A mid-week TWiA this week, because there's been a lot of news. We may not have as much to say toward the end of the week, so this might be the big one. We like to be thorough, but not intimidating...
This Week In Inequality
At a right-wing gathering late last month, Sen. Ted Cruz (R/TX) said, "I chuckle every time I hear Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton talk about income inequality, because it’s increased dramatically under their policies."
Sen. Rand Paul (R/KY) agreed. "The reason I would say the economy is getting better is despite the president and despite the president’s policies. This president should take no credit for any kind of recovery we have.”
Of course, both of these men want the president's job, which presents them with a problem. They have to argue that they would perform better than he has. And because the economy is growing and recovery is getting stronger, they have to lie about it.
Income inequality is the worst it's been since right before the Great Depression (and we would do well to always remember that income inequality was a major cause of that depression). But the gap turned into a chasm in the years before President Obama took office, spiking during the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush administrations. The Great Recession brought inequality down because it ate into the wealth of the richest more than it did into the poor and middle classes. Not that the rich felt the pain as much, because they're rich. But they lost more of their fortunes.
Meanwhile, as David Leonhardt writes in the New York Times, "The existing safety net of jobless benefits, food stamps and the like cushioned the blow of the so-called Great Recession. So did the stimulus bill that President Obama signed in 2009 and some smaller bills passed afterward. 'Not only were low-income people protected – middle-income and some higher income-households had much lower losses because of these public policies,' Mr. Rose said. 'For those who think government programs never work, maybe they need to think again.'"
Inequality remains a big problem, as does wage stagnation for the middle class. But government programs, including the too-small but nonetheless successful stimulus program (launched 6 years ago this week) have helped considerably, so for Rand Paul to claim the president has had nothing to do with the recovery is simply foolish. And over the longer term, some of the ideas advocated by the president in his State of the Union address will help more.
Back to Mr. Leonhardt:
"On the growth side of the ledger, both energy and education have been problems. The cost of energy, after temporarily falling in the 1990s, returned to its post-1970s norm in recent years and acted like a tax on the rest of the economy. Education, meanwhile, is the lifeblood of economic growth, allowing people to do entirely new tasks (cure a disease, invent the Internet) or to do old ones with less time and expense. Yet educational attainment has slowed so much that the United States has lost its once-enormous global lead.
"On both fronts, the country has been making progress, Mr. Obama rightly noted. The fracking boom and a more modest clean-energy boom have increased this country’s share of energy production and held down costs worldwide. The price of oil has been mostly flat for three years.
"And the number of high-school and college graduates is rising. The financial crisis deserves some perverse credit, because it sent people fleeing back to school, much as the Great Depression did. But some of the efforts to improve school performance – by raising standards and accountability – are also playing a role."
Leonhardt continues:
"As for the other entry in the ledger, the biggest reason to think economic growth may translate more directly into wage gains is the turnabout in health costs. After years of rapid increases, they have slowed sharply in the last three years. Mr. Obama likes to give more credit to the 2010 health care law than most observers do, but he’s not wrong about the trend’s significance.
"Health costs take a direct bite out of paychecks. Employers don’t have some secret stash of money to pay for health insurance; when it becomes more expensive, there is less money left for salaries. It’s no accident that the best period of wage growth in the last 40 years – the late 1990s – was also a period of quiescent health inflation."
So, no, Senators. Inequality has not gotten worse during Obama's presidency (and it's hard to know what he's talking about with regard to Secretary Clinton, because during the time he blames her and Obama for his imagined rise in inequality, she wasn't even a senator--she was Secretary of State, and then a private citizen. In neither position did she make economic policy. He's trying to score points against the supposed frontrunner even at the cost of making less sense than usual). And the president's policies have improved the economy, and will continue to do so.
Unless, of course, someone who's completely ignorant of economic reality (say, Sens. Cruz or Paul) is elected and, along with a friendly Congress, reverses those policies. If we want the economy to keep improving, that's what we have to beware of.
Side Note 1: According to the Washington Post, Sens. Cruz and Paul both have reasonable chances of winning the Republican nomination for president, which is both sad and terrifying. According to CNN's latest polling, former governor and purveyor of phony Alzheimer's cures (among other dubious offerings*) Mike Huckabee (R/AR) is out ahead, trailed by Jeb Bush, Gov. Scott Walker (R/WI) and Rand Paul. The entire field, as described in these pieces, is composed of far-right ideologues, without even a sensible Jon Huntsman-like character in the mix to toss in little nuggets of reality.
Side Note to the Side Note: *Huckabee is far from alone in being a right-wing politician who uses his list to run mail-order scams. Conservative Jonah Goldberg wrote in the National Review this week about phony PACs set up to suck money from the wallets of conservative donors while paying their executives handsomely and not really passing the donations on to candidates or causes. As a typical example, Goldberg notes that Sarah Palin's SarahPAC has spent only 7% of their haul--$205,000 out of $3 million collected. The National Draft Ben Carson for President Super PAC is not actually associated with Ben Carson, and out of the almost $13 million they've suckered people out of, they've only spent 4%. Anyone who gave to the NDBCFP or SarahPAC might want to demand a refund.
Side Note 2: The Washington Times reports that Cruz, Paul, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R/FL) are all trying to beef up their resumes in advance of presidential runs by sponsoring lots of bills in the Senate. They have, the Times says, led the sponsorship of hundreds of bills during their Senate careers. The problem? "The three senators, meanwhile, have carried a total of three bills through the Senate, according to records from the Library of Congress."
Combined, those three have more than ten years of Senate experience, four-plus each for Rubio and Paul and two-plus for Cruz. Each man has an average of one bill getting all the way through the Senate--not being signed into law, mind you, just getting it past their own chamber of Congress. Their records are only better than TWiA's by the slimmest of margins--and TWiA has never been a United States Senator.
Beefing up their resumes by failing more often? For these three, that's perfect.
Side Note 3: This week, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R/OH) celebrated the 6th anniversary of the stimulus by tweeting. "On this day 6 years ago POTUS signed his failed $787 billion 'stimulus' into law. Retweet if you agree: Washington spending isn't the answer."
Boehner can keep refighting that fight all he wants, but it only makes him look ever more delusional. The stimulus worked. It reversed the course of the Great Recession and kept it from becoming the Great Depression Redux, and it did a lot of good for the country in the process. Boehner's idea--also proposed during a debate by President Obama's 2008 opponent, Sen. John McCain (R/AZ) was a spending freeze. Even conservative columnist David Brooks called that idea "insane" at the time, and he was right. When the economy is in freefall, a government spending freeze is the best way to push it all the way into a devastating depression.
Boehner is picking a fight he's long since lost. He's good at that, if nothing else. When the history of this era is written, he'll go down as a hapless, hopeless, tragic figure, the weakest Speaker in generations. We hope he's enjoying the big office and extra pay, because he's sure not earning respect.
Below the fold: the Federal Reserve and clown shoes, ISIS and why terrorism shouldn't scare us, treason, free speech, and the most adorable bear. Keep reading!
This Week in The Fed
Last week we wrote about the challenges Rand Paul faces because he simply has no idea what he's talking about when he parrots his dad's "audit the Fed" nonsense. He wants to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate, and he seemingly wants to be taken seriously when he talks about what has become a "signature issue."
But he's so far off base that conservatives and financial professionals are calling him on it. They're getting worried because if his ideas were to gain traction, the real-world results could be disastrous. Politico reports:
"Critics of [Paul's proposed] bill say it is aimed much more directly at repealing a 1978 law establishing Fed independence on monetary policy decisions. Paul’s bill, though vaguely written, would likely allow the GAO to investigate monetary policy actions and report back to Congress immediately.
"That alarms even many conservatives at the Fed who say the central bank’s insulation from short-term political pressure is essential to its ability to function, especially in times of crisis like the nation faced in 2008 and 2009.
“'The operations and finances of the board of governors and the 12 Federal Reserve banks are already audited up the wazoo,' Dallas Fed president Richard Fisher, a noted conservative, thundered in a recent speech in New York. He added that the Fed already releases minutes of its policy meetings shortly after they are held, while Chair Janet Yellen faces regular news conferences and Capitol Hill questioning."
Not only that, but "The bank’s finances are already subject to audit by the Government Accountability Office, the Fed’s inspector general and outside audit firms, most recently Deloitte & Touche. Those interested in what’s on the Fed’s balance sheet can find out, down to the individual bond, on the website of the New York Federal Reserve."
Politico continues:
"Another element of the case against Rand Paul’s view of the Fed is that his critiques of its policies threatening runaway inflation and crushing the dollar have been wrong. 'If people are prepared to carry money to the grocery store in a wheel barrel, that may be coming,' Paul warned on the Glenn Beck radio show in 2011. 'What I worry about is the Weimar Republic, I worry about 1923 in Germany. When they destroyed the currency, they elected Hitler. I don’t want something like that to happen in our country.'
"Instead, in the ensuing years, inflation declined and the dollar strengthened to the point that it is actually damaging to U.S. exporters. And academic research shows that the more political pressure a central bank faces, the more inflation rises, the thing Paul says he worries about the most."
The business community objects to the left's imposition of regulations (most designed to prevent a meltdown like 2008's), but when it comes to Paul, they're worried about seemingly every aspect of his economic agenda. "'If he comes out of Iowa or begins to emerge with any kind of strength, I think you will see the GOP establishment go on red alert because they are going to view him as a dangerous person,' said one financial services industry executive who did not want to be quoted on record criticizing Paul. 'The Fed is the pre-eminent central bank on the planet and no one wants to put that at risk.'”
No one except for Rand Paul, who doesn't have a clue as to whether it's sound policy. That's not the point, in his mind.
“'Audit the Fed is an issue that plays to our base voters,' said Steve Grubbs, a top Paul strategist in Iowa. 'It’s an issue that’s been around for a number of years and it’s one that’s important libertarian Republicans know Sen. Paul is fully behind.' He added that 'the core of our base [voters] are liberty voters' and that 'our first job is to earn as much of that base vote as we can.' Ron Paul won 21 percent of the vote in the 2012 Iowa caucuses."
What Grubbs is saying there is that it doesn't matter how reckless Paul is, or how much damage his ideas could wreak. What's important is that ignorant, easily fooled Iowa voters--excuse us, "liberty voters"--like the sound of it.
Sometimes the greatest service a political candidate can perform is to educate the public, to raise issues in a serious way that allows voters to better understand what's going on around them. Rand Paul appears content to spout his dad's idiotic slogan to capture the votes of people who don't know how idiotic it really is.
When it comes to his signature issue, as with so many other topics, Paul is the furthest thing from serious. He's not only not suited to the presidency or the Senate, but we're increasingly convinced that he shouldn't be allowed near any career that doesn't involve big shoes and a rubber nose.
This Week in Climate
One of the many areas in which the Republican candidates could use a dose of reality is climate change. We suspect they'll be asked about it in their debates, unless all of their debates are hosted by Fox "News," and we look forward to how many ways they have of saying "I'm not a scientist."
In England, party leaders on the right and left have agreed that climate change is real and something needs to be done about it. The WaPo reports:
"The consensus is so strong that Cameron and Miliband [incumbent David Cameron and challenger Ed Miliband, running for Prime Minister], along with Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, have taken the extraordinary step during a heated campaign of signing a joint statement committing to fight 'one of the most serious threats facing the world today.'
"The statement, released early Saturday and brokered by the environmental think tank Green Alliance, binds the rivals to three specific pledges that would be inconceivable areas of agreement in American politics:
- To seek a fair, strong, legally binding global climate deal which limits temperature rises to below 2°C.
- To work together, across party lines, to agree on carbon budgets in accordance with the Climate Change Act.
- To accelerate the transition to a competitive, energy efficient, low carbon economy and to end the use of unabated coal for power generation."
Why can't our right wing embrace science for a change?
This Week in ISIS
Last week, President Obama formally requested an Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) from Congress, for the purposes of fighting ISIS, which we've been doing for at least six months on the basis of an AUMF from 2001. He requested that certain limitations be placed upon the AUMF, which is a change from other presidents, who have been happy to take whatever power they can get. Republicans in Congress, determined to always disagree with Obama about anything, have switched from calling him a power-hungry imperial president to demanding that he take on more power than he wants.
But who is ISIS, what do they want, and how can they be countered? We haven't seen a better description than this one by Graeme Wood in The Atlantic. The true believers in ISIS, he says, want to live in the ways described by the prophet Muhammad, as laid out in the Koran. The Koran, of course, was written a long time ago, when the world was a very different place (a problem we have with most religions--if they remain inextricably lashed to ideas generated thousands of years ago, unless those ideas were written down by God himself and not interpreted by fallible human beings, then they're perpetuating biases and practices that make no sense in the modern world). Most of the world's Muslims have accepted changing times and ideas, and don't seek to live under a caliphate required by the Koran to exist in a perpetual state of warfare, in which crucifixion and slavery are not only allowed but demanded. But the people flocking to ISIS do want to live that way, and believe that in doing so they're helping to bring about Armageddon--which to them is a good idea.
Wood thinks that only by really understanding their philosophical and religious beliefs can we hope to defeat them, or to pen them in to the point that they wither away because they're no longer fulfilling the prophet's insistence that the caliphate's territory be continually enlarged. He offers a few suggestions for dealing with them--none of which include a massive ground war, which is just what ISIS wants. We've stumbled so far, but it's not too late to take a smarter approach. We hope his article is being passed around the Pentagon and the White House right now. It's a long read, but worth the effort.
This Week in Terror
The White House held a summit meeting this week on countering violent extremism. In the Washington Post, Daniel Byman of Georgetown University and the Brookings Institution tries to dispel five myths about terrorism, writing of the summit, "Its goal is admirable and ambitious: neutralizing terrorism’s root causes by stopping people from radicalizing in the first place. Yet the causes of violent extremism are poorly understood, and programs are often targeted at the wrong audiences."
Jeremy Shapiro of Brookings adds, "So why hold the summit at all? Because in the wake of a horrific terrorist attack, the body politic demands a response. And so this is the response. It’s a better idea than invading some random country, restricting civil liberties, or torturing extrajudicial detainees. But it remains a colossal waste of time and effort."
Both writers make a good point. Terror attacks are incredibly rare. In the US, you're far more likely to die in an auto accident or at the barrel of a gun held by you or someone you know, or in very rare cases, by a stranger. Those account for more than 60,000 American deaths every year. Throw in smoking, heart disease, and cancer and you have hundreds of thousands of deaths that have nothing to do with terrorism.
A new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (of which TWiA has been a supporter for many years) closely examines terrorism in the US from April 2009 to February 2015, a period during which domestic terror has been on the rise (the last time it was so active was during the Clinton administration, when Timothy McVeigh skewed the number of deaths with the devastatingly effective Oklahoma City bombing). SPLC finds that in the 2009-2015 timeframe, 63 victims have died in terror attacks on US soil (along with 16 of the perpetrators). About 10 people a year. Did we say "incredibly rare?"
Of those attacks in the US, 90% were the work of one or two people. Organized terrorist organizations have not successfully attacked in the US since 9/11. The threat here, such as it is, is from "lone wolf" terrorists. A very few of these have been radical Islamists; the vast majority have been motivated by right-wing anti-government activism or "various forms of race or group hatred." Make no mistake--we're not saying this just because we at TWiA hold a left-of-center viewpoint. Except for a brief surge of leftist violence in the 1960s/early 70s, from groups like the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army (and in Europe, Baader-Meinhof and the like), domestic terrorism has almost exclusively come from the right, and it swells during Democratic presidential administrations.
What it's not, most of the time, is particularly dangerous. Yes, 63 deaths are too many. One death is too many. But realistically, terrorism isn't a threat.
But it works. It scares people, so they demand action. They demand things like White House summits and Guantanamo Bay and the abhorrent torture of prisoners. These are things that cut to the quick of our ideals, that change what it means to be an American.
We've said it before, and it looks like we'll keep saying it. When terrorism, here or abroad, makes us live in fear and sacrifice the ideals that have made this country a moral example for the world, we're letting the terrorists win. They're not beating us--we're handing them the game.
Instead, we should let them know we're not afraid of them, and that they can't change us. And we should make that be true.
This Week in Rewriting History
Where ISIS came from and how it gained a foothold are not questions in dispute. It grew from the organization called al-Qaeda in Iraq--which didn't exist in Iraq until after we'd invaded and deposed Saddam Hussein--and it gained a foothold because our post-invasion strategy had barely been considered, and the chaos that followed not only provided space and time for radical jihadism to grow, but the invasion and occupation provided a powerful recruiting tool.
So it's not surprising when apologists for that war of choice latch onto any shred of "evidence" that we had a legitimate reason for going in. Now they're trying to use a New York Times story as that "evidence." The only trouble with that is that the story proves the exact opposite of what they're saying (as did a previous NYT piece, last fall).
As Vox.com reminds us:
"The world has always known that Saddam had a chemical weapons program in the late 1970s and 1980s — American companies helped him build it — but that he shut it down in 1991. In 2002, Bush argued that the US had to invade because Saddam was actively developing new chemical, biological and nuclear WMDs, in a secret and ongoing program, with an explicitly aggressive purpose: 'to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons, and diseases, and gases, and atomic weapons.'
"Bush was explicit in claiming that Saddam had an active weapons program: 'Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons, and is increasing his capabilities to make more. And he is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon.' (Bizarrely, a number of conservatives now insist that Bush never made any such claim.)
"The Bush administration hit this argument repeatedly. Then-National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice claimed that Saddam was running a clandestine nuclear program that was only 'six months from a crude nuclear device.' She argued that this program was so imminent, and so clearly designed to target the United States, that a US invasion was the only option: 'We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.'"
A lot of the same voices clamoring for troops on the ground against ISIS (again, just what ISIS is hoping we'll do) are the same neocons who agitated for the Iraq war. Considering how disastrously wrong they were then, why should any sane person listen to them now? (And that includes Jeb Bush, who's considering a run for the White House and has lined up some of those neocons as policy advisors.)
This Week in Treason
Dr. Ben Carson, who imagines himself a possible candidate for the presidency of the United States, this week accused Republicans in Congress of treason.
Here's the backstory. President Obama issued a (perfectly legal) executive order prioritizing the use of the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) limited resources for finding and deporting undocumented people in the US. He thought priority should be given to deporting criminals and troublemakers, not people who have worked here, obeyed our laws, and have family here. Republicans--who temporarily forgot that they favored "family values"--went berserk. When they funded the government last month, they carved out DHS funding so they could take that up separately, holding that funding hostage unless the president rescinds his order. But all their efforts to do so have flopped. Having threatened a partial shutdown of DHS [which Speaker Boehner and Senate Majority Leader McConnell (R/KY) swore would never happen], they now find themselves skidding downhill toward shutdown, with few exit ramps available to them.
One possible ramp--this week a judge who is an avowed enemy of the action ruled that a coalition of 20 states have standing to bring a lawsuit against the action. His injunction temporarily puts a kibosh on the administration's plans, a couple of days before they were supposed to take effect. Republicans in Congress could seize that moment to say, "Well, it's in the courts now, so we can go ahead and fund DHS." So far, they haven't done so.
Enter Ben Carson. This week, appearing on Newsmax TV--which no serious candidate for political office should ever even consider a good idea--Carson was asked about the possible shutdown. He said, "I would say break the funding for Homeland Security up into parcels. Don't present it as a whole bill. That makes it much more difficult for [Obama] to stand in the way. And, if he does stand in the way, particularly of things that are vital to the security of this country, then I think we can start talking about treason. If things are done to the contrary to the security of this country, whoever does them is guilty of treason."
Obviously, he's a little confused. It isn't the president who's threatening to shut down DHS. He would like it fully funded. It's Republicans in Congress, who want to use homeland security funding as a cudgel to get their way, who are threatening shutdown. So if shutting down the department is treason, it's those Republicans who are guilty of it. And a majority of Americans know that.
Side Note: Shutting down DHS temporarily wouldn't have that big an impact on American security, but it would have an impact on the jobs and mortgages of a lot of DHS employees, and it would cost money to get it up and running again.
This Week in Free Speech
In the annals of disgraceful TV personalities, few are worse than Fox "News" commentator Dr. Keith Ablow. At the height of Ebola hysteria, Ablow said that President Obama wouldn't try to keep Ebola out of this country, because his "affinities" were with Africa. Of course, Obama tried--quite successfully--to keep Ebola out of this country. Ablow could look around and count the number of people in the US with Ebola on no fingers, because there aren't any. We have not, as yet, heard Ablow apologize for that slander.
Now he says that President Obama sees the United States as a bigger threat than ISIS. "He's balancing threats. To the President of the U.S., I believe that the United States of America is the bigger threat. That he sees that our focus on autonomy, our desire to spread our ideas around the world has been a great plague. He's really not up for the idea of saying 'I'm with these guys against them.' Because he sees 'them' as people who have been put upon."
Ablow's idea of spreading our ideas around the world involves doing so at the point of a gun, which has never worked particularly well for ideas.
There seem to be no disgusting depths to which Ablow won't happily sink. The fact that he is still allowed near a television camera is proof positive that Fox has no realistic claims to its "fair and balanced" slogan. "Insane and unhinged" is more like it.
* * *
On the topic of bogus "news" organizations and free speech, at the right wing's annual hatefest, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this year, Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson will receive the unintentionally hilariously named "Andrew Breitbart Defender of the First Amendment Award."
Talking Points Memo describes Robertson's noteworthy achievements in that regard. "Robertson, the star of the hit A&E reality TV show, became a conservative hero after he made homophobic remarks in a December 2013 GQ interview, leading the network to briefly suspend filming. He has since remained a vocal social critic, maintaining that he is 'as much of a homophobe as Jesus was' and saying that 'orthodox liberal opinion' leads to sexually transmitted diseases.
“'Phil has the guts to do and say what most politicians in Washington won’t: You must adhere to your conservative beliefs, all of them, and never surrender or compromise them for anyone,'' Breitbart News executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon said. 'We are proud supporters of the Robertsons.'”
We admit, we were previously unaware that spewing vile, ignorant bigotry (in addition to the homophobia, let's not forget his racism) was a high point in the history of free speech. And we generally appreciate the restraint shown by politicians in Washington when it comes to not making blatantly homophobic and racist remarks. But then, we also aren't clear on Breitbart's definition of the First Amendment. The one we know says "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech..."
When decent people were repulsed by Robertson's bigotry, that had nothing to do with Congress. And when A&E shut down production for a while, that was a business decision--the free hand of the market, which conservatives are usually in favor of (apparently except when it interferes with the free expression of hatred). No Congressional involvement there, either. So when exactly did Robertson defend the First Amendment? We're big fans of the First Amendment here at TWiA, but we must have missed that.
This Week in Founders
Charles Pierce at Esquire argues persuasively that the real genius of the Founders was not in writing a Constitution meant to be followed literally in every respect, because that doesn't account for the inevitability of cultural/technological change (see ISIS and the Koran, above), but in devising a system of self-government that lets us all be Founders, constantly refreshing and reinvigorating the American experiment, with the Constitution as our guide and bulwark.
This Week in Oregon
We reported last week on the troubles of the seemingly loony former Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber. This week, his successor takes over, and former Secretary of State Kate Brown becomes the first openly bisexual governor in the nation's history. Congratulations, Governor Brown, and good luck.
This Week in Bears
Given that the name of this blog is "This Week in America," we have always tried to focus on our home country. But some stories are too irresistible not to share. This is one. It's about Blue, a bear cub with a spinal injury who was cared for by the Free the Bears Fund. FtBF originated in Australia, and funds rescue operations in Asia. But once you've seen Blue overcome adversity, you'll understand why we had to post it. And if you don't smile when Blue licks the camera, well, you just might be a hopeless curmudgeon.
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