The Voice of Liberalism from Main Street, not Hollywood Boulevard
Monday, November 21, 2011
American Exceptionalism, Indeed
As of 4:00 p.m. Eastern time, it appears as though I was wrong. I had believed Democrats would on the debt supercommittee would cave sufficiently that the GOP would get, as John Boehner famously said about the debt ceiling agreement, 98% of what they want.
But not wrong about everything, unfortunately. No one has been killed, yet, in reaction to the Occupy Wall Street protests. But I wrote yesterday, seemingly unfairly comparing law the approach of U.S. law enforcement to that abroad
Throughout the nation mayors are frightened by other Americans, taking their cue from the eerily-named Department of Homeland Security, and projecting a show of force which spurred violence in Tahrir Square and Tianamen Square.
They could have taken the guarantee of free speech; freedom of religion; equal protection of the law; or (sarcasm alert) the right to bear arms to protect the nation in the absence of a standing military. Or, as is normally the case, the right peacefully to assemble. But, no. According to Gawker
Two people were killed in Cairo and Alexandria this weekend as Egyptian activists took the streets to protest the military's attempts to maintain its grip on power. And guess how the state is justifying its deadly crackdown.
"We saw the firm stance the US took against OWS people & the German govt against green protesters to secure the state," an Egyptian state television anchor said yesterday (as translated by the indispensable Sultan Sooud al Qassemi).
He wasn't kidding. No, the 12th wealthiest man in the U.S.A. was dead serious when he said of the individuals huddled together against weather in Zuccotti Park
It’s fun and it’s cathartic... it’s entertaining to go and blame people. ... It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp.
This also apparently is Mayor Bloomberg's idea of fun, New York City police officers in riot gear huddled together to protect Chase Bank:
mind-boggling that Bloomberg still hypes the canard that the banks were forced to reap enormous profits from toxic securities. It is an embarrassing, dishonest position when the record of banker fraud in creating the housing bubble is so well documented in Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuits. Is Bloomberg unaware that the major banks have agreed to pay hefty fines in a meager compensation for their schemes? That he blames the victims of the securitization swindles and then orders the arrest of those who dare speak the truth is a tribute to his belief in the enduring power of the big lie.
Throughout the nation mayors are frightened by other Americans, taking their cue from the eerily-named Department of Homeland Security, and projecting a show of force which spurred violence in Tahrir Square and Tianamen Square. And first in line in the Paranoia Parade is the Big Apple.
Think Progress, the website of the Center for American Progress, reports
During a town hall meeting in Ottumwa, Iowa Friday afternoon, Rick Santorum argued that Americans receive too many government benefits and ought to “suffer” in the Christian tradition. If “you’re lower income, you can qualify for Medicaid, you can qualify for food stamps, you can qualify for housing assistance,” Santorum complained, before adding, “suffering is part of life and it’s not a bad thing, it is an essential thing in life.”
CAP notes that many states, even since June, have cut benefits or increased eligibility requirements, or have added provider taxes or provider rate restrictions. Taking a broader view (as represented pictorially by Business Insider), the Senator ought to know that we now have the lowest percentage of citizens with the jobs since the 1980s while corporate profits are at their highest point in the past 64 years, save for a moment in 1987 before the recession hit (charts, from the St. Louis Fed, below).
In constant dollars, since 1990 (chart, whose image is from G. William Domhoff, UC, Santa Cruz, below), the pay of chief economic officers has risen 298.2%, corporate profits have gone up 106.7%, production workers' pay has risen 4.3%, and the federal minimum wage has declined 4.3%.
From 1972 to 2008, average hourly earnings in real terms declined 7.67% (chart,from Bureau of Labor Statistics, below).
According to a filing with the Federal Election Commission, Santorum made at least $974,000 ($293,153 as a commentator for GOP TV) last year, and Digby observes
Now I know that poor Rick is hanging on the ragged edge of the 1%, but I'm still going to call anyone who earns almost a millions dollars in one year (on Wingnut welfare no less) a very, very lucky fellow who really shouldn't be telling people who qualify for food stamps that suffering is part of life.
On November 9, Salon's Steve Kornacki noted that Jerry Sandusky is a registered Republican, Joe Paterno gave a nominating speech for George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988 and made a campaign appearance for George W. Bush in 2004, and Paterno's son Scott was a (unsuccessful) a Republican nominee for the U.S. House of Representatives in central Pennsylvania in 2004.
Kornacki pointed out that Rush Limbaugh stated that the Times Square bomber was a registered Democrat. Still, Kornacki acknowledged "there’s no link between partisan identification and the propensity to commit child sex abuse" and noted the criticism from a National Review blogger that the attempt to draw a connection is “puerile and an insult to children” and “cheaply partisan." While expressing some regret at his post, Kornacki explained "My only intent was to demonstrate how easy it is to manufacture some sort of completely fake, inflammatory, partisan connection to a horrible story that has nothing to do with politics — something we’ve all seen happen plenty of times before."
And it has happened again- not specifically partisan, but ideological with, arguably, partisan overtones. During the Meet The Press (transcript, here) roundtable last Sunday, The New York Times' David Brooks contended
I don't think it was just a Penn State problem. You know, you spend 30 or 40 years muddying the moral waters here. We have lost our clear sense of what evil is, what sin is; and so, when people see things like that, they don't have categories to put it into. They vaguely know it's wrong, but they've been raised in a morality that says, "If it feels all right for you, it's probably OK." And so that waters everything down. The second thing is a lot of the judgment is based on the supposition that if we were there, we would have intervened.
No, no. We don't know how David Brooks was raised but for the vast majority of us, there is no ambiguity. Molesting a child is not "probably OK." In fact, it does not "feel all right." People may disagree as to whether cheating on income tax or misleading an employer is a sin or evil; there is no one arguing that what coach Jerry Sandusky is alleged to have done with children, met by passivity by college football legend Joe Paterno, is unmitigated evil.
It does have something to do with power, privilege, and college athletics. But it has nothing to do with moral relativism or the 60s or permissiveness. But if Steve Kornacki can concede that his post is "one that if I had to do over, I probably wouldn’t put up, given the misunderstandings it has caused," David Brooks ought to acknowledge that a perch at the most prestigious news organ in the world is not a license for nonsensical, if veiled, accusations.
The Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, dubbed the "supercommittee," is due to report by next Wednesday and it is time to check in on the latest effort by Republican leader Rush Limbaugh to deceive his audience. On Wednesday, Limbaugh claimed
All the while, this is being presented as, "The Democrats are eager, willing, ready to compromise; but these rascally Republicans, they are fighting over tax increases! They don't want tax increases, they don't want the rich to pay their fair share, they don't want any more money coming in to Washington." Never mind the fact that the Republicans have proposed all kinds of tax reform. They have proposed alternatives to the Bush tax cuts being extended. They have proposed tax rate reductions that have been scored as increases, total increases in revenue to the Treasury. All rejected. But that isn't being reported.
What's being reported is, "The Republicans are being obstinate! They will not deal, they won't talk, they won't raise taxes." The real question is raise revenue. The Republicans have all kinds of proposals that they have put forth involving tax reform that would raise revenue. All of them have been rejected. Paul Ryan was even on Fox this morning saying this and pointing it out. A Fox reporter said, "Well, aren't the Republicans...?" I was struck. I was driving in and I was listening to Fox on the radio, and the Fox reporter (I don't know who it was, 'cause I wasn't watching so I couldn't tell who the voice belonged to), asked the question, "Well, aren't the Republicans gonna propose anything?" and Paul Ryan said, "What do you mean? We proposed things. We detailed the various proposals that they put forth and have been rejected." Nobody knows about it, hasn't been reported.
Obsessed with the committee's charge to reduce the debt by at least $1.2 trillion over the next decade, Democrats have, The Washington Post reported, "signaled a willingness to cut spending by $876 billion, including $225 billion from Medicare and $50 billion from Medicaid, these officials said, and raise tax revenue by $400 billion, far less than they had earlier demanded." Meanwhile, Republicans, whom Rush says," have all kinds of proposals that they have put forth involving tax reform that would raise revenue," have put forward... one.
Early this month, Senator Pat Toomey, former head of the Club for Greed, proposed a plan which would lower the top tax rate for individuals from 35% to 28% while cutting spending by $700 billion and increasing revenue by $500 billlion in new revenue by closing tax loopholes and reducing tax deductions. Contrary to Limbaugh's claim of "proposed tax rate reductions that have been scored as increases," Toomey's plan has not been scored but a similar plan has been scored by the Joint Committee on Taxation and Brian Beutler explains it
is almost as dramatic. It would make current policy permanent and then broaden the base sufficiently to pay for cutting all tax rates by roughly 15% from the 2011/12 rates (the top rate would be cut to 30%), with $600 billion left over. This proposal would cost almost as much - $3.0 trillion over ten years.
This similar proposal gives a sense of how dramatically Toomey’s proposal would have to cut deductions for the middle class. In order to raise $3.0 trillion, it would:
1. Reduce the personal and dependent exemptions ($3,800 per taxpayer and for each dependent) by 75%.
2. Reduce all itemized deductions, including the deductions for home mortgage interest, charitable contributions, and state and local taxes, by 75%.
3. Reduce certain above-the-line deductions by 75%.
4. Reduce all personal credits except the EITC, including the child tax credit, college tuition credits, and credits for retirement savings, by 75%.
Meeting Senator Toomey’s requirement of a top rate of 28% would require even more dramatic cuts to tax expenditures than those listed above. He has indicated that he is not open to raising taxes on capital income, including deductions for retirement savings and the reduced rates on capital gains and dividends, which generally benefit high-income taxpayers. This means that the only way to make the numbers add up is essentially to eliminate all of the deductions and credits listed above immediately with no transition, or to enact the tax expenditure cuts above and dramatically curtail the exclusion for employer-provided health insurance.
In fairness, when Limbaugh referred to "all kinds of plan, that raise revenue," he might have been thinking also of the proposal of Texas Representative Jeb Hensarling, like Toomey a member of the supercommittee. But as with the Pennsylvanian's scheme, that of Hensarling would extend the Bush-era tax cuts (video below), notwithstanding Rush's claim of "alternatives to the Bush tax cuts being extended." And the Texan's proposal wouldn't even raise net revenue, relying instead on the supply-side genie. Beutler notes
“We have gone as far as we feel we can go,” Hensarling said. “We put $250 billion of what is known as static revenue on the table, but only if we can bring down rates [but] any penny of increased static revenue is a step in the wrong direction. We can only balance that with pro-growth reform and frankly the Democrats have never agreed to that…. if we can’t get any type of reforms in health care, which has helped drive the nation towards insolvency, then, no, there’s no reason to frankly put any static revenues on the table.”
When Hensarling says “static,” he means revenue that will actually, predictably come into the Treasury. Republicans claim in a Laffer-ite way that their preferred tax policy will create enough economic growth to raise revenues even if the math says it won’t. Democrats reject that kind of analysis.
Well, of course they do. As Bruce Bartlett, domestic policy adviser to the late President Ronald(6) Wilson(6) Reagan(6) detailed, "no serious Republican economist has ever said that a tax rate reduction would recoup more than about a third of the static revenue loss." And that would be Republican economists, anxious to demonstrate that tax cuts don't reduce tax revenues.
Contributing to GOP obstinacy is Hensarling's threat to modify the "trigger" to be automatically pulled if the committee does not come to an agreement. Part of the Budget Control Act of 2011, it is to include cuts in defense equal in cuts to discretionary domestic spending, but Hensarling is stoking fear about the danger in cutting the $700 billion defense budget.
Democrats- foolishly- have agreed to undermine the widely popular social safety net. In return, Republicans have agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts, cut domestic spending, and increase the tax burden on the middle class.
And so it goes in the world of Republican "compromise."
Now that Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain all have had their fifteen minutes of fame, Newt Gingrich is settling in as the main rival to Mitt Romney.
More earthbound than the wild-eyed Bachmann and more substantive than Perry or Cain (analogous to saying Richard Dawkins is more religious than the late Madalyn Murray O'Hair), Gingrich is more dishonest and narcissistic than
Romney but appears to be ideologically akin to the former Massachusetts governor. In May, the former Speaker characterized the Paul Ryan Medicare destruction plan as "too big a jump" and remarked
What you want to have is a system where people voluntarily migrate to better outcomes, better solutions, better options, not one where you suddenly impose it. I am against Obamacare imposing radical change, and I would be against a conservative imposing radical change.
Gingrich took a little heat from ultra-conservatives for his comments, not because he wanted Medicare to bleed to death but because any criticism, implied or otherwise, of any aspect of the far-right worldview is off limits. But the thrice-married Gingrich had proposed a pretty slick way of irredeemably weakening Medicare, and Mitt Romney seems to have been listening. An Arizona Republic columnist recently opined
Mitt Romney recently stepped more bravely into the entitlement-reform minefield. He basically endorsed Congressman Paul Ryan's plan to transform Medicare from a program that pays for the medical bills of seniors to one that gives them financial support to purchase health insurance.
This is not as radical of a reform as depicted by opponents.
Seniors wouldn't be left to the ravages of predatory private insurance companies. The government would sponsor a purchasing pool for seniors. All insurers participating would have to meet benefit requirements and accept all enrollees at the same price without medical underwriting.
Actually it is fairly radical- and politically cagey, as was Gingrich's approach. Even if insurers were required to accept everyone regardless of medical condition, the healthiest portions of the elderly population would migrate to the private (non-Medicare) plans. The burden on the Medicare system would grow as the least healthy of old people would opt for that program. Medical insurance for the elderly no longer would be seen as an earned benefit, but as a subsidy for the most needy, akin to welfare. The most needy would be disproportionately poor, reinforcing the notion.
Allotments for Medicare would be reduced as the GOP continues its push to make the Bush tax cuts permanent with the intention of drowning government in the bathtub. While health care costs continue to rise, Medicare costs would grow even faster, giving conservatives and the mainstream media fodder to argue still that Medicare- rather than health care generally- is driving up health care costs to unsustainable levels.
Newt Gingrich is not likely to be the GOP presidential nominee and probably wouldn't win a general election against Barack Obama. But either he or Mitt Romney will be the Repub standard-bearer and both know how to package a radical idea as mainstream.
For a paragraph and a half, 13 to 15 sentences, Rush Limbaugh was getting it right. He was right to be annoyed because Chelsea Clinton was hired as a full-time special correspondent for NBC News. Limbaugh commented
Okay, Brian Williams: "I can't wait to hear Chelsea's voice and her viewpoint." Viewpoint? I -- I -- I didn't think as a "down the middle" expert journalist, she was supposed to have a viewpoint. Do you realize, folks... Howard Cosell talked about this in the realm of sports: "The jockocracy." He spoke about all the struggling, hardworking sportscasters, wannabes working in the small markets trying to work their way up to the top of the ladder, only to find that jocks -- when they retired -- with no broadcast experience whatsoever, were put in those positions; and here we have Brian Williams. Do you know how many journalists are out there? They've followed all the rules. They've been working hard to try to destroy somebody in the market they live.
That's number one: You do a profile on somebody destroy 'em or put 'em out of business or what have you, write a profile that just ruins 'em. People are working hard to get hired, and then they go hire somebody that's never done it before, at the highest level! The NBC Nightly News. Somebody who has never granted an interview! They don't know what she sounds like. They're never heard her voice. That's why Brian Williams said, "I can't wait to hear her voice." Nobody's ever heard it. She's never granted an interview.
Limbaugh even favorably alluded to the late liberal Democrat Howard Cosell (a liberal, clearly; whether registered as a Democrat, unknown here, but highly likely), thus suggesting that hiring the unqualified is a problem of long-standing in the world of sports. Limbaugh even avoided the temptation of identifying the decision to hire Al Sharpton as a host at MSNBC as a prime example of individuals with little or no broadcast experience given a prime appointment.
But then Rush went stupid- or, more likely dishonest, given that he's far less concerned with upholding the principle of meritocracy than he is with exuding gross partisanship. Continuing, he claimed
I told you yesterday what this is all about. This is simply the communications arm of the Democrat Party (which is NBC and the media) preparing Chelsea to get her some television experience. You need television to get anywhere in politics. You have to be good on television to get anywhere, and this is simply the preparatory period for her Chelsea Clinton to eventually run for the Senate in New York at some point or whatever state that they think she
can move to and win that will allow that, like New York does.
That's clearly what's happening here.
Oh, dear. Rush Limbaugh was so close to making sense and then it slipped out of his hands.
Glenn Greenwald pulls us back to reality, noting that NBC in August, 2009 hired Jenna Hager, daughter of George W. Bush, as a reporter for the Today show. And just this month, MSNBC announced that Meghan McCain, daughter of John S., has signed on as an MSNBC contributor.
We are awaiting word from Rush as to why these two individuals have decided to join the communications arm of the Democratic Party.
Certainly, Mrs. Hager, Ms. Clinton, and Miss McCain were hired in part because of they would entice the curious to watch NBC or MSNBC. Yet, Greenwald, noting the network's nod to monarchy, sarcastically explains
We all owe our gratitude to NBC News for single-handedly correcting the shameful, long-standing exclusion from our media discourse of the views of young, journalistically accomplished heirs and heiresses to political power and great fortune; it is long overdue that former NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller, son of the CEO and Chairman of Chevron, finally be joined by the next generation.
Someone explain to Rush Limbaugh: that Fox News exists to advance the cause of a political party does not mean that legitimate news networks do so, also.
