Month: January 2012

Punishing the perpetrators

by digby

Can you see what’s wrong with this picture? (From Dylan Ratigan’s show today)

Jonathan Capehart: This is just one piece, getting the money out of politics, the first step. But ultimately what’s going to have to happen, and this is my little drumbeat, is that the American people are going to have to let members of congress go to Washington to make the tough decisions. To make the hard calls that are really going to be uncomfortable, maybe even painful. But then the next step is to not punish them for doing the things you’ve sent them to Washington to do.

Allow members of congress and members of the Senate to actually be fearless, that’s the key. A lot of those people, there are 535 people on Capitol Hill are running in fear.

Imagine that. To think that in a democracy politicians would be afraid to cause the citizens pain and discomfort? What’s the world coming to?

This is, of course, a very typical Villager complaint. The “people” are just so stupid and selfish that they won’t let the politicians do what’s necessary to fix the problems. The “tough issues” we’re talking about of course, are cutting the “entitlements” which everyone in DC knows are the cause of all our woes.

It never occurs to Capehart that getting the money out of politics, raising taxes on the 1%, shrinking the empire might make all these painful, uncomfortable decisions unnecessary. Maybe if we did that most Americans could have a little health and retirement security and these politicians wouldn’t have to make those “hard calls” in the first place.

That of course, isn’t even contemplated. It’s just assumed that the American people must bear the burden of all the mistakes and all the waste the wealthy gamblers and their government stooges might make. And when the people express their dismay and vote these so-called leaders out of office they’re scolded like children for it.

What a system.

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Newt walks it back

by David Atkins

It’s been interesting watching the Not Romneys gingerly attack Romney for being the sort of vulture capitalist they’ve been diligently glorifying and deregulating for decades. They have to do it because the mood of the country is against him, and because the “Romney’s a liberal” line hasn’t exactly worked to knock him off the pedestal. Gingrich has been the most vocal on this front, though other Not Romneys have taken their shots as well.

Still, the big money men who control the Republican Party won’t tolerate that sort of populist heresy for long. We knew the clamps would come down eventually, just not so soon:

Newt Gingrich signaled Wednesday that he believes his criticism of Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital is a mistake — and that he’s created an impression that he was echoing Democratic rhetoric.

Gingrich conceded the problem when pressed by a Rick Santorum supporter at a book signing here Wednesday.

“I’m here to implore one thing of you. I think you’ve missed the target on the way you’re addressing Romney’s weaknesses. I want to beg you to redirect and go after his obvious disingenuousness about his conservatism and lay off the corporatist versus the free market. I think it’s nuanced,” said Dean Glossop, an Army Reservist from Inman, S.C.

“I agree with you,” Gingrich said. “It’s an impossible theme to talk about with Obama in the background. Obama just makes it impossible to talk rationally in that area because he is so deeply into class warfare that automatically you get an echo effect. … I agree with you entirely.”

The flimsiness of Newt’s excuse for making a cowardly retreat on Bain Capital is really something. He would stand up to Gordon Gekko, you see, if the threat of imminent Marxism weren’t right around the corner in the form of a President whose principal economic advisers are Larry Summers and Tim Geithner.

I’m pretty sure even most Republicans can see through that one. Leveraged vulture capital is sacrosanct ground in the modern GOP cult of Objectivism, which means Mitt Romney’s path to the nomination is all but assured. There will be some anti-Romney social issues pandering in the Bible Belt states because there is still marginal room for Republican heterodoxy on that front, but this thing is all but over.

The Republican Party is the proud standard bearer of vulture capitalism now. The only question that remains is whether the Democrats have enough independence from the influence of Wall Street cash to take a firm populist stand against it.

Update: I guess he’s walking back the walkback now. Whatever. Huntsman is also out there calling for an end to the attacks on Bain Capital. The pushback from the powers that be is already underway.

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Tipping the election

by digby

These billionaires really like Republicans, especially Romney.

Not that the president’s going to have a hard time raising money. Rich people play both sides — and why not? There is so much money sloshing around in the 1% right now, that this is chump change to them. That’s the truly shocking part. It’s not even really an investment. It’s a tip.

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It would be so nice if something made sense for a change

by digby

There’s going down the rabbit hole and then there’s going down the rabbit hole:

Brad DeLong writes about this dangerous CBO report that indicates that raising the Medicare eligibility age would save money and wouldn’t be a big problem for 65 year olds because they could just stay employed or buy their own insurance:

Fools rush in

by digby

Commenting on a shockingly obvious question in the Washington Post (“Does austerity really work?“) Atrios quips:

We are ruled by fools who think mass poverty is the solution to a bad economy.

New fools same as the old fools, I’m afraid:

Mellon became unpopular with the onset of the Great Depression. He advised Herbert Hoover to “liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate… it will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people.”

Oh and he advocated spending cuts, refused to loan money to banks, opposed any kind of spending cuts and insisted on budget balancing. In the Great Depression. It didn’t work out. (What’s Bush’s old saying? “Fool me once,…. won’t get fooled again?” Apparently not.)

But you can see what he’s saying there. It’s a matter of people working harder and living a “more moral life.” It’s good for ’em. Teach ’em the value of a real days work for a change. Make ’em grateful for they have instead of always wanting more.

This is tough love for the rubes who have to get used to their reduced circumstances. The “value” of being “middle class” or following the American Dream has to be adjusted. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.

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The next step in electoral corruption

by digby

For those of you who are freaked out about the influence of money in politics: Good morning!

Republican National Committee files brief in 4th Circuit Danielczyk case today arguing that for-profit corporations have the constitutional right to make campaign contributions directly to candidates.

That’s right. If this succeeds we shouldn’t even bother to hold elections anymore. We’ll just let the most profitable corporations hire politicians directly. President of the United States will only be middle management, of course, but it will look good on the resume and be good preparation for the executive suite.

Redefining capitalism

by David Atkins

Newt Gingrich isn’t the only Republican hopeful trying to bring down Mitt Romney by way of attacking the “free” market. Rick Perry got into it with Sean Hannity yesterday as well:

Perry said, “There is a real difference between venture capitalism and vulture capitalism.” He went on to clarify, “The truth is the truth, Sean, and there’s no use in us trying to shy away from it. If we think for a minute that Barack Obama’s not going to attack this and talk about this, we might as well get it out in the open and discuss it right now and find out is this the type of conservative that we want representing us at the top of the ticket.”

Hannity challenged Perry, saying “I just think as a conservative to say that those people that are willing to invest their money for companies that have either been mismanaged, or they are headed for bankruptcy, and they come in and try to get them profitable again. To say they’re vultures and they’re unethical, I mean that’s about as severe a charge as you can make.”

Perry responded, “The fact is the folks in Gaffney, South Carolina and Georgetown, South Carolina agree with that, and I happen to think that if they were going to be real venture capitalists, they would come in and help clean up those companies, save those jobs, rather than coming in and picking their bones clean, which I think is exactly what they did.”

Perry is right: Romney is going to be destroyed on this issue in a general election where the Objectivist cult only comprises about a quarter of the nation’s voters.
The Sean Hannitys of the world want to ram Objectivism down America’s throat and force them to like it.

But while the Obama campaign won’t frame it in these terms, modern capitalism itself will be on trial in this campaign. Many Republicans less hubristic and shortsighted than Hannity understand that, and want to pretend that vulture capitalism isn’t real capitalism (though it very much is, especially in a financialized, asset-based economy.) But it’s too late for that now. Romney is going to be their standard-bearer, exposing the ugliness of Republican economics for what it really is.

And while progressives know that President Obama is light years away from being a socialist, the right-wing media empire will attempt to portray him as such, framing the 2012 election as a choice between nasty European Socialism and good old-fashioned American Free Market Capitalism. Obama vs. Romney is nothing of the sort, of course, but the truth of the matter is irrelevant to the rhetoric of the debate set by the right-wing and its enablers in the traditional media.

For a great many voters who don’t know better, President Obama will represent “Socialism”, while Mitt Romney will represent “Capitalism.” So-called Socialism is going to win the day fairly handily in November 2012, and the wingers will have none but themselves to blame for it. Gingrich and Perry can whine belatedly all they want, but they made their bed and now they get to lie in it.

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The “A” Word

by digby

How many times can you say the word “abortion” in one ad?

And he thinks birth control is just fine too, so there.

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“Pain. I’ve never felt that way in my life”

by digby

Just another New year’s Day in America:

The traffic stop began peacefully three hours into New Year’s Day 2010, with the woman driving the SUV telling the officer that she hadn’t been drinking and her husband merrily exclaiming he was the source of the alcohol smell.

But the situation soured when Steven Kotlinski, 55, stepped out to watch his wife’s sobriety test, provoking the Mundelein officers to order him into the SUV. He reluctantly obeyed, but one officer said Kotlinski had obstructed his efforts. He ordered him back out, then tried to pull him out.

Next came the electric crackle of a Taser, a sound heard far more often in Chicago and many suburbs than it was just a few years ago.

A Tribune analysis shows Taser use has jumped fivefold in the city since 2008 and suburban agencies that were surveyed were on pace to double their use, as departments equipped more officers with the devices. Chicago police were deploying Tasers at a rate of more than twice a day in 2011.

And oversight has not kept pace with the explosion in use. Departments are on their own in developing policies on when and how electroshock devices should be deployed, with no state regulation.

In Kotlinski’s case, the engineer at Abbott Laboratories was removed from his SUV and pinned in the snow. He lost control of his body as an “intense burning sensation” accompanied the surreal feeling that he was floating over the ground, he said. He roared about his heart condition, then begged in a faint wheeze for someone to call 911.

“Pain. I’ve never felt that way in my life,” Kotlinski said.

Sadly, most people that sort of thing happens to assume it’s just the way things are — that in America it’s perfectly normal for police to shoot you with electricity if they feel you aren’t cooperating regardless of whether you are suspected of a crime or posing a danger. That’s just the way it is.

And it’s becoming more and more common:

Like almost all states, Illinois does not track the weapons’ use by local police, and departments have been left to monitor and govern electroshock devices with a patchwork of policies. In Chicago, the leap in the number of police carrying Tasers coincided with the scaling back of post-shock investigations by the Independent Police Review Authority.

In 2009, officers logged 197 incidents. A year later, after hundreds more weapons were passed out, Chicago police reported 871 incidents. As of fall, the department was on pace for 857 uses in 2011, which works out to 2.3 per day.

The growth in the weapons’ use should not come as a surprise, given their rise in popularity.

Several companies make electroshock weapons, which override the target’s central nervous system by firing wire-tethered probes that deliver electrical jolts. Arizona-based Taser International makes the most popular models. About 576,000 of the devices are used by more than 16,500 law enforcement and military organizations, nearly all in the United States, said spokesman Steve Tuttle. Only 500 or so agencies used the weapons in 2000, he said.

In Illinois, a little fewer than half of the municipal police agencies that responded to a 2007 survey reported they were using electroshock weapons, according to the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board, and more departments have since bought the weapons. Several suburban agencies contacted by the Tribune appear to have started using them in 2008 or 2009.

Taser International and police departments have faced lawsuits over safety. And though many fatalities following electroshock weapon use have been attributed to other causes, human rights group Amnesty International has counted 490 deaths after electroshock device use in the U.S. since 1990, said Debra Erenberg, Midwest regional director for the group. In some 50 cases between 2001 and 2008, coroners listed the weapons as a cause or contributing factor in a death.

You got a problem with that?

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