Mitt Romney, The Quiet Extremist
At the last GOP presidential debate, Americans of all political persuasions were shocked when the audience loudly booed Stephen Hill, an openly gay soldier who sent in a video question from Iraq about the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. We were even more shocked when it dawned on us that not a single candidate on stage was going to step up to defend Hill or even thank him for his service to the country. Rick Santorum, the only candidate to respond to Hill’s question, accused him of receiving “special privileges” for “sexual activity” and called the new policy that allows him to serve openly “tragic.” None of his fellow candidates contradicted him.
Similar scenes unfolded in earlier debates, when crowds cheered Texas’ record breaking number of executions and applauded the idea of an uninsured man dying of a treatable illness.
These reactions hopefully say little about the average GOP voter — most decent people of any party recoil at the idea of insulting an active servicemember or of a sick neighbor dying — but the candidates’ silence spoke volumes. Today’s Republican presidential candidates, even the supposed moderates, live in fear of crossing a small base that has developed an alternate view of reality and a dangerously skewed notion of liberty. Chief among these is Mitt Romney, who started his career as an East Coast moderate but now knows that extremists are the only thing that can keep him from the GOP nomination. The former moderate is now, paradoxically, the most beholden to the extremist fringe.
Romney is still trying to have it both ways — to retain what little is left of his “moderate” persona while cheerfully appeasing the most extreme elements of the corporate and religious Right. He is banking on being able to get through the primary with both of his personas intact. Unfortunately for him, it’s not working.
In fact, Romney’s eagerness to appease has placed him solidly in the far-right — and increasingly unpopular –Tea Party camp of the GOP.
Romney wears his pro-corporate politics with the pride of a Koch brother. He told an audience in Iowa recently that “corporations are people” — a bold statement, even for a multi-millionaire who made his fortune partly on the profits from outsourcing American jobs. And he hasn’t backed down from his claim — in fact, he keeps repeating it.
Romney may think that corporations are people, but he seems to think that they deserve more care and concern from the government than working, tax-paying, family-feeding citizens. His economic plan calls for the vast deregulation of financial markets, whose lack of constraints in the Bush era led to the catastrophic economic collapse from which we’re still digging our way out. In contrast with his policies as governor of Massachusetts, where he helped close a budget gap by eliminating $110 million in corporate tax loopholes, Romney has now signed a pledge rejecting all efforts to raise revenues by making the wealthiest pay their fair share in income tax or closing loopholes that help companies ship jobs overseas. Instead, he has called for reducing corporate income tax, which is already so low and riddled with loopholes that some mammoth companies didn’t pay any last year. When a debate moderator asked the GOP candidates if they would accept a budget compromise that included $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in revenue increases, Romney joined all the others in saying he would reject it.
It’s perhaps not unexpected that Romney has joined the Tea Party herd on fiscal policy — after all, he’s a wealthy man himself and stands to lose a little if Bush’s tax breaks for the wealthy and other hand-outs to the most fortunate are rescinded. But he has also, in more of a stretch, wholeheartedly embraced the social extremism of the Religious Right.
Romney’s still distrusted by many on the Religious Right — he was for abortion rights before he was against them, once promised to establish “full equality for American gay and lesbian citizens” and distributed pink fliers at a gay pride parade, and, of course is a Mormon. But that hasn’t kept him from kowtowing to the Religious Right leaders who still hold enormous sway in the Republican party.
In the most recent illustration yet of Romney’s quiet acceptance of the Radical Right, he is scheduled to speak at next week’s far-right Values Voter Summit, a Washington get-together sponsored by designated hate groups the American Family Association and the Family Research Council. At the event, Romney will take the stage immediately after AFA spokesman Bryan Fischer, a man whose record of outspoken bigotry is so shocking he would be an anathema to any reasonable political movement. Fischer wants to deport American Muslims, says gays are responsible for the Holocaust and claims Native Americans are “morally disqualified” from controlling land. He also claims that non-Christian religions don’t have First Amendment rights – among the faiths he has singled out as exceptions to the free exercise clause is Romney’s own Mormonism. I have called on Romney to distance himself from Fischer’s bigotry before handing him the microphone on Saturday… but don’t hold your breath.
Participants at the Values Voter Summit rarely check their less savory values at the door. At last year’s event, which Romney also attended, FRC president Tony Perkins managed to simultaneously insult both gay troops and several allied nations by insisting that nations that allow gay people to serve openly in the military “participate in parades, they don’t fight wars to keep the nation and the world free.” Neither Romney nor any of the other GOP luminaries present spoke up in response.
At the Values Voter Summit, as in the GOP debates, Mitt Romney will doubtless attempt to slide under the radar, never openly condoning extremism, but never contradicting it either. As he emerges as the GOP frontrunner, it needs to be asked: is Mitt Romney more moderate than his fellow candidates, or is he just better at strategically keeping his extremism quiet?
By: Michael B. Keegan, President: People for The American Way, October 4, 2011
Ten Reasons Why Immigration Reform Is Important To Our Fiscal Health
All eyes in Washington these days are on the new congressional super committee. The 12 members from both parties in both chambers of Congress have been assigned the task of developing a plan to reduce the federal deficit by $1.5 trillion over the next decade or risk setting off deficit-cutting triggers that will force sharp cuts to both defense and domestic spending.
There are many ways the members of this committee can reach the $1.5 trillion target between now and their Thanksgiving week deadline. We at the Center for American Progress understand that comprehensive immigration reform is not among the deficit reduction options on the table but want to urge the super committee to consider it. Comprehensive immigration reform is one key to boosting economic growth and thus helping to solve our nation’s fiscal problems.
Here are the top 10 reasons why immigration reform, or the lack thereof, affects our economy.
Additions to the U.S. economy
1. $1.5 trillion—The amount of money that would be added to America’s cumulative gross domestic product—the largest measure of economic growth—over 10 years with a comprehensive immigration reform plan that includes legalization for all undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States.
2. 3.4 percent—The potential GDP growth rate over the past two years if comprehensive immigration reform had gone into effect two years ago, in mid-2009. (see Figure 1)
3. 309,000—The number of jobs that would have been gained if comprehensive immigration reform had gone into effect two years ago, in mid-2009. A GDP growth rate of 0.2 percent above the actual growth rate translates into, based on the relationship between economic growth and unemployment, a decrease in unemployment by 0.1 percent, or 154,400 jobs, per year.
4. $4.5 billion to $5.4 billion—The amount of additional net tax revenue that would accrue to the federal government over three years if all undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States were legalized.
Revenue generated by immigrants
5. $4.2 trillion—The amount of revenue generated by Fortune 500 companies founded by immigrants and their children, representing 40 percent of all Fortune 500 companies.
6. $67 billion—The amount of money that immigrant business owners generated in the 2000 census, 12 percent of all business income. In addition, engineering and technology companies with at least one key immigrant founder generated $52 billion between 1995 and 2005 and created roughly 450,000 jobs.
Taxes generated by immigrants
7. $11.2 billion—The amount of tax revenue that states alone collected from undocumented immigrants in 2010.
Negative consequences of mass deportation
8. $2.6 trillion—The amount of money that would evaporate from cumulative U.S. GDP over 10 years if all undocumented immigrants in the country were deported.
9. 618,000—The number of jobs that would have been lost had a program of mass deportation gone into effect two years ago, in mid-2009. A mass deportation program would have caused GDP to decrease by 0.5 percent per year, which, based on the relationship between economic growth and unemployment, translates to an increase in unemployment by 0.2 percent, or 309,000 jobs, per year.
10. $285 billion—The amount of money it would cost to deport all undocumented immigrants in the United States over five years.
The upshot
Most Americans and their elected representatives in Congress would be pleasantly surprised to learn about the substantial benefits of comprehensive immigration reform to our nation’s broad-based economic growth and prosperity, and thus our ability to reduce our federal budget deficit over the next 10 years. Given how difficult a challenge the super committee faces, we cannot afford to ignore any viable options for strengthening our economy. We hope the super committee takes these top 10 economic reasons into account as they move forward with their deliberations.
By: Angela M. Kelley and Philip E. Wolgin, Center For American Progress, September 29, 2011
The GOP Congress Hates (Except When It Loves) Federal Spending
“You saw the House act,” Rep. Eric Cantor snapped to a reporter last Friday. Yeah, act like a petulant 4-year-old!
The majority leader of the GOP-controlled House has long been a whiney ideological brat who stamps his tiny feet in peevish anger whenever he can’t get his way on legislation. In this particular incident, Cantor tried to pretend that the House had approved more federal aid for thousands of Americans who’ve been devastated by natural disasters this summer. However, he had sabotaged his own “act” by slipping a poison pill into it.
You see, “federal aid” is a four-letter word to right-wing ideologues like Eric, so for weeks he had stalled the emergency funding that hard-hit families desperately need. Cantor and his fellow anti-government dogmatists in the House turned a straightforward humanitarian bill into their political football, insisting that any increase in funds must first be wholly paid for by cutting spending on other public needs. His ploy has become known as the “Cantor Doctrine” — budget purity first, people’s needs last.
Actually, his this-for-that demand could’ve easily been met if Cantor had agreed to cut things America definitely does not need, such as the $4-billion-a year subsidy doled out to Big Oil. But — whoa! — in Cantorworld, oil giants are gods that shower manna from heaven on Republican campaigns, so it’s blasphemy even to think of cutting that money.
Instead, Cantor went after Big Oil’s most dreaded nemesis: companies that are making fuel-efficient and clean energy vehicles. Thus, the Cantorites decreed that there’d be no more disaster relief until the federal loan program to foster development of this green industry was slashed by $1.5 billion.
This would have been a political hat trick for the GOP extremists — striking a blow for their anti-government absolutism, doing a favor for a major campaign funder and defunding an Obama-backed program that helps him with voters.
Luckily, Cantor’s nuttiness was so extreme that a bipartisan vote by 79 senators killed his political scheme — this time.
You’d think that aid for storm victims would be beyond politics. But nothing is too far out for right-wing cultists like Cantor.
Well, you might think, at least the leaders of the tea party-infused Republican Congress are consistent in their opposition to big infusions of federal dollars into the economy, right?
Absolutely! Unless you count infusions of taxpayer funds into projects favored by corporations in their districts.
For example, a favorite target of howling Republican ridicule has been President Obama’s effort to stimulate our moribund economy by making government-backed loans to job-creating, green-energy projects. In particular, they’re presently assailing a 2009 loan guarantee of $535 million that the Obamacans awarded to the failed solar-panel maker Solyndra. This loan to a financially shaky company, they wail, is proof that green energy programs are a waste and are just about politics. GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell recently sputtered in a rage that “the White House fast-tracked a half-billion dollar loan to a politically connected energy firm.”
Fair enough — the Solyndra deal does stink. However, Mitch’s tirade would’ve had a lot more moral punch if it were not for Zap Motors. In 2009, even as the Kentucky senator was loudly deriding Obama’s original stimulus program, he was quietly making not one, but two personal appeals to Obama’s energy secretary, urging that a quarter-billion-dollar loan guarantee be awarded to Zap for a clean energy plant it wanted to build in McConnell’s state.
Never mind that Zap Motors had its own shaky financial record, it was (as McConnell now says of Solyndra) “a politically-connected energy firm.” Connected directly to him, that is. The senator’s robust support of Zap came after the corporation hired a lobbyist with close ties to Mitch, having been a frequent financial backer of the senator’s campaigns.
The moral of this Republican morality tale is that they hate government spending, except when they love it. For them, political morality is relative — decry federal largesse loudly, but when it serves your own political needs, hug it quietly … and tightly.
By: Jim Hightower, Common Dreams, Originally published by Creators.com, September 28, 2011
Blame Greed, Not Obama For Rise In Health Insurance Premiums
It’s Obama’s fault
Isn’t everything? I can’t believe what I am hearing and reading. Insurance companies are raising their premiums and, of course, that is President Obama’s fault. It’s that damn “Obamacare.” Ah, no, it isn’t.
Insurance companies have been raising their subscriber’s premiums for years before Mr. Obama was president; actually, even before he was “Senator Obama.”
I have a family plan to cover my husband and our two children; but I also own two small businesses and cover my employees’ healthcare at both companies. The large private PPO provider who I won’t name, but has the color of the sky in their title (ahem), has increased my premiums for both group plans and my individual family plan at least once a year for the past five years. And when I phone them and ask why, they don’t have an answer. They certainly don’t say: It’s President Obama’s fault and the passage of the Affordable Care Act.
As a matter of fact, the president of Kaiser also stated that healthcare reform is not the reason for the increased premiums; at best, it might contribute to 1 percent; so what is the other 99 percent? What is the reason these insurance companies keep increasing our premiums?
How can healthcare reform increase our premiums? Due to the increased number of people being covered by the reform act (mostly children and students who may remain on their parent’s plan), there are more people purchasing plans, whether employers or employees, which actually brings more money to those insurance companies. So why the increase?
Every time my plan has been increased, I have phoned to ask what additional benefits I am receiving for that cost increase; and every time the answer is the same: none. When I ask why, no one knows. But I know, it’s greed.
All, not some, all of the heads of these insurance companies earn millions of dollars a year in their paychecks. The insurance companies are one of the few in America not being negatively affected by our economy. Don’t believe me? Check their stock prices, or the stock prices of most medical related companies for that matter.
Actually, the increase in premiums, whether a person has an HMO or a PPO, just helps to support the need not only for healthcare reform, but for further reform, specifically a public option.
These increases are proof that the public needs another option, an affordable option. And the mandate? That drives business to the insurance companies, so they should be reducing the premiums. Insurance companies will say that many people are requesting a higher deductible; of course we are, it’s a bad economy and most of us want to pay less per month, taking the risk that we won’t end up in the E.R. or need surgery, etc.
And according to my doctor-husband, that’s a big risk. He’s an orthopedic surgeon. Patients used to come see him when they were in pain—let’s say their knee hurt. Now they come when their bones are sticking out—when they’re chronic.
So the increased prices by the insurance companies should be blamed on the insurance companies. They are hurting our healthcare system, doctors’ ability to provide proper care, and the economy as well; especially when so many Americans head to the E.R. once they’re chronic, which further bankrupts the system.
Bottom line—don’t blame Obama. Blame the insurance companies. They’re the bad guys this time around.
By: Leslie Marshall, U. S. News and World Report, September 29, 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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