Deficit hawk climate deniers don’t care for future generations
by David Atkins
The President scored an obvious win over the Mitt Romney in last night’s debate. Hopefully the few remaining undecideds will see the difference between a proven leader and a conniving fraud in hock to the plutocrats.
But the real loser in the whole series of debates was the entire human race, along with every other species on the planet.
Across six hours of Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates, the number of times climate change was mentioned? Zero.
The number of times the deficit was mentioned? An astonishing seventy-two times. The word “deficit” occurred thirty-seven times in the first Presidential debate; eighteen in the second debate, despite the fact that none of the questioners actually asked about it; nine times in the third debate supposedly about foreign policy; and eight times in the Vice-Presidential debate.
Each and every one of these deficit-obsessed politicians claims that we must deal with the supposedly urgent problem so that future generations are not saddled with the selfish, poor choices of the current one. They insist that unless we destroy our safety net and slow down our economy even further, we are poor economic stewards for the long term. This concern for the future is said to be so crucial that it must be mentioned 72 times in the course of six hours of policy debates.
And yet, the issue of climate change is supposed to be so low on the priority list that it doesn’t even merit a single mention. Not one. Not even though the damage done by a warming climate is far, far, far in excess of one nation’s potential currency devaluations and tax hikes. Even though future generations will suffer catastrophe for decades after our current deficits are a distant historical footnote. And even though investment in renewable energy technologies will actually help improve our current and future economic outlook.
The reality is that people who work themselves into a lather over deficits while ignoring the very real problem of climate change don’t care a whit about the fate of future generations. They’re simply demagoguing a largely soluble non-issue to create an excuse for handing social insurance programs over to Wall Street, and for shredding what little is left of discretionary spending in order to ensure a cheap, desperate labor force with low tax rates for the wealthy.
Deficit hawks who don’t have equal concern about climate change care about the investment portfolios of the plutocratic class. But the future of the American people and the human race is quite possibly the last thing on their minds.
For President Obama, this is a major opportunity to hone in on the group that may be most important to his election: women. As pointed out by Ron Brownstein, one of the nation’s best students of the interplay of politics and demography, Obama can win the election if he wins over more college-educated women in the Southeast and more non-college educated women in the upper Midwest. He has already made strong inroads with both, but needs a little more heft.
Obama’s best way to do that is to convince women that he will not only protect our security but he will keep us out of war. He has argued in the past that he is doing just that by getting bin Laden and by extracting the U.S. from Iraq and Afghanistan.
He can advance his case by arguing that tough sanctions have led the United States and its allies to edge much closer to talks with Iran, which could defuse the possibility of an armed conflict. Presumably, the story leaked by the administration to The New York Times over the weekend about new talks with Iran was intended to set up exactly that conversation.
The Obama people also realize that they are presenting Romney with a tricky choice: either he can agree with Obama that more talks with Iran would be wise before any bombs fall, or he can take a harder line on Iran. The first choice risks Romney saying “me-too,” but the second might make him seem just too bellicose — George W. Bush revisited. Either way, he has to avoid that trap. Similar tough questions surround other issues, especially the growing dispute over whether the U.S. should intervene in Syria, a civil war spilling over into Turkey and Lebanon.
For Romney, a key imperative Monday night is to find a way to drum in his central message: He will be better than Obama in creating jobs, taming the deficits, and growing the economy.
On the surface, a foreign policy debate doesn’t lend itself to that message. But a clever candidate could find a way to argue that the biggest threat to America’s national security is economic weakness and demoralization at home. Military leaders stretching back to Eisenhower have successfully argued that peace comes through strength — both in arms and in the economy.
It has been clear for some time that Obama and Romney are running increasingly different campaigns. Obama is tailoring messages and actions to groups that make up his coalition: women, minorities and youth.
Romney, on the other hand, is trying to win through a single message aimed at all: I can turn this economy around.
That sounds like a good analysis of what they plan to do tonight. Feel the magic.
What’s clear is that this debate has nothing to do with national security or foreign policy. But then campaigns are never very illuminating about national security or foreign policy in general.
From my point of view, regardless of what they say, on national security President Obama will probably expand his covert wars and Romney (who really is quite a dud when it comes to this) will listen to his lunatic advisers who will make some huge error as these sorts usually do.
I would guess we’ll have some saber rattling and China bashing, but for the most part any sophisticated discussion about the global economy is considered above our pretty little heads, so I won’t hold my breath. And there’s been ample discussion of the lack in interest in climate change.
If I could ask a question it would be about the recent revelations that the DEA is operating in Africa, ostensibly because “narco-terrorism” is threatening Europe. I have to wonder if Americans agree that’s such an important national priority that their grandmothers must eat cat food (skin in the game!) so that the Europeans pay a little bit more for their cocaine and hash.
“What I’ve tried to do is find liberal middle-of-the-road Republicans and Democrats. In the Senate, Scott Brown, who single-handedly stopped the right-to-carry bill. You can question whether he’s too conservative. You can question, in my mind, whether she’s God’s gift to regulation, close the banks and get rid of corporate profits, and we’d all bring socialism back, or the U.S.S.R.”
Huh? I guess he might be saying that Warren isn’t a commie there, but it’s a mighty weird way of putting it. But that’s not the most nonsensical thing about it. It’s the idea that you can find liberal, middle of the road Republicans anywhere — or that Scott Brown is one of them.
The graph shows that while both parties have always been distinct in their ideology, since about World War 1 there’s at least been some slight overlap. All that changed in the early 70’s though, as successive Republican congresses became increasingly more conservative in their voting records, while Democratic congresses remained much the same. Today, there’s no ideological overlap between members of the two parties.
And it’s not getting any better.
Here’s a good example of how the problem is playing out in record time. David Roberts at Grist found this perfectly astonishing Youtube from the 1988 Vice Presidential debate on the question of global warming:
As Roberts says:
This is from 1988 — 24 years ago. The questioner doesn’t mamby-pamby around with he-said she-said, he states flatly that “most scientists” agree and that future generations are at risk.
And neither candidate bothers with dissembling or dodging. Both acknowledge the problem and promise to address it.
In 1988! In the ensuing 24 years, U.S. politics has moved backward on this issue…
Throughout the decade from 1998 to 2008, Democrats swung around more solidly behind climate concern, but Republican sentiment stayed roughly steady. Right around 2008, however, there was a sharp uptick in skepticism about climate change, almost exclusively among far-right conservatives.
Now, what happened in 2008 that might have turned conservatives against climate? Hm … thinking … wait, wasn’t there an election that year? Why yes, I believe there was. Black Democrat took office, as I recall.
The sharp conservative turn against climate was part and parcel of the Tea Party phenomenon. When Obama and congressional Democrats championed legislation to address climate change — legislation not that different from what McCain championed in 2008 — the right immediately aligned against it, like a school of fish. Once cap-and-trade failed spectacularly, the issue went underground. The right is united in implacable opposition to all solutions. Burdened with so many coal states, the Dem coalition doesn’t have the votes to overcome the right’s opposition. So there’s just nothing to say. There’s no margin in talking about it. It doesn’t get Dems any votes they don’t already have. It doesn’t — despite the festival of self-delusion going on lately — move any independent or undecided votes. And it activates furious right-wing activism. So … who has incentive to talk about it?
Who, indeed? (Certainly not the press, who cannot write anything without the words having fallen from the mouth of a politician or one of his flunkies first.)
Roberts agrees with Chris Hayes that it will take a mass movement of engaged citizens so that politicians have an incentive to tackle the issue. And that’s probably true. But I can’t help but think of another issue which brings no electoral upside to candidates of either party, but which politicians and the media nonetheless obsess over: the deficit. Of course, there is a constituency that’s mobilized on that issue. It’s not very big in numbers but it is the most valued constituency in American politics: the wealthy. They don’t have to take to the streets to get things done, they just have to take out their checkbooks.
If you want a bipartisan solution to a problem the most efficient way to do it is to convince rich people it’s in their interest to pursue it. Other than that, fuggedaboudit.
User zakandsantos at Daily Kos has a chilling story about her experience with Tennessee’s “Voter ID” law:
I was denied the right to vote on Wednesday, and after gathering up all my information, I went back Saturday to vote again. I decided to go to the same early voting site to see if I would have problems again, and lo and behold, the site gave me major problems this time as well. On a positive note, I was allowed to vote. On a negative note, it took roughly 35 minutes after waiting in line to argue my way to the voting machine….
My husband voted on the first day of early voting on Wednesday. This was the day that they gave me problems with my ID and I decided to leave and come back once I gathered up all the information. My husband escorted me back to the site on Saturday and I proceeded to wait another 30-45 minutes in line to cast my vote. Once I was directed to the sign in booth, I discovered that I had the same older, white woman that had given me so many problems when I last tried to vote. This time though, I was prepared. I put down my voter registration card, my staff ID from the state university, my most recent paycheck proving my address, and finally a print off from the secretary of state’s website saying I could use a staff ID from a state university as proof of my identity. I even gave her my social security card for even more proof of my identity.
She looked at all my information skeptically and started thumbing through a book of state issued ID’s. I glanced over at the book as she flipped through, and noticed that no examples of state university staff ID’s were in the book. She took even further issue that my ID said “Staff/Student.” She seemed shocked that you could be both on the staff of a university and be a student. Guess she’d never heard of graduate students in her life that often work as adjuncts and take courses at the same time. She then said she was going to call and verify that I could vote with the election commission. I said fine. She called and the person gave the okay, but she didn’t stop. She then began to grill me on what I did at the university, even though under Tennessee law the ID could be expired, so I didn’t technically have to do anything currently at the university. She then asked if she could take a copy of my ID, also giving me the idea that if I didn’t allow that I would not be allowed to vote. I said okay. She didn’t ask for copies of anyone else in line’s ID…just mine. At this point I felt horrific, as if by trying to vote, I had to first prove that I was not some election stealing criminal. Mind you, I haven’t missed an election in ten years, but obviously because I got married and hadn’t changed my name on my state license and had to use another form of ID I was suspect.
She finally let me vote but that was not before I heard her disenfranchising another voter! This woman had moved recently from one part of the county to another. She told her she could change her address today, but would have to come back on election day to vote. THIS IS NOT TRUE IN TENNESSEE! If you have only moved within the county, you can change your address at early voting and go ahead and cast your ballot.
This sort of thing is an affront to democracy and a civilized society. Appalling, discriminatory and unconstitutional. Which is exactly how the right wing in America wants it.
As I watch the polls get closer I have to say that I’m getting more and more worried that a narrow Obama win will be viciously contested, both legally and in the court of public opinion. All you have to do is listen to the incoherent babbling of John Fund — who has made a second career out of perpetuating the voter fraud myth — to see that they are working themselves into a lather.
This Chicago scandal to which Fund refers was investigated 30 years ago. Historically it’s certainly true that the big city political machines manufactured votes — but he could have just as easily have brought up Tammany Hall. The problem with Fund’s thesis is that there are no more big city machines capable of delivering such results today. And in any case, Voter ID would do nothing to stop it, regardless. Today, whatever institutional support the Democrats had just for voter outreach and registration — an entirely different thing — it was pretty much eliminated with ACORN (thanks to the Democrats’ own self-destructive impulses.) Even he can’t provide much of an argument other than “we need to police this just in case.”
But that’s not the point of this. We know this whole psuedo-scandal is designed to suppress the Democratic vote. They’ve been doing this for centuries in one way or another. (A future supreme court justice was even once part of the scheme.) But as Jane Mayer points out in this article in the New Yorker, our old friend Hans Von Spakovsky has been the driving force behind the recent legislation and other political activity around the issue. She documents many of his outright lies. This is just one example:
Von Spakovsky recently sat down with me in a conference room at the Heritage Foundation, wearing rimless eyeglasses and a sports jacket with a crisp white pocket square. In our conversation, and in later phone calls and e-mails, he expressed himself with lawyerly reserve. He said of True the Vote and its affiliates, “They’re doing a great job.” Earlier this year, he noted, the Pew Center on the States found that more than 1.8 million people who had died were still registered to vote in America, and that 2.75 million people were registered to vote in multiple states. How many of these errors translate into fraudulent votes? “It is impossible to answer,” he said. “We don’t have the tools in place.” But he cited a 2000 investigation, by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, of voting records in Georgia over the previous two decades; the paper reported that it had turned up fifty-four hundred instances of dead people being recorded as having voted. “That seems pretty substantial to me,” he said.
He did not mention that the article’s findings were later revised. The Journal-Constitution ran a follow-up article after the Georgia Secretary of State’s office indicated that the vast majority of the cases appeared to reflect clerical errors. Upon closer inspection, the paper admitted, its only specific example of a deceased voter casting a ballot didn’t hold up. The ballot of a living voter had been attributed to a dead man whose name was nearly identical.
And don’t forget our pals the Republican National Lawyers Association, which is mobilizing lawyers across the land to contest the vote count if the vote is close. As Von Spakovsky says ominously in the Mayer interview:
With legions of citizen watchdogs on the lookout for fraud, voters confused about the documents necessary to vote, and the country almost evenly divided politically, von Spakovsky is predicting that November 6th could be even more chaotic than the 2000 elections. He will play a direct role in Virginia, a swing state, where he is the vice-chairman of the electoral board of Fairfax County. Joining us at the conference table at the Heritage Foundation, John Fund, von Spakovsky’s co-author, told me, “If it’s close this time, I think we’re going to have three or four Floridas.” Von Spakovsky shook his head and said, “If we’re lucky only three or four.” If there are states where the number of provisional ballots cast exceeds the margin of victory, he predicts, “there will probably be horrendous fights, and litigation between the lawyers that will make the fights over hanging chads look minor by comparison.” Pursing his lips, he added, “I hope it doesn’t happen.” But, if it does, no one will be more ready for the fight.
Here’s a sample post from the Republican National Lawyers Association today:
Vote Fraud Dilutes Legal Votes
Mon, Oct 22 2012 4:07 AM
“Voter fraud drives honest citizens out of the democratic process and breeds distrust of our government. Voters who fear their legitimate votes will be outweighed by fraudulent ones will feel disenfranchised.”
Pop Quiz: Who said this?
If you think it’s a voter ID activist or conservative organization, think again. It actually was from the United States Supreme Court’s per curiam opinion evaluating the Arizona voter ID law in 2006.
This is one of the important points that John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky mention in their insightful new article published in USA Today.
Instead of stooping to the level of the left which employs incendiary rhetoric on the voter ID issue, von Spakovsky and Fund discuss the facts and intelligently respond to arguments by voter ID opponents like News21 and the Advancement Project.
What are those facts about vote fraud that they present?
They cite a nonpartisan group’s study about the poor records kept on our voter rolls:
Pew Center on the States found one in eight voter registrations were inaccurate, out-of-date or duplicates. Nearly 2.8 million people were registered in two or more states, and perhaps 1.8 million registered voters are dead.
They cite polling data:
64% of Americans think voter fraud is “very” or “somewhat” serious. Blacks (64%) and those earning under $20,000 a year (71%) agreed.
They offer recent examples of vote fraud:
Three non-citizens were arrested in Iowa last month for voting illegally in the 2010 general election and 2011 city election. A Democratic nominee for Congress resigned in Maryland last month after allegations that she had voted in two states at the same time.
So that’s three illegal votes. The RNLA is collecting stories from around the country which purport to document voter fraud. (They are, in fact, just news stories about claims of voter fraud.) In fact, I’m willing to stipulate that there have been oh — a thousand instances of voter impersonation fraud around the nation in the past two elections. Two thousand even. But the fact that this means some Republicans will feel “disenfranchised” if their candidate loses is not reason enough to keep millions of eligible citizens from voting at all. Not to mention that there’s no real evidence that any illegal votes turned an election.
But note the legal argument contained within that post: the votes of legitimate voters will be “diluted” by fraudulent votes. Recall that the argument Republicans used successfully in 2000 was that legitimate voters would be “disenfranchised” by the counting of “illegal” votes. It sounds as though they are dusting it off the shelf in anticipation of a close election.
David Dayen makes a very good point, which I missed: during the Hofstra debate, in which questions were posed by members of the public rather than the Beltway elite, there wasn’t a single question about the deficit. Not one. The public really doesn’t care.
And you know what? Neither do financial markets, which continue to lend to the U.S. government at incredibly low rates.
Meanwhile, the results from austerity are in — and it’s now clear that the adverse economic impacts of austerity in a depressed economy are much worse than the elite imagined (although Keynesian economists knew better), and are in fact so severe that austerity is largely self-defeating, having little impact on the budget deficit even in the short run because reduced revenue takes away much of the initial savings. Once you take long-run effects into account, austerity is almost surely self-defeating.
Neither candidate was asked a question about the deficit at the second presidential debate, but the two said the word “deficit” a total of 18 times combined. And they have discussed it continually throughout the campaign.
This is the opposite of pandering. It is politicians preparing their constituents for what they are going to do, regardless of their wishes. Or to be more charitable, it is “educating” them about an issue they don’t care about but which the politicians believe they should.
I have long argued that educating the public is part of their job so I can’t complain about that. But, naturally I’d hoped that the leftward politicians would use their platforms to persuade the people to support policies that are in their self-interest not the interest of the 1%. So it’s fairly astonishing — and depressing — that this is the only issue on which they have bipartisan agreement and are only arguing about the details. An issue which is neither a voter priority or a genuine problem that must be solved immediately and at the expense of the citizens’ already stretched and insecure personal finances. (See: Krugman, above.)
There are differences between the parties and those differences will guide the reasoning and tribal identifications of the voters next month. Sadly for all of us, the obsession with the deficit is not one of them.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s odd that nearly 70 million people turned into the first presidential debate? In fact, according to this, more people tuned in that any election since Carter-Reagan, which I find astonishing. The second debate had fewer, but still more than most.
I’ve also found that my personal friends are more engaged in these debates than I ever remember. I’m not sure what it means. If I’d had to bet a month ago I would have said that people were apathetic and disillusioned and not inclined to tune in, certainly in comparison to 2008. It turns out that this is not true.
I don’t know what that means for the outcome of the election, but it’s probably good news for democracy. Unfortunately, it’s been good news for Romney as people tuned in and saw him as a reasonable alternative. Lying convincingly in front of 70 million people is obviously a good political strategy.
I’ll be surprised if the numbers hold up for a foreign policy debate in a year when foreign policy isn’t at the top of the agenda. But what do I know?
As a child of ex-Mormon parents whose blood relatives are mostly still practicing Mormons, I heard a good deal about the secret Temple ceremonies that no one was ever allowed to speak of, much less put on film. They have been described before by participants, but actual footage of the ceremonies has leaked onto the web in the last week. Well worth a peek:
Yes, it’s occult and bizarre. That’s also true of every religion, of course. It’s just that most of the more mainstream faiths have rituals to which we have become desensitized through over a millennium or more or practice. But it’s still a little disconcerting to see this sort of thing on video.
It has long been intention to write into my will that no organization may attempt to baptize me posthumously. I no longer have any contact with my Mormon blood relatives, as a result of my brother, my wife and I having written and produced this anti-Proposition 8 ad that aired in California:
I’m told that my uncle mentioned the ad in shock to my father, without even knowing his nephews had made it. Once he found out, I never heard from that side of the family again.
Honestly, good riddance. As I’ve said before, I have more in common with a fellow progressive half a world away than with my conservative blood kin or next door neighbors. I consider myself a world citizen, have little respect for the institution of the nation-state, and am consistently amused by the strain of Westphalian fundamentalism that masquerades as a certain kind of isolationist pseudo-progressivism in certain quarters of the left.
As to posthumous baptism, if my relatives attempt it and my next of kin discover the effort, I want the pants sued off of them, with the proceeds to go to progressive charities. If that happens I just may do more good in death than I will have done in life.
