Month: April 2012

We’ll Miss You, Ricky

by David Atkins

Yes, this man was and still is taken seriously by tens of millions of Republican voters. That’s still hard to process.

I suppose I do share a country with these people, but only on the flimsiest and most superficial of levels.

Of course, Mitt Romney comes equipped with his own special brand of assholery, so there’s that, too.

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The Santorum Legacy

Sarah Posner:

Just days after he won the Iowa caucuses (at the time, he was a close second until additional votes were found and counted), Santorum began the race to the dark ages:

Rick Santorum thinks Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that invalidated criminal bans on contraception, was wrongly decided. He’s off the deep-end on this one, and completely out of touch even with his fellow Catholics, but his statement provoked an exchange at last night’s debate about whether states should be permitted to ban birth control.

Mitt Romney feigned surprise — and emphasized that he would be absolutely, positively against banning birth control — but the moderators failed to ask him about his enthusiastic support for “personhood” bills that would effectively ban certain kinds of birth control (not to mention fertility treatments). Santorum turned the question to be all about the Griswold ruling on a “penumbra” of rights created under the constitution, anathema to conservatives because of how it underpins Roe v. Wade, and, as Chris Geidner points out, Lawrence v. Texas. They claim these rights are not actually found in the Constitution but were created by “activist judges” — this from the people who think the 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection to fertilized eggs.

At his press conference today, Santorum alluded to reproduction and procreation by praising the family as “the moral enterprise that is America,” and by specifically thanking the 19 Kids and Counting Duggars for campaigning for him. It might have sounded like a standard political homage to wholesome family life, but to anyone who knows Santorum’s views, it was an homage to uber-fertility. As Kathryn Joyce noted here last week, it rings of Quiverfull:

It’s the movement that looks to the Duggar family as de facto spokespeople (even if the Duggars have often hedged whether or not they consider themselves a part of it), and that so venerates the role of proud “patriarch” fathers leading their families—comparing them to CEOs and generals—that it’s easy to see where Harris’ appraisal of Santorum’s family-man qualifications come from. In this election, and the birth control debate that has become a significant part of its soundtrack, the convictions of the Quiverfull community seem to have made a mainstream debut.

Santorum’s speech this afternoon was suffused with other religious imagery, calling Good Friday his family’s “passion play” because of his daughter Bella’s hospitalization; he talked about “witnessing” for Americans’ stories and voices, and belief in miracles. Miracles, that is, for the true believers, not the Kennedys who want to keep religion out of governing, or the mainline Protestants whose congregations are supposedly in shambles, or the believers in “phony religion.”

I wrote about the Quiverfull influence a couple of weeks ago, here. I think he succeeded in doing exactly what he set out to do:

No matter how much they are willing to compromise, no matter that a Democratic president actually managed to leave a surplus (granted, it was during a boom) which the Republicans promptly threw away in tax cuts, the Democratic Party finds itself on the wrong side of this equation.

Now, I don’t think this appears as high on the list of voter priorities as the Village Scrooge’s think it does, but it’s still a potent perennial issue as an abstract symbol. And for whatever reason, the Democrats seem to be desperate to be seen as magnificent spending cutters. (Perhaps that’s because many of them are fiscal conservatives themselves who are just stuck with inconveniently liberal constituents.)

This is a problem. If it were me, I’d probably stop trying to prove how “responsible” I am, since even leaving budget surpluses is considered irresponsible. I think I’d just spend all my time trying to persuade the American people that government spending to help people is good and that fighting expensive wars and coddling wealthy criminals is bad. But that’s just me. I don’t have to run for office.

But there are people running who will make that case. You can find them here.

Update:

I have taken a fair amount of grief over the years from fellow liberals for saying that racism is still an animating feature of conservatism. I got a lot of blowback back in 2005 for my writing on Katrina in which I analyzed the delayed response through the prism of white fear of the black mob and the history of slave revolts and then more recently in the virulent racist undercurrents in the Tea Party movement. It has been very unpopular among a certain set of liberals to submit that despite the huge improvements in race relations over the past couple of generations, wiping out this primal characteristic of American culture was still a work in progress.

Conservatives, almost universally, feel like they get a bad rap on race. They catch heat when they point out improvements over the last several decades in race relations and in the material well being of minorities in America, even though those phenomena are real. They catch heat when they contend that government programs intended to help the poor have led to problems with dependency in minority communities, even though those critiques are sometimes correct. They catch heat when they criticize Affirmative Action, even when in some cases (as at the University of California) Affirmative Action was clearly disserving minority communities.

Why do conservatives catch such heat? It’s probably because there is still so much racism on the Right to go alongside valid arguments on issues relating to race and ethnicity. Conservatives so often get unfairly pounded on race because, so often, conservatives get fairly pounded on race.

And this is the Right’s own fault, because conservatives are not serious about draining the swamp.

In recent months, both Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have gotten questions at public events that referred to President Obama being a Muslim. Neither candidate corrected the questioner. Santorum later told a reporter that’s “not his job.” PPP polls in Mississippi and Alabama have found that about half of Republican voters believe Obama is a Muslim, and others aren’t sure.

For years, Republicans have done a dance with the Birthers in the Republican base, trying to avoid associating themselves with the Birther position without alienating activists who believe the President was born abroad. Donald Trump has worked to keep Birtherism alive and in the news, and in January, Mitt Romney went to appeared in Las Vegas to accept his endorsement on live television. Republican rejections of Birtherism tend to focus on the issue being “a distraction,” as RNC Chairman Reince Preibus puts it, rather than pointedly noting that it is a nutty, racist conspiracy theory.

There has been a clear strategic calculation here among Republican elites. Better to leverage or at least accept the racism of much of the Republican base than try to clean it up.

The problem is that elite conservatism is not just accepting it — they are exploiting it. And it’s because of that that it’s awfully hard to take their allegedly legitimate contributions to the dialog regarding “dependency” or affirmative action as anything more than extensions of their racist exploitation.

They always knew it was a bad idea

Krugman on social security

by David Atkins

Paul Krugman explains the fake social security crisis again for the 10,000th time:

Jared Bernstein and Dean Baker are both mad, understandably, at Robert Samuelson, who pulls out, for the 7 millionth time, the old Social Security bait and switch. Here’s how it works: to make the quite mild financial shortfall of Social Security seem apocalyptic, the writer starts out by talking about Social Security, then starts using numbers that combine SS with the health care programs — programs that are very different in conception, financing, and solutions.

And then the writer ends by demanding that we cut Social Security, as opposed to addressing health care costs.

The serious (as opposed to Serious) thing to say here is that on current projections, Social Security faces a shortfall — NOT bankruptcy — a quarter of a century from now. OK, I guess that’s a real concern. But compared to other concerns, it’s really pretty minor, and doesn’t deserve a tenth the attention it gets.

It’s also worth noting that even if the trust fund is exhausted and no other financing provided, Social Security will be able to pay about three-quarters of scheduled benefits, which would mean real benefits higher than it pays now. I don’t want to see that happen, but it’s worth keeping in perspective — especially when you look at the solutions “reformers” propose, which all seem to involve reducing future benefits relative to those currently scheduled.

If there’s any debate in this country that more fully proves how full of shit professional centrists are, and how totally captured our politics are by Wall Street, it has to be the “debate” over Social Security. That supposedly intelligent people spend any time arguing about this when there are so many other urgent problems is madness.

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Lord Saletan of Slate

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

And then throw a couple of bucks in the tip jar. Thew drinking that is necessary to deal with the wankerrific for ten long years doesn’t come cheap …

War on women? Huh?

On Thursday, with little fanfare, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker signed a bill repealing the state’s 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act, which allowed victims of workplace discrimination to seek damages in state courts. In doing so, he demonstrated that our political battles over women’s rights aren’t just about sex and reproduction—they extend to every aspect of women’s lives.

Yes, they really did this. And more. And he did it in the middle of the night.

But that’s ok. The women won’t mind. They don’t really want to make as much money as men because they have children. Or something:

Repealing the law was a no-brainer for state Sen. Glenn Grothman (R), who led the effort because of his belief that pay discrimination is a myth driven by liberal women’s groups. Ignoring multiple studies showing that the pay gap exists, Grothman blamed females for prioritizing childrearing and homemaking instead of money, saying, “Money is more important for men,” The Daily Beast reports:

Whatever gaps exist, he insists, stem from women’s decision to prioritize childrearing over their careers. “Take a hypothetical husband and wife who are both lawyers,” he says. “But the husband is working 50 or 60 hours a week, going all out, making 200 grand a year. The woman takes time off, raises kids, is not go go go. Now they’re 50 years old. The husband is making 200 grand a year, the woman is making 40 grand a year. It wasn’t discrimination. There was a different sense of urgency in each person.” […]
Grothman doesn’t accept these studies. When I ran the numbers by him, he replied, “The American Association of University Women is a pretty liberal group.” Nor, he argued, does its conclusion take into account other factors, like “goals in life. You could argue that money is more important for men. I think a guy in their first job, maybe because they expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious. To attribute everything to a so-called bias in the workplace is just not true.”

It’s a liberal plot. Here’s what the conservative Concerned Women For America have to say about this issue:

The Concerned Women For America calls Equal Pay Day an “annual farce” and encouraged “women not to let feminists make them victims of an imaginary enemy.”

“The real problem is feminist groups who try to dictate wages rather than allowing the market to provide a wide variety of options to women. In an age where women have more opportunities than ever before, it is shameful that feminists judge them by the size of their paycheck. Women who choose to stay home with their children make a huge contribution to society,” said Wendy Wright, spokesperson for Concerned Women For America, “every person has the opportunity to make career choices and when we compare men and women who have made similar choices, we see equal pay already exists.

A majority of women would stay home with their children if they could afford to. We should focus on policies that allow women to make this choice, rather than pushing them into careers they don’t want.”

Wendy Wright was paid $121,000 in 2010 in her job as president of CWA. I guess she figured she earned it, unlike all those other women who weren’t giving their jobs their all, what with the childbearing and everything.

There is some mystery as to why she is no longer with the CWA. I sure hope it wasn’t over a salary dispute.

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Taibbi on the JOBS Act Debacle

by David Atkins

One of Matt Taibbi’s singular gifts is the ability to take complex financial issues and boil them down in a way that everyone can understand. His latest piece on the awful JOBS Act is a great example of this. I wish I could simply copy and paste the whole thing because mere excerpts don’t do it justice, but I’ll give you a taste:

The “Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act” (in addition to everything else, the Act has an annoying, redundant title) will very nearly legalize fraud in the stock market.

In fact, one could say this law is not just a sweeping piece of deregulation that will have an increase in securities fraud as an accidental, ancillary consequence. No, this law actually appears to have been specifically written to encourage fraud in the stock markets.

Ostensibly, the law makes it easier for startup companies (particularly tech companies, whose lobbyists were a driving force behind its passage) attract capital by, among other things, exempting them from independent accounting requirements for up to five years after they first begin selling shares in the stock market.

The law also rolls back rules designed to prevent bank analysts from talking up a stock just to win business, a practice that was so pervasive in the tech-boom years as to be almost industry standard.

Even worse, the JOBS Act, incredibly, will allow executives to give “pre-prospectus” presentations to investors using PowerPoint and other tools in which they will not be held liable for misrepresentations. These firms will still be obligated to submit prospectuses before their IPOs, and they’ll still be held liable for what’s in those. But it’ll be up to the investor to check and make sure that the prospectus matches the “pre-presentation.”

The JOBS Act also loosens a whole range of other reporting requirements, and expands stock investment beyond “accredited investors,” giving official sanction to the internet-based fundraising activity known as “crowdfunding.”

But the big one, to me, is the bit about exempting firms from real independent tests of internal controls for five years.

And why is that such a big problem? Taibbi explains:

There’s just no benefit that the JOBS Act brings to an honest startup company. In fact, it puts an honest company at a severe disadvantage, because now it has to compete against other, less scrupulous companies that can simply make their projections up on the backs of envelopes.

This is like formally eliminating steroid testing for the first five years of a baseball player’s career. Yes, you can pretty much bet that you’ll see a lot of home runs in the first few years after you institute a rule like that. But you’d better be ready to stick a lot asterisks in the record books ten or fifteen years down the line.

In the same way, get ready for an avalanche of shareholder suits ten years from now, since post-factum civil litigation will be the only real regulation of the startup market. In fact, there are already supporters talking up future lawsuits as an appropriate tool to replace the regulations being wiped out by this bill.

The JOBS Act seems like it will invite a replay of the disastrous tech-stock bubble of the late nineties. That mess was made possible by a historic collapse in accounting standards, with the great investment banks the pioneers of the collapse. In the old days, in the fifties and sixties for instance, you would never take a company public that wasn’t profitable at the time of the IPO, or didn’t have a multi-year track record of solid revenues.

There’s much more where that came from, too.

I have to confess that I don’t really understand how to solve this problem. The Republican Party is willing to do whatever it takes to eliminate the middle class in favor of Wall Street. The Democratic Party is fractured, with many great progressives like Elizabeth Warren trying to do the right thing, but with a number of corrupt Democrats as well. Also, there’s the pesky detail that the Democratic Party wouldn’t be able to win elections without its own share of corporate cash.

So screw parties and elections, right? OK, except for the fact that all the laws actually get passed by Congress and legislatures. Or the fact that we’d be at war with Iran right now if McCain were president. Or that whole Supreme Court thing, whose incredible importance should be patently obvious by now. No matter what one thinks of Barack Obama, can anyone imagine how much worse off we would be if Kagan’s and Sotomayor’s spots on the bench were replaced by Alito clones?

So…third party? Yeah, sure. The Greens and Peace and Freedoms have been around forever. The Greens’ biggest impact on national elections was giving Bush the presidency over Al Gore (and on that note, anyone who thinks Al Gore would have invaded Iraq isn’t capable of holding an intelligent conversation about politics. The financial crisis would have probably still happened, but we would still have been far, far better off under Gore than under Bush. These things still matter.) But no, the third party candidates most likely to enter America’s poisoned political blood stream are Michael Bloomberg, Angus King and (sigh) Linda Parks. If there is any movement away from the two parties, that’s the direction the movement is headed. And that’s fairly disastrous. Just one look at the viable non-partisan options drives me further into the arms of the Democratic Party as the only credible progressive alternative.

There’s popular protest, of course. We’ve seen the Occupy movement gain some traction by changing the discourse somewhat. Republicans became somewhat more scared of the income inequality message, and Democrats have been more eager to use it. And yet as we enter what is supposed to be an Occupy Spring, crap like the JOBS Act still passes, nor has anyone yet provided a credible answer as to how popular protest on these things is supposed to translate into legislative success.

My best answer at this point remains to attempt to curtail money in politics, while using the partisan techniques the Right has successfully implemented over the last forty years to attempt to make the Democratic Party as progressive as possible, eliminating all the Reagan Democrats (at least in blue areas) as swiftly as the Republicans got rid of their Rockefeller Republicans. I don’t see any viable alternatives that have a prayer of success.

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EZ Bipartisanship

by digby

I’ve been saying it for a while: bipartisanship is actually very simple to attain. All the Democrats have to do is enact the Republican agenda (which, when it comes to Wall Street, they are more than happy to do.) Robert Kuttner concurs:

Its Wall Street and Silicon Valley sponsors baptized it the JOBS Act, a contrived acronym for Jumpstart Our Business Startups — claiming that it would increase jobs. An ill-timed scandal involving accounting misrepresentations by Groupon in its stock pitch nearly rained on the JOBS Act’s parade. But President Obama signed the Act anyway, in a display of… bipartisanship.

Obama, in a Rose Garden ceremony, called it a “game changer” that would promote hiring by small businesses. More likely, it will promote stock frauds.

Leading GOP legislators were on hand to cheer for Obama’s support for Republican legislation. Standing behind Obama was House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a sponsor of the Act, who has blocked just about everything else Obama has proposed.

So this is what bipartisanship looks like. All Democrats have to do is embrace Republican ideology and — voila! — bipartisanship.

In this case, Silicon Valley Democrats helped, too. According to the Wall Street Journal, in a now-it-can-be-told piece, a venture capitalist named Kate Mitchell, a Democratic campaign donor, worked behind the scenes with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Republican House Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer Bacchus to shelter small (under a billion dollars!) companies from the disclosure and reporting requirements that protect investors.

Seeing a way both to ingratiate the White House with the business elite and to cheer Wall Street and Silicon Valley donors, Obama jumped on board. Once the White House signaled that Obama would sign it, most Democrats got out of the way.

This is what bipartisanship looks like.

Indeed it is. I’m sure there were many toasts to future bipartisan deals such as this one once they get this fall’s unpleasantness out of the way. The possibilities for more happy Rose Garden ceremonies are endless. Indeed, I’m guessing that the only hope progressives have is that the House Tea Partiers will be so riled up by the “liberal” Romney’s loss that they’ll try to impeach Obama — and ruin their only chance to completely dismantle the New Deal.

And keep in mind: the Democrats are either very, very cheap dates or they truly believe it’s a good idea to be able to rip off investors.

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