Category: politics

News of US politics

Newt Gingrich is the definition of hypocritical flip-flopper

Seth Anderson0 comment

Honey Bucket
Honey Bucket

If Newt Gingrich becomes president, I have to flee this country. I couldn’t take it.

Republicans have a far greater talent for hypocrisy than easily cowed Democrats do — and no doubt appreciate that in a leader.

Gingrich led the putsch against Democratic Speaker Jim Wright in 1988, bludgeoning him for an ethically sketchy book deal. The following year, as he moved into the House Republican leadership, he himself got in trouble for an ethically sketchy book deal.

Gingrich was part of the House Republican mob trying to impeach Bill Clinton for hiding his affair with a young government staffer, even as Newt himself was hiding his affair with a young government staffer.

Gingrich has excoriated Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae for dragging the country into a financial spiral and now demands that Freddie Mac be broken up. But it turns out that he was on contract with Freddie for six years and paid $1.6 million to $1.8 million (yacht trips and Tiffany’s bling for everyone!) to help the company strategize about how to soften up critical conservatives and stay alive.

At a Republican debate in New Hampshire last month before this lucrative deal became public, Gingrich suggested that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd should be put in jail. “All I’m saying is, everybody in the media who wants to go after the business community ought to start by going after the politicians who were at the heart of the sickness that is weakening this country,” he said.

(click here to continue reading My Man Newt – NYTimes.com.)

MoDo - Get a Clue
MoDo – Get a Clue

-parenthetical note, what does Dowd mean by “easily cowed Democrats?”

-second parenthetical note: Dowd writes,

Mitt Romney is a phony with gobs of hair gel.

But a couple days ago, the New York Times reported otherwise:

Mr. Romney’s is a restrained, classic look: short at the neck, neat on the sides and swept back off the forehead. “It is not something stylish,” Mr. de Magistris noted. “It is clean and conservative.”

The cut is so recognizable that men in this well-heeled suburb of Boston ask for it by name. “The Mitt,” they whisper to Mr. de Magistris from the red vinyl chairs in his upscale salon, Leon & Co., a few blocks from the sprawling home where Mr. Romney raised his family.

Mr. de Magistris, who gave Mr. Romney a $70 trim three weeks ago, agreed to share some of the secrets behind his most famous client’s coiffure in between haircuts the other day.

No, he said, Mr. Romney does not color his hair. Any such artificial enhancement, Mr. de Magistris said, “is not — what do you call it? — in his DNA.”

Despite holding its shape under all but the most extreme conditions, it is gel and mousse-free. “I don’t put any product in there,” he avowed.

(click here to continue reading Romney’s Image Expert, the One for His Hair, Anyway – NYTimes.com.)

Does Obama Use the I Word More Than Other Presidents?

Seth Anderson0 comment

Fist Bumps

Of course not. But that doesn’t stop bloviators like George Will from repeating this lie, nor does it stop the Fox News Enemies-of-Rational-Thought from repeating the lie either. Facts are not important to these people. So if you hear the allegation spewed somewhere, instead of just rolling your eyes, here’s an answer from the reality-based world:

But here’s one more tedious bit of fact-checking, based on a nearly-complete sample of the texts of weekly radio addresses delivered by Barack Obama and George W. Bush, and a newly collected sample of about 10% of Ronald Reagan’s weekly radio addresses. (I didn’t have time to clean up a more complete set for Reagan, but this temporally-random sample should generalize fairly well.)

As expected, Obama’s rates of “I” and of FPSPs in general are slightly lower than the other two presidents — and in fact George W. Bush alone has almost three times more I’s in total than Obama, since his higher rate was maintained for two full terms rather than for 3/4 of one term. Similarly, if we project Reagan’s rate to his full set of radio addresses (which tend to run longer in terms of word count as well), we expect his total I-word count in weekly radio addresses to be more than three and a half times greater than Obama’s:

# of addresses Total words “I” (%) Total 1st pers. sing. pro. (%)
Obama 99 77,555 704 (0.91%) 834 (1.08%)
Bush 2 230 223,305 2095 (0.94%) 2686 (1.20%)
Reagan 23 26,125 258 (0.99%) 340 (1.30%)

So the idea that Barack Obama “uses the I word more than … all presidents have used it collectively in the two hundred and some odd years of our nation” is a preposterous fabrication. But it’s only the most extreme version (so far) of a meme that has spread like pond scum through the stagnant waters of wingnut punditry since George Will popularized it in 2009.

Frankly, I’m disappointed in these people. Can’t they invent new fabrications instead of tediously repeating old ones?

(click here to continue reading Language Log » Flaming Napalmed Knickers.)

 

The Gingrich Group

Seth Anderson0 comment

Laugh Track
Laugh Track

Rep. Barney Frank returns serve to Newt Gingrich1. If you’re keeping score, Newt is losing.

“Well, he’s just lying,” Frank told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on Thursday. “It is, of course, lobbying.”

He added: “He is clearly the highest paid historian in American history. People complain if you go into the humanities, you don’t make as much money, but this may do a lot for that career path.”

Gingrich has repeatedly accused Frank of helping to cause the subprime mortgage crisis by failing to stop Freddie Mac from loading up on bad loans while serving on the House Financial Services Committee. But he defended himself on Thursday, blaming Republicans for turning a blind eye to reforming the mortgage giant during their decade-plus in the majority.

“If Tom DeLay was taking my advice during the period when I was in the minority, Bill Clinton wouldn’t have been impeached, we wouldn’t have gone to war in Iraq, and he wouldn’t have gone on the dance show,” he said.

Frank brought up Gingrich’s recent comments that since the payments were handled by his firm, the Gingrich Group, he couldn’t recall all the details about them.

“Frankly, I thought the ‘Gingrich Group’ were his wives,” he said in a jab at the thrice-married Republican.

The comedy routine continued as Matthews brought up a recent interview with former lobbyist and convicted felon Jack Abramoff’s in which he said Gingrichs was “engaged in the exact kind of corruption that America disdains.”

“Don’t you mean ‘historian’ Jack Abramoff?” Frank deadpanned.

(click here to continue reading Barney Frank: ‘I Thought The Gingrich Group Was His Wives’ | TPM2012.)

and more:

Frank said Gingrich’s anger over his and Dodd’s role in the financial meltdown was absurd given that Republicans were in charge of the House and — excerpt for a brief period — Senate, from 1995 to 2007.He noted that he worked on reform legislation on mortgage in his first year as chair in 2007.

“It’s interesting, the charge is failure to stop Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay from deregulating,” he said. “This notion we caused the problem that started while they were in charge even by Gingrich’s standards is very odd.”

(click here to continue reading Barney Frank Slams Newt Gingrich For Calling For His Imprisonment | TPM 2012.)

Gingrich claims to be an historian, but he never claimed to be a good historian…

Footnotes:
  1. if you’ve forgotten, Gingrich fulminated that Barney Frank should be thrown in prison for his Freddie Mac involvement [↩]

Newt Gingrich will never be President

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Who Is This Slimy Creature? It's Newt!
Who Is This Slimy Creature? It’s Newt!

I would be insanely surprised if Newt Gingrich even survives the first couple months of the upcoming primary season. He just has too much political baggage.

Talking Points Memo reports:

The real news in Bloomberg’s new reporting on Newt Gingrich’s time as a consultant for Freddie Mac isn’t how much he made — though that’s pretty precious — but that Freddie Mac sources from that time period say Newt was not, as he claimed, warning them about the housing bubble or the dangers of their business model. Nor, it should be added, was Newt advising them, as he most preposterously claimed, as a historian. In fact, his role was, in part, to protect the mortgage giants from more regulation by the Republican-controlled House.

(click here to continue reading Come Off It, Newt | Talking Points Memo.)

Clea Benson and Dawn Kopecki write that Gingrich made much more than the $300,000 he claimed last week. Significantly more, in fact:

Newt Gingrich made between $1.6 million and $1.8 million in consulting fees from two contracts with mortgage company Freddie Mac, according to two people familiar with the arrangement. The total amount is significantly larger than the $300,000 payment from Freddie Mac that Gingrich was asked about during a Republican presidential debate on Nov. 9 sponsored by CNBC, and more than was disclosed in the middle of congressional investigations into the housing industry collapse.

Gingrich’s business relationship with Freddie Mac spanned a period of eight years. When asked at the debate what he did to earn a $300,000 payment in 2006, the former speaker said he “offered them advice on precisely what they didn’t do,” and warned the company that its lending practices were “insane.” Former Freddie Mac executives who worked with Gingrich dispute that account.

Gingrich’s first contract with the mortgage lender was in 1999, five months after he resigned from Congress and as House speaker, according to a Freddie Mac press release.His primary contact inside the organization was Mitchell Delk, Freddie Mac’s chief lobbyist, and he was paid a self- renewing, monthly retainer of $25,000 to $30,000 between May 1999 until 2002, according to three people familiar with aspects of the business agreement.

During that period, Gingrich consulted with Freddie Mac executives on a program to expand home ownership, an idea Delk said he pitched to President George W. Bush’s White House.

(click here to continue reading Gingrich Said to Be Paid $1.6M by Freddie Mac – Bloomberg.)

Wheels grind exceedingly fine
Wheels grind exceedingly fine

and Gingrich lied about what his role was, unsurprisingly:

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said during a Nov. 9 debate that he earned a $300,000 fee to advise Freddie Mac as a “historian” who warned that the mortgage company’s business model was “insane.”

Former Freddie Mac officials familiar with the consulting work Gingrich was hired to perform for the company in 2006 tell a different story. They say the former House speaker was asked to build bridges to Capitol Hill Republicans and develop an argument on behalf of the company’s public-private structure that would resonate with conservatives seeking to dismantle it.

If Gingrich concluded that the company’s business model was at risk and that the housing market was a “bubble,” as he said during the debate, he didn’t share those concerns with Richard Syron, Freddie Mac’s chief executive officer at the time, a person familiar with the company’s internal discussions said.

(click here to continue reading Gingrich Said to Be Paid By Freddie Mac to Court Republicans – Bloomberg.)

Taking Freddie Mac’s money all those years didn’t preclude Gingrich from badmouthing the organization, once his contract ended. Sour grapes of an ex-lobbyist?

JFK gets schooled on Chicago-style politics

Seth Anderson0 comment

Was it a golden time for  politics? Or is it just that our current toxic political climate is so much worse than anyone could imagine? I cannot imagine President Obama having this frank of a discussion with Mayor Bloomberg of NYC for instance…

Picasso on The Cross
Picasso on The Cross, Daley Plaza

Clarence Page reports:

I came across a telling example of how Boss Daley’s talents of persuasion could come in handy as a force for good behind one of my favorite pieces of legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In Chris Matthews’ new bestseller, “Elusive Hero,” the NBC and MSNBC talk-show host excerpts transcripts of a taped conversation between Daley and John F. Kennedy. The president was rounding up votes for the civil rights bill in late October 1963.

It was two months after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic march on Washington — and only a month, it would turn out, before Kennedy would be killed in Dallas.

On this day, the White House taping system picked up Kennedy asking Daley for help. Rep. Roland V. Libonati, a Chicago Democrat like Daley, was holding up the act, Kennedy said. The congressman wanted a tougher bill. The trouble was that if Libonati had his way, the bill would lose the Republican support it needed to survive opposition from southern segregationist Democrats.

“He’ll vote for it,” Daley said calmly. “He’ll vote for any (expletive) thing you want.”

Kennedy laughs. “Well,” he said, “can you get him?”

“I surely can,” said Daley, who added later, “He’ll do it. The last time I, I told him, ‘Now look it, I don’t give a (expletive) what it is, you vote for it, for anything the president wants and this is the way it will be and this (is) the way it’s gonna be.'”

That, as the old-timers used to say, is how you get things done in the city.

(click here to continue reading JFK gets schooled on Chicago-style politics – chicagotribune.com.)

 

The Hate-Filled Self-Martyrdom of Pat Buchanan

Seth Anderson0 comment

Why I'm Glad We Moved Away from East Texas

Why is Pat Buchanan paid to spout his nonsensical opinions on television? Makes no sense that even in these politically correct times such an unmitigated racist is afforded a national platform. But he is.

If you go to Pat Buchanan’s website, you will come to an introductory page that says in big letters, ‘right from the beginning.” Of course, this has a double meaning, indicating a position on the right of the political spectrum, but also right in the sense of correct, or opposed to “wrong.” Taken together, the words indicate that the “right” is the “right” position, and that therefore, Pat Buchanan is right and has been right all along (something Mitt Romney, perhaps, cannot say).

Pat Buchanan, who believes minorities have inferior genes, and that women are “less equipped psychologically” to succeed in the workplace, has always been an outspoken and polarizing figure.

(click here to continue reading The Hate-Filled Self-Martyrdom of Pat Buchanan.)

 

Republican Pettiness, Part the 234,364th

Seth Anderson0 comment

Natural Science
Natural Science

Paul Krugman makes a joke, and Paul Ryan is one…

The Truth Has A Well-Known, Well, You Know

Greg Sargent takes us to Paul Ryan’s latest speech, in which Ryan expresses outrage over what President Obama is saying:

Just last week, the President told a crowd in North Carolina that Republicans are in favor of, quote, “dirtier air, dirtier water, and less people with health insurance.” Can you think of a pettier way to describe sincere disagreements between the two parties on regulation and health care?

Just for the record: why is this petty? Why is it anything but a literal description of GOP proposals to weaken environmental regulation and repeal the Affordable Care Act?

I mean, to the extent that the GOP has a coherent case on environmental regulation, it is that the economic payoff from weaker regulation would more than compensate for the dirtier air and water. Is anyone really claiming that less regulation won’t mean more pollution?

…

So Ryan is outraged, outraged, that Obama is offering a wholly accurate description of his party’s platform.

Let me add that this illustrates a point that many commenters here don’t seem to get: criticism of policy proposals is not the same thing as ad hominem attacks. If I say that Paul Ryan’s mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries, that’s ad hominem. If I say that his plan would hurt millions of people and that he’s not being honest about the numbers, that’s harsh, but not ad hominem.

(click here to continue reading The Truth Has A Well-Known, Well, You Know – NYTimes.com.)

 

Jean Quan Is a Know-Nothing And Proud

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Sorry to hear of Mayor Jean Quan’s evasion of responsibility re: the horrific police riot in Oakland that left Scott Olsen, a 2-tour Iraq Veteran, in the hospital with brain swelling and skull injuries. If you haven’t seen the video, here’s a short version with commentary:

Oakland — Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, who is being criticized from all sides for a police sweep of the Occupy Oakland encampment, said Wednesday that she was not involved in the planning and did not even know when the action was going to take place.

The decision to raid the camp outside City Hall was made by City Administrator Deanna Santana on Oct. 19 with consultation from interim Police Chief Howard Jordan after campers repeatedly blocked paramedics and police from entering the camp despite reports of violence and injuries.

News conference

Quan told a news conference at City Hall on Wednesday that her input on the raid was limited.

“I only asked the chief to do one thing: to do it when it was the safest for both the police and the demonstrators,” she said.

The mayor said “I don’t know everything” when asked by reporters if she was satisfied with how police conducted the sweep. She said she spent Wednesday meeting with community groups.

She also defended “99 percent” of police officers “who took a lot of abuse” and who “have really been trying to re-establish that connection with the community.”

(click here to continue reading Occupy Oakland: Jean Quan ‘I don’t know everything’.)

So basically, the Mayor is saying she isn’t that interested in what the police are doing in her city, and doesn’t think that is important for her to be involved, or even informed. Oh, and stop being so mean to the poor, poor police, they were just trying to pet kittens.1

Keith Olbermann was disappointed as well, saying (on Current-TV)

Olbermann discussed Mayor Quan’s 20 year liberal career in Oakland and then said, “And in the last two nights Mayor Jean Quan has betrayed all of that. There is no excuse. There is no justification. There is no rationalization for being the mayor who may have begun the great march backward in this country to the days when mayors like Sam Yorty of Los Angeles and Hugh Addonizio of Newark and Richard Dailey of Chicago stood back and their police incited, bullied, overreacted, and brutally assaulted protesters at the height of the Civil Rights and Vietnam movements. Those protests began non-violently, positively with singing and marching and cooperation with authorities, but the police like the police in Oakland, California this week, they injected the violence. Then it escalated and echoed, and soon there wasn’t just one Iraq vet in a hospital with a fractured skull, but there were dead men and women on the streets in this country and no one in this country wants to see that again today.”

He continued, “The mayor of any city is not out on the front lines with cops, and not everything they do can be lain at the mayor’s feet, but if one night a group of peaceable protesters exercising the rights given to them under the Constitution and not rights made up for the cops by the cops like lawful command and imminent threat. If they are attacked with tear gas and rubber bullets and the mayor’s only comments are to commend the police chief for a, “generally peacefully resolution to a situation, “ and after that claim democracy is messy, after the unprovoked actions horrify a nation, she is endorsing and assuming for herself whatever havoc the out of control police officers wrought.”

Later Olbermann closed by pointing out that it was only 15 months ago that Mayor Jean Quan was bullied by the police department, “Fifteen months ago Mayor Jean Quan was bullied by the Oakland Police Department, and tonight she is the bully. Mayor Quan is left with two choices. She can dismiss the acting police chief Howard Jordan and use her mayoral powers to authorize Occupy Oakland to protest again without harassment, or having betrayed everything she supported and all those who supported her, she must resign.”

(click here to continue reading Keith Olbermann Calls Out The Police for Instigating Occupy Oakland Violence.)

Footnotes:
  1. Or funny versions [↩]

OWS Is Bigger Than Pundit Class Can Comprehend

Seth Anderson0 comment

Blank Verse
Blank Verse

Dahlia Lithwick is right, Occupy Wall Street has nothing to do with the professional pundit class. Thankfully, because too often those self-satisfied mandarins are part of the nation’s problem. Fox News is the worst, but they are not alone. Do you think a news organization mostly owned by a defense contractor1 is going to fully report on challenges to the status quo? Or a news organization2 that has Frank Carlucci of the Carlyle Group on its Board of Directors?

I confess to being driven insane this past month by the spectacle of television pundits professing to be baffled by the meaning of Occupy Wall Street. Good grief. Isn’t the ability to read still a job requirement for a career in journalism? And as last week’s inane “What Do They Want?” meme morphs into this week’s craven “They Want Your Stuff” meme, I feel it’s time to explain something: Occupy Wall Street may not have laid out all of its demands in a perfectly cogent one-sentence bumper sticker for you, Mr. Pundit, but it knows precisely what it doesn’t want. It doesn’t want you.

What the movement clearly doesn’t want is to have to explain itself through corporate television. To which I answer, Hallelujah. You can’t talk down to a movement that won’t talk back to you.

…

Occupy Wall Street is not a movement without a message. It’s a movement that has wisely shunned the one-note, pre-chewed, simple-minded messaging required for cable television as it now exists. It’s a movement that feels no need to explain anything to the powers that be, although it is deftly changing the way we explain ourselves to one another.

Think, for just a moment, about the irony. We are the most media-saturated 24-hour-cable-soaked culture in the world, and yet around the country, on Facebook and at protests, people are holding up cardboard signs, the way protesters in ancient Sumeria might have done when demonstrating against a rise in the price of figs. And why is that? Because they very wisely don’t trust television cameras and microphones to get it right anymore. Because a media constructed around the illusion of false equivalencies, screaming pundits, and manufactured crises fails to capture who we are and what we value.

(click here to continue reading How OWS confuses and ignores Fox News and the pundit class. – Slate Magazine.)

Footnotes:
  1. NBC, MSNBC, et al [↩]
  2. CBS [↩]

Alabama Crops Rotting in the field

Seth Anderson0 comment

Indian Cucumber
Indian Cucumber

Oh, Alabama. Didn’t you learn anything from the Arizona fiasco?

Alabama’s new anti-immigrant law, the nation’s harshest, went into effect last month (a few provisions have been temporarily blocked in federal court), and it is already reaping a bitter harvest of dislocation and fear. Hispanic homes are emptying, businesses are closing, employers are wondering where their workers have gone. Parents who have not yet figured out where to go are lying low and keeping children home from school.

To the law’s architects and supporters, this is excellent news. “You’re encouraging people to comply with the law on their own,” said Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, who has a side career of drafting extremist immigration legislation for states and cities, notoriously in Arizona and now in Alabama.

Alabama’s law is the biggest test yet for “attrition through enforcement,” a strategy espoused by Mr. Kobach and others to drive away large numbers of illegal immigrants without the hassle and expense of a police-state roundup. All you have to do, they say, is make life hard enough and immigrants will leave on their own. In such a scheme, panic and fear are a plus; suffering is the point.

…The problems do not stop there. Farmers are already worrying that with the exodus, crops will go unpicked. Like much of the rest of the country, Alabama needs immigrant labor, because too many native-born citizens lack the skill, the stamina and the willingness to work in the fields — even in a time of steep unemployment.

(click here to continue reading It’s What They Asked For – NYTimes.com.)

Tomato Mountain Organic
Tomato Mountain Organic

Surprising to nobody who has ever lived on a farm1 or who reads this blog- Alabama agricultural businesses are having extreme difficulty finding people to pick crops once their intolerant anti-immigration bill passed, and farm laborers fled the state.

ONEONTA, Alabama (AP) — Potato farmer Keith Smith saw most of his immigrant workers leave after Alabama’s tough immigration law took effect, so he hired Americans. It hasn’t worked out: They show up late, work slower than seasoned farm hands and are ready to call it a day after lunch or by midafternoon. Some quit after a single day.In Alabama and other parts of the U.S., farmers must look beyond the nation’s borders for labor because many Americans simply don’t want the backbreaking, low-paying jobs immigrants are willing to take. Politicians who support the law say over time more unemployed Americans will fill these jobs2

…

Tomato farmer Wayne Smith said he has never been able to keep a staff of American workers in his 25 years of farming. “People in Alabama are not going to do this,” said Smith, who grows about 75 acres (30 hectares) of tomatoes in the northeast part of the state. “They’d work one day and then just wouldn’t show up again.” At his farm, field workers get $2 for every 25-pound (11.3-kilogram) box of tomatoes they fill. Skilled pickers can make anywhere from $200 to $300 a day, he said. Unskilled workers make much less. A crew of four Hispanics can earn about $150 each by picking 250-300 boxes of tomatoes in a day, said Jerry Spencer, of Grow Alabama, which purchases and sells locally owned produce.

A crew of 25 Americans recently picked 200 boxes — giving them each $24 for the day. It may make sense for some to stay at home. Unemployment benefits provide up to $265 a week while a minimum wage job, at $7.25 an hour for 40 hours, brings in $290. Spencer said the Americans he has linked up with farmers are not physically fit and do not work fast enough. “It’s the harshest work you can imagine doing,” Spencer said.

(click here to continue reading The Associated Press: Few Americans take immigrants’ jobs in US state.)

Let’s see, bust your ass, break your back, squatting in the hot sun and make $24 a day, or maybe more if you persevere a year or two, long enough to become skilled; or make $290 a week in an air-conditioned minimum wage job, making copies at Kinkos. Hmm, not much of a choice.

The only way banning illegal immigrants from farm labor will ever work is if either food costs to consumers jumps astronomically higher, or if minimum wage gets overturned by government fiat. I sincerely doubt the Republicans would be bold enough to eliminate minimum wage, even though they mention it every once and a while. And would you pay $17 for a single tomato? Probably not. So what’s the solution, besides allowing borders to open up? NAFTA, I guess, and more shipping of American jobs to places where $25 a day without benefits is adequate for a worker to survive.

Great plan you’ve come up with, immigrant haters in the GOP.

Footnotes:
  1. yes, I lived on a farm, but I don’t now, thanks god [↩]
  2. despite any evidence [↩]

Naomi Wolf: arrested at Occupy Wall Street

Seth Anderson0 comment

Sheriff's Line Do Not Cross
Sheriff’s Line Do Not Cross

The police and their insistence upon their own power being ultimate, no matter the legality of the situation, is troubling.

Naomi Wolf, author and political consultant was attending an event sponsored by the Huffington Post, and ended up getting arrested. She reports:

I went up [to the phalanx of NYPD cops] and asked them why [the OWC folks were moved away from the event]. They replied that they had been informed that the Huffington Post event had a permit that forbade them to use the sidewalk. I knew from my investigative reporting on NYC permits that this was impossible: a private entity cannot lease the public sidewalks; even film crews must allow pedestrian traffic. I asked the police for clarification – no response.

I went over to the sidewalk at issue and identified myself as a NYC citizen and a reporter, and asked to see the permit in question or to locate the source on the police or event side that claimed it forbade citizen access to a public sidewalk. Finally a tall man, who seemed to be with the event, confessed that while it did have a permit, the permit did allow for protest so long as we did not block pedestrian passage.

I thanked him, returned to the protesters, and said: “The permit allows us to walk on the other side of the street if we don’t block access. I am now going to walk on the public sidewalk and not block it. It is legal to do so. Please join me if you wish.” My partner and I then returned to the event-side sidewalk and began to walk peacefully arm in arm, while about 30 or 40 people walked with us in single file, not blocking access.

Then a phalanx of perhaps 40 white-shirted senior officers descended out of seemingly nowhere and, with a megaphone (which was supposedly illegal for citizens to use), one said: “You are unlawfully creating a disruption. You are ordered to disperse.” I approached him peacefully, slowly, gently and respectfully and said: “I am confused. I was told that the permit in question allows us to walk if we don’t block pedestrian access and as you see we are complying with the permit.”

He gave me a look of pure hate. “Are you going to back down?” he shouted. I stood, immobilized1, for a moment. “Are you getting out of my way?” I did not even make a conscious decision not to “fall back” – I simply couldn’t even will myself to do so, because I knew that he was not giving a lawful order and that if I stepped aside it would be not because of the law, which I was following, but as a capitulation to sheer force. In that moment’s hesitation, he said, “OK,” gestured, and my partner and I were surrounded by about 20 officers who pulled our hands behind our backs and cuffed us with plastic handcuffs.

(click here to continue reading Naomi Wolf: How I was arrested at Occupy Wall Street | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.)

Homeland Security Federal Protective Service Police
Homeland Security Federal Protective Service Police

and this bit is extremely troubling:

Another scary outcome I discovered is that, when the protesters marched to the first precinct, the whole of Erickson Street was cordoned off – “frozen” they were told, “by Homeland Security”. Obviously if DHS now has powers to simply take over a New York City street because of an arrest for peaceable conduct by a middle-aged writer in an evening gown, we have entered a stage of the closing of America, which is a serious departure from our days as a free republic in which municipalities are governed by police forces.

The police are now telling my supporters that the permit in question gave the event managers “control of the sidewalks”. I have asked to see the permit but still haven’t been provided with it – if such a category now exists, I have never heard of it; that, too, is a serious blow to an open civil society. What did I take away? Just that, unfortunately, my partner and I became exhibit A in a process that I have been warning Americans about since 2007: first they come for the “other” – the “terrorist”, the brown person, the Muslim, the outsider; then they come for you – while you are standing on a sidewalk in evening dress, obeying the law.

Footnotes:
  1. sic, UK spelling [↩]

Fed Setting Their Hair on Fire

Seth Anderson0 comment

Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Surprisingly, Paul Krugman liked President Obama’s speech:

First things first: I was favorably surprised by the new Obama jobs plan, which is significantly bolder and better than I expected. It’s not nearly as bold as the plan I’d want in an ideal world. But if it actually became law, it would probably make a significant dent in unemployment.

Of course, it isn’t likely to become law, thanks to G.O.P. opposition. Nor is anything else likely to happen that will do much to help the 14 million Americans out of work. And that is both a tragedy and an outrage.

Before I get to the Obama plan, let me talk about the other important economic speech of the week, which was given by Charles Evans, the president of the Federal Reserve of Chicago. Mr. Evans said, forthrightly, what some of us have been hoping to hear from Fed officials for years now.

As Mr. Evans pointed out, the Fed, both as a matter of law and as a matter of social responsibility, should try to keep both inflation and unemployment low — and while inflation seems likely to stay near or below the Fed’s target of around 2 percent, unemployment remains extremely high.

So how should the Fed be reacting? Mr. Evans: “Imagine that inflation was running at 5 percent against our inflation objective of 2 percent. Is there a doubt that any central banker worth their salt would be reacting strongly to fight this high inflation rate? No, there isn’t any doubt. They would be acting as if their hair was on fire. We should be similarly energized about improving conditions in the labor market.”

(click here to continue reading Setting Their Hair on Fire – NYTimes.com.)

And if you had the intestinal fortitude to watch the latest GOP debate12 – you heard the GOP repeatedly criticize the Fed, without having any factual reasons to do so…

Now, however, leading Republicans are against tax cuts — at least if they benefit working Americans rather than rich people and corporations. And they’re against monetary policy, too. In Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney declared that he would seek a replacement for Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, essentially because Mr. Bernanke has tried to do something (though not enough) about unemployment. And that makes Mr. Romney a moderate by G.O.P. standards, since Rick Perry, his main rival for the presidential nomination, has suggested that Mr. Bernanke should be treated “pretty ugly.”

So, at this point, leading Republicans are basically against anything that might help the unemployed.

Footnotes:
  1. I watched about half, and then ate a pound of laxatives [↩]
  2. not really [↩]

Rick Perry and the Low Wage Economy

Seth Anderson0 comment

Saturday Morning Lines

Saturday Morning Lines

Rick Perry’s regularly self-touted Texas Economic Miracle is fake, as regular readers of this blog know.

John Turner of the Guardian U.K. concurs:

The low-wage economy is Texas’s dirty little secret, and it is easy to ignore in swaths of the state. The sad scene at Dove Springs was unfolding only a few miles from the majestic domed state house in downtown Austin, a city which is famed for its vibrant music venues and world-class restaurants.

Austin is also famous for its growing technology sector and is becoming the Silicon Valley of the Texas hill country. It is in many places a city of well-to-do neighbourhoods, with manicured lawns and plush housing. The same is true of other Texas urban centres, such as Dallas and Houston, helped by an energy industry that has been buoyed by rocketing oil prices. The state also avoided the worst of the housing bubble.

Perry touts all this when he boasts of the legion of Fortune 500 companies that have flocked to make their headquarters here and he boasts that, since June 2009, about 40% of all jobs created in America are in Texas, a state whose economy is growing at twice the national rate.

But the devil is in the detail. Unemployment is stubbornly stuck at about 8%, below the national level but still leaving one million Texans out of work. In 2010 half a million people in the state earned no more than the minimum wage of $7.25 (£4.47) an hour. Texas, for all its glittering metropolises, has the joint highest percentage, along with Mississippi, of hourly paid workers earning the minimum wage or less.

Jim Hightower, a longstanding Texas liberal and radio host, has a simple description of Perry’s Texas economic miracle. “It is a hoax. He is telling Perry-tales. You can’t make a living off of these jobs,” he said.

(click here to continue reading The dark underbelly of Rick Perry’s Texas | World news | The Observer.)

 

Self-inflicted Decline Of United States

Seth Anderson0 comment

Neon Green Tea
Neon Green Tea

The United States has deep, serious structural problems with our economy, and yet the morons in Congress debate trivialities.

Malcom Fraser, former Prime Minister of Australia writes, part:

The United States’ friends around the world watched with dismay the recent brawl over raising the federal government’s debt ceiling, and the US congress’ inability to come to anything like a balanced and forward-looking compromise. On the contrary, the outcome represents a significant victory for the Tea Party’s minions, whose purpose seems to be to reduce government obligations and expenditures to a bare minimum (some object even to having a central bank), and to maintain President George W Bush’s outrageous tax breaks for the wealthy. The United States’ current fiscal problems are rooted in a long period of unfunded spending. Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the manner in which he conducted the “global war on terror” made matters much worse, contributing to a totally unsustainable situation. Indeed, Obama inherited an almost impossible legacy.

In the weeks since the debt ceiling agreement, it has become increasingly clear that good government might be impossible in the US. The coming months of campaigning for the US presidency will be spent in petty brawling over what should be cut. The example of recent weeks gives us no cause for optimism that US legislators will rise above partisan politics and ask themselves what is best for America.

In these circumstances, it is not surprising that financial markets have returned to extreme volatility. The expenditure cuts mandated by the outcome of the debt-ceiling debate will reduce economic activity, thereby undermining growth and making debt reduction even more difficult. Providing further fiscal stimulus to boost economic growth would carry its own risks, owing to the debt ceiling and another, more ominous factor: the US is already overly indebted, and there are signs that major holders of US government securities are finally tired of being repaid in depreciated currency.

Most importantly, China’s call for the introduction of a new reserve currency stems from its frustration with the failure of major governments – whether in the US or Europe – to govern their economic affairs with realism and good sense. China recognises that the US is in great difficulty (indeed, it recognises this more clearly than the US itself), and that, given the poisonous political atmosphere prevailing in Washington, there will be no easy return to good government, economic stability, and strong growth.

…

(click here to continue reading America’s self-inflicted decline – Opinion – Al Jazeera English.)

Bank of China
Bank of China

One more important excerpt from Mr. Fraser’s Op-Ed:

The counter-argument – that any sell-off or failure by China to continue to buy US government securities would hurt China as much as the US – is not valid. As each year passes, China’s markets expand worldwide, and its domestic market comes to represent a greater percentage of its own GDP. As a result, China will not need a strong dollar in the long term. Americans need to get their economic house in order before China loses its incentive to support the dollar.

On several occasions in the post-WWII period, the US has learned with great pain that there are limits to the effective use of military power. US objectives could not be achieved in Vietnam. The outcome in Iraq will not be determined until the last American troops have been withdrawn. In Afghanistan, where withdrawal dates have already been set, it is difficult to believe that a cohesive unified state can be established.

As the efficacy of military power is reduced, so the importance of economic power grows. Recognition of these central realities – and bipartisanship in addressing them – is critical for America’s future, and for that of the West.

We ignore these realities at our peril – and allowing the Tea Party to control policy is akin to letting someone hepped up on bath salts pilot your airplane. Dangerously stupid, in other words.

EPA Regulations Will Create Jobs!

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Homage to George L. Kelling

Homage to George L. Kelling

Speaking of green jobs, and of the moronic statement that EPA regulations will “cost jobs” that is the GOP mantra so compelling even Obama chants it in unison with the Koch Brothers and their Republican Party employees, Paul Krugman writes:

As some of us keep trying to point out, the United States is in a liquidity trap: private spending is inadequate to achieve full employment, and with short-term interest rates close to zero, conventional monetary policy is exhausted.

This puts us in a world of topsy-turvy, in which many of the usual rules of economics cease to hold. Thrift leads to lower investment; wage cuts reduce employment; even higher productivity can be a bad thing. And the broken windows fallacy ceases to be a fallacy: something that forces firms to replace capital, even if that something seemingly makes them poorer, can stimulate spending and raise employment. Indeed, in the absence of effective policy, that’s how recovery eventually happens: as Keynes put it, a slump goes on until “the shortage of capital through use, decay and obsolescence” gets firms spending again to replace their plant and equipment.

And now you can see why tighter ozone regulation would actually have created jobs: it would have forced firms to spend on upgrading or replacing equipment, helping to boost demand. Yes, it would have cost money — but that’s the point! And with corporations sitting on lots of idle cash, the money spent would not, to any significant extent, come at the expense of other investment.

More broadly, if you’re going to do environmental investments — things that are worth doing even in flush times — it’s hard to think of a better time to do them than when the resources needed to make those investments would otherwise have been idle.

(click here to continue reading Broken Windows, Ozone, and Jobs – NYTimes.com.)

Seems so obvious to me, and others, that I wonder what else is going on. Perhaps the rumors of Koch Brothers investing in Obama’s 2012 campaign are true, or maybe they’ve told him they’ll sit on the sideline instead of investing billions to defeat Obama. Or else Obama is just getting horrible, horrible advice from his staff…