Month: November 2015

Red scare for dummies

by digby

The American Action Network is supposedly a nice “center-right” organization run by “moderate” Republicans whom we can all agree are not among the crazies. It’s run by Fred Malek (who yes, has a little blackmark on his record but nobody’s perfect) and that nice Norm Coleman. Other nice moderate Republicans like Vin Weber and Mel Martinez along with some nice staffers from the Republican establishment are involved. They have a lot of money.

And this is an ad these nice moderates are showing during tonight’s GOP debate:

Nothing remotely dishonest or propagandistic about that. Certainly you’d never call them “wacko-birds” right?

Update: The Intercept has more on AAN

The American Action Network, the sponsor of the advertisement, is led by a team of lobbyists employed to beat back consumer protection regulations on behalf of industry clients. American Action Network board member Vin Weber is a lobbyist at Mercury LLC, where he is registered to work as a Navient lobbyist. On his registration forms, Weber says he specifically works on matters related to the CFPB.

Weber’s colleague on the board, Tom Reynolds, is also a registered lobbyist for Navient through the law firm Nixon Peabody. And another American Action Network board member, Barry Jackson, works with Brownstein Hyatt Farber Shreck, a lobbying firm that serves a number of student loan and payday lending firms on issues relating to the CFPB.

Navient processes federal student loans and works to collect on student debt. Formerly known as Sallie Mae, Navient spun off as a separate company in 2014. The company says it is responsible for managing $300 billion in student loans.

In August, Navient informed investors that the CFPB, after a multi-year investigation of the firm, had found evidence that Navient is in violation of consumer protection laws and may soon face a lawsuit from the agency. Separate investigations have faulted Navient for misleading borrowers on a range of issues, while seeking to maximize penalties and late fees.

The American Action Network has long served as a tool for corporate interests seeking to pursue political goals while minimizing scrutiny. The group is organized as a 501(c)(4) and is thus not required to disclose any donor information. In 2010, the health insurance company Aetna inadvertently revealed that it had given $3 million to the American Action Network as the group launched an unprecedented series of election advertisements against congressional Democrats.

.

A man and his ego

by digby

A play about Ben Carson’s life, based on his book Gifted Hands, which is part of Baltimore’s school curriculum has been shown to thousands of students over the years. This article interviews the actor who has played Carson for 20 years.

I guess you can see why Carson believes he’s been anointed by God

The play’s plot hewed closely to the 1990 memoir Gifted Hands—Carson’s poor childhood in Detroit, his bigamist father, his mother’s insistence that he and his brother write book reports even though her third-grade education prevented her from being able to read them. And it made dramatic use of the moment Carson says defined his life—when he claims he stabbed a friend and then prayed in a bathroom for three hours for God to take away his “pathological” anger.

“This young boy with the knife would have ended up in jail or reform school!” the narrator says as Havely, in a surgeon’s smock, turns around to face the audience. “That man with the knife led a team of 70 on a groundbreaking operation!”

That story gained new scrutiny Thursday when CNN interviewed childhood friends of Carson’s from Detroit who said they didn’t remember ever hearing of such an attack. Carson later admitted that he made up the name of the boy he says he stabbed, but Havely stands by the overall veracity of Carson’s account.

I’m super nervous,” he recalls. “Ben comes up and he just starts crying. He said that it was so accurate, it was like he was reliving it.”

“That’s what the whole show is about! He never hid any of that,” Havely said Friday. “The whole point of us doing the show was us showing this.”

Carson and his family did more than simply green-light the production. Carson donated family photographs for a video that was projected behind the stage. “Anything we needed, he would give us,” Havely says. Sometimes that included gentle directions on how to play certain scenes. 

Havely remembers the first time he played Ben Carson in front of Ben Carson, a kind of thrill he had never approached.

“I’m super nervous,” he recalls. “Ben comes up and he just starts crying. He said that it was so accurate, it was like he was reliving it.”

Havely’s performance schedule was tireless. During the school year it was common for him to perform the show for several thousand students from 50 or more schools in a matter of a few days. Often the schools would make a trip to Toby’s Theatre in Columbia, but Havely and the cast would also take the minimalist production on the road. The show went from a local novelty to a sprawling exposition of Ben Carson literature, including his self-help book Think Big.

As Carson told Politico in an email, “The play was supposed to go for one season and went on for more than 20.”

Over the years, the Carson family remained devoted to the production. Sonya Carson, Ben’s mother, came to a performance of the play every other week, according to Havely. She was a constant critic of her son’s character and her own, letting Havely and the play’s directors know when the fictional “Mama” got a little too sharp-tongued. In a 1997 feature about Sonya Carson in Parade Magazine, she asked the author to accompany her to the play, where she basked in the “moist eyes” of the students around her.

Havely says that area teachers would arrange for children who had been operated on by Carson to attend the play. Havely would feature them in the post-show Q&A session. He believes the idea of kids seeing Carson’s patients in their classrooms and social circles served to accentuate the force of the Ben Carson lore.

The real Carson saw the play at least once every year starting in 1994. The surgeon, Havely says, didn’t just come to watch. Once, while bringing a group from the Carson Scholars Fund to a performance, Carson stood up in the front row to play himself in the play about himself. “It was cute, because I got ready to end the play, and I go, ‘I have an answer for that: it’s think big!’ He’s in the front row and he goes, ‘Let me take that from here.’ And he comes up, and everybody applauded. It was the coolest thing,” Havely says. 

On several occasions, Carson brought Havely to dinners and Scholars Fund events to appear in character for a selection of the most memorable scenes.

Wow…

Update:  Might I just point out that if Carson’s mom saw this show constantly i might explain why she “remembered” the alleged stabbing incident in 1998?

.

Where do they get this stuff?

by digby

In my piece for Salon this morning I talked about this large number of conservative voters who now hate the Republican Party and are demanding a more “top down” form of leadership from candidates like Trump and Carson:

What seems to have happened is that GOP base voters feel betrayed and disillusioned because they voted for a Republican Congress and that Congress has failed to deliver the agenda on which they ran. First of all, they failed to remove President Obama from office, either through impeachment or at the ballot box in 2012. They also failed to repeal Obamacare,”close the borders,” ban abortion, stop gay marriage, or end political correctness, just for starters.

Someone forgot to tell Republican voters that there are three branches of government regulated by checks and balances, and other people in their own party, as well as the opposition party, who have different agendas competing with their own. If you listen to right-wing media and follow what’s being said in the conservative bubble, it’s understandable. They were told that they won a huge mandate, and now they quite logically blame the people who have been making promises they don’t keep.

When they listen to these professional politicians running for their party’s nomination, they just hear more of the same — and they don’t want to hear it anymore. They want someone who will assure them that this creaky government system with all those checks and balances, and all the resultant gridlock, will not be a hinderance to achievement of their agenda. They are tired of waiting. And right now they have two presidential candidates who are promising a different way of doing things.

Donald Trump is running to be a strongman. It’s all about him “getting the job done” because he’s smarter and tougher than everyone else. (This is a familiar archetype and Trump’s specific relationship to it is fascinatingly explored in this piece by Rick Perlstein, called “Donald Trump and the F-word.”) Ben Carson is a little bit more complicated. He’s running as a quasi-religious leader who will be able to overcome all these obstacles through the same miraculous process that has characterized his life story. (The recent questions about some details of that very famous life story have only resulted in adding martyrdom to his mystique.) In both cases, the people who like them are not merely attracted to the fact that these men are outsiders, but also by qualities that will ostensibly allow them to transcend the normal process of democratic government. Despite their professions of love for the constitution, these voters no longer believe in the system of government that constitution sets forth.

They don’t trust any politicians to do “what needs to be done.” Where are they getting this?  From their email box:

We know that Trump and Carson, each in their unique way, are running as outsiders. But so is this guy, who is being subtly pushed in a lot of these right wing emails. He’s making it very clear that he’s one of the outsiders too.

Ted Cruz is really the OG conservative movement’s dream candidate. He’s not actually a naive outsider. He’s a doctrinaire wingnut on every level who knows exactly what he wants to do. If they could have someone like him in the White House with a GOP congress they could die happy. Carson and Trump are loose cannons. This is the guy they really want.

.

The Doctor and The Donald’s right wing revolution

by digby

The Republican primary is starting to come into focus.  I wrote about it for Salon today:

“It’s a different test this time around,” said GOP strategist David Payne. “Experience, executive experience, these aren’t the tests. It’s about the right ideas and the right temperament and coming off as tough. You see how important the debates have been. Style and presentation matter more than ever, more even than if you were a great leader in the past.” […]

“Republicans this year don’t want managers, they want transformers,” conservative Iowa radio host Steve Deace, a Cruz supporter, told The Hill. “They don’t want reform, they want revolution. They don’t want a better government, they want a new government. The ground has shifted and the grassroots conservatives have taken the establishment’s preeminence away.”

Read on to see how this is playing out. One year out from the general and just two months from the first primary over half the Republicans primary electorate is saying they no longer trust the GOP to deliver — they are looking for a man on a white horse. A dictator or a savior, either one will do.

Stock Up Now, Boys ‘n Girls! 

by tristero

Now, this is going to be loads of fun to watch:

Seething with anger and alarmed over Mr. Rubio’s rise, aides to Mr. Bush, the former Florida governor, and his allies are privately threatening a wave of scathing attacks on his former protégé in the coming weeks, in a sign of just how anxious they have become about the state of Mr. Bush’s candidacy. 

Their looming problem: In trying to undercut Mr. Rubio as unaccomplished and unprepared, Mr. Bush is a flawed messenger. Over the years he has repeatedly, and sometimes lavishly, praised the younger lawmaker, often on camera.

 Time to kick back, get a big bucket, and buy in bulk!

The corporate university

by Gaius Publius

Though I haven’t written much about this topic, the merger of corporations and universities, it’s been on my mind a lot. You see it in the way the CEO class and university presidents tend to think like each other, mimic each other’s preferences, serve each other’s interests — and sometimes be each other — as they move from one wealth-serving job to another.

You see it in the way that MIT’s current president, for example, uses the power of his position to protect the wealth of the fossil fuel companies (my emphasis):

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will not shed its investments in fossil fuel companies despite calls from some students, faculty, and activists, the college said Wednesday in announcing a five-year campus blueprint to confront climate change.

President L. Rafael Reif, in a phone call with reporters, said the university has determined that maintaining ties with oil and energy companies is a more effective way to tackle the problem. …

The five-year plan calls for more research and education about climate change and solutions to mitigate and adapt to it; acceleration of low-carbon energy technology via eight new research centers; new tools to share climate information globally; and new measures to reduce carbon use on campus.

The plan mentions several major oil and gas companies whose chief executives recently expressed support for combating climate change, six of whom fund energy research at MIT: BP, Eni, Saudi Aramco, Shell, Statoil, and Total. …

Wonder what his next job will be? I doubt you find him in a soup kitchen ladling oats to the homeless. In a few years, I’ll bet
he shows up on “Thank You Street” instead and pretty well set up.

The corporate university. This is not your daddy’s alma mater. That alma mater has been acquired and “repurposed.” Which leads me to this.

They’re not just buying universities; they’re buying academics as well

The following is from a nice piece by Ben Walsh and Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post, which has been doing good investigative work lately. The “study” in the headline is an academic study, a “neutral” study produced by university professors. Note that while only one university is implicated, four were involved; the rest have simply failed to respond to requests for information.

Walsh and Grim (my emphasis):

Emails Show Pro-Payday Loan Study Was Edited By The Payday Loan Industry

Private emails show that the payday loan industry heavily influenced key academic research.

The payday loan industry was involved in almost every aspect of a pro-industry academic study, according to emails and other documents reviewed by The Huffington Post. The revelation calls into question a host of other pro-industry academic studies that were paid for by the same organization.

While the researchers disclosed their funding source for the 2011 paper “Do Payday Loans Trap Consumers in a Cycle of Debt?” they also assured readers that the industry “exercised no control over the research or the editorial content of this paper.”

The assertion was patently false, according to correspondence obtained from Arkansas Tech University through an open records request by the watchdog group Campaign for Accountability. The group subsequently shared the documents with HuffPost.

The Campaign for Accountability has filed requests for documents from professors at three other universities — the University of California, Davis; George Mason University; and Kennesaw State University — who produced similar pro-industry studies. So far, it has been met with resistance. Only Arkansas Tech turned over a cache of its records.

The emails show that the payday loan industry gave economics professor Marc Fusaro at least $39,912 to write his paper, and paid an undisclosed sum to his research partner, Patricia Cirillo. In return, the industry received early drafts of the paper, provided line-by-line revisions, suggested deleting a section that reflected poorly on payday lenders, and even removed a disclosure detailing the role payday lending played in the preparation of the paper.

Hilary Miller, the president of the Payday Loan Bar Association, a lawyers’ group for the industry, worked closely with the researchers on their study. Miller has represented payday lending giant Dollar Financial, and is also the president of the pro-industry group the Consumer Credit Research Foundation.

“This revelation has significant implications for the other research that the Consumer Credit Research Foundation has funded,” an industry expert told HuffPost. The foundation’s website lists six studies that it has funded in whole or part, all of which have influenced political debate over payday lending. Papers funded by the CCRF, by academics affiliated with George Washington University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, among others, have argued that payday lenders do not target black neighborhoods, that there is no good reason to regulate payday loans to the military, and that payday loans are cheaper for consumers than fees tied to bounced checks. […]

Check that last paragraph above again. Tip of the iceberg.

Of course, the payday lending industry has an acknowledged predatory business model, but they also have a ton of cash and know how to spend it, whether in the halls of Congress or the halls of what used to be called “academia.” And there’s an obvious connection between the two halls:

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will release a draft of of the first-ever federal rules regulating payday loans before the end of the year[.]

The connection between a pro-payday loan group and academic research comes as there is increased focus on the financial industry’s influence over what are apparently neutral studies.

Of course, you may think the payday lending industry is small potatoes relative to the vast ranks of academia. Just the tip of the iceberg. The Koch Bros are in the same game, have been for a while, and their potatoes are anything but small.

The corporate university

Welcome to the corporate university. I wouldn’t expect a reversal anytime soon. This is just too lucrative for all concerned. Even some of the professors have their hands out. Look again at the cartoon and caption at the top. This is what we get for letting the wealthy get very very wealthy.

When everyone’s impoverished, everyone’s for sale. All part of the plan; in the mahogany halls and gold-plated corporate jets, that’s called “mission accomplished.”

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

.

Revenge of the disempowered
by Tom Sullivan

Just yesterday I wrote about there being some hope of Americans across the political spectrum finding common ground. This morning, Robert Reich is thinking about the same topic. He is on a book tour through a number of red states where he finds even T-party types agree with him. They see they are being screwed and they don’t like it. They oppose crony capitalism, too-big-to-fail banks, factory farms, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and the Trans Pacific Partnership. Basically, “they see government as the vehicle for big corporations and Wall Street to exert their power in ways that hurt the little guy,” writes Reich at Salon. They want that power back:

They call themselves Republicans but many of the inhabitants of America’s heartland are populists in the tradition of William Jennings Brian.

I also began to understand why many of them are attracted to Donald Trump. I had assumed they were attracted by Trump’s blunderbuss and his scapegoating of immigrants.

That’s part of it. But mostly, I think, they see Trump as someone who’ll stand up for them – a countervailing power against the perceived conspiracy of big corporations, Wall Street, and big government.

Backing Trump is their revenge against the status quo. Trump can’t be bought, they believe. Republicans who plan to support Bernie Sanders have told me the same thing.

Ironically, just prior to Reich’s post this morning is another at Salon looking at homeopathic remedies. (Stay with me.) Pure quackery, but with a powerful placebo effect. A “growing distrust in Big Pharma may play a role in the growing interest in the use of complementary and alternative medicine,” writes Reynard Loki:

In a TED talk, behavioral economist Dan Ariely argued that, when given a choice, people prefer alternatives, even if those alternatives are irrelevant.

Disempowered people looking for alternatives to the status quo are behind what Reich is hearing and behind what is powering the alternative medicine industry. Politically, people are looking for alternatives to having their power further usurped. In the case of alternative politicians, people are ready to buy what Donald Trump and Ben Carson (former quack medicine pitchman) are selling even if they are essentially irrelevent. People want a sense of their own power again, even if it is an illusion.

Writing about conspiracy theories, Michael Shermer explains:

… polls reveal that “conspiracy theories permeate all parts of American society and cut across gender, age, race, income, political affiliation, educational level, and occupational status.” They note that in laboratory experiments “researchers have found that inducing anxiety or loss of control triggers respondents to see nonexistent patterns and evoke conspiratorial explanations” and that in the real world “there is evidence that disasters (e.g., earthquakes) and other high-stress situations (e.g., job uncertainty) prompt people to concoct, embrace, and repeat conspiracy theories.”

Posessing secret “truths” gives conspiracy theorists a false sense of power in a world beyond their control. When life feels as if you have awakened locked in the trunk of a car careening down a rutted mountain road, you want to believe – you need to believe – that someone, anyone, is sitting behind the wheel. Even a diabolical someone is better than no one at all.

Maybe what Reich is hearing and what the mood of the electorate indicates is that people are waking up, finally, to the fact that their country and their world has been hijacked, and not by immigrants, the poor, or ethnic minorities. What hangs in the balance is whether they will reach for a real alternative or another placebo.

It’s going to get worse #policeshootings

by digby

This isn’t quite a blank check but it’s getting mighty close:

The Supreme Court made it harder Monday to sue police for using deadly force against fleeing suspects, ruling that officers are immune from lawsuits unless it is “beyond debate” that a shooting was unjustified and clearly unreasonable.

By an 8-1 vote, the justices tossed out an excessive force suit against a Texas police officer who ignored his supervisor’s warning and took a high-powered rifle to a highway overpass to shoot at an approaching car. The officer said he hoped to stop the car but instead shot and killed the driver.

The high court said the benefit of the doubt in such cases always goes to the police officer who sees a potentially dangerous situation. The court has “never found the use of deadly force in connection with a dangerous car chase to violate the 4th Amendment,” the justices said in an unsigned 12-page opinion.

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor faulted the majority for “sanctioning a ‘shoot first, think later’ approach to policing.”
[…]
The case decided Monday began when a man in Tulia, Texas, fled from a drive-in restaurant when police tried to arrest him. He was believed to be drunk and carrying a gun. He led officers on a nighttime chase that reached 110 miles per hour.

Texas state Trooper Chadrin Mullenix heard about the chase over his radio and drove to a spot where officers were putting a strip of spikes across the highway to puncture the tires of the fleeing car. He had been criticized for not reacting decisively in the past, and he decided on his own to shoot at the fleeing car.

His commander advised him to “stand by” and “see if the spikes work first.” But Mullenix fired six shots and killed the driver, Israel Leija Jr.

His family sued, and a federal judge ruled the case could go to a jury to decide whether Mullenix’s actions were “reckless,” or reasonable under the circumstances. The 5th Circuit Court in a 2-1 decision agreed and said the officer was not entitled to immunity.

Texas state attorneys appealed, and after considering the cases for at least six weeks, the high court ruled in Mullenix vs. Luna that the officer was immune from being sued.

“By the time Mullenix fired, Leija had led police on a 25-mile chase at extremely high speeds, was reportedly intoxicated, had twice threatened to shoot officers and was racing towards an officer’s location,” the court said. “Ultimately, whatever can be said of the wisdom of Mullenix’s choice, this court’s precedents do not place the conclusion that he acted unreasonably in these circumstances beyond debate.”

Great.

There was one Justice who understood the gravity of this “benefit of the doubt”:

Sotomayor said the court “renders the protections of the 4th Amendment hollow” by sanctioning the officer’s “rogue conduct.” She noted he had not been trained in shooting at a fleeing car and was told not to shoot before the vehicle encountered the spikes across the highway.

“When Mullenix confronted his superior officer after the shooting, his first words were, ‘How’s that for proactive?” she wrote. “The glib comment…seems to me revealing of the culture this court’s decision supports when it calls it reasonable–or even reasonably reasonable–to use deadly force for no discernible gain and over a supervisor’s express order to ‘stand by.'”

8-1 folks. It wasn’t even close.

.

A terrible tragedy. 300 times a day.

by digby

Big story of the day:

The United States is taking “very seriously” the shooting of two American officers and a South African at an Amman, Jordan, training facility, President Barack Obama said Monday during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

During his statement to reporters, Obama said that someone dressed in a military uniform carried out the attack. The Associated Press reported earlier in the day that the two Americans were part of a State Department police training program.

“We take this very seriously, and we’ll be working closely with the Jordanians to determine what happened,” the president added, passing along his deepest condolences to the families of the victims.

Unfortunately, if that had happened in the US it might not have even made the local news it’s so common.

400,000: Americans who died fighting in World War II. 400,000: Americans who died by household Firearms since 2001

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) November 9, 2015

Yes, I realize that this may have been some kind of “terrorist” attack in Jordan and I don’t mean to trivialize the tragedy of two Americans being shot. But it just struck me as weird considering this:

Every day, 297 people in America are shot in murders, assaults, suicides & suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, and police intervention.

Every day, 89 people die from gun violence:

31 are murdered
55 kill themselves
2 are killed unintentionally
1 is killed by police intervention
1 intent unknown.
Every day, 208 people are shot and survive:

151 shot in an assault
10 survive a suicide attempt
45 are shot unintentionally
2 are shot in a police intervention

In One Year on Average (all ages) Over 108,000 (108,476) people in America are shot in murders, assaults, suicides & suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, or by police intervention.

32,514 people die from gun violence

11,294 people are murdered
19,992 people kill themselves
561 people are killed unintentionally
414 are killed by police intervention
254 die but intent is not known
75,962 people survive gun injuries:

55,009 people are injured in an attack
3,791 people survive a suicide attempt
16,334 people are shot unintentionally
827 people are shot by police intervention

Just saying.

Let’s build resorts and solve all our problems

by digby

Remember all those child refugees who came to our border looking for asylum last year? Well, we can send them all back now. A GOP Senator visited a country there and said it very beautiful so it’s just fine:

It’s not so bad to deport children to what was until recently the murder capital of the world, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said Friday, since Honduras is “a beautiful country” with “gorgeous resort zones.”

More than 200,000 unaccompanied minors or mothers traveling with their children have fled to the United States from the Central American countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador over the last two years, with many of them asking for asylum or other humanitarian relief. All three countries are plagued by out-of-control gang violence and inadequate criminal justice systems. El Salvador and Guatemala are both still recovering from civil wars that ended in the 1990s, while Honduras suffered a coup in 2009.

But the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs chairman said he saw on a recent three-day trip to Honduras and Guatemala that the implication that deporting children there is “sending them into a war zone” is incorrect.

“We had security but, you know, Vicki, it’s not a war zone,” he said on WIBA Madison’s “Up Front with Vicki McKenna.” “It’s obviously a poorer country than America but it’s a beautiful country, it’s a beautiful country. The people are beautiful.”

Johnson said one solution for improving the situation there could be building more resorts.

“You could establish along the zones of the coast of the Caribbean in Honduras gorgeous resorts zones,” he said. “If we could help them do that, they could start rebuilding their economy.

And then all the kids could serve nice drinks and clean the toilets of rich people! See, it’s all good.