“Revenge Is A Dish Best Served Coherent”: The Right Works Backwards To Make Their Thesis Of Putin Look More Impressive
The Hill published a curious piece this morning with a provocative headline, “Putin gets his revenge on Obama.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s criticism of the United States in the op-ed pages of Thursday’s New York Times was a revenge of sorts on President Obama. […]
The op-ed was the latest salvo in an open feud between Obama and Putin — one which the Russian appeared this week to take an upper hand when a last-second diplomatic proposal from Russia led Obama to ask Congress to call off votes authorizing strikes against Syria.
I’ll concede I’m not an expert in the nuances of international diplomacy, but the notion that the Russian president has exacted “revenge” on President Obama seems odd to me.
Let’s take stock of what happened this week: (1) the United States threatened Syria, a Russian ally, over its use of chemical weapons; (2) Syria then vowed to give up its chemical weapons; and (3) Russia has committed itself to the diplomatic process the United States wants, which is intended to guarantee the success of the Syrian disarmament plan.
So, Obama, at least for now, ended up with what he wanted, which was then followed with more of what he wanted. If this is Putin exacting revenge, I suspect the White House doesn’t mind.
Indeed, the op-ed certainly caused a stir, but let’s not exaggerate its significance. “Putin gets his revenge on Obama” sounds awfully dramatic, but I don’t imagine President Obama was reading the NYT with breakfast yesterday, telling those around him, “Putin wrote a newspaper piece? And it chides the United States? I’ve been foiled by my strategic better! Curses!”
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) told The Hill, “It’s a sorry state when we have to take our leadership from Mr. Putin.” What does this even mean? The U.S. told Russia we intend to do something about the threat posed by Syria’s chemical weapons; Russia is now working on helping eliminate that threat. In what way does the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee sees Americans taking our leadership from Putin?
Peggy Noonan wrote of Putin’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning, “He twisted the knife and gloated, which was an odd and self-indulgent thing to do when he was winning.”
The possibility that the Obama White House is actually achieving its strategic goals with these developments is apparently unimportant — Noonan and other Republicans are too overwhelmed by the belief that Putin got his revenge by writing an unpersuasive and inconsequential op-ed in a newspaper.
We’ve talked a couple of times this week about the right’s increasingly creepy affections for Putin, a phenomenon that only seems to be getting worse. This morning, though, I’m beginning to see the elements of a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts — the right decided in advance that Obama’s rival must be impressive because he’s Obama rival, so they work backwards to make their thesis look more impressive.
Just over the last few days, for example, Tucker Carlson heralded Putin for “riding to President Obama’s rescue” while Russia “humiliates the United States.” Charles Krauthammer added that it’s Putin’s government that’s “playing chess here with a set of rank amateurs.”
So, every development is then filtered through the conservative prism that says Putin is President Tough Guy Leadership. The Russian gently rebuked the U.S. in an op-ed? Then conservatives must be right about Putin’s impressiveness!
Again, this might be more persuasive if Obama weren’t getting exactly what he wants right now.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 13, 2013
“Embracing Their Inner Ebenezer Scrooge”: The GOP’s Mean-Spirited Hostility Towards Food Stamps
For decades now, the Republican Party has been honing its reputation for hostility toward the downtrodden, the poor, the disadvantaged. While a few of its leaders have tried to either shed that image or to dress it up with a more appealing facade — think George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” — lately the GOP has been enthusiastically embracing its inner Ebenezer Scrooge.
Consider its all-out assault on one of the government’s most venerable programs to assist the most vulnerable, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, usually known as “food stamps.” Last month, the GOP-dominated House passed an agriculture bill that omitted funding for the food stamp program — partly because the Republican caucus disagreed over whether cuts to the program should be merely harsh or extremely severe. Congressional conservatives have said they also want to include a work requirement and mandatory drug tests for beneficiaries.
Not so long ago, hardliners sought to cloak this sort of cruelty in the language of the greater good: the need to reduce government spending. But last month’s bill didn’t even attempt that pretense: It included billions in agricultural subsidies for wealthy farming interests, including some Republican members of Congress. It was the first time since 1973 that the House of Representatives omitted the food stamp program from the farm bill.
“It sounds to me like we’re in a downright mean time,” said Bill Bolling, founder and executive director of the Atlanta Community Food Bank, which procured and distributed 45 million pounds of donated food and groceries in the last year. He said that his agency has doubled its distribution over the last four years, since the Great Recession devastated household incomes.
The profile of his client base has changed, too, over the last four years, he said. About 20 percent of beneficiaries report that this is the first time they’ve ever asked for assistance from government or charitable programs. Among them are people who once belonged to the secure middle class; some were formerly donors or volunteers at the food bank.
Moreover, Bolling said, about half the people who seek food assistance have jobs.
“They’re keeping their part of the social contract. They are getting up every day and going to a job, maybe two jobs. If a man gets up and goes to work every day, I don’t care what his job is, he ought to be able to feed his family,” he said.
Conservative critics paint a very different picture. They tend to speak contemptuously of those struggling to make ends meet, to describe a lazy “47 percent” who want nothing but handouts, to dismiss those who can’t make ends meet as responsible for their own hard luck.
Some of that hostility toward struggling Americans can be explained by a racial antagonism that presumes that most of them are black or brown. In Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion, University of Michigan professor Donald Kinder and Vanderbilt professor Cindy Kam explain that means-tested programs such as food stamps have long been associated with the black poor. That makes them more likely to be viewed with suspicion by “ethnocentric” whites — those more likely to be antagonistic toward other racial groups.
Kinder and Kam say that public discourse by political “elites” — especially those on the conservative side of the spectrum — has “racialized” means-tested welfare programs. “Programs like … food stamps are understood by whites to largely benefit shiftless black people,” they write.
Those beliefs have persisted even though the Great Recession laid waste to the finances of many white families, too. They account for about 35.5 percent of food stamp recipients. Black Americans are disproportionately represented, but account for only about 23 percent. Latinos account for about 10 percent of recipients, while other racial groups account for smaller percentages, according to government data. (Eighteen percent of food stamp recipients belong to “race unknown.”)
Not that the facts tend to matter in a debate such as this. Nor do common decency and simple compassion hold much sway. If they did, there would be far fewer parents worrying about how to feed their children tonight.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, September 14, 2013
“Brush-Back Pitch”: Senate Democrats Have Had All They Can Take From David Vitter And His Obamacare Fixation
Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) this week tied up his chamber, blocking efforts to work on a bipartisan energy efficiency bill. He said he’d reconsider his obstructionist antics if the Senate voted on his measure to end the “Washington exemption from ObamaCare.”
As a substantive matter, Vitter is either deeply confused or playing a silly game in the hopes the public is deeply confused. There is no congressional “exemption” from the Affordable Care Act, as I imagine most senators realize. But Vitter engaged in his little stunt anyway, to his colleagues’ annoyance.
It appears that some of those colleagues are growing tired of the Louisiana Republican’s antics, and have a brush-back pitch in mind.
Senate Democrats have had all they can take from David Vitter and his fixation on Obamacare — and they’re dredging up his past prostitution scandal to hit back.
Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, has infuriated Democrats this week by commandeering the Senate floor, demanding a vote on his amendment repealing federal contributions to help pay for lawmakers’ health care coverage.
But Democratic senators are preparing a legislative response targeting a sordid Vitter episode. If Vitter continues to insist on a vote on his proposal, Democrats could counter with one of their own: Lawmakers will be denied those government contributions if there is “probable cause” they solicited prostitutes.
Ouch.
For those who may have forgotten, Vitter ran for the Senate on a “family values” platform, before getting caught with prostitutes. Making matters slightly worse, in at least one instance, the far-right Republican was found to have arranged a liaison with prostitutes from the congressional floor.
Vitter then ran for re-election anyway and won with relative ease.
By and large, Democrats have made very little effort to humiliate their conservative colleague over this, but it’s obvious they haven’t forgotten about it, either. The issue has apparently become something of a trump card Dems are prepared to play if nothing else works.
I imagine Vitter will see this as a cheap shot. Indeed, he’s already complaining.
“Harry Reid is acting like an old-time Vegas mafia thug, and a desperate one at that,” Vitter said in a statement to POLITICO, referring to the Senate majority leader. “This just shows how far Washington insiders will go to protect their special Obamacare exemption.”
First, let’s just be absolutely clear about the policy — there’s no such thing as an Obamacare exemption for Congress. It’s a made-up talking point that Republicans are fond of, which has no basis in fact. Whether or not Vitter realizes how wrong he is doesn’t matter; he keeps saying something that isn’t accurate.
Second, when you’re a married, family-values conservative who gets caught with prostitutes, you probably shouldn’t expect there to be no consequences for your actions.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 13, 2013
“The Power Of Words”: Syria Moving To Sign The Chemical Weapons Treaty Is A Win For The U.S.
The Syrian regime today told the United Nations that it intends to sign and abide by the Chemical Weapons Convention. This commitment does two things that change the dynamics of the international response to Syria regardless of whether it is implemented.
First, it ends arguments about whether Syrian dictator Bashar Assad has chemical weapons, and whether the concern with his using them is “just” an American preoccupation. Second, it gives the international and intrusive United Nations machinery a real and expanding role in dealing with Syria’s chemical stocks, potentially starting to move Russia off center stage.
The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein interprets an interview that Assad gave today as a “ransom note”: that Assad will not agree to move forward on chemical weapons destruction unless the U.S. agrees to stop arming his opponents. It’s almost touching to see Assad trying to inflate the importance of recent U.S. arms shipments, even as Syrian rebels continue to say they aren’t getting what they want. But if Assad has that interpretation, it’s a major plus for Washington. Here’s why every step toward getting Syria’s name on the Chemical Weapons Convention is a plus for Washington:
Implementation is no longer in Russia’s hands alone. As American politics takes a detour into obsessing with Vladimir Putin and his Thursday op-ed, Assad’s move to the U.N. actually begins the process of pushing Russia back out of the spotlight. Rather than foresee a future in which Assad hands chemicals straight to Russia, Assad’s signal of intent to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention kicks off a process that should put the U.N. out front in moving quickly to get Assad’s signature and establish what will comprise ratification. (You can see Assad claiming rebel attacks make it hard for the Syrian People’s Council, elected last year during the civil war, to meet. But its speaker has been sending fan letters to anti-war Western politicians without difficulty.)
As soon as that happens – or before, if Syria were to announce that it will begin abiding by the Convention, as Russia should be asked to pressure it to do – Syria becomes liable for declaring all of its weapons and production sites within 30 days, allowing 100 percent of them to be inspected by trained international inspectors affiliated with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and destroyed in a manner that can be verified by the OPCW. The Russians have apparently suggested to Washington that a model for how Syrian stocks are verifiably destroyed could be the joint U.S.-Russian destruction of old Soviet stocks carried out under the provisions of the Nunn-Lugar Agreement. Phones over at Nunn’s Nuclear Threat Initiative, which on its own has overseen removal of nuclear materials from some dicey places, should be ringing off the hook about now.
The standard for success becomes clearer. Pundits weighed in faster than a senator to a camera on the difficulty of destroying all of Syria’s chemical stocks. That’s the wrong standard. 16 years after the U.S. and Russia joined the treaty, we’ve destroyed 90 percent of our stocks and Russia 65 percent of its. What’s the right standard? Every pound destroyed is a pound that can’t be used by Assad, can’t fall into the hands of extremist groups and doesn’t swell the target list for possible military intervention.
Assad puts himself on the line internationally. The treaty text is simple, committing its signatories “never … to use chemical weapons” and “to destroy chemical weapons it owns or possesses.” The treaty also foresees a compliance mechanism – a soft one, but one much-discussed in recent days: “the Conference shall, in cases of particular gravity, bring the issue, including relevant information and conclusions, to the attention of the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council.” The use of “shall” is important. The treaty doesn’t say that treaty members vote on whether or not to refer to the Security Council, or that they “may” refer serious noncompliance to the Security Council. It says that they will. So one of Russia’s prior avenues for vetoing Security Council consideration would be removed.
Most important, Assad runs the risk, if his regime uses chemical weapons again, that Washington’s strike plans will be right back on the table, with considerably more international support. The rebels know this, and are likely to push him as hard as they can. Which hardly adds up to a win for Assad. It does, however, add up to the chance for a big win for the U.N., the Chemical Weapons Treaty, and the power of … words.
By: Heather Hurlburt, U. S. News and World Report, September 12, 2013
“Suffering Under The Weight Of Inequality”: Reaching The Point That Endangers Growth Itself, And That Should Concern Everyone
A report released this week by an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, shows that income inequality in the U.S. economy is at a new high. As the economy struggles in the wake of the Great Recession, income inequality broke records going back nearly 100 years.
According to the study, incomes among the top one percent rose by 31.4 percent between 2009 and 2012, while incomes for everyone else grew just 0.4 percent. The top decile of earners in the economy now captures more than half the total income.
Predictably, the debate rages about fairness. Commentators on the left argue that this income distribution couldn’t possibly be fair to workers, while those on the right suggest that any distribution is inherently fair as long as all Americans have the opportunity to compete to make it to the top.
It is difficult to show that any particular distribution of income is the right place to draw the line between fair and unfair. Let’s leave that question to others and focus solely on the question of whether disparities of this magnitude help or hinder the economy as a whole.
Economists have shifted their position on this issue over time. At one point, most economists agreed that inequality probably helps the economy. Inequality spurs people to work harder. In addition, some inequality is needed to create a pool of concentrated wealth that can be invested to finance the early stages of economic development: harvesting timber, building factories and so on.
However, more recent research suggests that while some inequality is necessary, too much inequality undermines growth: The research shows that the U.S. economy is probably at or near the point where the negative effects of inequality outweigh the positive effects.
Now, inequality dampens growth in three ways:
- Wealthy people handle their money differently than the rest. They tend to save a much higher percentage of their incremental income, or invest it in fixed assets like vacation homes. These forms of saving and investment do not trickle down to create significant wage income for others. In contrast, incremental money that flows to the middle class and poor people gets spent much more quickly. It’s spent on food, clothing and basic products that are produced in factories and on farms by people who earn wages. Money that flows to the middle class and poor has a multiplier effect, rippling through the economy to create more jobs and income for others. As a result, a shift in income towards the top results in less overall demand.
- In a nation like ours, where higher education is expensive, greater inequality means that fewer people get the skills they need for well-paying jobs. But as World Bank economist Branko Milanovic writes, “now that human capital is scarcer than machines, widespread education has become the secret to growth.” Facing a less prepared workforce, companies shift research and advanced manufacturing facilities offshore, which further erodes economic growth. The shift increases the chance that the next Facebook will be founded in India or China. Some other country will reap the economic benefit that comes from hosting breakthrough innovation.
- Other factors beyond the hard costs of higher education are important as well, as inequality rises and class lines harden. Consider two children, both with the same innate potential for accomplishment, one born to a family in the top 1 percent and the other to a family in the bottom 20 percent. The first one will have parents who read to them as a pre-schooler, stimulating his or her brain. The second one, probably not. The first one will grow up surrounded by role models whose hard work brought them success; the second one will grow up surrounded by others whose hard work brought them barely-livable incomes. Is it any wonder that the two children will enter adult life with a different readiness to use their intellect, a different level of motivation and confidence and a different awareness of how to build a successful career?
Two economists, Andrew Berg and Jonathan D. Ostry of the International Monetary Fund, have quantified the impact of inequality on economic growth. In a 2011 article, “Inequality and Unsustainable Growth: Two Sides of the Same Coin?” they examined why some countries enjoy long years of steady economic growth while other countries see their growth trail off after only a few years.
Berg and Ostry found that income inequality is the single most important factor in determining which countries can keep their economies growing. For example, income distribution is more important than open trading arrangements, favorable exchange rates and the quality of the country’s political institutions.
Berg and Ostry go on to measure the extent to which economic growth falls as inequality rises. They gauge inequality using the GINI coefficient, which ranges for 0 – 100. At one extreme, a society where everyone earns exactly the same would have a GINI score of 0. At the other extreme, a society in which one person owned all the wealth would have a GINI score of 100. For economies with GINI below 45, growth can be robust, but once it crosses above roughly 45, growth slumps. The GINI of the U.S. economy is in the low 40’s currently, so we are dangerously close to the point of decline.
Inequality in the U.S. shows no sign of abating, even as the economy recovers. The decline of unions, the pace of globalization, the abundance of workers in many industries and changes in health care and taxes have combined to staunch the earning power of working Americans, even as the economy grows and productivity increases. There are few options, and none that are consistent with the political climate of the time. But the trend is reaching the point that endangers growth itself, and that should concern everyone, regardless of the size of your paycheck.
By: David Brodwin, U. S. News and World Report, September 12, 2013
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