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The right’s stealthy coup

Right before our eyes, American conservatism is becoming something very different from what it once was. Yet this transformation is happening by stealth because moderates are too afraid to acknowledge what all their senses tell them.

Last week’s Supreme Court oral arguments on health care were the most dramatic example of how radical tea partyism has displaced mainstream conservative thinking. It’s not just that the law’s individual mandate was, until very recently, a conservative idea. Even conservative legal analysts were insisting it was impossible to imagine the court declaring the health-care mandate unconstitutional, given its past decisions.

So imagine the shock when conservative justices repeatedly spouted views closely resembling the tweets and talking points issued by organizations of the sort funded by the Koch brothers. Don’t take it from me. Charles Fried, solicitor general for Ronald Reagan, told The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein that it was absurd for conservatives to pretend that the mandate created a market in health care. “The whole thing is just a canard that’s been invented by the tea party. . .,” Fried said, “and I was astonished to hear it coming out of the mouths of the people on that bench.”

Staunchly conservative circuit judges Jeffrey Sutton and Laurence Silberman must have been equally astonished, since both argued that overturning the law would amount to judicial overreach. Yet moderate opinion bends over backward to act as if this is an intellectually close question.

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Dangerous Minds: Where (and when) the Right Went Wrong

Bruce Bartlett: In recent years, Bruce Bartlett has been a harsh, harsh critic of the economic policies of George W. Bush and the Tea party’s know-nothingness (he’s not much a fan of the Democrats, either, I should add). In recent months he’s been in the news for calling Texas Governor Rick Perry an “an idiot” on CNN, adding “and I don’t think anybody would disagree with that.”

In this interview, Bartlett, who began his Washington career first working for Congressman Ron Paul and then Jack Kemp, and who was an extremely influential figure in the “supply-side” economics debate, lets it fuckin’ rip, but in a very measured, dignified, highly informed manner. He’s not just an economist, he’s an historian as well. And he’s worked at the top levels of two Republican administrations. Here, Bartlett flat out calls “bullshit” on what’s going on now. It’s nothing short of amazing to hear someone say the things Bartlett says in this interview on American television.

source and video

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Republicans Once Again Unleash Reality Distortion Field

In 1995, when congressional Republicans grew annoyed that independent reviews of science produced answers they didn’t like, they shut down the Office of Technology Assessment. In 2001, when Senate Republicans grew annoyed that parliamentary procedure produced results they didn’t like, they fired their parliamentarian. Now, in 2012, congressional Republicans are annoyed yet again with the real world, and their answer, yet again, is to create a new reality more to their liking.

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Rich People DON’T Create Jobs: 6 Myths That Have to Be Killed for Our Economy to Live

By Kevin Drum | Mother Jones

MYTH #1: THE STIMULUS FAILED

For the first four years of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt tackled the Great Depression with inflation, easy monetary policy, and government spending. But in 1937, FDR’s advisers persuaded him to reverse gears. After all, interest rates had been close to zero for years, commodity prices were climbing, and fear of inflation was on the rise.

Bust or Boost?

What happened next is now called the “Mistake of 1937” (PDF). Federal spending was cut and monetary policy was tightened up, with disastrous results: GDP immediately began to plummet, and industrial production fell by a third. Within a year everyone had had enough. In 1938 the austerity program was abandoned, and the economy started to grow again.

The truth is that stimulus worked in 1933 and it worked in 2009. So why is our economy still in such bad shape? For one, partly due to political considerations and partly because it wasrushed through Congress, the 2009 stimulus wasn’t as well designed as it could have been. It was also sold badly. If the bill passed, administration economists predicted, unemployment would peak at 8 percent and then start declining (PDF). But the recession was far worse than the White House originally thought. Unemployment peaked in the double digits, and that’s made the stimulus a fat target for Republican critics ever since.

But as awkward as it is to argue that things would have been worse without the stimulus—”Not as bad as it could have been!” isn’t a winning slogan—well, the truth is that things would have been a lot worse without the stimulus. Everyone from the nonpartisanCongressional Budget Office (PDF) to private-sector forecasting firms have concluded that it increased economic growth, reduced unemployment, and put millions of people back to work. It just wasn’t big enough, or long-lasting enough. Unfortunately, this has given conservatives an opening to demand tighter money and lower spending—exactly the same mistake we made in 1937.

MYTH #2: THE DEFICIT IS OUR BIGGEST PROBLEM

If your credit card company offered you $30,000 interest-free to buy a car, would you take the deal? Sure you would. It’s a three-way win: You replace your clunker, the auto industry keeps its assembly lines humming, and the credit card company is happy to have made a safe loan, even at no interest. Apparently, they think you’re a pretty good credit risk.

The Bush Effect

This is pretty much the situation the US government is in now. If our national debt were really at dire and unsustainable levels, as conservative economists and Republican leaders have taken to arguing, nervous investors would be driving up interest rates on federal borrowing. But just the opposite has happened: As I’m writing this, 10-year real treasury yields are at 0.00 percent. The seven-year rate is actually negative. Apparently, the financial markets think we’re a pretty good credit risk.

It’s true that the United States needs to address its long-term deficit problem—a problem almost entirely due to Medicare and other health care expenditures. (Domestic, defense, and Social Security spending have actually decreased as a percentage of GDP over the past 40 years, and there’s no reason to think that’s about to change.) But that’s in the long term. Right now, our problem is a sluggish economy and too many people out of work. The real answer to future deficits is to spend money now to get the economy growing again.

America’s infrastructure is crumbling, there are people who could be put to work fixing it, and banks are practically begging us to take their money. A trillion dollars in infrastructure spending would be good for our economy today, good for economic growth tomorrow, and thanks to those low interest rates (and the increased revenue that would come from growth), it wouldn’t even increase our debt much. As they say, only an idiot turns down free money.

Only an Idiot Turns Down Free Money

MYTH #3: LOWER TAXES ARE THE BEST WAY TO GROW THE ECONOMY

There’s no greater orthodoxy in the Republican Party than unconditional fealty to tax cuts. In a recent GOP debate, when the candidates were asked whether they’d walk away from a deficit deal that included just $1 in tax increases for every $10 in spending cuts, every single hand shot up.

Taxes have been the third rail of American politics ever since the California tax revolt of 1978. Even Democrats are nervous about touching them: President Obama has famously called for letting some of the Bush tax cuts expire, but he’s always careful to make it clear that he wouldn’t change rates for anyone earning less than $250,000 per year. In other words, he’d repeal less than a quarter of the Bush tax cuts.

This fear is easy to understand. No one likes paying higher taxes. But do lower taxes actually spur economic growth? Bruce Bartlett, an economist in the Reagan administration, has compared tax rates in various rich countries in 1979 to each country’s growth rate since then. His conclusion? There’s virtually no correlation.

Recent US history backs this up too. Bill Clinton raised tax rates in 1993, and Republicans insisted it would cripple the economy. Instead, the economy boomed. In 2001 and 2003, George W. Bush lowered taxes and Republicans insisted the economy would flourish. Instead, we got the weakest expansion of the past century. Republicans are simply wrong about taxes: Within reason, high tax rates don’t hinder growth, and low tax rates don’t stimulate it.

But don’t high taxes reduce the incentive for people to work? Actually, no: For ordinary wage earners, participation in the job force and total hours worked barely respond to taxes at all. (According to tax specialists Joel Slemrod and Jon Bakija, this is “a rare example of a question on which there is a broad consensus among economists.”) The same is true for rich people. As a trio of prominent economists concluded last year after reviewing the literature, “there is no compelling evidence to date of real economic responses to tax rates” (PDF). Even capital gains rates have virtually no impact: During the past few decades, they’ve bounced up and down from 40 percent to their post-Depression low of 15 percent. The effect on business investment is nil.

If a Tax Rate Falls…

Will the Economy Notice?

Are American businesses paralyzed by fear of a tidal wave of new regulations? WhenMcClatchy reporter Kevin Hall went out and asked small-business owners about this, he got a clear answer. “Absolutely, positively not,” said one. “Government regulations are not choking our business,” said another. In its most recent quarterly survey (PDF) of small-business trends, the National Federation of Independent Business reports that sales—i.e., lack of demand—is the No. 1 concern, beating out taxes, regulations, inflation, and everything else.

The Bottom Line Is the Bottom Line

In any case, regardless of what the Wall Street Journal editorial page says, the Obama administration has hardly been a whirlwind of regulatory activity. Its health care reform will have very little effect on either small businesses (which are exempt) or large businesses (which mostly offer health plans already) and only a modest effect on medium-size businesses (PDF). Its financial reform bill affects only the financial sector. Its proposed new air-quality regulations will mostly affect old coal-fired electrical plants that would have shut down anyway (PDF).

Dumb and outdated regulations are no friends to the economy—and the Obama administration has undertaken a regulatory review that’s projected to save an estimated $10 billion during the next five years. But as welcome as that is, our economy’s biggest problem right now isn’t regulatory uncertainty. It’s economic uncertainty.

MYTH #5: OBAMA IS DEBASING THE DOLLAR

In one of the most infamous moments of his young candidacy, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry decided to tee off on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke last summer. “If this guy prints more money between now and the election,” he told an enthusiastic audience in Cedar Rapids, “I don’t know what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.”

Bernanke’s sin? Pumping money into the banking system after the collapse of 2008. Although this is widely credited with helping prevent a second Great Depression, tea partiers and gold bugs are convinced that Bernanke’s actions have debased the dollar. There are two problems with that claim. First, it’s not true. Second, we’d be better off if it were.

First things first: Has the dollar lost value under Bernanke and Obama? No. The usual measure for the strength of the dollar is called “trade-weighted value.” In July 2008, just before the financial crisis erupted in earnest, the greenback’s value stood at 95.4. As I’m writing this in mid-September, it has gone up, then down, and is currently sitting at 96.1.Taking a longer view, the dollar lost value under Reagan and Bush I, gained value under Clinton, lost value under Bush II, and has mostly stayed steady under Obama. There’s just no basis to the claim that Obama and Bernanke have debased the currency.

And that’s unfortunate. As economist Dean Baker is fond of pointing out, if we want to get our national savings rate up and our long-term budget deficit down, there’s only one way to do it: by fixing our massive trade deficit. We have to import less and export more, and one way to make that happen is with a weaker dollar. A weaker dollar makes foreign goods more expensive, so we’ll buy less of them, and makes American goods cheaper, so others will buy more of them.

The truth is that we’d be better off if we ditched the loaded “strong/weak” terminology and just talked about an “export dollar” (weak) and an “import dollar” (strong). Sometimes one is good, and sometimes the other is. The Chinese, for example, have done well for decades with an export yuan. Likewise, an export dollar would be our friend right now.

Bad News for Tourists…

 MYTH #6: IF YOU UNSHACKLE THE RICH, THEY’LL REV UP THE ECONOMY

Think of this as the supermyth—the one underlying so many other fallacies. For decades, America’s economic policies have been based on the notion that catering to corporations and the wealthy is the way to stimulate the economy. Republicans routinely insist that we need to bail them out, lower their taxes, allow them to repatriate hundreds of billions in overseas profits, and free them from annoying government meddling. If we don’t, the “job creators” will stay in a funk, and the economy will stay in a rut.

But here’s a pesky fact neither corporate America nor the GOP establishment is trumpeting: After-tax corporate profits are currently at an all-time high. The problem businesses face isn’t lack of cash but rather a lack of confidence that consumer demand will pick up in the future. So they’re not expanding or hiring at the rate they should be.

Rich people don’t create jobs when we hand them big windfalls. They create jobs when the economy is growing and they have customers for their businesses. And the key to solving that problem, at least during a deep economic slump like the one we’re in now, is to focus like a laser on more stimulus, easier money, higher inflation, and a weaker currency. Unless we want to relive 1937 over and over and over again. As Bill Murray said,

“Anything different is good.”

Wall Street’s Gain…

Main Street’s Pain

 [SOURCE]

Republicans must stop thwarting upward mobility

By Star-Ledger Editorial Board | blog.nj.com

“Class is not a fixed designation in this country,” Ryan said. “We are an upwardly mobile society, with a lot of movement between income groups.”

That is certainly the American idea. It’s the principle our country was founded on: With plenty of hard work, anyone can climb up in the ranks.

Trouble is, Republicans have been doing everything in their power to subvert that.

They’ve shown hostility toward efforts to spur mobility, like union organizing and raising the minimum wage. They’ve opposed funding preschool for poor kids and Pell grants that help talented students who aren’t rich attend college.

And “justice for all” isn’t only about mobility. If we have a nation in which the top sliver has an inordinate portion of gains and everyone else lives on scraps, that offends American values, too — even if we all have a shot at joining the elite. Polls show Americans are disturbed by the extreme income inequality we have now.

People working hard and playing by the rules shouldn’t be poor in a country this prosperous. On this count, Republicans fail even more miserably. The GOP budget approved in the House this year imposed deep cuts in programs such as food stamps, Medicaid and jobless benefits. In poverty prevention and equal access to health care and educational opportunities, we rank near the bottom of industrialized nations…

[FULL STORY]

They’ve become a vengeful cult that will never back the president on anything, even their own job-growth policies. Will even destroy the economy to achieve their goals. They do not care about democracy. They want absolute control. And they’re succeeding.

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

Yes folks, I am mad as hell. The America I believed in when I volunteered for the Marine Corps, went to Korea, that America has been hijacked by an irrational, dark force that’s consuming our political system. We saw this coming a few years ago reviewing Jack Bogle’s warnings in “The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism.” Buffett called that one: “There’s class warfare, all right. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Today that toxic mind-set is a metaphor visible everywhere, in images like Dexter’s Four Horsemen, visions of America descending into a self-created Inferno.

My America is out of control, babbling nonsense, acting like a junkie, addict, very bad alcoholic. Been there. Now decades in recovery. Also worked years professionally with hundreds from Betty Ford Center. Today everywhere I see a nation consumed by addictions: self-centered, selfish, greedy, aggressive, power hungry, lost souls with no moral compass, in denial of their suicidal mission, incapable of stopping.

You know exactly what I’m saying: America is way off track. Our great nation is acting like a drunken self-destructive addict. Could use an intervention. But sadly we’ve drifted so far off our moral compass that only hitting bottom, a total collapse, near-death experience, only another meltdown bigger than 2008 and a depression will do the trick.

You know addictions turn even nice people into monsters. In the end they don’t care who they take down with them. Nothing matters, not families, not nations. Protect your assets folks.

[FULL STORY]

Jon Stewart Asks The GOP: WTF Is Wrong With You People?

By Jason Easley | politicususa.com

On The Daily Show Jon Stewart hammered Republicans for being classless and unstatesmanlike for their refusal to give Obama any credit for being right about Libya, and asked WTF is wrong with you people?

After playing clips of Fox News claiming that Obama might have caused instability by getting rid of Gadhafi, and that it could have been avoided if Obama would have acted sooner, Stewart said, “Is there no one? Is there no Republican that can be gracious and statesmanlike in this situation? We removed a dictator in six months, losing no American soldiers, spending like a billion dollars rather than a trillion dollars, and engendering what appears to be good will to people who now have a prideful story of their own independence to tell. Not to mention oil, they have oil.”

Jon Stewart then played clips of Republican Senators Marco Rubio, Chuck Grassley, and John McCain giving credit to the British and French for the independence of Libya to the British and French, not Obama. The Daily Show host said, “What the f**k is wrong with you people? Honestly, what’s wrong with you? Are you that small? Are you that, you know what else we really got to give credit to the Chinese. Without the invention of gunpowder, I don’t know. How bad was it? Keep your eyes on Steve Doocy when Gretchen throws to commercial on Fox and Friends.”

After playing the clip, Stewart continued, “Unless I’m mistaken here, Steve Doocy actually tried to console that woman as they left the segment. Hey kid, look on the bright side. Obama’s policies can’t be vindicated every day. By the way I’m no expert on body language, but I’m not sure she appreciated this.”

When the members of the Republican Party can’t put their partisanship aside for one day and acknowledge that President Obama was correct on Libya, it proves that Republicans are permanently putting politics ahead of country. The same people who blasted Obama for his Libya decision in the beginning, are not surprisingly now refusing to give him any credit when it turns out that he was right and they were wrong.

What kind of Americans would give credit to a foreign country before their own president?

We all know that Fox News gets depressed when things go right for Obama. Heck, I am surprised that the whole building wasn’t placed on suicide watch after the death of Bin Laden, but what kind of warped people are depressed because President Obama might get a little credit for getting rid of one of the most murderous dictators in the world. Gadhafi was also involved in funding multiple acts of terrorism that killed American citizens.

What is wrong with Republicans that they would rather see Gadhafi alive and murdering if it would mean that they could go on Fox News and call Obama a failure? If they can’t see that Libya is a better country and the world is a better place without Gadhafi in it, Jon Stewart really did say it best.

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

[SOURCE AND VIDEO]

How the Religious Right is a major factor in the current mess in Washington.

[SOURCE]

Starting in the election of 1980 and continuing steadily since then, corporate interests have greatly increased their political power by pandering to politically motivated religious voters who care about nothing more than social issues such as abortion, gay rights, and other so-called “culture war” issues. Whereas corporate interests were once held in check by an electorate that considered the economic interests of real people a high priority, a large section of that electorate has now indicated that social issues will almost always trump everything else. Hence, corporate interests, which generally are indifferent to social issues, have discovered that they can be assured a large base of voters by simply pandering to these social conservatives, throwing red meat to them on issues of abortion, God in government, LGBT rights, etc.

———————————————————

Strangely, public support for these corporate-driven policies is very low, usually in a minority, but from a political standpoint corporate interests get their candidates elected because they are in bed with the Religious Right, which will support any pro-corporate candidates that advance the socially conservative agenda. Psychologically, these social conservative voters feel more compelled to oppose gay rights, for example, than to support candidates who would steadfastly defend Social Security and other important economic interests. The social conservative voter would like to tax the rich, but to do so he might have to vote against the candidate who is always talking about God and Bible-based values. In this internal struggle, the religious conservative voter will more often abandon his economic interest in order to vote consistently with his perceived “Christian” outlook.

These are just a few key paragraphs of the article, this is exactly what I’ve said has been going on for years now, but was always shouted down as wearing a “tinfoil hat”.

The thing is, it’s so rampant and brazen now that it should be pretty hard to deny for anyone with a more moderate political outlook.

The problem is, a lot of moderate voters don’t actually vote, the more radical people are, the more passionate they tend to be about their politics and beliefs and the more likely they are to be at the polls on election day.

Add this to the fact that you have all these candidates on the right that pander to conservative social issues while at the same time have corporate interests at heart and you have a perfect recipe for a duped public.

All we can do is try and decrease voter apathy in the more moderate voters, and the only way to do that is to get more of this commentary out into the public eye.

Think about it, what better way to get your candidate (who is going to be writing policies and laws in favor of your corporate agenda) into office is to convince your voter base that they have a moral obligation to vote for you.

This is why I’m so angry about the current political landscape, we should be better than this, smarter than this as a society, people should be insulted at they way they are being played by their political candidates and their corporate backers.

What Conservatives say they want is “Small Government.”

leftish:

What they are working on this year is Government that prohibits you from using contraception, that forcibly collects your urine, hair and blood, and that puts you in prison or deports you if it does not like the speeches you attend.  This stuff is happening all over, all the time now. This is what Conservative Government is like this year.  It sort of seems to me that this ought to be a bigger National Story.

~ Rachel Maddow

*slow clap*

This is what is fucking me up so much about the current political climate, the right is always claiming they want smaller government, that the government should stay out of people’s business, so on and so forth, yet they keep pushing these “social” issues, restricting rights, and taking power away from the people all under the guise of “good go fearing Americans”

The citizens of the U.S. need to wake the fuck up and see what is going on here. You are being pandered to through social issues, your rights are being eroded away little by little and it seems like everyone is so damn distracted by bullshit that they have no idea what is really going on.

We are a nation of sheep, ruled by wolves and owned by pigs.

The only way we can fix this is to get off your ass, educate yourself and vote for representatives based on something more than soundbites and personality cults.

(via jonathan-cunningham)