Month: November 2014

Shorter Republicans: “We forgive Michael Bennet for trying to win the Senate.” Shorter Sen. Bennet: “Glad we’re still friends.”

by Gaius Publius

Sen. Michael Bennet was head of the DSCC for this election cycle. The DSCC (Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee) is the party organization responsible for increasing Democratic control of the Senate, or at least not losing it. But as you know, Michael Bennet did lose the Senate to Republicans, or certainly helped to lose it — and Republicans now publicly forgive him for it.

How is that not “Thank you, and welcome back”?

Keep in mind that no DSCC chair had lost a home state seat. Bennet broke that record, watching his fellow Colorado Democrat, Mark Udall, defeated by hard-right Republican Cory Gardner. Gardner holds no grudges, though, and joins in the forgiveness:

Call him charmed
or calculating, but U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet was one of the few
Democrats to emerge from his party’s drubbing on Tuesday with little
more than a political paper cut.

It’s an impressive feat,
especially because Bennet has spent the past two years running the
Democratic machine that tried — and failed — to land the one-two punch
of re-electing Colorado Democrat Mark Udall and keeping his party in
control of the Senate….
At the same time,
several top Republicans, including Cory Gardner, said they were willing
to look past Bennet’s role as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial
Campaign Committee.

“Look, that was Michael Bennet’s job,”
Gardner said fewer than 24 hours after ousting Udall. “He did what he
believed he had to do to fulfill his duties. I look forward to working
with him.”

Sounds like an insult, but apparently it’s praise to Bennet:

Bennet’s desire to
preserve his middle-of-the-road persona, in fact, was one reason he
initially balked at becoming DSCC chairman. After turning down the job
in 2010, he thought about the offer for about a month before accepting the reins for the 2014 campaign.

“I
… wanted to make sure it would not interfere with my ability to work
in a bipartisan way in the Senate,” Bennet said in 2012. 

But as “risky” (to bipartisanship) as it was for Bennet to serve as DSCC chair, there were rewards as well — access to money:

Yet
taking a turn at the helm of the DSCC — or its counterpart, the National
Republican Senatorial Committee — often is a prerequisite for
politicians looking to rise in the ranks. Another benefit: DSCC and
NRSC chairs get to know the big-money donors in their parties. And with
Bennet up for re-election in 2016, this kind of network could prove
invaluable.

“The contacts you make in that position carry on for many, many years,” said Rick Ridder, a veteran Democratic consultant.

So apparently Bennet’s goals were (1) reluctantly help the “team,” so long as he (2) kept his bipartisan standing with conservative Republicans, and (3) forged closer ties to the big money financing elections. I’m not ready to impugn Bennet’s job (yet), but even he seems apologetic for trying too hard.

Is there a bipartisan corporate caucus in the Senate? Of course. Is that caucus run out of the leadership offices of both parties? Of course. As I told Sam Seder in an upcoming Ring of Fire broadcast, “This isn’t a conspiracy, this Democratic willingness to surrender — it’s out in plain sight. You just have to look at it.”

GP

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Oh those darned kids


by digby

So I see that some wags are upset at the millenials for failing to deliver their votes to the Democratic Party on Tuesday. It’s true that they failed to come through.  But don’t blame them, blame the fools who ever thought they would. Young people never vote as much as older people do in mid-terms:

They didn’t come out in 2010 either. I don’t know why this is so or if it’s written in granite but it’s a fact of life, nonetheless. All voters get more excited about presidential races than mid-terms but young people are apparently  bored rigid by elections that don’t feature the excitement of a big national race.

Right now the Republican base is older and whiter and they do vote in midterms elections. That’s a big advantage for the GOP.  But these younger voters of today will get older and they are likely to stay with the Democrats (since most people don’t change parties once they’ve signed on to one) and they’ll vote more often in these sorts of election than they do today.  And the kids who are in grade school today will be the ones who don’t vote in mid-terms. So it goes.

You can’t fault these young people since it appears that all of us do this when we’re that age.  That chart above gos back to the dark ages when I was  kid so it’s been that way for a very long time. Perhaps the Democrats need to figure out a different approach if they want to win these sorts of elections.  Call me crazy but they used to have a pretty effective appeal to old people: “they want to take your Social Security and we won’t let them.” It had the benefit of being true. Sadly, we decided that we needed to please Wall Street more than we needed any votes from older people so we threw that one in the trash can.

I’m sure they’ll think of something.

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QOTD: Paul Singer

by digby

Matt O’Brien writes about an inflation truther:

Paul Singer [is] the hedge fund billionaire who’s made his fortune buying bonds from countries on the edge of default, and then suing them to get paid in full. (This hasn’t worked as well with Argentina). Well, it turns out that he has some very idiosyncratic ideas about what inflation actually looks like. His latest investor letter recycles all these ideas, inveighing against the Fed’s “fake prices,” “fake money,” and “fake jobs,” before zeroing in on where inflation is really showing up — his wallet:

Check out London, Manhattan, Aspen and East Hampton real estate prices, as well as high-end art prices, to see what the leading edge of hyperinflation could look like.

That’s right: Paul Singer thinks Weimar-style inflation might be coming because he has to pay more for his posh vacation homes and art pieces.

Now, it’s true, if you’re a billionaire who’s interested in decorating your high-end real estate with high-end art, then, yes, your personal inflation rate is higher than others. But tough luck. (I’m pretty sure you’ll manage). The Fed, you see, isn’t worried about the Billionaire Price Index. It’s worried about the Consumer Price Index. And that, despite zero interest rates, is still below the Fed’s 2 percent target. That’s not going to change anytime soon, either. Indeed, just because the super-rich are bidding up the prices of houses in the Hamptons doesn’t mean that middle-class people, whose wages are flat, are going to bid up the price of, well, anything.

Well surely you can see the problem. The rising wages of all those dead artists are driving up the prices. Or something.

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All you need to know about the TPP “trade agreement” — corporate sovereignty

by Gaius Publius

A year or so ago I wrote that coming into office, Obama had four high-priority “legacy” items: 

 ▪ Health care “reform” — a privatized alternative to Medicare expansion
 ▪ A “Grand Bargain” in which social insurance benefits are rolled back
 ▪ Plentiful oil & gas, and passage of the Keystone pipeline
 ▪ Passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement 

While he accomplished the first almost immediately, and while we now have “plentiful oil & gas” (not a good thing from a climate standpoint), the other three remain stalled. But look for each of them to re-rear its head, thanks to the strengthened bipartisan corporate majority in Congress. About TPP in particular, US News writes:

The Republican Party has won a majority in the Senate, possibly providing an opening for two pending U.S. free trade agreements.
The U.S. is currently engaged in negotiations on two international pacts.

Republicans have traditionally been more supportive of trade
agreements because of the potential to increase economic growth and
business,
while Democrats have been wary that such policies could negatively
impact
domestic jobs, labor standards and environmental regulation. The Obama
administration has negotiated two such agreements – the Trans-Pacific
Partnership [TPP] and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership [TTIP] – but
the president hasn’t found [enough] backing from Senate Democrats, the chamber
responsible for approving trade agreements.

Ignore the “Democrats-this” and “Republicans-that” party obfuscation in the article’s lead. The writer is soon very clear — this is a bipartisan effort:

Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, likely the new Senate
majority leader, said Wednesday in Louisville that Republicans and President
Barack Obama share an agenda on trade. 

Obama wants TPP and TTIP to be signed, so does McConnell, and there is bipartisan support for it in the Senate corporate caucus, just not enough support. However, as I wrote elsewhere, the corporate caucus in both the House and Senate has just been strengthened, meaning Obama and McConnell may get their “trade” agreements after all.

What’s wrong with the TPP? Corporate sovereignty

Now for the main matter. What’s wrong with these “trade agreements”? It all seems so complicated, but in fact the issue is a simple one. Corporate sovereignty.

Here to explain it clearly is British writer George Monbiot. In his discussion of the European version, the TTIP, he notes the following — it’s “all you need to know” about any of these trade deals. Keep your eye on the phrase “investor-state disputes” — lawsuits by “investors” (corporations and other investing financial entities) against sovereign states:

The central problem is what the negotiators call investor-state
dispute settlement (ISDS). The treaty would allow corporations to sue
governments before an arbitration panel [“tribunal”] composed of corporate lawyers,
at which other people have no representation, and which is not subject
to judicial review.

Already, thanks to the insertion of ISDS into much smaller trade
treaties, big business is engaged in an orgy of litigation, whose
purpose is to strike down any law that might impinge on its anticipated
future profits. The tobacco firm Philip Morris is suing governments in Uruguay and Australia for trying to discourage people from smoking. The oil firm Occidental was awarded $2.3bn in compensation from Ecuador,
which terminated the company’s drilling concession in the Amazon after
finding that Occidental had broken Ecuadorean law. The Swedish company Vattenfall is suing the German government for shutting down nuclear power. An Australian firm is suing El Salvador’s government for $300m for refusing permission for a goldmine over concerns it would poison the drinking water.

The same mechanism, under TTIP, could be used to prevent UK
governments from reversing the privatisation of the railways and the
NHS, or from defending public health and the natural world against
corporate greed. The corporate lawyers who sit on these panels are
beholden only to the companies whose cases they adjudicate, who at other times are their employers.

Leaked clauses in the TPP would allow foreign banks to sue the U.S. to overturn bank regulations — a wet dream for Wall Street. Programs to “buy American” could be effectively outlawed, since the redress when a corporation wins in the “tribunals” is payment by the losing entity (the sovereign state or local government) of lost future profits.

Bottom line, this enshrines into the Constitution (via the Supremacy Clause) a set of corporate-controlled tribunals that are higher in standing than the
U.S. Supreme Court.

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made
in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made,
under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of
the land;

Treaties like these — TPP, TTIP and all their cousins — create a network of enforceable
international laws in which corporations hold sovereign power. That’s all you need to know to explain and oppose them. (And if you’re wondering why Barack Obama, of all people, would be in for them, I suggest you don’t know Barack Obama.)

GP

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Political caricatures have been around forever and they’re valuable commentary.  But racist ones are not ok.

by digby

I wrote about this hideous thing over at Salon yesterday:

That’s supposed to be Maxine Waters, the Democratic congresswoman from Watts. Now, the art itself is obviously derivative of the great guerrilla artist Robbie Conal, known for his gnarly street post depictions of politicians…

Starting in the 1980s these posters appeared on buildings and electric poles in California and elsewhere and became an iconic style of political commentary through art. This Maxine Waters poster artist clearly aspires to be a Conal knockoff and the work itself is competent, if also obvious. Indeed, if this artist could have restrained himself and taken a more subtle approach it could have been a political comment in itself. Taking the liberal iconography of Robbie Conal and using it for conservative purposes is a clever idea. But as with virtually all of right-wing culture, subtlety is not in their vocabulary so they had to go over-the-top with the obnoxious racist “poverty pimp” title and the even more racist commentary underlying the portrait.

Read on for a deeper deconstruction of the image and why it’s different than those Conal images of Reagan and Bush.

It’s just … ugh.

Not dead yet


by Tom Sullivan

After Tuesday night, it must feel to some on the left as though The Plague has hit. There are eulogies aplenty for Democrats, especially for Southern Democrats. The New York Times sounded a bit like Monty Python’s Dead Collector:

The rout went well beyond the Senate races — Republicans won all of those in the South except for a squeaker in Virginia and one in Louisiana that has gone to a runoff that Republicans are favored to win — and down to the state level, smothering hopes for strong Democratic farm teams.

Not so. We’re not dead yet. Democrats in our county, for example, swept local races, sent a solid blue delegation to Raleigh (two men and two women), and knocked off two GOP incumbents in doing it. Three of the four were first-time candidates.

If paid Democratic strategists believe what people want is a leader ranked the “most moderate” in the Senate, they need only look at the Republicans who won. And to find another line of work.

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You mean this didn’t signal an epic sea change in American politics?

by digby

Huh:

Yesterday’s elections brought a widespread win for the Republican Party, which will increase its share of seats in the House in the next Congress, and take over the Senate, with a net gain of at least seven seats.

Nationally, 52% of voters backed Republican candidates for Congress, while 47% voted for Democrats, according to exit polls by the National Election Pool, as reported by The New York Times. The overall vote share is similar to the GOP’s margin in the 2010 elections, and many of the key demographic divides seen in that election — particularly wide gender and age gaps — remain.

Men favored Republicans by a 16-point margin (57% voted for the GOP, 41% for Democrats) yesterday, while women voted for Democratic candidates by a four-point margin (51% to 47%). This gender gap is at least as large as in 2010: In that election men voted for Republicans by a 14-point margin while women were nearly evenly split, opting for GOP candidates by a one-point margin.

And well-known generational divides were again in evidence in Tuesday’s election. Young voters have been the Democratic Party’s strongest supporters over the last decade, as they were again yesterday, while Republicans fared best among older voters. But — as in 2010 — an older electorate compared with presidential elections advantaged the GOP.

Fully 22% of 2014 voters were 65 and older — a group GOP candidates won by 16-points. By comparison, in 2012, they made up just 16% of the electorate.

And even though Democratic candidates won the 18- to 29- year-old vote by an 11-point margin, 54% to 43%, this group didn’t carry the same weight as it did two years ago when Barack Obama was re-elected. They made up a much smaller share of the electorate than in 2012, and the Democratic margins among this group also were not as large as in 2012.

Until Democrats can figure out a way to get their voters to the polls in midterm elections, this will happen. We have known this for some time. And yet everyone’s acting surprised.

Angry people are angry. They have a right to be. And they’re going to get angrier.

by David Atkins

Digby and Markos have said it before: this was yet another wave election. The latest in a long string since 2006. It needs to be said again.

Turnout keeps declining in midterm elections as people lose faith in the political process. And the people who do vote, consistently vote for someone to change something. It’s entirely likely that people will be fed up with Republicans fighting one another and putting terrible bills on the President’s desk and vote again for change in the other direction in 2016–particularly with a larger, more progressive electorate. Not a given, of course, but likely.

And why not? The country is broken, and everyone who isn’t already wealthy knows it. Wages are stagnant; millennials are a lost generation with high student loan debt and unaffordable housing; the rich just keep getting richer; entire industries are disappearing, work hours are getting longer with lower pay, and life is generally less stable than it used to be. And it seems like absolutely nothing is going to change any of that, no matter who gets into office.

If you’re liberal you’re inclined to blame the plutocrats for that, and you would be right. If you’re of a more conservative bent, you’ll probably blame immigrants or government regulation or godlessness. And then there’s a very confused sliver of the electorate that blames all of the above and bounces back and forth between which side they want to punish more, exacerbating the now familiar midterm and presidential turnout seesaw.

As things get worse, the hostility of Americans toward each other and the political process itself is only going to increase. Conservatives don’t want to live near liberals or let their children marry them. Liberals feel the same way, as well they should. It’s getting to the point culturally where you can almost just look at a random person on the street and guess their political ideology simply by demography and the way they dress and carry themselves, and sense the palpable discomfort as members of the opposite team pass each other on the street.

Compromise isn’t going to fix any of this. People say they want compromise because in their personal lives compromise is how normal people solve problems. But compromise isn’t the goal–it’s a means to an end. What people want is problems to get solved. If stuffed shirt Democrats aren’t fixing things, maybe the nice smiling folksy pro-business lady will get in there and do something. Obviously Obama isn’t getting anything done.

That’s what’s going on. It isn’t as if the Republican brand or Republican policies somehow got more popular. They didn’t. And the next time around people will probably be saying “well, let’s try putting a woman in office and some agreeable politicians and see.” But they’ll flip again when things don’t change. Demography will ultimately doom the current incarnation of the Republican Party, but not before something snaps.

Eventually this will reach a breaking point. It has to. It’ll break when some sufficiently large crisis occurs, and one side is fully prepared to use that seething rage for constructive outcomes.

The party that is more ready for that moment will be the one that makes real policy changes. Until then, we’ll just keep surfing waves, watching each side crow that Americans have finally “woken up” and “put the adults back in charge” every two years while not a whole lot actually gets done for anybody but the rich.

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Lesson learned?

by digby

An editorial by the Washington Times:

This morning, Mr. Obama has a choice. He can double down, as his aides have predicted he would. He can come out with guns blazing to implement as much of his agenda as he can with questionable executive orders and continue to shun compromise with Congress. Or he can emulate Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, who, faced with a divided government, succeeded with reasonable compromise.

When Mr. Clinton’s party lost control of Congress in 1994, he lost the ability to set the agenda. Without the Senate or the House, Democrats couldn’t block legislation. Mr. Clinton signed much of what the new Republican Congress sent him, claiming that reforms in welfare and the deficit were his ideas in the first place.

And then they impeached him for his trouble…

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Let’s hope they’re being ironic

by digby

He’s only been in Washington for over 30 years.  Give the poor guy a chance people!

Here’s the change we’ve been waiting for:

“I think we need to do everything we can to get America back to work. And exactly which bill comes up first will be determined after discussing that with my colleagues and with the Speaker. Some examples of things that we’re very likely to be voting on: approving the Keystone XL pipeline, repealing the medical device tax, trying to restore the 40-hour work week, trying to get rid of the individual mandate. These are the kinds of things that I believe there is a bipartisan majority in the Senate to approve.”

Sounds awesome. And he’s probably right. There are always a slavering pack of Democrats yearning to be the GOP’s manservants.

And think about this:

“I’m the one who’s cut the deals that we’ve had. All of them. Biden and I did the December 2010 extension of the Bush tax cuts; the August 2011 budget control act, which actually led to a reduction in government spending for two years in a row for the first time since the Korean War; and the Dec. 31 fiscal cliff deal 2012, which made 99% of the Bush tax cuts permanent and saved virtually every family farm and small business in my state from being sold by altering the Death Tax exemption. So I’m not fundamentally opposed to negotiating with the President and his team and, in fact, I’ve been the one who’s done that in the past.”

I think we need to draft Biden to run for president.  Keep him busy.

*In case you were wondering “restoring the 40 hour workweek” is a wingnut euphemism for union busting.

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