Month: July 2014

Corrupt bargain

by digby

Some very smart people in DC have told me in the past that the real problem in DC is this, far more than partisanship, congressional gridlock or inept and incapacitated elected officials:

The revolving door is turning quickly in 2014, with more than 220 Capitol Hill staffers leaving their jobs to become registered lobbyists in the first six months of the year, according to a new report.

Legistorm, an organization that compiles and analyzes congressional data, reported that the number of departures to K Street in 2014 is on pace to exceed the last election year of 2012, when about 329 staffers left to go lobby.

Headhunters said a number of factors explain the jump, including a “brain drain” of ambitious aides who are frustrated by the legislative gridlock.

“I think they’re seeing the reality of Congress today and the inability to get things done, which leads them to seek other alternatives — which, by the way, includes less hours and higher pay,” said Ivan Adler, a principal at The McCormick Group.

“People work on the Hill because they truly believe they can make a difference, and they join the legislative branch to do so. However, I think there is a lot of frustration with the inability to get things done that is driving people away from this mission,” he added.

That’s a nice cover story.  But the truth for most of them is that they’re cashing in the chips they won over time after the lobbyists visited their offices and told them what a “bright future” they had and handed them their card saying to look them up when they decided to leave government service. I think we can all see the implicit bribe in that can’t you?

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Center right? Hardly. Just take a look at the polls…

by David Atkins

Joshua Sager has one of the better poll compilations lately proving that Americans really do prefer more progressive policies. It’s pretty stunning when assembled in one place. Here’s just a bit of the economics front:

According to Gallup polling, 59 percent of Americans think that U.S. wealth “should be more evenly distributed” among a larger percentage of the people while only 33 percent thought that the current “distribution is fair.” While this is down from the 2008 modern high point, where 68 percent of Americans supported more redistribution, the public opinion of redistribution has held a stable majority, if not super-majority, for decades.

The fact that such a large number of Americans believes that the distribution of wealth is currently too skewed toward the wealthy is made far more relevant by the fact that they don’t actually know just how skewed the wealth distribution has become. As explained by Michael Norton of the Harvard Business School, Americans think that the current distribution of wealth is far more equal (middle bar graph) than it actually is (top bar graph) — in short, they recognize the problem, but lack an understanding as to just how bad it has become.

According to Pew Research, 69 percent of Americans oppose any cuts to Social Security or Medicare, even in order to cut the deficit, while only 23 percent support such cuts. Additionally, 59 percent oppose cuts on programs assisting the poor in order to address the deficit, while only 33 percent support such austerity.

A multitude of polls have indicated that between 60 percent and 80 percent of Americans support increasing taxes on the wealthy, depending upon how the question is worded and the polling venue — this indicates that a majority of Americans support increasing taxes on top-earners in order to reduce the deficit.

According to Quinnipiac Polling, 71 percent of Americans support increasing the minimum wage to at least $10.10 an hour, while only 27 percent oppose increasing the minimum wage.

According to Gallup Polling, 54 percent of Americans support labor unions, while only 39 percent disapprove of unions.

According to Gallup Polling, 37 percent of Americans think that we spend too much on defense, while only 28 percent think that we spend too little.

During the fight over letting jobless benefits expire, Quinnipiac Polling found that 58 percent of Americans supported extending benefits by at least three months, while only 37 percent of Americans supported letting benefits expire.

The key challenge, of course, is that a lot of that broad support evaporates when Republicans start turning people’s prejudices against their own self-interest. It’s the oldest story in American politics.

But that’s why current demographic shifts are so important. That game is getting harder and harder for Republicans to play and still remain a viable national party.

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ICYMI: Palin serves up the red meat

by digby

You really have to see the video to believe it, but this write up gives a fair overview:

Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin ripped President Obama on Saturday, saying in order to “save the Republic” Americans must “have the guts to talk about impeachment.”

Palin bashed Obama on a variety of topics, including immigration and veterans services during a speech before the 2014 Western Conservative Summit in downtown Denver.

“These days you hear all of these politicians, they denounce Barack Obama, saying he’s a lawless imperial and ignores court orders and changes laws by fiat and refuses to enforce laws he just doesn’t like,” she said.

“That’s true. But the question is, “Hey politicians, what are you going to do about it?’ ” Palin said, as the crowd in the Hyatt Regency ballroom roared.

The former governor of Alaska, Palin rose to prominence in 2008 when Sen. John McCain of Arizona tapped her as his running mate on the GOP ticket. When talk-radio host Dan Caplis introduced Palin, he billed her as the most influential woman in the history of the Republican Party.

Line after line about Obama fired up the crowd.

“If Obama won’t do his job and enforce the borders, then it’s not immigration, it’s invasion,” she said.

“We’re not going to dethrone God and substitute him with someone who wants to play God,” she also said.

I think Dave Neiwert said it best:

Did Sarah Palin get into Aunty Peggy Noonan’s jar of Magic Dolphin Pills before her speech in Denver this week?

It does have that slightly slurry quality that so defines Noonan which is a change for Palin who has been rather crisply incoherent in the past if nothing else. But the crowd loved it. As much as we don’t want to admit it, she really does speak for a large number of people in this country.

Also too, Sarah now has her own online pay-TV network. What is they say about suckers born every minute?

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Contra Sam Harris 

by tristero

PZ Myers says it. Condemning Israel for its outrageous actions in no way translates into an endorsement of obscene atrocities committed by Hamas. There is no one standing on moral high ground in this and Harris is very, very wrong.

Don’t count your populist chickens

by digby

Yes, these are the kind of people we can count on to join us in a populist revolution:

Fox News’ morning program questioned a Texas official about providing emergency services to undocumented migrants, asking whether 911 calls from immigrants must be answered “even though for the most part, when you get there, you realize they’re not even American citizens.”

On July 23, Fox & Friends centered a discussion on how undocumented immigrants in Brooks County, Texas are “bombarding” the police department with 911 calls. Host Brian Kilmeade set up an interview with the Texas county’s chief deputy by claiming that “illegal immigrants are learning the hard way there’s a deadly cost to crossing the border.” Kilmeade suggested Brooks County emergency response services might be strained because, “not only are they understaffed and lacking resources, now they’ve got to deal with illegal immigrants who have no business being here.”

As an example, the program aired two emergency calls from Spanish speakers each identified on-screen as “Immigrant.” In the first, a distressed male requests emergency assistance for his cousin, whom the man described as “turning blue.” Another call featured a man and woman explaining to the 911 operator that they have not had access to water in three days.

Kilmeade asked the deputy, “So those calls, you have to respond to, even though for the most part, when you get there you realize, they’re not even American citizens?”

I think we’ve determined that most of the right wing believes that only Americans deserve to live, just as a general principle. And even then, if they don’t have adequate insurance or are part of the 47% of parasites who fail to pay enough taxes to derive any benefits (unless you happen to be a white, conservative Real American 47percenter who deserves her benefits) then you probably don’t deserve to live either.

There is simply no way that people with these beliefs will ever join left wing populists. No matter how much they may hate the big banks and bailouts, they hate the “other” more. And that “other” includes liberals like you and me.

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The sky has been falling since 1990


by digby

So today the projections of the financial health of the Medicare system are slated to be released.  And you can expect the usual shrill reaction to the “news” that it’s going to go broke and we’re all going to die, die,die!

When that happens, consider this, courtesy Mike the Mad Biologist:

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What a long strange trip it’s been

by digby

The New York Times, 10 years ago today:

With a rallying cry from one of its bright young hopes, a roar from its old liberal lion and a loving endorsement from the candidate’s own outspoken wife, the Democratic Party offered up John Kerry on Tuesday night as a worthy heir to the patriots of the past, ready and able to unite a nation bitterly divided by the policies and politics of the Bush administration.

”There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America,” said Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee for the Senate from Illinois, the son of a Kenyan and a Kansan and the party’s choice to deliver the keynote address.

For all the talk of a red and blue America divided by party, Mr. Obama said, ”We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.”

I was as thrilled by that speech as anyone. It sounded so good during those years of conservative intimidation to think that the country wasn’t totally dominated by Bush voters. And it wasn’t. But a whole lot of people heard Obama declare that the country was really one country with shared values and political beliefs — and that just isn’t true. It never has been.

Rick Perlstein pointed out the error in that formulation a long time ago citing the Great Communicator as the example of how this sort of appeal can be done to advance your agenda while appealing to people across the aisle. (By the way, it includes making some of your enemies furious …)

Reagan didn’t praise FDR. He stole from him. As in, “This generation has a rendez vous with destiny.” We should steal from Reagan too. As in: “There is no left and right. Only up or down.” He would then use that intro to frame some outrageously right-wing notion as “common sense.” We should do the same for left-wing ideas.

Also, use Reagan to mess with righties’ heads. As in: I agree we need a Reaganite foreign policy. When Reagan realized we were caught in the crossfire of a religious civil war in Lebanon, he got the hell out. He would have done the same thing in Iraq. The rule isn’t “never say anything nice about Reagan.” It’s “use Reagan for progressive ends.”

That’s quite different from the Red state/Blue state formulation Obama used. His formulation might have illustrated the nice progressive value of diversity, but it failed to advance progressive politics beyond that. And he carried that concept all the way through 2008 and beyond. As Perlstein pointed out in this article after the 2010 debacle:

Ronald Reagan scored a comfortable victory in 1980, promising a new day in Washington and the nation. Then Reaganomics ran into brick wall. Unemployment—7.4 percent at the beginning of his term—was heading toward 10 percent by the summer of 1982. The gross domestic product declined 1.8 percent. On Election Day, voters punished him by taking 27 House seats from his Republican Party, including most of the ones gained in 1980. That gave the Democrats a 269–166 seat advantage—far greater than the 51-seat advantage Republicans enjoy today.

The day after that woeful election, Reagan’s aides sent him into a press conference with defensive talking points. He tore them up. “We’re very pleased with the results,” he said, claiming that the GOP had “beat the odds” for off-year elections (he went back to 1928 to make the claim). “Wasn’t he in worse shape for 1984?” he was asked. “I don’t think so at all,” he replied. Hadn’t it been a historically uncivil campaign? He agreed—because of all the opposition did to “frighten voters.”

Barack Obama gave a press conference the day after his “shellacking” too. The contrast to Reagan couldn’t have been more stark. Ignoring the fact that the electorate had pretty much been switching their party preference every two years since 1992, he conceded the loss as an epochal sea change. “I did some talking,” he said of his meeting with Republican leaders the night before, “but mostly I did a lot of listening.” When asked about jobs, he talked about the deficit. He then boasted that when it came to what was essential to recovery, he really didn’t have essential principles at all: the answers were not to be “found in any one particular philosophy or ideology.”

Reality does bite and Reagan wouldn’t have been able to sustain that position if the economy hadn’t been improving, but he understood that the only way forward politically was to assert the rightness of his policies and philosophy. It was a gamble, but then it was a gamble either way.

Both Obama and Reagan won their re-elections, likely due to the improving economy as much as anything else. But Reagan had instilled a bedrock belief in a very large number of people that the conservative philosophy was the key to success. I don’t think President Obama can say the same thing.

*And yes, the economic fundamentals argue something very different. This is a matter of politics in which leaders develop a sense of trust in their ideological approach with the public. It doesn’t last forever, of course. As I said, reality bites. But the momentum can carry you quite a long way and a whole lot can be accomplished in its wake.

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Centrist reactions to inequality are potentially even worse than the ones on the far right

by David Atkins

Yesterday at the Washington Monthly I wrote about the four main American reactions to record income inequality, and how they play off one another.

After talking about the standard progressive response, I highlighted the centrists and the far right:

Those in the neoliberal/center-left camp do believe that modern inequality is a problem, but that this too shall pass and we can trudge along as usual after a recovery. They expect that middle-class incomes will surely pick up again in due time and everything will be mostly back to normal after the “black swan” event on Wall Street as long as asset prices continue to rise. This is delusional thinking, but extremely commonplace—particularly among wealthier liberals.

The biggest reason for the bitter and sharp divides within the left is that progressives are exasperated with the center-left folks who are desperate to keep status quo going. They’re trying to put more juice in the asset-inflation machine, praying that if we just send enough kids to college in STEM fields and keep the Dow Jones and housing markets frothy enough, we can keep the jobs engine humming. It’s not going to happen.

Then you have the center-right. They take rational market theory as an article of faith, believing with religious fervor that if the labor and capital markets are allowed to act unimpeded, then both labor and capital will find a comfortable, fair and balanced price. No amount of evidence can convince them that both human life and dignity are priced incredibly cheap on the open market, or that that late 19th century was not, in fact, the model of a moral or economically functional society.

Both the center-left and the center-right share the belief that at some level the edges of the system should be polished and softened to cushion the most unfortunate. But neither is comfortable with larger alterations to the balance between corporate and government power.

Finally, there is the far right. These are the True Believers: the ones who not only buy into the center-right line, but also the raw Objectivism of Ayn Rand and Fox News that says that the only economic injustice in society is the one being perpetrated by the government itself, taking money from the “deserving” and giving it to the “undeserving.” In this view, the only inequality that matters to them is redistributive taxation to “others” in society. But the far right, being mostly made up of poorer and middle-class voters, does have the saving grace of at least grasping that something is fundamentally broken in the economy, and they’re willing to take drastic measures to fix it.

This is the problem: on the center left and center right are mostly well-to-do people who have no personal incentive to alter the status quo. Whether out of genuine belief or raw self-interest, they don’t think that much needs to change, and they believe that things will be back to normal soon. After all, things tend to be going pretty smoothly for them, and there don’t seem to be any pitchforks on the horizon—yet.

Then you have the great apathetic mass of Americans, growing larger every day, who have given up believing that any change in government policy will have any effect.

Finally, you have the politically engaged on either side who understand that the status quo really isn’t working. The far right ignorantly thinks it’s all government’s fault. The progressive left gets the scope the problem and the nature of the necessary solutions, but has almost no voice at the moment.

The centrists are almost a bigger problem than the far right, which at least understands that something is seriously wrong that time alone won’t fix. Ironically, on this issue the far right isn’t actually the biggest impediment to real action.

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Feeling the darkness

by digby

Oh my God:

The deadliest Ebola outbreak in recorded history is happening right now. And now the Liberian government has confirmed that a senior doctor working to fight the disease, Samuel Brisbane, has died, the Associated Press reports. That makes him the first Liberian doctor to die of Ebola in the current outbreak.

In addition, an American doctor has been infected. Keith Brantly, a 33-year-old working for American aid organization Samaritan’s Purse, has been treated and is in stable condition, according to USA Today.

This news comes just days after an announcement that the top Ebola doctor in Sierra Leone, Sheik Umar Khan, had been infected.

Brisbane’s death is an unfortunate blow in a long battle that doesn’t look like it’s slowing down.

Sigh. This is where I am at this moment:

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The VSP Paul Ryan slaps a new brand on a stale old trope

by digby

So I guess nobody’s supposed to notice that the Very Serious Paul Ryan’s “new” plan is simply regurgitated stale right wing talking points going back 50 years?

Ryan appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to discuss his newly released poverty proposal, which involves consolidating 11 federal anti-poverty programs — including food stamps and housing vouchers — into one program coordinated on a state-by-state basis.

Host David Gregory asked the representative to speak to comments he made in January of 2013, in which Ryan said the country struggles with “more and more able-bodied people” becoming “dependent on the government.” Gregory said Ryan didn’t sound like he had much “sympathy” for impoverished Americans.

“We don’t want to have a poverty management system that simply perpetuates poverty,” Ryan said, pitching his poverty proposal that he says will allow for a customized approach to each individual’s needs.

“The federal government’s approach has ended up maintaining poverty, managing poverty, in many ways it has disincentivized people from going to work,” Ryan said. “Able-bodied people should go to work, and we should have a system that helps them do that so that they can realize their potential.”

Thanks Paul. That’s quite a unique observation. I wonder why nobody’s thought of it before now. (And kudos to David Gregory for calling him on this moldy old line of argument. Oh wait. He didn’t.)

Seriously, I cannot fathom why anyone would think this represents a break in hardcore wingnut thinking. It’s literally been their standard argument for decades ever since Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his famous report about African American culture:

In his report, officially titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” Moynihan claimed that African-American family values produced too many fatherless households and nurtured what he called a “tangle of pathology,” a self-perpetuating, self-defeating cultural flaw responsible for persistently high rates of poverty and violent crime. Conservative columnists and politicians seized on the report, promulgated by a liberal in Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, as official evidence that African-American culture was dangerously pathological. Civil rights leaders saw it as an attempt to blame the black community for systemic problems of racial discrimination. A wide spectrum of academic researchers criticized the report, finding errors and mistaken statistical logic; it was a hasty analysis wrapped in provocative rhetoric. Over the next decade, more evidence was brought forth that challenged Moynihan’s data and assumptions (and Lewis’). By the late 1970s, the premise that poor people have a distinctive culture that causes them to fail seemed to have been rejected.

Reagan’s election in 1980, however, rehabilitated the culture of poverty concept by invoking images of welfare queens and the supposed dangers of a dependent underclass. In 1984, Charles Murray, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a popular book called “Losing Ground,” which claimed harmful social programs and bad behavior by the poor were the main causes of the growing poverty of the era. Liberal academics countered that unemployment in deindustrialized urban areas was the main cause of poverty, though some of their cohort also conceded Moynihan’s original premise, arguing that economic failure partly resulted from ineffective parenting within the underclass. Once again, cause and effect were up for grabs, and conservatives (then, as now) opted for the appealing explanation that poor people cause their own problems.

In his interview with Bennett, Ryan cited Murray approvingly, a reference that intensified the charges of racism levied against him. Murray is a co-author of “The Bell Curve,” published in 1994, which controversially posited a genetic link between race and IQ. His 2008 book, “Coming Apart,” argued that the white lower classes were largely abandoning marriage and family fidelity, that they too have been infected with the tangle of pathology.

Ryan wants to “help” the poor the same way conservative have always wanted to help them — by giving them the “tough love” of making their lives even worse than they already are. If they want “help” they can go to a church and pray to their God and maybe they’ll get a sandwich.

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