Hullabaloo

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

 
Killing them over there so we don't have to kill them over here

by digby

Greenwald makes an important point today which I had also been thinking is curiously missing from the currently debate:

Today’s defense of President Obama from Andrew Sullivan is devoted to refuting Conor Friedersdorf’s criticism of Obama’s drone program. Says Sullivan:

What frustrates me about Conor’s position – and Greenwald’s as well – is that it kind of assumes 9/11 didn’t happen or couldn’t happen again, and dismisses far too glibly the president’s actual responsibility as commander-in-chief to counter these acts of mass terror.

This is exactly backward. I absolutely believe that another 9/11 is possible. And the reason I believe it’s so possible is that people like Andrew Sullivan — and George Packer — have spent the last decade publicly cheering for virtually every act of American violence brought to the Muslim world, and they continue to do so (now more than ever under Obama). Far from believing that another 9/11 can’t happen, I’m amazed that it hasn’t already, and am quite confident that at some point it will. How could any rational person expect their government to spend a full decade (and counting) invading, droning, cluster-bombing, occupying, detaining without charges, and indiscriminately shooting huge numbers of innocent children, women and men in multiple countries and not have its victims and their compatriots be increasingly eager to return the violence?

During the Bush administration this was the lefty utilitarian argument. Sure, we talked a lot about the immorality of invading a country which didn't threaten us and the horror of harming its innocent civilians based upon a lie. Then there was the illegality and the precedent setting and the usurpation of international law. But there was also this argument and it was persuasive, I think, to a whole lot of people.

Sure, the old "we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" was adopted by many. But I think the other argument, which was "we are creating more and more terrorists with these indecent acts and making ourselves less safe" made equal "common sense" to many Americans. And it's completely dropped out of the dialog --- for obvious reasons. The only people making that argument during the Bush years were liberals and today the only liberals who are prepared to oppose President Obama's policies are those who disagree on strong moral grounds. The utilitarian argument isn't made by anyone.

But it certainly should be. Warrior leadership is beloved and worshiped in most societies, but the United States is a special case and it needs to be very careful about how it indulges this primitive impulse. It's a global imperial power and therefore provides a convenient target for all the world's discontents (and not unjustifiably.) Its leadership has a responsibility to its people -- us -- to not create more enemies than already exist and to go to great lengths not to further provoke the already provoked.

A great nation would not delude itself into believing that it can kill its way to security. And that's what this is --- a violent version of security theater where we all feel soothed that the president is "taking out", one by one, all the foreigners who want to hurt us. And it's as ridiculous today as it was five years ago. Killing individuals, some bad I'm sure, along with innocents and lowly hangers-on cannot fix this problem. Indeed,as Glenn pointed out, it's exacerbating it.

It was suggested to me the other day in an email that this is being done because the administration knows the country will lose its mind and become an authoritarian nightmare if we have another terrorist attack and so they have no choice. But I think there's an excellent chance that the myopic total reliance on this strategy will make that inevitable. Can it be that we have seriously come to believe that our flying robots and satellite surveillance make it possible to kill them all over there so they can't kill us here? If that's the case we are all in grave danger.


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digby 6/12/2012 06:00:00 PM |

 
Pay equity: the bosses know exactly what they're doing

by digby

Remember last week when Republicans tanked the Paycheck Fairness Act? The conservatives gave lots of reasons, from the specious claim that motherhood accounts for the differences to the absurd notion that women don't want more money (After I wrote about it, my twitter feed went nuts for a while with conservatives insisting that the bill was all about paying uneducated women more money than men with better educations --- obviously a talking point from somewhere.)

Anyway, today we have this:

Female physician researchers make less money than their male counterparts, researchers found.

Among recipients of National Institutes of Health (NIH) career development awards, the average reported annual salary was $167,669 for women and $200,433 for men, according to Reshma Jagsi, MD, DPhil, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and colleagues.

Even after adjustment for differences in specialty, academic rank, leadership positions, publications, and research time, there remained an absolute difference of $13,399 per year between the sexes (P=0.001), the researchers reported in the June 13 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study, which is consistent with a previous study of life sciences researchers, "provides evidence that gender differences in compensation continue to exist in academic medicine, even among a select cohort of physician researchers whose job content is far more similar than in cohorts previously studied, and even after controlling extensively for specialization and productivity," they wrote.

They controlled for everything including parenthood and there was still a discrepancy. The only way to account for it was bias or some unknown factor (like women turning down raises?)

Our culture both celebrates money and makes salaries the biggest secret in the workplace. I knew much more about my co-worker's sex lives than I ever did about their incomes. It's the one great taboo --- talking about your salary can even get you fired in some places.

As I've mentioned before, it's considered a truism among many male executives that you don't have to pay women the same as men because they're happy to take status (titles and offices) over salary. It's not true, it's just that nobody knows what anyone else is making so women don't know they're being bought off with something that costs the company nothing --- and keeps them underpaid and endowed with less power because of it. (They are often laughed at by the bosses for being such fools, I'm sorry to say.)

Underpaying women is not always a case of subconscious or "institutional" bias. Often it's a conscious decision to pay them less because they know they can get away with it. That's why we need the Lily Ledbetter act and the Paycheck Fairness Act. You won't change these practices without giving women the tools they need to fight for equal pay for equal work.


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digby 6/12/2012 04:30:00 PM |

 
Changing the narrative

by David Atkins

Carville and Greenberg have done a few focus groups, and the conclusion is obvious: voters don't believe that a recovery is actually happening, and messaging centered on economic improvements by the Obama Administration falls flat:

What is clear from this fresh look at public consciousness on the economy is how difficult this period has been for both non-college-educated and college-educated voters – and how vulnerable the prevailing narratives articulated by national Democratic leaders are.[1] We will face an impossible headwind in November if we do not move to a new narrative, one that contextualizes the recovery but, more importantly, focuses on what we will do to make a better future for the middle class.

It is elites who are creating a conventional wisdom that an incumbent president must run on his economic performance – and therefore must convince voters that things are moving in the right direction. They are wrong, and that will fail. The voters are very sophisticated about the character of the economy; they know who is mainly responsible for what went wrong and they are hungry to hear the President talk about the future. They know we are in a new normal where life is a struggle – and convincing them that things are good enough for those who have found jobs is a fool’s errand. They want to know the plans for making things better in a serious way – not just focused on finishing up the work of the recovery.

We are losing these voters on the economy, but holding on because Romney is very vulnerable. They do not trust him because of who he is for and because he’s out of touch with ordinary people; he is vulnerable on the Ryan budget and its impact on people; he is vulnerable on the choices over taxes. But in the current context, it produces a fairly diminished embrace of Obama and the Democrats, the lesser of two evils, without much feeling of hope.

But we underscore the sentiment they expressed in the postcards to the President they wrote at the end of the exercise: overwhelmingly, these voters want to know that he understands the struggle of working families and has plans to make things better.

I found the exact same thing in the few focus groups I've conducted on the subject as well, and polling backs it up. Voters know that George Bush and Wall Street are to blame for the economic downturn. They know that things are bad, the economy is fundamentally broken and that it's not going to get better on its own. But unless Democrats are willing and able to come out and make the case for exactly what went wrong and how they plan to fix it, voters will not return them to power in significant numbers or at all. Progressives will stay home, and moderates will vote for Romney just to shake things up.

Protesting loudly about all the direct action the President has taken won't do much good. The President has done many things: he saved the American auto industry in a very risky political gamble, and he did get a major stimulus passed, inadequate and tax-cut heavy as it was. But he's not getting credit for it partly because it hasn't been enough, partly because it hasn't been visible enough, and partly because he has been unable or unwilling to provide a narrative explaining exactly why the economy is still struggling.

Any good story requires a villain. The Republicans are willing to provide that villain in the form of a spectral combination of deficits, bureaucrats and welfare moochers. It's bullshit, but it will work in the absence of a countervailing narrative.

As Digby has written before, the Obama Administration has been unwilling to provide that counternarrative because 1) it can't afford to upset the Wall Street donor base, and 2) the Administration really believed that the economy would get better over time and that they could run a "morning in America" campaign.

This is not to say that we're doomed to a Romney presidency. As Carville and Greenberg point out, Romney is a very weak candidate. But the inability of the Obama team to craft a coherent reason for the failure of the economy so far and a coherent direct plan for the years ahead is creating major political problem that won't be solved even if jobs numbers do improve over the coming months.


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thereisnospoon 6/12/2012 03:00:00 PM |

 
Getting the government our of our lives, Texas style

by digby

The Texas Republican platform is really something:

We support the definition of marriage as a God-ordained, legal and moral commitment only between a natural man and a natural woman, which is the foundational unit of a healthy society, and we oppose the assault on marriage by judicial activists.

We call on the President and Congress to take immediate action to defend the sanctity of marriage. We are resolute that Congress exercise authority under the United States Constitution, and pass legislation withholding jurisdiction from the Federal Courts in cases involving family law, especially any changes in the definition of marriage.

We further call on Congress to pass and the state legislatures to ratify a marriage amendment declaring that marriage in the United States shall consist of and be recognized only as the union of a natural man and a natural woman. Neither the United States nor any state shall recognize or grant to any unmarried person the legal rights or status of a spouse.

We oppose the recognition of and granting of benefits to people who represent themselves as domestic partners without being legally married...

The primary family unit consists of those related by blood, heterosexual marriage, or adoption. The family is responsible for its own welfare, education, moral training, conduct, and property.

We affirm that the practice of homosexuality tears at the fabric of society and contributes to the breakdown of the family unit. Homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God, recognized by our country's founders, and shared by the majority of Texans.

Homosexuality must not be presented as an acceptable "alternative" lifestyle, in public policy, nor should "family" be redefined to include homosexual "couples." We believe there should be no granting of special legal entitlements or creation of special status for homosexual behavior, regardless of state of origin.

Additionally, we oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith, conviction or belief in traditional values.

Here's the good news:

The party platform, adopted at a convention in Fort Worth, differs from the 2010 platform that would have made it a felony to issue a same-sex marriage license or perform a same-sex wedding.

Oh, and they've softened their previously harsh stance against strip clubs.

Is this two steps forward one step back or one step forward, two steps back? I can't honestly tell.


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digby 6/12/2012 01:45:00 PM |

 
People vs the corporations

by digby

It's interesting that Warren is addressing Mitt Romney, isn't it? I think that shows a lot of confidence. Good for her.


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digby 6/12/2012 12:00:00 PM |

 
Hysterical liberals, ruining everything

by digby

Well hell. It turns out that the Presidency of the United States is not only a mere ceremonial office to which nobody pays attention on domestic policy --- it's powerless when it comes to foreign policy and national security as well.

Kevin Drum read Daniel Klaidman's new book and reports that Obama would have really liked to do things differently than he has on Guantanamo and terrorism trials, but he had no support from the the feckless Democrats so he had no choice:

According to Klaidman, part of the answer is that Obama changed as he learned more about the reality of the fight against al-Qaeda. Another part of the answer is that, like all presidents, he succumbed to institutional and bureaucratic pressure. But for my money, the most telling passage of the book suggests that an equal part of the answer is that he simply never received any serious support from his own party.

Klaidman relates an anecdote about Barbara Boxer and Barbara Mikulski allegedly pitching a fit in the White House over the deal that Rahm struck allowing 45 days notice before a prisoner could be transferred from Guantanamo. The liberal ladies were evidently on the verge of hysteria, shouting "where's your plan, over and over again." Klaidman archly observes:

These were the same representatives who had pilloried the Bush administration for its fear-mongering tactics in the war on terror, but behind the grand doors of the LBJ Room, all politics were local. We're going to get clobbered back home, the Democrats protested.

Justice department officials stood by in dismay, worrying over the fate of our democracy.

Far be if from me to contest this version of events. I wasn't there. But let's review the events of late 2009 and early 2010 starting with this report from Dana Milbank (after the fact):

Emanuel bitterly opposed former White House counsel Greg Craig’s effort to close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year, arguing that it wasn’t politically feasible. Obama overruled Emanuel, the deadline wasn’t met, and Republicans pounced on the president and the Democrats for trying to bring terrorists to U.S. prisons. Likewise, Emanuel fought fiercely against Attorney General Eric Holder’s plan to send Khalid Sheik Mohammed to New York for a trial. Emanuel lost, and the result was another political fiasco.

Keeping that in mind, recall that Rahm made a deal with Republicans for this 45 day notice of transfer from Guantanamo and his poison pill got a vote of 79-19. Now whether he did this to purposefully make it impossible to actually bring any trials to the US or because he genuinely thought this would bring Republicans on board for the whole plan is unknown.

According to the Klaidman book the liberals were livid about this deal because they knew the whole thing was now going to turn into a non-stop shit-storm and they wanted to know just how the administration planned to deal with it. And then they refused to back the poor powerless president, who was left out there all on his own once again. Kevin writes:

[O]ne of the things that made it almost inevitable that Obama would end up caving in on so many of his promises was the fact that Democrats wouldn't help him fight back. In the end, maybe that didn't matter. Maybe public opinion was simply too hardened on these issues. But the plain fact is that if the entire national security apparatus and the opposition party and public opinion and your own party are pretty much all lining up on the same side, there's not much a president can do.

Except, you know, that didn't happen. It didn't happen over and over again:

October 21,2009:

The Senate voted early Friday to reject a Republican effort to prohibit the United States from prosecuting foreign terrorist suspects in civilian courts, handing a victory to President Barack Obama.

By 52-47, senators turned aside a proposal by Sen. Kelly Ayotte (AY-aht), R-N.H., that would have forced such trials to occur before military tribunals or commissions.

November 11, 2009

The Senate rejected a move Thursday to block the Obama administration from using ordinary federal courts to prosecute those alleged to have plotted the Sept. 11 attacks.

On a 54-45 vote, the Senate tabled an amendment from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) that would have left military commissions as the only option for prosecuting Sept. 11 suspects.

All 40 Republicans supported the amendment, along with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and four Democrats: Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.)

Graham said the measure, offered as an amendment to the annual appropriations bill for the Commerce and Justice Departments, was needed to head off what he said were plans by the Obama administration to send Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others allegedly involved in the Sept. 11 plot to trials before civilian courts in the U.S.

Cantwell, later agreed to join the Democrats in a subsequent vote.

Then this in February of 2010:

Democrats, to help the administration push back on Republican attacks, sent Obama a letter Thursday afternoon that endorsed the use of federal criminal courts. "Our system of justice is strong enough to prosecute the people who have attacked us," wrote Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.) and Senate Intelligence Chairman Dianne Feinstein (Calif.).

I could go on. It's just not the case that the president was hamstrung by the weak sister Dems who refused to help him. They did. They went out on a very weak limb to help him despite the fact that Rahm was in there making "deals" that ensured that even if they won, they had already lost.

I don't doubt this was always going to be hard, especially once Huckleberry Graham and his crew got out there and started fearmongering. (Graham, you'll recall, was supposed to be the administration's great "partner" during this period on Guantanamo and climate change.) And maybe there was never any way to get this done, politically. Americans have been brainwashed into believing that terrorists are supernatural villains unlike any enemy the world has ever known. But a majority of Senate Democrats, including the hysterical, parochial liberals, backed their president on this when it came time to vote, every step of the way.

Someday maybe Greg Craig will will write a memoir and we'll get the other side of this story.


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digby 6/12/2012 10:30:00 AM |

 
The Bronx Is America

by tristero

Bloomberg's proposed ban on super-size sodas strikes me as on the Big Brothery side - which Bloomberg has a propensity for, as those who protested the Republican Convention will recall. I think heavy taxes make more sense.

Then again, when i read that 70% of the Bronx is overweight and 1 in 3 Bronx residents is obese, Bloomberg's proposal becomes a bit more comprehensible. Education and access to better food isn't helping nearly enough as anyone would like.

I'd still like to see taxes instead. But at this point, it's veering close to a public health emergency. I can't condemn Bloomberg's proposal, but if it ends up morphing into a tax instead, I'd be much happier.


Special note: Whenever I blog about this, the comments become peppered with food industry representatives masquerading either as lovers of freedom or experts on nutrition and biology. They deflect the conversation with ad hominems, non-sequiturs and irrelevancies and try to evade the basic issue.

That issue is very simple and it is not about freedom. It is about the incontrovertible fact that the modern food industries cynically and systematically manipulate basic human instincts in order to maximize profits. They do not, with any seriousness or consistency, take enough account of the effects that their often-dangerous products have on the health of the average American (and the environment).

The only issue of substance here is how to change the situation, to somehow get the companies to stop making money when they provide products - such as super-sized sodas - that injure their fellow Americans. This is not about the "freedom" to harm yourself. This is about industries exploiting deep basic desires that override both willpower and freedom of choice. No one who's looked at this seriously argues the basic thrust of the science, that massive quantities of sugar and other empty calories are deeply unhealthy for humans The only issue, a very difficult issue, is how to stop the companies from providing Americans so many dangerous - and dangerously ubiquitous- food choices.
tristero 6/12/2012 09:00:00 AM |

 
Someone is going to take the blame for this

by David Atkins

You think voters are angry? I do, and here's why:

The recent economic crisis left the median American family in 2010 with no more wealth than in the early 1990s, erasing almost two decades of accumulated prosperity, the Federal Reserve said Monday.

A hypothetical family richer than half the nation’s families and poorer than the other half had a net worth of $77,300 in 2010, compared with $126,400 in 2007, the Fed said. The crash of housing prices directly accounted for three-quarters of the loss.

Families’ income also continued to decline, a trend that predated the crisis but accelerated over the same period. Median family income fell to $45,800 in 2010 from $49,600 in 2007. All figures were adjusted for inflation.

The new data comes from the Fed’s much-anticipated release on Monday of its Survey of Consumer Finances, a report issued every three years that is one of the broadest and deepest sources of information about the financial health of American families.

While the numbers are already 18 months old, the survey illuminates problems that continue to slow the pace of the economic recovery. The Fed found that middle-class families had sustained the largest percentage losses in both wealth and income during the crisis, limiting their ability and willingness to spend.

Surprise, surprise, that's what happens when you trade real wage growth for illusory asset growth. Bubbles burst, and then all of that "wealth" disappears.

Beyond that, this sort of thing can't happen without major voter outrage. They're going to take it out on someone. Someone will be to blame.

And if it's not going to be where it belongs on the top 1%, it'll be on other people. Like people who have the audacity to receive a decent pension.

There's an myth in American politics that all a president needs to win is optimism. Reagan is often cited as a prime example. But Reagan didn't just win with optimism. He also won with a big dose of racism, lies about Jimmy Carter, and a radical ideology blaming government for everything wrong with the country. When times are tough, people will seek out a villain. If they're not pointed in the right direction, they'll find one in the wrong direction.

I suppose I should stop writing now before I confirm Godwin's Law.


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thereisnospoon 6/12/2012 07:30:00 AM |

Monday, June 11, 2012

 
Chart 'o the day

by digby

From the latest Federal Reserve triennial look at family income and wealth:

Via Kevin Drum, who also points this surprising piece of information:

Despite these setbacks, consumers have continued to spend surprising amounts of money in recent years, helping to keep the economy growing at a modest pace. The survey underscores where the money is coming from: Americans are saving less for future needs and making little progress in repaying debts.

....The report highlighted the fact that households had made limited progress in reducing the amount that they owed to lenders. The share of households reporting any debt declined by 2.1 percentage points over the last three years, but 74.9 percent of households still owe something and the median amount of the debt did not change.

I say that's surprising because I honestly assumed that Americans were paying down their debt, which was contributing to the sluggish demand. Not true. Yikes.

(And you realize that the piece which says the poorest Americans gained a little bit in income in the past decade means that they need to be kicking in more in taxes, right? It's only "fair")

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digby 6/11/2012 06:00:00 PM |

 
Rand's wet dream

by digby

He's from the Tea Party and he's come to take his country back:

Dustin Siggins: Thank you for your time. I really enjoyed your interview with Erin Burnett, and how you outlined your positions on spending and taxes. I posted on ityesterday, and was hoping you could expound upon what you said about not jumping up and down when it comes to entitlement reform, and how you instead simply believe it’s fiscal reality.

Sen. Rand Paul: Sure. This is what the “grand bargain” idea was all about. Democrats think working with us on Social Security will bring a compromise. They think we want changes to Social Security and we will agree to bring taxes up. This is wrong-headed. We are not jumping up and down to reform entitlements; we want to fix them because they are broken. The Deficit Commission wanted a “grand bargain,” but the whole concept misses the point.

DS: You also told Burnett that you don’t mind if some wealthy people pay more taxes once loopholes are cut out, etc. Can you explain that a little, please?

Sen. Rand Paul: If you flatten and simplify the code, some will pay more taxes. But in the aggregate, when it comes to the two large pies of the private sector and the government sector, you want the government sector to shrink. So some people will pay more in taxes, but you won’t need as much revenue to come into Washington. With a flatter system with fewer loopholes you won’t have as much money coming into Washington, but with a smaller government people will pay less overall...

If Obama wants re-election, we should make the Bush tax cuts permanent. He is not likely to do that, but (and it’s too late) he could come to us and say “You guys have some good ideas on Social Security, why don’t we sit down together to reform Social Security?” About a year ago he sat down with all of the Republican Senators and the question I got to ask him was related to that: why we don’t gradually raise the age and means-test? Just these changes could save the program for 75 years, or probably forever.

My bill looks to make these kinds of changes, and includes an index linking retirement to longevity. Medicare will have to change the same way as Social Security, but it’s so broken it needs other reforms. My plan institutes some of the same market forces as Paul Ryan’s plans, and gives Americans the Congressional health care plan. I think this latter point is very important, as it’s hard for people to say we are trying to gyp seniors when we are giving them the same health care system Congress has. Everyone already believes Congressmen have such a great system for themselves, and so this take advantage of that.

He says later in the interview that his "Medicare" plan will save a trillion dollars and I assume that's because most people will just have to die a lot younger. That's called "freedom."

Ezra says the Republicans are cleverly changing the terms on Social Security to say they are "fixing" it rather than cutting it, but I honestly don't think there's anything new in that. They have always said they were "fixing" it, "reforming" it and "saving" it. And they can never get a majority to believe them. The ones that do are pathetically gullible and the rest know very well that they are lying.

As for old Rand, he's keeping it real:

He’s actually released a budget that would cut spending so deep you wouldn’t need to raise taxes. But as my colleague Dana Milbank has pointed out, Paul’s plan would:

cut the average Social Security recipient’s benefits by nearly 40 percent, reduce defense spending by nearly $100 billion below a level the Pentagon calls “devastating,” and end the current Medicare program in two years — even for current recipients, according to the Senate Budget Committee staff. It would eliminate the education, energy, housing and commerce departments, decimate homeland security, eviscerate programs for the poor, and give the wealthy a bonanza by reducing tax rates to 17 percent and eliminating taxes on capital gains and dividends.

It's a libertarian wet dream. The good news is that if he can also legalize drugs we can all either stay high so our dystopian hellscape doesn't seem so bad, or we can easily kill ourselves with narcotics. It's not as if there isn't a silver lining.


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digby 6/11/2012 04:30:00 PM |

 
Why is pension envy OK but "class warefare" isn't?

by David Atkins

It's called pension envy: the resentment that non-union employees often feel toward workers with good union pensions and benefits. As the results of the Wisconsin recall and ballot initiatives in San Jose and San Diego show, pension envy is not a phenomenon limited to the right. As a small business owner without unemployment benefits or even much in the way of retirement savings to fall back on should things go south, I myself feel it from time to time. Digby wrote an excellent and lengthy piece earlier today about pension envy and the way the Right has managed to marginalize the union movement in the United States while keeping Americans fighting one another for scraps.

But the puzzling phenomenon in all of this is the fact that pension envy is supposedly widespread, justified and politically acceptable, but resentment of the ludicrously wealthy who have stolen the nation's wealth from its workers is not. Someone who is upset over teachers' vacation and retirement pay should be a hundred times as angry at the ludicrous salaries of Wall Street executives skimming off the corporate profits that should be going to better private sector wages. There are a few probable explanations for it beyond simply the hostile conservative rhetoric that plays well with their base.

The first is that they're not mutually exclusive occurrences. The partisan divide may suggest that people would be either upset by pension envy or by radical income inequality, but not both. But polling on income inequality and the results of recent elections involving public union pensions suggests that there is a lot of both simultaneously. The difference is that few politicians dare to put initiatives on the ballot or pass laws that seriously impact the incomes of the top 1%, and that corporate cash is able to overwhelm union money in most cases where the two are comparably tested. It's also important to remember that unions themselves are not monolithic: many union members are Republicans, and there is a significant divide between public sector and private sector labor. Those factors combined to cause 38% of union households to vote against the recall. There is even some pension envy within the labor movement itself.

Another theory is that there is a special resentment of people who get paid with tax dollars, as opposed to those who are seen as taking money out of the private sector. This one is less persuasive to me: teachers, firefighters are police and respected professions; private sector unions don't have markedly better approval ratings; and Wall Street CEOs face extremely heavy anger that goes beyond their having taken taxpayer bailouts. Still, if the labor movement is to survive, it probably must do a better job of expanding aggressively into the private sector and not be siloed into taxpayer-funded jobs, a situation that will inevitably lead to political demise.

But there's a third explanation that I think is salient as well: regular people have much more everyday contact with public employees than with the super rich. As angry as regular voters are about inequality, most have no idea about the true extent of it. In the old days the Rockefellers and Carnegies would make ostentatious displays of their wealth. Nobles and peasants used to live in close proximity, and the palaces were but a short distance away from the slums. Meanwhile, there were multiple layers of social strata separating the nobility from the working class, including radically different dress styles and linguistic registers.

We don't see as much of that today. The democratization of wealth has meant that the very rich tend to look and act much more similar to the working class than they ever have before. Transportation and communications technology also allows them to paradoxically lead lives more separated from the working class than they ever have before.

What that boils down to is that people rarely knowingly see a member of the top 1%. But they do see teachers, firefighters and police every day. Pension envy is in their faces every day in a way that income inequality usually is not.

I see no way to immediately solve that problem beyond continuing to rhetorically highlight the vast income inequalities in this country, and fixing the campaign finance system that makes politicians so terrified of fighting for the middle class against the interests of the top 1%.


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thereisnospoon 6/11/2012 03:00:00 PM |

 
The Sununu Spin

by digby

I've always loathed this jerk, but he is always one of those guys who is wiling to come right out and defend the indefensible, so you have to give him a sort of credit:

Transcript via Think Progress:

SUNUNU: Let me respond as a taxpayer, not as a representative of the Romney campaign. There are municipalities, there are states where there is flight of population. And as the population goes down, you need fewer teachers. As technology contributes to community security and dealing with issues that firefighters have to deal with, you would hope that you can, as a taxpayer, see the benefits of the efficiency and personnel that you get out of that.

JANSING: But even if there’s movement to the suburbs, teachers and policemen are needed somewhere.

SUNUNU: But I’m going to tell you there are places where just pumping money in to add to the public payroll is not what the taxpayers of this country want.

JANSING: Do you think that taxpayers of this country want to hear fewer firefighters, fewer teachers, fewer police officers, from a strategic standpoint?

SUNUNU: If there’s fewer kids in the classrooms, the taxpayers really do want to hear there will be fewer teachers. [...] You have a lot of places where that is happening. You have a very mobile country now where things are changing. You have cities in this country in which the school population peaked ten, 15 years ago. And, yet the number of teachers that may have maintained has not changed. I think this is a real issue. And people ought to stop jumping on it as a gaffe and understand there’s wisdom in the comment.

This is just utter bullshit, although I'm sure the right wingers will quickly incorporate it into their pack of lies. "Hey, we just think that we should stop hiring all those extra teachers who aren't needed now that the population's going down. And the tea partiers and their friends will nod their heads and agree that they're just trying to cut the fat.

And, by the way, when they're demonizing teachers as lazy parasites feeding off the hard earned dollars of job creators, keep in mind who they are talking about:

In 2007–08, some 76 percent of public school teachers were female, 44 percent were under age 40, and 52 percent had a master’s or higher degree. Compared with public school teachers, a lower percentage of private school teachers were female (74 percent), were under age 40 (39 percent), and had a master’s or higher degree (38 percent).

It's a predominantly female profession. But then I guess I should give Mitt Romney credit because unlike Scott Walker, he went after the predominantly male police and firefighter professions (with whom he apparently has a longstanding beef) as well. I guess that's what counts as feminism in right wing circles.

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digby 6/11/2012 01:30:00 PM |

 
Rooting for the Plutocrats

by digby

I don't follow basketball, so I didn't know the story that Dave Zarin relates here. But I have followed the saga of Los Angeles football, so I'm aware of the sickening taxpayer blackmail by wealthy team owners. It's a truly remarkable insight into the minds of the 1%:

For non-NBA fans, as recently as 2008 the OKC Thunder were the Seattle Supersonics, a team of great tradition, flare and fan support. They were Slick Watts’s headband, Jack Sikma’s perm and Gary Payton’s scowl. They were a beloved team in a basketball town. Then the people of Seattle committed an unpardonable offense in the eyes of David Stern. They loved their team but refused to pay for a new taxpayer funded $300 million arena. Seattle’s citizens voted down referendums, organized meetings and held rallies with the goal of keeping the team housed in a perfectly good building called the KeyArena. Despite a whirlwind of threats, the people of Seattle wouldn’t budge, so Stern made an example of them. Along with Supersonics team owner and Starbucks founder Howard Schultz—who could have paid for his own new arena with latte profits alone—Stern recruited two Oklahoma City–based billionaires, Clay Bennett and Aubrey McClendon, to buy the team and manipulate their forcible extraction from Seattle to OKC.

Stern is a political liberal who has sat on the board of the NAACP. Bennett and McLendon are big Republican moneymen who hobby is funding anti-gay referendums. Yet these three men are united in their addiction to our tax dollars. In Oklahoma City, where rivers of corporate welfare awaited an NBA franchise, Stern, Bennett and McClendon had found their Shangri-La.

Bennett, Stern and McClendon lied repeatedly that they would make every effort to keep the team in Seattle, McClendon however gave the game away in 2007, when he said to the Oklahoma City Journal Record, “We didn’t buy the team to keep it in Seattle, we hoped to come here…. We started to look around and at that time the Sonics were going through some ownership challenges in Seattle. So Clay, very artfully and skillfully, put himself in the middle of those discussions and to the great amazement and surprise to everyone in Seattle, some rednecks from Oklahoma, which we’ve been called, made off with the team.”

While Bennett said all the right things about keeping the Sonics in Seattle, a team executive dinner on September 9, 2006, tells you all you need to know about the man and his motives. On that fine evening, the Sonics management, all held over from the previous ownership regime, all Pacific Northwesters, gathered in Oklahoma to meet the new boss. Bennett made sure they were sent to a top restaurant, and picked up the bill. As the Seattle execs sat down, four plates of a deep fried appetizer were put on the table. After filling their mouths with the crispy goodness, one asked the waitress what this curious dish with a nutty flavor actually was. It was lamb testicles. Bennett laughed at their discomfort and the message was clear: the Sonics could eat his balls. (See Sonicsgate.com for a full accounting of this theft.)

What a lovely group of people. We should all be so thankful they are the ones running the world. What could go wrong?

As Zarin points out, the media will hail the Oklahoma team for its plucky, small town values while excoriating the Miami Heat's big time players who advocated for themselves. We do still hate certain kinds of greed apparently --- the greed of the talented individual. Corporate greed, on the other hand, is the American way.


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digby 6/11/2012 12:00:00 PM |

 
A dazed and confused lame duck

by digby

Dday interviewed Senators Whitehouse, Brown, Cardin and Merkeley at netroots Nation about the lame duck "fiscal cliff" and frankly it sounds like nobody knows what the hell is going to happen. I would urge you to read the whole thing to get a sense of what they're all talking about.

Oddly enough, I am hoping that the biggest proponent of a Grand Bargain in the group is correct:

Cardin said the most likely scenario was an extension of everything, save the payroll tax cut, for a period of time, perhaps six months, while everyone regroups. Clearly there are a bounty of options on order here, ranging from a broad deficit deal that could harm the economy in the near term, to an extension that tries to expand growth while keeping the deficit steady.

It would be nice to put all this behind us, but I'm convinced that short of a total repudiation of the GOP (which can be read as a repudiation of their small government message) anything that happens in the lame duck will be bad. Perversely, it's the crisis atmosphere and lagging economy that's giving these deficit fetishists in both parties the opening they need to accomplish their nefarious goals, so delay is our friend. Who knows where we might be next year at this time? And at least these disaster capitalists won't have made things worse. As long as they insist on doing nothing real to boost the economy, the best we can hope for is that they do nothing at all.

Update: Paul Krugman the optimist:

America’s near-term outlook isn’t quite as dire as Europe’s, but the Federal Reserve’s own forecasts predict low inflation and very high unemployment for years to come — precisely the conditions under which the Fed should be leaping into action to boost the economy. But the Fed won’t move.

What explains this trans-Atlantic paralysis in the face of an ongoing human and economic disaster? Politics is surely part of it — whatever they may say, Fed officials are clearly intimidated by warnings that any expansionary policy will be seen as coming to the rescue of President Obama. So, too, is a mentality that sees economic pain as somehow redeeming, a mentality that a British journalist once dubbed “sado-monetarism.”

Whatever the deep roots of this paralysis, it’s becoming increasingly clear that it will take utter catastrophe to get any real policy action that goes beyond bank bailouts. But don’t despair: at the rate things are going, especially in Europe, utter catastrophe may be just around the corner.

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digby 6/11/2012 10:30:00 AM |

 

"Actually, in reality, work is my life..."

by digby

Last Tuesday night, when we all finally knew that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker had successfully beaten back his recall elections, the first Republican tweet I saw come through my twitter feed was this one:

That's Romney's top Florida campaign advisor.

That tweet was followed by the usual excessive conservative gloating and massive liberal despair as it became clear that Wisconsin was an even bigger loss than anyone had anticipated. And as the days went by, just about everyone declared the end of the union movement in one way or another, offering all manner of criticisms and observations, much of it interesting, a lot of it depressing.

Corey Robin responded by asking liberal critics to try to imagine how hard it is to organize in the workplace, which made me look back at my own career and realize just how difficult it must be, especially in large companies. Corporate life is built around individual competition with workers explicitly being pitted against each other for money, status and recognition. "Productivity" is gained by constantly expecting more for the same money and holding out the possibility that your extra work will be rewarded with entry into the executive suite (or maybe just a raise.) It's almost impossible for me to imagine being able to organize even the most exploited office workers despite the fact that they are all being screwed. People are afraid to lose their jobs, of course, probably more so today than in any recent period. But they are equally afraid to lose their futures, the possibility of advancement, prestige and yes, real money.

I experienced this a little bit in the early days of raised consciousness around sexual harrasment, in the wake of the Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas hearings. (If you watch Mad Men then you have some idea of what it was like for women in offices in the bad old days. If anything, it was even worse during the 70s and 80s, after the sexual revolution.) We had a seriously deranged harasser in a very senior position and one of the office assistants filed a formal complaint. The reaction was was brutal and she ended up quitting over it (amidst lots of whispering about what a bitch she was for being so sensitive.)

What does this have to do with organizing a workplace? Not whole lot except that it was clear from the beginning that there wasn't a bit of solidarity even among the victims beyond some sisterly gossip over drinks during the saga, much of which was later passed on to the bosses. Let's just say that I wouldn't have wanted to try to organize even that workplace, where the common behavior of some of the bosses was disgusting and the workers all clearly and immediately stood to gain by it stopping. It just wasn't in the vocabulary. (Fear of litigation made the difference in the end.)

So where are we really? Rich Yeselson persuasively argues that the problem has been decades in the making as unions slowly but surely lost their power, but also their place in the popular imagination. As fewer and fewer people belonged to unions, they forgot what they were, much less what they were good for.

He writes:

It’s this head scratching perplexity about the very point of unions—not the corporate and rightwing anti-labor rage, which is eternal—that is snuffing unions out like the air. Decline has begot decline in an endless feedback loop—the workers don’t have familial or community links to unions anymore and, thus, do not think unions are, even potentially central to their lives; the middle class professionals and writers aren’t, via the genuine power of a Hoffa or Reuther and their membership, exposed to a culture of union power anymore; and the politicians aren’t nearly as dependent on the money and votes of union members.

He points out that this question of why people don't form unions isn't a new one and relates an anecdote from 30 years ago that echoes the complaint from this correspondent of Josh Marshall's in the wake of the Wisconsin vote:

[I]t is also difficult for me to feel much sympathy or even understand Unions. I received a degree in Finance, Insurance and Real Estate in 1987, and have been in Sales and Marketing for most of the last 25 years in the Tech and CE sector.

I don’t want to demonize School teachers, and I am sure it must be a tougher job than I think. But over the last 10 years, I have taken a full 1 week off for vacation a grand total of 4 times. I take a day here and a day there, but if I am lucky it will work out to 2 weeks per year, usually less. Then there is the ever present e-mail, texts and phone calls that intrude into my evenings and weekends. Teachers get that much time off around Christmas time.

On my Son’s little league team, one of his teammates father was a teacher in the LAUSD. He told me that he wouldn’t know what to do if he had to work in the summertime. Really? I’ve only been doing it for a quarter century. But I do see his point, working has put a bit of a crimp in my life. Especially in the summertime. Actually, in reality, work is my life...

So I think there is a preception that the pay for teachers isn’t great, but not terrible either. But great benefits, a chance for a decent to good retirement, and it seems a bit like, if not a part time job, certainly not a full time job in any sense that I would recognize it. And pretty much limited accountability.

Public Safety Unions I precieve to be much tougher, and stressful jobs. But oh lord, the motherload of great pay, great benefits, high degree of public respect. Retiring at age 50 or earlier seems a little ridiculous though, especially given the gold plated retirement package.

This fellow has a genuine gripe, no doubt about it. Many jobs suck and it sounds as though he is working harder for less money and isn't happy about it. I feel for him. But considering all the reasons why that is, why does he resent those who have secured better working conditions through the unions?

He didn't say explicitly that he's mad because they are paid through taxes and are therefore doing well at his expense, but I'd guess that when you drill down that's part of it. Still, he describes himself as a man of the left so I don't know that this is about government and taxes nd the usual constellation of right wing concerns. More likely, and from the tone of his note, he seems to feel that it's just generally unfair that some people have these secure, humane, well paid jobs and he doesn't. And he's right! Everyone should have them. (And there are quite a few places in the world where they do. Just not here.) So why not see it from that perspective instead of feeling resentment toward those who have managed a better deal? That's the big question everyone's asking themselves, I guess.

We know that it's hard to organize workplaces and we know that most people no longer know what a union is, much less think it can do anything for them. But from where I sit, the real problem is that corporate values have filled the void, with ruthless competition, no job security --- all holding out the false promise that the "best" and "hardest working" will rise to the top. In fact, our whole "exceptional" culture with its fetish for individualism and competition (fed constantly by corporate propaganda) works against the idea that we are in anything together. We don't even have enough of a sense of community anymore to require people not to kill each other when it can be avoided.

Meanwhile, what's really happening is that people's working lives are getting worse and it's enervating and soul destroying. And perhaps the greater the social and economic distance between the 1% and the workers, the less likely the workers, perversely, resent them. Maybe they see them as exotic creatures from some far off land, not even human. (Those lazy schoolteachers, on the other hand, have got it way too good ...)

And I suppose that once you realize you aren't going to make it all the way to the top (and apparently there is no top unless you're Charles and David Koch) you just want to be able to have a life. If you can't even have that then the only thing left is to insure that nobody else does either. It's not the most edifying characteristic of human nature, but it's definitely one of the strongest.

Yeselson winds his piece up with this melancholy observation:

There has never been an advanced capitalist country with as weakened and small a union movement as today’s United States. (There are very few union members in France, for example, but French unions still have the vast majority of the workforce under union contract.) And according to academic evidence cited in Tim Noah’s recent book The Great Divergence, which Nocera uses as the occasion for his column (and which I reviewed in The American Prospect), the decline of the labor movement is one of the primary causes of American income and wealth inequality, particularly among male workers.

If conservative politicians and their wealthy supporters can replicate Walker’s project in other states, the public sector unions will wither as the private sectors unions already have. If so, I predict that many Americans clueless about unions today may grow to regret losing a world they barely knew existed.

As long as they can keep us fighting each other for fewer and fewer scraps, we won't have much time to think about it.

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digby 6/11/2012 09:00:00 AM |

 
How Presidential rhetoric matters

by David Atkins

In the endless debate over whether Presidential rhetoric matters, E.J. Dionne gets it:

Government is the solution.

Why don’t Democrats just say it? They really believe in active government and think it does good and valuable things. One of those valuable things is that government creates jobs — yes, really — and also the conditions under which more jobs can be created.

You probably read that and thought: But don’t Democrats and liberals say this all the time? Actually, the answer is no. It’s Republicans and conservatives who usually say that Democrats and liberals believe in government. Progressive politicians often respond by apologizing for their view of government, or qualifying it, or shifting as fast as the speed of light from mumbled support for government to robust affirmations of their faith in the private sector.

This is beginning to change, but not fast enough. And the events of recent weeks suggest that if progressives do not speak out plainly on behalf of government, they will be disadvantaged throughout the election-year debate. Gov. Scott Walker’s victory in the Wisconsin recall election owed to many factors, including his overwhelming financial edge. But he was also helped by the continuing power of the conservative anti-government idea in our discourse. An energetic argument on one side will be defeated only by an energetic argument on the other.

The case for government’s role in our country’s growth and financial success goes back to the very beginning. One of the reasons I wrote my book “Our Divided Political Heart” was to show that, from Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay forward, farsighted American leaders understood that action by the federal government was essential to ensuring the country’s prosperity, developing our economy, promoting the arts and sciences and building large projects: the roads and canals, and later, under Abraham Lincoln, the institutions of higher learning, that bound a growing nation together.

It's quite likely true that Presidential rhetoric is a blip on the radar of the factors that dictate his or her Party's chances at reelection. It's quite likely true that rhetoric browbeating Congress into passing a certain bill doesn't do much good at all.

But it's in the grand argument that these things matter. Ever since Reagan the Democratic Party at a national level has mostly ceded the notion that government is the problem. Entire books can and have been written on why and how this happened exactly. The most reasonable explanations lie in the fact that "government" became associated with giving handouts to "those" people in a country whose government has been crippled by issues of race and slavery since its inception, and the fact that starting in the 1980s Democrats faced a choice of taking lots of corporate money or getting slaughtered at the polls by being outspent by 10-1 margins.

Scott Walker's win in Wisconsin would not likely have been changed by the President making lots of speeches about the issue over the last few months. But the Party's general failure to address the issue of the positive effect of government spending in our lives has crippled the country (to say nothing of progressive politics) for decades now. Sometimes it almost seems if that charge were being led entirely by op-ed columnists like Krugman and Dionne, together with a chorus bloggers and a few largely ignored members of the Progressive Caucus in Congress.

It wouldn't turn the tide immediately nor would it be measurable in any peer-reviewed political science study, but a little Presidential rhetoric on the subject would certainly help over the long haul.


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thereisnospoon 6/11/2012 07:30:00 AM |

Sunday, June 10, 2012

 
Little wingnut monsters: even if you don't feed them, they grow up anyway

by digby

This fine fellow at the NY Times thinks liberals are ruining America because by paying attention to the right wing we are somehow making it impossible to find common ground with them. I find this unconvincing, since we ignored them for decades --- during which time they created a monster. And that monster is now mainstream. Here's just one example, from Sarah Posner:

In 2002, as head of the Brazos County Coalition for Life, Bereit, a former pharmaceutical salesman, developed a list of local companies targeted for a boycott over their donations of goods and services to a fundraiser for the local Planned Parenthood. The clinic was the community’s only abortion provider and one of only a few facilities where low-income women could obtain healthcare. Local business owners called the boycott “a threat” and “blackmail.” In Houston, activists made similar efforts to boycott local contractors who worked on a new facility that opened in 2010, which has been continually protested by anti-abortion forces as the “largest abortion facility in the Western hemisphere.”

Following his successes with the Coalition for Life in Brazos County, in 2004 Bereit launched the first local 40 Days for Life campaign — 40 days being a biblical number — of “prayer and fasting” outside medical clinics, or “abortion mills” as activists call them.

A year after launching 40 Days for Life, Bereit joined the American Life League, long considered one of the fringe players in the anti-abortion movement, serving as national director of its project STOPP, or Stop Planned Parenthood.

Shortly after joining STOPP, Bereit blamed the Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which ruled state bans on contraception unconstitutional, for “a tragic moral breakdown in our culture,” adding, “It is time for Americans to take a long, hard look at the real legacy of the Griswold decision. Although we can’t undo the consequences overnight, we can begin to take back our society one step at a time. The first step is to put an end to the destructive influence of Planned Parenthood, the organization that forced this tragedy upon our nation 40 years ago.”

In an online discussion titled “Ending Abortion,” Bereit interviewed Jim Sedlak, his former colleague and the current executive director of STOPP, calling him “the most credible expert I have ever heard on the topic of Planned Parenthood.” STOPP’s petition web page to end federal funding of Planned Parenthood charges, among other things, that Planned Parenthood’s “top goal for the next 14 years is to push its agenda of promiscuous sex everywhere in our society,” and that it pushes pornography to children, covers up for rapists and child predators, and is “openly hostile to Christianity.”

In a 2006 white paper, the pro-choice group Catholics for Choice described the American Life League as being “on the right wing of the antichoice movement, marginalized and isolated even among ostensible allies.” But the very aims of ALL — opposition to legal abortion without any exceptions, the creation of legal rights for fertilized eggs, and elimination of access to birth control — seem to have crept into the mainstream of anti-abortion activism in the six years since the publication of that report. ALL had a presence at the religious freedom rally, with supporters sporting its green “The Pill Kills” t-shirts. Former Rep. Bob Dornan, a long-time ALL ally, addressed the crowd. He called HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi “Judas Catholics” and approvingly quoted Cardinal James Francis Stafford, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary of the Holy See, who in 2008 called President Obama “aggressive, disruptive, and apocalyptic.”

STOPP’s 1995 essay, “Why We Oppose Planned Parenthood,” still widely reprinted on anti-abortion websites today, claimed that Planned Parenthood is a “cold, calculating group intent on spreading the Humanist religion, luring our children into their web of premarital sex and unlimited abortions, reducing the population of minorities in particular and filling its coffers with the profits from sales of birth control devices.” The document accused Planned Parenthood of being a “population control group” and complained that it “receives large amounts of government monies to spread its philosophies. PPFA receives $150 million from American taxpayers. Thus, we are being forced to pay for its outrageous programs and its attacks on our youth.” ALL currently is promoting its new campaign to take “Jesus to Planned Parenthood through Mary,” through which the group claims to call on Mary to use her “extraordinary gifts from God” to “put an end to the reign of terror that is Planned Parenthood.”

I remember reading that thing back in the late 90s and they might as well have been speaking in tongues for how much relevance it had to anything going on in politics. Abortion was under siege, of course, but the carrying on about being forced to pay for Planned Parenthood and attacks on birth control and female sexuality sounded like the rantings of lunatics and nobody but the fringiest fringers believed it. Not anymore. You'll recall that thishappened four months ago:

House Republicans voted on Friday to strip federal funding from Planned Parenthood, cutting money for contraceptives, HIV tests, cancer screenings and reproductive health services as part of an attempt to weaken the abortion provider. Planned Parenthood does not currently spend federal money on abortion services

They've come a long way, baby.

And it wasn't because feminists made a huge deal out of protecting Planned Parenthood back in the 1990s and giving these zealots oxygen that brought us to where we are today. They were good girls (and boys) and ignored the explicit threat. In fact, the clueless Democrats started babbling incessantly about birth control as the "common ground" we could all agree upon, obviously having no clue that the goalposts were already moving.

I wrote this back in 2006, when the Republicans introduced the Health Insurance Marketplace Modernization and Affordability Act (HIMMAA), which would have allowed insurance companies to ignore nearly all state laws that require insurance coverage for certain treatments or conditions, such as laws that require them to include contraceptives in their prescription plans. I said then:

This development is very interesting in light of the new emphasis on birth control among strategists in the Democratic party. The next battle is already being fought out on the edges of the abortion debate. If this goes the way of Democrats' previous brilliant strategies in the culture wars, within five years we'll have jettisoned our argument about Roe altogether and will be fighting with all our might to preserve Griswold, which the other side will be arguing is a matter of states' rights just like Roe. (No "streamlining" necessary.)

And still today, I hear "Oh please, you're being hysterical. They'll never get away with defunding Planned Parenthood or making contraception illegal." And I'm reminded again of this piece by Michael Bérubé from that same period, reminding us that our left wing avatar Ralph Nader had said it didn't matter if Roe vs Wade was reversed because it would "just go back to the states":

My point is that Nader, like all too many men on the left, doesn’t believe that the right-wing culture warriors really mean it. They think it’s all shadow-boxing, a distraction, a sop thrown to the radical fringe. That same attitude can be found, as I’ve noted before, in Tom Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, where Frank writes, “Values may ‘matter most’ to voters, but they always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won. This is a basic earmark of the phenomenon, absolutely consistent in across its decades-long history. Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act.”

The idea is that an actual abortion ban would go too far: the first back alley death, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble. Well, maybe and maybe not, folks. You might think, along similar lines, “the first hideous death by torture in the War on Terror, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble,” or “the first unconstitutional power grab by the executive branch, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble,” or “the first data-mining program of domestic spying, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble,” or “the first systemic corruption scandal involving Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham and Tom DeLay, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble,” and you’d be, ah, wrong, you know.

Besides, there’s a nasty time lag between that first back-alley death and the repeal (if any) of a state’s draconian abortion law, and in that time-lag, that state’s Republican Party might or might not be in deep trouble. It’s hard to unseat incumbents in this jerry-built and gerrymandered system, after all. So there’s no guarantee that popular outrage against back-alley deaths would jeopardize a state’s elected GOP officials en masse. But we can be pretty sure that women with unwanted pregnancies would be . . . how shall we say? in deep trouble.

The unthinkable becomes the thinkable in slow motion. You have to pay attention or you won't even notice until it's already too late.



*And just in case you aren't aware, the "abortifacient" nonsense is utter bullshit.

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digby 6/10/2012 04:30:00 PM |

 
Time To Fire Douthat

by tristero

Absolutely inexcusable (no link, you can find Douthat's column yourself in today's Times):

This progressive fascination with eugenics largely ended with World War II and the horrors wrought by National Socialism.

Nobody's talking censorship. Douthat has the right to say anything he wants, no matter how untrue, ignorant, obnoxious, racist or inflammatory he wants. He does not have a right to lie outright and hurtle utterly specious charges in the NY Times, however. This is far beyond "fit to print."

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tristero 6/10/2012 03:30:00 PM |

 
Googling the underbelly

by digby

Just remember. If you even hint that some of your fellow Americans might be harboring racial animus, you are a racist yourself. But taking that into consideration, check this out. Knowing that self-reporting about racist attitudes results in dubious results, a researcher decided to track racist attitudes by what people do in the privacy of their own homes:

Many Americans use Google to find racially charged material. I performed the somewhat unpleasant task of ranking states and media markets in the United States based on the proportion of their Google searches that included the word “nigger(s).” This word was included in roughly the same number of Google searches as terms like “Lakers,” “Daily Show,” “migraine” and “economist.”

A huge proportion of the searches I looked at were for jokes about African-Americans. (I did not include searches that included the word “nigga” because these searches were mostly for rap lyrics.) I used data from 2004 to 2007 because I wanted a measure not directly influenced by feelings toward Mr. Obama. From 2008 onward, “Obama” is a prevalent term in racially charged searches.

The state with the highest racially charged search rate in the country was West Virginia. Other areas with high percentages included western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, upstate New York and southern Mississippi.

Once I figured out which parts of the country had the highest racially charged search rates, I could test whether Mr. Obama underperformed in these areas.

He did:

Add up the totals throughout the country, and racial animus cost Mr. Obama three to five percentage points of the popular vote. In other words, racial prejudice gave John McCain the equivalent of a home-state advantage nationally.

Yes, Mr. Obama also gained some votes because of his race. But in the general election this effect was comparatively minor. The vast majority of voters for whom Mr. Obama’s race was a positive were liberal, habitual voters who would have voted for any Democratic presidential candidate. Increased support and turnout from African-Americans added only about one percentage point to Mr. Obama’s totals.

If my findings are correct, race could very well prove decisive against Mr. Obama in 2012. Most modern presidential elections are close. Losing even two percentage points lowers the probability of a candidate’s winning the popular vote by a third. And prejudice could cost Mr. Obama crucial states like Ohio, Florida and even Pennsylvania.

In 2008, Mr. Obama rode an unusually strong tail wind. The economy was collapsing. The Iraq war was unpopular. Republicans took most of the blame. He was able to overcome the major obstacle of continuing racial prejudice in the United States. In 2012, the tail wind is gone; the obstacle likely remains.

I wonder what you'd find if you measured other, less harsh racist terms. But then, I suppose there's no need: "From 2008 onward, “Obama” is a prevalent term in racially charged searches."

Keep in mind that this doesn't necessarily mean that only two percent of Americans are racist. After all, the vast majority of them are already in the GOP camp. But it does mean that some swing voters and Democrats are as well.

* I'm not endorsing this methodology. It's possible that it's completely wrong and this fellow has no idea what he's doing. But the conclusions don't seem surprising. The real surprise is that it wasn't a higher percentage than it was. You can bet it would have been 25 years ago. Progress.


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digby 6/10/2012 02:00:00 PM |

 
Video 'O the Day

by digby

Darcy Burner at Netroots Nation on the issue of building power, specifically aimed at women, but useful across the board:

Do you think the "powers that be" want this woman in the congress?

I didn't think so. You can donate to her campaign here. She's leading in her primary battle so far, but the Big Money Boyz haven't weighed in yet.


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digby 6/10/2012 12:30:00 PM |

 
Hispanic frustration

by digby

This story in today's Washington Post about Obama's chilly relationship with various members of his base, is worth reading. It shows a president who doesn't understand liberal supporters who question his commitment and is sorely disappointed --- even angry --- that he has failed to engender the kind of unquestioning loyalty he expected. I guess I can understand that. He believes that his life itself is a testament to his own higher motives.

But this anecdote shows something more, I think:

One after another, they spoke their minds, telling the president what he had done or not done that bothered them. They complained that a rising number of deportations on his watch were “terrorizing” Hispanic neighborhoods and tearing apart good families. They warned that he was losing credibility with a crucial constituency that had put its faith in him.

Obama’s body stiffened, according to several witnesses, and he started to argue with them. If they wanted meaningful change, he said, they should focus their pressure on the Republicans in Congress who opposed reform, not on him. He was with them but could only do so much. “I am not a king,” he said.

No, he isn't a king. But he does have control of one of the three branches of government and that branch is the one that has boosted deportations to higher levels than any previous administration. Congress has a lot to answer for, but this is all on the executive branch. It's a very clumsy attempt at misdirection. These people are morons.

I'm guessing his thin-skinned response (well documented in other situations in the article as well) comes from his knowledge that they're right -- that his sensitivity to this particular kind of criticism shows that he knows he's bargained away their cause in gestures of good will to opponents who take the concession and then laugh in his face. It must be galling to be reminded of that.

Read the whole article to get an idea of just how much the immigration activists have been given the run-around. It sounds as though the hardcore tactics that worked so well for the LGBT activists aren't having the same effect. Of course, the LGBT community held out the threat of withholding their substantialcampaign donations which is guaranteed to strike true fear into the hearts of politicians. They're back in the fold now that the president responded and (with the help of the joint chiefs of staff) got DADT repealed and has affirmed his personal support for gay marriage. The Hispanic community remains empty handed.

Update: Ooops. This is on the front page of the New York Times this morning:

The nation’s rapidly growing Latino population is one of the most powerful forces working in President Obama’s favor in many of the states that will determine his contest with Mitt Romney. But Latinos are not registering or voting in numbers that fully reflect their potential strength, leaving Hispanic leaders frustrated and Democrats worried as they increase efforts to rally Latino support.

Interviews with Latino voters across the country suggested a range of reasons for what has become, over a decade, an entrenched pattern of nonparticipation, ranging from a distrust of government to a fear of what many see as an intimidating effort by law enforcement and political leaders to crack down on immigrants, legal or not.

I guess their only hope is a return to the monarchy.

Update II: I should clarify that I obviously don't actually know what the president is thinking about all this. I'm just speculating about why he might be thin-skinned about such criticism, based on my observation of human behavior over the past few decades. For all I know it's something else entirely that makes him short tempered in these situations. But the result, the only thing we really have to go, remains the same.
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digby 6/10/2012 10:45:00 AM |

 

Paulite strategery

by digby

So Rick Santorum said this today:

"I like the platform that we have now," Santorum told host George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week." "I'm concerned that Ron Paul and some of his supporters out there are looking for a platform fight, and I want to make sure we have strong, principled conservatives there who stood with me in our primary fight to go there and counterbalance the effect of the Paul folks."

I think that calls for a round of applause for Adele Stan at Alternet, who saw this coming a while back when everyone else was still assuming that Ron was just angling for a Rand VP nom. She sketched out how the Paul delegates could force the choice on Romney at the convention, but then offered this up as a serious possibility:

So, falling short of some sort of Rand-a-palooza at the convention, what else might Paul win through his delegate-stacking exploits?

In 1996, Patrick J. Buchanan shocked the political world by winning the New Hampshire primary. Though he didn't get very far in subsequent contests, he did accumulate enough delegates devoted to his far-right ideals to cause Republican nominee Sen. Bob Dole a major headache. It wasn't until the eve of the convention that Buchanan announced he would not run a third-party challenge to Dole. In exchange, he won control of the party platform, which was largely written by Phyllis Schlafly, a Buchanan campaign co-chair, and Buchanan's sister, Bay, who managed his campaign.

That may not sound like a lot, but it forced Dole to run in the general election on a platform that not only trumpeted an anti-abortion policy with no exceptions for rape or incest, but also called for U.S. withdrawal from U.N. forces and all sorts of other paranoid proclamations. (The seating of the Buchanan delegation also led to the booing from the convention floor of Gen. Colin Powell, then just retired from the armed forces.)

She went on to speculate about the possibility that they could take over the platform as Buchanan did and force Mitt to run in the fall explaining an isolationist or drug legalization Party platform.

That would be something.

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digby 6/10/2012 09:00:00 AM |

 
Life is too damn short

by David Atkins

If you have 20 minutes to spare, you can listen to my interview on Angie Coiro's In Deep radio show a few days ago to talk about Wisconsin, the Presidential race, and how abnormal we are as activists. The direct podcast link is here (my segment goes from minutes 20-40.)

Otherwise have a great Sunday, everyone. There's going to be a heck of a fight gearing up to November, so get some rest and relaxation where it's available. While our choices at the Presidential level may not be able to make things all that much better in the coming year, we can at least prevent them from getting much worse even as we fight to make things better at a local level.

Make sure you call and hang out with your friends and loved ones, too. I've been visiting a friend and lifelong progressive activist in hospice over the last few days, and I fear today may be his last. No matter how unjust and unequal things become, the Great Equalizer awaits us all, and all the money in the world can buy us somewhat better health and treatment, but no guarantees of extra time. More time with my friend is what I wish I had more than anything else right now. Life is too damn short to spend it all grousing about national politics in front of a computer screen.


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thereisnospoon 6/10/2012 07:30:00 AM |

Saturday, June 09, 2012

 
Saturday Night at the Movies

SIFF 2012: Wrap party!

By Dennis Hartley

The 38th Seattle International Film Festival winds down this weekend, so this will be my wrap-up report. Hopefully, some of these will be coming soon to a theater near you…

I wish that I could tell you that writer/director/narrator Adam Curtis’ documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is as deep as its title (taken from a poem by Richard Brautigan), but I cannot. Ostensibly intended as an illustration of how mankind has become enslaved by its own technology (at least I think), Curtis opens his treatise with a portrait of Ayn Rand and an examination of what he alleges to be her influence on the cosmology of the Silicon Valley pioneers, and bookends it with theories about The Selfish Gene. In between, there’s Alan Greenspan, Dian Fossey, the ecosystem, gene theory, the internet, altruism, the global banking crisis, the Tutsis vs. the Hutus, the Man-machine… and a large orange soda. While Curtis does offer up a plethora of intriguing ideas over the course of his sprawling 180-minute film (edited from a 3-part BBC-TV series), ultimately he fails to connect them in any kind of satisfying (or cohesive) manner.

As an armchair cultural anthropologist, I’ve always found dinner parties to be a fascinating microcosm of human behavior. Ditto genre films; some of my favorites include The Anniversary Party, The Boys in the Band, and Don’s Party (my review). Unfortunately, White Camellias will be unable to join them this evening. Cybill Shepherd stars as a 60-ish artist, who has assembled a “perfect” Spanish-themed soiree. If all goes as planned, she hopes to rekindle a romance with a man she once had a fling with in Spain. All doesn’t go as planned, beginning with last-minute guest cancellations and heading downhill from there. I suspect that all didn’t go as planned for the filmmakers, either, because this attempt at romantic melodrama plays out as unintentional comedy instead. How bad is this film? One moment, our hostess recites poetry by Federico Garcia Loca to moon-eyed friends; in the next, a guest’s boyfriend loudly demands to know why his lover never tongues his ass. Destined to become the Showgirls of dinner party flicks.

Thale is an economical but highly imaginative sci-fi/horror thriller from Norwegian writer-director Aleksander Nordaas that plays like a mashup of The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. While on the job, two friends who work for a crime scene cleanup business stumble upon what appears to be a makeshift laboratory in a bunker beneath a remote farmhouse. Despite initial appearances, and the fact that the homeowner is most decidedly dead, it is not wholly “deserted”. Imagine their surprise. Not to mention what they discover in the freezer (*shudder*). Creepy, thrilling, generously tempered with deadpan humor and definitely not for the squeamish. This is the latest entry in what seems to be a burgeoning (and exclusively Scandinavian) horror subgenre: The Mythological Norse Creature Feature, which would include Beowulf & Grendel , the 2011 SIFF hit Trollhunter (my review), and Rare Exports (my review).

“Ginger Baker influenced me as a musician,” gushes an interviewee, who is quick to add “…but not as a person.” More than any other statement made in Beware of Mr. Baker, that one encapsulates the dichotomous nature of the man who many consider one of the greatest jazz-rock drummers of all time. Mixing archival footage with present-day chats with Baker, as well as observations from family members, admirers and former band mates, director Jay Bulger has assembled a compelling rockumentary that is as kinetic and unpredictably volatile as its subject. It’s probably a good thing that the filmmaker is a former boxer; in the opening scene, the ever-mercurial Baker punctuates his displeasure at some perceived slight by caning him on the nose. By his own admittance, interpersonal skills have never been his forte (he’s currently with the 4th Mrs. Baker). Still, what emerges is a portrait of an artist who literally lives for his art; he remains an absolute motherfucker on those drums because that is exactly what he was put on this earth to do.

OK, so I didn’t consciously set out to cover two docs about jazz drummers, but that’s how it worked out. Actually, I’m glad I caught Jeff Kaufman’s The Savoy King: Chick Webb and the Music That Changed America, because I learned quite a bit about a period of American music that I’m a bit rusty on-the Jazz Swing Era. Specifically, the story of a diminutive, hunch-backed drummer named Chick Webb, and the impact he made over the course of his relatively brief career (1927-1939). Crippled by TB of the spine (the result of a childhood injury), the self-taught drummer and band leader was not only a significant and respected player in his own right, but instrumental in fostering the career of one Ella Fitzgerald. With all due respect to the late Dick Clark, it turns out that his role in integrating America’s dance floors, while of significance, may have been overstated; it seems Webb was the true pioneer in that arena, thanks to the cross-cultural appeal of his music (years before American Bandstand). The archival footage is fabulous.

Previous 2012 SIFF coverage:

SIFF Preview

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Saturday Night at the Movies review archives

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Dennis Hartley 6/09/2012 05:30:00 PM |