Monday, October 15, 2012

“Cap & trade” too complex. Why not just create more rigorous emissions standards & fine polluters?

By Marc Jampole
 
Let’s take a break from the presidential election campaign to discuss a topic that both candidates seem to be largely ignoring: the environment - specifically the enormous amount of carbon wastes that humans are spewing into the environment by burning fossil fuels. The funny thing is that in long term, the rapid warming of the planet through human action is the most single important issue we face, and the candidates want to run away from the discussion.

California is not taking the head-in-the-sand approach of our national leaders when it comes to pollution emissions.  As the New York Times reported today, California is set to introduce a cap-and-trade plan which charges industries money for the greenhouse gases they produce. The California plan seems to be the preferred mode of economists and governments to address pollution control.  A similar cap-and-trade plan never made it through the U.S. Congress. The European Union has had a cap-and-trade program in place since 2005.

But just what is cap-and-trade? The Times gives a good overview of what will happen in California. After I read it, I was scratching my head at its complexity:

“…the state will set an overall ceiling on those emissions and assign allowable emission amounts for individual polluters. A portion of these so-called allowances will be allocated to utilities, manufacturers and others; the remainder will be auctioned off.

Over time, the number of allowances issued by the state will be reduced, which should force a reduction in emissions.

To obtain the allowances needed to account for their emissions, companies can buy them at auction or on the carbon market. They can secure offset credits, as they are known, either by buying leftover allowances from emitters that have met their targets or by purchasing them from projects that remove carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere…”

I like the part of it that involves gradually lowering the amount of emissions that are allowed.

But the idea of trading emissions credits is overly complex and therefore almost by definition easy to abuse.  Cap-and-trade creates a marketplace in which pollution credits are bought and sold.  Theoretically it enables a major polluter to continue to spew poison into the air merely by buying pollution credits from companies that don’t pollute or don’t pollute as much. As with all markets, even the theoretical “free market,” the altar at which most Republicans pray, the cap-and-trade marketplace runs by rules and regulations that lend both additional complexity and the possibility of nefarious manipulation.

In some ways, cap-and-trade reminds me of the securitization of home mortgages. It used to be that banks loaned people money to buy a home and then patiently waited until the consumer paid the loan back. With securitization, the banks made the loan and then sold it to someone else, who lumped together many loans and sold them as an investment that could be traded on the market.  Creating a market for mortgage-based financial instruments was supposed to spread the risk and lead to safer investments, which in turn would help consumers.  We all know how that worked out: Because banks were selling off the loans, their lending standards fell, people who couldn’t afford loans got them, those loans were buried in the financial vehicles that were sold, and when the loans went south, the entire house of cards of the mortgage market crumbled, taking the U.S. economy with it.

I don’t think that cap-and-trade will lead to another financial meltdown (although trading in a triviality—the tulip bulb—took down the Dutch economy in the 17th century). What it does is interject a level of complexity that is both unnecessary and open to abuse.

Cap-and-trade is the type of plan that Rube Goldberg might build.  Rube Goldberg was an American cartoonist who drew a series of popular cartoons depicting complex gadgets performing very simple tasks in convoluted ways.

The simple way to deal with emissions is to set regulations and make polluters follow them or suffer stiff fines. The argument against this approach is that it will be too expensive for companies or that the companies will pass on the costs of consumers, hurting everyone, but especially poor people.

These arguments are bogus: First of all, society is already paying the additional cost of pollution through higher healthcare costs and cleanup of natural disasters. These “hidden” costs, often called “social costs” are paid collectively by all of us. We pay and the company doesn’t, meaning that besides allowing our environment to be fouled, we as a community are subsidizing the income of the polluting company’s senior management and shareholders.  It’s a classic “pay me now or pay me later,” except instead of the companies paying now, we all pay later.

Keep in mind, too, that the money that the polluting companies shell out to put scrubbers on coal-burning plants, introduce a little natural gas into the coal mix or any of the other currently available emission technologies goes to the companies that develop, sell and maintain these pollution-preventing technologies. The money is not burned and lost to the economy. It is used to create a more diversified economy, and one that is not so hazardous to the health of the Earth.

As to poor people who might not be able to afford the new higher prices when companies clean up their act, it seems to me that it’s far simpler to give the poor an energy tax credit than to create a convoluted and easy-to-scam cap-and-trade marketplace.

I applaud California for actually doing something about greenhouse gas emissions.  I only wish it had followed the dictum of 14th century Christian philosopher, Thomas of Occam, to seek the simpler solution, which in this case means making polluters pay.

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Mitt Breaks Past 800 Lies

It was a relatively slow week for Mitt Romney, as he took a back seat to running mate Paul Ryan as the news media focused on the vice presidential debate. But Steve Benen of Maddowblog.com recorded 39 untruths, including one he had missed from the previous week, to bring the total lies told by Romney in his Republican presidential campaign this year to 808.

While it looks increasingly doubtful that Romney can reach 1,000 lies in the three weeks remaining in the campaign, he clearly is in a league of his own and 900 lies is well within his grasp. Even The Onion took notice, with a fake news story on its cover headlined: "Romney Proudly Explains How He's Turned Campaign Around: 'I'm Lying More,' He Says."

 Benen noted, "Behind all great satire, of course, is a degree of truth -- or in this case, more than a degree. Consider, for example, the 38th installment of my weekly series, chronicling Mitt's mendacity. (This is the second longest list of the year -- and the quotes below are entirely real, not satire.)"

 Along with the 38 lies Benen noted this past week, he noted that he had missed a statement made by Romney the previous week that "Right now, the (Congressional Budget Office) says up to 20 million people will lose their insurance as Obamacare goes into effect next year."

 Benen added, "That is 100% wrong," providing citations, as he does for all Romney's untruths. 

 Note also that ThinkProgress.org reported that Paul Ryan spoke for 40 of the 90 minutes during Thursday night’s vice presidential debate and managed to tell at least 24 "myths" during that time.
See previous editions of Benen's "Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity": Vol. I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII,XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXV, XXXVI, XXXVII

Friday, October 12, 2012

Selections from the November 1, 2012 issue






















Editorial: A Lying Shame


President Obama was too cautious in the first presidential debate and Mitt Romney took advantage of the president’s flat-footed performance to rebrand himself as a moderate. But that doesn’t mean Romney should be rewarded for playing fast and loose with the facts.

Who could have predicted that Mitt Romney would turn an about face on the “severely conservative” stances on which he had campaigned during the Republican primary race and make wild misstatements about his policies and Obama’s performance? Well, consider that Romney had told at least 719 documented lies from January through the week before the debate, according to Steve Benen’s tally at MaddowBlog.com, and Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom predicted in March that Romney would pivot after the nomination to appeal to moderate voters, suggesting that Romney’s conservative policy positions were written on an Etch A Sketch. “Everything changes,” Fehrnstrom said on CNN March 21. “It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.” And Romney’s pollster had told reporters at the Republican National Convention they were “not going to let [their] campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”

So Obama’s campaign team in Chicago might have had an inkling to expect Romney’s Etch A Sketch to be cleared at the debate. But, to bend a line from The Sound of Music, what do you do with a liar like Mitt Romney? Do you call him on every lie, or just the really big ones? Obama did call Romney on backing off the promise to cut taxes by 20% across the board, which would cost $5 trillion. But he let Romney repeatedly get away with saying that the Affordable Care Act took $716 billion from Medicare, when most of that money was taken from the insurance companies that were taking excessive profits from the Medicare Advantage program. (Under Romney’s reasoning, we suppose Obama also cut Medicare when a federal strike force on Oct. 4 charged 91 people, including a hospital president, doctors and nurses with $430 million in fraudulent Medicare charges.)

When Obama noted that corporations took advantage of tax deductions to move American jobs overseas, Romney — who as head of Bain Capital actually moved American jobs overseas — countered that he’d never noticed such a deduction in the tax code. “I maybe need to get a new accountant,” Romney said. Obama let it pass until the next day, when he joked that the “very spirited fellow” he met at the debate was “not the real Mitt Romney ... The Mitt Romney we all know invested in companies that were called pioneers of outsourcing jobs to other countries. But the guy on stage last night he said he’d never heard of tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas. Never heard of them. And he said, if that’s true, he must need a new accountant. So now we know for sure that wasn’t the real Mitt Romney because the real Mitt Romney is doing just fine with the accountant he already has.”

Obama’s campaign team in Chicago doubtless will harvest Mitt’s misstatements and policy pivots and deploy them in advertisements for the battleground states, but it would be nice if Obama had bloodied Mitt a bit for the national TV crowd and stood up for progressive programs such as Social Security and Medicare and done a better job defending the Affordable Care Act. Of course, then he’d have the Fox Noise bloviators complaining about the angry socialist black man in the White House — but he got that treatment anyway.

Thom Hartmann suggested on his radio show that it was more than a coincidence that a few days before the first debate the rightwing DailyCaller.com and Fox News dug up an old speech then-Sen. Obama delivered at Hampton University in 2007 — which was covered by the news media at the time — in which Obama gave a shout-out to his old United Church of Christ pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and suggested that racism played a role in the shabby treatment of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina — which is not exactly a radical view. Then, during the debate, Romney compared Obama to one of his “boys,” who were inclined to lie to him “but just keep on repeating it and ultimately hoping I’ll believe it.” Hartmann noted that the line undoubtedly was prepared in advance and it’s hard to believe that none of Romney’s advisers saw the racial implications of calling the first black president a “boy.”

Obama was wise not to respond to Romney’s race-baiting, but the President cannot let the challenger’s lies go unchallenged in the remaining debates.

As if to underscore the racist dog whistles that were being employed, the day after the debate, Romney campaign co-chair and former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu (R) on Fox News described Obama’s performance as “babbling,” “lazy” and “disengaged” and dismissed the possibility that he could do better in the future. “When you’re not that bright, you can’t get better prepared,” Sununu said. Later, on MSNBC, he again called Obama “lazy and disengaged” and said the debate revealed his “incompetence.”

Republicans should be ashamed of the way their campaign is being run, but they are long past embarrassment.

Good Enough for Government Work

As the general election campaign enters its final weeks, some progressives may have to overlook their disappointment at the performance of President Obama and the Democrats in some areas — particularly in continuing the war in Afghanistan and continuing and expanding terror-inspired restrictions on civil liberties. We know many were outraged that Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law with the provision for indefinite detention, even with his statement that he would not use the power. A judge appointed by Obama Sept. 12 threw out that indefinite-detention provision as flying in the face of the Bill of Rights but a three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals on Oct. 2 allowed the provision to remain in place while it is appealed. But progressives should not only re-elect Obama; we must elect more progressive Democrats who will stand up to Obama, if necessary, to strip the indefinite detention provision from next year’s NDAA and restore civil liberties.

We shouldn’t trust any president with the power to detain anybody indefinitely without recourse to the courts. But the Bill of Rights needs popular support that is not apparent at this time.

However, election of Romney and/or Republican members of Congress will put us further in the hole. Charlie Savage reported in the New York Times Sept. 27 that Romney’s advisers, who mainly are retreads from Bush Junior’s administration, have urged Romney to “rescind and replace” President Obama’s executive order banning torture of prisoners and permit secret “enhanced interrogation techniques against high-value detainees that are safe, legal and effective in generating intelligence to save American lives,” according to an internal Romney campaign memorandum. And Romney, who believes corporations are people, can be counted upon to nominate judges that will be well to the right of Anthony Kennedy, creating a conservative bloc that not only will defer to executive authority but also will set in stone pro-corporate decisions such as Citizens United and threaten generations of progressive court precedents.

If Obama doesn’t light your fire, despite the many good things he has accomplished in the past four years, progressives can get excited about candidates for the Senate such as Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, Shelley Berkley in Nevada, Martin Heinrich in New Mexico, Mazie Hirono in Hawaii, Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota and Chris Murphy in Connecticut, as well as re-electing progressive populists such as Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Bob Casey (D-Pa.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). And progressives ought to get excited about electing 25 more Democrats to the House, which would give the gavel back to Nancy Pelosi and put progressives in charge of key committees now helmed by right wingers. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2012

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Thursday, October 11, 2012

Why do so many right-wingers seem so grim and angry?

By Marc Jampole

I normally associate fear with many conservative positions:  Fear of minorities and the poor. Fear of losing a job or a home. Fear of terrorist attack. Fear of cities and those that have different lifestyles and backgrounds. This fear of the other that haunts U.S. culture through history.

But what I’m feeling from the right in the current presidential election cycle is anger, not fear.  Anger at people who accept government benefits—except for themselves, of course. Anger at Muslims and at Arabs (two different things). Anger at unions. Anger at anyone who wants to raise their taxes. Anger at women who have abortions and even at women who use birth control.

There have been so many Republican candidates who had fed this anger and then fed off of it that I don’t know where to start: Certainly, Mitt deserves notice for his “47%” comments, delivered in the smooth corporate style that Bertram Gross once called “friendly fascism.”

But even at his worst, Romney is so genteel. I’m talking about bitter, hateful words that seem to spew from the mouth like spitfire from an automatic weapon—Rick Santorum, Paul Ryan, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and Todd Akin are the A-team of the angry candidates, but other Republican celebs fomenting anger include Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Jack Welch, Jack Nicklaus and Sarah Palin.

I have experienced this anger in the tweets I receive whenever I write something critical of Romney or right-wing positions.  I must preface this remark by mentioning that I get very polished and enlightening tweets on a regular basis from a dozen or so conservatives who vehemently oppose my views—vehemently but with civility.

But I am getting a very large number of tweets from Romney supporters, global warming deniers and those who want to lower taxes on the wealthy and end Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid that manifest anger, and in many cases contain nothing more than angry invictive. Over the past few months every grammatical tense of all the common four-letter vulgarities have been tossed my way, along with a number of other usually tedious and gratuitous insults and an occasional veiled threat involving firearms.

I especially like when people infer things about me or my life, for example that I was a hippie, that I didn’t study in college (I won the scholarship as the outstanding student) or that I am not financially successful (when I have earned a great living running a business for more than 20 years).

But my favorite tactic of the angry birds attacking me on Twitter is “machine-gunning tweets,” by which I mean sending eight or nine tweets in a row. I can understand wanting to string some tweets together to make a point that requires too much detail for the 140-character Twitter limit. When machine-gunning tweets though, the tweeter is not building an argument, just sending a series of disconnected statements, all dripping with hostility.

(I can’t say if the progressives and centrists who tweet me are angry—they tend to agree with what I have written, so why would anger leak into their communications to an ally? They may display hostility when they tweet those with whom they disagree. I do know that a lot of them express fear when they tweet me—fear that Social Security, Medicare or food stamps could be eliminated, fear that we’ll restart our torture gulag, fear that they’ll lose reproductive rights, fear they’ll lose basic civil rights.  But I can’t say what the underlying emotional tone is when they tweet conservatives.)

The switch from fear to a mean-spirited anger came with the ascension of the Tea Party, which studies show basically comprises wealthier than usual whites living primarily in distant suburbs and rural areas.

Both anger and fear have an object and that object is the other. We fear the other. We hate the other. The other in the United States (as in many countries) are racial minorities and newcomers (AKA immigrants). It is truly a propaganda tour de force, though, that the Republicans have gotten away with adding poor people, those who receive government benefits (except for those that the hater receives), school teachers, union members and intellectuals to the list of the despised other without large numbers of people realizing that the list now includes a majority of all Americans.

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Mitt Closes in on 800 lies

Steve Benen recorded 50 lies told by Mitt Romney during the past week — including 31 during the first presidential debate on Oct. 3 — in the 37th installment of "Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity."

Benen noted:

Joe Conason watched the presidential candidates' debate this week, and had a reaction I could relate to. 
"'It's not easy to debate a liar,' complained an email from one observer of the first presidential debate -- and there was no question about which candidate he meant. Prevarication, falsification, fabrication are all familiar tactics that have been employed by Mitt Romney without much consequence to him ever since he entered public life," Conason wrote. 
Concerns along these lines were not uncommon yesterday. In fact, note David Gergen's take from Wednesday night: 
"I think [President Obana] was so surprised, he thought Romney was just flat-out lying," Gergen said. And if the president was thinking that, he had good reason to.
With the 50 lies this past week, Benen has documented 769 lies told by Romney since January. Romney will have to pick up the pace a bit during the next four weeks to reach 1,000 lies this past year, but with two more debates on tap it is possible.

See previous editions of Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity: Vol. I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII,XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXV, XXXVI

Friday, October 5, 2012

Romney admits he was wrong to write off 47% of the country

By Marc Jampole
 
News flash!

On last night’s “Sean Hannity Show,” Mitt Romney admitted that his comments about “the 47 percent” of Americans who don’t pay federal income taxes were “just completely wrong.”

Mitt doesn’t apologize, but he does say he was wrong.  Better late than never.

Romney explains away his harsh and dismissive comment by asserting that during a campaign a candidate says thousands of things and “now and then you’re going to say something that doesn’t come out right.”

He never tells us what he meant to say, but did remember to apply several at-a-boy pats to his back: “My life has shown that I care about 100 percent, and that’s been demonstrated throughout my life.”  

Maybe so and maybe no, but we know this much: The tax plan that Mitt has been talking about for the past 18 months and which he may or may not have repudiated in the first presidential debate cares only about the 1% and pretty much screws the other 99%.

I also have to wonder if Romney had another moment of “something not coming out right” in the debate when he said that the healthcare plan which he proposes to replace the Affordable Care Act will protect people with pre-existing conditions.  Yes, he enables people with pre-existing conditions to buy insurance if they had it but lost their job and are willing to pay for it themselves. Anyone else with a pre-existing condition is left holding the bag, unable to get insurance or paying an exorbitant amount for health insurance.

Romney told a lot of lies during the debate, which of course did not count in the scoring done by the pundits who have declared him the winner.  Maybe these were just other moments of “something not coming out right.”  Maybe nothing ever comes out right for Paul Ryan, whose litany of distortions and lies has been well documented.

Or maybe Mitt really meant it when he denigrated 47% of the population to an audience of fat cats last May. After all, the 47% include senior citizens, the poor, children and veterans, all of who benefit from government programs that would be cut or ended to pay for tax cut largesse that Romney wants to bestow on the already wealthy.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

The polls will tell us who won last night’s debate, but it looked like a draw.

By Marc Jampole

Despite the efforts of pundits and politicians to spin last night’s debate in favor of one or the other candidate, we won’t really know who won until we see the next set of polls of likely voters nationwide and in the swing states.

Many pundits and politicians say that Mitt Romney won because he was more aggressive and attacking. When we break his style down to its components, we get the following, all of which characterized Romney’s debate style against the other Republican contenders for the nomination:
  • Insistence that the rules be followed (usually so he could shoehorn in one more comment).
  • Interrupting his opponent(s).
  • Stridently communicating a few limited points and sticking to them.
There can be no doubt that these behaviors worked in the debates against other Republicans. Against Obama, they worked, too, but only to provide a contrast in styles.

What the pundits are really saying when they declare Romney the winner is that they prefer or believe that the American people prefer the attacking style to what seems to be Obama’s more laid-back and studied approach.

Most commentators have missed a more profound difference between the two candidates: Romney tended to speak in anecdotes and broad principles, while Obama’s presentation focused on facts and specifics.  My dear readers will be able to latch on to an example or two that contradicts what I say, but if you go back and read the transcripts carefully, you’ll see that the preponderance of examples supports my analysis that Romney followed Ronald Reagan’s model of telling stories to illustrate big ideas, while Obama went from fact to fact and from action to action.

While I much prefer the Obama approach, Daniel Kahneman proved in Thinking Fats and Slow that believing anecdotes over facts is hard-wired into the human brain, and that many people actually respond more favorably to the argument by anecdote, especially when they already believe what the anecdote supports. The degree to which fence-sitters in the election prefer anecdotal thinking will mostly determine if Romney picked up any votes last night, which is, of course, the true test of who won the debate.

As far as individual points go, the biggest verbal altercations surrounded two points:
  • Romney’s tax plan, which the Republican nominee either repudiated or lied about in the debates.  If he really does not intend to shift the tax burden to the middle class and poor from the wealthy, the debate was the first we have heard of his change of mind.  As Obama mentioned in the debate, all independent analyses of the Romney plan conclude that it would shift the tax burden down the economic ladder.
  • The $716 billion that the Obama Administration is saving in Medicare costs by ending unneeded testing, cracking down on fraud, adjusting payments to doctors and hospitals for certain services and running a more efficient operation. Romney continues to insist on falsely labeling as benefit cuts these business-like adjustments to what the government pays. Yes, doctors and insurance companies will make $716 billion less, but those on Medicare will receive the same level of benefits and have the same number of trips to the doctor and tests (except for those that they never should have had in the first place). 
The biggest disappointment in the debate was the reverence with which both candidates approached the report of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, known in short hand as the Simpson-Bowles Commission. As I and many other analysts pointed out when Simpson-Bowles released its report two years ago, the report did not do what it was supposed to do, which was to develop a plan to reduce the deficit.   Instead, the Simpson-Bowles plan proposedan overhaul of the tax system which would shift the burden of tax payments from the wealthy to the middle class and poor.  That both candidates spoke kindly of the plan shows how far right the country has moved.

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Hollywood fantasy imagines charter schools to be the answer when studies show they underperform.

By Marc Jampole
 
This year’s liberal stand-in for the devil incarnate are the Koch Brothers, who have forked over millions of dollars to establish the Tea Party, push Tea Party candidates, raise doubts about climate change and promote legislation that guts environmental regulations and reduces taxes on the wealthy.

It’s hard to vote against Dave and Charles when it comes to spreading around the bucks for bad causes, but how about Phillip Anschutz, the Conservative billionaire who financed the current anti-union melodrama, Won’t Back Down.

Won’t Back Down paints an ugly imaginary world in which all unionized teachers are lazy, uncaring incompetents. A sexy babe single parent played by Maggie Gyllenhaal organizes a charter school that saves the children.

According to Wikipedia, the film is “loosely based on the events surrounding the use of the parent trigger law in Sunland-Tujunga, Los Angeles, California in 2010, where several groups of parents attempted to take over several failing public schools” using a new law passed in California in 2010 which enabled parents “to direct changes such as dismissal of staff and potential conversion of a school to a charter school.”

The right-wing backing of Won’t Back Down begins with the studio that produced this fantasy, which also made Waiting for Superman, the documentary on charter schools that uses argument by anecdote to convince us that charter schools will save American public schools.  Anschultz, famous for his values campaigns and support of conservative think tanks, put up the money. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, known for its stands against unions, the minimum wage and any kind of government regulation of business, contributed $2.0 million to a national publicity campaign for the movie.  

By the way, Ms. Gyllenhaal went to the ritziest of private schools, belongs to a fabulously wealthy family and descends from Swedish royalty.  A lot of wealthy and connected people who send their own children to private schools like Bruce Rauner and Malin Burnham have put their money and influence behind the charter school movement. 

The question is: why would these right-wingers create and promote a slickly sentimental inspirational tearjerker about establishing a type of school that is known to fail?

Despite the glossy but distorted images of educational success in both Won’t Back Down and Waiting for Superman, charter schools are known to fail.

Let’s remain in the reality-based community that Karl Rove likes to belittle and look at the facts: Virtually all studies show that the charter school movement has yielded disappointing results in the area of student performance in school and standardized tests (which don’t test all skills, but do test a lot of skills such as reading and math that are needed to get through life and hold down a job). For example, a recent Stanford University study found that the math performance of 46% of charter schools is indistinguishable from public schools, 17% had substantially higher scores and 37% of charter schools had substantially lower scores than their public school equivalents.

Why do conservatives support charter schools?  Can the answer be anything other than breaking teachers’ unions? What I find so amazing is that so many people buy the argument that less experienced, lower paid teachers in charter or private schools or in the Teach for America program (which lets high-flying recent college graduates without education degrees teach in disadvantaged schools for a year or so) will do a better job than higher-paid teachers in unions. We think that higher paid actors, athletes, musicians, attorneys, physicians and business people are better at what they do. What’s different about teachers? And yet all these popular education reform movements seem to have as their goal the destruction of teacher unions and the lowering of salaries for the professionals who educate our young.

What we need to improve public education are more teachers and better facilities—smaller class sizes, more specialists helping kids with learning disabilities and those who are gifted, more computer labs and science labs, a shorter cycle of replacing text books and larger budgets for supplies. A recent study showed that better-performing schools spend more money on the classroom and teachers than do underperforming schools.

Of course that takes money, which mean that Phillip Anschutz and the other rich folk backing the attack on traditional public schools will have to pay more in  taxes.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Editorial: Mitt Keeps Digging


First, Mitt Romney chose to join Islamic extremists in attacking the US government on the anniversary of 9/11. Then he was caught on video writing off nearly half the country for being dependent on government handouts. Next, in an interview he said working-class Americans could get health care by showing up at their local hospital’s emergency room. As the presidential race entered the final six weeks, the most amazing thing was that there is still a race.

Romney’s campaign has been stumbling since Aug. 30, when the candidate got upstaged at his own nominating convention by Clint Eastwood’s rambling harangue of an empty chair. But Mitt’s week from hell started on Sept. 11, when he seized the opportunity to show his foreign policy chops by criticizing the Obama administration’s reaction to violent protests at the US embassy in Egypt and a consulate in Libya, which resulted in the death of Obama’s ambassador to Libya, an aide and two security personnel. Even many Republicans thought Romney was out of line when he falsely suggested that the Obama administration was sympathetic to the violent Muslim protests. Then, on Sept. 17, Mother Jones magazine released a secretly recorded video of Romney speaking frankly to high-dollar donors in Boca Raton, Fla.

In the following week, 60 Minutes aired an interview in which Romney, apparently aware that there was a camera this time, adopted the right-wing talking point that poor people without insurance could get health care as long as the local ER is open and he also said it was fair for him to pay a tax rate of just 14.1% on his investment income of $20 million, when a worker earning $50,000 a year in wage income pays a higher rate.

If you think Mitt looks bad when he tells lies, apparently getting caught telling the truth doesn’t endear him to the voters either.

Obama appears to be pulling away in the swing states, but many national polls still show Romney with support in the mid-40s and within the margin of error from Obama. Republicans still hope that Romney can turn the campaign around in the debates. In the meantime, the big unknown is how many of those people who think they’ll vote for Obama actually will be allowed to cast their ballots, as Republicans are trying to implement voter suppression bills in a dozen states, including Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, that will let them steal the election if they can’t win it fair and square.

 Voters have been told by the corporate media that Obama does not deserve re-election if he does not get the unemployment rate below 8%. Progressives should not accept that framing, which is based on the observation that no president since World War II has won re-election with an unemployment rate higher than 7.2%. But only two presidents — Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush — ran with rates higher than 7.2% on their records and their losses are not entirely due to that factor.

Aaron Blake of the Washington Post noted Sept. 14 that if you go back to 1900, three incumbent parties have won with unemployment higher than 7.2%. Republicans held onto the White House in 1908 (William Howard Taft succeeding fellow Republican Theodore Roosevelt) despite an unemployment rate higher than 8%. Then, Franklin Roosevelt won re-election in 1936 and 1940 with unemployment well into the teens.

Of all the elections in the 20th Century in which the unemployment rate was above 7.2% (an arbitrary level at which Ronald Reagan won re-election in 1984), incumbents won 3 of 7 races.

The important issue for voters should be which direction the unemployment rate is headed and what the candidates plan to do about it. When FDR took office in 1933, the Depression had put nearly one-fourth of American adults out of work. By 1936, with the help of stimulus programs such as the Works Progress Administration, unemployment had dropped to 16.6%, and Roosevelt won re-election. It was down to 14.6% in 1940, when FDR won a third term because voters trusted him.

When Obama took office, unemployment was 7.8% but the economy was still in free fall from George W. Bush’s watch and the rate was already 8.3% during Obama’s first full month in office in February 2009. He signed the $787 billion economic stimulus on Feb. 17, 2009, which increased federal spending for health care, provided tax breaks and incentives for businesses, provided additional assistance for the unemployed and sent aid to the states for public works projects and to keep government workers and schoolteachers on the payroll. In March 2009 Obama renewed loans that allowed GM and Chrysler to continue operations while reorganizing. The unemployment rate peaked at 10% in October 2009 but as the stimulus kicked in and the car industry recovered, the economy has stabilized and the unemployment rate has dropped slowly since then, to 8.1% in August. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported 30 straight months of private employment gains through August although Republicans have blocked efforts to pass a jobs bill to spur more economic activity.

Romney admitted in his secretly-taped meeting in Boca Raton last spring that he had no special plans to revive the economy. He is a great example of the fallacy of believing that a successful businessman would make a good leader of government. He made his millions by using other people’s money to buy struggling companies, outsourced manufacturing jobs to lower-wage countries where possible and sold off assets for salvage. It is possible for a predatory capitalist with few apparent principles but plenty of financial backing to make profits if he doesn’t care what happens to his employees or the community, but that doesn’t mean he’d make a good president.

 It’s not too early to worry that moderate Democrats might fall for a “grand bargain” on reducing the debt that could threaten Social Security and/or Medicare. A group of 28 Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), on Sept. 20 took a strong stand against any cuts to Social Security as part of a deficit reduction deal.

“We will oppose including Social Security cuts for future or current beneficiaries in any deficit reduction package,” the senators said in a letter circulated by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), founder of the Senate Defending Social Security Caucus.

In addition to Reid, Schumer and Sanders, signers included Sens. Mark Begich (D-Alaska), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), Tim Johnson (D-S.D.), John D. Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), Tom Udall (D-N.M.), Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.V.).

Social Security has not contributed to deficits because it has a dedicated funding stream that has built up a $2.7 trillion surplus so that it is able to pay benefits for the next 21 years. Workers and employers each pay half of a 12.4% payroll tax on the first $110,100 of a worker’s wages. The tax rate for employees was reduced to 4.2% in 2011, but is scheduled to return to 6.2% in January.

If your senators are not on that list, ask them why. The only acceptable “reform” of Social Security is to lift the cap on taxable wages to guarantee benefits for the foreseeable future.

Also remind your senators that any reduction in Medicare benefits is unacceptable. Nearly all Republicans already are on the record in favor of Paul Ryan’s proposal to change Medicare into a voucher program that would phase out guaranteed benefits. Democratic senators need to know that any who support a Social Security or Medicare “fix” that increases the eligibility age and/or reduces benefits will earn them a primary challenger. —JMC

From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2012

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Selections from the October 15, 2012 issue





DISPATCHES
Mitt’s taxes leave questions;
Clinton: tax secrecy 'red flag';
Chinese deals complicate Mitt’s campaign;
Obama moves against Chinese unfair trade practices;
Wheels fall off Romney campaign;
Romney is losing seniors;
Mitt warns Iowans of forced unionization;
Repubs kill vets jobs bill;
Ohio air war could define power of money;
GM corn linked to cancer;
Mitt nears 700 lies;
Scab refs blow calls;
Trans-Pacific trade secrecy protested;
Voters divide over size of government;
Voter suppression laws aim at Hispanic voters;
Quebec students claim victory in tuition revolt;
Romney losing white workers;
Bacon shortage seen ...

DON ROLLINS
Dem’s flawed plan on childhood poverty

BOB BURNETT
Welcome to Romneyland

WENONAH HAUTER
From Dubai to LA, water barons are all the same

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Amenable mortality: geography a risk for death






Mitt Breezes Past 700 Lies

Mitt Romney, perhaps the most prolific liar in the modern era of American politics, breezed past the 700-lie mark with a speech in Vandalia, Ohio, on Tuesday. Steve Benen, the chronicler of Mitt's Mendacity at Maddowblog.com, counted at least four lies in the speech out of the 37 he recorded during the week ending Friday in the 36th installment of "Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity."
At the campaign event in Vandalia, Ohio, Romney said of Obama, "He's going to bring the deficit down. Of course, he didn't. He doubled it."
In fact, Benen noted that the deficit on Obama's first day in office was $1.3 trillion. Last year, it was also $1.3 trillion. This year, it's projected to be $1.1 trillion. "When he says the president 'more than doubled' the deficit, as he has many times, Romney's lying."  
That was the 699th Romney lie Benen had recorded since he started the series in January while he was blogging at WashingtonMonthly.com. He moved to Maddowblog on Feb. 3.
The 700th lie came in the same speech, when Romney added, "[D]o you know how much money he's spent in one year putting money into companies that he thought had a bright future, green companies? He spent $90 billion! $90 billion!"
Benen noted that much of the $90 billion was appropriated by George W. Bush, not Obama.
Lie 701 came when Romney also argued, "This president persists on the road of making it harder and harder for small businesses to grow and thrive."
Actually, the administration has done the opposite.
Romney went on to say, "This president has a plan for small business. He's got a plan for small business. He's going to raise their taxes!"
In reality, Benen noted, Obama has repeatedly cut taxes on small businesses -- by some counts, 18 times -- and if given a second term, his tax plan would have no effect on 97% of small businesses.
By the end of the week, Romney was up to 719 lies, with five and a half weeks to go until the election. 
Benen noted, "When Mitt Romney talked to '60 Minutes' last week, he said President Obama has 'repeatedly shown a reckless disregard for the truth.' If there's ever been a more blatant example of political 'projection,' I don't can't think of it.
"And yet, Romney is increasingly invested in this. This week, several reports noted that Romney intends to use next week's debate to do some 'fact check' the president. The Obama campaign, unimpressed, released a video this morning on the subject."
Previous editions of Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity: Vol. I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII,XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII,XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXV


Friday, September 28, 2012

One quarter of the year now dedicated to the X-mas potlatch of conspicuous consumption

By Marc Jampole

Congratulations to Frontgate, a retail company selling home décor and furnishings with locations in Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio, plus a website and catalogue business.

Frontgate is the first company to try to sell me something related to Christmas this year.

The Frontgate Christmas catalogue arrived in the mail on September 25, more than a month before Halloween.  Frontgate wants us to bypass Halloween and Thanksgiving and go right to Christmas.

What Frontgate wants to sell us symbolizes the conspicuous consumption that long ago took all celebrations hostage in the United States (with the possible—and I stress possible—exception of Thanksgiving).  Frontgate is peddling wreathes, flameless candles, candle holders, fake holly displays, nutcracker soldiers that light up, artificial trees with and without lights and frosting, ornaments for the tree, lights for outside, Happy Holidays doormats, five-foot tall drummer soldiers beating snare drums, giant figurines for the lawn including Santa’s helpers and a dog with reindeer antlers replete with small cat sidling up to it and a sign that reads “Santa’s Little Yelper.”

Embedded in this list of items for purchase we can find many of the ideological corollaries of the basic principle of American consumerism: that all human experience—be it celebration, expression of emotion, response to challenge or interaction with others—reduces not just to products and services, but to the purchase of products and services.

Here are some of the themes of the consumer ideology that I recognize in what Frontgate mongers:
  • Buying stuff people used to make as an expression of the holiday spirit. People used to display their ingenuity and express their love by making things and giving it to friends and neighbors. That’s the origin of Christmas gift-giving. In an agricultural society, wreathes would be a natural gift and some might carve nutcrackers—perhaps not five-foot leviathans. The ideology of consumerism tells us that instead of making it, we should buy it.
  • Buying fake instead of real: Artificial wreathes and flowers belong with the rest of ersatz or pseudo culture, which also includes theme parks, casinos that are imitation European cities, ethnic food at fast food, theme restaurants and McMansions.  These fake experiences are all exhortations to consumers—buy the doodads for sale at the gift shop—it will all look comfortably alike except for that icon that has been trademarked by another kind of leviathan.
  • Showing off in front of the neighbors: who can outdo whom, keeping up with the Jones and the Cohens—there are lots of metaphors and aphorisms to describe buying stuff and showing it off to everyone you know hoping to inspire admiration and envy. All that wealth display takes a lot of spending, and it replaces other types of interaction with the neighbors— as conversations about stuff replaces conversations about the families, politics and community affairs or joining together in volunteer efforts (as opposed to giving money in return for your name on a building, room or brass tree leaf). Lots of the Frontgate Christmas stuff ends up on the kind of lawns that people drive miles to see in suburbs and that often infuriate the neighbors who sleep with artificial light in their eyes for six weeks or longer in the dead of winter. If that ain’t conspicuous consumption, I don’t know what is.
It was the early 20th century economist Thorsten Veblen who coined the term conspicuous consumption, which he said was how the leisure class jockeyed for status: by spending the excessive amounts of money they have showing their friends, neighbors and relatives how cool they are.

La plus ça change…
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