When Putin became president, I was for a long time in a state of profound naiveté. Well, I went to him … I told him: “Listen, Volodya, what happened: we destroyed the entire political space. Devoured, not destroyed, but devoured it. We absolutely dominated … Look, I’ll suggest that we can not have effective political system, if there’s a tough competition. So I suggest we create an artificial two-party system. So, let’s say, the left and right. A Socially Oriented party and neo-conservatives liberal party. Choose any. And I’ll make another batch. At the same time, my own heart is closer to neoconservatives, and I think so, you [Putin] are socially oriented. ” I earnestly believed then that he understood it. But I think that even then he looked at me like I was crazy.
Rand Paul has a long history of close relationships with neo-confederates and racists (One of whom is his own father) but he’s been reaching out to the black community in recent times trying to create an image of someone who really cares. I think that’s nice.
But what do you suppose are the libertarian solutions to the ongoing, structural, institutional racism that has permeated our culture since its inception and which remains the fetid, infectious boil on the American body politic? Well …
“We lower the taxes on the business people so they hire more people.”
There is literally no problem on earth that lowering taxes on business people will not solve.
Oh, and by the way, the criminal justice reform he and the Koch brothers are touting? Uh, not quite what it seems, I’m sorry to say:
Charles Koch, the company’s chairman and CEO, has said he became interested in criminal-justice reform after a grand jury’s 1995 indictment of a Koch refinery in Texas for 97 felony violations of environmental law. The company spent six years fighting the charges and eventually settled with the government for $10 million.
Sure, they may end up helping some poor people, especially African Americans, who are caught in the maw of our unjust prison industrial complex. As I said earlier, at this point, that may be the best we can hope for. But let’s not kid ourselves about what they really care about.
Supporting NAFTA Was the Kiss of Death for Democrats — Why Dems Should Think Twice About Voting for TPP
by Gaius Publius
Ross Perot describes the “giant sucking sound going south.” Notice how right he is about all the other evils he describes — how public officials “cash out,” for example, or the simple logic of dumping your domestic work force if all you care about is “making money.” Notice also that the questioner is a pro–trade agreement shill.
I’m not sure how the coming vote on Fast Track and TPP in the House will go (my latest update is here, but times are fast a-changing.). I’m hearing about the possibility of money changing hands on the Republican side (Bob Ney speculated about that in an on-air conversation with Thom Hartmann, and the sums he mentioned were huge). And I’m hearing about extraordinary pressure being put on Democrats by party leaders. So we’ll see.
Two things I do know. First, if Democrats push Fast Track and TPP over the finish line, it could be a bloodbath at election time. (That’s a warning for Republicans as well.) And second, if Democrats push Fast Track and TPP over the finish line, it should be a bloodbath at election time.
I will say, speaking for myself only, that every Democrat who votes for Fast Track needs to be made a lobbyist at the first opportunity. Some deeds are so bad, will do such damage, that they should never be rewarded with a return to elected office. If Fast Track passes, then TPP will almost certainly pass, the Trans-Atlantic version, TTIP (or as some call it, TAFTA) will pass, and TISA, the horrible “service sector” agreement will also pass.
These agreements will not only remake the world economy, as NAFTA did, but on a much larger scale — they will also neuter the sovereignty of every nation that signs them. Which of your elected representatives would you like to reward after saying yes to that? How about … none of them?
Starting with Ron Wyden, who greased the skids in the Senate, and people like House member Jim Costa (click to help tell him how you feel about his TPP support).
Supporting NAFTA Was the Kiss of Death for Democrats
Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies has taken a look at the NAFTA vote, one very similar to the current Fast Track and TPP vote, in that Democrats were heavily lobbied by their leaders to say yes, despite widespread understanding that NAFTA would be a job-killer. Remember, the NAFTA vote came not long after a presidential campaign in which Ross Perot talked about that “giant sucking sound going south,” the sound of jobs moving to Mexico. (Feel free to remind yourself about that moment by watching the short video at the top.)
Sarah Anderson, writing on the consequences to Democrats of their NAFTA votes, opens with a bit of context and a question:
Supporting NAFTA Was the Kiss of Death for Democrats –Why Dems Should Think Twice About Voting for TPP
As President Obama twists arms to pass “fast track,” a look back at the Democrats who helped Clinton win the bloody trade battle of 1993.
It’s serious flashback time for those involved in the 1993 debate over the North America Free Trade Agreement. With the “fast track” trade vote expected as early as this Thursday, a Democratic president is once again twisting arms and dangling rewards in a desperate effort to muster votes for a corporate-driven trade deal. And just like in 1993, the vote will be one of those rare bipartisan moments in Washington. The word is only about a dozen members remain on the fence, most of them Democrats. The president is reportedly putting the tightest screws on members of the Congressional Black Caucus. After the NAFTA wheeling and dealing began in earnest back in 1993, it didn’t take long to push enough Dems off the fence. All these years later, NAFTA remains the basic blueprint for every U.S. trade deal.
Let me skip over NAFTA’s failure to deliver on promises for workers, the environment, human rights, etc. These have all been extensively documented over the years by the Institute for Policy Studies, and many others across the continent. President Obama acknowledged its flaws himself when he made a campaign trail promise to renegotiate the deal. Instead, let’s take a look at what individual members got by helping to ram the pact through Congress. Did their support for the big business lobby’s dream deal ensure a glittering political career?
She then discusses House Speaker Tom Foley:
Starting at the top: Democratic House Speaker Tom Foley sided with the White House and against most of the House Democrats, including Majority Leader Richard Gephardt. In his 30-year political career, that controversial move stood out enough for the New York Times to mention it in Foley’s obituary. A year after the NAFTA vote, the obit noted, “Mr. Foley became the first speaker since the Civil War to be defeated for re-election in his own district.”
Ouch. While Foley’s defeat can’t be attributed to a single factor, his decision to side with the corporate lobby on NAFTA certainly didn’t prevent his electoral humiliation either.
What about all the Clinton White House promises of special safeguards that would shield members from disastrous consequences for their constituents?
In a detailed 2001 report following up on the NAFTA deals, Public Citizen concluded that “systematically, the White House promises of special safeguards for U.S. farm commodities, bridges and more remained unfulfilled. Exceptions were several meaningless promises, such as photographs with the president, and one campaign fund-raising event.”
“Photographs with the president.” Sounds like those rides on Air Force One that Obama is offering, as he flies to Germany to meet with the G7:
Inside US Trade: Four House Dems Supporting TPA To Accompany Obama On G7 Trip
Four House Democrats who have publicly announced or signaled their support for a pending Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) bill will travel with President Obama on Air Force One to attend the G7 summit taking place June 7-8 in Germany, according to a White House official. …
They are Reps. Jim Himes (D-CT), Gerry Connolly (D-VA), Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) and Mike Quigley (D-IL), the official said.
Apparently Himes was included as a reward for a very recent switch:
Of that group, Himes was the most recent member to announce his support for the TPA bill, having done so on June 3.
I hope those plane rides are worth those House seats; some TPP Democrats will lose theirs — just as many NAFTA Democrats lost back in that day. Anderson again:
One of these unfulfilled promises targeted textile and apparel state members. …
Rep. Clete Donald Johnson, Jr. was one of the targets of that empty promise. After voting for NAFTA, the Georgia Democrat got demolished in 1994, losing by a margin of more than 30 percent. A few years later, Clinton offered Johnson a consolation prize: a post as chief U.S. trade negotiator for textiles, a sector in rapid decline due to low-wage foreign competition.
Anderson mentions others, such as Rep. Bill Sarpalius of Texas, Rep. David Price of North Carolina, and Rep. Lewis Payne Jr of Virginia. These men and more believed the President’s empty promises of protection, voted with the money that wanted NAFTA to pass, and then were cast out of office.
“Members of Congress should know better than to trust an exiting president’s promises of political cover or to rely on vote-yes-now-goodies-later deals for voting ‘yes’ on such a controversial, career-defining issue as Fast Track,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “Our research of scores of deals over the past 20 years shows no matter who the president or congressional leadership is, almost all of the promises made in the heat of a trade vote go unfulfilled, and representatives who vote ‘yes’ are repeatedly left in political peril.”
If you remember the broken promises of the 2008 campaign, you know how cheap a president’s words are. Office-holders, trust the president to “have our back” at your peril.
Who Will Be Cast Out of Office This Time?
Non-Beltway and non-lobbyist people — i.e., voters — are putting pressure on the members of both parties not to pass the Fast Track bill. And members are feeling the heat. The popular resistance is so great that the AFL-CIO. for example, appears to have stopped all political contributions to office-holders and candidates until after the Fast Track vote, something that some money-fueled Democrats are complaining about.
Democrats Frustrated by Unions’ Cash Freeze Over ‘Fast Track’
One of Democrats’ best team players on the campaign finance front is playing hardball this cycle, withholding campaign cash over a package of trade bills being debated in Congress.
The AFL-CIO, along with some public sector unions, announced a campaign finance freeze in March. Unions hoped the threat of withholding contributions would scare Democratic lawmakers out of supporting President Barack Obama’s Trade Promotion Authority, or “fast track,” to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership — a trade agreement labor groups say would hurt manufacturing jobs in the U.S.
But instead, the freeze is frustrating and alienating plenty of House Democrats, many of whom say they are being punished even though they have been critical of the issue.
You can read further if you like, but the rest of the article seems like a “placed piece” attempting to shame unions into opening up their purses. I’d read it only of you want to see what “placed pieces” sound like.
Who will be cast out of office this time? If I’m a member of Congress and considering a Yes vote, I’d have to wonder if the answer is … me.
And if I’m a voter in a district with a Yes or Undecided member of Congress, I’d want to make sure I tell that member … it will be you if I can help it. House phone numbers here. Feel free to speak bluntly. It’s a blunt bill.
And we could use a few more of these as well:
How would you like to see three or four of these billboards up along the 99 between Fresno and Merced? Contribute here to help make that happen. But please do it soon, before the House votes.
Otherwise, we’ll have to put them up as punishment.
I’m so glad that racism doesn’t exist anymore and we can put that ugliness behind us. Here’s a nice Texas teacher:
“I’m going to just go ahead and say it … the blacks are the ones causing the problems and this ‘racial tension.’ I guess that’s what happens when you flunk out of school and have no education. I’m sure their parents are just as guilty for not knowing what their kids were doing; or knew it and didn’t care. I’m almost to the point of wanting them all segregated on one side of town so they can hurt each other and leave the innocent people alone. Maybe the 50s and 60s were really on to something. Now, let the bashing of my true and honest opinion begin….GO! #imnotracist #imsickofthemcausingtrouble #itwasatagedcommunity,”
Just so you know, these are her true and honest opinions and she’s not a racist. So that’s good.
And anyway:
Fitzgibbons insisted the post “was not directed at any one person or group.”
“It was not an educational post; it was a personal experience post,” Fitzgibbons said, adding she has a personal connection to the McKinney situation, but declined to elaborate.
She added: “I apologized to the appropriate people,” declining to identify those people.
With the post deleted and her apology made, the teacher said she hopes the issue is resolved.
Case closed.
This is just some random woman and there are always people who say stupid things. But come on. She’s just not that unusual. After all, somebody’s listening to this guy.
Update:
Poor thing. I think she needs an exorcism. It sounds like she’s apologising for being possessed by a demon that led her to say racist things she doesn’t believe. (Her name is “Emotions”)
I think we’ve all lost our tempers at times. But most of us don’t spout off about wanting to return to Jim Crow when it happens.
I wouldn’t want her teaching my kids, that’s for sure. Who knows when that devil “Emotion” might take over and make her do bad things again?
There has been a long running joke in political circles that we should just force politicians to wear the logos of their donors and favored lobbyists the way NASCAR drivers wears logos on their jumpsuit. It would make it much easier for voters to identify to whom our elected representatives really answer. Right now they just wear an American flag pin and that doesn’t really tell us much.
As I wrote the other day, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot we can do about this. Billionaires are perfectly happy to “own” politicians these days. If they ever had any shame about openly offering huge sums of money to anyone who will advance their agenda, paying lip service at best to the idea of democracy, they have managed to overcome it.
Since this insane income inequality is increasingly seen as almost supernatural, a condition ordained by the “invisible hand” of God, and to such a degree that many liberals have come to the conclusion that the only way to advance a liberal agenda is to find our own liberal billionaires. And that leads to certain awkward alliances, like this one, via Think Progress:
Usually the news that a major Republican donor will be dropping hundreds of millions of dollars on a campaign to influence voters on energy and climate change would make environmentalists worried. But not when that donor is spending $175 million to get Republicans to talk about clean energy and the solutions to the climate crisis.
Entrepreneur Jay Faison founded the ClearPath Foundation in December of last year in part to restore Republicans’ environmental legacy. Tuesday he announced that he will be investing $175 million on a public education campaign that will include a social media and online advertising to get Republicans to talk about market-based solutions to climate change. That includes $40 million through the 2016 cycle, and another $10 million as a seed fund for a political advocacy group. The foundation invested between $1 and $9 million in a few solar energy projects.
It is very hard to argue with that, and the environmental groups don’t even try. There is no greater challenge on the planet than the climate crisis and it would be foolhardy to turn away from any possible assistance in getting that done. The Sierra Club’s national campaign director Debbie Sease told Think Progress, ”it may or may not be enough, but it’s a really good thing. If you look at the scale of what we need to do on climate, you can’t do it with one party, you need Republicans too. It would be naive of me to think it’s the one thing that’ll turn it around, but it’s a start.”
Unfortunately, the right is antediluvian on this issue, so his “starting point” is trying to get the Republican rank-and-file to admit that the problem even exists and that science isn’t trying to yank their Bibles from their cold, dead hands. This man has his work cut out for him. And, at the end of the day, he will be trying to bring Republicans over to the cause while at the same time promoting conservative “solutions,” to be named later. And, let’s just say those don’t have the greatest track record when it comes to dealing with massive global crises.
Read on. There’s more. It’s depressing. But we’ve got to stay reality based amirite?
A Montana man committed suicide last weekend after murdering his family. His wife was “mocking” him, he told a friend. Police described the survivalist as “a Constitutionalist who didn’t believe in government.” They’re like oxymorons who don’t believe in contradiction that way.
Speaking of not believing in government, Rick Perry, the returning presidential contestant and former Texas governor, boasts how the job-creating, Texas economic “miracle” is a model for how to run the country. (It was the same with another former Texas governor-president. What happened with that?)
The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson finds the Texas miracle less than miraculous. By two measures of job quality, “Texas rates dead last.” Texans have the highest percentage
of people without health insurance in the country. What’s more, Meyerson writes:
The second measure of job quality is the share of people qualifying for government poverty programs who are nonetheless employed. In April, the University of California Center for Labor Research and Education released a study quantifying the number of Americans receiving Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, children’s health insurance coverage or the earned-income tax credit who have an employed family member. Low-paid work has become so prevalent, the study showed, that the yearly tab of federal dollars going to working families was $128 billion. The state with the highest share of funds going to such families was Texas.
By this measure, Texas is the Walmart of states — something else Texans who don’t believe in government can be proud of. After all, Walmart is a BIG box store.
The 49 other states are subsidizing Perry’s “so-called Texas miracle,” Meyerson writes. “Texas’s use of federal dollars to keep its workers afloat is only deepened by its favor-the-rich-and-soak-the-poor tax policies.”
Should he succeed in taking his model national, Rick Perry’s Texas-sized plan for America, I guess, is to recruit enough “downline” countries to do for America what America is already doing for Texas.
If the press really wonder what might be fueling some of this reported angst among Hillary Clinton’s supporters, they might want to take a look at this and ask if they aren’t simply afraid that the country is going to make their decision based on this rather than a serious problem with her policies and philosophy:
Last year, when Glassdoor released its annual ranking of employees’ highest rated CEOs based on their feedback during the year, just two women appeared among the top 50 (actually 51 due to an error), with one, Yahoo!’s Marissa Mayer, nearly dead last.
This year, however, women have completely disappeared. Among the 50 CEOs that garner the highest praise from their employees, the faces are all male.
There are, of course, few female CEOs who might end up on the list to begin with. Among companies in the S&P 500 index, just 23, or 4.6 percent, have a woman in the top position. Those ranks aren’t likely to swell anytime soon: women make up just 25 percent of executive and senior officers at these companies and those that are in the highest ranks are stuck in jobs unlikely to lead to the corner office.
But even women who do make it into leadership have to deal with the fact that Americans still like to see a man in charge. Both men and women say they prefer men as a senior executives at Fortune 500 companies. When asked, more Americans say they’d prefer to work for a man than for a woman.
Women also face a backlash when they try to act like bosses. They are penalized at work both personally and financially when they act assertively. Female leaders are more likely to be called abrasive, aggressive, strident, and emotional. Women are also more likely than men to get negative feedback on their work performance.
If she loses it could be because of any number of things, many of which will obviously be of her own doing or because of the obvious superiority of the man who beat her. But you can’t blame some women supporters for worrying that it doesn’t matter what she says or does — that this fundamental attitude about female leadership still guides the thinking of many people in our society.
In January and June 2002, Republicans were more sensitive to security from terrorism than to protecting civil liberties. By September 2002, they shifted toward prioritizing civil liberties and have done so since. They have become even more likely to say civil liberties should be respected with Obama in office than they were when George W. Bush was still president.
Democrats have always given greater weight to protecting civil liberties, but in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 they showed a closer divide on whether civil liberties or security from terrorism should be the higher priority. Like Republicans, Democrats became more sensitive to protecting civil liberties over time. However, the current results suggest a dip in the percentage favoring the protection of civil liberties, perhaps relating to having a Democratic president — one who called on Congress to pass the USA Freedom Act — overseeing the federal government.
Natch.
The rub, of course, is what people define as an encroachment on civil liberties:
Some congressional critics of government anti-terrorism methods, most notably Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, argue that the government has too many powers in this area that violate citizens’ rights. The majority of Americans, 55%, disagree, saying they do not believe such government programs violate their civil liberties. But that leaves a sizable minority of 41% who do feel the government is violating their civil liberties. Gallup asked this question for the first time in the June 2-7 poll, so it is not possible to know whether these views differ from those in the past.
They broke it all down demographically and by ideological and partisan affiliation and nobody, not even self-identified liberals, said they thought that what the government is doing violates their civil liberties (although they were more likely than any other category to say that it is.) Non-whites agreed although we don’t have the breakdown of who that might be. Muslims might have a different opinion.
So, this is the problem. A majority of Americans don’t think that the government should violate individuals’ civil liberties for anti-terrorism purposes. But they clearly don’t understand what their civil liberties are and certainly not when they’ve been violated. It sounds as though they tend to count on their political leaders to police this and since the national security state pretty much controls both parties, they don’t actually do that. When the government passes some tepid reform like the USA Freedom Act they assume that whatever was wrong is now right and it’s all good. And slowly but surely those civil liberties erode without anyone realizing it until it’s too late.
Republican presidential contender Ben Carson said Wednesday that if elected next year he might implement a “covert division” of government workers who spy on their coworkers to improve government efficiency.
The pediatric neurosurgeon-turned-candidate told a crowd of Iowa Republicans he is “thinking very seriously” about adding “a covert division of people who look like the people in this room, who monitor what government people do.”
Carson suggested people would work harder if they suspected their coworkers of monitoring their work. “And we make it possible to fire government people!” he said to loud cheers.
Conservatives often criticize government employees as bureaucrats who live off public money and aren’t accountable to taxpayers. Still, Carson’s suggestion that such workers should spy on each other is the latest in a string of unusual — and often bizarre — ideas he’s floated that win cheers from far-right crowds and raised eyebrows from everyone else.
I have to defend Carson a little bit here. The government is already doing this, although the alleged purpose is for fellow employees to monitor anyone they suspect of being disloyal rather than inept. It could easily be re-tasked.
Here is the brochure they use at the Defense Department:
“It is better to have reported overzealously than never to have reported at all.”
Carson’s spokesperson says that he meant to employ a “secret shopper” sort of spy program but this would be much cheaper. (You know how expensive federal contracting can be …) Of course they’d have to have some whistleblower protections of some sort and that’s where it all gets dicey. But hey, no need to reinvent the wheel, amirite?
