Tag: TMC Politics

There is no doubt at all that there are demographic groups that can be accurately categorized as base voting blocs (of both parties) and as swing voting blocs, and politicians must appeal to both to win elections. The key is to position yourself in a way that genuinely does appeal to both — that both fires up your side and resonates with those in the middle. The great fallacy for Democrats is in thinking those two kinds of voters are so far apart on the most important issues in determining their voting. This debate keeps raging in Democratic circles, and I expect it will continue to for the foreseeable future.

Historically, swing voters tend to be, as Lee Atwater and most Republican strategists for the last 50 years have understood, economically populist. That is especially true in tough economic times, when more people are hurting and angry. Swing voters intensely dislike the idea of cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. They don’t like Wall Street bankers at all. They hate outsourcing jobs and are not fans of trade deals. They support taxing people making over $250,000 a year. They like the idea of firefighters and cops and nurses being able to unionize. Now, there’s no doubt: they are swing voters for a reason — they don’t like “big government” in general, they aren’t crazy about their own taxes going up, they are worried about government deficits. But here’s the deal: if the goal is to have a message and platform that appeals to both base and swing voters, you can do no better than populist economics. And here’s the other key thing: it is hard to unite them any other way. D.C. conventional wisdom centrism sure doesn’t do it.

John Nichols: A Responsible Republican Rejects Paul Ryan’s Fiscal Folly

Susan Collins slipped the knife in gracefully.

The Republican senator from Maine said that it took “courage” for House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, to advance what he would have Americans believe is a deficit reduction proposal.

But, she explained Friday, “I don’t happen to support Congressman Ryan’s plan…”

Collins’ announcement, made in an interview with a Maine television station, signals a break by a key Senate Republican with the Ryan bill, which received lockstep GOP support in the House. And Collins may not be the only senator from her side of the aisle to break ranks.

Indeed, while Collins is considered to be something of a moderate, honest conservatives should have just as much trouble with the fiscal folly that Ryan proposes.

No one who is serious about reducing deficits, responsible budgeting or the maintenance of a functional society could back Ryan’s scheme — a bait-and-switch scheme that does not even propose to balance the federal budget until 2040.

Michele Chen: The Growing Food Crisis, and What World Leaders Aren’t Doing About It

If all goes as planned for the G-20 this year, leaders of the world’s most powerful economies will convene to issue bold proclamations, talk past each other, and quietly agree to do virtually nothing. The stakes might be a little higher now, though, as the political poker table will be stacked with millions of the world’s hungriest people. Guess who’ll come away empty handed?

World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned at a recent World Bank-IMF meeting that the planet was hurtling toward a food crisis, akin to the chaos that erupted in 2007-2008 across the Global South. The context this time is in some ways more daunting: a perfect storm of social and economic upheaval in North Africa and the Middle East, natural and nuclear disasters in Japan, debt crises in Europe and the U.S., and epidemic unemployment worldwide.

Michael Winship: Congress: Teaching New Dogs Old Tricks

For all their talk of the Founding Fathers, the Constitution and core principles, you’d have thought that the current freshman class of Congress, the sprouted seed of Tea Partiers and the 2010 midterms, would have made a similar tour their first priority on arrival. And for all I know, many of them did just that. But for some, the siren song of cash and influence has proven stronger, already luring them onto the rocks of privilege and corruption that lurk just inside the Beltway. They’ve made a beeline not for the hallowed shrines of patriots’ pride but the elegant suites of K Street lobbyists, where the closest its residents have been to Lincoln is the bearded face peering from the five-dollar bill — chump change.

So much for fiercely resisting the wicked, wicked ways of Washington. These new members were seduced faster than Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate.”

When the enemy convinces us that his victory is inevitable, then he has already won the psychological war. Wall Street, which owns the White House, most of both Houses of Congress and, quite literally, the corporate media, is in a mad rush to save itself from its own contradictions by dismantling or privatizing much of the government, while cutting taxes for its own class to the bone. At the same time, under the canard of national defense, the U.S. military spends as much as the rest of the world combined to bring the entire planet under the Pentagon’s full spectrum dominance. The ever-expanding war budget is justified on national security grounds, while the destruction of the domestic social safety net is supposedly unavoidable because…well, because the government is broke.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Emperor Trump Has No Clothes

For a media that loves infotainment, the horse race and spectacle-and has trouble tackling real policy issues and digging deep-Donald Trump is the gift that keeps on giving: all spectacle, all the time.

Now he’s out there on his ugly birther trip, riding it to the top of the polls amidst a GOP presidential field in disarray. And other than a few notable exceptions, the media is largely playing the role of cheering spectator for Trump’s latest self-aggrandizing parade-none more so than Fox, which has treated his birtherism-based candidacy as a cause célèbre. Media Matters notes thirteen Trump appearances on the network since March 20.

Alexander Cockburn: The Bloody War That Millions of Americans Prefer to Overlook

For a nation that that loves anniversaries, the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the American Civil War — April 12, 1861 — crept by on tiptoe, like a burglar slipping through a darkened house. Yet the Civil War was, given the size of the population at the time, a fearful killer. All told, at least 630,000 died; at Gettysburg, the single bloodiest engagement of a war that ran from 1861 to 1865, around 50,000 fell across the three-day battle, nearly the entire body count of Americans in the Vietnam War. The Civil War defined American politics for the next hundred years and is still a

The reason for this eerie silence is not hard to find. The Civil War is contested political terrain, particularly in the racist backwash after the 1960s and the civil rights movement, which naturally looked back on the Civil War as one in which tens of thousands of Americans gave their lives for the principle that all are born free and slavery is a shameful blot on any society.

David Swanson: The Cure for Plutocracy: Strike!

How do you get politicians living off legalized bribery to criminalize bribery? How do you persuade the corporate media to report on the interests of flesh-and-blood, non-corporate people? How do you take over a political party when the only other one allowed to compete is worse? These are not koans, but actual problems with a single solution.

It might seem like there are a million solutions: pass state-level clean election laws, build independent media, build a new party, etc. But the fundamental answer is that when the deck is stacked against you, you insist on a new deck. Power, as Frederick Douglas told us, concedes nothing without a demand. We cannot legislate our way out of plutocracy. Instead, we the people must seize power.

Ari Berman: News for Obama: Public Cares About Jobs, Not Deficit

Two major new polls show that Americans are increasingly anxious about the direction of the US economy. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll earlier this week, 44 percent of Americans said the economy was getting worse, not better, while 57 percent disapproved of President Obama’s handling of the issue. Now comes a New York Times/CBS News poll indicating that “Americans are more pessimistic about the nation’s economic outlook and overall direction than they have been at any time since President Obama’s first two months in office.” A stunning 70 percent of Americans believe the country is headed on the wrong track. And only 29 percent of Americans think that a major reduction of the federal budget deficit-the stated top priority of leaders of both parties-will create jobs. Fifty-six percent of Americans say cutting the deficit will cost jobs or have no impact.

That stat alone provides what Greg Sargent calls “the clearest evidence yet that official Washington’s prioritization of the deficit over jobs is completely out of sync with public opinion.” It also lends credence to John Judis’s argument that “Obama has chosen the wrong economic message.”

Senator Tom Coburn, a conservative Republican from Oklahoma, has had the good sense to demand an end to the $5 billion annual tax credit to makers of corn ethanol, a wasteful subsidy to farm states that is also dubious environmental policy. For his outspokenness, Senator Coburn was pilloried by anti-government activists of his own party who cannot stand the idea of more revenues flowing into the federal Treasury. But he and a few others in the Senate are holding fast, suggesting that at least some Republicans are willing to break with party orthodoxy to reduce the long-term budget deficit

The loudest criticism came from Grover Norquist, whose group, Americans for Tax Reform, is the author of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge that has become a sacred covenant for virtually anyone wishing to run as a Republican. More than 95 percent of the Republicans in Congress have signed it (including Senator Coburn), as have many Republican governors and state lawmakers.

Eugene Robinson: Field Manual for Despots

WASHINGTON-If I were a Middle Eastern despot, I’d know how to handle the pro-democracy movement that threatens my rule: Crack down viciously, using deadly force against civilians, and make no meaningful concessions. The West will fulminate and posture but won’t intervene decisively. I can survive.

Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, Bahrain’s al-Khalifa royal family and others have surely been watching events in Libya and taking notes. The NATO-led attempt to dislodge Moammar Gadhafi is going nowhere fast. Bickering allied leaders have no stomach-or popular support at home-for war making of the kind that would be necessary to defeat Gadhafi’s army and take Tripoli. The regime is bloodied but unbowed.

One wonders why we bothered at all.

David Sirota: Beware of Vampire Squids and Their Stadium Schemes

When it comes to media voyeurism and the economic insights it can provide, the ads in Vanity Fair rival Charlie Rose’s television program as the best peep show of all. Between rip-and-sniff Dolce & Gabbana pages and come-hither Gucci models, readers get to see not what the kings are selling the lowly serfs, but what the royal family is telling itself.

This is why I read Vanity Fair-its ads provide a valuable glimpse into the palace. May’s edition is no exception, thanks to Goldman Sachs-aka the investment bank at the center of Wall Street’s 2008 meltdown.

On page 123 of the glossy mag, this very same bank presents itself as the savior of one of those Middle-American cities whose averageness (and baseball bats) makes it synonymous with good ol’ fashioned Americana: Louisville, Ky.

Joe Conason: The Trouble With Trump

Everything we really need to know about the character of Donald Trump was revealed when the wannabe president frivolously accused Barack Obama’s late grandparents of committing fraud with his birth announcement. Trump told CNN that they had placed the Aug. 13, 1961, announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser because they wanted to get “welfare” and other benefits. But this casual falsehood revealed only the tiniest hint of the truth about Trump that Americans will discover if he actually runs for the White House.

Anticipating such scrutiny, Trump should use more caution when mouthing off about “welfare,” for instance. His family wealth and his own business have both depended heavily on the corporate welfare that supports the real estate industry, starting with the Federal Housing Administration support that undergirded his father Fred’s residential empire more than half a century ago.

Noam Chomsky: Is the World Too Big to Fail?

The democracy uprising in the Arab world has been a spectacular display of courage, dedication, and commitment by popular forces — coinciding, fortuitously, with a remarkable uprising of tens of thousands in support of working people and democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, and other U.S. cities. If the trajectories of revolt in Cairo and Madison intersected, however, they were headed in opposite directions: in Cairo toward gaining elementary rights denied by the dictatorship, in Madison towards defending rights that had been won in long and hard struggles and are now under severe attack.

Each is a microcosm of tendencies in global society, following varied courses. There are sure to be far-reaching consequences of what is taking place both in the decaying industrial heartland of the richest and most powerful country in human history, and in what President Dwight Eisenhower called “the most strategically important area in the world” — “a stupendous source of strategic power” and “probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment,” in the words of the State Department in the 1940s, a prize that the U.S. intended to keep for itself and its allies in the unfolding New World Order of that day.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins: One Year After BP Oil Spill: Communities Lead While Congress Fails

One year ago today, British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling unit exploded in the Gulf of Mexico – a catastrophe that most Americans will never forget.

11 people lost their lives. According to Good, roughly 5 million barrels of oil gushed uncontrollably into the Gulf – eventually covering more than 60 miles of shoreline. Areas of the shore remain oil-soaked to this day.

The tragedy highlighted the need for new regulations to strengthen oversight of offshore drilling.  In response, Congress held more than 60 hearings related to the BP disaster; more than 100 oil spill-related bills were introduced.

How many passed?  None.  Zero.

Stephen Bradberry: A Developing Health Crisis Across the Gulf Coast

NEW ORLEANS – Days after the BP oil disaster began, on Apr. 20, 2010, BP and the U.S. administration pledged that Gulf Coast communities would be made whole. One year later that promise remains unfulfilled: across the Gulf there is a developing health crisis as a result of the oil spill.

Our state and federal governments, and BP itself, must demonstrate the will to take actions promised a year ago.

The BP spill poured over 170 million gallons of crude oil and immeasurable amounts of toxic gases into the waters and atmosphere of the Gulf of Mexico, in addition to the two million gallons of chemical dispersants used in the response operations, the full impact of which is yet unknown. For coastal communities exposed to these poisons, and that continue to find oil in their marshes and fishing nets, the health impact, we can be sure, will be severe and long term.

The decision by Standard & Poor’s to move U. S. government debt to a negative outlook is really a political intervention by a ratings agency into the country’s debt and deficit debate.

I truly doubt that any investor expects the United States government to default on its debt. The underlying assets of the United States – which is to say, the largest economy in the world – are rather formidable. And history says that we eventually get our act together on budget matters, even though the politics on the way there is usually ugly.

Amy Goodman: Power Shift vs. The Powers That Be

More than 10,000 people converged in Washington, D.C., this past week to discuss, organize, mobilize and protest around the issue of climate change. While tax day tea party gatherings of a few hundred scattered around the country made the news, this massive gathering, Power Shift 2011, was largely ignored by the media. They met the week before Earth Day, around the first anniversary of the BP oil rig explosion and the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, while the Fukushima nuclear plant still spews radioactivity into the environment. Against such a calamitous backdrop, this renewed movement’s power and passion ensure that it won’t be ignored for long.

Rallying those attending to the work ahead, environmentalist, author and founder of 350.org Bill McKibben said: “This city is as polluted as Beijing. But instead of coal smoke, it’s polluted by money. Money warps our political life, it obscures our vision. … We know now what we need to do, and the first thing we need to do is build a movement. We will never have as much money as the oil companies, so we need a different currency to work in, we need bodies, we need creativity, we need spirit.”

Robert Sheer: The New Corporate World Order

The debate over Republicans’ insistence on continued tax breaks for the superrich and the corporations they run should come to a screeching halt with the report in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal headlined “Big U.S. Firms Shift Hiring Abroad.” Those tax breaks over the past decade, leaving some corporations such as General Electric to pay no taxes at all, were supposed to lead to job creation, but just the opposite has occurred. As the WSJ put it, the multinational companies “cut their work forces in the U.S. by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million, new data from the U.S. Commerce Department show.”

Gail Collins: The New Anti-Abortion Math

One of my favorite stories about the Texas State Legislature involves the time Senator Wendy Davis was trying to ask a colleague, Troy Fraser, some questions about a pending bill. Fraser deflected by saying, “I have trouble hearing women’s voices.”

Really, she was standing right there on the floor. Holding a microphone.

These days in the budget-strapped, Tea-Party-besieged State Capitol, you can be grateful for any funny anecdote, no matter how badly it reflects on Texas politics in general. Like the time Gov. Rick Perry defended the state’s abstinence-only birth control program by saying that he knew abstinence worked “from my own personal life.”

Jim Hightower: Gubernatorial Goofiness in Maine

Gov. LePage’s rampage includes busting unions, rolling back child labor laws, gutting programs for the middle class and poor, and raising the retirement age for the state’s workers

Here’s a bit of political trivia: Three of the goofiest, most anti-worker governors in America are named Rick. What’re the odds of that?

They are Scott of Florida, Snyder of Michigan, and Perry of Texas. But all three Ricardos are in danger of being out-goofied by Paul LePage of Maine. He’s the right-wing extremist who slipped into the governor’s chair last fall after a three-way race in which he got a mere 38 percent of the vote. Rather than show a bit of humility, however, this minority governor has pumped himself up with high-octane hubris and gone on a tear against the state’s workaday majority.

Supporters and opponents of abortion seem to agree: It’s no longer the law of the land.

Supporters and opponents of abortion agree on nothing. One side says this is a conversation about fertilized eggs; the other says it’s about fetuses. One side says the debate is about personal autonomy; the other says it’s about murder. One side sees exceptions to abortion restrictions for reasons of maternal life or health as necessary to protect life; the other sees them as cunning “loopholes.”

Increasingly, however, there is a fundamental assumption both sides seem to share, even if they don’t say so, and it may well shape the future of abortion rights in America: Opponents and supporters of abortion appear to have taken the position that Roe v. Wade is no longer the law of the land.

Laura Flanders: Demonizing Taxes, Heightening Inequality

Yesterday was Tax Day in the US, and that’s almost universally greeted with groans and complaints. That tax word’s been so effectively demonized that it may be there’s no coming back. Is it time for a new word?

Some research by Duke University’s Dan Ariely suggests it might be.

Ariely’s study showed that Americans actually want a more equitable society-in fact, they think they have one.  When asked to identify their homeland from a list of nations described only by their level of equality–a majority of those polled picked Sweden, thinking it was the US. When asked to create their ideal society, Democrats, Republicans, men and women, the rich and the poor all created a distribution of wealth that is much more equal than the one we’ve got.

All that “social mobility, low inequality” stuff–Americans love it. They just don’t have it. In fact, social mobility here’s been shriveling, as the wealth gap’s been opening up.

Daphne Wysham: Obama’s Dirty Energy Fixation

As radioactivity levels continue to spike in Fukushima, Obama’s support for nuclear power is unwavering.

Just days after a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami unleashed a nuclear disaster in Fukushima, President Barack Obama signed a nuclear power cooperation agreement with Chilean President Sebastián Piñera. Like Japan, Chile is seismically active. It suffered the sixth-most powerful earthquake–8.8–ever recorded on a seismograph only last year.

The irony of peddling nukes in an earthquake zone after a devastating nuclear accident was apparently lost on Obama.

A few weeks later, he called for lowering the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, as well as aiming to reduce it by one-third by 2025. But in the course of doing so, he perpetuated some tired ideas about what’s possible with our energy matrix.

Donna Smith: Why Is a Trump Bankruptcy (or Two) OK?

Donald Trump has benefited from bankruptcy twice.  Donald Trump has grown his personal fortune following his two bankruptcies and now may run for President of the United States.  Clearly, the rules for Donald Trump in the aftermath of bankruptcy are not the same as for the rest of us.

And is this what we want in terms of leadership for the nation?  Someone who is smart enough to mow right over the realities the rest of us face when financial disaster looms?  Someone who bellies up on hundreds of millions is better than someone like me who goes broke for want of several thousand dollars following medical crisis?  My credit as a bankrupted person should be ruined forever and keep me from working some jobs or ever owning a home again while Donald Trump’s bankruptcies catapult him to the Presidency and great personal wealth and the building of Trump structures all over the country?

Ari Berman: Obama vs. Ryan: Who’s Winning the Deficit Debate?

Democratic strategists believe that House Republicans committed political suicide by voting to approve Representative Paul Ryan’s budget plan last week. “When we win back the majority, people will look back at this vote as a defining one that secured the majority for Democrats,” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel told Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent.

Obama skillfully framed Ryan’s budget during a major speech on the deficit earlier in the week, contrasting his vision of “shared sacrifice” with Ryan’s “deeply pessimistic” plan to gut the social safety net and redistribute income upwards. After a week of enjoying the limelight, the “bold” and “courageous” Mr. Ryan, an instant media darling, suddenly looked like something of a fool. Ryan complained that Obama had characterized his proposal as “basically it’s un-American.”

Ralph Nader: Waiting for the Spark

What could start a popular resurgence in this country against the abuses of concentrated, avaricious corporatism? Imagine the arrogance of passing on to already cheated working people and the jobless enormous corporate losses? This is achieved through government bailouts and tax escapes.

History teaches us that the spark usually is smaller than expected and of a nature that is wholly unpredictable or even unimaginable. But if the dry tinder is all around, as many deprivations and polls reveal, the spark, no matter how small, can turn into a raging inferno.

The Boston Tea Party lit up the American Revolution. Storming the hated Bastille (prison) by impoverished Parisians launched the French Revolution. More recently, in December 1997, an Israeli military vehicle rammed a civilian van in the West Bank killing seven occupants and igniting the first Intifada.

Mark Bittman: What’s Worse Than an Oil Spill?

A year ago, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, gushing nearly five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico before it was finally capped three months later. It was by most accounts a disaster. But when it comes to wrecking our oceans, the accidental BP spill was small compared with the damage we do with intent and ignorance.

I recently talked about this with two men who specialize in ocean affairs: Carl Safina, the author of “A Sea In Flames” and the president of the Blue Ocean Institute; and Ted Danson, (yes, that Ted Danson), who recently published Oceana (the book) and is a board member of Oceana, the conservation organization he helped found. As Safina said, “Many people believe the whole catastrophe is the oil we spill, but that gets diluted and eventually disarmed over time. In fact, the oil we don’t spill, the oil we collect, refine and use, produces CO2 and other gases that don’t get diluted.”