Month: November 2011

Amen

by David Atkins

It’s no secret that Christianity broadly speaking and the Left haven’t been on the greatest terms over the last few decades. Part of that, of course, is that the Left tends to be more inclusive, which in turn means fighting for the rights of of minorities of all sorts, including religious minorities. That tends to earn the ire of dominant groups, Christianity among them.

Liberals also tend more towards atheism than conservatives do, largely out of a greater respect for the scientific method and a more skeptical approach toward authority.

All of that is self-evident. But there’s also a mutually reinforcing contempt that has arisen ever since the rise of the Religious Right started to turn (predominantly white) churches into Republican activist grounds. Christianity in the United States took on a more political edge with a distinctly right-wing tilt beginning around the 1970s.

Given that Jesus’ message was mostly concerned with social justice rather than sexual morality, it has been difficult for the Left to take the movement seriously as a religious movement, rather than one of socially conservative reactionaries using religion as a cover.

The absence of a serious religious left to counter this trend has been a big part of the problem. If mainstream Christians don’t want to become tarred by association with the bigots and charlatans, it’s up to them to push back and retake the initiative.

So this is a good sign in context:

A small but growing number of religious communities across the country are removing their money from Wall Street banks to protest what they see as unfair mortgage foreclosures and unwillingness to lend to small businesses.

The New Bottom Line (NBL) coalition of congregations, community organizations, labor unions and individuals is promoting a “Move Our Money” campaign with the goal of shifting $1 billion from big banks to community banks and credit unions.“In a way, the banks have divested from our communities, especially communities of color,” said the Rev. Ryan Bell, a Seventh-day Adventist pastor in Los Angeles. “So we’re basically telling Bank of America that we want them to invest in our communities, and until they do that we’re not going to give our money to them.”

Bell’s church was one of six Los Angeles Christian congregations that announced they would divest a collective $2 million from Bank of America and Wells Fargo as part of the Move Our Money campaign.

The campaign has been slow to get off the ground; but after a recent national convocation of clergy in New Orleans, about 100 more leaders from a broad cross section of Christian, Jewish and Muslim congregations pledged to move an additional $100 million.

Of course, these are mostly minority churches, which have always placed a greater emphasis on the social gospel. Hopefully this movement will go beyond that. But if more white churches don’t get on board, it will only reinforce legitimate accusations of hypocrisy, and exacerbate the divide between them and the Left. And while the Left may suffer from that somewhat in the short term, in the long term the churches and the image of American Christianity itself will be far more severely hurt.

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What is it about whining multi-millionaires that is so repulsive? Is it that they think they work so much harder than everyone else that they are entitled to hundreds of times what the average worker makes? Is it their petulant temper tantrums every few minutes because the president once called them “fat cats” in passing? Is it the fact that they are so insular and frankly stupid that they can’t see that there are times when they should shut their fat, entitled pie-holes and lay low? I don’t know. But this is exactly the sort of thing that is making average Americans believe that these people are threats to democracy, not President Obama’s tepid jabs.

“They knew they got it”

by digby

I guess the pepper spray was too messy, so they used what amounts to a cattle prod:

“We’d rather not do arrests but we are prepared to if need be,’’ State Patrol spokesman Dan Coon said a few minutes ago [about 6:40 p.m.]. Coon explained that protesters are being given additional chances to leave voluntarily. “It’s still very fluid. Lots of things are going on.’’

Coon also confirmed that tasers were used to zap protesters that tried to push past troopers guarding the north doors of the Legislative Building:

“Basically what happened was a trooper used his taser on three subjects that were … attempting to get back into the building. … (T) hey used it almost for their own safety to keep the crowd back. … They said it was absolutely necessary to keep the troopers at the door from being trampled. … and keep more people from coming into the building.”

Coon described the use of tasers as a “dry stun” in which the subject is jabbed by the electrical probes rather than shot by electrically charged arts. “I’m not sure it sends the same juice as with the two darts, but the individual knows they just got tased. They knew they got it,’’ Coon said.

I’m sure they did. In case you are wondering what a “dry stun” is:

A Las Vegas police document says “The Drive Stun causes significant localized pain in the area touched by the Taser, but does not have a significant effect on the central nervous system. The Drive Stun does not incapacitate a subject but may assist in taking a subject into custody.”[27] “Drive Stun” was used in the UCLA Taser incident and the University of Florida Taser incident (which popularized the widespread use of the phrase “Don’t tase me, bro!”). It is also known as “dry tasing”, “contact tasing”, or “drive tasing”.

Amnesty International has expressed particular concern about Drive Stun, noting that “… the potential to use TASERs in drive-stun mode — where they are used as ‘pain compliance’ tools when individuals are already effectively in custody — and the capacity to inflict multiple and prolonged shocks, renders the weapons inherently open to abuse.”

They’ll know they got it, though.

Update:

Commenter at the video site:

Tasing is effective, throw a few bars of Irish Spring at em along the way and we will have these filthy parasites cleared out in no time.

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Texas leading the way in the crusade against women

by digby

Sarah Posner has published an informative new article about the latest tactics in the war on women. Evidently Texas is now the epicenter of the Right To Life movement and they are going after birth control:

It’s a battle fought on more than one front, these Texas activists say, a window into the machinations of the anti-choice movement nationwide. The legislature is one front, and Texas has a robust constellation of anti-choice groups that, in conjunction with an increasingly powerful Republican caucus, have chalked up a series of impressive victories. These successes have led the national anti-choice group Americans United for Life to rank Texas fourth in the country for its “aggressive legislative action over the past several years.”

Another front is in the streets, where Catholic activists have led the way, praying and proselytizing in front of clinics that provide abortions, aiming to persuade patients that not only is abortion contrary to God’s will, but that it will cause them untold harm, from mental health problems to breast cancer, infertility, and even death. While medical evidence says otherwise, such falsehoods have been codified into law in Texas. Its 2003 “right to know” law, never challenged in court, requires doctors to “inform” women seeking abortions of a supposed link between abortion and a higher risk of breast cancer and future infertility, in addition to: “serious psychological effects… including depression, grief, anxiety, lowered self-esteem, regret, suicidal thoughts and behavior, sexual dysfunction, avoidance of emotional attachment, flashbacks, and substance abuse.”

While abortion hasn’t played a central role in the presidential campaign, that, too, is a product of the shift in strategy: anti-choice activists are focused not on overturning Roe v. Wade (although that remains a crucial goal). Instead, they are now fixated on portraying abortion as harmful to women, tying it to an “industry” (i.e., Planned Parenthood) they have targeted with an unrelenting campaign in an effort to malign not just abortion, but birth control—and to restrict access to both.

Rick Perry is apparently very personally involved in all this, which is very creepy. Thank goodness the base is so put off by him otherwise that he hasn’t gotten any traction. (The way that primary is going, though, it could circle back to him. Look at Newtie.)

Here’s where it gets interesting:

[T]he Texas legislature slashed family planning funding by two-thirds in 2011. The Republican-led legislature allocated another $8.4 million over two years to the Alternatives to Abortion program, which not only prohibits funding for abortion or abortion counseling, but whose contractors do not offer birth control, or even counseling or referrals for contraceptives. In other words, an uninsured woman entering a crisis pregnancy center for its free services will be dissuaded from having an abortion, given blankets, booties, and Jesus, and won’t be informed about how to prevent another unintended pregnancy in the future.

The Alternatives to Abortion program is modeled on a Pennsylvania program launched at the urging of former Governor Bob Casey, a Catholic anti-choice Democrat whose son, Bob Casey Jr., since being elected to the US Senate in 2006, has pressed for federal legislation funding “alternatives” to abortion.* The Texas program uses federal funds under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which are disbursed in block grants to the states…

Among the criteria the potential providers must meet are “maintain[ing] a pro-life mission and agree[ing] not to promote, refer, or counsel in favor of abortion or abortifacients as an option to a crisis or unplanned pregnancy” and “agree[ing] not to promote the teaching or philosophy of any religion while providing services to the client.” Yet most, if not all, of the centers maintain that Christian faith is central to their mission. Many are affiliated with Care Net, which describes itself as a “Christ-centered ministry whose mission is to promote a culture of life within our society in order to serve people facing unplanned pregnancies and related sexual issues.” Others are affiliated with Heartbeat International, which says it “does not promote birth control” because its “policies and materials are consistent with biblical principles and with orthodox Christian (Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox) ethical principles and teaching on the dignity of the human person and sanctity of human life.”

May I please have one of those “conscience clauses” requiring that the government not spend my tax dollars on patriarchal throwbacks? I think it’s only fair.

Read Posner’s whole piece. The so-called lovers of “life” have already extended their battle to birth control — proving that they are less about their great love of blastocysts than about their great loathing for women having stress and guilt free physical pleasure. (Either that or they really need that frisson of danger that sex could result in pregnancy to enjoy themselves.)

This piece makes it clear that the battle for reproductive freedom needs to be engaged right now, openly and without all this “common ground” nonsense that the Religion Industrial Complex is selling. They have managed to demonize abortion to such an extent it’s become an act of shame for most politicians to support it unequivocally as a matter of personal autonomy. And now they have launched their crusade against birth control. You don’t win battles like these with compromise.

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Our annual holiday kabuki special

Supporting the Troops

by David Atkins

There’s a great article in the Financial Times today about illegal foreclosures on military families. Essentially, banks were foreclosing on families of active duty troops. That’s against the law, and it carries criminal penalties. As in, jail time for those involved.

In the United States, that cannot be allowed to be happen to the “producers.” Jail time is reserved for protesters and little people. Here’s Dylan Ratigan:

Foreclosures on active duty troops is usually a big no-no, for a lot of reasons – for instance, when your credit rating is damaged by a foreclosure, it can impact your national security clearance. In addition, there’s enormous stress that the soldier goes through when his or her family is facing a threat of eviction, and it’s the kind of stress that makes him or her less equipped to be ready in a warzone. Congressman Bob Filner has even accused banks of “homicide” against American troops, blaming the banks for suicides resulting from the increased stress brought on by aggressive debt collection techniques.

So why is nothing happening?

Much has been made of President Obama’s argument that the banks did nothing illegally, and various other scholars and officials have argued that prosecuting the banks is far too expensive and difficult. Yet, the SCRA is a simple law with teeth; it carries real jail time, and the parties have already confessed to the crime. Here’s Section 303(d)(1) of that law, which spells out penalties. (PDF)

(1) MISDEMEANOR.—A person who knowingly makes or causes to be made a sale, foreclosure, or seizure of property that is prohibited by subsection (c), or who knowingly attempts to do so, shall be fined as provided in title 18, United States Code, or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.

Interestingly, the Department of Justice seems to agree with this interpretation. Here’s a press release from the Department of Justice on a settlement of some of these claims, from Bank of America. I’ve bolded the important part.

The Justice Department announced today that, as part of its settlement with BAC Home Loans Servicing LP, a subsidiary of Bank of America Corporation, servicemembers whose homes were unlawfully foreclosed upon will each receive a minimum $116,785 plus compensation for any equity lost to compensate them for the bank’s alleged violation of the Servicemember Civil Relief Act (SCRA).

Note the use of the word “alleged.” Bank of America isn’t admitting anything, and the Eric Holder’s Department of Justice isn’t making them admit anything. Otherwise, the penalties might come into play. Sometimes, law can get very complex. But sometimes, it isn’t. JP Morgan admitted to violating the law. There are up to 5000 more cases, and each one carries up to a year in jail.

Eric Holder and various US Attorneys around the country aren’t prosecuting bank foreclosures on active duty troops, even though they know it is happening. Bank regulators know about the problem. Congress knows about the problem. Certainly, the Pentagon knows about the problem.

But once again, New York AG Eric Schneiderman is stepping up to the plate. Per Dave Dayen:

It looks like even Congress is getting involved, or at least a few of them, because systematic illegal foreclosures on everyday people can be ignored, but systematic foreclosures on members of the military cannot. Jack Reed, a member of the Senate Banking Committee, will request a hearing on the matter. Brad Miller, who has actually been great on this issue and who sees it as a lever to open up a host of inquiries on foreclosure fraud, had a great statement yesterday:

It is hard to see this as anything except a flagrant disregard for a law that has been on the books continuously since the First World War. The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act is very clear: if you’re in harm’s way in our nation’s military, you can devote your whole energy to our nation’s service without worrying what’s happening in a courthouse back home. And if you have a claim against someone in our military, you can wait until they get home and can defend themselves.

The SCRA is not some obscure legal technicality that might just have escaped the attention of mortgage servicers. Those servicers are all affiliates of the biggest banks, but they’re huge and specialized. Servicing mortgages is all they do, and they really don’t have that many laws to keep up with. They have got to have known what the law required, and consciously decided that they could just ignore it, the same way they apparently decided it was okay to file false affidavits in legal proceedings.

The continued failure to pursue criminal charges in the face of flagrant violations of the criminal law is destroying Americans’ faith in their government and democracy. In a democracy, no one is too big to prosecute.

Absolutely. And when Eric Holder won’t, Eric Schneiderman is at least willing to give it a try.

The only thing the U.S. government throws banksters in jail for these days is ripping off Goldman Sachs. Rip off Goldman Sachs, you spend a decade in jail.

But systematically violating the law by screwing over active duty troops? No problem.

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Poll Number ‘O The Day

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 43% of Likely U.S. Voters agree with the former House speaker and think the protesters should take baths and get jobs. But an identical number (43%) disagree, and 14% more are undecided.

Who says this country is polarized?

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The most vile woman in Britain

Karl Rove is a jerk Part 17

by digby

In this Fox “News” piece Rove rends his garments about how terrible that mean and nasty Barney Frank has been for the congress. It’s very upsetting to courtly Republican gentlemen like Karl for politicians to be rude, don’t you know — it just makes them want to sit in a corner and have a good old fashioned cry. (And then in the ongoing pathetic conservative attempt to blame liberals for the global economic meltdown, he lies about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac some more, )

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A step in the right direction. Mostly.

by David Atkins

Harry Reid is launching a volley on behalf on the middle class:

Democrats are offering a bill that would cut taxes for most families next year by about $1,500, paying for the cut by taxing income above $1 million.

The idea is to extend and expand a tax cut passed for this year that has let workers off the hook for 2 percent of their Social Security payroll taxes. The new version offered Monday by Sens. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) would boost that figure to 3.1 percent, or half the 6.2 percent payroll tax, for 2012.

The measure would give employers the same break on the first $5 million of their payrolls, as well as waive the tax entirely on the first $12.5 million in payroll for new workers — in the hopes of creating an incentive to spur hiring. They estimate it would benefit 98 percent of small businesses.

The tax cut would be paid for by slapping a 3.25 percent tax on adjusted gross income above $1 million, which wouldn’t kick in until 2013. Reid said the bill would cost $255 billion, but would be paid for by the surtax, which has no sunset date.

The Republicans are refusing to go along with it, of course. While they haven’t offered a specific counterproposal to offset the payroll tax cuts, it will likely be highly regressive and designed to wedge the middle class against the poor, in an election where the Democrats will be looking to highlight income inequality between the middle class and the very rich.

So far so good. This is exactly the ground Democrats should be playing on, and puts the lie to the idea in many voters’ minds that the two parties are just mirror images of one another. There are serious policy differences here with serious consequences.

That said, there are two troubling issues that come to mind:

1) Though I haven’t written about it much, I’ve long championed payroll tax cuts as good policy. Payroll taxes are highly regressive, and a drag on hiring. I’m painfully conscious of that as a small business owner. Payroll taxes and healthcare costs are the two big hits to a true small business’ pocketbook when in comes to investing in the company and expanding the workforce, even when there is sufficient demand. Cutting existing payroll taxes puts more money in regular people’s pockets, which in turn theoretically increases demand. So that’s all good. Offset the budgetary issues involved in cutting taxes and you’re good to go (by the way, since the GOP is seeking alternative offsets, doesn’t that suggest even the GOP knows these cuts don’t pay for themselves?)

The sticking point with payroll tax cuts is that they fund Social Security. By cutting payroll taxes, the social security fund gets hit, which makes it easier for politicians to pretend that Social Security is “in crisis.” From a theoretical good government standpoint, this shouldn’t matter: regressive taxes that hurt hiring can be cut, and alternate progressive revenue streams found to cover the loss in funding. Certainly, the lack of a self-sustaining dedicated revenue stream didn’t stop us from invading Iraq. America manages to find the money for things it wants to prioritize, and Social Security should be no exception.

From a practical political standpoint, however, the closed system of payroll taxes to Social Security benefits has kept it from major cuts in the past, and from being considered a “welfare program.” Dedicated revenue streams for Social Security should be created through progressive taxation, but the likelihood of that actually happening is next to nil.

Which means that a payroll tax cut today might turn into an excuse to cut Social Security tomorrow.

2) The knock on Democrats lately has not been so much that we cater to the interests of wealthy, but to the interests of Wall St. and the financial sector. Of course, those two are in many ways synonymous, but in other ways they are not. Recall that even as Bill Clinton deregulated Wall St., he increased the marginal tax rate on the wealthiest Americans. Many of America’s wealthiest citizens like Warren Buffett would be happy to pay more in taxes on a personal level (they would hardly notice the difference, but the impact on the budget would be significant). But they would mostly oppose increases in taxes on the 15% capital gains rate, which is where most of the money is really made.

Democrats took a lot of heat and made a lot of progressives really angry when the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy were extended by the Obama Administration. But it’s important to remember that the Republicans were holding many other priorities hostage in exchange for those cuts, including the START treaty and unemployment extensions. Commentators can argue endlessly over whether the trade was a good one to make (I happen to think it wasn’t), but it’s deeply unfair to say that Democrats, including President Obama, don’t want to kill the Bush tax cuts for the rich. They do. Most Democrats, given the wherewithal to do so, will create a more progressive income tax system just as Bill Clinton did.

That’s an important point, especially considering that simply allowing the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy to expire will go almost halfway to killing our current budget deficit.

But the problem isn’t that. The problem is that the bigger lack of progressive punch in the tax code doesn’t apply so much to marginal rates on income (though that’s certainly a factor), as it does to rates on speculative behavior. And that’s where the sickness in the system lies: we have incentivized speculative behavior at the expense of slower, constructive long-term investment in stable enterprises.

The 15% capital gains rate is preposterously low; a higher rate would affect a few middle class 401K holders, but by far the most affected class would be the super wealthy. Capital gains is where they really make (I refuse to use the word “earn”, as it would be a misnomer) their money. Doubling the capital gains rate to 30% would make long-term investors take a hit as well–but not as much as speculative short-term day traders. For a long-term investor, a good investment is still a good investment whether taxed at a 15% or a 30% rate. But for a speculative short-term grifter, many trades wouldn’t be worth the risk at a 30% rate. And that’s a good thing. If that means many day traders would have to find a different line of work, then good. Consider it a sin tax. Update: as pointed out in the comments, the capital gains rate is only for investments held over a year. Thanks for the correction.

Similarly, a transaction tax of even half a cent on each trade would go completely unnoticed by responsible long-term investors, but would do serious damage to the front-running and blatant cheating that is high frequency trading:

High-frequency techniques are used by Wall Street banks and hedge funds, but it is new independent firms that account for the bulk of this new kind of activity. Most of them were founded in the last 10 to 12 years. Many are still relatively small, employing a dozen to a hundred people, though some have as many as 250.

Trading mostly with their owners’ money, they scoop up hundreds or thousands of shares in one transaction, only to offload them less than a second later before buying more. They can move millions of shares around in minutes, earning a tenth of a penny off each share.

As a group, they earned $12.9 billion in profit in 2009 and 2010, according to the Tabb Group, a specialist on the markets.

These sorts of taxes on Wall Street behavior are not only where the money is, but also where the real impact on public policy is.

Redistributive progressive taxes on the wealthy are a good thing, but they don’t really address the problem of how the great disparity in income happened in the first place. All they do is mitigate a public policy problem by treating its symptoms. Don’t get me wrong: treating the symptoms is good. But it’s in taxing speculative short-term gambling on Wall Street, with the aim of encouraging long-term productive investment in activity that actually creates stable jobs, that legislators can help cure the disease.

Update: It looks like the payroll tax cut doesn’t harm the Social Security trust fund after all: the money is mandated to be paid back from the general fund. This is all a big semantic game, of course. It’s all money going into the federal system and then coming back out again. But it’s important to quell Republican talking points that Democrats are “weakening Social Security.”

As I said, if politicians want to continue to fund Social Security at its current levels, they can find a way. The rest is posturing and political gamesmanship.

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