Month: June 2014

Who is the real enemy of patriotic Americans?

by digby

Here’s a little reminder of what really got the pro-Iraq war patriots going back in 2003: 


Note the fawning CNN commentary: 

DAVID MATTINGLY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, promoters here were predicting a crowd of about 10,000 here at Atlanta, at the Rally for America, but they’re now saying on the podium that they have more than doubled that.

Let’s take a look at this crowd. People coming out today, decked out in their red, white and blue, thousands of people. Thousands of people carrying banners and signs, offering patriotic sentiments and supporting U.S. troops.

A part of what you’re looking at could also be the power of talk radio. Stations across the country have been promoting rallies for America. They’ve been striking a chord that seems to resonate deeply with people in this crowd. They are pro-U.S., pro-military.

And some of the featured speakers also taking shots at anti-war demonstrators, particularly Hollywood celebrities protesting war in Iraq.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We were starting to believe that we were surrounded by them, by the ones that are the freaks in the limousine, the ones with the hairy armpits and the lesbian, whatever that is. We thought we were being surrounded by California.

Today, today, I’m proud to tell you they are clear, we surround them

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: Things wrapping up right now. They just had the song, “Proud to be an American” playing. People singing along with it.

Again quite a few thousand more people than they expected for this rally, particularly with this kind of rain. So promoters very happy with the showing here today and people leaving with a very good feeling that their opinion is being made known across the country.

Back to you.

WHITFIELD: And David, to make it clear, the folks that are assembling there in Atlanta say this is not a pro-war rally but instead, it is one showing patriotism, showing support of the troops, as you mentioned, as well as the president’s plans?

MATTINGLY: That is the theme here, support for the troops, for American soldiers right now in the Middle East. They say they don’t want a repeat of what they saw after Vietnam, where soldiers came home and were not treated with respect. They want to make sure that does not happen again this time.

But there are some political undercurrents going on. There’s a lot of signs here, a very partisan in support of the president, and a lot of signs critical of anti-war protesters, as we showed you before

Sunday Funnies

by digby

Via KosComics

Trickle-down economics is a proven failure

by David Atkins

I have a post up at Alternet detailing the ways in which trickle-down economics is a proven failure. Here is an excerpt:

The money doesn’t trickle down. Of all the failures of supply-side economics, this is the most damning. Conservatives often excuse poor wage growth and high unemployment as part of the global competitive marketplace, saying that everyone needs to tighten their belts. But not everyone is struggling–in fact, the rich are better off than ever. They control half of all the wealth, and the top 10% control almost 9/10ths of it. Corporate profits are at or near record highs, disproving the myth that the middle class must suffer due to competitive pressures. The Dow Jones index is threatening to burst past 17,000. Meanwhile, wages have stagnated since the Reagan era, even though productivity continues to increase. Corporate executives, in other words, are forcing workers to toil longer, harder and smarter than ever, but all the proceeds are going into the hands of the very rich while the people actually creating the wealth are struggling harder than ever to get by.

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2. The rich aren’t investing almost half of their resources.

This one is almost comical. In concept, supply-side economics is supposed to work by the corporate rich taking money gleaned by tax breaks and subsidies, and plowing it back into investments that theoretically employ people. Now, we already know that the economic life doesn’t actually work that way: when wealthy individuals and companies invest, they tend to do it in financialized vehicles, mergers, acquisitions and interest-bearing accounts while employing the fewest people possible at awful wages.

But even if it did work as supply-siders theorize, the brutal reality is that the rich aren’t investing almost half of their money (corporations aren’t doing much better, as their record profits sit largely idle avoiding taxation). 40% of the assets of the wealthy are sitting in deposits: the rich person’s equivalent of stuffing money into a mattress. Money sitting in deposits in Swiss and Cayman Islands accounts is essentially wasted wealth. It does as little good for the world economy as gold hoarded by a dragon in Middle Earth. It essentially sits there uselessly as an economic security blanket for the very people who need it least. By contrast, putting more money into the hands of the poor and middle class pays off immediately for the economy, as most people living paycheck to paycheck spend the money immediately or at least create a small backstop against bankruptcy and delinquency–thus creating immediate economic and social benefits. So not only does giving the rich more money not pay off when they do invest, it doesn’t even have the opportunity to pay off at all since almost half of the money isn’t even being invested.

I also go on to note that supply-side economics leads to a more unstable bubble economy with bigger and longer recessions, that it frays society and reduces trust in institutions, and that it increases the deficit as well.

Head on over to read the whole thing.

It might have been excusable back in 1980 to believe that supply-side economics might work. There’s no excuse for it today. It’s a proven failure.

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Thanks a lot:

The Republican-controlled House on Thursday approved a new, albeit long-shot, bill to expand domestic energy exploration, including opening up new areas off the West Coast to drilling.
The measure would require lease sales by the end of next year for energy production off the coast of Santa Barbara and Ventura counties, with production coming from existing offshore rigs or onshore-based extended-reach drilling operations. 

In  addition, the legislation would direct the Interior Department to develop a five-year plan that provides for energy exploration in coastal areas “considered to have the largest undiscovered technically recoverable oil and gas resources,’’ including areas off California. 

Drilling off the Virginia and South Carolina coasts enjoys support, but offshore drilling has long been a controversial issue in California, where a 1969 spill off Santa Barbara devastated the coast. 

[…]The California delegation broke along party lines, with Republicans supporting the measure and Democrats opposing it, except for Rep. Jim Costa (D-Fresno), who backed the bill. Democratic Reps. George Miller of Martinez and Grace Napolitano of Norwalk did not vote.

 This is why many rich Republicans in Santa Barbara and around the state vote Democratic even though they would also prefer not to pay taxes..  They don’t want to see the environment destroyed by a bunch of yahoos and the GOP is completely useless on this issue./

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Clever authoritarian tricks

by digby

This is a neat trick:

As part of the American Civil Liberties Union’s recent report on police militarization, the Massachusetts chapter of the organization sent open records requests to SWAT teams across that state. It received an interesting response.

As it turns out, a number of SWAT teams in the Bay State are operated by what are called law enforcement councils, or LECs. These LECs are funded by several police agencies in a given geographic area and overseen by an executive board, which is usually made up of police chiefs from member police departments. In 2012, for example, the Tewksbury Police Department paid about $4,600 in annual membership dues to the North Eastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council, or NEMLEC. (See page 36 of linked PDF.) That LEC has about 50 member agencies. In addition to operating a regional SWAT team, the LECs also facilitate technology and information sharing and oversee other specialized units, such as crime scene investigators and computer crime specialists.

Some of these LECs have also apparently incorporated as 501(c)(3) organizations. And it’s here that we run into problems. According to the ACLU, the LECs are claiming that the 501(c)(3) status means that they’re private corporations, not government agencies. And therefore, they say they’re immune from open records requests. Let’s be clear. These agencies oversee police activities. They employ cops who carry guns, wear badges, collect paychecks provided by taxpayers and have the power to detain, arrest, injure and kill. They operate SWAT teams, which conduct raids on private residences. And yet they say that because they’ve incorporated, they’re immune to Massachusetts open records laws. The state’s residents aren’t permitted to know how often the SWAT teams are used, what they’re used for, what sort of training they get or who they’re primarily used against.

That’s very clever, you have to admit.

I think the militarization aspect also has a different dimension here. They probably came to this privatization scheme from the experience of private contractors in Iraq which operated outside the normal military justice system but were also granted immunity from the Iraqi justice system because it was a war zone. When the US attempted to try some Blackwater murderers back in the US it was hampered by the byzantine rules of immunity that were granted in Iraq. The ultimate Catch-22.

The idea here would be to take what would be normal police operations and “incorporate” them so they can benefit from not having to be accountable by the taxpayers as government officials while maintaining the various grants of immunity that are given to government authorities.Very creative.

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Pitchforks

by digby

I wouldn’t think American rich people would enjoy this movie except for the fact that they persist in believing they are just salt of the earth, regular folks and will probably identify with the rebels. It’s one of the United States’ greatest delusions: everybody thinks they’re middle class …

I wonder how long that can last?

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Live broadcast from Sarajevo

by digby

The BBC is doing an amazing job of commemorating the hundred year anniversary of WWI:

BBC News is used to reporting breaking news around the world. It’s what we do, part of the reason for our very existence. So if there were to be an assassination of a prominent European leader today, we would want to be there, reporting live. And audiences expect to consume breaking news in a live blog environment which is why we wanted to experiment with revealing history in this way.

This was the idea behind 1914 Live as the BBC’s First World War season reaches the first significant anniversary.

We would use all the techniques of breaking news in 2014 to report on events from Sarajevo 100 years ago, particularly the BBC’s Live format used to great effect during the World Cup and Queen’s Baton Relay. And we would do it by using BBC correspondents in their familiar roles…

No one at the time thought the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire and his wife would lead to World War One. So our reports don’t suggest that. But what they do reflect are the tensions in Europe that summer and how Europe’s rulers were all deeply suspicious of each other.

1914 Live begins by reporting a royal visit by what was, by early 20th Century standards, a very modern couple. It follows the events of the morning as they happened and ends by reflecting the shock felt around Europe which, unbeknown by anyone, was suddenly 37 days away from war.

It’s fascinating stuff, well worth spending some time with if you’re interested in history.

Vox, meanwhile, has put together a handy little primer to soothe you afterwards by explaining that war isn’t what it used to be.  On the other hand, if there’s one lesson (among many) to be taken about WWI, it’s that things can hurtle out of control very quickly with very few people seeing it coming.

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Just don’t call it terrorism

by digby

If you have time to watch this over the week-end, you should:

In 1996, FRONTLINE took an in-depth look at one case that helped lead to the buffer zone law. Two years earlier, John Salvi, a radical young Catholic abortion opponent, opened fire on two clinics in Brookline, Mass., just outside Boston, and killed two women: Shannon Lowney, a 25-year-old receptionist at Planned Parenthood, and Lee Ann Nichols, who worked as a receptionist at PreTerm, the clinic down the street.

The killings ignited a fierce debate about the intersection of free speech, abortion and religion. For the first time, Murder on Abortion Row is streaming online.

Watch it at this link. It will remind you that making political statements through terrorism is not a tactic confined to radical Muslims.

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The rebrand’s final death knell

by David Atkins

Why, it seems like not even two years ago that the GOP seemed committed to a major rebrand. Not anymore. Greg Sargent gives the eulogy:

Exactly one year after the Senate passed an immigration reform bill that built a compromise on an exchange of increased enforcement for legalization for the 11 million, Republicans have now officially abandoned any pretense of a willingness to participate in solving the immigration crisis. Instead, they have committed the party to a course premised on two intertwined notions: There are no apparent circumstances under which they can accept legalization of the 11 million; and as a result, the only broad response to the crisis they can countenance is maximum deportations.

This means it’s now all in Obama’s hands to decide what he can do unilaterally to ease the pace of deportations and address the current unaccompanied migrant crisis.

Referring to the move of GOP representative Bob Goodlatte from pro-immigration-reform to the anti side, Sargent says:

This tells the entire story. Goodlatte was an early proponent of a form of legalization for the 11 million that could have been the basis for compromise. In this scenario, Republicans could have voted on piecemeal measures that included just legalization — and no citizenship — packaged with concurrent enforcement triggers. Paul Ryan and Mario Diaz-Balart both floated versions of that idea, which is to say, Republicans probably could have passed something like this, though it would have been (shock! horror!) difficult. This could have led to a decent deal for Republicans: In negotiations with the Senate, Dems would drop the special path to citizenship in exchange for Republicans agreeing to legal tweaks making it easier for the legalized to eventually find their way to citizenship through normal channels.

That’s essentially the larger scenario Goodlatte supported as early as last summer, and those who closely follow this debate have long known it was a plausible scenario and an endgame GOP leaders such as John Boehner privately hoped for. But it would have required getting the right angry at some point (which any immigration solution was always going to do). And so, it ran up against an unwillingness by a large bloc of Republicans in the House to do the hard work of figuring out what set of terms and conditions, if any, might enable them to support some form of legal status in the face of the right’s rage. Jeb Bush’s remarks were controversial precisely because he revealed the GOP unwillingness to cross this Rubicon as a moral challenge Republicans could not bring themselves to tackle. Even Boehner — who actually deserves some credit for trying to ease the party towards accepting legalization — essentially admitted this was the real obstacle to reform in a moment of candor earlier this spring.

And that’s where we are now.

There is no more rebrand. It’s done. The GOP tried to buck its racist base, and it couldn’t. Eric Cantor, of all people, paid the price for it.

Which means the GOP is only going to go farther and farther right. I’m not even sure they’ll try another round of rebranding after a 2016 loss.

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