Month: January 2012

Third Party’s the charm?

by digby

Ron Paul said this yesterday in the New Hampshire debate:

[M]y trillion dollar proposal to cut spending, doesn’t immediately deal with Social Security, it’s to try to work our way out of Social Security.I’m cutting a trillion dollars by attacking overseas spending and going back to ‘06 budget. And I do not believe that you have to have — people who have gotten special privileges and bailouts from the government, they may get the pain, but the American people, they get their freedom back and get no income back, they don’t suffer any pain.

He also said this to a reporter talking about South Carolina, the most conservative state in the country:

Venturing well beyond what any other GOP candidate would dare, the Texas congressman said he thinks his support can encompass followers in the Occupy Wall Street movement. He told a supporter in Meredith that his appeal extends to “independent people who are sick and tired of the two-party system. The people who are going out on Occupy Wall Street. They are sick and tired of it.”

Sounds good.Between that and his national security platform you have to wonder why he’s a Republican.

Until you look at the details. Here’s Paul’s economic plan. Let’s just say he’s not being entirely forthcoming:

DELIVERS A TRUE BALANCED BUDGET IN YEAR THREE OF DR. PAUL’S PRESIDENCY:

Ron Paul is the ONLY candidate who doesn’t just talk about balancing the budget, but who has a full plan to get it done.

SPENDING:

Cuts $1 trillion in spending during the first year of Ron Paul’s presidency, eliminating five cabinet departments (Energy, HUD, Commerce, Interior, and Education), abolishing the Transportation Security Administration and returning responsibility for security to private property owners, abolishing corporate subsidies, stopping foreign aid, ending foreign wars, and returning most other spending to 2006 levels.

ENTITLEMENTS:

Honors our promise to our seniors and veterans, while allowing young workers to opt out. Block grants Medicaid and other welfare programs to allow States the flexibility and ingenuity they need to solve their own unique problems without harming those currently relying on the programs.

CUTTING GOVERNMENT WASTE:
Makes a 10% reduction in the federal workforce, slashes Congressional pay and perks, and curbs excessive federal travel. To stand with the American People, President Paul will take a salary of $39,336, approximately equal to the median personal income of the American worker.

TAXES:

Lowers the corporate tax rate to 15%, making America competitive in the global market. Allows American companies to repatriate capital without additional taxation, spurring trillions in new investment. Extends all Bush tax cuts. Abolishes the Death Tax. Ends taxes on personal savings, allowing families to build a nest egg.

REGULATION:

Repeals ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, and Sarbanes-Oxley. Mandates REINS-style requirements for thorough congressional review and authorization before implementing any new regulations issued by bureaucrats. President Paul will also cancel all onerous regulations previously issued by Executive Order.

MONETARY POLICY:

Conducts a full audit of the Federal Reserve and implements competing currency legislation to strengthen the dollar and stabilize inflation.

CONCLUSION:

Dr. Paul is the only candidate with a plan to cut spending and truly balance the budget. This is the only plan that will deliver what America needs in these difficult times: Major regulatory relief, large spending cuts, sound monetary policy, and a balanced budget.

I urge you to click over to the site and see the details. It’s quite illuminating.

Paul’s plan calls for greatly reduced military spending. How that breaks down is unknown, but I assume that I would agree with most of it. But take a look at the specifics of the tax policy:

I didn’t know that Occupy was for lowering taxes for the 1% and corporations and eliminating financial regulations and I would imagine that would come as something of a surprise to most people who identify with that movement as well. But hey, maybe they’ve evolved.

Despite what he said in that interview. His long held position is that he would allow all the old folks to continue to collect SS (he says they’ve been “conditioned” to need it) but will end it for younger people. Not “opt out.” End it.

Why does he want to end it?

WALLACE: You talk a lot about the Constitution. You say Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid are all unconstitutional.

PAUL: Technically, they are. … There’s no authority [in the Constitution]. Article I, Section 8 doesn’t say I can set up an insurance program for people. What part of the Constitution are you getting it from? The liberals are the ones who use this General Welfare Clause. … That is such an extreme liberal viewpoint that has been mistaught in our schools for so long and that’s what we have to reverse—that very notion that you’re presenting.

WALLACE: Congressman, it’s not just a liberal view. It was the decision of the Supreme Court in 1937 when they said that Social Security was constitutional under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

PAUL: And the Constitution and the courts said slavery was legal to, and we had to reverse that.

That’s interesting because Paul’s philosophy really says that the constitution doesn’t have the authority to declare slavery illegal but perhaps that big old war made the difference on that one. And it should be said that he thinks states have a right to have their own social security plans so that’s good.

I suppose he’s actually being practical in saying that the elderly who haven’t been “conditioned” to spend their last years in penury because they can’t work will be allowed to collect. But you younguns should be ok because you are going to spend your lives in a dog eat dog, every-man-for-himself world and you’re all going to be tough old birds who can scrap out a meager living ragpicking at the (gigantic, toxic) landfill — or you’ll be rich, I tell you, rich! No matter what, at least you’ll have your pride.

The fact is that he’s being very cagey about the details of his economic plan, which seems a little bit odd considering that he’s the man of principle who sticks to his guns and tells it like it is. So, I have to wonder if he isn’t truly planning a third party run. His extreme economic views are certainly his big selling point to the Republican base so why would he soft peddle them and evoke the much loathed Occupy movement.

Adele Stan is following the Paul campaign on the ground and she wrote this a couple of weeks ago:

At last week’s Iowa debate, when asked if he would endorse the GOP nominee, Ron Paul dodged the question. I expect he will again endorse the Constitution Party’s nominee [as he did in 2008] — especially if it’s him.

While a third-party run by any of its early primary winners could cause problems for the Republican Party, if Paul is the third-party standard bearer, it’s a circumstance that could prove vexing as well to the Obama campaign, siphoning off the most enthusiastic sort of young voters that Barack Obama relied on for his 2008 triumph. And in 2012, Obama will need every vote he can muster.

If he’s talking about attracting Occupy protesters in the context of the South Carolina primary, it’s hard to figure any other way.

The Constitution Party is on the ballot in 38 states, by the way.

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Where have all the assets gone?

by David Atkins

I’ve written at length before about ideological battle between those who want to increase asset values, and those who want to see wage growth. To make a long story short, a variety of forces, the strongest of which are globalization and increased access to an endless supply of cheap labor, have conspired to depress wages. Rather than do the hard work of fixing the system to help a globally connected world synchronize in harmony with broad-based wage growth, policy makers chose to disguise the lack of wage growth by maximizing asset growth, and attempted to push as many people as possible away from wage orientation and into asset orientation, specifically stock investments and housing.

Some of the decision to do this was simply a question of taking the lazy way out of the problem. Some of it was a craven desire to help plutocratic campaign donors steal away more wealth. And some of it was ideological fervor, as with Ronald Reagan, who said in 1975:

“Roughly 94 percent of the people in capitalist America make their living from wage or salary. Only 6 percent are true capitalists in the sense of deriving income from ownership of the means of production…We can win the argument once and for all by simply making more of our people Capitalists.”

All of American policy was designed to cheapen the price of goods, to extend credit, and to maximize the prices of assets in attempt to create more Capitalists and hide the fact that wages were declining against inflation, and that non-bubble-related jobs were disappearing.

The problem, of course, is that asset prices are volatile and prone to speculative bubbles. When the bubbles inevitably burst, it wasn’t just speculators who got hurt this time: it was everybody who had been suckered into the asset-based con. When the recoveries from the speculative bubbles did belatedly show up, they tended to be increasingly jobless recoveries–just as one might have expected from a society where both boom and bust depend on quick-buck speculation rather than productive long-term investment.

But the problem doesn’t end there. There’s also the fact that regular Americans don’t have remotely enough wealth to buy into the asset-based ponzi scheme in the first place:

The attempt to disguise wage stagnation and decline with asset growth has been a marked failure on many levels, not least of which is the obvious fact that not enough Americans have access to enough wealth to make the model work. Cheap, easy access to homeownership was supposed to be the main fix for that. But that blew up just a few years ago, taking the entire economy with it. 401Ks were supposed to be another fix, but people have lost confidence in those too, as those who own substantial enough 401Ks to retire never know just how big their nest egg will be from year to year, while those without significant 401Ks or union pensions don’t have much retirement at all beyond Social Security.

But no one in a major role on a public policy level is even talking about the problem or looking toward new solutions. As I said before:

Whether they can articulate it or not, what has most progressives most incensed about the Obama Administration’s domestic policy is that it has ultimately hewed to the same asset-based economic model. When the Administration could be progressive on cutting costs or ensuring equality without negatively impacting assets, it did so. That’s what the ACA, the Ledbetter Act, the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and numerous other left-leaning Administration moves were designed to do. But the Administration has been very reticent to take any actions that would negatively impact the value of assets.

That’s not meant to be a knock on the Obama Administration alone. Almost no one in government is really talking much about this problem, which lies at the root of so many others. Certainly not Republicans who are just fine with the system and would like to slash the safety net while expanding asset inflating policies, and scarcely any Democrats, either. Certainly not the pundits who, when they can be bothered to talk about it at all, either celebrate the trend (Thomas Friedman) or figure that a simple combination of infrastructure spending and redistributive taxation can solve it (Paul Krugman.) Not even much of the progressive movement, which is stuck either in issue silos or railing against “corruption” and the influence of the one percent, as if all the country’s greedy villains had somehow gotten the people’s votes and assembled into Washington D.C. solely for the purpose of self-enrichment while pretending to fight one another.

The problem is systemic and broad-based. The entire country–and, indeed much of the rest of the industrialized world–looked at the threat posed by global labor competition and decided to jump into a razor blade-filled pool of asset speculation. The Right celebrated its victory, and the Left went neoliberal and decided to roll with it while the bubbles inflated, creating a fleeting mirage of universal prosperity. When the bubbles popped, the Right went off an ideological cliff to defend its position, and the Left was sent scrambling to find its soul again. Neither side has quite regained control of its senses or its moral center.

That’s not surprising: after all, it’s hard to find a solution to a problem that one cannot even identify. It’s no wonder that the majority of the country that has born the brunt of asset-bubble recessions without much partaking in the froth of the bubbly frenzy sees villains lurking in every shadow, regardless of political ideology. They don’t know who the criminals are. Heck, they don’t even know what the crime is, really. But they do know that somebody is going to pay for the loss of their standard of living.

But whoever the scapegoat is, they won’t get their assets back to bubble highs unless they’re part of the elite rich. And given legislators’ priorities of the last 30 years and more, they’re certainly not going to get their wages back, either.

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State sanctioned kidnapping

by digby

The other day, I wrote about the 14 year old African American girl who was wrongly deported to Colombia (even though she doesn’t even speak Spanish.) Well, she’s back home now. And her case illuminates a big problem with our Immigration Bureaucracy:

The girl was reunited Friday with her family for the first time since running away from her Dallas home in the fall of 2010. “She’s happy to be home,” the family’s attorney told reporters as Jakadrien left Dallas-Forth Worth International Airport at about 10 p.m., flanked by her family and police.

But the known facts of her case, namely that an American kid who didn’t speak Spanish ended up on a plane to Colombia within six weeks of being arrested in Houston for shoplifting, are reviving questions about the frequency of mistaken or accidental deportations of US citizens.Some suggest that mistakes are on the uptick as US authorities have notched record deportation levels in recent years.

“Clearly, U.S.-born citizens can’t be detained by immigration officials, much less deported by the Department of Homeland Security,” writes the Los Angeles Times in an editorial about Jakadrien’s journey. “But it seems to be happening with greater frequency.”

People who are indigent, mentally disturbed, ex-convicts, or those who were born in the US but can’t easily prove it are usually the most susceptible to mistaken deportations, which in the most egregious cases critics liken to state-sanctioned kidnapping. One study published last year looking at cases in which deported Americans have later been able to prove they’re US citizens contends that about 1 percent of those detained and deported in any given year are, in fact, Americans. That’s about 20,000 people since 2003, it concludes.

20,000 people are a lot of people. And that doesn’t even count the people who have lived here nearly their whole lives and are as “American” in identity as I am.

Any country that routinely incarcerates and deports it’s most vulnerable and poor, purely because they can’t prove their citizenship, is a sick country. You almost have to wonder if some of them aren’t doing it on purpose.

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Bungee madness

by digby

I don’t get it:

A 22-year-old Australian thrill-seeker miraculously survived after her bungee cord snapped during a death-defying dive over crocodile infested waters in Africa on New Year’s Eve, according to local reports.

Erin Laung Worth told Australia’s Channel 9 that her feet were still bound together after she plummeted into the rapids below the 360-foot Victoria Falls bridge on the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia.

“It went black straight away and I felt like I’d been slapped all over,” Worth told the station.

“It was quite scary because a couple of times the rope actually got caught on some rocks or debris,” the Aussie adrenalin junkie added.

“I actually had to swim down and yank the bungee cord out of whatever it was caught on to make it to the surface.”

This whole thing just escapes me. I guess it feels good when it’s over.

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Newt’s Free Market Heresy

by David Atkins

Newt Gingrich speaks heresy:

“Those of us who believe in free markets and those of us who believe that in fact the whole goal of investment is entrepreneurship and job creation,” Mr. Gingrich said, “we find it pretty hard to justify rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company, leaving behind 1,700 families without a job.”

At a campaign stop at the Don Quijote restaurant on the edge of downtown Manchester, Mr. Gingrich seized on one of Mr. Romney’s lines from the debate, when he said, in an effort to asert that he was not a lifelong politician, that he did not get into politics until he no longer had to pay a mortgage. Mr. Gingrich suggested his rival was out of touch with ordinary Americans.

“We want everyday normal people to run for office,” Mr. Gingrich said. “Not just millionaires.”

That’s not going to work out so well for Newt. Those are pretty words, but any capitalist knows that the whole goal of investment is to make lots of money off the surplus value of labor while cutting costs in order to provide greater value to shareholders. Entrepreneurship is beside the point, and job creation? Well, if an investor could produce greater profits by firing every employee and having gnomes do the work instead, they’d do it in a heartbeat.

Newt knows this, of course. He and all the other candidates have spent their lives in the service of destroying the middle class in pursuit of investor profits. Romney’s Bain Capital job cremation isn’t some sort of perversion of the free market. It’s the whole point of the free market.

But at least Newt understands that the real free market doesn’t exactly play well with actual voters. They know that their ideology is unAmerican even to their own primary voters, and they’re willing to actually admit it when it’s an intramural contest. Still, come June, they’ll all be singing the praises of Bain Capital and the “free market.”

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Tenther Pole Dancing

by digby

Rick Perry really is just letting it all hang out:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry doubled down on his claim that President Barack Obama is a socialist during Sunday morning’s GOP debate in New Hampshire.

“I make a very proud statement and a fact that we have a president that’s a socialist,” he said, in response to a question about whether he agrees with a 2011 editorial by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that said Obama should not be attacked as having un-American values.

The moderator asked if Perry agrees with that statement.

“I don’t think that our founding fathers wanted America to be a socialist country,” Perry continued. “So I disagree with that premise that somehow or another President Obama reflects our founding fathers. He doesn’t. He talks about having a more powerful, more centralized, more consuming and costly federal government.”

Perry said as governor he pushed for a stronger embrace of 10th Amendment, which says some powers should be left to the states rather than the federal government. “The states will considerably do a better job than Washington D.C. as led by this president,” he said.

He’s a Tenther all the way. And an idiot. You’d think he’d hit at least 15%.

But he does serve a purpose. By blithely calling Obama a socialist in presidential debates, he keeps the Democrats trying to prove they aren’t. And you know what that means. It’s a very effective ploy.

BTW: Apparently “tentherism” isn’t commonly understood in liberal circles. Here’s a good primer, more at the link:

When the right’s view of the Constitution was ascendant 75 years ago, basic protections such as a restriction on child labor were declared unconstitutional; laws banning discrimination were unthinkable; and Social Security was widely viewed as next in line for the Supreme Court’s chopping block.

America’s right now wants nothing more than to revive this discredited theory of the Constitution. These conservatives are over-reading the Tenth Amendment, a provision of the Constitution that provides Congress’s power is not unlimited. So-called “tenther” conservatives are determined to use their twisted reinterpretation to shrink national leaders’ power to the point where it can be drowned in a bathtub. They must not be allowed to succeed for three reasons:

Tentherism is dangerous. Monopolists seized control of entire industries during tentherism’s last period of ascendance. Workers were denied the most basic protections, while management happily invoked the long arm of the law when a labor dispute arose. Worst of all, Congress was powerless against this effort. And the Court swiftly declared congressional action unconstitutional when elected officials took even the most modest steps to protect workers or limit corporate power.

Tentherism has no basis in constitutional text or history. Nothing in the Constitution supports tenther arguments. And tenther claims are nothing new. Each of them was raised as early as the Washington administration, and each was rejected by George Washington himself.

Tentherism is authoritarian. Health reform, Social Security, and the Civil Rights Act all exist because the people’s representatives said they should exist. The tenthers express goal is to make the Supreme Court strip these elected representatives of power and impose a conservative agenda upon the nation.

The tenther agenda

In its strongest form, tentherism would eliminate most of the progress of the last century. It asserts that the federal minimum wage is a crime against state sovereignty, child labor laws exceed Congress’s limited powers, and the federal ban on workplace discrimination and whites-only lunch counters is an unlawful encroachment on local businesses. Many tenthers even oppose cherished programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Tenthers divine all this from the brief language of the 10th Amendment, which provides that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” In layman’s terms, this simply means that the Constitution contains an itemized list of federal powers—such as the power to regulate interstate commerce or establish post offices or make war on foreign nations—and anything not contained in that list is beyond Congress’s authority.

The tenther constitution reads each of these powers very narrowly—too narrowly, it turns out, to permit much of the progress of the last century. As the nation emerges from the worst economic downturn in three generations, the tenthers would strip away the very reforms and economic regulations that beat back the Great Depression, and they would hamstring any attempt to enact new progressive legislation.

Maybe that whole agenda is too extreme to win a national election. But as long as it’s considered respectable for presidential candidates to believe it — and dismiss those who disagree as “socialists” — the rightward pole of our politics will continue to pull us way off center. This is a radical, right wing theory, as radical as it gets. And from Perry to Paul to Santorum to Gingrich to Romney, every last one of these would-be GOP presidents have adopted it at least to some extent. The two Texans, Perry and Paul, are true believers. They really do want to turn back the clock a hundred years.

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Getting the word out one traffic jam at a time

by digby

The freeway blogger hit LA on January 4th. Check it out:

The out-of-touch candidate

by digby

I think this says it all:

Mitt Romney suggested in today’s debate that only rich people should run for office, and then quickly celebrated the fact that he’d forced a rival to take out a loan against his house.

Romney said his father, Michigan Governor George Romney, had told him, “Mitt, never get involved in politics if you have to win an election to pay a mortgage.”

“If you find yourself in a position when you can serve, why you ought to have a responsibility to do so if you think you can make a difference,” he recalled his father telling him. “Also, don’t get in politics if your kids are still young because it might turn their heads.”

A few seconds later, he bragged about his run against Teddy Kennedy.

“I was happy he had to take a mortgage out on his house to ultimately defeat me,” he said.

Really darling, if you have to worry about paying bills you have no business running for office. Needing money for your expenses distracts from your real job — delivering for your fellow millionaires.

I watched him last night and he really is bad. (I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch this morning’s yet.) Yes, he’s marginally better than the rest of them, but that’s a comment on them, not him. He doesn’t really say anything, his “passion” is stilted and phony and he’s stiff as a board.

Plus, he really proved last night that he isn’t in touch with the religious right base with his answer on birth control. He acted like it was insane to assume that anyone anywhere would like to ban it and didn’t seem to understand the connection between Griswold and Roe. And that’s just wrong. There’s a whole bunch of social conservatives for whom this is a priority of the first order and his dismissive attitude has to grate. Many of them believe that the pill is an “abortifacient” and believe it should be banned. Still other believe, as Rick Santorum does, that sex must be procreative regardless.

Now, it’s true that the vast majority of Americans don’t agree with this and use birth control without any thoughts to these issues, but Mitt’s still trying to get the votes of the GOP base and I would think that was seen as a slap in the face — a disregard of their very serious beliefs on this issue.

Maybe it won’t matter, but church goers are the foot soldiers in any Republican election. He may have to distance himself from them to appeal to the middle, but it’s odd for him to blatantly insult them in a GOP debate. Frankly, from what I saw, it was a genuine lack of understanding about this, not a political calculation. He’s just not tuned into his base. Which explains why they can’t stand him.

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Kathryn Lopez says that Rick Santorum is misunderstood. He’s not really “coming for your birth control.” He just doesn’t think you have a right to use it:

What Santorum has said is that the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut — which dealt with a case that was a Planned Parenthood official’s stunt — was a bad precedent and bad law. It created a constitutional right for married persons to use contraceptives. Writing for the majority, Justice William O. Douglas declared that ”specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance,” and that “various [of these] guarantees create zones of privacy.” That would be the basis for the Roe decision eight years later, which relied on a similar constitutional stretch.

Santorum’s is a perfectly sound opinion. Why is it such a threat that some feel the need to make his position into something much more than it is

Why is it a sound opinion? I don’t know. She doesn’t say.

What she does say is that Santorum has the courage of his convictions and that he is willing to talk about them.But don’t worry, just because he said he was going to talk about these issues from the presidential bully pulpit and make it part of the national conversation doesn’t mean that he’s going to have anationwide lecture because he won’t propose any legislation. So that’s good. Plus he’d be a “friend to sex-ed programs that don’t give out condoms.” (I’m fairly sure that’s right.)

She doesn’t mention the other thing that Santorum said, which is that he thinks states have a right to ban birth control. So, while she may be technically correct that Santorum will not personally be rummaging around in your nightstand, he’s perfectly willing for others to do it. Indeed, he explicitly said they should.

But here’s what interests me the most about Lopez’ piece:

There’s something else worth noting. While it wouldn’t be wise for the president of the United States to launch a lecture campaign (we get way too much of that from the current president) on so intimate an issue, Santorum’s view is not as fringy as it is often portrayed. Obviously, Santorum is informed by his Catholic faith on this issue, but, in recent years, we’ve had the testimony of women who realize the damage contraception has done in their lives and relationships. A New York magazine cover story marking the anniversary of the Pill included the following:

One anxiety — Am I pregnant? — is replaced by another: Can I get pregnant? The days of gobbling down the Pill and running out to CVS at 3 a.m. for a pregnancy test recede in the distance, replaced by a new set of obsessions. The Pill didn’t create the field of infertility medicine, but it turned it into an enormous industry. Inadvertently, indirectly, infertility has become the Pill’s primary side effect.

She’s mischaracterizing the (very silly) article, which suggested that using birth control is causing infertility — because women are waiting too long to get pregnant. It’s idiotic but I’m guessing it’s the next big paternalistic ploy by the forced childbirth brigades — too many dizzy gals are damaged by waiting too long to conceive that the choice must be taken out of their flighty little hands.

She goes on to complain about having to pay for birth control — which is going to be the hook these zealots will use to whittle away at women’s access and then ends with this:

In this campaign, Rick Santorum has not been lecturing us about so-called social issues. But he gets asked about them, and he answers honestly. Can’t we be honest about what he is saying?

Here’s what he’s saying (go to the end):

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“The state has a right to [make a law outlawing the right of married people to use birth control], I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that. It is not a constitutional right, the state has the right to pass whatever statues they have.

And he explained very thoroughly elsewhere that he believes birth control is wrong unless sex is procreative it “becomes deconstructed to the point where it’s simply pleasure.”

Dangerous Nutcases

by David Atkins

TPM has the New Hampshire GOP debate whittled down to 100 seconds:

I must admit that last night was only the third GOP debate I’ve actually sat down to watch the whole way through this cycle. Listening to a bunch of sociopaths sound more and more heartless and insane with each passing month is an enjoyable spectacle for some. For me, it’s just another push on the Overton Window taking the country down yet another notch on its core morality scale.

That any of these fools has even an outside shot at the Oval Office really says something about the depths to which the country has sunk.

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