“BS Hidden In Plain Sight”: Let’s All Agree To Pretend The GOP Isn’t Full Of It
It’s really amazing to see political reporters dutifully passing along Republican complaints that President Obama’s opening offer in the fiscal cliff talks is just a recycled version of his old plan, when those same reporters spent the last year dutifully passing along Republican complaints that Obama had no plan. It’s even more amazing to see them pass along Republican outrage that Obama isn’t cutting Medicare enough, in the same matter-of-fact tone they used during the campaign to pass along Republican outrage that Obama was cutting Medicare.
This isn’t just cognitive dissonance. It’s irresponsible reporting. Mainstream media outlets don’t want to look partisan, so they ignore the BS hidden in plain sight, the hypocrisy and dishonesty that defines the modern Republican Party. I’m old enough to remember when Republicans insisted that anyone who said they wanted to cut Medicare was a demagogue, because I’m more than three weeks old.
I’ve written a lot about the GOP’s defiance of reality–its denial of climate science, its simultaneous denunciations of Medicare cuts and government health care, its insistence that debt-exploding tax cuts will somehow reduce the debt—so I often get accused of partisanship. But it’s simply a fact that Republicans controlled Washington during the fiscally irresponsible era when President Clinton’s budget surpluses were transformed into the trillion-dollar deficit that President Bush bequeathed to President Obama. (The deficit is now shrinking.) It’s simply a fact that the fiscal cliff was created in response to GOP threats to force the U.S. government to default on its obligations. The press can’t figure out how to weave those facts into the current narrative without sounding like it’s taking sides, so it simply pretends that yesterday never happened.
The next fight is likely to involve the $200 billion worth of stimulus that Obama included in his recycled fiscal cliff plan that somehow didn’t exist before Election Day. I’ve taken a rather keen interest in the topic of stimulus, so I’ll be interested to see how this is covered. Keynesian stimulus used to be uncontroversial in Washington; every 2008 presidential candidate had a stimulus plan, and Mitt Romney’s was the largest. But in early 2009, when Obama began pushing his $787 billion stimulus plan, the GOP began describing stimulus as an assault on free enterprise—even though House Republicans (including Paul Ryan) voted for a $715 billion stimulus alternative that was virtually indistinguishable from Obama’s socialist version. The current Republican position seems to be that the fiscal cliff’s instant austerity would destroy the economy, which is odd after four years of Republican clamoring for austerity, and that the cliff’s military spending cuts in particular would kill jobs, which is even odder after four years of Republican insistence that government spending can’t create jobs.
I guess it’s finally true that we all are Keynesians now. Republicans don’t even seem to be arguing that more stimulus wouldn’t boost the economy; they’ve suggested that Obama needs to give up “goodies” like extending unemployment insurance (which benefits laid-off workers) and payroll tax cuts (which benefit everyone) to show that he’s negotiating in good faith. At the same time, though, they also want Obama to propose bigger Medicare cuts, even though they spent the last campaign slamming Obama’s Medicare cuts and denying their interest in Medicare cuts. I live in Florida, so I had the pleasure of hearing a radio ad from Allen West, hero of the Tea Party, vowing to protect Medicare.
Whatever. I realize that the GOP’s up-is-downism puts news reporters in an awkward position. It would seem tendentious to point out Republican hypocrisy on deficits and Medicare and stimulus every time it comes up, because these days it comes up almost every time a Republican leader opens his mouth. But we’re not supposed to be stenographers. As long as the media let an entire political party invent a new reality every day, it will keep on doing it. Every day.
By: Michael Grunwald, Time Swampland, November 30, @012
“Incompetent Managers”: Vulture Capitalism Ate Your Twinkies
What happens when vulture capitalism ruins a great American company?
The vultures blame the workers.
The vultures blame the union.
And vapid media outlets report the lie as “news.”
That’s what’s happening with the meltdown of Hostess Brands Inc.
Americans are being told that they won’t get their Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Ho Hos because the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union ran the company into the ground.
But the union and the 5,600 Hostess workers represented by the union did not create the crisis that led the company’s incompetent managers to announce plans to shutter it.
The BCTGM workers did not ask for more pay.
The BCTGM workers did not ask for more benefits.
The BCTGM workers did not ask for better pensions.
The union and its members had a long history of working with the company to try to keep it viable. They had made wage and benefit concessions to keep the company viable. They adjusted to new technologies, new demands.
They took deep layoffs—20 percent of the workforce—and kept showing up for work even as plants were closed.
They kept working even as the company stopped making payment to their pension fund more than a year ago.
The workers did not squeeze the filling out of Hostess.
Hostess was smashed by vulture capitalists—“a management team that,” in the words of economist Dean Baker, “shows little competence and is rapidly stuffing its pockets at the company’s expense.”
Even as the company struggled, the ten top Hostes executives pocketed increasingly lavish compensation packages. The Hostess CEO who demanded some of the deepest cuts from workers engineered a 300 percent increase in his compensation package.
“Wall Street investors first came onto the scene with Hostess about a decade ago, purchasing the company and then loading it with debt. All the while, its executives talked of investments in new equipment, new research and new delivery trucks, but those improvements never materialized,” explains AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka.
“Instead, the executives planned to give themselves bonuses and demanded pay cuts and benefit cuts from the workers, who haven’t had a raise in eight years,” said the AFL-CIO head. “In 2011, Hostess earned profits of more than $2.5 billion but ended the year with a loss of $341 million as it struggled to pay the interest on $1 billion in debt. This year, the company sought bankruptcy protection, the second time in eight years. Still, the CEO who brought on the latest bankruptcy got a raise while Hostess demanded that its workers accept a 30 percent pay and benefits cut.”
When BCTGM workers struck Hostess, they did not do so casually.
They were challenging Bain-style abuses by a private-equity group—Ripplewood Holdings—that had proven its incompetence and yet continued to demand more money from the workers.
“When a highly respected financial consultant, hired by Hostess, determined earlier this year that the company’s business plan to exit bankruptcy was guaranteed to fail because it left the company with unsustainable debt levels, our members knew that the massive wage and benefit concessions the company was demanding would go straight to Wall Street investors and not back into the company,” recalled BCTGM president Frank Hunt, who described why the union struck Hostess rather than accept a demand from management for more pay and benefit cuts.
“Our members decided they were not going to take any more abuse from a company they have given so much to for so many years,” Hunt explained. “They decided that they were not going to agree to another round of outrageous wage and benefit cuts and give up their pension only to see yet another management team fail and Wall Street vulture capitalists and ‘restructuring specialists’ walk away with untold millions of dollars.”
On November 6, American voters rejected Mitt Romney and Bain Capitalism.
But that didn’t end the abusive business practices that made Romney rich. They’re still wrecking American companies, like Hostess.
Instead of blaming workers, we should be holding the incompetent managers to account and cheering on any and every effort to rescue Hostess from the clutches of the vulture capitalists.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, November 18, 2012
“That’s Just How Those People Are”: Land Of The “Free Stuff,” Home Of The Brave
If you want to explain why your party lost a presidential election, there are a number of places to look. You can blame your candidate and his campaign (which usually means, “If only they had listened to me!”). You can blame your party and ask if it should examine its ideology or its rhetoric. You can blame the media. Or you can blame the voters. As the old political saw says, “The people have spoken—the bastards.” And that is what one conservative after another has been saying over the last week.
They aren’t saying that the voters are uninformed, or that they allowed themselves to be duped. Instead, Barack Obama’s re-election is said to be a moral failing on the part of the American public. They got what they wanted, conservatives are saying. And what was it they wanted? Universal health coverage, higher taxes on the wealthy, strong environmental regulations, legal abortion? Nope. They wanted free stuff. Because that’s just how those people are.
This was perhaps articulated most vividly by Bill O’Reilly, who on election night lamented the fact that “the white establishment is no longer the majority” and said, “It’s not a traditional America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.”
It didn’t start on election day; this is a tune that Republicans have been playing for a couple of years now, and nearly everyone, from media figures to members of Congress to their presidential nominee himself, joined in with increasing frequency over the last few months. “You either get free stuff or you get freedom. You cannot have both,” said Sarah Palin back in September. “Offering Americans a check is a more fruitful political strategy than offering them the opportunity to take control of and responsibility for their own lives,” wrote National Review‘s Kevin Williamson after the election. “You have two generations now who believe that the government owes them something,” said conservative columnist Cal Thomas. “If you’re looking for free stuff you don’t have to pay for, vote for the other guy,” said Mitt Romney during the campaign. And of course, his infamous 47 percent video was all about those people who think they are “entitled” to government benefits.
The truth, of course, is that every single person in America gets benefits from the U.S. government. We get defended from invasion, we get roads to drive on, we get reasonably clean air to breathe, we get parks and schools and so much else. But that’s not the “free stuff” conservatives are talking about. They’re talking about the government giving you something directly as an individual, like money. But there’s a problem here too: Lots and lots of Americans, including most of those whom Republicans deem morally worthy, get plenty of stuff from the government. I’m not even talking about bank bailouts, or corporations like General Electric rewriting the tax code so they pay nothing. I’m talking about individual people, the kind of people Republicans like, getting direct government aid.
There is nothing–nothing–that makes, say, Medicare superior to unemployment benefits, even though as far as conservatives are concerned, only receiving the latter makes you a “taker.” If you’re unemployed, you paid taxes, and now the government is helping you in your time of need. There is nothing that makes the mortgage interest deduction morally superior to food stamps, even though conservatives like one but not the other. The government has decided, wisely or not, that it wants to promote home ownership, so it pays for part of millions of homeowners’ mortgage interest. The government has also decided that it’s bad for our society if people starve, so if your income falls below the level where it will be difficult to afford food and also pay for the other necessities of life, it give you some help in buying food.
So what is it that, in conservatives’ minds, distinguishes the “makers” from the “takers,” particularly when, as political scientists Suzanne Mettler and John Sides report, “97 percent of Republicans and 98 percent of Democrats report that they have used at least one government social policy”? Think hard, and it’ll come to you.
Even if Mitt Romney had not chosen Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan to be his running mate, this election would still have seen the triumph of a Randian attitude on the right, in which every policy and everyone they don’t like is attacked as a despicable parasite sucking off the labors of their economic betters. We had Romney’s absurdly mendacious welfare ad (“You wouldn’t have to work … they just send you your welfare check”). We had Newt Gingrich proclaiming that he’d love to explain to the NAACP “why the African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” We had the attack on Sandra Fluke for allegedly wanting “free contraception,” or even asking for taxpayers to pay for it (“Ms. Fluke wants us to pick up her lifestyle expenses!” said Bill O’Reilly), when what she advocated was that the insurance coverage that women themselves pay for should cover contraception. We had conservatives fascinated by the idea that poor voters were being given free “Obama phones” (don’t ask). To the right, if you were voting for Obama it could only be because you wanted to get something from the government you didn’t deserve.
But if you want to find a real sense of entitlement, the place to look is among the country’s wealthy, the people who turned over hundreds of millions of dollars to Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie in their failed attempt to drive Barack Obama from office. They may not have been able to propel one of their own to the White House, but despite all their resentment and complaining things have never been better for the country’s economic Übermenschen. Not only do they hold more of the nation’s wealth than at any time since the Gilded Age, the privileges of that wealth have never been greater. Their taxes have never been lower. The entire world offers special concierge services to shield them from the indignities and inconveniences of everyday life. And now, they have new freedoms in the political realm as well; where they might have had to hold their tongues in the past, thanks to Citizens United they are now free to strong-arm their employees to vote in the right way, complete with threats of layoffs should the voters be so vulgar as to elect a Democratic president.
Perhaps by the time 2016 arrives, the Republican party will find a message that resonates with voters more effectively than “You people make me sick.” For now, though, that’s what they’re sticking with.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 12, 2012
“It’s Time To Grow Up Now”: An Idea For Our Conservative Friends
First, in 2008, back at the Guardian, you told me what an inexperienced loser Obama was, in addition to all the more nefarious things, and how there was no chance on earth he’d ever beat Hillary.
Then he did, and you said well, those Democrats are insane anyway, but now it’s a general, and that man will never be elected president.
After he won, you said that was a fluke and aberration, and he was doomed to be a failure and a one-termer, and I was in dreamland if I even began to think otherwise.
And now here we are, the morning after quite frankly an easy reelection. The race wasn’t always easy, of course, but the margin was. Eight of nine battleground states. Won the popular vote by nearly two percent. Won. Going. Away.
And now I’m sure you’ll have a list of other excuses. I’m sure Fox and Friends is providing a list of them now.
Here’s an idea. Why don’t you consider accepting the notions that: he is legitimately the president; that your party is right now, for whatever reason, a minority party (actually, I’d be interested in seeing you all debate the whys and wherefores of that, and by “debate” I don’t mean deciding whether it’s the media’s fault or Nate Silver’s); that the economy is in fact improving, and you might as well now cheer for it to improve, cheer every job; and that your party has some soul-searching to do, and that does mean just nominating a “true conservative” next time.
It’d be nice to hear sincere, self-critical reflections from you instead of the usual bombast. America rejects you, rejects your view of Obama, rejects your policies. Are you ready to grow up now and have real conversations about the substance of things?
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 7, 2012
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