Month: December 2011

The Kardashian Tax

by digby

Kim Kardashian made more than $12 million in 2010, but she only paid 1% more in taxes than a middle-class Californian. That’s not OK, especially when budget cuts are decimating schools and critical programs for children, the elderly, and the disabled. It’s exactly why Courage Campaign and two dozen other organizations are putting the Millionaires Tax of 2012 on the ballot. You can find out more here.

She can afford it.

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There’s been a lot of back and forth in the comments and elsewhere about the payroll tax cut and whether or not the Democrats should have ever signed on to something that gives the enemies of Social Security another cudgel with which to bash the program. I certainly agree that it’s as inevitable as the sun coming up tomorrow that the depletion of the trust fund will be used at some point to justify benefits cuts. But I’m also fairly sympathetic to the fact that allowing those tax cuts to expire without an adequate replacement would be contractionary at a very bad time. It’s hard to see how they could have done anything else in this environment. Which is the problem in a nutshell.

Further, the way the payroll tax cut is being marketed by too many of its Democratic proponents is maddening. Essentially, they sound like Republicans, and tout the simple virtue of the extension as being families having to pay less in taxes, period. How many of us have heard the statistic about a family earning $50,000 in wages will save $1,000 from the payroll tax cut? I’d guess pretty much everybody who has dipped into this debate for even a second.

On the other hand, how many know the estimates of how many jobs will be created or preserved because of the increased economic activity it spurs? Very few of us who aren’t economists, I’d imagine. Conservative estimates put it between 400,000 to 700,000 jobs. But it’s the jobs that make this tax cut worth doing – unless progressives are willing to willing to accede to the Republican framing that all the economy and American families really need is “tax relief” – a phrase that actually appears in the Senate bill extending the payroll tax cut for two extra months.

This inability to connect economic policy to the larger problem of joblessness is a real problem with the debate over the payroll tax cut. This disconnect explains why the unemployment insurance extension bundled with the payroll tax cut have attracted so much less attention. After all, if all that matters is the first tranche of money, the payroll tax cut will affect many more households than the UI extension. But all serious economists agree that the extension of unemployment insurance is a far more efficient fiscal support – providing about 50 to 100 percent more jobs per dollar added to the deficit.

What makes unemployment insurance so much more efficient? It is laser-targeted at families in genuine distress, meaning that the recipients will spend every marginal dollar that comes in the door. This also makes the extension better targeted at alleviating actual economic misery. I, for example, get a pretty big benefit from the payroll tax cut and that’s nice, but I’m (knock wood) doing pretty well. People like me really shouldn’t be highest on the list of policymakers’ concerns today. Sadly, this last point might not make for good politics.

I’m not sure if this is a lack of imagination, laziness, design a combination of the three. But no liberal should ever even utter the words “tax relief.” And by failing to properly spell out the reasons for stimulus over the past two years — jobs — the Democrats have actively helped the GOP tie their hands over the course of this recession. (I won’t even go into the political malpractice of spending an entire year flogging deficit reduction and austerity…)

This isn’t just petty partisan politics. I don’t care what anyone says, it matters how you frame problems and solutions. The parameters of what’s possible are made through these understandings and the agenda is largely fashioned around them. Indeed, the public’s understanding of how the economy and their government works is the essence of democracy — it is a failure of leadership when both parties succumb to a political framework and agenda that works against the national interest.

I know you are but what am I

by digby

You just have to watch this to believe it:

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A price for extremism?

by David Atkins

It has become increasingly clear over the last decade and a half that as long as the media is willing to pretend that “both sides do it” in the endless pursuit of “balance,” conservative Republicans will pay no real price in the media for their increasing extremism.

Even so, sometimes the gamesmanship is so bizarre that even the media can’t help but notice. Here, for instance, is what the Washington Post website is currently showing:

Keep in mind that the Washington Post is the maven of faux “balance” in journalism, but even they can’t help but point out the obvious.

At some point, there really does have to be a price for extremism. Suspension of disbelief can only go so far.

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Orange Face Saver

ProPublica gets it wrong on California redistricting

by David Atkins

The organization ProPublica wrote a recent article about supposed Democratic influence in Calfornia’s non-partisan redistricting process, alleging that the it was subject to undue influence from Party interests. Their argument essentially goes that because Democrats attempted to lobby the non-partisan Commission, that necessarily the Commission did what the state Democratic Party wanted. The supposed evidence for that claim lies in the fact that the maps, at least for Congress and State Senate, are fairly advantageous to Democrats. Conservative interest groups have been latching onto the ProPublica story to claim the process was rigged.

Predictably, the State Democratic Party is literally calling bullshit:

California Democratic Party chair John Burton, asked moments ago for his comment about the new ProPublica story that contends Democrats here manipulated the state’s redistricting process, was pretty direct: “It’s complete bull…t, an absolute f…ing fabrication.”
Burton said he was never contacted for comment on the story which published by the San Jose Mercury News this afternoon — and only just heard about the allegations it contains.

The story, titled “How Democrats Fooled California’s Redistricting Commission,” alleges party operatives “secretly organized testimony,” and “surreptitiously enlisted local voters, elected officials, labor unions and community groups,” often hiding their affiliations to outwit the members of the independent commission and win favorable lines for the party officials.
But in California, where Democrats enjoy a robust 44-30.9 percent (and widening) advantage in registration over Republicans, a fired up Burton lambasted those suggestions.
“As the chair of the party, I know the party didn’t do this…the Democratic Party didn’t do sh..t,” he said. “As far as I was concerned, there was nothing you could goddamned do.”
Burton said that “if the Democratic Party did that, one would think the (California Republican Party) would challenge all three redistricting” efforts — and not mounting just a challenge to Congressional and State Senate lines. He said that while he wasn’t called for comment, a source from the Rose Institute — which he dimissed as a “Republican Party subsidiary” – was included in the story.
Democratic Party campaign advisor Bob Mulholland, in an email, said it would have been “easier to influence North Korea” than the redistricting commission, which was made up of five Republicans, five Democrats and four decline to state voters chosen through a lengthy vetting and lottery process.

Of course, one might argue, that’s what one might expect the Democratic Party to say, right?

Well, Robert Cruickshank has a good take on it at Calitics, part of which I’ll quote here:

First, ProPublica seemed to not notice that pretty much everybody in California organized to try and influence the commission. That includes Republicans, Democrats, unions, businesses, progressives, teabaggers, MALDEF, Asian American voting rights activists, white supremacists, and so on. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. That’s how democracy works, and the commission was mandated to take public testimony.

Second, ProPublica did not bother to actually to look at California’s demographics or voter choices. They claim that the new maps did not reflect the will of the people. One reason they say this is that supposedly population growth benefited Republicans:

“Very little of this is due to demographic shifts,” said Professor Doug Johnson at the Rose Institute in Los Angeles. Republican areas actually had higher growth than Democratic ones. “By the numbers, Republicans should have held at least the same number of seats, but they lost.”

We’ll come back to the Rose Institute in a moment. But this claim itself is absurd on its face. Most of that population growth came from Latinos – who, as anyone familiar with California politics knows, have little love for Republicans. The reason is obvious: the California GOP is a white man’s party that despises Latinos. So why on earth should Republicans benefit from Latino population growth?

In fact, the notion floated by the Rose Institute that certain parties have a claim on districts is exactly what the commission was intended to challenge.

Of course, the core assumption that California Republicans deserved any new seats is challenged by their collapse in the November 2010 elections. While Republicans across the country were having a banner night, California Republicans lost every single statewide election (including losing the governor’s race by 13 points despite outspending the Democrats nearly 10 to 1). They also failed to pick up a single seat in either the legislature or Congress, losing one Assembly seat. California voters made explicitly clear in November 2010 that they do not like Republicans. That doesn’t appear to have actually influenced the commission’s deliberations, but it does mean the claim that Republicans had any reasonable expectation of gains is ridiculous.

And as it turns out, the Rose Institute is not a neutral observer, even though they were treated as one by ProPublica. John Burton and the CDP pointed out in their press release about the article that the Rose Institute is Republican-funded and had a score to settle with the commission…

Robert is exactly right. I’m 1st Vice-Chair and Field Operations Chair of the Ventura County Democratic Party, so I know a thing or two about this. My county is purple, with slightly more registered Democrats than Republicans, but due to voting patterns and the previous redistricting process, most of the local elected officials are Republican. It would be considered a “Republican area” by the Rose Institute.

Yes, Ventura County has had some big population growth. But as Robert says, it’s mostly Latino population growth, as well as growth from people like me moving north from Los Angeles. Both of those population types tend to have no love lost for Republicans. So “population growth in Republican areas” actually weakens the Rose Institute’s claims. It means that formerly red areas are getting bluer, making protecting Republican districts more difficult.

But the problems with ProPublica’s story don’t end there. Their article alleges that Democrats were well organized in attempting to game the process by sending in committed activists and pre-prepared alternative maps for the Commission, but Republicans and conservatives were not. That argument is simply untrue.

I was at the redistricting hearing in Oxnard. Conservative and Republican activists, many of them organized through the Chamber of Commerce, outnumbered Dem and progressive activists at the hearing. They used coordinated talking points and submitted prepared maps designed to protect the incumbent Republican districts held by Elton Gallegly (CA24) and Tony Strickland (SD19).

When the final maps in Ventura County turned out unfavorable to Republicans, it’s not because Democrats out-lobbied Republicans. Quite the opposite. It’s because demographic changes in Ventura County rendered Republican efforts to argue for their conservative incumbent protection ridiculous. Their arguments were essentially that their white-flight bedroom communities shouldn’t be lumped in with “urban” and “different values” (read, black and Latino) communities in Los Angeles and Oxnard. They were comical arguments that I took some heat for intemperately calling racist at the time, and the Commission ignored them for very good reasons that had nothing to do with Democratic or progressive lobbying.

It’s true that progressives attempted to sway the Commission. But so did conservatives. That’s the whole point of the public process, particularly on an issue that would only interest the politically obsessed. What kind of person who doesn’t have a partisan stake in politics is actively interested in the way these lines are drawn?

But perhaps the biggest problem with ProPublica’s argument is the assumption that the State Democratic Party organized and coordinated to have the lines drawn as the Commission drew them. That’s far from the truth.

Ten years ago, the California Democratic Party used gerrymandering the way all partisan state legislatures do: to protect its incumbents, even at the expense of doing what would be best to potentially pick up seats. The old maps protected Democrats and Republicans alike, leading to a dearth of competitive seats across the state. That lack of competitiveness is part of why voters wanted a non-partisan process in the first place. In my area, Democratic power and safety was largely minimized in order to maximize it elsewhere, resulting in largely protected Republican congressional and statehouse districts.

If the big power players in the Dem party had had their way, the maps would have been similar to those of a decade earlier, and protected incumbents again. I hated the old maps for that reason, and that’s why I voted for the redistricting commission proposition, even though it was Democratic heresy at the time. I had confidence that a non-partisan process would actually be more favorable to us overall (though it might give some of our incumbents headaches) than the partisan one had been–particularly in my county, which had been gerrymandered to weaken Democratic power in order to maximize it elsewhere.

Now there are many areas, such as the Sherman vs. Berman and Osborn vs. Butler races in Los Angeles, where the entire Democratic power infrastructure has been overturned by the Commission, causing all sorts of inane distractions for the State Democratic Party, as each candidate’s partisans attempt to game the endorsement process in their own favor. In the case of the Osborn versus Butler race, Betsy Butler left the area she used to represent because the new districts have made the race more challenging, and moved to a district that Torie Osborn was largely expected to run in. Betsy’s abandonment of her old turf means that it will likely fall into Republican hands, hurting Dems’ chances of taking a 2/3 supermajority in 2012. But since Betsy is a current Assemblymember and therefore technically an “incumbent” despite not having represented the district she is running for, Speaker Perez is leveraging major endorsement help in her direction.

And this messy situation is only one of many facing the CDP this year.

To put it mildly, these maps are not the ones that California Democratic Party power players would have concocted in smoke-filled backrooms if they had had their way.

In sum, ProPublica got it entirely backwards. The new maps do favor Dems overall. But that’s largely in spite of the efforts of the CDP, not because of them. The real reason for the Dem gains in the non-partisan maps is demographic shifts and the implosion of the California Republican Party. ProPublica should have been able to do a little research and recognize that.

Update: one of the article’s authors tweets the following:

I greatly respect your opinion, but we didn’t say anything in our story about the California state democratic party.

Upon retrospect, this is true, but even more curious. The author seems to be implying that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and other allies in Washington were orchestrating this from top to bottom. The only problem with that is that anyone with passing awareness of California Democratic politics knows that DCCC doesn’t have the level of local connections and clout to pull something like this off. They would have had to go through the state Party and its county committees.

Also, given that the new maps endangered several Democratic Congressional incumbents, it’s hard to see that these maps were the desired result for the DCCC, which has historically been significantly more interested in incumbent protection than in playing offense by expanding the map.

As far as my county is concerned, it’s true that local grassroots activists on both sides tried to sway the process. But there was zero coordination with DCCC or other national Democratic entities to my knowledge.

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Dear Jamie, can we talk?

by digby

I’m reprinting this entire letter from Josh Brown over at The Big Picture because I think it needs to be preserved for posterity. If you want to leave a comment, I urge you to click over and do it there:

Dear Jamie Dimon,

I hope this note finds you well.

I am writing to profess my utter disbelief at how little you seem to understand the current mood of the nation. In a story at Bloomberg today, you and a handful of fellow banker and billionaire “job creators” were quoted as believing that the horrific sentiment directed toward you from virtually all corners of America had something to do with how much money you had. I’d like to take a moment to disabuse you of this foolishness.

America is different than almost every other place on earth in that its citizenry reveres the wealthy and we are raised to believe that we can all one day join the ranks of the rich. The lack of a caste system or visible rungs of society’s ladder is what separates our empire from so many fallen empires throughout history. In a nation bereft of royalty by virtue of its republican birth, the American people have done what any other resourceful people would do – we’ve created our own royalty and our royalty is the 1%. Not only do we not “hate the rich” as you and other em-bubbled plutocrats have postulated, in point of fact, we love them. We worship our rich to the point of obsession. The highest-rated television shows uniformly feature the unimaginably fabulous families of celebrities not to mention the housewives (real or otherwise) of the rich. We don’t care what color they are or what religion they practice or where in the country they live or what channel their show is on – if they’re rich, we are watching.

When Derek Jeter was toyed with by the New York Yankees when it came time for him to renew his next hundred million dollar contract, the people empathized with Derek Jeter. Sure, this disagreement essentially took place between one of the wealthiest organizations in the country and one of the wealthiest private citizens – but we rooted for Jeter to get his money. Nobody begrudged him a penny of it or wanted a piece of it or decried the fact that he was luckier than the rest of us. In the American psyche, Jeter was one of the good guys who was deservedly successful. He was one of us and an example of hard work paying off.

Likewise, when Steve Jobs died, he did so with more money than you or any of your “job alliance” buddies – ten times more than most of you, in fact. And upon his death the entire nation went into mourning. We set up makeshift shrines to his brilliance in front of Apple stores from coast to coast. His biography flew off the shelves and people bought Apple products and stock shares in his honor and in his memory. Does that strike you as the action of a populace that hates success?

No, Jamie, it is not that Americans hate successful people or the wealthy. In fact, it is just the opposite. We love the success stories in our midst and it is a distinctly American trait to believe that we can all follow in the footsteps of the elite, even though so few of us ever actually do.

So, no, we don’t hate the rich. What we hate are the predators.

What we hate are the people who we view as having found their success as a consequence of the damage their activities have done to our country. What we hate are those who take and give nothing back in the form of innovation, convenience, entertainment or scientific progress. We hate those who’ve exploited political relationships and stupidity to rake in even more of the nation’s wealth while simultaneously driving the potential for success further away from the grasp of everyone else.

Here in New York, we hated watching real estate and financial services elitists drive up the prices of everything from affordable apartments to martinis in midtown with the reckless speculation that would eventually lead to mass layoffs, rampant joblessness and the wreckage of so many retirement dreams. No one ever asked the rest of us if we minded, it just happened. I’m sure people across the country can tell similar stories.

So please, do us all a favor and come to the realization that the loathing you feel from your fellow Americans has nothing to do with your “success” or your “wealth” and it has everything to do with the fact that your wealth and success have come at a cost to the rest of us. No one wants your money or opportunities, what they want is the same chance that their parents had to attain these things for themselves. You are viewed, and rightfully so, as part of the machine that has removed this chance for many – and that is what they hate.

America hates unjustified privilege, it hates an unfair playing field and crony capitalism without the threat of bankruptcy, it hates privatized gains and socialized losses, it hates rule changes that benefit the few at the expense of the many and it hates people who have been bailed out and don’t display even the slightest bit of remorse or humbleness in the presence of so much suffering in the aftermath.

Nobody hates your right to make money, Jamie. They hate how you and certain others have made it.

Don’t be confused on this score for a moment longer.

I hate slow-clapping or I’d do it.

I’d especially like to highlight this one line:

“…it hates people who have been bailed out and don’t display even the slightest bit of remorse or humbleness in the presence of so much suffering in the aftermath.”

That’s the part that tells us that they have no intention of changing and don’t even believe they did anything wrong. That’s why people are so angry. We know they’ll do it again the first chance they get.

So the payroll tax standoff continues with everyone, including the Wall Street Journal, telling the House Tea Partiers they need to give in on the two month tax cut and UI extension and come back and fight another day. The conventional wisdom is that the Democrats are in the drivers seat and are unlikely to blink.

by digby

Here’s a great read about the Ayn Rand cult which discusses not just the pernicious effect of its adolescent philosophy but the soap opera of Rand’s personal life — perfectly illuminating the bad Romance novel character of the books:

While Greenspan (tagged “A.G.” by Rand) was the most famous name that would emerge from Rand’s Collective, the second most well-known name to emerge from the Collective was Nathaniel Branden, psychotherapist, author and “self-esteem” advocate. Before he was Nathaniel Branden, he was Nathan Blumenthal, a 14-year-old who read Rand’s The Fountainhead again and again. He later would say, “I felt hypnotized.” He describes how Rand gave him a sense that he could be powerful, that he could be a hero. He wrote one letter to his idol Rand, then a second. To his amazement, she telephoned him, and at age 20, Nathan received an invitation to Ayn Rand’s home. Shortly after, Nathan Blumenthal announced to the world that he was incorporating Rand in his new name: Nathaniel Branden. And in 1955, with Rand approaching her 50th birthday and Branden his 25th, and both in dissatisfying marriages, Ayn bedded Nathaniel.

What followed sounds straight out of Hollywood, but Rand was straight out of Hollywood, having worked for Cecil B. DeMille. Rand convened a meeting with Nathaniel, his wife Barbara (also a Collective member), and Rand’s own husband Frank. To Branden’s astonishment, Rand convinced both spouses that a time-structured affair—she and Branden were to have one afternoon and one evening a week together—was “reasonable.” Within the Collective, Rand is purported to have never lost an argument. On his trysts at Rand’s New York City apartment, Branden would sometimes shake hands with Frank before he exited. Later, all discovered that Rand’s sweet but passive husband would leave for a bar, where he began his self-destructive affair with alcohol.

By 1964, the 34-year-old Nathaniel Branden had grown tired of the now 59-year-old Ayn Rand. Still sexually dissatisfied in his marriage to Barbara and afraid to end his affair with Rand, Branden began sleeping with a married 24-year-old model, Patrecia Scott. Rand, now “the woman scorned,” called Branden to appear before the Collective, whose nickname had by now lost its irony for both Barbara and Branden. Rand’s justice was swift. She humiliated Branden and then put a curse on him: “If you have one ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health—you’ll be impotent for the next twenty years! And if you achieve potency sooner, you’ll know it’s a sign of still worse moral degradation!”

This is the muse for many of the GOP leaders who pronounce themselves social conservatives.

The important point in all that is the one in which the 14 year old Nathan says that he was “hyponotized” and that Rand’s novels made him feel like a hero. That’s the key to Rand’s influence: the people who organize their lives around Rand’s overwrought philosophy are emotional adolescents and the pretense of “rationality” in her books is little more than a justification for youthful narcissism. Her own life bears this out as does the application of Randism to actual policy.

What’s frightening about all this is the number of leaders who count themselves as adherents. It’s common for narcissists to make it to the top of the food chain, but empowering this peculiar brand is akin to giving a 15 year old a Ferrari and a gun and taking off for the week-end. These are not people you want to put in charge of anything.

Newtie: the original Tea Partier

by digby

I was unaware of this, but apparently Newtie headlined Tea Party events from the very beginning:

I’m guessing it’s the Fannie Freddie charges that have hurt him among these people. Their whole rationale for the economic meltdown rests on the fact that ACORNFannie and Freddie helped the wrong people buy houses.

Still, he’s surviving, which means they may be in the process of absorbing and forgiving him for it. He truly is one of them.