Month: September 2010

Corporate Citizenship

by digby

Here’s the third in the series on the evolution of the first Reagan Democrat from The Donkey Edge. This one comes after Ronnie had become the face of GE:

General Electric uses the phrase “corporate citizenship”. That the corporation itself is a citizen and, as you say, has a responsibility as a corporate citizen in the community. And I think that modern industry would be the first to admit that back in the ’30s and previous to the ’30s leading up to the Great Depression that there was no such thing as “corporate citizenship” and that management was responsible before the creation of organized labor because they were unwilling to recognize their responsibility and their obligation to their fellow citizens.

And who said conservatives didn’t believe in progress?

read on here.

They Think They Have A Democracy

by digby

If you’re wondering why everyone’s suddenly skittish about repealing the Bush tax cuts on high earners even though a large majority favors it, Kevin Drum has the answer:

As research from Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels demonstrated several years ago, American politicians are powerfully affected by the views of the rich, and this has nothing to do with any recent electoral trends.

Rather … things have been this way for a long time. Using data from voting records in the early 90s, it shows that the responsiveness of senators to the views of the poor and working class is….zero. Or maybe even negative. And that’s true for both parties. The middle class does better — again, with both parties — and high earners do better still. In fact, they do spectacularly better among Republican senators. And this disparity has almost certainly gotten even worse over the past two decades.

This is the shape of American politics. If your income is low — and probably a fair number of the 56% who want Bush’s tax cuts for the rich repealed are low-income voters — politicians simply don’t care. If you’re middle class they care a little more. But if you’re rich, then they really, really care. And it’s safe to say that most high earners are opposed to repealing tax cuts on high earners. That goes for all Republicans and a growing number of Democrats too. So what seems like a no-brainer isn’t as simple as it looks. Economically it makes sense to repeal Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, and a majority of American citizens are in favor of it. Unfortunately for them, they belong to the wrong majority. They’re not rich themselves, and increasingly in America, that means their votes just don’t count.

This is one reason why the plutocrats are financing a bunch of far-right freaks and zealots right now. It plays to fools and morons, of course. But it also forces normal people into a defensive crouch having to defend against theocrats, authoritarians and crackpots thus diverting their attention from this problem. It’s very clever.

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Wild Angle

by digby

Far be it for me to be rude and suggest that this sort of thing might be just a tad beyond the pale for a serious Senate candidate, but perhaps we should just stay alert when authoritarian Christian Reconstructionists (is there any other kind?) are making a serious run for high office:

On the day she announced her candidacy in 2009, Angle clearly and unequivocally agreed with a conservative radio host who claimed that there are “domestic enemies” and homegrown enemies” within the Senate and the Congress.

She has now been given three chances to disavow this claim or to state clearly that she doesn’t agree with it. In all three cases, she’s refused.

Angle’s latest refusal came this morning, in response to aggressive questioning from ABC News’ Jonathan Karl:

ABC NEWS: Do we have enemies of the country inside the walls of Congress?

ANGLE: Certainly people who pass these kinds of policies — Obamacare, cap and trade, stimulus, bailout — they’re certainly not friends to the free market system.

ABC NEWS: So, what are they?

ANGLE: They’re not friends

There’s no need for alarm, of course. She hasn’t called for an official purge. Yet. She’s just calling it like she sees it:

CNN also asked Angle about her affirmation of the same conservative host’s observation that there are “home-born, homegrown” enemies who are operating in Congress. “The larger focus of that conversation is what has happened domestically here and our country for the last 18 months,” Angle said, pointing out that no names were mentioned during the conversation, and again avoiding the intent of her statement.

See? It’s not like she’s named any names. Yet.

I guess we’re supposed to either assume that she can’t possibly be elected, which would be silly considering the polling, or we are to assume she’s going to be elected but she’ll be some dotty old Aunt muttering to herself. But she has a huge billionaire financed movement behind her. Does it seem smart to just make those assumptions?

Update: Meanwhile, Axelrod says that these people might even be worse than Bush. Too shrill?

Inequality Conundrum

by digby

Timothy Noah at Slate has begun a two week long analysis of income inequality in the United States and it looks to be fascinating. He starts off by noting that the earliest study of the phenomenon was done in 1915, a period of great social and political tumult everywhere. (You’ll recall a little world war and communist revolution all happening around that time.)

He writes:

[1915] was when the richest 1 percent accounted for 18 percent of the nation’s income. Today, the richest 1 percent account for 24 percent of the nation’s income. What caused this to happen? Over the next two weeks, I’ll try to answer that question by looking at all potential explanations—race, gender, the computer revolution, immigration, trade, government policies, the decline of labor, compensation policies on Wall Street and in executive suites, and education. Then I’ll explain why people who say we don’t need to worry about income inequality (there aren’t many of them) are wrong.

Illustration by Robert Neubecker. Click image to expand.Income inequality in the United States has not worsened steadily since 1915. It dropped a bit in the late teens, then started climbing again in the 1920s, reaching its peak just before the 1929 crash. The trend then reversed itself. Incomes started to become more equal in the 1930s and then became dramatically more equal in the 1940s. Income distribution remained roughly stable through the postwar economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s. Economic historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo have termed this midcentury era the “Great Compression.” The deep nostalgia for that period felt by the World War II generation—the era of Life magazine and the bowling league—reflects something more than mere sentimentality. Assuming you were white, not of draft age, and Christian, there probably was no better time to belong to America’s middle class.

The Great Compression ended in the 1970s. Wages stagnated, inflation raged, and by the decade’s end, income inequality had started to rise. Income inequality grew through the 1980s, slackened briefly at the end of the 1990s, and then resumed with a vengeance in the aughts. In his 2007 book The Conscience of a Liberal, the Nobel laureate, Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman labeled the post-1979 epoch the “Great Divergence.”

It’s generally understood that we live in a time of growing income inequality, but “the ordinary person is not really aware of how big it is,” Krugman told me. During the late 1980s and the late 1990s, the United States experienced two unprecedentedly long periods of sustained economic growth—the “seven fat years” and the ” long boom.” Yet from 1980 to 2005, more than 80 percent of total increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1 percent. Economic growth was more sluggish in the aughts, but the decade saw productivity increase by about 20 percent. Yet virtually none of the increase translated into wage growth at middle and lower incomes, an outcome that left many economists scratching their heads.

That’s banana republic time, and it’s at the heart of everything that ails us. Without a strong and thriving middle class, we have an unstable society, one where very bad things can happen.

I’m fascinated by a visual presentation accompanying the article which shows that none of the things we might attribute to this phenomenon — gender and racial equality, tax rates etc — are born out by the numbers, at least not enough to explain it. At the very end of you’ll see that it looks like he’s going to say that it’s almost all attributable to corporate influence in American politics. I’m looking forward to seeing how that has worked, if that’s his thesis. Stay tuned.

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Door Frame

by digby

I prefer the more straightforward “they’re not waging a war against the special interests (wall street/ robberbarons/whatever) they’re waging war against us”, but this is a good step in the right direction:

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Blue America Live Chat With Jack Conway

by digby

If you’ve been around the blogosphere the past week or so you’ve notice that Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway is holding a money bomb today in an attempt to raise funds to fend off the inane Galt worshipping Rand Paul. I don’t have to tell any of you what an LSD-laced tea induced nightmare it would be to have this nutcase join the other GOP nutcases in the US Senate. If you like the idea of getting on a bridge to the 19th century, you’ll love Rand Paul.

Luckily, Conway is a very good candidate and this race is winnable even in this potential November bloodbath. And he isn’t doing it by being Republican lite, but by speaking to people’s real needs and wants on the economy and the deteriorating state of their communities and their country. Kentucky is a red state, but it’s hurting just like everywhere else and Paul’s ideological freakshow is making even Republicans down there very nervous.

Howie wrote a piece the other day about a very famous Kentuckian named John Sherman Cooper:

I grew up in a Democratic household in Brooklyn but back then it wasn’t hard to say that there were inspiring political leaders of the Republican persuasion– as well as really terrible Democrats. There are still some really terrible Democrats, plenty of them, but I can’t think of a single inspiring Republican in office anywhere. When I was a kid, Kentucky Republican John Sherman Cooper, for example, was someone any American could look up to. Aside from an exemplary personal life, he always believed his job was to fight for the interests of ordinary American families rather than for Big Business and he was one of the first Republicans with the guts to denounce Joseph McCarthy, to lead the battle against the Vietnam War, and to vote for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and, before that, the very Civil Rights Act of 1964 that current Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul says he would have opposed

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He was one of those Southerners driven out of office by the GOP Southern Strategy and now his seat is held by Mitch McConnell. Cooper was a certain kind of Southern politician we see less and less of today unfortunately, an enlightened populist who worked to bring his state out of poverty and into the modern world. He was a perfect example of how many Republicans in the South used to be before the Nixon team determined that they could get more votes by appealing to fear of change and racism. In the bizarroworld of American politics, it’s the enlightened populist Democrat Jack Conway who is Cooper’s rightful successor.

I’ve met Conway personally and he is a very impressive politician, which I’m grateful for. Rand Paul is one of the creepiest Senate candidates I’ve seen in my lifetime and the idea of him becoming a US Senator —- especially as part of a bloc of wingnuts —- is very frightening indeed. We need someone with intelligence, skill, savvy and toughness to beat him and Conway has all that.

Maybe it just comes down to this: Rand Paul wants to kill social security. Seriously. That is a number one priority for him; it goes against everything he believes in. Jack Conway refuses to even consider cutting benefits or raising the retirement age. That says everything about the two of them. One feels that a society has no obligation to ensure that its elderly are taken care of. The other does. It’s really that simple.

Please contribute to Conway’s campaign today if you can. Rand Paul has his daddy’s big libertarian list and he’s collecting big bucks from them and from the corporations (which he had previously promised to reject.) Jack needs us to stay competitive.

He’s going to be at Crooks and Liars at 11pdt/2edt for a chat if you’d like to come over and say hello or ask him some questions.

Again, here’s Blue America’s Senate Page. If you can throw a few bucks his way today it would be much appreciated.

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Normalizing Torture One Ad At A Time

by digby

Over the week-end I wrote about the Direct TV ad featuring rollicking taser humor. Here’s another ad for Verizon that’s perhaps even more disturbing:

Intermobile asks:

Is this just some slip up on Verizon’s part, or did the carrier’s marketing and advertising team decide to stir up a little controversy? Or did they just go through with the ad and watch the final product and say, “This looks so familiar, but why

I’m guessing they think it is cutting edge modern imagery, perfect for the Abu Ghraib generation.

h/t to lady libertine

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War of the Worlds Cartoon Show

by digby

Ooooh. I think Fareed Zakaria just stepped in some very deep doo-doo:

Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat?

Holy neocon, Batman. My head is spinning.

Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda’s best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives.

I do not minimize Al Qaeda’s intentions, which are barbaric. I question its capabilities. In every recent conflict, the United States has been right about the evil intentions of its adversaries but massively exaggerated their strength. In the 1980s, we thought the Soviet Union was expanding its power and influence when it was on the verge of economic and political bankruptcy. In the 1990s, we were certain that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arsenal. In fact, his factories could barely make soap.

The error this time is more damaging. September 11 was a shock to the American psyche and the American system. As a result, we overreacted.

Gosh, do you think invading a country that hadn’t attacked us was an overreaction? Really? Hmmm.

I’m glad to hear him say all this. Of course we dirty hippies screamed ourselves hoarse for years about this — and got a face full of fist for our trouble. My favorite personal post about it was one from 2004, called “War of the Worlds.” Here’s a short excerpt:

From the beginning we have behaved as if this was a threat so unprecedented that we didn’t have to observe any previous notions of civilized behavior — as if it were War of The Worlds and aliens were trying to colonize the planet rather than a bunch of clever criminals armed with box-cutters and a suicidal excuse to kill in the name of God. We invaded Iraq with too few trained troops, no help or input from the experts in nation building and peacekeeping and now we find ourselves in the worst possible situation. We are seen as arrogant, violent and inept. This should be expected when the government and the likes of Rush Limbaugh (who is piped in every day on Armed Forces Radio) encourage our military to act like barbarians by lying to them and the public about the nature of the threat and the identity of the enemy. We may not be facing aliens from a foreign planet, but we have now sown the seeds of an anti-American backlash that encompasses this planet and may well last for generations.

It’s felony stupid for a major power to demonstrate its weaknesses. I think there used to be a time when a US Government representative could go to the UN and produce evidence of a threat and most of the world would believe it. Do you think that’s true now? I don’t even think the US will believe it. And even if they want to, they won’t trust the information because we proved once before that our vaunted high-tech intelligence services couldn’t find water if they fell out of a frigging boat. Foolmeoncewon’tgetfooledagain and all that rot.

It’s going to be interesting to see how Zakaria’s piece will be greeted by the right and the Village punditocrisy. I didn’t think people were allowed to say that Al Qaeda isn’t much of a threat, but maybe we’ve moved on now and are more concerned with the more serious threat from within — our secret Muslim president’s plan to take everyone’s money and give it to gay people.

This post about the Fighting 101st keyboarders’ outraged reaction to Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is also pertinent. The poor dears worked themselves up into a frenzy.

Update: And then, there’s this: The true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion and beyond

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F-Bombs Away

by digby

Michael Moore sent Rahm Emmanuel a little note for Labor Day:

Dear Rahm Emanuel:

Happy Fuckin’ Labor Day! I read this week that — according to a new book by Steven Rattner, your administration’s former “Car Czar” — during White House meetings about how to save the tens of thousands of jobs that would be lost if GM and Chrysler collapsed, your response was, “Fuck the UAW!”

Now, I can’t believe you actually said that. Maybe Rattner got confused because you drop a lot of F-bombs, or maybe your assistant was trying to order lunch and you said (to Rattner) “Fuck you” and then to your assistant “A&W, no fries.”

Or maybe you did mean Fuck the UAW. If so, let me give you a little fucking lesson (a lesson I happen to know because my fucking uncle was in the sit-down strike that founded the fucking UAW).

Read on. It’s worth it.

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Today’s Freakshow Dispatch

by digby

Fergawdsake:

To an audience of about 50 people — fully half of whom were members of the press — Pastor Bill Keller launched his 9-11 Christian Center at ground zero this morning with a fiery sermon targeting Muslims and Mormons as hell-bound followers of false faiths. Keller took aim in particular at Glenn Beck, a Mormon, and Imam Rauf, the organizer of the Park51 Islamic community center. Keller, an extremist Internet evangelist from Florida, spoke at a drab ballroom of the Marriott hotel two blocks south of ground zero for the launch of his Christian Center, a response to Park51. He told the audience, which included a couple of 9/11 Truther protesters, that he is scouting three possible locations for a permanent church. Keller regularly assails Muslims as pedophiles and attacks Mormons and gay people. But his church has drawn no objections from opponents of the mosque who have consistently argued that the neighborhood around ground zero is sacred ground.

Meanwhile, I hear that The Man Called Petraeus has said that “Burn The Koran Day” will endanger the troops in the field. I wonder if anyone asked him whether Mosque burnings, Islamophobic wingnuts on TV or a national crusade against a Muslim community center in New York might also be a little bit provocative? If silly stuff like this from the lovely patriot Pam Atlas got out of hand, it couldn’t exactly be helpful:

I’m not big on the “endangering the troops” excuse for shutting down political discourse even when it’s as stupid as this. But I do think it’s just a tad inconsistent for the right wing to deliver huge propaganda victories to Islamic extremists after having viciously attacked the left for years for being objectively pro-terrorist. You can’t have it both ways.

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