“A Pledge To Ensure Failure, No Matter The Consequences”: Koch Brothers Push GOP Officials To Sign Anti-Climate Pledge
The Republican Party is certainly fond of its pledges. Grover Norquist, of course, has his infamous anti-tax pledge that has interfered with federal policymaking in recent decades, and in 2011, GOP presidential candidates were pushed to endorse an anti-gay pledge from the National Organization for Marriage.
But as it turns out, there’s another pledge that’s taken root in Republican politics that’s received far less attention. The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer reports this week on the “No Climate Tax Pledge” pushed by Charles and David Koch.
Starting in 2008, a year after the Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency could regulate greenhouse gasses as a form of pollution, accelerating possible Congressional action on climate change, the Koch-funded nonprofit group, Americans for Prosperity, devised the “No Climate Tax” pledge. It has been, according to the study, a component of a remarkably successful campaign to prevent lawmakers from addressing climate change. Two successive efforts to control greenhouse-gas emissions by implementing cap-and-trade energy bills died in the Senate, the latter of which was specifically targeted by A.F.P.’s pledge.
By now, [411] current office holders nationwide have signed the pledge. Signatories include the entire Republican leadership in the House of Representatives, a third of the members of the House of Representatives as a whole, and a quarter of U.S. senators.
The pledge, uncovered as part of a two-year study by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, forces policymakers to oppose any legislation relating to climate change unless it is accompanied by an equivalent amount of tax cuts.” [Updated: see below]
And what, pray tell, do tax cuts have to do with the climate crisis and effects of global warming? Nothing in particular, but the Koch brothers hope to make it impossible to pass any bills related to carbon emissions, and by demanding tax cuts, they’re effectively eliminating any credible policy options — as Mayer explained, “Since most solutions to the problem of greenhouse-gas emissions require costs to the polluters and the public, the pledge essentially commits those who sign to it to vote against nearly any meaningful bill regarding global warning, and acts as yet another roadblock to action.”
When President Obama unveiled his fairly ambitious new climate agenda last week, some hoped it would spur broader action in Washington. There’s still room for a comprehensive climate policy that may be more effective than the administration using the Clean Air Act to limit emissions, but it would require Congress to work towards a sensible, consensus remedy. Republicans don’t like the White House policy? Fine, it’s time policymakers sat down with environmentalists and industries to work on an alternative.
Of course, Congress can’t do much of anything with a radicalized House majority, and climate legislation appears completely out of the question — the Koch brothers have a pledge to ensure failure, no matter the consequences.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
* Update: The exact language of the pledge reads as follows: “I, ______________________, pledge to the taxpayers of the state of ______________— and to the American people that I will oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue.” The Koch-financed opponents of combating the climate crisis see this as different from Mayer’s description, though it’s worth emphasizing that since any meaningful policy would generate revenue, the pledge would effectively call for tax cuts to guarantee revenue neutrality. As for why far-right anti-climate activists would oppose new government revenue — which could ostensibly be applied to deficit reduction, which conservatives occasionally pretend to care about — your guess is as good as mine.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 3, 2013
“Pennies On The Dollar”: Congress Is Squandering The Opportunity Of A Lifetime
It’s the first Friday of the month, which means a jobs report. And this one isn’t bad. The economy added a net 195,000 jobs in June, with upwards revisions of 70,000 in April and May. Which means that, so far this year, the economy has added more than 1 million jobs. To repeat a point, this is why the 2012 election was so critical for Democrats—a Mitt Romney win would have given Republicans a chance to claim credit for the current job growth, and use the political capital to push a highly-ideological agenda.
But back to the numbers. Federal government employment dropped by 5,000, a likely result of sequestration, and part of an overall decline of public employment—since 2010, the public sector has shed more than 600,000 jobs. The unemployment rate remained unchanged at 7.6 percent, with a slight drop in long-term unemployment. Still, more than four million people have been out of work for longer than six months.
In other words, despite the improving economy, we’re still stuck in a period of mass unemployment. And, thanks the GOP’s categorical opposition to spending–and stimulus in particular—there’s no chance of relief for the economy.
What’s frustrating—and, given the cost of long-term unemployment to individuals, families, and communities, cruel—is that conditions are perfect for another round of large-scale government spending. Not only are there millions of potential workers (to say nothing of an overall demand shortfall), but—as Suzy Khimm notes for MSNBC—interest rates are still at historic lows. But that won’t last: “Already,” she writes, “there are early warning signs that this era of absurdly cheap borrowing will eventually come to an end: The interest rate on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes—the benchmark for long-term borrowing rates—rose to 2.66% on Monday, the highest rate since August 2011.”
There’s still time to act on this unprecedented opportunity by investing in new infrastructure: We could take advantage of these low rates, borrow, and use the cash to rebuild our roads, bridges, airstrips, and pipelines. The subsequent economic growth—from more jobs and a faster recovery—would be more than enough to pay back whatever we owe when the economy is stronger.
But Republicans have not budged from their commitment to spending cuts, monetary tightening, and other austerity-minded policies. They warn that greater public debt will lead to inflation and low growth, ignoring the extent to which inflation has held steady at just under 2 percent for the last four years, and disregarding the disastrous results of austerity in Europe, which has plunged several countries, including the United Kingdom, into a second recession. Because of this, their House majority, and their ability to filibuster in the Senate, there’s no chance Congress will move on new stimulus, or anything else that could boost the economy.
The sad fact is that the GOP’s dysfunctions—its hyper-ideological approach to government, hostility to liberalism, and opposition to compromise—will keep the United States from capitalizing on one of the great opportunities of the last 20 years. Thanks to GOP-driven gridlock and Washington’s myopic focus on debt reduction, we have squandered a once-in-a-lifetime chance to rebuild this country at pennies on the dollar, and bounce back from a long decade of mismanagement and neglect.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, July 5, 2013
“Rick Perry, Job Poacher”: Southern Grand Larceny With A Very Old Pedigree
Poaching on the labor of others is an ancient and honored Southern tradition, whose antebellum antecedents Texas Governor Rick Perry has recently brought up-to-date with a $1 million advertising campaign to encourage businesses to pack up and come on down to the Lone Star State where the taxes are lower than a worker’s wages.
Called “Texas is calling, your opportunity awaits,” the 30-second TV spots feature business leaders and celebrities like Dallas Cowboys running back Emmitt Smith calling Texas the “land of opportunity” and home of “creative renegades.”
On Fox News, Perry boasted, “Texas has the best business climate in the world. Over the last 10 years, 30% of all the new jobs created in America were in Texas.”
Wooing business from other states is all part of “healthy competition,” says Perry. “It’s the 50 laboratories of innovation that are out competing for the jobs to keep America at the front of the race,” the Governor insists.
Yet, when mayors and governors elsewhere talk about “growing” their economy they mean that literally – as in, creating new jobs where none existed before, from the ground up, nurtured by public-private partnerships, public investments in R&D and good schools, and other initiatives that create real value.
In Boston where I work, the South Boston Seaport District is one of the hottest real estate markets in the country right now, says Moody’s Investor Services, thanks in part to steps that Mayor Tom Menino has taken to make the area a magnet for entrepreneurs — an “Innovation District” — where start-up companies with bright ideas but not much cash can get reasonable financing and available space to help their businesses grow.
Just last week, the Boston Herald reported that the Small Business Administration called Menino’s Innovation District a model for other cities to follow who are interested in creating a cutting-edge start-up culture — “a Mecca for people from all over the world to launch out and build the next big company.”
He credited the city’s Innovation District initiative for creating a “community of entrepreneurship and creativity.”
Winslow Sargeant, chief counsel for the federal agency’s Office of Advocacy, said: “This ecosystem of innovation brings together entrepreneurs to share ideas and bring their vision to the marketplace. It presents a successful model and an ideal avenue for the public and private sectors to partner together for economic success,” he said.
In just three years, Boston’s Innovation District initiative has brought more than 4,000 jobs to the waterfront area.
Boston has become a great place to start a business, said Sargeant, who grew up in the city. “If someone wants to start a company or if someone wants to explore what it takes to, there are people that they can talk to and places they can go to network with others.”
Among the biggest benefits of the district, the Herald says, are the start-up incubators and accelerators that offer shared work spaces. “Magic things happen” when entrepreneurs get together and share work space and ideas, said Ben Einstein, founder of Bolt, one of the companies now operating in the district.
There is another economic development model, however, one favored by Governor Perry and governors throughout the South: Don’t make money the old fashioned way by earning it or actually “creating” anything. Let the Yankees do that with their fancy schools and business incubators. Then, when companies are off the ground and up and running, steal them away like cattle-rustlers in cross-border raids by luring owners with promises of lower taxes, fewer environmental regulations and protections against uppity workers who want a fair day’s pay for an honest day’s labor.
That is what Perry really means when he says that 30% of all the “new” jobs “created” in America were in Texas – proof of which is the $1 million Texas is now spending to steal other state’s jobs away from them.
There is political as well as economic method to Governor Perry’s madness since his desperado tactics are never aimed against other Republican governors, but only blue state Democratic ones in target-rich “enemy” territory.
Perry recently traveled to New York and Connecticut on a four-day trip to lure businesses away from those states. The trip comes on the spurred-heels of earlier raids into California and Illinois where Perry showed ads depicting an emergency exit door under the headline: “Get out while you still can.”
Both Perry’s trips and the ad campaign are being paid for by a group called TexasOne, which is a coalition of corporations and local chambers of commerce.
This sort of Southern grand larceny has a very old pedigree. A cold and forbidding climate like New England’s grows a population that must be skilled at living by its wits and the “Yankee Ingenuity” that cemented New England’s reputation as home to world-class education, the textile mills of Lawrence and Lowell that gave birth to America’s industrial revolution, and the Yankee traders who invented, then sailed, world-famous clipper ships like the Flying Cloud and Sovereign of the Seas.
A hot and humid climate like the South, rich in natural resources, on the other hand, tends to spawn a class of indolent, parasitic oligarchs whose labor saving inventions consist almost entirely of exploiting the labor of others.
In short, what we have in New England is called “entrepreneurial capitalism,” which means using the state as partner to nurture good ideas and develop them into profitable companies, perhaps whole new industries.
What Governor Perry exports from Texas, on the other hand, is “crony capitalism,” using the power of the state to enrich and reward powerful insiders, not by creating new opportunities but by lowering the rewards workers get from those opportunities that already exist.
And now that the GOP has become a Southern Party, Republicans have inherited the most disreputable features of what author Michael Lind calls this “Southernomics” as well.
It was not always thus. Between the 1930s and 1970s, so-called “modern Republicans” like Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon tried to level the playing field among the states — not through regressive tax and labor policies — but through revenue sharing and other public investments in infrastructure, writes Lind in Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics.
Ironically, then, modern Republicans and New Deal modernists built an infrastructure for the South and West that traditional conservatives inherited and were able to use for their own “illiberal purposes,” says Lind.
It is no coincidence, says Lind, that the two biggest companies to fail during the Bush administration – Enron and WorldCom – were both Southern.
Entrepreneurial or “bourgeois” capitalism is alien to Texas and other Southern states, he says, because “crony capitalism is the only kind familiar to the Southern oligarchs, decedents of planters who could not balance their books and knights who despised mere trade.”
The lesson from these scandals, says Lind, as well as Governor Rick Perry’s politically-motivated raids against Democratic economies, is not that capitalism is unworkable, but that “capitalism only works where there are real capitalists.”
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, July 4, 2013
“An Extension Of The GOP”: The Republicans Of The Supreme Court
In order to fully understand what the five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have been up to when they make decisions that affect our democracy, as they did last week on voting rights, you need to understand what the Republican Party has been up to.
The modern GOP is based on an unlikely coalition of wealthy business executives, small business owners, and struggling whites. Its durability depends on the latter two categories believing that the economic stresses they’ve experienced for decades have a lot to do with the government taking their money and giving it to the poor, who are disproportionately black and Latino.
The real reason small business owners and struggling whites haven’t done better is the same as most of the rest of America hasn’t done better: Although the output of Americans has continued to rise, almost all the gains have gone to the very top.
Government is implicated, but not in the way wealthy Republicans want the other members of their coalition to believe. Laws that the GOP itself championed (too often with the complicity of some Democrats) have trammeled unions, invited outsourcing abroad, slashed taxes on the rich, encouraged takeovers, allowed monopolization, reduced the real median wage, and deregulated Wall Street.
Four decades ago, the typical household’s income rose in tandem with output. But since the late 1970s, as these laws took hold, most Americans’ incomes have flattened. Had the real median household income continued to keep pace with economic growth it would now be almost $92,000 instead of $50,000.
Obviously, wealthy Republicans would rather other members of their coalition not know any of this — including, especially, their role in making it happen. Their nightmare is small-business owners and struggling whites joining with the poor and the rest of the middle class to wrest economic power away. So they’ve created a convenient scapegoat in America’s minority underclass, along with a government that supposedly taxes hardworking whites to support them.
This is where the five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court have played, and continue to play, such an important role.
First, wealthy Republicans have to be able to spend as much money as possible to bribe lawmakers to do their bidding, tell their version of history, and promulgate several big lies (the poor are “takers not makers,” government keeps them “dependent,” the wealthy are “job-creators” so cutting their taxes creates more jobs, unions are bad, regulations reduce economic growth, and so on).
The five Republicans on the Supreme Court have obliged by eviscerating campaign finance laws. Their 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, along with the broad interpretations given it by several appellate judges (also Republican appointees), has opened the money floodgates.
Second, wealthy Republicans want to quietly reduce the impact of any laws that might limit their profits, even though they may help struggling whites as consumers or employees. The easiest way to execute this delicate maneuver is to make it harder to sue under such laws.
Here, too, the five Republicans on the Court have been eager to oblige by tightening requirements for class actions and limiting standing to sue. In their recent Comcast Corp. v. Behrend decision, for example, they threw out $875 million in damages that a group of Philadelphia-area subscribers had sought from the cable giant, reasoning that the subscriber plaintiffs hadn’t proven they constituted a “class” for the purpose of a class action.
Third and finally, wealthy Republicans want to minimize the votes of poor and minority citizens – and further propagate the myth that these people are responsible for the economic problems of struggling whites – through state redistricting and gerrymandering, voter-identification requirements at polling stations, and the use of almost any pretext to purge minority voters from voting lists.
The five Republicans on the Court obliged last week by striking down a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that sets the formula under which states with a long history of discrimination must ask the federal government or a judge for approval before changing their voting procedures.
The significance of Shelby County, Alabama vs. Holder was made plain Thursday when the Court effectively nullified two cases involving Texas voter laws by sending them back to lower courts to reconsider in light of Shelby. One was a voter identification requirement, enacted in 2011, that a federal judge had rejected on grounds that it imposed a disproportionate burden on lower-income people, many of whom are minorities. The other was a redistricting plan, also rejected by a federal court, in part because it would block minorities from gaining a majority vote in almost all districts.
But now both are effectively reinstated, as are the efforts of several other states to suppress votes.
Supreme Court justices are appointed for life in order to ensure their independence from politics. But when it comes to the core political strategy of the Republican Party, the five Republican appointees are, in effect, an extension of the GOP.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, July 1, 2013
“A City Of The First Class”; Federal Court Upholds Ban On Undocumented Immigrant Renters, Ruling Cities Can Keep People Out
In a significant win for the anti-immigrant movement, a federal appeals court upheld a Nebraska city’s statute Friday that bans renting property to undocumented immigrants, holding that the law was neither preempted by federal law nor discriminatory.
In a 2-1 opinion, Judge James B. Loken rejected the rulings of several other federal appeals courts that federal immigration regulation precludes local prohibitions on the “harboring” of undocumented immigrants. Reasoning that cities and states are perfectly entitled to keep undocumented immigrants out of their borders, Loken and fellow Republican appointee Steven Colloton upheld a statute making it unlawful to hire, rent to, or otherwise “harbor” an undocumented person in Fremont, Nebraska, dubbed a “city of the first class.”
“Laws designed to deter, or even prohibit, unlawfully present aliens from residing within a particular locality are not tantamount to immigration laws establishing who may enter or remain in the country,” Loken, a former Nixon advisor and George H.W. Bush appointee, wrote for the majority.
In support of this proposition, Loken cites to a footnote in a U.S. Supreme Court decision that, ironically, affirmed the right of undocumented children to obtain a public education. In that footnote, the court recognized, as an aside totally separate from the contrary holding in the case, that a law is not necessarily invalid merely because it imposes an unequal burden on undocumented immigrants.
Fremont’s law does far more than impose an unequal burden on undocumented immigrants. In requiring all rental applicants to register with the city and prove their citizenship, the city of Fremont is not only effectively removing many undocumented immigrants from its jurisdiction; it is also making its own separate determination of lawful presence in the United States, without the assessment and due process that accompanies federal removal.
Just last year, the U.S. Supreme Court reiterated the breadth of federal supremacy in the field of immigration law in striking down key elements of Arizona’s controversial SB 1070, writing that no state or local government is allowed to “achieve its own immigration policy.” And as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit explained in striking down an almost identical provision prohibiting the “harboring” of illegal immigrants, these sorts of local laws attempt to remove undocumented persons from the city “based on a snapshot of their current immigration status, rather than based on a federal order of removal.” Dissenting judge Myron Bright explained:
This produces conflict with federal law because unlawful presence or undocumented status is not in every case equivalent with removability or with eventual removal. “Under federal law, an unlawful immigration status does not lead instantly, or inevitably, to removal.” Additionally, undocumented persons are afforded numerous procedural protections under federal law before an order of removal may issue. The federal government will sometimes exercise its discretion not to prosecute a removal, “thereby tacitly allow[ing] the presence of those whose technical status remains ‘illegal.’ ” Even once a removal proceeding is commenced, it is far from certain it will result in removal.
This ruling is a major win for Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who profited handsomely from drafting this provision for Fremont and several other cities around the country.
By: Nicole Flatow, Think Progress, July 1, 2013
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