Tag: Politics

On December 30, the Montana Supreme Court delivered a New Year’s gift to the nation, upholding a century-old ban on corporate political expenditures in state elections. The decision has gone underreported amidst the hoopla of the Republican primaries-even as super PAC spending skyrockets and there is an emerging understanding of its corrosive impact-but the Montana case sets up the first direct challenge to the disastrous Citizens United decision as we approach its second anniversary.

Free Speech For People – a national non-partisan campaign challenging the fabrication of corporate rights under the US Constitution-filed a friend- of-the-court brief in the Montana case. It led a coalition that included the American Sustainable Business Council, a network of more than 70,000 businesses across the country; the American Independent Business Alliance; and a local supermarket business and non-profit corporation.

George Zornich: Keystone XL Is Dead-Again

For the second time in as many months, the Obama administration has rejected the Keystone XL pipeline – a hugely controversial project that would traverse the length of the country from Nebraska to the Gulf of Mexico, carrying heavy and dirty tar sands oil from deep in Canada. [..]

But Republicans successfully revived the project during the end-of-year negotiations on the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance. Democrats desperately wanted these measures, and the final bill included a provision that would force the State Department to issue a decision on Keystone within two months.

Today – less than even one month since the payroll tax cut bill was passed – the State Department announced they were denying the permit. In a statement, President Obama endorsed that decision: “As the State Department made clear last month, the rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans prevented a full assessment of the pipeline’s impact, especially the health and safety of the American people, as well as our environment.”

Leslie Savan: Colbert Raises Cain

Stephen Colbert, the all-but-declared candidate for the president of the United States of South Carolina, and Jon Stewart, the man in charge of the Colbert Super PAC, are not technically, legally, or otherwise coordinating campaign plans-as they stated at one point in perfect unison last night. But in a frenzy of non-coordinatism, these two citizens united to get Stephen on the SC ballot, even though the ballots have already been printed and write-ins aren’t permitted. How? By running an ad equating a vote for Herman Cain, who dropped out of the race in last month but is still on the ballot, as a vote for Stephen Colbert. [..]

It’s only fitting that Cain, whom Rachael Maddow earlier revealed as not a candidate but a brilliant performance artist, play host to performance artist Colbert’s frankly parasitic campaign. After all, the comedic Republican primary, with its clown car full of jokesters (from Romney saying that the $374,000 he made in speakers fees last year is “not very much” to Gingrich’s blowing audible racist dog whistles during the Martin Luther King Jr. Day debate) is as funny as anything out of Comedy Central.

John Nichols: Scott Walker Admits His Defeat Would Stall the GOP’s Antilabor Push

Even Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was acknowledging Tuesday that the one million signatures that had been gathered on petitions seeking his recall and removal from office were all but certain to force him to face a new election.

Walker still thinks he will win that election.

But if he loses, and polling suggests that is a very real prospect, Walker has admitted that the anti-GOP agenda of Republican governors and presidential candidates will be dealt a blow.

Indeed, Walker suggests, Republican governors will be less inclined to attack public-sector unions. And he suggests that Democratic governors will also recognize that assaults on the rights, the benefits and the pensions of state, county and municipal employees and teachers are politically unwise.

E. J. Dionne, JR.: So Much for a Populist GOP

Members of the tea party insisted they were turning the GOP into a populist, anti-establishment bastion. Social conservatives have long argued that values and morals matter more than money. Yet in the end, the corporate and economically conservative wing of the Republican Party always seems to win.

Thus was Mitt Romney so confident of victory in Saturday’s South Carolina primary that he left the state briefly on Tuesday for a fundraiser in New York City. And why not? The power of big money has been amplified in this campaign by the super PACs let loose by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and lax regulation.

You cannot watch the morning news shows in this state without confronting an intricately confusing blitz of ads, some paid for by candidates, others by the supposedly independent PACs. One kind is indistinguishable from the other.

From all evidence, the issue of economic justice isn’t going away. Break the news gently to Mitt Romney, who seems apoplectic that the whole “rich get richer, poor get poorer” thing is being discussed out loud. In front of the children, for goodness’ sake.

“You know I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms,” he told the “Today” show’s Matt Lauer last week. “But the president has made this part of his campaign rally. Everywhere he goes we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives and Wall Street. It’s a very envy-oriented, attack-oriented approach.”

Actually, those blasts weren’t comimg from President Obama. That was Romney’s competition for the Republican nomination, sounding like a speakers’ lineup at an Occupy Wall Street rally.

Charles M. Blow: Newt Gingrich and the Art of Racial Politics

I’ll spare you the video. TMC

That’s the way I like to spend my Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: watching Newt Gingrich sneer at Juan Williams, a black man, for having the temerity to ask him if his condescending remarks about the work ethic of poor black people are indeed condescending:

   Juan Williams:  Speaker Gingrich, you recently said black Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps. You also say poor kids lack a strong work ethic and proposed having them work as janitors in their schools. Can’t you see that this is viewed as at a minimum as insulting to all Americans but particularly to black Americans?

   Newt Gingrich: No, I don’t see that (applause).

Gingrich went on to say that the children would be “getting money, which is a good thing if you’re poor. Only the elites despise earning money.”

The first implication here is that elites are liberals, not men like Gingrich – whose net worth The Los Angeles Times has estimated to be $6.7 million, who was a history professor, who was paid $1.6 million dollars by Freddie Mac for “advice,” and who had a half million dollar line of credit at Tiffany’s.

If Gingrich isn’t among America’s elite, the word no longer has meaning.

New York Times Editorial: Taxes and Transparency

Barack Obama released his tax records when he ran for president in 2008. So did Richard Nixon in 1968. In fact, so did George Romney in that same campaign.

But, in 2012, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and onetime chief executive of a private equity firm, is still hedging about whether he will do so.

Candidates for the presidency are not legally required to release their tax records, but they generally have for many years now – because American voters have a right to know how the men and women who want to be president make their money.

Barry Lando: Iran, the U.S. and Israel: Blind Man’s Bluff

In a perilous spiral of assassinations, threats and counterthreats, leaders in Washington, Jerusalem and Tehran keep ratcheting up the tension. What is most alarming about the situation is that the principal players and their advisers are engaged in an incredibly dangerous three-way game of blind man’s bluff.

None of them expresses a real understanding of the others-their motives, their concerns or their likely reactions. That’s true even for Israel and the United States: Though the U.S. risks being sucked into any conflict between Israel and Iran, the Obama administration is currently forced to guess what its supposed allies in Israel are planning.

The year 2011 will be remembered as the time when many ever-optimistic Americans began to give up hope. President John F. Kennedy once said that a rising tide lifts all boats. But now, in the receding tide, Americans are beginning to see not only that those with taller masts had been lifted far higher, but also that many of the smaller boats had been dashed to pieces in their wake.

In that brief moment when the rising tide was indeed rising, millions of people believed that they might have a fair chance of realizing the “American Dream.” Now those dreams, too, are receding. By 2011, the savings of those who had lost their jobs in 2008 or 2009 had been spent. Unemployment checks had run out. Headlines announcing new hiring – still not enough to keep pace with the number of those who would normally have entered the labor force – meant little to the 50 year olds with little hope of ever holding a job again.

New York Times Editorial: On the Trail of Mortgage Fraud

President Obama should form a task force to investigate and pursue potential civil and criminal wrongdoing by institutions and people whose conduct had the greatest economic impact.

Queens has been harder hit by foreclosures than any other New York borough, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation believes it has found a culprit. Last July, the F.B.I. accused Edul Ahmad, a local broker, of a $50 million mortgage fraud, saying he lured fellow immigrants into subprime mortgages, inflated the values of their properties and concealed his involvement in deals that were ruinous for scores, if not hundreds, of borrowers. Mr. Ahmad pleaded not guilty, and posted $2.5 million bail. Now, according to court papers, as reported in The Times, he is plea-bargaining with federal prosecutors.

Whatever Mr. Ahmad did or did not do, one thing is sure: he did not act alone. The attention Mr. Ahmad has drawn highlights the relative lack of scrutiny of the big banks and their senior executives. Big banks created demand and provided credit for dubious mortgage loans, which they bundled into securities and sold to investors. If not for reckless lending and heedless securitizing, there would have been no mortgage bubble and no mortgage bust – and, in all probability, no Edul Ahmad.

Eugene Robinson: The Dream That Came True

He would be an elder statesman now, a lion in winter, an American hero perhaps impatient with the fuss being made over his birthday. At 83, he’d likely still have his wits and his voice. Surely, if he were able, he would continue to preach, and to pray-and to dream.

For the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., dreaming was not optional. It was a requirement of citizenship to envision a fairer, more prosperous nation no longer shackled by racism and poverty. It was a duty to imagine a world no longer ravaged by senseless wars. His most famous speech was less an invitation to share his epic dream than a commandment.

In these sour, pessimistic times, it is important to remember the great lesson of King’s remarkable life: Impossible dreams can come true.

John Nichols: ‘Right-to-Work’ and the Jim Crow Legacy That Affronts King’s Memory

When the Congress of Industrial Organizations launched “Operation Dixie” in the aftermath of World War II, with the goal not just of organizing unions in the states of the old Confederacy but of ending Jim Crow discrimination, Southern segregationists moved immediately to establish deceptively named “right-to-work” laws.

These measures were designed to make it dramatically harder for workers to organize unions and for labor organizations to advocate for workers on the job site or for social change in their communities and states.

In short order, all the states that had seceded from the Union in order to maintain slavery had laws designed to prevent unions from fighting against segregation. The strategy worked. Southern states have far weaker unions than Northern states, and labor struggles have been far more bitter and violent in the South than in other parts of the country. It was in a right-to-work state, Tennessee, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while supporting the struggle of African-American sanitation workers to organize a union and have it recognized by the city of Memphis.

Christopher Brauchli: The Senate’s Holiday

Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and still more seldom likes to be told of it.

– Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

The Republicans’ newest way of countering criticism that Congress spends more time on recess than it does working occurred when it went home for the Christmas holidays. The criticism occurs because in 2011 Senate and House Members were in session for 112 days, according to the Library of Congress, leaving them 253 days of free time. (These numbers are imprecise. They may have inadvertently worked a few more days than shown.) To counter the impression that they do not work very hard the Republican Senators agreed to pretend they were working when most of them were spending the holidays away from Washington. They agreed that when they were gone they would not be gone.

Last evening, Tavis Smiley hosted a program that was broadcast live on C-SPAN live and that focused for two-and-a-half hours on the issue of poverty in America.  It was terrific.  The energy and commitment of the experts assembled to investigate and help alleviate poverty made the conversation rich beyond anything I’ve seen in ages.  Each panelist came at the topic from a different perspective.  That added to the richness of the discussion about being poor in America. [..]

Even though I’ve been through the slide from middle-income to poor and now am fighting the unwinnable fight to climb back out, I still need the affirmation these sorts of discussions can give to remember that it still isn’t my fault.  The system crushed me, and the system will crush me again unless I stay intensely vigilant — and maybe it will crush me again even if I do.  But I do not want to stay vigilant about the wrong things.

John Nichols: Mitt Romney Abandons His Father’s Civil Rights Legacy

The Republican Party, founded by militant abolitionists and once the political home of civil rights champions such as George Romney, has since the late 1960s been degenerating toward the crude politics of “Southern strategies” and what former Republican National Committee chairman Lee Atwater referred to as the “coded” language of complaints about “forced busing,” legal-services programs, welfare and food stamps. But the 2012 campaign has seen this degeneration accelerate, as the candidates have repeatedly played on stereotypes about race, class and “entitlements.” [..]

If ever there was a time when the man who is likely to be party’s 2012 presidential nominee should be joining the NAACP in objecting to the racialized language being heard on this year’s GOP campaign trail, it is now.

But that’s not happening.

Instead of objecting to the excesses of the other contenders, the “adult” in the race, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, picked up on the themes developed by Santorum and Gingrich to gripe about “the ever-expanding payments of an entitlement society” as “a fundamental corruption of the American spirit.”

Romney is arguably the most disappointing of the current candidates, as he surely knows better.

Charles M Blow: Bitter Politics of Envy?

You’re just jealous. At least that’s how Mitt Romney sees it. The millionaire who posed for a picture with the boys at Bain Capital with the long green clinched between their teeth and poking out of their collars and jackets now says that people who question what he did there, and what rich people do now, are just green with envy.

In his New Hampshire victory speech on Tuesday, Romney lambasted his Republican opponents (who have raised real issues about his role at the private equity firm Bain Capital) for following the lead of President Obama, whom he described as a leader who divides us “with the bitter politics of envy.”

Gail Collins: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Back in the late-1950s there was a TV show called “The Millionaire” about a mysterious rich man, named John Beresford Tipton, who would anonymously give checks for $1 million to total strangers.

Usually, the recipient was a poor schlub who was over the top with joy until it turned out that the money didn’t buy happiness. Clearly, we were all better off in our humble homes, clustered around our 14-inch TVs.

I am bringing this up because the current presidential race has demonstrated that a million dollars is nothing – nothing – these days. Nothing! A million dollars is what they give you for designing the best pantsuit on a reality TV show.

For Mitt Romney, Tuesday night’s triumph in the New Hampshire primary offered a tempting opportunity to gloat. Such unattractive conduct is no longer surprising from the Republican front-runner, who is enduring the gradual disclosure of his personality.

The hot Romney video of the moment displays him telling the Nashua, N.H., Chamber of Commerce: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me,” and went viral not because of its specific context, which wasn’t particularly damning, but because the public perceives the remark as a distillation of elite heartlessness. Every decent person who has had to fire someone knows that doing so-under almost any circumstances-is unpleasant, difficult and frequently wrenching. To boast that you “like to fire people” after observing years of economic pain among the jobless suggests a deep defect that, to most Americans, may disqualify Romney from the presidency.

Of course, that quote could have been a peculiar gaffe or a meaningless slip, but it wasn’t. There is no shortage of evidence, emanating mostly from his own mouth, that privilege, arrogance and entitlement are major features of Romney’s character.

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: Is This Land Made for You and Me – or for the Super-Rich?

The traveling medicine show known as the race for the Republican presidential nomination has moved on from Iowa and New Hampshire, and all eyes are now on South Carolina.  Well, not exactly all.  At the moment, our eyes are fixed on some big news from the great state of Oklahoma, home of the legendary American folk singer Woody Guthrie, whose 100th birthday will be celebrated later this year.

Woody saw the ravages of the Dust Bowl and the Depression firsthand; his own family came unraveled in the worst hard times.  And he wrote tough yet lyrical stories about the men and women who struggled to survive, enduring the indignity of living life at the bone, with nothing to eat and no place to sleep.  He traveled from town to town, hitchhiking and stealing rides in railroad boxcars, singing his songs for spare change or a ham sandwich.  What professional success he had during his own lifetime, singing in concerts and on the radio, was often undone by politics and the restless urge to keep moving on. “So long, it’s been good to know you,” he sang, and off he would go.

John Nichols: Walker, Texas (Money) Ranger: Can Lone-Star Cash Save Anti-Labor Governor?

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is scared, so scared that he is calling in a posse of Texas billionaires to try and save his political skin.

Facing the threat of a recall election, Walker poured money into a television advertising campaign to convince Wisconsinites that his attacks on collective bargaining rights, his budget cuts for education and local services, and his pay-to-play approach to politics are good things.

Wisconsinites weren’t buying what Walker was selling. On Tuesday, the recall campaign mounted by United Wisconsin will submit not just the 540,000 signatures needed to recall Governor Walker but hundreds of thousands more.

This fight is going to happen. Walker knows he faces an accountability moment that threatens to end his long political career.

But he is not giving up easily. The governor is arming himself with all the money he can get his hands on. Big money. Texas money.

Mark Weisbrot: The Economic Idiocy of Economists

The American Economic Association’s Annual Meeting is Red-letter Day for ‘the Dismal Science’. And Dismal it Proved

The American Economic Association’s annual meetings are a scary sight, with thousands of economists all gathered in the same place – a veritable weapon of mass destruction. Chicago was the lucky city for 2012 this past weekend, and I had just finished participating in an interesting panel on “the economics of regime change”, when I stumbled over to see what the big budget experts had to say about “the political economy of the US debt and deficits”.

The session was introduced by UC Berkeley economist Alan Auerbach, who put up a graph of the United States’ rising debt-to-GDP ratio, and warned of dire consequences if Congress didn’t do something about it. Yawn.

But the panelists got off to a good start, with Alan Blinder of Princeton, former vice-chairman of the US Federal Reserve, describing the public discussion of the US national debt as generally ranging from “ludicrous to horrific”. True, that. He asked and answered four questions.

Isabeau Doucet: Haiti’s Hard Road to Recovery

Two years after the earthquake life is improving, but the nation still faces a cholera epidemic and a huge rebuilding challenge

In Haiti, you’ll see a young man sitting on a crumbled wall blasting a song out of a bashed-up radio and singing along – apparently without irony – lyrics that just repeat “I love my life”. You’ll see a woman trying to peddle half-rotten papayas from a basket on her head, dancing to kompa on a pile of sewage-soaked rubble and trash. You’ll see a barefoot six-year-old boy flying a homemade kite wearing a T-shirt that says “Save Darfur”. You can be sure that if your motorcycle, car or SUV breaks down in the potholes of Port-au-Prince, any one of these folks will bend over backwards to help, rather than pose any threat to your safety.

What’s remarkable about Haiti is that despite the devastating earthquake, tent camps, cholera, political instability and chronically corrupt and neglected judicial institutions, it couldn’t be further from the orgy of violence people around the world associate with it. The United Nation’s latest homicide statistics show that Haiti is one of the least dangerous places in the Caribbean region with a murder rate on a par with the US.