Conservative columnist Matthew Vadum is just going to come right out and say it: registering the poor to vote is un-American and “like handing out burglary tools to criminals.”
“It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote,” Vadum, the author of a book published by World Net Daily that attacks the now-defunct community organizing group ACORN, writes in a column for the American Thinker.
“Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn’t about helping the poor,” Vadum writes. “It’s about helping the poor to help themselves to others’ money. It’s about raw so-called social justice. It’s about moving America ever farther away from the small-government ideals of the Founding Fathers.”
He isn’t wrong about some of the Founding Fathers’ thought on the subject. But it wasn’t exactly about small government ideals:
Those who own the country ought to govern it. — John Jay
The question is just who the “owners” are today and I would suggest that an awful lot of these Tea Partiers would be quite surprised to learn they aren’t actually among them.
The suggestion that Shariah threatens American security is disturbingly reminiscent of the accusation, in 19th-century Europe, that Jewish religious law was seditious. In 1807, Napoleon convened an assembly of rabbinic authorities to address the question of whether Jewish law prevented Jews from being loyal citizens of the republic. (They said that it did not.)
Fear that Jewish law bred disloyalty was not limited to political elites; leading European philosophers also entertained the idea. Kant argued that the particularistic nature of “Jewish legislation” made Jews “hostile to all other peoples.” And Hegel contended that Jewish dietary rules and other Mosaic laws barred Jews from identifying with their fellow Prussians and called into question their ability to be civil servants.
The German philosopher Bruno Bauer offered Jews a bargain: renounce Jewish law and be granted full legal rights. He insisted that, otherwise, laws prohibiting work on the Sabbath made it impossible for Jews to be true citizens. (Bauer conveniently ignored the fact that many fully observant Jews violated the Sabbath to fight in the Prussian wars against Napoleon.)
During that era, Christianity was seen as either a universally valid basis of the state or a faith that harmoniously coexisted with the secular law of the land. Conversely, Judaism was seen as a competing legal system — making Jews at best an unassimilable minority, at worst a fifth column. It was not until the late 19th century that all Jews were granted full citizenship in Western Europe (and even then it was short lived).
Most Americans today would be appalled if Muslims suffered from legally sanctioned discrimination as Jews once did in Europe. Still, there are signs that many Americans view Muslims in this country as disloyal. A recent Gallup poll found that only 56 percent of Protestants think that Muslims are loyal Americans.
Recognizing the unique historical nature of Anti-Semitism doesn’t preclude noting that those arguments are startlingly similar. States and localities are passing absurd legislation to ban Sharia Law in America, despite the fact that there is no threat of Sharia law in America. It’s all part of the same great human tapestry of bigoted bullshit.
This doesn’t even qualify as triangulation strategy. The administration seems to be under he impression that if they give all parties a portion of what they like along with a portion of what they hate, everyone will be happy. Unfortunately, the Republicans will throw what they hate to the floor, gobble up everything they like and then beat the hell out of the Democrats until they get more. Meanwhile, what the democrats like is lying on the floor, so they eat what they hate end up joining the Republican tantrum just to avoid getting pummeled.
President Obama’s controversial decision last week to suspend new anti-smog standards offered hints — but not the full road map — of how the White House will navigate politically explosive battles with congressional Republicans over which industry regulations to sacrifice and which ones to fight for this fall.
The Friday decision, which angered many environmental activists and won praise from business groups, represented the most high-profile case in a debate that carries deep implications for Obama’s reelection campaign as he tries to spur job creation, woo business donors and fire up his voting base. It came as the president prepares for a major address Thursday night to lay out a new employment strategy.
Most notable in the smog decision was that Obama made it himself — undercutting his own Environmental Protection Agency leadership and siding with industry officials who warned that stricter ozone standards risked further damage to a fragile economy.
And yet, as the administration signals that it will stand by other rules opposed by industry groups, advocates on both sides are left wondering what broader strategy may be guiding the White House as it reviews existing and proposed regulations.
“I do not have a sense of the administration’s philosophy here or where or how they determine to draw a line between economic impacts versus outside organizational pressures,” said R. Bruce Josten, the top lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents the nation’s businesses.
The Chamber heaped praise on the White House for its ozone decision. But Josten, who said he is in frequent contact with White House Chief of Staff William Daley and other top officials, said the administration “still has a heavy hand” with hundreds of regulations in the pipeline, from those affecting the environment to labor and capital markets.
Activists on the left, too, are curious. “Does Obama have an environmental bottom line?” asked Bill Snape, senior counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity, in an e-mail. “I cannot discern it.”
President Barack Obama will release a detailed deficit-cutting plan soon after his jobs speech, the White House said Friday, answering Republican critics who demanded more specifics during the debt-limit debate but reopening old wounds with the Democratic base.
The drama surrounding Obama’s new jobs plan has eclipsed the other major item on the White House’s September agenda: to offer his most specific proposal yet for reshaping Medicare, Medicaid and the tax code.
In the speech Thursday, Obama will challenge the 12-member congressional supercommittee to exceed its $1.5 trillion goal for budget savings — setting a higher target that would allow the additional money to fund tax breaks and other stimulus spending. But the “very specific” deficit recommendations that Obama promised last month won’t come until after the speech, although the exact timing is unclear, White House officials said.
By separating the two plans, Obama wants to maximize political impact for the jobs message, which Democrats have been desperate for months to hear. But by following quickly with a politically unpalatable deficit proposal, Obama risks infuriating progressives who say he needs to focus on using the levers of government to spur job growth.
I don’t know what to say about this strategy. It’s so obviously born out of fear of Republican lunacy and the corrupt necessity to raise outrageous sums of money that it makes me feel depressed even thinking about it.
And frankly, I’m increasingly worried that it’s going to end up in a bad result in November 2012. I wouldn’t have thought that was possible considering the GOP offerings and the stakes, but it’s hard to see a majority voting for this. It’s mush.
Update: BTW, here’s what the deficit plan reportedly looks like:
The deficit plan will be more specific than the framework the White House released in April. It is likely to include some unpopular measures that, until now, Obama backed only behind closed doors during the July talks with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), according to Democratic officials familiar with proposal.
Before the “grand bargain” fell apart over tax revenues, Obama and Boehner agreed on about $250 billion in proposed cuts to Medicare, including gradually raising the eligibility age to 67 and hiking co-pays and premiums for wealthier beneficiaries. They also agreed to change the inflation calculator for Social Security and other federal programs — which critics call a benefit cut.
Old TV episodes can serve as valuable history lessons. Digby regaled everyone with an instructive reminiscence on Stagecoach last month. Today, I’d like to share one from The Twilight Zone. In particular, the 1960 episode The Man in the Bottle.
A poor elderly woman visits Arthur Castle, an unsuccessful pawnbroker, bringing a wine bottle she found in a trash can. It has no value, but he buys it for a small amount out of pity. The bottle proves to contain a genie, who offers to grant four wishes to Castle and his wife. They use their first wish to repair a broken glass cabinet, proving the genie’s power, and then receive a million dollars in cash upon making their second wish. After they have given tens of thousands away to their friends, an IRS employee visits the shop and presents the Castles with a tax bill that leaves them with only $5 once they pay it.
The episode continues with the man’s wish for power, after which he is predictably turned into Adolf Hitler, and ends with his wish to return things to the way they were. It’s a classic morality tale in the style of the Monkey’s Paw.
But the instructive part is this: the tax bill the Castles get from the IRS on their $1 million windfall from the genie is $907,000, plus $35,000 in state income tax. Why is that number familiar? Because in 1960 when the episode was made, the marginal tax rate was 91%.
Over the last 40 years, the U.S. federal tax system has undergone three striking changes, each of which seems to move the federal tax system in the direction of less progressivity. First, there has been a dramatic decline in top marginal individual income tax rates. In the early 1960s, the statutory individual income tax rate applied to the marginal dollar of the highest incomes was 91 percent.
Keep in mind that this tax rate would have been completely normal to a 1960 audience. Today it seems bizarre to us–so bizarre, in fact, that modern viewers refuse to even believe it. Check out this TV.com user review:
The “punch line” of this particular episode is that all of the wishes granted to Mr. Castle come with some terrible consequence. This begins with an IRS agent spoiling the Castle’s wish for $1,000,000 with a $902,000 income tax bill. This is a rate of over 90%, a rate so high as to make the word “absurd” inadequate. At current rates, a married couple would owe approximately $322,000 of income tax on a $1,000,000 income, and, while rates were certainly different in 1960, they were not 300% higher…
Were the tax rate to be at 50% rather than 40, or 60% rather than 50, it could be forgiven. Viewers would take little notice of such an inflation. However, no person watching the program can fail to notice the absurdity of a 90% tax rate. The ordinary is no longer ordinary, shattering the very principle that made the show great. While the story is engaging enough to maintain the viewer’s interest, the entire punch line (and second half of the episode) is based upon something transparently contrived and false, making what is ordinarily the magic of the Twilight Zone simply… ordinary.
No, my dear reviewer. It is you who are mistaken…about a great many things. That 90% tax rate on a million dollar windfall was as American as Mom and Apple Pie at the time. As American as the transparent villainy of that banker in Stagecoach, whose rightwing talking points so common today were seen back then for the garbage that they were.
Remember that America circa 1960 is the America the Tea Party crowd desperately wants to “take their country” back to, even as they wail about being overtaxed at modern rates . One wonders if they even remember what patriotism and being a real American even meant back then.
Watch the whole episode split into two sections below. The key scene occurs at the end of the first clip and the beginning of the second.
If I had four wishes from a genie, I might wish that the Tea Party’s billionaire funders like Charles and David Koch really did get their country back. All the way back to that magical time in 1960 when they were taxed at the rates they owe, to the country that gave them the opportunity to have such massive wealth.
Update: As several commenters have pointed out, the tax rate would not be quite as high as the episode suggests, since that 91% is a marginal rate on every dollar over $400,000 filed jointly (see page 6 for the tax table.) That would amount to $569,000 on the $600,000 of income between $400,000 and $1 million, plus a somewhat lower but still hefty tax rate on the first $400,000. So while the total tax would not actually reach $907,000, it would come very close. And yes, then as now there were a number of loopholes that the wealthy would use to evade their obligations, lowering the effective rate. But that’s part of why those high effective rates are so important: they keep the effective rates substantial even after all the loopholes are abused.
There is one nagging question that arises when looking at the Administration’s somewhat surprising move to sue pretty much the entire financial sector: why sue the big banks on behalf of Fannie and Freddie, while at the same time sidelining Schneiderman to whitewash the robo-signing mess?
One potential answer, as Dave Dayen argues, would be that the FHFA is actingly independently of the Administration in a narrow capacity to protect the interest of taxpayers in getting money back for Fannie and Freddie. Rumors that Geither was looking to fire FHFA Director DeMarco won’t help to quell the theory that the FHFA is acting contrary to the overall desires of Obama and Geithner.
Still, it’s hard to believe that the Administration couldn’t have quelled this move if it really wanted to. At worst, Geithner and company have acquiesced to the move; at best, they’ve helped to push it through. So let’s give the Administration the benefit of the doubt.
The lawsuit is a big deal. The financial liability from the big banks arising from the suit is greater than the proposed robo-signing settlement. At best, the two actions send a contradictory message. Certainly, pursuing the legal action against the banks cuts strongly against the commonly held progressive theory of Barack Obama as corrupted pawn of the financial industry. But the desperate desire to let the banks off the hook makes a mockery of the view of the President as an even-handed defender of middle-class interests. So what’s going on?
The answer may lie in the Obama Administration’s “miss the forest for the trees” embrace of technocracy. In essence, its desire to discretely tackle policy problems one at a time leads to self-contradictory results that end up upsetting everyone while accomplishing none of the originally intended goals and vastly underestimating the scope of the problems as well as the resolve of the opposition.
A comprehensive settlement between U.S. authorities and banks over alleged mortgage servicing abuses needs to be reached quickly to help the housing market heal, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Tuesday.
Geithner said such a settlement will help dispel legal uncertainty that has been plaguing mortgage lenders and clogging the foreclosure process.
“It is very important that we try to bring this to bed as quickly as we can,” Geithner told the Senate Banking Committee. “I think all parties, not just the servicers, but the state AGs and the federal agencies have a strong stake in doing that.”
As I have explained before, the Administration sees a discrete policy problem: the economy can’t get better until the housing market improves; the housing market can’t improve unless foreclosures are flushed out of the system; the foreclosures can’t be flushed out until the robo-signing problem is neatly tucked away. Ergo, the robo-signing problem needs to hushed up and made to go away quietly with as little damage to the banks as possible.
Per this view, the Obama Administration would simply be doing what they see as the best thing for everyone in the long run, even if it means letting Bank of America and friends essentially get away with the biggest crime of the century.
On the other hand, pursuing a legal case against Goldman and friends to reimburse Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for close to $50 billion in losses is also a technocratic move to assist in housing market recovery, since funding Fannie and Freddie to make loans is clearly more useful to the mortgage market than is padding Goldman’s bottom line profit.
In that context, the Obama Administration’s contradictory decisions make sense in a bizarre sort of way. Each action is designed to solve a separate technocratic problem related to a (deeply misguided) attempt to reinflate the housing market.
What’s the problem with that? Well, it’s sort of obvious. While the Administration is tending to individual trees, the forest is burning down. Wall Street thinks the Administration is out to persecute them; the middle class and much of the Democratic Base think the Administration is a corrupted tool of Wall Street. The housing market isn’t getting better. If the neoliberals and conservatives are right that the market just needs “confidence,” the Administration certainly isn’t providing that, either. The politics of these decisions lack any sort of clarity from which to derive a narrative. The whole thing is a total mess.
Barack Obama was supposed to be the “big picture” candidate with “big picture” messages. What we have instead is muddled technocracy that pleases no one and accomplishes little, precisely because it lacks the guiding light of political narrative and the firm grounding of ideological clarity.
Brad DeLong has been a very important resource in following this whole economic debacle. He has the intellectual integrity to change his mind in the face of new evidence and admit to instances of error in the past. (I thought this was supposed to be a requirement among economists, but evidently not.)
Today he has a very interesting post outlining conversations he had with administration officials before the 2010 State of the Union address. It’s fascinating as always to get a sharp insight into their thinking. But it’s usually depressing as well because it reflects some of the most stale political thinking we’ve seen in quite some time. I urge you to read the whole post.
But this is I think an extremely important observation:
The responses were along the lines of: “Come on, Brad! A non-security discretionary freeze is only a shift in spending of $20 billion/year. It’s lost in the rounding error either on the tax side or the entitlement side. All we have done is throw them some rhetorical bones. We actually haven’t changed our macroeconomic policy. It is still highly stimulative.”
This seemed to me to miss the important point that all that a President ever does is throw rhetorical bones (and veto laws, and deploy troops). Congress passes laws and in response agencies spend and the Treasury taxes. The Federal Reserve conducts monetary policy. The Treasury conducts banking policy. If the President talks about how we need the government to spend less and tax more, Congress is unlikely on its own account to pass laws that spend more and tax less even in the short term of dealing with the Lesser Depression. If the President talks about how the time for stimulative policies have passed, the Federal Reserve is less likely to put the pedal to the metal. If the President is talking about the importance of debt reduction, the Treasury is unlikely to focus on expanding the set of potential future government liabilities by intervening in financial markets to encourage investment by taking tail risk onto the government’s books. The Presidency is a bully pulpit, but to a remarkable extent that is all that it is. And for Senior Administration Officials to dismiss what the President does is to mistakenly think that you are playing eleven-dimensional chess when your actual job is to roll Sisyphus’s boulder up the hill.
And now here we are.
Yes yes yes.
More on this later.
Update: No I’m not saying that the President can’t use executive authority or that he has no power. I think this observation shows that he has enormous power. It’s just not power that technocrats seem to understand. As I said — more later.
Documents found at the abandoned office of Libya’s former spymaster appear to provide new details of the close relations the Central Intelligence Agency shared with the Libyan intelligence service — most notably suggesting that the Americans sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya despite that country’s reputation for torture.
Although it has been known that Western intelligence services began cooperating with Libya after it abandoned its program to build unconventional weapons in 2004, the files left behind as Tripoli fell to rebels show that the cooperation was much more extensive than generally known with both the C.I.A. and its British equivalent, MI-6.
Some documents indicate that the British agency was even willing to trace phone numbers for the Libyans, and another appears to be a proposed speech written by the Americans for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi about renouncing unconventional weapons.
The documents were discovered Friday by journalists and Human Rights Watch. There were at least three binders of English-language documents, one marked C.I.A. and the other two marked MI-6, among a larger stash of documents in Arabic.
It was impossible to verify their authenticity, and none of them were written on letterhead. But the binders included some documents that made specific reference to the C.I.A., and their details seem consistent with what is known about the transfer of terrorism suspects abroad for interrogation and with other agency practices.
And although the scope of prisoner transfers to Libya has not been made public, news media reports have sometimes mentioned it as one country that the United States used as part of its much criticized rendition program for terrorism suspects.
A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Youngblood, declined to comment on Friday on the documents. But she added: “It can’t come as a surprise that the Central Intelligence Agency works with foreign governments to help protect our country from terrorism and other deadly threats.”
I’m going to try to enjoy this week-end and not go too deep, so I’ll just throw this out there and let it stew. I’ll just say that, unlike my friend David Atkins, this is one of the main reasons why I no longer believe in liberal interventionism. There may be some good motives (or rationalizations), but for the most part it’s a crock. With the exception of the world wars, history almost always ends up revealing that it’s been the same old imperialism and resource grab in humanitarian drag.
In this case, we helped Ghaddafi stay in power as long as he was useful. For torture. And PR. And the oil flowed freely. It was only once the region started to destabilize that we discovered our “conscience.” He had, after all, been running a tyrannical regime for decades.
Howie’s written some very interesting and thought provoking stuff at Down With Tyranny on Libya. Well worth reading.
I have written quite a bit about the Cameron Todd Willingham horror, mostly because the idea of executing an innocent man is so horrifying. I’m hardcore anti-death penalty in any case, but this one is particularly awful because there’s a ton of evidence that the state knew he was innocent and executed him anyway. It’s an even darker level of moral depravity than most. And it’s entirely possible that the buck stops with a man who could be the next president of the United States.
This article by Jason Linkins at the Huffington Post examines the death penalty in presidential politics, including the ugly examples of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush’s ostentatious embrace of the practice. But Rick Perry is in a class by himself. He didn’t just sign off on the execution of an innocent man. He actively worked to cover up the fact that Willingham was innocent and refused to acknowledge that the science that was used to convict him was in any way tainted, despite the mountains of evidence that it was.
Cameron Todd Willingham was convicted in August 1992 for the murder of his three young children in a fire that was deemed an arson by investigators. While on death row, a frantic effort to prove his innocence resulted in a full report which questioned the scientific legitimacy of the evidence used to convict Willingham. That report made its way to Gov. Perry’s office ahead of the zero hour, but it was all for nought — no stay of execution was granted in order to consider the new findings.
Willingham was executed by lethal injection on Feb. 17, 2004. Yet the efforts to exonerate Willingham only intensified, and in 2005, the Texas Forensic Science Commission decided to re-examine the case. The commission hired a nationally known fire scientist, Craig Beyler, to evaluate the evidence, and in his report, he came down on the same side as the scientists who had evaluated the case prior to Willingham’s execution: there was no credible scientific basis for the conclusion that arson had been committed.
Beyler was eventually scheduled to testify before the commission on Oct. 2, 2009. Two days before Beyler’s appearance, however, Rick Perry put a stop to it.
Two years later, we’re wondering if anyone wants to ask the presidential aspirant why.
I’m sure it will come up from time to time. But Perry will say the man was a monster and nobody will have the nerve to truly get into the weeds with him. Death penalty cases make everyone uncomfortable and most reporters will want to move on to easier topics.
Read the whole article if you have time this week-end. It lays out all the evidence and includes lengthy discussions of the New Yorker article that alerted most of us to the case, the Frontline program about it and the critically acclaimed documentary Incendiary as well as a lengthy list of newspaper articles.
Read it first and then watch this Youtube. You will be looking at the face of a sociopath. A sociopath who could quite easily become the GOP nominee for president. (A sociopath whose followers have been quoted saying “it takes balls to execute an innocent man…“
Perry, by the way, has personally signed off on 254 executions.
A bruising legal fight pitting the country’s most powerful banks against the full force of the United States government began Friday, as federal regulators filed suits against 17 financial institutions that sold the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac nearly $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities that later soured.
The suits are the latest legal salvo fired at the banks accusing them of misdeeds during the housing boom. Investors fled financial shares Friday amid growing concern that the litigation could last for years and undermine earnings and balance sheets in the process.
The complaints were filed just as the stock market closed Friday afternoon, but with word leaking out of the impending legal action during the trading session, shares of Bank of America fell more than 8.3 percent, while JPMorgan Chase dropped 4.6 percent and Goldman fell 4.5 percent.
The quote from the designated defender of the banking industry is priceless:
“The suits only add to the uncertainty that dogs the industry,” said Mike Mayo, an analyst with Crédit Agricole. “Banks should pay for what they did wrong, but at the same time they shouldn’t be treated as a big piñata that has the effect of delaying the housing recovery. If banks have to pay for loans they made five years ago, are they going to make new ones?”
On a similar note, it’s horrible how we create uncertainty for accused murderers and child molesters by putting them on trial and treating them like some big pinata. How are they ever supposed to walk the path toward rehabilitation and become productive members of society again?
Of course, it’s unfair to compare child molesters and murderers to Goldman Sachs. Not even the most prolific serial killers have managed to do as much widespread damage as Goldman Sachs and crew have managed. Also, as individuals theoretically capable of conscience and transformation, murderers have at least the potential for actual rehabilitation, while Goldman Sachs is accountable only to its corporate charter. So it’s really not a fair comparison at all.
“It’s not you. This is what the country is going through”
by digby
Here’s a tale probably told many millions of times, all over the country, throughout this slump:
ON June 25, 2010, Frederick Deare punched out for the last time from his job driving a forklift at the Old London factory in the Bronx. That summer, everyone at the plant was being laid off: the oven operators, the assembly-line packers, the forklift drivers, the sanitation workers. Total jobs lost: 228. Old London, the snack manufacturer that invented the Cheez Doodle, was moving its operations to North Carolina. At 53, Mr. Deare, known as Freddy or Teddy Bear to his co-workers, would have to find a new job.
Read on to see what it’s like to be 53 years old and looking for work in this environment, what it does to a person. This was a man who had worked hard his whole life to attain a comfortable middle class life. The quote in the title is the soothing words his wife would say to him when he was rejected by yet another employer. It’s a harrowing story of a good person, upstanding citizen caught in the maw of this awful economy.
He’s actually one of the lucky ones. After going through hell for most of a year, he’s found another job. But check it out — this is the new reality:
He got an interview, and the supervisor he met with sounded optimistic about his chances of being hired. But there was no formal offer. Day after day went by. For three weeks the wait stretched on. This time, however, he got the job. And it was a union job, with benefits. He started on April 11 — 290 days after Old London laid him off.
“You’re speaking to a happy man,” he said after his first day. “I am in my glory. I mean, today was wonderful.”
There was only one downside: The work paid $10 an hour, 40 percent less than he had made at Old London. After taxes, his paycheck was even less than the unemployment benefits he had been collecting. But he tried not to dwell on this. “I don’t let it bother me that I’m getting less, because of the simple fact I have something, and a lot of people have nothing,” he said. “You have to crawl before you can walk.” Four and a half months later, he is still on the job.
Everybody sees this, whether they’re employed or not. And it’s made working people very accommodating. Being scared you might never find a decent job again will do that to a person.
It’s great for employers, though.
And good for the NY Times for doing this sort of story. If social distance is one of the primary reasons we have have this huge disconnect between our leaders and the citizens, then stories like this might be helpful. If they never see anyone who has been dealt a blow from this economy at least they might read this and recognize that this isn’t an abstraction for millions of people.