Insulting Comments At Fox News Debate Show Newt Gingrich Clueless On Black Americans
If you want to understand why the GOP is so ill prepared to compete in an increasingly nonwhite America, just look at the exchange between Fox News questioner Juan Williams and Newt Gingrich halfway through last night’s Republican presidential debate.
It being Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Williams asked Gingrich whether some poor and minority voters might not be insulted at his claim that poor kids lack a work ethic and that black people should be instructed to demand jobs, not food stamps. Gingrich, as is his wont, haughtily dismissed Williams’s question, to wild applause.
Then Williams tried again, mentioning a black woman who had taken Gingrich to task for calling Barack Obama a “food stamp” president. By this point, the overwhelmingly white crowd had begun to boo the only African-American on stage. When Gingrich insisted that Obama was indeed the “food stamp” president—because more Americans are now on food stamps—and dismissed Williams’s criticism as “politically correct,” the crowd began to scream with delight. By the time Gingrich finished his answer, the crowd was on its feet in a standing ovation.
The fascinating thing about the exchange is that Gingrich is not a racist. I suspect he genuinely cares about the African-American poor. In fact, he’s convinced himself that his willingness to say things that many African-Americans consider insulting is an expression of that concern; that only he cares enough about African-Americans to speak the “politically incorrect” truths that black leaders won’t.
Gingrich’s problem isn’t racism; it’s ignorance. Only someone profoundly ignorant of African-American politics would suggest that black Americans have spent the past few decades seeking food stamps, not jobs. We celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, after all, in part because of the speech King gave at an event called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. If you look at the budgets proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus over the years, you’ll see that they often include huge, FDR-style government jobs programs. Gingrich may not think that’s the best way to go about providing jobs, but to suggest that African-Americans and their leaders don’t consider jobs important just reveals how shut off from Africa-American politics he actually is.
I’m sure Gingrich also sees nothing offensive in calling Obama the “food stamp” president. After all, under Obama the number of people using food stamps has gone up! So because Alan Greenspan presided over predatory lending policies by banks, perhaps we should have called him the “Shylock” chairman of the Federal Reserve. And if child molestations by priests rise on this administration’s watch, perhaps we should call Joseph Biden the “pedophilia” vice president.
Gingrich would never use those phrases, of course, because he’s familiar enough with Jews and Catholics to understand why they’d find them offensive. But for Gingrich—a veteran politician from the state of Georgia, speaking at a debate in South Carolina on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday—not to understand why calling the first African-American in the Oval Office the “food stamp” president would offend African-Americans is simply amazing. The most plausible explanation is that Gingrich inhabits a cultural and intellectual bubble. A bubble called the Republican Party.
I don’t doubt that Newt Gingrich wants to help African-Americans, just like I don’t doubt that George W. Bush wanted to help Iraqis. But in politics, if you want to help people, it’s a good idea to learn something about them first.
By: Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast, January 17, 2012
“A Model Of Deception”: For House Republicans, A Game Of Debt Charades
Lawmakers went home for the holidays and got an earful from constituents about their juvenile behavior in Washington.
So, in their first major act of 2012, House Republicans picked up exactly where they left off: They staged a duplicitous debate in which they pretended that they were going to deny President Obama permission to increase the government’s borrowing limit.
The pretense had been clear since last summer, when 174 House Republicans voted for a budget deal that guaranteed that the debt limit would continue to increase this year unless two-thirds of the House and Senate voted otherwise — a practical impossibility.
But that didn’t stop many of those same 174 Republicans from marching to the floor Wednesday afternoon to vote for a resolution “disapproving” of the very same debt-limit increase they had already blessed. It was a model of deception: claiming to oppose something they had guaranteed would take effect.
“My resolution that is before this chamber will send a message that the constant borrowing from our children, our grandchildren, must come to an end,” declared Rep. Tom Reed (N.Y.), one of the 174 Republicans who voted to allow the borrowing last summer.
“During my time in Congress, I voted nine times against raising the debt limit because it was not tied to spending controls. This is another time to say no,” argued Rep. Don Manzullo (R-Ill.), who said yes last year to the increase he voted against on Wednesday.
“If we do nothing, American prosperity will drown in debt,” said Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (Pa.), another of the 174 Republicans who had authorized the drowning.
“The culture of Washington must be reformed from the ground up,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) thundered in opposition to the debt-limit increase to which he consented last summer. “The future of our nation depends on it.”
Actually, if the culture of Washington is to be reformed, a good place to start would be for Kinzinger and his colleagues to be more honest about their shenanigans.
The role of calling out Republicans for their two-faced behavior fell on Wednesday to one of their own, conservative Rep. Jeff Flake (Ariz.), who, unlike most of his colleagues, was perfectly consistent: He opposed increasing the limit last year, and he continued to oppose it on Wednesday.
“This vote has been called a charade,” Flake said on the floor. “That is true. It is. Let’s face it.”
Flake, one of the few grownups in the chamber, was not done with his fellow Republicans. “I think we have to admit that even if the Senate had passed the House-passed budget, the so-called Ryan budget, we would still have to raise the debt ceiling,” he reminded them. “I don’t think anybody really disputes that. We are going to have to raise the debt ceiling again and again.”
Then Flake did something truly heretical: He reminded Republicans that “we were headed toward this cliff long before the president took control of the wheel.”
What Flake said was demonstrably true: Both parties created the debt mess, and to fix the problem both would have to be honest. Instead of being honest, however, House Republicans were staging a show so that they could tell voters they opposed the very debt limit hike they had authorized.
Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.) accused the Republicans of donning “flip-flops.”
“I do prefer Crocs, if anybody cares,” Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) retorted.
Apparently, most of the 174 Republicans who blessed the debt-limit increase last year were embarrassed about going to the floor to argue against it, because most of those who spoke were from that GOP minority who voted against the debt-limit increase last year, too.
“We should never have passed that Budget Control Act the way we did,” said Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), who voted no last summer. As a result, he said, Obama is “raising the debt ceiling without us being able to do a thing about it. We made a big mistake.”
Maybe they made a big mistake. Or maybe they did the right thing last year in reaching an agreement that kept the federal government from defaulting.
Reed, the floor leader for Republicans on Wednesday, wanted to have it both ways. “It’s so important, in my opinion, for the future of this nation, the future of the world,” he pleaded, with an urgency that he apparently lacked last summer. “The national debt is a serious threat to our very existence as an American nation.”
Reed and 232 fellow Republicans then voted to “disapprove” of the debt-limit increase — well short of the two-thirds majority needed to overcome a presidential veto. The House’s first legislative act of 2012 had been utterly pointless — which was just the point.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 18, 2012
“Cayman Baining”: Mitt Romney Invests In Several Bain Funds That Use Offshore Tax Havens To Boost Profits
Mitt Romney yesterday admitted for the first time that his tax rate is about 15 percent, lower than the rate paid by millions of middle class families. Romney is able to pay such a low rate (even though the top income tax rate is 35 percent) because his income comes overwhelmingly from investments and he is able to use a pernicious loopholeavailable to wealthy money managers.
Romney has been refusing to release his tax returns, finally conceding to releasing his 2011 return after he files it in April. However, only releasing his 2011 returns would give Romney the opportunity to keep under wraps some of the financial engineering he may have done to avoid taxes before the last calendar year. As Reuters noted, those returns “could shed light on how Romney and Bain use offshore strategies to avoid taxes.” In fact, ABC News reported today that Romney has millions of dollars parked in several Bain funds that are set up in tax shelters in order to help their investors avoid U.S. taxes:
Although it is not apparent on his financial disclosure form, Mitt Romney has millions of dollars of his personal wealth in investment funds set up in the Cayman Islands, a notorious Caribbean tax haven…As one of the wealthiest candidates to run for president in recent times, Romney has used a variety of techniques to help minimize the taxes on his estimated $250 million fortune. In addition to paying the lower tax rate on his investment income, Romney has as much as $8 million invested in at least 12 funds listed on a Cayman Islands registry. Another investment, which Romney reports as being worth between $5 million and $25 million, shows up on securities records as having been domiciled in the Caymans.
Even if these funds don’t help Romney directly dodge U.S. taxes, which the campaign claims they don’t, they convey a host of advantages to Bain and Romney, including “higher management fees and greater foreign interest” from investors looking to avoid U.S. taxes. As the Washington Post’s Suzy Khimm noted, “just one of these offshore-linked funds — Bain Capital Fund VIII, based in the Cayman Islands — generated $1 million for the Romneys in 2010.”
Offshore funds are attractive to investors, since they help with tax evasion, and more investor interest translates into more profit for Bain and Romney. As we’ve noted, Romney has a lucrative retirement deal with Bain that is paying him millions each year.
In contrast to Romney’s steadfast refusal to release his tax returns, George Romney (Mitt’s father) released 12 years worth of tax returns when he ran for president in 1968. Those returns showed that the elder Romney paid a 37 percent effective tax rate.
By: Pat Garofalo, Think Progress, January 18, 2012
GOP Sen Chuck Grassley: We Need “Child Labor” To Fight Obesity Epidemic
At a recent town hall in Osage, Iowa, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) responded to a question about the Labor Department’s stricter limits on child labor by claiming that they could exacerbate the child obesity epidemicby making kids less “active”:
Concern was raised about the proposed Department of Labor’s intent to greatly limit child labor on family farms.
“This farm bill will greatly affect our FFA and 4-H programs,” said Grassley. “Kids won’t be able to help on farms not owned by their parents.
“It’s interesting that this child labor bill goes against Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity initiative,” said Grassley. “How can kids be active if they are limited by this law?“
Grassley represents a farm state that both relies on child labor and contributes to the national obesity epidemic through its production of corn products like high-fructose corn syrup. Iowa farmers benefit from billions of dollars in corn subsidies that allow them to put a glut of cheap, unhealthy foods on the market.
As for his Dickensian defense of child labor, that’s sadly par for the course for Republicans these days. Several GOP-led states have rolled back child labor laws. In December, seventy rural state lawmakers led by Rep. Danny Rehberg (R-MT) denounced the Labor Department’s new protections for the country’s most vulnerable workers. They argued that hard manual labor teaches children important “life lessons.”
Under current law, 400,000 children working on farms are not protected from exploitation and dangerous labor. The proposed rules would forbid children younger than 16 from working with pesticides, timber operations, handling “power-driven equipment, or contributing to the “cultivation, harvesting and curing of tobacco.”
Contrary to Grassley’s suggestion, the physical activity children endure during farm labor is no picnic. The fatality rate for child farm workers is four times higher than that of nonagricultural child workers.
Many Republicans have mocked First Lady Michelle Obama’s anti-childhood obesity initiative, but Grassley in particular has powerful financial motivations for supporting some of epidemic’s worst culprits. As a member of the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry committee, he’s raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the Food & Beverage, Food Processing & Sales, and Agricultural Services and Products industries.
By: Marie Diamond, Think Progress, January 17, 2012
Have Banks Been Robo-Signing Credit Card Documents Too?
Several months ago, the nation’s biggest banks became embroiled in the “robo-signing” scandal, when it became clear that they had been approving thousands of foreclosures without verifying the proper documents or guaranteeing borrowers due process. The banks submitted fraudulent documents to courts and were forced to halt their foreclosures processes entirely as they sorted out what happened. “I had no idea what I was signing,” said one Bank of America employee. “We had no knowledge of whether the foreclosure could proceed or couldn’t, but regardless, we signed the documents to get these foreclosures out of the way.”
Robo-signing people into foreclosure is bad enough. But as it turns out, the practice may not have been limited to residential mortgages. American Banker, in fact, notes that JP Morgan Chase may also have been robo-signing credit card deals:
JPMorgan Chase & Co. has quietly ceased filing lawsuits to collect consumer debts around the nation, dismissing in-house attorneys and virtually shutting down a collections machine that as recently as nine months ago was racking up hundreds of millions of dollars in monthly judgments…It is unclear whether Chase has stopped pursuing collection on many claims nationwide, or if intends to pursue the debts in some other fashion. The bank has not explained its apparent moratorium and declined comment.
Chase’s halt does, however, follow scattered defeats in state courts and a whistle-blower’s allegation that it falsely overstated the balances of thousands of delinquent accounts it sold to a third party. Former Chase employees and debt collection experts insist that the bank would not have abruptly retreated from its collections efforts in the absence of trouble. […]
Robo-signing, or the high-volume production of signed legal documents, has been a key element of the governmental and media foreclosure reviews. Chase’s current pullback raises at least the possibility that at least some banks may have documentation problems in other business lines…”If sloppy record keeping and problems with false affidavits is a problem with mortgages, it’s 100 times bigger in credit card accounts,” says Michelle Weinberg of the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago.
As one finance blogger put it, “When a bank leaves money on the table for no obvious reason, you know that something’s not quite right.” It seems that JP Morgan, and who knows how many other banks, were attempting to collect on debts without being certain that the amount they were asking for was accurate. One whistle blower looked at $200 million in JP Morgan customer accounts and claims to have found that “half the accounts lacked adequate documentation of judgment and one-sixth listed the wrong amounts owed.”
Banks have been robo-signing documents since as least 1998, as an Associated Press investigation found, and its not all that surprising that a practice that worked so well for so long (at least in the eyes of the banks) would have migrated to other areas.
By: Pat Garofalo, Think Progress, January 17, 2012
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