Month: April 2014

Climate change denialism is a tribal marker for old white Republican males

by David Atkins

Gallup is out with a new poll on climate change. It turns out that while climate denialism spiked in 2010, acceptance of climate science has increased such that only 1 in 4 Americans are climate deniers today.

That’s still far too high a number, of course, but more interesting is the demographic skew of the denialist rump:

These are fairly astonishing numbers. There is no particular reason for this to be an issue so radically divided by age and gender. While Gallup doesn’t touch on race here, we know from other polling that climate denialism also skews heavily white. In a surprising break with some other polling on the issue, even education level seems to make little difference in the Gallup study.

The only compelling motivator for public opinion on climate science is partisanship. Simply put, the Republican Party has multiple compelling interests in denying the reality of climate change. If climate change is real, it’s almost certainly a problem that requires preventative global governmental intervention rather than post facto free market corrections. Acting on climate change would also directly impact the bottom lines of traditionally Republican fossil fuel economy donors. They stand to lose a lot of money.

The Republican base is made up mostly of older white men. The big money donors and their conspiracy theorist mouthpieces on talk radio and Fox News have spent countless hours and billions of dollars convincing the Republican base that climate change isn’t real, much in the same cynical way that they’ve persuaded their base that giving more money to billionaires will create jobs. So older white men tend to disbelieve in climate change. If Fox News and Rush Limbaugh started telling them that the sun revolved around the earth, their base would start believing that, too.

It also appears that the number of people in both the acceptance and denialist camps is increasing, and the number of people in the middle is decreasing. That’s another sign of the power of partisanship in this debate:

But, of course, not all partisanship is created equal, nor is it necessarily a bad thing. If one side of the country passionately believes that 2+2=4 and the other side just as passionately believes that 2+2=5, then the problem isn’t that the country is bitterly divided. The problem is that there is a corruption in the system that allows so many people to be deluded into believing patently and obviously wrong things. Nor would a reasonable person be inclined to fault the passions of those who accept the science of arithmetic, or question the legitimacy of their political intensity.

We know that climate change is real and manmade. This is not a subject for serious dispute among knowledgeable people. The only reason it has become such a contentious issue is that the Republican Party and its media machinery have chosen to betray the trust of their loyal demographic constituencies for raw financial and ideological gain. They have turned the world’s most pressing and consequential problem into just another tribal marker in the endless partisan war.

That goes beyond petty politics and the perpetual fight over resource allocation. That comes perilously close to a crime against humanity.

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The American Dream is dead. Long live the American Dream

by digby

The New York Times reports what we all know:

The American middle class, long the most affluent in the world, has lost that distinction.

While the wealthiest Americans are outpacing many of their global peers, a New York Times analysis shows that across the lower- and middle-income tiers, citizens of other advanced countries have received considerably larger raises over the last three decades.

After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada — substantially behind in 2000 — now appear to be higher than in the United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans.

The numbers, based on surveys conducted over the past 35 years, offer some of the most detailed publicly available comparisons for different income groups in different countries over time. They suggest that most American families are paying a steep price for high and rising income inequality.

Although economic growth in the United States continues to be as strong as in many other countries, or stronger, a small percentage of American households is fully benefiting from it. Median income in Canada pulled into a tie with median United States income in 2010 and has most likely surpassed it since then. Median incomes in Western European countries still trail those in the United States, but the gap in several — including Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden — is much smaller than it was a decade ago.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: contrary to what the Ayn Rand followers or the Rush Limbaugh acolytes will tell you, the American Dream is not to be richer than Croesus, although that’s certainly one of the appeals of the American system. Most Americans are practical sorts and to them it is the dream of middle class security — a house of your own, a good job, the chance to educate your children well and retire with dignity. Those things are becoming out of reach for more and more of us. Young people are in debt, middle aged people are squeezed by the need to care for their parents and their children, and the elderly are living longer with less. Workers aren’t as physically mobile as their parents were, burdened with homes they cannot sell and their freedom curtailed by a job market that forces them to cling to work they hate for fear of not finding anything better. The idea of an average person starting a business feels like a suicidal leap without a net.

Of course there have always been those who were closed off from the American Dream due to systemic bigotry and suffocating poverty but for a time the dream was even opening up to those who had been denied — racial and ethnic minorities were able to become middle class workers and enjoy many of the economic and social benefits that came with it. But with the shrinking or the public sector and the unions, that toe hold into the middle class is becoming tenuous again.

It’s just sad. Yes we’re still a rich country with plenty of privilege. It’s not as if we’re going through a huge cataclysm like a major war or great depression. But sometimes it’s psychologically harder to lose something in increments, to just feel it slowly slipping from your grasp and not be able to stop it, than it is to lose it all at once. The panic just sits there, in the pit of your stomach, never full blown but on the cusp of release. It’s exhausting.

We’ve always had problems and some of them were huge, gaping moral holes in the fabric of our so-called democratic society. The American Dream is what always sustained us before, gave us something material, attainable and authentic on which to hang our vision of this culture as the great leveler, a country without obvious class distinctions where anyone could start over, fit in, make it. It’s never been entirely true, of course. But I don’t know who we are or what we’ll be if we don’t have it to believe in anymore.

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Hashtag fail ‘o the century

by digby

Oops:

The NYPD learned the hard way that #myNYPD is not necessarily #everyonesNYPD.

A seemingly innocuous request by NYPD officials to have Twitter users post happy pictures of themselves with city cops blew up in the department’s face on Tuesday when people instead began tweeting photos of police brutality…

The hashtag quickly started trending on the Twitter-verse, quickly generating over 10,000 responses in the hour after 4pm., an overwhelming amount of which were negative. Many of the posts were photographic examples of the department’s heavy-handed treatment of Occupy Wall Street protesters in lower Manhattan in 2011. Some of the posted pictures show cops with billy clubs attacking rallying protestors.

Other Twitter users wrote funny captions for the violence-revealing pictures.
“The NYPD taking a quick break to enjoy the music and crowd surf,” user Yung DeGrassi wrote under a picture of a cop reaching over a barricade to grab an Occupy Wall Street protestor.

You might not have known this, but the NYPD can help you with that kink in your neck. #myNYPD pic.twitter.com/fzUok1FWXG
— Cocky McSwagsalot (@MoreAndAgain) April 22, 2014

On the other hand, it’s probably not a great idea to send a picture of yourself to the NYPD. Like so many government agencies they have a bad habit of keeping records on file to be used in other circumstances.

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The GOP is America

by digby

I wrote a piece the other day about the right’s unfortunate habit of describing their losses as wins — if they only count the white vote. You know, the real vote.

Now they’re just coming right out and saying they are the only Americans who count:

Poll is of GOP voters RT @CongHuelskamp: Contrary to Left, poll shows Americans support traditional marriage. http://t.co/FGFpW35oLg
— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) April 22, 2014

It was a congressman who tweeted that …

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The most important thing to remember about the 2014 election

by David Atkins

As the 2014 election approaches, the political world will be subjected to the usual round of questions about “swing voters” and “independents.” Will the Obama generation abandon him? Will swing voters change their minds about the ACA and vote for Democrats? How will independents decide to cast their votes? Will swing voters and independents turn on the Democratic Party the way they did in 2010?

In fact, all of those questions are based on false assumptions about the electorate. I’ve written about this before, but it’s always worth another reminder, and Lynn Vavreck provides an excellent one today in the NY Times:

If you want to understand the 2014 midterm elections, remember this simple fact about American politics: There just aren’t that many swing voters.

Many people change their minds over the course of a campaign about whether to vote and even which candidate they’re leaning toward. Ultimately, though, voters tend to come home to their favored party. There are relatively few voters who cross back and forth between the parties during a campaign or even between elections.

Political professionals have increasingly come to appreciate this pattern and have focused resources on getting previous voters to the polls. Both parties have spent considerable effort in recent elections trying to understand the effects of television ads, canvassing, phone calls and mailings on turnout. Mobilizing a party’s voters has become as important as persuading undecided or swing voters.

The 2010 midterm elections highlight the relatively small number of swing voters. After winning with a wide margin and extraordinary enthusiasm in 2008, the Democrats suffered one of the largest losses of seats in any midterm two years later.

Although the president’s party almost always loses seats in midterm elections, the size of the 2010 “shellacking,” to borrow President Obama’s description, created the impression that many voters had changed their minds about the president, his policy goals or his ability to get the country back on the right track between 2008 and 2010.

But only a small percentage of voters actually switched sides between 2008 and 2010. Moreover, there were almost as many John McCain voters who voted for a Democratic House candidate in 2010 as there were Obama voters who shifted the other way. That may be a surprise to some, but it comes from one of the largest longitudinal study of voters, YouGov’s Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (C.C.A.P.), for which YouGov interviewed 45,000 people at multiple points during 2011 and 2012.

The results clearly show that voters in 2010 did not abandon the Democrats for the other side, but they did forsake the party in another important way: Many stayed home.

Fewer than 6 percent of 2008 voters in the presidential election voted for a congressional candidate from the other party in 2010, with the switchers roughly evenly divided across the parties, according to the C.C.A.P. It’s worth noting, however, that these switchers are not evenly distributed around the country, with North Dakota’s single district having very few cross-party voters (under 3 percent) and some Pennsylvania districts, for example, having upward of 10 percent switching between 2008 and 2010.

On average, across districts, roughly 6 percent of Obama voters switched and just under 6 percent of McCain voters switched; because there were more Obama voters than McCain voters in 2008, this means — as you’d expect — that more voters swung to the Republicans than to the Democrats. An additional 1.5 percent switched to third-party candidates.

But on turnout, the numbers were not evenly balanced for Democrats and Republicans. Only 65 percent of Obama’s 2008 supporters stuck with the party in 2010 and voted for a Democrat in the House. The remaining 28 percent of Mr. Obama’s voters took the midterm election off. By comparison, only 17 percent of McCain’s voters from 2008 sat out the midterms.

Nor are independents a unified block. As I noted in the local Ventura County paper The Acorn last week:

Ventura County Democrats, on the other hand, don’t feel they need to change their message to attract independent voters.

“The majority of all voters agree with our position on social and economic issues,” said David Atkins, chair of the Ventura County Democratic Party. “If we get our message out about our issues and about what we stand for, the majority of voters will agree with us and select our candidates. It’s not a question of working harder to appeal to another kind of voter. We just have to make sure that the majority of people who agree with us get out to vote.”

In an assessment different from the Gallup report’s findings, Atkins said it’s a common misconception that independent voters are undecided or have more moderate views.

“Independent voters are simply people who have made a choice not to register with the party, but they’re just as liberal or conservative as their counterparts, often more so,” Atkins said.

He said registering as an independent is a cultural trend, especially popular among young people. But younger voters are still progressive on most issues, including immigration reform, reproductive rights and America’s growing wealth disparity.

This election is going to hinge on whether Democratic and progressive base voters feel inspired enough by Democratic candidates to bother coming out to vote.

Now, one could wish that left-leaning base voters understood the stakes better. But it’s also up to elected officials and other party leaders to provide people the incentive to get out and vote. When President Obama took office he acted to curb many of the evils the Bush Administration was actively perpetrating. But outside of providing somewhat less expensive health insurance to around 20 million people, there hasn’t been a lot of action that directly impacted people’s lives or even provided some sense of accountability and justice to the people who crashed the economy. When the President promised hope and change, people really expected their lives to get measurably and demonstrably better. If people don’t think their lives are going to get better, they’re not going to be likely to dash to the polling place between jobs, dinner and childcare to vote for down-ballot Democrats most of them are barely aware of.

If Democratic candidates want to win in 2014, they’re going to have to give their base a reason to come out to vote beyond the notion that they’re better than the GOP.

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“So much goddamn money …”

by digby

I’m fairly sure that despite his careful disclaimers about the moral comparison, Chris Hayes is going to take some heat for using the abolition analogy to explain the challenge of climate change in this blockbuster piece for The Nation. (I don’t even use the term “wage slave” anymore even though the term itself has a specific definition and has been used by the labor movement from the very beginning, because it upsets people so much.) But it’s really the only useful historical analogy for the vast economic impact this is going to have. (And there is a vital moral dimension as well ….)

Before the cannons fired at Fort Sumter, the Confederates announced their rebellion with lofty rhetoric about “violations of the Constitution of the United States” and “encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States.” But the brute, bloody fact beneath those words was money. So much goddamn money.

The leaders of slave power were fighting a movement of dispossession. The abolitionists told them that the property they owned must be forfeited, that all the wealth stored in the limbs and wombs of their property would be taken from them. Zeroed out. Imagine a modern-day political movement that contended that mutual funds and 401(k)s, stocks and college savings accounts were evil institutions that must be eliminated completely, more or less overnight. This was the fear that approximately 400,000 Southern slaveholders faced on the eve of the Civil War.

Today, we rightly recoil at the thought of tabulating slaves as property. It was precisely this ontological question—property or persons?—that the war was fought over. But suspend that moral revulsion for a moment and look at the numbers: Just how much money were the South’s slaves worth then? A commonly cited figure is $75 billion, which comes from multiplying the average sale price of slaves in 1860 by the number of slaves and then using the Consumer Price Index to adjust for inflation. But as economists Samuel H. Williamson and Louis P. Cain argue, using CPI-adjusted prices over such a long period doesn’t really tell us much: “In the 19th century,” they note, “there were no national surveys to figure out what the average consumer bought.” In fact, the first such survey, in Massachusetts, wasn’t conducted until 1875.

In order to get a true sense of how much wealth the South held in bondage, it makes far more sense to look at slavery in terms of the percentage of total economic value it represented at the time. And by that metric, it was colossal. In 1860, slaves represented about 16 percent of the total household assets—that is, all the wealth—in the entire country, which in today’s terms is a stunning $10 trillion.

Ten trillion dollars is already a number much too large to comprehend, but remember that wealth was intensely geographically focused. According to calculations made by economic historian Gavin Wright, slaves represented nearly half the total wealth of the South on the eve of secession. “In 1860, slaves as property were worth more than all the banks, factories and railroads in the country put together,” civil war historian Eric Foner tells me. “Think what would happen if you liquidated the banks, factories and railroads with no compensation.”

As it happens, that’s about the same amount of money we’re going to have to force the Big Money Boyz to leave on the table — or, more accurately, in the ground.

This is a great piece that illuminates just how difficult this is going to be — and why the special interests are spending the kind of money they’re spending to ensure that a good portion of the people will believe there’s no need to even think about doing such a thing. Interestingly, judging by the political strategy being employed by the energy sector billionaires and their corporate friends, many of those people will be concentrated in the states of the old confederacy. Go figure.

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New Blue America contest: You say you want a revolution? Here’s a start

by digby

Two stalwart progressives working together:

This week Blue America is encouraging progressives to contribute to Barbara Lee’s and Lee Rogers’ campaigns by offering one randomly selected donor who gives (any amount) a rare, signed Beatles portrait by the band’s favorite photographer, Robert Freeman, who shot 5 album covers for them starting in 1963.

Today Rep. Lee announced that her Barbara Lee Progressive PAC’s top 8 priorities for congressional action starts with “Bringing an end to perpetual war, saving trillions of dollars and millions of lives.” And in conjunction with that announcement comes another– her first endorsement of a challenger for the 2014 cycle, fellow Californian and fellow peace advocate, Lee Rogers.

“Lee,” she said, “is a doctor, a thinker, a progressive Democrat– and, he can win.

He’s running in California’s 25th Congressional District (Simi Valley-Santa Clarita area). It’s an open seat. And, the Nate Silver number crunchers say that it’s a district where Democrats can win. So help us put a progressive like Lee Rogers in it.”

More at the link.

Like the Beatles, Barbara Lee and Lee Rogers are the best of the best. You can win a beautiful portrait signed by the photographer and support real progressive governance at the same time.

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Nobody cares about David and Cokie right now. People are tired.

by digby

It’s hard to believe that anyone who doesn’t hate David Gregory with a mad passion would cooperate with an article like this:

“MTP’s” meltdown has sounded alarm bells inside NBC News and attracted the attention of its new president, Deborah Turness, who arrived from Britain’s ITV News in August. Gregory’s job does not appear to be in any immediate jeopardy, but there are plenty of signs of concern.

Last year, the network undertook an unusual assessment of the 43-year-old journalist, commissioning a psychological consultant to interview his friends and even his wife. The idea, according to a network spokeswoman, Meghan Pianta, was “to get perspective and insight from people who know him best.” But the research project struck some at NBC as odd, given that Gregory has been employed there for nearly 20 years.

Ouch.

The story isn’t just about Gregory although he is the Sunday host featured most prominently. Apparently all the Sunday shows are getting terrible ratings compared to the Golden Russert Years, with old guy Bob Schieffer at Face the Nation getting the highest numbers. It chronicles the depserate measures NBC and ABC are undertaking to boost their audience, none of which will probably succeed.

I don’t know if these Sunday institutions will ever regain their previous prestige. The cynicism about American politics is so pervasive that watching them is more like gawking at a trainwreck these days. It’s possible that if politics takes a turn for the better (or becomes more interesting) then people will tune back in. But I suspect that political shows are less and less interesting to the average non-political junkie. And that’s most of the people.

Consider this: We just came through a political period that was intensely exciting. We had a scandal plagued presidency of the most titillating kind. We had an impeachment. We had a stolen election. We had 9/11. We had a controversial war. We had a global economic meltdown. We had an election of the first African American president riding on the hope for a better day. Right now we’re just in a period of stasis, nothing major happening for good or ill. It’s just a bunch of little events telling the same story over and over again.

People are tired. They want Game of Thrones not David Gregory and Cokie Roberts. And you cannot blame them. But the news networks shouldn’t despair. Something horrible and dramatic will happen and everyone will be forced to pay attention.

Meanwhile, one hopes that people are just absorbing the one major message of our time: the wealthy interests are out of control. It may not add up to much in the short run, but in the long run it can change the way people think about our system without them even knowing it.

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Sean Parker should just buy No-Labels and call it a day

by digby

David and I both wrote about Sean Parker today, the Facebook billionaire and newborn political power broker. Mine is over at Salon.  Here’s an excerpt;

…One of the nice things about being a billionaire is that even if you have no idea about what you believe or any sense of how the political system works in theory or in practice you can meet with the actual players and have them explain it to you. That’s what Parker has been doing, meeting with politicians of such disparate ideologies as Rand Paul, Bill DeBlasio and Charlie Christ. I’m sure they all told him to put them on speed dial and to call day or night if he had any questions.

His plan, if one can call it that, makes the naive young heirs to the great fortunes look like grizzled old political veterans by comparison …

He’s not even a Mugwump. He’s just a mess. Apparently, he thinks he can “make Washington work” by financing a group of deal makers in both parties who will knock some heads together and get the job done. What, exactly, it is they are supposed to get done remains a mystery. Indeed, from the sound of it, it doesn’t really matter.

It’s the fact that he’s hired an army of political strategists from all sides of the political spectrum that is the tell. He will spend a whole lot of money and accomplish absolutely nothing. They’re already buying their vacation homes. But then he has so much it might as well be a trip to Vegas for him.

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Oh boy! Which direction will the billionaire swing next?

by David Atkins

Someday when the historians write the obituary for the 2nd American Gilded Age, this story will deserve at least a footnote:

These days — in the age of the super PAC and Citizens United — a campaign donor with a million dollars to spend isn’t cool.

You know what’s cool? A donor with a billion dollars.

By any standard, Sean Parker is a very cool donor indeed. And this year, the 34-year-old co-founder of Napster is poised to bring his considerable fortune into the political world with fresh intensity, retaining advisers to bring new focus and sophistication to his political enterprises and preparing to make a significant investment in the 2014 election cycle.

Known primarily as a bad-boy file-sharing guru and defined in the public mind by Justin Timberlake’s frenetic 2010 portrayal in “The Social Network” (“A million dollars isn’t cool,” Timberlake’s character memorably said) Parker has dabbled in the political world for half a decade now.

If the exact direction of Parker’s new push into politics is still taking shape, he is already working actively to build new and stronger political relationships. He has met privately in recent months with some starkly different politicians, huddling with both Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, the libertarian-leaning GOP presidential hopeful, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, the populist progressive Democrat. He is eyeing a range of 2014 elections to get involved in and has spoken with former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist about his party-switching comeback bid.

This week, Parker will co-host a San Francisco fundraiser for state Attorney General Kamala Harris, along with Silicon Valley super-elites such as Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, Laurene Powell Jobs and uber-investors Ron Conway, Marc Benioff and John Doerr.

On the operational side, Parker has hired Chris Garland, who recently stepped down as chief of staff to California Lt.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, to work in a political director role. The former Facebook president is conferring with national strategists about his political engagement. Among his advisers is Addisu Demissie, who managed New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker’s 2013 campaign and now heads up the West Coast office of the Messina Group, the consulting firm founded by President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager.

Parker’s allies say that his political goals remain broadly defined: Unlike other politically-inclined billionaires, such as the conservative Koch brothers and liberal environmentalist Tom Steyer, Parker hopes to avoid a purely partisan role as he ventures more deeply into politics.

Having donated almost exclusively to Democrats up to this point, Parker made a trip to Washington in December for the purpose of meeting quietly with Republican officeholders and strategists around town. He plans to donate to both sides starting this year, associates say, for the first time committing big sums to aid Republicans he views as credible deal-makers in a bitterly divided Congress.

It honestly doesn’t matter much whether Parker is a clueless naif who can’t seem to figure out his political allegiance between De Blasio, Rand Paul and Charlie Crist, or whether he’s a generally progressive guy looking to bribe a few potentially tractable Republicans into doing the right thing.

The fact that capricious, potentially clueless billionaires can throw down a bunch of money and have more impact than dozens of organizations that have been working their tails off for decades is a sign of a totally broken system of government. If American politics is going to be decided by a battle amongst 50-100 billionaires, the American people are going to be the losers no matter who wins.

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