Saturday, October 27, 2012

Editorial: Defeat the Vultures


The presidential race is entering the stretch run and it’s still too close to call, which is good news for the TV stations in the eight or nine battleground states who have political ads lined up to run for every available commercial minute, but for the rest of us it’s pretty nerve-wracking.

The third and final debate was supposed to be on foreign policy but still managed to occasionally find its way back to the economy and other issues of interest to Ohio, which seems to be the only state that really matters to the candidates. But that’s OK because I live in Texas, and thank goodness the Lone Star State is not the bellwether for the nation.

You might remember Rick Perry, our governor for life, from his brief foray into the GOP presidential campaign. A tea partisan by the name of Ted Cruz got the nomination for the US Senate and is the odds-on favorite to win the general election by convincing his fellow Republican primary voters that conservative Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst (R) was too moderate to trust in Washington. Cruz is so far to the right that his Democratic opponent, Paul Sadler, a former state representative, got the endorsements of the Dallas Morning News, El Paso Times, Fort Worth Star Telegram and the San Antonio Express-News, but Cruz has raised $3.5 million since the primary while Sadler raised only $358,734 (and was glad to get that) during the third quarter. The once-proud Texas Dems haven’t won a statewide race since 1994. A YouGov poll of likely voters in Texas, released Oct. 16, found Mitt Romney leading President Obama 55-41 and Cruz leading Sadler 51-36. At least we don’t have to watch those endless attack ads.

It’s frustrating to hear working people say they’re supporting Romney because he was a successful businessman, as if his experience as a predatory capitalist had anything to do with improving the lives of working people and their families. As our cover story by Gary Cohn notes, Bain Capital under Romney’s leadership gained control of GS Industries, a Kansas City steel maker, in 1993, and Bain put the company in bankruptcy in 2001, when Romney was still listed as CEO. A few months later, Bain announced that it was reneging on its promise to provide lifetime health insurance for retirees to improve its bottom line.

Romney claims he’s been out of Bain management since 2002, but he still has a financial interest in the firm, and he has a history of playing fast and loose with the facts. And Greg Palast recently uncovered Romney’s recent ties with vulture financier Paul Singer, who has made a specialty of buying up debt bonds at a few cents on the dollar and then using political connections to collect on the bonds. Singer’s vulture fund bought debt from Third World countries, such as the Congo, and then seized $90 million from foreign aid to that embattled nation, which could have been used to end a cholera epidemic, among other things. Singer’s tactics are outlawed in Britain and all over the world, Palast noted on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! show on Oct. 18, but it is still legal in the US, where Singer’s vulture fund feasted on the corpse of another victim, the once-world-leading Delphi auto parts division of General Motors (see Dispatches, page 5).

Singer, with the participation of Ann Romney, and other hedge funders bought stock in Delphi at 67 cents a share, threatened to shut down the parts supplier — which would have put GM and Chrysler out of business — if the government didn’t go along with their takeover. The government knuckled under, which kept the steering wheels and steering columns coming. GM and Chrysler survived but the hedge funders profited enormously as the government took over Delphi’s pension obligations and the new Delphi management shut down 28 of 29 parts plants in the US, costing 25,200 UAW members’ jobs as the factories were moved to China. The revived Delphi stock rose to $22.

“Mitt Romney said, ‘Let Detroit go bankrupt.’ And everyone thought this was a great, principled position,” Palast told Goodman. “And yeah, he wanted it to go bankrupt so that he could buy the auto parts division for literally pennies, 67 cents a share, then flip it for 30, 40 times that amount. In addition, don’t forget that this is TARP money. This is money that comes from the US taxpayer.”

Palast also explained that Singer is probably the most important of Romney’s coterie of billionaires, as the original $1 million donor to the 37-billionaire PAC called Restore Our Future. “He’s the guy who kind of signals all the other billionaires where to put their money. So, Singer is very, very important to Mitt Romney.”

But as Singer buys companies out of bankruptcy, he also, in effect, buys Third World nations out of bankruptcy, picking up their debt for pennies on the dollar and then holding their assets for ransom. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has led the Obama administration’s effort to put Singer out of business, saying his vulture tactics are a threat to the world economy. That may have played a major role in motivating Singer’s political intervention. Romney’s top foreign policy adviser and potential secretary of state is Dan Senor, who now works for Singer’s hedge fund, Palast noted.

Among other things, Senor, a hawkish protégé of wrongheaded neocon Bill Kristol, was the George W. Bush administration’s spokesman during the occupation of Iraq. Senor went to work on Wall Street after he left the Bush administration. He has advised Romney on foreign policy since 2006. As Romney’s senior foreign policy adviser, he has backed an Israeli strike on Iran and promoted Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. During Romney’s trip to Israel in July, Romney cited Senor’s book about Israeli entrepreneurship in his heavily criticized remarks that suggested economic disparities between Israelis and Palestinians could be chalked up to “culture.”

If Senor was the one who advised Romney that Syria is Iran’s path to the sea, as Mitt Romney said during the foreign policy debate on Oct. 22 (Iran borders the Caspian Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, but not Syria), Senor’s grasp of the Middle East apparently is not much better than mentor Kristol’s, who famously played down the differences between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

If you think the Obama administration is not hard enough on the malefactors of great wealth who drove the world into the economic ditch during the Bush Jr. administration, the prospect of a Romney administration should scare you. After all, Obama alienated Wall Street by backing the modest reforms of the Dodd-Frank bill in 2010 that tried to put some regulations back on the Wall Street casino — and that’s another bill that Romney would try to repeal on his first day in office.

Senor’s prominence in Romney’s circle of advisers foreshadows a foreign policy that would take a harder line against Iran, which probably would backfire by forcing moderate Iranians to embrace patriotic anti-Western views; he would embrace Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, which would alienate Palestinians as well as Arab neighbors; and he would give a green light to vulture capitalists such as Paul Singer to continue their buccaneering at home and abroad with the full faith and credit of the State Department as well as the US Treasury.

As election day approaches, vote early if you can. Celebrate if you can vote for a progressive Democrat (or independent, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders in Vermont), but settle for centrist Dems against nearly all Republicans. As we discovered after the 2010 election debacle, when progressives withhold votes from Democrats and let new Republican majorities push through draconian changes in a dozen states while they blocked progressive initiatives in Congress, the people who were punished are jobseekers who must forget about extended unemployment benefits; teachers and other public employees who find their pensions under attack to cut taxes for the rich; mothers in low-income families who find their food-stamp allocation shrinking and women’s health services cut off; and high school graduates who find that their only route to college runs through military service in Afghanistan and other hotspots to be determined because state lawmakers have reduced higher education appropriations and congressional Republicans have targeted Pell Grants. Elect candidates who will help. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2012

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Selections from the November 15, 2012 issue


















Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Does Romney deserve a free pass on foreign policy because he never represented a nation?

By Marc Jampole
 
The consensus in the main stream news media is that Obama won the debate on foreign policy, but that Romney did okay.

The view that Romney held his own neglects the fact that Mitt once again repudiated 24 months worth of speeches and position papers to list to the center. He accused Obama of projecting weakness abroad and yet ended up saying he’d do exactly what the President has done. At certain points, Romney was incoherent in response to Obama’s articulate and respectful chiding.

Whoever wins the election, Obama’s line about Romney’s idea of increasing our battleships will go down as one of the greatest of all debate putdowns. Here is the most extended version of it:
“You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines…And so the question is not a game of Battleship, where we’re counting ships. It’s what are our capabilities.”

While demurring from the mainstream view that Romney did okay enough to help himself, I want to consider the excuse that some like Cokie Roberts gave for Romney: a sitting president has an enormous advantage over the challenger when it comes to foreign policy.

It sounds reasonable until you actually examine the evidence. Even after four years as president, Bush II had no more experience in foreign policy than Kerry. The same for Bob Dole and President Clinton; the same for Walter Mondale and President Reagan. While challenger Clinton’s and Reagan’s foreign policy credentials couldn’t compare to the incumbents, they articulated easy-to-understand global visions and voters hated the policies of the incumbents, Bush I and Jimmy Carter, respectively.

In short, lack of foreign policy experience is not an excuse for Romney, but a flaw in his candidacy that voters should and will weigh when deciding for whom to cast their vote.

At least the inexperienced Clinton and Reagan offered voters a choice, each in his own way. By contrast, Romney offers nothing different in substance or action from Obama. Mitt’s only difference on foreign policy is one of style. Instead of speaking softly and carrying a big stick—yet another way in which Barack Obama resembles past Republicans, Mitt would propose we thrust our horns out, snort, kick the earth a few times and plunge into that China shop.

As many Democratic, liberal and progressive candidates, office holders and pundits have already recommended, perhaps we should judge Romney by the advisors he has retained. About two-thirds are former Bush II officials and the main guys all advocated or helped to plan or wage the disastrous Iraq war. Romney himself has now flipped and flopped on every foreign policy issue; and on many of them he flipped and flopped in the third debate.  Maybe instead of believing that Mitt has settled in the center, we should instead assume that he will listen to his neo-con advisors. The guys who brought us an expensive goalless war, torture, diminished respect among our allies and the hatred of many in the Moslem world

We can’t afford to give Romney the chance to put the neo-con warmongers back in charge.

Monday, October 22, 2012

I thought Mitt’s big issue was low taxes for rich; turns out he wants to use presidency to make money

By Marc Jampole
 
Over the weekend I read Lee Fang’s expose of the “Romney Family Business” in the latest issue of The Nation.

All this time I thought that the only thing Mitt Romney really cared about was lowering taxes on the wealthy. It turns out he plans to peddle influence and sell off the government to cronies and those who pay to be his pal—CORRECTION—the pal of his son Tagg. You know the young Mormon who wanted to slug the President of the United States.

Lee Fang reports that Mitt’s tag-along son owns a company that is a fund of funds for rich investors. For a big take of the action and fees up front, Tagg’s company, Solamere, invests the money of very rich folk into various hedge funds and private equity funds. But they do it through a series of corporations in the Cayman Islands and elsewhere so that the investors don’t pay taxes. It makes the Bush family ties to Saudi oil interests seem virtuous.

But wait, it gets worse.

Investors expect, and get, special access to the presidency.

The article focuses on the potential for giving away the government store to cronies. Here’s one example of what we might expect from a Romney presidency: twice on the campaign trail, Mitt has gone out of his way to praise a for-profit college called Full Sale University in comments about education reform.  Full Sale is owned by one of the Solamere equity partners, TA Associates.  It’s a real bargain, too—LOL—the third most expensive college in the country.

We can expect Romney to privatize as much as he can and then give the rights away in sweetheart deals to cronies, defined as those who invest with Tagg.  BTW, here’s what privatization mean to the U.S. economy: middle class government jobs are replaced by jobs that pay less and more money goes to the executives and owners of the companies with the government contracts.

But wait, it gets worse.

Solamere has invested in Hart Intercivic, which makes voting machines that Politico reports are prone to failures and counting errors. And yes, the Hart Intercivic machines are being used on voting day in parts of Ohio. Of course the good little Tagg-along would never dream of cooking the voting books. That would be illegal.

At this point, it might be best to begin remembering the difference between aristocracy and plutocracy. Aristocrats can be rich or poor, although the rich aristocracy will often help poor relations, especially the talented ones, kind of like Gavin Newsom and John Kerry got help as youths. (Of course, when the help is offered to all regardless of family background it’s sometimes called a meritocracy and sometimes called godless socialism.)  You can’t stop being an aristocrat, because it’s in the blood.

But the plutocracy operates on a cash only basis. If you don’t have the money, you have no influence in government. Without the big bucks, you are essentially without a vote.

Keep that in mind in the case that Mitt Romney wins the presidency.

Do voters condone lying by candidates? Corruption of elections may begin with the public

By Marc Jampole
 
The reaction to the vice presidential and the second presidential debates reminds me of a mirror. When you look in a mirror you see yourself. In the case of these debates, it appears that opinion writers, pundits, political advisors and bloggers are all seeing what they want to see. Yes, I believe that both the President and Vice President kicked butt, but I’m a liberal. The twisted arguments I have read on both sides make me discount all opinions, including my own, as subjective wishful thinking. Maybe I’m just seeing the reflection of my own views in the mirror. As with the first debate, we really won’t know who won until we see the polls in about a week.

Perhaps the most talked-about moment in the debate has been Mitt Romney’s unfortunate elision of “binders full of resumes of women” into “binders full of women.” Many Democrats and feminists have been giving Romney a hard time about the remark. The remark as stated does commoditize women, that is, treat them as interchangeable commodities. But give the guy a break.  It was another verbal flub and nothing more. I’m not voting for Mitt because I don’t like his stands and his plans and I don’t think he would make a competent leader of a democracy, but I’m willing to give him a free pass on this remark and rather focus on his awful positions on women’s reproductive rights, health care, the fact that women still make less than men for the same jobs and other important issues. The election is too important to sweat the small stuff.

The fact that the story Romney told about his binders was false raises a more important issue—lying by candidates.  Romney said that he asked for the resumes, when in fact they had been given to him and his opponent in the election before the votes came out in Mitt’s favor.  The Republicans have used these kinds of distortions as a major strategy of the campaign, as fact-checking services have revealed time and again.

But does the public care if candidates lie?

An opinion poll on the homepage of Yahoo! the day before the second presidential debate suggests that many do not.

First, let’s be clear that these online polls are not scientific since people can vote more than once using different computers and the participants are not screened to represent an accurate demographic cross-section.  For example, the Yahoo! polls always skew slightly to the right, meaning that the results always favor the conservative view more than scientific polls conducted by reputable organizations do. This rightward lean could reflect the fact that retired people tend to be more conservative and have the time to do these polls, or it may suggest that Yahoo! is used by a right-leaning demographic or it may be caused by another factor.

The results of Yahoo! polls can be particularly suspect because instead of asking yes-and-no questions, the possible answers always come with a characterization that spins them in one way or another. Here’s today’s poll, for example:
Was Candy Crowley wrong to fact-check during the debate?
            Yes, it’s not the moderator’s place.
            No, she made a good correction.

But what if you think that it is the moderator’s place to fact-check, but do not think Crowley’s correction was accurate? How do you vote then?

Taking the inherent inaccuracies of the Yahoo! poll into account, I am nevertheless completely shocked and dismayed by the results of the Yahoo! Poll on candidates’ lying. Here’s what the approximately half million people who answered the question said:
Do you expect candidates to lie during the debates?
Yes, it’s part of the game: 58%
No, they should be honest: 42%

Even if we factor in people voting twice and take into account the chatty but distorting way Yahoo! asks its questions—even when we consider all those factors, we can only conclude that a large part of the American public believes that its okay for our candidates and elected officials to lie to us. (BTW, I don’t want anyone to infer that I believe that conservatives condone lying more than liberals or centrists. I don’t, although I do believe that the current crop of conservative politicians do lie a lot more than other candidates, and a lot more than conservatives of the 60’s and 70’s did).

Lying and corruption are supposed to be the exceptions that we root out of the system. We are supposed to be shocked when we see students in cheating scandals, scientists giving false results or executives cooking the books.  We’re supposed to base our decisions on the truth and consider the liar a pariah.

But evidently, large numbers of Americans have become ethically challenged. They believe that it’s not how you play the game, but if you win. They follow the cynical political philosopher Machiavelli and think that the ends justify the means.

Is this what the American compact has come down to? Lie to get what you want.

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Romney tops 850 lies

During the town-hall debate on Long Island Tuesday, New York, Igor Volsky of ThinkProgress.org counted 31 "myths" told by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney but Steve Benen of MaddowBlog identified 41 instances of Mitt's Mendacity, out of 49 misstatements of the truth told during the entire week.

Since Benen has been chronicling Mitt's Mendacity for 39 weeks, starting when the presidential campaign heated up in January, we consider Benen's as the official count, and Romney's 49 stretchers bring him to 857 told so far this year. If there is a bigger liar in American politics, we're at a loss to identify him. (We exclude active Fox News hosts and commentators.)

We expect Romney to breeze past 900 lies in this coming week -- we invite you to guess how many lies he will tell in Monday's foreign-policy debate -- but it will still challenge his creativity to reach the plateau of 1,000 lies in the two weeks remaining in the campaign.

As Benen wrote:

President Obama and his campaign team have been increasingly assertive of late in accusing Mitt Romney of dishonesty, but the president is still cautious in how he makes the charge. 
In this week's debate, for example, Obama was willing to go so far as to say, "Not true, governor," when the president heard something obviously false. The problem, of course, is that the Republican challenger strayed from the truth with unfortunate frequency -- leading Obama to repeat the words "not true" a half-dozen times. 
I suspect the president was probably annoyed, both with Romney's dishonesty and with the challenge of coming up with alternative ways to let the audience know the Republican was repeating falsehoods. I know the feeling ...
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, XXXVII, XXXVIII


Wednesday, October 17, 2012

The low minimum wage reduces to a subsidy to businesses

By Marc Jampole
 
The statistic has been around for a few months now, but I just stumbled upon it and was amazed: Wal-Mart workers collectively receive $2.66 billion a year in food stamps, or $420,000 per Wal-Mart store in food stamps.  Year after year, low Wal-Mart wages lead to the government providing food stamps and other assistance to their workers and thus indirectly subsidizing Wal-Mart’s profit.

What would happen if Wal-Mart raised the wages it pays its workers to a level that prevented them from qualifying for food stamps? In asking the question, I assume that Wal-Mart, like most companies, does not carry excess labor and so could not lay off masses of people to keep their profit margin stable. So the company would be forced to raise prices.  But if Wal-Mart raises prices too much, people will start shopping elsewhere. After all, the main reason people shop at Wal-Mart is price.

To remain viable as a business, Wal-Mart would eventually have to take the money to pay workers a decent wage out of profit and executive salaries.

That means that there would be less money for the multi-billionaire Walton family and the executives who make millions, starting with $35 million a year for the chief executive officer. Maybe the CEO would have to settle for making 42 times what the average worker makes, which is what the average manufacturing CEO in the United States made in 1960. By the way, the average U.S. manufacturing CEO now makes 344 times what the average worker makes, compared to 25 times the average worker for European CEOs. Wal-Mart’s CEO currently makes more than 2,000 times what an entry-level Wal-Mart employee does.

It amazes me that Republicans like Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and the other good old boys and girls don’t complain about the corporate giveaway that takes place every time someone with a minimum or low wage job files for food stamps.

During the past 30 years, one way that income has been transferred from the poor and middle class is through the deterioration of the purchasing power of the minimum wage. Since the late 1960’s the minimum wage has lost 40% of its value. Most people who lose 40% of their purchasing power would be in real trouble—so imagine what it means to those at the lowest end of the wage spectrum.

It’s been a boon to employers who now can pay a de facto 40% less to get minimum wage jobs done. Since the minimum wage sets the bar for wages and salaries at all levels, it’s no wonder that on average, employees make less than they did 30 years ago, when inflation is figured into the equation.

My proposal is to set the minimum wage at a level so that 40 hours of it would bring a worker above the maximum level for receiving food stamps. That would result in an increase in all wages. It would also take money out of the pockets of the rich folk who save a significant part of their income and put that money into the hands of the poor, near poor and middle class, who would spend more of it, thus creating more jobs. Don’t worry, the rich and upper middle class would still do pretty well.

The fly in the ointment is the possibility that Wal-Mart and other large companies would offshore even more jobs to Asia than they do now. Which brings us to the second part of my proposal: that no good or service be allowed to be imported into the United States unless the producer/seller both paid its workers the prevailing U.S. wage and provided a similar level of safety and environmental protections.

My two proposals would lead to a more equitable distribution of wealth, in the United States and probably worldwide. Studies of 20th century America, 14th century Europe and 16th century Spain demonstrate that a more equitable distribution of wealth leads to a stronger economy.

The alternative is to continue on the path we are on and end up having an economy and society that look like those of a third world nation.   

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Right-wing group thinks that program to have school children have lunch with new friends may turn kids gay

By Marc Jampole
 
What could be more innocent and more reflective of basic American values than a program that encourages school children to have lunch with kids with whom they usually don’t associate?  It’s a wonderful way to encourage children to learn about people outside their small circle of friends, who might from a different ethnic or economic background, or maybe even have a disability.

This national program is called Mix It Up at Lunch Day and is sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a long-time civil rights organization known primarily for its work on behalf of African-Americans, but which in recent years has gotten involved in rights issues for gays, immigrants and others.  According to SPLC, Mix It Up “encourages students across the nation to challenge and cross social and racial boundaries by sitting with someone new in the cafeteria for just one day.” SPLC says that more than one million students across the nation took part in Mix It Up last year.

It reminds me of the middle school my son attended, which assigned kids to lunch tables and changed the assignments every six weeks. By the end of the year, every child had sat at lunch with every other child in his or her grade, a great way to slow down the formation of cliques. 

Mix it Up at Lunch Day sounds like an idea that everyone from all points of the political spectrum can get behind.

But not the ultra- right-wing American Family Association (AFA), which has launched a campaign to have parents keep their children home from school on this year’s Mix It Up day, set for October 30.

What could AFA’s objection possibly be?

As reported in the New York Times, AFA claims that the event is “a nationwide push to promote the homosexual lifestyle in America.” 

The Times gives us this quote from Bryan Fisher, who works for AFA: “Anti-bullying legislation is exactly the same,” Mr. Fischer said. “It’s just another thinly veiled attempt to promote the homosexual agenda. No one is in favor of anyone getting bullied for any reason, but these anti-bullying policies become a mechanism for punishing Christian students who believe that homosexual behavior is not something that should be normalized.”

The only way that this statement makes any sense is if Fisher is saying that AFA dislikes Mix It Up and anti-bullying policies because both discourage kids from beating up gays. What else could AFA possibly mean by “punishing Christian students who believe that homosexual behavior shouldn't be normalized” in the context of anti-bullying initiatives?

Beyond this convoluted justification for literally bashing GLBT students, is the illogical inference that Mix It Up has a special gay agenda. There is no special mention of GLBT as a group in the Mix It Up material I saw, and quite a lot about racial and ethnic groups like African-Americans and Latinos. I also saw an emphasis on encouraging kids from different socioeconomic groups to get together. There can be no doubt that Mix It Up is meant to include people of differing sexual orientations (as it should), but their inclusion is not explicitly stated. To say that the program has a special gay orientation is nothing more than a lie.

Moreover, Mix It Up promotes tolerance for differences—be it racial, social, sexual, whatever—does nothing to promote any given lifestyle or ethnic group.

What’s more, most people would only connect SPLC with the civil rights movement for African-Americans.   I understand that the AFA boycott may partially be in retaliation for SPLC putting the right-wing group on its list of hate groups. So maybe, all we have here is a tit-for-tat maneuver that is unfortunately based on a big lie and AFA’s ugly viewpoint regarding sexual minorities. 

That’s pretty bad in and of itself, but I keep having this gnawing feeling that something else is going on.  Let’s add one and one together: The first one is the fact that Mix It Up Day focuses on race and ethnicity. The second one is the fact that SPLC is known for its stand on race issues. When I add those two “ones” together, the two I get is that behind the attack on gays by AFA is a veiled racist attack against minorities.

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
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