From The Progress Report -- November 30, 2011:
Another Way The GOP Can Kick The Economy While It’s Down
Will the GOP Really Block Extended Unemployment Benefits?
This week, we’ve been talking about the extension of the payroll tax cut that the GOP is likely to block tomorrow — which would have disastrous economic consequences and raise taxes on 160 MILLION Americans. But there’s another equally important piece of must-pass legislation Congress must take up before they leave for their vacation next month: an extension of unemployment benefits. The current extension, which Republicans agreed to as part of the December 2010 deal that extended the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy for through 2012, runs out at the end of next month.
Here’s the rundown.
A Quick Explainer of How Unemployment Insurance Works
The State Role: The states are responsible for running their own unemployment insurance programs. They raise the funds for their own programs through taxes, administer state-level trust funds, determine eligibility rules, and distribute the funds under the guidelines they have established.
The Federal Role: While states are given a good deal of flexibility, federal law establishes certain overall rules and guidelines that the states must also abide by. And in times of high unemployment — like right now — Congress can authorize federally-financed extended unemployment benefits.
How Long Benefits Last: Typically, state-financed benefits last for up to 26 weeks, though many states have been cutting back benefits even as the unemployment crisis has worsened. Federally-financed benefits can run up to a maximum of 99 weeks in the states with the highest unemployment rates, though the number of weeks available varies considerably by state. Shockingly, some state legislatures have simply failed to pass the necessary legislation to enable their citizens to receive these extended benefits paid for entirely by the federal government.
By the Numbers:
$1.52…the amount of economic growth generated by every dollar spent on unemployment benefits
4…the approximate number of workers actively job-hunting for every position available.
48…the percentage of unemployed Americans currently receiving unemployment insurance benefits thanks to growing crisis of the long-term unemployment
500,000+…the number of jobs that could be destroyed next year if unemployment insurance is not extended
700,000+…the number of new jobs created in recent years thanks to extended unemployment benefits
2,200,000…the number of unemployed Americans who will lose their benefits in January if Congress fails to pass an extension of federal benefits
3,200,000…the number of Americans pulled out of poverty in 2010 thanks to unemployment benefits.
4,400,000…the approximate number of Americans who have been unemployed for more than a year
6,000,000…the number of unemployed Americans who will lose their benefits over all of 2012 if Congress fails to pass an extension of federal benefits
14,000,000…the current number of unemployed Americans
$57,000,000,000…the hit the economy would take during just the first three months of 2012 if unemployment benefits are not extended
No Time To End Extended Unemployment Benefits
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
How the Occupy Movement May Reverse the Fascist Takeover of America
From Common Dreams -- November 22, 2011:
'You Can Crush the Flowers, But You Can’t Stop the Spring'
Dream big. Occupy your hopes. Talk to strangers. Live in public. Don’t stop now.
by Rebecca Solnit
Last Tuesday, I awoke in lower Manhattan to the whirring of helicopters overhead, a war-zone sound that persisted all day and then started up again that Thursday morning, the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street and a big day of demonstrations in New York City. It was one of the dozens of ways you could tell that the authorities take Occupy Wall Street seriously, even if they profoundly mistake what kind of danger it poses. If you ever doubted whether you were powerful or you mattered, just look at the reaction to people like you (or your children) camped out in parks from Oakland to Portland, Tucson to Manhattan.
Of course, “camped out” doesn’t quite catch the spirit of the moment, because those campsites are the way people have come together to bear witness to their hopes and fears, to begin to gather their power and discuss what is possible in our disturbingly unhinged world, to make clear how wrong our economic system is, how corrupt the powers that support it are, and to begin the search for a better way. Consider it an irony that the campsites are partly for sleeping, but symbols of the way we have awoken.
When civil society sleeps, we’re just a bunch of individuals absorbed in our private lives. When we awaken, on campgrounds or elsewhere, when we come together in public and find our power, the authorities are terrified. They often reveal their ugly side, their penchant for violence and for hypocrisy.
Consider the liberal mayor of Oakland, who speaks with outrage of people camping without a permit but has nothing to say about the police she dispatched to tear-gas a woman in a wheelchair, shoot a young Iraq war veteran in the head, and assault people while they slept. Consider the billionaire mayor of New York who dispatched the NYPD on a similar middle-of-the-night raid on November 15th. Recall this item included in a bald list of events that night: “tear-gassing the kitchen tent.” Ask yourself when did kitchens really need to be attacked with chemical weapons?
Does an 84-year-old woman need to be tear-gassed in Seattle? Does a three-tours-of-duty veteran need to be beaten until his spleen ruptures in Oakland? Does our former poet laureate need to be bashed in the ribs after his poet wife is thrown to the ground at UC Berkeley? Admittedly, this is a system that regards people as disposable, but not usually so literally.
Two months ago, the latest protests against that system began. The response only confirms our vision of how it all works. They are fighting fire with gasoline. Perhaps being frightened makes them foolish. After all, once civil society rouses itself from slumber, it can be all but unstoppable. (If they were smart they’d try to soothe it back to sleep.) “Arrest one of us; two more appear. You can’t arrest an idea!” said the sign held by a man in a Guy Fawkes mask in reoccupied Zuccotti Park last Thursday.
Last Wednesday in San Francisco, 100 activists occupied the Bank of America, even erecting a symbolic tent inside it in which a dozen activists immediately took refuge. At the Berkeley campus of the University of California, setting up tents on any grounds was forbidden, so the brilliant young occupiers used clusters of helium balloons to float tents overhead, a smart image of defiance and sky-high ambition. And the valiant UC Davis students, after several of them were pepper-sprayed in the face while sitting peacefully on the ground, evicted the police, chanting, “You can go! You can go!” They went.
Occupy Oakland has been busted up three times and still it thrives. To say nothing of the other 1,600 occupations in the growing movement.
Alexander Dubcek, the government official turned hero of the Prague Spring uprising of 1968, once said, “You can crush the flowers, but you can’t stop the spring.”
The busting of Zuccotti Park and the effervescent, ingenious demonstrations elsewhere are a reminder that, despite the literal “occupations” on which this protean movement has been built, it can soar as high as those Berkeley balloons and take many unexpected forms. Another OWS sign, “The beginning is near,” caught the mood of the moment. Flowers seem like the right image for this uprising led by the young, those who have been most crushed by the new economic order, and who bloom by rebelling and rebel by blooming.
The Best and the Worst
Now world-famous Zuccotti Park is just a small concrete and brown marble-paved scrap of land surrounded by tall buildings. Despite the “Occupy Wall Street” label, it’s actually two blocks north of that iconic place. It’s rarely noted that the park is within sight of, and kitty-corner to, Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center towers crumbled.
What was born and what died that day a decade ago has everything to do with what’s going on in and around the park, the country, and the world now. For this, al-Qaeda is remarkably irrelevant, except as the outfit that long ago triggered an incident that instantly released both the best and the worst in our society.
The best was civil society. As I wandered in the Zuccotti Park area last week, I was struck again by how much what really happened on the morning of September 11th has been willfully misremembered. It can be found nowhere in the plaques and monuments. Firemen more than deserve their commemorations, but mostly they acted in vain, on bad orders from above, and with fatally flawed communications equipment. The fact is: the people in the towers and the neighborhood -- think of them as civil society coming together in crisis -- largely rescued themselves, and some of them told the firefighters to head down, not up.
We need memorials to the coworkers who carried their paraplegic accountant colleague down 69 flights of stairs while in peril themselves; to Ada Rosario-Dolch, the principal who got all of the High School for Leadership, a block away, safely evacuated, while knowing her sister had probably been killed in one of those towers; to the female executives who walked the blind newspaper seller to safety in Greenwich Village; to the unarmed passengers of United Flight 93, who were the only ones to combat terrorism effectively that day; and to countless, nameless others. We need monuments to ourselves, to civil society.
Ordinary people shone that morning. They were not terrorized; they were galvanized into action, and they were heroic. And it didn’t stop with that morning either. That day, that week they began to talk about what the events of 9/11 actually meant for them, and they acted to put their world back together, practically and philosophically. All of which terrified the Bush administration, which soon launched not only its “global war on terror” and its invasion of Afghanistan, but a campaign against civil society. It was aimed at convincing each of us that we should stay home, go shopping, fear everything except the government, and spy on each other.
The only monument civil society ever gets is itself, and the satisfaction of continuing to do the work that matters, the work that has no bosses and no paychecks, the work of connecting, caring, understanding, exploring, and transforming. So much about Occupy Wall Street resonates with what came in that brief moment a decade before and then was shut down for years.
That little park that became “occupied” territory brought to mind the way New York’s Union Square became a great public forum in the weeks after 9/11, where everyone could gather to mourn, connect, discuss, debate, bear witness, share food, donate or raise money, write on banners, and simply live in public. (Until the city shut that beautiful forum down in the name of sanitation -- that sacred cow which by now must be mating with the Wall Street Bull somewhere in the vicinity of Zuccotti Park.)
It was remarkable how many New Yorkers lived in public in those weeks after 9/11. Numerous people have since told me nostalgically of how the normal boundaries came down, how everyone made eye contact, how almost anyone could talk to almost anyone else. Zuccotti Park and the other Occupies I’ve visited -- Oakland, San Francisco, Tucson, New Orleans -- have been like that, too. You can talk to strangers. In fact, it’s almost impossible not to, so much do people want to talk, to tell their stories, to hear yours, to discuss our mutual plight and what solutions to it might look like.
It’s as though the great New York-centric moment of openness after 9/11, when we were ready to reexamine our basic assumptions and look each other in the eye, has returned, and this time it’s not confined to New York City, and we’re not ready to let anyone shut it down with rubbish about patriotism and peril, safety and sanitation.
It’s as if the best of the spirit of the Obama presidential campaign of 2008 was back -- without the foolish belief that one man could do it all for civil society. In other words, this is a revolt, among other things, against the confinement of decision-making to a thoroughly corrupted and corporate-money-laced electoral sphere and against the pitfalls of leaders. And it represents the return in a new form of the best of the post-9/11 moment.
As for the worst after 9/11 -- you already know the worst. You’ve lived it. The worst was two treasury-draining wars that helped cave in the American dream, a loss of civil liberties, privacy, and governmental accountability. The worst was the rise of a national security state to almost unimaginable proportions, a rogue state that is our own government, and that doesn’t hesitate to violate with impunity the Geneva Convention, the Bill of Rights, and anything else it cares to trash in the name of American "safety" and "security." The worst was blind fealty to an administration that finished off making this into a country that serves the 1% at the expense, or even the survival, of significant parts of the 99%. More recently, it has returned as another kind of worst: police brutality (speaking of blind fealty to the 1%).
'You Can Crush the Flowers, But You Can’t Stop the Spring'
Dream big. Occupy your hopes. Talk to strangers. Live in public. Don’t stop now.
by Rebecca Solnit
Last Tuesday, I awoke in lower Manhattan to the whirring of helicopters overhead, a war-zone sound that persisted all day and then started up again that Thursday morning, the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street and a big day of demonstrations in New York City. It was one of the dozens of ways you could tell that the authorities take Occupy Wall Street seriously, even if they profoundly mistake what kind of danger it poses. If you ever doubted whether you were powerful or you mattered, just look at the reaction to people like you (or your children) camped out in parks from Oakland to Portland, Tucson to Manhattan.
Of course, “camped out” doesn’t quite catch the spirit of the moment, because those campsites are the way people have come together to bear witness to their hopes and fears, to begin to gather their power and discuss what is possible in our disturbingly unhinged world, to make clear how wrong our economic system is, how corrupt the powers that support it are, and to begin the search for a better way. Consider it an irony that the campsites are partly for sleeping, but symbols of the way we have awoken.
When civil society sleeps, we’re just a bunch of individuals absorbed in our private lives. When we awaken, on campgrounds or elsewhere, when we come together in public and find our power, the authorities are terrified. They often reveal their ugly side, their penchant for violence and for hypocrisy.
Consider the liberal mayor of Oakland, who speaks with outrage of people camping without a permit but has nothing to say about the police she dispatched to tear-gas a woman in a wheelchair, shoot a young Iraq war veteran in the head, and assault people while they slept. Consider the billionaire mayor of New York who dispatched the NYPD on a similar middle-of-the-night raid on November 15th. Recall this item included in a bald list of events that night: “tear-gassing the kitchen tent.” Ask yourself when did kitchens really need to be attacked with chemical weapons?
Does an 84-year-old woman need to be tear-gassed in Seattle? Does a three-tours-of-duty veteran need to be beaten until his spleen ruptures in Oakland? Does our former poet laureate need to be bashed in the ribs after his poet wife is thrown to the ground at UC Berkeley? Admittedly, this is a system that regards people as disposable, but not usually so literally.
Two months ago, the latest protests against that system began. The response only confirms our vision of how it all works. They are fighting fire with gasoline. Perhaps being frightened makes them foolish. After all, once civil society rouses itself from slumber, it can be all but unstoppable. (If they were smart they’d try to soothe it back to sleep.) “Arrest one of us; two more appear. You can’t arrest an idea!” said the sign held by a man in a Guy Fawkes mask in reoccupied Zuccotti Park last Thursday.
Last Wednesday in San Francisco, 100 activists occupied the Bank of America, even erecting a symbolic tent inside it in which a dozen activists immediately took refuge. At the Berkeley campus of the University of California, setting up tents on any grounds was forbidden, so the brilliant young occupiers used clusters of helium balloons to float tents overhead, a smart image of defiance and sky-high ambition. And the valiant UC Davis students, after several of them were pepper-sprayed in the face while sitting peacefully on the ground, evicted the police, chanting, “You can go! You can go!” They went.
Occupy Oakland has been busted up three times and still it thrives. To say nothing of the other 1,600 occupations in the growing movement.
Alexander Dubcek, the government official turned hero of the Prague Spring uprising of 1968, once said, “You can crush the flowers, but you can’t stop the spring.”
The busting of Zuccotti Park and the effervescent, ingenious demonstrations elsewhere are a reminder that, despite the literal “occupations” on which this protean movement has been built, it can soar as high as those Berkeley balloons and take many unexpected forms. Another OWS sign, “The beginning is near,” caught the mood of the moment. Flowers seem like the right image for this uprising led by the young, those who have been most crushed by the new economic order, and who bloom by rebelling and rebel by blooming.
The Best and the Worst
Now world-famous Zuccotti Park is just a small concrete and brown marble-paved scrap of land surrounded by tall buildings. Despite the “Occupy Wall Street” label, it’s actually two blocks north of that iconic place. It’s rarely noted that the park is within sight of, and kitty-corner to, Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center towers crumbled.
What was born and what died that day a decade ago has everything to do with what’s going on in and around the park, the country, and the world now. For this, al-Qaeda is remarkably irrelevant, except as the outfit that long ago triggered an incident that instantly released both the best and the worst in our society.
The best was civil society. As I wandered in the Zuccotti Park area last week, I was struck again by how much what really happened on the morning of September 11th has been willfully misremembered. It can be found nowhere in the plaques and monuments. Firemen more than deserve their commemorations, but mostly they acted in vain, on bad orders from above, and with fatally flawed communications equipment. The fact is: the people in the towers and the neighborhood -- think of them as civil society coming together in crisis -- largely rescued themselves, and some of them told the firefighters to head down, not up.
We need memorials to the coworkers who carried their paraplegic accountant colleague down 69 flights of stairs while in peril themselves; to Ada Rosario-Dolch, the principal who got all of the High School for Leadership, a block away, safely evacuated, while knowing her sister had probably been killed in one of those towers; to the female executives who walked the blind newspaper seller to safety in Greenwich Village; to the unarmed passengers of United Flight 93, who were the only ones to combat terrorism effectively that day; and to countless, nameless others. We need monuments to ourselves, to civil society.
Ordinary people shone that morning. They were not terrorized; they were galvanized into action, and they were heroic. And it didn’t stop with that morning either. That day, that week they began to talk about what the events of 9/11 actually meant for them, and they acted to put their world back together, practically and philosophically. All of which terrified the Bush administration, which soon launched not only its “global war on terror” and its invasion of Afghanistan, but a campaign against civil society. It was aimed at convincing each of us that we should stay home, go shopping, fear everything except the government, and spy on each other.
The only monument civil society ever gets is itself, and the satisfaction of continuing to do the work that matters, the work that has no bosses and no paychecks, the work of connecting, caring, understanding, exploring, and transforming. So much about Occupy Wall Street resonates with what came in that brief moment a decade before and then was shut down for years.
That little park that became “occupied” territory brought to mind the way New York’s Union Square became a great public forum in the weeks after 9/11, where everyone could gather to mourn, connect, discuss, debate, bear witness, share food, donate or raise money, write on banners, and simply live in public. (Until the city shut that beautiful forum down in the name of sanitation -- that sacred cow which by now must be mating with the Wall Street Bull somewhere in the vicinity of Zuccotti Park.)
It was remarkable how many New Yorkers lived in public in those weeks after 9/11. Numerous people have since told me nostalgically of how the normal boundaries came down, how everyone made eye contact, how almost anyone could talk to almost anyone else. Zuccotti Park and the other Occupies I’ve visited -- Oakland, San Francisco, Tucson, New Orleans -- have been like that, too. You can talk to strangers. In fact, it’s almost impossible not to, so much do people want to talk, to tell their stories, to hear yours, to discuss our mutual plight and what solutions to it might look like.
It’s as though the great New York-centric moment of openness after 9/11, when we were ready to reexamine our basic assumptions and look each other in the eye, has returned, and this time it’s not confined to New York City, and we’re not ready to let anyone shut it down with rubbish about patriotism and peril, safety and sanitation.
It’s as if the best of the spirit of the Obama presidential campaign of 2008 was back -- without the foolish belief that one man could do it all for civil society. In other words, this is a revolt, among other things, against the confinement of decision-making to a thoroughly corrupted and corporate-money-laced electoral sphere and against the pitfalls of leaders. And it represents the return in a new form of the best of the post-9/11 moment.
As for the worst after 9/11 -- you already know the worst. You’ve lived it. The worst was two treasury-draining wars that helped cave in the American dream, a loss of civil liberties, privacy, and governmental accountability. The worst was the rise of a national security state to almost unimaginable proportions, a rogue state that is our own government, and that doesn’t hesitate to violate with impunity the Geneva Convention, the Bill of Rights, and anything else it cares to trash in the name of American "safety" and "security." The worst was blind fealty to an administration that finished off making this into a country that serves the 1% at the expense, or even the survival, of significant parts of the 99%. More recently, it has returned as another kind of worst: police brutality (speaking of blind fealty to the 1%).
The Pathetic, Ignorant Tea Party Morons
From The New York Times -- April 17, 2010:
New York Times poll reveals Tea Party ignorance, dishonesty and hypocrisy
By Marc Rubin
There were new myth making headlines out of a New York Times poll that supposedly showed that tea party supporters are "better educated and wealthier" than the general population. The supposed findings were used by some journalists and tea party organizers to build up the credentials of the tea party.
But when you look at the actual poll data that the NY Times used for its story, it's clear neither the Times editors nor the reporters who wrote the story could analyze their way out of a paper bag. The claims are preposterous and further re-enforces the credentials of the newspaper that brought us Whitewater and Judith Miller's bogus front page stories on the absolute certainty of WMD in Iraq in the run up to the war.
Many in the news media and on the cable news talk shows just took the preposterous conclusions by a bunch of inept Times reporters at face value without looking at the actual results (which are available here) which paints a very different picture. In fact, supposedly according to Michelle Bachman and some silly reporting, Tea Party supporters are even "hotter" than liberals.
But the data shows that compared to the general population almost twice the number of Tea Party supporters are retired, 32% to 18%. And another interesting poll number which calls the entire validity of the Times poll and the veracity of the those polled into question, is that according to their poll data only 16% of the tea party respondents say they are on Medicare.
Since everyone becomes eligible for Medicare at 65 its hard to believe that 50% of retirees who claim to be Tea Party supporters do not have Medicare. It indicates a number of things: a willingness to lie or be deceptive on the part of the respondents, probab;y because Medicare is a government run healthcare program and indicates a lack of analytical ability on the part of the Times pollsters, reporters who wrote the story and their editors..
With this answer and the answer to other questions, there is every indication that a good number of Tea Party supporters are willing to lie to pollsters to support their agenda, which, based on based on past performance shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone with the obvious exception of the New York Times.
On religion 83% are catholic or protestant with 1% saying they are Jewish and 6-9% saying "other". With only 1% of those polled saying they are Jewish its not likely that many of the respondents in the New York Times poll are from New York, or much of the northeast or Florida, a state where an anti-healthcare Tea Party Republican was just crushed in a special election for a seat in the House of Representatives. Given the lack of polling in the northeast, the claim that Tea Party supporters are "better educated" is also suspect and further examination of the poll data supports that also not to mention what we've seen of the protestors.
Of these supposedly higher educated Tea Partiers, 1% checked the answer " I dont know", when asked the question of whether they are married, had ever been married are divorced or separated, Of the supposedly less educated general public, 0% checked "I don't know" to that question. This might begin to explain the popularity of Michelle Bachman and Fox News.
One wonders if Tea Partiers have their names and addresses sewn into their clothing when they go on protests.
To the question of ideology, 73% of Tea Party supporters describe themselves as "conservative to very conservative" . This blows another hole in the veracity of the NY Times poll and/or the truthfulness of their Tea Party respondents since every poll, every measurable educational statistic has shown that those with liberal ideologies tend to be better educated while people who describe themselves as conservative less educated in the general population.
It's not likely that has changed as far as the Tea Party movement is concerned and there is more raw data in the New York times poll to back that up.
So what it also suggests is that, like the Medicare question, Tea Partiers are likely to be less than truthful when it comes to answering certain questions.In the answer to questions about their education, "some college" drew the highest percentage. Which means what? They dropped out? Couldn't handle it? Or was that the easiest to lie about? There is more polling data to call into question the "better educated" claim as well.
As for the Times conclusion that they are "wealthier", these are the actual numbers:
25% say they make between $50,000 and $75,000 a year compared to 18% of the general population and 12% between $75k-and 100k compared to 11% of the general population.
Assuming the Tea Partiers are telling the truth which has been shown can be highly doubtful, the disparity in the $75-100,000 category is so small as to be irrelevant. And with regards to the use of the term "wealthier"( the word used by the Times), it's doubtful that anyone in the country making $50-$75,000 or $75 -$100,000 a year thinks they are wealthy.
According to the poll there is a slightly higher number than the public as a whole claiming to make over $250,000 but that number is such a small percentage of the Tea Party supporters and general population as a whole that the conclusion that Tea Party supporters are "wealthier" is beyond silly and far from the truth.
But to get back to the "better educated" claim, maybe the biggest nail in the coffin of the New York Times article, is their poll data that shows 63% of these supposedly " better educated" Tea Party supporters say their primary source of information is Fox News. It is beyond the realm of possibility that highly educated people would use Fox News as their primary source of information.
This is the same Fox News where Sean Hannity said the healthcare bill if passed, could turn U.S. doctors into terrorists because it would cut their salaries and they'd be susceptible to taking money from Al-Qaeda to commit terrorist acts. There is no supermarket tabloid in America that wouldnt be embarrassed to publish such a story. This is also the same Fox News where Glenn Beck conducting his Ding Dong School fact-denying show, told people that under the new healthcare bill they will "go to jail", ( written on his blackboard) if they don't get health insurance.
Fox News is not news for highly educated people. And what's more Fox News itself knows it.
More data proving the absurdity of Tea Party supporters being better educated are the poll numbers that show 57% have a favorable view of George W Bush, the most inept, disastrous president in U.S. history. Bush visited more catastrophies on the United States because of his incompetence and negligence than U.S president in history, from getting 3000 people killed on 911 because he dismissed terrorism as a threat until it was too late, to destroying the balanced budget, exploding the deficit, creating the worst economic disaster since the depression, and the debacle in Iraq, not to mention those who died because of his handling of Katrina.
Yes this is the president that supposedly "better educarted" Tea Party supporters give a 57% job approval rating, which says as much about who Tea Party supporters really are as it says about the New York Time ability to analyze.
It reveals the Tea Party supporters as totally partisan, somewhat fascistic and completely hypocritical since every problem they complain about was caused by Bush and the Republicans who proved to be incompetent beyond anything anyone would have thought possible.
It also explains why Tea Party supporters didn't demonstrate when Bush destroyed the balanced budget, blew a $ 5 1/2 trillion budget surplus, cut tax rates for upper 5% of the country, exploded the deficit, sent the country into an unnecessary $1 billion a day war without paying for it, caused the worst economic crisis since the Depression, and are now "angry" with Democrats over the economy. Tea Party supporters are either mindlessly partisan or they were in a six year coma for 2001-2006.
What the Times poll really reveals is that a large segment ( no one can say "all") of the Tea Party movement is what it appears to be every day on television: ignorant,dishonest, uneducated, neo fascistic, filled with moral and intellectual hypocrites (as the foul mouthed family values conservatives who made obscene calls to Bart Stupak and others proved) with no real values except a deep desire to have everyone act they way they do and believe as they do to justify themselves and their conformity.
And there is, though a minority, a definite and distinct element of raw racism motivating many as was evident not just by some clearly racist signs aimed at Obama over healthcare. but even by the Governor of Virginia who neglected to mention slavery as the cause of the Civil War in a speech honoring those who fought for the confederacy.
As the data and any real analyis shows, the conclusions the Times reporters drew from their polling data are simply preposterous. And what the Tea Party protests have shon is that more than anything, the Tea Party movement is made of a bunch of small minded conservative partians, angry that the massive failure of their ideology led to their representatives being thrown out of power. And if the American people have any sense, it will stay that way despite Republican political operatives who try and exploit their temper tantrums for their own political ends.
Continue reading on Examiner.com New York Times poll reveals Tea Party ignorance, dishonesty and hypocrisy - New York Obama Administration | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/obama-administration-in-new-york/new-york-times-poll-reveals-tea-party-ignorance-dishonesty-and-hypocrisy#ixzz1eUskHurh
New York Times poll reveals Tea Party ignorance, dishonesty and hypocrisy
By Marc Rubin
There were new myth making headlines out of a New York Times poll that supposedly showed that tea party supporters are "better educated and wealthier" than the general population. The supposed findings were used by some journalists and tea party organizers to build up the credentials of the tea party.
But when you look at the actual poll data that the NY Times used for its story, it's clear neither the Times editors nor the reporters who wrote the story could analyze their way out of a paper bag. The claims are preposterous and further re-enforces the credentials of the newspaper that brought us Whitewater and Judith Miller's bogus front page stories on the absolute certainty of WMD in Iraq in the run up to the war.
Many in the news media and on the cable news talk shows just took the preposterous conclusions by a bunch of inept Times reporters at face value without looking at the actual results (which are available here) which paints a very different picture. In fact, supposedly according to Michelle Bachman and some silly reporting, Tea Party supporters are even "hotter" than liberals.
But the data shows that compared to the general population almost twice the number of Tea Party supporters are retired, 32% to 18%. And another interesting poll number which calls the entire validity of the Times poll and the veracity of the those polled into question, is that according to their poll data only 16% of the tea party respondents say they are on Medicare.
Since everyone becomes eligible for Medicare at 65 its hard to believe that 50% of retirees who claim to be Tea Party supporters do not have Medicare. It indicates a number of things: a willingness to lie or be deceptive on the part of the respondents, probab;y because Medicare is a government run healthcare program and indicates a lack of analytical ability on the part of the Times pollsters, reporters who wrote the story and their editors..
With this answer and the answer to other questions, there is every indication that a good number of Tea Party supporters are willing to lie to pollsters to support their agenda, which, based on based on past performance shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone with the obvious exception of the New York Times.
On religion 83% are catholic or protestant with 1% saying they are Jewish and 6-9% saying "other". With only 1% of those polled saying they are Jewish its not likely that many of the respondents in the New York Times poll are from New York, or much of the northeast or Florida, a state where an anti-healthcare Tea Party Republican was just crushed in a special election for a seat in the House of Representatives. Given the lack of polling in the northeast, the claim that Tea Party supporters are "better educated" is also suspect and further examination of the poll data supports that also not to mention what we've seen of the protestors.
Of these supposedly higher educated Tea Partiers, 1% checked the answer " I dont know", when asked the question of whether they are married, had ever been married are divorced or separated, Of the supposedly less educated general public, 0% checked "I don't know" to that question. This might begin to explain the popularity of Michelle Bachman and Fox News.
One wonders if Tea Partiers have their names and addresses sewn into their clothing when they go on protests.
To the question of ideology, 73% of Tea Party supporters describe themselves as "conservative to very conservative" . This blows another hole in the veracity of the NY Times poll and/or the truthfulness of their Tea Party respondents since every poll, every measurable educational statistic has shown that those with liberal ideologies tend to be better educated while people who describe themselves as conservative less educated in the general population.
It's not likely that has changed as far as the Tea Party movement is concerned and there is more raw data in the New York times poll to back that up.
So what it also suggests is that, like the Medicare question, Tea Partiers are likely to be less than truthful when it comes to answering certain questions.In the answer to questions about their education, "some college" drew the highest percentage. Which means what? They dropped out? Couldn't handle it? Or was that the easiest to lie about? There is more polling data to call into question the "better educated" claim as well.
As for the Times conclusion that they are "wealthier", these are the actual numbers:
25% say they make between $50,000 and $75,000 a year compared to 18% of the general population and 12% between $75k-and 100k compared to 11% of the general population.
Assuming the Tea Partiers are telling the truth which has been shown can be highly doubtful, the disparity in the $75-100,000 category is so small as to be irrelevant. And with regards to the use of the term "wealthier"( the word used by the Times), it's doubtful that anyone in the country making $50-$75,000 or $75 -$100,000 a year thinks they are wealthy.
According to the poll there is a slightly higher number than the public as a whole claiming to make over $250,000 but that number is such a small percentage of the Tea Party supporters and general population as a whole that the conclusion that Tea Party supporters are "wealthier" is beyond silly and far from the truth.
But to get back to the "better educated" claim, maybe the biggest nail in the coffin of the New York Times article, is their poll data that shows 63% of these supposedly " better educated" Tea Party supporters say their primary source of information is Fox News. It is beyond the realm of possibility that highly educated people would use Fox News as their primary source of information.
This is the same Fox News where Sean Hannity said the healthcare bill if passed, could turn U.S. doctors into terrorists because it would cut their salaries and they'd be susceptible to taking money from Al-Qaeda to commit terrorist acts. There is no supermarket tabloid in America that wouldnt be embarrassed to publish such a story. This is also the same Fox News where Glenn Beck conducting his Ding Dong School fact-denying show, told people that under the new healthcare bill they will "go to jail", ( written on his blackboard) if they don't get health insurance.
Fox News is not news for highly educated people. And what's more Fox News itself knows it.
More data proving the absurdity of Tea Party supporters being better educated are the poll numbers that show 57% have a favorable view of George W Bush, the most inept, disastrous president in U.S. history. Bush visited more catastrophies on the United States because of his incompetence and negligence than U.S president in history, from getting 3000 people killed on 911 because he dismissed terrorism as a threat until it was too late, to destroying the balanced budget, exploding the deficit, creating the worst economic disaster since the depression, and the debacle in Iraq, not to mention those who died because of his handling of Katrina.
Yes this is the president that supposedly "better educarted" Tea Party supporters give a 57% job approval rating, which says as much about who Tea Party supporters really are as it says about the New York Time ability to analyze.
It reveals the Tea Party supporters as totally partisan, somewhat fascistic and completely hypocritical since every problem they complain about was caused by Bush and the Republicans who proved to be incompetent beyond anything anyone would have thought possible.
It also explains why Tea Party supporters didn't demonstrate when Bush destroyed the balanced budget, blew a $ 5 1/2 trillion budget surplus, cut tax rates for upper 5% of the country, exploded the deficit, sent the country into an unnecessary $1 billion a day war without paying for it, caused the worst economic crisis since the Depression, and are now "angry" with Democrats over the economy. Tea Party supporters are either mindlessly partisan or they were in a six year coma for 2001-2006.
What the Times poll really reveals is that a large segment ( no one can say "all") of the Tea Party movement is what it appears to be every day on television: ignorant,dishonest, uneducated, neo fascistic, filled with moral and intellectual hypocrites (as the foul mouthed family values conservatives who made obscene calls to Bart Stupak and others proved) with no real values except a deep desire to have everyone act they way they do and believe as they do to justify themselves and their conformity.
And there is, though a minority, a definite and distinct element of raw racism motivating many as was evident not just by some clearly racist signs aimed at Obama over healthcare. but even by the Governor of Virginia who neglected to mention slavery as the cause of the Civil War in a speech honoring those who fought for the confederacy.
As the data and any real analyis shows, the conclusions the Times reporters drew from their polling data are simply preposterous. And what the Tea Party protests have shon is that more than anything, the Tea Party movement is made of a bunch of small minded conservative partians, angry that the massive failure of their ideology led to their representatives being thrown out of power. And if the American people have any sense, it will stay that way despite Republican political operatives who try and exploit their temper tantrums for their own political ends.
Continue reading on Examiner.com New York Times poll reveals Tea Party ignorance, dishonesty and hypocrisy - New York Obama Administration | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/obama-administration-in-new-york/new-york-times-poll-reveals-tea-party-ignorance-dishonesty-and-hypocrisy#ixzz1eUskHurh
The Republican Ideological Terrorists Who Are Dooming America
From The Washington Post -- November 21, 2011:
Republican obstinacy doomed the supercommittee
By Eugene Robinson
No, the sun didn’t rise in the west this morning. No, Republicans on the congressional supercommittee didn’t offer meaningful concessions on raising new tax revenue. And no, “both sides” are not equally responsible for the failure to compromise.
As usual, the two parties began with vastly different ideas of what it means to negotiate. Democrats envisioned meeting somewhere in the middle, while Republicans anticipated not moving an inch. This isn’t just my spin, it’s a matter of public record: Before the 12-member supercommittee ever met, House Speaker John Boehner warned that they had better not agree to any new tax revenue.
Think about this for a minute. The whole point of the subcommittee exercise was to begin reducing the ballooning national debt, now more than $15 trillion. Closing such a big gap with spending cuts is possible only in the parallel universe inhabited by GOP ideologues, a place where the laws of arithmetic do not apply.
Here in the real world — where tax receipts as a percentage of gross domestic product are lower than they’ve been since 1950 — it’s ridiculous to think of solving the long-term debt problem without substantial new revenue. Yet the position taken by Republicans in Congress is that tax rates can go only down, never up. To uphold this absolutist principle, they have gone so far as to threaten to send the U.S. Treasury into default.
That is basically where the subcommittee talks stood — Democrats ready to give and take, Republicans willing only to take — until the eleventh hour, when Sen. Patrick Toomey (R-Pa.) presented to his supercolleagues a proposal for tax reform that some commentators hailed as a breakthrough. It was, in fact, nothing of the sort.
Toomey’s plan would have actually cut tax rates, including for the wealthy, with a promise to raise them again if that’s what was needed to boost tax revenue by $250 billion over the next decade.
Puh-leeze.
While $250 billion sounds like a lot, it’s much less impressive when compared with the supercommittee’s overall goal of reducing the debt by $1.2 trillion. This would still mean four dollars in spending cuts for every one dollar of new revenue.
And Toomey’s number is a drop in the bucket when you look at the $15 trillion debt — or even the $4 trillion in debt reduction that most analysts believe would really make a difference. With so little new revenue, we would need to make draconian cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security that would radically alter the social contract in this country.
Toomey’s proposal on taxes is a breakthrough only if we’re grading on a curve — giving Republicans extra credit for moving an inch, simply because they’ve been so adamant about not moving at all. Democrats, meanwhile, get accused of being intransigent for drawing a line after having moved many, many miles.
It’s useful to remember that not all Republicans are so stubborn. Many realize that a balanced approach of spending cuts and tax increases will be needed to address the debt problem — and that these adjustments shouldn’t be made too abruptly, given the fragility of the economic recovery. But anyone who speaks these truths out loud is branded a heretic in Republican circles, where tax cuts are not a matter of policy but of faith.
The deal that established the supercommittee specified that if the superlegislators failed to reach agreement, $1.2 trillion in budget cuts would automatically take place at the beginning of 2013. Is this really better, from the progressive point of view, than some sort of lopsided “compromise” incorporating the Toomey revenue, which would reduce the dollar amount of budget-slashing needed to attain the $1.2 trillion goal?
Yes, no deal is almost certainly better than a bad deal. The automatic cuts will be painful, but they don’t touch entitlements — and thus don’t preempt the serious discussion we need to have about making sure that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are sustainable.
Instead, the Pentagon bears the brunt of the sword-of-Damocles cuts. Already, Republicans are beginning to howl that we need to find some way to avoid damaging our national security. The solution is clear: If we want a military that projects U.S. power around the globe, we need to pay for it.
Maybe Republicans will acknowledge that American greatness doesn’t come free. That’s the breakthrough we need.
Republican obstinacy doomed the supercommittee
By Eugene Robinson
No, the sun didn’t rise in the west this morning. No, Republicans on the congressional supercommittee didn’t offer meaningful concessions on raising new tax revenue. And no, “both sides” are not equally responsible for the failure to compromise.
As usual, the two parties began with vastly different ideas of what it means to negotiate. Democrats envisioned meeting somewhere in the middle, while Republicans anticipated not moving an inch. This isn’t just my spin, it’s a matter of public record: Before the 12-member supercommittee ever met, House Speaker John Boehner warned that they had better not agree to any new tax revenue.
Think about this for a minute. The whole point of the subcommittee exercise was to begin reducing the ballooning national debt, now more than $15 trillion. Closing such a big gap with spending cuts is possible only in the parallel universe inhabited by GOP ideologues, a place where the laws of arithmetic do not apply.
Here in the real world — where tax receipts as a percentage of gross domestic product are lower than they’ve been since 1950 — it’s ridiculous to think of solving the long-term debt problem without substantial new revenue. Yet the position taken by Republicans in Congress is that tax rates can go only down, never up. To uphold this absolutist principle, they have gone so far as to threaten to send the U.S. Treasury into default.
That is basically where the subcommittee talks stood — Democrats ready to give and take, Republicans willing only to take — until the eleventh hour, when Sen. Patrick Toomey (R-Pa.) presented to his supercolleagues a proposal for tax reform that some commentators hailed as a breakthrough. It was, in fact, nothing of the sort.
Toomey’s plan would have actually cut tax rates, including for the wealthy, with a promise to raise them again if that’s what was needed to boost tax revenue by $250 billion over the next decade.
Puh-leeze.
While $250 billion sounds like a lot, it’s much less impressive when compared with the supercommittee’s overall goal of reducing the debt by $1.2 trillion. This would still mean four dollars in spending cuts for every one dollar of new revenue.
And Toomey’s number is a drop in the bucket when you look at the $15 trillion debt — or even the $4 trillion in debt reduction that most analysts believe would really make a difference. With so little new revenue, we would need to make draconian cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security that would radically alter the social contract in this country.
Toomey’s proposal on taxes is a breakthrough only if we’re grading on a curve — giving Republicans extra credit for moving an inch, simply because they’ve been so adamant about not moving at all. Democrats, meanwhile, get accused of being intransigent for drawing a line after having moved many, many miles.
It’s useful to remember that not all Republicans are so stubborn. Many realize that a balanced approach of spending cuts and tax increases will be needed to address the debt problem — and that these adjustments shouldn’t be made too abruptly, given the fragility of the economic recovery. But anyone who speaks these truths out loud is branded a heretic in Republican circles, where tax cuts are not a matter of policy but of faith.
The deal that established the supercommittee specified that if the superlegislators failed to reach agreement, $1.2 trillion in budget cuts would automatically take place at the beginning of 2013. Is this really better, from the progressive point of view, than some sort of lopsided “compromise” incorporating the Toomey revenue, which would reduce the dollar amount of budget-slashing needed to attain the $1.2 trillion goal?
Yes, no deal is almost certainly better than a bad deal. The automatic cuts will be painful, but they don’t touch entitlements — and thus don’t preempt the serious discussion we need to have about making sure that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are sustainable.
Instead, the Pentagon bears the brunt of the sword-of-Damocles cuts. Already, Republicans are beginning to howl that we need to find some way to avoid damaging our national security. The solution is clear: If we want a military that projects U.S. power around the globe, we need to pay for it.
Maybe Republicans will acknowledge that American greatness doesn’t come free. That’s the breakthrough we need.
Monday, November 21, 2011
America's F--- You System of Government
From Common Dreams -- November 16, 2011:
Our F— You System of Government
Anti-Occupy Crackdowns Highlight Lack of Services
by Ted Rall
Governments are supposed to fulfill the basic needs of their citizens. Ours doesn’t pretend to try.
Sick? Too bad.
Can’t find a job? Tough.
Broke? Can’t afford rent? We don’t give a crap.
Forget “e pluribus unum.” We need a more accurate motto.
We live under a f— you system.
Got a problem? The U.S. government has an all-purpose response to whatever ails you: f— you.
During the ’80s I drove a yellow taxi in New York. Then, as now, there were no public restrooms in the city. At 4 in the morning, with few restaurants or bars open, the coffee I drank to stay awake posed a significant challenge.
It was—it is—insane. People pee. People poop. As basic needs go, toilets are as basic as it gets. Yet the City of New York, with the biggest tax base of any municipality in the United States, didn’t provide any.
So I did what all taxi drivers did. What they still do. I found a side street and a spot between two parked cars. It went OK until a cop caught me peeing under the old elevated West Side Highway, which later collapsed due to lack of maintenance. Perhaps decades of taxi driver urine corroded the support beams.
“You can’t do that here,” said the policeman.
“Where am I supposed to go?” I asked him. “There’s aren’t any restrooms anywhere in town.”
“I know,” he replied before going to get his summons book from his cruiser.
The old “f— you.” We create the problem, then blame you for the results.
I ran away.
In recent days American mayors have been ordering heavily armed riot police to attack and rob peaceful members of encampments allied with Occupy Wall Street.
Like NYC, which won’t provide public restrooms but arrests public urinators, government officials and their media allies use their own refusal to provide basic public services to justify raids against Occupations.
In the middle of the night on November 15th NYPD goons stormed into Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. They beat and pepper-sprayed members of Occupy Wall Street and destroyed the books in their library. Citing “unsanitary conditions,” New York’s billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, then told reporters: “I have become increasingly concerned…that the occupation was coming to pose a health and fire safety hazard to the protesters and to the surrounding community.”
Four days before the police attack The New York Times had quoted a city health department statement worrying about the possible spread of norovirus, vomiting, diarrhea and tuberculosis: “It should go without saying that lots of people sleeping outside in a park as we head toward winter is not an ideal situation for anyone’s health.”
So why don’t they give the homeless some of the thousands of abandoned apartment units in New York?
Anyway, according to the Times: “Damp laundry and cardboard signs, left in the rain, have provided fertile ground for mold. Some protesters urinate in bottles, or occasionally a water-cooler jug, to avoid the lines at [the few] public restrooms.”
Of course, there’s an obvious solution: provide adequate bathroom facilities—not just for Occupy but for all New Yorkers. But that’s off the table under New York’s f— you system of government.
Doctors noted a new phenomenon called “Zuccotti cough.” Symptoms are similar to those of “Ground Zero cough” suffered by 9/11 first responders.
Zuccotti is 450 feet away from Ground Zero.
Which brings to mind the fact that the collapse of the World Trade Center towers released 400 tons of asbestos into the air. It was never cleaned up properly. Could Occupiers be suffering the results of sleeping in a should-have-been-Superfund site for two months?
We’ll never know. As under Bush, Obama’s EPA still won’t conduct a 9/11 environmental impact study.
Sick? Wanna know why? F— you.
One of the authorities’ most ironic complaints about the Occupations is that they attract the mentally ill, drug users and habitually homeless.
To listen to the mayors of Portland, Denver and New York, you’d think the Occupiers beamed in bums and nutcases from outer space.
When mentally disabled people seek help from their government, they get the usual answer: f— you.
When people addicted to drugs—drugs imported into the U.S. under the watchful eyes of corrupt border enforcement officers—ask their government for help, they are turned away. F— you again.
When people who lost their homes because their government said “f— you” to them rather than help turn to the same government to look for safe shelter, again they are told: “f— you.”
And then, after days and years and decades of shirking their responsibility to provide us with such staples of human survival as places to urinate and defecate and sleep, and food, and medical care, our “f— you” government has the amazing audacity to blame us, victims of their negligence and corruption and violence, for messing things up.
Which is why we are finally, at long last, starting to say “f— you” to them.
Our F— You System of Government
Anti-Occupy Crackdowns Highlight Lack of Services
by Ted Rall
Governments are supposed to fulfill the basic needs of their citizens. Ours doesn’t pretend to try.
Sick? Too bad.
Can’t find a job? Tough.
Broke? Can’t afford rent? We don’t give a crap.
Forget “e pluribus unum.” We need a more accurate motto.
We live under a f— you system.
Got a problem? The U.S. government has an all-purpose response to whatever ails you: f— you.
During the ’80s I drove a yellow taxi in New York. Then, as now, there were no public restrooms in the city. At 4 in the morning, with few restaurants or bars open, the coffee I drank to stay awake posed a significant challenge.
It was—it is—insane. People pee. People poop. As basic needs go, toilets are as basic as it gets. Yet the City of New York, with the biggest tax base of any municipality in the United States, didn’t provide any.
So I did what all taxi drivers did. What they still do. I found a side street and a spot between two parked cars. It went OK until a cop caught me peeing under the old elevated West Side Highway, which later collapsed due to lack of maintenance. Perhaps decades of taxi driver urine corroded the support beams.
“You can’t do that here,” said the policeman.
“Where am I supposed to go?” I asked him. “There’s aren’t any restrooms anywhere in town.”
“I know,” he replied before going to get his summons book from his cruiser.
The old “f— you.” We create the problem, then blame you for the results.
I ran away.
In recent days American mayors have been ordering heavily armed riot police to attack and rob peaceful members of encampments allied with Occupy Wall Street.
Like NYC, which won’t provide public restrooms but arrests public urinators, government officials and their media allies use their own refusal to provide basic public services to justify raids against Occupations.
In the middle of the night on November 15th NYPD goons stormed into Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. They beat and pepper-sprayed members of Occupy Wall Street and destroyed the books in their library. Citing “unsanitary conditions,” New York’s billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, then told reporters: “I have become increasingly concerned…that the occupation was coming to pose a health and fire safety hazard to the protesters and to the surrounding community.”
Four days before the police attack The New York Times had quoted a city health department statement worrying about the possible spread of norovirus, vomiting, diarrhea and tuberculosis: “It should go without saying that lots of people sleeping outside in a park as we head toward winter is not an ideal situation for anyone’s health.”
So why don’t they give the homeless some of the thousands of abandoned apartment units in New York?
Anyway, according to the Times: “Damp laundry and cardboard signs, left in the rain, have provided fertile ground for mold. Some protesters urinate in bottles, or occasionally a water-cooler jug, to avoid the lines at [the few] public restrooms.”
Of course, there’s an obvious solution: provide adequate bathroom facilities—not just for Occupy but for all New Yorkers. But that’s off the table under New York’s f— you system of government.
Doctors noted a new phenomenon called “Zuccotti cough.” Symptoms are similar to those of “Ground Zero cough” suffered by 9/11 first responders.
Zuccotti is 450 feet away from Ground Zero.
Which brings to mind the fact that the collapse of the World Trade Center towers released 400 tons of asbestos into the air. It was never cleaned up properly. Could Occupiers be suffering the results of sleeping in a should-have-been-Superfund site for two months?
We’ll never know. As under Bush, Obama’s EPA still won’t conduct a 9/11 environmental impact study.
Sick? Wanna know why? F— you.
One of the authorities’ most ironic complaints about the Occupations is that they attract the mentally ill, drug users and habitually homeless.
To listen to the mayors of Portland, Denver and New York, you’d think the Occupiers beamed in bums and nutcases from outer space.
When mentally disabled people seek help from their government, they get the usual answer: f— you.
When people addicted to drugs—drugs imported into the U.S. under the watchful eyes of corrupt border enforcement officers—ask their government for help, they are turned away. F— you again.
When people who lost their homes because their government said “f— you” to them rather than help turn to the same government to look for safe shelter, again they are told: “f— you.”
And then, after days and years and decades of shirking their responsibility to provide us with such staples of human survival as places to urinate and defecate and sleep, and food, and medical care, our “f— you” government has the amazing audacity to blame us, victims of their negligence and corruption and violence, for messing things up.
Which is why we are finally, at long last, starting to say “f— you” to them.
Congressional Republicans: Screw You, America!
From The Progress Report -- November 21, 2011:
GOP Derails Super Committee To Protect Millionaires & Billionaires
By Pat Garofalo
The fiscal super committee created by last summer’s deal to raise the debt ceiling was charged with crafting a $1.5 trillion deficit reduction package by Thanksgiving. However, moments ago, the committee’s co-chairs issued a statement officially conceding that “it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee’s deadline.” For weeks, the GOP has been refusing to even consider new revenue, pairing modest attempts to close loopholes in the tax code with giant new tax cuts centered on the very rich that would add trillions to the deficit. The committee’s co-chairman Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) even said the GOP would not consider “any penny” in new revenue (a statement that he later walked back). Without a deal, automatic cuts are supposed to be scheduled for 2013, but several congressional leaders have been discussing canceling the cuts, leaving the super committee the latest in a long line of deficit commissions to unable to succeed in their attempt to alter the U.S. budget.
GOP REFUSED TO TAX MILLIONAIRES & BILLIONAIRES: The GOP, in lockstep with anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist and his radical Americans for Tax Reform no-taxes pledge, adamantly refused to include new revenue in a deficit reduction deal. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), one of the super committee’s members, released a plan to raise $300 billion in revenue via closing loopholes in the tax code, but at the same time lowering income tax rates, including taking the top tax rate from its current 35 percent down to 28 percent. A second, smaller plan put forward by the GOP included $640 billion in deficit reduction, with just $3 billion coming from closing tax loopholes. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted, the Toomey plan would result in a “shift in tax burdens from households at the top of the income scale to low- and middle-income households.” “The Toomey plan still results in the biggest tax cut since the Great Depression. It would be the biggest tax cut since Calvin Coolidge, and we all know how that turned out,” said Sen. Jon Kerry (D-MA) on NBC’s Meet the Press yesterday. “Now, we didn’t come here to do another tax cut for the wealthiest people while we’re (asking) fixed-income seniors to ante up more, people on Medicaid, who are poor, to ante up more.” Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), who is Hensarling’s co-chair on the super committee, added, “as long as we have some Republican lawmakers who feel more enthralled with a pledge they took to a Republican lobbyist [Norquist] than they do to a pledge to the country to solve the problems, this is going to be hard to do.”
GOP Derails Super Committee To Protect Millionaires & Billionaires
By Pat Garofalo
The fiscal super committee created by last summer’s deal to raise the debt ceiling was charged with crafting a $1.5 trillion deficit reduction package by Thanksgiving. However, moments ago, the committee’s co-chairs issued a statement officially conceding that “it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee’s deadline.” For weeks, the GOP has been refusing to even consider new revenue, pairing modest attempts to close loopholes in the tax code with giant new tax cuts centered on the very rich that would add trillions to the deficit. The committee’s co-chairman Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) even said the GOP would not consider “any penny” in new revenue (a statement that he later walked back). Without a deal, automatic cuts are supposed to be scheduled for 2013, but several congressional leaders have been discussing canceling the cuts, leaving the super committee the latest in a long line of deficit commissions to unable to succeed in their attempt to alter the U.S. budget.
GOP REFUSED TO TAX MILLIONAIRES & BILLIONAIRES: The GOP, in lockstep with anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist and his radical Americans for Tax Reform no-taxes pledge, adamantly refused to include new revenue in a deficit reduction deal. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), one of the super committee’s members, released a plan to raise $300 billion in revenue via closing loopholes in the tax code, but at the same time lowering income tax rates, including taking the top tax rate from its current 35 percent down to 28 percent. A second, smaller plan put forward by the GOP included $640 billion in deficit reduction, with just $3 billion coming from closing tax loopholes. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted, the Toomey plan would result in a “shift in tax burdens from households at the top of the income scale to low- and middle-income households.” “The Toomey plan still results in the biggest tax cut since the Great Depression. It would be the biggest tax cut since Calvin Coolidge, and we all know how that turned out,” said Sen. Jon Kerry (D-MA) on NBC’s Meet the Press yesterday. “Now, we didn’t come here to do another tax cut for the wealthiest people while we’re (asking) fixed-income seniors to ante up more, people on Medicaid, who are poor, to ante up more.” Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), who is Hensarling’s co-chair on the super committee, added, “as long as we have some Republican lawmakers who feel more enthralled with a pledge they took to a Republican lobbyist [Norquist] than they do to a pledge to the country to solve the problems, this is going to be hard to do.”
The Republican Congress Fails America Again
From The Washington Post -- November 20, 2011:
Debt supercommittee members brace for failure
By Paul Kane
The congressional “supercommittee” stumbled its way toward failure Sunday, with final staff-level discussions focusing mostly on how the panel should publicly admit that lawmakers could not meet their mandate of shaving $1.2 trillion from the federal debt.
Rather than making a final effort at compromise, members of the special deficit-reduction committee spent their final hours casting blame and pointing fingers, bracing for the reaction from financial markets that are already jittery over the European debt crisis.
If Congress can’t come up with a way to cut $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years, the Budget Act will do it for them unless some sort of postponement is worked out. A look at the deadlines that must be met and what happens if they’re not:
Half of the 12 lawmakers turned to the Sunday political news shows as their outlet, speaking of their effort in the past tense and accusing the other side of intransigence that they blamed for the failure to clinch a deal. There were no last-minute negotiations, no behind-closed-doors huddles, just a near-empty Capitol in which senior aides could not agree on how to formally shutter the panel by Monday night.
The only face-to-face meetings for members of the supercommittee came in the green rooms of the talk shows. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) blamed the committee’s failure on Democratic reluctance to cut into popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare. “Our Democratic friends were never able to do the entitlement reforms,” Kyl said, arguing that Democrats were the roadblock to a deal. “They weren’t going to do anything without raising taxes.”
Calling Kyl’s remarks “patently not true,” Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) accused Republicans of blocking the committee’s work by demanding an extension of George W. Bush-era tax cuts and refusing to consider significant tax increases on wealthier people. “We didn’t come here to do another tax cut to the wealthiest people while we’re [asking] fixed-income seniors to ante up more, people on Medicaid who are poor to ante up more,” he said.
Barring a last-second breakthrough, the law calls for a punitive set of $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts to kick in at the start of 2013, with half coming from national security budgets. Kyl and other lawmakers have embraced reconfiguring the automatic cuts to save the Pentagon from such steep cuts, but any movement that decreases the overall savings runs the risk of causing financial ratings agencies to downgrade the U.S. Treasury’s debt.
Senior staff members ran a last round of checks Sunday to make sure there wasn’t some final give from the other side. There wasn’t. Aides left the Capitol on Sunday evening with no clear path for shutting down the panel, which, under the committee’s rules, needed to unveil legislation before midnight Monday.
Republicans prefer releasing a joint statement from the co-chairmen, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), after the markets close Monday, fearing that formally ending their effort could set off a market reaction. Democrats were considering pushing for a brief public statement from the co-chairmen.
Almost every congressman has left Washington for the week-long Thanksgiving break, so the legislative reaction to the committee’s failure will not come until early next month. The impasse leaves a host of other must-pass items, such as extensions for unemployment insurance and the payroll tax holiday, without any vehicle for passage before year’s end.
Despite a national debt that topped $15 trillion last week, the two sides could not bridge the taxes-vs.-entitlement divide. The GOP’s passion for keeping tax rates as low as possible meant the panel’s Republicans demanded steep entitlement cuts for small-to-modest increases in tax revenue, and the Democrats fiercely guarded entitlement programs unless the Republicans gave in on higher taxes.
It was the same stumbling block that prevented President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) from reaching the “grand bargain” they negotiated over the summer, an effort to trim $4 trillion from future borrowing by the Treasury.
If Congress can’t come up with a way to cut $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years, the Budget Act will do it for them unless some sort of postponement is worked out. A look at the deadlines that must be met and what happens if they’re not:
The Obama-Boehner negotiation ended with an agreement on more than $900 billion in spending cuts to federal agency budgets over the next decade while creating the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction — tasked with finding at least $1.2 trillion more in savings and voting out a plan before Thanksgiving.
The panel of six Democrats and six Republicans, granted extraordinary fast-track powers, began convening in early September with a series of hearings and closed-door meetings. The group, however, has broken down in the past month into a series of small huddles, with a handful of lawmakers working to hit their minimum target of $1.2 trillion and others working on a smaller backup plan that would cushion the blow from the automatic spending cuts.
Neither Hensarling nor Murray formally admitted that the panel was hopelessly gridlocked, but each suggested a new effort was needed in the very near term to fix the government’s balance sheet.
“It wasn’t so much of a failure as it was a failure to seize an opportunity. . . . This nation better seize another one or we will be in big economic trouble,” Hensarling said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“I believe strongly that we still have the capability to come together to solve this problem,” Murray said on CNN”s “State of the Union. “If the supercommittee can’t do it, then I hope that Congress will. In fact, I’m committed to solving this. You can’t just ignore this crisis.”
The trigger of automatic cuts should assuage jittery financial markets, which have been on a roller-coaster ride since the summer’s debt standoff in the United States and the struggle to tame even greater fiscal quagmires in Europe. But lawmakers fear that the sentiment of a dysfunctional federal government could solidify and prompt new fear in the global markets.
After the summer-long battle over lifting the debt ceiling, Standard & Poor’s downgraded U.S. debt based on “America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective.” The supercommittee gridlock came despite its unprecedented parliamentary power — any plan winning at least seven votes would have been guaranteed a straight up-or-down vote in the House and Senate before Christmas.
“There is a real threat that not only will there be a downgrade,” Kerry said, “but that the market on Monday will look at Washington and say, ‘You guys can’t get the job done.’ And just the political confusion and gridlock is enough to say to the world: America can’t get its act together.”
Debt supercommittee members brace for failure
By Paul Kane
The congressional “supercommittee” stumbled its way toward failure Sunday, with final staff-level discussions focusing mostly on how the panel should publicly admit that lawmakers could not meet their mandate of shaving $1.2 trillion from the federal debt.
Rather than making a final effort at compromise, members of the special deficit-reduction committee spent their final hours casting blame and pointing fingers, bracing for the reaction from financial markets that are already jittery over the European debt crisis.
If Congress can’t come up with a way to cut $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years, the Budget Act will do it for them unless some sort of postponement is worked out. A look at the deadlines that must be met and what happens if they’re not:
Half of the 12 lawmakers turned to the Sunday political news shows as their outlet, speaking of their effort in the past tense and accusing the other side of intransigence that they blamed for the failure to clinch a deal. There were no last-minute negotiations, no behind-closed-doors huddles, just a near-empty Capitol in which senior aides could not agree on how to formally shutter the panel by Monday night.
The only face-to-face meetings for members of the supercommittee came in the green rooms of the talk shows. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) blamed the committee’s failure on Democratic reluctance to cut into popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare. “Our Democratic friends were never able to do the entitlement reforms,” Kyl said, arguing that Democrats were the roadblock to a deal. “They weren’t going to do anything without raising taxes.”
Calling Kyl’s remarks “patently not true,” Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) accused Republicans of blocking the committee’s work by demanding an extension of George W. Bush-era tax cuts and refusing to consider significant tax increases on wealthier people. “We didn’t come here to do another tax cut to the wealthiest people while we’re [asking] fixed-income seniors to ante up more, people on Medicaid who are poor to ante up more,” he said.
Barring a last-second breakthrough, the law calls for a punitive set of $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts to kick in at the start of 2013, with half coming from national security budgets. Kyl and other lawmakers have embraced reconfiguring the automatic cuts to save the Pentagon from such steep cuts, but any movement that decreases the overall savings runs the risk of causing financial ratings agencies to downgrade the U.S. Treasury’s debt.
Senior staff members ran a last round of checks Sunday to make sure there wasn’t some final give from the other side. There wasn’t. Aides left the Capitol on Sunday evening with no clear path for shutting down the panel, which, under the committee’s rules, needed to unveil legislation before midnight Monday.
Republicans prefer releasing a joint statement from the co-chairmen, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), after the markets close Monday, fearing that formally ending their effort could set off a market reaction. Democrats were considering pushing for a brief public statement from the co-chairmen.
Almost every congressman has left Washington for the week-long Thanksgiving break, so the legislative reaction to the committee’s failure will not come until early next month. The impasse leaves a host of other must-pass items, such as extensions for unemployment insurance and the payroll tax holiday, without any vehicle for passage before year’s end.
Despite a national debt that topped $15 trillion last week, the two sides could not bridge the taxes-vs.-entitlement divide. The GOP’s passion for keeping tax rates as low as possible meant the panel’s Republicans demanded steep entitlement cuts for small-to-modest increases in tax revenue, and the Democrats fiercely guarded entitlement programs unless the Republicans gave in on higher taxes.
It was the same stumbling block that prevented President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) from reaching the “grand bargain” they negotiated over the summer, an effort to trim $4 trillion from future borrowing by the Treasury.
If Congress can’t come up with a way to cut $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years, the Budget Act will do it for them unless some sort of postponement is worked out. A look at the deadlines that must be met and what happens if they’re not:
The Obama-Boehner negotiation ended with an agreement on more than $900 billion in spending cuts to federal agency budgets over the next decade while creating the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction — tasked with finding at least $1.2 trillion more in savings and voting out a plan before Thanksgiving.
The panel of six Democrats and six Republicans, granted extraordinary fast-track powers, began convening in early September with a series of hearings and closed-door meetings. The group, however, has broken down in the past month into a series of small huddles, with a handful of lawmakers working to hit their minimum target of $1.2 trillion and others working on a smaller backup plan that would cushion the blow from the automatic spending cuts.
Neither Hensarling nor Murray formally admitted that the panel was hopelessly gridlocked, but each suggested a new effort was needed in the very near term to fix the government’s balance sheet.
“It wasn’t so much of a failure as it was a failure to seize an opportunity. . . . This nation better seize another one or we will be in big economic trouble,” Hensarling said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“I believe strongly that we still have the capability to come together to solve this problem,” Murray said on CNN”s “State of the Union. “If the supercommittee can’t do it, then I hope that Congress will. In fact, I’m committed to solving this. You can’t just ignore this crisis.”
The trigger of automatic cuts should assuage jittery financial markets, which have been on a roller-coaster ride since the summer’s debt standoff in the United States and the struggle to tame even greater fiscal quagmires in Europe. But lawmakers fear that the sentiment of a dysfunctional federal government could solidify and prompt new fear in the global markets.
After the summer-long battle over lifting the debt ceiling, Standard & Poor’s downgraded U.S. debt based on “America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective.” The supercommittee gridlock came despite its unprecedented parliamentary power — any plan winning at least seven votes would have been guaranteed a straight up-or-down vote in the House and Senate before Christmas.
“There is a real threat that not only will there be a downgrade,” Kerry said, “but that the market on Monday will look at Washington and say, ‘You guys can’t get the job done.’ And just the political confusion and gridlock is enough to say to the world: America can’t get its act together.”
Combating Rising Inequality
From The Washington Post -- November 20, 2011:
Three ways to combat rising inequality
By Lawrence Summers
There has been a strong and troubling shift in market rewards for a small minority relative to the rewards available to most citizens. A recent Congressional Budget Office study found that incomes of the top 1 percent of the U.S. population (adjusted for inflation) rose 275 percent from 1979 to 2007, while income for the middle class grew only 40 percent. Even this dismal figure overstates the fortunes of typical Americans. In 1965, only one in 20 men ages 25 to 54 was not working; by the end of this decade, it is likely to be one in six, even if a full cyclical recovery is achieved.
Another calculation suggests that if the income distribution had remained constant from 1979 to 2007, incomes of the top 1 percent would be 59 percent, or $780,000, lower and that incomes among the bottom 80 percent would be 21 percent, or more than $10,000, higher.
Those looking to remain serene in the face of these trends or who favor policies that would disproportionately cut taxes at the high end — and exacerbate inequality — assert that snapshot inequality is all right as long as there is mobility within people’s lifetimes and across generations. In fact, there is too little of both. Inequality in lifetime incomes is only marginally smaller than inequality in a single year. And intergenerational mobility in the United States is now poor by international standards.
Why has the top 1 percent done so well relative to the rest? The answer lies substantially in changes in technology and in globalization. When George Eastman revolutionized photography, he did very well, and because he needed a large number of Americans to carry out his vision, the city of Rochester, N.Y., had a thriving middle class for two generations. When Steve Jobs revolutionized personal computing, he and Apple shareholders did very well, but those shareholders are all over the world, and a much smaller benefit flowed to middle-class American workers, both because production was outsourced and because the production of computers and software was not terribly labor-intensive.
The market system distributes rewards increasingly inequitably. On one side, the debate is framed in zero-sum terms, and the disappointing lack of income growth for middle-class workers is blamed on the success of the wealthy. Those with this view should consider whether it would be better if the United States had more, or fewer, entrepreneurs like those who founded Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook. Each did contribute significantly to rising inequality. It is easy to resent the level and extent of the increase in CEO salaries, but firms that have a single owner, such as private equity firms, pay successful chief executives more than public companies do. And for all their problems, American global companies have done very well compared with those headquartered in more egalitarian societies over the past two decades. Where great fortunes are earned by providing great products or services that benefit large numbers of people, they should not be denigrated.
Meanwhile, those who call concerns about rising inequality misplaced or a product of class warfare are even further off base. The extent of the change in the income distribution is such that it is no longer true that the overall growth rate of the economy is the principal determinant of middle-class income growth — how the growth pie is distributed is at least equally important. The observation that most of the increase in inequality reflects gains for those at the very top at the expense of everyone else further belies the idea that simply strengthening the economy will reduce inequality. Focusing on American competitiveness, as many urge, could easily exacerbate inequality while doing little for most Americans if the focus is placed on measures such as corporate tax cuts or the protection of intellectual property for the benefit of companies that are not primarily producing in the United States.
We need more and better responses to rising inequality. Here are three places to start.
First, government must not facilitate increases in inequality by rewarding the wealthy with special concessions. Where governments dispose of assets or allocate licenses, preference should be on the use of auctions to which all have access. Where government provides implicit or explicit insurance, premiums should be based on the market rather than in consultation with the affected industry. Government’s general posture should be standing up for capitalism rather than for well-connected capitalists.
Second, there is scope for pro-fairness, pro-growth tax reform. The moment when more great fortunes are being created and the federal deficit is growing is hardly the time for the estate tax to be eviscerated. And there is no reason tax changes in a period of sharply rising inequality should reinforce the trends in pretax incomes produced by the marketplace.
Third, the public sector must ensure greater equity in areas of the most fundamental importance. It will always be the case in a market economy that some will have mansions, art, etc. More troubling is that middle-class students’ ability to attend college has been seriously compromised by increasing tuitions and sharp cutbacks at public universities, and that, over the past generation, a gap has opened between the life expectancy of the affluent and the ordinary.
Neither the politics of polarization nor those of noblesse oblige on behalf of the fortunate will serve to protect the interests of the middle class in the post-industrial economy.
The writer, a professor and past president at Harvard University, was Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration and economic adviser to President Obama from 2009 through 2010.
Three ways to combat rising inequality
By Lawrence Summers
There has been a strong and troubling shift in market rewards for a small minority relative to the rewards available to most citizens. A recent Congressional Budget Office study found that incomes of the top 1 percent of the U.S. population (adjusted for inflation) rose 275 percent from 1979 to 2007, while income for the middle class grew only 40 percent. Even this dismal figure overstates the fortunes of typical Americans. In 1965, only one in 20 men ages 25 to 54 was not working; by the end of this decade, it is likely to be one in six, even if a full cyclical recovery is achieved.
Another calculation suggests that if the income distribution had remained constant from 1979 to 2007, incomes of the top 1 percent would be 59 percent, or $780,000, lower and that incomes among the bottom 80 percent would be 21 percent, or more than $10,000, higher.
Those looking to remain serene in the face of these trends or who favor policies that would disproportionately cut taxes at the high end — and exacerbate inequality — assert that snapshot inequality is all right as long as there is mobility within people’s lifetimes and across generations. In fact, there is too little of both. Inequality in lifetime incomes is only marginally smaller than inequality in a single year. And intergenerational mobility in the United States is now poor by international standards.
Why has the top 1 percent done so well relative to the rest? The answer lies substantially in changes in technology and in globalization. When George Eastman revolutionized photography, he did very well, and because he needed a large number of Americans to carry out his vision, the city of Rochester, N.Y., had a thriving middle class for two generations. When Steve Jobs revolutionized personal computing, he and Apple shareholders did very well, but those shareholders are all over the world, and a much smaller benefit flowed to middle-class American workers, both because production was outsourced and because the production of computers and software was not terribly labor-intensive.
The market system distributes rewards increasingly inequitably. On one side, the debate is framed in zero-sum terms, and the disappointing lack of income growth for middle-class workers is blamed on the success of the wealthy. Those with this view should consider whether it would be better if the United States had more, or fewer, entrepreneurs like those who founded Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook. Each did contribute significantly to rising inequality. It is easy to resent the level and extent of the increase in CEO salaries, but firms that have a single owner, such as private equity firms, pay successful chief executives more than public companies do. And for all their problems, American global companies have done very well compared with those headquartered in more egalitarian societies over the past two decades. Where great fortunes are earned by providing great products or services that benefit large numbers of people, they should not be denigrated.
Meanwhile, those who call concerns about rising inequality misplaced or a product of class warfare are even further off base. The extent of the change in the income distribution is such that it is no longer true that the overall growth rate of the economy is the principal determinant of middle-class income growth — how the growth pie is distributed is at least equally important. The observation that most of the increase in inequality reflects gains for those at the very top at the expense of everyone else further belies the idea that simply strengthening the economy will reduce inequality. Focusing on American competitiveness, as many urge, could easily exacerbate inequality while doing little for most Americans if the focus is placed on measures such as corporate tax cuts or the protection of intellectual property for the benefit of companies that are not primarily producing in the United States.
We need more and better responses to rising inequality. Here are three places to start.
First, government must not facilitate increases in inequality by rewarding the wealthy with special concessions. Where governments dispose of assets or allocate licenses, preference should be on the use of auctions to which all have access. Where government provides implicit or explicit insurance, premiums should be based on the market rather than in consultation with the affected industry. Government’s general posture should be standing up for capitalism rather than for well-connected capitalists.
Second, there is scope for pro-fairness, pro-growth tax reform. The moment when more great fortunes are being created and the federal deficit is growing is hardly the time for the estate tax to be eviscerated. And there is no reason tax changes in a period of sharply rising inequality should reinforce the trends in pretax incomes produced by the marketplace.
Third, the public sector must ensure greater equity in areas of the most fundamental importance. It will always be the case in a market economy that some will have mansions, art, etc. More troubling is that middle-class students’ ability to attend college has been seriously compromised by increasing tuitions and sharp cutbacks at public universities, and that, over the past generation, a gap has opened between the life expectancy of the affluent and the ordinary.
Neither the politics of polarization nor those of noblesse oblige on behalf of the fortunate will serve to protect the interests of the middle class in the post-industrial economy.
The writer, a professor and past president at Harvard University, was Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration and economic adviser to President Obama from 2009 through 2010.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Is Fascism Conquering the USA?
From The Sarcastic Liberal: Progressive and Abrasive -- November 20, 2011:
I do not attempt to be unbiased or polite. While I hold liberal views, this in no way means that I am a Democrat; I hold the view that the Democratic Party neither holds truly liberal views nor fights for its views in the public debate.
Occupy USA: Worst Police Brutality Cases
Over the past two months, the Occupations across the country have faced an extreme response by the police relative the threat they represent. Police have attacked the occupations as though they were domestic terrorists; utilizing LRAD sound cannons, flashbang/concussion grenades, nonlethal chemical weapons, rubber bullets, beanbag cannons, and simple batons in order to break up peaceful protests.
Don't get me wrong, there are times and places where such actions are justifiable (Look at the recent Penn State riot). Violent protests are a danger to the public welfare and might very well require physical force to suppress, but nonviolent protests should not encounter such a push back. The "Occupy" movement is entirely peaceful, utilizing a type of long term sit in (Essentially a "Live In") and marches in order to make their point. There is minimal graffiti, and no rioting associated with the occupations, but rather a concern for the public safety. At the Occupy Boston site, we have voted to not only attempt to minimize the negative effects of our occupation on our neighbors, but to re-sod the area where we live after we finish using it (the grass has been destroyed by the tents) and to act as an impromptu homeless shelter (we provide clothes, food and shelter to all who come). Police cite violence and crime in the camp, which is arguably true because we do have occasional problems; we have a zero tolerance policy for violence, drugs, and alcohol, enforced by removal from camp. The Occupations are not a threat to the public, nor are they guilty of anything other than challenging the rich, a crime that is apparently punishable by violence and incarceration.
I was under the impression that we are living in America, a country where we have constitutionally protected rights, not a repressive police state. The entire purpose of the first amendment is that the government may not always like what the citizens are saying, but they must not attempt to prevent the citizen from speaking. From a purely rhetorical standpoint, have we not sanctioned other governments for suppressing speech in similar ways in the recent future (Ex. China, Iran, Libya, Egypt, etc..)?
I am personally biased towards the Occupations due to my heavy involvement with the Boston occupation, so look at these videos and come to your own conclusions: Excessive force, or justifiable riot control.
This video is possibly the most egregious of a long series of egregious police brutality videos; in it, Kayvan Sabeghi, an Iraq war veteran is beaten by the police; to add insult to injury, Sabeghi was charged with resisting arrest. The police beat Sabeghi so badly that his spleen ruptures and then he is refused medical attention for hours in jail. A ruptured spleen only occurs when EXTREME force is exerted on the organ and is unbelievably painful. I seriously doubt that the police failed to notice that Sabeghi was in agony and unable to walk while incustody, thus the only conclusion is that they didn't care. Sabeghi was very close to the police before the incident, but he was not obstructing them, merely walking in step with them; his actions don't even get to the standard of obstructing traffic, never mind interfering with police business. When the officer begins to beat Sabeghi, he doesn't simply let him run, but follows him and continues the assault. The actions of the police officer go so far beyond misconduct that they enter the realm of criminal assault. Police officers are not allowed to indiscriminately beat protesters until they suffer severe injury (never mind chasing after and beating a man fleeing for his life).
In this video, notice how the police officer not only hits the legal observer (designated by the green cap) with the scooter, but parks it ON his leg. Once the scooter is parked on the guy's leg, the officer calmly walks away until he manages to kick the scooter over. After the observer manages to dislodge the scooter, the police beat him with batons until he loses consciousness and then arrest him, bringing him to the hospital in cuffs; the charges are resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. I don't even think that I need to comment on how wrong this is and if you require explanation as to why this is wrong, please seek professional help.
This video was shot on the quad at the University of California Davis. The protesters were engaging in a sit in, when they received a three hour warning that they would need to disperse. The important factors in this situation are that the protesters are UC Davis students, in their own quad and there was no allegation of violence or property damage by the police. This video was shot when the order to disperse time limit was up. Clearly, the police officer doing the spraying is enjoying himself (look at the flourish of the can before he starts spraying), and none of the police officers consider the students a threat. The police officers turn their backs upon the students in numerous occasions, not something that you would do if you consider the person threatening enough to pepper spray.
This video is of the famous Scott Olson shooting in Oakland, Ca. The man on the ground is Olsen after he was hit in the face by a tear gas canister. Firing a gas canister, similar to a filled tin can, directly at a crowd is very dangerous as it can break bones and damage soft tissue. Olsen was shot directly in the face and when you consider his location with that of the police line, the police must have been firing directly at him. While the shooting of Olsen could have been accidental, what comes after was clearly not. Notice how the police observe Olsen laying on the ground, not helping, while waiting for the protesters to come back to help. Once the protesters come back to drag Olsen to safety and medical attention, the police throw a flash bang directly into the group. How were the concerned protesters a threat while they were tending to their fallen friend? I would like to point out the similarities between this strategy and that of terrorists worldwide: A common terrorist tactic is to detonate a smaller explosive first, then wait for the first responders to arrive before detonating a larger blast.
Who hasn't seen this video, shot on Wall street, of women being corralled and pepper sprayed? The women are clearly boxed in and not a threat to anybody, but Anthony Bologna still comes by and assaults them with pepper spray. Bologna lost ten vacation days and received a transfer to Staten Island (closer to his home), where he was promoted to a special projects coordinator(with a raise). Sadly, the only lingering consequences of his reprehensible actions is the social stigma he will receive as being know as "That guy who pepper sprayed those women" and the grief that Anonymous can throw his way.
This video was taken on the college campus of Berkeley. The police actions can be broken down into two important parts: the crowd action and the arrest action. The "crowd control" methods utilized by the police in this situation are to crowd the students into a cluster and jab them with batons. The students are not resisting arrest, nor are they able to move away. The only purpose of this action is to inflict pain on the protesters while preventing them from escaping; a goal that is wholly outside of law enforcement's charter in this country (although perfectly fine in North Korea). Police can use force like this in riots, but this is clearly not a riot. Once several people are arrested, the police assault those who they have in custody. Look at the video at 1:20, and you will clearly see a cuffed and held protester being beaten by a police officer for no apparent reason. I don't care what you are protesting or where, the tactics shown by the police in this video are needlessly aggressive and sadistic.
What the hell has happened in this country, where corporations are considered people and given the right to speak, while people are treated without humanity while their right to speak is taken away?
I do not attempt to be unbiased or polite. While I hold liberal views, this in no way means that I am a Democrat; I hold the view that the Democratic Party neither holds truly liberal views nor fights for its views in the public debate.
Occupy USA: Worst Police Brutality Cases
Over the past two months, the Occupations across the country have faced an extreme response by the police relative the threat they represent. Police have attacked the occupations as though they were domestic terrorists; utilizing LRAD sound cannons, flashbang/concussion grenades, nonlethal chemical weapons, rubber bullets, beanbag cannons, and simple batons in order to break up peaceful protests.
Don't get me wrong, there are times and places where such actions are justifiable (Look at the recent Penn State riot). Violent protests are a danger to the public welfare and might very well require physical force to suppress, but nonviolent protests should not encounter such a push back. The "Occupy" movement is entirely peaceful, utilizing a type of long term sit in (Essentially a "Live In") and marches in order to make their point. There is minimal graffiti, and no rioting associated with the occupations, but rather a concern for the public safety. At the Occupy Boston site, we have voted to not only attempt to minimize the negative effects of our occupation on our neighbors, but to re-sod the area where we live after we finish using it (the grass has been destroyed by the tents) and to act as an impromptu homeless shelter (we provide clothes, food and shelter to all who come). Police cite violence and crime in the camp, which is arguably true because we do have occasional problems; we have a zero tolerance policy for violence, drugs, and alcohol, enforced by removal from camp. The Occupations are not a threat to the public, nor are they guilty of anything other than challenging the rich, a crime that is apparently punishable by violence and incarceration.
I was under the impression that we are living in America, a country where we have constitutionally protected rights, not a repressive police state. The entire purpose of the first amendment is that the government may not always like what the citizens are saying, but they must not attempt to prevent the citizen from speaking. From a purely rhetorical standpoint, have we not sanctioned other governments for suppressing speech in similar ways in the recent future (Ex. China, Iran, Libya, Egypt, etc..)?
I am personally biased towards the Occupations due to my heavy involvement with the Boston occupation, so look at these videos and come to your own conclusions: Excessive force, or justifiable riot control.
This video is possibly the most egregious of a long series of egregious police brutality videos; in it, Kayvan Sabeghi, an Iraq war veteran is beaten by the police; to add insult to injury, Sabeghi was charged with resisting arrest. The police beat Sabeghi so badly that his spleen ruptures and then he is refused medical attention for hours in jail. A ruptured spleen only occurs when EXTREME force is exerted on the organ and is unbelievably painful. I seriously doubt that the police failed to notice that Sabeghi was in agony and unable to walk while incustody, thus the only conclusion is that they didn't care. Sabeghi was very close to the police before the incident, but he was not obstructing them, merely walking in step with them; his actions don't even get to the standard of obstructing traffic, never mind interfering with police business. When the officer begins to beat Sabeghi, he doesn't simply let him run, but follows him and continues the assault. The actions of the police officer go so far beyond misconduct that they enter the realm of criminal assault. Police officers are not allowed to indiscriminately beat protesters until they suffer severe injury (never mind chasing after and beating a man fleeing for his life).
In this video, notice how the police officer not only hits the legal observer (designated by the green cap) with the scooter, but parks it ON his leg. Once the scooter is parked on the guy's leg, the officer calmly walks away until he manages to kick the scooter over. After the observer manages to dislodge the scooter, the police beat him with batons until he loses consciousness and then arrest him, bringing him to the hospital in cuffs; the charges are resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. I don't even think that I need to comment on how wrong this is and if you require explanation as to why this is wrong, please seek professional help.
This video was shot on the quad at the University of California Davis. The protesters were engaging in a sit in, when they received a three hour warning that they would need to disperse. The important factors in this situation are that the protesters are UC Davis students, in their own quad and there was no allegation of violence or property damage by the police. This video was shot when the order to disperse time limit was up. Clearly, the police officer doing the spraying is enjoying himself (look at the flourish of the can before he starts spraying), and none of the police officers consider the students a threat. The police officers turn their backs upon the students in numerous occasions, not something that you would do if you consider the person threatening enough to pepper spray.
This video is of the famous Scott Olson shooting in Oakland, Ca. The man on the ground is Olsen after he was hit in the face by a tear gas canister. Firing a gas canister, similar to a filled tin can, directly at a crowd is very dangerous as it can break bones and damage soft tissue. Olsen was shot directly in the face and when you consider his location with that of the police line, the police must have been firing directly at him. While the shooting of Olsen could have been accidental, what comes after was clearly not. Notice how the police observe Olsen laying on the ground, not helping, while waiting for the protesters to come back to help. Once the protesters come back to drag Olsen to safety and medical attention, the police throw a flash bang directly into the group. How were the concerned protesters a threat while they were tending to their fallen friend? I would like to point out the similarities between this strategy and that of terrorists worldwide: A common terrorist tactic is to detonate a smaller explosive first, then wait for the first responders to arrive before detonating a larger blast.
Who hasn't seen this video, shot on Wall street, of women being corralled and pepper sprayed? The women are clearly boxed in and not a threat to anybody, but Anthony Bologna still comes by and assaults them with pepper spray. Bologna lost ten vacation days and received a transfer to Staten Island (closer to his home), where he was promoted to a special projects coordinator(with a raise). Sadly, the only lingering consequences of his reprehensible actions is the social stigma he will receive as being know as "That guy who pepper sprayed those women" and the grief that Anonymous can throw his way.
This video was taken on the college campus of Berkeley. The police actions can be broken down into two important parts: the crowd action and the arrest action. The "crowd control" methods utilized by the police in this situation are to crowd the students into a cluster and jab them with batons. The students are not resisting arrest, nor are they able to move away. The only purpose of this action is to inflict pain on the protesters while preventing them from escaping; a goal that is wholly outside of law enforcement's charter in this country (although perfectly fine in North Korea). Police can use force like this in riots, but this is clearly not a riot. Once several people are arrested, the police assault those who they have in custody. Look at the video at 1:20, and you will clearly see a cuffed and held protester being beaten by a police officer for no apparent reason. I don't care what you are protesting or where, the tactics shown by the police in this video are needlessly aggressive and sadistic.
What the hell has happened in this country, where corporations are considered people and given the right to speak, while people are treated without humanity while their right to speak is taken away?
Congressional Republicans Continue to Dump America Down the Garbage Chute and Throw Americans Out to the Street like Trash
From The Washington Post -- November 19, 2011:
Supercommittee likely to admit defeat on debt deal
By Lori Montgomery and Rosalind S. Helderman
The congressional committee tasked with reducing the federal deficit is poised to admit defeat as soon as Monday, and its unfinished business will set up a year-end battle over emergency jobless benefits and an expiring payroll tax holiday.
Those provisions are among a host of measures set to lapse at the end of December. During nearly three months of negotiations, the “supercommittee” had been weighing whether to extend at least some of them as part of a broader plan to shave a minimum of $1.2 trillion over the next decade.
Democrats and many economists consider particularly urgent the need to extend jobless benefits and the one-year payroll tax cut. With national unemployment stuck at 9 percent, and the ranks of the long-term unemployed at record levels, the government is providing up to 99 weeks of support to about 3.5 million people.
Meanwhile, the payroll tax cut, enacted last December, allows most American workers to keep an additional 2 percent of their earnings, a boon to tight household budgets as well as the economic recovery. Economists at J.P. Morgan Chase recently estimated that if Congress does not extend the two measures, economic growth next year could take a hit of as much as two percentage points — enough to revive fears of a recession.
Time is also running out for doctors who see Medicare patients. These physicians are scheduled to absorb a 30 percent cut in government reimbursements in January. A long list of tax breaks, including an inflation adjustment that protects more than 30 million families from paying the alternative minimum tax, also will be eliminated unless Congress acts.
Although many of the expiring provisions have received bipartisan support in the past, this year they face a welter of political obstacles, none more important than cost. Extending them all through 2012 threatens to add nearly $300 billion to annual budget deficits — and therefore to future borrowing — darkening the nation’s fiscal outlook at the very moment lawmakers had hoped to reassure financial markets with fresh savings.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, said he was uneasy about extending the payroll tax holiday, calling the national debt “a greater threat to us” than the weak economy.
“If the supercommittee fails, I think there will be a stark realization by every member of the U.S. Senate that we’re at the end of the year and these complex challenges have not been dealt with,” Sessions said. “It’s likely to be a really difficult period.”
The policy battle comes as the parties are gearing up for a high-stakes election season dominated by economic concerns, with both the White House and Congress in play. The political pressure that has helped keep the 12-member supercommittee from compromising on hot-button issues such as taxes is sure to grow more intense.
The panel remained gridlocked Saturday with the clock ticking toward a deadline of midnight Monday. Although the official deadline is midnight Wednesday, the committee is legally barred from voting on any plan that was not made public at least 48 hours in advance.
Republicans on the supercommittee held a conference call Saturday morning, and aides said members from both parties continued to talk by phone. But neither side was predicting a last-minute breakthrough. Instead, seven panel members booked appearances on the Sunday talk shows, as both sides readied their best arguments for why the other is at fault.
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), a panel member, spent the day in his Capitol office. “The hope was that even at this late date, they could take things that had been scored [by the Congressional Budget Office] and put them together,” he told reporters as he left for the evening. “That gets pretty doubtful at this point,” he said.
If the supercommittee does not finish on time, it would lose special procedural powers to push a tax-and-spending plan through a bitterly divided House and Senate, leaving congressional leaders without an easy path to compromise on the expiring provisions — and a potentially nasty holiday-season fight on their hands.
“We don’t have the answers,” Sen. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, conceded recently as it became evident that the panel’s effort had stalled. “The supercommittee was put in place” to develop “a strategy to take us through the election” by resolving the toughest outstanding budget problems, he said. “If they don’t succeed, then we have to address these issues.”
Durbin said he is “prepared to add to the deficit at this moment” to extend the economic measures and “bring us out of this recession, to put people to work.” But many Democrats have conflicting emotions about the measures, especially the one-year payroll tax cut.
In addition to adding more than $100 billion to budget deficits, the tax cut would reduce Social Security’s dedicated financing stream, making the program dependent on congressional appropriations at a critical moment.
“There are a lot of other casualties that will be collateral damage with the failure of the supercommittee,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), a key House moderate, adding that the payroll tax cut would be a particularly “heavy lift.”
“You don’t want to do anything at this juncture to retard what seems like it’s an uptick in the economic growth,” Connolly said. “But on the other hand, we’re worried about Social Security. Do we really want to be starving it of revenue?”
Republicans are also divided. Rep. Nan A.S. Hayworth (N.Y.) said she is “extremely sympathetic to extending” the payroll tax holiday, but Rep. Jason Chaffetz (Utah) said he would have trouble supporting it without matching cuts in spending.
“I’m in favor of lower taxes. But, when you don’t couple it with a spending decrease, it’s a real problem,” Chaffetz said. “And we don’t seem to be able to cut anything around here.”
President Obama has demanded a more ambitious economic package that would, among other things, expand the payroll tax cut to employers as well as workers and overhaul the unemployment insurance system. In September, he called on the supercommittee to come up with a way to cover the $447 billion cost so the package wouldn’t increase budget deficits. Obama suggested raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy.
Democrats on the supercommittee pressed to use savings from the drawdown of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to cover the cost of economic measures. But Republicans on the panel wanted to use the war savings to cover the cost of fixing the alternative minimum tax (AMT) and protecting payments to doctors who see Medicare patients.
Without the political cover of a supercommittee deal to reduce borrowing by the $1.2 trillion target, aides in both parties say it would be difficult to claim savings for any purpose from what some lawmakers have taken to calling “the overseas contingency account.” Because the decision has been made to bring the troops home, many budget analysts argue that the money — as much as $900 billion over the next decade — was never going to be spent anyway. Using war savings to “pay for” other priorities is therefore widely considered an accounting gimmick that is unlikely to pass muster in the House or the Senate.
While December is shaping up as a critical month, lobbyists and senior aides say they expect lawmakers to put off some decisions until next year. For example, although the inflation adjustment for the AMT is set to expire on Dec. 31, most people would not have to pay the higher tax until April 2013. That leaves plenty of time for Congress to fix it.
Dozens of expiring tax breaks for businesses and individuals, collectively known as the “tax extenders,” also could be revived retroactively.
Lawmakers may want to delay debate on the tax extenders for another reason, said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group. Many of the breaks are designed to benefit narrow home-state interests, such as NASCAR racetracks, racehorse breeders and ethanol producers. Those are precisely the sorts of provisions that have been excoriated throughout this year’s debate over the debt. Both parties are now firmly on record as being in favor of a simpler tax code, stripped of such items.
Said Ellis: “To have gone through this whole wailing and rending of garments and gnashing of teeth that the supercommittee process has elicited and then to turn around and increase the deficit by extending a bunch of tax breaks — many of which are for special interests — would just look terrible.”
Supercommittee likely to admit defeat on debt deal
By Lori Montgomery and Rosalind S. Helderman
The congressional committee tasked with reducing the federal deficit is poised to admit defeat as soon as Monday, and its unfinished business will set up a year-end battle over emergency jobless benefits and an expiring payroll tax holiday.
Those provisions are among a host of measures set to lapse at the end of December. During nearly three months of negotiations, the “supercommittee” had been weighing whether to extend at least some of them as part of a broader plan to shave a minimum of $1.2 trillion over the next decade.
Democrats and many economists consider particularly urgent the need to extend jobless benefits and the one-year payroll tax cut. With national unemployment stuck at 9 percent, and the ranks of the long-term unemployed at record levels, the government is providing up to 99 weeks of support to about 3.5 million people.
Meanwhile, the payroll tax cut, enacted last December, allows most American workers to keep an additional 2 percent of their earnings, a boon to tight household budgets as well as the economic recovery. Economists at J.P. Morgan Chase recently estimated that if Congress does not extend the two measures, economic growth next year could take a hit of as much as two percentage points — enough to revive fears of a recession.
Time is also running out for doctors who see Medicare patients. These physicians are scheduled to absorb a 30 percent cut in government reimbursements in January. A long list of tax breaks, including an inflation adjustment that protects more than 30 million families from paying the alternative minimum tax, also will be eliminated unless Congress acts.
Although many of the expiring provisions have received bipartisan support in the past, this year they face a welter of political obstacles, none more important than cost. Extending them all through 2012 threatens to add nearly $300 billion to annual budget deficits — and therefore to future borrowing — darkening the nation’s fiscal outlook at the very moment lawmakers had hoped to reassure financial markets with fresh savings.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, said he was uneasy about extending the payroll tax holiday, calling the national debt “a greater threat to us” than the weak economy.
“If the supercommittee fails, I think there will be a stark realization by every member of the U.S. Senate that we’re at the end of the year and these complex challenges have not been dealt with,” Sessions said. “It’s likely to be a really difficult period.”
The policy battle comes as the parties are gearing up for a high-stakes election season dominated by economic concerns, with both the White House and Congress in play. The political pressure that has helped keep the 12-member supercommittee from compromising on hot-button issues such as taxes is sure to grow more intense.
The panel remained gridlocked Saturday with the clock ticking toward a deadline of midnight Monday. Although the official deadline is midnight Wednesday, the committee is legally barred from voting on any plan that was not made public at least 48 hours in advance.
Republicans on the supercommittee held a conference call Saturday morning, and aides said members from both parties continued to talk by phone. But neither side was predicting a last-minute breakthrough. Instead, seven panel members booked appearances on the Sunday talk shows, as both sides readied their best arguments for why the other is at fault.
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), a panel member, spent the day in his Capitol office. “The hope was that even at this late date, they could take things that had been scored [by the Congressional Budget Office] and put them together,” he told reporters as he left for the evening. “That gets pretty doubtful at this point,” he said.
If the supercommittee does not finish on time, it would lose special procedural powers to push a tax-and-spending plan through a bitterly divided House and Senate, leaving congressional leaders without an easy path to compromise on the expiring provisions — and a potentially nasty holiday-season fight on their hands.
“We don’t have the answers,” Sen. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, conceded recently as it became evident that the panel’s effort had stalled. “The supercommittee was put in place” to develop “a strategy to take us through the election” by resolving the toughest outstanding budget problems, he said. “If they don’t succeed, then we have to address these issues.”
Durbin said he is “prepared to add to the deficit at this moment” to extend the economic measures and “bring us out of this recession, to put people to work.” But many Democrats have conflicting emotions about the measures, especially the one-year payroll tax cut.
In addition to adding more than $100 billion to budget deficits, the tax cut would reduce Social Security’s dedicated financing stream, making the program dependent on congressional appropriations at a critical moment.
“There are a lot of other casualties that will be collateral damage with the failure of the supercommittee,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), a key House moderate, adding that the payroll tax cut would be a particularly “heavy lift.”
“You don’t want to do anything at this juncture to retard what seems like it’s an uptick in the economic growth,” Connolly said. “But on the other hand, we’re worried about Social Security. Do we really want to be starving it of revenue?”
Republicans are also divided. Rep. Nan A.S. Hayworth (N.Y.) said she is “extremely sympathetic to extending” the payroll tax holiday, but Rep. Jason Chaffetz (Utah) said he would have trouble supporting it without matching cuts in spending.
“I’m in favor of lower taxes. But, when you don’t couple it with a spending decrease, it’s a real problem,” Chaffetz said. “And we don’t seem to be able to cut anything around here.”
President Obama has demanded a more ambitious economic package that would, among other things, expand the payroll tax cut to employers as well as workers and overhaul the unemployment insurance system. In September, he called on the supercommittee to come up with a way to cover the $447 billion cost so the package wouldn’t increase budget deficits. Obama suggested raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy.
Democrats on the supercommittee pressed to use savings from the drawdown of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to cover the cost of economic measures. But Republicans on the panel wanted to use the war savings to cover the cost of fixing the alternative minimum tax (AMT) and protecting payments to doctors who see Medicare patients.
Without the political cover of a supercommittee deal to reduce borrowing by the $1.2 trillion target, aides in both parties say it would be difficult to claim savings for any purpose from what some lawmakers have taken to calling “the overseas contingency account.” Because the decision has been made to bring the troops home, many budget analysts argue that the money — as much as $900 billion over the next decade — was never going to be spent anyway. Using war savings to “pay for” other priorities is therefore widely considered an accounting gimmick that is unlikely to pass muster in the House or the Senate.
While December is shaping up as a critical month, lobbyists and senior aides say they expect lawmakers to put off some decisions until next year. For example, although the inflation adjustment for the AMT is set to expire on Dec. 31, most people would not have to pay the higher tax until April 2013. That leaves plenty of time for Congress to fix it.
Dozens of expiring tax breaks for businesses and individuals, collectively known as the “tax extenders,” also could be revived retroactively.
Lawmakers may want to delay debate on the tax extenders for another reason, said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group. Many of the breaks are designed to benefit narrow home-state interests, such as NASCAR racetracks, racehorse breeders and ethanol producers. Those are precisely the sorts of provisions that have been excoriated throughout this year’s debate over the debt. Both parties are now firmly on record as being in favor of a simpler tax code, stripped of such items.
Said Ellis: “To have gone through this whole wailing and rending of garments and gnashing of teeth that the supercommittee process has elicited and then to turn around and increase the deficit by extending a bunch of tax breaks — many of which are for special interests — would just look terrible.”
The Super Crap-Box Fomerly Known as the Congressional Super-Committee
From Politico -- November 20, 2011:
BACKSTAGE - HOW THE SUPERCOMMITTEE FLUNKED :
The supercommittee last met Nov. 1 - three weeks ago! It was a public hearing featuring a history lesson, "Overview of Previous Debt Proposals," with Alan Simpson, Erskine Bowles, Pete Domenici and Alice Rivlin. The last PRIVATE meeting was Oct. 26. You might as well stop reading right there: The 12 members (6 House, 6 Senate; 6 R, 6 D) were never going to strike a bargain, grand or otherwise, if they weren't talking to each other. Yes, we get that real deal-making occurs in small groups. But there never WAS a functioning supercommittee: There was Republican posturing and Democratic posturing, with some side conversations across the aisle.
Playbook was a superoptimist: We thought that human factors would prod ambitious members to crack the code, and that the committee would take on its own ecology, regardless of pressures from above or below. But we were punk'd: The supercommittee - one of the most fascinating government experiments of this generation -- never existed as a dynamic political organism.
The official deadline for action by the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction is Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. The real deadline is Monday night, since any plan has to be posted for 48 hours before it's voted on. So conversations this weekend revolved around how to shut this turkey down. Aides expect some "Hail Mary" offers on Sunday, and there's something on the stove that could be inoffensive to both sides. But the committee may not even have a fig-leaf agreement to announce. Total, embarrassing failure. The markets and the country will hate it.
The most likely scenario: The co-chairs, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), on Monday will issue a short joint statement with the basic message: "This marriage is over." Other possibilities are to hold a short going-out-of-business hearing, or to vote down a Republican proposal and a Democratic proposal. But one aide says: "Few, if any, one either side, want a final, ugly food fight ... The chairs are working to figure out how to put the appropriate period on the sentence and do so in the most dignified manner possible. ... [Don't expect] a showdown of dueling voters and a ton of fingerpointing."
Both sides recognize that the optics are disastrous. The Dem. aide continued: "They don't feel the need to burn the place down as they turn off the lights."
The concept of the supercommittee, as POLITICO's Jake Sherman articulated in an email: "[I]f you put 12 serious members in a room, no distractions, easy way through the Senate [direct path for bill], they'd be able to get something." BUT THAT NEVER HAPPENED: The 12 members never had specific, hot-box, come-to-Jesus discussions. It was all white noise. Neither side was willing to jump first, and the two didn't have the capacity to jump together.
One Democrat said Murray "had a really great relationship with Hensarling. They had a very productive relationship -- well, I guess, not 'productive' in the sense of producing a deal at the end. ... [Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John] Kerry [D-Mass.] was his diplomatic self: very active in trying to keep the channels of communication open and feeling the sides out."
A senator told us the supercommittee should have gotten serious sooner - made some tough choices on parameters at the beginning, then figured out how to get there. But that implies committee members got serious at the end. Instead, they were sniping about what was an "offer" and what was a "conversation." When one side claimed a breakthrough, the opposition emailed reporters with the subject line: " Old News Ain't News."
The supercommittee even fooled itself. "Both sides at various times, after ad hoc conversations, felt like we were making progress in the evening," recalled a GOP participant, "before coming back in the morning and finding, 'We can't actually do that.'" A Democratic participant: "It became clear on our end that this all came down to [insistence on extending] the Bush tax cuts for Republicans, and that was the immovable object at the end of the day."
Democrats have almost the same beefs, and even express them similarly. A top Dem. aide : "The Democrats on the committee didn't feel like they had a willing partner in negotiations because revenue was never a serious component of discussion. ... [W]e've seen offers, and none of those offers are legitimate or are plans that would require the wealthiest Americans to sacrifice along with everybody else. ... Democrats came into this in the spirit of, 'We can make some hard choices around entitlements. We can make some painful decisions and we can take some guff from the left.' And I think that throughout the process, they did that. If you look at MoveOn and AARP and even the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, we took a lot of hits from the left on the entitlement reforms that we put forward ."
One Democrat said the supercommittee structure "was a kind of diffuse, horizontal ... You had a lot of folks trying to take initiative and be the one to get the deal done."
Republicans usually met in the Cannon House Office Building, where Hensarling has his office as chair of the House Republican Conference. The GOP prepared elaborate plans: not just how much the government could make from auctioning spectrum, but what part would go on the block, and what part would be reserved for public safety. Hensarling repeatedly told the GOP members: "I'm an old Boy Scout. I like to be prepared."
Democrats usually met in S-116, in one of Kerry's Foreign Relations conference rooms. Murray - the Democratic chair, who also chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee - was described by one participant as "the police ... the voice of our base." Another Democrat put it more gently: "She is really influenced by the constituents that she represents. Throughout this process, she had these conversations with people about, 'My Social Security is on the line.' So she really felt a very heavy burden to do something, but to do something in a way that was going to be fair to the people that she's made a career out of representing. She made some really difficult choices, and she felt like she did enough that if Republicans reciprocated, there was an opportunity for a deal. ... She's one of those people who believes that while it certainly seems like Washington is broken, it has to work."
Two supercommittee members - Reps. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) -- never really checked into the conversation, according to numerous participants on both sides. A Democrat explained: "There's a basic threshold for our guys that any deal has to be better than what would happen with no deal. There were some folks who never really saw us get close to [that] threshold."
Through all this, the White House was mostly hands-off. One Democrat said President Obama gave the committee "a lot of autonomy." Another Democrat: "It was kind of the opposite of the debt ceiling. Instead of really haggling, inserting himself into the actual haggling back-and-forth, he intervened kind of surgically to draw clear lines at a couple points that we felt put us in a good negotiating position."
Speaker John Boehner, elliptically in public and explicitly in private, had given Republicans top cover to raise revenues in return for tax reform. "This has always been a question of scale," a top GOP aide explained. "If they were willing to go a little further on entitlements, we'd see what we can do on revenues. That was the way it would have to work. What we found was, they needed a trillion-plus in revenues, and weren't willing to do anywhere near that on entitlements."
Republicans pat themselves on the back for a plan - floated by supercommittee member Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), a former president of the Club for Growth - that would, in the GOP euphemism, "lead to additional revenues." As one aide recalled: "We thought we had found the sweet spot: The right was pissed, but not too pissed. The mainstream media was giving us credit for getting out of our comfort zone." At Tuesday's regular meeting of House Republicans, Hensarling gave a detailed description of the plan, and got applause.
But Democrats sensed the Republicans were getting pushback, either from leaders or rank and file. A Dem. aide: "What you saw was over the course of last weekend was members getting somewhat close to a deal. [There were] empty Senate office buildings, empty House buildings, members meeting casually to talk about this. ... Once the House came back into town, the negotiating stance of those House Republicans radically changed. ... At the end of the day, it was clear that there was nothing that they could say 'yes' to."
A Democratic aide had this eulogy for the supercommittee: "The worm has turned a little bit. The national conversation now is about income inequality and about jobs, and it's not really about cutting the size of government anymore or cutting spending. 2010 gave one answer to that question. But 2012 will give another, and we've got to see what it is."
BACKSTAGE - HOW THE SUPERCOMMITTEE FLUNKED :
The supercommittee last met Nov. 1 - three weeks ago! It was a public hearing featuring a history lesson, "Overview of Previous Debt Proposals," with Alan Simpson, Erskine Bowles, Pete Domenici and Alice Rivlin. The last PRIVATE meeting was Oct. 26. You might as well stop reading right there: The 12 members (6 House, 6 Senate; 6 R, 6 D) were never going to strike a bargain, grand or otherwise, if they weren't talking to each other. Yes, we get that real deal-making occurs in small groups. But there never WAS a functioning supercommittee: There was Republican posturing and Democratic posturing, with some side conversations across the aisle.
Playbook was a superoptimist: We thought that human factors would prod ambitious members to crack the code, and that the committee would take on its own ecology, regardless of pressures from above or below. But we were punk'd: The supercommittee - one of the most fascinating government experiments of this generation -- never existed as a dynamic political organism.
The official deadline for action by the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction is Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. The real deadline is Monday night, since any plan has to be posted for 48 hours before it's voted on. So conversations this weekend revolved around how to shut this turkey down. Aides expect some "Hail Mary" offers on Sunday, and there's something on the stove that could be inoffensive to both sides. But the committee may not even have a fig-leaf agreement to announce. Total, embarrassing failure. The markets and the country will hate it.
The most likely scenario: The co-chairs, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), on Monday will issue a short joint statement with the basic message: "This marriage is over." Other possibilities are to hold a short going-out-of-business hearing, or to vote down a Republican proposal and a Democratic proposal. But one aide says: "Few, if any, one either side, want a final, ugly food fight ... The chairs are working to figure out how to put the appropriate period on the sentence and do so in the most dignified manner possible. ... [Don't expect] a showdown of dueling voters and a ton of fingerpointing."
Both sides recognize that the optics are disastrous. The Dem. aide continued: "They don't feel the need to burn the place down as they turn off the lights."
The concept of the supercommittee, as POLITICO's Jake Sherman articulated in an email: "[I]f you put 12 serious members in a room, no distractions, easy way through the Senate [direct path for bill], they'd be able to get something." BUT THAT NEVER HAPPENED: The 12 members never had specific, hot-box, come-to-Jesus discussions. It was all white noise. Neither side was willing to jump first, and the two didn't have the capacity to jump together.
One Democrat said Murray "had a really great relationship with Hensarling. They had a very productive relationship -- well, I guess, not 'productive' in the sense of producing a deal at the end. ... [Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John] Kerry [D-Mass.] was his diplomatic self: very active in trying to keep the channels of communication open and feeling the sides out."
A senator told us the supercommittee should have gotten serious sooner - made some tough choices on parameters at the beginning, then figured out how to get there. But that implies committee members got serious at the end. Instead, they were sniping about what was an "offer" and what was a "conversation." When one side claimed a breakthrough, the opposition emailed reporters with the subject line: "
The supercommittee even fooled itself. "Both sides at various times, after ad hoc conversations, felt like we were making progress in the evening," recalled a GOP participant, "before coming back in the morning and finding, 'We can't actually do that.'" A Democratic participant: "It became clear on our end that this all came down to [insistence on extending] the Bush tax cuts for Republicans, and that was the immovable object at the end of the day."
Democrats have almost the same beefs, and even express them similarly. A top Dem. aide : "The Democrats on the committee didn't feel like they had a willing partner in negotiations because revenue was never a serious component of discussion. ... [W]e've seen offers, and none of those offers are legitimate or are plans that would require the wealthiest Americans to sacrifice along with everybody else. ... Democrats came into this in the spirit of, 'We can make some hard choices around entitlements. We can make some painful decisions and we can take some guff from the left.' And I think that throughout the process, they did that. If you look at MoveOn and AARP and even the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, we took a lot of hits from the left on the entitlement reforms that we put forward ."
One Democrat said the supercommittee structure "was a kind of diffuse, horizontal ... You had a lot of folks trying to take initiative and be the one to get the deal done."
Republicans usually met in the Cannon House Office Building, where Hensarling has his office as chair of the House Republican Conference. The GOP prepared elaborate plans: not just how much the government could make from auctioning spectrum, but what part would go on the block, and what part would be reserved for public safety. Hensarling repeatedly told the GOP members: "I'm an old Boy Scout. I like to be prepared."
Democrats usually met in S-116, in one of Kerry's Foreign Relations conference rooms. Murray - the Democratic chair, who also chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee - was described by one participant as "the police ... the voice of our base." Another Democrat put it more gently: "She is really influenced by the constituents that she represents. Throughout this process, she had these conversations with people about, 'My Social Security is on the line.' So she really felt a very heavy burden to do something, but to do something in a way that was going to be fair to the people that she's made a career out of representing. She made some really difficult choices, and she felt like she did enough that if Republicans reciprocated, there was an opportunity for a deal. ... She's one of those people who believes that while it certainly seems like Washington is broken, it has to work."
Two supercommittee members - Reps. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) -- never really checked into the conversation, according to numerous participants on both sides. A Democrat explained: "There's a basic threshold for our guys that any deal has to be better than what would happen with no deal. There were some folks who never really saw us get close to [that] threshold."
Through all this, the White House was mostly hands-off. One Democrat said President Obama gave the committee "a lot of autonomy." Another Democrat: "It was kind of the opposite of the debt ceiling. Instead of really haggling, inserting himself into the actual haggling back-and-forth, he intervened kind of surgically to draw clear lines at a couple points that we felt put us in a good negotiating position."
Speaker John Boehner, elliptically in public and explicitly in private, had given Republicans top cover to raise revenues in return for tax reform. "This has always been a question of scale," a top GOP aide explained. "If they were willing to go a little further on entitlements, we'd see what we can do on revenues. That was the way it would have to work. What we found was, they needed a trillion-plus in revenues, and weren't willing to do anywhere near that on entitlements."
Republicans pat themselves on the back for a plan - floated by supercommittee member Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), a former president of the Club for Growth - that would, in the GOP euphemism, "lead to additional revenues." As one aide recalled: "We thought we had found the sweet spot: The right was pissed, but not too pissed. The mainstream media was giving us credit for getting out of our comfort zone." At Tuesday's regular meeting of House Republicans, Hensarling gave a detailed description of the plan, and got applause.
But Democrats sensed the Republicans were getting pushback, either from leaders or rank and file. A Dem. aide: "What you saw was over the course of last weekend was members getting somewhat close to a deal. [There were] empty Senate office buildings, empty House buildings, members meeting casually to talk about this. ... Once the House came back into town, the negotiating stance of those House Republicans radically changed. ... At the end of the day, it was clear that there was nothing that they could say 'yes' to."
A Democratic aide had this eulogy for the supercommittee: "The worm has turned a little bit. The national conversation now is about income inequality and about jobs, and it's not really about cutting the size of government anymore or cutting spending. 2010 gave one answer to that question. But 2012 will give another, and we've got to see what it is."
Welcome to the New American Fascism (formerly "Conservatism")
Fourteen Defining Characteristics Of Fascism
By Dr. Lawrence Britt
Source Free Inquiry.co
Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the Fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread
domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.
6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.
9. Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
10. Labor Power is Suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.
By Dr. Lawrence Britt
Source Free Inquiry.co
Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the Fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread
domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.
6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.
9. Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
10. Labor Power is Suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
The Creepy Right-Wing Losers Who Are Attacking Occupy Wall Street
From SALON -- NOV 18, 2011:
The bizarre history of the OWS counter-protesters
A Fox contributor and failed talk radio host with a penchant for publicity-seeking takes to the streets against OWS
When brothers John and Derek Tabacco showed up at the big Occupy Wall Street protest Thursday holding “Occupy a Desk” and “Get a Job” signs, they claimed they were engaging in an organic counter-protest against dirty hippies who were preventing them from getting to work. The local, national, and even international media promptly picked up their story.
But it turns out the Tabacco brothers have a long and sometimes checkered history of publicity-seeking and relentless self-promotion — and their claim that 50 local businessmen are supporting the anti-Occupy protest is entirely unsubstantiated.
Besides owning a finance company called LocateStock in lower Manhattan, John Tabacco is a Fox News contributor, a failed talk radio host, an unsuccessful city council candidate from Staten Island, and a onetime participant in the VH1 show “My Coolest Years.” An endorsement John Tabacco received in his city council campaign was later alleged to have been part of a pay-to-play deal. Derek Tabacco, for his part, is the CEO of what appears to be a defunct social network company for sports fans.
The Tabaccos showed up Thursday morning at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway, the spot where news cameras had gathered to film protesters and the throng of NYPD officers who had barricaded the street and were demanding “work IDs” for entry.
TV camera crews were assembled in a packed media area pointed down Wall Street toward the New York Stock Exchange, which protesters had planned to try to disrupt, but which they ultimately got nowhere near because of multiple NYPD barricades. So bored cameramen, who had been waiting around all morning for action (much of which ended up happening a few blocks away), turned to the Tabacco brothers.
That’s when I snapped the above photo. Each Tabacco brother was dressed more like a “Wall Street businessman” from central casting than an actual Wall Street businessman. They repeatedly said that occupiers were preventing them from getting to work; this seemed unlikely, as the police barricades were efficiently sorting protesters from actual office workers.
I asked them the name of the company they worked for a few times. They refused to say.
It all seemed like a pre-planned stunt designed exclusively for the benefit of the media, rather than any kind of organic counter-protest. And, as a media stunt, it worked remarkably well.
The story was picked up by multiple regional and national media outlets, as well as the Daily Mail. In one interview, Derek Tabacco referred to the occupiers as “these animals.” In another, John Tabacco referred to himself as “a member of the 53 percent,” a reference to the right-wing campaign around those Americans who “pay more in federal income taxes than they receive back in deductions or credits.”
John Tabacco was promptly brought in to Fox News for a sit-down interview with Neil Cavuto.
Note that in the Fox interview Tabacco said he and his brother had “about 50 small business owners” who were there — or there in spirit — standing against the Occupy protesters.
In my interview with Tabacco, he said he had “about 25 business owners” backing the effort. “It started very organically between small business organizers,” he told me.
Who are they? I asked.
“A lot of them are reluctant to stand in the street with a homemade sign. But we had their support,” Tabacco said. He later identified just two supporters in an email: John Bostany of the Bostany Law Firm and Robert Steffanelli of Legend Securities.
Here is what I have been able to piece together about John and Derek Tabacco’s history:
* In April, John Tabacco’s local talk radio show, “Family Business,” was cancelled just two weeks after it launched after he invited on Drita D’avanzo of the reality show “Mob Wives,” and she repeatedly used profanity on the air. Another “Mob Wives” star Tabacco had on the show, Renee Graziano, also swore on air.
* Tabacco has also been involved in an online TV show called “Street Cents” that touched on mob themes. Here he is interviewing Victoria Gotti. The show now appears to be defunct.
* In 2009 John Tabacco mounted an unsuccessful bid for city council from Staten Island. He later acknowledged to the New York Post that he had received the endorsement of the Independence Party in the race after making a $10,000 loan to the party chairman’s wife. The episode of (in the Post’s words) “possible pay-to-play conduct” was brought to the newspaper by Tabacco himself for reasons that are not entirely clear.
* In 2010, Tabacco attempted to get on an Independence Party primary ballot to challenge U.S. Rep. Michael McMahon — but failed to submit enough valid signatures. The McMahon camp challenged the signatures, alleging that Tabacco had submitted “sheets of names all signed by the same person.” The Board of Elections ruled against Tabacco, finding that he had not collected the 497 signatures needed to get on the ballot. In response, Tabacco filed a lawsuit to appeal the ruling – but then withdrew it without explanation.
* John Tabacco has been a regular guest on Neil Cavuto’s Fox News show going back to 2008. Transcripts frequently identify him as a “Fox business analyst.” Tabacco tells me he is a “contributor to Fox and CNBC” but he is not paid.
* John Tabacco is the CEO of LocateStock. According to its website, the firm’s “Matador Platform” will help you “optimize hedging strategies by getting locates on hard-to-borrow securities.” The site also throws around words like “revolutionary” and “unique” to describe its product. For a company offering “exclusive real time access to a global pool of securities,” the website has remarkably low production values and features a lot of random Wall Street-themed stock art. In an interview Tabacco told me the company provides tools that allow “retail traders” to engage in short-selling.
* Tabacco made “his nationwide television debut” on the VH1 series “My Coolest Years” in 2005, according to one of his bios.
* The brothers have a local sports show, which is produced by “Tabacco TV.” In this episode, they box each other at a gym in Brooklyn.
* John said his brother Derek is the CEO of FreeTheFan.com, described as “a competitive social community for sports fans.” But the site appears to be defunct, and its Twitter feed, which has six followers, was last updated in 2009.
* UPDATE: Derek Tabacco also appeared on season 4 of the Bravo reality show “Millionaire Matchmaker.”
So what’s next for the Tabaccos? It sounds like they’re going to ride the anti-Occupy theme for as long as possible. There is now a “wallstfighters” Twitter feed.
“We had a strategy session last night,” Tabacco told me. “We have a couple strategic counter-protests coming up.” But, he added, they’re not ready to reveal the details.
The bizarre history of the OWS counter-protesters
A Fox contributor and failed talk radio host with a penchant for publicity-seeking takes to the streets against OWS
When brothers John and Derek Tabacco showed up at the big Occupy Wall Street protest Thursday holding “Occupy a Desk” and “Get a Job” signs, they claimed they were engaging in an organic counter-protest against dirty hippies who were preventing them from getting to work. The local, national, and even international media promptly picked up their story.
But it turns out the Tabacco brothers have a long and sometimes checkered history of publicity-seeking and relentless self-promotion — and their claim that 50 local businessmen are supporting the anti-Occupy protest is entirely unsubstantiated.
Besides owning a finance company called LocateStock in lower Manhattan, John Tabacco is a Fox News contributor, a failed talk radio host, an unsuccessful city council candidate from Staten Island, and a onetime participant in the VH1 show “My Coolest Years.” An endorsement John Tabacco received in his city council campaign was later alleged to have been part of a pay-to-play deal. Derek Tabacco, for his part, is the CEO of what appears to be a defunct social network company for sports fans.
The Tabaccos showed up Thursday morning at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway, the spot where news cameras had gathered to film protesters and the throng of NYPD officers who had barricaded the street and were demanding “work IDs” for entry.
TV camera crews were assembled in a packed media area pointed down Wall Street toward the New York Stock Exchange, which protesters had planned to try to disrupt, but which they ultimately got nowhere near because of multiple NYPD barricades. So bored cameramen, who had been waiting around all morning for action (much of which ended up happening a few blocks away), turned to the Tabacco brothers.
That’s when I snapped the above photo. Each Tabacco brother was dressed more like a “Wall Street businessman” from central casting than an actual Wall Street businessman. They repeatedly said that occupiers were preventing them from getting to work; this seemed unlikely, as the police barricades were efficiently sorting protesters from actual office workers.
I asked them the name of the company they worked for a few times. They refused to say.
It all seemed like a pre-planned stunt designed exclusively for the benefit of the media, rather than any kind of organic counter-protest. And, as a media stunt, it worked remarkably well.
The story was picked up by multiple regional and national media outlets, as well as the Daily Mail. In one interview, Derek Tabacco referred to the occupiers as “these animals.” In another, John Tabacco referred to himself as “a member of the 53 percent,” a reference to the right-wing campaign around those Americans who “pay more in federal income taxes than they receive back in deductions or credits.”
John Tabacco was promptly brought in to Fox News for a sit-down interview with Neil Cavuto.
Note that in the Fox interview Tabacco said he and his brother had “about 50 small business owners” who were there — or there in spirit — standing against the Occupy protesters.
In my interview with Tabacco, he said he had “about 25 business owners” backing the effort. “It started very organically between small business organizers,” he told me.
Who are they? I asked.
“A lot of them are reluctant to stand in the street with a homemade sign. But we had their support,” Tabacco said. He later identified just two supporters in an email: John Bostany of the Bostany Law Firm and Robert Steffanelli of Legend Securities.
Here is what I have been able to piece together about John and Derek Tabacco’s history:
* In April, John Tabacco’s local talk radio show, “Family Business,” was cancelled just two weeks after it launched after he invited on Drita D’avanzo of the reality show “Mob Wives,” and she repeatedly used profanity on the air. Another “Mob Wives” star Tabacco had on the show, Renee Graziano, also swore on air.
* Tabacco has also been involved in an online TV show called “Street Cents” that touched on mob themes. Here he is interviewing Victoria Gotti. The show now appears to be defunct.
* In 2009 John Tabacco mounted an unsuccessful bid for city council from Staten Island. He later acknowledged to the New York Post that he had received the endorsement of the Independence Party in the race after making a $10,000 loan to the party chairman’s wife. The episode of (in the Post’s words) “possible pay-to-play conduct” was brought to the newspaper by Tabacco himself for reasons that are not entirely clear.
* In 2010, Tabacco attempted to get on an Independence Party primary ballot to challenge U.S. Rep. Michael McMahon — but failed to submit enough valid signatures. The McMahon camp challenged the signatures, alleging that Tabacco had submitted “sheets of names all signed by the same person.” The Board of Elections ruled against Tabacco, finding that he had not collected the 497 signatures needed to get on the ballot. In response, Tabacco filed a lawsuit to appeal the ruling – but then withdrew it without explanation.
* John Tabacco has been a regular guest on Neil Cavuto’s Fox News show going back to 2008. Transcripts frequently identify him as a “Fox business analyst.” Tabacco tells me he is a “contributor to Fox and CNBC” but he is not paid.
* John Tabacco is the CEO of LocateStock. According to its website, the firm’s “Matador Platform” will help you “optimize hedging strategies by getting locates on hard-to-borrow securities.” The site also throws around words like “revolutionary” and “unique” to describe its product. For a company offering “exclusive real time access to a global pool of securities,” the website has remarkably low production values and features a lot of random Wall Street-themed stock art. In an interview Tabacco told me the company provides tools that allow “retail traders” to engage in short-selling.
* Tabacco made “his nationwide television debut” on the VH1 series “My Coolest Years” in 2005, according to one of his bios.
* The brothers have a local sports show, which is produced by “Tabacco TV.” In this episode, they box each other at a gym in Brooklyn.
* John said his brother Derek is the CEO of FreeTheFan.com, described as “a competitive social community for sports fans.” But the site appears to be defunct, and its Twitter feed, which has six followers, was last updated in 2009.
* UPDATE: Derek Tabacco also appeared on season 4 of the Bravo reality show “Millionaire Matchmaker.”
So what’s next for the Tabaccos? It sounds like they’re going to ride the anti-Occupy theme for as long as possible. There is now a “wallstfighters” Twitter feed.
“We had a strategy session last night,” Tabacco told me. “We have a couple strategic counter-protests coming up.” But, he added, they’re not ready to reveal the details.
Friday, November 18, 2011
More Bad News for the GOP TeaBag DoucheBags
From The Washington Post -- November 18, 2011:
Obama outpaces GOP rivals and his own 2008 results in small donations
By Dan Eggen and T.W. Farnam
Even with low approval ratings and an uncertain path to reelection, President Obama is exceeding expectations in one area: His campaign is doing far better at attracting grass-roots financial support this year than his GOP rivals or his own historic effort in 2008, according to new contribution data.
The sheer scale of small donations, totaling $56 million for Obama and his party, has surprised many Democratic strategists and fundraisers, who feared that a sour economy would make it difficult for Obama to raise money from disenchanted and cash-strapped voters.
President Obama’s reelection campaign and DNC together raised $70 million in the third quarter of 2011. Outside of fundraising, the president is ramping up support for his reelection with his visits and talk about focusing on the economy.
A Washington Post analysis shows that nearly half of his campaign contributions, and a quarter of the money he has raised for the Democratic Party, has come from donors giving less than $200. That’s much higher than it was four years ago, and far beyond what the best-funded Republicans have managed.
Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, the leading GOP fundraisers, have instead embraced a traditional approach, focusing on big-dollar contributors who can fill the coffers without the high overhead costs of a campaign targeting small donations, the analysis shows.
Business executive Herman Cain has had more success with small donors, who have helped propel a surge in contributions to the candidate in recent weeks.
A grass-roots-oriented campaign presents both opportunities and risks for Obama, who is already weighed down by the stagnant economy, a glum public mood and signs of disaffection among Democrats.
The focus is rooted in the belief that donors, even if they only give a few dollars, are more committed to their candidate than those who have not written a check.
“The number of small donations shows who it is that supports this president and who put him there,” said Katherine Hahn, a self-described “mom and artist” from Evergreen, Colo., who gives Obama $25 a month. “It wasn’t the powers that be so much as it was people like me.”
But relying on donors of modest means could limit the fundraising ability of the president, who is already showing signs of struggling to bring in big donations. Fewer than 6,000 contributors had given Obama $2,500 or more through September.
That compares with more than 8,000 maxed-out donors to Romney. And if Romney wins the nomination, the same people will be able to give much larger amounts to his campaign and the Republican Party.
“We always knew we needed to build a broad-based support network, and we try not to rely too much on one thing,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in an interview. “Our experience is that people who give become volunteers, and people who volunteer become donors. We want to build a relationship with them.”
Republicans say their eventual nominee will have plenty of time to build widespread excitement after the primaries.
“The role of small donors is the same as large donors – to participate in our campaign community, one that is eager to replace President Obama with a new leader who can get our country back on track,” said Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul. She said 83 percent of Romney’s donors in the third quarter gave less than $250.
A central part of the Obama campaign’s grass-roots strategy is in swing districts such as Jefferson County, Colo., west of Denver. The county, home to Coors Brewing Co. and the Colorado School of Mines, leans Republican but went decisively for Obama in 2008.
In interviews with a cross-section of donors from the area, Hahn and others said they are backing Obama’s reelection, even if they are disappointed in some aspects of his presidency.
President Obama’s reelection campaign and DNC together raised $70 million in the third quarter of 2011. Outside of fundraising, the president is ramping up support for his reelection with his visits and talk about focusing on the economy.
“I think he’s trying very hard,” said retiree James Dunn of Wheat Ridge, who has given Obama $225 so far this cycle. “I am 86 years old and I have never seen such a concentration of lies against a decent man.”
Pat Angel, 71, of Morrison said she gives $25 to the president’s campaign when she can, with another $10 per month from her husband for the Democratic National Committee. Angel helps run the family business, Angels Bail Bonds, and also works full-time at Wal-Mart because she can’t afford to retire.
Despite her struggles, Angel remains loyal to Obama. “I honestly think he is the only hope,” she said. “When I look at the Republican slate I shudder.”
But there are also many donors who supported Obama in 2008 who haven’t returned. Michael Glode, 64, a registered Republican and medical professor in Golden, gave Obama $210 in 2008 — the first political donation of his life — but won’t do so again.
“His biggest mistake was not going directly to the American people with his oratory skills,” Glode said. “I’m pretty disappointed in American politics.”
This year, about 45 percent of the $90 million raised by Obama’s reelection campaign from April through September came from donors who each gave less than $200 in aggregate donations, according to The Post’s analysis of Federal Election Commission records. When money that Obama has helped raise for the DNC is included, the figure is 36 percent.
Either way, the share is higher than in 2008, when about a quarter of the $755 million raised directly for Obama’s campaign came from the smallest donors.
About 9 percent of the $32 million raised by Romney through September came from small donors; the figure for Perry, who raised $17 million, was 4 percent. Several other GOP candidates have notably high percentages of small donors, but their overall fundraising is modest.
One surprise for the Obama campaign was the discovery that, out of more than 1 million donors so far this year, half had never given to him before.
Supporters who make revolving donations get special T-shirts, monthly conference calls with Messina and other goodies as part of “Team 2012,” an effort with more than a passing resemblance to a public-radio fundraising drive. Donors who give as little as $3 can enroll to win dinner with the president.
The campaign has also mounted a program to contact every 2008 supporter by phone or in person, and an effort to recruit students and other young adults.
“The fundamental thing that we believe, and that we bring to all the work online and offline, is that people take action on behalf of a campaign because they feel an emotional connection with it,” said Teddy Goff, the campaign’s digital director. “We are much more focused on how we can give people access to the campaign than on thinking up new tricks or gimmicks.”
Obama outpaces GOP rivals and his own 2008 results in small donations
By Dan Eggen and T.W. Farnam
Even with low approval ratings and an uncertain path to reelection, President Obama is exceeding expectations in one area: His campaign is doing far better at attracting grass-roots financial support this year than his GOP rivals or his own historic effort in 2008, according to new contribution data.
The sheer scale of small donations, totaling $56 million for Obama and his party, has surprised many Democratic strategists and fundraisers, who feared that a sour economy would make it difficult for Obama to raise money from disenchanted and cash-strapped voters.
President Obama’s reelection campaign and DNC together raised $70 million in the third quarter of 2011. Outside of fundraising, the president is ramping up support for his reelection with his visits and talk about focusing on the economy.
A Washington Post analysis shows that nearly half of his campaign contributions, and a quarter of the money he has raised for the Democratic Party, has come from donors giving less than $200. That’s much higher than it was four years ago, and far beyond what the best-funded Republicans have managed.
Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, the leading GOP fundraisers, have instead embraced a traditional approach, focusing on big-dollar contributors who can fill the coffers without the high overhead costs of a campaign targeting small donations, the analysis shows.
Business executive Herman Cain has had more success with small donors, who have helped propel a surge in contributions to the candidate in recent weeks.
A grass-roots-oriented campaign presents both opportunities and risks for Obama, who is already weighed down by the stagnant economy, a glum public mood and signs of disaffection among Democrats.
The focus is rooted in the belief that donors, even if they only give a few dollars, are more committed to their candidate than those who have not written a check.
“The number of small donations shows who it is that supports this president and who put him there,” said Katherine Hahn, a self-described “mom and artist” from Evergreen, Colo., who gives Obama $25 a month. “It wasn’t the powers that be so much as it was people like me.”
But relying on donors of modest means could limit the fundraising ability of the president, who is already showing signs of struggling to bring in big donations. Fewer than 6,000 contributors had given Obama $2,500 or more through September.
That compares with more than 8,000 maxed-out donors to Romney. And if Romney wins the nomination, the same people will be able to give much larger amounts to his campaign and the Republican Party.
“We always knew we needed to build a broad-based support network, and we try not to rely too much on one thing,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in an interview. “Our experience is that people who give become volunteers, and people who volunteer become donors. We want to build a relationship with them.”
Republicans say their eventual nominee will have plenty of time to build widespread excitement after the primaries.
“The role of small donors is the same as large donors – to participate in our campaign community, one that is eager to replace President Obama with a new leader who can get our country back on track,” said Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul. She said 83 percent of Romney’s donors in the third quarter gave less than $250.
A central part of the Obama campaign’s grass-roots strategy is in swing districts such as Jefferson County, Colo., west of Denver. The county, home to Coors Brewing Co. and the Colorado School of Mines, leans Republican but went decisively for Obama in 2008.
In interviews with a cross-section of donors from the area, Hahn and others said they are backing Obama’s reelection, even if they are disappointed in some aspects of his presidency.
President Obama’s reelection campaign and DNC together raised $70 million in the third quarter of 2011. Outside of fundraising, the president is ramping up support for his reelection with his visits and talk about focusing on the economy.
“I think he’s trying very hard,” said retiree James Dunn of Wheat Ridge, who has given Obama $225 so far this cycle. “I am 86 years old and I have never seen such a concentration of lies against a decent man.”
Pat Angel, 71, of Morrison said she gives $25 to the president’s campaign when she can, with another $10 per month from her husband for the Democratic National Committee. Angel helps run the family business, Angels Bail Bonds, and also works full-time at Wal-Mart because she can’t afford to retire.
Despite her struggles, Angel remains loyal to Obama. “I honestly think he is the only hope,” she said. “When I look at the Republican slate I shudder.”
But there are also many donors who supported Obama in 2008 who haven’t returned. Michael Glode, 64, a registered Republican and medical professor in Golden, gave Obama $210 in 2008 — the first political donation of his life — but won’t do so again.
“His biggest mistake was not going directly to the American people with his oratory skills,” Glode said. “I’m pretty disappointed in American politics.”
This year, about 45 percent of the $90 million raised by Obama’s reelection campaign from April through September came from donors who each gave less than $200 in aggregate donations, according to The Post’s analysis of Federal Election Commission records. When money that Obama has helped raise for the DNC is included, the figure is 36 percent.
Either way, the share is higher than in 2008, when about a quarter of the $755 million raised directly for Obama’s campaign came from the smallest donors.
About 9 percent of the $32 million raised by Romney through September came from small donors; the figure for Perry, who raised $17 million, was 4 percent. Several other GOP candidates have notably high percentages of small donors, but their overall fundraising is modest.
One surprise for the Obama campaign was the discovery that, out of more than 1 million donors so far this year, half had never given to him before.
Supporters who make revolving donations get special T-shirts, monthly conference calls with Messina and other goodies as part of “Team 2012,” an effort with more than a passing resemblance to a public-radio fundraising drive. Donors who give as little as $3 can enroll to win dinner with the president.
The campaign has also mounted a program to contact every 2008 supporter by phone or in person, and an effort to recruit students and other young adults.
“The fundamental thing that we believe, and that we bring to all the work online and offline, is that people take action on behalf of a campaign because they feel an emotional connection with it,” said Teddy Goff, the campaign’s digital director. “We are much more focused on how we can give people access to the campaign than on thinking up new tricks or gimmicks.”
The T-GOP Is Insane
From The Washington Post -- November 17, 2011:
How Republican conformity is ruining politics
By Michael Gerson
In the GOP’s whack-a-mole primary process, Newt Gingrich is about to get thumped by conservatives.
The cause is likely to be climate policy. It is not only that Gingrich appeared next to Nancy Pelosi in a 2008 commercial calling for “action to address climate change.” A year earlier, Gingrich argued, “The evidence is sufficient that we should move toward the most effective possible steps to reduce carbon-loading in the atmosphere.” To that end, he supported “mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur.”
At the time, Gingrich’s position was not unique. John McCain had been the Senate sponsor of cap-and-trade legislation. His primary GOP opponents in the 2008 presidential campaign, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, had endorsed greenhouse gas limits in various forms. When Tim Pawlenty was criticized for similar views this year, he noted, “Everybody in the race — at least the big names in the race — embraced climate change or cap-and-trade at one point or another. Every one of us.”
There is a reason for such mass heresy: because the case once made by Gingrich and the others is perfectly reasonable. Conservatives have been open to market-oriented restrictions on pollution since Milton Friedman talked of “effluent taxes.” Recent studies, using increasingly refined methodologies, have confirmed a long-term rise in global temperatures and made a strong case for the contributing role of carbon emissions. In addition, many national security conservatives are disturbed by the massive U.S. payments to hostile, oil-producing nations.
But Gingrich, in the manner of Cultural Revolution self-criticism, has now called his appearance with Pelosi the “dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years.” Some conservatives may dispute this claim, arguing that Gingrich’s previous support for the individual health insurance mandate and the Medicare prescription drug benefit are rivals. (Never mind that Medicare now provides medicines to seniors at 41 percent less than was initially projected.)
It is now a familiar pattern — the scandal of sanity. Rick Perry is criticized for supporting discounted higher education for the children of undocumented workers, as though the ignorance of the innocent is an obviously superior policy option. Herman Cain is attacked for supporting a TARP bailout that prevented a national panic. “Owning a part of the major banks in America is not a bad thing,” wrote Cain in 2008. “We could make a profit while solving a problem.” Which is precisely what happened. For all its (considerable) flaws, Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health reform was based on ideas that originated in conservative think tanks.
There is room for debate on all these issues. Cap-and-trade may be an innovative, market-oriented solution or an easily gamed mess. Romneycare may be a good idea badly applied or an approach doomed to failure. But these are not the arguments we’ve seen. Instead, candidates are accused of political heresy. Then they apologize — some eagerly, others reluctantly. Movement conservatives have created a box of orthodoxy so small that even the most conservative candidates must engage in undignified contortions just to fit.
Some of this is just the nature of primaries, in which audiences applaud for purity. But there are other factors. Over the past few decades, the GOP has become a more conservative party. The development of self-consciously conservative media — on radio, cable and the Internet — has provided a welcome alternative to the bias of the mainstream media. It has also simplified many public debates into a contest of ideological teams — a tendency shared by self-consciously liberal media. Candidates, pundits and voters are called to join one side or the other, doing nothing that will give comfort to the enemy. But ideological conformity easily becomes cultural isolation — the development of assumptions, language and views disconnected from the broad middle of American life.
Many political activists have adopted a form of fundamentalism: the belief that a return to power can be achieved only by a return to purity. This is particularly unproductive during a presidential primary. It narrows the range of qualifications — elevating fealty above other, important public virtues such as stable judgment, competence, relevant experience and integrity.
And this approach makes for bad politics. There is a reason that the purest candidates are often not the strongest candidates. Appealing, successful politicians have usually built unexpected governing coalitions, engaged in creative ideological outreach and shown intellectual independence.
A political party that is serious about winning does not punish candidates for their virtues.
How Republican conformity is ruining politics
By Michael Gerson
In the GOP’s whack-a-mole primary process, Newt Gingrich is about to get thumped by conservatives.
The cause is likely to be climate policy. It is not only that Gingrich appeared next to Nancy Pelosi in a 2008 commercial calling for “action to address climate change.” A year earlier, Gingrich argued, “The evidence is sufficient that we should move toward the most effective possible steps to reduce carbon-loading in the atmosphere.” To that end, he supported “mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur.”
At the time, Gingrich’s position was not unique. John McCain had been the Senate sponsor of cap-and-trade legislation. His primary GOP opponents in the 2008 presidential campaign, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, had endorsed greenhouse gas limits in various forms. When Tim Pawlenty was criticized for similar views this year, he noted, “Everybody in the race — at least the big names in the race — embraced climate change or cap-and-trade at one point or another. Every one of us.”
There is a reason for such mass heresy: because the case once made by Gingrich and the others is perfectly reasonable. Conservatives have been open to market-oriented restrictions on pollution since Milton Friedman talked of “effluent taxes.” Recent studies, using increasingly refined methodologies, have confirmed a long-term rise in global temperatures and made a strong case for the contributing role of carbon emissions. In addition, many national security conservatives are disturbed by the massive U.S. payments to hostile, oil-producing nations.
But Gingrich, in the manner of Cultural Revolution self-criticism, has now called his appearance with Pelosi the “dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years.” Some conservatives may dispute this claim, arguing that Gingrich’s previous support for the individual health insurance mandate and the Medicare prescription drug benefit are rivals. (Never mind that Medicare now provides medicines to seniors at 41 percent less than was initially projected.)
It is now a familiar pattern — the scandal of sanity. Rick Perry is criticized for supporting discounted higher education for the children of undocumented workers, as though the ignorance of the innocent is an obviously superior policy option. Herman Cain is attacked for supporting a TARP bailout that prevented a national panic. “Owning a part of the major banks in America is not a bad thing,” wrote Cain in 2008. “We could make a profit while solving a problem.” Which is precisely what happened. For all its (considerable) flaws, Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health reform was based on ideas that originated in conservative think tanks.
There is room for debate on all these issues. Cap-and-trade may be an innovative, market-oriented solution or an easily gamed mess. Romneycare may be a good idea badly applied or an approach doomed to failure. But these are not the arguments we’ve seen. Instead, candidates are accused of political heresy. Then they apologize — some eagerly, others reluctantly. Movement conservatives have created a box of orthodoxy so small that even the most conservative candidates must engage in undignified contortions just to fit.
Some of this is just the nature of primaries, in which audiences applaud for purity. But there are other factors. Over the past few decades, the GOP has become a more conservative party. The development of self-consciously conservative media — on radio, cable and the Internet — has provided a welcome alternative to the bias of the mainstream media. It has also simplified many public debates into a contest of ideological teams — a tendency shared by self-consciously liberal media. Candidates, pundits and voters are called to join one side or the other, doing nothing that will give comfort to the enemy. But ideological conformity easily becomes cultural isolation — the development of assumptions, language and views disconnected from the broad middle of American life.
Many political activists have adopted a form of fundamentalism: the belief that a return to power can be achieved only by a return to purity. This is particularly unproductive during a presidential primary. It narrows the range of qualifications — elevating fealty above other, important public virtues such as stable judgment, competence, relevant experience and integrity.
And this approach makes for bad politics. There is a reason that the purest candidates are often not the strongest candidates. Appealing, successful politicians have usually built unexpected governing coalitions, engaged in creative ideological outreach and shown intellectual independence.
A political party that is serious about winning does not punish candidates for their virtues.
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