Tag Archives: Democrats

We Can All Ignore the Next 18 Months

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Thousands of articles will be written. Hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent. There will be interviews and debates. There will be speeches and rallies. There will be polls and predictions. Strategies and personalities will be analyzed. Policies will even be discussed.

We can safely ignore it all.

The only question regarding the presidential election in November 2016 is whether we should elect a Republican or Democrat. If you’ve been paying attention at all, you already know how to vote.

Paul Krugman explained why last month:

As we head into 2016, each party is quite unified on major policy issues — and these unified positions are very far from each other. The huge, substantive gulf between the parties will be reflected in the policy positions of whomever they nominate, and will almost surely be reflected in the actual policies adopted by whoever wins.

To paraphrase the differences Krugman points out:

Any Democrat elected will try to maintain or strengthen Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. Any Republican will try to do the opposite.

Any Democrat will seek to maintain or increase taxes on the wealthy. Any Republican will do the opposite.

Any Democrat will try to preserve regulations on Wall Street and the big banks (she or he might even try to break up banks that are “too big to fail”). Any Republican won’t.

Any Democrat will try to limit global warming and make it easier for immigrants to become citizens. It’s pretty clear that any Republican won’t.

I’ll add that any Democrat will try to stimulate the economy and create jobs by increasing infrastructure spending. You can count on any Republican to protect the wealthy at all costs.

And any Democrat will nominate reasonable people to the Supreme Court. On the other hand, well, how do you feel about Scalia, Alito, Roberts and Thomas? 

Professor Krugman continues:

Now, some people won’t want to acknowledge that the choices in the 2016 election are as stark as I’ve asserted. Political commentators who specialize in covering personalities rather than issues will balk at the assertion that their alleged area of expertise matters not at all. Self-proclaimed centrists will look for a middle ground that doesn’t actually exist. And as a result, we’ll hear many assertions that the candidates don’t really mean what they say. There will, however, be an asymmetry in the way this supposed gap between rhetoric and real views is presented.

On one side, suppose that Ms. Clinton is indeed the Democratic nominee. If so, you can be sure that she’ll be accused, early and often, of insincerity, of not being the populist progressive she claims to be.

On the other side, suppose that the Republican nominee is a supposed moderate like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. In either case we’d be sure to hear many assertions from political pundits that the candidate doesn’t believe a lot of what he says. But in their cases this alleged insincerity would be presented as a virtue, not a vice — sure, Mr. Bush is saying crazy things about health care and climate change, but he doesn’t really mean it, and he’d be reasonable once in office. Just like his brother.

There are a lot of big books around the house I’ve been meaning to get to. If you have any time-consuming projects you’ve been putting off, the next 18 months will be a great time to get going.

Krugman’s whole column is here.

The Second Bill of Rights

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If Franklin Roosevelt had lived longer, the United States might have a Second Bill of Rights. We might have had more amendments to the Constitution, or simply a collection of new laws, but in either form we would have established a set of economic rights to go along with the political rights already stated in the Constitution.

This was news to me until recently. Here’s what President Roosevelt said in his State of the Union address on January 11, 1944, as the war continued in Europe and the Pacific:

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth- is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our Nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being….

I ask the Congress to explore the means for implementing this economic bill of rights… Many of these problems are already before committees of the Congress in the form of proposed legislation. I shall from time to time communicate with the Congress with respect to these and further proposals. In the event that no adequate program of progress is evolved, I am certain that the Nation will be conscious of the fact.

The President began his fourth term one year later, on January 20, 1945, but he didn’t live past April. President Truman took over and didn’t pursue the idea of an economic Bill of Rights.

There’s more about the speech, including the full text, here. Roosevelt would have delivered the State of the Union to Congress, but he didn’t feel well that night. Instead, he gave the speech over the radio from the White House (Congress received a printed copy). But he also had parts of the speech filmed by newsreel companies so it could be shown in movie theaters. Here’s some of that footage:

Roosevelt said a lot else that night. For example, he criticized what we now call “special interests”, calling attention to the millions of people with “few or no high pressure representatives at the Capitol”:

The overwhelming majority of our people have met the demands of this war with magnificent courage and understanding…. However, while the majority goes on about its great work without complaint, a noisy minority maintains an uproar of demands for special favors for special groups. There are pests who swarm through the lobbies of the Congress and the cocktail bars of Washington, representing these special groups as opposed to the basic interests of the Nation as a whole. They have come to look upon the war primarily as a chance to make profits for themselves at the expense of their neighbors – profits in money or in terms of political or social preferment.

Well, that situation has only gotten worse since 1944.

Roosevelt also warned against right-wing reactionaries trying to turn back the clock:

One of the great American industrialists of our day … recently emphasized the grave dangers of “rightist reaction” in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop — if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called “normalcy” of the 1920’s — then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.

Even if Roosevelt wasn’t feeling well that night, I bet he would have had a good laugh if someone had suggested that a certain 32-year old actor, then making Army Air Force training films in California, would one day lead just such a right-wing reaction.

A Month of Unwritten Posts Condensed Into One

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It’s not as if there’s a shortage of reading material on the Internet. Nevertheless, since I haven’t done my part lately:

You might hear of a new Quinnipiac University poll, according to which Fox News is the most trusted network news in America. The poll found that 29% of American voters trust the news on Fox more than any other network. However, the poll also found that 57% of American voters trust either CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC or MSNBC more than Fox. In other words, 29% of us trust the right-wing propaganda “news” delivered by Rupert Murdoch, and twice as many of us trust the other kind, the “mainstream media” news that Rupert doesn’t own. So it’s bad enough, but not as bad as it sounds.

Meanwhile, a Pew Research Center poll found that 53% of Americans disapprove of the Affordable Care Act, even though the ACA has resulted in more people getting health insurance than the Obama administration predicted, while contributing to slower growth in overall healthcare spending. A Bloomberg article helps explain this discrepancy. First, many people think they can do without the comprehensive health insurance the law mandates and resent paying for services they’ll never need (like maternity care) or don’t think they’ll ever need (like rehabilitation). Second, more than half of the big companies in America have told their employees that the ACA is forcing them to pay even more for health insurance.

The Bloomberg article says that the coverage mandates aren’t making health insurance more expensive. The mandates are merely “pooling the cost of that coverage across more people”, which is why fewer people are having trouble paying for healthcare. Furthermore, employers are blaming an ACA provision (the so-called “Cadillac” tax) for immediate cuts in benefits and higher insurance payments, even though it’s unlikely that these employers will ever be subject to that provision.

But does it matter what the facts are? According to a very interesting article by Heather Cox Richardson, Professor of History at Boston College, America’s right-wing doesn’t accept the importance of empirical evidence or rational argument. She traces this amazing attitude back to William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1950s book God and Man at Yale. Richardson says that:

Buckley rejected the principles that had enabled social progress for centuries and laid out a mind-boggling premise: The Enlightenment, the intellectual basis of Western Civilization, was wrong.

Rational argument supported by facts did not lead to sound societal decisions, Buckley claimed; it led people astray. Christianity and an economy based on untrammeled individualism were truths that should not be questioned. Impartial debate based in empirical facts was dangerous because it led people toward secularism and collectivism—both bad by definition, according to Buckley. Instead of engaging in rational argument, Buckley insisted, thinkers must stand firm on what he called a new “value orthodoxy” that indoctrinated people to understand that Christianity and economic individualism were absolute truths.

If we accept the premise that Christianity and economic individualism (the idolatry of the “free market”) are absolute truths, it makes sense to reject any contradictory ideas, however well-founded those ideas are given the empirical evidence.

For example, the governor of Minnesota, Mark Dayton, inherited a $6 billion deficit from his predecessor, a self-styled “fiscal conservative” who wouldn’t raise taxes. Dayton convinced the legislature to raise taxes on the rich and increase the minimum wage. Republicans predicted, as always, that businesses would leave the state and unemployment would rise. What actually happened was that the deficit turned into a surplus, unemployment went down and Minnesota now has one of the best economies of any state. Forbes Magazine (a bastion of capitalism) recently ranked Minnesota as having the 7th best “economic climate” and the 2nd best “quality of life” in the nation.

But if you believe that higher taxes on the rich and a higher minimum wage are absolutely wrong, since they conflict with your “understanding” of morality and economics, it’s understandable that you’ll reject the evidence. Nothing that conflicts with absolute truth can possibly be true.

To end on a positive note, however, consider that Larry Summers, a leading economist and Wall Street-friendly Democrat, is now arguing for a relatively progressive set of policies. According to an encouraging article by Thomas Edsall of the New York Times, Summers has concluded that “free market capitalism, as now structured, is producing major distortions”:

In order to stem the disproportionate share of income flowing to corporate managers and owners of capital, and to address the declining share going to workers, the report calls for tax and regulatory policies to encourage employee ownership, the strengthening of collective bargaining rights, regulations requiring corporations to provide fringe benefits to employees working for subcontractors, a substantial increase in the minimum wage, sharper overtime pay enforcement, and a huge increase in infrastructure appropriations – for roads, bridges, ports, schools – to spur job creation and tighten the labor market…. Summers also calls for significant increases in the progressivity of the United States tax system.

Summers has advised both President Obama and Hillary Clinton on economic matters, so it’s a positive sign that he now advocates more worker-friendly policies.

Finally, with our harsh winter finally winding down, I want to express my sincere appreciation for everyone who has to work outside or travel to their jobs during terrible winter weather. Many such people aren’t able to take a day off or “work at home”, because you can’t drive a snowplow or staff your boss’s restaurant from your living room. I also want to express my profound appreciation for whoever devised the snow shovel with a bent handle. I’ve used one for years and there’s nothing better for shoveling snow while avoiding back pain!

backsaver-shovel2

We Don’t Torture Them Now – We Kill Them Instead

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American insanity isn’t limited to Republicans or Republican-sympathizers, of course. For example, President Obama may have curtailed our use of torture, but he’s expanded our use of drones. From The Atlantic:

A report from the CIA’s inspector general [in 2004] had raised the possibility that the CIA’s interrogation techniques violated the UN Convention Against Torture, and that individual officers might be liable for criminal prosecution. That torture report … “was perhaps the single most important reason for the C.I.A.’s shift from capturing to killing terrorism suspects.”

The difficulty in keeping terrorism suspects locked up indefinitely without access to the regular judicial system gave our government an additional reason to kill them instead of capturing them. The result has been more drone attacks:

Though the U.S. drone war started under Bush …, Obama has ramped it up considerably in his half-decade in office. [According to Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations, Obama] has authorized over nine times as many strikes as his predecessor… Estimates of the precise number of fatalities in those operations range widely; Zenko’s own tally, based on reporting from non-governmental research organizations, puts the rough death toll at around 3,500 people. These include an unknown number of civilian casualties believed by independent researchers to number at least in the hundreds….Tuesday’s report from the Senate Intelligence Committee, meanwhile, lists 119 terror suspects known to have been detained by the CIA, of whom “at least 39 were subject to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques”….

But despite the vast disparity in the numbers of people abused through the CIA’s detention program versus killed by drones, there has been no official accounting of the latter program on par with the torture report released this week. “[Those] normally interested in upholding human rights ideals and promoting transparency (generally Democrats) simply will not investigate their own,” Zenko explained. “And as I’ve pointed out, in every public opinion poll … Americans are more comfortable killing suspected terrorists than torturing them.”

As Andrea Tartaros of Fox News said the other day, “We are awesome!”.

Political Corruption in America, Then and Now

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Zephyr Teachout is a law professor at Fordham University. She recently ran against Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, a quixotic venture if her goal was to become the Governor of New York. Her more realistic goals included calling attention to Cuomo’s political shenanigans, highlighting ways to improve our politics and maybe selling a few copies of her book (we all have to eat).

The book is Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United. The snuff box was a diamond-encrusted gift that Louis XVI gave to our ambassador to France. “Citizens United” is the recent Supreme Court decision allowing corporations and other organizations to influence elections as much as possible by spending unlimited amounts of money.

From a review of Corruption in America by the journalist Thomas Frank:

Today’s [Supreme Court] understands “corruption” as a remarkably rare malady, a straight-up exchange of money for official acts. Any definition broader than that, the justices say, transgresses the all-important First Amendment. Besides, as Justice Anthony Kennedy announced in the Citizens United decision, the court now knows that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption” — a statement that I guess makes sense somehow in law-land but sounds to the layman’s ear like the patter of a man who has come unzipped from reality….

Our current Supreme Court, in Citizens United, “took that which had been named corrupt for over 200 years” — which is to say, gifts to politicians — “and renamed it legitimate.” Teachout does not exaggerate. Here is Justice Kennedy again, in the Citizens United decision: “The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach. The government has ‘muffle[d] the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy.’ ”

You read that right: The economy needs to be represented in democratic politics, or at least the economy’s “most significant segments,” whatever those are, and therefore corporate “speech,” meaning gifts, ought not to be censored. Corporations now possess the rights that the founders reserved for citizens, and as Teachout explains, what used to be called “corruption becomes democratic responsiveness.”

Being “unzipped from reality” aptly describes much of our politics, including a series of decisions by our Republican-dominated Supreme Court.

Did it matter that the Supreme Court helped George Bush get elected in 2000, which made it possible for him to be reelected in 2004? David Cole, writing in the New York Review of Books, reminds us:

… when Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor announced her retirement and Chief Justice Rehnquist died in office in 2005, President Bush, not Al Gore or a successor, had the privilege of appointing two new justices and shaping the Court for years to come. Had a Democratic president been able to replace Rehnquist and O’Connor, constitutional law today would be dramatically different. Affirmative action would be on firm constitutional ground. The Voting Rights Act would remain in place. The Second Amendment would protect only the state’s authority to raise militias, not private individuals’ right to own guns. Women’s right to terminate a pregnancy would be robustly protected. The validity of Obamacare would never have been in doubt. Consumers and employees would be able to challenge abusive corporate action in class action lawsuits. And Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which struck down regulations on corporate political campaign expenditures and called into question a range of campaign spending rules, would have come out the other way. But it was not to be.

Returning to Thomas Frank’s review of Zephyr Teachout’s book, it’s hard to believe that political lobbying used to be shameful, even criminal, not a multi-billion-dollar industry:

Once upon a time, lobbying was regarded as obviously perfidious; in California it was a felony; and contracts to lobby were regarded as reprehensible by the Supreme Court. Here is a justice of that body in the year 1854, delivering the court’s decision in a case concerning lobbyists and lobbying contracts:

“The use of such means and such agents will have the effect to subject the state governments to the combined capital of wealthy corporations, and produce universal corruption, commencing with the representative and ending with the elector. Speculators in legislation, public and private, a compact corps of venal solicitors, vending their secret influences, will infest the capital of the Union and of every state, till corruption shall become the normal condition of the body politic, and it will be said of us as of Rome —omne Romae venale [in Rome, everything is for sale].”

Well, folks, it happened all right, just as predicted. State governments subject to wealthy corporations? Check. Speculators in legislation, infesting the capital? They call it K Street. And that fancy Latin remark about Rome? They do say that of us today. Just turn on your TV sometime and let the cynicism flow.

And all of it has happened, Teachout admonishes, because the founders’ understanding of corruption has been methodically taken apart by a Supreme Court that cynically pretends to worship the founders’ every word. “We could lose our democracy in the process,” Teachout warns, a bit of hyperbole that maybe it’s time to start taking seriously.

Considering how money pollutes our politics, and how gerrymandering, vote suppression, low turnout (especially among the young and the poor) and the Constitution itself skew the results, the idea that America is an oligarchy, not a democracy, doesn’t sound hyperbolic at all.  

Nevertheless, quixotic or not, I’m still going to vote in a couple weeks for the Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate (he’s sure to win) and the House (she’s sure to lose), as well as for bail reform and more environmental funding. It’s the least I can do.