August-September 2011
Views and Opinions

The New Resentment of the Poor
Source: The New York Times, editorial
Posted: August 31, 2011
In a decade of frenzied tax-cutting for the rich, the Republican Party just happened to lower tax rates for the poor, as well. Now several of the party's most prominent presidential candidates and lawmakers want to correct that oversight and raise taxes on the poor and the working class, while protecting the rich, of course.

These Republican leaders, who think nothing of widening tax loopholes for corporations and multimillion-dollar estates, are offended by the idea that people making less than $40,000 might benefit from the progressive tax code. They are infuriated by the earned income tax credit (the pride of Ronald Reagan), which has become the biggest and most effective antipoverty program by giving working families thousands of dollars a year in tax refunds. They scoff at continuing President Obama's payroll tax cut, which is tilted toward low- and middle-income workers and expires in December.

Until fairly recently, Republicans, at least, have been fairly consistent in their position that tax cuts should benefit everyone. Though the Bush tax cuts were primarily for the rich, they did lower rates for almost all taxpayers, providing a veneer of egalitarianism. Then the recession pushed down incomes severely, many below the minimum income tax level, and the stimulus act lowered that level further with new tax cuts. The number of families not paying income tax has risen from about 30 percent before the recession to about half, and, suddenly, Republicans have a new tool to stoke class resentment.
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An undeserved attack on the 'Undeserving poor'
Source: Los Angeles Times
Posted: August 31, 2011
Amid the crowd-rousing shorthand employed by some American politicians, surely one of the hardiest chestnuts is the notion of the "undeserving poor." You know the spiel, which plays to old and discredited stereotypes. It defines welfare recipients as spongers, drunks, tomcats and loose women; anyone with a swarthy visage or Hispanic accent as likely an "illegal immigrant"; anyone on unemployment as a lazy good-for-nothing; anyone receiving government assistance (other than bankers and oil company executives, of course) as a chiseler.

The most modern variation on this theme aims to be somewhat more politically correct by branding these people as "non-taxpayers."

[...] It's far more instructive to view this argument in the historical context of the "undeserving poor" meme. In olden times, before taxes became such an obsession of policy wonks, the label was most often applied to relief clients, especially when politicians or the newspapers found people collecting welfare while living high on their own wealth — the "lady in mink" phenomenon, as it was known after the New York papers turned up said lady wearing said garment to collect a check at her local welfare office in 1947.

The New Yorker's legendary press critic A.J. Liebling subverted the whole yarn in a piece memorably entitled "Horsefeathers Swathed in Mink." He determined that despite having collected a five-figure divorce settlement many years before, the woman now depended for survival, along with her 5-year-old daughter, on $5.40 a day from the city welfare department. The mink was a ratty and torn old thing worth a few hundred bucks.

Liebling identified the underlying theme of all undeserving-poor narratives: "that the poor are poor because of their sins and whatever they get is too good for them." He might have added a corollary widely favored today especially by the GOP, that the rich are rich because of their inherent virtues and whatever they get is barely enough, because they're our "job creators."

Leaving aside the sad fact that the wealthy haven't created so many jobs lately even though their top marginal income tax rates are at their lowest level since 1992, it's not hard to draw a line between the 1940s view of the poor and contemporary discussions of tax policy. The Wall Street Journal editorial page did it succinctly in 2002, when the percentage of non-paying tax filers was about 30%. The editorialists labeled these people, almost all of whom were gathered at the lowest end of the income scale, as "lucky duckies" and attributed their good fortune, dismissively, to "a welter of tax credits for things like child care and education."

What's most important to keep in mind is that this critique of tax policy is necessarily selective. For one thing, the Journal's pundits didn't pay any attention to the luckiest duckies of all — wealthy non-taxpayers. The Tax Policy Center calculated that in 2009, about 123,000 tax returns reporting cash income over $200,000 also reported owing zero federal income tax — including 6,000 returns showing income over $1 million.
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It's past time to put America back to work
Source: Teamster Nation
Posted: August 30, 2011
A guest post from the peerless Bob Herbert:
The biggest domestic policy failure has been the refusal of top officials in the White House and in Congress to recognize the severity of the employment crisis that has settled like a plague over American workers.

There is no longer any excuse for believing that the Great Recession and its aftermath was a more or less typical economic downturn to be followed by a robust recovery. That’s a pipedream. What we are experiencing is an economic disaster, the worst reversal to hit the U.S. since the 1930s. The human suffering is profound. Some 14 million Americans are officially counted as unemployed. Nearly half have been out of work for six months or more, and many have been jobless for a year or two or longer.

Poverty is once again on the march, moving like Patton’s Third Army through communities that had never had more than a tenuous hold on the American dream. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, the minimum wage or just above, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle class standard of living.

Starved of tax revenues, the federal budget is submerged in a vast ocean of red ink. One of the tragic results is that social services are under furious attack at the same time that the need for such services has grown enormously. If dramatic steps are not soon taken to put millions of jobless Americans back to work, the quality of life for much, if not most, of the population will be irreparably damaged. The American dream itself is at risk.

Politicians have given little more than lip service to this terrible turn of events. If there was but one message that I would try to get through to the nation’s leadership, it is that we cannot begin to get the United States back on track until we begin to put our people back to work.

And there is so much work to be done. Start with the crying need to rebuild the nation’s aging, deteriorating infrastructure – its bridges and highways, airports and air traffic control systems, its sewer and wastewater treatment facilities, the electrical grid, inland waterways, public transportation systems, levees and floodwalls and ports and dams, and on and on. Lawrence Summers, until recently President Obama’s top economic adviser, has pointed out that 75 percent of America’s public schools have structural deficiencies. Twelve percent of the nation’s bridges have been rated structurally deficient and another 15 percent are functionally obsolete.

Three to four trillion dollars worth of improvements will be needed over the next decade just to bring the infrastructure into a reasonable state of repair. Meanwhile, we’ve got legions of unemployed construction workers, manufacturing workers, engineers and others who are ready and eager to step into the breach, to take on jobs ranging from infrastructure maintenance and repair to infrastructure design and new construction. It shouldn’t require a genius to put together those two gigantic pieces of America’s economic puzzle – infrastructure and unemployment.

Yes, it would be expensive. But the money spent would be an investment designed to bring about a stronger, more stable economic environment. Putting people to work bolsters the economy and the newly-employed workers begin paying taxes again. Improving the infrastructure would make American industry much more competitive overall, and would spawn new industries. Creation of a national infrastructure bank that would use government funds to leverage additional investments from the private sector to finance projects of national importance would lead to extraordinary longterm benefits.

But even rebuilding the infrastructure is not enough. The employment crisis facing the U.S. is enormous and is taking a particularly harsh toll on the less well-educated members of the society. We need to take our cue from Franklin Roosevelt who understood during the Depression that nothing short of a federal jobs program was essential. The two-pronged goal was to alleviate the suffering of the unemployed and, as the workers began spending their wages, improve the economy.

Roosevelt put millions of Americans to work, including artists, writers, photographers and musicians. It was an unprecedented undertaking, and it worked.

We need a public jobs program in America now. A number of approaches have been offered, including a particularly thoughtful and comprehensive proposal prepared for Demos by Philip Harvey, a professor of law and economics at Rutgers University. The idea is simple: “Create jobs for the unemployed directly and immediately in public employment programs that produce useful goods and services for the public’s benefit.”

As Harvey’s report explains:
“When jobs program participants spend their wages, and program administrators purchase materials and supplies for program projects, the benefits delivered in the first instance to unemployed workers trickle up to the private sector, inducing private sector job creation that supplements the immediate employment effect of the job creation program itself.”

A crucial aspect of the program is that it would begin to fill the demand gap that is hampering the economic recovery. With so many millions of people out of work, the demand for goods and services is diminished. Consumers are tapped out. Private businesses are not hiring workers because the demand is not there for the additional goods and services they would be producing.

Direct job creation would put people to work quickly, without having to wait many long months, or possibly years, for the economy to fully recover. The money from their paychecks would be pumped immediately into the economy.

Like infrastructure spending, a carefully crafted direct jobs plan would be an investment that would be repaid many times over, just as investments in Hoover Dam, rural electrification, the Works Progress Administration and the G.I. Bill delivered enormous longterm benefits to the society.

F.D.R., in his first inaugural address, told a worried nation that “our greatest primary task is to put people to work.” It was a task, he insisted, that should be treated “as we would treat the emergency of a war.”

The question today, in one of our darkest economic hours, is whether we’re smart enough to heed that essential lesson of history.

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ChartSocial Security vs. Ponzi schemes in one Venn diagram
Source: Ezra Klein, in The Washington Post
Posted: August 29, 2011
So many Republican politicians call Social Security a Ponzi scheme that I’ve basically stopped taking notice of it. But Rick Perry’s recitation of the talking point has attracted a fresh round of ire from hardier souls than me. Jonathan Bernstein, for instance, writes that “anyone who says that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme either misunderstands Social Security, misunderstands Ponzi schemes, is deliberately lying, or some combination of those.”

As he explains, a Ponzi scheme is a fraud that relies on new investors being unaware of the program’s financing mechanism. Social Security is a fully transparent system of age-based redistribution that releases regular actuarial reports explaining, in great detail, how it is financed now, and what it will need to be fully financed into the future. Or, as Russell Long (apparently) put it, “Social Security is nothing more than a promise to a group of people that their children will be taxed for that group’s benefit.” You may like that structure or you may hate it, but it’s not a Ponzi scheme. And in case you forget, Nick Baumann went ahead and made a Venn diagram explaining the situation:

Note that a lot of the elderly investors who saw their money vanish in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme are going to be kept afloat in their old age by, yes, Social Security. That’s another difference: Ponzi schemes tend to be pretty unreliable. Social Security has been sending out checks without interruption for more than 70 years.

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Verizon strike has bigger lessons for U.S. economy
Source: Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America, in The Hill
Posted: August 26, 2011
The 45,000 CWA and IBEW members are hopeful that Monday night’s return to work at Verizon after a two- week strike will bringmeaningful collective bargaining and a good result for all concerned.  For us, the strike was about real collective bargaining rights as much as about preserving the standard of living for our families.

The unity of our members and the widespread public support for workers really speak to the general state of working families in the US.  This includes stagnating  real wages in recent years, the collapse of employer based health care,  declining retirement security and the export of good jobs to low wage contractors and offshore.  The root cause of much of this decline is the collapse of bargaining rights in the US in both the public and private sectors.  

For our members and their union, as well as Verizon management, at least on the surface, there is no larger story.  The strike was about this contract and the state of bargaining at this company.  Verizon has begun a management transition, and we are hopeful that for lots of reasons this is an opportunity for change. But the unity of our members and the popular support of their cause, to a large extent, reflects how normal cuts have become and how unusual resistance on this scale is in the United States of the 21st century.

For working women and men, and retirees in the US, there is little structural economic support.  We can pretend otherwise, but look at nearly every other industrial democracy, where high level and cost effective health care is the norm, retirement security means much higher income replacement, public policy supports retaining jobs in key industries and most important, there is widespread public and politicalsupport for collective bargaining.

We are in an economic free fall.  Pretending that we are consumers and not working Americans first will not fix it.  Tax cuts will not fix it.  Attacks on working Americans and their rights like those led by Republicans in the House of Representatives and extremist governors at every opportunity will make the landing even harder.
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What if Republicans Closed the E.P.A.?
Source:The New York Times
Posted: August 25, 2011
President Richard M. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, in an effort to increase government efficiency. Forty years later, top politicians in his party are trying to dismantle it.

In The New York Times last week, John M. Broder ran through the field of Republican presidential contenders, detailing the candidates who have opposed the agency: Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, former Speaker Newt Gingrich, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, Representative Ron Paul of Texas, the Georgia businessman Herman Cain, the former Utah governor Jon M. Huntsman Jr. and the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

The candidates seem unanimously in agreement with Mrs. Bachmann’s assessment that the federal environmental agency should be called the “job-killing organization of America.” So what would happen if we got rid of the E.P.A.? Is there a better model to do what the agency was created to do?
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Obama's Deal for the Bankers: Amnesty for the Indefensible
Source: Robert Scheer, in The Nation
Posted: August 25, 2011
They will get away with it, at least in this life. "They" are the Wall Street usurers, people of a sort condemned in Scripture, who have brought more misery to this nation than we have known since the Great Depression. "They" will not suffer for their crimes because they have a majority ownership position in our political system. That is the meaning of the banking plea bargain that the Obama administration is pressuring state attorneys general to negotiate with the titans of the financial world.

It is a sellout deal that, in return for a pittance of compensation by banks to ripped-off mortgage holders, would grant the banks blanket immunity from any prosecution. That is intended to short-circuit investigations by a score of aggressive state officials, inquiries that offer the public a last best hope to get to the bottom of the housing scandal that has cost US homeowners $6.6 trillion in home equity in the past five years and left 14.6 million Americans owing more than their homes are worth.

The $20 billion or so that the banks would pony up is chump change to them compared with the trillions that the Fed and other public agencies spent to bail them out. The banks were given direct cash subsidies, virtually zero-interest loans, and the Fed took $2 trillion in bad paper off their hands while the banks exacerbated the banking crisis they had created through additional shady practices, including fraudulent mortgage foreclosures.

Yet the administration has rushed to the aid of the banks once again and is attempting to intimidate the few state attorneys general who have the gumption to protect the public interest they are sworn to serve.
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Do state Republicans support killing TAA?
Source: The Stand
Posted: August 24, 2011
Up is down these days in the sorry political machinations of U.S. trade policy.

As the New York Times reports today, “In an upside-down pair of performances, Democratic senators filled half a hearing room to declare their support for trade deals opposed by much of their party’s political base, while Republican senators stood before television cameras to declare that they would not allow a hearing on legislation that much of their own base strongly supports.”

What’s going on? Democrats are pushing to reauthorize a robust Trade Adjustment Assistance program to help workers who lose their jobs as a result of offshoring and increased imports. Eligible workers at TAA-certified companies can get fully funded short- or long-term training in approved programs, health-care coverage subsidies, assistance with their job search and relocation costs, and perhaps most importantly, extended weekly income support beyond the usual 26 weeks of unemployment benefits.

Democrats in Congress and the White House are insisting that TAA approval be coupled with votes on new free trade agreements with Korea, Panama and Colombia. Republicans support passage of those FTAs, but they want to get rid of the TAA program. Organized labor opposes these FTAs — as do the vast majority of the American people — because they are more of the same NAFTA-like job-killing agreements that have decimated U.S. manufacturing and promote corporate investment in nations with lax labor and environmental standards.

However, labor strongly supports TAA reauthorization to mitigate the harm being done by these existing U.S. trade policies.

Back in February, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) refused to hold a vote on extending the TAA. Because of his blockade, the TAA program that been strengthened in 2009, reverted back to its 2002 version that covers fewer workers and offers lower benefits and fewer opportunities for displaced workers. The White House told Republicans in May that it would not consider three pending trade agreements with Korea, Panama and Colombia until Congress reauthorizes the enhanced TAA. It hasn’t happened, and now the stalemate is jeopardizing the White House’s self-imposed deadline to pass the FTAs by the end of July.

At this point, Republican leaders in both the House and Senate are insisting that TAA — which they intend to kill — must be considered separately. They agree with the assessment of the right-wing Heritage Foundation that the TAA program is “ineffective” and offers “overly generous benefits” at a time when “out-of-control spending and surging public debt [are] threatening our nation’s stability.”

So where does Washington’s delegation stand on TAA?
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Republicans for Tax Hikes
Source: Slate
Posted: August 23, 2011
It's not news when Jon Huntsman criticizes fellow Republicans. It's news when he agrees with them. On Sunday, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Huntsman found himself in a virtual love-in with Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann over, of all things, taxes. The paper asked Huntsman if "the half of American households no longer paying income tax—mainly working poor families and seniors—should be brought onto the income tax rolls."

He agreed, crediting the GOP's current front-runner for vice president, Sen. Marco Rubio, with the insight that "we don't have enough people paying taxes in this country."

The Journal called this position the "new GOP orthodoxy," which it is. When he announced his presidential bid two weeks ago, Perry told a room of conservative activists and bloggers that "we're dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don't even pay any income tax." He was following on Bachmann, who'd just told the South Carolina Christian Chamber of Commerce the very same thing.

"Part of the problem is today, only 53 percent pay anyfederal income tax at all; 47 percent pay nothing," said Bachmann. "We need to broaden the base so that everybody pays something, even if it's a dollar. Everyone should pay something, because we all benefit."

Huntsman, Perry, Bachmann: All of them are taking a bold stand in favor of cognitive dissonance. The main reason Washington couldn't get a "grand bargain" on the budget and debt ceiling was that Republicans balked at increasing taxes on anyone. How did we get from there to the notion that it would be a good idea to raise taxes on the 60-odd million people who didn't end up owing the IRS any money last year?

Conservatives have an argument: You can't, and shouldn't, balance the budget and pay for entitlements by continually raising taxes on the rich. Doing so, they say, is "class warfare." At the same time, however, they must contend with persistent support for the welfare state. So conservatives are betting that regular Americans are losing track of how much it costs to give them what they want.

This isn't a new theory. In 2002 and 2003, long before it got Huntsman in the room, the Wall Street Journal editorialized that poor people who didn't pay income taxes were "lucky duckies." The poor slob with a low income and child tax credit would get a small or nonexistent tax bill, not one that would "get his or her blood boiling with tax rage." The problem here wasn't that the poor slob wasn't paying any taxes; the problem was that his meager tax bill failed to foment enough anger to reduce taxes on other people. Tax cuts for the rich—tax cuts for anyone, really, but the Journal has always been concerned about tax cuts for the rich—require a broad base of outrage.

Republican politicians didn't make this argument—until the Obama era. What changed? For decades, the "lucky ducky" number, the percentage of Americans that pay no taxes, never rose above 30 percent. The Bush tax cuts pushed it over 30 percent, but not too far over. Then, in 2008 and 2009, the economy collapsed. The government responded with, among other things, new tax deductions.

The result: The percentage of people paying no income taxes spiked up to 47 percent and stayed there. When the Tea Party started rallying in 2009, it wasn't protesting higher taxes, because federal income taxes were lower, with more loopholes. It was protesting the perception that productive Americans were shelling out for an ever-expanding class of moochers. And Republicans have taken the Tea Party's lead.
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President's Bus Tour Suggests Broken Moral Compass
Source: In These Times
Posted: August 20, 2011
President Obama’s three-day bus tour of small Midwestern (and virtually all-white) towns this week was designed to show his understanding of ordinary Americans’ plight. The country's jobless rate is above 9 percent and recovery seems more remote than ever.

Obama aims to express confidence in America’s capacity for renewal and provide the outlines of a broader economic plan to be rolled out after Labor Day. Unfortunately, Obama’s remarks thus far on that plan have been highly disappointing, apart from his advocacy of a national infrastructure bank to fund much-needed public projects to put Americans back to work.

The tour looks like yet one more lost opportunity for Obama to move public opinion toward defining the jobs crisis as America’s most compelling economic and moral imperative. Compared with FDR’s speeches during the Great Depression, Obama seems tone-deaf to the despair felt over the nation’s rising inequality and distant to his base—especially labor activists in Wisconsin and elsewhere—that he must count on now to be re-elected next year. The tour reflects numerous problems that continue to  discourage Obama's (former?) base:

STIFF-ARMING HIS BASE: While touring the region where fierce battles are taking place between right-wing Republican governors ravaging public workers and financing more corporate tax breaks, Obama passed over any opportunity to defend the struggle of workers in Wisconsin despite their two election victories in recall elections this week.

Instead, he used a question from a unionized schoolteacher to generally defend the role of unions, but finished off his response with an insulting reminder to unionists that they must support "reform." While Joan Walsh in Salon defended Obama as merely displaying his typical "on the other hand" syndrome, the remarks reflected his more basic unwillingness to simply embrace his base at a vital moment.
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The Tea Party's Revolt Undermines the Private Sector More Than it Reins in 'Big Government'
Source: Slate
Posted: August 16, 2011
America's Tea Party has a simple fiscal message: The United States is broke. This is factually incorrect—U.S. government securities remain one of the safest investments in the world—but the claim serves the purpose of dramatizing the federal budget and creating a great deal of hysteria around America's current debt levels. This then produces the fervent belief that government spending must be cut radically—and now.

There are legitimate fiscal issues that demand serious discussion, including how to control growth in health care spending and how best to structure tax reform. But the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party cares more about small government than anything else. Its members insist, above all, that federal tax revenue never be permitted to exceed 18 percent of GDP. Their historical antecedent is America's anti-revenue Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, not the original anti-British, pro-representation Boston Tea Party in 1773.

Most importantly, their tactics have proved massively destructive of wealth in the United States. Since the prolonged showdown over the budget began earlier this year, the stock market has lost about 20 percent of its value (roughly $10 trillion). In effect, the Tea Party is working hard to reduce publicly funded social benefits—including pensions and Medicare—even as its methods dramatically reduce the value of private wealth now and in the future.

Part of the Tea Party's founding myth, of course, is that smaller government will lead to faster growth and greater prosperity for all. Never mind that the eye-popping growth projections in Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan, for example, are utterly implausible; these projections matter politically, because, without them, the full sting of Ryan's proposed Medicare cuts would be readily apparent.
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Stop Coddling the Super-Rich
Source: Warren Buffett, in The New York Times
Posted: August 16, 2011
OUR leaders have asked for "shared sacrifice." But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as "carried interest," thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they'd been long-term investors.

These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It's nice to have friends in high places.

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that's actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.

To understand why, you need to examine the sources of government revenue. Last year about 80 percent of these revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It's a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn't refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what's happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.
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Michele Bachman, Christian Reconstructionism and the Law
Source: Jonathan Turley.com
Posted: August 15, 2011
[...] In my view Rep. Bachmann's religious beliefs are a mandatory topic for thorough examination and public debate. Why? Because she espouses a brand of Christianity that seeks not merely to transform the institutions of government, but to absorb them into a reconstructed society build upon a foundation of Old Testament law, a goal which implicates the Constitution and which strikes at the heart of the idea of secular government.

Michele Bachmann's religion is grounded in the Christian reconstruction theology of A.J. Rushdoony, the late pastor and neo-Calvinist theologian. At the center of Mr. Rushdoony's teaching is the idea that the source of all human knowledge is God, and that the acquisition of knowledge must come through the truth revealed by God in the sacred scriptures. This belief required that he reject the rationalism of the Enlightenment as a sort of idolatry, the worship of autonomous human reason independent of God. It follows from this thesis that the legitimacy of government requires its submission to the sovereignty of God through compliance with God's law as outlined in the Bible, particularly the Mosaic law of the Old Testament. His three-volume work "The Institutes of Biblical Law" is widely taught in Christian schools and colleges. Reconstructionist theology demands of Christians that they exercise dominion over all creation, including social, legal and political institutions, and restructure them to properly reflect the sovereignty of God through biblical law. Rushdoony thus shared with the Pilgrims the view of America as the shining city on the hill, the Kingdom of God on earth. As a pure theocrat, Rushdoony regarded all law as religious in nature and firmly denounced democracy.

[...] Christian reconstructionists reject both religious pluralism and the concept of separation of church and state as a false notion championed by secular humanists. They support the abolition of unions, elimination of minimum wage laws, the criminal prosecution of homosexuals and the dismantling of social welfare programs.
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Democracy Died First in Wisconsin - Long Live the Oligarchs
Source: Thom Hartmann, at Truthout
Posted: August 13, 2011
The Wisconsin recall election was the first major test of the new era in American politics. That new era began in January of 2010 when the US Supreme Court ruled in "Citizens United v. FEC" that the political voice of We The People was no longer as important as the voices of billionaires and transnational corporations.

Now we know the result, and it bodes ill for both 2012 and for the tattered future of small-d democracy in our republic. A few of America's most notorious oligarchs – including the Koch and the DeVos (Amway fortune) billionaires – as well as untraceable millions from donors who could as easily be Chinese government-run corporations as giant "American" companies who do most of their business and keep most of their profits outside the US – apparently played big in this election.

I say "apparently" because the Supreme Court has ruled that we no longer have the right to know who is really funding our election commercials, or even our candidates themselves. Thanks to an irrational and likely illegal Supreme Court ruling, we have moved into an era of oligarch-run politics. As much as $40 million of our oligarch's money was spent in Wisconsin in a handful of local races – a testing laboratory for strategies that will now be used against Democrats nationwide in 2012.

And so now we enter the battle of the oligarchs over the next fifteen or so months. As the old saying goes, when the elephants fight, the mice get trampled. In this case, the mice aren't just the voters. It's democracy itself. America is now – demonstrably, as proven by Wisconsin – just a few years away from the possibility of a totally corrupted, totally billionaire- and corporate-controlled political system. Political scientists call it oligarchy.

The Citizens United election experiment is over, and the oligarchs won. Long live the oligarchy.

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Democrats need to find out what they stand for and get busy standing for it
Source: We Party Patriots
Posted: August 13, 2011
In a very well written piece, “Which Side Are You On?”, writer Andrew Cole calls out the Democratic Party for doing nothing but trying to elect other Democrats and riffs on other lessons learned from the Wisconsin recall elections. His article argues that Democrats blew an opportunity to make the recall elections about what the protesters were fighting for, collective bargaining rights, and instead tried to turn it into a soft debate about populism. As the 2012 Presidential Election gains steam, I wonder if Democrats will have the guts to go on the attack and fight to regain the fundamental rights stripped by the Tea Party’s radical agenda or if they will rally under a less controversial message, with hopes of keeping their incumbents in place and picking up a few extra seats. It seems to me, and presumably to Andrew Cole, that the Democrats need to find out what they stand for and get busy standing for it.

Here is an excerpt from “Which Side Are You On?”

While conventional wisdom dictates that it was good politics to de-emphasize collective bargaining, Democrats missed a crucial opportunity to change the terms of the public debate on organized labor. Walker and the GOP spent weeks demonizing public workers and the unions that represent them, and instead of hitting back on behalf of the very same people who worked tirelessly to help them seize the senate, the Democrats decided to accept the Republican’s terms. Even if Democrats eventually take both houses and the governor’s office, can labor really count on them to restore their rights?

Before the election, union-organizer-turned-journalist Josh Eidelson suggested that the Democrats were embracing a class-based populist message, and that the recalls would provide a test case for this strategy going forward. He notes that Democrats often “dabble in populism” without actually embracing it once elected, but seems to think that something is different this time; the Democrats may have had a genuine change of heart when it comes to speaking in stark terms of rich vs. poor or worker vs. boss. From my vantage point, it looks like they’re still dabbling. Their rhetoric is missing the fire and militancy of a genuine worker’s party, which ought to speak in terms of protests, occupations, and strikes and help workers understand and articulate an alternative vision of economic justice rather than emphasizing elections and accepting the terms of corporate capitalism as the limit of its vision. The Democrats channelled the movement’s best energies into electoral politics with the aim of increasing their own power. By abandoning the collective bargaining issue, the Democrats showed their true colors and proved once again that the Democratic Party exists solely to elect Democrats.

In retrospect, perhaps funneling all of that time, money and energy into the recalls was a mistake. The Democratic Party can certainly spin it as a victory and enhance its own political power, but it was working people, union and non-union alike, who occupied the Capitol for weeks and prompted the 14 Democrats to leave the state. Tens of thousands of people in the streets of Madison sent a message to the elite, Democrat and Republican alike, that they could not ignore. The protest movement, with spontaneous acts of civil disobedience, mass rallies, and a militant posture, genuinely empowered workers to take matters into their own hands. The Democratic Party co-opted that energy to serve its own political ends and did more to demobilize the protest movement than any Republican could have hoped for. But are their ends the same as ours?

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Scott Walker's Ludicrous Claim of Victory
Source: The Progressive
Posted: August 12, 2011
Why did Governor Scott Walker and Wisconsin Republicans claim victory after losing two incumbents on Tuesday?

Simple. They don’t want you to look deep enough to find the truth.

In Wisconsin history, only two legislators have been removed through a recall election. On Tuesday, voters removed two Republicans in one fell swoop. We may not have taken the majority in the Senate, but let’s not let the GOP take our eye off the prize: recalling Scott Walker.

Progressive momentum is easy to see when you compare Governor Walker’s 2010 election with Tuesday’s Senate recall elections. Note, of the six Senate Republicans up for recall, five of the seats are considered by political insiders as safe Republican districts.

In 2010, Governor Walker cleaned up all six Senate districts in 2010, but Republicans lost two of them on Tuesday. GOP enthusiasm in those districts (and dare I say the entire state?) is waning.

Governor Walker actually averaged 55.6% of the vote in the six Senate recall districts in 2010 compared to his 52.3% statewide total. Last Tuesday, Senate Republicans averaged 52.7% in these six Walker stronghold districts, which underperforms 2010 candidate Scott Walker by almost three full percentage points.

Governor Walker has alienated a lot of traditional middle-class Republican voters and it will seriously hurt his chances in his next election, which may be sooner than he’d like.

If a recall election were held today and the same 3% of Republicans who voted Democratic in the recall elections vote for the Democratic recall candidate, Governor Walker could be in serious trouble. Combine that with adding in heavily progressive Dane County and the City of Milwaukee and we’ve got ourselves a recipe for Democratic revolution in Wisconsin.
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Wisconsin's Warning to Union-Busters
Source: The New York Times, Editorial
Posted: August 11, 2011
Five months after Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin pushed through a law stripping public unions of their bargaining rights, the Republican Party has paid a price. Two of the state senators who backed the law were thrown out of office by voters on Tuesday and replaced with Democrats. Mr. Walker's opponents did not succeed in turning over the Senate, but it was still an impressive response to the governor's arrogant overreach.

Recall elections are extremely difficult to win; only two had succeeded in the state in the last 80 years. The districts lean Republican, and getting people to turn out in an unusual off-year election is always a struggle. Had Democrats won one more district, they would control the Senate, but they were also trying to send a warning to Republican lawmakers around the country who are trying to break public employee unions. In that, they succeeded.

Republicans will not admit this, but the numbers showed significant strength for Democrats even in the districts they lost — strength that could grow if lawmakers continue cutting spending and taxes while reducing the negotiating rights of working families. In one rural senatorial district that had not elected a Democrat in a century, the Democratic candidate reached 48 percent of the vote. Another race was also close, and as Nate Silver noted in The Times, the overall results suggest that a contemplated statewide recall of Mr. Walker himself would be too close to call. (Two Democrats face recalls next week.)

Mr. Walker and his colleagues tried to paint the unions as unwilling to sacrifice a bit of their pensions and health benefits in rough fiscal times. It was heartening to see more than 160,000 Wisconsin voters reject that false notion. The unions had already agreed to significant concessions on both; what the Republicans really wanted was to break their organizing ability by ending bargaining on anything except wages and limiting raises to inflation.

The measure they enacted, which would block withholding of union dues from state employees' paychecks, was aimed solely at labor's political power and had nothing to do with the state budget. But Tuesday's vote proved that the unions and the middle-class voters who support them remain a potent force.
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Labor and Dems lost. They should be proud of what they accomplished.
Source: Greg Sargent, in The Washington Post
Posted: August 10, 2011
The history of the American labor movement is crowded with losing battles and crushing disappointments. The men and women who have fought for workers’ rights, often against tremendously long odds, have all too often suffered defeat and humiliation, only finding consolation in the idea that their efforts perhaps succeed in awakening a bit of public sympathy for their plight, inching their larger cause forward in unseen ways.

Yesterday unions and Democrats fell just short of victory in Wisconsin, winning two of six races to recall GOP state senators, in a battle that had unexpectedly emerged as ground zero in a national class war, partly over the fate of organized labor. There’s no way to sugar-coat it: Unions and Dems failed in their objective as they defined it, which was to take back the state senate, put the brakes on Scott Walker’s agenda, and let the nation know that elected officials daring to roll back public employee bargaining rights would face dire electoral consequences.

But nonetheless, what they failed to accomplish does not diminish what they did successfully accomplish.

[...]

By staging a fight that drew national attention, labor and Wisconisn Dems revealed an unexpected level of national sympathy for public employees, and, yes, for unions and their basic right to exist. This alone was an important achievement, flummoxing pundits who had confidently predicted that public employeees would make easy public scapegoats for the national conservative movement in dire economic times.

[...]

Will the national support for public employees in polls slow the drive of conservatives and GOP governors to roll back bargaining rights nationally? Probably not. Conservatives will point to yesterday’s events, with some justification, as proof that governors might not suffer direct electoral consequences in response to radical union-busting policies. But what Wisconsin showed us is that the broader public simply isn’t on their side. Let’s hope national Dems take heart.

The events in Wisconsin were a blow to organized labor. But the simple fact is that labor and Dems came within a hair of realizing an objective that was dismissed at the outset of this fight as a delusional lefty pipe dream. Wisconsin won’t chasten the left; Wisconsin will embolden it. And those who poured untold amounts of time and energy into the Wisconsin effort shouldn’t regret their efforts for a second.
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Guest commentary by Richard Trumka and Mark Gaffney
Deficit our country faces is a moral deficit
Source: Michigan Live
Posted: August 10, 2011
From the debate today about the debt ceiling and deficits, you wouldn’t know that America has, for the past two generations, led globally in modernizing medicine, developing the Internet, and providing top-notch higher education. We have long had the strongest economy, the biggest middle class and broadly shared prosperity. We’ve been on top.

But now we’re slipping and the people of Michigan are struggling to get by. And what’s mind-boggling is that many of our elected leaders seem almost happy to declare that our country is broke and only a few can enjoy life’s bounty. Instead of imagining a future for our children to thrive in, they’re saying it’s time to pull back.

So let’s be clear: The policies proposed by politicians contradict our defining American belief that our ambition is to create a future that is better for our children than it is for us — and not just our children, but for all children.

Why isn’t the greatest problem-solving nation solving problems? What will be the big achievements of the 21st century? Finding a cure for HIV/AIDS? Designing super-fast trains and highways that transform transportation and energy consumption? Rebuilding our middle class and a ladder of economic opportunity?

We’re miles from those achievements and headed in the wrong direction. The unemployment rate in Michigan is one of the country’s highest: 10.3 percent. Nearly 20 counties have unemployment rates of 25 percent or higher. Meanwhile, the state Senate has approved broad caps on welfare benefits without also increasing resources people need to become self-sufficient, such as job training and education.

Elected leaders across the country are calling for the defunding of foreclosure counseling and food aid for the poor and blocking job training and transportation infrastructure, all while upholding tax subsidies for profiteers and the super-rich. These are political choices, not economic ones, and they are intended to undermine the power of working people. The people of Michigan and America deserve better.

It’s time to recognize that the deficit our country faces is a moral deficit. We must begin where the American people want our future to be. That means returning balance to our economy. It means restoring progressive taxation. President Obama is right — the Bush tax cuts for the rich must end. Billionaires should pay higher rates than millionaires, and millionaires should pay higher rates than the upper middle class. And we must end tax breaks for big corporations.
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The Rule-or-Ruin Republicans
Source: Paul Begala, The Daily Beast/Newsweek
Posted: August 9, 2011
Progressives almost never get the labeling right. (To be fair, conservatives almost never get the policy right, which is worse.) What did we label an innovative tax credit to encourage work and reward those who leave welfare? The Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC. Wow, that's gripping. Not.

But it appears that this time we got the branding right. Within hours of the announcement that Standard & Poor's had downgraded U.S. Treasury debt, progressives were all calling it the Tea Party Downgrade. I think it will stick because, as Henry Kissinger said in another context, it has the added virtue of being true. Now, counter to prevailing stereotypes, it is progressives who proudly wave the flag and right-wingers who run down America. While Romney whines about "the failure of leadership of the president of the United States in Washington D.C." (glad you clarified that, Mitt. For a minute I thought you were talking about the president of the United States in Baraboo, Wisconsin), the billionaire Democrat Warren Buffett defends our country and mocks S&P, boldly announcing that "if anything, it may change my opinion on S&P," and proudly declaring that the United States deserves a "quadruple A" rating.

[...] One-hundred-fifty-one years ago, in his address at Cooper Union, Abraham Lincoln, the founder of the Republican Party, addressed his opponents bitterly: "Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events."

The Tea Party Downgrade. Brought to you by Rule-or-Ruin Republicans.
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I Want My America Back -- not the Tea Party's America
Source: Huffington Post
Posted: August 9, 2011
When I was a kid and we were deciding what games to play and how to play them, our slogan was "the majority rules." That constant and lofty principle ranked right up there with "loser walks" after a touchdown in sandlot football. The bullies and the brats who stamped their feet to get their way did not make the rules. We carried the concept of majority rule into our adult lives and assumed it applied to government as well, but apparently that is no longer the case. Some of our elected representatives would bring down this country in pursuit of their own jihad. The majority no longer rules, and we are all losers as a result. When have we ever had a statute enacted when so many legislators voted their approval and simultaneously voiced their disapproval? The country is in a state of despair -- and for good reason. The stock market has obviously given the debt-ceiling "compromise" and the debate leading up to it a flunking grade as has Standard & Poor's.

Wiser voices have spoken about the consequences of the legislation saving the country from its credit default. I am interested and concerned with the process. The undisputed fact is that a minority of the country has taken over its control. Although the cabal may not share blood oaths or secret handshakes, they have their intractable pledges and fanaticism that makes them willing to destroy this country's and possibly the world's economy to achieve their ends. By holding up a vote on what had been a traditional rubber stamp for decades by both political parties to raise the debt limit, they sought to extort compliance with their own demands irrespective of the destruction that might ensue if their demands were not met. This conduct strikes at the very foundations of our democracy and the future of our country.

[...] Apart from the early, classic Tea Party slogan, "Keep the Government out of Our Medicare," the cry was, "I Want My America Back". Well, I want MY America back too. Yes, the deficit must be reduced, waste eliminated, spending curtailed, and entitlements reviewed and probably reduced, but we need a government that operates by compromise not coercion. I want an America that builds bridges and hires workers to build them. I want an America that educates its children, feeds its poor, helps the unemployed, cares for its veterans, provides for the elderly and treats the sick who cannot afford it. I want an America that protects its environment, its food supply, its consumers and its borrowers. I want an America that is more concerned about the civil rights of its citizens rather the mythical invasion of Sharia law. What I don't want is to deny any or all of the foregoing in order to protect the wealth of the wealthiest among us. I want an America that cares as much about its people as it does about its corporations. I want an America that reflects the will of the majority in the decisions it makes and not some small, fringe group that threatens the country and its people in order to achieve its goals. I want an America that is not governed by bullies and brats who insist on making the rules. I want an America in which the rules that governed my childhood playground govern the country as well.
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How weak Democrats enable hard-line Republicans
Source: The Washington Post
Posted: August 8, 2011

Ross Douthat argues that the Republican Party’s intransigence on taxes is rendered rational by the Democratic Party’s cowardice on taxes. He’s right:

During the debt ceiling negotiations, I argued that by passing on a grand bargain today, Republicans were risking a bigger defeat on taxes down the road. The response that I got from more than a few conservatives was telling: They simply didn’t believe that the Democrats would ever muster the political will to actually let the Bush tax cuts expire. And if that assumption is correct, then the Republican refusal to bend on taxes makes all the sense in the world. If you don’t think your opposition can actually pull the trigger and fire the bullets in its gun, then why not wait till after the next election to cut a deficit deal? At best, you’ll have a Republican president and a better final package; at worst, the same basic bargain will still be on the table, because the Democrats won’t have the guts to take it off.
This is the reality that liberals need to face: Much of the Republican “intransigence” and “hostage-taking” and “terrorism” that they deplore is a direct consequence of the fact that Republicans assume that Democrats will always, always, cave on taxes. And so long as that assumption keeps getting vindicated by events, there’s no incentive for the G.O.P. to accede to sweeping compromises on deficit reduction. Why would you compromise with a party that won’t actually fight for the revenues required to pay for the programs it claims to want to protect? Why would you sign off on tax increases that your notionally pro-government opposition doesn’t want to sign off on themselves?

The interesting implication of this, which you see clearly in Ross’s post, is that moderate Republicans are being undermined by weak-kneed Democrats. After all, if centrist Republicans can’t credibly argue a hard-line position will lead to much higher taxes, they can’t credibly argue that the Republicans Party needs to compromise.

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Downgrade blame? GOP gets it
Sources: The Washington Post
Posted: August 8, 2011
As we continue to see the fallout from S&P’s downgrade of U.S. debt today, one thing should remain clear: Republican hostage-taking caused the downgrade. 

Greg already dealt with this over the weekend, but it needs to be said again, because much of the media coverage continues to operate on a principle of supposed "objectivity" that is premised on "fairness" to both parties rather than the actual facts. The most egregious example of this over the weekend came from Time’s Mark Halperin, who said that there is “blame to go around” and that it was wrong to vest it all with Republicans. The Associated Press even said the downgrade happened because the cuts in the deal weren't steep enough, without noting S&P's concerns about Republican opposition to additional revenue. Politico “reported ” that  "it was hard not to read the S&P analysis as a report card on Obama’s oft-repeated pledge to cure Washington’s hyper-partisanship," as though the fault lay on Obama for failing to persuade Republicans to be reckless, rather than on Republicans for being reckless. 

Of course there isn’t “blame to go around.” As the S&P report itself blamed “political brinksmanship” and “America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed.”

The S&P report also faulted Republicans for being unwilling to raise taxes, but this is really a minor point. The downgrade was the result of Republicans turning a procedural vote on raising the debt ceiling into a hostage negotiation in which they were willing to put the full faith and credit of the United States on the line to secure policy concessions they wouldn't have been able to achieve otherwise, and they have made it clear they will do so again. In fact, as House Speaker John Boehner himself said, many Republicans literally hoped for enough “chaos,” believing that a disaster after Aug.2 could lead to a balanced budget amendment. 

Putting aside S&P's problems with arithmetic and the role they it played in the financial crisis with their positive ratings of mortgage-backed securities, the firm’s analysis that, as Jonathan Chait puts it, “the Republican Party poses a long-term threat to the stability of the U.S. financial system,” is entirely accurate.
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The F.A.A., After the Republicans
Source: The NY Times, editorial
Posted: August 4, 2011
Here is what has happened since the Federal Aviation Administration lost its authorization on July 23, courtesy of House Republicans. The agency has not collected more than $300 million in taxes (money the airlines have mostly pocketed). It has had to furlough some 4,000 workers and halt construction projects worth $11 billion in 241 airports, putting 70,000 more people out of work.

And why is this happening? Republicans, who are experts at such maneuvers, have been holding the reauthorization of the F.A.A. hostage for months, trying to get Democrats in the Senate to agree to weaken transportation workers' rights.

The tale, like so much in Washington, is a convoluted one, but it comes down to this: Last year, the National Mediation Board changed a rule to make it easier for airline and railroad workers to unionize with a straight majority vote. At the behest of the airlines, House Republicans inserted a provision in the F.A.A. reauthorization bill to undo the rule change. The Senate's version kept the rule.

[...] Both parties agree subsidies must be cut. But the list, Democrats note, was written in a way to hit airports in the states of prominent Senate Democrats, including Majority Leader Harry Reid. Representative John Mica, the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, announced publicly that the subsidy issue was "just a tool" to get the Senate to give in on the union issue.

Before leaving Washington on Tuesday, Senate Democrats tried to find a way to extend the F.A.A.'s authority until Sept. 30 — including proposing an extension bill that included a broader plan to trim subsidies to rural airports. They were blocked by Senate Republicans. Unless the vacationing Congress takes extraordinary action, nothing will change until after Labor Day, at the very least.

By then, the extortion will have cost the government around $1 billion. Thousands of people will have gone without a paycheck for at least four more weeks. And critical repairs at airports will not have been made. There is no excuse.
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Union is NOT a dirty word!
Source: Daily Kos
Posted: August 2, 2011
This past week I had to purchase a new car (well, new to me). My goals were simple, affordable, a good reliable car, union made, and made in the United States. Of the four goals I accomplished three of them. I purchased a 2006 Ford Fusion. It was affordable, union made and reliable. It was not however, made in the United States. It was built at the Hermosillo Stamping and Assembly plant located in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico. While I am disappointed in Ford Motor Company for building “domestic” autos in Mexico I am glad to know that the plant in Mexico is unionized (although I am not sure what the workers wages are nor have I been able to find information on benefits). I posted my goals/requirements for my new car as a status on Facebook. The majority of comments were positive. Some were less so. Now the majority of conservative associates that were “friends” on Facebook were purged during the Wisconsin protests. The ones that remain are family members. For the most part these family members do not say much about my political leanings or my political posts. However when I posted that one of the goals for my new car purchase was that it be union made – well, I stuck my head into a hornet’s nest. I was told that non-union labor was “just as good” as union labor, that “Unions are not needed,” that union labor did not provide anymore quality than non-union labor and so on.

I come from a union family and I am getting pissed off about all of the union bashing. As a child, union wages put food on the table and clothes on the backs of my siblings and me. It allowed us to own a nice home in Madison just a block away from a public school. Union wages gave my parents the ability to own a small RV (A Holiday Vacationer), which we used to go camping almost every weekend in the summer. The union stood by my dad when his boss tried to break the union. The union allowed my parents to have a comfortable retirement. The union took care of my mother’s long-term care as she suffered the debilitating effects of dementia.

Madison.com had an article posted today titled, In recall campaigns, union is a dirty word — on both sides, the quote that stopped me in my tracks was this one,

The fight over collective bargaining that threw Wisconsin into political chaos in February and ignited efforts to recall nine state senators, but when it comes to the actual campaigns being waged this summer, "union" is a dirty word on both sides. Republicans and Democrats, along with national conservative groups and unions, are steering clear of the battle over union rights in the millions being spent through television ads, mailers and other messaging in the races.
Union is not a dirty word! As unions go, so goes the middle class. Our nation needs a strong middle class; to have a strong middle class we must have strong unions. Unions are not protection for lazy workers; unions do not provide a safe haven for workers that are incompetent. Unions protect workers against abuse by management. Unions allow many to negotiate as one, instead of one negotiating for oneself. The argument should not be about whether union or non-union workers provide better quality products, it should be about unions providing better wages and benefits for their members. Living wages, real wages that can help our economy grow. The Wisconsin protests started because of union rights being stripped away from public employees for our democratic candidates to shy away from supporting union rights is unconscionable to me. As democrats we need to demand that our candidates support labor, both union and non-union.

We must stand together!
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