“Obama Loves America, But Not The One Giuliani Does”: Clearly Part Of The Permanent Conservative Strategy Of ‘Otherizing’ Obama
Rudy Giuliani oversold it, naturally. In an attempt to save America from the grip of a president who’d already been in office for six years, or perhaps just desperate to get back into the headlines, the former New York mayor and presidential also-ran said Wednesday, “I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.” And then, to make matters worse, he insisted his remark wasn’t racist because Obama “was brought up by a white mother, a white grandfather, went to white schools, and most of this he learned from white people.”
“This isn’t racism,” he added. “This is socialism or possibly anti-colonialism.”
On the list of hateful things uttered about Obama by his political adversaries, this one is near the bottom (and that’s saying something). After all, Giuliani wasn’t questioning Obama’s parentage, nationality, sexuality, or his children’s behavior. By comparison, simply saying the man doesn’t love America seems tame, merely a softer brand of birtherism (a line of attack Giuliani once rejected). It’s clearly part of the permanent conservative strategy of otherizing Obama, of which birtherism was one of the most openly racist examples.
The irony, of course, is that Obama’s childhood and family background perfectly fit the conservative fantasy that Giuliani promotes. Obama was the child of an immigrant and a woman from the heartland, raised partly by a grandfather who helped liberate a Nazi concentration camp while serving our country and a Rosie-the-Riveter grandmother who worked on the Boeing assembly line during World War II. By any Norman Rockwell-ish estimation, that’s about as American as you get.
As a New York Daily News editorial put it:
It is impossible to say which is more appalling:
Giuliani’s willful ignorance of Obama’s heritage (his grandfather served in World War II while his grandmother worked on a B-29 assembly line); Giuliani’s division of the country into right-thinking Americans (Republicans) and unworthy others; or Giuliani’s sense that he had hit on a winning political tactic in poking the hornet’s nest of haters.
And yet, we should not be so surprised; this is what Giuliani does. Rather than seek to mend the racial division during David Dinkins’ term, Mayor Giuliani saw an opportunity, instead antagonizing the city’s communities of color. He charged William J. Bratton, the police commissioner then and now, with implementing the ineffective and unjust “broken windows” strategy. And we can’t forget his unflinching support of the New York Police Department in the wake of abuse after abuse—when police sodomized Abner Louima with a broomstick, and when they gunned down unarmed black men like Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond. Now, with words like these about the president, Giuliani is trying to create racial divisions on a national level.
But if we simply dismiss Giuliani’s latest remarks as a joke and then move on, we’ll miss an opportunity ourselves. His words were “un-American” in the sense that they were an ad hominem attack on a sitting president. In another sense, though, they were quintessentially American. Our country’s history is full of agents like Giuliani who provoke racial strife and spew stereotypes that benefit the privileged class. Obama wasn’t raised with the same kind of “love of country” that Giuliani was because the president grew up as a member of a group whose social mandate from birth, for survival’s sake, is to engineer change in a society—to correct the very systemic disadvantage that Giuliani is desperate to save.
Giuliani is probably right: Obama doesn’t love America, not the one Giuliani does. But the inverse is true, too: Giuliani doesn’t love America, not the one Obama is trying to build.
By: Jamil Smith, The New Republic, February 20, 2015
“Lying To Your Face”: Republicans Don’t Care About The Deficit. Just Look At Scott Walker
Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker is almost certain to run for president. He’s got two blue state election victories under his belt, ravening anti-union bona fides, and a record that would make him the most conservative presidential candidate in at least 50 years. Best of all, he’s got a pleasant, mild demeanor — none of the bug-eyed nutcase affect of other right-wingers.
However, he’s recently run into some budget troubles. Back in 2013, Wisconsin had a sizable budget surplus. Walker did what conservatives always do: he passed $2 billion in tax cuts heavily weighted towards the rich, blowing through the entire surplus and then some. Now he’s resorting to financial chicanery to avoid default:
Scott Walker, facing a $283 million deficit that needs to be closed by the end of June, will skip more than $100 million in debt payments to balance the books thrown into disarray by his tax cuts. [Bloomberg]
Whether Walker — who has surrounded himself with Ronald Reagan’s crackpot voodoo economists — can talk his way out of this will be a big political question. But this does demonstrate a fundamental truth of American politics: conservatives don’t care, at all, about deficits or debt. They use deficit concern trolling as a convenient excuse to cut social insurance and other benefits. But when it comes down to brass tacks, they choose larger deficits, not smaller.
To be clear, Walker’s move is perfectly legal. But it’s just a delaying tactic, and it will cost more in the future. Per Bloomberg‘s analysis, it will increase debt service payments “by $545,000 in the next budget year, which starts July 1, and by $18.7 million in the one after that.”
Kansas’ Sam Brownback, another Republican governor, did the exact same thing to his state. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, another possible 2016 contender, has the same problems as Walker, only worse — his budget hole is $1.6 billion. He passed massive tax cuts early in his term, and has spent the rest of the time cutting services, especially higher education, to the bone in a desperate, futile bid to make up the shortfall. He won’t rescind the tax cuts, of course.
And when collapsing oil revenues turned the budget problem into a full-blown crisis, Jindal began raiding every change jar in the state to keep Louisiana from defaulting outright, including selling state property and burning through all manner of special reserve funds.
The Republican Party has gone precisely nowhere on fiscal policy since 2000, when President George W. Bush pulled this exact same trick. He took the Clinton surplus and spent it on tax cuts for the rich. The following eight years, incidentally, resulted in the worst economic performance since Herbert Hoover.
Policy-wise, there isn’t that much to learn from this, other than conservatives produce absolutely atrocious economic policy. But we already knew that.
However, there are two political lessons. For liberals, very much including President Obama, it implies that any hard work done reducing the budget deficit will be immediately negated the moment Republicans get a chance. All of Obama’s cherished deficit reduction — accomplished at gruesome cost to the American people — will go straight to the 1 percent if Walker (or Jindal, or Jeb Bush) is elected.
Second, for paid-up members of the centrist austerity cult, who worship a falling deficit like some kind of fetish object, realize that Republicans are lying to your face. If you genuinely care about the deficit, the GOP is not going to deliver.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, February 20, 2015
“Hold Your Applause”: Walmart’s Wage Hike Still About Greed
With much fanfare and platitudes like “Our people make the difference,” WalMart has achieved a public relations coup by granting quite meager raises to its employees. The headlines make the $277 billion (market cap) company look quite generous as it has raised its starting hourly wage immediately to $9 an hour, which is 19 percent higher than the prevailing federal minimum wage.
It sounds like great news from the world’s largest private employer, but the news is nowhere near as good as headlines suggest.
The New York Times estimates that there are only about 6,000 retail workers among WalMart’s 1.4 million employees that are paid the federal minimum wage. This shouldn’t be too surprising, since 28 states already mandate higher minimum wages than the federal standard and, says the law, the highest required wage wins. Only seven states have minimum wages set at $9 or higher. So WalMart workers in 43 states are getting some sort of raise.
But in the vast majority of cases, it’s nothing like the 19 percent number you’re seeing thrown around.
For those getting the largest bump from the federal minimum wage to $9, it’s important to put this all in perspective. The federal minimum wage has not been raised since 2009. It would take a wage of $8.55 an hour to equal the purchasing power of $7.25 six years ago.
So, in a real sense, WalMart’s lowest paid employees are getting a 45-cent-per-hour raise—a 6.2 percent increase. Meanwhile, workers in California, Massachusetts and Rhode Island will see no increase (the state hourly minimum is already $9) while minimum wage workers in Washington, Oregon, Connecticut and Washington, D.C., already make more than $9 an hour.
In its release to workers and the public, WalMart says that the wage increase scheduled to go into effect in April will raise the average part-time worker’s wage to $10 an hour across the company. Back in 2010, IBISWorld, a market research firm, estimated that WalMart cashiers made about $8.81 an hour. That 2010 wage inflations adjusts to a $9.56 wage in today’s dollars. According to WalMart’s release, part-time workers will see their wages rise from $9.48.
That means, until now, WalMart’s part-time workers were losing ground against inflation. While nice, this isn’t the saintly endeavor WalMart is making it out to be. The current bumps gets those employees just a few coins ahead of the rise in the cost of living since the end of the Financial Crisis.
For its full-time workers, WalMart says that the average wage is rising from $12.85 an hour to $13. In 2013, WalMart said that its average full-time wage was $12.83. So WalMart’s full-time associates got a 2-cent raise between 2013 and 2014 and now get a 17-cent bump. Adjusted for inflation, you’d need $13.04 cents today to buy what you could with $12.83 in 2013. WalMart’s full-time employees are coming out of this 4 cents short of inflation.
WalMart’s workforce is split about evenly between full- and part-timers. Part-timers will make $17,500 a year if they work 35 hours a week for 50 weeks a year. Full-timers will make $26,000 working 40 hours a week for 50 weeks.
For a two-person household, the federal poverty line is $15,930. For a four-person household it is $24,250.
Even after the raises, WalMart will continue to employ people who will be living below, at or barely above our various, imperfect measures of poverty.
These workers will continue to depend on public subsidies to get by, whether they need help with health care, buying food, or lunches for their school-aged children. It’s hard to see, even, how these wage increases will do enough so that WalMart employees don’t have to hold holiday food drives for each other.
WalMart has wanted to open a store in New York City for years and has been rebuffed at every turn by coalitions of labor and local retailers. The chain most recently failed to infiltrate East Brooklyn. It faces community opposition in cities and towns around the country.
The retailer is clearly tired of being seen as an unwelcome neighbor—and that’s likely a big consideration for why they’re upping their wages just enough.
The company would also like to buy itself a new labor history. For years, WalMart used contractors to clean and maintain its stores, putting a buffer between the companies and the often abused workers—especially when those workers were very often not authorized to work in the U.S. Since the middle of the last decade the company has also been hit with scores of class action lawsuits, some relating to the treatment of women workers and some alleging wage theft through various means.
In 1914, Henry Ford paid his workers $5 a day. It was a move that truly helped create the middle class. Five dollars in 1914 is $118 today, although that would only add up to a $35,000-a-year salary for a six-day workweek, which is well below our current medium income.
What some forget about Ford is that he had ulterior motives: He wanted to mold his workers into what he considered model Americans. WalMart has ulterior motives as well: It wants to mold your perception of it until you see a model American corporation.
If WalMart is a model corporation, the model is broken.
By: Michael Maiello, The Daily Beast, February 20, 2015
“Why Did Ronald Reagan Hate America?”: Once You’ve Decided, Everything Else Makes Sense And All The Pieces Fall Into Place
Ronald Reagan has been dead for more than a decade, but it’s long past the time for us as a nation to come to grips with the fact that this two-term president really didn’t love America. Scholars will have to debate whether he just had a mild distaste for the land of the free, or whether he actively hated America and wanted to see it laid low. But the rest of us need to confront this ugly legacy.
To begin with, Reagan came into office promising a fundamental change. As radio host Mark Levin recently said, “when somebody says they want to fundamentally transform America, well, then you must not love America.” By that measure, Reagan had no love. Here’s part of what he said in a speech on election eve, 1980:
In thinking about these questions, many Americans seem to be wondering, searching . . . feeling frustrated and perhaps even a little afraid.
Many of us are unhappy about our worsening economic problems, about the constant crisis atmosphere in our foreign policy, about our diminishing prestige around the globe, about the weakness in our economy and national security that jeopardizes world peace, about our lack of strong, straight-forward leadership.
And many Americans today, just as they did 200 years ago, feel burdened, stifled and sometimes even oppressed by government that has grown too large, too bureaucratic, too wasteful, too unresponsive, too uncaring about people and their problems.
Americans, who have always known that excessive bureaucracy is the enemy of excellence and compassion, want a change in public life—a change that makes government work for people. They seek a vision of a better America, a vision of society that frees the energies and ingenuity of our people while it extends compassion to the lonely, the desperate, and the forgotten.
All that talk of change, characterizing Americans as fearful and stifled? Why couldn’t Reagan just accept the country that had given him so much?
And it didn’t start in 1980. Back in 1965, Reagan promised that an America with a Medicare program would be a hellhole of socialist oppression. Only someone with no faith in our country could say something like this:
If you don’t [write letters to stop Medicare], this program I promise you, will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day as Normal Thomas said we will wake to find that we have socialism, and if you don’t do this and I don’t do this, one of these days we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.
I don’t know if he actually spent his sunset years running down America to his grandchildren, but it wouldn’t surprise me. And there’s more: Did you know that Reagan didn’t just pal around with terrorists like some people, he actually sold weapons to them? It’s true. How could anyone who loved America do such a thing? And when Islamic terrorists killed 241 brave American servicemembers, did Reagan stand up for America? No, he turned tail and ran, like some kind of cowardly commie. And he even apologized for America!
Where did all this disdain for America come from? We may never know. Maybe it was his upbringing, or the crowd he ran with in high school, or the Hollywood types he fell in with in his career as an actor.
I know what you’re thinking: Hold on, didn’t Reagan sing America’s praises in speeches all the time? Sure he did. For instance, he said, “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.” He said, “You know, this country of ours has more wealth than any nation, but that’s not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military on Earth, but that’s not what makes us strong. Our universities and our culture are the envy of the world, but that’s not what keeps the world coming to our shores. Instead, it is that American spirit, that American promise, that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend.” And he said, “We keep our eyes fixed on that distant horizon knowing that providence is with us and that we are surely blessed to be citizens of the greatest nation on earth.”
OK, it wasn’t actually Reagan who said those things, it was this guy. But those were the kinds of things Reagan said.
But anybody can say that stuff. How can you tell whether the words are being offered sincerely by someone who loves America, or whether it’s all a big lie? The key is to make the conclusion your starting point. Do that, and you’ll understand that when he criticized decisions made by a prior administration, he was actually making clear his hatred of America. You’ll know that you can look for the worst person he ever met one time at a party, and impute all that person’s views to him. You’ll be able to look at any action he took and find its true motivation in his contempt for this country. Once you’ve decided that Reagan hated America, everything else makes sense and all the pieces fall into place.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Writer, The American Prospect, February 20, 2015
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