“The Plight Of The Poor”: Your Newest Fraudulent Poverty Crusader Is The Tea Party’s Mike Lee
Have you heard about the hot new trend that is sweeping the Republican Party? No, not “endorsing a celebrity’s confused defense of Jim Crow,” I am talking about “caring about poverty.” Marco Rubio cares. Paul Ryan cares. Rand Paul cares. Even Eric Cantor cares. Now, it can be revealed that Sen. Mike Lee also secretly cares very deeply about the plight of the poor.
“Tackling poverty may seem a counterintuitive agenda for one of the most conservative figures in Congress,” the Guardian says, but we have seen many examples over the last few months of how easily a far-right figure can earn positive press simply by stating that it is bad that some people are very poor and that something should be done about that. (Though to be fair to the press, it is actually pretty unusual to hear any politician admit that many Americans are very poor, and the last prominent politician to campaign on a platform of doing something about it turned out to be a toxic narcissist.)
Lee, best known for being a less telegenic Ted Cruz, declared a “war on poverty” last November. Unlike the prior War on Poverty, which was made up of various policies designed to alleviate poverty (and which was much more successful than its critics have claimed), Lee’s war on poverty is mainly about making the rhetorical case that government causes poverty and that eliminating welfare benefits for the poor will somehow spur “market forces” to solve the problem. Here are Lee’s policy proposals, as described by the Guardian:
-“[A“] bill, introduced last week, that would restore a work requirement for recipients of food stamps….”
-capping means-tested welfare spending at 2007 levels”
Capping spending on benefits at 2007 levels — that is, capping them where they were just before the devastating economic crisis and subsequent worldwide recession — seems, like so much of the modern GOP “anti-poverty” platform, to be more of a cruel joke than a serious suggestion. The right now rejects the idea that spending on benefits ought to increase when need increases, in favor of believing, because they really want to believe, that need increases because spending increases. Keep in mind too that “means-tested welfare spending” includes a wide array of programs beyond TANF and SNAP — scroll down to Sec. 301 here — and capping spending at 2007 levels would effectively reverse the ACA Medicaid expansion.
(The Guardian, to its credit and unlike certain American press outlets reporting on GOP poverty crusading, does quote experts explaining how Lee’s ideas will not actually help any poor people.)
At least Marco Rubio suggested a program that might actually alleviate poverty. (Though in order for it to do so, it would have to spend money. And that is why Marco Rubio is a huge failure at being a modern conservative superstar.) The Pauls and Lees simply argue that their goal of completely dismantling the welfare state is in fact an anti-poverty platform, because the government giving poor people money and vouchers is the only thing standing in the way of the poor lifting themselves from poverty with the assistance of the benevolent market.
When a Republican announces his war on poverty, impoverished people should understand that they are the ones the war is against.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, February 20, 2014
“The Buffoon Speaks Again”: John McCain Says Ignorant, Belligerent Things, Press Swoons
I’ll admit that I know next to nothing about Ukrainian politics. And when it comes to the current crisis there, I don’t have any brilliant ideas about how the United States could solve this problem, but that’s partly because the United States probably can’t solve this problem. My limited knowledge and lack of transformative ideas puts me on equal footing with John McCain. Yet for some reason, McCain is once again all over the news, now that the situation in Kiev is turning uglier by the hour. What does McCain have to say? Well, he believes that it’s all Barack Obama’s fault. “This is the most naive president in history,” he said, citing as evidence the fact that five years ago, the Obama administration said it wanted to “reset” relations with Russia. Got ’em there, John. Obviously, if a certain someone was president, and he’s not naming any names here, this whole thing could be wrapped up in an afternoon.
What does McCain actually think we should do about Ukraine? We’ll get to that in a moment. But if you had to sum up John McCain’s foreign policy beliefs in a single word, that word would probably be “Grrrr!” Whatever the situation is, McCain’s view is always that we should be tougher than whatever the White House is doing. This applies to both Republican and Democratic presidents. If we’re already bombing somebody, McCain’s answer to any challenge is that we should bomb harder. If we haven’t yet commenced action but are seriously thinking about it, he thinks we should start bombing. If we’re engaging in diplomacy, McCain thinks we should ditch all that talk, which is for pussies anyhow, and get “tough” with whoever it is that needs getting tough with.
That is, I promise you, the extent of the sophistication of McCain’s foreign policy thinking. Despite the fact that he is regularly lauded by the reporters who have worshipped him for so long as an “expert” in foreign policy with deep “knowledge” and “experience,” I have never heard him say a single thing that demonstrated any kind of understanding of any foreign country or foreign crisis beyond what you could have gleaned from watching a three-minute report on the Today show. And this one? Well, McCain’s got the solution: “This thing could easily spiral out of control into a major international crisis,” he says. “The first thing we need to do is impose sanctions on those people who are in leadership positions.” You mean, Senator, what the Obama administration already did? Or the ones they’re preparing with our EU allies?
Once somebody clues McCain in to that, you can bet he’ll come back and say that it isn’t tough enough, and we have to get tougher. And dozens of media outlets will run stories titled “McCain Calls for Tougher Stance Toward Ukraine,” as though he were some kind of wise and influential foreign policy voice, and not a buffoon.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 21, 2014
“Recycling For Fun And Profit”: The Imminent Return Of The ‘Clinton Scandals’
Hillary Clinton may well run for president in 2016. Or she may not. But while the nation awaits her decision, both jittery Republican politicians and titillated political journalists – often in concert – will seize upon any excuse to recycle those old “Clinton scandals.”
The latest trip around this endless loop began when Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican of extremist pedigree and nebulous appeal, deflected a question about his party’s “war on women” by yapping about Monica Lewinsky, former “inappropriate” playmate of Bill Clinton. Then the Free Beacon, a right-wing Washington tabloid, published some old papers about the “ruthless” Hillary and the “loony-toon Monica” from the archives of the late Diane Blair, a longtime and intimate Arkansas friend of the Clintons.
Suddenly the media frenzy of the Nineties resumed, as if there had never even been a pause.
What was truly bizarre in Senator Paul’s outburst was his suggestion that somehow Hillary Clinton is implicated in the Lewinsky affair (which he and others have wrongly characterized as “harassment” or victimization of the young White House intern). Most voters will consider that kind of insinuation more repulsive than persuasive.
Still, there were other long-running pseudo-scandals that featured Hillary. Are we doomed to revisit every crackpot allegation and conspiracy theory? Very likely so, if only because that brand of moonshine brought in wads and wads of money from the same credulous wingnuts who follow Fox News. Last week many of them surely sent money to Senator Paul or clicked on the Free Beacon.
The Clintons are still big box office in the mainstream media as well. Our historical amnesia will make the old charges against them sound new again. And if there’s a sucker born every minute, a lot of minutes have passed since they left the White House.
To prepare for the coming tsunami of bullbleep, a brief guide to past scandals may prove useful. Then when another lightweight politician or television personality starts spouting about Whitewater or Filegate or Travelgate – about which he or she actually knows approximately nothing – pertinent facts will be available. (For the longer version, with colorful narrative, consult The Hunting of the President.)
Whitewater: Kenneth Starr spent roughly millions of dollars trying to find evidence of chicanery in a land deal that lost money for the Clintons – and his probe ended up demonstrating their innocence, like several earlier investigations. Having whispered to gullible journalists that he was about to indict Hillary in December 1996, Starr instead abruptly resigned as independent counsel in February 1997, knowing he had no case against her.
Indeed, the Clintons have undergone more thorough and invasive financial vetting than any couple in American history, from the exhaustive Starr investigation through Hillary’s Senate financial disclosures to the Clinton Foundation donors disclosed before her nomination as Secretary of State.
Travelgate: Feverish coverage of Hillary Clinton’s firing of several White House employees who handled press travel arrangements neglected some salient facts –such as the suspicious absence of accounting records for millions of dollars expended by the White House Travel Office, the Travel Office director’s offer to plead guilty to embezzlement, and evidence that he had accepted lavish gifts from an air charter company. The First Lady and her staff didn’t handle the controversy skillfully, but she had plenty of reason to suspect chicanery. And again, exhaustive investigation found no intentional wrongdoing by her.
Filegate: Sensational accusations that Hillary Clinton had ordered up FBI background files to target political opponents soon became a Republican and media obsession, with respectable figures warning that Filegate would be the Clintons’ Watergate. “Where’s the outrage?” cried Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican presidential nominee. Starr investigated the matter and found no evidence of wrongdoing. Finally, in 2010, a Reagan-appointed federal judge mockingly dismissed a civil lawsuit based on the allegations, saying “there’s no there there.”
In truth, there never was.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, February 14, 2014
“It’s Bad For Consumers”: Merging Cable Giants Is ‘An Affront To The Public Interest’
When it comes to media, bigger is not better. And when it comes to the control of the infrastructure of how we communicate now, the trend toward extreme bigness—as illustrated by Comcast’s plan to buy Time Warner Cable and create an unprecedented cable combine—is accelerating at a dangerous pace.
In the aftermath of a federal court decision striking down net neutrality protections that were developed to maintain an open and freewheeling discourse on the Internet, and with journalism threatened at every turn by cuts and closures, the idea of merging Comcast and Time Warner poses a threat that ought to be met with official scrutiny and grassroots opposition.
The point of the free-press protection that is outlined in the First Amendment is not to free billionaire media moguls and speculators to make more money. The point is to have a variety of voices, with multiple entry points for multiple points of view and a communications infrastructure that fosters debate, dissent and democratic discourse.
When media conglomerates merge, they do not provide better service or better democracy. They create the sort of monopolies and duopolies that constrain America’s promise. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was right when he decried “concentration of economic power in the few” and warned that “that business monopoly in America paralyzes the system of free enterprise on which it is grafted, and is as fatal to those who manipulate it as to the people who suffer beneath its impositions.”
Merging the two largest cable providers is a big deal in and of itself—allowing one company to become a definitional player in major media markets across the country—but this goes far beyond cable. By expanding its dominance of video and Internet communications into what the Los Angeles Times describes as a “juggernaut” with 30 million subscribers, the company that already controls Universal Studios can drive hard bargains with content providers. It can also define the scope and character of news and public-service programming in dozens of states and hundreds of major cities—including Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York City and Washington, DC.
That’s too much power for any one corporation to have, especially a corporation that has been on a buying spree. Comcast already controls NBCUniversal and a broadcast and cable empire that includes NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, the USA Network, Telemundo and various other networks.
It’s bad for consumers.
“In an already uncompetitive market with high prices that keep going up and up, a merger of the two biggest cable companies should be unthinkable. The deal would be a disaster for consumers and must be stopped,” says Craig Aaron, the president of the media-reform group Free Press.
It’s bad for musicians, documentary makers and other creators.
“Comcast’s proposed takeover of Time Warner would give one company incredible influence over how music and other media is accessed and under what conditions,” says Casey Rae, interim executive director of the Future of Music Coalition, who noted “the ever present danger of a huge corporation like Comcast—which already owns a major content company—disadvantaging competition or locking creators into unfair economic structures.”
And it is bad for the democratic discourse of a nation founded on the premise memorably expressed by Thomas Jefferson in 1804 when he wrote, “No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press.”
The idea that “all the avenues to truth” would be controlled by a monopoly, a duopoly or any small circle of multinational communications conglomerates is antithetical to the understanding of the authors of a free press, and of its true defenders across the centuries.
So yes, US Senator Al Franken—the Minnesota Democrat who has proven to be one of the most serious and savvy congressional watchdogs on communication policy—is absolutely right when he says, “There’s not enough competition in this space; we need more competition. This is going in the wrong direction.”
Franken has written to the US Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, urging each of them “to act quickly and decisively to ensure that consumers are not exposed to increased cable prices and decreased quality of service as a result of this transaction.”
The FCC, in particular, has broad authority to review telecommunications-industry mergers, with an eye toward determining whether they are in the public interest. And watchdog groups have been pressuring the commission’s new chairman, Tom Wheeler, to assert the FCC’s authority. For Wheeler, a former president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the lobbying organization for the cable industry, this is will be a critical test of his leadership.
But challenges to this proposed merger must also come from the anti-trust lawyers at the Department of Justice and the congressional watchdogs over consolidation and monopoly issues.
“Stopping this kind of deal is exactly why we have antitrust laws,” says Free Press’s Aaron.
The congressional role cannot be underestimated. The Department of Justice, the FTC and the FCC get cues from Congress. And the voices of members of the House and Senate will play a critical role in determining whether the merger goes forward.
Some of the initial signals have been good.
“This proposed merger could have a significant impact on the cable industry and affect consumers across the country,” says Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar, the chair of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, who announced: “I plan to hold a hearing to carefully scrutinize the details of this merger and its potential consequences for both consumers and competition.”
The ranking Republican on the committee, Utah Senator Mike Lee, supports the review, as do public interest groups ranging from Public Knowledge to Consumers Union.
But hearings will not be enough. The Senate, in particular, must send clear signals.
Former FCC Commissioner Mike Copps is precisely right when he says of the idea of creating an even larger telecommunications conglomerate, “This is so over the top that it ought to be dead on arrival at the FCC.”
Copps, who now serves as a special adviser to Common Cause’s Media and Democracy Reform Initiative, is also right when he says, “The proposed deal runs roughshod over competition and consumer choice and is an affront to the public interest.”
But the public interest will prevail only if the public, and its elected representatives, raise an outcry in defense of the robust competition that opens “all the avenues to truth.”
By: John Nichols, The Nation, February 14, 2014
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