Month: May 2013

Jared Bernstein makes it simple

by David Atkins

Jared Bernstein points out the obvious in the New York Times. Discussing the alarming unemployment rate, he points out that automation and trade deficits are part of the problem, but the biggest challenge is income inequality:

Third, a growing number of economists believe that our very high levels of inequality are not just whacking the incomes of the “have-nots” but are slowing job growth as well. Part of this works through the demand channel: with so much spending power in the hands of so few, consumer demand is becoming bifurcated. Walmart will do well on one end, Neiman Marcus on the other, with too little in between. Another part works through misallocation: too much economic activity devoted to “innovative” finance and too little to sectors more germane to middle-class jobs and incomes.

The way to deal with it is by ending austerity and restarting a jobs program:

What would it take to reverse these trends? For one thing, in the near term, do no harm. Austerity, including sequestration, is the economic version of medieval leeching. The Federal Reserve continues to apply high doses of monetary stimulus, and that’s supporting low interest rates, which in turn are linked to the improving housing market. But it can’t do it alone, and Congress is counteracting such tailwinds with fiscal headwinds.

We also need a significant, permanent program to absorb excess labor (an explicit part of the Humphrey-Hawkins law). We should consider restarting and rescaling a subsidized jobs program from the 2009 Recovery Act that, though relatively small, made jobs possible for hundreds of thousands of workers.

And we have to reassess our manufacturing policy, including reducing the trade deficit. That means both reshaping our dollar policy — going after competitors who suppress their currencies’ value to get an edge on net exports — and public investments in areas where clean energy intersects with production.

This stuff is really simple. It’s not hard to understand. The Austerians have a reason not to understand it. They’re not interested in slashing deficits. They’re interested in killing the safety net and drowning government in a bathtub. Everything else is just window dressing.

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Let’s talk backdrops, shall we?

by digby

So Sarah the huntress made a big splash at the NRA convention today slamming President Obama for “exploiting” the Newtown tragedy:

At the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting, Palin slammed Obama for flying the grieving parents of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Air Force One and then “making them backdrops” at rallies.

“That same media is now the reliable poodle-skirted cheerleader for the president that writes the book on exploiting tragedy,” she said, wearing a T-shirt that said “women hunt.”

“Now, emotion is a good and a necessary thing. But we have politicians exploiting emotion for their own agenda,” she said. “We have well-meaning Americans who are desperate to respond.”

She’s right, you know. The one thing about Republicans is that they never used citizens as props or exploited tragedy.

It’s just not who they are:

by digby

Colbert took on the Guantanamo hunger strike and interviewed Charles Swift, who explained the problem very well:

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In case you don’t know who Swift is, here’s a post of mine from 2006:

American Hero


by digby


Every once in a while you read about or get to meet someone who displays by his or her actions one of those wonderful fundamental lessons in personal integrity, intellectual consistency and common decency that makes you think this species might not be doomed after all. Here’s one:

The U.S. Navy lawyer who challenged the Bush administration’s efforts to try terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, walked a professional tightrope between fellow officers trying to gain speedy convictions and what he considered a moral imperative to buck the chain of command and vigorously defend his client.

Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift could have taken the easy route of arranging a plea bargain for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the Yemeni alleged to have worked as a driver and bodyguard for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

But fearful of the dangerous precedent that could be set by denying international standards of justice to those swept up in the war on terrorism, Swift battled to get the rights and protections of the Geneva Convention for his client.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush had overstepped his war powers in sending Hamdan and nine others to face military tribunals, America’s first since World War II.

“I feel like we all won, that the rule of law won, and that is essentially what we are all about,” Swift said of the high court’s validation of his three-year campaign on behalf of his 36-year-old client.

Swift was assigned to defend Hamdan by the Pentagon in November 2003 and initially was ordered by a superior officer to secure a plea bargain so there would be a timely conviction.

“I had the unenviable task of going down to this guy from Yemen in the uniform of people who had been treating him badly and saying, ‘If you don’t make a deal you may never see me again,’ ” Swift recalled of his first meeting at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo with Hamdan and his decision to fight a process stacked against the defendant.

Swift was allowed a rare phone call to the Guantanamo prison Thursday to give Hamdan the news of their legal victory. He described the prisoner as “humble, not jubilant, and very, very thankful.”

“It was gratifying to hear the belief in his voice, the recognition that mighty people don’t always get to do what they want,” Swift said of Hamdan, who, he added, understands that his case is far from over.

After more than 100 meetings at the remote U.S. naval base in southeastern Cuba, Swift said, he and Hamdan have developed a trusting relationship, and he would gladly represent the Yemeni in any future trial, military or civilian.

Colleagues attributed the high court ruling to what they considered to be Swift’s determination to protect the integrity of U.S. jurisprudence against a Pentagon bent on retribution for terrorism attacks on U.S. forces.

“It took exceptional courage. He had to risk himself being alienated from the larger military establishment,” said David Scheffer, law professor and director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University. “He must have known when he took this on that he was risking his career, and sadly he may have done that within the U.S. Navy.”

Though Swift’s successful challenge of the tribunal’s legitimacy will probably open doors in the private sector and academia for the Navy lawyer, Scheffer said, Swift has reportedly been passed over for promotion.

“It was a gutsy move, and he did it with complete dedication and devotion to the cause,” Benjamin Sharp of the Washington office of Perkins Coie said of Swift, with whom the Seattle-based law firm collaborated in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld.

Sharp speculated that Swift’s military career was probably damaged by his defense of Hamdan, a possibility the naval lawyer also alluded to.

“I love the military. I love my career and I’m proud of it,” Swift said, noting he would be eligible for early retirement in nine months and would leave the Navy unless he was promoted. “One thing that has been a great revelation for me is that you may love the military, but it doesn’t necessarily love you.”

The military has many men and women of great physical courage. That’s the point, after all. But it takes a person of exceptional character to be willing to take on the military hierarchy from within in order to preserve our fundamental principles. I’m skeptical that the threat of Islamic terrorism can be properly categorized as a war but if it is, one of the big battles being fought is for the integrity of the American system, and the battle is internal, not external. In that battle, this guy is a hero.


Swift appeared briefly on Hardball yesterday and had to endure an unbearably puerile interview from Chris Matthews, but he said a couple of things that I think are so simple and yet so important that it always boggles my mind that they get lost in the argument:

MATTHEWS: What about the charge made recently, just a couple minutes ago by Kate O‘Beirne of the “National Review,” that people who fight us who are not in uniform, who do not represent countries who are party to the Geneva Convention shouldn‘t be free riders? They shouldn‘t get Geneva Convention treatment. They should be treated like thugs.

SWIFT: Well, you know, if you‘re looking at it from that way, we have a lot of criminals here in this country. And to prejudge anyone that we capture outside the country as a thug, why are we having a trial in the first place? We‘ve already decided they were guilty.

What the Supreme Court said is you have the trial first, you use the procedures that are set up under international law, and then you decide whether they‘re a thug. You don‘t make the thug determination going in.

Why is this so hard to understand? We already know they picked up a whole lot of innocent and low level nobodies in Afghanistan and shipped them off to Gitmo. In the early days, the US was paying the Northern Alliance $5,000 per head and the NA was handing over their tribal rivals and anybody else they wanted to get rid of. I’m sure Kato and her barely repressed racist allies on the right don’t think it matters if some poor innocent wog gets tortured and locked up forever, but civilized people have come to recognise that show trials, kangaroo courts and lynching are immoral — and counterproductive. If you want to stress liberal values, the rule of law and democracy as the way forward in these fundamentalist religious cultures, you can’t behave this way. It doesn’t make you look tough or strong; it makes you look like you don’t believe in your own system — and that makes you weak. 

More from Colbert on Gitmo:

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Justice, American style

by digby

Cuz’ we just *know*:

Willie Manning is on death row in Mississippi, awaiting execution for the abduction and murder of two college students in 1992. He was convicted on circumstantial evidence, including the testimony of a jailhouse informant who had previously given a statement implicating another person. No physical evidence has ever linked Willie to the crime, and he has always maintained his innocence. He has been seeking DNA testing of crime scene evidence for years.

Incredibly, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that there is “overwhelming evidence of guilt,” so no DNA testing is needed. His execution has been set for May 7th. Eighteen men have been exonerated by DNA testing after being sentenced to death, including Kennedy Brewer of Mississippi.

Can you think of even one decent reason why we should not automatically test available DNA for all capital crimes? How can these people live with themselves?

But then our prison system is a nightmare generally and we are now openly exempting some people from even being tried because we just *know* they’re dangerous but we don’t have evidence to prove it. So it’s fairly clear that our childhood teachings about justice and the American way have pretty much been shown to be vacuous bromides. Our justice system is a joke.

If you’ve a mind to try to help this man get a DNA test, you can click here to send a note to Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant to stay the execution and order one. It’s incredible to me that he hasn’t done it long ago.

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Who needs to count votes when you’re a Republican?

by David Atkins

How little respect for democracy do Republicans have? Well, in North Carolina when a vote on energy policy didn’t go their way, they simply decided to go to voice vote and pretend they won:

Yep — in its desperate attempts to get rid of North Carolina’s renewable energy program, the legislature has given up the radical, liberal, lamestream, obviously subjective “science” of, um, actually counting votes. You see, when the votes were actually counted, the bill that would have removed the renewables program (and said that wind, among other things, was not renewable) died in the state house, failing to emerge from committee by an 18-13 vote.

Okay, hmm … you’re Republican legislator Mike Hager, you hate the renewables program, and your bill has just been defeated by an indisputable margin of five votes. What to do … what to do? Easy. You reintroduce the bill. And when it next comes up in committee, this time in the state senate? You have a voice vote — and have your finance committee chair, Republican Bill Rabon, refuse to count the actual votes. In a voice vote so close that both sides claim they would have won if the votes had been counted, Rabon declares that the bill has passed and runs off.

No, I wish I were, but I am not making this up. We have given up counting votes in North Carolina. The Reign of Error rules supreme here.

It’s not just that Republicans have no compunction about cheating to get their way. It’s that fundamentally they don’t respect democracy. They view most actual voters as parasites and squishes, they think they know what should really be done, and the process of democratic governance is mostly a painful roadblock.

As far as Republicans are concerned, government should only be in the business of protecting national borders and private property; corporations should run most day-to-day affairs, and the family and church should try to take care of whatever else people might need. That such a system works for no one but the very wealthy, some church leaders and a bunch of patriarchal male heads-of-household doesn’t bother them. They know most people won’t go along with that dystopian vision, so votes are superfluous to governance. Suppression and anti-democratic shenanigans are the right thing to do in the service of the greater cause.

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Did you know the White House invented marketing?

by digby

This piece by Brian Beutler is a fascinating analysis of Obama’s “permission structure” and specifically how the White House sees itself reaching a Grand Bargain with the Republicans.  There are so many moving parts it’s hard to keep it all straight which is also why I think it may be just a tad ambitious — any political strategy that depends upon dozens of pieces falling exactly the way you want them to is better considered a pipe dream.

Anyway, the plan seems to revolve around getting a few Republicans that other Republicans trust to sign on and then let them sell the Grand Bargain to the troops. Ezra describes it this way:

The now-famous term comes, as far as I can tell, from a 2008 profile of David Axelrod in the New Republic, where Jason Zengerle quoted Ken Snyder, a Democratic consultant and Axelrod protege, on his mentor’s approach. “David felt there almost had to be a permission structure set up for certain white voters to consider a black candidate.” The “permission structure” relied heavily on “third-party authentication,” which is to say, endorsements from respected figures or institutions that the targeted voters admired.

If you think back to the 2008 campaign, you can see Axelrod slowly building this permission structure around Obama. Right before Super Tuesday, Axelrod rolled out the endorsements of Ted and Caroline Kennedy. Right before the election, he rolled out Colin Powell. The timing and nature of the endorsements were meant to make an African American candidate with an international upbringing and the name Barack Hussein Obama into someone that Ohio steelworkers could feel comfortable voting for. If Ted Kennedy and Colin Powell can back this guy, so can you.

At his news conference this week, President Obama trotted the idea out again, this time in reference to negotiating with congressional Republicans. “We’re going to try to do everything we can to create a permission structure for them to be able to do what’s going to be best for the country.”

I guess this is supposed to be some kind of original and exiting new concept, but the truth is a little bit more prosaic.  The “permission structure” is nothing more than a common sales technique called “influencer marketing” something that marketing majors learn in their first year of junior college:

Influencer marketing, (also Influence Marketing) is a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers. 

Influencers may be potential buyers themselves, or they may be third parties. These third parties exist either in the supply chain (retailers, manufacturers, etc.) or may be so-called value-added influencers (such as journalists, academics, industry analysts, professional advisers, and so on).

The first approach to that theory comes from a communication’s classic “The people´s choice”, a Lazerfeld and Katz 1940 study on political communication that was also known as Multistep flow model, that claims that the majority of people are influenced by secondhand information and opinion leaders.

We used to call it “validator marketing” as well. But never let anything as prosaic as marketing 101 get in the way of Obama campaign hagiography. They invented the wheel, we all know that.

Anyway, the point of the article is that the White House is still determined to pursue their Grand Bargain and they’ve come up with a supposedly “new” plan to get Republicans on board (and apparently steamroll the Democrats into cutting their own throats.) But the legislative strategy is extremely complicated, as Beutler’s post describes in dizzying detail, so even if they can get their “validators” to run with the Grand Bargain, getting it to a vote is a truly daunting task.

Good luck with all that. Maybe the Tea Partiers all listen to Tom Coburn and Lindsay Graham and will do whatever they say, but I doubt it. They just aren’t as lemming-like as their rivals across the aisle.

The again, you never know …

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The Nazis were very sharp dressers

by digby

Via Think Progress:

JEFFREY Roobin: “This country fought Adolf Hitler. And I don’t really believe that Osama bin Laden and his group are worse or more dangerous than Adolf Hitler…We managed to defeat Adolf Hitler by following the rule of law.”

ARI FLEISCHER: They [the Germans] followed the law of war. They wore uniforms and they fought us on battlefields. These people are fundamentally, totally by design different. And they need to be treated in a different extrajudicial system.

See, the Nazis weren’t so bad after all. Sure, they committed genocide and other war crimes and atrocities of an unprecedented nature, but you have to admit they were very sharp dressers. Which made all the difference. Plus they were white, so there’s that.

This is not unusual actually. The right has been pimping what I call “The War of the Worlds scenario” since 9/11 to justify their proclaimed intention to “take the gloves off.” Not only did they create the illusion that we were fighting an epic war on the scale of WWII (as Chris Hayes memorably examined in this piece back in 2006) they took it one step farther and constructed an “enemy” with supernatural powers that presents an existential threat so grave that we must abandon all pretense of civilization to stop it. It is incredibly fatuous. And it exposes a cowardly side of the American character that will embarrass us forever. This is not the reaction of a strong and confident nation. It’s the reaction of a bunch of pants-wetting panic artists.

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Paging Corey Robin

by digby

One of my favorite insights of Corey Robin’s book The Reactionary Mind is this one:

Every great political blast—the storming of the Bastille, the taking of the Winter Palace, the March on Washington—is set off by a very private fuse: the contest for rights and standing in the family, the factory, and the field. Politicians and parties talk of constitution and amendment, natural rights and inherited privileges. But the real subject of their deliberations is the private life of power.

And here’s this week’s Weekly Standard (h/t David Atkins)

[A] case can be made that the welfare state has competed with the family for primacy from the beginning. It’s a point exquisitely if unintentionally illustrated by the Obama reelection campaign’s infamous “Julia” website, which showed the beneficent state stepping in to do at every stage of life what used to be done by competent families: babysitting, educating, influencing romantic decisions, caring for someone in old age.

Raw propaganda aside, some serious thinkers have also remarked over the years on the zero-sum game that is the power struggle between family and state. Plato, for one, understood that the only sure way to make children reliable instruments of his Republic was to separate them from their families at an early age. British author Ferdinand Mount argued in a 1992 book that the family “is a subversive organization. .  .  . Only the family has continued throughout history and still continues to undermine the ‘State.’ ” Tocqueville, Mount pointed out, also grasped this fundamental antagonism between family and state; witness the great Frenchman’s observation that “as long as family feeling is kept alive, the opponent of oppression is never alone.”

Looking away from theory and toward the public square, it’s also plainly true that the welfare state has interrupted the organic bonds of family in ways too numerous to count. As Milton Friedman once observed of Social Security, “The voluntary transfers [from young to old] strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken those bonds.” And certainly it’s the welfare state that has effectively bankrolled via many programs the expensive pan-Western fallout of the sexual revolution: the unprecedented levels of divorce, family breakup, out-of-wedlock births, and other trends that have turned the modern state into an inefficient but all-encompassing substitute for a man of the house.

In sum, statism has been an engine of family destruction—and vice versa. All of which leads to a contrarian thought: Might the dark ages of the welfare state end in a family renaissance?

If the welfare states of the West finally do implode, it’s hard to think of any institution but the family that could step into that vacuum. When politics forces the truth that taking care of one’s own is less ruinous than having the state do it, it’s just possible that personal choices could come to reflect that fact.

Can it be any plainer?

And this is also why conservatives have been a bit more, shall-we-say, flexible with marriage equality lately than one might have expected. The institution of marriage is the bedrock of their patriarchal belief system. Sure, they may wish it stayed more “traditional” but as long as the nuclear family remains sacrosanct, the workplace stays outside the purview of society at large (aka government) and the individual is not empowered beyond these institutions, they are winning.

All the pain and insecurity of these past few years of austerity are necessary. This experience will force us to submit to power in private relationships based upon our material needs — in the family, the factory and the field. Survival, in other words will depend upon the good will of our family and our bosses. And as long as we obey their rules we should be ok.  Just as God intended.

It’s ironic that these are the same people who extol the founders and proclaim their great love of freedom and liberty, but then the founders were a bunch of rich white guys who loved those things universally in the abstract but kept the privilege only for themselves in reality, so I guess it makes a sort of sense. The good news is that our modern freedom-lovers will allow obedient people of color to claim a small share of the patriarchy and some are even willing to support gay folk who agree to live by their prescribed bourgeois values. So, it’s not as if they don’t ever evolve at all. Progress!

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QOTD: Mittens channels the Duggars

by digby

Remember how he was all moderate and regular and not-like-that-crazy-Santorum? Well, not so much. Here’s what Mitt told graduates at Southern Virginia University last weekend:

“If you meet someone you love, get married. Have a quiver-full of kids if you can”

I’ve written a bit about the Quiverfull movement over the years, which is just about as retrograde as you can get without going full-blown fundamentalist polygamy: instead of having 20 kids by several wives, just force one poor wife to do it. For all his modern money making cleverness, he’s still a primitive patriarch.

But I’m fairly sure he is still jealous about this (who wouldn’t be?):

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Elections are still about the broad middle class

by David Atkins

I’m not usually in the habit of highlighting articles written by conservatives in the Examiner–particularly ones designed to steel racist anti-Latino tendencies in the GOP–but Byron York nevertheless makes a point that is worth noting. Mitt Romney could have garnered 70% of the Latino vote in 2012 and still lost the election:

But what if Romney had been able to reach a mind-blowing 70 percent of the Hispanic vote? Surely that would have meant victory, right? No, it wouldn’t. Romney still would have lost, although by the narrowest of electoral margins, 270 to 268. (Under that scenario, Romney would have won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College; he could have racked up huge numbers of Hispanic votes in California, New York and Texas, for example, and not changed the results in those states.)

According to the Times’ calculator, Romney would have had to win 73 percent of the Hispanic vote to prevail in 2012. Which suggests that Romney, and Republicans, had bigger problems than Hispanic voters.

The most serious of those problems was that Romney was not able to connect with white voters who were so turned off by the campaign that they abandoned the GOP and in many cases stayed away from the polls altogether. Recent reports suggest as many as 5 million white voters simply stayed home on Election Day. If they had voted at the same rate they did in 2004, even with the demographic changes since then, Romney would have won.

York does concede the obvious point that as the Latino population grows, things will only become even more problematic for the GOP. But he also notes that Romney’s problem wasn’t so much weakness with minority groups as weakness with the broad spectrum of middle class households among all races:

But here is the real solution. Romney lost because he did not appeal to the millions of Americans who have seen their standard of living decline over the past decades. They’re nervous about the future. When Romney did not address their concerns, they either voted for Obama or didn’t vote at all. If the next Republican candidate can address their concerns effectively, he will win. And, amazingly enough, he’ll win a lot more Hispanic votes in the process. A lot from other groups, too.

York is doing a little whistling past the graveyard here, of course, and in the service of a terrible and bigoted cause. If Republicans fail to move forward with immigration reform, there’s no chance that Latino voters will be swayed to the Republican side by other policies and arguments. Perhaps more importantly, it’s not as if the ever-rightward tilt of a Republican Party that is celebrating the death of the welfare state because families will have to take care of their own is about to make any serious inroads with persuadable middle-class voters.

That said, Democrats have to be careful not to count their demographic chickens before they’re hatched. If Democrats don’t start doing a better job of address middle-class economic concerns instead of the deficit hysterics of the wealthy, all it will take is one charismatic Republican to erase that demographic advantage and take the presidency in 2016 and beyond.

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