Month: February 2012

Today’s jobs report is pretty damn good, and if the last twelve straight months are any indication, the numbers that were reported are probably an underestimate of the pace of the recovery. As it is, the unemployment rate is now down to 8.3%. On this trajectory, it should be below 8% by election day, and that will eliminate one of the zombie lies the Republicans like to tell us. They falsely claim that the administration “promised” that the Recovery Act would keep the unemployment rate below 8 percent. That’s not true. But it won’t matter much if the rate falls below 8%, will it?

We now have 23 straight months of job growth. In 2004, John Boehner sent out a press release that said, among other things:

Last Friday, the Labor Department reported that 1.1 million new jobs had been created over the last eight months, including 625,000 in the last two months alone. Eight consecutive months of positive job growth shows the Republican plan for economic prosperity is working and more and more Americans are finding work everyday.

If eight months of positive job growth indicated that the Republican plan for economic prosperity was working in May 2004, what does 23 months of positive job growth mean for the president’s plan?

Mitt Romney loves America.  And Mitt Romney loves “America the Beautiful”.  You don’t even have to ask him; he’ll tell you.  He won’t just tell you; he’ll recite a verse…or two…or three…or even sing it to you, as Republican campaign audiences all over Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida have found out.  (Get ready Nevada; you’re next.)

But do Mitt Romney and all those nice Republicans know the sordid history behind “America the Beautiful”?

-That those “pilgrim feet, Whose stern impassion’d stress, A thoroughfare for freedom beat” are the feet of Yankee social reformers and carpetbaggers?

-That the “heroes prov’d, In liberating strife, Who more than self their country lov’d, And mercy more than life”  are the heroes of the Union Army crushing the
secessionists and empancipating 4 million slaves?

-That the “gleam” of the nation’s “alabaster cities” is the shining example of Chicago(!) and cities like it?

And that’s just the lyrics.  The poet who wrote them is perhaps even more horrifying to contemplate.

Katherine Lee Bates was a Wellesley College English professor, a feminist, a lesbian, a support of labor unions, of settlement houses and of social reform movements throughout her life—a living embodiment of the coastal, cultural elites of her day.*  Why is Mitt Romney singing the praises of Katherine Lee Bates?  (On the other hand, she was a lifelong Republican, so maybe that it explains it.)

[Don’t tell Ann Coulter (Cornell ’84) or Laura Ingraham (Dartmouth ’85).]

P.S.  On the whole, the fact that Mitt Romney sings in public is one of his more attractive, and humanizing qualities.  (And goodness knows, he needs all the humanizing qualities he can manufacture.)

A word of caution, though:  Mitt, you don’t want to get into a singing contest with this guy.

Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com

If you and I commit fraud by, say, writing a check for which we know we have no funds on deposit, or by selling a product we know cannot produce the benefits we claim for it, well, we go to jail. Wall Street moguls (and by that term I mean the largest financial firms in the country) who committed securities fraud on a grand scale and crashed the economy requiring the US taxpayers to bail them out, on the other hand, routinely pass go with nary a worry that their “indiscretions” will result in prosecution. Too big to fail means too big to bring to justice, as well. Over the past ten years large financial firms have frequently skipped merrily away from any punishment for their crimes by the Department of Justice, even when caught red-handed, according to a NY Times report:

[The SEC] has repeatedly allowed the biggest firms to avoid punishments specifically meant to apply to fraud cases.

An analysis by The New York Times of S.E.C. investigations over the last decade found nearly 350 instances where the agency has given big Wall Street institutions and other financial companies a pass on those or other sanctions. Those instances also include waivers permitting firms to underwrite certain stock and bond sales and manage mutual fund portfolios.

JPMorganChase, for example, has settled six fraud cases in the last 13 years, including one with a $228 million settlement last summer, but it has obtained at least 22 waivers, in part by arguing that it has “a strong record of compliance with securities laws.” Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, which merged in 2009, have settled 15 fraud cases and received at least 39 waivers.

This is a bipartisan failure, for it has not made any difference who sat in the Oval Office over the past decade, the results have been the same. The rich financiers fleece the rest of us while making profits off their criminal malfeasance, and both Republican and Democratic administrations have turned a blind eye toward their fraud and deceit, crimes that have cost our economy trillions of dollars, led to massive unemployment and what would be called outright theft, if an individual burglar were involved rather than a multi-billion dollar institution.

Yet, why should they change their ways? No one is holding them accountable now for their nefarious schemes. We’ve have had proof since a Congressional Committee report issued last year that Wall Street firms rigged the Mortgage backed derivatives game to benefit themselves and defraud their customers on a massive scale:

The great and powerful Oz of Wall Street was not the only target of Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, the 650-page report just released by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, alongside Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Their unusually scathing bipartisan report also includes case studies of Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, providing a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in our history — “a million fraud cases a year” is how one former regulator puts it.

These fraudulent criminal schemes led to the near collapse of our global economy, yet what has been done since then to bring the principals, corporations and individual alike, who were responsible for these frauds, to justice? Next to nothing, unfortunately. Republicans rail against the (meager) oversight and reforms passed by the Democrats prior to the 2010 mid-term elections and would overturn them in a heartbeat if they could, and prominent Democrats, including my Senator from New York, Chuck Schumer stands in Wall Street’s corner, ever alert to protect these “mobsters” (for that is in effect what they are) from ever having to face the music.

And people still question why the Occupy Wall Street movement arose, organically, and attracted so many adherents to its cause despite lack of funding from billionaires like the Koch brothers, physical abuse by law enforcement of peaceful protesters and the unlawful use of force and arrests of thousands of people merely for seeking to express their first amendment rights.

The answer is obvious. It’s as plain as the millions of corporate dollars pouring into to “Super Pacs” to run unprecedented numbers of attack ads in 2010 and in the Republican primaries this year, thanks to a Supreme Court that defines money as speech and includes corporations as “persons” (albeit persons with far more cash to exercise their “free speech rights), and no police officers to bash in their skulls, or use pepper spray designed to thwart grizzly bear attacks against them, when they do.

We are in the midst of a crisis far worse than any we have faced since the Civil War. A crisis that has resulted in the loss of our civil liberties at the expense of monopolistic multinational corporations. It is a fair question to ask if we are even a democracy anymore, though we follow the forms of holding elections, because of the the immense influence corporations exert over the individuals we “elect” as our representatives, and because of the power they exert over our news media and judicial system.

You and I, under the Constitution have the de jure right to be free of government interference regarding free speech, unlawful searches and seizures of our persons and property, and the right to due process. However, those rights are all too often not being enforced by our authorities, and so we have in a real sense witnessed a de facto diminishing of our civil liberties. Meanwhile, large corporations (and not just Wall Street) operate unfettered from the laws and rules the rest of us must obey. Indeed, one can say that these corporate persons have gained the right not to be bothered by our laws, nor subject to criminal prosecution for their crimes, provided they are big enough.

Oh yes, on occasion we hear of fines and other “slaps on the wrist,” but those are for show, nothing more. The profits made from evading the law far outweigh any minor financial sanctions incurred by these firms. And who among their executives has gone to jail, other than individuals such as Bernie Madoff whose principal crime was not being smart enough to cover his tracks, and too dumb to create a Ponzi scheme that it was possible to ignore forever. Indeed, one can argue he played the role of the “scapegoat” for the rest of the banksters, that sacrifice of a small animal that obscures the sins of the larger community of greed and avarice that has stolen our livelihoods, our country and our future from us.

Madoff was a convenient symbol. He was used to distract is from the big criminals, in much the same way that Republicans and the “conservative media” used fake muckrakers like James O’Keefe to tar ACORN, and to lay the entire blame for the economy’s fall from grace at the feet of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, Democrats, our social safety net and, last but not least, that “Negro” (though they would never say that world publicly) in the White House.

We live in dangerous times, where the truth is condemned as damn lies, and lies masquerade as God’s own truth. And the cause of this crisis? The greed and heartlessness of a few men and women who have used their corporate masks, and their willingness to destroy this nation of ours, so long as there is profit in it for them.

The system that FDR and the New Deal began, a government that saw its mission as promoting the welfare of the greatest number of Americans (even if at times it came up short on meeting that ideal) has been eradicated. The challenge before us is to transform our nation back to the pursuit of that ideal in a nation where too many deluded individuals drink the corporate-financed right wing Kool-Aid and say “thank you very much, may I have another?” It will not happen in a single election (2008 was proof of that). It will take a generation, and even more misery, before, if we are lucky, we can remove this yoke of oligarchy from our necks. Yet what else can we do? The other path that can be taken leads to fascism, madness, death, greater oppression and endless wars. In short, to tyranny.

We are too far along that path as it is.

I quote from Politico because I care.

With no nominee yet to spell out the party’s agenda, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is locked in a behind-the-scenes debate with other Republicans over their strategy for winning back power.

The divide within the party is sharp. McConnell and other influential senators believe the party should avoid putting out a detailed platform and focus squarely on Obama’s record, while a range of junior senators — and some veterans like Sen. John McCain — think the conference should lay out a Contract with America-type agenda. Others, such as Sens. Roy Blunt of Missouri and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, want to more aggressively push House Republican bills in the Senate in order to speak with one voice coming out of Congress.

But the strategies all carry great risk. If the GOP rolls out an agenda, it will be picked apart and take the focus off Obama. If the party doesn’t bother, it risks giving the president more opportunities to slap the “do-nothing” label on Congress.
And all of this is coming to a head now because the nominating contest involving Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum is showing no signs of ending, with Gingrich even warning that he’d take the race “all the way to the convention” in late August.

The ongoing debate has prompted Senate Republican leaders to schedule a special meeting next Wednesday to discuss election-year tactics, allowing the 47-member conference to continue talks it was unable to conclude at a daylong retreat at George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate last week.

Let me lay this out with more pungent language. The Republicans came up with an economic plan. It was created by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. At the core of Ryan’s plan was a proposal to end Medicare as a guaranteed benefit and replace it with private insurance, with insufficient subsidies to pay for that coverage. The Democrats reacted with glee and ran against the Republicans’ plan to end Medicare as we know it. It was a perfect example of a party putting its own most unpopular ideas to the test and discovering that people don’t like to eat dog chow. The Democrats, including the president, would like nothing better than to run against Paul Ryan’s budget plan. They will likely win House seats they haven’t held in living memory. And, yet, the Republican candidates are afraid to run away from Ryan’s budget. Gingrich tried, a long time ago, but the whole party came down on him so hard that he had to get in line. As a result, the Republicans’ economic policy (at least in its legislative form) is so toxic that it’s like trying to sell Native Americans blankets contaminated with yellow fever.

Another option is lay low and wait for the Republican nominee to lay out their vision, and then to get behind that vision. There are several problems with this. First, Obama will be running against a do-nothing Congress. The way to combat that is to actually work on a few areas of agreement and pass some bills that the president can sign. The STOCK Act was a good start. When that bill gets to the president’s desk, the Republican leaders should all show up in the Rose Garden to celebrate the historic reforms and praise themselves for their ability to get things done. They should identify two or three more significant bills that they can put on the president’s desk that he will sign. But the Republicans don’t want to make the president look effective or like someone they can work with, and they’re too divided to produce much that the Democrats are interested in making into law. And that’s also why the congressional Republicans won’t get much mileage out of passing partisan bills in the House. They’ll go nowhere in the Senate, and so they’ll do nothing to blunt the do-nothing charge. This will be true whether the House bills are passed willy-nilly or as part of some new “Contract on America.” Finally, pushing a Contract package of legislation won’t help the Republicans if it isn’t consistent with the eventual nominee’s campaign. It could wind up undermining their message or contradicting their positions.

Finally, waiting for the nominee to provide some guidance is problematic because the nominee hasn’t been decided and may not be decided for a couple of months. That would leave Congress no time to push any agenda. Moreover, the likeliest nominee, Mitt Romney, is going to want to pivot far to the left of the median Republican member of Congress. If they wait for him, they probably won’t like what he asks them to do (or not do).

The bottom line is that the GOP is an unholy mess.

The pink ribbon,
jagged edged, unfocused confused.
While today, at long last, we know the proper dollar valuation of the unlike® link.
Huzzah.

Our readers were very generous over the holiday season. I thank you for relieving a lot of the stress I was feeling during December. It’s wonderful to have loyal group of supporters who value what we do here enough to make sure we can continue to do it. The biggest thing that happened since our December fundraiser is that Finn celebrated his second birthday on New Year’s Day. He’s really amazing. You should see him work an iPad. He understands that thing better than I do.

In January, I also started doing a little consulting work with Democracy for America, which you may have noticed. I’m very grateful to them for giving me an opportunity to work on some issues again.

As you know, we’re witnessing a presidential campaign unlike any we’ve seen in our lifetimes. Unlimited and unaccountable PAC money is changing the way our elections work. There’s a study out from the The Democratic Strategist (pdf) that lays out what we’re going to face once the Republicans settle on a nominee. Here’s a teaser:

After the primaries Democrats will be on receiving end of a propaganda campaign of a scope and ferocity unparalleled in American history. Dems must anticipate this onslaught and begin now to plan how best to respond.

That’s not just a concern for the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign. It’s a concern for everyone on the left. We’ve always been at a messaging disadvantage, but it’s never been this bad. The blogosphere is one of the only things we have to fight back with. And I think we need blogs that recognize the stakes and what we’re up against. I hope we here at Booman Tribune are consistent in living up to that challenge. We’re just a grain of sand on the beach in the larger picture, but when we’re combined with other like-minded blogs I think we are making a difference.

So, please consider making a contribution to the Frog Pond so we can continue to lend our small voices to the national conversation during this campaign season.

You can donate through PayPal here:

A lot of you have contacted me over the years wanting to make a contribution but not wanting to use PayPal for a variety of reasons. I have finally created a solution for you by opening a P.O. Box. If you’d like to make a donation by mail, please use this address:

Martin Longman
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Once again, thank you for your generosity and your support. Without it, we’d have closed up shop a long time ago.

Yeah, he did it again (video from Lawrence O’Donnell’s The Last Word):

The idea that someone could pay zero gift taxes on contributions to a $100 million trust fund may surprise people who have heard arguments that the wealthy are overburdened by gift and estate taxes. But the Romneys’ gift-tax avoidance strategy is perfectly legal.[…]

The explanation may stem from how the Romneys were able to value the assets put into the trust. If I’m right, it involves a special tax deal that Congress gives to people who manage investment partnerships, as Romney did at Bain Capital from 1984 to 1999.

This deal allows these managers to receive a kind of compensation known as “carried interest.” As the tax law sees it, carried interest does not represent ownership of stock or other securities, only the right to receive future profits. Because there is no ownership, the IRS lets people value their carried interest at zero for gift tax purposes if they meet certain technical rules.

For some reason I am reminded of this song:

Bill Maher gets to the essence with why people do hate and should hate Mitt Romney for his wealth. Romney really is very different from other American icons like Steve Jobs and Walt Disney. Maher points out in this new campaign ad (pulled from sound bites from the Maher TV Show) that Romney is really more like in-your-face rappers than true entrepreneurs. Take a look and see for yourself.

Mitt Romney managed to infuriate the left and demoralize the right when he told CNN‘s Soledad O’Brien that he didn’t care about the very poor and that the federal programs that serve them are working just fine. It’s kind of obvious why people on the left took offense, but what about people on the right? Daniel Horowitz does a good job of explaining how Romney’s comments were a concern:

The media, Democrats, and many Republicans are painting him as out-of-touch, while expressing their concern that he is apathetic to the plight of the poor. However, they are missing the point. The real outrage is not that he doesn’t want to do more for the poor; it’s that he thinks they are taken care of with the welfare state. Worse, he believes that the welfare state is, more or less, functioning properly. Fear not, any minor glitches would be repaired by Mr. Fix It.

There are a number of zombie lies the right likes to tell itself to maintain the fiction that they care about the poor. In truth, if you’ve ever worked with the poor, you’ve seen that there really is a major concern for the poor among conservative Christians. They do a lot of work with the homeless, with getting people into drug treatment, and with trying to save troubled people’s souls by offering them unconditional forgiveness and a second chance through the grace of their Savior, Jesus Christ. They do a lot of good work and they are successful in helping countless people back on their feet again. But they’re also working to win converts, and many of them see the government as competitors.

The way this gets translated into electoral politics is through a critique of federal programs aimed at helping the poor. Here, Mr. Horowitz offers up the standard fare:

As conservatives, we care deeply about the poor. Then again, we care for everyone equally. We don’t recognize a class system – one that Romney has propagated incessantly throughout the campaign. It is that conviction that burns in the heart of every conservative who desires to fundamentally overhaul the welfare state and the cycle of dependency and poverty.

We care immensely about the millions of poor who are condemned to a life of failure because they are trapped in the public education system perpetuated by teachers’ unions and the Democrats. We cry out for those who cannot afford healthcare because the liberals have destroyed the free market. We empathize with those who can no longer afford food, gas, and utilities because liberals have artificially inflated the prices with government interventions. We sympathize with those who can’t find jobs that fit their skill set because liberal environmentalists have eliminated their jobs.

As conservatives, we are not happy to merely be efficient stewards of Medicaid, LIHEAP, Food Stamps, Unemployment, and TANF to deal with the aforementioned problems. We seek to solve those problems by offering an equal opportunity for everyone to earn a living with dignity; not by offering capricious politicians the opportunity to grow dependency, and by extension, their own power.

As you can see, in this critique, the liberals are to blame for everything. Nothing we try to do is successful, and most of it is counterproductive. But underneath it all is the unstated premise that the poor can be better served by religious groups. These groups can run soup kitchens in lieu of the government providing food stamps. They can educate kids better than the state-run federally-subsidized schools. They can provide health care in their private hospitals, or through small clinics.

You can go all the way back to the 4th-Century and see that Christians have always been successful in winning converts because they offered social services (food, counseling, medical care, education, job centers) that the state (or the pagan cults) either did not provide or provided inadequately and inefficiently.

For conservative Christian groups that work with the poor, federal anti-poverty efforts are seen as a way of secularizing the poor, just as federal education standards are seen as taking God out of education. This battle has been at the heart of the conservative movement since it started to take shape in the 1950’s. It’s why you see such a growth in home-schoolers today. And it’s part of why secular anti-poverty groups like ACORN come under such withering attack.

Mitt Romney seems to have little interest in this battle, which shouldn’t be all that surprising since he comes from a competing missionary faith. And Mormons go about their missionary efforts in a completely different way from the conservative Christians.

The GOP is an uneasy alliance between people who are tax-averse because of their high incomes and people who are government-averse because of the competition government provides to their faith-traditions. But the result of this alliance is that poor people overwhelmingly support the Democrats. And that makes Republicans care even less about using the government to help the poor than would otherwise be the case. They don’t want to do it anyway, but they won’t get any credit for it even if they do.

So, the idea becomes to disavow government efforts to help the poor, even to the point of denying people the unemployment insurance they paid for. All government assistance is suspect and likely counterproductive. And Mitt Romney stepped all over that by suggesting that the country’s social welfare programs are just fine the way they are. He missed the point. It’s okay to not want to offer any government assistance to the poor, but it’s not okay to say that you don’t give a shit about the poor because they’re doing just fine. It’s okay to say that you want to focus on the middle class, but not okay to say that federal welfare programs are working great.

The truth is that religious groups do a lot of great work in this country but they are not capable of providing education, health care, counseling, and financial assistance to everyone who needs those things. And we live in an officially secular country where no one should be put in a situation where they have to engage in religious activities in order to receive aid.

Romney just proved, simultaneously, that he doesn’t give a shit about the poor and that he doesn’t give a shit about Movement Conservatism’s war against the federal government. No one is happy. Especially since he’s proven (once again) to be such a shitty politician.

In my opinion, when a man promises to do something and then does the exact opposite that makes him a Liar (and I make no apology for the Capital L). In 2007, Mitt Romney promised that his family trusts that hold his stock portfolio (you now the ones that make him able to claim he’s unemployed while raking in millions of dollars a year) would be divested of any shares in companies that conflicted with his party’s positions regarding China, Iran, stem cell research, etc. However, he never followed through on that pledge, and kept buying shares in companies and investments that conflicted with his promise as late as 2010, just before he launched his current Presidential run.

Now I don’t really care if some rich bastard that got that way by being a bastard and running companies into the ground for profit continues to be a bastard, because it’s difficult to change one’s essential nature. However, RMoney is running for the office of President of the United States, so if he makes a promise, one he could have easily kept, and then refuses to follow through on that promise until he needs to cover-up his failure to do so — well, most politicians lie at one time or another but Mittens seems to make a career out of it:

During his presidential campaign in 2007, Republican candidate Mitt Romney promised that a trust overseeing his financial portfolio would shed any investments that conflicted with GOP positions toward Iran, China, stem cell research and other issues. But Romney’s family trusts kept some of those stocks and repeatedly bought new investments in similar holdings as recently as 2010, when they were sold in advance of his latest White House campaign, a detailed review of Romney’s financial records by The Associated Press shows.

Recently disclosed 2010 tax returns for three family trust funds for Romney, his wife, Ann, and their adult children show scores of trades in such investments, worth more than $3 million when the holdings were all sold in 2010.

Now RMoney’s spokes-reptiles claim he had no idea what his “trusts were doing” and that, of course he had no control over them, and blah, blah, blah, various other “it’s not my job” excuses for not living up to his pledge, but if you believe that horsepuckey, well as the proverbial saying goes, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can sell you (or Mitt’s family trusts do).

Seriously, divesting yourself of certain investments is not a difficult thing to do, even for a vulture capitalist and inveterate coupon-clipper (no, not the Supermarket coupons, the other ones). All he had to do was give express orders to his trustees to sell off those investments and not buy any more. But Mitt apparently was either so incompetent or so deceitful (I opt for the latter) that he couldn’t manage to accomplish even that:

“Financially, these would seem to be completely legitimate investments,” said Thomas B. Cooke, a professor of business law at Georgetown University and former president of the National Society of Tax Professionals. “But for someone running for president, there’s also a smell test.”

Yes, and the stink just keeps getting worse with each passing day. Imagine this guy in the White House. My guess is that he would make Dubya look like a piker when it comes to corruption and financial scandals, and that’s not an easy trick to pull off. Well, unless you are RMoney, that is. Then it’s just business as usual.

Hedge fund moguls and other high-flying capitalists dominate the top of a recently unveiled list of donors to a group supporting Mitt Romney’s bid for the presidency, a reflection of his years as head of Bain Capital as well as his probusiness approach to improving the economy.

Improving the economy for whom? Hedge Fund managers? Liars and tax cheats? Mitt’s family trusts? By the way, those are rhetorical questions.