- Romney, the Rich and the Rest
- Romney Isn't Concerned
- Romney in October: 'The people who need help most are not the poor'
- Turning the 'Buffett Rule' Into Law
- The Grover Norquist "Impeach Obama" Fantasy
- Don't Stop the Debates
- Pensions Aren't the Problem for State Budgets
- Mr. Gingrich's Deceptions
- Horatio Alger Debunked
- ‘Licking Their Chops’ on K Street and Capitol Hill
- Dissent in the Jobs Council
- The GOP: Unmasked and Undone
- America Isn't a Corporation
- Previous articles are available here
Romney, the Rich and the Rest
Posted: February 4, 2012
Source: Charles M. Blow, in The New York Times
After all, Mitt Romney is the same multimillionaire who joked that he was “unemployed” while he was “earning” more in one day than most Americans earn in a year and paying a lower rate on those earnings than most Americans do.
This is the same man who bragged last month that he liked to fire people at a time when nearly 13 million people are out of work and who accepted the endorsement this week of Donald Trump, who has made “You’re Fired!” his television catchphrase.
This is the same man who in November claimed that federal employees are making “a lot more money than we are.” What?! We? What we? Please direct me to the federal employees with the $20 million paychecks. In fact, The Washington Post pointed out in November that federal employees on average “are underpaid by 26.3 percent when compared with similar nonfederal jobs, a ‘pay gap’ that increased by about 2 percentage points over the last year while federal salary rates were frozen.”
And who could forget his remark that “corporations are people.” Classic.
But this week when Romney said that he wasn’t concerned about the very poor in this country, he jumped in the pickle barrel and went over the waterfall.
First, his statement:
“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich. They’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America — the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”
Romney went on to say that his campaign was focused on “middle-income Americans” and that “we have a very ample safety net” for the poor.
He later tried to clarify, saying that his comments needed context. Then he said that the comments were a “misstatement” and that he had “misspoke.” Yeah, right.Read the complete source story here.
Romney Isn't Concerned
Posted: February 2, 2012
Source: Paul Krugman, in The New York Times
If you're an American down on your luck, Mitt Romney has a message for you: He doesn't feel your pain. Earlier this week, Mr. Romney told a startled CNN interviewer, "I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there."
Faced with criticism, the candidate has claimed that he didn't mean what he seemed to mean, and that his words were taken out of context. But he quite clearly did mean what he said. And the more context you give to his statement, the worse it gets.
[...] You can say this for the former Massachusetts governor and Bain Capital executive: He is opening up new frontiers in American politics. Even conservative politicians used to find it necessary to pretend that they cared about the poor. Remember “compassionate conservatism”? Mr. Romney has, however, done away with that pretense.
At this rate, we may soon have politicians who admit what has been obvious all along: that they don’t care about the middle class either, that they aren’t concerned about the lives of ordinary Americans, and never were.
Read the complete source story here.
Romney in October: 'The people who need help most are not the poor'
Posted: February 2, 2012
Source: Greg Sargent, in The Washington Post
But in some ways, this version is even worse. He flatly states that the middle class need more help than the poor do, because the latter have their safety net. It’s a clearer glimpse into Romney’s thinking:
A fuller version of the video is right here, at around the 20 minute mark. Here’s the quote:“In our country, the people who need the help most are not the poor, who have a safety net; not the rich, who are doing just fine; but the middle class.”In some ways this is an even starker version than yesterday’s was: Romney doesn’t qualify this by saying the safety net needs repair, as he did yesterday. Thanks to the saftey net, the poor are less in need of help than middle class people are.
Read the complete source story here.
Turning the 'Buffett Rule' Into Law
Posted: February 1, 2012
Source: The New York Times, editorial
On Wednesday, Senate Democrats are expected to create legislation that would require million-dollar earners to pay at least 30 percent of their income in taxes. Even if the bill faces a brick wall of Republican opposition, which it will, a vote on this proposal cannot come soon enough.
The bill, to be introduced by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, would impose a new rate of up to 30 percent that would phase in gradually on incomes between $1 million and $2 million. The new rate would have to be paid if it is higher than the taxpayer’s current rate. It would operate like the alternative minimum tax, superseding all brackets and the lower rates for investment income, though it would preserve the incentive for charitable donations.
Those taxpayers who earn most of their high incomes from salaries would not be affected, as their rates are already higher than 30 percent. But taxpayers like Mitt Romney, who earn most of their income from investments or hedge-fund partnerships that are taxed at 15 percent, would have to pay substantially more.
President Obama prefers the example of Warren Buffett, who, he has said, pays a smaller tax rate than his secretary. (Thus, he calls it the “Buffett Rule.”)
The Congressional Research Service estimates that the Buffett Rule, requiring millionaires to pay at least the same rate as most middle-income taxpayers, would affect about a quarter of all millionaires, or 94,500 taxpayers. Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal policy group, says the bill’s 30 percent rate would bring in about $50 billion a year.
The Obama administration says it is supportive of Mr. Whitehouse’s bill but still wants to see other changes in the tax code, such as using limits on itemized deductions for the highest earners to generate more tax revenue.
Both approaches would be good starts toward making the rich pay a fairer share and reduce the mounting cuts to government programs that benefit the less fortunate. But they are only the beginning. Sound tax policy calls for raising the capital gains tax, which, at 15 percent, is the lowest since the Great Depression.
Read the complete source story here.
The Grover Norquist "Impeach Obama" Fantasy
Posted: January 31, 2012
Source: Esquire
One of the more piquant passages in the interview that Mark Warren and I did with former President Bill Clinton, which appears in this month's production of Esquire: The Magazine is this part right at the top where Clinton talks about a change of heart experienced by a former GOP congresscritter named Bob Inglis, who lost in a primary in 2010 because he said disrespectful things about Glenn Beck but who, in the giddy years of the late 1990's, wielded his pitchfork most enthusiastically in the cause of impeaching Clinton, an effort for which he recently apologized, according to the former president, who nonetheless told us:
I had a fascinating meeting with Bob Inglis the other day. Bob Inglis was an extremely conservative Republican congressman from South Carolina. He was a three-term-pledge guy in the nineties.... So he came to me and he said, "I just want you to know, when you got elected, I hated you. And I asked to be on the Judiciary Committee in 1993, because a bunch of us had already made up our minds that no matter what you did or didn't do, we were going to find some way to impeach you. We hated you. You had no right to be president."
This has been a consistent something-more-than-a-rumor ever since Bill Clinton took office — that the Republicans wanted him removed from the first day he took office, and that they were not waiting for a crime so much as they were waiting for the moment when they had the votes to do it. (That this is a monumental act of contempt for the people who elected him their president should not concern us here, because it apparently never concerned the Republicans.)[...] Which makes me a little less sanguine than most people when I hear that Grover Norquist is going on about the subject again:
Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach. The last year, he’s gone into this huddle where he does everything by executive order. He’s made no effort to work with Congress.
Yes, and I have made "no effort" to convince Holy Mother Church to close St. Patrick's and open up a fried-dough stand in its place.
Over the past 10 years, and particularly over the past three, we have seen as a consistent strategy by conservative Republicans thinking, and then acting, on the unthinkable. Nobody ever used the filibuster the way they have. All the "gentlemen's agreements" that grease the wheels of the legislative process have become dead letters, no matter what dunces like Evan Bayh say. If you don't think they won't try this farce again, elect them majorities in both houses and see what happens.Read the complete source story here.
Don't Stop the Debates
Posted: January 30, 2012
Source: The New York Times, editorial
Senator John McCain spoke for many nervous Republicans on Sunday when he said it's time to "stop the debates." They've turned into mud-wrestling contests, he said on "Meet the Press" on NBC, and are driving up negative impressions of the party's presidential candidates.
Mr. McCain, who knows something about unfavorable ratings, is right that the 19 debates so far have left an increasingly sour taste in voters’ mouths. Since the debates began, the popularity gap has grown between the leading Republican candidates and President Obama.
But that’s not simply because the candidates have increased the intensity of their attacks on each other, nor is it curable by cutting back the mud-fighting, as Mr. McCain suggests. It’s also because voters have been exposed to the broken windows of the Republican idea factory. The value of debates is to put the candidates on stage to air their ideas. If voters find them dishonest and divisive, the Republicans are getting the wrong message if they think all they have to do to fix that is to stop talking so much.
Consider some of the “bold ideas” the country learned about in just the last two debates in Florida, leading up to Tuesday’s primary there.
Newt Gingrich wants to build a lunar colony on the moon in just eight years, and he seems to believe that the private sector can be induced to pay for it. He wants to convene a “gold commission” to get the country back to hard money, which would shackle the economy to a single commodity. He wants to end multilingual ballots (disenfranchising millions), promote an uprising in Cuba and end the capital gains tax, which would allow millionaires to pay less of their income to the government than the minimum they pay now.
Mitt Romney promised to get millions of illegal immigrants to “self-deport,” apparently by making their lives miserable. He would veto the Dream Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for immigrant college students and military service members. He would refuse to extend any government help to struggling homeowners, while repealing the Dodd-Frank law that finally regulated the banking practices that led to the housing crisis.
The debates that Mr. McCain so deplores also gave voters a taste of the incompetent candidacies of Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, helping to put an end to them. They have properly marginalized Ron Paul and his cranky libertarianism.
Read the complete source story here.
Pensions Aren't the Problem for State Budgets
Posted: January 29, 2012
Source: AFL-CIO Now Blog
Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, the Pravda of the 1 percent, is at it again, continuing its push to gut the retirement security of millions of middle class workers across the country while enriching the Wall Street moneymen who just three years ago took our economy over the cliff.
Virtually everyone agrees that our nation faces a retirement security crisis, but the Journal last week published a shameful op-ed calling for the elimination of pensions for nurses, firefighters, corrections officers and others who still have them. Having punched private-sector workers retirement in the gut, these folks won’t be happy until the whole concept of a secure retirement for working Americans is a thing of the past.
The typical AFSCME member — men and women who plow our streets, care for the sick, protect our children, clean our buildings and keep our communities safe — receives a pension of approximately $19,000 a year after a career of public service. The employees have earned and paid for these pensions. Employee contribution rates commonly amount to 3 percent to 10 percent of their paychecks. These contributions, combined with investment earnings, usually account for 75 percent or more of all pension benefit funding.
The economy’s collapse in 2008-2009 took its toll on everyone’s retirement savings. But our nation’s public pension systems, which were fully funded before the crash, continue their robust recovery earning their highest returns in decades in fiscal year 2011. Pensions continue to provide irreplaceable retirement security to millions of Americans who provide public services. Yet, the corporate-backed
opponents of pensions are creating a myth that the system is falling apart and that state and local governments are going bankrupt because of the $19,000 pensions sanitation workers are earning.
That is simply not true. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the size of the projected state and local government pension funding shortfalls is manageable. In most states, the total shortfall for the pension funds is less than 0.2 percent of projected gross state product during the next 30 years. Even in states with the largest shortfalls, the gap is less than 0.5 percent of projected state product during that period. And, because pension payments are made over generations of workers,
funding can remain stable over long periods, and funding challenges managed over decade long periods, despite short-term economic setbacks. These are facts that the opponents of public pensions simply ignore, as they seek to punish workers for Wall Street’s psychopathic behavior.
Read the full post here.
Mr. Gingrich's Deceptions
Posted: January 26, 2012
Source: The New York Times, editorial
Newt Gingrich’s victory in South Carolina turned on an almost comically broad deception, an inversion of the truth in which the insider whose personal wealth and political experience are entirely creations of Washington becomes the anti-establishment candidate. That it worked speaks poorly of voters who let themselves be manipulated by the lowest form of campaigning, appealing to their anger and prejudices.
Speaking on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Mr. Gingrich said he was the only one in the race who understands the level of anger at the “national establishment.” He feels no need to actually define this establishment; it’s simply a blob of elitist others who are trying to tell real Americans “what they’re allowed to think, what they’re allowed to say.” It is clear, though, that both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are in it, as are Wall Street, all bureaucrats and most emphatically the national media.
Mr. Gingrich is clearly hoping that if he keeps the volume up high on his sputtering and raving at this nebulous group, it will drown out his lifetime membership in it. For years, he was a lobbyist for Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage company, making more than $1.6 million over eight years. He also cashed in on his influence by selling access to health-care companies and insurers, bringing in $37 million over eight years.
But all of this was ignored in South Carolina, where he won by a commanding margin through exploitation of racial resentment and hatred of the news media.Read complete source story here.
Horatio Alger Debunked
Posted: January 25, 2012
Source: Huffington Post
America is losing its social mobility. What makes this particularly dangerous is that it represents a shift from historical patterns, and particularly attacks the bulk of the country, the middle and working class, in unprecedented fashion.
Since the late nineteenth century, the model has been the Horatio Alger stories. In pamphlets with wonderfully alliterative titles, the hero (Determined Dick, Terrific Tom, etc.) starts out poor, and through smarts, Puritan work ethic, and improbable good luck, winds up in the ranks of the wealthy.
While this really did happen to a few famous individuals like Andrew Carnegie, the scenario was actually unlikely. A number of historical studies have shown that the ranks of the upper middle class to rich -- those who benefitted from the booming economy of the Gilded Age -- were drawn from members of their own class, and their own ethnic group. The odds on a worker or farmer or an immigrant breaking in were slim indeed.
There are several other problems, however, with using Alger's characters as the archetypes. While rags-to-riches was rare, another kind of social mobility did occur. Millions of Americans made it from the working class to the middle stratum, even if it was to the lower reaches. That is the true American success story, the result of free public education, equitable tax rates to fund public efforts, unions, and reform laws such as those that protected workers' health and prevented an injured bread winner from plummeting the family back into poverty.
Let us not be naive about history. If this shift happened, it came at exceptionally high cost. The casualty rate along the way, of laborers dead and maimed in the mills, was higher than that of any external war this country has fought. It required enormous sacrifice, and gut wrenching hunger, often of parents who went without so offspring could rise a wrung on the ladder. As that implies, mobility often took more than one generation. Note that there was also plenty of downward mobility -- something never touched on in all the accounts of our miracle -- as large numbers fell farther and farther behind thanks to layoffs, injuries, and other setbacks that were devastating, yet rarely the fault of the worker.
Read the complete source story.
‘Licking Their Chops’ on K Street and Capitol Hill
Posted: January 24, 2012
Source: Bill Moyers.com
The public’s disgust with Congress has been confirmed in poll after poll; Americans are fed up with the combination of partisan squabbling and inertia that since last year has led to little or nothing accomplished. Missouri Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, told CNN on Tuesday, “I think that the 11 percent of Americans who think we’re doing a good job need therapy.”
Several reports in the last day or two may finally convince that remaining 11 percent to head to the analyst’s couch. A headline in the congressional newspaper The Hill announces, “K Street Headhunters Enamored with Upcoming Class of Retiring Lawmakers.” Lobby shops and law firms in DC are scouting the talent and formulating their “mock draft” as at least 25 representatives and senators have announced their plans to leave office at the end of their current terms.
The paper’s Kevin Bogardus writes, “The retiring class includes lawmakers who are known for their bipartisan ties, and others who have spent decades on Capitol Hill accruing seniority on powerful committees. That mix of attributes has many on K Street licking their chops…
“Former senators could expect to earn somewhere between $800,000 and $1.5 million in annual salary next year at lobby firms, while ex-House members could earn between $300,000 and $600,000, headhunters estimated.”
And far be it from us to begrudge anyone else their benefits, but teeth may grind with the realization that in addition to the big salaries retired legislators pull down as Washington rainmakers, many of them also are among the 15,000 former federal employees receiving annual, six-figure pensions. Bloomberg News reports that according to the Office of Personnel Management, “They include former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt ($106,512 for 28 years of work as a Missouri Democratic congressman); Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle ($105,804 for 33 years as a South Dakota Democratic lawmaker); Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole ($144,432 for 40 years as a Kansas Republican lawmaker); and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott ($110,352 after 39 years as a Republican lawmaker from Mississippi).”Read the complete source story here.
Dissent in the Jobs Council
Posted: January 23, 2012
Source: The New York Times, editorial
At Disney World last week, President Obama announced new executive orders to speed up visas for foreign tourists to the United States. The measure, a priority for the travel industry, was one of several sensible recommendations made in the last year by Mr. Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, a 27-member panel of corporate executives, academics, investors and labor leaders. The White House has carried out 17 others so far.
Increasingly, however, the council’s recommendations have resembled not so much expert advice as a corporate wish list. In a report last October, the council’s sound proposals for job-creating public works projects were overshadowed by its unfounded claim that antifraud provisions put in place in 2002 in response to Enron are an impediment to growth and hiring, and should be ended.
Its latest report, issued last week, went so far in the direction of the Republican political agenda that it was endorsed by House Speaker John Boehner for its emphasis on lower tax rates and less regulation. The report drew the ire of the panel’s two union members, Richard Trumka, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and Joseph Hansen, chairman of the Change to Win coalition. After the false premises and false fixes that have dominated the job creation debate, the dispute is healthy.
Mr. Trumka wrote a dissent in which he agreed that the United States has fallen behind other countries in investment in infrastructure, manufacturing, education, job skills and alternative energy. What he rightly objected to was the idea that less regulation, lower corporate tax rates and other demands on the business agenda are the key to restoring competitiveness and creating jobs. “Without timely action by government on a large scale,” he wrote, “solutions will continue to elude us as a nation.”Read the complete source story here.
The GOP: Unmasked and Undone
Posted: January 17, 2012
Source: Huffington Post
The Republicans have tipped their hand -- spilled it all over the floor, actually -- and demonstrated beyond doubt that they are solely dedicated to crippling any idea that Americans should have hope, that Americans should be nothing less than afraid and that history and facts are merely vague, noisy complexities, not of any real use to anyone and ultimately up for grabs.
And it is now clear that anything that comes from the Right Wing purporting to be factual analyses of social and political issues is invariably propaganda, much of it a cunning mixture of outright lies with some factual details and factoids woven into the mix to give it an air of credibility. Witness Mitt's incessant lie-stream and Fox's round-the-clock trumpeting of divisive memes, pouring into the media culture like so much bilge water.
But make no mistake: the years that comprise the Obama administration will be described as The War Years, not only for the inherited wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but as much for the war being waged on our own turf, emanating from within the think tanks and daily memos distributed by the far-reaching Right Wing machine.
The war on government being waged is fundamentally a war on Democracy. It's a war that is being waged strategically and continually and is now being fought in the open, as the GOP contenders having hogged the airwaves and congressional halls for so long that there is no way for the Right Wing to utilize its prime strategy of causing knee-jerk responses to hot-button issues -- everyone and everything's been given far too much airtime.
And even the dedicated ditto-heads and loyal Rep-bots who follow their orders without question are starting to see the holes in the repeated arguments, smell the proverbial rat; the geniuses and demagogues who profess to wage this war on behalf of their patriotic and steadfast audience are being spotted for the turncoat corporate shills they actually are, and are even seeing their reviled Obama as anything but the Socialist oppressor pig the brazen propagandists have painted him as being since he was duly elected.
But hell, this is Capitalist America and they are just doing the job for which they are well paid. They have mastered the selling of America, managing to buy up all the old fashioned version, hollow it out and resell it to a now hungry and desperate demographic.
And maybe more than a "teachable moment", this is actually an "evolution moment", where the two primordial elements that determine the course taken by a civilized society clash, naked, in a battle for dominance, all subtlety stripped away. No wonder the Right Wing has made a fetish of decrying Evolution and would put all its stock in myth rather than reality.
Read the complete source story here.
America Isn't a Corporation
Posted: January 13, 2012
Source: Paul Krugman, in The New York Times
[T]here’s a deeper problem in the whole notion that what this nation needs is a successful businessman as president: America is not, in fact, a corporation. Making good economic policy isn’t at all like maximizing corporate profits. And businessmen — even great businessmen — do not, in general, have any special insights into what it takes to achieve economic recovery.
Why isn’t a national economy like a corporation? For one thing, there’s no simple bottom line. For another, the economy is vastly more complex than even the largest private company.
Most relevant for our current situation, however, is the point that even giant corporations sell the great bulk of what they produce to other people, not to their own employees — whereas even small countries sell most of what they produce to themselves, and big countries like America are overwhelmingly their own main customers.
Yes, there’s a global economy. But six out of seven American workers are employed in service industries, which are largely insulated from international competition, and even our manufacturers sell much of their production to the domestic market.
And the fact that we mostly sell to ourselves makes an enormous difference when you think about policy.
Consider what happens when a business engages in ruthless cost-cutting. From the point of view of the firm’s owners (though not its workers), the more costs that are cut, the better. Any dollars taken off the cost side of the balance sheet are added to the bottom line.
But the story is very different when a government slashes spending in the face of a depressed economy. Look at Greece, Spain, and Ireland, all of which have adopted harsh austerity policies. In each case, unemployment soared, because cuts in government spending mainly hit domestic producers. And, in each case, the reduction in budget deficits was much less than expected, because tax receipts fell as output and employment collapsed.
Now, to be fair, being a career politician isn’t necessarily a better preparation for managing economic policy than being a businessman. But Mr. Romney is the one claiming that his career makes him especially suited for the presidency. Did I mention that the last businessman to live in the White House was a guy named Herbert Hoover? (Unless you count former President George W. Bush.)
And there’s also the question of whether Mr. Romney understands the difference between running a business and managing an economy.
Like many observers, I was somewhat startled by his latest defense of his record at Bain — namely, that he did the same thing the Obama administration did when it bailed out the auto industry, laying off workers in the process. One might think that Mr. Romney would rather not talk about a highly successful policy that just about everyone in the Republican Party, including him, denounced at the time.
But what really struck me was how Mr. Romney characterized President Obama’s actions: “He did it to try to save the business.” No, he didn’t; he did it to save the industry, and thereby to save jobs that would otherwise have been lost, deepening America’s slump. Does Mr. Romney understand the distinction?
Read the complete source story here.