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“An Outsized Voice”: There’s A Big Difference Between Union Money And Koch Money

For dozens of readers, our editorial this morning on the Democratic criticism of the Koch brothers left out something crucial: the big financial muscle of unions in backing liberal politcians.

“As the editors of The Times must know, unions in America far outspend the Kochs in their funding for Democratic candidates,” wrote Yitzhak Klein of Jerusalem wrote in the comments section. “What Harry Reid is doing is cheap demagoguery. Also this editorial.”

Mr. Klein, like many other commenters (some of whom are prominent) has his figures wrong. As the Washington Post and the Center for Responsive Politics recently reported, unions poured about $400 million into the 2012 elections. That almost matched the $407 million raised and spent by the Koch network in that same election cycle.

But think about what those numbers mean. Two brothers, aided by a small and shadowy group of similarly wealthy donors, spent more than millions of union members. The fortunes of just a few people have allowed them an outsized voice, and they are openly trying to use it to turn control of the Senate to Republicans.

The Koch group Americans for Prosperity has also joined the right-wing drive to reduce union rights and membership around the country, with the goal — made explicit at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference — of muzzling the voice of union members in politics.

The Times has long deplored the vast amount of cash that is polluting politics, whether it comes from the right or left. (And we were critical of a Democratic donor who plans to spend $100 million this year against candidates who ignore climate change.) But for the most part, unions, unlike the Koch network, don’t try to disguise their contributions in a maze of interlocking “social welfare” groups. Their contributions on behalf of candidates or issues may be unlimited, thanks to Citizens United, but they are generally clearly marked as coming from one union or another. (They want Democrats to know which unions raised the money.)

Union members aren’t coerced into giving political money, either, despite the claims of several commenters. Thanks to a 1988 Supreme Court case, workers have the right not to pay for a union’s political activity, and can demand that their dues be restricted to collective bargaining expenses. The union members who contributed to that $400 million pot in 2012 opted into the system.

That’s still too much money. But there’s a world of difference between a small group of tycoons writing huge checks, and a huge group of workers writing small ones.

 

By: David Firestone, Taking Note, Editor’s Blog, The New York Times, March 11, 2014

March 12, 2014 Posted by | Campaign Financing, Koch Brothers, Unions | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“A Breed Apart”: So This Is What “Individual Liberty” Looks Like

I was minding my own business channel surfing when I stumbled upon a disturbing scene carried on (where else?) Fox News. More than 1,500 students from all over the world were gathered in Washington to attend what was billed as the Students for Liberty Conference, whose advertised aim was to “celebrate freedom.”

The part I saw had Fox Business host John Stossel, author of No They Can’t: Why Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed, moderating a panel in which he asked students this bit of political trivia: How often is the word “democracy” used in the Constitution, or the Declaration of Independence for that matter?

What came next was chilling. When students were given the correct answer – none – they cheered.

Stossel later explained why. These students, like the Founding Fathers, “understood that democracy may bring mob rule – tyranny of a majority. So the Constitution focuses on restricting government – to secure individual liberty.”

Thanks go to Chris Hayes of MSNBC for showing what this so called “individual liberty” sometimes looks like in real life.

Hayes profiled ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson. As the head of the largest natural gas producer in the US, Tillerson is a vocal proponent of a controversial process known as hydraulic fracking.

It is so controversial, in fact, that many municipalities have begun passing local ordinances to place a moratorium on the practice until more is known about its long-term consequences. Exxon, for its part, has been just as active suing these cities and towns to have the ordinances overturned.

Then along comes another gas company with plans to construct one of these water towers needed for fracking — but this one near Exxon Rex’s 83-acre, $5 million horse ranch near Bartonville, Texas. Tillerson, of course, welcomes the new gas company to the neighborhood with open arms. Right?

Not on your life. Instead, Tillerson and his super-wealthy neighbors file a lawsuit which states that the fracking tower must be stopped since it might “devalue their properties and adversely impact the rural lifestyle they sought to enjoy.”

Further, as the Wall Street Journal disapprovingly reports, Tillerson and his neighbors filed suit, claiming that what the gas company wanted to do was illegal since it would create “a noise nuisance and traffic hazards” due to the heavy trucks hauling and pumping the massive amounts of water needed to unlock oil and gas from dense rock.

As Hayes succinctly put it: “Rex Tillerson is leading the fracking revolution — just not in his backyard.”

Adds Rich Unger writing in Forbes: “Sometimes, the hypocrisy expressed in real life is so sublimely rich that one could never hope to construct a similar scenario out of pure imagination.”

Being a vocal advocate for fracking is “a key and critical function” of Mr. Tillerson’s day job, says Unger. It is all he can do when he wakes up in the morning to “protect and nurture the process of hydraulic fracturing so that his company can continue to rack in billions via the production and sale of natural gas.”

So committed is Rex to the process of fracking, says Unger, “that he has loudly lashed out at those who criticize and seek to regulate hydraulic fracturing, suggesting that such efforts are a very bad idea, indeed.”

Except when the fracking is in Tillerson’s backyard.

The odium directed at Tillerson practically writes itself. But critics are wrong to call him a hypocrite. A hypocrite is someone who subscribes to the notion that people are basically equal, who agrees that rules should apply equally to everyone, but who nonetheless insists on special privileges or exemptions for themselves.

Tillerson, and those of his kind throughout history, do not subscribe to such egalitarian — dare we say democratic — ideals as justice or fairness. They really do believe their wealth makes them a breed apart. And they really do think that rules which apply to everyone else do not apply to them, though they rarely admit that in public.

To Tillerson and his caste, double standards are the only ones worth having. Consequently, it is perfectly legitimate, in their view, to make billions of dollars supporting a fracking process they say is a danger to no one — except people who  own multi-million horse ranches in rural Texas.

I wonder if Stossel’s Students for Liberty cheered just as loudly once they learned the Constitution does not use the world oligarchy either?

 

By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, February 27, 2014

March 2, 2014 Posted by | Fracking, Oil Industry | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“The Politics Of Fear”: It’s The Solidarity Of The Group That Matters Most To Right Wing Conservatives, And Their Loyalty To It

The bigger they are the harder they fall. The higher they climb the greater their fear of falling.

That was the takeaway of a much talked-about piece by Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo, called “the Brittle Grip,” about America’s rich and how they’ve twisted American politics because of their pathological fear of losing it all.

What Marshall’s essay highlights is how pervasively the glue which now holds the Republican coalition together is fear and anxiety. It’s a fear that is fed daily by demagogues like Rush Limbaugh and the prime time line-up on Fox News.

One reaction among the Top 1% to the near collapse of the world economy back in 2008 might have been shame and remorse and a resolution to make amends for the pain and suffering their greed and recklessness had caused for millions of Americans who lost jobs and are still struggling to find work.

Instead, the Top 1% became consumed by fears the American people, acting through their government, might rein in bankers and financial wizards the same way their ancestors did when they elected Franklin Roosevelt after capitalism almost destroyed itself way back in 1929.

The higher the Top 1% has climbed up the income ladder, the more tenuous it feels its grip on those top rungs has become. And it is that fear of falling, as Marshall says, which explains the snarling, ferocious backlash we’ve seen over the past five years among an upper class that is desperate to keep everything it’s won and furious with President Obama for suggesting they should give some of it back.

“The extremely wealthy are objectively far wealthier, far more politically powerful and find a far more indulgent political class than at any time in almost a century – at least,” says Marshall. “And yet at the same time they palpably feel more isolated, abused and powerless than at any time over the same period and sense some genuine peril to the whole mix of privileges, power and wealth they hold.”

This “disconnect” requires some socio-cultural explanation, says Marshall, because on the surface this hysteria among the swells just doesn’t make sense.

After all, President Obama angered portions of his own party when he went along with George W. Bush to push through unpopular fixes that saved the personal fortunes of a lot of the same people who are now demonizing him — like billionaire Tom Perkins who recently compared Obama to Hitler in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

The irony, of course, is that Obama’s policies have been just fine for rich people, says Marshall. Taxes have stayed low. Almost nobody got prosecuted for incinerating trillions of dollars of wealth. And profits are again at record levels.

But reality is no match for a concentration of wealth and gap between rich and poor that is so massive it creates its own “status anxieties” among people who are anxious their status at the top of the social pyramid makes them targets of envy and resentment by those left behind.

The Top 1% (or .01% ) doesn’t just have more stuff, says Marshall. “The sheer scale of the difference means they live what is simply a qualitatively different kind of existence.”

Today’s income gap would create “estrangement and alienation” in any society, says Marshall. But such massive inequality is particularly problematic in a democracy like ours “where such a minuscule sliver of the population can’t hope to protect itself alone at the ballot box.”

And it’s that fear of what “the masses” might do with whatever residual political power they still retain in our democracy that has turned America’s upper class into mistrustful reactionaries who are fighting back with everything they have and demanding that the Republican Party give not one inch to this interloper in the White House and the rainbow coalition he represents.

Could that be why a once-socially responsible conservative like George F. Will, who used to regularly scold fellow conservatives for embracing a survivor-of-the-fittest ethos, has found a new home at Fox News and a second career denigrating democracy while proclaiming the infinite virtues of plutocracy?

Those shouting “class warfare!” today are the same people who were spoiled by Ronald Reagan and his Republican heirs with all their fawning flattery that those with money were the only ones “driving forward the society and economy and prosperity for everyone.”

No matter that Wall Street had come close to crashing the global economic system with its irresponsible risk taking and its gaming the political system to permit “this high-risk, wealth-juicing leverage,” says Marshall. “These were, and are, folks who just weren’t used to public criticism.”

These “masters of the universe” believed their own mythology that only they were responsible for “keeping the globe we all live on from spinning off its axis,” says Marshall. Their attitude was: “So let us enjoy our Hamptons estates and our private jets in peace and we’ll do our jobs and you do yours.”

It’s this overwhelming hubris, insecurity at the brittleness of their hold on wealth, power and privileges — combined with the reality of great wealth and power — “that breeds a mix of aggressiveness and perceived embattlement,” says Marshall.

Obama is hardly a radical socialist. Indeed, most historians and political economists locate Obama somewhere right of center on the political spectrum given his (infuriating to his supporters) caution when approaching the near economic depression of the past five years and the financial sector abuses that caused it.

But when Southerners Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are the only other Democratic presidents elected in the past half century, then Barak Obama becomes the closest thing to a real progressive any of these plutocrats have seen in their adult lives. “And that was just not something any of these folks had experienced before,” says Marshall.

That is how Republicans mutated from a party that once believed in a “hands-off fiscal and regulatory policy” to one that exhibits a “kind of feverish mindset” where conservatives can actually claim with a straight face that progressives are intent on a campaign of “mass wealth confiscation or internment or even exterminations,” says Marshall.

This “feverish mindset” at the upper end of the Republican food chain finds ample expression at the bottom of the conservative coalition as well, where the GOP’s populist right wing base is suffering its own “status anxieties” as white Christians shudder at all those lurid tales it’s been told of the dark-skinned hoards now taking over the country who mean to confiscate their bank accounts and throw them from their homes.

Theirs is the demographic panic of a Mayflower descendent like Sarah Barnes, who complained on Herman Cain’s website how Coca-Cola’s Super Bowl commercial featuring America the Beautiful sung in a chorus medley of different languages was robbing her of her heritage, her cultural inheritance and her “national identity.”

Barnes is all for “diversity” — just so long as the dark-skinned races remember their place and not turn America into a “Frankenstein national cadaver of half dead cultures, stitched together by some godless bureaucrats in Washington.”

Having told us how she really feels about her fellow Americans, Barnes can’t understand for the life of her why narrow-minded liberals are not more accepting of the “different” ideas she expresses but instead call her a racist just because she thinks America belongs to her and her kind while the rest of us are free to live here just so long as we behave.

I feel quite certain that if ever Adolph Hitler rose from the dead and threw his helmet into the ring for the Republican presidential nomination there would be those conservatives who would compare liberals to Nazis for demonizing Das Fuhrer for proposing that the vote be limited to blue-eyed Nordic blondes.

Is the odious bigotry of Sarah Barnes, so rampant now on the right, identical to fascism? Maybe not. Not yet.  But it’s a kind of fascism. Or at least the kind of toxic cultural chauvinism that leads to fascism given the right conditions.

“The human mind is so weak an instrument, and is so easily enslaved and prostituted by human passions, that one is never certain to what degree the fears of the privileged classes of anarchy and revolution are honest fears and to what degree they are dishonest attempts to put the advancing classes at a disadvantage,” wrote Reinhold Niebuhr in 1932, just as FDR was taking office.

But these are not bad people, Niebuhr reminds us, just bad groups, which bring out the worst in their members.

Individuals may be moral because “they are endowed with a measure of sympathy and consideration for their kind” and so are able to consider interests other than their own, says Niebuhr.  And provided these  individuals are able to purge “egoistic elements” from themselves, they may even from time to time prefer the advantages of others to their own.

“But all these achievements are difficult, if not impossible, for human societies and social groups,” says Niebuhr. That is because in every human group “there is less reason to guide and to check impulse, less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others and therefore more unrestrained egoism than the individuals who compose the group reveal in their personal relationships.”

For all their fine talk about liberty and individualism, it’s the solidarity of the group that matters most to right wing conservatives, and their loyalty to it.

 

By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, February 13, 2014

February 16, 2014 Posted by | Conservatives, Economic Inequality | , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

“In The Name Of Freedom”: How To Spot A Paranoid Libertarian

In a recent essay in the New Republic, Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz contends that Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange reflect a political impulse he calls “paranoid libertarianism.” Wilentz claims that far from being “truth-telling comrades intent on protecting the state and the Constitution from authoritarian malefactors,” they “despise the modern liberal state, and they want to wound it.”

Wilentz gives credit to Richard Hofstadter for the term “paranoid libertarianism,” but he is being generous. Although Hofstadter wrote an influential essay called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” he didn’t call special attention to its libertarian manifestation. Wilentz has performed an important public service in doing exactly that.

Most of Wilentz’s essay focuses on Snowden, Greenwald and Assange, and he offers a lot of details in an effort to support his conclusions about each of them. But let’s put the particular individuals to one side. Although Wilentz doesn’t say much about paranoid libertarianism as such, the general category is worth some investigation.

It can be found on the political right, in familiar objections to gun control, progressive taxation, environmental protection and health care reform. It can also be found on the left, in familiar objections to religious displays at public institutions and to efforts to reduce the risk of terrorism. Whether on the right or the left, paranoid libertarianism (which should of course be distinguished from libertarianism as such) is marked by five defining characteristics.

The first is a wildly exaggerated sense of risks — a belief that if government is engaging in certain action (such as surveillance or gun control), it will inevitably use its authority so as to jeopardize civil liberties and perhaps democracy itself. In practice, of course, the risk might be real. But paranoid libertarians are convinced of its reality whether or not they have good reason for their conviction.

The second characteristic is a presumption of bad faith on the part of government officials — a belief that their motivations must be distrusted. If, for example, officials at a state university sponsor a Christian prayer at a graduation ceremony, the problem is that they don’t believe in religious liberty at all (and thus seek to eliminate it). If officials are seeking to impose new restrictions on those who seek to purchase guns, the “real” reason is that they seek to ban gun ownership (and thus to disarm the citizenry).

The third characteristic is a sense of past, present or future victimization. Paranoid libertarians tend to believe that as individuals or as members of specified groups, they are being targeted by the government, or will be targeted imminently, or will be targeted as soon as officials have the opportunity to target them. Any evidence of victimization, however speculative or remote, is taken as vindication, and is sometimes even welcome. (Of course, some people, such as Snowden, are being targeted, because they appear to have committed crimes.)

The fourth characteristic is an indifference to tradeoffs — a belief that liberty, as paranoid libertarians understand it, is the overriding if not the only value, and that it is unreasonable and weak to see relevant considerations on both sides. Wilentz emphasizes what he regards as the national- security benefits of some forms of surveillance; paranoid libertarians tend to see such arguments as a sham. Similarly, paranoid libertarians tend to dismiss the benefits of other measures that they despise, including gun control and environmental regulation.

The fifth and final characteristic is passionate enthusiasm for slippery-slope arguments. The fear is that if government is allowed to take an apparently modest step today, it will take far less modest steps tomorrow, and on the next day, freedom itself will be in terrible trouble. Modest and apparently reasonable steps must be resisted as if they were the incarnation of tyranny itself.

In some times and places, the threats are real, and paranoid libertarians turn out to be right. As Joseph Heller wrote in Catch-22, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”

Societies can benefit a lot from paranoid libertarians. Even if their apocalyptic warnings are wildly overstated, they might draw attention to genuine risks, or at least improve public discussion. But as a general rule, paranoia isn’t a good foundation for public policy, even if it operates in freedom’s name.

 

By: Cass Sunstein, The National Memo, January 30, 2014

January 31, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Government | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Beyond Polarization To Warfare”: It’s The Broader Acceptance Of Political Warfare In The Conservative Movement That’s Most Alarming

At WaPo’s Monkey Cage subsite today, there’s an important piece by University of Texas political scientist Sean Theriault that gets to a distinction in political attitudes that some of us have been trying to articulate ever since the radicalization of one of our two major parties occurred:

I have been studying party polarization in Congress for more than a decade. The more I study it, the more I question that it is the root cause of what it is that Americans hate about Congress. Pundits and political scientists alike point to party polarization as the culprit for all sorts of congressional ills. I, too, have contributed to this chorus bemoaning party polarization. But increasingly, I’ve come to think that our problem today isn’t just polarization in Congress; it’s the related but more serious problem of political warfare….

Perhaps my home state of Texas unnecessarily reinforces the distinction I want to make between these two dimensions. Little separates my two senators’ voting records – of the 279 votes that senators took in 2013, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn disagreed less than 9 percent of the time (the largest category of their disagreement, incidentally, was on confirmation votes). In terms of ideology, they are both very conservative. Cruz, to no one’s surprise, is the most conservative. Cornyn is the 13th most conservative, which is actually further down the list than he was in 2012, when he ranked second. Cornyn’s voting record is more conservative than conservative stalwarts Tom Coburn and Richard Shelby. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz disagreed on twice as many votes as John Cornyn and Ted Cruz.

The difference between my senators is that when John Cornyn shows up for a meeting with fellow senators, he brings a pad of paper and pencil and tries to figure out how to solve problems. Ted Cruz, on the other hand, brings a battle plan.

That’s probably why Cornyn has attracted a right-wing primary challenge from Rep. Steve Stockman.

The rise of “politics as warfare” on the Right, accompanied with militarist rhetoric, is one that my Democratic Strategist colleagues James Vega and J.P. Green and I discussed in a Strategy Memo last year. We discerned this tendency in the willingness of conservatives to paralyze government instead of redirecting its policies, and in the recent efforts to strike at democracy itself via large-scale voter disenfranchisement initiatives. And while we noted the genesis of extremist politics in radical ideology, we also warned that “Establishment” Republicans aiming at electoral victories at all costs were funding and leading the scorched-earth permanent campaign.

All I’d add at this point is that it’s not terribly surprising that people who think of much of the policy legacy of the twentieth century as a betrayal of the very purpose of America–and even as defiance of the Divine Will–would view liberals in the dehumanizing way that participants in an actual shooting war so often exhibit. But it’s the broader acceptance of political warfare in the conservative movement and the GOP–typified by the perpetual rage against the Obama administration–that’s most alarming.

 

By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 10, 2014

January 13, 2014 Posted by | Conservatives, Politics | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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