The Republican’s Imaginary Class War
Suppose they threw a class war and nobody came?
The Republican Party is up in arms this week in response to President Obama’s proposal to help close the deficit by requiring the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share of taxes. Specifically, the president has proposed the “Buffett Rule,” named for billionaire Warren Buffett, which would ensure that millionaires pay as fair a share in income tax as do all working Americans. In response, GOP budget guru Rep. Paul Ryan resurrected one of his party’s favorite talking points, calling the proposal “class warfare.” Others have been following his rhetorical lead. In last night’s GOP debate in Florida, Mitt Romney asserted that “the president’s party wants to take from some people and give to others” and Newt Gingrich insisted that people on unemployment insurance are getting paid “for doing nothing.” Republican leaders seem to be preparing for an all-out assault from low-and-middle income Americans whom they bizarrely believe are intent on stealing their cash.
The Republicans’ “class warfare” accusation is both ironic and cynical.
It’s ironic because, in the midst of the current economic and jobs crisis, where a huge number of Americans are desperately hurting — with homes underwater, with unemployment insurance running out and health insurance gone, with kids in over-crowded classrooms in buildings that are decaying — the rich are getting richer and large corporations are sitting on record profits. Income inequality in the U.S. is at its highest since the precarious days of the late 1920s. One third of Americans who were raised in middle class households can fall out of the middle class as adults. A political elite beholden to the wealthiest CEOs has pursued policies that take money out of the pockets of the neediest to create ever-larger tax breaks for the wealthy. The richest one percent of Americans now earn almost a quarter of the country’s income and control 40 percent of its wealth — a level of inequality not seen since the days before Social Security and Medicare and the social safety net as we know it. If there is “warfare” going on between the “haves” and the “have nots” it’s pretty clear who is waging war on whom.
Even more, this claim of “class warfare” that Republicans are touting is something quite dangerous. It’s an expression of a deeply cynical vision of our country, in which everyone is out for themselves, the suffering of the least fortunate is of no consequence to the most fortunate, and the American dream is off-limits to those who have lost their footing in a devastating economy. Fortunately, this is a vision that most people wholeheartedly reject. The task of our elected officials is to stop assuming the worst about their constituents’ insensitivity to the plight of their fellow Americans, to stop trying to pit us against each other and to start working toward an economic policy that works for everyone. Struggling Americans don’t want to take the American dream away from those who have achieved it and successful Americans don’t want to see their fellow citizens slip into permanent poverty.
The “class warfare” Republicans decry is all in the heads — and the destructive policies — of a small number of political leaders. While all but a few Republicans in Congress have signed a pledge to never raise taxes on corporations or the wealthy, the majority of Americans are much more pragmatic. According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, a whopping 71 percent of Americans — including 86 percent of moderates and 74 percent of independents — think that any plan to reduce the deficit should include both spending cuts and tax increases. 56 percent, including large majorities of moderates and independents said that wealthier Americans should pitch in and pay higher taxes to help reduce the deficit. A Gallup poll this week found that 53 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners support the president’s plan to eliminate corporate tax loopholes (a major element of the alleged “class warfare”), and majorities of GOP respondents supported spending that extra revenue on hiring public employees, funding public works projects and cutting payroll taxes on small businesses.
The Republicans’ invocation of “class warfare” is a political ploy that the vast majority of Americans want no part of. Warren Buffett is not alone.
By: Michael B. Keegan, Huffington Post, September 23, 2011
Desperately Seeking A Candidate: Republicans Falling In And Out Of Love
Here’s my question for the Republican Party: How’s that Rick Perry stuff workin’ out for ya?
You’ll recall that Sarah Palin asked a similar question last year about President Obama’s “ hopey-changey stuff.” Indeed, hopey-changey has been through a bad patch. But now the GOP is still desperately seeking a presidential candidate it can love. Or even like.
That Perry was crushed by Herman Cain — yes, I said Herman Cain — in the Florida straw poll Saturday confirms that the tough-talking Texas governor’s campaign is in serious trouble. He’s the one who put it there with a performance in last week’s debate that was at times disjointed, at times disastrous.
Perry was supposed to be the “Shane”-like Western hero who brought peace to the troubled valley that is the Republican presidential field. A month after he rode into town, however, increasingly frantic GOP insiders are begging New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to saddle up and save the day.
After watching Perry in the debate, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol — a card-carrying member of the Republican establishment — had a one-word reaction: “Yikes.”
Perry got off to what his supporters consider a strong start, which means he spoke in complete sentences. After the first hour, however, he began to slip into gibberish — as when he said his program for controlling the border with Mexico without building a fence includes putting “the aviation assets on the ground,” and when he described the nation between Afghanistan and India as “the Pakistani country.”
Then he wound up for his big attack on Mitt Romney as a flip-flopper. This is what came out:
“I think Americans just don’t know sometimes which Mitt Romney they’re dealing with. Is it the Mitt Romney that was on the side of — against the Second Amendment before he was for the Second Amendment? Was it — was before — he was before the social programs from the standpoint of — he was for standing up for Roe versus Wade before he was against Roe versus Wade? Him — he was for Race to the Top. He’s for Obamacare and now he’s against it. I mean, we’ll wait until tomorrow and — and — and see which Mitt Romney we’re really talking to tonight.”
Yikes, yikes and double yikes.
The prospect of Perry standing next to Obama on a debate stage may have freaked out the GOP establishment, but what angered the party’s base was Perry’s position on illegal immigration. It is both reasonable and compassionate, meaning it is also completely unacceptable.
At issue was Perry’s initiative to let the sons and daughters of illegal immigrants in Texas pay in-state tuition at state universities. “If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart,” Perry said.
Two days later, in the straw poll, Florida Republicans showed him just how heartless they can be.
I don’t know anyone who believes that Cain’s big victory — he captured 37 percent of the vote, compared with Perry’s 15 percent and Romney’s 14 percent — is a sign that the Hermanator’s campaign is about to catch fire, except perhaps Cain himself. Instead, it was a vote of no confidence in what still looks like a strikingly weak field.
Michele Bachmann swiftly rose and fell in the polls. If Perry traces the same arc, the temptation would be to conclude that the party has resigned itself to Romney and is ready to fall in line. But Romney has been running for nearly five years now and still hasn’t overcome an uncomfortable truth: The party’s just not that into him.
At this point, you have to wonder if the GOP will fall in love with anybody. I’m trying to imagine the candidate who can maintain credibility with the party’s establishment and Tea Party wings. If the ultra-flexible Romney isn’t enough of a political contortionist to do it, who is?
Given the state of the economy, Obama’s going to have a tough re-election fight no matter what. But while the president flies around the country knitting the Democratic Party’s various constituencies back together, Republicans are still waiting for Mr. or Ms. Right to ride over the horizon.
I don’t know if Christie can ride a horse, but this movie’s not over yet.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 26, 2011
Only Conservatives Can End The Death Penalty
Every so often, one capital case makes a public spectacle of the American machinery of death. Last week, it was the controversy over Troy Davis, who was executed in Georgia after years of impassioned argument, organizing and litigation.
I honor those who worked so hard to save Davis’s life because they forced the nation to deal with the imperfections and, in some instances, brutalities of the criminal justice system.
Yet after all the tears are shed, the repeal of capital punishment is still a political question. Can the politics of this question change? The answer is plainly yes.
It’s hard to imagine now, but in 1966, more Americans opposed the death penalty than supported it — by 47 percent to 42 percent. But the crime wave that began in the late 1960s and the sense that the criminal justice system was untrustworthy sent support for capital punishment soaring. By 1994, 80 percent of Americans said they favored the death penalty, and only 16 percent were opposed.
Since then, the numbers have softened slightly. Over the past decade, the proportion of Americans declaring themselves against capital punishment has hovered around 25 to 32 percent. The mild resurgence of opposition — caused by a decline in violent crime and by investigations raising doubts about the guilt of some death-row prisoners — has opened up political space for action.
Liberals are not going to lead this fight. Too many Democratic politicians remember how the death penalty was used in campaigns during the 1980s and ’90s, notably by George H.W. Bush against Michael Dukakis in 1988. They’re still petrified of looking “soft” on crime.
Moreover, winning this battle will require converting Americans who are not liberals. The good news is that many are open to persuasion. Gallup polling shows that support for capital punishment drops sharply when respondents are offered the alternative of “life imprisonment, with absolutely no possibility of parole.” When Gallup presented this option in its 2010 survey, only 49 percent chose the death penalty; 46 percent preferred life without parole.
And a survey last year for the Death Penalty Information Center by Lake Research Partners showed that if a variety of alternatives were offered (including life without parole plus restitution to victims’ families), respondents’ hard support for the death penalty was driven down to 33 percent.
If a majority is open to persuasion, the best persuaders will be conservatives, particularly religious conservatives and abortion opponents, who have moral objections to the state-sanctioned taking of life or see the grave moral hazard involved in the risk of executing an innocent person.
Despite the cheering for executions at a recent GOP debate, there are still conservatives who are standing up against the death penalty. In Ohio this summer, state Rep. Terry Blair, a Republican and a staunch foe of abortion, declared flatly: “I don’t think we have any business in taking another person’s life, even for what we call a legal purpose or what we might refer to as a justified purpose.”
Last week, Don Heller, who wrote the 1978 ballot initiative that reinstated the death penalty in California, explained in the Los Angeles Daily News why he had changed his mind. “Life without parole protects public safety better than a death sentence,” he wrote. “It’s a lot cheaper, it keeps dangerous men and women locked up forever, and mistakes can be fixed.”
The most moving testimony against Troy Davis’s execution came from a group of former corrections officials who, as they wrote, “have had direct involvement in executions.”
“No one has the right to ask a public servant to take on a lifelong sentence of nagging doubt, and for some of us, shame and guilt,” they said. “Should our justice system be causing so much harm to so many people when there is an alternative?”
Political ideology has built a thick wall that blocks us from acknowledging that some of the choices we face are tragic. Perhaps we can make an exception in this case and have a quiet conversation about whether our death-penalty system really speaks for our best selves. And I thank those conservatives, right-to-lifers, libertarians and prison officials who, more than anyone else, might make such a dialogue possible.
By: E. J. Dionne, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 25, 2011
Lynch Law Lives On Stage And In Troy Davis Execution
When you visit Atlanta, ask about the death of Troy Davis, an execution by lethal injection as miles of people across land and sea kept a vigil until it came to pass at 11:08 p.m. last Wednesday evening.
Nice to know law and order—or do I mean lynch law and order?—prevails in the stubborn deep South, whatever the world thinks. Davis was put to death despite a slew of supporters, including dignitaries and law enforcement experts, who found shades of reasonable doubt in his murder case.
In a stroke of amazing timing and relevance, Georgia’s capital city is the setting of a tragical musical, Parade, based on a true story of a 1915 lynching. I just saw the brilliant production on opening night at Ford’s Theatre on 10th Street here in Washington—the very spot where Abraham Lincoln was shot at close range, by someone he never saw coming in the dark. A vengeful son of the South, an actor, played a Shakespearean scene for all he was worth—MacBeth, Lincoln’s favorite.
On that tragic April night, Lincoln was heartily enjoying a comedy. Similarly, all seems bright at first in this Ford’s Theatre play. Parade’s exuberant ensemble charms with spring songs, costumes, and revelry as the curtain opens on Atlanta’s celebration of “Confederate Memorial Day” in April 1913. But the holiday itself reveals the defiance of Atlanta’s white society, keeping the anti-Yankee candles burning.
The theatre director, Paul R. Tetreault, expertly captures the tableau of a wounded world that tells itself, over and over, that it was never vanquished, despite the festering sore of the Recent Unpleasantness.
An old guard culture, hostile to outsiders, was the downfall for a Jewish New Yorker in his early 30s, Leo Frank, who made a good living as a factory superintendent. He was accused and arrested of a gruesome child murder. Playwright Alfred Uhry, author of Driving Miss Daisy, wrote the book for the Broadway play, launched onstage in 1998. Uhry has family ties to the story, in true Southern storytelling style. There are no secrets down there, except the ones they choose to tell years later.
Parade is no picnic as it wends its way through the Southern justice system on a murder case that became a national cause, like the Davis case. Frank was found guilty of fatally strangling a girl worker in his pencil factory. When he was sentenced to hang, there was an outcry from quarters who felt a virulent strain of anti-Yankee anti-Semitism played a part in the verdict.
The governor of Georgia a century ago, John Slaton, went against the will of Atlanta’s townspeople. His character, portrayed by Stephen F. Schmidt, exhibits courage and pathos, clear about the consequences of bucking the establishment. Governor Slaton reviews the conflicting evidence in Frank’s case and grants him clemency: life imprisonment instead of death by the state’s hand. That is precisely what Georgia state officials refused to do for Troy Davis.
Lead actor Euan Morton telegraphs Frank’s desperate plight with impressive restraint. Jenny Fellner, the actress who plays his wife Lucille, sparkles onstage with her singing voice and her journey to loving her husband, locked up and alone, more than she ever did.
Relentlessly, the end closes in. A well-connected mob of white men break into the jail where Frank is held, to take him for a long night ride. It was a well-planned thing. In the show as in life, the hooded men string Frank up—as he prays in Hebrew—and hang him, with picture postcards to show for it all. Very nice.
So if you get to Marietta, ask them about the tree where Frank was hanged. Yes, Georgia has lots of colorful local history, and the fun part is trying to see where the past ends and the present begins. Both the Davis and Frank convictions were reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied relief or mercy in both cases. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the famous justice, scolded Georgia for what he called a form of “lynch law” in Frank’s trial. But he was a damn Yankee in the minority.
Tetreault and others chose this timely tale to inaugurate The Lincoln Legacy Project, an initiative to spark a national dialogue on overcoming violence based on hate or bigotry. Parade’s history lesson could not be more sobering. Early in the 20th century, lynchings of black men were at an all-time high in the Southern states (including Maryland.) This was a spur to the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. Ari Roth of Theater J, a partner in co-producing the play, notes Frank met the same fate as so many black men at the hands of mobs. Parade, Roth said, is a “galvanizing reminder of what can go wrong in our country when hate speech and raging angers aren’t tempered and set to rest.”
Amen. And let the conversation begin.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, September 26, 2011
Calling All Progressive Democrats: A Time To Fight
Should you find your enthusiasm for activist politics waning, Robert Reich has a Monday morning energizer in his latest blog entry “Don’t Be Silenced,” via RSN:
We’re on the cusp of the 2012 election. What will it be about? It seems reasonably certain President Obama will be confronted by a putative Republican candidate who:Believes corporations are people, wants to cut the top corporate rate to 25% (from the current 35%) and no longer require they pay tax on foreign income, who will eliminate capital gains and dividend taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 a year, raise the retirement age for Social Security and turn Medicaid into block grants to states, seek a balanced-budged amendment to the Constitution, require any regulatory agency issuing a new regulation repeal another regulation of equal cost (regardless of the benefits), and seek repeal of Obama’s healthcare plan.
Or one who:
Believes the Federal Reserve is treasonous when it expands the money supply, doubts human beings evolved from more primitive forms of life, seeks to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and shift most public services to the states, thinks Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, while governor took a meat axe to public education and presided over an economy that generated large numbers of near-minimum-wage jobs, and who will shut down most federal regulatory agencies, cut corporate taxes, and seek repeal of Obama’s healthcare plan.
That’s the default scenario, the one which will become reality if Democratic apathy is allowed to fester. The rest of Reich’s column is more of a challenge to progressive/left Dems to fight for the causes that once made the Democratic Party a great champion of working people:
…Within these narrow confines progressive ideas won’t get an airing. Even though poverty and unemployment will almost surely stay sky-high, wages will stagnate or continue to fall, inequality will widen, and deficit hawks will create an indelible (and false) impression that the nation can’t afford to do much about any of it – proposals to reverse these trends are unlikely to be heard.Neither party’s presidential candidate will propose to tame CEO pay, create more tax brackets at the top and raise the highest marginal rates back to their levels in the 1950s and 1960s (that is, 70 to 90 percent), and match the capital-gains rate with ordinary income.
You won’t hear a call to strengthen labor unions and increase the bargaining power of ordinary workers.
Don’t expect an argument for resurrecting the Glass-Steagall Act, thereby separating commercial from investment banking and stopping Wall Street’s most lucrative and dangerous practices.
You won’t hear there’s no reason to cut Medicare and Medicaid – that a better means of taming health-care costs is to use these programs’ bargaining clout with drug companies and hospitals to obtain better deals and to shift from fee-for-services to fee for healthy outcomes…Nor will you hear why we must move toward Medicare for all.
Nor why the best approach to assuring Social Security’s long-term solvency is to lift the ceiling on income subject to Social Security payroll taxes.
Don’t expect any reference to the absurdity of spending more on the military than do all other countries put together, and the waste and futility of an unending and undeclared war against Islamic extremism – especially when we have so much to do at home…
Although proposals like these are more important and relevant than ever, they won’t be part of the upcoming presidential election.
The choice facing progressive Dems is between whining and hand-wringing about inadequate leadership of the Party on the one hand and doing something to change it on the other. Reich sounds the call to arms to put real progressive policies back on the agenda:
…I urge you to speak out about them – at town halls, candidate forums, and public events. Continue to mobilize and organize around them. Talk with your local media about them. Use social media to get the truth out.Don’t be silenced by Democrats who say by doing so we’ll jeopardize the President’s re-election. If anything we’ll be painting him as more of a centrist than Republicans want the public to believe. And we’ll be preserving the possibility (however faint) of a progressive agenda if he’s reelected.
Re-read that last graph. That alone is reason enough to push hard from the left inside the party — it actually strengthens Dem defenses against the GOP default scenario and it lays the foundation for a stronger progressive future for the Democratic Party, win or lose in 2012.
Still not juiced? Reich’s clincher:
Remember, too, the presidential race isn’t the only one occurring in 2012. More than a third of Senate seats and every House seat will be decided on, as well as numerous governorships and state races. Making a ruckus about these issues could push some candidates in this direction – particularly since, as polls show, much of the public agrees.Most importantly, by continuing to push and prod we give hope to countless Americans on the verge of giving up. We give back to them the courage of their own convictions, and thereby lay the groundwork for a future progressive agenda – to take back America from the privileged and powerful, and restore broad-based prosperity.
Grumble and gripe about inadequate leadership in your party, if you will. But do something this week to advance progressive policies and federal, state and local candidates who support them. Your actions add legitimacy to your critique.
By: J. P. Green, The Democratic Strategist, September 19, 2011
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