Author: Tom Sullivan

But will she fight?
by Tom Sullivan

Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich isn’t worried about Hillary Clinton’s values or ideals. “I’ve known her since she was 19 years old,” he writes, “and have no doubt where her heart is. For her entire career she’s been deeply committed to equal opportunity and upward mobility.” The question Reich poses is: Will she fight?

If she talks about what’s really going on and what must be done about it, she can arouse the Democratic base as well as millions of Independents and even Republicans who have concluded, with reason, that the game is rigged against them.

The question is not her values and ideals. It’s her willingness to be bold and to fight, at a time when average working people need a president who will fight for them more than they’ve needed such a president in living memory.

Hillary Clinton gave a nod to the vocal and enthusiastic “Elizabeth Warren Wing” of the Democratic party in her announcement video, echoing Warren by saying “the deck is still stacked” against ordinary Americans. In 2008, she spoke about “invisible Americans,” but she couldn’t make the sale. There is an “Elizabeth Warren Wing” because Warren is credible, and she’s credible because she’s proven she’s a fighter. The question is will Hillary Clinton come out swinging or will she follow Bill and “triangulate”?

Reich observes:

In recent decades Republicans have made a moral case for less government and lower taxes on the rich, based on their idea of “freedom.”

They talk endlessly about freedom but they never talk about power. But it’s power that’s askew in America –concentrated power that’s constraining the freedom of the vast majority.

That’s a keen observation. By relentlessly attacking labor and voting rights, through regulatory capture and recent attacks against cities, the One Percent has concentrated in its hands not just wealth, but power. By eroding the political clout of working people with one hand, while with the other spoon-feeding them “freedom” as pablum, the One Percent has eliminated most challenges to its “divine right” to rule. It looks increasingly like a conscious effort to create a Potemkin democracy.

Money may be how the rich keep score. But money is also the ability to wield power. The palpable frustration in America is not simply income insecurity. It is the nagging and worrisome power imbalance that threatens to further erode democracy and tear apart this country. Demonstrating a willingness to fight to restore that balance is what has made Elizabeth Warren both a star to everyday supporters and a credible threat to the power elite. It remains to be seen whether Clinton will take up that fight.

Making the right noises in stump speeches will not bring people out to the polls in 2016. Millennials may lean Democrat by default, but it’s turnout that wins elections.

Americans love a fighter. They made how many Rocky movies?

Shutting down Skynet
by Tom Sullivan

You know you’re in trouble when life starts resembling a Schwarzenegger movie. What with economic insecurity, huge income disparity, severe drought in California, massive NSA surveillance, a virtual
war on the poor, police firing on unarmed civilians, and a population pacified with reality TV, The Running Man (1987) comes to mind. In a dystopian, near-future police state, Ah-nold gets framed as “The Butcher of Bakersfield” after a police helicopter crew (following orders) fires on food rioters.

But that was 2017. Today, the Air Force is hot to open your friendly skies to its large Predator, Reaper, Global Hawk, and Sentinel drones. A few weeks ago, I wrote about that at Crooks and Liars. The press focus has been on the FAA’s congressionally mandated commercial drone testing, yet “there is no funding from FAA to support the test sites.” Plus, everywhere you look, the people involved in the testing program seem to include Department of Defense, ex-military, Air National Guard, or members of the defense industry. I wrote:

It’s not that commercial drones aren’t of interest to the private sector. Ask Amazon. But the military and U.S. defense contractors want access to civilian airspace for testing exportable military hardware and for keeping their drone pilots’ skills sharp. Several drone testing programs are fashioned as university research programs and appear as civilian efforts. That might be understandable after George W. Bush’s speech about drones attacking civilians with “chemical and biological weapons,” and after revelations about widespread domestic surveillance here and abroad.

The T-party is a mite freaked out about the prospect. (I help by telling them Obama’s surveillance drones can see down into their gun safes and count their weapons.) Still, Bush took us to war a dozen years ago over the supposed threat of Saddam Hussein’s unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) raining death from above. Now, post-Edward Snowden we’re supposed to be cool with the idea of Air Force UAVs — now rebranded Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) — sharing the national airspace with your flight to Chicago for your cousin’s wedding. But not to worry. The Department of Defense is racing to develop and equip its unmanned aircraft with autonomous sense-and-avoid (SAA) technology.

Not creeped out yet?

This week, nations from around the world will debate the future of lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS), or so-called “killer robots,” at the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in Geneva.

Killer robots, as in The Terminator? Geneva Convention, as in the Bush White House declared provisions it didn’t like quaint ? Yup:

Today, April 13, experts and delegates from around the world are gathering in Geneva, Switzerland for a discussion on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, or, LAWS. The Meeting of Experts is organized by the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). Over the next five days, the representatives will attempt to work through some of the technical, legal, military, sociological, and ethical issues posed by the development of “killer robots.” At stake is a proposed preemptive ban on the development, production, and use of these weapons.

The call to ban “killer robots” is gaining traction among human rights lawyers and activists. On April 9, Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic published a report urging all nations to support a ban on LAWS given the “significant hurdles to assigning personal accountability for the actions of fully autonomous weapons.” Various nations are also pushing for the ban as a means of preventing LAWS from reaching the battlefield. Since these highly sophisticated autonomous weapons have yet to be invented, a substantial portion of the deliberations at this meeting will be devoted to understanding and defining LAWS.

I know. What a relief, right?

(h/t Barry)

Reason Number 6
by Tom Sullivan

Jonathan Chait offers five reasons why Hillary Clinton will win the presidency in 2016. But in the end, his sixth reason may be the only one that matters:

The argument for Clinton in 2016 is that she is the candidate of the only major American political party not run by lunatics.

“That sums it up for me.”

The Democrats’ “Iron Lady”?
by Tom Sullivan

Hillary Clinton is “a pretty good person,” according to Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. Today seems like a fine day for starting the competition for the best 2016 out of context quotes, so that’s my entry:

“Hillary Clinton is actually a pretty good person for us to run against,” he said in an interview on Fox News. “She unites the [Republican] Party, she allows us to raise a lot of money and allows us to recruit a lot of volunteers.”

There is much Sturm und Drang on the left over Hillary Clinton’s second run for president (the announcement is expected any minute). Clinton is not well liked on the left, considered yet another corporate Democrat, and in spite of hints that she might be “significantly to the left” of her husband on some issues. Elizabeth Warren’s economic populism is much more in keeping with the left’s sensibilities (mine included). But I wanted to play the contrarian this morning.

Publicly anyway, Republicans seem to relish the thought of running against Hillary Clinton. With its new “Stop Hillary” web ad and more:

Priebus — who habitually describes Clinton as a cold, Nixonian liberal millionaire — has approved a six-figure advertising campaign targeting voters in swing states, according to Allison Moore, a spokeswoman for the RNC.

But a galaxy of other conservative power brokers, rabble-rousers and advocacy organizations is involved, including right-wing Web sites and super PACs that can accept millions of dollars, without limits, from the party’s biggest donors.

Perhaps the electorate is more inured to Swift Boat-style attacks by now. Perhaps fear, the drug of choice for the GOP’s pushers, is not providing the rush it once did. And maybe not. But like those surefire Muslim-Kenyan-communist attacks on Obama, going back to the future to revisit anti-Clinton attacks from the 1990s could backfire. The Washington Post cautions Republicans about launching an anti-Hillary jihad:

“Republicans need to be careful about seeming condescending toward a female candidate when we talk about competence. If we’re not careful, it’ll bring out even more of the women vote for her, and that’d be devastating,” [Republican lawyer and Reagan administration veteran Bruce] Fein said.

“I’d advise to never talk about her age or her health. Rather, the focal point should be on her fitness to serve,” said Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster who advises male GOP candidates running against Democratic women.

There will likely be “an errant comment here or there,” she adds, by a “bit player” that will draw fire. You can take that to the bank. And they might not be bit players. Someone at DNC headquarters should start a pool.

The problem for the RNC is that, as with electing the first black president, voters might be eager to see the first woman become president and will want to take part in that historic election. Republican women included, especially given the all-male clown car that is the current Republican field.

No matter what punches conservatives have thrown at her for decades now, Hillary Clinton just will not go down. And that coldness Priebus wants to exploit could work in Clinton’s favor. There is a bit of “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher to Hillary Clinton that might prove attractive to Republican women already inclined to vote for a women. Like Clinton or not, if there’s one thing Republicans fear, respect, and vote for, it’s strength.

For the RNC’s “Stop Hillary” players, it just might be the fear talking.

Cult? What cult?
by Tom Sullivan

This week’s in-box brought news that one North Carolina Republican, Rep. Chuck McGrady, is re-introducing a bill to permit benefit corporations or B-corps in the state. It has failed to advance in past legislative sessions. B-corps, as I understand them, give directors legal protection for decisions that consider community stakeholders’ interests, not shareholders’ alone. Twenty-eight other states and the District of Columbia permit them:

Under current corporate law in North Carolina, corporations are not allowed to serve a purpose beyond maximizing profit for its shareholders. The North Carolina Benefit Corporation Act, however, would allow businesses to accomplish goals that go beyond the bottom line.

“It’s a for-profit entity that can do nonprofit work,” McGrady said. “They’ve got other purposes. They’re not all about the highest value for the stakeholders.”

The Horror.

Naturally, Randians hate the idea. In North Carolina, that means the Art Pope-sponsored Civitas Institute. The idea that people might invest in business for reasons other than maximizing personal wealth is blasphemy:

For starters, the underlying premise of creating a “benefit corporation” is that traditional corporations and companies don’t benefit the public. This notion, of course, is ludicrous. As Francis DeLuca noted in the 2011 Bad Bill summary: “A lawful, profitable business, by its very existence, already ‘benefits’ society…A business, by making a profit, increases the wealth of society and hence the ability of individuals to find employment and increase their standard of living. They also provide products and services that make our lives better.”

Civitas argues, “We do not need government to designate some business as better than others.” Because for Randians, laissez-faire capitalism is a self-contained system of morality whereby pursuit of self-interest is, in and of itself, the highest good. Anything other is less, not better. The idea that someone might want to invest in business for mixed personal and altruistic reasons, one supposes, is a kind of economic miscegenation, and by definition unclean. (Translation: benefit corporations have cooties.)

That’s not at all cult-like, is it?

The T-Party hates benefit corporations for its own reasons. Like Agenda 21:

This initiative is a part of the overall Agenda 21 program. It is a push to convey greater and greater control by government over private enterprise and private property. The longer term objective is to reduce private control over property and commerce, moving the United States toward facism and socialism.

Cold Warriors never die. They just see new -isms hiding in new woodpiles.

The new impoverishment
by Tom Sullivan

The shooting of yet another unarmed, black man this week in North Charleston continues to plague the mind. Rather than pursue the unarmed man on foot, Officer Michael Slager is seen in the witness video drawing his weapon and firing at the fleeing man until he is brought down. Over a broken taillight. For three black men recently, “misdemeanors became capital offenses,” writes Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post:

But it doesn’t take data analysis to realize that when police treat communities like occupied territory — and routinely automatically classify black men as suspects — the opportunity for tragedy grows exponentially.

Walter Scott’s broken taillight was an excuse, not an offense. Slager knew that Scott had to be guilty of something. It was just a matter of finding out what that black man’s crime might be.

Because living in a poorer neighborhood has itself become a crime in this country, especially if one is black. We worship wealth here, or didn’t you know? By definition, the poor are sinners.

Emily Badger of the Post’s Wonkblog writes that from drug-testing aid recipients to passing new laws restricting what foods the the poor can buy with SNAP benefits, the odd double standard applied to government support for the poor raises several questions about why, one of them moral:

We rarely make similar demands of other recipients of government aid. We don’t drug-test farmers who receive agriculture subsidies (lest they think about plowing while high!). We don’t require Pell Grant recipients to prove that they’re pursuing a degree that will get them a real job one day (sorry, no poetry!). We don’t require wealthy families who cash in on the home mortgage interest deduction to prove that they don’t use their homes as brothels (because surely someone out there does this). The strings that we attach to government aid are attached uniquely for the poor.

At Salon, Alex Henderson offers seven cases of cruelty towards the poor becoming the new normal. He begins with this story:

In Portland, the courts spent months prosecuting a homeless woman for—of all things—using an electrical outlet in a sidewalk planter box to charge her cell phone in July. The woman, who the website Street Roots News identified as “Jackie” (she didn’t want her real name used), was charged with theft. And when “Jackie” missed her arraignment (she was homeless, after all), a bench warrant was issued. Months later, she turned herself into police and spent a night in jail. “Jackie” (who had never been arrested before) was offered a plea bargain, which she turned down because she was on a waiting list for housing and feared that having a criminal record would jeopardize her chance at putting a roof over her head. Eventually, the theft charge was dropped, but the very fact that “Jackie” was arrested and prosecuted in the first place shows that the “throw the peasants in the Bastille” mentality is alive and well in the U.S.

From debtors prisons to criminalizing feeding the poor on the street, this country has made poverty a crime at a time when poverty is a growth industry.

Missouri’s proposed surf-and-turf law prohibits food-stamp recipients from using them to purchase, among other things, seafood or steak. This might include prohibiting the poor from purchasing canned tuna. (Sorry, Charlie.) Where’s a seafood industry lobbyist when you really need one?

Dana Milbank writes:

The surf-and-turf bill is one of a flurry of new legislative proposals at the state and local level to dehumanize and even criminalize the poor as the country deals with the high-poverty hangover of the Great Recession.

We kiss up and kick down here. Steal trillions through your too-big-to-fail bank, and at most you’ll draw a fine. Plug in a cell phone on the street and go to jail if you’re lucky enough not to be tasered or shot. The new impoverishment is one of the soul.

Look. Over there. A poor person eating.

“I knew the cop didn’t do the right thing.”
by Tom Sullivan

When I heard the news on Tuesday night that a cop had shot and killed an unamrmed black man in South Carolina, and that it had been caught on video, my first thought was North Charleston. Parts are gritty. Working-class. Heavily African-American and Latino. The North Charleston department is not known for its subtlety or for its community policing.

The witness who shot the video came forward yesterday and appeared last night on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes.” Feidin Santana told MSNBC he was reluctant to come forward out of fear. He is still afraid:

“I felt that my life, with this information, might be in danger. I thought about erasing the video and just getting out of the community, you know Charleston, and living some place else,” the 23-year-old said. “I knew the cop didn’t do the right thing.”

Santana told reporters that he had, in fact, gone to the police to inform them he had video of the shooting, but left before speaking to anyone in charge. Instead he ran out and got a lawyer.

The question no one seems to have asked the North Charleston Police Department is what they might have done with that video if they had gotten it from the witness and he had never released it to the press.

The State newspaper out of Columbia reports that over the last five years police in South Carolina have fired on 209 suspects. While a few were accused of doing so illegally, “none has being convicted,” according to The State:

South Carolina has been in the news for a Highway Patrol officer’s shooting last September of an unarmed driver at a gas station after the officer stopped him for a seat-belt violation. But the vast majority of the suspects shot at in South Carolina during the past five years have been armed.

There’s video of that gas station shooting here.

Jeff Stein provides more stories from North Charleston at Salon. Here’s just one:

After going through the drive-through at a Kentucky Fried Chicken, Robert Wayne Bishop drove down Rivers Avenue in North Charleston before being pulled over. The officer told Bishop that “he was stopped randomly because he was driving through a high drug trafficking area,” according to federal court documents, and was ordered out of the vehicle.

Bishop was then pushed “face-first” onto the pavement, had the officer’s knees pushed into his neck and was dragged by his feet, according to records submitted by Bishop’s attorney.

“Another North Charleston Police Officer, Daniele, arrived on the scene with his canine and allowed the dog to ‘nip’ at Plaintiff, who sat in the road while handcuffed and bleeding from his nose and face,” the lawsuit states.

“As a result of the force … Plaintiff suffered a broken nose, a broken tooth, and a lacerated lip, all of which required surgery.”

The police officer had a different memory of the events, telling officials instead that Bishop had resisted arrest.

It has been a few years, but I have worked and stayed in North Charleston. Passing a shopping center on Rivers Avenue once, I watched as a couple of squad cars in the other lane emptied out, and all the officers immediately drew weapons on a black man standing in front of what might have been a liquor store. Never heard how that worked out.

Bringing back the nightmares
by Tom Sullivan

Matthew Yglesias yesterday reminded us of how just a dozen short years ago Donald Rumsfeld took time out from overseeing Moe, Larry, and Curly in Baghdad to send this memo to Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith. Rummy had a few extra things he needed Doug to clean up for him:

The first time I recall seeing Feith’s name was in a Salon expose a year later on the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. Feith, described as “a case study in how not to run a large organization,” and OSP stovepiped raw intelligence to Vice President Dick Cheney’s office for use in building a public case for the Iraq invasion. Gen. Tommy Franks was less kind in his assessment of Feith.

Where are they now? Still waiting for the “sweets and flowers,” are they?

The Goldilocks question
by Tom Sullivan

The phrase “big government” scrolled across the screen again the other day and got me thinking about how effectively the right has been in programming Americans to believe that any government at all is the ever-execrable big government of the GOP’s daily rantings. A little over a year ago, Gallup reported that 72 percent of Americans believe big government is a greater threat than big business or big labor.

Yet, writing at the Daily Beast, Matt Lewis warned fellow conservatives that big businesses that put profit margins ahead of principle are at best strange bedfellows for the right. He warns, it’s best not to trust anyone who’s trying to sell you something:

I think it’s time that social conservatives also realize that big business isn’t their friend, either. My theory is that there are essentially two groups of people you have to be wary of: big government and big business. Conservatives have typically obsessed over the former, while attempting to co-opt the latter.

When Ronald Reagan declared that government is the problem he might as well have delivered the message on stone tablets from Mount Sinai. Those who beatified Saint Ronnie use the phrase big government as if there is no other kind. Thus, when conservatives control the reins of power, they begin obsessively dismantling the America built by those who came before them. So obsessively, in fact, that it is fair to ask how they will know when they are done. When is it time to put down the sledge hammers?

I like to pose the Goldilocks question:

How much government is too big, how much government is too small, and how much government is just right?

For the Scott Walkers and the Sam Brownbacks and the Pat McCrorys and the John Kasichs and the Ricks Snyder and Scott, this is not a trivial question. Since a “right-sized” government does not seem to exist in their universe, these are questions the right seems completely unprepared to address. Asking the question generally leaves them with their mouths hanging open.

Originalists among the T-Party typically fall back on Article 1, Section 8 enumerated powers in the Constitution. Of course, there is no Air Force in there — it’s neither an Army nor a Navy. Therefore, no satellites, no telecommunications, no GPS. (Sorry, fishermen.) No system of lake, river, coastal, and aeronautical aids to navigation. They’re not exactly military, nor law enforcement, nor commerce — and there’s not really a market for trade in buoys, range markers, lighthouses, radio beacons, and air traffic control. No interstate highway system in Article 1, Section 8 either.

We ought to demand that our friends on the right define what their anti-big-government utopia looks like. Paint us a picture. Compare and contrast the life we live today with the one you promise your policies will provide. How about you start, Sam Brownback?

If you believe the lives we live right now are manacled by big, bad government, what would you demolish? What should go away? How much smaller should the military be? Is half a million installations worldwide too big? Is nearly 900 overseas bases too big? Would the Founders have considered that big government? Is Social Security big government? What’s your plan for demolishing it? Do you propose privatizing the interstate highways? Should there be tolls on all of them?

And no, no more abstract blather about more freedom and more choices and fewer taxes. Paint us a picture. Describe for us, in detail, what your small-government utopia will look like in day-to-day, physical terms. Lowly fiction writers can do that.

How much government is too big, how much government is too small, and how much government is just right?

That voodoo that you do so well
by Tom Sullivan

It was voodoo economics then. It’s voodoo economics now. Conservative governors are finding out that George H.W. Bush was right about trickle-down economics as early as the 1980 Republican primaries. That hasn’t stopped generations of Republican lawmakers from pursuing the policy over and over, trying to make it work. (There’s an old saw about that, as I recall.) Plus, there’s got to be a pony in there somewhere.

The Century Foundation’s Amy Dean, writing for Aljazeera, describes the hangover Republican governors have from drinking all that tea. Those tax cuts for the wealthy haven’t performed as advertised:

In Kansas, Brownback lowered tax rates for top earners by 26 percent. Now the state faces a $334 million budget deficit. Kansas’ public services are so emaciated that the State Supreme Court ruled the funding of the school system unconstitutional. Economic growth has stalled and the state’s employment growth currently ranks 34th in the nation.

[snip]

Wisconsin is experiencing similar woes from supply-side tax cuts and union busting. In 2013 the Federal Reserve ranked Wisconsin 49th in economic outlook and 44th in private-sector job growth. Wages fell 2.2 percent that year. Wisconsin is now raiding public employees’ retirement funds to make up for a budgetary shortfall of nearly $280 million. By contrast, neighboring Minnesota raised taxes on top earners in 2013 and now has one of the fastest growing economies in the nation. The state raised its minimum wage and balanced its budget without resorting to financial accounting games.

What Republican governors have resorted to is raising taxes on the middle class through consumption taxes and raiding state pension funds. Will voters remember come election time?

Not likely, writes Paul Krugman in his Monday New York Times column. Voters have notoriously short memories, and tend to judge a government’s economic policies not over the long haul, but perhaps only over the two quarters leading up to the election:

This is, if you think about it, a distressing result, because it says that there is little or no political reward for good policy. A nation’s leaders may do an excellent job of economic stewardship for four or five years yet get booted out because of weakness in the last two quarters before the election. In fact, the evidence suggests that the politically smart thing might well be to impose a pointless depression on your country for much of your time in office, solely to leave room for a roaring recovery just before voters go to the polls.

Please, don’t give these guys any more clever ideas.