempts to woo Detroit money today, even more shameful. His laissez-faire strategy toward our auto industry during its time of crisis was wrong from the start – and a clear indicator of the misguided leadership he would bring to the White House.
The U.S. is facing enormous economic and global challenges, so we need a leader who isn’t afraid to roll up his sleeves to do what it takes to guarantee U.S. jobs and American success. It’s obvious that Romney is not that leader.
When Romney comes here with his hand out Wednesday, his Michigan supporters should treat him in the same way he treated the auto industry.
The Koch Brothers war Against America -- Can We Afford to Let Koch Win?
From The Progress Report -- June 8, 2011:
When Koch Attacks
By Josh Dorner
Oil-Funded Group: Leave Oil Companies Alone!
The billionaire Koch Brothers; their giant oil conglomerate, Koch Industries; and their vast network of right-wing political groups, think tanks, and other organizations are rarely out of the news these days, but the oil profit-fueled, multi-pronged assault on clean energy that Koch groups launched this week is particularly notable — and worrisome. Here’s what you need to know about the latest Koch-fueled attack on clean energy and President Obama, which is, at its core, an effort to make the American people forget that oil companies like Koch Industries are responsible for and benefit from today’s high gas prices and our reliance on dirty energy.
WHO: Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the Koch Industries, oil-funded front group with state chapters in at least 32 states. The group, bankrolled in part directly by the Koch Brothers, spent $45 million in last year’s elections, and is positioning itself to be a force in 2012.
WHAT: AFP is involved in at least five major campaigns against clean energy right now:
The Please Don’t Blame Oil Companies for High Gas Prices Campaign : This week, AFP announced it was launching a “Running on Empty” tour to try to falsely blame President Obama for high gas prices. The tour will travel to Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Missouri, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The tour is, of course, funded in part by the profits Koch Industries is making as a result of today’s high oil prices.
In reality, polls show that nine of out 10 Americans blame Wall Street speculators and Big Oil’s greed for the high prices. Even Goldman Sachs and ExxonMobil agree that speculation is to blame for today’s high oil prices.
Unlikely to be mentioned on the tour? How the Kochs built an oil speculation empire that is partially responsible for driving up oil prices right now.
Attacking the Clean Air Act:Various Koch groups, but especially AFP, are attempting to gut the Clean Air Act in order to prevent the EPA from using it regulatory powers to protect public health from the dangers caused by global warming pollution.
Attacking Regional Cap-and-Trade Programs: AFP has launched an all-out assault on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the Northeast’s successful regional cap-and-trade system. Having already persuaded New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to bail on RGGI, AFP is staging a major protest today featuring 2012 contender Herman Cain outside the RGGI headquarters in New York City. AFP has also been trying (unsuccessfully thus far) to convince other states, including New Hampshire, Maine, and Delaware to leave the climate pact.
Attacking State-Level Renewable Electricity Standards: Politico reports that AFP is considering strategies for killing Renewable Electricity Standards in “some three dozen states,” including Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Attacking Natural Gas Vehicles: While Koch rakes in billions in annual subsidies as a result of oil and ethanol businesses, among others, AFP has launched a campaign against legislation to incentivize the use and production of natural gas vehicles. The campaign’s main attack on the legislation: that it’s a “subsidy.”
WHY: To protect the sizable profits of Koch Industries and its vast array of polluting business, both from regulations and competition from cleaner energy sources. And, most importantly, to pretend that oil companies like Koch Industries have absolutely nothing to do with the pain American consumers are feeling at the pump right now.
When Koch Attacks
By Josh Dorner
Oil-Funded Group: Leave Oil Companies Alone!
The billionaire Koch Brothers; their giant oil conglomerate, Koch Industries; and their vast network of right-wing political groups, think tanks, and other organizations are rarely out of the news these days, but the oil profit-fueled, multi-pronged assault on clean energy that Koch groups launched this week is particularly notable — and worrisome. Here’s what you need to know about the latest Koch-fueled attack on clean energy and President Obama, which is, at its core, an effort to make the American people forget that oil companies like Koch Industries are responsible for and benefit from today’s high gas prices and our reliance on dirty energy.
WHO: Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the Koch Industries, oil-funded front group with state chapters in at least 32 states. The group, bankrolled in part directly by the Koch Brothers, spent $45 million in last year’s elections, and is positioning itself to be a force in 2012.
WHAT: AFP is involved in at least five major campaigns against clean energy right now:
The Please Don’t Blame Oil Companies for High Gas Prices Campaign : This week, AFP announced it was launching a “Running on Empty” tour to try to falsely blame President Obama for high gas prices. The tour will travel to Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Missouri, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The tour is, of course, funded in part by the profits Koch Industries is making as a result of today’s high oil prices.
In reality, polls show that nine of out 10 Americans blame Wall Street speculators and Big Oil’s greed for the high prices. Even Goldman Sachs and ExxonMobil agree that speculation is to blame for today’s high oil prices.
Unlikely to be mentioned on the tour? How the Kochs built an oil speculation empire that is partially responsible for driving up oil prices right now.
Attacking the Clean Air Act:Various Koch groups, but especially AFP, are attempting to gut the Clean Air Act in order to prevent the EPA from using it regulatory powers to protect public health from the dangers caused by global warming pollution.
Attacking Regional Cap-and-Trade Programs: AFP has launched an all-out assault on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the Northeast’s successful regional cap-and-trade system. Having already persuaded New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to bail on RGGI, AFP is staging a major protest today featuring 2012 contender Herman Cain outside the RGGI headquarters in New York City. AFP has also been trying (unsuccessfully thus far) to convince other states, including New Hampshire, Maine, and Delaware to leave the climate pact.
Attacking State-Level Renewable Electricity Standards: Politico reports that AFP is considering strategies for killing Renewable Electricity Standards in “some three dozen states,” including Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Attacking Natural Gas Vehicles: While Koch rakes in billions in annual subsidies as a result of oil and ethanol businesses, among others, AFP has launched a campaign against legislation to incentivize the use and production of natural gas vehicles. The campaign’s main attack on the legislation: that it’s a “subsidy.”
WHY: To protect the sizable profits of Koch Industries and its vast array of polluting business, both from regulations and competition from cleaner energy sources. And, most importantly, to pretend that oil companies like Koch Industries have absolutely nothing to do with the pain American consumers are feeling at the pump right now.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Senator Mitch McConnell, Another Leading Republican Destroyer of America
From The Daily Beast -- June 1, 2011:
Mitch McConnell -- Putting Party Ahead of Country Every Time
By Michael Tomasky
People insist on presuming that Mitch McConnell speaks and acts in good faith. But, as Michael Tomasky argues, this is a delusion born of the Senate’s distinguished history.
The leathery visage of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell never fails to sadden and enrage me. McConnell has made it abundantly clear that his goal is not to help the economy or anything else; his overriding concern is making Barack Obama a one-term president. When he said Sunday that there will be no deal on raising the debt ceiling without substantial Medicare cuts, he made his motives clear again. Others have beaten me to the punch in calling this a hostage situation, and that’s precisely what it is.
My sadness and rage intensify when I stop to think that McConnell once worked for and now holds the seat of the great John Sherman Cooper. Who? A senator from Kentucky from the 1940s through the 1970s, Cooper was a liberal Republican: not just someone who was kind of liberal for a Republican, but a genuine liberal, and also a genuine Republican, at a time and from a place when and where it was possible to be both. Cooper hailed from southeastern Kentucky, an oasis of Republicanism in what was then an otherwise solidly Democratic state. Remember, in those days and in such places, Democratic meant segregationist, another thing the towering Cooper never was: As a Kentucky circuit judge after the war (he was among the soldiers who happened across Buchenwald) but before his Senate service, he empanelled black citizens as jurors—in 1946.
Are Democrats—and is the president—ready to do what it takes to defeat McConnell and his fellow Republicans in their effort to enact ruinous and unpopular changes to Medicare?
How emblematic it is of our benighted times that we’ve had to watch this decline and fall, from one of the noblest senators of his or maybe any era to this gastric partisan. But the real tragedy reposes in the fact that McConnell benefits in his way from the standard set by great senators like Cooper.
What do I mean by this? I mean that there was a period in the history of this republic, and of the world’s so-called greatest deliberative body, when senators really did, at some crucial point in deliberations, put their partisan differences aside and work out solutions to the country’s pressing problems. I don’t mean to over-glorify the past—always a temptation, and always misleading. The Senate has had its share of scoundrels and partisans and drunks since the beginning. But by and large, they did find ways of conducting the nation’s business.
And I don’t secretly mean here that I pine for the time when moderate Republicans rolled over for liberal wish-list items back in the 1960s. Even the Social Security compromise of 1983, when Democrats accepted raising the retirement age and Republicans agreed to an increase in the Social Security payroll tax in order to preserve the entitlement for future generations, an accord signed into law by Ronald Reagan, represented a notch in the belt of good-faith compromise.
The Senate that was capable of an agreement like that still lodges itself in the minds of many, the high-pundit class to be sure but also senators themselves, who want to believe devoutly in the idea of both sides coming together to work out solutions to our problems. But the hard fact of our politics today is that one side isn’t playing. I suspect everyone knows this—the Republicans most of all, even though for obvious reasons they can’t say so. And yet, everyone wants to believe it’s still true.
McConnell benefits from the lingering good feeling that still permeates the institution in which he serves—because people insist on presuming that the leader of the minority party speaks in good faith. But there’s no good faith here.
The only question is whether the Democrats will accede to the hostage-taker’s demands. They’re in a tough position, especially after yesterday’s vote in the House, where nearly half of the Democrats joined all Republicans in refusing to raise the debt limit without deep and permanent cuts. Raising the ceiling is extremely unpopular in polls (of course it always has been, but that fact that didn’t prevent a certain M. McConnell from voting to raise it seven times during George W. Bush’s presidency).
But whacking Medicare is extremely unpopular, too. So what the Obama people need to be asking themselves is the following.
Are Democrats—and is the president—ready to do what it takes to defeat McConnell and his fellow Republicans in their effort to enact ruinous and unpopular changes to Medicare while also risking default on the country’s debt? I think the Democrats can win the fight politically, but only if they’re ready to go to the wall.
Mitch McConnell -- Putting Party Ahead of Country Every Time
By Michael Tomasky
People insist on presuming that Mitch McConnell speaks and acts in good faith. But, as Michael Tomasky argues, this is a delusion born of the Senate’s distinguished history.
The leathery visage of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell never fails to sadden and enrage me. McConnell has made it abundantly clear that his goal is not to help the economy or anything else; his overriding concern is making Barack Obama a one-term president. When he said Sunday that there will be no deal on raising the debt ceiling without substantial Medicare cuts, he made his motives clear again. Others have beaten me to the punch in calling this a hostage situation, and that’s precisely what it is.
My sadness and rage intensify when I stop to think that McConnell once worked for and now holds the seat of the great John Sherman Cooper. Who? A senator from Kentucky from the 1940s through the 1970s, Cooper was a liberal Republican: not just someone who was kind of liberal for a Republican, but a genuine liberal, and also a genuine Republican, at a time and from a place when and where it was possible to be both. Cooper hailed from southeastern Kentucky, an oasis of Republicanism in what was then an otherwise solidly Democratic state. Remember, in those days and in such places, Democratic meant segregationist, another thing the towering Cooper never was: As a Kentucky circuit judge after the war (he was among the soldiers who happened across Buchenwald) but before his Senate service, he empanelled black citizens as jurors—in 1946.
Are Democrats—and is the president—ready to do what it takes to defeat McConnell and his fellow Republicans in their effort to enact ruinous and unpopular changes to Medicare?
How emblematic it is of our benighted times that we’ve had to watch this decline and fall, from one of the noblest senators of his or maybe any era to this gastric partisan. But the real tragedy reposes in the fact that McConnell benefits in his way from the standard set by great senators like Cooper.
What do I mean by this? I mean that there was a period in the history of this republic, and of the world’s so-called greatest deliberative body, when senators really did, at some crucial point in deliberations, put their partisan differences aside and work out solutions to the country’s pressing problems. I don’t mean to over-glorify the past—always a temptation, and always misleading. The Senate has had its share of scoundrels and partisans and drunks since the beginning. But by and large, they did find ways of conducting the nation’s business.
And I don’t secretly mean here that I pine for the time when moderate Republicans rolled over for liberal wish-list items back in the 1960s. Even the Social Security compromise of 1983, when Democrats accepted raising the retirement age and Republicans agreed to an increase in the Social Security payroll tax in order to preserve the entitlement for future generations, an accord signed into law by Ronald Reagan, represented a notch in the belt of good-faith compromise.
The Senate that was capable of an agreement like that still lodges itself in the minds of many, the high-pundit class to be sure but also senators themselves, who want to believe devoutly in the idea of both sides coming together to work out solutions to our problems. But the hard fact of our politics today is that one side isn’t playing. I suspect everyone knows this—the Republicans most of all, even though for obvious reasons they can’t say so. And yet, everyone wants to believe it’s still true.
McConnell benefits from the lingering good feeling that still permeates the institution in which he serves—because people insist on presuming that the leader of the minority party speaks in good faith. But there’s no good faith here.
The only question is whether the Democrats will accede to the hostage-taker’s demands. They’re in a tough position, especially after yesterday’s vote in the House, where nearly half of the Democrats joined all Republicans in refusing to raise the debt limit without deep and permanent cuts. Raising the ceiling is extremely unpopular in polls (of course it always has been, but that fact that didn’t prevent a certain M. McConnell from voting to raise it seven times during George W. Bush’s presidency).
But whacking Medicare is extremely unpopular, too. So what the Obama people need to be asking themselves is the following.
Are Democrats—and is the president—ready to do what it takes to defeat McConnell and his fellow Republicans in their effort to enact ruinous and unpopular changes to Medicare while also risking default on the country’s debt? I think the Democrats can win the fight politically, but only if they’re ready to go to the wall.
How Republican Policies Have Wrecked the American Economy
From Common Dreams -- March 31, 2011:
The Truth about the US Economy
by Robert Reich
The U.S. economy continues to stagnate. It’s growing at the rate of 1.8 percent, which is barely growing at all. Consumer spending is down. Home prices are down. Jobs and wages are going nowhere.
It’s vital that we understand the truth about the American economy.
How did we go from the Great Depression to 30 years of Great Prosperity? And from there, to 30 years of stagnant incomes and widening inequality, culminating in the Great Recession? And from the Great Recession into such an anemic recovery?
The Great Prosperity
During three decades from 1947 to 1977, the nation implemented what might be called a basic bargain with American workers. Employers paid them enough to buy what they produced. Mass production and mass consumption proved perfect complements. Almost everyone who wanted a job could find one with good wages, or at least wages that were trending upward.
During these three decades everyone’s wages grew — not just those at or near the top.
Government enforced the basic bargain in several ways. It used Keynesian policy to achieve nearly full employment. It gave ordinary workers more bargaining power. It provided social insurance. And it expanded public investment. Consequently, the portion of total income that went to the middle class grew while the portion going to the top declined. But this was no zero-sum game. As the economy grew almost everyone came out ahead, including those at the top.
The pay of workers in the bottom fifth grew 116 percent over these years — faster than the pay of those in the top fifth (which rose 99 percent), and in the top 5 percent (86 percent).
Productivity also grew quickly. Labor productivity — average output per hour worked — doubled. So did median incomes. Expressed in 2007 dollars, the typical family’s income rose from about $25,000 to $55,000. The basic bargain was cinched.
The middle class had the means to buy, and their buying created new jobs. As the economy grew, the national debt shrank as a percentage of it.
The Great Prosperity also marked the culmination of a reorganization of work that had begun during the Depression. Employers were required by law to provide extra pay — time-and-a-half — for work stretching beyond 40 hours a week. This created an incentive for employers to hire additional workers when demand picked up. Employers also were required to pay a minimum wage, which improved the pay of workers near the bottom as demand picked up.
When workers were laid off, usually during an economic downturn, government provided them with unemployment benefits, usually lasting until the economy recovered and they were rehired. Not only did this tide families over but it kept them buying goods and services — an “automatic stabilizer” for the economy in downturns.
Perhaps most significantly, government increased the bargaining leverage of ordinary workers. They were guaranteed the right to join labor unions, with which employers had to bargain in good faith. By the mid-1950s more than a third of all America workers in the private sector were unionized. And the unions demanded and received a fair slice of the American pie. Non-unionized companies, fearing their workers would otherwise want a union, offered similar deals.
Americans also enjoyed economic security against the risks of economic life — not only unemployment benefits but also, through Social Security, insurance against disability, loss of a major breadwinner, workplace injury and inability to save enough for retirement. In 1965 came health insurance for the elderly and the poor (Medicare and Medicaid). Economic security proved the handmaiden of prosperity. In requiring Americans to share the costs of adversity it enabled them to share the benefits of peace of mind. And by offering peace of mind, it freed them to consume the fruits of their labors.
The government sponsored the dreams of American families to own their own home by providing low-cost mortgages and interest deductions on mortgage payments. In many sections of the country, government subsidized electricity and water to make such homes habitable. And it built the roads and freeways that connected the homes with major commercial centers.
Government also widened access to higher education. The GI Bill paid college costs for those who returned from war. The expansion of public universities made higher education affordable to the American middle class.
Government paid for all of this with tax revenues from an expanding middle class with rising incomes. Revenues were also boosted by those at the top of the income ladder whose marginal taxes were far higher. The top marginal income tax rate during World War II was over 68 percent. In the 1950s, under Dwight Eisenhower, whom few would call a radical, it rose to 91 percent. In the 1960s and 1970s the highest marginal rate was around 70 percent. Even after exploiting all possible deductions and credits, the typical high-income taxpayer paid a marginal federal tax of over 50 percent. But contrary to what conservative commentators had predicted, the high tax rates did not reduce economic growth. To the contrary, they enabled the nation to expand middle-class prosperity and fuel growth.
The Middle-Class Squeeze, 1977-2007
During the Great Prosperity of 1947-1977, the basic bargain had ensured that the pay of American workers coincided with their output. In effect, the vast middle class received an increasing share of the benefits of economic growth. But after that point, the two lines began to diverge: Output per hour — a measure of productivity — continued to rise. But real hourly compensation was left in the dust.
It’s easy to blame “globalization” for the stagnation of middle incomes, but technological advances have played as much if not a greater role. Factories remaining in the United States have shed workers as they automated. So has the service sector.
But contrary to popular mythology, trade and technology have not reduced the overall number of American jobs. Their more profound effect has been on pay. Rather than be out of work, most Americans have quietly settled for lower real wages, or wages that have risen more slowly than the overall growth of the economy per person. Although unemployment following the Great Recession remains high, jobs are slowly returning. But in order to get them, many workers have to accept lower pay than before.
Starting more than three decades ago, trade and technology began driving a wedge between the earnings of people at the top and everyone else. The pay of well-connected graduates of prestigious colleges and MBA programs has soared. But the pay and benefits of most other workers has either flattened or dropped. And the ensuing division has also made most middle-class American families less economically secure.
Government could have enforced the basic bargain. But it did the opposite. It slashed public goods and investments — whacking school budgets, increasing the cost of public higher education, reducing job training, cutting public transportation and allowing bridges, ports and highways to corrode.
It shredded safety nets — reducing aid to jobless families with children, tightening eligibility for food stamps, and cutting unemployment insurance so much that by 2007 only 40 percent of the unemployed were covered. It halved the top income tax rate from the range of 70 to 90 percent that prevailed during the Great Prosperity to 28 to 35 percent; allowed many of the nation’s rich to treat their income as capital gains subject to no more than 15 percent tax; and shrunk inheritance taxes that affected only the top-most 1.5 percent of earners. Yet at the same time, America boosted sales and payroll taxes, both of which took a bigger chunk out of the pay the middle class and the poor than of the well off.
How America Kept Buying: Three Coping Mechanisms
Coping mechanism No. 1: Women move into paid work. Starting in the late 1970s, and escalating in the 1980s and 1990s, women went into paid work in greater and greater numbers. For the relatively small sliver of women with four-year college degrees, this was the natural consequence of wider educational opportunities and new laws against gender discrimination that opened professions to well-educated women. But the vast majority of women who migrated into paid work did so in order to prop up family incomes as households were hit by the stagnant or declining wages of male workers.
This transition of women into paid work has been one of the most important social and economic changes to occur over the last four decades. In 1966, 20 percent of mothers with young children worked outside the home. By the late 1990s, the proportion had risen to 60 percent. For married women with children under the age of 6, the transformation has been even more dramatic — from 12 percent in the 1960s to 55 percent by the late 1990s.
Coping mechanism No. 2: Everyone works longer hours. By the mid 2000s it was not uncommon for men to work more than 60 hours a week and women to work more than 50. A growing number of people took on two or three jobs. All told, by the 2000s, the typical American worker worked more than 2,200 hours a year — 350 hours more than the average European worked, more hours even than the typically industrious Japanese put in. It was many more hours than the typical American middle-class family had worked in 1979 — 500 hours longer, a full 12 weeks more.
Coping mechanism No. 3: Draw down savings and borrow to the hilt. After exhausting the first two coping mechanisms, the only way Americans could keep consuming as before was to save less and go deeper into debt. During the Great Prosperity the American middle class saved about 9 percent of their after-tax incomes each year. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, that portion had been whittled down to about 7 percent. The savings rate then dropped to 6 percent in 1994, and on down to 3 percent in 1999. By 2008, Americans saved nothing. Meanwhile, household debt exploded. By 2007, the typical American owed 138 percent of their after-tax income.
The Challenge for the Future
All three coping mechanisms have been exhausted. The fundamental economic challenge ahead is to restore the vast American middle class.
That requires resurrecting the basic bargain linking wages to overall gains, and providing the middle class a share of economic gains sufficient to allow them to purchase more of what the economy can produce. As we should have learned from the Great Prosperity — the 30 years after World War II when America grew because most Americans shared in the nation’s prosperity — we cannot have a growing and vibrant economy without a growing and vibrant middle class.
The Truth about the US Economy
by Robert Reich
The U.S. economy continues to stagnate. It’s growing at the rate of 1.8 percent, which is barely growing at all. Consumer spending is down. Home prices are down. Jobs and wages are going nowhere.
It’s vital that we understand the truth about the American economy.
How did we go from the Great Depression to 30 years of Great Prosperity? And from there, to 30 years of stagnant incomes and widening inequality, culminating in the Great Recession? And from the Great Recession into such an anemic recovery?
The Great Prosperity
During three decades from 1947 to 1977, the nation implemented what might be called a basic bargain with American workers. Employers paid them enough to buy what they produced. Mass production and mass consumption proved perfect complements. Almost everyone who wanted a job could find one with good wages, or at least wages that were trending upward.
During these three decades everyone’s wages grew — not just those at or near the top.
Government enforced the basic bargain in several ways. It used Keynesian policy to achieve nearly full employment. It gave ordinary workers more bargaining power. It provided social insurance. And it expanded public investment. Consequently, the portion of total income that went to the middle class grew while the portion going to the top declined. But this was no zero-sum game. As the economy grew almost everyone came out ahead, including those at the top.
The pay of workers in the bottom fifth grew 116 percent over these years — faster than the pay of those in the top fifth (which rose 99 percent), and in the top 5 percent (86 percent).
Productivity also grew quickly. Labor productivity — average output per hour worked — doubled. So did median incomes. Expressed in 2007 dollars, the typical family’s income rose from about $25,000 to $55,000. The basic bargain was cinched.
The middle class had the means to buy, and their buying created new jobs. As the economy grew, the national debt shrank as a percentage of it.
The Great Prosperity also marked the culmination of a reorganization of work that had begun during the Depression. Employers were required by law to provide extra pay — time-and-a-half — for work stretching beyond 40 hours a week. This created an incentive for employers to hire additional workers when demand picked up. Employers also were required to pay a minimum wage, which improved the pay of workers near the bottom as demand picked up.
When workers were laid off, usually during an economic downturn, government provided them with unemployment benefits, usually lasting until the economy recovered and they were rehired. Not only did this tide families over but it kept them buying goods and services — an “automatic stabilizer” for the economy in downturns.
Perhaps most significantly, government increased the bargaining leverage of ordinary workers. They were guaranteed the right to join labor unions, with which employers had to bargain in good faith. By the mid-1950s more than a third of all America workers in the private sector were unionized. And the unions demanded and received a fair slice of the American pie. Non-unionized companies, fearing their workers would otherwise want a union, offered similar deals.
Americans also enjoyed economic security against the risks of economic life — not only unemployment benefits but also, through Social Security, insurance against disability, loss of a major breadwinner, workplace injury and inability to save enough for retirement. In 1965 came health insurance for the elderly and the poor (Medicare and Medicaid). Economic security proved the handmaiden of prosperity. In requiring Americans to share the costs of adversity it enabled them to share the benefits of peace of mind. And by offering peace of mind, it freed them to consume the fruits of their labors.
The government sponsored the dreams of American families to own their own home by providing low-cost mortgages and interest deductions on mortgage payments. In many sections of the country, government subsidized electricity and water to make such homes habitable. And it built the roads and freeways that connected the homes with major commercial centers.
Government also widened access to higher education. The GI Bill paid college costs for those who returned from war. The expansion of public universities made higher education affordable to the American middle class.
Government paid for all of this with tax revenues from an expanding middle class with rising incomes. Revenues were also boosted by those at the top of the income ladder whose marginal taxes were far higher. The top marginal income tax rate during World War II was over 68 percent. In the 1950s, under Dwight Eisenhower, whom few would call a radical, it rose to 91 percent. In the 1960s and 1970s the highest marginal rate was around 70 percent. Even after exploiting all possible deductions and credits, the typical high-income taxpayer paid a marginal federal tax of over 50 percent. But contrary to what conservative commentators had predicted, the high tax rates did not reduce economic growth. To the contrary, they enabled the nation to expand middle-class prosperity and fuel growth.
The Middle-Class Squeeze, 1977-2007
During the Great Prosperity of 1947-1977, the basic bargain had ensured that the pay of American workers coincided with their output. In effect, the vast middle class received an increasing share of the benefits of economic growth. But after that point, the two lines began to diverge: Output per hour — a measure of productivity — continued to rise. But real hourly compensation was left in the dust.
It’s easy to blame “globalization” for the stagnation of middle incomes, but technological advances have played as much if not a greater role. Factories remaining in the United States have shed workers as they automated. So has the service sector.
But contrary to popular mythology, trade and technology have not reduced the overall number of American jobs. Their more profound effect has been on pay. Rather than be out of work, most Americans have quietly settled for lower real wages, or wages that have risen more slowly than the overall growth of the economy per person. Although unemployment following the Great Recession remains high, jobs are slowly returning. But in order to get them, many workers have to accept lower pay than before.
Starting more than three decades ago, trade and technology began driving a wedge between the earnings of people at the top and everyone else. The pay of well-connected graduates of prestigious colleges and MBA programs has soared. But the pay and benefits of most other workers has either flattened or dropped. And the ensuing division has also made most middle-class American families less economically secure.
Government could have enforced the basic bargain. But it did the opposite. It slashed public goods and investments — whacking school budgets, increasing the cost of public higher education, reducing job training, cutting public transportation and allowing bridges, ports and highways to corrode.
It shredded safety nets — reducing aid to jobless families with children, tightening eligibility for food stamps, and cutting unemployment insurance so much that by 2007 only 40 percent of the unemployed were covered. It halved the top income tax rate from the range of 70 to 90 percent that prevailed during the Great Prosperity to 28 to 35 percent; allowed many of the nation’s rich to treat their income as capital gains subject to no more than 15 percent tax; and shrunk inheritance taxes that affected only the top-most 1.5 percent of earners. Yet at the same time, America boosted sales and payroll taxes, both of which took a bigger chunk out of the pay the middle class and the poor than of the well off.
How America Kept Buying: Three Coping Mechanisms
Coping mechanism No. 1: Women move into paid work. Starting in the late 1970s, and escalating in the 1980s and 1990s, women went into paid work in greater and greater numbers. For the relatively small sliver of women with four-year college degrees, this was the natural consequence of wider educational opportunities and new laws against gender discrimination that opened professions to well-educated women. But the vast majority of women who migrated into paid work did so in order to prop up family incomes as households were hit by the stagnant or declining wages of male workers.
This transition of women into paid work has been one of the most important social and economic changes to occur over the last four decades. In 1966, 20 percent of mothers with young children worked outside the home. By the late 1990s, the proportion had risen to 60 percent. For married women with children under the age of 6, the transformation has been even more dramatic — from 12 percent in the 1960s to 55 percent by the late 1990s.
Coping mechanism No. 2: Everyone works longer hours. By the mid 2000s it was not uncommon for men to work more than 60 hours a week and women to work more than 50. A growing number of people took on two or three jobs. All told, by the 2000s, the typical American worker worked more than 2,200 hours a year — 350 hours more than the average European worked, more hours even than the typically industrious Japanese put in. It was many more hours than the typical American middle-class family had worked in 1979 — 500 hours longer, a full 12 weeks more.
Coping mechanism No. 3: Draw down savings and borrow to the hilt. After exhausting the first two coping mechanisms, the only way Americans could keep consuming as before was to save less and go deeper into debt. During the Great Prosperity the American middle class saved about 9 percent of their after-tax incomes each year. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, that portion had been whittled down to about 7 percent. The savings rate then dropped to 6 percent in 1994, and on down to 3 percent in 1999. By 2008, Americans saved nothing. Meanwhile, household debt exploded. By 2007, the typical American owed 138 percent of their after-tax income.
The Challenge for the Future
All three coping mechanisms have been exhausted. The fundamental economic challenge ahead is to restore the vast American middle class.
That requires resurrecting the basic bargain linking wages to overall gains, and providing the middle class a share of economic gains sufficient to allow them to purchase more of what the economy can produce. As we should have learned from the Great Prosperity — the 30 years after World War II when America grew because most Americans shared in the nation’s prosperity — we cannot have a growing and vibrant economy without a growing and vibrant middle class.
The Deliberate Destruction of the American Economy by the Republican Party
From Common Dreams -- May 31, 2011:
For Sale: The Desperate States of America
by Rania Khalek
While we have been frantically playing defense against relentless assaults on multiple fronts, from anti-union legislation to draconian anti-choice laws to the attempted privatization of Medicare, the selling off of public assets to the private sector has received little attention.
As states face a budget shortfall of $125 billion dollars for fiscal year 2012, leaders are searching for creative ways to fill budget gaps, while refusing to consider the one legitimate solution: forcing tax-dodging corporations and the rich to pay their fair share in taxes. Rather than upset the moneyed interests who bought their seats in office, politicians of all stripes prefer to cut pensions, close schools, slash child nutrition programs, and most importantly privatize, privatize, privatize!
In 2008, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley auctioned off the city's 36,000 parking meters to a Morgan-Stanley lead partnership, for a lump sum of $1.15 billion. According to Bloomberg, Chicago drivers will pay Morgan Stanley at least $11.6 billion to park at city meters over the next 75 years, 10 times what the system was sold for. The Mayor used millions from the deal to help balance the budget, but since then, Morgan Stanley has raised parking fees 42%. It now plans on stuffing more cars into fewer metered spaces by getting rid of marking lines, raising the number of metered slots and expanding the hours that require fees. Chicago gave up billions of dollars in revenue for a short term fix and now, if the city faces another fiscal crisis, it will be left with an asset that generates revenue for Morgan Stanley. Despite the controversy in Chicago, the Associated Press reports that New York is exploring private options for its parking spaces as well.
Meanwhile, Rep. Dennis Ross (R-FL), a member of the Tea Party Caucus, has suggested that one way to help close the nation’s budget deficit is to “start liquidating” public lands in Utah by privatizing large parts of the state, 70 percent of which is owned by the federal government. Soon after, Utah Governor Gary Herbert hopped on board, agreeing that Ross's idea was "worth exploring." He even went so far as to claim that the land would be better in private hands because private owners maintained Indian artifacts and burial grounds better. Apparently his position is quite popular, since it has been embraced by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and John McCain (R-AZ), who proposed a bill which would sell off land in Utah and other western states.
The most insidious privatization scheme so far this year was in Wisconsin, the center of the state budget battles. A provision in Republican Governor Scott Walker's budget repair bill would have empowered politicians to sell any state-owned heating, cooling, or power plant, including those located in prisons and the University of Wisconsin campuses, to anyone for any price at any time, without public approval or a call for bids. Although the provision was ultimately removed from the budget bill just before it passed, it is expected to be taken up again later this year.
In an effort to offset an $8 billion budget deficit, Ohio Republican Governor John Kasich has proposed privatizing five prisons, a sale expected to bring in an estimated $200 million. Florida's GOP-controlled Legislature is set to require the state to privatize prisons in South Florida, home to one-fifth of the statewide inmate population of 101,000. Louisiana Republican Governor Bobby Jindal plans to sell three state prisons to private operators. Similar bills have sprung up in other states, nevermind that evidence showing that private prisons actually save any money is seriously lacking.
In more desperate and bizarre attempts to fill in budget gaps the City Council in Naperville, IL is considering giving corporations exclusive rights to plaster their logos on city property. One proposed municipal sponsorship deal would allow Kentucky Fried Chicken to repair potholes in exchange for stamping the fresh asphalt with the chicken chain's logo.
It would be foolish to assume that the push for privatization is isolated to the GOP or the states. The "liberal" Obama administration has proposed legislation that would establish a presidentially appointed, seven-member Civilian Property Realignment Board, tasked with evaluating excess federal properties. The surplus includes 12,000 buildings, pieces of land and other property nationwide that the federal government wants to get rid of.
According to McClatchy, the White House claims it would see savings of as much as $15 billion by no longer having to maintain or pay for utilities at some of the underused or unused facilities. The government in 2009 reported spending $134 million to maintain buildings that have been declared excess. It costs an estimated $1.3 billion a year to maintain federal buildings that aren't yet declared surplus but that go underused. However, it remains unclear if and how this strategy would result in a significant enough amount of savings to make a dent in a trillion dollar deficit.
Ironically, the list includes land where the dorms in Daniel Boone National Forest are located, which once served as a camp for workers from the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Great Depression work program. Rather than invest in jobs programs to put the unemployed back to work like FDR did during the Great Depression — an idea that the Obama administration has all but abandoned — the President has instead chosen the path of austerity and privatization, tactics that have historically been detrimental to society.
It's no secret that corporate behemoths, backed by their free-market think tanks and foundations have long dreamed of privatizing everything public. Thus far, they have been largely successful in hollowing out the defense department by outsourcing computer, intelligence, and even combat operations to for-profit companies like Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, and Blackwater, to name a few. We now know that this was done intentionally, strategically planned by the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who profited magnificently as a result. The terrorist attacks on 9-11 presented the Bush administration with the opportunity to accelerate the outsourcing of war.
In the Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein thoroughly documents how wealthy elites often use times of crisis and chaos to impose unpopular policies that restructure economies and political systems to further advance their interests. She calls these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, “disaster capitalism.”
While catastrophic events, such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks, are difficult to predict, economic disasters are not. With this in mind, it's difficult to deny that the economic crisis has been somewhat manufactured to serve as a pretext for draconian cuts into social programs that the corporate state has long been eyeing. On it's face, this theory seems conspiratorial, however a brief review of recent history demonstrates a trend of intentional crisis generation.
Paul Krugman understood this concept in 2003, during the implementation of the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthy, when he wrote the following:
"the gimmicks used to make an $800-billion-plus tax cut carry an official price tag of only $320 billion are a joke, yet the cost without the gimmicks is so large that the nation can't possibly afford it while keeping its other promises.
But then maybe that's the point. The Financial Times suggests that ''more extreme Republicans'' actually want a fiscal train wreck: ''Proposing to slash federal spending, particularly on social programs, is a tricky electoral proposition, but a fiscal crisis offers the tantalizing prospect of forcing such cuts through the back door.''
It's no secret that right-wing ideologues want to abolish programs Americans take for granted. But not long ago, to suggest that the Bush administration's policies might actually be driven by those ideologues -- that the administration was deliberately setting the country up for a fiscal crisis in which popular social programs could be sharply cut -- was to be accused of spouting conspiracy theories."
As the free-market ideologues in government continue to neglect America's aging infrastructure while making deep cuts into education funding and borrowing upwards of a trillion dollars for two failed wars, they reaffirm the perception that the government is inefficient and incapable of providing what they believe private enterprise can do better.
The fact of the matter is that those now shrieking about big government debts and deficits have spent the last decade maximizing government spending with unaffordable wars, financial deregulation, and tax cuts for the wealthy, which they knew would cost trillions of dollars. Today, the consequences of their actions, which they were warned about, are the ploy these very same people are using to justifythe accelerated demise of welfare programs, and the incremental destruction of the meager social safety net that guarantees Americans won't starve in their old age.
The core tenets of free market fundamentalism — privatization, deregulation, and cuts to government services — has laid the foundation for the economic breakdown we are witnessing today. And this recession-induced breakdown is being used by professional disaster capitalists to warrant more privatization, deregulation, and cuts to government services until there is nothing left. It is clear that the continued auctioning off of pieces of the state to large corporations will result in a total loss of democratic control to the disaster capitalists who are profiting immensely from their orchestrated crisis.
For Sale: The Desperate States of America
by Rania Khalek
While we have been frantically playing defense against relentless assaults on multiple fronts, from anti-union legislation to draconian anti-choice laws to the attempted privatization of Medicare, the selling off of public assets to the private sector has received little attention.
As states face a budget shortfall of $125 billion dollars for fiscal year 2012, leaders are searching for creative ways to fill budget gaps, while refusing to consider the one legitimate solution: forcing tax-dodging corporations and the rich to pay their fair share in taxes. Rather than upset the moneyed interests who bought their seats in office, politicians of all stripes prefer to cut pensions, close schools, slash child nutrition programs, and most importantly privatize, privatize, privatize!
In 2008, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley auctioned off the city's 36,000 parking meters to a Morgan-Stanley lead partnership, for a lump sum of $1.15 billion. According to Bloomberg, Chicago drivers will pay Morgan Stanley at least $11.6 billion to park at city meters over the next 75 years, 10 times what the system was sold for. The Mayor used millions from the deal to help balance the budget, but since then, Morgan Stanley has raised parking fees 42%. It now plans on stuffing more cars into fewer metered spaces by getting rid of marking lines, raising the number of metered slots and expanding the hours that require fees. Chicago gave up billions of dollars in revenue for a short term fix and now, if the city faces another fiscal crisis, it will be left with an asset that generates revenue for Morgan Stanley. Despite the controversy in Chicago, the Associated Press reports that New York is exploring private options for its parking spaces as well.
Meanwhile, Rep. Dennis Ross (R-FL), a member of the Tea Party Caucus, has suggested that one way to help close the nation’s budget deficit is to “start liquidating” public lands in Utah by privatizing large parts of the state, 70 percent of which is owned by the federal government. Soon after, Utah Governor Gary Herbert hopped on board, agreeing that Ross's idea was "worth exploring." He even went so far as to claim that the land would be better in private hands because private owners maintained Indian artifacts and burial grounds better. Apparently his position is quite popular, since it has been embraced by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and John McCain (R-AZ), who proposed a bill which would sell off land in Utah and other western states.
The most insidious privatization scheme so far this year was in Wisconsin, the center of the state budget battles. A provision in Republican Governor Scott Walker's budget repair bill would have empowered politicians to sell any state-owned heating, cooling, or power plant, including those located in prisons and the University of Wisconsin campuses, to anyone for any price at any time, without public approval or a call for bids. Although the provision was ultimately removed from the budget bill just before it passed, it is expected to be taken up again later this year.
In an effort to offset an $8 billion budget deficit, Ohio Republican Governor John Kasich has proposed privatizing five prisons, a sale expected to bring in an estimated $200 million. Florida's GOP-controlled Legislature is set to require the state to privatize prisons in South Florida, home to one-fifth of the statewide inmate population of 101,000. Louisiana Republican Governor Bobby Jindal plans to sell three state prisons to private operators. Similar bills have sprung up in other states, nevermind that evidence showing that private prisons actually save any money is seriously lacking.
In more desperate and bizarre attempts to fill in budget gaps the City Council in Naperville, IL is considering giving corporations exclusive rights to plaster their logos on city property. One proposed municipal sponsorship deal would allow Kentucky Fried Chicken to repair potholes in exchange for stamping the fresh asphalt with the chicken chain's logo.
It would be foolish to assume that the push for privatization is isolated to the GOP or the states. The "liberal" Obama administration has proposed legislation that would establish a presidentially appointed, seven-member Civilian Property Realignment Board, tasked with evaluating excess federal properties. The surplus includes 12,000 buildings, pieces of land and other property nationwide that the federal government wants to get rid of.
According to McClatchy, the White House claims it would see savings of as much as $15 billion by no longer having to maintain or pay for utilities at some of the underused or unused facilities. The government in 2009 reported spending $134 million to maintain buildings that have been declared excess. It costs an estimated $1.3 billion a year to maintain federal buildings that aren't yet declared surplus but that go underused. However, it remains unclear if and how this strategy would result in a significant enough amount of savings to make a dent in a trillion dollar deficit.
Ironically, the list includes land where the dorms in Daniel Boone National Forest are located, which once served as a camp for workers from the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Great Depression work program. Rather than invest in jobs programs to put the unemployed back to work like FDR did during the Great Depression — an idea that the Obama administration has all but abandoned — the President has instead chosen the path of austerity and privatization, tactics that have historically been detrimental to society.
It's no secret that corporate behemoths, backed by their free-market think tanks and foundations have long dreamed of privatizing everything public. Thus far, they have been largely successful in hollowing out the defense department by outsourcing computer, intelligence, and even combat operations to for-profit companies like Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, and Blackwater, to name a few. We now know that this was done intentionally, strategically planned by the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who profited magnificently as a result. The terrorist attacks on 9-11 presented the Bush administration with the opportunity to accelerate the outsourcing of war.
In the Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein thoroughly documents how wealthy elites often use times of crisis and chaos to impose unpopular policies that restructure economies and political systems to further advance their interests. She calls these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, “disaster capitalism.”
While catastrophic events, such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks, are difficult to predict, economic disasters are not. With this in mind, it's difficult to deny that the economic crisis has been somewhat manufactured to serve as a pretext for draconian cuts into social programs that the corporate state has long been eyeing. On it's face, this theory seems conspiratorial, however a brief review of recent history demonstrates a trend of intentional crisis generation.
Paul Krugman understood this concept in 2003, during the implementation of the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthy, when he wrote the following:
"the gimmicks used to make an $800-billion-plus tax cut carry an official price tag of only $320 billion are a joke, yet the cost without the gimmicks is so large that the nation can't possibly afford it while keeping its other promises.
But then maybe that's the point. The Financial Times suggests that ''more extreme Republicans'' actually want a fiscal train wreck: ''Proposing to slash federal spending, particularly on social programs, is a tricky electoral proposition, but a fiscal crisis offers the tantalizing prospect of forcing such cuts through the back door.''
It's no secret that right-wing ideologues want to abolish programs Americans take for granted. But not long ago, to suggest that the Bush administration's policies might actually be driven by those ideologues -- that the administration was deliberately setting the country up for a fiscal crisis in which popular social programs could be sharply cut -- was to be accused of spouting conspiracy theories."
As the free-market ideologues in government continue to neglect America's aging infrastructure while making deep cuts into education funding and borrowing upwards of a trillion dollars for two failed wars, they reaffirm the perception that the government is inefficient and incapable of providing what they believe private enterprise can do better.
The fact of the matter is that those now shrieking about big government debts and deficits have spent the last decade maximizing government spending with unaffordable wars, financial deregulation, and tax cuts for the wealthy, which they knew would cost trillions of dollars. Today, the consequences of their actions, which they were warned about, are the ploy these very same people are using to justifythe accelerated demise of welfare programs, and the incremental destruction of the meager social safety net that guarantees Americans won't starve in their old age.
The core tenets of free market fundamentalism — privatization, deregulation, and cuts to government services — has laid the foundation for the economic breakdown we are witnessing today. And this recession-induced breakdown is being used by professional disaster capitalists to warrant more privatization, deregulation, and cuts to government services until there is nothing left. It is clear that the continued auctioning off of pieces of the state to large corporations will result in a total loss of democratic control to the disaster capitalists who are profiting immensely from their orchestrated crisis.
More Republican Snake Oil On Job Creation and Medicare
From The Progress Report -- June 3, 2011:
The GOP’s Bad Medicine
The GOP’s (Non)-Solution to the Jobs Crisis? Tax Cuts!
The GOP’s prescription for our economic woes is like one of those old bottles of patent medicine you see in museums — dusty, completely ineffective, peddled by hucksters, and probably containing something that will make you even sicker. Nevertheless, this morning’s very dismal jobs report has the GOP reaching for some of that old-time medicine yet again.
House Republicans used this morning’s bad news as an opportunity to call a press conference to trot out their plan for “job creators” (that’s conserva-speak for the wealthy and major corporations). This plan is of course a tired re-hashing of the same old failed policies that drove us deep into recession and debt. Here are the lowlights:
A massive tax cut for the wealthy (the top rate would be cut by almost one-third)
A massive tax cut for corporations (the top rate would be cut by almost one-third)
A permanent loophole to let tax-dodging corporations game the system to avoid paying taxes on their overseas profits
More deregulation
Missing from the plan? Any new ideas or anything that would in fact create jobs for the millions of Americans now out of work.
If this so-called plan sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same “plan” that President George W. Bush had, and it borrows the same massive tax breaks that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) included in his ruinous and extremely unpopular budget plan. Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress, sums it up like this:
This plan is a rehash of the same unsuccessful plan that led our economy into the Great Recession during the Bush administration. The problem then and now with the top Republican goal of economic policy—to make the top income earners in our society even more incredibly wealthy—is that it undercuts our nation’s prospects for a prosperous future.
We’ve been down this road before, and it didn’t end well.
We certainly haven’t found a cure-all for our economic woes, but we should say no to more snake oil from the GOP.
Numbers to Know: Clock is Ticking on a Real Jobs Plan From the GOP
150…the number of days since Republicans took control of the House
0…the number of jobs bills they’ve put forward
News You Can Use: GOP Plan to End Medicare Hurts Today’s Seniors Too
As town halls raged (literally), Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the architect of the GOP budget, has gone to great pains to insist that the GOP plan to end Medicare will only impact those aged 55 and under. The National Journal has a blockbuster story today calling out this lie. Here’s the lede:
“The retirees are going to be taken care of; there’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it,” House Speaker John Boehner vowed in an interview with CBS last month. The plan’s architect, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, has said time and again that the changes wouldn’t affect anybody getting close to retirement. “We propose to not change the benefits for people above the age of 55,” Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, insisted last week.
There’s only one problem with the strategy: It’s not true.
Here’s a quick explainer about how the GOP’s plan to end Medicare in order to pay for tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations would, in fact, hit today’s seniors — immediately:
The Affordable Care Act fills the so-called ‘doughnut hole’ in Medicare Part D (the part that pays for prescription drugs), which previously forced seniors to pay 100 percent of their prescription costs when they hit$2,840 in drug spending until they hit $4,550 in spending, when the benefit would kick in again. But, as National Journal explains, “under the 2010 health law, Medicare will pay 7 percent of the cost of generic drugs and 50 percent on name-brand pharmaceuticals; by 2020, the doughnut hole will be closed.”
The GOP’s budget plan repeals the entire Affordable Care Act, reopening the notorious doughnut hole. This would immediately impact 3 to 4 million seniors and cause them to shell out billions more each year just to pay for the prescription drugs they depend on each day.
The GOP’s budget plan also would also slash Medicaid funding, which pays for long-term care for millions of seniors each year.
The whopping $744 billion in cuts from Medicaid would undoubtedly impact the 9 million seniors who are currently eligible for the program.
Bad Party Tricks: GOP Playing With Fire on Debt Ceiling
As we discussed on Wednesday, the GOP is playing political games with the nation’s debt ceiling. The debt ceiling must be raised by August 2 or the U.S. will default on its obligations (including payments to veterans, our military, seniors, and many others).
Well, this game is starting to have serious consequences. Yesterday, the credit rating firm Moody’s announced that there would likely be a review of and possible downgrade to the U.S. credit rating in July — sooner than anybody had expected. And, ominously, Moody’s specifically cited the current stalemate over the debt ceiling. That would be the stalemate caused by the GOP’s unwillingness to drop their plan to end Medicare or consider any new revenues for the government.
Republican leaders used this news as an opportunity to double down on their demands for the president to accept their deeply misguided and disastrous budget plan.
Shockingly, other Republicans have even begun to argue that default would a good thing, including Rep. Allen West (R-FL) speaking to reporters this morning at the Faith & Freedom Conference here in DC.
The GOP’s Bad Medicine
The GOP’s (Non)-Solution to the Jobs Crisis? Tax Cuts!
The GOP’s prescription for our economic woes is like one of those old bottles of patent medicine you see in museums — dusty, completely ineffective, peddled by hucksters, and probably containing something that will make you even sicker. Nevertheless, this morning’s very dismal jobs report has the GOP reaching for some of that old-time medicine yet again.
House Republicans used this morning’s bad news as an opportunity to call a press conference to trot out their plan for “job creators” (that’s conserva-speak for the wealthy and major corporations). This plan is of course a tired re-hashing of the same old failed policies that drove us deep into recession and debt. Here are the lowlights:
A massive tax cut for the wealthy (the top rate would be cut by almost one-third)
A massive tax cut for corporations (the top rate would be cut by almost one-third)
A permanent loophole to let tax-dodging corporations game the system to avoid paying taxes on their overseas profits
More deregulation
Missing from the plan? Any new ideas or anything that would in fact create jobs for the millions of Americans now out of work.
If this so-called plan sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same “plan” that President George W. Bush had, and it borrows the same massive tax breaks that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) included in his ruinous and extremely unpopular budget plan. Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress, sums it up like this:
This plan is a rehash of the same unsuccessful plan that led our economy into the Great Recession during the Bush administration. The problem then and now with the top Republican goal of economic policy—to make the top income earners in our society even more incredibly wealthy—is that it undercuts our nation’s prospects for a prosperous future.
We’ve been down this road before, and it didn’t end well.
We certainly haven’t found a cure-all for our economic woes, but we should say no to more snake oil from the GOP.
Numbers to Know: Clock is Ticking on a Real Jobs Plan From the GOP
150…the number of days since Republicans took control of the House
0…the number of jobs bills they’ve put forward
News You Can Use: GOP Plan to End Medicare Hurts Today’s Seniors Too
As town halls raged (literally), Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the architect of the GOP budget, has gone to great pains to insist that the GOP plan to end Medicare will only impact those aged 55 and under. The National Journal has a blockbuster story today calling out this lie. Here’s the lede:
“The retirees are going to be taken care of; there’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it,” House Speaker John Boehner vowed in an interview with CBS last month. The plan’s architect, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, has said time and again that the changes wouldn’t affect anybody getting close to retirement. “We propose to not change the benefits for people above the age of 55,” Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, insisted last week.
There’s only one problem with the strategy: It’s not true.
Here’s a quick explainer about how the GOP’s plan to end Medicare in order to pay for tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations would, in fact, hit today’s seniors — immediately:
The Affordable Care Act fills the so-called ‘doughnut hole’ in Medicare Part D (the part that pays for prescription drugs), which previously forced seniors to pay 100 percent of their prescription costs when they hit$2,840 in drug spending until they hit $4,550 in spending, when the benefit would kick in again. But, as National Journal explains, “under the 2010 health law, Medicare will pay 7 percent of the cost of generic drugs and 50 percent on name-brand pharmaceuticals; by 2020, the doughnut hole will be closed.”
The GOP’s budget plan repeals the entire Affordable Care Act, reopening the notorious doughnut hole. This would immediately impact 3 to 4 million seniors and cause them to shell out billions more each year just to pay for the prescription drugs they depend on each day.
The GOP’s budget plan also would also slash Medicaid funding, which pays for long-term care for millions of seniors each year.
The whopping $744 billion in cuts from Medicaid would undoubtedly impact the 9 million seniors who are currently eligible for the program.
Bad Party Tricks: GOP Playing With Fire on Debt Ceiling
As we discussed on Wednesday, the GOP is playing political games with the nation’s debt ceiling. The debt ceiling must be raised by August 2 or the U.S. will default on its obligations (including payments to veterans, our military, seniors, and many others).
Well, this game is starting to have serious consequences. Yesterday, the credit rating firm Moody’s announced that there would likely be a review of and possible downgrade to the U.S. credit rating in July — sooner than anybody had expected. And, ominously, Moody’s specifically cited the current stalemate over the debt ceiling. That would be the stalemate caused by the GOP’s unwillingness to drop their plan to end Medicare or consider any new revenues for the government.
Republican leaders used this news as an opportunity to double down on their demands for the president to accept their deeply misguided and disastrous budget plan.
Shockingly, other Republicans have even begun to argue that default would a good thing, including Rep. Allen West (R-FL) speaking to reporters this morning at the Faith & Freedom Conference here in DC.
Have You Noticed the Similarities Between Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama?
From Salon -- June 2, 2011:
Was Abe Lincoln a Jewish Pawn of the Rothschilds?
He freed the slaves, preserved the Union and pushed major banking reform. That last part still gets people upset
BY ANDREW LEONARD
At Salon, we try to keep abreast of as many currently percolating conspiracy theories as possible. Not only is it good for business -- readers always love a good dose of the crazy -- but in recent years what once could be easily dismissed as irredeemably fringe now pops up in mainstream political discourse with alarming and increasing frequency. One day, you might be deleting an email that seems to be little more than random gibberish, and then before you've caught your breath, a presidential candidate is quoting from that same email while out on the campaign trail.
Even with this background in mind, I still probably should not have engaged with a correspondent who wanted me to write a story about a photograph purported to be of a "young Jewish-looking Abraham Lincoln." When I asked what relevance a revisionist reading of Lincoln's religion or ethnicity might have to the historical record, I was informed that a) "he would want to free the black slaves because his ancestors were traumatized about being slaves in Egypt" and b) "he would try to help the European Jews (Rothschilds) in taking over the United States by starting a war and having Americans fight one another while they take control of our banking system."
News like this can make a person reconsider celebrating Presidents' Day, if you take it seriously, which, initially, I did not. You didn't have to be Jewish to think slavery was an abomination, and what I can glean from the historical record seems to indicate that the Rothschilds thought an American Civil War would be bad for business. But I still felt compelled to do some googling to see if I could get a sense of where the "Abe Lincoln as Jewish Rothschild pawn" ranked on the Birther/911 Truther conspiracy theory Richter scale.
I discovered the usual mish-mash of fabricated quotes and wild anti-Semitic ravings. Maj. Gen. Count Cherep-Spiridovitch to the white courtesy telephone, please! One thing you discover quickly when googling the keywords "Rothschilds" and "Lincoln." Blaming Jews for starting the Civil War has been a popular pastime for a long, long time. And I have to say: It certainly simplifies things to decide that Lincoln himself was just another rootless cosmopolitan in on the plot. Even if the "evidence" for this assertion is less than compelling.
But if you dig a little deeper on the specific accusation that the Rothschild motivation for starting the Civil War was to take over the U.S. banking system, you suddenly find yourself facing a set of concerns that are surprisingly close to the surface of contemporary political discourse involving the national debt and monetary policy.
Because Abe Lincoln didn't just free the slaves and preserve the Union. He also ended the so-called "free banking" era, and established a national currency in which paper notes backed by the U.S. government were by law considered to be legal tender.
Mainstream economic historians tend to portray the "free banking" or "wildcat banking" era as chaotic and prone to banking panics. Loosely regulated by states, and not at all by the federal goverment, banks had the power to issue their own currency, resulting in a proliferation of competing bank notes that sometimes weren't worth the paper they were printed on. From this perspective, the passage of the National Banking Acts in 1863 and 1864 marked a welcome step in the maturation of the U.S. financial system.
But whether or not you accept that explanation of history -- and many, many libertarians, led by Rep. Ron Paul, do not -- there was also another clear reason for the consolidation of central government control over U.S. currency. Lincoln had to find a way to pay for his enormously expensive war, and issuing paper currency theoretically backed by government securities was the method he used to do it.
If you listen to some of the more wild-eyed libertarian voices out there, you will find that it is at this point that America really went off the tracks. Abraham Lincoln centralized government control over the money supply! And freedom died. We lost our bearings during the Civil War and have never managed to find our way back.
So of course he's a traitor! And of course some way must be found to transform him into an alien "other."
Remind you of someone else? Some other president who faced a national emergency, borrowed a lot of cash to deal with it, then pushed through major bank reform legislation and found himself immediately tarred as a Muslim socialist out to destroy a great nation? And who now faces an array of contenders for the White House calling for a return to the gold standard, a balanced budget amendment, and the abolishment of the Federal Reserve? It's all connected, man. Abraham Lincoln, the president who ended slavery, and Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, are peas in the same pod, both irredeemably stained by the hard fiscal decisions they had to make to save their nation.
Was Abe Lincoln a Jewish Pawn of the Rothschilds?
He freed the slaves, preserved the Union and pushed major banking reform. That last part still gets people upset
BY ANDREW LEONARD
At Salon, we try to keep abreast of as many currently percolating conspiracy theories as possible. Not only is it good for business -- readers always love a good dose of the crazy -- but in recent years what once could be easily dismissed as irredeemably fringe now pops up in mainstream political discourse with alarming and increasing frequency. One day, you might be deleting an email that seems to be little more than random gibberish, and then before you've caught your breath, a presidential candidate is quoting from that same email while out on the campaign trail.
Even with this background in mind, I still probably should not have engaged with a correspondent who wanted me to write a story about a photograph purported to be of a "young Jewish-looking Abraham Lincoln." When I asked what relevance a revisionist reading of Lincoln's religion or ethnicity might have to the historical record, I was informed that a) "he would want to free the black slaves because his ancestors were traumatized about being slaves in Egypt" and b) "he would try to help the European Jews (Rothschilds) in taking over the United States by starting a war and having Americans fight one another while they take control of our banking system."
News like this can make a person reconsider celebrating Presidents' Day, if you take it seriously, which, initially, I did not. You didn't have to be Jewish to think slavery was an abomination, and what I can glean from the historical record seems to indicate that the Rothschilds thought an American Civil War would be bad for business. But I still felt compelled to do some googling to see if I could get a sense of where the "Abe Lincoln as Jewish Rothschild pawn" ranked on the Birther/911 Truther conspiracy theory Richter scale.
I discovered the usual mish-mash of fabricated quotes and wild anti-Semitic ravings. Maj. Gen. Count Cherep-Spiridovitch to the white courtesy telephone, please! One thing you discover quickly when googling the keywords "Rothschilds" and "Lincoln." Blaming Jews for starting the Civil War has been a popular pastime for a long, long time. And I have to say: It certainly simplifies things to decide that Lincoln himself was just another rootless cosmopolitan in on the plot. Even if the "evidence" for this assertion is less than compelling.
But if you dig a little deeper on the specific accusation that the Rothschild motivation for starting the Civil War was to take over the U.S. banking system, you suddenly find yourself facing a set of concerns that are surprisingly close to the surface of contemporary political discourse involving the national debt and monetary policy.
Because Abe Lincoln didn't just free the slaves and preserve the Union. He also ended the so-called "free banking" era, and established a national currency in which paper notes backed by the U.S. government were by law considered to be legal tender.
Mainstream economic historians tend to portray the "free banking" or "wildcat banking" era as chaotic and prone to banking panics. Loosely regulated by states, and not at all by the federal goverment, banks had the power to issue their own currency, resulting in a proliferation of competing bank notes that sometimes weren't worth the paper they were printed on. From this perspective, the passage of the National Banking Acts in 1863 and 1864 marked a welcome step in the maturation of the U.S. financial system.
But whether or not you accept that explanation of history -- and many, many libertarians, led by Rep. Ron Paul, do not -- there was also another clear reason for the consolidation of central government control over U.S. currency. Lincoln had to find a way to pay for his enormously expensive war, and issuing paper currency theoretically backed by government securities was the method he used to do it.
If you listen to some of the more wild-eyed libertarian voices out there, you will find that it is at this point that America really went off the tracks. Abraham Lincoln centralized government control over the money supply! And freedom died. We lost our bearings during the Civil War and have never managed to find our way back.
So of course he's a traitor! And of course some way must be found to transform him into an alien "other."
Remind you of someone else? Some other president who faced a national emergency, borrowed a lot of cash to deal with it, then pushed through major bank reform legislation and found himself immediately tarred as a Muslim socialist out to destroy a great nation? And who now faces an array of contenders for the White House calling for a return to the gold standard, a balanced budget amendment, and the abolishment of the Federal Reserve? It's all connected, man. Abraham Lincoln, the president who ended slavery, and Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, are peas in the same pod, both irredeemably stained by the hard fiscal decisions they had to make to save their nation.
Sarah Palin's Bus Tour "Bushel of Whopper Lies"
From The Washington Post -- June 4, 2011:
Sarah Palin collects a Bushel of Pinocchios on her Bus Tour
By Glenn Kessler
“This Sunday, May 29th, Governor Palin and the SarahPAC team will begin a trip through our nation's rich historical sites, starting from Washington, DC, and going up through New England. The ‘One Nation Tour’ is part of our new campaign to educate and energize Americans about our nation's founding principles, in order to promote the Fundamental Restoration of America.” — Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s Web site
Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin has spent this week taking a high-profile bus tour up to New Hampshire, in what may or may not be a prelude to a presidential run in 2012. She spent half an hour the other day chatting with Fox News’s Greta van Susteren. The full interview is posted on Palin’s Web site, but we watched all of it so you don’t have to.
Much of the interview consisted of fluffy stuff, but every so often van Susteren diverted into asking about policy issues. Palin responded with her trademark style of making broad assertions with only a shaky command of the facts. We’ll go through the key statements in the order in which she said them, which allows us to begin and end with some absolute whoppers.
“We don’t have the $2 billion [to give to Egypt]. Where are we going to get it? From China? We are going to borrow from foreign countries to give to foreign countries. … We want to know where those dollars are going because we don’t have the money to be providing foreign countries, not in this day and age when we are going broke.”
Palin managed to get almost everything wrong in this comment. She clearly was not listening too closely to President Obama’s speech on the Middle East, because otherwise she would have realized that he was not talking about spending more taxpayer dollars.
Obama proposed to forgive up to $1 billion of Egypt’s $3.6 billion debt (money that was spent buying American farm products). The forgiveness, which would take several years, would take the form of a “debt swap,” in which the money saved will be invested in designated programs in Egypt.
The other $1 billion would consist of loan guarantees by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), which are structured at no cost to the U.S. taxpayer. So none of this would involve new debt issued by the Treasury.
Palin appears to assume that the United States simply hands out dollars with little idea about what happens to the money. This is a common misconception. Actually, there are often strings attached.
Under the terms of the 1978 Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel, the United States gives about $2 billion in direct aid to Egypt every year, making it one of the largest foreign-aid recipients. But most of this aid — about $1.3 billion a year — is financing to buy U.S. military hardware and services.
Egypt, for instance, has used the U.S.-supplied funds to replace aging Soviet-supplied equipment with at least 220 F-16 aircraft, 880 M1A1 tanks and 36 Apache helicopters. So Egypt ends up with weapons — but the money actually goes to U.S. firms and helps create U.S. jobs.
Palin is also wrong to assume that every dollar of foreign aid would be borrowed. The budget deficit is high, but the U.S. government still takes in substantial revenues. According to the latest Congressional Budget Office forecast, about 40 percent of the federal budget is financed through new debt — and that percentage is projected to drop significantly as the economy improves.
Finally, while China is the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt, foreign countries actually hold only about 28 percent of the $14 trillion debt. The latest Treasury bulletin shows that the biggest holder is the U.S. government itself (i.e., Social Security and Medicare), while U.S. pension funds, mutual funds, insurance companies and state and local governments hold almost as much as foreign investors.
“If you have more recipients than you have payers into the [Social Security] system, it is like a Ponzi scheme that’s going to be upside down in no time at all. We are going to be underwater with Social Security.”
Palin correctly identifies a potential problem for Social Security — that as the Baby Boom generation retires, there will be fewer workers paying into the system. But she overstates the case by calling it a “Ponzi scheme,” in which money from new investors is used to pay off old investors.
You cannot just look at the number of workers. You also have to look at productivity and technological change — which over time has allowed the nation’s economic output to greatly exceed population growth. That’s why the system has worked so well for so long.
As for being “underwater with Social Security,” the latest trustees report says that Social Security’s trust fund reserves will be exhausted in 2036; after that point, tax income would be enough to pay 75 percent of scheduled benefits through 2085. That’s certainly a problem, but not an insurmountable one — and clearly not a Ponzi-like collapse. (For those who do not believe the trust funds exist, please see our previous article on this issue.)
“Look at the debt that has been accumulated over the past two years. It is more debt under this president than all those other presidents combined.”
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is sometimes described as a possible Sarah Palin rival in the presidential sweepstakes. In this case, Palin is virtually repeating a claim for which Bachmann had previously earned Pinocchios.
As we noted then, the numbers simply do not add up.
To keep it simple, we will look at the historical tables on the White House Web site, which lists the debt totals by fiscal year.
The national debt (including bonds held by U.S. government agencies) stood at just under $10 trillion a few months before Obama took office. The United States recently reached the debt ceiling of $14.3 trillion, more than two years after Obama took office. Last time we checked, $4 trillion is much less than $10 trillion.
“[Obama passed] a trillion dollars in stimulus package projects that still have resulted in record-setting unemployment, a heartbreaking number of home foreclosures, crashed markets left and right.”
Obama’s stimulus plan was actually $800 billion, not $1 trillion. The bill also included more than $200 billion in immediate tax breaks, so it is incorrect to suggest it was all spending projects.
We’re not sure one can make a direct link between the stimulus bill and home foreclosures and “crashed markets left and right,” whatever that means. But “record-setting unemployment”?
Perhaps Palin is referring to raw numbers, but given population growth, that’s a silly way to look at it. The most relevant figure is the percentage of workers who are unemployed.
During the Great Depression, the unemployment rate reached 23.6 percent in 1932. In the modern era, the rate topped 9.7 percent in 1982, when Ronald Reagan was president. It reached 9.6 percent in 2010, which is certainly pretty close, but it’s not a record.
“[Look at] the impacts of that [drilling permit] moratorium [in the Gulf of Mexico], where 97 percent of our offshore has been locked up. What we are looking at now is 150,000 barrels less per day next year, and 200,000 barrels per day less being able to be developed from the Gulf the year after. …We are going to be looking at $8 billion a day that we are going to be pouring into foreign countries in order to import that make-up fuel that we are going to need to take place of what we could have gotten out of the Gulf.”
When Palin started talking about oil — and the “drill baby drill” decal over the gas tank of her bus — she became very emphatic, slicing the air and hitting the table with one of her hands. But once again her facts were wrong.
We’re not sure where she comes up with the notion that 97 percent of the offshore area has been “locked up,” though this is a phrase she has used before. In any case, the relevant figure would seem to be the percentage of technically recoverable oil that was affected by the drilling permit moratorium, imposed by the Obama administration after the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The independent Energy Information Agency (EIA) pegs the number at 20 percent (18 billion barrels), with 4 billion barrels in the Gulf of Mexico.
Palin’s figures on the production decline are not far off, but the EIA last month cited the moratorium as a secondary factor in the decline: “EIA expects production from the Federal Gulf of Mexico (GOM) to fall by 130,000 bbl/d in 2011 and by a further 190,000 bbl/d in 2012 because of production declines from existing fields and the impact of last year's drilling moratorium and the subsequent delay in issuing new drilling permits.”
In fact, the Interior Department this week issued its 15th drilling license for the deepwater region of the Gulf of Mexico, so that 2012 figure may well improve.
Meanwhile, Palin’s claim of $8 billion a day in additional imports is absurd. That amounts to 80 million barrels a day at $100 a barrel—and the entire world's consumption is about 85 million barrels a day. If Palin took out a calculator, she would see that her own estimate of 200,000 barrels a day amounts to just $20 million a day.
This is a sizable collection of misstatements and bloopers for a 30-minute interview. You could say it is almost Newt-sized.
The Pinocchio Test --- Four Pinocchios
Sarah Palin collects a Bushel of Pinocchios on her Bus Tour
By Glenn Kessler
“This Sunday, May 29th, Governor Palin and the SarahPAC team will begin a trip through our nation's rich historical sites, starting from Washington, DC, and going up through New England. The ‘One Nation Tour’ is part of our new campaign to educate and energize Americans about our nation's founding principles, in order to promote the Fundamental Restoration of America.” — Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s Web site
Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin has spent this week taking a high-profile bus tour up to New Hampshire, in what may or may not be a prelude to a presidential run in 2012. She spent half an hour the other day chatting with Fox News’s Greta van Susteren. The full interview is posted on Palin’s Web site, but we watched all of it so you don’t have to.
Much of the interview consisted of fluffy stuff, but every so often van Susteren diverted into asking about policy issues. Palin responded with her trademark style of making broad assertions with only a shaky command of the facts. We’ll go through the key statements in the order in which she said them, which allows us to begin and end with some absolute whoppers.
“We don’t have the $2 billion [to give to Egypt]. Where are we going to get it? From China? We are going to borrow from foreign countries to give to foreign countries. … We want to know where those dollars are going because we don’t have the money to be providing foreign countries, not in this day and age when we are going broke.”
Palin managed to get almost everything wrong in this comment. She clearly was not listening too closely to President Obama’s speech on the Middle East, because otherwise she would have realized that he was not talking about spending more taxpayer dollars.
Obama proposed to forgive up to $1 billion of Egypt’s $3.6 billion debt (money that was spent buying American farm products). The forgiveness, which would take several years, would take the form of a “debt swap,” in which the money saved will be invested in designated programs in Egypt.
The other $1 billion would consist of loan guarantees by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), which are structured at no cost to the U.S. taxpayer. So none of this would involve new debt issued by the Treasury.
Palin appears to assume that the United States simply hands out dollars with little idea about what happens to the money. This is a common misconception. Actually, there are often strings attached.
Under the terms of the 1978 Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel, the United States gives about $2 billion in direct aid to Egypt every year, making it one of the largest foreign-aid recipients. But most of this aid — about $1.3 billion a year — is financing to buy U.S. military hardware and services.
Egypt, for instance, has used the U.S.-supplied funds to replace aging Soviet-supplied equipment with at least 220 F-16 aircraft, 880 M1A1 tanks and 36 Apache helicopters. So Egypt ends up with weapons — but the money actually goes to U.S. firms and helps create U.S. jobs.
Palin is also wrong to assume that every dollar of foreign aid would be borrowed. The budget deficit is high, but the U.S. government still takes in substantial revenues. According to the latest Congressional Budget Office forecast, about 40 percent of the federal budget is financed through new debt — and that percentage is projected to drop significantly as the economy improves.
Finally, while China is the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt, foreign countries actually hold only about 28 percent of the $14 trillion debt. The latest Treasury bulletin shows that the biggest holder is the U.S. government itself (i.e., Social Security and Medicare), while U.S. pension funds, mutual funds, insurance companies and state and local governments hold almost as much as foreign investors.
“If you have more recipients than you have payers into the [Social Security] system, it is like a Ponzi scheme that’s going to be upside down in no time at all. We are going to be underwater with Social Security.”
Palin correctly identifies a potential problem for Social Security — that as the Baby Boom generation retires, there will be fewer workers paying into the system. But she overstates the case by calling it a “Ponzi scheme,” in which money from new investors is used to pay off old investors.
You cannot just look at the number of workers. You also have to look at productivity and technological change — which over time has allowed the nation’s economic output to greatly exceed population growth. That’s why the system has worked so well for so long.
As for being “underwater with Social Security,” the latest trustees report says that Social Security’s trust fund reserves will be exhausted in 2036; after that point, tax income would be enough to pay 75 percent of scheduled benefits through 2085. That’s certainly a problem, but not an insurmountable one — and clearly not a Ponzi-like collapse. (For those who do not believe the trust funds exist, please see our previous article on this issue.)
“Look at the debt that has been accumulated over the past two years. It is more debt under this president than all those other presidents combined.”
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is sometimes described as a possible Sarah Palin rival in the presidential sweepstakes. In this case, Palin is virtually repeating a claim for which Bachmann had previously earned Pinocchios.
As we noted then, the numbers simply do not add up.
To keep it simple, we will look at the historical tables on the White House Web site, which lists the debt totals by fiscal year.
The national debt (including bonds held by U.S. government agencies) stood at just under $10 trillion a few months before Obama took office. The United States recently reached the debt ceiling of $14.3 trillion, more than two years after Obama took office. Last time we checked, $4 trillion is much less than $10 trillion.
“[Obama passed] a trillion dollars in stimulus package projects that still have resulted in record-setting unemployment, a heartbreaking number of home foreclosures, crashed markets left and right.”
Obama’s stimulus plan was actually $800 billion, not $1 trillion. The bill also included more than $200 billion in immediate tax breaks, so it is incorrect to suggest it was all spending projects.
We’re not sure one can make a direct link between the stimulus bill and home foreclosures and “crashed markets left and right,” whatever that means. But “record-setting unemployment”?
Perhaps Palin is referring to raw numbers, but given population growth, that’s a silly way to look at it. The most relevant figure is the percentage of workers who are unemployed.
During the Great Depression, the unemployment rate reached 23.6 percent in 1932. In the modern era, the rate topped 9.7 percent in 1982, when Ronald Reagan was president. It reached 9.6 percent in 2010, which is certainly pretty close, but it’s not a record.
“[Look at] the impacts of that [drilling permit] moratorium [in the Gulf of Mexico], where 97 percent of our offshore has been locked up. What we are looking at now is 150,000 barrels less per day next year, and 200,000 barrels per day less being able to be developed from the Gulf the year after. …We are going to be looking at $8 billion a day that we are going to be pouring into foreign countries in order to import that make-up fuel that we are going to need to take place of what we could have gotten out of the Gulf.”
When Palin started talking about oil — and the “drill baby drill” decal over the gas tank of her bus — she became very emphatic, slicing the air and hitting the table with one of her hands. But once again her facts were wrong.
We’re not sure where she comes up with the notion that 97 percent of the offshore area has been “locked up,” though this is a phrase she has used before. In any case, the relevant figure would seem to be the percentage of technically recoverable oil that was affected by the drilling permit moratorium, imposed by the Obama administration after the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The independent Energy Information Agency (EIA) pegs the number at 20 percent (18 billion barrels), with 4 billion barrels in the Gulf of Mexico.
Palin’s figures on the production decline are not far off, but the EIA last month cited the moratorium as a secondary factor in the decline: “EIA expects production from the Federal Gulf of Mexico (GOM) to fall by 130,000 bbl/d in 2011 and by a further 190,000 bbl/d in 2012 because of production declines from existing fields and the impact of last year's drilling moratorium and the subsequent delay in issuing new drilling permits.”
In fact, the Interior Department this week issued its 15th drilling license for the deepwater region of the Gulf of Mexico, so that 2012 figure may well improve.
Meanwhile, Palin’s claim of $8 billion a day in additional imports is absurd. That amounts to 80 million barrels a day at $100 a barrel—and the entire world's consumption is about 85 million barrels a day. If Palin took out a calculator, she would see that her own estimate of 200,000 barrels a day amounts to just $20 million a day.
This is a sizable collection of misstatements and bloopers for a 30-minute interview. You could say it is almost Newt-sized.
The Pinocchio Test --- Four Pinocchios
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