Wisconsin Democrats have now won a round in the state Senate recalls, with Dem incumbent state Sen. Dave Hansen easily winning against a politically weak and seemingly troubled challenger, GOP activist and recall organizer David VanderLeest.
With 65% percent of precincts reporting, Hansen is winning by 69%-31%, and has been projected as the winner by the Associated Press.
In two other races, where Republican primaries were being held, the votes are still being counted to determine who will face Democratic state Sens. Robert Wirch and Jim Holperin.
This leaves eight races to go. On August 9, general elections will be held in six races targeting incumbent Republicans. Then on August 16, two more races will be held targeting incumbent Democrats. Republicans currently control the chamber by a majority of 19-14. Democrats hope to gain a net three seats and win a majority in a backlash against GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-public employee union legislation. In other words, control of the chamber is up for grabs.
This particular result was not in much doubt — due to the fact that VanderLeest has been plagued by questions about his fitness for office, after revelations about his personal finances and reports of domestic violence (which included a plea of no-contest to two charges of disorderly conduct).
As the election headed into its home stretch, VanderLeest made such statements as, “None of it’s true. I don’t smoke rocks, and that’s the truth,” and threatened to sue Hansen and various Democratic groups for slander. (He also claimed to have learned that there was an investigation against these groups for racketeering. The source: A complaint filed by a supporter close to his campaign.)
To be clear, VanderLeest was not the GOP’s preferred candidate. Instead, Republicans became stuck with VanderLeest after their originally recruited candidate, state Rep. John Nygren, failed to submit the required 400 valid petition signatures. Nygren submitted slightly over 400 signatures for himself — despite the fact that Republicans had been able to gather 18,000 signatures to trigger a recall — with not enough of a buffer for when a few them were disqualified. Nygren initially filed a lawsuit to get onto the ballot, but lost in court and announced he would not further appeal the decision.
In last week’s Democratic primaries, for races targeting six incumbent Republicans, the official Democratic candidates all won against fake Dem candidates — who were in fact Republican activists planted in the races by the state GOP in order to delay the general elections.
By: Eric Kleefield, Talking Points Memo, July 19, 2011
July 20, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Class Warfare, Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, Democracy, Gov Scott Walker, Ideologues, Ideology, Middle Class, Politics, Public Employees, Right Wing, State Legislatures, States, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Republicans | Dave Hansen, David Vanderleest, Fake Democrats, John Nygren, Wisconsin Democrats, Wisconsin Legislature, Wisconsin Recall |
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The House Republican strategy to link a normally routine increase in the nation’s debt limit with a crusade to slash spending has already had a high cost, threatening the nation’s credit rating and making the United States look dysfunctional and incompetent to the rest of the world.
But that’s not the most awful thing about it.
What’s even worse is that this entirely artificial, politician-created crisis has kept government from doing what taxpayers expect it to do: Solve the problems citizens care about.
The most obvious problem is unemployment. The best way, short term, to drive the deficit down is to spur growth and get Americans back to work. Has anyone noticed that Americans with jobs can provide for their families, put money into the economy — and, oh yes, pay taxes that increase revenue and thus cut the deficit?
There is no mystery about the steps government could take. Ramping up public works spending is a twofer: It creates jobs upfront and provides the nation’s businesses and workers the ways and means to boost their own productivity down the road.
Wise infrastructure spending can save energy. And when public works investments are part of metropolitan plans for smarter growth, they can also ease congestion and reduce commuter times, giving our citizens back valuable minutes or hours they waste in traffic. If you want a pro-family policy, this is it.
State and local budgets all across the country are a shambles. Teachers, police, firefighters, librarians and other public servants are being laid off. As the New York Times’ David Leonhardt pointed out recently, even as the private economy has been adding jobs, if too slowly, state and local governments have hemorrhaged about half a million jobs in two years.
President Obama knows this. “As we’ve seen that federal support for states diminish, you’ve seen the biggest job losses in the public sector,” he said in his July 11 news conference. “So my strong preference would be for us to figure out ways that we can continue to provide help across the board.”
So why not do it? “I’m operating within some political constraints here,” Obama explained, “because whatever I do has to go through the House of Representatives.”
Excuse me, Mr. President, but if you believe in this policy, why not propose it and fight for it? Leadership on jobs is your central job right now. Let the Republicans explain why they want more cops and teachers let go, or local taxes to rise.
We should also extend the payroll tax reduction instituted last year and unemployment insurance. Why so little discussion of how balky Republicans have been on this Obama tax cut proposal, or how resistant they have been to further help those out of work? They won’t raise taxes on the rich to balance the budget but are utterly bored by relief for the middle class or the jobless. Isn’t that instructive?
And while we have been parsing the Rube Goldberg complexities of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s procedural contortions to get us out of a battle we should never have gotten into, we haven’t been discussing how to reform the No Child Left Behind law.
It’s true that some good people in Congress are trying to figure out a way forward on education reform. That’s a far more important national conversation than whether Tea Party Republicans understand the elementary laws of economics. But you wouldn’t know it because those who care about the substance of governing never get into the media. You get a lot of attention — and are sometimes proclaimed a hero — if you say something really dumb about the debt ceiling.
Then there is the coming debate over a “balanced budget” amendment to the Constitution that would limit government spending to 18 percent of gross domestic product and require a two-thirds vote to raise taxes. It’s an outrageous way for members of Congress to vote to slash Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, aid to education and a slew of other things, to lock in low taxes on the rich — and never have to admit they’re doing it. It’s one of the most dishonest proposals ever to come before Congress, and I realize that’s saying something.
Every member of Congress who got us into this debt-ceiling fight should be docked six months’ pay. They wasted our time on political posturing instead of solving problems. Better yet, the voters might ponder firing them next year. This could do wonders for national productivity.
By: E. J. Dionne, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 17, 2011
July 18, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Budget, Businesses, Congress, Conservatives, Constitution, Debt Ceiling, Deficits, Economic Recovery, Economy, GOP, Government, Government Shut Down, Ideologues, Ideology, Jobs, Lawmakers, Politics, President Obama, Public, Public Employees, Republicans, Right Wing, States, Tax Loopholes, Taxes, Unemployment | Balanced Budget Amendment, Global Economy, House Republicans, Politicians, Sen Mitch McConnell, Spending Cuts, Tax Revenue, Workers |
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It’s easy to understand why the government will have more trouble borrowing if it fails to pay its debts, or even has a difficult time paying its debts. It’s a bit harder to see why ordinary Americans, the city of Pittsburgh, hospitals in Iowa, and medium-sized corporations will have more trouble borrowing. But they will. And their trouble borrowing is the main channels through which a default, or even something too close to it for the market’s comfort, could deal a body blow to the economy.
On Wednesday, Moody’s warned that it was putting the U.S. government credit rating on review for a downgrade. But they didn’t stop there. Another 7,000 debt products that are “directly linked to the U.S. government or are otherwise vulnerable to sovereign risk” were also put on review for a possible downgrade. That’s about $130 billion worth of debt. If America tumbles, so do they. But Moody’s still wasn’t done. An unknown amount of “indirectly linked” debt is also getting reviewed.
If America’s credit rating falls, it’s taking a lot more than just Treasury securities with it. It’s going to take the whole credit market with it. Which, as you’ll remember, is exactly how the subprime housing sector took the economy down in 2008.
The first to fall will be “directly linked” debt. These are bonds that rely on payments from the federal government. Naomi Richman, a managing director in Moody’s Public Finance division, puts it bluntly: “There are certain kinds of municipal bonds that are directly reliant on Treasury paying or some other direct payment,” she says. “If those bonds don’t receive their payment, they have no other source of revenue.” So down they go.
Then there’s the “indirectly linked” debt. That’s debt from state government, local governments, hospitals, universities and other institutions that rely, in some way or another, on payments from the federal government. If Medicaid stops paying its bills, all the hospitals that rely on Medicaid’s payments become less creditworthy. If we stop funding Pell grants, then all the universities that enroll students who pay using financial aid become less creditworthy. And since the federal government passes one-fifth of its revenues through to the states, and the states pass those revenues through to cities, if the federal government stops paying its bills, all states and all cities are suddenly in worse financial shape, which will make it harder for them to get loans.
And then there’s everything else. Mortgages. Credit cards. Loans that businesses take out to expand. Much of the debt in the American economy, and in fact globally, is “benchmarked” to Treasury debt. When your bank quotes you a mortgage rate, the calculation begins with the rate on 10-year treasuries and then adds premiums for various types of risk specific to you and your area on top of that. “There’s a whole credit structure,” says Pete Davis, president of Davis Capital Investment Ideas. “Think of it as roads and bridges, but it’s finance, it’s all connected, and it’s all on top of treasuries. Your CD at a bank, your credit card interest rates, your car loans, your mortgages — that’s all built on Treasury rates. So when you shake the basis of it, everything on top of it shakes, too.”
The 2008 economic crisis wasn’t started by a nuclear bomb detonating in New York, or a campaign to sabotage the country’s factories, or a plague that struck our able-bodied young males. Rather, investors bought a lot of debt based on subprime mortgages. They performed some tricky financial wizardry that they thought made the debt low-risk. They found out they were wrong. And then, because the players in the financial system no longer knew how much money anyone had, the credit markets froze and the economy crashed.
Now imagine that happening, not with the housing market, but with the government of the United States of America. The cornerstone of the global financial economy is the idea that Treasuries are risk-free. If they’re not, then like in the financial crisis, no one knows how much money anyone who holds treasuries has. But they also don’t know how much money anyone who depends on the federal government — be they businesses or individuals — holds.
This is how a default gets into the rest of the economy: It takes everything the financial markets thought they could know and rely on and upends it. It then shuts off credit, or makes it prohibitively expensive, for nearly every participant in the economy, from states and cities to hospitals and universities to homebuyers and credit-card applicants. That, in turn, freezes all of their activity, which destabilizes everyone who relies on them, which then destabilizes financial markets further, and so on.
It was one thing to have forgotten that this sort of thing could happen in 2006, when America hadn’t seen it for 70 years. But we just went through it. And if we go through it again, the Federal Reserve, which has pushed interest rates as low as they can go, and Congress, which has vastly expanded the deficit, have a lot less ammunition left for a response.
Are we likely to get to that point? No, of course not. But between here and there are worlds where the economy doesn’t crash, but because the federal government panics the market, interest rates rise and the economy slows. In a recovery this weak, that would be a disaster. And it would be entirely of our own making.
By: Ezra Klein, The Washington Post, July 15, 2011
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July 17, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Banks, Budget, Businesses, Congress, Conservatives, Consumer Credit, Consumers, Debt Ceiling, Deficits, Democrats, Economic Recovery, Economy, Financial Institutions, GOP, Government, Government Shut Down, Ideologues, Ideology, Lawmakers, Medicaid, Middle Class, Politics, Public, Republicans, Right Wing, States | Bonds, Cities, Credit Ratings, Default, Federal Reserve, Global Economy, Homeowners, Housing, Interest rates, Loans, Markets, Moody's, Mortgages, Pell Grants, Students, Tax Revenue, Treasuries |
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It sure is funny that, at basically the same time, state legislatures across the country began passing a slew of similar measures attacking collective bargaining, undocumented immigration and abortion, right? Just a weird coincidence, I’m sure, this sudden nationwide war on public employee unions and immigrants and women.
Hah, I am just kidding. We all know it’s because of lobbyists and the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC is sort of a Match.com for state lawmakers and the nation’s worst industry lobbies. The Center for Media and Democracy’s ALEC Exposed project has a handy list of the hundreds of bills ALEC pushes in every state in the union, on subjects ranging from school vouchers to gutting environmental regulations to opposition to the National Popular Vote Compact. (Yeah, that one I don’t even get.)
Here’s how the ALEC process works: GOP state legislators go to fancy conferences where they sit down with lobbyists and right-wing activists and draft right-wing legislation together. They return home and introduce it without mentioning the source. The lobbies then throw some cash at the legislators working to advance their agenda. Then, these days, the bill passes, and everyone else gets around to getting outraged about it, long after their outrage would do much good. Repeat.
This is how incredibly similar anti-immigration bills end up passing, independently, in Arizona and Tennessee. This is how bills against public employee collective bargaining end up passing in Wisconsin and Indiana. This is the process behind state resolutions banning the establishment of “Obamacare.” Our biggest national wars are being fought, and largely won, in the statehouses, with liberal activists not even joining the fight until after they’ve lost it.
Liberals aren’t this good at local politics. Unions and low-income organizations like ACORN used to take care of lobbying and politicking at the state and community level, but, oh, look what’s happened to them. Defunded!
It took a while for Democrats to figure out that they should have their own Heritage Foundation, and so far, they seem to be taking just as long to decide to create their own ALEC. (Of course the Democratic ALEC will probably also push “school reform” and pro-telecom bills and whatever else rich Democratic donors want.)
As a result of that late adoption, the famous laboratories of democracy are now often the places where massive, monied interests — along with their odd allies in the religious right — can implement their political agendas piece by piece, instead of trying to get their dream bills through the U.S. Congress, where all the cameras and journalists are. The sudden death of the small- and midmarket newspaper certainly helps. Your average local TV news doesn’t really do sophisticated policy analysis.
The closest thing liberals even have to a state to experiment with is … California, with its property-tax cap and public rejections of gay marriage and marijuana legalization. (Right-wingers know better than to trust legislating to the popular ballot, even though they’re quite good at organizing and spending huge sums of money to win ballot measures.)
Oh, the record number of bills restricting access to abortion services nationwide? That one might just be the natural Republican enthusiasm for controlling women’s bodies. I mean, the right-to-life groups obviously jumped into action when the GOP came into power and lobbied for all of the 162 new restrictions on reproductive rights enacted since the start of the year, but I’m not sure any specific business lobby benefits from it.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, July 14, 2011
July 15, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Abortion, Anti-Choice, Businesses, Class Warfare, Collective Bargaining, Congress, Conservatives, Corporations, Democracy, Democrats, Equal Rights, GOP, Ideologues, Ideology, Immigration, Lawmakers, Media, Politics, Republicans, Right Wing, State Legislatures, States, Union Busting, Unions, Women, Women's Health, Womens Rights | ACORN, Activists, ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council, Arizona, California, Indiana, Legislation, Lobbyists, Public Employees, Religious Right, Tennessee, Wisconsin |
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The first in a series of recall elections, spurred by a contentious labor fight, got under way in Wisconsin Tuesday.
Six Democrats easily cruised to primary wins as expected, and will face Republican state senators who supported Gov. Scott Walker’s push to strip most public employees of collective bargaining rights in a general election match-up on Aug. 9. At stake is control of the narrowly divided, GOP-controlled chamber.
The unusual primaries Tuesday pitted Democratic candidates supported by the party against what news reports came to describe as “fake Democrats” — six candidates put forward by the GOP because recall races with only one challenger each would have bypassed the primary stage. Republicans therefore backed what they called “protest candidates,” allowing the incumbent GOP senators more time to campaign for the general election.
While outside groups campaigned on behalf of some of the Republican-sponsored challengers, those candidates themselves did not seriously campaign. The party-supported Democrats all won with comfortable margins — one as large as 40 percentage points — and only one race ended in single-digit margins. The recall contests set up by Tuesday’s results include Democratic state Rep. Jennifer Shilling vs. Republican state Sen. Dan Kapanke; Democratic state Rep. Fred Clark vs. state Republican Sen. Luther Olsen and Democratic state Rep. Sandy Pasch vs. Republican state Sen. Alberta Darling.
Wisconsin voters will go the polls again next Tuesday, when Green Bay Democratic state Sen. Dave Hansen will be the first legislator to face a recall general election since the state exploded in political protest in February. Republicans in two Democratic-held Senate districts will also face off that day in primaries, the winners of which will take on incumbents on Aug. 16. Unlike State Democrats are not running “fake Republicans” in an effort to push back recall dates.
By Aug. 16, nine state senators — six Republicans and three Democrats — will have faced recall elections.
Walker’s fight against public employees unions prompted Senate Democrats to flee the state in an effort to block a vote; protestors on both sides flooded the Capitol and a fiercely competitive state Supreme Court race shortly afterward snared national headlines. Republicans eventually managed to pass the law, and it was upheld by the state Supreme Court — but not before Wisconsin spent weeks at the center of a national political firestorm.
By: Dan Hirschhorn, Politico, July 12, 2011
July 12, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Class Warfare, Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, Corporations, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, GOP, Gov Scott Walker, Governors, Ideologues, Middle East, Politics, Republicans, Right Wing, State Legislatures, States, Union Busting, Unions, Voters, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Republicans | Public Employees, Wisconsin Legislature, Wisconsin Recall, Wisconsin Senate |
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