Month: August 2011

You’ve undoubtedly heard that the authorities shut down cell phone service in order to disrupt a protest at the BART stations in northern California. One would think that people would be disturbed by such unilateral action without provocation, particularly when modern communications technology is now so necessary for everyday life — and has had such a salutary effect on organizing democracy movements around the world. It would seem to be basic to freedom of speech in our brave new world.

Boring Things Can Make a Big Difference

by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

There are a myriad number of ways in which Washington is wired for conservative rule come Democratic or Republican Administrations. Some of them are accidents of the Constitution, and yet others are the product of intentional ratchet effects by big business and their allies. They are mostly boring process issues, but they make all the difference in the world in preventing anything resembling real democratic change from taking place, particularly in the modern world of intensive lobbying and extremely expensive political campaigns.

Among these hurdles to progress are the filibuster; the ability of corporations to spend unlimited money on politics; the lack of proportional representation in the Senate, the need for legislation to pass through a series of corruptible committees before it can ever see the President’s desk; inadequate representation at the local level in Washington; elections held on Tuesdays to decrease turnout; the revolving door between legislator and lobbyist careers on Capitol Hill; and there’s much more where that came from. This is partly the subject of Hacker and Pierson’s excellent book Winner Take All Politics, which does a great job outlining these problems. Many of these barriers will have to come down before we get real change in Washington.

Impossible? Hardly. One of those barriers is the Electoral College system, which gives outsize influence to small and medium-sized “battleground” states. That barrier came much closer to coming down recently when California governor Jerry Brown signed the National Popular Vote Act:

More than a decade after George W. Bush beat Al Gore for president despite winning fewer votes nationwide, California has given a movement to overturn the nation’s Electoral College system perhaps its greatest lift yet.

Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation this morning committing California to an interstate compact to award electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the most votes nationwide.

The agreement would become effective only if states possessing a majority of the nation’s 538 Electoral College votes agree. Eight other states and the District of Columbia have signed on, committing 74 electoral votes. The bill Brown signed today adds California’s 55.

Proponents say the agreement would make California more relevant in presidential elections.

“For too long, presidential candidates have ignored California and our issues while pandering exclusively to the battleground states,” the bill’s author, Assemblyman Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, said in a written statement. “A national popular vote will force candidates to actually campaign in California and talk about our issues.”

Assembly Bill 459 passed through the Legislature with little Republican support. Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed previous versions of the bill, in 2006 and 2008.

Schwarzenegger said the plan was “counter to the tradition of our great nation, which honors state rights.” He also said he could not endorse awarding California’s electoral votes to a presidential candidate a majority of Californians may not support.

That brings the number of electoral votes committed to the national popular vote to 132. That’s almost half the 270 necessary to trigger a total change in the way Presidential elections are run. Most people who read about the national popular vote will immediately think of the Bush-Gore election in 2000 which would have gone the other way, or the potential for John Kerry to have beaten George Bush with a few more votes in Ohio despite losing the popular vote.

But far more important is that fact that at present, the concerns of urban voters in blue states are all but ignored at the presidential level, even as nonsensical policies like massive ethanol subsidies rule the day due to outsize influence of far less populated states. Conservatives find this situation quite pleasant, of course: Presidential elections are forced to appeal to largely white surburban demographics, while bases of progressive support are all but ignored as the votes of New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are rendered irrelevant in blue states, and urban areas such as Atlanta and Nashville in red states are rendered similarly useless.

If Democratic presidential candidates could win election by massively boosting turnout in these areas, it would make them much more accountable to the progressive base and to the core economic needs of the people who actually constitute the American tax base, rather than the narcissistic parasites who falsely consider themselves to be the overtaxed.

And that, ultimately, would have a greater impact on our politics and on public policy than all the screaming on progressive blogs over the last eight years combined.

Head over to the National Popular Vote website and see how you can get involved in the effort to help make real change happen.

“Almost treasonous”

by digby

It sure looks like Rick Perry has it all. He’s a Fed hating, Christian Reconstructionist, neoconservative super-hawk Tea partier with a nasty, personal contempt for President Obama:

Cook upholds Cokie’s law

by digby

For a perfect example of Cokie’s Law, go to about 3:55 on this video and watch Charlie Cook explain that Michele Bachmann trafficking in lies is perfectly normal and no cause for concern:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Mitchell: at the same time Bachmann did she show some real problems being able to handle the economic questions. She really doubled down on the default of being against the debt ceiling raising and default isn’t that big an issue we could have handled it. Let’s see for a second the way she handled it with Lester Holt on the “Today” show.

Bachmann: You cannot turn the economy around if you give Barack Obama a blank check for $2.4 trillion in exchange for $21 billion in cuts.

Holt: This raising the debt ceiling was for bills that have been agreed to, not new spending

Bachman: Actually that’s not true. This money will go not just to bills that have already been spent, this will be for future money as well. That’s a false statement.

Mitchell: So here she’s saying to Lester Holt that raising the debt ceiling is to take care of future money not past money, which is not factual.

Cook: It’s not true, but on the other hand she’s not saying anything that a lot of Republican caucus attendees or primary voters would disagree with.

Mitchell: So, politically it’s fine.

Cook: Yeah, politically I think it’s fine …

if you watched the video you can see how blithely he dismissed the fact that she was lying. Indeed, he went on to highly praise her political skills.

Village Confidence Men

by digby

Did someone say “out of touch?”

Washington, D.C., led the nation in economic confidence during the first half of 2011… Its 12-point increase in confidence compared with the same period a year ago expanded its lead.

Ok, so DC scores higher on the economic confidence index. But get a load of this, courtesy of Catherine Rampell at the NY Times:

Not only does Washington have the highest index value of any state or district in the country, it’s also the only place where the index value is positive.

Here are the top 10 states in terms of overall economic confidence:

North Dakota is next most confident. And it’s 23 points less confident that DC — and 13 points in the “not confident” side of the ledger. Click the Gallup link to see just how unconfident the rest of the nation is.

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Rick Perry: Culture Warrior of Justice

by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

There’s been a lot of chatter lately about this from Rick Perry’s announcement speech:

We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax. And you know the liberals out there are saying that we need to pay more. We are indignant about leaders who do not listen and spend money faster than they can print it.

There’s no shortage of facts out there demonstrating why this zombie talking point is so deliberately deceitful. Think Progress has a good basic rundown:

I’s certainly true that nearly half of Americans don’t have any federal income tax liability, but a large portion of that population pays federal payroll and excise taxes, as well as state and local taxes, which fall much harder on the middle-class and low-income individuals than those at the upper end of the income scale. The simple fact is that they don’t make enough money to have to qualify for even the lowest federal income tax bracket.

Overall, less than a quarter of the nation’s households don’t contribute to federal tax receipts — and the majority of the non-contributors are students, the elderly, or the unemployed. Does Perry believe that these people are really undertaxed?

At the same time that Perry is crying foul over the poor and the elderly paying too little in taxes, income inequality in the country has skyrocketed. Just the richest 400 Americans hold more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of Americans combined, and the richest 10 percent of Americans control two-thirds of the country’s net worth. But its low tax rates at the bottom of the income scale that have Perry all riled up.

But what is more interesting about Perry’s push on this particular subject is less economic than cultural. It’s not just Perry who talks about this “issue.” Michele Bachmann has raised eyebrows with it as well.

Rick Perry is an idiot. So is Bachmann by all accounts. These are people with strong social intelligences, but not a lot of analytical firepower or intellectual curiosity.

They appeal to less educated conservative voters who vote their “gut” and “common sense”, and take the mockery and rejection of their heroes’ ideas by educated elites as proof of their righteousness. By definition, these less educated voters tend to be lower income as well. A great many of them are almost certainly in that poorer 47% that has no federal income tax liability.

And Perry and Bachmann are the conservative candidates trying to win election by promising to raise the taxes of the very constituency to which they are trying to appeal. None of this would make sense if the issue in question were being determined based on rational self-interest and economic motivation. But it isn’t. This is a cultural issue for Perry and Bachmann.

At its heart lies the myth of the white suburban taxpayer being gouged to support blacks and Latinos in urban areas. Even though all the data shows that urban counties pay the bills of suburban and rural counties, and more urban states pay the bills of rural states, still the myth continues. It’s so pervasive that you see phenomena like red counties in California wanting to secede to create their own state, using “fiscal responsibility” as a talking point–even though the suburban counties in question are net drains on the state, while the Los Angeles and San Francisco counties from which they want to secede are net providers.

There is a mass delusion in whitebread suburban America that they are the real America, and that they are being oppressed by high taxes to pay for poor minorities, even though the reality is actually the reverse: urban centers pay the bills for parasitic suburban lifestyles, which are ultimately unsustainable socially, fiscally and environmentally.

Matt Taibbi called it best:

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They’re completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I’m an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I’m a radical communist? I don’t love my country? I’m a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.

It’s not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It’s just that they’re shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority. That may not be racism, but it is incredibly, earth-shatteringly stupid.

They’re the sort of people who can suck up the nation’s tax dollars, while pretending to be Ayn Rand’s Atlas, holding up the entire world on their shoulders, desperate to shrug off the parasitic riffraff for a change. Even when they themselves are the actual riffraff. The less-educated conservatives who will vote for Perry and Bachmann see themselves as oppressed taxpayers even when they are in the 47% that Perry and Bachmann promised to tax, because they don’t see themselves as a member of that economic class. The “poor who pay no taxes” aren’t them: they’re of a different race, in a different place filled with rap music and urban blight. They’re not real Americans who drive trucks and SUVs, and do their shopping at Wal-Mart.

Progressive elites can spend all day and all night proving how wrong Perry and Bachmann are about the economic facts. But they’re wasting their time, because this argument, much as it appears to be based on economics, is actually based on racism and cultural resentment. It’s still Lee Atwater’s world, and we’re still living in it.

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni**er” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni**er, ni**er.”

If progressives want to deal with the economic zombie lie Bachmann and Perry are perpetuating, they’ll focus less on the broad economic realities of rich and poor, and more on smashing the lie that underpins most of the narcissistic conservative worldview.

They will point out that most majority-white rural, suburban and exurban communities, far from being economic producers carrying the weight of America’s taxes on their shoulders, are actually parasitic drains on the economy. And that the economic overlords on Wall St. intend to squeeze them to death just as surely as any inner-city minority community in their relentless pursuit of profit. Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry will lead them happily to the slaughterhouse on behalf of the big money rancher–and they’ll go willingly, assuming that the undernourished brown and black cows who are supposedly getting all their food will be the only ones coming out as hamburger.

Ezra Klein subbed for Martin Bashir today and is very unimpressed with President Obama’s spirited rhetoric today saying that fiery speeches are a waste of time and that what he wants to see is action. Robert Reich then made the point that the only way to get any action in a gridlocked congress is for the President to rally the people to support it. I don’t know if Ezra agreed with that (the segment ended) but I doubt it. He seems to believe that Democrats need to be smarter about leveraging their power, but if it’s not the power of their constituency, then I’m not sure what power he’s talking about. (Money maybe?)

4/13/11:

But I also know that we’ve come together before and met big challenges. Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill came together to save Social Security for future generations. The first President Bush and a Democratic Congress came together to reduce the deficit. President Clinton and a Republican Congress battled each other ferociously, disagreed on just about everything, but they still found a way to balance the budget. And in the last few months, both parties have come together to pass historic tax relief and spending cuts.

And I know there are Republicans and Democrats in Congress who want to see a balanced approach to deficit reduction. And even those Republicans I disagree with most strongly I believe are sincere about wanting to do right by their country. We may disagree on our visions, but I truly believe they want to do the right thing.

That sounds like someone who thinks that his patented “balanced approach” will win him a second term — and it might. But it’s fairly clear how well that works as a governing principle, isn’t it? It’s a mandate for hostage taking and gridlock. So why not try to rally the public for something real, as Reich says?

I don’t suppose we will ever resolve the argument around whether or not the President of the United States has any power to leverage the people, the executive branch and the Party he leads to back his program while in office. I find the position that he doesn’t to be absurd, but we’ll leave it at that. However, the idea that a politician has no power to persuade the electorate to back a real mandate through the skillful use of political rhetoric during election campaigns argues for the abandonment of democracy itself.

It is considered out of bounds to make too much of this — and if anyone uses sharp language to describe it they are immediately chastised and abandoned by the party and many liberal supporters. But it’s real and it’s a problem, as Michelle Goldberg spells out here:

This article in the NY Times explores the burning question of why so many people say they want “compromise” while the politicians in Washington are apparently unable to find any. The reporter consults political scientists and sociologists who say that it isn’t the fault of the politicians because they are reflecting the will of their constituents who are living in closed communities and reinforcing each others’ biases and beliefs. This evidently leads to some sort of horrible false divide in which only the people who are politically involved — who are by definition extremist weirdos, apparently — forcing their leadership to be intractable.

Digby and Dave Dayen did a great job yesterday covering the hidden anti-corporate rebellion brewing across the nation. It’s an interesting story to read, but it makes for even more interesting video.

For instance, watch below as Republican representative Nan Hayworth (NY-19) gets grilled about her quiet acquiescence to Verizon’s tax dodging and job offshoring, even as she defends the notion that America must race to the lowest common denominator in wages and corporate taxes:

Paging CNN and affiliates. If it’s rowdy town halls and angry constituents you’re looking for, all you have to do is be there. Of course, it’s not the Tea Party, so it doesn’t fit the corporatist agenda. But it’s compelling television nonetheless.

Something tells me we won’t be seeing the camera crews rolling in, though.