“Not A Bad General Election Issue”: Should Democrats Press The Public Option?
There’s no question that the Affordable Care Act’s rollout has been “rocky,” to borrow the common parlance of the Beltway. The Web site troubles and shifting health coverage for some Americans, despite over-assurances from President Obama during the 2010 political debate, have naturally turned off some people. A much-ballyhooed poll from CNN yesterday shows that support for “Obamacare” has dropped to an all-time low.
But conservatives toasting the apparent turn in public opinion ought to look a little closer at the polling data. It’s true that only 35 percent of Americans favor the law, while 43 percent oppose it. But there’s a crucial third group: 15 percent oppose the ACA because it’s “not liberal enough.” That means that 50 percent of Americans either support the law or want policy changes that shift leftward.
Looking at the polls in that light suddenly shifts the political calculus. Republicans who want to repeal and “replace” the legislation — with measures that have never been entirely clear, especially when it comes to the most popular provisions of the ACA — are suddenly facing an uphill battle with the public.
This presents a pretty clear road map for Democrats worried that the biggest legislative achievement of the Obama era might turn against them. The CNN/ORC poll didn’t press people on what, exactly, “not liberal enough” meant, but it’s not hard to imagine what those people might want. Recall that while the legislation was being crafted, the public broadly supported a “public option” in the bill that would allow people purchasing insurance on the exchanges to select a federal health insurance plan.
So what if Democrats pushed for it? A public option would save $100 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and could offer respite from the plan cancellations and rate hikes that still persist with private insurers with the ACA in place.
There’s essentially no chance President Obama will take another bite at the health-care apple, especially with so many other priorities to tackle: his professed desire to combat climate change and income inequality before he leaves office, along with getting comprehensive immigration reform passed. But strategists on 2016 presidential campaigns ought to take heed.
Imagine a candidate who comes out early, and strong, for adding a public option to the ACA exchanges. It could become a signature issue with the liberal grass roots during the primaries, and it wouldn’t be a bad general election issue either — the polls in 2010 showed support for a public option among Republicans and independents as well as Democrats. As Ezra Klein has noted, the sudden disappearance of the public option from Democratic politics has been “a bit curious,” but perhaps its day is coming.
By: George Zornick, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, December 24, 2013
“Hurt Feelings”: Banks Demand Pity Party Over Volcker Rule Losses
Whatever successes might have been attained within the hundreds of pages of regulations implementing the Volcker Rule, our nation’s bureaucrats must have known they couldn’t do anything that would force banks to unearth any long-buried losses in their financial reports. Because then many bankers would feel victimized. They would demand that regulators rush to soothe their hurt feelings. And America would never be the same until the banks could keep those losses unrecognized again.
Yes, I’m kidding. But the banking lobby isn’t. This week, a Utah-based lender, Zions Bancorp, said it would have to take a charge to earnings in the neighborhood of $387 million because the new rules will force it to sell a bunch of collateralized debt obligations. Those CDOs declined in value a long time ago. But the accounting rules said Zions didn’t have to include those losses in its earnings. Now that Zions has to sell them, it can’t keep the losses buried and must count them on its income statement.
A few hundred other lenders may be in similar situations, though probably none as extreme as the one at Zions. Now the banking industry’s numerous lobbying groups are complaining to regulators and asking for clarification of the rule — footnote 1,861, if you care to look it up — which means they don’t like it and want it changed. They also have enlisted several U.S. senators to intervene with regulators on their behalf.
It generally isn’t a good idea for the government to pick winners and losers or to tell companies what investments they can’t keep. Surely there is money to be made somewhere buying up assets that banks aren’t allowed to own anymore. It’s hard to tell if the regulators intended the consequences in this instance or not, as part of the rules’ prohibitions against banks sponsoring or owning stakes in hedge funds and private- equity funds.
That said, the point of the Volcker Rule was to keep banks from gambling with depositors’ money. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that banks face new restrictions on the types of investments they can make. At some point, after three years of hand-wringing, the banking regulators have to stop revising what they’ve passed and declare it final, which they happen to have done already this month. Whining from bankers about their sudden inability to paper over losses on old CDOs isn’t a sufficient reason to reopen the process all over again.
By: Jonathan Weil, Bloomber View, Published in The National Memo, December 23, 2013
“Who Is For Growth And Job Creation And Who Isn’t”: The Biggest Thing Centrists Miss About The Inequality Debate
With the electoral victory of Bill de Blasio in New York City, an unabashed economic progressive, and the rising star of Elizabeth Warren, the issue of inequality has come to occupy center stage in lefty policy discussions. As Greg has been writing, it’s popular — something we see in reports today that Democrats are planning to use a near-certain GOP vote against a bill hiking the minimum wage against them in 2014.
But this has brought about a reaction from center-left types, who insist that the progressives have their priorities wrong. In the process, they mischaracterize the progressive view, and set up a false dichotomy between that and establishment positions. Progressives see inequality as a fundamental part of why our economy is not working as it once did, not a problem to be placed above job creation.
Bill Keller recently provided a representative sample:
The left-left sees economic inequality as mainly a problem of distribution — the accumulation of vast wealth that never really trickles down from on high. Their prescription is to tax the 1 percent and close corporate loopholes, using the new revenues to subsidize the needs of the poor and middle class…
The center-left — and that includes President Obama, most of the time — sees the problem and the solutions as more complicated. Yes, you want to provide greater security for those without independent means (see Obamacare), but you also need to create opportunity, which means, first and foremost, jobs. … The center-left … agrees on the menace of inequality, but places equal or greater emphasis on the fact that the economy is not growing the way it did for most of the last century.
First of all, this is a bit rich to hear from the center. The left has been howling about jobs and growth for five years now, for so long and so loud that our collective tonsils have about come unglued — and who were we arguing against? The centrists, who were a major bloc of support behind the premature turn to austerity back in 2010. Better late than never, I guess. Welcome to the party, guys!
In fact, this longstanding hair-on-fire panic about mass unemployment, which until now has been met with near-total indifference from the elite, is a big part of what motivates the inequality focus today. Because I have never met or even heard of someone concerned with inequality who is not also a fervent supporter of immediate monetary and fiscal stimulus to restore full employment as fast as possible. (That’s Item One in the inequality-reduction handbook!) The problem isn’t just mass unemployment — it’s the fact that we haven’t done anything about it since 2009. As Steve Randy Waldman has written, there are many economic strategies to create jobs now, of which we are trying none whatsoever. Inequality-driven discrepancies in political influence are a probable factor here.
What’s more, there is a compelling case that inequality is a major reason why our economy seems so prone to bubbles and why traditional policy remedies no longer have much purchase on job creation. A full recounting is beyond the scope of this post, but such arguments are worth taking seriously.
In any case, Keller is right to say that Republicans are now the major obstacle to any job creation agenda, so if centrists are now aboard the jobs train, I welcome them with open arms. They just shouldn’t kid themselves about who is for growth and job creation, and who isn’t.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, December 24, 2013
“Evangelical Church’s Ugly Truth”: Duck Dynasty And Christian Racists
The Evangelical Church has a racism problem. And it is incumbent on us in this Christmas season to tell the truth about that. Recently A&E suspended Phil Robertson, the patriarch of its hit show, “Duck Dynasty,” for making incredibly homophobic statements in a GQ magazine interview. In typical fashion, he affirmed his evangelical belief that homosexuality is a sin, but went even further, comparing gay people’s sexual behavior to bestiality, and declaring emphatically that they would not inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.
Liberal-minded folk, some Christians included, have been outraged at his homophobia, while conservative Christians of all races jumped to defend his right to free speech. Many of these Christians feel particularly threatened by what they call “censorship” of Robertson, because the belief that homosexuality is a sin, and the right to declare that belief freely without recourse, has become for many of these people a defining marker of their identity as Christians.
A reluctant evangelical, I reject conservative theological teachings on homosexuality; the violence that the Church does to gay people in the name of God is indeed one of the primary reasons for my reluctance. But I am also ambivalent about the Church because of its continued subjugation of women and its failure to be forthright about its continuing racism problem.
I grew up in a black baptist church, in a small town in North Central Louisiana, about 30 miles west of where “Duck Dynasty” is filmed. I made my first “profession of faith” in Jesus Christ while at a white baptist church I had visited with my childhood best friend, Amanda, when I was about 7 years old. I was baptized at the age of 13.
At 33 years of age, my disillusionment with the church — which has come to full bloom in the last five years or so — is the thing that perhaps most solidly marks me as a member of the Millennial generation. Though I am often ambivalent about that label, too, I still get why Millennials, fed up with the vile homophobia of the church — as particularly evidenced by the “Duck Dynasty” episode — are leaving the institution in droves. But in the fervor and closing of ranks over Robertson’s homophobia, many Christians, white and Black, old and young alike, have missed the racist remarks he made in that same interview. Millennials, it turns out, haven’t proven themselves to be fundamentally better on race, despite post-racial proclamations to the contrary.
Apparently, according to Robertson, 1950s and 60s Louisiana — the Louisiana of his childhood — was a happy heavenly place where Black people hoed cotton and eschewed the blues:
“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field. … They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’ — not a word! … Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”
I have several aunts and uncles and a grandparent who would beg to differ with Robertson’s account of events. In 1956, several hundred African Americans were purged from the voter registration rolls in Monroe, and spent years struggling to be re-enfranchised.
I’m reminded of these words from James Baldwin’s essay “A Fly in Buttermilk”:
“Segregation has worked brilliantly in the South, and in fact, in the nation to this extent: It has allowed white people with scarcely any pangs of conscience whatever, to create, in every generation only the Negro they wished to see.”
But racism and colonization have also allowed white people, like Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, to create the Jesus they wish to see, too: a blonde, blue-eyed white man with long hair. Now my Bible says that Jesus was a Jew with Egyptian (Read: African) ancestry (Matthew 1). But many white people are decidedly uncomfortable worshipping a God that doesn’t look like them.
As Evangelicalism goes, racism, homophobia, and sexism go hand in hand. Black evangelicals like to tell themselves that they can reject Christianity’s racist past, while embracing homophobic and sexist ideas about the position of gay people and women, in the world and the church. I have come to say: It just isn’t so.
God is not a racist. I know that despite a Bible that sanctions enslavement and implores slaves to obey and be kind to their masters.
God is not a sexist. I know that despite a Bible that tells me that women are to be quiet in church, that women are not to teach men, that women are to submit.
God is not a homophobe. I know that despite a Bible that declares sex between men to be an abomination.
God is love. That is a truth I learned first and foremost from the Bible. And it holds moral and political weight for me because of the life that Jesus Christ lived, from birth to death and back again.
I love the Church, despite myself. But I won’t love it uncritically. This is what hermeneutic consistency requires. And worshipping alongside white folks who are more moved to stand with a homophobe than to stand against racism gives me great pause.
The Church can no longer afford to be disingenuous about its racism problem. Easy unity is not what we need. Time has run out for an African American Church that continues to tack hard to the right — uncritically imbibing the agenda of the (white) Evangelical Right, without acknowledging that this position, predicated as it is on the belief that Christian = Republican, is fundamentally averse to, and in some ways responsible for, the declining social and political condition of African Americans, gay and straight alike.
Ironically enough, the progressive Christians who inspire me the most these days are white. Rachel Held Evans, Jay Bakker, Brian McLaren and theologian Peter Enns are fighting the good fight of faith. But I won’t let any of them off the hook for their failure to be more forthright in addressing racism. Evans, Bakker and McLaren are great on questions of homophobia, poverty and sexism; but racism, when it is addressed at all, is largely addressed as a problem of individual attitudes rather than systemic disfranchisement. What Robertson’s statements point to, however, is that individual prejudices, and the amelioration of them, are bound up with the structures that support them. After all, it wasn’t his racist statements that got him suspended.
This is the season of hope. And I am hopeful. Because even though Phil Robertson said gay people would not inherit the kingdom of God, Jesus did say that the Kingdom of God is within us. Phil Robertson and his ilk don’t possess the keys to the kingdom. We do.
By: Brittany Cooper, Contributing Writer, Salon, December 24, 2013
“Reality Isn’t So Ducky”: Profit, Not Equal Rights Or Freedom Of Religion, Is The Real Coin Of The Realm
It’s Christmas and a strange white-bearded fellow uttering quack-quack-quack has streaked across the continent, dumping a large sack of something on America’s hearth.
Phil Robertson — millionaire star of “Duck Dynasty” — seems an unlikely antagonist as 2013 wraps up. As all sentient beings know by now, he was suspended from the wildly popular A&E program for comments he made about gays during a recent GQ interview.
Suddenly our nation is consumed anew with impassioned debate about nearly every foundational principle — freedom of speech, religious freedom, civil rights and same-sex marriage.
The last is relatively uncontroversial in some states and most urban areas, but not in rural America where hunters convene — or among fundamentalist Christians, for whom biblical literalism is a virtue — and certainly not among millions of “Duck Dynasty” fans. Needless to say, these three groups overlap considerably.
Robertson isn’t just a megastar in waterfowl world, he is the composite character so loathed by liberals and certain elites who would nigh perish at the thought of close contact with his sort — a white, fundamentalist, Bible-thumping, duck-killing yahoo who somehow missed the civil rights movement, not to mention the New England Enlightenment.
Distilled, Robertson said two things in particular that provoked protests outside the bayou. One, that homosexual acts are sins, which is hardly news among recipients of the Gospel (hate the sin, love the sinner). Two, he said that African Americans he worked with during the Jim Crow era were just fine. “They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues,” he said.
Except, of course, many blacks were singing the blues and had been since about the 19th century when plantation slaves invented the genre while toiling in the Mississippi Delta not far from Robertson’s haunts.
Robertson’s words released an onslaught of fire and brimstone not seen since God unleashed his fury on Sodom. Speaking of which, it is tempting to note that God was rather selective in his outrage back then. Furious with homosexuals, he seemed to have no problem with Lot, whom he saved, when Lot offered his virgin daughters to townsmen who were demanding to “know” the angels hanging with Lot that God had sent to destroy Sodom.
Similarly, sort of, Robertson’s fans didn’t seem to care much about the vile, X-rated imagery he used to make his point to GQ concerning the relative merits of human apertures for sexual gratification. Granted, GQ is read mostly by old teenagers and young adults, but is this really the fellow Christians want instructing America’s camouflaged kiddos?
Robertson’s blunt talk caused a stir not because he was delivering tablets from the burning bush but because he was clearly speaking outside his wheelhouse to the detriment of people whose equal rights — even their very lives — are endangered by such talk. Robertson may “love the sinner,” but you sure can’t tell.
Executives at A&E clearly were banking on hicks acting like hicks, not expressing what they actually think. But then, what did they expect from a Louisiana duck-call whittlin’, part-time preacher, for Pete’s sake?
“Aw, shucks, the more love in the world the better is what I always say” ?
To the greater point, the fact that a healthy, if dwindling, percentage of the country feels helplessly opposed to redefining marriage reveals an existential divide that won’t easily be bridged. Robertson didn’t create it; he exposed it.
He also helped illuminate our persistent confusion about gay rights. South Carolina’s largest newspaper, the State, recently featured two stories back to back — one dealing with “Duck Dynasty” fans protesting Robertson’s indefinite hiatus, the other about Methodists defrocking Frank Schaefer for performing his gay son’s marriage.
One is damned for being anti-gay marriage and the other for being pro — both in the name of the same deity, presumably. So which is it? The Christian, as well as the constitutional, way seems to me the latter. But fundamentalism, regardless of religion, finds refuge in the toxic swamp of moral certitude.
In other near-certainties, Robertson reportedly will be back on the show when it returns in January. With shelves emptied of “Duck Dynasty” paraphernalia by loyal consumers, and A&E facing boycott threats, there’s too much money at stake.
Profit, not equal rights or freedom of religion or any of the other high-minded principles we seize to bolster our selective outrage, is the real coin of the realm. And, as if you didn’t know, it quacks like a duck.
By: Kathleen Parker, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 24, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
