The holiday season tends to be one of the slowest times of year in the news business. How else to explain this?
Tagg Romney told the Boston Globe that his father, Mitt Romney, only reluctantly ran for president.
Said Romney's eldest son: "He wanted to be president less than anyone I've met in my life. He had no desire to run."
He added: "If he could have found someone else to take his place... he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn't love the attention."
Beyond a sudden interest in the opinions of the rich and pointless, I can't see any reason why anyone would want to cover this. Well, maybe to generate lots of commentary, of which my favorite was this one by a commenter "nctodc":
Nothing says truly reluctant like doing something twice.
Over at Other Words, former George McGovern campaign worker Steve Cobble wrote this about the experience of working for McGovern's losing presidential campaign the other day:
Image credit: From original article
I learned a few hard lessons about electoral politics that day. Being decent, humane, smart, caring, and brave was not enough.
Being a decorated war hero who flew 35 bomber missions against Nazi Germany didn't stop the Nixon Republicans from labeling McGovern unpatriotic. Caring enough about working men and women to write his history Ph.D. thesis about the 1914 Ludlow coal strike and massacre was not enough to keep AFL-CIO head George Meany from double-crossing McGovern when he became the nominee. Telling the truth about the immorality of the Vietnam War and the crookedness of the Nixon Administration did not convince nearly enough voters to win.
To paraphrase Jack Nicholson, America couldn’t handle the truth in 1972. Nor since, given that we still have an empire stretching across the globe.
Sound familiar? It should. I wrote something similar a few days ago when I learned of McGovern's death. I hadn't mentioned a couple things that Cobble does here, though. The first is his Ph.D. thesis, which to me is just an indication of where McGovern's real concerns lay. He was one of those folks who, despite being very successful, never forgot that there are plenty of people who are less fortunate through no fault of their own. It's interesting, but mainly in a historical sense. It might be enlightening to consider how few of today's congressmen have such an academic background, or have done anything else in their lives that might indicate they have some understanding of what it's like to be a working stiff here in America.
The other thing is about George Meaney, and this point is something that is definitely relevant to our situation today. I'll let Wikipedia explain what Cobble meant there:
Meany opposed the anti-war candidacy of U. S. Senator George McGovern for the Presidency against incumbent Richard Nixon in 1972, despite McGovern's generally pro-labor voting record in Congress. He also declined to endorse Nixon. On Face the Nation in September 1972, Meany criticized McGovern's statements that the U.S. should respect other peoples' rights to choose communism, because there had never been a country that had voted for communism; he accused McGovern of being "an apologist for the Communist world".[21] Following Nixon's landslide defeat of McGovern, Meany said that the American people had "overwhelmingly repudiated neo-isolationism" in foreign policy. Meany pointed out that the American voters split their votes by voting for Democrats in Congress.[22] According to Meany, class resentment was a major reason that Nixon won 49 states against McGovern, despite the dislike of the Vietnam War by a majority of American voters.
Meany wasn't one of those modern labor leaders who seem to be mostly interested in making their own lives better, rather than the people they're supposed to represent. He led a fight against corruption in labor unions, and was born into a blue collar family. He understood the working class, because he came from it. Still, Meany couldn't get past his own hangups about "communism", in quotes because he, like many Americans, had a view of the subject that was more based on prejudice than actual knowledge, to support the presidential candidate who would have made sure organized labor was protected. Instead, he helped lumber us with four more years of Nixon, which meant four more years of Vietnam, four more years of the Southern Strategy, and the beginning of the decline of organized labor in America. All because of an issue that wasn't relevant to organized labor.
Which, I think, is the lesson here. When Meany became a big political player, he forgot what was really important. The guy from the blue collar labor union background set the stage for the decline of organized labor. He did that, because he obsessed about winning a war against communism that couldn't be won. That war fell harder on the working class, his people, than it did on the rich or the upper middle class. If you don't believe that, consider that George W. Bush, Dan Quayle, Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, and Mitt Romney all found something better to do than risk serving in Vietnam. While Bill Clinton stayed opposed to the war, the others supported it. Kids from the working class, though, were far less likely to have a route to Canada, a college deferment, or a relative who could get them a posting to the National Guard. Yet Meany ignored all this, in the name of combating something that was, at best, a theoretical consideration for the people he represented.
This sin of Meany's, what Cobble refers to as a betrayal of McGovern and the Democrats of that time, might not have been enough to ensure Nixon's victory in 1972. Meany's endorsement might not have been enough to give McGovern the White House, but to the members of his unions he was one of them, and his feelings would have been persuasive to some. It certainly made McGovern's showing worse. That showing helped to engender the changes that it would eventually occur in the Democratic Party. That party quickly turned its back on labor and liberalism generally, and eventually learned that it could do pretty much whatever it wants without losing labor's support.
In short, Meany was another progressive who forgot what was really important, once he became important. It's a tale we've seen many times since.
There are folks at a table near mine having a lively discussion about economic policy. Thankfully, I can only hear enough to understand the subject matter. I say "thankfully", because typically there is so much misinformation and outright nonsense in such conversations that it's nearly impossible to keep up with it, never mind refuting it. You typically hear stuff like this:
"We have to watch our debts. Why shouldn't the government?"
And other similar silliness. It's not that governments shouldn't watch their debts, it's that they need to know that there are times to accumulate them and time to pay them down. In contrast to most households these days, they're also not on fixed incomes.
But it's not surprising that you hear (or read) this sort of thing way too often. To understand this, all you have to do is look at our national conversations on this issue and see why. Here's a recent example, courtesy of Reuters:
Romney has tried to make the election a referendum on Obama's economic stewardship, but many voters still pin the blame for the sluggish economy and high unemployment on his predecessor in the White House, Republican George W. Bush.
Here's what's true: Yes, lots of people blame George W. Bush, who deserves some of that blame. Unfortunately, as we've learned, it isn't entirely his fault that the financial system's casino ran out of money, either. To understand how all that came about, you need to look at the idiotic trend toward "deregulation" that started under President Jimmy Carter. You can thank that trend for Enron, the Savings and Loan crash, the electricity crises and Enron, not to mention the Dot Com and housing bubbles. By the time Bill Clinton was President, everyone who had any "serious" economic cred was saying that the way to prosperity was to deregulate just about everything, no matter how much we depended on it. He and the Republican-controlled Congress deregulated the banks, and you can thank that genius move for the crash of Lehman, Bear Sterns, and the near-collapse of everything else.
What we should have learned from this is that some regulations are good ones. Instead, what we learned is that George W. Bush is an idiot. The latter is true, but not as important as the former.
To continue:
"Until Governor Romney can show why his policies would be different from Bush's policies, then we think it is highly unlikely that he can win," Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analyst Brian Gardner wrote in a research note.
The problem here is that Barack Obama should have to explain the same thing. With the exception of the stimulus, which was way too small, there was nothing he did that a third Bush Administration wouldn't have, including utterly ignoring the criminal behavior of the people who were running the financial system. Bush bailed out General Motors, which in a sane world means that it would eliminate half of the slogan "Saved GM. Killed bin Laden" that so many Obama supporters are so proud of.
The article goes on to say:
The conservative National Review says Romney should acknowledge that problems like the mounting national debt and the Byzantine tax code were in place long before Obama took office, but argue the current president has failed to fix them.
Of course, Obama largely did what the Republicans wanted on tax policy. We still have the ruinous Bush tax cuts in place, despite how concerned everyone is about debt. That's why I said that governments aren't on a fixed income. They can raise taxes. This one just chose not to.
So, in an analytical piece by one of the world's leading wire services, we read an analysis of the economics debate that is almost complete nonsense.
Little wonder I don't want to overhear conversations on the economy.
There's something truly sad about the state of affairs Jon Stewart discusses in this segment:
The other day, emptywheel discussed Mitt Romney's idea about how to prevent fires on airplanes:
But now that she is safe–but looking ahead to six more solid weeks of chartered air travel–I’m surprised by Mitt’s problem solving process. The solution to this scare, Mitt says, is to make it possible to open windows on planes.
“I appreciate the fact that she is on the ground, safe and sound. And I don’t think she knows just how worried some of us were,” Romney said. “When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem. So it’s very dangerous. And she was choking and rubbing her eyes. Fortunately, there was enough oxygen for the pilot and copilot to make a safe landing in Denver. But she’s safe and sound.”
Never mind the obvious reasons you can’t have windows that open on jets, never mind the additional problems introduced if you tried to have open windows in the cockpit, where the fire and smoke–and therefore the greatest risk–broke out.
Tell you what, let's belabor those obvious reasons for a moment. Mitt Romney, the candidate of one of the major political parties for the highest office in this country, believes that a crackerjack way of preventing fires on aircraft is to build windows into them you can open. I think we should belabor this point a moment, because it appears that you can graduate from an exclusive private school and then go on to graduate from a prestigious private university, and not understand that airplanes fly at altitudes where it's impossible to breathe without assistance, and that they travel at something beyond 150 miles per hour (240 kilometers per hour) so they can stay in the air.
A candidate for President thinks that a good way to deal with a fire problem in a large metal tube that's full of potential debris is to send a hurricane-force wind through it, and starve all the passengers of oxygen, because they won't be able to find their oxygen masks in the smoke and wind before they pass out.
Forget all the nonsense about how dealing with that kind of pressure differential requires lots of extra weight and materials when you want the option of opening another hole in the plane. That's specialized knowledge and an engineering problem. I think it's sufficient to say that if the airplane makers and the numerous government agencies around the world that regulate them had thought it was a good idea, there would be windows you can open on an airplane. (I mean, besides the ones that are already in cockpits, which is the part of the plane where the fire originated - more specialized knowledge.) What I mention in the previous paragraph are things that any educated person should know, and Romney clearly doesn't.
What's sad about this isn't just that Romney was the best choice of one political party for a position of national leadership. It's that he was already chosen as a leader. He ran Bain Capital, which was responsible for managing (one could say destroying) companies with thousands of employees. This is typical of how we manage things nowadays, as emptywheel goes on to observe:
In other words, the people who control the finances of this transportation company, who decide how much money it needs to do its job, and whether to perform particular parts of the business in house or through contract, don't know a thing about the business they're running. They're a bunch of Mitt Romneys - people who, for all the expert industry knowledge they bring to the table, might as well be drooling idiots. They're the kind of people who, when you can't explain in a sentence or two why you need to do something that's vital in your line of work, get bored and tell you to get out of their office.
This is how we do things in America nowadays. If events in Europe are any guide, it's how things are done there nowadays, too. You'd think that no sane person would choose to do things this way, particularly in an industry where the consequences are that the person you love most in the world could die on the way to visiting you. Yet it's a rare business or political leader these days who doesn't think this is just a jim-dandy way to run an economy. Romney chose that charter company using the same criteria he used to run all those companies he killed while he was running Bain.
What Mitt Romney would do to us as President, particularly as opposed to what Barack Obama will do, pales in comparison to the fact that there are so many other Mitt Romneys wandering around out there. How else do you explain the cast of characters who ran for the Republican nomination this time, or the ones who ran for the Democratic Party's in 2008? They're almost universally a bunch of people who stumble trying to recite the bigoted nonsense and sound like they know it and mean it.
And in most cases, you can figure that they probably do mean it.
Afterword: Taylor Marsh has the perfect quote to describe Bain Capital's mission while Mitt Romney ran it:
Harvest the financial organs of a company, then leave it and the workers who depend on it for their livelihood dead.
The recent gaffe by Republican presidential nominee Mitch Romney, in which he disparaged nearly half the country as being freeloaders, has certainly prompted a lot of commentary. What it reminded me is that there are a whole lot of people in America who were, to use Ann Richards' line about George W. Bush, "born on third base, and thought he hit a triple". And yes, I'll call this a gaffe, because even though Romney clearly intended the audience he was addressing to get the message he sent, he almost certainly didn't want that message leaking to the general public. Plus, as we've observed, one definition of a gaffe is telling a truth by mistake. To Romney, what he was saying in front of that group of rich supporters, people like him, is the truth.
My own remarks on an earlier speech by New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez at the Republican convention made the point that even people who genuinely worked hard and earned the money they received owe a lot more to the rest of their society than they're willing to let on, and a lot more to effective government than they seem to realize.
There are a couple of other interesting perspectives on the attitude of America's rich toward their society and the rest of us. The first is an editorial by Naomi Klein:
I have been noticing, with sadness, that politicians do not even bother invoking the American Dream anymore. They know that we know that everything is rigged against it now, and that the language no longer persuades even the most naive and idealistic; the best you'll get from a politician is a pledge, playing to nostalgia, to restore its lost promise. But what is striking about Romney's remarks is that they have replaced that commitment with a willingness to blame a vast swath of striving, middle-class Americans for their plight.
We thus see a turning-point in American conservative philosophy. This was the moment when the wealthy elite stopped believing its own PR, the self-affirming myth of that economic success can always be had for those who want it and are willing to work. Mitt Romney has told us that it's now simply class war: a struggle to stop the other half getting what "we" have. Thank you for your candor, Mr Romney.
You don't have to be anywhere near the bottom of the heap to realize that this has become true in America. Even most of our so-called "entrepreneurs" of late have been educated people from middle class backgrounds, and often upper middle class, at that. About the only poor people who make it big are athletes or entertainers, and I don't see many of them, either.
The other perspective, and maybe the most profound one, comes from Jon Stewart and The Daily Show:
His conclusion about the rich folks who buy into the idea that they are the job creaters:
If they have success, they earned it. If they fail, the government ruined it for them. If they get a break, they deserve it. If you get a break, it's a handout and an entitlement.
It's a remarkable insight, all the more so because Stewart has certainly made quite a bit of money for himself.
I've been careful here to avoid characterizing this as merely the attitude of Republicans. It's not. As this speech shows, Barack Obama has a similarly disparaging view of his base. He has made that plain enough times that you almost have to willingly ignore it not to see. It's the attitude of much of our political class, because, let's face it, we aren't the ones who give them the money. In the case of many poor and lower middle class citizens, we don't even give them votes.
That's why the outcome of this election won't matter very much, at least in economic terms. We will continue to see the gulf widen between the rich and the rest of us, because neither major party wants that to change. What is worth watching, though, is what our politicians tell us about themselves, and their view of us as well.
Sojourners, a group of leaders from various and sundry religions, asked President Obama and Mitt Romney, his principle challenger for office this year, what they planned on doing about poverty. Both candidates produced videos, but if you want to absorb all that smarmy nonsense in a tenth the time, you can read the transcripts I'm going to quote from.
On the basic question of the economy, here are the candidates' responses:
We can pay down our debt in a balanced and responsible way, but we cannot balance the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable.
A strong economy will reduce our budget deficits, and it will reduce poverty as well. But at this point, budget cuts are also going to be necessary and I intend to make them.
Translation: The voodoo (economics) will continue until the patient improves.
If I were a believer, I’d say praying was in order. Since I’m not, I’ll say it won’t do any less good than what these guys have in mind.
Of course, they spent a bit of time telling us how their faiths helped them reach this conclusion, etc. It's astonishing how homogeneous our presidential candidates are these days.
At FireDogLake, Jon Walker sums the result of the two conventions up pretty well today:
What should be the most concerning to [Mitt Romney's presidential] campaign about Romney’s lack of [post-convention poll] bounce is not that he is currently trailing two months out from the election, but rather what it says about the two campaigns. For three days the American people listened to what was basically a non-stop free infomercial for Romney. The Republicans were uninterrupted as they put forward their best arguments for their candidate, and the electorate simply wasn’t moved by it. On the other hand, when Democrats got their three days to make their best arguments, it clearly resonated with enough voters to make a significant difference.
It really was the GOP ticket's moment to shine, and they didn't. A few months ago, I predicted that the GOP nominee would win the election (I believe I put it something like 70-30 in their favor, but I haven't found that link yet), but I hadn't reckoned with how badly they'd manage the campaign. Romney won in Massachusetts, after all.
Whatever else you can say about him, President Obama has run a good campaign thus far. He has governed badly enough to lose, and yet I'd say at this point he is in the driver's seat. Only something cataclysmic is likely to change that.
Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney's bigoted comments regarding the cultural superiority of the United States and Israel versus some of their neighbors receives a justified skewering from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show:
This is a wonderful example of how it can be easier to point up the folly of peoples' prejudices using comedy than trying to make a serious case. To anyone familiar with the reasons the Palestinians are where they are now, Romney's comments are absurd. I don't discount cultural differences, but there's a hell of a lot more going on here than two cultures that started out on even terms. For a variety of economic, geographic, and historical reasons, Israel has had an advantage from the early days of their formation. Glossing over all that in favor of extolling the superior culture of the Israelis is an insultingly stupid comment, even by the standards of today's political discourse.
Not all that long ago, JP Morgan, supposedly one of those ingenious investment houses that are always working wonders with our money, lost $2 billion under circumstances that are, to put it mildly, still pretty murky. That money on this scale can simply disappear with no one being responsible should be a concern to anyone, even folks who work in that industry.
Yves Smith, of Naked Capitalism, wrote this yesterday in the New York Times Room For Debate:
Preventing blow-ups like the JPMorgan “hedge” that bears no resemblance to any known hedge isn’t difficult. What makes preventing it difficult is that banks that exist only by virtue of state-granted charters -- and more recently, huge transfers from the public -- have persuaded public officials and regulators that they have a God-granted right not just to high levels of profit but also high levels of employee and executive compensation.
Now wait, you might be asking, isn't JP Morgan a bank? Well, yes and no. It used to be that banks just did safe things like lending money to people who could be generally relied on to pay the money back. They were heavily regulated, and the money depositors put in those banks were (and still are) backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The "Glass-Steagall" Yves is referring to is the Glass-Steagall Act, which enforced that separation between what was a bank and what was an investment house. Nowadays, thanks to the repeal of Glass-Steagall, among other financial regulation, during the Reagan and Clinton Administrations, that separation no longer exists. Merrill Lynch is owned by Bank of America. JP Morgan does risky stuff that loses billions of dollars at a time on behalf of Chase Bank, which is now JP Morgan Chase.
What all the de-regulation of the banking industry has done for the rest of us is put us on the hook for the mistakes they are now free to make. The FDIC backs depositors, at least up to a certain limit. There's lots of our money out there, though, that doesn't qualify for FDIC insurance. Plus, as we've seen in the Crash of 2008, the Federal Reserve System has been used to keep the big banks afloat. Banking has become a casino where we end up paying for the gamblers' taxi fare home, plus all the damage they did while they were celebrating.
That's why I feel that on economic matters, at least, there is no difference between President Obama and a potential President Romney. Obama hasn't done a thing to clean up the aftermath of the financial industry's last binge, and he won't do anything to prevent the next one, if he can avoid it. That's what these last three years should have taught us, if they can teach us anything.
Dean Baker, via Susie Madrak on the state of thought in Washington, DC:
[W]hen all the inside Washington types agree on something, it is a good idea to hang on to your pocket books. Remember, these are the folks who thought it was great that everyone was becoming a homeowner in the middle of a housing bubble and that Alan Greenspan was the greatest central banker of all-time. In other words, inside Washington types are a group of people that mindlessly repeat the conventional wisdom and are largely incapable of original thought.
The particular subject, of course, is DC's never-ending quest to "save" Social Security by destroying it, but it's a statement that could just as easily be applied to the War On Terrorism, the War On Drugs, intellectual property, foreign policy, any other aspect of economic policy, and defense spending. Anyone independent enough to think outside that box is branded a wacko in one way or another. Yet they are usually the ones who make sense.
In Baker's article, he makes the point that the government's own statistics should tell our elected officials that they are doing the wrong thing. Yet, they will do the wrong thing, anyway, because that's what makes sense to them. His article, and Susie Madrak's take on it, are both worth a look-see, I think.
Paul Krugman puts hammer to nail today with this graph and commentary:
Just a quick picture. On the right, it’s an item of faith that the crisis in Europe represents a failure of the welfare state. So what is the correlation between the size of government and recent economic performance?
Nor I. There really isn't any. The countries in that chart are most of the European Union countries, plus the U.S., Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and Australia.
Growth may be affected by the size of government at some point, but there's a pretty wide variety of government spending to gross domestic product (GDP) ratios there (just by eyeballing the chart, it looks like the range is 31 to 52 percent), and a very large range of differences in economic performance.
I'm sure that won't stop a lot of so-called economics experts from trying to see a pattern, though. Maybe they'll see Elvis or the Virgin Mary, too.
Caption: No, that's not Mitt Romney, that's Micheal Moore. The rubber glove seems appropriate, though.
It's hard to believe, but if the Los Angeles Times analysis is correct, Mitt Romney may have come up with a worse health care plan than President Obama and the Democrats did. Talking Points Memo summarizes:
What the Times arrived at is a plan broadly similar to the widely derided blueprint John McCain ran on in 2008.
The underlying idea is to wipe out one of the main fiscal tent poles of the existing health care system [tax breaks for employer-provided health care], and use the resulting revenues to finance billions of dollars in subsidies to buy insurance on the existing private market. The result, according to experts, would likely be a significant increase in the number of uninsured Americans, in an economy where, for better or worse, employers would likely no longer provide their workers with health care coverage.
For those who don't have to buy their own health insurance, let me introduce you to the central idea of this situation:
It's you against the insurance companies. That means you will lose.
When a medium- or large-sized company buys health insurance from an insurance company, it has some power in that relationship. If it decides to change insurance plans, the insurance company will lose a significant amount of revenue. While the company is not as motivated as its employees, it still will want its insurance provider to actually provide coverage for its employees, so they aren't sick all the time or leaving for an employer with a better health plan. Individual buyers, on the other hand, have little to no power in that relationship.
Of course, as the LA Times notes, this is another case when the Free Market Pony will gallop to our rescue, according to the "experts":
Conservative healthcare experts offer several reasons for such a change. The main one is that the tax law needs to be revised to bring free-market competition to the healthcare system.
"It is absolutely essential if you are going to reform the health insurance market to change the tax treatment of health insurance," said Robert Moffit, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. "It is the 800-pound gorilla in the healthcare debate."
Moreover, the current system effectively discriminates against Americans who do not get health benefits at work. They must buy coverage on their own and do not get the same tax break.
There are any number of things wrong with what these "experts" are saying, not the least of which is that health insurance is not, and will never be, a "free market". It is a risk pool, and that in itself says it's going to be rather less than free, because bigger risk pools are inherently safer. Since market forces are almost inevitably affected by costs, it pays to leave people out of those pools who actually need health care services. Leaving insurance companies to compete has gotten us where we are now - with people who need insurance not able to buy it or afford to use it.
Which is a long way of saying that the LA Times is right when it says this:
For example, if workers had the ability to shop anywhere for a health plan, and if companies no longer got tax breaks, some employers would likely stop providing health coverage. That might be fine for young, healthy workers who could buy plans on their own. But older or sicker workers would lose the protection they now receive by buying insurance within a group. If young adults opted to buy low-cost plans that provided limited benefits, prices could rise sharply for middle-aged workers who are more likely to have chronic health problems.
Under the [Presidential candidates John] McCain [health care reform] plan, more than 9 million fewer people would have received health benefits through their jobs, according to an estimate from the Lewin Group, a healthcare consulting firm.
There's little reason to doubt any of that analysis, assuming the Times is correct about Romney's intentions.
So, what about the individual mandate, perhaps the most unpopular notion in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and certainly one I've objected to often enough? Don't get your hopes up. The LA Times notes that Romney pooh-poohed the mandate during the primary campaign, but I remain skeptical. Obama and the Democrats gave the insurance companies the chance to put millions of uncovered Americans over the fence and bone the daylights out of us. They won't give that up without expecting something else in return. With our two current political parties, the insurance companies get what they expect.
Ergo, if you're expecting "RomneyCare" to be mandate-free, you're even dumber than the folks who expected Obama and the Democrats would hold out for a "public option". After all, when he was on the campaign trail, Obama's health care plan didn't have a mandate, either.
RomneyCare will, if implemented, be a fitting successor to ObamaCare. ObamaCare managed to make things worse than they were already, and RomneyCare will make them worse still. It's sad, when the GOP could have put forward a plan to change the ACA that would have followed their stated principles, and yet improved the system at least slightly, that they have chosen not to do so.
Every once in a while, some crazy person hacks into Robert Reich's blog somehow, and writes insane things like this:
The returns aren’t all in yet on today’s Republican primaries but President Obama didn’t wait. He kicked off his 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney with a hard-hitting speech centered on the House Republicans’ budget plan – which Romney has enthusiastically endorsed.
Well, I don't really know if someone hacked into his site. After all, it's possible that on the occasional dull day, Prof. Reich just decides "Hey, why don't I write something that's batshit crazy, and see if anyone notices." Heck, there are days I want to do that.
But let's give him the benefit of the doubt. Whoever broke into his site is not entirely wrong there. The Paul Ryan plan for the end of America is a pretty grim piece of work, lacking as it does both a chance of working and any compassion for those who aren't rich contributors.
The problem is that Reichthis evil hacker seems to think there's something in there that the Democrats wouldn't do if they could.
Let's review briefly what the last three years have shown us about the priorities of the Democratic Party.
First up, in the face of the largest financial collapse since the Great Depression, they proposed, and then half-implemented, a stimulus program that wasn't a quarter of what was needed. At the same time, they declared that there was absolutely no reason to think there would ever have to be another one. If someone were deliberately trying to convince the American public that there was no way stimulus spending could work, they couldn't have done a better job than the Democrats did.
Next, they passed, after much deliberation and not much actual thought for their re-election chances, a health care "reform" bill that neither reformed health care, nor made it more accessible to most of the people who don't have access. It did, however, require that millions of Americans buy insurance that they will not be able to afford to use.
After that stirring success, they passed some bank regulations that will do nothing to prevent a repeat of the collapse of 2008, and passed a mortgage "relief" act that was vastly undersized and so badly administered that most of the few people who actually might have been helped have been able to get any help.
Of course, I've skipped over a few things, like the continued assault on civil liberties, the never-ending wars in places that most of us couldn't find on a map, and the nonstop giveaway of our natural resources to the oil companies.
Now, try to think back to 2008 and then tell me, if I had listed these "accomplishments" we would be talking about at the beginning of 2012, how many of you would have guessed that John McCain had been elected President, and that the GOP had a majority in Congress?
Here's how I see the great choice of 2012:
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism, with birth control
Now, don't you just feel so special, living in a country where you can cast your vote for one of these competing visions of our future?
UPDATE (Apr. 4): I couldn't find that picture last night, so here it is now.
Can we talk? I mean, really. Put down that glass of whatever, and try to find something to lean on, because I don't want you to lose your equilibrium. There, that's better.
I don't give a crap how rich Mitt Romney is.
There, I said it. Pretty shocking, isn't it? But there it is. I don't care. Well, OK, I care a little. There are days when I think it would be just wonderful if the person in the White House had some earthly idea what most of us go through in our lives. Unfortunately, I don't think that's been the case for a long, long time. I think the last time there was a President who actually had some idea what it was like to be a working stiff was when Ulysses Grant was in office.
Presidents are rich people. If for no other reason, we know that because they can afford to take off two years or more from whatever they are supposedly doing to run for office. They have to know a lot of rich folks so they can start advertising and setting up a campaign. Every President of modern times has done this, including the current one.
So I don't care how rich Romney is. Every President is way richer than I am. They're all way richer than you are. Do you think it really matters that Romney is richer than Barack Obama? Until they moved to DC, the Obamas lived in a house that almost none of us could afford.
Being rich doesn't have to mean that you aren't concerned about how everyone else lives. Teddy Roosevelt was rich; so was his cousin Franklin. Jack Kennedy was rich. Somehow, they all acquired some idea what it was like for everyday people, at least enough to implement policies that made our lives better. Being rich, or even talking about it a lot, doesn't make you unable to put yourself in someone else's shoes.
It's just more difficult.
Once you're rich enough that you don't have to work ever again, there's really not much more that can separate you from the common man, except maybe being so rich that you can buy absolutely anything you want. I suppose Romney's that rich, but it really doesn't matter. His opponents, no matter if it's Mister "I'm From A Steel Town" or Mister "I'm From A Big City With A Corrupt Government", don't have any idea what it's like to have to worry about bills or whether the kids get those braces they need. They certainly have no idea what it's like to wonder what happens when you get sick and can't afford medical care.
Even Mister "Man From Hope" had to learn most of that from someone else.
So, I don't care how rich Mitt Romney is. I don't care how many times he talks about how many NASCAR team owners he knows, or why the Missuz needs two Cadillac SUVs, or why he can't seem to stop reminding us how rich he is. Because, folks, they're all rich. Most of them have absolutely no idea what it's like to be you or me. That's why they're where they are. At least there's one thing we can honestly tell ourselves that Mitt Romney has never lied about.
What I care about is that Romney's economic policies look an awful lot like President Obama's, as do his health care policies, his foreign policies, and his policies about just about anything else worth mentioning. That, and that they all suck at least as much as Obama's policies.
Now you know the dark secret of my soul. I hope you can forgive me someday, even if you'll never be able to respect me.
I only saw about the last three minutes of this year's Super Bowl. In the time I was watching, the New York Giants scored a touchdown to go ahead, yet the folks who were interpreting the game for us said that this was a dumb thing to do. I thought that scoring so you could be ahead at the end was the objective of this game, but apparently, as has been the trend, the game is getting more complicated.
Thus, I felt ill prepared to write the usual incisive post-game analysisSlobber And Spittle readers have come to rely on.
Still, even having missed most of the game, I heard about this commercial:
It's Clint Eastwood at his dramatic best, narrating what I suspect will be one of the more memorable Super Bowl commercials ever. True to his usual on-screen persona, he's that gritty tough guy who sometimes need reminding that he has a heart, telling us we're gritty, tough folks who sometimes need reminding we have a heart, and we're not going to let a little thing like an economic downturn get us down. It's for the Chrysler Corporation, whose products and economic outlook are both looking considerably better than they were three years ago, thanks partly to the actions of both the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration to make sure Chrysler and the other U.S. automakers had financing when they needed it.
I've discussed before the fact that manufacturing firms will often need financing to keep going. Improvements to production facilities are expensive in many industries. There are also economic downturns and sales downturns, when a company might need financing to weather the storm.
The plain fact is that it wasn't the auto industry in America that failed, it was the finance industry. It caused the crash of 2008, and it refused, even after a huge bailout, to help American industry deal with its economic woes. I supported both the Bush and Obama Administrations on this issue, and that's part of the reason why.
Sadly, not everyone agrees. There seem to be quite a few folks who think that we can do without a manufacturing base in this country. Second City Television puts that notion in the perspective it deserves, with its own parody of the Eastwood Chrysler commercial:
In particular, it calls out a Mitt Romney op-ed that appeared in the New York Times back in 2008. In the grand tradition of sportscasters who think that scoring a go-ahead touchdown is a dumb idea, he wrote this:
If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.
Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.
The idea that you can make a manufacturing company better by starving it of funds is insane, but it's one that people who have made their living by destroying companies, which is what Romney used to do, tell themselves and anyone else stupid enough to believe it. Romney appears to believe that instead of making things that people value here, we should instead become a nation of people who sell our "intellectual property" to each other. We should, in other words, become vampire capitalists like him, or work on the domestic staff of folks like him.
I don't fault Romney particularly among our current crop of presidential candidates on economics policy. None of the likely candidates for either party betrays the slightest idea of what really makes a national economy function. Obama has surrounded himself with the same Wall Street pirates who made the economy crash in 2008. Romney is one. That's the main difference there. Ron Paul's views on economics are mostly either insanely foolish or foolishly insane, and neither Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich has a clue.
I think these politicians must get their economics advisors from the same school that produces the sportscasters who advise against scoring a go-ahead touchdown at the end of a game.
What people ought to remember is that Romney was writing that editorial about what George W. Bush did. Barack Obama supported that decision with more loans. Neither is a flaming liberal. Both realized that we couldn't afford to let an industry that employs hundreds of thousands of Americans in high paying jobs go bankrupt. The loans have been repaid, and Detroit automakers are back to making useful products again. That's more than we can say for the finance industry, despite the massive bailout it received.
What I love about these two videos is that in a way they're both saying the same thing. A point is made in one using straight drama to make its point, and the other uses biting sarcasm as a counterpoint.
I hate to make predictions, since I hate having to grind my teeth months later when I see what I wrote. Nevertheless, since I published these in a comment elsewhere, here are mine for 2012:
Occupy will continue to change tactics. Realizing that their nonstop protests aren’t getting it done, they’ll make more efforts to cost Goldman Sachs, et. al., real money in hopes that they’ll change their ways. I think those predicting that there will be violence at one or both of the party conventions next year are accurate. What I will add to those predictions is that the violence will be mostly, if not entirely, perpetrated by police.
The Republicans will nominate someone “safe”, like Mitt Romney, for President. He will win. Between progressives being so unconcerned with Obama’s re-election, and times getting even worse, he won’t stand a chance.
Times will get worse. The stimulus has run out, and there’s nothing to replace it. Government will respond by doing the same things that got us here – more austerity, and less regulation.
Of these predictions, I think only the last one needs any elaboration. The first is pretty vague, but the events it describes are subject to rather vague forces, so I don't think one can do much better.
The economy will continue to get worse. By that, I mean that it will grow at a rate that is less than that which will create net jobs beyond what is needed for an expanding population. That typically means something less than two-ish percent growth. No, you don't get to say I was wrong if growth is 2.1 percent. You get to say I was wrong if there were more than a million net jobs added next year. That means a million beyond labor force growth, which I would conservatively define as:
12 months * 90,000 jobs/month = 1.08 million jobs.
So, if the numbers of employed grow by more than two million jobs, I was wrong. I say that this is a conservative estimate, because it's the smallest number of new laborers per month that I've seen any credible economists use. I think that number should be higher, but we'll be conservative here.
We'll be lucky if there's any net growth at all. Nothing that either our government or Europe's various governments are doing instill any confidence at all that things will get better. Austerity will continue until the economy improves, which is to say that the economy will not improve.
So there, fearless predictions. For the most part, this is obvious. The only risky one is predicting that Obama won't be re-elected, but I'd give that one at least two to one odds of being right.
Scarecrow, at FireDogLake, on the latest economic prescription from aspiring Republican Presidential spokesmodel Mitt Romney:
I don’t follow what Mitt Romney says everyday, because sooner or later a policy chameleon will say everything once, mimic all positions, and then switch back in case you missed something.
Which I think captures the back-and-forth shuffle Republican candidates have had to do for a pretty long time now - all of my adult life at least. Of course, the Mittster is particularly adept at it, given how much practice he's had.
I'm not sure if I prefer this to the Democrats' simpler solution of simply lying about what they want to do, and then doing what Republicans probably would have in their place, but there's at least some potential entertainment value here that the Democrats just aren't providing.
It's been quite a day in politics. Not a good day, mind you, but quite a day. It started with Anthony Weiner's resignation over something that shouldn't have done more than raise a few eyebrows.
Then Mitt Romney made what I took to be a self-effacing comment about his current employment status, and various and sundry progressives wanted me to think that this means he's the anti-Christ. To me, the troubling part of that article came near its end:
“We have all been distressed by the policies that this administration has put in place over the last two years,” Mr. Romney said. “We have seen the most anti-investment, antigrowth, antijob strategy in America since Jimmy Carter. The result has been it’s harder and harder for people to find work.”
Not only is this tirade completely wrong from an economic perspective, it's wrong from a historical one as well. Jimmy Carter was the first proponent of "de-regulation", which was later referred to as "getting the government off our backs". Of course, it mostly got government off the backs of the folks who run the financial sector and other large businesses, allowing them to cause the unemployment Romney and the folks he was talking to were lamenting.
I don't remember any of the progressives who were castigating Romney mentioning this.
So, it was a bit of a relief to be pointed to this video this evening:
This reminds me of the Strange Bedfellows Campaign, in which progressive and libertarian bloggers and activists got together to try to make our government more accountable. In this regard, we're natural allies, even if we don't often agree on what the role of government should be. Government that isn't accountable to its people is nearly always going to be a failure.
Speaking of which, former Senator and Stand Your Ground Award winner Russ Feingold addressed the Netroots Nation today. One thing I get from this is that he still wants to work with the Democratic Party. He made the inevitable plug for supporting President Obama, which isn't going to happen unless something really fundamental changes pretty soon. But the interesting part of the address had to do with the corrupting influence of corporate money in politics.
The Super PAC Priorities USA, which was founded by former Obama White House aides to collect and spend the unlimited corporate funds allowed under the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, and other Democratic Super PACs are nothing short of a disaster for the party, Feingold said.
"It's dancing will the devil," he told hundreds of liberal activists gathered at the Minneapolis Convention Center.
His deeper message, however, was a call to action for progressives to practice a politics of principle rather than simple partisanship -- a theme that is central to the work of the national reform group he leads, Progressive United. Yes, he argued, Barack Obama should be reelected in 2012. Yes, he hopes that Democrats make a comeback after the devastating 2010 election cycle that cost him his Senate seat and cost his party control of the U.S. House and governorships across the country.
But, he warned, a victory-at-any-cost approach will cost the party the credibility it needs to attract Americans who are disgusted by political corruption – and it will yield little in the way of progress.
Decrying the failures of the Obama administration on issues ranging from bank regulation to tax policy to trade agreements, he urged progressives – especially progressive bloggers, who have become such a powerful influence in the party – “to call out Republicans and Democrats” who fail to stand for reform.
My views on this subject are pretty clear, I think, but I'll just restate them quickly here. You don't get the attention of a politician like President Obama by first saying you'll support him no matter what, then saying what you want him to do. You get absolutely nothing from a politician who doesn't have to give it to you.
Still, I like Feingold's spirit. What his career in the Senate tells me is that he is not going to let the Obama Administration dictate what he does, either.
Hopefully, I'll find a video later. It was quite a speech.
It would be such a pleasure to have a government that was composed of people like this, who disagree fundamentally on some issues, but who will take principled stands when they think they're right. One Ron Paul, Russ Feingold, or Ralph Nader is worth all the self-serving hypocrites who have been calling for Rep. Weiner's resignation this week put together.
There really are good people in politics; it's just that sometimes, you have to look really hard to find them.
After explaining that Mitt Romney's promise to keep the federal budget at less than 20% of GDP is not possible, Paul Krugman goes on to ask:
But Romney is willing to pretend to be an ignorant extremist to have any chance of getting the Republican nomination. So this ends up being a character issue: do you want a man that cynical in the White House?
The way I look at it, there are two possibilities here. Either Romney will keep this promise, even though it's crazy, or he won't. If it turned out to be the former, then I really don't think we're any worse off than we are right now. The Democrats are going to do something like this anyway. They talk like they won't, but as with the health care "reform" effort, they are doing something else behind the scenes. They will pass a Medicare cut, and almost certainly will either renege on the promise to raise the maximum income level for Medicaid coverage to 133%, or they'll figure out how to get more blood out of that turnip somehow. In short, in contrast to what Romney would do, they are telling us they want to do the smart thing, and are actually doing the stupid thing.
Or, the other possibility is that Romney has no intention of keeping his promise. In that case, I'm not bothered at all that he's lying to people who are so deliberately ignorant that they don't know how much their government is spending on what, and yet demand that it cut spending. People that stupid aren't ever going to believe the truth, because there will always be someone around who is dishonest enough to tell them what they want to hear. If he does that, and then breaks that promise, good for him.
In short, I don't have much of a problem with that idea. There are plenty of reasons I don't think Romney would make a good President, but this barely rises to the level of being an interesting philosophical question.
When it comes to character, if this is the worst Romney does, he's no worse than the current occupant of the White House.
